California, Oregon and Washington Ally on Vaccines in Rebuke to Trump’s CDC

  

Gavin Newsom speaks in San Francisco, California, on 22 August 2025. (photo: Getty)

 

“Vaccines are among the most powerful tools in modern medicine; they have indisputably saved millions of lives."  

 

Lauren Gambino / Guardian UK 04 September 25

 

The governors of California, Oregon and Washington announced on Wednesday the creation of a West Coast Health Alliance aimed at safeguarding access to vaccines, amid growing turmoil at the nation’s top public health agency under the leadership of Robert F Kennedy Jr.

In a joint press release, Governors Gavin Newsom of California, Tina Kotek of Oregon, and Bob Ferguson of Washington said the CDC had become a “political tool that increasingly peddles ideology instead of science”.

“President Trump’s mass firing of CDC doctors and scientists – and his blatant politicization of the agency – is a direct assault on the health and safety of the American people,” the Democratic governors said in a joint statement, adding: “California, Oregon, and Washington will not allow the people of our states to be put at risk.”

The move comes days after the White House forced out the newly confirmed director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Susan Monarez, who had clashed with Kennedy, Trump’s secretary of the US health and human services department (HHS), over his efforts to reshape federal vaccine policies in ways that contradict established scientific research. 

Her firing, just weeks after her confirmation, prompted several senior officials to resign in protest and has led to rising calls from lawmakers, scientists and former agency employees for Kennedy to step down. Monarez was replaced by a Trump loyalist with no medical or scientific background.

He argued that the organization’s “dysfunction” was responsible for “irrational policy” during the Covid pandemic, leading to a disproportionately large number of deaths recorded in the US compared with the global average.

In a statement, an HHS spokesperson Andrew Nixon, blamed Democrats’ response to the Covid-19 pandemic for undermining public trust in vaccine policy, and said federal immunization recommendations would continue to be “based on rigorous evidence and Gold Standard Science, not the failed politics of the pandemic”.

“Democrat-run states that pushed unscientific school lockdowns, toddler mask mandates, and draconian vaccine passports during the Covid era completely eroded the American people’s trust in public health agencies,” he said.

The newly formed West Coast Health Alliance will coordinate health guidance across the three states, including evidence-based immunization recommendations. Officials say the effort is intended to provide residents with access to consistent and credible information about vaccines in the absence of reliable federal leadership.

According to the announcement, the alliance will release a set of shared principles in the coming weeks. While the states will share immunization recommendations, they will also pursue independent strategies based on their “unique laws, geographies, histories, and peoples” and with respect to Tribal sovereignty.

The three states registered their concern over Kennedy’s leadership in June, when they jointly condemned his abrupt removal of all 17 members of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices – a group long considered central to vaccine safety oversight. 

In announcing the new alliance, the governors said they were acting to protect the health of the tens of millions of residents across California, Oregon and Washington, pledging that public health guidance would be shaped by “science-driven decision-making”. Without consistent, evidence-based leadership from the federal government, they warned, the nation’s health security was increasingly at risk.

Their action comes on the same day as more than 1,000 past and present HHS employees published a letter calling for Kennedy’s resignation. It comes two days after nine former CDC officials wrote in a New York Times guest essay that Kennedy’s leadership, and ousting of Monarez, months after he appointed her, was “unacceptable” and “unlike anything we have ever seen”.

It also marks a stark departure from some Republican-led states that have moved to loosen – or eliminate entirely – certain vaccine mandates. On Wednesday, the Florida state surgeon general announced that children will no longer be required to receive vaccines against preventable diseases including measles, mumps, chickenpox, polio and hepatitis. And earlier this summer, a new law took effect in Idaho removing the requirement for children to be vaccinated to attend schools in the state.

Public health officials in California, Oregon and Washington warned of an erosion of trust in vaccines.

“Our communities deserve clear and transparent communication about vaccines – communication grounded in science, not ideology,” Sejal Hathi, the director of the Oregon health authority, said in a statement. “Vaccines are among the most powerful tools in modern medicine; they have indisputably saved millions of lives. But when guidance about their use becomes inconsistent or politicized, it undermines public trust at precisely the moment we need it most.”

It it quacks, it's probably a quack.

PRESIDENT LIES AGAIN: US Strikes on Iran’s Nuclear Sites Only Set Back Program by Months, Pentagon Report Says

This satellite image of the Isfahan nuclear technology site in Iran on Sunday after U.S. strikes. (photo: Maxar Technologies/AP)

 

 TRUMP POST: “THE NUCLEAR SITES IN IRAN ARE COMPLETELY DESTROYED!”

 

Hugo Lowell / Guardian UK 25 June 25 

 

ALSO SEE: US Airstrikes Failed to Destroy Iran's Nuclear Sites, Sources Say

An initial classified US assessment of Donald Trump’s strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities over the weekend says they did not destroy two of the sites and likely only set back the nuclear program by a few months, according to two people familiar with the report.

The report produced by the Defense Intelligence Agency – the intelligence arm of the Pentagon – concluded key components of the nuclear program, including centrifuges, were capable of being restarted within months.

The report also found that much of Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium that could be put to use for a possible nuclear weapon was moved before the strikes and may have been moved to other secret nuclear sites maintained by Iran.

The findings by the DIA, which were based on a preliminary battle damage assessment conducted by US Central Command, which oversees US military operations in the Middle East, suggests Trump’s declaration about the sites being “obliterated” may have been overstated.

Trump said in his televised address on Saturday night immediately after the operation that the US had completely destroyed Iran’s enrichment sites at Natanz and Fordow, the facility buried deep underground, and at Isfahan, where enrichment was being stored.

“The strikes were a spectacular military success. Iran’s key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated. Iran, the bully of the Middle East, must now make peace,” Trump said in his address from the White House.

While the DIA report was only an initial assessment, one of the people said if the intelligence on the ground was already finding within days that Fordow in particular was not destroyed, later assessments could suggest even less damage might have been inflicted.

Long regarded as the most well-protected of Iran’s nuclear sites, the uranium-enrichment facilities at Fordow are buried beneath the Zagros mountains. Reports have suggested that the site was constructed beneath 45-90 metres (145-300ft) of bedrock, largely limestone and dolomite.

Media coverage of the DIA assessment appeared to anger Trump, who on Tuesday evening accused news outlets of demeaning the military strike by saying it only set back Iran’s nuclear program by a few months.

“THE NUCLEAR SITES IN IRAN ARE COMPLETELY DESTROYED!” Trump posted in all caps on his Truth Social platform.

The White House also disputed the intelligence assessment, which was first reported by CNN. “The leaking of this alleged assessment is a clear attempt to demean President Trump, and discredit the brave fighter pilots who conducted a perfectly executed mission to obliterate Iran’s nuclear program,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement.

The US vice-president, JD Vance, admitted on Sunday that Washington did not know where Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranian was, saying: “we are going to work in the coming weeks to ensure that we do something with that fuel”.

Rafael Grossi, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said on Monday that the IAEA could no longer account for Iran’s stockpile of 400kg of uranium enriched to 60% purity.

The Guardian revealed last Wednesday that top political appointees at the Pentagon had been briefed at the start of Trump’s second term that the 30,000lb “bunker buster” GBU-57 bombs meant to be used on Fordow would not completely destroy the facility.

In that briefing, in January, officials were told by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency at the Pentagon that developed the GBU-57 that the bombs would not penetrate deep enough underground and only a tactical nuclear weapon would wipe out Fordow.

The US strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities involved B2 bombers dropping 12 GBU-57s on Fordow and two GBU-57s on Natanz. A US navy submarine then launched roughly 30 Tomahawk missiles on Isfahan, US defense officials said at a news conference Sunday.

Defense secretary Pete Hegseth repeated Trump’s claim at the news conference that the sites had been “obliterated”, but the chair of the joint chiefs of staff, Gen Dan Caine, who helped oversee the operation, was more measured in his remarks.

Caine said that all three of the nuclear sites had “sustained severe damage and destruction” but cautioned that the final battle-damage assessment for the military operation was still to come.

TOUGH GUY PINOCCHIO: “The strikes were a spectacular military success. Iran’s key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated."

Thousands of Protestors March in Washington, D.C.

 

People attend the "People's March on Washington" ahead of the inauguration of President-elect Donald Trump, in Washington, D.C., Jan. 18, 2025. (photo: Jon Cherry/Reuters)

350 more marches taking place in every state

Linday Whitehurst and Ashraf Khalil / PBS 

19 January 25

 

Thousands of people from around the United States rallied in the nation’s capital Saturday for women’s reproductive rights and other causes they believe are under threat from the incoming Trump administration, reprising the original Women’s March days before President-elect Donald Trump’s second inauguration.

Eight years after the first historic Women’s March at the start of Trump’s first term, marchers said they were caught off guard by Trump’s victory and are determined now to show that support remains strong for women’s access to abortion, for transgender people, for combating climate change and other issues.

The march is just one of several protests, rallies and vigils focused on abortion, rights, immigration rights and the Israel-Hamas war planned in advance of inauguration Monday. Around the country, over 350 similar marches are taking place in every state.

Jill Parrish of Austin, Texas, said she initially bought a plane ticket to Washington for what she expected to be Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris’s inauguration. She wound up changing the dates to march in protest ahead of Trump’s swearing-in instead, saying the world should know that half of U.S. voters didn’t support Trump.

“Most importantly, I’m here to demonstrate my fear, about the state of our democracy,” Parrish said.

Demonstrators staged in squares around Washington ahead of the march, pounding drums and yelling chants under a slate-gray sky and in a chilly wind. Protesters then marched to the Lincoln Memorial for larger rally and fair, where organizations at the local, state and national level hosted information tables.

They held signs with slogans including, “Save America” and “Against abortions? Then don’t have one” and “Hate won’t win.”

There were brief moments of tension between protesters and Trump supporters. The march paused briefly when a man in a red Make America Great Again hat and a green camo backpack walked into a line of demonstrators at the front. Police intervened and separated him from the group peacefully as marchers chanted “We won’t take the bait.”

As the protesters approached the Washington Monument, a small group of men in MAGA hats walking in the opposite direction appeared to draw the attention of a protest leader with a megaphone. The leader veered closer to the group and began chanting “No Trump, no KKK” through the megaphone. The groups were separated by high black fencing and police officers eventually gathered around.

Rick Glatz, of Manchester, New Hampshire, said he came to Washington for the sake of his four granddaughters: ” I’m a grandpa. And that’s why I’m marching.”

Minnesota high school teacher Anna Bergman wore her original pink pussy hat from her time in the 2017 Women’s March, a moment that captured the shock and anger of progressives and moderates at Trump’s first win.

With Trump coming back now, “I just wanted to be surrounded by likeminded people on a day like today,” Bergman said.

Rebranded and reorganized, the rally has a new name — the People’s March — as a means to broaden support, especially during a reflective moment for progressive organizing after Trump’s decisive win in November. The Republican takes the oath of office Monday.

Women outraged over Trump’s 2016 presidential win flocked to Washington in 2017 and organized large rallies in cities throughout the country, building the base of a grassroots movement that became known as the Women’s March. The Washington rally alone attracted over 500,000 marchers, and millions more participated in local marches around the country, marking one of the largest single-day demonstrations in U.S. history.

This year, the crowd was far fewer than the expected 50,000 participants, already just one-tenth the size of the first march. The demonstration comes amid a restrained moment of reflection as many progressive voters navigate feelings of exhaustion, disappointment and despair after Harris’ loss.

“Before we do anything about democracy, we have to fight our own despair,” said one of the event’s first speakers, Rachel O’Leary Carmona, executive director of Women’s March.

The comparative quiet contrasts sharply with the white-knuckled fury of the inaugural rally as massive crowds shouted demands over megaphones and marched in pink pussyhats in response to Trump’s first election win.

“The reality is that it’s just hard to capture lightning in a bottle,” said Tamika Middleton, managing director at the Women’s March. “It was a really particular moment. In 2017, we had not seen a Trump presidency and the kind of vitriol that that represented.”

The movement fractured after that hugely successful day of protests over accusations that it was not diverse enough. 

This year’s rebrand as a People’s March is the result of an overhaul intended to broaden the group’s appeal. Saturday’s demonstration promoted themes related to feminism, racial justice, anti-militarization and other issues and ended with discussions hosted by various social justice organizations.

The People’s March is unusual in the “vast array of issues brought together under one umbrella,” said Jo Reger, a sociology professor who researches social movements at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan. Women’s suffrage marches, for example, were focused on a specific goal of voting rights.

For a broad-based social justice movement such as the march, conflicting visions are impossible to avoid and there is “immense pressure” for organizers to meet everyone’s needs, Reger said. But she also said some discord isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

“Often what it does is bring change and bring in new perspectives, especially of underrepresented voices,” Reger said.

Middleton, of the Women’s March, said a massive demonstration like the one in 2017 was not the goal of Saturday’s event. Instead, it’s goal was focusing attention on a broader set of issues — women’s and reproductive rights, LGBTQ rights, immigration, climate and democracy — rather than centering it more narrowly around Trump.

“We’re not thinking about the march as the endgame,” Middleton said. “How do we get those folks who show up into organizations and into their political homes so they can keep fighting in their communities long term?”

We shall overcome.

How the Climate Crisis Fuels Devastating Wildfires: ‘We Have Tweaked Nature and Pissed It Off’

   

Firefighters tackle a wildfire. (photo: Josh Edelson/AFP/Getty Images)

 

"When you look at how we live, and what drives the life we live, we are a fire-based society." 

Victoria Namkung / Guardian UK 11 January 25 

 

REPUBLISHED BY:

Blue Country Gazette Blog

Rim Country  Gazette Blog 

When writing about the hot, dry Santa Ana winds and how they affect the behavior and imaginations of southern Californians, Joan Didion once said: “The winds show us how close to the edge we are.”

I’ve lived here my entire life. I evacuated my family’s hillside home as a teenager. I’ve experienced the surrealism of watching ash rain down from the sky more times than I can count. But there is something different, supercharged, about the hurricane-force winds that fueled this week’s catastrophic wildfires in Los Angeles.

We’re not just close to the edge. It feels like we’ve already gone overboard.

Over 10 million people live in LA county – more than the populations of most US states – and 150,000 of them remain under evacuation (another 166,800 residents are under evacuation warnings). At least 11 have died, more than 10,000 structures have been damaged or destroyed and hazardous smoke is compromising our already compromised air quality. The Los Angeles wildfires are on track to be the costliest in US history with some analysts projecting economic losses of $50 to $150bn.

Writer John Vaillant, an American and Canadian dual citizen who resides in Vancouver, is intimately familiar with colossal fires like the ones devouring Los Angeles. He’s the bestselling author of Fire Weather, a gripping account of Canada’s 2016 Fort McMurray fire and the relationship between fire and humans in a heating world that was a finalist for the Pulitzer prize and the National Book Award.

Throughout his work, Vaillant is clear about why these “21st-century fires” are so different from the ones I grew up with: it’s the climate crisis.

I spoke to Vaillant about these new fires we’re seeing, not just in Los Angeles, but in Paradise, California, and Maui, the role of the fossil-fuel industry and his advice for Angelenos right now.

We don’t know who or what exactly started the Los Angeles wildfires but what role has the fossil fuel industry played?

It’s certainly not the cause of the fires, but it is an enhancer, an enabler and an energizer of the fires. I coined a term in Fire Weather, which is “21st-century fires”. It burns fundamentally differently than it used to, and it’s responding to climate change and the atmosphere’s growing ability to hold heat at low elevations and heat everything around us. Climate science ain’t rocket science. When you make things hotter and drier, they burn more easily. We have basically tweaked nature, pissed it off and we have altered the climate of this planet in a way that makes it more hostile to our ambitions and safety.

How do you connect Canada’s 2016 Fort McMurray fire, which you documented extensively in your book, to other massive fires like we saw more recently in Paradise, Maui and now Los Angeles?

The intensity of the fire that burned through Fort McMurry in 2016, in the sub-Arctic of Canada when there was still ice on the lakes, burned basically the same way as the ones in LA. You had the drought, you had the fuel, you had the wind and that’s all you need. That can be recreated anywhere in the world. Any city can burn now. LA is effectively surrounded by fires and the wind will decide the fate of LA. That is a weird situation to be in, but it’s also a very honest one. I don’t care what business you’re in, nature owns 51% of it, at least. We act as if we own it. We share it. That’s what LA is discovering.

In your book, you propose that we replace the nomenclature homo sapiens with homo flagrans, which loosely translates to ‘burning man,’ to characterize our species. Why?

Homo sapiens, which is a generous name for us, means wise man, rational man. We have speech and we can organize and do incredible things and that’s awesome. Flagrans means fiery, it means outrageous. We are fiery, we are passionate, we do outrageous things, good and bad. So flagrans is not necessarily negative, it’s not homo horribilis, but it’s recognizing our allegiance to and entanglement with and dependence on combustion. We are a fire species. Fire is our enabler and it’s our superpower.

When you look at how we live, and what drives the life we live, we are a fire-based society. I’m watching cars just whispering along right now. There’s no smoke, there’s no fire, but there are raging violent explosions going on under the hood of these gasoline-powered cars. If you were to mount an engine on your kitchen table and run it, you’d go deaf from the noise and then you’d be dead from the emissions if you didn’t have the windows open, so that’s what we have under the hood of our car. You multiply that by every furnace, every water heater and when you look at the things in your house, everything is mediated some way through fire’s energy or fire’s heat.

We need to tip our hats to the engineers because that you and I can sit in a car together and have a conversation with that incredibly powerful engine banging away under the hood, but so expertly muffled and insulated and siphoned off that we don’t hear it, smell it or notice it. The engineering has enabled us to forget the real cost, which is the heat and emissions. They’re invisible to our eye, but the atmosphere knows and fire absolutely senses it and is capitalizing on it.

More people are waking up to that cost it seems.

Fire has no heart and soul; all it wants to do is grow and expand. There are analogies there if you look at how Amazon behaves or Elon Musk behaves or Walmart. The emphasis is on growth and it’s exciting to grow a company and have an idea that sells. 

But the act of creation can also be an engine of destruction. The dynamic with the shareholder engineers the conditions for institutional sociopathy. The CEO’s job is to create profits for the shareholders to keep them invested. You have to do that at all costs. Profit trumps everything else and that is sociopathic and it’s not reality-based because it doesn’t take into account the limits of nature and the limits of nature determine whether we live or die or prosper or fail and that’s the reckoning.

What role does the modern house play in intensifying fires like the ones in Los Angeles?

I’m walking around on a laminate floor made from petroleum distillates, so if that started burning it would start offgassing and it would make terribly toxic black smoke. I’m leaning on a sofa, this colossal sectional that’s completely synthetic. Synthetic is almost a euphemism for petroleum protects. I’m sitting on a couple barrels of gas here, but it’s disguised as pillows and cushions and it’s really comfortable. The TV is all plastic. The kitchen cupboard doors are particle board, held together with glue, which is flammable chemicals. A particle board door is going to burn very differently than a pine covered door from your great-grandmother’s house.

What would you say to political leaders and billionaires who put the blame for these fires on Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass or Governor Gavin Newsom?

Unfortunately, we have the most powerful people in the world trying to distract and obfuscate and frankly lie about this. The idea of leaders lying about science is so fundamentally wrong and damaging and civilization-corroding. What do you do when the future president of the United States attacks the most populous state in the union? Using every opportunity to foment division and partisanship is absolutely toxic – as toxic as supercharging the atmosphere with fossil fuels that make the entire world more combustible.

You have a whole bunch of people who are traumatized now. When you go back and see the place you live, or where you were raised, or where you raised your kids, and you see that smoking ruin and somewhere in there is your kid’s bed, that is a blade to the heart and that’s what any national leader, industrial leader should be focusing on.

What can people do to better prepare for fires in the future?

We need people to speak courageously about why we are in this situation and our role in it, but we don’t have the same control as a CEO does. We don’t have the same control as a city councilor who got installed by the petroleum industry to advocate for petroleum. There’s a program in Canada called FireSmart where firefighters come to your community and go over your yard and cul-de-sac and suggest cutting things down and pulling things back. They recommend removing things that are fuses for fuel.

We’ve moved back into the forest because it’s gorgeous to live there. The Palisades is the poster child for beautiful mountain forest living, but it’s flammable as hell, especially in a drought. We have to get humble and renegotiate our relationship to fire and also to water and petroleum. How do we keep you safe and conscious where you live?

What’s one piece of advice people in the Los Angeles area can use right now?

Don’t look at the fire, look at the wind. If the wind is blowing over you, it means the embers are, too. The fire could be 2 miles away, but if the wind is toward you, the embers are, too, and act accordingly.

No, we are not merrymaking about a CEO's awful death -- we are expressing our pain

 

We are expressing righteous communal pain and anger about unchecked exploitation

"I have never killed anyone, but I have read some obituary notices with great satisfaction." — Clarence Darrow

By sepia sirenCommunity 

Daily Kos 

Friday, December 30, 2024 at 9:09:39a MST

 

REPUBLISHED BY:

Blue Country Gazette Blog 

Rim Country Gazette Blog 

Upon hearing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson's sudden demise after a man in a hoodie shot and killed the policymaker outside a Hilton in midtown Manhattan, the internet erupted in a peculiar cocktail of dark glee and grim satisfaction.

For a man whose company spent years perfecting the art of telling people "no" when they needed "yes," the irony was thick enough to chew—and chew many did.

The killing of Thompson, whose annual compensation package exceeded $10 million, drew instant, sardonic comments from some social media users.

“Thoughts and sympathy today to all of those who have lost loved ones, because they were denied insurance claims by #UnitedHealthcare,” wrote one such user.

Another posted a mock logo for the company featuring crosshairs, along with the question, “Do you think I’d get sued if I made this as a shirt.”

Yet another wrote, “It’s hard to find sympathy for a CEO of one of the worst health care companies in the world…They eat off your family members [sic] grave.”

It wasn’t all random comments from otherwise anonymous individuals, either.

Anthony Zenkus, a senior lecturer in social work at Columbia University, wrote on X, “Today we mourn the death of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, gunned down…wait, I’m sorry— today we mourn the deaths of the 68,000 Americans who needlessly die each year so that insurance company execs like Brian Thompson can become multimillionaires.”

As of Thursday evening, Zenkus’s post had been liked 84,000 times and retweeted 11,000 times.

Those kinds of sentiments spurred a counter-reaction.

Billy Binion, a reporter for libertarian publication Reason, wrote on X that it was “vile” that people seemed to be “gleefully celebrating a dad of two getting shot to death.”

Robert Pondiscio of the conservative American Enterprise Institute wrote on the same site that the online response to Thompson’s killing “marks a new and ominous low for social media.” — KRON San Franciso

Now, I’m no fan of violence, and murder is neither a just solution nor a moral stance. But as I scrolled through the reactions, I couldn’t shake an uneasy feeling: not sympathy for the man but discomfort at how little I could muster.

And then it hit me—this wasn’t schadenfreude over a life lost. It was something more profound: the collective catharsis of those crushed under the grinding gears of profit-driven cruelty.

Thompson wasn’t simply a man—he was a symbol of an oppressive system that denies life-saving treatments to sick children while celebrating cost-cutting measures with champagne and investor applause. He stood for the modern corporate ethos that monetizes misery and reaps dividends from people’s despair.

CEOs and The Wealthy have killed us off for years

—All for profit, and no one is safe, not even children.

And it’s not just healthcare. Consider Sarah Huckabee Sanders signing legislation to shuffle children as young as 14 into meatpacking plants—a Dickensian nightmare repackaged as “opportunity.”

Supporters of the new law say it gets rid of a tedious requirement, streamlines the hiring process, and allows parents — rather than the government — to make decisions about their children.

But opponents say the work certificates protected vulnerable youth from exploitation.

"It was wild to listen to adults argue in favor of eliminating a one-page form that helps the Department of Labor ensure young workers aren't being exploited," the group Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families wrote about the law in a legislative session recap. — NPR

If this is what Republicans mean by "protecting children and family values," they can stuff it! Seriously, the so-called "good old days" of unchecked child labor gave us kids as young as six years old who wound up maimed, mangled, or dead.

Is that the nostalgia they’re selling—childhoods spent dodging factory gears instead of playing hopscotch?

“Unguarded machinery was a major problem for children working in factories.

One hospital reported that every year it treated nearly a thousand people for wounds and mutilations caused by machines in factories. Michael Ward, a doctor working in Manchester told a parliamentary committee in 1819:

"When I was a surgeon in the infirmary, accidents were very often admitted to the infirmary, through the children's hands and arms having being caught in the machinery; in many instances the muscles, and the skin is stripped down to the bone, and in some instances a finger or two might be lost.

Last summer I visited Lever Street School. The number of children at that time in the school, who were employed in factories, was 106. The number of children who had received injuries from the machinery amounted to very nearly one half. There were forty-seven injured in this way." - Spartacus Educational

The Healthcare Monster is but a symptom—

Men like Thompson don’t merely profit from suffering; they revel in it. They’re the modern-day Marie Antoinettes, offering non-existent cake to the hungry and quietly counting the coins from picked pockets—look at Elon Musk, for instance.

As he and Vivek Ganapathy Ramaswamy go over their plan to dismantle much-needed safety nets via their made-up play toy government agency DOGE, Musk jokes that taking money and assistance from the poor will be “tedious” and “unglamorous” cost-cutting work. The cherry on top? “Compensation is zero.”

“Indeed, this will be tedious work, make lots of enemies & compensation is zero,” he wrote. “What a great deal!”

Check out the infuriating article here — Elon Musk’s DOGE Seeks “High-IQ Revolutionaries” Willing to Work 80 Hours a Week for Free | Vanity Fair

Is it any wonder people have asked why the bullet found Thompson and not Musk?

Not that I condone such sentiments—violence begets chaos, and chaos leaves all but the richest worse off. But the sentiment speaks to a deep, festering wound in our collective soul.

The tragedy isn’t just Thompson’s death. It’s the billion-dollar system he represented, one that profits by denying chemo drugs to little girls and tells grieving families their premiums, “don’t cover this.”

As Rick Wilson aptly stated, “Health insurance companies do not make their money by providing care; they make their money by denying it.” And that’s the crux of it: a world where suffering is engineered for profit.

That’s what is vile, Billy Binion.

And there it is

—the American Dream distilled into a cold, heartless business model where the less you help, the more you earn. It's capitalism’s version of “opposite day,” but with life-and-death stakes.

This isn't just a broken system; it's a masterpiece of sociopathic efficiency.

Think about it: there are countless ways to get rich while ensuring people have food, shelter, and basic dignity. But no—someone had to sit down and say, “What if we make wealth-building fun by making misery mandatory?” It’s like playing Monopoly, except the board is on fire, and the only pieces left are a noose and a foreclosure notice.

We’ve lived too long under this abusive paradigm, told to sacrifice, to tighten our belts, to "work harder" while the ultra-rich build empires on our exhaustion. Worse, we’ve been turned against each other, squabbling over crumbs while CEOs pop champagne with the blood, sweat, and tears we’ve unwittingly donated to their bottom line.

It’s the same twisted logic behind child labor laws being rolled back: why let kids have carefree childhoods when they could be mangled in meatpacking plants? Why let adults rest when they could work 80-hour weeks for zero pay to satisfy Elon Musk’s whims? Why let anyone live when so much money can be made from their suffering?

Thompson’s death doesn’t solve this vexing, eternal problem. But the shot outside the Hilton may finally echo where it needs to: in the halls of power, in boardrooms of marble and glass, where men like him make decisions that shape our lives.

The question now is whether that echo will spur change—or whether some will continue eating cake until there’s no one left to serve it.

 

Superstition: RFK Jr.

Ambition: Elon Musk

Ignorance: Donald Trump and MAGAs everywhere

Rage Against the System

 

 

Dan Rather. (photo: Stewart Volland/Vulture)

Murder, money, and Americans who are mad as hell

Dan Rather / Steady 14 December 2416 december 24 

Reader Supprted News https://www.rsn.org/

Over the course of my career in journalism, I have certainly seen news stories take surprising turns. But the murder of a health insurance executive on the streets of New York is something different. The killing by a coward, ambushing from behind, collectively shocked and disgusted many of us. As it should have.

But what has suddenly grabbed much of the country by the lapels is the support shown not for the victim, but for the man accused of committing the crime. With that support, we are witnessing an undercurrent of anger, even rage, come to the surface. It is directed squarely at an American business model that is, according to many policyholders, screwing us over every single day.

Violence cannot and should not be condoned, especially cold-blooded murder. It should be condemned, and the person who did it made to pay the maximum penalty under law. Period. Full stop. Beyond that, we as a nation, as a society, as a people are forced to recognize this: The lack of sympathy for murdered UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson and the glorification of his alleged killer has opened a window into the frustrated psyche of the American health insurance consumer. It is a window that we ignore at our peril.

If you haven’t been following this closely, here’s the quick backstory: On the morning of Wednesday, December 4, Thompson was shot in the back and killed in midtown Manhattan on his way to an investor meeting. The shooter inscribed the words “delay,” “deny,” and “depose” on the shell casings found at the scene.

Some of those words appear in the title of Jay Feinman’s book about the health insurance industry, “Delay, Deny, Defend: Why Insurance Companies Don’t Pay Claims and What You Can Do About It.” The killer’s etched words have become a rallying cry for many Americans who are hurting — physically, emotionally, and financially — under the current system. In these days after the murder, you can buy online merchandise like mugs and sweatshirts adorned with “delay, deny, depose.”

The man now charged with Thompson’s murder is 26-year-old Luigi Mangione, an Ivy League graduate who allegedly dropped a backpack full of Monopoly money in Central Park as he fled the scene on a rented electric bike, according to police. He was able to escape the city on a bus. Authorities arrested him on Monday at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania, after a patron recognized him.

In the ensuing five days, Mangione was vaunted as a modern-day folk hero and a 21st century Robin Hood.

What gives? Americans are good-hearted people. With that having been said, we are now witnessing a groundswell that knows no boundaries. It is red and blue, men and women, coast to coast — folks who have collectively had it with corporate health care.

Much of the online reaction to Thompson’s murder was morbid glee. The UnitedHealthcare Facebook page had to be taken down after a post about the CEO’s death received more than 36,000 laughing reactions, according to The New Yorker.

Things weren’t better on X, where 6 of 10 posts about the crime were in support of the shooter. “Thoughts and deductibles to the family. Unfortunately my condolences are out-of-network,” one person posted. “My only question is did the CEO of UnitedHealthcare die quickly or over several months waiting to find out if his insurance would cover his treatment for the fatal gunshot wound?” posted another.

Author Joyce Carol Oates put it well with her social media post. The outpouring of negativity “is better described as cries from the heart of a deeply wounded & betrayed country; hundreds of thousands of Americans shamelessly exploited by health-care insurers reacting to a single act of violence against just one of their multimillionaire executives,” she wrote.

The phenomenon of a person operating outside of the law to deliver justice in what is perceived as an unjust world has been called social banditry. “When people lose faith in the state’s ability to address their concerns and grievances, they sometimes look to outlaws who offer themselves as an alternative,” Joshua Zeitz wrote in Politico Magazine.

In the eyes of many, Luigi Mangione has become that alternative.

This unnerving reaction to Thompson’s murder and murderer was born of unbridled frustration with a failing system. The American health insurance “system” is a misnomer. It implies that it was intentionally designed. In truth, coverage in the United States entails a messy patchwork of private insurance companies covering 65% of those insured and government-funded insurance (Medicare and Medicaid) covering the other 35%.

Senator Bernie Sanders is a proponent of health care for all provided by the federal government. What we have “is a system not designed to provide health care to all people in a cost-effective way,” Sanders said of the current setup. “It is a system designed to make huge profits for the insurance companies, the drug companies, and many other industries within the system.”

Most of those private insurance companies are publicly traded entities whose primary goal is to make money. And boy, do they.

Last year, UnitedHealthcare, the largest private insurance company in the country, made $16 billion in profit. To boost profits even further a company must reduce costs. The easiest way for insurance companies to do so is to deny coverage. UnitedHealthcare, which has one of the highest denial rates in the industry, turns down about a third of all claims.

Shockingly to me, many health insurance companies — UnitedHealthcare among them — outsource the decision-making of approving or denying coverage to third parties that use AI-generated algorithms to make life-and-death judgements. According to reporting by ProPublica, this hidden cottage industry works by a “denials for dollars” model. The more they deny, the more they get paid.

It is no wonder people are infuriated and some are praising a self-styled vigilante who claimed he was trying to do something about it.

A 2023 Gallup poll found that just 31% of Americans trust the U.S. health csare system. One in 4 report delaying or foregoing medical treatment because of cost. While the Affordable Care Act has improved things, adding 45 million people to the insurance rolls, an estimated 23% of these are still underinsured, meaning they don’t have enough coverage.

Wouldn’t it be great if we had politicians who had the guts to do something about this mess? Health care lobbyists have spent more than $150 million to keep Congress in line.

And now we have Donald Trump and his bevy of billionaires, including the world’s richest man, looking to cut costs. Elon Musk says he may consider Social Security and Medicare as possible places to find savings.

The system can be fixed, but it would take elected officials willing to have the government do more, not less, at least when it comes to health care. Anybody think that sounds like Trump, et al.

On top of it all this guy is reintroducing polio.  Not to mention an inevitable new pandemic without a vaccine. 

Hear No Climate Change, See No Climate Change, Speak No Climate Change . . . Climate Change!

The sharpie of things to come

Trump will halt progress and reverse Biden's climate initiatives

 

By Dan K 

Community 

Daily Kos 

Sunday, December 01, 2024 at 2:23:45p MST

 

REPUBLISHED BY:

Blue Country Gazette Blog

Rim Country Gazette Blog

Dr Ryan Maue, who served as a NOAA administrator and in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy — in the Trump administration, no less! — has a warning about the weather, or more precisely about Trump’s plans for the weather, in this morning’s NYT: Republicans Would Regret Letting Elon Musk Ax Weather Forecasting.

For people who care about weather and climate, one of the most concerning proposals on the table is to dismantle the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration [NOAA]. The authors of Project 2025, a blueprint for the administration crafted by conservative organizations, claim erroneously that NOAA is “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry” and should be “broken down and downsized.” [emphasis added]

Other than that highlighted quote above, Dr. Maue doesn’t discuss climate change denial. He should have: Trump’s attitude toward climate change concerns those who know what they are talking about.

Trump 2.0: This Time the Stakes for Climate Are Even Higher

The November 5 election was the worst-case outcome for climate regulation. The return of Donald Trump to the Oval Office and Republican control of the Senate and the House of Representatives will halt federal progress and lead to a reversal of most of the climate initiatives undertaken by the Biden administration.

Trump Victory Is a ‘Gut Punch’ to U.S. Climate Action

Trump's victory over Vice President Kamala Harris immediately cast doubt over the future of U.S. climate measures and raised questions about the country's commitment to cutting planet-warming pollution.

So right there is a motive for Trump (via Musk and Ramaswarmy) to cut NOAA funding on the usual right-wing belief that if it isn’t reported, it didn’t happen — or at least, people won’t find out that it’s happening, until the next flood or drought or hurricane hits them when it shouldn’t have.

And speaking of hurricanes . . . Dr. Maue  points out predicting them is a major function of NOAA that can’t be replaced by the private sector:

The best-known part of NOAA, touching all of our daily lives, is the National Weather Service. This is where daily forecasts and timely warning of severe storms, hurricanes and blizzards come from. Using satellites, balloon launches, ships, aircraft and weather stations, NOAA and its offices around the country provide vital services like clockwork, free of charge — services that cannot be adequately replaced by the private sector in part because they wouldn’t necessarily be profitable.

Oops, hurricanes. That’s another reason why Trump has it in for NOAA. Back in 2019, when Trump mistakenly said Hurricane Dorian would hit Alabama, the National Weather Service (a branch of NOAA) said no, it won’t, and Trump blew a gasket. He could have just blamed a staffer for giving him bad info. But that would mean Trump misspoke, even if unintentionally, and Trump never misspeaks. His sharpie editing of the hurricane map was the least of it. Anatomy of a fiasco: A detailed timeline of Trump’s Alabama map meltdown

           He falsely claimed that Hurricane Dorian was likely to hit Alabama.    

           Then he repeated the claim after the National Weather Service debunked it.    

           Then he insisted that the media, not him, was in the wrong.    

           Then, to try to prove his point, he showed the media an outdated map that had clearly been altered.    

           Then, trying again, he tweeted out an unaltered map that was too old to prove his point.    

           Then, trying again again, he tweeted out some more old maps.    

           Finally, Trump got his homeland security adviser to issue a statement vouching for him.    

           Over five days, President Donald Trump delivered a barrage of inaccurate and confusing statements about Dorian – aggressively defending his original false claim by being repeatedly dishonest about what it was he had originally said.    

It wasn’t only HHS; Trump forced NOAA to speak out against its own agency: NOAA Contradicts Weather Service, Backs Trump on Hurricane Threat In Alabama. And Agency reverses course on Trump’s Alabama hurricane claim: “But the president has been adamant throughout the week that he was correct, and the White House has deployed government resources and staff to back him.”

Trump made it clear throughout the campaign that one of his main goals this time around would be revenge on anyone who had ever stood in his way, ever challenged him, ever beseeched him “in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you might be mistaken.” (OK, that last one was Oliver Cromwell to the elders of the Church of Scotland, but I’ve always been fond of its scatological plea.) Defunding NOAA will include defunding the NWS, and you can bet Trump will see that as a plus: He gets revenge.

Never mind that this will leave us without accurate weather forecasting, forcing us to rely on European weather services, (whose priority, understandably, is Europe). And that has national security implications. Here is Dr. Maue again:

[B]ecause the military relies on NOAA’s infrastructure, the risks of and damage from extreme weather and climate events are a national security concern as much as an economic one.

Dr. Maue didn’t bother to state the obvious: If European weather agencies fall into unfriendly hands, there will be a high probability that our farmers, our emergency services, and especially our military, will be forced to rely on doubtful and even misleading weather reports.

But at least Trump won’t have to worry any more that his administration will speak out of turn, whether it’s about hurricanes or about climate change.

The weather, however, will still have some things to say.

Who will put out the fire now?

 

A giant middle finger from a tiny, malevolent man

Will "bootlicker" Senate majority cave to Trump on craven cabinet picks?

By Sabrina Haake

Community

The Substack

DailyKos 

Thursday, November 14, 2024 at 3:02:31p MST

 

REPUBLISHED BY:

Blue Country Gazette Blog

Rim Country Gazette Blog 

Giving the middle finger to anyone who bought his schtick about lasting peace, Trump has chosen stunningly unqualified cranks and loyalists to help him burn down the government.  

Matt Gaetz, more barking clown than lawyer, is under investigation relating to alleged sex with a minor. In an SNL skit that writes itself, Trump would name him Botox King Attorney General.  Tulsi Gabbard, who thinks it’s ‘defensible’ to gas civilians then bomb the clinics treating them, would be Director of National Intelligence. Trump’s deputy chief of staff, the dead-eyed Stephen Miller, says red states will send their National Guard units into blue states to execute mass deportations. (Civil war, anyone?) Pete Hegseth, a white nationalist tattoo-sporting Fox News commentator, would lead the Defense Department, condoning preemptive strikesand seeking pardons for war criminals. Worm-on-the-brain RFK? I can’t even. Too bad Jeffrey Epstein is gone, he's missing a short-window opportunity at the Education Department.  

And how many Hannibal Lecters must Trump want to appoint, that he’d try to strong-arm the Senate into taking recess just so he can bypass their advice and consent? The Senate’s role on presidential appointments is more than window-dressing. It’s a core Article II Constitutional function, foundational to the separation of powers. Advice and consent from the Senate was designed to keep nutjobs away from the seat of government. Given that the GOP will have a solid 53 member majority of bootlickers in the Senate come January, Trump’s desire to bypass them is even more alarming than who he’s picked so far.

These developments would be funny if they weren’t so dangerous. Trump now has a SCOTUS imprimatur to sic Seal Team Six on domestic enemies. One wonders if President Biden has read that opinion. A president’s first duty is to protect and defend, and it’s often said that the best defense is a good offense. Why not use the next two months to put Trump on an island or behind bars sans Twitter for the rest of his miserable life, if it will prevent the bloodshed he’s promising?  The right already projects Trump’s “lawfare” and criminality onto Biden anyway, why not earn the label?  

Buzzing narratives ignore a remarkable global trend

Trump’s asinine choices make clear that we’re in for a bumpy ride for the next two years, but Democrats need to knock it off with the intra-party blame game. In pontificating about what Dems “did wrong,” the line between helpful introspection and destructive navel-gazing is thin already. The most common rejoinder is: ‘If only Biden/Harris/Dems had done X, they’d have won, and it just so happens I’ve been arguing for X for years.’ But there’s a major difference between data-informed reality and narratives that regurgitate pre-existing worldviews.

Instead of bald recriminations, Democrats should look at the numbers. Harris lost by 3 million votes, out of a national total of 151,318,415 votes. This loss by less than 2 percent of all voters is hardly a mandate. Whatever the spin of the hour is, it should be tempered with awareness of global reality. In defeating Biden’s party, the US did what every other industrialized nation in the world did, with shocking uniformity:  We punished the incumbent party, the party who was holding the bag during the worst years of post-covid economic pain, regardless of who caused it.

In a remarkably under-reported phenomenon, in 2024, whichever ruling party occupied the seat of government was voted out of office, world-wide. This chart from Financial Times plots the increase and decrease in share of votes for incumbent parties dating back to 1910. Over the past century, there’s been a fairly even distribution of incumbent gains and losses, at least  through 2020. But in 2024, in elections across the globe, whichever party was in charge- left or right- was shown the same exit door. In 2024, for the first time dating back to 1910, incumbent parties were removed from office with ZERO wins, without regard to partisan ideology.

So, the real narrative isn’t right vs. left, progressive vs. moderate, Trump vs. Harris.  Democrats lost due to post-covid economic pain outside their control, as it was for every other incumbent party in the world. I realize this is an argument so nice I made it twice, but I offer it again to not only encourage democrats to stop the blame game, but also to give comfort. As horrific as sending a craven felon to the White House is, US voters fell in line with the same global upset displayed by voters around the world.

It's important to get behind that reality and remember that this too shall pass. There’s another election in two years. Every seat in the House and a third of the Senate — mostly Republicans — will be up for reelection. And if Trump keeps up the juvenile shenanigans, voters will punish his party hard, most likely all the way through 2032.

So as painful as this is, it’s temporary. The only enduring quality about elections is that, as soon as the victor is announced, the next election has already begun.

Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25 year litigator specializing in 1st and 14th Amendment defense. She writes the Substack, The Haake Take.