Saturday Report 7/12/25 — Plow Fields or Lose Benefits? Trump Admin Says Medicaid Recipients Should Become Farm Laborers...

The Best of the Rest of the News

— Killing them softly with criminal negligence: July 4th, the day Trump signed the bill to cut taxes on billionaires, jack-up the national debt our children will have to pay off, and turn ICE into one of the largest federal police forces in the world, a massive climate change-fueled flood hit central Texas. The first alert from the National Weather Service (NWS) went out at just after 1 AM, but the city of Kerrville didn’t let people in the area know about it until after 7:30 that morning because the so-called Department of Government Efficiency had given early retirement to the fellow whose job was to communicate NWS warnings to local authorities, and, to save money to pay for billionaire tax cuts, he was not replaced. By then many were already dead. To compound the horror, FEMA wasn’t able to preposition disaster assistance or even respond in a meaningful way for a full three days because it’s acting director, David Richardson — who has no disaster experience whatsoever — reportedly hasn’t been seen in weeks and DHS Secretary Kristi Noem had put into place an order that no FEMA activity could take place costing more than $100,000 without her personal sign-off, presumably to free up even more tax dollars for billionaires’ tax cuts. It took her 72 hours, according to CNN, to get around to signing off on the authorization so FEMA could do their job. When asked about all this, Noem’s spokesperson said and rightwing media dutifully reported: “DHS is rooting out waste, fraud, abuse, and is reprioritizing appropriated dollars. Secretary Noem is delivering accountability to the U.S. taxpayer, which Washington bureaucrats have ignored for decades at the expense of American citizens.” Asked about the situation, Trump told Fox “News” that Noem was doing a “great job” because he saw her “on television.” And when a reporter asked him about it, he called the journalist “evil” for questioning him or his administration. Sadly, the Fox cult followers will almost certainly never know the true story of what happened.

— Trump’s IRS now says that churches, contrary to Jesus’s teachings and the law, can openly advocate political positions and hustle on behalf of politicians. Anybody who’s ever read the Bible, or just the books of Matthew or Mark, knows Jesus was violently — literally — opposed to churches and synagogues engaging in politics and hustling money: “On reaching Jerusalem, Jesus entered the temple courts and began driving out those who were buying and selling there. He overturned the tables of the money changers … ‘Watch out for the Scribes... They devour widow’s houses and for a show make lengthy prayers. These men will be punished most severely.’ … ‘It is written,’ he said to them, ‘My house will be called a house of prayer, but you are making it ‘a den of robbers.’” As much as Mike Johnson and a group of Republicans made a big show of praying on the House floor for passage of their tax cuts for billionaires that screws the poor and needy, in actual fact they’re the classic hypocrites Jesus condemned; they don’t give a damn about His actual teachings, or any of the other great spiritual leaders of history. All of them throughout history have said to first do good for “the least of the least,” as Pope John Paul II mentioned to me when he invited Louise and me to a private audience at Castle Gandolfo, and as His Holiness the Dalai Lama reiterated in the week I spent with him when I “took refuge” at his monastery in Dharamsala and the meditation room in his private home in McLeod Ganj (Harrison Ford narrated a documentary about our visit) reiterate. And yet now Trump’s toady running the IRS says churches can openly preach politics from the pulpit. This is naked blasphemy, and a violation of the 1950s federal law known as the Johnson Amendment stripping tax exempt status from churches that engage in politics that has stood for more than a half-century. So much for the constitutional mandate that the president “shall take care that the laws are faithfully executed.”

— Democrats need to take a lesson from Republicans, like those who run the Lincoln project, about how to “take names and kick ass.” Compare Chuck Schumer’s “strongly worded letters” to the administration and Hakeem Jeffries’ lectures as you check out this astonishing video one minute:

— There are an estimated half million white undocumented immigrants in the US, most from Europe, particularly Ireland and the rest of the UK, but to date very few have been arrested or incarcerated at Alligator Alcatraz or any other ICE facilities. However, the brown-skinned son of a US soldier born on a military base has been deported, as was the brown-skinned father of three US Marine sons. Tell me again how this is not about Trump and Stephen Miller pandering to their racist base and MAGA isn’t just a euphemism for “Make America White Again”? Meanwhile ICE is now engaging in massive shows of force like their “Operation Excalibur” this week at MacArthur Park in Los Angeles, driving terrified children out of the park with halftracks, turret-mounted machine guns, on horseback, and bringing along two ambulances because they’re expecting, what? And now the Big Bill has given ICE a larger budget than the entire Russian military; are they planning to start treating the browner parts of American cities like Putin does Ukraine? (Remember when police bombed a row of houses in Philadelphia in May of 1985, killing 11 Black people, including five children, and destroying more than 60 nearby homes?) It’s troubling to even think this, but it sure appears Trump and his lickspittles have dark days for America in mind.

— Texas Governor Greg Abbott is trying to “fix” the midterms? “In response from a Trump administration demand for more Republican seats to preserve or expand the party’s narrow House majority,” Texas is redrawing — super gerrymandering — more of that state in order to diminish the number of Democrats in the US House of Representatives. Looks like the GOP is freaked out about next year’s elections after all the bizarre and nakedly fascist stuff they’ve been doing. As Greg Palast’s research documented, were it not for over 4 million Democratic voters being purged from the rolls in the months before the November 2024 elections, Kamala Harris would today be president: double check your voter registration every few months, particularly if you live in a Blue city in a Red state.

— Work in the fields for $5/hour or lose your healthcare? Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins has a plan: if you’re on Medicaid and want to keep your benefits, you can replace migrant farm and hotel workers! Isn’t that special? “We got to work with the farmers and people that have hotels and leisure properties, too. … And then also, when you think about, there are 34 million able-bodied adults in our Medicaid program. There are plenty of workers in America.” Right. Get grandma out there in the fields, and teach grandpa how to tuck in the corners of those bedsheets. But what about when the cuts hit all the Amazon and WalMart and other workers for massive corporations who are already on Medicaid because they’re paid so little? It’s pretty damn unlikely that Bezos, et al, are suddenly going to start offering benefits to their lowest-paid workers, so millions of Americans will be, as the old saying goes, SOL.

— Red state Republicans won’t discover how badly screwed they are until after the next years’ midterm elections. In one of the most cynical and disgusting parts of the Billionaires’ Big Bill, the cuts to Medicaid and many other benefits don’t kick in until January, 2027, just after the November, 2026 midterm elections. Just a coincidence, right? “Heartless” doesn’t begin to describe these people.

— Billionaire wannabe dictators who try to loot their nations gotta stick together, or at least so says Trump. He’s now threatening to hit Brazil with a 50% tariff because that country has the temerity to prosecute its corrupt former president, Jair Bolsonaro, for usurping the country’s democracy and stealing from the public purse. Brazil’s current president essentially told Trump to go screw himself. After all, we buy more stuff from Brazil (mostly coffee) than they do from us. Once again, Trump is showing his true colors and his loyalty to the authoritarian boys club including Putin, Orbán, Erdoğon, etc., while economically shooting American consumers in the face.

— Got a wacky conspiracy-nut theory? Trump’s administration and the GOP is here to help! Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency head and former righting nutcase congressman Lee Zeldin says people wondering about “chemtrails” (the theory that psychoactive drugs are being added to jet fuel to drift down on us from the sky to turn us into compliant zombies happily embracing socialism) have “been unfairly ‘vilified’ for years for questions asked in ‘good faith.’” Meanwhile, Marjorie Taylor Greene is introducing legislation to investigate and prosecute people using Jewish space lasers or other devices that she believes are modifying our weather to cause disasters like we just saw in Texas. (There actually is weather modification going on, but it’s the fossil fuel industry billionaires doing it, not Jewish space lasers.) And she’s apparently not the only one; as The New York Times reported yesterday: “Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health and human services secretary, has suggested without evidence that the Defense Department’s research arm is spraying Americans with harmful chemicals that have been added to jet fuel.“ Manipulating the uneducated and gullible is one of the worst things dictators love to do, and Trump’s GOP and billionaire-owned media outlets are at the very front of that particular line. It’d be pathetic if it wasn’t so destructive to our democracy.

(The photos are so you know I’m not BS’ing you: these people actually said these things to me, and, of course, have repeated such sentiments many times in public venues.)