— The for-profit Medicare Advantage giants are doing exactly what for-profit companies do, and a million or so seniors are about to find out what “advantage” actually means. Republicans have hated government run programs like Social Security and Medicare — and consistently worked to gut or harm them — since their introduction in 1935 and 1965 respectively. This is why the Bush administration and Republicans in Congress pushed through the creation of the Medicare Advantage scam in 2003, which is neither Medicare nor an advantage. It’s simply a corporate alternative to real Medicare that actually costs us taxpayers more but generates hundreds of billions in profits every year for the companies that run it, who then share some of that profit with GOP (and some Democratic) politicians. And, because it’s all about making profits rather than delivering healthcare, while real Medicare will never require you to get pre-authorization before any sort of medical procedure, Advantage plans almost always do. That’s their profit: denying you care. But apparently that’s not enough for some of these behemoths; now they’re dumping customers who’ve gotten older and sicker and thus more expensive. Humana is shutting down plans covering roughly 600,000 members for 2027, its second year in a row of what it cheerfully calls “targeted plan exits,” while a Leerink analyst note reported by Axios says UnitedHealthcare appears to have dropped about 13 percent of its plans across 18 states. The “giveaways” they offer to get you to sign onto inferior insurance, like major dental benefits, free groceries, and over-the-counter drugs are being slashed, while copays when you visit an (expensive) specialist are exploding. Humana’s CFO told Wall Street the company will “recapture a significant portion of that volume,” corporate double-speak for “we’ll re-sell the same seniors a worse product.” Their goal, laid out during an earnings call with shareholders and executives, is a “sustainable” pre-tax profit margin. Not better care: better profit margins. When Bush pitched this “Advantage” scam as “choice” in 2003, apparently what he meant was the insurance company gets to “choose” whether or not to pay for your care. Every other industrialized nation in the world figured this out decades ago; we’re still letting Big Insurance’s shareholders decide how much they’re going to pay for your doctor or hospital visit.
— Diesel hit a record $6.05 a gallon Friday, and Trump’s insane war with Iran is entirely responsible for it. According to AAA figures reported by NPR, the national average is up from $5.85 a week ago and $3.70 a year ago, a jump of more than 60 percent since Trump and Netanyahu started their war in late February. CNN notes diesel is on track for the biggest annual percentage increase ever recorded as a result of oil being back above $100 a barrel. Regular gas is at $4.29. And as NBC News points out, after six-plus months of insisting the war would be short, Trump’s now claiming that it’ll magically be fixed just after the election, so please vote for Republicans because this is just temporary. Nobody’s believing him. Diesel powers every truck, train, tractor, and container ship in America, so when it goes up, so does every item on every shelf in every store. This recent hike in fuel prices is only now starting to show up in our purchases; it’s going to get a hell of a lot worse. Welcome to Trump’s “golden age,” all because he thought he could be as slick as Reagan with Grenada, Bush with Iraq, and Bush with Afghanistan, getting himself a “little war” that would goose his popularity. Sadly, he’s not bright enough to do it right, and the drunk weekend TV commentator he put in charge of the Pentagon is even dumber. This is not going to end well.
— Trump closed his midterm convention in Dallas by making the crowd raise their right hands and pledge they would cheat for him, then told them they’ll go to Hell if they don’t vote the way he wants. According to The Hill, the president had the arena repeat after him that they pledged “to the greatest president in the history of the United States that loves us so much he can’t even breathe,” and then delivered the theological part: “You know what happens if you don’t vote? You go to hell.” Most shocking — and even more shocking that no Republican has publicly repudiated it or called for Trump to step down — was when Trump had his followers swear, as the Daily Beast reported, “I’m going to try and cheat like hell, like they do.” Registered to vote or not, he added. Donald Trump Jr., Speaker Mike Johnson, and RFK Jr. all took the pledge. Trump also unveiled a $5,000 “Trump dividend” for every adult citizen, payable only if Republicans keep both chambers, with no explanation of how he’s going to get Congress to appropriate the money. Remember those DOGE and Tariff Rebate Checks we all got? Yeah, me neither. When a party’s closing argument is “cheat or burn in Hell,” it’s telling the world that it can’t win an honest election.
— A right-wing think tank has spent twenty years secretly building a database on thousands of Muslim Americans, and only admitted it when HuffPost started asking questions. This is astonishing and deserves a much larger treatment in our media. The Middle East Forum is a Netanyahu/Likud-aligned group whose “Israel Victory Project” wants America to help Israeli achieve “victory” over the Palestinians. Their files, according to investigative reporting from Huffington Post, contain more than 4 million data points on more than 5,500 Americans and 10,600 organizations, including names, social media accounts, tax information, and organizational ties. Sitting members of Congress Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and André Carson were targeted, along with Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who isn’t Muslim, was filed under “Fellow Traveler,” a phrase that eerily echoes Joe McCarthy’s infamous and fundamentally anti-American playbook. Georgetown’s Mobashra Tazamal put it plainly, writing that “It’s a target list.” And once the reporters called, MEF’s response was to announce that “researchers” can now apply for access. Lists like this always start with an unpopular minority (for McCarthy it was gays and communists), but rarely end there. The organization’s founder, Daniel Pipes, recently bragged about the arrest by DHS last month of a Georgetown scholar who’d criticized Israel and they’d compiled a dossier on. This isn’t the sort of thing healthy democracies promote, although these guys are in tight with Trump and friends.
— Trump got asked a simple question by a Black woman reporter on the tarmac in Dallas and responded by lunging and screaming at her. ABC’s Rachel Scott asked why, if his economic policies are working, Trump thinks he needs to pay people $5,000 to vote for his party. Trump claimed it was a “reward” for “surviving Biden” rather than a bribe, and when she tried to follow up by asking about the $2,000 Tariff Dividend and $5,000 DOGE dividend checks that never arrived, he leaned into her space, jabbed his finger at her face, and repeatedly screamed “Not you!” This is at least the third time this year he’s gone after Scott specifically, having previously called one of her questions “stupid” and referred to her as a “horror show.” This is how a democracy dies, one attack on the media at a time, all being cheered on by lickspittle elected Republicans and the billionaire-owned rightwing media that now dominates America.
— An active-duty Navy sailor was trotted out on stage at the Republican convention as a prop, which is against Pentagon rules, and the Pentagon so far has nothing to say about it. CBS News reports that Petty Officer 2nd Class Wilbert Joseph Castañeda, who was freed last year from a Venezuelan prison in a prisoner swap, stood before Trump’s Trumpapalooza Dallas crowd holding a sign reading “351 days” as the announcer thanked President Trump for rescuing hostages “taken during the Biden administration.” This is against Pentagon policy and perhaps a violation of the law: Defense Department Directive 1344.10 says active-duty troops can attend partisan conventions but only as spectators, must be out of uniform, and cannot participate in a way that seems to endorse the politics. As former Army JAG officer Cody Harnish told CBS, “The moment he stepped on stage as part of the production, he stopped being a spectator.” Meanwhile, Air Force Major Jason Watson is facing court-martial under Defense Department Directive 1344.10 for criticizing Trump on the steps of the Capitol while being in uniform. And, most astonishingly hypocritical, the disgraced Marine Stuart Scheller, who pleaded guilty to that same violation for his viral anti-Biden videos shot while in uniform, now holds a senior personnel job in Whiskey Pete’s Pentagon. In other words, the rules are enforced on troops who criticize Trump and waived for those who suck up to him. That’s the exact opposite of “the rule of law” and an “apolitical military” that are supposed to have defined and defended America since 1789.
— The people building artificial intelligence spent the week telling Congress it might kill everybody, so Mikey Johnson decided the House should leave town for six weeks and avoid the topic. Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon quit Tuesday with a post that’s been viewed more than 150 million times saying the people building AI “earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.” The process called “alignment” is AI-industry speak for making sure that the goals and behaviors of an AI system are “aligned” with the needs of humanity (including our survival), but Anthropic’s lead alignment scientist, Evan Huginger, posted in response that he puts the odds of AI killing off all of humanity within the next decade at a shocking “>10 percent.” Trump says it’s not a big deal; beating China in the AI race is more important that the death of all humans. And Johnson refuses to respond to congressional concerns even though more than 20 members of Congress, including a handful of Republicans, have called for action, and a bipartisan bill for a human-controlled “kill switch” has already been introduced. The Republican position is apparently that anything a billionaire wants to build must be good for us, particularly as the AI industry becomes one of the largest funders of congressional campaigns. While the engineers themselves are screaming from inside the building, Republicans — who were also fine with their Medicaid cuts killing another 50,000 Americans a year — are standing around with their fingers in their ears.
— Crazy Alert! Apparently Donald Trump isn’t the only one who can rename things. Weeks after Trump signed an executive order bizarrely christening Lake Ontario
