Saturday Report — Why is the GOP Leaping Off the Health-Care cliff?

The Best of the Rest of the News and Opinion

— How do we save journalism and democracy? As Jefferson famously pointed out, democracies can’t survive without a vigorous free press, and a free press can’t thrive without democracy. Both have been horribly damaged by five corrupt Republicans on the US Supreme Court, resulting in laws like the Telecommunications Act of 1996 specifically exempting social media giants from liability for the content on their platforms, and Reagan’s stopping enforcement (in 1983) of anti-trust laws that dated back to the 1880s. Between social media super-powering lies, propaganda, and misinformation polluting our public sphere (when more than half of all Americans now get their “news”) and consolidation in the newspaper, radio, and TV realms in ways that would have been blatantly illegal before the Reagan Revolution. If we’re to save both journalism and democracy in America we need to: 1) Reverse Citizens United and its precedents dating back to Santa Clara County in 1886, 2) Repeal Section 240 of the Telecommunications Act so Zuck, Musk, et al, will once again be required to carry responsibility for the content on their platforms and re-hire moderators who do actual moderating, and, 3) require all algorithms used in social media to be open-source and completely visible/transparent to users and the public. If we’re going to be manipulated for political and economic purposes by these richest men in the world, we should at least know how we’re being manipulated.

— Is Our Gun Culture Grooming People to Kill? We make getting guns almost as easy as ordering a hamburger. The shootings at Brown University remind us that America has become the world’s mass-killer groomer, not because people here are uniquely hateful or unstable but because we’ve engineered a system that trains anger into carnage through sheer access. In a country where getting a gun or rifle can be as easy as ordering a hamburger, grudges don’t cool off, they get armed. The alleged shooter, Claudio Neves Valente, didn’t emerge from a vacuum, he emerged from a culture that tells people with a grievance that the fastest path to power is through the trigger. Other nations have rage, resentment, and conflict too, but they don’t groom them into mass murder because they refuse to confuse public safety with profit. So let’s stop letting the gun lobby write our laws and start passing universal background checks, safe storage, and real limits on weapons built for killing, because this fight isn’t just about one shooting, it’s about whether we’re going to keep raising the next headline or finally choose a country that values lives over firepower.

— Does Trump’s Chief of Staff have Russia ties? Bette Dangerous (Heidi Siegmund Cuda) was on my radio/TV program yesterday and laid out the multiple connections between Trump’s Chief of Staff, Susie Wiles, and Russian oligarchs. It’s all circumstantial and implicit, but genuinely creepy. She writes about it at her Bette Dangerous Substack newsletter, and it’s really worth a read.

— The Billionaire Protection Program at the Department of Justice rolls on. A small fraction of the files about billionaire Jeffrey Epstein were released yesterday, utterly failing to satisfy the requirements of the law, after a reported 1000 FBI agents worked to strip out any reference to billionaire Donald Trump. Were the Trump Talent Agency and Miss Teen USA Show funneling young girls to Jeffrey Epstein? And will Pam Bondi face prosecution for violating the law? Let’s not forget that Richard Nixon’s Attorney General, John Mitchell, went to prison for committing crimes while he held that office. It is possible. The release yesterday was a joke, with some documents entirely redacted which is absolutely different from the provisions of the Epstein Transparency Act. Members of Congress are now talking about impeaching Bondi and Todd Blanche, and it’s becoming increasingly evident to everybody in America that Donald Trump himself was up to no good back in the day.

— Jack Smith has the goods on Trump’s criminal activity and Republicans in the House don’t want you to hear the details. Jim Jordan made sure we’ll not hear what Smith had to say, even though Smith explicitly requested a public hearing, by forcing the hearing behind closed doors. What’s leaked out is that Smith said that he’d happily prosecute Trump again, that the evidence is solid, and that Trump not only stole Top Secret documents and kept them where spies visiting Mar-a-Lago could easily access and copy them (Trump even handily put a copy machine in the storage room) but also then obstructed justice by repeatedly lying about them, another felony. We have a convicted criminal in the White House who’s doing everything he can to tear down our democratic institutions and transform America from a democratic republic into an oligarchic strongman state aligned with Russia instead of Europe. If only Merrick Garland had acted two years earlier…

— How strange is it that the GOP has the urge to jump off the health-care cliff? South Dakota Senator Mike Rounds says, “It’s just strange” that Republicans in the House and Senate were unwilling to extend the Affordable Care Act subsidies for even one more year when the consequences of that failure will be so destructive to over 20 million Americans and the electoral hopes of the party next November. Rounds is apparently unaware that five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized rightwing billionaires buying politicians, and those billionaires don’t think it’s right that they should have to pay income taxes to cover the health insurance of “the little people.” It’s really that simple: if the rightwing billionaires who own the GOP had told their politicians to vote to extend the subsidies, it would have happened in a heartbeat. It’s really all about the Benjamins…

— Bob Kennedy’s Children’s Health Defense anti-vax group is circulating disinformation at the height of a measles outbreak, according to reporting in The Guardian. We’re now in the midst of the worst measles outbreak in 30 years, with 1,958 people infected and three dead so far. But Children’s Defense is on the offense, publishing an article that questions whether anybody should be vaccinated against the sometimes-fatal disease and saying it’s “absurd” that the parents of any of the children who’ve died of the disease — or anybody else — should criticize Bob for his years of work against vaccines. Vaccine law expert at UC Law SF, Dorit Reiss, notes, “Nobody wants to believe that they’re hurting children. They will be blamed for this, and they will be rightly blamed for this, because most of the cases are in the unvaccinated and they have been promoting anti-vaccine misinformation for years.” And Amy Pisani, CEO of the group Vaccinate Your Family, added, “Even if he’s not responsible for the actual start of the outbreak, he is most certainly responsible for the spread of the outbreak.” Amen.

— Geeky Science. Feeling awe and wonder actually improves your health, both mental, emotional, and physical. Multiples studies over the years have proven that the more often we can provoke that feeling of awe within ourselves — be it through looking at the stars at night, viewing awesome art, or just simple spiritual exercises like prayer — the more it improves our body and mind. Figure out what triggers your awe-button and turn it into a daily ritual; you’ll see a whole cascade of improvements in your life, according to all this research.