Why?  Because he’s a black man and, although he has not been in office for over 8 years, they know their hate-filled base just loves to attack Obama.

Perhaps it is time the United States joins the rest of the world with national health insurance – Medicare for All.  Read on.  Pay special attention to the last paragraph.

 

The price increases that should cause Americans more alarm
The price of health insurance is rising faster than the price of eggs or gasoline.
August 8, 2025 at 6:45 a.m. EDT
By Elisabeth Rosenthal

Elisabeth Rosenthal is senior contributing editor at KFF Health News and author of “An American Sickness: How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take It Back.”

Wary of inflation, Americans have been watching the prices of everyday items such as eggs and gasoline. A less-noticed expense should cause greater alarm: rising premiums for health insurance. They have been trending upward for years and are now rising faster than ever.

Consider that, from 2000 to 2020, egg prices fluctuated between just under $1 and about $3 a dozen; they reached $6.23 in March but then fell to $3.77 in June. Average gas prices, after seesawing between $2 and $4 a gallon for more than a decade starting in 2005, peaked at $4.93 in 2022, and are now back to just over $3.

Meanwhile, since 1999, health insurance premiums for people with employer-provided coverage have more than quadrupled. From 2023 to 2024 alone, they rose more than 6 percent for both individuals and family coverage — a steeper increase than that of wages and overall inflation.

For many people who have the kind of insurance plans created by the Affordable Care Act (because they work for small companies or insure themselves), rates have probably risen even more drastically. In this market, state regulators scrutinize insurers’ proposed rate increases, but only if they exceed 15 percent.

And the situation is about to get worse: For 2026, ACA marketplace insurers have proposed eye-popping new prices: In New York, UnitedHealthcare has proposed a 66.4 percent rise. HMO Colorado has asked for an increase of more than 33 percent in that state. In Washington, the average proposed increase across all insurers is 21.2 percent, and in Rhode Island it’s 23.7 percent.

According to Business Group on Health, a consortium of major employers, “actual health care costs have grown a cumulative 50% since 2017.” In a recent survey, 87 percent of companies said that in the next five to 10 years, the cost of providing health insurance for their workers would become “unsustainable.”

 

 

Working conditions at Tesla’s manufacturing plant in Fremont, California, have gone from bad to worse, with sexual assaults aboard company shuttle buses, drug and alcohol use onsite, all-out brawls breaking out between employees, and “prevalent” bigotry – including widespread use of the N-word, a bombshell lawsuit reveals.

In a 159-page federal lawsuit filed Thursday and obtained first by The Independent, Ozell Murray, a former Fresno police officer in charge of security at the 22,000-person factory, claims he and his team “routinely” seized cocaine and fentanyl onsite, confiscated guns discovered in the building, investigated “acts of sexual deviance” on Tesla grounds, and, at regular intervals, “pulled employees off the manufacturing line and sent them home for being alcohol-intoxicated and high on drugs.”

Those who reported the issues were fired over bogus charges or forced to resign, according to Murray’s complaint, to which several of his ex-colleagues signed on as co-defendants.

“Healthy profits have always been more important to the Company than a healthy working environment,” the complaint alleges. “For Tesla, more bodies on the manufacturing line meant more vehicles flying out the factory door – no matter how unclean the hands were that were assembling those cars.”

Read more: https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/tesla-lawsuit-elon-musk-california-b2804549.html

Why is Trump’s Secretary of Defense calling for women to lose their right to vote?

The United States Secretary of Defense just promoted a clip calling for women to lose their right to vote.

Pete Hegseth shares a clip saying women shouldn’t have the right to vote, the 19th Amendment should be “repealed,” and women should “submit” to their husbands: “All of Christ for All of Life”

“All of Christ for All of Life,” Hegseth posted on social media, from an account marked with a grey checkmark that says, “This account is verified because it’s an affiliate of @DeptofDefense on X.”

That post accompanied a CNN interview (below) of Pastor Wilson. CNN billed the segment as “The Christian nationalist pastor with ties to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.”

“Women are the kind of people that people come out of,” Wilson unapologetically told CNN.

“It doesn’t take any talent to simply reproduce biologically,” he continued. “The wife and mother, who is the chief executive of the home, is entrusted with three or four or five eternal souls.”

Wilson also believes women should not have certain leadership roles, and should not be allowed to vote.

https://www.alternet.org/higseth-christian-nationalist/

On Tuesday Donald Trump went on CNBC to explain why the European Union is facing a tariff of “only” 15 percent.

But what he said was simply delusional — and the delusion should be more concerning than the non-existent tariffs.

The Europeans, Trump asserted, had agreed to cough up $600 billion, which he described as a “gift,” not a loan. And he emphasized that this is “$600 billion to invest in anything I want. Anything. I can do anything I want with it.”

So Trump apparently believes that the European Union has agreed to provide him with a personal $600 billion slush fund.

In fact, as several economists pointed out after the “deal” was announced, the EU agreed to no such thing. In fact, it literally couldn’t have made such an agreement. European nations aren’t command economies in which government can tell the private sector where to invest, and in any case the European Commission, which negotiated with Trump, can’t tell the governments of member states what to do.

So think of it as the emperor’s new trade deal: Trump is strutting around, feeling very impressed with himself, but in substantive terms he’s stark naked.

Does it matter?  Yes, it matters because it means he’s lost touch with reality across the board.

He really does seem to think that completely vague and unenforceable promises of “investment” represents a kickback he can use to buy people off and bail people out. The problem is what happens when he figures out that this isn’t true:

What will happen if and when Trump realizes that Europe hasn’t actually promised what he thinks it has — or, as he’s likely to see it, that the EU has gone back on its promise? He’s already given us an answer: He’s going to put the tariff on Europe back up to 35 percent.

He may not be able to carry out that threat. In fact, there’s a very real possibility that the courts will rule many of the tariffs Trump has already imposed illegal (which they surely are) and order the administration to refund the money it has already collected.

But assume that the Supreme Court does its usual thing and decides that the Constitution allows Trump to do whatever he wants. How afraid should Europe be of the possibility that Trump will put the tariffs back up, higher than before?

Well, as far as anyone can tell putting U.S. tariffs up from 15 to 35 percent would do less damage to Europe than many people imagine.

Yes, it would hurt, but not all that much. By making a 15 percent tariff the baseline — what countries pay even if they do make “deals” — Trump has used up a lot of his trade war ammunition, greatly reducing the effectiveness of any further threats.

After all, Europe has never been all that dependent on access to U.S. markets. In 2024 the EU’s exports of goods to the United States were slightly less than 3 percent of its GDP — not a trivial sum, but not enough to make European prosperity dependent on U.S. goodwill.

Trump’s tariffs will make the EU even less dependent on the U.S. market.

The crucial number is what economists call the “Armington elasticity,” which measures how sensitive trade flows are to tariffs, and that a reasonable estimate of that elasticity is 3. If we go with that number, we would expect the 15 percent tariff currently in place to cut EU exports to America by roughly a third, to around 2 percent of GDP.

That’s a palpable hit, but not a huge one. Writing in the Financial Times, Richard Milne tells us that reports from European companies are showing surprising resilience. Furthermore, the loss of U.S. business will be partially offset by higher government expenditure in Europe, with Germany in particular boosting spending on both infrastructure and defense.

That’s with a 15 percent tariff. But what happens if Trump pushes tariffs up to 35 percent? Back-of-the envelope calculations say that this would reduce Europe’s exports to the United States by another 0.7 percent of GDP. That is, the hit to Europe if Trump makes good on his threats would be smaller than the hit he has already imposed with the tariffs he plans to keep in place regardless.

One of the many problems here is that the clowns who are giving Trump his ideas are convinced both(1)  that the United States is being completely ripped off by the rest of the world and (2) that everyone is totally dependent on access to the American market. Neither of these things is true, but the result will be a bunch of random revenge outlashes that will hurt the US more than it hurts other countries.

 

Desperate for warm bodies to help carry out President Donald Trump’s evil deportation agenda, the Department of Homeland Security this week has announced it is lowering the standards for applicants to serve as Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.

DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said on Wednesday that there are no longer age limits to serve as an ICE agent, as the agency seeks to staff up after being injected with billions in funding from Republicans’ unpopular “One Big, Beautiful Bill.”

“We are ENDING the age cap for ICE law enforcement. Qualified candidates can now apply with no age limit,” Noem wrote in a post on X.

A day earlier, Assistant DHS Secretary Tricia McLaughlin declared that no undergraduate degrees are necessary to work at ICE. All uneducated racists are welcome!

“Serve your country! Defend your culture! No undergraduate degree required!” the official DHS account wrote in a post on X, using blatantly white supremacist rhetoric to say that the administration is deporting mostly Latino immigrants in order to preserve American—i.e. white—culture.

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It was one of a number of vile DHS posts seeking ICE applicants, including multiple that use the iconic World War II Uncle Sam poster.

“​​America has been invaded by criminals and predators. We need YOU to get them out,” reads one post that includes the Uncle Sam image.

Yes, this is an actual DHS recruiting poster.

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ICE is desperate to beef up its staff to meet the arbitrary 3,000-per-day arrest quota set by bigoted hobgoblin Stephen Miller. Indeed, ICE arrests have actually dropped by 20% in July—which is likely the reason DHS is so desperate to hire more ICE agents.

Not only does the agency not have enough staff to arrest that many people, but it’s causing ICE agents with modicums of a soul to quit or consider quitting, saying they are being forced to stop going after actual criminals to instead arrest day laborers and farm workers who are the engine of the American economy.

“Even those that are gung ho about the mission aren’t happy with how they are asking to execute it—the quotas and the shift to the low-hanging fruit to make the numbers,” one ICE agent told the New Republic in July.

Indeed, TRAC reported 71% of people in ICE custody have no criminal convictions. Those that do have convictions are for minor offenses, such as traffic violations.

In order to entice people to sign up as an ICE goon, the agency has been offering as much as $50,000 in bonuses and student loan forgiveness to get retired agents to rejoin Trump’s deportation force. Apparently there are some student loans Trump and his goons think are worth forgiving.

But apparently even that’s not doing the job to get enough warm bodies, as it’s now lowering age and education standards. But relaxing standards for ICE agent hires is dangerous.

History shows that doing this could increase misconduct in the agency—which is already abducting citizens off streets and holding them in detention facilities without charges. Andrea Velez, a U.S. citizen in California, was abducted off the street by ICE agents and detained. She was later charged with assaulting an ICE officer, even though video footage shows she was grabbed off the street by masked agents and forced into a vehicle in a situation that she said felt like a kidnapping. Charges were later dropped.

“Any time you have massive political pressure to beef up overnight, it never turns out well,” T.J. Bonner, former president of the Border Patrol agents union, told the Associated Press. “Too many corners have to be cut. Then when things go wrong, the fingers get pointed.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

“The enemy is not Hamas, nor is it the military wing of Hamas, every child in Gaza is the enemy. We need to occupy Gaza and settle it, and not a single Gazan child will be left there. There is no other victory,”

-Moshe Feiglin

https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/moshe-feiglin-every-baby-in-gaza-is-an-enemy-ex-israeli-lawmakers-shocking-remarks-8477020

Moshe Feiglin’s appalling call for the extermination of Gazan children is not just a window into a genocidal worldview—it shatters any claim to moral credibility he or his defenders might assert. This isn’t politics. It’s an open endorsement of war crimes and a chilling invocation of ethnic cleansing, reminiscent of humanity’s darkest eras. To label infants as enemies and dress up mass murder as “victory” is not an act of strength—it’s the deranged rhetoric of people utterly severed from basic human decency. If the international community had any resolve, Feiglin’s name would already stand alongside the architects of genocide. Instead, we witness a deafening silence from global leaders, as the children he vilifies continue to suffer and die. Let it be clear: this is not self-defense. This is a call to annihilate. And history will remember who stood against it, and who said nothing.

Anyone defending this isn’t defending democracy or Israel, they’re defending genocide, the murder of innocents, and fascism.

“Moshe Zalman Feiglin (Hebrew: מֹשֶׁה זַלְמָן פֶייגְּלִין; born 31 July 1962) is a right libertarian-leaning Israeli politician and activist, and the leader of libertarian Zionist party Zehut. As a member of Likud, he headed the Manhigut Yehudit (Jewish Leadership) faction within the party, and represented Likud in the Knesset between 2013 and 2015”

Every day, Americans are bombarded with the bad news of Trump 2.0: concentration camps; cruel ICE raids targeting law-abiding residents; health insurance being yanked from millions; elite universities, media companies, and law firms yielding to mob-like extortion; crypto deals and other brazen grifting tied to a corrupt White House; rampant abuses of governmental power and threats of sham criminal prosecutions against the administration’s critics and political foes; drastic cuts in food assistance; assaults on women’s rights; the withholding of disaster relief; the reckless shutdowns and eviscerations of crucial government services and agencies that will result in hardship (and, in some cases, death) for Americans and people overseas.

This is, of course, a partial list. And it is exhausting to keep track of and absorb each new outrage. That is the clear intent. The Trump transgressions come so fast they distract from each other. Public attention rarely remains focused on any one atrocity. We’re bludgeoned by the never-ending stream of misdeeds and affronts—which each day come wrapped in propaganda extolling a new Golden Age and assorted false glories of Dear Leader. When one is caught in the crossfire, it is hard to see, let alone address, the big picture.

That is to Donald Trump’s advantage. For a long time, commentators have noted that he relishes generating chaos and believes he can exploit disorder for political advantage. It’s an escape route for him. The dizzying whirlwind he creates places critics and opponents off-balance. And perhaps best of all for him and his crew, it hides their overall plan and inhibits the development and promotion of an overarching counternarrative. Their foes are stuck decrying the individual acts of villainy, one at a time, without doing what is most necessary in American politics: telling a story.

Trump and his gang are deconstructing America. This is their purposeful goal and an obvious one, if you look past the daily barrage of absurdity, indecency, corruption, wrongdoing, and abuses of power. It is the story that must be conveyed to the citizenry.