Our democracy is in jeopardy. The Constitution is being attacked. No branch of government is standing up for our fundamental rights. We invite you to join us in taking a stand.
A group of Seattle retirement communities have begun protesting twice a month. Mirabella and Horizon House now “Give an Hour for Democracy” on the second and fourth Thursdays, from 4-5. We are organizing Skyline in solidarity, joining forces with Horizon House, at 8th and Madison, beginning September 25th.
We hope you will join us, with signs, strong voices, and heartfelt concern!
An organization, called “Seniors at the Crossroads” has been formed to spread the word and encourage seniors to demonstrate their commitment to democracy and the Constitution. See the website https://www.seniorsatthecrossroads.org. Let’s stand together, so our voices will be heard.
We hope you will join us on Thursday, September 25th, from 4-5, at 8th and Madison.
The “Give An Hour for Democracy” Organizing Committee
Posted inAdvocacy, Government|Comments Off on Give an Hour for Democracy
by Jillian Wilson in the Huffington Post (thanks to MaryLou P.)
How many alcoholic drinks do you have in an entire week? Five, seven, 10? More? If you have one drink a day, your health could be impacted ― but the powers that be aren’t doing much to make that fact known.
Earlier this month, Vox reported that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the Department of Health and Human Services decided not to publish a large federal study on the negative impact alcohol has on our health. A draft of the report, known as the Alcohol Intake and Health Study, was published for public comment in January and is available online.
“This report and our findings were, as we were told, going to inform the new drinking guidelines,” said Priscilla Martinez, the deputy scientific director at the Alcohol Research Group and an author of the report.
Now, instead, a competing report that’s in-line with the country’s current drinking guidelines (one drink or fewer a day for women and two or fewer for men) will inform the guideline update, according to the New York Times. Some of the panelists behind this competing report have financial interests aligned with the alcohol industry, the New York Times reported.
“I think you generally want to have any recommendations about diet or lifestyle behaviors [to be] informed by the most sound science,” Martinez said. “And so that’s what I think is unfortunate about the [the Alcohol Intake and Health Study] not being included.”
The Department of Health and Human Services did not reply to HuffPost’s request for comment.
The Alcohol Intake and Health Study brought important health consequences of drinking alcohol to the spotlight. These health issues happen more with heavy drinking, of course, but researchers found they can start at a pretty low amount of alcohol use. Here’s what to know:
As little as one drink per day is linked to cancer and other chronic diseases, researchers found.
“This report that isn’t going to be released, links [alcohol] with 200-plus health conditions,” said Brooke Scheller, a clinical nutritionist and author of “How to Eat to Change How You Drink.” Scheller was not affiliated with the research.
These conditions ranged from mental health disorders to heart disease to cancer to digestive diseases and more.
Researchers found that the risk of negative health effects started at one drink a day, which increased the risk of developing certain cancers and risk of liver cirrhosis. This is true for both men and women.
The cancers that increased with alcohol use include breast cancer, liver cancer, colorectal cancer, pharyngeal cancer, oral cavity cancer, laryngeal cancer and esophageal cancer.
People who had one drink a day did have a lower risk of stroke, but that benefit was canceled out if folks even occasionally had more than one drink a day. And, the more you drink, the more at risk you are for health problems. (continued on page 2 or here)
At 10:22 on the morning of Sunday, September 15, 1963, a bomb ripped through the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. It was Youth Day in the historic brick church, and five young girls dressed in their Sunday best were in the ladies’ lounge getting ready for their part in the Sunday service that was about to start. As Denise McNair, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Addie Mae Collins were chatting and adjusting their dresses, a charge of dynamite stashed under the steps that led to the church sanctuary blasted into the ladies’ lounge. It killed the four girls instantly. Standing at the sink in the back of the room, Addie’s sister Sarah survived with serious injuries.
Just five days before, Black children had entered formerly all-white schools after an August court order required an end to segregation in Birmingham’s public schools. This decision capped a fight over integration that had begun just after the May 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision in which the Supreme Court declared segregation unconstitutional.
In that same year, in the wake of the successful 381-day Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott to protest that city’s segregated bus system, Birmingham’s Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, along with the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., the Reverend Ralph Abernathy, and strategist and civil rights activist Bayard Rustin, started the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to challenge segregation through nonviolent protest, rather than trusting the work to the courts alone.
On September 9, 1957, Shuttlesworth and his wife, Ruby, along with other Black parents, tried to enroll their children in the city’s all-white flagship John Herbert Phillips High School. A mob of white Ku Klux Klansmen met them at the school, attacking them with chains and bats; someone stabbed Ruby Shuttlesworth in the hip with a pocketknife, and an amateur videographer captured a man named Bobby Frank Cherry on video reaching for brass knuckles before diving back into the attack on Shuttlesworth.
Cherry had no children at the school.
Over the next several years, the Ku Klux Klan lost the political struggle over civil rights, and its members increasingly turned to public violence. There were so many bombings of civil rights leaders’ homes and churches that the city became known as “Bombingham.” When the Freedom Riders, civil rights workers who rode interstate buses in mixed-race groups to challenge segregation, came through Birmingham, police commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor looked the other way as KKK members beat the riders with baseball bats, chains, rocks, and lead pipes.
Connor was a perfect foil for civil rights organizers, who began a campaign of nonviolent direct action to challenge segregation in Birmingham. Shuttlesworth invited King to Birmingham to help. One of the organizers’ tactics was to attract national attention by provoking Connor, and participants in the movement began sit-ins at libraries, kneel-ins at white churches, and voter registration drives.
In April 1963, Connor got an injunction barring the protests and promised to fill the jails. He did. King’s famous Letter from a Birmingham Jail was a product of Connor’s vow, smuggled out of jail on bits of paper given to him by a sympathetic inmate. In the letter, King responded to those who opposed the civil rights protests and, claiming to support civil rights, said that the courts were the proper venue to address social injustice. King agreed that the protests created tension, but he explained that such tension was constructive: it would force the city’s leaders to negotiate. “‘Wait,’” he reminded them, “has almost always meant ‘never.’”
But Connor’s tactics had the chilling effect he intended, as demonstrators shied away from being arrested out of fear of losing their jobs and being unable to provide for their families. So organizers decided to invite children to join a march to the downtown area. When the children agreed, the SCLC held workshops on the techniques of nonviolence and warned them of the danger they would be facing. (continue on page 2 or here)
On May 2, 1963, they gathered at the 16th Street Baptist Church, just blocks away from Birmingham’s City Hall. As students moved toward City Hall in waves, singing “We Shall Overcome,” police officers arrested more than 600 of them and blocked the streets with fire trucks. The national news covered the story.
The next day, Bull Connor tried another tactic to keep the young protesters out of the downtown: fire hoses set to the highest pressure. When observers started to throw rocks and bottles at the police with the fire hoses, Connor told police officers to use German shepherd dogs to stop them. Images from the day made the national news and began to galvanize support for the protesters.
By May 6, Connor had turned the state fairgrounds into a makeshift jail to hold the overflow of protesters he was arresting, and national media figures, musicians, and civil rights activists were arriving in Birmingham. By May 7 the downtown was shut down while Connor arrested more people and used fire hoses again. The events in Birmingham were headline news.
By May 10, local politicians under pressure from businessmen had agreed to release the people who had been arrested; to desegregate lunch counters, drinking fountains, and bathrooms; and to hire Black people in a few staff jobs.
After Connor’s insistence that he would never permit desegregation, white supremacists in Birmingham felt betrayed by the new deal, basic though it was. Violence escalated over the summer, even as King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail was widely published and praised and as civil rights activists, fresh from the Birmingham campaign, on August 28 held the March for Jobs and Freedom in Washington, D.C., where King delivered the “I Have a Dream” speech.
For white supremacists in Birmingham, the children and the 16th Street Baptist Church where they had organized were the symbols of the movement that had beaten them.
Their fury escalated in summer 1963 when a lawsuit the Reverend Shuttlesworth had filed to challenge segregation in public schools ended in August with a judge ordering Birmingham public schools to desegregate.
Five days after the first Black children entered a white school as students, four members of the Cahaba River Group, which had splintered off from another Ku Klux Klan group because they didn’t think it was aggressive enough, took action. Thomas Blanton, Robert Chambliss, Herman Cash, and Bobby Frank Cherry—the same man who in 1957 had beaten the Reverend Shuttlesworth with brass knuckles for trying to enroll his children in school—bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church. “Just wait until Sunday morning and they’ll beg us to let them segregate,” Chambliss had told his niece.
The death of innocent children—on a Sunday morning, in a house of God—at the hands of white supremacists drew national attention. It woke up white people who had previously been leery of civil rights protests, making them confront the horror of racial violence in the South. Support for civil rights legislation grew, and in 1964 that support helped legislators to pass the Civil Rights Act.
Still, it seemed as if the individual bombers would get away with their crimes. In 1968, the FBI investigation ended without indictments,
But it turned out the story wasn’t over. Bill Baxley, a young law student at the University of Alabama in 1963, was so profoundly outraged by the bombing that he vowed someday he would do something about it. In 1970, voters elected Baxley to be Alabama’s attorney general. He reopened the case, famously responding to a Ku Klux Klan threat by responding on official state letterhead: “kiss my *ss.”
The reluctance of the FBI to share its evidence meant that Baxley charged and convicted only Robert Chambliss—whose nickname in 1963 was “Dynamite Bob”—for the murder of Denise McNair.
But still the story wasn’t over. Another young lawyer named Doug Jones was in the courtroom during that trial, and in 1997, President Bill Clinton appointed Jones as U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Alabama. Jones pursued the case, uncovering old evidence that had been sealed and finding new witnesses. Herman Cash had died, but in 2001 and 2002, representing the state of Alabama, Jones successfully prosecuted Thomas Edwin Blanton and Bobby Frank Cherry for first-degree murder.
Chambliss, Cherry, and Blanton all died in prison: Chambliss in 1985, Cherry in 2004, and Blanton in 2020.
Doug Jones went on to serve as a Senator from Alabama from 2018 to 2021. On this anniversary of the bombing, Senator Jones talked about the events of that day, justice, healing, and what lessons today’s Americans can take from the bombing and its aftermath.
Throughout the last few years I’ve emphasized to my teammates at Citizen University that we must not let everything in civic life get nationalized — that we must help our network of CU catalysts practice humanity and civic power and civic character in the local relational contexts of the places where they live.
But I know that is increasingly difficult. The assassination of Charlie Kirk this week was terrible in its own right — no one should be murdered for their views and political action. It is dangerous also because it may now accelerate the nationalizing and literal weaponizing of our politics, the dehumanizing of opponents, the hardening of everyone’s hearts.
So, with my team today and now with this wider ecosystem, I do come back to my original emphasis, with a variation. We can and must help people “live like a citizen” wherever they live — to practice how to see, feel, hear, serve the people around them in their full complex humanity. But more than ever now, to sense the pain around them. And neither we nor they can be preferential about our pain-sensing. A kind of pain has led millions of people to follow Kirk. A kind of pain has led someone to take Kirk’s life. A kind of pain is pulsing through cities where people fear their own government and their neighbors. There are so many other kinds of pain making our politics tumultuous in every quarter, shaping how people show up or don’t in the lives of their towns and neighborhoods.
The “habits of heart and mind” that inform our programs and projects at CU — that keep a community from disintegrating — are not just about the sensing. They are also about inviting each other to convert what we sense and feel into what we do and choose: build or destroy, heal or scorn. There are ways to relieve pain that involve inflicting it on others, and there are ways to relieve pain that involve solving problems with others, making sense of things together, and in the process making each other more wholly human.
That choice is not just for the day after a headline-making act of political violence, and not just on 9/11 + 24. It’s not only about partisan or ideological divides. Making that choice doesn’t require the permission of some prominent leader or influencer. It doesn’t require me or you to validate views we don’t like. Nor does it invite us to be the savior of people we think are benighted, nor imply that we have surrendered naively to them. We recommit to humanizing habits to save ourselves, our own civic souls, and simply out of the other deep principle we teach at CU — that society becomes how you behave.
I know it’s hard, and it’s probably going to get harder. We’ve got to keep at it, with heart and courage. We truly have no choice. If we are to live together we must choose to live, together. And to show others that it is possible.
Aaron S. Kesselheim is a primary care physician, lawyer, and professor of medicine at Harvard with expertise in pharmacoepidemiology and pharmacoeconomics.
Pharmaceutical ads in the United States are annoying. Absurd. And almost uniquely American.
In fact, only one other high-income country in the entire world—New Zealand—allows prescription drug companies to advertise directly to consumers. Everyone else has decided the downsides aren’t worth it. So why hasn’t the U.S. stopped them?
From the get-go, RFK Jr. has named eliminating pharmaceutical ads as one of his goals. And believe it or not, I’m with him on this one. (Gasp!) But can the administration actually take action? They think they can. Yesterday, a new executive memo and an accompanying FDA press release claimed to step up enforcement against drug ads.
Here are answers to the top 9 questions.
Why are prescription drug ads even allowed here? The story goes back to 1938, when Congress passed the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act. For decades afterward, most assumed this law made it illegal to advertise prescription drugs directly to consumers. Why? Because no advertisement could possibly provide a full and complete description of a drug’s benefits and risks. Thus, ads would inevitably misbrand medicines.
But in the 1980s, the FDA decided that wasn’t exactly true. The agency concluded that drug ads were legal as long as they included a “brief summary” of the FDA-approved drug label. That’s when glossy magazine ads took off—big splashy photos on one page, with tiny print summarizing risks on the next.
In 1997, the FDA made another pivotal change: on TV and radio, drug makers no longer needed the entire summary. Instead, they could provide a “major statement” of key risks. That’s the moment the modern era of pharmaceutical commercials began.
Do drug ads make medicines more expensive? Not directly. Brand-name drugs are expensive in the U.S. because we allow manufacturers to set whatever price they want. Unlike in most other countries, the government does not negotiate those prices up front. Then, once a drug is on the market, companies can hike prices at will.
But ads do shape what drugs patients ask for, and those tend to be the most expensive ones.
Generic manufacturers rarely advertise because they face what economists call the “free rider” problem. Multiple companies make the same generic pill. If you ask your doctor for a generic, your pharmacy will give you whichever version is in stock, not a specific brand. That means an ad from one generic company might boost sales for its competitors, too. Why bother?
As a result, nearly all drug ads are for costly brand-name drugs. That means patients who respond to ads often end up paying for these expensive drugs, even when a cheaper, equally effective generic or even a non-drug treatment exists.
Have the number of ads increased over time? Yes, particularly to patients (or consumers) compared to physicians. One study found that between 1997 and 2016, direct-to-consumer ad spending jumped from $2.1 billion to $9.6 billion. Today, drug manufacturers pour roughly $6 billion a year into these ads, most of it concentrated on top-selling brand-name drugs—and not necessarily the best brand-name drugs, either. (continued on page 2 or here)
Figure from Medical Marketing in the United States, 1997-2016 in JAMA. Source here. Another study found that fewer than one-third of the most common drugs featured in direct-to-consumer television advertising were rated as having high added value for patients.
Why do ads spend half the time listing side effects? It’s required. When the FDA opened the door to TV ads in the late 1990s, they did so with strings attached. Companies had to include a “major statement” of key risks.
On top of that, drug ads must provide “fair balance,” meaning the positives and negatives have to both be presented. In practice, this usually means the first half of the commercial shows people frolicking on beaches, while the second half is a dizzying recital of warnings.
Are drug ads misleading? The short answer: sometimes.
The FDA’s Office of Prescription Drug Promotion (OPDP) is supposed to make sure ads are accurate, not misleading, and fairly balanced. But here’s the catch: companies don’t have to submit ads for approval before airing them. When OPDP does find problematic ads, it’s often months after they’ve gone public.
And what counts as “misleading” isn’t always straightforward. Take an ad that promotes a new sleep medicine that helps people “fall asleep quickly.” That sounds impressive until you learn that in the trial leading to the drug’s FDA approval, patients taking the drug fell asleep within 30 minutes, while people taking placebo fell asleep within 45 minutes. Not a big difference. Is the ad technically misleading? Hard to say.
Psychology complicates things further. Studies show that when drug risks are read aloud while soothing images play in the background, viewers are distracted from the serious information. The ad meets the rules, but the impact on patients is another story.
Do these ads actually help patients? This is a complicated question.
On one hand, drug ads increase prescribing of the featured medicines. One can imagine a case in which that is good. Patients who might otherwise suffer in silence, for example with erectile dysfunction or depression, might be encouraged to start conversations with their doctors. In theory, ads can empower people to seek treatment for stigmatized conditions.
On the other hand, ads can drive “over-prescribing.” If a patient walks into the doctor’s office and asks for a drug by name, studies show they’re more likely to get it, even if a different approach might have been better. This has raised concerns about ads fueling unnecessary or inappropriate use, especially for conditions like adult ADHD, dry eyes, or adjustment disorder.
The truth is, drug ads are a mixed bag. They can open doors to care but likely, more often than not, encourage expensive and even unnecessary prescriptions.
Could the U.S. ever ban these ads? Banning drug ads would be hard to imagine in the U.S. for multiple reasons.
The biggest is the First Amendment. A ban on drug ads would have to be defended in court, since pharmaceutical companies would immediately sue to overturn the ban. But the Supreme Court has interpreted the First Amendment’s protection of freedom of speech to cover commercial entities, even though businesses are not people. Unfortunately, changing the courts’ current perspectives on commercial speech is hard to envision short of a Constitutional amendment that clarified that corporations are not people and do not deserve similar speech protections.
So, if not a ban—and in the absence of a voluntary agreement by the drug companies to stop advertising—the government could try to regulate drug ads more tightly. For example, the FDA could create rules about their content or where and when they can be shown. Online ads, in particular, may have features that make them prone to misinterpretation—for instance, how risk information is displayed or how distracting design elements (like autoplay videos or pop-ups) might affect understanding. The FDA could try to identify such situations and establish rules to address them. Congress could also provide more resources and authority to the FDA to spot problematic ads quickly and remove them from circulation.
Why hasn’t this been accomplished before? In one word: lobbying.
The pharmaceutical industry has the most powerful and well-resourced lobbying organization in Washington D.C. It has historically opposed any efforts that would restrict manufacturers’ ability to advertise broadly because, as noted above, drug ads help brand-name manufacturers make money. The industry has provided substantial funds over the years to many of the legislators and helped elect presidents who have defined the FDA’s agenda and funding.
So does this FDA proposal have teeth? The new directive sounds tough, but in practice it doesn’t have much bite. As with drug ads themselves, it is important to read the fine print!
Key steps included in the directive are:
Stricter enforcement: The FDA reportedly plans to issue about 100 cease-and-desist letters and “thousands” of warning letters about drug ads.
Closing a loophole: In their major statements of drug risks, TV and radio ads have long been allowed to list only the “most important” risks if they point viewers to a website or phone number for more details. The administration says this “adequate provision” rule isn’t sufficient and wants more risks spelled out directly in the ads, even if it makes them a little bit longer.
Expanding oversight: Regulators are being directed to pay closer attention to how drug ads appear on social media platforms.
The impact of these moves will likely be limited. Warning letters nearly always just result in the company withdrawing or adjusting the advertisement without any fines or additional penalties—oftentimes months after the ad has already been widely disseminated. With recent cuts to the personnel and budget at the FDA, consistent and aggressive oversight of social media will also be hard to sustain. The directive does not even try to provide details about the so-called expanded oversight, such as essential guidelines about what should and should not be permitted in social media advertising of drugs. Such details have been needed for many years (and still do)!
Bottom line Drug ads are a limited and inherently problematic way to inform people about prescription drugs. We need to do a much better job of empowering patients to get the medical care they need and to educate patients about the true benefits and risks of prescription drugs in an unbiased way.
Whether this ever changes will depend not just on one administration, but on how we as a country decide to balance corporate power, commercial speech, and the health of our citizens.
CHICAGO (AP) — Thousands of protesters marched in Chicago on Saturday against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and President Donald Trump’s plan to send National Guard troops and immigration agents to the city.
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This is a photo gallery curated by AP photo editors.
People march during Illinois Coalition for Immigrant & Refugee Rights’ “Chicago Says No Trump No Troops” protest Saturday, Sept. 6, 2025, in Chicago. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)People march during Illinois Coalition for Immigrant & Refugee Rights’ “Chicago Says No Trump No Troops” protest Saturday, Sept. 6, 2025, in Chicago. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)People march by Chicago Theater during Illinois Coalition for Immigrant & Refugee Rights’ “Chicago Says No Trump No Troops” protest Saturday, Sept. 6, 2025, in Chicago. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster) – continued
Hope you got go to Eric Barnes’ presentation today. Love the lyrics to this song! I’ll try to post a few more including Piano Man. Let me know your favorites! (Also I hope we can get an upgraded sound system in the MBR. It’s so badly needed!). Sorry to learn that Joel has been diagnosed with normal pressure hydrocephalus. We wish him well. What a talent!
Posted inMusic|Comments Off on Just The Way You Are
Some researchers suspect that rising prescription drug use may explain a disturbing trend.
Ed Note: At your next doctor visit, consider asking them whether any of your medications (prescription or over-the-counter) many be related to increased risk of falling.
Earl Vickers was accustomed to taking Molly, his shepherd-boxer-something-else mix, for strolls on the beach or around his neighborhood in Seaside, Calif. A few years ago, though, he started to experience problems staying upright.
“If another dog came toward us, every single time I’d end up on the ground,” recalled Mr. Vickers, 69, a retired electrical engineer. “It seemed like I was falling every other month. It was kind of crazy.”
Most of those tumbles did no serious damage, though one time he fell backward and hit his head on a wall behind him. “I don’t think I had a concussion, but it’s not something I want to do every day,” Mr. Vickers said, ruefully. Another time, trying to break a fall, he broke two bones in his left hand.
So in 2022, he told the oncologist who had been treating him for prostate cancer that he wanted to stop the cancer drug he had been taking, off and on, for four years: enzalutamide (sold as Xtandi).
Among the drug’s listed side effects are higher rates of falls and fractures among patients who took it, compared with those given a placebo. His doctor agreed that he could discontinue the drug, and “I haven’t had a single fall since,” Mr. Vickers said.
Public health experts have warned of the perils of falls for older people for decades. In 2023, the most recent year of data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 41,000 Americans over 65 died from falls, an opinion article in JAMA Health Forum pointed out last month.
More startling than that figure, though, was another statistic: Fall-related mortality among older adults has been climbing sharply. (continued on Page 2 or here)
From GoodGoodGood – thanks to Pam P. (Ed note: Is this perhaps a new way to worship?)
St. John’s Lutheran Church has sat on a downtown corner of Madison, Wisconsin — just three blocks from the state Capitol — for nearly 170 years.
But its leaders are now working to demolish it.
“St. John’s has always been a place focused on refuge, serving the poor, and meeting people where they are,” the church’s pastor, Rev. Peter Beeson, said in a fundraising video.
“Today, we’re looking at adapting our building in the most audacious way yet: by tearing it down to build 110 units of affordable housing, plus worship and community space.”
The current St. John’s Lutheran Church building. Photo courtesy of Google Maps
In the place of the old building will be a brand-new 10-story redevelopment, as Beeson described, home to a new worship space, offices, community spaces, and over 100 mostly low-income apartments, with a parking garage underneath.
The idea came about from conversations around how the congregation could best give back to the community, and now the $58 million project is about to break ground, with the goal to be completed in the next two years.
“We were realizing more and more people were struggling with finding housing,” Beeson recently told Wisconsin Public Radio. “And if they were able to find housing, were paying 50, 60, 70% of their income for housing costs.” (continue on page 2 or here)
Posted inAdvocacy, Housing, Kindness, Morality, Religion|Comments Off on Church to demolish existing worship space, creating 110 units of affordable housing
Today President Donald J. Trump signed an executive order to rename the Department of Defense as the Department of War, although the 1947 abandonment of the Department of War name was not simply a matter of substituting a new name for the original one. In 1947, to bring order and efficiency to U.S. military forces, Congress renamed the Department of War as the Department of the Army, then brought it, together with the Department of the Navy and a new Department of the Air Force, into a newly established “National Military Establishment” overseen by the secretary of defense.
In 1949, Congress replaced the National Military Establishment name, whose initials sounded unfortunately like “enemy,” with Department of Defense. The new name emphasized that the Allied Powers of World War II would join together to focus on deterring wars by standing against offensive wars launched by big countries against their smaller neighbors. Although Trump told West Point graduates this year that “[t]he military’s job is to dominate any foe and annihilate any threat to America, anywhere, anytime, and any place,” in fact, the stated mission of the Department of Defense is “to provide the military forces needed to deter war and ensure our nation’s security.”
As Amanda Castro and Hannah Parry of Newsweek note, in August, Trump said he wanted the change because “Defense is too defensive…we want to be offensive too if we have to be.” By law, Congress must approve the change, which Politico estimates will cost billions of dollars, although Trump said: “I’m sure Congress will go along if we need that. I don’t think we even need that.” By this evening, nameplates and signage bearing the new name had gone up in government offices and the URL for the Defense Department website had been changed to war [dot] gov.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has pushed the change because he sees it as part of his campaign to spread a “warrior ethos” at the Pentagon. Today he said the name change was part of “restoring intentionality to the use of force…. We’re going to go on offense, not just on defense. Maximum lethality, not tepid legality, violent effect, not politically correct. We’re going to raise up warriors, not just defenders. So this War Department, Mr. President, just like America, is back.”
In 1947, when the country dropped the “War Department” name, the chief of staff of the U.S. Army—the highest-ranking officer on active duty—was five-star general Dwight D. Eisenhower. It is unusual for anyone to suggest that Eisenhower, who led the Allied troops in World War II, was insufficiently committed to military strength. Indeed, the men who changed the name to “Defense Department” and tried to create a rules-based international order did so precisely because war was not a game to them. Having seen the carnage of war not just on the battlefield but among civilians who faced firebombing, death camps, homelessness, starvation, and the obscenity of atomic weapons, they hoped to find a way to make sure insecure, power-hungry men could not start another war easily.
The Movement Conservatives who took over the Republican Party in the 1980s leaned heavily on a mythologized image of the American cowboy as a strong, independent individual who wanted nothing from the government but to be left alone. That image supported decades of attacks on the modern government as “socialism,” and it has now metastasized in the MAGA movement to suggest that the men in charge of the government should be able to do whatever they want.
Just what that looks like was made clear on Wednesday when the Trump administration launched a strike on a boat carrying 11 civilians it claimed were smuggling drugs. Covering the story, the New York Times reported that “Pentagon officials were still working Wednesday on what legal authority they would tell the public was used to back up the extraordinary strike in international waters.” (continued on page 2 or here)
By Daily Actions on September 5, 2025 (thanks to Mary M.)
Donald Trump and Dr. Oz want to let Artificial Intelligence (AI) choose which procedures Medicare will cover for individual patients — with AI companies being paid based on how much money they save by denying people’s coverage.
Donald Trump and Dr. Oz* are rolling out a pilot program to fundamentally change Medicare. They want to require senior citizens to get prior authorization for some healthcare services, and here’s the kicker: Artificial Intelligence (AI) gets to decide whether medical care is approved or not. Medicare plans to pay them a share of the savings generated from rejections. AI companies would directly profit from denying needed care to seniors.
These for-profit AI Death Panels will roll out this January in six pilot states: Arizona, New Jersey, Ohio, Oklahoma, Texas, and Washington. It is a first step towards privatizing Medicare.
A pilot program in six states [including Washington State] will use a tactic employed by private insurers that has been heavily criticized for delaying and denying medical care.
Like millions of older adults, Frances L. Ayres faced a choice when picking health insurance: Pay more for traditional Medicare, or opt for a plan offered by a private insurer and risk drawn-out fights over coverage.
Private insurers often require a cumbersome review process that frequently results in the denial or delay of essential treatments that are readily covered by traditional Medicare. This practice, known as prior authorization, has drawn public scrutiny, which intensified after the murder of a UnitedHealthcare executive last December.
Ms. Ayres, a 74-year-old retired accounting professor, said she wanted to avoid the hassle that has been associated with such practices under Medicare Advantage, which are private plans financed by the U.S. government. Now, she is concerned she will face those denials anyway.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services plans to begin a pilot program that would involve a similar review process for traditional Medicare, the federal insurance program for people 65 and older as well as for many younger people with disabilities. The pilot would start in six states next year, including Oklahoma, where Ms. Ayres lives.
The federal government plans to hire private companies to use artificial intelligence to determine whether patients would be covered for some procedures, like certain spine surgeries or steroid injections. Similar algorithms used by insurers have been the subject of several high-profilelawsuits, which have asserted that the technology allowed the companies to swiftly deny large batches of claims and cut patients off from care in rehabilitation facilities.
The A.I. companies selected to oversee the program would have a strong financial incentive to deny claims. Medicare plans to pay them a share of the savings generated from rejections.
The government said the A.I. screening tool would focus narrowly on about a dozen procedures, which it has determined to be costly and of little to no benefit to patients. Those procedures include devices for incontinence control, cervical fusion, certain steroid injections for pain management, select nerve stimulators and the diagnosis and treatment of impotence.
Abe Sutton, the director of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation, said that the government would not review emergency services or hospital stays.
Mr. Sutton said the government experiment would examine practices that were particularly expensive or potentially harmful to patients. “This is what prior authorization should be,” he said. (continued on Page 2 or here)
Posted inEthics, Finance, Government, Health|Comments Off on Medicare Will Require Prior Approval for Certain Procedures [for those with Original Medicare]
As we speak, President Trump has deployed thousands of National Guard troops, federal agents, and local police forces to the streets of D.C. to target Black and Brown residents, immigrants, and unhoused people — all in an effort to expand his power and sow fear in our communities.
This militarization is about control, not safety. And now they’re threatening to target people exercising their First Amendment right to protest.
Unfortunately, this is likely just the beginning as the Trump administration has threatened to deploy military troops into other beloved American cities like Chicago, Baltimore and New York City.
We want to make sure you know your rights when protesting this extreme abuse of power by the administration. Join ACLU People Power’s Know Your Rights Training on 9/5 at 8 PM ET to get prepared before you take action.
WHAT: ACLU People Power’s Know Your Rights Training WHEN: Friday, September 5th at 8 PM ET Hosted By: ACLU National
This is our home. This is our community. These are our streets. We will defend them together.
Register now to make sure you Know Your Rights before you take action.
Thanks to Ann M. (Ed. note: Maybe Russell will speak here some day! Can anyone else beat this cousin story? And yes, keep your boots on!)
After a career in home building, my Texas cousin Russell Eppright now manufacturers “top drive” hunting vehicles with compartments for guns, dogs, beer, etc. He poses with rattlesnakes on his ranch.
One recent Saturday morning, Twisp was full of activity, typical for the region’s peak tourist season.
People in bathing suits ready to raft on the Methow River. Shoppers getting fresh produce at the Twisp Farmers Market. Others gathered in Twisp Works, a community hub that offers a mix of retail, eateries, art and public green space.
At the corner of State Route 20 and South Glover Street, about 150 people gathered for what’s become routine for the community: a protest over President Donald Trump’s policies. Aug. 23 marked the 27th consecutive Saturday protest.
Despite living in a Trump stronghold, Okanogan County residents have been able to sustain several months of regular demonstrations and other activities protesting the first half-year of the president’s second term.
These Okanogan County protesters hope to connect with others with similar concerns, and also to be heard by those with differing viewpoints.
The August 23 protest in Twisp. (David Ryder for Cascade PBS)
Okanogan County, which borders Canada, is the state’s largest county by area — at more than 5,300 square miles, nearly equal to the state of Connecticut. By population — the county had nearly 45,000 residents based on a 2024 estimate by the U.S. Census Bureau — it’s smaller than a few dozen Washington cities.
It heavily favored President Donald Trump in the 2024 election, giving him 55.7% of the county’s votes to Democrat Kamala Harris’ 40.8%. However, several precincts within the county went for Harris, including those in the Methow Valley where Twisp is located.
Those protesting in Okanogan County want to call attention to how Trump’s policies from the other Washington will affect one of the state’s poorest counties: As of 2023, Okanogan County’s personal income per capita was $52,446, putting it in the bottom 28% of all counties statewide, according to figures from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis.
As a result, many residents here are dependent on programs such as Medicaid and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), both of which will receive massive cuts under the budget reconciliation bill passed by Congress and signed into law by Trump in early July. (continued on Page 2 or here)
We understand that over the past 250-odd years, you have come to rely on the services provided by the U.S. of A.: postal delivery, representative government, edible food, clean water, lifesaving vaccines, and no kings—ever, guaranteed. Well, 250 years of free is enough. Now we demand $TRUMP coin.
Was America perfect before? Hell, no! Some of these features arrived pretty late for some of you, and for that, we used to be sorry.
We were so excited to reach 340 million free users. But now it’s time to streamline our product so that it appeals more to paid subscribers, and that means some changes for everyone else. We are adding a lot of features no one asked for that will make your experience worse and also cost a lot of money! Freedom isn’t free! Nor is it, exactly, the freedom you’ve been used to! Yes, that is the National Guard in your city. We know that you didn’t request it; it’s just a new feature we’re rolling out, possibly for 30 days, possibly for even longer!
You were pretty vocal about what attracted you to America in the first place: personal liberty, economic opportunity, something called the American dream, and, of course, the perennial threat of gun violence. (That last feature developed over time, but it seems that our users are pretty attached? We offered you many opportunities to opt out.) But we knew what was really keeping you here: inertia, and the challenge of finding an alternative that sells decent breakfast burritos. We are banking on that going forward.
We hope the difficulty of switching to another provider will keep you here while we slowly remove all the features that you came for and replace them with AI-generated slop. We are also changing a lot of our graphic design to extract any remaining soul from our product. (We saw how well that went for Cracker Barrel!) This comes with branding updates too! Instead of a Nice, Friendly Place Where You Can Work Hard and Have a Better Life, we’re now That Place With More Than 60,000 People Currently in ICE Detention. Sydney Sweeney’s jeans are running the Department of Homeland Security.
Don’t worry. Our new CEO does hate a large portion of our current user base, but he’s not totally ignorant of the culture here. He is very excited to bring back some things that past users described as “great,” such as Depression, Recession, and White-Shark Attacks. It was also his brilliant idea to add the features of autocracy—State Control of Business, General Encouragement of Groveling, Masked Men Who Yank Your Neighbors Into an Unmarked Van to Whisk Them Off to a Gulag—to our core democratic product.
You heard it right: The government you knew for Weather Data and Medical Research is going all in on Despot Whims. This costs money, so bedrock features such as Separation of Powers, No Troop Quartering, and Due Process are being phased out, even for premium subscribers. We are also getting rid of most of our Health and Science. But you can have a career in ICE.
We are retaining some features for premium users. Want rule of law? That’s premium. The right to run your company without government interference? That’s a paid feature now. An explanation from the Supreme Court as to why it just ruled against you? Maybe!
Why is this happening now? Simple. You all know the classic process of enshittification, as coined by Cory Doctorow, from your experience with the tech products that touch every aspect of your life. First, you have a product that everyone enjoys, and then, when someone decides that that product needs to make a profit, everything about it gets gradually worse and worse until the whole thing is ruined. This is why, whenever you open America’s homepage, an unwanted video starts to play. Instead of the medical recommendation you were looking for, there is a man with one weird trick, whom doctors hate! (He is the health and human services secretary!) All of the articles are now written by AI, except Article I, which has disappeared entirely.
Why are these changes necessary? They aren’t! Can you opt out of them? No! Tariffs, a share of Intel, and a weirdly conciliatory attitude toward Russian President Vladimir Putin are now the default for all users. Also, everything that used to be free now isn’t: speech, assembly, and petition, to name just three. Eggs now cost $800—both because they are very expensive to produce and because we are trying to make the dollar worthless.
What happened to my free press? Sorry! That’s paywalled.
We have gotten rid of the people responsible for making gradual improvements to America, and our new team wants to see exponential profits for shareholders. It’s unclear who these shareholders are, exactly! We thought all of us were, but it might just be our CEO? The executive mansion definitely seems fancier than we remember, and he has a new private plane.
You can still keep using America, and depending on your version, it may remain functional for some length of time. But if you’d like to subscribe to our premium product, there’s no better opportunity than right now! Please hand $5,000,000 in unmarked bills to our CEO. He may spare you.
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