How martial of him.
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They kicked out the AMA, American Academy of Pediatrics, the Infectious Diseases Society of America, the American College of Physicians, the American Geriatrics Society, the American Osteopathic Association, the National Medical Association and the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases.
Because they are special interest groups and have bias based on the people they represent.
Weāre doomed.
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letāsee, 2016ā¦ so mark meadows didnāt think a trump department of pedophilia would be a good first year initiative?
Convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epsteinās former butler has surfaced with some wild claims about his boss and President Donald Trump.
Valdson Vieira Cotrin, who ran Epsteinās Paris home and worked for the disgraced financier for 18 years, gave a wide-ranging, on-the-record interview with The Telegraph.
Cotrin recalled having a conversation with his boss in 2016 about Trump while picking Epstein up in Paris from the airport.
āA few days after Trumpās election, Mr. Epstein arrived in Paris on Monday or Tuesday, and I went to pick him up at the airport,ā Cotrin told The Telegraph. āHe said, āValdson, you saw that Trump is the new U.S. president?ā āYes,ā I replied, āI saw it on the news in Paris.āā
āāWell, Trump asked me to work for him in the new government,āā the butler claimed Epstein said. āI said, āCongratulations. Iām happy for you,ā in my bad English. He said, āNo, I didnāt accept.āā
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I still donāt want his billionaire ass to run for president, but good on him. More democrats should be doing this shit.
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I sincerely hope that in the vacuum created by all this anti-vax bullshit at the govāt level insurers and HMOs and hospitals can band together to figure out this fallās flu shot, as it would be in their interest to do so. Iām wondering if weāll have to travel to get flu/covid boosters outside the US.
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I just got my flu shot this morning actually. Theyāre apparently not advertising them very well, obviously the government isnāt, but theyāre out there.
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If itās between him and Newsom - Iāll take him.
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Iād take him over Buttigieg as well
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Seconded.
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Agreed. I just would like better options for all of usā¦ No transphobes, no billionaires, no cowards. We deserve that much at least.
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So I was thinking today, as I drove with someone who insisted that āitās not as bad as the news makes it out to beā and āheās losing tons of support every dayā, what happens next?
I mean, letās pretend time stops right now and we move forward 3.5 years, and miracle of miracles, a Dem wins the Presidency. Itās John Q. Average, a middle-aged white guy with standard Dem beliefs, if that helps you set your brain space.
What do they do? The country, our country, has tens of thousands of people in pop-up jails right now. We have hundreds (?) in a black site, off book, out of country jail. We have tens of thousands of armed, at least semi-trained right wing militia who believe that they can and should arrest anyone who is of wheat bread coloring or darker. Weāve destroyed relations with our neighbors and most other countries and have proven to be as reliable as a damp match in a hurricane.
What in the world do we do next? I was trying to figure it out and all I know is I am not smart enough to know where we go from here. Unwinding the things we can now (the brain drain is impossible to fix short term) is massive in scale for each single thing. You need to have some sort of hybrid FDR/Obama/Lincoln at the helm to get anything done even.
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More chaos at the IRS with the ouster of another agency leader. (Not that he ever should have had the job in the first place.)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/08/us/politics/trump-billy-long-irs-commissioner.html
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Paul Krugman keeps making the argument that although the current tariffs are more impactful than Smoot-Hawley, the impact on the domestic economy (beyond causing inflation) is relatively minor - at least compared to the chaotic effect of Trump policies and the uncertainty around the tariffs, which are hugely damaging.
I saw that Ford cars had record revenue last quarter - but actually lost money because of the tariffs. Like many companies, they were waiting to see what happened with the tariffs, so ate the added costs, like Trump wanted. (Making it clear that Trumpās demand amounts to forcing companies to lose rather than make money under his regime.) But that clearly isnāt a viable long-term strategy, especially now that the tariffs are even higher.
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Thatās the thing, thoughā¦ none of us are. Not alone. There is no easy answer, and thatās why we need lots of us working together to come up with solutions, both to fix this shit that has been shoveled down our throats by the MAGA cult, and the already existing problems. Because thatās the thing about working together, that you can come up with workable, realistic solutions to problems, as long as there isnāt someone there gumming up the works and insisting that the ONLY actual solution is to burn it all down. Burn it all down is the easy āsolutionā that has a tendency to just make shit worse. Itās almost never the only solution that will work. Yeah, itās a huge task to fix our shit, but we have to figure out a way to do it, and we can.
I always think about the moon landing. Like, Iām not sure that most people are really aware of how difficult that was, especially with the way we have private corporations doing shit like āh0w wOuLd U liK tO Go tO MarZ?ā. Just getting our asses off the planet was a massive set of problems, not to mention the moonshot. But we did it! How did we do it? We poured money into science education, we propagandized the shit out of space via pop culture, and we created a major coordinating body to do the work (NASA) of bringing all of this together in order to make it a reality. We certainly made use of the private sector, but NONE of it would have happened without the resources and manpower of the federal government, too, taking it seriously as a challenge.
Imagine if we did that but for fixing our country and planet post-MAGA. We CAN do it. We have models of good governance to pull from throughout history. We have creative minds and we have the ability to work together across social and cultural boundaries that we know are generally speaking social constructs. We CAN do that.
Iād argue that that is part of the problem, though. that mind setā¦ waiting for the ārightā person to come along, rather than finding someone who understands that individuals do not do the work of fixing major problems in the world. It wasnāt Kennedy making a pretty speech about the moon that got us there - even if he certainly inspired people. It was the people doing the work that made it happen. It wasnāt FDR speaking on the radio that fixed the problems - it was him understanding that he needed people who could come up with solutions, who in turn depended on others to help them find those solutions. FDR depended on Francis Perkins, who herself depended on the work of labor unions, for example, to figure out how to bring both labor and management to the table at a national level for everyone to benefit. I think a charismatic figure can help, but only in so far as they themselves understand and can articulate that this work is universal, and we all can and should play a role.
We honestly should be working to roll back our sense that itās heroes and legends who fix the world, and try to remember that itās justā¦ us who do that. No one person ever solved large scale problems aloneā¦ thatās what a good, solid understanding of history will teach us, that almost all major crises in the world were collectively dealt with. If we can hold that in our head, and have the humility to look at how others solved the crises of their age, we can probably figure out a path forwardā¦
Anyway, thanks for coming to my Ted talk! Letās save the humanities!
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Oddly trump is apparently meeting putin in Alaska (the site of a historical sale of territory which putin has always said he wished russia could undo) and about this meeting, ostensibly about the war in Ukraine, trump said:
Trump said of territory generally āweāre looking to get some back and some swapping. Itās complicated.ā
naaaaahā¦ my tinfoil sombrero has just got over taxedā¦ surely?
Trump says heāll meet Putin next Friday in Alaska to discuss ending the Ukraine war
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Putin will make a complete chump of Trump.
Again.
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He was born into that money. Thatās not something he could control. But this is how heās chosen to dedicate his life. Heās not grifting, heās giving back.
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