On April 1, the staff of the CDC’s Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Program was fired as part of the agency’s reduction in force. The program included epidemiologists, statisticians and advisors who specialized in lead poisoning — from detecting the source of exposure to planning an effective response.
They (Milwaukee Health Dept) wanted CDC expertise to help manage this crisis and had worked for months on a formal request for CDC staff support, he says.
“They were going to send that team to Milwaukee to help us with the investigation, screening, data management,” he says. Once the federal staff was all laid off, the request was formally denied, he explains, “because they didn’t have any subject matter experts within the entire CDC to support the childhood lead investigation that we were doing.”
We are well and truly on our own. What MAGAts don’t fully understand is that richer Blue states will fare better in that arena than poorer Red ones will. They are screwed even worse than we are.
Somebody must not have said “thank you, Mr. Trump”
Trump also played a video that he said was of “a burial site” of murdered white farmers. Ramaphosa said: “Have they told you where this is? I’d like to know where this is?”
I’m sure Trump didn’t appreciate any of this pushback.
Ramaphosa had wanted to use the meeting to […] take a transactional tack and make a deal with Trump because a vital free trade agreement hangs in the balance amid other economic concerns.
Guess Trump is too concerned with helping to further his agenda of white nationalism than he is to make progress on one of his 200+ trade deals he’s supposedly negotiating singlehandedly.
All this discussion of SALT and caps and lifting or removal of caps gives me a thought along those lines. What if states institute a SALT recoup tax, essentially filling in missing federal funding to provide their residents with the support that has gone missing and funding it from the corporate and personal (wealthy) taxes that the feds are foregoing.
Essentially, if we’re living in a neoconservative hellscape, let states claw back some of the missing federal support for essentials - healthcare, social security, infrastructure, education, etc. Better yet, let states band together to pool resources…Oh, shit, that’s basically secession.
I was hearing some discussion from South African political commentators on the radio this morning. As insane and off-the-rails as that meeting was, the part that really surprised them was that Trump didn’t bring up the subject of South Africa bringing a genocide case against Israel before the International Court of Justice. The S.A. officials had been expecting that to be a big sticking point with Trump and had “overprepared” for it.
Anyway, it was amazing that Ramaphosa was able to keep his cool during all that nonsense.
Post the Zelenskyy ambush, I suspect all world leaders are just going into these meetings expecting that the moron-in-chief is going to try and ambush them with some right-wing-nut conspiracy bullshit.
Personally, I love the low-flying burn Ramaphosa got in about not having a plane to give Trump that obviously went over his head.
“WHO’s priorities have increasingly reflected the biases and interests of corporate medicine,” Kennedy said, alluding to his anti-vaccine and germ-theory denialist views. He chastised the health organization for allegedly capitulating to China and working with the country to “promote the fiction that COVID originated in bats.”
Good God, this makes us look like idiots. Which, I guess we are, considering our elected representatives…
I can only hope that the world sees the American people apart from our elected representatives, in much the same way that I try to see the Chinese or Russians (or Turkish, Saudi, etc.)
Collectively, we made this mess, but not all of us did so willingly. In fact, not even a majority.
