Matt Watkins (WASHINGTON MONTHLY) observes:
When President Donald Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act on July 4, 2025, the Congressional Budget Office estimated it would reduce federal Medicaid spending by more than a trillion dollars over a decade, financing tax cuts that primarily benefit the wealthiest Americans. The administration insisted the law would not cut Medicaid or endanger patients. “The OBBBA is not going to cut Medicaid,” Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said in a July 2025 interview, “and there’s nobody who is going to die from this.”
Before the law was signed, researchers had already modeled the consequences. A study in the Annals of Internal Medicine, published in June 2025, projected that coverage losses would result in more than 16,000 preventable deaths annually. A JAMA Health Forum study published two weeks after the signing reached similar conclusions. Both analyses projected that 7.6 million people would lose Medicaid coverage once the law’s work requirements and eligibility changes were fully implemented. Both were based on what would happen when individuals lost insurance. Neither could account for what would happen when states, facing new budget pressure from the law’s tax provisions, eliminated whole programs before the law’s major Medicaid provisions even took effect.
In Idaho, that chain of consequences has become a documented fact. The state’s tax code conforms to federal law, meaning the OBBBA’s tax provisions immediately reduced revenue by $167 million that lawmakers had been counting on. The Gem State had to close the gap with the money it had on hand.
In August 2025, Governor Brad Little, a Republican, issued an executive order requiring all state agencies to reduce their budgets by 3 percent. The Idaho Department of Health and Welfare directed Magellan Healthcare, the private company the state had hired to administer the Medicaid behavioral health benefit, to identify services that could be reduced to achieve a 4 percent net cut, according to court documents in a federal lawsuit brought by five Medicaid beneficiaries in November 2025. The beneficiaries argued the cuts violated the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Rehabilitation Act by eliminating an evidence-based mental health program without adequate alternatives. The department had chosen from a constrained menu: it could not reduce services that federal law requires Medicaid to cover, but it could reduce optional services. Idaho’s Assertive Community Treatment (ACT) program was optional.
ACT is not a single service. Administered by Magellan Healthcare, ACT deploys a coordinated team of counselors, nurses, employment specialists, and prescribers that the state’s own materials described as “a psychiatric hospital without walls.” Teams visited patients at home, tracked their medication, and intervened when someone with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder stopped engaging with treatment. The Idaho Sheriffs’ Association warned the cuts would risk public safety. A white paper from the Idaho Association of Community Providers and the Idaho ACT Coalition estimated that $20 million in behavioral health cuts could generate more than $150 million in downstream costs for local governments.
Nonetheless, by late October, 2025, providers received notice that, effective December 1, only two of the 20 services ACT had delivered as a unit—including medication management, crisis intervention, employment support, housing assistance, and direct psychiatric care—would remain reimbursable. Without reimbursement for the program as a whole, providers could not afford to keep the teams staffed.
When the cuts to ACT took effect in December, 2025, approximately 200 people were enrolled in the program, according to a court declaration by Magellan’s Idaho executive director. Four of them are now dead. In court filings and press interviews, providers have attributed their deaths directly to the program’s elimination.
There was nothing big or beautiful about Chump's bill. It provided massive tax breaks for the wealthy and did so by gutting the safety net, by defunding the programs that work for all of us.
NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani spoke of realities on Friday. Tim Balk (NEW YORK TIMES) reports:
On Saturday, Vice President JD Vance pushed back in a speech that appeared to be in direct dialogue with Mr. Mamdani’s. He criticized those who, he said, speak “obsessively not of our national greatness but of our national imperfections.” And he dismissed what he said was “zero-sum” thinking that pits the powerful against the powerless and that only finds pride in the defeats of the well-off.
“Reject the two-dimensional view of your fellow citizens and reject the two-dimensional view of your country,” Mr. Vance, who is considered a potential 2028 presidential candidate, said aboard the U.S.S. Kearsarge in New York Harbor, within a few miles of where Mr. Mamdani spoke a day earlier. “Reject the view of your nation that sees only its sins, but not its grace and its greatness.”
It's not a "zero-sum" game, Miss Sassy insists. The 'Big Beautiful Bill' made it that. Four Americans are dead as result of Chump and Vance. They're the ones who are lying and harming the country. And they lie about this country's imperfections to avoid addressing reality and fixing real problems.
And, for the record, we don't need Vance's psuedo religious remarks. He doesn't even understand Catholicism despite being a recent convert and passing himself off as an expert on it.
Vance lies and so does the rest of the MAGA right. And Chump's spent our tax dollars getting lies out there. Eleanor J. Bader (TRUTHOUT) notes:
When the America 250 Civics Education Coalition launched last fall, it brought the U.S. Department of Education into partnership with several right-wing organizations with the aim of “renewing patriotism, strengthening knowledge and advancing a shared understanding of America’s founding principles in schools across the nation.” Primary sponsors of the coalition include the America First Policy Institute, Turning Point USA, and Hillsdale College, as well as additional supporting partners such as the Heritage Foundation, Moms for Liberty, PragerU, and Priests for Life.
In a press conference to announce the launch of the ongoing educational campaign, Secretary of Education Linda McMahon made clear that she believes there’s a need to boost civics education in U.S. schools. “Civic knowledge, engagement and Constitutional literacy among our youth — I’m going to say it’s in decline,” she said. “I can almost say it is absent and we have to really refocus on this.”
“Why don’t these young people love America, or why aren’t they proud to be Americans? It’s because they don’t know America,” she railed. “We haven’t taught them about America. They don’t know our history. They don’t know the trials and tribulations that led to this being the most wonderful country on the face of the earth.”
[. . .]
But, not content with America250, Donald Trump launched (to much confusion) his own competing initiative last year: Freedom 250. While both organizations are receiving taxpayer funding, the Trump administration has directed funding toward his preferred organization, NOTUS has reported. Freedom 250 is perhaps most known for Rededicate 250, a prayer event on the National Mall, as well as a concert series that swiftly fell apart when numerous musicians dropped out almost as soon as the lineup was announced. But the initiative has also included its own “Story of America” history lessons, developed by the conservative Christian Hillsdale College. Among them is a video about the “faith of our founders” that offers a Christian nationalist perspective on the separation of church and state.
Hillsdale is a member of the America 250 Civics Education Coalition, as is the right-wing digital media outlet PragerU, whose Road to Liberty videos are featured on the Freedom 250 website. That series, produced in conjunction with the White House, features AI-generated figures like George Washington offering Trump-friendly “history” lessons that blend quotes from primary sourcing with fiction. As NPR pointed out, for example, a video purporting to speak for John Adams features the quotation “facts do not care about your feelings” — a common refrain from right-wing provocateur and PragerU contributor Ben Shapiro.
Joseph A. McCartin, professor of history at Georgetown University and co-director of the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor, called the Freedom 250 resources a “coloring book version of U.S. history” and a “simplified and truncated version of developments that remove the complex questions that have shaped our history.” It focuses on “the great man theory of history,” he said, centering George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and John Adams as an exclusive band of founding heroes.
But McCartin notes that who — and what — is left out is as important as who and what is included.
As a history instructor, he said he’s observed that students are often stunned to learn that many Black people sided with the British during the revolutionary period, as Britain had promised them their freedom. “If you do not understand this, you can’t really understand America,” McCartin told Truthout. “The world’s oldest constitutional democracy includes many rich, but contradictory impulses. The statement that all men are created equal, with inalienable rights, is something the founders said was provided, but it was not actually true. It took until women’s suffrage and passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 [which has since been eviscerated] for the U.S. to take steps toward becoming a multiracial democracy.”
As part of its attempt to pervert America’s semiquincentennial into a partisan celebration of the most corrupt president in American history, the White House has put out, in partnership with Hillsdale College, a series of propaganda videos masquerading as history. A 13-minute piece titled “The Story of America: The Faith of Our Founders” is a paragon of the genre. The video features narration from Mark David Hall, a professor at Regent University and a member of Trump’s so-called Religious Liberty Commission. I watched it so that you don’t have to.
Hall opens by dismissing the “popular writers who claim that America’s Founders owed something to the Enlightenment.” Historians going all the way back to the founding itself have maintained that the Founders drew heavily from the Enlightenment—but Hall, like so many in the MAGA movement, isn’t interested in serious historians and cites none during this video. His agenda is information-averse: Sure, he includes some snippets of texts and historical facts. But he’d prefer to convince viewers that the Founders were super-holy men, not learned ones. And these Founders definitely never intended to separate church and state in the first place. Apparently, the Founders inserted that pesky First Amendment prohibition on the establishment of religion in the Constitution just to ensure that conservative Christians would assume their natural right to rule the country.
Hall starts with the claim that America’s Founders cited the Bible more than any other text. By this logic, Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason—which cites scripture repeatedly in order to make the point that, as he wrote, “it is from the Bible that man has learned cruelty, rapine, and murder”—must count as an exercise in religious devotion and Christian nationalism.
Hall then dwells on comparatively minor figures such as Elias Boudinot, the director of the U.S. Mint, who resigned from that post in 1805 to found the American Bible Society, which he led for five years. Hall neglects to mention that Boudinot’s boss, President Thomas Jefferson, was in those very same years taking a razor to the Bible to separate the morsels of moral wisdom from any reference to the supernatural, miracles, and other references to the divinity of Jesus. It was like locating “diamonds in a dunghill,” Jefferson wrote in an 1813 letter to John Adams.
Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, George Washington, Ethan Allen, and other Founders were also known in their time as “infidels,” “deists,” and otherwise unorthodox in their religious views. Yet, as Hall tells us dismissively, in this video about the faith of our Founders, “that label [deism] may only be applied to only a handful of individuals.”
The narrative reaches a climactic absurdity in the treatment of the debates concerning religious freedom in Virginia. As Hall notes, the Virginia Declaration of Rights, authored principally by George Mason, declares “that religion or the duty which we owe to our Creator and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence.” According to Hall, this somehow proves that Mason never wanted to separate church and state. In fact, the point of the Declaration was to do precisely that. Mason himself was a classic Enlightenment rationalist who valued empirical inquiry and universal natural rights over blind obedience to religious dogma and clerical leaders. That’s why he put in the bit about religion being grounded on “reason and conviction”—and not revelation. Hall manages to twist this declaration of religious freedom and the values of reason and equality into pro-religious nationalist messaging.
Sure enough, by the time we arrive at the photomontage with which the video culminates, we are treated to an engraving, based on the 1866 painting by Henry Brueckner, of George Washington that shows him kneeling in the snow at Valley Forge. The alleged Valley Forge epiphany has been repeatedly debunked ever since it was invented, including by the Valley Forge Park Commission, which concluded in 1918, after a comprehensive investigation that included analysis of thousands of pages of correspondence and diaries of Washington and his staff, along with those of other officials and personnel who were at the military camp, that “in none of these were found a single paragraph that will substantiate the tradition of the ‘Prayer at Valley Forge.’” In fact, Washington was infamous among the ministers of his time for pointedly refusing to kneel in church. But as with the Christian nationalist movement’s elevation of the work of revisionist historian David Barton, the myths, contradictions, and deliberate decontextualizations are too valuable to reject simply because they are not true.
Meanwhile, ATLANTA BLACK STAR NEWS notes:
President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance have been put on notice. Not by Congress or any court of law, but by a rogue military officer who couldn’t stay silent any longer.
Air Force Major Jason Watson risked his career to do what no one else in the military has done yet: call for the impeachment, conviction, and removal of Trump and Vance from office.
On Wednesday, Watson showed up at a news conference by the activist group Removal Coalition on the Capitol steps in full military garb in violation of Air Force rules. Removal Coalition lobbies members of Congress to impeach Trump.
And in other news, Kevin Bogardus and Scott Waldman (POLITICO) report:
President Donald Trump’s cost-cutting commission that once plunged the government into chaos is nearing its destiny — becoming a former federal initiative.
Up for debate: how and when the end will truly come for the Department of Government Efficiency, which triggered thousands of federal employees to leave their jobs and voided billions of dollars in government contracts.
Trump’s January 2025 executive order creating DOGE also established a July 4, 2026, sunset. “A smaller Government, with more efficiency and less bureaucracy, will be the perfect gift” to America on its semiquincentennial birthday, the president said when he announced the commission.
But DOGE didn’t really deliver on that promise, said Elizabeth Linos, a Harvard Kennedy School public policy and management professor, as did others who spoke to POLITICO about DOGE's dramatic efforts over the past 18 months. Instead, it resulted in a near-immediate loss of expertise and live-saving programs but cost savings nowhere near the $2 trillion once promised.
Looking long term, Linos said that “effectively, DOGE told the American people that they can't trust government to protect their data, to use their data and technology for good.”
“That has really long-lasting effects on our ability to rebuild trust in government or even convince the next generation of talent to enter government to begin with,” she said.
Let's wind down with this from Senator Adam Schiff's office:
Washington, D.C. — Today, U.S. Senators Adam Schiff and Alex Padilla (both D-Calif.) urged Department of the Interior (DOI) officials to reconsider the elimination of Yosemite National Park’s reservation system.
In a letter to Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum and Acting Director of the National Park Service (NPS) Jessica Bowron, the Senators expressed concern over upcoming peak summertime visitation coupled with reductions in staff and funding.
“The increased visitation we have seen without the reservation system, mixed with the reduction in staff and resources over the past year, leaves us deeply concerned about how the Park will be able to manage visitation safely and effectively protect park resources during the peak summer months,” wrote the Senators. “Yosemite National Park is the crown jewel of the National Park System, yet overcrowding, vehicle congestion, limited parking, and long lines have long been issues that diminish what should be a world class experience.”
“In response to these challenges, Yosemite implemented a reservation system during the summers of 2020-2022 and 2024, which both greatly improved visitor experiences and supported visitation to the Park by spreading visitation across the peak summer months,” continued the Senators. “However, in February 2026, NPS decided to cancel this successful reservation system without providing any scientific justification or evidence of public stakeholder engagement.”
The Senators questioned the decision to eliminate the reservation system and how NPS officials plan to mitigate its impacts during the upcoming peak visitation months.
“According to widespread reporting and testimony from our constituents, the Park has seen bumper-to-bumper traffic around the valley floor, hiking trails backed up with people, and parking lots full in the early mornings causing visitors to illegally park off-road on vegetation and in meadows,” concluded the Senators. “This situation is further complicated by the Administration’s reductions in staff, which has created critical gaps in park operations. Key science and park safety staff have been rerouted and stretched thin to handle traffic monitoring and park maintenance, which hinders Yosemite’s ability to manage wildfire risk, ensure visitor safety, and conserve the treasured natural resources throughout the Park.”
Yosemite is California’s most visited national park, with 4.3 million visitors in 2025. In February, the Trump Administration announced that Yosemite’s timed reservation system would be eliminated for 2026 without justification. This decision has had significant impacts on businesses in the Yosemite area, with conservation organizations and Yosemite’s employees also expressing strong opposition.
“As a small business owner serving Yosemite’s visitors, my team and I have seen firsthand that removing the reservation system has led to the park being functionally inaccessible for many families,” said Elisabeth Barton, CEO of Echo Adventure Cooperative. “Visitors shouldn’t have to spend hours sitting in entrance lines, searching for parking, or abandoning plans altogether. Access to a national park should be measured by the quality of the visitor experience, not just whether someone eventually makes it through the gate. The reservation system successfully spread visitation throughout the weeks and months providing economic stability throughout the year, but the removal has caused volatility that makes it harder for local businesses to retain employees, invest in their communities, and provide the level of service visitors expect. The reservation system doesn’t restrict access; it preserves the quality, predictability, and sustainability of access for visitors, gateway communities, and the park itself.”
“This Administration’s actions are harming natural resources and creating pure chaos for visitors and the incredible employees who care deeply for the park,” said Mark Rose, Sierra Nevada program manager of the National Parks Conservation Association. “Yosemite’s reservation system was a massive success, backed by years of expert analysis and public input. Yosemite Superintendent McPadden’s decision to scrap the reservation system does nothing to benefit the American people who own this park. The crisis unfolding in Yosemite will only end when park leadership listens to the public and its own staff and brings the reservation system back online.”
“Superintendent McPadden’s decision to discontinue the reservation system undermines the hardworking Yosemite staff,” said NFFE Local 475, representing Yosemite National Park NPS employees. “The National Park Service is consistently ranked by Americans as the most beloved, trusted federal agency, and our polling of Yosemite staff shows overwhelming agreement that working conditions and visitors’ experiences have been negatively impacted because there is no reservation system. Staff have reported increased wait times during their commutes, challenges to fulfill their work duties due to standstill traffic, and a heightened strain on all facilities and infrastructures throughout the park. The decision to dismiss the very real concerns of the dedicated park staff who build trails, protect wildlife, restore meadows, and maintain and clean the facilities of this globally significant park is both disheartening and disappointing to the NPS workforce.”
The full text of the letter is available here.
The following sites -- plus Mike' "Idiot of the Week" -- updated:
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Bicentennial Memories17 hours ago
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Tuna Melt Tomatoes in the Kitchen18 hours ago
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You fight lies with the truth20 hours ago
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