Posted by drunken Pete Hegeseth, the admission that WINNING is NOT an option
Saturday, August 1, 2026
Upcoming events in Charlestown
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Trump to HIV and Cancer Patients: Get Back to Work
Priorities
By David
Dayen
Yesterday was the 61st anniversary of the signing of
Medicare and Medicaid, a promise by the government to at least care for the
oldest and most vulnerable people in our society. Today is the deadline for
public comment on a rule that could force severely ill patients with cancer,
HIV, and other ailments to get out of their hospital beds and go to work if
they want the government to keep that promise.
The new rule, which was spurred by cuts to Medicaid in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) but was not required in the text, adds a layer of bureaucracy for “medically frail” individuals who got a statutory exemption from the law’s new work requirements for health coverage.
Medical frailty has long been a concept in
Medicaid, giving patients suffering from serious conditions the ability to
access coverage. But the administration’s interim final rule published last
month said that not only would individuals have to exhibit one of the medically
frail conditions, but their condition would have to “significantly impair”
their ability to work.
“That’s not an existing standard, and there’s no data source
for that information,” said Jennifer Wagner with the Center on Budget and
Policy Priorities (CBPP). This means that states, which are partners in
Medicaid, will have to establish an entire regime for verifying “significant
impairment” on the fly, and justify it to a federal government that is quick to
say that anything resembling expansion of assistance to the poor is actually
fraud. “There’s language in the [rule] that says ‘we will hold states
accountable’ if they don’t follow this unclear definition precisely,” Wagner
said.
So people with serious medical maladies—osteosarcoma
patients suffering severe bone weakness, for instance—will have to jump through
very undefined bureaucratic hoops to “prove” they cannot work 80 hours a month,
with the risk of a coverage loss if that’s denied. Even a temporary coverage
gap could be serious. “They will die, they will become sick,” said Carl Schmid,
executive director of the HIV+Hepatitis Policy Institute in Washington. “That’s
why we pushed so hard for the exemption, because we know the ramifications of
people losing access to health care.”
Schmid cited estimates that
145,000 Americans living with HIV could be affected by the change. About 40
percent of all Americans with HIV rely on Medicaid, according to Schmid.
How vaccine skeptics use storytelling effectively to create powerful but medically inaccurate messaging
Vaccine stupidity has a long history
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| A drawing published by the London Society for the Abolition of Compulsory Vaccination in the late 1800s. Historical Medical Library of The College of Physicians of Philadelphia |
As long as there have been vaccines, there have been people who doubted their science and safety.
Back in 19th-century England, people rioted against a mandatory smallpox vaccine, claiming that it violated civil rights and was an affront to human bodily integrity. In the United States, organizations dedicated to resisting vaccines have existed since the Anti-Compulsory Vaccination League of Brooklyn was established in 1894.
Researchers generally refer to people who do not follow the standard advice of health professionals about vaccines, by either refusing or delaying some or all vaccines, as vaccine hesitant. Today, vaccine hesitancy is most famously associated with the Make America Healthy Again movement and its standard-bearer, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.Public health advocates and science communicators have largely tried to counter these ideas by offering accurate, factual information. But as a medical humanities researcher studying how groups that embrace vaccine hesitancy craft their message, I’ve learned that part of why vaccine hesitancy is so hard to combat is how these groups use storytelling to spread their views.
Vaccine-hesitant groups have fewer limitations than pro-vaccine groups on the kinds of stories they can tell about the development and impact of vaccines. While science-driven messaging that encourages vaccination has to be faithful to the complex and often uneventful reality of science, vaccine-skeptic stories tend to make more dynamic claims.
You’re not imagining it: Your kid’s school supplies cost more this year
From lunchboxes to No. 2 pencils, the prices are skyrocketing. Here's how much.
Chabeli Carrazana, Economy and Child Care Reporter.webp)
This story was originally reported by Chabeli Carrazana of The 19th. Meet Chabeli and read more of their reporting on gender, politics and policy.
Chabeli Carrazana, Economy and Child Care Reporter
.webp)
Pencils are more expensive. So are notebooks, scissors, glue sticks — just about every back-to-school item that families will load into their literal or virtual carts this summer has gone up in price at a time when American families already feel crushed by rising costs.
According to one analysis of the 21 most common school supply items by the Groundwork Collaborative and The Century Foundation, two progressive think tanks, prices are up about 7.7 percent with parents paying an average of $173.45 for their school supply haul. That’s an even bigger jump than last year. Add to that an 11 percent hike in prices for school lunch essentials — from the literal tons of blueberries needed to feed young children to apple juice — and costs balloon to nearly $4,000 a year to cover supplies and meals.
That data was first shared exclusively with The 19th. The analysis is based on weekly retail transaction data on millions of products collected by NielsenIQ from about 50,000 retailers.
With school supply costs outpacing inflation, many families — and especially the women who do the majority of purchases in American households — are going to feel the sticker shock, said Lindsay Owens, the president and CEO of the Groundwork Collaborative.
“Women in this country are rip-roaring mad about the price hikes that they're absorbing. They're trying to manage household finances and budgeting. They're trying to feed their kids healthy food,” Owens said. “The work is getting harder of providing for your family.”
Here are the school supplies with the biggest spikes in price:
- Lunch boxes are up 27 percent
- Notebooks, notebook paper, tissues and index cards are all up about 20 percent
- Scissor costs rose 14 percent
- Dry erase markers and glue sticks are up 8 percent
- Headphones, binders, crayons, colored pencils and No. 2 pencils increased between 5 and 7 percent
On the lunch side:
- 12 ounces of blueberries are up a whopping 48 percent
- A loaf of sandwich bread is up 22 percent
- Apple juice prices have risen 20 percent
- A pound of oranges has risen 17 percent
- A box of packaged animal crackers will run you nearly 16 percent more
- A package of chocolate chip cookies is up 14 percent
Driving up some of these costs are tariffs and the war on Iran.
Friday, July 31, 2026
Voters Are Realizing that Trump Doesn’t Care About Them
He has his own priorities
Mark
Schauer for Common Dreams
The bill wasn’t
controversial at all. It was negotiated by both parties’ top committee members
and aimed squarely at lowering housing costs.
But Trump let it sit for weeks
rather than sign it, hoping to extract an unrelated voter-suppression bill in
return.
In his first inaugural address, Trump claimed to be the
champion of America’s “forgotten men and women.” But it was a lie from the
start. He never cared about the poor and marginalized.
At this point, childish behavior from the president
shouldn’t be surprising.
He cared about cutting
taxes for his friends; scapegoating immigrants for the struggles of the working class; and
restoring a mythical era of American “greatness” characterized by the supremacy
of straight, white, Christian males.
Although his lie was obvious, it was also effective. In 2016, Trump won around one-eighth of voters who’d supported Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in the Democratic primaries. In 2024, he significantly increased his share of the Black and Hispanic vote.
South Kingstown leaves Flock
South Kingstown cancels Flock Safety contract after community advocacy, ACLU letter
From an ACLU of RI press
release
The decision by the council came after a thorough discussion
where a representative from Flock Safety was asked numerous questions and the
councilors shared their concerns, and concerns they had received from dozens of
their constituents, who also showed up to the meeting to support cancellation
of the contract.
The contract was initially approved a year ago, in June
2025. The Council’s decision to terminate it comes just weeks after the Little
Compton Town Council voted to reject installing Flock Safety cameras
in that community.
Last week, the ACLU of RI sent a four-page letter to the South Kingstown council members outlining numerous privacy concerns about the Flock Safety cameras.
The letter emphasized that the cameras collect more information than just license plates, that there are no state laws that protect the privacy of Rhode Islanders in the installation and use of these systems, and that the cameras are part of a nationwide surveillance system that has been misused in many ways.
In the past
year, dozens of other municipalities across the country have canceled their contracts
or rejected the cameras due to the significant privacy concerns their use
raises. In Rhode Island, in addition to Little Compton, the Warren and Portsmouth
Town Councils have recently rejected police efforts to install the
cameras in those communities.
Dems push Trump to restore funding for global vaccination program
Communicable diseases do not care about national boundaries
Rep. Rose DeLauro Press
Release
House Appropriations Committee Ranking Member Rosa DeLauro (D-CT-03) issued the following statement after the State Department notified Congress of its intent to release $600 million in lawfully appropriated funding for Gavi, an international organization that supports children in developing nations with vaccine access.
“After continued advocacy from myself and my Democratic
colleagues on the House and Senate Appropriations Committees, these funds are
finally being allowed to flow. It is utterly shameful that these resources were
ever blocked in the first place, and children around the world were deprived of
desperately needed vaccines for nearly two years.
“Gavi has helped to vaccinate over 1 billion children
globally over the past 25 years, preventing more than 20 million deaths. The
insertion of Secretary Kennedy’s senseless, selfish, and absurd crusade against
vaccines is putting children in the United States and abroad at great risk. He
must stop putting his own personal, ill-informed opinions above
well-established scientific evidence before even more children get sick.”
How can you trust a Health Secretary who
takes his grandchildren swimming in sewage?
Ranking Member DeLauro raised this issue during an
Appropriations Committee meeting in late
April.
A closer look at Foulkes’ record on opioids
What she did and didn't do - are the attacks fair?
By Philip Eil, Rhode Island Current
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Aside from a few high-profile moments — a jab in a debate by candidate Luis Daniel Munoz, a controversial TV ad where the McKee campaign claimed Foulkes had made money “pumping opioids into our homes” — you could have easily missed discussion of the issue. McKee ultimately won that primary over Foulkes by three percentage points.
This time has been different.
On the day the former CVS executive announced her run again for governor last fall, McKee debuted a website and attack ads tying her to the opioid crisis. And he hasn’t let up, continuing to link her to the crisis via campaign statements, interviews, TV ads, and social media posts. His ongoing criticism of CVS recently prompted a rebuke from some state business leaders.
Foulkes — who polls show leading McKee by a significant margin — defended her opioids record in her first TV ad of the campaign. To date, CVS — the Woonsocket-based juggernaut with a market capitalization exceeding $125 billion — has been sued by thousands of cities, counties, states, and tribal governments for its role in the crisis. In 2022, the company paid $5 billion to settle those lawsuits, though it stated that the deal was “not an admission of any liability or wrongdoing.”
CVS has also paid more than $70 million in fines after Department of Justice (DOJ) investigations into opioid-related conduct — involving improper dispensing, filling prescriptions for unauthorized prescribers, record-keeping violations, and more — across 11 states, including Rhode Island and its neighbors, Connecticut and Massachusetts.
Foulkes was president of CVS’s Pharmacy division from January 2014 to February 2018. During that time she was, as a company-produced bio noted, responsible for all aspects of the company’s retail business, including pharmacy operations.
In her answers to reporters’ questions and in stump speeches, Foulkes has returned to a few points: the company’s record of cutting off pill mill doctors, its role in passing legislation that lowered the number of pills allowed in initial opioid prescriptions, the sweeping drug-takeback initiatives on her watch, and a steep overall drop in opioids dispensed during her tenure.
Here’s a closer look at her claims:
Thursday, July 30, 2026
O Canada
Trump renews war on Canada because?
The White House claims the tariffs are a “punishment” for
Canadian discrimination against American cars, dairy, and alcohol.
But the tariffs will also punish us. Remember,
tariffs are import taxes — paid for by you and me and everyone else in America. So,
we’re about to pay more for everything we import from Canada — plywood, paper,
furniture, hockey sticks, cement, et al. Canada is our second-largest trading
partner, for chrissake.
Even if the Supreme Court finds that Trump lacks authority
to invoke these tariffs and the government must refund American importers for
the extra cost — as the high court did with his first round of tariffs — you
and I won’t be reimbursed for the extra costs we’ve paid.
Corporations aren’t giving their customers any of the $80
billion in refunds they’ve received from the Treasury Department for
the first round of tariffs, so don’t expect any reimbursement on this second
round. Which means we’re doubly screwed.
Worse yet, the Treasury isn’t really bearing the cost of the $80 billion in refunds.
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