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Saturday, February 28, 2026

Making America Vicious and Unwelcoming Whether You Live Here or Not

Don’t come here and don’t stay

Rebecca Gordon for the TomDispatch

During my slog through the Substack messages, newspaper headline notices, and podcast reminders that hit my inbox every morning, two stories drew my attention. 

Both had to do with the fact that human beings have always moved around this planet, beginning long before there were any countries or maps to display the borders where one nation ends and another begins. 

I was reminded of a decades-old song by the Venezuelan singer Soledad Bravo, “Punto y Raya”—“The Dot and the Dash”:

Entre tu pueblo y mi pueblo hay un punto y una raya,
la raya dice no hay paso el punto vía cerrada

“Between your people and mine,” says the song, “there’s a dot and a dash. The dash says, ‘No entrance,’ and the dot, ‘The road is closed.’” Bravo goes on to say that, with all those dots and dashes outlining the borders of nations, a map looks like a telegram. If you walk through the actual world, though, what you see are mountains and rivers, forests and deserts, but no dots or dashes at all.

Porque esas cosas no existen, sino que fueron creadas
para que mi hambre y la tuya estén siempre separadas.

And she adds, “Because those things aren’t real, they were created so your hunger and mine would remain separated.”

Two Immigration Stories

Two morning news stories brought that song back into my mind, along with the human reality it expresses. Both appeared in the New York Times (and no doubt elsewhere). The first reported that the “United States population grew last year [between July 1, 2024, and June 30, 2025] at one of the slowest rates in its history.” 

Such a reduction in growth was in large part due to the Trump administration’s immigration policies. In 2025, immigration rates to the United States dropped by 50% compared to the previous year. Perhaps surprisingly, Trump’s vicious and deadly deportation efforts accounted for only about 235,000 of the 1.5 million-person net decline in immigration.

Much more significant were the barriers to entry created under Trump, largely through the influence of Stephen Miller, the man Steve Bannon has labelled the president’s “prime minister.” Those include the effective closing of our southern border to undocumented arrivals. The administration has also made legal entry to the US much more difficult in a variety of ways, including:

Now we know where they went

Two re-scheduled Tomaquag Museum that were snowed out

 


News from the Charlestown Democratic Town Committee

 

C-Town Dems News

February 2026

Meet your 2026 candidates!

Wednesday, March 4, 6:00 PM
CDTC Meeting

with
AG candidate Kim Ahern
LG candidate Sue AnderBois

 

Join the Charlestown Democratic Town Committee for conversation with Kim Ahern and Sue AnderBois

 

Meeting will be held at the Charlestown Police station
6 PM

 

We'll be hosting other candidates for statewide races on future dates, so subscribe and follow our socials below.

About Kim: A trusted prosecutor for nine years, Kim served as a Special Assistant Attorney General under three Rhode Island attorneys general. She fought to uphold the law, prosecuting over 1,000 cases in what is now known as the Special Victims Unit, as well as environmental crimes to protect Rhode Islanders’ air and water. She served as the Attorney General’s representative on the Rhode Island Commission on Prejudice and Bias and worked closely with the office’s Civil Division.

 

Kim went on to serve as a senior counselor to Rhode Island’s last two governors. Kim was a trusted advisor on a range of policy and legal matters, including juvenile justice reform, reentry support, and housing.

 

When COVID hit Rhode Island, Kim helped lead the state’s response, including efforts to provide food, housing, and other supports to the state’s most vulnerable populations.

 

Most recently, Governor McKee appointed Kim as the first-ever Chairperson of the Rhode Island Cannabis Control Commission. From 2023 to 2025, Kim successfully built a new, independent state agency, balancing economic opportunity with public health safeguards. She oversaw the regulation, licensing, and enforcement of adult-use and medical cannabis in a way that was safe, transparent, and equitable.

About Sue: Currently Deputy Majority Whip of the Providence City Council, where she is also chair of the Special Committee on the Environment and Resiliency & also the North Main Street Task Force. She is a member of the Finance Committee, HOPE Committee, a Commissioner of the Providence Parks, and Vice Chair of the City Property Committee. 

 

Sue's career has largely focused on energy policy and local food systems. She most recently was the Northeast Director of Climate and Energy for The Nature Conservancy, and prior to that was Rhode Island's first "food czar" in the Raimondo Administration, where she wrote and implemented RI's first food strategy Relish Rhody. She has served on many boards and commissions, including as a current appointee on the RI Energy Efficiency Council. She previously served as Chair of the Providence Sustainability Commission, was a founding board member of the Local Return, and was a board member of Farm Fresh RI, Green Energy Consumers Alliance, Southside Community Land Trust, and the RI Food Policy Council.

 

She lives in Providence with her husband Scott and their dog Captain Ruggles and cats Zeni and Wasabi.  She has a BA from Dartmouth College and an MBA from Yale University.

Call for Volunteers

Your Charlestown Democratic Town Committee needs you! We are looking for active participants who want to help support Democratic candidates and causes. If interested, send a note to info@charlestowndemocrats.org. Please consider joining us!

 **In America, we don’t do kings.**

 For those looking to keep abreast of local and state resistance efforts, we recommend South County Resistance and Indivisible RI to find out what’s going on and to join some like-minded neighbors.​

Get our latest updates

The Charlestown Democratic Town Committee manages the affairs of the Democratic Party in the town of Charlestown, RI subject to RI Election Law, State Party rules and its own bylaws. We meet the first Wednesday of every month at 6:00 PM at the Charlestown Police Station. Any Charlestown registered Democrat is welcome to attend.

End debacles like Roger Williams and Our Lady of Fatima Hospitals

Kathy Fogarty and Linda Ujifusa introduce bills to pushback on private equity hospital take-overs

For more on this study, CLICK HERE.
Sen. Linda Ujifusa and Rep. Kathleen A. Fogarty have filed two companion bills to protect Rhode Island’s health care system from abuses associated with private equity ownership and the corporate practice of medicine (CPOM).

The legislation is based on model legislation developed by the National Academy for State Health Policy (NASHP), informed by analyses conducted by researchers at the Center for Advancing Health Policy through Research (CAHPR) at the Brown University School of Public Health. The bills would strengthen transparency, oversight and accountability for corporate actors operating within Rhode Island’s health care system.

The first bill (2026-S 24922026-H 7720) addresses private equity ownership in health care, in which financial firms acquire or exert control over hospitals and medical practices in ways that prioritize short-term financial returns over long-term patient care and workforce stability. National research has linked private equity ownership to hospital closures, reduced access to care, and deteriorating working conditions for health care staff. 

Bobby Junior goes full quack on autism treatments

FDA makes its warnings about bogus autism cures disappear

A page recently pulled from the Food and Drug
Administration’s website gave examples of “false claims”
about treatments for autism and its symptoms.
 Internet Archive
The warning on the government website was stark. Some products and remedies claiming to treat or cure autism are being marketed deceptively and can be harmful. 

Among them: chelating agents, hyperbaric oxygen therapies, chlorine dioxide and raw camel milk. 

Now that advisory is gone.

The Food and Drug Administration pulled the page down late last year. The federal Department of Health and Human Services told ProPublica in a statement that it retired the webpage “during a routine clean up of dated content at the end of 2025,” noting the page had not been updated since 2019. (An archived version of the page is still available online.) 

Some advocates for people with autism don’t understand that decision. “It may be an older page, but those warnings are still necessary,” said Zoe Gross, a director at the Autistic Self Advocacy Network, a nonprofit policy organization run by and for autistic people. “People are still being preyed on by these alternative treatments like chelation and chlorine dioxide. Those can both kill people.” 

Chlorine dioxide is a chemical compound that has been used as an industrial disinfectant, a bleaching agent and an ingredient in mouthwash, though with the warning it shouldn’t be swallowed. A ProPublica story examined Sen. Ron Johnson’s endorsement of a new book by Dr. Pierre Kory, which describes the chemical as a “remarkable molecule” that, when diluted and ingested, “works to treat everything from cancer and malaria to autism and COVID.”

Johnson, a Wisconsin Republican who has amplified anti-scientific claims around COVID-19, supplied a blurb for the cover of the book, “The War on Chlorine Dioxide.” He called it “a gripping tale of corruption and courage that will open eyes and prompt serious questions.”

The lack of clear warning from the government on questionable autism treatments is in line with HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s rejection of conventional science on autism and vaccine safety. Last spring, Kennedy brought into the agency a vaccine critic who’d promoted treating autistic children with the puberty-blocking drug Lupron. And in January, Kennedy recast an advisory panel on autism, appointing people who have championed the use of pressurized chambers to deliver pure oxygen to children, as well as some who support infusions to draw out heavy metals, a process known as chelation.

Kennedy has embraced various unconventional measures in his fight against what he views as a government system corrupted by special interests. In October 2024, shortly before Donald Trump won the presidency again, Kennedy vowed on social media that the FDA’s “war on public health” was about to end.