Articles & Videos

…If you’re a confused (almost) 80-year-old man.

Hamawy called for “health care, not bombs; to abolish ICE; and to unrig this economy.”

The proposed cut is estimated to strip modest fruit and vegetable benefits from nearly 5.4 million WIC participants.

House Republicans, joined by four Democrats, voted Thursday to cut food aid for pregnant women and children.The House passed a bill 213–210 that reduced funding for the Department of Agriculture and other federal agencies. The bill includes a $141 million cut to food and vegetable benefits in the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children, which help pregnant and postpartum women and children.Five Republicans voted against the bill, while Democratic Representatives Donald Davis, Adam Gray, Vicente Gonzalez, and Marie Glusenkamp Perez voted for it, ensuring it passed the chamber. The Senate still has to pass the appropriations measure before it heads to President Trump’s desk. The $141 million cut estimate comes from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Another organization, the National WIC Association, estimates that fruit and vegetable benefits would drop from $52 to $13 for nursing mothers and from $26 to $10 for young children.House Republicans attempted to justify the move, with Representative Andy Harris, who chairs the House Appropriations subcommittee on agriculture, saying that there’s more than enough agriculture funding left over for the WIC program, claiming that data “clearly shows” that participation in WIC has gone down this fiscal year.“With lowered participation estimates and increased carryover funding, $8 billion will fully fund the program,” Harris told The Washington Post. “Let me say it one more time.… WIC is fully funded. No woman or their children will lose or be denied coverage.”Three of the Democrats who voted for the cuts, Gray, Gonzalez, and Perez, are members of the conservative Blue Dog Coalition, and Perez has a reputation for often voting against her party. But it’s puzzling why fruit and vegetable assistance for mothers and children was deemed acceptable to cut, especially during an economic crunch. It’s highly likely that WIC enrollment will go up in the coming months, and now, fruits and vegetables will be more expensive.

Accra factored an average of $154 million a year from USAID into government budgets, of which nearly half went into "critical areas" of its health system.

The Trump administration had plans to falsely declare 2.7 million people dead as part of the president’s cruel mass deportation efforts, The Washington Post reported Friday. A 49-page whistleblower disclosure reviewed by the Post detailed how the White House plotted to add the names and Social Security numbers of millions of living, breathing people to the Social Security Administration’s Death Master File, or DMF, which is used to track when a person has died and should stop receiving government benefits.Whistleblower Jeremiah Schofield, who worked at the Social Security Administration for 25 years before leaving in October, told the Post that he’d refused to implement the plan. Schofield said that when he pulled a sample from the 2.7 million names, he found that all of the people marked for death were still alive. Agency lawyers had warned that falsely marking someone as dead could violate federal law, and Schofield realized that the plan’s purpose was to terrorize immigrants. Schofield described one meeting in which a DOGE official revealed the goal of such a cruel plan: to make immigrants so miserable that they would self-deport or try to visit a Social Security office, where they could be arrested. “That call was one of the most disappointing calls I’ve been in in my 25-year career,” Schofield told the Post. “I was shocked. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.”The Trump administration previously moved more than 6,000 immigrants to the DMF last year. Being wrongly moved to the DMF can have far-ranging effects, as people will no longer be able to access their bank accounts or use their credit cards. The SSA’s website says that the effects of being wrongly included in the DMF can be “devastating to the individual, spouse, and dependent children.”

John Fetterman has once again handed President Trump and Republicans a victory, as the embattled Democratic senator allowed Trump’s pick for a Pennsylvania federal judge to move along in the nomination process—waiving his right to block the nomination through the blue slip process.Now former federal prosecutor Antonio Pozos will likely be the judge for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania until he dies. This is the first time in Trump’s second term that a Senate Democrat has turned in a “blue slip” and given up their right to oppose one of Trump’s judicial picks.“These are not normal times, and any senator who thinks that this is standard operating procedure and that any of these nominations are normal course of operations is deluding themselves,” Demand Justice president Josh Orton told Punchbowl News. “If Democrats truly believe that we have to stand up to Trump’s attacks on the rule of law, they have to do so in every room—not just on Twitter and not just on TV.”Fetterman has made it his M.O. to do the opposite of what progressive Democrats are doing any chance he gets. He’s been one of the most outspoken advocates for Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, wants the deadly and expensive war on Iran and Lebanon to continue, and voted to confirm Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin.