Lone Candle
Champion of Truth
Work requirements on Medicaid will rob many people of health insurance because many will fail to do the burdensome paperwork to prove they are working.
Doctor has seen people die from preventable ailments because the people couldn’t afford to get care.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYGTbKOWu88
Trump’s threatened tariffs on Brazil for them prosecuting a former president for crimes he appears to have committed have appeared to backfire as the current president is getting a polling bump from Trump’s unjustified threats.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bowcbk9W50A
How to Propel the Fight Against Poverty in America
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJpjAwxAciA
“President Donald Trump recently banned travel and immigration to the United States for nationals of a dozen countries, insisting that this would protect the U.S. from terrorists and criminals.
The ban applies to Afghanistan, Myanmar, Chad, the Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen. (It allows minor exceptions for immediate family members of U.S. citizens and adoptions, as well as a few other limited categories.)
Trump’s proclamation states that the restriction is intended to “protect [Americans] from terrorist attacks and other national security or public-safety threats.” Those countries’ “vetting and screening information is so deficient,” the administration insists, that such procedures can’t help U.S. officials identify and deny entry to terrorists and criminals.
But we already know that people from those countries do not pose a substantial risk to the United States.
The president is probably correct that many of those countries’ regimes either can’t or won’t properly identify terrorists and criminals, or are unwilling to share that information with the United States. That still doesn’t make his travel ban necessary.
If the lack of information sharing by those countries posed a significant terrorism risk, we should have seen evidence already. Considering all immigrants or visitors from those dozen banned countries over the past 50 years, one terrorist attack occurred on U.S. soil, killing one U.S. citizen. It was committed by a single individual, Emanuel Kidega Samson from Sudan. (He committed a shooting at a Tennessee church in 2017, killing one victim and wounding seven others.)”
…
“Travelers and immigrants from the named countries don’t pose a disproportionate criminal risk of any sort. The 2023 national incarceration rate for travelers and immigrants, aged 18 to 54, from those countries is 37 per 10,000. That’s approximately 70 percent below the incarceration rate of native-born Americans.
While the risks to Americans from letting in people from those countries are minimal, the travel and migration benefits to the targeted people are massive. Those countries have autocratic, socialist, totalitarian, theocratic, or otherwise dysfunctional governments. Allowing people to escape them, even temporarily, can and does increase prosperity and help spread ideas for reform.”
https://reason.com/2025/07/01/trumps-travel-ban-will-not-make-americans-safer/
“As the U.S. wraps up the congressionally mandated Coordinator for Afghan Relocation Efforts (CARE) program, uncertainty for allies overseas is on the rise. Some allies who relied on CARE housing for safety while waiting on a yearslong processing queue now face an uncertain future, while multiple endangered U.S. Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP) applicants have reportedly been deported from Pakistan, where they once sought refuge during case processing.”‘
https://reason.com/2025/07/01/the-u-s-is-closing-every-door-on-afghan-allies/
“A divided Supreme Court has cleared the way for the Education Department to fire almost 40 percent of its workforce four months after President Donald Trump ordered his administration to begin closing down the department.
The justices, by an apparent 6-3 vote announced Monday, lifted an injunction a federal judge in Boston granted in May against the firings. That judge found that the staff cuts were so drastic they would prevent the department from carrying out duties mandated by Congress. He also said the mass firings appeared to be part of Trump’s plan to eliminate the Education Department entirely, despite a lack of congressional authorization to do so.
…
The high court’s majority offered no explanation for its decision, but all three liberal justices joined a 19-page dissent that accused the court’s conservative majority of favoring the Trump administration when considering emergency appeals.
“When the Executive publicly announces its intent to break the law, and then executes on that promise, it is the Judiciary’s duty to check that lawlessness, not expedite it,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.
…
The majority stressed in that decision that the high court was not giving its legal blessing to any specific plan to downsize any particular agency. But now it appears to have done just that with the Education Department.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/07/14/supreme-court-education-department-ruling-00452134
“Trump on Monday went further than he ever has in helping Ukraine defend itself against Russia, greenlighting a European purchase of Patriot missile defense systems and other weapons for Ukraine.
…
Even as Trump wants to up the pressure on Moscow, bucking the isolationist wing of the MAGA movement, he is insisting that this latest move aligns with his “America First” strategy and fits into a decades-long view that America has been ripped off by allies and that Europe, in particular, has gotten a free ride on defense.
Trump, during an Oval Office meeting with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte on Monday, exaggerated how much money the U.S. has already spent on aid to Ukraine and emphasized that Europeans would finally pay their fair share.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/07/14/trumps-ukraine-aid-fits-america-first-00452809
“It has been several months since the first major law firm brokered a deal with Trump to get out from under an executive order penalizing the firm for conducting work or hiring lawyers that the White House disfavors. Eight firms followed that precedent in order to avoid becoming targeted themselves, ultimately committing a combined total of nearly $1 billion in pro bono legal services to largely unspecified initiatives supported by the Trump administration. Four firms refused to buckle and successfully challenged the orders targeting them in federal district court in Washington, D.C.”
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/07/10/trump-law-firms-deals-mess-column-00445259
“Most Medicaid recipients (92 percent) under the age of 65 already work full- or part-time jobs, according to KFF.”
…
“States have attempted to implement work requirements for their Medicaid programs, but have faced challenges to successful implementation. In 2018, when Arkansas attempted to implement similar Medicaid work requirements, confusion with paperwork resulted in 18,000 people losing health care, and there was no improvement in employment rates. Georgia’s work requirement program, which began in 2023, spent $55 million verifying eligibility. It enrolled only 2.3 percent of the estimated 240,000 Georgians who were eligible for the program.”
https://reason.com/2025/07/01/medicaid-work-requirements-are-a-short-term-fix-to-a-long-term-problem/
RFK Jr. is Dangerously Stupid
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HqI_z1OcenQ