Turns Out It’s Still Here
Also: It’s Still Bad For You
The citizenry of the U.S. of A may be unable to agree on much of anything, but we do appear to have arrived at a consensus about Covid: “Thank God that’s over with. Let’s all go back to living our normal lives, as if all that pain, suffering, and death was just a bad dream.”
To whatever extent they still acknowledge that Covid ever existed, right wingers tend to brush it off as just another typical overreaction by liberal weenies.
For its part, the Biden administration seems to have stopped keeping track of cases a year ago, to more plausibly claim victory when it announced the end of the public health emergency.
However, as Marine General James Mattis famously said, “No war is over until the enemy says it’s over. We may think it over, but in fact, the enemy gets a vote.” And sure enough, awkward and inconvenient though it may be, Covid is still out there, wreaking havoc.
While reliable data is scarce, we did see in the New York Times that, as of March 9th, about 4,000 people are being admitted to hospitals with Covid every day. Between December 10th of last year and January 6th—the most recent date available for which complete data is available—3.3 percent of deaths of all causes were due to Covid.
Ostriches R Us
It’s not clear whether, or how, we’ll get a clearer picture going forward. Under new guidelines issued last fall by the Department of Health and Human Services, April 30 was the last day hospitals were required to report Covid data to the Centers for Disease Control [CDC].
The CDC hasn’t entirely quit working on Covid. It just quietly releases new information, apparently hoping nobody notices.
Fortunately, knowledgeable people like Dr. Lucky Tran, whose credentials include Cornell, Columbia, and Cornell, pay attention and pass along what they learn. On July 4th, Tran [@luckytran] tweeted:
“The CDC has finally acknowledged that SARS-CoV-2 is not a typical ‘winter’ respiratory virus, and COVID-19 is a threat that can surge throughout the year.”
The CDC’s announcement, posted July 3rd, says “While flu and RSV have a generally defined fall/winter seasonality and circulate at low levels in most parts of the United States in the summer, meaningful COVID-19 activity occurs at other times of the year.”
Sadly, the end is not in sight. The CDC goes on:
“Although the future pace of SARS-CoV-2 evolution is unpredictable, surges outside the winter season will likely continue as long as new variants emerge and immunity from previous infections and vaccinations decreases over time.”
And guess what, Bunkie—our “What, Me Worry?” policies guarantee that new variants will keep emerging indefinitely. This is unfortunate, because…
News Flash: Being Sick Is
Bad For Your Health
CDC, July 3rd: “Although COVID-19 is not the threat it once was, it is still associated with thousands of hospitalizations and hundreds of deaths each week in the United States, and can lead to Long COVID.”
Another branch of the CDC, the National Center for Health Statistics, reports that 6.8 percent of Americans have Long Covid.
Yes, you read that right—the latest available figures show that 6.8 percent of Americans have Long Covid. Like, now.
We find this particularly troubling since another study, published in February in the New England Journal of Medicine, found that even a mild case of Covid could knock three points off a person’s IQ. People with persistent symptoms lost six points, while a trip to the ICU diminished patients intelligence by nine points.
This is… disturbing. But, perhaps it helps explain our current political situation.
The night of July 3rd: bombs bursting in air behind Old Glory and the Middle Street Baptist Church. It’s almost the full picture. What’s missing? A few robed poobahs courtsplaining the new rules: criminals will henceforth get a pass, while the rest of us must continue to knuckle under.
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GOP Goes on Austerity Rampage
One leading Democrat warned Republicans’ spending proposals would
“demolish public education” and “let corporate price gouging run rampant.”
by Jake Johnson
With much of the public’s attention on the looming presidential election and high-stakes jockeying over who will take on Donald Trump in November, congressional Republicans in recent weeks have provided a stark look at their plans for federal spending should their party win back control of the presidency and the Senate.
The appropriations process for Fiscal Year 2025, which begins in October, is currently underway, with congressional committees engaging in government funding debates that are likely to continue beyond the November elections.
In keeping with their longstanding support for austerity for ordinary Americans, Republicans in the House and Senate have proposed steep cuts to a wide range of federal programs and agencies dealing with education, environmental protection, Social Security, election administration, national parks, nutrition assistance, antitrust enforcement, global health, and more—all while they pursue additional deficit-exploding tax giveaways for the rich.
“Some of the most concerning policy riders in the House Fiscal Year 2025 budget bills include mandates for new oil and gas leasing, prohibitions on the establishment of important protected areas for wildlife and natural ecosystems, and limitations that hinder federal agency ability to regulate polluters, putting water quality, air quality, and the climate at risk,” the Surfrider Foundation noted in a statement earlier this week.
“Two of the key federal agencies that administer these programs are the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), yet the House budget bills call for a 20% funding cut to the EPA, and a 12% funding cut to NOAA,” the group added.
Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, has been attempting to sound the alarm over the GOP’s proposals, which she has warned would “demolish public education,” endanger the health of women and children, gut mental health programs, “let corporate price gouging run rampant,” and “expose children to dangerous products.”
“I respectfully request that those on the other side of the aisle go back to the drawing board and come back with a new slate of workable subcommittee allocations across all 12 bills so that we can proceed with the important business of our 2025 appropriations work,” DeLauro said during a markup hearing last month.
But Republican lawmakers have made clear that they are bent on pursuing steep cuts across the federal government, proposing spending levels well below the caps implemented by the Fiscal Responsibility Act, legislation that suspended the debt limit through January 1, 2025.
“House Republicans now intend to fund 2025 non-defense appropriations bills 6% below the 2024 level rather than provide the 1% increase” negotiated in 2023, noted David Reich, a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
Republicans in the Senate have also pushed for damaging cuts to non-military spending as the upper chamber prepares to hold markup hearings for its appropriations bills next week.
The Food Research & Action Center warned in a recent statement that legislation put forth by the top Republican on the Senate Agriculture Committee would slash Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits by $30 billion over the next decade, jeopardizing critical food aid for tens of millions of people as hunger rises.
According to a May report by Feeding America, “the extra amount of money that people facing hunger said they need to have enough food” has “reached its highest point in the last 20 years.”
Congressional Republicans’ spending proposals for next fiscal year are in line with the draconian cuts pushed by Project 2025, a sweeping far-right agenda from which Trump—the presumptive GOP presidential nominee—is attempting to distance himself as horror grows over the initiative’s vision for the country.
Project 2025’s 922-page policy document calls for more punitive work requirements for SNAP recipients, massive cuts to Medicaid, the abolition of the Department of Education, the elimination of major clean energy programs, and the gutting of key Wall Street regulations.
“Despite Trump’s claims to have ‘nothing to do with’ Project 2025, his administration and campaign personnel contributed to the project,” The Intercept’s Shawn Musgrave wrote Friday. “Former Trump administration officials wrote and edited massive chunks of the manifesto. One of its two primary editors, Paul Dans, who directs the Heritage Foundation’s 2025 Presidential Transition Project, served as the White House liaison for the U.S. Office of Personnel Management during the Trump administration, among other positions.”
“Rick Dearborn, who was briefly Trump’s deputy chief of staff, wrote the White House chapter,” Musgrave added. “Russ Vought, Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, wrote the chapter on OMB and similar executive offices.”
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Jake Johnson is a senior editor and staff writer for Common Dreams. This work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.
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‘They’re Everywhere’:
Common Foods Linked to Elevated Levels of PFAS in Body
by Edward Carver
Common foods including white rice and eggs are linked to higher levels of “forever chemicals” in the body, new research from scientists at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth shows.
The researchers also found elevated levels of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in people who consumed coffee, red meat, and seafood, based on plasma and breast milk samples of 3,000 pregnant people. The findings, published in Science of the Total Environment, add to the mounting evidence of the accumulation of PFAS, which were developed by chemical companies in the mid-20th century, in the natural environment and the body.
“The results definitely point toward the need for environmental stewardship, and keeping PFAS out of the environment and food chain,” Megan Romano, a Dartmouth epidemiologist and co-author of the paper, told The Guardian. “Now we’re in a situation where they’re everywhere and are going to stick around even if we do aggressive remediation.”
PFAS are a class of 16,000 compounds linked to a wide range of adverse health conditions including cancer, with research ongoing. The chemicals’ development and production went effectively unregulated for decades, but has received significant attention in recent years, with alarming studies coming out regularly.
3M, a consumer goods multinational that developed and manufactured many PFAS compounds, knew that they were accumulating dangerously in the blood of the general public, but concealed it, according to a recent investigation co-published by ProPublica and The New Yorker; the article was written by journalist Sharon Lerner, who previously reported on PFAS-related deception by 3M and Dupont for The Intercept.
Such corporations may yet face unprecedented legal action. As Steven Shapin wrote in the London Review of Books on July 4th, “It is thought that the monetary scale of American lawsuits against companies responsible for PFAS water pollution may eventually dwarf those involving asbestos and tobacco, considering that people are in a position to decide whether or not to smoke cigarettes but everybody has to drink water.”
While much of the concern about PFAS has rightly centered on drinking water—in which they’re found worldwide—that is just one of the ways the chemicals can get into the human body. A new study this week showed they can be absorbed through the skin.
Food intake is also a primary means of accumulation in the body, and the new Dartmouth study indicates which foods are the worst. The study doesn’t explore why, though Romano discussed some possible reasons with The Guardian. Rice is likely contaminated because of PFAS in soil or agricultural water, while coffee could have PFAS because of various factors including filters. Animal products can be contaminated if, among other reasons, the ground that the animals lived off was treated with PFAS-fouled toxic sludge, which is used by farmers as a cheap alternative to fertilizer.
Even consumption of backyard chicken eggs lead to elevated levels of PFAS, and that could be because of the table scraps the chickens are often fed, Romano said.
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Edward Carver is a staff writer for Common Dreams. This work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.
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Ninety-nine of the nation’s newest citizens wave flags as neighbors applaud, during Strawbery Banke’s annual July 4th immigrant naturalization day. Our Wandering Photographer doesn’t usually roust himself early enough to get across town in time for this event. He made a special effort, though. Who knows? This one may have been the last.
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Extreme Inequality is a Threat to Free Speech
If money is speech, then speech isn’t free.
By Peter Certo
I was a student in the late 2000s when I had my first brush with “cancel culture.” A campus group had invited Nick Griffin—a racist Holocaust denier and leader of a fascist British political party, among other charming things—to speak.
Many shocked students, including me, called Griffin’s views vile and warned that violent extremists might come to support him. Eventually, the group rethought the invitation and canceled the event. Thank heavens.
No one’s speech had been denied. Others had simply exercised their own.
Yet a few short years later, campus protests like these became a bête noire for right-wing politicians, who produced countless diatribes against “woke mobs” and the “free speech crisis” on campus. Then, with ample backing from well heeled donors, they launched an actual war on speech, on campus and beyond.
Protest has never been a threat to speech—it is free speech. What we’ve learned is that the real threat is inequality.
Consider this spring’s campus protests against Israel’s war on Gaza and U.S. support for it.
Conservative politicians who’d thrown fits over free speech on campus cheered as police officers roughed up and arrested student protesters. Some even called to deploy the National Guard, which infamously murdered four Kent State students during the Vietnam era.
Meanwhile billionaire CEOs like Bill Ackman led campaigns to out students who’d participated in the protests and blacklist them from employment.
Cynically casting these often Jewish-led protests as anti-semitic, Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.)—who has a history of embracing truly anti-semitic conspiracy theories—hauled several university presidents before Congress to answer for why the protests hadn’t been shut down more brutally.
When University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill feebly defended the First Amendment, a $100 million donor complained and Magill was compelled to resign. Under similar donor pressure, Harvard President Claudine Gay followed suit. And Stefanik? She raked in campaign cash.
Of course, high-end donors are shaping what can and can’t be said inside the classroom as well.
Corporate and billionaire-backed groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council and Of The People have poured enormous sums into backing laws that ban books, restrict what history can and can’t be taught, and severely curtail classroom instruction on race, gender, or sexuality.
Many public libraries and universities face defunding for carrying materials these billionaire-backed politicians don’t like. And in some red states, teachers and school librarians may now face felony charges for running afoul of state censors.
In other cases the public square itself is falling under sustained assault from the extreme wealthy. For example, after spending a fortune to buy Twitter, billionaire Elon Musk proclaimed himself a “free speech absolutist” and promptly eliminated nearly all content moderation.
But perhaps “absolutist” was a relative term.
As threats and hate speech predictably flooded the platform, Musk threatened a “thermonuclear lawsuit” against a watchdog group that cataloged the growing trend. He also appeared to suspend journalists that covered him critically and otherwise censored users who espoused causes he didn’t care for, like LGBTQ rights or racial justice.
A parallel problem has played out more quietly in local news, with beleaguered American newspapers now outnumbered by dark money “pink slime” news sites which peddle misinformation while posing as local news outlets.
Lying, of course, is usually protected speech. But when it’s backed by big money and linked to a sustained, state-backed assault on speech to the contrary, then we’ve badly warped the field on which free speech is supposed to play out.
Similarly, when the Supreme Court rules that cash payments—even bribes—are “free speech,” then those of us with less cash get a lot less free speech.
Extreme inequality threatens our First Amendment right not only to speak freely, but to assemble together and petition our representatives.
Alongside real campaign finance reform and anti-corruption laws, higher taxes on billionaires and corporations would leave them with less money to spend warping our politics, classrooms, and public squares. So would stronger unions who can win pay raises and social movements that can protect their communities from retribution.
If we want an equal right to speech, we need a more equal country.
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Peter Certo is the communications director of the Institute for Policy Studies and editor of its OtherWords.org op-ed service. He wrote this for InsideSources.com. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative 3.0 License.
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~·~ Better Old News Than New Lies ~·~
No Money To Pay Pensions
Pension Agent Cheney has sent out a circular to veterans throughout the district informing them that this agency is without funds, and the payment of pensions due July 4th must necessarily be delayed until the regular appropriation bill becomes law.
– New Hampshire Gazette, July 14, 1892, pg. 3.
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Far From Home
… Down at the [Westport Point, Mass.] wharf the other day, when it was suggested that what is called a ‘tautog’ here looked very much like a large-sized cunner, the old weather-beaten captain who sold the fish remarked thusly, “My son, if you are as far from home as that fish is from a cunner, you will never get there again.”
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Brave, Valiant, and … Forgiving?
There have been some interesting articles in the columns of the [Portsmouth] Times, entitled,“Unwritten History of the War,” supposed to have been written by one of the corps, who is said to have been a brave and valiant soldier. But he must be of a very forgiving disposition and ready to shake hands across the bloody chasm when he undertakes to bolster up a convention which not only reflects the sentiments of ex-rebels, but contains at least one paragraph copied almost verbatim, literatim, seriatim et punctuatim, from the confederate constitution. The rebels did all they could to cause the destruction of the democratic party at the Charleston convention; but now they have come back again and taken the reins right in their own hands. – Viator
– New Hampshire Gazette, July 14, 1892, pg. 5.
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Old-Fashioned Advocacy Journalism
The Times says on the arrival of the bath house at its location it was at once taken possession of by boys anxious to learn to swim, and yet had it not been for the lashing of the city authorities by the Gazette the bath house would have been at Charley Gray’s island high and dry all the year. It is a pity that bathers have been deprived so long of the public facilities for enjoying themselves, by the narrow and contracted ideas of those in authority.
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The Creek’s Un-American Poachers
Daniel Mason has a large aviary of pigeons, which he keeps well fed, but they fly up along the track of the B & M railroad sometimes, where they are picked off by some of the foreign un-Americanized residents about and above the Creek, while the young birds are consequently left to starve in their nests. Like the British poachers in the Behring sea, animals out of sight of home belong to them. – Viator
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Electioneering in “Merrie England”
London, July 19 — Sir Pryce Pryce-Jones, who contested the Montgomery district in Wales in the Conservative interest, and who defeated the Hon. F. Hanbury Tracy, the Liberal candidate, visited Llanidioes yesterday in company with his wife. They were set upon by an infuriated crowd, sho stoned them and otherwise maltreated them. Sir Pryce was hit on the head with a stone and severely bruised.
– New Hampshire Gazette, July 21, 1892, pg. 2.