Trump doesn't know what's in his Big Beautiful Bill?

What an agony we are going through this July...

First we had the push toward Trump's big ugly bill passed on July 3, and now we're figuring out how to live with it, how to continue fighting the effects of the $79 billion given to ICE, and how to prevent the bill's many cuts to health care for Americans.

Three sources say that when Trump was negotiating with a few Republicans holding out against the bill in the House of Representatives on July 2, he said "There are three things Congress can't touch if they want to win elections: Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security."

"But we're touching Medicaid in this bill," said one Republican.

Trump mumbled something not recorded on tape. Maybe it was, "Oh, I didn't know." Or maybe it was a denial that this bill includes cuts in Medicaid--$1 trillion in health cuts total.

Jamie Raskin: "The extraordinary thing about that is that, of course, all  of these people have gotten in line despite their own misgivings because Trump is leading the way, but Trump might not even understand what's in the bill. So it's a very dangerous moment when you think about what democracy is, and it doesn't speak well for what has become of the Republican Party. 

Raskin went on to say: "Now some people think that it's just Trump's devilishly clever politics where he's already distancing himself from a bill that he knows will be a nightmare, and then he'll blame it on somebody else for not having told him what was really in there."

Chris Hayes: "My read on this is that he doesn't really care that much one way or the other." Thank you to All in with Chris Hayes for airing this report on Fourth of July weekend.

• The bill approves spending of about $4.5 trillion total.
• It includes tax cuts of about $1 trillion for billionaires & corporations.
• It cuts more than $1.1 trillion from Medicaid, Medicare, and Obamacare over the next ten years.
• It will add $3.4 trillion to the deficit over the next ten years--or more depending on how you predict details.

Sources:

"House Passes Sweeping Bill..." NY Times, July 3, 2025

https://www.crfb.org/blogs/breaking-down-one-big-beautiful-bill  

        --detailed estimate as of June 4, 2025

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DzmLp9RoLws

See also Senator Elizabeth Warren's post on Facebook:

Being brave in the 21st century...

 

"Grant us wisdom, grant us courage / For the facing of this hour" wrote Harry Emerson Fosdick in 1930, composing lyrics for a hymn that begins with the words "God of grace and God of glory."

He had no idea how bad the next 10-15 years would be, but he had served as a chaplain in World War I. 

Mariann Edgar Budde, Episcopal Bishop of Washington, chose those words of Fosdick for the first page of How We Learn to Be Brave: Decisive Moments in Life and Faith, published in 2023.

In order to counteract all the bad news around us, I'm reading this book and listening to her read it aloud via Audible.

I'm also tending the flowers in my garden and enjoying those in the streets around me as I walk my dog, Neenah.

Flowers are brave. They don't give up. Given half a chance, they bloom--rooted in the crack of a rock or in soil that has had no rain for months. 

Each one has a mission to grow, unfold, and lift a smiling face to the universe, whether there's a human around to see it or not. 

Sometimes a deer comes by and eats the flowers. If not, they fade, lose their petals, and grow seeds that ants or birds or humans eat.

Some of the seeds sprout and bring more flowers, but always they give life in one way or another.

Animals are brave too and humble. They never know what's next, but they carry on. Deer endure rain and freezing winters. Coyote venture into city streets in search of their next meal. Abandoned dogs cower in shelters but wag their tails if someone takes them out. Neenah spent time in a shelter.

May we be brave like the flowers and animals as the terrible news of bombing, starvation, and genocide assaults us daily.

May we  grow, unfold, and lift a smiling face to the One who made us all.

May we give life in one way or another and do our best to stop the killing, starvation, and disease. 

Lead us not into temptation. Deliver us from evil, as Jesus taught us to pray.

Where there is genocide, let me sow life.

Kathy McTaggart - Doing her part to stop violence

 

Katherine K. McTaggart  

(1943-2012)

Kathy McTaggart, champion for violence prevention

Katherine McTaggart, better known around the community as Kathy, was loved by the countless young people whom she befriended over her 16-year career as a licensed therapist at various Santa Monica schools. Her specialization was working with adolescents and their families.

Her official title was School and Community Partnership Coordinator in the SM-Malibu Unified School District. In the early 1980s, Kathy was the on-site therapist at Olympic Continuation School, where she counseled high-risk and gang-involved students. She met with their families and enabled many young people to stay in school and resist drugs and other dangers that their peers were involved in.

Kathy developed a genuine rapport with her students, which in turn led to long-lasting friendships. Over the years she stayed in touch with many of her former students, both those at Olympic and those at Santa Monica High School.

In 1988 Kathy was honored as YWCA Woman of the Year. She was active in youth-serving organizations in the community such as the Police Activities League (P.A.L.), where she served on the Board of Directors. As a part of city and county social service networks, she had extensive knowledge of community resources for youth and families. 

Violence Prevention

Violence Prevention aims to prevent the infusion of physical, emotional, and psychological distress from occurring.  Instead, meaningful dialogue serves as a preventive measure to ensure that violence does not become a solution to disagreement or a developing problem.

In the first decade of this millennium, Kathy and others in Santa Monica connected to form a Community Violence Prevention Coalition. We sought solutions to youth and community violence through education, community dialogue, and advocacy for services and policies that would result in violence prevention and intervention. Conflict de-escalation was a central training we supported.

Education and early years

A valedictorian of Suffern High School in Suffern, New York, Kathy graduated from Smith College summa cum laude in 1965 with two BA degrees, one in social work and one in art history.  Then she earned two MA degrees in art history and in child development from New York University, followed by another MA in Family and Child Counseling (MFCC) from CSU Northridge. She married and raised two sons.

Prior to settling in Santa Monica, she had worked in Hong Kong, Indonesia, and New York.  She is a person of value who will always be remembered.

"A baby is God's opinion..."

We are in dark days, but Carl Sandburg had a comment for us in times like these: "A baby is God's opinion that the world should go on."

When I gave birth to my first daughter, my grandmother gave me a small white cushion with those words embroidered on it.

Now as, my granddaughter approaches her first birthday, the felon in the White House is doing his best to make sure that the world as we know it does not go on. 

He wants to banish the people of Gaza from their war-torn land by the sea and convert their homes into a playground for the very rich, a Mediterranean resort like Monaco--and somehow add Canada, Greenland, and other nations to the fifty United States.

God has another opinion--that old people and their old prejudices of world domination should not go on.

My grandmother's family owned slaves in Georgia, "But they were good to their slaves," she would say. 

They weren't good enough to free them, and she occasionally used figures of speech that were racist. I remember thinking, when she died, that it was necessary for one generation to die and be replaced by a new point of view.

You will die, nightmare president. You will be replaced, and the people younger than you will learn from your mistakes.

From Carl Sandburg, Remembrance Rock (NY: Harcourt Brace, 1948) Ch. 2: 

"A baby is God's opinion that life should go on. A book that does nothing to you is dead. A baby, whether it does anything to you, represents life. If a bad fire should break out in this house and I had my choice of saving the library or the babies, I would save what is alive. Never will a time come when the most marvelous recent invention is as marvelous as a newborn baby. The finest of our precision watches, the most super-colossal of our supercargo plants, don't compare with a newborn baby in the number and ingenuity of coils and springs, in the flow and change of chemical solutions, in timing devices and interrelated parts that are irreplaceable. A baby is very modern. Yet it is also the oldest of the ancients." He continues: Before humans learned how to make fire or a wheel, they knew how to make a baby (paraphrased).

On November 5, 2024

 

It’s a holy day

    this November 5.

The nation quavers,

Butterflies pause and puzzle

    at the energy in the air.

Demons fly

    and angels watch

As millions perform the ritual,

    claiming free will.

 

The Earth does not wobble on its axis.

The time of trial ends,

     and we live on, guilty and innocent,

     to face November 6.

                            Anne Linstatter

Alexei Navalny, Jesus, Martin Luther King Jr., and on

Screen shot from MSNBC, Feb. 16, 2024

We begin the season of Lent with the execution of an innocent man, a man like Jesus, who gave his life for his people.  Say his name: Alexei Navalny.

Both spoke truth to power, and both were executed.

Like Martin Luther King Jr. 

Like Mahatma Gandhi, Jamal Khashoggi, and so many others.

CNN re-aired a documentary about the 2020 poisoning of Navalny by Vladimir Putin.

Here's a timeline of Navalny's recent actions:

Aug. 20, 2020 - Nalvalny is poisoned on a flight within Russia.

Sept. - Nov. 2020 - Team of researchers discovers who participated in the plot-- and that the murder was clearly ordered by Putin.

Dec. 14, 2020 - Researchers disclose plot via many social media platforms.

Dec. 21, 2020 - Researchers play an audiotape of one of poisoning team disclosing the plan while secretly being recorded.

Jan. 17, 2021 - Navalny returns to Russia to continue to challenge Putin's stranglehold on Russia.

Feb. 16, 2024 - Navalny is murdered in a Siberian prison weeks before the next presidential election in 
Russia.

Navalny gave his life to fight Putin's stranglehold on Russia. 

See also:

"Putin saw an existential threat in Navalny" by Nathan Hodge.

"Inside the mind of Vladimir Putin" documentary with host Fareed Zakariah.

Love Israel, Support Peace

We live in a different world since last Saturday, October 7.

Guest essay by Nir Avishai Cohen, NYT

The world mourns--well, some distract themselves with football or the nearing World Series.

The best commentary I've seen is by a major in the reserves for the Israeli Defense Forces, Nir Avishai Cohen in today's New York Times.

But all of us have witnessed yet another instance of willingness to massacre civilians.  This began on a large scale during World War 2 and climaxed with Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Then Putin began it again in Ukraine, and now Hamas has waged war on babies, young adults at a party, elderly people and others not bearing weapons.

In 2018 Major Cohen wrote a book titled Love Israel, Support Palestine.  

"Israel did not do enough to make peace," he writes.  

True and tragic for all.

"Israelis must realize that there is no greater security asset than peace," he concludes in this article.  "The strongest army cannot protect the country the way peace does."

Katharine, talented sister of the Wright Brothers

What a fate--to be the talented sister of two famous brothers! 

Katharine Wright, sister of Orville and Wilbur, is in the news this week because her correspondence with other men of her era was being auctioned by Christie's, the renowned art appraiser and seller.

Katharine Wright Haskell
photo from Wikipedia

Thank you to book and manuscript specialist Heather Pisani for her review of the Katharine's letters and her sketch of the life of this influential woman.  Thanks also to my brother Jim, who sent me this link:

https://www.christies.com/features/Katharine-Wright-Aviations-unsung-heroine-9222-1.aspx

Though Katharine was the youngest of her siblings, her brother Orville was quite dependent on her. She called him "Little Brother." When she finally married at age 51, Orville had a fit and never spoke to her again.

She was essentially the manager of her brother's efforts, their financial affairs, their patent, and their acceptance as the first to achieve flight.

Virginia Woolf wrote about what might have been the outcome if Shakespeare had had a sister as talented in writing plays as he was.

She might have scribbled some pages secretly, wrote Virginia, but she would have been "careful to hide them or set fire to them."  The senior Shakespeares would have tried to force her into marriage with the son of a well-to-do family, but she would have run off to London instead to work in the theatre. 

Only women could be actors in the 1580s, so she would have been laughed out of town, or perhaps seduced and found herself pregnant and desperate and "killed herself one winter's night."

"That, more or less, is how the story would run, I think, if a woman in Shakespeare's day had had Shakespeare's genius," writes Woolf in A Room of One's Own, chapter three.

Katharine Wright fared much better than that.  In 1893 she enrolled at Oberlin College in Ohio, the first college in the US to enroll both women and men.  After three years, however, she took time out to care for Orville when he was seriously ill.

She became a Latin teacher after graduating but stopped that work to manage her brothers' affairs, traveling to France with them to demonstrate flight to European rulers.

Katharine also worked hard for women's suffrage and was successful in making Ohio the fifth state to ratify the 19th Amendment.

After thirty years of service to her brothers and their legacy, she married a fellow Oberlin graduate--but Orville was furious at her for not continuing to pour all her energy into his health and career.  He never spoke to her again. (Katharine had already lost her brother Wilbur to typhoid fever contracted in Europe, just as Virginia had lost her brother Thoby.) 

Though Katharine's life turned out better than Woolf had predicted for Shakespeare's sister, the similarities are striking.

What trials Katharine Wright faced!  

Though largely responsible for her brothers' success and for the recognition they received, she was expected to place their needs ahead of her own and give up her own life for theirs.

Shireen Abu Akleh - Palestinian-American journalist

Shireen Abu Akleh
photo by Al Jezeera Media Network

What's more important, the coronation of King Charles III or the one-year anniversary of the killing of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh? 

The pageantry of the coronation on May 7 is a fairy tale, a relic of the past.  We all want to live in this fantasy world where princesses ride in coaches, kings are crowned, and the poor are happy.

But May 11, 2023, one year after Israeli soldiers shot Shireen, is a reminder of Palestinian suffering.

She was reporting on the military raid of Israeli soldiers on Jenin, a city in the occupied West Bank of the Jordan River, when she was shot--though clearly identified as press.

A US investigation of her death was opened late in 2022, but it has bogged down.  After all, there's so much investigation of January 6, Donald Trump, and the classified documents still to be done.

A report will be given to some members of Congress soon, but the Biden administration has said it will make "technical edits" to the report before releasing it.

The Israeli newspaper HaAretz notes tension in the US and Israel as the anniversary nears:

Sen. Chris Van Hollen has been perhaps the leading advocate in Congress on Abu Akleh’s behalf over the past 12 months. On Monday, he urged U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken not to edit a new report on Abu Akleh’s death before sharing it with U.S. lawmakers.

No one in Israel has yet been held accountable for Shireen Abu Akleh's death, neither the soldiers nor the government that authorized the brutal raid.  Biden does not want to lose support by taking a strong stand against Netanyahu's oppression of Palestinians.

If we spend an hour or two watching Charles receive his crown, we should devote an equal amount of energy to protesting Shireen's death and the ongoing persecution of Palestinians by the Israeli military.

                  

See also reports of ongoing raids, such as this one last March:

Israeli forces kill four Palestinians in latest Jenin raid

Men are still using the label "witch" to kill women

How is it possible that women are still being killed by men claiming they are witches?

Read this report in the Daily Mail on December 5.

A Boko Haram commander in northern Nigeria claimed that witches caused the deaths of his children.

Women were rounded up.  On November 15, about 26 of them were murdered.

This kind of murder is common enough that a citizens' group in Nigeria has been founded: Advocacy for Alleged Witches (AfAW).  The group called on Nigeria's president to do more to protect women.

On the website SaharaReporters.com, AfAW explains that

accusations happen when people attribute misfortunes to occult or supernatural causes or when people are not satisfied with ordinary, natural, or commonsensical explanations of ailments and deaths.

These murders occurred just two weeks after our American holiday of Halloween, when we dress up ourselves or our children as witches; we display pumpkins and witches in our yards.

Perhaps it's time to stop making fun of a serious problem, both in the present and in history.

Until men around the world stop using superstition to kill women, jokes about witches should be just as off-limits on Halloween as nooses hanging from trees.

To make things worse, some people are using religion to promote ideas about demon possession and witchcraft.  One such person in Nigeria is Helen Ukpabio, "widely accused of causing large-scale harassment and violence against children accused of witchcraft," according to a Wikipedia report.

Dr. Leo Igwe is a founder of AfAW.  His book Saving Child Witches: A Nigerian Perspective was published in 2008.

He writes:

In particular, we need to check the activities of our so called pastors and other self styled men and women of God who use the Bible or Holy books to perpetrate and justify atrocious acts and human right abuses. These religious charlatans continue to act and preach in ways that reinforce the belief in witches and provoke acts of witch accusation, persecution and killing.

Thank you to Andre Berthou in Sevres, France, for calling my attention to this problem.