Aliya Uteuova, Environmental Justice Reorter - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan:
The American illness Profit system is unprepared and already being overwhelmed by climate change, and we are just at the beginning of this trend.
Paramedics in Phoenix, Arizona, rush a resident to the hospital during a heatwave. Credit: Bloomberg / Getty
In his 40 years in the emergency room, David Sklar can think of three moments in his career when he was terrified.
“One of them was when the Aids epidemic hit, the second was Covid, and now there’s this,” the Phoenix physician said, referring to his city’s unrelenting heat. Last month was the city’s hottest June on record, with temperatures averaging 97F (36C), and scientists say Phoenix is on track to experience its hottest summer on record this year.
“All three of these situations are sort of disasters, where we became overwhelmed by something that had really serious effects on a large part of our population.”
In recent months, Sklar and his colleagues have seen waves of patients coming into the ER with heatstroke, dehydration and even asphalt burns.
He described seeing several patients in a single shift with heatstroke. “Typically people aren’t talking at all, they’re just breathing and gasping and are in very bad shape,” he said of the most severe cases.
Look at the graph at the head of this article. Notice that the United States is the only developed democracy offering justices lifetime tenure. Biden is proposing this be changed. This is very good news from President Biden. I don’t think it will work until after the election and, then, only if Harris elected President and the Democrats get large majorities in both the House and the Senate. But I absolutely support this. However, it is only going to happen if you vote only for Democrats, and encourage your family and friends to do the same. This election is not about the usual politics. This is an election between continuing democracy or becoming a christofascist White supremacist handmaid oligarchy. Criminal Trump is saying it explicity. If you vote him into office, he is telling people, you won’t have to vote again.
Summary
Biden calls for 18-year term limit for justices
Rules would make justices refrain from political activity
Proposals unlikely to be passed by divided Congress
WASHINGTON, July 29 (Reuters) – President Joe Biden on Monday proposed sweeping changes to the U.S. Supreme Court, including term limits and a binding code of conduct for its nine justices, but opposition from Republicans in Congress means the proposals have little chance of enactment.
Biden called on Congress to pass binding and enforceable rules that would require the justices to disclose gifts, refrain from public political activity, and recuse themselves from cases in which they or their spouses have financial or other conflicts of interest. He also urged the adoption of an 18-year term limit for the justices, who currently serve life tenures.
Biden called for the revamp, as well as a constitutional amendment to eliminate broad presidential immunity recognized in a July 1 Supreme Court ruling involving former President Donald Trump, in an opinion piece published in the Washington Post.
He will speak on the issue at the presidential library of former President Lyndon B. Johnson in Austin, Texas, later on […]
It seems almost every day as I do the research for SR I come across one story after another about the dysfunction of the American Illness Profit System. This one is just plain evil. Yet, do you hear anyone in either party, except Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren talking about instituting universal birthright single-payer healthcare? Do you see or hear anyone in corporate media arguing for this? You do not. The truth is MSNBC, CNN, and Fox Propaganda basically depend on the advertising of Big Pharma, one of the worse components of the the illness profit system, to keep operating.
Credit: MedPage Today
Critically injured trauma patients without insurance had a higher risk of being taken off life-saving care sooner than their insured counterparts, according to findings from a retrospective cohort study of more than 300,000 U.S. adults.
After adjustment for patient and hospital characteristics, those without insurance had significantly earlier withdrawal of life-sustaining therapy (WLST) when compared with Medicaid recipients (HR 1.53, 95% CI 1.45-1.62) or the privately insured (HR 1.57, 95% CI 1.49-1.65), reported researchers led by Graeme Hoit, MD, of the University of Toronto.
In contrast, no such difference in time to WLST was observed between the Medicaid and privately insured groups (HR 1.03, 95% CI 0.98-1.08). Unadjusted numbers showed mean times to WLST of 6.5 days in the uninsured group, 8.9 days in the Medicaid group, and 7.8 days for the privately insured group.
“Our study suggests that a patient’s ability to pay may be associated with a shift in decision-making for WLST,” the group wrote in JAMA Network Open
I have a personal and strong dislike for Louis DeJoy because I live on a rural island and DeJoy’s sabotage of the Postal Service has caused all kinds of problems. I pay a bill but it takes two weeks to get to the recipient so there is a late fee I have call to get excused. Someone sends me a time sensitive mailing and I don’t get it in time to respond properly. The postal work on the island complain about staff cuts, or policy changes. DeJoy, who is invested in a company that competes with the USPS, has been a disaster. He is also an MAGAt ideologue and is using the post office to make voting by mail more difficult. It now looks like President Biden may be able to get rid of this cretin. I certainly hope so.
U.S. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy testifies during a House Oversight Subcommittee on Government Operations and Federal Workforce hearing on Capitol Hill. Credit: Drew Angerer / Getty
Ever since Postmaster General Louis DeJoy — a major Republican donor — was selected to head the United States Postal Service (USPS) in 2020, he’s been enacting massively unpopular policies criticized by postal workers and Democrats alike. Now, President Joe Biden may soon be able to replace him.
On Thursday, Politico congressional correspondent Anthony Adragna reported that Biden was nominating former Rep. Val Demings (D-Florida) to fill the last remaining vacancy on the USPS Board of Governors. She, along with former Labor Secretary Marty Walsh, are now awaiting confirmation by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, which is chaired by Sen. Gary Peters (D-Michigan).
Should both Demings and Walsh be confirmed, that would give Biden seven appointees on the nine-member board overseeing USPS. And because the Postmaster General’s hiring and firing is up to the board […]
Brett Wilkinsand, Staff Writer - AlterNet / Common Dreams
Stephan:
The MAGAt cult is getting scared because of the sudden change in the polls, the Harris fundraising success, and the tens of thousands of men and women who have volunteered work to get Harris elected. In response, they are doing everything they can to make it more difficult for people to register and vote. Trump and his cultists are not interested in fostering the wellbeing of a healthy democracy.
Christofascist Republican Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who has been making voting. more difficult one of his main political efforts. Credit: Gage Skidmore
The group behind a popular get-out-the-vote technology platform said Friday that it’s registered more than 100,000 new U.S. voters since President Joe Biden withdrew from the 2024 presidential race, a surge that came amid mounting Republican efforts to make it harder to register and vote.
Vote.org said that 84% of voters registered in the new wave are under age 35. Nearly 1 in 5 new registrees is 18 years old. Andrea Hailey, the group’s CEO, said that “since 2020, we have led the largest voter registration drive in U.S. history,” with more than 7.8 million people registered.
After dropping out, Biden endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris to face former Republican President Donald Trump and Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) in the November election. The new presumptive Democratic candidate has already earned endorsements from many Democrats in Congress and groups advocating […]
