To our Canadian friends please accept our apology because Americans wrongly elected stupid Donald Trump and Republicans will not impeach him

Stupid Donald Trump tariffs are hurting Canadian tourism in the U.S. But let's be honest about the bigger picture. Tariffs are hurting everybody.

Echo opinion published in the Sun Sentinel by the Editorial Board

Canadians aren’t simply staying home because of higher prices caused by Donald Trump's stupid tariffs. Many are deliberately choosing not to spend their vacation dollars in the U.S.  because of how Canada has been treated by the Trump administration: the tariffs, threats, repeated talk of making Canada the “51st state,” and the increasingly hostile rhetoric toward a longtime ally.

Echo letter published in The New York Times: "Something vital is being ignored in the negotiations about tariffs between Canada and the United States — the decades of warm and mutually supportive neighborliness between our countries. I’ll always remember the many Canadians who stepped forward immediately in solidarity after the September 11, 2001, attacks. Before that, their troops fought and died on Normandy’s Juno Beach just as American paratroopers of the 82nd Airborne, including my father, were engaged at Utah Beach.
Canadian travel to the U.S. fell about 25% last year, costing our tourism industry billions of dollars. The decline has continued in 2026 as Canadians choose other destinations. They are spending their money elsewhere," From John Elder in Bristol, Vermont

This should concern Florida especially. Canadians have long been among our most important international visitors. This isn’t simply a tourism problem — it is the economic consequence of alienating people who have traditionally loved coming to America.

If we want Canadian visitors back, lowering tariffs would help. But restoring goodwill and treating Canada as a valued neighbor and ally would help even more. From Andrea Culberson, in Weston, Florida

Extending a sincere apology😢

Canada, please accept our sincere apologies for the behavior of stupid Donald Trump.  I think little Donny failed in the “plays well with others” department and he never developed that emotional skill set. Even though he had 30 dolls, he wanted everyone else’s, too. Thus, he grew up a bully and a sore loser. And when those dolls became real life women, he grabbed them by their private parts, just because he could. I guess it’s all about the power trip.

Canada, please know you are America’s BFF and that is one of the few things most Americans can agree on these days. Please know his insane reign will end one day soon, and we will have a real president again — one who works for the benefit of all Americans and our allies, not just for his own wealth and ego.

I have no idea where this animus to our allies came from. (IOW, it is completely idiotic❗)

The Donald actually had a good idea when pressing NATO allies to contribute their fair share. But his personality defect could not let him take the win, and he had to double down. Your leader’s speech at Davos established what inspirational, moral leadership looks and sounds like. Making Donnie look bad (even though it was his own rambling, self-praising, Greenland poking and general incoherence that made him look like a fool) was the unforgivable sin. Don’t abandon us, Canada. We need you and love you. From Tanya Miller, in Hallandale Beach, Florida

Measles in Pennsylvania- All measles infections are preventable and death associated with the virus must quickly be accurately reported

Echo opinion published in The New York Times by Rachael Bedard.

The United States has had at least 2,777 confirmed measles cases this year, the most on record this century and more than the country had in all of 2025. 

Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, a Democrat, announced that there had been two measles-associated deaths in the state — the first such deaths this year. That’s when a new kind of trouble started.

Over the following 48 hours, the public received conflicting information about the deaths from the Pennsylvania Department of Health, the Lancaster County coroner, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., (aka "RJKjr") the secretary of health and human services. The parties disagreed about exactly what led to the two deaths. Much of their discord played out over social media, where a cacophony of voices amplified the acrimony and confusion.

The stakes of this moment — measles transmission is high, confidence in government and public health is low — require a standard of engagement, clarity and transparency that the initial Pennsylvania response failed to meet. We should be honest about what’s gone wrong here and try to correct course.

Pennsylvania is the country’s most recent measles hot spot, and Lancaster County, where there are large Mennonite and Amish communities with lower vaccination rates, has had a majority of those cases. On Aug. 25 the Pennsylvania Department of Health announced there had been two measles-associated deaths; “associated” is careful language that conveys that measles was detected but not confirmed as the direct cause of death. During a news conference, Mr. Shapiro emphasized that both “individuals were unvaccinated” and said that deaths from measles were “completely preventable.”

The governor went on to describe a phone conversation he’d had with Kennedy, during which Mr. Shapiro said he’d been “blunt” about the Trump administration’s anti-vaccine talk. “There’s real-life consequences to spreading misinformation,” he said he told  Kennedy.

In response to inquiries from a Lancaster County commissioner, Josh Parsons, a Republican, the county coroner’s office reported that it had no current cases of people who had died of measles and only one who had tested positive for measles: a newborn with evidence of a measles infection acquired before birth whose immediate cause of death was a laceration to the spleen. Measles was listed on the baby’s death certificate as a factor implicated in the death; the coroner then made public statements saying he didn’t believe measles played a role in the baby dying. The other measles case was not in the coroner’s charge.

Mr. Parsons, Kennedy and a host of the Kennedy (deranged❗) supporters seized on these details to suggest that the state’s initial statements were misleading. And, indeed, they might have been — at a minimum, they were premature, and the apparent lack of coordination between the coroner’s office and state officials left room for doubt. The governor’s claim that the deaths were “completely preventable” was perhaps too definitive. And referring to the infant as an “unvaccinated individual,” without the context that a baby would not have been eligible for vaccination, could be seen as disingenuous and in service of an agenda to scare and shame people who are hesitant about vaccines.

A laceration to the spleen in a newborn implies injury. It’s plausible that the baby’s measles led the spleen to rupture and that birth trauma caused the laceration, but that is not yet confirmed, and other explanations are possible.

When pushed for details, state health officials declined to provide additional information, citing privacy concerns. That’s hard to justify. Confirming the age ranges of the people who died and providing general information about comorbidities, hospitalization statuses and exposures would not have made the cases identifiable. The state had already, of course, confirmed the vaccination statuses of the two individuals; vaccination opponents seized on what they perceived as hypocrisy, and recriminations escalated again.

(Stupid and incompetent)...Kennedy got into a social media dust up with Governor Shapiro.  Kennedy wrote an essay-length post on X saying the governor had dismissed some Americans’ religious concerns about how the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine contains the tissue of aborted fetuses. (A component of it was developed in the 1960s, on a fetal cell line, but the vaccine does not contain such tissue.) He accused the governor of “gaslighting” the public. In response, Mr. Shapiro posted an equally long response in which he challenged the secretary’s claims and accused him of stoking vaccine hesitancy.

Kennedy posited that perhaps the measles deaths had been completely fabricated. A coterie of anti-vaccine personalities with large follower counts echoed the accusation, seizing on inconsistencies and filling the void of official information with their own speculation. On Thursday the C.D.C. posted that “discrepancies” in what had been announced about the deaths “raise important questions.”

This is our low-trust, politicized public health reality, in which every ambiguity creates space for conspiracy. This means that there’s no room for error.

I understand why Mr. Shapiro, a decisive communicator who has demonstrated strong leadership during prior crises and who seems to have presidential ambitions, wanted to say that measles-associated deaths reflect politically badly on Kennedy and Donald Trump. 

But the governor made a mistake by not speaking carefully enough. In a polarized environment where vaccine-hesitant Americans lean Republican, his approach was geared toward the wrong public: affirming to liberals and alienating to the very people he needs to reach.

Kennedy, in turn, exploited a public health crisis to score points with his base. His approach for years has been to weaponize misstatements, inconsistencies and ambiguities about public health claims, and he has been employing that playbook here. As a result, Pennsylvania’s health leaders have seemed reluctant to share information with the C.D.C. at a time when they’d normally rely on the federal agency for maximum support.

Pennsylvania's measles outbreak does not appear to be ending any time soon, and there’s still time to rebuild confidence and trust. Luckily, the profession has a well-established crisis communications playbook to employ in just these situations. It’s time everyone started using it.

The C.D.C.’s longstanding crisis and emergency risk communication protocol is based on six core principles: Be first, be right, be credible, express empathy, promote action and show respect. To those tenets, I’d add four: Be transparent, be consistent, acknowledge uncertainty and stay apolitical.

Pennsylvania's Department of Health is doing heroic work getting people vaccinated: Its staff members have administered over 2,100 doses of the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine this month, more than three times as many as they administered in July. Public health teams are tracking cases, advising sick families and supporting people who are unvaccinated, as well as those who are willing to get the vaccine. That necessary work is where attention should be focused — not on trying to score points against political opponents.

A designated state health official should deliver all updates to the public. The updates should be frequent and, when possible, scheduled well ahead of time and should focus on the steps the state is taking to contain the outbreak. The official should err on the side of giving more information, not less, including when there is uncertainty.

Saying “This is what we don’t yet know, and here’s how we intend to find out” increases trust in the competence and integrity of a response.

The public is entitled to know about measles-associated deaths, but in this case the information provided would have better served a fractured ecosystem had it been more complete, honest and clear. For instance, an official could have said: “This is an unusual case. Measles was associated with an infant’s death, but we have yet to establish the role of the virus. We’re working with the coroner to establish what happened and will share additional updates as soon as we can.”

Pentagon erupts over classified leak about Iran war dissent

Echo report published in The Hill by Jarod Gans

(Question❓ Has Iran surrendered yet❓)

The Pentagon is seething over a Washington Post report that top military leaders recently warned Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth against extending large-scale Iran war operations.

People familiar with a classified assessment prepared for Hegseth told the Post that several combatant commanders have advised the Defense chief that prolonging operations against Iran is unsustainable and risks weakening the U.S.’s ability to address threats elsewhere, including on U.S. soil.

The warnings appear in the August 14 edition of the Secretary of Defense Orders Book (SDOB), detailed by the heads of the Army, Navy and Air Force, and the four-star commanders overseeing U.S. operations throughout Europe, Asia and Latin America, the Post reported Sunday.

Defense Department spokesperson Sean Parnell lambasted the report in a post on the social platform X.

“Publishing highly classified assessments from the Secretary’s orders book is a crime. It’s a betrayal of the force,” he said. “And much of what they’re publishing is inaccurate.”

Parnell said the Pentagon wants “candid” advice and disagreements are common.  “Hegseth sees them constantly (Maine Writer....but does he actually READ them❓). That’s how you run a real military. We are in great shape around the world.🤥🤥 🙄This story isn’t about readiness,” he said, alleging it is about “TDS,” an acronym that Trump and his allies often use to mean “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” (Maine Writer....duh❓And your point is...😕❓)

Washington Post military affairs reporter Dan Lamothe defended his colleagues’ work with a response to Parnell.

“Fact check: Independent journalism is not a crime,” he said. “It’s also especially important at a time when government officials are withholding key details and concerns about a war being fought on behalf of the American people with their taxpayer dollars.”

The August 14 SDOB directs some U.S. forces currently deployed in the Middle East to remain through September and others into 2027, those familiar with the document told the Post.

The heads of U.S. European, Pacific and Southern Commands, along with the Navy’s top admiral, responded with a “non-concur” — signaling their disagreement with Hegseth’s order to extend their forces, the Post reported.

The report comes as the U.S. and Iran traded fire for the first time in almost a month. The war, now in its sixth month, has drained the Navy’s budget and significantly depleted U.S. stockpiles of missile interceptors and long-range precision missals. 

Throughout the conflict, U.S. ships, personnel, aircraft and equipment have been redirected from various parts of the world to the Middle East. The sources told the Post that this has limited the military’s ability to conduct missions and ensure proper training.

In addition to Parnell, other accounts on X with links to the Pentagon weighed in to slam the Post for reporting on classified information.

(So what❓)

The account DataRepublican, which is run by Utah software engineer Jennica Pounds, a special government employee at the Defense Department, responded to Lamothe. 

Let's Write about finding lost family even after the Holocaust

How I found out in my 60s that I have cousins on two other continents. We thought our grandfather’s family was decimated in the Holocaust. Now we’re finding family we didn’t know we had.

Echo article from Connecticut Magazine published in the Boston Globe Magazine by Richard Newman.

The writer’s grandfather Sam Ajdels in his Russian army uniform in 1914. Sam and his brother Harry reunited in New York in 1979 after 65 years apart. (illustration by Albee Lu; photographs from richard newman)

For years, we believed our family history was complete. We knew our Polish origins had spread across oceans when two brothers left their homeland. My grandfather Sam Ajdels immigrated to America in 1926, after serving in the Russian army from 1914, to 1922. His brother Harry left for London in 1919. We presumed their six siblings perished in the Holocaust.

It wasn’t until 1979 that Sam and Harry reunited. We thought that emotional encounter would be the most extraordinary chapter of our family narrative. I even wrote a memoir about it, believing I’d told the whole story. But recently, we discovered just how much we didn’t know.

Harry’s grandson Jonathan, living in London, had taken a DNA test some years ago, and in April he heard from the Holocaust Reunion Project: a woman in California named Suzanne was a match. DNA revealed her grandmother Frajda was Sam and Harry’s sister. She had died in 1920, leaving behind an infant son who later survived Auschwitz, came to America, and raised two daughters (Suzanne and her sister, Liliane) in California. Our family tree had a newly revealed branch.

Jonathan started a WhatsApp group: The Long Lost Ajdels. Within days, we were in a nonstop conversation, sharing photographs, stories, and discoveries. For a family shaped by trauma and inherited silence, the most surprising feature of our texts was not grief — it was humor.

Harry’s daughter Jeanette, 88, posted witty comments at 1 a.m. from London. My sister Leslie wrote Dr. Seuss-inspired poems with every family revelation. 

Newly discovered cousins interrupted at the same moments, deflected emotion with the same sarcasm, laughed in the same rhythm. Apparently, comedic timing was the trait most successfully passed down across generations.

Then my sister found two photographs — an unnamed woman and an unnamed boy — stored for decades in a leather satchel belonging to our grandfather Sam. Suzanne recognized the boy as her father; the woman almost certainly was the faceless grandmother she had spent years searching for.

Suzanne texted: “Whoa Whoa Whoa.” Suzanne’s middle name is Frieda — named for that grandmother.

Discoveries accelerated. For years, a rumor floated that another sister, Fajga, had escaped to Argentina before the war — but we couldn’t track her without her married name. Within days, our WhatsApp group uncovered long-lost answers through intensified sleuthing.

We learned Fajga left Poland years before arriving in Buenos Aires in 1923, where she raised five children. Immediately, we set up a Zoom call with Argentine cousins in their 70s and 80s who, a week earlier, had no idea we existed. 

The writer's great-aunt Frajda Ajdels Chojnowski, who died in 1920, and his cousin Izzy Chojnowski, who later survived Auschwitz and other concentration camps. The writer did not know about either until a few months ago. from Richard Newman.

Fajga’s great-grandson translated. We laughed like people who’d been connected their whole lives.

We learned that Fajga’s youngest son, Arie, now 91, had immigrated to Israel from Argentina decades ago. I identified someone on LinkedIn who I thought could be his son and messaged him. The response arrived within minutes: “Yes. Arie is indeed my father. He knew nothing about his mother’s family.”

Now our Zoom calls include relatives from four continents. Arie met his London-based first cousins (ages 88 and 94) online for the first time, his son translating stories into Hebrew as they unfolded. Though we’d just met, nobody spoke with the guarded politeness of strangers. The familial warmth was immediate.

Sam and Harry spent their whole lives believing they were the only ones who’d survived. They couldn’t have imagined that a century later, the extended Ajdels family would reunite. 

In October, we’re gathering in London — long-lost cousins from America, Argentina, England, and Israel.

The strangest part of this story is not that we found each other. It’s how quickly we recognized one another❗ 

We started by exchanging old pictures, but in a matter of weeks, the group chat was full of birthday wishes and good-natured World Cup trash talk. The extraordinary quickly became ordinary.

Jeanette, posting from London at 1 a.m. as usual, said it best: “I’m running out of wow words.”

Richard Newman is a writer in Newton and author of Don’t Be Such a Big Shot: A Family Memoir of Identity, Secrets, and Survival. 

Emergency! Where are mothers to go? Birthing Centers are closing. Women and babies will die.

You Can’t Be Born Here. You Can Only Die.

Echo opinion report published in The New York Times by Jessica Grose:

When Bonner General Health stopped providing labor and delivery services in 2023, the families of Sandpoint, Idaho, were devastated. Jen Jackson Quintano told me that back in 2014, she had planned on a home birth, but it was not progressing, and her midwife took her to Bonner General, where she had a C-section. It went so well, she became friends with her obstetrician.

If you’re a pregnant woman in Bonner County, in the northern panhandle of the state, your options for receiving prenatal and postpartum care and giving birth are quite limited. If you want to get an ultrasound, you are probably driving nearly an hour to Coeur d’Alene, or over an hour to Spokane, Wash. That’s in good weather. But try navigating a bumpy dirt road and mountain passes, which sometimes close, in an ice storm, while in labor.

As a result, many pregnant women in the area are either opting for planned home births with midwives, or, if it’s possible, they are booking short-term rentals or staying with family near hospitals with obstetric units. If a planned home birth goes sideways, fast, some of these women may end up in Bonner’s emergency room, which no longer has obstetricians nor pediatricians to manage neonatal resuscitations. Some of them are buying helicopter insurance in case they need to be airlifted.

Quintano, who is a progressive activist, gathered birthing stories from other community members when Bonner closed its labor and delivery unit three years ago.

Without having Bonner’s obstetric care available, “I likely never would have tried to start a family knowing that all my prenatal appointments were over an hour away,” a woman named Jonell said as part of the collected stories.

The closure of rural labor and delivery units is not just a northern Idaho problem. According to a 2024, report on maternity care deserts from the March of Dimes, “In 1,104 U.S. counties, there is not a single birthing facility or obstetric clinician.” 

This is also not solely a recent problem, though it will be worsened by cuts to Medicaid by the Trump administration. The federal Rural Health Fund, which seeks to modernize ailing country hospitals, among other improvements, will not offset these cuts by much.

I’d describe it more as a slow-rolling disaster that is picking up speed across the country.

The existential pain of losing birth services

While reporting this article, I heard from mothers, physicians, nurses, midwives and doulas living in rural areas from Maine to Oregon.

They described the same interwoven set of dynamics making it hard to keep rural labor and delivery units open. The first issue is the aging population of rural America, which means fewer babies, and less revenue. Rural hospital administrators say that if a labor and delivery unit drops below 200 births a year, its financial viability is endangered, and it may no longer be able to guarantee the safety of its maternity care.

Maternity care tends to be a financial loser at urban hospitals, too, because insurance reimbursement rates for it are not great. But higher-volume procedures compensate for the losses. And if a city hospital ends labor and delivery services, a prospective patient’s travel time to another hospital tends to be far shorter and less perilous.

Over 130 rural labor and delivery units have closed since 2020, per the Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform, a nonpartisan policy organization. Women who live in rural areas (that are not adjacent to urban areas) without hospital-based obstetric care are more likely to have preterm births and less likely to receive adequate prenatal care, according to a 2018 investigation published in The Journal of the American Medical Association. They are more likely to give birth in emergency rooms that are not set up for obstetric emergencies.

I have now heard stories from across the country of women giving birth on the side of the road or in their cars because they did not make the long journey to the hospital in time.

Still, when any hospital loses obstetric services, it puts pressure on the closest hospitals. 

Patients now wait longer to see providers, and I heard anecdotes about women having to give birth in the hallways of hospitals because there was no bed for them.

Richard Leidinger is the medical director of surgical specialists at Northern Light Health in Presque Isle, Maine, part of Aroostook County. Half of the county’s obstetrics departments have closed in the past 10 years. So Leidinger’s hospital, which has one of the two remaining units in a county larger than Connecticut, is seeing women who “have had no prenatal care and arrive in active labor on our doorstep with no warning.”

Keeping staff at rural hospitals is a huge problem in many medical specialties, because doctors and nurses often prefer to be closer to the amenities of more populous areas. Elizabeth Khan, a primary care physician who was formerly based in sparsely populated Mendocino County, California, and also gave birth while living there, said that the closest obstetrician to her hospital “was an hour-and-a-half drive through the mountains from us” while some of her patients have to drive four hours to San Francisco, where she now lives, to see a neurologist.

Katy Backes Kozhimannil, a co-director of the Rural Health Research Center at the University of Minnesota, told me that when a community loses its labor and delivery unit, that loss is about so much more than just some medical procedures — it becomes existential. We all have a story of where we were born, she told me.

“What does it mean to live a good life in a place❓” Kozhimannil mused. “It feels like there is a deep loss in a community if you can’t be born there — you can only die.”

Cutting red tape, increasing reimbursements

The good news is that there are many common-sense, bipartisan policy solutions to this problem, and there is both state and federal legislation in the works aimed at some of the obstacles to rural women’s getting quality care.

“The simplest solution is for health insurance plans (both commercial insurance and Medicaid) to pay adequately for labor and delivery services. ‘Adequately’ means enough to cover the lowest feasible cost of delivering high-quality care in that community, not some amount that might be adequate, on average, for large hospitals,” said Harold Miller, the president and chief executive of the Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform. Because there are fewer deliveries at small hospitals, there needs to be a higher payment per delivery to keep them afloat.

Miller also explained that ideally hospitals should be receiving what’s called a standby capacity payment from each health insurance plan, a payment that would “support the minimum fixed costs of maintaining labor and delivery staffing in that community regardless of how many births there are.” After all, he said, we don’t fund fire departments based on how many fires there are every year.

There is a bill sitting in Congress called the Rural Obstetrics Readiness Act that would provide grants to rural hospitals for equipment and emergency obstetric training for physicians. I heard from many family medicine doctors who said that it would be useful to have additional obstetrics training, since they are providing cradle-to-grave care in many hospitals in rural America. This doesn’t fix the problem of keeping staff in rural areas, but it’s something.

Another policy solution, which some states have already taken steps to institute, is unbundling Medicaid payments for prenatal, birth and postpartum care. In many states, Medicaid reimbursement is a one-time payment for everything. In practice this can result in a delay in reimbursement or in hospitals potentially seeing no money at all if someone receives prenatal care from their obstetricians but delivers in another setting. By reimbursing on a fee-for-service plan, small rural hospitals can see more funding for what they are providing.

There also needs to be better reimbursement for and easier access to midwives and doulas, who are providing essential care to rural women. I spoke to Sara Fichtenbauer, who is planning a home birth for her third child in Chippewa Falls, Wis. She told me she is paying $6,000 out of pocket for midwife care, and she isn’t sure she’s going to get reimbursed — she’s still filling out paperwork. California recently passed a law that cut some of the red tape for midwife-run birthing centers to help ease the burden of maternity deserts. This isn’t a cure-all, though, because midwives cannot perform C-sections, and sometimes infants really need a NICU, and fast.

The babies are going to keep coming whether there’s a labor and delivery unit to care for them. 

There is no shortage of ideas, nor of passion for fixing this problem. The issue is the political will and the slow pace of legislative solutions.

Leidinger, the hospital medical director in Presque Isle, told me that he served at a combat surgical hospital in Iraq, and he also treated patients in rural Guatemala. What he is seeing now in Maine makes him think that we’re headed in the direction of those levels of medical care.

This shouldn’t happen in the richest country in the world, Leidinger said. Exactly❗ And I couldn’t agree more.

Senator Susan Collins truth serum: As a senior Senate Republican she could have supported health insurance premiums. But guess what?

Republicans Are Trying to Hide These Health Care Cuts

Echo editorial opinion published in The New York Times.

One of the federal government’s great achievements this century was making health insurance affordable to millions more Americans. In 2010, nearly 18 percent of people under 65 lacked insurance. 

By 2024, the rate had fallen below 10 percent, thanks to the Affordable Care Act and later legislation that built on it.

Donald Trump and congressional Republicans are working to dismantle that achievement. They have effectively cut subsidies for the Affordable Care Act’s marketplaces, making it harder for people who do not receive insurance through work to afford a plan. This year, the subsidy cuts led three million people to lose their health insurance. In Ohio, nearly a third of previous marketplace enrollees lost their insurance.

The situation stands to worsen next year. In addition to reducing the marketplace subsidies, Trump and congressional Republicans enacted sweeping cuts to Medicaid, which expanded under the Affordable Care Act. They will take effect after this year’s midterm elections. (Yes, that timing is deliberate.) By 2034, the combined cuts will most likely erase about half of the gains from the Affordable Care Act, causing 14 million Americans to lose insurance.

Politicians from both parties have talked up affordability in the run-up to this year’s elections. Republicans, however, are taking deliberate steps to make health care less affordable. Many middle-class and poor Americans will struggle — even more — to afford important medical care as a result.

Americans have good reasons to be disappointed in their government. Progress on health care, imperfect though it was, represented a positive counterexample of the government working to genuinely improve people’s lives. Donald Trump and the Republicans in Congress are trying to ruin that success story. (Including Senator Susan Collins.)

Those health insurance cuts caused premiums and deductibles to spike this year. As an example, a middle-income, middle-aged couple with two children could see their premiums more than double, costing an additional 💲3,500 a year.

In the more direct approach to cutting health care coverage, Republicans targeted Medicaid, the program focused on the poor and disabled. Last year, the federal government enacted what Republicans call a work requirement. In reality, it is a paperwork requirement — one that forces Medicaid enrollees, most of whom are working or have a valid reason for not working, to file repeated documents proving they have a job or a valid exemption. Americans lead busy lives, and many of them may not know of the new requirement. 

About two in three enrollees who will lose health insurance should, in fact, be eligible for it, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimated.

Arkansas enacted a version of this policy before the federal law passed, and it was a failure: Work force participation did not rise, and eligible people lost their insurance because of paperwork problems.

The Affordable Care Act was a triumph of government, and it is justifiably popular. Mr. Trump and other Republicans once promised to repeal the law, but they have largely stopped making such statements. Instead, they have sought to weaken the law — partly out of an ideological aversion to government, partly to finance tax cuts for the wealthy — and hope that voters do not notice.

Democrats should not let Donald Trump and Senator Susan Collins get away with this subterfuge. They should make the health insurance cuts a central piece of their midterm campaign and, as important, offer voters a vision that includes other improvements to the nation’s costly, rickety health care system, both to continue expanding access and to reduce costs. The Affordable Care Act also happens to be a model on costs; it meaningfully slowed growth in health care prices over the past decade.

Republicans in the Congress should be looking for next steps, not moving backward. The Affordable Care Act demonstrated that progress is possible.

Senator Susan Collins 😢🤥🤥 lies. She is paying millions in false campaign political ads with claims about how she supports healthcare. She lies❗ What's more, she is paying former Maine hospital association CEO Steven Michaud to lie on her behalf.  He lies 🤥 about how Senator Collins somehow magically bought money into Maine to help pay for health care services. Truth is, only people who have health insurance can access the technologies described in the fake ads and Senator Collins voted to cut insurance subsidies.  

Donald Trump and maga Republicans continue to carelessly botch up America. IOW Donald Trump is a failed leader

 Trump goes 0-for-3 on recent leadership (In other words, a failing grade. Who knew😟😨❓)

Echo opinion letter published in The Mercury News, a Califonia newspaper.

More Trump Failures❗

Donald Trump is squarely responsible for the botched repair job of Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. 

Trump’s original claim that the cost would be $1.5 to $2 million has mushroomed to $16 million. He personally selected a contractor he worked with at his private clubs and bypassed the competitive bidding process. Refusing any accountability, he shifted blame for the repair failure to a former (innocent) Olympic medalist, charging him criminally with vandalism.

Typical of Trump's incompetence is reflected in his other big building project that destroyed the White House East Wing to build a gold-plated ballroom, which will likely cost taxpayers millions more than he first claimed. 

Far more revealing of Trump’s inept leadership and malfeasance is his mishandling of the Iran war, which he is solely responsible for starting and could have serious long-term economic and national security consequences.

From Warren Seifert in Gilroy, California

Canadian "Liberation Day": A "NO!" heard around the world.

Donald Trump and his incompetent White House staff obviously have serious short term memory loss. Where is Secretary of State Marco Rubio❓

"I’ll always remember the many Canadians who stepped forward immediately in solidarity after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Before that, their troops fought and died on Normandy’s Juno Beach just as American paratroopers of the 82nd Airborne, including my father, were engaged at Utah Beach", John Elder, in Bristol, Vermont published in The New York Times.

Canada Said No to America. It Will Reverberate Far Beyond Its Borders. Echo opinion published in The New York Times 

The NO! (Non!) Heard Around the World 🌍🌎🌏.  

Friday, August 21, 2026, may go down in history as Canada’s Liberation Day. It was the day America came for us, and we said no.

The trade negotiations between the United States and Canada was moving forward in the weeks after Donald Trump first threatened 50 percent tariffs on Canadian goods, but just before midnight, Prime Minister Mark Carney rejected the American proposal. “Last-minute changes in the U.S.-proposed terms were unfair, uneconomic and called into question the reliability of any deal,” Mr. Carney said in a statement. “Canada will match those tariffs dollar for dollar to protect our workers and businesses.”

It was a decision made, seemingly, on the spur of the moment, but the deep history of this country paved the way for this one critical gesture — a historic “no.”

But Mr. Carney did not simply reject a trade offer on Friday. He was openly defiant of the new breed of American aggression. “We will not allow any nation to determine our future,” he said.

Trump’s tariffs on some 💲20 billion of Canadian goods began immediately after his deadline passed. For Canada, the choice came down to either accepting severe but temporary economic instability or binding itself to a pseudodemocratic fiscal basket case of a nation whose only apparent foreign policy objective has become domination for the gratification of Donald Trump's slapdash vanity.

It was a unique statement for any leader in Canada to make. The country has long defined itself through its participation in global systems, seeing itself as a node in the larger orders of the world, the postwar trans-Atlantic order and, before that, the British Empire. Mr. Carney is taking Canada in another direction, emphasizing national sovereignty on every front — economic, political, military and technological.

While the prime minister’s approach is certainly new, it emerges from deep reservoirs of the Canadian spirit. For nearly a decade, I was a columnist at Esquire magazine. During that time, one of the greatest discrepancies I noticed between Canadians and Americans — and Canadian and American men in particular — was in their basic idea of what earned respect. 

For Americans, the capacity to project power, the ability to make things happen and to win are the primary virtues. 

For Canadians, on the other hand, the defining virtue is toughness, the capacity to endure.

The difference is subtle but profound. Margaret Atwood’s work of literary criticism that defined 1970s Canadian nationalism is titled “Survival.” The coureurs des bois, the great New French traders who went into the impossible North on canoes looking for pelts, measured themselves by their ability to survive on the bare minimum in the midst of a vast, indifferent wilderness.

These deep-running values, rarely openly expressed, are the undercurrent of Canada’s rejection of America last week. The offered deal, or at least the details that have emerged, veered significantly from purely economic matters. Apparently, one of the final sticking points was an American demand that Quebec undo its French-language laws and French-language cultural protections. French, in Canada, is not a business matter. Its place in our nation transcends absolutely any market-based consideration. It is not something that gets put on the table.