Showing posts with label Kennedy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Kennedy. Show all posts

Wednesday, July 22, 2026

Senators grilled Hegseth on Iran. Here are 3 big moments from the hearing | PBS News

The latest estimate of total costs in the Iran war so far is now: $37.5 billion, Hegseth told Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., which anticipates costs through the end of the fiscal year on Sept.30. 

This is up from the $29 billion estimate put out by the Pentagon comptroller in May. At the time, Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., the top Democrat on the committee, called the estimate "suspiciously low."…

 https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/senators-grilled-hegseth-on-iran-here-are-3-big-moments-from-the-hearing


 

Sunday, April 27, 2025

Bird Flu, Measles, and Trump’s Ticking Time Bomb (Reveal podcast)

On this week’s episode of “More To The Story,” how public health emergencies and the dismantling of federal agencies are colliding.

This month marks the five-year anniversary of the Covid-19 pandemic, which has killed 1.2 million people in the US alone. While life has returned to normal for most Americans, the threats to our health haven’t disappeared. Hundreds of people in the US continue to die of Covid each week, while millions more suffer complications from Long Covid. We’re experiencing the worst flu season in at least 15 years. There are multiple outbreaks of measles, the most serious occurring in an undervaccinated West Texas community. Then there’s the threat of bird flu, which has spread through dairy and poultry farms, sickening dozens of people and killing one so far.

At the same time, the second Trump administration has been actively reshaping and even dismantling the country’s public health infrastructure. Hundreds of employees across the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Institutes of Health, and Food and Drug Administration have been handed termination notices. And Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the country’s new secretary of health and human services, still questions the use of vaccines, specifically the MMR vaccine to prevent measles.

On this week’s episode of More To The Story, host Al Letson talks with infectious disease epidemiologist Jessica Malaty Rivera about the collision course between the Trump administration’s health priorities and developing public health emergencies.

Rivera says the US is still not testing enough people to determine whether these diseases and others are spreading. Meanwhile, the Trump administration is making things even more difficult by withholding regular public health data that infectious disease experts routinely rely on to assess whether a larger health emergency is emerging. “Without good data, we can’t make good informed choices,” she says. “And it is conceivable that [a pandemic] can be happening and brewing right underneath our nose and us not pick it up.”
Interview: 

 

Sunday, March 2, 2025

Morbidity and Mortality (Dan Barker and Annie Laurie Gaylor, Freethought Radio podcast)

We celebrate the fact that Pew reports 43 percent of young adults are nonreligious, and that overall the “Nones” (nonreligious) are larger than any religious denomination. 

Mandisa Thomas, founder and president of Black Nonbelievers, tells us about the upcoming Revival of Reason conference in Atlanta. 

Then, we speak with public-health expert Professor Patrick L. Remington, who is on the board of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly about the dangers that religion and the right-wing administration pose to the work of the CDC.
Interview: 


Sunday, November 19, 2023

Dallas lives with JFK legacy – but hate that spawned assassination simmers

In Dallas, the buckle on the Bible belt, the hostility was a toxic mix of racism, anti-communism and religious bigotry aimed at America's first Catholic president – some feared that Kennedy was being controlled by the pope. Extremist groups such as the John Birch Society and the Minutemen were small but vociferous. 

Mike Rawlings, a Democrat who was mayor of Dallas from 2011 to 2019, said: "There was definitely a very conservative bent. The John Birchers were the worst of it but still there was a lot of folks that were that way. It was the Tea Party and Maga [Make America great again] before the Tea Party and Maga."…

Thursday, July 27, 2023

DeSantis suggests he could pick RFK Jr. to lead the FDA or CDC - POLITICO

Kennedy, who remains a long shot for the Democratic presidential nomination, has aired contentious views over vaccines, having questioned their effectiveness on several occasions. In the past few weeks, hecame under sharp fire from liberals for suggesting that Covid was engineered to be less lethal to Asian and Jewish people. He has also been a critic of Anthony Fauci, the former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, commenting once that he would prosecute him if "crimes were committed."…

Tuesday, May 16, 2023

US senator denounced as ‘profoundly ignorant man’ over remarks on Mexico | Republicans | The Guardian

Mexicans "would be eating cat food out of a can and living in a tent behind an Outback" Steakhouse restaurant if it were not for their nation's proximity to the US, and their country should be invaded because of the presence of drug cartels there, the US senator John Neely Kennedy said...

Wednesday, October 26, 2022

High court Justice Alito assured Kennedy on abortion rights: NY Times

"So I recognize there is a right to privacy. I'm a believer in precedents. I think on the Roe case that's about as far as I can go," Alito said to Kennedy, a staunch defender of abortion rights who died in 2009...


Friday, July 1, 2022

The Supreme Court’s “praying coach” decision rests on a bed of lies - Vox

…Moreover, because Gorsuch's opinion relies so heavily on false facts, the Court does not actually decide what the Constitution has to say about a coach who ostentatiously prays in the presence of students and the public. Instead, it decides a fabricated case about a coach who merely engaged in "private" and "quiet" prayer…









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