Latest news with #StandingRoomOnly
Yahoo
03-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Major country music star plays first show in year after series of surgeries
Tim McGraw overcame various health issues to return to the stage for the first time in more than a year. The country music superstar performed at the Music City Rodeo in Bridgestone Arena in Nashville, Tennessee on Saturday, May 31 following a series of major back surgeries and knee replacements over the past year. 'When you think Tim McGraw we hope you think of us,' the venue posted on X Monday. 'Shoutout to the Rodeo Marshal himself who closed out the final night of Music City Rodeo in true cowboy fashion.' The 58-year-old — who in addition to Reba and Jelly Roll headlined the three-day event — performed a slew of his signature hits such as 'Live Like We're Dying,' 'Southern Voice,' 'I Like It, I Love It,' 'Real Good Man,' 'How Bad Do You Want It' and 'Something Like That,' Music Mayhem Magazine reported. The three-time Grammy Award-winner also played 'Paper Umbrellas,' his current single on country radio, as well as an unreleased song called 'King Rodeo.' The track is expected to appear on McGraw's forthcoming new album, which will follow his 17th studio album, 'Standing Room Only,' from 2023. An exact release date for the album has yet to be announced. 'Thank you! My name's Tim, better known as Faith Hill's husband, which I like a lot,' McGraw said while introducing himself to the sold-out crowd, per Music Mayhem Magazine. 'Welcome to the inaugural Music City Rodeo! Had you had a good time? Give it up for Miss Reba [McEntire], Mr. Jelly Roll and my boys,' the singer said. 'I want to thank my team for putting this together, Pat, Brian, Down Home, everybody that did such a great job. And thanks to you guys for showing up and supporting this. We're going to be here every single year, so I want y'all to keep coming out. It's been a blast doing this and a big hand for the cowboys and cowgirls. It wouldn't be a show without those guys.' Fans on social media applauded McGraw's return as well. 'What an unforgettable performance,' one TikTok user wrote on another video from Music Mayhem Magazine. 'Tim McGraw never fails to deliver such an emotional and powerful show.' 'He's still got it,' another user commented. 'Kudos for him for being able to not miss a beat.' McGraw's three daughters — Gracie (28), Maggie (26), and Audrey (23) — also joined him on stage to sing the final chorus of his 2007 hit, 'Last Dollar (Fly Away).' 'This hits hard because I loved this one as a kid and I'm roughly their age,' one TikTok user wrote on Music Mayhem Magazine's video. 'I'm sobbing and have a lump in my throat,' another user commented. McGraw's return comes after he was forced to cancel his 'Standing Room Only' tour last June because of health issues. The 14-time CMA-winner revealed on 'The Bobby Bones' show May 23 that he had five surgeries in the past '6 to 8 months.' 'I'm on the upswing now,' he told the host. 'Some mornings are good, some mornings it takes a little while, but it's getting there.' McGraw added that he has 'done a lot of rehab, a lot of P-T [physical therapy] and now I'm slowly getting back to a routine.' 'Our hearts are shattered': Country star's husband dies at 72 from mouth cancer 'Let's not twist the message': Country music star clears up viral AMAs moment Country music power couple calls it quits after two years of marriage Country music superstars perform chart-topping duet at Boston Calling Country singer posts bond after Tennessee arrest Read the original article on MassLive.
Yahoo
27-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
The hidden elitism of RFK's MAHA movement is making America more unhealthy
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy has a well-documented history of lying, and so it was reasonable to believe he was lying again during his January confirmation hearing when he said he is "not anti-vaccine" and promised he wasn't going to take vaccines away. Still, it's both alarming and remarkable how swiftly he's moved to take away COVID-19 boosters that have helped millions of Americans avoid becoming seriously ill from this still-novel virus. Last week, the Food and Drug Administration announced plans to deny access to the vaccine for people under 65 without an underlying health condition. This fits in with Kennedy's long-standing history of eugenics-tinged notions that disease is a good thing, falsely claiming that it strengthens the gene pool, and insinuating that it makes survivors stronger. (In reality, vaccines boost overall immunity while disease often weakens it.) But the particulars of the policy also reveal something about Kennedy's reactionary class politics, which contradict his family's history of progressivism. As Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo noted on Bluesky, "I strongly suspect you're going to have doctors leaning forward on what constitutes a preexisting condition in this case." Which is to say, people who want the booster can get around the FDA ban by asking their doctor for a prescription. But as many folks, including myself, immediately pointed out, forcing people to go to the doctor requires time and usually money. Previously, most people could get the vaccine, often with no copay, by breezing into a pharmacy while grocery shopping. The people who don't have the time or money to go through the onerous process of a doctor's appointment are more likely to be working class or poor. Even middle-class people who can afford a copay struggle to find the time to do so. This policy is turning what was once a 10-minute process into a half-day ordeal, if you're lucky. In effect, Kennedy isn't banning the vaccine — he's just making sure that only well-to-do people like himself have "Make America Healthy Again" slogan — shortened to "MAHA" — has a lot of surface appeal. Worse, Kennedy is smart about floating attention-grabbing policy ideas, like banning artificial food dyes, that are unlikely to happen but snag a lot of headlines, misleading people into thinking he's serious about improving public health. Looking away from Kennedy's empty, lie-laden rhetoric to his actions, however, and another narrative emerges: He's taking away health care, with a special emphasis on limiting access for women, minorities, children, and working people. On the latest episode of my YouTube show, "Standing Room Only," journalist Lindsay Beyerstein and I discussed how much Kennedy is taking away. Of course, the most prominent assault from Republicans on health care is Donald Trump's new tax bill, which aims to kick over 10 million eligible people off Medicaid. The mechanism for cheating people out of their coverage is phony "work requirements." In reality, it's a paperwork requirement that uses red tape to keep eligible people from accessing benefits. 'It's going to be creating this administrative bureaucracy and devastating amount of poor people who, despite being eligible, are going to lose coverage so that Congress can fund tax cuts for the wealthiest,' MaryBeth Musumeci of George Washington University told the Washington Post. Ironically, the people most affected will often be those who work full time, because they have the least free time to navigate the paperwork labyrinth. Kennedy, who grew up in a famously progressive household, surely knows this. But he cynically joined in the lie that eligible people are "cheating" the system by penning a New York Times op-ed earlier this month that falsely claimed "able-bodied adults on welfare are not working at all" and "we don't even ask them to." Kennedy and his co-authors hope readers are picturing lazy young men who refuse to work so they can sit around playing video games. We know this because Jesse Watters rolled out the blunter form of this message on Fox News, claiming Medicaid recipients "play softball on the weekend, sell ecstasy on the side" and don't "even look for a job." As if young men don't have any need for money other than for paying their medical bills. But, as John Knefel at Media Matters explained, "92% of people on Medicaid are working, have a disability, or are performing duties — such as going to school or caregiving — that could qualify for an exemption from meeting work requirements." Those 92% are in danger of losing access because of the paperwork maze requirements. Of the other 8%, four out of five are women. And they aren't young or lazy. On average, they're 41 years old and were recently forced out of the workforce, often to care for family members, especially elderly ones. Most have only a high school degree or less, and their median annual income is $0. That's not a typo. This is a group of very poor women. This is where the GOP's traditional classism and racism meld with Kennedy's unsubtle eugenicist impulses. He speaks frequently of disabled people as if they are useless parasites. During his confirmation hearing, Kennedy said this about people with disabilities or chronic illnesses, a category which includes anyone with diabetes or asthma: "A healthy person has a thousand dreams. A sick person has only one." That was his scripted remark, and even then, he was arguing that a person with any chronic health condition, from someone in a wheelchair to someone who needs daily medication to manage depression, does not have a life worth living. Punishing for the "sin" of caring for disabled family members fits into this bleak, anti-human worldview. It will not make America healthy to let people die because they don't have the wealth to pay for health care out of pocket. Social Darwinism was a bad idea in the 1900s. It's even dumber now. We have decades of medical evidence showing that robust, functioning health care systems are how you improve public health. The entire history of public health research shows that the "rising tide" model isn't just more humane, but more effective than the "culling the herd" model. Sickness spreads, often directly through viruses or indirectly by depleting family resources, putting stress on people that degrades their health. Taking away health care from the people Kennedy thinks are the undeserving sick will not make others healthier. That's not even really the goal of the Medicaid cuts, which are about funding massive tax cuts for the rich. Pulling a few food dyes out of your snacks is no substitute for what Americans need, which is the health care support for all to live full and productive lives.
Yahoo
07-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
"Two dolls" for Christmas: Trump resorts to sexism to sell tariffs
The first time Donald Trump opined about how many dolls a little girl should have, it seemed he was speaking off the cuff, as he often does, about a subject he knows nothing about. During one of his fake "Cabinet meetings" — which are better described as mandatory praise provision from his underlings — Trump defended his trade-destroying tariffs by lecturing parents about not spoiling their daughters. "Well, maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls, you know?" argued the billionaire who flies on a private jet to play in rigged golf games at one of his many estates most weekends. The doll thing is evidently a preplanned talking point, because Trump keeps returning to the subject. "I don't think a beautiful baby girl that's 11 years old needs to have 30 dolls. I think they can have three dolls or four dolls," Trump told Kristen Welker of NBC News, revealing that this father of five is unaware that 11-year-olds aren't babies. He repeated the talking point, showcasing his total lack of understanding of how children age, the next day to reporters. "All I'm saying is that a young lady, a 10-year-old-girl, 9-year-old girl, 15-year-old-girl, doesn't need 37 dolls," he said, not knowing that high schoolers don't usually play with dolls. "She could be very happy with two or three or four or five," asserted this self-appointed expert in child psychology. Now Trump's Cabinet members are picking up the claim that the problem isn't rising prices, but parents who need to be sterner with whiny little girls. However poor his execution, it seems obvious that Trump is working off instructions, likely given by his ever-present aide/manager Stephen Miller, to keep the focus on dolls and maybe "pencils," which he brought up with Welker. Either way, the telling detail is that the only children Trump will talk about are girls. Boys aren't mentioned. Neither are toys more stereotypically associated with boys, like Legos or toy trucks. This is likely not an accident, but part of a larger effort to sell the otherwise indefensible tariffs to the MAGA base by invoking the same misogynist resentment that helped Trump get elected. Want more Amanda Marcotte on politics? Subscribe to her newsletter Standing Room Only. A little over a month ago, Trump superfans on X started arguing that the tariffs were the key to restoring male dominance. They falsely claim that tariffs will drive women out of the workforce and force them to get married to survive. The argument wasn't made using customary tactics like reason or evidence, so much as incoherent rage at women with desk jobs. One silly video of some women dancing for a moment in their office drew special rage and claims that tariffs are needed to destroy this unsightly display of female joy. Fox News picked it up, and tried to argue that tariffs will restore the patriarchal gender order by bringing back manly manufacturing jobs, while destroying "email jobs" that are primarily held by women in MAGA fantasy version of reality. The opposite, however, is what's happening: Trump's trade war is shutting down American factories that need foreign-sourced materials, as well as devastating other "manly" blue-collar jobs like truck driving and farming. But the gender resentments Trump taps into were never about facts, but about giving Trump's male supporters a scapegoat for all their self-inflicted woes: women. Or, with the "doll" gambit, girls. Guardian columnist Moira Donegan joked about this on Bluesky, "As we all know, the only workers who ever produce anything are men, and all women are exclusively parasitic consumers (men do not consume). This is how the economy works in the right wing symbolic order. " The "doll" talk, like the anger at the dancing video, dials into the same tired, sexist stereotype: that women and girls are inherently frivolous. The narrative in the manosphere is that young women have too much self-esteem, due to allegedly being spoiled by parents and educators who allowed them to believe their gender should be no limit on their ambitions. When parents and teachers tell girls they're worth something, the argument goes, they grow up to be egotistical "cat ladies," too busy pursuing their own goals to settle into their proper role as an uncomplaining helpmeet for a man. The image of "too many" dolls taps right into this ugly worldview that overly indulged girls are growing into "selfish" women who think they're too good to settle for Mr. Tweeting Incel. The White House leans heavily on the unjustified grievances of the Elon Musk fanboys of X to develop their talking points, but it's not at all certain this is a smart strategy. Last month's go-round of trying to spin tariffs as a restoration project for American male dominance did little to raise public trust in the trade war, with polls showing large and growing majorities of Americans oppose the tariffs. It would be nice if it were because Americans have embraced gender equality, but truthfully, most don't seem to be picking up on the gender grievance behind all this "doll" talk. All they hear is Trump admitting prices are going up — and most people are smart enough to know it won't be limited to dolls. Tariffs are especially threatening to parents of young children, because they will raise the price of daily necessities that are already too expensive. As USA Today documented, prices on diapers, clothes, car seats, and strollers are expected to rise dramatically, as these are either manufactured in countries hit with high tariffs or the American manufacturers import supplies from overseas. Trump may not be able to tell the difference between a baby and a 6th-grader, but most Americans understand kids grow quickly and need new clothes. Forget those tradwife fantasies that women can be strong-armed into making clothes for kids — the price of fabric is already high and will be rising with tariffs, too. The "doll" talk may have been intended to provoke gender resentments, but it's mostly just a reminder that Trump doesn't care about the economic struggles of young parents. That's especially aggravating in light of the reports that the White House is entertaining condescending policy pitches aimed at "persuading" women to have more children. Proposals include giving mothers of big families "medals" for child-bearing or even paying new moms a $5,000 baby bonus. None of this will work, of course. Five grand is not enough to cover health and child care costs for a baby, much less all the stuff that needs to be bought, most of which will be more expensive from this trade war. Trump just sounds like he's even more out of touch with the daily lives of ordinary people.
