Latest news with #redstates
New York Times
2 days ago
- General
- New York Times
Trump Rescinds Biden Policy Requiring Hospitals to Provide Emergency Abortions
The Trump administration announced on Tuesday that it had revoked a Biden administration requirement that hospitals provide emergency abortions to women whose health is in peril, including in states where abortion is restricted or banned. The move by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, a branch of the department led by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., was not a surprise. But it added to growing confusion around emergency care and abortions since June 2022, when the Supreme Court rescinded the national right to abortion by overturning Roe v. Wade. 'It basically gives a bright green light to hospitals in red states to turn away pregnant women who are in peril,' Lawrence O. Gostin, a health law expert at Georgetown University, said of the Trump administration's move. The administration did not explicitly tell hospitals that they were free to turn away women seeking abortions in medical emergencies. Its policy statement said hospitals would still be subject to a federal law requiring them to provide reproductive health care in emergency situations. But it did not explain exactly what that meant. Mr. Gostin and other experts said the murky policy could have dire consequences for pregnant women by discouraging doctors from performing emergency abortions in states where abortions are banned or restricted. 'We've already seen since the overturn of Roe that uncertainty and confusion tends to mean physicians are unwilling to intervene, and the more unwilling physicians are to intervene, the more risk there is in pregnancy,' said Mary Ziegler, a professor at the University of California-Davis and a historian of the American abortion debate. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Washington Post
2 days ago
- Health
- Washington Post
Political idiocy is going to make us, well, idiots
In today's edition: You walk into the pharmacy in Idaho and pick up the pamphlet that says 'Ivermectin and You.' You open it. Instead of information, loose pills simply tumble out. You ask the pharmacist about vaccines, and she pretends she hasn't heard you. This, my friends, is medical freedom. Leana Wen's latest column is a case study of the right's antipathy toward the medical establishment, chronicling how ivermectin — long used for deworming livestock — gained conservative cachet during the covid-19 pandemic and is now being made available over the counter in a bunch of red states; meanwhile, vaccine access is being 'sacrificed on the altar of contrarianism.' Yes, Leana says, 'proponents hail these moves as a win for the 'medical freedom' movement,' but they are in fact the manifestation of a diseased relationship with public health and science writ large. To wit: Vice President JD Vance doesn't seem to have a very good grasp on how America's space program happened, Mark Lasswell writes: Vance claims 'American talent' powered the program, with a teeny bit of help from 'some German and Jewish scientists' who came to this country from Europe. 'Some'? Mark entreats us to remember rocketry mastermind Wernher von Braun. Oh, of the Philadelphia von Brauns? Not quite. True, a lot of those contributors became Americans in the 1950s — but Vance doesn't appear too keen on the whole naturalization thing, either. All of this pairs very poorly with, as Mark writes, the White House 'working energetically to dissolve arrangements between several research universities and the government.' Max Boot characterizes it even more starkly: 'the suicide of a superpower.' That's because a lot of progress really has been the result of American ingenuity, which happens to occur largely at universities funded by the government. Examples include: the internet, GPS, smartphones, artificial intelligence, MRIs, LASIK, Ozempic, and drugs that actually prevent and treat covid. But, years hence, as our adversaries explore the cosmos, the human genome and the limits of generative AI, at least we will be worm-free. Chaser: Professor Carole LaBonne writes that it's true that colleges have benefited plenty from federal funding, but if we're looking at which way the reliance relationship really goes, it's the government that depends on universities. From Perry Bacon's essay on the way 'flyover country' conquered this basketball season, with the Indiana Pacers and Oklahoma City Thunder heading to the NBA Finals. 'Is the NBA self-sabotaging? Does the league just have terrible luck?' Perry asks. 'No and no. Teams in fairly small markets will host the championships for a league that craves a massive and even international audience. And that's just fine.' The league, Perry writes, will have plenty of money no matter how many viewers tune in to this year's finals. What's more interesting is the way the NBA sorta kinda stands athwart the supercity-cization of the United States, by way of its strict rules for how much teams can spend and what Perry calls its 'socialist-y system' for paying players. It is not just not bad, Perry argues, but actively great that littler cities are able to compete. As coastal megalopolises hoover up whole industries and their workers, we all ought to have it in us to cheer on these finals. 'Courage I know we have in abundance … but [gun]powder — where shall we get a sufficient supply?' Abigail Adams, I was not familiar with your game! John Adams was, though. The future president once told his wife and pen pal: 'I really think that your Letters are much better worth preserving than mine.' The powder letter is pretty much exactly 250 years old, exchanged in the lead-up to the Revolutionary War, and the resolve it displays is remarkable, writes historian Joseph Ellis, considering the overwhelming uncertainty still swirling at that point. Britain was the world's hegemon, Ellis writes, yet the Adamses 'were like poker players who were all-in before knowing what cards they had been dealt.' Even more remarkable is the couple's prescience that their correspondence would be important some day, as John noted. Ellis writes: 'They were not just writing letters to each other; they were writing to posterity — which is to say, us.' So read up on what Ellis excerpts. Then, in our own era of uncertainty, maybe start writing, too. It's a goodbye. It's a haiku. It's … The Bye-Ku. NBA reckons With remotest finals sites This side of Oort cloud *** Have your own newsy haiku? Email it to me, along with any questions/comments/ambiguities. See you tomorrow!
Washington Post
23-05-2025
- Business
- Washington Post
Climate dollars gushed to red states. Now senators are in a bind.
Donald Trump campaigned last year on reversing what he called the 'Green New Scam,' but Republican senators now must grapple with the reality behind the slogan: cutting hundreds of billions of dollars of clean energy subsidies that are overwhelmingly flowing to red states. The House advanced a tax measure early Thursday that sets the stage for an epic lobbying battle in the Senate over the future of U.S. energy. Factories that would manufacture solar panels, wind turbines, batteries and other crucial pieces of America's energy future as envisioned by former president Joe Biden and Democrats are on the chopping block.
The Verge
20-05-2025
- Business
- The Verge
Republican lawmakers could soon kill clean energy jobs in their home states
Renewable energy has driven a manufacturing boom in the US, but that's all at stake as Congress weighs cuts to Biden-era tax incentives. Solar, wind, and battery companies have announced plans to either create or expand 250 manufacturing facilities since August 2022. That's when Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), considered the biggest federal investment to date in climate and clean energy. If those projects are up and running by 2030, they would collectively create more than 575,000 jobs and contribute $86 billion annually to gross domestic product, according to a report published today by the American Clean Power Association (ACP). Republican districts benefit the most from the IRA's clean energy tax credits. But now, GOP lawmakers could take away those tax incentives if they follow through with President Donald Trump's plan to pass a 'big, beautiful' spending bill that would rollback what he calls a ' green new scam.' 'Republican districts benefit the most from the IRA's clean energy tax credits' Red states are home to 73 percent of active facilities, according to the ACP. And already, solar, wind, and battery manufacturing supports 122,000 full-time jobs. Solar manufacturing employed the biggest share of Americans, some 75,400 people. Solar was the fastest-growing source of electricity in 2024, according to data from the US Energy Information Administration, accounting for 81 percent of added annual capacity. Costs for solar and wind have fallen dramatically for decades, with utility-scale solar now the cheapest source of electricity in most parts of the world. Despite that growth, supply chains for solar energy have been concentrated in China and beset with concerns about forced labor and human rights violations, particularly in the Xinjiang region. The Inflation Reduction Act was meant to supercharge domestic manufacturing, largely through tax credits. And it was starting to pay off. Manufacturing capacity for solar modules grew 190 percent in the US last year, according to a separate report by the Solar Energy Industries Association and research firm Wood Mackenzie. Those tax credits are now in the crosshairs of a Republican-controlled Congress trying to ram Trump's agenda into a sweeping spending bill. A draft bill from the House Ways and Means committee last week proposes phasing out the advanced manufacturing tax credit (45x) and other tax incentives for renewables established in the IRA, and would add stipulations in the meantime that would make it difficult for projects to qualify for credits. If those proposals are ultimately signed into law, the US clean energy industry will see job losses as factories shut down, MJ Shiao, ACP Vice President of Supply Chain and Manufacturing said during a press briefing last week. 'What we have seen from these texts from House Ways and Means, it basically goes too far, too fast,' Shiao said. 'The manufacturers that were being supported by these incentives, and frankly, were trusting that the government was going to honor these incentives, you know, they're getting the rug pulled out from under them.'
Yahoo
10-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Angry Trump Kills 'Woke' Program—and Accidentally Screws MAGA Voters
The other day, during his intensive daily reading of complex policy papers, President Donald Trump noticed that a government initiative created by his predecessor had the word 'equity' in its title. Naturally, this caught his attention. As he appeared to conclude, this could only mean the initiative was designed to help undeserving minorities. Which presented Trump with a ripe opportunity to demagogue about supposed reverse racism against white people. As Trump just announced on Truth Social, he has canceled the program, raging that it's 'RACIST.' He fumed: 'No more woke handouts based on race!' Except there's a problem here. The program in question, the Digital Equity Act, contained huge amounts of money for governments in GOP-run states, as well as Democratic ones, to expand high-speed internet access in underserved communities—very much including red states' rural areas. What's more, every red state government had submitted proposals designed to garner their states large amounts of this funding. These proposals were explicitly designed by these GOP governments partly to serve their states' rural areas. While much of that money has already been granted, large sums still have not, according to the office of Senator Patty Murray, who is monitoring these expenditures as ranking Democrat on the Appropriations Committee. With Trump moving to block these funds, these states now could be denied some or possibly all of that money, Murray's office says. Murray's office says this cutoff is illegal, and some of these states will likely sue. 'Democrats will fight this every step of the way,' Murray said in an emailed statement. In this saga, we once again see Trump—who is supposed to be remaking the GOP into a 'working-class party'—employing precisely the same race-mongering scam that Republicans have used for a very long time to downsize 'Big Government' in ways that hurt their own voters. The Digital Equity Act—which was part of the bipartisan infrastructure law that former president Joe Biden signed in 2021—appropriated over $2 billion for grants to states to improve internet access. As The New York Times reports, states were already in the process of submitting plans to access that grant money, red ones included. Here's where the story gets funny—or perhaps sad. Under the law, the federal government recognizes 'covered populations' that are underserved by high-speed internet. Each state's plan is supposed to be designed to use federal money to expand access to those populations. One of these populations is 'members of a racial or ethnic minority.' Plainly, that's what constitutes the 'woke handouts based on race' that triggered Trump. After all, it sounds woke, doesn't it? But as it happens, some of the other 'covered populations' include 'veterans' and 'people living in rural areas,' as well as 'low-income households.' Guess what: Those aren't necessarily minorities, and red states have a lot of people in those categories too! Indeed, as the Times story details, the racial component of the law was actually pretty negligible. 'The law barely mentions race at all,' the Times observes. But here's the real rub of the matter. A number of red states' proposals—submitted, again, to access federal money for themselves—explicitly detailed how they intend to use that money to expand digital access to their veterans and to their rural residents. You can see that in proposals submitted by Arkansas, Indiana, Ohio, Kansas, and many others. 'Individuals living in rural areas face the most urgent needs for broadband availability,' Alabama's proposal reads. And Iowa's proposal laments the internet 'accessibility gap' that persists 'particularly in rural communities.' Here's the other rub of the matter. As of now, under the law, the federal government has approved tens of millions of dollars to well over a dozen red states, along with a lot of blue states. But many of these states don't have full access to that money, pending their completion of further steps in the approval process, Murray's office tells me. This is where Trump entered the picture: It's anybody's guess how serious Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick really is about this. But if the Commerce Department, which is implementing this law, follows Trump's command, it will do all it can to halt these payments. Murray's office estimates that as much as hundreds of millions of dollars has still not been formally approved. 'It's insane that Trump is blocking resources to help make sure kids in rural school districts can get online all because he doesn't like the word 'equity,'' Murray, who originally sponsored this law, said in her statement. 'My Republican colleagues will need to explain to their constituents why the rural schools they represent won't get this funding for hotspots or laptops in the meantime.' The irony here is that lack of digital access is a good example of a serious inequity (there's that 'woke' word again!) that impacts both low-income minorities and low-income rural whites in a similar way. This lack of access constitutes an unfairness embedded in the nation's patchwork infrastructure, something the federal government is well positioned to try to rectify across racial lines. So it's degenerate nonsense for Trump to pluck out the tiny fraction of this effort aimed at minorities and cast it as racism against white people. 'In today's world, everything is online, and yet folks in rural areas, low-income households, and racial and ethnic minorities all suffer from the same challenge—barriers that keep people offline,' Amy Huffman, policy director at the National Digital Inclusion Alliance, told me. 'It's absurd to say this is reverse racism.' For decades, Republicans have demagogued about Big Government giving handouts to racial minorities, in order to justify slashing government programs in myriad ways that hurt their own voters. This has often been communicated in couched language: For Ronald Reagan it was 'welfare queens.' For Mitt Romney, it was the '47 percent' who were 'dependent on the government.' For Paul Ryan, it was the 'hammock that lulls able-bodied citizens to lives of dependency.' We constantly hear that Trumpism is supposed to represent a break with that old form of Reaganesque, drown-government-in-the-bathtub, plutocratic GOP ideology, as part of its supposed project to remake the GOP as 'working class.' But the reality is that MAGA often takes that old race-baiting trick and, if anything, supercharges its racist overtones. This latest move is a case in point: Once again, here we see Trump carrying out precisely that same old scam. And once again, GOP voters may very well get screwed by it.
