Trump says, “You know, the cost of eggs have come down like 93, 94% since we took office. They are pretty much normally price now.”

In truth, the price of a dozen eggs in April 2024 was $4.15; now it’s $4.65.

A 93% price reduction would leave the price at 29 cents a dozen.  Somehow I don’t recall seeing anything like that in my local grocery store.
If you’re to claim a 93% price reduction, why not make it a 110%?  Stores are now paying you to take their eggs?  That’s credible, isn’t it?
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Insofar as the world is not currently beset with an epidemic like COVID-19, the subject of people’s “rights” to flout health regulations is not a present-day issue in our daily news cycles.   That’s a good thing, but it would be foolish to think it’s going to last forever.

It’s apparent that Americans, under this new Trump administration, are even more deeply rooted in their anti-scientific beliefs than they ever were before.  As evidence I cite that the new Secretary of Health and Human Services is an anti-vaxxer, and that the federal government is working hard  dismantling the Centers for Disease Control.

Here’s an article from the Economic Policy Institute called “Trump’s gutting of public health institutions is setting the stage for our next crisis” that begins:

The Trump administration is gutting our national public health infrastructure in real time, setting the stage for the next public health crisis. The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), tasked with “protecting the health of all Americans and providing essential human services, especially for those who are least able to protect themselves,” is set to see a reduction in staff from 82,000 to 62,000 (a decrease of almost 25%) alongside major cuts to spending on contracts.

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It’s not just the poor, sick, and elderly who suffer, and whose lives will continue to get worse, to that group, we need to add those who count on:

Public education, labor laws, food safety standards, air traffic control, social security, Medicare, national parks, the Weather Service, FEMA, veterans affairs, NASA, the National Institutes of Health , and a clean environment.

On this last item, a clean environment, keep in mind that future generations are the ones who will experience most of the pain caused by climate change, as flood waters rise, wildfires destroy our property, our oceans no longer support aquatic animals, and land masses are lost to sea-level rise.

 

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Regrettably, what U.S. representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says here is completely true.  The genie is out of the bottle.

Long after Trump is gone, his core values of racism, xenophobia, greed and lawlessness will remain, and form the soul of a huge swath of the U.S. electorate.

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There is no proof of this.  Yet.

Even if it turns out to be untrue, his actions are identical to those that an enemy of the United States would take: crashing the economy, turning allies against us, and destroying American democracy, our rule of law, and our balance of powers.

 

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It would be foolish to think that Pope Francis made a dent in the hate and hypocrisy of the Christian right, but at least he tried.

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Apparently the other 44% of Americans believe that Trump has absolute authority to do anything he wants, and that neither the legislative nor judicial branch has any power.

That’s a tragedy.

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Until the United States is somehow able to rid itself of Donald Trump, and let’s be honest–that’s a tough row to hoe, we will live with a cruel fact: anything in the U.S. government that benefits the health, safety, and general well-being of the common American will eventually be eliminated to enable more tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, most of whom are Trump mega-donors.

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Speaking for the majority of Americans, I’m sorry we elected such a terrible person, the consequences of whose actions are so deeply hurtful for the people of the world.  

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Pope Francis will never be forgotten, in particular for the fact that he completely transformed the Catholic Church into a humanitarian institution.

Some people may not be able to appreciate this fully, as they may be unaware that, for 1600 years, the history of the Church was one of very little change, and included a long period in which heretics were routinely tortured to death.

Then along comes one man and turns all this on its head.  He worked hard to deal with virtually every oppressive aspect of human culture: poverty, hunger, environmental collapse, slavery, the death penalty greed, ignorance, and the denial of healthcare.

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