House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries spoke with reporters Thursday and was asked whether Democrats would be amenable to voting on separate legislation to support U.S. military families—who are already hurt by the Trump administration—while shutdown negotiations continue.
“Yes,” Jeffries answered. “I mean, this is an extraordinary thing. It's unbelievable. Members of the House Republican Conference are upset and perplexed that their leadership has them on vacation. The last day the House was in session was September 19. Republicans got out of town before sundown, and we haven't seen them back in Washington since. This is extraordinary.”....
He went on to highlight all of the ways that the GOP’s government shutdown has negatively impacted Americans.
“This is a crisis—both in terms of the government shutdown, the impact on the American people, the impact on aviation safety, the impact on public safety, the impact on the health and wellbeing of the American people,” Jeffries said. “And House Republicans remain on vacation. Their own voters are telling them—including the Republican Speaker—’get back into town, sit down with Democrats, engage in a bipartisan negotiation, reopen the government, and address the health care crisis that they've created.’"
The GOP’s shutdown is predictably damaging vital operations that Americans rely on. Yet Republicans’ response has been to threaten federal workers while claiming that they plan to come up with a solution to skyrocketing health care costs—eventually.
As Jeffries rightly points out, Americans just want Republicans to do their damn jobs.
House Speaker Mike Johnson was asked on Tuesday whether his delay in swearing in Democratic Rep-elect Adelita Grijalva, who won a special election for Arizona's Seventh District two weeks ago, was related to fears over a forced vote on releasing the government’s files on accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.
“No, it has nothing to do with that at all,” Johnson said. “We will swear her in when everybody gets back. It's a ceremonial duty. Look, we’ll schedule it, I guess, as soon as she wants. It has nothing to do with it. We’re in pro forma session because there is nothing for the House to do.”
“The House has done its job,” Johnson continued. “People say, ‘Why don't you do more? Let's do more. Now, you should do something.’ We already did something. It was passing a clean CR [continuing resolution].”
Grijalva, who represents a decisive vote on bipartisan discharge petition to force the release of the Epstein files, has publicly demanded Johnson stop stalling and swear her in.
Republican Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, a co-sponsor of the Epstein-related bill, has accused Johnson of “doing everything he can” to block the vote.
At this point, Johnson’s role as speaker seems to have narrowed to one objective: protecting President Donald Trump, no matter what the cost to his party, the economy, or our democracy.
Vice President JD Vance defended the GOP’s government shutdown on Wednesday by falsely claiming the Democratic Party is trying to give federal health care benefits to undocumented immigrants.
"If you're an American citizen [and] you've been to a hospital in the last few years, you probably noticed that wait times are especially large, and very often somebody who's there in the emergency room waiting is an illegal alien—very often a person who can't even speak English,” Vance said. “Why do those people get health care benefits at hospitals paid for by American citizens?”
As ABC News notes, undocumented immigrants are not eligible for federally funded health insurance programs.
Like many of his GOP colleagues, Vance’s only defense for the party’s failed policies is racist scapegoating. While the Trump administration threatens Americans with economic suffering, their supposed solutions amount to little more than blaming immigrants and marginalized groups for the consequences of their own policies.
The Republican playbook is simple: Lie, repeat the lie, and lie again.
Vice President JD Vance took time after one of his trademark lie-filled speeches to stridently defend the Trump administration's efforts to squash the freedom of speech.
During a question and answer discussion on Wednesday in North Carolina, Vance was asked how he “square[s] your fervent belief in free speech with what's going on now with Jimmy Kimmel and the FCC [Federal Communications Commission] pressure.”
"I’m pretty sure that Jimmy Kimmel was back on the air last night, and to the extent that he's not back on the air, it's because he's not funny and has terrible ratings,” Vance replied in what can be described only as a self-defeating response.
“What people will say is ‘Well, you know, didn't the FCC commissioner put a tweet out that said something bad?’” he continued “What is the government action that the Trump administration has engaged in to kick Jimmy Kimmel or anybody else off the air? Zero. What government pressure have we brought to bear to tell people that they're not allowed to speak their mind? Zero.”
Vance then blamed the former Biden administration for YouTube’s content-moderation decisions to suspend accounts promoting misinformation about the 2020 presidential election and the COVID-19 pandemic.
“That is real government censorship, and it left the White House when Joe Biden left the White House" Vance said.
President Donald Trump made another ridiculous public health announcement promoting old, debunked vaccine myths Monday.
Flanked by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Administrator for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Mehmet Oz, Trump pushed the debunked conspiracy that autism is caused by everything from acetaminophen to vaccines.
"I can say that there are certain groups of people that don't take vaccines and don't take any pills that have no autism. Does that tell you something?” Trump said, asking Kennedy, “Is that a correct statement, by the way?"
"There are some studies that suggest that, yeah. With the Amish, for example,” Kennedy replied.
"The Amish, yeah. Virtually … I heard none,” Trump agreed. “See, Bobby wants to be very careful with what he says, and he should. But I'm not so careful with what I say. But you have certain groups. The Amish, as an example. They have essentially no autism."
The threadbare anti-vax myth that the Amish don’t have autism and don't vaccinate is—like every single thing Kennedy promotes—completely unsupported by any available evidence.
The limited interactions that Amish communities have with broader society has fueled baseless claims from anti-vaxxers like Kennedy—and now Trump. But in reality, Amish children have been diagnosed with autism at rates comparable to other communities. And while data is limited, it’s clear that Amish children are often vaccinated, though at a lower rate.
Having failed to prove a link between the measles vaccine and autism, anti-vaxxers like Trump and Kennedy are now pushing vague, unfounded claims that a combination of drugs may be linked to autism in children.
“Don't let him pump your baby up with the largest pile of stuff you've ever seen in your life, going into the delicate little body of a baby.” Trump added.
He then went on to give his own version of medical advice.
“Even if it's two years, three years, four years, you just break it up into, I would say five. But let's say four—four visits to the doctor instead of one,” he said.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom isn’t done trolling President Donald Trump—with facts. During a press conference on public safety Thursday, Newsom offered the president some important crime statistics he seems to have overlooked.
"Mississippi leads the nation as the No. 1 murder state in America. I imagine this, in particular, may resonate with the President of the United States. It's got a murder rate that’s 180 percent — 180 percent —higher than Los Angeles,” Newsom said. “It’s interesting, L.A. has more people—these are all per capita numbers.”
...“Perhaps the president could deploy the National Guard in every corner of Mississippi,” he continued. “The murder rate is out of control there. Carnage.”
After citing other GOP-led states and cities with higher murder rates, Newsom stressed that he isn’t offering opinions but “stone cold facts.
"If the president is sincere about the issue of crime and violence, there's no question in my mind that he'll likely be sending the troops into Louisiana, Mississippi, to address the just unconscionable wave of violence that continues to plague those states," he said.
In co-opting Trump’s crass, blunt object stylings, Newsom has been successful in getting under the skin of right-wing media. Whether his style of attack will propel him into higher office remains to be seen.
But two things are certain: It sure is fun to watch, and—unlike the orange blowhard—Newsom has reality on his side.
During a briefing on Thursday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt used Wednesday’s mass shooting in Minneapolis, Minnesota, as an opportunity to attack Democrats, particularly former press secretary Jen Psaki.
When asked about Psaki’s and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey’s criticism of the GOP’s refusal to take any action on school shootings, Leavitt doubled down on the “power of prayer in this country.”
“Yes, I saw the comments of my predecessor,” she said. “And frankly, I think they're incredibly insensitive and disrespectful to the tens of millions of Americans of faith across this country who believe in the power of prayer, who believe that prayer works, and who believe that in a time of mourning like this, when beautiful young children were killed while praying in a church, it's utterly disrespectful, um, to deride the power of prayer in this country.”
Leavitt’s stammering response came after Psaki—through tears—described her frustrations as “half of the politicians in our country have little more to offer than thoughts and prayers,” during her MSNBC show Wednesday night.
“We have seen this play out over and over again. There is a shooting, then come the thoughts and prayers, and then comes the attempt to shift the focus. This is what always happens,” she said.
.Like clockwork, Republicans and their pro-gun allies have pivoted to mental health and transgender rights, ignoring the obvious truth that the only factor that separates the United States from other countries is the sheer number of guns.
As for action, the Trump administration has continued to offer nothing more than thoughts, prayers, and a vague promise to investigate medicines that have already been well researched.
At least one White House press secretary knows how to tell the truth.
President Donald Trump was caught on a hot mic Monday, seemingly boasting about his bromance with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin.
"I think [Putin] wants to make a deal,” Trump said. “I think he wants to make a deal for me. Do you understand that, as crazy as it sounds?"
The audio was captured shortly before the convicted felon was scheduled to meet with European leaders to discuss strategy for ending Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives.
Trump met with Putin this past Friday in Alaska, in what was billed as an attempt to pause Russia’s aggression against Ukraine. Trump’s special relationship with Putin has not led to any slowing down on the part of Russia, which continued to bomb Ukraine, reportedly killing 14 people in an attack on Monday.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt was asked about a federal judge blocking the release of grand jury documents related to Jeffrey Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell.
"We think that decision is unfortunate. Of course, we move to unseal that information because the president has said he wants to see credible evidence released,” the White House’s front-facing lie machine said about the documents, which are decidedly not the same as the long-promised Epstein files that Attorney General Pam Bondi said were “sitting” on her desk in February.
“As for the appeal process, I would refer you to the Department of Justice for that," Leavitt added.
But she conveniently forgot to mention that Judge Paul A. Engelmayer pilloried the White House in his ruling, calling the effort to unseal the grand jury documents a "diversion—aimed not at full disclosure but at the illusion of such."
Leavitt’s spin sessions and the Trump administration’s ludicrous conspiracy theories—designed to distract from Trump’s ties to Epstein—have become so absurd that it’s hard to tell if they’re simply getting lazy or if they’re so cynical about their base’s intelligence that they’re willing to serve them undercooked slop—or both.
President Donald Trump announced a state of emergency in Washington, D.C., during a press conference Monday, claiming with no evidence that the city is gripped by a crime epidemic. He pledged to deploy the National Guard and extend the authoritarian order to other Democratic cities.
“We have other cities that are very bad. New York has a problem. And then you have, of course, Baltimore and Oakland. We don't even mention that anymore—they're so, they're so far gone,” he said. “We're not going to let it happen. We’re not gonna lose our cities over this. And this will go further. We're starting very strongly with D.C., and we're going to clean it up real quick. Very quickly, as they say.”
Joined by U.S. Attorney for Washington, D.C., Jeanine Pirro, Trump weaved a story of violent youth, crumbling infrastructure, and chaos in the nation’s capital. He also demanded that homeless residents leave the city.
Trump’s claims are contradicted, of course, by reality. Violent crime in D.C. is at a 30-year-low, and Baltimore and Oakland have seen similar drops in crime.
Trump’s occupation of D.C. is consistent with his repeated threats to control the capital by force.
And his promise to deploy federal troops in other Democratic-run cities on similarly false pretenses has been a hallmark of his second term. Citing lies about violent immigrant hordes as the reason for his inhumane immigration policies, Trump sent the National Guard to Los Angeles in June without Gov. Gavin Newsom’s consent.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul held a press conference Monday to respond to ongoing GOP efforts to disproportionately increase Republican representation in Congress. She discussed potential Democratic strategies to combat Texas’ gerrymandering scam, including redrawing New York state’s congressional maps to offset the loss of Democratic seats.
"If that's what's called for, I will put saving democracy as my top priority at any cost, because it is under siege,” Hochul told reporters. “Just like those who put on a uniform to fight in battles across the ages. For centuries we've stood up and fought. Blood has been shed. This is our moment in 2025 to stand up for all that we hold dear and not let it be destroyed by a bunch of renegades in a place called Texas.”
Hochul joins Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, who has also pledged to counter Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s machinations to sabotage democracy by redrawing California’s congressional maps.
Texas Democrats have been preparing for this fight. On Sunday, most Democratic state legislators left the state, denying Republicans the quorum needed to pass any legislation. Texas Democratic state Rep. James Talarico accused the GOP of “trying to rig the midterm elections right before our eyes.”
Abbott has since threatened to replace Democratic representatives and charge them with “bribery.”
President Donald Trump went on quite the emotional journey Wednesday after a reporter informed him that the financial community has coined a new term for dealing with his chaotic tariff threats: the “TACO trade,” which stands for Trump Always Chickens Out.
The revelation followed an Oval Office ceremony to swear in bottled-water tantrum thrower and former Fox News host Jeanine Pirro as Interim U.S. Attorney for the District of Washington.
“Oh, isn’t that nice—I chickened out. I never heard that,” Trump responded, seemingly unaware that his trade “strategy” of bluster followed by retreat is being mocked by the very finance bros he seeks approval from.
Trump worked himself up into a lather trying to defend his wounded ego, bragging that he is opening China and characterizing his latest capitulation to the European Union after threatening 50 percent tariffs as strategic.
“We have the hottest country in the world right now,” Trump said, quoting an alleged compliment from the king of Saudi Arabia. “Six months ago, this country was stone cold, dead. We had a dead country.”
A still rambling Trump proceeded to admit that he had to reduce his crazy high proposed tariff rates after realizing, “Wow, that's high.” It isn’t the first time that Trump has confessed to making up numbers when blabbing out misguided policies.
Trump closed with one of his routine attacks on the free press, admonishing the reporter who hurt his feelings by telling him the truth.
“But don't ever say what you said. That's a nasty question,” he whined. “To me that’s the nastiest question.”
That query was the least nasty thing about being in a room where Pirro had just been sworn in for anything other than a deposition.
Just like the so-called Department of Government Efficiency it was named after, the House Delivering Outstanding Government Efficiency Caucus has delivered little more than chaos and waste.
Started by Republicans Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa and Rep. Aaron Bean of Florida, the DOGE caucus pledged to help multibillionaire Elon Musk scour the federal government to find trillions of dollars in waste, fraud, and abuse.
Reps. Jared Moskowitz of Florida and Greg Landsman of Ohio were the first Democrats to join the committee, arguing that if Republicans are truly interested in government efficiency and oversight, Democrats should be at the table. While the move drew some criticism, it effectively called Republicans’ bluff.
“The DOGE caucus is dead. It’s defunct. We haven’t met in months. We only had two total meetings in five months. And we weren’t involved at all in anything [happening at DOGE], which Elon was in charge of. Zero. Zilch. Nada. [Musk] did it all on his own,” Moskowitz told Politico.
He added that “DOGE was a complete failure. Complete failure. Nothing has been made more efficient. Ask the people in Newark [Liberty International Airport, which has suffered delays and cancellations] how efficiency is going.”
If these DOGE offshoots have succeeded at anything, it's toeing the Trump administration line: Musk is somehow both in charge of everything DOGE does and completely blameless for its failures.
Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency has left National Weather Service teams desperately scrambling to staff depleted operations ahead of the hurricane season.
According to the National Weather Service Employees Organization, there are at least 155 vacancies that need to be filled, including forecasters essential for the around-the-clock coverage needed during hurricane season.
“For most of the last half century, NWS has been a 24/7 operation. Not anymore, thanks to Elon Musk,” Tom Fahy, legislative director of the union, wrote in an email to the Washington Post.
Now, the Trump administration is looking into reassigning some of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s remaining staff to the “critically understaffed” weather service offices.
At the start of 2025, NOAA had more than 600 vacancies, but instead of trying to fill these important roles, President Donald Trump—with the help of Musk’s DOGE goons—illegally fired and pushed out about ten percent of the remaining workforce.
And the effects of these cuts were felt immediately. In March, the NWS announced that it would suspend weather balloon observations in several locations and greatly reduce data collection efforts in others due to staffing issues.
The economic value of NOAA’s weather and climate data has been estimated at more than $100 billion, but that was before Trump and Musk got their hands on it.
The Trump administration’s efforts to destroy NOAA are part of its broader strategy of undermining climate science. By gutting weather and climate research, it obscures the real costs of climate change and extreme weather events, leaving Americans in the dark.
They say Kennedy uses the disorder as a political tool and pushes damaging stereotypes that spread misinformation.
“The U.S. Secretary of Health, RFK Jr., made false comments about autism, like people with autism are broken, that autism is caused by vaccines, and that people with autism will never have jobs or families,” said Teddy, a fourth grader from New Jersey whose statement at a school board meeting went viral earlier this month.
“I have autism and I’m not broken,” Teddy said. “And I hope that nobody in Princeton Public Schools believes RFK Jr.'s lies.”
The New Jersey schoolkid and autism awareness groups felt the need to speak out after Kennedy’s vile comments last month about U.S. autism rates, where he repeated his false claim that autism is an epidemic that “destroys families.”
Kennedy also mischaracterized autism as a “preventable disease” and falsely asserted that 25% of autistic people are non-functioning—ridiculous notions that experts say are inaccurate.
“His comments were incorrect, but more to the point, they were eugenic,” Colin Killick, executive director of the Autistic Self Advocacy Network, told the Boston Globe. “Talking about autistic people as themselves being destroyed but also having destroyed their families is a horrific argument.”
“There’s an unscrupulous industry of alternative medicine providers who exploit families by charging them tens of thousands of dollars to ‘recover’ people with autism,” Ari Ne’eman, who is autistic and an assistant professor of health policy and management at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, told NBC News. “The way that industry works is by terrifying families.”
David Mandell, a University of Pennsylvania psychiatry professor and director of the Penn Center for Mental Health, told PBS News that Kennedy’s “fixed, myopic view” stems from needing to interface with parents of autistic children and scientists who work in the field.
Julie DeFilippo, a social worker with an autistic son, told the Boston Globe that “as a parent of an autistic kid, I get hundreds of moments of joy every day. That’s the easy part—being at home and supporting him.”
Kennedy’s characterization of autism as a preventable tragedy also appears connected to his notorious anti-vaccine crusade. In a recent interview with Dr. Phil McGraw, he repeated the vigorously debunked claim of a link between autism and vaccines.
“Many of the parents have reported that their kid, that their child, developed autism immediately after [childhood vaccinations],” Kennedy told the psychologist-turned-TV star.
Kennedy has used his position as America’s chief public health official to launch what he claims is a scientific study into the cause of autism, to be led by an anti-vaccine activist with heinous ideas about treatments for the condition that include experimenting with chemical castration drugs.
“I have seen a lot of people treat [Autism Spectrum Disorder] as some sort of disease that needs to be ‘cured,’ which is very offensive towards people like me,” John Trainor, a high school student, told the Boston Globe. ”We are normal people who have a much harder time socially.”
Kennedy has also announced plans to create an autism database, using the private medical information of millions of Americans, promising Trump in a surreal Cabinet meeting in April that he’d be able to identify the cause of autism by September.
Kennedy announced on May 7 that he intends to direct the National Institutes of Health to use Medicare and Medicaid insurance claims related to autism diagnoses to build his database.
Critics point out that Kennedy’s plan amounts to an autism registry, and experts add that Kennedy’s promises are unrealistic.
"If you just ask me, as a scientist, is it possible to get the answer that quickly? I don't see any possible way,” Dr. Peter Marks, a former top vaccine scientist for the FDA, said on Face the Nation last month.
If you thought FBI Director Kash Patel had any competence whatsoever, think again.
Appearing before the Senate Appropriations Committee on Thursday, Patel was unable to provide a timeline for when his department’s budget—which was required by law to be submitted more than a week ago—would finally be delivered to Congress.
Democratic Sens. Patty Murray of Washington and Chris Van Hollen of Maryland noted that the hearing was essentially pointless, since Patel failed to provide critical spending and budget documents.
“How do we, as Congress, do our budget and our work without that request and without the spend plan?” Murray said, calling Patel’s lack of preparedness “insufficient and deeply disturbing.”
Patel’s signature dunderheaded combativeness was on full display during a tense exchange with Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon, who asked whether people deported under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 have the constitutional right to due process under the Fifth Amendment.
“It’s not for me to call the balls and strikes on it,” Patel responded.
“You haven't read the Constitution?” Merkley asked, citing the Supreme Court ruling in Reno v. Flores as part of the settled law on the matter.
“It concerns me that you're not familiar with the core concept of due process applying to all persons as written in black and white in the Constitution,” Merkley added.
After the hearing, Murray called out Patel’s incompetence and the threat it poses to the United States.
“Kash Patel, the conspiracy theorist that Republicans made FBI Director, came to a Senate hearing on the budget—with NO budget, NO timeline, and NO clue. It's downright incompetent, and it's making America less safe. We need serious leadership at the FBI,” she wrote on Bluesky.
No budget? Check! Equivocating statements about the Constitution? Check! Seems like Patel’s competence is perfectly in line with the rest of the Trump administration.
The insanity continues with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who appeared on Dr. Phil McGraw’s YouTube channel Tuesday to crow about the “revolution” in health he and the Trump administration are administering to the American people.
“Many of the parents have reported that their kid, that their child, developed autism immediately after the vaccine,” Kennedy said.
Of course, this claim has been debunked many times by many different scientific studies.
He then cavalierly implied that a pharmaceutical conspiracy is behind medical professionals’ support for the measles vaccine.
“I got chicken soup and vitamin A, which, you know, which nobody can patent. But now the only treatment that doctors really know about is you've got to get the measles vaccine,” Kennedy said.
When an audience member asked whether new parents should vaccinate their children, Kennedy gave an intentionally vague anti-vax response.
“We live in a democracy, and part of the responsibility of being a parent is to do your own research,” he said.
Kennedy also repeated the myth that the COVID-19 vaccine led to an increase in myocarditis in children, ignoring the evidence showing that the risk of myocarditis is actually higher in those who contract COVID-19 than in those who are vaccinated.
And during a Q&A session, a woman who identified herself as “Emily” raised concerns that “stratospheric aerosol injections” are “continuously peppered on us every day.”
“Stratospheric aerosol injections” is the sesquipedalian way of referring to the chemtrail conspiracy theory, which purports that the white trails left behind airplanes—officially called condensation trails—are some kind of biological weapon sprayed by sinister and shadowy actors to manipulate everything from the weather to human minds.
“It's not happening in my agency. You know, we don't do that. It's done, we think by DARPA. And a lot of it now is coming out of the jet fuel,” Kennedy said, blaming the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. “I'm going to do everything in my power to stop it. We'll bring on somebody who's going to think only about that.”
For years, Kennedy and other Republicans have eschewed their actual responsibilities to bring bills to state legislatures that presuppose that the unsubstantiated chemtrail theory is true. Just last month, Kennedy boasted that he would use his office to tilt at this windmill.
Kennedy’s interview with Dr. Phil wasn’t the revolution he thought it was. Rather, it was an hour-long disinformercial for Kennedy’s rampant conspiracy theories, proving that he remains one of the most dangerous obstacles facing public health today.
