Tag: donald trump

Deal Reached To End The Government Shutdown

After more than a month of gridlock, the U.S. Senate has reached a bipartisan deal to reopen the federal government. The agreement, struck after days of tense negotiations, appears to have the backing of both Senate Democrats and Republicans, paving the way for the shutdown to finally end.

The deal was spearheaded by Senators Angus King (I-Maine), Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), and Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.), working alongside several GOP colleagues. According to sources familiar with the talks who spoke to Politico, the agreement has “more than enough” Democratic support to advance through the Senate. Lawmakers are expected to vote Sunday night to advance the House-passed stopgap measure, which will serve as the vehicle for the broader funding package.

The new agreement would fund several key areas of government for the rest of the fiscal year, including the Department of Agriculture, the Food and Drug Administration, the Department of Veterans Affairs, military construction projects, and congressional operations. All remaining agencies would be funded through January 30 under a continuing resolution released Sunday evening.

As part of the compromise, Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) has agreed to give Democrats a vote in December on extending Affordable Care Act subsidies set to expire at the end of the year. Importantly, Democrats will be able to determine which version of that extension receives consideration. The deal also ensures that federal workers who were furloughed or laid off during the shutdown will be rehired and receive back pay once the government reopens.

The announcement follows growing pressure on lawmakers as the shutdown entered its sixth week, disrupting pay for hundreds of thousands of federal employees, halting nonessential services, and straining public patience. The political standoff, which began over disagreements surrounding Obamacare subsidies and long-term spending levels, had become a major test for both parties.

President Donald Trump, who has publicly backed Senate Republicans throughout the negotiations, reportedly supports the agreement. Conservative commentators praised the outcome, arguing that the deal heavily favors the GOP’s negotiating position.

“President Trump successfully gave Senate Republicans unbelievable leverage, forcing ‘moderate’ Democrats to cave,” political commentator Eric Daugherty wrote on X. “Funding set to be through Jan. 30th. No Obamacare subsidies. The only main GOP concession? Simply allow an ACA vote next month. No guarantee on passing or supporting it.”

Others hailed the deal as a strategic victory for Trump, pointing out that Democrats failed to secure new spending commitments or long-term extensions of ACA provisions.

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Trump administration demands states ‘undo’ full SNAP payouts as states warn of ‘catastrophic impact’

President Donald Trump’s administration is demanding states “undo” full SNAP benefits paid out under judges’ orders last week, now that the U.S. Supreme Court has stayed those rulings, marking the latest swing in a seesawing legal battle over the anti-hunger program used by 42 million Americans.

The demand from the U.S. Department of Agriculture came as more than two dozen states warned of “catastrophic operational disruptions” if the Trump administration does not reimburse them for those SNAP benefits they authorized before the Supreme Court’s stay.

Nonprofits and Democratic attorneys general sued to force the Trump administration to maintain the program in November despite the ongoing government shutdown. They won the favorable rulings last week, leading to the swift release of benefits to millions in several states, and the Trump administration belatedly said the program could continue.

On Friday night, however, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson temporarily paused the two rulings ordering the SNAP disbursement while the nation’s highest court considered the Trump administration’s appeal. That led the Department of Agriculture on Saturday to write state SNAP directors to warn them it now considers payments under the prior orders “unauthorized.”

States could face penalties for paying benefits

“To the extent States sent full SNAP payment files for November 2025, this was unauthorized,” Patrick Penn, deputy undersecretary of Agriculture, wrote to state SNAP directors. “Accordingly, States must immediately undo any steps taken to issue full SNAP benefits for November 2025.”

Penn warned that states could face penalties if they did not comply. It was unclear if the directive applies to states that used their own funds to keep the program alive or to ones relying on federal money entirely. The Department of Agriculture did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In a filing in federal court on Sunday, the agency said states moved too quickly and erroneously released full money SNAP Benefits after last week’s rulings.

U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, a Republican, on Sunday called the directive “shocking” if it applies to states, like hers, that used their own money to prop up the program.

“It’s one thing if the federal government is going to continue its level of appeal through the courts to say, no, this can’t be done,” Murkowski said. “But when you are telling the states that have said this is a significant enough issue in our state, we’re going to find resources, backfill or front load, whatever term you want, to help our people, those states should not be penalized.”

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Tariffs, Tobacco, and Policy Whiplash

When politicians talk tough on trade, they usually promise to protect American jobs. But sometimes those gestures do the opposite. The Trump administration’s proposed 100 percent tariff on large cigars imported from Nicaragua is a case in point. According to my latest research, the tariff would shrink US GDP by $1.26 billion, reduce total output by $2.06 billion, eliminate nearly 18,000 jobs, and cost state and local governments $95 million in tax revenue.

There is no domestic industry to protect. The United States produces almost no large cigars, which are rolled by hand from long tobacco leaves and sold through tobacconists, cigar lounges, and small brick-and-mortar shops. Roughly 60 percent of all 430 million cigars imported each year come from Nicaragua. Doubling landed import costs would devastate the 3,500 retailers and 50,000 workers whose livelihoods depend on that trade.

Worse, this tariff reverses one of the administration’s genuine policy successes—its early effort to limit the Food and Drug Administration’s overreach into small-batch cigars and other low-risk nicotine products. It also repeats the same arbitrary logic behind the FDA’s recent warning letter to NOAT—a Swedish company selling mild, recyclable nicotine pouches already cleared for sale in Europe. In both cases, symbolic toughness trumps scientific and economic sense.

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Onward Christian Soldiers

Somewhere between New York’s Studio 54 disco and the White House, Donald Trump became infused by militant Christianity. At the same time, he also seems to have been imbued by the most extreme, far-right Zionism.

Politics do odd things. Trump may espouse a lot of oddball causes, but he’s no fool. He lives and breathes politics.

This week’s political rabbit out of the hat is, of all places, Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nations, with 232 million rambunctious people. As with many of today’s world problems, Nigeria was a creation of British imperialism. The British took a very large swathe of West Africa comprising all sorts of peoples, religions and tribes, drew a line around its borders, and called it Nigeria.

Northern Nigeria, which abuts the Sahara, was predominantly Muslim. Southern Nigeria, where vast stores of oil were eventually discovered, became largely Christian thanks to intense British missionary activity. The two huge communities occasionally squabble or fight, most often over land disputes, cattle rusting and kidnapping of women.

This behavior is common all over West and Southern Africa. Its victims number less than black people killed each year in Chicago’s endemic urban violence.

It’s nonsense to say Nigeria is racked by anti-Christian violence. The tribal conflict that it suffers is small-time violence whose numbers and severity have long been played up by fundamentalist Christians in the United States who preach holy war against Muslims everywhere. Most of these militant Christian fundamentalists look at Trump as a second savior. He has carefully cultivated this image.

The Christian far right is a key component of Trump’s supporters. The late far-right Christian advocate, Charlie Kirk, who was assassinated was a key spokesman for Trump’s Christian moment. The Christian Right has long been focused on Africa, raising funds for anti-Islamic causes. The most notable were efforts to break the regions of Darfur from Sudan in 2018, and the current conflict in the same region as Sudan is being pulled apart.

Most impressive was US support in 2011 for secessionist, primarily Christian South Sudan – another oil rich area. South Sudan broke away with US help from Sudan, then proceeded to fall into tribal chaos and banditry. Christian groups in America had urged on this dismemberment of Sudan and even, in some cases, supplied arms to the south Sudanese rebels.

Many fundamentalist Christian voters get much of their world news from the propaganda mill at Fox News or church-issued news bulletins. Many approve Trump’s proposal that US troops be sent to Nigeria to succor Christians without being able to locate Nigeria on a map. All this fits in with efforts by the Trump administration to vilify Muslims in general or ban them from the US.

Let’s hope the 82nd Airborne Division is not about to be dropped onto Abuja Nigeria on some sort of later-day Crusader mission to please the folks in Biloxi, Mississippi. Trump vowed no more Third World wars (China excepted) and now he’s stepping right into one of totally unpredictable outcome and no sense whatsoever. Some in the White House are urging Trump to conquer all the world’s oil producers. He wants to be King of Oil on top of king of most everything else.

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Trump Is Not To Blame For Democrats Electing Violent Extremists

While liberal America is justifiably triumphant about Tuesday night’s election results, a lot of professionals are quietly worried about extremism infecting the party. Certainly, electing a mayor of New York who’s an unfortunate hellbroth of communism, Islamism, and “defund the police,” is not someone you want defining your party nationally.

And then there’s the problem of Jay Jones, the Attorney General-elect of Virginia, who won handily despite being caught sending text messages wishing death on a Republican colleagues’ kids — and this wasn’t some flippant message. After he did this, he called up his colleague on the phone to further argue his point about needing to watch kids die in order to make political progress. He also appears to have deceived the state and faked community service hours as part of a punishment for being caught driving 116 mph.

Despite this, no notable national Democrat called for Jones to withdraw from the race. Virginia gubernatorial candidate Abigail Spanberger refused withdraw her endorsement of Jones, and Virginia Senator and former vice-presidential candidate Tim Kaine also continued to support him.

Further, Northern Virginia, where the bulk of the state’s votes are, is comprised of the Washington, D.C. suburbs. It’s perhaps the most politically attuned area of the country, so it’s nearly impossible to make the case that voters were somehow unaware of Jones’ conduct. Jones was also running against a moderate incumbent Hispanic Republican whose tenure in office was scandal free, so voters really had no excuse to justify voting for Jones.

I live in Northern Virginia, and much to my own discomfort, there’s no way to get around the fact Jones owes his victory to a bunch of my liberal neighbors deciding in the middle of a government shutdown triggered by congressional Democrats that they’re fine with wishing death on children if it helps protect the cushy federal jobs and lucrative government contracts that make Northern Virginia one the wealthiest areas of the country.

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MAHA: Monitoring Americans’ Health Attributes — or CCP-style Digital Control Grid?

This summer, President Donald Trump unveiled a sweeping plan to “bring healthcare into the digital age.” He calls it the “Digital Health Tech Ecosystem.” Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. also announced the launch of a digital health ID initiative in conjunction with Amazon, Apple, Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic. The latter is an AI startup that received most of its $580 million seed funding from the now-bankrupt FTX under convicted fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried.

This “Ecosystem” is part of the artificial intelligence (AI) venture Stargate Project, which Trump excitedly announced on his first day in office. Stargate is the reason you may have noticed large AI facilities springing up across the country, driving up energy prices with their unprecedented demand for electricity, and threatening aquifers with their unprecedented demand for water.

Trump declared Texas-based Stargate to be a $500 billion collaboration between leading tech companies that will make the United States the global leader in AI. Among investors are OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Oracle chairman Larry Ellison. During the White House unveiling, Ellison bragged that Stargate’s AI would be able to produce cancer vaccines in 48 hours.

Microsoft and NVIDIA are two other U.S.-based investors, while Emirati state-owned MGX of Abu Dhabi and U.K.-based Arm Holdings, Inc. are also involved. Stargate’s chairman is Japanese billionaire Masayoshi Son, who also chairs Stargate investor SoftBank.

Data Not Secure

Naturally, the healthcare component of this technological boom is supposed to help the little guy: improving patient care through earlier disease detection and — you guessed it — vaccinations. But are we to believe that this international consortium of businesses has our best interests at heart?

For that matter, do our own politicians? During testimony before Congress earlier this year, Kennedy admitted: “My vision is that every American is wearing a wearable [health-related monitor] within four years.” But he dodged a follow-up question about plans to secure that personal health data. That’s disconcerting, considering the vulnerability of personal information in federal hands. Remember the early 2025 reveal that Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency gained illicit access to 19 sensitive U.S. Health and Human Services databases, exposing everything from electronic health records to Social Security and bank details? 

Wearables

The “wearable” health monitors would expand that data collection astronomically, creating a “digital twin” of yourself as government officials harvest vital signs, movement and sleep patterns, and other physical metrics in real time.

Moreover, Trump signed an executive order in March calling for data-sharing of personal information about Americans across federal agencies. His administration has since awarded more than $900 million in contracts to Peter Thiel’s data analytics company, Palantir, while even current and former employees have petitioned the company to pull out of the plans.

The HopeGirl Alternative News channel on Rumble depicts what healthcare in this modern Fourth Industrial Revolution will look like. Healthcare 4.0 works with a constant stream of data from wearable devices to analyze us — individually and population-wide — at every hour of the day in all settings. This system is already in operation. Starting in 2020, U.S. hospitals implemented “body area networks” (BAN) to deliver real-time vitals to the Pentagon’s Project Salus during the Covid “public health emergency.”

The REAL ID Connection

This helps explain why U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem finally enforced the REAL ID Act of 2005 this year. (Right now, it’s mandatory for domestic air travel and entering federal buildings, but the legislation allows for unlimited expansion of REAL ID requirements.) Until this year, various states stymied REAL ID, correctly labeling it a gross violation of Americans’ constitutionally protected rights. Now, the U.S. Transportation Security Administration boasts on its website about its biometric overhaul.

Indeed, the REAL ID Act allows states to collect biometric data (fingerprints, facial geometry, triangulated body measurements) on each of us. The Citizens’ Council for Health Freedom (CCHF) explains that the “purposes could include banking, employment or health care.”

CCHF warns: “REAL ID provides the digital and biometric infrastructure to implement a China-like control grid, where your access to services could depend on behavior, beliefs or health status.”

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JUST IN: Judge Immergut Permanently Blocks Trump From Deploying National Guard Troops to Portland

Judge Karin Immergut issued a permanent injunction blocking President Trump from deploying National Guard troops to Oregon.

Last month a federal appeals court temporarily blocked President Trump from deploying Oregon National Guard troops to Portland after a judge issued a Temporary Retraining Order (TRO).

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals temporarily reinstated Judge Karin Immergut’s TRO last month after it halted an order issued by a three-judge panel from the court.

President Trump previously called up hundreds of California National Guard Troops to Portland to circumvent the judge’s order blocking Oregon National Guard Troop deployment.

Trump also activated up to 400 Texas National Guard troops for deployment to Oregon, Illinois and other states amid violent, anti-ICE protests.

On Friday evening, Immergut issued a permanent injunction and blocked Trump from deploying troops to Portland.

Trump can appeal Immergut’s ruling.

NBC News reported:

A federal judge in Oregon on Friday issued a permanent injunction barring the Trump administration from deploying the National Guard on the streets of Portland in response to protests against the president’s immigration policies.

“This Court arrives at the necessary conclusion that there was neither ‘a rebellion or danger of a rebellion’ nor was the President ‘unable with the regular forces to execute the laws of the United States’ in Oregon when he ordered the federalization and deployment of the National Guard,” U.S. District Judge Karin J. Immergut, who was appointed by President Donald Trump in his first term, wrote in her ruling.

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Supreme Court Issues Emergency Order Temporarily Blocking Full SNAP Payments

The Supreme Court has issued an emergency order blocking SNAP funding amid the ongoing Schumer Shutdown.

Here’s more from the Associated Press:

The Supreme Court on Friday granted the Trump administration’s emergency appeal to temporarily block a court order to fully fund SNAP food aid payments amid the government shutdown, even though residents in some states already have received the funds.

A judge had given the Republican administration until Friday to make the payments through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. But the administration asked an appeals court to suspend any court orders requiring it to spend more money than is available in a contingency fund, and instead allow it to continue with planned partial SNAP payments for the month.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson issued the ruling, putting a temporary stay on an earlier order issued by a Rhode Island judge that required the Trump administration to disburse the full SNAP payment amount in the month of November.

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Trump’s Weight-loss Drug Deal: Cheaper Shots, But Is It MAHA?

President Donald Trump has unveiled a sweeping action to slash the cost of the nation’s most expensive weight-loss drugs, casting it as a turning point for both healthcare affordability and economic fairness. In what the White House calls a “historic” agreement with pharmaceutical giants Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk, the administration announced that prices for popular GLP-1 agonists (weight-loss drugs) such as Ozempic and Wegovy will drop by more than two-thirds under a new initiative known as TrumpRx. The program is a government-backed platform that allows Americans to purchase prescription drugs at discounted rates negotiated by the administration.

The measure, described by officials as one of the largest single reductions in drug prices in U.S. history, aims to make medications long seen as luxury treatments accessible to millions of Americans battling obesity and related conditions.

Applause for the move was far from unanimous. Within the “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) camp — the wing of the movement that believes real health starts with prevention rather than prescriptions — the mood was restrained. Critics argue that the deal hands pharmaceutical companies both market dominance and political validation, locking Americans further into a medical model driven by patented injections.

The Deal

The White House framed the deal as a landmark victory for American consumers:

The agreement represents a historic reduction in prices for Americans on the two drugs with the highest annual expenditures in the United States, both of which help adults struggling with diabetes, heart disease (Ozempic and Wegovy only), obesity, and other conditions.

Under the terms of the new arrangement, the monthly cost of Ozempic and Wegovy will fall from about $1,000 and $1,350, respectively, to $350 when purchased through TrumpRx. Prices for Eli Lilly’s Zepbound and Orforglipron, once approved, will be reduced from $1,086 to an average of $346. If — or rather when — the FDA later authorizes the Wegovy pill or similar oral GLP-1 drugs currently in development, “the initial dose of those drugs will be priced at $150 per month” through the portal.

The administration said the new pricing will allow Medicare and Medicaid to cover obesity treatments “at a dramatically lower cost to taxpayers than that proposed by the Biden Administration.” Under the agreement, Medicare will pay just $245 a month for drugs such as Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro, and Zepbound. That is less than half of prior proposals.

According to the fact sheet:

These low prices will enable Medicare to cover Wegovy and Zepbound for patients with obesity and related comorbidities for the first time.

Beneficiaries “will pay a co-pay of just $50 per month.” Plus, “state Medicaid programs will also have access to these medications at these prices.”

The deal also extends to other high-cost medicines. Eli Lilly’s Emgality, a migraine therapy, will now cost $299 per pen, down $443 from its list price. Trulicity, another diabetes treatment, will fall to $389 per month, a reduction of nearly $600. Novo Nordisk’s insulin products NovoLog and Tresiba will be capped at $35 per monthly supply.

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Hegseth Says US Strikes Another Drug-Smuggling Boat, Killing 3 Onboard

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth said the U.S. military carried out another lethal kinetic strike on a vessel in the Caribbean that was transporting illegal drugs to the United States on Nov. 6.

Hegseth stated on social media that the strike targeted a vessel run by a “designated terrorist organization,” killing three people on board whom he described as “narco-terrorists.”

“The vessel was trafficking narcotics in the Caribbean and was struck in international waters,” he stated on X, noting that the strike was conducted under President Donald Trump’s direction.

No U.S. armed forces were harmed in the operation, according to the Pentagon chief.

This was the 17th reported U.S. military strike on drug-smuggling vessels in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific since September, as the Trump administration intensifies efforts to combat drug trafficking. More than 60 suspected drug traffickers have been killed in these strikes.

Hegseth warned that U.S. military operations against drug smuggling vessels will not stop until the illegal drug flow into the United States ends.

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