Travel Rite Inc (2024)

25/10/2024

October 24, 2024 (Thursday)

Trump’s threat to use the military on “the enemy within,” along with the recent statements of General John Kelly and other members of Trump’s administration who say he is a fascist, have fed growing concern that Trump’s reelection could spark a deadly conflict between MAGA Republicans and those they perceive as their enemies. But there has been far less attention paid to the civil war within the Republican Party.

On the Hugh Hewitt Show this morning, Trump boasted that he had “taken the Republican Party and made [it] into an entirely different party…The Republican Party is a very big, powerful party. Before, it stood, it was an elitist party with real stiffs running it.”

Trump’s analysis of his effect on the party is right. In 2015, the party had been controlled for years by a small group of leaders who wanted to carve the U.S. government back to its size and activity of the years before the 1930s, slashing regulations on business and cutting the social safety net so they could cut taxes. But their numbers were small, so to stay in power, they relied on the votes of the racist and sexist reactionaries who didn’t like civil rights.

Once he took office in 2017, Trump put the base of the party in the driver’s seat. Using the same techniques that had boosted Hungarian prime minister Victor Orbán, he attacked immigrants, Black Americans, and people of color, and promised to overturn the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision protecting abortion rights. After his defense of the participants in the August 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, he began to turn his followers into a movement by encouraging them to engage in violence.

In the following years, Trump’s hold on his voting base enabled him to take over the Republican Party, pushing the older Republican establishment aside. In March 2024 he took over the Republican National Committee itself, installing a loyalist and his own daughter-in-law Lara Trump at its head and adjusting its finances so that they primarily benefited him.

But while older leaders were happy to use Trump’s base to keep the party in power, the two factions were never in sync. Established Republican leaders’ goal was to preside over a largely unregulated market-driven economy. But MAGA Republicans want a weak government only with regard to foreign enemies—another place where they part company with established Republicans. Instead, they want a strong government to impose religious rules. Rather than leaving companies alone to react to markets, they want them to shape their businesses around MAGA ideology, denying LGBTQ+ rights, for example.

In 2024, those tensions are stronger. Trump’s promise to build a tariff wall around the country contradicts the established Republicans’ reliance on free trade. His vow to deport 20 million immigrants threatens to devastate entire sectors of the economy. Both plans are widely panned by economists. Yesterday, twenty-three Nobel Prize-winning economists warned that Trump’s economic plans would “lead to higher prices, larger deficits, and greater inequality.” On Morning Joe today, economic analyst Steve Rattner noted that Trump’s plans would cut the gross domestic product in the U.S. by 8.9%, creating a severe recession or a depression.

MAGA Republicans are fiercely loyal to Trump, but it is not clear how much they offer to those trying to get elected in more moderate districts. Extremist abortion bans have fired up significant opposition to Republican candidates, and that opposition does not appear to be weakening. "My wife…was miscarrying and bleeding out,” John Legend said today on the podcast of Broncos legend Shannon Sharpe. “Her life was in danger, and for the government to say, 'Oh, we need to evaluate this to make sure you're sufficiently dying before you can have an abortion'—that’s what they’re saying in...all these states where they have Trump abortion bans. Not your doctor, not you and your family. The government. No! Stay out of it!... We don’t need the government to be involved in it. And if the government’s involved, that means the police and the district attorney are involved in medical decisions. That's crazy!”

“He is killing us!” Mika Brzezinski said this morning on Morning Joe. “He is putting us at risk. He is making us afraid to have babies. He is putting our reproductive health at risk and some women have died already because of this…. What’s happening with women right now is real, and it is playing out across America.”

MAGA extremists in the House of Representatives did the party as a whole no favors when they took control of the chamber in 2023 and made it virtually impossible for the Republicans to govern. Party members took weeks to agree on a House speaker and then threw him out, marking the first time in U.S. history that a party has thrown out its own speaker. With MAGA extremists unwilling to compromise on their demands, the Republicans were unable to pass almost any legislation at all, including appropriations bills and the long-overdue farm bill.

Their determination not to yield an inch continues. A Trump-endorsed Republican candidate challenging a Democrat incumbent in New York could not name a single Democrat she would be willing to work with if she is elected. “These people are not fit to govern,” House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) posted today.

MAGA Republicans are already signaling their intent to expand their power in the House should Republicans retain control over it: Ohio representative Jim Jordan appears to be considering making a bid for House leadership, while others have their eye on committee chairs. Joe Perticone of The Bulwark explored today how “Trump’s Already Stuffing House GOP ‘Normies’ in a Locker” as they feel obliged to defend everything he does, even when his former White House chief of staff says he is a fascist.

But the struggle between the Republican factions has not gone away in the past few years. Indeed, it appears to be escalating as evidence mounts that Trump will not be able to continue to lead the party. Earlier this month, 230 doctors publicly called on Trump to release his medical records, “Trump is falling concerningly short of any standard of fitness for office and displaying alarming characteristics of declining acuity," they wrote. Today, 233 mental health professionals organized by conservative lawyer George Conway’s Anti-Psycho PAC warned both that Trump “appears to be showing signs of cognitive decline that urgently cry out for a full neurological work-up,” and that his malignant narcissism makes him “grossly unfit for leadership.”

But if Trump’s grip is slipping, who will take over the party?

In a new biography of Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) by Michael Tackett of The Associated Press, obtained by CNN, McConnell condemned the MAGA movement and blamed Trump for making it hard for the Republican Party to compete. He called Trump “not very smart, irascible, nasty, just about every quality you would not want somebody to have.” He also went after Florida senator Rick Scott for his leadership of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the party’s campaign arm.

Trump loyalist Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) promptly called McConnell’s comments “indefensible.” Scott said he was “shocked that [McConnell] would attack a fellow Republican senator and the Republican nominee for president just two weeks out from an election.”

Technology elites, including Elon Musk, who is pouring money into Trump’s campaign, and Peter Thiel, who backs Trump’s running mate J.D. Vance, also appear to be making a play to control the Republican Party, challenging both the established Republicans and the MAGAs.

And then there are the Republican voters, some of whom are abandoning the MAGA Republicans who are now openly embracing fascism. Today, Republican state senator Rob Cowles of Green Bay, Wisconsin, who has served for almost 42 years, announced he would vote for Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris. David Holt, the Republican mayor of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, also indicated he would be casting his ballot for Harris.

In 1880, when the Democrats went off the extremist cliff, voters forced it to move to the center.

In 1879, after the bitterly contested 1876 election, voters gave Democrats control of Congress. So convinced were Democrats that the American people backed their determination to overthrow Reconstruction, they refused to fund the government unless Republican president Rutherford B. Hayes pulled the federal government out of the southern states. (They also tried to get a federal pension for Confederate president Jefferson Davis.)

“If this is not revolution,” Civil War veteran House minority leader James A. Garfield (R-OH) said, “which if persisted in will destroy the government, [then] I am wholly wrong in my conception of both the word and the thing.”

Observers had expected the 1880 election to be a romp for the Democrats, who reiterated their demands in their party platform, but voters backed Garfield’s defense of the country and of Black rights and elected him to the White House.

The unexpected loss prompted the Democrats to toss aside their former Confederate leaders and shift toward the northern cities. For president in 1884 they backed former New York governor Grover Cleveland, who had broadened Black appointments to office and desegregated the New York City police force, and who had worked closely with New York Assembly minority leader Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican, to reform the worst abuses of the industrial system. Cleveland won with the help of significant numbers of crossover Republican voters, dubbed “Mugwumps,” thereby securing the roots of the modern Democratic Party.

25/10/2024

October 23, 2024 (Wednesday)

The struggle over whether the U.S. government should work for everyone or for the very wealthy and corporations was on display today. Cable and internet providers and home security companies sued to stop the newly finalized Federal Trade Commission “click-to-cancel” rule that says it must be as easy to cancel a service as it is to sign up for it.

Also today, the Department of Transportation reached a record settlement of $50 million with American Airlines, whose damage to wheelchairs and dangerous physical assistance to disabled passengers has broken laws. Senator Tammy Duckworth (D-IL), who lost both legs in combat in the Iraq War, praised the fine and commented: “When an airline damages or breaks someone’s wheelchair, it’s like breaking their legs.”

"The era of tolerating poor treatment of airline passengers with disabilities is over," U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said in a statement. "With this penalty, we are setting a new standard of accountability for airlines that violate the civil rights of passengers with disabilities. By setting penalties at levels beyond the mere cost of doing business for airlines, we're aiming to change how the industry behaves and prevent these kinds of abuses from happening in the first place.”

A reader called to my attention that the recent Federal Election Commission filings showed one significant difference in the expenditures of the two presidential campaigns. The Harris campaign spent $34,550.02 on sign language interpreting services. The Trump campaign spent $0.00.

These details of governance are fragments of a larger picture of how we see our country. Are we all created equal and entitled to be treated equally before the law? Or are some people better than others?

CNN was supposed to host another presidential debate tonight, but while Vice President Kamala Harris accepted, Trump declined to attend. In place of a debate, CNN invited each candidate to hold a town hall. Harris accepted; Trump declined.

In her discussion with host Anderson Cooper, Harris focused on the reiteration yesterday by Trump’s longest-serving White House chief of staff, retired U.S. Marine Corps general John Kelly, that Trump had spoken admiringly of Adolf Hi**er and expressed a desire to have generals like Hi**er’s. In an interview with the New York Times, Kelly said Trump “met the definition of a fascist, would govern like a dictator if allowed, and had no understanding of the Constitution or the concept of rule of law.”

The ideology of fascism is associated with Italian journalist and politician Benito Mussolini, who articulated a new political ideology in the 1920s. Mussolini had been a socialist as a young man and had grown frustrated at how hard it was to organize people. No matter what socialists tried, they seemed unable to convince their neighbors that they must rise up and take over the country’s means of production. The efficiency of World War I inspired Mussolini to give up on socialism and develop a new political theory.

Mussolini rejected the equality that defined democracy and came to believe that some men were better than others. Those few must lead, taking a nation forward by directing the actions of the rest. They must organize the people as they had during wartime, ruthlessly suppressing all opposition and directing the economy so that business and politicians worked together. Logically, that select group of leaders would elevate a single man, who would become an all-powerful dictator. To weld their followers into an efficient machine, they demonized opponents into an “other” that their followers could hate.

This hierarchical system of government was called “fascism” after the bundle of rods tied around an axe that was the ancient Roman symbol of authority and power. Italy adopted it, and Mussolini’s ideas inspired others, notably Germany’s Adolf Hi**er. These leaders believed that their new system would reclaim a glorious past with the ideology of the future, welding pure men into a military and social machine that moved all as one, while pure women supported society as mothers. They set out to eliminate those who didn’t fit their model and to destroy the messy, inefficient democracy that stood in their way.

But while today we associate fascism with this European movement, its foundational principle—that some men are better than others and have the right and even the duty to rule over the majority—runs parallel to that same strand in United States history. Indeed, N**i lawyers and judges turned to America’s Jim Crow laws for inspiration, and Hi**er looked to America’s Indigenous reservations as a way to rid a country of “unwanted” people.

For retired Marine general John Kelly to have spoken out against Trump before the 2024 election was a huge deal. As Secretary Buttigieg put it: “It’s one thing for some leftist group to call you a fascist. Quite another when it’s a fellow Republican. And absolutely astonishing when it’s your own chief of staff.” But Kelly was not alone. Former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley told veteran journalist Bob Woodward that Trump is “fascist to the core.”

In tonight’s CNN town hall, Vice President Harris told Cooper that she agreed that Trump is a fascist. She noted that when a four-star Marine general comes out two weeks before an election to warn Americans that one of the candidates is a fascist, we should see this as “a 911 call to the American people.”

Trump is “increasingly unstable,” Harris said, “and unfit to serve…. [T]he people who know Donald Trump best, the people who worked with him in the White House, in the Situation Room, in the Oval Office, all Republicans by the way, who served in his administration, his former chief of staff, his national security advisor, former secretaries of defense, and his vice president have all called him unfit and dangerous. They have said explicitly he has contempt for the Constitution of the United States. They have said he should never again serve as President of the United States,” she said.

When Trump talks about “the enemy within,” Harris said, “ [h]e's talking about the American people. He's talking about journalists, judges, nonpartisan election officials…. And he's going to sit there unstable, unhinged, plotting his revenge, plotting his retribution. Creating an enemies list.” In contrast, she said, she would have a “to-do list” to work on the things that matter to the American people.

When Trump responded to Kelly’s claims, he appeared to confuse Kelly, who was retired when Trump chose him to serve as White House chief of staff, and Mark Milley, the active-duty chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Trump referred to four-star general Kelly, whose son died in Afghanistan, as “tough and dumb,” a “LOWLIFE, and a bad General,” but then went on to talk of him as active duty and to say he stopped seeking his advice in the White House.

Forced to comment on Kelly’s comment about Trump’s embracing fascism, Republican leaders are either ducking the question or acting as if it is not a big deal. On CNN this morning, New Hampshire governor Chris Sununu said the news that Trump has praised Hi**er will not affect Sununu’s support. “If we can get a Republican mindset out of Washington,” he said, “we need that culture change.”

At a rally tonight in Macon, Georgia, Trump agreed with the audience as it chanted: “Lock him up.” “You should lock them up,” Trump said. “Lock up the Bidens. Lock up Hillary. Lock ‘em up.”

Tonight, Shawn Reilly, the mayor of Waukesha, Wisconsin—a key Republican stronghold—announced he’s voting for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz.

24/10/2024

We have 12 days until the most important
Election of our lives and I encourage you
To vote democratic as this is a very close
Election and every vote counts! In a Town
Hall meeting last night Kamala Harris took
Many important questions about her policy
And specifically stated that no one earning
Under $400,000 would get a tax increase!
She promises to bring down prices on
Groceries and address price gouging as
Well as addressing the cost of housing .
She is passionate about women having the
Ability to make decisions about their bodies
And she promises to be a President for all
People -democrats and republicans! He on
The other hand is a convicted felon, a facist,
Promising dictatorship and does not support
The rule of law or our Constitution! He is
Mentally unhinged and not fit to be President!
He has promised to bring retribution and
He is compiling a list of people, the enemies
From within, people in the United States that
He wants to punish while she has a TO DO list of
Real issues & problems she wants to fix! When
We fight, we win so let’s unite to elect Kamala
Harris on 11/5. Amen!!

23/10/2024

October 22, 2024 (Tuesday)

Former president Trump’s closing economic argument for the American people is that putting a high tariff wall around the country will bring in so much foreign money that it will fund domestic programs and bring down the deficit, enabling massive tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations.

Vice President Kamala Harris’s closing economic argument is that the government should invest in the middle class by permitting Medicare to pay for in-home health aides for the elderly, cutting taxes for small businesses and families, and passing a federal law against price gouging for groceries during emergencies.

The two candidates are presenting quite stark differences in the futures they propose for the American people.

Trump has indicated his determination to take the nation’s economy back to that of the 1890s, back to a time when capital was concentrated among a few industrialists and financiers. This world fits the idea of modern Republicans that the government should work to protect the economic power of those on the “supply side” of the economy with the expectation that they will be able to invest more efficiently in the market than if they were regulated by business or their money taken by taxation.

Trump has said he thinks the word tariff is as beautiful as “love” or “faith” and has frequently praised President William McKinley, who held office from 1897 to 1901, for leading the U.S. to become, he says, the wealthiest it ever was. Trump attributes that wealth to tariffs, but unlike leaders in the 1890s, Trump refuses to acknowledge that tariffs do not bring in money from other countries. The cost of tariffs is borne by American consumers.

The industrialists and Republican lawmakers who pushed high tariffs in the 1890s were quite open that tariffs are a tax on ordinary Americans. In 1890, Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World complained about the McKinley Tariff that raised average tariffs to 49.5%. “Under the McKinley Act the people are paying taxes of nearly $20,000,000 and a much larger sum in bounties to Carnetic, Phipps & Co., and their fellows, for the alleged purpose of benefiting the wage-earners,” it wrote, even as the powerful companies slashed wages.

Today, on CNBC’s Squawk Box, senior economics reporter Steve Liesman noted that the conservative American Enterprise Institute has called out Trump’s proposed tariffs as a tax hike on American consumers of as much as $3.9 trillion.

Together with Trump’s promise to make deep cuts or even to end income taxes on the wealthy and corporations, his economic plan will dramatically shift the burden of supporting the country from the very wealthy to average Americans, precisely the way the U.S. economy worked until 1913, when the revenue act of that year lowered tariffs and replaced the lost income with an income tax.

That shifting of the economic burden of the country downward showed in another way yesterday, as well, when the Committee for a Responsible Budget noted that Trump’s economic plans would hasten the insolvency of Social Security trust funds by three years, from 2034 to 2031, and would lead to dramatic cuts.

Harris’s plan explicitly rejects the supply-side economics of the past and moves forward the policies of the Biden administration that work to make sure the “demand side” of the economy, or consumers, has access to money and opportunity. Those policies, dismissed by the ideologues of the Reagan revolution, had proven their success between 1933 and 1981 and have again delivered, achieving the nation’s extraordinary post-pandemic economic growth.

The International Monetary Fund underlined that growth again today when it outlined that the nation’s surge of investment under the Biden administration has attracted private investment, all of which is paying off in higher productivity, higher wages, and higher stock prices, enabling the U.S. to pull ahead of the world’s other advanced economies.

And it is continuing to deliver. Yesterday the Federal Trade Commission’s final rule banning fake online reviews and testimonials that mislead consumers and hurt real businesses went into effect. Today the Department of Health and Human Services reported that in the first half of 2024, nearly 1.5 million people with Medicare Part D saved almost $1 billion in out-of-pocket costs for prescription drugs thanks to the drug negotiations authorized by the Inflation Reduction Act.

Harris has expanded that plan to focus on small businesses and families. In addition to her plan to permit start-ups to deduct $50,000 in costs rather than the current $5,000 and to cut taxes for families by extending the Child Tax Credit, she has called for raising the corporate tax rate to 28%, lower than it was before the Trump tax cuts and lower than the rate President Joe Biden proposed in his 2024 budget. She has proposed $25,000 in down payment assistance for first-time homebuyers and promised to work with the private sector to build 3 million new housing units by the end of her first term.

Her recent proposal to enable Medicare to pay for home health aides has flown largely under the radar, although it would be a major benefit to many Americans. She proposes to pay for that benefit with additional savings from drug price negotiations. By keeping seniors in their homes longer, it would save families from having to meet the high cost of residential care.

Yesterday the White House proposed an expansion of the Affordable Care Act to make over-the-counter contraceptives free under health plans. Currently, only prescription contraceptives are covered. If the rule is finalized, it would expand contraceptive coverage to the 52 million women of reproductive age covered by private health plans.

As the campaigns enter the last two weeks before the election, the difference between their economic vision is stark.

So, it seems, is the difference between the candidates.

Today, Trump canceled another event, this one a roundtable with Robert Kennedy Jr. and former Democratic representative Tulsi Gabbard, both members of Trump’s transition team, that was supposed to highlight Kennedy’s vision for America’s health and their contributions to the campaign. He later held a rally in North Carolina.

Harris, meanwhile, sat down with Hallie Jackson of NBC News and participated in an interview with Telemundo’s Julio Vaqueiro. Tonight, rapper Eminem introduced former president Barack Obama at a rally for Harris and her running mate, Minnesota governor Tim Walz. Harris’s campaign announced today that on Friday she will campaign in Houston, Texas, where she will emphasize the dangers of abortion bans in the heart of Trump country.

The biggest news about the candidates today, though, appears to be an article by Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic exploring Trump’s disparagement of the U.S. military. Noting that it is an odd thing for a president to remain popular when he is openly dismissive of soldiers and their decorated officers, Goldberg explores Trump’s inability to understand any relationship that is not transactional. He noted Trump’s dismissal of soldiers as “losers,“ his astonishment at how little pay they make, and his dislike of wounded personnel who, he thinks, made him look bad.

Unable to understand the principles of honor or patriotism, Trump could not comprehend that Army generals were loyal to the U.S. Constitution rather than him. He yearned for generals, he said, like those of autocratic rulers. He said he wanted generals like Hi**er’s, a leader he sometimes praised. “Do you really believe you’re not loyal to me?” Trump asked then–chief of staff General John Kelly. Kelly was clear: “I’m certainly part of the administration, but my ultimate loyalty is to the rule of law.”

That was not an answer Trump liked. When the generals refused to shoot protesters or deploy U.S. troops against American citizens, Trump screamed: “You are all f*cking losers!”

Finally, General Kelly spoke up himself. In an interview with Michael S. Schmidt of the New York Times published tonight, Kelly noted that he had decided not to speak out about Trump unless Trump said something deeply troubling or something that involved Kelly and was wildly inaccurate. For Kelly, Trump’s recent talk about the “enemy within” was dangerous enough that he felt obliged to make a public comment.

The retired U.S. Marine Corps general confirmed that Trump is “certainly the only president that has all but rejected what America is all about, and what makes America America, in terms of our Constitution, in terms of our values, the way we look at everything, to include family and government—he’s certainly the only president that I know of, certainly in my lifetime, that was like that.”

Kelly added that “in his opinion, Mr. Trump met the definition of a fascist, would govern like a dictator if allowed, and had no understanding of the Constitution or the concept of rule of law.”

23/10/2024

October 22, 2024 (Tuesday)

Former president Trump’s closing economic argument for the American people is that putting a high tariff wall around the country will bring in so much foreign money that it will fund domestic programs and bring down the deficit, enabling massive tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations.

Vice President Kamala Harris’s closing economic argument is that the government should invest in the middle class by permitting Medicare to pay for in-home health aides for the elderly, cutting taxes for small businesses and families, and passing a federal law against price gouging for groceries during emergencies.

The two candidates are presenting quite stark differences in the futures they propose for the American people.

Trump has indicated his determination to take the nation’s economy back to that of the 1890s, back to a time when capital was concentrated among a few industrialists and financiers. This world fits the idea of modern Republicans that the government should work to protect the economic power of those on the “supply side” of the economy with the expectation that they will be able to invest more efficiently in the market than if they were regulated by business or their money taken by taxation.

Trump has said he thinks the word tariff is as beautiful as “love” or “faith” and has frequently praised President William McKinley, who held office from 1897 to 1901, for leading the U.S. to become, he says, the wealthiest it ever was. Trump attributes that wealth to tariffs, but unlike leaders in the 1890s, Trump refuses to acknowledge that tariffs do not bring in money from other countries. The cost of tariffs is borne by American consumers.

The industrialists and Republican lawmakers who pushed high tariffs in the 1890s were quite open that tariffs are a tax on ordinary Americans. In 1890, Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World complained about the McKinley Tariff that raised average tariffs to 49.5%. “Under the McKinley Act the people are paying taxes of nearly $20,000,000 and a much larger sum in bounties to Carnetic, Phipps & Co., and their fellows, for the alleged purpose of benefiting the wage-earners,” it wrote, even as the powerful companies slashed wages.

Today, on CNBC’s Squawk Box, senior economics reporter Steve Liesman noted that the conservative American Enterprise Institute has called out Trump’s proposed tariffs as a tax hike on American consumers of as much as $3.9 trillion.

Together with Trump’s promise to make deep cuts or even to end income taxes on the wealthy and corporations, his economic plan will dramatically shift the burden of supporting the country from the very wealthy to average Americans, precisely the way the U.S. economy worked until 1913, when the revenue act of that year lowered tariffs and replaced the lost income with an income tax.

That shifting of the economic burden of the country downward showed in another way yesterday, as well, when the Committee for a Responsible Budget noted that Trump’s economic plans would hasten the insolvency of Social Security trust funds by three years, from 2034 to 2031, and would lead to dramatic cuts.

Harris’s plan explicitly rejects the supply-side economics of the past and moves forward the policies of the Biden administration that work to make sure the “demand side” of the economy, or consumers, has access to money and opportunity. Those policies, discredited by the ideologues of the Reagan revolution, had proven their success between 1933 and 1981 and have again delivered, achieving the nation’s extraordinary post-pandemic economic growth.

The International Monetary Fund underlined that growth again today when it outlined that the nation’s surge of investment under the Biden administration has attracted private investment, all of which is paying off in higher productivity, higher wages, and higher stock prices, enabling the U.S. to pull ahead of the world’s other advanced economies.

And it is continuing to deliver. Yesterday the Federal Trade Commission’s final rule banning fake online reviews and testimonials that mislead consumers and hurt real businesses went into effect. Today the Department of Health and Human Services reported that in the first half of 2024, nearly 1.5 million people with Medicare Part D saved almost $1 billion in out-of-pocket costs for prescription drugs thanks to the drug negotiations authorized by the Inflation Reduction Act.

Harris has expanded that plan to focus on small businesses and families. In addition to her plan to permit start-ups to deduct $50,000 in costs rather than the current $5,000 and to cut taxes for families by extending the Child Tax Credit, she has called for raising the corporate tax rate to 28%, lower than it was before the Trump tax cuts and lower than the rate President Joe Biden proposed in his 2024 budget. She has proposed $25,000 in down payment assistance for first-time homebuyers and promised to work with the private sector to build 3 million new housing units by the end of her first term.

Her recent proposal to enable Medicare to pay for home health aides has flown largely under the radar, although it would be a major benefit to many Americans. She proposes to pay for that benefit with additional savings from drug price negotiations. By keeping seniors in their homes longer, it would save families from having to meet the high cost of residential care.

Yesterday the White House proposed an expansion of the Affordable Care Act to make over-the-counter contraceptives free under health plans. Currently, only prescription contraceptives are covered. If the rule is finalized, it would expand contraceptive coverage to the 52 million women of reproductive age covered by private health plans.

As the campaigns enter the last two weeks before the election, the difference between their economic vision is stark.

So, it seems, is the difference between the candidates.

Today, Trump canceled another event, this one a roundtable with Robert Kennedy Jr. and former Democratic representative Tulsi Gabbard, both members of Trump’s transition team, that was supposed to highlight Kennedy’s vision for America’s health and their contributions to the campaign. He later held a rally in North Carolina.

Harris, meanwhile, sat down with Hallie Jackson of NBC News and participated in an interview with Telemundo’s Julio Vaqueiro. Tonight, rapper Eminem introduced former president Barack Obama at a rally for Harris and her running mate, Minnesota governor Tim Walz. Harris’s campaign announced today that on Friday she will campaign in Houston, Texas, where she will emphasize the dangers of abortion bans in the heart of Trump country.

The biggest news about the candidates today, though, appears to be an article by Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic exploring Trump’s disparagement of the U.S. military. Noting that it is an odd thing for a president to remain popular when he is openly dismissive of soldiers and their decorated officers, Goldberg explores Trump’s inability to understand any relationship that is not transactional. He noted Trump’s dismissal of soldiers as “losers,“ his astonishment at how little pay they make, and his dislike of wounded personnel who, he thinks, made him look bad.

Unable to understand the principles of honor or patriotism, Trump could not comprehend that Army generals were loyal to the U.S. Constitution rather than him. He yearned for generals, he said, like those of autocratic rulers. He said he wanted generals like Hi**er’s, a leader he sometimes praised. “Do you really believe you’re not loyal to me?” Trump asked then–chief of staff General John Kelly. Kelly was clear: “I’m certainly part of the administration, but my ultimate loyalty is to the rule of law.”

That was not an answer Trump liked. When the generals refused to shoot protesters or deploy U.S. troops against American citizens, Trump screamed: “You are all f*cking losers!”

Finally, General Kelly spoke up himself. In an interview with Michael S. Schmidt of the New York Times published tonight, Kelly noted that he had decided not to speak out about Trump unless Trump said something deeply troubling or something that involved Kelly and was wildly inaccurate. For Kelly, Trump’s recent talk about the “enemy within” was dangerous enough that he felt obliged to make a public comment.

The retired U.S. Marine Corps general confirmed that Trump is “certainly the only president that has all but rejected what America is all about, and what makes America America, in terms of our Constitution, in terms of our values, the way we look at everything, to include family and government—he’s certainly the only president that I know of, certainly in my lifetime, that was like that.”

Kelly added that “in his opinion, Mr. Trump met the definition of a fascist, would govern like a dictator if allowed, and had no understanding of the Constitution or the concept of rule of law.”

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25/10/2024

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