#politics

HOPE. TURN THE VOLUME UP.

New York will remain a city of immigrants, a city built by immigrants, powered by immigrants. And as of tonight, led by an immigrant.

Haha. I can’t wait for “Trump says Earth is flat. Wikipedia updates Earth article to agree.”

“The question is, why should the opinions of the largely impartial UN and human rights scholars be weighed equally to the obviously partisan opinions of commentators and governments?

“Wikipedia has never, ever treated all voices as equal, nor does policy demand we do. If we did, the Earth article would state that Earth’s shape is under debate. But we don’t do that because scholarly consensus is that Earth is roughly spherical. Instead, flat eartherism is presented as what it is: a fringe movement without scientific backing,” the editor wrote.

Experts including the International Association of Genocide Scholars, Amnesty International, B’Tselem, and a UN Human Rights Council commission led by former president of the Rwanda genocide international tribunal Navi Pillay, have all concluded that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.

Healthcare spending is driven by utilization (the number of services used) and price (the amount charged per service). An increase in either of those factors can result in higher healthcare costs. Despite spending nearly twice as much on healthcare per capita, utilization rates for many services in the United States is lower than other wealthy OECD countries. Prices, therefore, appear to be the main driver of the cost difference between the United States and other wealthy countries.

The U.S. spends twice as much as comparable countries do on health, driven mostly by higher payments to hospitals and physicians.

"Private insurance companies in this country spend between 12 and 18 percent on administration costs," Sanders said on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sept. 17. "The cost of administering the Medicare program, a very popular program that works well for our seniors, is 2 percent. We can save approximately $500 billion a year just in administration costs."

Is the gap between private and public health insurance providers’ administrative costs really that high? Most experts agreed the numbers looked about right. But because of key differences between Medicare and private insurance, the trade-off isn’t as simple as Sanders suggests.

If "the numbers looked about right", then why is it "half truth"?

Experts told us we could safely assume private insurance costs, on the other hand, are much higher, though actual spending estimates vary.

Aah... So it's a "half truth" because Bernie understated how much cheaper medicare is than private insurance companies.

Historically, administrative expenses were much higher in the commercial market because insurers did a lot of underwriting, or using the health status of individuals or groups to determine their premiums. The Affordable Care Act was designed to curb that spending.

On top of that, experts explained that unlike Medicare, private insurers take on more responsibility than simply paying claims or occasionally going after fraud. Before a claim is even filed, they check its appropriateness, assess whether it is medically necessary, and whether it can be done in a cheaper way (outpatient versus inpatient care, for example).

"Medicare has been trying in fits and starts to look a little more closely at how it pays claims but generally speaking, it is passive in processing claims," Sabrina Corlette, a research professor at the Center on Health Insurance Reforms at Georgetown University.

And private companies, deny more claims, which makes it more expensive.

Health expenditures per person in the U.S. were $13,432 in 2023, which was over $3,700 more than any other high-income nation.

But there's something else that we've got to do, Jon. We have to have a vision for the future of this country. And-- and I think that many of my colleagues in the Democratic Party have not had that vision.

SPEAK!

The conversations pulsing across these platforms are shaped not by civic values but by whatever proves to keep people scrolling: Nuanced opinions are compressed into viral slogans; attention collects around the loudest and most controversial voices; algorithms love conflict, inspiration, outrage and anger. Everything is always turned up to 11.

One worry I have about Democrats right now is that they do not want to confront how much of the country disagrees with them. Polls show that the percentage of voters saying the Democratic Party is too liberal increased sharply between 2012 and 2024. The percentage of voters saying the Republican Party is too conservative fell during that same period. Even the violence and corruption of Trump’s second administration have not fully closed the gap: A September poll from The Washington Post and Ipsos found that 54 percent of voters thought the Democratic Party was too liberal and 49 percent thought the Republican Party was too conservative.

But what happened over the past 15 years is that the Democratic Party has made room on its left and closed down on its right. For all the talk of what the Democratic Party should learn from Sanders and Mamdani, there should be at least as much talk of what they should learn from Manchin or Golden or Marie Gluesenkamp Perez or Sarah McBride. The party should be seeking more, not less, internal disagreement.

His primary win was a spectacular repudiation of the pollsters, who with glossy charts and graphs try to induce the public to consent to middle-of-the-road, incrementalist politicians who give up before the negotiations have even started. Meanwhile? The median age of first-time homebuyers has soared from 33 years old during the pandemic to 38 in 2024. If that’s pragmatism, is it any surprise that no one’s interested? “It’s not about money, it’s about will,” Mamdani told Stewart.

• 90K volunteers on his campaign!

Politics is not something that you have, it's something that you do.

It's an opportunity to actually show that this whole campaign where we've talked about freezing the rent, making buses faster, free delivering universal childcare, these are not just slogans. These are commitments. And when we deliver them here in New York City, it will be also the delivery of a politics that can actually aspire for more than what you're living through. And for so many people across the city, politics has just become synonymous with an argument of celebrate the little you have or lose that.

It's not about money, it's about will.

We bridge the gap between mathematics and the law to achieve fair representation through redistricting reform

“Trump’s Take” is a real-time financial tracker documenting the cash and gifts that President Donald Trump and his family have received by selling the presidency. For our purposes, the family includes President Trump, Melania Trump, Donald Trump Jr., and Eric Trump, hereafter referred to collectively as the “Trump family,” but excludes Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner.

Trump has made most of the cash by launching his own crypto ventures—reversing his outspoken, skeptical stance on crypto—while aggressively deregulating the industry. Trump takes a cut in cash from the trades and sales of the family’s coins and tokens along with stablecoin interest. The “take” is the cash he has received calculated in real time, based on actual trading activity and stablecoin interest. It can only go up. We have also added the value of the gifts, legal settlements, and the income from Melania Trump’s documentary paid directly to Trump or to his presidential library.

Due to the complex nature of these earnings, which are channeled through multiple financial vehicles, our calculations are constantly being updated and refined. A comprehensive methodology detailing the determination of the Trump family’s crypto income is available here.

We have excluded income from assets Trump had before his November 2024 election victory—including real estate, hotels, licensing deals, and more—even though their value has inarguably increased as a result of his election. We made one notable exception by including income from his first crypto venture, World Liberty Financial Inc. (WLFI). WLFI launched in September 2024, and nearly all of the income from this venture was made after his election in November of the same year.

It’s not that the Trumps are the first to leverage the presidency for profit. Jimmy Carter’s brother, Billy, promoted Billy Beer—and took money from the Libyans. Richard Nixon had his brother Donald’s phone tapped amid concerns about business dealings. Hunter Biden received more than $1 million for artwork of questionable quality. But no first family has used the office to make as much money as Donald Trump’s.

Crypto is the big driver, but additional funds have come from advising right-wing companies in America and partnering with cash-rich firms overseas, especially in the Middle East. Family members who never had significant fortunes of their own—Eric, Don Jr., Barron and Melania—have accumulated tens, then hundreds of millions of dollars. All told, the family (including the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner) is now worth an estimated $10 billion, having nearly doubled its net worth since last year’s election.

Your stopover in the United Arab Emirates, where you will reportedly seal a deal relaxing export controls on sensitive U.S. technology, is poised to showcase this new level of grifting – and it will come directly at the expense of U.S. national security.

You and your family are financially tied to World Liberty Financial (WLF), a crypto venture that recently launched the stablecoin USD1.3 In March, prior to the official launch of USD1, your crypto assets – including WLF holdings and your $TRUMP meme coin –accounted for nearly 40 percent of your total assets.4 Your holdings in WLF have clearly expanded your wealth since you took office and will only further expand it as USD1 issuance grows.

On May 1, Eric Trump and the son of your Special Envoy Steve Witkoff announced that Emirati state-owned investment firm MGX will use USD1 to complete a $2 billion dollar transaction with cryptoexchange Binance. 5 In selecting USD1, the Emirati-backed fund will likely pay hundreds of millions of dollars in transaction fees, and WLF will be able to reap returns on any investments it makes with the $2 billion deposit. In essence, WLF – and you and your family by extension – are receiving a cut of this deal.

One position Mamdani has stood firm on is his criticism of Israel and lifelong support for Palestinian rights. It represents a break from the Democratic party establishment and could be a deciding factor for many voters in a city with the largest Jewish population outside of Israel.

the biggest takeaway was Trump’s willingness to add sanctions to those imposed under the Biden administration.

“This is the first set of sanctions from President Trump after he returned to the White House,” said Weafer. “And the fear now is that now that he’s broken, kind of like the seal, as it were, that if he is dissatisfied with any progress with Russia going forward, then he may come with more and more damaging sanctions.”

“So many of these measures have been implemented too slowly and ... a little bit at a time so that Russia has had time to adapt and to prepare and to prevent and to react,” Perrotta Berlin said.

In 1963, the U.S., the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union signed the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty to stop nuclear tests in the atmosphere, outer space and underwater.

The decision was made over environmental concerns and the fallout of the Cuban Missile Crisis, per the CSIS. The Threshold Test Ban Treaty in 1974 limited the yield of underground testing to below 150 kilotons. In 1992, Congress passed a resolution that prohibited the U.S. from conducting underground nuclear tests unless a foreign state did so, leading to the current moratorium. Of note: The 1997 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty sought to ban all nuclear testing worldwide, and it proved largely successful even though it was not universally ratified.

The SNAP shutdown halts roughly $8 billion a month in federal food assistance — money that usually flows straight into grocery stores and helps feed 42 million Americans. Without it, both low-income households and major retailers like Walmart, Aldi and Kroger feel the pinch. Driving the news: Companies and nonprofits are rolling out new programs to keep food flowing — from free grocery credits to multimillion-dollar donations.