The Birds on Trump’s Brain

Richard Eskow

Donald Trump’s brain. It’s an unusual instrument, and a frightening one, even in the best of circumstances. Now someone has “put a bird on it”– a lot of them, in fact. Here’s what Trump said about wind power on Monday:

“The wind kills all your birds. All your birds, killed. You know, the environmentalists never talk about that.”

Your birds. All of them. Killed. Got that?

Medicaid Works: 10 Key Facts

Edwin Park

Medicaid provides health coverage to low-income families and individuals, including children, parents, pregnant women, seniors, and people with disabilities. Here are ten key facts about how Medicaid helps millions of Americans live healthier, more secure lives:

Medicaid provided quality health coverage for 97 million low-income Americans over the course of 2015. In any given month, Medicaid served 33 million children, 27 million adults (mostly in low-income working families), 6 million seniors, and 10 million persons with disabilities, according to Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates.

How One GMO Nearly Took Down the Planet

New law deals major blow to GMO labeling.

By Thom Hartmann

On July 29, President Obama signed bill S.764 into law, dealing a major blow to the movement to require GMO labeling. The new law, which food safety groups call the "Deny Americans the Right to Know" (DARK) Act, has at least three key parts that undermine Vermont's popular GMO labeling bill and make it nearly impossible for Americans to know what's in their food.

The law claims to set a federal labeling standard by requiring food producers to include either a QR barcode that can be scanned with a phone, or a 1-800 number that consumers can call to find out whether a product contains genetically modified ingredients.

Paul Krugman: No Right Turn

All the experts tell us not to pay too much attention to polls for another week or two. Still, it does look as if Hillary Clinton got a big bounce from her convention, swamping her opponent’s bounce a week earlier. Better still, from the Democrats’ point of view, the swing in the polls appears to be doing what some of us thought it might: sending Donald Trump into a derp spiral, in which his ugly nonsense gets even uglier and more nonsensical as his electoral prospects sink.

As a result, we’re finally seeing some prominent Republicans not just refusing to endorse Mr. Trump, but actually declaring their support for Mrs. Clinton. So how should she respond?

For the Wealthy, a Taxing New Worry

Sam Pizzigati

Tax law professors don’t normally have much of a public profile. Victor Fleischer does. In fact, one business journalist has just tagged this ace analyst from the University of San Diego “the closest thing the tax world has to a rock star.”

Most rock stars have big break-out hits. Fleischer’s big break-out came about a decade ago when his scholarship exposed an incredibly lucrative tax giveaway to the rich that hardly anyone knew existed. The “carried interest” loophole, Fleischer detailed, was helping private equity and hedge fund billionaires chop their tax bills by nearly half.

More Coca-Cola Ties Seen Inside U.S. Centers For Disease Control

by Carey Gillam

In June, Dr. Barbara Bowman, a high-ranking official within the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, unexpectedly departed the agency, two days after information came to light indicating that she had been communicating regularly with – and offering guidance to – a leading Coca-Cola advocate seeking to influence world health authorities on sugar and beverage policy matters.

Now, more emails suggest that another veteran CDC official has similarly close ties to the global soft drink giant. Michael Pratt, Senior Advisor for Global Health in the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion at the CDC, has a history of promoting and helping lead research funded by Coca-Cola. Pratt also works closely with the nonprofit corporate interest group set up by Coca-Cola called the International Life Sciences Institute (ILSI), emails obtained through Freedom of Information requests show.