What does the Dept of Education do? "It administers federal grant programs, including the $18.4 billion Title I program that provides supplemental funding to high-poverty K-12 schools, as well as the $15.5 billion program that helps cover the cost of education for students with disabilities. The department oversees the $1.6 trillion federal student loan program and sets rules for what colleges must do to participate."
Support publications and media outlets doing good work on American news. Here's a list some friends are sharing. What or who else should be included? Mastodon accounts preferred!
"We know it can feel impossible to muster up optimism in a moment like this, but there are small things we can all do. It's important to protect yourself, your art, your peace, and your community. Ahead, we rounded up some words of encouragement and reminders that hope is not lost."
"On Friday, Kennedy tweeted that on its first day in office, a Trump administration would push to ban fluoride in water, claiming it is 'industrial waste' that leads to problems like cancer and other diseases...Major public health groups support water fluoridation, and health groups also emphasize that the practice is safe."
"A group of 111 OB-GYNs in Texas released a letter to elected state leaders Sunday urging them to change abortion laws they say have prevented them from providing lifesaving care to pregnant women.
The doctors pointed to recent reporting by ProPublica on two Texas pregnant women who died after medical staff delayed emergency care."
"In the decade since 1989’s release, there have been many incredible things indeed. And the Swift we have come to know is the one she introduced on that album. The global pop icon too big for genre. The city slicker—bye, Nashville! The feline enthusiast. The über-capitalist. The Antonoffian. The cultural obsession. It’s all there on 1989." https://www.theringer.com/music/2024/10/28/24281909/10-year-anniversary-taylor-swift-1989-album
"Greedy influencers and comics and public personalities and certainly tech companies want to align themselves with an unapologetic right wing movement that has no concerns for regulation or law or justice or decency or democracy to increase their earnings and put them in the seat of power.
Fascism is good for business if you toe the line."
Why the Houston Chronicle makes endorsements: "Newspapers don’t endorse candidates. Editorial boards do. The editorial board is separate from the newsroom...We do it as a service to our readers and to our democracy, which cannot flourish without an informed citizenry."
The editorial board of the Houston Chronicle isn't afraid to endorse Kamala Harris for president.
"Jay Singleton, owner of an ophthalmology practice in New Bern, has spent the past four years challenging a state law that caps the kinds of medical services offered in a region.
Now, the Singleton Vision Center proprietor is at the center of a case that has the potential to upend how the health care and hospital industries have done business in North Carolina for decades."
"Attorney General Ken Paxton of Texas sued a Dallas pediatrician on Thursday, accusing her of providing gender transition treatment to minors in violation of a 2023 state law. Mr. Paxton described the suit as the state’s first enforcement action under the new law."
"These backpack bans have made the already difficult experience of navigating one’s period as a teen even more difficult. Menstruating students have nowhere to discreetly keep their hygiene products and instead are left scrambling for covert ways to carry pads and tampons at a time when their bodily changes already weigh on them like shameful secrets."
"Asian Health Services, where Kim works, is a part of a fledgling movement trying to address a dire shortage of therapists by training community health workers and other nonlicensed professionals who have trusted relationships with their communities to add mental health counseling to their roles. This approach, already implemented abroad and proven to help address some common mental health conditions, is called lay counseling."
"Hurricane Milton, a Category 5 storm whose winds reached 180 mph late Monday but weakened to a Category 4 early Tuesday, is whirling toward a possible landfall in Tampa Bay just as the main federal disaster programs are facing financial instability amid a series of recent calamities, including Hurricane Helene’s flooding of communities throughout the Southeast."
"Texas has surpassed 18 million registered voters for the first time as an increasingly urban and diverse population reshapes the state’s political landscape and pushes the GOP to retool its decades-old playbook to keep a grip on the state.
The state’s voter registration rolls are expanding at a quicker pace than other fast-growing southern states like Florida, North Carolina and Georgia."
"The top Texas zip codes with the most individual contributions to Republican and Democratic presidential campaigns were both in Houston, according to an ABC News and ABC Owned Television Stations analysis of donations...When looking at individual donors with zip codes in Texas, we found that about $39.6 million was donated to the campaigns of President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and former President Donald Trump."
"Vance appeared to understand the political unpopularity of the Republican position on abortion. 'My party, we’ve got to do so much better of a job at earning the American people’s trust back on this issue where they frankly just don’t trust us,' he said, while maintaining that he agrees with his running mate Donald Trump that abortion rights should be decided at a state level."
"Could the ideas in Project 2025 actually happen? Not all of them, and not overnight. But a movement amasses power that then can lead to massive social change piece by piece. Some of the plans, like dismantling the Department of Education, have been on conservative wishlists since the department began. That doesn’t mean they couldn’t happen – it just means there is an eventual tipping point where they could."
“Medicine is a social science and politics is nothing else but medicine on a large scale. Medicine as a social science, as the science of human beings, has the obligation to point out problems and to attempt their theoretical solution..." - Virchow
"From 2019 to 2022, the rate of maternal mortality cases in Texas rose by 56%, compared with just 11% nationwide during the same time period, according to an analysis by the Gender Equity Policy Institute...'All the research points to Texas’ abortion ban as the primary driver of this alarming increase. Texas, I fear, is a harbinger of what’s to come in other states.' "
"For the past few years, I’ve been working on a documentary film and podcast called 'Silence in Sikeston.' The project is about two killings that happened decades apart in this Missouri city: a lynching in 1942 of a young Black man named Cleo Wright and a 2020 police shooting of another young Black man, Denzel Taylor. My reporting explored the trauma that festered in the silence around their killings."
She/her | FM physician interested in helping patients get all the health care they need and none they don't | Boosts ≠ endorsements - I share what I'm reading, but it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with it | Opinions are mine, not of any organization I'm affiliated withPosts autodelete after 2 weeksHeader: Sunlight pouring through clouds above a landscape of mountains and volcanic craterProfile: Person with black shoulder-length hair and glasses, purple top in front of colorful backdrop