Nurses Are Angry - The last People You Want to Be Angry are Nurses!!

With six hospital visits over the last two years, I cannot think of superlatives that genuinely capture the professionalism, empathy, and precision of nurses. 

They are your first responders, repeatedly...

The Guardian

 "...I think the biggest reason why nurses are so mad about the Department of Education removing us from the professional occupation list is because it feels like one more slap in the face after years of giving literally everything we have.

We spent years in school, taking some of the most impossible classes with clinical hours, exams, and boards that people outside of healthcare don’t even realize exist.

We’re responsible for medications, IV drips, critical decisions, emergencies, and real human lives….all while juggling impossible patient loads, short staffing, and emotional stress most people will never see.

We work 12-hour shifts that turn into 14. We skip meals. We miss holidays with our families. We deal with trauma, loss, and heartbreak… and then go home and try to act like everything is normal.

So when the Department of Education takes the word “professional” away from nursing it makes us mad because nurses have spent YEARS fighting to be seen, respected, and taken seriously in a system that runs on our backs. We advocate so hard not just for our patients but for ourselves too.

This isn’t about a label.

It’s about the message it sends.

If we’re removing “professional” from the people who literally keep the healthcare system functioning, what does that say about the priorities in this country?

Nurses aren’t angry for no reason…. they’re tired of being treated like they don’t matter. Because sooner than later enough will be enough and there wont be any of us left..."

USAID Shutdown Has Led to Hundreds of Thousands of Deaths - Is this really what Americans Want????

 

From Paul Krugman - Substack 25 November

"...But although DOGE is gone, its malign legacy endures. Arguably DOGE’s biggest “achievement” was shutting down the U.S. Agency for International Development. And the dismantling of USAID has left a legacy of death. According to a Harvard study, closing the agency “has already caused the deaths of six hundred thousand people, two-thirds of them children...”

________________________________________________________________

By 

Karen Feldscher

November 20, 2025

"The Trump administration’s decision to shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths from infectious diseases and malnutrition, according to Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s Atul Gawande.

Gawande—a surgeon, author, and distinguished professor in residence at Ariadne Labs, which he co-founded—served in the Biden administration as the assistant administrator for global health at USAID. He wrote a Nov. 5 article in the New Yorker about the devastating impact of the loss of USAID funds around the world. He was also featured in an accompanying short documentary called “Rovina’s Choice,” which he co-executive produced, that told the story of how one mother living in a Kenyan refugee camp tried to save her severely malnourished daughter after U.S. support dried up.

In the article, Gawande cited an analysis in The Lancet that estimated that USAID assistance—aimed at combatting diseases such as HIV, tuberculosis, malaria, and polio, reducing maternal and child deaths, and fighting malnutrition—had saved 92 million lives over two decades.

The dismantling of USAID, according to models from Boston University epidemiologist Brooke Nichols, “has already caused the deaths of six hundred thousand people, two-thirds of them children,” Gawande wrote. He noted that the toll will continue to grow and may go unseen because it can take months or years for people to die from lack of treatments or vaccine-preventable illnesses—and because deaths are scattered.

“We are now witnessing what the historian Richard Rhodes termed ‘public man-made death,’” Gawande wrote.

The documentary told the story of how Rovina Naboi, a single mother of nine children, took her daughter Jane, whose health has deteriorated due to malnutrition, to a clinic and stayed with her there for 10 days. But she felt compelled to leave with Jane—still seriously ill—because she learned that her other children, left alone at home, had not eaten for days. Arriving home, Naboi managed to find food for her other children. But Jane died the next day.

The clinic’s chief medical officer, Dr. Sila Monthe, commented on Naboi’s predicament—having to choose between leaving the hospital with Jane, or staying while her other children starved. “That is a decision that no mother should ever have to make,” she said.

Read the New Yorker article: The Shutdown of U.S.A.I.D. Has Already Killed Hundreds of Thousands

Watch a Democracy Now! interview featuring Gawande: Dr. Atul Gawande: Hundreds of Thousands Have Already Died Since Trump Closed USAID

A Battle with My Blood - Tatianna Schlossberg Shares Her Reaction to a Blood Cancer Diagnosis

As Tatiana Schlossberg says so elegantly, when I received the news that I had leukemia, I also couldn’t believe it.

Though my diagnosis is different from hers, I understand what she is going through.

An excellent source for anyone with Blood Cancer is Blood Cancer United, formerly known as the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, a nonprofit organization focused on funding research, providing patient support, and advocating for access to care for all types of blood cancers. 

Many people, when diagnosed, don’t know who to turn to after doctors and family. Blood Cancer United has a program called “First Connection, which is the Patti Robinson Kaufmann First Connection Program.

If you or a family member has been diagnosed with a blood cancer, you may find it helpful to speak with someone who has gone through a similar experience and learned how to manage the same disease you’re trying to cope with each day. The Patti Robinson Kaufmann First Connection Program is a free service of Blood Cancer United that introduces patients and their loved ones to a trained peer volunteer who has gone through a similar experience.

When I was diagnosed with leukemia, my first thought was that this couldn’t be happening to me, to my family.

By Tatiana Schlossberg

When you are dying, at least in my limited experience, you start remembering everything. Images come in flashes—people and places and stray conversations—and refuse to stop. I see my best friend from elementary school as we make a mud pie in her back yard, top it with candles and a tiny American flag, and watch, in panic, as the flag catches fire. I see my college boyfriend, wearing boat shoes a few days after a record-breaking snowstorm, slipping and falling into a slush puddle. I want to break up with him, so I laugh until I can’t breathe.

Maybe my brain is replaying my life now because I have a terminal diagnosis, and all these memories will be lost. Maybe it’s because I don’t have much time to make new ones, and some part of me is sifting through the sands.

On May 25, 2024, my daughter was born at seven-oh-five in the morning, ten minutes after I arrived at Columbia-Presbyterian hospital, in New York. My husband, George, and I held her and stared at her and admired her newness. A few hours later, my doctor noticed that my blood count looked strange. A normal white-blood-cell count is around four to eleven thousand cells per microlitre. Mine was a hundred and thirty-one thousand cells per microlitre. It could just be something related to pregnancy and delivery, the doctor said, or it could be leukemia. “It’s not leukemia,” I told George. “What are they talking about?”

George, who was then a urology resident at the hospital, began calling friends who were primary-care doctors and ob-gyns. Everyone thought it was something to do with the pregnancy or the delivery. After a few hours, my doctors thought it was leukemia. My parents, Caroline Kennedy and Edwin Schlossberg, had brought my two-year-old son to the hospital to meet his sister, but suddenly I was being moved to another floor. My daughter was carried off to the nursery. My son didn’t want to leave; he wanted to drive my hospital bed like a bus. I said goodbye to him and my parents and was wheeled away.

The diagnosis was acute myeloid leukemia, with a rare mutation called Inversion 3. It was mostly seen in older patients. Every doctor I saw asked me if I had spent a lot of time at Ground Zero, given how common blood cancers are among first responders. I was in New York on 9/11, in the sixth grade, but I didn’t visit the site until years later. I am not elderly—I had just turned thirty-four.

I could not be cured by a standard course of treatment. I would need a few months, at least, of chemotherapy, which would aim to reduce the number of blast cells in my bone marrow. (Blast cells are immature blood cells; a high count can be a sign of leukemia.) Then I would need a bone-marrow transplant, which could cure me. After the transplant, I would probably need more chemotherapy, on a regular basis, to try to prevent the cancer from returning.

I did not—could not—believe that they were talking about me. I had swum a mile in the pool the day before, nine months pregnant. I wasn’t sick. I didn’t feel sick. I was actually one of the healthiest people I knew. I regularly ran five to ten miles in Central Park. I once swam three miles across the Hudson River—eerily, to raise money for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. I work as an environmental journalist, and for one article I skied the Birkebeiner, a fifty-kilometre cross-county race in Wisconsin, which took me seven and a half hours. I loved to have people over for dinner and to make cakes for my friends’ birthdays. I went to museums and plays and got to jump in a cranberry bog for my job. I had a son whom I loved more than anything and a newborn I needed to take care of. This could not possibly be my life.

I ended up spending five weeks at Columbia-Presbyterian, and the strangeness and sadness of what I was being told about myself made me hunt for the humor in it. I didn’t know what else to do. I decided that everyone in the hospital had Munchausen syndrome by proxy, and I was their target. It was a joke that I found funnier than everyone else did. Later, when I was bald and had a scrape on my face from a fall, my joke was that I was a busted-up Voldemort.

There were indignities and humiliations. I had a postpartum hemorrhage and almost bled to death, before being saved by my obstetrician. (She had already saved my life once, by noticing my blood count and giving me the chance to be cured. This time felt like overkill.) Little things made it easier, or somehow made it feel like everything was going to be fine. My son came to visit almost every day. When friends heard that I liked Spindrift seltzer, they sent cases of it; they also sent pajamas and watercolor kits and good gossip. People made paintings and drawings to decorate my walls. They dropped off food at my parents’ apartment, where George and the kids had moved. The nurses brought me warm blankets and let me sit on the floor of the skyway with my son, even though I wasn’t supposed to leave my room. They ate up the gossip that I gathered; they looked the other way when they saw that I had a contraband teakettle and toaster. They told me about their kids and their dating lives and their first trips to Europe. I have never encountered a group of people who are more competent, more full of grace and empathy, more willing to serve others than nurses. Nurses should take over.

Eventually, my blast-cell count went down and I was allowed to do a round of treatment at home, with my family. My care was transferred to Memorial Sloan Kettering, one of the largest centers for bone-marrow transplants in the country. Whenever I needed to be back in the hospital, my oncologist visited me almost daily, talking about my disease, of course, but also about foxhunting, who was annoying me that week, his new cat. He’s Orthodox Jewish and observes the Sabbath, but he would still answer texts that I rudely sent on Saturdays. He has scoured every inch of the earth for more treatments for me; he knows I don’t want to die and he is trying to stop it. My transplant doctor, always in a bow tie, always shouting a big hello, is a mad scientist in disguise as one of the country’s foremost experts on bone-marrow transplants, who safely got me through a lung infection and didn’t bat an eye when I pulled out a rosary and a bottle of holy water, blessed by Pope Francis and sent from Rome. He looked at me and said, “Vaya con Dios. Go with God.”

After the at-home chemo, I was admitted to M.S.K. for an even stronger dose of poison. Then I was ready for a transplant. My sister had turned out to be a match and would donate her stem cells. (My brother was a half-match, but he still asked every doctor if maybe a half-match was better, just in case.) My sister held her arms straight for hours as the doctors drained blood from one, scooped out and froze her stem cells, and pumped the blood back in the other.

The cells smelled like canned tomato soup. When the transfusion began, I sneezed twelve times and threw up. Then I waited—for my blood counts to recover, for my sister’s cells to heal and change my body. We wondered if I would get her banana allergy or her personality. My hair started to fall out and I wore scarves to cover my head, remembering, vainly, each time I tied one on, how great my hair used to be; when my son came to visit, he wore them, too. After a few days, I couldn’t speak or swallow because of sores in my mouth; food turned to dust on my tongue.

George did everything for me that he possibly could. He talked to all the doctors and insurance people that I didn’t want to talk to; he slept on the floor of the hospital; he didn’t get mad when I was raging on steroids and yelled at him that I did not like Schweppes ginger ale, only Canada Dry. He would go home to put our kids to bed and come back to bring me dinner. I know that not everyone can be married to a doctor, but, if you can, it’s a very good idea. He is perfect, and I feel so cheated and so sad that I don’t get to keep living the wonderful life I had with this kind, funny, handsome genius I managed to find.

My parents and my brother and sister, too, have been raising my children and sitting in my various hospital rooms almost every day for the last year and a half. They have held my hand unflinchingly while I have suffered, trying not to show their pain and sadness in order to protect me from it. This has been a great gift, even though I feel their pain every day. For my whole life, I have tried to be good, to be a good student and a good sister and a good daughter, and to protect my mother and never make her upset or angry. Now I have added a new tragedy to her life, to our family’s life, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it.

went home after fifty days at Memorial Sloan Kettering. The transplant had put me in remission, but I had no immune system, and would have to get all my childhood vaccines again. I started a new round of chemotherapy to keep the cancer at bay. I relapsed. My transplant doctor said that leukemia with my mutation “liked to come back.”

In January, I joined a clinical trial of car-T-cell therapy, a type of immunotherapy that has proved effective against certain blood cancers. Scientists would engineer my sister’s T-cells, directing them to attack my cancer cells. It was dark all the time outside my hospital window. I was given more chemotherapy; after the car-T treatment, I had cytokine-release syndrome, in which a storm of inflammation left me unable to breathe without high-flow oxygen. My lungs filled with fluid and my liver was unhappy and I was constantly on the brink of going to the I.C.U. A few weeks later, I was in remission again, though I had lost about twenty pounds. The doctors were happy with the results: I had done better than several other patients in the trial, which beggared belief, but I went home.

It didn’t really feel as if I was home: I had to go to the outpatient clinic most days, to treat infections or receive transfusions, sitting in a recliner for hours on end, waiting to know when I would need to go back to the hospital. In early April, I did go back, on just a few days’ notice, for my second transplant. I hoped that this would work. Actually, I decided that it would work. I dutifully copied Seamus Heaney poems into my notebook: “The Cure at Troy” (“Believe that a further shore / Is reachable from here. / Believe in miracles / And cures and healing wells.”) and “The Gravel Walks” (“So walk on air against your better judgement”). I tried to be the perfect patient: if I did everything right, if I was nice to everyone all the time, if I didn’t need any help or have any problems, then it would work.

This time, I had an unrelated donor, the logic being that the cells would be distinct from those of my sister and me, and thus better suited to take on the cancer. All I know about the donor is that he is a man in his twenties from the Pacific Northwest. I imagined a Portland woodcutter or a Seattle tech bro. Either way, I wished I could thank him. I went into remission again; I relapsed again. I joined another clinical trial. I was hospitalized twice more—weeks I don’t remember, during which I lost another ten pounds. First, I had graft-versus-host disease, in which new cells attack old ones, and then, in late September, I was downed by a form of Epstein-Barr virus that blasted my kidneys. When I got home a few weeks later, I had to learn how to walk again and couldn’t pick up my children. My leg muscles wasted and my arms seemed whittled into bone.

During the latest clinical trial, my doctor told me that he could keep me alive for a year, maybe. My first thought was that my kids, whose faces live permanently on the inside of my eyelids, wouldn’t remember me. My son might have a few memories, but he’ll probably start confusing them with pictures he sees or stories he hears. I didn’t ever really get to take care of my daughter—I couldn’t change her diaper or give her a bath or feed her, all because of the risk of infection after my transplants. I was gone for almost half of her first year of life. I don’t know who, really, she thinks I am, and whether she will feel or remember, when I am gone, that I am her mother.

Meanwhile, during the car-T treatment, a method developed over many decades with millions of dollars of government funding, my cousin, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., was in the process of being nominated and confirmed as the Secretary of Health and Human Services. Throughout my treatment, he had been on the national stage: previously a Democrat, he was running for President as an Independent, but mostly as an embarrassment to me and the rest of my immediate family.

In August, 2024, he suspended his campaign and endorsed Donald Trump, who said that he was going to “let Bobby go wild” on health. My mother wrote a letter to the Senate, to try and stop his confirmation; my brother had been speaking out against his lies for months. I watched from my hospital bed as Bobby, in the face of logic and common sense, was confirmed for the position, despite never having worked in medicine, public health, or the government.

Suddenly, the health-care system on which I relied felt strained, shaky. Doctors and scientists at Columbia, including George, didn’t know if they would be able to continue their research, or even have jobs. (Columbia was one of the Trump Administration’s first targets in its crusade against alleged antisemitism on campuses; in May, the university laid off a hundred and eighty researchers after federal-funding cuts.) If George changed jobs, we didn’t know if we’d be able to get insurance, now that I had a preëxisting condition. Bobby is a known skeptic of vaccines, and I was especially concerned that I wouldn’t be able to get mine again, leaving me to spend the rest of my life immunocompromised, along with millions of cancer survivors, small children, and the elderly. Bobby has said, “There’s no vaccine that is safe and effective.” Bobby probably doesn’t remember the millions of people who were paralyzed or killed by polio before the vaccine was available. My dad, who grew up in New York City in the nineteen-forties and fifties, does remember. Recently, I asked him what it was like when he got the vaccine. He said that it felt like freedom.

As I spent more and more of my life under the care of doctors, nurses, and researchers striving to improve the lives of others, I watched as Bobby cut nearly a half billion dollars for research into mRNA vaccines, technology that could be used against certain cancers; slashed billions in funding from the National Institutes of Health, the world’s largest sponsor of medical research; and threatened to oust the panel of medical experts charged with recommending preventive cancer screenings. Hundreds of N.I.H. grants and clinical trials were cancelled, affecting thousands of patients. I worried about funding for leukemia and bone-marrow research at Memorial Sloan Kettering. I worried about the trials that were my only shot at remission. Early in my illness, when I had the postpartum hemorrhage, I was given a dose of misoprostol to help stop the bleeding. This drug is part of medication abortion, which, at Bobby’s urging, is currently “under review” by the Food and Drug Administration. I freeze when I think about what would have happened if it had not been immediately available to me and to millions of other women who need it to save their lives or to get the care they deserve.

My plan, had I not gotten sick, was to write a book about the oceans—their destruction, but also the possibilities they offer. During treatment, I learned that one of my chemotherapy drugs, cytarabine, owes its existence to an ocean animal: a sponge that lives in the Caribbean Sea, Tectitethya crypta. This discovery was made by scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, who first synthesized the drug in 1959, and who almost certainly relied on government funding, the very thing that Bobby has already cut.

I won’t write about cytarabine. I won’t find out if we were able to harness the power of the oceans, or if we let them boil and turn into a garbage dump. My son knows that I am a writer and that I write about our planet. Since I’ve been sick, I remind him a lot, so that he will know that I was not just a sick person.

When I look at him, I try to fill my brain with memories. How many more times can I watch the video of him trying to say “Anna Karenina”? What about when I told him I didn’t want ice cream from the ice-cream truck, and he hugged me, patted me on the back, and said, “I hear you, buddy, I hear you”? I think about the first time I came home from the hospital. He walked into my bathroom, looked at me, and said, “It’s so nice to meet you in here.”

Then there’s my daughter, her curly red hair like a flame, squinting her eyes and grinning a gap-toothed grin after taking a sip of seltzer. She stomps around the house in bright-yellow rain boots, pretending to talk on my mother’s phone, a string of fake pearls around her neck, no pants, giggling and running away from anyone who tries to catch her. She asks us to play James Brown’s “I Got the Feelin’ ” by picking up a portable speaker and saying, “Baby, baby.”

Mostly, I try to live and be with them now. But being in the present is harder than it sounds, so I let the memories come and go. So many of them are from my childhood that I feel as if I’m watching myself and my kids grow up at the same time. Sometimes I trick myself into thinking I’ll remember this forever, I’ll remember this when I’m dead. Obviously, I won’t. But since I don’t know what death is like and there’s no one to tell me what comes after it, I’ll keep pretending. I will keep trying to remember. ♦

$2 Billion Given by Knight Family to Support Cancer Research, Care, Therapies, etc.

 

THANK YOU

Phil and Penny Knight have pledged a historic $2 billion to Oregon Health & Science University’s Knight Cancer Institute, marking the largest donation ever made to an American university. This extraordinary gift will expand the center, increase access to clinical trials, and accelerate groundbreaking research aimed at saving millions of lives. It reflects a commitment to transforming cancer care and supporting innovations that could change how the disease is treated worldwide.

Leading the institute is Dr. Brian Druker, renowned for developing Gleevec, which turned a deadly leukemia into a manageable condition. With the Knights’ unprecedented support, the institute is poised to redefine global cancer treatment, inspire new therapies, and bring hope to patients and families everywhere. This donation sets a new benchmark for philanthropy in medical research.

"Drop Crocs!!" Plunging Onto Prey From The Trees

 

By Margherita Bassi - Smithsonian Magazine

Paleontologists Unearthed Australia’s Oldest Known Crocodile Eggshells. The eggshells belonged to an extinct group of crocs, some members of which were “drop crocs” that plunged onto prey.

As if the wildlife in Australia today isn’t intimidating enough, tens of millions of years ago, visitors would have had to deal with an additional nightmarish scenario—crocs jumping out of trees.

“It's a bit of a joke when you talk about Australia having drop crocs. But the reality is, we appear to have had them,” Mike Archer, a paleontologist at the University of New South Wales Sydney (UNSW), tells the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Angus Randall. The ancient reptiles “spent time in the trees, probably jumping out on their prey. And these same weird crocodiles weren't behaving like normal crocodiles. They weren't sitting in the water.”

In a study published November 11 in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, Archer and his colleagues describe the oldest known crocodile eggshells discovered in Australia. They belonged to mekosuchine crocodiles—an extinct group of crocs that inhabited the continent’s inland waters 55 million years ago.

Some mekosuchines seem to have been at least semi-arboreal, “like a leopard croc, jumping on top of you from the trees, not leaping up from river systems,” Archer tells the Canberra Times’ Lloyd Jones.

The fossilized eggshells probably didn’t belong to a drop croc, but an earlier relative, per the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Namely, the fragments may have come from species of Kambara—an especially old genus of mekosuchines, Michael Stein, a paleoecologist at UNSW and co-author of the study, writes for the Conversation. Kambara species could grow to over six feet long and likely ate fish and softshell turtles, he adds.

Researchers unearthed the eggshells in a rancher’s backyard in the small Queensland town of Murgon—one of the oldest fossil sites in Australia. The fragments are now shedding light on the crocs’ reproduction, adaptation and environment.

The fossil site at Murgon Mina Bassarova

“They preserve microstructural and geochemical signals that tell us not only what kinds of animals laid them, but also where they nested and how they bred,” Xavier Panadès I Blas, lead author of the study and a researcher at the Catalan Institute of Paleontology Miquel Crusafont, says in a UNSW statement.

The shells’ microstructure indicates that the crocs laid their eggs on the edge of a lake and that they were adapting their reproductive strategies to a changing environment. The remains also feature little evidence of bacterial degradation, Stein writes for the Conversation, suggesting that the nest may have gone through dry periods because of the fleeting nature of forest-lined wetlands surrounding Murgon.

“We're quite convinced we're talking about a kind of a temporary, shallow, freshwater lake in which these crocodiles came in, perhaps only once a year, to a crocodile, you know, egg-laying fest,” Archer tells the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. They “probably retreated after that back into the forest to gobble up animals that didn't expect to be eaten by crocodiles in the middle of the forest.”

Mekosuchine crocs might have eventually lost a significant portion of their inland habitat to spreading dryland, forcing them to retreat to diminishing waterways, where competition for food was fierce. Nevertheless, they highlight that especially ancient crocodiles “did a lot more than they do in modern ecosystems,” Matthew McCurry, a vertebrate paleontologist at the Australian Museum who did not participate in the study, tells the Guardian’s Donna Lu. Australia’s modern crocs arrived just 3.8 million years ago.

Ultimately, the study provides a window into the ecosystem of Australia tens of millions of years ago, back when the island continent was still attached to South America and Antarctica.

David Horsey is the best in the trade!!! His Editorial cartoons nail it every time.

 By 

David Horsey

Seattle Times cartoonist

Ever since the Second World War, there is a phrase that has been used to describe the worst types of police terror: Gestapo-like tactics.

It is a phrase that can be overdone. Not every excess of law enforcement is comparable to the actions of the Gestapo, Adolf Hitler’s political police who used violence and intimidation to beat down the opponents and victims of the Nazi regime.

But there are certainly times when it does apply. The ruthless cops who bludgeoned peaceful Civil Rights marchers in Selma at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965 is one example. The police attack on demonstrators outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago might be another.

For certain, it is accurate to characterize the current behavior of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents as Gestapo-like. Despite the lies being told by Trump administration officials, ICE is not targeting only criminals and “bad hombres” (in President Donald Trump’s terminology). As evidenced by incident after incident, day after day, it is an irrefutable fact that, in carrying out Trump’s roundup of alleged undocumented immigrants, ICE agents are employing brutal force, racially profiling and violating constitutional rights as they chase down peaceful people at their workplaces, their homes, on city streets, at shopping malls and outside of churches.

An appalling example is the Latino man in Los Angeles whose car was surrounded by ICE storm troopers outside a Home Depot a few days ago. They pulled the man from his car and took him away, leaving his 1-year-old girl in the back seat. The man is an American citizen, born in California, according to his mother, who says she is also a citizen. The child got home safely, but her father has disappeared into the dark netherworld of ICE custody, like hundreds of other victims.

This incident is not an outlier, it is a common example of the illegal tactics being employed by the poorly trained, pseudo-cops of ICE who are a disgrace to all the disciplined, brave police officers in America.

There are many countries around the world where good folks are terrorized by violent goons in the service of authoritarian regimes. Until this year, the United States was a leader in condemning and opposing such regimes. Now, the USA is one of them.

See more of David Horsey’s cartoons at: st.news/davidhorsey

View other syndicated cartoonists at: st.news/cartoons

Editor’s note: Seattle Times Opinion no longer appends comment threads on David Horsey’s cartoons. Too many comments violated our community policies and reviewing the dozens that were flagged as inappropriate required too much of our limited staff time. You can comment via a Letter to the Editor. Please email us at letters@seattletimes.com and include your full name, address and telephone number for verification only. Letters are limited to 200 words.

David Horsey:  is a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist for The Seattle Times. His latest book is “Unhinged USA.”

Governor Newsom at Global Climate Summit Speaks the Truth

 

Smart move on Governor Newsoms Part..

  

Governor Gavin Newsom replaces Donald Trump on the world stage by announcing that he will attend the United Nations climate summit in Brazil that the MAGA leader refused to send a delegation to.

Big Oil owns Trump but they don't own his ascendant arch-nemesis...

COP30, the conference in question, will be held on Friday and Newsom will be the highest-profile American government official in attendance. The appearance, which will supercharge interest in his 2028 presidential run, comes in the wake of his historic redistricting victory on Tuesday.

The governor told Politico that he's making the trip “because of the complete abdication of the Trump administration that is joining the Saudis and Russia and the Gulf states.”

“It’s doubled down on hydrocarbons as the rest of the world is sprinting ahead on low-carbon green growth,” he said. “For me, it is about our economic competitiveness, period, full stop.”

Newsom's angle here is a smart one. Climate change is an existential crisis for the survival of our species, but it's also an enormous economic opportunity for those countries that are willing to adopt clean energy quickly and efficiently. Either the United States rises to meet demand or China will.

Trump has repeatedly dismissed climate change as a "hoax" and a "con job" despite the overwhelming evidence and proliferation of extreme weather events. Fossil fuel companies helped foist him into power and he's paying them back tenfold at the cost of our planet.

“I just want to make sure everyone understands we’re maybe 2,000 miles from 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., but we’re a world away in terms of our mindset on these issues,” Newsom added.

Tens of thousands of diplomats, scientists, experts, and activists are attending the conference which will unfold over two weeks in Belém, a city close to the mouth of the Amazon River. Newsom will have a strong legacy to tout during his trip since California has been leading America in renewable energy on numerous fronts.

The rest of the world is eager to speak with the United States and so Newsom will have an opportunity to boost his international standing even further—

“The U.S. will not play a major role. The world is collectively outraged, and so we will focus — as will everyone else — on engaging in talks with those who are driving the process forward," said Jochen Flasbarth, undersecretary in the German Ministry of Environmental Affairs."

Thanks to Gavin Newsom, the world doesn't have to count America out just yet. We need not surrender our global leadership. It's time to recommit to our responsibilities.