Cancer is on my Mind

 Facebook opens by asking, "What's on your mind?"

Cancer is on my mind. I had a dear friend and pillar of the community here die from pancreatic cancer less than 2 years ago. My cousin, whom I dearly love, has just been diagnosed with the same disease -- Stage 4. I had prostate cancer. My best friend here had the same disease. I benefited from prior research on the condition, and excellent treatment at the UW Medical Center, which receives substantial government funding through NIH, the National Science Foundation, and other federal grants for research. This funding is crucial for supporting research initiatives, training future researchers, and providing advanced medical care, like that I received almost twenty tears ago.

About 1,200 jobs are expected to be cut at NIH as part of the layoffs at the Health and Human Services Department, and the administration also has canceled hundreds of NIH grants to scientists around the country. HHS is expected to lose about 20,000 people.

National Institutes of Health main research campus

 "HHS deals with Americans from birth to death. There is absolutely no way you can lose 25% of the workforce without directly affecting Americans across this country," former HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said, adding this includes "research and science at NIH, which is the gold standard of the world."

Anjee Davis, the CEO of Fight Colorectal Cancer, a patient advocacy group, told CBS News her reaction to the cuts was fear.

The University of Maryland has more than 250 active clinical trials, many that bring experimental medications to cancer patients across the country — but these trials are at risk of disruption.

Despite improvements in research and treatments, cancer is still the second leading cause of death in the country, highlighting the importance of continued research (Heart disease is the leading cause of death).

The Trump Administration, with Elon Musk [a man who can afford the best medical treatment anywhere in the world] leading the charge, is gleefully taking a chain saw to medical research and funding. Meanwhile the man who heads of HHS, Robert Kennedy, Jr., is attacking fluoride in public drinking water.

Someone you love, a friend, an acquaintance, a valued member of the community, will be impacted. Friends, loved ones, neighbors, will suffer and die because of ignorance, incompetence, inhumanity, and mendacity in a federal government led by Donald Trump, enabled by his cadre of sycophants.

Make sure you tell your representatives and senators how you fell about this. Carry a sign at the next protest you attend that says, "STOP KILLING US!"

Stay Silent and Stay Powerless Against Trump’s Tyranny

 

By Ralph Nader

March 14, 2025

There are reasons why influential or knowledgeable Americans are staying silent as the worsening fascist dictatorship of the Trumpsters and Musketeers gets more entrenched by the day. Most of these reasons are simple cover for cowardice.

Start with the once-powerful Bush family dynasty. They despise Trump as he does them. Rich and comfortable George W. Bush is very proud of his Administration’s funding of AIDS medicines saving lives in Africa and elsewhere. Trump, driven by vengeance and megalomania, moved immediately to dismantle this program. Immediate harm commenced to millions of victims in Africa and elsewhere who are reliant on this U.S. assistance (including programs to lessen the health toll on people afflicted by tuberculosis and malaria).

Not a peep from George W. Bush, preoccupied with his landscape painting and perhaps occasional pangs of guilt from his butchery in Iraq. His signal program is going down in flames and he keeps his mouth shut, as he has largely done since the upstart loudmouth Trump ended the Bush family’s power over the Republican Party.

Then there are the Clintons and Obama. They are very rich, and have no political aspirations. Yet, though horrified by what they see Trump doing to the government and its domestic social safety net services they once ruled, mum’s the word.

What are these politicians afraid of as they watch the overthrow of our government and the oncoming police state? Trump, after all, was not elected to become a dictator—declaring war on the American people with his firings and smashing of critical “people’s programs” that benefit liberals and conservatives, red state and blue state residents alike.

Do they fear being discomforted by Trump/Musk unleashing hate and threats against them, and getting tarred by Trump’s tirades and violent incitations? No excuses. Regard for our country must take precedence to help galvanize their own constituencies to resist tyranny and fight for Democracy.

What about Kamala Harris — the hapless loser to Trump in November’s presidential election? She must think she has something to say on behalf of the 75 million people who voted for her or against Trump. Silence! She is perfect bait for Trump’s intimidation tactics. She is afraid to tangle with Trump despite his declining polls, rising inflation, the falling stock market and anti-people budget slashing which is harming her supporters and Trump voters’ economic wellbeing, health and safety.

This phenomenon of going dark is widespread. Regulators and prosecutors who were either fired or quit in advance have not risen to defend their own agencies and departments, if only to elevate the morale of those civil servants remaining behind and under siege.

Why aren’t we hearing from Gary Gensler, former head of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), now being dismantled, especially since the SEC is dropping his cases against alleged cryptocurrency crooks?

Why aren’t we hearing much more (she wrote one op-ed) from Samantha Power, the former head of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) under Biden, whose life-saving agency is literally being illegally closed down, but for pending court challenges?

Why aren’t we hearing from Michael Regan, head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), under Biden about saboteur Lee Zeldin, Trump’s head of EPA, who is now giving green lights to lethal polluters and other environmental destructions?

These and many other former government officials all have their own circles – in some cases, millions of people – who need to hear from them.

They can take some courage of the seven former I.R.S. Commissioners — from Republican and Democratic Administrations — who condemned slicing the I.R.S staff in half and aiding and abetting big time tax evasion by the undertaxed super-rich and giant corporations. I am told that they would be eager to testify, should the Democrats in Congress have the energy to hold unofficial hearings as ranking members of the Senate Finance and House Ways and Means Committees.

Banding together is one way of reducing the fear factor. After Trump purged the career military at the Pentagon to put his own “yes men” at the top, five former Secretaries of Defense, who served under both Democratic and Republican presidents, sent a letter to Congress denouncing Trump’s firing of senior military officers and requesting “immediate” House and Senate hearings to “assess the national security implications of Mr. Trump’s dismissals.” Not a chance by the GOP majority there. But they could ask the Democrats to hold UNOFFICIAL HEARINGS as ranking members of the Armed Services Committees!

Illinois Governor JB Pritzker can be one of the prime witnesses at these hearings – he has no fear of speaking his mind against the Trumpsters.

On March 6, 2025, the Washington Bureau Chief of the New York Times, Elisabeth Bumiller, put her rare byline on an urgent report titled, “‘People Are Going Silent’: Fearing Retribution, Trump Critics Muzzle Themselves.”

She writes: “The silence grows louder every day. Fired federal workers who are worried about losing their homes ask not to be quoted by name. University presidents [one exception is Wesleyan University President Michael Roth] fearing that millions of dollars in federal funding could disappear are holding their fire. Chief executives alarmed by tariffs that could hurt their businesses are on mute.”

To be sure, government employees and other unions are speaking out and suing in federal court. So are national citizen groups like Public Citizen and the Center for Constitutional Rights, though hampered in alerting large audiences by newspapers like the Times rarely reporting their initiatives.

Yes, Ms. Bumiller, pay attention to that aspect of your responsibility. Moreover, the Times’ editorial page (op-ed and editorials) are not adequately reflecting the urgency of her reporting. Nor are her reporters covering the informed outspokenness and actions of civic organizations.

Don’t self-censoring people know that they are helping the Trumpian dread, threat and fear machine get worse? Study Germany and Italy in the nineteen thirties.

The Trump/Musk lawless, cruel, arrogant, dictatorial regime is in our White House. Their police state infrastructure is in place. Silence is complicity!

Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate, lawyer, and author. He is 91.

Thank you for your service

My wife and I are both Air Force veterans. We met and married in Bitburg, Germany, while assigned to the 36th TFW. I made the Air Force a career. My wife, an Air Force nurse, helped save my life, retired, and then raised our two boys.

I volunteered for Vietnam after my assignment to Bitburg. I did so because I had friends, guys like myself in their early twenties, putting their lives on the line to serve their country. News was coming back to us that some were KIA or MIA. I felt a need to serve, as they had, and to honor them in doing so.

As it turned out, the Air Force had other plans for me, and I didn’t end up going to Vietnam. I was assigned to the Pentagon instead. I was lucky. So many of my generation weren’t. They gave the “last full measure of devotion” to their country — those who died, and those who live afterward with the scars of their service forever etched in their psyche.

I had a good friend, 'Dan' (pseudonym), who was shot down and spent 6 years in the “Hanoi Hilton.” When the war was over, he transited Hawaii, where I was stationed at PACAF HQ. He had dinner with us. We had music playing. He asked me to turn it off. He’d been beaten so severely about the head, that what we heard as music was just a cacophony to him.

I haven’t the words to express my emotions when seeing Donald Trump’s disdain for my Brothers in Arms. He will never understand, “What's in it for them,” because for him sacrifice is a sucker’s bet. For Trump, there's always a way to get around an obligation, an oath, and even a law.

Several thousand protesters on the National Mall on Friday, March 14, included veterans, who rallied against the Trump administration's unilateral deep cuts to the federal government, including at the Department of Veterans Affairs. Trump's cuts to the VA and rollback of veterans healthcare is further evidence of his disdain for "service," a concept foreign to him.

In case you missed it, March 14 is abbreviated as 3/14, and Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, disqualifies anyone from holding office if they engaged in insurrection. Trump should have been disqualified, but a heavily conservative Supreme Court, even then held in low esteem, quelled at the thought of "disenfranchising voters" (Justice Kavanaugh's words), and on March 4, 2024, ruled that states could not disqualify Donald Trump.

So, here we are a year later, after more than seventy-thousand Americans (just under 50%) voted to install the Insurrectionist-in-Chief, victims to the whims of a man intent on creating a nation in his own image; selfish, mean-spirited, unpredictable, and destructive.

God Bless America.