It took us just thirty days into the second administration of Donald J. Trump to reach a signature moment in American history. In calling Volodymyr Zelenskyy a dictator and accusing him of starting the war that his country has suffered through from Russian aggression for nearly three years, Trump has loudly and clearly taken the side of a real dictator against our ally, Ukraine. It's no longer as if Trump is acting like a Russian asset. He has raised the white, blue, and red flag of Russia over the White House. In military terms, Trump has switched sides and begun firing from Russian lines at American troops.

The United States began preparing for a land war in Europe with Russia's progenitor, the Soviet Union, 80 years ago at the end of the Second World War, when the Soviets militarily occupied the Eastern European nations which had been taken by the Nazis. The Soviets didn’t bother declaring them within their sphere of influence and immediately began treating them as client states. You need look no further than at photographs of Russian tanks on the other side of Checkpoint Charlie or rolling into Budapest in 1956 to put down the Hungarian Revolution for evidence of Russia's crimes against Eastern Europe.

In 1955, when my family debarked at Bremerhaven from a converted military troop ship called the General Patch, there were more than 300,000 American troops stationed in Germany, with about 70,000 more in France, and tens of thousands scattered around Italy, Great Britain, and other countries. We didn't arrive in Germany on a family vacation. My father commanded an infantry company in Stuttgart and was almost immediately put on alert and sent to the field for maneuvers and training that lasted for months at a time. My uncle James was an F-100 pilot assigned to fly missions along the border with Czechoslovakia to guard against encroachments by Soviet MiGs.

It was serious business to be assigned to combat units in Germany in the 1950s. The word that was used to describe the American military in Europe in those days was “tripwire.” The US Army and Air Force were stationed on European soil to deter the Soviet Union from turning the countries of Western Europe into more of its client states. The Soviet Union and its Communist leadership, headquartered in the Russian capital of Moscow, was the enemy of the United States.

Today, our enemy is the nation of Russia, led by its dictator, Vladimir Putin. If you have any question as to whether Russia has transformed itself into the enemy of Western Europe and the United States, all you have to do is look at the destruction Putin's military has wreaked on its much smaller neighbor, Ukraine, over the last three years, causing once again American military units assigned to Germany, Poland, and the Baltic states to be referred to as a tripwire.

The threat of Vladimir Putin’s Russia to Western Europe is so great and taken so seriously that Germany every year hosts the Munich Security Conference, attended by the secretaries of defense and military commanders of every country in NATO and the European Union. Those images you see in the papers or on television of European leaders around conference tables in Munich every year are not posed for show. Despite the juvenile presence of the American Vice President in Munich giving a speech that could have been written in Moscow, the security conference this year was especially serious for one reason: according to JD Vance and the drunken frat boy we have for a Secretary of Defense, Donald Trump decided to back Vladimir Putin and Russia against our allies in Ukraine. Listening to the words of Vance and Hegseth, no other conclusion can be drawn than that the United States is no longer acting as a member in good standing of NATO.

There is only one good thing about what Trump has done over the last two days. One of the readers of this column, Reed Bonadonna, put it better than I could in his comment today, which I will quote in full:

“As a military type, I feel a sense of excitement that the enemy has declared itself, looming like a hideous, toupéed Pantagruel. This, I begin to wondering see, is the battle for which we have always been preparing ourselves.”

I had to look up Pantagruel to discover how apt is Bonadonna’s comparison of Trump with this character created by Francois Rabelais in 1532. Pantagruel first appeared in his book, The Horrible and Terrifying Deeds and Words of the Very Renowned Pantagruel King of the Dipsodes, Son of the Great Giant Gargantua.

Rabelais has been described by critic John Parkin, author of “The Rabelais Encyclopedia” as “the world's greatest comic genius,” and his grand series of books about Pantagruel are seen as championing "the advancement of humanist learning, the evangelical reform of the Church, [and] the need for humanity and brotherhood in politics.” I mean, how perfect is it to compare Donald Trump to a character from the 16th century who used his own urine as a weapon in war and his tongue to shelter his army?

Humor may provide a lens through which we can consider anew this hideous monster who has been elected to the highest office in our land. But it is the fact that he has declared himself an enemy of his own country and indeed of all civilized human beings that marks this date as one we should remember and act upon.

We need to take comfort in the idea that our history has prepared us for a battle such as this one. We have risen to the occasion before, once to fight a Civil War to free enslaved human beings and make them our fellow citizens. Freedom is at stake again, this time for all of us. Donald Trump has declared himself our enemy. It is past time to square the circle and fight.

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Finding the right therapist is hard. Finding one that takes insurance can be even harder.  

Insurers are required to cover mental health care under the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act. Yet, almost a third of therapists still don’t accept insurance at all or limit the number of insured clients they treat. The ongoing therapist shortage, exacerbated by the pandemic, has made the hunt for a provider even more difficult. Therapists that do take insurance are often fully booked.  

And accepting insurance has its perks, like widening access to a larger client pool.  

So why would a therapist not accept insurance in the first place? It turns out, it doesn’t pay as much and can be a real hassle.  

Low pay 

A 2023 Government Accountability Office report concluded that low insurance reimbursement rates are one of the main reasons why mental health care has become so inaccessible. Therapists just don’t recoup their costs with insurance, so there isn’t much incentive to accept it.  

The national average cost of a psychotherapy session is $100-$200/hour, varying based on state, licensure, specialty, and demand for services. While reimbursement rates aren’t publicly available, we do know that they are low, sometimes only a fraction of the cost to provide care.  

For instance, fee-for-service Medicaid rates in 2022 for common psychiatry services, including psychotherapy, were only 81% of Medicare’s rates. And Medicare reimbursement rates for behavioral health are already low, hitting far below what other care providers are reimbursed for. 

Providers who work with private insurance have voiced that reimbursement rates can be “insulting.” It also doesn’t help that rates haven’t significantly increased in decades. 

Given the overhead costs of maintaining licensure and owning or participating in a private practice, these low rates are unsustainable. What’s more, salaried therapists in community rehabilitation centers often make even less, as little as $30,000 a year.  

The end result is that the profession isn’t a financially attractive path to take, contributing to the therapist shortage.  

Insurance is a pain to deal with, too. 

Beyond the pay, the logistical challenges that come with insurance are another reason why mental health care providers often opt out.  

For one, the administrative responsibilities add up. Filing insurance claims and advocating on behalf of a client requires a learning curve, all done in unpaid time. Getting credentialed with an insurance company is also time-consuming, and reimbursement isn’t immediate. 

Insurers impact the care provided, too. For example, to receive reimbursement, therapists must make an official diagnosis. This can be problematic because mental health diagnoses are not always helpful for treatment. Clients may not even meet diagnostic criteria, especially during the first few sessions. Yet, diagnoses remain permanent in health records regardless.  

Insurers can then also dictate how much care they will pay for, such as the number of sessions or the length of the sessions. Those decisions don’t always align with what the therapist and client know is necessary for healing.  

The alternative: paying more out-of-pocket 

For these reasons, clients are often left paying cash and seeking reimbursement from their plan for an out-of-network visit, if their plan even offers any out-of-network therapy coverage. Sometimes therapists offer sliding payment scales based on the client’s financial situation, for which an affordable rate is agreed upon by both the therapist and client.  

Still, these options often mean higher out-of-pocket costs compared to having in-network insurance coverage or paying to see a primary care provider. 

While mental health care parity is the goal, we are clearly far from it. To this day, insurers unlawfully delay and deny coverage, perhaps to encourage patients with chronic mental illnesses – who are more expensive to cover – to drop coverage or switch to another insurer. 

We are in the throes of a mental health crisis as a nation. With care out of reach for so many though, solving the crisis feels unattainable. Paying mental health workers more, incentivizing insurance acceptance, and increasing reimbursement rates may alleviate some of the access burden. 

Mental health has been undervalued as a profession, a policy priority, and an important part of overall health for far too long. The effects of unaffordable access to care are not going away, especially as demand for care grows and the workforce struggles to keep up. It’s time we listen to the voices of both those providing and receiving care, and treat mental health like any other form of care. 

Were I one of the judges whose decisions have aimed to stop Elon Musk’s lawless grab for Americans’ private information, I’d be angry to see him now reaching instead into the Internal Revenue Service and the Social Security Administration. Lawsuits about those efforts will be forthcoming, but Musk and Donald Trump have elected to ignore the spirit of these court decisions.

As a Social Security recipient and a tax filer, I am furious. Given the record of sloppiness and misleading claims of fraud in Musk’s findings and pronouncements, I’m aware that one slip by his coders could wipe out our income or somehow ruin our tax filings. Musk has no business probing the very private tax and income records for you and me.

The headlines are about the sudden protest resignation of Michelle King as head of Social Security and the tussle with the IRS over resistance to opening the books rather than about exactly what Musk is seeking to learn that requires getting to individual records. A federal judge has extended court orders to block DOGE from access to Treasury Department computer payment systems. It seems clear that the same state attorneys general who sued for that stop will go after these.

The IRS already audits returns, presumably in search of fraud, and Social Security — which involves the money that you and I paid into this system over a lifetime of work, making it our money — has stringent financial reviews in place. Musk says that young coders in his so-called Department of Government Efficiency have found names on Social Security rolls who are 150 years old — though it turns out that a certain number of information-lacking names were identified with an 1800s birthdate as a flag for non-payment.

An audit produced by the Social Security Administration’s inspector general last year found that from 2015 to 2022, any overpayments amounted to less than 1 percent, including cases in which paperwork was wrong or missing. Do we need to find the same waste and fraud again?

I’d even understand if, Musk wanted to reevaluate the financing rules behind the systems at large, including raising Social Security eligibility by two years — a subject that seems to pop up every other year. But you don’t need access to individual records to do that.

The Information

Those IRS computer systems contain the private financial data tied to hundreds of millions of Americans, including Social Security numbers, addresses, banking details and employment information. Social Security serves 70 million individuals who are retired, disabled or in serious need.

Musk is a private citizen apparently without any national security clearance for his staffers, who are working on an agreement about how to protect any data they get. A software engineer named Gavin Kliger, not an auditor, is DOGE’s agent in the IRS; to boot, according to Reuters, Kliger has boosted white nationalism effort online.

Meanwhile, the same Musk was engineering the dismissal of thousands of IRS employees as part of wider worker reductions, singling out employees with less than two years, who have fewer protections. That alone says there could be delays in tax refunds and tax reviews — and seems at odds with a desire to look more deeply into taxpayer records. Over time, Donald Trump has attacked the IRS as overly aggressive and vowed to rescind added money and staff that Joe Biden had given to the agency.

For total absurdity, add in a legal filing by the Trump administration this week in which Joshua Fisher, director of the White House’s Office of Administration, said in a sworn affidavit that Musk is “not an employee” of DOGE, a claim that contradicts every Trump and Musk assertion. Instead, Musk is a special employee of the White House, as if that is different. The affidavit apparently was meant to blunt a legal challenge for access to records.

If you wanted to examine individual IRS records for “fraud,” you might start with corporations that proudly proclaim they pay nothing. Or Trump himself. Why exactly does Musk need to look at records, audits, and returns of 350 million Americans?

It’s hard to come up with a rationale. Why aren’t we forcing him to do so?

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The post Going After Our Tax Records appeared first on DCReport.org.

The D11T is the largest and most powerful bulldozer made by the Caterpillar Company in Peoria, Illinois. It weighs 248,500 pounds, is 36 feet long and 14 feet tall, has a width of 10 and a half feet, and has a 22 foot wide blade that can move 45 cubic yards of material in a single load. There is a desperate need for a row of about five or six D11Ts s to be lined up on South Ocean Boulevard in Palm Beach with their 850 horsepower engines spewing diesel smoke and their gigantic sprocket driven iron tracks groaning and clanking, and they should bulldoze Mar a Lago into Lake Worth Lagoon.

Why you ask, other than removing from the planet for good that hideously gross example of gold-plated bad taste and excess? Well, it would prevent Donald Trump from ever again holding a press conference there and spewing the kind of unhinged lies and garbage that he emitted from his cake hole earlier today. Trump was questioned by reporters about the negotiating session held between his Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, and the Russian Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov. What did Trump do? He took direct aim at Ukrainian President Zelenskyy who was not present in Saudi Arabia for the talks over the future of his country.

Referring to Zelenskyy, Trump said, “Today I heard, ‘Oh, well we weren’t invited.’ Well, you’ve been there for three years,” Trump said with a sneer. “You should’ve ended it in three years. You should have never started it. You could have made a deal.”

Tanks and armored personnel carriers and artillery pieces and rocket launchers and infantry rolled across the Ukrainian border from Russia without warning three years ago next week and began their murderous rampage. Putin had been told by his military commanders and intelligence officials that his attack on Ukraine would be easy. The Russian army would take Kyiv in five days, and Ukraine would be his.

What deal could Zelenskyy have made, you Putin-toe-sucking baboon? I surrender? Please come on in and take our country and do whatever the fuck you want with it?

If we needed any evidence that US membership in NATO is a dead letter, and a new world order will be crafted in a gold-plated hot tub overlooking the Black Sea by a former KGB major and his bloated orange-haired half-human lackey, we have it now.

Seventy-seven million certifiable fools have turned the United States and indeed the world at large over to a man who can't see beyond the head of his golf putter. If you thought we were in trouble when Elon Musk and his teenage tech-manglers started running around and turning over desks in Washington, think again. With Donald Trump accusing Volodymyr Zelenskyy of starting the war that has destroyed a fifth of his country and killed more than a hundred thousand of his own citizens, we have truly entered the age when black is white, up is down, and two plus two equals a crypto coin with Trump's face on it.

I'm going to save the next sentence as a widget, so I won't have to keep typing it over and over again as we spiral into a black hole of madness and doom.

God help us all.

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