Posted on | October 2, 2025 | 1 Comment
Mike Magee
For those prepared to take a deep breath and relax in the aftermath of the MAGA induced assault on the First Amendment that whipsawed Disney leadership last week as they abandoned and then rescued Jimmy Kimmel, be advised reproductive health access is at the top of the list when it comes to MAGA campaigns to “restrict liberties.”
Consider the ongoing campaign to federally restrict telemedicine enabled medication abortion.
A few facts:
- Medication abortion is a process that involves taking two medications (mifepristone and misoprostol) at specific intervals over one to three days. It is approved for use up to the first 70 days of a pregnancy and costs on average about $500.
- As defined by Yale Medicine, “Mifepristone is a medication that blocks progesterone activity in a female’s body. Progesterone is a critical hormone for supporting an early pregnancy. The second medication, misoprostol, causes contractions and expels the pregnancy tissue. It typically takes 12 to 24 hours to pass the tissue.”
- The overall number of abortions have risen since the Dobbs decision overturned Roe v. Wade. There were 1.1 million US abortions in 2023, that is 88,000 per month compared to 80,000 the year before.
- Medication abortions account for 2/3 of all abortions in the US. At least 1 in 4 of these last year involved telemedicine provision by mail order including to citizens from states with highly restrictive abortion laws.
- Success rate in terminating pregnancy is 99.6%. Major complications occur in .4% of cases and mortality is nearly non-existent.
- Anti-abortion advocates are currently focused on obstructing legal access to abortion pills.
Immediately following the Dobbs decision, 12 states banned abortion and 4 states imposed a 6-week gestational limit on access to abortion. Nine of these states now explicitly ban telehealth enabled medication abortion. Countering these measures, eight states where abortion remains legal have passed “shield laws” that protect health professionals from prosecution by other states for engaging in telehealth support of patients seeking self-care within states where abortion is illegal. By latest count, 1 in 7 telehealth assisted medication abortions involved practitioners from shield states.
President Trump’s campaign pledge to reinstate the dormant 1873 Comstock Act to cripple telehealth efforts in support of medication abortion has gone nowhere. In a similar vein, flawed science studies engineered by anti-abortion advocates attempting to challenge FDA clearances for safety and self management of the drugs involved have been exposed as unscientific, deceptive and biased. Multiple state suits, for and against imposing additional FDA hurdles to access in the absence of demonstrable medical benefit or risk mitigation are piling up in the courts. And Louisiana recently took a different tact, reclassifying misoprostol a “controlled substance” and inviting provider countersuits.
As Cornell legal experts remind us, the freedom of expression and the right to freedom of speech may be exercised “in direct (words) or a symbolic (actions) way.” When first written, and adopted as the first of the original 10 entries in the Bill of Rights in 1791, the First Amendment said: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
Nowadays, the provision applies to the entire federal government and is reinforced by the Due Process Claus of the 14th Amendment which protects citizens from state government interference as well.
For better or worse, the actions leading up to the Dobbs decision were led, funded, organized and executed primarily by religious groups, primarily Roman Catholics and Evangelical Christians, joining ranks on the issue five decades ago. Those very religions legitimacy and independence has long been protected by the First Amendment.
A simple listing of the opening salvo of our Bill of Rights reveals a complex tangle of protections that define not only our primary rights as citizens, but also our power and legitimacy as a healthy representative democracy.
What’s included? According to legal experts, our 1st Amendment “protects the right to freedom of religion and freedom of expression from government interference. It prohibits any laws that establish a national religion, impede the free exercise of religion, abridge the freedom of speech, infringe upon the freedom of the press, interfere with the right to peaceably assemble, or prohibit people from petitioning for a governmental redress of grievances.”
Religious leaders remain deeply divided. Opposing reproductive choice while protecting the religious freedom assured by the very same 1st Amendment is a difficult needle to thread. Consider the comment of Baltimore Archbishop William Lori, Chairman of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on Pro-Life Activities, on June 24, 2022, the day of the Dobbs decision: “I recognize there are people on both sides of the question in the Catholic Church. What we are finding though is that when people become more aware of what the church is doing to assist women in difficult pregnancies … hearts and minds begin to change.”
Well, not exactly. A March, 2025 Pew Survey of Catholics nationwide revealed that 6 in 10 Catholics believe that abortion should be legal in all or most cases.
It is ironic that, in attempting to usurp women’s rights to their own reproductive freedoms, that some religious leaders continue to attack the country’s foundational 1st Amendment that has assured the continued existence of their sponsoring organizations.
Posted on | September 29, 2025 | 1 Comment
God Bless Walgreens for “Leaning-in” to Vaccines.
(Does this get them a spot on Trump/RFK Jr. Enemy List?”
Campaign Video
Schedule Your Shot Online – HERE.
Posted on | September 19, 2025 | 1 Comment
Mike Magee
Jimmy Kimmel and Donald Trump don’t get along. Their feud is long standing. But their argument now has Constitutional standing of the 1st Amendment kind. A back and forth on Trump’s Truth Social site has been the stuff of legends. But on March 10, 2025, at the 96th Academy of Awards, Kimmel did what many thought was impossible. He displaced President Barack Obama as enemy #1 in the Trump “insult-him-in-public” orbit.
Not that Obama has ever been forgiven. On April 30, 2011, after months of constant needling from Trump demanding that the President release his long form birth certificate, the President chose the White House Correspondent’s Dinner to settle the score with Trump and Melania in attendance. The President’s sarcasm laced put-down lives on in YouTube infamy.
Multiple experts later claimed that April 30th was the night that Trump decided to go all in on Presidential politics. A subsequent FRONTLINE documentary said simply that he acted on a basic instinct that “redemption and revenge are intertwined.” In the documentary, Trump biographer, Michael D’Antonio, elaborated: “Donald dreads humiliation and he dreads shame, and this is why he often attempts to humiliate and shame other people. This is a burning, personal need that he has to redeem himself from being humiliated by the first black president.”
But you don’t have to be a Democrat to get under his skin. Consider conservative New York Times political columnists, Ross Douthat. Three months into Trump’s first term in March, 2017, he penned a New York Times editorial titled,“The 25th Amendment Solution for Removing Trump.” Speaking of the presidency, he wrote, “One does not need to be a Marvel superhero or Nietzschean Übermensch to rise to this responsibility. But one needs some basic attributes: a reasonable level of intellectual curiosity, a certain seriousness of purpose, a basic level of managerial competence, a decent attention span, a functional moral compass, a measure of restraint and self-control. And if a president is deficient in one or more of them, you can be sure it will be exposed. Trump is seemingly deficient in them all.”
Eight years later, Kimmel delivered this killer line to a worldwide audience: “Donald Trump is mentally ill. Say it out loud!” Then, as the Awards extravaganza was reaching its final “Best Picture” climax, Kimmel reappeared from stage left at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles, California, and said he had an extra minute to burn.
As the spotlight shone, Kimmel said , “This show is not about me, and I appreciate you having me. It’s really about you, and Emma, and all these great actors and actresses and filmmakers, but I was told we had like an extra minute, and I’m really proud of something, and I was wondering if I could share it with you. I just got a review.
“Has there ever been a worse host than Jimmy Kimmel at The Oscars. His opening was that of a less than average person trying too hard to be something which he is not, and never can be. Get rid of Kimmel and perhaps replace him with another washed up, but cheap, ABC ‘talent,’ George Slopanopoulos. He would make everybody on stage look bigger, stronger, and more glamorous. Blah. Blah. Blah. Make America Great Again.”
With the structured timing of a comedic pro, Kimmel waited as the laughter began to fade , and then said, “See if you can guess which former president just posted that on Truth Social. Anyone? No? Well thank you President Trump. Thank you for watching. I’m surprised you’re still up. Isn’t it past your jail time?”
The 2nd term President’s 34 felony count conviction on May 10, 2024, remained fresh in his mind.
A tragic and malignant Donald Trump remains our inheritance. Douthat and Kimmel are not alone in their conviction that he is unsuitable for the Presidency. In The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, a book published in October 2017, 27 psychiatrists said as much. Based on a Yale Psychiatry conference in April, 2017, titled “A Duty to Warn,” the psychiatrists reviewed in depth “the Trump dilemma” and his effect on American society. In short, we were amply warned, not only about him, but his autocratic friends providing the Project 2025 policy game plan fully funded by the likes of Peter Thiel and Elon Musk.
Those who continue to support his candidacy now do so despite the risk to all of us, and for their own personal gain. There remain a few on the religious right who honestly believe that “God put Trump here for a purpose” (to support patriarchy, outlaw abortion, advance Christian nationalism etc.)
Academics, Jurists, Priests, and Corporate CEO’s have been careful not to label Trump as mentally ill.
Sadly, his words in 2024 remind of another influential essayist, Kenneth Burke, whose 1939 masterpiece, The Rhetoric of Hitler’s Battle, is required reading for graduate students from English to Philosophy, and from Political Science to History and Religious Studies. The piece’s main focus involves a critical analysis of Hitler’s Mein Kampf (“my struggle”) which includes this stark warning.
Leaders of the free world need “to discover what kind of ‘medicine’ this medicine-man…concocted, that we may know, with greater accuracy, exactly what to guard against, if we are to forestall the concocting of similar medicine in America.”
Trump too has written his own fictional story; a despotic force with his own signature language. University of Massachusetts sociolinquist, Jennifer Sclafani, wrote a book about Trump-speak in 2018 titled, “Talking Donald Trump.” In it she explores “how Trump’s language has produced such polarized reactions among the electorate.”
Lara Trump, proudly announced, she too was now multi-lingual. “As my father-in-law says, ‘bigly’ … We’re going to win!”
Like zombies, Trump followers and the former Republican Party have now followed him into the basement, and are heading down a tunnel which has no end. It has been “a virtuoso performance without a grand finale.”
Does President Obama regret treating Trump like an Apprentice in front of a bunch of FOX-filled personalities? Probably no more than Trump may live to regret picking a fight with a super-tight band of the world’s greatest humorists and satirists.
Within 24 hours of Kimmel’s cancellation, Jon Stewart opened a dialogue with Trump in a UK Royal clad strategic retreat. His words: “Father has been gracing England with his legendary warmth and radiance. Gaze upon him, with a gait even more majestic than that of the royal horses that pranced before him!”
Ouch! And there’s more to come.
Posted on | September 15, 2025 | 1 Comment
Mike Magee
The massive extension of tax cuts to the super-wealthy and financing of ICE-laced terrorism of immigrants doesn’t come cheap. The Kaiser Family Foundation predicts it will expand the nation’s debt ceiling by $5 trillion and add 17 million to the ranks of the uninsured by 2034. And a big part of the funding baked into the Republican “One Big Beautiful Bill” for the wealthy will come from a familiar political football with a half century plus history – Medicaid.
President Kennedy’s efforting on behalf of health coverage expansion met stiff resistance from the American Medical Association and Southern states in 1960. Part of their strategic pushback was a faint hearted endorsement of a state-run and voluntary offering for the poor and disadvantaged called Kerr-Mills. Southern states feigned support, but enrollment was largely non-existent. Only 3.3% of participants nationwide came from the 10-state Deep South at the time.
Based on this experience, when President Johnson resurrected health care as a “martyr’s cause” after the Kennedy assassination, he carefully built into Medicaid “comprehensive care and services for substantially all individuals who meet the plan’s eligibility standards.” But by 1972, after seven years of skirmishes, the provision disappeared.
Riding a wave of early popularity, President Obama folded in federal subsidization of an expanded Medicaid with broader eligibility for all Americans living at or below 133% of the Federal Poverty Level. Generous federal subsidies of up to 90% of state costs, with acute need being reinforced later by a raging opioid epidemic that targeted disadvantaged and needy Americans disproportionately, led even red-state governors to consider offers for voluntary enrollment.
As the final year of Obama’s second term drew to a close, autonomous state leaders had chosen expanded Medicaid to manage the health care needs of 77 million Americans with high patient satisfaction scores. 34 million of these citizens were children. 2 million mothers that year ushered the newborns in as part of the full-bodied Medicaid prenatal and obstetric coverage. 9 million blind and disabled citizens slept easier each night thanks to the participating governors.
A decade later, 41 states (including DC) are now voluntary participants with primarily federal financing. The ten hold outs illustrated by the KFF graph above are Texas, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, Florida, Tennessee, Kansas, Wyoming, and Wisconsin.
One of the last conservative states to join the program was Missouri. The “Show Me State” held tight until their state budget bled bright red in response to mismanagement of the Covid-19 pandemic. The final reversal came in earshot of the new president’s musings about a “health-care plan within two weeks, a full and complete health-care plan” and laughable pledges to “repeal Obamacare” just as 45 million additional Americans became unemployed and uninsured simultaneously.
By a margin of 6% Missourians voted in 2020 to extend health coverage to an additional 200,000 state dwellers. Those votes came dramatically from former conservative leaning suburbans. By then even the state’s rural voters were beginning to get the message, having seen 10 rural hospitals shut their doors in the prior few years.
Now the state’s historic ambivalence when it comes to Medicaid is once again on full display. Their senator, Josh Hawley (R-Mo), suddenly turned camera shy on July 5, 2025, the day after the passage of the “One Big Beautiful Bill” that had earned his support. His irate and powerful state hospital industry was full-throated in their displeasure.
Within a few days, Sen. Hawley vowed that he would introduce legislation to remove measures in the bill that cut Medicaid payments to his Missouri hospitals from the legislation that he had loudly supported.
CEO’s at St. Louis Children’s Hospital, Children’s Mercy Adele Hall Hospital in Kansas City, Shriners Children’s St. Louis, among others were all ears since roughly half of all their revenue comes from Medicaid. Hawley and his colleagues had just green-lighted the elimination of supplemental payments, known as state directed payments, that account for 1/3 of these hospitals Medicaid revenue and 14% of their total revenue.
This is not the first time the famous 45 year old Missouri senator has been called out for an abrupt change in direction. On Jan. 6, 2021, he was caught on tape with “fist raised in solidarity with protesters already amassing at the security gates” – a gesture that according to Capitol police “riled up the crowd.” A few hours later, he reappeared on video, running to the closest exit from the Capitol to avoid the crowd of his supporters now in full insurrection mode.
Contrast this record with 94 year old former Indiana Congressman Lee Hamilton (D-IN), who serves as an honorary co-chair for the World Justice Project, an organization that works to strengthen the rule of law worldwide.
Lee Hamilton is beloved in Indiana where he was elected in 1982 to the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame, (joining the likes of John Wooden, Oscar Robertson, and Larry Bird) after taking the Evansville Central Bears to the state finals in 1948, and setting scoring and rebound records at De Pauw University in 1951 and 1952.
Hamilton was a member of the large Democratic freshman class that entered Congress with the LBJ landslide in 1964, and served in that role for 34 years. He was asked in 2020 to comment on the factors that make for a great politician. He started by noting that the qualities that get you elected are not necessarily the same as those that mark a successful legislator. Then the former vice-chair of the 9/11 Commission (appointed by George W. Bush) added : “I think the most successful politicians have integrity. When you’re interacting with many others to deal with complex and difficult public policy issues, it’s hugely important that you can trust someone’s word. Most of the politicians I’ve met stay true to what they tell you. They recognize the need to work with others and know that trust matters.”
Posted on | September 10, 2025 | 1 Comment
Mike Magee
In light of today’s attack on Charlie Kirk (and other recent) events, it seems right to pause and reflect on leadership. Because the truth is, not all leaders are created equal.
We are in the grip of change and our American Democracy is at risk. Change is one of the few human experiences that supports two dramatically opposed human emotions. On the one hand, change is fear, and on the other, change is exploration. And while you can support both emotions simultaneously, you can only do so for a short period of time before the tension created between the two forces you to choose one or the other.
At times like these, leadership really matters. Negative leaders embrace fear, using it as a currency to mobilize and organize populations, and to cement minority rules. In contrast, positive leaders are explorers who use a compelling value-centered vision as currency. Through role modeling and the strength of new ideas, they draw people in as they work through the challenges and shape an environment consistent with the majority’s long-term vision.
Negative leaders retrench and divide; positive leaders connect across the divide. Negative leaders segregate; positive leaders aggregate. Negative leaders build walls. Positive leaders build “islands of common stewardship.”
In our lifetime, we have witnessed the emergence of the Internet and HIV, of globalization and overnight delivery, of bubbles and bursts in our stock market, of the genomic revolution, and artificial intelligence. We have witnessed our health care system creak under the weight of a pandemic, and borne witness to an ongoing attempt to overthrow our democratic form of government. We are heavily armed, are always prepared for war, but show little desire for peace.
People are basically good, but they are not perfect.
People are basically kind, but when afraid can act unpredictably.
People are basically loving, but when misled can respond with hatred.
People are people.
Positive leaders are value driven role models and highly effective leaders worth emulating. They are also defenders and practitioners of Democracy.
Each of us is called to reflect on a simple answer to a simple question: “What type of leader do you want to be. What type of leaders do you wish to support.
My own answers to these questions are well documented. They are organized in 10 cornerstone themes, and 52 personal challenges which are the distillation of values and lessons drawn from one life. They are no more valid than your own.
They are available online HERE. I encourage you to take the time to review and share this free resource with all who might benefit.
Posted on | September 4, 2025 | Comments Off on
Translation HERE.
Posted on | August 29, 2025 | 1 Comment
Mike Magee
The Health and Human Services department (HHS) includes in its dominion the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Center for Disease Control (CDC), and the National Institutes of Health (NIH). It is fair to say that their new leader, RFK Jr. is not a wallflower.
In June, the FDA led the news with its assault on food coloring. On August 7th, it was the CDC with new child and adolescent vaccine schedules. And two weeks ago, the HHS crown jewel NIH hit a raw nerve among the nation’s top medical researchers by grandstanding on the loosely defined term “scientifically justifiable” to declare war on the use of gender data in comparative NIH funded research.
The NIH is housed in 75 buildings on 300 acres in Bethesda, Maryland. It consists of 27 different institutes and centers that together awarded $37 billion in U.S. grant funding in 2024. Reports have documented a 250% return on investment for every dollar in NIH funded research. That includes over 400,000 jobs created and $94.58 billion in new economic activity in 2024.
Jay Bhattacharya M.D., Ph.D., the new NIH Director, assumed his new role as the 18th Director of the NIH on April 1, 2025. As former professor of medicine and economics at Stanford, he has attracted criticism inside and outside the campus boundaries of governmental, academic, and corporate medical science; criticism like this: His attacks on the NIH research partners “seem at odds with the administration’s stated goals of fighting censorship in science at the NIH and liberating public health from ideology.”
This rancor could be considered par for the course in this age of social media and with a president who lives on Truth Social. But when it comes to the NIH, it is not so unusual. Complexity, controversy and intrigue have lived side by side at the organization since its wartime informal beginnings 75 years ago.
Whether it was materials, logistics, or coordinating laboratory studies themselves, the effort to put research on a war footing at the outset of WW II required a group of wily and innovative businessmen-scientists. Primary among them was the bespectacled gentleman who appeared on the April 3, 1944, cover of Time, leaning forward into the lens, tanned, in a light gray suit, with a crisp, white shirt and steel-blue tie, next to a ray-emitting radio microphone. The caption read, “Vannevar Bush: General of Physics.”
As overall head of President Roosevelt’s Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD)—also known as the fifth branch of the military general staff, or G5—Bush coordinated 6,000 scientists working in some 300 laboratories, both university-based and commercial. He had plenty of help at the top. Among others in his management team was one George W. Merck, a close friend and confidant since 1933. After Pearl Harbor brought the US into the war, Merck, who had already moved aggressively to centralize his own pharmaceutical company’s research operations, became head of the US Army Biological Warfare Laboratories within Vannevar Bush’s OSRD.
Born March 11, 1890, in Everett, Massachusetts, the only son of a Universalist preacher and the grandson of a whaler, Vannevar Bush earned a math degree from Tufts, followed by a PhD in engineering from MIT. From the beginning of his career he straddled the academic and the industrial in a way that anticipated the future of almost all scientific research.
In 1917, he became head of the experimental laboratory for Tufts University’s new radio station, owned by the American Radio and Research Corporation (AMRAD). His work focused on wave disturbances in magnetic fields, which Bush and the US Army felt might help identify submerged German submarines.
After World War I, he joined MIT’s electrical engineering department, but he continued his affiliation with AMRAD, all the while codeveloping a thermostatic switch with another company that would be acquired 30 years later by Texas Instruments. By 1924, he was working with AMRAD physicist Charles Smith, who invented the S-shaped gas rectifier tube to increase the efficiency of radios and eliminate the need for batteries. In 1925, its Metals and Controls Corporation was renamed Raytheon. Obviously, Bush was well positioned to benefit from the long tail of his academic-industrial efforts.
In time, Bush left MIT to become head of the Carnegie Institute in Washington, DC, the most powerful philanthropic science organization in America, but he was already leading a shadowy second life helping design code-breaking automated machinery for the predecessor of our modern National Security Agency.
In 1939, with the Second World War consuming both Europe and Asia, Bush and James B. Conant, president of Harvard University, met with Frank B. Jewett, president of Bell Labs and of the National Academy of Sciences, to map out a strategy for overcoming our lack of scientific preparedness. Out of that small meeting came a short, four-paragraph proposal for a centralized science operation—outside the control of the military—which Bush placed before President Roosevelt on June 12, 1940.
The president read the report, seized his pen, and scratched at the top, “OK-returned- I think you had best keep this to your own self. FDR.” With that stroke, the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC) was created, and with it, the fully codified and institutionalized era of academic-industrial partnerships in research.
By early fall 1944, the Allies had gained the upper hand on the battlefield, and President Roosevelt had the luxury of thinking about how the US could translate its now thriving wartime-research structure into a postwar world. On November 17, 1944, he wrote to Bush: “There is no reason why the lessons to be found in this experiment cannot be profitably employed in times of peace . . . for the improvement of the national health, the creation of new enterprises bringing new jobs, and the betterment of the national standard of living.” Roosevelt went on to speculate about how the experience gained through OSRD could be adapted “to the war of science against disease.”
By the time Bush had formulated his response in July 1945, Roosevelt was dead of a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of 63. As a consequence, Bush submitted his report, Science: The Endless Frontier, to the newly sworn-in President Harry S. Truman.
Truman agreed that the government needed to support science in the postwar period not only to boost the economy, but also as a bulwark of national defense in the Cold War that was then taking shape, a war in which East and West would become rivals in everything from nuclear weapons to piano competitions. (And today, AI.)
Where Vannevar and Truman parted ways was on the precise role of government. The president saw Washington as being much more engaged, and the new organization allocating America’s treasure under White House directed, government management. Bush leaned heavily toward a more independent, business-oriented venture relying on cooperation among independent scientists, subject to arms-length government oversight and funding.
In the immediate postwar period, the United States fully embraced the idea of a nationally led war against disease. Energized by a healthy business climate and fueled by federally funded American ingenuity, control over our national research enterprise was transferred to a mid-20th-century version of today’s dynastic venture capitalists committed to eventually turning a budding meritocracy into a stable and everlasting aristocracy. Meanwhile, general public health planning and execution was massively decentralized down to the state and county levels. In 1950, more than 6,000 county health departments served nearly 90 percent of the US population and employed 35,000 workers nationwide. Their outputs varied widely in funding, priorities, training, and execution, and their influence steadily diminished over the next half century.
The spigots for research and development were now wide open. In 1940, the US government funded less than 7 percent of the nation’s scientific Research and Discovery. By 1950, that share had grown to 50 percent of a much larger total. Most assumed that Vannevar Bush would be director of the OSRD’s peacetime equivalent, the National Science Foundation, and many were surprised when Truman did not appoint him. However, Bush was ready to move on. He joined the Board of Merck in 1949, and on George Merck’s passing on November 10, 1957 from a cerebral hemorrhage, became Chairman of the Board.
Who’s to know what Vannevar would have thought about RFK Jr. with his 100 Push-His and 50 Pull-Ups, or what he might advise Jay Bhattacharya to do to calm the choppy waters in Bethesda. Four years before his death on June 30, 1974, he was asked what advice he might have for younger leaders.
He wrote, “My conclusion is that things are not so bad as they seem. We need a revival of the essence of the old pioneer spirit which conquered the forest and the plains, which looked at its difficulties with a steady eye, labored and fought, and left its thinking and its philosophy for later and quieter times. This is not a call for optimism; it is a call for determination.”
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