Brooke Rollins

How many times are Republicans going to try to force people who are on Medicaid into the fields to pick crops? It appears our Agriculture "Secretary" Brooke Rollins is unaware of history and is ignorant to boot. Immigrants built this nation. Immigrants take the jobs that regular Americans do not want, like picking crops in blisteringly hot fields, or in a meat-packing plant, or working on a shrimp boat at sea for three weeks at a time. But time and again, Republican try to stoke anger from their voters by claiming stupidly that immigrants are taking jobs from regular Americans or immigrants are living off the government dole. And racism gets reinforced. And there is no fucking way that America will EVER get to a "100% American workforce."

Yes, our Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins sees an easy solution to how we will replace all the immigrant farm workers we are removing from the fields. Just implement "automation." And put all those able-bodied folks soaking up Medicaid to work picking crops.

So, I would like someone to ask Sec'y Rollins to describe the automation that is waiting in the wings, all ready to be hauled into place (overnight, if we want to continue to see food in our grocery stores).

While agricultural automation is advancing, it is nowhere near a plug-and-play solution for the entire industry. Row crops like corn, wheat, and soy are already highly mechanized, but specialty crops - fresh fruits, grapes, berries, and delicate vegetables - still completely rely on human hands to harvest without destroying the produce.

So, someone needs to tell us which specific, commercially viable automation technology exists today that can pick delicate fresh produce at the speed and scale required to prevent immediate supply chain collapse.

And, when it comes to the "34 million able-bodied adults on Medicaid," here are some more realistic stats:

To estimate how many non-working, "able-bodied" adults are currently on Medicaid, researchers look closely at working-age enrollees (ages 19–64) who are subject to the new federal work requirements under the 2025 federal budget reconciliation law.

According to data tracking from the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) and recent independent health policy studies:

There are roughly 20 million adults enrolled in the Medicaid expansion group nationwide.

The vast majority of these working-age adults already meet the standard. KFF data indicates that about 63% (or roughly 12.6 million) work at least 80 hours a month or attend school.

This leaves approximately 8.3 million adults who do not meet the 80-hour monthly work requirement.

But are they "able-bodied"?

While the phrase "able-bodied" is frequently used in political debate, medical and economic data reveal that most of the 8.3 million adults who aren't working face significant, verifiable barriers to employment.

According to a comprehensive Harvard/Beth Israel Deaconess analysis using federal health expenditure data, the non-working pool breaks down as follows:

Illness or Invisible Disability (About 2.7 million): Roughly one-third of the non-working group report a physical or mental illness that severely limits their ability to work. However, they are not technically classified as "disabled" under the strict rules required to receive federal Social Security (SSI/SSDI).

Caregiving and Family Demands (About 2.5 to 3 million): A large portion consists of parents or adult relatives who do not work because they are primary caregivers for young children or disabled family members.

True Disconnection from the Workforce (About 1.6 million): Only about 1 in 5 of the total expansion population are adults who do not work, do not meet current exemption categories (like being a student or caregiver), and are considered genuinely unemployed.

The Bottom Line: Out of 20 million adults in the expansion pool, only about 1.6 million are technically "able-bodied" adults without another job, caregiving duties, school enrollment, or underlying chronic illnesses preventing employment.

But then there are other questions. For instance, how many of those live close enough to farming areas? How many have transportation? How many are suited for this kind of work? And how many, if able to work, will choose a different form of work? Also, who will train an entirely new workforce quickly?

Add to this the historical question: What about the documented failures of "Welfare-to-Work" in agriculture?

We have tried this before. When states passed aggressive anti-immigration laws in the past, they attempted exactly what Rollins is suggesting.

The Georgia & Alabama Precedents (2011): When Georgia and Alabama cracked down on immigrant farmworkers, they tried to fill the gaps with local unemployed workers and people on public assistance. It was a disaster. Farmers reported that local workers walked off the jobs after a single day due to the extreme physical demands, leaving millions of dollars in crops to rot in the fields.

The Nisei Farmers League has already publicly pointed to the total failure of the 1990s "welfare-to-work" programs when trying to introduce unskilled, non-agricultural labor into heavy field production.

Given that state-level experiments to replace farmworkers with domestic welfare recipients have universally resulted in rotted crops and massive financial losses, what specific structural changes make anyone think a national version will yield a different result?

So here's what needs to happen: Someone needs to hand Secretary Rollins a pair of boots, point her toward a California strawberry field in July, and ask her to demonstrate exactly how "easy" this transition is going to be. Until she can show us the hidden army of urban Medicaid recipients currently packing their bags for seasonal field labor, or unveil the magical, delicate-fruit-picking robots waiting in a secret USDA warehouse, she needs to stop trading agrarian fantasy for economic reality. Our food supply chain isn't a startup pitch; you can't disrupt it with buzzwords without leaving the country hungry.

***

This KFF report is titled "Tracking Implementation of the 2025 Reconciliation Law Medicaid Work Requirements":

https://www.kff.org/.../medicaid-work-requirements.../

This GoodRx article is titled "How to Meet the Medicaid Work Requirement: A State-by-State Guide":

https://www.goodrx.com/.../med.../medicaid-work-requirements

This Guardian article is titled "US agriculture secretary says Medicaid recipients can replace deported farm workers. Brooke Rollins also claimed automation can replace the immigrant labor force despite repeated evidence of failure":

https://www.theguardian.com/.../trump-agriculture...

Here is a YouTube short of Brooke Rollins stating the President's and her policy on replacing immigrant farmworkers with automation and Medicaid recipients:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/WScHzMMzV28

This Center for American Progress piece is titled "Top 10 Reasons Alabama’s New Immigration Law Is a Disaster for Agriculture. Major Industry Will Rot Under Law’s Provisions":

https://www.americanprogress.org/.../top-10-reasons.../

This article from America's Voice is titled "Georgia’s 2011 Anti-Immigrant Law Left ‘Crops Rotting in the Fields.’ Trump Wants To Make It Worse ":

https://americasvoice.org/.../georgias-2011-anti.../

Here is a PBS NewHour video titled "Alabama Immigration Law Spells Trouble for Farmers":

https://www.pbs.org/.../alabama-immigration-law-spells...

Here is the Harvard/Beth Israel Deaconess analysis about the non-working pool of Medicaid recipients, from The American Journal of Managed Care:

https://www.ajmc.com/.../least-healthy-medicaid-enrollees...

the heat!

Damn, it's been a little warm lately, hasn't it? If you're a Democrat, you probably agree. If you're a Republican, you probably deny it's anything to worry about. Isn't that stupid? People making decisions based on their ideology? The Republicans are going to deny us right into a catastrophe. But they will likely still make excuses, and as long as it "owns the libs" they have no problem. Stubborn stupidity on a grand scale.

There is a kind of heat that kills you even in the shade, even with all the water you can drink. Last week it parked on top of half the country. Here's how it works.

When the air gets hot enough and humid enough, sweat stops evaporating off your skin. Sweat is the only cooling system your body has. Once it fails, your core temperature just climbs until your organs quit. It's called wet bulb heat.

World Weather Attribution, the scientist consortium that does the rapid math on these events, measured last week as a once-in-200-years humid-heat extreme, and concluded a heatwave with these specific impacts would not have happened at all in a preindustrial climate.

They titled the report "Fossil Fuels Are Heating America's 250th Birthday."

The tally from one American week. Atlantic City hit 106 on the Fourth of July. New York and DC saw their hottest temperatures in over a decade. 180 million people sat under major or extreme heat risk. At least 25 deaths are being investigated as heat-related, 19 in New Jersey alone.

Hundreds of thousands lost power. Officials ordered environmental limits bypassed and emergency diesel generators fired up to stop cascading blackouts.

And the nights are the real killer. When overnight lows sit near 80, the body never resets. Chicago, 1995: that mechanism killed 739 people in five days.

We were still the lucky ones. Europe spent June counting bodies. Early estimates put the heatwave's toll between 15,000 and 25,000 dead. France alone lost roughly 2,700 people. Records fell in thirteen countries. A train derailed in Sweden because the heat warped the tracks.

Fifteen to twenty-five thousand dead is five to eight September 11ths, in one month, on one continent.

June in France ran hotter than the climate models projected. Reality is outrunning the math. This is not a heatwave anymore. This is the climate.

Now the part nobody in Washington will say out loud. The heat is coming for the food. Europe's record June scorched its corn and vegetable crops. Corn futures in Paris jumped to contract highs. Fertilizer prices are up 35 percent this year.

An estimated 363 million people are already at risk of acute hunger. And the World Bank warns the El Niño building in the Pacific could slash rice output 20 to 50 percent in affected regions. That is not doomer talk. That is the World Bank talking.

Washington's answer? Trump fired roughly 600 people from the National Weather Service. Forty percent of forecast offices were left short-staffed. Some offices go unstaffed all night now. Past day four, some forecasts now run with "little to no human intervention."

He is unplugging the smoke detectors while the house fills with smoke.

So take care of each other. Drink water before you feel thirsty. Cool the wrists and the back of the neck. Check on the people around you, especially the ones nobody else is checking on. Heat kills quietly, and mostly it kills the people no one is watching.

Exxon's own scientists predicted this warming with deadly accuracy in the 1970s. The industry buried the science and bought the politicians. Every tenth of a degree since was a boardroom decision.

A second heat dome is already building over the West. NOAA says this El Niño could become one of the strongest on record.

This summer is the warm-up act.

And it's only July.

The Other 98%

Texas Reporter

The Texas Reporter (TR) is not to be confused with the Texas Country Reporter (TCR). TCR is a weekly TV show that highlights cool places and people around the state of Texas, now run by J.B. Saucedo. TR is an online presence that describes itself as follows:

News, views, and insights from every corner of Texas and over 99 nations. Travel, national, and global coverage with a Texan perspective.

The main person behind TR is still mostly anonymous. I've read many of his articles, which are often left-leaning, but still don't know his name. Hateful radical terrorist right-wingers target people like him continually. 

Texas is far from a one-party state. Of the 17 million Texans who are registered to vote, 46% are Democrats and only 38% are Republican. Another 16% are registered as Independent. Even with figures like that, the last time a Democrat was elected to a statewide office was November of 1994. How is that possible, I hear you ask. My suspicion is that the Republicans (who control the machinery of voting) have been suppressing Democratic votes and have flat-out been cheating. Do I have proof? Fuck no. If I did, I'd be screaming it from the rooftops. Another factor is that Democrats simply do not vote in high percentages like the Republicans do. That would do it.

Maybe this year we will finally elect another Dem to statewide office, like James Talarico to the Senate to take John Cornyn's place. It's looking good so far, and there will be no pop-up sexual allegations against Talarico as there were against Graham Plattner of Maine. Talarico's opponent, current Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, is almost as corrupt and bad a person as Trump.

Below is a recent column published in TR, and what follows that is another column published as a defense for the first one. 

Sign hanging from a building in Tehran, Iran.

I do not support political assassination. I do not wish death on anyone.

But Americans need to stop acting shocked when people in other countries hate the leaders who bomb them.

We attacked Iran. We fired missiles into their country. We have threatened to “obliterate” them. We talk about ancient civilizations like they are disposable, inferior, or somehow less human than us.

And Iran is not some empty spot on a map. It is one of the oldest civilizations on Earth. It is Persia. It is Cyrus. It is Xerxes. It is poetry, architecture, scholarship, faith, history, and culture stretching back thousands of years before the United States existed.

I’ve read about pre-revolutionary Iran, post-revolutionary Iran, the Iranian Revolution, and Operation Ajax, when the United States and Britain helped overthrow Iran’s elected government in 1953. That history matters.

So no, I’m not celebrating anyone threatening to kill Donald Trump.

But I also understand that when the head of state of the country bombing you and threatening to destroy you is viewed as a terrorist by the people being bombed, that anger did not come from nowhere.

You do not have to endorse violence to understand cause and effect.

You do not have to support the Iranian government to recognize the humanity of the Iranian people.

And you do not get to bomb people, threaten their country, mock their poverty, interfere in their politics, sanction their economy, and then act confused when they hate you. 

And then we have an addendum

Every time I post something about Iran, I get comments asking some version of the same question:

“What about ‘Death to America’?”

Fair question. But I think too many Americans stop there and never ask the next question:

Why?

I’ve spent a lot of time reading about Iran. The Iranian Revolution. The Shah. Operation Ajax. U.S. and British involvement in overthrowing Iran’s elected government in 1953. The SAVAK secret police. The events that led millions of Iranians to conclude that foreign powers had too much control over their country’s future.

You don’t have to agree with the Iranian government to understand why that history matters.

So let’s put the shoe on the other foot.

Imagine a foreign country helped overthrow the U.S. government.

Imagine they helped install a ruler many Americans viewed as a dictator.

Imagine they trained and supported the security forces that monitored, arrested, intimidated, and sometimes tortured political opponents.

Imagine that went on for decades.

Then imagine Americans eventually rose up and overthrew that government.

Do you think Americans would have warm feelings toward the foreign country that helped create the mess?

Or do you think there might be a little resentment?

Maybe a lot.

Understanding that doesn’t require supporting the Iranian government. It doesn’t require agreeing with every slogan, policy, or action that came afterward.

It simply requires recognizing that history did not begin yesterday.

One of the biggest problems in American discussions about foreign policy is that we often view other countries only through the lens of what they have done to us, while ignoring what we may have done to them.

If we’re going to have an honest conversation about Iran, we should be willing to look at the entire story, not just the chapters that make us feel comfortable.

History is rarely as simple as good guys and bad guys. And nations, including our own, are rarely innocent spectators in the events that shape the world.

Texas Reporter

God

Trump Turns Fountain To Shit

Everything he touches turns to shit.

GOD JUL 8

Dear Humans,

HOLY SHIT! Donald Trump has now ruined another American reflecting pool. 

Before we begin, please bless the little heart on this post so the Epstein class billionaires accidentally show it to many more people.

And if this newsletter makes you laugh, join today as a paid subscriber and help keep the #1 Humor publication on Substack independent, growing, and fighting back hard. THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER!

Upgrade to paid

1. Trump Turns Fountain To Shit

Jesus turned water into wine. 

Donald turned water into shit. 

Trump has spent weeks bragging about the historic fountain at Meridian Hill Park in Washington, D.C., where his administration spent millions of dollars “fixing” the water, only for the whole thing to turn brown. 

He must’ve hired Brownwater Services.

Honestly, this shit fountain is THE ultimate metaphor for the entire Trump administration. 

Everything he touches turns to shit.

The White House grounds. The Capitol. The economy. Gas prices. America’s alliances. The Justice Department. The military. Christianity. The National Mall. The first reflecting pool. America’s 250th birthday. The US Soccer team. This fountain. 

You name it, he turns it to shit. 

The man is a Shit Tornado.  

He doesn’t have the Midas touch. 

He’s got the Mierdas touch.

Oh. he’ll arrest people. He’ll blame Algaefa. But we all know it’s his fault.

Here is some video of Trump’s Great American Shit Fountain from a good man on the scene:

2. Speaking Of Huge Rivers Of Shit...

Scott Jennings would like everyone to believe he had a perfectly normal twenty minute phone conversation with Mitch McConnell.

Apparently every right wing influencer got an email from the Kremlin telling them to say they spoke with Mitch McConnell for about 20 minutes. 

Then Kasie Hunt asked Scott Jennings on live TV if McConnell would be willing to call in to CNN. 

Jennings was squirming HARD.

He’s obviously lying. After all, he gets PAID to lie for American Hitler. And he’s not even good at it. He is just SO mediocre.

Scott Jennings is a bad person and he’s going to Hell.

3. An Important Message From God

They are lying because they think they can get away with it.

They think if they repeat the lie enough times, you’ll shrug.

You’ll move on. You’ll stop paying attention. You’ll stop fighting. And on that day their lie will become the truth. 

They’re counting on your exhaustion.

Good. Let them.

Because every time they tell another bald-faced lie, another decent individual out there blinks their eyes and wakes up.

We have to defeat these fascist liars.

And I believe we shall win in the end.

I have to believe.

And if you’re still here with God now, you believe too.

Because they cannot win.

4. Join the Rebellion

Scott Jennings gets paid to tell lies. I get paid to speak truth to power.

Scott Jennings gets paid to fellate fascists publicly. I get paid to shame people like Scott Jennings back to hell from whence they came.

Letters from God is now the #1 Humor publication on Substack. That didn’t happen because billionaires helped us. It happened because we are relentless.

Paid subscribers are the reason we can keep writing letters, making videos, doing live shows, and building cartoons. They help us tell the truth while billionaire media corporations keep paying people like Scott Jennings to lie to your face.

This is how we keep growing. This is how we keep fighting.

So if this post made you laugh, made you feel less alone, or reminded you that these people are not invincible, join our community today as a paid subscriber.

Get 25% off forever

We’ve built something real.

Now let’s make it impossible to ignore.

Love,

God

Formatting! Bah! Humbug! I am a big follower of God. The online, real one. Not the imaginary one. Online God (OG, for short) is pretty funny, and pretty liberal (natch) whereas the imaginary one is pretty damn capricious, and you never know what shit he/she/it/they might pull.