Two things matter about this outrage. First, the federal government has unlimited power to create dollars, so there is no reason to withhold money that helps keep children healthy and alive.

The second thing comes in the red paragraph in the article.

Gov. Greg Abbott defends Medicaid funding for Texas

By Terri Langford, The Texas Tribune, September 2, 2026

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is doubling down on the state’s fight to recover nearly $10 billion in Medicaid funding that the Trump administration is withholding from Texas hospitals.

“Texas is working with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to protect funding that helps hospitals serve Medicaid patients and keeps critical emergency care available,” Abbott’s spokesman Andrew Mahaleris said in a statement.

The statement comes two days after The Texas Tribune reported that the governor’s office had stepped into a nearly year-long impasse between the Texas Health and Human Services Commission and Washington over the funding. The money helps hospitals close the gap between Medicaid reimbursements and the actual costs they incur to treat low-income Texans.

The money was to go to Texas hospitals beginning Tuesday, the start of the state fiscal year. Each day it is delayed, it costs Texas hospitals about $27 million, according to the Texas Hospital Association.

Texas hospitals pay about $4.2 billion annually to local taxing districts and the federal government matches that amount for the supplemental Medicaid funding.

Beginning last December, the federal government began questioning Texas HHSC, which administers Medicaid for the state, about how those taxes are generated and calculated, indicating the feds would withhold the money until those questions were answered to their satisfaction. But state health officials have insisted there’s nothing wrong with the way this money is collected and nothing has changed in its calculations.

“Texas’ financing fully complies with federal law, and Texas health care providers should receive the funding they are due,” Mahaleris, Abbott’s spokesman said on Wednesday.

Abbott’s statement and his letter to Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. last month in which the Republican governor characterized the $10 million hold as an economic “gun to the head” is not only a rare public disagreement with the administration, but also one of the strongest public stances his office has made in support of Medicaid funding for Texas.

Texas, under Abbott’s watch, is one of the few states that has not expanded Medicaid to more low-income Texans. This has contributed to Texas having the highest uninsured rate in the nation.

Now, MAGA Governor Abbott suddenly cares about low-income Texans?? He didn’t care when he forced these low-income people to do without healthcare, even though the federal government (under the Democrats) offered to pay.

Why did Abbot do something so stupid? Because Trump told him to, and Abbott is very obedient.

Suddenly, Abbott realizes that the Texas government has to pay, so he panics. Now he wants the federal government to do what it offered to do many months ago — what it is doing for all but the most MAGA-dumb states.

A reminder to Texans who vote Republican, no matter what. You get what you vote for.

Last year, Texas’ health agency had to fight back a measles outbreak as the state endured a claw back of $700 million in unspent COVID funding last year, plus millions more cut in public health funding.

Oh, you don’t believe in vaccination because a Trump dummy told you not to vaccinate. You do realize that Trump is completely vaccinated, don’t you?

Publicly, lawmakers praised the fact that the Trump administration was replacing hundreds of millions in healthcare cuts with a fraction of the loss through smaller grant programs.

Of course he did. Those are the lawmakers who would praise Trump even if he “shot someone on 5th Avenue.” I don’t want to demonstrate Schadenfreude here, because there are innocent children involved, and they can’t control what their damn-fool parents have done.

But if there were no kids involved, I would laugh and shout, “It serves you right, you bigoted fools, for backing America’s #1 bigoted fool. Now, your hatred and bigotry is coming back to bite you. You voted your hatred and now you reap the whirlwind.

But my heart goes out to the kids who have you as parents.

The federal government’s scrutiny comes after the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that Congress passed last year that cut $900 million from Medicaid.

The federal government could have created the needed money, simply by pressing a few computer keys. It had no reason to cut spending, especially while giving tax cuts to the  rich.

Statement from the St. Louis Federal Reserve: “As the sole manufacturer of dollars, whose debt is denominated in dollars, the U.S. government can never become insolvent, i.e., unable to pay its bills. In this sense, the government is not dependent on credit markets to remain operational.” (i.e., doesn’t borrow dollars and is not in debt.)

Alan Greenspan, Former Federal Reserve Chairman: “A government cannot become insolvent with respect to obligations in its own currency. There is nothing to prevent the federal government from creating as much money as it wants and paying it to somebody.

The brunt of those cuts affected those states that expanded Medicaid, but a provision in the legislation effectively froze Texas’ taxing structure for hospitals, prompting the cutoff on the supplemental funding.

Late Tuesday, a CMS spokesman informed the Tribune that it is committed to ensuring that Medicaid funds are used appropriately but offered no other details about the dispute.

“The agency is working with all states to ensure compliance with both longstanding and recent statutory requirements and remains engaged with the state on these issues,” the agency said in a statement. “CMS will continue to monitor the implementation of these changes and their potential impact on access to care for Medicaid beneficiaries.”

The shortfall is the result of a decision by the Trump administration to withhold approval from Texas for about $9.8 billion in the next year from three programs, the bulk of which affects the Comprehensive Hospital Increase Reimbursement Program (CHIRP).

This program gives hospitals additional funding to cover the difference between Medicaid rate payments and the actual costs that hospitals incur to provide services to Medicaid patients. Essentially, hospitals, which often are paid less than what they spend on Medicaid patients due to outdated payment rates set by the state, are losing out on their additional reimbursement for 2027.

Local governmental entities collect taxes from hospitals — about $4 billion a year, according to the Texas Hospital Association — and under the Reimbursement Program, the federal government matches those funds so that Texas hospitals can then use them to cover the actual costs of providing Medicaid services. Hospitals say those Reimbursement Program dollars are critical and if they lose that funding, they will likely have to cut services to patients.

Keep voting Republican, Texas. Trump thanks you for buying his lies, and as for your poor kids, well you really don’t care about them, do you?

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell

(Liz Landers is a correspondent for PBS News Hour, where she covers the White House and the Trump administration. Prior to joining the News Hour, she served as the national security correspondent for Scripps News, and also reported on disinformation for the network.)

What with Trump’s Iranian war, the advent of data centers, and Trump’s additional hatred of solar energy, we have a serious energy shortage.

Liz Landers:  Several large-scale wind energy projects on the East and West Coast of the U.S. have been canceled in the last few months. In March, the administration announced a nearly $1 billion payout to TotalEnergies, which is a French company, to abandon an offshore wind project.

They had bought two leases in 2022, one off the coast of North Carolina. That was for more than $133 million, and then another off the coast of New York for $795 million.

And then last week, more than $900 million in additional payouts were made for two more projects, Bluepoint Wind off the coast of New York and New Jersey and Golden State Wind off the coast of California.

So in the last few months, these payments have totaled nearly $2 billion. The administration had initially tried to block some of these wind projects from going forward, citing national security concerns. Several courts struck that down.

And the Interior Secretary, Doug Burgum, told the Associated Press that these projects were only viable when they were propped up by taxpayer subsidies under the Biden administration.

We reached out to the Department of Interior to ask about this. We did not hear back from them in time.

There are serious questions about the legality of this.

I spoke with Liz Klein earlier today. She was the former director under President Biden of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management. And she does not think that it is legal for the administration to be taking these kinds of steps. Here’s a little bit of what she had to say.

Elizabeth Klein, Former Director, Bureau of Ocean Energy Management: Many of us believe they have gone outside of what is lawful, certainly outside of any appropriate process.

They have crafted these agreements, which really the best way to describe them are backdoor deals that lack transparency. They lack an appropriate process that you would normally follow.

Liz Landers: Klein says that the agency that she used to oversee does not have the statutory or regulatory authority to refund the monies to these companies after they paid for the lease. And this is raising questions for members of Congress and also Republicans in New York state who are questioning the administration’s moves here.

But Trump has been bribed by the coal interests (He calls it “beautiful coal) to stand in the way of renewable, clean energy. Here’s what he lies (says, which in Trump’s case is the same as lying) about China’s wind energy:

“During a January 9, 2026, meeting at the White House with top oil executives, President Trump made the following statement during the meeting.

“All you have to do is say to China, how many windmill areas do you have in China? So far, they are not able to find any. They use coal, and they use oil and gas and some nuclear, not much. But they don’t have windmills, they make them and sell them to suckers like Europe, and suckers like the United States before.”

The U.S. Department of Energy Says Otherwise.

China has more wind and solar capacity than any other country in the world. The country analysis brief on China released by the U.S. Energy Information Administration in May of 2025, shows that China added 76 gigawatts of wind energy in the year 2024. 

A full 16% of all electric generation in China comes from wind, as shown in the EIA chart below.

“The Largest Wind Power Project in the World. The Jiuquan Wind Power Base, otherwise known as the Gansu Wind Farm, is the world’s largest wind power complex; is located in the Gobi Desert near Jiuquan in China’s Gansu Province; has 7,000 turbines with a planned 20GW capacity; enough to provide electricity to a small country (more than 7.5 million homes).

Started in 2008, this multi-phase project is a major symbol of China’s renewable energy ambitions.”

Fact: China has four times more wind energy than America:

1. Lying
2. Hurting America for his own personal gain.
3. Giving to the rich and taking from the rest.

Social Security supposedly is running short of money. Medicare supposedly is running short of money. Helping the middle class and poor is “unaffordable.” But giving billions of dollars away to prevent wind energy is just fine.

Are there still suckers who vote Republican?

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell

Another unnecessary, childish Trump war. Retaliatory tariffs from Canada set to take effect

Trump threatens to escalate trade war with another round.

By Ian Austen, The New York Times

OTTAWA, Ontario — After more than two weeks of finger-pointing, threats and patronizing insults between longtime trading partners, Canada’s latest retaliatory tariffs against the United States were set to take effect just after midnight Eastern time Tuesday.

Polls show that Canadians strongly back Prime Minister Mark Carney’s decision to end trade talks with Washington last month and to hit back with tariffs on about $20 billion in U.S. products entering Canada.

But concerns remain about what might happen next. President Donald Trump has threatened another round of U.S. tariffs if Canada follows through on its plan. Some in Canadian industry say they are inclined to take Trump at his word, at least on
this threat.

People in the Trump administration “are willing to hurt themselves, their own sectors and industries, in pursuit of their goal, however misguided I think it is,” said Flavio Volpe, president of the Automotive Parts Manufacturers’ Association of Canada. “So they may escalate. I hope that we don’t end up in a tit-for-tat situation. We’re going to run out of runway.”

Carney announced Canada’s new tariffs after he pulled Canadian negotiators out of talks in Washington last month — an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to stave off 50% U.S. tariffs on $20 billion in Canadian exports and to reduce or eliminate tariffs of up to 50% on Canadian steel, aluminum and automobiles.

The Trump administration said the tariffs it imposed last month were in part a response to retaliatory tariffs Canada placed last year on some U.S. imports, particularly autos. U.S. officials have repeatedly noted that only China and Canada retaliated against the United States since Trump began upending global trade.

At a news conference after a sternly worded speech announcing the tariffs, Carney declared that Canada had been attacked by the United States and that the two countries are now “at war.”Last week, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent rejected that framing, arguing that Canada is too small an economic power to battle the United States.

“I don’t think you can be in a tit-for-tat with someone who’s 13 times larger than you are,” Bessent said on CNBC.

On Friday, Trump escalated his trade rhetoric even further. He said that he might “end all trade with Canada” and other countries that have trade surpluses with the United States.

Separately, U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said Carney had shut down the talks to gain “political leverage” at home, not because of what the U.S. side had offered.

As last week went on, Carney made it clear that he was in no hurry to return to negotiations and was focused instead on diversifying Canada’s trade and expanding its domestic economy.

Even MAGAs are growing tired of Trump’s endless wars and bullying, all designed to take their minds off his incompetence and the damage he is doing to America.

“Make America great again???” Really??? How do these repeated wars make America great? Oh, and don’t forget about his Epstein scandal.

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell

THE DAILY BEAST: Donald Trump has caused a major diplomatic incident in Europe with a deranged Truth Social post threatening a large-scale U.S. takeover.

 

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell