Kaaryn Gustafson

I’m so sorry, Katie.

I.R.S. Says Churches Can Endorse Candidates From the Pulpit

Holy shit, a real masks-off moment. Trump's IRS says churches can continue to claim tax benefits as a nonprofit even while explicitly endorsing candidates.
www.nytimes.com/2025/07/07/u...

My mom and stepdad are from the same diaspora group as Zohran Mamdani’s dad (same like “my stepdad was kicked out of the same town and knows some of his classmates”) and apparently the New York Times doesn’t understand how diaspora works, so I am going to tell you a little about my mom’s people!

Report An Error Report An Error

Please report pharmacy errors! Document the errors in writing. States have pharmacy licensing boards. You can usually submit complaints online. You can also anonymously report errors to a nonprofit that works to gather data on medical errors: home.ecri.org/pages/ecri-i... 6/6

The pharmacist filled the Rx incorrectly. My mother had been drugged into a stupor. She thought she was losing her mind and her memory. She had unknowingly been driving under the influence of sleeping pills, endangering herself and others. Staff indicated no plans to hold anyone accountable. 5/6

My polite, Midwestern, don’t- make-a-fuss Mom didn’t raise a stink. She went home, called me, and complained about the rude pharmacy staff. Rudeness was not the problem. 4/6

Mom took the bottles to the pharmacy to point out the error. The person at the pharmacy counter then accused my mother of somehow making a mistake and insisting she must have another bottle at home. No apology. Only after my mother balked did they refill the diuretic. 3/6

She noticed two bottles had pills that looked the same. The evening pill was a sleeping pill, the morning pill was a diuretic. According to Google, the pills in one bottle were the wrong color and had the wrong stamp. Turns out both bottles held sleeping pills; she’d been taking two daily. 2/6

In calls with my mother over the last few weeks, it was clear she wasn’t doing well: entire body swollen; so tired she could barely function. Tears welled up in her eyes when she described her fatigue. Yesterday, my mother Googled her medications to check for side effects or interactions. 1/6

Commentary: 'We're all just a bunch of Josés': Vance's dig at Padilla is a new low “José” is what Vance thinks of Alex. Anyone who thinks this was a slip of the tongue doesn't know their anti-Latino history.

MY LATEST @latimes.com ‬⁩ COLUMNA: 'We're all just a bunch of Josés': Vance's dig at Padilla is a new low. Share, porfas!

Cover of George Takei’s They Called Us Enemy” showing a young Japanese American boy in a line of people being sent to an internment camp guarded by a uniformed American soldier

Meant to mention this last week, but if you have a young person in your life who’s into history or graphic novels or just good books, buy them George Takei’s “They Called Us Enemy.” My oldest couldn’t put it down.

And a slow clap for the jerk who bought out all of the Kevlar-lined wheelchair tires from all of the suppliers a while back, set up a website, and doubled the cost. I curse your mother daily. And not under my breath.

Someone should teach an economics course on market defects. Two case studies—wheelchairs and elevators—could well cover a broad range of the defects (e.g., inelastic demand, captive market, regulatory capture, moral hazard, monopoly).

And let’s not forget that some parts can only be ordered by phone, meaning either a wheelchair user or someone at the repair company will have to sit on hold for an hour just to order a part.

And then there are the wheelchair manufacturers that have redesigned components so that you can’t do minor repairs. Need to change out a $6 bearing in a caster wheel? Sorry. Can’t be done anymore because the bearings have been sealed in. You now have to buy a new casters—sold in pairs. Cost: $700+.

The weeks-long process for getting an insurance company to approve a repair and the months-long process for approval of durable medical equipment is unbelievable. How many work hours are lost and how many injuries suffered during those wait periods?

The mergers of various wheelchair manufacturers and various wheelchair sellers means there is no competition. Wheelchair users are stuck.

Calls to wheelchair companies to request repairs often prompt the receptionist to ask, “Did you buy the wheelchair from us? We only service wheelchairs that we sell.” Asking whether that is an antitrust violation usually will usually get you in for an appointment.

Someone at the company admitted to me that they only make money on the sale of wheelchairs. They don’t make money on repairs and have been trying to figure out how they to avoid doing repairs altogether. 🧵⬇️

I’m sorry, Omri. I hope they remain safe.

Video shows Sen. Alex Padilla forcibly removed from DHS news conference | CNN Politics Democratic Senator Alex Padilla of California was confronted by security and forcibly removed from a news conference being held by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem in Los Angeles.

www.cnn.com/2025/06/12/p...

This is where we are at this point in the decline of free speech rights. If California’s Senator can be roughed up, we are all in trouble.

McGovern: "You are literally taking food off kids' plates to buy Elon Musk another yacht. I guess he's getting a good return on his campaign donations ... this is not policy. This is theft."

THREAD: We recently heard that the Trump administration was leaning on the government of Gambia to help Elon Musk. For weeks, our team made phone calls, wrote letters and knocked on folks’ doors to try to confirm it. But we were stuck.

So our reporters got on a plane to Banjul. 1/

I know there's a lot going on, but I would like to highlight that Mike Johnson slipped language into an otherwise routine House procedural vote yesterday that now blocks Democrats from forcing an investigation into Pete Hegseth’s Signal scandal, through October.

Truly awful; and yet, not new! Been the case for many years!

What’s happening now is that Congressional democrats had FINALLY gotten support for legal services funding for unaccompanied migrant kids, and hundreds of lawyers were working on these cases — then Trump killed the funding in one day.

For this story, I reached out to 42 institutions to gather biomedical graduate admissions data. Those that said class size would decrease reported an average drop of about a third. “The future of the enterprise is jeopardized," Suzanne Ortega, president of the Council of Graduate Schools, told me. 👇

RFK Jr’s autism study collecting Americans’ private medical records The National Institutes of Health claims it is fulfilling RFK’s promise to find cause of autism by September

An autism "registry" culled from private medical records could potentially violate federal privacy laws and runs the risk of abuse.

It also harkens back to a time when disabled people were labeled, segregated, and excluded. We won't go back.