Dem Governor Vetoes Ban on Surprise Ambulance Bills in Shocking Move

Colorado’s Democratic Governor Jared Polis has vetoed a bill that would ban surprise billing by ambulance companies, over the unanimous objections of both chambers of the state legislature. 

Why would Polis veto a bill that’s popular with everyone, even Colorado Republicans? The governor wrote in his veto statement that drafting errors in the bill made it “unimplementable” and estimated that it would make insurance premiums go up by as much as $0.73 to $2.15 per person. 

“I am committed to working with proponents and sponsors to protect Coloradans from surprise bills, but I encourage all parties to work towards a more reasonable reimbursement rate that mitigates premium impacts and nets a better deal for Colorado families,” Polis wrote. 

In Colorado, if legislators in both chambers repass the bill with a two-thirds majority, they can override the governor’s veto, especially considering that the bill passed with the support of every single legislator. But the legislature adjourned on May 7, meaning that the bill has to be passed again when the legislature reconvenes in January.  

For some reason, ending surprise ambulance billing nationally is not the slam-dunk issue it should be. Congress ended most surprise medical bills in 2020 but exempted ground ambulances from the bill. Was Polis’s veto due to badly drafted language and a (seemingly modest) price hike in insurance premiums, as he said, or was it for a different, more nefarious reason? We might not know unless and until the bill is reintroduced next year.

A good chunk of the white-collar criminals pardoned by Donald Trump after his massive “Day One” pardoning spree either have a political or financial tie to him.

The president has issued 60 pardons since he offered political forgiveness to some 1,600 individuals charged in the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. But out of those subsequent 60 unrelated to the attack, 12 people—or roughly one in five—were already in Trump’s orbit, according to ABC News.

They included several politicos, including former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich, who was convicted on several counts of corruption, including for an attempt to sell Barack Obama’s Senate seat after he left the position for the White House; former Republican Representative Michael Grimm, who pleaded guilty to tax fraud; former Nevada gubernatorial candidate Michele Fiore, who allegedly stole public funds intended to commemorate a slain police officer; and former Tennessee state Senator Brian Kelsey, who pleaded guilty to campaign finance fraud in 2022.

Trump also pardoned major financiers of his presidential campaigns. Trevor Milton, the founder of the Nikola electric vehicle company, donated nearly $2 million toward Trump’s 2024 campaign. Imaad Zuberi, who has donated to both parties, issued “at least $800,000 to committees associated with Trump and the Republican Party,” ABC reported.

Others helped Trump advance his retribution campaign against his political enemies, or helped advance his own image in the broader Republican Party. Devon Archer and Jason Galanis, both former business partners of Hunter Biden, accused the younger Biden of leveraging his father’s name and influence in order to conduct business overseas. Archer had defrauded a Native American tribal entity, while Galanis was serving time for multiple offenses.

Trump also forgave Todd and Julie Chrisley—reality TV stars known for their show Chrisley Knows Best who were sentenced to a combined 19 years on fraud and tax evasion charges—after their daughter Savannah Chrisley spoke at the 2024 Republican National Convention.

Speaking to press Friday after her parents’ release, Savannah Chrisley said that the “biggest misconception right now is I either paid for a pardon or slept for a pardon—,” but she couldn’t finish her sentence before Todd interjected: “That’s something I would have done,” he said.

Donald Trump’s administration was well aware that many of the 238 Venezuelan immigrants it shipped off to a notorious megaprison in El Salvador had no criminal records at all, according to a Friday report from ProPublica.  

While Trump officials claimed that the deportees were brutal gang members and “the worst of the worst,” only 32 of the deportees had actually been convicted of crimes, and most of them were minor offenses such as traffic violations, according to data from the Department of Homeland Security reviewed by ProPublica, The Texas Tribune, and a team of journalists from Venezuelan media outlets. One of the men, 23-year-old Maikol Gabriel López Lizano, faced a misdemeanor charge after he was arrested in 2023 for riding his bike and drinking a can of beer.

Little more than half of the deportees, 130 of the 238, were charged only with violating U.S. immigration laws. Twenty of them had criminal records from other countries. The U.S. government data showed that 67 individuals had pending charges, with only six being for violent crimes. 

In several cases, the government data about the pending charges differed from what ProPublica was able to find. In some cases, the men had actually been convicted, and in one, the charges had been dropped. 

But in many cases, these individuals were remanded to a foreign prison before their criminal cases were ever resolved. 

The Trump administration has touted allegations of gang affiliation as a justification for denying the deportees their due process rights. But none of the men’s names appeared on a list of roughly 1,400 alleged Tren de Aragua members kept by the Venezuelan government, ProPublica reported. 

Trump’s border czar Tom Homan tried desperately in March to downplay reporting that many of these individuals did not have criminal records. “A lot of gang members don’t have criminal histories, just like a lot of terrorists in this world, they’re not in any terrorist databases, right?” Homan said on ABC News. But the methods the government relies on to classify individuals as gang members—such as identification of gang-affiliated tattoos—have been disproven by experts. 

Not only were many of the men who were deported not proven gang members, they weren’t even criminals, and by denying them the right to due process, they were remanded to a foreign prison notorious for human rights abuses without ever getting to prove it. 

Trump has continued to pressure the Supreme Court to allow him to sidestep due process as part of his massive deportation campaign, claiming that the judiciary has no right to intrude on matters of “foreign policy.” But immigrants residing on U.S. soil—who are clearly not the bloodthirsty criminals the administration insists they are—are still subject to protections under U.S. law. 

Republican Senator Joni Ernst had a particularly unhinged response to questions from her constituents at a town hall in Parkersburg, Iowa, on Friday.

Ernst was asked about the GOP’s budget bill kicking people off of Medicaid, and her condescending answer quickly became callous and flippant as the Iowa politician smirked at the audience.

“When you are arguing about illegals that are receiving Medicaid, 1.4 million, they’re not eligible, so they will be coming off, so—” Ernst began, before an audience member shouted, “People are going to die!”

“People are not—well, we all are going to die,” Ernst responded, as the audience drowned her in loud protests.

What was Ernst thinking with that answer? Almost every Republican town hall this year has gone badly for the politician holding it, thanks to President Trump upending the federal government, and Ernst surely knew that choosing death over Medicaid wouldn’t go over well with the crowd. Earlier this week in Nebraska, Representative Mike Flood was heckled after he admitted that he didn’t read the budget bill.

Ersnt’s town hall wasn’t even the first one in Iowa to go badly for a Republican. On Wednesday, Representative Ashley Hinson was met with jeers and boos, with audience members in Decorah, Iowa calling her a fraud and a liar. But at least Hinson had the good sense not to seemingly embrace death over a vital, lifesaving government program.

Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson thinks the Supreme Court “botched” a decision to allow the Trump administration to revoke the Temporary Protected Status protections of about 500,000 Haitian, Cuban, Nicaraguan, and Venezuelan immigrants.

Jackson and fellow liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor were the only two dissenters.

“The Court has plainly botched this assessment today. It requires next to nothing from the Government with respect to irreparable harm,” Jackson wrote in the dissent. “And it undervalues the devastating consequences of allowing the Government to precipitously upend the lives of and livelihoods of nearly half a million noncitizens while their legal claims are pending.”

TPS is a long-standing program that allowed those 500,000 immigrants to stay in the U.S. after they fled violence and risk in their home countries. After the Supreme Court’s ruling, all of them are at high risk of sudden deportation.

“It is apparent that the government seeks a stay to enable it to inflict maximum predecision damage,” Jackson wrote.

Read the full dissent here.

Artificial intelligence researchers claim there’s “definitive” proof that Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his team used AI to write his “Make America Healthy Again” report.

Kennedy’s report projected a new vision for America’s health policy that would take aim at childhood vaccines, ultraprocessed foods, and pesticides. But a NOTUS investigation published Thursday found seven studies referenced in Kennedy’s 68-page report that the listed study authors said were either wildly misinterpreted or never occurred at all—and researchers believe that AI could be partly to blame.

Some of the 522 scientific references in the report include the phrase “OAIcite” in their URLs—a marker indicating the use of OpenAI.

“This is not an evidence-based report, and for all practical purposes, it should be junked at this point,” Georges C. Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association, told The Washington Post. “It cannot be used for any policymaking. It cannot even be used for any serious discussion, because you can’t believe what’s in it.”

AI researcher Oren Etzioni, a professor emeritus at the University of Washington, felt similarly, referring to the report as “shoddy work.”

“We deserve better,” Etzioni told the Post.

During a White House press briefing Thursday, press secretary Karoline Leavitt dodged direct questioning as to whether Kennedy’s department had leaned on AI to draft the report.

“I can’t speak to that, I’d defer you to the Department of Health and Human Services,” Leavitt said while lauding the Kennedy report as one of the most “transformative reports ever released by the federal government.” Leavitt added that the “MAHA report” was backed by “good science” that had “never been recognized” at the national level.

But what the administration will likely brush off as a temporary flub actually sets a horrifically dangerous precedent for the government, as it starts the slow encroachment of unvetted and unverified AI usage to form the basis of America’s public health policy.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem celebrated the arrest of a Mexican man she claims made a threat against Donald Trump’s life—but law enforcement thinks he’s been framed, according to a CNN exclusive report.

In a post on X Wednesday, Noem lauded the arrest of 54-year-old Ramon Morales Reyes, alleging that he’d sent a letter to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, as well as several other federal agencies, threatening to “shoot your precious president in the head.”

“All politicians and members of the media should take notice of these repeated attempts on President Trump’s life and tone down their rhetoric,” Noem wrote in her post.

But a high-level law enforcement official briefed on the matter told CNN that after speaking to Reyes, law enforcement officials had determined he wasn’t the letter’s author. A handwriting sample Reyes provided didn’t match that of the handwritten letter.

Further, investigators suspect that Reyes was set up by someone hoping to see him deported before a separate robbery case, in which Reyes was a victim, could go to trial.

One person suspected of playing a role in the letters had made jail calls inquiring about specific addresses, including one that received the menacing note.

In a press release, the Department of Homeland Security asserted that Reyes had written the letter. The agency also claimed that Reyes had “entered the U.S. illegally at least nine times between 1998-2005.”

“His criminal record includes arrests for felony hit and run, criminal damage to property and disorderly conduct with a domestic abuse modifier,” the DHS said.

The Milwaukee Police Department told CNN on Thursday that the case was still ongoing and that it was “investigating an identity theft and victim intimidation incident related to this incident.” Police added that no one had been charged at this time.

Earlier this week, Noem and White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller announced that they intended for ICE to ramp up arrests even more, aiming to detain a minimum of 3,000 people every day.

President Trump is making remigration, a racist plan popular among the European far right, a reality, according to Reuters.

The State Department on Thursday announced its plans to establish an “Office of Remigration,” assuming it is approved by Congress, on July 1. The term “remigration” is a white supremacist concept pushed by Austrian neo-Nazi Martin Sellner that posits that all immigrants and “non-assimilated citizens” be forcibly removed, with the goal of establishing a white ethnostate.

“The Office of Remigration will serve as the [Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration]’s hub for immigration issues and repatriation tracking,” the plan the State Department submitted to Congress reads. “It will provide a policy platform for interagency coordination with DHS and other agencies on removals/repatriations, and for intra-agency policy work to advance the President’s immigration agenda.”

This isn’t the first time Trump has floated remigration.

“As President I will immediately end the migrant invasion of America,” he wrote on X in September. “We will stop all migrant flights, end all illegal entries, terminate the Kamala phone app for smuggling illegals (CBP One App), revoke deportation immunity, suspend refugee resettlement, and return Kamala’s illegal migrants to their home countries (also known as remigration).”

His deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, another proponent of right-wing white supremacist policy, backed him up.

“THE TRUMP PLAN TO END THE INVASION OF SMALL TOWN AMERICA: REMIGRATION!” he wrote at the time.

While remigration isn’t a household term in the U.S., it’s taken off in certain European political circles. The first “Remigration Summit” took place earlier this month in Milan featuring multiple far-right leaders and chants of “Save our nation, remigration.”

“It’s outrageous,” Wendy Via, CEO and president of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, told Wired. “There is no hiding from the fact that the ultimate goal of ‘remigration’ is purely about ethnic cleansing. It is a terrible day for our country when ‘remigration’ proponents are crediting the US and Trump’s administration for normalizing the term.”

Those on the far right, particularly Sellner himself, think that the U.S. has been well on its way toward establishing remigration for some time now.

“There are differences between Europe and the USA, but the common line is the same: preserving the cultural continuity by stopping replacement migration. Reversing the flows with border security, mass repatriations, and incentives to leave,” Sellner told Wired.

Trump’s immigration crackdown, his extrajudicial disappearances of students based on their beliefs, and his invocation of the 1798 Alien Enemies Act—which asserts that the country is being invaded by immigrants—are all obvious indicators of remigration already occurring here.

“Remigration is in fact already taking place in the US,” white nationalist author Cyan Quinn, who attended the Remigration Summit, told Wired. “The first flight of 64 self-deportees following President Trump’s stipend announcement have already arrived home safely in Honduras and Columbia.”

The Trump administration is collecting data on all Americans, and they are enlisting the data analysis company Palantir to do it.

The New York Times reports that President Trump has enlisted the firm, founded by far-right billionaire Peter Thiel, to carry out his March executive order instructing government agencies to share data with each other. The order has increased fears that the government is putting together a database to wield surveillance powers over the American public.

Since then, the administration has been very quiet about these efforts, increasing suspicion. Meanwhile, Palantir has taken more than $113 million in government spending since Trump took office, from both existing contracts and new ones with the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security. That number is expected to grow, especially given that the firm just won a new $795 million contract with the DOD last week.

Palantir is speaking with various other agencies across the federal government, including the Social Security Administration and the IRS, about buying its technology, according to the Times. Palantir’s Foundry tool, which analyzes and organizes data, is already being used at the DHS, the Department of Health and Human Services, and at least two other agencies, allowing the White House to compile data from different places.

The administration’s efforts to compile data began under Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency initiative, which sought Americans’ personal data from multiple agencies including the IRS, the SSA, Selective Service, Medicare, and many others. In some cases, court orders hindered these efforts, but not in all of them.

Thiel has multiple ties to DOGE, both through Musk and through many of his former employees working for the effort or taking other jobs in the Trump administration. And this data collection effort could give Thiel, Musk, and Trump unprecedented power over Americans, with the president being better able to punish his critics and target immigrants.

Privacy advocates, student unions, and labor rights organizations are among those who have sued to stop Trump’s data collection efforts. Palantir’s involvement also gives a powerful tech company access to this data, and its CEO, Alex Karp, doesn’t exactly have a benign agenda, hoping to cash in on American techno-militarism. Musk too has plans for government data, using his AI, Grok, to analyze it. Will anyone be able to stop Trump and these tech oligarchs?

Donald Trump has decided that his reign as “Mr. Nice Guy” on his Chinese tariff plan has come to an end.

In a Truth Social post Friday, the president claimed that his supposedly soft approach on China in his tariff negotiations had greatly benefited their economy, but added that the Eastern powerhouse had “totally violated” the trade arrangement.

“Two weeks ago China was in grave economic danger!” Trump wrote. “The very high Tariffs I set made it virtually impossible for China to TRADE into the United States marketplace which is, by far, number one in the World. We went, in effect, COLD TURKEY with China, and it was devastating for them.

“Many factories closed and there was, to put it mildly, ‘civil unrest.’ I saw what was happening and didn’t like it, for them, not for us. I made a FAST DEAL with China in order to save them from what I thought was going to be a very bad situation, and I didn’t want to see that happen,” he continued. “Because of this deal, everything quickly stabilized and China got back to business as usual. Everybody was happy! That is the good news!!!

“The bad news is that China, perhaps not surprisingly to some, HAS TOTALLY VIOLATED ITS AGREEMENT WITH US. So much for being Mr. NICE GUY!”

The announcement followed a Thursday night Fox News interview with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, in which the trade negotiator said that talks between the two countries had “stalled.”

Earlier this month, the Trump administration temporarily lowered its import duties on Chinese goods to 30 percent from 145 percent. In exchange, China said it would lower its import tariff on American products to 10 percent from 125 percent. Both nations agreed to maintain a reciprocal tariff rate of 10 percent.

But how countries plan to continue negotiations with the White House over the hit-and-miss trade agreements is unclear, especially after components of Trump’s plan were deemed illegal by different U.S. courts. Trump’s tariff plan was blocked by a trade court Wednesday, with a three-judge panel ruling that the president’s plan exceeded “any authority granted” by the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. (That ruling has been temporarily paused, leaving the tariffs in place while the government appeals the decision.) Less than 24 hours later, another court intervened in Trump’s levies, denoting in a two-page order that the duties were “unlawful.”