BREAKING: “YOU DON’T SEE MAGA HATS ANY MORE!” – Jamie Raskin returns from the road with a startling observation: “Support for Republicans is melting away.” Rep. Jamie Raskin has spent weeks traveling through rural America – and says something is disappearing from the landscape. “You don’t see any MAGA hats anywhere in the country anymore,” Raskin said. “So the support for the Republicans is melting away.” That's Raskin's first-person read of what he's been seeing on the road. But he says there's something considerably more serious behind the disappearing red hats: anger over what is happening to health care in rural America. “People in the rural areas are especially revved up to get rid of MAGA rule in Congress,” Raskin said. He pointed to Medicaid, Affordable Care Act tax credits and the enormous financial pressure already facing rural hospitals. One of his stops was Michigan's sprawling 1st Congressional District, where Raskin campaigned with Democrat Callie Barr. Barr has been warning for months about the disappearance of maternity care across northern Michigan. “We've lost three labor and deliveries in the past year and a half,” Barr said earlier this year. Local reporting identifies those losses as obstetric services in Laurium and Ironwood and the closure of the hospital in Ontonagon. Raskin put the human consequence much more starkly. “That means people are having to drive four or five hours to get somewhere where they can actually deliver a baby,” he said. “This kind of thing is going on across rural America.” Raskin can't prove a national political realignment by counting baseball caps from the campaign trail. But the missing hats are really just his metaphor for what he says he encountered underneath them – rural communities angry about hospitals, health care and the increasing distance between people and basic medical services. And whatever happens to the hats, women having to travel hours simply to give birth is a much more consequential story. If you agree, like and share this post.

BREAKING🚨 ICE has been running a mass immigration operation in Memphis for almost a YEAR, with more than 1,200 officers still on the streets of one of America's largest majority-Black cities, and most of the country has never heard about it.

Since last September, a 31-agency task force has patrolled Memphis at the invitation of Trump and Republican Gov. Bill Lee, sold to the public as a crime crackdown. Officials never mentioned immigration. 

The first months brought hundreds of immigration arrests, a sixfold jump, and a review of that arrest data found the vast majority of those picked up had no criminal convictions. Most were taken during traffic stops.

Hunter Demster, a Memphis resident who runs a soup kitchen and drives around filming task force activity so people can see it, has had Tennessee's Halo Law invoked against him dozens of times. The law makes it a crime to come within 25 feet of an officer after a warning.

On August 26, Demster was recording from a sidewalk when agents pointed at him and yelled "25 feet." As he backed away, two agents kept walking toward him, issuing the warning again and again, so that standing still became a violation. When Demster said he was already far more than 25 feet back, an agent told him, "You've gotta be 25 feet back from me because I've extended the scene." Agents then surrounded him, tackled him to the ground, pinned him, restrained his legs and handcuffed him.

ACLU of Tennessee legal director Lucas Cameron-Vaughn arrived, identified himself as Demster's lawyer, and was ordered to move back 25 feet and threatened with arrest too.

Four days later, agents massed across the street from Demster's house. One called him by name. As they left in unmarked vehicles, an agent in a U.S. Marshals vest photographed his home. On September 3, a task force SUV was parked outside his house, and a man inside stuck his phone out the window and filmed him.

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