Disaster was averted at a Kentucky hospital when an ostensibly deceased organ donor began “thrashing” around in the operating theater, a preservationist tells NPR.
“He was moving around,” Natasha Miller recalled of the patient, whom NPR identified as Anthony Thomas “TJ” Hoover II. “He was crying visibly.”
The two surgeons assigned to the transplant naturally refused to go through with the procedure, which was reportedly scheduled to take place at Baptist Health Richmond Hospital in October 2021. But when her colleague called Kentucky Organ Donor Affiliates, which coordinated the harvest, Miller said the supervisor told them they “were going to do the case” and needed to “find another doctor.”
In a statement to NPR, a spokesperson for the Network for Hope—an organization formed this year by a merger between KODA and the LifeCenter Organ Donor Network—said that “no one at KODA has ever been pressured to collect organs from any living patient” and that “KODA does not recover organs from living patients.”
Baptist Health Richmond told NPR: “The safety of our patients is always our highest priority. We work closely with our patients and their families to ensure our patients’ wishes for organ donation are followed.” The Daily Beast has contacted both entities for comment.
Another former KODA employee, Nyckoletta Martin, told NPR that Hoover, who’d been believed brain dead, reanimated during a procedure to assess his heart health. “He was thrashing around on the table” at that point, too, Martin said, alleging that his physicians merely “sedated” him. Martin would eventually become the whistle-blower, submitting a letter to Congress for a hearing on organ donation organizations.
A coalition of 1,100 professionals and patients involved in transplant procedures nationwide countered in their own letter that “misinformation” has been “eroding public trust in organ donation” and discouraging people from signing up as donors. But nonetheless, several government agencies—the Kentucky attorney general and the U.S. Health Services and Resources Administration—are reportedly investigating.
While the KODA rep told NPR that the “case has not been accurately represented,” Martin described the incident as “everybody’s worst nightmare.”
“Being alive during surgery and knowing that someone is going to cut you open and take your body parts out?” Martin told NPR. “That’s horrifying.”
Three-quarters of American voters are dissatisfied with Trump’s handling of the Epstein files, recent polling shows.
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Speaker of the House of Representatives Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) has canceled chamber votes scheduled for Thursday, shortening the length of the House’s work this week in order to prevent a potential vote pressuring the Trump administration to release more files on Jeffrey Epstein.
Johnson had previously promised that he wouldn’t cut the House’s work short this week, but abruptly changed his mind after demands for the Epstein files intensified, including within his own Republican conference.
For years, right-wing figures within the MAGA-sphere have suggested that Epstein, the disgraced financier who died in his jail cell in 2019, kept a list of co-conspirators in his child sex trafficking ring. President Donald Trump, who was once friends with Epstein, implied on the 2024 campaign trail that he would release more files, including the “Epstein list,” claiming without evidence that the Biden administration had purposely concealed files from the public.
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After Attorney General Pam Bondi released a short, two-page report denying the existence of an “Epstein list” (months after previously claiming she had the list on her desk), Trump’s MAGA base splintered, with many openly criticizing the administration for failing to live up to its promises to release more of the files. Trump lashed out at those supporters, calling them “weaklings” and stating that he didn’t “want their support anymore.”
Amid continued pressure, however, Trump later acquiesced and called for the Department of Justice (DOJ) to request a New York court to release transcripts of grand jury witness testimony in Epstein’s case and the case involving his girlfriend and child sex trafficking cohort, Ghislaine Maxwell.
Johnson, a staunch ally of Trump’s, is blocking efforts by House lawmakers to pass a resolution calling on the administration to release more files by preventing the House Rules Committee from taking any more consideration for votes, in general, for the rest of the week. That means that the last day of business for the House, ahead of its monthlong August recess, will be on Wednesday, and that the earliest the House could compel a vote on the Epstein files would be in September.
During a press conference on Tuesday, the speaker complained about such efforts, which are being pushed by Democrats along with some Republican lawmakers who have peddled Epstein conspiracy theories over the years.
“The president has said clearly, and he has now ordered his DOJ to do what it is we’ve all needed DOJ to do for years now, and that is to get everything released. So they’re in the process of that,” Johnson stated, adding that Congress pushing the subject would have “no purpose” and would amount to “political games” and “gotcha politics.”
Despite his assertions, Johnson is wrong — requesting grand jury testimonies would not “get everything released” relating to the DOJ’s files on Epstein.
“The president is trying to present himself as if he’s doing something here and it really is nothing,” said Sarah Krissoff, a former assistant U.S. attorney in Manhattan, speaking to The Associated Press over the weekend.
“People want the entire file from however long. That’s just not what this is,” said Joshua Naftalis, a former Manhattan federal prosecutor, adding that the transcripts are “not going to be everything the FBI and investigators have figured out about Maxwell and Epstein.”
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In late summer of a typical year, both parties in Congress are drafting bipartisan appropriations legislation that won’t get filibustered in the Senate and will keep the federal government open when the next fiscal year starts on October 1.
This year is not typical.
Congressional Republicans, at President Donald Trump’s behest, have unapologetically broken faith in the appropriations process by undermining a bipartisan agreement struck just four months ago. That deal kept the government open through the current fiscal year. Since Democrats can no longer trust Republicans to keep their word, they should abandon negotiations over Fiscal Year 2026 spending and let the Republican majority figure out how to keep the government open.
Let’s review what just happened.
During Fiscal Year 2025, Congress passed three bills to fund the federal government, the last signed by Trump in March. These bills set specific spending amounts for government programs.
Last week, Republicans exploited a quirk in the law that allows the Senate to vote on a presidential request for “recissions”—cuts to previously agreed-upon spending amounts—without the possibility of a filibuster. Without any Democratic votes in favor, Republicans clawed back $8 billion in foreign aid and $1 billion in support for public broadcasting. An agreement on funding levels, approved of by a bipartisan Senate supermajority, was rolled back by a narrow partisan simple majority.
If you are charitable, you might say: Nine billion dollars is a rounding error on nearly $7 trillion of federal spending. The lion’s share of the agreement held. And this only happened once. There’s no need to overreact, end negotiations, and stumble into a government shutdown.
However, Trump’s budget director Russ Vought said afterwards that the recissions package was not intended to be a one-off, but the beginning of a new appropriations process. “Who ran and won on an agenda of a bipartisan appropriations process? Literally, no one,” Vought told reporters at the July 17 Christian Science Monitor Breakfast, “No Democrat, no Republican. There is no voter in the country [who] went to the polls and said, ‘I’m voting for a bipartisan appropriations process.’ The appropriations process has to be less bipartisan.” He also said another recissions package is “likely to come soon.”
So there will be a next time, and the next recissions may be even bigger. Any bipartisan agreement is worthless. Trump and the Republican majority will determine the final budget. Why should Democrats provide a wisp of bipartisan cover?
The Democratic response to Vought should be: You want a partisan appropriations process? You got it.
The ranking member of the House Budget Committee, Brendan Boyle, in an article for The Bulwark, encouraged “my fellow Democrats to be wary this September before lending their votes for deals that President Trump is inevitably going to disregard through illegal impoundments, or that Republicans are just going to rip up anyway. Doing so will chip away at public trust, undermine our ability to govern effectively, and weaken the checks and balances meant to protect democracy.”
I would take it a step farther.
Democrats should immediately announce that all talks about Fiscal Year 2026 appropriations are over. Democrats, even in the congressional minority, are willing to share the responsibility of governing for the common good. But they cannot exercise joint responsibility if Republicans not only won’t keep bipartisan agreements but are openly dismissive of them.
Where would that leave the appropriations process?
Under the current rules, in limbo. Trump just signed what he calls the One Big Beautiful Bill, which cleared Congress through the budget reconciliation process, which forbids a Senate filibuster. But as the current rules stand, the type of spending determined through the annual appropriations process is not eligible for budget reconciliation. To pass the Senate, 60 votes will be needed, which means securing at least seven Democratic votes.
Does that guarantee a government shutdown for which Democrats will get blamed?
No. Republicans would have two options.
One, Republicans could change the rules. After all, these are not folks who are especially enamored with norms and precedents. For example, in the budget reconciliation process, Republicans wriggled out of rules meant to limit deficit spending by asserting that expiring tax cuts—initially made temporary to survive budget reconciliation rules—could be extended as “current policy” without adding to the deficit. Republicans then prevented Democrats from having the Senate parliamentarian review the maneuver.
Skirting the parliamentarian was a hair short of overruling the parliamentarian by majority vote. Senate rule changes are supposed to require a two-thirds vote. Still, everyone knows that rule changes can be, and have been, steamrolled by overruling the parliamentarian by simple majority. (This is the so-called “nuclear option” maneuver.) But nothing is stopping Republicans from crossing that line too, except the recognizing Democrats could do the same the next time they have a Senate majority. If you want a partisan appropriations process, that’s how to get it.
Two, Republicans could capitulate. The Fiscal Year 2026 appropriation bills could include provisions that protect spending from the threat of recission. Separate legislation could be enacted that broadly subjects future rescission requests to filibusters.
The former, of course, is more likely than the latter. But both are ways the Republican majority is empowered to avoid a government shutdown. They are the party in control. They have already indicated they do not believe the minority party should share governing responsibilities. So it’s entirely on Republicans to keep the government open; they own the consequences of failing to do so. It’s not the Democrats’ job to keep the government open and have no say in how the federal government functions.
Why wait to make that clear? Democrats shouldn’t want to have a government shutdown. Publicly ending negotiations now gives Republicans the maximum time to determine their next steps. Trump is already pressuring the Senate Majority Leader to cancel the August recess to get more of his nominees confirmed, including highly controversial ones such as Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove to a federal appeals court despite being accused by a whistleblower of encouraging defiance of judicial orders. If Republicans are going to cut short their break, they might as well work on keeping the government open.
Sometimes the minority party is caught between what’s politically smart and what’s necessary for the public interest. This is not one of those times. Walk away.
Philly workers went out on strike—and came back with a deal that nobody seems to like.
(6ABC Philadelphia)
It has now been a week since Philadelphia’s striking municipal workers went back on the job. During their historic eight-day work stoppage, normal city operations ground to a very obvious halt.
When contract negotiations broke down at the end of June between Mayor Cherelle Parker’s administration and AFSCME District Council 33—which represents 9,000 of the city’s blue-collar employees—the union had a choice. It could accept a contract extension (as it had already done in 2024) or consent to stay at the bargaining table and work without a contract. Instead, the union chose the more difficult path. For the first time since 1986, DC33 walked out.
The major issue was money. DC33 is the lowest-paid of the city’s four municipal unions; it is also the only one with a majority-Black membership. In 2024, the union was able to negotiate a 5 percent raise alongside the contract extension that Mayor Parker had requested, but even with that small bump, the members struggled.
The median salary for a DC33 member is $46,000, startlingly low compared to those of their counterparts in places like Chicago and New York City; for sanitation workers, with a salary range of $39–42,000, that comes out to about $18–20 per hour to deal with the 610,000 tons of trash the city generates annually, and falls several thousand dollars short of a living wage. One of the primary purposes of a strike is to apply pressure, and few of us enjoy quite so much leverage as a sanitation worker in a major city during the midst of a summer heat wave.
When DC33’s representatives, including outspoken union president Greg Boulware, sat down with the city to hammer out a new contract for its members, they aimed to make significant improvements to that embarrassing status quo. It shouldn’t have been that big of a lift. The city currently has a budget surplus of $882 million that is under the mayor’s direct control. Parker budgeted $550 million to cover new contracts for the four municipal unions (DC33, its sister union DC47, the firefighters, and the police, whose recruits start at a comparatively princely $64,000).
Given that the mayor’s latest city budget proposal includes $872 million for the police department, out of a total $6.7 billion, one might have assumed that Parker could easily find a few extra pennies for the city’s blue-collar workers. In addition, Mayor Parker proudly styles herself and her administration as pro-worker and pro-union. Her own personal story of growing up in poverty in North Philadelphia burnishes her working-class bona fides, and as the first Black woman to hold Philadelphia’s top job, she shares common ground with many of the women who make up DC33. Parker, a moderate Democrat who ran on “tough on crime” policies, is especially friendly with the building trades, whose support helped her get elected in 2023. Conversely, DC33 declined to endorse her that year, and her evolving relationship with the union and its leadership has remained less than cozy.
Despite this, reporting from The Philadelphia Inquirer implied that the union still hadn’t expected to be met with so much resistance, and was taken aback by the Parker administration’s combative, sometimes outright hostile posture during the strike. After a few days on the picket lines, in an effort to play ball, DC33 even bumped their original ask of an 8 percent raise for each year of a four-year contract down to 5 percent, but Parker refused to budge, citing a need to keep the city “on solid fiscal ground.”
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The term “blue-collar city worker” covers a lot of bases, and it’s a high-wire act to keep a city of 1.5 million people running at all, let alone efficiently, without the people whose job titles fall under that vague definition. This became very clear, very quickly, when the strike began at 12:01 am on July 1. But instead of returning to the bargaining table with a better offer, the Parker administration ran to the courts. A flood of litigation began the moment DC33 walked out. A judge quickly granted the city three injunctions: one that forced striking 911 dispatchers back to work, another that did the same to a “skeleton crew” of water department employees, and one that slapped restrictions on workers and their allies’ ability to picket outside municipal buildings.
Philadelphia’s labor community was taken aback. “Aggressive injunctions meant to break a strike and attacking union leaders to divide them from membership is straight from the anti-union playbook,” City Council member Kendra Brooks said in a statement following the end of the strike. “That’s divisive in a pro-union town.”
By July 3, another injunction sent strikers from the medical examiners’ office back to work. A “backlog” meant that the morgue was “over capacity,” as news coverage delicately phrased it, and bodies were being stored two to a bed. The lack of staff had also left the office struggling to pick up and transport bodies to refrigerated storage areas, as exemplified by the horrifying story of a 19-year-old man who had been shot in the face early that morning and left for dead. His body lay in the street for hours, half a block from his home. As the mayor continued to insist that the city’s offer was worth taking, corpses were piling up and bodies were being left outside in 90-degree weather because the workers who usually handled them were out sweating on the picket lines.
The living were suffering, too. Late in the evening on July 3—perhaps the strike’s most unfortunately eventful day—36-year-old sanitation worker Tyree Ford and his pregnant fiancée, fellow DC33 member Aaliyah Norris, were doing picket duty on Delaware Avenue when a drunk driver swerved onto the sidewalk they were sitting on. In the split second before it hit them, Ford leapt to push Norris out of the way, saving her life as well as that of their unborn son. That left only his body to absorb the impact from the black SUV.
According to his sister, Crystal Purnell-Bolden, Ford suffered a litany of severe injuries, including multiple skull fractures, a broken femur, a broken collarbone, a broken pelvis, and injuries to his eyes, face, and lungs. The father of six has a long road ahead of him, and his sister has set up a GoFundMe to help with his medical expenses. “Those men and women are out there just to do their part and to have something tragically happen like that senselessly, it’s terrible,” DC33 president Greg Boulware said when he heard the news. “God willing he’s able to recover. He may never get the opportunity to work again because of the severity of his injuries.”
Under the tentative agreement that Mayor Parker and DC33’s executive board signed on July 8, Ford would not be in good financial shape even if he did miraculously make it back to work tomorrow. As a sanitation worker, he would’ve stood the most to gain from that 5 percent raise the union sought, and it still wouldn’t have been much. Once the public was informed about how little these city workers actually make (and experienced a tiny taste of what the sanitation workers deal with every day), the city’s refusal to bend came across as petty and mean, instead of the “tough love” approach they were clearly aiming for. Parker’s insistence on defending her own six-figure salary and hefty recent raise rubbed people the wrong way, too, and her communications team fanned the flames by putting out infographics that seemed to imply the workers were asking for too much. The public began to speak up on social media and at rallies, urging the mayor to pony up and pay the workers what they were asking. Parker became the face of the strike, serving as the unhappy inspiration for both “Parker piles” and the popular picket line chant, “What’s that smell? Blame Cherelle!”
When LL Cool J and Jazmine Sullivan canceled their appearances at the Wawa Welcome America concert on July 4 in solidarity with the strikers, it seemed as though a corner had been turned. Surely, the mayor would have to come around now. The national media was finally starting to pay attention, their cameras lingering lovingly on the reeking garbage piles that began to take over the city. With heavy rainstorms on the way, the trash problem was about to get exponentially worse, and no one was excited about that prospect (especially the small-business owners and homeowners who were already complaining about the temporary dumpsters parked in front of their buildings). Parker had already been caught using scab labor to set up the Welcome America stages and paying private contractors to dispose of (some) trash. It just didn’t make political sense for her to commit to lowballing these workers. The strike was tumultuous, disruptive, and very, very pungent, yet the residents of the city were still behind the strikers all the way.
So when the news broke early in the morning of July 8 that the strike was over, it took many people by surprise—including the strikers. A huge support rally that had been planned to take place at City Hall that afternoon was hurriedly canceled, and strikers began receiving notices to report back to work. Rumors flew. Had Parker been preparing to unleash an injunction ordering the sanitation workers back to work on public health and safety grounds, as she’d done with the medical examiners office? Were the pressures of these underpaid workers’ first week without a paycheck too dire? Did the wretchedly hot, humid, rainy weather play a role?
No one but the people who were directly involved in negotiations knows for sure, but DC33’s Boulware made his feelings plain as he exited the municipal building that morning. “The strike is over, and nobody’s happy,” he told The Philadelphia Inquirer. “We felt our clock was running out.”
A rough outline of the deal was soon shared online and with the membership, and to call it “underwhelming” would be a real seventh-inning stretch. The end result was a 9 percent raise over a three-year contract, which was far below what the union was seeking ( remember, most of these workers are making less than $2K per month after taxes). They did manage to retain control over their healthcare plan and beat back some of the city’s more punitive proposals, but it was more of a defensive win than anything else. With the annual rate of inflation at 2.9 percent, the workers may be getting an immediate 3 percent “raise,” but they’ll basically be treading water.
On Monday afternoon, union members voted to approve the contract. Meanwhile, Mayor Parker hailed the deal as a victory for her administration, though she may be the only one happy about it. While she stood her ground and successfully defended what she thought was her fiscal responsibility, her reputation among the city’s labor community has been indelibly tarnished. Parker’s term as mayor isn’t up until 2027, but she’s already been looking ahead—and as she herself acknowledged, that future may not be bright. “You can threaten me with not supporting me if I decide to run for reelection,” Parker said at the top of the Philadelphia Art Museum steps during the strike. “But I’ll tell you what I will not do. I will not put the fiscal stability of the city of Philadelphia in jeopardy for no one. If that means I’m a one-term mayor, then so be it.”
For now regular trash pickup has resumed, more or less, and the stinking, moldering “Parker piles” of trash, furniture, and discarded construction materials that dominated the news coverage have begun to disappear. The water supply is flowing (though you should probably still use a filter). The libraries and city pools are open; the airport is running as smoothly as it ever does; and if you call 911, an operator meets you on the line. The medical examiners’ office is operating at its normal capacity, busy as ever in a town where murder or accidental death is a daily occurrence.
DC33’s workers are back on the job, doing what they do to keep the city running. They know that Philadelphians will have their backs, but they are still underpaid, still overworked, and unappreciated by the people who sign their paychecks.
In short, something’s still rotten in the city of Philadelphia, and everyone can smell it.
With Trump and Stephen Miller cheering on ICE’s terror tactics, Jaime Alanis Garcia’s fatal fall in the raid on Glass House Farms was the most recent example of a death foretold.
A conversation with the medical sociologist about her new book, Get It Out, and the perils of considering abortion, hysterectomy, and gender-affirming care as separate issues.
And that’s exactly what the Orange Jello Mold did yesterday, posting an AI depiction of Obama getting arrested after Tulsi Gabbard said Obama falsely claimed Russia aided Trump’s election.
Oh yeah, and it was captioned “No One Is Above The Law.”
Because Obama was actually elected without Vlad’s help.
Because Black man.
Because Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize.
Because Obama is thin and handsome, and is praised for his intelligence and speaking skills.
Because he desperately needs a distraction from the ongoing Epstein story.
