September 30, 2026 (Wednesday)

A Washington Post headline today read: “U.S. withdraws forces in Iraq as balance of power shifts to Iran.”

Journalists Mustafa Salim and Alex Horton explained: After more than two decades, the deaths of more than 200,000 Iraqi civilians and more than 4,500 U.S. troops, the wounding of more than 30,000 U.S. military personnel, and the cost of more than $2.8 trillion, the last of the U.S. military forces in Iraq today pulled out of Erbil Air Base in northern Iraq.

In December 2021 the military announced it was ending U.S. combat in Iraq, leaving about 2,500 troops to advise and assist Iraqi forces. In 2023 the Iraqi government called for complete U.S. withdrawal, and former President Joe Biden and former Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani agreed to a withdrawal plan in 2024, but Iraq allowed a small contingent of advisors to remain after that deadline when the collapse of Bashar Al-Assad’s regime in Syria led to concerns that the confusion in Syria would allow militant Islamic groups to regain a foothold there.

At the time Biden agreed to withdraw from Iraq, Iran appeared to be on the ropes, with its regime isolated from neighboring countries and laboring under sanctions and increasing public unrest. Now, as Salim and Horton note, Trump’s impulsive war on Iran has strengthened Iran’s hand in the region.

The U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks on the United States two years before, although Iraq was not involved in that attack.

After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, a group of foreign policy hawks known as “neocons” were frustrated that Democratic President Bill Clinton was not pushing American ideology overseas as hard as they thought he should. In 1997, political commentator William Kristol brought together Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and other neocons to insist that the United States should significantly increase defense spending and lead the world.

Believing that Iraq’s Saddam Hussein was destabilizing the Middle East, they saw removing him from power as key to their “Project for the New American Century.” Iraq had allied with the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and neocons believed the U.S. must “challenge regimes hostile to our interests and values” and “promote the cause of political and economic freedom abroad.”

Saddam was out of reach until September 11, 2001, when neocons saw al-Qaeda’s attack on the U.S. as an opportunity to “hit” Saddam Hussein, although he had not been involved in the attack. The terrorists—fifteen from Saudi Arabia, two from the United Arab Emirates, one from Lebanon, and one from Egypt—were operating out of Afghanistan, where the ruling extremist Islamic government, the Taliban, permitted al-Qaeda to have a foothold.

Although Saddam was not affiliated with the 9/11 attackers, officials in the George W. Bush administration pushed so hard on the idea that the terrorists were affiliated with Iraq that many Americans—especially those who watched the Fox News Channel, which pushed the connection—came to believe, incorrectly, that the 9/11 terrorists either were Iraqi or were working with Saddam Hussein.

Bush launched attacks on the Taliban government, successfully overthrowing it before the end of 2001. And then the administration undertook to reorder the Middle East in America’s image. In 2002 it announced the Bush Doctrine, arguing that the new conditions of terrorism required the government to act preemptively to forestall hostile acts rather than wait for an attack.

It embraced the idea that there was “right and wrong” in foreign affairs and demanded that America wage “a war of ideas” by spreading pro-American economic and cultural policies. It warned that there were few greater threats to America than a terrorist attack with weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), meaning nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons.

To convince recalcitrant foreign policy realists that Saddam Hussein needed to be removed from power, Bush administration officials warned that the dictator was amassing WMDs, including nuclear devices. In a television interview, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice warned of mushroom clouds rising over American cities and insisted that Saddam was working to obtain a nuclear weapon.

On February 5, 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, spoke passionately before the United Nations, providing what he insisted was evidence that Saddam had chemical WMDs and had obtained the resources to create nuclear weapons. He hinted that the Iraqi leader had worked with al-Qaeda in 2001 or that he might in the future.

Powell was well known and trusted; if he said Iraq was deadly dangerous, people thought it must be true. It later turned out that Powell had not personally vetted the “evidence” he presented and that it was almost entirely either discredited or made up of rumor.

But his speech did the trick. Enough countries to call it a “coalition of the willing”—although the only major power that participated was the United Kingdom—backed an invasion of Iraq. On March 20, 2003, American troops invaded Iraq with the intention of overthrowing Saddam Hussein’s government. The operation would be a “cakewalk,” the administration thought; desperate Iraqis who hated their leader would welcome coalition forces with open arms. Like cowboy heroes—and often portrayed as cowboys—American soldiers would bring democracy and capitalism to the benighted Iraqis.

Saddam’s forces crumbled in little over a month. By May the United States had set up a transitional government in Iraq overseen by former ambassador and State Department official L. Paul Bremer.

On May 1, 2003, Bush landed in a fixed-wing aircraft on the carrier USS Abraham Lincoln. Wearing a flight suit, he posed for photographs with the vessel’s crew, which had just returned from the Persian Gulf. Bush then gave a speech announcing the end of major combat operations in Iraq. Festooning the aircraft carrier was a giant banner emblazoned “Mission Accomplished.”

But, of course, it wasn’t.

Today on social media, Trump took credit to himself for ending the U.S. engagement in Iraq—although he confused the names of two different Iraqi operations—complaining that it was “very bad decision-making that got us involved in this quagmire in the first place.”

And yet the United States is entering its eighth month of a war on Iran that Trump apparently began with the same cowboy mentality Bush carried into the war in Iraq.

Today Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth delivered a “State of the Force” address at Marine Corps Base Quantico. He announced he had transformed the military by enforcing the idea of “o fatties, no trannies, no beardos, no weirdos, no wimps, no radicals. Just warriors.”

“The ideological clowns are out,” he said. “The patriotic cowboys are in, with testosterone testing on top.”

Ta.

o fatties, no trannies, no beardos, no weirdos, no wimps, no radicals

—

Those are exactly the rules for visitors to my place.

October 1, 2026 (Thursday)

John Hudson of the Washington Post reported this evening that the Trump administration is openly defying Congress, taking $52 million in military assistance lawmakers appropriated for European and Middle Eastern countries hurt by Russia’s war on Ukraine and diverting it to right-wing governments in Panama, Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia.

When the State Department notified Congress last month that it intended to make the switch, Senator Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) and Representative Gregory Meeks (D-NY) put a hold on the funds. Late yesterday, the administration told Congress it is defying the hold and moving ahead. Shaheen and Meeks objected, warning the White House that Congress had provided the money for a specific purpose and that “he Executive Branch does not have unlimited discretion to redirect these funds toward unrelated Administration policy priorities or countries.”

The State Department told Hudson that Trump is prioritizing the Western Hemisphere and that the money would be better spent in Latin America than where Congress wanted it.

The U.S. Constitution is clear that only Congress can appropriate money and that the president must execute the laws as Congress passes them, but the Trump administration has been aggressive about its intention to take control of the power of the purse from Congress. Yesterday Tarini Parti, Marianne LeVine, and Michelle Hackman of the Wall Street Journal reported that the administration appears to have taken $20 million from the funds Congress appropriated for the Department of Homeland Security to pay for the ads boosting Trump before the midterms.

That destruction of the fundamental separation of powers at the heart of our government has gotten very little pushback from Republican lawmakers. And senators left Washington, D.C., today for a recess until after the midterms; the House is already in recess.

The White House has made very little secret of its determination to abandon the international order the U.S. helped to put into place after World War II. In its place, Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth appear to embrace the idea that major powers should exercise influence over the countries around them, as Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, believes.

Yesterday Paul McLeary, Stefanie Bolzen, and Jack Detsch of Politico reported that the Trump administration had not invited the United Kingdom, France, the Baltic countries, or other U.S. allies to a meeting of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) members next month in Poland. The meeting is being directed by Defense Department policy chief Elbridge Colby and is designed to discuss NATO’s future. The exclusion of traditional U.S. allies has raised concerns that the U.S. is continuing to try to splinter NATO according to those Trump considers loyal and those whose actions he dislikes.

Earlier this week, Putin warned NATO that he might use nuclear weapons against NATO countries. German chancellor Friedrich Merz said Putin’s threats are a sign of his “desperation” over the Ukraine invasion and that Europe expects Russia to launch “severe” hybrid attacks: sabotage, cyberattacks, and destabilizing disinformation. Should such attacks come, Merz said, “we would respond quickly and very clearly.”

The fact that the United States Constitution and foreign affairs appear to be at the mercy of one man and the loyalists he has around him undermines the principles at the heart of our democracy. The fact that that one man’s mental acuity has collapsed is an immediate calamity.

Time magazine today released a “lightly edited” transcript of an interview their senior political correspondent Eric Cortellessa and editor-in-chief Sam Jacobs conducted with Trump at the White House on September 28.

The interview reveals a man unable to answer questions coherently, obsessed with his architectural projects, consumed by his own fantasy of himself, and angry at the media that he feels mistreats him. He does not appear to be a well man.

He complained bitterly that the three Supreme Court justices he appointed “voted against me too often,” and suggested he expects “loyalty” from them. Asked about the national debt, which just passed $40 trillion, he blamed Biden for it, although Trump by himself has added $11 trillion to the debt in his time in office. He insisted he will change the name of artificial intelligence to “super intelligence.” Once again, he claimed that the economic growth created by AI will pay off the debt.

Trump refused to rule out using the Insurrection Act before the midterms, demolishing the Kennedy Center, or “annihilating” Iran. He talked about designating the Oval Office a national landmark so no one can alter the changes he’s made to it, covering it in gold frippery.

Despite having hit new lows in his job approval ratings, he claimed: “I would beat anybody running today by 20 points. Your numbers that you have are fake. The pollsters are corrupt. They’re almost as corrupt as the writers.”

“I have the highest of IQs. I have the highest. I’m fine, and I understand that stuff. You know, my uncle was at MIT for 41 years, and you know, I’m a—I believe in genetics, frankly, and I understand. I understand it much more than I think any president would, because I do have an ability on this. I have an ability on those things that were the new frontiers.”

“Here we are doing this. You haven’t asked me one f*cking positive question. All of this. What about this? What about that? What about that? What about this? All negative.”

Aaron Rupar of Public Notice recommended “people read this to get a sense of the president’s grave cognitive impairment.”

Trump’s inability to tell the difference between his fantasies and reality was on display Wednesday when, as Timothy W. Martin and Gavin Bade of the Wall Street Journal explained, Trump announced that the South Korean government had agreed to invest $50 billion in a liquefied natural gas (LNG) pipeline in Alaska. With him was Senator Dan Sullivan (R-AK), whose seat is in danger from Democratic candidate Mary Peltola. “This one is huge for Alaska,” Sullivan said, and his office later celebrated the “historic $54 billion Korean investment” into Alaska’s LNG pipeline.

In fact, the Commerce Department and South Korea’s Industry Ministry had simply agreed to “commence working” on such a project. The South Korean government disagreed with Trump’s statement. “Putting out figures, or using definitive language, goes far beyond what was agreed,” South Korea’s industry minister, Kim Jung-kwan said. South Korea’s president, Lee Jae Myung, took to social media to emphasize that the plan will proceed only if it turns out to be financially viable and meets legal requirements in South Korea.

Trump on Monday announced a deal to build a $15 billion steel plant in Lee County, Iowa. As Stephanie Kaloi of Mediaite reported, at the announcement, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told him the plant came from “your 232 tariffs, the steel tariffs at work.” Energy Secretary Chris Wright said the plant is the “Trump reindustrialization of America hitting the ground at a series scale.” Lutnick said: “I think this deal is done. This deal is done. They’ve already worked it out. That’s why we’re all together with the president. The president doesn’t bring people together unless it’s a done deal. You guys know that already.” To that, Trump added: “They’ve already started building.”

But when Matt Christensen of KWQC in Davenport, Iowa, went to look, he found no major property purchases tied to the project this year. “Company officials say they don’t have details about its plans, and no permits have been filed. The financial side isn’t settled, either,” he said. “The Iowa legislature will meet Friday in a special session to debate incentives for the company to build in Iowa. Meanwhile, Trump and lawmakers still haven’t disclosed exactly where in Lee County the plant would go. For residents here, that’s left more questions than answers about a project the White House is calling ‘a sure thing.’”

This afternoon, as he set off for Denton, Texas, before a rally in Durant, Oklahoma, Trump told reporters about Iran: “Now I have to make a decision. They’ll either sign a very fair deal, or they won’t exist any longer.” In Texas he told the crowd the U.S. would “win very easily…right after the election.”

Although the outrageous chaos of the Trump years has numbed us, it is not acceptable for the president of the United States to threaten another nation with annihilation.

Lara Seligman and Shelby Holliday of the Wall Street Journal reported today that the United States will send a third aircraft carrier strike group to the Middle East. The USS Theodore Roosevelt will join the USS George H.W. Bush and the USS George Washington, adding 9,000–10,000 troops to the more than 50,000 U.S. troops already in the region.

The Roosevelt left San Diego on Sunday, while a group of three amphibious ships and Marines from the 13th Marine Expeditionary Unit left Monday. They will arrive at their destination by the end of November.

Meanwhile, here at home, Judge Todd E. Edelman today dismissed the government’s case against David Hearn with prejudice, meaning it cannot be resurrected. Hearn is the Olympian the government accused of vandalizing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, although the contractors themselves acknowledged they were responsible for its torn lining. After the government acknowledged that there was no merit in its prosecution of Hearn, Trump continued to insist Hearn should be prosecuted.

“ecause the government’s legitimate interest in maintaining the possibility of a future prosecution seems so marginal, and because of the extraordinary possibility that Mr. Hearn will nonetheless face a meritless, politically motivated prosecution,” the judge said, the court must protect him from uncertainty “and from what, objectively, would be harassment” from his own government

Thanks for posting. It’s madness. Complete madness.

October 2, 2026 (Friday)

Trump held a campaign rally tonight in Mobile, Alabama, the city where, as Shawn McCreesh of the New York Times recalled, his MAGA rallies really took off in August 2015, when more than 30,000 people showed up at a football stadium to hear the television personality turned presidential candidate.

Just two months before, on June 16, 2015, Trump had announced his campaign for the presidency. In his speech at Trump Tower, he tapped into the anger of those people who had been left behind economically since the 1970s, when U.S. companies began to ship manufacturing jobs overseas and automate factories, taking manufacturing jobs with them.

The economy had grown in the 1980s, but most of the jobs had been in the service industries. Those were dominated at the top by men—and increasing numbers of women—with business or law degrees and at the bottom by jobs coded toward women and immigrants. At the same time, cuts to education and to the social safety net pushed upward mobility out of reach for families in towns and cities whose disappearing manufacturing base took everything else with it.

By 1994, Robert Reich, secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton, warned that the U.S. was “on the way to becoming a two-tiered society composed of a few winners and a larger group of Americans left behind, whose anger and whose disillusionment is easily manipulated.” He explained: “Once unbottled, mass resentments can poison the very fabric of society, the moral integrity of a society. Replacing ambition with envy, replacing tolerance with hate. Today the targets of…that rage are immigrants and welfare mothers and government officials and gays and an ill-defined counter-culture. But as the middle class continues to erode, who will be the targets tomorrow?”

In 2015, in rhetoric mimicking the classic blueprint of rising dictators, Trump tapped into the anger of people who felt they had been dispossessed from their rightful place of importance in the country and tapped into the country’s racism and sexism as he told them to blame immigrants and Democratic politicians for their plight. And he promised he was the only person who could restore them to their former significance.

He devoted most of his speech to how other countries—China, Japan, Mexico, Saudi Arabia—were “killing us economically.” American workers had no protection from immigrants, he said, and they were being undercut by their inferiors. “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” he said. “They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” Contrasting American workers with those immigrants, he claimed people “from all over South and Latin America, and…probably from the Middle East,” were taking American jobs.

Although the actual unemployment rate was 5.6%, he claimed it was “anywhere from 18 to 20 percent”—although he then upped it to 21%—and “the worst since 1978.” “A lot of people…can’t get jobs,” he said. “They can’t get jobs, because there are no jobs, because China has our jobs and Mexico has our jobs. They all have jobs.

He sneered at the federal government, claiming “stupid” politicians had no idea how to negotiate and were wasting so much money that the national debt was close to $24 billion, a number he called “the point of no return…. That’s when we become a country that’s unsalvageable.”

He claimed the ACA, dubbed “Obamacare,” must be “replaced with something much better for everybody. Let it be for everybody. But much better and much less expensive for people and for the government. And we can do it.” He promised to build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico, to “rebuild the country’s infrastructure,” and to get rid of the “horrible and laughable deal” with Iran, finding a better way to “stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons.”

He promised to bring back jobs, bring back the military, take care of veterans, and be a cheerleader for the country. He boasted he was worth more than $8 billion, promising that he could make the country as successful as he was. He promised to “Make America Great Again,” and in August 2015, more than 30,000 Alabamians turned out to see him at the start of what would be a rise to the presidency of the United States.

As journalist McCreesh reported, Trump’s return to Mobile tonight had a wistful feel. The stadium where he spoke was nowhere near the size of the football stadium of 2015, and even so, it was not full. McCreesh noted that some of the upper sections were almost entirely empty.

Trump is planning to travel to 17 states before the midterms to rally MAGA voters who might otherwise not turn out. “Can everybody just close your eyes and pretend I’m on the ballot?” Trump asked the audience in Mobile.

That is no longer a selling point, even for many of those who embrace the administration’s racism and sexism.

An AP/NORC poll from September 24 showed that only 31% of Americans give Trump good marks for how he is handling the presidency. G. Elliott Morris of Strength in Numbers noted today that in September, rising prices turned a majority of Republicans and Republican-leaning Independents against Trump’s handling of the economy. The rising price of diesel has hit rural America particularly hard, and it was in rural America where Trump found his strongest support.

Today’s jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed that the U.S. added just 29,000 jobs last month, unemployment has risen to 4.2%, and wage growth has slowed. The bureau revised the job numbers for August and July downward, showing that July actually saw a loss of 10,000 jobs.

Trump is aware enough of his falling popularity that, according to Maggie Haberman, Hamed Aleaziz, Shane Goldmacher, and Jonathan Swan of the New York Times, he personally ordered Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought to come up with $20 million to run the new television ads praising him. The journalists report that Vought took the money from funding Congress had appropriated for the Department of Homeland Security.

The Republican Senate Leadership Fund today stopped spending money to elect Michael Whatley to the U.S. Senate from North Carolina. The former chair of both the Republican Party of North Carolina and the Republican National Committee, placed in that role by Trump for the months that covered the 2024 election, Whatley is down by double digits in the polls against former North Carolina governor Roy Cooper.

They are shifting that money to Kansas, to shore up Republican senator Roger Marshall, recently mired in the revelations that his aggressive debt collection from 700 of his obstetric patients led to the arrests of 81 of them. Polls show Marshall’s Democratic challenger Adam Hamilton, a pastor who used to be a Republican, pulling ahead.

Two of the four living Republican governors of Kansas have endorsed Hamilton. Today, former governor Mike Hayden said he is backing Hamilton because “overning should always center around the best interests of the people.” By supporting Trump’s tariffs and the war on Iran, which are destroying markets and driving prices so high that Kansas farmers are at risk of losing their farms, he said, Marshall “is failing to live up to that standard.”

And therein lies the crux of the crisis that is driving a seismic political change: it has become crystal clear that Trump never intended to address the real problems he identified. His tariffs, deep tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, extraordinary corruption, multiple vanity projects, and war on Iran are benefiting him, his family, and his cronies. At the same time, the Republicans are, at his direction, slashing the social welfare programs, medical funding, education, infrastructure, and healthcare that used to serve the American people.

Trump has taken to claiming that the country’s economy is booming, but that he and the Republicans have done a bad job of telling people. “All over the country, they’re building factories, plants—manufacturing’s coming back,” he told a crowd at a truck facility in Texas. “The only thing we’re doing badly at is public relations.”

But as Josh Boak of the Associated Press reported today, people aren’t buying it. One three-time Trump voter in Ohio, who was one of 1,400 just laid off from a truck factory just days before Trump held a rally nearby, is now knocking on doors for Democrats. “Something has to change politically in this country,” he told Boak. “Seems like it just kept getting worse and worse and worse.”

The old MAGA rhetoric isn’t working any more, and Democrats are taking over the space that Trump exploited.

On Thursday, campaigning in South Florida, Vice President J.D. Vance called Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate Angie Nixon a “self-described socialist,” and said the right response was to tell her to “get the hell out of here. You don’t belong in America.”

In response, journalist Jim DeFede of CBS News Miami suggested that people were “somewhat surprised that the vice president would actually say that based on your political views, you should get out of America if you’re not happy here.”

Nixon herself responded: “It’s very disrespectful. It’s really disheartening, especially knowing that I come from folks who helped build this country, and my grandparents were sharecroppers in southern Georgia. And all I want for people is to have access to quality healthcare, to have access to fully funded public schools, for people to have homes to live in, and not have to worry about living on the streets.

“There’s absolutely nothing radical or extreme about that,” she continued. “And I don’t consider myself a socialist. I consider myself a lifelong Democrat who puts people over party, people over politics, and people over profit.

Thanks for posting.

AI video played at the One Nation Victoria campaign launch event

https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenAussie/comments/1wwgbv8/ai_video_played_at_the_one_nation_victoria/

And now I feel the need to vomit.

Spiny Norman said:

AI video played at the One Nation Victoria campaign launch event

https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenAussie/comments/1wwgbv8/ai_video_played_at_the_one_nation_victoria/

And now I feel the need to vomit.

Not quite sure how that ended up in this thread …

Ah, DV’s link isn’t quite correct.

Spiny Norman said:

Ah, DV’s link isn’t quite correct.

never trusted that DV. Eyes too close together.

Bogsnorkler said:

Spiny Norman said:

Ah, DV’s link isn’t quite correct.

never trusted that DV. Eyes too close together.

And he doesn’t like chocolate.

He’s worse than trump.

October 3, 2026 (Saturday)

On Saturday, October 3, the Power to the People festival, organized by Rock & Roll Hall of Fame guitarist Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave, took over the stage at the Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia, Maryland. On two stages were rock, alternative, and hip hop royalty, joining together to remind Americans of their agency to change the future and reclaim American democracy.

The line-up of musicians was legendary. Joan Baez, Jack Black, Cypress Hill, Dropkick Murphys, Flavor Flav, Foo Fighters, Brittany Howard, The Linda Lindas, Mike McCready, Killer Mike, Dave Matthews, Public Enemy, Nathaniel Rateliffe, Bruce Springsteen, Stephen Stills, and Serj Tankian, among others, covered seven decades of American music.

The festival featured a “Freedom Village” where attendees could find ways to get involved in government, grassroots organizing, education, mutual aid, and social impact organizations. Festival organizers donated a portion of the proceeds from ticket sales to VoteRiders, a nonpartisan organzation that works to overcome barriers to voting and make sure everyone who is eligible can vote.

Both in person and in the live stream of the concert, artists urged Americans to remember that they have the power to throw the Trump administration out of office and, together, to build a better nation.

The artists at the event pointedly demonstrated their right to free speech. They were explicit and thorough in their spoken descriptions of their anger at the Trump administration and billionaires who have taken over the country, and they chose songs that needled Trump—John Fogerty’s “Fortunate Son,” for example—or excoriated his policies: Baez and Rateliff sang Woody Guthrie’s “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos),” Springsteen sang “Streets of Minneapolis,” and the Dropkick Murphys’ sang “Don’t Call Me a F*cking Terrorist,” the last two both written in the wake of the Minneapolis shootings by ICE agents.

They emphasized their freedom to express themselves by singing Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World.”

The ten-hour concert ended with the performers singing Guthrie’s famous anthem “This Land is Your Land,” written in 1940 as the Great Depression dragged on. Guthrie wrote it to reclaim the United States of America for its working people. “This land is your land,” he wrote, “this land is my land/From California to the New York islands/From the redwood forest to the Gulf Stream waters/This land was made for you and me.”

Tonight Morello sang a verse often left out of the anthem: “In the squares of the city, in the shadow of the steeple/By the relief office, I saw my people/As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking/Is this land made for you and me?”

Famously, Guthrie painted on his guitars the words “This Machine Kills Fascists,” a slogan he took from the World War II machinists and workers who put stickers saying “This Machine Kills Fascists” on their heavy equipment to express their support for the war effort. Guthrie believed that music could fight the hatred, ignorance, and greed that built fascism just as powerfully as a gun.

Tonight Morello reminded the audience: “Every act of art is an act of resistance.”

Curiously, today’s concert took place on the anniversary of the day that Woody Guthrie died in 1967. And eighty-six years after he wrote “This Land is Your Land,” his work continues to echo.

“This is still America,” Springsteen told the audience of the administration’s tyranny, “and this will not stand.”

Neophyte said:

October 3, 2026 (Saturday)

On Saturday, October 3, the Power to the People festival, organized by Rock & Roll Hall of Fame guitarist Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave, took over the stage at the Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia, Maryland. On two stages were rock, alternative, and hip hop royalty, joining together to remind Americans of their agency to change the future and reclaim American democracy.

The line-up of musicians was legendary. Joan Baez, Jack Black, Cypress Hill, Dropkick Murphys, Flavor Flav, Foo Fighters, Brittany Howard, The Linda Lindas, Mike McCready, Killer Mike, Dave Matthews, Public Enemy, Nathaniel Rateliffe, Bruce Springsteen, Stephen Stills, and Serj Tankian, among others, covered seven decades of American music.

The festival featured a “Freedom Village” where attendees could find ways to get involved in government, grassroots organizing, education, mutual aid, and social impact organizations. Festival organizers donated a portion of the proceeds from ticket sales to VoteRiders, a nonpartisan organzation that works to overcome barriers to voting and make sure everyone who is eligible can vote.

Both in person and in the live stream of the concert, artists urged Americans to remember that they have the power to throw the Trump administration out of office and, together, to build a better nation.

The artists at the event pointedly demonstrated their right to free speech. They were explicit and thorough in their spoken descriptions of their anger at the Trump administration and billionaires who have taken over the country, and they chose songs that needled Trump—John Fogerty’s “Fortunate Son,” for example—or excoriated his policies: Baez and Rateliff sang Woody Guthrie’s “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos),” Springsteen sang “Streets of Minneapolis,” and the Dropkick Murphys’ sang “Don’t Call Me a F*cking Terrorist,” the last two both written in the wake of the Minneapolis shootings by ICE agents.

They emphasized their freedom to express themselves by singing Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World.”

The ten-hour concert ended with the performers singing Guthrie’s famous anthem “This Land is Your Land,” written in 1940 as the Great Depression dragged on. Guthrie wrote it to reclaim the United States of America for its working people. “This land is your land,” he wrote, “this land is my land/From California to the New York islands/From the redwood forest to the Gulf Stream waters/This land was made for you and me.”

Tonight Morello sang a verse often left out of the anthem: “In the squares of the city, in the shadow of the steeple/By the relief office, I saw my people/As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking/Is this land made for you and me?”

Famously, Guthrie painted on his guitars the words “This Machine Kills Fascists,” a slogan he took from the World War II machinists and workers who put stickers saying “This Machine Kills Fascists” on their heavy equipment to express their support for the war effort. Guthrie believed that music could fight the hatred, ignorance, and greed that built fascism just as powerfully as a gun.

Tonight Morello reminded the audience: “Every act of art is an act of resistance.”

Curiously, today’s concert took place on the anniversary of the day that Woody Guthrie died in 1967. And eighty-six years after he wrote “This Land is Your Land,” his work continues to echo.

“This is still America,” Springsteen told the audience of the administration’s tyranny, “and this will not stand.”

Nice one. Thanks.

:)

Spiny Norman said:

AI video played at the One Nation Victoria campaign launch event

https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenAussie/comments/1wwgbv8/ai_video_played_at_the_one_nation_victoria/

And now I feel the need to vomit.

Argh!

October 4, 2026 (Sunday)

On Friday night, just before 11:00, Trump announced that his administration “will, immediately, begin sending ‘Checks’ of nearly $100 to over 20 MILLION wonderful Seniors to help pay for their Medicare Part B premiums, which we have already reduced by significant amounts. This money will come from the Medicare Improvement Fund, a pointless ‘Slush Fund’ that has only been used by Dumocrats in Congress to pay for the Waste, Fraud, and Abuse for their Special Interest friends, and drive up Healthcare costs.”

Congress established the Medicare Improvement Fund in 2008 to enable improvements to the program and periodically adjust payments to healthcare providers. A Republican congressional aide told Dan Diamond of the Washington Post that lawmakers had been planning to use the fund to help fund several health programs this year, and were taken aback by Trump’s announcement.

Trump continued: “Because I delivered on this very important issue for the American People, they can also rest assured the highly popular $5,000 Trump Dividend will be distributed to every U.S. Citizen if, and when, the Republicans win the Midterm Elections!”

The fact that he is openly using taxpayer money to buy votes in the election suggests just how worried Trump is about Democrats winning control of Congress in the upcoming midterms.

He has reason to be worried. If Democrats retake control of one or both chambers of Congress, they will not necessarily be able to pass legislation, since Trump will still be able to veto it. But they will be able to start investigations immediately, and they have made it so clear they intend to do so that the administration is already taking steps to trip them up.

In April the Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice issued an opinion that the president doesn’t have to comply with the Presidential Records Act, enacted to make sure presidents after Richard M. Nixon could not destroy their records; in May a federal judge said they did, in fact, have to follow the law. In August the Department of Justice issued a memo saying that the executive privilege that enables a president to protect his conversations with government advisors also covers any civilian to whom the president speaks “so long as they relate to official presidential decisionmaking.”

As Trump’s time in office stretches out, more and more stories of corruption are surfacing. As Aaron Parnas reported in Meidas News, Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, the top-ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, wrote a letter on September 30 to Attorney General Todd Blanche and FBI director Kash Patel demanding they immediately release a document they are “illegally” concealing, and any others like it.

Wyden has been doggedly following the money trail connected to sex abuser Jeffrey Epstein, noting that his operations, including human trafficking and sexual abuse, depended on the banks whose officers looked the other way as Epstein’s finances repeatedly indicated he was engaged in criminal activity. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has refused to give the Senate Finance Committee access to Treasury materials about those finances, including Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs). When Wyden tried to get Congress to pass a law forcing the release of those files, Senate Republicans blocked it.

Now Wyden’s investigators have discovered that the FBI conducted an interview with a banker tied to Epstein, but the bureau did not release the transcript of the interview, known as a “302 report,” as Congress required when it passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act. Wyden suggested that the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the FBI “are withholding key documents from Congress and the public.”

“Furthermore,” he added, “the existence of this 302 indicates that it is likely that the FBI possesses additional, related, FBI 302s that have not been released” as they should have been under the Epstein Files Transparency Act.

A new report from Anton Troianovski and Eric Lipton of the New York Times Saturday revealed that the administration’s talk about doing business deals with Putin while he continues to strike Ukraine was not hypothetical. As they have allegedly been negotiating for an end to Russia’s war on Ukraine, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff—neither of whom are diplomats—have been talking with Russia’s president Vladimir Putin about a multibillion-dollar deal to buy the assets of Russian oil giant Lukoil at the rock-bottom prices to which they have sunk because of U.S. sanctions.

Because such a sale would immediately remove those assets from U.S. sanctions, they would instantly become far more valuable. Those looking to benefit financially from the purchase would include a major Trump donor, as well as Middle Eastern investors tied to the Trump family and the Witkoffs. The U.S. government would take a stake in the company as well, through the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation, which Congress authorized in 2018 to invest in development projects in lower- and middle-income countries.

While Lukoil is technically a private company, observers believe Putin has control over it. And while the deal would have to be approved by the U.S. Treasury Department, it seems unlikely that Trump loyalist Bessent would stop it.

According to Troianovski and Lipton, Putin suggested the deal on September 5. It was likely not coincidental that the offer came after Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) died on July 11. Graham, who was close to Trump, was firmly behind Ukraine as it tried to fight off Putin’s invasion. Until Trump, Democrats and Republicans both felt strongly that American national security depended on stopping Putin’s aggression, and they stood behind Ukraine.

Trump’s ties to Russia are extensive and well known, but this apparent attempt to buy Trump’s support for Russia even as the war drags into another winter and Ukraine’s drones are destroying Russia’s oil sector seems especially blatant. It puts a spotlight on the fact that, under Trump, U.S. national security is for sale. A Democratic-led Senate would undoubtedly object to what the Republicans have permitted.

Indeed, under Trump there does not appear to be a line between foreign affairs and Trump family business deals. On October 1, Allegra Goodwin, Katie Polglase, and Majlie de Puy Kamp of CNN reported that while in discussions about ending the war in Gaza, Kushner has major financial interests in the Israeli military.

Kushner’s private equity firm, Affinity Partners, has invested in Phoenix Financial, a firm based in Tel Aviv, Israel, that, in turn, has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in at least nine companies that provide equipment for the Israeli military. The CNN journalists report that the stock values of all the nine companies grew last year and that many of the companies attributed the growth to the war in Gaza. Kushner’s firm sold a quarter of its stock in Phoenix in July for more than $340 million, more than five times the value of its initial purchase.

If he were a government employee, Kushner would have to disclose his finances, but he is a “volunteer” negotiator. One of Kushner’s lawyers told the reporters that Kushner has “never participated in or directed Phoenix’s decisions” about investments, but, as the journalists note, Kushner told Forbes that he meets with the leaders of the financial group every few weeks and maintains “a very active dialogue” with them.

Kushner’s lawyer confirmed that was true a year ago when Kushner said it, but that since he has been “substantially more engaged in volunteer public-service and diplomatic efforts,” he has scaled back that contact significantly.

It’s not just Kushner. The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal on October 2 warned that “Don Jr.’s Star Turn Is Coming,” noting that the “Trump family businesses will be in the spotlight on Capitol Hill for the next two years.” “Does the Trump family know what is about to hit them?” the board asked. It noted that even Republicans are upset at the news that an oligarch close to Putin had paid for Don Jr.’s wedding celebration. Senator John Curtis (R-UT) has called for the Senate to subpoena Don Jr. to find out how that financial underwriting came to happen. While they’re at it, Curtis wants to learn more about the family’s cryptocurrency and prediction market ventures.

The corruption of the administration is matched by its incompetence, and neither will come out well in congressional investigations.

In September, hackers broke into the FBI jobs portal and stole information about nearly every FBI employee, as well as more than 8,000 state and local law enforcement officers who had worked with the FBI agents. On Saturday, Ken Dilanian and Carol Leonnig of MS NOW reported just how devastating that breach was. The hacked data included “names, home addresses, cell phone numbers, FBI email addresses and employee ID numbers, in addition to personal identifying information for emergency contacts, including Social Security numbers and personal email addresses.”

According to FBI officials and outside experts, Dilanian and Leonnig report, the breach is a counterintelligence disaster—one of the worst in U.S. history. The information not only exposes the people involved, but also enables adversaries to figure out U.S. priorities and who is working on what.

One cybersecurity expert at the FBI said the cause of the breach was “definitely incompetence.” The information should never have been linked to the internet, the expert said. “It belonged on our internal system and some dumbass moved it all” to a system connected to the internet. The expert told Dilanian and Leonnig that in chats the FBI obtained, the hackers wrote they couldn’t believe that the hack of such important information was so easy.

Speaking at a high school gymnasium in Ohio Saturday night, Trump told an audience: “Just get out and vote. If you do that, we’re going to win, and we’re going to win big, and we’re gonna shove it up their *ss.”

On-line scammers pick some strange names for their links.

Someone pretending to be the ATO wants me to click on poop.php.

October 5, 2026 (Monday)

Last night, on October 4, U.S. Southern Command posted that it had struck another small boat in the Caribbean, killing another four people it called “narco-terrorists.” This brings the number of strikes to more than 70, and the number of people killed in the strikes that began a year ago to more than 230 people.

The administration’s justification for the strikes has not been made public. It has claimed—without evidence—that the men on the boats were trafficking drugs, but such a charge would normally be handled by the legal system. The Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice produced an opinion providing legal cover for the strikes, and some of the members of Congress who have seen it are alarmed.

Senator Adam Schiff (D-CA) saw the memo in November and said: “If that opinion were to be adopted, it would not constrain any use of force anywhere in the world. I mean, it is broad enough to authorize just about anything.” In December the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights sued to gain access to the memo after the government denied their requests to see it under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

On September 21 a report from the United Nations concluded that the extrajudicial killings broke international law and may be crimes against humanity.

Last Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York ordered the Department of Defense and the Department of Justice to show him the memo and let him know who else has seen it, in order to evaluate whether to release it to the public.

On October 1, John Hudson of the Washington Post reported that the Trump administration has taken $52 million Congress appropriated for countries impacted by Russia’s war on Ukraine and rerouted it to right-wing governments in Colombia, Ecuador, Panama, and Peru.

On Saturday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told reporters the U.S. could move U.S. military personnel from Europe to the Western Hemisphere, saying: “Well, we’re definitely expanding our presence and our footprint in Central and South America with partners, and because of the bold move the president made in Venezuela,” referring to the U.S. capture of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife in a nighttime raid in early January. “We have a whole new suite of options economically and militarily with partnerships.”

While the administration is billing its intervention in Latin America as a battle against drugs, the comparison to Venezuela, where Trump has claimed control over the country’s oil fields and says he has taken billions of dollars out, although there is no public acknowledgement of where that money has gone, is instructive.

On Sunday, Jan Crawford of CBS News published an interview with Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, in which Alito said one of his first thoughts after he learned that a draft of his Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health decision overturning the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision had been leaked was that “this would endanger” the people on the court.

Alito went on to say that he does not anticipate that the court will overturn the 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges decision recognizing the right to same-sex marriage. That case is different from Roe v. Wade, he said, because people have come to rely on Obergefell as they organize their lives.

“One of the important factors we take into account in deciding whether we should reexamine a past decision is the degree to which there has been reliance on the decision,” Alito said. “Obviously a great deal had changed in the country as a result of Obergefell. There was a lot of reliance in various ways on the decision in Obergefell.”

In fact, all but one of the justices who overturned Roe—Thomas declined to answer—said in their confirmation hearings that they considered Roe settled law. Crawford pointed out that people thought Roe was settled law and had organized their lives around it, just as people had organized their lives around Obergefell.

“After Obergefell, people of the same sex got married and entered into contracts…it was much more concrete,” Alito told Crawford. “Whereas with Roe, the argument was made that it had an effect on people’s ideas, women’s ideas about the kind of society that they were going to live in, that this would have an effect on the society. It was much more abstract than what would’ve been involved had we been asked to overrule Obergefell.”

These are the same story: the deliberate destruction of the post–World War II order those who had lived through the horrors of World Wars I and II put in place to prevent another world war.

Even before the U.S. entered World War II, U.S. president Franklin Delano Roosevelt and British prime minister Winston Churchill and their advisors laid out principles for an international system that could prevent future world wars. In the 1941 Atlantic Charter, they declared that countries must not invade each other.

In April 1945, 850 delegates and their staff and advisors met in San Francisco, California, where they wrote, and adopted unanimously, the United Nations charter prohibiting “the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.”

Trump and his loyalists reject this framework in favor of one favored by those like Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, one that looks much like the world did before 193 nations signed onto the United Nations charter. In their worldview, strong nations exercise spheres of influence, taking political and economic control of neighboring nations.

Part of the post–World War II attempt to prevent future wars was an insistence that all human beings had certain rights and must be treated equally before the law. In 1948 the United Nations General Assembly announced the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), which provided a common standard of fundamental rights for all human beings.

Eleanor Roosevelt, widow of former president Franklin Delano Roosevelt and much beloved defender of human rights in the United States, led the commission that wrote the UDHR, figuring out how to define the violation of human rights not only internationally but also within a nation, and how to protect “the rights of man all over the world.”

Drafted over the next two years, the final document established that “ll human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights…without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status” and regardless “of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs.”

Those rights included freedom from slavery, torture, degrading punishment, arbitrary arrest, exile, and “arbitrary interference with…privacy, family, home or correspondence, attacks upon…honour and reputation.” They included the right to equality before the law and to a fair trial, the right to participate in government, either “directly or through freely chosen representatives,” the right of equal access to public service. After all, the UDHR noted, the authority of government rests on the will of the people, “expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage.”

Under Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, the U.S. has abandoned the U.N. prohibition on violating the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, as well as the human rights of the people in the small boats, not to mention migrants. As Alito’s statement that the right of women to have control over their healthcare was simply an abstract idea that didn’t have to be protected suggested, undermining the post–World War II order has been a long-term project.

In its place, Trump and his allies propose a dictatorship. Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, who was jailed in the U.S. for money laundering but pardoned by Trump, worked with the Trump family to establish the crypto start-up World Liberty Financial, which put $799 million in Trump’s pocket last year. Zhao now lives in the United Arab Emirates.

In a recent interview with David Yaffe-Bellany of the New York Times, Zhao explained: “Democracy has been hailed as, like, the holy grail for the last couple hundred years, but democracies are inefficient. If you get a benevolent dictator, it’s actually extremely efficient. There’s very little debate going on. You don’t waste time on a lot of frivolous stuff.” It’s a model for which Trump repeatedly has expressed admiration.

In March 1941, eight months before the U.S. joined World War II, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt noted that “Nazi forces are not seeking mere modifications in colonial maps or in minor European boundaries. They openly seek the destruction of all elective systems of government on every continent—including our own; they seek to establish systems of government based on the regimentation of all human beings by a handful of individual rulers who have seized power by force.”

“hese men and their hypnotized followers call this a new order,” FDR said, but “t is not new and it is not order.” “he rallying cry of the dictators, their boasting about a master-race, will prove to be pure stuff and nonsense,” he said. “There never has been, there isn’t now, and there never will be, any race of people on the earth fit to serve as masters over their fellow men.”

“The world has no use for any Nation which, because of size or because of military might, asserts the right to goosestep to world power over the bodies of other Nations or other races,” he said.

“We believe that any nationality, no matter how small, has the inherent right to its own nationhood” and that “the men and women of such Nations, no matter what size, can, through the processes of peace, serve themselves and serve the world by protecting the common man’s security; improve the standards of healthful living; provide markets for manufacture and for agriculture. Through that kind of peaceful service every Nation can increase its happiness, banish the terrors of war, and abandon man’s inhumanity to man.”

“Never, in all our history, have Americans faced a job so well worthwhile,” he concluded. “May it be said of us in the days to come that our children and our children’s children rise up and call us blessed.”

Thanks for posting.

October 6, 2026 (Tuesday)

Judging from his social media posts, Trump is panicking.

Shortly after noon yesterday, he posted that it was “no longer the Strait of Hormuz” driving up gasoline prices, but Ukraine’s strikes on Russia’s refineries. In fact, some oil tankers have indeed been passing through the strait but, as Spencer Kimball of CNBC explains, “only due to a major U.S. military commitment and at a high cost to the lives of tanker crews.” That policy was already too expensive to sustain, and now increased strikes from Iran are threatening it altogether.

Then, clearly incensed at reports that people are not turning out for his rallies, he posted pictures to prove the arenas were full, but those pictures were carefully cropped to avoid the empty upper decks shown in news photographs. “I never have empty seats—Never have, and never will!” he posted. “The Rallies are “HOTTER” than ever.” He added: “The New York Times, and many other Artificial Media Outlets, should be arrested for their dishonesty and disservice to our Country.”

Then he accused the New York Times of doctoring a picture of his Miami club, Trump National Doral, where he has announced he will hold this year’s Group of 20 (G20) summit of leaders from the world’s major advanced and emerging economies this December. His attempt to hold the G7 there in 2019 created an uproar even from Republicans about the blatant self-dealing.

There is less uproar now, leaving Trump free to complain that the New York Times “is a CROOKED outfit that caters to Lunatics who want to see our Country fail” and to warn that “Some day in the not too distant future The Times will be forced to close its dirty doors, and that will be a Great Day for America!” Next to the New York Times image that showed a dirty, yellowed building looking out at the elbows, Trump posted one showing it gleaming white with immaculate gardens.

A New York Times spokesperson told Alice Gibbs of Newsweek that the 2020 photo was not doctored. Gibbs noted that multiple photos from 2023 to 2026 show the same weathering shown in the New York Times photo. The founder of the Photography Ethics Center, Savannah Dodd, told Gibbs that the image Trump shared appeared to be a promotional photograph, and “ommercial photography has different standards for accuracy, which are less stringent than journalistic standards.”

Then Trump posted a wild attack on Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate from South Carolina, Annie Andrews, in an effort to boost his hand-picked candidate, Darline Graham, the late Senator Lindsey Graham’s sister. Begging people to vote for her, he wrote: “For years my dear friend Lindsey would say that, ‘Darline is the finest, most reliable, and one of the smartest people I have ever known.’ He would then always add, ‘Also, the most loyal!’ Oftentimes I would be upset with Lindsey for saying this, because I thought I had all of those qualities.”

Why is Trump suddenly interested in South Carolina? As William Kristol noted in The Bulwark today, new polls show that Andrews, a doctor who has refused to respond to what Kristol calls Trump’s revolting bigotry, is competitive against Graham, whose major qualification for the seat is that she is Graham’s sister.

Kristol notes that in response to Trump’s post, Andrews wrote: “As a mom and a pediatrician, I’m in this race to fight for my patients, my three kids, and South Carolina. And I’m going to work with anyone to put South Carolina first, because lowering costs and making life better for families across our state is going to take all of us working together. If you care more about your bills than the politics in Washington, this campaign is for you.”

Then, once again, Trump promised: “If Republicans win the House of Representatives and the Senate in the 2026 Midterm Elections, I’m going to give all Adult Citizens in the United States of America, $5,000.”

Then he acknowledged the bipartisan outcry over his using $20 million of taxpayer money to run ads boosting himself, writing: “The Radical Left is upset with the fact that I am taking Ads, which I consider to be a positive promotion for our Great U.S.A., and paying for them with U.S.A. money. This is a rather standard thing to do but, rather than doing that, although nothing will make them happy, I have decided to do the Patriotic Ads, among others, and pay for them myself, and with money I raised for MAGA, Inc. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”

(This afternoon, Trump walked that back, telling reporters that “many presidents before” him had produced ads like the ones he’s been running that boosted himself, so “we’ll decide” if he should reimburse the American public for the cost of the ones he’s run. Tonight, the White House said he would not reimburse the American people, and his promise would only apply “moving forward.”)

Then, yesterday, he posted again about the Doral photo, saying “The New York Times DOCTORED the picture of the beautiful exterior facade of Doral, in Miami, trying to make it look as bad as possible. These people are STONE COLD LOSERS—Totally dishonest. That’s why they’re going TO HELL, and their subscription numbers are way down!”

With media stories noting that Republican candidates do not want to be seen with Trump, this morning he posted: “My Rally crowds and enthusiasm are unbelievable! Nobody has ever seen anything like it. We are flipping races all over the place. The Fake News knows it, but they don’t want to be truthful with their viewers. It’s all happening! The Dumocrats never counted on this. Thanks you to the great Networks that are covering the Rallies in full. They are being rewarded with BIG RATINGS. Watch for the ‘Midterm Surprise!’”

About an hour and a half later, he posted: “MY RALLIES ARE SAVING THE REPUBLICAN PARTY, AGAIN!!!”

That post was likely in light of the outrage today over his statement about oil prices at a rally in Nebraska last night:

“And again, remember, with the war it’s just artificial, it’s a little bit high, it’s a small price to pay for keeping the world safe, keeping our country safe. They can take out a city, let ’em take out Los Angeles. Let ’em take out San Diego. That’s, this is a very small price to pay, and it’s gonna be over with very soon. It’s essentially almost over with, and they might keep going a little long, you know? They always say they have a big threshold for pain. They need it, let me tell you, they need it. But it’s gonna end very soon….”

The outcry against a president suggesting a nuclear attack on U.S. cities has been rapid and profound. California governor Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, posted: “After sending the National Guard and Marines to occupy California, Donald Trump is now saying our foreign enemies should ‘take out’ Los Angeles and San Diego. He is deranged and dangerous.” Newsom’s press office followed up with: “Let’s be clear: The President is advocating for an attack on 10+ million U.S. residents in two of America’s largest cities. This is not normal. None of this is.”

Democratic San Diego mayor Todd Gloria posted: “San Diego is not collateral damage. We are not expendable. And we are never a ‘small price to pay.’ Keep our city out of your reckless war talk.”

Scholar of authoritarianism Timothy Snyder warned that Trump appears to be inviting a terrorist attack. “Telling Americans that it would be acceptable, or even good, if San Diego were destroyed, if Los Angeles were destroyed by Iran…tells us where his mind is. His mind is exclusively focused on staying in power. It’s exclusively focused on himself. There is no care for Americans there. There’s only an obsession with perhaps having less control over things than he has now. It’s a very clear sign of just how wrong things have gone, when the American president can stand in front of Americans and fantasize about millions of Americans being killed.” Snyder urged Americans to vote, organize, and be prepared to defend the results of the election.

Meanwhile, the administration appears to be pulling out all the stops to get MAGA voters to turn out. Sam Ogozalek of Politico reported today that the Federal Transit Authority is now saying it wants to steer grant money for local and state infrastructure to areas with higher-than-average birthrates and marriage rates. This plan reflects the administration’s embrace of the “Great Replacement” theory, the idea that white Americans must increase their birthrates to prevent being replaced by people of color.

In an event in May, after Centers of Medicare & Medicaid Services administrator Mehmet Oz said that “one in three Americans are under-babied,” Trump called himself “the father of fertility.” Senator Patty Murray (D-WA), the top-ranking Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, said: “Tying funding for transit projects to marriage rates and how many babies a woman has is the sort of bizarre and dystopian idea you’d expect in a TV show, not actual policy put forth by the U.S. government—yet here we are.”

Transportation consultant Peter Rogoff told Ogozalek: “It’s throwing a bone to these ideologues who want to incentivize child rearing and marriage, but it’s ludicrous on its face to try to achieve that goal through an infrastructure program. Does anyone really believe that there are couples out there saying, ‘Hey, sweetheart, you and I should get married and raise a passel of kids because a dozen years from now, maybe they’ll build light rail out to our neighborhood?’”

Wes Siler points out in Wes Siler’s Newsletter that the administration has also promised major changes in hunting and fishing regulations, most of which can’t possibly happen, including Trump’s promise to create a “task force” to kill sharks and seals “to reduce the economic and ecological impact of shark depredation on the recreational angling sector.” Siler notes that this would require changes to existing laws and both national and international fisheries and endangered species agreements.

“SHARK FORCE would be a lot cooler if it was actually like a team of highly trained sharks sent to remove naval mines from the Strait of Hormuz,” Siler writes. But while removing apex predators might benefit anglers in the short term, the whole reason we have all those agreements in the first place is that we know destroying the food chain breaks ocean ecosystems.

Felicia Schwartz of MS NOW reported today that the Trump administration has not invited monitors from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) from observing the U.S. midterm elections. This will be the first time since 2002 that the U.S. has not welcomed these observers. Until now, the only two countries of the fifty-seven in the organization that refused such observation were Russia and Belarus. Now the U.S. joins them.

Dan Baer, who served as U.S. ambassador to the OSCE during the Obama administration, told Schwartz: “Refusing election observers is usually something that countries in a position of weakness do, when they know that they have corrupt or unfair elections. It’s very strange for the United States, which has been historically a standard setter in free and fair elections, to refuse observers.”

On Monday, election denier Tina Peters reportedly met with Trump at the White House. As Matt Cohen of Democracy Docket reported, Peters and voter suppression lawyer Cleta Mitchell have been pushing the idea that Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick can seize voting machines because they use some foreign-made parts. As Cohen notes, election experts are crystal clear that no law gives Lutnick that power.

This afternoon, at a rally in Maryland, Trump called out Director of the Office of Management and Budget Russell Vought, a key author of Project 2025, saying: “We have some big surprises coming up in another few weeks, right Russ? He’s gonna be one of the very important people in the history of our country in my opinion. He’s got some great things happening.”

Imagine whinging at “doctored” photos when he posts shitty AI garbage.

October 7, 2026 (Wednesday)

On October 7, 2016, in the run-up to the 2016 election, the Washington Post broke the story of the so-called Access Hollywood tape, a video from 2005 in which Donald Trump told television host Billy Bush about his approach to women. “I don’t even wait” to start kissing them, he said. “And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything…. Grab ‘em by the p***y. You can do anything.”

On October 7, 2021, the Democratic majority of the Senate Judiciary Committee released a draft report of its investigation into Trump’s attempt to use the Department of Justice to overturn the results of the 2020 election. The report found that Trump repeatedly tried to get the Department of Justice to endorse his false claims that the election was stolen and to overturn its results, singling out nine specific attempts to change the outcome. Trump, the report says, “grossly abused the power of the presidency.”

On October 7, 2026, from the Oval Office, Trump told reporters: “I could have done very bad things to Hillary Clinton. I could have done very, very bad things to Joe Biden. I could have done very bad things to Barack Hussein Obama. I thought it was inappropriate to do so because you have to treat the office of the presidency with respect. Then I found out that they impeached me twice, and I certainly even, to this moment, I have, I can do whatever I want, if I want. They’ve done some very bad things. You just mentioned it. It was just mentioned in the form of a question, what they did, very illegal, what they did, many illegal things, but I view the presidency as a very sacred position.”

“I can do whatever I want, if I want.”

Ten years we’ve been at this.

I’m going to take an early night tonight. Will be back at it tomorrow.

“I thought it was inappropriate to do so because you have to treat the office of the presidency with respect”

Yeah… that’s the reason 🙄

Divine Angel said:

“I thought it was inappropriate to do so because you have to treat the office of the presidency with respect”

Yeah… that’s the reason 🙄

treat the office or the president itself

October 8, 2026 (Thursday)

On October 8, 1871, dry conditions and strong winds drove deadly fires through the Midwest. The Peshtigo Fire in northeastern Wisconsin and parts of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula burned more than 1.2 million acres (4,860 square kilometers) and 17 towns, claiming between 1,500 and 2,500 lives. The Great Chicago Fire burned 3.3 square miles (8.6 square kilometers) of the city, destroying the wooden structures that made up the relatively new town, killed about 300 people, and left more than 100,000 people homeless.

The Peshtigo Fire is the deadliest wildfire in U.S. history.

The Chicago Fire is the one people remember.

The difference is in part because Chicago was a city, easy for newspapers to cover, while the Peshtigo fire killed people in lumber camps and small towns. But the Great Chicago Fire also told a political story that fit into an emerging narrative about the danger of organized labor.

It was not clear, coming out of the Civil War, how Republicans would stand with regard to workers. After all, the U.S. government had fought the war to protect the right of every man to enjoy the fruits of his own labor. But immediately after the war, workers had started organizing to demand adjustments to the wartime financial policies that favored men with money. By 1866 the Democratic Party had begun to listen to them, and leaders called for rewriting the terms of the Civil War debt, which had been generous to investors in the days when U.S. bonds were a risky investment. After the war, with the U.S. secure, the calculations changed, and Democrats charged that investors had gotten too good a deal.

Republicans, horrified at the idea of changing the terms of a debt already incurred, added to the Fourteenth Amendment the clause saying, “The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.”

They were also concerned when more than 60,000 people came together in August 1866 to launch the National Labor Union, calling for the government to level the playing field between workers and their employers. They asked for an eight-hour day, an end to monopolies, and cooperation between Black and white workers. In 1867, in what was almost certainly a misquoted comment, stories spread that Republican Benjamin Franklin Wade of Ohio had told an audience in Kansas that “property is not equally divided, and a more equal distribution of capital must be wrought out.”

Also in 1867, Congress passed the Military Reconstruction Act, which divided the ten unreconstructed states into five military districts and required new state constitutional conventions to rewrite the state constitutions. For the first time in history, the new law permitted Black men to vote for delegates to those conventions.

When former Confederates preferred to live under military rule rather than share political power with their Black neighbors, Congress amended the Military Reconstruction Act to permit the military to enroll voters. In 1868, Congress passed and then states ratified the Fourteenth Amendment, protecting the right of all citizens to the equal protection of the laws. In 1870, Congress passed and the states ratified the Fifteenth Amendment, protecting Black male voting. And then, when white reactionaries organized as the Ku Klux Klan to keep Black men and white Republicans from voting for the constitutions the conventions had written, Congress created the Department of Justice to prosecute Ku Klux Klan members and protect Black rights in the South.

Attacks on Black political rights on grounds of race were now unconstitutional, and the federal government seemed prepared to back that principle up with the law. So reactionary southerners took a new tack.

Beginning in 1871, they argued that they had no objection to their Black neighbors on racial grounds. What they objected to, they said, was that these folks, newly out of enslavement, were poor. White leaders claimed that the South remained in a recession not because India and Egypt had taken over the global cotton market during the war, but because Black southerners were lazy and hoped to use their new political power to redistribute the wealth of white landowners into their own pockets.

When South Carolina voters put into office a majority-Black legislature, white South Carolinians railed against the Black voters “plundering” taxpayers. One observer commented that “a proletariat Parliament has been constituted, the like of which could not be produced under the widest suffrage in any part of the world save in some of these Southern States.” Democrats organized a “Tax-Payers’ Convention” to protest new taxes levied by the legislature.

While Republicans were unwilling to bow to the Ku Klux Klan’s violence against their Black colleagues on racial grounds, this attack had legs, thanks, in part, to events in Europe.

For two months in spring 1871, in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War, workers took over the city of Paris and established the Paris Commune. American newspapers plastered details of the Commune on their front pages, describing it as a propertied American’s worst nightmare. They highlighted the murder of priests, the burning of the Tuileries Palace, and the bombing of buildings by women who lobbed burning bottles of newfangled petroleum through cellar windows. American newspapers portrayed the Communards as a “wild, reckless, irresponsible, murderous mobocracy” who brought to life a chaotic world in which workers had taken over the government with a plan to confiscate all property and transfer all money, factories, and land to workers.

Republicans’ fear of workers grew. Organized laborers “are agrarians, levelers, revolutionists, inciters of anarchy, and, in fact, promoters of indiscriminate pillage and murder,” the Boston Evening Transcript charged. The Philadelphia Inquirer insisted the redistribution of wealth through law appealed to poor, lazy, vicious men who would rather steal from the nation’s small farmers and mechanics than work themselves. Scribner’s Monthly warned in italics: “the interference of ignorant labor with politics is dangerous to society.”

Turning first against Black southerners, Republican newspapers began to claim that African Americans were radical levelers. They were “ignorant, superstitious, semi-barbarians” who were “extremely indolent, and will make no exertion beyond what is necessary to obtain food enough to satisfy their hunger.” To these lazy louts, Republicans had given the vote, which gave them “absolute political supremacy.” They elected to office leaders who promised to confiscate wealth through taxation and give it to Black citizens in the form of roads, schools, and hospitals. “The most intelligent, the influential, the educated, the really useful men of the South, deprived of all political power,” wrote the New York Daily Tribune, “ taxed and swindled by a horde of rascally foreign adventurers, and by the ignorant class, which only yesterday hoed the fields and served in the kitchen.”

After the Paris Commune, Republicans began to sweep white workers into this equation as well, taking the lead of former Confederates. An article in the New York Daily Tribune quoted Georgia Democrat Robert Toombs, the first Confederate secretary of state, who explicitly compared formerly enslaved people to the Paris Communards. He called for a property requirement for voting, without which “the lower classes…the dangerous, irresponsible element,” would control the government and “attack the interests of the landed proprietors.” According to Toombs: “Only those who owned the country should govern it, and men who had no property had no right to make laws for property-holders.”

When Chicago went up in flames in October 1871, some Americans blamed the Great Fire on “communists” or “socialists” eager to take over the country. Even those unconvinced a deadly fire in a wooden city was part of a deliberate plot blamed the fire on stupid immigrant workers careless about fire. They blamed “Mrs. O’Leary and her cow,” claiming the animal had kicked over a lantern near straw, and even children knew not to put fire near straw.

The Great Chicago Fire spoke to politics as the rural Peshtigo Fire did not. It fanned the flames of fear that workers were trying to destroy America. Famous reformer Charles Loring Brace wrote, “In the judgment of one who has been familiar with our ‘dangerous classes’ for twenty years, there are just the same explosive social elements beneath the surface of New York as of Paris.”

And for those determined to make sure workers didn’t have a powerful voice in American society, the Great Chicago Fire could be framed as an illustration of precisely that.

Ta.

October 9, 2026 (Friday)

Late Wednesday afternoon, Dana Mattioli, Drew Hinshaw, Rebecca Ballhaus, and Joe Parkinson of the Wall Street Journal reported on the tawdry grifting of Kimberly Guilfoyle, former fiancee of Donald Trump Jr. and now Trump’s ambassador to Greece. Panicked about how much money she owed on her American Express credit card, Guilfoyle reached out to Eric Deters, who wanted the administration’s help with tax and legal issues. Deters had promised Guilfoyle as much as a million dollars if she was successful in getting him the help he wanted.

With her confirmation hearing for the ambassador post coming up, Guilfoyle begged Deters to pay $100,000 to American Express. “It won’t show up anywhere if you wire money to American Express,” she wrote on the secure messaging app Signal, the Wall Street Journal reporters explained. “Please.” She reiterated over text: “Honey please I need you to get this done for me today.” “Your needing $100,000 urgent unfortunately is not going to work,” Deters wrote. “I can’t do this without getting a divorce.”

In their months of correspondence, Guilfoyle often complained that he was not being careful enough. “Eric, I really wish you would stop papering all these things,” she wrote. “It’s really dangerous and not helpful to you or me while you could simply just call me on signal.” She wrote: “It’s unbelievable when we have a private arrangement with you that you would now CC a producer talking about money.” And later: “What a nightmare you’ll literally cost me my ambassadorship stop writing.”

Looking back today at stories of corruption involving Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, former secretary of homeland security Kristi Noem, and so on, Chris Hayes of MS NOW explained that Trump’s inner circle “works a lot like a crime family…. veryone gets their fiefdoms. They can get their beaks wet. But they’ve always got to make sure they’re giving the boss his due.”

On Tuesday, Samantha Subin of CNBC reported that just days after Palmer Luckey joined the Pentagon’s new Project Meridian, set up to report on the military’s future needs, the company Luckey co-founded—Anduril—landed a $2.9 billion contract with the U.S. Navy. And today, Reuters reported that Kalshi is investigating suspicious trades having to do with Trump’s selection of Katie Zacharia as the new White House press secretary.

Americans don’t like corruption, and with the midterms shaping up to be a disaster for the Republicans, Trump has launched an all-out offensive to solidify his base. That offensive includes spinning the Iran War, calling for a public execution, attacking immigrants both rhetorically and in real life, and shifting the United States against the defense of international law and allying with authoritarian governments.

On Wednesday, October 7, Jonathan Saul of Reuters reported that attacks on tankers in the Strait of Hormuz hit the highest level since the war on Iran began. Shortly after noon yesterday, October 8, Trump tried to spin the situation there to make it sound like he was in control. He posted that “Iran is in a very bad condition, both Economically and Militarily,” that the U.S. blockade is still in effect, that oil is flowing “in Record Numbers of Barrels through the Hormuz Strait,” and that the administration is having “productive discussions” with Iran. He added: “e will not be attacking Iran at any time prior to the Midterm Elections to be held in the United States on November 3rd. IRAN WILL NOT HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON!”

In an interview with far-right podcaster Jack Posobiec on board the USS Abraham Lincoln on Wednesday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth appealed to the MAGA religious base with a promise that the execution of former Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan, the mass shooter who killed 13 people at Fort Hood in 2009, would be public. An active Army officer when he committed the murders, Hasan was court-martialed and sentenced to death.

“We’ll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it’s public, because people need to understand that there’s serious consequences for these types of things,” Hegseth said. CNN national security analyst Peter Bergen noted that a livestream of the execution would be a rallying cry for terrorists.
The backlash against Hegseth’s plan has been swift and bipartisan.

Representative Jason Crow (D-CO), who served as a paratrooper and Army Ranger and is now on the House Armed Services Committee and the House Intelligence Committee, said: “Pete Hegseth has taken our military’s tradition of selfless service and flipped it on its head. With this public execution, he is degrading the culture of our military and turning a culture of service into one of vengeance and spectacle, performed for cameras and attention on social media. The Fort Hood shooter’s actions were horrific. Responding to it by livestreaming a violent execution is not an answer. A public execution only gives our adversaries fodder for anti-American propaganda that makes us less safe. Pete Hegseth’s self-absorbed hunger for power, attention, and violence is disgusting and beneath the office he holds. He is not fit to lead.”

The idea was “beyond disgusting,” Senator Tom Tillis (R-NC) wrote. “Public executions are what oppressive dictatorships like Iran and Afghanistan do. It should not be happening in America.”

Trump then tried to rile up his supporters by turning them against an invented “enemy,” a tactic that is Authoritarianism 101. On Wednesday the FBI said it had prevented an attack on Minnesota’s Mall of America by a teenaged American-born U.S. citizen of Somalian descent whom they had been monitoring since December 2024 and to whom an FBI agent sold the assault rifle and ammunition for the attack.

At 4:30 on the afternoon of October 8, Trump wrote: “The once Great State of Minnesota is being taken over by Somali Immigrants. There is Violence, Murder, and Mayhem all over the State. The people of Minnesota must fight back. You have been robbed, and abandoned by your State Government. Your Governor is an incompetent thief who doesn’t want to get involved. He just wants to get out of town with as much as he can steal, and then, lead a quiet life. The Somalians should not be allowed to get away with what they are doing. They view you as weak and stupid people. Fight back Minnesota, fight back! If you need, the Federal Government will come to your rescue. Governor Tim Walz, and Mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Frey, must immediately ask for Federal help—and leave the rest to us!”

Representative Tom Emmer of Minnesota, a MAGA Republican, promptly referred to Somali-Americans as “enemy combatants” and complained that Democrats were not “rounding them up and putting them in jail.”

On Thursday, October 8, Priscilla Alvarez and Michael Williams of CNN reported that on Tuesday, the leaders of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) verbally told agents across the country to ramp up their arrests by another 1,000 people a day, bringing arrests back to 3,000 daily.

On Thursday afternoon, as ICE agents in New York City surrounded a Dominican man and his five-year-old son in a car, one of the agents fired several shots. It is not clear how badly injured Oscar Belgal is; he was shot in the neck, treated at a hospital, and then moved to an ICE facility outside of New York. His son was not hit by a bullet. New Yorkers immediately began to protest, calling for an end to ICE. New York governor Kathy Hochul and New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani, both Democrats, have demanded ICE stop operations in the state. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin refused. “No, we’re not putting a pause on enforcement,” he said. “I’m sorry, we’re not. In fact, I’m not sorry.”

The Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded this year’s Nobel Peace Prize to Navi Pillay, a South-African-born jurist and former chief of human rights at the United Nations. There she led a U.N. commission that concluded Israel had committed genocide against Palestinians. She is currently a judge at the International Court of Justice. The committee’s message with their choice seemed pointed: Pillay has promoted peace through her protection of international law, they said, and the committee chair said the award was “a message to those who are attacking” international law. The committee said Pillay was “instrumental in ensuring that war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide are prosecuted.”
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu posted that the “Nobel Prize committee has lost its moral compass,” calling Pillay “a bigot who built her career around inventing and propagating blood libels against the one and only Jewish state.”

Hours after the prize announcement, Humeyra Pamuk, Steve Holland, and Anthony Deutsch of Reuters reported that Trump’s administration was imposing sanctions on the International Criminal Court (ICC), founded in 2002 to prosecute war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. The U.S. has imposed sanctions on judges and prosecutors before; now it is sanctioning companies that provide services to the court itself.

The ICC has issued arrest warrants for Israeli officials including Netanyahu, as well as Russian officials including Vladimir Putin. Today Secretary of State Marco Rubio said: “President Trump will never allow the International Criminal Court to prosecute Americans.”

Sanctioning the ICC sets the U.S. against its allies in Europe, who are increasingly worried about hybrid attacks from Russia, attacks that avoid direct war while destabilizing another country, methods like cyberwarfare or disinformation. Today, after ten years of cozying up to Vladimir Putin, Trump openly allied the United States with Russia against Ukraine.

Three weeks ago, by large bipartisan votes, Congress passed new sanctions against Russia and countries that were continuing to use Russian oil and gas and gave Trump sweeping powers to expand those sanctions. At the time, Representative Michael McCaul (R-TX) said: “This bill will cripple Russia’s war machine and finally bring Putin to the negotiating table. It will ensure America’s adversaries, not only Russia, but also China and Iran, suffer for their coordinated campaign of aggression.”

But today, Trump used the law for the opposite of what Congress apparently intended: “I have just concluded a highly successful discussion with President Vladimir Putin, of Russia, wherein it was agreed that Russia will immediately supply over 300,000 Tons of Diesel Fuel to the American and Global Marketplace, another 500,000 Tons during the month of November, and 1,000,000 Tons immediately thereafter. Additionally, based on the condition of their Diesel Refineries, Russia will then deliver, within a short period of time, 3,000,000 Tons of Diesel Fuel. Between our TOTAL CONTROL of the Strait of Hormuz, and this great announcement on Russian Energy, Diesel Prices for Americans and, indeed, the World, will be COMING DOWN, IN RECORD NUMBERS, AND FAST! Lower prices for Americans, especially our Great Farmers, Ranchers, and Truckers, is my Greatest Priority. This is a very big and important announcement. Additionally, it must be understood, that Iran will not have a Nuclear Weapon!”

The Treasury Department promptly announced it was issuing a temporary license to permit Russian diesel to sell on the global market. The sales will likely do little for U.S. oil prices, but they will funnel money to Russia for its war on Ukraine.

Trump’s smash-and-grab suggests concern he will lose the midterms. The latest poll from the Pew Research Center shows that 68% of Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of the presidency. Cook Political Report has moved 18 more House ratings toward the Democrats. Myah Ward of Politico reported that 26% of those who voted for Trump in 2024 think the Republican Party should break with Trump in order to win in November. In Kansas on Wednesday, more than 100 prominent Republicans launched a coalition called “Republicans for Hamilton” to back Democrat Adam Hamilton for the U.S. Senate. Their announcement referred to “a growing network of everyday Republican voters…who are ready for change.”

Sarah Longwell of The Bulwark, who conducts focus groups with voters, says Trump’s campaign ads boosting himself have backfired: people hate them. They object to using taxpayer money for them by a margin of 86 to9. Furthermore, Longwell finds that Trump 2024 voters in Florida whom Trump needs to energize for this election, really hate them—the word Longwell used is “revulsion.” One said: “We need to get rid of all these people. Even if the Republicans don’t win for the next ten years, it’s probably best to wash these people out, you know, so you can get cleaned—clean slate.”

“Americans don’t like corruption”

Seems more than a few people are ok with it 🤷🏻‍♀️

“and with the midterms shaping up to be a disaster for the Republicans”

Is it though? Remember all those polls saying Hilary and Kamala would win? It seems like there’s a non-zero chance he’ll pull every trick in the book to avoid the elections. Declaring war on home soil, civil war, changing election boundaries/criteria, removing people from office…

“Trump has launched an all-out offensive to solidify his base. That offensive includes spinning the Iran War, calling for a public execution, attacking immigrants both rhetorically and in real life, and shifting the United States against the defense of international law and allying with authoritarian governments.”

Pro-life indeed 🙄

There’s another bod who’s scribblings i look at, name of Bob Lefsetz – he’s just written on US election matters and i thought I’d take the liberty of shoehorning it in here…

The Horse Race

People didn’t love Donald Trump in 2024.

But they did hate Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

Meanwhile, we constantly have to hear about Harris possibly running again, makes me tear out what little hair I have left, she is an inauthentic loser who couldn’t even get one delegate back in the 2020 primary season!

There, I said it, positively heresy. She’s Black, she’s a woman, how could I say anything negative?

Now let me see… Joe Biden was too old and they said he was not and then he evidenced this on television and told us not to believe our eyes while he dilly-dallied for weeks deciding to retire, like a baseball player who has lost a step. And we Democrats are pissed. Because the team has been managed so poorly. It’s hard to be a fan when the General Manager denies the truth and when changes are made, they are worse.

I didn’t vote for Kamala to be the candidate, and neither did you. She was foisted upon us. But she almost won anyway, because most of the country has Democratic values, and so many people hate Donald Trump.

So Trump didn’t win, the Democrats forfeited. And Trump has been showered with hosannas ever since.

Until now, when the media is reporting that those who voted for him are disillusioned and are now leaning towards Democrats. OF COURSE, BECAUSE HE DIDN’T HAVE WIDESPREAD SUPPORT TO BEGIN WITH!

Meanwhile, all the reporting is about the mechanics, who will win in what state and although important, this is not the main issue in America today. No, people have lost faith in the Democrats and the system.

The wishy-washy Dems? Who never raise their voices, who say their hands are tied, who won’t stand up to Trump but also won’t stand up to special interest groups?

How many trans women are there in college sports anyway? But rather than say this, most Democratic candidates are afraid of pissing off…exactly who? The trans community, which is how big? This is a no-brainer, the Republicans are anti-trans, you can defend trans people without losing your mind. When even Martina Navratilova comes down against trans women in sports, you know you’re on the wrong side.

Once again, no problem with trans people, just everybody is not entitled to do everything!

Kind of like when they refuse to say only biological women can conceive babies. This is a huge gift to the right, can’t anybody on the left speak English?

And speaking of English, only bleeding heart liberals could come up with the moniker “Latinx” for a group of people who hate the appellation. Ditto on defund the police, people in Black neighborhoods want MORE police!

There’s this endless rabbit hole of b.s. No one has a backbone.

And then we get to Democratic Socialism… Traditional Democrats are missing the point, it’s not about socialism whatsoever, but hatred of the usual suspects, the establishment.

But the Democratic party can’t reform itself, can’t arrive in the twenty first century, never mind look forward.

And the doofus Republicans in Congress, afraid of Trump and their own shadow. He’s a paper tiger. It’s like an invisible dog fence. They’re all afraid of breaking ranks, crossing the line, when in truth liberation exists right outside the barrier. The public is not with Trump, he just won an election because the Democratic candidate was so bad. Sure, there’s a hard core of Trumpers, but it’s smaller than you think and in truth it’s not about love of the Donald but hatred of the so-called coastal elite. Who even I hate. The self-anointed educated and rich who think they know better.

But the irony is this is not a one party problem, there are self-righteous, pompous elite members of the Republican party, it’s just that the Democrats never seem to make this point and hammer it down.

We are looking for truth, for fighters, and all we get is wusses.

People are more alike than different, and in truth James Carville had it right back in 1992 and for all time…IT’S THE ECONOMY, STUPID!

Most people don’t care about the day to day activities in D.C., they just want to be free to live their lives. And when you impinge upon those lives, like with the banning of abortion… The Democrats keep talking about packing the Supreme Court, doing something to undercut our rigged system, but then they never pull the trigger, they’re waiting for the people to rise up and lead. Which could happen, because Trump is running the country off a cliff while the Democrats twiddle their thumbs.

Find me a person who defends a Russian oligarch paying for Don, Jr.’s wedding celebration.

Find me a person who is down with the closing of the Kennedy Center.

Find me a person who is in support of the arch.

No, Trump is acting with impunity, and no one will stop him, believing he has widespread support. HE DOESN’T!

Now is the time for the true believer, not someone who equivocates, who consults polls before doing anything, who is afraid to offend anyone. We are looking for people who connect with us emotionally. Meaning both J.D. Vance and Marco Rubio have absolutely no chance of winning in 2028 assuming the Democrats run a reasonable candidate chosen by the people. We need someone to believe in.

Trump got elected in 2016 because people were freaked out about the future, technology, opportunity, they wanted to put the brakes on society. Which, of course, is impossible. We needed a leader to navigate the new world, not someone who promised us a return to what once was, which wasn’t so good and is never coming back again.

The old farts in Congress… All they can do is hate on technology, after the fact, when it is already pervasive and dominant.

And most people now hate Elon Musk, a blowhard too myopic to be aware of the public’s perception of his personality and identity.

But the news talks about him coming back to Washington like it’s a fait accompli.

There is a way out of this, and it’s not so much moving to the left as in moving into the future. If one more Democrat asks me for money for TV ads… What next, radio soap operas? They hire consultants baked into the past who are only concerned with getting paid.

So I’m disillusioned with both parties, as almost everybody is, especially on the left. It’s only old people who are true Democratic believers, young people have never felt the power of a JFK, a politician who spoke to them.

On the right… It’s fear and disarray, and a refusal to acknowledge how weak Donald Trump really is, how he’s out of touch with the populace.

So what happens now?

Maybe the Democrats take Congress.

Maybe Trump interferes with the election.

But gridlock will remain, a constant scrum wherein the two lines butt heads and the ball never moves either way. Meanwhile, while we’re killing our young people as they get CTE from playing football. What next, executions on TV? YES!

People don’t want barbarism. They do want expertise. They want humanity. They want to be acknowledged and understood. People are reasonable, they don’t require everything if they believe they are heard. Right now they do not feel they’re being heard.

So either the Democrats wake up and break the system, or Trump will bring us ever closer to true autocracy or…

The public will revolt. People can only take it for so long.

Gas is stratospheric in price because an uninformed idiot started a war he couldn’t win, undermining the status of the U.S. in the process. The same man who takes the side of Russia against Ukraine. Do you really think the public is behind him? OF COURSE NOT!

Can we at least speak English and admit this?

And know that the fear for the Democratic party is not socialism, but extinction, because it has lost touch with its constituents.

The right rules on fear. But when people see the light, they become less scared. But it’s hard to shed light in our obtuse world where everybody gets their news from a different outlet, oftentimes biased.

The Ten Commandments in school? We’re sitting on the sidelines wondering what is going on. Isn’t this exactly what the Constitution forbade?

We live in bizarroland. Oldsters are tuning out, living on their savings. Young people have no savings and are constantly scolded by oldsters for utilizing technology, for not showing up and being abused at work. And you think this draws youngsters to them?

But all we hear about is numbers. Establishment talking heads giving us analysis baked in the past. Everybody so locked into the game that they can’t see what is truly going on.

Meanwhile, we’re on the outside, alternately detached and enraged. How come we can see the obvious and they can’t? How come we can see it’s not about the details, but the overall picture? How come there’s no longer any agreed upon truth? How come even if I vote I still feel powerless?

Change is coming. What it will look like, I don’t know. A tightening of the noose or a breaking of the system.

One thing is for sure, things can’t go on as usual. The public knows this, the Democrats certainly do not. Rally the troops, don’t divide them. Bring everybody in, don’t give them a reason to stay out. Make people feel heard and included.

That’s the way they used to do it.

But not anymore.

Divine Angel said:

“Americans don’t like corruption”

Seems more than a few people are ok with it 🤷🏻‍♀️

Americans don’t like corruption, they love it.

truth

Divine Angel said:

“and with the midterms shaping up to be a disaster for the Republicans”

Is it though? Remember all those polls saying Hilary and Kamala would win? It seems like there’s a non-zero chance he’ll pull every trick in the book to avoid the elections. Declaring war on home soil, civil war, changing election boundaries/criteria, removing people from office…

^

SCIENCE said:

Divine Angel said:

“and with the midterms shaping up to be a disaster for the Republicans”

Is it though? Remember all those polls saying Hilary and Kamala would win? It seems like there’s a non-zero chance he’ll pull every trick in the book to avoid the elections. Declaring war on home soil, civil war, changing election boundaries/criteria, removing people from office…

^

It is so disappointing but I can’t see the Democrats winning. They are too busy destroying the progressives. If only they would attack the Republicans with the same fervour.

Thanks for posting.

October 10, 2026 (Saturday)

So now, after more than a decade of pretending that he is not associated with Russia and that he would honor the U.S. national security position of support for Ukraine and our European allies, Trump is openly backing Russia’s president Vladimir Putin.

Asked today by a reporter about concerns that his dropping of sanctions against Russian oil yesterday would funnel money to Putin’s war on Ukraine, Trump blamed Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky for prolonging the war:

“Zelensky could have settled this war many times. Many, many times,” Trump said, “And he chooses not to.” Trump blamed Zelensky for the high cost of diesel because Ukrainian forces have targeted Russian oil refineries, although since Russian oil was sanctioned, the actual chokepoint for diesel prices is the Strait of Hormuz, largely closed because of Trump’s war on Iran.

Trump accused Zelensky of wanting “to make problems for the world. He wants to make problems for our farmers, our ranchers, with diesel fuel, because Russia supplies a large portion of the diesel fuel throughout the world.” Ukrainians have hit Russian oil refineries to stop the flow of money into Russia as it evades sanctions and sells oil through its so-called shadow fleet. Russia, in contrast, has been striking civilian targets in violation of the laws of war.

Trump continued with a warning to Zelensky, saying “he’d better damn well stop.”

Ukraine continues to fight against Russia because Russia has invaded Ukraine and is trying to occupy Ukraine’s eastern industrial area in violation of the United Nations charter that vows no country will use threats or force against another’s territorial integrity. Until Trump took office, the United States was the key guarantor of this principle.

The U.S. has stood against Russia’s 2014 and 2022 invasions of Ukraine not only because of the principle of territorial sovereignty, but also because of security guarantees the U.S., along with the United Kingdom and Russia, gave to Ukraine in 1994. After the Soviet Union crumbled in 1991, Ukraine had the third-largest stockpile of nuclear weapons in the world. In exchange for Ukraine’s giving up those weapons, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Russia agreed to secure Ukraine’s borders. In the 1994 Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances, they agreed they would not use military force or economic coercion against Ukraine.

Then Russian leader Vladimir Putin worked to bring Ukraine under the sway of the Russian oligarchs who rose to replace the region’s communist leaders, monopolizing formerly publicly held industries as those industries were privatized. American journalist Paul Klebnikov, the chief editor of Forbes in Russia, was murdered in 2004 after calling attention to what the oligarchs were doing.

In that same year, a Russian-backed politician, Viktor Yanukovych, appeared to be elected president of Ukraine. But the election was so full of fraud—including the poisoning of a key rival who wanted to break ties with Russia and align Ukraine with Europe—the government voided the election and called for a do-over. Yanukovych needed a makeover fast, and for that he called on an American political consultant with a reputation for making unsavory characters palatable to the media: Paul Manafort.

For ten years, from 2004 to 2014, Manafort worked for Yanukovych and his party, trying to make what the U.S. State Department called a party of “mobsters and oligarchs” look legitimate. He made a fortune thanks to his new friends. In 2010, Yanukovych finally won the presidency on a platform of rejecting NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization through which Europe joined together to oppose first the USSR, and then the rising threat of Russia. Immediately, Yanukovych turned Ukraine toward Russia. Then, in 2014, after months of popular protests, Ukrainians ousted Yanukovych from power in what is known as the Revolution of Dignity. He fled to Russia.

Shortly after Yanukovych’s ouster, Russia invaded Ukraine’s Crimea and annexed it, prompting the United States and the European Union to impose economic sanctions on Russia itself and also on specific Russian businesses and oligarchs, prohibiting them from doing business in the United States and in its territories. These sanctions hurt Russia and froze the assets of key Russian oligarchs, including Putin.

Now without his main source of income, Manafort owed about $17 million to allies of Yanukovych and Putin, especially Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. By 2016, his longtime friend and business partner Roger Stone was advising the presidential campaign of Donald Trump, and Manafort was happy to step in to help. He did not take a salary. He began as an advisor in March 2016 and became the campaign chairman in late June, after meeting on June 9 with Don Jr., Jared Kushner, and Russian operatives.

It turned out that Russia was looking for a way to grab the Ukrainian land it wanted without continuing to fight. Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s 2019 report on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election explained that Manafort and his partner, Russian operative Konstantin Kilimnik, in summer 2016 “discussed a plan to resolve the ongoing political problems in Ukraine by creating an autonomous republic in its more industrialized eastern region of Donbas, and having Yanukovych, the Ukrainian President ousted in 2014, elected to head that republic.”

The Mueller Report continued: “That plan, Manafort later acknowledged, constituted a ‘backdoor’ means for Russia to control eastern Ukraine.” The region that Putin wanted was the country’s industrial heartland. He was offering a “peace” plan that would carve off much of Ukraine and make it subservient to him. This was the exact opposite of U.S. policy for a free and united Ukraine, and there was no chance that former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, who was running for the presidency against Trump, would stand for it. But if Trump were elected, the equation changed.

According to the Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee, Kilimnik wrote: “ll that is required to start the process is a very minor ‘wink’ (or slight push) from D T saying ‘he wants peace in Ukraine and Donbass back in Ukraine’ and a decision to be a ‘special representative’ and manage this process.” Kilimnik further suggested that Manafort “could start the process and within 10 days visit Russia ( guarantees your reception at the very top level, cutting through all the bullsh*t and getting down to business), Ukraine, and key EU capitals,” and that “once then–Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko understood this ‘message’ from the United States, the process ‘will go very fast and DT could have peace in Ukraine basically within a few months after inauguration.’”

According to the Senate Intelligence Committee, the men continued to work on what they called the “Mariupol Plan” at least until 2018. Trump could not make it happen during his first term, although his operatives spent a great deal of time messing around in Ukraine and trying to smear Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden from there, and after Biden took office, Putin invaded Ukraine again in 2022.

As Jim Rutenberg wrote in his coverage of the Mariupol Plan in the New York Times Magazine, once his troops were in Ukraine, Putin claimed he had annexed Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson, two of which were specifically named in the Mariupol Plan, and instituted martial law in them, claiming that the people there had voted to join Russia.

Biden pulled together countries from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), along with other allies and partners, to stop Russia’s attack and to support Ukraine’s heroic efforts to repel the Russian invasion. Russia’s troops, meanwhile, have committed atrocities and are attacking civilians. The International Criminal Court (ICC) has indicted several Russian officials and commanders, including Putin himself, for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

But once Trump was back in office in 2025, he promptly tried to swing the U.S. behind Russia. His appointees insisted that the real story of the 2016 campaign was not Russia’s support for Trump, but rather a Democratic conspiracy to push the story of the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia. Repeatedly, Trump has threatened Zelensky and tried to cajole him into surrendering the territory Russia wants.

After the ICC indictment, Trump welcomed Putin to American soil in Alaska in August 2025, ordering U.S. soldiers to roll out a red carpet for him, and he has invited Putin to a gathering of the Group of 20 nations with advanced economies at Mar-a-Lago in December. Yesterday, the U.S. announced sanctions on the ICC itself, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio has vowed to take the organization apart “brick by brick.”

Meanwhile, Putin has behaved like someone who has a strong hand over Trump. In August 2025, Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov showed up at the Alaska meeting wearing a sweatshirt with the Cyrillic letters “CCCP,” which translates to USSR, suggesting that the Soviet Union had won the Cold War after all.

On Friday, despite the fact that Russia is backing Iran, whose military is killing U.S. soldiers, Trump proudly announced he was removing sanctions to let Russia sell its oil on global markets. Ukrainian attacks have curtailed Russian production, so the amount it has available to help the diesel squeeze in the U.S. is negligible, but the ability to rake in cash as the world’s current oil shortage has driven up prices is invaluable to Putin for his desperate war effort.

Also yesterday, Trump asked the Supreme Court to weigh in on a lawsuit over the 2016 election that he brought in 2022 against Hillary Clinton and former members of the Department of Justice, including former director of the FBI James Comey, Clinton’s campaign chair, and a grab bag of others. Trump sued them for conspiring to tie him to Russia in order to undermine his campaign.

As John Fritze of CNN reported yesterday, a federal court dismissed the lawsuit as “frivolous” and ruled that Trump’s attorneys were liable for nearly $1 million in sanctions. The 11th U.S. Circuit of Appeals upheld most of that decision last year. “This case should never have been brought,” U.S. District Judge Donald Middlebrooks of the Southern District of Florida wrote. “Its inadequacy as a legal claim was evident from the start. No reasonable lawyer would have filed it.” Now Trump is appealing to the Supreme Court.

But at this point, how much more evidence is necessary to assess that Trump has undermined U.S. national security and is working for Russia? And how much longer will Republicans in Congress continue to protect him as he does it?

Unless the Republican party wants to go down the road of a full-blown coup of some sort, so as to establish a one-party (Republican) dictatorship with Trump at its head, they’ll have to look very soon at what life without Trump is going to be like.

Trump has had his two terms. His future is limited. Even if they can somehow engineer a third term for him, it’s practically a certainty that he’d drop dead at some time during that third term.

If the Democrats win the Senate, then life gets very awkward for Trump. Inquiries and impeachments are just about guaranteed. A lot of his protection will be gone.

If Democrats should win both Houses, then Trump is politically isolated and negated. He ceases to have much political relevance.

Of course, he still holds a lot of unilateral power, especially as C-in-C of the armed forces.

But, that aside, he’s dead in the water. If the Democrats don’t get him, then there’s still a good chance that he’ll die soon. With nothing left to lose, the Republicans will be able to shake themselves free of his claims that the Republican party needs him and that they can’t win anything without him.

Will they let him hang on until the demeaning end, or will they back a 25th Amendment impeachment, to see if they can’t salvage something from the extensive wreckage of his Presidency?

captain_spalding said:

Unless the Republican party wants to go down the road of a full-blown coup of some sort, so as to establish a one-party (Republican) dictatorship with Trump at its head, they’ll have to look very soon at what life without Trump is going to be like.

Trump has had his two terms. His future is limited. Even if they can somehow engineer a third term for him, it’s practically a certainty that he’d drop dead at some time during that third term.

If the Democrats win the Senate, then life gets very awkward for Trump. Inquiries and impeachments are just about guaranteed. A lot of his protection will be gone.

If Democrats should win both Houses, then Trump is politically isolated and negated. He ceases to have much political relevance.

Of course, he still holds a lot of unilateral power, especially as C-in-C of the armed forces.

But, that aside, he’s dead in the water. If the Democrats don’t get him, then there’s still a good chance that he’ll die soon. With nothing left to lose, the Republicans will be able to shake themselves free of his claims that the Republican party needs him and that they can’t win anything without him.

Will they let him hang on until the demeaning end, or will they back a 25th Amendment impeachment, to see if they can’t salvage something from the extensive wreckage of his Presidency?

The other option is to interfere with the mid-terms, seize ballots and interfere with the counting and all that and then just declare their candidates the winners. Or stage another attempted coup on the Congress when they meet in January to swear all the new members in. The MAGA protesters know they’ll get a pardon again if they stage another insurrection.

Don’t expect Trump to accept the results of the mid-terms with any good grace, he might do what he did when Biden won 2020, but even worse. At the very least he will call the elections rigged and question the legitimacy of the process and the people doing the counting. He just doesn’t have it in him to be graceful and respectful about these things.

Then bear in mind he has a whole host of personally loyal devotees who he has appointed to various positions of power and influence. These people are complete grubs and toadys and are just going along with it to enrich themselves. A lot of these people know they have sinned, many times over, and deserve to be in prison if “normal” circumstances ever resumed. These will have nothing to lose in backing a coup.

Thanks for posting HCR’s letter.

October 11, 2026 (Sunday)

This week I marked the end of another summer by spending as much time as I could on the water. In the low fall light, paddling past the rock pier I’ve known my entire life, I saw something that made me appreciate the masons’ artistic ability even more than I always had.

It seemed they made the rocks take flight.

Here’s hoping the next year brings us all entirely new ways to look at the world.

Neophyte said:

October 11, 2026 (Sunday)

This week I marked the end of another summer by spending as much time as I could on the water. In the low fall light, paddling past the rock pier I’ve known my entire life, I saw something that made me appreciate the masons’ artistic ability even more than I always had.

It seemed they made the rocks take flight.

Here’s hoping the next year brings us all entirely new ways to look at the world.

:)

October 12, 2026 (Monday)

Billionaire Elon Musk has already funneled at least $366 million into the midterms to try to make sure voters elect Republicans. Theodore Schleifer of the New York Times reported today that Musk has put more than $276 million of that money into groups and political action committees just since July. More than $76 million has gone into his own super PAC, which is focused on seven Senate seats in battleground states, and more than thirty House races.

Schleifer notes that this is just the money that law requires must be disclosed; sources told Schleifer that in both this election and in 2024, Musk has made seven-figure donations to candidates through so-called “dark money” groups: ones that aren’t required to disclose their donors.

Adam Wren, Meredith Lee Hill, and Will Steakin of Politico report that Trump’s super PAC, “MAGA Inc.,” is coordinating with other super PACs to try to salvage the Republicans’ control of the Senate. The Republican Senate Leadership Fund has poured close to $100 million into Ohio alone to defeat former senator Sherrod Brown and is expecting to dump close to $200 million into Texas to defeat James Talarico. It’s also throwing money at Iowa to defeat Josh Turek, at Alaska to defeat Mary Peltola, at Michigan to defeat Abdul El-Sayed, and even at Kansas, to defeat Adam Hamilton.

Among other projects, Musk’s money is producing literature accusing Democrats of being radicals.

And yet the real radicalism in American politics today comes from those like Musk, those on the right who are consolidating the power of the government and the money of the American people into their own hands: Musk’s businesses depend on government contracts, after all, contracts a Democratic-run Congress would likely revisit.

That right-wing radicalism was on full display this morning, when agents from the Department of Homeland Security conducted a predawn raid on the Washington, D.C., home of Representative Ilhan Omar (D-MN). According to the Fox News Channel, which appears to have been read into the raid ahead of time, the Justice Department claimed that the search “stems from a criminal fraud investigation” over immigration paperwork filled out by her late father in the 1990s when Omar was a child.

Not only is it unlikely that evidence of a potential crime committed when the congresswoman was a child would be in her Washington, D.C., residence decades later, but also, as legal analyst Joyce White Vance noted: “To state what’s obvious to prosecutors here, we are within the period before an election where doesn’t take overt steps in an investigation that might influence its outcome. Another hard norm out the window.” More to the point was the comment by Mark Jacob of Stop the Presses, who noted: “This search was conducted by the Homeland Security Department, where lying and harassment are routine.”

Indeed, this latest attack on Omar follows Trump’s social media post of last Thursday, when he urged “he people of Minnesota” to “fight back!” against Minnesotans of Somali heritage. Representative Tom Emmer of Minnesota, a MAGA Republican, promptly echoed Trump, referring to Somali-Americans as “enemy combatants” and complaining that Democrats were not “rounding them up putting them in jail.”

This new attack on a Democratic representative is the second attempt of the administration to cow Democratic representatives. It has an ongoing case against New Jersey representative LaMonica McIver, whom it accuses of assaulting immigration agents in a skirmish outside of Delaney Hall detention center, in which no one was hurt. If McIver is convicted, she faces up to 17 years in prison. Both Omar and McIver are women of color. The attempt of the president to arrest and imprison his political opponents in the legislative branch is a direct assault on our democracy.

Indeed, the administration is trying to make their opponents live in fear. The latest target of their ire is Cassidy Hutchinson, the former aide to Trump’s first-term chief of staff Mark Meadows. Hutchinson was working in the White House in the weeks when Trump was trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election, and she testified before Congress about Trump’s behavior during that time. Federal prosecutors are trying to get a grand jury in Washington, D.C., to indict her for perjury.

As the attack on Omar shows, in their attempt to grasp complete control of the country, Trump and his loyalists are working hard to divide the American people along the old culture war lines that worked in the past. But Americans are concerned primarily about the economy as the war on Iran drives prices upward, so Republicans are becoming more and more extreme in their actions and their ads.

As Morgan Trau of WEWS wrote in a piece reprinted by the Ohio Capital Journal, an ad paid for by the Senate Leadership Fund featuring a woman who accuses Ohio Senate candidate Sherrod Brown of “pushing transgender surgeries on minors ‘like her,’” and who, in another ad, claims she had “surgery without my parents’ consent” as “a kid,” actually shows a woman from Texas who had gender-affirming surgery in that state as an adult. She has no connection to Ohio, where such surgery on minors is illegal.

Brown’s statement on healthcare was that he believes families and their doctors, not politicians, should make healthcare decisions.

An even more extreme meltdown took place over the weekend as MAGA tried to insist that Texas Democratic candidate James Talarico had suffered a mental breakdown and had been admitted to a treatment facility in Ohio. As Will Sommer and Andrew Egger of The Bulwark explained yesterday, MAGA influencers Nick Sortor and Rhein Amacher claimed they had proof that Talarico had been at the Lindner Center of Hope in Mason, Ohio. They claimed they had a tape of a Lindner employee telling them over the phone that Talarico had just been released.

With Musk pushing it, Sortor’s social media post alleging that “proof” garnered millions of views in hours.

But, predictably, the story fell apart fast. Neither the logic (why would Talarico go to Ohio for medical treatment rather than stay in Texas?) nor the timeline (Tararico was out in public in Texas during the time Sortor suggested he was in treatment) made sense. Then Sommer and Egger got access to the full recording of the alleged “proof.” It showed Amacher lying to the Lindner employee to get her to expose private health information. It also showed her repeatedly denying that anyone named James Talarico was in the system.

On Sunday night, the Lindner Center publicly announced that Talarico had never been treated there. Talarico himself posted a laughing emoji beside the information that he has never even been to Ohio. To a reporter, he added his own assessment of his opponent’s health, “I’ve heard credible reports that Ken Paxton has a serious medical condition that causes clinical levels of cowardice,” and noted that Paxton has refused to debate Talarico about actual issues.

Sommer and Egger note that while HIPAA, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, says medical providers can’t disclose patients’ information, it also penalizes individuals who try to get that information improperly, imposing heavier penalties for those who commit that offense “under false pretenses.” Those who access that information “for commercial advantage, personal gain, or malicious harm” can be fined up to $250,000 and be imprisoned for up to ten years.

Amacher later told Jesse Singal that he did not do “any after-the-fact fact-checking work and pointed to the fact that he’s a political advocate, not a journalist, and is therefore held to different standards.”

Trump’s choice of Katie Zacharia on Friday to become the new White House press secretary illustrates that the administration is fully committed to pushing its dominance through disinformation. As Judd Legum explained yesterday in Popular Information, Zacharia is a conspiracy theorist who pushed the “Pizzagate” conspiracy, the lie popular in 2016 that leading Democrats and Hollywood figures were sexually trafficking children and engaging in cannibalism in an organization run out of a Washington, D.C., pizza restaurant.

As Legum notes, Zacharia was relatively obscure before Trump tapped her. Her major qualification is that she posts a lot on Trump’s social media site and has worked as a senior communications advisor for the site.

On Saturday, Trump told a crowd in Clarksville, Tennessee: “There’s such love. Like, I mean, it’s amazing. When you stand up here, it’s just like—the love. I could say the stupidest things and you’d clap me.” He claimed that, in fact, what he does say is “things of common sense” and called for renaming the Atlantic or the Pacific Ocean either “‘Trump Ocean’ or ‘Ocean of the Americas.’”

Media figures are increasingly showing that Trump’s promises are false. Although Trump suggested after public outcry about $20 million in tax dollars going to his ads promoting himself that he would pay for them, the ads were apparently paid for with money Republicans in Congress allocated to the Department of Homeland Security. When asked on CBS’s Face the Nation Sunday about a reimbursement for taxpayers, Department of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin answered: “Any time we can do a public service announcement and brag about America, I’m all about it…. I think 99% of the coverage from President Trump is negative…. I commend the opportunity of President Trump to give us the opportunity to brag about America.” “So, no reimbursement,” host Margaret Brennan concluded.

Last night, U.S. District Judge Jennifer Rochon ordered the administration to immediately stop running the ads, which have been running on national media for two weeks, saying they likely “exceed the purposes authorized by Congress and violate restrictions on publicity and propaganda.” Kyle Cheney of Politico explained that the administration tried to avoid a ruling on the legality of the ad campaign by saying it was going to stop it after Sunday.

Scott Nover, Aaron Schaffer, and Aoife Walsh of the Washington Post reported that the administration ignored the order and continued to run the ads today.

The administration also appears to have ignored the law on Saturday, when it felled more than 400 trees on the East Potomac Golf Links course that Trump wants to turn into another of his projects.

U.S. District Judge Ana C. Reyes had previously warned the administration not to make any irreversible changes to the landscape, but she did not forbid it from doing maintenance work. The administration maintains the Saturday cutting was routine maintenance. Reyes was furious, telling the administration’s lawyers she didn’t know how she could have made it any clearer that she was trying to stop it from doing precisely what it did. She warned that the government had lost all credibility with her. The administration’s lawyer said they still planned to cut several hundred more trees.

Trump’s announcement on Sunday that both Russia and Ukraine had agreed to an “energy ceasefire” has also been exposed as a devastating lie. At the time, Ukraine said it had heard nothing about any such plan until it appeared on social media, and Russia promptly attacked Ukrainian power plants.

Foreign affairs journalist Anne Applebaum wrote today in The Atlantic that Trump’s dropping of sanctions against Russian oil looks like “an abrupt, Hail Mary attempt to force Ukraine to surrender and to save the Russian economy, perhaps in order to finally complete the multiple business deals that the Russians are known to have discussed with American negotiators and others in Trump’s orbit.”

Meanwhile, Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels have attacked Saudi Arabia’s main airport, killing at least 20 people, including a U.S. national. Oil prices are rising again, and Trump is said to be considering joining the Saudi fight against the Houthis.

On Friday evening, before the long weekend, the Pentagon quietly raised the number of U.S. service members killed in the Iran war from 18 to 21, and the number of wounded from 767 to 865, updating the numbers that had been on the Defense Casualty Analysis System website since August.

As John Ismay of the New York Times noted, when the Washington Post reported in September that the Pentagon was hiding the true numbers of those killed in the Iran war, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth posted on social media: “This is DISGUSTING and FAKE. A complete LIE.”
On Wednesday, Barak Ravid of Axios reported that the U.S. military is drawing up plans for another round of major combat operations in Iran.

Hegseth has named Elon Musk, who is pouring money into the midterms, to Project Meridian, a group charged with plotting out the future of the American military.

Identifying where the actual radicalism in American politics lies at this moment is important.

October 13, 2026 (Tuesday)

This afternoon, the President of the United States posted two videos of lions and tigers attacking humans.

Either he has entirely lost it, or he is desperate for a distraction, or both.

It turns out the attacks on Texas Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico were probably an attempt to get ahead of yet another damaging story about Trump’s hand-picked Republican Texas Senate candidate, Ken Paxton. Yesterday Elizabeth Findell, Mark Maremont, and Josh Dawsey of the Wall Street Journal reported that Paxton spent New Year’s Eve in 2024 in Dubai, partying with a woman who was not his wife, along with two fugitives from U.S. justice.

Although Vice President J.D. Vance and other members of the administration have vowed to remove more than 760,000 enrollees from the Affordable Care Act, citing widespread fraud, the fugitives with whom Paxton was hanging out were wanted on federal healthcare fraud charges. They allegedly embezzled $15 million from a Chicago hospital, and one of them was charged with receiving at least $195 million from the U.S. government for fraudulent Covid-19 tests.

One of the men donated $190,000 to Paxton, $25,000 of it after he was indicted.

Ron Filipkowski of MeidasNews posted: “JD Vance running around the country saying he’s fighting health care fraud while his nominee for the senate in TX who he completely supports is partying in Dubai with a guy stole over $300 million in health care fraud and gave Paxton $190,000. This is the Republican Party.”

Meanwhile, although the administration has boasted that it is cracking down on fraud in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program by cutting benefits, ProPublica reported today that the real fraud comes from criminal syndicates, often from Romania, who last year walked away with $470 million stolen electronically from more than 990,000 households. The theft could be stopped with digital microchips, but Congress has refused to add them to the benefit cards. Now the Trump administration has stripped funds allocated to address the theft.

Diesel prices jumped today as traders appeared to doubt Trump’s abandonment of Russian sanctions will do much for prices in the U.S. Steve Kopack of NBC News noted that U.S. diesel futures were up about 5% by midday. Generally, a jump in futures prices means higher consumer prices are forthcoming. The price of diesel is up 70% since the war on Iran began on February 28.

Gulf Oil adviser Tom Kloza posted: “Absolutely stunning price spikes in wholesale diesel today…. Market clearly not believing that Russian oil is on the way.” He added: “US retail diesel price record of $6.53/gal could be topped by the midterms.”

As Barbara Sprunt reported at NPR, a bipartisan group of senators is pushing back on Trump’s lifting of sanctions, calling it a “betrayal of the people of Ukraine.” Democratic senators Richard Blumenthal (CT), Chris Coons (DE), Dick Durbin (IL), Jack Reed (RI), Jeanne Shaheen (NH), and Sheldon Whitehouse (RI) joined Republicans Alan Armstrong (OK), Susan Collins (ME), John Cornyn (TX), Mitch McConnell (KY), Lisa Murkowski (AK), and Thom Tillis (NC) in asking Trump to rescind the deal.

“The deal you struck with President Vladimir Putin on October 9th will not achieve just ends, nor will it benefit Americans,” they wrote. It “only provides Putin with more fuel to finance his war machine and enables Russia to continue its brutal attacks on Ukrainian civilians. Granting Moscow the ability to sell Russian diesel freely in global markets damages American security interests and is a betrayal of the people of Ukraine, who continue to defend themselves from Putin’s murderous, illegal war. This deal is a gift to our adversary and a betrayal of our Allies; it should be rescinded.”

The senators emphasized that with last month’s Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026, Congress had tasked Trump with applying economic pressure on Russia, not with easing that pressure.

When asked about the letter, Trump told reporters: “Nobody’s telling me anything. That’s a diesel deal. Not for us. That’s being released into the world. That’s not being released to us. That’s a diesel deal that’s going to be released into the world for the world market, because the world market suffered with high prices.”

Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky said Ukraine got no warning from its Western partners about Russia’s overnight strikes on the capital, raising concerns that Trump is making good on his threat to stop sharing intelligence with Ukraine unless it stops striking Russian oil refineries. Trump today told reporters that the U.S. is still sharing intelligence.

Trump’s new White House press secretary held her first press conference today. Observers called it “brutally bad” and compared it to a Saturday Night Live cold open. Katie Zacharia revealed that she is fiercely loyal to Trump, and that she is neither a competent reader nor comfortable answering questions. News broke today that Trump overrode his chief of staff, Susie Wiles, to give the position to Zacharia, a leak that Jen Rubin of The Contrarian speculated had come from either Wiles or an ally “to prove she was right! OUCH”

Judd Legum of Popular Information, who uncovered Zacharia’s history of pushing conspiracy theories, today noted that while Trump calls her “an attorney” and she describes herself that way, there is no record that she ever passed a bar exam or has been admitted to practice law in any state. When reporters asked her about where she had passed the bar exam, she answered: “I moved to China.”

Zacharia did say in today’s press conference that “we have asked Ambassador Guilfoyle to resign.” Kimberly Guilfoyle has been embroiled in a story about shaking down a donor to pay off $100,000 of her credit card debt, and she did, in fact, resign her post as the U.S. ambassador to Greece today. In a social media post, she defended her tenure in Greece and promised to “vigorously defend my name, my reputation, and my integrity.”

“While my time as Ambassador may be coming to an end, my commitment to President Trump, the America First movement, and the country I love will never end,” she posted. Trump later told reporters that Guilfoyle, who dated his son Don Jr. for six years and was engaged to him for four, “wasn’t a member of my family. She, I guess, dated my son a long time ago.”

A new poll conducted by the Associated Press–NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that almost six in ten Americans say they believe Trump is either illegally profiting from the presidency or doing something unethical but not illegal.

Jordain Carney and Mia McCarthy of Politico reported today that Republicans are worried not only about how much work Congress needs to get through after the midterms, but also about whether Republicans will even bother to come back to vote after the election. “Attendance is an issue right now,” Representative Austin Scott (R-GA) told Carney and McCarthy.

October 14, 2026 (Wednesday)

According to Ukrainian presidential advisor Serhiy Beskrestnov, last night, without warning, Elon Musk’s SpaceX restricted the speed limits for the Starlink terminals Ukraine’s military uses, known as Starshield, debilitating Ukraine’s drones even as Russian forces launched strikes against Ukraine’s energy and critical infrastructure—the very infrastructure Trump said must be left alone.

As Christopher Miller of the Financial Times reported, Russia launched 39 ballistic missiles and more than 120 drones against Ukraine last night and, just as the night before, Ukraine received no intelligence warning from the U.S. Last night, though, Ukrainian drone operators also found they could not control drones at speeds above 160 kph (about 100 mph).

Last night’s barrage was one of the largest attacks of the war, killing at least five Ukrainians and leaving at least 600,000 people without power.

Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky noted that “he strike was entirely deliberate and demonstrative in its scale—Russia has never before shown such ostentatious disrespect toward the United States.” He continued: “We ask America and EVERYONE in the world who does not turn a blind eye to reality to respond—and to respond forcefully. Russia has squandered the opportunity for de-escalation and has clearly chosen to continue its insane war of annihilation…. Peace can only come through strength, and we ask America to remember this principle of Reagan’s.”

Ukraine relies on two satellite systems related to SpaceX. One is Starlink, which handles communications, defensive drones, and coordinating ground forces. The other is Starshield, which is used for offensive purposes and is controlled by the U.S. government.

It appeared at first that Elon Musk deliberately sabotaged Ukrainian military operations while they were underway, in defiance of American national security policy. Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) pointedly wrote to Musk on social media: “lease tell me these overnight disruptions to Starlink terminals in Ukraine were unintended—that is doing everything it can to fix a temporary glitch.”

He continued: “I’m confident this does not reflect a change in SpaceX policy because if so, intentionally degrading Ukraine’s ability to defend itself might be construed as aiding and abetting a mass murderer. Can you confirm that’s not SpaceX’s intent?”

This would have been at least the second time Musk had used his power over communications to weaken Ukraine. In 2025, Joey Roulette, Cassell Bryan-Low, and Tom Balmforth of Reuters reported that in 2022, as Ukraine was retaking land Russia had invaded, Musk ordered engineers to deactivate Starlink in crucial areas, leaving the Ukrainian military without communications and hamstringing their ability to gather intelligence or aim at targets.

One of the people who told the journalists about Musk’s 2022 order noted that Musk had been able to reshape the front lines of the battle and that he had taken “the outcome of a war into his own hands.”

SpaceX is a defense contractor for the U.S. government, currently receiving more than $16 billion through NASA, the Department of Defense, the Space Force, the National Reconnaissance office, and the Space Development Agency, with as much as almost $30 billion forthcoming if it exercises all its options. SpaceX operates the U.S. military’s primary satellite communications—the same system limited last night in Ukraine—and launches most of the classified intelligence satellites for the U.S.

Musk has spent about $366 million so far to swing the midterm elections toward Republicans, and SpaceX’s undermining of Ukraine supports Trump’s effort to help Russia’s president Vladimir Putin fund his ongoing attacks. That support for Russia flies in the face of traditional U.S. alliances with the democratic nations of Europe, instead isolating the U.S. alongside autocratic Russia.

But after a furious outcry today about the failing communications service that left Ukraine vulnerable to Russian attacks, Musk called out the difference between Starlink and Starshield to blame the change on Trump.

He wrote: “Starshield systems are owned and controlled by the US government. Any limits on speed or usage are decided by the US military and ultimately .” Then he added: “Starlink is a commercial service owned and controlled by SpaceX. Usage of Starlink is limited to civilian or defensive activities and cannot be used for offensive military action, as doing so would be inappropriate for a commercial company.”

Barak Ravid of Axios reported that both systems—Starshield and Starlink—were restricted.

Ravid also reported that, while Musk blamed Trump for the service slowdown, the White House claimed it had no control over SpaceX, thereby putting the blame for the deadly slowdown on Musk.

The fact that this was the only response of the White House to the profound betrayal of U.S. ally Ukraine tells its own story. Senator Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), the top-ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, noted today that: “The Pentagon is…required to notify Congress if it pauses or downgrades intelligence sharing with Ukraine. If that happens, must provide that immediately.”

Foreign affairs journalist Laura Rozen noted that Representative Jim Himes (D-CT), the top-ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said the committee has received no such notification and is trying to find out more information.

While Musk and Trump blamed each other for the technological shift that benefited Russia, Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky was in London, conferring with Prime Minister Andy Burnham and King Charles III. At 10 Downing Street, the official residence of the prime minister, a gathered crowd greeted him with enthusiastic applause.

The official readout of their meeting revealed their agreement that “Russia had no interest in peace” and noted “Russia’s blatant indiscriminate attacks on civilians and energy infrastructure since President Trump called for an energy ceasefire.”

This evening, Henry Foy, Paola Tamma, Christopher Miller, and Amy Mackinnon of the Financial Times reported that last week, Trump asked European countries to thaw Russian assets that were frozen after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and to transfer those assets to a vehicle controlled by the United States in order to revive peace talks. European officials declined, but the very idea added to questions about U.S. intentions.

At home, Trump is taking authoritarianism out for a spin.

John McCormick, Michelle Hackman, and Sadie Gurman of the Wall Street Journal reported this evening that the goal of administration officials in investigating the citizenship paperwork of Representative Ilhan Omar (D-MN), filled out by her father when she was a child in the 1990s after the family arrived in the U.S. from a refugee camp in Kenya, is to find a way to strip her of her U.S. citizenship and deport her. In their search on Monday, federal agents took Omar’s cellphone, notebooks, personal computers, and passport.

Omar is running for reelection with Election Day less than a month away. Department of Justice rules caution prosecutors against taking any action that could affect an election, or even create the perception that they are trying to do so.

At a rally today in Bullhead City, Arizona, Trump doubled down on culture war tropes when he told attendees that they must vote for MAGA Republican Andy Biggs because Democrats want to “raise your taxes,…annihilate your very secure borders, decimate Arizona jobs, mutilate your children. They want to mutilate, cut your children. It’s unbelievable what they do…. Your son leaves as Jimmy and comes back home in three days as Janet. And they don’t even ask you.” He urged them to “defeat the Democrat communists and vote for more money in your pockets, bigger paychecks for your families, lower taxes, less crime, a booming Arizona economy…. All you have to do is vote Republican and you’re going to have all that and more.”

But new numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics released today showed inflation up again last month, reaching 3.7%, up from 3.4% in August. Politics and national security scholar Nicholas Grossman noted: “In the supposedly horrific year of 2024, monthly inflation averaged 2.9% and was trending down rather than up.”

Morning Joe economic analyst Steve Rattner explained today how Trump and a couple dozen insiders have made almost $2 billion on Trump’s meme coin, while about 2 million Americans lost $4.3 billion. “It’s like buying a pet rock just to lose a lot of money,” he observed.

Gabe Kaminsky, Madeleine May, and Steve Reilly of CBS News reported today that more than half of the people competing for seats at Trump’s next coin dinner use cryptocurrency exchanges that bar U.S. customers, meaning they likely belong to people outside the U.S. The November 22nd dinner will include the top 185 holders of the $TRUMP meme coin.

Zach Everson, a researcher for the progressive consumer rights advocacy group Public Citizen, told the CBS News reporters: “Foreign actors used to need a back door to try to influence a president.” Now, though, “Trump is holding the front door open and inviting them in for a steak dinner.”

U.S. District Court Judge Timothy J. Kelly, a Trump appointee, ruled yesterday that Trump had banned more than 70 journalists from CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House press room because he wanted more favorable coverage. That ban violated both free speech and due process, Kelly ruled, and he said Trump could not ban the organizations from the White House, although he did not address whether the administration could bar reporters from Air Force One or the Oval Office.

Kelly noted that both free speech and due process are protected by the Bill of Rights, as the first ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution are known. The Justice Department says it will appeal. David Folkenflik of NPR noted that after the five major television networks—ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox News, and NBC—rallied together when Trump banned CNN, the Department of Justice announced it is investigating the networks for breaking antitrust laws.

Yesterday Trump posted two videos of people being mauled by lions and tigers. Last night, just before midnight, in the style of strongmen trying to prove they are supermen, he posted an AI video of himself warning a tiger off, then chasing the tiger, tackling it, dominating it, and finally playing with the now docile animal.

!!!

October 15, 2026 (Thursday)

There is an old saying about rats and sinking ships. There’s also an old saying about how a democratic system taken over by a single party quickly becomes corrupt because the ruling party lacks oversight. Then, as corruption becomes the party’s driving force, the only people willing to work for it are either corrupt themselves or so unqualified they support the corrupt leadership to gain power, knowing that in a merit-based system it would be entirely out of their reach.

OK, that second old saying is shared mostly among political scientists, but it’s accurate, and it’s right up there with the rats and the ships to describe what’s happening in Trump’s orbit now.

The saga of Kimberly Guilfoyle, who was recently forced to resign from her post as U.S. Ambassador to Greece, continues to expand. Guilfoyle left her post after news broke that she had tried to get a donor, Eric Deters, to pay down her credit card debt. She and her lawyers countered the story by claiming Deters was withholding money she had earned, and said the text messages he shared with news outlets were false.

Guilfoyle dated Don Jr. from 2018 to 2024 and was engaged to him the last four years of that time. Now there are rumors that during her time inside the family as a trusted loyalist, she kept a “burn book” about the family.

While that may or may not be true, the fact that there’s such a threat out there reflects the cracking loyalties of Trump insiders. More to the point might be the video released today by Deters himself, saying he had launched a lawsuit against Guilfoyle for defamation and that he would depose her and Don Jr. and demand subpoenas to clear his name. He also vowed to play a 16-minute phone conversation tomorrow that he claims has information which “might just bring down the entire Trump administration, an administration which I have supported from Day One.”

Note that the story of Guilfoyle’s alleged shakedown is breaking now, although it happened more than a year ago.

Also in the category of old stories coming to the surface is one reported yesterday by Marc Caputo of Axios. He wrote that Trump’s former lawyer Alina Habba is saying that another one of Trump’s advisors, Ric Grenell, did not deposit her billionaire husband’s $5.6 million donation to the Kennedy Center. According to Habba, Grenell asked that the donation be routed through a $17.6 million payment for a business deal, an accusation Grenell called “absurd.”

Trump appointed Grenell to be U.S. Ambassador to Germany and then acting director of national intelligence during his first term. After retaking office, he named Grenell as a special envoy to Venezuela before putting him in charge of the Kennedy Center.

A fight that has been going on for more than a year in the administration broke into the open this morning in a Politico story by Daniel Lippman. He explained that Trump named Italian Paolo Zampolli, a former modeling agent who introduced Trump to First Lady Melania Trump at a party in New York City, as a special envoy at the State Department with a portfolio of cultural diplomacy. But Zampolli apparently ignored that assignment and struck out on his own on a wide range of issues, infuriating Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau.

“My number-one boss is the president of America,” Zampolli told James Fontanella-Khan of the Financial Times in April. “I get my instructions from the White House, Commerce and the Department of War…anything to advance the America First agenda.” More than 16 administration officials have been included in the angry email chains Zampolli and Landau have exchanged, which at one point led to communications about the fight with a top-level foreign official.

At one point Zampolli accused Landau of leaking to reporters what appeared to be the story that Zampolli had tried to get custody of his son by asking Immigrations and Customs Enforcement to deport Amanda Ungaro, the boy’s mother. That story created its own scandal when Ungaro, a former model, threatened to expose information about the president and first lady. Landau responded to Zampolli’s accusation, which he sent to more than a dozen other officials, saying: “Your threats and accusations are getting more and more bizarre, defamatory, and inappropriate for broad dissemination on email.”

An administration official told Lippman that the State Department was “generally squeaky clean and professional and above it all.” In contrast, these exchanges were “cartoonish and embarrassing.”

By this afternoon, Lippman had a follow-up story: Zampolli had been fired.

It is not just the current associates of the president who are problematic. Today, news broke that two women have named former Republican representative Matt Gaetz (R-FL), along with his friend former Seminole County tax collector Joel Greenberg and others, in a civil lawsuit, alleging that from 2017 through January 2019, “Gaetz and Greenberg coordinated recruitment, payments, drugs, and travel to obtain commercial sexual acts….”

In 2024, the House Ethics Committee reported that Gaetz “regularly” paid women, as well as a 17-year-old girl, for sex, and bought and used illicit drugs while a member of Congress. Those accusations helped to sink Trump’s nomination of Gaetz for U.S. attorney general in 2025.

Gaetz’s response was hardly a denial: “I look forward to taking the plaintiffs’ depositions because much of the conduct alleged against me is false,” he wrote. “The lawsuit relies almost exclusively on a Congressional Committee Report that didn’t allow me to confront my accusers. Now I will finally have that chance.”

One has to wonder why anyone would want to be part of such a mess, but Trump’s new White House press secretary provides an answer: in a normal administration she would never make it through the door. Trump has described Katie Zacharia as an “attorney,” and she has identified herself as “general counsel,” claiming she worked as a lawyer in China.

But after Judd Legum of Popular Information noted there was no sign she had ever passed the bar exam or been admitted to a state bar, Philip Wegmann and Alexandra Bruell of the Wall Street Journal reported today that, in fact, she failed the California bar exam when she took it. That, itself, is not unusual—the California bar exam is notoriously difficult—but it does mean she is not qualified to call herself a lawyer.

Democracy Defenders Fund, a nonpartisan team defending democracy led by lawyer Norm Eisen, has asked the State Bar of California and California Attorney General Rob Bonta to investigate whether Zacharia practiced law without a license in California, where doing so is a crime.

Tonight, on his show, Fox News Channel personality Sean Hannity seemed to undercut Zacharia, asking her why she had insisted on describing herself as a lawyer when she could just have said she “went to Pepperdine Law School and then took a different career path.” Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo noted that Hannity’s stance likely reflected that Trump is turning on her.

Rhein Amacher, the man who started a right-wing media frenzy when he claimed to have proof that Democratic Texas Senate candidate James Talarico had sought mental health treatment in Ohio, backed away from that claim today…sort of.

Amid suggestions that he might well have run afoul of HIPAA penalties for trying to obtain health information duplicitously, he posted that “this entire situation has been blown completely out of proportion,” and wrote, “As far as I’m concerned, this matter is closed.” Later, in response to a post saying he had lied, he added: “Never lied, I just doubled down on wrong information.”

A blockbuster story by Jonathan O’Connell, Sarah Blaskey, and Aaron Schaffer of the Washington Post today explained that the administration has been able to keep donations for Trump’s ballroom largely secret by using a nonprofit to collect the donations and then channeling that money “into a White House account the president directly controls.”

The reporters gained access to a list of the 57 donors who have committed to giving $100,000 or more to the project. They found that “the vast majority of the funds raised came from companies and wealthy individuals with interests before the federal government.” Large technology companies Nvidia and Apple committed $25 million each. Microsoft, Palantir, and Lockheed Martin pledged $10 million each.

Individuals on the list who are associated with Trump include Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s son Brandon, chair of investment bank Cantor Fitzgerald, who contributed stock worth more than $2.5 million, and the U.S. ambassador to the Netherlands, Republican donor Joseph Popolo Jr., and his wife, who gave $1 million. Missing from the list is Trump himself, who claimed he would be helping to pay for the project.

Sarah Longwell of The Bulwark was right when she called the ballroom being constructed where the East Wing of the White House used to be “a monument to corruption” built by “a corrupt American president.”

On Tuesday, Charles Gorrivan, Lydia Beyoud, and Nicola M. White of Bloomberg reported that on March 23, a few traders placed billions of dollars of contracts predicting that the price of oil would fall just 15 minutes before Trump posted on his social media platform that he had changed his mind about striking Iranian power plants. The deals were worth billions, and analysts from the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) flagged the traders and the deals and sent a referral to the Division of Enforcement to decide whether to open an investigation into insider trading. But in a virtually unheard-of move, the administration asked the CFTC to withdraw the referral.

The journalists note both that there have been many trades apparently tied to Trump’s announcements and that between a 20% cut to CFTC staff during Trump’s second term and the agency chair’s vow to curb “over-zealous regulation,” enforcement actions have dropped dramatically from the numbers during the Biden administration.

Steven Portnoy and Katherine Faulders of ABC News reported today that the White House is claiming that all Trump’s conversations about plans to renovate the Kennedy Center are covered by executive privilege and therefore can be kept secret. This is a dramatic expansion of the concept of executive privilege, which enables the president to shield conversations with key advisors from public scrutiny, extending it to consider virtually all conversations private.

Apparently in anticipation of Democratic investigations, Attorney General Todd Blanche issued a memo as soon as he took office, claiming presidents can shield “presidential communications with private advisers so long as the communications relate to official presidential decisionmaking.”

A new Fox News poll released today showed that voters’ top concern is “corruption in government,” with 88% worried about it compared to 12% who are not. Corruption tops even “inflation and high prices,” which comes in at 85%, and “gas prices,” which concern 83% of voters.

In a conversation with Rob Finnerty of Newsmax, aired tonight, Trump suggested he would pardon everyone in the administration, including himself, to make sure none of the people around him have to “go through years of nonsense, hire lawyers and everything else, all for nothing.”

It is no wonder that Republicans eager to stop Trump are backing Democratic candidates for the midterms. Today, 58 Republicans and Independents in New Hampshire declared their support for the Democratic Senate candidate, Representative Chris Pappas over Republican candidate John Sununu. Those supporters include Don Bolduc, who was Trump’s pick for the Senate in 2022, but who lost to Democrat Maggie Hassan by 9 points after he embraced Trump’s claim to have won the 2020 election.

One of the Republicans supporting Pappas told Kevin Landrigan of the New Hampshire Union Leader: “Donald Trump has turned the Republican Party into something I no longer recognize.”

Ta.

October 16, 2026 (Friday)

Trump’s new pick for White House press secretary lasted less than five days. Katie Zacharia resigned today after a series of disastrous performances and news that she had misrepresented her legal credentials. Trump said he would let her decide if she wanted to stay but added that if he were in her shoes, he would “reconsider.”

Wags noted that the time unit of a Scaramucci—named for the White House press secretary who lasted only 11 days during Trump’s first term and used to identify an official whose stay in public office has been exceedingly brief—has been replaced by the Zacharia.

Yesterday morning, Trump posted on social media that the execution of Nidal Hasan, who killed 13 people and injured 32 others at Fort Hood in 2009, will not be livestreamed. As Amy B. Wang and Alauna Safarpour of the Washington Post reported yesterday, 80% of Americans opposed livestreaming the execution to the public.

A poll by the Washington Post, ABC News, and Ipsos showed that the only demographic polled in which a majority wanted a livestream of the execution was MAGA Republican men, of whom 57% wanted the event livestreamed and 42% were opposed. Veterans, Democrats, non-MAGA Republicans, Independents, and MAGA Republican women all opposed the livestream by overwhelming amounts.

And so, the chaos of Trump’s MAGA administration continues.

Chaos continues as well in Trump’s approach to Ukraine, and it has a deadly pattern.

After SpaceX debilitated Ukraine’s military defenses on October 14, in the midst of one of the heaviest Russian bombardments of the war, by slowing down the speed of Ukraine’s Starlink terminals and the Starshield system that Ukraine’s military uses, Elon Musk, who owns SpaceX, and Trump, who controls Starshield, each blamed the other for the slowdown.

Yesterday, Senator Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), the top-ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, led a bipartisan group of nine senators demanding answers from Platte Moring, the inspector general of the Department of Defense.

Noting that the slowdown meant that “U.S. diplomatic, military, and security personnel were unable to reach designated bunkers during Russian air raids,” they asked “hether any Department of Defense or other U.S. government officials directed, authorized, approved, or had advance knowledge of changes to intelligence-sharing arrangements, warning capabilities, or Starlink and Starshield services affecting Ukraine.”

They also asked if the slowdown was a policy decision or a contractor action, whether U.S. personnel received adequate warning, and whether “any restrictions on Starlink or Starshield services were directed, authorized, or implemented by SpaceX, the Department of Defense, or other U.S. government entities.” They also wanted to hear exactly what “immediate corrective measures are being implemented” to make sure such a crisis doesn’t happen again.

Today Trump told reporters that neither he nor Musk had caused the shortage. “I didn’t do that. No, we didn’t do that at all. In fact, I don’t even think it was slowed down, from what I understood. Because I just checked this morning.” He continued: “I heard about it from the news, the media. And we didn’t slow it down at all. And I think it’s probably functioning, from what I understand.” When a reporter asked if Musk had had anything to do with the slowdown, Trump said: “I don’t know if it was anybody, because it wasn’t me, and I don’t think it was Elon, and from what I understand, it’s the same as it’s always been.”

Joe Barnes of The Telegraph reported today that according to four sources familiar with the discussions over the issue, as well as “ high-ranking European official and two “well-placed Ukrainian sources,” it was Musk who approached Trump with the idea of slowing down the Starlink systems in Ukraine, and Trump agreed. But, according to Barnes, the outcry over Russia’s destructive attacks that night made Musk worry that European customers might turn against him, as indeed they warned him on social media.

A source told Barnes: “He tweeted out that he was innocent and that it was the US administration that did it. The reality is that they were both in it.”

Meanwhile, Theodore Schleifer of the New York Times reported today that Musk donated $158 million in September alone to a super PAC that immediately sent $158 million to back Ken Paxton’s campaign to become the next U.S. senator from Texas instead of Democratic candidate James Talarico. Musk donated an additional $10 million to a different pro-Paxton super PAC, as well.

Musk’s huge donations have kept the unpopular Paxton financially competitive with Talarico. Paxton is currently the Texas attorney general, responsible for the few state regulations concerning SpaceX and Musk’s more than 90 other companies and other legal entities in Texas.

Trump has clearly decided his own personal interests require bringing the United States to the rescue of Russia’s president Vladimir Putin. Just a week ago, he announced he was waiving sanctions to allow Russia to sell diesel on the global market, funneling money to Putin to continue his war on Ukraine.

Tonight, in a late Friday night news dump, Trump signed an executive order waiving yet more sanctions on Russia that would have gone into effect in two days under the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026. The president wrote that waiving those sanctions is “in the national interests of the United States,” although he did not specify why.

Congress passed the Graham Act just weeks ago, making clear that it expected stronger measures against Russia. Trump signed the law but is doing the opposite of Congress’s intent. Representative Don Beyer (D-VA) posted: “Trump’s latest surrender to Putin again betrays our Ukrainian partners and defies clear congressional intent of legislation designed to punish Russia for its illegal war of aggression.”

Like Putin, Trump has been determined to sow confusion and fear over the midterm elections, likely hoping to depress voter turnout and destroy faith in the outcome. Central to that is Trump’s insistence that noncitizens are swinging elections against him, even though experts across the political spectrum agree that voting by noncitizens is both illegal and exceedingly rare.

Jacob Bogage and Andrew Goudsward of Reuters reported on October 13 that after losing 26 of its lawsuits designed to get access to state voter rolls and winning none, the Department of Justice gave California officials just two days to review a list of 20,000 people it suspects are not citizens but may have received mail-in ballots for the midterm election. The DOJ sent along a thumb drive that it said identified those voters.

California officials did not do as the DOJ demanded, saying the scheme had no legal basis. Sarah N. Lynch of CBS News reported that Dean Logan, the registrar-recorder/county clerk of Los Angeles County, said his office would not open the thumb drive “because doing so would conflict with established data privacy and information security protocols.” He added: “Federal and state laws are clear on how voter eligibility is established—and any action to remove a voter from eligibility must be based on verifiable information, not assertions of unconfirmed data matching.”

Yesterday Alanna Durkin Richer, Sophie Austin, and Safiyah Riddle of the Associated Press reported that the administration is escalating its threats, suing election officials in California and asking a judge to stop the state from counting mail-in ballots from people the administration claims aren’t citizens until their citizenship has been verified.

Today Juhi Doshi, Alexander Mallin, Luke Barr, and Lucien Bruggeman of ABC News reported that the administration is now threatening criminal prosecution for election workers who knowingly count ballots filled out by noncitizens. Trump added on social media: “They will all go to jail for a long period of time!!!”

According to the ABC News journalists, “Experts overwhelmingly agree the lawsuit is unlikely to succeed. But they fear the consequences of publicly calling election outcomes into question could damage confidence in democracy.”

That concern is behind the No Kings events taking place across the country on Saturday, October 17. While earlier No Kings events emphasized protest and solidarity, tomorrow’s will be about “nonpartisan voter participation, being in community with each other, and making sure every eligible voter has a plan, knows their options, and is ready to make their voice count.”

The organizers remind Americans: “Our democracy depends on every eligible voter having the freedom to participate without intimidation, interference, or barriers.”

Thanks for posting.

Keeps me up to date, but is all very depressing.

:(

October 17, 2026 (Saturday)

Around the United States of America and the world, people gathered today at more than 3,000 No Kings: Vote Early events to encourage Americans to vote in the November 3 midterm elections. The events were designed to encourage people to vote early to ensure their votes are counted in an election where the president and his party have made it clear they intend to silence their opponents.

Since Trump launched the Big Lie that he had been cheated of victory in the 2020 presidential election by voter fraud, Republican-dominated state legislatures have restricted access to the vote. Although it is already illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal elections and such votes are vanishingly rare, Trump and his allies are insisting that states must restrict the vote to prevent voter fraud. According to the Brennan Center, which works to protect voting rights, in 2021 at least 19 states passed 32 laws to make voting more difficult. Since the 2024 election, 22 states have passed 47 laws that restrict the vote.

As Bob Ortega of CNN reported yesterday, states have closed polling places in Black and Latino districts, required new paperwork to vote, reduced early voting, and restricted the use of student IDs for voter identification. Celina Stewart, the chief executive officer of the League of Women Voters, a nonpartisan organization that works to expand access to the vote, told Ortega: “In 17 years of working on voting rights, I have never seen such a widespread and coordinated effort to restrict access to the ballot.”

No Kings organizer Ezra Levin said the way to judge the effectiveness of this No Kings Day was to answer the question: “Did we drive the biggest early vote in the history of the Republic?” He added: “I think we’re gonna do it.” People turned No Kings

But just at the height of the pro-voting events, Meta took down the main No Kings organizing page on Instagram for about four hours. According to Levin, Meta didn’t respond to the No Kings team, “even as the account was offline at the peak of our national day of action and livestream.” Once the account was viewable again, “Meta told us in their response email that they made a bad call.”

Still, though, No Kings administrators had no access to the account, blocking their ability “to post about an ongoing day of mass action for early voting.” Levin noted: “This is part of a much bigger concern: activists and movements around the world are increasingly vulnerable to decisions made by powerful technology platforms that can determine who gets heard and who gets silenced.”

The League of Women Voters wrote that the timing of the blackout mattered. “When people are gathering, organizing, and seeking information about civic participation, cutting off a movement’s primary communication channel—even temporarily—is deeply troubling. This is about more than one account. It raises serious questions about transparency, accountability, and the power private technology platforms wield over public communication.”

Meta later claimed the issue was technical, saying, “When accounts post, share or comment at very high frequencies it can trigger automated systems. That’s what happened with the No Kings IG account in the lead up to today’s day of action. Unfortunately, that automated action was clearly taken in error. Everything is now working as it should and we sincerely apologize.”

The timing of the error was unfortunate. Just yesterday, Reuters reported on a story out of Brazil claiming that in internal communications, Meta employees acknowledged that the company had restricted the Instagram accounts of Brazilian ​President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva during the country’s recent election. The story says the employees’ messages also recommended accounts related to his challenger, Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, the son of Jair Bolsonaro, the right-wing ex-president who tried to overthrow Lula’s government. Senator Bolsonaro did much better than expected in the election, and the two face a runoff.

It was not until close to 6:00 Eastern time that the No Kings account could be used again. “WE ARE BACK IN! We can post again,” Levin wrote. “This was utter bullsh*t on the biggest early vote effort in history. But it will not stop what we’re building.”

“No Kings means no kings in the White House,” he wrote, “or in Silicon Valley.”

Ta.

“In 17 years of working on voting rights, I have never seen such a widespread and coordinated effort to restrict access to the ballot.””

In a parallel universe, this kind of thing gets people locked up.

Heather Cox Richardson and David Corn

Link

October 18, 2026 (Sunday)

Tonight Lingling Wei, Alex Leary, Thomas Grove, and Josh Dawsey of the Wall Street Journal reported that Russia’s president Vladimir Putin has proposed a meeting next month with Trump and China’s president Xi Jinping to decide the fate of Ukraine.

The reporters explained that a three-way summit with China and the U.S. would cement Russia’s status as one of the world’s three great powers, a status Putin has sought since 2000 when he entered the Kremlin. Such a summit would formally acknowledge that the U.S. had broken from Europe and allied with Russia, a goal for Putin as he tries to take control of Ukraine.

A former Russian intelligence officer told the reporters that the summit would replace the rules-based international order established by the United States and its allies and partners after World War II with a system that divides the globe into spheres of influence.

After ten years of Trump insisting that reports of his cooperation with Russia were a hoax, here we are, watching one profoundly unpopular man tear apart the global system under which we have lived for eighty years in order to climb into bed with Vladimir Putin.

In just over a week, Trump has lifted sanctions on the sale of Russian oil on the global market, a way both to send desperately needed money to Russia to fund its war on Ukraine and to begin the process of reintegrating Russia into the global economy. Either Trump or Musk or both appear to have slowed down Starlink and Starshield—the two systems that manage communications for defense and offensive drones, respectively—making them inoperable during one of the worst Russian bombardments of the war. And on Friday, Trump waived additional sanctions Congress demanded in a recent law named for the late Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) two days before the sanctions were to go into effect.

Putin confidant Kirill Dmitriev, who manages Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, reposted an AI-generated image of the U.S. eagle standing next to a Russian bear, snarling at a British lion standing next to the flag of the European Union—the U.S. and Russia standing shoulder to shoulder against the United Kingdom and Europe—with the caption “Things Have Changed…”

Over the post, Dmitriev wrote: “Together.” He cheered on Trump’s waiving of the sanctions imposed by the Graham Act and, in response to a post claiming that Trump’s move to bolster Russia had caused panic in Europe and Ukraine, posted: “Checkmate.”

In The Atlantic, national security scholar Tom Nichols noted with evident disgust: “The American commander in chief has abandoned the Western order, the most successful—and powerful—security arrangement in human history.” This decision, Nichols wrote, appears to have had nothing to do with the national interest of the United States. Instead, Trump appears to have thrown out the world order because of his own personal interests, his admiration for Putin, his resentment of Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky, “and quite possibly other factors that so far have remained obscured from the American public.”

Outrage over Trump’s actions has come from across the political spectrum. Nichols notes that former federal prosecutor turned conservative commenter Andrew McCarthy wrote that Trump is giving Putin “aid and comfort.” Those words echo Article III, Section 3 of the Constitution, which defines treason against the United States, as “levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.”

McCarthy’s blistering article in the National Review on Saturday reminds readers that Putin is a murderous dictator who is actively supporting Iran’s military operations against the United States with both intelligence and drones and provoking U.S. allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). And yet Trump is siding with him against Ukraine, a U.S. ally. McCarthy demanded Congress hold “immediate hearings about this week’s shocking escalation of the Trump-Putin alliance.”

The backlash appears to have pushed Trump to try to justify his gutting of the Graham Act, at least. This afternoon, he posted on social media: “My decision on Russia is a very simple one.” He went on to claim that he didn’t want “to do anything that will drive, foolishly, Russia away from the bargaining table” in the quest for a peace deal with Ukraine. He shrugged off Russia’s support for Iran in its war against the U.S. by suggesting it “is doing very little, if anything, to help the Islamic Republic of Iran, compared to what they could be doing, and I want to keep it that way.” And then he attacked Zelensky, blaming Ukrainian attacks on Russian refineries rather than his own war on Iran for the high cost of diesel in the U.S. and claiming that Zelensky “doesn’t want to end this war, and probably never did.”

Nichols tore through this screed, calling it a pathetic admission of Trump’s weakness “in his relationship with the Kremlin boss.” “The leader of the most powerful nation on the planet,” Nichols pointed out, “is trying to get everyone else, including the American Congress, to avoid antagonizing Putin, instead of warning Putin not to even think about aiding Iran.”

Until now, Nichols wrote, “ world in which the White House is allied to the Kremlin was…the stuff of paranoid fiction. Manchurian candidates and red presidents were fantasies.” Now that alliance exists. Nichols laments that Trump and Putin have fulfilled the dreams of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and the Cold War leaders who followed him, humbling and humiliating the mighty United States.

The Framers of the Constitution thought they had designed a system that would prevent the rise of a tyrant. They believed U.S. representatives would be so fearful of a leader’s abuse of power that they would impeach any president who overstepped his authority, and that U.S. senators would be so jealous of their own power they would convict, and tyranny would not be able to take root. The Framers especially did not anticipate that senators, to whom they deliberately gave longer terms than they gave the president, would put party over country and stand aside as a president and his appointees captured the prerogatives of the Senate.

And yet, here we are.

But even given the evidence of the past ten years, it is truly astonishing to see Republicans, who for more than forty years have championed President Ronald Reagan for his stance against the Soviet Union, stand aside as Trump trashes the post–World War II system of global security in order to ally the United States with a Russian dictator.

Neophyte said:

October 18, 2026 (Sunday)

Tonight Lingling Wei, Alex Leary, Thomas Grove, and Josh Dawsey of the Wall Street Journal reported that Russia’s president Vladimir Putin has proposed a meeting next month with Trump and China’s president Xi Jinping to decide the fate of Ukraine.

The reporters explained that a three-way summit with China and the U.S. would cement Russia’s status as one of the world’s three great powers, a status Putin has sought since 2000 when he entered the Kremlin. Such a summit would formally acknowledge that the U.S. had broken from Europe and allied with Russia, a goal for Putin as he tries to take control of Ukraine.

A former Russian intelligence officer told the reporters that the summit would replace the rules-based international order established by the United States and its allies and partners after World War II with a system that divides the globe into spheres of influence.

After ten years of Trump insisting that reports of his cooperation with Russia were a hoax, here we are, watching one profoundly unpopular man tear apart the global system under which we have lived for eighty years in order to climb into bed with Vladimir Putin.

In just over a week, Trump has lifted sanctions on the sale of Russian oil on the global market, a way both to send desperately needed money to Russia to fund its war on Ukraine and to begin the process of reintegrating Russia into the global economy. Either Trump or Musk or both appear to have slowed down Starlink and Starshield—the two systems that manage communications for defense and offensive drones, respectively—making them inoperable during one of the worst Russian bombardments of the war. And on Friday, Trump waived additional sanctions Congress demanded in a recent law named for the late Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) two days before the sanctions were to go into effect.

Putin confidant Kirill Dmitriev, who manages Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, reposted an AI-generated image of the U.S. eagle standing next to a Russian bear, snarling at a British lion standing next to the flag of the European Union—the U.S. and Russia standing shoulder to shoulder against the United Kingdom and Europe—with the caption “Things Have Changed…”

Over the post, Dmitriev wrote: “Together.” He cheered on Trump’s waiving of the sanctions imposed by the Graham Act and, in response to a post claiming that Trump’s move to bolster Russia had caused panic in Europe and Ukraine, posted: “Checkmate.”

In The Atlantic, national security scholar Tom Nichols noted with evident disgust: “The American commander in chief has abandoned the Western order, the most successful—and powerful—security arrangement in human history.” This decision, Nichols wrote, appears to have had nothing to do with the national interest of the United States. Instead, Trump appears to have thrown out the world order because of his own personal interests, his admiration for Putin, his resentment of Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky, “and quite possibly other factors that so far have remained obscured from the American public.”

Outrage over Trump’s actions has come from across the political spectrum. Nichols notes that former federal prosecutor turned conservative commenter Andrew McCarthy wrote that Trump is giving Putin “aid and comfort.” Those words echo Article III, Section 3 of the Constitution, which defines treason against the United States, as “levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.”

McCarthy’s blistering article in the National Review on Saturday reminds readers that Putin is a murderous dictator who is actively supporting Iran’s military operations against the United States with both intelligence and drones and provoking U.S. allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). And yet Trump is siding with him against Ukraine, a U.S. ally. McCarthy demanded Congress hold “immediate hearings about this week’s shocking escalation of the Trump-Putin alliance.”

The backlash appears to have pushed Trump to try to justify his gutting of the Graham Act, at least. This afternoon, he posted on social media: “My decision on Russia is a very simple one.” He went on to claim that he didn’t want “to do anything that will drive, foolishly, Russia away from the bargaining table” in the quest for a peace deal with Ukraine. He shrugged off Russia’s support for Iran in its war against the U.S. by suggesting it “is doing very little, if anything, to help the Islamic Republic of Iran, compared to what they could be doing, and I want to keep it that way.” And then he attacked Zelensky, blaming Ukrainian attacks on Russian refineries rather than his own war on Iran for the high cost of diesel in the U.S. and claiming that Zelensky “doesn’t want to end this war, and probably never did.”

Nichols tore through this screed, calling it a pathetic admission of Trump’s weakness “in his relationship with the Kremlin boss.” “The leader of the most powerful nation on the planet,” Nichols pointed out, “is trying to get everyone else, including the American Congress, to avoid antagonizing Putin, instead of warning Putin not to even think about aiding Iran.”

Until now, Nichols wrote, “ world in which the White House is allied to the Kremlin was…the stuff of paranoid fiction. Manchurian candidates and red presidents were fantasies.” Now that alliance exists. Nichols laments that Trump and Putin have fulfilled the dreams of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and the Cold War leaders who followed him, humbling and humiliating the mighty United States.

The Framers of the Constitution thought they had designed a system that would prevent the rise of a tyrant. They believed U.S. representatives would be so fearful of a leader’s abuse of power that they would impeach any president who overstepped his authority, and that U.S. senators would be so jealous of their own power they would convict, and tyranny would not be able to take root. The Framers especially did not anticipate that senators, to whom they deliberately gave longer terms than they gave the president, would put party over country and stand aside as a president and his appointees captured the prerogatives of the Senate.

And yet, here we are.

But even given the evidence of the past ten years, it is truly astonishing to see Republicans, who for more than forty years have championed President Ronald Reagan for his stance against the Soviet Union, stand aside as Trump trashes the post–World War II system of global security in order to ally the United States with a Russian dictator.

Thanks.

A lot to take in HCR’s short missive today.

Neophyte said:

October 18, 2026 (Sunday)

Tonight Lingling Wei, Alex Leary, Thomas Grove, and Josh Dawsey of the Wall Street Journal reported that Russia’s president Vladimir Putin has proposed a meeting next month with Trump and China’s president Xi Jinping to decide the fate of Ukraine.

The reporters explained that a three-way summit with China and the U.S. would cement Russia’s status as one of the world’s three great powers, a status Putin has sought since 2000 when he entered the Kremlin. Such a summit would formally acknowledge that the U.S. had broken from Europe and allied with Russia, a goal for Putin as he tries to take control of Ukraine.

A former Russian intelligence officer told the reporters that the summit would replace the rules-based international order established by the United States and its allies and partners after World War II with a system that divides the globe into spheres of influence.

After ten years of Trump insisting that reports of his cooperation with Russia were a hoax, here we are, watching one profoundly unpopular man tear apart the global system under which we have lived for eighty years in order to climb into bed with Vladimir Putin.

In just over a week, Trump has lifted sanctions on the sale of Russian oil on the global market, a way both to send desperately needed money to Russia to fund its war on Ukraine and to begin the process of reintegrating Russia into the global economy. Either Trump or Musk or both appear to have slowed down Starlink and Starshield—the two systems that manage communications for defense and offensive drones, respectively—making them inoperable during one of the worst Russian bombardments of the war. And on Friday, Trump waived additional sanctions Congress demanded in a recent law named for the late Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) two days before the sanctions were to go into effect.

Putin confidant Kirill Dmitriev, who manages Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, reposted an AI-generated image of the U.S. eagle standing next to a Russian bear, snarling at a British lion standing next to the flag of the European Union—the U.S. and Russia standing shoulder to shoulder against the United Kingdom and Europe—with the caption “Things Have Changed…”

Over the post, Dmitriev wrote: “Together.” He cheered on Trump’s waiving of the sanctions imposed by the Graham Act and, in response to a post claiming that Trump’s move to bolster Russia had caused panic in Europe and Ukraine, posted: “Checkmate.”

In The Atlantic, national security scholar Tom Nichols noted with evident disgust: “The American commander in chief has abandoned the Western order, the most successful—and powerful—security arrangement in human history.” This decision, Nichols wrote, appears to have had nothing to do with the national interest of the United States. Instead, Trump appears to have thrown out the world order because of his own personal interests, his admiration for Putin, his resentment of Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky, “and quite possibly other factors that so far have remained obscured from the American public.”

Outrage over Trump’s actions has come from across the political spectrum. Nichols notes that former federal prosecutor turned conservative commenter Andrew McCarthy wrote that Trump is giving Putin “aid and comfort.” Those words echo Article III, Section 3 of the Constitution, which defines treason against the United States, as “levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.”

McCarthy’s blistering article in the National Review on Saturday reminds readers that Putin is a murderous dictator who is actively supporting Iran’s military operations against the United States with both intelligence and drones and provoking U.S. allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). And yet Trump is siding with him against Ukraine, a U.S. ally. McCarthy demanded Congress hold “immediate hearings about this week’s shocking escalation of the Trump-Putin alliance.”

The backlash appears to have pushed Trump to try to justify his gutting of the Graham Act, at least. This afternoon, he posted on social media: “My decision on Russia is a very simple one.” He went on to claim that he didn’t want “to do anything that will drive, foolishly, Russia away from the bargaining table” in the quest for a peace deal with Ukraine. He shrugged off Russia’s support for Iran in its war against the U.S. by suggesting it “is doing very little, if anything, to help the Islamic Republic of Iran, compared to what they could be doing, and I want to keep it that way.” And then he attacked Zelensky, blaming Ukrainian attacks on Russian refineries rather than his own war on Iran for the high cost of diesel in the U.S. and claiming that Zelensky “doesn’t want to end this war, and probably never did.”

Nichols tore through this screed, calling it a pathetic admission of Trump’s weakness “in his relationship with the Kremlin boss.” “The leader of the most powerful nation on the planet,” Nichols pointed out, “is trying to get everyone else, including the American Congress, to avoid antagonizing Putin, instead of warning Putin not to even think about aiding Iran.”

Until now, Nichols wrote, “ world in which the White House is allied to the Kremlin was…the stuff of paranoid fiction. Manchurian candidates and red presidents were fantasies.” Now that alliance exists. Nichols laments that Trump and Putin have fulfilled the dreams of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and the Cold War leaders who followed him, humbling and humiliating the mighty United States.

The Framers of the Constitution thought they had designed a system that would prevent the rise of a tyrant. They believed U.S. representatives would be so fearful of a leader’s abuse of power that they would impeach any president who overstepped his authority, and that U.S. senators would be so jealous of their own power they would convict, and tyranny would not be able to take root. The Framers especially did not anticipate that senators, to whom they deliberately gave longer terms than they gave the president, would put party over country and stand aside as a president and his appointees captured the prerogatives of the Senate.

And yet, here we are.

But even given the evidence of the past ten years, it is truly astonishing to see Republicans, who for more than forty years have championed President Ronald Reagan for his stance against the Soviet Union, stand aside as Trump trashes the post–World War II system of global security in order to ally the United States with a Russian dictator.

The Republicans could end this today.

The Democrats could take some pages out of Mitch McConnell’s book, (except the living corpse move). His obstructions are legendary.

The Democrats could stop hiring the consultants who have helped them to lose to Trump twice .

Kara Swisher says in her podcast that she listens to a lot of late night Russian TV and during the past year that that’s been a lot of discussion about how Poland will be next after the Ukraine falls.

I feel concerned that the Dems are so weak, they are putting more energy in fighting the members of their own party, more than fighting the Republicans. I feel worried that America is on a trajectory for a Nazi type President in 2032. But hopefully I am very, very wrong..

Heather Cox Richardson just keeps on going.

Link

2 minutes

ms spock said:

Heather Cox Richardson just keeps on going.

Link

2 minutes

10 days ago. Since then Trump and Musk have cut back help to Ukraine, allowing Putin to blow up more of Ukraine.

October 19, 2026 (Monday)

I am just through the door from several days’ travel and am wiped out, so this will not be a real letter.

Instead, just two observations.

First: it was exactly ten years ago tonight that then–Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton told the American people that Russian president Vladimir Putin hoped to have a “puppet” in the White House, and that Donald Trump was that puppet.

A scowling Trump responded: “No puppet. No puppet.”

Clinton continued: “It’s pretty clear.

Trump interjected: “You’re the puppet.”

Clinton continued: “It’s pretty clear you won’t admit…”

Trump interjected: “No, you’re the puppet.”

Clinton: “…that the Russians have engaged in cyberattacks against the United States of America, that you encouraged espionage against our people, that you are willing to spout the Putin line, sign up for his wish list, break up NATO, do whatever he wants to do, and that you continue to get help from him because he has a very clear favorite in this race.”

Trump shook his head disparagingly.

Ten years later, Trump is openly embracing Putin and is working to destroy the strongest and most successful alliance in human history to cement that partnership, apparently with an eye to enriching himself.

And so, the events of the present change the way we see the past. Had Trump strongly supported Ukraine as Congress has demanded, and stood firm against Russia, a country that is, after all, a minor economic player whose military is flailing at its attempt to absorb its neighbor, we would rightly dismiss Clinton’s warning as campaign hyperbole. As it is, though, Trump’s tie to Putin—the story he has always tried to bury by calling it the “Russia, Russia, Russia hoax”—seems likely to emerge as the central story of the Trump years.

As Clinton wrote today: “In just the last few days: Trump made a deal for the U.S. to buy Russian diesel, an economic lifeline for Putin; he and Elon Musk blamed each other for an order that slowed down Starlink satellite connectivity over Ukraine, hampering the country’s defenses during a devastating Russian attack; and Trump waived sanctions on Russia that Congress, led by his late friend Lindsey Graham, had pushed for. Now, Putin has proposed a summit with Trump and Xi to decide Ukraine’s fate for them, bulldoze a century of international cooperation, and frame Russia as an equal to the U.S. and China.

“We’ll see if Putin’s puppet continues to dance on his strings.”

Second, as no one paying even a modicum of attention can have missed, Trump is so unpopular that support for Republicans has fallen into historically low numbers. The gutting of Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), tariffs that have destroyed markets for agricultural products and increased prices, the war on Iran that has sent prices of gasoline and especially diesel soaring and thus increased the cost of everything that travels by train or truck, the blatant corruption that is lining the pockets of Trump and his cronies while ordinary Americans can’t make ends meet, and now Trump’s open embrace of Russian president Vladimir Putin—all wildly unpopular positions—mean that the districts that were firmly Republican by double digits just two years ago are now up for grabs.

That shift has revealed something interesting. Republicans running for office are refusing to hold town halls or to engage in debates with Democratic challengers. When they do show up, they tend to show how unserious they are about filling elected office, as Republican Dan Sullivan of Alaska illustrated when he asked the moderators at a debate with Democrat Mary Peltola if she had been given the questions beforehand because she seemed to be reading from notes while he didn’t know how to answer the questions. As the moderators quashed his allegation, Peltola noted: “I’m prepared!”

In the past, Republicans in safe Republican districts did not have to appeal to constituents or campaign, apparently because the letter “R” was enough to get voters to make a mark next to their name. In this new environment in which constituents are furious with Republican policies, Republicans hoping to be elected continue to keep their heads down, apparently hoping that they can be elected, or reelected, if they simply keep their mouths shut.

Their invisibility raises the question of why these people, who evidently don’t care about representing their constituents, would want to hold national office. Perhaps they want to hobble the federal government to enable wealthy businessmen to gain even more control over the country. Perhaps they want to enable the rise of a theocracy. Perhaps they are hoping to make money off their offices. Perhaps they simply want the prestige of a federal office.

But the extreme gerrymandering of states at the hands of Republican lawmakers that made their candidates shoo-ins in the past also means those Republican candidates are weak. New scrutiny of those candidates as Democrats challenge them is revealing just how weak they are.

In Texas, for example, Republicans are running Trump’s hand-picked candidate for the U.S. Senate, state attorney general Ken Paxton, a stunningly corrupt man who has recently been revealed to have spent New Year’s Eve 2024 partying in Dubai with a mistress and two men who are fugitives from U.S. law. In Kansas the Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate is incumbent senator Roger Marshall, a man who has been revealed as having sued more than 700 of his obstetrical patients for unpaid bills, resulting in 81 arrests.

In North Carolina, Republican U.S. Senate candidate Michael Whatley has little to recommend him other than Trump’s endorsement; the same could be said of the Republican candidate for Senate from South Carolina, Darline Graham, whose main qualification is that she is former South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham’s sister. The story is the same across the country as Republicans field subpar candidates. Even in Maine, where Senator Susan Collins should have been a strong candidate for the party, stories of apparent corruption are undermining her candidacy.

As Paul Waldman noted in Public Notice on October 15, these stories and others are “just the Senate candidates. Up and down the ballot, the has nominated crackpots and nitwits, none more colorful than Victor Marx, their nominee for governor in Colorado. Marx refuses to say how many people he has killed (though he says his stepfather forced him to commit his first murder at age 7), hunts demons, claims he can call in US airstrikes, and boasts of being a seventh-degree black belt in a martial art he invented. Normal stuff!”

In contrast to the Republicans hoping to coast to election, the Democrats running for office are holding town halls, listening to the people of their districts, needling their opponents who refuse to debate, and using the word “mission.”

The contrast between the two is a snapshot of a dying party that is no longer bothering to compete, and a rising party whose candidates are eager for the job and willing to work for it. It reminds me of the 1850s, when the Democrats, who were so accustomed to holding office that they assumed they were entitled to their posts, met the rising Republicans, whom Democrats considered too uncouth to hold office, but who ended up dominating the political system for the next seventy years.

Love that Hilary’s too classy to simply post, “told you so”.

Divine Angel said:

Love that Hilary’s too classy to simply post, “told you so”.

The Western world should have been wary of the USA self interests a long time ago instead of sucking up to them and buying their propoganda.
They as a government and military are appalling and what’s worse is they use their own population as a huge resource to exploit.
Born from blood and destined to repeat it as it often gets them what they want or a reprieve to give them more time for the next scheme

Cymek said:

Divine Angel said:

Love that Hilary’s too classy to simply post, “told you so”.

The Western world should have been wary of the USA self interests a long time ago instead of sucking up to them and buying their propoganda.
They as a government and military are appalling and what’s worse is they use their own population as a huge resource to exploit.
Born from blood and destined to repeat it as it often gets them what they want or a reprieve to give them more time for the next scheme

That feels like a pretty bleak indictment – the US has done a lot of good in the world; maybe not so much recently, but history does stretch back further than the last decade

Cymek said:

Divine Angel said:

Love that Hilary’s too classy to simply post, “told you so”.

The Western world should have been wary of the USA self interests a long time ago instead of sucking up to them and buying their propoganda.
They as a government and military are appalling and what’s worse is they use their own population as a huge resource to exploit.
Born from blood and destined to repeat it as it often gets them what they want or a reprieve to give them more time for the next scheme

They really do exploit their people. It’s atrocious. Watching the young people that I worked with do the tertiary education thing, whilst working 2 or 3 part-time jobs, and spending their meager pay on shit stuff (made in China) from the bookstore. Pop culture collectables are a drug to so many young people. Just a snippet of my observations.

diddly-squat said:

Cymek said:

Divine Angel said:

Love that Hilary’s too classy to simply post, “told you so”.

The Western world should have been wary of the USA self interests a long time ago instead of sucking up to them and buying their propoganda.
They as a government and military are appalling and what’s worse is they use their own population as a huge resource to exploit.
Born from blood and destined to repeat it as it often gets them what they want or a reprieve to give them more time for the next scheme

That feels like a pretty bleak indictment – the US has done a lot of good in the world; maybe not so much recently, but history does stretch back further than the last decade

Perhaps
I don’t like they are held up or were as the ideal society as the world measures greatness by military and economic might.
The rise of trillionaires means we really will get these evil conglomerates who have the means to control the planet
I’m sure people here know I think much of how the world works is wrong, agree with me or not but money rules and its inherently self destructive
So many things we take for granted are trappings to maintain the status quo
Not conspiracy type nonsense but we seem to work to live so we can work to live.
If humanity ruins this planet in the pursuit of wealth accumulation then I don’t think we deserve to exist.
Earth doesn’t need humans, we need it

kii said:

Cymek said:

Divine Angel said:

Love that Hilary’s too classy to simply post, “told you so”.

The Western world should have been wary of the USA self interests a long time ago instead of sucking up to them and buying their propoganda.
They as a government and military are appalling and what’s worse is they use their own population as a huge resource to exploit.
Born from blood and destined to repeat it as it often gets them what they want or a reprieve to give them more time for the next scheme

They really do exploit their people. It’s atrocious. Watching the young people that I worked with do the tertiary education thing, whilst working 2 or 3 part-time jobs, and spending their meager pay on shit stuff (made in China) from the bookstore. Pop culture collectables are a drug to so many young people. Just a snippet of my observations.

I admit I was influenced in my thinking back in high school when we learned communism
A good idea in thought but not in practice as humanity as a whole is too immature to implement it or at least a version less fascist.
Both large examples once again born from blood and the death of millions and maintain control through fear
Russia is the pits as a government and China isn’t doing anything previous semi evil empires haven’t tried before
All crash and I can imagine China will decay within the next 50 years assuming we last that long
Humans have so much potential and we see this when we cooperate and sacrifice for others
Its a very dangerous time for us as a race (all humanity not the stupid races we separate each other into)

October 20, 2026 (Tuesday)

A blockbuster story in the Wall Street Journal tonight by Alexander Ward, Natalie Andrews, and Josh Dawsey says that it was billionaire Elon Musk who ordered Space X to slow down its service in Ukraine, rendering some drones that stopped incoming missiles and others aimed at Russian targets useless.

The reporters say it is unclear if Musk operated without input from White House officials. Some of their sources say he did; others say he coordinated with multiple senior officials, including Trump.

According to Jennifer Jacobs of CBS News, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth appeared to try to dismiss the slowdown as a business decision: “We haven’t pulled anything back. There are terms of service that ultimately need to be complied to. And that’s where Starlink has the option to make those decisions, but nothing’s changed from our view. We haven’t made any directives or anything like that.” He added: “e wish the Ukrainians, obviously, success.”

After the slowdown caused a public uproar, the Wall Street Journal reporters write, representatives from SpaceX, the parent company of Starlink, called the White House to coordinate messaging to say that Starlink and the administration had agreed to the slowdown ahead of time.

Musk’s decision to change the course of a war with “a seeming flick of a switch,” taking it upon himself, with or without the complicity of White House officials, to reverse the foreign policy of the United States of America for the benefit of Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, is a stunning assumption of power reminiscent of Revolutionary War general Benedict Arnold’s weakening of the Americans’ defenses and draining of supplies at the strategic fort at West Point to enable the British to capture it before he was discovered and defected to the British Army.

Another lens through which to see this story is the apparent eagerness of White House officials to turn Musk into a scapegoat for a decision they were happy to endorse until it blew up in their faces.

A New York Times story by Tyler Pager suggests a different leak from the White House. Pager relates that billionaire Venezuelan banker Julio Herrera Velutini wanted a presidential pardon. His family hired Alina Habba, a former Trump lawyer who at the time was working at the Justice Department, as general counsel at a company, Concord Partners, that was launched by Herrera’s daughter, has no public profile and whose business is unclear. Habba’s contract is worth more than $50 million over four years. Just weeks after she began to work for Concord Partners, Trump granted Herrera a full pardon.

Habba denied having any role in the pardon and refused to describe her work for Concord Partners, but Pager reports that “eople familiar with Ms. Habba’s contract said they believed that she was brought in to help with Mr. Herrera’s push for a pardon and expressed surprise at the scale of the compensation.”

Thomas Frank at Politico received a recording of a speech Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Administrator Cameron Hamilton gave today at a private conference in Little Rock, Arkansas, in which he said the Trump administration plans to shift responsibility for disaster management to the states.

Hamilton’s speech built on an internal memo from October 15, which Frank also covered, that said the administration seeks to turn disaster response over to local and state government, thereby “reducing federal dependency.” “Federal dollars should be building greater capability, not creating greater dependency,” Hamilton said today.

Today Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan of the New York Times reported that sources have told them that Trump wants to move the press out of the White House and that Bill Pulte, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency who has pushed to go after Trump’s political opponents for mortgage fraud, is one of those pushing the idea of restoring the press briefing room to its original form as a swimming pool. Another is Boris Epshteyn, the lawyer who has pushed the lawsuits the president has launched against journalists.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had the pool installed because swimming helped strengthen his muscles, weakened by polio. President Richard Nixon had it covered over and turned into a briefing room to accommodate the growing White House Press Corps. Haberman and Swan note that forcing the press out of the White House would be “highly symbolic. The proximity of the media to the seat of U.S. executive power has long been an acknowledgment of the importance of a free press in a constitutional democracy.”

These four stories, just from today, encapsulate the administration’s betrayal of U.S. national security, its corruption, and its disregard for the welfare of Americans. It’s not a great record to run on, and the leaks from the administration show that at least some insiders are aware of how unpopular and dangerous that record is.
And so, Trump is pulling out all the stops to keep Democrats from winning control of Congress in the upcoming midterm elections.

In what appears to be a transparent attempt to shore up wavering support from a constituency that until recently was one of his most loyal, Trump announced yesterday that the Agriculture Department would provide $8 billion to help farmers slammed by the high cost of diesel. Kevin Draper of the New York Times reported that rates of payment will be announced next month, and the money will come no sooner than late November or early December, well after the election.

Trump announced the prospective payments at an event for Republican senator Roger Marshall of Kansas, whose reelection campaign is facing a strong challenge from Democrat Adam Hamilton. Meredith Lee Hill and Grace Yarrow of Politico report that Marshall had asked Trump for the program. Republicans like Marshall are hoping Trump’s announcement will help stop the flow of voters away from the Republicans and toward the Democrats in the farm states. Representative Derrick Van Orden of Wisconsin, whose reelection is uncertain given the strength of his Democratic challenger Rebecca Cooke, said: “This will go a long way to making sure the folks that feed us have it a bit easier when they most need it.”

But Trump officials told Hill and Yarrow that the fund Trump intends to use for the payments—a taxpayer-funded account in the Department of Agriculture—doesn’t have enough money in it to make the payments. Either Congress will have to add more to it, or the administration will have to take the money from a different program.

Top agricultural groups say farmers need at least $50 billion to make up for the impact of tariffs, disasters caused by weather, and the high cost of fuel and fertilizer caused by the war on Iran.

Trump told the Kansas audience at the announcement that if they reelect Marshall, he will also allow year-round sales of gasoline containing 15% ethanol, a big deal for corn growers. But, he added, “if Adam Hamilton is in, I’m not doing it.”

Still, Democrats are not letting the White House change the subject from its betrayal of Ukraine. This morning, Representative Jim Himes (D-CT) posted a video, saying he had just gotten off a phone call with Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky and a number of other representatives and senators.

“I was just appalled by what I learned,” he said. “The president said that Starlink—Starshield—has been throttled so that the Ukrainians can no longer intercept most of the Russian drones that are wreaking havoc at schools and hospitals and civilian centers. He said that they are completely out of missile interceptors. And make no mistake: that’s our fault.

“More significantly, that’s the fault of Donald Trump, who has now shown his hand as an ally of Vladimir Putin and Elon Musk. We can’t really get straight answers about whether it’s Elon or Donald Trump, but at the end of the day, because they throttled Starlink, Ukrainians are dying.

“In the call, I made the point to some of my colleagues, which is, it’s time to accept that Donald Trump is rooting for a Russian victory here. And that the Congress needs to step up and actually pass veto-proof legislation. Enough dilly-dallying with the secretary of state in the Oval Office. We need to step up and pass veto-proof legislation that will provide assistance, military aid, and access to Starlink for the Ukrainians. That’s the only way this is gonna get done, and it needs to get done now.

“Ukrainians are dying, and Putin will win this if Donald Trump has his way,” Himes said, “e’re going to act as a Congress and override this president’s desire to see Vladimir Putin win.”

Ta.

I know it isn’t their war but surelly both Trump and Musk deserve to be charged with war crimes over this.

roughbarked said:

I know it isn’t their war but surelly both Trump and Musk deserve to be charged with war crimes over this.

pretty sure it absolutely totally is their war

SCIENCE said:

roughbarked said:

I know it isn’t their war but surelly both Trump and Musk deserve to be charged with war crimes over this.

pretty sure it absolutely totally is their war

:( yeah but they’ll argue that it isn’t.

SCIENCE said:

roughbarked said:

I know it isn’t their war but surelly both Trump and Musk deserve to be charged with war crimes over this.

pretty sure it absolutely totally is their war

Don’t say something sensible

kii said:

Cymek said:

Divine Angel said:

Love that Hilary’s too classy to simply post, “told you so”.

The Western world should have been wary of the USA self interests a long time ago instead of sucking up to them and buying their propoganda.
They as a government and military are appalling and what’s worse is they use their own population as a huge resource to exploit.
Born from blood and destined to repeat it as it often gets them what they want or a reprieve to give them more time for the next scheme

They really do exploit their people. It’s atrocious. Watching the young people that I worked with do the tertiary education thing, whilst working 2 or 3 part-time jobs, and spending their meager pay on shit stuff (made in China) from the bookstore. Pop culture collectables are a drug to so many young people. Just a snippet of my observations.

kii said:

kii said:

Cymek said:

The Western world should have been wary of the USA self interests a long time ago instead of sucking up to them and buying their propoganda.
They as a government and military are appalling and what’s worse is they use their own population as a huge resource to exploit.
Born from blood and destined to repeat it as it often gets them what they want or a reprieve to give them more time for the next scheme

They really do exploit their people. It’s atrocious. Watching the young people that I worked with do the tertiary education thing, whilst working 2 or 3 part-time jobs, and spending their meager pay on shit stuff (made in China) from the bookstore. Pop culture collectables are a drug to so many young people. Just a snippet of my observations.

Not just america.

Someone I know very well was in charge pf payroll at a medium sized Australian company, and used to make sure that the employees got paid their entitlements as per the wage book. She was very surprised when I told her that those wages were the absolute minimum that the company could pay their slaves staff without getting sued by the government.

“I just thought that those were the normal pay rates”.

The young bloke that I employ is getting paid about 80% above that. Fuck starvation wages.

October 21, 2026 (Wednesday)

Everything feels out of whack in the United States.

First of all, the president’s behavior is becoming more and more erratic. Earlier this week, he walked past the open door of his armored car, known as “The Beast” and wandered toward an open field before Secret Service agents redirected him.

And he is losing any filter he used to have. At campaign rallies, he has taken to commenting on how he finds Ohio Republican senator Jon Husted physically attractive. “I looked at his a‑‑, and then I looked at his legs, and my—I said, ‘His a‑‑ is like, it’s like a pile of muscle.’ Then I looked at his legs, and I said, ‘Man, his feet are big.’ Then I looked at his shoulders, and I tapped him on the shoulder, and it actually hurt my hand. It was like a piece of steel. I said, ‘This guy’s a monster.’”

Today he snarled at CNN’s Kaitlan Collins: “You don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re a dummy. You’re a low-IQ person, you’re a dummy, and you work for CNN.”

In the news, Trump’s abandonment of the traditional allies of the United States to embrace Vladimir Putin and Russia remains front and center. Today, videos circulated of Trump’s special envoy to Russia, Steve Witkoff, praising Putin as a “humanitarian” even as the Russian military continues to bombard Ukrainian civilians, this week killing a baby in a stroller at a public park.

Today, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton told Kara Swisher: “I continue to believe that Putin has things on Trump. I continue to believe that he is holding photos, videos, whatever it might be.” Clinton reiterated that Trump “is a willing Putin puppet to help Putin. Putin’s not going to stop with Ukraine…. I guess Trump has this idea that he wants to divide the world,” Clinton said. “He gets the Western Hemisphere, Putin gets Russia and Europe, and Xi Jinping gets the rest of the world.”

Meanwhile, Trump claims he had nothing to do with the slowing of Starklink over Ukraine, telling a reporter: “I wasn’t involved.” When asked if Elon Musk ordered it, Trump responded: “I don’t know who did it, but I was not involved.”

Congress members, including Republicans, have vowed to hold whoever was responsible for the cuts accountable. Representative Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA) said on Monday that those limiting Starshield “will be fully investigated and will be held fully accountable.” He said Congress would investigate and mete out “immediate harsh and punitive budget cuts to any responsible agency or agency head.”

Musk is not taking that threat calmly. In response to a report by Calen Razor in Politico that Democrats intend to investigate Musk’s role in cutting Ukraine’s access to Starlink communications networks, leaving Ukraine vulnerable to Russian attacks, Musk posted on social media: “Live by the sword, die by the sword. Those who pick fights with me should understand that I will find out who is really pulling the strings and come for them, not just their puppets …”

His was a shocking threat against members of Congress, but the move of Europeans and Canadians to develop their own satellite communications systems given the dangers of relying on Starlink seems to be worrying Musk. If Congress also moves the United States away from his contracts, he could be in real trouble. As Douglas P. McCormick noted in Fortune last June, Musk’s trillion-dollar fortune is not real. Almost all of his net worth is unrealized equity in companies he runs. His wealth is simply the market’s estimate of the worth of his promises to deliver in the future, and those promises depend on government contracts.

Americans are beginning to see the costs of Trumpism more generally.

As Paul Krugman noted in his newsletter this morning, twelve million Americans have lost healthcare coverage under Trump, and those who still have it have seen the cost of their premiums rise sharply. The situation will get worse in the future, since when they wrote their One Big Beautiful Bill Act, Republicans put the worst of their cuts off until after the midterms.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reports that enrollment in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) fell by more than 5 million people, or nearly 13%, between July 2025, when the Republicans enacted the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, and June 2026. Nearly half of those no longer receiving benefits are children. Starting this month, more of the costs of SNAP will fall to states. The amount of their payment will be based on their error rates, causing them to err on the side of denying benefits and cut costs, leading even more to lose benefits in the future. Some states may have to withdraw from SNAP altogether.

In The Atlantic today, David Frum wrote that the bill for Trumpism is coming due. Although Trump promised in his first term to eliminate the national debt and in his second to balance the budget, maybe even financing a $2,000 check for every American taxpayer, the budget deficit for the fiscal year that ended on September 30 clocked in at about $2 trillion, about $160 billion more than it was during former president Biden’s last year as president. Next year’s deficit will likely be even greater.

How we got to this point, Frum reminds us, is that the Republicans’ 2025 extension of their 2017 tax cuts will reduce government revenues by $4.5 trillion over the next ten years. Their cuts to Medicaid and SNAP reduced spending by $1.1 trillion. That leaves a growing deficit that climbs to more than $4 trillion as the cost of servicing the debt grows.
Economist Justin Wolfers explained: “Washington has discovered a brilliant financial strategy. Cut benefits for people who need them, cut taxes for people who don’t, and borrow the difference from people who aren’t old enough to vote.”

Those numbers, Frum notes, don’t include the cost of Trump’s war on Iran. The administration acknowledges that fuel and munitions for that war have cost about $45 billion, but the real costs run far higher with the destruction, for example, of U.S. bases in the Middle East. The Department of Defense has asked for an additional $200 billion for the war, and Trump has asked for $1.5 trillion to fund the military in 2027, which Frum notes is up 44% from before the war on Iran.

In order to stay in power, Republicans are peddling what Jesse Watters of the Fox News Channel recently called “fear porn.” Matt Gertz of Media Matters quoted Watters’s explanation: to engage non-MAGA voters, he said: “You have to say, these people are going to take your healthcare, they’re going to let in the Third World, they’re going to jack up your taxes, and that’s what’s going to get people to come out to vote. You have to say, these people are scary and dangerous, you know what we’re all about. And that’s really a choice.”

In September, Watters warned that “the Democrat party and its communist base are running against America” and “want to shatter the pillars of Western civilization.” He continued his dark fantasy: “They want to abolish the Senate, police, ICE, and of course the border. Some of them are even calling for reparations and rent control. Others have a little bit of a problem with whites, and a majority of Democrats don’t prefer capitalism. It’s like we’re fighting the Cold War here in our own country.”

Host Sean Hannity told viewers: “We can vote to build on the successes of President Trump, his first two years in office, or you can shred your Constitution, allow our country to be taken hostage by this new radicalized leftist democratic socialist communist movement and their far-left extremist candidates.” He called Democrats “completely insane.”

A company formed last month in Wyoming has been circulating in Texas phony leaflets and text messages pretending to be from a trans rights group. Addressed to the “student” of the household, the flyers claim to be a resource guide for transgender and LGBTQ+ youth. The flyers are deliberately inflammatory, purporting to give a roadmap to children for how to separate from their parents and replace them with other adults or organizations.

Right-wing groups are sharing the mailers and linking them to Democrats. A Republican candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives called them “disgusting and evil” on social media and posted further: “The radical left is trying to brainwash Texan children and unravel the basic framework of our society.”

In Ohio, Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy released what the editor of the Cleveland Plain Dealer called “the most vile political ad in Ohio history.” It features the biological mother of his opponent, Dr. Amy Acton, saying Acton is a liar for saying she lived in a tent as a child. In the ad, the woman tells Ohioans not to “let her become your governor.”

Acton, 60, has not seen her biological mother since she was 12, when she and her brother were removed from the woman’s home after a grand jury indicted the woman’s second husband for raping Acton. The woman helped her husband escape custody and avoid trial until he died. Charles Hilu of the National Review reported that court records confirm Acton’s history, and noted that the impoverished family did, in fact, spend a winter living in a tent.

Acton’s brother replied to the ad, saying both of them had been abused, but she had received the worst of it as she tried to protect him. “Shame on Vivek,” he said.

While Vice President J.D. Vance defended Ramaswamy’s ad, others were appalled at his attempt to use her childhood trauma against her.

The Columbus Dispatch endorsed Amy Acton and called the ad “revolting.” MK Pritzker, the wife of Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker, donated $500,000 to Acton, saying: “Bad men gain power when we refuse to stand up and fight.”

New Jersey’s Republican former governor Chris Christie told Karen Tumulty and Dan Merica of the Washington Post: “The question for all Republicans is whether this type of attitude is what we want leading our party going forward. For the last decade, our party has been infected by a corrupted moral center. Vance’s acceptance of this campaign ad only breathes life into the disease that we should be seeking to cure.”

Today Ariana Baio of the Guardian reported that Neil Bush, the brother of President George W. Bush, has voted for Democrat James Talarico rather than Texas attorney general Ken Paxton to be the next U.S. senator from Texas. Bush explained: “I have been a Republican for most of my life, and I still believe deeply in many traditional Republican principles. But character matters more than party affiliation. Our democracy depends on leaders who respect our institutions, tell the truth, accept accountability, and seek to unite rather than divide.”

October 22, 2026 (Thursday)

Alexander Ward and Lara Seligman of the Wall Street Journal reported today that Trump called Elon Musk yesterday to ask him to stop throttling Starlink’s military-grade communications system, Starshield, in Ukraine. Slowing down the system degrades Ukraine’s defenses as well as its offensive drones, leaving it even more vulnerable to Russian attacks. Russia’s president Vladimir Putin has taken advantage of this vulnerability by increasing strikes against Ukraine’s civilians.

The whole question of who ordered the slowdown in the first place remains a blame game between Trump and Musk, both of whom support Russia in its war on Ukraine. Members of the administration, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and U.S. ambassador to NATO Matt Whitaker, have tried to sell the slowdown as a business decision that Musk has the authority to make.

Whitaker told the Fox News Channel yesterday: “They are a private company. Obviously they have terms of use that are applied to all of their customers, including the Ukrainians, and I think it’s more of a dispute along those lines…than anybody in this administration trying to change the way that Starshield or Starlink is used.”

Strategic studies scholar Phillips P. O’Brien wasn’t buying that explanation, posting that it is evident “the White House is desperately trying to make the fall guy for what is happening to Ukraine.” He continued: “If Trump wanted to help Ukraine militarily and with starshield he could. He is president. He doesn’t want to.”

But it is simply astonishing that the president of the United States, the commander in chief of the United States military, is suggesting he had to negotiate with a private citizen to tell him to stop interfering with American foreign policy.

This afternoon, asked about the call, Trump told reporters: “t was a very interesting situation. So I don’t want to comment one way or the other, but, uh, my re—, my relationship with Elon is a very good one.” He reiterated: “I don’t want to comment on it. You know, whether I called or whether somebody else called, doesn’t make any difference. I guess the bottom line, he put it back.”

It remains unclear if the Ukrainians do, in fact, have full use of the networks again. Siobhán O’Grady, Carlotta Gall, and Anton Troianovski of the New York Times reported yesterday that a senior Ukrainian commander told them he had lost more than a million dollars worth of drones when Starshield went fuzzy from the slowdown. For the next three days, he had to stop almost all operations, endangering his troops by hampering their ability to stop Russian advances by striking Russian command posts and fuel hubs.

Meanwhile, Bloomberg reported today that officials from Rosneft, Russia’s biggest oil producer, say sanctions and Ukrainian drone strikes that are pushing deeper and deeper into Russia threaten the company’s survival. Profits for the company, which produces about a third of Russia’s oil, are falling and its debt is rising as the strikes cause fuel shortages.

Ukrainians are repeatedly hitting the refineries, one as far as 2,500 kilometers (about 1,553 miles) from the border, first damaging the structures and then destroying repairs after workers have rebuilt the structures, forcing the company to take on more and more debt as it shovels money into repairs that don’t survive. Even when it can find the money, sanctions limit its ability to replace equipment. The officials say even a few more months of war could destroy Rosneft.

The crisis explains why Putin and Trump are so desperate to stop Ukrainian attacks on Russia’s oil refineries and to lift sanctions on Russia. Rosneft’s loans from the Credit Bank of Moscow are becoming problematic, straining the bank.

In a sign this year’s writers are straining to make things as obvious as possible, Alex Horton and Dan Lamothe of the Washington Post broke the story today that in February, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth apparently decided he wanted to display in his office one of the two floor globes General Dwight D. Eisenhower used during World War II.

Eisenhower was the erudite five-star general who oversaw the Allied invasions of North Africa and Sicily before directing the Allied invasion of France and Germany as the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe. He is widely credited with developing the plans that defeated the Nazis.

After the war, Eisenhower went on to the presidency of Columbia University, where he devoted his energies to founding the American Assembly, a think tank to gather the world’s greatest minds to bring the understanding of history, foreign affairs, and philosophy to address the problems of the post–World War II world.

In 1952, when the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination vowed to cut U.S. support for the fledgling North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Eisenhower ran for president to protect the new postwar institutions that he believed were vital to global security in the face of an aggressive Soviet Union. He won the Republican nomination and then the presidency with almost 55% of the vote, retaking the White House from Democrats for the first time since 1933.

During the war, Eisenhower had visited Ohrdruf, the Nazi concentration camp that funneled prisoners to Buchenwald, a week after soldiers liberated it. He was shocked to the core. “I never dreamed that such cruelty, bestiality, and savagery could really exist in this world!” he wrote to his wife. Determined to do all he could to guarantee that such atrocities never happened again, he urged reporters and congressmen to visit the camp to ensure there were witnesses, pictures, and films to contradict anyone who might, in the future, try to deny the horrors that had taken place.

After the war, Eisenhower embraced the work of San Francisco philosopher Eric Hoffer, who explained in his 1951 book The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements that economically or culturally dispossessed people were natural targets for political and religious extremists. They could easily be manipulated to back a demagogue who promised to resurrect a world in which they had enjoyed prosperity and cultural significance. Such a leader was dangerous enough during the Nazi era, Eisenhower thought, but with the advent of nuclear weapons in 1945, such a strongman could destroy humanity.

Eisenhower believed that it was crucial for the U.S. to build alliances and to help increase standards of living around the globe in order to prevent such a scenario. He built NATO and began the Food for Peace initiative, a program that later was absorbed into the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the same agency that Musk and Trump shredded in 2025.

In their story about Eisenhower’s globe, Horton and Lamothe reported that Hegseth was so eager to get the historic object in place that rather than waiting for trained curators to move it, as is expected for any such priceless historic artifact, Hegseth’s staff decided to retrieve it on their own.

They dropped it.

The artifact smashed into its base, and the stand impaled it, ripping a gash through the fragile globe.

It never did end up in Hegseth’s office.

It is currently undergoing repairs

October 23, 2026 (Friday)

Despite Trump’s statement yesterday that billionaire Elon Musk had removed the restrictions from Starlink and Starshield that are crippling Ukraine’s ability to protect itself from Russia, Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky said today the restrictions continue.

An article published tonight by Anton Troianovski and Eric Lipton in the New York Times sheds a spotlight on the oil deals that lie behind Trump’s rush to normalize relations with Russia at Ukraine’s expense, as well as repeated statements from him and his cronies that they want to open up business transactions with Russia as incentives for Russia’s president Vladimir Putin to stop his war on Ukraine—an argument that, on its face, never made sense.

Troianovski and Lipton report that a project designed to liquefy natural gas in Alaska and export it would not only use Russian technology but also be funded with money from a Russian company close to Putin that is currently under U.S. sanctions. That company, Novatek, told the reporters that it is planning to take “minority shareholder” status in the Polar LNG project, a move the reporters call “a striking effort by the Russian energy giant to seek ownership of American gas production.”

U.S. sanctions against Novatek mean Polar LNG would need special permission from the Treasury Department to use Novatek’s equipment. The Graham Act sanctions bill Congress recently passed specifically targets Novatek because of its ties to Putin—a likely reason that Trump just waived the new sanctions just two days before they were to go into effect.

Joel Riddle, the chief executive officer of the company, Polar LNG, resigned when he learned that the funding came not from the United Arab Emirates, as he had been told, but from Russia. “It’s not only unlawful, but it’s not in the U.S. interest to have Russian technology controlling the commercialization of Arctic gas in the North Slope,” Riddle told the New York Times reporters. At least two other Polar LNG executives have also resigned, citing their concerns about the Russian financing.

Talks about gas in Alaska were joined with talks about the sale of parts of Russian energy giant Lukoil to the U.S. government and investors, some of whom are tied to Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and special envoy—and business partner—Steve Witkoff. Also involved in the Alaska project is Gentry Beach, who was a college friend of Donald Trump Jr.

It seems that Trump, Putin, and their allies in the administration are trying to replace the post–World War II international order and carve the world up into the system of spheres of influence they want as quickly as possible before the midterms. Central to those systems are private deals that enrich Trump and his cronies.

On October 20, Cate Brown, Aaron C. Davis, and Sebastian Rotella of ProPublica reported that the deal to capture Venezuela’s oil sets up a strategic partnership between the U.S. and a Venezuelan oligarch, Alejandro Betancourt, who has been accused of money laundering. A deal signed by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio calls for the U.S. to take a 35% stake in Betancourt’s firm, North American Blue Energy Partners, by buying shares in a parent company that’s registered in Barbados.

A source told the ProPublica reporters that the people making the deal wanted to work with Betancourt because a publicly traded company would have to report to shareholders. They wanted flexibility and secrecy. The registration of the parent company in Barbados enables the identities of its investors, who could make fortunes from the deal, to remain hidden.

In exchange for the investment, the U.S. can buy up to 20% of the oil produced at a steep discount, but that cost doesn’t factor in moving the oil, which is so thick it has to be blended with other products to flow through pipes. Betancourt’s company currently produces only as much oil in one year as the U.S. uses in three days.

The U.S. insists the deal is a good one for both countries, but it appears to violate Venezuelan law, which prohibits oil concessions longer than 25 years, and to lock in U.S. control. The deal creates a powerful seven-member board to oversee the venture for 15 years. A majority of the board members must be U.S. citizens. The U.S. government can appoint a single, nonvoting member of the board, and it can oust Betancourt only with a supermajority of five votes from the board. Any disputes over the company must be resolved not in Venezuela, but in Texas.

The administration is also suggesting it will take steps to control Cuba. At 4:35 today, Secretary of State Rubio posted on social media: “To those who seek to create positive change in Cuba—now is the time. The disappointment of failed promises, corruption, and the privileged lives of only a few; seize this opportunity to create the change you desire through a discrete partnership with the CIA.”

Neophyte said:

October 23, 2026 (Friday)

Despite Trump’s statement yesterday that billionaire Elon Musk had removed the restrictions from Starlink and Starshield that are crippling Ukraine’s ability to protect itself from Russia, Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky said today the restrictions continue.

An article published tonight by Anton Troianovski and Eric Lipton in the New York Times sheds a spotlight on the oil deals that lie behind Trump’s rush to normalize relations with Russia at Ukraine’s expense, as well as repeated statements from him and his cronies that they want to open up business transactions with Russia as incentives for Russia’s president Vladimir Putin to stop his war on Ukraine—an argument that, on its face, never made sense.

Troianovski and Lipton report that a project designed to liquefy natural gas in Alaska and export it would not only use Russian technology but also be funded with money from a Russian company close to Putin that is currently under U.S. sanctions. That company, Novatek, told the reporters that it is planning to take “minority shareholder” status in the Polar LNG project, a move the reporters call “a striking effort by the Russian energy giant to seek ownership of American gas production.”

U.S. sanctions against Novatek mean Polar LNG would need special permission from the Treasury Department to use Novatek’s equipment. The Graham Act sanctions bill Congress recently passed specifically targets Novatek because of its ties to Putin—a likely reason that Trump just waived the new sanctions just two days before they were to go into effect.

Joel Riddle, the chief executive officer of the company, Polar LNG, resigned when he learned that the funding came not from the United Arab Emirates, as he had been told, but from Russia. “It’s not only unlawful, but it’s not in the U.S. interest to have Russian technology controlling the commercialization of Arctic gas in the North Slope,” Riddle told the New York Times reporters. At least two other Polar LNG executives have also resigned, citing their concerns about the Russian financing.

Talks about gas in Alaska were joined with talks about the sale of parts of Russian energy giant Lukoil to the U.S. government and investors, some of whom are tied to Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and special envoy—and business partner—Steve Witkoff. Also involved in the Alaska project is Gentry Beach, who was a college friend of Donald Trump Jr.

It seems that Trump, Putin, and their allies in the administration are trying to replace the post–World War II international order and carve the world up into the system of spheres of influence they want as quickly as possible before the midterms. Central to those systems are private deals that enrich Trump and his cronies.

On October 20, Cate Brown, Aaron C. Davis, and Sebastian Rotella of ProPublica reported that the deal to capture Venezuela’s oil sets up a strategic partnership between the U.S. and a Venezuelan oligarch, Alejandro Betancourt, who has been accused of money laundering. A deal signed by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio calls for the U.S. to take a 35% stake in Betancourt’s firm, North American Blue Energy Partners, by buying shares in a parent company that’s registered in Barbados.

A source told the ProPublica reporters that the people making the deal wanted to work with Betancourt because a publicly traded company would have to report to shareholders. They wanted flexibility and secrecy. The registration of the parent company in Barbados enables the identities of its investors, who could make fortunes from the deal, to remain hidden.

In exchange for the investment, the U.S. can buy up to 20% of the oil produced at a steep discount, but that cost doesn’t factor in moving the oil, which is so thick it has to be blended with other products to flow through pipes. Betancourt’s company currently produces only as much oil in one year as the U.S. uses in three days.

The U.S. insists the deal is a good one for both countries, but it appears to violate Venezuelan law, which prohibits oil concessions longer than 25 years, and to lock in U.S. control. The deal creates a powerful seven-member board to oversee the venture for 15 years. A majority of the board members must be U.S. citizens. The U.S. government can appoint a single, nonvoting member of the board, and it can oust Betancourt only with a supermajority of five votes from the board. Any disputes over the company must be resolved not in Venezuela, but in Texas.

The administration is also suggesting it will take steps to control Cuba. At 4:35 today, Secretary of State Rubio posted on social media: “To those who seek to create positive change in Cuba—now is the time. The disappointment of failed promises, corruption, and the privileged lives of only a few; seize this opportunity to create the change you desire through a discrete partnership with the CIA.”

Thanks for posting.

It just gets wilder and wilder each day.

Michael V said:

Neophyte said:

October 23, 2026 (Friday)

Despite Trump’s statement yesterday that billionaire Elon Musk had removed the restrictions from Starlink and Starshield that are crippling Ukraine’s ability to protect itself from Russia, Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky said today the restrictions continue.

An article published tonight by Anton Troianovski and Eric Lipton in the New York Times sheds a spotlight on the oil deals that lie behind Trump’s rush to normalize relations with Russia at Ukraine’s expense, as well as repeated statements from him and his cronies that they want to open up business transactions with Russia as incentives for Russia’s president Vladimir Putin to stop his war on Ukraine—an argument that, on its face, never made sense.

Troianovski and Lipton report that a project designed to liquefy natural gas in Alaska and export it would not only use Russian technology but also be funded with money from a Russian company close to Putin that is currently under U.S. sanctions. That company, Novatek, told the reporters that it is planning to take “minority shareholder” status in the Polar LNG project, a move the reporters call “a striking effort by the Russian energy giant to seek ownership of American gas production.”

U.S. sanctions against Novatek mean Polar LNG would need special permission from the Treasury Department to use Novatek’s equipment. The Graham Act sanctions bill Congress recently passed specifically targets Novatek because of its ties to Putin—a likely reason that Trump just waived the new sanctions just two days before they were to go into effect.

Joel Riddle, the chief executive officer of the company, Polar LNG, resigned when he learned that the funding came not from the United Arab Emirates, as he had been told, but from Russia. “It’s not only unlawful, but it’s not in the U.S. interest to have Russian technology controlling the commercialization of Arctic gas in the North Slope,” Riddle told the New York Times reporters. At least two other Polar LNG executives have also resigned, citing their concerns about the Russian financing.

Talks about gas in Alaska were joined with talks about the sale of parts of Russian energy giant Lukoil to the U.S. government and investors, some of whom are tied to Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and special envoy—and business partner—Steve Witkoff. Also involved in the Alaska project is Gentry Beach, who was a college friend of Donald Trump Jr.

It seems that Trump, Putin, and their allies in the administration are trying to replace the post–World War II international order and carve the world up into the system of spheres of influence they want as quickly as possible before the midterms. Central to those systems are private deals that enrich Trump and his cronies.

On October 20, Cate Brown, Aaron C. Davis, and Sebastian Rotella of ProPublica reported that the deal to capture Venezuela’s oil sets up a strategic partnership between the U.S. and a Venezuelan oligarch, Alejandro Betancourt, who has been accused of money laundering. A deal signed by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio calls for the U.S. to take a 35% stake in Betancourt’s firm, North American Blue Energy Partners, by buying shares in a parent company that’s registered in Barbados.

A source told the ProPublica reporters that the people making the deal wanted to work with Betancourt because a publicly traded company would have to report to shareholders. They wanted flexibility and secrecy. The registration of the parent company in Barbados enables the identities of its investors, who could make fortunes from the deal, to remain hidden.

In exchange for the investment, the U.S. can buy up to 20% of the oil produced at a steep discount, but that cost doesn’t factor in moving the oil, which is so thick it has to be blended with other products to flow through pipes. Betancourt’s company currently produces only as much oil in one year as the U.S. uses in three days.

The U.S. insists the deal is a good one for both countries, but it appears to violate Venezuelan law, which prohibits oil concessions longer than 25 years, and to lock in U.S. control. The deal creates a powerful seven-member board to oversee the venture for 15 years. A majority of the board members must be U.S. citizens. The U.S. government can appoint a single, nonvoting member of the board, and it can oust Betancourt only with a supermajority of five votes from the board. Any disputes over the company must be resolved not in Venezuela, but in Texas.

The administration is also suggesting it will take steps to control Cuba. At 4:35 today, Secretary of State Rubio posted on social media: “To those who seek to create positive change in Cuba—now is the time. The disappointment of failed promises, corruption, and the privileged lives of only a few; seize this opportunity to create the change you desire through a discrete partnership with the CIA.”

Thanks for posting.

It just gets wilder and wilder each day.

Thank heavens Ms HCR is there to cast an objective eye over it all – in years to come, her reports will be the ones quoted when describing these times to future generations.

Neophyte said:

Michael V said:

Neophyte said:

October 23, 2026 (Friday)

Despite Trump’s statement yesterday that billionaire Elon Musk had removed the restrictions from Starlink and Starshield that are crippling Ukraine’s ability to protect itself from Russia, Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky said today the restrictions continue.

An article published tonight by Anton Troianovski and Eric Lipton in the New York Times sheds a spotlight on the oil deals that lie behind Trump’s rush to normalize relations with Russia at Ukraine’s expense, as well as repeated statements from him and his cronies that they want to open up business transactions with Russia as incentives for Russia’s president Vladimir Putin to stop his war on Ukraine—an argument that, on its face, never made sense.

Troianovski and Lipton report that a project designed to liquefy natural gas in Alaska and export it would not only use Russian technology but also be funded with money from a Russian company close to Putin that is currently under U.S. sanctions. That company, Novatek, told the reporters that it is planning to take “minority shareholder” status in the Polar LNG project, a move the reporters call “a striking effort by the Russian energy giant to seek ownership of American gas production.”

U.S. sanctions against Novatek mean Polar LNG would need special permission from the Treasury Department to use Novatek’s equipment. The Graham Act sanctions bill Congress recently passed specifically targets Novatek because of its ties to Putin—a likely reason that Trump just waived the new sanctions just two days before they were to go into effect.

Joel Riddle, the chief executive officer of the company, Polar LNG, resigned when he learned that the funding came not from the United Arab Emirates, as he had been told, but from Russia. “It’s not only unlawful, but it’s not in the U.S. interest to have Russian technology controlling the commercialization of Arctic gas in the North Slope,” Riddle told the New York Times reporters. At least two other Polar LNG executives have also resigned, citing their concerns about the Russian financing.

Talks about gas in Alaska were joined with talks about the sale of parts of Russian energy giant Lukoil to the U.S. government and investors, some of whom are tied to Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and special envoy—and business partner—Steve Witkoff. Also involved in the Alaska project is Gentry Beach, who was a college friend of Donald Trump Jr.

It seems that Trump, Putin, and their allies in the administration are trying to replace the post–World War II international order and carve the world up into the system of spheres of influence they want as quickly as possible before the midterms. Central to those systems are private deals that enrich Trump and his cronies.

On October 20, Cate Brown, Aaron C. Davis, and Sebastian Rotella of ProPublica reported that the deal to capture Venezuela’s oil sets up a strategic partnership between the U.S. and a Venezuelan oligarch, Alejandro Betancourt, who has been accused of money laundering. A deal signed by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio calls for the U.S. to take a 35% stake in Betancourt’s firm, North American Blue Energy Partners, by buying shares in a parent company that’s registered in Barbados.

A source told the ProPublica reporters that the people making the deal wanted to work with Betancourt because a publicly traded company would have to report to shareholders. They wanted flexibility and secrecy. The registration of the parent company in Barbados enables the identities of its investors, who could make fortunes from the deal, to remain hidden.

In exchange for the investment, the U.S. can buy up to 20% of the oil produced at a steep discount, but that cost doesn’t factor in moving the oil, which is so thick it has to be blended with other products to flow through pipes. Betancourt’s company currently produces only as much oil in one year as the U.S. uses in three days.

The U.S. insists the deal is a good one for both countries, but it appears to violate Venezuelan law, which prohibits oil concessions longer than 25 years, and to lock in U.S. control. The deal creates a powerful seven-member board to oversee the venture for 15 years. A majority of the board members must be U.S. citizens. The U.S. government can appoint a single, nonvoting member of the board, and it can oust Betancourt only with a supermajority of five votes from the board. Any disputes over the company must be resolved not in Venezuela, but in Texas.

The administration is also suggesting it will take steps to control Cuba. At 4:35 today, Secretary of State Rubio posted on social media: “To those who seek to create positive change in Cuba—now is the time. The disappointment of failed promises, corruption, and the privileged lives of only a few; seize this opportunity to create the change you desire through a discrete partnership with the CIA.”

Thanks for posting.

It just gets wilder and wilder each day.

Thank heavens Ms HCR is there to cast an objective eye over it all – in years to come, her reports will be the ones quoted when describing these times to future generations.

100%.

October 24, 2026 (Saturday)

In the election of 1920, Americans handed a landslide victory to the Republicans and their presidential candidate Warren G. Harding, giving them control of both Congress and the White House. After the moralizing of the Progressive Era and the horrors of World War I and the Spanish flu epidemic that followed it, Americans looked forward to an era of “normalcy.”

Once in charge, Republicans rejected the Progressive Era notion that the government should regulate business and protect workers and consumers. Instead they turned the government over to businessmen, believing that only men who had built businesses truly understood how to build the country.

Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon—one of the richest men in America—cut taxes on the wealthy to spur investment in industry. He also gave rebates and tax abatements: between 1921 and 1929 he returned $3.5 billion to wealthy men.

At the same time, Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover, who had made a fortune as a mining engineer and consultant, expanded his department to fifteen thousand employees with a budget of more than 37 million dollars, working as a liaison between businessmen and the government and helping businesses to avoid antitrust lawsuits. He urged European countries to buy American.

Their policies seemed to work brilliantly. Between 1925 and 1926, more than twenty-two thousand new manufacturing companies formed. Industrial production took off. Business profits rose, and if wages didn’t rise much, they didn’t fall, either.

And oh, the changes the new economy brought! By 1929, more than two thirds of American homes had electricity, which brought first electric lights, then refrigerators, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, toasters, and radios. Consumers rushed to buy them, along with ready-made clothing, beauty products, and cars, all of which the new advertising industry, which grew out of the government propaganda campaigns of World War I, promised would bring them glamor, sophistication, romance, and power.

In the Roaring Twenties, it seemed that government and business had finally figured out how to combine government promotion with the efficiency of an industrial economy to benefit everyone. Business was booming, standards of living were rising, and Americans were finding the time to read, learn, invent, and improve. In 1928, Republicans tapped Hoover for president. He promised that continuing the policies of the last eight years would bring the U.S. “in sight of the day when poverty will be banished from this nation.” He won with a whopping 58.2% of the vote.

With Hoover in the White House, Americans wanted in on the inevitable growth of the economy. They invested in industries producing steel, coal, and consumer goods, and in utilities and transportation. Stock prices rose. And rose, and rose. By 1929 the rush to buy stocks had become a rush to speculate in the stock market. Prices that in spring 1928 had seemed too high to be real were laughably low by fall. Radio had been at 94½ in March 1928; by September 1929 it was 101 but had split so often that the holdings from 1928 were actually worth 505. And so it went, down the stock lists.

Those with less money to burn could get into the market by buying on margin, putting down 10 or 20 percent of the cost of a stock and borrowing the rest from a broker with the promise that the loans would be paid off by the anticipated increase in the stock’s value.

Those excited by the scene dismissed skeptics who warned that stock prices were a bubble as ignorant, anti-American naysayers. “Be a bull on America!” boosters urged. “Never sell the United States short!”

October 24, a Thursday, was the beginning of the end. Heavy trading in the morning slowed the ticker tape that recorded trades. Brokers fearful of being caught sold more and more heavily. When the tape finally caught up after 7:00 that night, it showed that an astonishing 12,894,650 shares had changed hands. By afternoon, bankers managed to shore up the market, which regained the ground it had lost in the morning. But those dreadful early hours had wiped out hundreds of thousands of small investors.

The market seemed to recover on Friday and Saturday. But then, on Monday, October 28, prices slid far in heavy trading. And then, on October 29, 1929, it all came crashing down.

When the opening gong in the great hall of the New York Stock Exchange sounded at ten o’clock, men began to unload their stocks. The ticker tape ran two and a half hours behind, but that night it showed that an extraordinary 16,410,030 shares had traded hands, and the market had lost $14 billion.

Black Tuesday began a slide that seemingly would not end. Within two years, manufacturing output dropped to levels lower than those of 1913. The production of pig iron fell to what it had been in the 1890s. Foreign trade fell from $10 billion to $3 billion. The price of wheat fell from $1.05 a bushel to 39 cents; corn dropped from 81 cents a bushel to 33 cents or lower; cotton fell from 17 to 6 cents a pound. Prices dropped so low that selling crops meant taking a loss, so struggling farmers simply let them rot in the fields.

By 1932, over a million people in New York City were unemployed. By 1933 the number of unemployed across the nation rose to 13 million people—one out of every four American workers. Unable to afford rent or pay mortgages, people lived in shelters made of packing boxes.

Republican leaders blamed poor Americans for the Great Depression, saying they drained the economy because they refused to work hard enough. “Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate,” Treasury Secretary Mellon told Hoover. “It will purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people.”

But the problem was not lazy workers. The rising standards of living that had gotten so much attention in the new magazines of the 1920s mainly benefited white, middle-class, urban Americans. Farm prices crashed after WWI, leaving rural Americans falling behind, while workers’ wages did not rise along with production. The new economy of the 1920s benefited too few Americans to be sustainable.

Hoover tried to reverse the economic slide by cutting taxes and reassuring Americans that “the fundamental business of the country…is on a sound and prosperous basis.” But he rejected public works programs to provide jobs, saying that such projects were a “soak the rich” scheme that would “enslave” taxpayers, and called instead for private charity.

By 1932, Americans were ready to try a new approach. They turned to New York governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who promised to use the federal government to provide jobs and a safety net to enable Americans to weather hard times. He promised the American people a “New Deal”: a government that would work for everyone, not just for the wealthy and well connected.

Under Roosevelt, Democrats protected workers’ rights, provided government jobs, regulated business and banking, and began to chip away at racial segregation. New Deal agencies employed more than 8.5 million people, built more than 650,000 miles of highways, built or repaired more than 120,000 bridges, and put up more than 125,000 buildings.

They regulated banking and the stock market and gave workers the right to bargain collectively. They established minimum wages and maximum hours for work. They provided a basic social safety net and regulated food and drug safety. And when World War II broke out, the new system enabled the United States to defend democracy successfully against fascists both at home—where by 1939 they had grown strong enough to turn out almost 20,000 people to a rally at Madison Square Garden—and abroad.

Ta.

Neophyte said:

October 24, 2026 (Saturday)

When the opening gong in the great hall of the New York Stock Exchange sounded at ten o’clock, men began to unload their stocks. The ticker tape ran two and a half hours behind, but that night it showed that an extraordinary 16,410,030 shares had traded hands, and the market had lost $14 billion.

Black Tuesday began a slide that seemingly would not end. Within two years, manufacturing output dropped to levels lower than those of 1913. The production of pig iron fell to what it had been in the 1890s. Foreign trade fell from $10 billion to $3 billion. The price of wheat fell from $1.05 a bushel to 39 cents; corn dropped from 81 cents a bushel to 33 cents or lower; cotton fell from 17 to 6 cents a pound. Prices dropped so low that selling crops meant taking a loss, so struggling farmers simply let them rot in the fields.

By 1932, over a million people in New York City were unemployed. By 1933 the number of unemployed across the nation rose to 13 million people—one out of every four American workers. Unable to afford rent or pay mortgages, people lived in shelters made of packing boxes.

…

Ta,

roughbarked said:

Neophyte said:

October 24, 2026 (Saturday)

When the opening gong in the great hall of the New York Stock Exchange sounded at ten o’clock, men began to unload their stocks. The ticker tape ran two and a half hours behind, but that night it showed that an extraordinary 16,410,030 shares had traded hands, and the market had lost $14 billion.

Black Tuesday began a slide that seemingly would not end. Within two years, manufacturing output dropped to levels lower than those of 1913. The production of pig iron fell to what it had been in the 1890s. Foreign trade fell from $10 billion to $3 billion. The price of wheat fell from $1.05 a bushel to 39 cents; corn dropped from 81 cents a bushel to 33 cents or lower; cotton fell from 17 to 6 cents a pound. Prices dropped so low that selling crops meant taking a loss, so struggling farmers simply let them rot in the fields.

By 1932, over a million people in New York City were unemployed. By 1933 the number of unemployed across the nation rose to 13 million people—one out of every four American workers. Unable to afford rent or pay mortgages, people lived in shelters made of packing boxes.

…

Ta,

I was reminded of this from Matt Bevan’s If you are listening

If you’ve read Harpo Marx’s autobiography. ‘Harpo Speaks’, you know that Harpo was one of the ‘jet set’ of the 1920s (or would have been, if there’d been any jets to set by).

Friend and confidante of the rich and famous, Harpo was in on the trends of the day, which included the stock market, the 1920s equivalent of crypto or AI. He tells of how everyone was buying stocks (not so much selling, because everyone was enjoying watching the value of their stocks continuing rise, and equally enjoying dividends)>

And, an awful lot of this was done ‘on the margin’, where you only made what was essentially a down-payment on the stocks, and promised to pay the rest.

What this meant was that, when things suddenly turned ‘bad’, there was a vast mountain of money owed to the firms that had issued the stocks, and those firms needed it, fast. So they issued ‘margin calls’, demanding that the shareholders cough up what they still owed on their margin purchases.

A lot of those shareholders had bought ‘on the margin’ because they had been sold the idea that the stock market would simply continue to rise, with no end in sight, and therefore no need to ever call in amounts owed on margin purchases.

They never had the money to buy the shares at full price. And, when the margin calls came, they didn’t have it then, either. The stockholders defaulted on their margins, many were bankrupted by those debts, and the issuing companies had to write of huge amount of their stock value. Overnight, people were destroyed, and companies were made worthless.

Welcome to the Great Depression.

Today’s situation has similarities. AI companies have been, and are, borrowing hundreds of billions of dollars to fund their plans, and added to that is the cost of insurance against default on those borrowings.

The worry is that, unless AI lives up to every word of its hype, in full, those companies (or the great majority of them) are not going to make enough money to service the debts they’ve incurred, and that there just isn’t going to be enough money in the system to pay the default insurance against those debts.

The borrowed money is gone, the insurance payouts can’t be funded, and lenders have to write off hundreds of billions of dollars all over the world. A very large chunk of the world’s money simply disappears, Banks and other institutions can’t meet their obligations, and the system collapses.

captain_spalding said:

If you’ve read Harpo Marx’s autobiography. ‘Harpo Speaks’, you know that Harpo was one of the ‘jet set’ of the 1920s (or would have been, if there’d been any jets to set by).

Friend and confidante of the rich and famous, Harpo was in on the trends of the day, which included the stock market, the 1920s equivalent of crypto or AI. He tells of how everyone was buying stocks (not so much selling, because everyone was enjoying watching the value of their stocks continuing rise, and equally enjoying dividends)>

And, an awful lot of this was done ‘on the margin’, where you only made what was essentially a down-payment on the stocks, and promised to pay the rest.

What this meant was that, when things suddenly turned ‘bad’, there was a vast mountain of money owed to the firms that had issued the stocks, and those firms needed it, fast. So they issued ‘margin calls’, demanding that the shareholders cough up what they still owed on their margin purchases.

A lot of those shareholders had bought ‘on the margin’ because they had been sold the idea that the stock market would simply continue to rise, with no end in sight, and therefore no need to ever call in amounts owed on margin purchases.

They never had the money to buy the shares at full price. And, when the margin calls came, they didn’t have it then, either. The stockholders defaulted on their margins, many were bankrupted by those debts, and the issuing companies had to write of huge amount of their stock value. Overnight, people were destroyed, and companies were made worthless.

Welcome to the Great Depression.

Today’s situation has similarities. AI companies have been, and are, borrowing hundreds of billions of dollars to fund their plans, and added to that is the cost of insurance against default on those borrowings.

The worry is that, unless AI lives up to every word of its hype, in full, those companies (or the great majority of them) are not going to make enough money to service the debts they’ve incurred, and that there just isn’t going to be enough money in the system to pay the default insurance against those debts.

The borrowed money is gone, the insurance payouts can’t be funded, and lenders have to write off hundreds of billions of dollars all over the world. A very large chunk of the world’s money simply disappears, Banks and other institutions can’t meet their obligations, and the system collapses.

Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble.

captain_spalding said:

If you’ve read Harpo Marx’s autobiography. ‘Harpo Speaks’, you know that Harpo was one of the ‘jet set’ of the 1920s (or would have been, if there’d been any jets to set by).

Friend and confidante of the rich and famous, Harpo was in on the trends of the day, which included the stock market, the 1920s equivalent of crypto or AI. He tells of how everyone was buying stocks (not so much selling, because everyone was enjoying watching the value of their stocks continuing rise, and equally enjoying dividends)>

And, an awful lot of this was done ‘on the margin’, where you only made what was essentially a down-payment on the stocks, and promised to pay the rest.

What this meant was that, when things suddenly turned ‘bad’, there was a vast mountain of money owed to the firms that had issued the stocks, and those firms needed it, fast. So they issued ‘margin calls’, demanding that the shareholders cough up what they still owed on their margin purchases.

A lot of those shareholders had bought ‘on the margin’ because they had been sold the idea that the stock market would simply continue to rise, with no end in sight, and therefore no need to ever call in amounts owed on margin purchases.

They never had the money to buy the shares at full price. And, when the margin calls came, they didn’t have it then, either. The stockholders defaulted on their margins, many were bankrupted by those debts, and the issuing companies had to write of huge amount of their stock value. Overnight, people were destroyed, and companies were made worthless.

Welcome to the Great Depression.

Today’s situation has similarities. AI companies have been, and are, borrowing hundreds of billions of dollars to fund their plans, and added to that is the cost of insurance against default on those borrowings.

The worry is that, unless AI lives up to every word of its hype, in full, those companies (or the great majority of them) are not going to make enough money to service the debts they’ve incurred, and that there just isn’t going to be enough money in the system to pay the default insurance against those debts.

The borrowed money is gone, the insurance payouts can’t be funded, and lenders have to write off hundreds of billions of dollars all over the world. A very large chunk of the world’s money simply disappears, Banks and other institutions can’t meet their obligations, and the system collapses.

The prime minister has advised people to stock up on tinned food and bottled water in order to be prepared for emergencies.

With storms battering the UK, and in the wake of online disruption caused by a major security flaw, Andy Burnham said “unexpected events seem to be becoming more and more common”.

The government has drawn up recommendations for households to have three days’ worth of bottled water and tinned food to deal with a crisis such as a war, an online attack or a natural disaster.

Burnham added: “It’s not about panicking… It’s about just taking sensible measures to have enough in the house to tide you over should there be a difficult situation.”

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckr5yz2pqqppo

Divine Angel said:

captain_spalding said:

If you’ve read Harpo Marx’s autobiography. ‘Harpo Speaks’, you know that Harpo was one of the ‘jet set’ of the 1920s (or would have been, if there’d been any jets to set by).

Friend and confidante of the rich and famous, Harpo was in on the trends of the day, which included the stock market, the 1920s equivalent of crypto or AI. He tells of how everyone was buying stocks (not so much selling, because everyone was enjoying watching the value of their stocks continuing rise, and equally enjoying dividends)>

And, an awful lot of this was done ‘on the margin’, where you only made what was essentially a down-payment on the stocks, and promised to pay the rest.

What this meant was that, when things suddenly turned ‘bad’, there was a vast mountain of money owed to the firms that had issued the stocks, and those firms needed it, fast. So they issued ‘margin calls’, demanding that the shareholders cough up what they still owed on their margin purchases.

A lot of those shareholders had bought ‘on the margin’ because they had been sold the idea that the stock market would simply continue to rise, with no end in sight, and therefore no need to ever call in amounts owed on margin purchases.

They never had the money to buy the shares at full price. And, when the margin calls came, they didn’t have it then, either. The stockholders defaulted on their margins, many were bankrupted by those debts, and the issuing companies had to write of huge amount of their stock value. Overnight, people were destroyed, and companies were made worthless.

Welcome to the Great Depression.

Today’s situation has similarities. AI companies have been, and are, borrowing hundreds of billions of dollars to fund their plans, and added to that is the cost of insurance against default on those borrowings.

The worry is that, unless AI lives up to every word of its hype, in full, those companies (or the great majority of them) are not going to make enough money to service the debts they’ve incurred, and that there just isn’t going to be enough money in the system to pay the default insurance against those debts.

The borrowed money is gone, the insurance payouts can’t be funded, and lenders have to write off hundreds of billions of dollars all over the world. A very large chunk of the world’s money simply disappears, Banks and other institutions can’t meet their obligations, and the system collapses.

The prime minister has advised people to stock up on tinned food and bottled water in order to be prepared for emergencies.

With storms battering the UK, and in the wake of online disruption caused by a major security flaw, Andy Burnham said “unexpected events seem to be becoming more and more common”.

The government has drawn up recommendations for households to have three days’ worth of bottled water and tinned food to deal with a crisis such as a war, an online attack or a natural disaster.

Burnham added: “It’s not about panicking… It’s about just taking sensible measures to have enough in the house to tide you over should there be a difficult situation.”

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckr5yz2pqqppo

Funnily enough it was all smiles in Wall Street offices as panic selling ensued.

Bubblecar said:

Funnily enough it was all smiles in Wall Street offices as panic selling ensued.

Just before they started jumping out of fourth storey windows

roughbarked said:

Bubblecar said:

Funnily enough it was all smiles in Wall Street offices as panic selling ensued.

Just before they started jumping out of fourth storey windows

…which never actually happened.

Bubblecar said:

Funnily enough it was all smiles in Wall Street offices as panic selling ensued.

There was a couple of false-hope promises of bail-outs and efforts at intervention by a team of the nation’s wealthiest men to prop up the market early on, and the market ‘rallied’ a couple of times, prompting surges of belief that it was all going to be OK.

Nope.

captain_spalding said:

roughbarked said:

Bubblecar said:

Funnily enough it was all smiles in Wall Street offices as panic selling ensued.

Just before they started jumping out of fourth storey windows

…which never actually happened.

Was probably thinking about War of the Worlds

roughbarked said:

captain_spalding said:

roughbarked said:

Just before they started jumping out of fourth storey windows

…which never actually happened.

Was probably thinking about War of the Worlds

There was a lot of twaddle talked about chaps defenstrating themselves.

There was a number of suicides as a result of the crash, but only one or two took the Gravity Express, and then it was the Ritz-Carlton on 59th Street, not on Wall Street.

October 25, 2026 (Sunday)

And so, here we are in the last days of the 2026 midterm campaign.

As the political winds fill Democrats’ sails and they are picking up momentum, MAGA is doubling down on what has worked in the past: a false narrative undergirded by cruelty. But that false narrative is now so out of sync with reality that it does not seem to be attracting voters.

Trump and his allies keep saying they are digging the United States economy out of a hole dug by former president Joe Biden, but on October 19, 2024, The Economist called the U.S. economy “The Envy of the World.” Trump disagreed, insisting that Biden’s economy was horrible.

He promised the new tariffs he intended to impose would create an economic miracle. Just hours after his second inauguration, he said that tariffs were “the most beautiful word to me in the dictionary,” because “tariffs are going to make us rich as hell. It’s going to bring our country’s businesses back that left us.”

Now Republicans are studiously avoiding the word “tariffs” except when someone like Senator Susan Collins (R-ME), who is facing a strong challenge to her reelection from Democrat Troy Jackson, tries to attract voters by announcing she persuaded Trump to take off some of the tariffs he had placed just two months ago on goods from Canada. In Michigan, Republican Mike Rogers, struggling to pull out a win against Democrat Abdul El-Sayed in a race for the U.S. Senate, ran an ad holding a Canadian beer and saying “end this tariff war now.”

On Friday, Greg Ip of the Wall Street Journal noted that while Republicans spent more than $2.2 million in 2024 on ads promoting tariffs, in 2026 they have spent zero.

At rallies and in appearances before the media—including calling in to the Fox News Channel—Trump insists the economy is booming. One of his main examples, though, is that the country is making trillions of dollars because his war on Iran has created oil shortages. At a rally yesterday, he told the audience: “We’re making a freaking fortune.”

But “we” is doing a lot of work in that statement. Oil companies and their investors—like Trump—are indeed making a fortune, but the rest of the country is suffering under climbing gasoline prices and record high diesel costs, which have driven up the prices of food and anything that travels by train or truck. At a rally today, Trump said the great things he and the Republicans have done will “kick in later.”

Trump insisted tariffs and his war on Iran were his policies and his alone, intended to take credit for the prosperity he believed they would usher in. Having claimed the policies for his own, he now cannot deflect blame for the crises they have caused. So MAGA candidates are trying to attract votes by warning that Democrats will be even worse, and doubling down on culture wars.

Although Trump has embraced the Muslims from Qatar who gave him the luxury plane he now uses as Air Force One, as well as Muslim leaders from Saudi Arabia, and appointed Dr. Mehmet Oz, who is Muslim, to head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, he and his allies have tried to attract voters by attacking Muslim Democrats El-Sayed, a medical doctor like Oz, and Representative Ilhan Omar (D-MN) as dangerous radicals.

Early in the morning of October 12, as many as 25 agents from the Department of Homeland Security raided the home of Representative Omar, searching it for four to five hours in what Jake Tapper of CNN reported is an attempt to prove that her late father lied about her age in the family’s citizenship papers.

Ted Hesson, Jeremy Roebuck, Perry Stein, and Salvador Rizzo of the Washington Post reported that political appointees in the first Trump administration had tried to find something on Omar in 2019, but had not been able to find any issues with her immigration paperwork.

After Omar talked to Chris Hayes of MS NOW, Allison Detzel reported that Omar had said the agents left with her phone, two old phones, “her husband’s notebooks and a camera he had received from his uncle,” and “a Somali phrase book for children, which her husband was using to learn the language.”

“To walk away with 17 items, of, like, 10 that were just notebooks and like old phones, was such a bizarre, bizarre thing,” Omar said, and suggested the raid was simply fodder for right-wing media. It has also revealed where she lived, forcing her and her family to move for their safety.

After the raid, Trump demanded first that Omar resign, and then on Friday told a rally that she had “conceded” her congressional seat.

Trump is also trying to demonize Dr. El-Sayed, posting today that the doctor, who was born in the United States and thus is a natural-born citizen, is “a Jihadist Member of the Muslim Brotherhood,” an organization founded in Egypt in 1928. Under Trump, the U.S. government has designated some of the branches of the movement as terrorist organizations. Trump appears to believe the words are frightening and wants to tie them to the Democrat as his popularity surges against incumbent Republican senator Mike Rogers in Michigan.

That attempt hasn’t gone well. When a man challenged him at a town hall to disavow the Muslim Brotherhood, El-Sayed answered, “Sure, yeah, absolutely,” and then suggested “Tommy,” as the man identified himself, was accusing El-Sayed of dual loyalties, likening those accusations to those John F. Kennedy faced during his 1960 presidential campaign.

El-Sayed reminded the man that the Constitution guarantees freedom of religion and then turned the tables, asking the man if he would disavow the attempt to push religion into American law. Tommy said he would not disavow that effort. El-Sayed then told Tommy that he, not El-Sayed, was the man who needed to understand the Constitution. Tommy left the room, and days later Marisa Kabas of The Handbasket reported that Tommy was Thomas Teepell, a Republican operative with ties to Christian nationalists.

Today, in an interview on NBC’s Meet the Press, Mike Rogers tried again to tie El-Sayed to the Muslim Brotherhood, only to have host Kristen Welker point out that he, Rogers, had called for talks with the Muslim Brotherhood in 2012. Rogers appeared flustered, trying to turn the conversation back to what he insisted was El-Sayed’s radicalism.

And then there is Ohio Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy’s ad featuring Democratic candidate Amy Acton’s homeless biological mother, who called Acton a liar for saying she had lived in a tent as a child. The ad didn’t tell the full story: officials removed 12-year-old Acton and her younger brother from their mother after a grand jury indicted her stepfather for raping her. Court records bear out both that story and that they lived in a tent.

Rather than painting Acton as a liar, the ad reveals both Ramaswamy and those who supported the ad—including Trump, Vice President J.D. Vance, and MAGA influencers—as men willing to weaponize the rape of a child if it helps them win power. Donations to Acton surged in the wake of the ad as members of both parties condemned it.

American Catholics have slid away from their support for Trump, especially since Pope Leo XIV, the first pope born in the United States, has pointedly criticized the administration’s cruelty to immigrants. And so, allies of the White House arranged for a photo op of Catholic leaders praying over Trump in the Oval Office.

Today Archbishop Jeffrey Grob of Milwaukee issued a public apology for participating in the prayer event, and said the White House had publicized it “without the consent of the participants.” He insisted that praying for the president “was in no way an endorsement of the president, his policies, or his party.

Grob said he went to the White House with fellow bishops to discuss “immigration enforcement, religious worker visas, and human dignity.” “We were told the meeting was to be a private discussion, that several Catholic members of the cabinet might make an appearance, and that there could be an opportunity to pray privately with the president.”

After the private meeting with domestic policy advisors, they were ushered into the Oval Office, where Trump gave them commemorative tokens. He explained: “We were then directed to stand behind him and pray. After which several photos were taken and we were ushered out. Unbeknownst to the group of bishops a video was also taken. But permission for the public distribution or posting of either the video or photos was not given by the bishops.”

The White House immediately released the video and photos, Grob said, and he began to receive “messages of serious concern over the possibility that I had inadvertently participated in a political event less than two weeks before a national election” and communications from those hurt by the president’s policies.

“I feel a heavy sadness, not only over the pain I caused, but also for the fact that something so sacred to a group of religious leaders, prayer to our Heavenly Father, would be manipulated in that way. We came in good faith…, not to pose for a political photo opportunity,” he wrote. “We should never have been put in that position by the White House. I did not go without reservations. I wish I had heeded them.”

Meanwhile, Trump’s increasingly erratic behavior is not helping as he makes the Republicans’ closing argument. After repeated and detailed praise of Ohio Republican senator Jon Husted’s “*ss,” to boost his chances against Democratic former senator Sherrod Brown in Ohio, Trump assured a rally today that rapper Nikki Minaj also has a “one hell of a beautiful *ss,” and urged her to stand up and show it off to the crowd.

Punning off President Kennedy’s famous statement in his 1961 Inaugural Address, “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country,” conservative lawyer George Conway commented: “*ss not what you can do for your country—*ss what you can do for .”
It’s quite a closing message for the last days of the 2026 midterm campaign.

In Serbia today, longtime nationalist strongman Aleksandar Vučić conceded defeat after nearly two years of street protests led by students led to an election that ousted his party from power. A former diplomat from neighboring Montenegro noted that Vučić perfected a system divided between friends and enemies and in which “every criticism of power is treason.”

An opposition candidate told Andrew Higgins and Alisa Dogramadzieva of the New York Times, “No force can forever overpower a people who have decided to take their destiny into their own hands.” A 24-year-old engineering student celebrated the change in government: “For the first time in my adult life, I’m seeing a change of government. After so many years under the same leadership, I’m happy that I’ll finally get to live in a free, normal country.”

In Brazil, leftist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva won a fourth term in a runoff election with right-wing challenger Flávio Bolsonaro. Flávio Bolsonaro is the son of former president Jair Bolsonaro, who in 2022 tried to stop the transfer of power to Lula and consolidate his power over the government and is now under house arrest. The younger Bolsonaro says he will not accept the results of the election.

“ White House had publicized it “without the consent of the participants””

I, for one, am shocked that the President would do something without consent. SHOCKED, I tell you!

Neophyte said:

October 25, 2026 (Sunday)

And so, here we are in the last days of the 2026 midterm campaign.

As the political winds fill Democrats’ sails and they are picking up momentum, MAGA is doubling down on what has worked in the past: a false narrative undergirded by cruelty. But that false narrative is now so out of sync with reality that it does not seem to be attracting voters.

Trump and his allies keep saying they are digging the United States economy out of a hole dug by former president Joe Biden, but on October 19, 2024, The Economist called the U.S. economy “The Envy of the World.” Trump disagreed, insisting that Biden’s economy was horrible.

He promised the new tariffs he intended to impose would create an economic miracle. Just hours after his second inauguration, he said that tariffs were “the most beautiful word to me in the dictionary,” because “tariffs are going to make us rich as hell. It’s going to bring our country’s businesses back that left us.”

Now Republicans are studiously avoiding the word “tariffs” except when someone like Senator Susan Collins (R-ME), who is facing a strong challenge to her reelection from Democrat Troy Jackson, tries to attract voters by announcing she persuaded Trump to take off some of the tariffs he had placed just two months ago on goods from Canada. In Michigan, Republican Mike Rogers, struggling to pull out a win against Democrat Abdul El-Sayed in a race for the U.S. Senate, ran an ad holding a Canadian beer and saying “end this tariff war now.”

On Friday, Greg Ip of the Wall Street Journal noted that while Republicans spent more than $2.2 million in 2024 on ads promoting tariffs, in 2026 they have spent zero.

At rallies and in appearances before the media—including calling in to the Fox News Channel—Trump insists the economy is booming. One of his main examples, though, is that the country is making trillions of dollars because his war on Iran has created oil shortages. At a rally yesterday, he told the audience: “We’re making a freaking fortune.”

But “we” is doing a lot of work in that statement. Oil companies and their investors—like Trump—are indeed making a fortune, but the rest of the country is suffering under climbing gasoline prices and record high diesel costs, which have driven up the prices of food and anything that travels by train or truck. At a rally today, Trump said the great things he and the Republicans have done will “kick in later.”

Trump insisted tariffs and his war on Iran were his policies and his alone, intended to take credit for the prosperity he believed they would usher in. Having claimed the policies for his own, he now cannot deflect blame for the crises they have caused. So MAGA candidates are trying to attract votes by warning that Democrats will be even worse, and doubling down on culture wars.

Although Trump has embraced the Muslims from Qatar who gave him the luxury plane he now uses as Air Force One, as well as Muslim leaders from Saudi Arabia, and appointed Dr. Mehmet Oz, who is Muslim, to head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, he and his allies have tried to attract voters by attacking Muslim Democrats El-Sayed, a medical doctor like Oz, and Representative Ilhan Omar (D-MN) as dangerous radicals.

Early in the morning of October 12, as many as 25 agents from the Department of Homeland Security raided the home of Representative Omar, searching it for four to five hours in what Jake Tapper of CNN reported is an attempt to prove that her late father lied about her age in the family’s citizenship papers.

Ted Hesson, Jeremy Roebuck, Perry Stein, and Salvador Rizzo of the Washington Post reported that political appointees in the first Trump administration had tried to find something on Omar in 2019, but had not been able to find any issues with her immigration paperwork.

After Omar talked to Chris Hayes of MS NOW, Allison Detzel reported that Omar had said the agents left with her phone, two old phones, “her husband’s notebooks and a camera he had received from his uncle,” and “a Somali phrase book for children, which her husband was using to learn the language.”

“To walk away with 17 items, of, like, 10 that were just notebooks and like old phones, was such a bizarre, bizarre thing,” Omar said, and suggested the raid was simply fodder for right-wing media. It has also revealed where she lived, forcing her and her family to move for their safety.

After the raid, Trump demanded first that Omar resign, and then on Friday told a rally that she had “conceded” her congressional seat.

Trump is also trying to demonize Dr. El-Sayed, posting today that the doctor, who was born in the United States and thus is a natural-born citizen, is “a Jihadist Member of the Muslim Brotherhood,” an organization founded in Egypt in 1928. Under Trump, the U.S. government has designated some of the branches of the movement as terrorist organizations. Trump appears to believe the words are frightening and wants to tie them to the Democrat as his popularity surges against incumbent Republican senator Mike Rogers in Michigan.

That attempt hasn’t gone well. When a man challenged him at a town hall to disavow the Muslim Brotherhood, El-Sayed answered, “Sure, yeah, absolutely,” and then suggested “Tommy,” as the man identified himself, was accusing El-Sayed of dual loyalties, likening those accusations to those John F. Kennedy faced during his 1960 presidential campaign.

El-Sayed reminded the man that the Constitution guarantees freedom of religion and then turned the tables, asking the man if he would disavow the attempt to push religion into American law. Tommy said he would not disavow that effort. El-Sayed then told Tommy that he, not El-Sayed, was the man who needed to understand the Constitution. Tommy left the room, and days later Marisa Kabas of The Handbasket reported that Tommy was Thomas Teepell, a Republican operative with ties to Christian nationalists.

Today, in an interview on NBC’s Meet the Press, Mike Rogers tried again to tie El-Sayed to the Muslim Brotherhood, only to have host Kristen Welker point out that he, Rogers, had called for talks with the Muslim Brotherhood in 2012. Rogers appeared flustered, trying to turn the conversation back to what he insisted was El-Sayed’s radicalism.

And then there is Ohio Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy’s ad featuring Democratic candidate Amy Acton’s homeless biological mother, who called Acton a liar for saying she had lived in a tent as a child. The ad didn’t tell the full story: officials removed 12-year-old Acton and her younger brother from their mother after a grand jury indicted her stepfather for raping her. Court records bear out both that story and that they lived in a tent.

Rather than painting Acton as a liar, the ad reveals both Ramaswamy and those who supported the ad—including Trump, Vice President J.D. Vance, and MAGA influencers—as men willing to weaponize the rape of a child if it helps them win power. Donations to Acton surged in the wake of the ad as members of both parties condemned it.

American Catholics have slid away from their support for Trump, especially since Pope Leo XIV, the first pope born in the United States, has pointedly criticized the administration’s cruelty to immigrants. And so, allies of the White House arranged for a photo op of Catholic leaders praying over Trump in the Oval Office.

Today Archbishop Jeffrey Grob of Milwaukee issued a public apology for participating in the prayer event, and said the White House had publicized it “without the consent of the participants.” He insisted that praying for the president “was in no way an endorsement of the president, his policies, or his party.

Grob said he went to the White House with fellow bishops to discuss “immigration enforcement, religious worker visas, and human dignity.” “We were told the meeting was to be a private discussion, that several Catholic members of the cabinet might make an appearance, and that there could be an opportunity to pray privately with the president.”

After the private meeting with domestic policy advisors, they were ushered into the Oval Office, where Trump gave them commemorative tokens. He explained: “We were then directed to stand behind him and pray. After which several photos were taken and we were ushered out. Unbeknownst to the group of bishops a video was also taken. But permission for the public distribution or posting of either the video or photos was not given by the bishops.”

The White House immediately released the video and photos, Grob said, and he began to receive “messages of serious concern over the possibility that I had inadvertently participated in a political event less than two weeks before a national election” and communications from those hurt by the president’s policies.

“I feel a heavy sadness, not only over the pain I caused, but also for the fact that something so sacred to a group of religious leaders, prayer to our Heavenly Father, would be manipulated in that way. We came in good faith…, not to pose for a political photo opportunity,” he wrote. “We should never have been put in that position by the White House. I did not go without reservations. I wish I had heeded them.”

Meanwhile, Trump’s increasingly erratic behavior is not helping as he makes the Republicans’ closing argument. After repeated and detailed praise of Ohio Republican senator Jon Husted’s “*ss,” to boost his chances against Democratic former senator Sherrod Brown in Ohio, Trump assured a rally today that rapper Nikki Minaj also has a “one hell of a beautiful *ss,” and urged her to stand up and show it off to the crowd.

Punning off President Kennedy’s famous statement in his 1961 Inaugural Address, “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country,” conservative lawyer George Conway commented: “*ss not what you can do for your country—*ss what you can do for .”
It’s quite a closing message for the last days of the 2026 midterm campaign.

In Serbia today, longtime nationalist strongman Aleksandar Vučić conceded defeat after nearly two years of street protests led by students led to an election that ousted his party from power. A former diplomat from neighboring Montenegro noted that Vučić perfected a system divided between friends and enemies and in which “every criticism of power is treason.”

An opposition candidate told Andrew Higgins and Alisa Dogramadzieva of the New York Times, “No force can forever overpower a people who have decided to take their destiny into their own hands.” A 24-year-old engineering student celebrated the change in government: “For the first time in my adult life, I’m seeing a change of government. After so many years under the same leadership, I’m happy that I’ll finally get to live in a free, normal country.”

In Brazil, leftist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva won a fourth term in a runoff election with right-wing challenger Flávio Bolsonaro. Flávio Bolsonaro is the son of former president Jair Bolsonaro, who in 2022 tried to stop the transfer of power to Lula and consolidate his power over the government and is now under house arrest. The younger Bolsonaro says he will not accept the results of the election.

I imagine the phones have plans to invade the USA in the guise of deposing an evil dictator but you really want to steal their oil

Thanks for posting.

October 26, 2026 (Monday)

Trump’s increasingly erratic and corrupt behavior condemns Republican leaders who continue to support him.

At 8:00 last night, he posted on social media his longest entry ever: an emotional 1,323-word screed attacking late-night host Bill Maher. While the screed was directed at the comedian, it seemed really to be a cry of fury at his loss of control over his base and over the country.

Giant turnout for rallies by former president Barack Obama in Ohio and Michigan on Saturday illustrated the changing mood of the country. In Cleveland, Obama rallied voters behind Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate Sherrod Brown and gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton. In Michigan he rallied voters for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Jocelyn Benson, Michigan’s current secretary of state, and Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate Dr. Abdul El-Sayed.

Obama told attendees that El-Sayed is “fighting for change, real change, that will get money out of politics and put money in your pocket” and would “finish the job we started with the Affordable Care Act and guarantee quality, affordable healthcare to every single American.” He called out Trump’s corruption, “enriching himself and his family” and “selling favors.”

Obama’s jokes were even more calculated to get under Trump’s skin. As Joseph Gedeon of the Guardian reported, Obama mocked Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s fascination with testosterone levels and asked: “How much time do you think this man spends in front of the mirror every day?” He belittled Trump’s fight with “that well-known evil empire, Canada,” a poke reminding listeners that President Ronald Reagan had called Russia an “evil empire” while Trump is now in league with that regime. And Obama poked fun at Trump’s White House projects, saying “he should be on HGTV,” a cable network that focuses on home improvement and interior design.

Perhaps even more galling to Trump were the images that circulated on social media of Obama’s packed venues, comparing them to the dwindling crowds at Trump’s.

Trump’s post about Maher listed Trump’s own triumphs, beginning with The Apprentice, and claimed that Maher has been “DESPARATELY” begging him to come on his own show. Trump then tore into the idea that Trump’s popularity has dropped so far that even Republicans are abandoning him, reiterating that a CNN poll showed “I’m at 98 and 99% support within the Republican Party, an All Time Record High,” higher even than Reagan’s high-water mark.

The post felt frantic. In fact, the CNN poll to which Trump referred measured his popularity among his own base of self-identified MAGA Republicans, not the Republican Party as a whole. Trump went on to post videos to reinforce his claims.

Trump’s determination to keep Republicans in control of Congress seems to be about more than his refusal to accept that he isn’t always the winner. Since January, he has been warning that if Democrats take control of the House of Representatives, they will impeach him. Increasingly, it seems he is concerned about what such hearings will uncover.

On Saturday the Washington Sun reported that the White House has been evaluating whether to issue a blanket pardon for all junior staffers. Such a move would take away their incentive to cooperate with investigations, but it would also remove their ability to refuse to speak under their Fifth Amendment protections against self-incrimination.

The administration is already trying to hide documents, emails, and texts between Trump’s hand-picked Kennedy Center director Matt Floca and Trump’s executive assistant Natalie Harp about Trump’s sabotage of the Kennedy Center. They are also trying to shield messages between Floca and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick about the Kennedy Center when Lutnick was acting for Trump in discussions about the performance center.

Zach Everson of Public Citizen noted that Trump’s hotel in Washington, D.C., opened ten years ago today, and Republicans’ refusal to condemn the flood of money into that enterprise to buy his goodwill convinced him that there would be no repercussions for grifting off the presidency. Everson notes that at the opening Trump said, “Today’s a metaphor for what we can accomplish in this country,” and now, ten years later, he has made more than $1.4 billion off crypto while investors have lost $4.8 billion.

On Thursday a shareholder of a publicly traded U.S. crypto company sued Trump and his family’s World Liberty Financial crypto company. The lawsuit accuses Trump and the company “corruptly profiting” off more than $2 billion in crypto deals, including a deal that violates the Constitution’s prohibition on accepting gifts from foreign countries: a $500 million investment made by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, who is the brother of the current president of the United Arab Emirates and who manages a UAE sovereign wealth fund.

Today Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee released a report saying that a “growing body of evidence demonstrates that Donald Trump was an active participant in Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual abuse of young women during the mid-to-late 1990s. The Department of Justice (DOJ) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) are doing everything they can to keep the American people in the dark about it.” The report offered new information from Beatrice Keul, a former Miss Switzerland, who says Trump used a pageant at the Plaza Hotel in New York City as a “hunting ground” to prey on young victims and that Trump raped her there in 1993, leaving her bleeding and bruised.

At a rally yesterday, Trump told attendees if the Democrats win the midterms, “you will only have yourselves to blame.”

And so, he and his allies are trying to put their finger on the scales against Democratic voters.

Bill Allison and Dana Hull of Bloomberg reported on October 22 that billionaire Elon Musk, whose companies depend on U.S. government contracts, has poured at least $445 million (not a typo) into the Republican effort to keep control of Congress. That money is swamping Democratic candidates, who nonetheless are holding on to a significant percentage of the vote.

So, last Thursday, the Trump administration sued the state of Alaska and its election officials personally to try to stop the certification of the U.S. Senate election there if Democrat Mary Peltola wins. Unless the Republican incumbent, Senator Dan Sullivan, wins, the Department of Justice says, state officials must not accept the results.

The Republicans’ complaint is that a candidate named Daniel J. Sullivan is also on the ballot, and they are currently claiming that if the Republican incumbent loses it will be as a result of voter confusion. But the Alaska Supreme Court has already rejected a Republican attempt to get Daniel J. Sullivan removed, and the Alaska Republican Party chose how to identify the two Sullivans: the incumbent is listed as the Republican incumbent while the other Sullivan is listed without a party affiliation.

On Friday, Trump told reporters that he, personally, demanded the lawsuit.

On Saturday, in an article in Politico titled “Facing an electoral wipeout, Trump goes after the system,” Andrew Howard, Erin Doherty, Alec Hernandez, Samuel Benson, and Lauren Fedor reminded readers that under Trump, the Justice Department has tried to get access to state voter files—so far, it has lost every case—and Trump has vowed to refuse to distribute federal funds to state and local governments that won’t make the changes he demands in election procedures.

As Zolan Kanno-Youngs of the New York Times noted on Sunday, Trump has also tried to use the United States Postal Service to screen ballots with the potential for rejecting tens of thousands of them. Now the Justice Department is trying to force California election officials to set aside ballots it claims were sent to 20,000 noncitizens, warning the officials they could be prosecuted if they don’t help the federal government identify alien voters.

California officials said the federal government has no authority to oversee their voter lists and note that the federal government has made false accusations against states. In July, officials from the Department of Homeland Security publicly told Nevada officials they had found nearly 16,000 noncitizens on the state’s voter rolls, but ultimately, they could not provide evidence of even one.

On October 22, Madeleine May of CBS News reported that ICE agents, armed and in uniform, are knocking on doors in at least six states—California, Georgia, Missouri, Pennsylvania, Washington, and Wisconsin—to ask residents about their immigration status and whether they have either registered to vote or voted in past elections.

It is a crime to vote in federal elections if you are not a U.S. citizen, and the number of times such votes are cast is vanishingly low. As May notes, since the second Trump administration began it has charged—not obtained convictions, charged—just 156 people out of 227 million registered voters.

But Trump has made the Big Lie that Democrats win elections only through fraud central to his hopes of keeping MAGA in control of the government, and he is weaponizing the government against his political opponents by using the idea of illegal voting as justification for trying to intimidate lawful voters. It is a tactic straight out of the Reconstruction South, when gangs of white supremacists, often organized as the Ku Klux Klan, visited Republican voters before elections to make it clear their survival depended on staying away from the polls.

Even so, the Alaska suit was a new level of election interference and may reflect the recently exposed story that the administration is backing the sale of a liquefied natural gas project in Alaska to a sanctioned Russian company. Such a plan will be harder to pull off if there is a Democratic senator in the state conducting oversight.

This transparent attempt to steal the election is unlikely to succeed in court, but it is another way for Trump to sow confusion over the elections and lay the groundwork for challenging a Democratic victory. This afternoon, Trump continued that effort by posting on social media a vow that sounded even more desperate than his repeated promises to pay Americans $5,000 if the Republicans win the midterms. “Anybody reporting Voter Fraud in the past Elections, or the upcoming 2026 Midterm Election,” he wrote, “will be paid $1,000,000 upon the arrest and conviction of those that created the Fraud!”

Thanks for posting.

I didn’t realize Obama was poking the ants nest.

Neophyte said:

October 26, 2026 (Monday)

Trump’s increasingly erratic and corrupt behavior condemns Republican leaders who continue to support him.

At 8:00 last night, he posted on social media his longest entry ever: an emotional 1,323-word screed attacking late-night host Bill Maher. While the screed was directed at the comedian, it seemed really to be a cry of fury at his loss of control over his base and over the country.

Giant turnout for rallies by former president Barack Obama in Ohio and Michigan on Saturday illustrated the changing mood of the country. In Cleveland, Obama rallied voters behind Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate Sherrod Brown and gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton. In Michigan he rallied voters for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Jocelyn Benson, Michigan’s current secretary of state, and Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate Dr. Abdul El-Sayed.

Obama told attendees that El-Sayed is “fighting for change, real change, that will get money out of politics and put money in your pocket” and would “finish the job we started with the Affordable Care Act and guarantee quality, affordable healthcare to every single American.” He called out Trump’s corruption, “enriching himself and his family” and “selling favors.”

Obama’s jokes were even more calculated to get under Trump’s skin. As Joseph Gedeon of the Guardian reported, Obama mocked Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s fascination with testosterone levels and asked: “How much time do you think this man spends in front of the mirror every day?” He belittled Trump’s fight with “that well-known evil empire, Canada,” a poke reminding listeners that President Ronald Reagan had called Russia an “evil empire” while Trump is now in league with that regime. And Obama poked fun at Trump’s White House projects, saying “he should be on HGTV,” a cable network that focuses on home improvement and interior design.

Perhaps even more galling to Trump were the images that circulated on social media of Obama’s packed venues, comparing them to the dwindling crowds at Trump’s.

Trump’s post about Maher listed Trump’s own triumphs, beginning with The Apprentice, and claimed that Maher has been “DESPARATELY” begging him to come on his own show. Trump then tore into the idea that Trump’s popularity has dropped so far that even Republicans are abandoning him, reiterating that a CNN poll showed “I’m at 98 and 99% support within the Republican Party, an All Time Record High,” higher even than Reagan’s high-water mark.

The post felt frantic. In fact, the CNN poll to which Trump referred measured his popularity among his own base of self-identified MAGA Republicans, not the Republican Party as a whole. Trump went on to post videos to reinforce his claims.

Trump’s determination to keep Republicans in control of Congress seems to be about more than his refusal to accept that he isn’t always the winner. Since January, he has been warning that if Democrats take control of the House of Representatives, they will impeach him. Increasingly, it seems he is concerned about what such hearings will uncover.

On Saturday the Washington Sun reported that the White House has been evaluating whether to issue a blanket pardon for all junior staffers. Such a move would take away their incentive to cooperate with investigations, but it would also remove their ability to refuse to speak under their Fifth Amendment protections against self-incrimination.

The administration is already trying to hide documents, emails, and texts between Trump’s hand-picked Kennedy Center director Matt Floca and Trump’s executive assistant Natalie Harp about Trump’s sabotage of the Kennedy Center. They are also trying to shield messages between Floca and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick about the Kennedy Center when Lutnick was acting for Trump in discussions about the performance center.

Zach Everson of Public Citizen noted that Trump’s hotel in Washington, D.C., opened ten years ago today, and Republicans’ refusal to condemn the flood of money into that enterprise to buy his goodwill convinced him that there would be no repercussions for grifting off the presidency. Everson notes that at the opening Trump said, “Today’s a metaphor for what we can accomplish in this country,” and now, ten years later, he has made more than $1.4 billion off crypto while investors have lost $4.8 billion.

On Thursday a shareholder of a publicly traded U.S. crypto company sued Trump and his family’s World Liberty Financial crypto company. The lawsuit accuses Trump and the company “corruptly profiting” off more than $2 billion in crypto deals, including a deal that violates the Constitution’s prohibition on accepting gifts from foreign countries: a $500 million investment made by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, who is the brother of the current president of the United Arab Emirates and who manages a UAE sovereign wealth fund.

Today Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee released a report saying that a “growing body of evidence demonstrates that Donald Trump was an active participant in Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual abuse of young women during the mid-to-late 1990s. The Department of Justice (DOJ) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) are doing everything they can to keep the American people in the dark about it.” The report offered new information from Beatrice Keul, a former Miss Switzerland, who says Trump used a pageant at the Plaza Hotel in New York City as a “hunting ground” to prey on young victims and that Trump raped her there in 1993, leaving her bleeding and bruised.

At a rally yesterday, Trump told attendees if the Democrats win the midterms, “you will only have yourselves to blame.”

And so, he and his allies are trying to put their finger on the scales against Democratic voters.

Bill Allison and Dana Hull of Bloomberg reported on October 22 that billionaire Elon Musk, whose companies depend on U.S. government contracts, has poured at least $445 million (not a typo) into the Republican effort to keep control of Congress. That money is swamping Democratic candidates, who nonetheless are holding on to a significant percentage of the vote.

So, last Thursday, the Trump administration sued the state of Alaska and its election officials personally to try to stop the certification of the U.S. Senate election there if Democrat Mary Peltola wins. Unless the Republican incumbent, Senator Dan Sullivan, wins, the Department of Justice says, state officials must not accept the results.

The Republicans’ complaint is that a candidate named Daniel J. Sullivan is also on the ballot, and they are currently claiming that if the Republican incumbent loses it will be as a result of voter confusion. But the Alaska Supreme Court has already rejected a Republican attempt to get Daniel J. Sullivan removed, and the Alaska Republican Party chose how to identify the two Sullivans: the incumbent is listed as the Republican incumbent while the other Sullivan is listed without a party affiliation.

On Friday, Trump told reporters that he, personally, demanded the lawsuit.

On Saturday, in an article in Politico titled “Facing an electoral wipeout, Trump goes after the system,” Andrew Howard, Erin Doherty, Alec Hernandez, Samuel Benson, and Lauren Fedor reminded readers that under Trump, the Justice Department has tried to get access to state voter files—so far, it has lost every case—and Trump has vowed to refuse to distribute federal funds to state and local governments that won’t make the changes he demands in election procedures.

As Zolan Kanno-Youngs of the New York Times noted on Sunday, Trump has also tried to use the United States Postal Service to screen ballots with the potential for rejecting tens of thousands of them. Now the Justice Department is trying to force California election officials to set aside ballots it claims were sent to 20,000 noncitizens, warning the officials they could be prosecuted if they don’t help the federal government identify alien voters.

California officials said the federal government has no authority to oversee their voter lists and note that the federal government has made false accusations against states. In July, officials from the Department of Homeland Security publicly told Nevada officials they had found nearly 16,000 noncitizens on the state’s voter rolls, but ultimately, they could not provide evidence of even one.

On October 22, Madeleine May of CBS News reported that ICE agents, armed and in uniform, are knocking on doors in at least six states—California, Georgia, Missouri, Pennsylvania, Washington, and Wisconsin—to ask residents about their immigration status and whether they have either registered to vote or voted in past elections.

It is a crime to vote in federal elections if you are not a U.S. citizen, and the number of times such votes are cast is vanishingly low. As May notes, since the second Trump administration began it has charged—not obtained convictions, charged—just 156 people out of 227 million registered voters.

But Trump has made the Big Lie that Democrats win elections only through fraud central to his hopes of keeping MAGA in control of the government, and he is weaponizing the government against his political opponents by using the idea of illegal voting as justification for trying to intimidate lawful voters. It is a tactic straight out of the Reconstruction South, when gangs of white supremacists, often organized as the Ku Klux Klan, visited Republican voters before elections to make it clear their survival depended on staying away from the polls.

Even so, the Alaska suit was a new level of election interference and may reflect the recently exposed story that the administration is backing the sale of a liquefied natural gas project in Alaska to a sanctioned Russian company. Such a plan will be harder to pull off if there is a Democratic senator in the state conducting oversight.

This transparent attempt to steal the election is unlikely to succeed in court, but it is another way for Trump to sow confusion over the elections and lay the groundwork for challenging a Democratic victory. This afternoon, Trump continued that effort by posting on social media a vow that sounded even more desperate than his repeated promises to pay Americans $5,000 if the Republicans win the midterms. “Anybody reporting Voter Fraud in the past Elections, or the upcoming 2026 Midterm Election,” he wrote, “will be paid $1,000,000 upon the arrest and conviction of those that created the Fraud!”

Thanks for posting.

$1 M for each voter fraud conviction.

LOL

October 27, 2026 (Tuesday)

On Sunday a student-led democratic movement ousted Serbia’s Aleksandar Vučić, a key ally of Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, from power. Today Serbian TV started its news program by apologizing to viewers. “For years, we failed to fulfill our duty. We kept silent, turned a blind eye, reported events one-sidedly and failed to ask necessary questions. We owe our viewers an apology.”

Also on Sunday, right-wing presidential candidate Flávio Bolsonaro lost to leftist incumbent Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Despite what appears to have been the restriction by Meta, the company that owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, of social media accounts that promoted Lula and its promotion of pro-Bolsonaro accounts, Lula pulled out a victory.

Tiago Rogero and Tom Phillips of the Guardian reported that Lula’s victory came, in large part, from street protesters who helped different factions come together against Bolsonaro and from Lula’s supporters’ use of social media to override Meta’s restrictions and make pro-Lula content perform well on social media. Lula ally André Janones created a WhatsApp channel called “Lula’s Army” that organized more than 10 million followers to push back against Bolsonaro content and boost Lula.

Three weeks ago, many observers thought Bolsonaro would win the election. Bolsonaro and his supporters had cultivated the idea they were allied with Trump in fighting off a perceived communist threat. A victory for Bolsonaro would help to spread the idea of Trump’s control over the Western Hemisphere as he helped to install right-wing leaders across Latin America. But in the end, the vote was not close. Lula supporters organized voters, explained what social media was suppressing, helped folks get to the polls, and Lula won by more than 4 million votes.

Initially, Bolsonaro said that he would not accept defeat and would ask for the result of the election to be annulled. In that refusal to accept the results of an election, Bolsonaro echoed his father, right-wing leader Jair Bolsonaro, the former president of Brazil who in 2023 launched a coup to remain in power after voters elected Lula. The elder Bolsonaro is currently serving a 27-year sentence for his role in that coup attempt.

As Megan Messerly, Daniel Desrochers, Ari Hawkins, and Phelim Kine of Politico reported, the younger Bolsonaro had the support of MAGA insiders in the U.S., who claimed the Brazilian election had been stolen. On Sunday, Trump himself told reporters that Brazil’s election “looked so, so corrupt, so terrible.”

But on Monday, Trump suggested to reporters he would not intervene in the election, and as Michael Birnbaum, Marina Dias, and Terrence McCoy of the Washington Post reported, minutes later, Bolsonaro effectively conceded. A Bolsonaro advisor told the reporters: “Flávio has given up. He’s terrified. He is worried his father will die in jail, that he himself will be jailed this week and that he may have a long prison term ahead.”

Brazilian authorities ordered Flávio Bolsonaro, who is under investigation for corruption, money laundering, and currency evasion, to surrender his passport and stay in the country. Bolsonaro posted a video saying he would comply and that he had never thought of leaving Brazil. But today he went missing. Brazil’s Federal Police canceled his passports and began to look for him.

Bolsonaro and his family turned up this afternoon in the United States, where a senior State Department official told reporters the State Department would offer the family visas to enter the country. Bolsonaro’s allies cheered that he would lead Brazil’s right-wing opposition to Lula from the United States.

Meanwhile, concerns are circulating about a manipulation of information in the U.S. before the midterm election, similar to what happened in Brazil. As Kevin Frey of MS NOW reported today, Democratic representatives Robert Garcia of California and Jamie Raskin of Maryland are demanding that Meta owner Mark Zuckerberg explain why the main Instagram account of No Kings was suspended earlier this month during the October 17 No Kings rallies around the country that were encouraging Americans to vote. The representatives wrote that the “apparent” act of “corporate censorship of political speech raise serious concerns about Meta’s dedication to ensuring free and fair elections.”

The representatives dismissed Meta’s explanation that the outage was caused by an automated action triggered “when accounts post, share or comment at very high frequencies.” Garcia and Raskin wrote that such an explanation strained “public credulity,” and noted that Meta appeared to have interfered in Brazil’s election.

“Technical glitches occur,” the congressmen wrote, “but at Meta they are happening frequently and, curiously, seem to disproportionately impact the political opponents of President Trump and his authoritarian political alliances.” Garcia and Raskin noted that the interests of Zuckerberg and Meta in government contracts mean they have a financial incentive to cooperate with Trump.

In addition to the suppression of information, disinformation is also a concern. As George Chidi of the Guardian reported today, disinformation, driven by AI, is running rampant on social media in the U.S. in the runup to the midterm election. Social media companies reduced their efforts to stop the flood of disinformation in the wake of Trump’s reelection, Chidi writes, and now official government sources like the Department of Homeland Security sometimes amplify the lies.

Trump and his allies have always relied on a false narrative to gain and then to keep power. They adopted a strategy developed by Russian political theorists to overturn democracy by using modern media to create a false political world. Voters begin to base their political decisions on that fake image, rather than on reality, and are manipulated into giving up control of their government to an authoritarian.

Political strategists who were key to the rise of Russian president Vladimir Putin after the collapse of the Soviet Union called this manipulation “political technology.” They perverted democracy, turning it from the concept of voters choosing their leaders into the concept of voters rubber-stamping the leaders they had been manipulated into backing.

“The Democrats don’t matter,” Trump ally Steve Bannon told a reporter in 2018. “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with sh*t.” Keeping listeners constantly trying to distinguish what is real from what is not destroys their ability to make sense of the world. Many people turn to a strongman who promises to create order. Others will get so exhausted they simply give up.

Trump’s allegiance to Putin continues to be on display. Today journalists reported the administration is considering lifting sanctions on Russia’s multibillion-dollar government investment fund. Anton Troianovski of the New York Times explained that the Biden administration placed sanctions on the fund immediately after Putin’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, cutting it off from the West’s financial system. Lifting those sanctions would be an economic boon to Russia in the midst of its war on Ukraine.

Peter Andringa, Chris Campbell, and Eenee Purevdorj of the Financial Times reported today that Donald Trump Jr. took a hunting trip in Mongolia this August with Umar Kremlev, the man who helped to finance Don Jr.’s wedding party in May. Kremlev is a boxing promoter with a criminal record of extortion and battery, and is close to Putin. The journalists called the relationship between Trump and Kremlev “remarkable.”

On the trip, Jr. shot and killed an endangered sheep prized for its large horns. According to the Financial Times, this was at least the third Altai argali he has killed.

Tonight Angie Nixon, the Democratic state representative who is running for the U.S. Senate from Florida wrote in a social media post addressed to Meta that her campaign’s Instagram page “was suddenly taken down while we were actively posting content from” a “get-out-the-vote rally in Osceola County, home to a large Puerto Rican community.”

“This page is a critical communication tool for reaching Latino voters and mobilizing our community,” she wrote. “With just seven days until Election Day, every minute matters.”

She continued: “The stakes are too high to take down pages encouraging people to vote in seven days, Meta & Instagram.”

October 28, 2026 (Wednesday)

The story of how Flávio Bolsonaro arrived in the United States was odd and is becoming odder. After losing the election to become Brazil’s president on Sunday, he suggested he would contest the results of the election, and Brazilian authorities asked him to give up his Brazilian passport because he is under investigation for laundering more than $1 billion through an online gambling scheme, and for financial irregularities involving a bank regulators shut down for fraud. And then he disappeared.

When he didn’t turn in his passport, authorities canceled it and barred Bolsonaro from leaving the country. Ana Ionova, Edward Wong, Alice Maciel, and Lucía Cholakian Herrera of the New York Times reported today that Bolsonaro, his wife, and his two daughters crossed from Brazil to Argentina in a van across a bridge in a remote area. In Argentina they boarded a plane owned by a private company used by Argentina’s president Javier Milei, an ally of Trump, and flew to Ecuador. In Ecuador they boarded another private jet for Miami.

A senior U.S. State Department official said the U.S. will issue visas for Bolsonaro and his family, allowing them to enter the country.

Flávio Bolsonaro is the son of Jair Bolsonaro, who is serving a 27-year sentence after being convicted of launching a coup against the duly elected Brazilian president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. On social media this afternoon, the younger Bolsonaro claimed he faced political prosecution in Brazil and declared himself the “legitimate president-elect” of Brazil, later changing that language to “leader of Brazil.” He claimed the legal investigation against him was a “witch hunt.”

Bolsonaro’s defeat strikes a blow at Trump’s evident plan to install right-wing leaders across Latin America as part of a move to create a U.S.-dominated Western Hemisphere. Evidently, Trump intends to shelter Bolsonaro in the U.S.

Yesterday Terrence McCoy, Marina Dias, and Isaac Arnsdorf of the Washington Post reported that a justice on the Brazilian Supreme Court ordered Brazilian police to investigate whether Rockbridge, a donor network co-founded by Vice President J.D. Vance, illegally helped to finance Bolsonaro’s presidential campaign.

The Rockbridge Network rejected the suggestion, saying: “The Brazilians made false representations about their relationship with Rockbridge and created documents representing or referencing Rockbridge without Rockbridge’s knowledge or consent.”

While Trump allies are supporting those who share their authoritarian vision of government abroad, MAGA is showing signs of collapsing at home.

In Status yesterday, Oliver Darcy reported a dramatic decline in the numbers of people watching the Fox News Channel. October’s numbers will be down 27% in total viewers and 32% in the age group between 25 and 54 since October of last year. In contrast, MS NOW and CNN are picking up viewers.

Brendan Rascius of The Independent reported that stores featuring Trump merchandise are shutting down around the country as interest in them flags. An owner of a Trump store told Rascius: “The store has kind of run its course.”

A sign of just how deep rejection of MAGA has reached in society was the October 19 article by New York Times chief fashion critic Vanessa Friedman offering advice to a man who wrote in, concerned that his Brioni suit made people think he was MAGA. “Do I need to be concerned that what I’m wearing is sending the wrong message about my political proclivities?” he asked. Friedman suggested a number of tweaks “to avoid being confused for a MAGA man,” including the possibility of “dress sneakers, which would give the whole look a more casual vibe than the one Team Trump usually conveys, which leans more toward New York in the 1980s.”

Democratic Texas Senate candidate James Talarico is running ads featuring Republicans crossing the aisle to vote for him rather than Republican Senate candidate Ken Paxton. “I truly believe that he is the most corrupt politician Texas has ever seen,” Republican former Tarrant County Judge Glen Whitley says in one that features five former Republican officials. “James Talarico is by far, without a doubt, the best person in the race for the U.S. Senate,” former Texas state representative Bennett Ratliff continues.

“I’m a lifelong Republican, and I know it’s hard to go in and vote for a Democrat,” Whitley says. “We need to support the best person, not look at their party label, not look at what jersey they’re wearing, but who is going to represent us,” Ratliff adds. The Republicans urge voters to back Talarico.

In South Carolina, two former governors—Democrat Jim Hodges and Republican David Beasley—cut an ad together to urge voters to support Democratic candidate Dr. Annie Andrews for the U.S. Senate rather than Republican candidate Darline Graham, the late Senator Lindsey Graham’s sister. “This country is too divided,” they say, “and the political rhetoric has gotten way, way out of hand.” Andrews “understands that leadership isn’t about making people angrier. Well, it’s about making things better. She’s willing to put people ahead of politics.” “South Carolina deserves more than the same political fighting,” they say, “so join the two of us in supporting Dr. Annie Andrews. Let’s send her to the United States Senate.”

In Alaska, Senator Lisa Murkowski has endorsed Democrat Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins in the Alaska governor’s race. Saying that “ur future is too important to be hamstrung by partisan divisions” and that Kreiss-Tomkins “understands that governing requires listening to people with different perspectives and finding common ground to solve the problems all of us face,” Murkowski urged “Alaskans of every political stripe” to consider voting for him.

Today Calder McHugh of Politico reported that OpenAI has created an “Election Operations Center” to identify misinformation and efforts to disrupt the upcoming midterm elections. McHugh writes that the company is trying to “position itself as a defender of the democratic process,” positioning that suggests it expects such a defense, rather than support for MAGA, will put it on the right side of politics in the future.

Katie Rogers of the New York Times reported tonight that the “increasingly unpredictable” president is isolated and angry and, as one official put it, “feasting on a media diet of fawning press coverage, disparaging clips about his perceived enemies, and helpings of flattering photos and ‘A.I. slop’” served up by a small group of loyalists. As Lisa Lerer of the New York Times noted on Tuesday, his multiple rallies in states that until recently have been reliably Republican underscore “Republicans’ growing alarm over a political map that leaves Democrats with multiple paths to Senate control.”

And, finally, it appears that authorities have found some voter fraud. Today, as Mark VanCleave and Rebecca Boone of the Associated Press reported, right-wing activists James O’Keefe and Cam Higby were charged with voting unlawfully and stealing an identity after they gave false names to poll workers in Minnesota during the state’s primary election.

The men say they were testing the “vouching” process available in the state that enables voters who lack proof of their current address to vote in a new precinct after another voter in that precinct vouches for them.

The process is rarely used, and poll workers reported the men, who posted a video to YouTube of their attempt to vote fraudulently. O’Keefe and Higby claimed they were simply exposing the “lunacy” of the system.

But it turns out the system worked, and they are now charged with a felony.

And that final anecdote is delicious.

buffy said:

And that final anecdote is delicious.

Some years back, there was an Australian radio ‘shock-jock’ (forget which one, might have been Ray what’s-his-name) who was rabbiting on about people voting multiple times in elections.

He cited the usual suspects: radicals, lefties, greenies, Labor voters.

He dared anyone who’d done it to call him up and admit to it.

A small number of people did. Problem was, they’d all voted multiple times for L/NP or other conservative candidates, and most were quite proud of having done that.

captain_spalding said:

buffy said:

And that final anecdote is delicious.

Some years back, there was an Australian radio ‘shock-jock’ (forget which one, might have been Ray what’s-his-name) who was rabbiting on about people voting multiple times in elections.

He cited the usual suspects: radicals, lefties, greenies, Labor voters.

He dared anyone who’d done it to call him up and admit to it.

A small number of people did. Problem was, they’d all voted multiple times for L/NP or other conservative candidates, and most were quite proud of having done that.

Vote early, and vote often, as they say.

captain_spalding said:

buffy said:

And that final anecdote is delicious.

Some years back, there was an Australian radio ‘shock-jock’ (forget which one, might have been Ray what’s-his-name) who was rabbiting on about people voting multiple times in elections.

He cited the usual suspects: radicals, lefties, greenies, Labor voters.

He dared anyone who’d done it to call him up and admit to it.

A small number of people did. Problem was, they’d all voted multiple times for L/NP or other conservative candidates, and most were quite proud of having done that.

Vote early, and vote often, as they say.

captain_spalding said:

buffy said:

And that final anecdote is delicious.

Some years back, there was an Australian radio ‘shock-jock’ (forget which one, might have been Ray what’s-his-name) who was rabbiting on about people voting multiple times in elections.

He cited the usual suspects: radicals, lefties, greenies, Labor voters.

He dared anyone who’d done it to call him up and admit to it.

A small number of people did. Problem was, they’d all voted multiple times for L/NP or other conservative candidates, and most were quite proud of having done that.

Hadley?

roughbarked said:

captain_spalding said:

buffy said:

And that final anecdote is delicious.

Some years back, there was an Australian radio ‘shock-jock’ (forget which one, might have been Ray what’s-his-name) who was rabbiting on about people voting multiple times in elections.

He cited the usual suspects: radicals, lefties, greenies, Labor voters.

He dared anyone who’d done it to call him up and admit to it.

A small number of people did. Problem was, they’d all voted multiple times for L/NP or other conservative candidates, and most were quite proud of having done that.

Hadley?

I think that’s the one.

Woodie said:

captain_spalding said:

buffy said:

And that final anecdote is delicious.

Some years back, there was an Australian radio ‘shock-jock’ (forget which one, might have been Ray what’s-his-name) who was rabbiting on about people voting multiple times in elections.

He cited the usual suspects: radicals, lefties, greenies, Labor voters.

He dared anyone who’d done it to call him up and admit to it.

A small number of people did. Problem was, they’d all voted multiple times for L/NP or other conservative candidates, and most were quite proud of having done that.

Vote early, and vote often, as they say.

Trump is looking for voter fraud but in reality there is so little of it as to be inconsequential.

roughbarked said:

Woodie said:

captain_spalding said:

Some years back, there was an Australian radio ‘shock-jock’ (forget which one, might have been Ray what’s-his-name) who was rabbiting on about people voting multiple times in elections.

He cited the usual suspects: radicals, lefties, greenies, Labor voters.

He dared anyone who’d done it to call him up and admit to it.

A small number of people did. Problem was, they’d all voted multiple times for L/NP or other conservative candidates, and most were quite proud of having done that.

Vote early, and vote often, as they say.

Trump is looking for voter fraud but in reality there is so little of it as to be inconsequential.

we heard that when looking for things it’s the biggest instances closest to the person looking, that can’t be found

roughbarked said:

Woodie said:

captain_spalding said:

Some years back, there was an Australian radio ‘shock-jock’ (forget which one, might have been Ray what’s-his-name) who was rabbiting on about people voting multiple times in elections.

He cited the usual suspects: radicals, lefties, greenies, Labor voters.

He dared anyone who’d done it to call him up and admit to it.

A small number of people did. Problem was, they’d all voted multiple times for L/NP or other conservative candidates, and most were quite proud of having done that.

Vote early, and vote often, as they say.

Trump is looking for voter fraud but in reality there is so little of it as to be inconsequential.

So many people would need to be involved if it was in large numbers and likely detected afterwards anyway

roughbarked said:

Woodie said:

captain_spalding said:

Some years back, there was an Australian radio ‘shock-jock’ (forget which one, might have been Ray what’s-his-name) who was rabbiting on about people voting multiple times in elections.

He cited the usual suspects: radicals, lefties, greenies, Labor voters.

He dared anyone who’d done it to call him up and admit to it.

A small number of people did. Problem was, they’d all voted multiple times for L/NP or other conservative candidates, and most were quite proud of having done that.

Vote early, and vote often, as they say.

Trump is looking for voter fraud but in reality there is so little of it as to be inconsequential.

The Trump administration has charged 180 people with illegal voting or registration as noncitizens since his second term began, but a Washington Post analysis of these cases found no evidence of an organized scheme by Democrats or any other group. Most cases stem from individual registration errors or isolated incidents, and roughly 70% of the charged individuals were Republicans or Trump voters.

Key data points on the rarity of proven fraud include:

• 513 proven cases led to criminal convictions or court actions since 2016, out of more than 685 million votes cast (less than 0.0001%).

• The conservative Heritage Foundation database lists only 24 convictions for noncitizen voting between 2005 and 2025.

• Postal vote fraud averages about 4 cases per 10 million votes cast.

• In July 2026, Trump released declassified documents claiming China stole 220 million voter files, but there is no evidence this data was used to manipulate any election.

Cymek said:

roughbarked said:

Woodie said:

Vote early, and vote often, as they say.

Trump is looking for voter fraud but in reality there is so little of it as to be inconsequential.

So many people would need to be involved if it was in large numbers and likely detected afterwards anyway

The people involved wouldn’t just be the candidates, but hundreds of election officials who aren’t going to risk their job and possible jailtime
To what purpose as well, money ?
You’d be wanting many thousands to do so

Cymek said:

Cymek said:

roughbarked said:

Trump is looking for voter fraud but in reality there is so little of it as to be inconsequential.

So many people would need to be involved if it was in large numbers and likely detected afterwards anyway

The people involved wouldn’t just be the candidates, but hundreds of election officials who aren’t going to risk their job and possible jailtime
To what purpose as well, money ?
You’d be wanting many thousands to do so

MAGAs might do it, just for the warm fuzzies of helping the Anointed and Adored Leader, who’s been sent by God to rescue the United States from…from…from…those people!

Thanks for potusing.

:)

:)

October 29, 2026 (Thursday)

Flávio Bolsonaro’s escape from Brazil to Miami turns out to have been arranged, in part, by White House officials including Trump advisor Jason Miller, who arranged for a charter jet to take the Bolsonaros from Argentina to Florida.

Edward Wong, Ana Ionova, Hamed Aleaziz, and Tyler Pager of the New York Times reported today that Trump himself ordered the State Department to give temporary status to Flávio Bolsonaro and his family on humanitarian grounds. U.S. officials told the reporters that the government will likely grant them permanent residency later.

Wall Street Journal reporters Vera Bergengruen, Samantha Pearson, Ryan Dubé, and Philip Wegmann write that Bolsonaro intends to set up a political system in exile, despite the fact that more than 50 countries, including Latin American leaders from a wide range of political persuasions, have recognized the victory of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Sunday’s election. Lula won by more than 4.4 million votes. International observers call that margin decisive.

Trump has refused to recognize Lula’s victory, suggesting that the votes against the right-wing Bolsonaro were rigged. But, as the Wall Street Journal reporters add, it is unclear how much political capital he will be willing to expend on propping up Bolsonaro’s pretensions to power.

Trump’s own energies have been devoted to trying to project authority and power, but he has succeeded primarily in illustrating that he is far more concerned with his development projects than with what’s going on in the White House. Yesterday he posted at length on social media about the East Potomac Golf Course he wants to redo—the one where the administration cut down more than 400 trees in defiance of a judge’s order—saying it “is highly dangerous, dilapidated, and absolutely disgusting” and calling for it to be “closed immediately for safety reasons!”

Last night, Eric Flack of WUSA9 reported that the National Park Service told a federal judge it is closing not just the East Potomac Golf Course, but also nearly all of Hains Point beginning on November 15. As Flack notes, this area includes “the perimeter running loop, the dedicated bike and pedestrian lane the Park Service completed in 2023, and the picnic areas and open space used year-round.” The Park Service did not say how long the closure would last. Trump promised: “After we are done, the East Potomac Course will be a place of immeasurable Pride for the City, all of the Golf Enthusiasts who live here, a Course worthy of and befitting our Nation’s Capital.”

Rachel Treisman of NPR reports that plans for the finished park show only a golf course. The current facilities for walkers, runners, cyclists, birders, picnickers, and so on, are not shown.

Trump is paying less attention to the affairs of government. Today, when asked about claims that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had fired Lieutenant General Sylvia for leaking classified information from the Pentagon, Trump responded: “She’s got problems. She’s gonna have big problems. She did. We’re very much looking for leakers and ah, she’s going to have big problems. Long-term problems.”

Lieutenant General Brett Sylvia, the director for strategy, plans, and policy on the joint staff that advises the president on military issues, is a man.

Tonight Shauneen Miranda of News From the States reported that Trump has cancelled his rallies in Kansas and Iowa, planned for this weekend. When a reporter asked if the Kansas cancellation meant he was “sick of traveling,” Trump exploded, calling the reporter “sick” and “disgusting” and saying, “You look like hell.”
Trump is also expending his energies in trying to convince Americans that the Democrats are rigging the 2026 midterms.

The administration has tried to force California to set aside 20,000 ballots in the election, claiming that those casting them might not be citizens. Yesterday, as Ryan Sabalow of Cal Matters reported, U.S. District Judge David O. Carter refused to agree, saying the Trump administration is engaging in “a broad, ongoing pattern of attempted election interference.” Carter noted that Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin has also sent letters to the secretaries of state in New Jersey, Nevada, and Pennsylvania claiming that the states’ voter rolls include noncitizens. Mullin publicly alleged there were 15,903 noncitizens on the voter rolls in Nevada, then quietly dropped that number to 185. When Nevada officials chased down the 185 names, every single one belonged to a U.S. citizen.

“Never before in American history has the federal government, on the eve of an election, sought to coerce a state and local government to abandon their own Constitutional elections procedures and bend to the will of the Executive Branch,” Carter wrote. “This case is about the right of every American citizen to vote in a free and fair election.”

The administration has asked a federal appeals court to rule by Friday on an emergency attempt to stop California from including those 20,000 ballots in the ballot count. In the meantime, as Rick Hasen of Election Law Blog reported, this afternoon the leadership of the Department of Justice directed California’s top federal prosecutors to launch criminal investigations of local and state officials, claiming they are administering illegal voting.

In a “but her emails” kind of moment, the administration is also jumping on yesterday’s New York Times story by Kellen Browning that a staffer for the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate from Alaska, Mary Peltola, searched for and recruited a man with a name similar to that of the Republican candidate, Dan Sullivan, as a spoiler for the race.

Browning reported that this sort of activity, called “ballot stacking,” is “common in politics and generally considered legal—and been employed by both parties in Alaska,” and that Republicans had used it against Peltola herself two years ago. The author suggested the story was important simply because it “reveals the lengths to which Democrats went to seek advantage in a Senate race that could determine control of the chamber.”

The source for the story, Peltola’s former campaign manager Elisa Rios, said Peltola was not directly involved in the project but was “definitely aware.” Before publication of the story, Browning notes, Rios “contacted The Times and said she wanted to take back her previous statements. ‘As discussed on our call earlier today, I am confirming that I have retracted all statements made regarding the 2026 Alaska Senate Race in connection with any article you may or may not be writing,’ Ms. Rios wrote. ‘I am not willing to be a source for any story in any capacity.’”

Peltola’s campaign, Peltola, and Daniel J. Sullivan all deny any involvement in a ballot-stacking plan. Sullivan says he ran because he was dissatisfied with the performance of Senator Sullivan. Ballot stacking runs into legal trouble if a candidate is paid to run. No one has said this is the case in the 2026 Alaska race.

On October 23 the Justice Department sued Alaskan election officials to block the certification of a winner in Alaska’s Senate race unless the Republican won, saying the inclusion of Daniel J. Sullivan on the ballot might confuse voters who wanted to elect Senator Dan Sullivan, who, unlike Daniel, is listed on the ballot both as a Republican and as the incumbent.

With the publication of the New York Times story, Trump promptly took to social media to call the scheme illegal “ELECTION FRAUD.” He called for Peltola and Daniel J. Sullivan to be removed from the Alaska ballot, letting Republican Senator Dan Sullivan run essentially unopposed.

The Justice Department promptly issued at least three dozen subpoenas and requests for the preservation of documents. On Wednesday night, Republican Alaska governor Mike Dunleavy announced he was ordering an investigation into whether Peltola’s campaign should face criminal charges or civil penalties, although he did not identify any illegality.

Michael Kosnar, Megan Brand, and Raquel Coronell Uribe of NBC News reported that, at Dunleavy’s request, “Alaska’s Department of Public Safety Deputy Commissioner Austin McDaniel said Thursday that the Alaska Bureau of Investigation had started looking into the ‘alleged conduct in a recent New York Times article.’”

Today the New York Times ran two stories noting that ballot stacking is common and legal. A piece by Reid J. Epstein explained that while the Alaska race “has drawn the most attention,… both parties are quietly trying to use little-known candidates in other battlegrounds to siphon votes.” Epstein explained that in Ohio, for example, Republicans are promoting a socialist candidate to take votes from Democratic candidate, former senator Sherrod Brown.

Another piece by Madison Malone Kircher, titled “Ballot Stacking in Elections? History Shows It’s Not Unusual,” listed some of the more spectacular instances of ballot stacking in U.S. history, including the 2020 Florida state senate race in which a Republican paid Alexis Pedro Rodriguez to challenge an incumbent Democrat, state senator José Javier Rodríguez. It worked. The challenger won more than 6,000 votes, 32 more than the incumbent, and the Republicans flipped the seat. In that case, the exchange of money crossed the legal line, and the challenger later pleaded guilty to campaign finance crimes.

But the context for the Alaska story arrived too late: Trump and Republicans are pushing the story as hard as they can to suggest Democrats are cheating in the midterm elections.

Another ballot-stacking story from this week adds even more context to the Alaska story. Donald Shaw of Sludge, the home for investigative journalism on money in politics, reported that a review of tax records shows that the nonprofit organization that helped to get Cornel West on the 2024 presidential ballot got all of its $7.7 million in funding that year from a right-wing political network bankrolled by Elon Musk. West, a leftist Black intellectual, was widely seen as a spoiler to siphon votes from Democratic presidential candidate Vice President Kamala Harris.

And there is, in fact, reason to be concerned about the Alaska election process. Eric Stone and Hannah Flor of Alaska Public Media reported on Tuesday that polling places in some rural areas failed to open as schedules said they would. Democratic state senator Bill Wielechowski wrote to Division of Elections director Carol Beecher and Lieutenant Governor Nancy Dahlstrom on October 23 to say that “at least 18” rural early voting locations “have failed to open as legally required.” He noted that in the primary, “dozens of rural Alaskan voters did not have their absentee in-person votes counted because it took too long for their ballots to arrive by mail to the Division’s regional office,” and expressed concern the same thing could happen in the general election. He called the Division’s failures “shocking.”

Dahlstrom responded: “Of the eighteen sites listed in your letter, three have now declined to open, twelve have confirmed they are open, and we are working to hear from the remaining three locations.” She noted that polling locations were free to change their hours.

Meanwhile, there has been widespread talk that Trump intends to restart the military assault against Iran after the election, and it appears a plan is in place. Yesterday, at the Middle East Institute, Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) said that the war plan that has been prepared for the administration “is insane…. It will lead to devastating escalation and the likely destruction of our commitment to the rule of law.” He continued: “he plan that they have developed will lead, in my view, to a prolongment and an escalation of this war that will be devastating for our security interests.”

Ta.

October 30, 2026 (Friday)

Not much from me tonight, but I do want to call out the political signs reading “Stop Fraud: Vote Republican” I saw today as I left Maine. They seemed especially audacious in light of today’s news from Ernesto Londoño of the New York Times that last summer the Department of Homeland Security paid more than $495 million for a 1,600-bed prison the state of Minnesota declined to purchase a year ago for the asking price of $75 million—or even “a fraction of that price.”

They also seem to contradict the report yesterday from Wendy Siegelman of NewsTRACS that Trump Media & Technology Group received $350,000 for running ads on Trump’s social media site for this summer’s Freedom 250 events. Freedom 250 was the group Trump backed in place of the congressionally-approved nonpartisan America 250 organization designed to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Trump owns 41% of Trump Media & Technology Group.

Perhaps Republicans are hoping to attract low-engagement voters who don’t pay much attention to politics. According to G. Elliott Morris of Strength in Numbers, those voters preferred Trump to Democratic candidate Vice President Kamala Harris by 13 points in 2024. Now, though, they are not a good bet for the Republicans, Morris notes. He explains that they have swung away from Trump by 15 points and now prefer Democratic congressional candidates by 2 points.

Those voters might not be highly engaged in politics in general, but they cannot miss the country’s rising prices, especially the cost of gasoline and diesel—and the food delivered by vehicles that use them—resulting from Trump’s war on Iran. Bloomberg reported today that almost half of Americans’ spending now goes toward food and housing, the highest percentage in 15 years.

Rising costs contrast painfully with reports from today that those higher prices are sending oil company profits skyrocketing

Steve Kopack of NBC News reported today that oil giant BP’s profits are at an 18-year-high and Chevron’s earnings are up more than 180% from a year earlier.

On the campaign trail in 2024, Trump asked oil executives to donate a billion dollars to his campaign, calling it a “deal” considering how much money they would make from the regulatory cuts and new permits Trump promised. That investment seems to have paid off. At a rally on October 24, Trump commented to attendees, “I wonder if I should say this,” then went on to say that “our country is making hundreds of billions of dollars because of what’s happened in the Middle East.” He continued: “My people said, ‘Please don’t mention that, sir,’ because people are paying a little higher. But what we’ve done for this country, we’re making money like this country has never made before.” He finished: “I don’t give a damn: I’m going to say it. We’re making a freaking fortune.”

But most Americans are not part of that “we,” and they are angry not only at the soaring profits of oil companies while they pay higher prices, but also at the cuts to Medicaid, Affordable Care Act subsidies, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, medical and scientific research, and so on at the same time that the administration is pouring lives and taxpayer money into Trump’s war of choice on Iran.

On Wednesday, Ben Finley and Konstantin Toropin of the Associated Press reported that the Pentagon has provided a new estimate of the cost of the war to the Pentagon: $47.1 billion. That number does not include the damage to U.S. military bases in the Middle East, which Anika Arora Seth, John West, Shelby Holliday, and Lara Seligman of the Wall Street Journal reported today could cost as much as $15 billion. Graphics from that story, by Carl Churchill and Katherine Chui, illustrate the extent of the damage.

On Wednesday, Summer Said, Shelby Holliday, Benoit Faucon, and Anat Peled of the Wall Street Journal reported that U.S. officials have warned Gulf Arab countries to prepare for a renewal of U.S. strikes on Iran as early as November 4.
Trump has been on the road for the midterms, convinced that his rallies will help Republican candidates struggling against surging Democratic opponents. But the rallies have drawn far fewer people than Trump likes, and his wandering monologues about how great the economy is, how he aced a cognitive test, how wonderful his ballroom will be, and how much he admires the anatomy of a certain male Republican candidate, along with his deep unpopularity, have made even allies distance themselves from him.

When Trump cancelled rallies scheduled for this weekend in Kansas and Iowa in favor of webcasts, one top Republican official told Kevin Liptak, Kaitlan Collins, Adam Cancryn, and Alayna Treene of CNN: “Thank God. He hasn’t moved the needle anywhere.” Officials hoped he would stay more focused in what they called “telerallies.”

But, the CNN journalists report, Trump fumed at media coverage of the cancellations and ordered the rallies to be reinstated. So he will be in Kansas and Iowa on Sunday, trying to sell voters on his message.

That may not be an easy sell. An image circulating on Bluesky shows a Maine “Stop Fraud: Vote Republican” sign. Next to it, a handmade blue sign with a big white arrow pointing to it reads: “HILARIOUS.”

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