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On Unseriousness: Digging More Bonkers GOP Holes
In a possibly more than averagely batshit news cycle, the apocalyptic clusterfuck of clowns "governing" this country got up to some serious weirdness last week. As the chief clown waffled on the best way to kill us all - AI, nukes, nukes in space, forever war, hissy fits, agitprop up the wazoo - his lackeys frantically gaslit us with brain-dead pols, high T warriors and drunken sheep fuckers. No wonder Americans are said to be dreading the fall - not autumn, but the fall of democracy and civilization (sic) itself.
With Trump's approval rightly cratering but his faithful flunkies inexplicably urging us to vote like he's on the ballot - umm, okay - he's so far gone he still giddily maintains the deranged fiction we "have the greatest economy in history," we're resplendent in "a Golden Age of America," and he's all good on shamelessly, unconstitutionally banning news outlets he doesn't like - "I don't want them in my (sic) office," aka, "I’ll take 'Something a dictator would say' for $1000, Alex" - because he evidently thinks "repressive" is a compliment, devoutly to be wished. Otherwise, heading into a mid-term election that promises ("Oh please, oh please") to be a GOP rout, he's doing nothing to drag them out of the deepening holes he's dug except flailing and digging more.
Historically, inanely dazzled by nuclear power - see his "irresponsible and dangerous and frankly incompetent" burbling about the "N-word" - he's now touting the option of a shiny new Space Force military "offensive." Never mind America's 1969 moon landing assurance from "Planet Earth," "WE CAME IN PEACE FOR ALL MANKIND"; the one relatively peaceable place in the galaxy, space-weapons free for 18 billion years, now faces possible invasion from "Mister Schlock, Trash Gordeon, Darth Hater, Puke Skyfucker." Or in the pointedly indecipherable jargon of Air Force Secretary Troy Meink, "The United States now has on-orbit space control weapons capable of defending the joint force against hostile adversary action." By more "aliens"?
Back on an increasingly fragile Planet Earth, the same dangers loom amidst an Iran debacle wherein the U.S. is committing war crimes, hiding deaths and shortfalls along with damage to buildings, equipment, vehicles - one active service member: "We’re standing with our eyes closed getting punched in the face" - lying about a vital Strait of Hormuz that remains "a parking lot" and spending up to $2 billion a month despite a third House vote to end the carnage and a defiant Iran insisting it will not reopen the Strait until “the criminal Trump and bloodthirsty Netanyahu” are gone. All as the mad child-king muses publicly about his "big decision coming up. Do I want to go in and annihilate them or do I not? Anything could happen with me."
Hence another equally incoherent whiplash on the hazards of AI: From unhinged denial spewed by the master of "Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV": the only guardrail needed is "a STRONG AND SMART (high IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S. has that, in spades!" - to tentative hedging - a supposed concept of a plan to create an AI Czar - with the moronic, "Only High I.Q. individuals need apply!” - and an AI Force - like his "tremendous SUCCESS" the largely illusory Space Force - back to a knee-jerk "SICK conspiracy" against AI and data centers like the "many Hoaxes generated by the Radical Left Dumocrats, for purposes of destroying our Country.” When in God's name will he learn: "It ill behooves a man to rave on at length."
Still nursing a long-held grudge against the elites of the arts world, especially the storied family who both embodied it and always outclassed him, he also remains obsessed with slapping his odious name on the Kennedy Center or, now, threatening to tear it down if he can't. George Conway: "To destroy things he can’t possess or control is his essential nature." After multiple losses in court - the most mortifying the forced removal of his name, which rankled so much he's lamely kept the facade covered with a tarp - he persists in arguing the flourishing-until-he-came-along Center is "a mess" that's lost "tens of millions" or maybe "hundreds of billions" and "I’m the one capable of fixing it." Otherwise, "The building is destined to doom (sic)."
Unsurprisingly, an emerging backstory is far seedier. The only thing straining finances is the arts world boycotting him and his own Treasury holding hostage hundreds of millions in funds. After a storm brought down some ceiling plaster, lackeys left it, posted photos - Trump will fix it! - mapped the “debris field” for a 55-page bullshit briefing, and voted to close down. Richard Grenell partly replaced the art collection, including African works honoring JFK, with MAGA "art," some from "the Tony Montana Meets Saddam Hussein Collection," and workers glitzed up Trump's theater boxes. After a judge again refused to restore his name, Trump threw a tantrum and brought in forklifts, prompting the judge to issue an emergency order forbidding any mob-like, midnight demolition.
Meanwhile, he whines - The Federal Reserve is raising interest rates “to make Trump do as bad as they can possibly do” (sic) - threatens - GOP-led North Carolina, whose streets are "blood-soaked killing fields" (LOL) may get no more FEMA funding after Helene, "the biggest water hurricane" - propagandizes - the Smithsonian's "Ideological Capture” - and a desperate GOP goose-steps along. Vance lies about immigrants, RFK Jr. blithers about "chemtrails," Melania sneers let them eat flowers, fabulist MAGA Mike, seeking to be raptured, boasts of an uber-productive House "almost unmatched in history." And Mitch 'Weekend at Bernie's - McConnell is outlandishly wheeled out, dead-eyed and smile-plastered, from a months-long stupor to cast a vital "vote." Mother Mary of God, make it stop.
Preening peacock Pete Hegseth, evidently thinking he’s still on TV, ordered commanders to choose only soldiers who meet “impeccable grooming and uniform standards (no exception)” to attend his upcoming “State of the Force” speech; if they’re really cute they may get to join one of his dorky workouts. He also revived testosterone screening for symptoms like low energy and “loss of spontaneous morning erections.” Rex Huppke: “OUR ENEMIES WILL QUAKE AT THE SIGHT OF AMERICA’S BONER WARRIORS!” No wonder Unholy Mike ran away - aka sent the House home early "to explain all the great things we’ve done" - so they couldn't vote on Rep. Thomas Massie's articles of impeachment against Hegseth for "high crimes and misdemeanors."
Finally, there was Kash Patel, lackiest lackey of all, with his "unbelievable" testimony before a Senate hearing on newly lowered standards to work at the FBI. First, Tom Wellborn's background on Patel, a grown, childless man who wrote a kids' trilogy about a wizard named Kash serving a king named Donald; sold Ka$h-branded merch and anti-COVID-vaccine supplements; compiled an enemies list of high-level anti-Trump conspirators; took a government plane to hear his SWAT-team-protected girlfriend sing at a wrestling match; long yelled for release of the Epstein files until he was in power and found nothing to see; likewise ignored ICE abuses, rampant corruption, right-wing extremism while purging the FBI of 1,100-plus "disloyal" agents; and abruptly lowered standards to stop losing candidates to "the rigors of the requirements from yesteryear.”
Last week, Patel defended a new policy that no longer automatically disqualifies people for several offenses: paying for sex, defrauding employers, and bestiality - having sex with animals. In the FBI's universe of moral relativism, now you're all good if you hired a prostitute fewer than three times or over ten years ago; stole from your employer at least three years ago, or did unspeakable things with a sheep, horse, goat, dog etc when you were young and presumably horny. Throughout his testimony - here starting at 5:25 - Patel, who's suing The Atlantic for $250 million for credibly charging he's often drunk on the job, frantically shuffled papers that turned out to be cheat sheets to trash Sen. Dick Durbin, who calls him "the least qualified and most partisan FBI director in U.S. history."
Patel's surreal, wide-eyed, often bellicose testimony on, say, goat-fucking rattled even Louisiana's fake-folksy GOP Sen. John Kennedy, who was trying hard to give him the bizarre benefit of the doubt. After Patel explained the earlier policy "automatically disqualified any individual who participated on either side of it," a confused Kennedy asked, "Which side of what, the bestiality?" Patel: "Yes." Kennedy: "So, you disqualified the animal?" Patel: "We have some great canines - we're not gonna disqualify them. Hang on, I'm trying to explain." Kennedy: "So if Joe participated in bestiality, not as the animal but as the human, don't you think he ought to be disqualified?" Patel: "If he voluntarily did it, sure, but if he was trafficked into it..." Kennedy: But how do you involuntarily do it?" Etc.
Bravely, Kennedy tried to understand Patel's response to what he assumed was an underling's report. "Why would you get into bestiality?" he asked. "When you saw bestiality, I say this with respect...Why didn’t you just say, 'What planet did you parachute in from?'" Smirking, Patel said that was his response until he learned people were often "trafficked (into) these awful heinous acts." Then, he summoned his best impersonation of self-righteousness. "We did not want to punish victims of bestiality," he intoned, with the once-clear word "victim" doing a ludicrous amount of work. "At this FBI, we're not gonna criminalize and prevent victims from serving (America) in the premier law enforcement agency in the world." Maybe it was, before him. Or not. Just sayin'.
Hacks, trolls, crooks, clowns. "This is what unseriousness looks like," noted one observer, "when it finally hits a wall." And when the edict, "Do not obey in advance" matters. Tolstoy: "The wicked become even worse when they are tolerated." Friday night, with a few hours' notice, organizers of a protest dubbed "Hands Around the Kennedy Center" hoped for a turnout of 400 to 800 people. They were pleased when 950 signed up. Then over 6,400 showed up. The mood was defiant. One longtime volunteer said she'd "stand in front of the wrecking ball." People formed a human chain around the concert hall an inept, vengeful narcissist had just closed and called "a dump," relishing what it felt like “to hold hands with somebody you don’t know for something you believe in.” Afterwards, they all sang America the Beautiful. There may be hope. (Or not.)
Sep 21, 2026
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'We Are Spending Our Reserves,' WMO Chief Warns as UN Drops Global Water Report
The world's water cycle "has become more erratic and unpredictable," and recent trends have "serious implications for people and economies in the future," the United Nations' weather agency said Thursday, announcing the release of its annual report on one of the planet's most important natural resources.
Speaking at the launch of the "State of Global Water Resources 2025," World Meteorological Organization (WMO) Secretary-General Celeste Saulo explained that "some parts of this cycle—such as precipitation, river flow, soil moisture—are fast. They respond to weather within hours, days, weeks. Others, like groundwater and glaciers, are slow. They accumulate or decline over seasons to decades or longer."
"Traditionally, these slow reserves have acted as the planet's savings account: a buffer that absorbs bad years so that a single drought or a single dry season does not translate directly into a water crisis," she continued. "One of the central stories of the 2025 report is what is happening to that savings account. And the simple answer is that we are depleting it. We are spending our reserves."
According to the WMO's new report, terrestrial water storage—or the total stored in groundwater, lakes, rivers, soil moisture, vegetation, ice, and snow—has been falling since the mid-2010s. Saulo stressed that "this is not a single bad year, but it is a persistent, decadelong signal."
The agency also found that 2025 was among the driest years for river discharge worldwide in more than three decades, with below-normal flows over a third of the global basin area—and for the seventh straight year in a row, the number of river basins with "normal" conditions was in the minority.
Last year was also the fourth straight to feature widespread glacier loss across all regions. The WMO noted that the losses from 2023-25 could fill about 560 million Olympic-sized swimming pools—or about a third of annual freshwater withdrawals.
The report also "shows that water-related extreme events continue to devastate communities and economies," Saulo noted, highlighting the Early Warnings for All Initiative. "Over the past five years, Asia and Africa have accounted for at least half of all reported hydrological extreme events and more than 80% of associated deaths. And precisely these regions often lack the observations necessary for forecasts and early warnings."
Her comments came a day after the death toll from the flooding disaster in Tibet and Nepal topped 1,400. Experts have emphasized that tragedy's connection to the fossil fuel-driven climate crisis, with University of Pennsylvania professor Michael Mann writing that the "glacial collapse and deluge... was not a freak weather event; it was the structural failure of a mountain itself, nature's latest commentary on the deadly consequences of human-caused planetary warming."
That warming has also intensified the naturally occurring warm phase of a key pattern in the Pacific Ocean called El Niño, according to a study published last month. The WMO chief warned in her Wednesday remarks that "the strengthening El Niño will increase the extremes—drought in some countries and floods in others."
The agency's latest forecast, also released Wednesday, anticipates an "exceptionally high likelihood of nearly 100%" that the warm phase will persist through to February 2027. UN Secretary-General António Guterres said that "El Niño is being supersized before our eyes. The science leaves no room for doubt: The planet is in uncharted waters, and those waters are heating up."
Only when the last glacier has melted and the last reservoir has dried up will you realize that you can't drink gasoline…#climatecrisis#climatecollapse
[image or embed]
— Jürgen Döschner (@jdoeschner.bsky.social) September 17, 2026 at 4:01 PM
While the related releases generated calls for action, Saulo said that "it is not all bad news. Some regions showed improvement in 2025," pointing out that "parts of South America saw a partial recovery in water storage during 2025 after a severe multiyear deficit," while "Central and Southern Africa maintained much-above-normal water levels across several major lakes."
Still, action is needed. As Saulo put it: "The State of Global Water Resources report calls for a sense of urgency, not panic. The buffers that have historically protected water security—snow, ice, groundwater—are eroding in many regions on a timescale of years, not overnight. We have a genuine window for action: expanding early warning coverage; investing in the hydrological monitoring infrastructure; and opting for water management policies to address both water supply and use/overuse."
"My concluding message is that this report exists because members share their data and their science," she said. "This level of understanding—global, standardized, comparable year to year—did not exist a decade ago. It is the product of sustained international cooperation under WMO's mandate. And my last call is for all of you to continue to invest in it."
Sep 17, 2026
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Paltry Concessions Given to Secure Paramount-Warner Merger Deal Decried as 'Meaningless Bullshit'
"A settlement that promises less than nothing."
That's how one critic of Paramount Skydance's planned acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery on Tuesday described the paltry concessions extracted by Democratic California Attorney General Rob Bonta and other state officials to enable the proposed $111 billion media megamerger.
Critics argue that the proposed settlement agreement lacks meaningful antitrust enforcement and hands control of major news and entertainment properties to a billionaire family closely aligned with President Donald Trump.
“Every! single! one! of these concessions is meaningless bullshit,” writer Cory Doctorow said Tuesday on Medium. “Bonta just handed the American movie and TV sector to two of the most odious creeps to draw breath, surrendering without firing a shot."
The settlement, which was announced Monday, clears a major roadblock to Paramount CEO David Ellison's takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns CNN, HBO, Warner Bros. Pictures, and numerous cable networks. The combined company would control nearly 30% of both US theatrical film distribution and basic cable channel licensing.
The agreement contains a pledge to distribute at least 30 films annually for the first two years, then 32 movies each year after, invest hundreds of millions of dollars in US film production, maintain existing theater rental terms for three years, not sell Paramount and Warner Bros. studio lots for five years, and create an editorial independence board for CBS News and CNN.
In a Monday Substack post, American Economic Liberties Project research director Matt Stoller pointed out an apparent loophole in the settlement's film distribution requirement.
“They only have to distribute that many films,” he wrote. “They can make half as many. And those can be co-produced. So in fact, if you add up the numbers, Ellison promised to make fewer films going forward than Paramount and Warner are putting out today."
The settlement's editorial oversight board for CBS News and CNN have also come under fire. The five-member board overseeing the two entities will be appointed and paid by the combined company. Reuters reported Tuesday that the board would have no explicit investigative authority and that the company would be empowered to fill vacancies.
“As we learned from the failed and widely panned Facebook oversight board, a fake bipartisan oversight committee won’t save CNN,” Jessica González, the co-chief executive of the advocacy organization Free Press, said Monday. “We have all the evidence we need from the Ellisons’ destruction of CBS about what they do to warp journalism at Donald Trump’s request.”
David Ellison's father, tech billionaire Larry Ellison, is a Republican megadonor.
Seth Stern, a media attorney and chief of advocacy at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, said that "it's unclear how the attorneys general or courts can constitutionally hold Paramount accountable for the board's actions or inaction without themselves interfering in content."
Stoller noted that the agreement's force-majeure clause, which would reportedly allow Paramount-Warner to dodge its commitments in the event of economic recessions, strikes, and other labor disruptions.
Other opponents of the proposed deal bristle at the Federal Communications Commission’s approval of Saudi and Emirati investment in the new company that would be created if the merger is approved.
Alvaro Bedoya, a senior adviser to the American Economic Liberties Project, lamented that “today, billionaires have yet again bribed, censored, and bullied their way to the top."
“Layoffs will follow. People from [Los Angeles] to Atlanta will lose their jobs, small businesses will lose their contracts, your cable bill and movie ticket will be even more expensive,” he continued. “Dissent against money and power will be even harder to find.”
“This did not have to happen," Bedoya stressed. "Thanks to an extraordinary outpouring of grassroots anger against the merger, a coalition of 12 state attorneys general sued to block it. They beat Paramount in court, winning a court-ordered pause on the merger, and beat them again at the negotiating table, getting the conglomerate to agree to pause the merger until as late as next June.”
“But the Ellison family does not care about the law. Instead, they loudly threatened to leave California if their merger did not go through immediately," he added. "[Gov.] Gavin Newsom caved to that pressure. So did [former state Attorney General] Xavier Becerra. And eventually, so did Attorney General Rob Bonta, agreeing to a weak settlement that will be exceedingly difficult to enforce.”
Stoller said that "there are a bunch of reasons they cleared the deal, such as threats to move the studio out of California, corruption, and general incompetence."
"I personally think CNN is terrible, and I’m glad it’s going to be discredited," Stoller wrote. "I also find it embarrassing that the Democratic AGs used antitrust law in an attempt to shade news coverage. But it’s downright comical they demanded that David Ellison not corrupt CNN by having David Ellison appoint a board ensuring that David Ellison not do that."
Sep 22, 2026
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Lula Teams With Bad Bunny to Highlight Dangers of Trump’s Colonial Ambitions Across Latin America
The campaign of Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva released new advertisements this week that sounded alarms about the threat posed by US President Donald Trump to the country's sovereignty and resources.
One ad, released on Tuesday, features a Portuguese version of Puerto Rican music star Bad Bunny's song "Lo Que Le Pasó a Hawaii," the lyrics of which decry the damage done by US imperialism throughout the Western Hemisphere.
The ad consists of a video montage highlighting Brazil's rich cultural, ethnic, and ecological diversity, and ends with Lula saying, "Brazil has only one owner: The Brazilian people."
Do Latim, Silva é a própria selva: a raiz que brota do solo, o verde que resiste e a força viva da terra.
Durante séculos quiseram diminuir a nossa gente, mas foi na garra, no suor e na dignidade que cada Silva construiu este país.
A nossa força não se curva, a nossa bandeira… pic.twitter.com/iwujl0ojq0
— Lula (@LulaOficial) September 23, 2026
"Lo Que Le Pasó a Hawaii" was one of the songs that Bad Bunny performed during his acclaimed Super Bowl halftime show in February, which some critics saw as a joyful rebuke to the colonialist vision for Latin America that Trump has embraced throughout his second term.
According to a report published Thursday in Correio Braziliense, Bad Bunny gave Lula's team permission to use his music in the campaign video.
Another ad, released on Thursday, is more explicit in its warnings about Trump's ambitions for Latin America.
Unlike the video released Tuesday, the later ad directly links the unpopular US president to far-right politician Flávio Bolsonaro, who has emerged as Lula’s top rival for the presidency in upcoming elections and is the son of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, still serving a criminal sentence for efforts to overthrow Lula's government.
"Flávio Bolsonaro is Trump's candidate," says that ad's narrator. "And what Trump wants is to colonize Brazil, take our wealth, steal our future, and leave us behind."
"Flávio Bolsonaro," the narrator concludes, "is playing against the Brazilian people."
Flávio Bolsonaro é o candidato do Trump.
Quer entregar o nosso país e as nossas riquezas para os Estados Unidos.
Se depender dele, o Brasil vira colônia de novo.
Mas o Brasil só tem um dono: o povo brasileiro. pic.twitter.com/jOSJ83xcKb
— Lula (@LulaOficial) September 25, 2026
In a Thursday social media post, Lula said Bolsonaro “wants to deliver our country and our wealth to the United States,” adding that, if it were up to Bolsonaro, “Brazil will become a colony again.”
During a speech delivered at the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday, Lula called out efforts to treat Brazil as a colony, although he didn’t mention the US directly.
“Brazil is no one’s backyard,” the Brazilian president said at one point.
“We will not allow the enemies of democracy—internal or external—to attack the will of the people," he said. "Brazilian democracy belongs to the Brazilians.”
Sep 25, 2026
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AI Battle Between Insurers and Hospitals Jacked Up Patient Prices by Nearly $1 Billion
Artificial intelligence proponents claim AI will make healthcare more efficient, but an analysis published Wednesday suggests that the burgeoning technology is instead helping hospitals identify more lucrative diagnoses—and is driving nearly $1 billion in additional costs for patients and insurers.
The Blue Cross Blue Shield Association (BCBSA) analysis found that the share of inpatient cases billed as "medically complex" rose from 37% at the beginning of 2023 to 40% by the end of 2025. While that may seem like a small increase, it translated into an estimated $942 million in additional costs for Blue Cross plans over two years, including $653 million attributable to secondary diagnoses that pushed hospital claims into higher-paying categories.
“Critically, what we found is underneath all of that data [was] no change in corresponding care for a more complex patient,” Luke Chalker, BCBSA’s senior vice president of product and data science and a co-author of the analysis, told reporters. “We find no evidence of a corresponding change in care.”
The analysis' findings underscore an intensifying battle between hospitals seeking maximum reimbursement and insurers trying to contain payouts—a conflict increasingly mediated by AI. AI-powered coding systems can scan medical records, doctors' notes, and laboratory results for additional diagnoses that can increase the amount hospitals are paid. Ambient AI systems can also listen to clinician-patient conversations and automatically document them.
While AI can have legitimate benefits—like reducing paperwork and administrative burdens—BCBSA contends that the financial incentives built into the nation's fee-for-service healthcare system can turn those capabilities toward maximizing profits.
"Not exactly the cancer cure we were promised," More Perfect Union quipped on social media.
In one example, the analysis examined secondary diagnoses like anemia following major bowel surgery.
“If patients are truly sicker, we'd expect to see more treatment,” Chalker said. “For example, we're seeing significantly more anemia diagnoses at these hospitals without a corresponding increase in transfusions. The disconnect between diagnoses and treatment suggests that AI is identifying more billable conditions, not sicker patients.”
The analysis' findings echo an earlier BCBSA study of maternity care, which found that some hospitals dramatically increased diagnoses of acute posthemorrhagic anemia, while transfusion rates barely changed. BCBSA estimated that the increase in that single diagnosis alone added $22 million to maternity admission costs in one year.
Progressive healthcare advocates argue that the problem cannot be solved by tweaking the current system. Advocates for a Medicare for All-type system, including US Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), propose replacing the for-profit insurance system with a universal public program.
In August, Sanders cited a Yale study estimating that his Medicare for All legislation could save 114,000 lives each year, while reducing national healthcare spending by more than $1 trillion annually.
“We do not suffer from scarcity in this country; we suffer from greed,” Jayapal said at a July Medicare for All shadow hearing.
"Medicare for All is the path to fix the broken healthcare system that has let corporate interests determine who lives and dies," Jayapal added. "The reality is that Medicare for All is the only solution that guarantees care for everyone in the US, brings down costs for working families, and generates savings for the country.
Sep 24, 2026
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UK's New Israel Sanctions Haven't Actually Suspended Any Weapons Transfers
Earlier this month, the UK government announced plans to cut off trade with Israel's illegal settlements in the West Bank—including weapons shipments.
But according to new disclosures made to Parliament, reported Thursday by Declassified UK, the sanctions regime has not actually led to any weapons licenses being suspended or revoked, validating warnings by some critics that the new Labour government's effort to cut ties with Israel's occupation was only skin-deep.
Back in 2024, as Israel's genocidal assault on Gaza was raging, then-Prime Minister Keir Starmer had suspended 30 out of approximately 350 arms export licenses to the country.
According to the UK-based Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT), the UK has still approved at least £178 million ($235 million) worth of fixed-value military export licenses to Israel since October 2023—a figure that excludes exports authorized under open licenses, including much of Britain's contribution to the F-35 program.
UK Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband described the new restriction on arms export licenses as a “double lock against arms sales” to Israel under which the government would continue its existing suspensions and refuse applications for arms that "materially contribute to the occupation” of Palestine.
However, CAAT warned the following day that the policy, while welcome, "does not go far enough," and included several loopholes—including one that allowed the UK to continue supplying F-35 fighter jet parts to an international pool used by the Israeli military and another allowing Israel to potentially use military equipment exported there for use by third countries.
Several prominent leftists in Parliament, including Your Party co-founders Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana, as well as Green Party leader Zack Polanski, said that the trade bans should ultimately be just a first step on the way to a full arms embargo.
On September 16, the UK's trade department acknowledged, following a question from MP Iqbal Mohamed, that "no additional licenses have been revoked or suspended since September 8," according to Declassified.
The department explained that this was "largely because licenses for items that might materially contribute to the occupation have already been suspended because of Israel’s conduct in the Gaza conflict."
Declassified called this into doubt, however:
The government insists that many of the extant licenses for Israel cover items that are for re-export to a third country or military-grade goods for civilian use such as body armor.
Yet fighter jet components are still being exported to global spares pools used by Israel, and UK-made trainer aircraft parts, which help to sustain the F-35 program, continue to flow directly to Tel Aviv.
When asked about trainer aircraft, the trade department told Parliament that such components “are not used in Gaza and… do not materially contribute to Israel’s illegal occupation.”
This is despite the Foreign Office previously acknowledging that Israel’s M-346 trainer aircraft are “used to train [Israeli Air Force] fast-jet pilots” and “facilitate the development of an offensive capacity.”
Dearbhla Minogue, a lawyer from Global Legal Action Network, which took the UK to court over arms exports to Israel in 2024, told the outlet that these revelations appear to indicate that there will be "no concrete consequences for Israel after this government recognized the likelihood of war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and what it terms Israeli terrorism."
"Successive governments have done everything in their power to continue aiding and abetting genocide and war crimes with deadly and devastating consequences," said Sam Perlo-Freeman, CAAT’s research coordinator. "The new so-called ‘double-lock’ on arms exports to Israel exemplifies this."
He added that it is "nothing more than a soundbite designed to appease voters, whilst failing to deliver meaningful policy change, and continuing to allow arms dealers to profit from Israel’s genocide in Gaza."
This news comes days after Prime Minister Andy Burnham also affirmed that the UK would provide military support—specifically “defensive” air-to-air refueling—to Saudi Arabia as it launches new strikes on Yemen’s Houthis.
A new CAAT report says the UK approved £464.8 million in military exports to Saudi Arabia in just the first quarter of 2026, with most of the value consisting of air-to-surface weapons.
The Saudi-led war against Yemen that lasted from 2015-22 killed an estimated 377,000 people from direct and indirect causes. During that time, CAAT found that the UK approved £7.1 billion ($9.4 billion) worth of military goods to Saudi Arabia.
Sep 24, 2026
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'Working People Won': Unions Score Deal to Shield Federal Workers From Government Shutdown Firings
"We’re glad this settlement places limits on their ability to use federal workers as bargaining chips to push their extreme agenda during the next government shutdown, but the fight is far from over," said one union leader.
Sep 25, 2026
A coalition of federal employee unions won a settlement Friday requiring the Trump administration to abandon its policy authorizing mass layoffs during government shutdowns, after unions sued to block the firings of thousands of public servants.
“Today, working people won,” American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) president Everett Kelley said in a statement. “The administration tried to turn a shutdown into an excuse to fire the public servants who kept this country running without a paycheck on payday, and we refused to let it stand. We fought back, we held the line, and they backed down.”
“The people they tried to fire are hardworking Americans who care for our veterans, keep our airports safe, and make sure Social Security checks go out on time," Kelley added. "They deserve to be treated with dignity and respect for their service, not used as pawns in a political fight they had no part in creating."
The settlement announced Friday settles litigation stemming from the Trump administration's actions during the 43-day government shutdown in 2025, which was the longest in US history. The administration had directed agencies to implement reductions in force (RIFs) targeting workers whose programs it deemed inconsistent with President Donald Trump's agenda.
Roughly 4,200 employees at seven federal agencies—including the Environmental Protection Agency and departments of Commerce, Education, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, Housing and Urban Development, and Treasury—received RIF notices.
A federal judge in California subsequently blocked the administration from carrying out the layoffs, and workers separated through the shutdown-related RIFs were reinstated.
Under Friday's settlement, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and Office of Personnel Management must notify agencies within 30 days that previous guidance authorizing shutdown-related RIFs has been rescinded. Agencies must remove blanket authorization for such layoffs from their shutdown contingency plans. If an agency later seeks to modify its plan to permit RIFs during a shutdown, it must provide the unions with 30 days' notice and publicly post the revised plan.
The settlement represents a significant setback for the Trump administration's broader effort to remake the federal workforce largely spearheaded by Russell Vought, director of Trump's OMB. Vought co-authored the policy portion of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation-led blueprint for a right-wing overhaul of the federal government that includes dramatic cuts to critical public programs and abolishing or gutting essential agencies.
The case was initially brought by AFGE and the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) and later expanded to include several other unions, including the National Treasury Employees Union, Service Employees International Union, American Federation of Teachers (AFT), and National Federation of Federal Employees.
“Only an administration that wanted to hurt workers and help billionaires would use a government shutdown as a cynical pretext to fire tens of thousands of federal employees,” AFT president Randi Weingarten said Friday.
"Today’s victory is yet another rebuke to this administration’s illegal attacks on the people who keep this country running," she added. "And if they try it again, we will be waiting in the courts and on the streets to send a message that the American people won’t stand for these bully-boy tactics that hold workers’ careers to ransom to pursue a craven political agenda.”
While welcoming the win, AFSCME president Patrick Moran warned that "this billionaire-run administration continues to put politics between these essential workers and their public service, at great expense to our communities."
"We’re glad this settlement places limits on their ability to use federal workers as bargaining chips to push their extreme agenda during the next government shutdown," he added, "but the fight is far from over."
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New York Times Affirms Haaretz Report: Netanyahu Was Warned About Oct. 7
"Netanyahu not only has unleashed vicious crimes onto Palestinians, but he failed his own people."
Sep 25, 2026
As Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu returned to Israel after using his United Nations speech "to repeat baseless lies meant to sanitize his genocide of Palestinians" in the Gaza Strip, The New York Times on Friday corroborated Haaretz's recent reporting that the Israeli leader was warned about the Hamas-led October 7, 2023 attack that resulted in the war.
Haaretz reported earlier this month that during a September 2023 phone call, United Arab Emirates President Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan told Netanyahu about now-deceased Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar's plans "for a major event" targeting Israel.
Netanyahu not only denied receiving that notice but also sent a "warning letter," threatening to file a libel lawsuit against the Israeli newspaper and journalists Shlomi Eldar and Ruth Yuval. In response, Haaretz said that it stood by their work.
A trio of Times journalists backed up that exposé on Friday, reporting that "a person who said they had spoken with Sheikh Mohammed and another person who said they had been briefed by someone on the call between the two leaders told The New York Times that the Emirati leader had secretly reported to Mr. Netanyahu that Hamas was considering a major attack."
"The warning from the Emirati leader, however, never reached the leaders of Israel's security establishment, according to five former senior Israeli officials. Mr. Netanyahu gathered his security chiefs days later, on October 1, 2023, for a meeting about the situation in the Gaza Strip, and never mentioned the warning," reported the US-based paper, which reviewed meeting minutes.
The minutes show that Netanyahu "pushed back when some security officials said that Israel should consider military strikes against senior Hamas leaders in Gaza who were overseeing attacks against Israelis in the West Bank," and suggested such action "might sabotage the prospect of Saudi Arabia establishing diplomatic relations with Israel," according to the Times.
While the Emirati foreign ministry and Netanyahu's office did not respond to the Times' requests for comment, the paper also revealed that months after the reported September 2023 phone call, the UAE's president told then-Central Intelligence Agency Director William Burns that "he had spoken to Mr. Netanyahu about a looming threat of violence in the West Bank or the Gaza Strip carried out by Hamas," according to someone familiar with that discussion. The paper's sources were granted anonymity.
The Times' reporting came just days after an Emirati source commented on the Haaretz article. As the Israeli paper detailed:
"UAE discusses security matters with other countries through the relevant entities, and does not discuss such details at the level of national leaders," the source told UAE state-owned newspaper The National. He did not deny that the two leaders spoke, nor did he refute Haaretz's report.
In 2024, the Financial Times reported that The National is owned by Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the UAE's vice president and the president's brother. It also reported that the site aligns with the government's position and practices self-censorship on issues deemed sensitive or problematic by the authorities.
Noting that Netanyahu reportedly declined to pass the warning along to his intelligence agencies, investigative journalist Eli Clifton, a co-founder and senior adviser at the US-based Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, asked: "Why? Did he welcome the attack as an opportunity to wage war?"
Mehdi Hasan, who founded the outlet Zeteo, similarly wrote "wonder why" on social media.
Journalist Zaid Jilani declared that "Netanyahu not only has unleashed vicious crimes onto Palestinians, but he failed his own people."
Israel's next parliamentary elections are scheduled for October 27.
Ryan Bohl, a senior Middle East and North Africa analyst at risk intelligence firm RANE, said that it is "as close to an October surprise as one gets in Israel. If I was a betting man, I'd be betting against Netanyahu being next PM."
Reminder that the Trump administration is trying to destroy the ICC in order to protect this man.www.nytimes.com/2026/09/25/w...
[image or embed]
— Brian Finucane (@bcfinucane.bsky.social) September 25, 2026 at 1:02 PM
In a series of decisions seen as signs that Netanyahu and his allies are worried about holding on to power, Israel's Central Elections Committee—which is chaired by a Supreme Court justice but dominated by members of the Knesset's governing coalition—just disqualified all Arab-majority political parties and multiple candidates, while rejecting similar petitions for right-wing parties.
Israel's Supreme Court is set to review those decisions next week, and may overturn some or all of them before the elections.
While Netanyahu's allies on the committee tried to bar potential challengers from running, the prime minister briefly traveled to New York City to speak at the UN General Assembly—despite being the subject of a 2024 International Criminal Court arrest warrant issued over Israel's decimation of Gaza, which human rights groups and scholars have denounced as genocide.
As Netanyahu claimed in his speech that "Israel didn't commit genocide," but rather "prevented genocide," at least hundreds of protesters filled New York's streets and argued that the Israeli leader "needs to be tried in The Hague."
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Trump's ICE Wasted Millions of Dollars on Deadly Immigrant Detention Drive: Audit
"Remember when Donald Trump promised to get rid of ‘waste, fraud, and abuse’ in Washington?" said one senior Democratic senator. "Well, GAO continues to uncover incompetence and waste at the highest levels of ICE."
Sep 25, 2026
The Trump administration's deadly immigration crackdown has not only resulted in widespread abuse of detained immigrants, it has also wasted millions of dollars on facilities and services that were never used, were quickly abandoned, or were far more expensive than necessary, according to an audit published Thursday by the Government Accountability Office.
The nonpartisan congressional watchdog found that US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has poured billions of dollars into six detention expansion initiatives since January 2025 without the comprehensive planning needed to determine whether the investments were necessary, affordable, or capable of meeting federal detention standards.
"ICE pursued this and the other initiatives without necessary analysis and planning," the GAO said, concluding that the agency's approach has already resulted in "millions of dollars of waste."
The report contends that "urgent planning" is "needed to avoid further waste of taxpayer dollars."
Heather MacLeod, director of Homeland Security and Justice at GAO, said Friday that "we just saw a real lack of planning overall."
"The lack of planning has really led to stops and starts which have ultimately resulted in waste," she added.
Among the most striking examples highlighted in the report is the administration's purchase of 11 warehouses for roughly $1.07 billion, with plans to convert them into detention centers. ICE subsequently decided to sell seven of the properties. More than $20 million had already been spent on costs—including security and zoning assessments—that cannot be recovered.
In May, More Perfect Union detailed how members of Trump's inner circle were cashing in on the warehouse-buying spree.
The GAO also exposed spending for almost no apparent use at Guantánamo Bay. For example, after Trump ordered officials to expand immigration detention capacity at the US military base in Cuba, the Pentagon assembled tents intended to accommodate thousands of people. However, DHS subsequently determined that the tents failed to meet ICE detention standards and they were dismantled, costing approximately $2.85 million.
Meanwhile, an average of just 16 immigrants per day were detained at Guantánamo during fiscal year 2026. Pentagon and State Department inspectors general had previously found that roughly $68 million had been committed for immigration detention there between October 2024 and May 2026, while ICE separately committed approximately $43 million through June 2026.
The report also highlights the now-shuttered Florida facility commonly known as Alligator Alcatraz. The Federal Emergency Management Agency awarded Florida a $608.4 million detention support grant, even though there was no agreement or contract authorizing the facility to detain immigrants, according to senators who requested an investigation into the matter.
The GAO's findings came after Congress approved an unprecedented $45 billion for ICE detention expansion under Trump's so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act, a boon for the private prison industry. Yet the agency still lacks a comprehensive strategic plan governing how many beds it needs, where they should be located, or how to account for detainees' medical and other needs.
This, as more than 50 people have died in ICE custody during Trump’s second term.
ICE has also failed to adequately consider long-term affordability, according to the new report. As of July, the agency had spent $2.5 billion purchasing warehouses and detention facilities but had only estimated operating costs for the first three years—even though some of the funding supporting the expansion expires after fiscal year 2029.
A separate GAO investigation published in June found millions in waste and serious safety and operational deficiencies at Camp East Montana at Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas. The nation's largest immigrant detention facility opened last year under a $1.3 billion contract.
Responding Friday to the new GAO report, a DHS spokesperson told CBS News that ICE is "working at turbo speed on cost-effective and innovative ways to deliver on the American people's mandate for mass deportations of criminal illegal aliens."
Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said on social media in response to the GAO revelations: "Remember when Donald Trump promised to get rid of ‘waste, fraud, and abuse’ in Washington? Well, GAO continues to uncover incompetence and waste at the highest levels of ICE."
"Americans are outraged at ill-conceived immigration detention projects," he added, "and it’s time to hold DHS and ICE responsible."
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Watchdog Says Trump Control of $400 Million Political War Chest a 'Clear-Cut Violation of Campaign Finance Law'
"President Trump, MAGA Inc., and anyone else who breaks campaign finance laws must be held accountable to help ensure that our political system is free of corruption."
Sep 25, 2026
An election spending watchdog on Friday accused President Donald Trump of committing a "clear-cut violation of campaign finance law" through his stated control over spending decisions made by the MAGA Inc. super political action committee.
Citing decades of legal precedent, the Campaign Legal Center (CLC) argued that federal office holders are prohibited from directing spending for super PACs, which raise money outside the scope of federal campaign laws.
Saurav Ghosh, director of federal campaign finance reform at CLC, noted that Trump has stated publicly on multiple occasions that he will decide where MAGA Inc.'s $400 million war chest will be deployed in the 2026 elections—which Ghosh said would be flatly illegal.
"Our laws are clear: No federal officeholder or candidate is allowed to direct the money raised or spent by a super PAC," said Ghosh. "President Trump, MAGA Inc., and anyone else who breaks campaign finance laws must be held accountable to help ensure that our political system is free of corruption."
Last week, CLC filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) that cited statements Trump made to reporters, whom he told funds raised by MAGA Inc. were "my money that I control."
This statement alone, the group said, was "a remarkable admission of a serious campaign finance violation."
The complaint then asked the FEC to seek "appropriate sanctions for any and all violations" of campaign finance law committed by Trump and MAGA Inc., "including civil penalties sufficient to deter future violations and an injunction prohibiting the respondents from any and all violations in the future."
While MAGA Inc. has a formidable stash of campaign cash at its disposal, it is unclear how much of an impact it will have on the 2026 midterms given that polls show the president and his party are in a deep hole with voters.
A report from The New Republic published last week revealed that the pro-Trump super PAC is plugging significant money into at least 17 districts that the president won by more than five points in 2024, and six districts that he won by more than 10 points.
David Wasserman, elections analyst for Cook Political Report, told The New Republic that this spending in pro-Trump districts is "an acknowledgment that things have shifted in a huge way since 2024."
"Republicans have hemorrhaged support among independent voters, they’ve got a real enthusiasm problem," said Wasserman, "and as a result, districts that ordinarily would vote handily for Trump and Republicans are now in play."
A Friday report in The Washington Post examined the states where Trump is preparing to campaign in the coming days, and found the president is being deployed in deep-red states such as Alabama and Oklahoma.
"Oklahoma is a state Trump won in 2024 with 66% of the vote—and won all 77 counties," the Post reported. "In Alabama, Trump won with 65%."
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'Maybe Trump’s Neighbors Know Something He Doesn’t': Palm Beach County, Home to Mar-a-Lago, Passes Data Center Moratorium
Trump has said that communities that don't want data centers "want to end up being backwards and poor."
Sep 25, 2026
President Donald Trump has said every American should want a data center in their town. But his home county in Florida just voted to block them.
In a 6-0 vote, commissioners in Palm Beach County—home to the president's luxurious private club and second residence, Mar-a-Lago—voted to enact a one-year moratorium on the construction of new "large-scale" data centers that use at least 50 megawatts of power.
The moratorium, approved on Thursday, came after Palm Beach residents expressed concerns shared by Americans around the country who’ve seen data centers move into their communities. Palm Beach already has some smaller data centers. But in July, it rejected a proposal for the 600MW Project Tango, following warnings about its potential effects on local wetlands and on families’ pocketbooks.
"Many communities want the economic benefits that data centers bring, but we all fear the higher power bills, the negative environmental impact, disruptive noise, and the depletion of water resources," explained one supporter of the moratorium at a county commission meeting on Thursday, according to the local ABC affiliate.
A poll conducted last month by Embold Research and published by Heatmap Pro found that 75% of Americans now oppose the building of AI data centers in their area, including 61% who registered strong opposition. Aversion to data centers crosses party lines, with majorities of Democrats, Republicans, and independents viewing them negatively.
As AI companies spend tens of millions bankrolling Trump and Republican candidates, members of the president's Cabinet, including Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Energy Secretary Chris Wright, have scoffed at Americans' concerns about the tremendous water and energy use of data centers, which have been well documented as jacking up utility prices.
In a social media post last month, Trump himself said the only reason communities would not want a data center nearby is if they "want to end up being backwards and poor." Before that, he said that "smart communities" were "begging for them."
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who has become one of Capitol Hill's leading critics of data centers and the artificial intelligence models they power, has said that if Trump truly finds data centers so desirable, he should “lead by example” by having his friend and megadonor, tech billionaire Elon Musk, build one at Mar-a-Lago.
"Trump says communities that oppose data centers will end up 'backwards' and 'poor,'" Sanders remarked Friday on social media. "Yesterday, Mar-a-Lago’s own Palm Beach County passed a year-long ban on these facilities."
"Maybe," the senator said, "Trump’s neighbors know something he doesn’t."
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Fresh Calls for Trump Removal as Tucker Carlson Claims He Said 'In the End, We All Die, Anyway' Ahead of Iran War
Carlson's account of his conversation with the president days before the US and Israel attacked Iran was "extremely disturbing," said one journalist.
Sep 25, 2026
New revelations from right-wing political commentator Tucker Carlson about President Donald Trump's push to wage war on Iran earlier this year prompted the latest calls for Cabinet members to invoke the 25th Amendment and force Trump out of office on the grounds that he is unable to fulfill the duties of the office—namely, to protect the security of the people of the United States.
"Days before the war began," Carlson told Steve Inskeep of NPR on Thursday, the president explicitly said that the outcome of the conflict didn't matter, because "in the end we all die, anyway."
Carlson revealed that he visited Trump in the Oval Office of the White House in late February, after having gone to Tel Aviv and interviewed Mike Huckabee, the US ambassador to Israel.
Trump expressed annoyance at Carlson, an on-and-off ally of the president over the years who claimed in April that he had "regrets" about supporting him, for challenging Huckabee on the US relationship with Israel.
Carlson had pressed Huckabee on his comment that "it would be fine if Israel took" over huge swaths of the Middle East, including parts of Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, and Türkiye.
The host of "The Tucker Carlson Show" said he told Trump he had come away from his two-hour discussion with Huckabee understanding that the unprovoked war the US and Israel was days away from started was not aimed at ending Iran's nuclear program—which the president had claimed was taken out of commission in June 2025 by US strikes.
The Israeli threats against Iran, said Carlson, were actually aimed at ending Iran's "regional power," "diminishing the power" of the Gulf Cooperation Council, and ultimately "getting the US out of the Middle East because we constrain their ambitions" by maintaining a presence in countries in the region.
As the podcaster warned the president not to be manipulated by the Israeli government into taking military action against Iran, according to Carlson, "he looked at me and said, 'Yes, you're right, but in the end we all die, anyway, so it doesn't matter."
This is also 25th Amendment stuff. Extremely disturbing. pic.twitter.com/SnyqCwI3fL
— Ryan Grim (@ryangrim) September 25, 2026
"That's exactly what he said," said Carlson. "I said to him, shocked, ''But what about our kids and our grandkids, and like, our country?' And he goes, 'Argh!'... That's a verbatim exchange."
"I was shocked by that," he added. "Who lives or dies does matter, the future does matter."
The president's assertion that allowing Israel to push the US into war—something Secretary of State Marco Rubio also openly acknowledged had happened after the conflict began—could be disastrous for the US and lead to an untold number of American deaths, was called "extremely disturbing" by Drop Site News journalist Ryan Grim, who suggested Carlson's revelation should prompt the use of the 25th Amendment.
Journalist Pedro L. Gonzalez expressed wariness at the thought of taking Carlson at his word regarding his exchange with Trump and his current opposition to the president, while Carlson said he believed the need for Cabinet members to push Trump out of office predated the interview.
He said that Trump's threat of nuclear war in April, when he threatened to annihilate the "whole civilization" of Iran, "never to be brought back again," was grounds for invoking the 25th Amendment, with a majority of his Cabinet members voting to remove him from office.
Tucker Carlson: Trump should have been removed from office immediately when he threatened nuclear war pic.twitter.com/eYPbYBRsta
— FactPost (@factpostnews) September 24, 2026
"He should have been bundled up and taken out," said Carlson. "That's a crime."
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US Citizens 'Could Lose Their Right to Vote' After Supreme Court Gives Green Light to Trump's Voter Purge Database
"The SAVE database has known errors, including incorrectly flagging numerous eligible citizens... as noncitizens," an election security expert told Common Dreams.
Sep 25, 2026
Many eligible voters may be at risk of having their voter registrations wrongfully canceled just weeks before the midterms after the US Supreme Court cleared the way on Friday for the Trump administration to screen voters using a database known for flagging naturalized citizens.
In a 6-3 decision, the court's conservative majority lifted a lower court order that blocked the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) from using and expanding the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database—whose original purpose was to check if noncitizens qualified for government benefits—to trawl through state voter rolls and link them to information supposedly confirming citizenship.
The expanded SAVE system relied upon by the Trump administration has also incorporated federal immigration and Social Security records that can be outdated.
"Because Social Security data was never intended for verifying voter eligibility, [the Social Security Administration] has no reason to keep people’s immigration status up to date in cases where it isn’t relevant for their benefits," explained Nancy Altman, president of Social Security Works, on Friday.
"As a result," she said, "US citizens could wrongfully lose their right to vote."
Investigations and court records have documented eligible US citizens being wrongly targeted by voter-purge systems using flawed citizenship data. In Missouri and Texas, for example, investigations have found that the system wrongly flagged hundreds of eligible voters as noncitizens, often those born outside the US who have since become naturalized.
Halting the SAVE system's implementation in June, Judge Sparkle Sooknanan of the US District Court in Washington, DC, wrote that the Trump administration had “haphazardly combined and repurposed the private information of millions of Americans, including citizenship data that they knew to be unreliable."
But the Supreme Court's conservatives wrote on Friday, in an unsigned majority opinion, that the lower court's block on the use of SAVE impeded “the federal government’s efforts to assist state and local agencies in the proper administration of the midterm elections.”
In her dissent, the liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson emphasized that "the harm caused by burdening or disenfranchising even a few lawful voters outweighs the nonexistent harm that the government experiences when it is prevented from taking an action that it likely lacks the authority to take."
The court did not issue a final ruling on SAVE's legality to scrutinize voting rolls. But the timing—less than six weeks before the November 3 midterm elections—means the administration can potentially use it to direct states to identify and purge purported noncitizens on their voter rolls.
"The Supreme Court’s decision today wrongly lifts the burden from DHS and puts it on the shoulders of voters," Pamela Smith, president and CEO of the election security nonprofit Verified Voting, told Common Dreams. "The SAVE database has known errors, including incorrectly flagging numerous eligible citizens, such as recently naturalized citizens, as noncitizens."
"Now more than ever," she said, "voters must check their registration well in advance of Election Day to ensure they are not swept up in a flawed system through no fault of their own."
Jon Sherman, the litigation director for the Fair Elections Center, told Common Dreams that the court's ruling did contain a "silver lining." It "acknowledged that the National Voter Registration Act cuts off systematic voter removal programs 90 days before a federal election." However, voters could still be individually flagged as potential noncitizens.
The use of citizenship data is part of a larger effort by Trump to "nationalize" voting to clamp down on what he claims, without evidence, is a rash of noncitizens voting. He has used unsubstantiated claims of mass illegal voting to justify his efforts to overturn his loss in the 2020 election to former President Joe Biden.
Earlier this month, the Supreme Court refused to let Trump enforce another portion of his voting executive order, which would have had the US Postal Service block mail-in ballots in states that did not turn over information about mail-in voters to the federal government.
There is little evidence that noncitizen voting, or voter fraud more generally, is a significant problem: The right-wing Heritage Foundation's nationwide database of alleged instances of voter fraud identifies just 99 total cases of suspected noncitizen voting dating back to the year 2000.
A Brookings Institution review of that data in 2024 found that across several swing states, all forms of fraud impacted less than one vote for every million, far below what would be needed to swing an election.
"The Supreme Court’s decision to allow DHS and states to use an error-ridden system is completely unacceptable and didn’t need to happen this close to the election," said Virginia Kase Solomón, the president and CEO of the watchdog group Common Cause. "This DHS system, which the federal government itself admits is flawed, has always been part of the Trump administration’s campaign to interfere in our elections and sow distrust—and it will fail."
The legal challenge to the SAVE database was brought by the League of Women Voters and several state affiliates, along with the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), who are represented by Democracy Forward, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), and the Fair Elections Center.
The coalition said Friday's decision was "profoundly disappointing, as it puts millions of Americans at risk of being unlawfully targeted by the administration’s unreliable voter purge database weeks before the midterm elections."
"However, this case is not over," it said. "The DC District Court ruled that the expanded SAVE program violated multiple laws. We will be doing everything in our power to protect Americans’ voting and privacy rights by ensuring that the district court decision stands."
Rep. Delia Ramirez (D-Ill.) said that with Friday's ruling, the Supreme Court had upheld a "Trump administration voter-suppression tactic."
"It's disappointing that the Supreme Court decided to capitulate to and enable an authoritarian, again," she said. "States must hold the line and do everything in their power to protect voting rights and our democracy!"
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Ad for US Senate Seat in Kansas Pillories Roger Marshall for Having Pregnant Mom Arrested Over $50 Medical Payment
'The healthcare system is broken, but not for Roger Marshall. He's absolutely profiting from it."
Sep 25, 2026
The campaign of Kansas Democratic US Senate candidate Adam Hamilton on Friday released an ad highlighting incumbent Republican Sen. Roger Marshall's history of having patients arrested for medical debt.
The ad features Meischa Zimmerman, a one-time patient of Marshall, who prior to running for political office had a long career as an obstetrician-gynecologist.
Zimmerman begins the ad by recounting her 2011 arrest.
"One evening, I see [police] lights, I open the door, and it's a police officer," Zimmerman explains. "They arrested me because I didn't make a $50 payment to Roger Marshall."
"I was eight months pregnant," she continues. "And I said, 'Please do not handcuff me in front of my two-year-old daughter.'"
At the end of the ad, Zimmerman turns Marshall's aggressive debt collection tactics into an indictment of the for-profit US healthcare system.
"Roger Marshall preyed on the low-income families of Kansas," she says. "The healthcare system is broken, but not for Roger Marshall. He's absolutely profiting from it."
Meischa was Roger Marshall's patient. This is her story. pic.twitter.com/M6bmqK92gm
— Team Hamilton (@TeamHamiltonHQ) September 25, 2026
Zimmerman's story was highlighted earlier this month in a report from The New York Times, which found that Marshall filed lawsuits against more than 700 patients for medical debt, leading to at least 81 of them getting arrested.
Zimmerman owed Marshall $3,596 for a C-section her performed while delivering one of her children and, after his office sued her for outstanding medical debt, she agreed to undertake a monthly $50 payment plan.
Zimmerman told the Times that, while she tried to make the monthly payments, there were times when she couldn't keep up.
"I had to choose whether I’d pay my electricity," Zimmerman said, "or pay $50 to a doctor who didn’t need it."
Additionally, the law firm representing Marshall began charging 18% interest on her unpaid bill, which she said nearly doubled the total value she owed.
The Times story found that many patients Marshall sued didn't have anywhere close to the thousands of dollars in medical debt owed by Zimmerman, and that one of his patients was arrested for owing as little as $114.
The anti-Marshall ad drew praise from many political observers, who described it as a searing indictment of the Kansas Republican's character.
"This is a killer ad," wrote Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia's Center for Politics, in a social media post. "If Hamilton defeats Marshall for Senate in Kansas, include it in your analysis."
Bloomberg columnist Francis Wilkerson similarly described the ad as "among the best... I've seen."
Amanda Litman, president of Run for Something, declared after watching the ad that "Roger Marshall is a real piece of shit."
James Goodwin, policy director at the Center for Progressive Reform, argued that the ad was so strong that it could break through a key barrier progressives have long faced when challenging right-wing politicians.
"One of the structural advantages that Republicans have enjoyed the last 10 to 15 years is ordinary people didn't believe you when you told them how evil they were," Goodwin wrote. "After all, how could anyone be that evil? That's just the left exaggerating again, right? It feels like that is starting to fall apart."
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'Every Taxpayer... Should Be Outraged': Anger Spreads Over 'Illegal' US-Funded Pro-Trump Ad
“This is the sort of government propaganda one might expect in North Korea, not the United States of America, and it is an egregious and utterly illegal misuse of Americans’ hard-earned tax dollars,” said four lawmakers.
Sep 25, 2026
Outrage mounted Friday over a taxpayer-funded television advertisement glorifying President Donald Trump, with critics describing the 30-second spot as self-aggrandizing propaganda and questioning whether the administration violated federal law restricting the use of public money for partisan communications.
The ad—which aired this week on outlets including Fox News, Newsmax, and CBS—features a dizzying montage of Trump at rallies, White House events, sporting events, and alongside military personnel, captioned, "AMERICA WILL NEVER BE A COMMUNIST COUNTRY."
The refrain of R&B singer JMSN’s “Love Me” plays over the rapid-fire images. The spot concludes with a voiceover from Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO Dana White praising Trump as “the toughest, most resilient person that I’ve ever met.”
At the bottom of the screen, an alarming disclosure appears, reading, "Paid for by the US government."
The White House dismissed criticism of the ad—which aired ahead of November's midterm elections—by calling the spot a "public service announcement" intended to remind Americans “to love their country and understand what makes it worth defending.”
However, on Friday, US Sens. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and Jack Reed (D-RI), along with Reps. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) and Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), excoriated the clip.
“This is the sort of government propaganda one might expect in North Korea, not the United States of America, and it is an egregious and utterly illegal misuse of Americans’ hard-earned tax dollars,” the four senior congressional appropriators said in a joint statement.
“The law is not complicated," the lawmakers added. "You cannot use taxpayer dollars for political advertisements.”
Federal appropriations law—including the funding bill Trump signed earlier this year—prohibits the use of government funds for unauthorized “publicity or propaganda purposes,” while the Government Accountability Office (GAO) has interpreted the prohibition to encompass communications whose obvious purpose is “self-aggrandizement” or “puffery,” as well as “purely partisan” communications.
The consumer advocacy watchdog group Public Citizen on Friday filed a complaint with the GAO alleging the ad "violates laws prohibiting the use of government resources for propaganda, the Hatch Act, and other related laws."
"Whether or not President Trump was personally involved in the ad, it was conceived, produced, and distributed by Trump’s White House staff," Public Citizen said.
US Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said Friday on social media that "every taxpayer, no matter your party, should be outraged by this."
"Your money is being used to fund campaign ads for Trump," the senator added. "It’s totally, completely [illegal]. He’s stealing your money for his campaign."
"The advertisement raises deep concerns about the Trump administration’s use of taxpayer dollars and its compliance with federal laws that prohibit the use of appropriated funds for the promotion of a political party or candidate," Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-NH) said Thursday.
“This taxpayer-funded political advertisement serves as yet another troubling example of President Trump’s growing list of expensive vanity projects—including the White House ballroom—that are estimated to cost over $1.8 billion, money that could have instead [been] spent lowering costs for Americans.”
Sam Stein, co-host of "The Bulwark Podcast," said, "What possible rationale could there be for using tax dollars to play that ad? This is just pure cult propaganda paid for by us."
@timmiller.bsky.social and @samsteindc.bsky.social react to a taxpayer-funded TV ad praising Trump, complete with “Love Me” playing over footage of the president.“This is just pure cult propaganda paid for by us.”
[image or embed]
— The Bulwark (@thebulwark.com) September 24, 2026 at 6:46 PM
Noting that Trump's approval rating has plunged below 30%, Stein added: "People are abandoning him... members of his own party are starting to distance themselves from him, and he uses that moment to have an ad [saying] please love me... It's desperate."
Tim Miller, Stein's co-host, called the ad "alarming" and "Orwellian."
Virginia Kase Solomón, president and CEO of the advocacy group Common Cause, said Friday in a statement that “taxpayer dollars should never be used to bolster the president’s self-esteem because his ego has been damaged."
"Running political messaging stamped with ‘Paid for by the US Government’ dangerously crosses the line from public service into authoritarian self-promotion," she added. "It also raises serious questions about whether it violates federal law barring tax dollars from being used for publicity or propaganda."
Others noted that the ad blasted communism as Trump rolled out the red carpet at a state dinner for Chinese President Ji Xinping, who is also the secretary general of the Chinese Communist Party.
"The clip’s heavy-handed anti-communist messaging also strikes a wildly hypocritical note, if not for anything but the fact that the Supreme Leader that ran it followed up by hosting China’s Xi Jinping with open arms, a flyover of US military planes, and a statue of a bald eagle," Jezebel's Danielle Han wrote on Friday.
Meanwhile, the controversy has spread beyond politics. JMSN—whose real name is Christian Berishaj—said that he never authorized Trump to use “Love Me,” writing that he would “never authorize my music to be used for ANY political agenda or campaign.”
"I am looking at lawyers," he added, "and handling this internally.”
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'We Won't Let Him': Efforts to Stop Trump Grow as Work Observed at 'Illegal and Immoral' Arch
"I will continue doing everything in my power to stop this illegal and reckless attempt to turn our nation's capital into a monument to Donald Trump," vowed Rep. Don Beyer.
Sep 25, 2026
While Americans are stressed about the economy and President Donald Trump's approval rating has hit a historic low, the second-term Republican is focused on vanity projects like his proposed 250-foot "Triumphal Arch," which opponents are trying to block.
The watchdog group Public Citizen is planning a protest and press conference for the morning of October 1 at Memorial Circle in Washington, DC. Speakers include Congressman Don Beyer (D-Va.), military veterans, and other critics of the "self-indulgent project" that lacks congressional approval—and which Trump is now trying to push as a national security project.
"Trump's planned construction is not only illegal," Public Citizen said in a Thursday statement, pointing to the lawsuit it filed on behalf of three Vietnam War veterans and an architectural historian. "It is an affront to American veterans and their families."
"The arch will sit on Memorial Circle along the Potomac River, impeding the symbolic line-of-sight between the Lincoln Memorial in DC and Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia, where hundreds of thousands of our nation's military members have been laid to rest," explained the group, which has secured from a federal judge temporary restrictions on work at the site.
Beyer—whose district includes Arlington National Cemetery—headed to the site on Thursday. He said in a statement that "after hearing from constituents who saw construction equipment at the site of Trump's proposed vanity arch, I drove down to Columbia Island to see for myself. When I arrived, I found workers operating heavy equipment who told me they were conducting archaeological work to evaluate the composition of the soil."
"When I asked whether this work was a precursor to construction of the arch, they said that they could not answer," the congressman continued. "The logical conclusion, however, is that the presence of this heavy equipment and additional surveyors is a clear indication that the Trump administration is preparing to move forward with construction. That would be deeply troubling. Trump's arch is illegal and immoral, and the administration is also under court order requiring 48 hours' notice before work proceeds."
"Yet, the administration appears to be pushing ahead with activity at the site even while it still has not done the basic work necessary to understand the consequences of this project," Beyer warned. "There has been no adequate assessment of the regional impacts of this 250-foot structure on public safety, vehicular traffic, air traffic, or historic sites, including the implications of Trump's latest ravings about using the arch as a base for drone and sniper operations."
Beyer, who also shared video of his visit to the site on social media, added that “Donald Trump and his administration are determined to find a way to push this project through by any means necessary, regardless of the law or the concerns of the people who live here, but my constituents have made their views abundantly clear: They do not want this project. Neither do I. I will continue doing everything in my power to stop this illegal and reckless attempt to turn our nation's capital into a monument to Donald Trump."
In May, Beyer and Dina Titus (D-Nev.)—who, as co-chair of the Congressional Humanities Caucus, led challenges to the administration's illegal attempts to fund the arch using the National Endowment for the Humanities budget—introduced the Arlington National Cemetery Viewshed Protection Act, which would explicitly prohibit construction of Trump's project.
"As President Trump strips away the necessary safety nets from Americans who are struggling to afford their basic needs like groceries and healthcare, he builds his unauthorized, grandiose Triumphal Arch. While destroying historical monuments and artifacts important to our American identity, he is erecting monuments to honor himself," Titus said at the time. "The American people deserve a leader who is responsibly using federal funding for critical government services, not for self-promotion."
After months of pushback over the project, Trump announced last Sunday that "at the strong request of the United States Military, and for National Security purposes, I have agreed to convert the magnificent Triumphal Arch, planned since the Civil War Era many years ago, at the Receptive Circle adjoining the Arlington Memorial Bridge, into a top grade Military Complex/Triumphal Arch, to house, store, and have the rapid ability to use large numbers of drones, plus Snipers, on both the roof and plaza areas, and additionally have and hold large quantities of sniper ammunition in storage."
"There will be no facility like this anywhere in the World," the president wrote on his Truth Social platform. "Out of the 59 top cities and Capitals, Washington, DC, IS THE ONLY ONE IN THE WORLD THAT DOES NOT HAVE A TRIUMPHAL ARCH, but it will now and, by far, the greatest of them all!"
The Hill reported Friday that analysts and lawmakers "are perplexed by President Trump’s surprise declaration," with Michael O'Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution think tank, telling the outlet that adding military elements to the arch "is not totally fictional or crazy—but also not optimal."
Whether or not the project include military components, "to build an arch on federal land (that is not in the White House complex), the administration needs to navigate a lot of bureaucracy," The Washington Post noted Thursday. "The administration has argued the arch doesn't need to abide by DC's height laws for buildings and that it doesn't need congressional authorization because Congress authorized something similar a century ago nearby."
However, the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation—whose members are picked by the president—has attempted to abide by Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act and related regulations, and consulted with local officials "to seek ways to avoid, minimize, or mitigate adverse effects to historic properties that would result from this undertaking."
ABC News highlighted that "the law says federal officials don't have to reach an agreement with state officials on mitigation of those harms, but they do have to try. Those consultations can then be unilaterally terminated if there's a failure for parties to meet in the middle."
The council's vice chair, Travis Voyles, on Thursday wrote to Tammy Stidman, associate regional director for lands and planning at the National Park Service, that "we are hereby terminating consultation," but the panel "will develop and transmit its final comments to the secretary of interior," aiming to deliver them by October 7.
According to the Post, "The administration is hoping to start construction by November."
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