November 6, 2025

Nancy Pelosi isn't running again

NBC News - Rep. Nancy Pelosi, who made history as the nation’s first female speaker of the House and twice served in that top job, will not seek re-election to Congress in 2026. The powerful California Democrat, now 85, led her party in the House for two decades — from 2002 to 2022. Her decision will spark a fierce contest for her liberal, deep-blue San Francisco seat at a moment when Democrats across the country are embracing a new generation of leaders.

Meanwhile. .

The Guardian -  Zohran Mamdani announces all-female transition team as he prepares for New York mayoralty

NPR - A federal judge has ordered the White House to immediately start providing American Sign Language interpretation at its briefings held by the press secretary or the president

Shutdown

NPR  - Most Republicans are not in favor of ditching the filibuster, as Trump has sought, but some bipartisan talks appear to have picked up steam this week, NPR’s Sam Gringlas tells Up First. The solution that Senate Democrats and Republicans could be discussing is a short-term funding measure until December or later, along with votes on a small package of regular appropriations bills. Republicans would need eight Democrats to sign onto a deal to reopen the government. However, the expiring health care subsidies remain a sticking point during these talks

Donald Trump

When it comes to groceries, Donald Trump doesn’t have just one problem; he has three related problems.

The first and most obvious is their cost. The president has spent months insisting that he’s somehow succeeded in lowering the prices American consumers pay at supermarkets, but his claims are obviously untrue, no matter how many times he repeats them. (This led to an especially contentious exchange on CBS’s “60 Minutes,” when Trump became agitated after being confronted with reality.)

The second problem is that he considers “groceries” to be an exotic word. “It’s such an old-fashioned term, but a beautiful term: ‘groceries,’” Trump said in April, as if he were introducing the public to foreign terminology. “It says ‘a bag with different things in it.’”

But as weird as it’s been to see the president lie about grocery costs, while lecturing the public on the definition of a word we’re all familiar with, there’s also a third problem: Trump still doesn’t know how people buy products at grocery stores.

This came up quite a bit during his first term. In 2018, for example, the Republican insisted that consumers had to show ID to purchase breakfast cereals (they do not). He later added that it was also necessary to present identification to buy bread (also wrong).

At a Tuesday-morning event at the White House, Trump went even further down the same path.

As part of a pitch on proposed election restrictions, the president told Senate Republicans, “All we want is voter ID. You go to a grocery store, you have to give ID. You go to a gas station, you give ID. But for voting, they want no voter ID.”

For now, let’s put aside the fact that in-person voter fraud is extraordinarily rare, making voter ID laws an unnecessary solution to an imaginary problem. Let’s instead consider the simple fact that the incumbent American president, 10 years into his political career and five years into his White House tenure, is so detached from the lives of everyday Americans that he has no idea that people buy groceries all the time without presenting identification.

A student answers the theocratic right

Jim Higtower -  An essential part of our children’s education is learning proper moral behavior. And who better to deliver that ethical guidance than politicians?

Huh? Bizarre, yet this is the conclusion of the GOP’s theocratic Christian Nationalist faction. They are demanding that legislatures across the country must intervene in local educational policy to require that all public schools plaster every classroom with Christianity’s Ten Commandments. It’s in-your-face religiosity, forcing one religious dogma on students of every faith. It’s also ludicrously hypocritical – after all, legislators are notorious for committing adultery, stealing from the poor, killing in the name of the state, bearing false witness against immigrants, bowing down to false gods… and otherwise mocking the Christian religion’s own commandments. Who do these nationalists and their politicians think they’re fooling?

Certainly not America’s free-thinking students. If you wonder whether young people will just go along, take heart in the uplifting thoughts of Arjun Sharda, a high-school freshman in Round Rock, Texas. In a recent op-ed piece, he went right at the humbuggery of the state’s Republican leaders: “The same lawmakers who preach about freedom and limited government,” he wrote, “are now legislating what we must hang on our classroom walls... But faith loses its power when it’s forced. True belief comes from conviction, not compulsion… Texas prides itself in independence, yet this law enforces conformity.”

The Christian Nationalist autocrats are not only trying to turn public classrooms into their exclusive pulpits, but to establish their repressive theology as America’s official religion. As Sharda warns, “Texas should stop confusing religion with righteousness – before the wall between church and state becomes just another thing we’ve torn down.”

Household debt

WalletHub -  With household debt reaching $18.59 trillion in Q3 2025, the personal-finance company WalletHub today released its rankings of the States With the Largest & Smallest Debt Increases, based on new data from TransUnion and the Federal Reserve, to highlight where people may be in financial danger.
 

Largest Average Household Debt
Increase
Smallest Average Household Debt Increase
1. Hawaii 41. Michigan
2. California 42. Indiana
3. Colorado 43. Ohio
4. Utah 44. Alabama
5. Washington 45. Louisiana
6. Massachusetts 46. Arkansas
7. Maryland 47. Kentucky
8. Virginia 48. Oklahoma
9. Idaho 49. West Virginia
10. Oregon 50. Mississippi
 
For the full report

National Stats
  • Q3 Results: Total household debt increased by $69 billion during Q3 2025. That is 19% less than the increase in Q3 2024.
     
  • Household Average: The average household owed a total of $154,152 at the end of Q3 2025, which is $13,466 below the all-time high.
     
  • Total Debt-to-Deposits Ratio: The ratio of total household debt to deposits indicates consumers are in a stable position. It's still below pre-Covid levels and roughly 46% lower than the early-2000s peak.
     
  • Total Debt-to-Assets: The ratio between total household debt and assets, at 9.36%, continues to be at a very healthy level.

Polls

Axios -  48 vs. 50 - That's the latest split in public opinion on whether Democrats should keep fighting to extend the enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies or whether they should vote to end the government shutdown, according to a new KFF poll out this morning.

. 48% want the Democrats to keep fighting, 50% want to end the shutdown without addressing the subsidies...
  • What is still lopsided is the public support for extending the subsidies so they don't expire: 74% of Americans say Congress should renew them

November 5, 2025

The election

 Republicans filed a lawsuit on Wednesday morning challenging California’s newly approved House maps, hours after voters signed off on a ballot measure that would redraw them.

President Trump on Wednesday said the government shutdown was to blame for the Democratic victories in Tuesday’s elections, calling it a “big factor, negative for the Republicans.” Democrats dug in further.

 

Meanwhile. . .

NY Times - Trump Officials to Cut Air Traffic in 40 Major Markets if Shutdown Continues. The plan, which officials said was intended to help air traffic controllers, would force the cancellation of thousands of flights as the administration seeks to pressure Democrats to end the shutdown. 

Numerous Ways Trump’s Power is Being Constrained


Donald Trump

Black and white photograph of several men in suits standing around a desk where one central figure in a suit and tie signs a document with a pen. The men appear formal and professional with some wearing red ties. Large bold text overlay reads Surprise! Surprise! 1986: Reagan signs the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act guaranteeing health services to all undocumented immigrants. Below it states 2025: Trump shuts down the gov claiming Dems passed this law.
Via 

 

The Election

Why Mamdani won - “He brought the working, middle and upper-middle classes together in what I called back in July an ‘emergent coalition of the precariat’ — united in part by a growing affordability crisis and in part by simple rage about income inequality, corruption and the entitlement and impunity of the very rich.”   David Wallace-Wells, Opinion writer, NY Times

A bar chart from CBS News exit poll for New Jersey Governor election in November 2025 displays Latino voters support with a blue bar at 64% for Mikie Sherrill (D) and a red bar at 32% for Jack Ciattarelli (R). The graphic includes the CBS News logo and text labels for candidates and percentages.

 NY Times - More than 2 million New Yorkers had voted even before the polls closed at 9 p.m., the first time that total had been surpassed since 1969, when John V. Lindsay won re-election.

Can Mamdani fulfill his promises? 

Time - New York Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani built his platform around a simple premise: The city is far too expensive, and he’s going to make it more affordable.

From freezing rents and making buses free to boosting the minimum wage and increasing taxes for New York’s wealthiest residents, nearly all of the major actions Mamdani has pledged to take as mayor are aimed at lowering costs for New Yorkers and shrinking the wealth gap in the country’s biggest city.

“I think that the Democratic Party must always remember what made so many proud to be Democrats, which is a focus on the struggles of working-class Americans across this country,” he said in an interview on ABC.

Those ambitious, affordability-focused proposals have been key to Mamdani’s unlikely rise from a lesser-known Queens assemblymember who came into the crowded Democratic primary as a heavy underdog to New York City’s next mayor. Now, as he leaves the campaign trail and turns toward governing the city, the question looms large: Will he be able to make his plans work in practice?   Dealing with the issues he boosted 

NY Times - Mr. Mamdani’s political rise may be remembered for what came first: the buoyant, flamboyant, rule-breaking primary run that united a new coalition of Brooklyn gentrifiers and Queens cabbies around the city’s growing affordability crisis and the birth of a megawatt talent.

But his election on Tuesday as the 111th mayor of New York owes as much to the equally improbable backroom campaign that followed. In Midtown C-suites and intimate phone calls, a left-wing populist who had built his brand on taxing the rich wooed, charmed and delicately disarmed some of the most powerful people in America.

The arc of his success is nothing short of staggering. At the start of the year, Mr. Mamdani was polling at 1 percent, tied, as he likes to say, with the candidate known as “someone else.” Few New Yorkers recognized his name, and his own political team put the odds of winning as low as 3 percent.

Now, at age 34, he will be New York City’s youngest leader in more than a century, amid a pile of historic firsts: the first Muslim mayor, the first South Asian and arguably the most influential democratic socialist in the country.

California’s congressional maps will be redrawn to create more blue-leaning districts after voters approved a measure to amend the state’s constitution on Tuesday, delivering a victory for Gov. Gavin Newsom and Democrats in a contentious redistricting battle that has broken out around the country.  will be redrawn to create more blue-leaning districts after voters approved a measure to amend the state’s constitution on Tuesday, delivering a victory for Gov. Gavin Newsom and Democrats in a contentious redistricting battle that has broken out around the country. 

Time - Democrats will hold onto the governorship of New Jersey as Rep. Mikie Sherrill defeated Republican Jack Ciattarelli in the most closely watched gubernatorial race of the year, offering her party a much-needed boost after months of political uncertainty under the Trump Administration. The Associated Press called the race for Sherrill shortly after the polls closed on Tuesday night.

Sherrill, 53, a former Navy helicopter pilot and federal prosecutor who was elected to Congress in the Democratic wave of 2018, emerged victorious after a bruising campaign that tested her reputation as a moderate in a state that has shifted towards Republicans in recent years. Her win extends Democratic control of the governor’s mansion to a third consecutive term and cements her status as one of the party’s rising national figures.

NBC - Texas voters approved two state constitutional amendments in statewide votes, NBC News projected. The ballot measures amend the state's constitution to clarify that only U.S. citizens can vote and to enshrine parental rights. 

NBC -  Virginia state Sen. Ghazala Hashmi became the first Muslim-American woman elected to statewide office in the U.S. with her victory in the state's lieutenant governor's race, NBC News projected.

NBC -  Pennsylvania voters are projected to approve the retention of three state Supreme Court justices, preserving Democrats' 5-2 majority on the battleground state's high court.

The Associated Press Colorado voters approved a ballot measure that would raise state income taxes on higher-earning households to fund free meals for all public school students.

 


Half Of Young Adults Admit To Faking Wealth

 Study Finds 

  • Half of Gen Z and millennials admit to lying about their wealth or financial success, with 37% willing to overdraft their accounts or go into debt just to impress a date
  • Credit scores have become dating credentials: Over 50% say a high credit score makes someone more attractive, and 1 in 5 want dating apps to display credit scores upfront
  • Men take bigger financial risks for romance: 46% of men would overdraft to impress a date compared to 28% of women, and men are nearly twice as likely to overlook a partner’s bad credit
  • Money talk remains taboo among friends: 70% of women and 60% of men almost never discuss finances with friend groups, despite widespread financial anxiety

... A new Credit One Bank survey of 1,000 young adults reveals that 51% admit to faking their wealth or exaggerating their financial success. Gen Z leads the pack at 54%, compared to 48% of millennials. And it gets worse. A staggering 37% say they’d be willing to overdraft their account or plunge into debt just to impress someone on a date.

Voting Behavior Has ‘Strong’ Link To Risk of Death

 Newsweek -  Voting behavior in elections and an individual’s future risk of death have a "strong association." In fact, it’s a stronger determinant of mortality than education, according to researchers from the University of Helsinki in Finland. 

While voting in national and local elections has already been recognized as a social determinant of health—with voters generally thought to have better health profiles than non-voters—the link between electoral participation and death has not been established.

With this in mind, the researchers analysed data on participation in the 1999 Finnish parliamentary elections and associated registers by Statistics Finland containing sociodemographic and mortality information....

The study included more than 3,185,500 people (with voter turnout of 71.5 percent among men and 72.5 percent among women), tracking their survival from election day on March 21, 1999 to the day of death or the end of 2020, whichever came first. 

In total, 1,053,483 people died; 95,350 deaths from external causes (accidents, violent and alcohol-attributable causes), and 955,723 from other underlying causes. 2,410 people whose cause of death was not known were excluded from the final analysis.

Not voting was consistently associated with a 73 percent heightened risk of death from any cause among men and a 63 percent heightened risk of death among women, the researchers discovered.

After adjusting for their education level, this was reduced to a 64 percent heightened risk among men and a 59 percent heightened risk among women.

The difference in mortality between non-voters and voters was stronger than between those with basic and higher education. These differences were strongest for external causes of death and for younger age groups.

When adjusting for age, the risk of death was twice as high among both men and women who did not vote than it was among those who did. 

Utah building forced labor camp for homeless

 Common Dreams - In an effort to fulfill President Donald Trump’s executive order on homelessness, Utah is building a massive facility that housing advocates warn will function as an “internment camp” where the unhoused will be subject to forced labor.

Last month, Utah’s homeless services agencies came to an agreement for the state to acquire a nearly 16-acre parcel of rural land in the Northpoint area of northwest Salt Lake City to construct the first-of-its-kind facility, which is slated to have 1,300 beds.

The genesis of the project began in July, following Trump’s “Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets” executive order, which threatened to withhold funding from states and cities unless they criminalized homeless people camping on streets and ordered the attorney general to expand the use of involuntary civil commitment for adults experiencing homelessness.

More corporate funding of Trump

 Axios - President Trump has raised about $1.9 billion from an array of corporate donors to help finance his political committees, White House construction projects and celebrations of the nation's upcoming 250th anniversary....

  •  No president has raised so much money, so quickly, for so many different reasons. And there's more to come, aides say.

"The midterms are paid for," a source briefed on Trump's fundraising operations told Axios. MORE

Credit card delinquency

WalletHub -  With the rate of credit card delinquency increasing in all 50 states over the first two quarters of 2025, the personal-finance company WalletHub today released its updated report on the States Where Credit Card Delinquency Is Increasing the Most, to identify where people’s credit scores are most in danger.
 

Increasing the Most Increasing the Least
1. Minnesota 41. Illinois
2. Iowa 42. South Carolina
3. Kansas 43. Utah
4. South Dakota 44. Hawaii
5. Ohio 45. North Dakota
6. Colorado 46. California
7. Mississippi 47. Alaska
8. New Hampshire 48. Wyoming
9. Arkansas 49. Vermont
10. Michigan 50. Florida
 
For the full report and to see where your state ranks


November 4, 2025

Polls

 

Just a thought

 Sam Smith - Donald Trump is very good evidence of the danger of only relying on white leaders in America, which he would like us to do. Few black or latino officials ever acted as badly as he has. And those that did lacked his power. Skin color and language don't tell us much. 

Black-and-white close-up portrait of an older man with short gray hair, stern facial expression, and suit jacket, overlaid with yellow text block quoting LBJ on convincing poor white voters by racial superiority to overlook economic exploitation.
Via 

 

Weather

Newsweek -  A map shared by storm chaser Stephen Jones on Monday suggested a broad swath of the Eastern U.S. could see notable departures from average temperatures next week.  "Big-time cold front next week," wrote Jones. "Across the Eastern Half of the U.S. This may allow for snow as far south as the Southern Appalachian Mountains with temperatures being 15-25 degrees below average."

Americans Now Buying First Home at Record Average Age of 40

 Newsweek - The average age of first-time homebuyers in the U.S. has now reached the all-time high of 40. This is according to a new report by the National Association of Realtors (NAR), confirming that homeownership has gotten out of reach for many young Americans over the past several years.

Historically, first-time homebuyers in the U.S. have been in their 20s and 30s. In the 1980s, for example, they were usually in their late 20s. Now a few decades later, buying a home has become a near-insurmountable challenge for many young people in the country carrying the burden of high student debt while facing higher housing costs.

DC now has two conservative daily papers

Michael Tomasky, New Republic -  It is The Washington Post’s right, of course, to stand for whatever it and its owner wish it to stand for. If the owner of this magazine woke up tomorrow and decided that Murray Rothbard was right about everything and The New Republic was henceforth going to follow the Cato Institute line on all matters, that would be his right, and I’d ungrudgingly go look for new employment. That’s how this business works.

So this is not a liberal whine that the Post “ought” to be liberal, although it is worth pointing out that (a) this shift effectively defenestrates 50 or 60 years of proud history, (b) a conservative stance puts the paper in a very bad odor indeed with respect to the city it purports to serve, and (c) the paper has bled enormous polemical talent over the last couple of years: Eugene Robinson, E.J. Dionne, Ruth Marcus, Dana Milbank (still at the paper but no longer a columnist), and not least Greg Sargent and Perry Bacon, about whom I’m delighted to say that the Post’s loss is TNR’s gain. (Here’s a bonus fun fact: No matter how hard the Post swings in this reactionary rightward direction, The Wall Street Journal got there first, and they do it better.)

My point rather is that liberals, especially those of the multimillionaire and billionaire variety, need to pay close attention to this phenomenon. The nation’s capital is now served by two editorially conservative newspapers: the Post and the Unification Church’s Washington Times, still going … well, one can’t quite say “strong.” I never hear anyone talk about it or see someone link to one of its stories or columns on social media. Never. I realize they’re not exactly my crowd, but this wasn’t always the case—it seemed to me that during the Reagan and Bush 43 eras, the Times mattered more than it does now. There’s also arguably a third, The Washington Examiner. It’s now online only, but it’s a tabloid newspaper in its DNA, and very conservative.

So, chew on that: The nation’s capital, a city that is the seat of the federal government and home to many thousands of public servants, and a city that Democratic presidential candidates generally carry with around 90 percent of the vote, has three conservative voices and no longer has a single liberal newspaper

How Americans feel about their finances

 USA Facts  More than a quarter of US adults say they’re struggling financially: 73% reported “living comfortably” or “doing okay,” 19% said they were “just getting by,” and 8% said they were “finding it difficult to get by.”  

Inflation topped the list of financial challenges, followed by the costs of basic living expenses and housing. 

Financial confidence tracks with education: 87% of people with at least a bachelor's degree said they're doing at least okay, compared to 68% of people with some college or a technical or associate's degree, and 47% of people without a high school diploma.

It’s harder for parents with children at home, too: in 2024, 65% of parents thought they were doing at least okay, compared to 76% of all other adults. 


FDA Announces Nationwide Recall of Peaches Sold at Walmart, Trader Joe’s, and Other Major Retailer

Can we do enough to lessen climate change?

 Axios - Fresh UN analysis finds that nations' updated emissions pledges to date will barely lower previously projected warming. And that's if they're implemented — a gigantic "if."

Countries' "nationally determined contributions" (NDCs) would bring warming of 2.3°C to 2.5°C above preindustrial levels, the annual "emissions gap" report finds.  Meanwhile, current policies yield 2.8°C of warming. That's under last year's projection, but still a really harmful amount...

"Alignment with [the Paris Agreement's] 1.5°C and 2°C goals would require rapid and unprecedented cuts to greenhouse gas emissions far above what has been pledged," a summary states....

Back when Paris was adopted, nations' current policies were on track to bring catastrophic warming of roughly 4°C, the UN claims.

A new Rhodium Group study sees a likely warming range of 2.3°C to 3.4°C by 2100, and a mean of 2.8°C — well below pre-Paris estimates, but still a "dire climate future."....

Bloomberg reports that "this year's COP30 summit in Brazil will be conspicuously free of top-level Wall Street bankers discussing how to cut their financed emissions," citing climate focus giving way to meeting demand and security.

  • ING analysts, in a note about COP30, see "little cause for optimism at this stage."
  • However, "corporate climate action remains resilient, but more discreet."

"Victory on the big issues in BelĂ©m might merely mean establishing a process that could facilitate braver, science-based political decisions in the future — a sad consolation prize," Nigel Purvis, a former U.S. climate diplomat, writes in Foreign Policy.

Meanwhile. . .

 At least 25 million people tuned into the final game of the World Series on Saturday — raising the average rating for the entire seven-game series to more than 14 million viewers, Axios Media Trends author Sara Fischer writes... It was the highest-rated World Series finale since 2017.

Most overweight and obese states

With November being National Diabetes Awareness Month and obesity costing the healthcare system around $173 billion each year, the personal-finance company WalletHub today released its report on 2025's Most Overweight & Obese States in America.

Trump's military takeover of America

NPR - For years, President Trump and several high-ranking officials in his second administration have discussed using the National Guard to assist with mass deportations and immigration raids. This consideration arises despite U.S. laws that generally prohibit the military from being used for domestic law enforcement. During Trump’s second term, he and Stephen Miller, his right-hand man on immigration, have considered invoking the Insurrection Act, which would allow the president to deploy the military within the U.S. under specific circumstances. Legal experts, activists, and watchdog groups are now concerned that the Trump administration could fundamentally change how the military operates on U.S. soil.

➡️ The idea is part of Project 2025, a conservative action plan. 
➡️ Miller has promoted the concept publicly for years, including in 2023 on the late right-wing activist Charlie Kirk's podcast.
➡️ Kica Matos, president of the National Immigration Law Center, says she is worried about what the presence of troops might mean for voters as they cast their ballots in the upcoming 2026 elections. 

Read more about why Trump’s deployment of troops isn’t random here.