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November 4, 2025
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.
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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.
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 Belém 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.
➡️ 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.
November 3, 2025
Trump planning attack on Mexico - another illegal war
Newsweek - President Donald Trump's administration is creating detailed plans to send U.S. troops and intelligence officers into Mexico to combat drug cartels, NBC News reported Monday, citing two U.S. officials and two former senior U.S. officials.
"The Trump administration is committed to utilizing an all-of-government approach to address the threats cartels pose to American citizens," a senior Trump administration official told NBC in response to the report....
The report comes after weeks of escalating attacks on alleged drug smugglers out of Venezuela in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean, killing multiple suspects the Trump administration has said are known cartel and criminal gang members. Members of Congress have raised concerns about a potential move to land-based operations, which could be seen as the White House carrying out an act of war.
Polls
Washington Post - A majority of Americans believe President Donald Trump is not committed to protecting freedom of speech, ensuring a fair criminal justice system or preserving free and fair elections, according to a Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll.
The Democratic Party, however, has only a modest edge on these same issues, the poll found. That finding points to a potential problem for Democratic efforts to make an issue of Trump’s attacks on long-standing norms in the justice system.
The Guardian - Donald Trump’s approval rating has fallen to one of its lowest points, with only 37% of Americans expressing approval of his performance as president. The new CNN/SSRS survey released on Monday shows a sharp decline in Trump’s approval ratings compared with the early days after he began his second term in January, when his approval stood at 47% by mid-February.
Newsweek - A new poll by The Economist/YouGov found Trump’s approval rating at its lowest level since he returned to office in January, with 39 percent of people saying they approved of the job he is doing, while 58 percent disapproved, resulting in a net approval rating of -19 points.
NY Times - More than 735,000 New Yorkers cast early ballots ahead of Tuesday’s mayoral election, marking the highest early in-person turnout ever for a nonpresidential election in New York.
Sunday, the final day of early voting, saw about 151,000 early voters, the most of any day since the polls opened, and more voters under 35 than in the first weekend combined, according to data from the city’s Board of Elections. That brought the median age of early in-person voters down to 50.
Turnout among younger age groups lagged early in the week, with about 80,000 people under 35 voting from Sunday to Thursday. That number jumped from Friday to Sunday, with over 100,000 voters under the age of 35 casting ballots, including more than 45,000 on Sunday.
NBC News - Voters say President Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress are more to blame for the ongoing government shutdown, according to a new NBC News poll. But their verdict on the spending stalemate includes more blame for Democrats than some past shutdowns, part of a growing collection of data outlining negative views of both parties.
The survey, conducted Oct. 24-28, finds a combined 52% of voters blame Trump and congressional Republicans for the stalemate, while 42% blame Democrats in Congress and 4% blame all of the players.
The share of voters who blame Democrats is the highest for the party when compared to other shutdowns or potential shutdowns measured in NBC News polling over the last 30 years.
Jack Smith moves from defense to counterattack
NY Times - President Trump’s unrelenting fast-track drive to humiliate, investigate and prosecute the people he hates has gained momentum, in part, because his targets have not been in a position to inflict serious retributive pain on him.
Jack Smith is different.
Mr. Smith, the special counsel who twice indicted Mr. Trump, appears unintimidated by the president’s demand that Republican lawmakers investigate him and that the Justice Department put him in prison for as-yet unproved and unspecified crimes.
Quite the opposite, in fact. Mr. Smith, who spent more than two years aggressively collecting evidence to prove Mr. Trump mishandled classified documents and tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election, appears eager to publicly challenge a foundational pillar of MAGA canon: that the president was a sinned-upon innocent who did nothing to deserve scrutiny, much less two prosecutions.
Mr. Smith has told people in his orbit that he welcomes the opportunity to present the public case against Mr. Trump denied to him by the Supreme Court decision asserting broad presidential immunity from prosecution and adverse rulings from a Trump-appointed judge on the federal bench in Florida.
Climate change
Washington Post - The Post’s analysis, based on state-of-the-art weather data and computer models of the climate system, reveals how rising global temperatures have made the atmosphere more waterlogged — providing fuel for wetter and more dangerous storms. In the past 85 years, The Post found, the amount of water vapor moving through Earth’s atmosphere has increased 12 percent. That increase is equivalent to 35 Mississippi Rivers flowing through the air every second.
But this moisture is not distributed equally around the planet. Nor are its effects evenly felt.
SNAP to get only partial payments in response to judge's ruling
NY Times - Tens of millions of Americans will get only partial payments from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program for this month, the Trump administration told a federal judge on Monday, and it was not clear when even those reduced benefits would be distributed. The administration said it would not tap additional money to fund full payments in November, the second month of the government shutdown. The food aid program for low-income women and children, commonly known as WIC, received more temporary funding.
Lindsey Graham
Republicans against Trump - Lindsey Graham: “I feel good about the Republican Party and where we're going as a nation. We're killing all the right people and we're cutting your taxes. Trump is my favorite president. We've run out of bombs. We didn't run out of bombs in WWII”
Word
Robert Reich - The 400 richest Americans are now worth a record $6.6 trillion.
The entire bottom 50% of America is worth just $4.2 trillion. ... When 400 people control more wealth than half a country’s population, we have a very serious problem.
North American box office records lowest monthly total since 1997
The Guardian - Box office earnings in October have crashed to levels not seen since the late 1990s, with Halloween weekend becoming the worst of the year so far.
According to a report in Variety, cinema takings for October in North America totalled $425m (£323m), the lowest figure since October 1997, when it was $385m – not counting October 2020, when North American cinemas only took $63m as moviegoing was severely affected by the Covid-19 pandemic.
A number of factors have been blamed for the poor results. Notably, there was a paucity of putative blockbusters, with the only large-scale effects movie on release being Tron: Ares, which took $67m in North America, as part of a disappointing $133m worldwide gross against its $180m reported budget.
Also disappointing was the performance of so-called “awards season” films, with Dwayne Johnson wrestling movie The Smashing Machine, Julia Roberts #MeToo drama After the Hunt, and music biopic Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere all grossing less than expected.
Trump says giving money to NYC "gonna be hard for me" if Mamdani wins
Axios - In his first "60 Minutes" interview in five years, President Trump told CBS News' Norah O'Donnell it's "gonna be hard for me as the president to give a lot of money to New York" if Zohran Mamdani, the heavy favorite in tomorrow's voting, becomes mayor.
- Trump — labeling Mamdani a "communist" and "far worse than a socialist" — hinted at an early clash between the White House and City Hall.
New York City's budget this year relied on more than $7 billion in revenue from the federal government.
- That represents a fraction of the total budget (6.4%). But Mamdani's ambitious plans — namely, universal childcare and making all buses free — would require billions more dollars.
- Trump pulling funds could become a significant early obstacle for Mamdani, forcing him to balance budget shortfalls with advancing his progressive agenda. Watch the interview
Top 10 US billionaires’ collective wealth grew by $698bn in past year
The Guardian - The collective wealth of the top 10 US billionaires has soared by $698bn in the past year, according to a new report from Oxfam America published on Monday on the growing wealth divide.
The report warns that Trump administration policies risk driving US inequality to new heights, but points out that both Republican and Democratic administrations have exacerbated the US’s growing wealth gap.
Using Federal Reserve data from 1989 to 2022, researchers also calculated that the top 1% of households gained 101 times more wealth than the median household during that time span and 987 times the wealth of a household at the bottom 20th percentile of income. This translated to a gain of $8.35m per household for the top 1% of households, compared with $83,000 for the average household during that 33-year period.
Meanwhile, over 40% of the US population, including nearly 50% of children, are considered low-income...
Car insurance rates have soared
NPR-- Car insurance premiums have risen by 55% since February 2020, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Rising prices for cars, parts and repairs needed, and medical bills have increased, driving up the price of insurance. Here’s how people are handling the rising car insurance costs:
🚗 Over 58% of drivers say car insurance is a financial burden, and
more than a third have driven without it, a LendingTree survey found.
🚗 Experts urge shoppers to check insurance costs before buying a car to avoid surprises.
🚗 Experts urge shoppers to check insurance costs before buying a car to avoid surprises.
Shutdown
| NPR - President Trump has shown little interest in negotiating with Democrats to end the government shutdown. He spent the weekend in Florida, one of five trips he’s taken since the shutdown began. On Air Force One last night, he told reporters it is up to the Democrats to end it. Check the latest news on the shutdown from our coverage here. |
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Native American leaders say layoffs and benefit lapses are making shutdown more painful for their communities
CNN- Native American leaders warned senators last week that mass layoffs and potential benefit lapses are making this government shutdown more painful for their communities and insisted that the federal government fulfill its treaty obligations with tribal nations.
“The shutdown reductions in force have crept into our classrooms, our early childhood programs and our homes. What began as a budget dispute in Washington has become a daily crisis in Indian country,” Kerry Bird, president of the board of directors of the National Indian Education Association, told senators during a hearing on Capitol Hill on Wednesday.
Bird and other witnesses were invited by the Senate Indian Affairs Committee to testify about how layoffs, also called reductions in force or RIFs, and the shutdown have affected their communities. They emphasized that in reducing the number of the federal employees who interface often with tribes, especially on issues of education, economic development, health and food security, the administration has left Native communities isolated and unsupported at a time when many federal benefits like SNAP are delayed. More
Trump Regime Admits It Doesn’t Know Who Exactly It’s Killing in Boat Strikes
The Intercept - The Trump administration has made a series of startling admissions about the people it is killing in its undeclared war against suspected drug smugglers in the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean. Trump officials acknowledged in separate briefings provided to lawmakers and staffers on Thursday that they do not know the identities of the victims of their strikes, and that the War Department cannot meet the evidentiary burden necessary to hold or try survivors of the attacks. Such victims who find themselves in the water are now deemed “unprivileged belligerents,” a murky designation under international humanitarian law.
Since September 2, the U.S. military has been attacking boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific Ocean, killing more than 60 civilians. The Trump administration insists the slayings are permissible because the U.S. is engaged in “non-international armed conflict” with “designated terrorist organizations,” or DTOs. Two government officials told The Intercept that the administration secretly declared a “non-international armed conflict” weeks if not months before the first attack of the campaign.
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