November 2, 2026
Just politics
Time - President Donald Trump invited outgoing congresswoman Haley Stevens to join
the Republican Party after she surprisingly endorsed her state’s GOP nominee
for the U.S. Senate, Mike Rogers, over her partymate, Abdul El-Sayed, in a
last-minute move her fellow Democrats have called a “betrayal.”
- Stevens’
shock announcement of an endorsement for the GOP candidate just days
before Election Day could upend a tight race that may decide the fate of
the upper chamber.
· A
number of Democrats have shared their dismay and disappointment, including
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who criticized Stevens’ “despicable
betrayal” and said that Senate Democrats were “united” in their support for
El-Sayed. —Chad de Guzman
Bank closings
Kitchen
Table Insights - Across the country, banks are quietly
shutting down locations with little warning and even less explanation. Here’s
what’s already happening:
PNC Bank: 22
branches closing
JP Morgan Chase:
66 branches closing
Citizens Bank:
18 branches closing
Bank of America:
45 branches closing
In just one recent week, 64 bank
branch closures were announced.
Why things are running a little slow
Sam Smith - Our news today may be a bit slow thanks
to the fact that your editor fell out of his bed last night and couldn’t rise
from the floor until he was aided two guys from the local fire department. The
cause was one I had previously avoided by sleeping over a foot away from the
edge of the bed. This time I was careless around 4 am. My wonderful wife called the Freeport fire
department and two nice guys had me up and going in just a few moments.
November 1, 2026
Tales from the Attic: Confessions of a rebel
From our archives
Sam Smith- A few years back, Mark Plotkin started an interview with me
on WTOP this way: "How do you respond to those who say you're just
outrageous, off the wall, beyond normal?" Here's part of what I told him:
If you go back and read what I wrote ten, twenty or thirty years ago it's hard
to see what the problem was. The FBI, in a rare of moment of literary eloquence
labeled those who fought in the Spanish Civil War as "premature
anti-fascists." In DC timing is everything. Phil Hart once described the
Senate as place that does things 20 years after it should have. I think I was
like a bad comedian; I got the punch lines right; I just delivered them too
soon.
I didn't plan it this way. I didn't
want it this way. In truth, a large part of me still would have liked to have
been one of the popular boys in the class, but things kept getting in the way -
some addictive confluence of moral aggravation, periodic accident,
undisciplined imagination, sporadic and unpremeditated courage randomly
suppressing chronic shyness and cowardice, sloppy romanticism, episodic
existentialism, recurrent hope, stultifying stubbornness and an abiding
intolerance for the dull. A child's dreams and an adult's faith pounding tide
after tide on the rock of reality, thinking that maybe this time I'll float
off.
Some people take it personally, as
though I rebelled simply to annoy them. They make little jokes about the fact
that I'm different, as if I had a moral obligation to be like them. When they
see someone like me coming, they close the doors of their institutions, their
imaginations, and their hearts. We are, after all, thieves who might abscond
with their most precious possession: the tranquility of unexamined certainty.
But it's really more like Vaclav
Havel said long ago when he was still a rebel:
You do not
become a 'dissident' just because you decide one day to take up this most
unusual career. You are thrown into it by your personal sense of
responsibility, combined with a complex set of external circumstances. You are
cast out of the existing structures and placed in a position of conflict with
them. It begins as an attempt to do your work well, and ends with being branded
an enemy of society . . . "
Those dissidents who somehow remain
connected to the normal find themselves alone in the crowd. Even in my home
town, I often feel an exile - as though all had emigrated except for me, as
though somehow I had missed the ship.
It's often not easy. Albert Camus
spoke of the tremendous energy some must expend "merely to be normal"
and added:
The rebel
can never find peace. He knows what is good and, despite himself, does evil.
The value which supports him is never given to him once and for all - he must
fight to uphold it, unceasingly.
Emerson also understood the problem:
You will
always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know
it. It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in
solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the
crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
Still, you can't talk about such
things because it would further confirm the belief that you are best ignored,
dismissed, or considered absurd. So you become the charming stranger from a
strange place, you tell the jokes first, and you change the subject when it
starts to get too close to the real. Better yet, you fool them into thinking
that you are one of them even though you really blend better with those the
urban itinerant Joe Gould once described as the "cranks and misfits and
the one-lungers and might-have-beens and the would-bes and the never-wills and
the God-knows-whats."
Still, among the illusions of my
life has been that if I stuck it out long enough, time would provide the
acceptance that my words and thoughts had prevented. I. F. Stone used to say
that when you're young you're blamed for things you didn't do and when you're
older you get credit for them. It hasn't worked out like that, in part because
just when I should have started coasting, the world around me took a nasty,
greedy and dangerous turn. America began destroying itself. It was the wrong
time to start fitting in .
True, the best period for a
revolution of the good is when one is young. To be twenty or thirty and part of
an uprising of the collective soul is a rare gift of life. It does spoil you,
though, for you go through the rest of your time wondering why that moment went
away and why nothing seems able to bring it back.
What was unexpected, both in timing
and intensity, was that I would not only live through one of America's great
revivals but during a subsequent era when my country -- without debate,
consideration, or struggle -- decided it really didn't want to be America any
more.
Few even talked about it, but I knew
that in the silence could be something as telling and evil as words. After all,
the language of the old south was most descriptive in what it didn't say - and
what wasn't allowed to be said.
Much later I would come across the
words of a German university professor who described to journalist Milton Mayer
what it had been like under the Nazis in the 1930s:
To live in
the process is absolutely not to notice it -- please try to believe me --
unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most
of us ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential,
so well explained or, on occasion, 'regretted.'. . .
Believe me
this is true. Each act, each occasion is worse than the last, but only a little
worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one shocking occasion,
thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join you in resisting
somehow.. . .
Suddenly it
all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more
accurately, what you haven't done (for that was all that was required of most
of us: that we did nothing). You remember those early meetings of your
department in the university when, if one had stood, others would have stood,
perhaps, but no one stood. A small matter, a matter of hiring this man or that,
and you hired this one rather than that. You remember everything now, and your
heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair.
Shortly before his death in Tom
Stoppard's Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, Rosencrantz says:
What was it
all about? When did it begin? . . . Couldn't we just stay put? . . . We've done
nothing wrong! We didn't harm anyone. Did we? . . . There must have been a
moment, at the beginning, when we could have said -- no. But somehow we missed
it.. . . Well, we'll know better next time.
o
I have tried to help keep alive the
beleaguered tradition of plain speaking and truth-seeking that I understood to
be at the heart of good journalism. But in a time when much of the media
prefers perceptions to facts, bullet quotes to understanding and spin over
reality, such efforts are seen as eccentric at best, apostasy at worst. The
proper journalist has become, wittingly or not, the accomplice of a system in
which news, advertising and agitprop are hopelessly mingled and the facts
adulterated. Truth has little to do with it anymore. It is as if we are living
in a new Middle Ages, only with the myth being driven by cable TV rather than
by the church.
Further, where once saying
unconventional things was regarded as hip, it is now considered
'inappropriate.' Hipness has become a fashion statement - a consumer selection
carefully synchronized with corporate intent rather than outward evidence of a
state of mind free of the corporatized state. And so it is easy to feel
ostracized, alone and ineffectual. Such feelings are bad enough at 26, but far
harder at 66 if for no other reason than that you have less time to recover
from them.
I know because I've had the feelings
at both ages. And at both ages the despair has often been exaggerated,
self-defeating, and self-fulfilling. Which isn't to say unnecessary, for
wrestling with the pain of living is one of the surest signs that you are still
alive. The problem is that you never know when you're exaggerating and when
you've got it right.
o
Part of my love of the craft of
journalism has been the simple joy of possessing the license to go wherever
curiosity leads, to consider no place in the planet alien to my inquiry, to use
words as a child uses little plastic blocks. Part of it has been the pleasure
of deliberately learning more about something than any reasonable person would
want to know.
Tina Hobson once said of her
husband, the civil rights activist, "The trouble with Julius is that he
takes the Constitution personally." I suffer from a similar debility. But
sometimes people credit me with a sense of justice when in fact I am just
titillated, fascinated or surprised. In such ways I have also disappointed some
of my more didactic allies who expected me to stick to business and not be
distracted by the noise of news and the search for better words with which to
describe it.
I also want to walk away from it at
will. Back in the 60s, I was sitting in an office on 8th Street SE in
Washington talking with one of the sergeants of the War on Poverty. It was
shortly after the riots of April 1968 and our conversation drifted in the
shadows of those smoky and charred days. Then the community organizer stopped
in mid-sentence and said, "Look, Sam, all I really want to do is to sit on
my front stoop in the sun, drink beer, and shoot craps."
His words keep coming back, a
reminder that even the best politics are a pretty poor substitute for life and
that the worst politics compound their felony by forcing us to leave the front
stoop to do something about them. Our quarrel with the abuse of power should be
not only be that it is cruel and stupid but that it takes so much time way from
other things -- like loving and being loved, and music, and a good meal and the
sunset of a gentle day. In a nation ablaze with struggles for power, we are too
often forced to choose between being a co-conspirator in the arson or a member
of the volunteer fire department. And, too often, as we immerse ourselves in
the terrible relevance of our times, beauty and happiness seem to drift away.
That community organizer in the
dingy office on 8th Street understood that the proper end of politics was not a
policy, not a budget, not an ideology, not even worthy abstractions like peace
and justice, but rather good places, and good days and healthy and happy people
-- the collective little republics of our individual hopes and dreams.
In the melancholy that descends from
time to time, in the loneliness that lies like a desert between myself and my
imagination, I think about opportunities and offers that have come my way that
I brazenly - wantonly, some might say - rejected. I think I knew in my heart
that if I had accepted such things, I would have ended up broken or fired. And
probably a drunk as well.
And as best as I can tell, my real
impetus was not masochism but a truly manic, grandiose, and cockeyed optimism -
the faith that even in late 20th century America I could do something on my own
that would be even better than what I could if I just did what was expected of
me.
Saul Alinsky was once asked by a
seminarian how he could retain his values as he made his way through the
church, "That's easy," replied Alinsky. "Just decide now whether
you wish to be a cardinal or a priest." It was a choice I made early.
As far back as high school, when I
first read of Thoreau's preference for sitting on a pumpkin and having it all
to himself to being crowded on a velvet stool, I had rated freedom ahead of
power. Raised in dysfunctional comfort, I have placed an abnormal emphasis on
things I could do without benefit of social standing, money, or power, such as
writing, playing the piano, . . and imagining. I would come to suspect that I
had spent a lifetime trying to finish the script of a radio show first
concocted under the covers as a child - a lifelong broadcast in which I was the
stumbling protagonist. I have tried to live a daydream - one that began because
I didn't like what was going on downstairs. And still don't.
I can't recommend such a way; I
can't even justify having tried it. A lot of it doesn't make sense. I spurned
the normal icons of ambition, yet was so ambitious that I sought the
unattainable. I gave the outward impression of a radical but in my heart was
just a moderate of a time that had yet to arrive. I constantly sought change
but was most happy enjoying the changeless virtues of music and conversation
and returning to the mooring after a long, happy day on the bay.
Sometimes I would think of myself as
a reluctant draftee, called up to serve in the struggle that Albert Camus
described: "It is those who know how to rebel, at the appropriate moment,
against history who really advance its interests." I didn't really want to
do it. I just had to. What I wanted most was that the struggle be won so I
could live in a land where people laughed and made new friends and were gentle
with one another. So I could return to that place where the sun hit the front
stoop just right on a quiet morning, reminding me that this was how good
everything else could be as well.
Meanwhile. . .
NY
Times - Linda McMahon, the education secretary, plans to spend $43,000
on new furniture for her government office, a work space makeover that comes as
she lobbies Congress to shut down her department. Ms. McMahon’s team has
informed Congress that her current furniture is worn out and “cannot be
configurationally or aesthetically integrated into the agency’s new office
space,” according to Education Department records reviewed by The New York
Times that have not been publicly disclosed.
Brain Disease Pervasive in N.F.L. According to New Estimate
NY
Times - This summer, a scientific study sent reverberations through the
football world, making headlines and deeply worrying players and families. At
least 25 percent of retired N.F.L. players who died over a recent six-year
period, the study found, had C.T.E., or chronic traumatic encephalopathy, the
neurodegenerative brain disease associated with repeated hits to the head.
But most of the other 75 percent
of deceased players were never tested. That left a complex, high-stakes
question — the actual prevalence of C.T.E. among deceased ex-N.F.L. players —
open for analysis.
Now, the same research team has
deployed statistical techniques to home in on a more precise number. In a new
study published Wednesday, they estimate that three out of four former N.F.L.
players who died between 2008 and 2023 most likely had C.T.E. in their brains
at death.
Stupid stuff
Congressional
Insider - Senator Ted Cruz
mocked Abdul El-Sayed as a “jihadist leprechaun,” turning a heated Michigan
Senate fight into a test of facts, faith, and political lines.
Cruz’s insult spotlights claims
tying El-Sayed to the Muslim Brotherhood despite no public evidence of his
personal affiliation. El-Sayed has
disavowed the Muslim Brotherhood and rejected imposing religious law in the
United States.
Critics lean on a half-sister’s
old posts about family ties, which do not show El-Sayed’s own membership.
October 31, 2026
Things for Democrats to talk about
Ralph Nader - In media appearances and at
public rallies, Progressive candidates should authentically summarize what they
will fight for—that resonates with left/right voters struggling to have decent
livelihoods.
- Raise the frozen federal minimum wage from $7.25 per
hour to at least $15 or $17 an hour. Twenty-five million workers will
benefit.
- Raise Social Security benefits, frozen
for 45 years, paid for by raising the Social Security tax on the wealthy.
About 60 million elderly people will benefit.
- Enact an authentic child tax credit, cutting child
poverty in half. Over 60 million children will be better off.
- Catch up with Western countries and Taiwan by passing
Medicare for All, lifesaving, far more efficient, and much less
aggravating than the present profit-gouging, benefit-denying, corporatized
system of greed first.
- Crack down on corporate crooks stealing consumer
dollars, worker wages, and pensions. (Saving trillions of dollars yearly
and having 90% approval.)
- Adopt child care, paid family sick leave, and other
humane programs long in place in Western Europe and Canada.
- Pass labor laws for safety, economic freedom to speak
and band together, and pension protections put forth decades ago.
(See: pensionrights.org).
- Invest in crumbling public services and
infrastructure in communities. Creating many good jobs.
- Paying for the above by (1) restoring taxes on the
very undertaxed or non-taxed super-rich and large corporations to the
level of the prosperous 1960s, (2) by ending huge corporate welfare
giveaways, subsidies, and bailouts, and (3) de-bloating the runaway,
unaudited military budget, devouring over half of all operating spending
by the federal government and getting more wasteful, fraudulent, and
controlling corporate contractors by the year.
For more practical ideas, see the
attached piece by former Secretary of Labor and current popular blogger Robert
Reich, titled 10-Point Plan to Make America Affordable.
White House vs. Constitution
Ken
Kuppenstein - Asked in a little-noticed Tuesday interview about what
the government could do about foreign influence operations on social media like
TikTok, White House counterterrorism czar Sebastian Gorka reply was shockingly frank:
“We have that knee-jerk: ‘Oh,
First Amendment, don’t do anything’ — but there are things we have to do if
there’s a threat to national security that actually comports with the U.S.
Constitution.”
When the White House’s point man
on counterterrorism calls First Amendment concerns “knee-jerk,” that’s a pretty
good freedom of speech isn’t a top priority.
Deportation
Independent,
UK - Donald Trump’s administration is imminently expected to forcibly
remove dozens of Afghans from the U.S. to Afghanistan, marking the first
large-scale deportation flight of Afghans back into the hands of the Taliban,
aid groups and human rights lawyers warn. Roughly 15 Afghans are reportedly scheduled for the
removal flight, which is being routed from Louisiana to Pakistan, where
officials are expected to expel them to their home country. Afghans on the
flight include family members of U.S. allies who worked alongside military
forces and aid groups, among others who could face discrimination and violence
upon their return — including at least one LGBTQ+ person.
Election
Newsweek
- Donald Trump’s Department of
Justice has been ordered to stop threatening to prosecute or launch
investigations into election workers—following weeks of aggressive tactics
intended to root out ineligible voters that the court said were likely
“interfering with the lawful administration” of the 2026 midterms.
On Friday, a federal judge issued
the temporary restraining order after a number of labor groups brought forward
a lawsuit against the DOJ and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). As
summarized in the court order, the agencies' officials were accused of engaging
in a campaign to “intimidate, threaten, and coerce state and local officials
and employees who are engaged in administering the ongoing midterm 2026
election.”
The
Guardian - Donald Trump is
waging a brazen effort to interfere with voting in this year’s midterm
elections, escalating concerns that the federal government will try to slow
down certification of election results – a strategy that could create chaos
when the new Congress is seated next year.
Experts are certain the
administration’s efforts to subvert America’s elections will not work. And some
have bemoaned “fearmongering” about far-fetched scenarios that are unlikely to
go anywhere in court.
But after the attack on the
Capitol on January 6, 2021, voting lawyers and other democracy groups aren’t
dismissing the possibility of anything.
The potential for interference is
related to how close the contest winds up being, said Ned Foley, a professor at
the Ohio State University and an expert on disputed elections.
“The more it looks like a blowout
or a ‘blue tsunami’, the harder it’s going to be for any attempt to make
mischief to get any traction,” he said.
“I put the probability of these
impactful nightmare scenarios materializing at under 50%, so I’m not expecting
them to make a difference,” he added. But, he said there are “risks of weird
things happening, and you need to pay attention to them even if the risk is
rather low”.
The Trump administration’s
efforts to interfere began last year with an effort to collect detailed voter
roll information from nearly every state. And it has continued into the final
days of the election, in which the government has sought to sequester ballots
in California and filed a legally thin lawsuit to try to stop the certification
of election results in Alaska, where there is a hotly contested US Senate race.
The US constitution gives the
states, not the federal government, authority to run elections. And it gives
the president no power when it comes to voting.
Press Herald - At a crucial moment for U.S.-Israeli relations, a major pro-Israel lobbying group has dropped millions on Maine's U.S. Senate race, according to campaign finance data - throwing its support behind Sen. Susan Collins' reelection bid.
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, is a group that endorses and puts money behind pro-Israel candidates. It is far and away the largest donor to Collins' campaign and leadership PAC this year, Federal Election Commission data shows.
The group has contributed about $2.8 million so far - more than her next 20 top donors combined, according to data compiled by OpenSecrets, a nonprofit campaign finance tracking organization.
In her decision, U.S. District
Judge Trina Thompson wrote that the administration’s efforts “are likely to
have the effect of interfering with election administration and
disenfranchising lawful voters.”
The order extends through Nov.
16, nearly two weeks after Election Day. It follows efforts to require states
including California and Washington to segregate ballots the administration
says may have been cast by noncitizens.
Axios -
Pro tip: Don't stay up for the Senate results in either Maine or
Alaska.
- Even a clear win (or defeat) for Collins may not be obvious until Wednesday. In 2020, when she won by nearly 9 points, the AP didn't call the race until lunchtime Wednesday.
- Alaska, with its ranked-choice voting, could take weeks
Donald Trump
The
Hill - Washington, D.C., and Virginia sued the National Parks Service
and Interior Department to block President Trump’s proposed triumphal arch on
Saturday, a new court filing shows. The planned arch would resemble arches in
other cities, including Paris’s Arc de Triomphe, and be constructed on the
border between D.C. and Virginia.
In the court filing, the plaintiffs call the arch
“flagrantly unlawful” because Trump did not seek congressional authorization to
construct the project. “In their rush to break ground on the Arch, Defendants
have made only half-hearted gestures at complying with these requirements,” the
lawsuit reads. “Perhaps recognizing that the project is legally indefensible,
Defendants have made clear that they will attempt to outrun judicial review.”
Internet
Bloomberg - The internet has gotten too good at taking your
money. Hidden fees, forgotten subscriptions and addictive feeds
reflect a growing imbalance between the value companies create and what they
claim for themselves. AI could tilt that balance even
further.
Alaska' s Dan Sullivans
The
Guardian - The top federal prosecutor in Alaska confirmed
on Friday the existence of a criminal and a civil investigation into an alleged
scheme by Democrats to confuse voters by recruiting a spoiler candidate on the
ballot for US Senate who shares a name with the Republican incumbent, senator
Dan Sullivan.
Speaking at a news conference in Anchorage on Friday, US
attorney Michael Heyman cited reporting by the New York Times which suggested
that the Senate campaign of Democrat Mary Peltola and national Democrats had,
in his words, “orchestrated a sprawling conspiracy to recruit and prop up
Daniel J Sullivan as a sham candidate”.
Both Dan Sullivans – one a Republican senator and the other
a retired schoolteacher with no prior political experience – qualified for the
ballot.
October 30, 2026
Trump's golf course controversy
The Trump administration has insisted for weeks that there
were no imminent plans to close the park despite the president's Truth Social
announcements outlining his vision for the project.
The Department of Justice finally admitted in court filings
this week that the president's plans to close East Potomac Park on November 15
are, in fact, in the works.
U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes repeatedly erupted at
government attorneys during a heated court hearing on Friday before finding
that Justice Department officials "intentionally" timed the abrupt
removal of hundreds of trees to evade judicial review - and may have been
misleading the court about plans that have long been in the works.
"The third highest ranking official at the Department
of Justice is telling me, telling a federal court, that he cannot say that when
the president posted the 'course will close on November 15,' what he meant was,
'the court will close on November 15'?" Reyes asked.
Trump vs. climate facts
Democratic
Conservation Alliance: TRUMP SAID: “It’s been getting cooler, not warmer.”
FACT CHECK: The National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration (NOAA) reported that the summer of 2026 (June through August)
was the hottest summer on record for the contiguous United States.
TRUMP SAID: “The ice caps are bigger than they’ve ever
been.”
FACT CHECK: Though sea ice naturally fluctuates on a
seasonal schedule, yearly minimum and maximum measurements show that it’s
declining overall and becoming thinner. This year’s maximum was the lowest on
record.
TRUMP SAID: “We were all supposed to be dead in 12 years.
Nobody died recently, did anybody die recently?”
FACT CHECK: Yes, they have! Climate change is responsible
for the rapid worsening of catastrophic weather events, including recent
disasters like the historic flash floods that killed 130 in Texas last summer,
the Los Angeles wildfires that killed 31, and August’s extreme tornado outbreak
that killed Americans across the central states.
Ralph Nader was right again
The
Guardian - A corporate plutocracy. A broken healthcare system. Massive and
widening inequality. Cash-soaked elections. Angry people struggling to pay
their bills and disgusted with lawmakers in Washington DC.
Nearly everything that pushed
famed consumer-rights advocate Ralph Nader to launch the 2000 presidential run
that made him a political pariah in Washington is front and center as the US
gears up for the 2026 midterm elections. But this time, things are much, much
worse.
Nader, now 92, has been seething
from his home in north-west Washington as the Trump administration rips the
guts out of the hard-fought consumer and safety protections he built in the
1960s and 1970s. He’s once again calling for a revolution in a Democratic party
that still wants nothing to do with him.
The Supremes may be more damaging than Trump
Sam Smith - The Supreme Court has probably damaged America’s constitutional democracy more than what’s left of Trump’s life. On June 30, the court ruled that limits on political party coordinated expenditure limits violate the First Amendment. In other words, there are lots of ways you or Elon Musk can give money to a candidate in atrocious sums.
For example, the Maine Morning Star reports: “With Maine’s
entire state Legislature up for election in November, even incumbent lawmakers
aren’t safe in their reelection bids. With outside groups — that don’t have to
disclose their donors — increasing their involvement in state elections, the
legislative districts with the most outside spending feature lawmakers up for
reelection. According to data from the Maine Ethics Commission as of Thursday,
Oct. 29, outside groups spent roughly $4.6 million in state races.”
Polls
The Guardian - Government corruption has
emerged as a top issue in the upcoming US midterm elections, with an
overwhelming majority of Americans saying US government officials use their
public office for personal financial gain, according to an exclusive Harris
poll for the Guardian.
Nearly nine out of 10 Americans
said that government corruption, as defined as elected officials putting their
own or their donors’ financial interests ahead of the public’s, is a problem,
according to the survey.
Three-quarters (76%) of voters
said that elected officials care more about enriching themselves than improving
the economy for ordinary people. Voters were more likely to say that government
corruption (65%) is more concerning than corporate power (29%). Just under 10%
said that neither concerns them.
Christa Pike update
NBC
News - One month ago, Christa
Pike survived what seemed impossible: a lethal injection in which two rounds of
the drug had already entered her body. Medics took her from the Tennessee death
chamber and she was placed on a hospital ventilator; she regained consciousness
days later.
Now, Pike, the sole woman on
Tennessee’s death row, says she is healing in a prison medical ward, but that
the pain she still feels extends far beyond the physical.
“There hasn’t been a moment since
that night when I haven’t been in pain,” Pike, 50, said in her first public
statement, which her legal team shared Friday. “My body hurts. My arms hurt. My
hands hurt. My throat hurts. I still struggle to speak. And the pain isn’t just
physical. There is pain in my mind and in my soul.”
Pike, who has been on death row
for three decades for murdering Colleen Slemmer, a 19-year-old classmate, was
discharged from the hospital and returned to her Nashville prison 10 days after
the attempt to execute her Sept. 30 went awry. Her arms were left swollen and
bruised after the execution team tried to insert intravenous lines to deliver
two rounds of the lethal drug pentobarbital into her bloodstream, her legal
team said. Medical experts have suggested Pike’s injuries could have been the
result of incorrect needle insertion or the chemical leaking into her tissue.
October 29, 2026
IQ tests are only about a century old
Nautilus
- People too often forget that
IQ tests haven’t been around that long. Indeed, such psychological measures are
only about a century old. Early versions appeared in France with the work of
Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon in 1905. However, these tests didn’t become
associated with genius until the measure moved from the Sorbonne in Paris to
Stanford University in Northern California. There Professor Lewis M. Terman had
it translated from French into English, and then standardized on sufficient
numbers of children, to create what became known as the Stanford-Binet
Intelligence Scale. That happened in 1916. The original motive behind these
tests was to get a diagnostic to select children at the lower ends of the
intelligence scale who might need special education to keep up with the school
curriculum. But then Terman got a brilliant idea: Why not study a large sample
of children who score at the top end of the scale? Better yet, why not keep
track of these children as they pass into adolescence and adulthood? Would
these intellectually gifted children grow up to become genius adults?
Social Security to run short of funds by 2032
The
Congressional Insider - America’s main retirement fund faces a hard
date: the Social Security old-age fund is projected to run short in late 2032,
triggering across-the-board cuts if Congress does nothing. Trustees project the
old-age fund will deplete in the fourth quarter of 2032. After depletion,
incoming taxes would cover about 78% of promised benefits. The system’s 75-year
shortfall grew to 4.42% of taxable wages, showing rising strain. Lawmakers
split on fixes: benefit trims, tax hikes on the wealthy, or a mix.
East Potomac Golf Links
The
Hill - The National Links Trust said this week it will cease operations
at East Potomac Golf Links, Washington’s most popular public golf course,
as President
Trump eyes the property for redevelopment.
In a statement Thursday, the
trust said it entered a new long-term lease agreement with the Interior
Department and National Park Service (NPS) to manage, operate and rehabilitate
Langston Golf Course and Rock Creek Park Golf, two other public courses in the
nation’s capital.
East Potomac sits on NPS land and
is prime real estate on a peninsula bisecting the Potomac River in central
Washington, D.C.
The trust said its “role” at the
property will end on or before Nov. 15, and its new lease for Rock Creek Park
Golf and Langston Golf Course will span 50 years.
Under the trust, the East Potomac
course became known around the country as a model for affordable public golf
and catered to players of all skill levels and backgrounds. The park is also
home to a number of walking and biking trails used daily by thousands of locals
and tourists, and cherry trees bring waves of visitors to D.C. every spring.
Israel
The
Guardian - The Israeli newspaper Haaretz has reported that, with 97% of
votes counted, the balance between the political blocs remains unchanged. Netanyahu’s
coalition remains at 53 seats and Eisenkot’s bloc at 48. Parties representing
Palestinian citizens of Israel hold 19 seats.