Job cuts at Disney

Bloomberg - Walt Disney is said to be preparing thousands of job cuts, asking some managers to find annual savings of 20%. Earnings may be holding up, but the entertainment giant is still grappling with a shift in consumer attention to social media and online video. Netflix, Sony and others face similar pressures and have also cut jobs.

Voting

USA Facts - When the House of Representatives flips, it’s usually during midterm elections. Of the 19 House majority shifts since the modern two-party system started, 15 were in midterm years. This includes four of the last five midterms.  

Roll Call -  Residents of D.C. observe election night like some other cities observe major sporting events. And after the Nationals failed to advance to the postseason this year and with the first playoff game for the Washington Spirit still a few days away, the midterms will be the main ticket in town.

“It’s usually standing room only every time. I don’t think it matters whether it’s presidential or midterms,” said Matt Weiss, who owns Capitol Hill’s Union Pub.

While the pub will also be showing the Washington Capitals play the Dallas Stars at 7 p.m., Weiss said the sound will be on for election results rather than hockey. He expects around 50 percent more business than a regular Tuesday, which is already a busy night with weekly trivia.   

Center for American Voting -   It’s finally Election Day, but it’s worth remembering that nearly 58 million people have voted already—that’s compared to 46 million in 2022, and it’s a midterm record.

New Republic- President Donald Trump’s attempt to mess with California’s elections has been shot down by the Supreme Court. In a one-sentence rejection with no explanation, the court ruled on Monday evening against the Trump administration’s emergency request that California separate 20,000 ballots that the White House claims were cast by noncitizens. There do not appear to have been any dissents.

Election officials in California and Los Angeles County said that the administration’s list was unreliable, pointing to their own findings that many on the list were actually U.S.-born citizens. The Trump administration even admitted that the list contained inaccuracies but still insisted that California comply with its demands. Late last month, the DOJ sued to force California to separate those 20,000 ballots. Last week, U.S. District Judge David Carter issued a blistering ruling castigating the White House for acting like a monarchy.

District Line Daily - The FBI has “directed all employees stationed in D.C. to avoid polling locations,” according to the Washington Sun. “Agent personnel were advised that the only exception to that prohibition is if there is an active shooter at a particular polling location,” per the FBI’s statement. But across the country, the Department of Justice plans to send about 1,000 election monitors to polls, which Axios says is “far more than in previous elections.” Expect monitors in Prince George’s County and Fairfax County. [Washington Sun, Axios]

Social Security

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.

Donald Trump

NY Times -  Even Mr. Trump seems astonished at times by what comes out of his mouth — and by how much his supporters embrace him nonetheless. “I could say the stupidest things and you’d clap. ‘Oh, I love you so,’” he marveled at a recent rally in Clarksville, Tenn. “But we don’t say the stupidest things,” he quickly added. “We say things of common sense. We say things that make sense.”

For Mr. Trump, making sense often places second to having fun at rallies, and some outrageous remarks appear aimed at generating a laugh. His allies say too much is made of comments that are really just jokes. He has always been a provocative speaker, willing to outrage for the sake of outrage. Mr. Trump defends his stream-of-consciousness rambling as a “brilliant” speaking style that he calls “the weave.”

But the weave seems to be getting weavier. An A.I.-assisted New York Times review of Mr. Trump’s comments from speeches, rallies, social media, interviews and public meetings found significant changes since he began a run for president at age 69 in 2015, although not as much of a notable shift since 2024 when a similar review was conducted. Broadly speaking, the review concluded, Mr. Trump’s public communication is more vulgar, more uninhibited and less coherent than it was a decade ago.

Israel

The Hill -  President Trump said on Tuesday that he has reached a deal with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that will end U.S. aid to Israel this year.  Trump said in an interview with “Fox & Friends” that he and Netanyahu made a deal “months ago” for Washington to end its aid to Israel.

Trump vs. women

Alternet America -   The Trump administration is preparing to reverse workplace accommodations for women, according to seven people familiar with the plans. The changes would narrow protections under the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, a 2022 law that guarantees accommodations like bathroom breaks and time off for prenatal appointments.

…. The administration is also considering religious exemptions that would allow employers to deny accommodations that conflict with their beliefs. A federal court in Louisiana has already ruled for Catholic organizations that didn’t want to accommodate workers seeking abortions, and the proposed changes would make it easier for other employers to follow suit.

The rollback would have the biggest impact in the 23 states where abortion is now banned or restricted. In those states, women often have to travel across state lines for the procedure, and current regulations require their employers to give them the time off.

Health

Washington Post -   When Sen. Chris Murphy, 53, was hospitalized after a stroke Saturday, he became a high-profile example of what may be a troubling trend: Strokes seem to be more common in younger adults than they were in the past.

Over almost three decades, a team of researchers has been tracking cases in Greater Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky. This area is not random — it’s demographically similar to the United States overall in terms of age, race, education and income, said Emily Fisher, a neurologist at the University of Cincinnati and one of the researchers. “That allows us, if we see a signal in our region, to say, ‘Hey, does this need to be looked at on a greater scale because it could be reflective of what’s going on in the United States overall?’”

The results of this effort, published in September in Neurology, showed that stroke rates among 20- to 54-year-olds in the region almost doubled from 1993-94 to 2020, while declining among older people. The increase was largely driven by the ischemic type, caused by a blockage in a blood vessel — often a clot — supplying the brain.

Still, strokes remain much less common in younger adults. Their annual rate rose from about 34 to 62 cases per 100,000 people. In the older group (those 55 and older), it fell from about 619 to 453.

10 tourist traps to avoid

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Just politics

New Republic - In addition to being a megadonor, Musk is a mega federal contractor, largely through his aerospace company, SpaceX. According to a new report by Democracy Defenders Action, a nonprofit legal group co-founded by Norm Eisen (co-counsel for the House Judiciary Committee during President Donald Trump’s first impeachment), Musk has “won at least $10 billion in contracts since he left the government.” That was a mere 17 months ago, amid a heavily publicized feud with the president. That $10 billion is actually in addition to the $38 billion that Musk suckled from the federal teat before 2025, and it doesn’t count the $6.3 billion that Musk extracted while he was running Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency. DOGE was supposed to cut government spending, but instead it ran up a bill of $517 billion, not counting the $6.3 billion in federal contracts Musk pocketed at the same time, nor the $10 billion Musk pocketed later. 

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

The Guardian - The president bashed El-Sayed, a practicing Muslim, in brazenly racist terms, saying that Congress would have to “get a special metal detector for Abdul” if he were elected. “If you vote for this jihadist lunatic that wants to destroy you, you’re crazy. Mike Rodgers is apple pie. And you know what this country needs? A little apple pie. We don’t need the communists or jihadists, the Muslim Brotherhood. We need apple pie.”

The Guardian -  Michigan Democrat Haley Stevens’ shocking last-minute endorsement of Mike Rogers, a Republican Senate candidate, has sparked fierce backlash from members of her party.

Stevens, who narrowly lost in the Democratic primary for Senate to Abdul El-Sayed, announced her support for Rogers after a feud with the El-Sayed campaign over an outside group’s campaign ad that blamed the high cost of living on US support for Israel.  Stevens had said she would appear at a campaign event if he denounced the advertisement. El-Sayed’s campaign disinvited her.

Donald Trump

The Guardian - A federal judge threw out Trump’s renewed $10 billion defamation lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal and ruled that it can’t be filed again, marking another setback for the president’s legal fights with the press. Trump or his business interests have also filed multimillion dollar complaints against the NYT and the British Broadcasting Corp.

Latino voting exploding in Texas

NBC News - Texas early-voting numbers show a staggering surge in Hispanic turnout, according to an analysis by the NBC News Decision Desk. To date, nearly 1.8 million Hispanic voters have cast ballots in the Lone Star State, over 881,000 more than voted at this point in the 2022 election, or an 87.2% bump.

The numbers do not indicate whom voters are supporting, but they reveal the potential awakening of a giant at the polls at a moment when America is at a crossroads on immigration enforcement.

Self built castles

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, one of them asking at the start, "whatcha doin' down there?"

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.

 

Maine 7th best state for finding jobs

How Trump and his allies seek to interfere in the US midterm elections

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.

11 ‘crimes’ you didn't know are legal

How Elon Musk Made Off With $16 Billion of Taxpayer Money

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.

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.

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. Enact an authentic child tax credit, cutting child poverty in half. Over 60 million children will be better off.
4. 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.
5. Crack down on corporate crooks stealing consumer dollars, worker wages, and pensions. (Saving trillions of dollars yearly and having 90% approval.)
6. Adopt child care, paid family sick leave, and other humane programs long in place in Western Europe and Canada.
7. Pass labor laws for safety, economic freedom to speak and band together, and pension protections put forth decades ago. (See: pensionrights.org).
8. Invest in crumbling public services and infrastructure in communities. Creating many good jobs.
9. 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.

The Guardian -  A federal judge issued a sweeping order last night barring the Trump administration from threatening or intimidating election officials in the days leading up to the midterm elections. The eight-page ruling prohibits any action that could “threaten, intimidate or coerce state or local election officials or workers” into halting the processing of ballots from registered voters the administration believes are ineligible to vote.

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.

Religion

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.