TV Giants Accused Of Illegal Boycott

Congressional Insider - The Justice Department opened an antitrust investigation into five major television networks after they briefly halted pooled White House coverage, raising fresh questions about power, access, and who really controls the public’s view of the presidency.

Most and least envergy efficient states

Wallet Hub- With October being National Energy Awareness Month and the average U.S. family spending at least $2,000 per year on utilities, the personal-finance company WalletHub today released its report on 2026’s Most & Least Energy-Efficient States, to see which states save people the most money while also saving the environment.

WalletHub compared the energy efficiency of residents’ homes and automobiles in 48 U.S. states. Due to data limitations, Alaska and Hawaii were excluded from our analysis.
 

Most Energy-Efficient States	Least Energy-Efficient States
1. California	39. Louisiana
2. Vermont	40. Georgia
3. New York	41. Kentucky
4. Washington	42. Tennessee
5. Massachusetts	43. Wyoming
6. Oregon	44. Mississippi
7. Colorado	45. Arkansas
8. Utah	46. West Virginia
9. Minnesota	47. Alabama
10. Nevada	48. South Carolina

 
To view the full report and your state’s ranking,

Americans support Medicare for all

Axios-  Supporters of "Medicare for All" now outnumber opponents by nearly 2-to-1, according to a new survey of U.S. adults from the Axios-Ipsos American Health Index.

Two-thirds of all survey respondents — and half of Republicans — said the federal government should be willing to spend more tax dollars to lower health care costs for Americans.

With three weeks to go before the midterm elections, and private health insurance premiums and prescription prices crushing voters, these findings suggest a path for swing-state candidates who embrace socialized medicine.

• But the public's openness is driven more by desperation than by confidence in government. Affordability is foremost on most Americans' minds, and health care brings almost daily reminders of economic pressure.

Middle East

NBC News - Oil and gas prices rose yesterday after President Donald Trump’s “energy ceasefire,” announced Sunday, failed to gain traction. Brent crude had jumped 2% to almost $108 per barrel, and U.S. crude oil had risen more than 2% to about $94. By Tuesday morning, Brent fell to around $105 per barrel and U.S. crude oil to around $92. 

Meanwhile, Russia has continued to strike Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said, including an attack on a power plant in Kharkiv.

Trump indicated that he knew neither Ukraine nor Russia had committed to a ceasefire when he made the announcement on Truth Social. “They agreed, you know why? Because I said, ‘You agree,’” Trump told reporters yesterday. 

The “energy ceasefire” came two days after another surprise Trump announcement — that Russian President Vladimir Putin had agreed to supply 300,000 tons of diesel fuel “to the American and Global Marketplace,” requiring a six-month suspension of the fuel sanctions imposed on the Kremlin in 2022 for its illegal invasion of Ukraine. The suspension of sanctions angered Ukrainian officials, European allies and some U.S. lawmakers.

Trump yesterday defended the deal with Russia, calling it “the right choice for the American people.” Still, experts are highly skeptical that there will be any significant resumption of Russian diesel exports in the near term because of Ukrainian strikes on refiners deep inside Russia.

Mamdani says ICE agents who shot man in New York looked like ‘mass shooters’

The Guardian - The New York mayor, Zohran Mamdani, compared US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)’s recent shooting of a man in Manhattan to a mass shooting scene – and called for an end to the agency’s operations in his city. Oscar Belgal, 28, was struck in the neck during an enforcement operation while he was in his car with his five-year-old child also inside. Describing his perspective on videos of the shooting scene that have emerged since, Mamdani told MS NOW it was unclear even to the mayor that the agents in the footage are law enforcement personnel based on their being in plainclothes.

Elon Musk

NY Times - Mr. Musk has already given far more money, about $366 million, to federal committees during the 2025-26 election cycle than he did during the 2024 election, when he laid out roughly $290 million to help return President Trump and Republicans to power. He has given even more in undisclosed donations during both elections, according to people briefed on the giving.

The latest torrent of spending has helped give the Republican Party a financial advantage in the midterms, as well-funded outside groups like Mr. Trump’s powerful super PAC flood the airwaves with advertising in the final weeks. No Democratic billionaire is spending nearly as much as Mr. Musk, and money remains a central worry for the party in an otherwise favorable political environment.

Artificial intelligence

'This Is Nuts.’ An OpenAI Insider Explains Why He Quit.

The Guardian  - Donald Trump is a “corrupt, senile felon” whose fixation on the term superintelligence proves he knows nothing about AI, said Geoffrey Hinton, “godfather” of the technology, in a wide-ranging interview where he doubled down on recent warnings that AI models pose an existential threat to humanity and scoffed at claims the industry could regulate itself.

The pioneering computer scientist, whose work helped lay the foundations of modern AI, has since become one of the technology’s most vocal critics. His latest remarks come after a tumultuous month during which a growing list of senior AI scientists and researchers have joined Hinton in ringing the alarm about how the technology he helped create could ultimately escape human control, sparking an industry crisis, the hasty assembly of congressional meetings and a rare global consensus that something must be done.

NY Times  -  Below is an edited transcript of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the episode wherever you get your podcasts. Last week, news broke that David Robinson, who had been leading safety transparency efforts at OpenAI, had quit his job at the company because he believes its technology is not safe.

Robinson is an interesting figure. He didn’t come out of the Silicon Valley Bay Area hothouse — he’s more of a recognizable Washington, D.C., figure. He’s a Rhodes scholar. He formed a civil rights nonprofit. He got a law degree at Yale. He worked in policy. He advised the Biden White House. He was interested in the intersection of technology and justice.

When he joined OpenAI, he thought this whole set of worries about safety risk and extinction was kind of nuts. But three years later, he’s not so sure. What he is sure about is that OpenAI does not have the culture of safety necessary to protect the world from what it is building. And it’s not just OpenAI — he thinks this is a problem endemic to the A.I. industry. The interview

Hannaford website offline as company addresses security issue

Press Herald  - Hannaford’s website and mobile app have been temporarily shut down as the supermarket chain’s parent company addresses a cybersecurity issue. Ahold Delhaize, the Dutch company that owns the Scarborough-based grocer, said in a brief news release Monday that it was experiencing an internal network issue and had taken some systems offline to protect them. That includes the Hannaford app and website, both of which carried messages Tuesday morning that they were currently unavailable.m/

So Trump can expand a gold course

A federal worker felling trees in DC with no environmental permit this weekend, in order to expand a golf course President Trump wants to use for holding championships. - Bill McKibbon

Bipartisan opposition to the Russian diesel deal

Time - President Donald Trump on Monday defended his plan to import diesel from Russia amid mounting calls from within his own party to reverse course on the controversial deal.

Lawmakers across party lines, however, argue that the deal goes against a 2022 law which banned Russian oil imports and is not in the best interests of the American public.

“Congress was clear: The U.S. should not import oil from Russia until it ends its aggression against Ukraine and ceases threats against our NATO allies,” read a joint bipartisan statement released Sunday by four Republican Senators and three Democrats.

Elsewhere, Republican Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania announced plans to introduce a bipartisan bill intended to stop Trump from lifting sanctions on Russian oil.  - Read the full story here.

How much will the Supreme Court favor religions?

Washington Post - Religion is on a winning streak at the Supreme Court — and faith-based advocates are pushing to extend it in coming months, hoping to cement a shift in American life that could be one of the current court’s biggest legacies.

The justices are poised to decide in their new term whether a Catholic school that does not accept the children of gay parents can participate in a Colorado prekindergarten program. It is likely to hear arguments on whether the Ten Commandments can be posted in public schools. And it may take a case from Amish parents seeking an exemption from New York’s vaccine mandate for their school-age children.

Over the past five years, the Supreme Court has ruled in favor of expanding the rights of religious groups in nearly every case that has come before it, according to a data analysis conducted for The Washington Post. Since the 2020 term, the court has sided with those groups in seven of those eight cases.

This term’s cases may test how far the court is willing to go in remaking the wall between church and state in America. Recent victories for religious-rights organizations, along with a slew of earlier decisions by the court led by John G. Roberts Jr., already have greatly expanded the presence of religion in public life.

Right wing lie of the week

The National Memo - Far-right media figures circulated a fake story about Texas Senate candidate James Talarico over the weekend, only to have the enterprise quickly blow up in their faces. Racist billionaire Elon Musk played a key role in promoting the smear.

Recently, Talarico, who is running against Republican nominee Ken Paxton, had an extended absence from the campaign trail due to a bout of flu.

On Sunday, MAGA media figure Nick Sortor falsely claimed that the flu story was “a BIG FAT LIE” and that “a hospital employee told @RheinAmacher and I that Talarico had in fact been a patient at the Lindner Center of Hope near Cincinnati, Ohio, which specializes in around-the-clock mental health treatment.” Sortor then said that Talarico’s supposed stint at the hospital meant the Democrat was “CLEARLY not suited to become a US Senator representing over 30 MILLION TEXANS.”

… Lindner Center of Hope added to the right’s humiliation, noting in a post on X, “Representative James Talarico has never received treatment from Lindner Center of Hope.” And Talarico responded, “I’ve never even been to Ohio.”

Meanwhile. . .

Toni Piotti - Anyone in Desert Pines, Freeport with a landline. You already know we had a power outage last Friday, 10/9. When the power came back on our landlines were dead. A number of residents have called Consolidated and gotten various days of repair. I called today and explained that it is widespread outage in the hope that they will respond more quickly. Hopefully it will be taken care of quickly.

A few reasons to get rid of Trump

UNITED STATES CONSTITUTION

Article II, Section 4

“The President.. shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”

14th Amendment, Section 3

“No person shall […] hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath […] to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”

25th Amendment, Section 4

“If the Congress […] determines by two‑thirds vote of both Houses that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the President shall [not] resume the powers and duties of his office.”

Federal judge stops mass tree cutting by Trump regime on DC golf course

Washington Post - A federal judge ordered the Trump administration Monday morning to stop cutting down trees at East Potomac Golf Links after preservationists asserted that more than 500 were felled Saturday and “hundreds more” were slated for removal. Utrict Judge Ana C. Reyes halted all tree removal — including work described as routine maintenance — until 7 a.m. Tuesday or until she issues another order. ….

The battle for the Senate

Data as of Oct. 9. | Source: The Cook Political Report | The New York Times

ICE

The Hill - Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), long a target of President Trump’s ire, had her Washington, D.C., home searched by federal agents on Monday amid a criminal investigation by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency. Homeland Security Investigations, ICE’s investigative unit, carried out the raid. White House border czar Tom Homan had previously confirmed a federal criminal investigation involving the Minnesota lawmaker.

The Hill’s Rebecca Beitsch notes that the Justice Department does not typically carry out major actions against political candidates within 60 days of an election. Omar is seeking another term, and the midterm elections are about three weeks away.

The president has called the Minnesota Democrat “garbage” and a “scammer.” He has repeatedly spread a baseless conspiracy theory that she married her brother to become an American citizen. Some of Trump’s supporters have called for Omar, who was born in Somalia, to be deported.

Omar came to the U.S. as a child with her family as they sought asylum amid the Somali civil war that spurred widespread displacement. She became a U.S. citizen in 2000.

She is a fierce critic of Trump and his administration. During the president’s State of the Union address in February, she heckled him and called him a liar in response to his comments about Somali immigrants in Minnesota.

Omar said in a Monday statement to social platform X that she “will not be silenced.”

Time moves on

Sam Smith – Although I’m generally perceived as an alternative urban journalist, my parents bought a Maine farm in 1946 and I worked on it numerous summers as a teen ager and ended up as chairman of its board for several years. Wolfe’s Neck Farm was an early organic farm and is now known as Wolfe’s Neck Center for Agriculture and the Environment.

Last weekend I attended a memorial event for one of our board chairs and was shocked to find, in a room with over 100 guests, that I knew less than a dozen of them. For a guy like me approaching 89 years old in less than two months, it was another sign that one’s role in humanity is closing.  Such as over 200  friends, relatives and co-workers who have already passed away.

Despite my urban background, I was both fond of, and deeply affected by my time on the farm. For example, when I was 13, the farm director  Jimmy Mann had taught me how to drive a tractor and a six wheel truck. In fact, I claim to be the farm’s first farmer since before we even had any cows I was daily feeding three pigs.

But now those days are over. And I am reminded regularly that farm life is like show business. It absorbs you and then doesn’t need you any more. And so you go an event to honor the past and hardly recognize anyone there. Fortunately, my wife and I now live in Maine fulltime.

 Back when you were one of "The Cruds", one thing I remember were the group's white buck shoes with soles that looked like giant Eberhard Faber Pink Pearl erasers. - rslemay

Meanwhile. . .

NBC News - Pope Leo XIV announced that he will undergo surgery to remove an early-stage nodule on his lung….. He said that surgery had already been scheduled “for the coming days,” and thanked onlookers for their support.

Los Angeles officials again labeled a Fairfax property an imminent health and safety hazard and hauled away more than seven tons of waste, yet the trash keeps coming back. Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety officials determined the Fairfax District property posed an imminent public safety and health hazard. That finding gave the city legal grounds to act....

Election problems

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth just announced that our military’s cyber forces – the U.S. Cyber Command – will work with the Department of Homeland Security to defend our elections from any foreign interference. But Trump has gutted critical election security infrastructure since he entered the White House – including the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) that was designed to ensure our elections are free, fair, and safe.

As one expert put it:

“If the administration was serious about assisting state and local election officials, they shouldn’t have dismantled all of the federal government’s election cybersecurity capacity and fired all their experts in early 2025.” - Former DOJ Attorney David Becker

This is the same administration that has pushed countless conspiracy theories about our election system – that Trump won the 2020 election, that our elections are "rigged" against him and MAGA Republicans, and that there's widespread voter fraud.

So with the midterms approaching, voters have every right to ask what this announcement is really about – and whether putting a close Trump ally like Pete Hegseth in charge of "watching" our elections will protect them or put them at risk.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth just announced that our military’s cyber forces – the U.S. Cyber Command – will work with the Department of Homeland Security to defend our elections from any foreign interference.

….This is the same administration that has pushed countless conspiracy theories about our election system – that Trump won the 2020 election, that our elections are "rigged" against him and MAGA Republicans, and that there's widespread voter fraud.

So with the midterms approaching, voters have every right to ask what this announcement is really about – and whether putting a close Trump ally like Pete Hegseth in charge of "watching" our elections will protect them or put them at risk.

The problem Democrats aren't dealing with

Washington Post - With everything going their way in the final weeks before an election in which Democrats will almost certainly win control of the House and possibly the Senate, many are beginning to raise the question: What then?

….In past midterm elections, the party out of power has felt the need to brand itself with a concrete set of policy proposals. In 1994, when Republicans regained control of the House for the first time in four decades, they touted a 10-point plan they dubbed their “Contract with America.” It included poll-tested measures such as bills requiring members of Congress to live under laws it applied to the rest of America, adding a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution and imposing congressional term limits.

When Democrats took that majority back in 2006, their rallying cry was “Six for 06.″ Their package included raising the minimum wage and allowing Medicare to negotiate for lower drug prices.

Though these promises helped shape a governing blueprint for the new House majorities, many died in the Senate.

This year, President Donald Trump’s unpopularity alone may be enough to carry the day for Democrats. “Democrats essentially win this election by making it all about Trump,” said Kevin Kosar, a senior fellow and specialist in Congress at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.

Donald Trump

Police and venue security escorted disruptive individuals to restore order.

The Guardian - Donald Trump has said Ukraine needs “a new leader”, a day after making a deal with Vladimir Putin to buy large quantities of Russian diesel.  The US president suggested Volodymyr Zelenskyy has not done enough to end the war with Russia and blamed him for high diesel prices in the US. “I suggest they get a new leader who can make a deal because he could have made many deals and for some reason he never does,” Trump said.

Trump made the comments as Russia launched deadly strikes on civilians in Ukraine, which Zelenskyy said were a “thanks” to Trump for the diesel deal. The Ukrainian president has expressed outrage at the agreement announced by Trump on Friday, which the US president said was needed to reduce diesel prices, and comes ahead of November’s midterm elections in which fuel costs are a key voter issue.

Save Juneteenth

CBCPAC - Joe Biden awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Opal Lee, “the grandmother of Juneteenth,” in 2024. Donald Trump wanted to cancel Juneteenth celebrations forever. He’s trying to erase Black history. Opal Lee fought for decades to have Juneteenth recognized as a federal holiday — and this week, we celebrated her 100th birthday. ….That's why we've created a Black History Preservation Panel… Right now, Republicans across the country are trying to ban Black history books from libraries and schools, and totally erase Black history from public school curriculum. 

Bribes or payments?

The Hill -   President Trump is doing everything he can to win favor with a dissatisfied electorate before the midterms — including promising money. Speaking in San Antonio on Wednesday evening, Trump repeated his pledge to send $5,000 to every adult American if the GOP retains its narrow majorities in the House and the Senate.

Skeptics roll their eyes at the proposal, noting that previous Trump promises about checks purportedly garnered from tariff revenue and Department of Government Efficiency savings failed to materialize.

Trump’s promise would also become moot if Democrats merely win a majority in the House. The consensus among political insiders in both parties is that they are highly likely to do so.

Nevertheless, voters can “count on it” that the checks would arrive if the GOP pulled off a double-victory, Trump promised the crowd in San Antonio.

Democrats don’t see the Trump tactic as either serious or effective.

“In some places it might matter, but in most places it won’t,” Democratic strategist Hank Sheinkopf told this column. “In places where Republicans should do well, they’re being clobbered right now. It would take a lot of checks for people to change their minds.”

…A plan is already in motion sending $90 payments to more than 20 million people enrolled in Medicare Part B. In a separate move, almost 1 million people are receiving $500 checks, purportedly because they were overcharged under the terms of the Affordable Care Act (ACA).

….Announcing the $90 Medicare-related payments in a social media post late last week, Trump wrote that the money was intended “to help pay for [recipients’] Medicare Part B premiums, which we have already reduced by significant amounts.”

He added that the money would come from the Medicare Improvement Fund, which he derided as “a pointless ‘Slush Fund.’”

A separate fact sheet from the White House said the fund “has been given $2 billion by Congress for the purposes of making improvements to the Medicare fee-for-service program, but has never before been utilized.”

….The White House has pushed back against questions about the ethics of these actions, or whether they amount to electioneering….Richard Painter, who served as the chief White House ethics lawyer during former President George W. Bush’s administration, asserted that the taxpayer-funded Trump-centric TV ads “definitely crossed the line. Those were illegal. Those were propaganda.”

But Painter also characterized the pledge of the $5,000 checks in the event of a GOP midterm victory as “a stupid promise” rather than an illegal one — even as he doubted that the president could get such a windfall authorized by Congress.

And he seemed even more relaxed about the Medicare and ACA-related payments.

 

Things we get wrong about the "united states"

We’ve all picked up "facts" about the fifty states somewhere along the way, but not all of them hold up. Some are half-truths passed around for generations, others are just plain wrong. So, in an attempt to set the record straight once and for all, we’ve gathered some fun truths that clear up the biggest mix-ups about ourstates

Putin Cons Trump Into Making Massive Oil Deal

New Republic - President Donald Trump announced Friday that the U.S. would lift sanctions on the sale of Russian diesel—a move that will help Russian President Vladimir Putin far more than it’ll help Americans.The Treasury Department announced that the U.S. would waive sanctions on Russian diesel sold to the global market until April 2027. In a post on Truth Social, Trump claimed that Russia would “immediately” supply more than 300,000 tons of diesel fuel to the American and global marketplace. Russia agreed to supply another 500,000 tons in November and then “1,000,000 tons thereafter,” Trump added.

Ken Paxton

New Republic - Senate candidate Ken Paxton took nearly 1,000 business trips during his tenure as Texas Attorney General, costing taxpayers millions of dollars along the way. Only one in six of them actually had to do with work.

A new report from ProPublica and The Texas Tribune shows that Paxton has taken almost 1,000 trips out of state since 2015, accompanied by Texas police each time at a cost of $3.3 million to his constituents. His security detail alone cost $24,000 a month, while his predecessor Greg Abbott’s cost $7,400 a month. Of those 1,000 trips, research only linked 138 of them to actual business. In fact, Paxton didn’t even record them as such.

Indigenous People's Day

Newsworthy News -  Dozens of colleges are using government-backed grants to host Indigenous Peoples’ Day events on October 12, the same date as Columbus Day, a holiday presidents have called an answer to one of the worst acts of anti-Italian violence in American history.

Columbus Day began in 1892 after the lynching of 11 Italian Americans in New Orleans. White House proclamations under multiple presidents link the holiday to Italian American heritage and past discrimination.

Schools like Boston University and Brown University have renamed or replaced Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples’ Day.

College supporters say the switch honors Native American history rather than targeting Italian Americans. Surveys show most college students back the change, even as some Italian American groups push back.

Zelenskyy furious as Trump announces deal to buy Russian diesel

 The Guardian -  Donald Trump is on a fresh collision course with Volodymyr Zelenskyy and European allies after his stunning agreement to buy Russian diesel upended years of US and western pressure on the Kremlin to end its war against Ukraine.

Zelenskyy reacted furiously to Trump’s announcement of the deal with Vladimir Putin on Friday, calling it “absolutely terrible” and “not fair and not honest”.

The Ukrainian president said “back room deals” with the Russian leader would give Putin more chances on the battlefield. On Saturday morning, Ukrainian officials reported that a Russian attack had killed 12 people in the south-east, including three children, and Moscow claimed its troops were advancing in the east.