Rep. Mark Pocan - Yes, the government will reopen today.
But here’s what won’t happen:
No protection for 22M paying more for ACA
15M still losing healthcare due to Big Ugly Law
SNAP cuts remain, $180B slashed from the #1 anti-poverty program
Billionaire tax cuts untouched
I hope my Republican colleagues are tanned and rested after their 7-week paid vacation. We’re not stopping. The fight for working people is just getting started.
November 13, 2025
Starbucks strike
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Robert Reich - Reminder that Starbucks’ CEO made 6,666x more than the company's median employee in 2024. This was the widest CEO-to-Worker pay gap in the entire S&P 500.
Judge orders release of hundreds arrested during Chicago immigration attack
The Guardian - A federal judge has ordered the release of hundreds of people who were arrested over the last few months in the Chicago area amid the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration raids across the city. On Wednesday, US district judge Jeffrey Cummings ordered the justice department to produce a list showing which of the 615 possible class members are still in custody by 19 November, the Chicago Tribune reports.
According to Cummings, he would allow the members’ release on a $1,500 bond as long as they have no criminal history or prior removal order. The ACLU of Illinois said that the order will mean the immediate release of 13 people who have been detained by federal officials.
As part of Wednesday’s order, Cummings also prohibited the government from pressuring detainees to agree to voluntary deportation while their cases are pending, the Chicago Tribune added.
Weather
Newsweek - A rapid weather shift will impact Texas, Missouri, Arkansas and Oklahoma this week, as record-challenging warmth sweeps over the region just days after a powerful Arctic cold front prompted freezing temperatures and even snowfall. The dramatic turnaround could break high-temperature records and enhance wildfire risks where vegetation has quickly dried out.
D.C. is slowing e-bikes down, citing teen crime and speeding issues
Washington Post - D.C.’s dockless electric bikes have become slower, and in some cases more expensive, after police raised concerns that the rental vehicles are enabling teen crime and misbehavior.
In mid-October, e-bike rental companies Lime and Veo agreed to lower the maximum speed boost on their e-bikes across the city. In certain crowded nightlife areas where teenagers congregate, all rented e-bikes are being slowed down even further.
“Anecdotally, we have some concerns about some of the shared transportation equipment being used in — to commit crime,” Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) said at a news conference Wednesday morning. “We want to make sure that all the bicycles can be available for the purpose that they are intended and curb any misuse.”
Meanwhile. . .
The Wrap - ev. Jesse Jackson was admitted to the hospital Wednesday for treatment relating to his progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP) diagnosis.
Health
The Guardian - The rate of children and teenagers living with high blood pressure globally has nearly doubled because of a toxic combination of unhealthy diets, mass inactivity and soaring levels of obesity, according to the largest review of its kind.
Experts said 114 million children who have developed hypertension even before reaching adulthood were facing potentially deadly and lifelong harm, including cardiovascular disease, kidney disease and a myriad of serious health complications.
Washington Post - Regularly listening to music is linked to a lower risk of developing dementia, according to a new study. In the study, published in October,
researchers looked at data spanning a decade and involving more than
10,000 relatively healthy people, aged 70 and older, in Australia.
People who listened to music most days slashed their risk of developing
dementia by 39 percent compared with those who did not regularly listen
to music, the study found.
FDA Announces Nationwide Recall of Baby Formula Linked to Infant Botulism Outbreak
California will revoke licenses of 17,000 immigrant truck drivers
Independent, UK - California has caved to President Donald Trump and will revoke 17,000 commercial driver’s licenses given to immigrants. It comes after the Trump administration raised concerns about people in the country illegally receiving licenses to drive a semitruck or a bus. Gov. Gavin Newsom said the revocations are for violations of state law, but he didn’t provide specifics.
Small business
Institute for Local Self Reliance - More than 100 small businesses from across the country joined a lively virtual briefing hosted by ILSR and 15 Small Business Rising (SBR) coalition partners. The briefing shed light on how large corporations, including retailers such as Walmart and Amazon, are bullying suppliers into providing them with illegal pricing deals, fueling consolidation at the expense of independent businesses and consumers. Featuring leading antimonopoly and small-business advocates, the event galvanized small businesses to fight back and assert their rights, rather than accept price discrimination as the cost of doing business. A key takeaway from the briefing is that, as a small business owner, your stories matter and can drive meaningful change. Watch the replay here. And share your story here.
Jeffrey Epstein
NY Times - President Trump’s long friendship with Jeffrey Epstein came to an apparent end in the mid-2000s. But Mr. Epstein remained intently focused on Mr. Trump for years afterward, seeking to exploit the remnants of their relationship up until his arrest on federal sex-trafficking charges in 2019.
In more than 20,000 pages of Mr. Epstein’s typo-strewn emails and other messages released by a congressional committee on Wednesday, Mr. Epstein insulted Mr. Trump and hinted that he had damaging information on him.
By turns gossipy, scathing and scheming, the messages show influential people pressing Mr. Epstein for insight into Mr. Trump, and Mr. Epstein casting himself as the ultimate Trump translator, someone who knew him intimately and was “the one able to take him down.”
The Guardian - Newly released Jeffrey Epstein emails have cast further doubt on Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s account of when he cut ties with the child sex offender and his denials about meeting his accuser Virginia Giuffre.
In March 2011, four months after he later claimed to have ended his relationship with Epstein, the former prince told him and the convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell: “I can’t take any more of this,” in response to allegations put to him by the Mail on Sunday...
In her posthumous memoir, Giuffre alleged she was forced to have sex with the former prince three times – once at Maxwell’s home in London, once at Epstein’s address in Manhattan, and once on the disgraced financier’s private island, Little St James.
Jeffrey Epstein Called Donald Trump 'Borderline Insane' and Questioned If He Had 'Early Dementia' in Emails Before Death
New Republic - Newly released emails suggest that President Donald Trump may have spent his first Thanksgiving in office accompanied by none other than Jeffrey Epstein.
The Guardian - In a rare break from Trump, Republican House speaker, Mike Johnson, said that he didn’t believe that the Epstein case was a “hoax” and called for the release of the case documents, and some of Trump’s supporters burned their Maga hats...
Trump, who was friendly with Epstein for at least 15 years before having a falling out in 2004, has consistently denied any knowledge of or involvement in Epstein’s criminal activities. Still, Trump’s past association with Epstein continues to haunt him politically, and in recent months he has found himself embroiled in headline after headline regarding his past ties to the disgraced financier....
Democrats on the committee said that the emails were part of more than 23,000 documents turned over by Epstein’s estate as part of their ongoing investigation into Epstein and that they are still reviewing the documents.....
The release of previously unseen emails sent by convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein has thrust Donald Trump back into the center of the long-running Epstein controversy that has plagued his administration for months, inflamed parts of his own political base and offered Democrats an ongoing line of political attack.
On Wednesday, Democrats on the House oversight and government reform committee released email exchanges from 2011, 2015 and 2019 that they say were provided by the estate of the late Epstein, who died by suicide in federal prison in 2019 while awaiting trial on federal charges of sex-trafficking minors.
NBC News - Jeffrey Epstein referenced Trump in emails to his associate Ghislaine Maxwell and a journalist, claiming in one that Trump "knew about the girls," according to emails released by House Democrats. Democrats on the House Oversight Committee released three email chains, sent between 2011 and 2019, saying the documents came from the late convicted sex offender's estate as part of the committee's investigation into the Epstein case.
The emails also showed Epstein saying Clinton had "never" been to his private island, despite Trump's claims to the contrary. Trump and Clinton have both denied any wrongdoing and have never been charged with any criminal activity.
NPR - Epstein mocked Trump and even wrote a note saying there isn’t one decent cell in Trump’s body to former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, NPR’s Stephen Fowler tells Up First. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the release of the emails proves nothing.
Hartmann Report - The Epstein Affair Has Moved From Sleaze to a Crisis for American Democracy Itself
World still on track for catastrophic 2.6C temperature rise
The Guardian - The world is still on track for a catastrophic 2.6C increase in temperature as countries have not made sufficiently strong climate pledges, while emissions from fossil fuels have hit a record high, two major reports have found.
Despite their promises, governments’ new emission-cutting plans submitted for the Cop30 climate talks taking place in Brazil have done little to avert dangerous global heating for the fourth consecutive year, according to the Climate Action Tracker update.
The world is now anticipated to heat up by 2.6C above preindustrial times by the end of the century – the same temperature rise forecast last year.
This level of heating easily breaches the thresholds set out in the Paris climate pact, which every country agreed to, and would set the world spiralling into a catastrophic new era of extreme weather and severe hardships.
A separate report found the fossil fuel emissions driving the climate crisis will rise by about 1% this year to hit a record high, but that the rate of rise has more than halved in recent years.
The past decade has seen emissions from coal, oil and gas rise by 0.8% a year compared with 2.0% a year during the decade before. The accelerating rollout of renewable energy is now close to supplying the annual rise in the world’s demand for energy, but has yet to surpass it.
“A world at 2.6C means global disaster,” said Bill Hare, CEO of Climate Analytics. A world this hot would probably trigger major “tipping points” that would cause the collapse of key Atlantic Ocean circulation, the loss of coral reefs, the long-term deterioration of ice sheets and the conversion of the Amazon rainforest to a savannah.
“That all means the end of agriculture in the UK and across Europe, drought and monsoon failure in Asia and Africa, lethal heat and humidity,” said Hare. “This is not a good place to be. You want to stay away from that.”
POLITICS
Ex-top aide to Gavin Newsom indicted in scheme to steal money from ex-US health secreta
Roll Call - The longest partial government shutdown in history ended late Wednesday night when President Donald Trump signed into law a short-term spending patch that funds federal agencies through January. Flanked by House GOP leaders around his desk in the Oval Office, Trump signed the bill as he repeated his call for abolishing the Senate filibuster to avoid the risk of another shutdown.
NBC News - Trump's directive to change the name of the Department of Defense to the Department of War could cost as much as $2 billion, according to six people with knowledge of the potential cost.
NBC News - A political consultant who formerly worked as chief of staff for California Gov. Gavin Newsom has been indicted on fraud and tax crime charges.
Cost of military occupatioin of cities
Intercept - President Donald Trump’s military occupations of U.S. cities have cost nearly half a billion dollars, according to an expert estimate provided exclusively to The Intercept.
The current $473 million price tag now includes $172 million spent in Los Angeles, where troops arrived in June; almost $270 million for the occupation of Washington, D.C., which began in August; nearly $15 million for Portland, Oregon, which was announced in September; and more than $3 million for Memphis, Tennessee, and almost $13 million for Chicago, which both began last month.
The National Priorities Project, a nonpartisan research group, tallied these totals from open-source information and costs-per-day estimates supplied to The Intercept by the office of Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill.
Canada just lost its measles elimination status — and the U.S. could be next
NBC News - Canada has been unable to control an ongoing outbreak of the measles virus for at least a year, and now the nation has lost its measles elimination status, the country’s Public Health Agency announced.
The U.S. is also on the brink of losing its status, after eliminating measles in 2000. As of last week, 1,681 cases had been confirmed in the U.S. this year alone, the most in more than 30 years, after an outbreak that started in West Texas.
Past greenhouse gas progress
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| Data: IEA; Chart: Sara Wise/Axios |
Axios- The chart above shows three different greenhouse gas emission scenarios from the International Energy Agency. .
- The top blue line shows what the IEA was predicting would happen with policies in place and under consideration back in 2014.
- The middle pink line shows what IEA is predicting today based upon policies currently in place.
- The lower purple line shows where emissions from the energy sector could go if policies under consideration are put in place.
Reality check: Even so, past performance doesn't dictate future results.
"There is no guarantee that we will take stronger action on climate change in the future. I hope we will. I think we will because that's been the trend over the last few decades," said Berkeley Earth climate scientist Zeke Hausfather in an interview.
- "If the 21st century is led by leaders who share ideology closer to the Trump administration, we won't."
The bottom line: The possible trajectories are better than a decade ago, but they still indicate significant global warming.
November 12, 2025
Politics
NY Times - House Republicans on Wednesday released 23,000 pages of documents from Epstein’s estate after months of delays, which journalists and the political world are now combing through.
In a move that has shocked families across the nation, the Supreme Court has sided with the Trump administration by halting full Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) payments for the foreseeable future. This decision comes as part of a sweeping set of reforms targeting illegal immigration and federal spending. Millions of working-class Americans who rely on SNAP to feed their families now find themselves waiting and worrying, as the administration prioritizes border security and fiscal restraint over expanding government benefits.
NBC News - Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., swore in Rep. Adelita Grijalva, D-Ariz., whom he had refused to seat when the House was out of town during the shutdown after her Sept. 23 special election victory.
One of Grijalva’s first moves was to provide the 218th signature on a bipartisan discharge petition that would allow rank-and-file lawmakers to bypass Johnson and force a floor vote to release the Justice Department files from its Epstein investigation. The measure is expected to pass the House in the coming weeks, though it would face long odds in the Republican-led Senate. But it will keep the issue in the conversation when Trump and Johnson would rather shift the focus elsewhere.
Mayra - Trump’s former Chief of Staff John Kelly confirms that Trump called American service members “suckers” and “losers,” refused to visit their graves, and that he didn’t want to be seen with amputee veterans because “it doesn’t look good for me”
Donald Trump has repeated a request to Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, for a pardon for Benjamin Netanyahu, who is on trial in three separate corruption cases
NY Times - House Democrats on Wednesday released emails in which Jeffrey Epstein wrote that President Trump had “spent hours at my house” with one of Mr. Epstein’s victims, among other messages that suggested that the convicted sex offender believed Mr. Trump knew more about his abuse than he has acknowledged. Mr. Trump has emphatically denied any involvement in or knowledge of Mr. Epstein’s sex-trafficking operation. He has said that he and Mr. Epstein, the disgraced financier who died by suicide in federal prison in 2019, were once friendly but had a falling out.
John F Kennedy’s grandson Jack Schlossberg has said he will run for the US House next year, announcing Tuesday that he was seeking a key New York seat set to be vacated by longtime Democrat Jerry Nadler.
NPR - Some Democrats have called for Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer to be ousted from his leadership role, even though he voted against the plan. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries dodged questions about Schumer with reporters last night, highlighting divisions within the party.
Time - Many in the U.S. are already concerned about the growing role of wealth in politics, and the influence it could have on lawmakers. A 2023 Pew study found that over 70% of Americans believed there should be spending limits for political campaigns, while 85% believed that “the cost of political campaigns makes it hard for good people to run for office” and 80% said those who donate to campaigns have too much influence over members of Congress.
Socialist looks like she will be next Seattle mayor
Politico - A progressive activist appears to be on the cusp of winning her bid for mayor of Seattle in a narrow victory that has echoes of the race to lead New York City. With a dwindling number of ballots left to count, Katie Wilson led Mayor Bruce Harrell by just over 1,300 votes, according to results released Tuesday by King County Elections. The incumbent led by more than 10,000 votes the day after the election but mail-in ballots counted after Nov. 4 favored the challenger.
Harrell has not conceded but it was unlikely he can make up the difference with the ballots left to count, Democratic strategists said. “Kate Wilson won 61.23% of the 6,121 ballots counted today. Huge percentage and her total is close to not requiring a recount,” Crystal Fincher, a Seattle-based political consultant, said by text after the latest results. “I’m comfortable calling this race for Wilson now.”
Polls
Newsweek - President Donald Trump’s handling of the federal government has lost support among Republicans and independents as the government shutdown stretches into its sixth week, according to a new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research...
The survey, conducted after Democrats’ recent off-year election victories but before Congress advanced measures to end the shutdown, found that only 33% of U.S. adults approve of Trump’s management of the government, down from 43% in March. The decline was fueled largely by falling support among Republicans and independents. About 68% of Republicans now approve of Trump’s management, compared with 81% earlier this year. Among independents, approval dropped from 38% to 25%.
The penny dies at 232
New York Times - The American penny died on Wednesday in Philadelphia. It was 232.
The cause was irrelevance and expensiveness, the Treasury Department said.
Nothing could be bought any more with a penny, not even penny candy. Moreover, the cost to mint the penny had risen to more than 3 cents, a financial absurdity that doomed the coin.
The final pennies were minted on Wednesday afternoon in Philadelphia. Top Treasury officials were on hand for its final journey. No last words were recorded....
Even after death, the penny will not vanish for a while longer. There are some 250 billion pennies in circulation and they will be out there, gathering dust, or maybe, very, very rarely, being used to help pay for something. As the last pennies slowly disappear, businesses will have no choice but to round transactions to the nearest nickel when dealing with cash.
With the penny’s demise, coin enthusiasts’ worried eyes now turn toward its longtime associate, the nickel. Its purchasing power has also shrunk to nearly nothing, and it costs more than a dime to make.
Taiwan’s Population Plunges Further
Newsweek - There were more deaths than births in Taiwan for the 22nd consecutive month, according to new government data for October.
More troubling for policymakers than the sheer drop in population, however, is the island's steady march toward what the United Nations classifies as a “super-aged society,” where people aged 65 and older make up at least 20 percent of the population.
Birth rates are falling across many high- and middle-income countries as younger generations delay or opt out of having children amid rising living costs and shifting attitudes toward family life.
Taiwan now has one of the world’s lowest birth rates, raising concerns over the economic impact as a dwindling number of working-age people are left to care for a rapidly growing elderly population.
Weather
Florida has been blasted by a cold snap, bringing plummeting temperatures as low as 26 F in some parts of the state. In Miami, the temperature of 48 F recorded on Tuesday was the coldest on record for a November 11 since 1913—over 110 years ago—according to the National Weather Service (NWS).
Newsweek - Parts of America have been told to continue to brace themselves for more wintry weather, as gusty winds as high as 100 mph and up to 2 feet of snow are expected to blanket certain areas from Wednesday, with some areas experiencing snowfall until Friday afternoon, according to the National Weather Service (NWS), which has issued alerts for three states...The following three states have been issued winter weather advisories by the NWS: New York, Nevada, and parts of California's Northeastern region.
Washington Post under Jeff Bezos
NPR- On at least three occasions in the past two weeks, an official Washington Post
editorial has taken on matters in which owner Jeff Bezos has a
financial or corporate interest without noting his stake. In each case,
the Post’s official editorial line landed in sync with its owner’s financial interests
Getting folks working together
Nice News - One group of pals in Charleston, South Carolina, formed The MARSH Project to restore a tidal wetland that runs through their neighborhood. They host trash cleanup events, plant native species, and in the process, gain a new sense of hope. “We can be paralyzed by the bad news that we are fed every day, or we can work within our local communities and engage with people and actually do things,” said co-founder Joel Caldwell.
Decline in school math skills
Free Press - Between 2020 and 2025, the number of freshmen at the University of California San Diego falling short of middle-school math standards grew nearly thirty fold, reports Tanner Nau. Almost 10 percent of students now need remedial math that teaches basic first-grade concepts. The slide in math has also reached the Ivy League. More
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