curated news excerpts & citations
… trying to ‘unbury the lede’
Miles Taylor:
Donald Trump has fully transformed your government into a casino
Donald Trump used to buy TV ads to lure gamblers into his casinos and bolster his brand. Now he’s just using your taxpayer dollars.
If you watched TV this week, you might have seen ads of the president vowing to “rout the fake news media” and urging viewers to “love me,” followed by a strange new tagline: “paid for by the U.S. government.” That’s your money, and it’s paying for the latest vanity project the president has cooked up.
The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that the ads were funded through U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the agency that’s supposed to be guarding our ports and borders. By Sunday, the ads had aired more than 2,300 times on local stations alone. As someone who used to help run DHS, I can say without hesitation this is totally unprecedented and head-spinningly corrupt. Border money is supposed to be spent on the border, not on presidential self-promotion, and certainly not weeks before an election.
(Former Bush ethics czar Richard Painter went as far as to say it could be an impeachable offense.)
For me, the ads completed the image of Trump returning to his casino-hustler roots. He used to run gambling houses in Atlantic City. One of them was literally called Trump Castle, and its TV commercials serenaded gamblers with a jingle: “You’re the king! You’re the king of the castle!”
Danielle Kurtzleben @ NPR:
How Trump keeps undercutting his anti-communist message
Marc Elias :
Even Trump’s AI won’t back his election lies
Mitch Jackson:
“President of the Unites States.”
Ken Klippenstein:
Trump’s Finger Gets Closer to Nuclear Button
Heather Cox Richardson:
Letters from an American – September 30, 2026
… “U.S. withdraws forces in Iraq as balance of power shifts to Iran.”
Jennifer Rubin:
34 Days to the Midterms
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Eleanor Thornber @ Bloomberg:
Climate Change Is Making Groceries More ExpensiveFrom seaweed to sirloin and tomatoes to corn, grocery items around the world are getting more expensive as climate change turns temporary weather-related price spikes into a more persistent driver of inflation, a new study shows.
Analysts at Zero Carbon Analytics, an international research firm, mapped food price spikes between 2022 and 2026, tracing them to extreme weather events they say are tied to climate change.
So far this year, they’ve connected all but one of the price jumps they documented to unprecedented temperatures, drought or rainfall, meaning the events were more extreme than any similar instance in the historical climate record. The lone exception was a winter storm that sent US tomato prices soaring about 40% but wasn’t made worse by climate change.
(Eleanor Thornber @ Bloomberg more…)
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Elisabeth Marnik, PhD @ Your Local Epidemiologist:
What we lose when the research stopsWhen “DEI” research is cut, what happens to community health?
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Joseph Cox @ 404 Media:
How Cities Are Forced to Funnel License Plate Data to a Massive Federal Surveillance ProgramThe Trump administration is using an anti-drug trafficking grant program from the 1980s to force cities around the country to funnel their ongoing collection of automated license plate reader data into large federal surveillance centers that fall under the White House’s jurisdiction, according to public records and court documents reviewed by 404 Media.
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Anne Applebaum @ Atlantic:
Ideologues have transformed American foreign policy into a tool of private gain and antidemocratic reactionIn the summer of 2025, the government of Brazil suddenly found itself in a deep crisis. The Trump administration had unexpectedly imposed 50 percent tariffs on the country’s products, threatening everyone from coffee planters to shoe manufacturers. At the same time, the United States canceled the visas of eight Brazilian supreme-court justices and placed unprecedented financial and travel sanctions on a powerful justice and his family.
Many things about this crisis were novel. For the first time anyone could remember, an American administration had used tariffs not for economic reasons but as a tool to influence the internal politics of a friendly democracy. President Trump was publicly fulminating against what he called the “WITCH HUNT” against Jair Bolsonaro, the former president of Brazil, who was then on trial for plotting to carry out a coup after losing an election in 2022. Some of Bolsonaro’s followers had stormed Brazil’s Parliament and other federal buildings, likely inspired by the actions of Trump supporters on January 6, 2021. Steve Bannon, who called the Brazilian insurrectionists “freedom fighters,” was one of many MAGA boosters who cheered them on. When combined with local grievances, the language of American election denial was right at home in Brazil.
(Anne Applebaum @ Atlantic more…)
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James Eagle:
ICE arrests of people with no criminal history have risen fastest
The widening gap between those with violent convictions and those with no criminal charges is not driven by preference. It’s driven by the increasing quotas for deporting illegal immigrants, rather than ICE enforcement officers deliberately targeting those without criminal convictions.The pool of those illegal immigrants without convictions is simply larger than those with convictions, and so that’s why you are seeing an increase in non-conviction arrests. ICE is actively looking for illegal immigrants now to arrest, and most of those people that they find and arrest have no criminal convictions.
(James Eagle more…)
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Michael Wriston, Em Chapin @ Project Salt Box:
ICE funds tent camp for detained women
The Department of Homeland Security will pay Akima Infrastructure Protection, which runs migrant detention at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, $7.2 million to build a tent facility for detained women near Buffalo, N.Y., after the state barred county jails from holding people for immigration authorities.
(Michael Wriston, Em Chapin @ Project Salt Box more…)
A field guide to claims
Last Days in Two Nations
Climate.us
formerly Climate.gov
Climate Solutions Explorer
Have I Been Flocked?
Brockovich AI Data Center Reporting
resources tracking the “Andes” hantavirus outbreak
Apocalypse Early Warning System
Al Jazeera Death toll and injuries live tracker
Mike Ludwig @ truthout: ICE Says 51 People Died in Custody Under Trump. Experts Say That’s an Undercount.
ICE Accountability Project
Sergio Martínez-Beltrán, Ximena Bustillo, Jasmine Garsd @ NPR: Deaths of migrants in ICE custody hit record high under Trump
- September 18: Carlos Josue Marchena Marchena
- August 31: Pierre Damas Bel
- August 1: Edwin Lopez-Cornejo
- July 19: Jose Chajon-Raxon
- July 14: Juan Jairo Coronilla Duran
- July 13: Joan Sebastian Guerrero
- July 7: Lorenzo Salgado Araujo
- June 4: Mamuka Artmeladze
- April 16: Aled Damien Carbonell-Betancourt
- March 25: Jose Guadalupe Ramos-Solano
- March 16: Royer Perez-Jimenez
- March 14: Naseer Paktiawil
- February 25: Nurul Amin Shah Alam
April 1 – Jennifer Peltz and Jake Offenhartz @ AP: Death of a refugee left at a Buffalo doughnut shop by Border Patrol is ruled a homicide - January 24: Alex Pretti
- January 14: Heber Sanchaz Dominguez
- January 14: Victor Manuel Diaz
- January 9: Parady La
- January 7: Renée Good
- January 6: Luis Beltran Yanez-Cruz
- January 5: Luis Gustavo Nunez Caceres
- January 3: Geraldo Lunas Campos
- December 31, 2025: Keith Porter
Suffering Under President Obama
NACDL Criminal Case Tracker
Texas Tribune: A Walk for Peace: photos of Fort Worth monks’ journey to Washington
Walk for Peace – Dhammacetiya – The Ancient Sacred Buddhist Scripture Stupas
Margaret Chase Smith: Declaration of Conscience
NPR: January 6, 2021: A visual archive
Accountability Initiative ICE List
GriftMatrix
Trump Action Tracker
Timeline: Tracking the Trump Justice Department’s Anti-Voting Shift
Tracking the Lawsuits Against Trump’s Agenda
Trump Pardons Database
Project 2025 Tracker
DOGE Tracker
ProPublica: Elon Musk’s Demolition Crew
Wired: 6 Tools for Tracking the Trump Administration’s Attacks on Civil Liberties
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