curated news excerpts & citations
Brian Bengs: Rules for Thee but not for Me? I Prefer Rules for We.
We should treat healthcare tax credits like Congress treats billionaire & corporate tax cuts
As I was walking my dogs on the trails near my home yesterday, a “Eureka” moment gave a common-sense solution to solve the government shutdown, preserve regular folks’ access to healthcare, and budget problems all at once!
Let me start by acknowledging that South Dakota’s Senators Mike Rounds and John Thune actually deserve credit for this idea. Applying their inscrutable logic to help out working families should get strong support across the political spectrum. I don’t need the spotlight for the idea, I just don’t want to see millions of Americans lose healthcare coverage due to price increases.
Simply put, let’s treat Washington’s Medicaid and Affordable Care Act (ACA) healthcare cuts the same way Mike Rounds and his “fiscally responsible” colleagues in Washington treats tax giveaways for billionaires and corporations: If we’re paying for it now, we can afford it next year.
In order to understand this idea, it’s important to break down the political context over the past 8 years. I can’t help it, it’s the professor in me. Washington’s typical strategy is to confuse regular folks by overcomplicating simple concepts and oversimplifying complicated concepts, so it helps to be thorough.
(Brian Bengs more…)
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NY Times: Why Now? The Lost Chances to Reach a Hostage Deal, and a Cease-Fire, Months Ago
On Gaza, President Trump put few, if any, guardrails on Israel’s offensive, bucking international demands for a cease-fire. Then he changed course.
… the Israeli attempt to kill Hamas negotiators in Qatar, dropping a bomb on their temporary residence, both angered Mr. Trump and awakened him. It gave the United States the opportunity to rally Arab states around the 20-point plan, even if they thought many of the details would not work.
…Hamas said “yes, but,” agreeing to the first terms — the hostage release in return for a prisoner swap — but insisting on more negotiations on the critical next steps. Mr. Trump ignored the “but,” and simply took the partial yes as full agreement.
(NY Times more…)
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Charlie Sykes: The Seal Team Six President?
It is not clear whether this was another errant DM to Pam Bondi like the previous one where he ordered the prosecutions of his political enemies. But several points cry out.- The most obvious is: Joe Biden was not president of the United States on January 6, 2021. Donald J. Trump was.
- He seems to have forgotten that. Which is worrying, don’t you think?
- Almost everything else in the post is … false.
- Which leaves the ongoing enigma: Is he lying or nuts? (And yes, I know that these are not mutually exclusive choices.)
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Heather Cox Richardson: Letters from an American – October 12, 2025
On October 9, President Donald J. Trump’s office issued an official proclamation declaring Monday, October 13, “Columbus Day.” The proclamation says that the day is one on which “our Nation honors the legendary Christopher Columbus—the original American hero, a giant of Western civilization, and one of the most gallant and visionary men to ever walk the face of the earth. This Columbus Day, we honor his life with reverence and gratitude, and we pledge to reclaim his extraordinary legacy of faith, courage, perseverance, and virtue from the left-wing arsonists who have sought to destroy his name and dishonor his memory.”
The proclamation goes on to present a white Christian nationalist version of American history, with much more emphasis on Christianity than Trump’s previous, similar proclamations. …
…This proclamation completely misunderstands the fifteenth-century world of expanding European maritime routes that entirely reworked world trade—including trade in human beings—and the role of Italian mariner Christopher Columbus, who worked for Spain’s monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella, in that expansion.
It also misses what historians call the “Columbian Exchange”: the transfer of plants and animals between the Americas and the “Old World”—Europe, Asia, and Africa—after Columbus’s first landfall in the Bahamas in 1492. That exchange went both ways and transformed the globe, but its effect on the Americas was devastating. When Columbus and his sailors “discovered” the “New World,” they brought with them both ideologies and germs that would decimate the peoples living there.
Estimates of the number of Native people living in North America and South America in 1490 vary widely, but there were at least as many as 50 million, and possibly as many as 100 million. In the next 200 years, displacement, enslavement, war, and especially disease would kill about 90% of those native peoples. Most historians see the destruction of America’s Indigenous peoples as the brutal triumph of European white men over those they perceived to be inferior.
Historians are not denigrating historical actors or the nation when they uncover sordid parts of our past. Historians study how and why societies change. …
…The Columbus Day holiday began in the 1920s, when a resurgent Ku Klux Klan tried to create a lily-white country by attacking not just Black Americans, but also immigrants, Jews, and Catholics. …
…To combat the growing animosity toward Catholics and racial minorities, the Knights of Columbus began to highlight the roles those groups had played in American history. …
They also turned to an old American holiday. Since the late 1860s, Italian Americans in New York City had celebrated a “Columbus Day” to honor the heritage they shared with the famous Italian explorer. …
The Knights intended for Columbus Day to honor the important contributions of immigrants—and Catholics—to American society. …
As society changes, the values we want to commemorate shift. In the 1920s, Columbus mattered to Americans who opposed the Ku Klux Klan because celebrating an Italian defended a multicultural society. Now, though, he represents the devastation of America’s Indigenous people at the hands of European colonists who brought to North America and South America germs and a fever for gold and God. It is not “left-wing arson” to want to commemorate a different set of values than the country held in the 1920s.
What is arson, though, is the attempt to skew history to serve a modern-day political narrative. Rejecting an honest account of the past makes it impossible to see accurate patterns. The lessons we learn about how society changes will be false, and the decisions we make based on those false patterns will not be grounded in reality.
And a society grounded in fiction, rather than reality, cannot function.
(Heather Cox Richardson more…)
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James Eagle: Where are the world’s immigrants
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The pace has quickened. Since 2020, nearly 30 million more people have joined the migrant population. Europe absorbed the largest share, driven by war and labour shortages. Asia plays both roles, sending workers abroad and drawing them in. Within Africa, freer movement is quietly redrawing migration patterns.This is not a temporary spike. Migration is becoming the pressure valve for ageing economies and geopolitical shocks alike, some of which we have yet to experience.
(James Eagle more…)
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USA Today: Trump would have doctors like me leave undocumented patients to die. We won’t.
As a doctor, I cannot stand aside and stay silent when a person, regardless of citizenship status, is ill.
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Allison Gill: My Latest FOIA: Truth Social DMs
Recently, Trump posted a message to Pam Bondi that was meant to be a direct message. I want to know what other official messages he’s sending to cabinet members.
…My lawyer and I got to thinking that if Trump is conducting official government business using direct messaging on social media apps, those messages should be subject to the Freedom of Information Act.
So we’ve filed the following FOIA request:
This is for the Truth Social and Twitter accounts of Kristi Noem. We’ve also filed identical requests for the accounts of Pam Bondi, Kash Patel, Tulsi Gabbard, Russ Vought, and Pete Hegseth.Let’s see if we can drag their behind-the-scenes communications into the light, and maybe set precedent that these private social media messages are official government communications subject to FOIA in the future.
(Allison Gill more…)
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ProPublica: Trump Is Accusing Foes With Multiple Mortgages of Fraud. Records Show 3 of His Cabinet Members Have Them.
The White House has targeted opponents, including a Fed governor, for having more than one primary residence on their loan papers. ProPublica found that, in one case, a Trump cabinet secretary got two such mortgages in quick succession.
(ProPublica more…)
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Ruth Ann Crystal MD: COVID & Health News, 10/12/25
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Fast Company: Why Grand Central Station just replaced all of its ads with art
Brandon Stanton turns Grand Central into a love letter to the people who make New York what it is.
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The process of clearing out the space and replacing it with art, Stanton explains, was monumental. “I would say it took 1,000 ‘yeses’ to make this happen. One ‘no’ could have completely made it fall apart,” he says.
(Fast Company more…)
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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