Ken Griffin

Ken Griffin, CEO of the Hedge Fund Citadel, has donated $3 billion to higher education in south Florida. This is the kind of thing that the richest in our country should be doing: put the money to work in the public realm instead of just hoarding it. 

It's hard to imagine how much money you must have to be able to donate $3 billion to anything. Looks to me like we have to increase taxes on the super-wealthy, even if it's a one-time tax like California is considering. That item will be on the California ballot on Election Day in November. But wait, isn't South Florida in increasing peril due to climate change and sea level rise? Seems like there could be safer spaces to build even more.

BY  HEATHER HOLLINGSWORTH

Updated 3:38 PM CDT, October 1, 2026Carnegie Mellon University announced Wednesday that hedge fund CEO Ken Griffin is donating $3 billion, with the bulk of the money for a new campus in Miami focused on societal challenges. 

The Pittsburgh-based private research university said the gift is the largest ever single gift to a U.S. university. Other donations topping the billion-dollar mark include $1.8 billion from former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg to Johns Hopkins University in 2018. And Nike co-founder Phil Knight and his wife, Penny, also have been prolific donors, including a $2 billion gift to Oregon Health & Science University in 2025.

Griffin’s gift includes $2 billion to build a new 35-acre campus in Miami’s Wynwood neighborhood, just north of downtown. The campus is expected to enroll around 3,500 undergraduate, master’s and doctoral students. Construction is scheduled to begin next year.

Rather than academic majors, it will focus on what the university and Griffin described in a news release as “grand challenge areas,” such as human health and biological discovery; national security and strategic capabilities; energy and climate resilience; and advanced manufacturing and industrial transformation.

The rest of the money will be divided evenly between the Pittsburgh campus’ computer science program, which will be renamed after Griffin, and other unspecified projects on the main campus.

“Throughout our history, CMU has anticipated moments of profound technological change and responded with new ways of thinking and solving problems,” Carnegie Mellon’s President Farnam Jahanian said in a news release praising Griffin. “ Artificial intelligence represents one of the defining intellectual developments of our time, and it demands that we rethink how we educate students, conduct research and partner with others.”

Colleges are facing growing pressure to prepare students for a workforce that is rapidly being transformed by AI. Job postings including AI and machine learning in the skills requirements or job title are exploding. 

At the same time, financial pressures on higher education are mounting. International enrollment is dropping, just as many states are seeing their classes of high school seniors begin to shrink because of U.S. demographic changes. Meanwhile, expenses like fuel, healthcare and technology are rising.

Griffin, a GOP megadonor who founded the Citadel investment firm, owns a waterfront home in Miami, which is part of a growing metropolitan area whose population tops 6.4 million. 

The area already is home to the University of Miami, a private research university; Florida International University, a public research university; and Miami Dade College, which started out as a community college but also offers some four-year degrees. Combined, enrollment at the three schools totals around 135,000. Several smaller private colleges are also based in the area. 

But Griffin, who has donated over the years to causes such as medical research, charter schools and other universities, saw room for something new.

“The opportunity to bring Carnegie Mellon to Miami places our city at the heart of humanistic and scientific advancement and amplifies the University’s international reach and impact,” said Griffin, who is joining Carnegie Mellon’s Board of Trustees, in a news release.

Even before the announcement, Carnegie Mellon had growing ties to Florida, a state where conservatives have increased their influence on higher education. 

Its computer science department runs a program designed to teach middle school students in Florida and several other states about AI. The university also is involved in a partnership with the Gates Foundation to deploy AI-powered course materials for introductory math classes at Miami Dade College.

HEATHER HOLLINGSWORTH

Hollingsworth has worked for The AP for 25 years, covering stories of interest in the Midwest and beyond. She is based in Kansas City, Missouri.

Story on AP

Greg Palast

I have followed Greg Palast's writing for years. How he discovers some of his info I don't know and he won't say. He can be rather infuriating. Not AT him, but at what he writes about. In the back of my mind is a little voice saying, "He's right! Dammit!" And another voice says, "It can't be that bad." But it often is.

I used to think the “Horseshoe Theory” was horsesh*t. The ”horseshoe” theorem is that, like the two far ends of a horseshoe, extremists of the political Right and Left will meet and echo each other.

My talk at a building with Jesus Christ on the wall showed me that, to my chagrin,  the “horseshoe” is alive and well.  

Some Sundays back, I was asked to speak to a church discussion group about my investigations of vote suppression. The room was packed with white hairs, old hippie types (like me) who, you could imagine, always tell their friends about the mud at Woodstock even though they probably weren’t there.

Anyway, one of the wizened women strummed a Joan Baez-y song about kindness and freedom and worked in lyrics about the ICE killings in Minneapolis. It was all very kumbaya.

Then I gave a little talk about the new Jim Crow tactics used to deny voting rights to Black citizens.  

But the parishioners had more important things on their mind. One gray-hair said, “I have a bone to pick with you.” I invited her to pick.

Her complaint was that I had, on some radio appearance, made mention of the 30,000 protesters gunned down in January in Iran.  

This bone-picker demanded that I accept the Iranian government’s figure of “only 3,000” killed.

I didn’t want to nit-pick a bone picker, but the figure of 30,304 dead was based on actual Iranian hospital records.  

Rather, what got to me was her use of the word, “only.”

“ONLY 3,000??” Wow. Here was a group in a building meant to honor the Prince of Peace and they were brushing off 3,000 dead — just after bemoaning the death of two protesters in Minneapolis. 

So, I asked why they were not disturbed by the deaths of thousands of unarmed protesters, whether 30,000 or 3,000.

The congregation’s convener responded, “Those demonstrations were instigated by Mossad!”

As if that made it OK to gun down unarmed protesters. It is ill-making when I hear self-described “Christian Progressives” echo language from Trump’s sticky lips…that protesters are “terrorists.”

That statement about Mossad was offensive on several levels. It’s certainly a slur against Muslims — that Muslims protested against the mullahs, put their lives on the line, only because they were duped by Israelis.

I asked him why, when we have a case of Muslims gunning down other Muslims, Christians make it the fault of the Jews.  

He replied, “Not Jews. Zionists.”

Oh, OK then. It is now perfectly fine, according to this gentleman of the cloth, to shoot unarmed Iranians as long as you can find a Jew (or “Zionist”) lurking nearby. It sounds a little too close to the Proud Boys chant, “Jews will not replace us!”

The Horseshoe was alive and well. These Christians’ comments would have fit very well on The Tucker Carlson Show.  

This little story has nothing to do with Netanyahu or Trump or their crazed bombing spree in Iran.  

This has everything to do with who WE are.  

The philosopher Elvis Costello once asked, “What’s so funny ‘bout peace, love and understanding?”  

Oh, dear Lord, Kumbaya.

Greg Palast

nukes

I look at Trump talking about Iran (presumably) nuking Los Angeles and San Diego as just another diversion. A diversion from the Iran war and the Epstein files. And since his stupid comments got such an uproar from the left (and some on the right), he's going to keep saying it. The guy is one sick f**k.

Today I had someone I know who supports Donald Trump mention to me how I hadn't brought him up to them much lately.

I told them very simply: because he's boring.

Sure, there's plenty to write about, but to bring up in a discussion?

Oh, he's calling someone a childish, petty name? Shocker!

He's claiming that Democrats are going to "cheat" to win anytime an election doesn't go his way? He's never done that — except, only always.

Let me guess, while giving a speech, he basically claimed that if Democrats win, everything horrible imaginable would be dropped upon the country like never before? Yup, I'm sure I've heard him say the country will "cease to exist/enter a Great Depression/collapse/die" if Democrats win — yet they've won, and we're still all here.

Wait, I know — something he's done is the best it's ever been done? "They're" saying, "Sir, we've never seen anyone as great as the almighty Trump!"

I wonder who "they" are, John Barron?

I got it: everyone who opposes him is a "traitor," any negative news is "fake," the polls are all "fake," and anyone but him and the people he chooses — aka people who constantly suck up to him — are "the enemies of the country."

No, I bet it's all Democrats are communists! You know, the same attack line Republicans have been using against the Democratic Party since the days of FDR in the 1930s. Clearly, almost a century later, they've been right the whole time, since absolutely no Democrat has been anywhere close to being a communist.

Wait, or is it socialist? I forget, since Republicans like to call Democrats both even though they're two different ideologies.

I bet he bragged about the "trillions" he's bringing into the country — even though our national debt is $40 trillion and climbing at a record pace. Makes you wonder where those "trillions" are going, doesn't it?

I just told my friend, I love writing about politics, and there's more than enough content to cover about this orange, babbling clown, but talking about him with people I know who support him is like the movie Groundhog Day — it's the same damn discussion we've been having for a decade because Trump's bullsh*t has been the same.

It's repetitive, it's predictable — it's boring.

Come talk to me when he says something new because I'm tired of the "Best of Donald Trump 2016" being stuck on a loop because he's a small-minded, petty, unhinged, childish, low-IQ buffoon with the vocabulary of a child and the emotional stability of a toddler.

Allen Clifton

Brent Molnar

This is a rather scary one from Brent Molnar, who writes under the site "A Voice of Reason" on Substack. This column may or may not seem "reasonable" depending on your perspective. But as we have seen from Donald Trump, expect anything and everything from this Russian Agent Orange.

Canceling the Election Is a Trap Trump Cannot Win

I’ve been working on this one for a while. Hopefully it answers some questions. If the Trump regime issues an executive decree ordering states to cancel, postpone, or suspend an American federal election, we need to be ruthlessly clear about what happens the following morning. This is the institutional equivalent of detonating a bomb at the bedrock of the republic. The moment a president declares that citizens cannot vote, the American system violently fragments into an immediate, uncontainable collapse of constitutional order.

The first domino to fall is the illusion of federal authority. The United States maintains fifty separate, state-run systems governed by the Elections Clause of the Constitution. A president possesses zero constitutional or statutory authority to alter a federal vote under the Insurrection Act, the National Emergencies Act, or the pretext of a foreign bioweapon. The second an executive order lands on state desks, the country splits in two: blue and purple states will reject the decree and keep polls open, while cooperative red governors will shutter polling sites, impound ballot machines, and deploy state troopers to lock out voters.

The legal system will suffer immediate whiplash. Within minutes, civil rights organizations, election boards, and disenfranchised citizens will flood courts with emergency petitions for injunctions. In state after state, judges will issue orders declaring the cancellations unconstitutional and commanding local clerks to administer the vote. When compliant governors defy those court mandates, the judiciary reaches its operational limits, leaving armed state police standing between citizens and the ballot box while turning local election workers into political hostages.

Then comes the constitutional trapdoor that compliant states step into: legislative suicide. Governors who cancel congressional elections assume they are preserving power, but the Twentieth Amendment to the Constitution operates with mechanical finality. It dictates that the terms of all 435 members of the House of Representatives and one-third of the Senate expire automatically at noon on January 3. If red states refuse to vote, their seats sit empty. The states that held their elections will send certified delegations to the Capitol to form a rump Congress where the seated members hold commanding supermajorities, handing full control of taxation, spending, and impeachment to the opposition faction.

Any attempt by partisan holdovers to physically block the newly elected Congress from taking power collides with basic legislative mechanics. Under the Twentieth Amendment, the term of every sitting Representative, including the Speaker of the House, expires automatically at noon on January 3. An outgoing Speaker lacks authority to lock the chamber doors because an outgoing Speaker holds no public office.

Procedural authority falls solely to the nonpartisan Clerk of the House, whose statutory duty is to call the roll of certified winners. Supreme Court precedent in Powell v. McCormack explicitly requires seating any member holding certified state credentials who meets constitutional qualifications. The members present on the floor will elect their own presiding officer, swear themselves in, and assume the full legislative authority of the federal government.

The economic catastrophe will unleash within hours. The global supremacy of the U.S. dollar rests on institutional predictability and the peaceful transfer of power. If global markets realize that the American electoral process has broken down into authoritarian decree, Wall Street will crater. Credit rating agencies will immediately downgrade U.S. sovereign debt to junk status. Foreign central banks will dump Treasury bonds, triggering a currency freefall and an inflationary panic that wipes out domestic capital. The business community will recognize that an administration willing to cancel the vote will readily nullify property rights, contracts, and regulatory protections.

The streets will erupt. Disenfranchising tens of millions of citizens by executive fiat will provoke the largest civil unrest in modern history. Mass strikes will paralyze supply chains, transit networks, and ports.

When millions of people lose their peaceful mechanism for redress, the social contract dissolves.

Cities will face general strikes, state capitals will operate under indefinite curfews, and the executive will deploy federalized National Guard or active-duty troops onto American streets to preserve public order, turning the military against the civilian population.

Historically, canceling elections outright backfires by stripping regimes of international recognition, inviting devastating sanctions, and provoking general strikes.

Modern autocrats like Viktor Orbán, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and Vladimir Putin practice competitive authoritarianism: keeping elections operational while weaponizing state media, redrawing legislative districts, disqualifying opposition candidates, and tilting administrative rules to guarantee victory.

Leaders succeed in stopping elections solely by achieving complete capture of the military and police while operating without decentralized counter-institutions. In a federalist system with divided powers, an executive attempting to stop the vote merely isolates their own faction while the remaining machinery continues running independently.

Trump faces a fixed constitutional clock, and his team recognizes that canceling the vote leads to structural failure. The strategy has shifted from administrative suppression to visible panic, dangling $500 rebate checks and campaign promises of $5,000 payouts to keep voters on board. Cash promises offer temporary distraction, but the legal and procedural machinery of the vote remains absolute.

To support this work, search my name on Substack and subscribe or go to my Facebook profile and tap the Linktree link in my bio. Your support is the only thing keeping this independent work alive. If this journalism brings you value, your voluntary contribution gives me the runway to keep digging. I refuse corporate cash, and I refuse paywalls. This page answers only to the truth, funded directly by the people reading it.

Brent Molnar: A Voice of Reason

Heather Delaney Reese

I would be remiss if I didn't include at least one mention of the incredible and excellent work of Heather Delaney Reese. She is not trained as a historian, but she sure knows her history, especially of this beloved, flawed country of ours. She writes a daily column that catches you up on just about everything that is going on with our wannabe despot Donald Trump. Her pieces are usually long and quite informative. I expect most of you that are reading this are already aware of Heather and her It's a Lovely Life site. But I don't take that for granted. 

There is, of course, another Heather of note, one Heather Cox Richardson, who truly is a political historian and also does an outstanding job of reporting what the hell is going on in Washington. The two Heathers are part of what makes America great.

By Heather Delaney Reese

At 7:45 tonight, Donald Trump experienced what appeared to be a serious mental health crisis while on stage campaigning for Republicans in Ohio. He had just arrived at the High School Activity Center in Vandalia, Ohio, 45 minutes late after his motorcade was forced to change its route to avoid protesters.

After making his way to the podium, he wasted no time launching into a truly disturbing speech where he told the crowd that Democrats tried to kill him and that “we’re going to put them down once and for all.” He said that Democrats rigged the elections and that the Republican Party is going to beat them, and that they would “shove it up their ass.”

He attacked the press, called Biden a “fake president,” and presented a bribe to every American over the age of 18, promising to send each one of them $5,000 if his party wins and keeps control of Congress. This was just the tip of the iceberg of the dangerous things the president said tonight.

Within minutes, it became clear that this was not going to be a regular campaign rally. As the speech went on, it only got worse as Donald Trump unraveled on live TV. Tonight marked the beginning of an even darker chapter in American History. One where the leader of the free world openly shared that he and his administration will reject, by all means possible, anything other than the outcome he wants for the midterm elections.

Trump told the crowd: “We’ve defeated every hoax and overcome every threat. Now we are on the cusp of beating the communist, socialist, radicalized lunatics and villains once and for all. We’re going to put them down once and for all.”

That is exactly what the President of the United States is saying about those he sees as a threat to his unchecked power. This includes, but is not limited to, Democrats, American citizens, journalists, and protesters. But it was the “put them down” part that is the most concerning. Most of us know that as a phrase used to mean the euthanasia of a sick or injured animal. When he added “once and for all,” he left very little room for interpretation. He was talking about ending opposition permanently.

With Donald Trump, we have to take him at his word while hoping he is just being provocative. History has already taught us how far he will go and how far others like him have gone before. Hitler did not start by rounding up his final targets and sending them to the camps. He started with the language he used and testing what he could get away with saying. He called his political opponents vermin and disease, and he told crowds at his rallies that they were a threat to the nation. The eventual horrific actions followed later.

He did not stop there. He told the crowd that Democrats had “attacked me, they’ve impeached me, they’ve arrested me, and they even tried to kill me.” He called Biden a “fake president,” still clinging to his election lie all these years later. He also said that Democrats rigged the elections and that they were “a bunch of dumb sons of bitches.” He said they, the Republicans, were going to win big and “shove it up their ass, okay?” That is the President of the United States of America, speaking from a podium with the presidential seal on it, terrified of losing and spiraling out of control.

Trump is building a narrative where he is the ultimate authority in our country. It is part of his strategy ahead of the devastating loss he expects to face during the midterms. Today he gave us a look into what that will look like and how it will play out. Part of his plan is to convince his followers that he is smarter than everyone else, and he pretty much said exactly that: “I know more about everything than anybody in this room, than anybody anywhere in the world.” He then stopped for a very quick pause, pointed at a woman sitting near the stage, and continued, “There’s a woman sitting right over there who is a housewife, but she’s very good. She’s got a natural instinct for business. She perhaps knows more than I do, but I actually don’t think so.”

And then he brought up his latest bribe. Trump told the room, and those of us watching from home, that “If Republicans win the House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate, I am going to give all adult citizens in the United States $5,000 each because we’re making so much money with the tariffs and other things.”

Every time he promises to send Americans money in exchange for their votes, we have to do the math because that is where the promise immediately falls apart. There are roughly 245 million adults in this country. That is $1.20 trillion. The president does not have the authority to just send out checks on a whim, and he certainly can’t spend more than a trillion dollars without approval. That is not even taking into account the practical side of things, like where the money would come from. Donald Trump also promised $2,000 tariff dividend checks. Those never came, and these never will either. He knows that, and he also knows that there is almost no realistic path for Republicans to hold both chambers of Congress. So the excuse and the scapegoat are already built in for when the checks are never sent. He will blame the Democrats. He will say he wanted to send the checks, but the radical left “Dumocrats” blocked him from sending them. He will use this as another reason to further divide us.

He also shared fear-based propaganda that he created in his mind about what is to come if his party loses. “If the Democrats are in control again, we’ll have another Great Depression like in the 1930s.” He said that if Democrats win, “you will end up in a 1929-style economic depression, and we will have a disaster on our hands.” He is trying to terrify the most vulnerable people in this country into voting out of fear, while also trying to bribe them with money he will not and cannot send. He is counting on them believing that this time will somehow be different and that he will actually deliver on the promises he makes.

He not only told us that he will be targeting political dissent over the next couple of years, but he also made it very clear that he is coming after the media and anyone committed to fact-based reporting. He pointed up at the press section and told the crowd, “Some of the fake news media are sitting right there.” The crowd loudly booed, with someone even screaming, “F*CK CNN!” Trump stood there grinning and smirking as he stared directly at the journalists, letting the hostility in the room build toward them. He went after Kaitlan Collins again, calling her “such an unhappy person,” and said that “she’s a young, nice person, but she never smiles.” He said, “the fake news media refuse to talk about our record-setting numbers.” The President of the United States continues to try to humiliate journalists who haven’t bent to his demands for only positive coverage. He also said, “It’s the golden age of America. Our nation is doing better now than ever before, and fake news like CNN, sitting right there, doesn’t want to run.” Then he offered us a new name for the press: “We could call the media ‘artificial media.’ That would be accurate. We could call them ‘artificial news.’ They’re artificial news, meaning fake, but I like ‘fake’ better. I made that up a long time ago, and it seems to be quite accurate.”

This is why Trump is so focused on destroying trust in the media. He needs his supporters to believe that every reporter, news outlet, and really anyone who says something Donald Trump doesn’t like is lying to them. Trump knows his numbers and polls are both terrible, so he needs to convince his supporters that the only person they can trust is him. So that it doesn’t matter what anyone else reports. He is setting the stage for what comes next. If the midterm results are not what he wants, he will say the media lied and that there was rampant fraud. He will tell his supporters that the election was stolen from them, and many will believe him. We saw what happened on January 6th, and we have watched him pardon the insurrectionists. We know Donald Trump’s part in what happened, and how he has convinced those who carried that out for him, and the next round of people like them, to think they will ultimately be protected the next time he asks people to do his dirty work for him.

The difference this time is that Donald Trump is sitting inside the White House with the power of the federal government behind him. Everything he said tonight was in preparation for what may be one of the darkest chapters in the history of our country. We got a glimpse of just how dark the next 30+ days and the months that follow could become. There were multiple moments during this rally that would have warranted serious discussions about the 25th Amendment with any other president. But things have become so normalized that we don’t even talk about that like we did even a year ago. Our country has fallen so far over the past 21 months that even the president accusing Democrats of trying to kill him or calling them “dumb sons of bitches” is no longer enough to shock us.

The big picture is that this is what we are going to see until the midterms if Donald Trump isn’t stopped. And then the worst of the Big Beautiful Bill is purposefully set to happen shortly after that, devastating everyday Americans. The months after that may very well be even worse. He is going to push everything through he possibly can before the new Congress is seated. At the same time, he will have set the tone with his radicalized followers that anybody, including the legacy media, independent journalists, and writers such as myself, are all part of the “fake news” and can’t be trusted. He will challenge every election result that does not go his way. He will say that foreign governments meddled in our elections and that the results have been manipulated. There will be court cases, and games played to try to keep the new, duly elected members of Congress from being seated.

This may be a very trying time for our country. We will get through it. We will come out on the other side. What it takes to get there is another story. And even after all of that, we are looking at a sitting-duck president at a level this country has never seen, with nothing left to hold him back and nothing left to lose. With his diminished physical and cognitive abilities, we won’t truly start to feel safe and see a path forward for this country until at least early 2029, and even then, we will be dealing with the damage for years to come.

We knew these dark times were coming. We knew it would get worse the closer we got to the midterms. Today he showed us exactly what that is going to look like. He is coming after dissent, the truth, and anyone who refuses to fall in line. But no matter what he tries to take from us, we need to remind Donald Trump and each other that we are not helpless. There are still things we can do. We can vote, and we can get louder. If you’ve been on the sidelines, this is the moment to step off them. If you’ve been scared to speak out, I understand that fear completely. I know what it costs and the threats that come with it. I’ve lived it for a year and a half, and I’m still here, and it has not slowed me down. Because I also know what silence costs, and that price is higher. It always has been, and it always will be.

I made a promise when I started writing these posts. Every time Donald Trump or his administration attacked the press, the First Amendment, or the rights of the American people, I would call it out. Today Donald Trump took his attacks even further. His public threats were meant to cause ripples of fear through all of us. They want us to hesitate the next time we go to speak, and they want us to question our next vote for a Democrat for fear that they will usher in the next Great Depression.

Tonight we resist with our voices and our money. Every time this administration attacks the First Amendment, or our right to free, fair, and fear-free elections, we respond by funding the people defending it. On these nights, I donate and subscribe to those on the right side of history who offer a paid membership. To use the overplayed line about how most of these options cost about the same as a cup of coffee, I actually live by that. I rarely buy coffee outside the house anymore because I would much rather give that money to someone fighting for our country anyway.

Those of you who have been reading these posts for a while know how this goes. If we are able, and it will not cause a financial hardship, we put our money to good use. We support our local, state, and federal candidates. The other side is throwing a lot of money at these elections, so our candidates can always use more funds. We donate to nonprofits that are defending our Constitution and the most vulnerable in our communities. That includes organizations that are challenging Donald Trump’s abuses of power in court. And we also support the people taking a stand to deliver the truth about what is happening in this country under extreme threat from Donald Trump and the federal government. Thank you all for supporting me in this way. It is how I’m able to dedicate my life to this work and write these posts every night. I am grateful that I can be a part of this fight with your support.

But like I always say and will until the end of time, I’m also asking you to think beyond just my voice. Think about every writer, journalist, podcaster, and other independent outlet that you turn to when you need the truth about what is happening in this country. Think about the people writing and creating content day in and day out, without breaks, because they care about our country and the generations we will be leaving it to. Donald Trump just told us what comes next, and we need to be prepared now so that our truth tellers are funded to survive it. The most powerful thing we can do right now is make sure the people refusing to be silent can keep going. Every paid subscription to an independent voice is a vote against everything Donald Trump said today and does tomorrow.

Donald Trump didn’t have his meltdown at the podium today because the future looks good for him or the Republican Party. He is waging these attacks because he is scared. He is scared of what happens to him next. He knows the resistance is just growing and that his deficits are as well.

He knows that he is in a weak position, and nothing makes him feel more threatened than that. But while he was standing on that stage trying to make the rest of us feel the same fear he is, a group of musicians was standing in front of a sold-out crowd of close to 20,000, reminding us just how much power we still have. Just 25 miles from the White House, Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine’s Power to the People Festival in Columbia, Maryland, brought together some very powerful voices in American music for a day built around the very things Trump is trying to destroy: freedom, justice, equality, and people coming together and using their voices for something bigger than themselves.

Performers included Bruce Springsteen, the Foo Fighters, Dave Matthews, Joan Baez, Public Enemy, Killer Mike, Cypress Hill, Serj Tankian, Brittany Howard, Dropkick Murphys, Jack Black, The Linda Lindas, and Shepard Fairey. This wasn’t just a music festival. This was a show of resistance. (and Jack Smith was there!)

Donald Trump wants us to think that the fight is over and that we have already lost our country. But we know the truth. We know that he is only going to these lengths because he knows what is coming and he is desperately trying to stop it. In 31 days, we are going to come together and show him just how much power we still have, and he is going to finally start to face the consequences of what he has put our country through. That is why I still have hope for America. And you should, too.

I’ll see you tomorrow,

Heather

Heather Delaney Reese is a political writer, commentator, and founder of the digital platform It's a Lovely Life.

election day

Here is another one from a local here in deep South Texas, Duardo Paz-Martinez, which will give you a taste of what is going on down hyar. 

We know that a lot of Hispanics moved over to vote for Trump and Republicans in 2016, 2018, 2020 and 2022. It took them awhile for reality to slap them in the face, but many are coming back to the Democratic fold. How many? We shall see in about a month. 

There is still a lot of dissatisfaction with the Democratic Party here in South Texas, but after seeing Trump and the Republicans up close for a few years, all the grifting, corruption, religious hypocrisy, stupid and insulting comments, and the egomaniacal narcissistic character of Trump and his sycophantic cabinet, the Republicans are looking a lot worse than the Democrats. Not exactly a ringing endorsement, is it? 

Find The Weakest Baboon": . . . . . . Fear has reached furious desperation for Trump's faithful followers. They are losing the fight.

Election Day nears and their quest for a country all their own looks to be in ruins. For one, Americans in Texas do not want four more years of Trump groupie Greg Abbott. He could shock you and stand up unaided. . .and Texans would still hate him.

Suitcases of cash are said to be moving across the state line, from New York and Shanghai, in to help the slippery MAGA governor stave off humiliating defeat at the hands of Democrat Gina Hinojosa on Election Day, November 3rd.

Fast recruitment of emergency voters now includes the homeless, the abandoned and the dispossessed, according to a midnight story out of California. Wouldn't it be something to see a few of these people at Mar-a-Lago for a celebratory party?

A general and steady drop in Right-Wing national polls is the most desperate famine of good news for right-wingers hellbent on staying the hate and bigot course.

It may be said that the average MAGA foil lives in a continual crisis of fear and rage. They are sending in the clowns. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton was recruited to run for the U.S. Senate by an Austin vagabond loitering outside the Broken Spoke honky tonk who told him his time "had come." Paxton smirked and said, "Let's do it, my man!"

Downrange, in Corpus Christi, troubled Brown Republican Eric Flores is wondering how in the Holy Hell he could be talked into running for Congress. He knows. He has seen the ill winds. The other Texas U.S. Senator, one Ted Cruz, has told him to head for Cancun a few days ahead of the election to cement that "winning" image on Congressional District 34 voters. Flores has booked the flight.

In taco-happy Edinburg, home of the original two-tortilla taco, Brown Republican Monica De La Cruz works on her fake eyebrows and skin-cleansing treatments every free moment. The oft-divorced 52-year-old is in the brawl of her life against the most popular dude in South Texas, Democrat Bobby Pulido. District 15 is Ground Zero for Monica's Bad Menudo overboil.

Will MAGA survive the election, see its Red Hats take to the streets in crazed celebration, or will this, well, all-telling election be the end of the cheap nightmare. Here in the hardscrabble Rio Grande Valley, I foresee disaster, Brown Republicans eating happily while looking into each other's weepy eyes, spoiled salsa running down their chins.

At home the next day, their bowels will refuse to move. .

Duardo Paz-Martinez