grimpy

“Ordinary people get one vote. Billionaires get the opportunity to spend as much as they want to elect the candidates they want,” [Senator Bernie] Sanders said, decrying the influence of super PACs that can accept unlimited political donations. “That is the context in which this election is taking place.”

[Alexandria] Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), meanwhile, cast the race as one that “mirrors what we are up against nationally, both an authoritarian criminal presidency, fueled by corruption and bigotry and an ascendant right-wing extremist movement,” as well as the “insufficient, eroded, bygone political establishment, this time in the form of Andrew Cuomo.”

“Congress established an emergency fund to ensure that millions of Americans on SNAP continue to receive nutrition assistance when funding expires in November,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who caucuses with Democrats, said on social media Saturday.

Sanders—the ranking member of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions—then appealed directly to Republican President Donald Trump: “Don’t let kids go hungry. Use these emergency funds to feed low-income families.”

“Speaking as a former OMB official, I know from experience that the federal government has the authority and the tools it needs during a shutdown to get these SNAP funds to families,” [Sharon Parrott] continued. “It would be unconscionable for the administration to go out of its way to threaten millions of children, seniors, veterans, people with disabilities, parents, and workers with hunger, rather than taking all legal steps available to provide food assistance to people who need it.”

“The United States, just months before its 250th birthday as the world’s leading democracy, has tipped over the edge into authoritarianism and fascism,” Garrett Graff, the American historian and author, wrote in August. “In the end, faster than I imagined possible, it did happen here.”

One awakes to new horrors each day. And it is difficult to grasp – and painful to realize – just how far gone we are, and how quickly it has happened.

New York City mayoral frontrunner Zohran Mamdani forcefully defended his call for a $30 minimum wage during the final debate of the race Wednesday night, warning that under the status quo, the expensive metropolis is at growing risk of becoming “a museum of where working-class people used to be able to live.”

The inability of many New Yorkers to make a livable wage in the city, Mamdani said, “is pushing them to live in Jersey City, to live in Pennsylvania, to live in Connecticut, because they can’t afford to live in New York City.”

Under Mamdani’s proposal, which would have to be approved by lawmakers, New York City’s wage floor would rise incrementally before reaching $30 an hour by 2030. The minimum wage would then be tied to either cost-of-living increases or worker productivity jumps.

A group of United Nations experts on Tuesday condemned US President Donald Trump’s recent threats to wage war on Venezuela and said his decision to bomb at least seven boats in international waters—killing dozens of people accused without evidence of drug trafficking—amounted to “extrajudicial executions.”

Trump’s repeated threats against Venezuela “violate the fundamental international obligations not to intervene in the domestic affairs or threaten to use armed force against another country,” said the trio of experts, warning that the US president’s belligerence represents “an extremely dangerous escalation with grave implications for peace and security in the Caribbean region.”

Vought is “the driving force behind the [government] shutdown” and “basically a second commander-in-chief, a shadow president,” says ProPublica reporter Andy Kroll, who spent months researching Vought for an extensive profile on the Office of Management and Budget director. During this second Trump administration, Vought’s deeply conservative ideology has been unchallenged by a compliant Congress

“The president is putting his ego over responsibility with this disregard for public safety,” Democratic governor Newsom said in a statement. “Firing live rounds over a busy highway isn’t just wrong – it’s dangerous. Using our military to intimidate people you disagree with isn’t strength – it’s reckless, it’s disrespectful, and it’s beneath the office he holds.”

Saturday’s military event coincided with No Kings rallies and marches held across the US, including several locations in California, aligning behind a message that the nation’s slide into authoritarian rule under Trump needs to stop.

DOWNTOWN — With their city caught in the country’s largest immigration enforcement operation, as many as 250,000 Chicagoans flooded Downtown on Saturday to condemn Donald Trump’s administration as part of the second nationwide No Kings protest.

“We will never surrender!” Illinois governor JB Pritzker said. “Throughout history we have learned that tyranny doesn’t arrive with dramatic proclamations. We learned that it comes wrapped in ‘law and order’ … The reality here in Chicago is this: Black and Brown people are being targeted for the color of their skin. Children are being zip-tied and separated from their families … These people are not abstractions. They pay taxes on their businesses. They work hard — these people are the fabric of our society.”

“They want a rematch of the Civil War,” Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson said to the crowd. “But we are here to stand firm, to stand committed — that we will not bend. We will not cower. The attempt to divide and conquer this nation will not prevail, because when the people are united, justice always prevails.”

Johnson closed out his remarks by calling for a general strike.

One day it struck me that the world would be a very different place if environmental crimes were treated in the same way as murders. So, why aren’t they? And should they be?

At the moment such crimes can, mistakenly, feel distant and abstract. If someone came into your flat and set fire to your furniture, stole your valuables, killed your pet, added poison to your water … what would you do? You’d be terrified. You’d go to the police. You might want revenge. You’d certainly want justice. It would be entirely obvious to you that a crime had been committed.

They have a ‘Hate America’ rally that’s scheduled for October 18 on the National Mall,” the House speaker, Mike Johnson, said on Fox News on Friday. “It’s all the pro-Hamas wing and, you know, the antifa people. They’re all coming out.”

On 18 October, tens of millions of people in the streets, peacefully exercising the democratic rights that the Trump regime is laboring to eliminate, will give the lie to Maga’s hallucinatory network of bomb-throwing traitors. No Kings will show America who the real haters are.

Members of the Democratic Women’s Caucus on Wednesday marched through the Capitol and to Speaker Mike Johnson’s office with Representative-elect Adelita Grijalva, demanding that she be sworn in. Grijalva won a special election in Arizona more than three weeks ago. She would be the final 218th vote on a discharge petition to release the Epstein files. On Tuesday, Grijalva reported that she finally had access to her congressional office, but that the phone lines aren’t working, and there are no computers or internet in the office.

When Donald Trump scheduled a press conference after a weekend in which rumors about his health swirled, two women in red-state Oklahoma launched a livestream for their more than 1 million followers on YouTube to speculate about the condition of “Cankles McTacoTits”, shortened to Canks “for expediency and spite”.

It was fitting for the profanity-laced, straight talking liberal podcast ‘I’ve Had It’ that quipped, after interviewing Barack Obama, that the former president has “big dick energy”.