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.

The US military has for the first time attacked and destroyed two boats on the Pacific side of South America, as part of its controversial fight against what it says are drug-trafficking activities.

The strikes – on Tuesday night and then early on Wednesday – killed five people, according to the US defence secretary, Pete Hegseth. They came on top of at least seven other strikes in the Caribbean that have killed at least 32 people and raised tensions with Colombia and Venezuela.

White House officials have tried to justify the increasing number of strikes with a dubious legal theory that claims the boats are affiliated with “designated terrorist organisations” with which the US was now in a “non-international armed conflict”, the Guardian has reported.

Until this month, the administration has referred to Tren de Aragua and other cartels as foreign terrorist organisations, or FTOs. Legal experts suggested that simply characterising drugs cartels as FTOs did not give the administration any additional authority to use lethal force.

An unverified rumor that Venezuelan gang members were preparing to kill police officers spread like wildfire through US law enforcement agencies last year, internal records reveal, only for federal officials to later quietly acknowledge the claim was mistaken.

The intelligence report, which appears to have first been disseminated by a local New Mexico police department in July 2024, suggested that the Tren de Aragua (TdA) gang had directed its members to “fire on or attack” law enforcement. The vague assertion quickly traveled among law enforcement agencies. It even made its way into a formal proclamation by Texas governor Greg Abbott, and was repeated by Republican Congress members as evidence of the dangers of Venezuelan immigrants and Democrats’ border policies.

There is a long history of US officials falsely painting immigrant groups as criminal and violent to justify crackdowns on migration, said Deep Gulasekaram, professor of constitutional and immigration law at the University of Colorado, noting how propaganda about the dangers of Chinese immigrants, including claims that they threatened white women, was used to justify the Chinese exclusion act in the late 1800s.

“It is so easy in this country to sell a story about immigrant danger, and the claims have such staying power,” he said, noting no study has ever credibly found a link between immigration and crime. “It’s amazing how fast falsehoods about noncitizens and their danger will make its way through every media channel.”

I believe ICE enforcement is poised to become a mass disabling event, and I’m concerned that very few people are discussing it.

They’re already targeting the disabled and most vulnerable. They’re bullies, and when bullies get access to increasingly destructive weapons, nothing good happens.

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

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is defending the purchase of two luxury private jets for herself and other DHS officials, costing more than $170 million in public funds. The U.S. Coast Guard’s acquisition of two Gulfstream G700 jets comes as the federal government shutdown is in its 21st day, hampering federal nutrition assistance and other public aid for millions of people nationwide. In a statement, Democratic Congressmember Bennie Thompson slammed the multimillion-dollar purchase as “blatantly immoral” and “probably illegal.”

Oregon’s attorney general, Dan Rayfield, said that Trump’s [National Guard] deployment was unlawful. Portland had neither seen a foreign invasion nor sprawling anarchy – rather, there was one minor protest outside an Immigration and Customs Enforcement field office in Portland.

“Let’s be clear, local law enforcement has this under control,” [Oregon governor] Kotek also said. “We have free speech demonstrations that are happening near one federal facility. Portland police is actively engaged in managing those with the federal folks at the facility, and when people cross the line, there’s unlawful activity, people are being held accountable.”

The Central Intelligence Agency is providing the bulk of the intelligence used to carry out the controversial lethal air strikes by the Trump administration against small, fast-going boats in the Caribbean Sea suspected of carrying drugs from Venezuela, according to three sources familiar with the operations.

Experts say the agency’s central role means much of the evidence used to select which alleged smugglers to kill on the open sea will almost certainly remain secret.

Information the agency gathers against any of the alleged smugglers – dead or alive – is likely to remain classified and out of public view. That is in spite of the worldwide public interest and debate over the killing of civilians.

The agency’s intelligence, unlike information gathered by the DEA or the Coast Guard, which used to handle maritime interdiction operations against smugglers, is not designed as legal evidence.