BREAKING: Trump deploys 300 troops to Chicago
VIDEO OF THE DAY: Trump-appointed judge delivers knockout blow to Trump in court
Brian Tyler Cohen breaks down Judge Karin Immergut's surprise decision to block Trump's fascistic decision to deploy 200 soldiers to Portland, Oregon.
Take Action: Demand an increase to teacher pay ASAP!
Greta Thunberg "tortured" by Israeli forces in detention, activists say
Several international activists deported from Israel after joining a Gaza aid flotilla have accused Israeli forces of mistreating climate campaigner Greta Thunberg. Turkish journalist and Gaza Sumud Flotilla participant Ersin Celik told local media outlets he witnessed Israeli forces “torture Greta Thunberg,” describing how she was “dragged on the ground” and “forced to kiss the Israeli flag.” Malaysian activist Hazwani Helmi and American participant Windfield Beaver gave similar accounts at Istanbul Airport, alleging Thunberg was shoved and paraded with an Israeli flag. “It was a disaster. They treated us like animals,” Helmi said, adding that detainees were denied food, clean water, and medication. Beaver said Thunberg was “treated terribly” and “used as propaganda,” recalling how she was shoved into a room as far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir entered. Italian journalist Lorenzo Agostino, who had been on the flotilla, also cited the treatment of Thunberg.“Greta Thunberg, a brave woman, is only 22 years old. She was humiliated and wrapped in an Israeli flag and exhibited like a trophy,” he told Anadolu. Others described severe mistreatment. Turkish TV presenter Ikbal Gurpinar said, “They treated us like dogs. They left us hungry for three days. They didn’t give us water; we had to drink from the toilet … It was a terribly hot day, and we were all roasting.” She said the ordeal gave her “a better understanding of Gaza”.
Freshman Democrat under ATTACK for standing up to the GOP
Nellie Pou for Congress: Nellie Pou has only been in Congress a few months, but she’s already facing a barrage of GOP attacks for voting against their destructive budget bill that would hand out huge tax breaks to the wealthy while RAISING taxes on working families. Just a few days ago, the NRCC issued an error-filled press release written by Big Business lobbyists that falsely smeared her with lies. She’s one of the few Democrats to win her seat in a county that voted for Trump; she’s going to need all the help she can get if we want to protect the MUST-HOLD seat and retake Congress. Will you chip in to thank her for doing the right thing and helping her weather the storm against GOP attacks?
Elites always say we can’t have nice things. They’re wrong.
Branko Marcetic, Jacobin: "Day after day, almost all of politics and media is dead set on bludgeoning your brain with one counterintuitive idea: that you can’t make the world a better place, and you shouldn’t even try, because the obvious solutions to people’s miseries would actually just make everything worse. You hear it all the time. You can’t do a rent freeze, because it will make more people homeless. You can’t pay minimum wage workers more, because it will actually put more people out of work. We can’t move to a four-day workweek, because it will destroy the economy. We can’t have universal health care, because it will make the quality of health care worse. This is all wrong. But you don’t need to decipher arcane economic models, read scores of academic studies, or even consult a small army of experts to know it’s wrong. You can be sure it is because these apocalyptic predictions are what the forces of greed — big business, right-wing politicians, and the corporate press loyal to both — have always made about any attempt to improve the lives of people who work for a living, going back more than a century. Nearly a century on, it takes the average person roughly a second to call bullsh*t on all of these arguments, and to recognize they’re not just wrong, but laughably wrong. Giving workers the weekend off didn’t destroy or handicap the US economy, nor did it kill housing construction. Letting them work a maximum of eight hours a day didn’t bankrupt the railroads or end the American work ethic. Outlawing child labor didn’t lead to a dictatorship. The minimum wage didn’t lead to mass unemployment or the collapse of the United States. Unemployment insurance is today considered as American as apple pie. Not long after these measures were enacted, in fact, the United States became a global superpower, and Americans enjoyed what we now look back on as a period of unmatched prosperity. All of it was possible. All of it is now basic common sense. Imagine what else will be, too."
Trump just gave Democrats the ideal albatross to hang around his neck
Michael Tomasky, The New Republic: "President Donald Trump has finally told the truth about something. He’s embraced Project 2025. Anyone who believed his disavowals last year during the campaign is, of course, a fool. And the media, reporting those disavowals, looked foolish. Trump knew, as he has known all his life, that all you have to do is lie about something, and the press, following the rules of objectivity, will report straightforwardly what you said. So he largely got away with it. The Kamala Harris campaign tried to tie Trump to the project, as in this ad; but it didn’t manage to convey the project’s extremism with any force. And now? The Democrats have another huge opportunity to hang Project 2025 around Trump’s neck. It should be easier now, for two reasons. One, it’s not purely hypothetical anymore. According to the Project 2025 Tracker, a community-driven initiative, the Trump administration has already checked off 48 percent of the project’s goals. Two, Trump and OMB Director Russell Vought’s open promises to shred the federal bureaucracy give Democrats a huge target. The question is, do they have the skill—and the guts—to hit it? The first message should be simple: What Trump and Vought are about to do here is the second coming of Elon Musk and DOGE. Second, tell Americans who Vought is, what he believes, the things he has said. He’s a Christian nationalist who believes Trump is “God’s gift” to America and wants the U.S. to be “a nation under God.” These are of course completely un-American ideas. Making these two arguments requires the Democrats to take two moral and unambiguous stands. The first is in defense of an activist federal government. The second is in defense of the religious pluralism upon which this country was founded. If the Post poll is right, they’re already winning. And now that Trump has introduced the unpopular Project 2025 into the equation, the door is open for the Democrats to make Trump’s posture here even more unpopular. Also, I’d argue that to the extent the shutdown will result in chaos, well, people understand that it’s Trump who is the sower of chaos in this country. Majorities are far more likely to blame Trump for chaos than Democrats."
If the world can’t stop the genocide against us, let it at least carry our stories
Mohammed al-Sawwaf, The Nation: "It is midnight in Gaza City. The drones never leave the sky—we call them zannana—for the way their zzzzzz drills into our heads. Explosions roll from the next neighborhood with every airstrike on homes, or when a remotely operated ground vehicle—an unmanned robot packed with explosives—is steered between buildings and detonated. On the street below my window, a truck waits under the cones of flashlights, stacked with what remains of my neighbors’ lives: mattresses, blankets, and wooden furniture pried apart for firewood—the only fuel left after nearly two years without gas or diesel. They are leaving again—for the eighth time in nearly two years of war. I sit in an unfinished apartment, its walls still pitted with holes from helicopter gunships and drone fire. I rented it after being displaced from the east of the city. Now it shelters three families from my relatives. Together we debate whether to join the convoys heading south. I am certain every family in Gaza is having the same conversation. This is the rhythm of life here: displacement after displacement, death after death, with no time for mourning—only desperate attempts to save whoever is left. I have lost more than 65 relatives in this war: my mother and father, four siblings, and their children. Two of my brothers were journalists: One worked with an international news agency; the other was a filmmaker I collaborated with. I myself have been wounded twice. Journalism here is no longer a profession. It is a deadly gamble. In nearly two years, Israel has killed about 250 of our colleagues—journalists, filmmakers, and media workers—in Gaza. At dawn on September 20, 2025, before I could finish writing these words, our neighbors from the Jammala family were killed. I have known them since I was 13, when they raised their building beside ours. They lived by selling meat and running a small grill restaurant; their kebab was famous, and they were generous, sharing food with the poor. Their building was flattened. Most of the dead were children. One woman lost her husband, Mahmoud, and their three children; if she survives, she will live with one leg. His younger brother, Khaled, lost his wife and all his children and will live alone. Their only “crime,” as it is, was refusing to flee again. Their home stood beside mine, which was destroyed 22 months earlier, when most of my family were killed in the same way—because they stayed. That night I had been sleeping beside my parents when they were torn apart. The blast threw me several meters. My relatives found me by following the sound of my moaning under the rubble. Journalists and filmmakers also have families. Many have begun fleeing south in search of a safety that does not exist. I fear no one will remain to document what happens, and we will die in silence—as the perpetrators intend. Every day we wrestle with the same question: Do we stay, cameras open, and accept the risk of death? Or do we flee with our families, knowing there is no safe place even in the south? Gaza is not only “breaking news,” not only ruins, not only hunger. It is voices, souls, and human dignity demanding recognition. If those who kill intend to silence, our obligation is the opposite: to record. We may not be able to save our bodies. But we can protect the record of our lives—and refuse to vanish without a witness."
Food for thought
The Sunday wrap-up
Hope...
Share 
Tweet
PS — Please don't forget to sign the petition to demand RFK Jr. restore the funding for life-saving vaccine research, and be sure to follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Good Influence on Instagram.