Obama rips into Trump and Republicans in barnburner campaign rally
President Obama made a rare appearance on the campaign trail stumping for Virginia gubernatorial candidate Abigail Spanburger, torching Trump for his ballroom obsession and deliberately neglecting the American people. “As for the president, he has been focused on critical issues like paving over the Rose Garden so folks don’t get mud on their shoes, and gold-plating the Oval Office and building a $300 million ballroom!” Obama said. “So Virginia, here’s the good news. If you can’t visit a doctor, don’t worry, he will save you a dance...it’s like every day is Halloween except it’s all tricks and no treats!" Cue Truth Social meltdown in 3...2...1...
VIDEO OF THE DAY: BULLSH*T! Gavin Newsom deals knockout punch to Trump, Mike Johnson
Brian Tyler Cohen sits down with California's governor to talk Trump, the shutdown, and fighting back against fascism.
Time is running out to make a difference in CRITICAL state Supreme Court race
State and Local Election Alliance: On November 4th, the critical battleground state of Pennsylvania will vote on whether or not to keep three Democratic state supreme court members. If PA votes “no,” then Gov. Josh Shapiro will have to replace them before a full-on partisan election to replace them in 2027. If we lose control of the state Supreme Court, Trump and his cronies will have the opportunity to unleash a dark money avalanche and install loyalist justices who will happily rubber-stamp lawsuits to throw out votes, nullify election results, or award delegates regardless of vote count. In other words, we could never win the White House again. That’s why Republicans have poured a historic $8 MILLION in dark money into the race. Will you chip in to the State and Local Election Alliance and support their efforts to convince the people of Pennsylvania to vote YES on retaining our Democratic justices?
Mike Johnson’s Christian values: children starve, pedophiles skate
Michael Tomasky, The New Republic: "Saturday is November 1—the day open enrollment begins on the Obamacare exchanges, and thus the day that those 20 million people will start learning in specific terms how much their health care premiums are going to increase. It is also the day that the Trump administration will stop paying SNAP benefits, the nutritional assistance program that helps 42 million Americans buy food for themselves and their families, at an average of around $175 a month. It will do this despite the presence of a $6 billion reserve fund to cover food stamp emergencies, which the administration argued in court Thursday it couldn’t or wouldn’t spend because this is not an emergency. Or the right kind of emergency. Or something. In addition, it will be the thirty-second day of the current government shutdown (the longest was 35 days, during Donald Trump’s first term). It will also mark 51 days since the House of Representatives, under Speaker Mike Johnson, has cast a vote. And it will be 38 days since the election of Democrat Adelita Grijalva to the Arizona House seat held by her father without her yet being sworn in, a situation about which Johnson, who by law must perform the ceremony, has told lie after pathetic lie. He has kept the House out of session and delayed her swearing in for one reason alone, which everyone knows: She’ll be the 218th vote to release the files relating to Jeffrey Epstein. So these are Mike Johnson’s Christian values, as Paul Krugman put it on his Substack Tuesday: 'It sounds crazy to say that Republicans are making children go hungry to protect pedophiles, but it’s actually a reasonable interpretation of the situation.' It’s a 100 percent reasonable interpretation. If Johnson weren’t paralyzed by the looming Epstein vote, which he wouldn’t have the power to block from coming to the floor, the House could be in session, voting, and it could have done something about getting those SNAP benefits to people. In fact, the only factor that makes Krugman’s interpretation an other-than-reasonable one is that Republicans, given their long-standing and ferocious hostility to food stamps and every program that makes poor people’s burden a bit lighter, might not agree to vote for emergency spending. They’ve been trying and sometimes succeeding at making deep cuts to this program for nearly 15 years. Many people have pointed out that Republicans are harming their own constituents, since many SNAP recipients are rural and white. People point this out as if the Republicans don’t know this, and telling them would make them go, 'Oh, heck, we forgot, thank you, we better go change our ways. Praise Jesus.' News flash: They know. They just don’t care. After all, who can forget the imperishable New Testament chapter wherein Jesus said to let the poor children go hungry and the undeserving poor take ill and die for the sake of protecting sexual predators? These people are beyond immoral."
Humanity needs democratic control of AI
Giorgos Galanis, Jacobin: "When a predictive algorithm denied thousands of black applicants fair mortgage approvals in 2019, it wasn’t a glitch but a design choice — reflecting the priorities of profit-driven tech giants. In The Means of Prediction: How AI Really Works (and Who Benefits), Oxford economist Maximilian Kasy argues that such outcomes are not accidents of technology but the predictable results of who controls it. Just as Karl Marx identified control over the means of production as the basis of class power, Kasy identifies the “means of prediction” (data, computational infrastructure, technical expertise, and energy) as the foundation of power in the AI age. As such, AI becomes a battleground, where algorithms shape the future to serve tech owners rather than the working class. Kasy’s provocative thesis exposes AI’s objectives as deliberate choices, encoded by those who control its resources to favor profit over social good. Only by seizing democratic control of the means of prediction can we ensure that AI serves society at large rather than the profits of tech giants. Kasy begins by demystifying AI, grounding it in the mechanics of machine learning, where algorithms predict future outcomes based on past data. But which future outcomes are algorithms programmed to predict? Social media platforms, for instance, collect vast amounts of user data to predict which ads maximize clicks, hence maximizing expected profits. In pursuing engagement, algorithms have learned that outrage, insecurity, and envy keep users scrolling. The result is a surge in anxiety, sleep deprivation, and body-image distress — especially among teenagers — driven by algorithmic comparison and targeted advertising. Predictive tools used in welfare or hiring contexts produce similar effects. Systems designed to flag “high-risk” applicants rely on biased historical data, effectively automating discrimination by denying benefits or job interviews to already marginalized groups. Even when AI appears to promote diversity, it usually does so because inclusion enhances profitability — for example, by improving team performance or brand reputation. In such cases, there exists an 'optimal' level of diversity: the one that maximizes expected profits. Kasy also explores AI’s growing role in labor and automation. In workplaces, AI can either augment human abilities or replace them entirely, creating unemployment for some while concentrating wealth for others. This technical clarity sets the stage for Kasy’s broader argument: AI is not just about prediction but about what is predicted, and for whom. Data collection and analysis can indeed advance public goods such as medical research or education, improving health and broadening human capabilities. Yet the objectives encoded in AI systems ultimately mirror the priorities of those who control the 'means of prediction.' If workers, rather than corporate owners, directed technological development, Kasy suggests, algorithms might prioritize fair wages, job security, and public welfare over profit. From courtroom algorithms to social media feeds, AI systems increasingly shape our lives in ways that reflect their creators’ private priorities. As such, they should not be seen as neutral technological marvels but as systems shaped by social and economic forces. The real conflict lies not between humans and machines, as in The Terminator’s robot uprising, but between the tech capitalists controlling the machines and the rest of us. The future of AI depends not on technology itself but on our collective capacity to build institutions like data trusts to govern it democratically. Kasy reminds us that AI is not an autonomous force but a social relation, an instrument of class power that can be retooled for collective ends. The question is whether we have the political will to seize it."
Katie Miller had a podcast meltdown and threatened the citizenship of a critic
Arwa Mahdawi, The Guardian: "Some couples bond over shared hobbies; others over shared values. The Maga bigwigs Stephen and Katie Miller, on the other hand, appear to have connected over their shared love of terrorizing immigrant children. The political power couple, who married in 2020, bonded during Donald Trump’s first term, when Stephen helped engineer a family-separation policy at the border that ripped more than 5,000 children, as young as four months old, from their immigrant parents. At the time, Miller (then going by her maiden name, Waldman) was an immigration spokesperson, and a big fan of Stephen’s hardline policies. 'DHS sent me to the border to see the separations for myself – to try to make me more compassionate – but it didn’t work,' she told MSNBC’s Jacob Soboroff in 2018, according to his book on the border policy, Separated. The book also quotes Miller saying she didn’t expect to change her mind: 'My family and colleagues told me that when I have kids I’ll think about family separation differently. But I don’t think so.' Fast-forward to the present day and the married couple now share three young children. Stephen is White House deputy chief of staff and possibly the most dangerous man in the Trump administration. Miller, meanwhile, quit a mysterious role at Elon Musk’s private ventures back in May to start a podcast about motherhood as part of an apparent plan to recruit more women to Maga. Yep, the woman who couldn’t muster up any compassion for kids in cages is now a momfluencer. And now that her husband is Trump’s right-hand man, she’s not just going after immigrants – she’s threatening to strip one of her critics of US citizenship. This week, Miller appeared on Piers Morgan’s YouTube show, along with a panel that included the leftwing commentator Cenk Uygur, to discuss Islamophobic attacks on the New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani. Miller kicked off the discussion with an incomprehensible point about the anti-Israel movement and then accused Uygur of 'using coded language to attack American Jews and to say that we should not be here and we should not be in existence.' Uygur retorted by saying she was lying, adding: 'It’s very normal for a Miller to be completely and utterly lying.' An epic meltdown ensued. Miller, who doesn’t appear to have much experience being challenged during an interview, then started ranting at Piers Morgan about how Uygur saying 'the Millers lie' is coded language for them being Jewish. After some more screaming, she also told Uygur: 'You better check your citizenship application and hope that everything was legal and correct … because you’ll be just like Ilhan Omar,' a frequent subject of Republican attacks. This, to be clear, is hardly some one-off. Threatening to deport your critics, even those with American citizenship, seems to be Maga policy now. The representative Nancy Mace, a Trump loyalist, for example, has said she would “love to see” Omar, a progressive representative, 'deported back to Somalia.' Various Republicans are also threatening to deport Mamdani; indeed, Miller’s meltdown occurred during a discussion about how the representative Randy Fine of Florida and Andy Ogles of Tennessee have been pushing the federal justice department to investigate Mamdani’s citizenship. Expect more of this. The Trump administration has made it very clear to 24.5 million naturalized Americans in the US that they’d better keep their mouths shut to keep their passports. Ultimately, Miller’s threat on Piers Morgan’s show wasn’t just directed at Uygur, it was a warning to everyone in America: criticize Maga and there will be consequences."
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The Sunday wrap-up
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