“Two hypothetical college graduates who are married now have a combined annual income of $240,000; they each earn $120,000 per year. Should an American who graduated from high school but never went to college — and who now works as a delivery truck driver, earning $43,950 per year (the median annual earnings for that job) — be forced to help pay off the federal student loans of these two college graduates who make $240,000? If former President Joe Biden had gotten his way, that truck driver and other hardworking American taxpayers would indeed have seen their tax dollars help pay off those loans. When Biden was running for president in April 2020, he announced his plan for ‘forgiving student debt’.” (09/23/26)
“Billionaire Les Wexner has long been a magnet for political campaigns seeking contributions — especially in his native Ohio, where the retail tycoon directed a generous portion of his giving to candidates from both parties. Then came the Epstein files. Jeffrey Epstein, the late convicted sex offender, was Wexner’s former financial adviser. That relationship and Wexner’s history of political donations has figured prominently in Ohio’s U.S. Senate race, which could end up as the most expensive in the country this year. Wexner, who has disavowed his prior association with Epstein, contributed about $116,000 to support Republican Sen. Jon Husted from 2001 to 2025, mostly during the two decades he spent in state politics before being appointed to fill Vice President JD Vance’s seat last year. While that’s just a sliver of Husted’s prolific fundraising, his opponent in this year’s race, former Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown, is turning it into a campaign cudgel.” (09/23/26)
“Kristalina Georgieva, managing director of the IMF, issued a warning on debt levels at the UN general assembly meeting in New York City. The world’s advanced economies including the UK and US need to cut borrowing and reduce debt levels following weeks of spiraling government interest costs, the head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has warned. In an exclusive interview, Kristalina Georgieva said global economic shocks had been ‘pushing debt levels up like a staircase not to heaven’ but that governments had taken ‘no action to contain that service cost’. ‘[It’s] time to take that action,’ she said, adding that ‘courage’ was needed by politicians to take the necessary steps. The intervention comes as government borrowing costs have surged in response to wars disrupting the supply of oil, which has fueled inflation.” (09/23/26)
“A lot of rich and influential people have suddenly become very worried about artificial intelligence models’ danger to humanity, thanks to several recent episodes in which various AI ‘agents’ carried out hacks of other websites and systems. OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, and xAI’s Elon Musk all now agree that the government needs to help them set up a cartel in violation of antitrust law—er, I mean, ‘pace the frontier’. Yet for odd reasons, the ‘AI safety’ discussion has been focused almost entirely on rather weird-sounding future scenarios. Will artificial intelligence models unleash an economic or social cataclysm? Or cause the extinction of the human race? Or destroy all life on Earth? Or even turn all the matter on the planet into paper clips? Or all the matter in the galaxy? The universe?” (09/23/26)
“Police in Mississippi have arrested a second man in the death of a [b]lack woman found hanging from a tree and have issued an arrest warrant for a third suspect. Jackson police said late Tuesday that they arrested 25-year-old Earnest Lloyd Jr. in the death of 29-year-old Tasia Fortune, whose body was found hanging behind an abandoned home in the city on Aug. 3. Like Fortune and the first man arrested, 51-year-old Jarques Ratliff, Lloyd is [b]lack.” [editor’s note: One more brick falls in the wall of claims about “racist lynchings” – SAT] [additional editor’s note: Arrests are not convictions. And falling bricks would explain a lot about whatever goes on in SAT’s head – TLK] (09/23/26)
“Xi Jinping is preparing to visit the United States. Washington will focus on artificial intelligence, tariffs, rare earths, supply chains, and trade. Behind these discussions lies a common assumption: China is still rising—a disciplined superpower capable of challenging America for decades. That may be true. But Washington may also be repeating the mistake the West made with the Soviet Union. After the Soviet collapse, briefly opened archives allowed Western intelligence officials to reassess decades of analysis. Richard Kerr, a former deputy director of the CIA, offered an ironic summary: ‘We tried to find out what the Soviet leaders knew. Finally, we found out that they did not know much. They didn’t even know that their country would soon collapse.'” (09/23/26)
“Ethiopia’s government and the party in control of the northern region of Tigray have accused each other of launching offensives, escalating fears of a return to full-scale conflict. Getachew Reda, a cabinet minister and adviser to Ethiopia’s prime minister, said Tigrayan fighters had taken control of federally administered airports in Tigray and launched offensives in neighbouring Afar and Amhara regions. Earlier, the Tigrayan authorities said their forces had been forced to enter ‘a defensive war’. The statement followed reports of drone strikes in Tigray. The two-year war in Tigray ended in 2022 – but over recent months both sides have been accusing each other of violating a peace deal. It was one of the most deadly conflicts this century – the African Union’s mediator estimated some 600,000 people died as the fighting drove the region to the precipice of famine.” (09/23/26)
“Iran’s president said Wednesday that his people have been ‘victims of terrorism’ by the United States, delivering a rare wartime speech at U.N. General Assembly a day after President Donald Trump said he ‘may annihilate’ the Islamic Republic if a deal isn’t reached soon to end the nearly seven-month war. The defiant speech by President Masoud Pezeshkian marked a striking instance of a foreign leader addressing the world body while their country is at war with the host nation. … ‘We have only defended ourselves. We are not terrorists,’ Pezeshkian said at the General Assembly. ‘Our innocent people have been the targets of cowardly attacks and aggressions imposed upon our country. And we defended ourselves with utmost strength. America and Israel attacked us.’ He added of the United States: ‘Yes they did hit us, but we did not bend the knee.'” (09/23/26)
“A shady trio was spotted emerging from a manhole just steps from the hotel where Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is expected to stay during the United Nations General Assembly, cops and sources said. The three unidentified men were spotted around 4:35 a.m. climbing out of the underground pit on Park Avenue near East 61st Street on the Upper East Side, authorities said. They fled in two separate vehicles that headed north on Park Avenue, police said. Netanyahu and other dignitaries are expected to stay at the Loews Regency New York down the block, sources said. It was not immediately clear whether the sewer incident is linked to his stay.” (09/23/26)
“If the Left is serious about winning elections across the country, working-class voters must be at the center of this project. And yet, too many campaigns don’t make these voters’ priorities their focus. In a new report from The Center for Working Class Politics (where I am a research associate), scholars Joan Williams and Jared Abbot analyze the results of a recent Class Gaps Poll, which compares the political attitudes of working-class people with those of liberal upper-middle-class voters, who, like it or not, have steered the modern progressive movement and its agenda.” (09/22/26)
