“The off-year governor’s election in purple Virginia is almost always a win for the party that doesn’t hold the White House, but this year the race is showing how much Democrats have refused to learn their lessons from their massive culture-war losses of 2024. The battle in the Old Dominion has all the hallmarks of Democrats’ White House defeat in November. An uninspiring political-insider candidate, hand-picked by the party establishment, is running a campaign that relies on hype from friendly media. She’s dodging questions about hot-button cultural issues — including trans athletes in school sports and men [sic] in girls’ dressing rooms — and betting she can coast to victory on resistance-fueled backlash to President Donald Trump.” (10/05/25)
Source: Caitlin Johnstone, Rogue Journalist
by Caitlin Johnstone
“It’s cute how the Zionists think they’ll be able to manipulate and propagandize the world into liking Israel again. Yeah, saturate all online platforms with weird-faced influencers telling us Israel is awesome. That’ll make us forget those years of genocidal atrocities. Sure, buy up the social media platforms that young people are using so you can censor criticism of Israel. That’ll convince them that Zionism is cool. Go on, take control of CBS and make Bari Weiss the boss. That’ll make us forget all those videos of mutilated Palestinian children. Right, use Zionist oligarchs and influence operations to manipulate governments and institutions into crushing free speech which opposes a genocidal apartheid state. That’ll get everyone supporting the genocidal apartheid state. Propaganda is an effective tool of mass-scale psychological manipulation, but it isn’t magic. It isn’t going to miraculously erase what people know in their bones to be true.” (10/06/25)
Source: Common Dreams
by Jeffrey D Sachs & Sybil Fares
“President Trump’s 20-point plan offers some constructive proposals on hostages, humanitarian aid, and reconstruction. Yet it is marred by an unmistakable colonial framework: Gaza is to be overseen by Trump himself, with Tony Blair and other outsiders cast as trustees for Palestinian governance — while Palestinian statehood is deferred indefinitely. This logic is not new. It reprises the century-long Anglo-American approach to Palestine since the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, when Britain acquired the Mandate over Palestine, and through successive U.S. interventions, direct and indirect, in the region since 1945. A real peace plan must eliminate the colonial scaffolding.” (10/06/25)
“The Biden administration spent four years placing a record level of new regulatory impediments on the nation’s airlines. An analysis by the Office of Management and Budget estimates that Biden’s Transportation Secretary, Pete Buttigieg, nearly tripled the number of transportation-related rules and regulations. There’s no evidence that all this added red tape made airline travel safer or reduced flight delays. Biden should have learned from the airline deregulations of the late 1970s, which liberated airlines from government controls on pricing and flight routes.” (10/06/25)
“I have consistently expressed my frustration with the different ways that Democrats are talking about the shutdown in public, compared with what they’re asking for in private. In public, this is just a fight about a looming health care cliff, using the leverage of needing Democratic votes (at least under current Senate rules) to pass government funding to demand that Republicans avert a crisis of millions of people losing their insurance coverage or seeing the price of it double. In private, this is a fight about extreme executive power and autocracy, with Democrats demanding that any government funding they pass must actually be spent, not withheld or rescinded. A No Kings Budget, in other words. That private conversation is becoming somewhat more public.” (10/06/25)
“The head of the U.N. refugee agency suggested Monday that President Donald Trump’s America has carried out deportation practices that violate international law, and criticized a wider ‘backlash’ in some countries against migrants and refugees. Filippo Grandi, the U.N. high commissioner for refugees, used a speech to lament that drastic funding cuts and shortages have forced his agency, UNHCR, to slash nearly 5,000 jobs this year, or nearly a quarter of its workforce. The cuts may not be finished, he said. ‘This was certainly not an easy year for any of us,’ Grandi told the opening of UNHCR’s executive committee. ‘But remember, please: There has never been an easy year to be a refugee – and there never will be.’ He did cite some bright spots and praised the Trump administration-led peace efforts in Congo, where conflict has displaced millions of people.” (10/06/25)
“I think I am going to form a hip-hop group with some of my retired officer friends that we will call the Phat Generalzzz – dibs on being the human beatbox! That is, of course, a ridiculous idea, but you know how it differs from the nonsense the Dems keep trying to sell us? The difference is that I don’t mean it. I am not actually going to form a hip-hop group with some of my retired officer friends that we will call the Phat Generalzzz, though if I did, I would call dibs on being the human beatbox. But the Dems are serious about the ridiculous stuff they say and seek to put in effect as policy …” (10/06/25)
“Illinois filed a lawsuit on Monday seeking to block U.S. President Donald Trump from deploying hundreds of federalized National Guard troops into the streets of Chicago. The Democratic-led state and the city of Chicago filed the lawsuit hours after a federal judge in Oregon on Sunday temporarily blocked Trump’s administration from sending any National Guard troops to police Portland, Oregon. The lawsuit took aim at a decision by the Trump administration over the weekend to federalize up to 300 members of the Illinois National Guard over the objections of Democratic Governor J.B. Pritzker and another 400 from Texas to deploy into Chicago.” (10/06/25)
“Venezuela warned Monday of an alleged plan by extremists to attack the shuttered U.S. Embassy complex in Caracas with explosives, coming as bilateral tensions simmer over Washington’s military deployment in the Caribbean. Jorge Rodríguez, head of the National Assembly and of Venezuela’s delegation for dialogue with the U.S., said in a statement that through ‘three different channels,’ the United States had been warned ‘of a serious threat’ from right-wing groups posing as followers of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. ‘Through a false-flag operation prepared by extremist sectors of the local right, there are attempts to plant lethal explosives at the U.S. Embassy in Caracas,’ Rodríguez said. The Associated Press requested comment from the U.S. State Department and was awaiting a reply.” (10/06/25)
Source: In These Times
by Sarah Lazare & Lindsay Koshgarian
“If the immigration enforcement apparatus of the United States were its own national military, it would be the 13th most heavily funded in the world. This puts it higher than the national militaries of Poland, Italy, Australia, Canada, Turkey and Spain — and just below Israel. That bloated force is due to a massive funding increase in President Donald Trump’s budget bill that went into effect October 1, and it comes as Chicagoland faces an escalation of violence from ICE and other federal agencies. Agents are tear gassing and beating protesters, raiding and ransacking communities across the area, and detaining people at homeless shelters and hospitals. They are roaming the city and surrounding suburbs in masks, sometimes in plain clothes and unmarked cars, and other times — especially near protests — in armored vehicles, wearing the militarized, camouflage uniforms that are the hallmark of soldiers.” (10/05/25)
