“President Donald Trump is promising more payments to voters just ahead of the Nov. 3 midterm elections — this time, to more than 20 million seniors, giving them $90 each to help pay for Medicare premiums. The announcement, made late Friday night by Trump on social media, comes after the president last month said about 1 million people would get rebate checks of $500 for Affordable Care Act premiums. He has also promised on the campaign trail to send every American adult $5,000 if Republicans retain control of the House and Senate in the midterm elections. That pledge (which would require approval from Congress) would likely cost more than $1 trillion, adding to the deficit and worsening inflation. Trump highlighted his $5,000 promise at a rally in Vandalia, Ohio, on Saturday night, and told supporters that 70,000 families in the state would receive the ACA rebates ‘within the next couple of days’.” (10/03/26)
“President Trump repeatedly berated Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) on Saturday over his stance on a daylight savings [sic] bill after posting the Republican Congress member’s cell phone number on social media. In a morning Truth Social post, the president encouraged his supporters to call the senator and urge him to back legislation that would make daylight savings [sic] time the permanent standard time. After Cotton stood by his position in a brief statement shared later Saturday, which didn’t directly mention the president or the leak, Trump went back on the offensive. … Trump blamed the GOP lawmaker for holding up the bill in the upper chamber after the House passed the legislation in July with broad bipartisan support.” (10/03/26)
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Our goal is $5,503, which means we’re only $2,741.50 short — and no, that’s not bad math. Reader GL has pledged to “match funds” for half the goal, so we “only” need a total of $2,751.50 from the rest of you. More on that in a minute, but first the call to action: PLEASE SUPPORT THE FREEDOM MOVEMENT’S DAILY NEWSPAPER at:
Today is a “Firehose Friday” at RRND/FND with more than 100 items awaiting your attention at our web edition. We don’t do those very often anymore, because starting earlier this year we began supplementing our 60-item email edition with extra web-only content (usually 10-20 additional items) EVERY day. But every once in a little while (like, say, during our annual fundraiser), we like to really push you toward the web edition.
Now, back to the fundraising lecture:
Other than the occasional “we’re reader-supported” mention, we come to you once, and only once, a year to ask for a fairly modest bit of money.
After 35 years (as RRND, 24 years next month) of reliably (every non-holiday weekday!) bringing you the Internet’s oldest daily news and commentary roundup for libertarians, we hope we’re still earning your support by delivering value. Please return some of that value in the form of financial support at:
I’ve been asked by at least one reader whether we’re perhaps just relying on artificial intelligence to do the work these days while we lie on the beach, sipping drinks with little umbrellas in them and working on our tans while robots do all the heavy lifting.
The answer is a hard no. We remain “hand-made,” with two humans personally scouring the news and political media each day, manually choosing, excerpting, and linking the content we expect you’ll find interesting. Nothing against AI as such, but we’re big on the human touch.
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So please, help get us to our goal ASAP so we can stop talking about money entirely for the rest of 2026 and mostly for the first nine months of 2027. That URL one last time:
“A US official told Al Jazeera that the USS Theodore Roosevelt strike group and the Makin Island amphibious force, carrying 2,000 Marines, have left San Diego. The official said three carriers and two landing groups are deploying around Iran. UK Maritime Trade Operations said a supertanker carrying 2.5 million barrels was struck by an unknown projectile and caught fire while passing through the Strait of Hormuz.” (10/01/26)
“A federal judge on Wednesday ruled the Trump administration must turn over a Department of Justice (DOJ) memo that legally authorizes the Pentagon’s lethal boat strikes in the Caribbean and Pacific. U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer rejected two of the administration’s three arguments to keep the document secret in a 66-page opinion, requiring that the government submit the memo within two weeks for his confidential review. Three legal organizations — the American Civil Liberties Union, the New York Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights — filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit last year to demand the release of this memo and other records related to these strikes. … More than 230 people have been [murdered] in at least 70 boat strikes in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific since the military campaign’s start on Sept. 2, 2025. ” (10/01/26)
“Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Thursday the country’s military had deployed a domestically developed FP-7 tactical ballistic missile in the war against Russia for the first time. … Zelensky did not specify the target, but published a video of a missile launch at night. The Ukrainian defence firm Fire Point had previously postponed the first combat deployments of its ballistic missile on several occasions. … By developing its own ballistic missile weapon, Kiev aims to achieve parity with Moscow in terms of military capability. Ukraine has already deployed short-range ballistic missiles from old Soviet stockpiles during the war.” (10/01/26)
“SpaceX’s latest astronaut launch just set a new space record. The company’s Crew-13 mission for NASA arrived at the International Space Station (ISS) today (Oct. 1) at 7:05 p.m. EDT (2305 GMT), 7 hours and 55 minutes after it launched from Florida’s Space Coast. That’s the fastest any American spacecraft has ever reached the orbiting lab, NASA officials said. … In May 2020, a Russian Soyuz spacecraft carrying three astronauts reached the orbiting lab just 3 hours and 3 minutes after lifting off from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. … Crew-13 delivered four astronauts to the orbiting lab: NASA’s Jessica Watkins and Luke Delaney, Joshua Kutryk of the Canadian Space Agency and Sergey Teteryatnikov of the Russian space agency Roscosmos. The quartet will live and work in space for the next six months.” (10/01/26)
“Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier on Thursday filed a lawsuit against Pfizer and its CEO, Albert Bourla, accusing the drugmaker of misleading consumers about the safety and effectiveness of its COVID-19 vaccine. … Uthmeier filed the lawsuit in state court, alleging that Pfizer told consumers its COVID-19 vaccine was safe while failing to disclose potential risks, including heart inflammation and other adverse events. Pfizer, according to the lawsuit, urged people to get the shot to protect others, even though the company never tested whether the vaccine stopped the virus from spreading. … Pfizer said in a statement the state’s allegations have no merit and that it would respond to the suit in due course.” [editor’s note: While Uthmeier is a grandstanding pol with a history of frivolous publicity-seeking and political corruption, there does seem to be a case here; the discovery phase should prove quite interesting – TLK] (10/01/26)
“The Supreme Court announced Thursday it will decide the legality of President Trump’s mandatory detention policy, putting one of his banner immigration programs on the justices’ docket for their upcoming term. The Trump administration argues it can detain people without bond if they’re found to be in the country unlawfully, even if they have been living on U.S. soil for years. It’s a significant expansion of the government’s immigration powers. The push has fueled thousands of cases claiming the policy exceeds federal law, creating an avalanche of work for judges across the country, who are racing to keep up. The case marks another major confrontation between the Trump administration and the conservative-majority court. However, the justices opted against taking up a broader legal question of whether Trump’s policy violates constitutional due process protections. As of now, the court will only decide if the policy follows federal law.” [editor’s note: Under the “supreme” federal law — the US Constitution — it’s literally impossible to “be in the country unlawfully” – TLK] (10/01/260
“The Labor Department reported Thursday that seasonally adjusted initial jobless claims fell by 1,000 to 197,000 for the week ending September 26, the lowest reading since mid-July. The prior week’s figure was revised up by 1,000, from 197,000 to 198,000. The four-week moving average of claims slipped 2,500 to land at 200,000, a level that irons out the noise of weekly fluctuations. That figure was also revised up by 250 from the prior week, to 202,500. Continuing claims — a measure of insured unemployment and a proxy for the number of people currently receiving benefits — fell by 11,000 to a seasonally adjusted 1.701 million for the week ending September 19, the lowest since March 2023, according to Bloomberg. The insured unemployment rate held at 1.1%.” (10/01/260
