Source: The Dispatch
by Kevin D Williamson
“I will believe that Hegseth is serious about this stuff when Hegseth starts acting like he is serious about it. As a few observers have pointed out, Hegseth’s Beverly Hills, 90210-style sideburns often extend to a length that would be prohibited under military grooming standards. But there is another area of dress convention that Hegseth violates in practically every public appearance, one that is in fact relevant to his current position: the Flag Code. … It forbids wearing the flag as an article of clothing, a rule Hegseth routinely flouts with his dopey flag-lined suits. It specifically forbids using the flag as a handkerchief, which Hegseth does habitually, tucking it into his chest pocket as a decorative pocket square — and surely, surely not because doing so makes it look like he is wearing some kind of military decoration.” (10/03/25)
https://archive.is/Owlc1
Source: Fox News
by Batya Ungar-Sargon
“It was an action-packed week in America that ended with a government shutdown as Democrats and Republicans failed to arrive at a compromise on health care benefits. But despite what you heard from the mainstream media, that wasn’t the big health care story of the week. It was this: On Tuesday, the Trump administration reached a deal with Pfizer to lower the cost of drugs for Americans, reversing decades of unfair pricing in which American patients paid up to four times more than Europeans for drugs that were developed in our own country. Pfizer agreed not to launch new drugs at a higher price in the U.S. than in other wealthy countries. It also agreed to sell drugs to Medicaid at lower prices and to sell drugs at a discount to Americans without insurance.” (10/04/25)
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/batya-ungar-sargon-how-trump-uses-same-strategy-curb-big-pharma-secure-mideast-peace
Source: BBC News [UK State Media]
“Police in Georgia have clashed with anti-government protesters trying to storm the presidential palace in the capital, Tbilisi. Security forces used water cannons and pepper spray to disperse demonstrators. The Caucasus country has been in crisis since the ruling Georgian Dream party claimed victory in last year’s parliamentary election, which the pro-European Union opposition says was stolen. Since then the government has paused talks on joining the EU. The protest took place on the same day as local elections, which the opposition is largely boycotting following a government crackdown. One organiser had earlier called for leaders of the Georgian Dream party to be arrested. Waving Georgian and EU flags, tens of thousands of protesters marched in central Tbilisi on Saturday.” (10/04/25)
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ce86kgnj7zro
Source: Responsible Statecraft
by Ted Snider
“Various forces, from tariffs to wars to the emerging multipolar world order, are potentially reshaping the Middle East and its alliances, and Egypt is playing a leading role. However, Egypt’s vision is bumping up against the reality that its dependence on Washington limits those shifting alliances and Egypt’s ability to play a leading role in them. Time will tell how far Egypt can go.” (10/03/25)
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/egypt-israel-arabs/
Source: CBS News
“Iran executed six death-row inmates Saturday it alleged carried out attacks in the country’s oil-rich southwest on behalf of Israel, the latest prisoners to be put to death in a wave of executions believed to be the highest in decades. The executions follow the 12-day Iran-Israel war in June, which ended with Tehran vowing it would target its enemies at home and abroad. However, activists warn Iran often relies on coerced confessions and closed-door trials in its death penalty cases, particularly those involving Israel.” (10/04/25)
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/iran-executes-death-row-inmates-israel/
Source: Freakonomics
“The Merger You Never Knew You Wanted.” (10/03/25)
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/the-merger-you-never-knew-you-wanted/
Source: Eunomia
by Daniel Larison
“The president has dressed up his summary executions of alleged criminals by pretending that the U.S. is fighting a war with these groups, but these groups are not engaged in hostilities with our government. They aren’t carrying our armed attacks on our country or our military. Calling them terrorist organizations doesn’t authorize or legitimize the killing Trump has ordered. Branding noncombatants as combatants doesn’t make them lawful targets. The administration has dubbed this a ‘non-international armed conflict’ for the purposes of creating a fig leaf for the president’s murders.” (10/03/25)
https://daniellarison.substack.com/p/trump-fabricates-a-war-to-cover-up
Source: SFGate
“Taylor Swift’s surprise midnight Friday album drop has taken over the internet and quickly worked itself into the current biggest personal rivalry in American politics. Gov. Gavin Newsom released a TikTok video Friday afternoon showing a montage of his interactions with President Donald Trump set to Swift’s new song ‘Actually Romantic.’ The video shows Trump’s tweets attacking Newsom captioned with the lyrics, ‘It’s actually sweet, all the time you’ve spent on me.’ The Friday video is only the latest jab in a duel that’s come to epitomize the subterranean lows American political dialogue has reached. Trump has spent the past decade eroding political norms with a constant stream of name-calling, overstatements, outright lies and all-caps social media posts aimed at whoever crosses his mind. Newsom has recently responded in kind, with his own stream of rants and foul-mouthed social media posts, usually aimed at Trump or one of Trump’s followers.” (10/03/25)
https://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/gavin-newsom-uses-taylor-swift-to-attack-trump-21083446.php
Source: Underthrow
by Max Borders
“Presumably, the point of voting is to change things you don’t like or to make the world a better place by electing the ‘right’ people, but the likelihood that your vote will affect the outcome of an election is vanishingly small. And the ‘right’ people are almost always wrong. Consider that it takes about 3,633,600 drops of water to fill a 40-gallon bathtub (90,840 drops per gallon). Considering that 155,240,953 people voted in the 2024 election, your vote is like a single drop in 43 bathtubs. What are the odds that your drop will fill the forty-third tub? And yet democracy is the only game in town.” (10/03/25)
https://underthrow.substack.com/p/democracy-is-overrated
Source: Common Dreams
by Ralph Nader
“In Gaza, 200,000 Palestinian children have already been murdered by the Netanyahu regime, with American weapons. A survey last year by a British civic group found that 46% of the children in Gaza wanted to die, and over 95% believed they would be killed. This is not surprising. The Israeli genocidal regime has daily bombed tiny Gaza’s 2.3 million residents (the geographical size of Philadelphia) with the TNT equivalent of seven Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs, smashing civilians and their infrastructure from water mains, electricity, fuel supplies, roads, agricultural crops, to hospitals, clinics, schools, housing, and bakeries into bits and pieces of flesh and debris. Imagine the horror, the screams, starvation, chronic diseases, and untreated, bleeding injuries, the huge number of limbs amputated from children, most severed without any anesthesia.” (10/04/25)
https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/children-of-gaza-to-us
