August 27, 2026

02b U.S. Politics – Progressive

Blurb:

The Wall Street Journal, which famously floats trial balloons for corporate behemoths, is carrying water for the poor AI companies who are so, so disliked:

OpenAI this week published a populist wish list of policy proposals that zero in on worries like job replacement and wealth concentration, floating such ideas as a four-day workweek and an AI-invested public-wealth fund distributed to citizens.

Those proposals come as its rival Anthropic has been signing partnerships and building tools for such sectors as consulting and software, where share prices have been whacked by investor worries that they will be replaced by AI. Anthropic’s efforts have helped push back up shares of tech companies including LegalZoom.com LZ 3.84%increase; green up pointing triangle.

Anthropic and OpenAI are each pursuing ventures to help private equity, a big owner of companies in sectors ripe for disruption, with AI transformation. (Those efforts could also yield lucrative new business customers.)

Blurb:

 

This is a spectacular screw-up—and it implicates the The New York Times newsroom top to bottom. A The New York Times headline ignorantly called NATO the “North American Treaty Organization,” triggering widespread online ridicule and criticism of editorial standards. The error spread quickly on social media, with users calling it embarrassing and questioning newsroom competence. The paper acknowledged the mistake and said a correction would appear in the next print edition.

Blurb:

Writing Sunday night for crazy Oliver Darcy’s site Status, Natalie Korach gushed over an apparel line designed by CNN host Jake Tapper for journalists to don April 25 at the White House Correspondents Dinner (WHCD) so they can stick it to the people many of them hate: President Trump (and, by extension, his supporters).

Korach explained the items — which include a fan, lapel pin, notebook, pocket square, phone wallet, or tote bag, all benefitting the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press — will be “bearing the text ‘Congress shall make no law abridging the Freedom of Speech or of the Press’” in “a hand-drawn design by CNN’s Jake Tapper” and serve as a brave way to “rise to the occasion” against the President and his team.

Blurb:

Liberal reporters have a funny habit of touting liberal bias as glorious “editorial independence.” When Larry and David Ellison won the bid to take over CNN in February, Washington Post reporters found it sad: “Among power players in politics and media, Paramount’s swoop is also widely viewed as a win for the right amid a broader push to rein in what many conservatives view as a liberal slant in the media and entertainment industries.”

On April 5, Post media reporters Scott Nover and Liam Scott turned to a group of CNN staffers — providing them with anonymity to complain without offending the new owners. How nice of them. Nover tweeted with the “independence” verbiage:

Blurb:

Donald Trump’s flip-flopping has been laid bare in the statements he has made over the last six weeks of the war – which culminated today in a chilling threat to annihilate Iran.

Donald Trump has appeared increasingly desperate as the war in Iran continues

Donald Trump’s descent into desperation during the Iran War has been laid bare, with a massive timeline of the president’s public statements capturing his conflicting briefings about the war as it enters its sixth week.

Trump, 79, despite having long insisted that the operation he launched on February 28 was successful from day one, has been accused of constantly U-turning, leaving international allies frustrated as he asks for their aid.

Blurb:

President Donald Trump had a plan to deport the “worst of the worst,” but that veil has long been lifted from the public’s eyes. And over the weekend, two new reminders emerged showcasing how intensely messy the president’s push to remove immigrants has gotten.

A young soldier preparing for deployment is now worried about the safety of his wife who was detained by ICE soon after they arrived on the military base. Matthew Blank and Annie Ramos—who entered the U.S. with her parents from Honduras at just 22 months old—tied the knot just days before she was detained.

 

Blurb:

With less than a month before election day in Virginia, a new poll finds voters aren’t crazy about the Democrats’ plan to change the constitution in order to rig the commonwealth’s political maps.

Heritage Action’s Redistricting Poll of 814 likely Virginia voters gauges support — and opposition — for the April 21 ballot question asking whether the state’s constitution should be altered. Members of the Democrat-controlled Assembly want to “temporarily” push aside the work of a state redistricting commission so that they can rewrite Virginia’s congressional maps. They want an extreme gerrymander that aims to take out four Republican House seats and give Democrats a 10-1 advantage in the state’s congressional delegation.

Blurb:

Forty-seven Democrats voted against a photo ID amendment on Thursday despite Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer previously claiming that he was supportive of photo ID.

Sen. Jon Husted (R-OH) introduced an amendment to the Safeguarding American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) America Act that would simply require photo ID to vote. Acceptable forms of ID include an unexpired driver’s license with a photo, a valid passport, a military ID, an unexpired state-ID card, among others.

The measure needed 60 votes to pass but only received 53 “AYE’s.”

Blurb:

As the US-Israeli war against Iran entered its second month on Saturday, US President Donald Trump had an urgent message for the American people: turn on Fox News.

Those who followed the president’s advice – delivered through his Truth Social media platform – would have tuned in to see ultraconservative pundit Mark Levin publicly calling on Trump to seize Iran’s stockpiles of enriched uranium by force.

“We’ve got to get the uranium,” he said. “If it cannot be destroyed, if it cannot be altered, we gotta get it.”

Blurb:

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said Monday that the Saudi Arabian government should “eject” U.S. troops from its country, three days after the Iranian military attacked a U.S. air base in Saudi Arabia. “Iran respects the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and considers it a brotherly nation,” Araghchi wrote on the social platform X. “Our operations…
from thehill.com

Blurb:

“One woman became so sick from eating the food that she began vomiting blood.”

“My kids are terrified; we are all depressed.”

“I always ask my children for forgiveness for making them suffer through all of this.”

Though the number of families inside Dilley Immigration Processing Center in Texas has dropped dramatically in recent months, for dozens of children still inside, such brutal conditions remain. Now, at the risk of their stories fading to the background of the Trump administration’s cascading crises, Ms. Rachel, the beloved children’s educator, is calling on the public to fight for their release.

“We have to hold on to hope for families who are locked in Dilley and keep going,” Ms. Rachel, whose real name is Rachel Griffin Accurso, told Mother Jones. “I do believe the public outcries and the people who have come together and worked on this long before I have are making a huge difference.”

“I do believe the public outcries and the people who have come together and worked on this long before I have are making a huge difference.”

Blurb:

Illinois Governor JB Prtizker — who has long been seen as a potential presidential contender in 2028 — recently laid out his plans to launch politically-motivated prosecutions targeting Trump officials, a strategy he referred to as “Project 2029.”

While speaking with the New York Times, Pritzker framed the plan as a “forward-looking framework” for Democrats aiming to regain national power after the 2028 election. Pritzker, who has served as governor since 2019 and has frequently clashed with the Trump administration on issues including immigration enforcement, described the project as a necessary response to political lessons from recent years.

Blurb:

Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner is doubling down on earlier promises to arrest and prosecute Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, this time threatening agents deployed to his city’s airport.

The George Soros-backed prosecutor made his threats during a Tuesday press conference, directing his remarks to federal ICE agents who helping to patrol Philadelphia’s International Airport.

Blurb:

The Democrats have set a new record for single-month lobbyist fundraising. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee reported a record $4.1 million in lobbyist-bundled contributions in February, according to a Sludge analysis of Federal Election Commission filings, a dramatic increase in corporate-linked fundraising as House Democrats are campaigning on “affordability.” The lobbyist-derived cash made up nearly one-third of the DCCC’s fundraising last month.

Lobbyist bundling, in which registered lobbyists collect checks from their clients and colleagues and deliver them in a single package, is a key way that corporate interests work to gain influence with lawmakers. Federal law requires disclosure of bundled contributions above $24,000.

The DCCC’s February total shatters previous records and builds on a trend of the Democrats’ increasing reliance on lobbyist bundling for their funds. January’s $3.6 million was itself a high-water mark, and as recently as 2023, monthly lobbyist bundling reported by the DCCC was generally much lower, typically in the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Blurb:

 

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer rolled out an energy and climate change agenda Wednesday as a preview of what Democrats have in store if they take the chamber’s majority in November’s elections.

Schumer’s five-point plan seeks to ride the national momentum on affordability, framing Democrats as the party not just of clean energy and fighting climate change, but of lower electricity bills and more jobs.

Blurb:

 

In midterm elections in which control of all or part of Congress flips away from the president’s party, a common pattern emerges.

The party out of power grows stronger on the hypothetical midterm-election ballot as the year moves toward Election Day.

A president isn’t on the midterm ballot, but his/her popularity and the perception of how the country is doing factor in to how voters vote in a midterm election.

The perception of both Donald Trump’s performance and the country’s current situation is not good.

MIT Data reveals the Democrat Party saw a 23 million vote drop in mail-in ballot votes from 2020 to 2024. Meanwhile, it’s other voting data mostly held steady from 2020 to 2024. The spike in Democrat votes in 2020 has never been explained. This recent finding suggests the answer may be where many thought it was the whole time, in the post-election-day ballot “counting” behind windows covered with pizza boxes.

Blurb:

STATISTICALLY IMPOSSIBLE”: MIT Data Shows 23 MILLION Democrat Mail-In Voters Vanished From 2020 to 2024 – gellerreport.com

ELECTION INTEGRITY: MIT data shows Democrat mail-in voting dropped 23 points from 2020 to 2024 with zero drop in Democrat in-person voting. Republican voting was relatively static. The 23-point surge in Democrat mail-in ballots in 2020 has no explanation. Did these voters ever exist?

Blurb:

USC was set to hold a debate for California’s gubernatorial candidates. There was no problem with this, so a disgruntled candidate made one up. Subsequently, the event was canceled less than 24 hours before the scheduled time because the candidates were too white for the left.

According to The Desert Sun:

Former U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, a Democratic candidate for governor, accused USC of using an “arbitrary formula that favors wealthy candidates” and said the criteria resulted in the exclusion of all candidates of color from the debate.

In other words, Becerra was beside himself, as he could not comprehend how he did not meet this “viability” score.

Maybe, just maybe, the reason he did not qualify for the debate had nothing to do with skin color and everything to do with the fact that he is polling at 3%.

USC said it stood by the independence of the data-driven formula used to determine candidate “viability,” but acknowledged the controversy had become a distraction from issues voters care about.

“We recognize that concerns about the selection criteria for tomorrow’s gubernatorial debate have created a significant distraction from the issues that matter to voters,” the university said, adding that it would “look for other opportunities to educate voters on the candidates and issues”.