Saturday, September 13, 2025
■ The Week in Review
"Your periodic reminder that health insurance is not healthcare," said one advocate. "It's an unnecessary middleman designed to restrict access to healthcare and exploit people for profit."
By Brad Reed • Sep 12, 2025
Health insurance premiums are set to skyrocket in the coming months, which has prompted many progressive advocates to remind Americans that a less expensive alternative is possible.
As The Washington Post reported on Friday, the cost of health insurance is “on track for their biggest jump in at least five years” thanks in part to the actions of congressional Republicans and President Donald Trump.
Citing new research from KFF, the Post noted that most people who buy insurance through the Affordable Care Act are set to see their premiums rise by over 75% unless Congress steps in and renews enhanced subsidies that had been passed into law under the American Rescue Plan in 2021.
Congressional Democrats have said that they will not vote to fund the government past its current rapidly approaching deadline unless Republicans in Congress agree to an extension of the enhanced health insurance tax credits.
The Post report also pointed to Trump’s trade war threats as a justification being cited by insurers to raise rates. Even though Trump has yet to actually levy tariffs on pharmaceutical imports, his Commerce Department is currently investigating their impact and the president himself has said that the tariffs could be as much as 250%.
“Some insurers, in legal filings with regulators, have said explicitly that the expected tariffs were raising insurance prices,” the paper explained. “A document from United Healthcare of New York states that, to account for ‘uncertainty regarding tariffs and/or the onshoring of manufacturing and their impact on total medical costs, most notably on pharmaceuticals, a total price impact of 3.6% is built into the initially submitted rate filing.‘”
Given all this, longtime supporters of Medicare for All encouraged their fellow Americans to consider a different way of handling healthcare.
“Next year, Americans will see the biggest jump in health insurance costs in 15 years,” commented former US Labor Secretary Robert Reich. “Meanwhile, the six largest health insurers raked in more than $31 billion in net income last year. Still not sure if we need Medicare for All?”
Warren Gunnels, a staffer for US Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), cited studies by the Congressional Budget Office and Yale to argue that Medicare for All would be a net money saved.
“Your daily reminder: Medicare for All would save $650 billion and 68,000 lives each and every year while providing comprehensive healthcare to every man, woman, and child with no premiums, no deductibles, and no co-payments,” he wrote.
Melanie D’Arrigo, the executive director of Campaign for New York Health, argued that the best part of Medicare for All is that it would simply make the private insurance industry obsolte.
“Your periodic reminder that health insurance is not healthcare,” she said. “It’s an unnecessary middleman designed to restrict access to healthcare and exploit people for profit. The fiscal and moral path forward is universal healthcare with Medicare for All.”
Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) reacted to the news of insurance price hikes with a simple message.
“Medicare for All. Now,” he wrote.
One ACLU leader warned it "would hand the Trump administration more tools to criminalize immigrants and terrorize communities at the same time they are deploying federal agents and the military to our streets."
By Jessica Corbett • Sep 11, 2025
Eleven Democrats voted with Republicans in the US House of Representatives on Thursday to advance the so-called Stop Illegal Entry Act, which critics have condemned as ”dangerously overbroad” as well as ”dehumanizing and horrific.”
The final vote was 226-197. The 11 Democrats who joined all GOP members present in backing the bill were Reps. Henry Cuellar (Texas), Don Davis (NC), Laura Gillen (NY), Jared Golden (Maine), Vicente Gonzalez (Texas), Adam Gray (Calif.), Kristen McDonald Rivet (Mich.), Frank Mrvan (Ind.), Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (Wash.), Tom Suozzi (NY), and Gabe Vasquez (NM).
Introduced by Congresswoman Stephanie Bice (R-Okla.) and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), HR 3486 would increase sentences for undocumented immigrants who repeatedly enter the United States illegally or enter the country and then commit a felony. The bill still needs Senate approval to reach the desk of Republican President Donald Trump, who supports it.
After Thursday’s vote, Mike Zamore, the ACLU’s national director of policy and government affairs, warned that “HR 3486 would supercharge President Trump’s reckless deportation drive, which is already damaging our economy and destabilizing communities.”
“This legislation would hand the Trump administration more tools to criminalize immigrants and terrorize communities at the same time they are deploying federal agents and the military to our streets. It would also undermine public safety by diverting more resources away from youth services and prevention programs that actually improve community safety,” Zamore said. “While the House narrowly passed this bill, we thank the members of Congress who held the line and voted against this harmful legislation.”
“At a time when president is threatening American cities and the Supreme Court is greenlighting racial profiling, it is vital that a growing number of elected officials are standing together in rejecting Stephen Miller’s dystopian agenda to criminalize and demonize people who come to this country seeking a better life,” he added, calling out the White House deputy chief of staff for policy infamous for various anti-migrant initiatives from Trump’s first term, including forcible separation of families.
Speaking on the House floor, Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), an immigrant herself, called the bill “Republicans’ latest attempt to scapegoat and fearmonger about immigrants.”
US Rep. Sylvia Garcia (D-Texas) also spoke out against the bill, saying on social media: “It does nothing to protect communities or make us safer. Instead, it piles on cruel mandatory minimums, explodes prison costs, and treats families seeking safety like violent criminals. We need real immigration reform, not another zero-tolerance failure.”
Congressman Dave Min (D-Calif.), the son of immigrants, said in a statement that “in talking with local and state law enforcement officers, I learned that this bill will potentially make it harder for them to do their jobs. By increasing the scope of crimes that local police officers might be expected to enforce, while not providing any funding for this, HR 3486 would effectively reduce the resources our local law enforcement has to keep our communities safe and potentially lead to increases in violent crime.”
Min also pointed to the US Supreme Court’s Monday ruling that allows Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to engage in what critics have called “blatant racial profiling.”
“This bill, combined with the Supreme Court’s clearly wrong decision allowing ICE to detain people based on ethnicity, race, language, or place of employment, will give sweeping new authorities to ICE to perpetuate the mass incarceration of immigrants,” he said. “I am deeply concerned that HR 3486 will lead to more violent attacks and unlawful arrests by ICE of the people I represent. For these reasons, I voted no earlier today.”
"At the very same time that Trump is ordering strikes on a boat in Venezuela, he's cutting, gutting the programs that we use to interrupt the drug trade coming through Central America and Mexico," said Sen. Chris Murphy.
By Julia Conley • Sep 11, 2025
As new details emerged about the boat that the Trump administration bombed last week off the Venezuelan coast, legal experts and lawmakers said Wednesday that the White House’s case for carrying out the unprecedented military strike against suspected drug smugglers had grown even weaker—with new evidence showing the vessel had turned away from the US, back toward Venezuela, just before it was bombed.
Legal analysts have said in the days since the attack that killed 11 people that the bombing amounted to an extrajudicial murder, dismissing President Donald Trump’s claim that the White House has “tapes of [the victims] speaking” that proved they were members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua—the only “evidence” that’s been made public.
Even if the 11 people killed were members of the gang—which Trump has classified as a terrorist organization despite US intelligence agencies’ finding that Tren de Aragua is a relatively low-level gang without connections to Venezuelan government—the administration used military force to stop a suspected criminal enterprise, instead of following law enforcement procedures, experts have said.
In a video posted on social media Wednesday, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said it was highly unlikely that the boat was carrying fentanyl, which killed an estimated 48,422 people in the US in 2024 and which is primary trafficked through Central America and Mexico—not Venezuela.
“His stated reason for taking the strikes to try to stop the flow of drugs into the United States, makes no sense as the centerpiece of a counternarcotics strategy,” said Murphy. “At the very same time that Trump is ordering these strikes on the boat in Venezuela, he’s cutting, gutting the programs that we use to interrupt the drug trade coming through Central America and Mexico. We have dramatically fewer resources to stop fentanyl coming to the United States while we’re taking airstrikes on a boat off the Venezeuelan coast.”
The strike, said Murphy, particularly in light of the new information disclosed by US officials, is “another sign of Trump’s growing lawlessness.”
With US officials disclosing Wednesday that the boat had not been headed toward the US when it was bombed, a former military attorney told The New York Times that the new information further undermined Trump’s claim that he ordered the strike to stop a threat to US national security.
“If someone is retreating, where’s the ‘imminent threat’ then?” Rear Adm. Donald J. Guter, a retired judge advocate general for the Navy, told the Times. “Where’s the ‘self-defense’? They are gone if they ever existed—which I don’t think they did.”
The people aboard the vessel had turned back after spotting US planes that had been surveilling them “for a significant period of time,” The Intercept reported. Three sources including Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who has expressed outrage over the strike, said the boat was attacked by at least one drone, and The Intercept reported that the victims survived an initial attack before being killed in the second one.
The strikes were conducted after the boat turned back toward the Venezuelan shore.
Officials told the Times that a 29-second video Trump released that was purported to show several clips of a speedboat racing toward the US before an explosion, left out key details of the event.
“It does not show the boat turning after the people aboard were apparently spooked by an aircraft above them, nor does it show the military making repeated strikes on the vessel even after disabling it,” the Times reported.
A high-ranking Pentagon official told The Intercept that even if the White House’s claim that the boat’s passengers were trafficking drugs is true, the strike was a “criminal attack on civilians.”
“The U.S. is now directly targeting civilians. Drug traffickers may be criminals but they aren’t combatants,” the official said. “When Trump fired the military’s top lawyers the rest saw the writing on the wall, and instead of being a critical firebreak they are now a rubber stamp complicit in this crime.”
US officials have yet to share information confirming where the vessel was headed; before the administration began claiming it was headed to US shores and driven by “evil narco-terrorists trying to poison our homeland,” as one White House spokesperson said, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters the boat was likely headed to another country in the Caribbean.
One foreign policy expert said these congressional authorizations "have become like holy writ, documents frozen in time yet endlessly reinterpreted to justify new military action."
By Stephen Prager • Sep 11, 2025
Almost exactly 24 years after the September 11, 2001 attacks, the US House of Representatives voted Tuesday to finally repeal a pair of more than two-decade-old congressional authorizations that have allowed presidents to carry out military attacks in the Middle East and elsewhere.
In a 261-167 vote, with 49 Republicans joining all Democrats, the House passed an amendment to the next military spending bill to rescind the Authorizations for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) passed by Congress in the leadup to the 1991 Persian Gulf War and 2003 War in Iraq.
The decision is a small act of resistance in Congress after what the Quincy Institute’s Adam Weinstein described in Foreign Policy magazine as “years of neglected oversight” by Congress over the “steady expansion of presidential war-making authority.”
As Weinstein explains, these AUMFs, originally meant to give presidents narrow authority to target terrorist organizations like al-Qaeda and use military force against Saddam Hussein, “have been stretched far beyond their original purposes” by presidents to justify the use of unilateral military force across the Middle East.
President George W. Bush used the 2002 authorization, which empowered him to use military force against Iraq, to launch a full invasion and military occupation of the country. Bush would stretch its purview throughout the remainder of his term to apply the AUMF to any threat that could be seen as stemming from Iraq.
After Congress refused to pass a new authorization for the fight against ISIS—an offshoot of al-Qaeda—President Barack Obama used the ones passed during the War on Terror to expand US military operations in Syria. They also served as the basis of his use of drone assassinations in the Middle East and North Africa throughout his term.
During his first term, President Donald Trump used those authorizations as the legal justification to intensify the drone war and to launch attacks against Hezbollah in Iraq and Syria. He then used it to carry out the reckless assassination of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani in Iraq.
And even while calling for the repeal of the initial 2001 and 2002 authorizations, former President Joe Biden used them to continue many of the operations started by Trump.
“These AUMFs,” Weinstein said, “have become like holy writ, documents frozen in time yet endlessly reinterpreted to justify new military action.”
The amendment to repeal the authorizations was introduced by Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-N.Y.) and Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas).
Meeks described the authorizations as “long obsolete,” saying they “risk abuse by administrations of either party.”
Roy described the repeal of the amendment as something “strongly opposed by the, I’ll call it, defense hawk community.” But, he said, “the AUMF was passed in ‘02 to deal with Iraq and Saddam Hussein, and that guy’s been dead... and we’re now still running under an ‘02 AUMF. That’s insane. We should repeal that.”
“For decades, presidents abused these AUMFs to send Americans to fight in forever wars in the Middle East,” said Rep. Chris Deluzio (D-Pa.) shortly before voting for the amendment. “Congress must take back its war powers authority and vote to repeal these AUMFs.”
Although this House vote theoretically curbs Trump’s war-making authority, it comes attached to a bill that authorizes $893 billion worth of new war spending, which 17 Democrats joined all but four Republicans Republicans in supporting Wednesday.
The vote will also have no bearing on the question of President Donald Trump’s increasing use of military force without Congressional approval to launch unilateral strikes—including last week’s bombing of a vessel that the administration has claimed, without clear evidence, was trafficking drugs from Venezuela and strikes conducted in June against Iran, without citing any congressional authorization.
Alexander McCoy, a Marine veteran and public policy advocate at Public Citizen, said, “the 1991 and 2002 AUMFs” are “good to remove,” but pointed out that it’s “mostly the 2001 AUMF that is exploited for forever wars.”
“Not to mention, McCoy added, “we have reached a point where AUMFs almost seem irrelevant, because Congress has shown no willingness whatsoever to punish the president for just launching military actions without one, against Iran, and now apparently against Venezuela.”
In the wake of Trump’s strikes against Iran, Democrats introduced resolutions in the House and Senate aimed at requiring him to obtain Congressional approval, though Republicans and some Democratic war hawks ultimately stymied them.
However, Dylan Williams, the vice president of the Center for International Policy, argued that the repeal of the AUMF was nevertheless “a major development in the effort to finally rein in decades of unchecked use of military force by presidents of both parties.”
The vote, Williams said, required lawmakers “to show where they stand on restraining US military adventurism.”
With the suspect still at large and the motive unknown, the president "seized the moment of widespread mourning to spread more hatred and division."
By Julia Conley • Sep 11, 2025
Despite the fact that the murderer of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk remained unidentified and still at large, President Donald Trump declared the “radical left” as “directly responsible” for the assassination in remarks from the White House on Wednesday night—comments that critics say shows Trump is more than willing to exploit the killing for his own purposes while sowing more, not less, political violence in the future.
In a video address from the Oval Office, Trump said that criticism of Kirk from the left was “directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now.”
The president didn’t specify which opponents of Kirk he believed contributed to his killing; over the years the influencer, who frequently visited college campuses to debate students, clashed with and was criticized by supporters of abortion rights, gun control, and immigrants’ rights. But Trump said his administration would “find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it.”
Trump did not detail how the White House would determine what groups “contributed” to Kirk’s killing.
“Radical left political violence has hurt too many innocent people and taken too many lives,” he asserted, though he did not mention any of the political violence—which is statistically more pervasive—on the political right.
The president was echoing sentiments expressed by far-right influencer Laura Loomer who has played a key role in shaping the Trump administration, lobbying for the hiring and removal of certain aides.
“It’s time for the Trump administration to shut down, defund, and prosecute every single leftist organization,” Loomer said Wednesday, even before Kirk was publicly pronounced dead. “We must shut these lunatic leftists down. Once and for all. The left is a national security threat.”
In a Thursday op-ed for Common Dreams, author and journalist Christopher D. Cook laments how “Kirk had barely been declared dead when President Trump hideously used his killing to falsely blame and attack the left.”
The president, writes Cook, “seized the moment of widespread mourning to spread more hatred and division, in a reckless, angry televised speech that hurled blame at the left despite not a scintilla of evidence about Kirk’s assassin or their politics.”
Trump named a number of victims of political violence in recent years, including US Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.), who was shot in 2017 by a man who opposed the president; and Trump himself, who survived two assassination attempts last year.
The president did not mention the killing earlier this year of Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman, a Democrat. The suspect in Hortman’s killing was an evangelical Christian who strongly opposed abortion and LGBTQ+ rights.
Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) also asserted without any evidence that critics of the far-right agenda that Kirk embraced were to blame for his killing, specifically suggesting that her Democratic colleagues were implicated in the assassination.
“Democrats own what happened today,” she told reporters. “Some raging leftist lunatic put a bullet through his neck.”
Mace added that it was “ridiculous” to suggest that by her logic, Republican lawmakers “own” Hortman’s assassination.
The comments from Trump and Mace, wrote Cook, only show that these are “not the people who are going to lead us out of this ugly toxic pit” of political violence now pervasive in the United States.
At Zeteo, journalist Mehdi Hasan listed several other recent acts of political violence in which the suspected or confirmed perpetrators held right-wing ideologies, including the attempted assassination of Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro earlier this year; the assault of then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband in 2022; and the attempted kidnapping of Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in 2020.
“There is no equivalent or even similar list of Obama or Biden supporters who have carried out murders, attempted murders, or violent attacks against Republicans or conservatives in recent years,” wrote Hasan. “In fact, according to statistics compiled by the ADL’s Center on Extremism, 2024 was the third year in a row in which all of the extremist-related killings in the United States were carried out by... right-wingers.”
On the social media platform X, Texas Monthly senior writer Robert Downen pointed out that some far-right white supremacists had also “reviled” Kirk.
“I’m not speculating about the shooter,” said Downen. “I just have been stunned how quickly people have jumped with certainty to partisan conclusions. Because in extremism spaces, the Charlie Kirk Hater-to-Nazi pipeline is canon. It’s how we got a generation of antisemitic extremists.”
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) was quick to rebuke the suggestion that Democrats or left-wing groups are to blame for the rise in politically motivated attacks or the emergence of violence as a commonplace, acceptable occurrence in American culture.
“Oh, please,” she said when a reporter asked her whether Democrats should tone down their rhetoric. “Why don’t you start with the president of the United States, and every ugly meme he has posted, and every ugly word.”
In a podcast put together Wednesday evening in the wake of Kirk’s assassination, journalist David Sirota said that “what we desperately need right now in this country are leaders who lower the temperature, leaders who will try to pull us back from the brink.”
Instead, Sirota warned, “we have a president right now who seems mostly interested in using the bully pulpit to actually bully people. Inflaming every cultural conflict he can stick his nose into—all for the cause of grabbing more power and money for himself and his family.”
In place of more anger, hatred, and calls for political retribution, Sirota told his audience he wanted to offer a different message.
“It’s a simple message whether you are a leftist, a liberal, a centrist, a conservative, or a MAGA fan,” said Sirota. “Your life has value and your political opponents’ lives have value too. You can hate your adversaries’ ideas, and you can fight hard for your cause, but the moment we stop seeing each other as human beings and we start concluding that violence is the answer, that’s the moment we let the soulless corporations, the ruthless authoritarians, and the sociopathic demagogues win.”
The “nihilism” and “greed” of too many, he added, “are creating the conditions for a civil war—one that we must all do our part to stop. Before it becomes unstoppable.”
Highlighting how the Pentagon is "replete with waste and fraud," one critic called it "a disgraceful and unconscionable misuse of taxpayer money."
By Jessica Corbett • Sep 10, 2025
Nearly all Republicans and 17 Democrats in the US House of Representatives voted Wednesday evening for a military bill that would push the figure for defense spending approved this year beyond $1 trillion.
The final vote for the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for fiscal year 2026 was 231-196, with just four Republicans opposing the bill, which will still need to be reconciled with the Senate’s version.
Robert Weissman, co-president of the consumer watchdog group Public Citizen, highlighted after the vote that the House’s NDAA authorizes about $883 billion for defense spending—including over $848 billion for the Pentagon, which has never passed an audit—on top of the $150 billion in the GOP budget reconciliation package that President Donald Trump signed in July.
“Throwing a trillion dollars at the Pentagon—an agency replete with waste and fraud—at the same time the Republican Congress and the Trump regime are slashing spending on healthcare, education, housing, food assistance, and foreign aid is a disgraceful and unconscionable misuse of taxpayer money,” Weissman said, referring to other provisions in the earlier package.
“On top of the age-old dangerous and wasteful spending, the bill pours billions into new boondoggles like Trump’s ‘Golden Dome’ space interceptor vanity project and supercharges the dangerous development of killer robots for the battlefield,” he noted. “Making it still worse is the administration’s in-your-face, authoritarian misuse of Pentagon dollars—from the deployment of the National Guard on the streets of Washington, DC, to the illegal and murderous attack on a Venezuelan boat.”
Weissman added that “the bill includes some modest, positive requirements to report waste, fraud, and price gouging to Congress and establishes financial penalties if the Pentagon fails its audit. But these small measures do not begin to offset the damage done by the dangerous and wasteful overall package.”
House Armed Services Committee Ranking Member Adam Smith (D-Wash.), who voted against the NDAA’s final passage, told Politico that “we didn’t get any of the amendments and the debates that we wanted; not a single solitary one.”
“Meanwhile, all manner of different issues that are pure culture war partisan issues were allowed in,” he continued. “I fear that many of those are going to pass.”
In a statement after the vote, the Congressional Equality Caucus condemned “six Republican-sponsored anti-LGBTQI+ amendments,” including bans on medically necessary healthcare for transgender service members and dependents.
“The National Defense Authorization Act has traditionally received strong bipartisan support, yet for the second Congress in a row House Republicans have tainted a bill aimed at improving the lives of servicemembers with poison-pill riders that threaten our troops’ rights, their families’ stability, and our efforts to retain top talent,” said the caucus chair, Rep. Mark Takano (D-Cailf.).
“Republicans’ sacrifice of a strong bipartisan vote for a politicized NDAA to appease the Trump administration and a small slice of their base cannot undo the sacrifice of the transgender service members, cadets, or military dependents that will be hurt by this bill,” he added. “Congress should be fighting for those who fight for us—but it’s clear the GOP has other priorities. I will keep fighting to prevent the harmful provisions in this bill from becoming law.”
"Unconscionable acts of violence should have no place in our country," said Congresswoman Ilhan Omar—whom Kirk wanted to denaturalize and deport. "Let's pray for no more lives being lost to gun violence."
By Brett Wilkins • Sep 10, 2025
Tuesday’s assassination of far-right firebrand Charlie Kirk in Utah drew widespread condemnation from many of the same progressive figures who have previously decried his rampant bigotry, dismissal of gun deaths, and promotion of conspiracy theories including the “stolen” 2020 election.
“Political violence has no place in this country. We must condemn this horrifying attack,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said on the social media site X. “My thoughts are with Charlie Kirk and his family.”
Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) said on X that she was sending “sincere condolences to Charlie Kirk’s family.”
“Violence is unacceptable, always,” she added. “Though I disagree with nearly everything he said publicly, I never lose sight of others’ humanity. He was someone’s son. He was someone’s husband. He was a father to two young children. Praying for the [Utah Valley University] community impacted by this horrific act of gun violence.”
Another “Squad” member, Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.)—whom Kirk wanted to strip of her US citizenship and deport to Somalia—posted that “political violence is absolutely unacceptable and indefensible.”
“Unconscionable acts of violence should have no place in our country,” she added. “Let’s pray for no more lives being lost to gun violence.”
Kirk, the 31-year-old CEO and co-founder of the conservative youth organization Turning Point USA, was fatally shot during an event at Utah Valley University. The assassin’s identity is still not known; The Washington Post reported that “a person of interest is in custody and being interviewed by officials.”
Kirk’s last words were a characteristically racist attempt to deflect an audience member’s question about US mass shootings—one of which occurred at a Colorado high school on the same day as his assassination.
The irony of Kirk’s murder was not lost on numerous observers, some of whom posted video of him saying in 2023 that “I think it’s worth to have a cost of unfortunately some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment.”
Still, even staunch critics of Kirk and his politics in the United States and abroad condemned his murder.
“There is never any place for violence in our politics,” ACLU executive director Anthony Romero said in a statement. “The only way to work out differences in a democracy is to work them out together—peacefully through our political system.”
“The ACLU condemns this horrific act and extends its sympathies to the family of Charlie Kirk,” Romero added.
Scottish lawmaker and former First Minister of Scotland Humza Yousaf said on social media that “I couldn’t have disagreed more with Charlie Kirk on virtually every political issue he debated.”
“But that is the point, he debated,” Yousaf added. “In any society, let alone a democracy, violence can never be justified. I hope God eases the suffering of his wife, children, family, and friends.”
Civil rights attorney and transgender rights activist Alejandra Caraballo was among those who expressed deep concern over the direction in which the nation is heading.
“We are in a ‘years of lead’ scenario where political violence has become normalized,” she wrote on the social media site Bluesky. “This is not good for anyone and is deeply dangerous. This level of political violence is not compatible with a functioning society.”
“I’m honestly terrified of what the right will use this as justification for,” she said of Kirk’s assassination. “They’re itching to engage in violence against their enemies and this will give them the excuse to do so. This is why political violence is never acceptable. It just descends into uncontrollable chaos and more violence.”
Correction: This article has been corrected to remove a quote erroneously attributed to Kirk.
The US is considering "shooting down Venezuelan military aircraft" or "bombing Venezuelan military airfield," according to a report from independent journalist Ken Klippenstein.
By Brad Reed • Sep 10, 2025
US President Donald Trump’s administration is considering launching military strikes on Venezuela, according to new reporting from independent journalist Ken Klippenstein.
Military sources on Tuesday told Klippenstein that the Trump administration is mulling an attack against Venezuela unless it cracks down on drug cartels that it claims are shipping fentanyl into the United States.
Contrary to the administration’s claims, according to the US Drug Enforcement Administration and other agencies, Venezuela plays virtually no role in fentanyl manufacturing and trafficking.
Klippenstein’s sources said the attack was likely to involve “shooting down Venezuelan military aircraft or by bombing Venezuelan military airfield,” and that the US Air Force has been rehearsing for such a mission in recent weeks.
Such an attack would mark a dramatic escalation in the Trump administration’s hostilities toward Venezuela, which escalated last week when the administration bombed a boat off the Venezuelan coast that it alleged was carrying drug traffickers.
Many legal experts were quick to condemn the strike as a violation of maritime law. Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky was among those who condemned the military attack on suspected drug smugglers without due process.
A leaked Department of Homeland Security memo obtained by Klippenstein gives clues as to why the administration is taking an aggressive military posture toward Venezuela.
Specifically, writes Klippenstein, the memo gives insight into the administration’s view that Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro is actually in charge of the Tren de Aragua cartel and is giving it orders to poison American citizens by getting them addicted to drugs.
However, Klippenstein cautions that this view of Maduro as the commander of an international drug cartel is not backed up by US intelligence agencies.
“A declassified assessment prepared by the National Intelligence Council concluded in April that the Maduro regime ‘probably does not have a policy of cooperating with TdA and is not directing TdA operations in the United States,‘” he noted.
Klippenstein closed his report by likening the situation to the buildup to the 2003 Iraq War, but with fentanyl taking the place of “weapons of mass destruction” as the purported casus belli.
“Similar to the ‘debate’ about Saddam’s WMD, Democrats in Congress are busy discussing whether the strike on a small drug boat was legal and complaining that they weren’t briefed on the operation,” he wrote. “The fundamental question—is there any evidence that the Venezuela government is directing fentanyl into the U.S.?—is hardly ever asked. And most importantly, would bombing Venezuela do anything to reduce the flow of drugs into the U.S.?”
One critic called the report "a slap in the face to the millions of Americans, from health-conscious moms to environmental advocates to farmers, who have been calling for meaningful action on pesticides."
By Brad Reed • Sep 9, 2025
Health and environmental advocates are hammering a new report issued Tuesday by the Trump administration’s Make America Health Again Commission for papering over dangers posed by pesticides and replicating the positions of powerful corporate interests.
According to StatNews, the MAHA report takes a “cautious line” on pesticides, and even includes a section recommending that the Environmental Protection Agency work “with food and agricultural stakeholders... to ensure that the public has awareness and confidence in [the Environmental Protection Agency’s] pesticide robust review procedures.”
As StatNews noted, this section in particular drew the ire of organic food advocate Elizabeth Kucinich—the spouse of Dennis Kucinich, who served as presidential campaign manager for Trump Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—who said that it “reads like it was written by Bayer and Monsanto.”
Zen Honeycutt, founder of the pro-MAHA group Moms Across America, similarly told StatNews that “we are deeply disappointed that the committee allowed the chemical companies to influence the report,” even as she praised other parts of it.
Public interest advocacy groups, meanwhile, slammed the MAHA report, which they called wholly deferential to major industries.
“The MAHA Commission report is a gift to Big Ag,” said Food & Water Watch senior policy analyst Rebecca Wolf. “Its deregulatory proposals read like an industry wish list. The truth is, industrial agriculture is making us sick. Making America healthy again will require confronting Big Ag corporations head on—instead, the Trump administration has capitulated.”
Wolf added that the MAHA report lacks “any real action on toxic pesticides linked to rising cancer rates nationwide” and called it “shameful but not surprising” that the report barely mentioned so-called ”forever chemicals” contaminating drinking water “while disregarding how elsewhere in the administration common-sense water safety rules are being weakened and canceled.”
Sarah Starman, senior food and agriculture campaigner at Friends of the Earth, was even more scathing in her assessment of the report, which she called “a slap in the face to the millions of Americans, from health-conscious moms to environmental advocates to farmers, who have been calling for meaningful action on pesticides.”
Like other critics, Starman heaped particular scorn upon the report’s section on pesticides.
“Laughably, the report calls the EPA’s lax, flawed, and notoriously industry-friendly pesticide regulation process ‘robust,‘” she said. “This, in spite of the fact that EPA currently allows more than 1 billion pounds of pesticide use on US crops each year, including the use of 85 pesticides that are banned in other countries because of the serious risks they pose to human health and the environment.”
The Center for Food Safety (CFS) said that the MAHA report offered “a few crumbs” to health advocates, but was mostly filled with “hollow rhetoric.”
George Kimbrell, legal director and co-executive director of CFS, also called out the report’s claims about the EPA having a “robust” procedure for approving pesticides.
“There is nothing ‘robust’ about EPA’s regulation of pesticides,” he said. “In reality it is the antithesis of robust: it is an oversight system filled with data holes and regulation loopholes, lacking in public transparency, which has instead required decades of dogged public interest litigation to get EPA to do its most basic duties.”
Environmental Working Group co-founder and president Ken Cook said that the report made a mockery of Kennedy’s past promises to use his power to take on powerful industries.
“It looks like pesticide industry lobbyists steamrolled the MAHA Commission’s agenda,” he commented. “Secretary Kennedy and President Trump cynically convinced millions they’d protect children from harmful farm chemicals—promises now exposed as hollow.”
Cook also took aim at the leaders of the MAHA movement, whom he described as “grifters exploiting the hopes and fears of health-conscious Americans in their quest for power jobs in Washington.”
Voters trust Mamdani more on issues from affordability to crime to Israel-Palestine, but one strategist says party leadership is likely still refusing to back him due to "donor pressure."
By Stephen Prager • Sep 9, 2025
Progressive state lawmaker Zohran Mamdani holds a “commanding” lead in New York’s upcoming mayoral election, according to the latest polling. But his continued momentum is still not enough for some top Democrats to get behind him, even as President Donald Trump openly colludes with his rivals.
A New York Times/Siena poll published Monday has Mamdani, a democratic socialist state assemblyman, 22 points north of his nearest challenger, disgraced former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, whom he soundly defeated in the Democratic primary earlier this year.
Last week, several outlets reported that the Trump administration has been working behind the scenes to clear the field for Cuomo by offering administration posts to other mayoral candidates, including Democratic Mayor Eric Adams, and Republican contender Curtis Sliwa in exchange for them dropping out of the race.
Cuomo’s identity as Trump’s horse has ratcheted up the pressure for top Democratic leaders—namely the Empire state duo of House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer—to throw their weight behind Mamdani. But with the election now less than two months away, they have still refused to budge, to the increasing frustration of the party’s base and its progressive leaders.
Last week, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) called out these leaders directly, asking on the steps of the Capitol: “Are we a party who rallies behind our nominee or not?”
“I am very concerned about the example that is being set by anybody in our party,” she continued. “If an individual doesn’t want to support the party’s nominee now, it complicates their ability to ask voters to support any nominee later.”
During a stop on his “Fighting Oligarchy” tour, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), a Brooklyn native, said New York Democrats should be “jumping up and down” to support a candidate who has galvanized young voters like Mamdani.
Speaking of party leadership, Sanders said: “It’s no great secret that they’re way out of touch with grassroots America, with the working families of this country, not only in New York City, but all over this country.”
That sentiment was shared by the liberal tastemakers on the popular podcast Pod Save America. Former Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau called out leadership by name, saying their hesitancy to endorse Mamdani was “pathetic.”
“Donald Trump’s going to try to get Eric Adams out of the race so he can help Andrew Cuomo,” Favreau said. “Meanwhile, Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer have not yet endorsed the candidate who won the Democratic primary in New York City, the choice of the Democratic voters. Because why, because they don’t want to get involved in a primary in a city, in the state they represent?”
Favreau questioned what happened to the “rule that when a Democrat wins the primary, we’ve all got to unite behind the nominee... because we are facing an authoritarian threat.”
Cuomo, he said, “is basically participating” in that threat by being “on Donald Trump’s side.”
According to CNN, this reluctance is widespread across New York Democrats:
Reps. Yvette Clarke, Dan Goldman and Ritchie Torres have not said they plan to support Mamdani. Rep. Gregory Meeks, who endorsed Cuomo in the primary, has also remained silent along with Rep. Grace Meng, who represents parts of Queens.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and Mamdani have had “a number of conversations,” Hochul said recently, and the two have met in person. Speaking separately to a Politico reporter, Hochul dismissed the talks between Adams and Trump aides with a profanity. Still, she has not made an endorsement.
Sources told CNN that the reticence stems in some part from the “public threat by Mamdani’s democratic socialist allies to primary Jeffries and other congressmen” as well as Mamdani’s “ties to democratic socialists and his criticism of Israel.”
Sanders countered that Mamdani’s were “not radical ideas.”
“We’re the richest country in the history of the world,” he said. “There’s no excuse for people not having affordable housing, good quality, affordable, decent transportation, free transportation.”
Not only did the Times/Siena poll find Mamdani leading in the coming election, but voters also said they trusted him most on issues across the board, including ones that party grandees fear will be liabilities.
He holds leads over all comers, not only on his bread and butter issues of affordability and housing, but also on crime, taxation, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
In an interview on CNN, former Obama campaign manager David Axelrod suggested that the refusal to back Mamdani was probably the result of “donor pressure.”
Though Mamdani has surged in recent months with small-dollar donors, big money in the city has been behind Cuomo and other centrist candidates.
The biggest of these is the billionaire-funded Fix the City PAC, which received an $8.3 million donation from former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and as of late August had dropped more than $15 million to keep Cuomo afloat.
Another fund, called New Yorkers for a Better Future Mayor ‘25 has yet to declare a favorite, but has both barrels locked on Mamdani. Under a similar name, this PAC marshalled support for more than a dozen corporate-friendly city council candidates early this year, with support from the pro-Israel hedge fund manager Bill Ackman and several major players in New York’s real estate industry. It has announced a goal of raising $25 million to defeat Mamdani in November.
Axelrod said that the party leadership’s fealty to these donors over the groundswell of support for Mamdani was “a mistake.”
“He ran on the issue of affordability and on a kind of positive politics that got—as Bernie said—many, many young people in that city to involve themselves in the process,” he said.
Axelrod also added that, despite Jeffries’ claim that Mamdani has yet to win over voters in the House leader’s district, the insurgent candidate, in fact, ”carried Hakeem Jeffries’ district” by a 12-point margin.
Former Sanders foreign policy adviser Matt Duss said that Axelrod’s diagnosis of “donor pressure” was “correct.”
“But,” he said, “we should also be completely clear that ‘donor pressure’ is just a polite way of saying ‘political corruption.‘”
"Our peaceful mission to break the siege on Gaza and stand in solidarity with its people continues with determination and resolve," said members of the flotilla's steering committee.
By Julia Conley • Sep 9, 2025
Pro-Palestinian protesters gathered at the Port of Sidi Bou Said in Tunis, Tunisia early Tuesday morning after the international group organizing a humanitarian aid mission to Gaza said one of its boats had been struck by what was believed to be a drone.
The Global Sumud Flotilla said one of the main vessels of its fleet of 50 boats was struck while it was anchored in the harbor. The boat was carrying the group’s steering committee, which includes climate leader Greta Thunberg, human rights activist Yasemin Acar, and Brazilian organizer Thiago Ávila.
Footage taken from a boat docked near the “Family Boat” showed the moment an object appeared to drop onto the vessel, triggering an explosion.
The Global Sumud Flotilla said no one was injured in the apparent attack and said that “acts of aggression aimed at intimidating and derailing our mission will not deter us.”
“Our peaceful mission to break the siege on Gaza and stand in solidarity with its people continues with determination and resolve,” said the group in a statement.
Political commentator Brian Allen posted another video taken aboard the Family Boat.
The flotilla is the latest fleet of boats headed for Gaza to deliver humanitarian aid and break the siege Israel has imposed since October 2023 as it has relentlessly attacked the exclave, killing more than 64,000 Palestinians so far, and said it is planning a complete takeover of Gaza.
Nearly 400 people, including at least 140 children, have died of starvation caused by Israel’s near-total blockade on humanitarian aid. More than 1,000 people have been killed while trying to access food, including at hubs set up by the privatized, US- and Israel-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification said in late July that parts of Gaza are facing famine, with one in three people going days without consuming any food.
Israel has stopped several aid boats from reaching Gaza in recent months, including the Madleen and the Handala, and detained organizers. The Conscience, another boat operated by the Gaza Freedom Flotilla, was reportedly bombed by Israel in May off the coast of Malta, forcing organizers to turn back.
Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has threatened to designate humanitarian aid organizers trying to reach Gaza by boat as “terrorists” and to detain them.
On Tuesday, Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, said the reports of a drone attack have to be verified but noted Israel’s “history” of attacking aid vessels bound for Gaza.
Tunisian officials have said the vessel was not attacked by a drone and blamed the fire that broke out on a cigarette butt or lighter.
“There is no other state protecting this boat other than Tunisia creating a safe port,” said Albanese. “The question is, if it’s confirmed that this is a drone attack, it will be an assault, an aggression against Tunisia and against Tunisian sovereignty.”
“We cannot keep on tolerating this,” she added, “and normalizing the illegal.”
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