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Good morning everyone. Trump’s FCC just got Jimmy Kimmel’s interview with a Democratic Senate candidate pulled off broadcast television, the second late-night host in six months to face that exact pressure over the same candidate. His first-ever midterm convention played out in front of a half-empty arena while he insisted it was “packed,” and the headline promise from that speech, a $5,000 check for every American adult, falls apart the moment you do the math. And while Trump keeps telling voters the war with Iran will be over right after the midterms, his own vice president and secretary of state are privately warning him it could drag on for years.
When the FCC can threaten a network into pulling a Senate candidate's interview off the air, and when it's happened twice now to two different hosts covering the same race, that's not a coincidence, it's a warning shot at anyone in traditional broadcast who books the wrong guest. Independent journalists don't have network lawyers to lean on and we don't have affiliates the government can squeeze, which means we don't scare the same way. That's exactly why this work matters right now and why I need your support to keep doing it. If you want news that doesn't get quietly disappeared because a politician doesn't like it, subscribe, share this with someone, and help keep independent journalism alive while it's under real pressure.
Here’s the news:
Trump Silences Jimmy Kimmel:
Jimmy Kimmel announced that his Thursday interview with Democratic Texas Senate candidate James Talarico will not air on broadcast TV after Trump’s FCC threatened Jimmy Kimmel Live!, ABC, and its affiliates and local stations. Instead, the interview will be posted in full on the show’s YouTube channel, a workaround Kimmel says he’s using “out of consideration” for ABC’s local stations, particularly its Texas affiliates, who would otherwise have to deal with regulatory blowback. Kimmel noted that he’s interviewed political candidates without incident for his show’s entire 20-plus-year run, including Hillary Clinton, Ted Cruz, and Trump himself back in 2015, when Trump seemed eager to appear on late night and had no objection to the practice. He said he can’t explain what’s changed now that Trump is president, other than the FCC targeting “simple, traditional editorial decisions” like guest bookings it apparently disapproves of. Kimmel closed by urging viewers to register to vote, calling that “the most important thing you can do” in the current media environment.
This isn’t the first time a late-night host has had a Talarico interview blocked from broadcast under similar pressure. About six months earlier, then-Late Show host Stephen Colbert said CBS lawyers directly told him he could not air a scheduled interview with Talarico, citing FCC threats, though CBS publicly denied that it had prohibited the broadcast. The recurrence of this exact pattern across two different networks and hosts suggests a broader chilling effect on how traditional broadcasters are willing to cover Talarico specifically, rather than an isolated incident. Both cases involve mainstream, decades-old late-night programs that have historically hosted candidates from both parties without controversy, making the sudden regulatory pressure notably selective.
Talarico is a four-term Texas state representative, former schoolteacher, and Presbyterian seminarian now running a competitive Senate campaign against state Attorney General Ken Paxton in a state Democrats haven’t won a federal seat in for more than 30 years. He’s built his campaign around blending progressive economic positions, particularly on wealth inequality, with language rooted in religious values, a combination that has helped him attract crossover support from Texas independents, moderates, and even some disaffected Republicans. That crossover appeal, combined with how close the race has become, may help explain why his media appearances in particular have drawn outsized scrutiny and pressure compared to other Democratic candidates. The pattern of blocked interviews adds a new wrinkle to a race already being closely watched as a test of whether Democrats can break their multi-decade losing streak in Texas statewide races.
Trump’s Convention Speech Debunked:
Trump’s opening night speech at his “Trump-a-palooza” midterm convention in Dallas was undercut by visible rows of empty seats across the American Airlines Center, despite his repeated insistence that the 21,000-capacity arena was “packed” and that an equal number of people were standing outside. Reporters on the scene, including Reuters’ Nandita Bose and NBC’s Garrett Haake, posted photos and video directly contradicting him, showing empty upper decks and attendees leaving well before his speech, which ran nearly double its planned 45 minutes, finally ended. The giant screen behind him also glitched during his opening remarks, awkwardly looping rapid-fire clips of earlier speakers like Scott Bessent and UFC fighters instead of showing him live. Trump even joked with the crowd about not leaving their seats to use the bathroom so the media couldn’t photograph the gaps, an echo of his long history of disputing crowd-size coverage dating back to his 2017 inauguration. The speech itself was packed with familiar bravado, from blaming Democrats for the affordability crisis to reasserting his false claim that he won the 2020 election, all while his campaign now faces mounting scrutiny over the legality and roughly $1.3 trillion cost of the $5,000 “dividend” he promised voters.
Trump’s promise to send every American adult a $5,000 “dividend” if Republicans hold Congress was the biggest moment of the night, but it doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. He offered no explanation of how it would be funded, only that Republicans need to “win,” and claimed it was possible because of the economy’s “tremendous strength,” even as inflation stays above the Fed’s target and food prices haven’t been dropping the way he claimed. The math alone is disqualifying: paying roughly 245 million adults $5,000 each would cost more than $1.2 trillion, several times what tariff revenue actually generates, and the federal government is running deficits of about $2 trillion a year against $40 trillion in debt, meaning this would be a deficit-financed handout, not a “dividend” in any real sense of a company distributing profit. The funding source he’s pointed to is also shakier than he suggests: the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in February that the emergency powers law Trump used to justify his tariffs doesn’t actually authorize them, and the government has since been unwinding and refunding those duties. He also has no unilateral authority to send this money without Congress, many of whose own Republicans are fiscal hawks who may not go along with it, and notably, an earlier $2,000 “tariff dividend” Trump promised back in November 2025 still has never materialized.
Convention speakers spent much of the night attacking Democrats as extremist “communists” rather than touting Republican accomplishments, with figures like Tom Emmer, Mike Collins, Steve Scalise, and Tim Scott repeatedly using that label to paint the opposition as un-American. This messaging push comes even though most Democrats running in competitive midterm races have not embraced socialism, and while a handful of self-identified democratic socialists have won primaries this cycle, the broader Democratic field remains largely centrist. Scalise went so far as to call it “the Bolshevik Revolution in the Democratic Party,” while Scott framed the midterms as a fight to keep “dangerous, radical, weird” out of the Senate. Republicans appear convinced this attack line resonates with their base regardless of how accurately it reflects most Democratic candidates’ actual positions.
The event fully lived up to its “Trumpapalooza” nickname, with Trump’s face and merchandise dominating the arena, including Trump golf balls, rubber ducks, Bibles, MAGA guitars, and a shirt depicting him as the Marlboro Man on horseback. Despite Trump declaring the arena “packed” and claiming people were turned away outside, large sections of upper-level seating remained visibly empty. Several Republican candidates in tight races skipped the convention entirely to distance themselves from a president dragging down poll numbers, even as many speakers used their time on stage to praise Trump as much as promote their own campaigns. The overall tone had the feel of a celebration built around Trump personally rather than a traditional midterm strategy session, a dynamic some Republicans worry could backfire with swing voters.
In a surprising twist, Democratic Sen. John Fetterman appeared in a video played at the Republican convention introducing his Pennsylvania colleague, Sen. David McCormick, and pledged to work with McCormick and Trump to “defend the steel way of life.” Fetterman used the appearance to distance himself from his own party, saying he rejects “the extremes and socialism” and will “always stand with America,” language that echoed Republican convention rhetoric rather than Democratic messaging. This comes after a year of Fetterman angering fellow Democrats with his strong pro-Israel stance, criticism of his own party on Fox News, and praise for Trump. Democrats had otherwise skipped holding a counter-convention, instead sending officials like Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker to Dallas to hold press conferences accusing Republicans of using the event to obscure Trump’s record on the economy and the Iran war, making Fetterman’s appearance an unwelcome distraction from that messaging.
Despite the U.S. military escalating strikes on Iran just a day earlier, convention speakers almost entirely avoided mentioning the war, a war that polling shows is deeply unpopular and has split the MAGA coalition itself. Rising gas prices, with Brent crude nearing $100 a barrel and gasoline averaging around $4 a gallon, have compounded cost-of-living frustrations that make the conflict a political liability heading into the midterms. Trump himself was the only speaker willing to address it directly, calling it “small potatoes,” predicting it would end “immediately” after the midterms because Iran is “desperate,” and floating renaming the Strait of Hormuz the “Trump Strait.” Rather than engage with the war, most speakers steered toward safer, base-friendly topics like immigration enforcement and tax cuts.
Iran War Could Last Years:
Top White House officials, including Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, have privately warned Trump that the war with Iran could drag on through the remainder of his presidency, potentially past Inauguration Day in January 2029, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing US officials familiar with internal Oval Office and Situation Room discussions. That assessment stands in direct contrast to what Trump has told the public, where he’s repeatedly claimed the conflict would wrap up soon, most recently predicting it would end “immediately after” the November midterms because Iran is “desperate” and “can’t hold out any longer.” Trump acknowledged diplomatic talks remain theoretically possible but said his administration isn’t pursuing negotiations right now, leaving unclear how the White House would actually handle a war that drags on well beyond what Trump has publicly promised voters. The gap between the private warnings and Trump’s public timeline raises questions about whether his midterm messaging on Iran is grounded in his own administration’s actual assessment of the conflict.
George W. Bush appeared to shade Trump by praising the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine: “Thank God you are where you are.”
Oil prices jumped sharply, with US crude briefly topping $100 a barrel and Brent crude trading around $105, both the highest levels since May, as markets braced for a prolonged fight after fighting between the US and Iran escalated sharply this week. The spike came directly on the heels of the Wall Street Journal’s report that Trump’s own advisers see the war potentially lasting years, undercutting his public claim that fighting would end right after the midterms. Retail gasoline hit a Labor Day record, and diesel prices are expected to cross $6 a gallon for the first time ever in the coming days, even as Trump insisted prices would fall once the election passes. Analysts, including Goldman Sachs’ Daan Struyven, warned that continued attacks on shipping could push oil above $120 a barrel if the conflict keeps escalating, while other market strategists noted crude has already erased months of prior price declines.
Multiple US military aircraft were damaged overnight in Iranian strikes on the Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan, including an A-10 Thunderbolt attack jet that lost a wing and roughly eight F-15s that sustained lighter damage but were returned to service, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke to CBS News anonymously. No American deaths have been reported from the strikes. The attack came in retaliation after the US struck five Iranian tankers on Tuesday, with Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps claiming it hit eight tankers and two warships in response, prompting US forces in Jordan to fire more than 30 Patriot missiles in defense, a response notable given CBS’s earlier reporting that America’s Patriot missile stockpile is running critically low. Despite the direct hit on US forces, Trump told reporters Wednesday he still expects the war to end right after the midterms and said he is not currently seeking negotiations with Iran, “to be honest.”
Other news:
OpenAI board member Paul Christiano, a former head of model alignment at the company and a US government technology adviser, warned that the AI industry, including OpenAI itself, is not on track to reduce the risk of “catastrophic and irreversible loss of control” to an acceptable level, a statement he made this week as he joined OpenAI’s non-profit foundation board and its safety governance committee. His warning comes just months after OpenAI admitted hundreds of its AI agents went rogue during a training exercise, accessing the internet, conspiring on message boards, and hacking a third-party site called Hugging Face. It also follows a claim from Anthropic’s alignment science lead, Evan Hubinger, that there’s a greater than 10% chance AI could “kill all humans” within a decade, and the resignation of a 27-year-old Anthropic researcher who said neither company was “acting responsibly.” Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton, one of AI’s so-called godfathers, said Hubinger’s 10% estimate “seems not an unreasonable estimate,” while Anthropic separately disclosed a January incident in which a Claude model in training went rogue, uploaded malicious code to a public repository, and leaked credentials that let it access a security vendor’s database. Lawmakers on both sides of the Atlantic, including Ted Cruz, Bernie Sanders, and UK officials, are now calling for government action as these long-discussed Silicon Valley fears break into mainstream political debate.
Trouble in the US bond market threatens to keep prices elevated for consumers, as investor concerns over inflation, the ongoing Iran war, and the record $40 trillion national debt have driven the 10-year Treasury yield to 4.8%, its highest since 2023, up from 3.95% at the end of February when the war began. Because mortgage, auto loan, and credit card rates are closely tied to Treasury yields, borrowing costs are already climbing, with the 30-year fixed mortgage rate at 6.66% as of late August and expected to rise further, a trend that’s already slowed homebuilding and is expected to ripple into construction jobs and retail sales. Economist Alex Jacquez of the Groundwork Collaborative warned that higher borrowing costs will hit hardest for Americans whose savings are already depleted, noting that credit card balances and defaults are creeping back up as people turn to credit to cover basics like healthcare and groceries. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent tripled the government’s bond buyback program from $2 billion to $6 billion to try to stabilize the market, following an earlier move to buy Japanese yen, but both interventions only briefly calmed yields before they resumed climbing, drawing criticism from billionaire investor Stanley Druckenmiller that “governments defending prices against fundamentals always lose.”
Wholesale inflation accelerated in August, with the Producer Price Index rising 5.4% year-over-year, up from 4.8% in July, as the war with Iran continued driving up energy costs, which alone accounted for more than three-fourths of the monthly rise in goods prices. Core inflation, which strips out volatile food and energy, also ticked up to 4.6% annualized from 4.3% in July, while electronic component costs jumped 3.4% for the month and are up 27.6% for the year, a trend tied to the ongoing AI buildout. The report complicates the Federal Reserve’s efforts to hit its 2% inflation target ahead of next week’s policy meeting, where investors now expect the Fed to hold rates steady but potentially raise them as soon as October. It also raises the stakes for Friday’s Consumer Price Index release, especially after Fed Governor Christopher Waller said persistently high inflation could push him to “consider a rate hike” even though he generally favors holding steady.
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Yemen’s Houthi rebels have seized the strategic Red Sea port of Mocha and other territory in the most intense fighting with the Saudi-backed government in years, a move that could hand Iran and its proxies effective control of two critical global shipping chokepoints, the Bab al-Mandeb strait and the Strait of Hormuz, on opposite sides of the Arabian peninsula. The escalation appears aimed at opening a second front in the broader Iran-US conflict, pressuring Saudi Arabia and Washington to lift the US blockade on Iranian oil tankers, with analysts estimating rebel forces have gained control of more than 2,320 square miles of territory and at least 276 people killed in just five days of fighting. Saudi Arabia has responded with dozens of airstrikes while acknowledging Houthi ground gains, and the conflict traces back to a July dispute over a Houthi delegation’s return flight from Iran that Saudi forces prevented from landing, triggering a Houthi naval blockade announcement and subsequent strikes on Saudi oil infrastructure and shipping. Experts say a de-escalation is unlikely soon since both sides are trying to inflict maximum damage to force a compromise, and the fighting has already helped push global oil prices back above $100 a barrel after trading closer to $80 in prior weeks.
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Elon Musk launched an angry public attack on documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney after Gibney’s four-hour film about Musk premiered at the Venice Film Festival, calling him a “bitter old man” with “zero integrity” and dismissing the film as a boring “hit piece” in a series of posts on X. Musk also reposted an image depicting a conspiracy-style chain of puppets linking the Democratic Party, George Soros, Gibney, and Hollywood, calling it “accurate,” and separately denied a claim from his ex-partner Ashley St Clair that his team offered her $40 million for a non-disclosure agreement. Katie Miller, wife of Trump adviser Stephen Miller and a former Musk DOGE communications director, amplified complaints that Musk allies were absent from the film, calling it a “hit job” that can’t be “definitive.” Gibney, whose past subjects include Enron, WikiLeaks, and Vladimir Putin, called Musk “extremely dangerous” and speculated that a difficult childhood in South Africa may explain Musk’s current behavior, saying Musk is “playing out that trauma on the rest of us.”
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A Floodlight investigation found that the chemical industry has successfully pushed nearly identical laws in Louisiana, Kentucky, and Ohio that bar regulators from using community-collected air pollution data for enforcement unless it comes from EPA-approved equipment costing tens of thousands of dollars, effectively neutralizing one of the few tools residents have left to hold polluters accountable. Internal industry emails showed companies like Chemours explicitly rejected a compromise version of similar legislation in West Virginia specifically because it would have let regulators consider community data under certain conditions, with one executive writing the compromise “codifies what we are trying to prevent.” This comes as the public monitoring network has deteriorated sharply, with federal funding down more than 35% over two decades and the number of government monitors nearly halved, leaving nearly six in ten US counties with no public air monitor at all, and at 71 of 100 major industrial facilities Floodlight examined, the chemical released in the greatest quantity isn’t tracked by any state monitor. Ohio resident Donna Ballinger, who lives near a steel plant and fears developing cancer, is part of a lawsuit challenging her state’s law, which she says renders her privately purchased monitor’s readings useless as evidence, while Louisiana’s own history in Louisville’s Rubbertown district shows monitoring can work, since documented data there led to regulatory changes that cut toxic air contaminants by nearly 80%.
A new peer-reviewed study found that natural feedback loops, including thawing permafrost, worsening wildfires, and warming wetlands and lakes, are releasing additional methane and carbon dioxide that could amplify global warming by an extra 20% to 30% by the end of the century, adding as much as 0.2 to 0.4 degrees Celsius beyond what current climate models project. Researchers say this “hidden multiplier” from natural sources like permafrost, wildfires, wetlands, and freshwater systems is largely missing from the models that guide international climate policy, meaning those models likely underestimate future warming and overestimate the remaining carbon budget. The findings arrive just after the UN acknowledged the 1.5°C warming target will be breached within years, and current government policies are already projected to push warming to 2.6°C, a level that would cause severe sea level rise, crop losses, and other disruptions for billions of people. Scientists not involved in the study, including Oregon State ecologist Bill Ripple, called the results an important warning that reinforces the need for rapid emissions cuts, since crossing certain thresholds risks triggering the kind of runaway feedback loops that could push the planet toward catastrophic, self-reinforcing warming.
A new documentary called NAZA, produced by the Guardian and premiering at the Venice Film Festival, features testimony from 24 anonymous Israeli military and intelligence insiders detailing secret AI-based targeting systems used to identify and kill Palestinian civilians in Gaza, including strikes on the homes of low-level Hamas targets carried out at night with knowledge that family members would also die. Interviewees described the military hacking into phones to track targets and listening to victims’ final conversations with their wives and children before airstrikes, along with the destruction of neighborhoods where up to a quarter of residents were still sheltering, systematic home burnings, and a killing at a food distribution site. Several sources worked in a secret intelligence unit reporting directly to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office, with one saying their mission was to “thwart peace,” and directors Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, who previously co-directed the Oscar-winning No Other Land, said the film focuses not on rogue soldiers but on the systemic orders, policies, and logic enabling the killings. The film builds on years of reporting by +972 Magazine, Local Call, and the Guardian, and comes as Israeli attacks since 2023 have killed more than 73,000 Palestinians and injured over 174,000, in a war that began after the October 2023 Hamas-led attack that killed roughly 1,200 people and took 251 hostages.
See you soon.
— Aaron
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