VIDEO OF THE DAY: Lauren Boebert sex scandal surges into spotlight
The outspoken anti-LGBTQ Republican has been hit with serious complaints alleging that she had inappropriate relationships with THREE staffers, Clarice Navarro, Boebert’s district director from January 2021 to January 2025; Jeffrey Small, Boebert’s chief of staff from 2021 to 2025; and Raven Finegan, Boebert’s current district chief of staff. The allegations also include a $200,000 payment to buy silence. Boebert has called the allegations “utterly false” and emphasized that “well, I’m not a lesbian or bisexual.”

Take Action: Prosecute EVERY member of the Trump administration for their crimes!

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Democracy may survive Trump, but it looks like capitalism might not
Michael Tomasky, The New Republic: “It was a surreal week, bursting with surreal news generated by the surreal idiot who sits in the White House, but maybe the most surreal headline of all was the one I saw Thursday morning telling me that Costco was rationing motor oil. The limit they’ve set is very likely more than your average motorist needs, but still. Rationing! Am I in England in the 1950s? And on top of that, the price has nearly doubled since April, to $58 for a 10-quart pack. Or maybe it was the news that diesel had topped $6 a gallon. Before the war in Iran, it was about $3.60 a gallon. Some stations, in fact, are out of diesel. Diesel powers trucks and delivery vans and tractors and other farm equipment. (Harvest season is around the corner, by the way.) Also freight trains. And buses and ships and barges and tugboats. And bulldozers and backhoes and cranes, and I guess that also means forklifts—you know, the kind seen this week crashing repeatedly into the Kennedy Center. The nation’s, and the world’s, commerce, in other words, runs on diesel.

For years, we’ve wondered whether American democracy would survive Donald Trump. But now, we need to fret that capitalism may not survive Trump, and that between now and January 2029, assuming the GOP doesn’t go Twenty-Fifth Amendment on him, he’ll single-handedly bring not only the American but the global economy to its knees.

These tariffs, these unleashed ones—they’re a disaster. Wall Street hates them, Main Street hates them, farmers hate them, consumers hate them, China hates them, Canada hates them, the markets and bond traders hate them, everybody hates them. Even the normally toadyish Supreme Court said it hated them. Trump’s other major decision, of course, was the war in Iran, which has been a top-to-bottom disaster. The Strait of Hormuz, no matter what he says, is effectively closed. On Monday, four commodity ships passed through the strait, compared to the prewar normal of 120, 130. And now of course, on the other side of the Arabian Peninsula, Iran has the Houthis seizing Saudi pipelines and facilities. And that’s why diesel prices are headed toward $7 a gallon. Produce prices were already rising over the summer—after all, growing produce requires fertilizer, and getting it to us requires diesel gas to power those refrigerated trucks. A bag of baby spinach or mixed greens runs what, $2.99? Picture that at $4.29 in time for Thanksgiving and Christmas.

If a human being with normal cognitive development was presiding over this mess, we could reasonably hope that he’d recognize what has gone wrong and change. But Trump is not a normally developed human being. When he does bother to turn his attention to the economy, he says that it’s the best in the history of the country and that gas prices will come down rapidly as soon as X thing happens, which never happens. So far, though, the guardrails of democracy have more or less held. But what about the guardrails of the economic system? They are: a Congress that conducts real oversight and demands accountability; a class of corporate and financial leaders who actually put the good of the country ahead of the next tax cut or earnings statement; a well-regulated market system that is set up to punish short-term excess and wealth creation for the few and reward efforts to produce shared prosperity. Right now, we have none of those things.”

Take Action: Expose Israel’s violence and human rights abuses in the West Bank!

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Mike Johnson: Trump’s presidency is OVER if Republicans lose the House
Red to Blue: Speaker Johnson just said the quiet part extremely out loud: “[Trump] needs all four years, not just two, to fix the mess. And that’s what we need. If we lost the midterms, heaven forbid, if we lost the majority in the House, it would be the end of the Trump presidency in a real effect.” That’s what’s at stake this November. We are faced with a choice between succumbing to dictatorship or stopping Trump’s agenda in its tracks and making him a lame duck two years into his term. Democratic leadership just identified the top 20 most important races for the 2026 midterms. Will you make a donation that will be split between all the progressive Democrats in these must-win races? Let’s take our country back and WIN in November!

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Americans are turning to GoFundMe just to get by
Branko Marcetic, Jacobin: “At this point, you have to have been trapped in space for the last two years not to notice that the cost of living is onerously high. Or you could just be the Treasury secretary. In any case, there’s no shortage of metrics that show Americans are struggling: rising credit card delinquencies, a spike in foreclosure filings, surging demand for food banks, or the growing number of high-income Americans deciding to shop at budget stores like Dollar Tree. Alternatively, you could just look at GoFundMe.

In October last year, GoFundMe CEO Tim Cadogan disclosed that the category the company calls ‘essentials,’ which he defined as ‘things like rent, utility bills, car payments, sort of your basic things you need to get through life,’ had ‘gone up significantly in the last three years’ virtually everywhere the company does business. According to GoFundMe’s 2025 ‘Year in Help’ report, fundraising for essentials had shot up 20 percent last year, monthly bills were the site’s second-fastest-growing category, and two of the six most common words in fundraiser descriptions were ‘bill’ and ‘food.’

Reading through these GoFundMe pages is like taking a tour through the wreckage of working-class American life in the 2020s, as rising prices for basic goods have battered households already burdened by sky-high debt, drug prices, and medical bills — and uniquely so in the developed world. The threadbare US welfare state, briefly expanded during the pandemic until it was allowed to unravel three years later, often proves far from a lifeline.

‘One of my biggest struggles right now is affording my medication, which is very expensive without insurance, since I no longer have coverage,’ wrote one Arkansas woman managing several serious health issues. ‘I am on unemployment and am currently looking for another job but unemployment doesn’t pay much,’ wrote a laid-off woman in Texas, who described having to leave town to move into an RV. In many cases, the people behind fundraisers describe being plunged into financial crisis by a sudden, unforeseen event: the death of a loved one, the loss of a job, an injury, a mental health crisis, long-term hospitalization, or any number of other serious health incidents. “I don’t want to be homeless,” pleaded one Washington state man, who described losing his job and being diagnosed with a litany of health issues. ‘If you’re reading this thinking this situation will never happen to you, I was there once too. On top of the world with everything figured out, then within days the ground crumbled beneath my feet,’ wrote one Maryland father of three earlier this year.

But maybe more revealing about the state of the economy is the fact that many of those fundraising for groceries and bills are employed — but they still can’t keep up with runaway costs anyway. In many cases, the crux appears to be the general expensiveness of life that has shot up over the past six years. A combination of the pandemic shutdowns, resulting supply chain bottlenecks, corporate greed, and a series of energy shocks has led prices to climb 25 percent since 2020. The soaring cost of housing in particular comes up again and again.

GoFundMe has always been something of a cracked mirror onto the state of life and the economy in the United States, in particular thanks to the mass reliance on crowdfunding to cover US households’ exorbitant medical bills. These pages have long served as an indictment of the United States’ uniquely privatized health care system, where even an insured person suffering a moderate medical event can find themselves plunged into financial crisis. But the mass turn to crowdfunding for groceries, rent, and bills — and worse, its failure to often provide the necessary lifeline to Americans in need — is something else entirely. It suggests the US political economy is no longer just deeply flawed but fundamentally broken, one where neither the welfare state nor an economy with officially low unemployment nor even the generosity of others is enough to keep scores of people out of the poorhouse. In a system where even the well-off find themselves penny-pinching, who’s left to spare a dime?”

Take Action: Tell Congress: Impeach and remove RFK Jr. now!

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Macklemore is taking on a powerful machine
Andre Gee, Current Affairs: “The call to ‘Free Palestine’ is a statement against Israel’s decades-long occupation and blockade of Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem. In 2026, it’s a denouncement of an active genocide. To New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, it’s akin to antisemitism. At Kraft’s behest, Ed Sheeran dropped Macklemore from his Loop Tour after the Seattle rapper advocated for Palestine during his opening set at New Jersey’s MetLife Stadium. ‘To all my Jewish brothers and sisters: Criticism of Israel, criticism of apartheid, being against genocide in no way is a criticism of you,’ he said, adding, ‘my message is for peace.’ On September 14, he revealed Epstein Lister Kraft had colluded with other NFL owners to cancel the tour’s remaining American dates if he was on the bill. Days later, the Wall Street Journal reported that Kraft told Sheeran that NFL owners Jeffrey Lurie (Philadelphia Eagles), David Tepper (Carolina Panthers), and Arthur Blank (Atlanta Falcons) were in on the collusion. Kraft released a statement claiming that his decision ‘is not about diminishing the suffering of innocent Palestinians or denying anyone the right to advocate on their behalf.’ He thinks Macklemore’s comments diminish Hamas’ role in the violence that’s taken place since their October 7, 2023 attack on an Israeli music festival.

Macklemore has said that he’s donating his $1 million in tour earnings to Palestinian relief efforts, which YouTube star Ms. Rachel plans to match. Kraft accepted Macklemore’s request to match, offering $2 million in donations to “aid in the region”—which could just mean Israel. Kraft’s impending donation couldn’t stop the outrage toward him and his colluders. Sheeran’s other supporting acts, Aaron Rowe, Beoga, Finneas, and Danish band Lukas Graham, withdrew from the tour in solidarity with Macklemore. The series of post-removal events feels like a best-case scenario against wealthy Zionists who’ve been punishing both entertainers and everyday citizens for calling out Israel’s homicidal conduct. Sheeran is learning that ‘I don’t do politics’ equates to ‘I stand with evil.’ Kraft is learning that his shadowy collusion has consequences when his targets go public. And the Palestinians are reassured that Macklemore, and millions of other Americans, stand with them.

Kraft is deceptively conflating Macklemore’s condemnation of Zionism with antisemitism, knowing the social consequences of that term. The stance feels like a defense mechanism to evade complicity in another’s oppression, akin to white supremacists surmising that pro-Black movements calling out systemic racism are ‘anti-white.’ And this ban clearly has nothing to do with antisemitism. Ye (formerly known as Kanye West) has been performing at American stadiums all summer, a year after making a song called ‘Heil Hitler,’ the nadir of a years-long assault on Jewish people which included incendiary tweets, an iced out swastika chain, and dinner with Donald Trump and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes. Kraft hasn’t said anything about Ye, a much more popular artist than Macklemore, headlining shows all year. Kraft’s punishment of Macklemore isn’t about antisemitism, but about stifling criticism of Israel.”

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Food for thought

The Sunday roundup

Hope…

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