UNDERNEWS

Congressman files articles of impeachment against Trump

2026-09-29T15:03:59.105-04:00

News Center Maine - Tennessee Congressman Steve Cohen has reportedly introduced more than two dozen articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump. Cohen introduced 26 articles of impeachment against Trump Thursday, Sept. 24.

"Trump is clearly the most impeachable President our country has ever endured. His continued presence in office is a danger to our democracy. That the sycophantic Republican majority in Congress is derelict in its duty does not mean that I must abandon my responsibilities," Cohen said in a statement.

The articles accuse Trump of abuse of power, violation of oath, disregard of courts, attacks on a free press, unlawful taxation, and abolishment of a congressionally mandated agency. "I took an independent oath to support and defend the Constitution. That commitment compels me to introduce this resolution today," Cohen said. "When historians write about this period, and our constituents ask who stood up to President Trump's lawlessness, this resolution is the answer."

Public school funding

2026-09-29T14:36:16.307-04:00

USA Facts- US public schools were given about $1.04 trillion in funding during the 2023–2024 school year. That averages out to $21,100 per student. Almost 90% of that funding was from state and local sources, with the rest coming from the federal government. But the percentages vary depending on the school’s location.

Per-student funding ranged from $13,200 in North Carolina to $37,500 in New York. Cost of living, local property values, and state tax policy all factor into that gap.

State sources covered 45.8% of public school funding, while local sources covered 42.5%. The federal government covered the remaining 11.7%. These percentages have stayed fairly consistent over the past decade.

Most local money for schools comes from property taxes. State money comes mostly from income and sales taxes, with some states adding lottery revenue or tobacco or alcohol taxes.

The federal government provides money for specific programs, such as Title I for schools serving low-income communities and grants under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act for special education. Much of this funding goes to the state, which allocates it to individual school districts.

The balance between state and local funding varies. For example, Vermont drew 87.0% of its school funding from state sources and 2.6% from local sources, while its neighbor, New Hampshire, drew 28.4% from the state and 63.3% from local sources.

Education Department cuts protections based on sexual orientation

2026-09-29T14:09:27.831-04:00

The Hill - The Education Department formally rescinded a Biden-era Title IX interpretation Monday that provided sex-based discrimination protections to students based on sexual orientation and gender identity

The change will require schools to return to Title IX rules as they were interpreted under the first Trump administration in 2020. The president had vowed to end the protections while on the campaign trail in 2024.

…..The Biden-era rule had already been struck down by a federal judge last fall following a lawsuit from a group of 15 Republican-led states.

Health

2026-09-29T13:41:44.088-04:00

Action Network - The Trump administration is using cold AI algorithms to strip ACA subsidies from another 760,000 Americans, claiming healthy people who don't go to the doctor every month are "fraudulent." It’s not fraud. It’s a deliberate plot to crash the system and destroy lives.

By kicking healthy people off coverage, they are sabotaging the risk pool so premiums skyrocket overnight. They are forcing working families into a nightmare choice: pay rent or buy lifesaving medicine.

Parents will be forced to skip basic care until minor issues become medical emergencies. Cancer, diabetes, and heart patients will lose their doctors and treatments.

They are targeting everyday people, deliberately gutting the system to leave millions stranded without a lifeline.

Some Republicans opposing Trump's fund cuts

2026-09-29T13:18:10.049-04:00

The Hill - Republican lawmakers are pushing back on President Trump’s decision to cancel nearly $1 billion in federal funding, setting up a new clash between the White House and members of Trump’s own party at a particularly precarious moment for the GOP.

The administration announced Friday that it would use a budget maneuver known as a “pocket rescission” to claw back funding for a range of federal programs, especially grants through the Department of Health and Human Services that support minority students, refugee resettlement and children without legal status. The cancellation comes less than 45 days before the end of the fiscal year, meaning the canceled funds will be paused through the year’s end regardless of what Congress does in response.

The move threatens to further stiffen the government funding process, which is already mired in partisanship over how much the government should spend on defense versus domestic programs. Whether Congress can manage a regular funding procedure this winter is already in question and will be determined, in large part, by the outcome of the midterm elections.

The White House has defended the new cuts as necessary to eliminate government waste and fraud, arguing that some money originally intended for refugee resettlement is no longer needed because fewer people are crossing the southern border illegally.

But Republica.ns on the congressional Appropriations committees, who are supposed to be in charge of the government’s purse, have never liked rescissions. Several of them voiced concern that the White House is encroaching on Congress’s constitutional authority over federal spending

Jack Smith takes on Capitol Hill Republcans

2026-09-29T13:01:02.455-04:00

Washington Post - Former special counsel Jack Smith returned to Capitol Hill on Tuesday to defend his derailed efforts to prosecute President Donald Trump, telling lawmakers he would not “be silenced by continued threats of prosecution” from the president.

Testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Smith rejected Republican assertions that his investigations of the then-former president were driven by partisanship or were used to improperly surveil GOP lawmakers during the Biden administration.

Smith said he stood by his decision to charge Trump in two felony indictments during his years out of office, the first focused on his alleged mishandling of classified documents and the second on his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

“If asked whether to prosecute a former president today based on the same facts, I would do so regardless of whether the president was a Republican or a Democrat,” Smith said.

With that assertion, the former special counsel kicked off his latest high-stakes clash with Republican lawmakers amid a fight to control the public’s understanding of Smith’s twin investigations, both of which he was compelled to abandon after Trump won the 2024 election.

ICE

2026-09-29T12:12:17.375-04:00

The Guardian - Bolstered by $75bn in funding from Congress, the Department of Homeland Security – the US government agency that oversees ICE – has more than doubled its workforce this year to more than 22,000 officers and staff. It has also vastly expanded its capacity by working with local police, sheriffs, highway patrol and even fish and wildlife agents. As of 15 September, ICE had signed more than 2,500 287(g) agreements. ICE is now detaining more immigrants than ever before.

Word

2026-09-29T12:02:48.141-04:00

“We shouldn’t always force students to maintain a written record of knowledge. Universities have forgotten that archiving and thinking are separate.” — Joe Cruz, the chair of the philosophy department at Williams College

Artificial Intelligence

2026-09-29T11:58:36.751-04:00

The Guardian - New campaign finance disclosure data shines a light on which US political campaigns are using AI tools and how much they are spending on them. Candidates’, parties’ and committees’ spending reveals that AI is fast becoming an essential tool of politics. The candidates themselves are quiet about how they are using the technology in their own campaigns. It’s a sensitive issue that we have been tracking closely since we started writing our book, Rewiring Democracy, which examined how AI is beginning to influence politics. A September 2025 Pew survey of Americans found that more than 70% would think less of a candidate if they used AI to help write a speech.

Itemized expenditure disclosure data from the US Federal Election Commission, dating back to 2020, reveals at least $17m in disclosed spending on AI technology vendors across 523 federal candidates and campaigns. Data from four states, California, Colorado, Massachusetts and Washington, provides a more localized picture going back to 2022.

Beginning with the AI behemoths, at least 80 federal campaigns and committees have reported spending with OpenAI since 2024. The total spending is not huge: only about $50,000 reported, skewing slightly more Republican than Democratic. The Republican National Committee is the largest overall buyer, with nearly $10,000 in reported expenses.

Ranked choice voting

2026-09-29T11:40:06.684-04:00

Independent Voter News – On November 3, ranked choice voting goes on trial in three cities: Irvine, California; Honolulu, Hawaii; and Longmont, Colorado.

No city in Hawaii uses ranked choice voting, and the state capital could be the first. These are local questions about local elections, not the national party fights the pundits keep having.

The appetite for reform is not subtle. A new poll finds 56% of voters want to replace closed party primaries, and here's why: just 9% of voters already picked your Congress in low-turnout primaries.

That's why you don't want to miss IVP's big announcement on the latest episode of the Independent Voter Podcast: Trump and Mamdani Agree on this One Big Issue.

Pete Hegseth

2026-09-29T11:20:18.201-04:00

The Hill - Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is set to announce a 20 percent cut to slots slated for admirals and generals at the Pentagon as part of his push to overhaul the outlook of the department, a Pentagon official confirmed to The Hill on Tuesday.

Word

2026-09-29T10:50:51.108-04:00

Trump admin rolls out ‘worthy’ student rule - The rule would set new standards for federal student loan eligibility: namely, by denying loans to students pursuing degrees that lead to careers that “don’t make enough money.” Who will decide your career? Trump? - Thom Hartmann

Socialists want new constitution

2026-09-29T10:09:44.447-04:00

Newsworthy News - Democratic Socialists of America national program language says members aim to “draft a new constitution” and build a “democratic socialist republic,” signaling an explicit desire to change America’s governing order. A Cleveland chapter essay argues the United States is “no democracy at all,” and urges opposition to the current constitutional structure. A San Diego resolution calls the Constitution “antidemocratic and oppressive,” and presses for a “new constitution” as a core socialist aim. These texts show a direct challenge to the present system.

US life expectancy

2026-09-29T10:05:33.997-04:00

GuideKiwi - The United States experienced notable declines in life expectancy between 2014 and 2021. After steady increases for most of the 20th century, life expectancy began to fall. From 2019 to 2020 alone, life expectancy dropped by nearly one full year—one of the largest single-year declines recorded in modern times. This decline continued, though at a slower rate, through 2021. This reversal marked a significant public health concern and prompted extensive research into the causes.

Several factors contributed to the recent decline. The COVID-19 pandemic caused approximately 400,000 excess deaths in 2020 and 2021, creating much of the documented drop in life expectancy. However, the decline wasn't solely due to pandemic deaths. Drug overdose deaths, particularly those involving opioids and synthetic drugs like fentanyl, increased substantially during this period. The number of overdose deaths roughly doubled between 2015 and 2021, hitting approximately 100,000 deaths annually by 2021. Suicide rates also increased during certain years in this period. Deaths from chronic conditions worsened in some cases due to delayed medical care during lockdowns.

The declines were not evenly distributed across populations. Some groups experienced larger drops in life expectancy than others. Working-age adults, particularly those without college degrees and those facing economic hardship, showed larger declines. Certain geographic regions—particularly rural and post-industrial areas—saw more significant drops than others. These patterns suggested that the decline was connected not only to specific diseases but also to broader social and economic conditions affecting different populations differently.

Starting in 2022, U.S. life expectancy began to increase again, though data remains preliminary. The causes of the recent increases include reduced COVID-19 mortality as vaccines and treatments improved, declining overdose death rates in some regions due to increased access to overdose reversal medications and treatment programs, and general reduction in excess mortality. However, life expectancy remained below pre-2020 levels as of the most recent available data.

Health

2026-09-28T11:28:25.826-04:00

Health - Certain raw milk cheeses have been recalled nationwide after being linked to a multistate outbreak of E. coli, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced Friday.1

Sierra Nevada Graziers voluntarily recalled four types of raw milk cheese—medium cheddar, sharp cheddar, jalapeño jack, and Monterey jack—after learning that nine of the 13 people in the outbreak ate the cheese before getting sick. No deaths have been reported in connection to the outbreak, but eight people have been hospitalized, and three developed hemolytic uremic syndrome, a serious complication of E. coli that can lead to kidney failure.

Which Cheese Was Recalled?

Product description: Sierra Nevada Graziers grass-fed raw milk cheeses

Varieties: raw medium cheddar, raw sharp cheddar, raw jalapeño jack, and raw Monterey jack

Sizes: 8-oz and 16-oz packages for retail, and 5-lb loaves for wholesalers and foodservice providers

WBLM - According to the American Cancer Society, more than 324,000 new cases of breast cancer are diagnosed every year. That is simply a staggering number. To put it into perspective, 1 out of every 8 women in America will be diagnosed with breast cancer in her lifetime.

Trump and Hegseth want men to boost their manliness

2026-09-28T11:15:52.713-04:00

The Guardian - Two years after Donald Trump decisively won the vote of the American man, polls say male voters are increasingly disillusioned with an administration that has waged wars and enriched itself.

Ahead of the midterms, Trump’s strategy seems to be to find a way to get that masculine animus back, so the male populace will vote not with their heads or their hearts, but with their hogs. At least, that’s one way of understanding why, this summer, Trump’s secretaries of health and defense announced plans that could increase levels of testosterone, or simply “T”, in the civilian and military population.

In June, the health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, announced the FDA was removing a limitation on testosterone replacement therapy (TRT) which stated that its safety and effectiveness “have not been established”. This was part of a suite of FDA changes that could make it much easier for men to be prescribed testosterone, potentially accelerating a boom in the number of men on TRT; already nearly 12m prescriptions were dispensed in 2025, from fewer than 1m in 2000.

A few weeks later the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, announced he was making testosterone screening compulsory for military service members over the age of 30, and offering voluntary screening for all members – part of an effort to forge what he calls a “High-T department of war”. Service members who are deemed to have low T will be offered state-sponsored replacement therapy.

Trump acolytes don’t only want to give men more testosterone, they are keen to castigate those who they think don’t have enough of it. Ken Paxton, campaigning for a Texas Senate seat that may decide the balance of power in Washington, has run ads casting his Democratic challenger, James Talarico, as “too low-T for Texas”. Trump’s most loyal adviser, Stephen Miller, called Talarico, a cisgendered heterosexual man, the “first transgender Senate candidate”.

Meanwhile. . .

2026-09-28T10:51:08.168-04:00

Tennessee is scheduled to execute Christa Pike by lethal injection on Wednesday, September 30, 2026, at 10 a.m. at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville — what would be the state's first execution of a woman since 1820, more than 200 years ago wtop.com fox17.com.

How to cope with the stress of anti-LGBTQ+ prejudice

Vaccines

2026-09-28T09:33:01.190-04:00

The Congressional Insider - A federal judge in Idaho left the state’s Medical Freedom Act intact and affirmed that daycares cannot reject a child because a parent opts out of vaccines, according to the attorney general’s office and court reporting…..Attorney General Raúl Labrador said parents, not daycares, make kids’ medical choices. The state argued daycares cannot require injections as a condition for care.

Trump vs. the news media

2026-09-28T09:25:56.452-04:00

The Guardian Donald Trump’s attorney general, Todd Blanche, argued that the administration was permitted to ban three news outlets from the White House because “it is a privilege and not a right to be there”. On Thursday, a judge issued a temporary restraining order requiring the White House to temporarily restore the credentials of affected journalists at CNN, MS Now and Politico, and they were allowed entry to the executive complex. However, on Saturday CNN said its journalists were barred from joining the press pool traveling with the president on Air Force One.

Pressed to point to a specific report the administration objected to, Blanche seemed to suggest that any negative reporting about Trump must be inaccurate, saying: “The information coming out of CNN and some of these other networks is wholly and completely, almost 100% negative toward the president.” Without providing any evidence, Blanche repeated the administration’s position that the affected three outlets’ reporting amounted to a “national security problem”.

What's a humanities?

2026-09-27T11:59:55.342-04:00

Sam Smith - Some five decades ago, my wife was director of the Washington Historical Society and I helped to start the DC Humanities Council. Recently we got word that the two organizations were merging. It wasn't the first connection, for in the late 1970's Kathy Smith got a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to train teachers in the history of DC. Here’s something I wrote about humanities back in 1979

SAM SMITH, DC GAZETTE, 1979 - I have to confess something. I have strayed from the civic abstinence I promised on these pages a while back. I have once again joined a committee. But it's just a small committee and I think I can handle it. If not, drive me home and I'll never do it again. Promise.

The committee is called the DC Community Humanities Council. Fifty states and Puerto Rico have such committees - and the funds from the National Endowment for the Humanities that follow in their wake - but DC, through a combination of federal inertia and local indifference, has been years late to the gate. . .

I was invited to serve on the committee by the NEH for reasons that are not entirely clear, but presumably have something to do with what is known in the trade as "community outreach," or, as Senator Scoop Jackson put it even less felicitously the other day, providing another "rung on the spectrum." Since I had complained in print about the lack of a local humanities committee, I thought I ought to put some time where my mouth was. But there was another less honorable reason for my willingness to accept the invitation. You see, what the folks at NEH don't know is that not only did I graduate from college magna cum probation but I was so indifferent to the humanities and scholarship in general that my English instructor once sent me a neatly written card that read: "Mr. Cole requests the pleasure of your attendance at the next regular meeting of his course." Many of the courses I did attend left me thoroughly befuddled. The first hint that joining the fellowship of educated men was going to be a treacherous business came when I returned to my room after the initial day of classes. I settled down to dash off a bit of Max Weber before supper. Ten pages in my heart went into a barrel roll and my hands began to rattle. I hadn't understood one word the man was saying. This exquisite form of panic would return many times over the next four years.

I struggled to separate the thoughts of Locke from the sermons of Cotton Mather; Veblin and Bentham congealed in my brain; Karl Marx was, as far as I could discern, the opiate of sadistic professors; and when I walked into an examination hall I was certain that all around me could balance more philosophers within the margins of a blue book than I. The die was cast early as one of my anthropology professors noted on a paper. "This is pretty good journalism," she wrote of my painfully conceived review of the Naga situation, "but it is bad anthropology." I left the ivy-bedizened halls vowing never to return and, in fact, never did except for an occasional guest talk to the class of a professor or two of eccentric tastes. So for me to be invited to share responsibility for the fate of the humanities with genuine, certified, dissertating scholars was too good an offer to pass up - not unlike an ex-con being asked to serve on a judicial nominations commission.

So of course I accepted. This first thing that happened was a friend, when I told her of the project, described herself as "one of nine people in the city who knows what the humanities are." I passed on the remark to an historian who asked, "Don't you think that figure is a little high?"

Right away I knew I was in trouble. One of the real pleasures of graduating from college is that seldom thereafter does anyone ask you to define your terms. I had been away from the academic world for twenty years and had sort of assumed that in the interim they had come up with handy definitions for things like the "humanities." But apparently we were heading for square one -- back to Humanities 10: "Define the humanities and illustrate by example, citing sources where applicable." .

It all came back. The slush of ideas, concepts, symbolisms, metaphors, imagery, and philosophies through which I had so laboriously slogged during college, and so assiduously avoided since, was underfoot once more and I could feel my socks getting wet and clammy.

I had voluntarily agreed to serve a cause whose meaning and purpose I thought I understood, but which I couldn't decently explain to anyone who didn't understand. I had done so somewhat whimsically and capriciously, in part because I sensed it all had something to do with constructive irrelevance, a subject which has come to interest me after years of excessive relevance and the not totally satisfying product of the same. It also seemed to favor my anarchistic side, since the humanities like to ask questions without providing answers while politics tends to provide answers without asking questions. Further, humanists have a reputation for not doing anything useful, so perhaps if I became associated with them, people would stop asking me to do things that were useful.

But that would hardly do when we had to go out and explain what we were about and why anyone should be interested. You can't tell a sullen scribe from one of the dailies who asks "What do you see as the role of the humanities in this city?" something like, "If you have to ask, you'll never know." So I decided I better find out what a humanities really was before the National Endowment blew my cover and decided that this community outreach business had gone far enough. Here is some of what I found:

The word humanities doesn't mean much to most people. Most people to whom it does mean much work on college campuses. For them it means pretty much what it did when I was in college: it's what you major in if you're not in the physical or social sciences, haven't decided what to do with your life or want to go to law school but would like to learn something first.

Here are some of the humanities: philosophy, comparative religion, history, ethics, literature.

Here is one thing the humanities have in common: you feel a little foolish listing them on a job application form.

That may be one reason that most people who know about the humanities are found on college campuses: no one else will hire them.

There's another reason: Some people on campus feel that the humanities shouldn't be talked about too much off campus. They feel the humanities are a profession and that you should have a Ph.D. to be "in" them. They want people to treat them like physicians and lawyers and CPAs and lieutenant colonels, so they call each other 'Doctor' a lot.

It is confusing because it suggests that you might need a license to think about literature, religion, history or philosophy. This is not necessarily true. It is still further confusing because humanities scholars, when they're not calling themselves 'Doctor,' call themselves "humanists." Off campus, the word sometimes has a different meaning. The woman down the street may be called "a real humanist" because she set up a senior citizen center or organized the heart drive, even though she doesn't know who Kierkegaard was. You can't be a humanist on campus without knowing who Kierkegaard was, no matter how much you raise for the heart fund.

Finally, it is confusing because in many people's minds, a doctor is meant to fix something. Humanist-type doctors are hard-pressed to prove that they do. And in our scientific and technological society, we tend to discount what can't be proved. There is no morality program you can slip into the computer, no antibiotic against cultural vacuity, no certifiable benefits to be achieved through an acquaintance with the past and no minimum daily requirement for literature.

I think a part of what the National Endowment for the Humanities is trying to do is to end some of this confusion. This is good because even though the word "humanities" is not used that much off campus, we use what it describes all the time. We just don't have a name for it.

We practice it without a license and without credit. Some of the biggest issues of our lives are concerns of the humanities. Like whether we accept a politician's definition of "acceptable risk" at a nuclear power plant. Like publicly funded abortions or legalized gambling or how we distribute political power .

These are also political questions and their philosophical, historical or religious core often gets hidden behind the politics, which is too bad because good politics is a poor substitute for a good philosophy, whereas good philosophy can makes good politics.

Our best presidents, for example, were those who convinced people not just of their politics but of its philosophical or ethical base. The New Deal, the War on Poverty, the civil rights legislation and the Peace Corps would never have gotten off the ground if people hadn't accepted the philosophy before the politics.

We need, as Martin Marty said, a place from which to view the world. The media and the merchandisers would like us to think otherwise. They want us to acquiesce in their plan to create packaged consumers for their packaged products - whether it be artificial eggs, a new TV series or a president. They would like us to want more than to be. The thing that keeps us in rebellion is a part of what the humanities are about. This is the revolutionary aspect of the National Endowment for the Humanities. It proposes to fund the dangerous notion that we can still think for ourselves. That we still want to know why we do things as well as when and how much it will cost. That we still have some choices left. . .

Whatever a humanities is, it used to be different. Rod French, a scholar at George Washington University who happens to be both an academic and a non-academic humanist, described it this way in a paper prepared for the National League of Cities:

"At the opening of the modern age, in the city states of Italy in the 14th and 15th centuries, humanist scholars and poets handled state correspondence, represented their sovereigns as diplomatic emissaries and wrote orations for great civic occasions. But already in the 16th century, this whole class of scholars began a long decline into disgrace and neglect. Their ambition and poor judgment was responsible in part, but they were also the victims of deep social changes. The rise of the middle class and the democratic revolutions of the 18th century further displaced humanists from positions of influence. And then industrialization placed a premium on a set of new skills. Those who persisted in studying the humanities were forced to the margins of public life. . . .In the Renaissance, the term humanist referred to men (almost exclusively} who dedicated themselves to the study of the humanities. That happened to mean to them the study of the literature and history and politics and ethics and art of classical Greece and Rome. Today, hardly anyone in public life feels they need a humanist and few humanists feel they need a public life . . .

"The only way to get the humanist down from the ivory tower is to drag him into public affairs. If his alleged contribution proves in actual experience to be trivial or ephemeral, then the game is up. If the managers of society refuse even to give his questions a hearing then we can conclude fairly that they are not really friends of the good society."

Here is one more historical note: Tocqueville called the French Revolution the first great event in history brought about by men of letters. The Russian Revolution was another. So, as late as this century, some humanists have been found relevant.

The National Endowment for the Humanities says that all programs funded by state humanities committees should have "scholars involved centrally." Artists can get money from their national endowment without scholars being centrally involved in their sculpture or dance. Governments are more leery of unformed ideas than they are of unformed stone, which may be why federally funded thinking must be accompanied by licensed personnel. I think humanities scholars should have to prove that their ideas are worth something, just like anyone else, but they're on the dole far less than most groups, there isn't much risk that they will turn into a mandarin class in the near future, and they need the money, so what the hell. You can always pull the anchovies off the pizza if you don't like them..

One of the problems with defining the humanities is that it is hard to do anything well without them. A doctor or a nuclear physicist who isn't also a humanist can cause a lot of trouble. One of the purposes of the humanities is to give some direction to the other things we do. The humanities are often at their most potent when they modify something else rather than being just an end. Of course, you don't have to justify interest in the humanities on the basis of social utility. After all, the Declaration of Independence ranked the pursuit of happiness only after life and liberty as a basic right. It hasn't fared so well since. The humanities, among other things, have to do with the pursuit of happiness. As Hubert Humphrey said when the bill establishing the National Endowment passed, "At last the Congress voted for fun; at last the Congress voted and said let's have something that celebrates the rights of man to sheer fun."

But, then again, we may be too late. Newsweek seems to think so. It ran a headline over a book review recently that read: "Albert Camus: The Last of the Humanists." I hope not. . .

So what's a humanities? I can't really give you one answer. But I can give you several. It's asking why before we say yes. It's remembering something someone wrote two centuries ago when we can't remember what we wrote yesterday. It's mistakes we don't have to make because they've already been made and solutions we don't have to dream up because someone has already thought of them. It's how we got where we are and where we might go from here. It's things we can't measure yet know have depth and breadth. It's parts of our culture we might lose like the Indian tribe writing its language down and putting it in a book. It's parts of our culture that we're often slow to recognize as such, like the legislature in Georgia finally making "Georgia on My Mind" the state song and inviting Ray Charles to come down and sing it. It's the moral, philosophical, and historical issues hidden behind the political babble. It's rights and beliefs and their protection. It's preserving the past and the future and not just exploiting today. It's thinking as well as talking, questioning as well as answering. And it's placing human values and culture at the center of our world and making machines and technology and Channel Seven serve us rather than the other way around.

If we talk about things like these, we'll be talking humanities whether we know it or not. And I think we'll be reminded that they really do matter. And have all along.

Middle East

2026-09-27T11:08:37.914-04:00

Alternet - Sen. John Fetterman (D-Penn.) cast a tie-breaking vote that will allow President Donald Trump's war with Iran to continue. The House has left Washington, but the Senate has remained throughout the week.

Word

2026-09-27T10:39:17.403-04:00

Robert Reich

Trump wants to ignore Congress and cut nearly $1 billion in federal funding.

2026-09-27T10:27:20.824-04:00

Time - President Donald Trump said this week that he is seeking to cancel almost $1 billion in federal funding, sidestepping congressional approval and earning blowback from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle. Using a controversial move known as a “pocket rescission,” Trump said he wants to nullify $810 million that Congress had approved for programs largely serving immigrants, minorities, and children.

The Trump Administration said that rescinding the funds is “consistent with the Administration's goal of ending the use of Federal taxpayer dollars to support non-citizens, putting Americans first.” But the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office and lawmakers from both parties have asserted that the move is an illegal sidestepping of the constitutionally protected separation of powers—chiefly, Congress's power of the purse.

The Administration invoked the 1974 Impoundment Control Act, which allows the President to propose spending cancellations and gives Congress 45 days to approve them or see the funds released. However, the Administration submitted its request just five days before the fiscal year ends Sept. 30—all but ensuring the funds expire without congressional approval. —Rebecca Schneid/

American alcohol drinking is down

2026-09-27T10:17:11.634-04:00

Time - The U.S. is in the midst of a temperance boom. Drinking rates have been steadily declining nationwide, with an August Gallup poll showing that only 54% of Americans ever consume alcohol—sharply down from 67% as recently as 2010. Now, a study in the Annals of Internal Medicine takes those findings a step further, reporting that younger adults in the Millennial and Gen Z cohorts—people born from 1981 to 2012—are driving that trend. Meanwhile, older Americans, aged 50-64, are actually consuming more alcohol than they used to, with rates increasing by more than one third since 2018.

History

2026-09-27T10:13:04.541-04:00

Ten interesting facts about FDR

Voting

2026-09-27T09:52:19.305-04:00

Alternet - Yesterday, the six corrupt Republican ideologues on the Supreme Court voted 6-3 to let the Trump regime go forward with their plan to create a national database of Trump-approved, GOP-approved voters that they intend to then force upon the states in violation of the Constitution. This overturned a June ruling from Judge Sparkle Sooknanan, who found the government had “knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens.”

The Guardian - Election experts have warned Donald Trump's administration could use the crucial hours and days after November's midterm elections to disrupt the results after struggling to enforce a crackdown on voting. With less than six weeks remaining until polls close, and control of US Congress in the balance, the post-election "counting window" is seen as as a particularly vulnerable moment by former US federal government officials.

While the US president's bid to impose sweeping restrictions on mail-in ballots was rejected by the supreme court earlier this month, there is apprehension that Trump and his allies could use the period while votes are counted to amplify unfounded allegations in a bid to challenge results that don't go their way. More

The silent crisis of Americans in prime of life

2026-09-26T16:10:27.797-04:00

Study Finds - Death rates for Americans between 25 and 44 years old jumped 71.2% in just eleven years, rising from about 140 deaths per 100,000 people in 2010 to 239 per 100,000 by 2021. No other age group came anywhere close to that surge. Overdoses, suicides, car crashes, and chronic diseases appearing at increasingly younger ages are now cutting down people in the prime of their lives. ...Sixty countries had a lower risk of a person dying before age 40 than the United States did. That gap didn't open overnight. It has been widening since the 1990s, and it sped up sharply after 2010.

Health

2026-09-26T15:59:36.985-04:00

365 Better Health - Five minutes of easy walking every half hour cut post-meal blood sugar spikes by about 60% in a Columbia-led study Keith Diaz shared on the TED stage. Prolnged sitting hurts metabolic and vascular health; short movement breaks help. A five-minute walk every 30rolo minutes reduced blood sugar spikes by roughly 60%….Federal guidance has flagged prolonged sitting as a health risk factor.

43% of Americans view socialism positively

2026-09-26T15:46:43.521-04:00

Deep State Tribunal - A new Gallup poll finds 43% of Americans now view socialism positively, the highest level in the poll’s 16-year trend. Gallup reports a record 43% positive view of socialism since tracking began in 2010. Capitalism still leads at 55% positive, while free enterprise remains far stronger overall. Socialism now rates higher than big business in public favorability, 43% to 35%.

250 years of America's socialism

2026-09-26T13:19:46.430-04:00

Ralph Nader - On September 18, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce announced it is launching a six-week, 20-state “Free Enterprise Express Bus” tour to back Republican candidates and “fight for free enterprise.” This big business lobby ignores the fact that, just like “capitalism,” American “democratic socialism” (supported by the voters for generations) is everywhere in our mixed-economy country.

Here is an incomplete list of public goods, services, benefits, and institutions that Democratic candidates can invoke in asking their GOP opponents: “Which one of the following will you tell voters you want to get rid of?”

Public Lands – Parks and National Forests
Public Schools and Universities
Public Transit
U.S. Postal Service
Public Drinking Water Departments
Public Electric Utilities
Public Fire Departments
Public Libraries
Public Roads and Highways
VA hospitals
Mandatory Minimum Wages
SNAP Food Stamps
Unemployment Compensation Payments
Social Security
Medicare
Medicaid
Head Start
Peace Corps and AmeriCorps
Meals on Wheels
Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA)

The list can go on. During the Vietnam War, the Pentagon begged the big drug companies to work on anti-malaria medicines. Malaria was the second leading cause of hospitalization for U.S. soldiers in that undeclared war. Big Pharma refused, saying there was too little profit in one-time anti-malarial shots, compared with medicines soldiers were taking every day. So, the Pentagon chose socialism, setting up its own drug development entity in its two military hospitals. Pentagon scientists and doctors developed three of the four anti-malaria drugs in use and offered them to any country for use, without imposing patent monopolies.

Probably one of the nation’s earliest and foremost mixed-economy-minded civic founders was Ben Franklin. A successful businessman, he also knew the meaning of the phrase later coined by Amory Lovins: “Markets make a good servant, a bad master, and a worse religion.” Societies have many necessities that markets—meaning private companies—don’t supply when immediate profits are insufficient. Franklin helped create institutions to meet some of those needs: Philadelphia’s subscription Library Company, the volunteer Union Fire Company, and the Academy and College of Philadelphia, a precursor to the University of Pennsylvania. He also played an important role in colonial postal administration. These were not all government-operated public agencies, but they were civic institutions intended to serve broad public purposes.

Public works were crucial in enabling private business enterprises to flourish. Consider the Erie Canal, which opened in 1825 and linked the Hudson River at Albany to Lake Erie at Buffalo. It created a navigable commercial route between the Atlantic economy and the Great Lakes interior, reducing transportation costs and accelerating settlement and trade. The growth of the nation-building national post office is an example of a spectacular universal “democratic socialistic” public institution.

When these and other socialistic enterprises generated consumer or worker demand, private corporate usurpers moved to undermine them, seize a piece of this governmental success and their publicly created value, rip them off as vendors, or persistently disparage these services to get the public to lose confidence in them. This corporate propaganda never stops. MORE