LONDON — Britain is still lagging behind Australia when it comes to assisted dying. But one Labour MP who has seen the debate in both countries is hoping she can push forward a thwarted attempt at change in the U.K.

“If I had six months to live and I was facing a potentially very frightening, very painful, very uncomfortable death, I would want to be able to have the choice to choose to end my life surrounded by my family,” Lauren Edwards, who became an MP in 2024 — and hails from Melbourne, Australia, tells POLITICO in an interview.

Edwards’ support for assisted dying is shaped in part by the laws in Victoria, where she still has family. In 2017, it became the first Australian state to legalize assisted dying for people expected to die within six months, or 12 months for those with neurodegenerative diseases, and who face unacceptable suffering. 

Though Edwards argues her own legislation is “preferable and has stronger safeguards” than the Australian model — unbearable suffering is not a criterion for eligibility in her bill — she found it helpful to see how assisted dying has worked in practice the last time British MPs tackled this issue.

It’s an experience from which many in Labour still bear the scars — and on which new Prime Minister Andy Burnham already appears to have drawn a line in the sand.

Stepping forward 

MPs passed fellow Labour backbencher Kim Leadbeater’s Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill last year by 314 votes to 291. But it failed to become law after delays in the U.K.’s House of Lords.

Now Edwards is reintroducing the bill — and is adamant that the groundbreaking social change can succeed this time around.

It means that next month, the House of Commons will once again be thrust into a divisive vote on a matter of conscience, deciding whether to legalize assisted dying in England and Wales for terminally ill adults judged as having fewer than six months left to live.

“When Kim’s bill came up, I did have conversations with my dad about how things have gone in Australia,” Edwards says. The situation reassured her compared to “more extreme examples” like Canada, where a terminal condition is not required for patients to be eligible, but instead an irreversible, “advanced state of decline” and “unbearable physical or mental suffering.”

Next year, Canadian eligibility for assisted dying is set to be expanded to include individuals whose sole underlying medical condition is a mental illness, though this change has been repeatedly delayed.

Sense-checking the legislation with family down under was “really important” when weighing up whether to support Leadbeater’s earlier proposals, she says.

Edwards has Australian friends who have settled in Britain too — and contrasts a friend able to attend his mother’s assisted death in Australia with British families currently worried about prosecution for helping relatives to die. U.K. law punishes the offense with up to 14 years in prison.

“[The] status quo is not neutral. It is not benign,” Edwards argues. “It is a situation where, if we don’t make this legislative change, unfortunately, we will be allowing that pain, fear and isolation.”

In October 2024, an independent review of assisted dying in Victoria by the state Department of Health’s Centre for Evaluation and Research Evidence found the system to be safe and “operating as intended” with “no reports of ineligible individuals” accessing substances to end their lives.

However, access to assisted dying varies across the vast state — which is only slightly smaller than the entire U.K. — and just “a few practitioners” deliver the majority of care. Victoria has been urged to press the central Australian government for more funding.

Choice of priorities

Back in the U.K., the main political parties have agreed that the decision to legalize assisted dying should be a matter for parliament, rather than any one administration. MPs were not whipped to vote in any particular way on Leadbeater’s bill, and the issue is treated as a matter of conscience.

But there was tacit endorsement for the most recent attempted overhaul from the top of Keir Starmer’s government. Before entering No. 10, Starmer promised broadcaster Esther Rantzen — who has stage four lung cancer — that he’d make time for a vote in parliament.

Leadbeater’s bill also received technical support from civil servants in the Department for Health and Social Care and the Ministry of Justice to ensure its workability.

New Prime Minister Andy Burnham appears to have other ideas. Burnham was not an MP when assisted dying passed the Commons last year and abstained in a 2015 vote during a previous stint in parliament.

More strikingly, when asked about his stance on the issue last month, Burnham said “the fixing of the funding of palliative care and social care” needs to happen first — and argued it would be “very challenging” to introduce assisted dying without substantial progress on these two running policy sores.

Edwards remains bullish. She commends the PM’s commitment to sustainably funding social care — Burnham has kicked off cross-party talks on the issue and asked for a speedier inquiry — and she insists his professed skepticism hasn’t put her off.

“It’s really important that we consider them together,” Edwards says of social care and assisted dying. “I don’t think that there is a reason to delay” changing the law, she argues, highlighting £125 million provided by Starmer’s government for adult and children’s hospices. (A Public Accounts Committee report said this one-off funding did not directly pay for service delivery or solve financial problems facing the sector.)

Edwards’ bill has a four-year implementation period. That means if it becomes law next year, assisted dying wouldn’t be permitted until 2031. She believes the two systems can work on a “dual track” and that poor palliative care won’t incentivize people to access assisted dying. 

“I don’t necessarily think that lack of care is a motivator for this option,” she argues. “I think it’s a last resort when physical suffering really can’t be relieved.”

From MPs to peers

A majority of Starmer’s Cabinet backed the bill last time, including Health Secretary Yvette Cooper and Justice Secretary Alex Norris — but only 12 MPs need to switch sides for the bill to fall, making the margins tight. Indeed, suspended Labour MP Karl Turner told POLITICO he’ll vote against the bill after abstaining last June.

“People’s views are largely what I expect them to be when we next vote on this,” Edwards argues. “We haven’t seen any significant moves away from people who were supportive of the bill.”

Then there is the substantive question of the House of Lords. Edwards condemns the “small minority” of peers she blames for filibustering the previous bill. She said she is happy to work with peers on good faith amendments in the “scrutiny process” this time around.

The pro-assisted dying camp will be relying on a little-used pair of laws — the Parliament Acts — which would, in narrow circumstances, allow a bill to be passed despite being deadlocked or defeated by peers in the House of Lords again. “I want to get it back to [peers] ASAP so that they will have the maximum amount of time to finish the job of scrutinizing,” Edwards says.

An impassioned opposition campaign last time around argued Leadbeater’s bill was not safe. The Royal College of Psychiatrists, while neutral on the principle of assisted dying, said it could not support her plans due to a lack of clarity about their profession’s role in the process and whether adequate resources are in place.

While Edwards may struggle to win over Burnham, she hopes to “sit down and have a conversation” with the prime minister before MPs return from recess in September.

One open question remains: how Starmer himself will vote. As prime minister, he voted for it, but didn’t explain his reasoning. Now freed from the constraints of government, Edwards hopes Starmer will make an intervention. 

“He has a well-known legal background, is very considered and is obviously a really crucial voice,” she says. Starmer’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

President Donald Trump has some beef with the price of beef.

American ranchers — many of them among his most reliable supporters — have some beef with his solution.

Trump announced Friday that the United States would temporarily allow up to 300,000 metric tons of foreign beef to enter the country without triggering higher out-of-quota tariffs. He said exporters had committed to selling the beef at 25% below current market prices.

“This deal will reduce prices for Americans while giving space for our Great American Beef Herd to grow again,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

But the plan has prompted unusually sharp opposition from cattle producers and Republicans representing ranching states, who say importing discounted foreign beef will undercut the American producers Trump has promised to protect.

“What a slap in the face to American cattlemen & consumers,” Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., wrote. “Worse than socialism!”

Massie argued that temporarily dumping cheaper foreign beef into the American market could lower prices without giving U.S. ranchers an incentive to raise more cattle.

Former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., also criticized Trump’s approach, instead endorsing Massie’s PRIME Act, which would loosen federal restrictions on meat processed at smaller local slaughterhouses and sold within the same state.

If Trump really wanted to lower beef prices he would support Massie’s PRIME Act which allows individual states to permit local custom slaughterhouses to sell individual cuts of meat directly to consumers, restaurants, and grocery stores within that same state. But instead the… pic.twitter.com/feQtEmoqTy

— Former Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸 (@FmrRepMTG) August 21, 2026

“If Trump really wanted to lower beef prices he would support Massie’s PRIME Act,” Greene wrote Friday, also calling for country-of-origin labeling on imported meat. “Why won’t the Republican elected President support these legislations which are America First?” she asked.

The criticism comes amid a growing rupture between Trump and former MAGA allies including Greene and Massie, who increasingly accuse the president of abandoning the “America First” agenda they once championed.

They aren’t alone on beef.

Beef prices have reached record highs as the American cattle herd remains near its smallest size since the 1950s. Years of drought, wildfires and high operating costs led ranchers to reduce their herds, which can take years to rebuild.

The American Farm Bureau Federation warned Trump’s proposal could cause “long-term damage” to cattle producers, while Republican lawmakers from major cattle states have also pushed back.

Montana Sen. Tim Sheehy said he advised Trump against the plan, noting that many of the ranchers affected are MAGA Republicans. Nebraska Sen. Deb Fischer, herself a cattle rancher, said lowering grocery prices cannot come “at the expense of American producers.”

Trump dismissed those concerns Friday.

“The ranchers are great; they’re my people. I love the ranchers,” he told reporters.

But consumers want lower prices, Trump said, and the foreign beef would provide “a little help.”

The post “They’re my people”: Trump shrugs off concerns of MAGA ranchers’ beef appeared first on Salon.com.

Education Secretary Linda McMahon praised the growing use of artificial intelligence in classrooms Sunday, even as she acknowledged there is little evidence yet showing how the technology affects student learning.

During an interview with CNN’s Dana Bash, McMahon pointed to Alpha School in Austin, Texas, where students spend the first two hours of their school day wearing headphones and learning in front of computers with teachers monitoring their progress.

“The beauty of that is that a student almost has a one-on-one tutor,” McMahon said, explaining that AI programs can adjust instruction based on how quickly individual students are learning.

Her comments come just days after the Education Department issued new guidance telling schools to evaluate educational technology based on evidence that it improves student outcomes.

But when Bash noted that generative AI is too new for comprehensive long-term studies and asked whether students were effectively becoming “guinea pigs for chatbots,” McMahon acknowledged the evidence is still developing.

“There aren’t a lot of metrics available now,” McMahon said.

Still, she praised what she witnessed at the Austin school. “Oh, it’s working wonderfully and they’ve been doing it now for a few years,” she said.

Schools across the country are already wrestling with how much artificial intelligence belongs in education.

Thirty-seven states have issued guidance on AI in schools while districts that initially focused on preventing students from using chatbots to cheat are increasingly introducing AI literacy programs designed to teach students both how to use the technology and recognize its limitations.

Those limitations can be significant. During a recent AI training session for educators in South Carolina, an AI-generated world map misspelled Mali as “Mail,” labeled Egypt “Sopth” and replaced Libya with a country simply called “Africa.”

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McMahon said schools should monitor whether AI tools actually improve student outcomes and remove those that don’t. She also emphasized that AI should not replace human teachers.

“Nothing should replace that one-on-one teacher interaction with students,” McMahon said, calling for “AI with guardrails.”

The question facing schools may increasingly be where those guardrails should go. McMahon said parents should be able to object when they believe AI isn’t helping their children, while acknowledging schools are still learning what effective AI education looks like.

“It’s how effective are the teachers being able to interact with the students and work with them,” she said. “Students need to be able to communicate with each other.”

The post Are kids “guinea pigs for chatbots”? McMahon backs classroom AI use appeared first on Salon.com.

When German Chancellor Friedrich Merz finally rose to power in May 2025 after years of political failure and an inconclusive election, he already faced what looked like an impossible situation. He had Donald Trump on one side, a few months into an increasingly erratic and vindictive second term, and the rapid rise of the neofascist far right in Europe, and specifically the Nazi-curious Alternative for Germany party, or AfD, on the other. 

Merz’s party, the center-right Christian Democratic Union, had just “won” a federal election in Germany with 28.5% of the vote, the second-worst result of its entire post-World War II history. The AfD had literally doubled its vote share, to nearly 21%, but enthusiastic support from Elon Musk, JD Vance and other MAGA ambassadors failed to push it over the top (and may even have backfired). Merz was able to forge an awkward governing coalition with the center-left Social Democratic Party, the CDU’s longtime ideological opponents. The “firewall,” an agreement that Germany’s mainstream parties will do everything possible to block the AfD from power, had held for the moment.

If Merz briefly became a leading figure in optimistic media narratives about liberal democracy fighting back against extremism — alongside wounded-duck Emmanuel Macron in France and since-deposed Keir Starmer in Britain — that didn’t last long. After 15 months in power, Merz’s popularity has sunk to sub-Trump levels, while the AfD seems poised to become the largest party in upcoming state elections in Saxony-Anhalt, in Germany’s scenic and historic heartland. 

Merz once vowed to cut the AfD’s support in half, essentially through a combination of appeasement and opposition. He could undercut the far right’s electoral appeal, he suggested, by cracking down on “irregular immigration” but not going all the way to MAGA-style mass deportation, and by shoring up the German welfare state and reducing wasteful spending. (Across party lines, Germans still support a social safety net that seems remarkably generous by American standards.) 

In the judicious language of The Economist: 

None of this has worked. Irregular immigration has plummeted, but the AfD has simply moved further right, now raging against “culturally foreign” workers and urging “remigration” (a slippery term that can mean anything from deporting asylum-seekers to ethnic cleansing).

The CDU/SDP government is widely seen as inept and bureaucratic, which is exactly what tends to happen in “grand coalitions” between parties with fundamental disagreements about the nature of society. Meanwhile, the AfD has gone from 10% support in 2021 to almost 30% in some national polls this year. 

There’s a growing consensus that the firewall, or Brandmauer in German, has failed, but much less agreement about exactly why that happened or what opponents of far-right nationalism or neofascism should do about it. Although I doubt anyone in Germany is inclined to take history lessons from an American, I would suggest that in both countries the failure to suppress the fascist uprising speaks to fundamental flaws in liberal democracy, and that the bitter lessons of the Trump/Biden/Trump era may prove instructive.

What we have perhaps learned during the second Trump term — let me emphasize “perhaps” — is that the only way out is through. The temporary return to “regular-order democracy” and the rule of law under Joe Biden (a tragic and pathetic historical figure, for sure) was a damaging illusion. Forceful resistance to the Trump virus has been crucial, for moral and symbolic reasons as much as anything else, but the only effective cure, it would seem, lies in widespread exposure to its most toxic effects. 

To give Merz credit, he seemed to understand the historical moment and tried to embrace his role as Europe’s last man standing against tyranny. It was “five minutes to midnight” on the continent that had birthed liberal democracy, he announced, and the reawakening of fascism was “the last warning to the political parties of the democratic center” to reach consensus on immigration policy, economic reform, a shared European defense strategy and other thorny issues.

But from the beginning Merz was about the last person you’d pick as defender of democracy, circa 2026. He’s more like a time traveler from the glory days of neoliberalism, a pro-American, pro-business multimillionaire with a wardrobe full of €3,000 suits, a copy of Francis Fukuyama’s “The End of History” under his arm, and an entire career of close ties to transatlantic high finance and the Reagan-era Republican Party. Photoshop him into a 2005 summit meeting alongside Tony Blair, George W. Bush and Jacques Chirac, and he’d fit right in. Today? Not so much.

It’s also true, as German journalist Jörg Lau has observed, that Merz was essentially for Trump before he was against him. He first ran for the CDU leadership in 2018 as an overtly MAGA-friendly candidate, vowing to push the party back toward the right both on immigration and what we might now call “wokeness” after the downfall of longtime Chancellor Angela Merkel. If he didn’t exactly promise to make Germany great again, that was the general idea. 

In short, this was the wrong guy pursuing the wrong strategy, in a manner that should sound familiar to American liberals and progressives: endless triangulation and compromise on right-wing policy goals, while refusing to stand on any bedrock principles except the increasingly shaky proposition that we’re decent people and the other side is dreadful. Furthermore, the mainstream German parties’ efforts to demonize or marginalize the AfD only seem to have activated public sympathy and increased its appeal, much as the congressional investigation of the Jan. 6 insurrection and Jack Smith’s indictments of Trump only hardened his support.  

One could argue that a more vigorous prosecution of Trump and his allies, or for that matter an outright ban of the AfD, might have produced different results. But as they say, we are where we are. Perhaps the greatest weakness of the German firewall is that since the AfD has never held power anywhere, it can make increasingly outlandish, ultra-MAGA promises with no consequences and no accountability: It will deport literally all “foreigners,” up to and including the second- or third-generation descendants of immigrants, and pour money into the welfare state while reducing taxes and bringing back full employment. 

Very little of that will happen in the real world, presumably. But in another echo of the second Trump regime, the AfD feels no need to compromise or moderate its positions, because its grassroots energy is driven by extremism. “We don’t think about how to make ourselves nice so that the CDU asks us for a coalition,” one AfD legislator told the Economist, while another said that those within the party who advocate moving toward the center have already lost the argument, since “our election results are getting better and better without us being forced to change.”

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From this side of the Atlantic, the inescapable conclusion is that Merz’s firewall is doomed, and that sooner or later his party will reach an accommodation with the AfD or simply surrender to it. That’s likely to end his political career and fracture the CDU; see also the current relationship between the British Conservative Party and Nigel Farage’s Reform UK. That’s a prognosis, not a recommendation, and should not be confused with James Carville’s infamous doctrine that Trump-era Democrats needed to “roll over and play dead.” 

What we are starting to perceive in the U.S., I believe, is a more difficult but ultimately more hopeful path forward. It may be necessary for Germany to go through its own period of far-right triumph, which will be especially painful for obvious historical reasons, in order to convince the public that fascism (whether old-style or new) offers no legitimate answers to inequality, alienation or global disruption. Those who stand up for their ideals and principles without compromise, and seek to communicate them clearly, certainly won’t win every election, and they may well suffer for their convictions. But they also have a better chance of turning the tide against tyranny than the professional prevaricators in business suits with bankers standing behind them. We’ve tried that, over and over. It has never worked.

The post What if the fascists win in Germany? appeared first on Salon.com.

Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Saturday flatly rejected a call by his former defense chief to send the country to the ballot box.

“I believe that during a war like this, elections in general pose major risks,” Zelenskyy told journalists — including POLITICO — behind closed doors.

A vote “right now would be a tsunami for the state, one that would divide Ukraine,” the Ukrainian president said. He added that his strategy is “to bring the country to the end of the war and preserve an independent and sovereign state.”

His remarks come after former Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov — ousted from his government role in July following a controversial reshuffle — called for elections earlier this week.

“If our partners offer us specific conditions under which elections can be held … safely, legitimately and democratically,” with the participation of soldiers on the front line and citizens who fled to other countries to escape the war, “then let’s discuss it,” Zelenskyy continued. But “it is impossible under the conditions we have right now, when Putin refuses to agree to any form of ceasefire,” he argued.

Fedorov has emerged as a rival to the current president. In a video address Tuesday, he argued that “people cannot endlessly live in a state where they do not understand why certain decisions are made.”

But his appeal has been criticized by both Zelenskyy allies and opposition members: Elections — which are suspended under Ukraine’s martial law, in place since Russia’s full-scale invasion began in 2022 — would only strengthen the Kremlin’s position and sow division. “I have genuinely had, and continue to have, a very positive attitude toward Mykhailo,” the president said of Fedorov. “We have been through a lot together. “But I believe that he is either going himself – or is being pushed – toward the wrong things.”

Fedorov seems undeterred and doubled down in comments to the BBC on Sunday, saying he has a “moral right” to raise the topic of elections. “If I cannot share my ideas and be open about them with my own society, then what are we fighting for?”

Donald Trump has always believed himself to be an expert at what he calls “nuclear,” due to the fact that his uncle, John Trump, was a physicist who taught at MIT. The president has made it clear on numerous occasions that his uncle’s expertise transferred to him due to the Trump family’s superior genes. 

It’s too bad Dr. Trump died in 1985, because the president could use a refresher course on the subject. He certainly hasn’t learned anything new by virtue of the Oval Office. 

We may never fully know what led Trump to start his war with Iran, which has been going on for nearly six months. Whether he was feeling his oats after the successful kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro or by Israel’s assurances that the Iranian regime was so weak it would crumble quickly under American bombardment, Trump decided to make the move on impulse without having a specific goal or strategy other than “winning.” 

As the war has dragged on, Trump’s stated motives for the offensive have also changed. First, the administration claimed he wanted to liberate the Iranian people. Then it became regime change, then removing Iran’s capability to threaten its neighbors and finally, almost as an afterthought, the president said it was to prevent them from developing a nuclear weapon. Understandably, the administration was reluctant to use that rationale at first since Trump had already declared that along with Israel, he had “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program following joint airstrikes in 2025. But as the war has progressed into a standoff over the Strait of Hormuz, through which oil was flowing freely before it began, the issue of nuclear weapons is all they have left to explain the debacle. 

Trump and administration officials have taken to declaring that the economic sacrifices Americans are making for his war are patriotic gestures to ensure that Iran will never have a nuclear weapon — a pledge that had already been successfully obtained through the 2015 Iran nuclear deal negotiated under President Barack Obama, which Trump tore up upon taking office the first time, and then supposedly obtained again through the force of several bunker-buster bombs in 2025. According to the polls, most Americans aren’t buying that claim. 

At the same time, still sulking that U.S. allies didn’t rush to jump into his Iran quagmire, Trump has decided to pick up where he left off in 2020 with his alleged good pal Kim Jong Un and punish America’s longtime ally South Korea by canceling some military exercises after the country, in his words, “refus[ed] to join us in the Denuclearization of the Islamic Republic of Iran.” Anyone else would have seen how insensitive such a comment would be to a country that has been forced to stand by as the unhinged, totalitarian dictatorship to its north built up a nuclear arsenal aimed at them and their allies, all while the U.S. brayed about “denuclearization.” 

In 2006 it was confirmed that North Korea had successfully conducted an underground nuclear test and was on its way to building a bomb. By the time Trump took office in 2017, according to estimates, the country had enough fissile material for 60 weapons and they were rapidly developing a ballistic missile program. At first Trump did his usual insult-and-threat routine, and he then hit upon the idea that he could personally talk Kim out of the program. The famous bromance began.

When Trump held his first summit with the North Korean leader, giving him the international prestige he had always wanted while getting nothing in return, the president was asked how long he thought it would take for North Korea to denuclearize. “Well, I don’t know, when you say a long time,” he said. “I think we will do it as fast as it can be done scientifically, as fast as it can be done mechanically . . . It’s a 15-year process. Assuming you wanted to do it quickly, I don’t believe that . . . You’re talking about a very complex subject. It’s not just like, ‘Oh, gee. Let’s get rid of the nukes.’”

He also mentioned his Uncle John. 

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For all the “beautiful letters” Trump exchanged with Kim, by the end of his first term, North Korea had kept enriching plutonium at a rapid pace, developing short-range missiles thought to be meant for tactical weapons purposes, and in October 2020, it unveiled a massive intercontinental ballistic missile designed to carry multiple warheads that could theoretically overwhelm U.S. defenses. There was no word on whether Kim sent Trump a nice note telling him about it.

Today, North Korea and Russia have formed a strategic partnership in which the North Koreans supply soldiers and arms against Ukraine and Russia provides food aid and advanced technology in return. They have become vital allies. As we know, Trump thinks he is very close with both leaders, so there is no threat from either that he needs to worry about. At this point, he just wants to punish allies he believes have not followed his orders, and he has shown a willingness to use whatever levers he has. 

In some ways, the situation is reminiscent of an argument that raged in the 1950s over “who lost China.” The idea was that the left, and specifically the Truman administration, had allowed the country’s communist revolution to prevail, a notion that fed into the red-baiting Cold War rhetoric that dominated the national discourse for decades. In fact, the escalation in Vietnam and the subsequent quagmire that resulted could largely be attributed to the Democratic Party’s fear of being blamed for “losing Vietnam.”

We now find ourselves in a similar situation at the hands of Donald Trump and the Republican Party, and the stakes are high. It can be argued, as it was with China, that there is no single action that could have prevented North Korea from obtaining nuclear weapons. Despite great efforts to use the diplomatic and economic route to contain Iran’s nuclear ambitions, it’s supposedly been made clear now that any president can simply come in and abrogate them, so what’s the point? 

The problem stems from the contrast between the way Trump — in contrast to all other presidents — has treated the North Korean leadership and the way he has gone about dealing with Iran. His cloying deference to Pyongyang and his crude antagonism toward Tehran have sent one very strong message to every country on the planet: Get a nuclear weapon as quickly as possible if you want the United States to treat you with respect. 

There’s a question historians will one day ask of this era: Who started the global nuclear arms race? The answer to that is complicated, but one name will always rise to the top of any list: Donald Trump.

The post Donald Trump has made the world go nuclear appeared first on Salon.com.

When you’re looking at a thread of social media bots sharing the same five replies to AI-generated slapfights between anthropomorphic fruits, it can be hard to remember the internet used to be a lively place. Enthusiastic message boards, blogs dedicated to any niche you could find in any hobby, news and culture websites as renowned for sharp commenters as their stable of writers. This was a time when your blogroll was nearly as important as your friend list, a period where a well-curated feed on Google Reader (RIP) denoted good taste as much as a co-sign from the arbiter of taste Derek Guy does today. 

The web never quite reached the global utopian vision of its 1990s early adopters, but for about two decades it was a good hang. Like a neighborhood bar or a bowling alley, the internet was a place you could reliably go to have fun and occasionally learn something from semi-strangers who shared your interests. The internet was rife with what sociologist Ray Oldenburg called “third places,” a space separate from home and work that encouraged social interaction and bred cohesion in communities. 

“Third places remain upbeat because of the limited way in which the participants are related. Most of the regulars in a third place have a unique and special status with regard to one another,” Oldenburg wrote in his 1989 book “The Great Good Place.” “It is special in that such people have neither the blandness of strangers nor that other kind of blandness, which takes zest out of relationships between even the most favorably matched people when too much time is spent together, when too much is known, too many problems are shared, and too much is taken for granted.”

Oldenburg was pushing back against restrictive zoning and suburbanization, arguing that fully residential neighborhoods weakened the societal fabric of the United States. For a time, the internet did put a Band-Aid on this problem, bringing isolated communities together and providing the sort of crosstalk they couldn’t hear on the abandoned sidewalks of gated developments.

At the risk of dating myself even more than I already have, I had a few websites that I visited daily from the family room of my suburban home. Often I’d sign on to read the takes of sharp commenters over the writers who provided the digital parlor. 

In the same way I’ll now swing through my local bar or corner coffee shop to see who’s around, back then I’d find time every day after school to give the forums and comment sections a once-over. I’d scroll down and take in a guerilla column from a reader with an unprintable name and profile picture of a crudely drawn yellow Pokemon with a phallus for a nose. A bit farther down, I’d find the poster who spoke only in comments lifted from forums about the mallcore metal act Avenged Sevenfold. Heading over to the Gawker network of websites — prior to its Peter Thiel-backed demolition — I’d find what the nation’s bored lawyers had to say about news from the worlds of gossip, pro sports (Deadspin) and sci-fi (i09). While never quite as gratifying or grounding as a true third place you had to physically visit, these online hubs were the closest thing to cafes and churches that the infrastructure of the internet could offer. 

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The social media age — sometimes dubbed Web 2.0 to distinguish it from the less openly interactive earlier era of the internet — seemed to supercharge this impromptu rezoning of the information superhighway. Without needing to build a website or familiarize themselves with a forum, any netizen could start or join a conversation at any time. It ushered in a new kind of fun that was fresher, busier and airier than past listservs and chatrooms, the dank basements of internet interaction.

All that promise started to wither around 2015, as social media giants gobbled up more and more of the profits that kept earlier hangouts afloat. Facebook’s fraudulent video metrics struck a massive blow against the writers and editors that maintained these digital communities. Blogs and entire media networks shuttered in rapid succession. There were fewer places to hang out, and the ones that remained were less useful due to overcrowding. Facebook’s turn toward spam and fake news, along with Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter (now X), turned the one-time gathering places into crowded bazaars where vendors shouted for your attention. Reddit, once the internet’s premier place to talk about the news, was cannibalized by invite-only chatroom platforms like Discord and Telegram. 

Writers who remained employed on this hollowed-out web were increasingly left wondering where all their favorite haunts had gone. 

Here’s Dan Nosowitz writing for New York magazine in 2018: 

The other day, I found myself looking at a blinking cursor in a blank address bar in a new tab of my web browser. I was bored . . . What I really wanted to do was waste some time. But . . . I didn’t know how. I did not know what to type into the address bar of my browser.

Five years later, New Yorker columnist Kyle Chayka declared “the social-media Web as we knew it . . . appears to be over.” “The precipitous decline of X is the bellwether for a new era of the Internet that simply feels less fun than it used to be. Remember having fun online?” he wrote. “These experiences don’t seem as readily available now as they were a decade ago.”  

This dearth of fun places to gather is nothing new in America, online or otherwise. We’ve seen it happen to our physical third spaces for decades. In his seminal 1995 essay “Bowling Alone,” Robert D. Putnam worried about the erosion of American social life — blaming television and the internet in part — for the decline in civic organizations and club participation. His book-length expansion, published five years later at the dawn of the social media age, worried that lonely entertainment would kill what was left of American socializing, and that collapse would lead to a new age of political extremism.

I don’t dispute that using the internet is a solitary activity. It was then and remained so even at the height of blogs and Weird Twitter. But over the last decade it’s become even lonelier, with algorithms and vertical video platforms like TikTok siloing users into consumption over interaction. Facebook turned from a place to share photos and event invites to a place where Boomers give themselves AI psychosis. Under Musk, X has transformed into a haven of bots looking to start fights for pennies. This era of scrolling alone has, as Putnam halfway predicted, coincided with a rise in asocial extremism.

There is some hope for people who remember those old internet communities, as well as the nostalgic youngsters who never knew a more wide-open internet. The internet as we knew it might have been torn down to the studs by Silicon Valley bigwigs looking to sell the wiring for scrap, but the bones are still good. Many people are already rebuilding. My favorite listservs are likely goners, both thanks to the obsolescence of the technology and the average age of users rapidly approaching “dead,” but you can see echoes of that chattier internet if you know where to look.

Defector, a cooperative founded by former Deadspin staffers, bills itself as “the last good website,” and an appreciative community of subscribers seem to agree. Music publications like Stereogum and Pitchfork have switched to a paid supporter model while fostering their communities of indie music obsessives in robust — and, in Pitchfork’s case, brand new — comment sections. Dinosaurs of Web 2.0 like Digg and Myspace have either relaunched or are considering it, thinking their friends-first model will be welcome in 2026.

Hopefully, I don’t sound as naive as those early internet optimists, who thought new shifts would usher in a golden age of humanity. But the early success of these smaller, people-first models is promising. Internet users have proven they’ll make a habit of swinging by these fledgling new spaces — if the conversation is interesting enough.

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One man was injured in a shooting in Brussels’ Saint-Gilles municipality Saturday evening, just a day after gunmen targeted a police station in Anderlecht.

Saint-Gilles Mayor Jean Spinette told Belga news agency the victim didn’t suffer life-threatening injuries and linked the incident to narcotics-related crime. The shots were fired on a square known as “place des Deux Bancs,” associated with drug trafficking.

The attack comes one day after shooters carrying a heavy weapon targeted a police station in another Brussels municipality, Anderlecht, before fleeing on an e-scooter.

The violence marked “yet another wake-up call” for the Belgian capital, the region’s Minister-President Boris Dilliès reacted on X. “We will not let organized crime take over our city,” he added.

Dilliès said his government was taking measures to address the violence, including by appointing a Brussels commissioner for drugs, who will take on the role from September, and by restricting the use of e-scooters, which he said “unfortunately, are often used by criminals.”

The city’s top prosecutor Julien Moinil said that, given the target of Friday night’s shooting, “there is a clear intent to undermine authority” — but he added that “they will not succeed.” He explained that a lot of shootings are ordered from inside prison, calling for secure zones where phones cannot operate.

A third shooting followed early Sunday morning, when a bullet hit the window of an apartment near Porte de Hal.

Brussels recorded 57 shootings in the first seven months of 2026. Two people were killed and 21 injured, according to VRT.

KARMIEL, Israel — It was a gunshot to the head of a Palestinian militant that first exposed the gulf between Gadi Eisenkot and Benjamin Netanyahu.

In March 2016, two Palestinians armed with knives attacked Israeli soldiers in the West Bank, wounding one of them. The soldiers opened fire, killing one attacker and leaving the other wounded on the ground. Several minutes later, a 19-year-old Israeli soldier named Elor Azaria cocked his rifle, aimed at the wounded attacker’s head and pulled the trigger. Azaria said he had felt threatened.

The question of whether the soldier should face a military trial divided the country. To some Israelis, Azaria was no criminal but a soldier who had killed a terrorist. To others, Azaria had carried out an extrajudicial killing or even murder. He was eventually convicted of manslaughter by a military court.

Eisenkot, then chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces, defended the decision to prosecute Azaria, arguing that shooting an attacker who had already been incapacitated was incompatible with the values of the Israeli military. Netanyahu sided with the soldier and called for him to be pardoned.

A decade later, the dispute still reverberates. 

A former member of Netanyahu’s war cabinet, Eisenkot has seemingly overnight emerged as the prime minister’s most formidable challenger ahead of Israel’s parliamentary election on Oct. 27. His centrist Yashar! party — which he founded last year — was born out of rising discontent with Netanyahu’s response to the attack by Hamas on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023 and the war in Gaza that followed.

In several nationwide polls, Yashar! — a name that can be translated as “Straight!” or “Honest!” — has already overtaken Netanyahu’s ruling Likud party. Eisenkot’s supporters point to the Azaria case as evidence of their candidate’s high moral standards. Netanyahu’s allies, meanwhile, have revived it to portray the former military chief as too soft and too far to the left.

Rarely has an Israeli election been watched abroad with such anticipation. For much of the past 30 years, Netanyahu’s mix of right-wing nationalism and hardline stance on Israel’s relationship with the Palestinians and its neighbors has dominated Israeli politics. Eisenkot is promising his supporters that he can wrest the country in a new direction. 

“There are moments in history when, after a very charismatic and dominant leader, people deliberately choose someone less charismatic because they simply want peace and quiet,” said Shai Bazak, an Israeli former diplomat and communications figure who served Netanyahu as an adviser during his first term as prime minister. “They do not want all the drama anymore.”

“Eisenkot is a very nice person,” Bazak added. “He is not extreme. He is not particularly divisive. That makes it easier for people who traditionally vote for the right to move toward him.”

Whoever wins will have to navigate a radically different foreign-policy landscape.

Since Hamas killed about 1,200 people and took 251 hostages on Oct. 7, 2023, Israel’s position on the world stage has fundamentally changed. The largest mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust drew a wave of international solidarity that receded in the following months and years as Israel responded with a war in Gaza. According to the Hamas-run Health Ministry in Gaza, more than 73,000 Palestinians have been killed, both civilians and combatants — a figure widely considered reliable by the Associated Press, U.N. agencies and independent experts. Israeli military officials indicated at the beginning of this year that they agree that the overall Gaza death toll was around 70,000; in 2025 the IDF said it had killed more than 22,000 militants in Gaza and acknowledges that while it has tried to minimize civilian casualties, two to three civilians have died for every militant killed.

In several European countries, most notably Spain and France, criticism has grown as Netanyahu’s government has responded to attacks by Hamas and Hezbollah with what critics consider excessive military force, devastating large parts of Gaza and seizing a large swath of southern Lebanon.

Relations between Netanyahu’s government and the European Union have deteriorated to such an extent that Israel’s foreign minister no longer speaks to the EU’s top diplomat. On June 18, 2026, Gideon Sa’ar announced that he was severing all contact with Kaja Kallas after it emerged that during a visit to Mexico in May, Kallas had compared Israel’s treatment of Palestinians to South Africa’s apartheid system.

Israel’s traditionally close relationship with the United States has also come under strain. Netanyahu and U.S. President Donald Trump did agree to jointly conduct military strikes against Iran aimed at preventing the Islamist regime in Tehran from acquiring a nuclear weapon. Iran has declared the destruction of Israel to be one of its overriding goals.

Yet Trump has also occasionally criticized Netanyahu. “What the fuck are you doing?” Trump reportedly asked the Israeli prime minister in June, referring to his offensive against Hezbollah in Lebanon. Trump has so far stopped short of publicly endorsing Netanyahu for reelection.

Meanwhile, the conflict in Gaza and the war in Iran have driven down U.S. support for Israel, especially on the left wing of the Democratic Party and among parts of Trump’s MAGA coalition, making the debate over Israel a live political issue for both parties as they head toward midterm elections.

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As Netanyahu comes under growing pressure from Eisenkot, he is fighting back hard, seeking to turn the former army chief’s greatest strength, his security credentials, against him. “Eisenkot wanted to surrender. Netanyahu is fighting!” the prime minister declared in a recent campaign video.

“The campaign against me has begun,” Eisenkot told supporters at a campaign event earlier this month in the northern Israeli city of Karmiel. Speaking in a slightly hoarse voice, he launched his counterattack. “Netanyahu attacks his opponents in the same way every time, claiming: Only Netanyahu can provide security.”

Then he added pointedly: “We saw how that worked out on October 7.”

Eisenkot is demanding an independent state commission of inquiry into the failures of the military, intelligence services and political leadership surrounding the 2023 Hamas attack. In doing so, he also wants the prime minister himself to be held accountable. Netanyahu’s government has so far resisted establishing such a commission.

“If there is no commission of inquiry, it will hang over Israeli society like a curse,” Eisenkot said. He delivered his attacks on Netanyahu calmly, almost monotonously. Eisenkot is stocky, with the air of a chef who has been persuaded to leave his kitchen to greet an enthusiastic dining room. 

He is neither a charismatic nor a gifted speaker in the mold of Netanyahu. But he projects something that could become the most valuable currency in this election: trustworthiness. While Netanyahu carries the burden of an ongoing corruption trial, his challenger is widely regarded as a man of exceptional integrity.

An Israeli retiree named Josef Benjamin listened intently to Eisenkot’s speech in Karmiel, watching him with a critical eye. He had come to make up his own mind about the man who has suddenly become the talk of the country. “Eisenkot is a man of the people, a good man,” Benjamin said. “Netanyahu, on the other hand, rules like a king. He is no longer good for Israel and should step down.”

It is no coincidence that Eisenkot chose Karmiel. The city is predominantly home to lower- and middle-income Israelis and is a stronghold of Netanyahu’s Likud party. Over the course of just a few days, Eisenkot was making 15 appearances here in northern Israel.

The rally was a display of confidence: He wants to win over the prime minister’s voters. Among the roughly 300 people gathered in Karmiel’s municipal auditorium, there was plenty of gray hair, along with hearing aids and walking sticks. Young faces were rare.

Eisenkot has something of a paternal charm. He projects the experience of a man who has known both a remarkable rise and profound loss. He comes from modest circumstances. The son of Jewish immigrants from Morocco, he was born in the city of Tiberias on the Sea of Galilee, far from Israel’s major metropolises. He grew up in Eilat, a Red Sea resort town on the country’s southern tip. 

In the military, he rose from an ordinary infantryman in the storied Golani Brigade to chief of staff of the IDF — appointed by Netanyahu, himself a product of intellectual circles and elite American universities. In one campaign ad, Likud mocks Eisenkot’s less-than-perfect English. Yet his popularity continues to rise.

Majd Yassin, an Arab Israeli in his 40s, likes the prospect of Eisenkot becoming Israel’s first prime minister with Moroccan Jewish roots. “I really appreciate that he addressed the problems facing Arab society. No one is really showing much interest in solving the problems we face in Israel’s Arab community, as Israeli citizens,” Yassin says. “I think Gadi Eisenkot recognizes these issues, and he has the ability to address them.”

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It is not only Eisenkot’s story of social mobility that makes him relatable to many Israelis, but also his family’s tragedy.

On Dec. 7, 2023, Eisenkot’s son Gal Meir was taking part in an operation to recover the bodies of two Israelis who had been abducted into Gaza on Oct. 7 and killed. As the soldier approached an open tunnel shaft, an explosive device detonated. The 25-year-old was critically wounded and later died in hospital.

Two of Eisenkot’s nephews were also killed in Gaza. Eisenkot does not make his loss a campaign issue, but most Israelis know exactly what his family has sacrificed. Netanyahu’s son Yair, by contrast, remained in Florida as Israel mobilized some 360,000 reservists in the aftermath of the Hamas attack, drawing criticism from Israelis who returned from abroad to serve. Netanyahu defended his son, saying Yair was volunteering in the United States and helping procure equipment for the military and emergency services.

Eisenkot now embodies Israel’s grief for its fallen sons and daughters — and the hope that the man whose profession was war might be the one to end it.

His popularity also reflects a yearning among many Israelis to once again place the country in the hands of a benevolent father figure, as Yitzhak Rabin once was. Rabin, too, had served as IDF chief of staff before entering politics, commanding Israel’s military during its victory in the Six-Day War. Until his assassination in 1995, he was the great hope for peace in the Middle East.

Does Eisenkot have what it takes to inherit Rabin’s mantle? Many highly decorated former military commanders have tried before him. According to an analysis by the Israel Democracy Institute, roughly two-thirds of former IDF chiefs of staff later entered national politics. Most failed. Ehud Barak did become prime minister, but his coalition collapsed after just 20 months. More recently, former IDF chief Benny Gantz, a centrist who once emerged as Netanyahu’s most formidable political rival, saw his party’s support collapse and is now likely to fail to make it back into the Knesset.

The military and politics ultimately operate according to very different rules. The armed forces are hierarchical; politics demands compromise — and therefore a particular ability to deal with people. 

Those are soft skills the military does not necessarily teach, said Danny Orbach, a military historian at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. “In the army, Ehud Barak — an extreme example of a failed politician with a military background — could shout at his subordinates if they didn’t obey him,” Orbach added. “In politics, people simply walk away.” 

Orbach, however, considers Eisenkot a different kind of figure: “Eisenkot is very conscientious and deeply patriotic,” he said. “He means well. Without Netanyahu’s baggage, he may be able to rebuild relations with the EU and with certain segments of the Democratic Party in the United States.”

The military historian is more skeptical about Eisenkot’s lack of political experience. Eisenkot entered parliament only four years ago. He is also critical of positions Eisenkot took as a member of Netanyahu’s war cabinet after Oct. 7.

“Had it been up to Eisenkot, he would have given in to pressure from the families of the hostages and ended the war,” Orbach said. “We would now be without the achievements we have made: 60 percent of Gaza under our control, and Hamas weakened and isolated.”

Eisenkot has argued that this presents a false choice: Israel could have struck a deal to bring the hostages home and resumed its campaign against Hamas later.

Generally, Eisenkot and his campaign team are trying to overcome such criticism with a promise of a better future. Even the choice of music at his campaign rallies makes the point.

An old Israeli peace song comes over the speakers: “Everything will be alright.”

The Axel Springer Global Reporters Network harnesses the resources of the company’s newsrooms to publish ambitious scoops, investigations, interviews, opinion pieces and analysis. It allows journalists — including those from POLITICO, Business Insider, WELT, BILD, The Telegraph, Onet and Fakt — to collaborate on major stories for an international audience of hundreds of millions across platforms: online, print, TV and audio.

A Texas appeals court dramatically reduced the amount conspiracy theorist Alex Jones owes the parents of a 6-year-old boy killed in the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, cutting a nearly $50 million judgment to about $5.6 million.

The ruling Friday upheld $4.1 million in compensatory damages awarded to Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis, whose son Jesse Lewis was among the 20 first graders and six educators murdered at the Connecticut school in 2012.

But the court reduced the $45.2 million in punitive damages awarded by a jury to $1.5 million, citing limits under Texas law.

Jones spent years falsely claiming the Sandy Hook massacre was staged and that the grieving families were actors participating in a government plot to restrict gun rights. The parents testified that Jones’ lies resulted in years of harassment and threats from his followers.

The Texas case is only one part of the massive financial judgments against Jones stemming from his Sandy Hook lies.

A Connecticut jury separately ordered Jones to pay nearly $1 billion to families of eight victims and an FBI agent who responded to the shooting. A judge later added hundreds of millions of dollars in punitive damages, bringing that judgment to roughly $1.4 billion.

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Jones has fought the judgments for years through appeals and bankruptcy proceedings while continuing to operate Infowars.

The Texas appeals court said state law required it to substantially reduce the punitive portion of the Heslin-Lewis award, despite rejecting other arguments Jones made challenging the verdict.

The decision means the parents who spent years fighting Jones in court will receive a fraction of what the Texas jury believed his conduct warranted.

The children killed at Sandy Hook would now largely be young adults.

Jesse Lewis would have turned 20 in June.

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Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth‘s Pentagon has spent months restricting journalists’ access to the military. Now, the crackdown has reached a news organization created specifically to serve American troops and their families.

The Pentagon fired “Stars and Stripes” editor-in-chief Erik Slavin and Middle East reporter Lara Korte on Friday, citing insubordination after the journalists publicly defended the newspaper’s editorial independence. Publisher Max Lederer, who announced his retirement earlier this week after more than three decades at the publication, also received a separation notice.

The firings mark the latest escalation in Hegseth’s increasingly contentious relationship with the press. Last year, dozens of journalists surrendered Pentagon credentials rather than agree to new restrictions on their reporting. A federal judge later blocked key portions of the policy, but the Pentagon responded by closing the “Correspondents’ Corridor” used by journalists for decades and announcing plans to move reporters to an annex outside the building.

“Stars and Stripes,” however, occupies a unique place in American journalism.

The publication traces its history to the Civil War and has continuously served U.S. military communities since World War II. Although partly funded by the Defense Department, Congress has protected its editorial independence, allowing its journalists to report on the military without functioning as a Pentagon public relations operation.

That independence has increasingly collided with Hegseth’s vision for the paper.

In January, Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell said “Stars and Stripes” would be “custom tailored to our warfighters” and focus on “warfighting, weapons systems, fitness, lethality, survivability and ALL THINGS MILITARY,” while eliminating what he called “DC gossip columns” and Associated Press stories.

In April, the Pentagon fired Jacqueline Smith, the newspaper’s ombudsman, whose job was specifically intended to protect its editorial independence.

Slavin told the Associated Press that his refusal to accept military censorship was cited in his termination notice as insubordination. Similarly, Korte, who has reported extensively on the war with Iran, defended the newspaper’s role following her dismissal.

“Military families and service members have trusted us to share their experience with the world,” she said.

The crackdown also comes amid questions over how Hegseth determines who gets access to Pentagon information. According to reports, his wife, Jennifer Rauchet Hegseth, holds no official Pentagon position but has attended meetings with foreign defense officials and was included in a Signal chat in which Hegseth shared sensitive information about U.S. military operations.

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Meanwhile, “Stars and Stripes” continues doing what it has done for generations: reporting directly to military communities.

On Saturday, the newspaper reported that the USS Abraham Lincoln was finally leaving the Middle East after months supporting the Iran war without leave — news likely of particular importance to the thousands of sailors aboard the carrier and their families waiting at home.

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Marjorie Taylor Greene, the former Georgia congresswoman, issued a blistering response Saturday morning after Donald Trump attacked her, Tucker Carlson and Thomas Massie as “LOSERS ALL” in a late-night Truth Social post. But Greene went considerably further than returning Trump’s insults, arguing that the president has abandoned the “America First” movement that once united them.

“We never changed, Trump did,” Greene wrote.

I wonder if it was being called a traitor at his own rally yesterday that caused him to dictate his lies and insult laden attack on Tucker, Thomas, and I, while he flew back on the plane.
It’s also the bad polling that I’m sure he’s seen by now.

He attacks us with such vitriol… pic.twitter.com/tM9e7PqTg0

— Former Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸 (@FmrRepMTG) August 22, 2026

Greene accused Trump of becoming a “neocon puppet for Israel, corporations, big donors with special interests,” while pointing to their disagreements over foreign wars and the release of files related to Jeffrey Epstein.

She also defended Carlson as “a serious Presidential contender,” arguing that young men who once supported Trump increasingly see the president as “an old fraud.”

The feud has been building for months, as Greene, Massie and Carlson have increasingly argued that Trump has abandoned the movement he once led.

While Greene and Massie publicly split with Trump months ago, Carlson’s break with Trump has been building for months, driven largely by the president’s decision to enter the war with Iran. In June, Carlson announced he would no longer support the Republican Party after decades of defending it.

“I’m out,” Carlson said. “And if I’m out, then I think a lot of other people are out.”

Now, that threat is beginning to take shape.

Earlier this month, Carlson hosted a small group that included Greene, Massie and Joe Kent, Trump’s former counterterrorism chief who resigned over the Iran war. Kent later said the group was attempting to build a new anti-war political movement and had encouraged Carlson to run for president in 2028.

Carlson has also laid out a 10-point political manifesto built around what he considers a return to “America First,” including ending foreign wars and reducing foreign influence over American policy.

The three represent an unusual rebellion against Trump because they haven’t abandoned MAGA politics. Instead, they argue that Trump abandoned the movement they supported, particularly his promises to keep the United States out of foreign wars.

Trump dismissed Carlson as irrelevant, although his Friday night attack suggested he isn’t entirely dismissing the political risk.

“Tucker’s ‘Views’ have fallen through the floor,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, calling Carlson “totally irrelevant” and a “very Low I.Q. individual.”

But Trump also predicted that Carlson, if he ran for president, “could probably take a couple of points away from whatever the Republican ticket happens to be.”

The president also attacked Greene as a “Liberal ‘Fool’” and dismissed Massie as a “failed politician” and a “real JERK.”

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Trump’s attack prompted an even broader repudiation from Greene Saturday. She criticized his “name calling, absurd and reckless rhetoric” as “unbecoming of the office of the president” and compared him to “an internet troll.”

Greene, who was once one of Trump’s most fervent congressional allies, said she now believes the president has become a “Trojan horse” for policies he once campaigned against.

“In the past, I supported him because of the policies he professed to support and passionately campaigned on,” Greene wrote.

“I’m sorry I didn’t see it earlier and wish I had never supported him.”

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BRUSSELS — French President Emmanuel Macron said on Saturday that Paris will strengthen its support for Ukraine after Russia’s deadly attacks on a shopping mall in Kryvyi Rih on Friday.

Macron wrote on X that he called Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Saturday following the strikes, which killed 16 and left 130 injured. “I informed President Zelensky that we are stepping up our support with the delivery of interceptors and are continuing our cooperation,” he said.

Confirming the phone call during which the pair discussed “first and foremost, the need for air defense,” Zelenskyy also shared on social media that the two leaders had “agreed to accelerate the delivery of the latest French equipment and missiles.”

“Thank you for confirming your readiness to provide licenses for the production of missiles,” wrote the Ukrainian leader.

Regarding relations with Washington, Zelenskyy said he and Macron “also discussed the state of diplomatic work with our partners and communication with the team of the President of the United States. We agreed on steps that could open up additional diplomatic opportunities.”

Macron, along with his counterparts from Germany and the U.K., are expected to co-host a Coalition of the Willing meeting on Monday to discuss continued support for Ukraine against Russia’s aggression. The meeting will be held in Kyiv, with some leaders — including the French president — dialing in remotely. Around 10 leaders, including European Council President António Costa, are expected to attend in person, reported Le Monde.

It’s the Democrats who have mostly had to answer questions about electability this midterm season, but why are there so few questions about the “E” word for the other side?

Gas prices are still skyrocketing. A number of Republican candidates, such as Ohio Rep. Max Miller and former Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who’s running for a Senate seat, are mired in scandal. The Iran war was unpopular from the start, but it is getting even less popular as it drags on. And Trump’s approval rating recently hit 33 percent, the lowest of his presidency yet.

On this week’s episode of America, Actually, host Astead Herndon speaks with one of Trump’s most vocal defenders, conservative influencer CJ Pearson, about whether we’re seeing Trump’s brand slip even among his supporters and the young people who helped him win in 2024, and how that could affect the midterm elections. 

Pearson, a conservative content creator and influencer, first went viral when he posted himself, then 12 years old, criticizing Barack Obama in a YouTube video. Now 24, Pearson is one of MAGA’s most prominent Black voices.

In this episode, Astead and Pearson discussed how Republicans should answer questions about whether voters’ lives are better than they were two years ago; whether Trump still has any cultural cachet left over from his last presidential campaign; and when Pearson started to see young Republicans turning away from the MAGA movement.

Below is an excerpt of Astead’s conversation with Pearson, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full show, so listen to America, Actually wherever you get your podcasts or watch it on Vox’s YouTube channel.

That “E” word’s been thrown around a lot about Democrats, but we want to think about how Republicans are on their own. If you could rate Donald Trump’s second term one through 10, what would you give it?

I think the president’s doing incredibly well for the American people. Promises made, promises kept in many ways. 

I think if you look at this president who ran on securing our southern border, he’s done it. You look at this president who’s talked about bringing down costs, he’s brought down the cost of dairy, eggs. He’s achieved that. 

And I think also this president is only just getting started. He ran on “no tax on tips.” He did that. He ran on “no tax on overtime.” He did that. Oftentimes I tell people the challenge of this administration is keeping up the messaging at the same pace as the accomplishments of this president.

And so I think that there’s a lot more work to do. Thankfully, we have two more years to do it.

Can I get a number?

I think he’s doing well. I will say I grew up in a place where there’s always room for improvement, so I’ll give him an eight.

You’re giving him an eight. I wanted to just start there because Trump’s approval rating has fallen, as I’m sure you have seen. Why do you think the country isn’t maybe on the same page as you?

I think a lot of people are focused on their pocketbooks, right? They’re focused on domestic issues, and I think that we have been very internationally focused over the course of the past few months as we’ve navigated and dealt with the Iran conflict. 

But I think that as we get ready to get through this last wave of primaries, I think you’re going to see a change in his messaging and a reset at the midterm convention in Dallas next month in September. 

And I think you’re going to hear this president talking about how he’s made America more affordable, how he’s kept Americans safe, far safer than they were under President Joe Biden.

And I think that you’ll see those numbers start to change. And a reminder, the only poll that matters is on Election Day. There are many polls that had Kamala Harris beating President Trump, in 2024, and that didn’t happen.

Yeah, I don’t want to be overly poll-reliant, but we’ve heard some of this directly from Republicans even. 

We were at Donald Trump’s UFC event in DC talking to young men, and even there we heard people really come to be critical on three issues specifically: tariffs, the Iran war, and the handling of the Epstein files.

You mentioned the question of affordability. Donald Trump has said, quote, “I love the inflation.” And when asked by reporters about the public strain that has come from the conflicts with Iran, he said, “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody.”

How can you say that Republicans are gonna run on affordability if the president’s saying he doesn’t care if Americans’ lives are unaffordable?

Well, I’ve often said that we can’t cede this entire affordability debate to the Democrats. The reason that I think a lot of young people are giving a little bit, even a flirtatious nod to the DSA and their socialist and communist candidates, is because they’re talking about an issue that’s top of mind for them.

In the same way that when President Trump won in 2024, he was talking about issues that were top of mind of the American voter, which was the cost of living. 

And so I think that we need to get back to that messaging. I think that this president has continued to deliver on that front. Costs are coming down.

The economy is resurging. We’re seeing economic and global investment in this country unlike anything we’ve seen before. In Oklahoma, we’re bringing back manufacturing with the aluminum smelting plant.

But the president’s not saying this. The president’s saying, “I love the inflation, and I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation.” Do those words help Republican midterm candidates?

Well, I think the president has a lot of time to say a lot more things because Election Day is pretty far away from now. I think we have two or three months left, and I think the president will make this case. 

But I think what will also make the case is that the candidates that the Democrats are running and nominating all across this country, who are now affiliating themselves with the socialist movement, are not actually fighting for things that will actually ever work.

Socialism has never worked anywhere it’s been tried, and I think that this is going to be an election between common sense versus crazy. Do you wanna run a candidate that hates Thanksgiving?

For the record, that candidate lost in the primary. She will not be on the ballot in November.

She did. She almost was there, though, and that’s the thing. I’m glad common sense won the day in Wisconsin, that the good people there love turkey.

I know that you say that the argument is based on how Democrats are out of touch, but we have talked about some ways in which Donald Trump has not lived up to folks’ expectations, particularly on things like prices and on things like the Iran war.

How does the GOP overcome that electability question? What is their message when folks ask, is their life better than two years ago?

I think we’ve got to lock in. I think we also need to prosecute the case that it’s going to be a lot worse under the Democrats if these crazy communists get into office. And so I think that when you’re looking at costs, we need to make that argument central. We need to make that what we lead with.

And I think that we have to pump the brakes on a lot of the international stuff. And I think that we need to talk about the things that are actually affecting people’s everyday lives at grocery stores, at gas stations, wherever it may be. And I think that is how we can kind of turn the ship around.

When we talk about the Democratic candidates, you’re saying the DSA candidates are far left, and we’ve certainly explored some electability questions for them and some ways that I think they might have stances that are misaligned with the American people. But so does Donald Trump, and he’s endorsed scandal-plagued candidates like Ken Paxton in Texas, like Max Miller in Ohio.

Why is that not just as much a sign of a conservative version of extremism, just as you are arguing that there’s a Democratic or leftist version of that?

Because I think you’re talking about folks who have dealt with issues in their personal lives, not necessarily their voting record.

Okay, maybe I should say Tom Tiffany, who didn’t vote to certify the 2020 election, but I imagine you agree with him.

Well, no, I think that was six years ago. I don’t think about 2020 anymore. I think about 2026 and I think about 2028. So when I look at that … it’s important that we really make the case for crazy communism versus common sense. And I think that the American people are not going to vote for that.

I guess I’m saying, does Donald Trump win the commonsense argument? Like, isn’t crazy versus commonsense an argument that Democrats can make and say Donald Trump is said crazy?

No, because I think Donald Trump definitely wins the common sense argument when we’re running against folks who belong to a party that is now, you know, waging a war against Thanksgiving, who believe that biological men should be playing women’s sports. Again, these are 80/20 issues, and so I actually really like our odds here.

It’s going to be hard, right? It’s always hard for the party that controls the White House to fare all too well in any midterm election. But I think that we’re going to overperform. I think we’re going to hold onto the Senate. The House will be a dogfight, but I like our chances.

BRUSSELS — Former Estonian Prime Minister and European Commissioner Siim Kallas has died at the age of 77.

 “It is with sadness that I must announce that my dear father, Siim Kallas, passed away last night,” posted EU foreign affairs chief Kaja Kallas on Instagram.

The Estonian politician was the country’s first ever European commissioner, starting from 2004. He took up the economic and monetary affairs post under then-European Commission President José Manuel Barroso, and later served as vice-president and transport commissioner from 2010 to 2014.

An economist by training, Kallas started his career as president of the Bank of Estonia in 1991, where he was one of the principal architects of the country’s monetary reform. In 1994, he founded the liberal-democratic Reform Party and was elected to the Estonian parliament the following year, when he became foreign affairs minister.

Kallas was also an important figure in the Baltic country’s European trajectory: After his appointment as foreign minister, he oversaw Estonia’s bid to join the EU. He was prime minister in 2002, when the country concluded negotiations to become a member and was invited to join NATO.

“I think of courage required to rebuild a state and introduce its own currency in the early 1990s, as well as the quiet conviction he brought with him to Brussels,” wrote European Parliament Roberta Metsola on social media in response to the news. “Estonia and Europe are better because of his life’s work.”

“Through his public career, [Kallas] helped shape Estonia’s EU path and key European policies,” stated the Commission.

His daughter, Kaja Kallas, was Estonia’s youngest-ever serving prime minister, holding office from 2021 to 2024. She is now the EU’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs for Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s second term.

This story has been updated.

Scott Jennings’ appointment as White House press secretary would not be a surprising turn in Donald Trump’s second administration. If the reports and rumors turn out to be right, the choice would say as much about our modern political media as it would about the CNN pundit himself. His is a particular kind of American grift that only cable news could have produced: the professional Trump apologist who spends years building a brand on “reasonable conservative who’ll push back a little,” cashes it in for a White House podium and never once has to explain how those two roles were supposed to coexist. 

Jennings has been auditioning for that grift since the day he first told a CNN panel in 2017 that Trump deserved a fair hearing. Now, with Karoline Leavitt’s departure at the end of August, he may finally get taxpayers to fund his propaganda by way of a federal salary.

Leavitt, who has served as press secretary since Trump’s second term began in January 2025, recently announced she would be stepping down to spend more time with her family after the birth of her second child. Her impending exit has kicked off a telling scramble inside Trumpworld, one that has led to a shortlist that apparently includes former George W. Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer, Trump aide Natalie Harp, White House communications director Steven Cheung, Breitbart’s Matthew Boyle and former Trump attorney Alina Habba. But the name that keeps rising to the top, and the one CNN itself has now confirmed as the “early favorite,” is Jennings. 

CNN reported that White House chief of staff Susie Wiles met privately with Jennings at Mastro’s Steakhouse in Washington, with one senior administration official explaining the interest bluntly: Jennings is “competent and good on TV.” Multiple Trump staffers reportedly believe he already has Wiles’ backing. A separate report by POLITICO revealed that Jennings had been sending clips of his CNN appearances directly to senior White House staffers, seemingly campaigning for the job in real time. 

Jennings is almost comically suited to the part. Anyone who has watched him on CNN knows the routine. He occupies the familiar cable news position of conservative contrarian, the lone Republican supposedly willing to enter hostile territory and calmly dismantle the liberals around him. While the network presents his presence as ideological friction, Jennings presents it as sober common sense. The result is often that of a major cable news network treating the indefensible as merely another side of a good-faith argument. CNN has unquestionably helped turn Jennings into a national brand.

Over the course of Trump’s second presidency, Jennings’ television role has increasingly become defined by outright aggression in his defense of the administration. “I think every president deserves a good, solid defense and someone who can go out there and explain what they’re doing,” he said on CNN this week, calling the press secretary’s work “the conduit to transparency in front of the camera and also behind the scenes.” But Jennings’ behavior on CNN, particularly on “CNN Newsnight with Abby Phillip,” is especially combative. He often snaps at his co-panelists and displays a hostility to truth, twisting reality to promulgate the administration’s given narrative.

His defense of the president is particularly naked careerism because Jennings was once an outspoken critic of Trump.

On Jan. 6, 2021, Jennings wrote an op-ed for CNN with a headline that could not have been less ambiguous: Trump caused this insurrection, and every Republican must condemn it. “This is literally an insurrection,” he wrote, adding that the failure to secure the Capitol was nothing less than “a failure of leadership by the commander in chief.” He went further, writing that Trump had caused the violence with his lies and conspiracy theories about a stolen presidential election. Jennings said he was ashamed and embarrassed for his country — and for any Republican who failed to condemn what had happened. On CNN the following day, he stated unequivocally that Trump had caused the insurrection and criticized Republican senators who continued challenging the election results after the Capitol had been attacked. Nearly six years later, those remarks could be a political problem for Jennings as he seeks employment inside the Trump coalition.

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But a capacity for rapid transformation is the premier currency in Trump’s orbit. The president has long surrounded himself with people who initially condemned him before bending the knee. Figures like Secretary of State Marco Rubio to Vice President JD Vance have calculated that proximity to power and the adulation of the MAGA base outweigh any lingering attachment to personal dignity. Jennings has played this game with cunning precision, much like his mentor and fellow Kentuckian Sen. Mitch McConnell, who himself condemned Trump after Jan. 6, and described him as practically and morally responsible for provoking the attack.

Neither man’s fury translated into action. McConnell voted the following month to acquit the president of inciting the riot. Trump, for his part, mass-pardoned the Jan. 6 defendants on his first day back in office. Confronted on air in January 2026 about the administration’s recasting of rioters as patriotic protesters unfairly targeted by an overzealous Capitol Police force, Jennings allowed only that he has “a somewhat different” view than the president’s, before pivoting to complain that Democrats treat the anniversary like “a national holiday.”

Jennings’ Jan. 6 flip-flop is not an isolated point of friction for the pundit. Just this month on his nationally syndicated Salem Media radio show, he aired a heavily edited compilation of clips from the leftist Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, accusing Piker of “calling for Black voters to be lynched” and warning listeners that “beneath all the smiles and dancing videos, there’s nothing but hate and violence in the heart of these communists.” Snopes reviewed the original streams and found the clip had been stitched together out of order and stripped of context; Piker’s remarks about lynching were sarcastic reactions to something someone else had said, not an endorsement of anything. By his own account, Piker is now preparing a defamation suit against Jennings and Salem Media, and possibly Fox News, which cited the same debunked compilation. Piker has said the fallout has brought a wave of death threats serious enough that he has tightened his security and cut back on public appearances. 

Perhaps that’s why Trump reportedly remains “not quite sold” on Jennings. Despite the president’s apparent misgivings, it makes perfect sense for a man who is facing a defamation lawsuit for airing a doctored video to simultaneously be the frontrunner to become Trump’s official voice to the American public. Scott Jennings’ potential appointment to White House press secretary would be yet another triumphant coup for a MAGA apparatus that demands complete moral surrender from its acolytes.

The post Scott Jennings as press secretary could be Trump’s final coup appeared first on Salon.com.

Even as Donald Trump’s war against Iran drags on with no end in sight, let alone any sort of victory for the U.S., there’s another conflict America will definitely never win: the drug war. Even though “war” is somewhat metaphorical here, it has always been waged like one, with military-grade equipment used to police neighborhoods, support clandestine spying operations and aid in the invasion of cities. But given that the main opponent of the Drug Enforcement Administration is, well, drugs, which don’t possess the ability to surrender, there can never be an end to this war, only further escalation.

At the same time, it was announced Wednesday that the DEA is helping to investigate the death of actress Hayden Panettiere earlier this week, apparently as the result of an overdose. No official cause of death has been announced, but Panettiere was open about her struggles with addiction, chronic pain and domestic violence. While her sudden death at the age of 36 is nothing but tragic, I question the DEA’s involvement as a good use of federal resources. Panettiere’s passing wasn’t the result of some high-level cartel assassination or a major drug trafficking operation, it seems to have been a sadly routine accidental poisoning. 

But as with the death of actor Matthew Perry in October 2023, which the DEA also jumped on, superstar overdoses are attractive bait for an agency that thrives on celebrity energy and little else. Such a high-profile investigation may lend the DEA a veneer of competence, but its billions in annual funding have done little to stop the tide of deadly overdoses plaguing the U.S., or to make a meaningful dent in the flow of drugs entering the country. The investigation of Perry’s death — which, it must be emphasized, was a result of drowning while on ketamine, not purely an overdose of the drug itself — did ultimately result in several arrests, but it produced no significant reforms for addiction treatment or healthcare access.

What’s interesting is that, according to the Associated Press, the DEA is itself being investigated for allegedly allowing the powerful opioid fentanyl to flood into New Mexico between 2023 and 2025 in yet another of their many botched undercover operations. The agency is accused of letting drugs “walk,” meaning that fentanyl deliveries were permitted to happen to build bigger cases against drug traffickers. On Monday, a Justice Department internal watchdog announced a review of this controversial tactic, which may have resulted in overdose deaths and/or injuries, which are exactly what the DEA is supposed to prevent.

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The irony here is extra thick when you recall that the Trump administration designated fentanyl a “weapon of mass destruction” last year. Does that make the DEA a terrorist organization, or perhaps “enablers” of terrorism? Imagine if the Department of Homeland Security, using similar methods that the DEA allegedly utilized in New Mexico, allowed white supremacists to blow up a few bridges so they could get a bigger conviction against them.

This underscores the absurdity of labeling fentanyl a weapon of mass destruction in the first place. The drug is used safely every day in virtually every hospital in America, and in fairness, most users who ingest the drug do not die immediately. Many don’t die at all. It’s an opioid, not sarin gas. More importantly, the hysterical  label does nothing to help people struggling with addiction or to reduce overdose deaths. It does, however, give cover for Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s ongoing campaign to blow up boats in the Caribbean, which has widely been condemned as a war crime.

 

Whether it’s spreading myths about “rainbow fentanyl” in kids’ Halloween candy, or promoting the ludicrous lie that simply touching fentanyl can cause an overdose, the DEA is a bigger source of drug misinformation than that kid in your high school who channeled a lot of Joe Rogan. For all the phony celebrity investigations, in more than 50 years the DEA has made little progress in ending the war on drugs, let alone making America healthier. And there’s a reason it will never work: Addiction is a health problem, not a policing problem. It can’t be solved with more cops or more guns. Amid all the talk about abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement, there are other three-letter agencies that deserve the same fate.

The post The DEA is a bigger joke than ever appeared first on Salon.com.

WASHINGTON — With under nine weeks to go until early voting begins in Texas’ U.S. Senate race, both Ken Paxton and James Talarico have been campaigning around the state, meeting voters everywhere from restaurants to music halls as they’ve pitched their political visions.

But on television, Texans have only seen one of them.

Talarico, an Austin state representative, has spent over $25 million on advertising since the general election began in late May, according to ad tracking firm AdImpact — with nearly $10.7 million deployed on broadcast and an additional $8.4 million on streaming devices. (The rest has gone to a combination of cable, digital, radio and satellite.)

Texans turning on their TVs this summer have seen Talarico talk about the importance of loving God and neighbor in a spot featuring his grandfather. They’ve seen the Democrat lamenting high costs in a grocery store and while driving a truck, and heard about his record in a World Cup-themed Spanish language ad.

Over that same time period, the Paxton campaign has spent $119,000 — nearly all of it on digital advertising — meaning that Talarico has essentially had the airwaves to himself. Over that time, he’s built a narrow polling lead, pulling ahead in numerous surveys within the margin of error.

In television interviews, Paxton has noted this disparity and appealed to donors for help. On Fox News recently, the Republican nominee laid out his timeline for campaign spending, saying he expects that litigating Talarico’s record will cement the Democrat’s loss — but that he needs resources to do it.

“As we’re raising money, we’re working our way back into October, which is where we can spend money, and we’re trying to work our way back to September,” Paxton said. “But we need help now, because James Talarico’s been spending $3 or $4 million a week on TV for the last month. So, I want to compete.”

The Paxton campaign has also touted that while he was outraised by Talarico in the second quarter, Paxton still raised more money — over $9 million — than any non-incumbent GOP Senate candidate in the country. And Paxton has noted that the expensive primary runoff left his coffers more depleted than those of Talarico, who could afford to spend the spring stockpiling his war chest after winning his March primary.

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Conventional election wisdom states that most voters don’t start paying attention until after Labor Day, and that Republicans can still win while being outspent on ads — which Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, did in both his narrow victory in 2018 and comfortable win in 2024. Republican strategists expect the cavalry to come for Paxton, with well-heeled outside players helping narrow the spending gap.

But as September approaches, they’re eyeing the calendar.

“I do think Paxton needs to define Talarico, and he needs to do it soon,” John Wittman, an unaffiliated Republican consultant and former adviser to Gov. Greg Abbott, said in an interview. “We’re about three months out from Election Day. So it’s important for Republicans to combat this Democrat aggression, that they do start to spend and start to define Talarico for the crazy liberal he is.”

Republican strategists caution that Democrats’ polling is typically strongest in the summer, and that they expect those numbers to shift once Paxton or his allies begin attacking Talarico on television. A Republican group called Protecting America’s Future, seeded by longtime Paxton ally and West Texas billionaire Tim Dunn, became the first GOP group to run an anti-Talarico ad, attacking him in two spots on China policy and crime in a $120,000 ad spend airing mostly in the Corpus Christi media market this week.

By comparison, Talarico’s campaign has spent over $7.3 million on ads over the past couple weeks, over 36 times the amount dropped by Republicans.

In 2024, when Cruz beat Democrat Colin Allred by an 8.5-point margin, he was also outspent over the summer — though Cruz was spending more on a week-by-week basis than Paxton is now. Cruz started spending six figures a week on advertising in late July 2024, according to AdImpact data, and ramped up to a weekly seven-figure spend by late September. When combined with outside spending, Republicans were dropping at least $2 million on ads each week by the end of August two years ago.

Paxton, by contrast, has spent no more than $20,000 on ads in any week of the general election thus far. AdImpact has tracked over $72,000 in Republican spending this week, the party’s high-water mark since the runoff.

In total, Democrats outspent Republicans by a margin of $119.7 million to $82.6 million in Texas’ 2024 Senate race after the primaries. Cruz’s campaign was aided by tens of millions in outside ad support and coordinated spending, the bulk of which did not come until late September.

And Cruz, of course, was an incumbent senator who had six years to build his war chest, while this is Paxton’s first federal race.

“GOP donors need to get off their asses”

Beyond Paxton’s campaign itself, well-heeled groups including Senate Leadership Fund, the national PAC aligned with Senate GOP leadership, and MAGA Inc., the massive campaign super PAC aligned with Trump, could even the field in Texas — though both groups are operating with a national map bigger than Texas. The question animating Republicans in Texas remains: When will the money come?

Paxton has acknowledged that Talarico’s superior spending has affected the standing of the race. Polls have put the race essentially tied, with Talarico narrowly leading in recent polls that put him within the margin of error — an unprecedented situation for the top-of-the-ticket race in Texas since Republicans solidified control of the state.

“He’s got money,” Paxton told GOP radio host Dana Loesch. “He’s been on TV for about four or five weeks. And it’s helped him a little bit in the polls — that’s why the polls have gotten closer.”

But the current lack of future ad reservations — from Paxton or allies — has some Republicans offering warnings to the outside groups that have yet to spend money. After the Paxton interview, Loesch, whose show is broadcast from Dallas, told her listeners that Republican groups were “leaving you to hang” and questioned, “Where’s the GOP in this race?”

“This is a winnable race,” Loesch said. “All these big money GOP donors need to get off their asses and make a decision. Because I guaran-damn-tee you, if their inaction results in us having somebody like James Talarico, dear God in heaven, my rage will be limitless.”

Karl Rove, a longtime Republican strategist who supported Sen. John Cornyn in the primary against Paxton, put it even more starkly. Rove said Texas is a Republican state, but that the disparate fundraising dynamics have made the race unusual.

“He’s not going to change as a fundraiser,” Rove said on Fox, referring to Paxton’s past performances. “So this is going to be one that is going to depend mightily upon the decision of President Trump to spend or not spend the half a billion plus dollars that he has in his two super PACs — MAGA Inc. and Never Surrender. If he does spend, then he can sort of even it up. If he doesn’t spend, this could be a really bad night for Republicans in Texas.”

Texas Bullpen reported that MAGA Inc. fielded a message testing poll in Texas with possible attacks against Talarico this month, portending potential future spending.

In the Fox News interview, Paxton said Republican leadership is “planning on spending money here, is my understanding,” but he noted that he can’t coordinate with them.

“We haven’t yet, but we’re very hopeful that that’s coming soon,” Paxton told Loesch when she asked if he was getting adequate funding from GOP groups. “We’ve been told September.”

Across the Republican spending landscape, Texas stands out for the lack of future TV ad reservations. GOP candidates and their allies have booked at least $10 million from Sept. 1 onward in eight battleground states, according to AdImpact. In the five other competitive states where Republicans are playing defense — Alaska, Iowa, Maine, North Carolina and Ohio — the GOP has outspent Democrats in its fall bookings.

Democrats have not booked any ad reservations in Texas past Sept. 1 either. That includes Senate Majority PAC, the super PAC aligned with Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer, which has bought ad time in other battleground states.

A few factors could explain why both parties are waiting to get involved in Texas.

In smaller states with fewer media markets, ad rates can rise quickly, especially when there are competitive governor and House races also competing for airtime. In those cases, early reservations can be critical. Meanwhile, Texas has 20 different media markets, placing less pressure on outside groups to commit money early and lock in rates, one national GOP strategist told the Tribune. That’s why campaigns and groups often buy ad time on a week-to-week basis here.

Super PACs can also make a difference. But on that front, Democrats also had an advantage at last count.

Lone Star Liberty PAC, the pro-Paxton super PAC that dropped $5.7 million throughout the primary, has yet to spend any money on television since the runoff. That’s expected to change at some point, but the group went into July with major reloading to do after an expensive second quarter taken up by the primary runoff. The PAC only had $35,000 in its war chest at the end of June, according to federal records.

Meanwhile, Lone Star Rising PAC, which supports Talarico, had nearly $12.7 million on hand.

Outside of the Senate race, Republicans’ cash advantage in other statewide contests — especially the governor’s race — could serve to benefit Paxton as well, when an expected deluge of pro-Republican, anti-Democrat messaging hits the airwaves this fall.

The next round of federal campaign fundraising data will not be available until mid-October, just before early voting begins.

This article first appeared on The Texas Tribune.

The post Talarico floods Texas airwaves in U.S. Senate race as Paxton, GOP stay quiet appeared first on Salon.com.

Am 6. September steht Sachsen-Anhalt vor einer historischen Landtagswahl, bei der die AfD erstmals stärkste Kraft werden könnte. Ministerpräsident Sven Schulze liegt in Umfragen deutlich hinter seinem Herausforderer Ulrich Siegmund zurück. Gordon Repinski begleitet den CDU-Politiker auf einem Spaziergang durch den härtesten Wahlkampf des Landes.

Im Wahlkampfendspurt setzt Schulze auf konkrete wirtschaftliche Lösungen und warnt eindringlich vor seinem AfD-Konkurrenten. Er wirft Siegmund vor, zwar Probleme zu benennen, aber keine pragmatischen Antworten auf Jobverluste oder das Schulsterben zu haben. Bei echten Krisen fehle der AfD das politische und wirtschaftliche Netzwerk.

Zudem spricht Gordon Repinski mit dem Ministerpräsidenten über umstrittenen Wahlkampf-Gästen wie Dieter Hallervorden und parteiinternen Querschüssen. Mit Blick auf den Wahlabend vermeidet Schulze klare Koalitionsaussagen zur Linkspartei, betont aber sein oberstes Ziel: Sachsen-Anhalt müsse zwingend weiter aus der politischen Mitte heraus regiert werden.

Das Berlin Playbook als Podcast gibt es jeden Morgen ab 5 Uhr. Gordon Repinski und das POLITICO-Team liefern Politik zum Hören – kompakt, international, hintergründig.

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