United States | News & Politics

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/46562517

The Wall Street Journal, its parent company and Rupert Murdoch asked a federal judge to dismiss Donald Trump‘s $10 billion defamation lawsuit over the publication’s report on the president’s past connections to Jeffrey Epstein.

“The First Amendment’s protections for truthful speech are the backbone of the Constitution,” the Journal’s attorneys wrote in their motion.

The attorneys also challenged the notion the that the article could have damaged Trump’s reputation, noting that he had “publicly admitted to ‘locker room talk’ and has made numerous bawdy public statements,” as well as to his relationship with Epstein.

Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman sat down with longtime political prisoner and Indigenous activist Leonard Peltier for his first extended television and radio broadcast interview since his release to home confinement in February. Before his commutation by former President Joe Biden, the 81-year-old Peltier spent nearly 50 years behind bars. Peltier has always maintained his innocence for the 1975 killing of two FBI officers. He is expected to serve the remainder of his life sentences under house arrest at the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Nation in Belcourt, North Dakota. In a wide-ranging conversation, we spoke to Peltier about his case, his time in prison, his childhood spent at American Indian boarding school and his later involvement in the American Indian Movement (AIM) and more. “We still have to live under that, that fear of losing our identity, losing our culture, our religion,” Peltier says about his continued commitment to Indigenous rights. “The struggle still goes on for me. I’m not going to give up.”

AMY GOODMAN: In a Democracy Now! global TV/radio broadcast exclusive, we spend the hour with longtime Indigenous activist Leonard Peltier. In February, he was released from a federal prison in Florida after spending nearly half a century behind bars for a crime he says he did not commit. President Biden, on his last day in office, commuted Peltier’s life sentence to home confinement. Biden’s decision came after mounting calls by tribal leaders and supporters around the world in a decadeslong community-led campaign fighting for his freedom.

In the ’70s, Peltier was involved with AIM, the American Indian Movement. In 1975, two FBI agents and one young AIM activist were killed in a shootout on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Two AIM members were later arrested for killing the agents. At trial, the jury acquitted them. Leonard Peltier was arrested later, tried separately and convicted. Peltier has always maintained his innocence.

Notable supporters of Leonard Peltier over the years included Nelson Mandela, Pope Francis and Amnesty International. Supporters of Peltier say his trial was marked by gross FBI and federal prosecutorial misconduct, including the coercion of witnesses, fabricated testimony and suppressed exculpatory evidence.

After being released in February, Leonard Peltier returned home to live on the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Reservation in Belcourt, North Dakota. September 12th was Leonard Peltier’s 81st birthday. People gathered throughout the day, visiting him to celebrate this first birthday in almost a half a century where he was home. We got there on his birthday. The next day, Saturday, we spoke in his living room in his first extended TV/radio broadcast interview since his release from prison.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/6212926

cross-posted from: https://ibbit.at/post/60404

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Late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel returns after suspension sparked fears of censorship.

95 Democrats chose to celebrate a racist, misogynist, and very bad debater.

President Donald Trump is worried that Attorney General Pam Bondi is moving too slowly to prosecute his political adversaries on fake charges. Trump has good reason to be concerned. He is carrying out his project to consolidate authoritarian power against the trend of declining public support for his administration and himself. He is like a man trying to race upward on a downward-moving escalator. If he loses the race, he will be pulled ever deeper below—and the escalator keeps moving faster against him.

Autocracies are headed by one man but require the cooperation of many others. Some collaborators may sincerely share the autocrat’s goals, but opportunists provide a crucial margin of support. In the United States, such people now have to make a difficult calculation: Do the present benefits of submitting to Trump’s will outweigh the future hazards?

As Bondi makes her daily decisions about whether to abuse her powers to please Trump, she has to begin with one big political assessment: Will Trump ultimately retain the power to reward and punish her? It’s not just about keeping her present job. On the one hand, people in Trump’s favor can make a lot of money from their proximity to power. On the other, Richard Nixon’s attorney general, John Mitchell, served 19 months in prison for his crimes during Watergate. If Trump’s hold on power loosens, Bondi could share Mitchell’s fate.

Trump’s hold on power is indeed loosening. His standing with the voting public is quickly deteriorating. Grocery prices jumped in August 2025 at the fastest speed since the peak of the post-pandemic inflation in 2022. Job growth has stalled to practically zero.

Almost two-thirds of Americans disapprove of higher tariffs, Trump’s signature economic move. His administration’s attack on vaccines for young children is even more unpopular. This year has brought the highest number of measles cases since the Clinton administration introduced free universal vaccination for young children in 1993. Parents may be rightly shocked and angry.

Shortly after MSNBC reported that Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar, had accepted $50,000 in cash from FBI agents posing as businessmen last year, allegedly in exchange for a promise to help secure government contracts, the pro-Trump podcaster Megyn Kelly posted, “We DO NOT CARE.” This kind of acquiescence to corruption has been one of Trump’s most important resources. But the American people become a lot less tolerant of corruption in their leaders when they feel themselves under economic pressure. As of early August, nearly two-thirds of Americans regarded Trump as corrupt, 45 percent as “very corrupt.” More than 60 percent think the Trump administration is covering up the Jeffrey Epstein case. Almost 60 percent regard Bondi personally responsible for the cover-up.

The MAGA project in many ways resembles one of former businessman Donald Trump’s dangerously leveraged real-estate deals. A comparatively small number of fanatics are heart-and-soul committed. Through them, Trump controls the Republican apparatus and the right-wing media world, which allows him to do things like gerrymander states where he is in trouble (50 percent of Texans now disapprove of Trump, while only 43 percent approve) or wield the enforcement powers of the Federal Communications Commission to silence on-air critics. But overleveraged structures are susceptible to external shocks and internal mistakes.

Trump in his first term mostly avoided screwing up the economy. His trade wars with China triggered a nearly 20 percent stock-market slump in the fall and early winter of 2018. Trump retreated, and no recession followed the slump until the COVID shock of 2020. But in his second term, Trump has jettisoned his former economic caution. The stock market is doing fine in 2025 on hopes of interest-rate cuts. The real economy is worsening. The percentage of Americans who think the country is on the “wrong track” rose sharply over the summer. Even self-identified Republicans are now more negative than positive.

The souring is especially bitter among younger people. More than 60 percent of Republicans younger than 45 say things are on the wrong track, a 30-point deterioration over the three summer months.

Trump has a shrewd instinct for survival. He must sense that if he does not act now to prevent free and fair elections in 2026, he will lose much of his power—and all of his impunity. That’s why he is squeezing Bondi. But for her, the thought process must be very different. Trump is hoping to offload culpability for his misconduct onto her. She’s the one most directly at risk if she gives orders later shown to be unethical or illegal.

The survival of American rights and liberties may now turn less on the question of whether Pam Bondi is a person of integrity—which we already know the dismal answer to—than whether she is willing to risk her career and maybe even her personal freedom for a president on his way to repudiation unless he can fully pervert the U.S. legal system and the 2026 elections.

The wealthiest New Yorkers are desperately to rally support – and millions of dollars – for Andrew Cuomo to defeat the democratic socialist

It was the Trump show at the Charlie Kirk memorial, where the US president pushed hate, fear, and downright conspiracy theory

Inside the “psychological torture” regime targeting migrants who can't be sent home.

A recent report from UAW Region 6 outlines a bold vision for how to expand clean energy industries in California using union labor. It’s an example of how unions can get serious about industrial policy and assert themselves in the “abundance” debate.

"Seriously though, has anyone ever been handed $50,000 cash in a paper bag for something legit?"

Jon Queally
Sep 21, 2025

The Congressional Progressive Caucus over the weekend officially endorsed a bill that would block the sale of many offensive US weapons to Israel. This move coincides with growing outrage from US voters from across the political spectrum who say they have seen enough of American complicity with the genocidal humanitarian blockade and bombardment of the Gaza Strip.

The Block the Bombs Act, first introduced in May by Rep. Delia C. Ramirez (D-Ill.) and now backed by 49 co-sponsors, calls for a prohibition on the sale of a variety of US weapons and a limitation on military services to the Israeli government, accused of committing a genocide in Gaza.

The vote by the caucus, which took place Saturday and was first reported by Zeteo, marks a historic shift—even for the most progressive group of lawmakers on Capitol Hill—that provides “a significant boost to efforts to hold Israel accountable for its genocidal war in Gaza.”

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/36489025

Trade deals many had hoped would quickly emerge after President Donald Trump slapped tariffs on some of the United States’ biggest agricultural customers haven’t come. A farm bailout is no sure thing on Capitol Hill. And farmers — many of whom voted for Trump — say time is running out.

“It just seems like things have stalled all summer long,” said Brian Warpup, who grows corn and soybeans on his 3,900-acre farm in northeastern Indiana. “We’re always hopeful that those negotiations are moving forward, but yet with harvest here, patience may be running thin.”

Across the US, farmers describe increasingly dire circumstances stemming from a confluence of factors — trade wars, Trump’s immigration crackdown, inflation and high interest rates.

Though the challenges vary in different parts of the country, farmers in some cases, particularly on the West Coast, are struggling to find labor to pick their harvest. Others, especially in the Midwest, said they can’t sell what they’ve produced. And many are scrambling to find storage.

“This is not your ordinary farm crisis. We call it ‘farmageddon,’ and it’s really a tough time,”

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/27693837

Hundreds of people detained at the Alligator Alcatraz immigration processing center west of Miami, Florida, appear to have vanished. They have disappeared from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) online database, and their lawyers and families have been unable to locate them, according to immigrant advocacy groups.