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- ‘LOCK THE CLOCK!’
President Trump is in a race against time. There are 28 days until the midterms. There are 837 days left in his presidency. There are actuary tables noting the challenges of battling Father Time for 80-year-old men. But, at the moment, he is focused on one particular slice of time: daylight savings.It has become the latest obsession for a man known for not letting go of his compulsions. He has tilted against windmills, told the government to stop procuring paper straws, and spent significant mental and rhetorical energy openly discussing which is worse: electrocution in a sinking electric boat or being devoured by a shark.His attention has been pulled to daylight savings by pending legislation that would end the requirement to change clocks twice a year to match the seasons, moving an hour back in the fall and then jumping forward in the spring. Instead, he wants to keep the clock where it is after springing forward—ensuring more sunlight in the evening—and not falling back, which allows for more light in the mornings during winter months. “LOCK THE CLOCK!” the president wrote on social media over the weekend.Trump has offered a number of anecdotal arguments to support his view. During an interview with the conservative commentator Wayne Allyn Root in August, he claimed that he was once an hour late for an important meeting—“a big person from a big country”—because he had forgotten to reset his clock. He then claimed that stopping the time change would deter crime, “because criminals sleep late, you know; they do their crime in the evening.” He has suggested that it’s unsafe and costly for workers to have to reset clocks on church steeples or government buildings twice a year. He has also said that getting rid of daylight savings would lower people’s risk for cardiac issues and stroke, limit seasonal depression, and boost tourism.[Read: A different kind of fading president ]But perhaps Trump’s most fundamental motivation became evident late last month: A president who likes to golf would like more sunlight to do so. During the final day of the Presidents Cup, held at a Chicago-area country club on September 27, Trump met with the PGA Tour Chief Executive Brian Rolapp and discussed daylight savings. A few days later, Rolapp sent Trump a letter urging him to ensure that there is more sunlight in the evenings. Too many golfers are busy with their lives… [TheTopNews] Read More.2 days ago - Everything You’ve Been Told About Lethal Injection Is a Lie
In the months leading up to Christa Pike’s execution date, she and her legal team made it clear that she, the lone woman on Tennessee’s death row, 50 years old, wasn’t afraid to die. She was terrified of the execution itself. “Her greatest fear wasn’t dying,” attorney Stephen Ferrell told USA Today in a press conference. “It was a fear of a prolonged, painful, traumatic death.” Citing her blood-clotting disorder and a history of difficult blood draws, her attorney argued that there could be problems properly affixing the IV into Pike’s arm and that executing her via lethal injection would amount to cruel and unusual punishment. About a month before her execution, her lawyers had pushed for her to be hanged or shot by a firing squad instead. At the eleventh hour, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals stayed her execution, only to have the Supreme Court overrule it. When she finally arrived in the prison’s death chamber, Pike and her lawyer’s concerns would be proven true to a degree they couldn’t have anticipated: she became the first person to survive the administration of a double dose of lethal injection drugs. What should have been a ten- to twenty-minute process took two hours, according to the Associated Press, and ended with Pike alive but in critical condition. Christa Pike reportedly remains intubated, on a ventilator in a Nashville hospital, receiving life-saving care after being pumped with what should have been two fatal doses of pentobarbital, a barbiturate used by many states for lethal injection. When she arrived at the hospital, Pike’s arms were “swollen, burned and blistered,” according to an emergency filing from her legal team. There’s still a lot that we don’t know about the actions of prison officials leading up to and during Pike’s execution. Pike’s attorneys believe that a problem with the state’s IV lines caused the pentobarbital to flow into her tissue, instead of her veins. Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee has halted all executions in the state and ordered an “independent investigation.” The head of Tennessee’s Department of Correction resigned days after Pike’s hospitalization, but defended the execution, saying the state “carried out its responsibilities in accordance with the established protocol.” Christa Pike’s case, while unusual in many respects, is a perfect encapsulation of the pitfalls of lethal injection as an execution method in the United States. Most people’s understanding of lethal injection—as a humane… [TheTopNews] Read More.2 days ago - “They Knew, They Lied”: Fire Survivors Bring Their Fight to the Supreme Cour...On Monday morning outside the Supreme Court, as Justices heard arguments concerning a landmark climate liability lawsuit, a rally organized by the Center for Climate Integrity and Fossil Free Media drew a crowd of roughly one hundred people. Many carried signs with messages like “Climate Change is No Accident,” “SCOTUS Hands Off Boulder,” and “Warning: Burning Fossil Fuels Can Destroy Civilization.” At several points, The People v. Big Oil gathering chanted “They knew, they lied” in a call-and-response, referencing fossil fuel scientists and executives who knew more than 50 years ago that burning fossil fuels would raise global temperatures, and instead sowed doubt to undermine scientific evidence. As Louie Delaware, a survivor of the 2021 Marshall Fire told the crowd, “No company or industry should gain an advantage by hiding facts that people need to protect their health, their communities, and their future. The bottom line is that they knew, they lied, and they must be accountable for their actions.” Delaware lost his home along with roughly 50 others on his street when the fire devastated Boulder, Colorado. His family was displaced for more than two and a half years. Other survivors of the Marshall Fire spoke at the rally, as well as survivors of the 2025 Eaton fire in Altadena, California. Meanwhile, inside the courtroom, the justices heard arguments in Suncor Energy v. Boulder, widely regarded as a seminal case concerning the issue of whether or not local governments can demand damages from fossil fuel companies for their contributions to climate change. The fossil fuel companies are arguing that a state court can’t hold multinational companies accountable for global harm. As I reported last week: The case revolves around a dispute between the City and County of Boulder, which first sued the energy companies in 2018. They are arguing that Suncor and Exxon deceived the public about the dangers of climate change and should be forced to pay damages for climate-induced heat waves, wildfires, droughts, and floods. “The damages will only multiply as climate change worsens,” Boulder stated in its lawsuit. Suncor and Exxon, meanwhile, are asking the justices to kill the case before it makes it to trial—and with it a host of other state-level climate cases. Depending on how the eight justices rule—Justice Samuel Alito announced what some considered to be an 11th hour recusal earlier this week—the case could have far-reaching… [TheTopNews] Read More.2 days ago
- The Republican Plan to Buy the Election Got Too Expensive
“Republicans Enter Final Midterm Stretch With a Significant Financial Edge.” “Republicans Are Unleashing Their Fundraising Advantage Against the Democrats.” “Republicans’ One Clear Advantage This November: Money.” These headlines are like others that blared in major publications just three weeks ago, as Republican Senate candidates and their allied party organizations and political action committees opened up a 2-to-1 margin over Democrats in early September advertising spending, and booked $221 million more than Democrats in ad buys through the rest of the campaign. But as most Americans find a dollar doesn’t go as far as it used to, Republican ad buyers are learning the hard way that millions in dark money funneled to super PACs don’t go as far as money sent directly to candidates. Money is rarely the sole factor in determining election outcomes. Democrats spent more on Senate campaigns in 2024 and still lost the chamber. But if Republicans hope to hold off a Blue Wave in a midterm when their president’s job approval is cratering, money is their best bet. Yet we already knew from Cook Political Report’s Amy Walter that both Democratic and Republican operatives have found that in most races “attack ads against Democrats were not yet ‘moving the needle.’” Part of the reason is that Republicans are selling a bad product, no matter how much money is put into marketing. Voters don’t want to buy more Republican policies that have eaten away at their bank accounts. And when they’re mad about their thinning wallets, as I wrote previously, they are not easily riled up by appeals to transphobia and Islamophobia. But another factor is that, despite their massive war chest, Republicans aren’t dominating the airwaves. Last Thursday, the ad tracking company AdImpact tallied up not just what the two parties spent on Senate campaigns in nine battlegrounds through the end of September, but how much actual advertising that money bought. Republicans outspent Democrats $563 million to $375 million, a 60-40 split. But when it came to how often broadcast ads air, the Republican advantage nearly vanished. AdImpact found that “Republicans led broadcast spending in seven of the nine battlegrounds and by 26% overall but led broadcast airings by just 7%. In Texas, a 44% Republican broadcast spending advantage yielded only an 8% airings advantage. Democrats led broadcast airings in Ohio and North Carolina despite being outspent on broadcast in both states.” Why… [TheTopNews] Read More.2 days ago - Hannah Arendt’s Life in Friendship
It’s well established that the last decade has been unfriendly to friendship. We Americans in 2026 have fewer friends than we used to, spend less time talking with the ones we do have, and, depending on the survey, anywhere from 8 to 17 percent of our fellow citizens report having no close friends at all. Even among those still maintaining human relationships, divisive events—say, a global pandemic, a disputed election, or overseas wars—have increasingly broken bonds. More than a third of Americans say they’ve ended a relationship—and most often, a friendship—over political difference. It’s easy to see, then, why concerned parties would turn to the work of Hannah Arendt, the late political philosopher and leading theorist of how social isolation lays the groundwork for authoritarianism, who built and sustained friendships across chasms of disagreement. “What prepares men for totalitarian domination,” Arendt wrote in her oft-cited Origins of Totalitarianism, “is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience of the evergrowing masses of our century.” A World We Share: Hannah Arendt and the Power of Friendship in a Broken World by Roger Berkowitz. Yale University Press, 176 pp. Despite living most of her life as a foreigner, first as a German refugee in Paris in the 1930s, then as a stateless refugee-turned-expat in New York City from 1941 until she died in 1975, friendlessness was foreign to Arendt. In his new book A World We Share: Hannah Arendt and the Power of Friendship in a Broken World, Roger Berkowitz, the founder and director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College, chronicles her many relationships as models of respectful disagreement. Whereas couples in 2026 may bring arguments over Brexit or a vote for Donald Trump to their marriage counselors, Arendt, a German-Jewish academic, found a way to reconcile with Martin Heidegger, her former professor and lover who joined the Nazi Party and supported stripping Jewish professors of their positions. Cancellation, to put it mildly, was not her way. Berkowitz attempts a heavy lift with A World We Share. Taking the parallel crises of politics and friendship as a starting point, and touching on the standoff between nationalist tribalism and cosmopolitan globalism along the way, he weaves toward a central argument: Claimed truths and moral certainties are… [TheTopNews] Read More.2 days ago - Six Overlooked Reasons California’s Community NEWS Act Is ‘A Big Deal’
In signing AB 2222, the Community NEWS Act, Gov. Gavin Newsom said, “This is a big deal.” He’s right—and not just for the obvious reasons. Before we get to the more unexpected elements, here are the basics. This is the most ambitious effort to revive community news in the country, probably ever—about $200 million over five years. It provides refundable tax credits to news organizations that hire or retain local journalists: $20,000 for each of the first five local journalists and $15,000 for each one after that, plus an additional $15,000 for new hires. The incentives are right: Hire more reporters, get a match from the state. Shrink your newsroom, get fewer benefits. We also like that this is content-neutral, meaning eligibility will not be based on government officials making judgments about quality, topics, or any other part of the editorial process. Now here are some of the less obvious reasons why we love this bill (and, full disclosure, Rebuild Local News was the lead external sponsor of the bill and guided the crafting of the legislative language). It encourages investment in hiring journalists. It is a guaranteed tax benefit rather than a fixed amount of appropriated funds. That makes it different from the employment tax credit laws in Illinois, New York, and New Mexico, which each have a finite pool of money. Why does that matter? Because news organizations, investors, or philanthropists can make a decision to invest in growing a newsroom with the certainty that their contribution will be partly matched by the state. It’s the first law that’s well positioned to leverage that kind of additional outside support. If, for example, California’s foundations wanted to create a campaign to eliminate all news deserts, it just got a whole lot more achievable. It strongly helps small publishers while effectively balancing the needs of legacy outlets and startups, labor and capital, for-profits and nonprofits. We started shopping this employment credit approach in California in January. We then spent the next several months working with legislative staff and all the media groups to refine the language and policy, and with key legislators to find the best champions. This is a compromise in the best sense: It does not exclude larger companies from benefiting, but it does supersize the benefits for up to five employees, so the average per-person payment for smaller outlets will be larger than for the major… [TheTopNews] Read More.3 days ago
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