10.17 The Los Angeles Dodgers defeat the Milwaukee Brewers 4-1, sweeping their series 4-0 to win the National League championship. In six plus innings of work, the starting pitcher for the Dodgers, Shohei Ohtani, strikes out ten batters and hits three home runs, one of which left the stadium. In 150 years of Major League Baseball, no player has hit three home runs and struck out ten.
10.17 Prince Andrew surrenders the use of his title, the Duke of York
10.16 With less than a year in his post as head of the U.S. Southern Command, Adm. Alvin Holsey, who is overseeing the Pentagon’s escalating attacks against boats in the Caribbean Sea that the Trump administration says are smuggling drugs . announced that he is stepping down. According to an unnamed official, Holsey had raised concerns about the mission and the attacks on the alleged drug boats.
10.16 Justice Department indicts John Bolton.
10.16 The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit issued a decision upholding U.S. District Court Judge April M. Perry’s Oct. 9 decision to bar the White House from deploying troops in Chicago.
10.16 Susan Stamberg, Founding Mother of NPR, dies at 87.
10.16 Ace Frehley dies at 74.
10.15 My colleague Josh Robertson posted this photo on Facebook. It was taken in Bushwick at a memorial service for Tim Mohr, and shows Playboy colleagues Lee Froelich, Scott Anderson, Jay, Josh, Chris Napolitano, Rocky Rakovic, Bob Love, Jennifer Ryan Jones and Conor Hogan.
10.11 Diane Keaton dies at 79.
10.10 Mike Johnson: ‘We refer to it by its more accurate description, ‘The Hate America Rally.’ I’m not sure how anybody can refute that.”
10.9 Israel approves Gaza deal that would free hostages and prisoners
10.9 Justice Department indicts Letitia James.
10.6 Trump authorizes deployment of 300 National Guard troops to Chicago.
10.6 Marjorie Taylor Greene on X: “I’m not towing the party line on this, or playing loyalty games. I’m a Republican and won’t vote for illegals to have any tax payer funded healthcare or benefits. I’m AMERICA ONLY!!! I’m carving my own lane. And I’m absolutely disgusted that health insurance premiums will DOUBLE if the tax credits expire this year.”
10.4 A federal judge in Portland Oregon rules that Trump lacks the authority to deploy Oregon National Guard members to protect federal buildings in Portland. Judge Karen Immergut said that deploying active-duty troops to Portland would violate the US Constitution and defy federal law barring military involvement in domestic law enforcement. She also argued that Trump’s order did not reflect the reality on the ground, describing the protests at an immigration processing facility in South Portland as “small and uneventful.” “The President’s determination was simply untethered to the facts,” wrote Immergut.
| 10.4 James Carville in conversation with William Kristol: “I want to have a presidential nominating thing because we have a lot of people. And sometimes these people call me and ask [me to] say something. My advice: I want all of you to run. Just get up there. You do more service by running and showing people that you can string a sentence together, that you know something about the United States beyond coastal cities, and you have some degree of energy and spunk and movement about you. But right now, that’s what people think about us. And I know that from a thousand people calling me looking at a thousand focus groups. When you mention the Democrats, people said, “Well, I don’t know. They’re for the cities and they’re old….” When you win, [the old image] goes away. It sounds so absurd to say this, but people have to be reminded: In politics, winning is everything. If you lose, your own people don’t like you. It doesn’t do any good. And if the Democrats have a good 2026, the image of the party will pop up. All of the bad polling is a result of Democrats do not like their party because they lost. Why would I like them? And the way that you cure that is, well, you win.” |
10.4 Sanae Takaichi becomes Japan’s first female prime minister.
10.3 Trump: “Portland, Oregon, every time I look at that place it’s burning down. There’s fires all over the place,” he said. “When a store owner, and there are very few of them left, when a store owner rebuilds a store, they build it out of plywood, they don’t put up storefronts anymore, they just put wood up, because they know it’s going to be ripped down. Then I hear how wonderful it is. It’s not wonderful, it’s a disaster. That’s almost an insurrection.”
10.2 Lawrence O’Donnell onMSNBC: “Tonight, The New York Times is lost. The New York Times has no idea how to cover the madness of Donald Trump. And so The New York Times ignores it, just as the madness of King George III had to be ignored by the London Times in 1789. The Washington press corps is lost along with The New York Times. There is no one working at The New York Times tonight who, when they were editing their high school newspapers and dreaming about one day working at The New York Times, ever imagined they would have to cover a President of the United States who uses the official social media communications tools of the White House — government communications paid for by the taxpayer — to post fake videos of the first Black minority leader of the United States House of Representatives and the first Jewish minority leader of the United States Senate.
“When they were working on their high school newspapers, they had no idea there would be a President of the United States who would post videos on a government-operated social media account that put fake words into Chuck Schumer’s mouth, which AI makes sound exactly like Chuck Schumer, and that fake language in that video would be filled with Donald Trump-style profanity — language Chuck Schumer would never use in public, but language that the current President of the United States has shocked the world with repeatedly. …As every adult is supposed to know, there are places where profanity is not appropriate. No one taught Donald Trump that. Who’s going to bother to stop to talk about Donald Trump’s use of profanity when he is sending troops into American cities that he lies about being a war zone? I agree that it’s just too small an item in the daily transgressions of Donald Trump.
“But remember, don’t ever forget that the American news media almost unanimously agrees that Hillary Clinton lost her presidential campaign because she used the word ‘deplorable’ once to describe some Trump voters, some of whom proved themselves willing to behave deplorably and violently for Donald Trump on January 6th, when they became the only people in American history to attack the Capitol of the United States on behalf of their presidential candidate. There are people working at The New York Times today who will insist to you that Hillary Clinton’s use of the word ‘deplorable’ was in and of itself deplorable.
“Those same people have nothing to say about Donald Trump’s use of language. Absolutely nothing. Those people believed that you cannot possibly be elected president in this country if you use the word ‘deplorable’ to describe any voters in America. Donald Trump calls us ‘vermin.’ Donald Trump got elected President calling American voters ‘vermin’ if they didn’t vote for him. Hitler’s word, ‘vermin.’ Donald Trump is now using fake AI sound of Chuck Schumer saying that all Democrats are pieces of crap. Of course, he doesn’t use the word crap. I just cleaned that up. But all Democrats, all those wise pundits who’ve been telling you for years that Hillary Clinton couldn’t possibly be elected in this country if she’s going to use a word like ‘deplorable’ in a political campaign, referring to voters on the other side, can only make that argument now by completely ignoring every single thing Donald Trump has said publicly about voters who do not vote for him, every single thing he said. When Hillary Clinton used the word ‘deplorable,’ it was in a private fundraiser. She did not intend for it to be heard outside of that room. …But Donald Trump says, deliberately and clearly into microphones for all the world to hear, that all Democrats are ‘lunatics.’ That’s his word, ‘lunatics.’ Donald Trump thinks 75 million Americans are ‘lunatics’ for voting for Kamala Harris. Donald Trump has said the ugliest things about American voters that any American politician has ever said, and Donald Trump went on to win the Electoral College after saying those things. And The New York Times simply doesn’t know how to handle what Donald Trump says and does. …
“Tonight, The New York Times and the Washington press corps are drowning in the deviancy and perversity of Donald Trump and his White House, all of whom, everyone working in that White House, supports this deeply perverse use of government-operated social media to put out poison, and what is clearly raw insanity, from the darkness of Donald Trump’s mind, and the White House press corps has just drowned in it. They’re lost in it. They have internalized it. They have fully accepted it.
“That is what The New York Times and the Washington media have done so far this week. They have accepted it, to the point that when The New York Times wrote its big editorial about the government shutdown, everything it wanted to say about it, titled ‘The Real Stakes of the Shutdown,’ they didn’t mention what Donald Trump did instead of negotiating a way out of the shutdown. They didn’t mention what he has done on social media, putting a sombrero on Hakeem Jeffries’ head, putting fake words in Chuck Schumer’s mouth, profane, awful, stupid, Trump words. They didn’t even mention it.
“The real stakes of the shutdown are insanity versus sanity. And the press corps does not know how to face that. The New York Times refuses to confront and identify the insanity, refuses to even describe it. The Times editorial about the shutdown is a very well-reasoned and clear, solid editorial all the way. It says, ‘The two parties are fighting about is whether Americans should have access to affordable health care. President Trump is seeking to deprive millions of Americans of their health insurance, and Senate Democrats are refusing to acquiesce.
“That is a clear presentation of the stakes in the shutdown prior to the outburst of public Trump insanity. The editorial ends in the classic style that everyone working at The New York Times mastered in their high school newspapers. And it reads like something from the 20th century. It reads like something long before the existence of Trump madness in our government. It reads like something you could have written about Bill Clinton in the White House and Newt Gingrich as Speaker of the House. It says, ‘It is incumbent on the President and Congress to reopen the government as soon as possible and commit to preventing Americans from having to pay too much for health insurance next year. The only way forward is to negotiate a compromise. It’s time to start talking.’
“How lost is that? What century are they in? What fantasy world do they live in that would allow them to type those sentences? They could have written that line in any editorial about any government shutdown during any other presidency. But when you read it now, you see how lost the Times is.
“‘It’s time to start talking’ to a man who refuses to talk to you and only posts social media video lying about you and ridiculing you. Talk to him. No one in the history of governing in the United States of America has ever had to talk to a person that crazy about anything, ever. And the Times says, ‘It’s time to start talking.’ The entire editorial does not find the space to make a single reference to the madness of Donald Trump as even a factor in the government shutdown or in the way out of the government shutdown.
“And here, I guess, is its reference to Donald Trump’s insane social media posting: ‘He mixed bombastic social media blasts and threats to fire thousands of federal workers if Democrats did not provide the votes for his plan to keep the government open.’ Bombastic social media blasts. That’s what they are. How very polite. No, they’re not bombastic. They are insane. Democratic congresswoman Madeleine Dean approached the Republican Speaker of the House to talk about the Trump madness, and he appeared to offer nodding agreement that Donald Trump is unwell. …He could have said, ‘No, the President is not unwell.’ Maybe he meant to say that, but he didn’t. It was taken as a given in the conversation. He nods when he hears ‘The President is unwell.’ His response, as he’s nodding, is, ‘A lot of folks on your side are, too.’ The word ‘too’ there indicates similarity to what was just said, meaning, similarity to Trump. The plain language of that is the Speaker, in effect, is agreeing that Trump is unwell and simply saying that other people are unwell. That’s the Speaker’s defense of Trump being unwell. He’s not the only one. …The Republican Speaker of the House has to be shocked by what Donald Trump has done on social media. We know he is shocked. But like all Republicans in Washington, he processes the shock instantly and knows he will never dare publicly say a negative word about it because he spends every working moment of his life as a coward. He has taken, in effect, an oath of cowardice to Donald Trump. He’s not the Speaker of the House. He’s the Speaker of Trump in the House. …
“I had never presumed that I can do a better job than The New York Times. I never presumed that I could do a better job than anyone who’s at bat in Yankee Stadium out there who strikes out. And so, it’s not with some sense of superiority that I find The New York Times has struck out in the face of the madness of Donald Trump this week, which has reached new extremes that we haven’t seen before, even from Donald Trump. The White House staffers who live with Donald Trump’s insanity up close have obviously decided it cannot be defended, and the only thing to do is pretend there’s nothing crazy about it. That’s what Donald Trump’s faithful Vice President tried to do yesterday. And now the White House says they will continue to post that video at government expense on official White House communications and make the sombrero bigger every day.
“That’s what the children in the White House are going to do. This is the first President in the first White House that has decided, as JD Vance did yesterday, that a shutdown is funny. They’ve decided it’s funny. JD Vance thinks the shutdown is an opportunity for jokes and that the sombrero stuff is funny. He didn’t explain what’s funny about it. Prior to the existence of the Trump White House, whenever the disaster of a shutdown would occur, everyone on the White House took the situation very, very seriously. They didn’t have to suppress jokes. They weren’t making jokes about it, no matter who the President was.
“And so, the crisis of this week’s publicly flaring madness from the White House is made all the worse by the crisis of The New York Times and the Washington press corps taking it all as business as usual. They have internalized Trump madness in their coverage. They have lost their ability to react to it. But their outrage will be fully revived if a Democratic candidate for President or if a Democratic President ever says a single negative thing about any kind of American voters ever, anywhere. The Washington press corps’ outrage mechanism is sleeping tonight, but it will be fully operative again once they have a Democrat to aim it at.
“That’s not a partisan statement on my part. It is simply an observable fact. You all saw it. We’ve all seen it. They cannot pretend this isn’t true. We all saw them scream endlessly at Karine Jean-Pierre, Joe Biden’s press secretary. We all saw them scream directly at Joe Biden in his face when asking him questions. And we all see that they do not dare ever do anything like that in the Trump White House. They can never, ever deny again, that they do indeed have a double standard, and the double standard of coverage favors Trump madness. It accepts Trump madness. And if a Democratic President gets one word wrong in a sentence, he doesn’t get a chance to correct it. He’s immediately judged to be too old for the job. The double standard is there, and it’s going to be operating for the next three years of this White House coverage. They’re lost. We could only hope that they find their way.”
10.2 Mark Robichaux in the Washington Post: “[Here’s the] undeniable truth: “The Late Show” stopped being worth the cost. And the old model it represents — celebrity guests, scripted monologues, musical acts — was built for a media world that no longer exists. YouTube, TikTok, podcasts and streaming have flattened the attention economy. Younger audiences aren’t sitting through 60 minutes of middling entertainment to catch a joke that will be viral by morning. The annual production cost of “The Late Show” — salaries, studio, travel, band, etc. — is estimated around $100 million, while losses have been reported at $40 million or more. Meanwhile, the broader economics of late night have cratered: Ad revenue across the genre plunged from $439 million in 2018 to just $220 million by 2024, according to media analytics firm Guideline. That’s not a dip. It’s a collapse that mirrors the rapid decline in both viewership and advertiser interest.”
10.1 Jane Goodall dies at 91.
