Food assistance used by more than 40 million Americans will not be distributed from November due to the ongoing US government shutdown, according to the US Department of Agriculture.
“Bottom line, the well has run dry,” the department said in a notice on its website …
President Donald Trump is trying to make the basketball gambling bust that rocked the sports world about himself.
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But when Trump, 79, weighed in, he put his own twist—and pettiness—on the subject.
“What’s worse, the NBA Players cheating at cards, and probably much else, or the Democrats cheating on Elections,” he began in a post on Truth Social.
“The 2020 Presidential Election, being Rigged and Stolen, is a far bigger SCANDAL. Look what happened to our Country when a Crooked Moron became our ‘President!’ We now know everything. I hope the DOJ pursues this with as much ‘gusto’ as befitting the biggest SCANDAL in American history!”
https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-hijacks-nba-scandal-to-dunk-on-favorite-adversary
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents detained a Texas father whose green card was revoked due to charges from when he was a teenager, his lawyers and wife told Newsweek.
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Roman Surovtsev, now 41 years old, immigrated to the United States from the Soviet Union when he was 4 years old. When he was a teenager, his green card was revoked after he pleaded guilty to charges including carjacking and burglary, NPR reported.
But he was not deported after his prison sentence. Surovtsev is technically stateless, as neither Russia nor Ukraine, the two countries to which the U.S. government initially sought to deport him, has been able to prove him as a citizen, his lawyers Eric Lee and Christopher Godshall-Bennett told Newsweek.
“The Trump administration is trying to send him to a country where he will be drafted into the army and sent to front, where there is a very, very high likelihood of death,” Lee said. “This is somebody that has lived in the United States since he was a child. Yes, he’s made mistakes. He’s paid the price through the criminal process, but he has two young U.S. citizen daughters, a U.S. citizen wife He’s got a job and reformed himself. There’s absolutely no reason why he’s being detained.”
https://www.newsweek.com/ice-detains-dad-after-green-card-revoked-teenage-crime-lawyer-10910015
He’s not deportable — neither Russia nor Ukraine will accept him as their citizen — and he’s kept his nose clean for over 20 years. He also has 3 family members (wife, 2 daughters) who are U.S. citizens.
A woman who has filed federal lawsuits accusing Donald Trump of raping her two decades ago, when she was 13, abruptly canceled a news conference Wednesday at which she was to detail her extraordinary claims against the GOP presidential nominee.
In the most recent suit, Trump’s accuser asserts that while she was exploring a modeling career in 1994, she attended a series of parties at the Manhattan home of prominent investor Jeffrey Epstein. She alleges that during those parties the real estate mogul tied her to a bed and raped her.
https://www.politico.com/story/2016/11/donald-trump-rape-accuser-lawsuits-230647
Tony DiMare’s family owns 4,000 acres of tomato farms across Florida and California. Sadly, his Florida crops are not looking good — mowed over and left to rot, like tomato vines across the state.
But it’s not growing conditions that are the problem. It’s economic ones.
DiMare told WSVN 7 Miami that President Donald Trump’s tariff and immigration policies are driving farmers to abandon their crops.
In January, he warned that Trump’s crackdown on migrants would squeeze farmers, who rely on migrants to pick produce.
“We have to secure our borders south and north, but you have to have a workforce in this country,” he told the Financial Post.
Deportations devastate farm workforce
About 50% of farm workers in the U.S. are undocumented migrants — including skilled supervisors and machine operators — according to Farmonaut, a farm technology company.
As the Trump administration proceeds with mass deportations of undocumented migrants, there are far fewer pickers in the fields, and crops are left to go bad.
One spoke to WSVN about fellow migrants leaving Florida each day. He spoke on condition of anonymity, concerned he might be deported himself
“A lot of people are really afraid, and sometimes they come, sometimes they don’t come,” he said. “And the harvest is lost because it cannot be harvested.”
The labor shortage also means Florida farmers have to pay more for labor. At the same time, they’re getting less money for their produce due to Trump’s tariff policies.
Tariffs upset traditional supply chain
From January through April, Trump’s threatened tariffs triggered Mexican suppliers to double or even triple tomato exports to the U.S. — before tariffs went into effect.
The result? The U.S. market was flooded with Mexican tomatoes. Florida farmers saw the wholesale price of a box of tomatoes plummet from $16 per box to $3 or $4. DiMare said tomato farmers need around $10 or $11 per box to break even.
“You can’t even afford to pick them right now,” said Heather Moehling, president of the Miami-Dade County Farm Bureau. “Between the cost of the labor and the inputs that goes in, it’s more cost-effective for the farmers to just plow them right now.”
It’s not just Florida tomato growers feeling the pinch. Canada has imposed a 25% tariff on U.S. watermelons in retaliation for Trump’s tariffs on Canadian products. DiMare knows one watermelon grower who’s lost Canadian customers to Mexican watermelon suppliers as a result.
Prepare for higher food costs
Farmonaut notes that the impacts of tariffs and immigration policy on farmers will have a knock-on effect in grocery stores. If U.S. farmers don’t have enough workers to harvest crops, Americans will have to buy more imported produce, and pay more due to tariffs.
The Food Policy Center at Hunter College of New York City warns that the resulting surge in food prices will drive inflation — “stressing household budgets across the nation, and particularly hurting families in areas with high food insecurity.”
While farmers have few options but to hope the political upheaval will end, consumers should prepare to mitigate those costs.
One way to do that is to buy a membership in a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) organization. You’ll be supporting local farmers and getting local, less costly produce delivered to your door.
In addition to shopping frugally by clipping coupons and shopping sales flyers deals, you can get creative in the kitchen. For example, you can limit food costs by planning weekly menus around seasonal and affordable foods.
Two weeks into a government shutdown with no end in sight, tensions are high and getting hotter among the people with the power to the end it.
At the U.S. Capitol this week, two Democratic senators confronted the Republican speaker of the House outside his office, accusing him of “covering up for pedophiles” by avoiding a vote to release more information on the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
On the same day, the Democratic House minority leader separately yelled at a Republican congressman to “keep your mouth shut.” And that’s just the start of it.
The testy scenes underscore an increasingly bitter rapport between America’s two major political parties, as the first government shutdown in seven years approaches the start of a third week. Lawmakers were making little effort to resolve their differences in public. The House of Representatives has not taken a vote in more than three weeks and the Senate has yet to work through a weekend since funding lapsed at the end of the fiscal year on Sept. 30.
At the same time, the stakes of the shutdown are rising. On Wednesday, Oct. 15, military service members will miss their first paycheck since the shutdown crisis began. Funding for a key food aid program relied on by millions of mothers and infants will likely run out of money in the coming days. And key economic data needed to calculate Social Security payments for more than 70 million Americans next year doesn’t seem to be coming anytime soon.
Members of Congress say they are starting to feel the pressure. “I’m trying to muster every ounce of Christian charity that I can,” Speaker Mike Johnson, R-Louisiana, said of dealing with the Democrats.
“It’s bare knuckles in this fight,” added Rep. Jimmy Gomez, D-California.
Senators confront speaker
On Wednesday, Oct. 8, two Democratic senators from Arizona were complaining about Johnson outside his office.
That’s when the speaker emerged and walked toward the senators, Ruben Gallego and Mark Kelly, who then criticized him over refusing to swear in a new Democratic congresswoman from their state during the shutdown.
Once Rep.-elect Adelita Grijalva officially takes office, they pointed out, she’ll likely deliver the final vote needed to pass a measure forcing the Justice Department to publicly release more Epstein files.
The senators accused Johnson of keeping members of the House of Representatives away from the Capitol in order to delay the Epstein vote.
“We’re going to do that as soon as we get back to work. But we need the lights turned back on,” Johnson told them, according to video from the news outlet NOTUS. “You guys are experts in red herrings … This has nothing to do with Epstein.”
“You just keep coming up with excuses,” Gallego fired back.
The fiery exchange drew the attention of security guards, staffers and reporters, many of whom stood nearby, phones drawn, watching intently. It ended with all three politicians talking over each at the same time. Video of the encounter spread online.
Johnson drew even more heat when he took calls on C-SPAN the next morning. A rotation of frustrated Americans criticized him for failing to negotiate a solution to the shutdown. One caller in particular, a woman who said she was a military wife in northern Virginia who lives paycheck-to-paycheck, told the speaker of the House that her “kids could die” if troops go without pay.
Top Democrat to congressman: ‘Keep your mouth shut’
In another acrimonious scene the same day, a conversation between a Republican congressman and the leader of House Democrats devolved into a shouting match.
Rep. Mike Lawler, R-New York, confronted House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-New York, about his refusal to support a one-year extension of expiring health insurance subsidies, which are at the center of the shutdown fight.
“It’s sad,” Lawler said, holding up a copy of a proposed bill to continue the subsidies, which come in the form of tax credits.
“Why don’t you just keep your mouth shut,” Jeffries said.
The ruckus drew a gaggle of onlookers, many of whom filmed the interaction, which went viral afterward. Talking to reporters after the fracas, Lawler said Democrats are “so full of (expletive), it’s not even funny.”
At a Cabinet meeting in the White House the next day, President Donald Trump weighed in on the shutdown with a series of jabs at the political oppoisiton. “We really don’t know who the hell is leading the Democrats,” Trump said.
Glimmers of bipartisanship
There are still some glimmers of bipartisanship in the halls of the Capitol.
Senators on both sides of the aisle are still talking to each other. Back-channel conversations continue among lawmakers on a potential health care deal that could help bring Democrats around to voting to reopen the government, though Sen. Markwayne Mullin, R-Oklahoma, described those negotiations this week as “stalled.”
Likewise, Gallego gave the GOP some credit. “I’ve been talking to my Republican friends,” he told reporters. “They do want to figure out a way out.”
http://usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/10/11/government-shutdown-trump-democrats/86608206007/
In a scathing critique of President Donald Trump, Gov. JB Pritzker on Tuesday accused the Republican president of deploying National Guard troops to the Democratic cities of Chicago and Portland based on fixations that stem in part from his being mentally impaired.
“This is a man who’s suffering dementia,” Pritzker said in a telephone interview with the Tribune. “This is a man who has something stuck in his head. He can’t get it out of his head. He doesn’t read. He doesn’t know anything that’s up to date. It’s just something in the recesses of his brain that is effectuating to have him call out these cities.
“And then, unfortunately, he has the power of the military, the power of the federal government to do his bidding, and that’s what he’s doing.”
The governor’s comments came as National Guard troops from Texas were assembling at a U.S. Army Reserve training center in far southwest suburban Elwood and Trump’s administration was moving forward with deploying 300 members of the Illinois National Guard for at least 60 days over the vocal and legal objections of Pritzker and other local elected leaders.
The Trump administration has said the troops are needed to protect federal agents and facilities involved in its ongoing deportation surge and has sought to do much the same in Portland, Oregon, though those efforts have been stymied so far by temporary court rulings. A federal judge in Chicago is expected to hold a hearing this week over the legal effort by Illinois and Chicago to block the deployments, which Pritzker and other local officials say is not only unnecessary but a violation of the Posse Comitatus Act that prohibits the use of U.S. military assets from taking part in law enforcement actions on domestic soil.
During the interview, Pritzker — who has been one of Trump’s harshest critics and is a potential 2028 presidential Democratic candidate — said the courts will play an integral role in challenging Trump’s efforts in Illinois and across the nation.
“We’re not going to go to war between the state of Illinois and the federal government, not taking up arms against the federal government,” Pritzker said. “But we are monitoring everything they’re doing, and using that monitoring to win in court.”
Pritzker also said he has not had any conversations with his staff or other Democratic governors regarding a so-called soft secession, a political and legal theory that has grown during Trump’s second term in which Democratic states would gradually withdraw their cooperation with the federal government, including withholding financial support, without formally leaving the Union.
“Preparing for and going to court with the law on our side and winning in court is important,” he continued. “It is the most important thing that we can do legally. If there are people who are suggesting there are things that we should do that are illegal. I would suggest to you, we’re not going to do those things.”
But even as the governor said he was counting on winning in the courts, Trump was openly exploring options to circumvent them.
Speaking in the Oval Office on Tuesday, the president reiterated that he was considering employing the two-century-old Insurrection Act to get around legal court orders that would deny him the ability to deploy National Guard troops to cities such as Chicago and Portland over governors’ objections.
“It’s been invoked before,” Trump said of the law, which the Brennan Center for Justice said has been used 30 times, starting with President George Washington, to quell the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794.
Trump says he’d consider Ghislaine Maxwell pardon and mentions Diddy in same breath as Epstein pal: ‘Have to take a look’
The Insurrection Act is an exception to Posse Comitatus and allows a president to deploy the military to “suppress rebellion” or “insurrection” when enforcing federal law becomes “impracticable.”
Past Supreme Court rulings have given the president broad discretionary powers to decide if conditions have been met to invoke the Insurrection Act, but it has left the door open for judicial review to determine if a president invoked the law “in bad faith” or in going beyond “a permitted range of honest judgment.” And the actions of the military, once invoked, are also subject to judicial review.
The last time the Insurrection Act was invoked was by President George H.W. Bush during the Los Angeles riots of 1992, with the support of California Gov. Pete Wilson. It also was used in Chicago in 1968 by President Lyndon Johnson to curb rioting over the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. with the backing of Mayor Richard J. Daley and acting Gov. Samuel Shapiro.
But the last time it was invoked over the opposition of a sitting governor was in 1965 when Johnson used it to federalize troops to protect civil rights marchers in Montgomery, Alabama, over the objections of segregationist Gov. George Wallace.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower famously invoked the act in 1957 to order the Arkansas National Guard to stand down from its orders from Gov. Orval Faubus to prevent the segregation of Little Rock’s public schools following the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education ruling. Eisenhower also deployed the Army’s 101st Airborne Division to protect Black students attending classes.
As Pritzker has sought to counter Trump on nearly every front, he has joined California Gov. Gavin Newsom in threatening to leave the bipartisan National Governors Association because the organization hasn’t spoken out against Trump’s National Guard mobilizations.
In the Tribune interview, Pritzker noted how nearly all 50 state governors at the time signed on to an April 29, 2024, letter to then-President Joe Biden’s administration opposing the military’s push in Congress to forcibly transfer Air National Guard units performing space missions into the U.S. Space Force without the governors’ consent.
Among those who signed were then-GOP South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, who now heads the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, overseeing the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency and Border Patrol.
“Well, I’m somebody who likes to reach out and do things in a bipartisan fashion, and I’ve attended NGA events and had friendly relationships with some Republican governors in the past, and the NGA has an important role. But not if it’s unwilling to stand up in this moment and speak on behalf of states’ rights the way that it always has,” Pritzker said. “So I don’t know how I can trust that the NGA actually does stand up for the states with Republicans in charge, apparently they’re just going to do Donald Trump’s bidding.”
Pritzker also continued to defend the process and timing of the Illinois attorney general’s office in filing a lawsuit to halt the National Guard activations, which wasn’t filed until Monday, two days after U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth issued a memo about the Illinois National Guard deployments. This is despite Pritzker and Attorney General Kwame Raoul knowing for weeks that Trump had threatened to send the military to the streets of the Chicago area.
“You have to understand legal proceedings. In order for you to bring a lawsuit of any sort, you have to have what’s called ripeness. It has to be ripe. That means there has to be some action that’s taken to demonstrate that the wrong is being effectuated,” said Pritzker, calling any questions about the timing of the suit “a false avenue to follow.” “Just because someone says they’re going to call out the National Guard to do this in Illinois, until they do, you can’t file suit.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/gov-jb-pritzker-says-president-233400557.html
