Good afternoon. I’m Ryan Rose, and this is AlterNet America. Please take a moment to click the ❤️ and restack this post. The oligarchs’ platforms are trying to keep stories like the ones below from hitting your feeds, and this helps us break through.
CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss pushed reporters to chase debunked conspiracy theories about two Democratic Senate candidates. Trump ordered “IMMEDIATE” construction on a public golf course in spite of a federal judge’s order. Florida Republicans filed a lawsuit threatening criminal prosecution of anyone who repeats a grand jury ruling against the state. And MAGA was caught planting a heckler in Abdul El-Sayed’s audience.
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In case you were wondering what CBS stands for, it’s now “Conspiracy Broadcasting Service.”
CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss pushed her journalists to pursue debunked conspiracy theories about Democratic Senate candidates Abdul El-Sayed and James Talarico, according to a recent Semafor report. Her own reporters resisted the assignments, calling the coverage baseless.
Weiss personally wrote an August headline claiming that El-Sayed’s deleted tweets about the September 11 attacks deserved scrutiny. She also pushed for reporters to investigate supposed ties to the 9/11 terror attacks, despite the fact that he has denounced the Muslim Brotherhood numerous times.
Weiss also wanted reporters to look into a claim that Talarico had been treated at an Ohio mental health facility after missing nine days on the campaign trail with the flu. The facility itself publicly denied that Talarico was ever a patient there, and the New York Times reviewed security camera footage that showed him at his Austin home during the time in question.
Weiss has a history of killing or heavily editing CBS stories that conflict with her political views. She previously killed a report on the CECOT megaprison in El Salvador, and personally intervened in a story about Israeli settler violence in the West Bank that nearly drove correspondent Lesley Stahl to quit.
Trump has never once told FEMA to act “IMMEDIATELY.”
Trump announced on Truth Social early Monday that construction on the East Potomac Park golf course would begin “IMMEDIATELY,” defying a federal judge’s order that requires three days’ notice before any irreparable changes are made to the site. Trump wrote that the government does not “need an approval” to move forward.
U.S. District Judge Ana C. Reyes issued the notice after a hearing in which she said she was “furious” with the government for cutting down hundreds of trees without warning. The government said the trees were being removed as part of routine maintenance and were not linked to the renovation plan, but Reyes ordered the cutting to stop until October 26.
The Department of Justice on Friday filed a motion asking Reyes to be removed from the case, accusing her of bias against the Trump administration. Reyes denied the motion, saying all she’s done is require the government to follow the same rules it would be subject to in any federal courtroom.
The renovation could cost between $20 million and $49 million. East Potomac Park currently charges under $50 for a round of golf, making it one of the most affordable courses in the Washington area. Trump has not said what the new course will charge, but his private clubs start at $350,000 just to join.
The first rule of Hope Florida is you don’t talk about Hope Florida.
Late Friday, the Republican Party of Florida filed a lawsuit to block a Democratic campaign ad mentioning the Hope Florida scandal, where a grand jury found $10 million in taxpayer money was secretly funneled to Republican political committees. The party argues that repeating the findings constitutes a first-degree misdemeanor and criminal contempt of court.
The money came from a Medicaid settlement that was supposed to go back to taxpayers but was instead funneled to First Lady Casey DeSantis’s charity. From there, the grand jury found it traveled through a series of shell organizations and made its way to political committees, including one controlled by current Attorney General James Uthmeier.
The suit names the Florida Democratic Party, three statewide Democratic candidates, and the owners of 11 television stations in Central Florida. Station managers also received letters from the party’s lawyer threatening criminal referrals to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.
The lawsuit was filed in rural Highlands County where none of the defendants are based, and the complaint’s caption places the case in the wrong judicial circuit. When asked why Highlands County was selected, Republican Party chair Evan Power said he did not know.
For $250,000, you’d think they could have hired someone who was good at this.
Republicans paid a senator’s staffer to pose as a young voter and ambush Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed at a town hall in Michigan Saturday. The plan backfired so badly that the resulting video clip has been viewed more than 13 million times on X, making it the most widely shared moment of El-Sayed’s campaign.
The operative, who identified himself as Tommy, asked El-Sayed to denounce the Muslim Brotherhood. El-Sayed rejected the bigoted premise, and asked Tommy if he would renounce attempts to inject religious doctrine into American law.
Later reports showed Tommy is actually Thomas Teepell, operations director for Missouri Republican Senator Josh Hawley and the son of a former chief of staff to Louisiana Republican Governor Bobby Jindal. Teepell’s father runs a consulting firm, Breakthrough LLC, which received $250,000 from Jindal’s dark money group for influencer marketing against El-Sayed.
The Michigan Daily previously reported that the conservative PAC America Next paid College Republicans $200 each to attend El-Sayed’s events and ask confrontational questions. The group chat messages obtained by the paper showed organizers coaching students on what questions to ask at a town hall in Flint.
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Pennsylvania Residents Reject $10,000 Cash Payoffs to Allow Amazon Data Center. Residents of Hazle Township, Pennsylvania are saying no to a developer’s offer to give every person in town $10,000 in exchange for allowing Amazon Web Services to build a huge data center campus in their community. Almost 17 percent of the township’s population is below the federal poverty line, but residents are calling the offer a bribe and warning that property values will collapse if the project moves forward. When residents confronted a local township supervisor about the payments at a town meeting in August, he shrugged and said he did not even know whether the offer was legitimate.
** Illinois Eliminates $1.4 Billion in Medical Debt for Nearly 700,000 Residents.** Illinois spent $10 million on a state program that wiped out more than $1.4 billion in medical debt for 694,000 residents, meaning every penny spent erased a dollar of debt. The state partners with nonprofit Undue Medical Debt to buy portfolios of unpaid bills, and those who qualify receive a letter in the mail explaining how much debt was wiped away. One resident had $900,000 in medical bills eliminated, and the average person saw about $1,200 disappear. Together with a similar Cook County program, the two initiatives have cleared $2.4 billion in debt for about 1.5 million people across the state.
USDA Approves Blight-Tolerant American Chestnut Tree. The USDA announced it is deregulating the Darling 54 American chestnut, a genetically engineered tree that can withstand the fungal blight that wiped out about 4 billion American chestnuts in the first half of the 20th century. The trees made up roughly a quarter of all hardwoods stretching from Maine to northern Georgia, and the blight, first spotted at the Bronx Zoo in 1904, almost eradicated them from eastern forests. It is the first time a tree modified for environmental restoration has gone through federal regulatory scrutiny and scientists at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry who came up with the tree say it can bloom in as little as five years.
** Bison Reintroduced to Oklahoma Have Restored the Grassland Ecosystem.** In 1993, 300 bison were released onto the Joseph H. Williams Tallgrass Prairie Preserve in Oklahoma, and today that herd numbers between 2,100 and 2,700 animals that are actively restoring the grassland ecosystem. Dietary studies show that 99 percent of a bison’s diet is grass and the animals avoid eating flowering plants, which has helped the preserve become home to more than 750 species of flora. The bison also help decrease the risk of wildfire by eating as much as 30 pounds of dry grass a day and their dung is taken underground by beetles, storing carbon and fertilizing the soil. Today, the preserve encompasses more than 39,000 acres inside the Osage Reservation, where conservation has become a collaborative effort among ranchers, environmentalists, and Osage Nation landowners.
