Good morning, AlterNet America family.
Welcome to the Saturday Wrapup, where I give you my thoughts on the week’s biggest news as I consume my caffeine with you.
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America is eight months into a war with Iran, so naturally it’s time to open a second location.
CBS News has obtained an internal Army message that indicates the U.S. military is quietly building the capability to conduct a new ground operation. The message does not name Cuba, but several U.S. officials told the network the island is the target.
The message asks Army Reserve commands to report the availability of six types of units to U.S. Southern Command, including military police, medical teams and logistics support. With a deadline of 90 to 120 days, the earliest action possible could come in late December.
Earlier this year, CBS reported that U.S. forces conducted surveys of sea approaches and the seafloor around Cuba. Planners at the Pentagon had also considered an air assault involving thousands of soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division, but officials stressed that no decision had been made at the time.
Trump said in March he expected to have “the honor of taking Cuba,” adding, “Whether I free it, take it, I think I could do anything I want with it, if you want to know the truth.” At the United Nations this week, he claimed Cuba’s communist government “will fall” and said Marco Rubio was “deep into negotiations” with Havana.
The Cuban delegation walked out during his speech.
The rats are not leaving the ship so much as pretending they were never on it.
The panic is beginning to set in for Republicans facing a historic blue wave in the midterms. TIME reports that the party’s own internal polling shows them losing ground in states Trump easily won two years ago with less than six weeks to go until Election Day.
Tim Scott, who runs the NRSC, told the caucus in a closed-door briefing Wednesday that the strategy for the midterms is now all defensive. The party is fighting to hang on to seats in Texas, Iowa, Maine and Alaska. And now North Carolina and Georgia are completely out of the picture.
In Iowa, where Trump won by 13 points in 2024, Republican state lawmakers were told by their own pollsters that anyone in a 15-point district is now in the margin of error, conservative radio host Steve Deace reported. If you’re within 10 points of the leader, you’re in the hole.
Iowa Rep. Zach Nunn voted last week to rein in the president’s war with Iran, one month after campaigning with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Instead of bragging about her Trump endorsement, the GOP nominee for the state’s open Senate seat, Rep. Ashley Hinson, is running ads about working with Democrats.
House Republicans and their allies have bought $485 million in ad time from Aug. 1 through Election Day. That’s only for districts Trump already won.
Even a ouija board would have produced more accurate results.
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin announced in July that the department had found 15,903 noncitizens on Nevada’s voter rolls. Now, after months of scrutiny by Nevada election officials, that number is zero.
At an August meeting between DHS officials and Nevada election officers, Nevada Secretary of State Chief Deputy C. Murphy Hebert asked if that number had been vetted. DHS official Kimberley Vogt said the department had “done something with it” to arrive at 15,000, but it had not performed a full manual review of every name.
DHS later revised the number down to 185 people it said were definitively noncitizens on the voter rolls. Those 185 names were reviewed by Greg Ott, a Nevada deputy attorney general, who wrote to DHS this week that all of them were citizens. “You have provided nothing of substance to suggest otherwise,” he wrote.
DHS has since lowered its claim to 6,218, but even that number is meaningless. Ott said DHS is comparing immigration case numbers to voter records, which do not indicate whether someone is a citizen. A match only tells you the number exists in both systems, not that the person attached to it is ineligible to vote.
Most Bond villains would look at Larry Ellison’s portfolio and ask him to tone it down.
A settlement this week between state attorneys general and Paramount Skydance could pave the way for David Ellison’s $111 billion merger with Warner Bros. Discovery. A federal judge on Tuesday questioned the “factual and legal underpinnings” of the pact, but approval is still expected.
Last year, David’s Skydance Media bought Paramount, which owns CBS, Paramount Pictures and Paramount+. The deal was backed by his father Larry Ellison, the billionaire founder of Oracle.
The Trump administration is enabling the Ellisons’ media monopoly at every step. Trump helped broker Oracle’s co-ownership of TikTok earlier this year, and his FCC approved the Paramount deal after David Ellison made editorial concessions. Larry Ellison reportedly promised Trump he would “clean up CNN” if the Warner Bros. deal went through.
Oracle holds a nearly $7 billion contract to manage data for the Pentagon. Larry Ellison bragged more than a decade ago about its ability to track how long a person lingers in a particular aisle of a specific store, and said 5 billion people were already in the company’s “ID Graph.” He made a joke that there were only 2 billion to go.
Larry Ellison told investors in 2024 that “citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on.” At the World Governments Summit in Dubai in February 2025, he said countries should “unify” all of their national data into a single database that AI could study.
The agreement would allow the Ellisons to use their media platforms to amplify fears about crime and terrorism, and then profit when the government buys Oracle’s surveillance technology in response.
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