Good afternoon. I’m Ryan Rose, and this is AlterNet America.
Welcome to another special edition where every story is positive! I wish I could do these regularly, but there’s just not enough positive news being reported on. Still, I promise to do them when I can. And notice I said “being reported on” — just because I can’t find it doesn’t mean good things aren’t happening.
Our main stories this evening: Rep. Al Green has filed new articles of impeachment against Donald Trump, accusing him of running ICE and Border Patrol as paramilitary police forces. The Washington Post has been ordered to rehire the Black opinion columnist it fired for posting about Charlie Kirk. Rural Texas conservatives are so angry about data centers that they are planning to vote for a Democrat for governor. And California Democrats are stepping in after Shasta County’s outgoing elections chief hired a convicted election denier to run the midterms.
AlterNet America was launched as a direct response to MAGA billionaires buying up networks like CBS and newspapers like the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times. We’re going all-in on the bet that reader-supported journalism can compete directly with the billionaires by being the one thing they can’t buy. We’re incredibly grateful to all the free subscribers who have signed up to receive our newsletters in recent weeks. But if you’ve been thinking about making the leap to become a paying subscriber, this is the time when it matters the most. Please upgrade today.
If at first you don’t succeed, the president is still committing impeachable offenses.
Democratic Rep. Al Green of Texas filed new articles of impeachment against Trump on Monday, this time accusing him of using Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection as “vicious, quota-driven, unaccountable paramilitary police forces.”
The articles name four people killed by the agencies in 2026, including Renee Good and Alex Pretti in January, and Lorenzo Salgado Araujo and Johan Sebastian Duran Guerrero in July. Democrats have been urging the administration to reform its enforcement tactics since their deaths, so far without success.
Green was the first member of Congress to introduce articles of impeachment during Trump’s first term, and he filed another round in June 2025 over the unauthorized strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities. That effort was tabled by a vote of 344 to 79, with 128 Democrats voting to shelve it.
Trump has been impeached twice by the House, once in 2019 and once in 2021, though neither resulted in conviction. Nobody expects the measure to succeed in a Republican-controlled House either, but Green has always seemed more interested in the record than the result.
Firing your only Black opinion columnist for calling out racism is the kind of decision that sounds even worse when you have to defend it in front of an arbitrator.
A private arbitrator has ordered the Washington Post to reinstate Karen Attiah, the opinion columnist it fired last September after she posted on Bluesky in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s shooting death. The arbitrator found that the Post violated its labor agreement and did not have sufficient cause to terminate her.
Attiah made a series of posts in the days after Kirk was killed in Utah, only one of which actually mentioned Kirk by name. It paraphrased something Kirk himself had said about Black women not having the “brain processing power” to be taken seriously.
The Post said her posts were “unacceptable,” “gross misconduct,” and were “endangering the physical safety” of her co-workers. The arbitrator dismissed all of those claims, and ordered the Post to immediately reinstate her.
The Washington Post Guild cheered the decision, with the chair saying journalists can’t work at an organization where they fear they’ll be fired for doing their jobs. You’d have thought a newspaper with the slogan “Democracy Dies in Darkness” would already know that.
Everything is bigger in Texas, including the number of Republicans who are about to vote for a Democrat.
Greg Abbott is running for a fourth term as governor, and is losing support in the last place any Republican would expect. Rural Texans are furious with data centers, and a $33 billion electric transmission project has only poured gasoline on the fire.
Abbott issued an order in August halting new data center approvals, but that hasn’t comforted voters. A Republican county commissioner in West Texas told Politico he sees the data centers as “the straws that broke the camel’s back,” and a Republican voter in Hood County said she believes the entire pause is “all smoke and mirrors.”
Polls from Fox News and Texas A&M have Abbott ahead of Democratic challenger, state Rep. Gina Hinojosa, by one point. His approval among rural voters has fallen from 63 percent in 2018 to 48 percent in 2026, according to the Texas Politics Project.
Texas hasn’t elected a Democratic governor in more than 35 years and has not sent a Democrat to the Senate since 1993. Both of those streaks are now in danger simultaneously, as Democrat James Talarico is also polling within a point of Republican Ken Paxton in the Senate race.
Fool me once, shame on you. Hire the same person to do it again, shame on Shasta County.
U.S. Senators Alex Padilla and Adam Schiff have written to the California Secretary of State urging maximum oversight after Shasta County’s outgoing elections chief, Clint Curtis, announced that he wants to hire Tina Peters as a consultant ahead of the November midterms.
Peters, a former clerk in Mesa County, Colorado, was convicted in 2024 on seven criminal counts for tampering with voting machines in a scheme to show that Trump lost the 2020 election. She was sentenced to nine years, but served less than two. In May, the Democratic governor of Colorado commuted her sentence and she was paroled in June.
Curtis himself was censured by the Shasta County Board of Supervisors for violating personnel policies, and voters rejected him in the June primary. His replacement normally would take office in January, but Curtis has made clear he intends to bring Peters on board before then.
CNN has reported that Peters recently traveled to Washington to meet with Trump administration officials, where she promoted the idea that the president could use emergency powers to seize control over the midterms. So much for the rehabilitative power of the American prison system.
There is a reason the stories above may not reach you through your television. Too many media outlets are being hollowed out from within by billionaire owners who want to censor journalism to curry favor with the administration. Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post. The LA Times is owned by a MAGA billionaire. But AlterNet America remains committed to calling it like it is.
This is all because we’re entirely funded by readers. We don’t have an owner to please, advertisers who get spooked when we show a spine, or an FCC license to maintain. But we’re behind on our fundraising numbers.
If just one in 20 people who read this become paying subscribers, we can fund our entire reporting budget. Will you be one of the five percent?
Thanks for reading. We’ll see you tomorrow.
Turning Point USA Chapter President Quits After J.D. Vance’s Disastrous Campus Visit. Caroline Mattox, the president of the University of Georgia’s Turning Point USA chapter, has resigned from her position after an abysmal visit from JD Vance. The crowd that came to see the Vice President speak filled only a quarter of the arena, and CEO Erika Kirk backed out at the last minute, citing security concerns. TPUSA’s Andrew Kolvet tried to blame the empty seats on left-wing protesters supposedly reserving tickets, which Mattox addressed in her resignation letter by writing that “Charlie spent his life fighting for truth, and I do not believe he would stand for the blatant dishonesty now being spread by the organization that he built.” The University of Arkansas chapter disbanded entirely last month after Erika Kirk visited, meaning she has personally closed more TPUSA chapters than any liberal protest ever has.
** Planned Parenthood Can Refer Indiana Patients to Abortion Providers in Other States.** The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit has decided that Planned Parenthood may continue referring pregnant minors in Indiana to states where abortion is legal. The court upheld an injunction that blocked a 2017 state law from taking effect that would have prohibited organizations from assisting minors in obtaining abortions without parental consent, ruling that giving people factual information about the procedure is speech protected by the First Amendment. The court said much of what Planned Parenthood was telling patients was already available online, so Indiana was banning a doctor from saying what a teen could look up in 30 seconds.
New York City Unveils $4 Billion Plan to Finally Rebuild Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the city’s Department of Transportation announced plans Monday to rehabilitate the city-owned portion of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway from Atlantic Avenue to Sands Street. The infrastructure is 20 years beyond its design life and now carries more than 130,000 vehicles per day, more than twice its design capacity. The project includes building a temporary, two-level bypass highway along Furman Street to divert traffic while repairs are made to the existing structure. Construction is expected to begin in 2030 and will take about 10 years to complete at a cost of about $4 billion. The city first started planning to fix the structure in 2006, which means it only took 24 years to announce that they would start in four more.
Solar Is on Track to Become the World’s Largest Source of Electricity by 2032. Solar will be the world’s biggest source of electricity by 2032 as prices fall and manufacturers build more panels than the world currently knows what to do with, according to BloombergNEF’s New Energy Outlook 2026. The latest Middle East conflict alone has hastened the transition, by reminding the entire planet what happens when your energy supply depends on stable shipping lanes through a war zone. Global investment in the energy transition hit a record $2.3 trillion last year, with battery storage expected to grow 17-fold by 2035. The report does say it is too late to keep the world from warming up 1.5 degrees Celsius, which is both the best and worst news you will read all day.
