Jon Stewart interviews Abdul El-Sayed

On his weekly podcast, he spoke with the Democratic candidate for the senate seat in Michigan. The interview lasts about 90 minutes and is engrossing.

El-Sayed comes across as charismatic, likeable, whip smart, principled, disciplined, and focused on the key issues. I can see why Trump, Republicans, oligarchs, Big Pharma, the hospital and Israeli lobbies, the tech billionaires, and other powerful interests are freaked out by the possibility of him winning and are throwing huge amounts of money into the race to try and defeat him.

Mo Amer talks about the unhinged Islamophobia on display and the extreme labels that the right are trying to pin on him.

Trump has high standards for his press secretaries

I was surprised to learn that the Deputy Press Secretary in the White House for the past two years has been Anna Kelly, who seems to meet pretty much all the requirements for a Trump spokesperson, being young (29 years old), female, a smooth liar, a Trump fangirl, and former beauty contestant. She was deputy to Karoline Leavitt for two years and could have taken over that role when Leavitt left and avoided the Zacharia debacle. The one thing that may have sunk her candidacy is that she has red hair and is not a blonde and Trump must not have been able to overlook that fatal flaw.

Meanwhile Jordan Klepper is miffed that his carefully researched piece on Katie Zacharia was not ready to air before her flameout.

The Zachbot’s spectacular flameout

Just before the FtB site went down, I had prepared a post about the spectacular flameout of Trump’s latest press secretary Katie Zacharia, whose tenure broke the record set by Anthony Scaramucci (11 days) and British prime minister Liz Truss (47 days), so I decided to post it anyway.

She lasted just a week, her appointment announced on Friday, October 9, took office on the following Monday, had a disastrous first press conference on Tuesday, and got fired on Friday the 16th.

Her ouster came despite a full-throated, reality-free defense of her inaugural press briefing by the White House website.

Today, Katie Zacharia delivered a commanding inaugural press briefing as the 37th White House Press Secretary. The briefing, which generated wall-to-wall coverage, served as a strong introduction to her tenure and highlighted the Trump Administration’s record of delivering historic successes for the American people.

[Read more…]

Monday morning comedy

I thought that I would start the week with some laughs before the usual dreary news kicks in.

The Onion News Network reports on a minimum wage bill that Congress might actually pass.

Trump’s BFF Natalie Harp seems to have become a news mainstay.

Here is Jimmy Kimmel having his monologue interrupted by her (played by Kimmel’s wife).

And here is SNL’s cold open that also features Trump’s curious attempt to ingratiate himself with Zohran Mamdani.

.

John Oliver on the evil UnitedHealth Group

Luigi Mangione is scheduled to be sentenced on December 18, 2026. He became something of a folk hero after killing Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, a health insurance company widely reviled for its practice of putting up block after block to prevent having to pay for the health care of its subscribers even when they faced life-threatening situations and even died because of the denials.

In his usual thorough way, John Oliver on his show Last Week Tonight dissects the odious practices of UnitedHealthcare and the even worse practices of its lesser-known but even bigger parent company UnitedHealth Group which, it turns out, is the third biggest corporation in the US. He looks at how it got so profitable by adopting practices that have infuriated both patients and doctors alike.

The obscene profits and behavior of these health insurance companies have to end and we have to create a single payer system that puts them out of business. As Oliver says, “at best they are pointless time wasting middlemen and at worst algorithmically driven, ruthless arbiters of who lives and who dies.”

Will this year be another Texas mirage?

Texas has long been a tease for Democrats. While it used to reliably elect Democrats to major offices, in the mid-1990s, it swung sharply to the right and since then has consistently elected Republicans to statewide positions. Democrats have felt that they had a chance to regain ground in previous election cycles but after some glimmers of hope, Republicans were able to beat back the challenges.

This year seems to provide one of the best chances to get a US senate seat with James Talarico competing against Ken Paxton. Paxton is widely viewed as a weak candidate, who is scandal-plagued on many fronts both major and minor, public and personal, in addition to having a lackluster personality. While being a state official on a $153,000 salary, he has managed to acquire 15 properties and has refused to give an accounting. Since he is the Texas attorney general, no charges were filed against him. Republicans would have had a much better chance if they had renominated incumbent senator John Cornyn but Trump, out of a sense of pique because Cornyn was not totally servile to him, threw his weight behind Paxton and got him the nomination.
[Read more…]