Live at 9 AM Eastern & Streaming 24-7 Thereafter:

Editorial cartoonist Ted Rall and political analyst Jamarl Thomas deprogram you from mainstream media every weekday at 9 AM Eastern time.

Today we discuss:

• In an epic display of nerve, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insulted New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani—head of the host city of the UN—in a wild address to the United Nations General Assembly that saw many delegates walk out before it even began. Netanyahu is the subject of an International Criminal Court arrest warrant alleging war crimes and crimes against humanity for Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

• Aramco, Saudi Arabia’s state oil company, is responsible for more of the carbon emissions driving the escalating climate crisis than any other company in history, and the kingdom has long been a major blocker of climate action. Yet at least a dozen of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) lead authors are employed by or linked to Saudi Aramco, Saudi institutions and other oil and gas interests. One IPCC vice-chair, part of the body’s leadership group, also represents the kingdom at global climate negotiations as a government employee.

• Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi proposes reopening the strategically vital Strait of Hormuz and resuming nuclear talks with the U.S. within seven days if the Trump administration abides by the Memorandum of Understanding.

• ICE and other agencies have wasted tens of millions of dollars pursuing ill-conceived plans to rapidly increase detention capacity, and the total will likely rise due to ongoing mismanagement, congressional investigators warn. The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) documented costly problems, including nearly $3 million to erect tents at Guantanamo Bay that were never used, $20 million to maintain purchased warehouses that are now being sold without having housed a single detainee, and excessive rates paid to hold detainees at a deficient and now-shuttered Alligator Alcatraz.

• The Danish Defence Intelligence Service (DDIS) says that there is a “low but growing risk” Russia could launch a “limited” military attack against a NATO member in the coming months, saying the Kremlin appears more willing to take risks after more than four-and-a-half years of war against Ukraine.

• In Italy, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s cabinet adopts a decree-law, rendering the wearing of burqas and niqabs in schools illegal and introducing a 30% cap on non-Italian speakers in classrooms starting next year.

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The post I’m Not the War Criminal, You Are! | DeProgram with Ted Rall and Jamarl Thomas appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

After spending like wild men on wars, tax cuts for the rich, and ballroom renovations no one ever asked for or needed, Trump-era Republicans are getting ready to recast themselves as fiscal conservatives as soon as the Democrats take control of the House this fall.

The post Today the Party, Tomorrow the Fast appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Live at 9 AM Eastern & Streaming 24-7 Thereafter:

Editorial cartoonist Ted Rall and political analyst Jamarl Thomas deprogram you from mainstream media every weekday at 9 AM Eastern time.

Today we discuss:

• In an indication of how radicalized international relations have become, Prime Minister Mark Carney says that Canada is  preparing for the “extreme tail risk” that US President Trump might order military action against Canada.

• ICE left a U.S. citizen from Evanston, Ill., injured on the ground with broken teeth after he was brutalized and detained in another incident of mistaken identity. Meanwhile, Trump is reconsidering his deal to import Argentine beef.

• The New York Times reports that Mary Peltola, an Alaska Native running for Senate, runs a chaotic political operation marked by tumult—angry and profane outbursts at aides, and shoving an aide. Legit criticism or a sexist double standard?

• Campaign finance records cited by ProPublica show that a shell company established by fraudster Martin Kao made a pay-to-play donation to a super PAC supporting Maine Senator Susan Collins’ 2020 re-election campaign. Emails show Scott Reed, head of the super PAC backing Collins, knew Kao had used a shell company to mask his illegal donation.

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LIVE 9:00-11:00 am Eastern time Mon & Wed & Fri

LIVE 9:00-10:00 Eastern Time Tue & Thurs

Streaming Anytime

Conflict reporter/writer/cartoonist Ted Rall and political analyst Jamarl Thomas deprogram you from mainstream media every weekday at 9 AM ET.

This week, “Deprogram” expands into two hours Monday, Wednesday, and Friday!

Today we discuss:

• The podium of the United Nations was an unusual setting for the leader of a global superpower to threaten to “annihilate the Islamic republic” of Iran or to declare that, in another conflict, “to the victor belong the spoils.” Yet that was exactly what Trump did. Meanwhile, U.S. officials met for three hours with the Iranian delegation to the United Nations General Assembly.

• The ICE officer who shot a Venezuelan man in Austin over the weekend is a recruit who was issued a body camera but was not using it during the incident. Wilber Garcés Pérez, 28, a DoorDash delivery driver, was shot after ICE officers attempted to make a traffic stop on Sunday. Officers were in an unmarked black SUV, and Garcés said at a news conference he did not know they were law enforcement. His attorney said ICE sideswiped his car and struck Garcés again as he attempted to make a U-turn to find a place to pull over. Video captured by a bystander shows an officer exiting the SUV and approaching Garcés’s vehicle before shots are fired.

• The Trump administration has ejected more than 750,000 enrollees from Affordable Care Act insurance marketplaces, claiming that many were receiving premium subsidies they did not qualify for and that some were not real people. JD Vance estimated that removing the targeted enrollees would save the government $2.2 billion. Obamacare enrollment has already declined significantly this year, as the cost of the plans has risen, a potential political risk for Republicans.

• The second hour of the show will continue the news and analysis with a focus on your questions and comments.

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The post Trump Threatens to Nuke Iran | DeProgram with Ted Rall and Jamarl Thomas appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The American people are constantly being told that they can’t have universal healthcare or high-speed rail or free college or any number of other great things citizens of other countries have because we spend so much money on defense. Now, however, the Defense Department is saying they don’t even have enough bombs to fight wars. Where is the money going?

The post Bombs Away appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

LIVE 9:00-11:00 am Eastern time Mon & Wed & Fri

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Conflict reporter/writer/cartoonist Ted Rall and political analyst Jamarl Thomas deprogram you from mainstream media every weekday at 9 AM ET.

This week, “Deprogram” expands into two hours Monday, Wednesday, and Friday!

Today we discuss:

• Join us for a live interview with Pulitzer Prize winner Benjamin Moser for an enlightening conversation about “Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History,” his new book. Moser traces a long, buried lineage of Jewish rabbis, artists, lawyers, journalists, and activists who opposed Zionism on religious, ethical, and political grounds—and paid for it with exile, censorship, and worse. He argues that anti-Zionism is not a synonym for antisemitism but a Jewish tradition older than the state it critiques, one that warned against a nationalist project built on exclusion. We’ll discuss Zionism founder Theodor Herzl, the myth of consensus, and what this hidden history means now.

• US taxpayers have spent $44 billion to attack Iran, are sending $3 billion more to Israel for bombs, and now the WSJ reports that Trump wants to send $5 billion to oil-rich Gulf states to repair the infrastructure damaged in the US/Israeli war against Iran.

• Belarus’s leader Alexander Lukashenko says that there are no available volumes of fertilizer to send to the U.S. This comes after Trump announced that he was working on a “massive Deal” to buy potash from Minsk at a steep discount amid the trade war with Canada.

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In 2002, I drew a six-panel political cartoon titled “Israel vs. Palestine: Where Do You Stand?” Each panel shows a different speaker making a statement about the conflict, with a bold label underneath that sarcastically identifies the speaker’s supposed position. In the first panel, a man labeled “MODERATE HONEST BROKER” says, “The Arab killers must be killed before they get the chance to kill.” Next, another man says, “It’s always sad when innocent women and children die, but hey—that’s war!” Then a woman identified as a “GARDEN-VARIETY ANTI-SEMITE” says, “i can’t help noticing that Israel kills more Palestinians than vice versa.” The labels escalate, culminating with a person called “THE LIVING INCARNATION OF ADOLF HITLER” saying, “Surely Israel could find a better way to keep itself safe?”

The cartoon’s joke is that any statement short of a blank-check endorsement of the IDF is recast as anti-Semitic. At the time of publication, reaction was predictable: supporters of Israel disliked it; those who criticize Israel liked it. I took the usual heat from the usual haters.

I recently reposted this cartoon, along with others from decades past, to my X and Facebook accounts. This time, as John Hiatt might say, things got strange.

Supporters of Palestine became angry. “Your comment is short-sighted, disingenuous, reactionary,” one “friend” barked. “Public figures such as you defending the Zionist project under the ‘Greater Israel’ mandate is certainly grist for Jew hatred,” another complained. Bear in mind, I have never supported Israel. I have always been on Team Palestine. I have drawn hundreds of cartoons along those lines—and caught abuse for it.

Hate me if you must, but not for the wrong reasons. So I added a comment to my 2026 re-post pointing out that my 24-year-old cartoon was dripping in sarcasm. It was depressing, I sighed, how many people missed that.

Someone responded to my clarification with the following: “The fact that media literacy is down so far that: 1. Next to no one identified this as sarcasm. 2. A good majority genuinely believe that the statements made in the comic align with the titles. 3. The people that disagree with the statements and the titles but did not identify the sarcasm and therefore are interacting with the post as if it were made in earnest.”

Others cited Poe’s Law.

Another person added: “I think it’s also a sad expression of how over-the-top Israeli propaganda has become that people are accustomed now to seeing arguments nearly this hyperbolic made seemingly in earnest.”

All excellent points.

There is an additional contributing factor: the systemic debranding of news and editorial content has radically increased decontextualization, making it far more difficult for people to understand what they are reading and seeing.

When I started in national syndication 35 years ago, the media landscape was obviously different. Now, when you come across a cartoon, the odds are that it is on social media, just one of a myriad of unrelated items in an infinite scroll. Many times the artist’s signature is missing or illegible. When the creator’s name is discernible, you probably do not recognize it.

In other words, the cartoon stands on its own. You do not know the cartoonist’s previous work, so you cannot compare the latest piece with what came before. Nor do you know the publication that originally ran it, which might have given you a hint of its political orientation: The Atlantic, thus corporatist/Democratic. Jacobin, thus Bernie progressive. There are no helpful labels such as “this cartoon was drawn by a liberal Democrat.”

You don’t know the author, you don’t know where they’re coming from. Like my French mom used to say, it arrives comme un cheveu sur la soupe—like a hair on your soup. Randomly, unexpectedly, devoid of context.

Until the advent of the internet in the 1990s, that same cartoon would have run in the same position on the page, day after day, week after week, in the same newspaper. There was usually a byline. Whether it was a cartoon or a movie review, you developed a sense of its creator’s point of view over time. You knew where the cartoonist was coming from ideologically, tonally, generationally.

It is impossible to overstate the importance of contextualization in a reader’s ability to digest and understand content properly. A regular viewer of “At the Movies” with Chicago newspaper movie critics Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel, for example, would eventually notice that Ebert had more establishmentarian tastes than the edgier Siskel. So if Ebert, who generally disliked horror movies, gave a thumbs-up to one, it was notable.

That was the world in which I drew the aforementioned cartoon in 2002. Even though I was not on staff at a paper, the syndication clients that ran it tended to run me regularly in the same spot in the same publications.

Writing in Slate in 2012, Simon Doonan argued that “Sarcasm relies heavily on verbal delivery and face-to-face contact,” but sardonic humor in plain old text, no emojis to signal “warning: humor ahead,” used to be plentiful and easily grokked by all but the dimmest. Many of my papers were alternative weeklies whose sophisticated cartoons and writing deeply imbued with Gen X’s love of irony. As years passed, I developed a relationship with the readers. Without ever reading or watching an interview with me, they learned that I was to the left of the Democratic Party and that, among many other things, I was critical of the state of Israel and the way it treated Palestinians.

So when my readers—my regular readers, who knew who I was—saw that cartoon, they knew where I was coming from. Clearly, I was being sarcastic. Nobody, whether Zionist or anti-Zionist, thought or could have thought that my cartoon was pro-Zionist. People understood the point.

For the foreseeable future, we are not returning to a media model in which people subscribe to trusted media name brands and develop close relationships with those brands and their content creators. This leaves those of us who communicate with the public facing a choice.

We can be didactic to a fault, stating everything literally in the simplest possible vocabulary and grammatical constructions imaginable. Or we can wield irony, sarcasm and more sophisticated literary devices while necessarily taking the risk that we will be repeatedly misunderstood. There are workarounds, such as signaling sarcasm with internet-era markers like “/s,” though those gimmicks merely serve up didacticism in a thin veil of sophistication. In 2014 Facebook tested a “satire tag” because posts like those from The Onion kept getting taken seriously, but decided against it—or maybe they just were being sarcastic.

What happens next? Writing and other forms of expression become stupider. Or the marketplace of ideas generates an ingenious solution, such as automatically labeling the ideological leanings of a cartoonist based on their catalogue of previous content.

I don’t like the odds.

(Ted Rall, the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of “Never Mind the Democrats. Here’s What’s Left.” Subscribe: tedrall.Substack.com. He is co-host of the podcast “DeProgram with Ted Rall and Jamarl Thomas.”)

The post The Death of Sarcasm appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

LIVE 9:00-11:00 am Eastern time Mon & Wed & Fri

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Conflict reporter/writer/cartoonist Ted Rall and political analyst Jamarl Thomas deprogram you from mainstream media every weekday at 9 AM ET.

This week, “Deprogram” expands into two hours Monday, Wednesday, and Friday!

Today we discuss:

• Trump asks “if and when do I blow the entire nation [Iran] up?”

•  The cost of the war in Iran was $43.6 billion through Sept. 3, with bombs, missiles and other munitions accounting for more than 60 percent of the expenses, the Pentagon told Congress.

• Security chief Mohsen Rezaei has laid out Iran’s new set of conditions to end its war with the U.S.:

• An end to the war on all fronts, including, in particular, Lebanon.
• The release of its frozen funds that run into billions of US dollars.
• An end to the naval blockade on Iranian ports.
• An end to US interference in Iran’s internal affairs.
• An end to US cooperation with “the opponents of our revolution”.
• An end to all US attacks on Iranian territory.

• Trump says his proposed 250-foot triumphal arch will now be a “top grade” military complex that will house drones, snipers and ammunition.

• Trump says the United States has entered a security agreement with Greenland and Denmark that “gives the United States permanent control over security, and all other needs, in Greenland, completely addressing ALL of our many U.S. concerns.”

• Trump bans CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House.

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The post Iran Lays Down the Law | DeProgram with Ted Rall and Jamarl Thomas appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Trump’s pre-midterm offer to send every American adult $5,000 if the GOP retains the House and Senate has fallen flat with voters, not because it’s a bribe, but because they don’t trust him to deliver.

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LIVE 9:00 am Eastern time, Streaming Anytime:

Conflict reporter/writer/cartoonist Ted Rall and political analyst Jamarl Thomas deprogram you from mainstream media every weekday at 9 AM ET.

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• China, long highly vulnerable to oil supply shocks, has transformed that weakness into a source of geopolitical power, by stockpiling huge amounts of oil, building extra oil refining capacity and investing in coal and other alternatives. And it flexed that power by cutting off supplies of jet fuel, gasoline and diesel to neighboring countries. Already dominant in solar panels, batteries and electric vehicles, China now has an unparalleled position across the energy landscape.

• Under pressure, the Democratic Senate nominee in Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed, rejected Hasan Piker’s argument that the U.S. has caused more terror than Al Qaeda. Can he/should he be cowed by the corporatists?

• Washington and Florida insiders – from billionaire Trump allies and Rubio-linked lobbyists to Cuban exiles – are jockeying for control of the communist-ruled island-nation’s assets, charging to help clients navigate sanctions, and positioning themselves to loot Cuba in case of regime collapse.

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The post China Won the Iran War | DeProgram with Ted Rall and Jamarl Thomas appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Gen Z young people, especially men, have their parents deeply concerned because they are not having sex or partying the way young people used to. This may be the first time in history that an older generation has screamed at their kids to turn that damn music up.

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Politics is war. In war, capturing and replacing a rival head of state does not constitute victory. Looking into the future, policies and practices have to change.

But you also have to look back into the past. Statues of the old leader must be demolished. The people he appointed must be fired and replaced with new personnel. His institutions must be dismantled. If you fail to abolish their legacy, everything that mattered about them lives on. You may not know it—but you have lost.

Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation blueprint written as a governing plan for a conservative administration, understood that. It treated rolling back rolling back the prior Democratic agenda—especially Biden’s—as a central task. Trump spent much of his first year focused on that rollback, and Republican voters loved it.

As the 2028 campaign begins in earnest next summer, however, Democratic voters have little reason to believe the next Democratic president would erase Trump’s legacy with anything close to the same scale or energy. That is the Ratchet Theory, as former Reagan-Bush official Bruce Bartlett explained: “Republicans are extreme radicals; when in power they do extreme stuff. Democrats are moderates; in power they do moderate stuff. This means they never undo all the bad radical stuff Republicans do, so there is a steady ratchet toward Republican priorities over time.”

Bernie Sanders and the populist-progressive wing he leads have watched that ratchet work for decades. They want Democrats who fight for their own ideas and reverse conservative policies whenever they can. Trump is increasingly unpopular, and anti-Trump sentiment is at a fever pitch. Democratic messaging will still be incomplete without sweeping pledges to make it look as if no one named Donald J. Trump had ever lived in Washington.

Part of that is symbolism. Any 2028 Democratic nominee should promise to tear down however much of Trump’s White House ballroom gets built, restore the East Wing and Jackie Kennedy’s Rose Garden, and rip out that horrid helicopter pad on the South Lawn. Palm Beach International Airport should get its name back. Restore the bordello-ized Oval Office to its pre-Trump state. The Kennedy Center should get its name back, plus a new charter that guarantees its financial solvency and blocks future politicization. No more Gulf of America, no more Lake America—and blow up the Arch too.

I’d leave the Department of War. It’s a rare case of Trump telling the truth.

If history is any guide, far too much of Trump’s legacy will outlast both his presidency and his body. When Biden confided to wealthy donors in 2019 that “nothing would fundamentally change” if he won, he meant it.

Obama kept Bush’s wars and started new ones.

Biden kept Trump’s tax cuts for the rich and his Space Force. Rather than return to Obama’s status quo, he maintained Trump’s sanctions on Cuba and Venezuela. He endorsed and tried to expand Trump’s Abraham Accords, refused to move the U.S. embassy out of Jerusalem, accepted Trump’s recognition of the occupied Golan Heights as Israeli, and continued a pro-fracking energy stance. He did reverse the Muslim travel ban and rejoin the World Health Organization. On two of the biggest issues, though—Israel’s war in Gaza and human-caused climate change—the two old white guys were hard to tell apart.

Approval of Trump’s tariffs regime is in the toilet: 30% in the latest polls. His Canada-specific tariffs are even less popular, at 20%. Yet California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a leading 2028 hopeful, will not promise to mend fences with our northern neighbor and closest ally. “I can’t guarantee that,” he says. Is making nice with Canada really such a heavy lift?

Similarly, only 5% of registered Democrats support Trump’s partnership with Israel in attacking Iran, a war that has become an economic disaster with no end in sight. Yet no major Democratic prospect has promised to withdraw U.S. forces from that war of aggression on day one. Newsom, who governs a state with a large Iranian exile community, echoes Trump-era talking points: the “corrupt and repressive Iranian regime must never have nuclear weapons,” and Iran’s leadership “must go.” Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro criticizes Trump for sidestepping Congress, then recites the same brief against the “Iranian regime”—the target of Trump’s war—as a repressive state and “the leading state sponsor of terrorism.” On this latest forever war, it is reasonable to expect the 2028 nominee to land, as Kamala Harris did in 2024, on Team Israel.

The party may be splitting, but its voters agree on this: they hate Trump, want his presidency behind them and want what he did undone. A pivot to the center for swing voters will not save a nominee who cannot close the enthusiasm gap. That requires a clear list of promises to unwind the last 8 to 12 years.

That means not only leaving the Iran war but moving fast toward begging forgiveness, diplomatic normalization and paying restitution. It means cutting off U.S. military and financial aid to Israel and redirecting those funds to Palestinians. Nicolás Maduro and his wife should be returned to Venezuela and allowed to resume the presidency; tear up the attempt to seize the country’s oil. Everyone fired by DOGE should be offered their job back, with back pay and restitution. People who entered the country with permission—including under Biden—should be allowed to return, with a path to permanent residency and citizenship.

With a presidency this extreme, it is not enough to promise to govern differently or better. You have to scrap what they built. Annul every executive order, reverse every law, fire every appointee. If you can’t promise that, why should anyone vote for you?

(Ted Rall, the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of “Never Mind the Democrats. Here’s What’s Left.” Subscribe: tedrall.Substack.com. He is co-host of the podcast “DeProgram with Ted Rall and Jamarl Thomas.”)

The post Get Rid of All Things Trump appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

LIVE 9:00 am Eastern time, Streaming Anytime:

Conflict reporter/writer/cartoonist Ted Rall and political analyst Jamarl Thomas deprogram you from mainstream media every weekday at 9 AM ET.

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• The Wall Street Journal reports that dapper Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth only wants attractive, masculine, troops who meet waist-to-height requirements and have “impeccable” grooming to attend his speeches. This comes after he encouraged troops to inject testosterone and Hegseth’s speech at Quantico Base, where he declared “no more beardos” or “fat generals.” A scantily-clad Hegseth likes to work out with ripped, buff, totally 100% straight soldiers on base.

Hegseth, in Democratic crosshairs for investigations next year, ordered two US Air Force crewmen whose F-15E was shot down over Iran in April to take part in an interview with CBS’s “60 Minutes” about their experience.

• Trump set out to make it the 51st state. Instead, he has driven Canada into the arms of the European Union as an Associate Member, after antagonizing the Canadians for months, taunting the country’s prime minister and waging a relentless trade war. Trump threatened to respond with “serious tariffs” against Europe.

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Conflict reporter/writer/cartoonist Ted Rall and political analyst Jamarl Thomas deprogram you from mainstream media every weekday at 9 AM ET.

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• The Trump administration approves a $2.8 billion sale of heavy bombs to Israel, in what would be among the largest deliveries of U.S. munitions there even as public support for the country declines. The proposed sale would include 40,000 one-ton bombs whose use by Israel in Gaza and Lebanon has drawn international anger because of the civilian harm caused by their wide blast radius.

• ICE went on a hiring binge last year. The agency offered $50,000 signing bonuses. The hiring happened so quickly that many new officers were put on the streets before being adequately vetted. The agency has begun quietly firing some of the recruits—and some are taking their own lives.

• FBI Director Kash Patel defends a new policy at the bureau that does not immediately disqualify potential hires who have engaged in bestiality.

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The post Trump Sends $2.8 Billion More to Israel | DeProgram with Ted Rall and Jamarl Thomas appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

In America’s two-party system, voters who are unhappy with the incumbent Republicans have only one electoral alternative: vote for the Democrats they know will do the same thing.

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Conflict reporter/writer/cartoonist Ted Rall and political analyst Jamarl Thomas deprogram you from mainstream media every weekday at 9 AM ET.

Today we discuss:

• A big win for the gerontocracy as half-dead octogenarian Mitch McConnell returns to the US Senate.

• The Supreme Court refuses to let Trump’s U.S. Postal Service tighten the use of mail-in ballots ahead of the midterm elections. Homeland Security may have broken state laws as part of an expansive effort to find noncitizens on the nation’s voter rolls, according to a federal whistle-blower. The effort has relied on questionable data, and has likely improperly flagged U.S. citizens who are eligible to vote.

• The now-closed state-run Alligator Alcatraz ICE gulag in the Florida Everglades failed to comply with a host of federal detention standards, creating cramped conditions and “calming” migrants in tiny metal cages. Immigrants seeking documents from the government to prove that they are in the country legally are being ignored or provided paperwork that is heavily redacted.

• Star Wars! The United States has installed weapons in Earth’s orbit, Air Force Secretary Troy E. Meink admits.

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The post Democracy So Good Even the Dead Can Vote | DeProgram with Ted Rall and Jamarl Thomas appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Live at 9 AM Eastern & Streaming 24-7 Thereafter:

Editorial cartoonist Ted Rall and political analyst Jamarl Thomas deprogram you from mainstream media every weekday at 9 AM Eastern time.

Today we discuss:

• Trump stands by his support for a united Ireland. Trump said in Dublin, sitting beside Irish Taoiseach Micheál Martin on Saturday, that he’d “love to see” Ireland unified and that it is “going to happen eventually,” so it “may as well happen now.” He described uniting Northern Ireland with the Republic of Ireland as “fantastic,” adding: “The U.K. would have something to say about it obviously, but I think it would be a great thing, I mean, how can it be bad?” Trump later said Irish reunification would be a “very cool thing” while noting that “no matter what you say or how you say it, there’s no good answer.” Trump told reporters: “It just seems to me that you have Northern Ireland and you have Ireland. It seems to me that one of the naturals of all time is to put them together.”

• The National Security Agency is set to undergo its most extensive internal restructuring in at least a decade. The new design for one of the most powerful U.S. intelligence agencies, the brainchild of Army Gen. Joshua M. Rudd, calls for the creation of five new organizations inside the agency, in artificial intelligence, China, cybersecurity, combat support or warfighting, and global intelligence.

• Saudi Arabia is caught in the middle of the war between the United States and Iran. Trump refuses to attack the Houthis. Now, unable to export its oil, the kingdom’s leadership has few options.

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The post Trump, the Irish Nationalist | DeProgram with Ted Rall and Jamarl Thomas appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

For the president and, presumably, his supporters, there is an alternative reality in which everything is going as well as possible. The polls show that most voters do not believe that, yet the strategy of speaking demonstrable falsehoods persists.

The post Trump World appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

From curbs on mail-in voting and the purging of voter rolls to widespread confusion about the validity of elections, the Trump Administration—dreading losses—is scuttling Americans’ opportunities to cast lawful ballots in the 2026 midterm elections.

The post Scramble for the Government You Deserve appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

LIVE 9:00 am Eastern time, Streaming Anytime:

Conflict reporter/writer/cartoonist Ted Rall and political analyst Jamarl Thomas deprogram you from mainstream media every weekday at 9 AM ET.

Today we discuss:

• 25 years ago, 19 Al Qaeda terrorists hijacked 4 passenger jets and crashed them into the World Trade Center and Pentagon, killing more than 3,000 people. Hasan Piker has taken heat for saying America deserved it. (He has since retracted that.) Shortly before 9/11, Central Asian jihadis told Ted the war was about to come home for America. Given the aggressive nature of U.S. foreign policy, it’s a question we need to engage with: did the U.S. deserve 9/11?

• Facing dwindling weeks until the midterms, deepening unpopularity and darkening political prospects for his party, Trump is tossing out a new idea: a $5,000 check for every American adult if Republicans keep control of Congress in November.

• The Census Bureau suggests adding a citizenship question to the decennial questionnaire. The proposal argues that the census count should exclude any undocumented immigrants and noncitizens without permanent residency because they are “not true inhabitants, members of the body politic, or persons with a ‘usual residence’ in the United States due to their lack of a sufficient tie and allegiance to the United States.” Millions of residents could be excluded from the U.S. census, congressional representation could be reshaped and federal funds could be reallocated across states. Refugees and asylum seekers would be excluded from the population count. Trump administration officials also want to prohibit the Census Bureau from asking demographic questions, including about race, ethnicity or sexual orientation.

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The post 9/11: Did We Have It Coming? | DeProgram with Ted Rall and Jamarl Thomas appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.