‘Trump Vanity Calculator’ Spotlights President’s Abuse of $1.8 Billion in Taxpayer Funds

What we pay for Trump's egomania

Brad Reed for Common Dreams

Democrats on the congressional Joint Economic Committee on Wednesday released a report calculating that taxpayer funding for President Donald Trump’s vanity projects has soared to more than $1.8 billion.

Renovations made to the White House—including the president’s luxury ballroom—are the biggest projected expenses, as the analysis cites reporting from The Washington Post last month to estimate that they will cost $927 million.

After the White House renovations, the second-most expensive Trump vanity project highlighted in the report is the estimated $400 million that will be required to provide security upgrades to the luxury jet the president received as a gift from the Qatari government.

The report finds that taxpayers will also be on the hook for $257 in renovations to the the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts, which the president has threatened to tear down unless he is allowed to slap his name on the side of the building.

The president’s “Triumphal Arch” monument is another big-ticket item, as the report calculates it will cost $100 million to construct. Trump’s infamously botched attempt to renovate the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, meanwhile, is set to cost taxpayers $16 million.

Keeping it simple: vote Blue

With a nod to Woody Guthrie

Here's the original:

Starting in 1943, Woody put this slogan on his guitars

Screen Time at Ages 1 and 6 Linked to Lasting Learning and Memory Effects

Study challenges commonly held beliefs 

By Zhejiang University

Screens are now a routine part of life for many young children, but their possible effects on later learning remain uncertain. A study that tracked children from age 1 through age 8 found that greater viewing time, especially during infancy and near the start of school, was associated with lower academic performance at age 9 and weaker working memory at age 10.5. The results indicate that when children use screens may matter as much as how long they spend using them.

The World Health Organization (WHO) and the American Academy of Pediatrics advise avoiding screens before 18 to 24 months and limiting viewing to less than one hour per day between ages 2 and 5. Many children exceed those recommendations, yet previous research on screens and cognitive development has produced inconsistent results.

Much of that work has examined children at only one point in time, concentrated on those already in school, or lacked repeated measurements across the early years. Following children through several developmental stages can help researchers identify periods of greater sensitivity while accounting more carefully for family and environmental factors.

CDC inaction delays COVID shots for low-income children

Bobby Jr. and Trump withhold vaccine from poor children

Liz Szabo, MA

Satire from The Onion, but not far from the truth

Although hospitalizations due to COVID-19 are climbing, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has not yet announced when COVID shots for the most vulnerable children in the country—those eligible for the Vaccines for Children (VFC) program—will be available.

The VFC program offers free immunizations to more than half of US children, including those who are uninsured, underinsured, eligible for Medicaid, or American Indians or Alaska Natives.

The CDC approved updated COVID shots on August 27, and manufacturers have been shipping the vaccines to medical offices since at least September 7. 

While doctors and pharmacists have been able to buy COVID shots for children with private insurance, public health officials who administer state VFC programs say they have not yet received the free vaccines, a problem originally reported by The Wall Street Journal.

Why haven’t we had an Atlantic hurricane yet?

Thank El Niño.

Matt Simon, Senior Staff Writer

"This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist's weekly newsletter here."

You are about to time travel. Off the Pacific coast of South America, the band of warm water known as El Niño is mutating into a freak of nature. At more than 3 degrees Celsius above normal, it’s the warmest El Niño recorded since satellites started measuring sea surface temperatures half a century ago, and it won’t peak for several more months, potentially hitting somewhere around 4 degrees by November or December. 

“This event is already in record territory,” said Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at the research group Berkeley Earth. “And every model expects it to keep growing.”

At the same time, this year’s Atlantic hurricane season, which began in June, is shattering records in the opposite direction. On average, by this time of year we should have seen four hurricanes, two of them major. But so far, the Atlantic hasn’t produced even one. The previous record for the latest first hurricane in a season was September 11.

The two events on opposite sides of the Americas are individually extreme and bizarre. But while they’re both record-breaking, they’re not unexplained. In fact, they’re intertwined in a fascinating way.

To understand the link, we need to talk about the ingredients of a hurricane, which you can think of as an engine. The fuel is warm ocean water, which sends energy skyward. This is why hurricanes have grown so much more powerful and destructive in recent years: The more the planet warms, the more high-octane fuel that can go into cyclones. Additionally, hurricanes like high humidity, as masses of dry air tend to break them up. Lastly, they prefer that the wind move in a consistent direction.

The Atlantic is full of warm water right now, so the hurricanes should have fuel. But it’s the wind that’s getting in the way: El Niño increases wind shear over the Atlantic, meaning air moving in different directions and different speeds at different altitudes. 

The Trump-Vance family policy reeks of white supremacy and misogyny.

MAGA ❤️ Motherhood (If You’re White)

Mitchell Zimmerman in Common Dreams

Creepy. That’s the word for the rising right-wing interest in family policy, exemplified by a recent administration proposal to pay $9,000 each year per child for women to stay at home with their children. The money would come from, and deplete, an existing federal program that helps working parents pay for childcare.

Of course, that program, the Child Care and Development Fund, is already woefully underfunded—only 1 in 7 eligible parents is able to use it. Most of those are single working mothers, the kind of hardworking people who do tough work for low wages and are derided by conservatives as “Welfare Queens.” They would not be eligible for the stay-at-home moms benefit.

MAGA leaders like Vice President JD Vance have a model of family life that is a caricature of a 1950s TV family: Dad works and Mom stays home with the kids, shops, cooks, cleans house, and puts on a clean apron and a big smile for Dad when he comes home from the office. A woman’s appropriate concerns in that model life are “Kinder, Küche, Kirche.” Children, cooking, church, as 19th-century Germans described the feminine role.

Or put more simply, “barefoot and pregnant.”

In Vance’s view, women who seek a professional career have chosen a “value system that leads to misery.” Consistent with the MAGA conception of women’s roles in society, Vance opposes abortion in all circumstances, wants to make divorce more difficult, and sees traditional family life as “the path to happiness and to fulfillment.”

But Vance and the right are motivated by bigger concerns than female happiness. They believe more pregnancies are critical to preserving civilization. It’s a “crisis,” says Secretary of Health Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. “Low birth rate is the number one threat to the West,” says Elon Musk.

MAGA, this one's for you

October 3: Essen und Spaß

Trump signs "moral" deal with tech bros over artificial intelligence, and misspells "United States"

Since there is no such place as the "Unites States," does that mean the deal is void?

But what do you expect when Trump tries his hand at AI and gets THIS....

URI Theatre’s season lineup includes long-awaited return of ‘Cabaret,’ ‘Proof,’ ‘Charlotte’s Web’

URI THEATRE SEASON PREVIEW

James Bessette

The URI Theatre Department will produce a mix of Broadway classics, including “Cabaret” in December, and the children’s classic “Charlotte’s Web” in April during the 2026-27 academic year. Pictured is the cast of URI’s 2026 production of “Ride the Cyclone. (URI photo/Seth Jacobson)

This season, the University of Rhode Island’s Theatre Department will take audiences on a journey through the trials and tribulations of a brilliant mathematician’s family, a nightclub in 1930s Berlin, the French Revolution, and an enchantingly unique friendship between a young pig and a spider.

All the while, student actors, designers, directors and stage managers will bring their creativity to the URI Fine Arts Center’s various stages to both delight the public and also develop the necessary skills to thrive in the performing arts realm.

“Proof” and “Cabaret,” will premiere in the J Studio and Robert E. Will Theatre, respectively, this fall at the Fine Arts Center, 150 Upper College Road, on the Kingston Campus. In the spring, “The Revolutionists” and “Charlotte’s Web” will be staged under the bright stage lights.

The season commences Oct. 16 with “Proof” by David Auburn, directed by URI alum and Providence College professor of theatre Jimmy Calitri ’01—with URI theatre student Princess Johnson serving as student assistant director. Calitri returns to URI to lead “Proof” after previously directing “Guys and Dolls” and “Little Shop of Horrors” on campus a few years ago.

Trout season starts Friday

Hooked on Autumn: 25 Waterways to be Stocked with Trout

Get ready to drop a line during one of the fall’s fin-est pastimes! The Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management (DEM) is stocking brook and rainbow trout in selected areas throughout RI starting Friday, Oct. 2 through Thursday, Oct. 8. The following areas will be stocked:

• Alton Pond, Richmond
• Barber Pond, South Kingstown
• Blackstone River, Lincoln
• Browning Mill Pond, Exeter
• Carbuncle Pond, Coventry
• Carolina Trout Pond, Richmond
• Cronan Landing, Richmond
• Eight Rod Farm Pond, Tiverton
• Grantville to Rt. 95, Hopkinton
• Hope Valley Fishing Area, Hopkinton
• Kings Factory Bridge, Charlestown
• Lower Shannock, Charlestown
• Meadow Brook Pond, Richmond
• Rt. 165 Check Station to Wyoming Dam, Exeter, Hopkinton
• Onley Pond, Lincoln Woods State Park, Lincoln
• Round Top Ponds, Burrillville.
• Shippee Sawmill Pond, Foster
• Silver Spring Lake, North Kingstown
• Spring Grove Pond, Glocester
• Stafford Pond, Tiverton
• Upper Pawtuxet, (Hope), Scituate
• Upper Melville (Thurston Gray Pond)
• Willet Pond, East Providence
• Woodville, Richmond, Hopkinton        

Regular stocking updates will be available on DEM's Division of Fish and Wildlife's (DFW) Facebook Page and www.dem.ri.gov/troutwaters. See freshwater fisheries updates and FAQs at www.dem.ri.gov/fishing.

Big Tech’s Plans for AI Are Bringing Nuclear Power Back to New England

No Nukes campaign must be revitalized

Tom Valovic for Common Dreams

As you may have noticed, nuclear power is back. Many establishment Democrats have now not only abandoned bread-and-butter working-class issues, they’re also busy jettisoning some of the hard-won core principles of the environmental movement hammered out painstakingly over decades. Apparently, someone has waved a magic wand when we weren’t looking and nuclear power is now a “green” source of energy. Is that because if you become irradiated you start to turn green?

Nuclear Power is Green? This is Corporate Marketing Hype. Don’t Believe it.

How did this happen? We can start by taking a look at what’s been happening in New England, especially Massachusetts, which offers a good case study. In that bluest of blue states, Gov. Maura Healey is eager to bring nuclear power back despite a 1982 voter referendum—now law—that prohibits it. She’s not alone. In March 2026, a group of New England Governors—mostly Democrats—directed their state energy agencies to explore advanced nuclear energy technologies while also continuing to support the region’s existing nuclear resources.

The press release from Gov. Healey’s office described nuclear power as a “pillar of New England’s electric system.” The statement also eagerly encouraged the development of public-private partnerships. Unfortunately, this widely endorsed bipartisan concept has now become the working model for corporate exploitation of public resources and is a key latter-day building block of continuing deregulation. The press release gushed with enthusiasm for nuclear power, noting that “by ensuring both the continued operation of our existing nuclear fleet and setting our region on a path to explore next generation resources, including advanced nuclear energy technologies, the New England states will continue our leadership in grid modernization and energy innovation as we jointly work to meet the region’s current and future energy needs.”

Trump Stupidity and Recklessness vs Superintelligence

Doubles down in his UN General Assembly speech

Axel Fersen and Klaus Moegling in Common Dreams

Doonbeg, County Clare, Sunday, September 13, 2026. Donald Trump stands at the starting tee of the Irish Open, on his own golf course, watching a player. A reporter asks whether the AI industry should slow down or be more strictly regulated. Trump turns around. We’re ahead of China, he says; we’re the most advanced country in the world, and that’s how it should stay: “Whoever wins AI wins.”

Guardrails? You could put up guardrails, this and that. But there are many negative forces bringing up things that would never happen (PBS/AP, September 13, 2026). That was the entire answer, and it also sums up his entire agenda. The rest of the world had just begun to fear.

After all, the question didn’t come out of nowhere. Twenty-four hours earlier, Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, had published a long essay in which he called on his own industry to slow down. His company would grant independent auditors permanent access to its systems, on par with that of its own employees, and he asked the competition to follow suit (Amodei, September 12, 2026). 

Agreed: We DO need a smart President.
Anyone in mind?

Sam Altman of OpenAI agreed within an hour. Elon Musk, who has been at odds with both of them for years, simply wrote: “Dario is right” (SiliconANGLE). 

A few days earlier, Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon had resigned, stating that the labs were racing toward a superintelligence that would continue to evolve and improve independently of humans, thereby gambling with all our lives (TechCrunch). The three most powerful men in the industry and a defector—all in the same week, all with the same message: Nothing like this had ever happened before.

Trump’s response on Monday was an escalation. The only control AI needed, he said, was a strong, smart president with a high IQ—and America had one. There was a “SICK conspiracy” against AI and data centers, and the only one rejoicing over it was China. 

Vice President JD Vance called it a Trojan horse when companies pleaded with the government to regulate them (AP, September 14, 2026). You have to let that sink in for a moment: The creators of a technology are asking for oversight, and the government suspects a conspiracy behind it.

Misery loves company