Posted 17 Oct 2026, items compiled 1 Oct, about Trump campaigning on the taxpayer’s dime, how Project 2025 is succeeding better than Trump himself, how Hegseth is instilling his person religion into the military, and how Disney World solved a basic infrastructure problem.
This is about those TV ads extolling American virtue (and Trump) that are being paid for with tax dollars.
Slate, Shirin Ali, today 1 Oct: Trump’s Latest Attempt to Cheat in the Midterms Faces Little Blowback
Midterm elections are around the corner, and for months, while strategists have predicted a Democratic sweep, the GOP has been throwing everything and the kitchen sink at its base in hopes of mitigating the anticipated blue wave. This past week, those efforts took the form of a series of television ads, each one featuring President Donald Trump and highlighting his administration’s policies while also warning against unspecified threats of communism. The ads themselves, though, were not the most disturbing thing. The most alarming part of the ads is a small disclaimer at the bottom of the screen: “Paid for by the U.S. government.” It appears that Trump was using our taxpayer dollars to fund his midterm political efforts. Using taxpayer dollars for ads that are clearly political is a blatant violation of federal law, but the unfortunate reality is that there may not be a clear-cut way to actually stop the Trump administration from continuing to air them.
Every day Trump gets away with something new, and his MAGA fans don’t care.
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Stories like this appear in new depth after reading the Huffman book.
Salon, Heather Digby Parton, today 1 Oct: Trump’s failure hides Project 2025 success, subtitled “OMB director Russell Vought is quietly remaking the federal government, and Congress is next”
Huffman specifies how closely Vought and others in the Trump administration align with various Christian nationalist groups, and really would take down American democracy in favor of their fundamentalist Christian faiths.
It seems like a million years ago now, but there was a moment back in 2024, in the heat of that weird presidential campaign, when everyone was talking about the radical blueprint for Donald Trump’s restoration. Project 2025 was so extreme, in fact, that his campaign had Trump disavow it publicly. He usually said that he hadn’t read the plan and didn’t intend to, but at times he went further. In Grand Rapids, Michigan, on July 20, 2024, Trump said, “Like some on the right, severe right, came up with this Project 25 . . . They’re sort of the opposite of the radical left. You have the radical left and the radical right, and they come up — I don’t know what the hell it is, it’s Project 25 . . . and then they read some of the things, and they are extreme, seriously extreme.”
Trump disavowed it then, but hired people who are implementing it.
Project 2025 was a far-right manifesto, filled with the kind of pie-in-the-sky fantasies that denizens of conservative think-tanks had been churning out for decades in the hopes of influencing Republican administrations.
… This effort was largely guided by its co-author, Russell Vought … As a self-described Christian nationalist, he also believed that the U.S. should espouse fundamentalist Christianity, and that the country has no obligation to engage in global initiatives that do not directly benefit its own people.
The essence of tribal selfishness, the policy of conservatives.
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And religious theocracy. The Huffman book show how scary Hegseth’s religious commitments are. More than just white nationalism.
Friendly Atheist, Hemant Mehta, today 1 Oct: Pete Hegseth is centralizing religious power inside the military, subtitled “Hegseth’s explicitly Christian defense of a new Pentagon religious office leaves non-religious service members on dangerous ground”
During a “State of the Force” address in Virginia yesterday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced the formation of a new “Office of Religious Affairs.” The office would give military chaplains a direct line to him and make sure the needs of religious service members are being met.
While this office is supposed to support service members regardless of their beliefs, Hegseth spoke about it in explicitly Christian terms. And when the official memo announcing the office was released, it only confirmed that the resources were geared almost entirely toward religious programs.
Just imagine the outrage of MAGA folks if a Muslim tried to do this in favor of his religion, and that is how us non-Christians feel about this. Christians seem not to understand the comparison.
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Progress can be made. Some new ideas are good.
Vox, Future Perfect, Sara Herschander, today 1 Oct: Disney World solved a problem that could save America billions every year, subtitled “Our cities are built atop a dangerous obstacle course of cables. The Magic Kingdom found a better way.”
Buried beneath every American city is a mysterious jumble of cables, pipes, and gas lines, entangled like a pair of wired headphones the moment you pull them out of your pocket. Every time a contractor sticks a shovel in the asphalt, they embark on a high-risk excavate-by-dots obstacle course, dodging color-coded clusters of spaghetti-like power lines, gas mains, sewers, and fiber-optic cables. A line of blue spray paint means water. Red means power. Yellow is gas. Orange is telecom.
This is interesting. Our local street seems to be a nexus for utilities over the entire hillside from Route 13 up to Skyline, and so every couple three weeks there’s a utility crew with their spray cans painting different-colored stripes in the street. Presumably to plan their next excavation job.
About 700,000 times a year — that’s once every 47 seconds — something goes wrong.
With examples of how things can go wrong. But the point here is how the Disney properties have done this. It takes advance planning.
Directly beneath the Magic Kingdom is a sprawling network of tunnels. Initially designed to shepherd around Mickey and his friends, the system now also serves as one of the largest utility corridors ever created. Unlike the rest of America, where cables are typically dumped in ditches before being covered with dirt, the electrical lines that power Cinderella’s castle quite literally get the princess treatment.
Alongside water pipes, sewers, and animatronic control systems, these power lines lace the walls and ceilings of the utilidors, meaning they’re protected from weather and changes in the soil. They are also easy to monitor, catalog, and access if something needs fixing. While the cost of building a controlled system like this is much higher upfront than burying directly in the ground, the practice virtually eliminates the risk of accidentally rupturing a gas main or slicing a fiber optic cable during routine maintenance. Once they’re built, they can also drastically reduce costs in the long run because you no longer need to tear up a street every time a utility needs fixing.
Bottom line:
“Obviously, it’s expensive,” said Debra Laefer, a professor of civil and urban engineering at New York University, “but in the long term, it would be hugely cheaper,” especially “in areas where we are digging all the time, there’s a direct business case for moving towards these utilidors.”
This is why it will never be done locally. Conservatives don’t invest in the long-term.
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