The Best of the Rest of the News. — Swing district voters are increasingly upset with Trump and the GOP about exploding grocery prices. — Over the past decade Republicans have voted at least 70 times to repeal Obamacare (the Affordable Care Act or ACA), and they took a major whack at it again with the Big Billionaires’ Bill this year; most Americans agree with Democrats that its worth shutting down the government to force them to repeal the cuts. — Speaking of the shutdown, Congressional Progressive Caucus Vice Chairman and California Congressman Ro Khanna, a twice-monthly regular on my radio/TV program, echoed the point yesterday on Fox News that I made here on Hartmann Report a few days ago and have been discussing on the air: Republicans in the Senate don’t need a single Democratic vote to re-open the government. Not one! And they could do it tomorrow. — As the wealth of the top 1% of Americans hit a record $52 trillion last month (up 6% over the previous quarter), young people’s support for the Trump administration is in free-fall. — Portlanders laying flowers in front of the ICE building, planning a naked bike ride as a protest, and Portland’s bicycle police arresting a rightwing influencer (and two others) for trying to get into a fight with anti-ICE protesters are apparently getting to the White House. Now they’re threatening to cutting federal funds to Portland. — Elon speaks, the FBI leaps. — “Whiskey Pete” Hegseth orders our military to kill four more Venezuelan civilians in defiance of both US and international law, and the naval airmen comply. — Hunter in a Farmer’s World: The Superpower Hidden in ADHD: Hypercuriosity — Thom TV: Sue's Daily Stack, Monday, 29 September, 2025 — Wisdom School: The Hidden Power of Gratitude and Forgiveness

When lies become policy and propaganda becomes identity, democracy itself is put at risk… Recently, I mentioned that when I was 13 years old I went door-to-door with my dad for Barry Goldwater. Three years later I was living on my own in East Lansing getting tear gassed and beaten for demonstrating against the Vietnam War and continuing segregation in the South. In other words, I’ve seen — and participated deeply — in both the right and left sides of American politics. Although his position against the Civil Rights Act was reprehensible, I took Goldwater at his word that it was based on his concern about federal overreach and the 10th Amendment; having read both his books, I came to deeply respect his principled stands, even though I also deeply disagreed with most of them. As most historians will confirm, Barry Goldwater believed what he said, and never, so far as I can find, knowingly lied to the American people. That was my dad’s Republican Party. They’d spin or shade the truth, but rarely told what they knew were naked lies. And many among them deeply believed in the principles they espoused. That party is dead.

Decades of disinformation have built a rightwing propaganda empire—now it’s aimed at silencing dissent. Trump’s assault on our elections system and the GOP’s successful 2024 effort to deny at least (according to official US government statistics) 4.2 million Americans their right to vote (which gave Trump the election and Republicans the House and Senate) was based on his 2020 Big Lie that our elections were corrupted by “millions” of “illegals” voting, along with “massive” voter fraud. They’re continuing that Big Lie (which the GOP first embraced in the 1960s with Operation Eagle Eye that intimidated mostly Hispanic and Native American voters) going forward, with some observers expecting as many as ten million Americans being denied their vote in 2028. But corrupting and stealing elections was just their first effort, starting back in the 1960s, the one that brought them to power. Now, with that power, they’re doing their best to gut the basic guardrails of our 250-year-old constitutional system with brand-new Big Lies.

Few discoveries are more irritating than those which expose the pedigree of ideas. —Lord Acton To say that Ludwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek were both traumatized and influenced by their respective brushes with Nazism would be an understatement. Mises suffered the indignity of Hitler’s gestapo rummaging through his apartment in March of 1938, seizing 21 boxes of his papers and taking over his apartment. Two years later, Mises fled to the United States, where, ironically, he advocated many of Hitler’s racial ideas and even integrated them into his economic ideology.