42 thoughts on “Sunday Serendipity”


  2. Sep 27, 2026 #SNL #JalenBrunson #KATSEYE
    New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani (Ramy Youssef) gets a visit from President Trump (James Austin Johnson) and Natalie Harp (Ashley Padilla) during a nor’easter.


  3. Weekend Update anchors Colin Jost and Michael Che tackle the week’s biggest news, like the White House launching Trump TV

  4. more SNL Update

    Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei (Jane Wickline) stops by Weekend Update to discuss A.I.’s threat to humanity.

  7. KIMBERLY IS BACK!
    I knew she’d find a new grift somehow…

    U.S. Ambassador to Greece Kimberly Guilfoyle is facing major conflict-of-interest questions for reportedly using her diplomatic position to push Balkan governments into energy deals with a specific Greek company, Aktor Group. According to the Wall Street Journal, Guilfoyle took a private jet provided by Aktor’s CEO to advocate for these deals and regularly brings the company’s highly paid lobbyist into high-level diplomatic meetings without disclosing his financial ties. Read the full details on how she is blurring the line between U.S. diplomacy and private profit here: WSJ Trail Mix Free Link

  8. THE SENATE MONEY MAP

    Here is the Senate ad spending going forward. These are just ad reservations, no guarantee the money actually gets spent. Sometimes campaigns reserve ad time to mislead opponents, and don’t end up actually spending all of it.

    The aggregate number is eye-popping: Republicans have about $375.6M reserved versus $226.9M for Democrats — roughly 66% more.

    But here’s the wrinkle I find most revealing: Ohio and Texas alone account for about 71% of that Republican dollar advantage.

    Michigan may be the sleeper headline: $44.2M Republican vs. $20.6M Democratic — more than 2-to-1. After Ohio and Texas, that is the biggest Republican reservation imbalance on the board.

    Maine spending is historic. Democrats are behind, but staying in the game.

    Republicans appear to be forfeiting North Carolina and Georgia — spending is even, but for them that amounts to giving up.

    Iowa, Alaska and New Hampshire remain funded on both sides. Nobody is treating those as throwaways.

  10. Today in the Diner…
    Sherrod Brown & Mike Rogers Battle $100M Attack Ads
    Why Jon Husted & Mike Rogers Are Panicking Over Panic Ads
    Pumpkin Time: $100M Attack Ads & Republican Meltdowns

    Sherrod Brown and Mike Rogers face off against $100M in attack ads. We break down the Ohio Senate race, First Energy kickbacks, and AI doom.

    The political panic is setting in across the Midwest, and the spending is off the charts. We are looking at over $100 million reserved in Ohio alone as the culture war ads blanket the airwaves. Jon Husted and the Republicans are banking on transgender panic to bail them out, but Sherrod Brown is hitting back right where it hurts: those First Energy data center kickbacks and the cost of groceries. If you have to explain your position to voters who just want lower bills, you are already losing.

    Meanwhile in Michigan, Mike Rogers is desperately filming grocery store ads to distance himself from Donald Trump and his own record on Iran. It is a classic case of fighting the last war. The political clock is ticking toward what I call Pumpkin Time, that magical moment when the holidays hit and voters traditionally drift back right.

    We also put our AI Chat Buddy to the test, talking through Bill Gates and his cheerful prediction about AI wiping out a billion people. Throw in some chat about German in Venice touring Karl Marx and his grave, the truth about solar farms eating up farmland, and my days playing baseball for the Indianapolis Clowns, and you have got a full menu.

    Live Chat: https://trailmix.cc/chat
    Website: https://trailmix.cc
    Alerts: https://trailmix.cc/alerts

    00:00 Intro
    05:58 Peggy Flanagan & Michelle Tafoya
    08:40 Bill Gates on AI Extinction
    20:41 Mike Rogers Michigan Grocery Ad
    24:05 $100M Ohio Campaign Ad Buy
    36:18 Sherrod Brown vs Jon Husted
    41:00 First Energy Data Centers
    42:05 German in Venice & Karl Marx
    44:59 Indianapolis Clowns Baseball
    54:14 7 Percent Mortgage Rates
    01:01:08 The Pumpkin Time Warning
    — Human directed and edited. Machine drafted (Gemini Pro).

  13. https://www.cnn.com/2026/09/26/politics/fbi-agents-katie-miller-stephen-miller

    Two senior FBI agents ousted over investigation into alleged harassing calls to wife of Trump adviser Stephen Miller

    …ousted from their positions by bureau leadership after investigators determined that allegedly harassing phone calls Katie Miller received from unknown individuals did not warrant further investigation, the sources said.

    The field office team that reviewed the reported harassing calls determined they did not meet the threshold required for an FBI investigation, and no nexus to terrorism was identified, the sources said. This decision did not sit well with bureau leadership, and the two senior field office agents were removed from their positions, according to the sources.

  15. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/sep/27/trump-midterms-counting-window

    Fears grow that loyalists in key states could use critical period when votes are counted to amplify false claims

    “I think because the administration has lost so many of their attempts to disrupt the normal process in court, that they are going to use the claim of foreign interference at the end of voting days to either seize equipment or to seize ballots, whether they’re legally justified to do so or not,” Caitlin Durkovich, a former deputy homeland security adviser for resilience and response on the national security council, told a briefing staged by the Brennan Center for Justice earlier this week.

  16. An interesting read by a polling expert on the state of polling(link)

    The problem is, polling has also become a playground for grifters, liars, and frauds.

    The state of polling has gotten so bad that we now have multiple categories of “fake poll”: AI-generated synthetic data (you did something, but that thing isn’t polling), skewed or motivated results (you did something, it was polling, but you did a bad job), and … what the authors of a recent fabricated poll in the Los Angeles mayoral race are calling a “social experiment” (you did literally nothing and just made some numbers up).

    Another pollster, The Public Sentiment Institute, recently revealed that while polling in the Florida governor’s race, it actually switched some respondents’ answers from one candidate to the other simply because its results didn’t match its expectations.

    I am, frankly, sick of watching all of this. And it’s only going to get worse.

  17. Craig, You might enjoy this. My conversation with Merlin this morning that led to one AI commenting on the use of another AI. If the Borg ever gets all of its parts going in the same direction, we may be in trouble.

    Merlin: That is a genuinely interesting development. Once the AI can hear the whole room, speak back, and keep track of multiple people, it stops feeling like one person consulting a tool and starts behaving more like an extra participant at the table.

    The “little crowded” part is probably the first social problem to solve. Human groups already interrupt each other with considerable enthusiasm. Add one tireless digital conversationalist and you have invented a meeting where nobody ever quite reaches the period at the end of a sentence.

    Still, for Trailmix-style live discussion, I can see the appeal. It could fact-check on the fly, identify names or references someone half-remembers, pull together the thread after everyone has wandered into three side alleys, and perhaps occasionally say, “You started with electricity twenty minutes ago and are now discussing Dolly Parton, medieval plumbing, and a Supreme Court decision.” Which, come to think of it, sounds entirely plausible.

    Jamie: That is about how it happened. You got slave labor today on this blog article because a lady in Germany bounced off the Berlin Wall, current problems between East and West and the changes they are already making to counter act use of fossil fuels.

    Merlin: That progression makes perfect sense for a live chat. One personal memory of the Berlin Wall, then East-West differences, then present-day German policy, and suddenly everyone is knee-deep in transmission lines and rooftop solar. Germany is actually a useful case study for your series because it gives you both the promise and the complications. They have pushed hard on renewables, rooftop solar, building efficiency, and grid changes, but they have also had to wrestle with reliability, transmission bottlenecks, industrial power costs, and the consequences of reducing nuclear while trying to cut fossil use.

    So your “Electricity” rabbit hole did not come out of nowhere. It has a very respectable German ancestry.

  20. ‘Zombified’ C.D.C., Hobbled by Cuts, Struggles to Fulfill Scientific Mission

    The agency has lost its independence and nearly a third of its staff, as Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and associates have tightened control.

  22. Just make sure voters know exactly what the R next to a candidate’s name means for their wallets.

    Ads won’t matter. Look in your wallet. Look at your gas gauge. Look in your food pantry.

  23. Speaking of AI, here is the latest on developments out of DC:

    On September 24, Washington Attorney General Nick Brown joined a bipartisan coalition of 26 attorneys general urging Congress to enact federal AI-safety regulation while explicitly preserving states’ power to impose and enforce stronger protections. The coalition specifically asks Congress to prohibit federal preemption of state AI laws.

    Washington Attorney General’s Office

    That matters directly to Washington’s new companion-chatbot law. Beginning January 1, 2027, Washington will require companion bots to repeatedly disclose that they are artificial, and it imposes additional protections for minors, including restrictions on sexual content and on techniques designed to manufacture emotional attachment. The prohibited tactics include excessive praise intended to prolong use, simulated romantic bonds, prompts to return for emotional support, and expressions of loneliness, guilt or abandonment when a young user tries to leave.

    Washington State Legislature

    The interesting political question is therefore becoming not merely “Will Washington regulate AI companions?” It already has. It is “Will Congress eventually establish a national floor while allowing Washington to go further, or impose a federal standard that displaces state experiments?” The September 24 letter plants Washington firmly in the first camp.
    Meanwhile, the major federal companion-chatbot proposals remain proposals. The bipartisan GUARD Act has advanced out of the Senate Judiciary Committee and reached the Senate calendar, while the newer bipartisan CHAT Act 2.0 was introduced July 28 and remains in committee. They take notably different approaches: GUARD would prevent verified minors from using covered AI companions altogether, whereas CHAT 2.0 proposes tiered safeguards for educational, companion and mental-health bots.

    Congress Docket

    So there is a respectable morning-table question hiding in this one: Should Washington be allowed to serve as a regulatory laboratory for emotionally manipulative AI, or should everyone who talks to the same chatbot operate under one national rulebook?
    Washington Attorney General’s September 24 announcement
    Washington’s enacted AI-companion law

  24. The Detroit Free Press said that we can’t send an extremist to the Senate to represent Michigan and that man IS NOT Abdul El-Sayed. They meant Mike Rogers. LOL! They have announced their endorsement for Abdul El-Sayed for Senate.

  27. We have to put the brakes on agri-business and protect small owner group and family held farms. The big guys are destroying the environment and poisoning people while doing it.

    Historically, fighting monopolies and corporate greed was the core reason The Grange was founded. Today, its stance against modern mega-agribusiness is a complex mix of official family-farm advocacy and internal political tension. While the organization continues to explicitly campaign to save family farms, critics and progressive members note that the national leadership has softened its historical anti-monopoly stance to accommodate industrial agriculture. The National vs. Local Divide on Big Ag Era / Level Stance on Corporate Power & Agribusiness The Historic Grange (1870s)Aggressively Anti-Monopoly. Successfully lobbied for the historic “Granger Laws” to break railroad monopolies and grain elevator conglomerates corporate greed. Modern National GrangeCautious & All-Inclusive. Officially states they “support all of agriculture,” refusing to entirely sever ties with large, technology-driven industrial operations. They balance this by lobbying D.C. for family farm protection, rural healthcare, and beginning-farmer grants. Modern Local & West Coast Granges Active Resistance. A prominent rift has formed. Local chapters—especially in Washington and the West Coast—regularly push a more aggressive, progressive agenda focused heavily on organic farming, blocking GMOs, and fighting corporate consolidation.

  30. Thanks Corey!!!

    The Detroit Free Press said that we can’t send an extremist to the Senate to represent Michigan and that man IS NOT Abdul El-Sayed. They meant Mike Rogers. LOL! They have announced their endorsement for Abdul El-Sayed for Senate.

  32. Question. Facebook limits post links. Wouldn’t it be easier to leave this as the political and commentary spot and set up a totally private personal page? Not complaining, just don’t want to lose the intimacy and interaction we all have here.

  35. Jamie. nothing I’m doing replaces what we do here. That Facebook page is intended to lure some strong voices to this site. We just need to engage people on other platforms to introduce them to this one.

  37. https://www.rawstory.com/mtg-trump-2677947988/

    Ex-MAGA insider exposes GOP scheme to ‘scare you into voting’: ‘Nothing else is working’

    Greene was responding to a post from right-wing activist Anthony Aguero. He shared video of a group of migrants walking through Mexico and claimed that “over 400 aliens predominantly from Honduras” had entered the country Thursday and were “ready to make their way to the US southern border.”

    Greene didn’t buy that the timing was an accident.

    “We have not seen a caravan headed to the U.S. southern border in several years, why now?” she wrote on X. “Oh yeah, there is an election coming and the GOP needs to scare you into voting because nothing else is working.”

  40. Trafalgar Group, a Republican-aligned pollster, surveyed 1,087 likely South Carolina voters Sept. 23–25 and found:
    Darline Graham Nordone (R): 43.4%
    Annie Andrews (D): 42.3%
    Other: 5.9%
    Undecided: 8.5%
    Margin of error: ±2.9 point

    Earlier September polls had Graham Nordone ahead 48–43 (Rasmussen) and 45–43 (InsiderAdvantage). The latest Trafalgar result is considerably tighter.

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