As usual, that is omitted, then people believe it when other people say Dems do nothing. Elected Dems are doing all they can. Sen. Rand Paul is also involved, as Libertarians will be in matters of war.
Amid a wave of U.S. military strikes in the Caribbean and plans for covert operations in Venezuela, Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., is leading a bipartisan effort to force a vote to stop President Trump from unilaterally declaring war on the South American nation.
Kaine, a longtime proponent of Congress’ powers to declare war, filed the resolution late Thursday, a move that will force the Senate to take up the legislation after a 10-day waiting period. Sens. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., and Rand Paul, R-Ky., co-sponsored the plan.
Kaine said concerns about war in the Latin American region are growing.
“The pace of the announcements, the authorization of covert activities and the military planning makes me think there’s some chance this could be imminent,” Kaine told reporters.
Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., speaks to reporters outside the Senate chamber on Oct. 1. Kaine is hoping to prevent President Trump from unilaterally waging war on Venezuela without approval from Congress.Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
This week, Trump said the U.S. had conducted another military strike on an alleged drug boat in the Caribbean and announced that he had authorized CIA operations in Venezuela. He also said he was considering land operations in the country.
“We’ve almost totally stopped it by sea. Now we’ll stop it by land,” Trump said from the Oval Office on Wednesday about alleged drug smuggling.
Last week, Kaine and Schiff forced a Senate vote to limit Trump’s war powers in the Caribbean. While that vote failed 48-51, two Republicans, Paul and Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, joined Democrats in support.
Paul has been a vocal critic of the new military strikes, saying they set a precedent for the U.S. to shoot first without asking questions.
“The American people do not want to be dragged into endless war with Venezuela without public debate or a vote,” Paul said in a statement. “We ought to defend what the Constitution demands: deliberation before war.”
Kaine, Paul and Schiff are hoping more Republican members will vote in favor of the new limits. Several Republicans have voted for other war powers and use of military force resolutions led by Kaine in the past.
“I think it’s probably 10 or so [Republicans] who voted yes on at least one of them,” he said. “So we’ll start to work that.”
It remains unclear whether there are enough Republican votes for the measure to succeed.
Kaine said Congress continues to face a “black hole” of information related to action against Venezuela. Lawmakers say the administration still has not shared evidence to justify the boat strikes, which Kaine and others believe are illegal and unconstitutional.
Since September, Trump has ordered at least five U.S. military strikes on boats that the administration has claimed were smuggling illegal drugs. So far, at least 27 people have been reported killed, but their identities have yet to be shared.
I think I remember an ABC Movie of the Week back in the 70s, about something like this. I’m not rooting for bad acts, and this is a bad act. But what an entertaining story: man, oh, man!
PARIS (AP) — In a minutes-long strike Sunday inside the world’s most-visited museum, thieves rode a basket lift to the Louvre, forced a window into the Galerie d’Apollon — while tourists pressed shoulder-to-shoulder in the corridors — smashed display cases and fled with priceless Napoleonic jewels, officials said.
It was among the highest-profile museum thefts in recent memory and comes as Louvre employees have complained of worker and security understaffing.
One object was later found outside the museum, according to Culture Minister Rachida Dati. French daily Le Parisien reported it was the emerald-studded crown of Napoleon III’s wife Empress Eugénie — gold, diamonds and sculpted eagles — recovered just beyond the walls, broken.
The theft unfolded just 250 meters (270 yards) from the Mona Lisa, in what Dati described as “a four-minute operation.” No one was hurt.
Images from the scene showed confused tourists being steered out of the glass pyramid and adjoining courtyards as officers closed nearby streets along the Seine.
Also visible was a lift braced to the Seine-facing facade near a construction zone — an extraordinary vulnerability at a palace-museum.
A museum already under strain
Around 9:30 a.m., several intruders forced a window, cut panes with a disc cutter and went straight for the vitrines, officials said. Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez said the crew entered from outside using a basket lift.
The choice of target compounded the shock. The vaulted Galerie d’Apollon in the Denon wing, capped by a ceiling painted for Louis XIV, displays a selection of the French Crown Jewels. The thieves are believed to have approached via the riverfront facade, where construction is underway, used a freight elevator to reach the hall, took nine pieces from a 23-item collection linked to Napoleon and the Empress, and made off on motorbikes, according to Le Parisien.
Daylight robberies during public hours are rare. Pulling one off inside the Louvre — with visitors present — ranks among Europe’s most audacious since Dresden’s Green Vault museum in 2019, and the most serious in France in more than a decade.
It also collides with a deeper tension the Louvre has struggled to resolve: swelling crowds and stretched staff. The museum delayed opening during a June staff walkout over overcrowding and chronic understaffing. Unions say mass tourism leaves too few eyes on too many rooms and creates pressure points where construction zones, freight routes and visitor flows meet.
Security around marquee works remains tight — the Mona Lisa is behind bulletproof glass in a bespoke, climate-controlled case.
It’s unclear whether staffing levels played any role in Sunday’s breach.
The Louvre has a long history of thefts and attempted robberies. The most famous came in 1911, when the Mona Lisa vanished from its frame, stolen by Vincenzo Peruggia and recovered two years later in Florence.
Today the former royal palace holds a roll call of civilization: Leonardo’s Mona Lisa; the armless serenity of the Venus de Milo; the Winged Victory of Samothrace, wind-lashed on the Daru staircase; the Code of Hammurabi’s carved laws; Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People; Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa. More than 33,000 works — from Mesopotamia, Egypt and the classical world to Europe’s masters — draw a daily tide of up to 30,000 visitors even as investigators now begin to sweep those gilded corridors for clues.
Politics at the door
The heist spilled instantly into politics. Far-right leader Jordan Bardella used it to attack President Emmanuel Macron, weakened at home and facing a fractured parliament.
“The Louvre is a global symbol of our culture,” Bardella wrote on X. “This robbery, which allowed thieves to steal jewels from the French Crown, is an unbearable humiliation for our country. How far will the decay of the state go?”
The criticism lands as Macron touts a decade-long “Louvre New Renaissance” plan — about €700 million to modernize infrastructure, ease crowding and give the Mona Lisa a dedicated gallery by 2031. For workers on the floor, the relief has felt slower than the pressure.
What we know — and don’t
Forensic teams are examining the site of the crime and adjoining access points while a full inventory is taken, authorities said. Officials have described the haul as of “inestimable” historical value.
Recovery may prove difficult. “It’s unlikely these jewels will ever be seen again,” said Tobias Kormind, managing director of 77 Diamonds. “Professional crews often break down and re-cut large, recognizable stones to evade detection, effectively erasing their provenance.”
The Louvre closed for the rest of Sunday as police sealed gates, cleared courtyards and shut nearby streets along the Seine.
Key questions still unanswered are how many people took part in the theft and whether they had inside assistance, authorities said. According to French media, there were four perpetrators: two dressed as construction workers in yellow safety vests on the lift, and two each on a scooter.
Investigators are reviewing CCTV from the Denon wing and the riverfront, inspecting the basket lift used to reach the gallery and interviewing staff who were on site when the museum opened, authorities said.
___
Associated Press writer Jill Lawless in London contributed to this report.
Senior managing editor and logophile Andy Hollandbeck reveals the sometimes surprising roots of common English words and phrases. Remember: Etymology tells us where a word comes from, but not what it means today.
On October 16, 1758, Noah Webster and his wife Mercy Steel Webster welcomed a new son into their lives. They named him after his father. Noah Sr. was a farmer and weaver, and Mercy was a homemaker, and by all outward appearances, they lived a rather normal life in the West Division of Hartford — what would become West Hartford, Connecticut.
Though the elder Webster had never attended college himself, he placed great value on education, so from an early age, Mercy taught the younger Noah what she could of spelling, mathematics, music, and other subjects. At age 6, he began attending a one-room schoolhouse; later in life, he described his untrained teachers there as the “dregs of humanity.”
Regardless, Noah took to learning like a fish to water, eventually outgrowing the educational opportunities of his hometown. When he was 16, Noah Sr. mortgaged the family farm so that they could afford to send the younger Noah to Yale University to continue his studies; he graduated four years later in 1778, in the midst of the American Revolution.
After Yale, Noah wanted to study law, but his family couldn’t afford it. Remembering the deficiencies and horrors of his grade school days, he recognized that education might be a better place to make his mark. So he became a teacher.
Most of the books used in American classrooms at the time still came from England — some even included pledges to King George. There was also the matter of patriotism. There was a scarcity of American textbooks for American children, and Noah Webster decided he could help.
So in 1783, he published his own textbook, A Grammatical Institute of the English Language. Because it was printed with blue covers, it was known colloquially as the Blue-Backed Speller, and it became one of the most popular American books of the late 18th century, helping teach children to read, spell, and pronounce words.
But the words themselves were still anchored in Great Britain, and the lexicography coming out of England didn’t encompass the American experience. This realization set Webster on a course that would change the language. In 1801, he began collecting words and their definitions with the aim of creating an American dictionary.
His first edition, published in 1806, was called A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language, and it contained the spellings and brief definitions of 37,000 English words, including thousands of new words that originated on the left side of the Atlantic, words like skunk and raccoon and moccasin (entered as “Moccason or Moggason”).
Webster wasn’t the first to refer to his word hoard as a dictionary. That word had been used in English to describe a reference work at least since the early 16th century, including in the titles of Henry Cockeram’s The English Dictionarie (1623), Thomas Blount’s Glossographia; or, a dictionary interpreting the hard words of whatsoever language, now used in our refined English tongue (1656), Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (1755), and Francis Grove’s A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1788).
The word was apparently coined by John of Garland, a 13th-century English teacher, from the Latin dictio “speech, word.” There are quite a few dict words in English from the same source, such as edict (“to speak out”), contradict (“to speak against”), and benediction (“to speak well”). The adjectival form of dictio is dictionarius, meaning “of words.” In Medieval Latin, a book containing an ordered list of words was called a dictionarium (which might be a shortening of dictionarius liber), whence the English dictionary sprang.
Compendious is an interesting word. It traces to the Latin preposition com “with, together” and pendere “to hang, to weigh.” Compendium is literally “that which is weighed together,” but in Latin it meant “a shortening, a shortcut.” A compendium is a concise summary of a larger work or, more generally, a compilation of related things. The adjective compendious, then, was chosen to indicate Webster’s attempt to be both comprehensive but also brief.
And brief is a good word to describe the entries in Webster’s Compendious Dictionary, especially when compared with all the information found in dictionary entries today. The vast majority of entries are a single line on pages arranged in two columns. And while they are technically accurate definitions, they don’t always help the reader understand how to use the word. For example:
Definite, n. a thing defined or explained
Sailing, n. the act or art of sailing
Stoic, n. a philosopher of the sect of Zeno
Webster continued to collect, define, and compile words, and in 1828, at the age of 70, he published what is considered his magnum opus: An American Dictionary of the English Language, containing definitions for about 70,000 words. That the word American replaced Compendious in the title says a lot about his motivations. He was working toward a new edition when he died in 1843.
Webster famously simplified (corrected is the word he used) the common spellings of some entries based primarily on pronunciation, creating the separation between British English and American English that exists today. For example, his dictionary dropped the u from words like colour and honour. He also favored -ize over -ise in words like crystalize and emphasize, though he wasn’t wholly consistent.
Though Webster’s dictionary was widely popular in the United States, not everything he included was universally welcomed or adopted. Some of his spelling reforms simply didn’t take: For instance, he entered the word bedclothes into his dictionary as bedcloaths, sleigh as sley, and tongue as tung. He also included words that some found objectionable. In the December 27, 1828, issue of The Saturday Evening Post can be found this bit of snark:
Webster’s Dictionary has been issued from the press of Mr. Converse, the publisher. It is contained in two large quarto volumes, and is executed in a manner highly creditable to the press of our country. He introduces into his new dictionary as legitimate, the word lengthy. We should like to know whether his reasons for so doing are breadthy and strengthy.
Regardless of the criticisms, Webster’s lexical toils set the foundation for American dictionary scholarship that extends into modern times; the dictionaries of Merriam-Webster are the direct descendants of Noah Webster’s An American Dictionary of the English Language.
And that’s why October 16 — the anniversary of Noah Webster’s birth — is today celebrated by lexicographers, linguists, and logophiles as National Dictionary Day.
If you want to find a witch these days, you don’t have to look far. Elphaba, better known as the Wicked Witch of the West, is barreling down on us in Wicked: For Good, the sequel to last year’s blockbuster adaptation of Wicked. Wednesday is back on Netflix, and Yellowjackets finished up its third season earlier this fall. Last year’s Agatha All Along was a phenomenon, and the witchy Sanrio character Kuromi, currently co-starring in another Netflix series, makes weird concoctions and sports an adorable devil tail. Hell, even Marvel’s Ironheart—a show centered on a high-tech suit with an AI navigator—managed to work a teen witch into its plot.
In the book world, witches are even more prevalent. In the tiny neighborhood branch library where I work, a catalog search for “witch” produces over 300 results. Look at any Halloween display in a bookstore, and you might find a few werewolves and vampires alongside a metric ton of witches. I’d say witches are having a moment.
Except… hasn’t that moment been going on for a while now? Robert Eggers’ The Witch (or The VVitch, for purists) came out in 2015. Chilling Adventures of Sabrina is about the same age as my third grader. Then there’s the steady diet of witches that ’90s teens like me grew up on: Nancy Downs from The Craft, Willow Rosenberg from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Melissa Joan Hart’s Sabrina, the central trio in Charmed. People aren’t just hungry for stories about witches right now—we’ve been hungry for years. And no matter how many witchy movies, shows, and books come out, that hunger seems bottomless. (Did you know, for instance, that they’re making a Practical Magic sequel? Look it up! I’m not lying!)
Genre fads come and go, and you could argue that witches are just an extremely long-lived one, but it seems like their popularity has increased even more over the past few years. Meanwhile, real life in the U.S. is getting worse and worse, as Trump and the MAGA movement launch wave after wave of attacks on women, queer folks, immigrants, and other marginalized people. It’s interesting that the faster the U.S. slides into right-wing authoritarianism, the more witches seem to burst from the seams of American media and culture. What if stories about witches aren’t just a form of spooky escapism? What if they’re providing a much-needed counterpoint to fascist thought—and even offering us a way to imagine what resistance could look like?
The day before I began the final draft of this essay, Jimmy Kimmel Live! was pulled from the air after Kimmel very mildly criticized Republicans’ response to the death of Charlie Kirk. (Thankfully, the cancellation was reversed after public outcry, although local stations owned by Nexstar and Sinclair are still refusing to air the show as I’m writing this.) In the city where I live, masked gangs of ICE agents are jumping out of trucks and grabbing people off the streets. I can’t tell you how many Gazans will have been killed, with American-made bombs, by the time you read this. American fascism isn’t just a specter on the horizon. It’s here.
Most people recognize fascism by its biggest, most obvious signs: ultra-nationalist displays like military parades; one-party systems and dictatorships, with or without sham elections; secret police and concentration camps; genocides. Anyone who’s already marginalized, like immigrants, are fascism’s first targets. By the time they work their way up to challenging wealthy white men like Jimmy Kimmel, you know you’re already pretty far down the road to an authoritarian state.
What helps keep all this machinery humming, though, is a war on the imagination.
In 1937, after the Nazis had risen to power in Germany, they put on a now-infamous art exhibition: Entartete Kunst, or Degenerate Art. The exhibition displayed abstract and expressionist works by artists including Pablo Picasso and Paul Klee, along with art by Jewish artists like Marc Chagall. The point of the exhibition was to mock and ridicule modern art, encouraging the public to reject it. The art itself was hung haphazardly, accompanied by slogans like “Revelations of the Jewish racial soul” and “An insult to German womanhood.”
Meanwhile, another art exhibition nearby, called the Great German Art Exhibition, showed off the only kind of art that Hitler himself was capable of producing: aggressively bland landscapes and nudes.
If this kind of propaganda strikes you as ham-fisted and silly, then congrats: you’ve unlocked the deepest secrets of the fascist mind. Fascists are oafs. They’re scared of smart things and repulsed by nuance. Hitler himself denounced modern art as “works of art which cannot be understood in themselves but need some pretentious instruction book to justify their existence.” To understand how a fascist works, imagine the loudest, most obnoxious dude you can think of, standing in the Met and screaming at a Jackson Pollack painting, “I don’t like it! I don’t get it! Anyone could do that!” We think of fascists as diabolical masterminds, but really they’re just big enough bullies to get a critical mass of other bullies to follow them.
You can probably see the parallels to the Trump regime by now. Within the first few weeks of his term, Trump forcibly took over the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, ousting its board of trustees and installing himself as chair, even though he’d boasted about never attending a performance there. He fired Carla Hayden, Librarian of Congress. He’s begun censoring signs and exhibits in national parks and the Smithsonian under the guise of “restoring truth and sanity to American history,” which apparently means removing all references to Black history and white supremacy. Meanwhile, right-wing book bans have increased to a number not seen since the McCarthy era. The MAGA movement has made a war on “woke” art and history foundational to their ideology.
So what kind of art does Trump like? Why, soulless AI slurry, of course. As The Atlantic pointed out in 2024, AI memes seem to be MAGA’s preferred aesthetic. Trump’s social media accounts have posted AI-generated pictures of him as a Jedi and the Pope. MAGA Facebook groups abound with AI images of sobbing immigrants being arrested, and of Jesus lovingly endorsing various right-wing figures. Perhaps the most putrid MAGA AI meme yet is “Trump Gaza,” a video depicting Trump and Elon Musk being showered with money at a luxury resort on a Gazan beach after a successful genocide. What better aesthetic to capture the fascist imagination than art that involves no actual artist (other than the ones whose work is poached in order to train the AI), and has no point other than to glorify the fascists themselves? In MAGA art, all marginalized people—BIPOC, queer folks, immigrants, disobedient women—can be conveniently demonized, erased, and replaced with white Evangelical monoculture.
Outside of art, MAGA is managing to make reality itself increasingly weird. Trump has taken to wearing a variation on the MAGA hat that says “TRUMP WAS RIGHT ABOUT EVERYTHING!” to press events, in his official capacity as the literal President of the actual United States. Reporters and pundits struggle to make sense of speeches and sound bites that are now routinely nonsensical (one of my favorite lines from a recent New York Times article: “[Trump] did not specify who or what he was talking about”). Republicans have launched a frenzied campaign to anoint an openly racist podcaster as some kind of saint, and one of the latest right-wing talking points is that empathy is a weakness and a sin. These are all very weird things to do, and the national conversation has largely drifted away from how deeply weird they are. The more fascists can forcibly normalize bizarre behavior, the more they destabilize everyone’s reality. The more they destabilize reality, the more they can control it. Basic decency starts to feel like a hazy, unattainable fantasy.
19th-century occultist Aleister Crowley defined magic as “the art of causing change to occur in conformity with the Will.” You don’t have to believe in metaphysics to see this phenomenon play out in politics, although if you’re not paying attention, the process can certainly look like magic. The twin forces of propaganda and censorship erode the public imagination so that all that’s left—on the surface, anyway—is the fascist worldview. In an authoritarian regime, the dictator’s imagination is the public imagination; there is not, and cannot be, any distinction between the two. After all, if the public can imagine a different, better reality, then they can make it happen.
Enter the witch.
I probably don’t need to give you a beginner course on why the witch is such a potent archetype. The witch is unruly, rebellious, and powerful. The witch is Baba Yaga from Slavic folklore: a frightening and ambivalent figure who lives on the fringe of society, capable of both healing and cursing. The witch is Billy from Agatha All Along: a queer teen searching not just for magical skill, but identity and belonging. The witch is Tituba from The Crucible, later reimagined by novelist Maryse Condé in I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem: an enslaved healer and mystic who helps her fellow slaves revolt. The witch bucks all the strictures that society places on them, refusing to bow to arbitrary authority, seeking nourishment in the wild and profane. Author Bri Luna puts it thusly in her book Blood Sex Magic: “The Witch, bruja, healer, mother, sister, daughter, lover, artist, creative, bitch, wild woman, visionary, goddess. Transcendent of time and space. Reclaiming power, and ancestral bloodlines of magick from the heavens and the Earth. I come from dirt and blood, jewels and bones, moon and sun […] I am birthed of fire and lava and death and decay.”
To put it another way: if fascism is a tightly controlled lawn that’s sprayed with herbicides and mowed into uniformity, then witches are the thorned and flowering weeds that won’t stop sprouting up.
If we’re lucky, the depictions of witches we get on the page or screen are positive, with writers and directors who do their research and approach the subject with respect. But as I wrote in my recent book Witch Blood Rising, even if a depiction isn’t positive, we grasp at the crumbs we’re given because we can see something more powerful underneath.
Consider, for instance, the ’90s movie The Craft, which tells the story of the rise and fall of a teenage coven. The girls worship a deity named Manon, using invocations and rituals taken from actual Wiccan sources. At first, everything goes great, and the girls get revenge on the bullies, rapists, and abusers who are making their lives miserable. Then they get greedy and things go south. By the end of the movie, Nancy is raving in a psychiatric hospital, Bonnie and Rochelle lose their powers, and Sarah ends up bitter and alone. The moral of the story is clear: messing around with witchcraft will fuck you up. Female power is dangerous, the movie tells us, and it will ruin the life of any teen girl who tries to tap into it.
Or how about The Witch, in which a Puritan family is exiled from their community for being too pious, and find themselves at the mercy of a coven of witches? The family’s only survivor is the young Thomasin, who watches Satan and the witches pick off her family one by one until her only option for survival is to sign over her soul. There’s no way you can construe the witches in that film to be the good guys, but Eggers doesn’t hide his fascination with witchcraft as a practice, and neither do the filmmakers behind The Craft. In both movies, viewers are treated to firelit rituals on rocky coasts, in oak woodlands, and in dark forests. Thomasin loses her whole family, but once she follows Black Phillip into the forest, she gets to live deliciously.
Around the time The Witch came out, I was at a public Beltane ritual when a group of young girls dressed all in black showed up. They giggled happily, took selfies, and called themselves baby witches, telling us that this was their very first ritual. They reminded me of myself after I’d seen The Craft as a teenager, living in a heavily Evangelical suburb where megachurches were the norm and witches were only ever the villains in cartoon fairy tales. Holy crap, I remember thinking, watching Nancy and the others prick their fingers at an altar in the dappled shade of an oak tree. What is this? I’ve gotta try it!
When I think of those girls, I think about Zelma, the teen witch in Ironheart, and not just because she’s one of my favorite characters in Marvel comics. Her introductory scene is lovingly rendered, with an herb-filled sanctuary, magical goggles, and a good-natured argument with her mother (also a magic worker) about where she should train in sorcery. I keep thinking about Elphaba, for whom power doesn’t involve getting a makeover to make her more palatable to the powers that be, but a fierce embrace of the very qualities that made her an outcast. She refuses to hide her green skin; when she finds out the black hat Glinda gave her was a prank, she adopts it as her signature look. She aligns herself with the oppressed Animal citizens of Oz and rebels without hesitating. If storytelling—especially speculative stories—function partly as wish fulfillment, then the wish here is clear. Audiences want the beauty of the margins, of tangled and feral places, of power that doesn’t need to be mediated through an authority figure.
And the more authoritarians try to sterilize the media landscape, the more popular witches seem to become.
It’s one thing if a fascist monoculture makes people crave stories of witches, rebellion, and magic. But can these stories actually do any good? Are they just a release valve for frustration, or can they lead to real, tangible change?
Art has always been a powerful force against authoritarianism, of course. If it wasn’t, Hitler would never have felt the need to put on his exhibitions, and MAGA wouldn’t be waging its war on books and art and cultural institutions. Maia Kobabe’s graphic memoir Gender Queer, for instance, was the most challenged book of 2021 precisely because it revealed a reality that right-wing politicians wanted buried. “People told me they related to Gender Queer more than any other book they’d ever read,” Kobabe told NPR in 2023. “They told me it made them feel less alone. They told me they had shared the book with a parent, or a partner, or a friend, and it had opened up conversations they’d never been able to have before.” These kinds of revelations, the blossoming of empathy and the unfolding of new ways of being, are poison to fascism.
But what about witches specifically?
The most well-known example of the witch archetype being tied explicitly to activism is W.I.T.C.H., short for Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell, a movement in the ’60s that worked to tie feminism into broader social causes like the labor and anti-war movements. W.I.T.C.H. wholeheartedly embraced aspects of witchcraft like hexes and covens, so much so that the movement is believed to be one of the precursors to modern Wicca and neo-Paganism. Like Elphaba, W.I.T.C.H. leaned hard into everything that they were taught was undesirable. “By choosing this symbol,” writes researcher Cynthia Eller, “feminists were identifying themselves with everything women were taught not to be: ugly, aggressive, independent, and malicious.”
More recently, in 2015, the Russian feminist punk band Pussy Riot released a music video called “Witches of Pussy Riot Clean Manezhka,” in which the members dressed as witches ahead of the protests in Manezhnaya Square against the imprisonment of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny. The band had already become notorious in Russia for their performance in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior, for which two members were imprisoned.
Even if you don’t bring obvious witchy themes into your activist work, those themes can plant the seeds of resistance, or even offer thinly veiled how-to guides on how to protest. Witches, in fiction and often in real life, tend to embrace nature and mysticism, which flies in the face of industrialization and right-wing Christianity. Stories of witches feature independent women sticking up for themselves, queer people being unapologetically queer, and marginalized people fighting back against authority. In the fantasy novels The Fifth Sacred Thing by Starhawk and The Once and Future Witches by Alix E. Harrow, witchcraft is a vehicle for movements like ecojustice and women’s suffrage. In the horror novels Goddess of Filth by V. Castro and Slewfoot by Brom, what at first seems to be a malevolent demon turns out to be a deity who grants a young woman the power to fight back against her oppressors. These themes are powerful, even (or especially?) when they’re explored in a fun way, and once they take hold in the imagination, it’s hard to keep them from spilling out into real life.
To which I say: good. Let our stories be Pandora’s box, unleashing all the things fascists fear the most.
There’s one question I keep coming back to and not knowing how to answer: Will the MAGA regime start censoring stories about witchcraft? Or feminism, social justice, climate change, or any of the other subjects that witches, real or fictional, tend to be into? (snip; a little bit more. Refill your cup, click through on the title, enjoy, then look around the magazine for more you’ll like!)
October 18, 1648 I. Marc Carlson The Shoemakers Guild of Boston became the first labor union in the American colonies. Labor organization in colonial times —————————————————– October 18, 1929 The Persons Case, a legal milestone in Canada, was decided. Five women from Alberta, later known as the Famous Five, asked the Supreme Court of Canada to rule on the legal status of women. Some decisions of Magistrate Emily Murphy had been challenged on the basis that she was not a legal person, and she was a candidate for appointment to the Canadian Senate. After the Supreme Court ruled against them, they appealed to the British Privy Council.The Privy Council found for the women on this day (eight years after the case began and eleven years after women received the federal vote), declaring that women were persons under the law. October 18 has since been celebrated as Persons Day in Canada, and October as Women’s History Month.
Sculpture by Barbara Paterson of the Famous Five in Ottawa, first on Parliament Hill to honor women The other women activists in the Famous Five: Henrietta Muir Edwards, Nellie McClung, Louise McKinney, and Irene Parlby. The Persons Case
Former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (I) established a new 2025 benchmark for the most dollars received from private contributions in one day on Sept. 29, receiving over $244,000 from individual contributors, a day after New York Mayor Eric Adams announced his departure from the 2025 mayoral race.
But Cuomo still trails Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani in total fundraising, thanks to Mamdani’s massive lead in public funds received, with just a few weeks to go until Election Day.
Mamdani, a state assemblyman and self-described democratic socialist, defeated Cuomo and Adams in the Democratic primary. The ex-governor and outgoing mayor continued to run as independents but trail Mamdani in fundraising and the polls.
After reaching fundraising and spending caps, Mamdani has stopped soliciting donations. His campaign has raised $16.8 million and spent $10.7 million, and the New York City Campaign Finance Board estimates Mamdani has around $6.1 million left to spend, the most of any candidate.
Cuomo’s campaign has raised about $12.6 million and spent $8.9 million, leaving it with about $3.7 million. That fundraising total includes about $69,000 that was transferred in from one of Cuomo’s previous campaigns. In the last public funds payout on Oct. 9, Cuomo received $2.3 million, more than twice the payout for either Mamdani or Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa.
Sliwa didn’t receive any public payments during the primary since his race wasn’t competitive. He’s received $4.5 million in public funds for the general election and is estimated to have around $3.4 million to spend, not far behind Cuomo.
The Campaign Finance Board denied Adams public funds 12 times because his campaign failed to submit requested documents and may have violated election law, contributing to his departure from the race.
“Despite all we’ve achieved, I cannot continue my reelection campaign. The constant media speculation about my future and the Campaign Finance Board’s decision to withhold millions of dollars have undermined my ability to raise the funds needed for a serious campaign,” Adams said in his departure announcement.
His campaign still has about $3.3 million remaining. Adams’ campaign received the most private contributions of all candidates, but he also had a head start. By the time Mamdani, the first general election candidate other than Adams to raise funds, received his first contribution in October 2024, Adams’ campaign had already raised more than 60 percent of its $6.7 million in private contributions.
Adams may use some of the remaining funds to wrap up his campaign and pay any outstanding bills. Beyond that, his options are limited for the remaining money. He could save it for a future city race or transfer it into a state campaign fund that he could use to pay his legal expenses. He is strictly prohibited from contributing it to another campaign or organization.
With Adams out of the race, Cuomo’s campaign insists that the contest has shifted in his favor, and that the race is now a match-up between him and Mamdani, and the former governor did see a significant increase in financial support. (snip-MORE on the page linked above the story; worth the click to get the info.)
John Bolton has been charged by a grand jury in the District of Maryland with 18 counts of mishandling classified information in violation of the Espionage Act, 18 USC 793. He is charged with eight counts of unlawfully transmitting national defense information and 10 counts of unlawfully retaining it in his possession. The information Bolton is charged in connection with was classified at the secret and top secret levels. (snip-MORE)
Despite repeatedly promising not to cut Social Security, the Trump Administration is reportedly preparing a proposed rule that could reduce the share of applicants who qualify for Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) by up to 20 percent, according to an Urban Institute report that cites writing by a former Trump Administration official and interviews with former staff at the Social Security Administration (SSA). This would be the largest cut in SSDI history.
SSDI is an integral part of Social Security. It provides essential benefits to workers who cannot support themselves through earnings due to severe and long-lasting disabilities that significantly impede their ability to work, and it helps to prevent beneficiaries and their families from experiencing poverty.
The rule would make it much more difficult to qualify for both SSDI and Supplemental Security Income (SSI). Because it would dramatically change the eligibility criteria for older applicants, the losses among people over age 50 would be much deeper.
The rule is likely to be the largest-ever cut to Social Security Disability Insurance. A 20 percent cut in the share of applicants who qualify for SSDI would be larger than any previous change to the program. It would be even larger than the Reagan-era disability cuts, which the Reagan Administration was forced to reverse amid fierce opposition from governors, courts, beneficiaries, and advocates. According to an Urban Institute analysis, even a cut half the size of what the Trump Administration is considering would mean 750,000 fewer people would receive SSDI benefits within ten years. In addition to reducing the share of applicants who receive benefits, some current beneficiaries could see their benefits taken away when their eligibility is reviewed.
The rule would particularly hurt older workers. Like the rest of Social Security, SSDI serves largely older people; nearly 80 percent of disabled workers are aged 50 or older. SSDI benefits provide vital support to people whose careers are cut short by severe medical impairments. The rule is expected to target older applicants already determined to have significant medical impairments by discounting the barriers they face due to their age in continuing to do substantial work — despite the law’s requirement that the Social Security Administration (SSA) consider how age, education, and skills might make working harder, in addition to considering health conditions.
It’s already difficult at any age to qualify for disability benefits, given their stringent rules. Research shows applicants whose impairments are not severe enough to qualify for SSDI fare poorly in their attempts to return to work — especially if they’re older. Rejecting more older applicants will cause more hardship for people who would be eligible for benefits under the existing rules.
The rule will likely cause disproportionate harm to people living in the South and Appalachia. Some states have a higher share of people receiving disability benefits, particularly those with more older workers with fewer years of formal education, and who are more likely to have worked in physical jobs like manufacturing or mining. That is true of many Southern and Appalachian states, as well as Maine and the Rust Belt states of Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. The proposed rule drafted during the first Trump Administration would reportedly change the way SSA considers education as well as age, and because residents of these states are on average older and less educated, these changes will hit them doubly hard.
In addition to cutting Social Security and SSI, the rule would threaten retirement security, access to health care, and other supports. Workers who become disabled and qualify for SSDI are significantly worse off in retirement: they are poorer, experience more hardship, and have lower savings. Disabled workers will fare even worse in retirement if their eligibility for disability benefits is stripped. They would be forced to spend any retirement savings faster and claim their Social Security retirement benefits at a younger age, permanently reducing their — and possibly their family’s — monthly Social Security retirement benefits by up to 30 percent. For hundreds of thousands of older people, this rule would create long-term financial insecurity as they age.
In addition, applicants who do not qualify for disability benefits may face significant challenges accessing health care. SSDI recipients typically receive Medicare 24 months after they begin to receive benefits; if someone no longer qualifies for these benefits, they won’t be able to get Medicare until they turn 65. And, SSI recipients receive Medicaid, so those who lose SSI benefits may also lose Medicaid (particularly in states that have not adopted the Medicaid expansion). Most rejected applicants under the new standard will have very significant medical impairments, and many will struggle to access health care without those benefits — particularly after the steep Medicaid cuts in the Republican megabill.
Finally, restricting eligibility for disability benefits will make it more difficult for rejected applicants to access other key supports, such as food assistance, which has increasingly strict time limits for most non-elderly individuals without younger children who are not receiving disability benefits. New Medicaid work requirements could also pose significant impediments to people who lose disability benefits.
This rule is the latest in a series of harmful actions by the Trump Administration that threaten access to Social Security. This year, the Administration has forced SSA through a radical downsizing that has disrupted services for the largely older and severely disabled people who rely most on the agency, indiscriminately pushing out 7,000 workers in the largest staff cut in SSA’s history. This realignment has resulted in fewer staff serving Social Security applicants and beneficiaries, and huge cuts to staff supporting the agency’s customer service mission. These cuts have been coupled with inexplicable new restrictions — some of which have already been partially rolled back — for how the public can engage with SSA for assistance, creating additional access barriers.
At the same time, the Administration is working to advance changes that would make it harder for hundreds of thousands of eligible people to receive or continue receiving SSI, creating additional red tape for beneficiaries and more work for depleted and overburdened SSA staff.
I recently transferred to the rehab center, which is just across the street from the hospital. Today I took a cognitive test, I took a speech pattern test, and I took a physical test. Every day from here on out, I will be taking a physical test, which we call PT. They usually wanna work people till they wanna quit, but they haven’t had that problem with me yet, not because I’m super amazing or awesome, but because I really want to beat this shit as quickly as I can.
My friend Melissa Colombo came by and brought me some clothes. Nobody can go on Facebook and ask people to bring them shorts, T-shirts, and underwear while they’re in a rehab center, but I can. Hell, I once got people to send me self-addressed stamped envelopes for messed-up business cards. But I sent out a request on Facebook for someone to bring me some shorts and T-shirts to the rehab center. All I had this morning was just a road in the hospital, and my ass was hanging out.
A few people offered to ship me stuff, but that wasn’t the issue. I have money. I could easily order something. But I need something now because, let me put that again, my ass was hanging out. So my friend Melissa brought me some clothes. Funny thing is, someone else went ahead and quickly ordered me some stuff, and that was Leslie Elliott.
I want to thank Melissa and Leslie for literally saving my ass.
The next 10 days are going to be more PT. I am expected to be in this place for at least 10 days. After that, I’m expected to go home. The thing is, I live in a second-level apartment, and I want to be able to walk into my apartment and take care of myself again. Unfortunately, I’m nowhere close to that yet. Walking, taking steps, things are extremely difficult right now, and even grabbing things is impossible, but I am further today than I was yesterday.
If you have donated to me either by becoming a paid subscriber to my Substack, or donated through PayPal, or donated through Venmo, or donated through Zelle, and I have not sent you a message, please accept my apologies. I want to thank everybody who has supported me through this. The outpouring of support has blown me away. In fact, it’s blown away the entire cartooning community. We are all very impressed and overwhelmed by your support, especially me. I just wanna say thank you. I’m never going to stop saying thank you.
And on that note, I was just visited by a former photographer from the Free Lance-Star, Suzanne Carr Rossi. She brought me pants.
And now the Facebook updates from the past few days.
Today, October 16, 2025
Remember when Donald Trump took that cognitive test and bragged about it? Remember that he had to repeat “person, woman, man, camera, TV”. Trump said. “They said nobody gets it in order, it’s actually not that easy. But for me it was easy. And that’s not an easy question.” He is right.
It’s not an easy question when you have to answer five minutes later.
It’s not easy when the question is “bridge, Sarah, justice, banana.” It’s not easy when you have to remember photos that include car keys, a comb, and a helicopter five minutes later.
It’s not easy when you have to remember letters and numbers in the sequence of 1, A, 2, B, 3, C, 4, D, etc, to ten.
It’s not easy to count backwards from 20.
It’s not easy to have to draw a clock and other shapes with your left hand when you’re handed and your right hand is kind of dead from a stroke.
It’s not easy to do any of the stuff after having a stroke, but I did it. The thing is, nobody told me I was great or amazing for it. Sicophants didn’t fawn over me for it. Nobody threw a parade for me because I remembered five words. Idiots didn’t go until late-night TV to tell me I was a genius for it.
Donald Trump wants you to treat him like a baby for remembering five words.
Donald Trump never suffered from a stroke.
So why was Donald Trump given this cognitive test?
Who knew that my stroke would become part of my research?
October 16, 2025
Ok, Peezeheads!!! Who wants to volunteer to help out a stroke victim, and possibly an opportunity to see my ass?
I am at Encompass in Fredericksburg. I need someone to bring me a few button-up shirts. I can’t use a T-shirt because my shoulder is messed up from the stroke. I also need a pair of shorts. I just need athletic shorts, nothing with buttons or belts, or zippers. 
I could also use some underwear.
At this time, I am still wearing the gown from the hospital, and my ass is hanging out. Fortunately, the entire nursing staff has told me that my butt is not too hairy, but maybe they’re just being nice. 
Update: I am only asking local people to help. I need this stuff today, not delivered by Amazon. Thank you.
Update update: Melissa Colomboto the rescue, and then Leslie Elliott, and my friend Suzanne.
October 15, 2025
So many people have touched me this week, and I’ll never be able to you how much it means to me.
As I was being rolled out on a gurney to be taken to the rehab center, an old friend I hadn’t seen in nearly a decade was waiting outside my hospital room to see me.
I want to cry. I love you, Rhonda.
October 15, 2025
I had an MRI this morning after the procedure scan my heart. They were looking to see if there was a hole or any other abnormalities in my heart that may have caused the stroke. As it turns out, there’s nothing wrong with it.
But the MRI was brutal. You can’t move, your back hurts, you don’t know when it’s going to end, you are continuously being asked to hold your breath, and they’re playing 90s music made by other people. Instead of Pearl Jam, you’re getting Pearl lame.
It’s time to go. They want more blood.
October 15, 2025
I am being moved tonight to a rehab facility. I think this is good news. 
October 15, 2025
One of my nurses was training another nurse this morning. Just as the trainee was applying alcohol to my skin, in order for me to inject myself with insulin (yes they are making me inject myself), I decided let out a little scream. AAAAAGH! The trainee jumped, and the other nurse laughed her ass off, and said that was great.
They both said that they’re going to remember me.
Damn straight.
This is the GoFundMe set up by Kevin Necessary and Jack Ohman
This is a cartoon drawn by John Buss.
How to draw Peezy by Dave Whammond, and he’s trying to get more cartoonists to join in. I hope it happens because I would love to see more of my colleagues’ renditions of our favorite pizza.
Scottie's Playtime 