Category: Children / Kids / Minors / Teens / Family
Jimmy Kimmel Cancelled??? Stop Being Pusillanimous!!! | BREAKING NEWS Armageddon Update
ICE Attack Hospitalizes 80-Year-Old US Citizen
Two more clips from The Majority Report. One on RFK destroying the CDC and the other on the how bad Chuck Schumer is as an opposition party leader.
Less Serious News
Because it doesn’t hurt to know a little about these things, too.
News of the Week: Lottery Woes, Robert Redford, and Why Do People Swear So Much?
In the news of the week ending September 19, 2025, are lots of profanity, a stone skimming scandal, and saying goodbye to Robert Redford.
Random Notes
If I ever win the lottery, remind me to save and invest the money.
Every time I put down an ant trap, a mouse comes in overnight and takes it away. What are they doing with them?
I love prescription medication commercials that say “Tell your doctor what medications you’re taking.” Shouldn’t my doctor know that already?
Could you eat an entire meal at a restaurant without your phone? That’s what you have to do at the new eatery Hush Harbor in Washington, D.C., which doesn’t allow cell phones. They will supply you with letter-writing materials and board games though!
Life advice: Try not to be the type of person who would go on a reality show.
Kids, what if I told you that in the 1960s and ’70s, companies embedded vinyl records on the back of cereal boxes? It’s true!
If I put down mouse traps, will a larger animal come into the house overnight and take those?
Mass. Appeal
Why do things have to change?
Massachusetts is currently in the process of picking a new state flag and a new state seal. The old ones were perfectly fine but I guess they’re no longer appropriate for modern times. Or something.
Unfortunately, the finalists are TERRIBLE. The seals are passable, I guess, but the state flag choices are a mayflower (the flower, not the ship), a mountain with a gold star on top, and a circle of turkey feathers.
Writer Matt Taibbi thinks the state should run with the turkey idea but maybe in a Norman Rockwell direction.
Some people have joked that the new flag should be the colors of Dunkin’ Donuts, and compared to the finalists that might not be a bad idea.
Peak Profanity
I have a theory that everyone swears. They may not do it all the time and they may even pick the mildest of curse words. But everyone from the ages of 9 to 90 does it.
The New York Times thinks so too. The writer, Mark Edmundson, grew up in the 1950s and ’60s when cursing was relatively rare. And the people that swore were almost always guys (only never in front of a parent, teacher, or cop). But it’s everywhere now, from homes to schools and on television. I’m still sometimes shocked by what the basic cable channels can get away with now.
We try our hardest to leave out certain words in the pages of the Post, and if you leave a comment, please try to control yourself as well.
Headline of the Week
“Cheating Scandal Rocks World Stone Skimming Championships”
RIP Robert Redford, Bobby Hart, Patricia Crowley, Thomas Perry, Marilyn Hagerty, and Ricky Hatton
Robert Redford starred in many classic films, including All the President’s Men, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Way We Were, The Sting, Three Days of the Condor, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, The Candidate, and many other movies and TV episodes. He was also a director, helming Ordinary People (for which he won an Oscar), Quiz Show, and A River Runs Through It. He died Tuesday at the age of 89.
Here’s the Post’s Bill Newcott on Redford’s career.
Bobby Hart was half of the music duo Boyce & Hart. They not only recorded their own music, they wrote and produced songs for The Monkees, including “Last Train to Clarksville” and the theme song to the show. They also wrote “(I’m Not Your” Steppin’ Stone,” “Come a Little Bit Closer,” and the theme song to Days of Our Lives (!). He died last week at the age of 86.
Here’s Boyce & Hart on a classic episode of I Dream of Jeannie (they also made an appearance on Bewitched around the same time).
Uploaded to YouTube by Willy Gilligan
Patricia Crowley starred in the TV series Please Don’t Eat the Daisies and played Mary Scanlon on Port Charles. She appeared in dozens of other TV shows and films. She died Sunday at the age of 91.
Thomas Perry was a writer of bestselling thriller and suspense novels. He died Monday at the age of 78.
Marilyn Hagerty achieved fame at the age of 85 when her newspaper restaurant review of Olive Garden went viral. She was championed by Anthony Bourdain, and he even published a collection of her columns, titled Grand Forks: A History of American Dining in 128 Reviews. She died Tuesday at the age of 99.
Ricky Hatton was the former world boxing champion. He died Sunday at the age of 46.
This Week in History
William Howard Taft Born (September 15, 1857)
Here’s how Taft’s bid for a second term made for a chaotic 1912 election.
Lots of TV Shows Debuted! (September 15, 1965)
This was a big day for the debuts of classic shows. Lost in Space, Green Acres, I Spy, The Big Valley, and Gidget all started on this day in 1965.
It was actually a big week for debuts. Other shows that launched this week in 1965: I Dream of Jeannie, Hogan’s Heroes, F Troop, The Dean Martin Show, and The Wild, Wild West.
This Week in Saturday Evening Post History: Dole Fruits and Veggies (September 16, 1950)
That woman has a lot of hands.
September Is National Fruits and Veggies Month
You can use your own hands to make these recipes with those fruits and veggies.
Smitten Kitchen has Broccoli Parmesan Fritters and a Cranberry-Walnut Chicken Salad. Jellojoy has a Jello Fruit Cake, while Martha Stewart has Boiled Asparagus. The Pioneer Woman has a recipe for something called Melting Potatoes, and Allrecipes has Copycat Cracker Barrel Fried Apples. Iowa Girl Eats has this Marinated Vegetable Salad, Love & Lemons has Roasted Brussels Sprouts, and Dance Around the Kitchen has Banana Pudding.
All these recipes sound $%&*! great!
Next Week’s Holidays and Events
Fall Begins (September 22)
If you’re keeping track, it happens at 2:19 p.m. ET. (It also starts at that time even if you’re not keeping track.)
National Punctuation Day (September 24)
This, is, the, day to celebrate? periods, Commas; Exclamation “points” and other … forms of punctuation!!!!
Ryder Cup (September 26-28)
The annual U.S. vs. Europe golf event takes place at Bethpage Black in Farmingdale, New York. Here’s the broadcast schedule.
The right’s inflamtory rhetoric and blaming the left for inciting political violence on the left clips From The Majority Report
Hacks star Hannah Einbinder ended her Emmys speech with choice words for Donald Trump’s secret police force and some solidarity with the people of Palestine.
What Always Happens, Explained
Politics / September 19, 2025
Threatening Vulnerable People Is No Way to Mourn Someone Who Was Murdered
Those who had nothing to do with the violence against Charlie Kirk are being menaced—just like always.
Charlie Kirk’s suspected murderer was a 22-year-old white guy from Utah, but in the week since he was shot, at least six Historically Black Colleges and Universities have been forced to cancel classes due to bomb threats made against their students and faculty. Columnist Karen Attiah got fired from The Washington Post. Representative Ilhan Omar was nearly censured. Countless Black people have been harassed and, worse, countless immigrants have been threatened with the possibility of deportation, all for insufficiently respecting the life and death of a white supremacist.
Charlie Kirk’s suspected murderer was, again, a 22-year-old white guy from Utah who, I’ll bet, does not own either of my books and has most likely never read a single word I have written over my nearly two decades of public life, but this is what my mentions on Elon Musk’s apartheid-curious platform have looked like for a week:
Not that we needed more evidence, but the past week has been Exhibit One that this country hates Black people, and will do everything it can to silence, harass, and even murder us. A white man killed another white man for reasons we still don’t know, with a gun I don’t think he should have had, but Black people are catching death threats. That doesn’t make sense, unless you understand how deeply racist this country is. Black people are being fired from jobs and harassed online for insufficiently venerating a white supremacist, and having the temerity to describe his beliefs in public. It’s as if we’re all being asked to say our name is “Toby” instead of Kunta Kinte while being informed that the beatings will continue until morale improves. The white-led government, and many white employers, white-owned sports leagues, white public intellectuals, and a non-zero number of Black assimilationists and assorted would-be overseers are largely playing along with this racist gaslighting, proving once again that Black people have few, if any, real allies.
Somebody who considers themselves a good-white-ally(™) is just about to type “not all white people” or “also Matt Dowd” or “look at what happened to Jimmy Kimmel” in response to this article, as if I give a shit. What’s happening to white folks is that they’re being made to feel like Black people are made to feel every freaking day. Whenever white people catch a cold, Black people catch the flu, but God forbid I do a bit of triage before handing out chicken soup and Sprite to white folks feeling a bit under the weather these days.
The same thing is happening to the trans community, and the LGBTQ community more broadly, because when Kirk wasn’t railing against Black people, he was trying to stamp the LGBTQ community out of existence.
At this point, I’m supposed to turn and analyze what makes white males violently erupt against vulnerable people who have nothing to do with their problems. I’m supposed to talk about white gun culture and how it inevitably leads to racial and cultural violence. I’m supposed to talk about how Trump and his white supremacist government have given the very worst people in this country permission to carry out violence against any person they don’t like, with the promise of pardons should they undertake violence that pleases him. I know I’m supposed to address these topics, because these are the questions that have been floating around my professional networks for a week.
But even addressing those questions recenters the conversation around white folks and whiteness. It’s asking, “Now why did the monkey throw its poop at that fellow?” before you secure soap and a shower for the person covered in feces. At the moment, I’m just a little too beset by threats against myself and even my mother to think deeply about why white people do this. Analyzing why young white men are so dangerous to me is an intellectual luxury I do not have right now. I’m just trying to survive America for another week.
Luckily, after a fashion, I have some experience with this. This is not the first round of death threats I’ve gotten, and, unless they successfully kill me this time, it won’t be the last. I’ve been a Black man in the public eye for a while now, and you don’t get to be an old public Black person without developing a few coping mechanisms to keep you going. For a lot of people currently under threat, this is their first rodeo. There are, for instance, a number of staffers at The Nation who are for the first time having to live with what I live with every day, since the vice president went after our publication. There are folks who were never on the kind of violent watch lists Kirk created who now find themselves on the wrong end of the online rope.
It is terrifying to be in the eye of violent white folks. You have to take them seriously when they say they want you to come to harm. I cannot promise that you, or I, will survive what they’ll do next, but here are some tips to make it through this current phase of white America.
- Stick Together
They cannot kill, fire, or silence all of us. The violent people are predators and if you look at every natural predator on this earth, their first move is always to separate their target from the herd.
People must resist the urge to say some people deserve to be harassed and menaced by the government and the online right, as if to distinguish the people who deserve death threats from those who are “doing it the right way.”
Silence in the face of white supremacy is complicity with white supremacy. If we all resolve to not stay silent, we become a truth-telling hydra. Every time the white wing gets one of us, there should be others ready to take our places. (snip-MORE-excellent information)
https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/black-people-threatened-after-assasination
Useful Info & Resource
Understanding the Legal Framework Governing a Shutdown
September 17, 2025 | By Sam Berger
The government funding deadline is fast approaching. With the Trump Administration’s continued efforts to impound and rescind funding, complicating Congress’s ability to reach an agreement on funding bills for the upcoming year, it is important to keep in mind the legal framework that governs a shutdown, and the limits a shutdown places on the executive branch.
This primer focuses on the activities that can (and cannot) legally continue during a shutdown; it does not address the impacts of a shutdown on government programs or the people who use them.
Critically, while the executive branch has some discretion as to what activities continue during a shutdown — and it is impossible to predict whether the Administration will take unlawful actions under the pretext of a shutdown[1] — a government shutdown does not provide the Administration any additional legal authority to fire federal employees, limit review of its actions by federal courts, or freeze funding once full-year appropriations are provided.
Activities That Can Continue During a Government Shutdown
Under the Antideficiency Act, agencies can neither spend, nor make commitments to spend, money without appropriations from Congress.[2]
Some activities continue during a shutdown because they are separately or already funded. For example, activities funded by multi-year or indefinite funding, such as disaster relief, continue, with payments made as normal. Likewise, if some appropriations bills have been enacted prior to a shutdown, activities funded by those enacted appropriations also continue (a scenario sometimes described as a “partial” government shutdown). The Administration has no legal authority to impound or freeze these funds.
Based on long-standing Department of Justice (DOJ) guidance, there are also a limited set of activities for which the federal government can make commitments to pay — though it still cannot make payments — during a shutdown[3]:
- Activities expressly provided for in law to continue during a shutdown. Some laws expressly provide that certain activities can continue in the absence of appropriations, such as the Department of Defense’s “feed and forage” authority allowing it to obtain certain types of necessary supplies for military personnel.
- Activities to protect against imminent threats to life or property. This includes activities related to law enforcement, national security, air traffic control, and federal prisons, among others.
- Activities that are necessary to prevent significant damage to a funded program. For example, activities necessary to ensure Social Security payments (which themselves are funded under law) are made in a timely way can continue during a shutdown even if those activities themselves do not have funding.
- Activities necessary to discharge the President’s constitutional duties. This includes, for example, the President’s Commander-in-Chief responsibilities.
Different administrations have interpreted these exceptions to apply more or less narrowly, meaning that the activities that continue during a shutdown have differed to some extent from administration to administration. The first Trump Administration took a more expansive view of the public services that should continue.[4] However, to date, a core set of services — such as defense, law enforcement, transportation safety, Social Security, and Medicare — have continued during every shutdown.
Executive Branch Restrictions During a Government Shutdown
While the executive branch has some latitude in what activities it continues during a government shutdown, there are clear limits on its actions.
If an activity is not funded, no actual payments can be made during a shutdown.
Even for activities that continue during a shutdown because they are subject to one of the exceptions described above, funding to pay for them cannot be provided without appropriations. The federal personnel required to work — including law enforcement, prison guards, and the staff that process Social Security benefits — only receive IOUs that will be paid when appropriations are enacted. Federal contractors required to work or provide services also go unpaid during the shutdown.
Under current law, when the shutdown ends all federal employees receive backpay for the time the government was shut down regardless of whether they were working on an activity that could continue during a shutdown or were forced to stop work until the shutdown ended. However, federal contractors do not receive pay for this time period except for any work they were required to perform during it.
Each branch of government determines which of its activities can legally continue during a shutdown.
Congress and the judiciary make their own independent determinations about what activities continue during a lapse. The executive branch is not involved in those determinations.
In prior shutdowns, the judiciary has had sufficient funding in the absence of new appropriations to continue normal operations for the duration of the shutdown. Courts have said in previous shutdowns that in the event they ran out of funding during a shutdown, they would continue to hear cases and otherwise fulfill their constitutional responsibilities.[5] Thus, litigants who are suing in federal court would be able to bring suits against the Administration during a shutdown.
When DOJ does not have funding during a shutdown, its lawyers may request extensions from courts for filing deadlines and other procedural steps. Individual courts have the discretion to determine whether to provide such extensions, and courts have both granted and denied such requests depending on the circumstances.
A shutdown would not provide the Administration with any additional legal authority to engage in widespread firing of federal employees.
A temporary lapse in funding does not provide grounds for an agency to fire employees. In addition, during a shutdown most agencies will not be able to legally conduct personnel actions unrelated to the shutdown itself because their HR departments will not be funded and these types of actions do not fall under any of the available exceptions.[6]
A shutdown would not impact the Administration’s legal obligations to spend money once full-year appropriations are provided.
While many activities would cease during a shutdown because of a lack of funding, the shutdown would not provide the Administration with any authority to impound or freeze funds once appropriations are provided.
While this primer focuses on the legal framework that governs during a shutdown, the Administration has shown itself willing to take actions that are inconsistent with the law, which presents major challenges for the country at all times, not just during a shutdown.
Topics: Federal Budget, Budget Process
End Notes
[1] Sam Berger, “Trump is ignoring the law to keep the shutdown from causing him political pain,” The Washington Post, January 15, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/01/15/trump-is-ignoring-law-keep-shutdown-causing-him-political-pain/.
[2] Government Accountability Office, “Antideficiency Act,” https://www.gao.gov/legal/appropriations-law/resources.
[3] Walter Dellinger, “Government Operations in the Event of a Lapse in Appropriations,” Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel, August 16, 1995, https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/olc/opinions/attachments/2014/11/10/1995-08-16-lapse-in-appropriations.htm.
[4] Juliet Linderman, “Selective shutdown? Trump tries to blunt impact, takes heat,” Associated Press, January 13, 2019, https://apnews.com/article/66b50739f4b84063a2ff56dff3156712.
[5] United States Courts, “Judiciary Has Funds to Operate Through Jan. 31,” January 22, 2019, https://www.uscourts.gov/data-news/judiciary-news/2019/01/22/judiciary-has-funds-operate-through-jan-31.
[6] Office of Personnel Management, “Guidance for Shutdown Furloughs,” January 2024, https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/furlough-guidance/guidance-for-shutdown-furloughs.pdf.
Good News! Get On The Phone-
Bipartisan bill seeks to reinstate national suicide hotline for LGBTQ+ youth
Sep 17, 2025
Orion Rummler
This story was originally reported by Orion Rummler of The 19th. Meet Orion and read more of his reporting on gender, politics and policy.
If you or a loved one are in crisis, please call or text 988 or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a live volunteer crisis counselor.
Sens. Tammy Baldwin, a Democrat, and Lisa Murkowski, a Republican, introduced a bipartisan bill on Wednesday to re-establish national emergency suicide prevention services for LGBTQ+ youth — which have been stripped by the Trump administration at a time when the vulnerable group needs it most.
In July, the Trump administration terminated the 988 hotline’s LGBTQ+ services, which connected young people in crisis with counselors trained in supporting LGBTQ+ youth. This new bill, backed by the LGBTQ+ youth suicide prevention organization Trevor Project as well as the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, would modify the Public Health Service Act to reinstate those services and require the Secretary of Health and Human Services to maintain them. The bill now moves to committee.
The Trevor Project estimates that more than 1.8 million LGBTQ+ young people seriously consider suicide each year in the United States, as they face high rates of bullying, assault and discrimination. And when the 2024 presidential race was called for Donald Trump, calls and texts to the Trevor Project’s own crisis hotlines spiked by 700 percent, as LGBTQ+ youth felt afraid about the outcome of the election.
“Given that LGBTQ+ youth are more than four times as likely to attempt suicide than their peers, the need for these services remains pressing,” said Jaymes Black, CEO of The Trevor Project, in a statement. “This is not about politics, or identity; this is about doing what is best to support our country’s highest risk populations — and save young people’s lives nationwide.”
During his first term in 2020, President Trump signed a bipartisan law to create 988 as a more accessible resource for mental health emergencies. The free hotline launched in July 2022. Since then, millions of people in crisis have turned to 988. And nearly 1.5 million of those calls, texts and chats were sent by young Americans seeking specialized LGBTQ+ services.
“We are in the middle of a mental health crisis, and the 988 lifeline saves lives, plain and simple,” said Baldwin, who wrote the original legislation to create the 988 hotline. Cutting funds for specialized services within 988 puts the lifeline in jeopardy, she said in a statement.
“There is absolutely no good reason that Donald Trump took away this specialized help for our LGBTQ youth. Mental health does not see partisan lines or geography,” the Wisconsin Democrat added.
Scottie's Playtime 