WASHINGTON (TNND) — The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) said Wednesday that over 234 pro-Israel Democrats and Republicans won their elections in the midterms.

“AIPAC congratulates the hundreds of pro-Israel Democrats and Republicans who won their elections last night. More than 234 candidates supported by AIPAC members have already won, with many additional races still too close to call,” the lobbying group wrote in a post on X.

The group went on to congratulate Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-Ny) and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-Ny) for the Democratic victories in both the House and Senate.

The Democrats took control of the House and the Senate in the midterm elections.

“AIPAC members are determined to expand their political activism in the cycles ahead,” the group’s post concluded. “Our community will increase its support for Democrats and Republicans who recognize that a strong partnership with Israel helps keep both countries secure, advances peace and stability, promotes democratic values, and grows our economy through trade and innovation.”

Via https://therearenosunglasses.wordpress.com/2026/11/09/aipac-boasts-of-the-234-senators-and-representatives-who-are-still-pro-israel-first-and-foremost/

Screenshot

Iain Todd

November 6, 2026

NASA’s Artemis II mission caused enormous disturbances in Earth’s atmosphere that scientists say could have disrupted GPS and other communications.

The pre-print study by scientists from National Cheng Kung University in Taiwan found that disturbances created by the launch of the Artemis II rocket were stronger than those caused by any other rocket launches to date.

The team say the research could point to future problems caused by increasingly powerful rocket launches becoming more frequent

A mission around the Moon

The Artemis II mission was arguably the biggest spaceflight story of 2026.

It launched on April 1, 2026, taking four astronauts on a 9-day journey around the Moon and back.

Artemis II travelled further beyond the Moon than any mission before it, using the Moon’s gravitational pull to slingshot around it and begin the journey back to Earth.

It was the first crewed mission to the Moon since the Apollo programme and marked a key stepping stone in NASA’s plans to establish a permanent human presence on the lunar surface.

A disturbance in Earth’s atmosphere

Yet despite the success of the Artemis II mission and its popularity, a pre-print study published in Geophysical Research Letters says that the launch of the Artemis II rocket and subsequent rocket burns caused three distinct disturbances in Earth’s ionosphere.

The ionosphere is the region of our atmosphere that reaches about 80–640 km (50–400 miles) above Earth’s surface.

It’s at the edge of space, marking the boundary between Earth’s lower atmosphere and the vacuum of the cosmos.

The first ‘disturbance’ caused by the Artemis II mission occurred during the rocket’s launch from Kennedy Space Center, generating shock-acoustic and gravity wave modulations.

But the next two upper-stage burns were much stronger than the initial liftoff.

An hour after launch, a second disturbance came via the ‘apogee raise burn’, which is an engine burn used to increase the Artemis II spacecraft’s altitude.

About 25 hours after lift-off, a third was caused by the ‘trans-lunar injection burn’, which is used to put the spacecraft on its journey towards the Moon.

That apogee raise burn “triggered shock waves and unprecedented large-scale disturbances that elongated 50° longitude across North America,” the study authors say.

“This is the first time a single space mission produced three instances of ionospheric disturbances over the same region during successive orbit manoeuvres.”

Rocket launches, GPS and self-driving cars

One of the key points made by the authors of this pre-print study is the effect that future rocket launches could have on technologies like GPS systems, drones and self-driving cars.

While they found that there was no widespread GPS disruption caused by the Artemis II lift-off itself, they did record changes in the ionosphere that could potentially cause problems during future rocket launches.

Such disturbances could disrupt communications on Earth by, for example, disturbing radio signals.

And rocket launches could affect other technologies on Earth that rely on GPS for positioning, such as self-driving cars and drones.

Via https://www.skyatnightmagazine.com/news/artemis-ii-launch-tore-a-hole-in-earth-atmosphere

Particularly since the Citizens United ruling, US politics has been awash in corporate and billionaire money, with both parties taking gobs of cash from corporations that have direct interests in government policies. But President Donald Trump has taken corruption to new and breathtakingly bold levels.

“I have never seen such open corruption in any modern government anywhere,” said Harvard professor of government Steven Levitsky (Guardian, 6/17/25).

So, it’s probably not surprising to hear CNN (10/21/26) report that voters are increasingly “concerned about corruption,” ranking it only after the economy and the cost of living as a top concern. In a Gallup poll (9/2/26), a record-high 89% of respondents said they believe corruption is “widespread throughout the government in this country.”

But what might be surprising is that, according to a recent NBC poll (10/18/26), a majority (56%) say corruption “is equally a problem among elected officials in both parties.” (Among those who find it worse in one party or the other, 25% point to Republicans and 17% point to Democrats.)

Why would a majority of the public believe that Republicans and Democrats are equally corrupt? A FAIR study suggests that media play no small role: The US media system has given more coverage to the most prominent allegations of corruption under Biden than to those under Trump.

‘The most corrupt administration in history’

During his first term, Trump refused to divest from his business interests, raking in millions through them from foreign governments and people with interests before his administration. His solicitation of Ukrainian intervention in the 2020 presidential campaign led to his first impeachment trial.

After the GOP-controlled Senate (with Mitt Romney as the sole Republican exception) voted to acquit him—and after the Supreme Court ruling granting the president impunity for virtually anything done in office—Trump unsurprisingly entered his second term with far greater boldness. He essentially operated a pay-to-play administration that engages in regular shakedowns of major corporations and offers pardons to those with political or financial ties to him.

There have been repeated accusations of insider trading under his administration. Trump made $1.4 billion from the cryptocurrency industry in 2025 alone, including $635 million from his $TRUMP memecoin, which was gobbled up by not only true believers but also those seeking political favors. (While Trump profited from fees on trade activity, investors have lost a total of $3.8 billion because of the memecoin’s unsurprising collapse.) In perhaps the most brazen incident of corruption, Trump accepted a Boeing luxury jet worth an estimated $400 million from the Qatari government to use—after spending hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on security upgrades—as his presidential plane.

Craig Holman of Public Citizen told FAIR:

The second Trump administration is far more corrupt than Trump’s first administration, and stands out as the most corrupt administration in history. Trump has made no qualms about the fact that he is going to exploit his position as president for self-enrichment. In fact, he has said that he was a fool in his first term for overlooking the opportunities for self-enrichment, given the president’s exemption from the conflict of interest law (18 USC 208).

The corruption is led by Trump, but it’s been enabled by his party since their first impeachment acquittal. In Trump’s second term, the Republican-controlled Congress has refused to investigate any of the corruption scandals, implement stronger ethical standards, or include safeguards in cryptocurrency regulation to prevent Trump (and other political officials) from profiting off it.

Unequal allegations

During Joe Biden’s election campaigns and presidency, the GOP attempted to paint the former vice president as the pinnacle of corruption. When they took control in 2023, House Republicans launched an oversight committee investigation into the Biden family’s foreign business dealings during his vice presidency. They found that relatives and associates took in a total of $10 million from foreign companies during his tenure, but despite months of investigation, involving interviews and thousands of documents, the committee provided no evidence of Biden’s knowledge or influence. (It did lead to an unsuccessful impeachment inquiry.)

As perhaps the most memorable story in the right’s campaign to make the Biden family known as the “Biden Crime Family,” readers will be familiar with Hunter Biden’s famous laptop, which purportedly contained evidence of corruption on the part of his father. First published by the New York Post (10/14/20) just weeks before the 2020 election, the laptop story was pushed by the right for years and even continues to this day, despite its failure to show any actual evidence of corruption.

So on the one hand we have unsubstantiated stories of Biden family corruption, totaling $10 million in alleged graft, and on the other, we have stories of Trump corruption that total in the billions, some of which will be hard to legally prove Trump’s direct involvement (insider trading) and others in which Trump isn’t even trying to hide his self-enrichment (most of the rest, including the Qatari jet).

If the US had a media ecosystem in which those stories received attention relative to their importance, it wouldn’t even be close: Trump corruption coverage would overwhelm that of Biden.

The laptop and the ‘crime family’

In the distorted media ecosystem we are subjected to, reality is reversed. FAIR searched Media Cloud’s US–National dataset, which indexes 246 online outlets including all major corporate outlets, as well as right-wing sources like Daily Caller and left-wing sources like the Intercept, to compare attention to the two prominent Biden stories and two of the most prominent Trump stories.

When the New York Post (10/14/20) “broke” the Hunter Biden laptop story, it prompted a huge spike of attention that has never fully gone away. Coverage increased in spring of 2022, when outlets like the New York Times (3/16/22) and Washington Post (3/30/22) published pieces that helped revive it; coverage became particularly intense the next year, which saw the GOP inquiry and the Justice Department criminal investigation.

FAIR’s search found a total of 12,161 stories that mentioned “Hunter Biden” and “laptop” from the Post story’s publication through Biden’s withdrawal from the 2024 race (10/14/20-7/21/24). Right-wing outlets led the way, but MediaCloud showed even centrist outlets like the New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today and Newsweek in the top 20 outlets in terms of volume of coverage.

Coverage of the GOP investigation into Biden’s alleged “crime family,” which began in January 2023 and was led by House Oversight Committee chair James Comer (R–Ky.), drew similarly high averages and peaks of coverage, and also largely petered out after Biden’s withdrawal from the presidential race (1/1/23–7/21/24). In that year and a half, MediaCloud recorded 4,887 stories mentioning “Comer” and “Biden” and “family.”

Not all of these stories necessarily accused Biden of corruption; some centrist reports did work to debunk the false right-wing claims. But those big centrist outlets published enough prominent stories with murky headlines like “Biden Faces Conflict of Interest Questions That Are Being Promoted by Trump and Allies” (New York Times, 5/1/19), or explaining that the Hunter Biden case throws a “new wrench” in “the 2024 election” because “Democrats will have a harder time highlighting Trump’s indictments,” to muddy the narrative and legitimize the GOP accusations (see, e.g., CJR, 10/29/19; Press Watch, 8/14/23).

The Qatari jet and insider trading

Compare the quantity of these Biden corruption stories to coverage of the Qatari jet, a story that broke on May 11, 2025, and continued as Trump poured taxpayer dollars into its security upgrades. In the nearly year and a half from the story launch through the end of October 2026, the media produced 3,364 stories on the jet. That means that in approximately the same amount of time, media covered the investigation into Biden family corruption almost 1.5 times more than the Qatari jet. (Note that like the Biden stories, FAIR did not filter out jet stories that did not accuse Trump of corruption.)

Accusations of insider trading in Trump’s second term began in April 2025, when large call options were placed on the market shortly before Trump announced a 90-day pause on tariffs, sending the market soaring. They continued as more such suspicious and lucrative trades happened just before major Trump announcements on Venezuela and Iran, including within Trump’s personal holdings.

Coverage of Trump and insider trading from the first accusations (4/10/25) until the end of October 2026—a month longer than the Qatari jet coverage—has totaled 2,614 stories. The Biden family inquiry, at 4,887, got 1.9 times that amount.

Hunter Biden’s laptop, which dominated news headlines for longer, overwhelmed the Trump stories by far more. It got 4.7 times the coverage of insider trading under Trump and 3.6 times the coverage of Trump’s Qatari jet.

Even measuring them in terms of percentage of all news stories during their respective time periods, the Biden stories got far more coverage, with the family corruption story and the laptop story each averaging .10% of all content, while the Qatar jet averaged .06% and insider trading averaged .04%.

‘So vast as to be a new phenomenon’

This isn’t to say there’s no coverage of Trump’s corruption that attempts to put it into proper perspective. The New York Times editorial board (1/20/26) ran a lengthy editorial in January that tried to put a dollar amount to Trump’s self-enrichment just in the first year of his second term: $1,408,500,000.

The New Yorker (8/11/25), looking a bit more broadly and including his first term, came up with a conservative total of $4 billion.

Times columnist Jamelle Bouie (4/22/26) wrote:

To say that President Trump is corrupt is to somehow understate the size, scope and magnitude of his corruption.

It is as if you were to describe a modern thermonuclear device as a “bomb.” That is true enough, but it is not quite the truth. It does not capture the nature of the thing in full.

So it goes for Trump’s corruption, which is so vast as to be a new phenomenon in American politics.

Yet, just as media factchecking falters under the sheer number of Trump’s lies, these isolated efforts at contextualization fall increasingly short as Trump’s corruption balloons to nearly unimaginable proportions. That’s especially true as most right-wing media outlets’ interest in corruption would appear to apply only to Democrats.

One of the most important jobs of any media outlet in a democracy is to hold those in power accountable. Democracy doesn’t work if the public doesn’t know or understand what’s happening in their government. As polling shows, people clearly care a great deal about government corruption, but if they have little sense of its mechanics, scale or worst perpetrators, they can’t easily address it. With the midterm elections suggesting a mandate for rooting it out, there’s no more critical time for journalists to step up and shine the line—brightly and consistently—on what our elected and unelected officials are doing to us.

Via https://fair.org/home/media-obscure-enormity-of-trump-corruption/

Amy Furr

9 Nov 2026

Democrats are signaling they will block President Donald Trump’s massive defense budget request.

Most Democrats were already opposed to an increase and are set to reject the requested $1.5 trillion defense budget, Bloomberg reported Sunday.

Now, after their party won majorities in the U.S. House and Senate during the midterm elections, Democrats are “signaling they will block any efforts to push it forward,” the outlet continued:

At the same time, Republican lawmakers returning to the lame-duck session before the new Congress is seated in January may not be able to muster the support or political will to ram through the massive defense spending package, especially amid the Pentagon’s unpopular war against Iran that cost many of them their jobs.

“We must push for the development of a more realistic and sustainable approach to our national security — one that does not require a defense budget in excess of $1 trillion or one paid for with draconian cuts to critical domestic programs,” Representative Adam Smith of Washington, the incoming chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said in a statement after the election.

President Trump said in January the 2027 military budget should be bumped to $1.5 trillion, Breitbart News reported.

He explained the proposed increase would support what he called the “Dream Military” that would ensure America stayed safe and secure:

He linked the feasibility of the higher budget figure to revenue generated from tariffs, claiming that “tremendous numbers” from tariff income had made the larger figure viable. “Because of Tariffs, and the tremendous Income that they bring, amounts being generated, that would have been unthinkable in the past … we are able to easily hit the $1.5 Trillion Dollar number,” Trump wrote. He added that this approach would also allow for “pay[ing] down Debt” and providing a “substantial Dividend to moderate income Patriots within our Country.”

Trump later said there was an interest in increasing defense spending, adding that states should handle more of the domestic spending, according to Breitbart News.

“We’re fighting wars. We can’t take care of day care. It’s not possible for us to take care of day care, Medicaid, Medicare — all these individual things. They can do it on a state basis. You can’t do it on a federal,” he noted.

“We are delivering on President Trump’s commitment to expand American military dominance for decades to come. Previous administrations underinvested in our military while our enemies grew stronger and more dangerous, so we are now changing the game,” Secretary of War Pete Hegseth said upon release of the president’s fiscal year 2027 budget. “This budget builds this arsenal without compromising readiness that will ensure we remain the world’s premier fighting force, we protect the homeland, and we create peace through strength now and into the future.”

A CNN exit poll suggested Tuesday that a majority of midterm voters said the Iran War and high gas prices factored into their vote, and President Trump acknowledged Wednesday that the conflict with Iran cost Republicans votes in the midterm elections.

Via https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2026/11/09/democrats-set-to-reject-president-trumps-1-5-trillion-defense-budget-request/

The Cradle

House Democrats are facing a wave of calls and emails urging them not to elect Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries as House speaker following the party’s landslide victory in Tuesday’s elections, Axios reported.

Several lawmakers reported receiving hundreds of calls, with one describing the issue as their office’s top concern. The backlash reflects growing frustration among Democratic voters with party leadership, particularly Jeffries’ ties to pro-Israel organizations and corporate political action committees.

Some callers are pushing for Rep. Jamie Raskin, a prominent progressive Democrat, to replace Jeffries, although Raskin has expressed no interest in challenging him.

A Change.org petition opposing Jeffries had gathered nearly 900,000 signatures by Friday, amplified in part by actor Mark Ruffalo’s call for “a new speaker.” Meanwhile, incoming Ohio Democrat Don Leonard said he would be “shopping for a new leader” if Jeffries refused to change his pro-Israel position.

Despite the mounting pressure, Jeffries remains widely expected to secure the speakership after Democrats won a commanding House majority of more than 250 seats. He has maintained unanimous support from his caucus in previous speaker votes, and no challenger has emerged.

However, several incoming Democrats have declined to commit to supporting him, highlighting divisions within the party ahead of its leadership elections on 18–19 November and the House speaker vote on 3 January.

Via https://t.me/thecradlemedia/70671

Brian Shilhavy

From The New York Times.

Excerpts:

We’ve been here before. As with so many other transformational inventions — railroads, electricity, the internet — outsize enthusiasm for artificial intelligence is supporting a level of spending that’s gotten ahead of plausible profit expectations, a defining characteristic of a financial bubble.

Now that the stocks of some A.I. builders and suppliers are wavering, we think it’s important to ask the next critical question.

What happens to the American economy if this bubble bursts? The damage could run deep.

It was just over a year ago when we argued that the enormous sums being poured into A.I. are reminiscent of the go-go internet era of the 1990s and the housing boom of the 2000s, both of which turned out to be financial bubbles whose bursting spilled over into the broader economy, leading to job and income losses that affected most Americans.

Now, we’re already starting to see signs that this latest boom may be fading: The tech-heavy Nasdaq index fell by more than 5 percent Thursday and is down nearly 10 percent since Oct. 1. Growing investor nervousness led the prominent A.I. lab OpenAI to dial back its latest funding round target by $10 billion.

What happens if the A.I. boom goes bust?

There’s a consensus building among investors, academics and market analysts that any downturn would be relatively mild, similar to what happened in the early 2000s, after the dot-com bubble burst.

The inflation-adjusted value of the overall economy, or real gross domestic product, shrank less than half a percent. And while unemployment rose, it was considerably lower than it was at the peak of the financial crisis.

Unfortunately, this consensus looks too optimistic.

First, the A.I. bubble is by all measures substantially larger than the dot-com bubble; the stock market has increased by more than it did between 1996 and 2000 and is currently worth 240 percent of G.D.P., versus 160 percent at the peak of the dot-com bubble.

This difference in magnitude means that if the stock market fell as much as it did over the course of the dot-com bust, the amount of lost wealth could translate into a reduction in real consumer spending that would be twice as large. That reduction would show up as a lower demand for goods and services, which could in turn reduce business investment, hiring and overall growth.

Our current economy is also more fragile than it was back in 2000.

Hiring has been sluggish and real wages are falling, the latter because of elevated war-induced inflation. The Federal Reserve has been gradually raising interest rates, leading to higher borrowing costs and potentially dialing back economic activity.

Additionally, today’s fiscal conditions and outlook are much worse. In 2001, the federal government ran a budget surplus of 1.2 percent of G.D.P.; today, it is running a historically large deficit of 6.2 percent of G.D.P. That could limit Congress’s willingness to inject even more borrowed money into the economy to offset any downturn.

To get a rough read on the magnitude of the damage triggered by what an A.I. bubble burst might do to the economy, we ran the same economic model that the Federal Reserve uses to simulate the workings of the macroeconomy.

The results confirmed our concerns.

Mapping a dot-com-style sell-off onto today’s markets would lead real G.D.P. to fall by more than three times as much as it did during the 2001 recession: 1.4 percent versus 0.4 percent. The unemployment rate would steadily climb from its current rate of 4.2 percent to above 7 percent.

Back when we first expressed our concerns about the stability of the A.I. investment boom, we noted that the companies building the A.I. models and the infrastructure to support them were mostly spending their own cash, meaning a bust would hurt them but not their lenders.

That’s no longer the case: $445 billion worth of A.I.-related debt, or 1.4 percent of G.D.P., was issued in the first eight months of 2026 tech stock.

Via https://nytimes.com/2026/11/06/opinion/nasdaq-tech-stocks-ai-bubble-dot-com-bust.html