Welcome back friends to the Monday Good News Roundup. The time of the week when your intrepid GNR Newsroom (Myself, Killer300, Bhu, and the GNR Discord) bring you all the good news to start your week off right.
I hope everyone had a fun Halloween weekend, and I hope everyone gets out the vote this Tuesday. Lets show them who the Hell we are!
And we are gonna start with some music: Tarzan Boy by Baltimora
One of the more frequent complaints from center-left commenters and activists about the second Trump presidency has been how unconstrained it has seemed. Trump appears to continually press the boundaries of presidential power, get Congress to do his bidding, and cow his political opponents into submission, all while the media and the courts wave their hands and say “this is fine.”
Or … is that what is actually happening? Is there really no one putting constraints on Trump’s power and actions? I thought about this over the last couple of days, and came to the conclusion that if you look closer, there are actually quite a few ways that Trump has faced roadblocks and constraints, despite his ambitions to achieve unprecedented levels of power.
Consider these nine ways that Trump’s power is being constrained:
Trump is nowhere near as powerful as he wants you to think he is. Something you should always keep in mind. We can absolutely beat him.
In March, Donald Trump issued an executive order titled “PRESERVING AND PROTECTING THE INTEGRITY OF AMERICAN ELECTIONS.” Predictably, it was designed to do anything but that. Its goal was to make it more difficult to register to vote.
In April, Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, a senior judge in the District of Columbia, issued a preliminary injunction that temporarily prevented key parts of the executive order from going into effect while the litigation moved forward. The key problem Judge Kollar-Kotelly observed was that Trump was trying to usurp the power the Constitution affords to the states and Congress to run elections.
And to the surprise of no one, Trump yet again tries to overstep and a judge tells him where he can stick it.
Merkley and 10 other Democratic senators, including Oregon's U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden, sent a letter to CBO Director Phillip Swagel on Monday. The senators are asking the CBO to analyze the costs of activating, deploying and compensating National Guard members, along with the cost to sustain and maintain the deployments.
Yeah it turns out deploying the national guard to cities costs a lot of fucking money, and probably should be reserved for real emergencies and not, you know, stupid publicity stunts designed to intimidate people and distract from the Epstein files, so people might get mad about that.
President Trump is reportedly fuming that his threats, firings, and program cuts haven’t gotten Senate Democrats to cave to Republicans and end the shutdown.
Trump, 79, thought the shutdown would last ten days at most, believing that the unprecedented and
illegal firings of federal workers by his “
grim reaper‚” OMB head Russ Vought, would be enough to get Democrats to give up, sign the Republicans’ budget bill, and thus re-open the government.
It looks like the shut down is not going Trumps way. Stay strong everyone! We can win this.
President Donald Trump’s support among young American voters is cratering, according to monthslong YouGov/Economist polling trends.
The latest survey, conducted from Oct. 24-27, found that 20% of adults under the age of 30 approved of Trump’s performance as president. That marked a 30-point drop from February, when 50% of 18-to-29-year-olds approved of Trump and 42% disapproved.
Trump’s approval rating within the 30-to-44-year-old demographic also dipped by eight points during the same time range, from 45% in February to 37% in October.
*Sits backwards in chair* Okay, lets rap young people. Like I know some of you voted for Trump, and I get it, you’re new to politics, you didn’t like Biden, so you made a mistake, it happens. The important thing is you learn from this experience. Like you got one fuck up, now you know why we don’t let guys like Trump become President. Okay? Cool. See you next election, hope you make the right choice.
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Food stamps: A federal judge ordered the Trump administration to continue paying for food stamps during the federal shutdown. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, aids roughly 42 million people and was set to run out of funds on Saturday without intervention. The judge ordered distribution of funds “as soon as possible.” Read more ›
This is a big one, one a lot of people were worried about, and probably the main thing that would have made the Dems cave. But with that out of the way hopefully they will be able to hang in there and win this.
Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson on Thursday delivered a frantic warning about progressive New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani as new polls showed him with a big lead over top rival Andrew Cuomo.
During a news conference at the US Capitol, Johnson attacked Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries for giving a lukewarm endorsement of Mamdani last week and accused the entire Democratic Party of embracing “Marxism.”
I think Mamdani is gonna be one to watch. Also if he has the GOP this nervous he definitely has my endorsement.
Alright time for a music break. Alice Cooper House of fire
It is just too much. He has gone too far. His agenda is clearly failing and wildly unpopular, and Republican candidates who are going to have to run on all this next year - and “defend the indefensible” as I call it - are not happy. There are limits, and Trump may be running into them now. For most of these Republicans in Congress right now are going to be around long after Trump is gone, and they are going to have to live with the extraordinary mess he is making for years, perhaps decades.
The GOP is rapidly getting tired of this loser duck.
Jetten, who is the leader of the Democrats 66 (D66), hasn’t made his sexuality a focus of his campaign, instead emphasising his mission for positive change.
Following his party’s strong performance in the election on Wednesday (29 October), the 38-year-old is set to become the Netherlands’ youngest and first openly gay prime minister.
The far right is crumbling here, there and everywhere.
Adkison’s employer, a small construction company, does not offer health insurance and he makes too much to be eligible for Medicaid or other welfare programs. He was forced to take medical leave, despite not receiving sick pay.
His parents started a GoFundMe to help pay for reconstructive surgery and expenses while on leave, which raised over $74,000.
The amount of support, Adkison says, was “overwhelming,” even though he was against the idea of asking for help.
While the money wasn’t enough to pay for the surgery, Dr CJ Langevin at Wellspring Plastic Surgery in Texas offered to perform the jaw repair surgery for just $1,400 — which covered the cost of the surgical suite time.
Not all heroes wear capes. Its in our nature to help others, to be kind. Cruelty is an aberration.
For those who’ve been looking for a new way to protest U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, political nonprofit the Indivisible Project has some advice: Cancel your Spotify account.
The nonprofit organization best known for helping to organize recent No Kings protests across the country released a statement Tuesday announcing a campaign called “Don’t Stream Fascism: Cancel Spotify” in response to the revelations that the music streaming platform has been hosting recruiting ads for ICE on its platform.
“Spotify is exploiting the work of artists to line their pockets while recruiting for ICE — a secret police force that is terrorizing American communities. Spotify is actively amplifying the Trump regime’s drive to authoritarianism,” Indivisible wrote in a statement explaining the campaign.
I’m actually ahead of the curve on this one; I switched to Tidal months ago.
updated Microsoft reported earnings for the quarter ended Sept. 30 on Wednesday after market close and buried in its financial filings were a couple of passages suggesting that OpenAI suffered a net loss of $11.5 billion or more during the quarter.
Let's look first at page 9 of the official earnings filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, which includes the following passage:
We have an investment in OpenAI Global, LLC (“OpenAI”) and have made total funding commitments of $13 billion, of which $11.6 billion has been funded as of September 30, 2025. The investment is accounted for under the equity method of accounting, with our share of OpenAI’s income or loss recognized in other income (expense), net.
That second sentence is important. This isn't mark-to-market accounting, where it takes the presumed value of the investment based on what the market currently says it's worth (that value is a staggering $135 billion) and marks it up or down from its initial investment. This is equity accounting, where OpenAI's gains or losses directly affect Microsoft's net income on its income statement. This is how finance types account for a large but non-controlling stake in another company.
The bottom is rapidly falling out of AI. About freaking time.
A fiercely independent governor in New Hampshire, an octogenarian iconoclast in Nebraska and a Kansas Republican who bucked his party on transgender legislation have unwittingly formed a national bulwark against President Donald Trump’s aggressive redistricting push.
Despite threats and force, Trump’s team is finding there are some state-level Republicans who simply won’t budge on a legally questionable strategy that would grow the GOP’s advantage in next year’s fight to keep the House.
And then there’s Indiana, where state Senate leader Rodric Bray says he lacks support in his caucus to undertake a redraw, even as GOP Gov. Mike Braun called a special session to start next week.
The GOP’s desperate redistricting scam is falling apart.
I think that’s enough for this week: Time for Pokemon.
And now the cute corner.
Alright, have a good week everyone, remember to vote on Tuesday.
