October 21, 2025

Tuesday, October 21, 2025. Annette’s Roundup for Democracy.

Obama appraises Trump against Presidential norms.

Obama: Trump’s troop deployment to American cities an effort ‘to weaken how we have understood democracy’

The former president accused the Trump administration of pursuing “a deliberate end-run” around the law.

Former President Barack Obama decried the Trump administration’s deployment of military troops to American cities, saying the moves amount to “a genuine effort to weaken how we have understood democracy.”

In an appearance on the final episode of comedian Marc Maron’s podcast, “WTF,” Obama said President Donald Trump was attempting to contravene the Posse Comitatus Act, a nearly 150-year-old law generally prohibiting the use of the military for domestic law enforcement.

If I had sent in the National Guard into Texas and just said ... ‘I don’t care what Governor [Greg] Abbott says, I’m going to take over law enforcement because I think things are out of control,’ it is mind boggling to me how Fox News would’ve responded,” Obama said.

The former president’s comments come as the White House has pushed ahead with the deployment of troops in Chicago and Portland despite legal challenges and pushback from local leaders. A federal appeals court on Saturday allowed troops to remain in Illinois but blocked their planned deployment in Chicago, while a federal appeals court panel in Oregon seemed poised to allow a similar deployment in Portland.
“When you see an administration suggest that ordinary street crime is an insurrection or a terrorist act, that is a genuine effort to weaken how we have understood democracy and that was understood by Democrats and Republicans,” Obama said.

Trump and several administration officials — including Vice President JD Vance, senior adviser Stephen Miller and Attorney General Pam Bondi — have repeatedly accused liberal organizations of insurrection and domestic terrorism, vowing to crack down on nonprofit groups and activist networks or even invoke the Insurrection Act.

Obama, who has been increasingly outspoken about his objections to several White House moves in recent months, previously criticized the administration for throwing “the weight of the United States government behind extremist views” in the wake of conservative activist Charlie Kirk’s killing.

“I think there is no doubt that a lot of the norms, civic habits, expectations, institutional guardrails that we had, that we took for granted for our democracy have been weakened deliberately,” Obama said on the episode, released Sunday. “And I don’t think they’re destroyed, but I think they have been damaged. And they’ve been systematic about it.” (Politico).

The Supreme Court will decide whether the President has the right to militarize our cities and our lives, since dissension among judges continues in lower courts.

This may be the deciding case.👇

Illinois, Chicago urge Supreme Court to uphold block on National Guard deployment

The Trump administration's push to lift a lower court's order barring the deployment of the National Guard to Chicago relies on "mischaracterizations" of the facts on the ground, lawyers for the city of Chicago and state of Illinois wrote in a brief to the Supreme Court on Monday.

They urged the high court to keep in place the current order that allows the Trump administration to federalize the Illinois National Guard but prohibits them from deploying into Chicago.

Applicants' contrary arguments rest on mischaracterizations of the factual record or the lower courts' views of the legal principles. As the district court found, state and local law enforcement officers have handled isolated protest activities in Illinois, and there is no credible evidence to the contrary," they argued.

With the temporary restraining order set to expire in three days, Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul encouraged the court to reach the same conclusion reached by two lower courts -- that that Illinois would be irreparably harmed and Trump was unlikely to prove the takeover of the National Guard was justified.

They argued that the current arrangement barring the deployment but allowing the federalization of the National Guard "safeguards the careful balance of power struck by the Constitution and affords the federal government appropriate solicitude while this fast-moving case proceeds in the lower courts."

"The Framers carefully apportioned responsibility over the 'militia' -- today, the National Guard -- between the federal government and the States, granting the federal government the authority to call up the militia only for specific purposes and at specific times," they wrote. (ABC News).

One more thing.

Federalizing troops to control our cities is just one Trump attack against our people and Democracy.

Last weekend Trump authorized live missiles to be shot across the always traffic-filled I-5 freeway, risking the lives of people driving on the highway.

The 1-5 freeway runs almost the entire length of the West Coast, connecting San Diego and Los Angeles,

The military games during which the missiles we’re to be shot were part of the 250 year celebration of the marine corps, happening at Camp Pendleton (38 miles from San Diego and 75 miles from Los Angeles).

Governor Gavin Newsom of California tried to persuade Trump to stop the shooting. When he couldn’t, he took action to protect Americans who would have been driving on the highway by shutting down 17 miles of the road.

And then this happened.👇

More proof that the lives of Americans mean nothing to Trump.

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Updates on the damage Trump did yesterday (and proposes to do another day.)

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George Will starts by talking about print media, but he really explains why our news reports, whether television, cable, or digital/social, are siloed by political viewpoints.

“Information matters less relative to opinions.”

Opinion, not news, is now everything, whether you are Rachel Maddow, MSNBC, or Jesse Watters, Fox News.

# George Will. What killed print media — and what died with it
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The waning of newsprint is about cultural changes more momentous than digital publishing’s arrival.

A sound of morning silence is coming to Atlanta. The sound of newspapers landing on sidewalks in residential neighborhoods will vanish when, at year’s end, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, joining a national trend, stops publishing print editions.
Turning trees into paper, marking it with ink, trucking it to people who deliver it to readers — soon this laboriousness might be as forgotten as men with tongs lugging large slabs of ice for home iceboxes.

The waning of the 400-year era of newspapers is, however, about cultural changes more momentous than the efficiency and convenience of written words presented digitally.
The Economist reports that the share of American adults who read for pleasure has fallen 40 percent in 20 years, and students’ ability to read in quantity, with comprehension, is in parallel decline. An Oxford professor of English says students “struggle to get through one novel in three weeks.” Students lack, another professor says, “habits of application and concentration.”

A sound of morning silence is coming to Atlanta. The sound of newspapers landing on sidewalks in residential neighborhoods will vanish when, at year’s end, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, joining a national trend, stops publishing print editions.
Turning trees into paper, marking it with ink, trucking it to people who deliver it to readers — soon this laboriousness might be as forgotten as men with tongs lugging large slabs of ice for home iceboxes.

An Oxford professor of English says students “struggle to get through one novel in three weeks.”

Students lack, another professor says, “habits of application and concentration.”

The sentences that are being read are shorter and simpler. The Economist says an analysis of hundreds of New York Times bestsellers “found that sentences in popular books have contracted by almost a third since the 1930s.”

Readers, if they can be called such, who are mentally wired for driblets of 280 characters cannot cope with Charles Dickens’s “Bleak House” (1.9 million characters). Can people unable to decipher sophisticated prose manage sophisticated political ideas?


But sophistication is not in the repertoire of journalism devoted to what Andrey Mir, a Canadian, calls the retribalizing of society. In his epigrammatic 2020 book “Postjournalism and the death of newspapers,” Mir, a self-described “media ecologist,” says the media lost agenda-setting power when the internet enabled crowdsourced agenda-setting.

As advertising dollars migrated to the internet, newspapers, which hitherto were funded from above by selling readers to advertisers, became funded from below by selling themselves to readers. Newspapers encouraged readers to think of subscriptions as donations to political causes. Subscribers enjoy their “slactivism,” outsourcing their activism through “donscriptions” — subscriptions thought of as donations.


Mir says “the last newspaper generation” was born in the early 1980s. It came of age as the internet did. Soon journalism stopped being about informing people to make them citizens, and began to be about making them agitated.


The new business model depends on polarization, amplifying readers’ irritations and frustrations. “A newspaper,” wrote Vladimir Lenin, “is not only a collective propagandist and a collective agitator, but also a collective organiser.”


“Americans,” Mir says, “consume media 12 hours per day. Counting weekends, this is twice as much as a full-time job.” Because there is insufficient news to fill the time, emphasis has shifted to “expertise, commentaries, and opinions.

”
Prestige newspapers’ membership models make them function, Mir says, as validators. Readers value the newspapers’ attitudes toward events, not the news that readers already know about events. Readers must be financially able and emotionally inclined to make donscriptions. The work of reader-driven newspapers is to justify the readers’ agenda and inculcate it in others, who will become donors.

What Mir calls the “commodification of the Trump scare” has completed journalism’s transition from “making happy customers” for department stores and other advertisers, to “making angry citizens.” For what Mir calls postjournalism, the next challenge is to find a successor scare.
“

The shift from rationality to emotionality and peddling intensities” has, Mir says, made negativity mandatory. Hence this from the New York Times website on May 14, 2020:
“Almost 3 million U.S. workers filed for unemployment last week. Although the weekly tally has been declining since late March, experts are warning of a long struggle ahead.

”
There should be a key on the contemporary journalist’s computer that prints the phrase “experts are warning of.” Mir writes, “The trendsetting emotional tone is easy to read even on the faces of TV hosts”:
“In the 1970s, TV anchors had to wear smiles; now, they are obliged to wear an anxious grimace. Today’s news anchors make a kind of ‘basset face’ that would have looked unprofessional on 1970s TV. In return, an anchor with a ‘corgi face’ from the 1970s would look like an idiot on today’s news show.

”
Time flies. Until the 1840s, information could move at about 35 miles per hour — as a fast as a train. Today, information matters less relative to opinions, and opinions are distilled to attitudes. These are performative, and they compete for attention with upwardly spiraling shrillness. Hence this distinctively 21st-century achievement: the velocity of stupidity. (Washington Post)

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“They” will forgive anything.

What point could Trump be making? That he can sh*t over Americans anytime he wants?

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Everyone watches women’s sports, even those you might not have expected.

Malala Got Married and Started New Project with Husband Asser Malik, Encouraging Women's Sports

From left: Malala Yousafzai and Asser Malik in Brazil in May 2023.

"I believe that true education is giving girls access to all of these different pathways that they choose for themselves," Yousafzai tells PEOPLE. "And sports is a really powerful one"

Growing up in Pakistan, Malala Yousafzai did not have easy access to sports. By comparison, her husband, Asser Malik, whom she married in November 2021 after an initially secret courtship, could play hockey, football and cricket during his recess at the all-boy's school he attended in a different area of the country.

Their disparate experiences — and a shared passion for sports — led the couple to found Recess Capital, a firm they launched in January to invest in women's sports at the professional and amateur levels.

Yousafzai, a celebrated education activist and the youngest-ever winner of the Nobel Peace Prize after surviving a Taliban assassination attempt as a teen, says the project's name was born from their desire to reimagine school recess time for girls.

While the 28-year-old is well-known around the world as an advocate, some might be surprised to learn she and Malik, 35, are both sports fanatics.

It was sports, after all, that helped bring them together.

He [was working] in cricket, and that was one of the reasons why I was interested in him, because I was like, every cricketer is a hard and handsome guy to meet," she says in an interview for this week's issue of PEOPLE.

When they met in the summer of 2018, Malik, 35, was working as a cricket manager in Pakistan and Yousafzai was a student at Oxford University in the U.K. Their relationship overcame long distance, the global COVID-19 pandemic and cultural pressures. (Love marriages, like theirs, are still frowned upon throughout Pakistan.)

Yousafzai credits Malik with exposing her to new sports, such as golf and pickleball. She's also built relationships with legendary athletes through her advocacy work and counts Olympic skier Lindsey Vonn among her good friends, while tennis legends Serena Williams and Billie Jean King have helped mentor or advise her new venture.

She hopes to soon connect with WNBA star Caitlin Clark, whom both she and Malik are fans of.

Yousafzai has also supported the women's Afghan cricket team in its advocacy effort against FIFA, which would not allow them to be a formally recognized team while in exile following the Taliban's return to power.

"I believe that true education is giving girls access to all of these different pathways that they choose for themselves," say Yousafzai, who is set to publish a new memoir, Finding My Way, on Tuesday, Oct. 21. "And sports is a really powerful one, because it builds self-esteem and confidence among them, it challenges stereotypes around how women are seen and it promotes a very positive message about women and girls."

Yousafzai and Malik took a natural liking to women's sports before they began planning Recess.

They have attended many live events, such as women's tennis matches, WNBA games and the Women's World Cup. (They're also considering attending the next one, in Brazil in 2027.)

"There is this power about women's sports that can bring so many people together from different cultures, and it is such a powerful tool for gender equity as well," Yousafzai says. "So for me, I was like, we need to prove the business case of women's sports."

Malik, who is also the director of franchise development for the Multan Sultans, a Pakistani cricket team, hopes Recess can help create sports equity on a global scale.

"All this progress should not just be in one part of the world," he says. "So I think that's something that drives me also, is to figure out that piece of the puzzle as we start building out Recess."

(People)

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