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Good morning,
Welcome to MS NOW’s Sunday Spotlight, where you can find a selection of the week’s most interesting and important stories. Democratic Senate candidates are doing well in states won by President Donald Trump. Meanwhile, the administration sent checks to Americans, one state keeps coming up in other states’ campaigns and America may be undermining one of its greatest assets. Plus, Halloween is coming early to your local theater.
Don’t forget to check out more top columns and videos from the week below.
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Carson Elm-Picard / MS NOW
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Any path back to power for Democrats in the Senate runs through Trump country. But recent polls show Democrats are competitive in a string of Republican-leaning states, leading in Texas, Alaska, Ohio and North Carolina and running neck and neck in Iowa and Kansas, write Hunter Woodall and Kabir Khanna. Some of those leads are small, given historical polling errors, and polling in several races has been sparse. But the numbers point to a political environment that could cost Republicans dearly in November. Read more.
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Nearly a million Americans will receive a $500 refund check for Affordable Care Act premiums, accompanied by a letter from Trump. The letters say the refunds are due to the Biden administration overcharging them, but it’s dramatically misleading, argues Zeeshan Aleem. Not only is there no evidence that the money is due to mismanagement by Biden, but it’s also entirely possible that it comes from user fees collected during Trump’s first term. The checks also ignore how Republicans caused premiums to increase earlier this year. Read more.
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GOP nominees in some of the most hotly contested Senate races across the country are taking heat for owning real estate in the Sunshine State. Mike Rogers in Michigan, Roger Marshall in Kansas, Michele Tafoya in Minnesota and Ken Paxton in Texas have all faced attacks from Democrats painting them as out of touch with their states, writes Kevin Frey. The attacks have been so potent that Marshall told MS NOW that he just sold his Florida home. Tafoya also has a history of saying disparaging things about Minnesota while touting Florida. In 2023, she described herself as “sort of a Florida woman” in a video podcast. Read more.
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Vice President JD Vance recently announced investigations into some of America’s top universities for the supposed offense of trying to attract global talent to research and study programs. On the same day, he announced that Microsoft and Adobe would be suspended from the H-1B visa program. Vance framed all of this as a defense of the American worker, but it is the exact opposite, argues Kaivan Shroff, senior advisor to the Institute for Education. Foreign graduate students are responsible for 24% of U.S. billion-dollar companies. Now Vance is telling the next generation of the world’s best minds to head somewhere else. Read more.
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A new documentary on Elon Musk is four hours long, but that’s not why it’s terrifying. Directed by Alex Gibney, “Musk” employs strange devices, like a computer-generated Musk, but that’s really the point: capturing mounting apprehension about one man having this much wealth, power and influence, argues media critic Brian Lowry. The movie depicts its subject as a gifted self-promoter and fabulist whose tales come with “massive consequences,” including to the victims of accidents involving Tesla’s self-driving technology. Read more.
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Anna Lefkowitz / MS NOW; Getty Images
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When Trump said he was banning MS NOW, CNN and Politico from the White House, he initially said it was because he objected to what they have reported. That claim wasn’t likely to fly in court, argues First Amendment lawyer Caitlin Vogus, so Justice Department lawyers found a new one. They’re now arguing the news outlets were banned because they had published “sensitive or classified information.” A federal judge rejected the argument, but the scope of the new justification has far-reaching implications. For the first time, the government appears to be arguing that journalists from mainstream news outlets can be criminally prosecuted for publishing sensitive or classified information. Read the column here.
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Need parenting advice? Dr. Ann-Louise Lockhart explores the reality of raising children and teenagers in today’s political, cultural and digital landscape on MS NOW’s Member-exclusive series, “The Parenting Shift.” Submit your questions and she may answer in a future weekly episode.
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Tuesday, with only weeks to go until the midterms, “The 11th Hour” hits the road as Ali Velshi anchors live from Columbus, Ohio. Watch “The 11th Hour with Ali Velshi” Tuesday at 11 p.m. Eastern on MS NOW.
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