In Alaska, the Justice Department has gone to court seeking to block certification of a Mary Peltola Senate victory while a second candidate named Sullivan remains on the ballot alongside Republican incumbent Dan Sullivan. Trump said Friday that he personally ordered the lawsuit. The Alaska Supreme Court has already rejected an effort to remove the other Sullivan, and the incumbent is identified separately on the ballot. Voters can also rank both men under Alaska’s voting system, according to the Associated Press.
Apparently, the federal government has encountered two men with the same name and concluded that democracy may have to be suspended until someone finds a label maker.
It’s Friday, folks. The week of waking up at 6 a.m. has finally come to a close, and tomorrow I will sleep until noon and emerge rejuvenated. This arrangement has not yet been approved by the baby, who will almost certainly begin yelling at 6 anyway, but a girl can hope.
My husband doesn’t have the best hearing, so he generally sleeps through Ezra’s morning announcements. Otherwise, he would take the morning for me. He always tells me to wake him up, and I know he means it, but then I look at him sleeping and he’s so cute that I apparently decide to preserve him in his natural habitat. This is a problem of my own making, and I would prefer not to discuss it until after my nap.
It has been an eventful week. Every single day has involved leaving my preferred location, home, and braving the public. Today is supposed to include a bubble test and echocardiogram to check on the hole in my heart, which my brain has greeted with, “I’m fine. This is fine. Everything’s fine. We can wait.” I’m still debating whether to reschedule with my inner raccoons, none of whom has a medical degree and all of whom would like to stay home.
My bonus son is back with his mom this week, and we all miss him. His sister misses him with the force of a small weather system, and if you are ever uncertain about the current conditions, she will provide an update. Her feelings are the biggest and most important feelings, always. I admire the confidence.
She and Ezra are both taking antibiotics, and she has a ten-day course, which is a long time when taking medicine requires everyone involved to prepare emotionally. But she has done very well, and I’m proud of her. I even managed to give it to her by myself instead of calling in her dad. In this house, we recognize significant diplomatic achievements.
The rain is coming, and my husband is getting a little stressed about everything that needs to be finished or brought under cover, so that will be our weekend. It has been an amazing summer. I already look forward to the next one, but I’m also ready for cozy fall days, winter evenings, and spring, when the local nurseries begin filling up again and I start having entirely reasonable thoughts about where we could fit another plant.
Life is here, happening all around us. I wish it were easier to enjoy without an administration making the continued existence of a livable country feel like another thing we have to get done before the weather turns.
Back in Alaska, that lawsuit remains a request, and no court has granted the administration the power it wants. But the request itself deserves our attention. The president is using the Justice Department to seek an obstacle to certifying a race his preferred candidate could lose. Voters haven’t finished making their decision, and Washington is already asking for a way to hold up one possible answer.
We recently talked about Alaska through salmon and the people whose lives depend on them. Those communities have real decisions to make about their future. Their votes should carry authority even when the result is inconvenient to the president. Otherwise, we’re being invited to participate in an election whose customer satisfaction survey is filled out exclusively by the losing administration.
Meanwhile, older Americans are discovering how much authority an insurance company retains over arrangements they may have spent years building.
KFF Health News reports that UnitedHealthcare and Humana are discontinuing Medicare Advantage plans affecting approximately 390,000 and 600,000 members, respectively. These are private plans administering Medicare benefits. We covered enrollment changes last week. What deserves a closer look now is the financial situation on the other side of those envelopes.
UnitedHealth Group, UnitedHealthcare’s parent company, reported $112.7 billion in revenue and $6.6 billion in operating earnings for the third quarter of 2026. In its own October earnings remarks, it also reported spending $5 billion buying back its stock and paying $6.2 billion in dividends through September. That is $11.2 billion directed to shareholders in nine months. I suspect quite a few people opening a plan cancellation notice would enjoy being considered that essential to the business.
UnitedHealth says medical costs remain high and describes its decisions about benefits and markets as protecting the sustainability of its Medicare Advantage offerings. That explanation still leaves a question about whose stability receives protection. The corporation can adjust its business. A patient has to find out whether the doctor who knows their history will still be covered.
Medicare pays private Advantage insurers a fixed monthly amount for each enrollee’s coverage. Public money helps sustain this business, and the people depending on it have a reasonable claim to more than a fresh assignment whenever the company changes direction.
Consider what that assignment can involve for someone managing several conditions: checking a replacement plan’s doctors, prescriptions, costs, and rules, then trying to work out whether the advertised savings survive contact with their actual body. Medicare’s own guidance explains that networks, costs, and coverage rules vary among plans and can change each year. An insurer’s departure can send people back through that process even when their medical needs have stayed exactly the same.
I’d like to know why a system built around caring for older and disabled people requires them to remain so adaptable while an enormous corporation works to keep its financial performance on course. The shareholder gets a dividend. The patient gets high-stakes homework.
There is a related kind of uncertainty gathering around the people who care for our public forests.
Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said Thursday that the administration remains committed to its Forest Service reorganization. The plan includes moving headquarters to Salt Lake City, closing 23 research stations, and replacing regional offices with state offices. A judge has temporarily blocked it, and the administration is appealing. Officials argue it will reduce costs and bring leadership closer to Western forests; opponents warn that forcing employees to relocate could drive experienced people out.
Here in Oregon, I want the knowledge behind public land management to survive the next round of administrative enthusiasm. Research takes time. So does learning a landscape well enough to recognize what’s changing. When experienced people leave, their replacements can’t simply download thirty years of noticing which creek runs low first.
There’s room to debate where an agency’s headquarters belongs. There should also be a serious accounting of what happens to its work when the people doing it are given a choice between uprooting their lives and leaving.
Across these stories, I keep coming back to the amount of rearranging ordinary people are expected to do. A voter may have to defend a result. A Medicare beneficiary may have to rebuild a workable coverage arrangement. A public employee may have to move a household to keep doing a job. The people making those decisions can describe the process from a comfortable distance. Everyone else has to fit it around work, medication, children, and whatever is about to get soaked in the yard.
I want more room for the life already happening here. For a little girl being brave about medicine, a baby announcing the sunrise, a husband asleep beside me, and a future spring full of plants I have absolutely nowhere to put. Protecting that ordinary life is a worthy purpose for a government, and a reasonable thing to demand of the institutions paid to serve it.
For now, we’ll get what we can out of the rain. There’s a particular comfort in making a home warmer while the world insists on being like this.
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