This is where I write about the race, the district, the 17 counties I’m running in, the fights I’m running on, and the work as it happens. Field notes from the trail. The math of an outsider campaign in real time. What I get right, what I get wrong, who I meet, what I learn. No PR voice, no consultant tone. Just me, telling you the truth about how this actually goes.
My older national and cultural writing lives at rachelandthecity.com. Both feeds go out through the Substack if you want them in your inbox.
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xAI’s turbines are poisoning Boxtown’s air – and the Trump DOJ just moved to kill the lawsuit
Imagine being a slave – and not being told you were free until two years after the fact. That’s Juneteenth. Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863 – declaring the enslaved people in the rebel states free. But paper doesn’t free anybody on its own. It took Union soldiers showing up – and…
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When they yell about “Medicare fraud,” count the money
Republicans rant about Medicare fraud. But the real money isn’t street-level crooks – it’s private Medicare Advantage plans overbilling taxpayers by more than a trillion over a decade. Here’s the trick, and who’s cashing in.
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Elon Musk just became the world’s first trillionaire. You helped pay for it.
I thought everyone knew this – but I guess it bears repeating since I’ve seen so many posts defending Elon Musk becoming a trillionaire. CNN looked at how Musk got there, and the truth is Tesla and SpaceX don’t exist in the form they do today without government help. Our tax dollars ended up saving…
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A bill in Congress would force data centers to come clean before they break ground
There’s a bill in Congress that would make it harder to pull off what happened in Memphis with xAI. It’s called the AI Data Center Site Selection Transparency Act. It says that before a company can build one of these giant data centers, it has to come out into the open first. Six months ahead…
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You pay double for sugar – and Tennessee doesn’t even grow it.
I’ve been looking for more solutions that address affordability – you know, that word Trump said Democrats made up? Last week, I wrote about ethanol – how a 1970s rule still forces corn into your gas tank and quietly raises what you pay. Well, sugar works the same way. The federal government caps how much…
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Tennessee turned down $27 billion. Then it lost more hospitals than any state but Texas.
Let’s talk about Healthcare. Tennessee has lost sixteen rural hospitals. That’s more than any state but Texas. One of them was Haywood Park, in Brownsville. It closed in 2014. The building sat empty for eight years. For most of that time, if you had a heart attack in Haywood County, the closest ER was in…
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You bought the car. You’re not allowed to fix it.
You own your car, but some repairs your own mechanic isn’t allowed to finish – the data and tools are locked to the dealer. Here’s the bipartisan bill that fixes it.
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The rent on the sign isn’t the rent you pay
The listing says $1,095. By the time you sign, it’s $1,250 – and you paid $50 just to apply. Here’s the fee racket renters face, and the bill that fixes it.
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The benefits bill the gig companies wrote for themselves
Let’s talk about gig work. If you’re a writer like me who makes money posting on Facebook, or you drive for DoorDash, deliver for Uber Eats, clean houses through an app, do contract HVAC, or rent a chair to cut hair – any of the thousand kinds of 1099 work people here do to get…
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Trump is using a 1935 wartime law to keep the most expensive power in America on your bill
This is gonna piss you off, but we gotta talk about coal. There’s a sentence written in 1935 that’s about to show up on your power bill. Trump put out a poster this week – a coal miner with a pickaxe, smokestacks behind him, the words “President Trump’s Coal Actions Create 14,000 Jobs.” Very Depression-era.…