News & Brews November 19, 2025
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Trump admin backs $1B loan to restart TMI
The Wall Street Journal reports that the Trump administration plans to give Constellation Energy a $1 billion federal loan to restart the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Dauphin County. Constellation previously announced it would restart TMI “to help generate electricity for Microsoft…. The deal calls for Constellation to revive the plant’s undamaged reactor, which was too costly to run and closed in 2019. The power generated will be sold to Microsoft under a 20-year deal. The tech industry has a nearly insatiable demand for 24-hour-a-day power for AI data centers.”
Lawmakers ask how alleged terrorist got Pa. CDL
Pa. House Republican leaders have “sent letters to Attorney General Dave Sunday and state Auditor General Tim DeFoor … asking for a look into the case of Akhor Bozorov, an Uzbek man arrested by ICE in Kansas with a PA-issued CDL,” Spotlight PA reporter Stephen Caruso posted. “Four Senate Republicans, led by state Sen. Jarrett Coleman (R., Lehigh), had asked PennDOT about this issue earlier this month, citing ICE arrests in Oklahoma where detainees also held Pennsylvania CDLs.” A Shapiro spokesperson was quick to blame the Trump administration. Meanwhile, Coleman said, “Gov. Shapiro is quick to jump in front of cameras and tout his leadership, but when it comes to answering basic questions about how his administration is protecting Pennsylvania drivers, we get silence,”
A thorn by any other name?
Shakespeare’s Juliet famously said, “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” Well, the same idea goes for stinky things, too. Whatever the name, they still stink. The Washington Free Beacon reports that “Arabella Advisors, the shadowy for-profit consulting firm that managed a multibillion-dollar network of liberal dark money groups, is now Sunflower Services” after the group rebranded and sold off its fiscal sponsorship business to a new firm amid a series of high-profile investigations into its finances and billionaire Bill Gates’s decision to end a longstanding partnership with the organization.” Arabella’s tentacles are long, and countless organizations (including some in Pa.) that pretend to be grassroots groups are little more than front groups for Arabella.
The ‘pollster-optimized Democrat’?
There’s an interesting piece in the Liberal Patriot on what voters want to see from Democrats. From one poll of Democrat and Independent voters, the story offers a graph of what the (supposedly) ideal “pollster-optimized Democrat” looks like. A Biden admin alum? No. Private-sector job creator? Yes. Podcaster? No. Veteran? Yes. Good at getting attention? No. Has won tough elections? Yes.
Pa. close to spending all $13B in COVID funds
Spotlight PA reports that per the latest U.S. Treasury data, “Pennsylvania and its county and local governments are on track to spend nearly all of the more than $13 billion they received in federal pandemic relief funding.” The majority of this funding, $7.3 billion, went to the state, while the next highest recipients were Philadelphia, Allegheny County, and Pittsburgh. “The U.S. Treasury required these dollars be committed to projects by the end of 2024 or be returned to the agency…. Pennsylvania’s recipients reported how they would use $13.4 billion, leaving only 0.07%, which is roughly $9 million, unallocated.”