Today is Tuesday, 10/20 and the general US Elections are in TWO WEEKS.

As it stands right now, the current Senate composition is:
47 - Democrats
51 - Republicans
2 - Independents

Looking at the numbers, we COULD see a huge shift in the Senate this year, best case scenario would be:

52 - Democrats
45 - Republicans
3 - Independents

Chart Follows:

Donald Trump would prefer that voters not worry about inflation. But it’s hard for them to ignore.

Filling up a basic Ford F-150 truck now costs about $100, up $30 from a year ago. Mortgage rates have jumped to levels that have depressed home sales. And for the past 12 months, consumer prices have risen faster than paychecks, making the average family poorer.

One week before midterm elections that will serve as a referendum on his second term, Trump is struggling to deliver on his campaign promise to bring down costs, even as he insists the country has entered an economic “golden age.” The same frustration that powered his comeback two years ago could now cost Republicans control of Congress.

Democrats and outside watchdogs are planning a massive presence at the polls on Election Day driven by concerns that Donald Trump will further leverage the vast resources of the federal government to interfere with a midterm that could hobble his final two years in office.

They won’t be the only ones there. A sprawling election protection effort on the left that is expected to deploy tens of thousands of monitors will be met by the largest-ever monitoring program by the Justice Department and still more observers from Republican-aligned groups. The result could be unlike anything seen at the polls in modern times.

The effort among Democratic and nonprofit groups includes training volunteers to stand watch outside polling places and report activities they consider concerning. The network includes traditional government watchdogs such as Common Cause and the American Civil Liberties Union plus a flood of volunteers assembled by state Democratic parties, congressional leaders, national activist groups and organizations focused on protecting democracy.

House Judiciary Committee Democrats on Monday released an unsigned staff report laying out what they call “the case against Donald Trump emerging in the Epstein Files and DOJ’s desperate efforts to cover it up,” with those Democrats now calling for an independent special counsel to investigate the president as well as what they describe as Attorney General Todd Blanche’s conflicts of interest and the Justice Department’s reluctance to share relevant evidence with state and foreign law enforcement.

“The women who survived Epstein deserve to be heard,” the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., said in a statement. “Congress must have the complete files required by law, and an independent special counsel must investigate Epstein’s co-conspirators and DOJ’s cover-up and ensure that state and foreign prosecutors have the evidence they need to pursue justice.”

The more than 50-page report alleges that Trump was “an active participant in Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse of young women in the mid-to-late 1990s.” Although it also contains at least one entirely new allegation against the president, it provides no direct evidence other than the woman’s own conversations with Judiciary Committee staff.

He raped children, but the cult doesn't care. Thry like rapding children as evidenced by how many Republicans and church people keep getting caught raping children.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., speaks during an event with House Democrats on the Capitol steps in September. (Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call)

Donald Trump intensified his anti-Muslim rhetoric against Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed on Sunday, portraying him as a threat to national security and questioning his loyalty to the United States in remarks that drew a sharp rebuke from a former top Arab American ally.

Trump called El-Sayed, a former Detroit health official, a “jihadist” who was “on the side of the terrorists” and would “have to go through a metal detector before he’s allowed to go into the Senate.” He also repeatedly invoked the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, drawing a comparison between stopping El-Sayed from entering the Senate chamber and the passengers who fought back against the hijackers aboard United Flight 93.

El-Sayed, who would become the nation’s first Muslim senator if elected, has called attacks on his loyalty to the country “shameful” and repeatedly denied any ties to extremist groups. The Republican president’s remarks were condemned by Bishara Bahbah, a founder of Arab Americans for Trump, the group that helped lead the president’s outreach to Arab American voters in 2024.

Lula wygrywa wybory w Brazyli, i to wobec silnego zaangarzowania USA po stronie kontrkandydata. Facebook, X , ograziczały zasięgi i promowały fakenewsy wymierzone w zwycięzcę wyborów. To też przełamanie serii zwycięstw marionetkowych kandydatów forsowanych przez USA.

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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/54506028

cross-posted from: https://quokk.au/c/politics/p/1270828/iowa-dem-josh-turek-releases-anti-trans-ad-calling-for-a-federal-funding-ban-on-trans-care

On Saturday, Oct. 24, Josh Turek, the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in Iowa, released a new ad targeting transgender people—perhaps the worst anti-transgender ad of the entire election cycle to come from a Democrat. The ad begins with Turek talking about his disability and the importance of not discriminating, before immediately turning to adopt discriminatory policies toward transgender people. One such policy is a sports ban, a position sadly becoming increasingly common among high-profile Democrats in competitive races, and one that alone would have made this yet another newsworthy anti-trans ad. But Turek then goes further, advocating for a new policy: a proposal to ban federally funded gender-affirming care in the United States, one that would impact a substantial number of transgender people and make their care difficult to impossible to receive.

One afternoon last year, Donald Trump welcomed “a friend” to the White House – El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, the world’s most popular authoritarian. “I knew him as a very young man,” the US president said before the cameras. “He’s done a fantastic job. Mr President, it’s an honor to have you.”

...

Throughout Trump’s exile from power, Bukele stayed close to Maga, spending more than $1.5m to lobby Maga figures such as Donald Trump Jr., senator Ted Cruz, then senator Marco Rubio, senator Mike Lee, representative Lauren Boebert, and former representative Matt Gaetz, according to Mother Jones. In time, Bukele emerged as a Maga luminary himself – the poster boy for strongman solutions.

...

Bukele’s blueprint happens to mirror a different one: the sequential architecture for consolidating power outlined in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 report, which would become Trump 2.0’s policy roadmap. We can’t know that the report took inspiration from El Salvador. But the Heritage Foundation lavished praise on Bukele as early as 2019, and Project 2025 was drafted over the first year of his state of emergency. Much of what Project 2025 proposes is what Bukele had by then accomplished: turning tens of thousands of civil service positions into political appointments; increasing the president’s control over the levers of justice; deploying the military domestically; crippling unions; targeting media.

...

At one of the largest ICE camps in the country, in Texas, human rights groups collected accounts from detainees describing officers who crushed men’s testicles, stomped on them, and beat them while handcuffed. Three men died there in six weeks; one death ICE attributed first to “medical distress”, then to a suicide attempt, before the medical examiner ruled it a homicide. Thirty-six Texas state house Democrats have cited “numerous credible reports of torture, killing, and inhumane treatment” and demanded an investigation. As historian Andrea Pitzer said in the New York Times, “the point isn’t that they hide it. The point is to instill terror on the society as a whole.” Brutality on the streets and secrecy in the camps work together: “the goal is always to use one group as an example of what can happen to everybody.”

...

Two Catholic bishops have expressed regret about agreeing to a White House meeting that produced a publicly distributed photo of them praying with Donald Trump.

Milwaukee Archbishop Jeffrey Grob, in a statement titled “A Public Apology,” said Sunday that he had received many questions and comments — some of them distraught — about the meeting on Thursday which he and 11 other bishops attended.

He said the meeting was speedily publicized by the White House with photos and a video, without consent of the participants, and less than two weeks away from the midterm elections.

The last two posts talking about Iowa senate candidate Josh Turek's hard-right shift in betrayal of trans people were removed on technicalities. This one's a Reuters link, with the exact title of the article, which doesn't even mention his name, so we'll see if it stays up.

In Iowa, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Rob Sand, Senate candidate Josh Turek and congressional candidates Lindsay James and Sarah Trone Garriott have all distanced themselves from progressive positions on transgender issues.

“I ⁠oppose letting men in women's locker rooms and voted to let parents, not politicians, make decisions for their kids,” Trone Garriott said in a recent ad.

LGBTQ advocates have criticized such language, saying misgendering transgender women as men represents a betrayal of the party's LGBTQ supporters at a uniquely vulnerable moment.

The article unfortunately makes no mention of the fact that Turek has gone even further, and voiced support for banning federally funded gender affirming care, which would affect many trans people including veterans and government employees. Unfortunately, I couldn't find a mainstream corporate article that discussed that part of his ad.

The 30-second spot, entitled “Republicans In Your Bathroom,” targets the GOP over its fixation on restricting trans people’s access to restrooms and locker rooms. The ad, which The Hill reports is part of a larger buy worth over $1 million per The Hill, begins with a young girl entering a bathroom and to her horror, encountering an older white-haired man sitting in the stall waiting for her. He greets her with a short hello. Immediately, the girl presses the man for answers, “What are you doing? Who are you?”

“I’m your Republican congressman. Now that we’re in charge, I’m checking to make sure that there’s no trans people in the wrong bathroom,” he says.

Her response: “Bathrooms are private. Don’t you have anything better to do?”

“I won the last election, and this is my priority,” he says, “Now let’s make sure you’re really a girl,” ending with an ominous smirk.

"I can just see the fake headlines," Trump said. "President Trump is talking about all the money they're making while people are suffering at the pump."

"But I said, ‘I don't give a damn, I'm gonna say it: We're making a frickin fortune,’" he added.