Obama publicly humiliates Trump with hilarious rally burn

Top Stories for October 25:

VIDEO OF THE DAY: Standing ovation: Obama humiliates Trump, crowd loses it
President Obama demonstrated his razor-sharp wit and presidential gravitas at a rally for Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, delivering one-liner after one-liner in a devastating takedown of Donald Trump and his disastrous administration. His best zinger? “He’s got the White House looking like Saddam Hussein opened up a Cheesecake Factory!”

Take Action: Impeach RFK Jr. for unleashing epidemics of deadly disease with his insane policies!

Why Trump is embracing Vivek Ramaswamy’s vile ad
Jeet Heer, The Nation: “Donald Trump’s many offenses against decency should be viewed not only as moral transgressions, but as political acts. He has become the dominant political figure of our era in part by using vulgarity and nastiness to form a lasting bond with his supporters. This is easy enough to understand when Trump makes racist, sexist, or transphobic comments which, alas, excite voters who want to roll back egalitarian politics. But sometimes Trump’s affronts to basic morality are harder to parse at first glance—such as his decision this week to champion a vile political attack ad aired by Ohio Republican gubernatorial nominee Vivek Ramaswamy against his Democratic opponent, Amy Acton.

The ad features Acton’s biological mother, Donna Arthur, describing her daughter as a “liar” and warning Ohioans not to vote for her. The major problem with the ad is the context it leaves out. In 1978, Donna Arthur’s husband, Acton’s stepfather Cledith Arthur, was arrested for raping his stepdaughter. Donna Arthur supported her husband in the case for the rest of his life. The decision of the Ramaswamy campaign to weaponize this horrific family story has disgusted not just Democrats but also a wide swath of Republicans…However, the two most powerful Republicans in the country, Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance, are standing firmly by Ramaswamy.

There’s something about the prospect of parents denouncing children that clearly excites Trump: it speaks to right-wing values of hierarchy, obedience, and deference to seniority. If Vance was content to leave things at ‘support Republicans, right or wrong,’ Trump is offering a more primordial message: ‘parents, right or wrong.’ Trump wasn’t just defending Ramaswamy; he was defending toxic parenting. What makes Trump’s message shocking is that “right or wrong” in this case includes child sex abuse. But this is hardly new for Trump, whose defense of patriarchy has often meant supporting men accused of horrific child abuse. In 2017, the president gave unwavering support to Alabama senatorial candidate Roy Moore, even after multiple credible allegations emerged that Moore had sexually assaulted teenagers. Trump has also been notoriously reluctant to release files relating to the criminal activities of the late pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Trump’s support of Moore and handling of the Epstein scandal have a political component: they help him maintain the ties cultivated with a reactionary base that feels that complaints of sex abuse have undermined male power.

Democrat in must-win red-to-blue race hit with DERANGED attack from Trump
JoAnna Mendoza for Congress: Trump’s Super PAC has just released an absolutely unhinged new ad against veteran and top Democratic House candidate JoAnna Mendoza, pulling out the same anti-trans hysteria playbook of LIES that he used against Kamala Harris. It’s an all-hands-on-deck moment to fight back against this devious misinformation.Will you chip in to help Joanna flip this winnable red seat and take back control of Congress from the GOP?

The spirit of “party unity, my ass” is back and coming for the DSA (and El-Sayed)
Eoin Higgins, The Intercept: “The PUMA spirit is back. The 2008 Democratic Party protest movement, inflamed by what Hillary Clinton supporters viewed as Barack Obama stealing the nomination from their primary candidate, scorned his general election campaign and embraced the mantra ‘Party Unity, My Ass.’ This time, that energy is aimed at the candidates preferred by the Democratic Socialists of America. DSA-aligned progressives have won a number of party primaries and are set to help Democrats take the majority in Congress. But once in power, they’re likely to make demands — the kinds of demands that could upend decades of carefully crafted donor-friendly policymaking.

For moderate Democrats, ‘party unity’ is only a goal worth pursuing to bully the left wing of the party to fall in line with their preferred candidate. When it’s on them to step up and vote for someone who might have different goals, that’s another story completely, and some centrists are even hoping for Republicans to win the House this November if the alternative is an empowered DSA Democratic wing. James Carville, the fossilized Cajun strategist who was part of exactly one successful national political campaign, Bill Clinton’s 1992 White House victory, said on The Bulwark podcast last Sunday that he’d prefer a tight GOP hold on Congress over a narrow Democratic majority. Maine Gov. Janet Mills has yet to endorse the Democratic Party’s Senate nominee, Troy Jackson, after she lost to now-disgraced Graham Platner.

Perhaps most consequentially, in Michigan, Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed has faced an uphill battle since winning his party’s grueling primary. He’s now focused on winning in the general election and becoming the first Muslim U.S. senator, but resistance to his candidacy remains a concern. Much of the difficulty has come from members of his own party and other liberals. Their antipathy toward a candidate whose positions aren’t so out of step with other members of the caucus has raised questions about what exactly is so objectionable about him. El-Sayed may skew to the progressive side of the party, but he’s not a socialist and not a member of the DSA; his positions on domestic policy should place him companionably among the likes of Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s wing. Until recently, most of the anger after El-Sayed’s primary in early August was confined to X and occasional cable news hits.

That changed on October 16, when two Michigan Democratic Party power players, David Kramer and Lon Johnson, urged voters in a Detroit News op-ed to leave El-Sayed’s place on the ballot blank — effectively handing the Senate seat over to Republican Mike Rogers, an election denier and a lockstep Trump ally. The piece tied El-Sayed to extreme elements of Islam and suggested his opposition to Israel’s genocide, war crimes, and occupation was based in hatred for the Jewish diaspora.

Ultimately, all their griping may not matter. El-Sayed is regularly polling slightly ahead of Rogers, and 95 percent of Michigan Democrats said they intend to vote for him. Much like Jackson in Maine, should he win, El-Sayed will be even less beholden to the elements of the party power structure who are so desperately trying to prove he needs them, rather than the other way around.

Israel’s rogue state behavior is somehow only worsening
Branko Marcetic, Jacobin: “It is not a novel point that Israel acts like a rogue state, or that its behavior toward the United States often more closely resembles the behavior of an adversary than that of an ally. But it’s still worth periodically noting just how extreme its misbehavior on the world stage is, given that it is underwritten by the US taxpayers, even as majorities of Americans don’t want it to be. Let’s just keep it to things that have happened roughly this past week; otherwise this piece could end up being the length of a medium-sized book.

There was the incident where illegal Israeli settlers in the West Bank — who are financed, armed, enabled, and otherwise supported in every possible way by the Israeli government — viciously attacked a Washington Post photojournalist, breaking her ribs and fracturing her vertebrae, and a day later attacked a group of European diplomats from Belgium, France, and Poland (countries that, unlike Israel, actually are US treaty allies). At the same time, Israel continues to violate ceasefire agreements at will in the multiple wars in neighboring countries it’s fighting, routinely killing innocent civilians. In Gaza, it has in recent days killed a ten-year-old boy, a young girl, a seventeen-year-old, and a married couple, among others. These are just a small fraction of the more than 1,500 Palestinians it has killed in the territory since it signed a ceasefire last year. Israel is also still bombing Lebanon, another place where it signed a ceasefire months ago yet continues to attack anyway, and where its soldiers are still demolishing entire villages and posting videos cheerfully mocking their victims.

Eight of nine Israeli political parties earlier this month rejected the idea of an independent Palestinian state, going against what has been the overwhelming global consensus for decades and effectively committing to a one-state solution of explicit apartheid, with Israel controlling territory holding five million Palestinians without granting them basic rights like voting. Oh, and the Israeli prime minister is vowing to carry out regime change in an entirely different country, Iran, which he is reportedly actively making plans to attack next month after the US elections.

So, in summary, the Israeli government is: complicit in violent attacks on Western countries’ citizens and government officials; routinely and flagrantly violating ceasefire agreements and international law; having its officials make wild, explicit threats of bombing and ethnic cleansing; waging or plotting war on at least three of its neighbors (four counting Palestine); and illegally occupying or planning to seize their land — all as it plans a future as an undemocratic ethnostate launching never-ending preemptive wars on the entire Arab world.”

Help your neighbors make the right decisions this November
National Latino Evangelical Coalition: Everyone has Christian friends, neighbors, or relatives, and they’ve probably been subjected to a LOT of misleading faith-based language that leads to them voting for people who distort Christian values and harm vulnerable communities. That’s why the National Latino Evangelical Coalition (NaLEC) has put together “With Love,” a Guide to Faithful Voting, presenting a set of questions rooted in Scripture to help voters think clearly before casting their ballots. It’s important that we encourage voters to go beyond one-issue voting, consider a candidate’s whole platform, and decide whether they will REALLY work toward the good of our communities. Click here to get your copy and help your community make the right decisions at the ballot box.