VIDEO OF THE DAY: Reporter corners abusive GOP rep in ugly confrontation
Brian Tyler Cohen breaks down an confrontation between embattled wife-beating Republican Rep. Max Miller and a TMZ reporter over his Democratic challenger Brian Poindexter’s newest ad – an ode of love from his daughters. Max Miller will not be filiming a similar ad, as he is alleged to have broken his daughter’s collarbone. Then, BTC sits down with Brian Poindexter to discuss his campaign and how he’s going to flip this red seat blue.

Take Action: Chip in to help elect Brian Poindexter to Congress!

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Donald Trump has no idea of the tidal wave that’s coming for him
Michael Tomasky, The New Republic: “On this cusp of Labor Day, when election campaigns kick into fourth gear, I don’t want to jinx anything, but I have to say it: The voters are going to barber-strap Donald Trump in the November midterms. November 3 may be even worse for the Republicans than the conventional wisdom now predicts. There are three groups of voters who matter in this election, and each of them is going to punish Trump severely.

The first is people like you and me—the people who have always thought he was a fascist goon and an imbecile, and who would go out to cast a vote against him and his minions even if it meant voting for Homer Simpson. We are turbo-charged to get to the polls, and there are millions of us.

The second is the swing voters who were, to be frank—oh, okay, let’s put it slightly more politely—naïve enough to believe that Trump could lower prices and fix the economy. They know now that Trump cannot do that; he possesses no such magic wand. Would that they had known in November 2024. But they know now, and those who bother to vote will vote 80, 90 percent against Trump and his party.

Third is the BMPs: the Betrayed MAGA Pigeons. They’re not the same as swing voters. Unlike swing voters, they were never going to think for five minutes about voting for a Black woman in 2024. But to feel okay about themselves, they had to build a case for Trump in their brains that justified their Trump vote, even made it a righteous protest against the status quo. Core to the BMP justification were a few central ideas: that Trump would improve the economy; that he was right on immigration and heads needed to be cracked; that Kamala Harris was the real warmonger, and Trump would calmly keep the peace.

The first two groups will turn out in droves against Republican candidates. The third group won’t do that. But it, dispirited and confused, simply won’t turn out. And their absence, I think, is what will be decisive. There will be no defense against the onslaught. Ask yourself: What’s going to get better in this country between now and Election Day? Answer: Not much that I can see. We got a good jobs report this morning, but the bond market is still jittery and central banks are contemplating rate hikes. On Iran, he may cut a deal, but it will be a bad, desperate deal, and most people will recognize it as such. He’d better pray that a new ICE shooting controversy doesn’t explode in October. Am I missing anything? Ah, yes. Water-body renaming. He may score a couple more key wins there.

I am saying that a wave is building. And the man toward whom the wave is heading looks out on the ocean and sees calm, pacific seas. He’s delusional, spent, incapable of responding to reality. In the next two months, all that is only going to get worse—and more apparent to the American people.”

Take Action: Chip in to help flip Congress blue!

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Gina Hinojosa hits Greg Abbott where it hurts with BRUTAL new ad
Gina Hinojosa for Texas: Data centers are shaping up to be one of the biggest issues this election cycle — and Democrat Gina Hinojosa is NAILING the wildly corrupt Greg Abbott to the wall with a devastating new ad for accepting $20 MILLION from data center developers. “Greg Abbott is selling you out!” reads the final frame. It’s a powerful message sure to resonate with Texas voters, the majority of whom don’t want a data center anywhere near their homes. Will you chip in to help Gina get this ad on every TV screen and radio in Texas?

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“I still hear the voices”: Wedding guests recall horror of U.S. bombing in southern Iran
Peiman Salehi, Drop Site News: “Hundreds of guests had gathered in two family homes in Kuhestak, a coastal village in Iran’s southern Hormozgan province near the Strait of Hormuz, for a wedding celebration on Tuesday night when the missiles struck. ‘I still hear the voices of the women who were ululating, and then suddenly the roof of the living room and the walls came down on us,’ Zeinab Mallahi, a guest at the wedding, told Drop Site News. ‘That sound follows me from night into day and from day into night.’ A projectile tore through the roof of one of the homes, leaving a crater roughly 1.5 meters deep in the floor. Another struck a date palm, sending it crashing into a wall. People began screaming and ‘running everywhere,’ she recalled. ‘It was something I had only seen in movies. I had never seen a missile. I had never seen shrapnel. I didn’t understand what was happening.’

Four people were killed instantly: Four-year-old Amir Ali Karimi, 16-year old Mohammad Mallahi, 43-year-old Kolsoom Mallahi Nezhadnia, and 50-year-old Zarkhatoun Taheri. Two days later, 22-year-old Asieh Molaeinezhad, who had been critically wounded and placed in intensive care, died, bringing the death toll to five. At least 60 others were wounded.

Ali Mallahi, a local fisherman and the father of the bride, told Drop Site that at least 350 people had gathered to celebrate his daughter Maryam’s wedding when his house was struck. ‘I really don’t know what to say,” Mallahi told Drop Site. “This happened in a completely residential area. There were no military facilities around the house.’ As is typical of weddings in Hormozgan, the men and women were gathered in separate family homes separated by less than a hundred meters. Mallahi was with the men at his cousin Mohammad Rasoul’s house, while the women had assembled at his own. The explosion came without warning.

‘None of us had anything to do with politics. I don’t know international law, but I know what happened here is not right,’ Mallahi said. ‘America is certainly responsible. My house was in a completely residential area. I don’t know what has happened to my life. My daughter’s wedding was left unfinished. My relatives are in the hospital. Even my sister has to undergo surgery because of her injuries.’ More than 3,000 Iranians have been killed since the U.S. and Israel launched the war on February 28, according to Iranian authorities, including more than 50 during a 60-day truce before fighting resumed in July.”

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You wanted a more brutal world
Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs: “It was extremely difficult to suppress feelings of satisfaction at seeing Milo Yiannopolous, the viciously racist alt-right troll, fall into the clutches of the ICE deportation machine he had egged on for so long. Yiannopoulous, a British national, had spent years going around the U.S. saying horrific things about immigrants, trans people, feminists, fat people—basically anyone who wasn’t a fit white male Christian like himself. In his speeches, he would encourage people to ‘purge the illegals’ and give out ICE’s hotline number. He suggested that ICE raids sexually aroused him. But of course, he didn’t mean that he should be deported.

Instead, Yiannopoulos himself was snagged and booted from the country. The experience, as he describes it, was harrowing. The man who had once fantasized about seeing Hasan Piker ‘squeal ‘I’m more American than you!’ as they are dragging him onto his one way flight’ found himself shackled, crying, and ‘covered in filth and stains and drool.’ He was put in chains, which, he says, ‘hurts more than they make out on TV.’ He called the experience ‘humiliating,’ ‘disorienting’ and ‘physically degrading,’ noting that ‘I don’t think I’ve ever been frightened like that before.’ Yiannopoulos says he now regrets his support for Donald Trump. But it’s not clear how much he’s really learned.

We might well ask him: Now that you see how cruel and arbitrary this system is, given that you were a champion of building it, what are you going to do to help us dismantle it? Do you now understand why the political project you were part of is destructive and terrifying? Do you see why people have put their lives on the line to try to end this?”

Take Action: Stop DHS from spying on churches, unions and activists!

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Food for thought

The Sunday roundup

Hope…

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