Lifelong Republican cattle ranchers in Georgia ditched their party for the first time over skyrocketing electric bills and a proposed data center next to their property. Two Democrats won massive upsets for utility board seats in some of the reddest counties after voters got fed up with rate hikes and AI infrastructure projects eating up resources.
The wins are becoming a playbook for Democrats nationwide heading into the midterms. Candidates in Virginia and New Jersey ran on lowering energy costs and making data centers pay their fair share, and local opposition killed Amazon and Google facilities in Arizona and Indiana. One advocacy group spent millions on billboards and texts connecting utility rate increases to the...
Trump started his second term saying he might go easy on kids brought here young and Afghans stuck after the messy Biden withdrawal, but that all went out the window pretty fast. A college freshman who lived stateside for 12 years got shackled and deported when she tried flying home for Thanksgiving, and then the administration blocked all Afghan visas after one guy shot two National Guard members in DC.
Critics are pointing out that deporting a 19-year-old student with zero criminal history completely contradicts the whole "we're targeting dangerous criminals" messaging. Former Homeland Security people are saying there are no priorities anymore, just rounding up whoever they can grab to hit deportation numbers. Even Afghans who helped...
The Trump administration just yanked credentials from thousands of truck driver training schools and put a bunch more on notice. Transportation officials say they pulled accreditation from almost 3,000 centers for not meeting standards, and another 4,000 might get the boot within a month if they can't prove they're legit. This could wipe out over 40 percent of training facilities across the country.
The crackdown has been building since a crash where an undocumented driver killed three people after making an illegal turn. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has been going after schools that supposedly help unqualified drivers get commercial licenses, particularly targeting immigrant truckers. The industry group that represents trucking...
Trump went full nuclear on immigration after an Afghan guy shot two National Guard members, and the crackdown is hitting legal immigrants harder than anything we've seen in forever. The administration paused every single asylum decision for people already here, started reviewing green cards from 19 countries, and basically froze all Afghan immigration applications. Around 1.5 million people with pending asylum cases are potentially screwed, plus tens of thousands who already got approved under Biden.
Immigration experts are saying this kind of wholesale shutdown has never happened before, and it's way beyond normal security checks. People who already jumped through all the legal hoops to get green cards or asylum are freaking out...
The White House is defending that boat strike from September, where they killed some suspected drug smugglers in the Caribbean, and then apparently fired again to finish off whoever survived the first hit. Defense Secretary Hegseth gave orders to take out the boat and everyone on it, but officials are saying he never specifically told them to execute survivors after watching them get blown up. The commander running the operation just kept firing until the boat sank and everyone was dead.
Lawmakers from both parties are investigating whether this counts as a war crime since killing shipwrecked people is pretty clearly illegal even if you buy the administration's argument that they're fighting a formal war against cartels. Legal experts...
Bishop Reginald Jackson died from cardiac arrest at a hospital in Washington. The 71-year-old religious leader spent decades pushing Black voters to the polls and became a major player in both New Jersey and Georgia politics. His endorsement could apparently swing hundreds of thousands of church votes across New Jersey, and he helped flip Georgia blue for Biden by organizing massive turnout campaigns in 2020.
The bishop wasn't afraid to throw his weight around either. After state troopers shot up a van because a Black guy was driving it back in the 90s, he led protests until the department got put under federal oversight for a decade. When Georgia Republicans tried blocking Sunday voting to mess with church voters, he organized...
Politics has been absolutely unhinged since Thanksgiving ended, with Marjorie Taylor Greene rage-quitting Congress and exposing how fractured the Republican party has gotten. Trump dropped another immigration crackdown after troops got attacked in DC, and the economy is still a complete mess with inflation refusing to chill out. Democrats are basically spending every waking moment screaming about affordability problems and hoping voters blame Republicans instead of Biden.
Congressional Republicans are having a full meltdown because governing turned out way harder than they expected. Some of them are finally telling Trump to pound sand on stuff like the Caribbean boat strikes and tariffs, especially after reports came out about...
One of El Chapo's sons just admitted in a Chicago courtroom that he straight-up kidnapped his dad's old business partner and handed him over to American feds. Joaquín Guzmán López confessed to luring Ismael Zambada García out of hiding by pretending there was some political meeting to attend, then his crew put a bag over the guy's head and zip-tied him before flying him across the border. Prosecutors said both Guzmán López brothers have been cooperating with investigators, though the kidnapping itself apparently won't get them any credit toward lighter sentences.
The whole Sinaloa cartel has been getting absolutely wrecked lately between government pressure and rival gangs coming after them. El Chapo's other sons are still hiding out...
Hegseth is catching heat from all sides after reports dropped that he might have ordered troops to kill survivors from boat strikes off Venezuela. Trump started backing away over the weekend by saying he wouldn't have wanted a second strike, but Hegseth posted a meme of a cartoon turtle blowing up a boat and kept doubling down on social media about killing drug runners. Even conservative users were like "dude, this isn't Christian behavior."
The defense secretary has been a complete disaster since barely getting confirmed by one vote. He leaked classified battle plans in a Signal chat, kicked reporters out of the Pentagon, and got called out for making pro-Russia comments in Europe. Legal experts are saying the boat strikes are...
