Elections for school boards and public service commissions aren’t as sexy as a governor’s race, but they matter — and Democrats swept them everywhere.

https://uk.news.yahoo.com/wildest-democratic-victories-may-not-031729940


WASHINGTON – Everyone knows the headlines from Tuesday night’s Democratic sweep in the 2025 elections — governor’s races in New Jersey and Virginia, a big redistricting referendum in California, Zohran Mamdani’s historic win in the New York City mayoral race.

But some of the party’s most astounding wins played out down lower on ballots, and they won’t get as much national attention. These were races for things like school boards, city councils, state legislative seats and an obscure public service commission. They may not sound as sexy as a governor’s race, but these are the elections most connected to local communities and reflective of how regular people are feeling there.

Here’s a look at some of Democrats’ wildest wins at the local level.

>School boards

There were lots of school board elections on Tuesday, in red and blue states like Pennsylvania, Washington, Kansas, Idaho, Colorado and Texas.

School boards are almost always elected in nonpartisan races. But candidates’ endorsements give voters a sense of their policy positions and their alignment with parties, and school boards have been dragged into ugly culture wars in recent years. That’s largely due to the far-right group, Moms for Liberty, aggressively recruiting its members to run for seats on school boards around the country to enact anti-LGBTQ+ policies in schools.

Two of Tuesday’s school board elections were in Bucks County, Pa., which was considered “ground zero” for right-wing groups’ takeover of school boards in 2021. A few years ago, conservatives on these boards in Pennbridge and Central Bucks districts were using their roles to pass policies targeting LGBTQ+ students and banning books.

https://apnews.com/article/serbia-kushner-trump-tower-special-law-69b8c6f0969b30b3911875c841f323b9

BELGRADE, Serbia (AP) — Serbian lawmakers on Friday passed a special law clearing the way for a controversial real estate project that would be financed by an investment company linked to Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner despite widespread public opposition and legal hurdles.

The project seeks to redevelop a landmark military complex in central Belgrade that was partially destroyed in a NATO bombing campaign in 1999, turning it into a luxury compound with a high-rise hotel, offices and shops.

The special bill was approved with a 130-40 vote in the 250-member parliament after days of heated parliamentary debate and street protests by opponents.

Serbia’s government last year stripped the complex of its protected status and signed a 99-year-lease agreement with Kushner-related Affinity Global Development, based in the U.S. But the project stalled after Serbia’s organized crime prosecutors launched an investigation into whether documents used to remove that status were forged.

While the pro-Trump populist government of President Aleksandar Vucic says the project would boost both the economy and ties with the current U.S. administration, the plan has met fierce opposition from experts because of the building’s architectural significance — and because it is seen a symbol of resistance to the U.S.-led NATO bombing, widely viewed in the Balkan country as an unjust “aggression.”

https://thehill.com/policy/defense/5580613-pentagon-national-guard-quick-reaction-force-us-cities-trump-agenda/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/10/30/pentagon-national-guard-quick-reaction-force/

A top US military official has ordered the national guards of all 50 US states, the District of Columbia and US territories to form “quick reaction forces” trained in “riot control”, including use of batons, body shields, Tasers and pepper spray, according to an internal Pentagon directive reviewed by the Guardian.

The memo, signed on 8 October by Maj Gen Ronald Burkett, the director of operations for the Pentagon’s national guard bureau, sets thresholds for the size of the quick reaction force to be trained in each state, with most states required to train 500 national guard members, for a total of 23,500 troops nationwide.

As authority, Burkett cited Donald Trump’s August executive order that deployed the guard to fight crime in Washington DC. The same order required the secretary of defense to create “a standing National Guard quick reaction force … available for rapid nationwide deployment” in “quelling civil disturbances”.

https://www.npr.org/2025/11/06/g-s1-96437/trump-immigration-judges-fired

For three immigration judges, the day took a similar turn.

Kyra Lilien, who was hired in 2023, was presiding in a courtroom in Concord, Calif., in July when she paused the hearing of an immigrant seeking asylum to read an email.

"I told them that we were not going to have a hearing because I had just been fired," Lilien said. Present in the court was a court interpreter and an attorney for the Department of Homeland Security. "They asked me if I was joking."

Anam Petit, who was hired as an immigration judge in 2023 after a career in immigrant defense, was sitting on the bench in her courtroom in Virginia's Annandale Immigration Court in September. It was her two-year anniversary in the position and she was between hearings when she got the email.
"My voice was shaking. My hands were shaking. My mind was racing. And I gave the decision and I dismissed everyone without mentioning anything," Petit said. One decision that day was to deny asylum, and the other was a partial denial, each for a different member of one immigrant family, she recalled.

Tania Nemer was hired as a judge at the Cleveland immigration court in 2023. She had about 30 or 40 immigrants, a DHS attorney and staff in her court one morning in February. She had just finished explaining rights and responsibilities to the group when her door opened and her manager asked her to come with him. She was later escorted out of the building.

In a blow to yet another right wing /news/ shill narrative, Donald Trump has officially declared he will block SNAP benefits despite a court order mandating he fund the program.
This announcement, coupled with his continued acknowledgement that Senate Republicans can and should use the nuclear option to end the shutdown right now, has left right wing shills scrambling for new talking points. It has also led to their all but abandoning the topic of the shutdown on /news/ over the last few days, a stark reversal from their previous campaign to make it the sole topic discussed on this board.

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/04/snap-trump-food-shutdown.html

President Donald Trump on Tuesday suggested that the United States would not pay any SNAP benefits during the government shutdown, contradicting a court filing a day earlier by his administration.

Trump said that the benefits, which help feed 42 million Americans, will resume only after Democrats in Congress agree to pass a stopgap funding bill that would reopen the government.

The administration on Monday told a federal judge in Rhode Island that it would pay half of the costs of the SNAP benefits for November.

Trump on Tuesday said in a Truth Social post, “SNAP BENEFITS, which increased by Billions and Billions of Dollars (MANY FOLD!) during Crooked Joe Biden’s disastrous term in office (Due to the fact that they were haphazardly ‘handed’ to anyone for the asking, as opposed to just those in need, which is the purpose of SNAP!), will be given only when the Radical Left Democrats open up government, which they can easily do, and not before!”

The White House, when asked by CNBC for clarification on Trump’s statement given the court filing Monday, said, “Refer you to the President’s truth.”

https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/michigan-state-caught-mandating-dei-123027678.html

Despite pledging to eliminate Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) mandates, Michigan State University (MSU) is still requiring education students to take a race-based course, according to internal documents obtained by Young Americans for Freedom (YAF).

The documents show that the course, TE 101: “Social Foundations of Justice and Equity in Education,” is a three-credit requirement for teacher preparation students.

According to the Fall 2025 syllabus, students are required to read We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom by Bettina Love.

“In We Want To Do More Than Survive, Dr. Bettina L. Love brings her experiences as a Black queer educator, student, researcher, and community member to name the historical and dynamic systems of oppression that profit from the suffering of children of color,” the book’s introduction reads. “In particular, Love discusses the necessity to dismantle the educational survival complex that many students and teachers enact in order to survive the violent and harmful practices of the United States education system.”

The syllabus states that the course “explores the ways social inequalities, systems, and structures affect schooling,” according to YAF.

https://apnews.com/article/sandwich-throwing-trial-justice-department-a2776c568a1ea4b8ce5b6af606669b63

WASHINGTON — The D.C. man accused of assaulting a U.S. Border Patrol agent with a Subway sandwich was found not guilty by a jury Thursday, the culmination of a three-month criminal case that was both an absurd spectacle and a deeply serious clash over protest and prosecution in the Trump era.

Sean Dunn, a 37-year-old Air Force veteran and former Justice Department paralegal, faced up to a year in jail for hurling what became known as the hoagie heard around the world. His acquittal following a two-day trial amounts to a rebuke of President Donald Trump’s immigration and crime crackdown in Washington, as well as another embarrassing legal setback for Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney for D.C., whom he appointed.

Viral video from Aug. 10 showed Dunn shouting at the Border Patrol agent, Gregory Lairmore, before heaving a sandwich at his chest, running away and getting arrested after a brief foot chase. With anger brewing across the city over Trump’s takeover of city policing and deployment of the National Guard, Dunn quickly grew into a footlong folk hero and symbol of anti-Trump resistance.

Pirro’s office initially pursued a felony assault charge against Dunn, but a grand jury rebuffed prosecutors by declining to return an indictment. Eager to project the president’s tough-on-protest image, Pirro declined to drop the case and proceeded with a less serious misdemeanor charge that resulted in this week’s trial.

Prosecutors were gambling that jurors in liberal Washington would find that Dunn’s actions amounted to an “assault,” even though he was being widely celebrated and the case mocked as a joke.

Following recent algorithm updates, there's a massive wave of banned accounts on ElonX, and anyone can be affected, doesn't matter if new or old accounts, if free or paid or with/without OldTweetDeck.
Oddly enough, this happened shortly after (((New York))).

https://twistedvoxel.com/massive-ban-wave-targets-oldtweetdeck-users-following-xs-crackdown-on-third-party-access/

Are you affected? Me has had two accounts, they're gone, feels like beeing blind and deaf, just like a NPC

>Gregory Bovino was called out by a judge only two days earlier for lying about being assaulted by a protester

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/nov/08/border-patrol-gregory-bovino-chicago

A border patrol chief claimed on Saturday that his agents came under fire in Chicago while conducting immigration enforcement operations, just two days after a federal judge said that he had lied to her about having been struck by a rock during a previous confrontation with protesters in the city.

Gregory Bovino, the border patrol chief and frequent Fox News guest who has become the face of the Trump administration’s mass deportation efforts, said on social media that his agents had been “shot at”, and subjected to “vehicular assaults, physical assaults, impeding, violent mobs, vehicular blockades”, for a number of hours.

In a written statement, the Department of Homeland Security said that border patrol agents were “conducting immigration enforcement operations near 26th Street and Kedzie Avenue in Chicago, Illinois, when an unknown male driving a black Jeep fired shots at agents and fled the scene”.

The agency said that the “Chicago Police Department was called for assistance and cleared the scene. The shooter and vehicle remain at large, and this is a dynamic situation.”

Chicago police said they responded but found no signs of anyone having been struck by gunfire where the alleged shooting took place. “There are no reports of anyone struck by gunfire,” the Chicago police said in a statement.

According to the police, one officer was in good condition after being struck by a vehicle during the operation, and the driver was ticketed.

>No video evidence has yet surfaced of the alleged shooting, but social media clips and news photographs did show heavily armed agents in camouflage, including Bovino, confronting protesters, deploying tear gas and detaining people in the city’s Little Village neighborhood.