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Abdul El-Sayed and his wife Sarah Jukaku at campaign event
Further

Two Different America's (Sic)

Hoo boy. With the approach of what bleakly promises to be "the super-Islamophobic midterms," the Bigot-In-Chief is letting his racist freak flag fly by attacking Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, whose smarts, strength, hotness, accomplished wife and Michigan win clearly terrify him. Cue charges of "communist," "man of hate," and, probs soon, AI slop featuring suicide vests. Meanwhile, El-Sayed, a far sharper tool in the shed, has embraced the charge they represent "(two) America’s": The ads write themselves.

Planet MAGA, of course, is already so delusional Trump just boasted of his "Great Poll Numbers," which now sit at rock-bottom lows of 38% to 33%. For a bunch of hacks led by a fragile narcissist who's never seen a scapegoat he didn't relish, the fantastical goes hand-in-stubby-hand with the fear-mongering: vandals in the Reflecting Pool, domestic terrorists at No Kings, migrant caravans, lunatic Bolsheviks, weird names or just brown-or-black skinned success, more terrifying to many of these losers than any threat of extremism. Enter, in peril, the high-achieving epidemiologist, health official, author and "Muslim boogeyman" El-Sayed. “Expect them to throw the whole bigoted kitchen sink at El-Sayed," says Mehdi Hasan. "This will be the anti-Zohran Mamdani campaign on anti-Muslim steroids."

Unsurprisingly, it began in earnest the minute the good doctor won Michigan's against-the-odds primary against establishment Dem Haley Stevens. He'll face off against GOP Rep. and racist ijiot Mike Rogers, who of course has rushed to call the U.S.-born-and-bred El-Sayed "anti-American" and - pulling the same juvenile "Barack Hussein Obama" crap to undermine his legitimacy - to use his full, scary, def-not-in-Kansas-anymore name Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed. But Abdulrahman, who doesn't suffer fools gladly, has brutally pushed back. "With a name like mine, I never thought running for office would be possible," he said at a campaign event. But if "Mike" wants to focus on his 11-letter (a lot!) first name, he just wanted to remind him, "If you don’t know how to say it, keep the name out of your damn mouth.”

In moronic lockstep, MAGA's bigots, brown shirts and zealots have followed suit with "cartoonishly Islamophobic attacks." They use his full name and say he's a "socialist," which they can't define but anyway he isn't. Anti-trans goon Nancy Mace charges, “Every single Muslim holding public office (is) a Trojan Horse and a threat to national security and our republic," and woe is us when "our granddaughters are wearing burkas to school." Vapid scumbag JD calls him a "crazy" guy who doesn't want Trump's rip-off, oligarch-run "prosperous economy" and flings "personal insults" at Vance's family, though hours later Trump attacked El-Sayed's wife, who is U.S.-born and thus not an alleged Einstein Visa immigrant third wife who somehow after 30 years here can still barely speak English. Maybe it was an Epstein Visa?

As usual, Trump has eagerly led the racist, vulgar charge. Along with a communist man of hate, he's also called El-Sayed a "jihadist" from a rigged, "strictly Third World" state who's "full of shit." It turns out El-Sayed is also "the absolute best at casually burning Trump to the fucking ground": Asked about the barb, El-Sayed snapped back, “At least I don’t let mine go in the middle of the Oval Office." And as with another smart, quick, non-white guy who's way above his pay grade and lives rent-free in his wee puerile mind, he likes to sneeringly recite, often stumbling, the full, scary name of a guy who this time actually would be the first Muslim U.S. senator. Presumably, the ketchup really hit the White House walls last weekend when El-Sayed said he'd had "a really good conversation" with Obama about "what we need to do to win."

Above all, the bigot for all seasons pivots to the trope of anyone Arabic - El-Sayed's parents immigrated from Egypt - being anti-Semitic. "He doesn't love Jewish people," babbles Trump. "He hates them with a passion that burns in his heart." In fact, El-Sayed has plainly, repeatedly said he opposes not Jews but Israel's genocidal policies, AIPAC and the dark U.S. money that abets both: "I believe in equal rights to peace, dignity and self-determination for all people." That call for equality under the law has nothing to do with anti-Semitism, notes Peter Beinart; cognizant of history. he also warns that a political party or ideology willing to be "nakedly bigoted" toward any group of people, in this case Muslims, in order to maintain power would, if the politics were to shift, "do the same thing to Jews in a heartbeat."

Obviously, such subtlety is beyond the dim-witted likes of Trump and his MAGA zombies, who alone could look at Dr. El-Sayed and his (one) wife Dr. Sarah Jukaku, a psychiatrist whose parents emigrated here from India, and see a threat. Both are U.S.-born-and- raised doctors with undergrad degrees from University of Michigan, where they met, and advanced degrees from Columbia and Oxford. In his book Healing Politics, El-Sayed offers a rigorous framework for understanding systemic medical and political failure, and building conditions for lasting healing. He also calls Jukaku his “rock" and praises the "quiet confidence" that led her to work with people confronting pain. "I struggled to learn who I was,” he wrote of their earlier selves. “Sarah did not. She danced with her emotions. I wrestled with mine." The couple has two daughters.

No wonder, then, a needy, hollow rapist, con-man, bully and aspiring tinpot dictator, routinely raking in billions while kids go hungry and stuffed into a cheap tux for his fellow billionaire felons, posted a photo of himself with his tacky, mail-order, call-girl wife in a tight dress with "redacted Epstein files written all over it" - both smirking, "We're richer and be better than you and just ignore our vile name appearing in those pedo files thousands of times" - alongside the other couple, warmly smiling after a pancake breakfast in a diner, El Sayed in a t-shirt, Jukaku in a hijab so she must be a terrorist (though Trump, suspect, is wearing a cat.) The caption for the side-by-side pics, which only the spectacularly tone-deaf Trump could remotely imagine as a mic-drop: "Two VERY DIFFERENT America’s (sic).” Umm. Sure.

Kudos to El-Sayed, prince among men, who didn't even stoop to pick the low-hanging fruit of Trump's "grammatical shitbaggery" - one comment: "What a maroon" - emblematic of a proudly semi-literate GOP somehow come to power in our debased America without understanding how apostrophes work. Instead, El-Sayed went for the meat of the matter. "Yeah, he's right," he told CNN. Swiftly, he embraced the campaign-ready concept of two Americas: "Trump's vision, the one you're living in right now (in) which your overlords are two people who don’t like each other, but join in the interest of making billions of dollars off of you...Or two people who genuinely love each other, enjoyed some pancakes together, and want to come together to build the kind of America where they can raise a family and know that family is going to have the good things."

Those "good things" - health care, good jobs, clean air and water, a relatively level playing field to replace gross inequality, a country where people can live peaceably together "with their sisters and brothers" - are what he and his wife want for their kids, and he wisely gauges most of the rest of us do too. And no, he says, rebutting GOP charges, it's not "radical" to believe people should be able to afford groceries, have health care, partake in free elections. Also, he and his wife actually "like each other," he adds; as to the couple in the "very different" America, "From what I've heard, it's a bit of a rocky road." As mid-terms loom. “They are going to try to paint me as a certain thing, (but) America is a lot bigger than (these) very small people make it out to be," he says. "They all think we won't step up and fight...We fight for each other."

@abdulelsayed

They all think we won't step up and fight... They think they're the biggest, baddest bully on the playground... That they're going to show up and we're going to run away...

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Waters Off Block Island Host America's First Offshore Wind Farm
News

'Relentless in Its War on Offshore Wind,' Trump Admin Kills More Projects

Despite climate concerns and high prices from President Donald Trump's illegal war on Iran, his administration continued its assault on offshore wind this week, using another "taxpayer-funded bribe" to convince a company to instead invest in fossil fuels.

The German company RWE announced Thursday that it had reached a settlement with the US Department of the Interior to relinquish offshore wind leases off the coasts of New York, California, and Louisiana for $1.22 billion.

"After careful consideration, it was determined there is no path forward to permit these projects in the US for the foreseeable future," the firm said in a statement. "The company determined that this resolution best serves the interests of its stakeholders and allows it to direct resources toward energy projects that can be advanced with certainty."

RWE also disclosed that it would put $900 million toward an indirect 16% stake in a Louisiana liquefied natural gas project, and $300 million toward turbines for a pipeline of 15 natural gas peaking projects across target US markets.

Reuters reported that the deal is "the fifth, and largest, the administration has entered into this year as part of its wide-ranging effort to stop development of US offshore wind projects," which Trump has fought against since before becoming president. His current term has featured various moves collectively condemned as a "war against renewables."

The RWE deal was ripped by climate and labor advocates, as well as Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), who said that "everything the Trump administration does can be summed up in four words: CORRUPTION AT YOUR EXPENSE."

"Trump is again spending billions of taxpayer money to limit the US energy supply in favor of exporting more energy to countries like China," Schumer wrote on social media. "This will only make your utility bill MORE expensive."

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum fired back at Schumer, claiming that "your climate extremist energy 'transition' was actually energy SUBTRACTION," and "ZERO taxpayer money will be spent. It's a dollar-for-dollar repurposing of RWE's own money."

RWE explained that it had "invested more than $1 billion toward the leases and the development of these projects," and the new agreement resolves the company's "legal claims and provides $1.22 billion in settlement funds."

House Natural Resources Committee Democrats Ranking Member Jared Huffman (D-Calif.) joined Schumer and other critics in railing against the deal, saying Friday: "Trump just paid RWE over $1 BILLION in taxpayer money to walk away from offshore wind projects—including a project off Humboldt in my district—and invest in fossil fuels instead."

"This fake, illegal settlement kills good-paying jobs, raises electricity costs, and rewards Big Oil with taxpayer dollars," he continued. "When the accountability comes, and I promise you it's coming, everyone involved in these deals will answer for it."

This potential settlement has been feared for months. In May, over 50 US groups "alarmed to learn that RWE was contemplating a deal" sent a letter urging CEO Mark Krebber to resist the Trump administration's "bullying" and "vendetta against offshore wind."

Among those organizations was Friends of the Earth US, whose senior energy campaigner Raena Garcia declared Friday that "committing to reinvest over $1 billion in fossil fuels is a disastrous mistake."

"The Trump administration won't be around forever, and any company that cuts a deal like this should expect accountability eventually," Garcia added.

The BlueGreen Alliance, which brings together environmental groups and labor unions, has a webpage tracking the costs of the buyouts, which so far include $3.9 billion in taxpayer money, 21.15 gigawatts of anticipated energy, and over 57,000 projected jobs.

"The Trump administration is relentless in its war on offshore wind," alliance executive director Jason Walsh said of the latest deal. "Billions of taxpayers' dollars have gone to waste along with tens of thousands of lost potential jobs. At a time when energy demand and costs are rising, we are disheartened by this latest buyout. Now working people on three coasts will no longer get to reap the benefits of the clean and reliable energy that would have come from these projects."

The settlements still face legal hurdles. New York Attorney General Letitia James announced in June that she is leading a coalition that includes AGs from Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Vermont in a lawsuit seeking to block one of them. California Attorney General Rob Bonta has sent a notice of intent to sue over another deal.

Despite Big Oil-backed Trump's attacks on renewables and support for climate-wrecking fossil fuels, new data shows that the United States is generating more power from the sun and wind than ever, as Common Dreams reported earlier Friday.

For example, in May, solar generation eclipsed every other source of electricity in Utah for the first time. Weber State University physics professor Dan Schroeder said that is "wonderful news for air quality, it's wonderful news for the climate, and it's wonderful news for jobs and the economy."

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Bernie Sanders Holds Town Hall On AI In Stanford
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Sanders Proposal Would Mandate at Least Two Weeks of Paid Vacation for All Full-Time Workers

Sen. Bernie Sanders on Thursday reintroduced legislation that he said would end the "international embarrassment" of the US being one of the few countries in the world to not offer guaranteed paid vacation time for workers.

Sanders (I-Vt.)—who is co-sponsoring the Guaranteed Paid Vacation Act along with Sens. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), Ed Markey (D-Mass.), Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.), and Alex Padilla (D-Calif.)—said guaranteed vacation was essential for all American families.

"We hear a lot of talk about family values in America, but let’s be clear," Sanders said. "When a husband, wife, and kids, during the course of an entire year, are unable to spend any time together on vacation, that is not a family value. That is an attack on everything that a family is supposed to stand for."

"It’s not a radical idea to require companies in America to provide at least two weeks of paid vacation to their workers," Sanders added. "What’s radical is that millions of Americans are not only working longer hours for lower wages, but that they do not receive a single paid vacation day. That should not be happening in the United States of America, the richest country in the history of the world."

The legislation proposes giving every worker in the US the right to accrue at least one hour of paid annual leave for every 25 hours worked, with full-time workers earning at least two weeks of paid annual leave per year.

The bill would also prohibit employers from discriminating against workers who exercise their right to vacation.

Rep. Seth Magaziner (D-RI), who introduced a companion guaranteed paid vacation bill in the US House of Representatives, said the legislation was needed because "every worker in America deserves the chance to rest, recharge, and spend time with the people they love without worrying about missing a paycheck."

The legislation comes one day after the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) released a report finding that "US workers get an average of 10 days per year of paid vacation time, far less than the legal minimum required in almost all comparable world economies."

CEPR also found that nearly a quarter of US workers get no vacation time at all, including 57% of the lowest-paid 10% of the US workforce.

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US-POLITICS-VANCE
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'Fighting for the Peeping Tom Vote': El-Sayed Calls Out PATRIOT Act Champion Rogers Over Privacy

Amid an expanding assault on privacy by the federal government, Democratic nominee Dr. Abdul El-Sayed has brought the issue of mass surveillance to the forefront of Michigan's Senate race, attacking his Republican opponent, former Rep. Mike Rogers, for his longtime defense of the PATRIOT Act.

"Mike Rogers out here fighting for the Peeping Tom vote," wrote El-Sayed, a former public health official, in a social media post on Monday. "Creepy stuff, Mike."

El-Sayed was responding to an unearthed comment from Rogers, then the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, made during a 2013 committee hearing in Congress just months after whistleblower Edward Snowden's explosive revelations about the extent of the National Security Agency's (NSA) warrantless surveillance of Americans.

At the time, Congress was debating whether to enact legislation reining in a provision in the PATRIOT Act, Section 215, which the government had used to secretly collect phone records and other information in bulk from Americans not accused of wrongdoing.

Rogers was pushing American University law professor Stephen Vladeck to agree that the government should be allowed to examine Americans' business records to determine if they were connected to a foreign terrorist organization. Vladeck said he believed it should, but that protecting Americans' privacy needed to be taken into account. "The way we do it matters," he said.

The chair responded that in the decade since the policy had been enacted, nobody had ever complained about it. Vladeck, noting that the program was a secret, responded: "But who would be complaining?”

"Somebody whose privacy was violated," Rogers retorted. "You can't have your privacy violated if you don't know your privacy is violated."

The quote is highly representative of Rogers' record of support for extensive government surveillance over his decade-and-a-half in Congress. He was one of the PATRIOT Act's leading champions since its introduction in 2001 and led the charge to stop mass collection powers from being curtailed after the Snowden revelations.

“The charge that the program tramples on the privacy of citizens is simply wrong,” he said in a statement with Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger (D-Md.), then the ranking member of the Intelligence Committee.

Rogers and Ruppersberger also coauthored the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) in 2012, which would have allowed companies to share cybersecurity-related information with the government, including the NSA, with protections from existing privacy restrictions. The American Civil Liberties Union argued that the bill, which failed in the Senate, would have allowed the government to obtain large amounts of sensitive personal data with few restrictions.

"You can't have your privacy violated if you don't know your privacy is violated."

In 2026, as artificial intelligence becomes a new tool for even more powerful and pervasive spying, El-Sayed has said the government must be banned from using it to "conduct warrantless surveillance."

As part of an AI policy platform rolled out in June, he said rules should be put in place to prevent its use for "domestic authoritarianism," including "mass political surveillance, protected-characteristic predictive policing, or AI targeting of dissent."

During President Donald Trump's second term, as he's used anti-"terrorism" rhetoric to justify a legal crackdown on domestic opposition, the government's expanding spy powers have become an increasing concern.

With the aid of private surveillance companies like Palantir, the administration has created an unprecedented surveillance dragnet that connects AI-powered facial recognition technology, license plate readers, and phone location tools to piles of data on Americans that have been used to supercharge its mass deportation campaign and aggressively monitor protesters and dissenters.

It has been met with some pushback in the Senate, where Republicans earlier this year narrowly failed to extend Trump's powers to surveil noncitizens under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) without warrants. Though US citizens are not supposed to be targeted, civil liberties advocates argue that their information is often collected easily and the government has used it to prosecute them.

Rogers has attempted to back off some of his earlier defense of mass surveillance, though he has not meaningfully pushed to reduce the government's spying powers. During a losing Senate bid against Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) in 2024, he said that it's "wrong" for the FBI to conduct warrantless searches against US citizens, but did not call for actually repealing or blocking Section 702.

Since serving in Congress, Rogers parlayed his time overseeing the intelligence community into a lucrative career advising and governing cybersecurity, intelligence, and government-contracting firms.

He served as a senior security adviser to AT&T while the company operated a little-known program that gave law enforcement access to searches of trillions of domestic phone records, though there is no record that he personally worked on the program.

Michigan Advance reported earlier this year that he also made almost $100,000 advising a company that helped the government of former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro spy on dissidents.

Noting the Republican nominee's recent pivot to Trumpian election denialism, journalist Spencer Ackerman—who has extensively covered the expansion of government surveillance during the War on Terror—suggested in a post on social media that there is little reason to believe Rogers has changed much after over a decade out of Congress.

"I saw up close his efforts, post-Snowden, to protect the NSA and ensure it continues to nullify your constitutionally-protected privacy," Ackerman said. "He was for impunity then and wants the same thing for himself."

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Students protest outside OpenAI's new lobbying office
News

'Stop Stealing Our Future': Students Arrested in Protest of OpenAI's Lobby Office

With the pro-artificial intelligence super political action committee Leading the Future projected to spend $200 million on the midterm elections as the industry fights regulations and accountability for the harm its technology can cause, dozens of students rallied Monday at the new Washington, DC lobbying headquarters of OpenAI—with several placed under arrest for the peaceful protest.

More than 30 student activists gathered at the lobbying office—nicknamed "The Workshop"—just blocks from the White House on Monday after the Sunrise Movement, QuitGPT, and the Young Democratic Socialists of America held a training on how young people on college campuses can organize their communities to fight "tech companies propping up authoritarianism."

Sunrise reported that 13 people were arrested at 2:30 pm ET, two hours after the group had begun occupying the front lobby of the office.

A student protester is arrested in Washington, DC on August 10, 2026. A student protester is arrested in Washington, DC on August 10, 2026.

The students unfurled a banner reading, "Stop Stealing Our Future," and others displayed signs that said, "OpenAI Bought My Senator."

Both Democrats and Republicans have pushed legislation aimed at expanding AI, even as the massive data centers the technology requires have proven deeply unpopular across the political spectrum, and scientists and advocacy groups alike have warned the technology is likely to lead to job loss for the working class as well as harm users of AI chatbots.

Communities have rallied against the construction of data centers in their towns, citing concerns about the facilities' massive water and energy consumption, failure to bring long-term employment to regions where they're located, and carbon pollution.

“My friends chose to risk arrest to bring the fight to OpenAl,” said Raya Gupta, a student organizer who attended the protest. “Our generation doesn't have any guarantees about whether we'll have jobs after college, or whether there will be clean drinking water for all of us or whether people will have any power left in politics since our elections keep getting bought by Big Tech. We all believe that not taking action now, as the scales slide between the people and the billionaires, puts our futures in great jeopardy.”

Since starting its lobbying operation, OpenAI has pushed to ban states from writing their own AI regulations—an effort backed by President Donald Trump; secure legal immunity in cases where AI tech causes mass killing, such as if a bad actor uses the technology to "create a chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear weapon"; and win lucrative defense contracts that could result in AI surveillance.

The company's ties to the president have already appeared to benefit OpenAI, which received a $200 million Pentagon contract after OpenAI president Greg Brockman donated $25 million to the pro-Trump super PAC MAGA, Inc.

“Tech billionaires are trying to rob us of our future,” said Sunrise executive director Aru Shiney-Ajay. “They’re building unpopular data centers, they’re taking away our jobs, and they’re polluting our planet. And because they know how unpopular they are, they need to spend millions of dollars in legalized bribes to stop any regulations coming their way. They are sending us careening into fascism, just so they can make more money.”

As Congress is in its August recess, organizers are holding actions across more than 20 states as they demand that elected officials "Dump Big Tech."

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US-IRAN-ISRAEL-WAR-TRUMP
News

'He Has No Choice. He Lost': Expert Delivers Brutal Obituary for Trump's Failed Iran War

University of Chicago political scientist John Mearsheimer on Sunday delivered a harsh reality check to US President Donald Trump over the state of his illegal war with Iran.

In an interview with Australian journalist Tom Switzer, Mearsheimer was asked why Trump seemed willing to accept an arrangement in which Iran is able to demand fees from transport ships in exchange for reopening the Strait of Hormuz, which has been almost entirely shut down since the US and Israel began bombing Iran in late February.

"It's very simple... he has no choice," Mearsheimer replied. "He lost the war. This is a devastating defeat for the United States. Can you tell me what the United States should do to regain leverage over Iran? I actually think you can't tell me because we have no solution."

Mearsheimer then explained why Trump's threats to escalate his assault on Iran ring completely hollow.

"One, he's out of munitions," the political scientist said. "Number two, our Gulf allies have told him, in no uncertain terms, that is unacceptable because the Iranians have made it clear that if we escalate, they will escalate, and they will destroy oil facilities, desalination plants, and so forth."

In the same discussion, Vali Nasr, professor of international affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, similarly argued that Iran appears to be in the driver's seat, noting that "the period where you can basically pressure Iran into submission... I think is gone."

Nasr added that Iran now appears to be "very comfortable demanding" concessions from the US in exchange for reopening the strait, and he said that many in the Washington foreign policy establishment had yet to understand this fact.

"In reality, Iran is not overplaying its hand," he said. "It's just playing its hand."

The scholars' arguments were echoed by Daniel DePetris, fellow at Defense Priorities, who wrote in an analysis published Monday that the US has little choice but to accept Iran charging fees to ships in exchange for passage through the strait.

While acknowledging such a situation is far from ideal, DePetris said that it became inevitable when Trump launched his unprovoked war without authorization from the US Congress more than five months ago.

"Trump’s war handed Iran the perfect excuse to leverage its geography, and the Iranians didn’t hesitate to do so," wrote DePetris. "Over time, the Strait of Hormuz, in addition to Iran’s more aggressive posture toward its neighbors writ-large, has become something far more valuable: a strategic card Iran can play whenever Trump threatens to accelerate military operations."

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