Tuesday’s Election Result Is a Rebuke of Trump More than an Enthusiastic Embrace of DemocratsThe election results in Virginia, New Jersey, and New York have put wind in the sails of a Democratic Party that has been on the defensive since Trump’s re-election. For the more moderate Democratic Party pundits and politicians, the victories confirm their belief that a populist, anti-woke platform is the way to go. Spanberger opened her victory speech with the assertion that her campaign “sent a message to our neighbors and across the country…and the whole world, that in 2025 Virginia chose pragmatism over partisanship.” Sherrill, for her part, centered her acceptance speech on “prosperity,” tying appeals to America’s “democratic” tradition to people’s need for economic security. She added that the election shows that “we’re not going to give into our darker impulses,” without naming the transphobic, racist, and anti-immigrant vitriol which defined much of her Republican opponent’s campaign and Trump’s politics. Democratic Representative and House Speaker Hakeem Jeffries, who two days ago told CNN anchor Jake Tapper that the future of the Democratic wasn’t Zohran Mamdani, but the House Democratic caucus, said on Tuesday night that Democrats “won all over the country talking about the affordability crisis.” An ABC News article confirms that the races in Virginia and New Jersey centered on the issue of affordability, but the discourse about how to resolve it is much different in these states than in New York.
https://www.leftvoice.org/tuesdays-election-result-is-a-rebuke-of-trump-more-than-an-enthusiastic-embrace-of-democrats/Italian Fascists’ Love Affair With Israel Started Long Before Giorgia MeloniFew nations have such a disconnect between the public and the state when it comes to Palestine as Italy. The Italian government is one of just three – the others are Germany and the United States – that have continued to supply major conventional weapons to Israel since 2020. Alongside attack helicopters, naval guns and parts for Israel’s F-35 fighter jets, Italy’s prime minister Giorgia Meloni has continued to provide diplomatic cover to her Israeli counterpart Benjamin Netanyahu, refusing to take even the symbolic step of recognising the (as yet mostly nominal) Palestinian state. The Italian people, meanwhile, have been full-throated in their support for Palestinian liberation. The most recent Global Sumud Flotilla contained nearly 50 Italian activists, including four elected politicians. As the boats left the port at Genoa, they were saluted by a crowd of more than 40,000 people. But Meloni dismissed them as “irresponsible” propagandists, speculating that “maybe the suffering of Palestinians isn’t their real priority”. A representative of an Italian dockworkers’ union threatened to “shut down all of Europe” if the flotilla lost contact with the mainland. It wasn’t an empty threat.
https://novaramedia.com/2025/10/27/italian-fascists-love-affair-with-israel-started-long-before-giorgia-meloni/Dick Cheney’s Legacy Is One of Brutal CarnageOn March 15, 2006, the United States was nearly three years into its second Iraq war. After over a decade of brutal sanctions and continuous bombing, in spring 2003, the US had launched a full-scale invasion of the oil-rich Middle Eastern nation. The invasion was a flagrant violation of international law. After toppling Iraq’s Ba’athist government, a former on-again, off-again ally of Washington, the United States and its allies began a protracted military occupation of Iraq. The neocolonial affair was particularly brutal. Such is the nature of seeking to impose your presence by military force on a people who do not wish it and are willing to use force to oppose it. That day, March 15, soldiers approached the home of Faiz Harrat Al-Majma’ee, an Iraqi farmer . Allegedly they were looking for an individual believed to be responsible for the deaths of two US soldiers and a facilitator for al-Qaeda recruitment in Iraq. In the version told by US troops, someone from the house fired on the approaching soldiers, prompting a twenty-five-minute confrontation. Eventually the soldiers entered the house, killing all of the residents. This included not just Al-Majma’ee, but his wife; his three children, Hawra’a, Aisha, and Husam, who were between the ages of five months and five years old; his seventy-four-year-old mother, Turkiya Majeed Ali; and two nieces, Asma’a Yousif Ma’arouf and Usama Yousif Ma’arouf, who were five and three years old. An autopsy performed on the deceased “revealed that all corpses were shot in the head and handcuffed.” After slaughtering the family execution style, US soldiers called in an air strike, destroying the house. The presumed reason for the bombardment was to cover up evidence of the extrajudicial killings. The ten lives taken that day, including the children handcuffed and shot at point-blank range in the head, are part of the 4.5–4.7 million humans who lost their lives in the post-9/11 war zones. This includes not just Iraq but also Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Pakistan. It is impossible to reduce the “war on terror” and its colossal human toll to one person. But when it comes to the architects of the war on terror, one name looms larger than the rest: Dick Cheney. On Monday, November 3, Cheney died at age eighty-four due to complications from pneumonia and cardiac and vascular disease. I do not wish death on any human, nor do I have any desire to see any living being suffer. But when reflecting on Cheney’s legacy, we are obligated to acknowledge the millions of lives he cut short, like those of Iraqi women and children who were bound and killed execution-style in 2005. They are part of Cheney’s legacy, a legacy that includes a lifetime of defending the worst crimes of the US national security state.
https://jacobin.com/2025/11/cheney-war-terror-iraq-trump