TV News LIES

There are many ways to characterize Proposition 50, the single ballot initiative that Californians will be voting on this election season.

You could say it’s about redrawing congressional district lines outside the regular once-a-decade schedule. You could say, more precisely, that it’s about counterbalancing Republican efforts to engineer congressional seats in their favor in Texas and elsewhere with a gerrymander that favors the Democrats. You could, like the measure’s detractors, call it a partisan power grab that risks undermining 15 years of careful work to make California’s congressional elections as fair and competitive as possible.

\The way California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, and the Democrats are selling it to voters, though, boils down to something much simpler and more visceral: it’s an invitation to raise a middle finger to Donald Trump, a president fewer than 40% of Californians voted for and many loathe – for reasons that extend far beyond his attempts at election manipulation. For that reason alone, the yes campaign believes it is cruising to an easy victory.

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Zohran Mamdani called former Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s latest attacks against him “disgusting” and “racist” in the closing days of the New York City mayor's race, which show Mamdani leading in polls.

Cuomo on Oct. 23 said Mamdani, 34, couldn’t handle a crisis like the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the city nearly 25 years ago. Cuomo, running as an independent, appeared on the conservative radio show, “Sid and Friends in the Morning,” the morning after a heated final debate with Mamdani, the Democratic nominee and a member of the state Assembly, and Republican Curtis Sliwa.

“God forbid, another 9/11, can you imagine Mamdani in the seat?” Cuomo, 67, asked.

“I could,” host Sid Rosenberg said. “He’d be cheering.”

After laughing, Cuomo responded, “That’s another problem.”

Mamdani, a democratic socialist state assemblyman, would be the first Muslim mayor in New York City history if polls hold until the Nov. 4 general election. Nearly one in 10 New Yorkers are Muslim, and many faced profiling and surveillance in the aftermath of the 2001 attacks. Data also indicates rising Islamophobia.

TVNL Comment:  You would think there was no place in NYC for Islamophobia.  Yeah, you'd think so, but apparently racism is alive and well here.   Don't let it get to you, Assemblyman Mamdani.  We really are better than this, with a few obvious exceptions.

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The New York attorney general, Letitia James, on Thursday revealed that her legal team plans to ask a federal judge to dismiss the criminal charges against her on the grounds that the US attorney in eastern Virginia who obtained the indictment was unlawfully appointed, according to a court filing.

James’s legal team made the move the day before James is scheduled to be arraigned in the US district court in Norfolk, Virginia, where she is expected to plead not guilty to one count of bank fraud and one count of making false statements to a financial institution.

Lindsey Halligan was appointed by Donald Trump last month as US attorney for Virginia’s eastern district, after her predecessor was forced out of his job after he expressed concerns with the strength of the evidence against both James and the former FBI director James Comey.

Comey has also since been indicted in the same district on charges of obstructing Congress and making a false statement.

Trump has promised to seek retribution against people he alleges used the justice system against him in an effort to prevent him from returning to power, including Comey and James.

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President Trump said Thursday he would not deploy federal troops to San Francisco, reversing course on plans to implement anticrime and immigration enforcement in the Bay Area.

Trump in a post on Truth Social said friends of his called him to ask him not to go forward with the surge after arguing the city’s Democratic Mayor Daniel Lurie “was making substantial progress.”

The president said Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff were among “great people” who urged him not to deploy the National Guard to the city. 

He added that he spoke to Lurie on Wednesday evening, saying the mayor asked him “very nicely” to give him a chance to turn the situation around.

“I told him I think he is making a mistake because we can do it much faster, and remove the criminals that the law does not permit him to move,” Trump said. “I told him, ‘It’s an easier process if we do it, faster, stronger, and safer, but let’s see how you do?’”

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This brings our live coverage of the final New York mayoral debate to a close.

We will have analysis from our politics team shortly.

Overall, the 90-minute event seemed unlikely to have changed many minds, with the main focus being an extended argument between Zohan Mamdani, the Democratic nominee, and Andrew Cuomo, the former governor he defeated in the primary, now running as an independent.

Cuomo kept hammering the point that his experience should make him the right choice, given his long career in government at the state and federal level, as opposed to Mamdani, the state assemblyman who is almost exactly half his age.

Mamdani, for his part, cast himself as the candidate of change, focused on affordability and trying to reverse a situation in which New York is becoming “a museum of where working-class people used to be able to live”.

Sliwa is an engaging presence on television, but did little to change the perception that he remains more of a quirky cultural figure than a likely government administrator.

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The University of Virginia (UVA) has become the latest institution to agree to the Trump administration’s demands concerning discrimination in admissions and hiring following significant pressure from the justice department.

The deal, which the department announced on Wednesday, comes after the president of the esteemed public university resigned in June to resolve a justice department investigation into UVA’s diversity, equity and inclusion policies.

If the president, Jim Ryan, had stayed in the job, he was told “hundreds of employees would lose jobs, researchers would lose funding, and hundreds of students could lose financial aid or have their visas withheld”, according to Mark Warner, a Democratic senator from Virginia.

The deal means the justice department will end its investigation into the school, while the school agreed “not engage in unlawful racial discrimination in its university programming, admissions, hiring or other activities. UVA will provide relevant information and data to the Department of Justice on a quarterly basis through 2028,” the announcement states.

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