Report: AIPAC Spent a Record Amount on the 2024 Election

During the 2024 elections, the Israel lobby poured at least $45.2 million into winning candidates for Congress, the most by any organization in history, according to a new report from Sludge.

The report states that 349 senators and members of the House of Representatives, or 65 percent of Congress, received money from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee or its affiliated super PACs in both parties. For example, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson received at least $654,000, while House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, a Democrat, received at least $933,000.

AIPAC in particular targeted two Democratic members of the House: Representatives Cori Bush of Missouri and Jamaal Bowman of New York, each known for their progressive reputations and for being among the first in Congress to call for a ceasefire in Gaza. AIPAC spent $20 million to back their primary election opponents Wesley Bell and George Latimer, respectively, successfully unseating Bush and Bowman.

It’s a massive increase from AIPAC’s spending in 2022, which only amounted to $13 million in contributions to congressional campaigns. This time, the lobby upped its spending due to opposition to Israel’s brutal war in Gaza, which has created a humanitarian catastrophe and led to a massive civilian death toll.

Candidates that it backed oppose a ceasefire to end the war, which has continued unabated for more than a year and led to war crimes charges against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and Hamas military leader Mohammed Deif. But Israel still receives unconditional backing from the United States from President Biden as well as President-elect Donald Trump, and that will only become stronger when Trump is sworn in.

Rudy Giuliani is trying to get out of attending in-person trial proceedings, after being held in contempt of court, by pretending that his life is in danger.

Lawyers for the former New York City mayor argued in a filing Wednesday that their client cannot attend a session in person at the end of the week. Giuliani had appeared virtually in court on Monday.

“He is 80 years old and suffers from a number of medical conditions,” the lawyers explained, noting that he has issues with his knee, lungs, and heart.

The filing also cited “a number of credible death threats” against the disgraced politician.

“As one of the more outspoken critics of the current Iranian regime, at a time of heightened terrorism concerns following the recent events in New Orleans and Las Vegas and the escalating conflict between Israel and Iran and its various proxies, it is reasonable to take extra precautions regarding Mayor Giuliani’s safety, and limit travel whenever possible,” the filing said.

It’ll be interesting to see whether the profound concern for Giuliani’s safety extends to two weeks from now, when his lawyers requested permission for their client’s trial to be delayed so he could attend Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration festivities.

RFK Jr. is being accused of voter fraud. 

Watchdog group Accountable.US alleges that the former presidential candidate and current Trump pick to lead Health and Human Services should be investigated for  “registering for and voting” from “a New York residence at which he does not legally reside.” This would be a federal felony if true.

A New York Supreme Court in Albany found that Kennedy was using an address in Katonah, New York, to vote from while he actually lived in California. Public records show that he voted from that same address this November, according to the watchdog group. Kennedy said he’d been renting a room from a friend at the address, while the friend’s wife testified that he’d only spent a single night there. 

“Not actually living in New York in the eyes of the law apparently did not stop RFK Jr. from casting his election ballot there illegally,” said Accountable.US executive director Tony Carrk. “If RFK Jr. is so dismissive of the law in his personal matters, how can he be trusted to properly apply the law when it comes to our public health? Senators should press Kennedy on whether he intends to play by his own rules and thumb his nose at the law as HHS Secretary, like President-elect Trump is wont to do.”

RFK Jr. joins Pete Hegseth, Matt Gaetz, and Tulsi Gabbard on a list of embattled Cabinet nominees. His team has yet to comment on the allegation.

Within hours of announcing Meta’s policy changes to return the company to its “roots of free expression,” the company has already begun censoring criticism from its own employees, 404 Media reported.

Meta’s “Internal Community Relations team” deleted several posts made by employees criticizing the recent decision to add Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO Dana White—a close ally of Donald Trump—to Meta’s board of directors, the outlet revealed Tuesday.

While the response from employees was mixed overall, several were outspoken about their disappointment. While one joked that UFC fighter Connor McGregor would be next to join the company, another employee remarked that it was “kind of disheartening to see people in the comments celebrating a man who is on video assaulting his wife and another who was recently convicted of rape,” referring to White and McGregor, respectively.

“I can kind of excuse individuals for being unaware, but Meta surely did their due diligence on White and concluded that what he did is fine. I feel like I’m on another planet,” wrote a third employee.

Several posts criticizing White were supposedly deleted because they had violated the “Community Engagement Expectations,” or CEE, rules that govern the internal communications between employees.

“I’m posting a comment here with a reminder about the CEE, as multiple comments have been flagged by the community for review,” wrote one member of the Internal Community Relations team in a thread, which explained why posts had been deleted. “It’s important that we maintain a respectful work environment where people can do their best work. We need to keep in mind that the CEE applies to how we communicate with and about members of our community—including members of our Board. Insulting, criticizing, or antagonizing our colleagues or Board members is not aligned with the CEE.”

Tracy Clayton, a Meta spokesperson, told 404 Media that posts that were critical but did not violate the CEE had not been taken down. Clayton emphasized that the internal and external moderation policies were completely separate.

The censorship feels particularly hypocritical considering that Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Tuesday that the company’s platforms would no longer use third-party fact-checking services, in favor of community notes. They would also dial back content filters, allow more discussion around topics such as gender and immigration, and raise the threshold for removing a post—all changes that directly benefit right-wing speech.

Meta’s policy chief said that the announcement was inspired by Trump’s return to the White House, and even Trump speculated that the decision had “probably” been in response to threats he made against Zuckerberg.

White’s installation at the top of a major social media company signals a big shift in corporations toward appeasing both Trump specifically and the larger manosphere in general.

Donald Trump’s acolytes in the House of Representatives are so jazzed about his forthcoming administration that they’re practically handing him the reins to resume manifest destiny.

In a since-deleted tweet posted on Wednesday, the official account for the House GOP challenged the patriotism of the president-elect’s foreign policy detractors, claiming that denying Trump’s “big dreams” for the country was “un-American.”

“Our country was built by warriors and explorers,” the official House GOP wrote in a since-deleted tweet. “We tamed the West, won two World Wars, and were the first to plant our flag on the moon.

“President Trump has the biggest dreams for America and it’s un-American to be afraid of big dreams,” they wrote.

The message was circulated alongside the New York Post’s front page, which featured a caricature of Trump standing in front of a map of the Western hemisphere with America’s geographical neighbors rebranded as part of America.

Trump has escalated a laughless joke in recent weeks that Canada and Greenland should be absorbed into the United States, making them states under the American banner. But the bully behavior ends where foreign countries begin to take the threat seriously: Trump has also advanced the idea that the U.S. should take the Panama Canal from Panama. That alone has prompted the leader of the Panama Canal Authority to warn that Trump’s rhetoric “will lead to chaos.”

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal Wednesday, Ricaurte Vásquez Morales sternly rebutted Trump’s claim that China was getting preferential rates to use the vital trade route.

“Rules are rules and there are no exceptions,” Vásquez Morales said. “We cannot discriminate for the Chinese, or the Americans, or anyone else. This will violate the neutrality treaty, international law and it will lead to chaos.”

Donald Trump’s crazy idea to annex Greenland to the United States seems to have an unlikely supporter: Democratic Senator John Fetterman.

Fetterman appeared on Fox News on Tuesday with Republican Senator Katie Britt, and when the topic of Greenland came up, Fetterman didn’t dismiss the idea.

“There’s a lot of talk about Greenland, for example, and … there’s a lot of freak-outs, and, of course, I would never support taking it by force,” Fetterman said. He added that discussing the territory’s annexation would be a “responsible conversation,” including “just buying it out.”

“If anyone thinks that’s bonkers, it’s like, well, remember the Louisiana Purchase?” Fetterman said.

Trump will probably be very happy with Fetterman’s words. The president-elect keeps pushing half-baked plans of annexing Canada, Greenland, and the Panama Canal zone, and his son even visited Greenland on Tuesday. But the Danish-controlled territory and Denmark’s leaders say that the island isn’t for sale, and French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot warned Wednesday that the European Union would not tolerate an attack on its “sovereign borders.”

Fetterman’s reaction to Trump’s idea seems to be part of a pattern by the Pennsylvania senator, who has boasted about shifting away from progressive politics for more than a year. Pennsylvania’s only Democratic senator even bragged that brain damage resulting from his near-fatal stroke has allowed him to “say the things that I have to really believe in and not be afraid of if there’s any kind of blowback.”

If Trump actively pursues annexing Greenland, or any other territory, after he is sworn in, there certainly will be blowback, both in the U.S. and abroad. What will Fetterman and other Democrats who have chosen to appease Trump say then?

Republicans are using the devastating California wildfires as an excuse to score cheap political points against Democrats and Governor Gavin Newsom, rather than focusing on providing sorely needed assistance.

Multiple wildfires are burning through Los Angeles County, killing two people and forcing tens of thousands to evacuate. President-elect Trump called the fires “virtually apocalyptic.”

“Governor Gavin Newscum refused to sign the water restoration declaration.… He wanted to protect an essentially worthless fish called a smelt,” Trump said on Truth Social. “I will demand that this incompetent governor allow beautiful, clean, fresh water to FLOW INTO CALIFORNIA! He is the blame for this.”

Elon Musk retweeted a conservative account attacking Newsom, while presidential envoy Richard Grenell tweeted, “The far left policies of Democrats in California are literally burning us to the ground. Stop voting for people who won’t use common sense water management and forest policies. I’m pissed off. You should be, too.”

Governor Newsom struck back on Tuesday. “My message to the incoming administration—and I’m not here to play any politics—is please don’t play any politics,” he said. “There’s a time and place for that.… The precious moments we have to evacuate, we don’t have any time for that mishegoss.”

There’s a lot of finger pointing coming from a party that has ignored climate change for decades while continuing to invest in the very fossil fuel industry that is helping warm our climate and heavily influencing this irregular weather pattern in the process.

Senator Dick Durbin, the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, requested Tuesday that the Department of Justice scale back the president’s power to use the U.S. military domestically.

In a letter on behalf of the committee Democrats, Durbin urged Attorney General Merrick Garland to “withdraw certain legal opinions by The Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) relating to the allocation of war powers and foreign relations powers between Congress and the president.

“I request that the Department of Justice publicly release opinions and manuals pertaining to the domestic use of the U.S. military,” Durbin wrote. “For decades, OLC has issued guidance on the circumstances in which the President may deploy the military within the United States, as well as what servicemembers may do when so deployed.

“The American people have a right to know how the Executive Branch interprets the President’s constitutional and statutory authority to use the military domestically,” Durbin continued. “The need for transparency regarding these legal interpretations is particularly urgent today given the risk of domestic military deployment to suppress protests or carry out mass deportations.”

In a post on X, the committee Democrats alleged that there were five “flawed opinions” that had “run afoul of Congress’s critical check on presidential war powers” that needed to be rescinded.

It seems that Durbin and Senate Democrats are hoping to rein in Trump’s military powers ahead of his return to the White House later this month. Trump has previously claimed he will use the military to conduct sweeping raids as part of his mass deportation scheme. He has also threatened to turn the U.S. military against his political enemies and even foreign allies.

During a rambling press conference Tuesday, Donald Trump threatened that “all hell will break out” if hostages held by Hamas in Gaza aren’t released by his inauguration on January 20.

It’s a threat Trump has repeatedly made since early December, and he did not elaborate on what it means Tuesday, instead saying, “It will not be good for Hamas, and it will not be good, frankly, for anyone.” Last month, he promised “hell to pay” if the hostages weren’t released by his inauguration, seemingly threatening U.S. military action but making no mention of a Gaza ceasefire as a prerequisite.

If the “hell” Trump is promising is military action, it would inflame the Middle East further and likely set off a regional conflict that already includes Iran, Yemen, Syria, and Lebanon. In a phone call last month, Trump spoke to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, an accused war criminal, and reiterated the threat.

Throughout his presidential campaign, Trump has remarked that Israel should “finish the job” in Gaza, basically endorsing the country’s yearlong brutal military assault that has resulted in a humanitarian crisis and war crimes charges. What would further “hell” visited upon Gaza look like to a territory that has been reduced to rubble and tens of thousands of deaths?

The civilian death toll in Gaza has only continued to climb since then, with thousands of bodies trapped under rubble and indirect deaths caused by the destruction of infrastructure, including hospitals and food distribution systems. In October, 99 health workers who worked in Gaza sent President Biden a letter saying that they had “witnessed crimes beyond comprehension,” urging a U.S. arms embargo on Israel.

President Biden will leave office refusing to consider any action against Israel, instead planning an $8 billion arms sale to the country on his way out. Trump’s latest words confirm that his Israel-Palestine policy won’t be any better and in fact might exacerbate the ongoing genocide even further.

Los Angeles authorities have evacuated some 30,000 people as of Wednesday, as flames tear through the Pacific Palisades, threatening more than 10,000 homes. And even though the fires are literally in its own backyard, Los Angeles hasn’t exactly prioritized its ability to respond to the fiery devastation.

The city’s 2024–2025 budget slashed about $17.6 million from the fire department, while increasing the budget for the city’s police force by $126 million, according to figures from the Los Angeles City Administrative Office.

Exactly why the fire department was deprioritized amid escalating wildfire seasons is unclear, but the unfortunate budget decision comes at a time when state firefighting reserves are also facing the heat. Depending on the year, low-wage incarcerated inmates compose somewhere between 30 and 40 percent of the firefighters with the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection—but their ranks within the reserve have been drained by the Covid-19 pandemic, according to the Los Angeles Times.

“We’re here today to lay out a path forward for Los Angeles,” Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass said of the proposed budget in April. “This budget continues our momentum toward change by prioritizing core city services, but using this as an opportunity as a reset, so that our budgets moving forward are more honest, transparent and more focused.”

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders tossed some blame for the ongoing crisis at climate change deniers in Congress, slamming the country’s continued inaction on the “existential” threat.

“The scale of damage and loss is unimaginable. Climate change is real, not ‘a hoax.’ Donald Trump must treat this like the existential crisis it is,” Sanders wrote on X Wednesday.

But the incoming government is less than likely to prioritize green initiatives. Trump’s transition team has already prepared executive orders for the president-elect to once again withdraw the U.S. from the Paris Agreement, an international climate treaty limiting greenhouse gas emissions. What’s more, Trump reportedly resisted sending wildfire aid to California in 2018 because the state voted Democratic.

Republicans have also proposed nixing the nation’s clean energy programs, including dismantling the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 in order to save some $700 billion from the federal deficit so that they can barely dampen the blow of extending Trump’s 2017 tax plan to the benefit of corporations. Nonpartisan budget groups predict that such a move could balloon the deficit anywhere between $5 trillion and $15 trillion.

Killing President Joe Biden’s key legislative victory, however, would kill tax credits for electric vehicles and spur fossil fuel production on federally protected land.