B.C. Election Campaign Heats Up as Leaders Prepare for Debate
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British Columbia's election campaign is entering its second week with each party's team of candidates in place and the leaders looking ahead to the upcoming televised debate.
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Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) has taken to Instagram to listen to split-ticket voters from last week’s election, posting a question box asking “People who supported [President-elect] Trump & me OR voted Trump/Dem, tell us why” on her story. She received a variety of responses from her 8.1 million followers and beyond, citing reasons ranging from Trump and Ocasio-Cortez’s “care for the working class” to the war in Gaza. “I’m LISTENING,” she wrote. “Sometimes you gotta dig in and see it to understand and adapt! Even if it makes you want to barf.”“I support you and did this. Felt like I didn’t have a choice after Biden’s administration,” one reply said. “You are focused on the real issues people care about. Similar to Trump populism in some ways,” another said.“This is why I say that we should be signing up to knock on doors and be on the phones,” Ocasio-Cortez said in another story in response to a comment that said responses were “blowing [their] mind. “If you’re only tuning in to [mass media], you will think that most people fall along this spectrum, and a lot of people don’t.” She added that door knocking and phone banking are not a “junior thing” that politicians should grow out of. She also posted stories also asking about where leftists and Trump-supporting voters get their news from and shared some of those responses as well. Ocasio-Cortez glided to victory in her reelection race in New York last week, and will continue to represent the state’s 14th Congressional District.
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Melania Trump declined an offer to head to the White House Wednesday and meet with Jill Biden, citing the Biden administration’s raid on Mar-a-Lago as part of the federal government’s investigation into classified documents.“She ain’t going,” a source familiar with Melania’s decision told The Post. “Jill Biden’s husband authorized the FBI snooping through her underwear drawer. The Bidens are disgusting,” the source said.“Jill Biden isn’t someone Melania needs to meet,” the source added.Melania’s husband, President-elect Donald Trump, will sit with President Biden in the Oval Office Wednesday for a traditional post-election meeting.Typically, the first lady hosts her successor for tea in the White House.Melania visited the White House following her husband’s 2016 election win and received a tour from then- first lady Michelle Obama.After Trump lost his re-election bid in 2020, he failed to invite the Bidens to the White House before the Democrat officially assumed office, breaking the decades-old tradition, according to reports at the time.The Post has reached out to the Trump campaign and the White House about Melania’s decision to skip the meeting.The FBI raided Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in August 2022 in its probe of the 45th president’s withholding of classified White House documents.Melania, 54, has previously voiced her displeasure over the raid at their Palm Beach, Florida, mansion.“Yeah, it made me angry,” she said on “Fox & Friends” in a September interview, calling it an “invasion of privacy.” FBI agents scoured Melania’s wardrobe, combed through her 78-year-old husband’s office and even reportedly searched one of her son Barron’s rooms.
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Elon Musk, the richest man in the world and incoming head of President-elect Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency showered Trump’s nominee to serve as the next U.S. attorney general early on Tuesday morning, specifically citing his desire for vengeance as a positive.“Matt Gaetz has 3 critical assets that are needed for the AG role: a big brain, a spine of steel and an axe to grind. He is the Judge Dredd America needs to clean up a corrupt system and put powerful bad actors in prison,” wrote Musk on X at around 2:00 a.m. eastern time on Tuesday. “Gaetz will be our Hammer of Justice.In a follow-up, Musk summarily dismissed the various allegations of misconduct against him — which include statutory rape and paying women for sex.“As for these accusations against him, I consider them worth less than nothing. Under our laws, a man is considered innocent until proven guilty,” he submitted. “If AG Garland (an unprincipled douchebag) could have secured a conviction against Gaetz, he would have, but he knew he could not. Case closed.”Gaetz faces an uphill battle to confirmation due to a variety of reasons, including his limited legal experience, many enemies on Capitol Hill, and the allegations of misconduct against him.After Trump announced his intention to nominate Gaetz last week, he quickly resigned from the House of Representatives, only just preempting a vote in the House Ethics Committee on whether to release a report into allegations that he “engaged in sexual misconduct and illicit drug use, accepted improper gifts, dispensed special privileges and favors to individuals with whom he had a personal relationship, and sought to obstruct government investigations of his conduct.” Upon his resignation, the Ethics Committee lost jurisdiction over the investigation into Gaetz.
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Carlson and Donald Trump Jr., the president-elect’s oldest son, outlined what they said were the dangers of bringing neoconservatives into the administration—men and women, they claimed, who seek to control him, not serve him. They also argued that Pompeo had proven himself to be disloyal, the people said, pointing to Pompeo’s decision to distance himself from false claims that the 2020 election was stolen, and comments he made that the Jan. 6, 2021 riot at the Capitol by Trump supporters was “unacceptable.”Within days of the election, Pompeo was out of the running. The president-elect posted on Truth Social that Pompeo and Nikki Haley, Trump’s former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, wouldn’t be landing jobs in his administration.Officials such as Haley, who challenged Trump during the Republican primary, and former national security adviser Robert O’Brien were passed over for jobs as Trump and his team looked to stock his cabinet with “fresh blood,” as one transition official put it, who have roots in the MAGA movement. The perception among some within Trump’s inner circle is that appointees such as Pompeo would follow a more conventional GOP approach to national security policy by supporting U.S. involvement in overseas conflicts, such as Ukraine, or icing out traditional adversaries, such as Russia. Pete Hegseth, a military veteran and former Fox News host whom Trump chose to lead the Pentagon, has criticized U.S. involvement in the conflict in Ukraine, and has touted a controversial view that women should be barred from combat. But Hegseth’s path to confirmation has been fraught with challenges because of a number of personal controversies.
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A mother whose teen son died by suicide after a juvenile detention in the “Kids for Cash” scandal broke down in tears on air as she condemned President Joe Biden’s decision to commute the sentence of former judge Michael Conahan.Conahan was convicted in 2011 for his role in a scheme that traded juvenile detention sentences for millions in kickbacks. His actions, alongside fellow Democrat judge Mark Ciavarella, left a devastating legacy, including lives upended and families shattered.Conahan was sentenced to 17.5 years in prison after pleading guilty to racketeering conspiracy. In 2020, he was placed under home confinement due to the COVID-19 pandemic with six years remaining on his sentence. On Thursday, he was among the nearly 1,500 individuals whose sentences were commuted in what the White House described as a historic act of clemency. Biden’s move came after he pardoned his own son, Hunter Biden.Sandy Fonzo’s son, Ed, died by suicide at 23 after being sentenced by Ciavarella when he was 17 to eight months detention for a minor drug paraphernalia charge.Appearing on Democracy Now to speak with host Amy Goodman, Fonzo was emotional shared the outrage that Biden’s move had caused her."This is very emotional. Very heavy. Just hearing and having to relive all of this. This has just reopened wounds that have never healed and this is very very difficult, very heavy. I shouldn’t be having to relive this, especially at Christmas time. I mean this is unacceptable. I need to talk about it. I need to defend my son because he is not here to defend himself and I am his mother."
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The Senate on Wednesday gave final approval to a defense policy bill directing $895 billion toward the Pentagon and other military activities, moving over the objections of some Democrats who opposed a provision added late in the negotiations that would deny coverage for transgender health procedures for minors.The 85-to-14 vote, coming a week after a divided House passed the same measure, cleared the bill for President Biden’s signature.Most Republicans and many Democrats supported the measure, which provides a 14.5 percent pay raise to junior enlisted service members and a 4.5 percent pay raise for all other service members. It also expands access to meal assistance, housing and child care programs that benefit those in uniform.But several Democrats withheld their backing in protest of a provision preventing TRICARE, the military’s health care plan for service members, from covering “medical interventions for the treatment of gender dysphoria that could result in sterilization” for children under 18.The language, which would affect the gender-transitioning children of service members, was recently added to the measure at the insistence of Speaker Mike Johnson, Republican of Louisiana, who refused to bring a defense bill to the House floor without it, according to aides familiar with the negotiations.Twenty-one Democrats, led by Senator Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, proposed an amendment to strip the provision from the bill, but the matter was never brought to a vote. Several of them took to the floor on Tuesday to lodge their objections.“It’s flat-out wrong to put this provision in this bill and take away a service member’s freedom to make that decision for their families,” Ms. Baldwin said, estimating that the provision could negatively affect as many as 6,000 to 7,000 military families.
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