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RandySF's JournalSlotkin's home targeted by bomb threat one day after Trump's inflammatory post
U.S. Sen. Elissa Slotkin's home was the target of a bomb threat Friday evening, her office said.
Slotkin wasn't home at the time, a spokesperson for the Democrat from Holly said in a statement, and Michigan State Police searched the property and confirmed that no one was in danger.
Slotkin’s office confirmed late Friday that the bomb threat was made to her family farmhouse in Holly, not her home in Washington, D.C.
"Senator Slotkin is deeply grateful for the swift and professional response by Oakland County and Michigan State Police," the spokesperson said in a statement. "U.S. Capitol Police will continue to investigate and hopefully hold accountable those responsible."
https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/politics/2025/11/21/slotkins-home-targeted-by-bomb-threat-one-day-after-trumps-inflammatory-post/87408694007/
College athletes still banned from betting on professional sports after NCAA Division I schools vote to rescind proposed
College athletes will still be prohibited from betting on any sport in which the NCAA sponsors a championship after an eleventh-hour push to rescind a proposed rule change reached the necessary two-thirds threshold.
Facing a 5 p.m. ET Friday deadline and needing 241 schools to submit paperwork preventing college athletes from betting on professional sports, the NCAA reached the necessary two-thirds majority, according to a statement.
“After a procedural 30-day period, two-thirds of Division I member schools have voted to rescind a previously approved rule change that would have allowed student-athletes and athletics department staff members to legally participate in sports betting on professional sports only,” the NCAA said. “Because sports betting rules are common legislation, the ban on all forms of betting — for sports in which the NCAA sponsors a championship — will remain in place for all three NCAA divisions.”
A source told CNN Sports the NCAA hit 241 teams voting to rescind the rule at 4:30 p.m. ET, 30 minutes before the deadline.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/11/21/sport/ncaa-sports-gambling-rule-decision
A pregnant Texas mother kept getting sicker. She died after she couldn't get an abortion.
Tierra Walker had reached her limit. In the weeks since she’d learned she was pregnant, the 37-year-old dental assistant had been wracked by unexplained seizures and mostly confined to a hospital cot. With soaring blood pressure and diabetes, she knew she was at high risk of developing preeclampsia, a pregnancy complication that could end her life.
Her mind was made up on the morning of Oct. 14, 2024: For the sake of her 14-year-old son, JJ, she needed to ask her doctor for an abortion to protect her health.
“Wouldn’t you think it would be better for me to not have the baby?” she asked a physician at Methodist Hospital Northeast near San Antonio, according to her aunt. Just a few years earlier, Walker had developed a dangerous case of preeclampsia that had led to the stillbirth of her twins.
But the doctor, her family said, told her what many other medical providers would say in the weeks that followed: There was no emergency; nothing was wrong with her pregnancy, only her health.
https://www.texastribune.org/2025/11/20/texas-abortion-death-preeclampsia/
Greg Abbott vows to spend mightily to turn Harris County red
Two weeks before Election Day, Gov. Greg Abbott stopped by a barbecue joint in Harris County to rally voters, sharing his two goals for next year’s midterm election. The first is to win his own race, returning him to the governor’s mansion for a fourth term.
The second is to flip Harris County.
“I’ve got $90 million in my bank account, and I’m going to spend most of it in Harris County, Texas to make sure, precinct by precinct, we turn out voters who voted in the presidential election, turn out voters who never voted before,” Abbott said. “We got to win Harris County and make Harris County dark red.”
The county, where one in six Texans live, is critical to both parties’ statewide ambitions. It has been blue for about a decade after spending another decade as a massive purple county that voted for George Bush in 2004, Barack Obama in 2008 and again, just barely, four years later — but also kept popular Republicans in local offices.
https://www.texastribune.org/2025/11/21/greg-abbott-harris-county-houston-battleground/
Atlantic County judge settles dozens of disputed ballots
In a series of hearings on Thursday and Friday, a Superior Court judge settled disputes on more than 100 ballots that had caused a deadlock within the Atlantic County Board of Elections.
The disputes in question were layered and convoluted.
For some 40 provisional ballots, the board, split between two Republicans and two Democrats, had deadlocked on whether to accept the signatures, which would usually lead to a Superior Court judge breaking the tie. However, staffers for the board had apparently violated protocol when they sent “cure letters” to voters, allowing them to address the issues; cure letters, however, are only supposed to be sent after ballots have been rejected, and the deadlocked board had not technically rejected the ballots.
Superior Court Judge M. Susan Sheppard, who offered further instructions and examples on signature analysis, sent the ballots back to the board on Thursday evening, instructing them to try again. The board reached unanimous decisions on most of the ballots on their second try, only deadlocking on a final pair of mail-in ballots belonging to an elderly couple in Galloway. The couple had mistakenly placed their ballot into the return envelope designated for their partner, and one of them had failed to write the address on the return envelope.
https://newjerseyglobe.com/judiciary/atlantic-county-judge-settles-dozens-of-disputed-ballots/
Sherrill will support all N.J. congressional Dems for re-election
Gov.-elect Mikie Sherrill, who departed the U.S. House last night, issued endorsements today to eight of her former congressional colleagues running for re-election next year.
Sherrill’s endorsement went to every incumbent Democrat who will be on the 2026 ballot: Senator Cory Booker and Reps. LaMonica McIver (D-Newark), Nellie Pou (D-North Haledon), Rob Menendez (D-Jersey City), Frank Pallone (D-Long Branch), Josh Gottheimer (D-Tenafly), Herb Conaway (D-Delran), and Donald Norcross (D-Camden).
“Following a blowout victory in the gubernatorial election, it’s clear Democrats have momentum going into 2026, and I’m proud to endorse all of the Democratic members of our New Jersey delegation on the ballot next year,” Sherrill said in a statement.
“I’ve worked with each of them on different priorities to deliver for New Jersey, from lowering healthcare costs and investing in our infrastructure to supporting our defense installations,” she continued. “As Trump and Washington Republicans level unprecedented attacks on working New Jerseyans, it’s crucial that we work together to protect liberty and prosperity in New Jersey.”
https://newjerseyglobe.com/congress/sherrill-will-support-all-n-j-congressional-dems-for-re-election/
Missouri Organizers Challenge GOP's 'Inaccurate and Biased' Gerrymander Referendum Language
Pro-democracy organizers filed a new lawsuit Thursday accusing Secretary of State Denny Hoskins (R) of using wildly deceptive ballot language to tilt a referendum in favor of the GOP’s mid-decade gerrymander.
The legal challenge, led by People Not Politicians Missouri and referendum proponent Richard von Glahn, argues that the state’s top election official crafted a misleading political pitch — not a fair description of the measure — in a transparent attempt to boost support for the 7–1 Republican map before voters can weigh in next year.
Republican officials have been deploying every lever to keep their congressional redraw in place and block Missourians from exercising their constitutional right to overturn the law through a referendum.
The ballot question Hoskins certified to appear before voters, called 2026-R004, describes the 2022 map as a “gerrymandered” plan that “protects incumbent politicians” while claiming the new 2025 map “keeps more cities and counties intact,” is “more compact” and “better reflects statewide voting patterns.”
https://www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/missouri-organizers-challenge-gops-inaccurate-and-biased-gerrymander-referendum-language/
Veteran Democratic pollster Mark Mellman dies
Veteran Democratic pollster and strategist Mark Mellman died this week, according to a statement released by the Democratic Majority for Israel (DMFI).
The group, which Mellman founded and led, said Friday it was “devastated” to learn of Mellman’s death, referring to him as “a brilliant political strategist whose intellect and acumen shaped DMFI from the beginning.”
Mellman was also a regular opinion contributor to The Hill.
Tributes poured in from across the political communities in the U.S. and Israel on Friday.
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/5617561-democratic-strategist-mark-mellman/
In culture war backlash, Democrats sweep school boards
From Texas to Pennsylvania to Ohio, Democrat-backed candidates ran successful campaigns in some of the nation’s largest school systems and in political battlegrounds. They emphasized test scores and bus safety over debates about which bathrooms transgender students use and banning books from school libraries. The result was a set of election results at the local level that accentuated the punishment meted out against Republicans by swing voters earlier this month. Those results were accentuated by Democrats’ strong showing across the nation, as Americans issued a stinging repudiation of the party in power.
In Pennsylvania, Democrats flipped at least two dozen school board seats, per an ongoing tally from progressive recruitment group Pipeline Fund. The under-the-radar trend was enabled by voters’ increasing weariness with the culture wars that helped the MAGA movement engineer school board takeovers and generate hyper-local interest in politics as the Covid-19 pandemic raged.
In addition to Texas, Republicans lost seats in the suburbs of Columbus, Ohio, and the national battleground of Pennsylvania — the result of well-funded campaigns orchestrated by local leaders. School board races are typically nonpartisan, but candidates receive endorsements and financial backing from partisan groups.
“Folks just want their school boards to be boring again,” said Lesley Guilmart, one of the newly elected members in Cypress-Fairbanks. “They want normalcy. Once the board was taken over by a super partisan extremist majority, folks across the political spectrum were dismayed.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/11/21/culture-war-democrats-school-boards-00663699
MI-SEN: Mike Rogers once denounced election denial of the 2020 election. Now, he's surrounded by it.
In the wake of the 2020 presidential election, former U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers, now a Republican candidate for U.S. Senate, called for President Donald Trump to accept a peaceful transition of power and condemned election denialism by Trump and his allies.
“The president and some in his party are refusing to accept the outcome of the election, instead sowing doubt and conspiracy,” Rogers wrote in a Washington Post op-ed one day prior to the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol Building. “This was an election that multiple independent observers, the courts and both parties have found to be free and fair. To imply otherwise is self-serving and stokes further discord in our country.”
“President Donald Trump’s attempts to influence the electoral processes in Michigan, and elsewhere, is cause for both concern and alarm, and should be roundly rejected by both Democrats and Republicans alike,” he wrote in a Detroit News op-ed about a month earlier urging Michigan officials to certify the results. “It is well past time that the president accepts that he lost and begin the peaceful and orderly transition of power to President-elect Joe Biden.”
Now, Rogers, endorsed by Trump in his second Senate election in two cycles, is espousing his own election denial about his 2024 Senate bid — saying in October, without offering evidence, that a van of ballots was delivered to a polling place in Detroit. He embraced similar rhetoric during the 2024 campaign as well.
https://michiganadvance.com/2025/11/21/mike-rogers-once-denounced-election-denial-of-the-2020-election-now-hes-surrounded-by-it/
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