United States | News & Politics

Billionaire tech executive Elon Musk cast the upcoming presidential election in dire terms during a Saturday appearance with Donald Trump, calling the Republican presidential nominee the only candidate “to preserve democracy in America.”

The CEO of SpaceX and Tesla who also purchased X, Musk joined Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, where the former president survived an assassination attempt in July. He warned “this will be the last election” if Trump doesn’t win and, clad in a black-on-black cap bearing the “Make America Great Again” slogan of Trump’s campaign, appeared to acknowledge the foreboding nature of his remarks.

“As you can see I am not just MAGA — I am Dark MAGA,” he said.

The appearance marked the first time Musk joined one of Trump’s trademark rallies and represented the growing alliance between the two men in the final stretch of a competitive presidential election. Musk created a super PAC supporting the Republican nominee that has been spending heavily on get-out-the-vote efforts in the final months of the campaign. Trump has said he would tap Musk to lead a government efficiency commission if he regains the White House.

Trump joined Musk in August for a rare public conversation on X, an overwhelmingly friendly chat that spanned more than two hours. In it, the former president largely focused on the July assassination attempt, illegal immigration and his plans to cut government regulations.

Before a massive crowd on Saturday, Musk sought to portray Trump as a champion of free speech, arguing that Democrats want “to take away your freedom of speech, they want to take away your right to bear arms, they want to take away your fight to vote, effectively.” Musk went on to criticize a California effort to ban voter ID requirements.

Saturday’s rally took place at the same property where a gunman’s bullets grazed Trump’s right ear and killed his supporter, Corey Comperatore. The shooting left multiple others injured.

Several members of Comperatore’s family, as well as other attendees and first responders from the July rally, returned to the site on Saturday. Also appearing with the former president were his running mate Republican Ohio Sen. JD Vance, son Eric Trump, daughter-in-law and RNC co-chair Lara Trump, along with Pennsylvania lawmakers and sheriffs.

Here's also a site with other volunteering opportunities around you in person as well as online

Been seeing a lot of anxiety about the election on lemmy and online in general. Volunteering is a good way to turn the anxiety into something productive.

If nothing else it can at least help reduce the anxiety a bit

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/23946911

The amount of energy being consumed by AI is well-documented, which is why many companies in the industry are looking toward nuclear power as a solution.

As long as I live I will never fully comprehend it. There should have been a line of honest and wise men a mile long standing behind Cheney on Thursday. But their cowardice, their venality, their shameful abdication of responsibility only served to make this moment in Ripon more powerful.

Republicans in Arizona over the past several years have enacted proof-of-citizenship requirements for registered voters with the purported goal of eliminating the threat of undocumented immigrants from voting.

However, Just Security reports that many of these same Republicans have been changing their tune recently after they discovered that the law would purge a large number of registered Republicans.

Overall, registered Republicans represented 37 percent of the voters affected by the glitch, while registered Democrats made up 27 percent and unaffiliated voters represented 29 percent.

The White House on Tuesday doubled down on its stance that it won’t force striking dockworkers back on the job, and insisted that impacts to America’s vital goods will be minimal for now.

The key phrase is for now.

Just after midnight on Tuesday, thousands of dockworkers from New England to Texas represented by the International Longshoremen’s Association, who load and unload cargo at ports on the East and Gulf coasts, took to the picket lines. So far the Biden administration is sticking to its script: try to bring the union and the shipping industry to the table, monitor the situation and hope the dispute doesn’t drag out.

All of this means President Joe Biden is not planning to use powers from the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act to end the strike. Business groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce are already calling for Biden to invoke the act, but that would infuriate union members just weeks before the election.

On Tuesday the Republican chair of the House Transportation Committee also called on the administration to use the Taft-Hartley law and blamed the administration for not preventing the strike in the first place. The letter, signed by Chair Sam Graves (R-Mo.) and and Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation Subcommittee Chair Daniel Webster (R-Fla.) pointed to President George Bush’s decision to invoke the act against striking dock workers in 2002 as an example of effective action.

“Continued inaction only compounds our Nation’s economic harm, further burdening American families’ pocketbooks,” the Republicans wrote.

The White House said the president and vice president were briefed on assessments by federal agencies that “show impacts on consumers are expected to be limited at this time,” including fuel, food, medicine and infant formula.

The White House also outlined all the products that it says will not be affected by the strike, including bulk shipments of grain, crude oil, gasoline, natural gas, and other liquid fuel exports and imports.

But many other products — from fresh fruit to new cars and materials for manufacturing — will be affected, and that list could grow depending on how long the strike lasts.

For now, Biden is counting on his lieutenants to try to cajole both sides into a deal. He’s tasked Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, acting Labor Secretary Julie Su and economic adviser Lael Brainard to try to keep negotiations going.

The administration is also trying to assure Americans it has learned lessons about the supply chain from the pandemic, severe weather events and the collapse this year of a Baltimore bridge that idled part of that city’s port.

One Biden ally, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, suggested on Monday that the closeness to the election had its upsides because consumers shouldn’t feel major impacts from a strike during the few weeks before voters finish heading to the polls.

But the head of the dockworkers union has threatened to “cripple” the economy to get the shipping industry he’s negotiating with to meet his demands for higher wages. There were some last-minute hopes Monday for a deal before the strike began, with the shipping industry saying it had offered dockworkers “nearly” 50 percent wage increases over the next six years.

Appearing on Fox News Tuesday morning, Harold J. Daggett, international president of the dockworkers union, said it’s “time for Washington to put so much pressure on them to take care of us because we took care of them.”

“Now you start to realize who the longshoremen are, right? People never gave a shit about us until now when they finally realized that the chain is being broken now. Cars won’t come in, food won’t come in, clothing won’t come in. You know how many people depend on our jobs? Half the world,” he said.

Polling results released Wednesday, less than six weeks away from November's Election Day, show that a majority of Americans want to ditch the Electoral College and "would instead prefer to see the winner of the presidential election be the person who wins the most votes nationally."

Source.

Donald Trump on Sunday admitted that he refused to pay his workers overtime, leading to a massive pushback.