DML Morning Briefing Mon. Oct. 31

Today is October 31. Below are some of the stories grabbing headlines this morning. I hope you share this briefing as doing so will make you the smartest person in the room.

1 – Biden accuses red state of trespassing, demands containers plugging gaps in border wall be removed
Fox News reports: Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey was accused this week by the Biden Administration of trespassing as the Republican governor makes efforts to fill gaps along the U.S.-Mexico border with shipping containers.

Ducey announced last week that he would have crews install shipping containers along a section of the border to fill gaps not covered by a wall. The announcement came two weeks after federal officials ordered him to take down containers he had placed in the southwestern part of the state.

The Republican governor then sued and requested the courts allow Arizona to keep 100 shipping containers, double stacked with barbed wire on top, in place near Yuma.

The containers were put in place in August to fill gaps in the border, which Ducey said was pushing back against “the inaction of the Biden Administration in stopping migrants from entering the state from Mexico,” according to the Associated Press.

Ducey’s plan is to cover a 10-mile section of the border using more than 2,700 containers, each 60-feet long. But the Biden Administration continues to demand Ducey remove the barriers, with claims that the state is trespassing on federal lands.

MY TAKE: There you go, Biden WANTS OPEN BORDERS, plain and simple.

2 – Democrats ramp up spending in blue districts as GOP sees red wave forming
NBC News reports: From New York to California, Democrats find they have to spend big in the midterms homestretch to defend incumbents in blue House districts that President Joe Biden easily won two years ago.

The crush of last-minute spending in deep-blue states and Democratic strongholds, detailed through data from the ad-tracking firm AdImpact, underscores just how much the political winds have shifted in Republicans’ favor and how the GOP — buoyed by well-funded super PACs — has expanded the battlefield in the final sprint of the campaign.

In Southern California, Rep. Julia Brownley is making personal appeals to Democratic colleagues to send her campaign cash as her internal polls show a neck-and-neck race with her GOP challenger, two sources told NBC News.

Democrats have spent millions of dollars, raised from party entities and outside groups, to protect Rep. Jahana Hayes, the former Connecticut Teacher of the Year who cruised to decisive victories in 2018 and 2020.

And the House Democrats’ campaign arm last week deployed hundreds of thousands of dollars to save its chairman in a Biden district north of New York City.

MY TAKE: Conservatives, don’t mess this up! Make that red wave HUGE!

3 – Corrupt Socialist Lula Beats Bolsonaro in Brazil’s Closest Presidential Election in Decades
Breitbart reports: The top electoral authority in Brazil announced on Sunday evening that 77-year-old hardline socialist Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, once convicted and sentenced to over two decades in prison for alleged corruption, had won this year’s presidential election against incumbent conservative Jair Bolsonaro.

In his first words as president-elect for a third term, Lula vowed to “reconstruct the very soul of this nation” away from the small government, pro-freedom ideals of the Bolsonaro administration.

With 99 percent of votes counted, Lula received 50.9 percent of the vote, or about 60.3 million votes. Bolsonaro received 49.1 percent, or 58.2 million votes. The top election authority the Superior Electoral Tribunal (TSE), counted 20.58 percent (32.2 million votes) were “abstentions,” meaning the voter did not choose a candidate at all.

Lula’s high turnout in the northeast – the country’s poorest region and his traditional stronghold, made it possible to defeat Bolsonaro despite the conservative triumphing in the nation’s largest metropolises of Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Bolsonaro enjoyed his highest support in the Venezuelan border region of Roraima, now heavily populated with socialist refugees, and in the inland state of Rondonia.

From DML News App: Monday morning, Lula da Silva gloated, “They thought they had ended my political life. That they had destroyed me. But I’m here again. Firm, strong and passionate. There is nothing that will make me faint. Good morning and good week to all.”

MY TAKE: This is very disappointing. Will Brazil now be the next Venezuela?

4 – Supreme Court takes up race-conscious college admissions
The Associated Press reports: WASHINGTON (AP) — The future of affirmative action in higher education is on the table as the Supreme Court wades into the admissions programs at the nation’s oldest public and private universities.

The justices are hearing arguments Monday in challenges to policies at the University of North Carolina and Harvard that consider race among many factors in evaluating applications for admission.

The Supreme Court has twice upheld race-conscious college admissions programs in the past 19 years, including just six years ago.

But that was before three appointees of President Donald Trump joined, as well as Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the court’s first Black woman.

Lower courts upheld the programs at both UNC and Harvard, rejecting claims that the schools discriminated against white and Asian-American applicants.

The cases are brought by conservative activist Edward Blum, who also was behind an earlier affirmative action challenge against the University of Texas as well as the case that led the court in 2013 to end the use of a key provision of the landmark Voting Rights Act.

MY TAKE: Anything based on race is RACIST, and Democrats are the biggest racists of all.  ENOUGH OF THIS!  Can’t we just all be Americans?

5 – Families run to the exit at Shanghai Disneyland as thousands of people are LOCKED IN and barred from leaving over Covid scare
The Daily Mail reports: Shanghai Disneyland has barred thousands from leaving the Magic Kingdom after locking down the entire resort due to a Covid outbreak.

All visitors in the park at the time of the announcement have been ordered to stay inside until they can provide a negative test for the virus.

Footage shared on Weibo showed panicked guests rushing to the park’s gates to escape, only to find them locked. Around 60,000 visitors enter the park each day.

Authorities moved to shut it down after only 10 locally transmitted cases were reported across Shanghai yesterday, all of which it said were people without symptoms.

The resort said at 11.39am today it would immediately shut the main theme park and surrounding areas including its shopping street until further notice to comply with virus curbs.

MY TAKE: This is NUTS!!