DL Open Thread: Friday, November 21, 2025

In yet another Truth Social post, Trump again called the lawmakers’ behavior “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR AT THE HIGHEST LEVEL,” and said that, “Each one of these traitors to our Country should be ARRESTED AND PUT ON TRIAL. Their words cannot be allowed to stand – We won’t have a Country anymore!!! An example MUST BE SET.”

He also reposted an account that called for the lawmakers to be hanged.

The Democratic lawmakers did not explicitly say in the video what orders they view as illegal. They are likely referring to the extrajudicial killings Trump is carrying out in the Caribbean Sea, in which he has claimed without evidence that the boats he’s having the military blow up are trafficking drugs.

Hell-oooo?  25th Amendment anyone?  This should have been the lead story on every news outlet.  It wasn’t.

DOJ Says ‘Fuck You’ To Courts Once Again.  You simply must read this.  Like today’s opening article, it demonstrates how, in less than a year, the criminals running our country have turned the once-unthinkable into commonplace.

Democrats Oust RWNJ School Board Members.  Pretty much everywhere there were contests:

In Cypress, Texas, a Houston-area suburb that lures families with its high-quality education, Republicans used their two years of control on the school board to ban textbook chapters on climate change, diversity and vaccines.

This month, Democrats took over the majority, picking up three seats on the school board and ending the conservative reign.

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.

The go-home quote?:

“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.”

Delmarva: 1.  Ardentown and Ardencroft: Zero.  A righteous fight, but Delmarva’s threats to essentially bankrupt the towns won out:

Efforts by two tiny bucolic villages in northern Delaware to thwart Delmarva Power’s plan to replace high-voltage transmission lines have crumbled under a lawsuit filed by the state’s dominant electricity provider.

Ardentown and Ardencroft, whose roughly 500 residents live in a self-proclaimed “forest ecosystem” of mature woodlands and open spaces known as “greens,” (well, Cris, it is a forest ecosystem) object to the looming replacement of seven tall metal towers, one more than 100 feet high, that were built a century ago on what was then farmland.

The existing towers traverse about a half-mile of mostly hilly terrain through the two towns, with some located between the backyard of homes in a Delmarva right-of-way. Their replacement with galvanized steel structures designed to withstand hurricane-force winds is part of Delmarva’s 4.5-mile upgrade that’s aimed at improving reliability service for 13,000 customers while reducing the frequency and duration of outages.

But the village’s governing assemblies contend the project will tarnish the lush enclave by clear-cutting trees and disrupting lead-contaminated soil beneath the towers. They want the project rerouted about a quarter-mile away, near railroad tracks where Delmarva already has some towers. WHYY News detailed the controversy in January.

Ardentown trustee Lisa Wilson Riblett described the fight as a valiant but uphill battle for the “tree huggers” of the town, whose municipal budget is $22,500 a year, against the powerful subsidiary of Exelon Corp., a Fortune 500 conglomerate that had $23 billion in revenue and $2.46 billion in net income in 2024.

“The town did decide to rescind those ordinances because of just the financial burden of them,” Wilson Riblett said. “Unfortunately that doesn’t mean the problems are solved.”

Wilson Riblett said the utility still hasn’t provided detailed plans, including any tree replacement that’s needed.

She also pointed out that Delmarva must remediate the lead contamination under an agreement with state environmental officials and restrict the scope of their work to the width of the easement, which is as narrow as 8 feet in some stretches of the half-mile swatch through Ardentown and Ardencroft.

“Trying to go up against Delmarva when you’re a little tiny village is quite, quite difficult,” Wilson Riblett said. “But the people in the town are very proactive and they’re still working toward trying to make this the best situation that we can.”

I get it.  The improvements have to happen.  But so must tree replacement and lead contamination remediation. We have a deal?

What do you want to talk about?