Dr. Annelle Sheline knows firsthand what it means to act on principle. In March 2024, under President Biden, she resigned from the State Department in protest of U.S. support for the Gaza genocide, announcing that she could no longer “serve an administration that enables such atrocities.” Now a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute and a senior nonresident fellow at the Arab Center in Washington, D.C., Sheline continues to speak out against U.S. militarism.
When Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman was elected in 2023, the Democratic Party thought it might have a new kind of leader. The gruff, hoodie-wearing Fetterman was able to win over the working class in the country’s most important swing state and defeat his Republican challenger, Mehmet Oz, despite suffering a stroke in the middle of the campaign. As it turns out, the Democratic establishment was right—just not in the way they thought.Since Fetterman’s election, his net approval with Pennsylvania Democrats has dropped 108 points, from +68 in 2023 to -40 in 2026, as CNN’s Harry Enten reported Friday.“He’s down there with the Titanic,” Enten said. “There’s no historical analog to his unpopularity.”Fetterman’s unpopularity is easily explained: Since taking office, he has drifted hard to the right, for reasons largely unknown. He is often the lone Democrat who votes alongside the GOP, for instance when he voted to continue funding the Department of Homeland Security in February or to advance GOP Senator Markwayne Mullin’s nomination for secretary of homeland security out of committee last week. He is also probably the most vocally pro-Israel Democrat in the Senate.It’s a stark change for a politician who formerly championed progressive causes. Enten noted that Fetterman’s popularity among his own party is worse than that of every single sitting senator who lost a primary this century. He will certainly be a target for replacement when the Pennsylvania Senate primaries occur in 2028.
Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy paid for a lavish trip to Puerto Rico using campaign funds, a new report from MeidasTouch has revealed.Ramaswamy’s campaign paid $11,898.25 to the Dorado Beach Ritz-Carlton Reserve, one of the island’s most lavish resorts, in November. Campaign finance records cite the purpose of the payment as “travel.”Ramaswamy, who is worth $2.2 billion per Forbes, traveled to the island in preparation to give a keynote speech at ITServe Synergy, an annual conference held in early December by the tech collective ITServe Alliance.MAGA social media users then deduced that ITServe Alliance was committing the grave sin of advocating for H1-B visas, which allow noncitizens to enter the country to work in specialized fields. Ramaswamy immediately attracted fierce, sometimes racist criticism from his fellow conservatives for speaking at the event.Ramaswamy caved to the pressure, withdrawing from the event before it began. Bizarrely, a campaign spokesperson then told Signal Ohio that Ramaswamy had planned to be in Puerto Rico regardless of the conference. So maybe Ramaswamy was planning to go on vacation anyway, and then spontaneously decided to speak at the conference? But wouldn’t that make the use of campaign funds for the trip even more heinous? It speaks to the selfishness of billionaire Ramaswamy—who also wants to repeal birthright citizenship from undocumented immigrants even though he himself received birthright citizenship—that he would spend thousands in campaign money on a fancy resort so he can play pickleball with Logan and Jake Paul. No, really.