“Climate change” is abstract. A heat wave isn’t.

Brother’s visit was a pleasant one. One thing we did was to visit the Edsel and Eleanor Ford House overlooking Lake St. Clair, northeast of Detroit. Edsel was the son of Henry Ford. Eleanor’s ancestry included the founder of JL Hudson department stores (alas, none left). So, yeah, the place would be called a mansion – the ballroom had more square feet than my house (though my house is small). In one sense the décor of the house is thrifty – a lot of the materials, paneling and such, was rescued from English manor houses that were being demolished. Sister (who wasn’t with us at the House) added that those houses were being demolished because so many men died in WWI the families no longer had the money or staff to keep running them. The tour guide said things like, “This paneling is from the 1500s, that chandelier is from the 1600s, and that medallion in the window is from the 1200s.” My Sunday viewing was the Tony Awards. I enjoyed the show, glad to see some of the dances from the musicals, and wish more of the nominated plays were included (very little was). I now have a few more shows to check out, though not Schmigadoon. Andrew Mangan began a post for Daily Kos by showing a graph of the average temperatures between January and April, dating back to before 1900. Yes, 2026 is the hottest winter on record, though barely beating out a year more than a decade ago (maybe 2012?). Then Mangan reported on a YouGov poll about protecting the environment.

The survey included what’s called a “split sample test,” wherein a random half of respondents are shown one wording of a question and the other half are shown another. In that test, half of respondents—likely voters, in this case—were asked how much they thought “climate change” affected the rising cost of living. Sixty-one percent said it impacted it “greatly” or somewhat,” while 39% said it had little or no impact. But the other half of the sample didn’t see the words “climate change.” Instead, they were asked how much “issues like natural disasters, heat waves, and prolonged droughts” affected rising cost of living. And opinions were quite different: 80% said those things had an impact, while just 20% said they didn’t. ... “Climate change” is an abstract issue for many people. But a heat wave isn’t. People fear tornados, hurricanes, and floods. Palpable experiences sway voters better than concepts. Democrats often make those types of messaging mistakes.

This is the same sort of messaging mistakes as when Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez did their “Fighting Oligarchy” tour. Yes, that word accurately described the topic of their message, but used a word many people don’t recognize. They would have done better with “Fighting the Rich” or “Fighting Corruption.” Kos community member ranger995 posted a brief mention of a situation that Brother also found on a variety of sources and had him quite concerned.

The military conducted urban warfare exercises in our town last night. Helicopters, explosions, gunfire in suburban Pasadena. It lasted until 2:00 am. What the f---? Intimidation? Preparation?

Local Council person Rick Cole posted videos on Instagram and ranger995 included a link.

[Cole] indicated that the town was only warned in the morning and told that they could not inform citizens of what was taking place until an hour or so before the exercises started. Of course the comments are loaded with fascists and manosphere fantasy types. I bet they are the same people who went nuts over Jade Helm, which took place on military bases, not urban or suburban centers. It is really odd for the military to conduct any actions in the middle of suburban or urban areas. Especially without much notice to our authorities or citizens.

Last Friday Emily Singer of Kos reported that Senate Republicans passed a $70 billion immigration enforcement funding bill. Yeah, that’s money for the ICE goons. What wasn’t in the bill was language to limit that $1.776 billion slush fund to pay the traitors who attacked the Capitol. Though Senate Republicans have slammed the fund, they refused to adopt any language officially killing it. They seem to believe acting AG Todd Blanche that the fund is dropped and the nasty guy’s claim he will follow a court order temporarily blocking the fund. Also last Friday Lisa Needham of Kos reported:

Looks like the Trump administration has finally nabbed a high-profile criminal conviction. Sure, it’s a plea deal. And sure, it’s a Republican. And sure, it’s one of President Donald Trump’s own first-term Cabinet members. But hey, gotta take those vindictive prosecution wins where you can. Former national security adviser John Bolton is reportedly going to plead guilty to one count of retention of classified national security information. The extremely mustachioed hardliner was indicted in October 2025 on 18 counts of, well, basically the same thing that Trump was charged with when he stashed classified documents in one of his ugly Mar-a-Lago bathrooms.

Needham also wrote about billionaires. The net worth of the top 15 increased by 33% between July 1, 2024 and June 30, 2025. Collectively, their worth rose from $2.4 trillion to $3.2 trillion. Elon Musk (according to Forbes) is worth $839 billion. The next few are:

Larry Page — $257B (Google) Sergey Brin — $237B (Google) Jeff Bezos — $224B (Amazon) Mark Zuckerberg — $222B (Meta) Larry Ellison — $190B (Oracle) ... That’s a genuinely distressing list on its face, showing all that money locked up by just a few people. But it’s worse when you realize that out of the top 10, arguably all but Page, Arnault, Buffett, and Ortega are fully in thrall to Trump.

Another way to say all that is they are doing nothing out of the kindness of their hearts.

If you compare billionaires writ large to the rest of us, they come up pretty short. In the last decade, American billionaires with a net worth of a collective $5.7 trillion over that time have donated $185 billion, or roughly 3.25% of their vast, vast wealth. By contrast, people earning under $50,000 per year give about 14%, while people who earn between $50,000 and $100,000 per year donate about 7.8%.

Needham named two people who have given away sizable chunks of their fortune. One is George Soros, the guy declared to be evil by conservatives. The other is MacKenzie Scott, formerly married to Bezos.

And, even more than perennial GOP bogeyman Soros, Scott donates to things that bedevil conservatives: groups that promote forbidden DEI, reproductive health initiatives, racial justice organizations, you name it. It would be great if no one had this much money—but if they do, they should be giving most of it away. And if they decide to position themselves as a one-woman wrecking ball to the Trump agenda, even better.

Also last Thursday Oliver Willis Kos reported the Kennedy Center is beginning to comply with the court order to remove the nasty guy’s name from the side of the building. Employees much change email signatures and letterheads to list only the original name. Then there are forms, signs, brochures, and websites that must change by this coming Friday. All this because the judge ruled Congress named the facility and only Congress can change it. The nasty guy said he’s turning the whole thing over to Congress. The Good News Roundup of Kos wrote that Hunter Biden is very good at trolling MAGA types on X. Here’s three examples of what’s included in the roundup. First:

So let me get this straight. Jake Tapper is focused on attacking my Mom. Jared and Ivanka are building a private island paradise on Albanian protected land. Don Jr married the daughter of Epstein’s banker, and a startup his fund backs just got a record $620M Pentagon loan. Eric is taking an Israeli drone company public for $1.5B in the middle of a war with Iran that nobody wanted. And I know: “But what about your paintings, Hunter?” Please.

Second:

Someone called me the MAGA whisperer and I’ll gladly take the title. Left, right, D or R we all want the same things. We’re being divided on purpose by the Epstein Elite Oligarch class because as long as we’re at each other’s throats they get fat and rich off of our misery. The second we figure out we agree on more than we disagree, they’re done. Love your neighbor. Be yourself. Radical honestly. ... Everything else is just noise.

Three:

Things most Americans agree on: Groceries cost too much. Tariffs suck and make no sense. Congress and Presidents shouldn’t trade stocks. The debt is a mess. The border should be secure, but legal immigration is good. Endless wars are stupid, especially ones that nobody wants are have never been explained. Americans are exhausted. AI is like my new best friend that also might be trying to take my job, my ability to think for myself, and my humanity in the process ... [not quite half of the list] Things we’re told to fight about: Me. Laptop. Vaccines. Transgenders in sports. Pronouns. That’s the joke.

Hunter’s comments included a reference to Jared and Ivanka in Albania. They bought an island there. Next to their property is a protected land and many of the locals have an understandable fear whatever the Pandemic Prince and Princess decide to build will harm the ecosystem of the protected land. Though the Albanian government agreed to the deal, worth $4 billion, the citizens of Albania definitely do not agree. There have been mass protests. Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos, included a 22 second video showing the size of the crowd at the second day of the protests.

Who gets to embody national identity

Kos of Daily Kos is finally able to tell the story of his website being subpoenaed by the nasty guy’s Department of Justice. The DOJ wanted information about a particular user who was critical of the nasty guy (sheesh, the whole site is!) though there was no threatening language. The order also said there was a gag order around the subpoena. Of course, Kos fought back, refusing to comply, which confused the US attorneys. But lawyers cost money, so he told the story on the site being very careful not to violate the gag order. Members of the community gave enough to lessen the financial worries. The US attorneys threatened search warrants. But three weeks later they dropped the case. Now that the gag order has expired Kos could explain the details. He wrote:

They were counting on fear doing the work for them. They assumed most organizations would comply quietly rather than endure the cost, pressure, and uncertainty of a legal fight. Send a subpoena. Threaten search warrants and public raids. Wrap everything in national security language. And for Trump, that worked out well in those days, when way too many targets simply folded. That’s how authoritarian systems function—not through constant dramatic displays of force, but by making examples out of a few targets so everyone else learns to preemptively comply. But with us, they picked the wrong target. And we were able to stand firm because this community had our backs. Your donations turned what they assumed would be a routine compliance exercise into a time-consuming, difficult legal fight backed by serious counsel and a community unwilling to be intimidated. At some point, they clearly decided to focus on easier targets elsewhere. And that’s the story. The DOJ came after Daily Kos, and we told them to pound sand until they decided to move on.

Speaking of the DOJ... An Associated Press article posted on Kos reported on the nasty guy’s $1.776 billion slush fund meant to pay the Capitol attackers. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has said the creation of the fund will not move forward. There was rejection by the courts and fierce political backlash, even from Republicans, so they canceled the fund. There were two notable things about the announcement. One, the Blanche wouldn’t put the cancellation of the fund in writing (as I heard elsewhere). Two, a secondary proclamation made along with the fund’s creation that the nasty guy, his family, and his companies would not be investigated by the IRS, that part still stands. Emily Singer of Kos reported that a new acting director of National Intelligence has been named. The job opened up when Tulsi Gabbard resigned. She was pretty bad (such as being way too favorable to Russia). The new guy is worse. He’s Bill Pulte. We in Detroit know him as an heir of Pulte Home construction fortune. He has been and will continue to be the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency and chairman of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the federal mortgage assistance agencies. Heading National Intelligence will be an additional gig. This is why Pulte is worse: First, he has zero, repeat zero, experience in Intelligence work. Second, he has used his position at FHFA to harass people, including accusing New York Attorney General Letitia James (in the news because she had successfully prosecuted the nasty guy) and Federal Reserve Board Governor Lisa Cook of mortgage fraud. And third, his appointment as “acting” director means he doesn’t face Senate confirmation. His accusations of mortgage fraud mean he has shown he is willing to do the nasty guy’s dirty work. And as the head of National Intelligence he can bend their work from the necessary spying of actual enemies of America and towards spying on the nasty guy’s perceived enemies, as in fellow Americans. Singer wrote: “Pulte’s appointment is so bad that even Republicans are criticizing it.” Singer wished us a happy Pride Month! Then she reported there are a few states that won’t be participating.

But homophobic Republicans are refusing to mark the occasion. Instead, they are replacing Pride with Christian Nationalist-laced celebrations of “fidelity” and the “nuclear family”—which they unsurprisingly declare to be families led by married male-female pairs. At least three states—not surprisingly all of which are in the South—have refused to recognize Pride and instead made their own sad holiday months.

Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders of Arkansas declare June as “Fidelity Month.” In Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee signed a bill that says June is “Nuclear Family Month.” And in Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey declared June as “Strong Families Month.” So continues attempts at our erasure. Back in 2011 I wrote about Zach Wahls. At the time he was a 19 year old college student. The Iowa Senate was hearing testimony about their constitutional amendment that would ban same-sex marriage. Wahls, raised by a lesbian couple, spoke passionately and articulately against the ban and became an internet sensation. The Senate voted for the ban anyway. At the time the House was controlled by Democrats, so it died. It would have been overturned in 2015. I wrote about Wahls again just after the 2018 election. Then he was 26 and was elected to the Iowa Senate, yes, the place where he made is passionate debut. Wahls is in the political news again. He’s now 34. He was a Democratic candidate for the US Senate. Alas, he didn’t win the primary. Since Iowa is turning against the nasty guy this year Democrats have a better chance to take that Senate seat. But it won’t be Wahls, at least not this time. Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos, included a tweet from Mayor Zohran Mamdani of New York.

Today, I signed an Executive Order temporarily repealing bedtimes in the City of New York so that kids of all ages can watch our team in the NBA Finals. As Mayor, you’re forced to make many difficult decisions. This was not one of them. Go Knicks.

The Obama Presidential Center Museum in Chicago’s South Side will open Juneteenth (June 19th). Kos was invited by a friend to get a preview. He was able to see the whole building (which I’ll let you read about). I will quote some of his impressions.

It was impossible to move through the exhibits without the elephant in the room: the knowledge that everything Barack Obama did, personified, and represented was so deeply offensive to wide swaths of America that the backlash delivered the White House to Donald Trump—twice. And that made the experience disorienting, because the museum itself is a stunning architectural and artistic achievement.

Many museums name wings or galleries after wealthy benefactors. This museum required benefactors to name galleries after someone else. “Wealthy liberal philanthropist Fred Eychaner named his wing after Harold Washington, Chicago’s first Black mayor.” There is also a Worker Appreciation Wall to honor the thousands of people who physically built it. Kos noticed there are many inspiring messages about the nature of democracy placed around the museum.

And somehow, rather than inspiring me, those messages made me angrier. Why would telling people they could improve their communities inspire such hatred? Was it really that offensive to suggest that public service matters? That democracy is participatory? Because this wasn’t simply ideological disagreement. Republicans could have nominated any number of conventional conservatives promising tax cuts and deregulation. Instead, the backlash to Obama became something darker and more existential—a rejection not merely of his policies, but of the broader idea of who fully belongs in America and who gets to embody national identity.

Obama could have placed his museum in downtown Chicago, the polished and safe place. He placed it in the South Side. Kos got the message. This isn’t about reverence for Obama.

Beyond the nostalgia and the optimism was something quieter, but more durable: the belief that ordinary people can help shape the American story.

Brother arrives tomorrow and will stay for the weekend. I’ll post again after he leaves.

A hard-charging, uncompromisingly conservative faction

My Sunday movie was the documentary Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story. Reeve is best known for being the title character in the Superman movies of the 1970s and ‘80s. When he said he was going to that audition his acting friends thought he was selling out. The first one rocketed him to stardom. The fourth was forgettable. But he did a lot more than that. In one film (maybe two) he played a gay character. The one I know about was Deathtrap, which is a thriller (or dark comedy) and I remember seeing after it was released in 1982 and made its way to TV. He also played gay in a stage production (I didn’t get the name) which annoyed some people that Superman would stoop to that. The other thing he was well known for was a horse riding accident in 1995 that left him paralyzed from the neck down. He lived another nine years totally dependent on others. He still managed to do a lot. Growing up he had a messy home life that did not show a healthy marriage and ended in divorce. He had a father who was hard to please. From both of those he found relief in theater. When filming Superman he met Gae Exton, who became mother to his children Matthew and Alexandra. They never married and after a while the relationship fell apart. Months later he met Dana who became the mother of son Will (who now looks a lot like his father) and became his wife. Will Reeve is in the film industry as an actor and producer. Dana made sure to include Matthew and Alexandra as part of the family. Reeve saw how a marriage should work. He was roommates with Robin Williams in acting school (Julliard?) and they were lifelong friends. After the accident Williams was able to get Reeve to laugh and he knew life would be okay. Reeve used his stardom to gain access as an advocate. After the accident he became an advocate for those paralyzed, creating the Christopher Reeve Foundation to raise money for paralysis research. He wanted to find a cure. Dana wanted to improve the care of those paralyzed. Before the accident Reeve was quite active. After that he realized what was important wasn’t the activity but the relationship. That deepened with his kids. I very much enjoyed the film and recommend it. Christopher Reeve was a hero both on and off the screen. An article by Kavitha Surana for ProPublica and posted on Daily Kos discussed Emily Waldorf and her miscarriage and its complications, made worse because she lives in Arkansas. She was caught in limbo, her body started the miscarriage but over several days couldn’t complete it. In the meantime her uterus was open to infection. But doctors said they could do nothing until the fetal heartbeat ended, she went into labor, or she showed signs of dangerous infection. When doctors told her they could not treat her she started keeping notes of her experience. Texas modified its rules around abortion and miscarriage to say Waldorf’s situation is one where evacuating the uterus was medically necessary. Arkansas and many of the others that ban abortion haven’t done the same. Other women with this complication have died. Waldorf lived to tell the story, though resolving her case required a four hour ambulance trip to Kansas, were abortion is legal. There her uterus could be emptied. The whole thing left her with $147,000 in medical costs, which includes $5,000 for the ambulance ride. She worked at the hospital that refused to treat her. She did go back after he medical leave was over and quit a month later. No doctor has yet been sued under the abortion ban. But the hospital lawyers are way too wary of over eager prosecutors. To me they aren’t sufficiently concerned about malpractice. Eleanor Klibanoff, in an article for The Texas Tribune posted on Kos, explains how the nasty guy has transformed the Republican Party in Texas (and elsewhere). There was a lot of news recently about the nasty guy endorsing Ken Paxton for US Senate over incumbent John Cornyn, which Paxton won big. The story is enough Republican voters are loyal to the nasty guy to vote for whoever he says to vote for and get the results he wants. But Klibanoff wrote the dynamics began before the nasty guy appeared a decade ago. Before MAGA there was the Tea Party (remember them?), which formed the ground from which MAGA arose.

Once led by chamber of commerce conservatives who preached small government and big business, the Texas Republican Party has been conquered over the last 15 years by a hard-charging, uncompromisingly conservative faction, operating on the vanguard of the nation’s culture wars and driven by a sense of perpetual insurgency.

Since then there has been a power struggle in the party where “the hardliners, who paint themselves as the perennial underdogs, just keep winning.” The nasty guy cultivated candidates who were “aggressive, ideological, proudly politically incorrect and, above all, loyal.” And voters keep voting for them. Oliver Willis of Kos, as part of his series Explaining the Right delves into why Republicans continue to support the nasty guy.

For decades, the conservative media ecosystem primed these voters for a political figure like Trump. Right-wing talk radio, news sites, and especially Fox News have beamed propaganda into millions of American homes. Trump, an avid watcher of Fox News, learned what many other Republicans struggled with: that conservatives are extraordinarily responsive to messages that echo what they hear as part of their daily media diet. While other Republicans tend to focus on conservative policy issues, Trump has focused on the red meat of the right. This means snappy, punchy, insulting, bigoted statements and the like.

Voters want to continue with candidates ready with the insult rather than supporting the party establishment. So what the party does when the nasty guy can no longer be on the ballot is an open question. At the moment Republican candidates are sticking as tightly as they can to the nasty guy.

Right now, the most prudent path for Republicans probably seems to be the pro-Trump lane, but the writing is already on the wall. Voters have been rejecting Trumpism in droves. And the odds are it will hurt them in the long run.

That is American voters who are rejecting the nasty guy and all he’s been doing. Republican voters still vote for their man. Stephen Fowler of NPR went to a Republican rally in Iowa and reported on what he heard there. Most of the speakers Fowler featured did the usual thing that all good stuff comes from Republicans and all bad stuff comes from Democrats. What caught my attention is the anger coming off one speaker. The anger level was so high I wanted to cringe and cower. Alas, since the transcript doesn’t portray the anger I can’t tell which one it was (and I’m not listening to it again). In today’s pundit roundup Greg Dworkin of Kos quoted Lawrence Winnerman of Blue Amp discussing what is actually happening in the American economy. He says it is worse than a recession.

We are running an economy this week on the country we were in February. The shelves still look mostly normal. The shipping bays still seem mostly full. The cargo still appears mostly on time where it is supposed to appear. None of this is the world we are actually living in. We are spending down the last inventory of the country we used to have and we are spending it down on a clock. Inventory is mercy. Inventory is the cushion the world leaves you between the moment a thing breaks and the moment you feel it break. The blast wave is real, but the blast wave is also delayed by the length of a supply chain, by the contents of a warehouse, by the days it takes a tanker to cross an ocean. We have this week the strange privilege of standing inside the cushion. We will not have that privilege for long.

Lisa Needham of Kos wrote about the recent legal issues of the nasty guy and his minions. A pair of them caught my attention. The first of the pair is acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and his handling of the Kilmar Abrego Garcia case. The Campaign for Accountability decided there’s enough unethical stuff in Blanche’s actions they’ve filed a complaint with the bar of New York. The second of the pair is Blanche’s predecessor and former boss Pam Bondi. She’s facing a bar complaint in Florida. And she no longer has the protection of being a member of the president’s cabinet. This here blog has set another record in viewership with 313,818 views during May! That is 76% higher than the previous record of 177,760 set in April. Just a few days ago the daily viewership hit 29,010, also setting a record. As I mentioned last month the viewership is now quite broad. Blogger shows me the top 19 countries (“Other” is the 20th) and over the last seven days every one of those countries has had at least 1,860 views. That one is Tunisia. At the top of the list is Brazil at 12,878 views, Bangladesh at 6,000 views, Iraq at 5,704 views, and Vietnam at 5,234 views before we get to the US at 4,762 views. Other is at 39.8K views, so there are at least 21 more countries that have viewed this blog over the last week.