Why is someone donating this much money?

Kos of Daily Kos posted a piece titled Why Democrats need their own Trump. He admitted that was a poor choice for a title. But his point is a good one: The nasty guy has been the most effective recent president. Alas, what he’s done is all to benefit himself and not the country.

The reason is simple: Trump doesn’t believe in constraints. He doesn’t care about norms, traditions, public opinion, elite opinion, or whether anyone thinks he should be doing what he’s doing. ... Trump has shown that all those traditions and conventions were nothing more than artificial constraints on the power of the presidency. All those Democrats before him who claimed they couldn’t do this or that? It’s all been shown to be bulls---. The office has extraordinary power, now with the Supreme Court’s stamp of approval. ... Trump has exposed something that many Americans—and certainly many Democrats—never fully appreciated: The modern presidency is far more powerful than anyone admitted. For decades, Democratic presidents treated many of those powers as off-limits, constrained by norms and a fear of backlash from the wealthy and powerful interests most invested in the status quo. Sometimes public opinion mattered too. But more often, caution was treated as wisdom because the people who benefited from inaction demanded it. Trump has demonstrated that most of those constraints were voluntary.

Too often Democrats used their time in power to make small adjustments while explaining why they can’t make bigger changes. I see that as a big reason why voters are so annoyed with Democrats. To succeed in 2028 Democrats much actually use power. Anything less and voters are caught between Republicans who break the government and Democrats who restore the status quo. There is the illusion that good things can’t happen quickly. That illusion benefits the wealthy – and we now have a trillionaire. Kos knows what kind of candidate he wants out of the dozens who will run for the Oval Office in 2028. He knows what kind he doesn’t want. Anyone who talks about the old Congressional camaraderie, who wants to make sure the other party has a voice, who accepts that the Supreme Court can’t be fixed – instant disqualification. I add: Yes, Democrats have been too constrained. But in many cases we need that constraint. We need a president who spends money according to how Congress allocates it, who brings Congress with him when he thinks war should be declared, who respects the right to vote and its outcome, who protects the little guy from the big guy instead of the reverse, who works for democracy instead of breaking it. That post prompted a second. In the comments of the first post many said the nasty guy and Republicans smash things. Democrats need to build. Kos agrees that Democrats need to build – housing, clean energy, infrastructure, health care that actually works, an economy for all people. But before building, Democrats need to smash a lot of things too, to make all the building possible. They have to stop protecting the machinery that created and protects today’s extreme inequality. Kos lists more than a dozen things Democrats should smash and says in his first draft of the post the list went on for pages. Here’s just a few things from his list.

+ The Senate filibuster + Citizens United and the campaign finance system it unleashed + Corporate monopolies + The revolving door between Wall Street and Washington + Social media algorithms designed to maximize outrage instead of informing people + Major media outlets owned and controlled by right-wing billionaires + Private prison companies

These things exist because they protect the people with money and power. Democrats need to stop treating them as if they were inscribed on stone tablets – that was the party’s big mistake between the two nasty guy terms. Democrats like to say change takes time. Zohran Mamdani became mayor of New York because he was able to say here is part of the solution we can implement right now. Obama accepted the conventional limits to the presidency. The nasty guy tested every limit. Don’t mistake the status quo for progress. Robert J Petersen of the Kos community posted Hunter Biden’s advice to Democrats prior to the New York primary earlier this week. Here are a few of his points:

+ Authenticity is measurable. Voters can smell a focus group from a mile away. + Conviction beats caution. The candidates who said hard things about rent, about who pays for what, about Gaza, they won. The triangulators lost. + Cost of living is everything. Everything else is wallpaper. + If you want to lead a party you have to be willing to fight inside it. Mamdani didn’t ask permission. He took the field.

In a third article Kos wrote that conservatives are sicker and die younger than liberals. We remember their antics during the pandemic when they refused masks and other things that could keep them healthy. But this study includes data from the mid-to-late 2010s. One reason for the disparity might be that less healthy people became more conservative. See how the right responded when Michelle Obama suggested children eat vegetables. Another reason might be more disturbing: “Conservative politics itself may now be a health risk.” People on the right are more skeptical of medicines, not just vaccines. They’re more distrustful of the “institutions and professionals trying to keep them alive.” They’ve been told expertise is the enemy and are hostile to it.

And to add insult to injury, liberals are now subsidizing those ridiculously unhealthy conservatives through higher health insurance premiums, just like rural red America wouldn’t survive without blue states and cities subsidizing them.

Wednesday’s pundit roundup for Kos, assembled by Greg Dworkin, features several quotes about the New York primary I mentioned. The short answer is that the candidates that Zohran Mamdani endorsed won. Below that Dworkin included tweets by Jamie Dupree:

Senate rebukes Trump over the Iran war, voting 50-48 to approve a House-passed resolution directing the President to remove U.S. military forces from hostilities against Iran. 4 Republicans voted Yes, 1 Dem (Fetterman) voted No. Trump cannot veto this war powers resolution on Iran - because the form it was in (a concurrent resolution) does not go to a President for signature. In essence, it is a non-binding vote by Congress.

Axios commented on US House races in Maryland suburbs to Washington. The summary: There is such a thing as spending too much on a candidate. It leads to people asking, “Why is someone donating this much money?” Down in the comments. ClimateHawk reported on the number of formerly Confederate states won by Republicans (the party that freed the slaves) from 1880 (after Reconstruction ended) to 1948. In those 18 presidential elections Republicans took zero of those eleven states, except for 1920 when they took 1 and 1928 when they took five (Hoover). They took 3-5 states from 1952-1965, two of those were for Eisenhower. Then Lyndon Johnson, Democrat, signed the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and Voting Rights Act in 1965. He said he was doing the right thing but would lose the South for a generation. In the 15 presidential elections since then (much longer than a generation) Democrats have taken 0-3 states except when voting for Carter after Watergate, when all Southern states voted for him, and when Clinton took 4 of 11 states. In today’s roundup Chitown Kev quoted Robert Jimison and Michael Gold of The New York Times:

“Hours after President Trump angrily confronted Senate Republicans for joining Democrats to approve a war powers resolution rebuking his handling of the war in Iran, Republican leaders brought another, nearly identical measure to the floor. In a 50-to-47 vote, with one senator voting “present,” they defeated the measure in a largely symbolic move that did nothing to change the resolution the Senate had narrowly approved a day earlier. Instead, it served as an unmistakable gesture to mollify a furious president who had just berated them. ... Ultimately, the maneuver did not undo Tuesday’s vote, which was the first war powers measure approved by both chambers since the war began and remains adopted. Wednesday’s vote neither rescinded nor superseded it. Still, Republicans sought to characterize the procedural move as a chance to “re-vote,” even though the initial action cannot simply be erased through a subsequent vote on different legislation.”

Jay Michaelson of Forward wrote that Israel is now pretty much isolated in the world and is doing a good job of alienating its allies in the US.

And for what? For what bowl of porridge did Israel sell its birthright as a member of the civilized world? For nationalist pipe-dreams of Gaza wiped off the map? For keeping Bibi’s coalition alive so he doesn’t go to jail for bribery? For messianic dreams of Greater Israel? For the most hawkish possible interpretation of Israel’s legitimate security needs? For revenge?”

I saw images of this elsewhere (which I can’t find now). The Independent in Britain reported that in 2014 a French TV channel showed a fictional weather report for August 2050 to show the effects of climate warming. It showed France hitting 43C (109.4F). That prediction was surpassed 24 years early. France and much of Europe and Britain are in a heat wave and the temperature in Paris hit 42.6C (108.7F). And that happened in June. This is a big problem because only a quarter of homes in Paris are air conditioned.

A grotesque amount of money for any one human to hold

I finished the book The Magic Fish by Trung Le Nguyen. I didn’t realize until after I bought it that it’s a graphic novel. And it’s a beautiful one. The author and artist is the child of Vietnamese immigrants. The story is about Tiȇn, who is 13, and his mother Helen. He speaks mostly English and she speaks mostly Vietnamese and her name is the Anglicized version of her birth name. To help his mother learn English he reads fairy tales to her. The boy is gay, but doesn’t know the Vietnamese words to explain it to her. The first fairy tale featured in the story is Cinderella as told by German sources (which explains the images of Neuschwanstein Castle (the original on which Disney castles are modeled). Images here. The story isn’t exact, but does feature a beautiful woman attending a dance, meeting the prince, and leaving before he can know who she is. The second is a Vietnamese version of Cinderella in which the Stepmother is a lot nastier. Instead of a fairy godmother the story features a talking fish. The third fairy tale in Anderson’s Little Mermaid. Again the ending is changed. In all three the artwork is beautiful. The girls in the center of the stories are shown in wonderful gowns. I highly enjoyed and recommend it. At the end of the book the author says he sees the Little Mermaid story as an immigrant story. A person of one place tries to live in another place and doesn’t seem to fit. My Sunday viewing wasn’t a movie and wasn’t on Sunday. On Saturday evening I went to the Fisher Theater in Detroit to see lesbian comic Fortune Feimster. Her opening act was a gay guy with the last name Tower. I didn’t catch the first name. Both were quite funny, though definitely not PG, and I needed the laugh. Since both are queer, and their queerness is a part of their act, the audience was also quite queer. I very much enjoyed the evening. I’ve mentioned this before and Emily Singer of Daily Kos reported on the full story. Elon Musk, because of the initial public offering for his company SpaceX, is now a trillionaire, the world’s first.

That’s a grotesque amount of money for any one human to hold—made worse by the fact that it’s Musk, who has proven that he won’t use his fortune for good.

Some of the reasons Musk makes it worse: He has been spending big on Republicans. Through DOGE he has made government worse – less able to do the things Congress budgeted for and harming children and seniors. He destroyed USAID (US Agency for International Development), worsening health and hunger around the world. And he didn’t save the government any money.

Musk is a menace to society, and the fact that he’s now the world’s first trillionaire is a disgusting failure of public policy. “Elon Musk just became the world’s first trillionaire,” Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts wrote on X Friday. “The typical American household would have to work more than 11 MILLION years to make Elon Musk’s level of wealth. We need a wealth tax.”

Vyan of the Kos community discussed recent reports documenting the damage from Musk’s destroying USAID. Vyan suggests “Google ‘Deaths due to DOGE Cuts.’” The results, which Vyan quoted, looks like output from AI, though it does include links to specific articles. The current death toll is between 300,000 and 750,000 and is projected to “lead to more than 14 million additional preventable deaths by 2030, including over 4.5 million children under the age of five. That implies Musk, according to Vyan, is a mass murderer. Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) proposed that a one-time 5% tax on Musk’s wealth would bring in enough money to fund “universal child care for every family.” That brought on a feud of words between Khanna and Musk with Musk hurling insults and Khanna referencing research. Vyan described Musk as “a perfect example of predatory capitalism.” Then he quoted a tweet from DogeDesigner:

USAID was a criminal organization that funded bioweapons, censorship & global coups with your tax dollars. It was never about helping the poor. It was a viper’s nest of radical-left corruption, waste, and anti-America operations.

The tweet then listed some places where USAID money supposedly went. I have no trust that any of those statements are true and dispute USAID was never about helping the poor – if it prevented millions of deaths it was very much about helping the poor. Musk threatened to sue Khanna for lying. Vyan tweeted, “Go ahead and sue; discovery will be an absolute bitch.” Also ABC News has verified Khanna’s claim. Tim Henderson, in an article for Stateline posted on Kos, discussed the current state of American inequality.

The richest 1% of Americans held nearly a third of the country’s total wealth at the end of 2025, the largest percentage the Federal Reserve Board has recorded since it started monitoring the numbers in 1989. In 1990, the share was 22.5%. The latest percentage, 31.9%, is likely the largest since the end of World War II, possibly heralding a return to the extreme wealth inequality of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. And it is likely to balloon further as a result of President Donald Trump’s tax cuts and other pro-business policies. Today’s top 1% consists of about 1.4 million households with at least $12 million in net worth, holding a total of $55.9 trillion in wealth. The bottom 50% consists of 67.7 million households with less than $264,000 in net worth.

Because of this inequality and the problems it brings a dozen states have passed or proposed new taxes on the wealthy. Californian has a one-time tax on billionaires on the November ballot. This year at least 12 billionaires have left the state and new wealth has created 23 more. Nationally,

The combined effects of the tariffs and the tax and spending law will help households with the top 10% of incomes most and hurt 70% of households between now and 2034, according to a June 1 report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a left-leaning think tank that drew on information from the Budget Lab at Yale University.

The divide also affects views on inflation. The lower classes are hurt by it and the rich are unaffected. Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos, included a tweet by millesini that includes a half-minute video:

Albanians have begun to push construction crates downhill, in protest of the Kushner and Trump families’ plans to take over and island. Well done.

Kos community member xaxnar quoted from Timothy Snyder’s Substack about his discussion of “Utopias of Violence.” The opening:

The war in Iran began with a dream of violence. The question now is whether the nightmare that followed returns to the United States. The use of force does not magically lead to the outcome you want. You can think that firing some missiles and dropping some bombs will end Iran’s nuclear program, overturn its government, and lead to a victory that makes you feel grand about yourself; and then you can find that you no longer have any leverage over the nuclear program, that you have strengthened the power of the regime, and that you are paying hundreds of billions of dollars of reparations as the world draws conclusions from your capitulation.

Big proponents of the idea that might makes right and that the US military can’t lose are the nasty guy, the vice nasty, and the war nasty. Will they turn their violence on Americans? They tried it in Minnesota and it didn’t produce the results they wanted.

Trump, Hegseth, and Vance have not thus far shown themselves to be people who recognize basic social realities; they do not question their own utopias of violence, but only the motives of anyone who notes their folly. Just as they were overcome by strong feelings that violence would change Iran the way that they wanted, they will likely have strong feelings that violence in America will change America the way they want. This is very unlikely to be true; the utopianism, the faith in feelings, puts the republic in danger. But Trump and Hegseth (and Vance) are unlikely to see matters that way.

In the pundit roundup for Kos for last Wednesday Greg Dworkin quoted the International Crisis Group:

The war’s ambiguous end carries a clear lesson: wars of choice, launched based on inflated threats and wishful thinking, are far more likely to deepen than to solve the problems they purport to address. The specific lesson regarding Iran is also difficult to escape. After years of deploying every available coercive tool, from suffocating sanctions to military force, diplomacy remains the only approach that has delivered positive results. That reality argues for taking it more seriously this time round, not less.

Dworkin included a tweet from Politics and Poll Tracker with results from a CNN poll. As of May 27% of those polled said they were a Democrat, 26% said they were a Republican. They are quite evenly matched, likely within the margin of error. And 47% said they were independent. That’s almost half and the highest in a decade. The accompanying chart shows Independents showing a steady rise from 35% and Democrats showing a steady drop also from 35% starting about 2021. Republicans started their decline about 2022. Voters are disgusted that both parties are beholden to the rich and aren’t doing anything about why they are getting screwed. In last Sunday’s pundit roundup, down in the comments is a variation of a meme posted by exlrrp. I’ve mentioned several other variations. The original shows a woman walking down the street towards us. A man walking the other way turns to look at her. A second woman, presumably the man’s wife or date looks at him with annoyance. Each of the three people is named or described in some way. In this new variation the woman walking towards us is replaced by the supreme leader of Iran. The man doing the looking is the nasty guy. The one annoyed at his gaze is Netanyahu. Last week Thursday Singer reported on the state of the Reflecting Pool between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial in the center of Washington. Barely a week after the pool was “repaired,” painted by a nasty guy crony, and refilled, it became green with algae. Hydrogen peroxide was poured in to get rid of the algae, though not enough to actually make a difference there, but it was enough to cause the new paint to peel in chunks and float to the surface. That disaster is bothering the nasty guy, who blamed the mess on vandals on the nasty guy. That line of attack was taken up by conservative commentators, such as Grant Stinchfield. That prompted Singer to respond:

Hey Grant, if Democrats were so powerful enough to cause the biggest algae bloom in years in the reflecting pool just hours after it was refilled, they wouldn’t have lost the 2024 election. The real reason the pool is once again green is science, as algae thrives in hot water. But I guess we shouldn’t expect a halfwit like you to understand that.

The water is hotter because the dark “American Flag blue” absorbs more heat than the bare concrete. Democrats are using this mess to say the nasty guy is spending all his time on disastrous vanity projects and not on the cost of living. Instead of draining the Washington swamp the nasty guy has made it worse. In the comments of today’s roundup David Michigan posted a tweet by Edwin Heathcote that shows the green water of the Reflecting Pool with the words, “I saw this referred to as the Strait of Warm Ooze. Very good.”

This isn’t about the 2020 election, it's about 2026 and 2028

I finished the book The Mother by B. L. Blanchard. It is a companion book to The Peacemaker by the same author I read back in January. That book is set in a North America that had never been colonized and all the characters are natives. This book is set in a Europe, particularly an England, that had never colonized. Though the blurb on the back of the book starts with that I don’t see that it made much difference to the story. Yes, this is a different Europe and England, but how it became the way it is depicted doesn’t seem to depend on not colonizing. The England we see is modern – characters use phones and computers – but high in patriarchy and governed by Church Law, which appears to be Catholic Church Law, not Anglican. The main characters are from the aristocracy where a woman’s sole job is to produce a male heir. The story is mostly centered on Marie. However, I’ll start with her mother Charlotte. She was married to an Earl and had three daughters – Alice, Emma, and Marie. Since she hadn’t produced a son and her husband seemed to be auditioning successor wives she faked her death and disappeared. Alice was able to get a husband, though she was not beautiful and thus not a trophy, and produced three sons for him. Emma announced she was pregnant by the stable boy and thrown out and disowned. Marie married a Duke, a step up for her, but did not produce any children, son or daughter. When Marie hears her mother-in-law speak in a way that implied Marie had failed in her sole job and her son should should get rid of Marie, she fakes her death and flees, taking a few jewels and other valuables with her. Marie found Emma (who wasn’t hard to find) and learned Emma hadn’t been pregnant, she just wanted out of that life. Marie also wants to act on hints that her mother is still alive. So off they go. And they soon discover the Duke’s family is after them to drag Marie back to his manor house. The rest of the story is Emma and Marie rediscovering each other. That is mixed in with the chase. There are lots of dangers and narrow escapes as they travel across Belgium, Germany (still the Holy Roman Empire), and France. It’s a gripping story – I usually read in sessions a little longer than I usually do. And while I enjoyed the tale it was not the story I wanted it to be. I wanted a depiction of a Europe that had avoided the need to colonize. What I got was a Europe that was still very much in the mindset of the 15th century but with modern technology. Walter Einenkel of Daily Kos reported that while the Senate is refusing to pass the Save America Voting Act (which is full of voter suppression and other nonsense pushed by the nasty guy) Rep. Beth Van Duyne of Texas gave hints about what the next House budget will include.

Right now we are actively working on reconciliation 3.0. It’s gonna include healthcare, housing, election fraud, election integrity fraud, energy, defense, and tax portions.

I’m not sure what “tax portions” are and I’m afraid of what Republicans handling of “housing” would look like. I do know what “election fraud, election integrity fraud” means and I know “reconciliation” means crafting a budget using a process that doesn’t need Democratic votes. Lisa Needham of Kos reported that the nasty guy is pushing so hard on the Save Act that he’s willing to sacrifice national security. The story is convoluted so forgive me if I’m not accurate in my summary. Bill Pulte was appointed as acting Director of National Intelligence, about to take over for Tulsi Gabbard, who is leaving to care for an ailing husband. Since the Senate soundly rejected Pulte (they didn’t have to take a vote to get their point across) the nasty guy nominated Jay Clayton. Clayton’s hearings were to begin this week, but the nasty guy halted them. He wants the Senate to pass the Save Act first. The Senate doesn’t have enough Republican votes to pass it. The nasty guy also wants a vote on James McDonald, the guy who is taking the job Clayton is leaving. Also in the mix Democrats are refusing to vote for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, which expired. It, once passed, allows surveillance of foreigners in the US. But refusing to vote is different than voting no, meaning FISA is stuck too. With Clayton’s nomination stuck Pulte may be able to serve as DNI anyway. But the nasty guy’s snit means national security is vulnerable. Dion Nissenbaum and Alexander Shur, in an article for Votebeat posted on Kos, reported the FBI is investigating the 2020 election. Agents were sent to Milwaukee to talk people who said they saw suspicious things, though suspicions are not evidence for a judge. But...

“This isn’t about the 2020 election, this is about the 2026 and 2028 elections,” said David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan, nonprofit Center for Election Innovation and Research. “This is about intimidating election officials. This is about creating a stream of disinformation designed to delegitimize an election the president may believe he’s going to lose. This is designed by the president’s underlings to satisfy the unrealistic expectations of a president that still cannot comprehend that he lost an election that he definitely lost, and it’s incredibly destabilizing.” ... John Keller, a former acting head of the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section who resigned in 2025 after refusing the Trump administration’s demands to drop corruption charges against then-New York City Mayor Eric Adams, said the administration appeared to be trying to normalize federal investigations of state elections to pave the way for future intervention. “They are using enforcement directed at the 2020 election as a test run for what they can get away with on Election Day this year, or after, to try and delay certification or invalidate an election” if the results don’t go their way, he said.

Thom Hartmann of the Kos community wrote about previous Republican efforts to rig elections. In 1968 Richard Nixon learned of the deal between President Johnson and the leaders of both North and South Vietnam. Nixon reached out to the South Vietnamese leaders, promising riches, of they backed out of the deal. Nixon won and Humphrey didn’t. The war lasted another seven deadly years. Everett Dirkson, Republican leader in the Senate, called it “treason.” In 1979 during the Iranian hostage crisis, Reagan promised the new regime weapons if they held onto the hostages through the 1980 election. The hostages were released as Reagan took the oath of office. That new regime is the same one the nasty guy has been battling. In 2000 Florida governor Jeb Bush, in order to help his brother George W. was aggressive in “cleaning” voter rolls. There were estimates of between 10,000 and 70,000 black people were unable to vote. GW Bush won the state by 537 votes, and thus the presidency. In all three cases we didn’t learn of the manipulation until well after the affected election. We didn’t have a chance to protest the action. In contrast, the nasty is openly trying to rig this year’s election.

If it’s true that Trump became president in 2016, as Robert Mueller’s investigation found, because of major help from Putin, then the last legitimately elected Republican who didn’t commit or at least flirt with treason to become president was Dwight D. Eisenhower (1953-1961). By coincidence, he was also the last Republican president to reject the influence of America’s oligarchs and instead kept the top 90% income tax rate on oligarchs and actually worked to increase union membership and expand Social Security. So, get ready. We know in advance at least some of the dirty tricks they’re going to try to pull. Musk and Zuck spinning their social media outlets; Fox, CBS, and CNN under oligarch’s thumbs; ICE disruption; seized ballots; corrupted mail; and now realistic, highly deceptive AI-generated Republican deepfakes are already appearing in the Texas senatorial election.

In a second article Hartmann expanded on what the nasty guy is doing to steal the 2026 election.

The fraud claim was never an argument: it’s an excuse for voter suppression, its own form of election fraud. When you convince tens of millions of people that the only way your side can possibly lose is if the other side cheats, you’ve prepared them to swallow whatever you “have to do to protect the vote,” and to reject the result as illegitimate if you lose anyway. That’s the groundwork, and they’re laying it right now in the open. ... The Postal Service has proposed a rule that would let it refuse to deliver mail-in ballots in any state that won’t first hand over its complete list of mail voters to the federal government, a rule the NAACP says is built to disenfranchise voters and that twenty-three Democratic-led states are now suing to stop.

The nasty guy and others have talked about such things as have ICE surround the polls to intimidate voters. Todd Blanche, formerly the nasty guy’s personal lawyer and now acting Attorney General told a conservative crowd, “[E]verybody’s afraid that the next administration, if we don’t win, we’re going to all be investigated and indicted.”

He meant it as a rallying cry. What he actually delivered was a confession: you don’t spend your evenings bracing for an indictment unless some quiet part of you already knows what you’ve done. A reckoning is coming for the people breaking the law for this president, and they can feel it.

Blanche has reason to be worried. He knows the true nature of the nasty guy quite well. He isn’t being paranoid.

A Democratic majority doesn’t need to convict anyone to change everything. It can deny the appropriations that fund the deployments and the detention machine, it can compel sworn testimony and drag the concealed directives into daylight, and it can restore a Justice Department willing to enforce laws like Section 242, the Reconstruction-era statute that makes it a felony for any official to strip any citizen of their constitutional rights. ... These lawyers and judges aren’t afraid of impeachment as an abstraction: they’re afraid of the reckoning that oversight makes possible.

Make sure you’re registered to vote, then actually do it. Vote by mail if you can and do it early so the Post Office can’t interfere. Tell your senators and representative how you feel. Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos quotes the late columnist Molly Ivins on Thursdays. Yesterday was a quote from 1995 on why Rush Limbaugh was so popular. The reason is still true.

A large segment of Limbaugh’s audience consists of white males, eighteen to thirty-four years old, without a college education. Basically, a guy I know and grew up with named Bubba. Bubba listens to Limbaugh because Limbaugh gives him someone to blame for the fact that Bubba is getting screwed. He’s working harder, getting paid less in constant dollars, and falling further and further behind. Not only is Bubba never gonna be able to buy a house, he can barely afford a trailer. Hell, he can barely afford the payments on the pickup. Limbaugh offers him scapegoats. It’s the “feminazis.” It’s the minorities. It’s the limousine liberals. It’s all these people with all these wacky social programs to help some silly, self-proclaimed bunch of victims.

Between 2010, when I started having Blogger track viewership, and October 2025 this blog received one million views, most of that in the two years before then. Now just eight months later the number of views has passed two million and is at 2,008,968. In the last 30 days there have been 32.9K views from Brazil, 17.4K from Bangladesh, 17.1K from Iraq, and 16K from the US. Surprises include 12.1K views from Saudi Arabia and 10.2K views from Tunisia. This is post 5646. I’ve spent a lot of evenings over 18 years writing this blog. Brother is coming again for a short visit, this time with his daughter and her family. So I probably won’t post again until the middle of next week.