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.

Israel thought that Trump was a trusted partner

The nasty guy has announced an agreement with Iran to open the Strait of Hormuz. Both sides have already signed it. And the more we hear about it the worse it is for America. The deal opens the Strait now and puts off the big issues to be resolved over the next 60 days (don’t hold your breath). One of the possible sticking points is Israel and Lebanon. Iran says that must be part of the deal. But the nasty guy doesn’t control Netanyahu – to the point of letting loose a few expletives. Merlin196360 of the Daily Kos community discussed that Netanyahu has the ability to blow up the deal. But does he have the chutzpah to use it?

There are two parts to this Israeli fantasy. The first is that the Iranian regime could be overthrown with just airstrikes alone. The American military knew this already, but Trump and Netanyahu just proved this point. The second part of the fantasy is that Netanyahu and the Israeli public thought that Trump was a trusted partner. The only people more delusional and gullible than Netanyahu and the Israelis about Trump are MAGA cultists.

Netanyahu was not told the nasty guy is capitulating and had no input to the terms. As the details of the deal are being made public the number of Israelis who object will skyrocket. They can’t take their anger out on the nasty guy. That leave Netanyahu to receive the backlash. The Israeli leader is surely hoping someone will stop the nasty guy. We’ve already seen such a person has already been shoved out of the way. The nasty guy signed the deal while in France and at the Palace of Versailles where he had dinner with French leader Emmanuel Macron. Emily Singer of Kos reported on the news:

“I didn’t want to see economic catastrophe. If you kept this going, that could have happened,” Trump said Wednesday at a news conference in France during the G7 gathering. “But all I know is, every time we talked about the possibility of peace, the stock market shot up like a rocket ship.” Trump’s comment is an accidental admission that Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz boxed him into this deal—in which Iran gets both sanctions relief and hundreds of billions to rebuild from the bombing carried out by the U.S. and Israel—because the longer the major oil passageway remained closed, the closer we got to economic collapse.

This is a wild admission from an Oval Office occupant. Iran holding the global economy hostage worked. They’ll surely do it again. “Even Republicans are saying that the deal Trump struck is itself a catastrophe.” Singer is sure Macron knew and that the nasty guy didn’t that the Palace of Versailles is where Germany signed its unconditional surrender in WWII. I just realized I’m getting conflicting information. One part says he signed the deal while at the fight on the White House South Lawn that was staged for his birthday last Sunday. This site says he signed it while in France. That’s in addition to the formal signing in Geneva in Sunday (or maybe Friday?). Kos community member chloris creator discussed who profited from the Iran war. This list isn’t complete. At the top of the list is the Military Industrial Complex. That include nasty junior and his brother. Next is insider traders, the same people who bet on various aspects of the war as it started. Oil companies raked in windfall profits. Iran is getting $300 billion in reconstruction funds plus a suspension of sanctions. It will likely start charging “tolls” or maybe “fees” for ships sailing through the Strait, even though that’s illegal under international law. China is filling in the void created by the chaos. What it is gaining is explained in a video I didn’t watch. On to the losers. Short answer: It’s the rest of us. First is paying maybe up to $90 billion in taxes to fund the military. Second is paying close to $59 billion (so far) in higher gas prices. That doesn’t include the higher prices of jet fuel. Third is American farmers facing higher fertilizer costs and export tariffs. Fourth is America’s reputation in the world. We started a war we didn’t need to, it affected the world economy, and we lost, leaving Iran stronger. Our remaining ally is Israel and the nasty guy now cusses when saying his name. Then to global losers: Inflation hit everyone. I don’t know if inflation is worse here than elsewhere. Other possible losers: Taiwan. China may be seeing the US as unable to defend Taiwan. Maybe renewable energy? See oil profits above. The disruption of oil may spur more countries to switch to renewables. Is the deal any good? The text hasn’t been released and the vice nasty is spinning it as fast as he can. That’s all you need to know. In Tuesday’s pundit roundup for Kos Chitown Kev quoted Bobby Ghosh, writing for his Substack that some of the terms of the deal are yet to be worked out, but what is there may be enough to finish off Netanyahu.

As analysts like Danny Citrinowicz have noted, for 30 years the Netanyahu doctrine was based on the proposition that Iran was an existential threat, that only force could stop it, and that he alone could make Washington exert the necessary force. Every Israeli leader since Yitzhak Rabin feared the Iranian bomb. Netanyahu alone turned the fear into a brand. He carried a cartoon bomb to the rostrum of the United Nations. He lectured a joint session of Congress, over a sitting President’s objections, against the 2015 nuclear accord. He told Israeli voters, campaign after campaign, that he was the one man who could deliver an American President willing to finish the job. […] And the calendar is closing in on the prime minister. The Knesset has voted to dissolve itself, with an election due by late October and the ultra-Orthodox pressing for September — the same partners now drifting from Netanyahu over their sons’ exemption from the draft. The brief lift the war gave Likud is gone; the latest polling leaves his bloc around 51 seats, a long way from the 61 a majority requires. And the deal has already become a cudgel in the hands of his opponents, and some of his allies: Yair Lapid, Avigdor Lieberman and voices inside his own camp are competing to brand it a gift to the Islamic Republic. The autumn vote will not turn on the deal’s clauses, but on the doctrine that produced them.

Hunter Walker of Talking Points Memo discussed the UFC fight that took place on the South Lawn:

Overall, the evening exemplified the new flavors of American life and power. By the time the last punch landed and the blood was wiped away, the night included suspicious stiff armed salutes, transphobic insults, and fresh allegations of sexual assault as well as pitches for Silicon Valley AI, crypto, prediction markets, and the Saudi regime.

Paul Krugman, in his Substack, compared today’s billionaires with the rich men of the Gilded Age:

Members of the Gilded Age elite didn’t solely aim to display their wealth. They also tried to appear respectable. There were surely many private affairs and betrayals we will never know about. But the important point is that the super-wealthy of that era presented to the American public an image of being responsible members of society… Today’s oligarchs, by contrast, have largely given up on the old norms of social and individual responsibility. They give very little money to good causes and their vulgar taste reflects their in-your-face attitude towards the public. In our current hyper-Gilded Age, extreme vulgarity and the decline of philanthropy are really different aspects of the same phenomenon: the rise of an elite so disconnected from ordinary Americans that it feels no need to even appear to be honorable.

In today’s roundup Kev quoted Ghosh again:

Long before the first American bomb fell on Iran this February, the US military had already fought this war dozens of times — on paper, in classified exercises, in rooms full of officers pushing markers around a map. It kept losing. Across more than two decades of these games, the script bent the same way every time: once the shooting started, Iran reached for the Strait of Hormuz, the channel that carries roughly a fifth of the world’s oil, and the global economy seized. The most famous of them, the Millennium Challenge of 2002, ended with the retired general playing the Gulf adversary crippling much of the American fleet using little more than small boats, couriers on motorbikes and the element of surprise. The umpires refloated the sunken ships and ran it again.

In the comments, which I’m able to see again, there aren’t the long list of cartoons, but memes still show up. Such as this one posted by exlrrp and credited to Cameron Corduroy, though I’ve seen variations with the same text:

Renames it to the Department of War. Names himself Secretary of War. Fights one war: Loses.

The nasty guy had the Reflecting Pool between the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial repainted and supposedly fixed because algae had been growing so well. The fix didn’t work and the algae is worse than before. So exlrrp posted a meme of a red cap in the muck with the slogan, “Make Algae Grow Again.”

The right to move, to disobey, to reshape society

My Sunday movie was Choco Milk Shake. It’s a South Korean Boys Love story of 11 short episodes that fit into 2½ hours. I learned of this series through the Boys Love articles written by Krotor on Daily Kos. Jungwoo is a young man feeling quite sad and lonely. He works for his uncle in a coffee shop (which seems to rarely have customers – saves on hiring extras?). The uncle appears to be not much older. One day as Jungwoo is walking home two young men greet him with bright smiles. When the strangers have a chance to explain themselves they say they are the reincarnation of Jungwoo’s pet dog Choco and pet cat Milk. They were given bodies not of infants but of young men. Choco has a bright smile and follows Jungwoo around. Milk is more reserved. Both want their owner to pet them when they’ve been good (which is most of the time). Over the course of the show we learn that Jungwoo rescued Choco, which explains the devotion. Since Krotor writes about Boys Love stories one quickly wonders where this is going. Hopefully not a threesome. We are quickly shown through a blind date that Jungwoo is gay. And that Choco can be jealous. But where does that leave Milk? The acting is excellent (Krotor agrees). The story is cute and fun. I enjoyed it. If you watch be aware there is always one more scene after the episode credits roll. I finished the book The Dawn of Everything, a New History of Humanity, by David Graeber and David Wengrow. I read the paperback edition of the book and it begins by Wengrow announcing that Graeber died three weeks after they finished writing the book. The book had taken ten years to write, first as a way to bounce ideas off each other, then in earnest once they saw they had an important story to tell. That story examines human history since the end of the Ice Age (10,000 BCE). And their central questions are: Where did inequality come from? Is a social hierarchy the natural and default human condition? Seeing that focus I thought, yep, I’m in. These are questions I’ve been exploring. So I want to hear what these guys say about it. Alas, they don’t quite answer them. That doesn’t mean reading the book was a waste – there’s a lot of good and hopeful information here. Yeah, it’s long – 525 pages with another 165 pages of notes (worth reading), bibliography, and index. And, yeah, towards the middle as they reviewed yet another society, it got to be a bit of a slog. There has been a standard way of archaeologists to understand what they saw as they excavated ancient sites. Humans progressed from hunter-gather bands, to tribes, to cities, to states. Each one is declared more advanced than the previous. Along with that was the assumption that as agriculture took hold, which made cities possible, the social complexity of a city required a social hierarchy in which administrators and eventually kings organized the work and a worker class did it. The authors used 500 pages to show that view is contradicted by the evidence. The authors examined evidence of ancient sites from around the world – North and South America, Africa, Asia, and Europe. The earliest sites were inhabited in 8,000 BCE, the latest in 1800 AD. These late ones were on the Pacific coast of North America as Europeans arrived, so they were documented directly by Europeans. Some of these places developed hierarchies. Many did not. Some developed hierarchies and later abandoned them. Over and over the authors looked over the evidence and saw previous researchers, in explaining what they found, projected the standard model as well as their own thoughts and understanding onto the evidence. A man steeped in patriarchy would project patriarchy onto an ancient society. A researcher who had been schooled in the social hierarchy would interpret findings as evidence of a social hierarchy. Places where the evidence didn’t fit that was seen as an outlier or was about to develop into a society that fit the pattern. The authors said the older researchers assumed too much. Why is this society – and that, and that – an “outlier?” Why must this place develop in this way to fit the model? Perhaps your model is wrong. A lot of this book seemed like an indictment of how archaeology had been done over the last couple of centuries. Some of the things I learned in those 500 pages: We must assume that throughout human history people were as smart as we are, even if they didn’t know all we know now. They could figure things out. In the 12,000 years since the Ice Age the standard model assumed all of the ancient cultures of a particular size did the same thing. 120 centuries is a long time for societies to try different ways of organizing themselves. That organization does not require an administrative staff. In some situations involving more people than previously believed the people are quite capable of administering and organizing themselves. The authors discussed places, one if them in Florida, where the society was hunter-gatherer, yet was ruled by a brutal king. If I remember right, the Spaniards took him out. The shift from hunting to farming didn’t happen all at once. In many societies it happened over centuries. Many times they farmed small amounts when they had good weather and hunted at other times. A big influence in the Enlightenment in Europe was native tribes of North America facing their first contact with Europeans. Jesuits learned native languages in hopes of converting the natives, but the natives were good at pushing back. The native societies were not hierarchical. Leaders could not give commands because the rest of the community refused to follow commands because that would place one person over another. Jesuits wrote about what they learned and their books became widely read (by those who could read) across Europe. Wendat chief Kandiaronk traveled extensively around Europe describing native life. The idea of a society not based on hierarchy caused a stir and lead to the American and French Revolutions. Kandiaronk was good at arguing that native life was better than the European hierarchical life, though Europeans tried to argue the reverse. One argument in Kandiaronk’s favor was that many Europeans who were raised by natives and later offered the chance to return to European style life chose to stay with the natives. The native life was more concerned with the person. European life was boring – a person had to do the same thing every day. My family is well acquainted with the story of Frances Slocum. There is a Frances Slocum State Park in Indiana. She was abducted by natives at age 5. Her siblings found her when she was in her 70s (I think). She refused to go with her siblings, saying her life was with the natives now. We has always assumed the reason was she felt she was one of them now – well, she had married a prominent member of the tribe and produced two children. This book suggests another reason – she thought the native way of life was better. So the assumption that natives would prefer the European lifestyle once they got to know it, was hubris. Europeans said they had the right to take land from the natives because natives didn’t use the land (as in farm it) and were lazy. Natives countered they managed the land, such as burning out the undergrowth in a forest or reshaping a river bottom to improve fish spawning. Also, their hunting and gathering took less time than farming so they had time to be lazy. Natives were amused by the European belief that natives had dispersed across the North and South American continents by overland routes. They said they had spread down the coasts and up the rivers. The authors talk about basic freedoms and rights. And they aren’t what we have in our Declaration of Independence. The freedoms are: (1) The right to move, to leave this community and join a different one. (2) The right to disobey an order. (3) The right to reshape their social connections, to work out a different way to manage the community. They also listed ways one person or group is able to control another. The methods are: (1) Violence. (2) controlling information. (3) Charisma. I wasn’t able to get a clear sense of whether this last one referred to individuals, such as Hitler, or to a group of people, such as a warrior or hero class. Maybe both. The authors discussed the Cahokia society centered east of St. Louis. They had extensive influence across the Mississippi watershed. After thriving for centuries the leadership turned tyrannical. The society collapsed for what appears to be a simple reason. People objected to being ruled by tyrants. They exercised their first right and moved away. (One thing I feel this book lacked is a timeline, showing when many of these cultures were active. The only thing I remember of when the Cahokia society was active was that it collapsed before Europeans arrived yet the natives were still reacting to it.) Though I feel the authors didn’t quite answer their important question. A great deal of the world today is stuck in a social hierarchy where a government or oligarchs control or oppress those under them. There are many examples in human history where the people threw off the control and oppression. Since they did it so can we. There is hope.