This is not a realignment. This is a rental.

As of 9:45 this evening Real Clear Politics shows 312 US House races have been called, 23 still being counted. Of those called, 252 went for Democrats, 160 for Republicans. Both parties will likely gain a few more. Alas, the site doesn’t say which races were declared since I last checked. Emily Singer of Daily Kos wrote about what she thinks are the nine most stunning outcomes of the election. Here are some of them. James Talarico, new senator from Texas, got more votes in early voting, 4.4 million, than his opponent Ken Paxton got for the whole election, 4.2 million. “Every House district that Trump won by 11 percentage points or less in 2024 flipped to Democrats.” And a few the nasty guy won by 15 points and more. In their gerrymandering spree last year Republicans drew 15 House seats in their favor. They lost 13 of them. Every House district along the US-Mexico border will be represented by a Democrat. Forrest County, Mississippi is named for Nathan Bedford Forrest, Confederate general and first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. Scott Colom, a black Democrat candidate for the Senate, won the county 54%-43%. The state as a whole hasn’t been called yet. Mike Luckovich posted a cartoon on Kos showing a tree with fruit labeled with the names of black women who won statewide offices in Georgia – Keisha Lance Bottoms for Governor, Tanya Miller for AG, Penny Brown Reynolds for Secretary of State, and several more. Luckovich named the cartoon “Strong roots” and across the trunk of the tree is “Stacy Abrams,” the black woman who ran for governor a few years back and is a strong advocate for keeping elections accessible. Drew Sheneman posted a cartoon on Kos showing the nasty guy in royal regalia as a donkey reaches for his scepter. The donkey says, “What’s wrong? I thought you liked regime change.” In today’s pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin included a tweet by Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas posted back in July. It shows Abbott and eight other Republican candidates. Abbott wrote:

Last night, for the first time ever, ALL statewide Republican candidates (non-judicial) gathered to chart the course to victory in November. We will ensure Texas remains solid Red and we will preserve common sense over the chaotic policies promoted by radical Democrats.

After the election Christopher Hale added:

Every one of these candidates lost.

From Democracy Now:

In addition to taking back the House and Senate, Democrats also made major gains at the state level and will control a majority of governorships for the first time in 16 years. Democrats also flipped 12 state legislative chambers.

A series of tweets about one of the two Senate races not yet called. From La Soule: “What takes Mississippi so gahdamn long to count votes??” Mr. Make It Happens: “We have to say ‘Mississippi’ after each number.” Scott Colom, the Dem. candidate: “This may be the most Mississippi tweet I’ve ever seen. In the comments exlrrp posted a tweet from Dr. Annie Andrews, who just won the Senate seat from South Carolina:

The party that elevates Kyle Rittenhouse, a 17 yr old killer, & tears down Gus Walz, a 17 yr old with special needs who loves his dad, is a party that needs to be lit on fire & thrown in the dumpster & plunged into the deepest depths of the ocean never to be seen again.

Rambler797 posted a tweet by Wajahat Ali:

Democrats, you're on the clock starting tomorrow. You must stand up, fight and deliver. This is not a realignment. This is a rental.

In the pundit roundup from Friday a week ago (before the election) there were lots of interesting tweets and memes way down in the comments. https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2026/10/30/800119398/community/ab/ A tweet from Christopher Hale:

The Democratic Party is poised to send a Christian pastor, a Christian seminarian, a Jewish southerner, a Muslim doctor, and several Catholics to the United States Congress to win a commanding majority. Only in America.

They all won. A meme posted by exlrrp:

Donald Trump, in South Carolina: “In fact, hospitals now are doing reverse surgery at my order. They’re doing reverse surgery. Nobody ever heard about it.” If you genuinely think hospitals across the US are reversing gender surgeries at the personal order of Donald Trump you have actual mashed potatoes in your skull instead of brains.

Another meme posted by exlrrp:

Republicans wanted complete power. And now that they have it, they’re demonstrating why they should never have any power again.

I wrote yesterday that a big problem Democrats and the country face is being bought out by billionaires. Gaslit Nation has sent a couple emails about the election. Their general opinion is Democratic wins are great! But Chuck Schumer in the Senate and Hakeem Jeffries in the House are too establishment – too close to billionaire money – to want to do the major overhaul that is needed to protect the country from billionaire assaults on democracy. New leadership is necessary. Emily Singer of Kos reported that Stephen Miller has been appointed to be the nasty guy’s chief of staff. Susie Wiles, who had been in the job, will move over to the Trump Political Operation.

Miller is the architect behind Trump’s cruel, violent, deadly, and unpopular immigration enforcement agenda, which includes hiring a bunch of unqualified maniacs as Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and sending them out to round up anyone who looks Hispanic. The strategy led to massive blowback in the midterms, with Hispanic voters who had supported Trump and the GOP in 2024 swinging back hard to Democrats.

That the nasty guy is promoting Miller, rather than getting rid of him, is a sign this administration is going to continue the racist policies that brought the massive Republican loss. And Wiles in a political role? She was quite wrong in her opinion of what the election outcome would be. So, in my opinion, putting her into a political operation sounds like a fine idea. Lisa Needham of Kos reported the nasty guy was hit with a big loss over his triumphal arch. He’s been good at manipulating “standing,” the right to sue, over his building projects. A project must be imminent, beyond the planning stages. No need to sue over something that might not happen. The person must show they will be harmed, not just upset the project will be ugly. The nasty guy fouls that up by starting to build while saying there is no final plan yet, then declaring the person bringing the suit doesn’t have standing. While the issue is sorted out in court the building continues and soon he’s saying it’s too late to stop it. The National Capital Planning Commission is full of lackeys. They approved the arch on Nov. 5 and he notified the court, saying he was ready to build. US District Judge Tanya Chutkan was lying in wait and issued a restraining order 75 minutes later. There are two suits against the arch. The first is that it will destroy sightlines that signify post Civil War unity. That’s much different than saying the arch is ugly. The second is that the arch would massively snarl traffic, requiring millions to mitigate, something the arch planners appear to have not considered. Again, this is real harm. Also, he’s supposed to consult Congress who always has standing. And claiming Congress approved it 100 years ago doesn’t cut it. The new Congress is much less likely to approve this monstrosity.

If Democrats don't deliver again, Woke 2.0 becomes MAGA 2.0

Kelli Anne Busey of TransAction in an article posted on Daily Kos reported Democrat Allison Montgomery made history in Alabama by being the first transgender legislator in the state. Yes, in red Alabama where Tommy Tuberville was just elected governor. Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos listed the 13 women who were elected as governors. Some take over from other women, some from men, some elected to another term. The list includes Amy Klobuchar who follows Tim Walz in Minnesota. And commentary about the election, starting with what to do next. A major part of the discussion of what comes next is about what Democrats should and can do, knowing important bills will get vetoed. Some suggestions from Paul Krugman, as discussed by xaxnar of the Kos community: Investigate the full extent of the nasty guy family corruption. Pass popular bills that will improve the lives of Americans. If vetoed, call for a vote to override the veto to record Republican loyalty. Do not make a deal with the nasty guy or reach across the aisle to Republicans. Do not return to status quo governing. In a second post xaxnar speculated whether Supreme Court justices Samuel Alito or Clarence Thomas will retire while the nasty guy can get their replacement through in the lame duck session. First, replacements probably can’t get through by the end of the year. Second, Alito and Thomas are not going to give up power until they have to. The bigger issue is Supreme Court reform, including adding members, curbing the shadow docket, and perhaps adding term limits. Walter Einenkel of Kos reported new Michigan senator Abdul El-Sayed laid out his priorities on Morning Joe. Basically: Affordability, including a job that pays a living wage. A war powers resolution and returning to diplomacy. Ending the tariff regime and tussle with Canada. Stopping the collapse of healthcare because of the Medicaid cuts. And pass a “Crap Lettuce Elimination Act, to restore the parts of the FDA and CDC that protected food safety. Kos of Kos quoted conservative pundit Erick Erickson who listed reasons why voters turned against Republicans. Erickson came up with a decent list (according to Kos), including corruption, incompetence, tariffs, cruelty, aggressive deportations, arrogance, and the ballroom. Even with a long list, Kos thinks Erickson left out a few things: gutting healthcare, expensive spectacles for his birthday, trying to get his name on the Kennedy Center, and desperate attempts to manufacture culture-war distractions.

Now it’s time for Democrats to govern as a serious, sensible, measured, and pragmatic party—laser-focused on affordability and clean government. Less performative outrage. Less culture-war bullshit. More improving people’s lives. Because if Democrats fail to deliver again, Woke 2.0 will eventually give way to MAGA 2.0. And we already know what that hell looks like.

Another post by xaxnar, from before the election, discusses a Reuters article by Nandita Bose and Tim Reid about plans by the nasty guy administration to govern [rule] without input from Democrats and Congress. The power Democrats have is small compared to the nasty guy as the head of the executive branch and of the military. The summary of the article (xaxnar doesn’t clearly say if he wrote it or quoted it)

Officials identifying executive actions on immigration, tariffs, housing and spending, sources say. Trump says he would become “Mr. Veto”. Plans under consideration include tariffs on critical minerals and wind turbines. White House lawyers brief appointees on handling subpoenas and document requests, one source says.

Emily Singer of Kos has heard anonymous Republicans say that the election losses show the nasty guy’s power is waning. The party can now start to break from him. Singer can only laugh. Those comments were anonymous.

If Republicans are afraid to put their names to even the idea that they may have leeway to ignore Trump and stand up against his whims, on what planet should that give any of us any confidence that they will break with Trump when it actually matters? ... Ultimately, after a decade of wondering when Republicans would finally break with Trump, I’ve stopped waiting for that day to come. I refuse to be tricked by Lucy and the football any more.

Oliver Willis of Kos as part of his series of explaining the right asks why Republicans never learn from their election losses. It isn’t just a nasty guy thing, this has been going on for a long time.

The root cause of this unresponsiveness is an idea at the core of the modern conservative movement, which first came to the fore when conservative upstart Sen. Barry Goldwater secured the Republican Party presidential nomination in 1964. It is the idea that conservatism is always perfect. It cannot fail. The way the GOP sees it, if a conservative candidate loses an election, that is on the voters for not fully understanding the wonders of conservative ideology, not because those ideas are bad for the country and the world.

In the comments of today’s pundit roundup for Kos is a meme posted by exlrrp showing the nasty guy and the words, “[He] got beat so bad he didn’t even try calling it rigged.” Greg Dworkin posted a tweet by Degan Sports that appears to be from the TV show Breaking Points in which the host uses a half-minute to summarize why Republicans lost. This is an attempt at a transcript:

If you run a child sex trafficking ring, cover it up by waging a war after promising not to, and that war drives up the price of oil and breaks the global economy, and you spend the time getting rich and pushing money towards AI and data centers, you won’t do well in the elections.

A meme by the Fiber Friend and posted by exlrrp is about the Democrat who won the US Senate seat in South Carolina. I included a correction supplied by exlrrp. The text:

Dr. Annie Andrews is getting ready to sit in a seat that has been held by only two elected individuals in the last [72] years. 1. Lindsey Graham 2. Strom Thurmond. Thank you.

I had an important comment on what we face in the future. But I can’t find it. It was by The Geogre in the comment section of a pundit roundup on Kos, though perhaps working from someone else. The quote goes something like this: Money doesn’t defeat its opposition, it purchases them. A great many of the severe problems in America right now are because of the extremely wealthy wanting to destroy democracy so they can oppress everyone else with impunity. I’m glad Democrats won big, but I fear they won’t enact the necessary big reforms because they will be bought out by the rich. A cartoon by Drew Sheneman posted on Kos. It shows a rich man on a private jet saying, “I’ve spent more buying elections trying to avoid taxes than it would cost to just pay the taxes. Sometimes it’s the principle.”

Organized people can still defeat organized money

The results are quite delightful! Yes, the US elections ended yesterday and results were posted last night and this morning. I’d love to bask in every wonderful detail, but you can get most of the results from traditional news outlets. So I’ll mention the top numbers and then turn to results harder to find and to what some pundits are saying. Real Clear Politics (I learned about this site only recently) shows the top numbers. It also gives details on each race. As of 9:20 pm today it reported: Democrats gained 39 seats in the US House for 247 to 152 Republicans. There are 36 seats that haven’t been called yet. Democrats gained 7 seats in the US Senate for 54 to 44 with two seats too close to call. Those seven gains are almost all in red states. They are: Maine, not so red, but goodbye Susan Collins! Ohio. Both North and South Carolina, goodbye Darlene Graham, unqualified sister of the late Senator Lindsay Graham pushed into the position by the nasty guy. Iowa. Kansas, which hasn’t voted for a Democratic Senator since 1932, where pastor Adam Hamilton will take the seat. And Texas, where Seminarian James Talarico won. Democrats gained five governor’s mansions, in Ohio (I like this!), Iowa, Georgia (Jon Ossoff returning to the Senate has long coattails), Texas (even better!), and Nevada. Kalloli Bhatt of Michigan Public has the Michigan results. Democrats kept the governor, Secretary of State, Attorney General, the two contested seats in the state Supreme Court, and elected Abdul El-Sayed as the first Muslim senator in Washington. His opponent didn’t succeed in trying to smear him as a terrorist. Two seats in the US house also flipped. The Michigan constitution requires citizens be asked every 16 years whether it should be rewritten. But we now have too many wonderful amendments (independent redistricting, voter rights, abortion protection) to risk a complete rewrite most likely controlled by billionaires. There was fear at the start of the campaign season when it polled at 47% for a rewrite. Thankfully, no rewrite got 73.8%. I had helped gather signatures (all together more than a half-million) on a proposal to get money out of politics, especially from utilities and government contractors. It passed decisively with 81.3% of the vote! Already, one provision is the target of a lawsuit. Democrats widened their hold on the state Senate (their majority had been a single seat) and retook the state House, giving Michigan a trifecta again. There are still a few seats too close to call. The Daily Kos staff posted a chart (as of this morning) showing the Senate races that were not rated as safe for either party. It’s good to see all that have a “DEM. FLIP” designation. Sarah Bricker Hunt of Pridesource has results for Michigan’s LGBTQ candidates:

State Sen. Jeremy Moss became the first out LGBTQ+ person Michigan has ever elected to Congress, and Joanna Whaley will be the first openly trans member of the Michigan House. All nine out LGBTQ+ candidates for the Legislature won.

Whaley was in the news back in July when a suit tried to require the use of her deadname on the ballot. Moss won the seat vacated by Haley Stevens when she ran for the US senate. I’ll have more on her downfall likely in another post. Other firsts in this election:

Michigan was part of a night of national firsts. Chris Pappas of New Hampshire will be the first out gay man elected to the U.S. Senate, Keisha Lance Bottoms will be the first Black woman to serve as governor of any state after winning in Georgia and New Mexico's Deb Haaland will be the first Native American woman governor.

The 9 LGBTQ candidates for state legislature are also listed. One is shown as too close to call. The others won, some getting as much as 71% of the vote. Emily Singer of Kos listed her ten most satisfying results. Here are some of them: Max Miller, Republican candidate for Congress in Ohio and accused of domestic violence, lost by ten points to Brian Poindexter. Vivek Ramaswamy lost the race for governor in Ohio. He had run an ad showing his opponent Amy Acton’s mother denouncing her while not mentioning Amy had been pulled from her mother’s home at age 12. The ever concerned Sen. Susan Collins of Maine was known for her “independence” from the nasty guy when her vote didn’t matter, lost by nearly 8 points. I had noted Texas had voted for Democrat James Talarico for Senate. The state also voted for Democrats for Governor (goodbye Greg Abbott!) and other statewide races and flipping the state House. Texas is no longer a Republican stronghold. Lauren Boebert, racist MAGA warrior of Colorado, is on track to lose her House seat. It hasn’t been officially called yet. Democrats won almost all seats Republicans gerrymandered to be in their favor. Wisconsin, perhaps the most gerrymandered state for Republicans, flipped its House, Senate, and governor for a Democrat trifecta. Oliver Willis of Kos reported that Elon Musk spent at least $440 million to help Republicans win. A big chunk of that went to Texas in hopes of preventing a Talarico win. Of the candidates Musk supported 20 lost, one won, and 20 are too close to call. Shares of Tesla and SpaceX dropped on the news because Musk’s contracts with the government will be scrutinized by incoming Democrat majorities. Musk moved company headquarters from California to Texas to avoid state oversight. And now Texas is controlled by Democrats. In today’s pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin had, of course, election commentary. A tweet by Chaz Nuttycombe:

Arkansas Republicans got absolutely nuked in the state legislative races. Seats where they had 80, 90% odds of winning, just gone.

A tweet by Drew Savicki

Dummymander moment: Democrats are going to win 10/14 congressional districts in North Carolina on map that was drawn to be 11-3 Republican.

A tweet by Jesse Ferguson:

Welp. Democrats have just flipped control of the City Council in Lynchburg, Virginia. That's the home of Jerry Falwell's Liberty University.

In the comments, a tweet by Wendell Pierce:

THE NEW RECONSTRUCTION ERA FIRST BLACK HOUSE SPEAKER FIRST BLACK WOMAN GOVERNOR 3 BLACK WOMEN SENATORS 3 BLACK GOVERNORS CONCURRENTLY IN OFFICE FIRST MUSLIM SENATOR FIRST OPENLY GAY SENATOR

A tweet from Robert Reich:

The richest man in the world spent more money that most people will see in a lifetime, only to lose a Senate race and governor’s race in Texas by double digits. This is a reminder that we must overturn Citizens United. But it’s also a reminder that organized people can still defeat organized money.

A tweet from Armand Domalewski:

The mandatory sex change surgeries begin TONIGHT. All Republican voters, please report to your local abortion clinic voluntarily or a bisexual MS-13 member will be sent to your home. Somehow, pansexual org-es and shariah law are simultaneously in effect as of this moment.

Dan K of the Kos community commented on a New York Times report that at 10:30 last night the nasty guy said he would accept election results. He is looking forward to working with Democrats. Or maybe that’s a bit inside out. From the NYT

“I think they’re gonna want to work with me,” he said. “Otherwise I’d just veto everything and they’re not gonna want that.”

And from Dan K:

We’ve said all along we needed to win by so large a margin that trump couldn’t steal it away from us. We got that margin!!!!! (and we’re getting it bigger!!!!!), and it was enough to shock trump into a semblance of comity. For the moment.

Will his staff and cabinet allow him to not fight the results? Or maybe he is too old, tired, and sick to sustain a fight? I’ve been thinking a lot about not hearing anything in the news about putting in action the plan to contest the election, which I wrote about in my previous post last Friday. I’m delighted it doesn’t appear to be happening. Or maybe the nasty guy is content to turn his attention to his ballroom. This afternoon he held a news event inside the unfinished structure, as reported by Walter Einenkel of Kos. Dartagnan of the Kos community quoted a Republican strategist from mid October discussing polls showing a huge Democratic win.

It would be so historically unprecedented you’d have to presuppose we’re staring down the barrel of a generational national trauma that no one is aware of.

Dartagnan emphasized “no one is aware of” as evidence that conservatives live in a bubble. He explained:

They lost because they were living in a bubble. They were living in a media ecosystem that told them everything they were doing — everything that Trump was doing — was just peachy. The bubble was reinforced over and over on Fox News, and in all their social media feeds. That bubble brooked no dissent, not a hint of doubt or introspection. It was the same bubble all cult members live in. It was a big bubble, and it was an amazingly popular bubble (for them). They would go to bubbled events where they would only interact and talk to the people in the same bubble. They stared into their phones and read the same happy talk, tailored and curated for their bubble. And before too long — quite understandably — they all forgot about the bubble. No, they thought. This was reality. And Trump was happy to reinforce it for them, so much that acting– or even thinking — outside the bubble became unthinkable. But it wasn’t reality. It was still a bubble.

The moment the gavel changes hands, they are witnesses

Thursday evening I went to the Fisher Theater in Detroit to see the show Maybe Happy Ending. It won Tony Awards for Best Musical and five other categories out of ten nominations in 2025. It’s creators are South Korean and American. It’s first production was in Seoul. The story is about two HelperBots, robots that look human (and played by humans), who do domestic chores for their owners. These bots, Oliver and Claire, live in the company’s “retirement” community because they are obsolete. Oliver sings about how he loves his little room and is waiting for James, his owner, to come back and return him to service. He’s been waiting for a dozen years. Claire lives across the hall. She’s a later model but isn’t as durable and needs to use his charger because she can’t get repair parts for her own. They become friends and soon have a plan to go out and find James. Yes, the show shows robots with feelings, including eventually falling in love, and my friend and debate partner would strongly object to that. But go with it, the story makes a very good point about human emotions, including love, and solves a dilemma in a way only robots could. Which is why the happy ending is a maybe. This is pretty much a two character show. There are a few moments with other characters, such as James and his son, but they aren’t on stage for very long. And some of the characters appear only in video flashbacks, so while there are seven actors listed in the cast only four take bows at the end. I enjoyed the show. The music is pleasant, though the songs aren’t memorable. The set is memorable with screens pulling up and to the sides to reveal the active part of the stage and outline it with a border of light. We’ve seen some efforts to disrupt the midterm elections. So far the efforts have been rejected by a court or remain tied up there. But the nasty guy and his Republican minions will still keep trying. Daily Kos community member xaxnar quoted Dean Blundell of his own Substack discussing a calendar of seven steps the nasty guy plans to take to disrupt and steal the election. Blundell does not link to the source of his information (it may be leaked and not on a website). Blundell did post a graphic attributed to Brian and Ed Krassenstein, which xaxnar also included (though I won’t). The seven steps: Nov. 3 – Start declaring fraud while votes are still being counted. Immediately created doubt. Nov. 4-6 – Hold press conferences to push the allegations and highlight any voting anomalies. Make it look like a nationwide problem. Nov. 7-12 – Direct Department of Justice to investigate, subpoena voter records, threaten lawsuits to slow down the certification. Nov. 13-20 – Pressure states to not certify results, demand investigations to delay certification in close races. Nov. 21-Dec. 5 – Escalate legal battles, file lawsuits, claim voting machines were hacked, keep disputes in the news. Dec. 6-20 – Push Congress not to seat certain elected members, pressure other members to support the objections, block the new members from being seated. Up to Jan. 3 – Keep all this in the news, dispute the legitimacy of the new Congress, undermine public trust in the opposition. Blundell explained why the nasty guy is doing this:

Because losing the House is not a political problem for Trump. It is a legal one. A Democratic House means subpoena power. It means the Epstein files in their entirety, not the redacted scraps. It means the oligarchs who bought the crypto coin, the pardons, the Qatari jet, and the cabinet of cable hosts all get hauled under oath. It means the ICE contracts, the Pentagon slush, the family’s billions. Every person who has spent two years protecting him understands that the moment the gavel changes hands, they are witnesses. He is not fighting for a majority. He is fighting for his own skin and the skins of everyone standing behind him, and a man fighting for his skin will burn the house down and call it a renovation.

One way to fight this is to make the margins too big to deny. Another is to be ready for each step as it begins by having countermeasures ready to go. Kos of Kos discussed a report on Fox News that some Republicans are contemplating using a maneuver to challenge the oath of members of the Democratic Socialists of America. This oath is to uphold the Constitution and is taken by every member. The claim is that the DSA platform calls for scrapping the current US Constitution. That means they can’t swear an oath to uphold it. But the Constitution itself has articles explaining how to amend it, even calling for a convention to propose amendments. So, yeah, calling for scrapping the current one is perfectly constitutional. Thankfully, Speaker Mike Johnson said refusing to seat any Democrats is a “nonsense narrative” and the Supreme Court has previously ruled that the House can’t refuse to seat members who meet the requirements of being 25, a citizen for 7 years, and a resident of the state that elected them. Republicans are very good at performative outrage. It gets them on Fox News. Kos community member Hopeforthefuture says there might be an effort to unseat Johnson before the end of the year. A reason for that could be because of arcane rules. The only carryover from one House session to the next is the Clerk. One task is to accept the state election certification and list the new House membership. A very routine process.

However, the Clerk can, in theory, deliberately omit names from the list. For example, every new representative from the state of California. Clerks are normally elected by the full House and no normal Clerk would ever do this. However, when the House is not in session, the Speaker has the authority to dismiss the Clerk and appoint an acting Clerk. If the Speaker is Mike Johnson, there’s certainly a chance he would dismiss the current Clerk during the Christmas recess and appoint some corrupt, craven toady who would. I think this is exactly why the DOJ presented California with the illegal and impossible demand to disenfranchise 20,000 voters. They knew how California’s leaders would react, and they knew they could use that as a pretext for not seating California’s newly elected representatives.

Replacing Johnson with someone loyal to the Constitution could stop that effort. Am I chasing conspiracies? We’ll see. I’d be happy if this was wrong. Kos of Kos discussed a Gallup survey about which values Americans thought the country needed most. All Americans: Honesty (34%), responsibility (32%), integrity (31%), equality (29%), and fairness (26%). Democrats: Equality (44%), fairness (34%), honesty (32%), integrity (29%), and kindness (25%). Republicans: Patriotism (46%), responsibility (41%), honesty (38%), integrity (33%), respect (28%). Democrats put patriotism at 6%, independents at 15%. Kos questions Republicans about their honesty. They elected the nasty guy twice and an Economist/YouGov poll in September found of registered voters 53% described him as corrupt, 51% as dangerous, and 46% as cruel. And of Republicans 10% described him as corrupt, 49% as honest, and 41% as cruel. That doesn’t sound like they value honesty.

In a late September YouGov poll, just 26% of Republicans said Trump had “set a high moral standard.” That’s such a low bar for the president of the United States to meet, yet his own supporters couldn’t give it to him. So what happens when Republicans claim to value honesty, integrity, and responsibility, yet won’t hold their own president to those standards? What happens when their political loyalties matter more than the principles they insist America needs?

They won’t admit the nasty guy is a mistake. But what about the next guy? Such as the vice nasty. Or any of the Republicans currently in office. At least Republicans believe values exist and they say honesty and integrity are important. But they aren’t living by those values. They don’t influence what they’ll sacrifice for or condemn. They aren’t committed to the values they claim are important. Emily Singer of Kos reported last Monday that news outlet Puck reported that Sen. Marsha Blackburn is running to be governor of Tennessee. If she gets the job Pete Hegseth wants her to appoint him to fill her vacancy in the Senate. His reasons for his request (which he has not confirmed): It will help him launch a bid to be president. It also would avoid being impeached and removed, or perhaps fired, from his job at the Pentagon. The House is already working on articles of impeachment to be voted on after the midterms. Being impeached would stain his chance to run for president. If impeachment and trial happen it puts Republicans in a bind, whether to vote to keep the guy who goaded the nasty guy into war with Iran that is damaging the global economy. For that reason Blackburn could decide there are much better people to appoint to the Senate. Lisa Needham of Kos discussed the state of those articles of impeachment in the House. Kos discussed Obama on the campaign trail, rallying for Democrats in tight races. In Cleveland he packed a 10,000 seat venue for Amy Acton, running for governor. Kos included clips supplied by Aaron Rupar and HQNews. Some of Obama’s lines:

Remember draining the swamp? The only thing they drained was the reflecting pool after a no bid contract, and they messed it up. When I was president, all these Republicans are all deficits, deficits, debt, debt. You got to do something about it. And now—$40 trillion—Crickets. Somehow deficits only matter when a Democratic president is in office. Trump should be on HGTV. He's building a ballroom, paved over the Rose Garden, put a helicopter pad on the South Lawn, and what's up with the gold? He’s got the White House looking like Saddam Hussein opened up a Cheesecake Factory!

Sheesh, that last one. Stirred up a storm. I’ve eaten at a Cheesecake Factory once and was with Sister and Niece. Sister said her food was bland and returning was not worth it. I agreed. Kos wrote that a CF restaurant is indeed gaudy and over-the-top. It looks like “several ancient civilizations collided with a Las Vegas casino.” Which for CF is the point. It’s glorious excess is its charm (according to Kos). But the White House should have dignity. Ah, conservatives hyperventilated over the Cheesecake Factory and how elitist Obama must be. Kos provided several examples. Nate Silver called these people “performative humorless scolds.” The contrast between Obama and the nasty guy is a good reason for Republicans to “spend their weekend pretending to be offended by a Cheesecake Factory joke than talking about what Obama actually said.” Kos continued the discussion in a second post:

During the Obama years, conservatives could manufacture outrage and largely control the ensuing narrative. These days, liberals have the platforms and reach to turn that outrage right back on them, making the performative freakout itself the object of ridicule.

Such as this tweet from John Couger Colleencamp:

The right: “The left can’t take a joke!” Obama: makes a joke The right: starts a brand new culture war over…The Cheesecake Factory

And a tweet by Stephen Moran showing the nasty guy in a gilded room squirting ketchup on a steak while...

Saddam Hussein: I like what you’ve done with the place! Liberace: Me too!

A tweet from The Viscount:

The entire right wing media apparatus taking up pistols at 40 paces to defend the honor of the Cheesecake Factory is exactly how I want to close out the election cycle. Thank you all for this.

And in a third post Kos shows Obama’s reaction to the uproar, given in Atlanta while helping Sen. Jon Ossoff and Keisha Lance Bottoms, running for governor. Kos included a full transcript of his remarks. Here’s part of it:

I accused this administration, based on the facts, that they were engaging in unprecedented levels of corruption. They didn’t say anything about that. The president wasn’t even mad about the Saddam Hussein comparison. That part didn’t bother him! But he was very upset about the Cheesecake Factory comments. He took great umbrage. He said I didn’t understand the work of the artisans in the White House. And they mobilized—this was, I mean it’s all crazy, but this is the really crazy part—they mobilized a whole-of-government response to that joke. Not to inflation, but to that joke! ... To everybody out there, including the press, I want you to understand this. This is what I mean when I say these are not serious people. They don’t have solutions to actual problems. So they’d rather have the media and you talking about the Cheesecake Factory. That’s the game they’ve been playing for the last two years.

They want a doctor that knows them and sees their humanity

I finished the book Rough Sleepers, Dr. Jim O’Connell’s Urgent Mission to Bring Healing to Homeless People, by Tracy Kidder. I had mentioned back in April that Kidder died at the age of 80, so this was his last book. Rough Sleepers refers to people sleeping on the street. Kidder spent quite a bit of time with Jim (as he’s referred to in the book) and his work. This is the way Kidder had worked with his previous books. Jim’s work included driving around downtown Boston with a small team looking for homeless people and offering them soup, extra blankets, and a bit of money. Other days he worked at the Mass General Hospital in a clinic for homeless people or at a separate clinic with rooms that cared for the homeless while they recovered from an illness. Jim found that the homeless want to see the same doctor each time, a doctor that would know them from one visit to the next and spend as much time as needed rather than limit themselves to the allotted time a medical system has as its standard. They want a doctor who cares for them as people rather than seeing them as a body to be treated. They want a doctor that treats them like a human rather than the dregs of society. I think we all want that. A couple of the staff at the clinic worked to get their people into housing. They know the system well enough they sometimes have success. Sometimes they don’t. Kidder includes a discussion of the housing first movement – get a person housed and that will make all their other issues easier to manage. In many places that works quite well, in others it doesn’t. Some communities try to spend the funds to end homelessness, again with good results. Other times it doesn’t work as well. A big issue is many lawmakers (I add: usually Republicans) who simply don’t want to spend the money, no matter the great benefits. And, yes, that implies they want people to be homeless. Kidder describes Tony, one of the homeless men. He’s a big man and a kind soul, one who will do all he can to help out his fellow rough sleepers. Homeless women appreciate him because he will protect and not exploit them. But he is also an addict. Using frequently lands him in the live-in clinic. When he recovers enough to function he’ll serve as a social director – helping other residents, stepping in to break up arguments, and just being a friend to everyone. After a few days he’s back on the streets using again. Attempts at getting him housed don’t succeed because of things in his troubled past. I very much enjoyed the book and recommend it. Kidder is a very good writer, able to explain things well while maintaining his subject’s humanity. Michigan news has periodic stories of the Palisades nuclear power plant in southwest Michigan. The plant reached the end of its useful life and was sold to Holtec, a company that would decommission it and, presumably, tear it down in a manner that would minimize radiation exposure. But perhaps a year or two later that same company decided instead of decommissioning the plant they would return it to operation. The stories I hear are about the latest steps in the process, something that has not been done before. Karl Grossman and Harvey Wasserman of the Daily Kos community discussed an open letter to Congress by Arnie Gundersen that explains the plant isn’t and cannot be made safe. Gundersen has extensive experience and certification in the nuclear industry. But in the last three years, as long has this venture has been going on, he has been rebuffed by the The Nuclear Regulatory Commission and many other people in the nasty guy’s administration. The issue: Holtec has experience decommissioning reactors. It does not have experience running them. Staff members are not certified for that. The reason Holtec wants to run this one is that nuclear plants have never been profitable and never been as safe as they claim. They run with a great deal of government subsidy. And getting hands on that cash appears to be profitable for Holtec. In contrast to the significant subsidies needed by nuclear energy wind and solar are much cheaper. Gundersen goes into detail on the problems in the plant. I’ll skip that. The likelihood of a failure within the first 18 months is high, a failure that would prompt an evacuation out to ten miles. Fortunately, there is no city in that zone, but Detroit is only 180 miles downwind with Kalamazoo, Battle Creek, Jackson, Ann Arbor, and me in between. Gundersen hopes that Congress (or the one that takes control in January) will take him more seriously than the NRC has and stop Holtec’s efforts to revive the Palisades plant. Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos quoting Jon Stewart’s response to the vice nasty blaming the French riots on Muslim immigrants. Those riots began with students protesting conditions at their schools and expanded to include people protesting the cost of living. Stewart said:

I’m sorry, Vance, are you seriously suggesting that immigrants have brought a culture of revolution and protest to France??? Have you not been to the theater? Can you not hear the people sing? Do you know why Versailles is a museum? It used to be someone’s house, full of people with heads! Do you want to know how French these protests were? They stormed the Bastille! Other than adultery, it’s the most French thing you can do.

This is a good Marine, why wouldn’t we retain him?

No Sunday movie this weekend because I did a two-day trip to the Stratford Festival in Ontario. The journey allowed me to drive over the new Gordie Howe bridge, though that route included construction traffic near London. Eight years ago I saw the show Something Rotten! in Detroit. It is a spoof and love letter to Shakespeare and musicals. I wrote about it here. Two years ago I went to the Stratford Festival when Something Rotten! was one of the shows, though I told myself and others I had seen it and didn’t need to see it again. I did see four other shows over two days for an enjoyable trip. When Something Rotten! was announced for the Stratford Festival season this year I felt this time I needed to see it again. So I did on Friday evening. And I very much enjoyed it again, smiling and laughing throughout, from the opening “Welcome to the Renaissance” – aren’t we glad the Middle Ages are over? – to the closing number (telling you that could be considered a spoiler). The singing was excellent, the dancing high energy (the cast must be exhausted by the end of the show), the one-liners just as funny, and the whole thing still overmiked. The substantial crowd did standing ovations for two of the songs in addition to the show as a whole at the end. My friend and debate partner has told me over the years he enjoys interesting theater, but not spectacle. Then, my friend, you would not have enjoyed this one. While the numerous quotes of Shakespeare plays used in unexpected ways would amuse you, this show is about spectacle. Though if the rest of you are a fan of the Bard’s plays or of musicals or both this show would be a delight. Also while at the Festival I saw the show Saturday, Sunday, Monday, a new translation of a 1959 Italian play. The story is about a large Neapolitan family (husband, wife, three adult kids, spouses, fiancee, siblings, and father, plus a few friends). Saturday is spent preparing for Sunday dinner, including Mama’s legendary ragu. Sunday is the dinner and all that happens during it, and Monday morning is dealing with the consequences. The marriage of the senior couple is not healthy, Father has gone almost silent. That is compounded by the friendly attentions of one of the friends. The Sunday meal makes the jealousies worse. And on Monday Father sees the errors of his ways. The program booklet says the Italian author wrote it during a troubled time in his own marriage, hoping for a better outcome. Of course, the production is quite well done and the show enjoyable. Oliver Willis of Daily Kos reported on how well the military is following the nasty guy’s demand to remove transgender people from their ranks. Willis worked from a New York Times report that says the military set up review boards to consider individual transgender personnel.

In 12 cases that have come before the Navy and the Marines, boards have voted to retain troops nine times. The Trump purge has been more successful in the Air Force and Army, where troops are more likely to be removed. Former Air Force lawyer Rachel VanLandingham explained the quiet rebellion to the Times, “We are seeing them nullify a process they see as unjust.”

An example is Marine Staff Sgt. Damien Contreras. He was designated for removal but his board said he “remains qualified.”

“They see I’ve always done my job, I’ve deployed, I’ve mentored other Marines, followed the rules. They say, ‘Hey, this is a good Marine, why wouldn’t we retain him?’” he said.

Yes, this shows the administration’s stance is destructive and contrary to their claim of wanting the most powerful fighting force. Yeah, political appointees can overrule the boards. But this quiet defiance shows the conservative movement does not have unified support of the military. On to something completely different and not at all fun. Back in July (yeah, it’s been sitting in my browser tabs since then) Muriel Vieux of the Kos community wrote about the ever returning topic of men abusing women. Nearly all of the abusers are men these women know. Vieux concluded:

So, guys, when you say “not all men” “I’m not like that” “it’s only a small percentage of men”, how can women tell which men are safe, this is not snark but a serious question. What do we look for, what’s a clue that “this good presenting man” will not turn on us? Because every time we share our stories, it seems a lot of men here don’t understand the underlying issue, trust. They seem to miss the common thread that most of us have been raped by men we knew, loved and trusted.

Most Kos posts start with a photo or image. For this one Vieux reproduced a poem she wrote in 2023 in response to the MAGA movement, though she says it has nothing to do with the subject in the body of her post. She starts the poem with “You call yourselves ‘good people’” and ends with:

You call yourselves moral and virtuous Claim to value all human life It’s so easy to “call” yourself good It’s so easy to wear the make up of morals It’s so easy to cover yourself in pretend virtue What you call yourselves is immaterial What you are screams through the lies What you are shouts out loud piercing the facade What you are comes out in your actions You are vile, cruel, petty, and mean.

Their power is in broad daylight with total opacity

I’ve heard the term “redpill” before but didn’t really know what it meant. It comes from the 1999 movie The Matrix which I haven’t seen. At some point Neo, a main character, must choose between a red pill and confront reality or a blue pill and remain ignorant of reality. Kos of Daily Kos says there is now a black pill, though he doesn’t say where the term originated.

Unlike the blue pill, which means choosing ignorance, or the red pill, which means confronting reality, the black pill means giving up entirely. The problems are too big, the system is too broken, and nothing anyone does will make a difference.

The people who are figuratively taking the black pill are young men. The manosphere got these men to vote for the nasty guy in 2024. But the nasty guy hasn’t tried to keep them happy. Sure, he’s ranted against the supposed discrimination of white men and he and his team have posted racist memes, but that doesn’t pay the rent.

Bloomberg reports that more than 700,000 women have entered the workforce since Trump returned to office, compared with just 65,000 men. Construction employment has grown, but other male-dominated industries—including manufacturing, mining, transportation, and warehousing—have shed jobs. Meanwhile, inflation continues to squeeze household budgets, mortgage rates have pushed homeownership further out of reach, and gasoline prices remain roughly 37% higher than when Trump returned to office.

When they do get a job their economic mobility is lower. These young men are questioning their future. The MAGA movement was never about improving people’s lives – except himself, his family, and his cronies. MAGA was about hating others but with terms so vague the vice nasty can’t define them. These young men are discovering the nasty guy never intended to help them and he’s not delivering the revenge they want. What’s left is “living in their parents’ basements, gambling on sports, playing video games, vaping, and watching porn.” Kos will be happy if they don’t commit violence and don’t vote. I have a bit more compassion than that and will vote for people who have a goal of making life better for everyone, including those young men who have taken the black pill. Alix Breeden of Kos also wrote about young people, those trying to make the world better by running for office. Many face a problem – their online pasts are being put on display as campaign fodder. Breeden is a Millennial and is sure there is something in nearly young person’s social media that is worth talking about. That means some young people will decide they can never run for office. Others, such as Chris Gallant, 37 and running for Congress, are advocating for leniency. If the comments aren’t illegal, the writer should acknowledge that was in their history and doesn’t represent who they are now and should receive grace. Maybe this can be a breakthrough moment in understanding we’re all human and messing up is relatable. And a young candidate can refuse to be ashamed of their past. Lisa Needham of Kos reported we used to have a functioning Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to work with state election officials to secure voting infrastructure form attacks. But, like a lot of government, it’s been gutted. But it still asked to do a few things. CISA was supposed to secretly hack election machines and report findings to the White House. The purpose wasn’t to warn the voting machine companies, but to give the nasty guy a way to manipulate elections for Republicans. The command is in the past tense because the employees capable of this sort of hacking were laid off by DOGE.

Where CISA used to work in collaboration with the states, advising them on cybersecurity needs, it’s now just another part of Trump’s push to wreck elections. “Our number one risk at this point is the federal government,” Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold told Politico.

In today’s pundit roundup for Kos Chitown Kev quoted Marta Peirano of El País in English talking about how AI could disrupt our election. They could manipulate vote counts, though this remains least likely. They could cyberattack election facilities. And the most likely scenario is a deluge of disinformation campaigns where AI agents try to convince us that voting systems have been compromised and a large-scale fraud operation is underway. Already AI has been used to create fake document alleging fraud and to create videos of people tampering with ballot boxes, of the FBI inspecting boxes, of investigating voter registration groups, of corroborating conspiracy theories. Major AI companies say they have appropriate safeguards. But...

Big tech platforms concentrate unprecedented influence and access because they have replaced much of the traditional political infrastructure. They fund candidates and distribute their campaigns opaquely and selectively, but they are also the public square and the private communications system. They monitor all the public spaces where citizens debate, complain and express support or outrage. They are the main tool of power but also the means by which civil movements and the opposition coordinate and communicate. They distribute propaganda and journalism alike. Their alliance with the Trump administration in the age of artificial intelligence expands their power as surely as their large data centers do—broad daylight and total opacity.

In the comments exlrrp posted a meme that fits with I wrote about yesterday. It shows Lt. Uhura of Star Trek saying, “Captain, it’s just a message on repeat asking if we disavow the Muslim Brotherhood.” Another meme posted by exlrrp is based on the nasty guy wanting to rename New Mexico as “New America.” Officials in New Mexico expressed their displeasure with that request, though they are pleased it is something he can’t do. The meme references MapQuest, the map company that did not rename Lake Ontario (who knew wearing a tourist shirt with that name would be an act of resistance?). Here’s the meme:

Instead of renaming New Mexico to “New America”, maybe we should rename Washington DC to “New Moscow.” Are you listening MapQuest?

It’s you who needs to understand the Constitution, not me

I finished the book Only This Beautiful Moment by Abdi Nazemian. It is a novel about three generations of Iranian men at the time they each come of age. The youngest is Moud, a name he prefers to Mahmoud because that is the same name of the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who said Iran doesn’t have any gay people. Moud is gay. He’s a senior in high school in Los Angeles in 2019 and has boyfriend Shane. He lives with his father, who is distant and doesn’t speak about Moud being gay with a boyfriend. Moud is told his grandfather in Tehran is ill and doesn’t have long to live, so he and his father fly to Tehran to spend a few months before the old guy dies. In Tehran Moud’s cousin takes him to the underground queer community and he finds it to be much more loving and supporting than he thought possible. While in the country he begins to understand his heritage. Moud’s father is Saeed. He was a college student in Tehran in 1978 when there were large protests against the Shah that prompted violent regime responses. For safety Saeed is sent to Los Angeles to live with the American grandmother he had never heard about. Saeed’s father is Bobby who was a senior in high school Los Angeles in 1939 and living with his mother Margaret and stepfather. He is also gay and in love with Vicente of Mexican descent. Mom is quite the stage mom and gets Bobby an audition at MGM studios, which accepts him. He is asked (ordered) to play piano at a party hosted by Joan Crawford at the home of a gay couple. There he sees that gay people can form lasting and loving relationships and that there are clubs where queer people can gather. But studios have morals clauses in their contracts. Margaret, Bobby, and Saeed are very bad at telling the next generation about their history and culture. Bobby isn’t told about his Iranian father. Saeed isn’t told about his father being gay and that his mother is a lesbian and their marriage is one of convenience and support. Moud isn’t told much about his mother who had died when he was young and nothing about his grandfather being gay. When all this history is revealed it leads Saeed and Moud into greater appreciation for their culture and family. Saeed and Moud call the old man Baba. The book doesn’t say if the term means “Grandfather” or if it is the Iranian version of Bobby. In Tehran Moud learns his grandfather is is more than a music teacher. He and his wife are mentors in the queer community. Moud’s cousins tell friends to visit the teacher for “music lessons” which many times are lessons in love and acceptance of themselves. This is a wonderful book, full of family and community. I thoroughly enjoyed it and recommend it. Even so, I think there could have been more to the story. How did Margaret come to fall in love with an Iranian man and why did she leave him behind? The broad outlines were sketched but I would have enjoyed more detail. I also wanted to read more about what happened when Bobby met his father and why he decided to stay in Iran. I wanted more about the marriage Baba and his wife created and how that resulted in Saeed. Yeah, nearly 400 pages wasn’t long enough. Daily Kos community member alkatt posted an exchange with transcript between Abdul El-Sayed, Democratic nominee for the Senate from Michigan, and a man named Tommy. The exchanged happened at a campaign event and has gotten a lot of notice. Here’s my condensed summary: Tommy: “Will you disavow the Muslim Brotherhood?” Abdul: “Yes, absolutely.” But why are you asking the question? You’re assuming because I’m a Muslim I must have dual loyalties, that I would have a higher allegiance than the US Constitution. So why are you asking the question? Abdul brings up John F Kennedy and the concern the country had that because he was Catholic he would have a higher allegiance to the Pope. But Abdul won’t be a Muslim Senator, he’ll be a Senator who happens to be Muslim. Abdul: Tommy, are you a man of faith? Tommy: Yes, a Christian. Abdul: The Constitution guarantees both of us the right to choose the faith we practice. “So I’m going to ask you, do you disavow any attempt to read any religious doctrine into the laws of our country?” Tommy: “I do not.” Abdul: “You don’t disavow that. So, I think it’s you who needs to understand the Constitution, not me.” The audience cheers as Tommy leaves, visibly defeated. Oliver Willis of Kos adds background to the story. The event happened in Caro, Michigan, a small town in Michigan’s “Thumb,” very much a conservative area of the state. Willis wrote:

After the exchange went viral, reporter Marisa Kabas uncovered that the questioner was Thomas Teepell, who previously served as operations director for Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri. Teepell also worked for a Republican gubernatorial campaign in Kansas and is the son of Republican strategist Timmy Teepell, who worked for former Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal. Teepell’s attempt to throw off El-Sayed at a local event came just a few weeks after the conservative super PAC America Next offered up $200 to college Republicans to travel to Michigan and disrupt El-Sayed events.

Willis also reported on conservative talking heads who attacked El-Sayed for claiming he didn’t issue is disavowal fast enough or what he said wasn’t actually a disavowal. Since then I’ve seen cartoons featuring cartoons with one person mad at another for not disavowing the Muslim Brotherhood. El-Sayed is very much someone I can vote for. I’m pleased he took the time to root out what was behind the question. Thom Hartmann of the Kos community wrote about what he calls the greatest betrayal in American history. He begins with:

What the hell is going on in the Republican Party? Trump gutted his own Russia sanctions law, cut a diesel deal with Putin, and is now talking about carving up the world with Putin and Xi. Congress has the power to stop him right now: why are Thune and Johnson still on vacation? Yesterday Donald Trump told reporters he’s ready to sit down with Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping in Shenzhen next month — apparently, a modern-day Yalta conference to carve up the world — and that Ukraine’s president may not be invited to the meeting that will decide Ukraine’s fate. ... The party of Mike Johnson and John Thune, however, appear to have decided that the fate and future of American and European democracy is simply negotiable, and that it’s just fine that Putin is now running our foreign policy.

Some Republicans are muttering about this, but not more than that. Conservative pundits, such as the Murdochs, are using much stronger language. Hartmann reviews what Putin has been doing in Ukraine, including that it includes torture, children kidnapped and sent to Russia, and other vile things. He also noted “Elon Musk has put $366 million into this midterm cycle, $276 million of it in the last three months alone” thanks to the Supreme Court legalizing corruption. Republicans are the only ones who can stop the nasty guy and this Shenzhen summit. Where are they? Both the House and Senate are on break, scheduled to return after the election.

They can keep calling themselves “Republicans” if they like, but they’ve forfeited the right to call themselves “patriots” or, arguably, even “Americans.” My dad’s party — and the Republican statesmen of his day like Goldwater and Dirksen — would’ve been on a plane back to Washington the Friday night Trump killed those sanctions, and had an impeachment resolution on the floor by Monday morning.

Hartmann urges us to call Republicans, even those who work at the state and county level, and ask if they side with Eisenhower or Putin and Xi. Do they intend to stay in the party that betrays our nation this way? Eric Schmeltzer a Kos contributor and a Democratic communications consultant wrote that Republicans are trying to escape the stink of being associated with the nasty guy. Democrats should act like Rocky in the Rocky IV and keep them stuffed in the corner, keep their association with the nasty guy front and center. The nasty guy is providing plenty of help, having said, “pretend I’m on the ballot.” For every issue that’s brought up every Democratic candidate needs to say the problem is because of “Trump and [local candidate].” Every news reporter should ask the questions that link the candidate in front of them to the nasty guy. Everyone who can stomach going to a Republican campaign event should ask a similar question and record the answer. If they can’t send the video to a local news outlet, send it to Schmeltzer and he’ll get it into the appropriate hands. And one of the things journalists and citizens can ask about is whether they approve of the nasty guy meeting with Putin and Xi to carve up the world. Over the last few days NPR has played a clip from the nasty guy saying he’s mad at Zelenskyy for not making a deal. I hear that and think the nasty guy doesn’t care about Zelenskyy or Ukraine. What he cares about is getting credit for closing the deal. Lisa Needham of Kos reported that the nasty guy and the vice nasty have set aside $25 million for the Fraud Whistleblower Incentive Program. Uh, guys, we have a whistleblower program. It allows a person who knows the details of a government department to warn of possible fraud. It offers protections to the whistleblower.

What’s happening here is, well, not that. This is just encouragement for randos with no connection to or understanding of federal programs to declare that a company or city or state or person that they don’t like is misusing federal funds. If that little stunt catches the administration’s eye and they convict someone for fraud, you get up to $30,000. You’ll note that happens whether there’s any recovery of federal dollars or not. The point is the brutality of the prosecution and conviction, not of getting taxpayer money back. It’s the second part of the announcement—that you’ll get rewarded if your tip leads to federal enforcement action—that really shows what this is all about: getting the worst people in the world to gin up laughably thin claims of “fraud” in a program they have no understanding of or familiarity with or connection to, as a way to allow the administration to come in and brutalize a blue city or state.

As evidence of what Needham is saying she wrote the first award went to Nick Shirley, the guy who created videos claiming to show massive fraud in Minnesota daycare facilities. Those claims were what accelerated Metro Surge in the state, which murdered two people and arrested 3,800, of which more than 60% did not have a criminal record. No federal money was recovered.

So, to sum up: this announcement is nothing but is a bounty on the heads of immigrants and blue cities and blue states, and the scummiest people are going to be happy to try to collect it. Those same scummy people will cheer as a city gets crushed under the brutal weight of ICE.

The movie Digger starring Tom Cruise came out at the start of October. Metacritic gave it an average score of 46 out of 100 with Original-Cin giving it a score of 100 and New York Post giving it zero. I haven’t seen it. Thom Hartmann went to see it and discussed it for Kos. He wrote:

Don’t believe the negative reviews coming from the rightwingers; this is a brilliant movie about one of the most important issues of our day, climate change, and the fossil fuel industry’s complicity in knowingly destroying our planet and our culture.

For most of the two hour run time it seems like a cartoonish satire. “But the shocking last twenty minutes reorganized my entire understanding of what Cruise was doing.” That says the movie is effective in its message and the bad reviews are to keep people from seeing it. Hartmann wrote:

He [Cruise] lays out the fossil fuel industry’s last and best alibi — that they drilled and sold us oil because we demanded they do it — that I’ve been pointing to ever since 1998 when I published the first edition of The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight.

No, we didn’t simply demand more oil. Government and corporate policies pushed us to needing more oil and away from policies that would reduce our use of oil. That includes eliminating streetcar lines (see streetcars, Detroit, and General Motors) and minimizing train service. Big Oil’s business model includes a disinformation campaign and buying politicians. Back to Hartmann’s book. For most of humanity’s history we lived off “current sunlight” captured by plants. That became the basis for everything we ate and much of what we built. We found coal 900 years ago and oil 150 years ago. We began to live off the planet’s sunlight savings. We could consume more resources, in food, heat, and other things than what current sunlight could provide. That leads to a population that “depends on it and will suffer if it is taken away.” Movies like Digger can reshape the narrative around oil. That can reshape behaviors. Hartmann asks us to see the movie before it is buried by conservative slander.

Cute AI climate projects hide AI increasing fossil fuel use

I finished the book Only Son by Kevin Moffett. A sticker on the cover says it was on the longlist for the National Book Award. A description is straightforward: In the first third of the book the narrator describes the effect of losing his father at about age nine. In the middle third he talks about life as an adult with a son of his own. In the final third he and his son take a road trip, the basic outline taken from a brief description in his father’s diary. The trip happens the summer before the son goes off to college. While the book is praised and Goodreads gives it a decent reader rating of 3.9 out of 5, I was less pleased. Each scene in the book is short – rarely up to two pages, usually just a couple paragraphs, many times just s sentence or two. A lot of those scenes, especially in the middle of the book, seem to have topics all jumbled together, most of them seeming to have little to do with the general flow of the story. I bought the book because it was about the relationship between a father and son, including how the narrator losing his father affected how he raises his son. I don’t think I got much of that. With a book that gets this much praise I did enjoy reading it. I don’t think the story adds up to much. Last weekend Dan Gearino, in an article for Inside Climate News posted on Daily Kos discussed the chatter about AI at Climate Week NYC. One part of that chatter was about how AI could help reduce emissions in transportation, manufacturing, and buildings. Those benefits would outweigh AI’s big climate footprint. But AI also produces climate denial and perhaps misplaced optimism that technology can get us out of the mess. There was also chatter in how AI could optimize fossil fuel extraction and production – coming up with ways to increase the use of fossil fuels. So the benefits of AI are still hazy and off in the future and the problems of AI, such as high electricity demands for data centers, are happening right now. Holly and Will Alpine wrote about all that in the journal Nature. Holly said in an email to Gearino:

What we’re seeing at Climate Week is a familiar pattern: companies spotlighting a handful of clean energy pilot projects while the overwhelming majority of AI’s actual applications are aimed at increasing fossil fuel extraction and production. Nvidia’s post is a good example—highlighting a renewable energy partnership is easy and photogenic, while conveniently omitting how much AI is being deployed to find, extract, and produce more oil and gas.

Gearino turned to data centers. The AI companies don’t know how many of what size they will need. Electricity companies don’t know how many power plants to build. If they build too many, if the AI boom slacks off, the electricity companies may have to cover their costs by billing the rest of us. But if they don’t build enough and fast enough AI centers will use the “least efficient and most expensive power technologies, such as natural gas combustion turbines.” Lisa Needham of Kos wrote:

Bloomberg is reporting that the Trump administration has hit yet another milestone, and it is not a good one: For the first time, federal contract spending is more than $1 trillion. That’s “trillion,” with a T. Part of why you’re paying more is that because President Donald Trump’s gutting of the administrative state means outsourcing tasks to private companies, and that costs more.

These contracts to private companies are to pay for services the government used to do before DOGE fired 400,000 government employees. The services still need to get done and if the government doesn’t have enough employees to do it they must pay a private company to do it. And private companies want profit. So DOGE “savings” cost us more than leaving employees in place. Two weeks ago Needham told another side of the story.

Right now, every week, you’re paying $1.6 million to Voice of America employees, which probably sounds totally good and fine, because we should pay federal employees and pay them well, right? The problem is that you’re paying them to not work, and you’ve been paying that for months now.

The nasty guy wanted to close VOA and appointed Kari Lake to dismiss the staff. But a judge ruled her appointment to be illegal and those hundreds of employees were ordered back to work. But with VOA closed these employees have nothing to do. They’re not the only workers in this predicament.

Last month, an entirely different government agency, the Government Accountability Office, issued a report saying that in the aftermath of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency rampage through the federal government, $9.5 billion of your tax dollars have gone to paying federal employees not to work. That’s because DOGE’s antics resulted in a 435% spike in paid administrative leave.

DOGE claimed they would save us $2 trillion, a number that kept dropping. But in its first few months DOGE cuts cost us $135 billion. Some of that was because of cycles of firing and rehiring.

Overall, after all of these cuts, the administration shrank the workforce by over 350,000 employees. Yet somehow the federal deficit is higher and total spending is higher. Terrific job, everyone. It costs a lot to be this stupid, apparently.

Kos of Kos discussed a New York Times article that talked to disaffected conservatives. They are voters who want to punish Republicans by voting against them or tuning out the election. Kos says not voting is better than the alternative of voting for Republicans. But it must be nice to simply tune out the suffering their vote for the nasty guy caused. Even nicer would be to take responsibility for that mess and help clean it up. Yes, that means voting for Democrats. People who care for others.

The dealmaker makes another empty deal

I’ve mentioned the nasty guy made a deal with Russia to sell diesel fuel to the US. He made that deal because diesel prices are so high due to the war he started in Iran. Kos of Daily Kos explains how bad the deal is. Russia would supply 300,000 metric tons with another 500,000 tons in November and eventually up to 4 million tons sometime in the future. That sounds like a lot. But it isn’t. That first shipment is about 14 hours of American diesel consumption. The three shipments of 1.8 million tons will last about three and a half days. The grand total will cover less than ten days. The total amount is not enough to affect global prices. The deal is based on whether Russia has diesel to spare – and it doesn’t. Ukraine has so damaged Russia’s refineries it doesn’t have enough for domestic needs. Russia had banned exports and is importing from Iran and South Korea.

Trump doesn’t care about any of that. What matters to him is that 1) he could finally align U.S. policy alongside fascist Russia, and—this is particularly important—2) he could now blame Ukraine for high diesel prices. And his surrogates spent the weekend doing just that.

The nasty guy is also able to announce he made a wonderful deal to help out truckers and farmers. He won’t be saying anything about how empty the deal is.

Trump and Putin are fuming about Ukraine because their refinery strikes have emerged as one of its most effective weapons against Russia’s war machine. They damage Russia’s ability to fuel its military, disrupt its domestic economy, and deprive the Kremlin of revenue it needs to continue its invasion. So for Trump’s diesel deal to work, he needs Ukraine to stop doing one of the things that is actually working against Russia.

Thankfully, not many people are buying the BS the nasty guy is selling. That means he has no more leverage over Ukraine. And Europe has noticed and is working to replace American military and intelligence assistance. That leaves Ukraine to chart its own course through the war. The nasty guy announced an energy ceasefire. Zelenskyy said he would agree to it if Russia did. Russia hit some energy infrastructure – so Ukraine is back to attacking refineries. FischFry of the Kos community worked from a thread by progressive economist Gabriel Zucman to explain one of the ways the rich don’t pay taxes. The particular rich person in this story is Peter Thiel. He founded PayPal and got rich when he sold it. He’s gay yet a far right political player and anti-tax crusader. Back in 1997 the Roth IRA was created. It allows a person earning less than $110K to put up to $2K a year into a Roth account. When the person turns 60 he can withdraw from it tax free. At the time Thiel set up his Roth he was earning about $73K at PayPal. Thiel had his Roth invest in PayPal stock – 1.7 million shares at a price of $0.001 a share. A month later PayPal sold shares to investors for $500,000 each. Now there is speculation Thiel’s Roth is worth about $20 to $30 billion. And he can start withdrawing it – all tax free – in six months. FischFry wrote:

One can only begin to imagine the impact Thiel might have with that vast fortune, but we should fear so much of it will be used to further pollute political discussion, advancing the worst elements of our body politic.

Time for a wealth tax. Eleanor Beardsley of NPR reported that 500 to 700 grocery stores in France had their freezers and cold rooms hacked, turning them from coolers to heaters. Of course, all the food in them was spoiled. Strangely, the hackers didn’t ask for money. The freezers were hit because their security software hadn’t been updated (a reason not to connect freezers to the internet? – didn’t used to need to). One of the shopkeepers said incidents like this will only increase with AI able to sniff out hacking opportunities. My thermostat is programmable, but does not connect to the internet. I’m going to keep it that way. In today’s pundit roundup for Kos Chitown Kev quoted Paul Krugman writing for his own Substack. By mid March of 1945 Hitler knew the war was lost. He didn’t believe he had failed, he had been failed by the German people. Yeah, the tyrant believed the people hadn’t sufficiently supported his tyranny.

So on March 19 he issued the “Decree concerning demolitions in the Reich territory,” which has come to be known as the Nerobefehl or Nero decree. It ordered the destruction of Germany’s own infrastructure — supposedly to deny that infrastructure to the Allies, but the obvious purpose was to punish his own country. […] Think of the Kennedy Center, a national icon that Trump is destroying because he can’t put his own name on it, as the model for what is all too likely to happen to America over the next two years. Can Democrats stop the coming reign of destruction?

Democrats won’t get any help from the Supreme Court or supine Republicans and the nasty guy has backing of billionaires,

with vast resources who will continue to enable his attack on democracy even if their billions in political spending aren’t enough to buy this election.

In the comments exlrrp posted a meme from Tom Weinner.

Trump decided what to do in Iran by listening to Netanyahu. Now he’s deciding what to do in Ukraine by listening to Putin. The worst people in the world just lead him around by the nose from one catastrophe to another.

South Grand Prairie High School in Texas was told by their school board to shut down a production of Little Shop of Horrors. The reason: The lead character is Seymour, but not enough boys auditioned for the part. So it was given to a girl. That would mean when Seymour fell in love it would be with another girl. And that would violate Senate Bill 12. At least that’s the excuse the school board is giving. The version of SB12 prohibiting sexually-oriented performances on public property in the presence of anyone under 18 has been blocked by the courts. That provision isn’t in the current version of the bill. But Gov. Greg Abbott and AG Ken Paxton are pressing the ambiguity, prompting the school district to obey in advance. Thankfully, Abbott and Paxton are both in tight races.

And while the bill originally targeted drag queens, Texas Republicans have now made a new and vocal enemy: theater kids.

David Horsey posted a cartoon on Kos showing a large pizza with four people around it. The guy with a huge grin labeled “Top 1%” will get most of it. “Merely wealthy” with get a small slice. “Upper middle class” will get a thin slice. And “Lower 50%” will get crumbs. Horsey’s caption says, “This is not a joke.” Pedro Molina posted a cartoon on Kos appropriate for the Cornell 7 scandal. It shows a ball rolling downhill gaining size as it goes. Beside the small ball at the top is, “They’re just boys.” At the next larger ball is, “Their parents should teach them how to behave... I’m talking about the girl’s parents, of course!” After three more quotes, the one at the bottom is, “You know, I have this private island.”

Hurt some and offer their pain as a spectacle to everyone else

My Sunday movie was Tales from the Script, documentary about movie screenwriters. More than 40 writers talk about their work. Some of the famous ones are John Carpenter, Frank Darabont, Antwone Fisher, and William Goldman. They talk a bit about the writing process and needing to be willing to rewrite it 40 or more times. They talk more about: How competitive the business is and no one cares how good your previous script was, until you are a proven moneymaker. How hard it is to get an agent. How hard it is to pitch your story to a movie executive who loses nothing if he says no and might cause himself and his company a great deal of worry if he says yes. Costs are so high studios are very cautious. Or the producer says it’s a great idea but I want another writer to do it. Or they want changes – and if they want to add a chase scene it’s an indication there is a structural flaw elsewhere in the story. One must try to look lesser than the producer. What happens when the director and actors get ahold of it. They’ll say the character isn’t quite real and should say this instead. You must let them do it. This movie is divided in to chapters – talking about agents, producers, directors, actors – and at the start of each one is a scene from a movie about making a movie. And if you do end up with a hit the success can scare you so badly your writing freezes. So become a screenwriter only if your personality won’t let you do anything else. I enjoyed the film. Many of the stories are amusing or interesting. An example is Antwone Fisher working with Sidney Poitier. Fisher is so in awe in meeting his idol he can’t get coherent sentences out. I had previously written about documentaries about film composers and casting directors. I finished the book Packing for Mars, the Curious Science of Life in the Void by Mary Roach. One might think this is about what to throw in a suitcase and a rebuttal to the book City on Mars by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith that is highly critical of the efforts to get to Mars and that the fundamentally difficult problems in getting there seriously question the benefits of going. I reviewed that one back in April. But this book is more of a companion piece. I think a more accurate title would be Packing a Body for Mars. Getting a robot to Mars now seems easy. We’ve done it many times. Getting a human body to Mars is significantly harder. Roach, with a humorous touch, explores the history of getting a body into space and to the moon, covering several of the issues: Can someone live in a can for the many months flying there would take? Can someone live with someone else in that same small can without going outside for a break? (The International Space Station shows we can, though an escape to earth is never far away.) What can the forces of liftoff do to a body? Of landing? Of the weightlessness between those two points? How to deal with the weightless equivalent of motion sickness? Why we need to bathe and can one adequately bathe in space? The main purpose of Gemini VII was to spend two weeks testing that. I learned a lot more than I wanted to about space toilets. I think the first two paragraphs explain the book well:

To the rocket scientist, you are a problem. You are the most irritating piece of machinery he or she will ever have to deal with. You and your fluctuating metabolism, your puny memory, your frame that comes in a million different configurations. You are unpredictable. You’re inconstant. You take weeks to fix. The engineer must worry about the water and oxygen and food you’ll need in space, about how much extra fuel it will take to launch your shrimp cocktail and irradiated beef tacos. A solar cell or a thruster nozzle is stable and undemanding. It does not excrete or panic or fall in love with the mission commander. It has no ego. It’s structural elements don’t start to break down without gravity, and it works just fine without sleep. To me, you are the best thing to happen to rocket science. The human being is the machine that makes the whole endeavor so endlessly intriguing. To take an organism whose every feature has evolved to keep it alive and thriving in a world with oxygen, gravity, and water, to suspend that organism in the wasteland of space for a month or a year is a preposterous but captivating undertaking. Everything one takes of granted on Earth must be rethought, relearned, rehearsed – full grown men and women toilet-trained, a chimpanzee dressed in a flight suit and launched into orbit. An entire odd universe of mock outer space has grown up here on earth. Capsules that never blast off; hospital wards where healthy people spend months on their backs, masquerading zero gravity; crash labs where cadavers drop to Earth in simulated splash-downs.

This is a fun and enjoyable read, and a great book for those into space exploration. On Monday Homeland Security obtained a warrant and raided the house of Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota. Even NPR saw that the raid was politically motivated. The reason for the raid was to look for evidence of illegal immigration – she came to the US from Somalia as a child, though is now a US citizen. The raid was to look for evidence that her father did something wrong on the immigration papers. Of course, the real reason for the raid is because Omar is Muslim and also an outspoken critic of the nasty guy. He’s trying to silence his critics. David Michigan of the Daily Kos community says there is another reason behind the raid. In the midterm elections (results should be known in three weeks!) Republicans will quite likely lose control of the House and could lose control of the Senate. Once in office Democrats will open (they’d better open – it’s one reason why we’re sending them there) investigations into the corruption of the nasty guy, his cabinet, and the other big people in his administration.

Given all this, what does trump want to do, more than anything else? De-legitimize the very notion of accountability for public figures. Opening a blatantly corrupt investigation of a political figure may seem like a curious way of achieving this end, but work through the logic: Democrats and even neutral observers immediately picked up on the political implications of the Omar raid and denounced it as politically motivated. If an investigation of a Democrat is widely seen illegitimate because of the political motivation, then how could an investigation of trump or his minions by a political body be anything other than illegitimate? That’s the question they are working to plant in the minds of Americans, and especially in the minds of reporters and editors. Surely we must both-sides everything. Three months now, if (knock on wood) the Congress opens investigations into administration malfeasance, the media will be under intense pressure to compare the hearings to the blatantly illegitimate raid on Ilhan Omar. ... Yes, the Omar raid was blatantly corrupt. Such a clear violation of every norm that the norm-breaking itself made the front pages. That was the point.

Thom Hartmann of the Kos community has a different and complementary take on the raid. It is the same terrifying tactic used by every dictator:

As every dictator on Earth can tell you, you don’t have to silence the entire country; all you have to do is shut up a few strategically-selected people visibly and publicly enough and the rest of the country will get the message and back away.

The tactic costs the tyrant little and can have enormous impact on public behavior. Hartmann explored some of the history of this tactic. King George II executed Admiral John Byng because he lost a battle. Voltaire included that in his novella Candide. Hitler threw a few thousand liberal commentators into newly opened Dachau. Stalin used it. Putin used against one billionaire oligarch, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and all the rest immediately fell into line. Joe McCarthy never sent anyone to prison but his hearings prompted thousands of people in the movie industry and elsewhere to shut up. Hartmann also lists the people the nasty guy has attacked in this or similar manner: James Comey, Letitia James, Lisa Cook, Adam Schiff, Jan. 6 testifier Cassidy Hutchinson, former CIA Director John Brennan, Olympian Davey Hearn who touched the Reflecting Pool paint, black journalists Don Lemon and Georgia Fort, George Stephanopoulos and Jimmy Kimmel of ABC, reporters banned from the White House, and many more.

As former Homeland Security Chief of Staff Miles Taylor told me on my radio/TV program when Trump went after him, Comey, and others, the raid itself is the punishment. To destroy a person financially, to traumatize them emotionally, and to scare the hell out of their colleagues in a way that will make them shut up you don’t need a conviction. Hell, you don’t even need a trial. Just a subpoena, a lawyer letter filled with threats, or a raid can lead to hundreds of thousands in lawyer bills and months of sleepless nights.

Right now judges are the only force capable of stopping the nasty guy. So, of course, he or his minions are attacking them too. If the legislature and the press are cowed the courts will eventually crack too.

Trump’s goal is a quiet country. A country where the prosecutor doesn’t bring the case against the powerful donor, the reporter doesn’t file the story, the professor doesn’t sign the letter, the grand juror doesn’t want the hassle, and the judge wonders about her family before she rules.

Another group that has a chance of stopping the nasty guy is Democrats in Congress. Vote to make sure they gain a majority in both chambers. In the comments of the pundit roundup for Kos from Wednesday a week ago exlrrp posted a meme of a message by Jon Stewart:

I just want to say this to Trump’s defenders. You don’t have to bend over backwards trying to make Trump’s authoritarian power grabs seem like the rule of law. He does not give a f--- anymore. He’s saying it straight up. Trump is saying the people like dictators. Trump is saying I hate my opponents and I want them punished. And Trump is saying I’ll use all the levers of government at my disposal to accomplish that goal. So you can get on board with that and say I’m with that or you can join the rest of us and fight like hell for this constitutional republic.

Another meme posted by exlrrp:

The liberal plot to make Republicans look stupid, also known as “Operation Just Let Them Speak,” is working splendidly.

In Sunday’s roundup Chitown Kev quoted Timothy Snyder writing for his own Substack about Hegesth saying the firing squad execution of Nidal Hasan will be livestreamed. Hegseth says it will deter terrorism.

To livestream an execution will not deter terrorism. It will invite terrorism, as Mr. Hegseth no doubt understands. The deeper political consequence, however, is domestic. The basis of politics in the Trump regime is sado-populism. Rather than offer policy that benefits Americans, Trump uses the government to hurt some, and offer their pain as a spectacle to everyone else. To livestream a public execution is to take that politics to its logical extreme. The federal government would be instructing us to observe, and thus participate in, a public killing. This invitation to us is a major step towards seeing politics only as the pain of others. While execution by firing squad is the endpoint of a judicial proceeding, broadcasting it is to advertise killing is a political transformation. If Americans view, clip, share, and permanently enshrine an American public killing in a million ways on the internet, we will move towards fascist rituals of violence.”

In the comments darthstar included a tweet by News Eye that says, “This is how you write a headline.” The headline appeared in The Telegraph for an article about Trump making a deal with Putin to buy diesel fuel. The headline and subhead:

Trump backstabs Zelensky for five minutes of midterm relief. Deal with Putin for Russian’s oil might soften the markets but Ukraine will pay the price.

And a tweet by the James Talarico campaign, running against Ken Paxton for the Senate. It’s a spoof of the easily debunked claim that Talarico wasn’t seen for several days, not because he was home with the flu, but in a mental hospital in Ohio.

I challenged Ken Paxton to a debate 85 days ago, but no one has heard from him. People are getting worried. I’ve received credible reports he’s suffering from a rare condition that causes clinical levels of cowardice. @KenPaxtonTx: I’m asking for proof of ability to debate.