Headline of the Day

How Status Quo Democrats Could Create Another Trump

—The Lever, offering the thesis that Obama's betrayal of his promise of, "Hope and Change," led directly to Donald Trump.

I would argue that it could lead to something even worse than Donald John Trump. 

When I look back on all of my work over the last 30 years, one of the projects I’m most proud of is Meltdown, an audio series I did in 2021 with acclaimed director Alex Gibney that reveals the untold story of how Obama-era Democrats turning promises of economic hope and change into more of the same created the backlash conditions for the rise of Donald Trump.

It is a miracle Meltdown ever got made, because calling its tale “untold” is an understatement. The story of Obama’s 2008 victory concluding with Trump’s 2016 win involves a sequence of economic facts and events that have been suppressed, shadowbanned, memory-holed, and censored from America’s political conversation. This is particularly true in media outlets that serve liberals, who seek comfort in the idea that Trump is an anomaly rather than a symptom of something their own political party participated in creating.

Every now and again, there are attempts to warn about this perpetual doom loop. Gibney and I did so ourselves after Meltdown debuted in the pages of Rolling Stone, where we cautioned against Democrats coming into office promising big New Deal-style economic changes, then mostly delivering only for their big donors. We warned that such a bait-and-switch would result in the inevitable backlash from disillusioned voters who would ignore syrupy odes to restoring democratic “norms” and decide once again to vote for a Joker-style candidate like Trump promising to blow up the entire system.

………

So it is time for another alarm to sound — and thankfully, a new paper has provided one. And this particular warning is backed by reams of economic data.

The paper from researchers at the Institute for New Economic Thinking is entitled “A Revolution of Falling Expectations: The Macroeconomic Roots of Popular Discontent.” It’s a wonky title that undersells what it is trying to warn us about.

The first part of the paper debunks the idea — loudly promoted by Democratic pundits — that Bidenomics was fundamentally changing America’s economic structure in positive ways. Yes, Biden’s administration did more for the working class than Obama’s, and with way less political capital. But at the end of Biden’s time in office, the overwhelming beneficiaries of Biden’s economic policy were people who were already wealthy.

………

These data points are a long-overdue corrective to an insidious narrative against so-called “deliverism” — the FDR-themed idea that politicians delivering for voters prompts them to support said politicians. After the 2024 election, elite pundits began insisting that Democrats should never again assume delivering material gains for voters wins elections because Biden supposedly did that, and Democrats still lost.  

………

This is the Democratic Doom Loop — a party that overpromises when it is out of power, then underdelivers (for everyone other than its donors) when it is in power — prompting voters to then angrily vote for a GOP that promises to destroy the whole system. And yet, discussion of this doom loop remains stifled by establishment Democrats and their media apparatchiks self-servingly promoting the notion of Trump as an outlier rather than a manifestation. 

The current Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) will never move from serving wealthy donors above all else because their livelihoods depend on this.

As such they are willing to lose, and to elect more Donald Trumps, in order to preserve their power within the Democratic Party, because otherwise, they would need to find meaningful work for a living. 

Headline of the Day

Memo to Those Who Fear Socialism: Why Don’t You Try Fix Capitalism? 

— The New Republic, on the current socialism panic.

I can answer this question:  Because the Free Market Mousketeers believe that capitalism cannot ever fail, it can only be failed. 

Everywhere I look, I see people expressing alarm about the popularity of socialism. It polls in the mid-to-high 30s, and considerably higher among younger people. Older people, who have a living memory of the various socialist regimes that once dotted the planet, which at best didn’t deliver prosperity to their people and at worst threw them in jail by the thousands, can’t understand how this could be and seem to want to talk endlessly about it.

I, however, marvel at the other consistent result of all these polls, which these people don’t seem nearly as interested in talking about. I refer to the ratings Americans give to capitalism. They’re terrible. A big Gallup poll from last fall is representative. Socialism won the approval of 39 percent, while capitalism’s positive number was 54 percent.

That is pathetic—barely half the country! In the country that invented modern capitalism and where it is worshipped by the elite class! And you know what? It’s entirely deserved. In fact, it deserves to be a little worse (as it is among Democrats). The kind of capitalism we’ve been practicing in this country over the last 40-plus years is cruel, corrupt, and a perversion of what humane capitalism ought to be. The people who are so freaked out about socialism ought to realize that the only way they’re going to arrest its rise is to change capitalism for the better.

 

Happiness Insights From ……… Richard Nixon?

kinda wild that Richard Nixon of all people had a profound insight about happiness pic.twitter.com/zAU6fWxd5s

— David Sirota (@davidsirota) August 9, 2026

Trippy

There a lot of things that could be said about Richard Nixon, many of them not printable, but, "Jolly," was not one of them.

On the other hand, as much as I despise him, Nixon was not an unintelligent man, and I do think that he was self aware to a degree that seems absent from our current polity. 

I do think that Nixon is right about how idle wealth and its ilk make for miserable people being miserable. 

He is a complex figure.

This is the guy who created the EPA, OSHA, ended military conscription, went to China, signed the Endangered Species Act, and proposed national healthcare and universal basic oncome.

This is ALSO the guy who authorized illegal acts against his political opponents, engaged in a coverup of such actions, dropped more bombs on Cambodia than the US dropped on Germany during WWII, actively stoked racism as a political tactic, fomented a brutal coup in Chile, delayed the end of the Vietnam War for as long as he could, (including colluding to prevent a peace deal as an election ploy), and campaign finance related money laundering.

This Applies to the US as Well

One possible reason for the EU underperforming is that the European Union and its member nations have structured their economies and societies to favor rent seeking over productive activity.

In addition to increasing inequality, rent seeking uses the power of the state to favor the already wealthy, it also crowds out productive activity, because the former is more lucrative.

To be fair, there is also the energy increases resulting from the cut off of cheap Russian natural gas as well.

Why is Europe falling behind in investment and growth compared with the US, let alone China and India?  In a new report, Labour Squeezed, Investment Stalled – the renowned economist Mariana Mazzucato and a team at the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose, financed by the European Trade Union Federation (SETU), reckon that the EU’s declining competitiveness is not the result of too much regulation or the lack of cheap credit as mainstream economists and Mario Draghi is his report for the EU Commission argued. 

Instead it is due to “falling investment and productivity caused by the hoarding of profits and higher payments to shareholders and CEOs rather than reinvested in production, innovation and good jobs”. The decline is the result of an emergence of a “capitalism of rent” in Europe, where income is increasingly captured not by producing anything, but by owning assets, financial positions and market power, and charging for access to them. Mazzucato concludes that Europe must switch from “an economy based on value extraction to one based on value creation”.

Mazzucato and and the IIPP show that headline profits have stayed healthy even as profitability in production have declined since 2000.  They claim that’s because profits have been captured through ‘financialisation’ ie non-financial corporations are increasingly make more money through financial investment rather than in production. In study of over 300 EU corporations, they find that around one in six firms surveyed now draw more than 10 percent of earnings from financial rather than productive activity. 

I think that the framing in the last paragraph is particularly important.

Stating that financial activity is not a productive activity is true, even if financial activity can aid in productive activity by allocating capital to business that need it.

Finance, as well as IP driven activity are profitable because they are fundamentally parasitic in nature when taken to extremes. 

It's why they are so hard to fight, they have excess profits that can be redirected to bribery in various forms to support their businesses. 

Musing on Life, Courtesy of John, Paul, George and Ringo

F%$# I'm old.

The Apotheosis of a Libertarian Community is an Out of Control HOA

Case in point, a massive survivalist bunker complex currently embroiled in litigation.

It sounds a lot like every Home Owner Association horror story that you have ever heard.

Row upon row of concrete bunkers with steel blast doors peek up from the rolling grasslands—like hobbit holes for the apocalypse.

There are 575 of them, clustered on a former munitions depot near South Dakota’s Black Hills and billed as “The Largest Survival Community on Earth.” The pitch: Ride out nuclear war, the next pandemic or societal collapse in relative comfort.

Yet for many residents, the dream has soured. The threat hasn’t come from Armageddon, but from friction that resembles a suburban homeowners’ association battle.

Lawsuits, countersuits and disputes are piling up over septic systems, property taxes, off-leash dogs and a growing list of community rules. The legal skirmishing has reached the state supreme court—twice. Promised amenities, including a restaurant bunker, a pool bunker and a horse-stable bunker, have yet to materialize. Guns have been drawn, and there have been offers to settle things with fists. The developer denies wrongdoing and says complaints come from a few malcontents.

………

The doomsday enclave, known as Vivos xPoint, is the brainchild of Robert Vicino, a Los Angeles-based entrepreneur who had a vision in 1980: He needed to build a large underground structure to protect 1,000 people from a coming “life-extinction event,” according to the company’s website. He since has developed a global network of such communities.

In 2016, Vicino began working with local ranchers to convert the long-abandoned South Dakota property—far from “known nuclear targets” and “high-crime anarchy zones” (read: cities)—into a compound for “like-minded survivalists to ride out ‘the event,’” as Vivos puts it. Vicino later bought the property outright, according to his son, Dante, Vivos xPoint’s director of operations.

No bear problem this time, at least not yet.

Headline of the Day

You Can't Build Useful Alliances With Fascists, Dumbass

—Karl Bode, on fundamental stupidity of not punching Nazis in the face.

I think that his subhed says it all, "I hope we all now understand that forging strategic policy partnerships with fascists is like trying to develop an intimate relationship with a running chainsaw."

Read the rest.  It's kind of hard to summarize. 

Mind Officially Blown

Heinz Doofenshmirtz as a good parent who has turned aside his own trauma to be a loving father and family man?

He's right, and I am shocked. 

Deep Thought

Man Will Never Be Free Until the Last King Is Strangled with the Entrails of the Last Priest

—Denis Diderot

Snark of the Day

We Were Wrong, Years Ago. We Should’ve Rooted for the Jocks to Win, to Stuff Those Nerds in the Locker for All Eternity.

—Atrios, on Mark Andreeson's recent incoherent philosophical statements

Mark Andreeson has been hitting podcasts and social media insisting that self-examination is not a real thing, but rather it is an artifact of a dysfunctional modern world.

He has in fact said that, "The whole idea of self-examination, he explained, is basically a Freudian fad— an invention dating from around 1910 that serious people have no business indulging."

I think that the Delphic Oracle, Socrates, Marcus Aurelius, Sun Tzu, Cicero, Lucretius, etc. would like to have a word with you.

It really is amazing how aggressively tech bros try to find a moral justification for their own selfishness.  

The Finest Bit of Politics Theory That I Have Heard in a Long Time

This is about Canadian politics, which is something that I know little about, beyond the fact that there are two sorts of Canadians, those who hate Donald Trump, and those who are committing treason in an attempt to sell their province to Donald Trump. (Mostly, but not entirely, in Alberta)

In any case, there were recently party elections for the leadership of the New Democratic Party, the most progressive of Canada's 4 major political parties, and had been completely trounced in the last elections, largely because the last permanent leader Jagmeet Singh had decided to walk back party priorities in order to be in the government (as a second party) with the centrist (I would argue center-right, but I am a Pinko) Liberal Party.

(I said that I know little about Canadian politics, not that I could not read about Canadian politics)

So, they had leadership elections, and Avi Lewis, who is associated with the party's left wing won, and many of the party stalwarts (read careerist assholes and fossil fuel stooges) have expressed dismay, and some have moved away from the party, with some NDP MPs crossing the floor to serve with the (not-so) Liberals. 

Their electoral blowout was a direct result of their selling their souls for proximity to power.

After that long introduction, let me quote Jason's analysis:

People are calling this a split in the NDP, but it's not.

This is what happens when a party finally decides what it is and what it represents.

For the last decade, the NDP has been drifting to the center by working alongside the Liberals, softening its message and trying to appeal to as many people as possible.

They thought that that was a strategy, but really it created a problem.

If you're offering a softer version of the Liberals, voters are just going to choose the Liberals. And that's what they did in this last election. The party blurred itself, its identity, and its message so much that it collapsed, and that collapse forced a choice.

………

And that's being framed as a split. But it's not dysfunction, it's alignment.

Centrists are being forced to decide where they belong.

Soft Liberals are being pushed back toward the Liberal Party of Canada. And the NDP is stopping its attempt to be a party that only cares about proximity to power and is putting an effort into defining itself. 

 Watch the whole thing, it's only about 6 minutes.

Sign of the Apocalypse

I did not expect to see this, but the New York Times OP/ED page actually has a worthwhile article, "State Terror Has Arrived," by M. Gessen.

They aren't saying anything that you aren't hear everywhere, but the for what Atrios calls, "That Fucking Paper," it is a departure. 

I would also note that given Gessen's experience in Russia, they are in a position to draw parallels.

After the past three weeks of brutality in Minneapolis, it should no longer be possible to say that the Trump administration seeks merely to govern this nation. It seeks to reduce us all to a state of constant fear — a fear of violence from which some people may at a given moment be spared, but from which no one will ever be truly safe. That is our new national reality. State terror has arrived.

………

……… We don’t focus on these details in order to justify the federal agents’ actions, which are plainly brutal and unjustifiable; we do it to force the world to make sense, and to calm our nerves. If we don’t talk back, if we alter our routes to avoid protests, if we are lucky enough to be white, straight, natural-born Americans — or, if we are not, but we lie low, stay quiet — we will be safe. Conversely, we can choose to speak up, to go to protests, to take a risk. Either way, we tell ourselves, if we can predict the consequences, we have agency.

But that’s not how state terror works.

In the 1990s, when I talked to people in the former Soviet Union about their families’ experiences of Stalinist terror, I was repeatedly struck by how much people seemed to know about their circumstances. Time and time again, people would tell me exactly what had led to their family members’ arrests or executions. Jealous neighbors had reported them to the authorities, or colleagues who had been arrested named them under duress. These stories had been passed on from generation to generation. How could they come to know so much, I wondered. They couldn’t. People crafted narratives out of suspicions, rumors and hints, to fill a desperate need for an explanation.

………

For this was the secret about the secret police that became clear when the K.G.B. archives were opened (briefly) in the 1990s: They were ruled by quotas. Local squadrons had to arrest a certain number of citizens so they could be designated enemies of the people. That the officers often swept up groups of colleagues, friends and family members was probably a matter of convenience more than anything else. Fundamentally, the terror was random. That is, in fact, how state terror works.

………

The toolbox isn’t particularly varied. President Trump is using all the instruments: the reported quotas for ICE arrests; the paramilitary force made up of thugs drunk on their own brutality; the spectacle of random violence, particularly in city streets; the postmortem vilification of the victims. It’s only natural that our brains struggle to find logic in what we are seeing. There is a logic, and this logic has a name. It’s called state terror.

To true. 

 

The Greatest Trick That Obama Ever Pulled Was Convincing the World He Was Powerless

I am, of course rephrasing Charles Baudelaire in the hed, though most people know it from the movie The Usual Susopects.

With all the talk of the Green Lantern theory of politics and the like, the centrists have maintained for decades that they simply lack to power to follow through on their promises.

The reality is that they are fine with the way things are, because they personally do very well under the current regime of inequality. 

That's also why the centrists want to keep the filibuster, it gives them another excuse not to do anything.

Of course, when the reactionary right takes the White House, whether it be Reagan, Bush I, Bush II, or Trump, they seem to have no problem making the United States a crueler and worse place.

Well, over at The Lever, David Sirota shines a light on what might be the only bright side to Trump being elected in 2024, he has shown that the centrist bleats about being powerless are a lie, and they always have been.

There are a few of us who are old enough to remember everyone in the Obama White House and in liberal media defending former President Barack Obama’s failures by insisting that he never had the power to do any of the big things he promised.

Those who pushed Obama to at least try to do what he promised were ridiculed by Ezra Klein as deranged believers in a so-called “Green Lantern Theory” of the presidency. When Obama’s own grassroots supporters tried to help round up congressional votes for his promised populist policies like a public health insurance option, Obama’s Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel reportedly lambasted those supporters with epithets:

The friction was laid bare in August when Mr. Emanuel showed up at a weekly strategy session featuring liberal groups and White House aides. Some attendees said they were planning to air ads attacking conservative Democrats who were balking at Mr. Obama’s health care overhaul.

“F—ing retarded,” Mr. Emanuel scolded the group, according to several participants.

………

To be fair, former President Joe Biden rammed through Congress a much bigger stimulus package than Obama ever tried, and pockets of the Biden administration at the Federal Trade Commission, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and the Justice Department’s antitrust division did laudably exercise much more power to deliver than their Obama predecessors ever did. And yet, in his rhetoric and deference to norms, Biden himself did his own part to enshrine the overall idea of the powerless president as Democratic dogma.

………

I bring this all up not because I live eternally in the past, and not just because I’m still mad about what happened in the Obama years, and not because I still believe that was the entirely preventable meltdown that explains this whole godforsaken era. I bring it up with an eye on the future: I want to remind everyone in the horrible here and now that President Donald Trump’s ongoing second-term rampage of unilateral executive power shows what a complete lie all of that pretend Democratic powerlessness really was. And that reminder is important so that nobody accepts that horseshit excuse ever again. 

This is why the Democratic Party rank and file know this, which is why they want Chuck Schumer's and Hakeem Jefferies' heads on a pike.

They have seen what the, "Better things aren't possible," policies leads to, and that is Donald Trump.

Since the mid-1970s, the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) has positioned itself as a ratchet, so while they were in charge, nothing would get much worse, but they would not reverse the evil done by the reactionaries when they had power.

This is unsustainable for us as a society, and that which cannot continue will not continue. 

I Did Not Think That It Could Get Any More Stupid

If it's good enough for Bogie, it's good enough for me

I was misinformed.

It appears that Trump's lust for Greenland can get even stupider, or at least the cadre of those supporting the policy can get even dumber. 

It appears that the the prospect of establishing "Freedom Cities" in Greenland is giving the tech bros a stiffie.

I would note to these folks, that a similar attempt in a far more accommodating and less dangerous local, rural New Hampshire, because some people insisted that it was their business and no one else's if they wanted to feed bears, with predictable results.

Living in Greenland is far more difficult than living in New Hampshire, and polar bears are far larger, and far more aggressive, than are the black bears that are the only member of the family Ursidae in the Granite State.

Doubtless, any such attempt will result in a collapse through technical issues, fraud, or bear maulings.

I favor the latter, particularly for Marc Andreeson. 

This past week, President Trump removed any remaining ambiguity about his intentions toward Greenland. During a White House event, he declared he would take the Arctic territory “whether they like it or not.” Then he laid down what sounded like a mobster’s threat to Denmark: “If we don’t do it the easy way we’re going to do it the hard way.”

Trump also reportedly ordered special forces commanders to come up with an invasion plan, even though senior military officials warned him it would violate international law and NATO treaties. In an interview with the New York Times, Trump said, “I don’t need international law.

……… 

Given the massing opposition to Trump’s quest for Greenland, and questionable security benefits from annexing the island, what’s really going on here?

………

But they stop short of examining the forces that may be actually driving the minerals agenda: tech billionaires like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, who see Greenland not just as a source of rare earths, but as a laboratory for their libertarian economic and social experiments. These tech-billionaires envision unregulated “freedom cities” in Greenland, free from democratic oversight, environmental laws, and labor protections.

Ken Howery, Trump’s ambassador to Denmark and a PayPal co-founder with Thiel and Musk, has reportedly been in talks to set up these low-regulation zones.

There’s an ironic clash of interests here: the national security establishment wants strong state control over strategic territory. The tech-billionaire funding Trump want the opposite: a deregulated playground for their anarcho-capitalist experiments. Both share a common blindness to Greenlandic sovereignty and Indigenous rights.

I'm hoping for bear maulings, lots, and lots of bear maulings. 

Another Reason to Support Platner in Maine

Janet Mills, Chuck Schumer's choice, has a long record as a stooge of predatory business.

At a time when Democratic voters are demanding new, antiestablishment leaders, the Democratic Party’s power brokers are pushing a seventy-seven-year-old candidate for a key 2026 Senate race who’s spent the past six years as governor vetoing collective bargaining rights for workers, tax increases on the wealthy, renter protections, and tribal sovereignty protections, according to a Lever review.

That candidate, Maine’s two-term governor, Janet Mills, entered the 2026 Democratic primary race last month to take on Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) as the hand-picked candidate of Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. Her opponent is Graham Platner, a forty-one-year-old oyster farmer and populist candidate running on delivering Medicare for All and breaking up monopolies. He’s faced scrutiny for past postings in online forums and a tattoo from his time in the military.

Since entering the race, Mills’s campaign has highlighted her stances on a host of progressive causes, including her labor advocacy and her efforts to protect health care and abortion rights.

But the governor’s veto pen tells a different story, say her critics.

When bills arrive on her desk, “there’s a perception that she’s mostly concerned with business interests,” said Andy O’Brien, a former Maine state representative and the current communications director for the Maine AFL-CIO union federation, speaking in his personal capacity. “She’s very good on social issues like reproductive rights, LGBTQ issues, and the environment, but when it comes to economic issues, she’s very conservative.”

………

Just months before she announced her Senate bid, Mills ended Maine’s 2025 legislative session by striking down a bill supported by labor groups that would have permitted farmworkers to discuss their pay and working conditions with one another without threat of retaliation from their employer, as well as file complaints to a state labor relations board.

Her veto letter explaining the decision cited concerns about “disruptions” to agricultural businesses caused by a “new regulatory burden.”

………

Mills, the granddaughter of potato farmers, has made blocking worker protections for these laborers a hallmark of her time in the governor’s mansion. 

………

In 2024, she killed a bill banning restrictive noncompete agreements that hamstring worker mobility. That same year, she vetoed another piece of legislation that would have strengthened workers’ collective bargaining rights by banning anti-union intimidation tactics used by employers

In previous years, she blocked efforts to stop employers from punishing employees who took state-guaranteed paid time off, killed a permitting reform bill to streamline offshore wind developments because it included a provision mandating union jobs, and vetoed a modest labor bill that would have required the state government to merely study the issue of paper mill workers being forced to work overtime without adequate compensation.

 Other vetoes:

• A bill prohibiting retaliation for using the state mandated leave rights.
• Campaign finance reform bill.
• Increasing taxes on the rich.
•  The creation of a rape kid database.
• Landlord protections.

I think that this is rather more significant than Reddit posts and a profoundly ill-advised tattoo.

•  

Headline of the Day

Libertarianism, 13, Dies in Argentina Chainsaw Accident 

— The Nerd Reich, on the disaster that is Argentine President Javier Milei

It should be noted that Libertarianism has never worked.

Attempts have always devolved into allegations of fraud, infrastructure collapse, or bear infestations.

Even at the stage of the hunter-gatherer, which covers about 98% of human history, people did not exist alone.  They lived in communities, albeit small ones, and to be separated from the community was death.

I am sure that God is relieved that Libertarians believe that they have created themselves, but this does not make it true.

While it had been around for quite a bit longer, its basic concepts never progressed beyond the early stages of adolescent brain development. Libertarianism—which asserted that society would be better off with minimal government, laws, and taxes—succumbed after chainsaw-wielding Argentine President Javier Milei asked the United States for a massive economic bailout due to his catastrophic leadership.

Milei, a werewolf-clown hybrid in a suit who once hired a spirit medium to communicate with his dead dog, swept into office promising a libertarian-inflected miracle in Argentina. In an early preview of Elon Musk’s DOGE, he slashed government and social spending. Earlier this year, an essay published on the website of the libertarian Cato Institute mocked his critics as doomsayers who “warned that the profane self-described libertarian—who looks more like a still-touring ’80s rockabilly singer than the classically trained economist he actually is—would inflict on Argentina’s already-beleaguered economy ‘deep recession,’ ‘devastation,’ ‘economic collapse,’ and all sorts of other economic horribles.”

But the critics were correct. Instead of miracles, the self-described “anarcho capitalist” has delivered shocking disaster: collapsing institutions, chronic inflation, and the awkward realization that screeching about free markets doesn’t put bread on the shelves.

At the core of libertarian philosophy is the belief that they are all some sort of Randroid supermen.

They are not. 

Quote of the Day

The things we see every day — and have seen every day for the past two decades in particular — are not the byproduct of singular screw-ups, or youthful folly, but rather unvarnished malevolence. And, as a result, we have no reason to give these people the benefit of the doubt.

—Matthew Hughes

I think that the calculus here is accurate.

Fundamentally, when one looks at Silly-Con Valley, it is clear that these so-called "missteps" that we continuously see are not the product of incompetence.

If it were, these "Accidents" would not always accrue to the benefit of the malefactors.

So, after dozens, if not hundreds, of similar incidents, we turn a decades old aphorism on its head, "Never attribute to stupidity which can be adequately explained by malice."

To quote a psychopathic moron responsible for what is almost certainly millions of deaths, "ool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again."

Snatching Defeat from the Jaws of Victory

I am, of course, referring to the  Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment)

Once again the Very Serious People™ in the party have looked at possible challengers to Susan Collins in Maine, after completely screwing the pooch the last time, and are trying to nominate the worst possible candidate.

The story is nominally about a Maine oysterman who has decided to run against Collins, but it buries the lede.

The important part of the story is that Schumer and the DSCC are pushing another candidate, current Maine Governor Janet Mills, age 77.

She would be the oldest freshman Senator in history. 

But that's OK, 77 is the new 76!  AmIright?

The DC Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) are the biggest losers to come out of Washington, DC since the Washington Generals, who were paid to lose to the Harlem Globetrotters.

At 8 a.m., Taunton Bay is glassy—the air cool but salty enough to make your nose wrinkle. A man in rubber boots, canvas pants, and a black t-shirt worn to gray, carrying a large cooler on his shoulder passes me on the beach. “Ya here for Graham?” he says, his Maine accent looping the first two words together. 

“Yup,” I reply. 

“Good man,” he says, continuing on his way.

I flew here to profile Graham Platner because his announcement video for his Senate campaign (produced by the same company that’s done work for Zohran Mamdani) struck the same deep chord in me as it did in the millions of others who watched it. His plainspoken fury at the billionaire economy broke through the noise of the Trump presidency to capture extravagant donations of voters (the campaign says they’re closing in on $1 million) and the attention of media outlets across the country.

That he’s been added as speaker at Bernie Sanders’s anti-oligarchy rally on Labor Day is unsurprising. That Sanders has had to move the rally to a bigger venue since Platner got on the bill is telling.

Merciful heavens.  A candidate who excites the party base!

I have the vapors.  This cannot be allowed.

………

Someone asks Platner why bother running as a Democrat. He says the infrastructure for fundraising would not be as robust if he ran as an independent and, besides, running as a Democrat in Maine isn’t the campaign-killer it would be elsewhere. “Also,” he says, “At my core, I’m a Democrat. I grew up as a Democrat, I voted Democratic, my whole life.”

He cautions: “I want to make it clear, I’m not running as a reform candidate here. We need to take the party back. We need to build power and leverage power, both in the party and the institutions of power to get what we need.”

There are a lot of do nothing Democrats, both among elected officials and the consultants who don't want that.  

They are too timid, and selecting for nothing beyond fund-raising prowess is easy and it makes them money.

Thus we have:

………

Reportedly, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is wooing Maine Governor Janet Mills to run for the nomination. At 77, a win against Collins would make her the oldest senate freshman in history. (Platner is 40.) Platner’s campaign only becomes an insurgency against Susan Collins if he first survives the Democratic establishment. His pointed critiques of party inaction have already set the tone. His candidacy isn’t just about beating Republicans, it’s about forcing Democrats to do more than fundraise off of their failures.

And this is why you want your name removed from the DCCC, DSCC, DNC, Mothership Strategies, etc. lists.

I don't know if he can beat Collins, but Mills certainly won't, but she'll raise a f%$# tonne of money to pay the consultants with, so Schumer et. al want her. 

Quote of the Day

The hover text was, "Achilles was a mighty warrior, but his Achilles’ heel was his heel."
Link to xkcd comic

Comic Book Nerds and Theologians Are the Same Animal

—JR on  the Stellar Parthenon BBS,

We were discussing this xkcd cartoon, and JR made this observation.

Mind officially blown, because it is Charles Dickens (Turnips and Taxes) true, and I never realized it before. 

How did I miss this for so many decades? 

Happy July 4th Everyone

A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

—The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America, July 4, 1776.