October 31, 2026 (Saturday)

On his “Swing Around the Circle” in summer 1866 to drum up support for his party before that year’s midterms, President Andrew Johnson denounced Congress as an illegal body, called certain Republican members of Congress traitors who should be hanged, and compared himself both to his martyred predecessor Abraham Lincoln and to Jesus Christ.

In those days, the Democrats were the party of slavery and secession, while the young Republican Party stood firm on the Declaration of Independence. Johnson was a former Democrat from Tennessee, placed on the 1864 “National Union Party” ticket to emphasize unity in the fight to save the United States, and became an accidental president after Lincoln’s assassination. Johnson had broken from his Confederate neighbors because he was happy to see the end of the institution of human enslavement even though he had enslaved people himself until 1863. He believed slavery enabled a few rich men to monopolize the nation’s wealth, shutting out poorer white men like him.

When he became president in April 1865, in the last days of the Civil War, he supported the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution. But that was as far as he went with the Republican plans for a future in which every man, regardless of race, would have the right to the fruits of his own labor. Johnson opposed the party’s growing support for Black rights and intended to reconstruct the United States on the basis of white supremacy.

In one of the nation’s most unfortunate series of events, Johnson took office while Congress was out of session. It would not reconvene until December. After Lincoln’s death, Republican members of Congress rushed to Washington, D.C., expecting Johnson would call them into special session as Lincoln had done in summer 1861, but Johnson declined to do so, intending to “restore” the nation on his own terms.

Johnson set out to resuscitate the prewar political system dominated by the Democratic Party, with himself at its head. Over the course of the summer, he pardoned all but about fifteen hundred former Confederates, either by proclamation or by presidential pardon, returning them to positions of authority in southern society.

He required only that southern states ratify the Thirteenth Amendment, declare secession illegal, and default on Confederate debts before they could be readmitted to the Union. Since he pardoned ex-Confederates and refused to endorse Black voting, Johnson guaranteed that the same men who had taken the South out of the Union would be responsible for bringing it back in.

Southern leaders half-heartedly met the president’s demands, then joined him in trying to re-create the world of the Old South. Within each state, through a series of laws together dubbed “Black Codes,” they bound formerly enslaved people to white employers and guaranteed the dominance of white people in the South. In Mississippi, for example, Black men could be arrested and fined if they did not sign yearlong contracts, then “hired out” to anyone who paid their fines—a system that essentially threatened uncooperative Black Americans with new language for an old system of forced labor. Nowhere could a Black person testify against a white person in court, so they had no recourse against theft, rape, assault, or even murder.

Republicans looked on, aghast, as Johnson and white southerners took only months to erase the hard-earned fruits of victory in the Civil War. Adding insult to injury, the 1870 census would count Black Americans as whole persons rather than three-fifths of a person, as they had been counted before the war, meaning the South’s representation in the House of Representatives would increase. If Johnson’s plan were permitted to go forward unchallenged, wealthy southern whites would be more powerful after the Civil War than they had been before it.

When Congress reconvened in early December, Johnson cheerfully informed the members that the country had been reconstructed. All that remained to do, he announced, was for Congress to admit newly elected southern representatives—including many of the same men who had taken the South out of the Union—to their seats. They were already in Washington, marveling at the changes the war years had wrought on what only four years before had been a sleepy southern town.

Republicans had no intention of allowing the South to win the peace after losing the war.

Congress refused to seat the South’s representatives and appointed a committee of fifteen members to come up with a better plan than Johnson’s for rebuilding the nation. The Committee of Fifteen spent months hearing testimony from southerners, white and Black, about conditions in their war-torn region. Finally, on the last day of April 1866, members of the committee introduced the joint resolution that would become the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution.

The amendment recognized that every man was equal before the law and that any person born or naturalized in America—except “Indians not taxed”—was an American citizen. To address the problem of the upcoming 1870 census, the committee proposed that congressional representation for the southern states be based on population, as with all states, but that southern representation be reduced in proportion to the number of men a state refused to allow to vote.

The committee prohibited from holding elected office anyone who had sworn to support the Union and then broken that oath in order to join the Confederacy. The amendment also closed loopholes that southern states had found to protect their war debt. Finally, like the amendment that preceded it, the Fourteenth Amendment increased the strength of the federal government by giving Congress the power to enforce its provisions.

Both chambers of Congress agreed to the amendment on June 18, 1866, and sent it off to the states for ratification. Congress required southern states to ratify the amendment before being readmitted to the Union.

Johnson hated the proposed Fourteenth Amendment. He hated its broad definition of citizenship; he hated its assertion of national power; he hated its disfranchisement of the southern leaders he backed. Most of all, though, he hated that it offered a moderate route to reunification that could be supported by most Americans. If it were ratified by the states, it would destroy his chances of rebuilding a dominant national Democratic Party.

Johnson told southern politicians to ignore Congress. Democrats would win the 1866 midterm congressional elections, he assured them, and once back in power, they would reject Republican “radicalism” and allow Johnson’s plan for reconstruction of the Union to proceed.

As he asserted his vision for the country, Johnson egged on white supremacist violence. In July, white mobs attacked a Unionist convention in New Orleans where delegates had called for taking the vote away from ex-Confederates and giving it to loyal Black men. The rioters killed thirty-seven Black people and three white delegates to the convention.

By then, Johnson had become as unpopular as his policies. Increasingly isolated, he defended his plan for the nation as the only true course. In late August he broke tradition to campaign in person, an act at the time considered beneath the dignity of a president. He set off on a railroad tour, known as the Swing Around the Circle, to whip up support for the Democrats before the election.

Speaking from the same set of notes as the train stopped at different towns and cities from Washington, D.C., to New York, to Chicago, to St. Louis, and back to Washington, Johnson complained bitterly about the opposition to his reconstruction policies, attacked specific members of Congress as traitors and called for them to be hanged, and described himself as a martyr like Lincoln. And, noting the mercy of his reconstruction policies, he likened himself to Jesus.

It was all too much for voters. The white supremacist violence across the South horrified them, the restoration of power to southern whites infuriated them, the reduction of Black soldiers to quasi-slaves enraged them, and Johnson’s attacks on Congress alarmed them. Johnson seemed determined to hand the country over to its former enemies to re-create the antebellum world that northerners had just poured more than 350,000 lives and $5 billion into destroying, no matter what voters wanted.

Johnson’s extremism and his supporters’ violence created a backlash. Northerners were not willing to hand the country back to the Democrats who were rioting in the South and to a president who compared himself to Jesus. Rather than turning against the Republicans in the 1866 elections, voters repudiated Johnson. They gave Republicans a two-thirds majority of Congress, enabling them to override any policy Johnson proposed.

And, in 1868, the states ratified the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, launching a new era in the history of the United States.

Thanks for posting.

November 1, 2026 (Sunday)

Having seemingly given up on the House of Representatives, President Donald Trump and the officials in his administration are indicating that they intend to steal the 2026 midterm election to maintain Republican control of the Senate.

Trump continues to try to use the power of the government to boost his own popularity. On Friday and Saturday, Social Security Administration Commissioner Frank J. Bisignano sent an email to people with online Social Security accounts declaring that under Trump, “the Social Security Administration (SSA) is transforming into a model of excellence,” producing “the best performance in the agency’s 91-year-history.” More than 100 million Americans have online SSA accounts.

In fact, as Tara Siegel Bernard reported in the New York Times in July, the Department of Government Efficiency’s cuts of about 14% of SSA staff have created service delays. It’s much harder to get an in-person appointment, and although the agency reports that average phone response times dropped from 11 minutes to 5 minutes, it achieved that reduction by counting anyone who agrees to hang up and accept a return phone call as waiting zero minutes.

But it’s not just in boosting Trump that the administration is corrupting our government. Yesterday, in an astonishing illustration of just how thoroughly Trump and his cronies are weaponizing the government to cement their power, U.S. District Judge Trina Thompson of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California ordered the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to stop threatening local and state election officials with criminal prosecution if they don’t do as the administration demands.

Victoria Craw of the Washington Post reported that Thompson said that Attorney General Todd Blanche and Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin exceeded their authority when they sent warning letters to state election officials because states, not the federal government, are responsible for congressional elections. She also noted that they likely violated the Voting Rights Act by intimidating election officials.

“In the lead-up to the election,” Thompson wrote, “high-ranking DOJ and DHS officials have engaged in a campaign to intimidate, threaten, and coerce state and local officials and employees who are engaged in administering the ongoing midterm 2026 election. Although Defendants claim that their actions are designed to halt unlawful voting by noncitizens, their actions are likely to have the effect of interfering with election administration and disenfranchising lawful voters.”

“One of the hallmarks of a fair election is the freedom to exercise the right to vote free from threat, fear, or intimidation,” the judge wrote. “Free exercise of the right to vote is a core tenet of our democracy. It requires safeguarding to ensure full participation and public trust in our elections.”

Central to this effort to keep control of the Senate is the state of Alaska, where Democratic Senate candidate Mary Peltola has a slight edge over the Republican incumbent, Senator Dan Sullivan.

In late October, the administration sued to prevent the certification of any candidate in the election unless Sullivan wins. The administration’s argument was that Alaskan election officials had agreed to permit two candidates with similar names to be on the ballot.

On Friday, October 30, after a New York Times article alleged that members of Peltola’s staff recruited a challenger with a name similar to Republican Dan Sullivan—a common and legal maneuver both parties engage in—the administration asked a judge to order election officials in Alaska to separate all ballots that rank Daniel J. Sullivan from the rest of the ballots in the election.

As Gary Grumbach and Kyla Guilfoil reported at NBC News, they claimed they wanted the ballots separated “for the purposes of investigating whether such ranking was the product of voter confusion, should such an investigation become necessary.”

They did not explain how such a ballot could be reviewed or how reviewing a ballot would explain if a voter was confused. It also downplayed that under Alaska’s ranked-choice voting system, any ballots on which the lesser known Sullivan is ranked first will automatically go to the voter’s second choice—presumably Dan Sullivan—if no candidate wins more than 50% of the votes on the first round.

Today U.S. District Judge Sharon Gleason of the United States District Court for the District of Alaska dismissed the lawsuit prohibiting the state from certifying any winner in Alaska other than the Republican incumbent. She wrote that the administration had not provided a “workable plan as to how it proposes to segregate ballots cast for Daniel J. Sullivan on Election Day and then conduct a court-ordered unspecified ‘investigation’ of those ballots in a manner that would preserve voter secrecy.”

The administration, willing to violate Americans’ right to a secret ballot in order to make sure a Republican holds Alaska’s Senate seat, immediately filed a notice that it would appeal.

The Alaska Supreme Court signed off on the ballot months ago, specifying that the ballots would identify Senator Sullivan as the Republican incumbent and list the other Sullivan without a party affiliation.

Meanwhile, Democrats have filed a lawsuit over Alaska’s apparent failure to fully open at least 18 early voting locations in rural Alaska, disproportionately affecting the opportunity of Native Alaskans to vote.

Trump wants to retain power, but he seems to have little concern for the Americans he wants to govern. Tyler Pager of the New York Times reported that Trump spent last night at a lavish jungle-themed Halloween party at Mar-a-Lago, where guests could feast on Alaskan king crab and eat from a caviar bar.

Even as Americans are struggling under soaring prices of gasoline and diesel caused by Trump’s war on Iran, and as polls show almost 70% of Americans are unhappy with Trump’s handling of the economy, Trump was proud to party with wealthy people three days before the midterms. “Look at all my rich members,” Trump crowed to reporters covering the event. “They spent all day getting ready. Look at these guys.” “These are the biggest guys on Wall Street.”

Pager reported that Trump repeated his anger with his former lawyer Alina Habba Mildon, who allegedly pocketed $50 million for obtaining a pardon from Trump for a Venezuelan billionaire. In a different article on October 29, Pager reported that Trump has told people around him that Mildon should make sure some of that money moves in his direction. He wants her to donate some of the $50 million payout to one of the projects that he’s pushing: his future presidential library, for example.

Pager noted that at his Halloween party, Trump also acknowledged the story Jonathan Swan, Maggie Haberman, Ana Swanson, Paul Mozur, Tripp Mickle, and Julian E. Barnes broke in the New York Times on October 29 that a Chinese spy targeted Nvidia chief executive officer Jensen Huang to obtain information about the company’s advanced AI chips.

Alice Huang, also known as Huang Le, was allegedly sending information gathered from Jensen Huang directly to Beijing, facilitating China’s acquisition of advanced chip technology. Previous presidents have thought such a transfer endangers national security.

Although he was briefed about the intelligence about a year ago, Trump chose to do nothing about it. The reporters note that Trump has not wanted to disrupt Nvidia sales, which are key to the strength of the stock market, or to complicate trade with China even more than he already has.

Last night, asked about Jensen Huang, Trump told reporters: “I have a lot of respect for him. I like him. We hope everything’s OK.” He added: “We’ll check it out. We’re going to check it out very closely.” Asked if he would keep Huang on the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, Trump said he “would like to say yes.”

“I mean, unless we find out something to the contrary,” Pager reports Trump as saying. “I’ve always found Jensen Huang to be very above board. But you know, you’re dealing in a very complex issue, I will say.”

With the midterm approaching and early turnout that appears to favor Democrats surging, Republicans who are not close to Trump appear to be sliding away from him. On Saturday the Republicans in control of Alaska’s state government asked Judge Thompson to reject the administration’s lawsuit, pointing out that “frivolous” candidates are legal and that the Alaska ballot actually includes a candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives, Eric Hafner, apparently pushed by Republicans to take votes from the Democrats. Hafner is serving a 20-year federal prison sentence in New York and has never lived in Alaska.

They reiterated that states, not the federal government, control elections.

And even while administration loyalists suggest they will accept the results of the Alaska election only if Republican incumbent Dan Sullivan wins, when asked today if he shared that position, Sullivan himself told CNN: “No. I’m going to accept the election results.”

Ta.

November 2, 2026 (Monday)

Tomorrow is Election Day.

Trump made his closing argument for the midterm elections in a speech today at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. The choice of location made Democratic consultants exultant. The reflecting pool has become a symbol of the Trump administration: an expensive boondoggle that failed immediately.

After touting his experience as a developer and claiming he was an expert at building pools, Trump refused to accept the conclusion that the installation had been faulty—a conclusion the contractor agreed with—and instead insisted that vandals had ruined the project. Under his control, the Department of Justice went so far as to launch a criminal case against a man who reached into the pool to touch the liner. In October, a judge dismissed the case.

Highlighting the reflecting pool in the last hours before Election Day recalled the Greek myth of Narcissus, the young hunter who falls in love with his own reflection in a pool and is unable to tear himself away. In today’s world, that choice also seemed to show Trump’s conviction that he can shape the narrative according to which Americans act.
But his speech seemed to prove the opposite.

The very small audience heard Trump go on and on about the reflecting pool, showing photos of the repairs, seeming to want to convince people that he was the brilliant developer who had fixed a problem 100 years in the making and that his efforts had been beset by vandals. It’s possible his speech writer intended for the theme to suggest that Trump was fixing the U.S. as he fixed the reflecting pool, but Trump’s obvious interest was in his Washington, D.C., projects rather than the nation. He didn’t move off the reflecting pool, algae, bubbles, granite, vandals, and liners for the first 16 minutes of his speech.

Then he turned to his usual wild exaggerations—the investments he has drawn to the U.S., the thousands of criminals he’s captured, the school “mutilizations” of children, his conquest of Greenland and Venezuela to give the U.S. control of “almost 50% of the world’s oil,” his victory over Iran, and so on—before veering back to his Washington projects, including replacing the “very inferior grass” at the White House, near his new helipad. He boasted of repairs he’s made to fountains, then turned to praise his planned “triumphal arch military complex,” his “National Garden of American Heroes” to be filled with statues of Americans he admires, and his new Washington, D.C., golf course.

“t’s a golden age of America,” he concluded. “We have a country that we can be proud of again. We were laughed at all over the world for four years. We were laughed at like we were stupid people. We were laughed at by every ruler, every president, every prime minister, every king, every queen, but they don’t laugh anymore. Thank you very much, everybody.”
We will not know the results of the midterm elections until after the polls close and votes are counted, but early voting and polling suggest this election will see a Democratic wave.

Certainly, Republicans appear to be preparing for such an outcome. Alec Hernandez, Meredith Lee Hill, Erin Doherty, and Andrew Howard reported in Politico today that Republicans are bracing for big losses and are already privately blaming Trump. His trade wars, attacks on immigrants, killing of U.S. citizens, war on Iran, corruption, and alliance with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, as well as his lack of concern for the cost of his actions on the American people, have ruined his popularity and leave Republicans with little to run on.

“We all know who the problem is,” a Republican strategist told the Politico journalists. “It’s Trump. And do we continue down a path of losing?”

But this moment is far bigger than Trump.

At key moments in American history, the majority of voters have woken to the reality that a small group of men has rigged the system to funnel the wealth produced by ordinary people into their own pockets. With that wealth, they have bought power and undermined democracy in favor of themselves.
The potential for this perversion of the principles of the Declaration of Independence—that all people are created equal and have the right to an equal say in their government—became clear even before the creation of the United States of America. Shortly before the Revolutionary War, Daniel Boone had crossed the Appalachian Mountains and reported back to Virginians the miraculously rich resources of the land to the west, the land called “Kentucke.”

When the Revolutionary War ended, settlers rushed to push aside Indigenous Americans and lay claim to Kentucky. Once there, they quickly discovered that equality was not the inevitable result of economic freedom. Some men settled on better land than others, some had family money, some were just lucky, and quickly, those men accumulated more than others.

Along with their wealth, Kentucky’s landowners gained political power, which they used to secure legislation that promoted their interests at the expense of poorer settlers. Wealthy men came to control the government by working with lawmakers who shared their values and by buying the channels through which voters got information. Gradually, the laws they put in place circumscribed other men’s ability to rise, and wealth moved upward. Equality of opportunity faltered.

In 1787, when the Articles of Confederation were still in force, the congress assembled under that document passed the Northwest Ordinance, which was designed to prevent wealthy men from dominating the new western lands. The measure outlawed both primogeniture (the system in which the oldest son alone inherited a family’s wealth) and slavery, systems that the men who wrote the Northwest Ordinance believed were instrumental in concentrating wealth.

The men who wrote the Northwest Ordinance thought it would protect democracy, but over the next fifty years, a handful of wealthy enslavers tightened a stranglehold on the South. After 1854, when their intention to control the whole nation became obvious, Americans from a range of political parties came together to oust them from power. They created a government that worked to develop the economy from the bottom, educating young men and giving them land to farm. They tried to make America into a land where every man, regardless of race or background, could rise through hard work. They abolished human enslavement except as punishment for crime, then gave freedmen the vote to enable them to protect their own economic interests.

They argued that a government “of the people, by the people, for the people,” had a responsibility to expand economic growth that benefited everyone.

But that vision came under attack after the Civil War, as men who opposed Black rights began to insist that government-funded programs that protected formerly enslaved people and helped immigrants redistributed wealth from hardworking white taxpayers to the undeserving. Money and power again began to concentrate at the top of society, among those who became known as “robber barons.” When their control of the government helped to crash the economy in 1893, the American people once again came together to oust them from power, and the Progressive Era recreated a government intended to work for everyone.

The same old pattern of demonizing Black Americans and immigrants for supposedly stealing tax dollars repeated. Men determined to control the country insisted that government regulations and taxes took away a man’s liberty to run his business as he saw fit and undermined the individualism that made America great. In the 1920s, they convinced American voters to turn the government over to businessmen, whose policies, once again, concentrated wealth. When the bottom fell out of that system in 1929 with the Great Crash, Americans came together to demand government work for all Americans, rather than a privileged few.

The system they created promised a “New Deal” for the American people, and most Americans thought the system that regulated business, provided a basic social safety net, promoted infrastructure, and protected civil rights was so popular it would last forever.

But President Ronald Reagan began to undermine that system in the 1980s, insisting that the modern government redistributed the tax dollars of hardworking white men to people like the “welfare queen,” who played the system to live large without working. Like their predecessors from a hundred years before, Reagan and his allies claimed such a system was perilously close to socialism.

And, as before, cuts to regulation and taxes helped money—more than $50 trillion—move upward to the richest 1% of Americans. With it moved political power. Republican-dominated states suppressed voting by likely Democratic constituencies until we are now, in 2026, seeing people having to wait for hours to vote or having to march to distant polling places while billionaire Elon Musk pumps at least $446 million into the midterms to buy Republican control of Congress.

Still worried about losing, the administration is trying to rig the midterm election. After losing repeatedly in the courts over their demands to segregate 20,000 California ballots they insist might have been cast by noncitizens, it today appealed the question to the United States Supreme Court. California officials have said the list was haphazard and inaccurate, and today, in a different case, a Department of Justice lawyer told a judge it was “fair” to say the list has a “high” error rate.

This evening, the Supreme Court denied the administration’s emergency appeal to require California officials to set aside those 20,000 ballots.

The Republicans’ fear comes from the fact that the open looting of the government in Trump’s second term appears to have revealed to a majority of the American people that the policies the Republican Party has enacted since 1981 benefit only a few. Once again, it seems, Americans are coming together, ready to follow the pattern of the past and rebuild a government that works not just for the wealthy, but for everyone.

Neophyte said:

November 2, 2026 (Monday)

Tomorrow is Election Day.

snip

This evening, the Supreme Court denied the administration’s emergency appeal to require California officials to set aside those 20,000 ballots.

The Republicans’ fear comes from the fact that the open looting of the government in Trump’s second term appears to have revealed to a majority of the American people that the policies the Republican Party has enacted since 1981 benefit only a few. Once again, it seems, Americans are coming together, ready to follow the pattern of the past and rebuild a government that works not just for the wealthy, but for everyone.

Let us hope HCR is correct.

:)

Thanks for posting.

November 3, 2026 (Tuesday)

Election Day.

Neophyte said:

November 3, 2026 (Tuesday)

Election Day.

:)

Neophyte said:

November 3, 2026 (Tuesday)

Election Day.

Excellent. A day off.

November 4, 2026 (Wednesday)

And so, one era passes and another begins.

Yesterday, voters flipped control of both chambers of Congress from the Republicans to the Democrats. Votes in some races are still being counted, but NBC News projects that the Democrats will win at least 259 seats in the House of Representatives, far more than the 218 they needed to win a majority.

A Democratic victory in the House had been widely expected, but what would happen in the Senate, which had a bad map for Democrats this cycle, was unclear. There, too, voters were emphatic. Democrats flipped seven seats in the Senate: Iowa, Kansas, Maine, North Carolina, Ohio, South Carolina, and Texas.

The Senate race in Alaska hasn’t yet been called, but Democratic challenger Mary Peltola is currently slightly ahead of Republican incumbent Dan Sullivan there. Even more eye-popping, as of this writing, Democratic Senate candidate Scott Colom is ahead of the Republican incumbent in Mississippi. If he wins, he will be the first Black senator from Mississippi since Reconstruction.

In governors’ races, Democrats flipped Iowa, Georgia, Ohio, Nevada, and Texas. None of the new Democratic governors will be hamstrung by a Republican supermajority in the state legislature. Republicans in Kansas, Iowa, North Carolina, and Ohio either lost or failed to regain supermajorities that could override a governor’s veto.

The topline races don’t tell the whole story. Voters elected Democrats up and down the ballot. In Texas, the most prominent example of this phenomenon, Democratic senatorial candidate James Talarico won by about 12 points. Democratic gubernatorial candidate Gina Hinojosa won by 7 points. Voters flipped two congressional seats in districts Trump won by at least 14 points in 2024. Voters elected a Democratic attorney general and four Democratic supreme court justices, and they flipped control of the lower chamber of the legislature.

Many of the races across the country were not close. Some races flipped by double digits from the margins of 2024. Some flips were as high as 20, 30, or even 40 percent. Observers called the results “seismic” and “jaw-dropping,” not just a blue wave but a “tsunami.”

The 2026 midterm elections marked a revolution in American politics. Election scholar Michael McDonald estimates that about 124.3 million people, or just under 50% of those eligible, turned out to vote. That rate is just under the voting rate in the 2018 midterms, which itself was the highest midterm turnout rate since 1914.

The election came off without anything more than the usual hitches, a tribute to the quiet work of dedicated lawyers and voting rights groups who have been fiercely contesting the administration’s efforts to rig the vote or to stir up opposition to accept the outcome. It was, as organizers had hoped, “too big to rig.” After months of suggesting he would contest the outcome of the election if Democrats won, Trump told New York Times reporters Erica L. Green and Tyler Pager that he would accept the results.

The historic nature of this election cannot be overstated. It is a rejection of Trump, who insisted voters should imagine he was on the ballot. But more than that, it is a rejection of the Republican ideology that has driven American politics since the 1980s: the idea that some people are better than others and have the right to rule.

That ideology took root in American politics in the late 1970s, in response to the nation’s push toward equality for racial minorities and women. The 1965 Voting Rights Act protected the right of Black and Brown Americans to vote, while the introduction of reliable birth control that same year began to permit women to enter the workforce on terms equal to men. It seemed that the equality promised in American democracy was within reach.

But to win election, Richard M. Nixon brought into the Republican Party voters who opposed the expansion of American democracy while Democrats looked to expand their tent. In 1972, even as Nixon won in a landslide, Democrats sent to Congress giants like Barbara Jordan of Texas, the first Black woman elected to Congress from the South and the first woman to deliver a keynote address at a Democratic National Convention.

In 1974, voters infuriated by Watergate flipped 49 House seats and 5 Senate seats from Republican to Democratic and elected 93 new members of Congress, 76 of whom were Democrats. In 1976 they sent Democrat Jimmy Carter to the White House, where he signed legislation that made it illegal to fire women or cut their pay because they were pregnant, expanded contracting rules to boost Black-owned businesses, worked to end racial discrimination in hiring, and created the Department of Education.

Carter’s Republican successor, Ronald Reagan, won election by attacking the modern American state and warning that people like the “Welfare Queen,” a Black woman who abused the welfare system to live large, were taking money from hardworking white people. The government should get out of people’s lives, he said, and he promised to slash taxes and regulations to permit people to accumulate wealth. In turn, he claimed, they would invest in the economy, creating jobs for everyone. Reagan and his allies tied racial and gender inequality to economic prosperity.

That combination worked—more or less— to attract voters until Trump’s second term tore it apart. Trump and appointees like Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have purged the government of minorities and women and undermined the health and well-being of nonwhite Americans, immigrants, and women. But rather than benefiting regular Americans, those policies have hurt them. And administration leaders have been quite open about their intention of using the government to loot the country for themselves and their cronies.

In their determination to stop Trump and MAGA, Americans came together across the artificial lines that Republicans have exploited for more than a generation to stand against what the nation’s founders would have called tyranny. The rural areas that have made up the backbone of MAGA support joined more Democratic urban areas to elect Democrats. The racial, gender, and cultural divisions Republicans have exploited to stay in power have collapsed in the face of a rising oligarchy.
Even billionaire Elon Musk’s investment of close to half a billion dollars in Republicans in the midterms could not overcome voters’ frustration with a government that works only for the very wealthy. People across the country, organized in No Kings rallies, along overpasses, in webcasts, and in everything from political clubs to knitting communities, have come together to stand against the extraordinary corruption of the Trump regime, to oppose Trump’s rejection of constitutional limits in favor of autocratic power to declare tariffs and start wars, to demand the government address the needs of Americans, and to insist on the rule of law. Yesterday, they voted.

In Georgia, voters elected Keisha Lance Bottoms to be the first Black female governor in the nation. In New Hampshire, voters elected Chris Pappas to be the Senate’s first openly gay member. In Texas, voters elected Gina Hinojosa to be the state’s first Latina governor and the state’s first Democratic governor in more than 30 years. In New Mexico, voters elected former Interior secretary Deb Haaland to be the nation’s first female Indigenous governor. Voters in Minnesota sent Ojibwe Peggy Flanagan to the Senate. In Michigan, voters elected Abdul El-Sayed to be the nation’s first Muslim senator. Voters in Ohio sent Brian Poindexter, a union ironworker, to the House of Representatives and returned Sherrod Brown, known for his defense of unions, to the Senate.

It is a historic rebuke of the Republican ideology that derailed the movement for equal rights in the 1970s in order to sway the system back toward wealthy white people.

This sea change has some immediate repercussions. By putting Congress under the control of Democrats, last night’s results will mean that it will focus on Americans’ needs and will check Trump and his administration.

Asked if the Democrats would focus on costs or corruption, Senator Rafael Warnock of Georgia told CNN that the Democrats could “walk and chew gum at the same time.” Today Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker, reelected for a third term yesterday with almost 60% of the vote, released a 75-page road map for the congressional majority, asking it to end the war in Iran, raise the minimum wage, pass comprehensive immigration reform, provide universal healthcare and childcare, put guardrails around AI, and codify abortion rights into law.

Just after 10:00 last night, Eastern time, as Democratic victories piled up, the incoming chair of the House Oversight Committee, Robert Garcia of California, had one comment for administration loyalists. On social media, he wrote: “LAWYER UP.”

Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), who will retake a position as the head of the Senate Finance Committee, posted: “Subpoenas.” Among other things, Wyden has been trying to get financial information about sex abuser Jeffrey Epstein’s circle for years but has been stonewalled by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. The Senate Finance Committee reposted Wyden’s comment with the caption: “Let’s f*cking go.”

Senator Chris Coons (D-DE), who will likely retake the top spot at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, posted on October 28 that he is interested in hearing from Musk about his conversations with Russia’s president Vladimir Putin about satellites. “One more thing to add to the list of questions for Musk when I subpoena him,” Coons posted.

First thing this morning, Republicans set out to try to figure out a way to spin the results. President Trump posted on social media: “I wasn’t on the Ballot and if I was, we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE!” He then posted an image of a red MAGA hat with the word “VETO” on it in huge white letters, a reminder that he is still the president and a threat to veto any legislation the Democratic-dominated Congress passes.

But the election has made him the lamest of lame ducks and has already turned his attention back to his Washington, D.C., development projects. He showed up today at the White House ballroom construction site, where he described his fantasy world in which former President Joe Biden had turned Washington, D.C., into a “killing field” before he, Trump, took office the second time and fixed everything. Mostly, though, he praised his ballroom plans.

Florida governor Ron DeSantis called the election “close to an extinction-level event for Republicans in many parts of the country.” In an evident bid to set himself up to run for president in 2028, he pointed out that Florida remains controlled by Republicans while Texas underwent a Democratic sweep. This is true as far as it goes, but the surge of Angie Nixon and David Jolly in Florida, running for Senate and governor, respectively, was such a surprise that Democrats didn’t invest much in their races, which might have turned out differently if they had.

Vice President J.D. Vance doubled down on the culture wars—including backing the vile ad Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy ran against Democrat Amy Acton in Ohio, weaponizing that she was raped as a child—and now is faced with the fact Acton won her election by 8 points. In a long post on social media today, Vance blamed the loss on the Iran war, a clear attempt to throw responsibility for the dramatic losses onto Trump and Hegseth.

Vance insisted that voters did not turn on the Republicans over their immigration policies, despite the poignant images of people putting their “I VOTED” stickers on shrines to Renee Good and Alex Pretti and others murdered by federal agents during immigration enforcement raids. Vance has sold himself to the white Christian nationalism at the heart of MAGA that claims immigrants are destroying “Western culture,” and it appears he will not be giving that up.

But for now, anyway, Americans have moved on.

Thanks for posting.

:)

November 5, 2026 (Thursday)

Incoming chair of the House Judiciary Committee Jamie Raskin (D-MD) posted today: “House Democrats are in the fight to bring government back from the brink of authoritarianism. We will shine a light on President Trump’s quid pro quo, coin-operated, pay-to-play corruption and renew American government as an instrument for the common good.”

Raskin told MS NOW that he intends to subpoena the law firms that struck deals with Trump to learn more about alleged coercion from Trump. He also said he intends to investigate Attorney General Todd Blanche for his refusal to produce documents required by the Epstein Files Transparency Act and for the Department of Justice’s persecution of those Trump considers enemies, including James Comey, Letitia James, Adam Schiff, Mark Kelly, Maggie Goodlander, and Jason Crow.

Raskin also told Greg Sargent of The New Republic that the Judiciary Committee will work with Democratic appropriators to defund Trump’s corrupt prosecutions. “We have the power of the purse,” Raskin told Sargent. “We’ll be working closely with our Appropriations Committee partners to make sure that we’re doing everything we can to cut off money that is being used for political harassment and persecution.”

Representative Robert Garcia (D-CA) is in line to chair the House Oversight and Reform Committee. Yesterday, he told reporters the committee would focus on four major areas. The first is “the Trump crime family.” Garcia noted that a Russian oligarch paid for Don Jr.’s wedding party, the Saudis invested $2 billion in Jared Kushner’s business, and Eric Trump is on the board of companies that are getting Pentagon contracts. Trump himself has pocketed billions from crypto schemes.

The other three areas on which the committee will focus are the Department of Homeland Security and the abuses of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, corporate corruption, and those associated with sex abuser Jeffrey Epstein.
Eamon Javers of CNBC reported today that “Sen Ron Wyden’s Finance Committee staff intend to dig into JP Morgan’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, with a particular focus on the conduct of high ranking executives and their handling of the bank’s relationship with the disgraced financier.”

Yesterday the Senate posted new job listings, including one for an attorney to lead the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee’s work on “government ethics and anti-corruption legislation and to participate in the Committee’s oversight and investigations work.”

Gabe Kaminsky of CBS News reported today that Democrats plan to investigate the finances behind Trump’s presidential library. Last March, Trump said he doesn’t “believe in building libraries or museums” and that the building is “most likely going to be a hotel.” Nonetheless, Trump’s foundation, which is run by Trump’s son Eric and son-in-law Michael Boulos, told the IRS it was building a library.

The foundation says it will raise $950 million by the end of 2027. Money has poured into the foundation from companies Trump sued and that settled based on promises to contribute to the fund. People eager to avoid Trump’s wrath have also contributed. A former advisor told Kaminsky: “The library is one of the last few places he can squeeze people for money.”

Meanwhile, Trump appears to be acting, as President Abraham Lincoln once said of Major General William S. Rosecrans, “confused and stunned, like a duck hit on the head.” He has remained largely quiet about the election but is continuing to talk about his projects in Washington, D.C. Apparently afraid those projects will now come to a halt, he wanted his triumphal arch approved today so work could start immediately. Tonight his hand-picked commission voted as Trump wanted, agreeing to approve the arch, but just before midnight, Judge Tanya Chutkan stopped construction for fourteen days.

This afternoon, in his first action after the election, Trump issued an executive order designating the Oval Office and Cabinet room of the White House a “national landmark” and federal landmark” to prevent future presidents from altering them. He told reporters he wanted to “make it impossible for anybody to ever destroy this incredible space.”

Although the nation’s founders envisioned the Executive Mansion—it wouldn’t officially be called the “White House” until 1901—as a modest space that demonstrated the president was not a king, Trump has splashed so much gold frippery around the place former president Barack Obama joked during the campaign that it looked like “Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory.”

While the president focuses on his legacy, the rest of MAGA appears to be panicking. The right wing is trying to blame Tuesday’s wipe-out on the Iran War, or on Vice President J.D. Vance’s negotiation of the disastrous memorandum of understanding that last June that turned the conflict from an upfront clash into a simmering conflict.

But polls before the election showed that although the American people were upset about many things, at the top of their complaints about the Trump administration was corruption. Fittingly, the value of Trump’s social media company and his meme coin plummeted yesterday after the results of the election became clear. Annie Massa of Bloomberg noted that the dramatic drops suggest that investors “may be anxious about the implications of the election for the businesses with links to the president, which are now expected to receive fresh congressional oversight.”

The idea of oversight appears to be worrying people other than investors, and some appear to be thinking not of the American people, but of how to get themselves out of the range of fallout from Tuesday’s losses.

Today Harmeet K. Dhillon resigned from the Department of Justice, where she dismantled the department’s Civil Rights Division, the central cause for which Congress created the department in 1870. As Perry Stein and Jeremy Roebuck of the Washington Post report, on her watch, more than half the lawyers in the division and hundreds of career staffers left.

Rather than continuing the work of protecting vulnerable minorities from discrimination, she turned the department to pushing Trump’s social agenda, including purging the country of “woke ideology.”

Matt Cohen and Yunior Rivas of Democracy Docket recall that under Dhillon, the administration stopped defending voting rights. Dhillon also led the administration’s effort to take control of states’ voter rolls and pushed the Republicans’ extraordinary mid-decade redistricting campaign.

Outgoing Representative Thomas Massie (R-KY) posted today that when Congress returns next week, he expects to get the necessary signatures for a discharge petition to force a vote on the Epstein Files Transparency Act II. That measure will enable survivors to get their own records, state attorneys general to prosecute crimes, and Congress to sue the Department of Justice “for keeping critical files hidden.”

Massie also vowed to force a vote to impeach Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth when the House returns to work next week, and “multiple” Republican sources told Adam Cancryn, Sarah Ferris, Zachary Cohen, and Alayna Treene of CNN that they think the measure will pass. Massie added on social media that the one condition under which he won’t reintroduce the articles of impeachment against Hegseth is if Hegseth resigns first.

Hegseth promptly posted a video in which he sounded panicked. He appeared to be appealing to Trump, in which he called the impeachment articles a “sham” and added: “Just like they tried against President Trump, twice…. Didn’t work against President Trump, and it won’t work with me.”

The word corruption, in this case, is not just about laws being broken, but about the old fashioned idea that the body politic has been “corrupted”—the old word for a physical disease—by money. That sort of corruption is also under the microscope now.

Michelle Goldberg of the New York Times noted today that the only person who took a bigger hit on Tuesday than Donald Trump was billionaire Elon Musk. Musk poured almost a half a billion dollars into the election in an attempt to preserve Republican control of the Senate and to guarantee that Texas stayed in the hands of Republicans.

Goldberg recalls that Musk almost single-handedly funded the campaign of Republican Senate candidate Ken Paxton, Texas’s current attorney general, whose opponent, Democrat James Talarico, won the election by 12 points. She also notes that it sometimes seemed that Talarico was running against Musk as much as he was against Paxton, at one point telling a rally: “Elon Musk wants our land. He wants our water. He wants our tax dollars. He wants his very own personal United States senator.” Governor-elect Gina Hinojosa also called attention to Musk’s power in the state through his relationship to Texas governor Greg Abbott.

The election made it very clear that the American people do not want the data center build-out Republicans have touted.

Today tech firms lost billions of dollars in market value as investors worried about regulation of an industry in which investment was already faltering because of concerns that the industry would not deliver the returns leaders promised. As Rachel Clun and Osmond Chia of the BBC reported, Nvidia lost $400 billion, more than 9%, from its market value. Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Tesla together lost more than $300 billion in market value.

The seven tech companies called the “magnificent seven,” including Apple, Nvidia, and Tesla, lost a trillion dollars today. The Nasdaq composite, the index of publicly traded information technology companies, lost almost $2.5 trillion.

The election saw a quiet but dramatic move to address the corruption of money in politics. On Tuesday, voters in Montana overwhelmingly approved a ballot initiative to stop the flow of corporate money into political campaigns. The measure echoes a law passed in Hawaii in May but is the first to go directly to voters.

Rather than going after the political spending that the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens’ United v. Federal Elections Commission decision protected, the plan capitalizes on the fact that corporations are created by states. It simply says that the state can deny the power of corporations, trade associations, nonprofits, and other “artificial persons” to donate to political causes. Businesses chartered in other states can’t spend political money in the state.

Only 34.5% of Montana voters opposed the measure. More than 65% voted yes.

Eric Petry of the Brennan Center for Justice, which protects voting rights, told Mike Leonard and Jordan Fischer of Bloomberg Law: “The fact that this passed with near-supermajority support in a very red state shows how deeply upset the public is about the role of money in politics.”

These are all fine words from politicians high on success at the recent elections. Let’s hope these things get implemented.

party_pants said:

These are all fine words from politicians high on success at the recent elections. Let’s hope these things get implemented.

Yeah, they’ll calm down a bit over the weekend, and next week The Management will say, cool it, kids, there could be strings attached, let’s see where they lead before we go tugging on the easy meat.

Thanks for posting.

:)

November 6, 2026 (Friday)

On Tuesday, Americans rejected the Trump administration. It turns out most people hated the idea of a strongman who ignored the Constitution, undermined democracy, and tried to rewrite America’s history in order to impose a white, Christian nationalist regime that enriched him and his cronies at the expense of everyone else.

Voters made their position very clear. A majority of more than 12 million demanded an end to corruption, an end to Trump’s war on Iran, an end to costly tariffs, and an end to the masked agents kidnapping Black and Brown people off the streets.

By a margin of more than 13%, they voted for a country based on the rule of law in which everyone is held accountable for their actions and no one can break the law with impunity. They voted for the system of checks and balances established by the Framers of the Constitution. They voted for policies that supported the American people, making it possible for them to afford food and housing and healthcare rather than continuing to funnel money to billionaires.

They voted for the multicultural country Trump and his loyalists mocked. They elected Democratic Black candidates Keisha Lance Bottoms to govern Georgia, David Crowley to govern Wisconsin, Aaron Ford to govern Nevada, and Stacey Plaskett to govern the U.S. Virgin Islands. They elected Byron Donalds, a Black Republican, to govern Florida.

Voters elected Michigan Democrat Abdul El-Sayed to be the nation’s first Muslim senator, and they reelected Representative Ilhan Omar, whom Trump has made a key target of his attacks, with an astonishing 76.5% of her district’s vote.

As Valerie Gonzalez, Mike Catalini, and Jonathan J. Cooper of the Associated Press reported, Hispanic voters shifted hard away from the Republican Party and swung back toward the Democrats in 2026, with 7 out of 10 Hispanic voters in Texas backing Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico. In a rejection of Trump’s attacks on immigrants, for the first time since 2008, Democrats won every House district that touches the U.S.-Mexico border, and voters have sent fourteen new Hispanic Democrats to Congress.

Black voters, especially in the American South, turned out in unusually high numbers, and they voted for Democrats at higher rates than they did in 2024. Emily Cochrane of the New York Times reported that about 80% of Black votes in congressional races across the country were for Democratic candidates.
The message was unmistakable.

Since his 2024 reelection, Trump and his allies have repeatedly insisted that his victory of about 2.3 million voters over Democratic candidate Vice President Kamala Harris, earning him less than 50% of the vote, was a “mandate.” Compared to the margin of more than 12 million voters delivered on Tuesday, it was a fizzle. The Economist noted that Tuesday’s Democratic victory was “the biggest congressional landslide in 50 years.” Recognizing the direction of the tide, since the election, panicked Republicans have called for regrouping, ending the war on Iran, and addressing affordability.

Trump initially appeared dazed by the rebuke, but today he woke up and threw their rejection of his agenda back in Americans’ teeth.

Ousting his chief of staff, Susie Wiles, Trump replaced her with the architect of some of his administration’s most extreme policies: Stephen Miller.

Miller is a fervent white nationalist who appears to believe in the racist “great replacement theory,” the idea that Black and Brown immigrants to Europe and the United States are destroying “Western culture.”

Miller’s elevation to chief of staff doesn’t necessarily change much; he already was a powerful force in the White House. Miller drove the “Muslim ban” in Trump’s first term and, in his second, the administration’s arrest, incarceration, and deportation plans for undocumented immigrants. His push for masked agents to arrest 3,000 people a day led to the murders of U.S. citizens Renee Goode and Alex Pretti, as well as the shooting deaths of immigrants and their mistreatment and deaths in concentration camps.

Miller has been a key proponent of Trump’s seizing power through emergency declarations that he uses to ignore the law. Frustrated by opposition to his plan to hurt Black and Brown people, Miller pushed for Trump to crush the opposition by invoking the Insurrection Act.

And Miller was central to the administration’s undermining of disability rights. Mike Hixenbaugh of NBC News reported that after Trump complained about seeing homeless encampments in Washington, D.C., Miller argued for a plan to make it easier to round up mentally ill homeless people and institutionalize them. Making that happen required abandoning enforcement of the 1999 Supreme Court decision Olmstead v. L.C., which established that disabled Americans have a right to live in their communities rather than being forced into institutions.

The Department of Justice went along with Miller’s plan and issued a memo saying that it would no longer enforce Olmstead. While the initial targets were unhoused people, Hixenbaugh notes, the administration quickly backed away from at least five disability rights cases designed to keep physically or mentally disabled children and adults out of institutions. Hixenbaugh points out that the administration’s refusal to enforce Olmstead is sending a message to the states that, with the dramatic cuts to Medicaid in the Republicans’ so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” they should “feel free to cut services that help disabled people remain at home,” forcing them into institutions.

As Phillips S. O’Brien wrote in Phillip’s Newsletter, Miller also supports Russia’s version of its war on Ukraine and has taken a strong and public stand against the embattled U.S. ally. O’Brien notes that Trump’s elevation of Miller now illustrates the president’s determination to get whatever he can for Russia’s president Vladimir Putin before the new Congress starts investigations and puts up roadblocks.

So, rather than moderating his behavior after voters’ dramatic rebuke, Trump is demonstrating by elevating Miller that he is hardening his position. He is surrounding himself with the most extreme of his advisors: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, whom he has supported in the face of calls for his impeachment; Natalie Harp, the smiling aide who appears glued to his side,;and Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget and a key author of Project 2025, who Trump boasted before the election would soon “be one of the very important people in the history of our country, in my opinion.” He noted: “We have some big surprises coming up in another few weeks, right, Russ?”

Trump’s elevation of Miller was a deliberate declaration that he doesn’t care what the American people want. Representative LaMonica McIver (D-NJ), whom the administration has targeted because of her attempt to conduct oversight of a detention facility, was clear: “Stephen Miller is a white supremacist,” she said in a statement. “By promoting the person responsible for ICE detaining our neighbors and killing people in the streets, Donald Trump is doubling down on the cruelty and corruption that have defined his administration. The president is panicked after losing power in Congress and this is a signal about what he will prioritize in the final stretch of his presidency: grievance and cruelty.”

Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) posted: “Donald Trump learned nothing from his historic defeat. Stephen Miller is the architect of the most barbaric, inhumane policies of this administration. Trump couldn’t have made a worse choice. Our Democratic majorities will fight him every step of the way.”

House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries posted: “Stephen Miller is a dangerous xenophobe and reckless extremist who has American blood on his hands. His presence in government should be eradicated like a malignant tumor. Fire him today.”

But Trump’s embrace of Miller was not aimed at Democrats alone. It is a shot across the bow of Republicans who might want to jump ship. When Meredith Lee Hill of Politico told one House Republican that Trump had tapped Miller to be his chief of staff, the lawmaker replied: “Please tell me you’re lying to me right now, just to get a reaction.”

Trump is making it clear to Republicans that he intends to force the party to stay behind an even more extreme weapon of MAGA than the one voters rejected Tuesday, incinerating their hopes for 2028. Alex Isenstadt of Axios reported today that Trump has told advisors that he intends to keep raising money so he can continue to wield power over Republican candidates in 2028.

And in a sign that MAGA leaders are determined to keep Republicans in line, Philip Wegmann of the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that the White House sent a memo to more than 3,000 Republican-oriented groups, warning them: “As always, we are monitoring statements, press releases, and media engagements from your organizations.”
It all feels very desperate.

Tonight Trump appeared in a campaign hat at a NASA event at which he rambled from topic to topic, slurring his words and sounding tired. He said he had declared all of space “open for American settlement, American civilization, and American freedom.” He said that “ithin two years, NASA will launch the first ever nuclear powered spacecraft to Mars,” before veering off to talk about his uncle, who was a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Trump promised that “before the end of my term, the United States will return American astronauts to the surface of the Moon. So exciting. And soon thereafter the United States will establish a permanent presence on lunar soil.”

To a silent audience, Trump said: “By the way, I was not on the ballot, just in case you had any questions. Because if we were on the ballot we would’ve won.”

Ta.

November 7, 2026 (Saturday)

In his victory speech on November 3, after winning a U.S. Senate seat in the previously Republican-dominated state of Texas, Senator-elect James Talarico redefined the modern United States by recalling an older era when Americans worked together to defend their country against those who would take all its wealth and power for themselves.

His words were especially piercing in Texas, where billionaire Elon Musk spent at least $225 million in the midterm elections to keep the state government in the hands of Republicans. And yet, voters elected a Democratic governor, a Democratic lieutenant governor, a Democratic attorney general, and a Democratic House of Representatives anyway.

“We just took back Texas,” Talarico told the cheering crowd. “We just proved that all the money in the world is no match for the people of Texas. We just showed that a politics of division is no match for a politics of love. And we just sent a message to every billionaire megadonor, every trillionaire megadonor, every corrupt defender of this broken political system in this state, in this country. Power belongs to the people.”

Leaning into his religious faith and his own history as a middle-school teacher of underprivileged students and as the son of a single mother, he told the crowd: “Scripture has taught me, my own life has taught me, always bet on the underdog.”

“We were the underdogs in this race,” he said. “We went up against nearly 40 years of doubt and disillusionment. We went up against more than $300 million, more than any Senate campaign in American history. We went up against all the negative ads, smear campaigns, foreign bots, and AI deep fakes that money can buy. Those attacks were the final howls of a dying establishment, the death rattle of a status quo that knows its days are numbered.

“They played dirty because they were desperate. But we never lost hope. We never lost faith. And against big money and long odds, we took our power back. Always, always, bet on the underdog.

“We built a movement unlike any this state has ever seen. We united Texans from all backgrounds and beliefs onto one team to take on this broken, corrupt political system: first time voters, three time Trump voters, working people from every corner of this state who are fed up and ready for change. This win is for every underdog who’s been counted out and left behind. This win is for every teacher and every nurse, for every farmer and every rancher. For every young person who’s trying to buy a home. For every parent who’s trying to put food on the table.

“This win is for every Texan who’s ever wondered if anyone is listening. I heard you. We heard you, and tonight the world hears you.”

Talarico identified the moment the nation is in as monumental. “This win is not about the Democratic party or the Republican party,” he said. “It’s much bigger than that. There is something broken in America. Our economic system is broken. Our political system is broken. Even our relationships with each other feel broken. That’s because the most powerful people in the world want it that way.”

Talarico rooted his political beliefs in his belief in the commandments to “love God and love neighbor” and noted that “despite our differences, we all want the same things. A safe neighborhood, a good job, a high-quality, well-funded public school, and the ability to see a doctor when we need one.

“But the billionaires who own the social media algorithms, who own the cable news networks, who own the politicians fighting on our screens, they want us at each other’s throats. They want us focused on how we’re different instead of on how we’re the same. They want us looking left and right at each other instead of looking up at them. The real fight in this country is not left versus right. It is top versus bottom.

“The people at the top work so hard to keep us angry and divided because our unity is a threat to their wealth and their power,” he said. “We saw it in this race. We saw it in every billionaire-funded attack ad. The people at the top divide us by party, by race, by gender, by religion, by culture, so we don’t notice that they are picking our pockets, that they are defunding our schools, that they are gutting our healthcare, that they are raising taxes on all of us while they cut taxes for themselves. It is the oldest strategy in the world, divide and conquer. But tonight we sent a crystal clear message to the people at the top. We will not be conquered.”

“e are tired of being pitted against each other,” Talarico continued. “We are tired of being told to hate each other. It has been 10 years of this kind of politics. Politics as blood sport. Politics as trolling and owning. Politics as professional wrestling. It tears families apart. It ends friendships. And it leaves us all feeling terrible all the time. People across the political spectrum are hungry for a different kind of politics. Not a politics of hate, not a politics of fear, not a politics of division, but a politics of love.”

He explained how Democrats had won Texas: “We mobilized our 60,000 volunteers in every corner of the state, and together we delivered bottled water to Sand Branch, a community south of Dallas with no running water. We donated school supplies to an elementary school in El Cenizo, a small town on the border. We collected more than 20,000 pounds of groceries for families in Fort Worth who are struggling under the high cost of living. Before the world changes in ways you see on TV or read about in newspapers, the world changes person to person, neighbor to neighbor.”

“e know how to get there,” he said. “We must get big money out of our politics so no billionaire or trillionaire can buy our elections. We must unrig this economic system that only benefits the top 1%. We must pass universal health care so no one goes bankrupt just because they get sick. We must invest in our teachers and our students so every underdog has a fighting chance. We must end these corrupt forever wars that are driving up prices and killing our brave men and women in uniform.

“And,” he continued, “we must heal the deep spiritual corruption at the root of all of these crises. We must bridge the divides between us and repair the ties that bind us. We forged a new kind of politics here in the Lone Star State. An answer to this decade of division. We showed that when working people come together across every dividing line, we can do extraordinary things. We won this race because people who are desperate for change now are going to get change.

“That old politics is dying,” he told the crowd, “and a new politics is being born through each of us.”

Talarico, who won his race by an astonishing 12 points, accurately identified the extraordinary importance of local and relational organizing to create communities that would elect Democratic candidates in 2026.

He also accurately identified the threat this kind of politics poses to establishment politics, especially to MAGA. President Trump today reinforced his need for division and hatred by offering the job of White House press secretary to Dana White, the chief executive officer of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, whom he described as a “violent Fighter and Warrior.” Trump encouraged White to take the job and bring along a number of his UFC fighters.

“We need these people to defend us against the Lunatic Left,” Trump posted.

HCR adds “This was not what I intended to write tonight, but I felt I had to respond to the NYT story about how conservative white male Republicans in Texas are feeling about the midterms. We simply MUST stop centering media around that demographic.”

Neophyte said:

HCR adds “This was not what I intended to write tonight, but I felt I had to respond to the NYT story about how conservative white male Republicans in Texas are feeling about the midterms. We simply MUST stop centering media around that demographic.”

It’s like how the Flintstones was nearly always about Fred.

Bubblecar said:

Neophyte said:

Neophyte said:

“But the billionaires who own the social media algorithms, who own the cable news networks, who own the politicians fighting on our screens, they want us at each other’s throats. They want us focused on how we’re different instead of on how we’re the same. They want us looking left and right at each other instead of looking up at them. The real fight in this country is not left versus right. It is top versus bottom.

“The people at the top work so hard to keep us angry and divided because our unity is a threat to their wealth and their power,” he said. “We saw it in this race. We saw it in every billionaire-funded attack ad. The people at the top divide us by party, by race, by gender, by religion, by culture, so we don’t notice that they are picking our pockets, that they are defunding our schools, that they are gutting our healthcare, that they are raising taxes on all of us while they cut taxes for themselves. It is the oldest strategy in the world, divide and conquer. But tonight we sent a crystal clear message to the people at the top. We will not be conquered.”

HCR adds “This was not what I intended to write tonight, but I felt I had to respond to the NYT story about how conservative white male Republicans in Texas are feeling about the midterms. We simply MUST stop centering media around that demographic.”

It’s like how the Flintstones was nearly always about Fred.

sure we must stop centering media except they own the medias so how do yous propose we stop centering the media

Neophyte said:

HCR adds “This was not what I intended to write tonight, but I felt I had to respond to the NYT story about how conservative white male Republicans in Texas are feeling about the midterms. We simply MUST stop centering media around that demographic.”

Thanks for posting.

Michael V said:

Neophyte said:

HCR adds “This was not what I intended to write tonight, but I felt I had to respond to the NYT story about how conservative white male Republicans in Texas are feeling about the midterms. We simply MUST stop centering media around that demographic.”

Thanks for posting.

I’d like to hear more about how liberal black female Democrats from just about anywhere are feeling about he midterms.

They must still be on such a buzz!

November 8, 2026 (Sunday)

Since the dramatic victories of the Democrats on Tuesday, Trump has been posting increasingly provocative material on social media in what appears to be an attempt to turn attention away from the Democrats and back to himself.

Amidst all that mess, there are signs that the president is deeply concerned about anyone getting a window into how his administration has been operating. Yesterday he insisted that the Democrats are “threatening a lot of people…just because they happen to be Republicans, or Republican supporters.” He said that the Democrats’ promises to investigate the administration are themselves crimes and that he is ordering the Department of Justice (DOJ) to investigate. The post is convoluted, but Trump insists that “there have been no impeachable acts committed, or even thought of, by the victims of this illegal process.”

Shortly after, he posted, “These SLEAZEBAGS should go to jail for what they are doing”, “The Senate must act, and stop being pushed around to the point of the Republican Party losing Elections, and worse!” he insisted.

In another post he suggested just what that “worse” might be. Apparently worried that, this time, his impeachment by the House might lead to a conviction by the Senate, Trump posted creative math to argue that the outcome of the Senate race in Alaska, where Democrat Mary Peltola is ahead, is really a romp by Republican Dan Sullivan. Trump got there by counting the actual votes for Sullivan and then adding to that total the votes for everyone else in the race other than Peltola. “The Alaska Race is OVER,” he said, “Dan Sullivan WON, BY A LOT!”

It feels desperate.

As Perry Stein and Jeremy Roebuck of the Washington Post wrote today, congressional Democrats are already building the investigative staff of the committees they will begin to lead in January. In a line that shows just how much things have changed, Stein and Roebuck write that the congress members have “been hiring from the large pool of former career prosecutors who were fired or departed from the Justice Department since the start of Trump’s second term.”

As social media user ctrl+alt+RESIST commented: “Trump purged DOJ to bury the evidence and instead handed Congress a staff of people who know exactly where everything is filed. You cannot shred institutional memory. It just changed employers.”

Attorney General Todd Blanche appears to have thought events through in a similar fashion. Today on CNN, he seemed rattled as he tried to frame upcoming investigations as a system of threats and revenge against Republicans. Asked by Dana Bash what crime Democrats were committing by saying they would exercise their duty of oversight, Blanche did not have one. Asked if Democrats should be imprisoned as Trump suggested, Blanche said it depended on what they had done. When asked about the Trump administration’s attacks on Trump’s perceived enemies, he tried to dismiss them by saying such cases are only a few of the thousands the department has brought.

While Trump has perverted the Department of Justice by using it as his own personal weapon, in fact, accountability is not revenge; it is fundamental to maintaining the rule of law.

One hundred and fifty years ago, after the Civil War, General Ulysses S. Grant believed the cause of the Confederacy was “one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and for which there was the least excuse.” But when he accepted General Robert E. Lee’s surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia in the hamlet of Appomattox Court House, Virginia, in April 1865, he allowed Confederate soldiers to go home with only a promise that they would not take up arms again, in the hope that they would “be able to put in a crop to carry themselves and their families through the next winter.” It was a humanitarian gesture and also a practical one, for southerners were starving, and if they missed planting season, the devastation would get worse.

Grant’s amnesty also reflected the widespread belief among northerners that the blame for secession and the war that killed more than 600,000 Americans fell on the political leaders who had taken their states out of the Union to create a new slave-holding nation they could dominate. But President Andrew Johnson, who took office after the death of President Abraham Lincoln at the hands of an assassin, made a partisan decision to pardon all but about 1,500 of those leaders, returning to them all the privileges of citizenship in a nation they had tried to destroy in hopes that they would support him.

Never facing accountability for their attack on the United States, southern white leaders resurrected the ideology the North had defeated during the war. They changed the memory of what had happened at Appomattox, turning Grant’s clemency into something entirely different. Rather than being a gesture of a victor’s mercy, it was, they argued, a recognition of the superiority of the southern cause, proof that the Confederates were right all along and had lost only because they were overawed by the North’s superior firepower.

The lack of accountability for attacking the United States of America meant that the Confederates’ treason never became odious. Former Confederates were able to spread their ideology across the country in the postwar years. In 1871—just six years after the surrender at Appomattox—the first Confederate secretary of state, Robert Toombs, was being quoted in northern newspapers about the dangers of permitting poor men, especially poor Black men, to vote and his advocacy for a property requirement for voting.

Within a decade, white southerners were lamenting the “Lost Cause,” and northern sympathizers threw Black Americans overboard in their rush to reunite with white southerners against a government that worked for all Americans. The true history of the Confederacy—a brief rebellion against the United States to create a slave-holding nation—was whitewashed as a stand against federal overreach. As such, it endured, carrying racism and rebellion forward for more than a century. In 2021, when rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, some of them carried Confederate battle flags.

That same partisan reworking of history took place after President Gerald Ford issued a preemptive pardon to President Richard Nixon for his actions surrounding the 1972 break-in at the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C. Although Ford relied on the 1915 Burdick v. United States decision that said accepting a pardon carries with it “an imputation of guilt, acceptance, a confession of it,” Nixon never publicly accepted responsibility for his obstruction of justice, abuse of power, and contempt of Congress.

Instead, Nixon blamed the press, whose members designed their “leaks and accusations and innuendo” to destroy him. “When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal,” Nixon told interviewer David Frost in 1977. He went even further, suggesting that a president could “authorize” his staff members to break the law, as well.
The theme that accountability for lawbreaking is somehow a partisan plot by those who hate Republicans continued to fester. Over time, it bolstered the right-wing drive to declare a strongman president above the law.

Confident that presidents would not be held accountable for lawbreaking, President Ronald Reagan’s advisors ignored both U.S. sanctions on Iran’s revolutionary government and the law prohibiting aid to the right-wing Contra rebels trying to overthrow Nicaragua’s Marxist Sandinista government. In what became known as the Iran-Contra affair, they sold highly marked-up arms to Iran, and sent the proceeds—off the books—to aid the Contras.

During Reagan’s administration, the Office of Legal Counsel expounded a new theory of the “unitary executive” that said because the president was the head of one of the three independent branches of government, neither of the other two branches—the legislative branch (Congress) or the judicial branch (the courts)—could check him.

In 1989 the head of the Office of Legal Counsel, William Barr, wrote a memo warning officials in the George H.W. Bush administration to be wary of “legislative encroachments” on the president’s authority. When he later became attorney general, he backed Bush’s pardons of the eleven Reagan officials charged in the Iran-contra affair.

Lawrence Walsh, the independent prosecutor in the case, worried that pardoning the officials removed accountability and thus weakened American democracy. It “undermines…the principle…that no man is above the law,” he said. “It demonstrates that powerful people with powerful allies can commit serious crimes in high office, deliberately abusing the public trust without consequences.”

Barr went on to become the attorney general in Donald Trump’s first administration, and that administration continued the push against accountability. Then, after one grand jury charged Trump with 40 criminal counts for retaining and mishandling classified documents after he left office and then obstructing justice to cover up that retention, and a second charged Trump with four felony counts related to his attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, Trump moved to dismiss the cases on the grounds that “a President has absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions performed within the outer perimeter of his official responsibilities.”

On July 1, 2024, in Trump v. United States,the Supreme Court agreed, shattering the fundamental principle of U.S. democracy: that no one is above the law. Since returning to office, Trump has taken advantage of that immunity by turning the machinery of the federal government against those he perceives as his enemies.

But now, with the prospect of investigations into behavior that might fall outside a president’s official duties, Trump is trying to convince the American people that enforcing the rule of law is a partisan attack.

In fact, it is the opposite. The true rule of law is nonpartisan. It is the fundamental rule under which the American government was conceived.

“here, say some, is the King of America?” Thomas Paine wrote in Common Sense, the 1776 pamphlet that convinced British colonists in North America to cut ties with their king and start a new nation. “n America the law is king. For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be king; and there ought to be no other.”

Ta.

November 9, 2026 (Monday)

Let’s take a night of rest.

I’ll see you tomorrow.

Neophyte said:

November 9, 2026 (Monday)

Let’s take a night of rest.

I’ll see you tomorrow.

Lovely image.

Thanks for posting.

:)

November 10, 2026 (Tuesday)

Congress members came back to Washington, D.C., yesterday after the midterm earthquake. The membership of the current Congress remains the same, but the mood of the country and the momentum of the parties has shifted so completely it feels like the country lived through a decade of change in the past week.

As if in illustration of that change, Democrats have announced they are going to move the plaque honoring the law enforcement officers who defended the Congress and the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021—including 250 who were injured—to a more prominent spot.

Congress authorized the plaque, but House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) refused to put it up, and Republicans in the Senate finally buried it on a basement wall.

Yesterday morning, Trump tried to resurrect the Big Lie—that any election he loses is rigged—for the midterms, but the power of that lie to conjure news reports is apparently gone. Right-wing personality Megyn Kelly posted a response: “Just stop.” Today pictures of the big incoming class of new Democratic senators circulated on social media.
While the Democrats will remain in the minority in Congress until January, they are making it clear they intend to hit the ground running. Already they are putting forward measures to address both affordability and accountability.

Yesterday a group of sixteen Democratic senators reiterated their determination to get rid of the dramatic cuts Republicans made to Medicaid in their so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” of July 2025. In the short term, they asked the Republican chair of the Senate Finance Committee, Mike Crapo of Idaho, and the Senate majority leader, John Thune of South Dakota, along with their Democratic counterparts, to delay the Medicaid work reporting requirements set to go into effect on January 1, 2027. They note that such work requirements have never increased participation in the workforce. Instead, they have caused eligible people to lose coverage when they can’t navigate the new red tape.

New inflation numbers today showed prices rising faster than economists expected. Carl Quintanilla of CNBC reported that by Schwab’s estimates, the year from October 2025 to October 2026 saw consumer prices rise 12%.

Inflation is a direct result of Trump’s tariffs, war on Iran, and deportation of undocumented immigrants, and Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) today called Trump’s economic agenda “a failure.” In a speech today, she called for a higher federal minimum wage and banning congressional stock trading and “surveillance pricing,” the practice of tailoring prices to individual consumers. Expected to become the chair of the Senate Banking Committee, Warren said she will push back against bad actors in the financial industry and in crypto ventures.

Louise Radnofsky, Emily Glazer, C. Ryan Barber, and Lindsay Ellis of the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that Democrats from a variety of committees have already asked certain corporations, including Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft, to produce records concerning their ties to potentially corrupt administration schemes—including Trump’s legacy projects—by January 4, the first day of the new Congress.

Administration figures are already trying to distance themselves from possible wrongdoing. Yesterday, Trump told reporters that he had not heard about the relationship between Nvidia chief executive officer Jensen Huang and a Chinese spy who was transmitting information about the company and its protected chips directly to Beijing before he invited Huang to travel to China with him aboard Air Force One in May.

But in the New York Times today, Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Swan, Julian E. Barnes, Ana Swanson, and Tripp Mickle reported that Secretary of State Marco Rubio had indeed informed Trump about the intelligence concerning Huang and that Rubio’s conversation with Trump “marked at least the second time in seven months that the president had been told of intelligence about Mr. Huang’s involvement with the woman.”

As political scientist Elizabeth N. Saunders pointed out, the Trump administration’s refusal to do anything about the Nvidia case follows directly from Judge Aileen Cannon’s dismissal of the case concerning Trump’s mishandling of classified documents. Between that and his willingness to employ people who could not get security clearances, he has demonstrated his contempt for national security.

Yesterday Representative Thomas Massie (R-KY) filed eight articles of impeachment against Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Speaker Johnson sent the House home in October rather than having to bring Massie’s articles to a vote, but Massie has not backed down. The first three articles accuse Hegseth of violating the War Powers Act, not only by continuing the conflict for longer than the 90 days the law permits without obtaining congressional authorization, but also by launching the war without congressional authorization or an immediate threat, the language the law requires for the president to act on his own.

Article IV accuses Hegseth of ignoring laws to limit civilian casualties; Article V accuses Hegseth of extrajudicial killings of at least 221 people with the strikes on small boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific. Article VI accuses Hegseth of illegally suppressing free speech with his retaliation against Senator Mark Kelly (D-AZ) for questioning unlawful military orders. Article VII accuses Hegseth of kidnapping a sovereign leader—Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro—and Article VIII accuses Hegseth of launching an unlawful war in Yemen.

Hegeseth held a press conference today, his first in about six months. Lara Seligman and Michael R. Gordon of the Wall Street Journal noted that he didn’t talk about the ongoing war on Iran, but about his own impeachment. He claimed the impeachment effort was political and that criticism of his management of the military was an attack on the troops. While he tied himself closely to Trump, he did note that everything he did was “ordered by the commander in chief.”

According to Aidan McLaughlin of Vanity Fair, before the briefing, an official told reporters that if anyone “gets out of line” they would be “removed physically.” Journalist Dan Lamothe reported that Hegseth would only take questions from right-wing media.

The Trump administration is rushing forward with his legacy projects in Washington, D.C.—the triumphal arch, changes to Lafayette Square, the East Potomac Golf Links, and development of the Tidal Basin—to get them far enough along that they will be hard to stop when Democratic oversight begins in January. Sunlen Serfaty and Annie Grayer of CNN reported today that “multiple” whistleblowers have warned the top Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee, Jared Huffman of California, that administration officials are already destroying records. The House Natural Resources Committee oversees the national parks and federal lands Trump is trying to take over for his projects.

While a spokesperson for the Interior Department said the whistleblower claims were “100% false,” Huffman has sent letters to the many different agencies involved in the various construction projects reminding them they must “preserve existing records collections and productions,” “dentify and recover any deleted information,” and “suspend any destruction and deletion practices.”

“Everything is coming; it’s all coming,” Huffman told Serfaty and Grayer. “It’s just going to be an entirely new day.”

Meanwhile, MAGA Republicans appear to have decided to double down on the same ideology that voters overwhelmingly rejected last Tuesday. House speaker Mike Johnson told reporters that “voters made the wrong choice” in the midterms. Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) issued a call for Christians to meet the “shocking and historic” election with a “historic” response: an hour-long fast on December 15 at the Capitol.

In Jack Hopkins Now, Jack Hopkins noted Saturday that Trump’s elevation of Stephen Miller to White House chief of staff after he forced out former chief of staff Susie Wiles will take away whatever restraints Trump has on his behavior. Hopkins noted that Wiles had said Trump has “an alcoholic’s personality” in that he operates as if “there’s nothing he can’t do.” Wiles grew up with an alcoholic father and learned to manage that personality with structure, staying out of the media and controlling who had access to Trump, managing his impulses.

Miller, Hopkins notes, is the opposite. He loves the media, and rather than managing Trump’s impulses, he amplifies them. Seeing provocation as a way to get rewarded, he has described the U.S. as a scene of “American carnage” and wants to create a white nation through violent deportations and the crushing of internal dissent.

When Trump appeared to bow to popular revulsion over Miller’s immigration extremism in an interview on 60 Minutes last night, suggesting amnesty for hardworking immigrants whose only offense was entering the country without documentation, MAGA exploded. On the right-wing OAN channel, former director of Project 2025 Paul Dans cheered on the elevation of Stephen Miller to the position of White House chief of staff, suggesting that Miller would understand that “there is no appetite for the American public for amnesty.”

As Media Matters reported, Dans told former Representative Matt Gaetz (R-FL), who left office after the House Ethics Committee found he had paid for sex with a minor and used illicit drugs as a member of Congress: “We just drove away a historic coalition, young men were completely disenfranchised. And our first response to them can’t be, Hey, let’s give away your jobs to a bunch of foreigners. The first response has to be, We’re doing away with the H-1B program. We have to let young white men take the wheel again of the American economy.

That is the way out of this. And they need hope, this is their birthright, their country. And it’s time to put America and Americans first.”

The Make America Healthy Again movement and an apparently high Donald Trump Jr. have both come out in support of personality Russell Brand, who on Monday was sentenced to ten and a half years in prison in the U.K. for rape and sexual assault. As Brandy Zadrozny of MS NOW reported today, Brand was a prominent spokesperson for MAHA, and today the online publication of MAHA Action Inc, a key advocacy group for the movement, came out with a 3,700-word screed challenging the fairness of the trial and suggesting a political motivation for the four weeks of witnesses testifying that Brand had sexually assaulted four women between 2004 and 2009.

Later today, an apparently high Don Jr. posted a video suggesting that Brand’s conviction for rape was due to his embrace of “conservative life,” “when no one had a problem with it in the prior 27 years.”

Today on the Fox News Channel, Attorney General Todd Blanche doubled down on the idea that he would consider prosecuting Democrats for saying they’re going to enforce accountability. Also today, news broke that a federal appeals court has refused the attempt of the Department of Justice to gain access to 18 months of journalists’ records on LinkedIn, saying the “overbroad” demand threatened the freedom of the press.

On Monday the U.S. Department of Agriculture revived a plan that would cut Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits from those who qualify for other programs, affecting about 6.3 million people in fiscal year 2029. Marcia Brown of Politico noted that such cuts were outlined in Project 2025.

Alex Nguyen of the Texas Tribune reported that as the Texas attorney general’s office moves from the hands of Republican Ken Paxton to Democrat Nathan Johnson, the Department of Justice is joining a lawsuit Paxton launched against Planned Parenthood in an attempt to bankrupt the organization.

House Republicans today elected Trump loyalist Ohio congressman Jim Jordan to lead their conference. Jordan is a firebrand most famous for shouting down opponents, pushing MAGA rhetoric, and having been accused of turning a blind eye to accusations of sexual abuse of students by a team doctor when he was a wrestling coach at Ohio State University.

Republicans demonstrated their loyalty to Trump tonight when they voted overwhelmingly—Massie was the only one who voted no—to send Massie’s impeachment measure to the Judiciary Committee, where Republicans will bottle it up. Rather than making the issue go away, killing this fast impeachment measure has likely guaranteed a slower process when the Democrats take control of Congress in January, with hearings that will expose the details of Hegseth’s tenure at the Defense Department and make clear to the American people why Hegseth must go.

Meanwhile, Trump yesterday contrived a press conference to try to dig out from his apparent misunderstanding of a list of potential candidates for White House press secretary. He seems to have confused spokesperson Dana White with the Ultimate Fighting Championship promoter Dana White, offering the promoter a job for which he has no qualifications. At the press conference, Trump introduced the UFC promoter as if the whole suggestion were a big joke.

This morning, he called in to C-SPAN with a woman (not Melania) laughing in the background, then launched into his fantasy version of the world until the host nudged him off the line.

Ta.

November 11, 2026 (Wednesday)

The day that we now recognize as Veterans Day began at the end of World War I, when the armistice that turned into a lasting peace took effect on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. In 1954, after veterans of World War II and the Korean War had joined the ranks of returning military personnel, Congress changed the name of the U.S. commemoration from “Armistice Day” to “Veterans Day.”

President Dwight D. Eisenhower, himself a veteran who had served as the supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe and who had become a five-star general of the Army before his political career, later issued a proclamation asking Americans to observe Veterans Day: “et us solemnly remember the sacrifices of all those who fought so valiantly, on the seas, in the air, and on foreign shores, to preserve our heritage of freedom, and let us reconsecrate ourselves to the task of promoting an enduring peace so that their efforts shall not have been in vain.”

In our day it has become a tradition for political leaders to honor veterans on this day, and today was no exception. Trump delivered a Veterans Day speech at Arlington National Cemetery, although he broke with the tradition of nonpartisan speeches and ended his speech with a defense of his war on Iran and a celebration of the attack on Venezuela that has given the U.S. control of its oil fields.

“We’re taking out billions and billions of dollars of oil and all sorts of other things. Be hundreds of billions very soon,” Trump said. “Nobody’s ever seen anything like it, and we paid for the cost of the war many, many times over already.” “To the victor belong the spoils, they used to say,” he continued. “But you can say it again with us under this leadership.”

Also unusual was the president using the solemn day of remembrance to raise money. J.D. Wolf of MeidasNews reported that Trump used a holiday greeting to supporters to warn that his second term is “moving fast, and we still have major mountains to climb to finish the job.

After the unfortunate results of the recent Midterm Elections, The MAGA movement took a blow, but I will not falter…. We don’t have the luxury of slowing down. On this Veterans Day, the spirit of American courage and determination is burning bright in this movement, and we must protect it!” He announced a “Presidential Fundraising Blitz” to “send a powerful message that the American people will never surrender our liberty…the same liberty our veterans risked everything to protect.” “YOU’RE THE ONLY REASON WE SAVED AMERICA,” the message concludes. “NOW I AM ASKING YOU TO CONSIDER MAKING A SMALL SUSTAINING CONTRIBUTION, SO WE CAN COMPLETE THE MAGA AGENDA!”

After the ceremony at the Arlington National Cemetery, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and his wife, accompanied by his chief of staff Ricky Buria, deputy chief of staff Patrick Weaver and senior adviser and deputy assistant Tami Radabaugh, stopped for pictures by the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. One of the nation’s most sacred monuments, the tomb is guarded constantly by a Tomb Guard from the U.S. Army’s 3rd Infantry Regiment, known as “The Old Guard,” and visitors are supposed to remain silent at the tomb.

The group was chatting and laughing, and as Haley Britzky, David Brooks, and Natasha Bertrand of CNN reported, when their laughter floated back to the Tomb Guard, he stopped his carefully choreographed patrol to turn to the offenders and call out: “All visitors will maintain an atmosphere of silence and respect at all times.”

Different ways of honoring veterans were highlighted today, as Trump suggested that the 250-foot triumphal arch he wants to build between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery is for veterans, although Vietnam veterans are among those suing over its construction. “Soon we’re going to dedicate a magnificent triumphal arch to our veterans, and that’s in honor of our great veterans and our great militaries,” he said. “They’ve been waiting for it for 200 years.”

But in New York City, Mayor Zohran Mamdani had a different prescription for honoring veterans. “This Veterans Day, let us renew our commitment to those who served by confronting the injustices too many veterans still face, from homelessness and isolation to the threat of deportation,” he posted. “Our responsibility to those who served does not end when they come home.”

Eric Umansky of ProPublica hammered this point home today, chronicling the dramatic cuts to the VA, or U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, the Cabinet-level government agency that provides lifelong healthcare, benefits, and memorial services for veterans and eligible family members. Umansky explains that the VA serves 9 million veterans, providing healthcare that is “essentially socialized medicine,” with doctors, nurses, and staff all employed by the federal government. Umansky also notes that despite occasional scandals and chronic short-staffing, the VA has better outcomes than private care.

But the right wing has worked for decades to get rid of VA healthcare and push veterans toward private sector doctors and hospitals, claiming that such private care is more efficient than government-run healthcare. With data reporting by Joel Jacobs and illustrations by Hokyoung Kim, Umansky’s piece lays out how under Trump and Secretary of Veterans Affairs Doug Collins, the administration initially considered sweeping cuts to the VA but, after massive pushback, appear to have settled on making work conditions so bad people would leave on their own.

Citing national security, they canceled union contracts, ordered remote staffers back to work in buildings that couldn’t accommodate them, required employees to report what they had accomplished each week, and offered incentives to retire or quit. Under President Joe Biden, the agency had been hiring personnel; in the first six months under Trump’s second administration, the VA lost 3,800 doctors, nurses, and “mission critical” staff and eliminated hiring for positions that were open. In September 2025, Collins imposed new caps on staffing levels as part of his plan to cut 30,000 employees, and numbers of employees have continued to drop.

Umansky chronicled the downward spiral of a VA medical center as it and its affiliated facilities lost nearly 10% of their staff. Umansky reports that according to the VA’s watchdog, 97% of VA hospitals report “severe shortages of doctors.” Veterans are being pushed into the Community Care system Trump supports, but those systems are overwhelmed and wait times can run into months. Under Trump the VA has increasingly acted like an insurer, Umansky writes, simply paying private doctors to care for veterans as part of their normal practice.

The privatization of veterans’ care and its emphasis on driving veterans into the private sector contrasts dramatically with the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1945, which transformed the lives of returning World War II military personnel and in the process transformed the United States.

Congress had developed the precursor to what became known as the G.I. Bill in 1943, when Democrats worried that the 15 million soldiers returning from the war would flood the labor market and bring back the Depression. Democrats wanted unemployment benefits for soldiers, as well as education benefits to keep some in school and out of the job market. They also wanted to guarantee home or business loans of up to two thousand dollars to help returning service men and women transition back to civilian life.

Republicans objected to what they saw as a welfare program, but after a great deal of pressure from veterans’ groups, they recognized that opposing a measure to help veterans would be political suicide. Almost all Republicans came around to support the bill on the grounds that they were not endorsing a general social welfare program but rather helping veterans as the government had always done.

The end of the war in 1945 revealed that fears of a returning depression were unwarranted. Most veterans found work: on average, they spent fewer than three months looking for a job; only 14 percent were unemployed for a year. This meant that the unemployment benefits of the bill were far less important than the educational provisions. In late 1945, Congress revised the bill to reflect Republicans’ focus on economic growth rather than Democrats’ fears of returning unemployment. The new bill increased both the reimbursements the government provided schools and the stipends it offered veterans. The G.I. Bill was no longer a defense against recession; it had become an agent for economic growth.

And boy, did it work. The G.I. Bill enabled veterans to get vocational training or a college degree. Fifty-one percent of veterans—7.8 million—went back to school. Colleges and universities built apartment complexes and new academic buildings to accommodate the mature students who were, in some cases, more than doubling the student body. Returning soldiers tended to be serious students, determined to succeed. The G.I. Bill added to the American workforce not only skilled managers but also 450,000 engineers, 180,000 medical professionals, 360,000 teachers, 150,000 scientists, 243,000 accountants, 107,000 lawyers, and 36,000 clergymen.

The G.I. Bill helped four million veterans buy homes. House construction pumped up building trades. Once built, the homes continued to boost the economy. Soon they would fill with the children of the baby boom, who wore diapers and clothes, ate, played with toys, rode bikes, went to school, wore out the furniture, and before long would watch television.

By providing homes and higher education to almost 8 million Americans, the G.I. Bill transformed America. Millions of families vaulted into the middle class and enjoyed a standard of living that would have been unimaginable before the war. The vacuum created as working-class men entered the middle class opened up better-paying jobs at the lower end of the economy, as well.

But the G.I. Bill created a very specific new economy. Women and Black and Brown Americans were eligible for the provisions of the bill, but its benefits nonetheless went largely to white men. White educational institutions excluded Black students, while the chronically underfunded Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) couldn’t handle the influx of veterans. Even if a Black veteran could find a place, the local and state VA offices administering the benefits rarely provided them to Black applicants.

Home mortgages and businesses had the same outcome. The mortgages the VA backed relied on local banks and lenders, who routinely refused to lend money for homes in Black and Brown neighborhoods—a practice known as “redlining”—locking Black and Brown veterans out of the measure’s benefits.

Despite its faults, the G.I. Bill did more than any other law in U.S. history to prove that investing in the American people is sound policy. And it harked back to the original Republicans, who believed the government must care for its veterans. Congress established national homes for disabled volunteer soldiers on March 3, 1865, the day before President Abraham Lincoln gave his second inaugural address, in which he asked Americans “to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.”

Ta.

November 12, 2026 (Thursday)

Mississippi has a new U.S. senator-elect.

Last night, the Associated Press called the race for Democrat Scott Colom, district attorney for the 16th Judicial District of Mississippi. Shortly afterward, Republican incumbent Cindy Hyde-Smith conceded the race, saying she respected the decision of the Mississippi voters. She congratulated Colom and wished him well.

Colom thus becomes the third Black senator from the state of Mississippi and the first ever elected by the people, as his two predecessors became senators in the years immediately after the Civil War, when state legislatures, rather than the people, still chose U.S. senators.

In 1870 the Mississippi legislature chose Hiram R. Revels, a minister who had been born free in North Carolina to free people of color, to finish the term of a Senate seat left empty in 1861 when the man who held it left with the state upon Mississippi’s secession from the United States. Over the opposition of Democrats, who were then the party of the Confederates, Revels became the nation’s first Black senator, serving for a little over a year, from February 25, 1870, to March 3, 1871.

The second Black senator from Mississippi was Blanche K. Bruce, who was born into slavery in Virginia and in 1868 moved to Mississippi, where he became a large landholder and was active in the Republican Party. The legislature elected him senator in 1874, and he served from March 1875 to March 1881, working closely with New York’s machine politician Roscoe Conkling, for whom he named his son. During his tenure, he presided over the Senate for a day, becoming the first Black person to preside over the Senate and the only formerly enslaved person to do so.

The backlash against Black political power was ferocious in Mississippi, where Black people outnumbered white people in 39 of the state’s 75 counties. In 1889, when Republicans began to talk about federal protection for Black voters in the South, lynching, which had been declining, rose again dramatically.

The next year, a convention rewrote the state constitution to enforce white supremacy by making it virtually impossible for Black people to vote. They required voters to pay a poll tax of $2 and to be able to show receipts for the two previous elections and to be able to interpret a section from the complicated state constitution chosen by a polling registrar. Because jurors were drawn from voting lists, being purged from them meant Black Americans couldn’t sit on juries, either.

Northerners, worried about the political power of new immigrants, cheered on Mississippi’s educational qualifications for voting, and by 1903 every southern state and many northern ones had rewritten their constitutions to adopt similar limits to suffrage.

Mississippi became the center of voter suppression in the United States, making it the state on which voting rights activists focused in the years after World War II, especially after the lynching of 14-year-old Emmett TIll in the state in 1955 in the wake of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision requiring the desegregation of public schools.

Medgar Evers, a World War II veteran and the Mississippi field officer for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), urged the national organization to get involved in calling for justice for the child. As part of his civil rights work to combat segregation, Evers led voter registration drives in the face of growing white resistance. On June 12, 1963, Byron De La Beckwith, a member of a white supremacist Citizen Council, shot Evers in the back.

In one of the most powerful ads of the campaign, Colom told the story.

“There’s a house in Jackson every Mississippian ought to walk through once,” Colom says, as he stands in front of Medgar Evers’s home. “It looks like every other house on the street, except for it isn’t. It has no front door. You come in through the carport, where the walls give you some cover. The children slept on the floor, below the windows. Their father taught them that if they ever heard gunfire, they should crawl to the bathroom. He made it a game.”

“I’ve been a prosecutor for ten years,” Colom said. “Unfortunately, I’ve stood in a lot of houses where something terrible happened. This isn’t any house. This isn’t any tragedy. This is where Medgar Evers died. He fought for this country at Normandy. He came home to Mississippi, and they wouldn’t let him vote.

“So he organized, helping other people register. Just after midnight on June 12, 1963, he pulled into here with an arm full of T-shirts that said, “Jim Crow Must Go.” A man hiding across the street shot him in the back. Two juries let that man walk. His wife, Myrlie, never stopped. It took 31 years, then a Mississippi prosecutor reopened the case, and a Mississippi jury, both Black and white, convicted him.

“In Mississippi, no one is above the law, and no one should be outside its protection. He was killed for helping Mississippians vote. On Tuesday, use your vote, and honor everyone who died for that right.”

Mississippians heard Colom. They went to the polls and made him the first Black candidate elected to the United States Senate from Mississippi.

In his victory speech, Colom reached back to minister Hiram Revels to anchor his journey to the Senate in the faith that he called a Mississippi tradition. “For me, this journey started with a prayer,” he said, “and in Mississippi, our prayers have often changed the course of history.” He called out Medgar Evers and voting rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer for their faith in Mississippi, but added that “in Mississippi, it’s local people that make the difference. Not just the names that are recorded in history, but people that do the work without any expectation of recognition.”

He continued: “I’ll tell you, it’s local people that had faith that Mississippi can make progress, and it’s local people like the people out here who had faith that we can win this election. So God bless you. But as my mom would always tell me, faith without work is dead, and we worked this election, y’all. We worked. God didn’t want us to get it the easy way, he wanted us to get it the Mississippi way.”

“For months and months, I’ve been telling everybody, everywhere I go, that we’re going to win this election,” Colom said. “I was saying that eight or nine months ago, and recently, I’ve been saying it on the news. But every time I said it, I pointed out that people were going to give me too much credit for it, because it’s not something that I did; it’s something that we did.”

“All I did was have the courage to imagine a night like this,” Colom said. “I had the courage to believe in Mississippi. I had the courage to understand that we could show the country that Mississippi matters.”

“In one of the most powerful ads of the campaign, Colom told the story.

“There’s a house in Jackson every Mississippian ought to walk through once,” Colom says, as he stands in front of Medgar Evers’s home. “It looks like every other house on the street, except for it isn’t. It has no front door. You come in through the carport, where the walls give you some cover. The children slept on the floor, below the windows. Their father taught them that if they ever heard gunfire, they should crawl to the bathroom. He made it a game.”

“I’ve been a prosecutor for ten years,” Colom said. “Unfortunately, I’ve stood in a lot of houses where something terrible happened. This isn’t any house. This isn’t any tragedy. This is where Medgar Evers died. He fought for this country at Normandy. He came home to Mississippi, and they wouldn’t let him vote.

“So he organized, helping other people register. Just after midnight on June 12, 1963, he pulled into here with an arm full of T-shirts that said, “Jim Crow Must Go.” A man hiding across the street shot him in the back. Two juries let that man walk. His wife, Myrlie, never stopped. It took 31 years, then a Mississippi prosecutor reopened the case, and a Mississippi jury, both Black and white, convicted him.

“In Mississippi, no one is above the law, and no one should be outside its protection. He was killed for helping Mississippians vote. On Tuesday, use your vote, and honor everyone who died for that right.”

Mississippians heard Colom. They went to the polls and made him the first Black candidate elected to the United States Senate from Mississippi.

In his victory speech, Colom reached back to minister Hiram Revels to anchor his journey to the Senate in the faith that he called a Mississippi tradition. “For me, this journey started with a prayer,” he said, “and in Mississippi, our prayers have often changed the course of history.” He called out Medgar Evers and voting rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer for their faith in Mississippi, but added that “in Mississippi, it’s local people that make the difference. Not just the names that are recorded in history, but people that do the work without any expectation of recognition.”

He continued: “I’ll tell you, it’s local people that had faith that Mississippi can make progress, and it’s local people like the people out here who had faith that we can win this election. So God bless you. But as my mom would always tell me, faith without work is dead, and we worked this election, y’all. We worked. God didn’t want us to get it the easy way, he wanted us to get it the Mississippi way.”

“For months and months, I’ve been telling everybody, everywhere I go, that we’re going to win this election,” Colom said. “I was saying that eight or nine months ago, and recently, I’ve been saying it on the news. But every time I said it, I pointed out that people were going to give me too much credit for it, because it’s not something that I did; it’s something that we did.”

“All I did was have the courage to imagine a night like this,” Colom said. “I had the courage to believe in Mississippi. I had the courage to understand that we could show the country that Mississippi matters.”

It’s just s-o-o-o-o-o-o nice to hear an American politician talk like a responsible adult.

Ta.

:)

captain_spalding said:

It’s just s-o-o-o-o-o-o nice to hear an American politician talk like a responsible adult.

I’ll say.