God love the anti-abortion Democrats. The last Democratic governor of Louisiana, Jon Bel Edwards, and Congressman from Texas Henry Cueller. And that may just be it — have to look around in state legislators and one ballot line lower than anyone really knows to find anyone else. One of the two is not even in office anymore. What you are stuck with beyond this is someone, dunking on Republicans, claiming Joe Biden as anti-abortion but in his personal beliefso more legitimately so and authentically than the Republicans and religious conservatives — bending any real definition.

Henry Cueller sneaks into mind off of a Te Nehisi Coates interview, as his forges ahead against Kamala Harris with Palestine as his central issue and now is barking at comments from the likes of James Carville on the recent nomination pwins of DSA figures in New York City congressional districts. And here I can’t help but think of it were not for Darializa Avila Chevalier and her track record of pretty illiberal commentary and maybe toss in yesterday’s Colorado winner, Carville’s comments would be a little bit more mooted — clearly not liking this cohort but able to place then “in the big tent” and try to trumpet a bunch of other someone elses. Te Neisha’s response goes to an issue of race — a suggesting of “disenfranchisement” in the very ac of bemoaning the congressional nominees. “I don’t get it”. “That’s a lot of brown people and black people who voted for Chevalier and Lander.” Sure. And that is a lot of black people who voted for James Clyburn in South Carolina and a lot of brown people who voted for Henry Cueller in Texas, and I am pretty sure the response from Te Neisha Coates on what he thinks of those two persons would be along the lines of James Carville on these three DSA politicians. I think his conception of why they won over is big money and power, structures that need to be overcome and the definition of Democracy is when someone out of DSA politics who beats this machinery – – or something in so many words. The funky thing on Cueller– Trump pardoned him for some corruption charges and then was insulted when he remained a Democrat. Dude remains in the tent, I guess.

Colorado Governor Jared Polis exits stage right, and becomes another interesting figure. God bless him. His governing policy of commuting and shortening lots of non-violent offenders, so it is piles of low level druggies, moves into one non-violent conspiracist of January 6th fame. Tina Peters was almost certainly going to get her sentence shortened by the courts anyways, and Polis stepped in and did it himself. I kind of get it. I suppose the big reason not to is because Trump was pressuring him for the release and there is no way the perception of events isn’t just going to be viewed as step a and then step b — and that is how everyone covers it, what a sad sack Polis is as Peters runs off and gets a hero’s cause celebre welcome from the likes of Steve Bannon. But political office appears something of a rich man’s hobby for Polis and he can just walk off after his two terms in office indifferent that the whole world hates him and his status in the Democratic Party is along the lines on Jon Bel Edwards — he served over there for a couple terms and barely was moved by the headwinds every which way in national party politics.

Dumb feature of the political and media landscape is this disproportionate attention to a few elections in the New York metro area. Mamdani and his DSA machine have pulled three candidates to primary, and defacto insta-general, election victories against established Democratic incumbents. Good for them, but in a 435 member congress while it adds up to a hill of beans it does not add up to any more than that.

A little bit of a received opinion, and I haven’t looked too far at these soon-to-be congress critter, but two of them are all right, serious, set to figure in legislating and one of them sucks. So we see Bernie Sanders embracing in full and publicalky endorsing and then congratulating those two and keeping his lips sealed on that third one. But — this is Mamdani’s geo-parcel of the party and he has brought that third one up. And though of course the Republicans and John Fetterman will giddily portray them all as monstrosities — how does this go over in Peoria? — that third one will get a lion’s share of quotations tossed about, broad demands to comment on positions taken. And, I don’t know. If she proved unserious to the job and sticks to the narrow great left omni-cause of unconsidered latest trending sloganeering, she looks like the candidate most likely to go the way of Jamaal Bowman — make an ass of herself and lose in a primary to someone probably a mite to the right of the district but serious. And that will be described as a political earthquake even as everyone else carries along, a stalling of DSA politics. Which — may just show the limitations of their appeal, the factions in that organization naturally divided and factionalized further to the left, the very presence in electoral politics already a sell-out of real Socialist principles anyways.

Funny to see Talarico — and I ponder how Paxton and the Republicans make hay of his snippy commentary of the past. I watch a current favorite of theirs and ponder the meaning — Talarico chides some mega church pastor politicians and their teachings, it transmutes to Talarico hating Christianity. The footage is aired all about Republican media outlets. They cut it off mid-sentence, breathtakingly actually mid-word. Funny though, because the nuanced filler context and explainer for it is probably as politically a bummer as the out of context comment — it aligns him with those nasty secularists after all and this is the Christianity this electorate follows and how they define Christianity. Talarico’s Christian parsing here would probably would serve well in Peoria, but he is not in Peoria — we shall see if he can get over it in Texas.

“Idiocracy!” The common coinage, levelled as we look over at the spectacle of mma cage matches and the sea of shady corporate sponsors. ” We are living in Idiocracy!” And granted, the show out on brings us to Idiocracy. But otherwise, we only wish we were in Idiocracy. President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Camacho? He cares about the state of the nation and brings in the best people he can find to work on our problems, the problems inflicted on us by previous bad corrupt leadership. The guy is digging the nation out of the hole from the malicious idiots the Americans had brought to power previously. We are not living in Idiocracy — we are living through a prequel to Idiocracy.

And when we get to Idiocracy, Fox News and Newsmax (and Bari Weiss’s CNN and CBS) will be right there — marshalling half the electorate against him.

I have to refresh my memory on the controversy which met the Biden Administration at his hosting of the lgbt event — not the event itself, innocuous, but a specific incident. Someone took her shirt off, grabbed some snapshots. A lack of decorum not becoming of the White House, the Biden Administration rightly admonishes her and “won’t invite her” again. I figure it was worth it for her — she got what she wanted. But it is worthwhile to state at her comments:

Montoya defended her post on Instagram and Twitter, saying that “going topless in Washington, DC is legal and I fully support the movement in freeing the nipple.” She said critics of her toplessness affirmed that she is, in fact, a woman, as a man would not face similar pushback. She said she had “zero intention of trying to be vulgar or be profane in anyway,” adding that she covered her nipples with her hands in the video “just to play it safe.”

I am reasonably certain that the Biden White House would not want the men — trans or cis — to throw their shirt off, as much as you’d want to pound this “double standard” angle. The Trump Administration though — apparently not so much.

Somewhat annoying, Wikipedia does not have the primary percentages for South Carolina’s Republican primary. A signal of the decline in Insta-relevance of Wikipedia — any time I the past two decades it would immediately get inserted into Graham’s article and the Senate election article. I find the total elsewhere — 56.8 percent. His nearest challenger, who I would want to look into to see what his coordinates on opposition are — gets a 28.9 percent. Graham has a greater vote share than 2014 and less than 2020. Always considered a bane to the right, he probably got established to the right side in Trump in 2020 — his Kavanaugh performance an obvious inflection point. In the current year, various anti-war Republicans who took parts of Trump’s promises seriously — including Alex Jones and weirdo YouTube guy who has videos showing “on the ground, what’s really going on with antifa at ice protests in Portland” — shift the blame on Iran over to Lindsey Graham, chief neo-con. And I suppose you would have to have a grudging respect for Graham if he was indeed playing a long game — though I don’t know how you mitigate Ukraine in that scenario and mostly just laugh and mock at the half-deal walk-away reportedly in the air tonight. For his part, the commentary on his Twitter feed — happy birthday President Trump, I can’t wait to see this ufc cafe match! Do you believe him on that?

And I guess Graham would not have won if Trump had not stated an endorsed. Normally the President endorses all the incumbents of their party, so we can’t really place it. I known Cornyn lost in Texas, but Trump endorsed Paxton because his endorsement would not have pushed him to victory anyway. I do have one partial defense on Texas Republican voters — four terms in office may just well be enough justification to shift to another guy. The defense falls away, of course, on just what Young Turk they have as replacement. But you want seventy somethings plus in the Senate, you just want them not to be a super-majority. Likewise, you want the majority of them to come out of the Lawyer business and Lawyer educational complex — but you kind of want to throw an oyster farmer or two into the mix

A certain amount of happy talk on James Talarico, which gets undermined in the same breath with a “makes it a race” — fighting chance. Or, where everyone was before — Beto O’Rourke, that football guy in 2024. And unlike them who were behind in every poll you ever saw, he leads in the polls. The Republicans have an effective and tried and true strategy though: just say that he’s gay. Or, Vegan, which is the same difference. See, this way when he floats any shot of him eating meat they can claim he’s hiding it, a sign of desperation! And then float out a tweet celebrating the “first trans candidate” — can’t argue against that without alienating the trans, right?

For his part, we see the problem with the latest Republican “take down the establishment” — Paxton. Amuse yourself with the divorce proceedings by the divorce proceedings — “biblical grounds” — ha ha — I don’t really see how anyone cares, even if it’s politically convenient now-off is amusing. The problem when bringing up his record, the things that had the Texas legislator impeach him, and a record of scandal is in the litany — everyone skips right past “election denier” and a lead role in conspiracy hunting on January 6 — no more a scandal, an assumption.

Definitions for what get defined as “scandal” get fuzzy. Graham Platner of Maine — sordid past and all, but I take a kind of “meh” on the latest, even as it appears to drop one hell of a drop in female support in the polls. The circumstances of the latest are a little curious — he brought up his sexting images and infidelity to his wife, oh — oh, five minutes before he decided to run for Senate — a campaign staffer who is disenchanted with Platner dropped it into the ether just now. A semi-scandalous detail — I guess? — on these oh so hot dating app photo is he covers up his Nazi tattoo — I am not sure what that detail is supposed to suggest, even before he was aware of the genesis of the image it is by now a thing that he realises that it is not so bad-ass looking to the chicks he is trying to attract and cheat on. There is a bunch of commentary on Platner I am annoyed with — the consultant pundit Cilizza chimes in that what he’s want from a Platner is to jump in to a state legislator race and go from there. A couple problems with the assumptions baked into the proclamation — we are in a “Schumer cleared the field for an 80 year old career politico, an older version of people who have gone down to Collins in the past” — where is the more liberal and younger state legislator barn-storming the state for this primary? Also you lose years by that deed and the generation gap decreases.

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I watched the 4 episode Netflix series “Death by Lightning”, about President James Garfield.  I somewhat wonder on how an earlier depiction of things in an earlier decade would get depicted -with the scene of Charles Guiteau at Oneida, the people at the commune taking his complaints that it is all menial labor and fucking that his complaint is the women at the free love commune won’t do him — this falls in line with current take of mass shootings and violence as stemming broadly from incel entitlement.

Another thought, kind of where I am always stuck and sometimes end up with no consideration or assessment of “well written” and “badly written” because it is the mark of both  — the dialogue foreshadowing through an expression referencing Garfield’s death.  It strikes me that if a central event of a historical fiction was the famous person eating a hamburger at lunch, you would be finding allusions to that in their life and propping those up, and inventing a few for this mundane occurrence made a central point.

John Fetterman speaks. Once upon a time, an object of ridicule and horror on the right, part of a holy trio alongside Biden and Feinstein for “the Democrats’ cognitive decline problem” — two old people and a stroke victim. How did this guy who stutters incoherently and could barely campaign on his way through rehabilitation have won that election? Never mind the piece of work representing the Republicans. Now he is the Republicans’ favorite Democrat. Israel bashing Democrats turned him. Gaza lovers, I guess. A cautionary tale for the Bernie Sanders pac that pumped him up — Damned it, the Democrats should have gone with Conor Lamb. He walks into Fox News, comes out swinging for Trump’s building of a ballroom, calls everyone opposing this victims of “Trump Derangement Syndrome”. I mean — security — a guy got into the far peripheral a ways way from the President with a gun — that should settle it: ballroom!

Today you can do a side by side of Majority Report youtube clips for Fetterman’s Senate campaign and how threatening this bold progressiveness is to the Democratic Establishment next to clips of Graham Platner and his Senate bid on how threatening his bold progressiveness is to the Democratic Establishment. Indeed, Schumer did whiff on the recruitment — an 80 year old workhorse who… um… is 80 and had to get dragged in anyway. Promises a single term, which worked just fine for the presidential campaign of Biden (though not a re-election) but for the Senate you are eyeing how they may accumulate power. Today the Republican incumbent does as she always does — it is Jon Tester’s re-election campaigns over in Montana or Maine to what they have done for the state and whatever is going on in Washington is their business. Likely this time up Collins meets her time as up — though I guess we see if Platner’s skull tattoo reads as a Nazi tattoo and how everyone registers old reddit posts — warnings loom in the “one of us — loud blowhead men” category.

For Platner’s part, we get a little galaxy brained, half welcome in its conspiratorial grip. He has in his stump speech some issues I normally associate as getting pulled in on the conspiratorial right and a seeing of Communism everywhere. The “they” don’t want you owning anything. Under this umbrella, there are quite a things in tech and patent law that should be redecided and pulled off from the “well, that’s capitalism!”, the terms of service agreement on e-books and how Apple has its contracts, dove-tails neatly into vague Marjorie Taylor Greene weather horrors. Despite protestations from a respectable politico — post Trump ex-Republican — on a cash-less society as “conspiracy theory”, I do stare down at the casual acceptance of a laundromat that chucked its coin operation for its machines — a headache running amok when we move further and further on this model. This is to suggest a kind of Platner if he has a move from political hackdom in the right places could do some good here — exvept, hopefully he is a political hack in the right places. It probably hardly matters — in as much as I can single the broad point of his distinct stumping into individual lines of legislative moves — and it gets past the money that swaps out 40 and 50 Senators for passing — the Supreme Court will back the Power.

Watching Thomas Massie’s concession speech, a room full of his fiery supporters, and I am quickly transported to what I am actually seeing — this was a Ron Paul speech of old. And maybe we do still sneak in Rand Paul — endosrser and supporter of the guy after all. Along with amusingly enough the endorsement of Kyle Rittenhouse who… Bastard jackass even if I take the unpopular defence attorney position on and there get kicked out of any respectable table regarding.

In the end, the guy won every age demographic except the over 65s. And I have no great sense one way or the other if the circumstance of this election were different, the swamp of campaign and social engineering from the parties required would have targeted the campaign younger — gotten the ad spots on the tik and toks, bought off something in the Fuentes and Rogan and Pooles instead of Fox News and Newsmax and Wheel of Fortune. Thomas Massie was, as so happens, more Doge supportive than anyone, conceptually. Also moved forward past Trump on two campaign promises in releasing the Epstein Files opposing the war in Iran and foreign intervention — his two big crosses against Trump and major animating reasons on how the guy was elected.

What do I make of this Ron Paul energy, for a man who is set to go to his off the grid homestead and drink a lot of raw milk? Who the heck beat him and off what?

YouTube is dumping ads for the latest from Ben Shapiro. I don’t know. In earlier periods when I watched some conservative content and some things that maybe code culturally conservative, I would understand — but now I sense a desperate lurch at that time he has lost 80 percent of his audience, I seek a full expose on the nature of propped up conservative youtube content with Shapiro as test case. The sponsored video I am not clicking on is on “Brainrot Defeated”, a celebration of the defeat of Massie. And if nothing else, Shapiro is a fan of military bombings, so it passes. But I have watched the ads of Massie’s opponent and that of the next congressman from that Kentucky district. I have heard him speak after Trump and Vance. He ran a full speed run against The View. And have a scintillating ad with Massie getting ready to have a three-way with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortex and Ilhan Omar — to be sure, a metaphor visually depicted and I guess working well for Kentucky Fox News viewers.

It speaks poorly of Alex Jones and mainstream politics that Alex Jones gets placed in with a list of “prominent conservatives”. Skip back to his yokking with Charlie Sheen or Billy Corgan, pumping up Ron Paul, getting vicious quotes from Alan Grayson. Yep, right-wing indeed, but able to pose as an outside rabbler. Even the thing that has proven his undoing, the habit of declaring all acts of mass violence inside-jobs so enter Sandy Hook — was an outgrowth of the a-partisan worldview — no room for anyone even vaguely your guy in the White House, disenchanted (for the umpteenth time, mind you, and it never stuck) or not.

I half think Alex Jones could go back to the roots. Punk Rock, baby. Not gonna do the Big Circuits. Let’s do… Public Access Television again, where he would be huge in public access television terms.

Skipping about into infowars dot com before it finally gets refurbished by a parodist at The Onion, his big top story is the Federal Government’s indictment of Southern Poverty Law Center. That issue where I half want to place behind a grumbling of some diced opinions on the organization while dismissing that an toto as irrelevant to the fact that it is a bogus and flagrant political act on the part of the Trump government, and half think that any opinion should be so beside the point as to state it is to give the government credence. I think The Nation published a critical piece alleging it falling into its own bureaucracy — might be some other liberal rag — and maybe it is just well that it rests on its couple of big successes in torpoeding the Aryan Nations and prosecuting actual Klan violence. But looking at them, you have the sense of trying to will TP-USA or Focus on the Family out of the mainstream political spot they reside in — or, sure — worthwhile to combat, but the terms you do so fall flat. On their big national “Hate map”, a decade or so back focus on on how they tag Portland and the Willamette Week scratched their head — a coupke of tiny black Muslim reading groups which — looking in on them, maybe they are reading conspirat-orially on the evils of Jews or something in coded manner, but hardly seemed where you can land on the troubles we see. The closing chapters in Infowars posits that this shows — proves — reveals — the SPLC Did it all. The Oklahoma City Bombing, for one. Through their infiltration and seizing control of extremist groups. I half think this is what the DOJ claim actually does say, as this administration is almost just that out of whack, but I know they fall well short and Jones is projecting it onward. The unreality moves in in looking at comments sections at YouTube videos from various commenters on the looming Onion take-over — Jones was right all along here, you just to wake up.

It is this that brings Jones back to Trump — even after the hand-wringing over Iran. That and that he could always still make claims that he has insiders in the White House — referring to whatever Roger Stone threw at him to say. The logic moves on over to Joe Rogan who — apparently was big enough to not get bleated at in a Truth Social post. Just bring him in to stand behind him as he waves freedom for psychedelics use and greet him at a UFC fight and all is forgiven — that while Iran fiasco — what the ever. Nothing sticks. I mean, even Alan Dersowitz apparently remained the Democratic Party while I wasn’t looking — how else do I explain a second “Why I’m Quitting the Democratic Party” essay? (And will be write a third one a year from now?)

A familiar sight in electioneering — the opportunities of campaign dwindle to a handful for the unpopular incumbent — Obama needs to be out campaigning for someone In 2010, but true swing states cut him off — the only place he can find are some heavily black or heavily college districts and the man running against Christine O’Donnell throws him a bone. The circumstances are maybe a little different in this election cycle, but it is a desperate special election batch with, for instance, House Speaker Johnson rolls to a Trump +25 seat and carried a voice message call from Trump to maintain a hold and a seven point victory against a generic Democratic activist. Where will Trump show up — I don’t know, we are in Biden 2022 territory where he may just go wherewithal scarily lighted doom speech and then physically disappear — yeah, he came out swinging against Massie, but that’s a primary.

Today the most important election for the current American conservative movement is taking place. Over in Hungary. Victor Orban is holding on for fear life and has brought in the big guns to rally the base — enter Vice President JD Vance, enter a call in from Donald Trump to the cheering crowd, and enter a message Hungarian patriots to vote to stop powerful foreign and international movements from coming in tell them how they should run their country. The mind reels.

Trying to assess where to campaign — various red districts dotting the US, they won’t admit they have to put in money to Texas until they have to, but the real stop gap to hold and aid future political victory is Hungary. If Hungary falls, all is lost — it will be hard to pick up the pieces and how is JD Vance going to shuffle together the political map to get to 270 electoral votes in 2028 when Hungary is automatically Newsom Country?