nobody gives you a sweeping mandate like this because they want you to work with the people they just ran tf outta office
This week's featured post is "The Blue Wave came. What now?"
Ongoing stories
- Trump's assault on American democracy. Democracy struck back this week, as chronicled in the featured post. Some pundits may be tempted to claim Trump's overwhelming defeat means that the assault-on-democracy theme was always overblown. But while Trump's attempts to cheat may have come to little or nothing, that's because they were beaten back in the courts and by a motivated electorate. When police stop a gang from robbing a bank, you don't say "No harm done" and send them home to plot their next attempt.
- Climate change. Climate change wasn't a big issue in this campaign, but Trump's wide-ranging assault on reality was. Climate change denial/minimization is one of the many ways the regime lies to us. Going forward, Democrats need to connect obvious lies like "the economy is booming", "prices are going down", and "Iran has been defeated" to claims that climate change is a hoax.
- Israel/Palestine. Israel used to be admired by nearly all American voters, and any hint that a candidate might not like Israel or the current Israeli government was quickly punished. That's not true any more. In Israel itself, the anti-Netanyahu coalition has been given the first chance to form a new government, but that will be a heavy lift. If successful, the new government will also be right-wing, but possibly less inclined to commit war crimes.
- Ukraine. Phillips O'Brien points out that new Chief of Staff Stephen Miller is one of the most pro-Putin anti-Ukraine voices in the administration. "Trump is trying to get many of his most terrible priorities, including helping Putin, achieved as soon as possible, to pre-empt the powers of the new Congress." He also points out that the long-predicted manpower crunch may be hitting -- in Russia. Russian casualties rise every month, and are now outrunning recruiting rates.
This week's developments
This week everybody was talking about the Blue Wave
See the featured post.
I don't talk about any specific races in that post, but one that gave me particular joy was watching Abdul El-Sayed win the Senate race in Michigan by 7 points. El-Sayed is such an obviously talented communicator. Millions of dollars spent on raising bigotry against him did not get under his skin. He stayed focused on his message: Money out of politics. More money in your pocket. Medicare for All. Even the last-minute betrayal by Haley Stevens (God knows what she was thinking) couldn't throw him.
And in the end, neither the money nor the bigotry could prevail with Michigan voters.
El-Sayed's win also blew up a number of myths, including that progressive candidates can't win in battleground states. It's true that El-Sayed ran about 4 points behind the Democratic governor candidate Jocelyn Benson, but Benson is a pretty attractive candidate herself, and didn't face nearly the money-and-bigotry headwinds El-Sayed saw.
Bigotry lost out in a lot of other races too. Keisha Lance Bottoms will be Georgia's first Black female governor. Deb Haaland is the nation's first indigenous-peoples governor. Chris Pappas is the first openly gay senator.
I also enjoyed seeing James Talerico and Adam Hamilton win big. These two campaigns might reset how the media covers the relationship between religion and politics, and maybe even how the public thinks about that relationship.
Since Jerry Falwell started the Moral Majority to support Ronald Reagan, "religious" and "conservative" have been almost synonymous. And yes, White Evangelical Christians still went 80-20 for Republicans. But Talerico and Hamilton clearly ran on the liberal Christian message -- the message Jesus actually gave in the gospels rather than the message that has been manufactured and put in his mouth more recently. Jesus talked at length about healing the sick, feeding the hungry, and welcoming the stranger, but the gospels don't bother to record anything he might have said about abortion or homosexuality.
Plenty of conservative ministers described Talerico and Hamilton as "fake Christians". But I think they've got that backwards.
Democracy Defenders Fund's Norm Eisen takes offense at the WSJ editorial board pooh-poohing the threat Trump posed to the elections.
The reason “Trump didn’t steal the elections” is because we & the pro-voter coalition stopped him EIGHT times over the past 21 months.
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Jobs reports continue to be good. The unemployment rate is 4.1%.
Local communities have been fighting data centers, so corporations may start putting them in places where no one lives: the Great Lakes.
A Microsoft project set up off the coast of northern Scotland in 2018 found that after two years, server failures were reduced by 87% compared with on-land datacenter equivalents. Microsoft executives saw the project, which ended after two years, as an unmitigated success.
Computing throws off heat, so cooling is a constant issue. Underwater data centers, especially in cool climates, all but solve the cooling problem.
However, at some point you start heating up the lake, which changes the eco-system in unpredictable ways. Thinking of Lake Erie as an inexhaustible source of cooling is similar to the way polluting factories used to think of the air or the rivers as nothing more than vehicles for taking pollution "away", as if "away" never had to be accounted for.
It's hard to decide which is the worst Musk decision: spending nearly half a billion dollars on losing Republican candidates this year, or Tesla's Cybertruck, which is ending production as an Edsel-level automotive failure.
Tesla built its Texas lines for a planned capacity of 250,000 trucks a year, and Musk once talked about doubling that.
But the Cybertruck never sold more than 40,000 units in a year, and many of those were internal purchases by SpaceX, another Musk company. So Musk essentially was juicing the numbers by selling Cybertrucks to himself.
Remind me why we're supposed to believe this guy is a genius.
and let's close with with a victory lap
On Saturday, the real James "Talifreako" got to interrupt SNL's Trump imitator during the cold open.
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