Midweek, 6/10/26

It’s the 59th anniversary of my high school graduation. Maybe if you went off to boarding school at 14, you’d remember the date of your graduation, too. After that warmup, I was the most grounded college freshman you ever saw.

Nth Thoughts on Charlie Kirk

I didn’t really know much about Charlie Kirk, but since his death, the more I’ve gotten to know about him, … the more it has become clear to me that Charlie’s personality, and especially his Christianity, was what held back the tide of darkness that is now rolling across the young Right like a tsunami. My general thesis — subject to change once I go even deeper into my investigation — is that active, serious Christianity is the only barrier that will keep this from happening to the Right, and the country.

Rod Dreher, Kirk Killing: The Radical Right’s Reichstag Fire.

Charlie Kirk was way too Trumpy/MAGA for my pure (Pharisaic?) tastes. For instance, he was complicit in some of the 2020 Election subversion:

Several people affiliated with the Falkirk Center [Namesakes: Jerry Falwell, Jr. and Charlie Kirk] were among the most prominent supporters of the Trump team’s efforts to overturn the election, including Falkirk fellows Jenna Ellis, a central member of Trump’s “elite strike force” legal team, and Eric Metaxas, who literally called for “fight[ing] to the death, to the last drop of blood” over the election.

Calum Best, The Falkirk Center: Liberty University’s Slime Factory

But I’ve got to admit that I had forgotten one of my own frequent barbs: If you don’t like the Religious Right, just wait till you see the irreligious Right.

If Charlie Kirk helped hold back the tide of that darkness, bless him. I increasingly am persuaded in my pessimistic gut that there is no “that” that “can’t happen here.” We’re well down some treacherous paths already. Co-belligerent bringers-of-light-to-darkness may have to bracket some disagreements.

I appreciate stumbling onto this observation by Dreher.

(FWIW, TPUSA carries on or stumbles on or … we shall see: At TPUSA’s women’s summit, Christian influencers say feminism threatens motherhood.)

60 Minutes

First they came for the preening, powdered popinjays of television news, but I did not speak out because I am not a popinjay.

Forgive the sarcasm. Perhaps Mr. Pelley and his long career deserve more respect. But can we at least be proportionate and, unlike much of what he and his colleagues have been for so long, objective for a moment?

Mr. Pelley’s hysterical reaction—and that of many of his friends in the media—came in response to some editorial changes made by a new team at CBS News led by Bari Weiss, its president, whose sin is to want a different sort of journalism from that practiced at CBS and almost all other traditional media organizations for decades.

…

[I]f you think the traditional news networks have anything like the role they had 50 years ago, you’re living in a fantasy. The reasons for that decline are the whole point that the media people themselves miss. (Gerard Baker)

…

I’m not crazy about corporate bosses cringing before political power to advance their own interests, as may be happening with CBS. It is a further sign of America’s rapid slide into banana-republic territory, as a creeping crony capitalism favors those who can get closest to the government. But again, have a sense of proportion about the reality of our media landscape. You may not like the method, but any obeisance to President Trump is producing only incremental shifts in the wider media picture. The American news environment is vast and expanding. If viewers think they can no longer trust CBS News, they can read, watch or listen to literally thousands of other TV shows, podcasts, newspapers, social-media influencers and more. It is vanity in every sense of the term to think they are somehow less trustworthy than a superannuated news organization dominated by one political viewpoint.

Mr. Pelley was still at it this weekend, expanding his weird homicide analogy. In an interview with the New York Times, he described the firing of some of his colleagues as being like the murder of close family members. It was another example of the solipsistic specialness these media panjandrums possess. Millions of Americans lose their jobs every year because of corporate decisions, and most of them don’t provoke it by criticizing their employer. When it’s a TV personality, it’s a crime scene.

There was something unconsciously fitting about it all: the spectacle of one old media company offering a platform to an icon of another to say something unhinged, self-obsessed and divorced from reality.

Gerard Baker

I was a big fan of The Free Press when Bari Weiss left the New York Times and started it. I’m less enamored today, and I certainly assume no infallibility about Bari’s decisions at CBS.

But Baker is right that CBS has lost much relevance in today’s chaotic internet media environment, when even a distractible autodidact can put his opinions out there for anyone in the world to see. Heck, I don’t even write letters to the editor of our local Gannet rag any more, and they don’t really publish them.

War crimes in our name

In none of the [Caribbean and eastern Pacific] boat strikes has the military seized drugs or produced evidence that those it killed were involved in the drug trade. Many of the victims appear to have been fishermen or other laborers. This hasn’t stopped Trump from demonizing those killed or members of his administration from releasing celebratory video clips of vessels being destroyed from high above. Vice President J. D. Vance has cracked that he “wouldn’t go fishing right now in that part of the world.” In defending the campaign, called “Operation Southern Spear,” Hegseth uses bizarre theocratic rhetoric, warning that “Christian nations, under God” cannot be led astray by “radical narco-communists.”

Trump, meanwhile, spouts nonsense about the targeting program’s effectiveness. He has claimed that the strikes have prevented twenty-five thousand cocaine-related deaths in one year, though experts say that there have not been that many such deaths over the past fifty years in total.

Dominic Preziosi, ‘Simply Murder’.

A jilted lover’s wish for the sweet bluebird of happiness to crap all over the GOP’s birthday cake

Every once in a while, Kevin D. Williamson lets it all hang out:

Do you hear that? Skitter. Scuffle. Scurry … splash!

… As the SS Trump founders and careens, it is impossible to miss the sound of rat bellies hitting the water, with the rats snug in their little rat life-preservers and praying for a ratty little lifeboat to come along and pick them up.

And you know what that means: It is time to strafe the lifeboats.

How bad are things for Donald Trump? His overall approval rating is down to 38 percent, according to the New York Times poll, a reminder that half of any population has below-average intelligence and that 38 percent evidently couldn’t beat a chicken at tic-tac-toe.

…

Celebrity-wise, Trump is down to his hardcore groupies: Kid Rock, a 55-year-old white rapper who cannot figure out which is the front end of a fedora, and Lee Greenwood, a guy older than Joe Biden (really!) who is known for one treacly anthem so deeply impregnated with artificial sweetener that it’ll probably give listeners cancer through their hearing aids.

…

Even congressional Republicans are making squeaky little verminous noises vaguely suggestive of independence.

…

If Congress wants to stop the corruption, the illegal war, the trade anarchy, the massacres at sea, and the rest of it, then Congress can—and should—do what Congress has failed to do twice in Trump’s sorry career, which is to use the power of impeachment to remove him from office and to bar him from serving in any other office. Of course, Republicans will give no thought to doing that—it is, after all, the right thing, the patriotic thing, and the honorable thing.

… Mike Pence, who was Trump’s most fervid and po-faced apologist for years until by means of some bizarre moral parthenogenesis he produced a conscience at the very moment Trump’s star seemed to be setting in 2021, is out there trying to rally Republicans to the banner of Reaganism when what he should really do, if he had an ounce of self-respect, is don ashes and sackcloth, or maybe set himself on fire on the National Mall like one of those Vietnamese monks protesting the Ngô Đình Diệm regime way back when, while those of us who were willing to pay the price to be on the right side of this question from the beginning (and it was not inexpensive) roast a few s’mores over the hot embers of his smoldering sanctimony.

Which is basically what we should be doing to the Republican Party as a whole, because the Republican Party is still going to be what it is—dangerous and depraved—even when Trump has left the scene. Republicans from Ted Cruz and Rand Paul and Mike Johnson to their media cheerleaders, allies, and apologists should go down with the Trump ship—and, if necessary, they should be made to go down with it. The Republican Party has, in this past decade and some, shown itself to be willing to embrace anything, to tolerate anything, and to justify anything, no matter how fundamentally opposed to the values and virtues Republicans once claimed to cherish and champion, no matter how grotesque or unpatriotic or un-Christian, as long as it helps them stay in office—not even in power, which would be an almost understandable thing, but simply in office, sinecure-ensconced castrati who offer nothing to Congress and who cling to their seats only for the sake of their modest salaries and some staff and an air-conditioned place to hang out on Capitol Hill between Fox News hits.

In anno Domini 2026, there simply is no honorable way to be associated with the Republican Party.

After such lascivious quotation, I think I owe y’all a gift link.

Me, too

Williamson keeps posting daily:

[M]y preferred electoral outcome for the immediate future is seeing Republicans “stomped into goo.” I know what that means in practical terms. I don’t know that we have a word for negative polarization that is bipartisan, but, if there is one, that is approximately what I am feeling right now. If there were a way to get Republicans stomped without the party of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez getting more power, then I’d be all for that. But there isn’t.

My feelings almost exactly.

For the record

I have noted the re-emergence of preventable diseases like measles due to vaccine opposition.

I have nothing to say except What is wrong with you people?!

Although I have never understood generalized objections to vaccines (sometimes justified by “religion” of some vague sort), I tolerated a very low level of it. But the higher levels of vaccine objection are leading to systemic stresses. This may be a case, like motorcycle helmets, where we’re just going to have to say “sorry about your baffling conscience, mate” and make something mandatory. (But then my religious freedom lawyer instincts kick in, and I see some legal timebombs if they try to forbid religious objections while exempting for medical contraindications. It’s complicated.)

Indiana Election Update

I previously wrote:

Indiana does not register voters by political party, but it has some arcane rules intended to avoid mischievous crossover voting: basically, you are not entitled to vote in a party’s primary unless you voted for a majority of its candidates in the last election or intend to vote for a majority of its candidates in the upcoming election.

…

But let’s take the obnoxious system for what it is. Mischievous crossover voting is supposed to be eliminable by the arcane rules alluded to. But the way to enforce those arcane rules, normally, is to have partisan poll-watchers to challenge voters they think are not qualified to vote in the parties’ primaries.

Copenhaver and her supporters did not recruit such poll-watchers, but waited confidently for the election results and then, shocked by the results, went combing desperately through social media for people who boasted (truthfully or falsely — you know how social media roll) that they took crossover ballots to vote for Spencer Deery but intend to vote for the Democrat in the General Election.

Now they have filed, under seal, a list of 14 such people whose depositions they apparently intend to take in order to reduce Deery’s vote count, after the fact, instead of the normal course of challenging those voters upfront. So much for ballot secrecy and norms.

The good news:

The MAGA list of 14 is now down to 11 because 3 of the people they listed didn’t live or vote in the district.
There are reports that something like 7 of the 11 remaining challenged crossover voters have been crossing over (and back) repeatedly over many election cycles.
It appears to me clearer than before that there is no Indiana legal precedent for challenging crossover votes after the election; as I wrote, “the way to enforce those arcane rules, normally, is to have partisan poll-watchers [on election day] to challenge voters they think are not qualified.”
A lot of conscientious local Democrats are reporting that they regularly cross over because this is a sufficiently Red part of the state that the GOP primary is, for practical purposes, the election.
It doesn’t appear to me that public outrage over this stunt is waning any when the topic comes up.
Finally, the Recount Commission is going to finish the recount before they officially consider the MAGA ploy.

Finally, on that 4th point, I’m going to retreat a bit from my opposition to the state conducting partisan primaries. I’ve learned, quite coincidentally, that deeming party primaries purely “private” was one of the Jim Crow-related ploys to deprive black voters of an effective voice in heavily-partisan areas where the primary election effectively was the real election. Perhaps a deep dive into history (or a focused dive into an AI chatbot) would have told me that, but I think I got it from a reliable person on a podcast.

Shorts

Universities have started to treat education like a designer handbag: you claim it is valuable because it is scarce, not because a lot of really meaningful stuff happens in the eight semesters you’re there. (Walter Russell Meade on Ben Sasse’s Not Dead Yet podcast)
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, formally known as the Secretary of Defense, warned on June 6 that Europe faced what he called an invasion of dangerous ideologies arriving by sea, linking immigration to the legacy of the D-Day landings in remarks in Normandy. (Ummmm. Like, Normandy is in Europe, right? But I suppose Hegseth arrived by air, so it’s okay.)
Mindless optimism is the only antidote I know to rational despair. (Bret Stephens via Frank Bruni)
Mary Geddry rolled her eyes at one of the president’s favorite boasts: “Trump has been posting and ranting about the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, the MoCA … In his telling, passing a basic cognitive screening is proof of ‘extreme intelligence,’ because nothing says genius like repeatedly announcing that you successfully identified a camel and drew a clock.” (Frank Bruni)
Grace Dent appraised the diners at the exclusive, expensive restaurant Skof in Manchester, England: “The crowd, during this particular service, at least, was older, possibly retired, and wantonly spending their children’s inheritance on compressed malwina strawberries with jasmine cream and amasake sorbet with milk oolong tea. The more I travel, the more I’m convinced that millennials stand to inherit nothing more than a pile of Michelin-starred restaurant receipts and gout medication.”(Frank Bruni)
I doubt if there is anything in the world uglier than a Midwestern city. (Frank Lloyd Wright)
He wrote poems and threw them away the moment they were finished, because to keep them would have been to take them seriously, and to take them seriously would have been to betray them. The one thing he feared was the doctor who wanted to cure him of being himself. (Idle News Pantheon)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

Your enemies are not demonic, and they are not all-powerful and the right hasn’t always lost and the left hasn’t always won. But if you convince yourself of that, you give yourselves all sorts of permission to do a lot of stupid and terrible things under the rubric of “Do you know what time it is?”

Jonah Goldberg

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on my favorite no-algorithm social medium.

Primary Eve

I’m publishing today because some states have primary elections tomorrow and I’ve got some thoughts on elections.

Making modernity

One of the key moments in the creation of modernity occurs when production moves outside the household. So long as productive work occurs within the structure of households, it is easy and right to understand that work as part of the sustaining of the community of the household and of those wider forms of community which the household in turn sustains. As, and to the extent that, work moves outside the household and is put to the service of impersonal capital, the realm of work tends to become separated from everything but the service of biological survival and the reproduction of the labor force, on the one hand, and that of institutionalized acquisitiveness, on the other. Pleonexia, a vice in the Aristotelian scheme, is now the driving force of modern productive work.

Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue. (That requires a bit more chewing that we may be accustomed to doing.)

Insatiable

The question with which to start my investigation is obviously this: Is there enough to go round? Immediately we encounter a serious difficulty: What is “enough”? Who can tell us? Certainly not the economist who pursues “economic growth” as the highest of all values, and therefore has no concept of “enough.” There are poor societies which have too little; but where is the rich society that says: “Halt! We have enough”? There is none.

E.F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful. We’re going to need to update Proverbs 30:15–16.

Book Criticism on the decline

Dwight Garner counted the surviving full-time American book critics — and they fit on one hand. “The thin crust of American intellectual life, long flaking, has begun to show bald patches,” he wrote. He expressed envy of England, which has many more newspapers that routinely publish book reviews: “The literary debate over there is more like a boisterous dinner party and less like a Morse code dispatch between distant frigates passing in the night.” Still, America has its scrappy freelancers and part-timers. “I’m cheered by the young critics out there, swimming in this sea without drowning in it, trying not to be cast into gaol by their creditors, and working to make certain that the last snatch of book criticism isn’t three fire emojis, two jazz-hands, a crying face and a facepalm.”

Via Frank Bruni

Flat-out politics

What Democratic elites would prefer to do

The continuing appeal of Harris is a useful indicator of … stasis. Yes, she is unlikely to be the 2028 nominee, and part of her support is name recognition; … many Democrats who find her renomination unthinkable are nonetheless incapable of acknowledging the real reasons that she lost.

I’ll list some of those reasons. First, her party was seen as too beholden to progressive activists on a range of issues, including immigration, crime, education, energy and the transgender debate. Second, Harris’s vice presidency was itself a creation of the 2020 identity politics moment, without which Joe Biden never would have picked her, and she succeeded him without a fight in part because no one wanted to acknowledge her painful limits as a politician. Finally, she tried to solve both the policy problem and the identity politics problem through evasion and distraction and yet more identity politics, with empty rhetoric of “joy” and circumlocution about her past positions and a mediocre Midwestern white guy running mate.

Despite being on the record taking radical positions, Harris was never a radical politician. Rather, she was a perfectly hapless embodiment of a Democratic establishment that aspired to manage its base without ever strongly resisting its demands and that aspired to win moderate voters not by moderating on the issues but through a change of affect or a change of subject.

That’s still clearly what Democratic elites would prefer to do ….

Ross Douthat, Slouching Toward Kamala Harris

America needs a better Democrat party than that!

Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered

Graham Platner isn’t my ideal Senate candidate. Not even close. I’m deeply troubled by the thinness of his political experience, by the primacy of raw anger in his appeal to voters and by the oddities and ugliness, from a Nazi tattoo to a fondness for “gay” and “gayest” as put-downs, in his not-so-distant past. It’s a lot to overlook.

But if I lived in Maine, I’d vote for him in November. I’d do it without any joy and without any hesitation, because he’s a Democrat running against a Republican and I haven’t been kidding around when I’ve said that President Trump has no respect for democracy, no regard for the truth, no patience for Americans who don’t bow to him and no limits to his desire to exploit the presidency for his and his minions’ glorification and enrichment. I can’t recognize the profound moral offense and extreme danger of Trump and then sit out the election or cast a vote that potentially helps his party, which has abetted or ignored his authoritarian designs, win either chamber of Congress. That would be irresponsible, nonsensical and perilous.

But do other voters think the same way? Is their frequently articulated disdain for Trump just a bunch of colorful and cathartic words or a genuine cause for action, for uncomfortable choices ….

Frank Bruni, Are Democrats Scared Enough of Trump to Defeat Him? (my first NYT gift link this month).

I hope that 2026 will be such a wave election — nay, a Tsunami election — that the Republicans’ norm-shattering mid-decade gerrymanders will backfire. The press keeps reporting as if the gerrymanders will, if not stricken down by courts, accomplish exactly what the Republicans want, and I can’t rule that out.

But it ain’t necessarily so: if you take your pool of usually-Republican voters and spread them over more (redrawn) congressional districts, maintaining a theoretical but slimmer Republican majority in more districts, an election fueled by revulsion toward the GOP could see usually-Republican voters staying home or (horrors!) voting for Democrats, and with thinner margins more seats could flip.

That would be a lovely result in 2026 because:

It might frustrate and slow Trump in his last two years.
It would rebuke Trump for his obnoxious effort to steal 2026 by shattering democratic norms. (His 2020 meddling in Georgia, in the form of complaining of vote fraud so persistently that it depressed Republican turnout, got Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock elected to the Senate. Nice job, Mr. Genius!)
It would be a rebuke to those who kiss Trump’s … ummmm, ring … for going along with his obnoxious attempted theft.

In Tuesday’s Indiana primary May 5, I plan to take a Republican ballot (nothing new there) and vote against every candidate endorse by Trump — even the one running against a guy with a non-trivial but remote criminal record who had hoped for Trump’s endorsement over the RINO incumbent. I wish I could vote for Spencer Deery, who put a target on his back by putting Hoosier interests over Washington’s interests when Trump called for redistricting, but he’s in the next Senate district to my west.

War crimes

It has now become routine for U.S. Southern Command to post grainy videos online of boats being blown up, along with claims that “male narco-terrorists were killed,” even though the administration has not offered any evidence that even one of the people incinerated by U.S. firepower was engaged in drug trafficking, much less in terrorism. The administration is so averse to trying to prove wrongdoing in court that, when suspects survive a strike, they are released rather than arrested. Apparently, there is a secret Justice Department opinion justifying the strikes based on the fanciful premise that drug cartels are waging war on the United States.

Max Boot.

In a Wall Street Journal editorial today, James Freeman beclowns himself by pointing out that Barack Obama did sorta kinda the same thing. Now I would have no problem accusing Obama of war crimes if he did the same thing, but even Freeman’s account notes that Obama attacked those “believed to be terrorists,” whereas the Trump administration is labeling narcotics traffickers ipso facto “terrorists” without so much as making a plausible case that they really are narcotics traffickers in the first place.

The fallacy of Boromir

When people justify their voting choice by its outcome, I always think of The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien emphasizes repeatedly that we cannot make decisions based on the hoped-for result. We can only control the means. If we validate our choice of voting for someone that may not be a good person in the hopes that he or she will use his power to our advantage, we succumb to the fallacy of Boromir, who assumed he too would use the Ring of Power for good. Power cannot be controlled; it enslaves you. To act freely is to acknowledge your limits, to see the journey as a long road that includes dozens of future elections, and to fight against the temptation for power.

Jessica Hooten Wilson, What ‘The Lord of the Rings’ can teach us about U.S. politics, Christianity and power.

I’m not voting against all things Trumpy to seize power, by the way; it’s to destroy Sauron’s power.

Shorts

It was lovely to hear the King’s English, devoid of the vengeance, blasphemy and vulgarity common in our leader’s language. (Maureen Dowd on King Charles’ address to a state dinner during his recent trip to America)
We need stories – sometimes subtle, gentle things – that restore in us a sense of goodness. Not just jagged bitterness frothing at the mouth or bonkers political hijacking of deep religious themes. (Marin Shaw)
Our economically RINO administration is tariffing globalization to death. Democrats are writing the eulogy. (Andy Kessler, Wall Street Journal)

I confess, however, that I am not myself very much concerned with the question of influence, or with those publicists who have impressed their names upon the public by catching the morning tide and rowing very fast in the direction in which the current was flowing; but rather that there should always be a few writers preoccupied in penetrating to the core of the matter, in trying to arrive at the truth and to set it forth, without too much hope, without ambition to alter the immediate course of affairs, and without being downcast or defeated when nothing appears to ensue.

T.S. Eliot

Thursday, 12/29/22

The $1.7 Trillion Electoral Count Act Reform

Then there’s the fortifying fact that Congress passed greatly needed reforms of the Electoral Count Act as part of the omnibus bill that currently awaits Biden’s signature. Those changes clarify the procedures Congress and the Vice President must follow in the event that a future president and/or state legislatures attempt to overturn the will of the voters in the way that President Trump encouraged them to do as part of his self-coup attempt in the days and weeks leading up to January 6, 2021.

Damon Linker.

We knew for 2 years that reforming that poorly-written law was extremely important. Was paying a $1.7 trillion boondoggle-enriched ransom the only way to get it done?

Seeing what we expect to see

Since what we select to attend to is guided by our expectations of what it is we are going to see, there is a circularity involved which means we experience more and more only what we already know.

Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary

Hope breaks through

The Atlantic’s Franklin Foer stops doom-scrolling Twitter and locking his eyes on cable news, and now sees some hopeful signs:

Back in March, Francis Fukuyama, a prophet of optimism, suggested that Ukraine’s example of resistance might help spiritually rally liberal democracies to defend themselves against internal threats. He called it a revival of the “spirit of 1989.”

That prediction, which I doubted when he issued it, has come to pass. Even if I can’t prove that the causation tracks with Fukuyama’s argument, the results are palpable. Since the start of the Ukraine war, Western democracies have voted to cast aside populist goons. Emmanuel Macron held off Marine Le Pen. In October, Brazilians disposed of Jair Bolsonaro. In the midterm elections, the United States roundly repudiated election-denying Republicans, evidence of Donald Trump’s waning influence.

Franklin Foer, The Cynic’s Dilemma

Is their increasing marginalization by saner spirits why paladins of the new Right raged so absurdly against Zelensky’s visit?

Another sign of hope: Is 2022 the Year We All Finally Got Over Narcissists?.

Popehat pontificates on fires in crowded theaters

Ken White, a/k/a Popehat, pontificates on the exceptions to first amendment free speech rights.

I’ve been interested in this sort of thing for maybe 55 years. In law school, I got the top grade, in a class of 100-or-so, on Introductory Constitutional Law.

Yet I still found Ken’s post illuminating and a wonderful distillation of why “the first amendment isn’t absolute” is analytically useless. I hope it’s one of his Substack posts that you can read in full even if you’re not a subscriber.

A reliable contrarian

I have affirmation from a pretty good source that Bari Weiss’s Substack publication, recently rebranded as The Free Press, is a reliable way to get news that mainstream press aren’t covering, such as the poor science behind government Covid policy (or science that even contradicts it), problems in the world of gender transitioning, and such.

Yeah, you can get contrarian stuff lots of other places, but is it journalism or is it lazy-ass opinionating? Bari has a business plan and some actual, serious journalists writing for her, and that’s consistent with her plan to be a real journal with real news.

Election2026 and Election2028

I can’t believe I’ve already created tags Election2026 and Election2028 for my Obsidian database!

Here’s what prompted it:

Republicans face a favorable Senate map in 2024, when Democrats will defend seats in Montana, Ohio and West Virginia. Neither party appears to have any comparably strong pickup opportunities in 2026 or 2028, so the odds favor a Republican majority in each of the three Congresses starting in 2025.

The source, James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal, was analyzing the partisan merits of a call in Vox for SCOTUS Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan to retire now so Joe Biden can fill their seats: “Sotomayor and Kagan are only in their 60s, but the actuaries at Vox say it’s time for them to go” the subheadline summarizes.

I will be surprised if either of the Justices heeds the call, and I’ll be particularly disappointed if Kagan does, since she has an especially powerful combination of intelligence and personability that reportedly moderates the tendencies of her conservative colleagues.

(Sigh!) George Santos

Is there anything worse than worrying about future elections? Probably.

I tried to avoid even reading beneath the surface of the George Santos story, but it is such a parable that I finally relented:

At this point you might be thinking, “Are we sure he’s even gay?” A man willing to lie about anything and everything to spruce up his political appeal might reasonably conclude that identifying as gay is more of an asset than a liability in a state like New York, especially for a party that’s keen to be seen as more diverse. As chance would have it, it turns out that George Santos was married to a woman as recently as 2019 …

Trump proved that the modern right is willing to vest power in someone who’s comprehensively obnoxious. The defense of Santos is apt to prove that the right is willing to vest power in a total cipher. Who he really is, what’s true and what’s false, may be unclear even to him at this point. He’s barely discernible as a persona, just a series of lies stitched together. And so he’s a test case in how little character matters so long as one mouths the right talking points about being a fighter rather than a sucker. Can sheer pugnacity excuse anything? Will hardcore partisan right-wingers shill for a grotesque Tom-Ripley-style scam artist just to spite the left, because his seat is important and because he confounds Democrats’ expectations of identity politics?

I’m thinking yes.

…

I hope the House expels him anyway …

But they won’t do it. And if they don’t, I won’t complain. So much of this party’s elected leadership since 2015 has stooped to pretending to be things they’re not in order to gain power that it seems unjust to hold George Santos singularly culpable. By what right do reptiles like McCarthy and Elise Stefanik, who traded traditional Republicanism for Trumpism because that’s what it took to get ahead, sit in judgment of Santos for constructing his own identity to move up in the world? They’re all grifters. They deserve each other.

Nick Cattogio

Bah! Humbug!

The wishful public has been fed a diet of misinformation from a wishful news media that won’t tolerate anything but positive thinking about maintaining our current arrangements because imagining a different outcome is too depressing. This is not a malicious conspiracy by evil authorities so much as a neurotic defense mechanism in the face of the disturbing reality that the comforts and conveniences of recent decades may be drawing to a close.

James Howard Kunstler, Living in the Long Emergency

[S]ubordinating truth to politics is a game which tyrants and bullies always win.

Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge

To believe that wealth is the only significant measure of the worth of an individual, a family, or a community is to reject the teaching of nearly every religion and wisdom tradition that ever was.

Mark Mitchell and Nathan Schlueter, The Humane Vision of Wendell Berry

The Orthodox "phronema" [roughly, mind-set] cannot be programmitized or reduced to shibboleths.

Fr. Jonathan Tobias

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.