Month: November 2025

Of all the disgusting and offensive things Viceroy Of Russian North America Donald Trump has done, while exceeding the threshold of disgusting every waking hour, the one that attracted the most social media attention was early last week when he was on Air Force One and a reporter, Catherine Lucey of Bloomberg News, asked him what Jeffrey Epstein meant when he said Trump knew about “the girls”. Trump just said, “I know nothing about that”, and when she asked if there was anything incriminating in the Epstein Files, he put a finger right in her face and said, “Quiet! Quiet, piggy.”

First off, let’s get the obvious out of the way: In Trumpworld, every accusation is either a confession or a projection.

Secondly, that woman is on no level as overweight as Trump.

This was the same week that he hosted the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammad bin Salman, at the White House. Which one does for an acting head of state. But Bin Salman is usually referred to by his initials, MBS, which also stand for “Mr. Bone Saw.” Because a Saudi dissident reporter, Jamal Khashoggi, went to the Turkish consulate for Saudi Arabia in October 2018 – during the first Trump Administration – and was killed there, after which according to intelligence reports the murderers, some of whom worked on MBS’ personal detail, dismembered Khashoggi’s body. Saudi Arabia of course was also the homeland of the 9-11 terrorists who flew planes into the World Trade Center. So when Trump had him in the White House, an ABC reporter pointed out to MBS that a lot of 9-11 survivors were angry at this visit, and Trump stepped in, first to badmouth ABC, and then in reference to Khashoggi, “Things happen, but he knew nothing about it … You don’t have to embarrass our guest, asking a question like this.”

Of course Trump was going to take MBS’ side on this. His comments were a direct message to all the professionals in the room: If I could, I’d do that to any one of you. I mean, it makes sense that Trump would emulate an Arab oil prince. More money than God, you get to grow out your beard and wear a bathrobe in public, and you probably have 14-year old Filipino girls serving your every whim on pain of death. Of course you can’t eat pork in a Muslim country, but rules never apply to Donald Trump.

It’s of a piece with Trump’s lackey Steve Witkoff forwarding a 28-point “peace” plan for Russia and Ukraine that requires Ukraine to disarm and bans it joining NATO while at the same time forcing no concessions on Russia whatsoever. The authorship of the “American” plan was put in question given that much of the text uses idioms that are more common to Russian than American English. But the fact that this is presented as a State Department plan only confirms that Trump shares, or wants to emulate, Vladimir Putin’s approach to the world, in two respects: The idea that Russia, as a bigger, stronger nation, has every right to take little pieces out of a smaller, weaker nation at its leisure, which is not true, and that if Ukraine continues to resist, Russia will crush them, which is also not true, because Putin couldn’t do it three years ago when Russia had a fresh military with a million-odd less casualties.

And of course the more legally serious manner was where Democratic legislators with military/intelligence experience, including Senator Mark Kelly (D.-Arizona) and Senator Elissa Slotkin (D.-Michigan) made a media post addressing the military saying that they should not obey illegal orders from the government. Trump responded to this by twitting that it was “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR” that should be punished by “death!”

And sure enough Slotkin, for one, started getting bomb threats at her house. Of course everyone in the Trump Party was quick to take their Lord and Savior’s side when the same people were screaming that if we showed the least disrespect to the memory of the slain Charlie Kirk, every Republican was fair game for any trans person with a gun. But Trump is a simple man operating on the simple logic of a personalist dictator: Anything I do is legal, since I own the government. L’etat, c’est moi. If Donnie could speak French.

I am quite serious when I say that I can think of no more loathsome humanoid in world history.

I mean, even Hitler liked dogs.

You might say, Hey, didn’t Hitler kill millions of people? Well, we haven’t given Trump a chance to commit real genocide! That stuff with the fishing boats and the detainees in custody, that was just testing things out! We have to trust in the PLAN! Remember, Hitler didn’t have nukes. What, you don’t think Trump would use nukes on Venezuela just to stay out of prison? Look at what he’s done so far! You KNOW what they do to pedos in prison!

Yet for all the things that our magical emissary from God is able to do in defiance of our laws and traditions, he is not yet omnipotent and it looks like his near omnipotence is starting to go the way of his actual potence.

Of course, this month Trump had to sign the discharge petition on the Epstein Files. (‘What’s that illegible scribble under his autograph?’ ‘It’s Russian for ‘I sign under duress.’) How that happened is pretty amusing in itself. First off, it almost justified the Senate Democrats’ cave on the government shutdown because it took away House Speaker Mike Johnson’s pretext to hold up the business of Congress. Johnson, who is the answer to the question ‘What if Waylon Smithers were a live-action character?’ agreed to allow the vote on the assumption that the provisions of the bill allowed the Republicans in the Senate to attach all kinds of conditions to delay it even further. Instead Senate Majority Leader John Thune made a deal with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer to pass the thing under unanimous consent. Never let it be said that Schumer is good for nothing. But I think this was also Thune signaling that he’s just as sick of Johnson as he is of Trump.

And while Trump’s threat against “SEDITIOUS” heretics in Congress was clearly intended to incite stochastic terrorism (since after all he was not legally liable for inciting a riot on January 6), that requires having an army of brain-dead followers willing to commit violence in your name. And their loyalty is no longer assured. This was made clear when his primary brain-dead follower, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, made a big announcement Friday that she is leaving Congress on January 5 (staying in just long enough to be eligible for the Congressional pension). This also means that at least in the short term, Republicans have one less seat in the House, which may be another middle finger to both Trump and Johnson.

This resignation may also have implications for the long-term. Mainly, that Greene isn’t quite as brain-dead as she acts. She has even gone to the media to publicly apologize for many of the intemperate things she has said as a zealot in the Church of Trump. Why? Supposedly the Epstein Files. Again, it comes down to the point that there are only two kinds of Americans: Trumpniks, and people who live in reality. And the only thing they can agree on is: “Epstein didn’t kill himself.” People like Greene have indulged in the sick conspiracy fantasy that a cabal of Jews are sexually trafficking good Aryan girls, and it turns out not only are they right in Epstein’s case, but the hero they thought was going to put a stop to all that is at the heart of the whole thing – if not a participant himself, definitely willing to use his power to protect people who were part of the conspiracy, namely Ghislaine Maxwell.

But it goes beyond that. Greene also said after Congress passed the One Big Bullshit Bill that she only realized after the fact that cutting Obamacare would make insurance prices go up for her own family members. In this she is pretty represenative for everybody who voted for Trump when the rest of us were telling them that’s like turkeys voting for Thanksgiving. In the long term though, this really started when Greene overestimated her ambitions and asked Trump and others in the Inner Party about running for US Senate. Most Georgia Republicans know that running in a safely gerrymandered district is not the same as a statewide race, and shot her down. Trump, who at his best has better political instincts than most experts, agreed. And Greene’s been taking little steps away from the plantation ever since.

But the biggest point of Greene’s resignation speech was: “I have too much self respect and dignity, love my family way too much, and do not want my sweet district to have to endure a hurtful and hateful primary against me by the President we all fought for, only to fight and win my election while Republicans will likely lose the midterms. And in turn, be expected to defend the President against impeachment after he hatefully dumped tens of millions of dollars against me and tried to destroy me.”

First, that’s an acknowledgement that Republicans will likely lose the midterms. Secondly, that in her otherwise safe, “sweet” district there would be a contentious primary that would require Republicans to raise millions of dollars they need to spend elsewhere. And while she would likely win that election, as Paul Ryan likely would have won re-election in 2018, it wasn’t worth it. Because a Democratic majority will almost certainly impeach Trump. Why? Maybe destroying the East Wing without permission. Maybe if he starts the You Know What They Do To Pedos War. Maybe because his Mama shoulda got an abortion and saved the entire planet cosmic levels of grief.

And Greene would be expected to defend Trump after he repaid all her loyalty with spite and threats, because she couldn’t tell him two plus two make five.

Greene, like Trump, has been a moron for public consumption, because that’s what it takes to appeal to a voter base of morons. But unlike Trump, she doesn’t seem to have gotten high on her own supply of stupidity. And she, like the rest of the cult, went along with the stupidity because it was profitable for her. In her case, literally. What all this says, after everything else, is that it’s not going to be profitable for much longer, and she’s jumping ship.

Again, Trump only seems invincible because he has a mob of mouth breathers willing to shed blood in the name of Our Lord. But when most of them are about to have their insurance premiums skyrocket and a roll of ground beef is passing seven dollars, while they see Trump living high on the hog with Elon Musk and the other elites, some of them might start to look around and think “Hey… mebbe he lied to me.” Now, these are the people who think that their Nickelback albums should come with a five-cent rebate, so basic deduction may be beyond them. But if Margie can learn, so can they. Trump should hope not. In the future, probably sooner than any of us think, our Dread Sovereign might make some all-caps imperial proclamation that he expects his followers to enforce, and the response might be:
“Quiet, Piggy.”

The only good thing about the Schumer Surrender on Trump’s Shithole Shutdown is that it killed the pretext for Trump’s chamberlain, House Speaker Mousy Mike Johnson, to hold up the business of the House, which would have included the swearing in of the special election winner in Arizona, Democratic Congresswoman Adelita Grijalva, who along with all other Democrats and four Republican heretics would be enough votes to pass a resolution on releasing the Epstein Files. ™ Well, Wednesday, Johnson had to do exactly that. And of course such a petition would also have to be passed by the Senate, and if that happened it would certainly be vetoed by Childish Caligula, requiring an override. But even as the House action happened, various sources, including Republican committees, started releasing some of the information that they had access to, including emails released by the Epstein family estate and distinct from the Epstein Files ™ in question. The one that got the most attention is a 2011 email where Epstein told accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell that Trump is “the dog that hasn’t barked” because one of Epstein’s victims spent hours at his house with Trump and was “never once mentioned by investigators”, saying “I’m 75% there”, which probably means 75 percent towards deducing that Trump was a mole for law enforcement. Epstein also told a confidant that he’d met Trump at a Thanksgiving event in 2017 – after Epstein had already been convicted of state charges for child prostitution but before being convicted of federal charges. And after Trump was first inaugurated president. And then the big story Friday was the email where Mark Epstein asked his brother Jeffrey if Vladimir Putin had a photo of Trump “blowing Bubba“…

Did I mention that the end of last week was my birthday?

Happy Birthday to Me

Happy Birthday to Me

Fuck Trump up the a-aaaass

Happy Birthday to Me

(and many more…)

But I still want to go over exactly why the shutdown surrender was a bad thing overall even if it is paying dividends and is getting the country back to normal, whatever that is under the Trump occupation. Because while that regime may be ending soon, the way things went down just confirms that Republicans are only part of the problem.

Why did the Democrats shut down the government, when that never goes well? Because they already caved earlier in the year. In March, there was a lapse of funding that required a continuing resolution to last through September. Many Democrats in both Houses of Congress opposed the resolution given that the Trump regime was already taking money from several government programs, and under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (‘O BUBBA’) would end up defunding a lot more by legislation. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (of New York) decided to get enough Democrats to pass the continuing resolution, despite opposition within his own party. This was partially because Trump had already put many decisions under Elon Musk’s ‘Department Of Government Efficiency’ and a shutdown of Congress would only give DOGE more authority to take congressional powers away.

But in the subsequent months, not only did Congress pass Trump’s One Big Bullshit Bill, the Trump regime, while relying less on DOGE, continued to withhold spending that had already been earmarked for the fiscal year. Democrats indicated that they wished to avoid a shutdown – which Republicans under Trump had been threatening in order to force more concessions – but Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought said “The appropriations process has to be less bipartisan”, adding that the White House would not abide by bipartisan spending agreements and that he believed the Impoundment Control Act was unconstitutional. But the Congressional majority has generally gone along with all this, because the Banana Republican Party is all in on the idea of a unitary executive, which Donald Trump takes to mean that he can do anything he wants because he was directly appointed by God, who is also himself.

The issue was clear. Shut down the government, and Trump exercises unitary authority. Do nothing, and Trump exercises unitary authority anyway.

It’s sort of like a labor strike. Now kids, some of you may not even know what that is, but it’s when the labor force at a given business stops coming to work in order to demand better wages, benefits or work conditions. And it usually involves some of the workers picketing the business front to discourage third-party workers (‘scabs’) from coming to the job. This requires solidarity from everyone involved, which is why it’s kind of hard to run a strike these days. And when in this case you had people like the Nevada Senators and John Fetterman who were not keen on the shutdown to begin with. But in a strike, everybody knows there is going to be hardship, because they (unlike Congress) aren’t getting paid. But they do it anyway, for the principle, and because if they did nothing, things would get even worse. Usually, for a strike to succeed, it has to put the onus on the holdout party (management, in this case Republicans). And because everyone knows the Congress are not a bunch of poor miners or kitchen workers, it is hard for them to put the onus on the party that didn’t want the shutdown. But when the president of that party was petitioning the Supreme Court for the previously not-acknowledged right to withhold SNAP benefits to the poor, everyone knew who was really responsible, and that Trump wasn’t just supporting the shutdown, he was escalating the suffering. And the off-year elections, in which hardly any Republican won, should have indicated where the public pressure was going. Even Trump twitted that the shutdown was one reason for the election results. And the public was willing to support the Democrats because they knew that if they did nothing, they would lose social services anyway.

Really, if the Lamestream Media thought that Trump’s non-negotiation negotiation was a case of hostage taking, it was a case of the bank robbers getting everybody in the bank together then showing the police the bank president. Then shooting him. And then saying “Let us get all the money and get out of here free, or we’ll shoot the bank president.”
“Uh… dude, you already shot him.”
“Oh.”

It is testimony to how inept Trump is that he thought this would work and testimony to how much MORE inept Democrats are that it did.

Which doesn’t change the fact that a shutdown hardly ever works for the party that initiates it, and it was that much less likely to work given Trump’s infinite appetite to inflict pain not only on the country at large but Democrats and heretical Republicans in particular. So if the Democrats didn’t make the best of the one option they had, the other issue is that they didn’t see if they could create other options.

As Reed Galen pointed out Thursday, it’s not as though Democratic leadership didn’t have time to plan. “If Election Day last year was Tuesday, November 5, 2024 and Inauguration Day was January 20, 2025, that left 76 days, two and a half months, for the opposition party, that is, the Democrats, to huddle, brainstorm, plan, and execute any number of tactics that could have slowed down the new administration. Joe Biden was still President of the United States during this period.

Likewise, Democratic Senate Leader Chuck Schumer knew a short-term funding bill would be needed in March. He didn’t (do anything) about it a week ahead of time, but months in advance. When the time came, as we know, he and nine of his colleagues didn’t so much as cross the aisle to stop it, let alone stand athwart history.

…In 2021, Democrats passed emergency subsidies for the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare, if you’re nasty) with the American Rescue Act. They extended them through the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022. They were the ones who passed the bill that phased out the subsidies come December 31st, 2025. They’ve known this deadline was coming for three years.”

So Schumer had to go along with the shutdown in fall because he had no plan to deal with his party’s lack of options in March, (other than caving in advance like they did then) and that was because they did not make any plans after November 2024.

What plans? Well, as I’ve said, maybe they could have looked at what Republicans did under Obama and Biden and used every counter-majoritarian stop in the system to do to Trump what his party did to stymie their presidents. But there was not only bad strategy, there was NO strategy.

As I’ve said in regard to Obama in particular, the Democrats are the real conservatives of American politics, at least if one regards our main Founding Father as Franklin Roosevelt rather than Thomas Jefferson. They see things only in terms of their paradigm and years after Trump came on the scene – heck, years after Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh came on the scene – they have no clue how to react to people who don’t play by their rules. Even Obama, who is both more intelligent and more assertive than the typical politician, didn’t seem to grasp that Mitch McConnell and his party didn’t regard him as a legitimate president. And they actually treated Obama better than Biden. At least they acknowledged Obama was elected.

In 2016, I didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton, and I still maintain that that didn’t make any difference because my state voted for her anyway. But there are a lot of states where people didn’t vote for her or voted “third” party and that made the difference for Trump in the Electoral College. And what we just saw is a good part of why that happened. The idea that there’s no difference between the two sides, the idea that even if there is, Democrats aren’t going to do anything, or George Carlin’s assessment that “it’s a big club and you ain’t in it.” https://video.search.yahoo.com/yhs/search?fr=yhs-mozilla-102&hsimp=yhs-102&hspart=mozilla&p=it%27s+an+elite+club+and+you+ain%27t+in+it&type=newtabv2Aug27#id=1&vid=ef6d4ec948c9c826c554c59741695aa1&action=click The idea that Democrats are in the same club as the Republicans and they can use the shutdown and the ACA as political issues to rile up the voters, and as soon as they win elections, go back to not caring. After all, once you’re elected, you don’t need to worry about health care.

There are two problems with that: One, it wasn’t the US Congress that was being elected, and two, if anybody still believes that Washington Democrats and Republicans are in the same club, it’s just the Washington Democrats. Everyone else recognizes that the Republicans are not a ‘liberal’ (as in market liberal, small-r republican) party but the right-wing version of a Leninist cadre that works within the system only so long as they have to and as soon as they have eliminated all procedural obstacles, anyone who opposes them will get put up against the wall. Which makes the Democrat Senators’ sellout that much more inexplicable and counter-productive.

And that just gets to the point that if everyone is blaming Chuck Schumer for the shutdown, despite his conspicuous statements of opposition to the deal, it’s because it’s only the latest example of a pattern. He had already failed to recognize the nature of his opposition in March. At the time, Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi (D.-California) said “I myself don’t give away anything for nothing. I think that’s what happened the other day.” Schumer retains his position mainly because he is an expert organizer and fundraiser for establishment Senate candidates, which also means he acts as a gatekeeper for who’s “establishment.” It is widely perceived, for instance, that after rabble-rousing leftist Graham Platner announced a Maine Senate campaign to unseat Republican Susan Collins, Schumer not only got current Maine Governor Janet Mills to primary Platner, he got opposition research to come out regarding (among other things) the Totenkopf tattoo Platner got in the military. Which on one level would be fine. Janet Mills is not a hothead. She is a popular, respected and vetted politician who would be a better Senator than Susan Collins, if only because she doesn’t vote with the Trump Party. However Susan Collins is 72 and Janet Mills is 5 years older than that. And we’ve already had Dianne Feinstein (D.-California) and other cases to show us what happens if a Senator stays in office until they die of old age. During the election season, Schumer never endorsed Zohran Mamdani, the official Democratic nominee for New York Mayor, even after Mamdani got the endorsement of New York Congressman and Democratic House leader Hakeem Jeffries. Schumer wouldn’t even tell reporters whom he did vote for in New York. It was suspected that Schumer preferred former Mayor and Governor Andrew Cuomo, who lost the Democratic primary by a large margin, partially due to personal scandals and partially due to his assumption that being an establishment politician was an asset. And in the November shutdown deal, Schumer apparently did not want the eight Democrat-aligned Senators to go with the Republicans but he was unable to stop them. In fact he was apprised of their efforts even though he publicly opposed them. Oh, and here’s a news bit that hasn’t been publicized in the wake of all this: The Republican rider to the continuing funding bill that ended the shutdown included a provision allowing Republican Senators who were investigated by the government over the January 6 insurrection to sue the government for up to $500,000 each. This was added at the insistence of Senate Majority Leader John Thune (BR.-South Dakota) but Schumer signed off on it.

According to CNN’s Harry Enten, Schumer is “the least popular Democratic Senate leader ever” in polls dating back to 1985. Cause just think, we’re going to have to do this all over again when the continuing provision expires in January. And with friends like this, who needs enemas?

Even now, with Trump hemorraging, that doesn’t guarantee that America will get back to a good or even tolerable government, because both parties have been operating on “norms” rather than enforceable laws. And when the Trump Party acknowledges neither laws nor norms, the rest of the country needs to use what processes remain to stop them. And that requires an opposition that is willing to do so. Which currently doesn’t exist. So it needs to be created. I mean you never know, the next wannabe autocrat might not have a Mar-a-Lago full of sexual skeletons to expose, although to judge from Epstein’s black book, there’s probably going to be a lot of future candidates.

So with Donald Trump’s annual Shithole Shutdown reaching a new record for length, and Trump going so far as to enlist the Supreme Court to help him stop SNAP payments to the needy, his occupation government was getting more and more unpopular just as two important governors’ races and a mayoral race in New York were happening, and the results last Tuesday were such a shellacking for the Trump Party that in Georgia Democrats won two public officer races, when Democrats have not won a non-federal race in Georgia since 2006. Republicans have never been more unpopular, and Democrats have never had more leverage since Trump was inaugurated. Trump himself said that the two reasons his party lost were “Trump wasn’t on the ballot and the shutdown.” The first part is probably true given how many of his fan club didn’t vote for anyone else on the ballot in 2024, which is the main reason Democrats still have as many Senators as they do.

So what do you do if you’re the Democratic Party?

What do you do?

That’s right! CAVE!

Over the weekend (to make sure that no staffers would be available to take phone calls from angry constituents) seven Democratic Senators and one Democratic-aligned independent agreed to a deal that would end the shutdown without getting any concessions from the Republican Party to end the ‘recissions’ of the executive branch against Congressional spending, or preserve the insurance subsidies of the Affordable Care Act. What they got was a promise to vote later on a bill that might or might not extend the subsidies for a limited period. A promise. From the party led by the guy famous for making promises such as “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States” and “Honey, I brought the condoms this time.”

If you’re Chuck Schumer, you surrender everything in negotiations and get nothing back. It’s what you do.

Now, with my right-wing background, I am sympathetic to the pitch that a government that invests in social spending makes people dependent on it. But the fact is, that only becomes an issue if one party wants to make it a political issue, and the political issue is not how much welfare is to be budgeted, but rather the fact that one party thinks that any level of welfare is a good idea and the other never liked it much in the first place and is increasingly clear will no longer support at all. That party says its motives are based in Christianity, but what they mean by ‘Christian’ is “Jesus fed the hungry and cured the sick by magic, so that means we shouldn’t have to pay taxes for that stuff.”

It was pointed out that both Nevada Senators voted for this, given that the shutdown has been affecting air traffic control for weeks and Trump’s reality-TV Transportation Secretary announced that flights nationwide will be cut by up to ten percent. Of course they haven’t pointed out that Las Vegas tourism has been down for months because regular customers from Canada and other countries are being harassed by Border Patrol. Or maybe tourism is going down because greedy corporate bean counters charge up the ass for hotel parking and 12 dollars for a room service coffee.

Maybe the Democrats thought that if they went along with what the Republicans wanted to do, they could get things back to normal, whatever passes for that nowadays.

Maybe they’re just fucking pussies.

Monday, independent Senator Angus King of Maine went on “Morning Joe” to talk to his fellow collaborator Joe Scarborough, and described his vote to end the shutdown, saying “Standing up to Donald Trump didn’t work. It actually gave him more power.”

Jesus on a pogo stick, the Las Vegas Raiders fight harder than that.

Senator King – excuse me, MISTER King – would you like to tell that to all those people who voted in Virginia? Would you like to tell that to all those people in Pennsylvania who voted to confirm non-Trumpnik state court judges? Would you like to tell all the people in Mississippi who voted to break the state legislature Republican supermajority, that standing up to Donald Trump doesn’t work? Let’s just lie back and let him treat this entire country like Virginia Giuffre??

What the last election should have told Democratic ‘leadership’ was that the public at large, including a lot of people who probably hadn’t voted Democrat in years, were willing to hold firm on the shutdown, and a lot of them knew that the shutdown and everything that’s happened as a result of it are the direct responsibility of Donald Trump, and he will do worse if we do nothing, and the shutdown is the only thing that has changed anything?

Instead, senior Democrats decided, “eh, no. Let’s just cave on everything and hold out for an empty promise that we know Republicans will never honor, so that their Boss can smirk at the camera like a retarded toad and sneer, ‘I win again. I always win. I get everything I want. Always. Cause God hates the entire human race so he sent me here to turn this entire planet into an unbearable Hell that I will rule for all eternity.

‘Nyahh.”

With such political acumen, it’s a wonder Kamala Harris didn’t lose 52 states.

Because the other thing that senior Democrats should have learned last week but didn’t was that those who voted last week didn’t vote Democrat because of the institutional party, but in spite of it. House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries – Congressman from New York – didn’t endorse his own Party’s nominee for Mayor, socialist Zohran Mamdani, until the very end of the campaign. Senate Minority Leader (from New York) Chuck Schumer didn’t endorse Mamdani at all. (In his defense, if he had, it might have caused Andrew Cuomo’s polls to go up by 5 points.) He even refused to admit to reporters who he had voted for. Presumably if it wasn’t Mamdani, it would be Cuomo, an establishment politician who was ruined by allegations of corruption and sexual harassment and ended up getting endorsed by Trump. So for Schumer, that would be par for the course.

Jay Jones in Virginia ran for state attorney general and the press got wind of him having an email conversation where he joked about shooting a Virginia Republican politician. Everybody called on him to end the race cause he had no chance and could have undermined Abigail Spanberger’s race to be Governor. Spanberger won by double digits and Jones won by 6 points.

While Spanberger may be perfectly acceptable to the Democratic establishment, a lot of other people who ran and won last week are not. They won anyway. The common thread was that people thought they would take the fight to Republicans, not that the party machine had given them the stamp of approval.

This is again par for the course. It ties into an operational problem that has been an issue for years and has only become that much more obvious as Democratic Party standard operating procedure is revealed as that much more ineffective against the new Trump occupation government. I had already mentioned that when New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez moved to get the ranking Democratic seat on the House Oversight Committee, she was stymied by Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi (D.-California) who arranged for the seat to go to Gerry Connolly (D.-Virginia) who was at the time suffering from late stage esophageal cancer. And sure enough, he died, which is something that held up business. One of the issues with the House right now is that the most recently elected Congresswoman, Adelita Grijalva (D.-Arizona) is being held up by Speaker Mike Johnson (BR.-Trump’s Colon) because she and the House Democrats plus four Republicans would be enough to pass a petition to release the Epstein Files. That seat was vacant only because Grijalva’s own father, Raul Grijalva, was the Representative, and he died of old age and disease. Would that Democrats had let a younger and healthier candidate run in the last term, that standoff would not have been possible.

It is at this point I should bring up Kamala Harris as another example of Democratic establishment thinking. Because she may be totally irrelevant now, but in her memoir she revealed exactly why she is irrelevant and probably would have been more irrelevant than Joe Biden was when he was President. The book she released this year was called 107 Days, and it basically was organized on the theme that she only had 107 days after Biden’s retirement to run a campaign against Trump. I have not read it, because I’m cheap and I also make it a practice not to contribute to either left-wing or right-wing politicos who fuck up and then seek to profit from their fuckups with a tell-all book tour. But the excerpts I’ve seen are telling. For instance, Tim Walz (Governor of Minnesota) was likeable, outspoken and a good running mate for her but her first choice for Vice President was then Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who is very articulate and persuasive enough to be invited on Fox News several times. Her other choice was the very popular Governor of Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro. In both cases she took the conservative position, thinking that Shapiro would not settle for a passive position in her Cabinet, and thinking that voters wouldn’t accept a ticket that had both her as a Black woman and Buttigieg as a gay man. (Raising the question of why demographics would be disqualifying if Barack Obama won the presidency and Joe Biden chose her as running mate largely because she was a black woman.) That and the fact that the Party leadership as a whole wouldn’t listen to suggestions that Biden retire until reality forced the issue, and then basically made Harris the nominee rather than have a contested convention where the public could be involved.

Mind you, I still think Kamala Harris would have been a vastly better President than Trump or any of his minions, but so would I, and what does that tell you?

Then of course there’s David Hogg, who moved from surviving the Parkland school shooting to anti-gun activism to general activism as a Democratic fundraiser. He was successful enough in that role to where the Democratic National Committee got him to serve as co-chair, but immediately ran into issues where his PAC advocated for replacing old establishment candidates with younger progressives. In May the DNC came up with an excuse for removing him and Malcolm Kenyatta as vice chairs. Hogg has continued with his PAC and has generally been more active with it than the DNC has been on a national level.

The institution calls itself a Democratic Party, but it practices oligarchy within its own ranks. If the oligarchy knew what they were doing, that would be one thing. I said it before, and I will say it again: Democrats are the house Negroes of American government. They fight to defend a decadent and corrupt system because it’s the system they grew up with and they can’t imagine anything better.

Maybe we need people with better imagination.

Cuck Schumer very cleverly got Senators who are not up for re-election in 2026 to vote for the sellout, and very cleverly refused to vote for it himself. But that means either he was working behind the scenes or he really did oppose the surrender and simply didn’t have the influence to stop his fellows. It is hard to say which is more condemning.

Ezra Klein of Indivisible announced Monday that his agenda is to focus on the primaries of Senators who are up for re-election next year to make removing Schumer from leadership a condition of support, and to make it a condition for support for Democrats running for open or Republican seats. That would be the first step. More broadly, continue to support that organization, No Kings, David Hogg (Leaders We Deserve) and anybody who’s trying to promote something outside the official hierarchy. I’d already said I wasn’t going to contribute to official Democratic Party fundraisers because the difference between a Democratic fundraiser and a Kickstarter campaign is that with the Kickstarter there’s a better chance of getting what I paid for. I now make an exception to that. I may in the future contribute to a Democratic Party fundraiser. Not online, but by mail, with a 5 or 20 dollar bill, after I have used it to wipe my own ass.