Michael McGrady, Jr. writes about one of the many scams run by rightwingers with Republican ideological allies and friends in the government. The entity involved is called Our Rescue, formally known as Operation Underground Railroad. Our Rescue has received $158.1 million from Secretary Robert Kennedy, Jr.’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in a no-bid contract. The group’s CEO is Derek Brenner. During his tenure, McGrady writes for the City Weekly, “Our Rescue has continued to serve as the central node within a network of strange bedfellows.” Brenner served as a senior ICE official during Trump’s first term: “When he held that position, Benner was instrumental in ‘sting operations’ to mass-arrest immigrants. He occupied the role during a highly controversial HSI sex trafficking sting, Operation Asian Touch, which was an effort to probe illegal conduct at Asian massage parlors in Arizona.”
The HHS contract:
... is for Our Rescue to provide legal aid to unaccompanied migrant children currently in the care of the government.
But Our Rescue has little prior experience in that field, and critics have warned that its new revenue stream comes at the costly expense of legitimate aid networks specializing in such legal representation.
“I think it’s clear that the priorities of this presidential administration are to deport as many people as possible,” said Stephanie Richard, director of the Sunita Jain Anti-Trafficking Initiative and a visiting associate clinical professor at Loyola Marymount University Law School in Los Angeles. “Threatening the legal services for youth, who are some of the most vulnerable, shows the administration’s commitment to that.”
Our Rescue was contacted several times for comment on this story. No response was given by press time. [emphasis added] (1)
McGrady goes on to explain that some of those “unaccompanied migrants” are children whose parents have been snatched by Trump’s ICE Gestapo and Customs and Border Protection (CBP). And Richard warns:
... that the children Our Rescue is now paid to represent are also the children who face the greatest risk.
“What I can say is that if these kids are not provided appropriate legal services and support, it is more likely they will end up trafficked,” she observed.
Jeffrey Epstein is dead and gone. But his disgusting heritage lives on.
McGrady reports for The Pitch:
Hundreds of secular and religious organizations exist in this space, working to counter human trafficking. Many of these groups are led by recognized human rights activists and human services practitioners, emphasizing care and recovery in the overarching frameworks of bodily autonomy, gender equity, and mutual respect.
Many of these so-called “anti-trafficking” groups, however, are antithetical to the human rights viewpoints on these matters, citing “tough on crime” and mantras characteristic of the many right-wing and far-right groups operating in this space.
Missouri and Utah are what I consider two leading hubs of an explicit brand of anti-trafficking activism that is a blend of modern white slavery myths and conservative, dominionist Christian nationalist viewpoints of our society. In collaboration with Salt Lake City Weekly, The Pitch uncovered and traced a powerful influence network of so-called anti-trafficking and anti-pornography activists, law enforcement officers, and far-right politicos all tied, directly or indirectly, to the highly controversial Tim Ballard and the charity he formed, Operation Underground Railroad (OUR), which rebranded to Our Rescue in the years since his tenure. [emphasis added] (2)
If Democrats in Congress in 2027-28 don’t spend an extraordinary amount of time investigating, exposing, and legislating against these kinds of corrupt, sleazebag, and criminal activities, that will be political malpractice of the first order by the Democrats! And when Trump and his cult followers scream and cry and how the Mean Dem-u-crat Party is persecuting sex traffickers in league with corrupt government officials, well, let them cry.
McGrady’s long report in The Pitch gives us a disturbing glimpse of a particularly seedy corner of the Republican Right where Christian Right prudery mixes with racist xenophobia and highly dubious contacts with the sex-trafficking and private-prison worlds.
(3) Women accusing OUR founder Tim Ballard of sexual assault speak out. The Salt Lake Tribune YouTube channel 11/22/2023. <https://youtu.be/wq17yH_31XI?si=RsliNKG8nrKXy20r> (Accessed. 2026-23-10).
Kate Shaw of the University of Pennsylvania has been looking at ways the Congress can reign in real abuses by the judicial branch, and especially by the Roberts Supreme Court, which has been remarkably partisan. As Shaw observes:
It also feels different because this is a precarious moment for American democracy and for the mechanisms of democratic participation — and because it’s impossible to ignore the Supreme Court’s role in creating this instability. In this election cycle, state legislatures have aggressively redrawn congressional districts to maximize their partisan advantage and, in Southern states, to extinguish Black political power; the ultrarich are spending tens of millions of dollars helping to elect their preferred candidates; and the president has sought to radically change the rules for voting by mail, while openly promising voters payouts for helping his party retain control of Congress.
True, the court has rebuffed some of the most egregious efforts at election subversion this year. But it has laid the foundation for the electoral upheaval we are experiencing.
In that essay, she makes the argument that a rogue Court can be a real danger to democracy and the rule of law.
There are still Trump cultists who would surely argue that decisions like the 1954’s Brown v. Board of Education that declared racially segregated public schools to be unconstitutional were illegitimate overreach by the Court. Even though Brown was based on a straightforward reading of the actual language of the 14th Amendment. And, in any case, subsequent Court decision like Milliken v. Bradley (1974) and Parents Involved (2007) have nullified much of the substance of Brown. They also set the stage for Chief Justice Roberts’ majority decision in Shelby County v. Holder (2013), which then laid out the course the rightwing Court took to nullify the Voting Rights Act, which had been renewed in 2006 for 25 years by an overwhelming bipartisan majority in both Houses of Congress and with the backing of then-President George W. Bush. As Kevin Morris wrote earlier this year:
This week [in April 2026], the Supreme Court destroyed what little remained of the Voting Rights Act. In Louisiana v. Callais on Wednesday, the Court eliminated the law’s protections against lawmakers drawing maps that dilute the political power of minority voters. The decision continued more than a decade of the Court’s assaults on what is often called the crown jewel of the civil rights movement.
The opinion’s reasoning is based in part on a claim that is simply not factual. Pointing out that Black and white turnout reached parity in “two of the five most recent Presidential elections,” Justice Samuel Alito assured Americans that racial disparities in voting are no longer a problem. But Alito’s claim represents egregious cherry-picking, as he was not referring to recent elections, but to those in 2008 and 2012 — the years that Barack Obama ran for president. In the three most recent presidential elections, the trend shows exactly the opposite. The indisputable fact is the racial turnout gap is widening, and the Roberts Court is partially responsible. [emphasis added] (1)
Shaw calls attention to the Court’s anti-rule-of-law decisions allowing Trump to break the law in his role as President: “Since it declared presidents all but above the law in Trump v. United States two years ago, the court has created a permission structure for much of President Trump’s second-term lawlessness.”
This is the background in which Democratic majorities in either or both Houses will have to use their Congressional powers to dramatically call attention to the dangerous situation the Court has created through its reliance on the rightwing theory of the Unitary Executive - for which Dick Cheney deserves credit among his many attacks on democracy and the rule of law in his long career. Congress can use its investigative power to highlight and publicize the many abuses of the Trump regime and propose remedies.
Since the Equal Rights Amendment guaranteeing women equal treatment before the law failed to be ratified, Democratic members of Congress seem to have effectively forgotten about the power to amend the Constitution. There have been 27 Amendments since the Constitution first took effect, so they can scarcely be considered a radical new idea. So the Democrats can propose, for instance, a Constitutional Amendment that says straightforwardly that the US President is required to obey the laws of the United States. And they could make sure in demanding it that a large majority of US voters understand that the Republican Party in Congress is overwhelmingly opposed to the idea that the President should obey the law!
Shaw’s editorial and this podcast interview put forward a number of ideas on how the Democrats can highlight the problem of a rogue President whose abuses are being enabled by the very partisan position of the current Republican-dominated Supreme Court. And by the extreme laxity of the oversight of the Court even on serious corruption concerns. One of here suggestions is a dull idea that has been in the Constitution from the start and has been used by the Congress, which is known as “jurisdiction stripping.” While this may sound like a wild-and-crazy concept, it isn’t. And the Supreme Court since the days when John Marshall was its first Chief Justice has explicitly recognized that limitation on its own power.
A quick look at the Supreme Court’s “liberal” reputation
Certainly, from the late 1930s to at least 1980 (the beginning of the Reagan era), the Court had generally been seen as liberal, in both the ideological and in the broad “liberal democracy” (competitive elections and the rule of law) senses. This was not an unbroken record, however. In Korematsu v. United States in 1944, the Court upheld the legality of the race-and-national-ancestry-based imprisonment of Japanese-American citizens during the Second World War, now rightly remembered as one of the Court’s most notorious acts. (2)
Sad to say, the majority opinion and the and a concurring opinion included some of the best-known liberal Justices in the Court’s history: Hugo Black, William Douglas, and Felix Frankfurter. Black had been a literal member of the Ku Klux Klan in 1923-25, so perhaps the ruling was not so surprising from him – and Black was the Justice who formally delivered the opinion. In the 1960s, no Justices were hated by segregationists and Nixon Republicans more than Hugo Black and William Douglas, because of their generally liberal rulings. Except perhaps Earl Warren, Chief Justice from 1953-69, who as Governor of California during the Second World War was an enthusiastic booster for the Japanese-American internment program.
By far the most notorious and destructive Supreme Court decision was the Dred Scott decision of 1957, which had denied freedom to the slave Dred Scott, whose white master had taken him to a free state and argued that therefore he should be considered free. Chief Justice Roger Taney’s majority opinion went even further, declaring explicitly in what is probably the most notorious pronouncement the Court has ever made:
A free negro of the African race, whose ancestors were brought to this country and sold as slaves, is not a "citizen" within the meaning of the Constitution of the United States. …
They had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit.” [emphasis added]
That decision effectively eliminated the realistic possibility of ending slavery without a civil war. Which is what we got.
Roger Taney, the most infamous Chief Justice of the Supreme Court
There is some bitter irony as well in Taney’s decision. As a young lawyer in Baltimore, he had done pro bono work defending escaped slaves whose masters were seeking to have them returned to bondage. Taney was the brother-in-law of Francis Scott Key, composer of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” He later became Attorney General in Andrew Jackson’s Administration, where his biggest task was to fight to abolish the Bank of the United States, which Jacksonians took as the chief symbol of what they called the Money Power. Although the term “populist” had not yet been invented, that fight was in today’s terms a populist one, in which the Jacksonians claimed – legitimately in this case – to represent “The People” against “The Elite.”
But Taney will forever be remembered as the author of what is still considered the Supreme Court’s most infamous moment, and certainly the one with the most obviously destructive consequences.
Summary: No, the Supreme Court does not have the last say when it comes to defending democracy and the rule of law. It’s a job for all three branches of the federal government - and most of all for the American people whose government it is. Democrats could certainly benefit from recalling Franklin Roosevelt successful fight with the reactionary Supreme Court that was striking down New Deal legislation on the flimsiest of legal justifications.
(1) Kevin Morris, Finishing Off Voting Rights Act, Supreme Court Declares Racism Over – Again. Brennan Center 04/30/2026.
(2) David Neiwert’s 2005 book on the internment, Strawberry Days: How Internment Destroyed a Japanese American Community, has recently been republished.
As various commentators have recalled recently, mass protests France have been a part of the European scene since at least 1789.
FRANCE 24 has this report from October 22 on the current European protests – which aren’t restricted to France (1):
The actress Pamela Anderson attracted attention eight years ago by speaking out on the “yellow vest” protests at that time:
The French protests first began as a response to President Emmanuel Macron’s proposed fuel tax increase, something he has said would help the country’s green initiatives. But they have since encompassed everything from the minimum wage and taxes to demands for the dissolution of parliament and Macron’s resignation.
“I despise violence … but what is the violence of all these people and burned luxurious cars, compared to the structural violence of the French – and global – elites?” Anderson tweeted on Monday.
The photos of the destruction in Paris made for captivating viewing, she said, but it was important to examine what the motivation behind the protests were.
“[It] came from the rising tensions between the metropolitan elite and rural poor, between the politics represented by Macron and the 99% who are fed up with inequality, not only in France, all over the world,” she added.
On her Pamela Anderson Foundation site she further elaborated the following day.
The yellow vest movement, she wrote, “is a revolt that has been simmering in France for years. A revolt by ordinary people against the current political system which – as in many other western countries – colludes with the elite and despises its own citizens.”
Despite what critics of the movement have said, she wrote, the average person in France is not opposed to environmental initiatives, they simply don’t think the burden of paying for it should fall on them while the wealthy are given tax breaks.
“When some protesters destroy cars and burn shops, they symbolically attack private property that is the basis of capitalism. When they attack police officers, they symbolically reject and challenge repressive state forces – forces that primarily protect the capital.” (1) [emphasis added] (2)
Lots of things are involved in political protests. People who are upset about something. There is a government or a company or some other entity they want to do something about it. There are streets and parks and bridges and buildings they use for their protest. Other people will be inspired by the protests. Police, administrators, schools and businesses and property owners will have opinions to express on the protests. Politicians, parties and political activists will try to use the protests somehow to their advantage. Some churches and religious groups may be sympathetic to the protests, others will consider them a revolt against God and basic decency. If the protests are large enough to rate “front page” coverage by urban newspapers – or top promotion by digital algorithms – there will be at least some minor vandalism in the form of broken windows or spray-painting or at least excessive trash on streets and sidewalks.
Far be it from me to throw shade on decisive actions by political leaders, like Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer’s famous “sternly worded letters” to President Trump. But public protests are also an essential part of democratic politics.
How public officials, particularly the police forces in places where the protests are occurring, is obviously very important. As are the responses by politicians. The reporting on recent protests in France suggest that the police have been fairly ham-handed in their responses in some cases. And the far right, notably including former Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, part of the Peter Thiel’s stable of sponsored politicians, to rant about foreigners and Muslims causing all the trouble.
Le Monde/AFP reported on some of the events on Saturday:
French police fired tear gas on Saturday, October 24, to prevent protesters in several cities from advancing to their centers, in fresh nationwide demonstrations held a week after riots broke out, AFP journalists saw.
Police fired tear gas at protesters in Lyon, Lille, Toulouse, Montpellier and Nantes, hours after Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez warned: "We will not tolerate any violence or any disturbance of public order."
Authorities deployed 70,000 security forces across the country for the new marches held against the cost of living, after ones a week ago degenerated into street violence that saw public buildings vandalized, hundreds of shops looted and 2,700 people arrested. …
Police said 110,000 people were taking part in a protest march in Paris, where shops were boarded up and the Louvre and Musée d'Orsay museums closed. Scores of riot police stood guard to prevent protesters getting onto the city's ring road.
The main demonstration in the capital, pushed to its southeast rim under a last-minute order by authorities, was held largely in a calm and festive manner, with some parents and their toddlers looking on from the sidelines.
But there was also widespread anger at President Emmanuel Macron for banning non-union demonstrations his government deemed "illegitimate" and keeping all protesters away from city centers. [emphasis added] (3)
A New York Times report summarized the recent French protests and related events with this introduction:
The nationwide unrest in France began with a handful of student demonstrations at high schools in suburban Paris last month.
Now, in cities across the country, antigovernment marchers are protesting expensive living conditions, high fuel prices and conditions in schools. Using the unrest as a smoke screen for vandalism, rioters and looters have also joined in.
With the protests in their second month, the police have arrested thousands, and politicians are divided over how to respond. (4)
In the late 1960s in the US, various mass protests around civil rights and the Vietnam War produced a lot of discussion often polarized around conservative “law-and-order” rhetoric, which has persisted on the right. Except, of course, in instances when rightwing gun nuts murder somebody and claim that hate a stand-your-ground right to do so. Republicans as a group were remarkably lacking in outrage after Donald Trump on January 6, 2026 knowingly sent an armed, violent, howling mob into the US Capitol to attack member of Congress and stage a coup. Republican legislators in Oklahoma passed a law in 2021 to allow drivers to legally ram their cars into protesters.
Oklahoma’s Republican governor, Kevin Stitt, signed HB 1674 on Wednesday, even as advocates excoriated their elected officials for undermining democracy. ...
Legislators passed HB 1674 following historic protests against police brutality and racial injustice last summer, both in Oklahoma and across the country. The mass demonstrations – most of which were peaceful – faced sharp criticism from Republicans, who decried property damage and violence by some protesters.
Meanwhile, cars have become a weapon among those hoping to disrupt demonstrations, or drivers who get flummoxed and enraged. People drove their vehicles into protests more than 100 times last summer, and at least two protesters were fatally struck, according to USA Today. [emphasis added] (5)
On the one hand, it’s ridiculous to see such organized mass protests as we’ve seen recently in France and elsewhere in Europe as just some kind of nihilist phenomenon, as their rightwing critics would prefer to have it. Seeing them as an Islamist uprising against Western civilization as xenophobic politicians would prefer to see it, is pretty much on the insane spectrum of opinion.
In the case of the French students and also with some of the large recent protests in other European countries, there are valid complaints, such as the seriously deficient funding for public school systems. France’s national government is directly responsible for schools, a more centralized structure than in other European countries where it’s more of a function of state/provincial governments than it is in France.
But austerity economics as practiced in the EU – particularly in the eurozone, the countries which have adopted the euro as their currency – has been causing deficiencies in public services from schools in France to maintaining the railway system in Germany, and much else. A central plank of austerity economics is to protect the wealthiest and most profitable countries and individuals as far as possible from requirements that they pair a fair share of taxes to support the countries and the communities who make their wealth and profits possible.
David Cay Johnston has been covering Donald Trump for decades. In the first part of this recent interview, he talks about various ways that Trump may try on Election Day to suppress the actual vote. It also discusses the recent reception that Trump and J.D. Vance are encountering in public and Trump’s recent authoritarian performances. (1)
He also comments on some ongoing disgraces including the fact that the US minimum wage hasn’t been raised since 2009 when it was set at $7.25/hr. So the feeling of voters that the Democratic Party too often fails to deliver on its basic promises is not simply the result of effective Republican marketing. This will be a particular challenge if the Democrats successfully win control over both the House and the Senate in the Nov. 3 election.
Democrats can’t stop the Republicans from using messaging like: “See? The Democrats control all of Congress and they still can’t deliver on anything!”
But the Democrats do have real possibilities to make sure the voting public can see that they are promoting popular policies. They can pass bills on popular issues, like a minimum wage increase and legislative solutions aimed at limiting campaign contributions, i.e., to remedy the damage done by the Supreme Court with Citizens United and related decisions. The raising of the minimum wage and undoing Citizens United have been consistent Democratic talking points since early in the Obama Administration.
But it’s one thing to make issues like that part of a list of issues on a fundraising e-mail. It’s another to convince the majority of voter that the Democratic Party is collectively serious about doing something to fix the actual problems.
Selling pardons, corrupt business deals, shady deals favoring foreign oligarchs from whom the President’s family and business allies benefit in large and even spectacular ways – these are all issues that ordinary voters understand are connected to bad governance. It’s a hopeful sign that Democrats have been stressing the corruption issue in the final weeks of this year’s campaigns.
But the Democrats cannot afford to let the corruption issues become blurred into some vague “good government” idea. With control of one or both houses, they can use both legislative initiatives and the extensive investigatory power of Congress to keep the focus on problems caused by the Republican President and Republican policies.
“Bipartisanship”
When Barack Obama at the 2004 Democratic Convention famously declared, “there is not a liberal America and a conservative America - there is the United States of America” – a theme that John Kerry used as the Presidential candidate that year – that sounded to at least many Democrats like a welcome relief from the ugly partisanship of the Clinton and Bush II years.
What the country needs are good policies, like elections that can’t be bought by billionaire oligarchs. Like secure health insurance for everyone, i.e., Medicare for All. Like much more progressive taxes on those oligarchs. Like practical regulations on AI (“SI” in TrumpSpeak). Like a higher minimum wage. Like requiring the President to obey the laws of the United States.
But one of the peculiar features of American politics is the strange hangover of the idea that “bipartisanship” is somehow a virtue in and of itself. From the end of the Civil War until around 1980 at the latest, the ideological divisions in US politics were played out across both parties. There were conservative and liberals in both. FDR relied on Republican support for his major New Deal programs. The Republicans (at least until recently) would periodically remind the public that Lyndon Johnson’s Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act could only pass with Republican votes.
That era of that kind of bipartisanship essentially ended with Ronald Reagan’s election as President. The Trumpist Republican Party doesn’t bother with such bipartisan posturing. They’re currently calling the whole Democratic Party communists and terrorism supporters of terrorism.
But in 2026, essentially no voters actually consider “bipartisanship” as somehow a virtue in itself. And the Republican Party certainly does not. Of course, we need both parties to support the basic Constitutional structure with democracy and the rule of law. And when the Democrats get solid legislation passed with Republican votes, that’s great! But they should make sure that everyone knows that those Republican votes were welcome because they supported a good Democratic bill. The same is obviously also true for foreign policy.
The author Gil Duran is one of many people currently calling urgent attention to the threat to democracy from TechBro oligarchs, as in the following interview. (2) This is an issue the Democrats need to urgently address – no matter how much or how little “bipartisanship” Republicans may decide to show.
(1) Trump Frantically Looking For Ways to Dupe Voters as Hecklers Take Over Rally. Mark Thompson Show YouTube channel 10/21/2026. <https://youtu.be/HGKHdT42bUQ?si=bgqiMC9zO-CB6Nyy> (Accessed: 2026-22-10).
(2) 'You're with the billionaires or you're with the people' — Interview with Gil Duran. DW News YouTube channel 10/21/2026. <https://youtu.be/2176dnVR02E?si=5a2jrV3yk9NldDiY> (Accessed: 2026-22-10).
Le Monde English recently published a story summarizing protests in France, Italy, Belgium, Spain and Portugal. (1) They included this photo that probably was not selected for its intrinsic news value:
Sebastian Kurz, the smarmy rightwing former Chancellor of Austria who is now part of TechBro oligarch Peter Thiel’s stable of wholly-owned politicians that includes J.D. Vance, in a Facebook post blames the current student protests in France on immigrants and especially them thar’ Muslims. The video he features there is what you would get if you told AI to create a scene that would excite xenophobic white folks.
France has been known for its periodic mass protests since, oh, 1789 or so.
John Mearsheimer starts off this interview commenting on the French protests and reminiscing about the time he got tear-gassed during one of them in 2018. (2)
Near the end of that video, we also see a clip of Benjamin Netanyahu suggesting that Hamas is behind the demonstrations in France: “And let me tell you, if we don’t stop Hamas here, if we don’t dismantle Hamas in Gaza, you’re see them on the streets of Paris. And that’s exactly what is happening right now.” I’m sure we all look forward to seeing dozens and dozens of Hamas members demonstrating in Paris for more school funding in France.
The focus of the recent protests in France has been around the longterm neglect of the public school system as a result of the austerity economic policies followed by far too many of the EU leaders, including conservative French President Emmanuel Macron. Rightwingers like Kurz, of course, tend to take a hostile stance toward popular protests and jump at the chance to blame any vandalism or violence on “the left.” Which in the rightwing imagination in the West these days, includes Muslim fundamentalists whose ideology tends to be rightwing by most normal measures. Le Monde reports:
In Brussels, in a rare move, the European Commission – which is usually silent on the domestic policies of EU member states – commented on Monday, October 19, on the protests that took place in France on Saturday and especially on the violence that accompanied them.
Through its spokesperson, the European Commission condemned the looting, calling it "unacceptable," and reminded Paris that the right to peaceful protest "must be protected." In the European Parliament, the center-right European People's Party (EPP) and the far right quickly sought to politicize the issue by organizing a debate on Monday evening in Strasbourg, whose title sparked controversy within the chamber: "France, Italy, Belgium: Anti-democratic violence and destruction perpetrated by far-left groups." [emphasis added]
This is all taking place in the context of far-right groups like Germany’s AfD (Alternative for Germany) stressing immigration in particular as a menace. In the European parliamentary systems, the far right can’t take national power without the cooperation of the traditional conservative parties, i.e., the “center-right” EPP parties. Many conservative parties have tried to pander to xenophobic themes to compete with the right. The results have been remarkably consistent in Britain, France, Italy and other countries: it strengthens the far right parties.
Italian Prime Minister Georgia Meloni’s ruling far-right party has distinguished itself from ones like the AfD by not embracing a particular Russia-friendly in its foreign policy orientation. But she’s willing to engage in rightwing demagoguery on other issues:
In Rome, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni held an emergency security council meeting on Monday afternoon to assess the situation after the weekend's riots and looting. On Sunday, she took to social media to denounce the "gangs of thugs" who "set cities ablaze," such as Milan, where clashes broke out between youths and the police, and where 271 rioters were arrested, including 220 minors – scenes of "urban guerrilla warfare," according to RAI, the public broadcaster. …
This toxic social climate came to a head on Saturday in Rome, where the CGIL, the country's largest labor union, brought together nearly 100,000 people, joined by opposition leaders including Elly Schlein of the center-left Partito Democratico and Giuseppe Conte of the populist Movimento 5 Stelle. Maurizio Landini, secretary general of the Confédération générale italienne du travail (CGIL), called for a general strike on November 20. [my emphasis] (Le Monde)
In other words, it’s a broad-based protest movement. And Meloni is willing to indulge in Trump-style demagoguery with her talk of cities set ablaze. Does Netanyahu also blame the Italian protests on Hamas? Inquiring minds want to know.
On an anecdotal note, some of my acquaintances are currently touring in Italy including Rome. They are visiting interesting churches and other famous tourist sites. Somehow, they seem not to have noticed the “cities ablaze” that Meloni cited.
Belgium: Protests over schools and general austerity measures. Spain: Protests for the last three weeks demanding better access to housing and more adequate funding for schools. Portugal: Protests over inadequate housing.
These protests are about real issues that are a product of chronic conservative austerity policies heavily favored by the European economic establishments.
One of the surprises of this election year – a pleasant surprise for Democrats – is that several states that were considered likely Republican ones for this year’s election have turned into very competitive ones for the Democrats.
Florida: Democratic state representative Angie Nixon achieved a surprise win in the Democratic Senate primary. Commonweal recently described her race against Republican incumbent Ashley Moody this way:
Nixon has shrewdly put economic pressures at the center of her campaign … After her primary victory she … restyled herself as an independent-minded populist, affiliated with an array of progressive organizations but not in lockstep with any single one. That effort may neutralize crude attempts by J. D. Vance and Moody’s other surrogates to slander her as un-American. “I’m aligned with what folks have referred to as ‘the FDR Democrats,’” she has said, emphasizing that her motivation, as a café owner and former single mom, is to fight for working families.
Nixon is being actively supported by Sen. Bernie Sanders. She has heavily criticized her opponent Moody for having approved the diversion $10 million in public funds “to political action committees - one controlled by [Republican] Gov. Ron DeSantis’ Chief of Staff James Uthmeier - that helped defeat 2024 ballot initiatives on abortion and marijuana.” (USA Today)
Commonweal uses the term “big tent” populism to describe Angie Nixon’s Florida campaign, a term which could describe other 2026 Democratic candidates, as well. While there have been hard-fought primary campaigns involving candidates that clearly identify as progressives and others who identify as more centrist, the losing candidates in these races have rallied around the winners.
Kansas: The Democratic Senate nominee in Kansas is Rev. Adam Hamilton, Methodist pastor (and former Republican) who positions himself as a centrist: "I'm a liberal conservative and a conservative liberal, depending on the issue and the day of the week." His opponent is incumbent Republican Sen. Roger Marshall. Polls currently show Hamilton with a lead of 1%-5%. (NYT) The Kansas City Star notes that Kansas “hasn’t elected a Senator from that party in nearly 100 years has led Republican President Donald Trump to plan a visit next week.” Whether a Trump appearance on his behalf will help Marshall more than it hurts him!
Michigan: The Democratic Senate in Michigan hardly needs an introduction at this point. He’s family physician Abdul El-Sayed who provokes hysterical fantasies in Donald Trump and other Republican critics. He is very mediagenic and draws support from both progressive and more moderate Democrats. Barack Obama and Kamala Harris have expressed their support for him. El-Sayed faces Republican Mike Rogers, who is adopting the normal level of Republican civility by running an ad “an ad featuring a young Persian American man arguing that El-Sayed is too closely linked to radical Islam and al-Qaeda.” But Rogers is leery of being tied too closely “an unpopular president; he’s tried to mildly break from Trump over the trade war in Canada, for example.” (American Prospect)
Nebraska: The state Democratic party has endorsed Independent Dan Osborn in the Senate race against Republican incumbent Pete Ricketts. Osborn is a former union leader who led a strike at the Omaha Kellogg’s plant in 2021. The winner of the Senate Democratic primary was Cindy Burbank, who declined the nomination after the election to endorse Osborn. Burbank’s opponent in the primary was William Forbes, who certainly looked like a “spoiler” candidate. Forbes told CNN that he had voted multiple times for Trump. (Nebraska Examiner) Osborn has produced a catchy ad taking a populist-tinged poke at Sen. Ricketts for his support of data centers and tech oligarchs:
New Hampshire:
In New Hampshire, four-term Democratic nominee Chris Pappas is facing incumbent Republcan Sen. John Sununu. Retired Gen. Don Bolduc, who ran again Sununu in the Republican primary, has endorsed the Democrat Pappas for the general election. As the YouGov table indicates, Pappas is showing in the polls as a likely win. Pappas is also highlighting his opposition to big tax subsidies for data centers:
Ohio:
Former Senator and Democratic stalwart Sherrod Brown is running against the incumbent John Husted, who was appointed to take the Senate seat vacated by J.D. Vance when he became Vice President. Brown is also targeting data centers. He also has taken an aggressive approach to throwing sleazy polemics back in the Republicans’ faces:
Texas: Texas in the past produced statewide Democratic victories like Sen. Lyndon Johnson and Gov. Ann Richards. Democratic Sen. nominee James Talarico has been running an aggressive Senate campaign against incumbent Republican Ken Paxton, an exceptionally unattractive political figure. A former Presbyterian seminarian, Talarico is also explicitly talking about humane Christian religious principles in a way reminiscent of Jimmy Carter.
Talarico is also making a clever pitch accusing Paxton of being anti-puppy.
And Texas Republicans seem to be really worried about their party’s prospects next month., including the gubernatorial race, in which Regina Hinojosa is the Democratic nominee.
Robert Pape has an update on Pakistani and French forces being deployed to Saudi Arabia, which is currently at war with the Houthis of Yemen and with Iran. (1)
The US-Israel War on Iran that began in February a major military attack on Iran is now a big mess. And it’s spreading.
Pape’s analysis of this situation is always worth hearing because he’s an actual expert on war with Iran. I do have big reservations about the analogy with which he opens this segment and continues later, which is the analogy he makes to the beginning of the First World War. One of the biggest problems the US brought upon itself during the Cold War was the heavy but often careless application of historical analogies. To this day, the US can’t have any foreign policy confrontation without pundits and policymakers invoking the Munich Analogy. It is understandably said of the US neoconservatives in particular that for them, it’s always 1938 and Hitler is always on the verge of seizing the Sudetenland. Jeffrey Record is one of the military scholars who has warned that careless analogical approaches can lead to serious threat inflation and bad policy responses – and has done so repeatedly. (2)
Beware the World War I analogies
Obviously, it’s important to learn lessons from actual wars! And the miscalculations the various sides made in the lead-up to the First World War were serious. But even today, the origins of the First World War are still very much disputed to this day. There’s the “sleepwalker” thesis that the European powers stumbled into a war without really meaning to. And there was certainly stumbling in the leaders’ decision-making!
John Kenneth Galbraith once put the stumbling of those prewar days into a particular framework:
People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage. intellectual myopia, often called stupidity, is no doubt a reason. But the privileged feel also that their privileges, however egregious they may seem to others, are a solemn, basic, God-given right. …
There was a final consideration [on the beginning of the First World War], one that it is always thought a trifle pretentious to stress. Rulers in Germany and Eastern Europe, generals in all countries, held their jobs by right of family and tradition. If inheritance qualifies one for office, intelligence cannot be a requirement. Nor is its absence likely to be a disqualification. On the contrary, intelligence is a threat to those who do not possess it, and there is a strong case, therefore, for excluding those who do possess it. This was the tendency in 1914. In consequence, both the rulers and the generals in World War I were singularly brainless men.
None was capable of thought on what war would mean for his class - for the social order that was so greatly in his favor. There bad always been wars. Rulers had been obliterated. The ruling classes had always survived. To the extent that there was thought on the social consequences of war, this was what was believed. [emphasis added] (3)
Galbraith narrated his view of the beginning of the war in a television series of the same name: (4)
Something like the stupidity problem Galbraith discussed is also part of the current Iran War. The great European powers in 1914 were at least capable of conducting sophisticated diplomacy, even if they ultimately failed miserably in their aims. But Donald Trump has shown very little ability as President to manage complicated diplomatic challenges like those with the Iran War and the Russia-Ukraine War. Settling either of those with something like a stable peace would require very difficult and elaborate diplomacy, for which Trump has show little ability in either his first or second terms.
But neither carelessness nor stupidity adequately explain the beginning of that war. German historian Fritz Fischer in his 1961 book Griff nach der Weltmacht: Die Kriegzielpolitik des kaiserlichen Deutschland 1914–1918 (English title: Germany’s Aims in the First World War) argued what became known as the “Fischer Thesis,” which stressed the responsibility of the German leadership for the beginning of the war. It’s clear that after the assassination of Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, Kaiser Bill’s government in Germany pushed the Austro-Hungarian Emperor Franz Joseph to declare war on Serbia, which triggered the network of alliances that the European powers had set up in the previous decades to undertake a mass disaster of the war. As Galbraith put it:
In 1914, all the continental powers had immensely detailed mobilization plans - plans for getting troops into uniform and to the frontier. Once started, this mobilization had a further momentum of its own; the act of mobilization signified an intention to fight. And, given the importance of territory, it naturally signaled a preference (and thus an intention) for fighting on someone else's land. Better, if you were the other party, to mobilize, strike first and fight beyond your frontiers. Mobilization in 1914 did not, as is sometimes suggested, make war inevitable. It did provoke the atmosphere of fear and crisis in which rational decision was even less probable. [emphasis added]
But 1914 was a long time ago. There is no Austro-Hungarian Empire anymore, no Austrian Crown Prince to be assassinated. Although the current Iran War began with a “decapitation strike” which killed the Iranian Supreme leader and several other senior members of the government. But using easy analogies is a risky approach to foreign policy. Galbraith also noted that the European rulers in 1914 still were heavily influenced by the longtime fixation on war for territory as being critical, as opposed to warfare aimed at destroying the enemy country’s ability to continue a war.
Jeffrey Record had a straightforward caution for policymakers on dealing with historical analogies in dealing with current military threats, here using the Mother Of All Historical Analogies for American foreign policy wonks, the Munich Analogy. Here, Record uses the word “appeasement” in the 1930s sense of making concessions in a compromised. After the results of Munich, “appeasement” became in practice a synonym for cowardice and fecklessness in foreign policy:
The democracies' choices in the 1930s were severely constrained by war weariness, domestic politics, fiscal and economic considerations, perceptions of military inadequacy, and Hitler's effective strategic deception regarding Nazi Germany's intentions and capabilities.
Appeasement of attempted German revision of the Versailles Treaty made both moral and strategic sense because the treaty was unjust, strategically short-sighted, and unenforceable. And it was not politically possible for the democracies to forcibly oppose the reunification of the German nation within a single state. The victors of 1918 had violated Woodrow Wilson's sacred principle of self-determination by prohibiting union of Germany and Austria and by creating the polyglot state of Czechoslovakia with unhappy German majorities in that state's border areas with Germany. Appeasement became untenable the moment Hitler demanded, under the threat of force, the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia - which was not only a democratic state prepared to grant the Sudeten Germans considerable political autonomy but also a significant military counterweight to German territorial ambitions in eastern and southeastern Europe. Yet neither Britain nor France was in a political or military position to defend Czechoslovakia, although Chamberlain's threat of a general war deterred Hitler from seizing all of Czechoslovakia.
Security policy decisions are not made in a political and strategic vacuum; all are contextual and made by fallible human beings who can and do make mistaken judgments based on bad information, poor reasoning, ideological bias, disbelief, fear, overconfidence, stubbornness, and pride. Chamberlain clearly misjudged Hitler, but so did a lot of others, including conservative German nationalists who supported Hitler until his war-ensuring revolutionary intentions became apparent. [emphasis added]
(2) Record, Jeffrey (2005): Appeasement Reconsidered: Investigating the Mythology of the 1930s. US Army War College Press. <https://press.armywarcollege.edu/monographs/736> (Accessed: 2026-17-10).
(3) Galbraith, John Kenneth (1977): The Age of Uncertainty: A History of Economic ideas and Their Consequences, 22, 137-138. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
There is a lot of disturbing news coming out of Europe, which is undergoing a big change in its strategic concerns.
The Trump Administration is becoming more and more a chaos agent. European allies can no longer count on Trump to side with them in a possible conflict with Russia. Trump’s new arrangement to exempt Russian diesel from the economic sanctions is a further signal that the US is pursuing a different and more accommodating policy toward Putin’s Russia – to the extent there is a coherent policy on that conflict from the Trump regime at all.
Russia-Ukraine War
It’s obvious that Trump himself is increasingly incapable of operating anything resembling a normal foreign policy. His primary focus in office is maximizing his own wealth. It’s very hard to see how he could achieve a stable peace agreement with Iran or facilitate one in the Russia-Ukraine War.
It certainly appears that what John Mearsheimer has been saying about the latter conflict for a while is essentially correct. The Russia-Ukraine War is a brutal mess. Despite the hype around this strike or that by Ukraine into Russia, it’s not at all clear to me that Ukraine is doing more damage with their attacks on strategic infrastructure targets than Russia is doing to it. The leap in drone capabilities that Ukraine has achieved has been impressive. But since Ukraine’s offensive in 2023 that temporarily won back some territory, it’s basically been a long war of attrition, alternating between gains and reverses for both sides. The drones on both sides have made gaining ground nearly impossible on the front lines, with huge casualties for any offensive.
The best case in the current situation would most likely be some kind of semi-permanent ceasefire along the current lines without Ukraine formally conceding any territory. But as long as they are stuck in the current war of attrition, Russia’s advantages in population and economic strength - even without of the latest boost from Trump agreeing to exempt some diesel fuel from the US economic embargo) are big.
Even as unsatisfactory as a deal like that would be, I just don’t see how the Trump-Kushner-Wikoff malicious clown show could accomplish even that. Russia would demand US assurances and specific commitments before they agreed to any substantive solution. And unfortunately I just don’t see how this crew is able to pull off anything as complicated as a Russia-Ukraine armistice would be.
So Europe is looking at very likely having two more years of war between Russia and Ukraine, at least. And the war means that Russia has a much bigger and battle-experienced army than it had when they started this in 2022. Of course, war always takes a toll on a country. And many Russian officials and citizens will surely look very unfavorably on aggressive moves against Europe which could lead to another war like the current one, or worse.
Additional threats from Russia
But that does not mean that Russia will refrain from threats and actions short of actual war against the EU/NATO countries. Politico recently reported:
The talks about a nightmare attack scenario have taken place in recent weeks among EU ambassadors from all 27 countries gathering in “restricted format,” meaning without phones or assistants. Discussions have ramped up since the discovery of an explosives-laden drone at Leipzig airport in August, said the diplomats and officials, who were granted anonymity to discuss the confidential exchanges.
While the EU has discussed such scenarios for years — unveiling a “hybrid toolbox” geared at coordinating responses to cyberattacks, election interference, and sabotage — the latest talks zeroed in on the risk of more serious attacks that cause large-scale casualties. Two diplomats said a meeting among EU ambassadors last Wednesday focused specifically on such examples.
Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the EU says Moscow has intensified a campaign of cyberattacks, sabotage and other covert operations across the bloc. (1)
But, as always, there are a lot of angles being promoted by people representing various different interests and perspectives. For example, the former Ukrainian foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, gives his spin on reported events:
"Anti-European hysteria is being fueled in Russia, which I interpret as the preparation for a broader conflict with the rest of Europe," said Kuleba, before adding: "We [Ukrainians] don't have to drag you — Putin will drag you into the war."
European officials say Moscow has upped its hybrid campaign across the continent in recent months, using cyberattacks, sabotage and disinformation to disrupt critical infrastructure and weaken support for Ukraine.
Kuleba said the failed drone attack on the Leipzig airport in Germany in August was a sign of "growing preparation" for an offensive on the continent. "They see how your intelligence operates. They see how your security forces operate. They see how you react and they draw conclusions," he added.
In the aftermath of the incident, the German government concluded that Moscow was responsible for the attack, and ordered a review of security around sensitive locations. (2)
As always, it’s worth being caution about phrases like “hybrid war.” A violations of a country’s air space or some kind of cyber-hacking attack may or may not be war or a cause for war, depending on the severity and the particular situation. The use of “hybrid war” to describe immigration or refugee movements, even when it’s being consciously used as a provocative act by another country (which rarely happens), describing that a “war,” hybrid or not, is particularly problematic.
Intermingled political narratives
One constant feature in discussions over military spending is that war is profitable, especially for war industries and their financiers. That’s true regardless of the legal or moral aspects of the war. And, of course, if one side suffers enough damage, that can cut into profits, as well. Although the damage to corporate profits is not the same as the damage done to the human beings affected.
But this also means that there are vested interests who have a financial stake in hyping foreign threats. Anne Applebaum (who is married to Poland’s Foreign Minister) recently wrote:
All Vladimir Putin has to do is tell his soldiers to stop fighting, and then the war is over. The Ukrainians cannot stop fighting because, if they do, their country will be conquered and they will suffer the fate of their occupied territories: leaders murdered, children kidnapped, repression and concentration camps for everyone else. (3)
This is understandable as a polemical formulation. Russia did illegally invade Ukraine, first by seizing Crimea in 2014 and more in the current war that began in 2022. But it appears very unlikely that Russia has as its aim to take all of Ukraine. John Mearsheimer has argued repeatedly that Russia’s goal has been to hold Crimea and significant portions of eastern Ukraine, and to have a Russia-friendly government in Kiev. Or, failing that, having a weak government in Kiev that functions as the head of a dysfunctional rump state. As Mearsheimer notes, Russia occupying all of a hostile Ukraine would be a nightmare for Russia because it would be a significant military drain because of hostility from the local population. It would also give Europe that chance if they chose to do so of backing the irregular military resistance inside Ukraine.
We always have to be careful to remember that the calculations that countries make in such situations includes making assumptions about uncertainties. And national leaderships may not always make an accurate evaluation of their options. And even smart and experienced leaders can make dumb decisions.
The other huge uncertainty hanging over all this is the debility of the Trump 2.0 regime in diplomacy.
As low an opinion as I have for Trump diplomacy, I’m still surprised at all the instances we’re seeing of their inability to conduct anything like what we could call even half-competent foreign policy. It’s painfully obvious that Trump, Jared, and Steve Witkoff are laser-focused on deals that enrich themselves and their cronies. It’s been about as disastrous as it could be on the Iran War. And on Gaza. And they are hardly making a pretense these days that they could arrange a peace between Russia and Ukraine.
Former US Ambassador to Ukraine Steven Pifer wrote this week:
“You don’t have the cards,” President Donald Trump angrily told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy during their infamous February 2025 Oval Office meeting. Trump issued this assessment just days after he had launched his effort to mediate an end to the Russia-Ukraine War. Some 19 months later, the cards have been shuffled and redealt.
But does Trump know how to play cards? Apparently not. (4)
The following is a discussion at the Warsaw Security Forum of the European situation with Russia. It includes the foreign ministers of Britain, German, Norway, and Poland. Which of course includes Mr. Applebaum, Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski. Of course, they are speaking here as the foreign ministers of their countries, not as independent experts. (5)
A particular feature of the debate is that far-right European parties that favor a pro-Russia foreign policy are opposed to boosting European military budgets. And they will take the opportunity to make “guns and butter” arguments that government programs that benefit the public will need to be further cut back if the military buildup goes forever. Part of the scam of far-right parties like the Alternative for Germany (AfD) and Austria’s Freedom Party (FPÖ) is that they pretend that the support social services and public institutions for ordinary people. But generally they are happy to follow the policies advocated by TechBro oligarchs like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel – and those kinds of supporters aren’t going to be shelling out campaign money for parties that demand that they pay higher taxes! (6)
The dead weight of bad economic ideas
Europe suffers from two really bad policy problems: austerity economics and a serious fault in the construction of the euro currency.
Germany is well known for its chronic tendency toward conservative economic policies, despite its substantial social-welfare state. There are a couple of basic ways to remedy a shortage of funds: cut programs or increase government revenue. And since a big expansion of defense spending will require a substantial dose of one or both.
Germany’s current Chancellor Friedrich Merz of the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) is heavily inclined toward the former and against the latter. Because raising more revenue will require wealthier Germany including the sacred billionaires paying more to support their country. Merz and the CDU would rather not hear about any need to do that.
Politico reports under this title image: (7)
Germany and its allies rebuffed Ireland’s plan to downsize the [EU] bloc’s next seven-year budget, arguing that the proposed cuts are not enough.
On Saturday, the Irish presidency of the Council of the EU, which is steering the talks, proposed cutting around 8% from the bloc’s total budget from 2028 to 2034 in a bid to assuage a German-led camp demanding reductions of several hundred billions euros.
But Dublin’s hopes of facilitating a deal were immediately dashed by German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, one the key players in the negotiations as his country contributes to approximately one-quarter of the bloc’s common budget. [emphasis added]
Paul Krugman, an actual authority on international finance who closely followed the euro crisis following the 2008 economic slump warns that the structure of the euro currency remains highly risky.
What is France’s problem? France is on a fiscally unsustainable path. Debt is already very high as a percentage of GDP, and the French government is adding to that debt by running large budget deficits even though there is no emergency like a war, a severe recession, or a pandemic to justify such deficits. Furthermore, France has an aging population, which means that pension costs will, other things equal, grow much faster than revenue.
Now, everything I just said about France’s fiscal situation is true for other major advanced economies too, the United States very much included. But France does stand out, even among fiscally troubled nations, in one main way: its persistent inability to get realistic about retirement. …
And France’s reliance on the euro means that it’s all too easy to see how [a] loss of [market] confidence [in French debt] could turn into an ugly crisis. (8)
Krugman spent years arguing that the EU needed to fix the euro currency zone to meet the requirements of what economists call an “optimal currency area” (OCA). I won’t try to elaborate what that is here, though there are plenty of accessible descriptions available online. (9)
Jess Piper is a Democratic activist in rural Missouri who shares important insights on grassroots politics, especially in rural areas. She recently wrote:
It’s frustrating to hear folks say that rural Missourians vote against their self-interest when 66 of Missouri’s 163 House Districts had no Democratic nominee on the ballot in 2022 and in cycles previous to that. Nearly 2.5 million Missourians live in those uncontested districts and didn’t have the option to vote for a Democrat for the State House and many other races because there wasn’t one on the ballot.
More candidates ran in 2024, but we still had way too many uncontested seats.
The good news is that we have changed that metric…by a massive amount. When I ran in 2022, over 40% of seats were uncontested. In this cycle, only 2% are uncontested.
That’s the first step in clawing back democracy. (1)
She cites Howard Dean’s main theme during his time as Chair of the Democratic Party (2005-2009), the 50-state strategy to actively contest election in “red” Republican-dominated states. As one might expect, Democrats who successfully contested election in red states during that period tended to be more on the centrist part of the political spectrum than on the left. But at the very minimum, forcing the Republicans to spend more of their campaign funds on what they had been able to consider safe Republican districts was an advantageous effect.
The essential idea of the 50-state strategy was to build active Democratic Party organizations everywhere. As the title of Jess’ article states, “The Only Race We Can’t Win ... Is the one we don’t run.” During his first Presidential campaign, Barack Obama relied heavily on a community-organizing model with his Obama For America group that was doing essentially that kind of organizing.
But the party let that approach drop after Obama was elected. As Michele Hornish observes, “after the 2008 election we scrapped a national 50 state strategy that put funding and support into the hands of Red State Democrats and Democratic parties and helped deliver huge victories.” (2)
Despite the Republican approach that relies even more than the Democrats on big-money donations to drive campaigns with advertising, they have at least a robust grassroot get-out-the-vote (GOTV) operation based on conservative Christian churches.
This has left the Democrats in places like Nebraska, for instance, not even bothering to put up a Democratic candidate in the current Nebraska Senate race. Instead, they are backing an independent named Dan Osborn. As Michelle Cottle writes in the New York Times:
“I don’t like either party,” he told me over pizza and beer in the town of Albion recently, after a morning of campaigning. “I think they both kind of suck.” His goal, as Mr. Osborn tells it, is to infiltrate the Senate and start breaking the unhealthy two-party death grip on the system.
Given this pox-on-both-their-houses posture, it might seem strange that the Nebraska Democratic Party is backing Mr. Osborn’s candidacy, that national Democrats have given him their tacit blessing and that his campaign events tend to be packed with more die-hard Democrats than fence-sitting unaffiliateds. (3)
As Cottle notes, “by not running its own candidate, the party might give some voters the impression that it has given up on rural America.” But to Cottle, it apparently seems obvious that this is merely a “second-tier concern” when “compared with the fierce urgency of rural America’s antipathy toward Democrats - an antipathy unlikely to be improved by the ongoing crusade of the party’s left flank to drive out moderates.”
Who those among “the party’s left flank” it is who have as their goal “to drive out moderates,” she doesn’t specify. In the real world of 2026, it’s one of the notable features of this year’s politics that after party primaries, both progressives and more traditional Democrats have closed ranks around Democratic nominees.
But somehow, she finds it obvious that it’s better for the Democrats to back candidates who aren’t Democrats at all than to build up their own party brand by nominating, you know, actual Democratic candidates! The mysterious insights of inside-the-Beltway political commentary are sometimes difficult to comprehend …
She even rolls out one of the hoariest Beltway political clichés that what voters really want in a political representative is “a guy [sic] you’d like to have a beer with.”
As opposed to, say, a “guy” who thinks billionaires should be required to pay taxes to support their country. Or one who thinks that everyone having affordable health insurance would be a desirable thing. Or one who thinks completely unnecessary Forever Wars are a bad thing.
But Cottle assures us that not only would you want to drink a beer with Osborn, he’s also “loose, chatty, goofy and prone to saying stuff that would give the average campaign consultant a heart attack.” Of course, standard-issue Beltway political commentators feel heart attacks coming on when they hear the phrase “Medicare for All.” Which Harry Truman was promoting in his 1948 Presidential campaign (though by another name).
As Cottle notes, the Democrats in Montana, Idaho, and South Dakota have been leaning in the same direction. She closes by saying that such a trend “could make for a more dynamic, maybe even less polarized, Congress.” Presumably because a Congress in which a united Democratic Party would be consistently “polarized” against unnecessary and illegal wars, massive corruption, and masked ICE goons shooting people in the streets for no good reasons, would not be conducive to Democratic and Republican Senators and Congresspeople getting drunk with each other.
I’ll try to be fair about this. So I’ll say there is some chance there’s something to this beyond sleazebag New York Mafia-style politics.
I would put the odds of that being true at appoximately 100,000-to-1 against it. (1)
From the New York Times story: (2)
Federal agents executed a search warrant at the home of Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota on Monday, according to three people briefed on the matter, the kind of investigative step the Justice Department has long shied away from so close to an election.
The court-approved search of her Washington-area home comes after Department of Homeland Security officials said in recent months that they were investigating Ms. Omar, a Democrat, over her family’s immigration paperwork. [emphasis added]
They are trying to revoke an elected Congresswoman’s American citizenship.
Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way recently provided this round-up of similar political prosecutions in the Trump 2.0 regime:
The Justice Department launched politically targeted investigations into dozens of opposition politicians, prominent public critics, and other perceived rivals of the president. Many of them were indicted on flimsy charges or for minor offenses: New York attorney general Letitia James was indicted for alleged mortgage fraud; FBI director James Comey was indicted twice on dubious charges; and Congresswoman LaMonica McIver was indicted (and faced the prospect of seventeen years in prison) for allegedly impeding federal officers during an authorized visit to a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE; a division of DHS) detention center. The administration sought indictments against Senators Mark Kelly and Elissa Slotkin as well as four House members for “seditious behavior” after they publicly discouraged members of the U.S. armed forces from obeying illegal orders. The administration also initiated politically motivated investigations into then–Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, Senator Adam Schiff, Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey, Minnesota governor Tim Walz, former special counsel Jack Smith, and ex-government officials John Brennan, Christopher Krebs, and Miles Taylor—among others.
The Justice Department launched investigations into Democratic Party donors Reid Hoffman, George Soros, and Alexander Soros, as well as the Democratic Party’s main fundraising platform, ActBlue; indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights organization, on dubious grounds; and instructed U.S. attorneys to investigate the Open Society Foundations, a major funder of civil society organizations. By late 2025, Reuters had documented 470 individuals, organizations, and institutions that had been “targets of retribution” under Trump. (3)
Notes:
(1) Federal agents search Rep. Ilhan Omar’s house as part of criminal investigation. MS NOW YouTube channel 10/12/2026. https://youtu.be/wj1R0w5h2rM?si=DroxsJPUKB9Ok7uq (Accessed: 2026-12-10).
(3) Levitsky, Steven & Way, Lucan A. (2026): Competitive Authoritarianism in America. Journal of Democracy 37:4 10/04/2026, 5-25. <https://doi.org/10.1353/jod.2026.a1001893> Publicly available at this writing.
The Republicans in North Carolina’s Senate race have been running almost a carbon copy of the notorious “Willie Horton” theme from the 1988 Presidential campaign.
Democratic nominee Roy Cooper – currently leading in the polls - was Governor when a guy got out of prison and that guy later killed someone, so Cooper is responsible for the murder. USA Today: “This is not the first time that Republicans have stretched the truth to make Cooper appear weak on crime.”
What?!? Republicans making up sleazy claims against Democrats? Say it ain’t so!!!
That was the scam the Republicans used back then. And the Democrats at the national level and their campaign consultants still weren’t willing to take seriously enough how nasty the Republicans were willing to go to keep the White House.
This is a flashback report on that political episode from Retro Report (1):
That report plausibly suggests, though, that what hurt Dukakis even more was his seemingly passionless answer to a question asked by reporter Bernard Shaw during his Presidential debate against then-Vice President George H.W. Bush about what he would do if his wife were raped and murdered by someone. Dukakis’ bland-sounding response was disastrous.
Although legacy media loves to identify dramatic moments like that as decisive turning points, in that case it was at least a big negative for Dukakis.
He could have responded with something along the lines of: “If someone had said something to me like you just said in a bar, I would probably have just punched you in the face and then had your arrested for threating my wife in such a sleazy way. Try to have some dignity, dude.”
1988 was years before FOX News went on air and became the unofficial channel for the Republican Party. Conspiracy-mongers along the lines of Alex Jones and Glenn Beck in those days were more likely to be ranting on talk radio shows about UFOs or lizard-people from outer space than about Presidential politics. By 1992, Rush Limbaugh had become a Republican star with his own sneering “political humor” directed against Democrats.
According to Dukakis campaign manager Susan Estrich in the Retro Report account, Dukakis’ debate-prep team had encouraged him to counter such a question with a response about how he would always be on the side of crime victims. It’s notable that the Willy Horton ads were promoted by an “independent” group not officially connected with the Bush campaign, which was a relatively new thing in those days.
We can see in retrospect that the Republicans were already barreling toward the endless “Whitewater” scandals, the “Gingrich Revolution,” and the era of Forever Wars. But the belligerent tone of sneering contempt was there in Bush Sr.’s politics already. And with Trump 2.0, it has taken a quantum leap into the hostile madness that the current Republican President displays – at least in those moments where his statements and “Truth Social” posts are coherent at all.
Cooper was North Carolina’s attorney general for 16 years, so he has no trouble coming up with examples to show that he has a record as a “crime-fighter.”
Although in that ad, he does indulge in some needless “hippie-punching” by saying “no way do we defund the police.” “Defund the police” has long since become a stock Republican talking point against the Democrats, even though apparently no Democratic candidate nominee in 2026 is running on that slogan. There’s no reason to repeat a Republican talking point, although given Cooper’s credentials it doesn’t distract much from his message in this case.
Moral of this story: The Democrats have to show they will fight for their own side.
(2) Willie Horton: Political Ads That Shaped the Battle for the White House. Retro Report YouTube channel 07/14/2016. <https://youtu.be/sdJ97qWHOxo?si=msMdqdy-wLZ4PnQW> (Accessed: 2026-10-09).
