CaptainKudzu

Whose side is Trump on?

2026-10-28T14:17:14.747-04:00

From the title, you may think that I’m going to write about Ukraine today. I apologize for the confusion, because that is an understandable assumption.

Over the past few weeks, Trump has waived fresh Russia sanctions passed by Congress, threatened Ukraine over its strikes on Russian refineries, and curtailed Ukraine’s Starlink internet access (or maybe that was Elon Musk or possibly both of them acting together). Whose side Trump is on in the Ukraine war is a legitimate question, but that is not my focus today. (Actually, it isn’t really much of a question, and the answer is not Ukraine.)

Instead, let’s consider whether Trump might be intentionally trying to sabotage the Republican Party’s chances in the midterms. In an already tight election year, the president seems determined to make things even more difficult for his own party.

Image created by ChatGPT

For example, take Trump’s candidates. Please! Seriously, the president has a habit of endorsing bad candidates who go on to lose winnable races, and it looks like 2026 will not be an exception to the rule. Ken Paxton is the best-known bad candidate, who may well be on the way to losing Texas, but he isn’t the only one. In Georgia, senatorial candidate Mike Collins’ campaign staff seems to be riddled with white supremacists, while Michael Whatley in North Carolina has been plagued by minor scandals and questions about credibility. Even in South Carolina, one of the reddest of red states, Trump’s hand-picked candidate, Lindsey Graham’s sister, is in a dead heat against a much better-qualified Democratic candidate.

The trend is also apparent in several gubernatorial races. Everyone is familiar with Vivek Ramaswamy’s implosion in Ohio, as Merrie Soltis discussed last week, but Trump’s pick in the conservative bastion of Florida, Byron Donalds, is in a dead heat with his Democratic opponent, as is Rick Jackson in Georgia. In Iowa, Trump’s anointed Republican lost the primary, and his second choice is trailing in the polls.

Even when Trump tries to help Republican nominees like Susan Collins in Maine, it can backfire. The president lifted some Canadian tariffs to help Collins in her tight reelection race, but lifting the tariffs to help Maine is a de facto admission that tariffs in general are a drain on the economy. If tariffs are slowing economic growth and contributing to higher consumer prices, why offer relief only to Maine and then only until the election?

The president is also giving more ammunition to those who are concerned about his abuses of power. The Trump DOJ is taking a third bite at the James Comey apple with yet another attempt at prosecution. The previous charges against Comey, making false statements to Congress and obstructing Congress, were dismissed due to a ruling that Lindsey Halligan, the federal prosecutor, was unlawfully appointed. The new charges stem from comments Comey allegedly made to a reporter in 2016, and may already be in trouble because there is no indictment and the 10-year statute of limitations elapsed earlier this month.

Comey may also have a good case that the government is engaging in malicious prosecution. Three shaky prosecutions following a 2025 Truth Social post in which Trump seemed to order the DOJ to go after Comey seems a lot like lawfare, and given the timing, may cause blowback on Election Day.

The new charges against Comey aren’t the only recent examples of lawfare. Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) was the target of a federal raid on October 12 that reportedly centered on Omar’s immigration status, although few details have been made public since. A grand jury recently declined to indict former Trump aide Cassidy Hutchinson, who testified against Trump after January 6, and breaking news as I write this is that former congressman Eric Swalwell’s (D-Calif.) Beverly Hills home has been searched by federal agents. While acknowledging that there are good reasons to investigate Swalwell, who resigned amid allegations of sexual misconduct, the larger picture appears to be that Trump is working his way down an enemies list.

There’s also the Iran War, which the Administration probably thought would be a quick win to boost Republicans in the midterms a la Venezuela. It didn’t turn out that way, however, and now, not only are the resulting high energy prices a drag on Republican chances, but it’s an open secret that Trump and Netanyahu plan a resumption of attacks in the Persian Gulf after elections in both countries. That assumes, of course, that Netanyahu survives Israeli elections that are underway as I write this, and which don’t seem to be going well for Bibi. Republican losses in the midterms won’t be felt as quickly, but Democratic majorities in Congress would likely force a War Powers showdown and yet another constitutional crisis early next year.

Recent polling shows that the Iran War remains unpopular. Pew recently found 65 percent opposition to the conflict, with declining support among Republicans (63 percent today, down from 69 percent at the onset of the war). The open-ended Iran conflict may be a big reason that some Republicans choose to stay home next Tuesday.

Since I started with Ukraine, let’s consider that as well. Trump’s pivot towards Putin and Russia may be a historically bad move at the wrong time. A recent University of Maryland poll found that American sympathy for Ukraine has increased to 64 percent while support for Russia is practically nonexistent at two percent. Even about half of Republicans support Ukraine.

As Republicans get more and more nervous, Trump is singing to the choir at rallies in red states. Trump’s rally stops this week include Florida, Iowa, Mississippi, Ohio, and Texas. This may indicate a lack of strategic thinking on the part of the Administration, since usually a president would be visiting battleground states to boost candidates in tight races just before Election Day, or it may be that Republicans perceive that the battlegrounds have shifted to what have until recently been reliably red states.

Yes, according to rumors and vibes, even Mississippi may be in play. Republican Cindy Hyde-Smith is still the favorite, but recent polling has shown Democrat Scott Colom to be within striking distance. The polls also show a lot of undecided voters.

As Dick Morris often said, if you’re an incumbent polling below 50 percent, you’re in trouble. It’s likely (although not certain) that undecided voters have already decided to vote against you; they just don’t know it yet.

Going further, there are also Trump’s embarrassing comments when he does do rallies. Aside from the weird noise that Trump made in a speech in South Carolina, the president seems more interested in talking about men’s butts than explaining why voters should turn out for Republicans. On several occasions, the president has waxed poetic about the posterior of Ohio Senator John Husted.

If Joe Biden had committed these and other Trump gaffes, there would rightly be questions about his mental fitness for office. In fact, the same voters who were seriously concerned about Biden, as opposed to those who just wanted a wedge issue, are probably concerned about Trump as well. Since the president isn’t officially on the ballot this year, voters who see these clips might well want to elect a Congress that will provide a check on Trump rather than a rubber stamp.

The question I asked at the beginning was facetious. I know that Trump is legitimately backing the Republicans that he wants to have his back, but if Trump was trying to undermine GOP chances in the midterms, would he really have to do anything different?

Republicans are in trouble because they back Trump, and Trump makes bad decisions. When it comes to candidates, the president values (unquestioning) loyalty over competence. And when Trump’s incompetence leads the nation into more endless wars, rising consumer prices, and a general sense of chaos and ineptitude, the party that refused to hold him accountable is going to suffer.

Thanks for reading The Racket News ™! This post is public so feel free to share it.

EARLY VOTING Most states now have some form of early voting. While results are not released before Election Day, some data about his voting is made public. OnPointPolitics is a good hub for early voting data. Turnout has already been strong, and nationally, early data shows voters are more than nine points more Democratic than 2024. Gabriel Sterling, Georgia Deputy Secretary of State, tweeted on Tuesday that 27 percent of Georgia has already voted.

From the Racket News

The abortion misconception

2026-10-23T10:34:33.358-04:00

As a conservative Christian, when I talk about voting for Democrats, one of the first questions I usually get is some form of “What about abortion?”

That’s a reasonable question, because I am still pro-life and anti-abortion, but I now realize that the two are not the same. In my early years of political awareness, I looked at three main issues: abortion, guns, and taxes. My thinking was that if a candidate got those three issues right, the chances were good that I’d agree with him on most other stuff. For a long time, that strategy worked pretty well, but eventually things got more complicated.

Image created by ChatGPT

One of the first problems that emerged with my thinking was that electing candidates who spouted pro-life/anti-abortion rhetoric didn’t necessarily change things. Part of that was due to Supreme Court decisions that limited how restrictive anti-abortion states could be. Now, with the Dobbs decision as a legal precedent, the playing field is different, but that caveat remains.

What many pro-life people don’t understand is that the abortion rate was in a long-term decline for decades, regardless of which political party was in power or who was president. The abortion rate in the US peaked about 1990 and then declined under Presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama. That long-term trend reversed itself under Donald Trump before the Dobbs decision and has continued to rise since. Pro-life political groups applaud Trump for his pro-life actions, but they won’t tell you that there were big declines in abortion under Democratic, pro-choice presidents or that abortions have been increasing under Trump for years.

There is an argument that these trends are related to other factors aside from the policies of individual presidents. I agree, but that also undercuts the argument for why voting for pro-life candidates is so important.

For example, one reason that the abortion rate is rising is probably because of the growth of pharmaceutical abortions, some of which can be delivered through the mail. Louisiana filed a lawsuit seeking to ban such deliveries, but the same Supreme Court that handed down Dobbs paused an injunction that would have suspended postal deliveries of mifepristone. The FDA is conducting a safety review of the drug, but the agency has said the study won’t be ready until March, long after the midterm elections.

The case involves the Comstock Act, an 1873 law that bans the transfer of “lewd” materials and drugs that could end a pregnancy by mail. The law also initially banned the shipment of birth control drugs, but that provision has been repealed.

Pro-life groups would like for the Administration to enforce the Comstock Act, and some parts of the Administration would like to do so. Attorney General Todd Blanche has indicated that he is open to the idea.

The rub is with democracy. In 2022, after the Dobbs decision was announced, Republicans faced a backlash from the voters. That was true even in red states.

Long-term polling shows that Americans became more prolife over the years, even reaching a small majority at times. Pro-life was slowly winning the ideological war until May 2021, when prolife identification took a nosedive. It’s probably not a coincidence that this was when the Supreme Court agreed to hear the Dobbs case. In the long view, it may be true that electing politicians who appointed pro-life justices actually set the pro-life movement back.

I think the explanation for this may be that pro-life groups forgot that they were in a democracy when they got a friendly president. They stopped trying to persuade and started trying to control.

There were probably other reasons as well. When the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case, the threat to abortion rights became real rather than theoretical. A lot of people who claimed to be pro-life suddenly realized that they didn’t want abortion bans after all. Or maybe they weren’t really anti-abortion to begin with.

I also would not be surprised if Donald Trump’s toxic personality caused a shift against the whole pro-life ideology. There might be some truth to the idea that some people don’t want to be seen as pro-life just because Trump claims to be as well.

The current situation is that anti-abortion groups probably have the political clout and legal arguments to enact some additional abortion restrictions, but if they do so, it will be very unpopular. That’s not a recipe for lasting success. That’s a recipe for another backlash.

In retrospect, it was a mistake for the pro-life groups to allow the issue to become divided along partisan lines. There were once pro-life Democrats. In fact, there still are. But part of the reason that these are such a rare breed now is that, in addition to facing strong pro-choice pressures from inside their own party, they are also targeted by Republican groups.

The partisan strategy is a recipe for long-term defeat, however. The problem is that it means that pro-life policies only have a chance of advancing when their party is in power, and as we’ve seen, that means there aren’t many successes. Growing a pro-life caucus in the Democratic Party would enable bipartisan agreement to actually get laws passed that would survive a transition of power.

I’d also like to take a moment to address the myth of abortion up to the point of birth. There are claims that some blue states, like Massachusetts, allow abortion up to the point of birth. The Massachusetts law, passed in August, still requires a doctor’s judgment that the abortion is necessary and did slightly relax earlier rules that allowed late-term abortion in certain circumstances, but the reality is that late-term abortions are rare, less than one percent, per the Kaiser Foundation.

Further, late-term abortions are rarely elective except in some cases where the mother lacked access to earlier-term abortions or found out about the pregancy late. A larger share of late-term abortions are due to learning new information about fetal abnormalities or health risks to the mother. As someone once said, it simply isn’t true that women are carrying babies nearly to term and then having elective abortions for reasons of convenience.

In my opinion, the pro-life movement needs to get back to its roots and start winning converts. The argument that an unborn fetus is a living human being that should not be killed is a strong one, and that’s especially true as technology advances and gives us compelling pictures of life inside the womb.

Pro-life activists should also adopt strategies that address the reasons that women choose to abort. A study by the Guttmacher Institute found that the typical abortion patient is young, poor, and unmarried. Seventy-seven percent are under 30, 72 percent were never married, and 60 percent were below 200 percent of the federal poverty line. Further, about 60 percent also had at least one additional child.

This data suggests that making it easier and less expensive to raise children could help more women to choose life. Government programs to help single mothers feed their kids, provide them with health insurance and medical care, and pay for clothes and daycare could save countless unborn lives. Unfortunately, these are the same programs that many Republican pro-lifers consider to be socialism.

Another alternative might be providing free or low-cost birth control. Again, however, this idea runs afoul of many pro-lifers on the right.

We have arrived at a fundamental problem. Conservative pro-lifers want to prevent abortions, but many don’t want to adopt the policies that could help to reduce the abortion rate. They just want to enact bans. This is why many consider Republicans to be pro-birth rather than pro-life. The charge isn’t entirely unfair.

I’m against abortion, which I see as a moral issue, but I also don’t see it as the only moral issue. Corruption is rampant within the MAGA Republican Party. That’s a moral issue. The president started an unnecessary war that is getting untold numbers of people killed. That’s a moral issue. The Administration is now siding with Russia as it kills Ukrainians and kidnaps Ukrainian children, exporting them to Russia. That’s a moral issue. DOGE incinerated food and medical aid rather than giving it to needy countries that depended on it. The abrupt termination of US aid led to hundreds of thousands of deaths from starvation and disease. That’s not only a moral issue. It’s a pro-life issue and an issue of poor stewardship. I could go on.

I’m against abortion, but speaking pro-life platitudes does not mean that politicians should be exempt from basic standards of competence, ethics, and decency. I’ve often said that people in public life who claim to be Christian should be held to a higher standard, not given passes when they abuse the public trust.

So yeah, it’s gotten more complicated than my original three-pronged political test. Life and politics have a way of becoming gray, but the bottom line is that abortion won’t be ended by top-down bans. That’s especially true since most Americans get more hesitant about restrictions as they become more onerous.

Only about 10 percent favor a full ban. An outright ban will never happen. Pro-life activists don’t want to hear that, but it’s true.

I believe the way to reduce abortions is to reduce the factors that make women feel like they need an abortion. That is an achievable goal, but it will require bipartisan cooperation, and both sides want to keep the issue as a wedge.

From the Racket News

Why Dems are under/overperforming

2026-10-19T11:47:39.766-04:00

There’s a curious dynamic developing in this year’s midterms. A lot of the polling shows that Democrats are doing much better than normal in red states while lagging in a number of races in their home territory. I think the explanation is simple.

If you haven’t been following the polls, the scenario is simple. Democrats are racking up impressive polling results in states like Alaska, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, and Ohio. Red states are becoming battlegrounds, yet the traditional battlegrounds are remaining close, and the Democrats haven’t been able to close the deal in blue areas like Maine, Michigan, and Minnesota. The result is a larger number of battleground states than normal.

Image by ChatGPT

There are several possible explanations for this situation, but it seems to me that the most likely is that what we are seeing is not a blue surge on the merits of the Democratic Party, but a widespread rejection of both Trumpism and progressivism.

The core problem seems to be similar for both parties in that the members of the base that vote in primaries tend to select bad and extreme candidates. We all know about the disastrous choice of Ken Paxton in Texas, but the nomination of Abu El-Sayed in Michigan and Peggy Flanagan in Minnesota were unnecessarily risky partisan choices by progressive and, in some cases, DSA voters. Maine has had its own unique problems with Democratic nominees this year, first nominating a communist and then scrambling to find a replacement when a series of scandals forced him to drop out.

The bottom line here is that moderate and independent voters, the voters who decide elections, don’t like either the Republican MAGA right or the Democratic progressive left. The radical fringes are unconcerned about (or, more likely, blissfully unaware of) their unpopularity, and both keep nominating candidates who would be unelectable if the other side wasn’t nominating people just as bad, or worse.

So far, it looks as though MAGA is less popular than progressives. In most of the swing-state polling, Republicans are trailing. But Republicans are beating themselves more than being victimized by the Democrats. More specifically, the Republicans are being beaten by Trump, who remains unpopular amid high gas and consumer prices, and who just won’t shut up.

Last week, Trump started openly siding with Putin against Ukraine. At roughly the same time, the White House reportedly ordered Ukraine cut off from Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite system (Trump denies this) and then waived the just-passed sanctions against Russia, a move that is drawing criticism even from Republicans. All this while, Russia is providing Iran with intelligence to target American soldiers.

And then there is the Homeland Security raid on Rep. Ilhan Omar’s home. The government has not been forthcoming about the raid on the Minnesota congresswoman’s residence, but a similar investigation in the first Trump Adminstration did not find evidence of the immigration issues that are reportedly at the heart of the search. If the situation looks like lawfare and harassment of a Muslim Democrat for no legitimate reason, the raid may end up motivating more voters to vote against Republican candidates.

Charlie Cook, of the Cook Political Report, christened the polling phenomenon “the red undertow” to underscore the fact that Republican unpopularity hasn’t made Democrats more popular. As I described last week, most voters understand that, while the choice on the ballot isn’t necessarily binary, the outcome of the election almost certainly is.

There have also been a lot of questions about possible polling error. In every election, the theory of the shy Trump voter resurfaces, even though it seems that talking to pollsters just prior to elections is about the only time that Trump voters are ever considered to be shy about anything. And Trump isn’t on the ballot, so Trump voters, shy or not, may not show up anyway.

There is truth to the claim that pollsters are having a hard time talking to Republicans, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that Republican voters are being undercounted. Pollsters weight their results based on what they think the Republican share of the electorate will be. This does introduce more uncertainty into the process, but the error doesn’t always favor the same party, as Nate Silver pointed out. In 2025, much of the polling underestimated Democratic voters. Adding to the confusion, state polling is often much more difficult and less reliable than national polls.

There is a chance that the missing Republicans will show up by Election Day, and polling will break against the Democrats. There is also a chance that Republicans who don’t answer polling calls won’t bother to go to the polls to vote. The Democratic wave might be undercounted.

What seems to be certain is that the national mood does not favor Republicans. Each week seems to bring more stories of Trump hitting a record low in approval. Issues polling, typically national polls with less propensity for error, is finding that the biggest issues for voters are concerns like corruption (88 percent), inflation (85 percent), and high gas prices (83 percent). Those particular numbers are from a Fox News poll, and they don’t sound encouraging for the party in power.

Meanwhile, the Administration is out of touch and unconcerned about voter concerns. As voters worry about prices and the Iran War, Trump seems more concerned about his ballroom and overhauling golf courses. Republicans are partying like it’s 1789, and Trump is in the role of Marie Antoinette saying, “Let them eat cake.”

The big question then is, if voters are so sour on the job that Trump and the Republicans are doing, why is the polling so close?

The most obvious answer is that we are looking at shy Democratic voters. These are likely moderates and independents who are leaning Democrat but who haven’t fully committed yet.

I think it’s likely that the blue wave still emerges. Whether it’s a red undertow or a blue wave won’t matter much this year, but what Democrats take from the win will make a difference in coming elections. If Democrats get the mistaken impression that their victories this year are based on voter desire for a progressive agenda rather than a rejection of Trump and Republican overreach, those nice, new majorities won’t last long.

From the Racket News

One simple trick to stop Donald Trump

2026-10-14T08:26:53.518-04:00

It’s that time again. Early voting is starting in Georgia and many other states, and I’m seeing a chorus of my online friends who have been critical of the Trump Administration trumpet their intent to sit out the election and vote for neither side. Sometimes they say they’ll vote for a third party, while other times they don’t plan to vote at all. That’s a great plan if you don’t care what happens to your country.

I’ll confess that I used to sympathize with this point of view. Back in 2016, I didn’t think either Trump or Hillary was suited for the presidency. I couldn’t bring myself to vote for either of them, and I ended up both volunteering and voting for Evan McMullin. I did some third-party voting after that as well, mostly as a protest vote. I might as well have just flushed my vote down the toilet.

Image created by Meta AI

What I’ve realized since then is that, no matter whether you think both major party candidates are unqualified or unsuitable, one of them is going to win. (Extremely rare cases to the contrary, like this year’s Nebraska Senate race, prove the rule.) Knowing that, it is logically better to have input into which side is chosen, because even though both candidates may be bad, they aren’t equally bad.

It’s the old complaint about voting for the lesser evil, but that isn’t really a bad thing. By definition, the lesser evil is preferable to the greater evil (unless you like evil), and those who don’t choose the lesser evil are likely to end up with the greater evil.

This also becomes a question of how you look at life. The optimistic way of looking at the lesser evil is that it’s the greater good. Is the glass half empty or half full?

In certain situations, it’s true that your vote probably doesn’t matter. In a presidential election, if you aren’t in a swing state, your vote won’t make a difference in the presidency, but it might in down-ballot races. In deep red or blue states or districts, that may also be true in off-year elections.

But the flip side to that is that the only way to make races competitive is for the opposition to get out and vote. This year, states and districts that are often deep red are becoming battlegrounds. Iowa, Kansas, Ohio, and South Carolina are in play, as well as Michigan on the Democratic side, thanks to a bad primary choice by Democratic voters.

The reason for that shift this year is that the two sides are not the same level of bad. Yes, there are some extreme candidates on the Democratic side, but they pale in comparison to what is considered mainstream in the Republican Party. Even the best Republican candidates are totally beholden to and subservient to Donald Trump, a president who is completely unbound by the Constitution and increasingly unaccountable to the courts.

It’s also true that the smaller the voter pool, the more your vote counts. So, in local and district races in an off-year election, your vote matters more than when voting for president. A few votes can make a difference in these races.

The list of Trump’s transgressions is too long to cover completely, but any other president who acted so imperiously and corruptly would have rightly been impeached and removed. It is the Republicans who are up for re-election this year who have enabled his grift and abuses of power. If they are returned to power, it will be more of the same.

I’m not a Democrat. I’m a conservative and a former Republican, but I’ll be voting Democrat again this year, because the parties are not equally bad. We have a liberal party, and we have an insane personality cult that already tried to steal one presidential election and is currently talking about an unconstitutional third term and seems to be seriously considering martial law if they don’t get the midterm results they want.

In other words, this election is not about policy differences. This election is about whether we want to continue enabling a wannabe authoritarian and whether we want him to lock in his power grab or be held accountable for his crimes. This election is about whether we want to continue being a constitutional republic (which is a form of democracy, for those who say we aren’t a democratic country) or if we want to keep ceding our freedom to a lawless, political strongman.

Those who choose not to make the not-so-difficult choice to rein in the man who would reign over us are not being politically courageous. They are being apathetic. They are throwing their hands up into the air and saying, “Let the chips fall where they may.”

I agree that Democratic candidates are flawed and sometimes even dangerous, but it’s a matter of degrees. We should be considering political triage. When a patient with multiple illnesses presents at a hospital, doctors treat the life-threatening problems first. They don’t let a patient bleed out or die from a heart attack while they wheel him to radiation treatments. No, the proper sequence is to stop the bleeding, stabilize him after the heart attack, and then worry about the long-term threat from cancer.

It’s the same with politics. Trump and MAGA represent a serious, existential threat to our survival as a free nation. That doesn’t mean the Democrats are not a threat, but they are not the imminent danger that a Trump grabbing power at the expense of the Constitution is.

As a longtime follower of conservative and Republican media, I can also point out that many of the accusations that Republicans now level at Democrats are either hypothetical or things that Trump’s Republican Party is already doing. Republican fearmongering over Muslims is hypothetical, for example. Muslims are a small minority (less than two percent of the US population), and the First Amendment already prohibits Sharia law.

Most of the Republican accusations lack self-awareness. Socialism? Trump is nationalizing American companies at an alarming rate. Taxes? Trump’s unconstitutional tariffs are costing Americans thousands of dollars. Endless wars? Wars and rumors of wars are constant under Trump. Government overreach? Trump has created a vast, brutal and unaccountable police state that is already targeting American citizens. Lawfare? Trump already has a long list of political persecutions, even before the recent raid on Rep. Ilhan Omar, while pardoning his criminal friends at eight times the rate of Biden pardons. Corruption? Trump has amassed billions of dollars with open graft and monetization of the presidency. Kimberly Guilfoyle’s $100,000 alleged bribe request is small potatoes. Pro-life? Not only is the Trump Administration not reining in abortion (the abortion rate is increasing), but his cuts to USAID have resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths, most of them children, and now the Administration is planning for public executions.

Back in 2025, I predicted that the Trump presidency would be like another dark age. That prediction is coming true. The world is sinking into conflict and chaos. Trump’s government is internationally aggressive and he is openly siding with Putin, even violating recently passed Russia sanctions to make a deal for a token amount of Russian diesel. This as Russia aids Iran in targeting American soldiers. Trump’s trade barriers mean the US is being left behind internationally, and his attacks on scientific funding and research will cost us in terms of technological leadership. RFK’s assaults on health research and vaccines are allowing disease to flourish. America is in decline, thanks to MAGA.

Your vote matters. That’s why Trump and the MAGA Republicans are trying so hard to make voting difficult and to convince their opponents to stay home.

In fact, voting matters more than anything else when it comes to holding the government accountable. Election results are the one thing that politicians can’t dismiss or ignore, even though they sometimes try.

If you have spent the last two (or more) years complaining about Donald Trump’s government, now is your time. Don’t screw it up. Be an adult and make the unpleasant but necessary choice to vote Democrat and block a tyrant.

If you love America, the stakes are too high not to.

From the Racket News

Don’t fear the reapers

2026-10-06T09:51:07.929-04:00

Ah, fall. The days start getting shorter, the nights get cool and crisp, the leaves explode into vibrant colors, and if it’s an election year, we get word that migrant caravans are streaming towards the southern border.

In all seriousness, I don’t recall any caravans in 2024, but pretty much every election year in recent memory before that, Fox News and other Republican outlets had wall-to-wall coverage of the ragtag bands of migrants walking through Latin America. I’m pretty sure I even remember countdowns to their estimated arrival at the border that stayed in the corner of the screen.

Image by Meta AI

There has been a lot of angst about whether polling is accurate or not as an apparent blue wave builds, but a lot of Republicans believe it. You can tell because the migrant caravan fearmongering has returned. Over the past few days, I’ve started seeing more breathless posts about a new caravan headed north and warnings that American democracy is doomed if it isn’t stopped.

Those who don’t have the memory of a goldfish may recall these same warnings in years past. I remember folks online being whipped into a frenzy with dire warnings of what would happen. I remember commenters saying that the caravan should be bombed before it reached the US, never minding that a) the caravan members hadn’t broken any laws, at least none in the US, b) they were unarmed migrants, including women and children, and c) they weren’t even in the United States, so bombing them would be crossing the red line of an act of war on a neighboring country.

In 2026, we’ve crossed several red lines already, I guess. Unarmed migrants are now deemed a national security threat, and the list of countries that we (and by “we” I mean Trump) have bombed gets longer all the time.

Folks, these people are not an invading army, no matter how much the MAGA talking heads like to call them invaders. (Legally, illegal immigration does not fit the definition of an invasion.) They are laborers, women, and children looking for a better life. They’re coming to pick our crops, mow our lawns, build our houses, and clean our hotel rooms.

Thinking back to recent years, what happened when the migrant caravans arrived at the US border? Did they dig up weapons and mount raids on US settlements like Pancho Villa in 1916? Did they swarm across the border and cut all the lawns within a 50-mile radius? Did they proceed directly to the nearest welfare office without passing “Go” to collect $200?

No. IF they reach the US border, they mostly set up camp in Mexico and ask for asylum in the US. Often, the result is a humanitarian crisis on the Mexican side of the border, because the US-Mexico border runs through some pretty inhospitable territory. There isn’t much as far as living off the land, and these people didn’t have a lot when they started their walk.

If there was little welcome for the refugees under Joe Biden, there will be none whatsoever in the current Administration of Ming the Merciless. Donald Trump has lost heavily at the Supreme Court, but one area where the Court has deferred greatly to presidential authority is on illegal immigration and deportations. A recent small victory on the emergency docket was last week’s temporary reversal of a lower court’s injunction against deporting immigrants to pretty much any random country that will take them.

I say all that to say this: Why are MAGAs afraid? They claim that Trump has solved the illegal immigration problem, and the courts have unlocked new tools to use against those who would have the audacity to come pick our crops. If they really believe that Trump is not asleep at the border, why bother fearing the crop pickers coming to ask for asylum?

Don’t fear the reapers.

They’re not even here, and they’ll soon be gone.

The obvious answer is that the Republicans believe that their base needs to be frightened to the polls, and the boys who cry “communism” aren’t doing the trick. They have to ramp things up a bit with some racism.

I try not to toss the R-word around lightly, but at times it applies. It applied to Bo French, and it applies to the caravan fearmongering. It’s race-based fear of people different from us. It’s fear that they will eat our pets or spread leprosy or bring a crime wave with them. Never mind that none of these things are true.

If we stopped to think about it, we might realize that, while immigrants do commit some crimes, they commit them at a lower rate than Americans, because immigrants don’t want to attract the attention of law enforcement. They don’t want to get deported. The statistics bear out the theory that immigrants, legal or illegal, commit few crimes and are more likely to be victimized than to be predators. Again, they want to be Americans, and sometimes that comes with a cost.

The fearmongering is about keeping people frightened enough that they are afraid not to vote Republican. It’s the strategy of a party that is out of good ideas.

There are those who tell the truth. In 2018, Shepard Smith, one of my favorite anchors, tried to put his viewers at ease, saying, “There is no invasion. No one is coming to get you. There is nothing at all to worry about.” It wasn’t long after that when he was forced out of Fox News.

This year, it’s none other than Marjorie Taylor Greene. Thankfully, Greene is no longer in Congress, but she does seem to have grown up at least a bit since her break with Trump. Greene posted to the platform formerly known as Twitter, “We have not seen a caravan headed to the US southern border in several years; why now? Oh yeah, there is an election coming, and the GOP needs to scare you into voting because nothing else is working.”

I get a little frightened when I agree with MTG.

And to those of you panicking about the caravan who are Christians, you should be better than this. Realize that these warnings have been made before, and the sky did not fall. People who repeatedly make false predictions should not continue to be trusted. Remember that Christ told us not to be afraid, and don’t immerse yourselves in the lies of those who would enslave you with fear.

The Bible tells us to love foreigners, including our enemies. Jesus would have us helping the poor, not fearing them.

At the very least, we shouldn’t be clamoring to bomb them.

Thanks for reading The Racket News ™! This post is public so feel free to share it.

From time to time, I have to play a bit with the AI for the illustrations, and sometimes it just doesn’t work out. When I tried to include a reference to Blue Oyster Cult in the graphic, this is what I got. It’s a no-go for the thumbnail, but it’s good for a giggle.

Rejected Meta AI image

PLAGUE INC A medical worker in Siberia has reportedly died of pneumonic plague, apparently after a lab accident. Hundreds of people are isolated and under observation, and five hospitals are reportedly under quarantine. Pneumonic plague can spread from person to person, but experts say the risk of a widespread outbreak is small because transmission is insufficient and the disease is too lethal.

FLYDUBAI UPDATES The FO reportedly used the cockpit crash axe to attack the captain. He reportedly planned to use the airplane to attack Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion airport and planned the attack before taking the job at FlyDubai.

A NEW LIE Accounts on the MAGA right are claiming that “activist judges” are overturning laws that criminalize noncitizen voting. In reality, the Florida ruling affects one person who was prosecuted by the DOJ. The judge held that he needed to be prosecuted by the state because the Constitution grants states, rather than the federal government, the power to regulate elections.

BOOK NOTES Thanks to those of you who recommended books in my last post. I’m going to look into them. I just started the “Lost City of Z” after spontaneously checking it out based on author recognition. David Grann also wrote “Killers of the Flower Moon.” I’d recommend that in both book and movie form. My daughter also just passed me her copy of “Project Hail Mary.” I’m looking forward to that one as well.

From the Racket News

120 seconds over Tabuk

2026-10-04T16:41:12.153-04:00

This was a nightmare scenario.

A heavily loaded airliner is in cruise flight when the first officer attacks the captain with a knife and points the airplane towards the ground. The airplane hurtles towards the ground with hundreds of people on board and a madman at the controls.

In the case of FlyDubai 1073, the nightmare has a happy ending. Several of the 174 passengers, most of them Israelis, rushed the cockpit and subdued the mutinous first officer, an Omani national. A passenger regained control of the airplane, and another pilot, traveling as a passenger, ultimately took over the flight, landing safely at Tabuk, Saudi Arabia.

It was a close thing. Radar data shows that the Boeing 737 MAX 8 lost almost 20,000 feet in a matter of minutes. Such a massive loss of altitude would come with an increase in airspeed that likely exceeded the airplane’s structural limits. Just pulling out of the dive without ripping the wings off would be a challenge, especially for a nonpilot. In fact, the airplane seems to have lost its rudder, a movable piece of the vertical tail used in lateral steering.

Image created by Grok

The Israeli man credited with pulling the airplane out of its dive said that he knew what to do from watching “Air Crash Investigation,” which the show should put on its commercials. This is an important point because airplane flight controls are somewhat reversed from the video game controls that many are used to. In a video game, you typically push the control up to go higher, but in an airplane, you pull back on the controls to raise the nose and climb.

In our flight simulator training, we regularly practice recovering from an extremely nose-low unusual attitude. Beyond pulling the nose up, typical steps include reducing power and deploying speed brakes or flight spoilers to reduce the airspeed. Simultaneously, the pilot rolls the wings level and pulls back on the controls to bring the nose up, but this must be done carefully, especially if the speed has exceeded the red line limits. Pulling up too quickly, especially if the airplane is in a turn, could overstress the airframe and cause structural failure.

Miraculously, no one was killed, and only the two crew members seem to have been seriously injured. Even the captain, an Indian national, and the first officer are both alive and recovering.

The obvious question here is motive, and Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu has said the first officer “underwent Islamic radical indoctrination.” That’s definitely a possibility, but there are other explanations as well.

This story is very reminiscent of the September 11 attacks, specifically the heroic actions of the passengers and crew on United Flight 93, but what happened here is even more insidious, as well as more common. Rather than a hijacking by passengers, this was a mutiny by a crew member, which is even more difficult to guard against.

The phrase “suicide by cop” has long been used to describe people who intentionally goad police officers into killing them, but suicide by airliner, while not common, is also not unheard of in the aviation industry.

Other than the September 11 attacks, there have been several infamous examples of airline crewmembers committing suicide with their planes. One of the best-known was Germanwings 9525 back in 2015. Since then, we’ve had a Horizon Airlines maintenance worker who stole and crashed a Dash 8 turboprop in 2018 and China Eastern 5735 in 2022. Malaysia Airlines 370 and Air India 171 were also likely the result of intentional pilot action.

An additional incident occurred in 2023 when an off-duty Alaska Airlines pilot riding in the cockpit jumpseat tried to shut off both engines in flight. The pilot was restrained by the crew, who maintained control of the aircraft, and a spot opened up on the Alaska Airlines seniority list.

Reaching deeper into the past, a FedEx crew in 1994 was also attacked by a jumpseating crewmember, this one a flight engineer who boarded with a guitar case filled with hammers, knives, and a spear gun. The flight engineer attacked the crew with the hammers, intent on killing himself for a life insurance payout for his family, and then the flight devolved into a free-for-all that included aerobatic maneuvers in a DC-10. The crew was severely injured but was ultimately able to land the plane safely.

As a cultural reference, I’ll also add a relatively forgettable 1996 John Travolta film called “Broken Arrow.” I won’t spoil it, but the movie involves an attack on the crew of a stealth bomber.

A big question many are asking is how this could happen. Since September 11, most airliners have been built with hardened cockpit doors, but in these cases the threat came from inside the cockpit. Apparently, the door was either open or unlocked, which allowed the passengers to wrestle the first officer away from the controls.

In the US, flight crews go through the same TSA screenings that passengers endure. As an airline pilot, I was not allowed to carry a pocketknife, even when I carried my government-issued firearm as a Federal Flight Deck Officer. I could give you a list of things TSA has taken from me that include an Allen wrench that came with my suitcase that I didn’t even know was there.

That isn’t necessarily the case in other parts of the world, however. Not all countries are as security-conscious as the US, nor as fastidious about following security rules. For example, in the US and Europe, the flight deck door would probably have been locked from the inside, but in this case, a locked door would have spelled disaster.

Malicious acts by flight crews present a real and difficult security problem. Pilots have to have access to the flight deck, and when the flight deck is secured against outside attack, it can also protect a suicidal pilot from intervention.

Better security screenings of flight crews are a possible answer, but there is already a weapon in the cockpit. Federal aviation regulations require airliners to be equipped with a crash axe that is “accessible to the crew but inaccessible to passengers.” Jack Torrance would approve.

Better mental health screenings and professional help for pilots, as I mentioned in another post recently, would help, as would paying attention to what crewmembers do in their off time. The FlyDubai FO had allegedly posted about killing Jews, but at least in this country, examination of social media posts for radical beliefs and behavior probably wouldn’t fly (pun definitely intended). Still, other employees and fellow pilots should be encouraged to look out for the red flags of both murderous and suicidal behavior. In fact, these days, we should all familiarize ourselves with these warning signs.

Even though suicide-by-airplane is more common than you think, it’s still rare, and aviation is a very safe way to travel. Safe is not the same as risk-free, however, so keep your seatbelts fastened.

Thanks for reading The Racket News ™! This post is public so feel free to share it.

FAIRFORD UPDATE The bomb scare at RAF Fairford had a big plot twist when it was revealed that the vans did not contain explosives. As a result, the five suspects were released on bail. It’s possible that the incident was part of a dry run preceding an attack. The investigation is continuing, and there has been a new arrest involving a British-Iranian man.

SHAMELESS PLUG Our friend, Stan Mitchell, is once again cranking out podcasts. We encourage you to check him out here: https://linktr.ee/stanrmitchell

Stan is a Marine, a centrist, a Christian, and a pretty smart guy (for a Marine) as well as a nice one. His podcast covers politics and military affairs. If you like our stuff, you’ll probably like him.

WHAT I’M READING I went on a Stephen King binge this summer, broken mainly by a detailed history of Guadalcanal by Richard B. Frank. When I checked out “It” and “Guadalcanal: The Definitive Account of the Landmark Battle” at the same time because I had them both on holds that arrived together, it was about seven inches of books to read with the clock ticking. Both were good reads, but I can’t really recommend “It” because it is so deeply weird.

From there, I went to “Shining,” which was also pretty intense. Stephen King novels often make more sense than the movie versions, and that was the case here. The final moments of the movie are almost incomprehensible, but the book explains what the movie expects you to know.

As it turns out, there is also a sequel to “Shining” called “Dr. Sleep.” The sequel follows Danny Torrance as he grows up. Again, it’s intense, but a good read.

After that, I went in a different direction. I’ve always wanted to read Robert Heinlein’s “Starship Troopers,” but it’s hard to find copies. I located an internet copy and then found a library copy, so I was off to the races.

Let me just say that the movies are only very loosely based on the book (like a Stephen King movie). The book is good, but the action is almost an afterthought. I’d almost call it a sci-fi military version of Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged.” There’s a lot of detail about Basic Training for the Mobile Infantry as well as Officer Candidate School. These set the stage for political and philosophical discussions about the morals and structure of the Terran Federation with a lot of criticism of late 20th-century society.

I’m enjoying the book, but it’s definitely not what I expected.

Additionally, I do a lot of studies on the YouVersion Bible app, but the Sermon on the Mount study that I’m doing now has been really good. It’s a 19-day study that almost seemed a little too juvenile at first, but as I got deeper, it got deeper with excellent insights. The Sermon on the Mount is radical today, let alone for its time. Maybe that’s why so many people scroll back to the “thou shalt nots.”

From the Racket News

Let the fur fly

2026-10-01T21:19:19.395-04:00

Just when you thought politics couldn’t get any more ridiculous, Tommy Tuberville launches himself into the fray with an issue that is not only a bizarre misinterpretation of reality, but one that has no bearing at all on safety or anything else. I’m speaking, of course, about the Alabama senator’s expose’ of an alleged infestation of “furries” in the airline industry.

In a 20-minute floor speech followed by a post on the platform formerly known as Twitter, Tuberville breathlessly opined, “I know the deranged Democrats don’t like the fact that I called out the insane FURRY CULTURE this week. But the truth is, there is an ALARMING number of these DERANGED people working in our airline industry.” [All emphasis is his.]

Image created by ChatGPT

If you’re wondering just what in Sam Hill the former Auburn coach is talking about, he provides a clue, adding, “Don’t believe me? Just a few months ago, PILOTS were MEOWING and BARKING at each other over the radio at DCA.”

The incident at DCA, better known to the nonflying public as Reagan National Airport in Washington, DC, was real, but it doesn’t necessarily mean what Tuberville thinks it does. Back in April, there was an incident where someone was making animal noises on an air traffic frequency at the airport. If Tuberville is really concerned about this dire emergency, it isn’t clear why he waited five months to sound the alarm.

Here’s the backstory on the meowing. For quite some time now, there has been an epidemic of meowing on an emergency frequency known as “Guard.” Guard is supposed to be a frequency that is reserved for emergencies only, and good practice is to maintain a listening watch on a standby radio while workloads are low during cruise flight. Several years ago, it became a game for some pilots to meow on the Guard frequency when they get bored. I blame millennials and the 2001 movie, “Super Troopers,” which featured a scene in which state troopers meowed at a motorist they had pulled over.

Share The Racket News ™

At any rate, meowing has been a thing for years now, but it doesn’t follow that meowing on the radio means the perpetrators are furries. For one thing, if a pilot was really a furry, he’d probably want to keep a low profile rather than risk outing himself by meowing over the radio.

For those who don’t know, furries are people who enjoy dressing up in animal fursuits. Forbes notes that, for some, this is “part of a sexual fetish and incorporate the furry identity into a broader lifestyle, but for many it is a hobby not of a sexualized nature,” and I’m going to take their word for it without googling further.

Tuberville defended his alarmism in another post in which he claims that a recent furry convention in Minneapolis included an “Aviation Furs Meet-up,” and asked, “Would you be comfortable with a MENTALLY ILL FURRY being your pilot?”

But the senator fails to make the case either that there are a significant number of furries in the airlines or aviation in general, or that, if there are, they are a safety risk. There has never been an incident or accident that was related to furry behavior, and the vast majority of pilots have private licenses and do not fly commercially. The aviation furry meet didn’t necessarily include any commercial pilots.

Further, the evidence that furries are mentally ill is lacking. Psychology Today says furries “represent what you would expect to find in a typical geek or nerd subculture: Above-average school performance (nearly half are college students), an interest in computers and science, and a passion for video games, science fiction, fantasy, and anime,” also noting they are “seven times more likely than the general population to identify as transgender and about five times more likely to identify as non-heterosexual.”

In particular, however, the article declines to call furries mentally ill, but characterizes them as fans of animals and animal characters who enjoy engaging in fantasy. In other words, furries are akin to other fandoms that engage in dressing up as make-believe characters from genres like Star Wars or superhero franchises. They don’t believe that they are actually animals any more than Star Wars fans believe they are actually stormtroopers.

I will acknowledge Tyler Robinson, Charlie Kirk’s alleged assassin, had apparent ties to the furry community. A lot still isn’t known about Robinson’s motive, and correlation is not causation, but this one horrific crime is not an indictment of all furries. There are no official statistics on violence by or against furries, but such crimes seem to be rare.

Tuberville’s alarmism over furries reminds me a lot of Charlie Kirk talking about DEI at the airlines. Back in 2024, Kirk alleged that black airline pilots might not be safe, musing, “If I see a black pilot, I'm going to be like, 'Boy, I hope he's qualified.’”

Kirk’s fears were unfounded, just like Tuberville’s, and I’ll explain why. Any pilot hired by the airlines has already been certified multiple times by FAA-designated check airmen before they get near an airline cockpit. These examiners are governed by specific guidelines. They are not allowed to make subjective rulings based on factors like gender or race.

The federal prescreening of prospective pilots also includes a periodic medical exam that includes questions about mental health. Certain mental health issues are disqualifying, but as we have discussed, furry fandom is not considered a mental illness.

Once the pilot is hired, they go through an airline training program for their specific aircraft. Even if they’ve flown the airplane previously, they go through the entire course and take another flight test in the simulator. The instructors and check airmen are airline employees, but they answer to the FAA and must follow the same defined standards. Race and gender considerations might get an applicant to the top of the hiring list, but it won’t get them past the checkride.

When training and checking new and recurrent pilots, check airmen also ask themselves the question, “Would I want to entrust my family to this pilot?” This is not a rhetorical question given the flight benefits that families of airline employees enjoy. The checkers want safe pilots flying for their company.

Tommy Tuberville doesn’t seem to understand either aviation or furries, but that should be no surprise. He has never been assumed to be the sharpest tool in the shed, rising to political power amid a string of bigoted attacks on blacks, Muslims, and immigrants, among others. That may be enough to put him in the Alabama governor’s mansion as well.

Do I think furries are a bit weird? Yes, I do, but I also think that any adult who likes to play dress-up is a bit weird. I don’t make distinctions between those who dress up as animals, sci-fi characters, historical figures, or superheroes. I think furries are probably less harmful to the nation than Patriot Front members who cosplay as fascist brownshirts (although I don’t think that’s cosplay).

Having said that, I also don’t think that dressing up like an animal (or a stormtrooper or whatever) has any effect on a person’s ability to fly an airplane safely. If they can pass the tests, including recurrent training, and hold a medical certificate without raising red flags from examiners or coworkers, then they are most likely safe to fly passengers around the world. Based on the Psychology Today statistics and my own time at the airlines, I’d venture a guess that furries are more likely to be flight attendants than pilots, but I have never known any aviation worker to be a furry.

Tuberville’s rant is yet another attempt to distract from MAGA’s problems by stoking fear at misunderstood subcultures. The fear of flying furries fits with Trump’s claim that immigrants were eating pets, claims that schools were deploying litter boxes for students who identified as cats, or the perennial claims that migrant caravans are about to swarm across the southern border (a claim that I saw again today). These claims have all been debunked, but they are used by the internet pundits to create an atmosphere of chaos in an attempt to induce people to vote Republican.

If Tuberville really wants to help make aviation safer, he could push the FAA to take a more enlightened stance on mental health treatments. Because of the adversarial relationship between the FAA and pilots who need to keep their medical certificates active to keep their jobs, many pilots forgo mental health treatments for actual problems because of the fear of losing their livelihood. Mental health problems exist in the flying community, but they have been driven underground. Maybe Senator Tuberville could advocate for the reform bill backed by the Air Line Pilots Association that would help to address this problem.

Don’t worry about the furries. And also don’t be distracted from the real issues that we, as a country, face in the upcoming elections. I’m talking about political officials who partied with and protected Jeffrey Epstein, a slowing economy with rising prices (better known as “stagflation” in the 1970s), and a president who has indicated that he plans to resume bombing Iran after the midterms, as well as potentially starting yet another new forever war in Cuba.

Yes, the furries are deeply weird, but they aren’t the deranged ones.

Thanks for reading The Racket News ™! This post is public so feel free to share it.

FAIRFIELD FUROR On Sunday, major news broke about an attempted bombing at RAF Fairford in the UK. Per news reports, locals tipped off police to the presence of strange men and three vans, which turned out to contain explosives. The base was reportedly already on high alert due to intelligence about a possible attack. Iran is my prime suspect in the incident.

RAF Fairfield is one of the US bases in the UK that was used to stage bombing missions on Iran. The video below from March shows B-1 bombers launching on attack missions from the base.

Because American standoff weapons and interceptor missiles have made it difficult for Iran to strike back with conventional weapons, it should come as no suprise that that they are attempting to use asymmetric warfare. I’m just surprised that it was car bombs and possibly suicide vests as opposed to a swarm of drones.

From the Racket News

The center cannot hold

2026-09-24T06:53:18.767-04:00

For a while now, I’ve been predicting that undecided voters would start to break against Republicans. It looks like it’s happening in earnest.

There are many who are skeptical of the polling world, and we should all be a bit skeptical here, but there is not much good news for Republicans. Donald Trump’s approval rating is collapsing, and independent voters are swinging towards the Democrats. The president hit an all-time low in his approval rating at a net -22 points in Nate Silver’s polling average. This is lower than his approval just after January 6.

Image by ChatGPT

Meanwhile, Republicans are trailing Democrats by about nine points on the generic ballot. Among independents, it is far worse. Republicans trail with these unaffiliated voters by a whopping 25 points. This is a shift of 37 points since 2022, when Republicans led by 12.

Both Larry Sabato and Cook Political are moving races in the direction of the Democrats. I couldn’t tell you how long it has been since I saw a race shift to favor a Republican.

If you doubt the polling, consider that Republicans seem to believe it. Republican insider Steve Deace reported that Iowa State House Republicans were told, “If you are in a +15 district you’re within the margin for error, if you’re in a +10 district, you’re underwater, and that this might end being an even worse midterm environment than 2006,” when Democrats gained 5 Senate seats and 31 House seats with an eight-point popular vote advantage. There are rumors that Republicans will cut funding from their Senate candidates in Georgia and North Carolina, writing off those seats.

There are a multitude of reasons why the sky is falling for the GOP, but a big one is the alienation of Hispanic voters with aggressive and oppressive (and racist) immigration enforcement policies. Polling shows Hispanics abandoning the Republicans by double-digit margins, even in the red firewall states of Florida and Texas.

Byron Donalds evidently believes the polling. The Republican candidate for Florida governor just saw his race shifted to tossup status. Donalds’ response was to scrub all mentions of the other Donald from his campaign websites. Donalds isn’t the only Republican running away from Trump, but it will be hard to undo years of MAGA cheerleading in the less-than-six-weeks before the election, even less in states with early voting.

The midterm is shaping up to be a perfect storm of the Republicans own making. Call it Hurricane Donald. The current polling is a culmination of a long list of abuses of authority, incompetence, corruption, and downright insanity.

The only thing that’s surprising about the massive shifts in polling is that it took this long to register. Then again, maybe it didn’t.

There were signs of growing discontent all along. The cracks started showing with the economic chaos of the “Liberation Day” tariffs just a few months into Trump’s second term and grew into the massive No Kings demonstrations in which almost three percent of the US population took part.

So, it wasn’t really just high gas prices that sunk Trump Part II. It was the chaos, the shameless grifting, the unnecessary wars, and not least of all, the total unwillingness of Republicans to tell Donald Trump no.

There’s a lesson here about hubris that Democrats would do well to learn. Even personality cults won’t follow blindly forever, and even if 73 percent of Republicans still favor Trump, precious few other Americans do. Not nearly enough swing voters to stave off disaster.

Rhetoric and attacking the other side will only get you so far. Sooner or later, you have to perform. This was a problem for Trump in his first term, but he got a break when COVID-19 overshadowed his economic mistakes. This time around, not only have Trump’s mistakes been larger and more impactful, but they’ve taken center stage.

The idiocracy is on full display, and if the partisan base isn’t happy, the rest of the country is livid. And they’re about to show it.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

-Yeats

From The Racket News ™

The Spanish civil war election

2026-09-22T16:09:53.314-04:00

There are 42 days to the midterm elections. Six weeks. Get your voting shoes ready.

Both sides have described the election as a Flight 93 election at times, but I think there’s a better analogy. To find it, we have to look back a bit further than September 11.

At this point, it seems as though the big Republican closing argument is going to be that, sure, gas prices are high, but the Democrats are communists.

Admittedly, there is some truth to this. Graham Platner was a self-described communist, and in one of the rarest of all things, he was a communist with a Nazi tattoo. (Nick Fuentes might be another.) On the other hand, Graham Platner was shown the door a few months ago in one of the smartest moves the Democratic Party has made in recent years.

There are a few Democratic candidates who claim to be socialist, as well as some others, like Abdul El-Sayed, who don’t adopt the label but share many of the policies. It’s true that socialists are not communists, but it’s also true that the dividing line is pretty gray and blurred. “Socialism” can represent anything from the democratic socialism of the wealthy Nordic countries to the hardcore leninism of the Soviet Union (the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) and the Cubanand North Korean regimes.

There’s a lot of ground in between those two extremes, and Democrats who take the socialist label tend to skew toward the Scandinavian end. As I pointed out with Platner, however, there are exceptions.

On the other side of the political aisle, Democrats have accused Republicans of being fascists. That’s not a totally new thing, but as I pointed out a while back, Trumpism fits the generally-accepted definition of fascism that includes characteristics such as extreme nationalism, a (would-be) dictator with a cult-like following, and no firm principles other than whatever is best for the tribe. Fascism, of course, was also called national socialism.

An interesting quirk of politics and history is that national socialism isn’t really socialism. The word “socialism” in Hitler’s National Socialist party was a bait and switch, intended to capitalize on socialism’s popularity in 1920’s Germany in an attempt to appeal to the working class as well as middle-class Germans. The two ideologies overlapped in many ways, such as being anti-capitalist and authoritarian, but the Nazis were anti-socialist and anti-liberal.

In the wake of last week’s hullabaloo about Bo French’s racist tweet about college football crowds, Erick Erickson posted an expose’ about the white supremacist infiltration of Republican and Christian Nationalist groups, which traced the ideology of some prominent right-wing activists to Carl Schmitt, a veritable WWII German Nazi. The replies to Erick’s posts on the subject are revealing.

In a way, this year’s election is a matchup of Democratic Socialism versus National Socialism. You know what else had that sort of ideological faceoff? The Spanish Civil War.

Image created by ChatGPT

The Spanish Civil War gets short shrift in the American version of world history, but if you’re a World War II buff, you’ve probably at least heard of it. The conflict began in 1936 with a military revolt against Spain’s Republican government. The causes of the war aren’t as relevant to the story here as its conduct. The Nationalists, led by Francisco Franco (if you’re a Saturday Night Live buff, you may remember the old Weekend Update joke, “Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead”), fought the Republicans, and each side had its surrogates. (If you want an more backstory on the conflict, I recommend episodes 109 and 110 of the “WWII: Both Sides of the Wire” podcast.)

Once the war started, Nazi Germany used the conflict as a field test for the weapons and tactics that it would use in Europe a few years later. German soldiers and pilots, the Condor Legion, served tours in Spain to get combat experience and “advise” Nationalist troops. On the Republican side, the Soviet Union counterbalanced the fascist aid to the Nationalists.

In many ways, the Spanish Civil War was a cause celebre of the 1930s in much the same way that the Russo-Ukraine War has rallied the world’s support in our own time. Pablo Picasso’s masterpiece, “Guernica,” memorialized the loss of life on the Spanish town of Guernica by a German air raid, and Ernest Hemingway, a war correspondent who covered the conflict, detailed his experiences in “For Whom the Bell Tolls.” The United States was officially neutral, but American volunteers formed the Abraham Lincoln Brigade to fight against the Nationalists. Some of these volunteers were communists or socialists, while others just hated fascism.

As Hemingway wrote:

"Are you a communist?"
"No I am an anti-fascist"
"For a long time?"
"Since I have understood fascism."

It may be hard for those who know me know to believe it, but I was once an avid reader of “Soldier of Fortune” magazine (“the journal of professional adventurers”). In addition to covering the conficts of the 1980s, SOF also ran articles about military history and I distinctly remember one letter to the editor about about an article on Spanish Civil War. I can quote the closing lines from memory that succinctly described the war: “The Spanish Civil war was communism versus fascism. Both suck.”

Indeed.

The point here is that when faced with two unpleasant choices, sometimes you still have to choose. The lesser evil is also the greater good to an optimist. (Thanks to Micheal Medved for that insight.) Let’s not bother talking about third parties that have no chance. Sometimes being an adult means making difficult choices.

In 2026, we have a Spanish Civil War sort of choice. I’m not very excited about some of the people on the Democratic side, and I’m not excited about a lot of the Democratic platform.

However, I do understand that the greater danger is the wanna-be dictator and the personality cult who are actually in power and already doing tremendous damage. MAGA fascism is also a greater threat than Democratic socialism because the Republican Party is far more infected with radicalism than the Democrats are. Polling shows that Republicans are still79 percent MAGA while 55 percent of Democrats viewed socialism favorably in recent polling. Neither stat is anything to brag about.

Like Ernest Hemingway, being an anti-fascist in 2026 may put us temporarily on the same side as some socialists and even some communists. That doesn’t make us communists or socialists; it just means that we see fascism as a more imminent and dangerous threat.

Sinclair Lewis did not say, “When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross,” but the sentiment has proven correct and here we are. It’s up to the American people to correct the course of the country. Like the Spanish Civil War, it can be difficult and unpleasant choice, but there is definitely a right choice.

I’ll close with another Hemingway quote that seems eerily on target these days: “There are many who do not know they are fascists, but will find it out when the time comes.”

Thanks for reading The Racket News ™! This post is public so feel free to share it.

From the Racket News

The GOP’s white supremacy problem

2026-09-15T10:46:58.213-04:00

There are 48 days until the midterm elections, and not a lot is going well for Republicans. Aside from rising oil and gas prices, the worst news over the weekend was from a Texas statewide candidate who made the mistake of saying the quiet part out loud.

Bo French, candidate for Texas Railroad Commissioner (despite the name, the office is a powerful one that regulates the oil industry), posted an angry rant on the platform formerly known as Twitter about University of Texas students who had the temerity to not look enough like Heritage Texans. (You can see the picture on the original tweet here.) Most people saw ecstatic football fans celebrating UT’s win over Ohio State. Bo French saw an outrage.

This picture is a Rorschach test. What do you see? Screenshot from Bo French.

In his words, French lamented, “I heard UT graduation this year looked like this. I didn’t believe it. The problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined.”

The apparent problem was that the students in the picture were too brown, because there was no other obvious issue. The happy Longhorn fans in the photo look to be mostly of Indian or South Asian descent. To French, that’s a problem.

Lest you give French the benefit of the doubt, he explained further in a subsequent tweet, “Like body-cams exposed criminals, social media is exposing how many Americans have been displaced by foreigners. It’s everywhere and far worse than any of us could imagine.”

So here’s the problem with French’s take in case you haven’t figured it out yet. We live in a multicultural nation, the proverbial melting pot of cultures. It’s impossible to tell if someone is an American or a foreigner by looking at them. A great many native-born Americans have skin colors of varying shades of brown. They don’t look like Bo French, but they are still Americans.

There are no degrees of citizenship. A new citizen who was naturalized yesterday is just as American as a native-born American whose parents came over on the Mayflower. That’s the American way.

Further, under Texas law, Texas students in the top five percent of their classes are guaranteed admission to UT. The odds are good that, not only are the students in the picture Americans and Texans, but they were probably among the top students from Texas schools. That is called a meritocracy, and it’s something Republicans used to favor.

French is rightfully getting dragged online for his comments, and it seems that these tweets were only the tip of the iceberg. Other problematic- let’s just say the word: “racist” - tweets have also emerged, including one from last monththat says, “Muslims shouldn’t be allowed....in the United States Period.”

Tweets like these show the fallacy in the claim that Republicans only oppose illegal immigration. There is no evidence that any of the UT students were here illegally. French attacked them fore merely looking “foreign.” He would disallow all Muslim immigration based on religion, First Amendment be damned.

The interesting thing is the silence from Republicans. Quite a few online accounts are defending and agreeing with French, but most Republicans are staying silent. Ken Paxton denounced generic racism in a tweet that attacked James Talarico rather than addressing the elephant in the room.

Credit where credit is due, Erick Erickson is one of the few voices on the right that I’ve heard denouncing French and his defenders, calling out the talk of “Heritage Texans,” i.e. white Texans,as racist, and even calling French a “racist dumbass” in a memorable tweet. I’d be surprised if French and his ilk aren’t just as unhappy about Hispanic Texans as they are Indian ones, even though Texas’ Hispanic heritage is older than its Anglo one.

And that brings me to my next point. Ironically, Erickson was calling out the propensity of Republican staffers to be Nazi sympathizers just before Frenchgate broke.

The most recent such story involves the political director for Ohio Republican Senator John Husted, who used a picture of Waffen SS soldiers as his Facebook profile picture. This was not the only recent case of Republicans with a thing for Nazis. Just a few days ago, a staffer for Rep. Eric Pratt (R-Minn.) was fired after posting pro-Hitler and antisemitic content on social media. In Georgia, Rep. Mike Collins had an intern and PAC staffer who posted Nazi and KKK images and content, as well as a son-in-law who made white nationalist posts.

Going back further, there is even more. Trump’s Department of Homeland Security and other agencies have posted Nazi slogans and references. American flags with swastikas were found in several Republican congressional offices. A leaked group chat of Young Republican leaders was filled with racist and antisemitic comments. Going back to Trump’s first term, the Unite The Right rally that led to rioting in Charlottesville was filled with alt right and neo-Nazi figures like Nick Fuentes and Steve Bannon, yet the broader Republican movement accepted these people as conservatives.

And speaking of Charlottesville, as I was finishing this piece, I saw that Marshall Rawson, a Republican candidate for the Florida House, had been identified as having marched with a pro-secession, neo-confederate group at Unite the Right.

Partisans will dismiss these red flags as isolated occurrences, but there’s a lot of smoke here. I recall an aphorism from military history that, “Once is a coincidence, twice is happenstance, and three times is enemy action.”

The Republican Party has a serious problem with racism.

Honestly, I’m surprised at how blatantly racist the party has become. A few years ago, when I was a Republican, the talk was about equality without favoritism. There seems to be none of that talk anymore.

I grew up in the South, and have lived most of my life here. I’ve seen a lot of change, most of it for the better. There are fewer racial differences than when I was young. Friend groups cross the color barrier. Multiethnic children are common and accepted. I can remember when all this wasn’t the case.

But there was latent racism hiding beneath the surface. Hatred and suspicion of people who are different is still common, although I doubt most people who hold these views consider themselves racist. I think that the Republican stoking of fears about immigrants has played a major role in bringing such attitudes back to the surface.

Republicans had a chance with their inroads into minority groups in 2024, but they are blowing it. If the mass deportations, restrictions on legal immigration to near zero, and the suspicion of anyone who looks “foreign” weren’t enough to sour minority voters on Republican candidates, overt hostility and racism likely will be.

The damage being done now to the Republican brand is going to be a longterm problem for the party. The GOP is an increasingly white party in a country that is increasingly nonwhite. That demographic change is not necessarily a good thing or a bad thing. It’s just change.

Republicans should be aware that the white electorate is not getting any bigger. They can’t successfully run on racist subtexts forever. At some point, the scales will tip and the GOP will become a permanent minority party representing a demographic minority. Even in Texas, non-Hispanic whites are already only 39 percent of the population.

The growth of America’s nonwhite population is not something that Republicans can deport their way out of.

From the Racket News

Are Republicans surging?

2026-09-12T12:06:42.633-04:00

If you’ve been online much lately, you may have seen some optimism about the midterms from Republican quarters. Some accounts are suggesting that Republican chances are rebounding after a summer slump, Even our old pal, Erick Erickson, is questioning polling and pontificating that it won’t be as bad as all that, even though he does expect the GOP to lose the House.

Personally, I think all this is whistling past the graveyard. I’ve said for a long time that I do think it will be that bad, as long as the Democrats don’t go uber crazy. Even that may only matter at the margins.

Image by ChatGPT

A lot of the calls for encouragement are based on isolated polls. For example, Benny Johnson cites a Harvard Harris poll showing Trump at 44 percent approval. That’s not a great number, but it’s a better number than most polling gives Trump these days. The Real Clear Polling average puts his job approval at 39.6 percent, with Johnson’s poll being highest on the list. Most recent polls are lower.

If you’ve been reading me very long, this raises some red flags. Partisans like to rally the troops with cherry-picked outlier polls, but as I’ve written in the past, two big rules of thumb for looking at polls are to a) look at polling averages to avoid being fooled by outliers, and b) look at trends rather than focusing on numbers.

With respect to Erickson’s theory, he looks at 2020 and cites a column by Patrick Ruffini, who wrote that polling errors favor Democrats by up to 5.9 points over the summer and diminish to 2.6 points in favor of Democrats on Election Day. I think the answer to this theory is that 2026 is not a typical year.

We do have some hard data from this year in the form of special elections. An analysis of this year’s special elections by Multistate Elections found that Democrats overperformed in 36 of 43 contested races. That doesn’t mean Democrats won all those races, but they closed the gap, even in deep red districts with a median swing of more than 10 points toward the Democrats. That includes some high-profile wins in red states, including the Florida district covering Mar-a-Lago. I can’t find any Democrat seats that have flipped to Republicans in contested elections.

That isn’t polling or predictions. Those are votes that have been cast and counted.

“A swing at the current level, sustained through November, would point to a substantial Democratic wave,” the Multistate Elections analysis says, adding, “whether 2026 holds through the summer or fades the same way [as 2018] is the open question these specials are answering in real time.”

As you look at the hopeful Republican posts, ask yourself what would entice voters to vote Republican. The GOP is leaning heavily into communism and socialism in its campaign messaging, and while these culture war issues will sway some voters, “It’s the economy, stupid,” remains as true now as it was in 1992.

The economy isn’t great, and Trump’s fingerprints are all over it. From the recent unnecessary trade war with Canada to the already-endless unnecessary war with Iran, most of Trump’s policy moves have been akin to throwing wrenches into the economy. Elected to lower prices, consumer costs such as groceries and gas have surged under Trump.

It’s going to get worse.

As I write this, 55 days before Election Day and at a time when gas prices are usually falling, the national average price for diesel is about to hit $6 for the first time ever. Gasoline isn’t far behind at $4 per gallon.

The core cause of the sky-high gas prices is the war with Iran, and there is no end to that in sight. Seven months into the two-week war, ship counts in the Strait of Hormuz are still far below pre-war levels. To make matters worse, Iran’s Houthi allies recently launched a series of attacks on Saudi oil facilities outside the Persian Gulf.

Up to this point, Trump has blunted the effects of the energy crisis by releasing oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, but with the stockpile at its lowest point since 1982, about 40 percent capacity, our ability to smooth out price spikes is disappearing, especially if we want to maintain a supply for true emergencies. All this means that, after tamping down price increases through the spring and summer, the gas spike is primed to hit voters like a punch from George Foreman just as they go to the polls.

And it won’t be just gas. In our just-in-time economy, inventories are constantly being replenished by trucks and trains that are powered by - wait for it - diesel. If the diesel price spike continues, look for the cost of other consumer items to rise as well. Everything from food to clothes to toilet paper rides in diesel-powered transports.

What is the Republican answer to all this? Like a political Bruce Dickinson pressing for “more cowbell,” the Republican Party’s only coherent response is “more Trump!” This week the party is staging a rare midterm convention, aka the “Trumpapalooza,” in Dallas. They might also find other bodies of water to rename.

Wishful thinking aside, the situation is looking dire for Republicans. Poll after poll shows Democrats with strong generic ballot margins, and movement of swing voters away from Trump and MAGA. That’s especially true of the Hispanic voters who helped put Trump over the top in 2024. Who would have guessed that they’d dislike seeing their relatives and neighbors deported, along with being harassed themselves based on their appearance?

There is a caveat, however. Gerrymandering does favor Republicans. Democrats now need to win the national popular vote by an estimated four points to win the House.

That’s attainable. Democrats need to focus their messaging on the economy and affordability with a corruption and Epstein files as the icing on the cake. Those messages resonate.

Already, every time I see an update from the Cook Political Report, they are shifting race ratings towards the Democrats. I haven’t seen any race move towards Republicans.

The trend of the race is evident by where the battlegrounds are. Unlike 2024, where blue states were starting to turn purple, this time it’s red states that are starting to swing. Among the Senate tossups, five (Alaska, Iowa, Maine, Ohio, and Texas) are Republican, while Michigan is the only Democratic Senate battleground. What’s more, Republicans are trailing in all of those states except Iowa. It shift is akin to trumpeting a poll showing 44-percent approval.

This isn’t a typical year. Trump is atypically bad and destructive. The world is teetering on the brink of a financial calamity and expanded wars while Trump lines his pockets and builds his ballroom. If American voters can’t deliver a full-throated rejection of this Administration’s incompetence and corruption, we don’t deserve our Republic.

Get to the polls ASAP, and don’t trust your ballot to the Post Office this year.

Thanks for reading The Racket News ™! This post is public so feel free to share it.

MIAMI CRASH I didn’t write an analysis of the Miami Prime crash, but it appears to have been caused by a too-fast, unstable approach that led to a touchdown too far down the runway. To make matters worse, the crew apparently tried to start a late go-around and then reversed that decision. Here’s a good rundown:

From the Racket. news

The ballroom blitz

2026-09-09T22:02:14.074-04:00

The Supreme Court declined to halt Donald Trump’s ballroom construction in a ruling this week that hinged on the plaintiff’s lack of standing. In a dissent, Chief Justice Roberts wrote that the Administration’s actions were “likely unlawful.”

When cases reach the Supreme Court level, I tend to view standing as something that the majority can often game. In a great many cases, it seems that if the majority doesn’t want to rule on the merits of a case, they can simply find that there was no standing, and - poof - the case goes away. On the other hand, the same majority can look at different angles to find standing if it’s a case that they want to rule on.

Image by Grok - Do yall get the reference?

I have a couple of big questions for the Supreme Court about this case. First, who does have standing to stop the destruction of the White House and the lawless construction of the new ballroom? The follow-up is: what good are laws if no one has the power to sue and force them to be upheld?

The second question is the more important one. John Adams famously said, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

We are seeing the truth of that statement being played out in front of us right now. The Trump Administration is running wild and ignoring laws while the institutions that were designed to put the brakes on such abuses of power are systematically skirted or dismantled. I lay a lot of the blame for this on congressional Republicans who are too cowardly to stand up to the president and the Republican base.

The real problem is the voters, however. Not only Republican primary voters, but the voters who returned Trump to power after January 6 and after he explicitly campaigned on abusing his office if he was re-elected. The bottom line is that Trump is running amok and destroying the Republic because voters refused to hold him and his party accountable.

The greatest generation we aren’t.

A case can be made about why a ballroom should be built for state functions, but Trump’s actions are a case study in how not to handle government projects. The saga includes no-bid contracts for cronies, ignoring laws, cost overruns, subterfuge, outright lies, and frequently moving goalposts.

The ballroom may be a small piece of Trump’s corruption in the grand scheme of things, but it is magnificently symbolic of all that is wrong with his Administration. Trump was elected to fight inflation and high prices, but he is focused on the completion of a luxury vanity project that few Americans will ever see the inside of. Rather than following the constitutional process to appropriate and authorize the ballroom through Congress, Trump decreed the job with kingly authority and lied about his intentions from Day One, including falsely saying that the ballroom “won't interfere with the current building. It'll be near it but not touching it.” Days after making that statement, the president unilaterally demolished the East Wing.

The ballroom isn’t the end, either. Trump is already planning to start work on an arch monument, satirically dubbed the “Arc de Trump,” in a matter of weeks. Congress has not approved this construction either. If the president can rule by decree and appropriate his own funds, why do we need Congress?

Precedent is being set with the destruction of the White House and the construction of the ballroom. If Donald Trump can raze the East Wing and raise a ballroom in its place without congressional authorization, the next president can take equal and opposite action. Maybe the next Democratic president can demolish the ballroom and build a combination drag queen theme park and abortion clinic or something.

I’m not saying I support this, but turnabout is fair play. Frankly, I don’t want to get into a tit-for-tat in which federal buildings and historical landmarks are demolished and replaced every time we change presidents. It’s much better to use the constitutional process and involve Congress.

There is a reason that the founders and preceding generations of legislators set up processes for how to spend federal money and replace government buildings with other ones. A big reason is that the whims of one president can be easily replaced by another, and things get whipsawed back and forth.

If Donald Trump wanted a ballroom, he should have gone to Congress and asked for money, just as every president before him has done. That’s how our system is supposed to work. After all, the Constitution explicitly gives the House power over the federal purse in Article I, Section 7.

But Donald Trump wants to have his ballroom without going through Congress, and frankly, that needs to be an issue in the midterms. Let Trump and the Republicans defend the president’s gilded dance hall to voters who are worried about the rising costs of food and energy.

Trump’s ballroom fetish is about as populist as Marie Antoinette, and the Republican defense of the structure while Americans contemplate how to pay for their next tank of gas is akin to saying, “Let them eat cake.”

From the Racket News

Imperialism if you can keep it

2026-09-05T14:31:33.735-04:00

The United States had an important moment this week. The Trump Administration announced a deal with Venezuela that would purportedly give the US access to an estimated 300 billion barrels of oil reserves, more than triple the US reserves.

There are a lot of questions about the deal. These range from whether Venezuela actually has that much oil to whether the Venezuelan oil is worth very much in terms of converting the dark goo into gasoline. In any case, Venezuela has a lot of oil, but its infrastructure is in dire need of repair and upgrade, and its oil is of the heavy, sour variety that yields less gasoline but is well-suited to Gulf Coast refineries.

Image created ChatGPT

The most important question, however, is what the heck are we doing?

This all started with a daring, special operations raid last winter that captured Venezuela’s dictator-in-chief, Nicholas Maduro. Since then, we have left the regime in place, albeit with a different figurehead at the top. Delcy Rodriguez, vice president under Chavez, stepped into the top spot with American blessing and has proven to be more compliant, if no less authoritarian, than the previous dictator.

Contrary to the hopes of Venezuelans and human rights activists, our focus over the past nine months has been on assuming control of the Venezuelan oil industry rather than regime change or spreading democracy. The raid seems to have been all about the oil, rather than truth, justice, and the American way.

There’s a word for what Trump is doing in Venezuela, and that word is “imperialism,” which Merriam-Webster defines as “the policy, practice, or advocacy of extending the power and dominion of a nation especially by direct territorial acquisitions or by gaining indirect control over the political or economic life of other areas.” Military action to replace a dictator and gain control over Venezuelan oil is an almost verbatim real-life restatement of the definition.

The word “imperialism” has been overused a lot in recent decades, but at times it does apply. There were charges of imperialism in Afghanistan and Iraq, although Afghanistan had little of value and we didn’t keep Iraqi oil. But when a country is attacked and its resources taken under duress, it is one of those times when the word applies without stretching the concept.

For most countries, the allure of imperialism went out with World War II, if not the 19th century. Vladimir Putin’s Russia is one of the exceptions, and Americans should be disturbed at the fact that Trump’s foreign policy is becoming more explicitly Putinesque.

This was not without warning, however. The concept is perfectly in keeping with the theories about Trump’s geopolitical doctrine of dividing the world into spheres of influence controlled by us, Russia, and China. If these theories are correct, Taiwan should brace for the next shoe to drop.

Marco Rubio, the anti-communist son of Cuban immigrants, should be particularly ashamed. For the Secretary of State, the metamorphosis from advocate of Latin American freedom to defender of Trump’s exploitation of the Venezuelan people marks a decade-long decline from a top presidential candidate in 2016 to a MAGA yes-man.

And then there’s the fact that the deal also gives the federal government, specifically the Defense Department’s Office of Strategic Capital, a 35 percent stake in North American Blue Energy Partners (NABEP), the joint US-Venezuelan venture. So, in addition to being imperialist, the deal is also socialist, granting the government yet another ownership interest in a growing list of nationalized American companies.

Chevron has announced an investment into Venezuela, but as Republicans used to believe, government intrusion into the market may turn out to be detrimental. Aside from the legal questions, oil companies may question the wisdom and prospects of competing with a government-back entity.

It goes without saying that this is all without either congressional approval or oversight. The Senate has the constitutional duty to ratify treaties, but it’s unlikely that any treaty is forthcoming. Trump is almost always long on announcements and short on implementation.

The deal is already unpopular with the people of Venezuela. Trump avoided a prolonged war in Venezuela by replacing the head of the regime, but if it the plan doesn’t collapse under its own weight, it’s entirely possible that American soldiers will have to be deployed to protect US oil interests in the country, because ultimately imperialism is about using force to take what belongs to someone else, and often the victims don’t like that status quo.

Thanks for reading The Racket News ™

Election Follies

2026-09-05T14:26:39.783-04:00

There are a couple of oddities in the current election season. Strangely enough, the Alaska Senate race, where two Dan Sullivans are competing against Democrat Mary Peltola is not the oddest of the odd.

Alaska’s incumbent senator, Republican Dan S. Sullivan, is locked in a reelection battle with Peltola, the Democratic challenger, as well as another Republican Dan Sullivan.

Image by ChatGPT

Dan J. Sullivan, a retired teacher, emerged as a strong enough candidate to earn a spot on the November ballot after placing third in the state’s nonpartisan, jungle primary. Dan S. Sullivan, the incumbent, finished second behind Peltola.

Republicans are crying foul and blaming Democrats for playing shady tricks, but both the Peltola campaign and Dan J. Sullivan deny coordinating with each other. The state Division of Elections removed the non-senator Sullivan from the ballot, saying that his campaign was designed to cause confusion, but he was restored by a judge. Sullivan says that he is running in good faith, despite the fact that he voted for Peltola in her congressional bids.

What makes this even funnier is that this is not the first time that Dan Sullivan has been on the same ballot as another Dan Sullivan. When Senator Sullivan was first elected in 2014, yet another Republican Dan Sullivan was running for lieutenant governor. That third Dan Sullivan has endorsed Senator Dan Sullivan in the current race.

As a footnote, Senator Sullivan trailed Peltola by more than 10,000 votes in the primary. Even assuming that all Dan J. Sullivan voters would have voted for Senator Sullivan if Dan J. wasn’t on the ballot, his 3,847 votes would not have changed the outcome. I do wonder how many of the Senator’s voters intended to vote for Dan J.

You might wonder what could be more weird than the saga of the Alaskan Dan Sullivans, and the answer would be found in Nebraska, where Democrats are fighting to not have a candidate. No, that is not a typo.

In the Cornhusker State, Democrats are fighting a legal battle to keep their primary winner off the ballot and not have a candidate in the general election. The backstory is that when Nebraska Democrats held their Senate primary, they overwhelmingly chose Cindy Burbank over William Forbes, a Trump-supporting, pro-life candidate who, in a parallel to Alaska, some Democrats consider to be a plant. For his part, Forbes says he is a registered Democrat even though he voted for Trump multiple times and attended a training session for Republican candidates.

Burbank promised during the campaign to withdraw from the race if nominated in order to support independent candidate Dan Sullivan. No, I’m just kidding. The Nebraska candidate is a Dan, but his last name is Osborn. Osborn is not a Democrat and has rejected both parties, but he has strong support among Nebraska Democrats. As an aside, I’ll also note that promising to withdraw or resign is a strategy that I’d love to see more candidates use.

To make a long story short (too late!), when Burbank filed to withdraw from the race, Republicans sued to place Forbes, the alleged ringer, on the ballot, while Democrats fought to keep him off. The case hinged on the wording of the Nebraska statute, which stated that ballot vacancies “may be filled,” but also says, “the vacancy shall be filled by the majority vote of the proper committee of the same political party.”

The case was decided this week when a state judge threw out Forbes’ lawsuit. Per Courthouse News Service, the judge held that the word “may” gave the party discretion on whether to replace its nominee, but the “shall” dictated the procedure to follow if the decision to replace was in the affirmative.

Barring any further developments, Osborn will face incumbent Republican Pete Ricketts in November. The only recent poll is one sponsored by the Osborn campaign, and that one shows a 47-47 tie.

It remains to be seen whether Osborn can upset Ricketts, but it is a certainty that he has a much better chance of doing so without a Democratic nominee in the race. That is true even if the Democrat is a DINO (Democrat in name only), who only entered the race to sow confusion. Every vote will matter in this race.

This is an important election year. The outcome of these and other races matters a great deal, but despite that - or perhaps because of it - there seems to be ample weirdness in the electorate. File these stories away for use in trivia contests a decade or so from now.

Thanks for reading The Racket News ™! This post is public so feel free to share it.

DEPT OF ED COMPARES TRUMP TO HITLER A deleted post by the Department of Education featured a movie clip of Winston Churchill talking about Hitler, followed by a montage of Trump pictures. This creates the opportunity for a multitude of jokes that can easily write themselves. I’m starting to agree with abolishing the DOE.

Making frenemies

2026-08-24T09:38:30.203-04:00

Apparently, one war isn’t enough, because over the weekend, Donald Trump started new wars of trade and words with two of our closest allies. The president has long had a habit of alienating allies and fawning over dictators. We saw that again this week.

First, Trump distanced the US from South Korea and crowed about his relationship with Kim Jong Un in a move that will offend both South Korea and Japan. Just a day before joint exercises with the South Korean military were supposed to begin, Trump abruptly announced that the maneuvers would be “substantially reduced.” That the exercise continued at all was due only to the stated fact that it was too late to cancel them entirely.

Image by ChatGPT

Trump was apparently angry that South Korea has not joined in his Qixotic battle against Iran, but the fact that there is no coalition of the willing rests on the shoulders of Trump and Netanyahu, who decided to start the war on their own without consulting allies, much less expending the diplomatic capital required to build a coalition.

There has long been speculation that Trump would withdraw American forces from the Korean peninsula. While no such announcement has been made, the rift makes that a real possibility. This is the opposite of projecting American power and would benefit China and North Korea, while creating further problems with South Korea and Japan. It might also spur South Korea to become a nuclear power.

Bases in South Korea are not just about the defense of Korea. They are part of an interlocking line of defense that guards the entire Pacific region against Chinese encroachment. When that line is weakened, China gains an advantage.

Trump’s decision was likely economic as well as sour grapes over Iran. South Korea is an economic competitor as well as a trading partner. The Trump Administration said last year that the nation had promised to invest $350 billion in the US. Politico reports that frustration over the pace of that investment, equal to about one-fifth of the South Korean economy, may have played a role in Trump’s decision, but it was never a real possibility that South Korea would export that much wealth to the US.

Economics definitely played a role in the recent rift with Canada. Trump implemented 50-percent tariffs on a variety of Canadian goods on Saturday after trade talks broke down. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has pledged to fight back with retaliatory tariffs “dollar for dollar.” The current US-Canada trade deal was signed by - wait for it - Donald Trump in 2018.

As an aside here, I’m going to point out that Trump made a de facto admission that tariffs raise costs for consumers when he suspended beef tariffs in order to “get prices down.” Again, this was at the same time that he slapped new tariffs on Canada, as well as at the same time that the federal government is refunding tariffs that the Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional.

At this point, Canada had little choice. It is readily apparent that deals made with Donald Trump are not worth the paper they are printed on. A deal can be inked and signed, and Trump will change his mind and demand more concessions five minutes later.

Trump is a bully, and the way to handle bullies is to stand up to them. I’m surprised that our allies have not tried this before now. I don’t think that the Canadian model will be the last time such resistance happens.

At this point, some may accuse me of rooting against my country. Don’t confuse the president with the country. America is my country, right or wrong, but that does not mean that I have to support the actions of its government if I believe them to be unwise or immoral.

Part of loving your country is wanting the best for it. And like a parent who wants the best for his children, that does not mean supporting everything the children do. Tough love includes keeping the kids accountable when they make bad and self-destructive choices, while nudging them back towards the straight and narrow.

What we are seeing now are not policies that will make America great again. We are seeing policies that will make America irrelevant. If our allies can’t trust us to have their backs on security issues, but do trust us to backstab them on trade deals, that’s a recipe for creating an international order that bypasses or excludes the United States.

The fact that American voters have embraced Trump and his quasi-isolationist ideas not once but twice means that we can’t be trusted not to go further down this road in the future, if not in 2028, then sometime beyond. That means that much of the damage that Trump has done to American prestige, power, and relationships might never be repaired. At best, it will take decades to recover.

And we still have two years to go.

From the Racket News

JD Vance and curse of the cheap goods

2026-08-18T08:23:20.069-04:00

Vice President JD Vance is the current frontrunner in the 2028 Republican presidential primary, but as with Trump, many Republicans aren’t very excited about the option. This may be why there was a hatchet job on the veep over the weekend in the form of a video clip in which Vance shows his economic ignorance.

In the short clip, which comes from a longer video interview in 2023, Vance takes the positions that Americans are paying too little for consumer goods and that the dollar’s reserve currency status is an albatross around the neck of the country.

Image by Chat GPT

“I am not sure that I think the reserve currency is actually good for the United States of America,” Vance opined. “I think there’s a good argument that reserve currency is akin to coal in Appalachia; it’s a resource curse, right? It allows your consumers to consume very cheaply, right? That’s been the story of the American economy for the last 15 or so years, even before that. We can just borrow, basically in an unlimited way, because we have the reserve currency. That’s a massive subsidy to incurring debt. The debt is cheaper, even in a raised interest rate environment.”

“So we have this massive subsidy to cheap debt to the American consumer,” he continued. “That’s good, right? Consuming is important, especially food, medicine, and things like that, but I think it’s a massive tax on American producers.”

Keep in mind that this clip apparently originated at a time when prices were already high due to inflation, but Vance was concerned that American consumers were still consuming too cheaply. In a time of rising costs, that sentiment is not going to play well with voters.

More insidious is Vance’s dislike for the dollar’s status as the global reserve currency. The Bretton Woods agreement of 1944 established the dollar’s global currency status, and that has been a tremendous boon to the US economy. Transactions all around the world are conducted in dollars as the benchmark currency. This has contributed to American economic strength and helped consumers enrich themselves through the strong dollar.

Vance is correct that the global dollar has helped the US with cheaper borrowing costs, and that includes the government as well as consumers. The flip side to Vance’s argument is that if borrowing costs go up, interest on the federal debt, currently edging out defense spending as the third largest budget item, will grow as a share of the federal budget and crowd out other items. Without reserve currency status, we might ultimately lose the ability to finance the federal debt at any cost, triggering a Greece-like debt crisis. As I write this, 30-year Treasury yields, the cost of financing the national debt, have risen to their highest level since just before the 2008 financial crisis.

The kicker is that if the US enters an economic downturn because of a debt crisis, much of the rest of the world will follow, thanks to the interlinked global economy. When American consumers buy less, that impacts the economies of countries that export to us. To some extent, that slowdown is already happening due to Trump’s tariffs and trade wars. Our trading partners are looking for new markets as exports to the US drop. Those who can’t have experienced slowing or contracting economies.

The interesting thing for those defending Vance’s view is that our main geopolitical adversaries are also pushing to dethrone the dollar. Russia and China have long been jealous of the advantage that the US gets from the dollar’s global status, and they have been working to push alternatives for years.

If Russia and China think they stand to benefit from taking the dollar down a few notches, why is someone like Vance pushing the idea? In another 2023 clip, Vance explained his thinking to Fox News.

“While it does have benefits, King Dollar actually has a downside for American manufacturers,” Vance said. “I think our manufacturers could benefit quite a bit. What the reserve currency does, the good thing, is that it means that things are a lot cheaper here in this country. If you travel overseas, you can buy more with the American dollar. The bad thing is it’s really bad for our exporters.”

In essence, Vance’s argument for jettisoning reserve currency status is the same as Trump’s argument for tariffs. They think imports are too cheap, and they want to make foreign goods more expensive so that American consumers will buy more American-made goods.

The fundamental problem with this view is that the decline of American manufacturing is a myth. US manufacturing output has remained strong for decades, but there are two caveats. Manufacturing jobs have declined due to automation, and manufacturing has shrunk as a share of the GDP as the world transitions to an information-based economy. As with trying to shift aircraft carriers to steam catapultsand build a new class of already-obsolete battleships, the Trump Administration’s manufacturing policy seeks to return us to the past, but you can’t turn back the clock.

Interestingly, Donald Trump seems to realize the importance of maintaining the dollar’s reserve currency status. In yet another video, the president said, “If you want to go to third-world status, lose your reserve currency.”

It isn’t often that I agree with Donald Trump, but this is one of those times. I just wish Trump were more consistent on the issue. Trump may not want to dump the dollar’s global status, but he has advocated for a weaker, inflationary dollar to bolster his protectionist schemes.

To give Republicans some credit, a lot of the flak came from the last remaining conservatives. Our old buddy, Erick Erickson, was very critical of Vance on both foreign policy and domestic issues, at one point likening the vice president to Candace Owens. Ouch.

If JD Vance gets his way, rather than making America great again, his economic policies are likely to pave the way for American economic decline. As a general rule, we shouldn’t pursue the same economic policies that Russia and China are advocating for, and we shouldn’t elect politicians whose ideas mirror theirs, whether it be dethroning King Dollar or cutting off aid to Ukraine.

It’s a good thing that the chances of America electing another Republican in 2028 will be near zero after four years of Trump’s mismanagement of the country.

Thanks for reading The Racket News ™! This post is public so feel free to share it.

CLOWNS TO THE LEFT, JOKERS TO THE RIGHT A new CBS News poll showed that 58 percent of Democrats view socialism positively compared to 38 percent for capitalism. But even 54 percent of Republicans approve of price controls. Democrats were viewed as weak, while Republicans were viewed as extreme.

The poll also shed light on how the parties view socialism, with Democrats stressing “equality and fairness and public services,” and Republicans equating the term with “government control.” That ties in nicely with what I wrote in “Socialism vs. socialism” a few weeks ago.

The sad takeaway here is that neither party is very interested in free markets at this point.

SOUTH KOREA SLAP The Trump Administration called off joint exercises with South Korea as Trump wistfully recalled his good times with Kim Jong Un.

BOAT STRIKES OUT An intelligence assessment reviewed by the Washington Postfound that Trump’s attacks on boats had “failed to affect the supply or price of cocaine in the United States and had led traffickers to diversify beyond go-fast boats and to avoid international waters, opting instead for larger boats and hemming close to coastlines, where U.S. forces are less likely to open fire.” That’s a poor result for acts that may have been war crimes, or since we aren’t at war, just plain crimes.

ONLY THREE STATES approve of Trump in a new Newsweek poll. Can you guess them?

ZOIKS AND JINKIES For your viewing pleasure, check out this video of Scooby Doo and the gang investigating the reflecting pool mystery.

Share The Racket News ™

From the Racket News

A glimmer of hope

2026-08-13T09:58:58.909-04:00

The past few years have largely been a time of gloom and doom. Bad news is followed by worse news. Fake news, conspiracy theories, half-truths, and outright lies rule the internet. It’s easy to get lost in a deep, anxious funk.

But this week, I saw a glimmer of hope come from primary election outcomes, particularly in Michigan and Wisconsin.

Image by ChatGPT

Just a few days ago, I wrote about the threat of radicalism from within the Democratic Party that threatens to split the opposition to MAGA. In one of the most closely watched races of the week, Democratic Socialist Francesca Hong was narrowly defeated by David Crowley in the Democratic Wisconsin gubernatorial primary. Crowley had previously withdrawn from the race amid the initially crowded field, but reentered after other candidates dropped out. The victory over Hong, a radical who even opposed Thanksgiving, is a good thing for both the future of the Democratic Party and moderates everywhere.

Hong’s loss is all the more amusing because right-wing conspiracy theorists had already rolled out posts about late-night ballot drops to explain her victory. In the light of day, these posts, some of which are still up, take on a “Dewey Defeats Truman” vibe.

There were even signs of sanity from the Republican Party. In Michigan, MyPillow magnate Mike Lindell went down to defeat in the Republican gubernatorial primary. The conspiracy-pushing CEO remained true to form in defeat, claiming election irregularities and refusing to concede. Whether Republicans ultimately win the governorship of Michigan or not, and Lisa Demuth likely has an uphill fight in the general election, the Republican Party, Michigan, and the country in general are better off without Lindell having access to the bully pulpit of a nomination.

Donald Trump had a somewhat bad night as well. In addition to Lindell, another Trump-endorsed candidate, Darline Graham Nordone in South Carolina, advanced to a runoff but only received about a third of the vote. Both Michigan and South Carolina represented rare examples of Republican voters not blindly following Donald Trump. That’s encouraging.

These days, hope is where you find it. I’m encouraged to see small signs of both sides embracing sanity, even though I’m sure that we haven’t seen the last of the insanity. Maybe we’re taking baby steps back towards normalcy, and maybe Democrats are realizing that full leftist radical isn’t the way to go.

Never go full leftist radical.

I’ll say again that Republicans are about to get a comeuppance for their corruption, abuses of power, and downright incompetent administration of the government. It’s going to be a shellacking for the ages that will include loss of the Senate. Bookmark this and write it down.

What comes after the election is impossible to predict at this point. I wouldn’t be surprised if Trump and MAGA go full Lindell and refuse to accept the choices of the voters. They’ve done this time and again in the MAGA era. Before Trump leaves office, I also wouldn’t be surprised if political violence increases as MAGA violently tries to hold onto power.

Never go full Lindell or full Trump either.

But those are concerns for another day. As the old saying goes, the way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time. That saying predates the Republican Party, and I am not endorsing political cannibalism, by the way.

For the time being, let’s take our victories where we can find them and our hope where we can get it. One day at a time, and one step at a time.

Maybe, just maybe, we’ll come out of this okay.

Thanks for reading The Racket News ™! This post is public so feel free to share it.

MASS ABORTION Viral claims say that Massachusetts expanded abortion “until birth.” As Snopes explains, Massachusetts law already allowed abortion in certain extreme medical situations beyond 24 weeks. The new law still requires a doctor to justify the procedure. Late-term abortions are extremely rare and represent only about one percent of abortions.

A WORD ON OUR POSTING Our faithful readers may have noticed a drop-off in the frequency of our posts. We are still around, but as you are probably aware, both Steve and I have day jobs. Unlike most pundits, we don’t do this for a living. It’s a hobby. And that’s a good thing for our readers. We give you our unvarnished opinions with no need to regurgitate party talking points for clicks. We may not always be right, but we will always be honest with you. Most other outlets can’t honestly say that. (And we’ll be right more often than not.)

From the Racket News

Socialism vs socialism

2026-08-07T08:42:08.068-04:00

There is a lot of fallout from the Michigan election this week on both sides of the aisle. Republicans are salivating at the chance to label Democrats as socialists and play the Islamist card after the nomination of Abdul El-Sayed, a progressive congressional candidate who bested a Democratic establishment incumbent, while Democrats are panicking about the progressive surge and how it will affect their midterm chances.

A new Gallup poll shows that socialism is less popular than free enterprise and capitalism by large margins. Although they like the idea of equality and safety nets, they dislike the inefficiency, government control, and disincentive to work.

Image by ChatGPT

A few weeks ago, I wrote, “Democratic primary voters are not playing it safe, when that’s what they really should be doing if they want to ensure that Trump is blocked from implementing his authoritarian agenda.”

In some cases, that seems to be holding true. In others, not so much. For instance, you probably have not heard about how in another Democratic primary this week, Wesley Bell, a moderate congressman, defeated former representative Cori Bush in Missouri for the second time. And there are other moderate Democrats like Roy Cooper in North Carolina and Jon Ossoff in Georgia who won their primaries and seem ready to cruise to general election victories. Ossoff is even picking up Republican endorsements.

Two things can be true at once. The Democrats do have a socialist problem, but they also have a strong moderate faction. The big picture is that Democrats are showing some diversity of thought and nominating candidates of different ideologies in different regions. Only about a thirdof Democrats identify as democratic socialists.

Contrast that with Republicans, where Trump approval is still at 80 percent, even though only about 20 percent of the party is enthusiastic about the remainder of Trump’s term. On the surface, that seems like some major cognitive dissonance, but I suspect that they don’t blame Trump for his failures. As others have said, Trump can never fail; he can only be failed.

But the Democratic problems don’t necessarily mean that Republicans have clear sailing for the midterms. For starters, they have their own albatrosses. Democrats dumped Graham Platner, better late than never, but Republicans are sticking by Max Miller, an Ohio congressman accused of illegal drug use and domestic violence that includes throwing hot water on his wife, threatening her with a gun, and physical abuse of their two-year-old daughter.

Republicans have also given Democrats ammunition to fight back on the socialist label. For example, a sound bite this week that accused oil companies of “making too much money” from the Iran war came from Donald Trump rather than democratic socialists.

"[It's] too much money. You're surprised? I'm saying it. I'll say it loud and clear," the president added.

Even more damaging, the US government is now a shareholder in 30 private companies, up from zero prior to Trump. In some cases, the government has a controlling interest in these companies.

On Thursday, Trump told reporters, “We’ll have a big percentage of the [computer] chip business by the time I leave office,” before once again casting doubt upon whether he plans to leave office in 2029. What could go wrong with government central planning and control of the computer chip industry?

By definition, socialism is “governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods,” so by definition the Republican Party is now a more successful socialist organization than the party of Bernie Sanders and AOC.

To make matters worse, Trump’s socialism comes with the things that Americans don’t like, such as government control and inefficiencies, and not the things they do, such as free education and healthcare. As someone pointed out, Republicans made a long-term strategic error by labeling popular free government services as socialist.

In attacking socialism from Democrats, the vice president is now saying that the “last forty years of bipartisan economic policy has failed.” For those of you doing the math at home, that means that JD Vance is disavowing everything back to 1986. That includes the largest economic expansion in world history, the Reagan boom of the 1980s and 1990s, not to mention admitting that Trump’s first term was an economic failure. Vance’s statement is both historically and economically ignorant.

Vance goes on to defend Trump’s economic policies, which include protectionism and the aforementioned socialist takeover of a growing number of businesses. Vance credits Trump with saving American manufacturing and “making it possible to own a home and have a family,” but manufacturing jobs have continued a 70-year decline under Trump (the culprit is automation; manufacturing output over the same period) and affordability is a major issue this year because prices are rising thanks in large part to Trump’s policies of tariffs, trade wars, and energy crises sparked by literal wars. Home ownership has declined in Trump’s current term.

The state of the economy is illustrated by the recent online debate about whether it is possible to feed a family of eight burritos for $20.. It may technically be possible, although probably not with meat, but when the party in power is arguing that consumers need to cut back and be more savvy shoppers, it’s an election red flag. That’s especially true when the party in question promised lower prices.

The Republican attacks on democratic socialism are also a bit disingenuous. In Wisconsin,Francesca Hong’s campaign filings show that she has spent exactly zero on television ads in the Democratic gubernatorial primary. Instead, Hong’s campaign is being boosted by Republican ads attacking her despite the fact that she hasn’t won the nomination.

This tactic can work by elevating an easier-to-beat opponent, but it can also backfire. Hillary’s campaign boosted Donald Trump in 2016, a decision that the entire party has long since come to regret.

Socialism rising in the Democratic party is not a good thing. I’m hoping that more Democratic voters choose electable moderates over DSA radicals, but the current state of the nation and the highly unpopular policies of Donald Trump and the Republican Party make it likely that radical Democratic candidates are not only going to get nominated, but elected.

The socialist surge in the Democratic Party won’t wipe out the Democrats’ chances in the midterms, but it might reduce the margin of victory. At the same time, the New Democrat majority is likely to be more leftist due to the DSA influence.

Trump’s incompetence and corruption are fueling Republican popularity that is making it possible for democratic socialists to rise to prominence. Republican dysfunction may end up ushering in a larger socialist faction among the Democrats because the alternative is an authoritarian nationalistic socialism from Republicans.

Horseshoe theory is a real thing. The answer to preserving our republic and economy is not to veer to either left or right, but for bipartisan moderates to unite across the aisle and reject the radicals of both extremes.

Thanks for reading The Racket News ™! This post is public so feel free to share it.

BIRTH CITIZENSHIP II: ELECTRIC BOOGALOO Apparently believing that the Supreme Court was just fooling, Trump signed new Executive Orders limiting with the aim of limiting birthright citizenship. Upon closer inspection, however, the Orders seem more a restatement of existing law.

DETAINED MILITARY FAMILIES The AP reports that dozens of military spouses and parents have been arrested and detained by ICE.

CHRISTIAN HYPOCRISY HURTS A recent survey of Gen Z adults by the Wheaton College Billy Graham Center Research Institute found that half of respondents said that Christian support of Trump makes them less likely to church.

From the Racket News

What are the Iranians thinking?

2026-08-03T11:07:14.476-04:00

The fact that the Iran war continues in fits and starts isn’t news, but the question is why the war isn’t over. Iran has had numerous opportunities not only to end the fighting, but to end the fighting with the strategic victory of control over shipping through the Strait of Hormuz.

To hear the Trump Administration tell it, Iran is like the Black Knight in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.” The erstwhile knight unsuccessfully fights King Arthur, losing one limb after the other, but he never gives up, asserting, “Tis but a scratch.”

Image by Chat GPT

I’ve lost count of how many times the Trump Administration has said that Iran was defeated and its military destroyed. Somehow, like the Black Knight, Iran fights on.

So what are the Iranians thinking? They apparently don’t realize that they are destroyed and defeated.

One possibility is that the regime is suicidal. This is the view of many Republican Iran hawks. Going way back to 2009, I read several books about Muslim theology and the Twelfth Imam, a belief that is similar to Christian endtimes theology in many ways. I described the Twelver sect in my blog at the time and related how then-President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad seemed to believe that these prophecies were about to be fulfilled. Ahmadinejad, by the way, is apparently who the Trump Administration had picked to lead post-regime change Iran.

The regime clearly doesn’t value the lives of their citizens, but that doesn’t mean it is suicidal. In fact, the regime seems to be more clear eyed about what it can realistically accomplish than Trump and Netanyahu. In fact, I think that Iran has Trump right where it wants him.

Iran knows that Trump desperately needs to end the war for two reasons. First and most obviously, the midterms are coming and the war is unpopular. A war that drags on until Election Day would be one more strike against Republicans in a year that already has the momentum moving against them.

Perhaps more important, Trump started the war unilaterally and consequently has very limited authority to fight it. The clock has already run out and been restarted on the War Powers Act, a move of dubious constitutionality in itself, and war-limiting bills have passed the House, even with its Republican majority. If the war drags on into the new Congress, Trump may well find his war funding cut off.

As I wrote back in March, Trump has to do something to claim a victory, but Iran just has to survive. Iran’s regime is winning by continuing to exist and denying Donald Trump the ability to declare victory and stop fighting.

Like Rocky Balboa at the hands of someone in every installment of the series, Iran just won’t stay down for the count. When Trump declares a unilateral ceasefire, it is often Iran that triggers a resumption of hostilities, like a battered, bloody boxer that rises off the mat to take yet another shot at the champ.

And more like Rocky than the Black Knight, the damage inflicted on Iran seems to be overestimated. The proof of that statement is that Iran is still able to inflict damage on US bases in the region and neighboring countries.

Trump is caught in a trap. Like the proverbial monkey with his hand inside the log (or the tar baby from Southern folklore), Trump can’t let go, but he also can’t get the prize. He’s stuck.

He can continue bombing “until morale improves,” but the air campaign isn’t doing anything except expend ordnance at this point, and US ordnance stockpiles are becoming depleted, threatening our abilities not only in Iran but elsewhere. The only way to topple the regime is a ground invasion. It’s painfully obvious that Trump won’t do this for the two reasons cited earlier.

Trump could also aim lower and shift his war goal to reopening the strait that was open before he started bombing. The problem there is that Iran seems to still have a plentiful supply of drones and missiles to shoot at ships. To end the Iranian threat to shipping would probably require occupying the whole country because the range of these weapons is several hundred miles. At that point, regime change is back on the table.

And what if Trump does overcome his TACO tendencies and order in the infantry? Keep in mind that Iran has been supplying drones to Russians fighting in Ukraine. There are probably many members of the regime who would welcome the chance to fight a guerrilla war against Americans from Iran’s cities and mountains. In short order, we’d be seeing drone videos of American soldiers being stalked by the devices, just as we’ve watched Russian soldiers dying at the hands of Ukrainian drones.

Escalating the war with Iran could also have further unintended consequences. Houthi rebels in Yemen, allies of the Iranian regime, could move off the sidelines to blockade a second trade route, the Bab el-Mandeb strait that accesses the Red Sea. Opening a second theater would further strain US resources.

Going further, an invasion would be incredibly bloody, and as in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, a lot of the country would see us as occupiers rather than liberators. Iran would become another endless war unless Congress pulls the plug.

And then there’s the oil. Even during the ceasefires, Hormuz shipping didn’t return to anywhere near normal. As a result, world oil stockpiles are being depleted. Trump has kept a lid on gas prices at home by tapping the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, but per the Energy Information Agency, he has reached the end of his ability to do so. As of the end of July, the reserve is at its lowest point since 1982 with only a two-week supply left.

Trump has also gamed oil markets by fighting a weekend war. A pattern has emerged of threats and bombing late in the week with ceasefires breaking out before markets open on Monday.

An additional risk to escalation is that if Iran inflicts further damage on Persian Gulf oil facilities, the energy crisis would be exacerbated. The Saudis reportedly raised this concern before Trump backed down from his most recent threats of escalation.

Time is on Iran's side in almost every respect. Trump is facing a impending election, growing discontent in Congress, and a looming world energy crisis.

Again, Iran just has to survive. With the strait mostly closed, world economies are slowly being strangled by the lack of oil and rising energy prices. Trump has to somehow turn on the oil spigot again… without expanding the war. That’s a tall order, and it comes with an Iranian veto.

Donald Trump started this war, but he can’t end it. Iran is unwilling to accept his peace terms, even when he essentially offers an American surrender. That’s why Trump is stuck in the loop of bomb-threaten-cave-repeat.

He has no cards.

Thanks for reading The Racket News ™! This post is public so feel free to share it.

REFLECTING POOL The DOJ dropped the charges against an Olympian and others accused of vandalizing the reflecting pool, saying the pool’s problems were the result of shoddy workmanship. Ever committed to the bit, Trump insisted on social media that the damage was caused by vandals.

From the Racket News

Smoke and mirrors

2026-07-30T09:54:04.676-04:00

I guess Steve and I have both had a busy week, but I wanted to say a quick word about the Fauci hearing yesterday. The internet is blowing up over this, with some claiming that the doctor’s diary shows pandemic concerns were overblown and others blaming Fauci himself for creating a bio weapon that killed millions. Both claims can’t be true and neither is.

The Fauci hearing was lawfare in its most basic form with Republicans using their position, not to investigate the government’s actions in the pandemic, but to attempt to find something - anything - to use to prosecute the scientist. When it was obvious that wouldn’t work, they chose to humiliate him.

Image by ChatGPT

In context, Fauci’s diary entries don’t say what Republicans say they do. By definition, a diary is a stream of thought, written as events unfold. That Fauci’s view of the virus and unfolding pandemic changed over time should not be surprising. This was a brand new bug that we knew nothing about.

This was a brand new bug that ended up killing more than a million Americans. It went on until the vaccines stopped the outbreak. Ivermectin didn’t end the pandemic. Neither did hydroxychloroquine. Both those drugs were proven ineffective.

There is no firm evidence to prove the lab leak theory, but if a dangerous virus did escape from Wuhan, wouldn’t that mean that strict protocols were necessary? If the lab leak theory is correct, then so was Fauci.

Fauci had no authority on his own. He could only make recommendations to the president and state governors. Without a doubt, not all of those recommendations were correct, but in the context of a pandemic caused by a novel virus, they are justifiable.

Voters should ask themselves, why now, five years after the pandemic and two months before the midterms, is Fauci being pilloried? I think there are multiple answers to that question, beginning with the fact that Republican approval is plummeting. Republicans are losing a war with Iran, tariffs and oil prices (from the war) are dragging down the economy with higher prices, Americans are being harassed and detained because they look foreign, and corruption is rampant. Oh, and the Epstein files still have not been released after 556 days.

The hearing was also an attempt to rehabilitate Trump, just as the president has been relitigating the 2020 election. Trump’s handling of COVID played a major role in his loss. Fauci’s diary records that Trump repeatedly asked him to say positive and untrue things to help his reelection campaign, and that Trump was unconcerned about the pandemic.

Along the same lines, with anti-vax sentiment high in the GOP, Republicans want to distance Trump from Operation Warp Speed. Ironically, the effort to rapidly produce a vaccine was the best and most effective policy of the first Trump term, and now Republicans are running away from it.

Most Republican politicians, including Trump, got vaccinated while many told their constituents not to. The result was a clear partisan divide in the COVID death toll in which Republicans died at a higher rate than Democrats. Republican resistance to the vaccines and safety measures is the clear explanation.

Finally, I’ve always thought that Fauci’s original sin was being more popular than Trump. The calm, competent doctor inspired confidence during the dark days of the pandemic while Trump rambled about injecting disinfectant. Fauci had to be co-opted or destroyed.

I’ll add here that Fauci’s reflections on his newfound fame are unseemly, but not criminal. If the truth were told, I think most of us, if thrust into the spotlight, would be similarly awed and overwhelmed.

Republicans can’t run on their record so they are running on distractions. Perennial Republican accusations of socialism have been ramped up to communism, and while it’s true that the Democratic Socialists present a problem for the Democrats, but they are still a minority of the party.

The truth is evident when you look at who is attacking Fauci. It’s the Republican politicians and grifters, not doctors and medical experts. Healthcare people know that, as bad as the pandemic was, it could have been worse.

Dr. Fauci isn’t perfect. He made mistakes, but history will remember him for his effectiveness in fighting the virus. The current attempt to rewrite history is both shameful and disturbing. I’d go so far as to say that such actions are straight out of the communist playbook.

From the Racket News

Healthcare, insurance, and the prospect of poverty

2026-07-23T10:41:18.254-04:00

I normally sleep pretty well, but I woke up in the middle of the night last night thinking about Ben Sasse. If you don’t recall, Sasse is a former Nebraska senator who announced a few months ago that he has pancreatic cancer. There’s really no kind of cancer that anyone should want to get, but pancreatic cancer is one of the ones that most of us emphatically hope that we never end up with. Because it is hard to diagnose and there are few treatment options for the advanced disease, the lifespan of pancreatic cancer patients tends to be pretty short.

At least, it did. There are now a growing number of experimental treatments for the dread cancer, and one of them reportedly shrank Sasse’s tumor. I don’t know if Sasse will survive the disease, but at least he has some hope for a positive outcome.

Image by Chat GPT

Many people think I never say anything good about Donald Trump, but I applaud him for signing the Right to Try Act in 2018. This law allows terminally ill patients to try experimental treatments, and I suspect that Sasse’s good news may be related to the law.

From there, I started thinking about my own experience with prostate cancer. After almost three and a half years, my PSA levels are still very low, which is much better than I had hoped for at the time.

My nighttime reverie continued as I pondered the US healthcare system. Sasse is a former senator and university president with a lot of money and connections. I had few connections, but I did have savings and good insurance. It was a good thing too.

If you’ve never had a serious illness, you may not know much about the process. As most of you are aware, health insurance in the US is tied to the employer for the vast majority of us. Whether you have good insurance or not depends not only on your choices, but those of your employer. You may have the choice of a few different plans, such as high or low deductible options, but they’re probably all with the same insurer unless you forgo the company contribution and strike out on your own.

The same goes for disability insurance. Your company may not offer it. You might not have elected to buy the coverage if it does.

If you have an illness severe enough to be out of work for a long time, the company will typically use your vacation or PTO (Paid Time Off) days first. Then there is short-term disability and long-term disability with separate time limits if you’re still sick. If you aren’t aware, long-term disability insurance does not pay your full salary; about 50 to 60 percent is typical.

So, in the case of a long-term illness or injury, you have more bills than normal coming in, especially if you chose the high-deductible plan, and at the same time, your earnings have just been cut by about half. On top of that, if you stay out long enough, you may have to start paying your full health insurance premium out of pocket.

On top of all that, if the condition lasts long enough, you might lose your job when benefits run out. That doesn’t mean the illness goes away, but it does mean that you might lose your insurance.

That quick walk-through illustrates the insanity of the American health insurance system. Our current system is only marginally more market-based than the national health insurance systems in those “socialized medicine” countries. The consumer doesn’t have much choice under either model.

In both cases, the health care access is set up to serve people who aren’t very sick. It’s easy to get preventive care or antibiotics, but in the national health care model, you might go on a waiting list for a vital surgery. In the US, you can probably get the surgery scheduled quickly, but you may not be able to pay for it, and the odds are good that you won’t have any idea how much it costs until it’s over.

For most of my life, the conservative line was about personal responsibility, but under our current system, you can do everything right and still be bankrupted by a medical emergency. If you have a serious, long-term illness, you’d better hope that you can get added to your spouse’s insurance. If you aren’t married, start looking. It also helps with auto insurance.

In my prostate cancer experience, I was out of work for three months. I had bought the disability insurance and was covered on that for two months. The rub is that after my doctor cleared me to go back to work, I had to wait on the FAA to renew my flight physical. Because this was a paperwork issue, rather than a medical problem, the disability payments stopped. That was an oversight (since corrected) by my employer, and I can thank Senator Raphael Warnock’s office for helping to speed my paperwork along. (I contacted my local Republican congressman first and never got a response.)

I don’t know what the best solution is. I’m not a fan of government-run healthcare any more than I’m a fan of employer-run healthcare. Having said that, putting governments in charge at least makes more sense than tying medical insurance to a job, which makes none at all.

The healthcare problem also impacts the retirement problem. If people spend their retirement savings on medical issues or drain their IRAs to survive while out on medical leave, they are likely to run out of money later in life, just when they need it most.

There has to be a better way, and I think it will take both sides working together to find it. We owe it to ourselves to create a system that can supply timely, effective care without destroying our finances.

Cancer is already a nightmare. The healthcare system shouldn’t make it worse.

From the Racket News

The war on expertise

2026-07-21T18:47:34.807-04:00

You may be wondering why we didn’t cover Trump’s crazy speech last week. I didn’t watch it, and it seems like mainstream sources have done well at debunking Trump’s claims. The speech seems to have even dropped off the Republican radar quickly, but what else should we expect from a Republican presidential address that boiled down to the Democrats can run free and fair elections (2016 and 2024), but Trump can’t (2020). I think Republicans often want to forget that Trump, not Biden, was president in 2020.

Instead, I want to spend a little time on two instances that underscore how the Trump Administration is undermining public safety. Both problems arose within the past few days, but the basis for the problems were laid months ago.

Credit social media screenshot

The first example was the Blue Angel low pass in Florida. Over the weekend, videoemerged of the Blue Angels flying extremely low and fast over Pensacola Beach, near the home base of the team.

My immediate reaction was that, while this made for cool video, it was extremely dangerous to the crowd. Federal Aviation Regulations prohibit low “buzz jobs” and aerobatics over crowds. Military regulations mirror the civil rules.

Saying this online was like kicking over an anthill. Commenters came out of the woodwork to deny any danger and claim that the team knew exactly what it was doing. These attitudes persisted even after the team leader called the pass “unsafe,” and the pilot of the aircraft in question told a congresswoman that he miscalculated the turn.

The Navy handled this well. The team leader said the team would debrief and correct the problem. Initially, the Navy said it would conduct a safety review of the incident.

It takes courage to admit a mistake, especially one as well-documented as the Pensacola pass. The pilot, the Blue Angels, and the Navy should be commended for handling the problem head-on and honestly.

The Navy’s civilian leadership did not perform as well. Defense Secretary Hegseth and Acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao rushed to quash the review before it started, Hegseth tweeting, “The flyovers will continue until morale improves.”

The big problem is Hegseth is creating a climate that encourages risky behavior and dismissiveness of safety regulations. This is especially true since the underwhelming concern about the Blue Angels incident follows closely on the heels of other low flying incidents involving Army AH-64 Apache helicopters in Tennessee and South Carolina. It seems the only regulations that concern Hegseth involve PT and shaving.

This sort of attitude gets people killed, and both the Blue Angels and the Air Force Thunderbirds have had fatal crashes in the past, despite the faith of those who believe they can do no wrong. In fact, invulnerability is one of the five hazardous attitudes pilots are trained to avoid. (The others are anti-authority, impulsivity, macho, and resignation. Of these, four easily apply to Hegseth and the Administration.) Crashes at airshows are not unheard of, which is why aircraft aerobatics are kept a safe distance from the crowd.

The second example of a safety problem is the nationwide cyclospora outbreak of parasitic diarrhea. Under RFK’s leadership of the Department of Health and Human Services, the CDC decreased monitoring of parasitic foodborne infections and the FDA suspended the Foodnet infection tracking program. Further, there is widespread agreement that the Trump Administration’s cuts left the CDC and FDA unable to manage the crisis effectively.

So far, the government has given mixed messaging on the outbreak. The source of the outbreak was originally traced to lettuce imported from Mexico by Taylor Farms and used at Taco Bell, but now the government says that, even though the test that it performed on the lettuce yielded a false positive, Taylor Farms is still the prime suspect.

Americans are learning the hard way what some of those federal workers in the bloated bureaucracies do. Or did. Prior to DOGE, we may have had a government that was microscopically larger than the one we have today, but it was a government that effectively protected us all but the normal variety of Taco Bell diarrhea.

DOGE enacted massive cuts to the federal workforce, but the government is still spending more than ever. The minuscule savings were squandered on the Iran war and massive explosion of the anti-immigration police state (which has been involved in more bad shootings recently as well as arresting a legal Chinese immigrant who sought asylum after working as a human rights lawyer in the PRC).

Right-wingers thought the government was malevolent before, but under the Trump Administration, we’ve seen the altruistic segments of government eviscerated while the unaccountable (and poorly vetted and trained) police state has grown. The anti-government right has created their worst nightmare, and they don’t realize it.

The common thread between these two incidents is an antipathy to expertise, whether it be the aviation safety experts who make it possible for multimillion dollar fighter jets to fly within inches of either or the medical experts who made sure that our food supplies were not tainted. If you listen to the MAGAs, they’re all a bunch of nerds.

Part of the problem is that our safety protocols are so good that people have forgotten what it’s like to have frequent, devastating crashes or disease outbreaks. The one big recent problem that affected the American people, the COVID-19 pandemic, is not perceived as real by a large number of MAGA supporters.

This line of thinking has taken us to a point where experts doing their jobs are either forced out or ignored. These aren’t the last crises that we will see under the Trump Administration, and all we can do is hope that career military commanders can enforce discipline, the remnants of the scientific corps at HHS can hold the line against microscopic invaders, and that career experts in other agencies can hunker down and be there when we need them.

It will take years to complete the rebuilding of the government agencies that Trump has gutted. The rebuilding can’t even start for another two years, but voters can slow the destruction by electing politicians in November who will hold the Trump Administration accountable.

From the Racket News

Let your heart match your words

2026-07-12T09:23:17.277-04:00

Not long ago, I was ordained as a deacon in my church. One of the duties of deacons here is to periodically deliver a short meditation during the communion portion of the service. Today is my first time delivering this meditation. This is what I plan to say.

I grew up about an hour from Athens, and for part of my young adulthood, I attended the University of Georgia (Go Dawgs!) and worked in Athens while I commuted back and forth over an hour of country roads.

Image by ChatGPT

One of my memories of that drive is being behind an old car with a lot of environmentalist bumper stickers that said things like “the Earth is your mother” and “give a hoot, don’t pollute.”

What made this encounter memorable is that, as I drove behind this car, I was nearly hit by a steady stream of cup, bags, food wrappers, and other assorted garbage that was being tossed out both sides of the car.

If you know me, you know one of my pet peeves is people throwing garbage on the side of the road, especially my road, but what struck me at the time was that it was pretty funny that a car with all those environmentalist stickers was throwing such a high volume of garbage on the road.

They obviously didn’t believe what their stickers said.

About the same time, I heard a DC Talk song called “What If I Stumble.” The song started with this introduction:

The greatest single cause of atheism in the world today

Is Christians who acknowledge Jesus with their lips

Then walk out the door and deny him by their lifestyle.

That is what an unbelieving world simply finds unbelievable.

How many of us are like the people in that car, not acting out the teachings that we claim to believe in?

This might not be a salvation matter for us. We know that all have sinned, and we know that we will go on sinning because we are human, but God’s grace and our repentance cover our sin.

But the flip side is that I’ve had people who I know tell me that they don’t want to be a Christian because they see so many Christians who obviously don’t believe what they say. Personally, I don’t want my actions to be the reason someone turns away from Christ. We need to remember that Paul wrote that we are Christ’s ambassadors (2 Corinthians 5:20), and ambassadors are typically on their best behavior because they want their actions to reflect well on their home country.

So that leads us to the question of how Christians should act. There are lots of Bible passages that give us guidance on how to act, as well as how not to act. I’m not going to try to hit all these because they said I need to keep this to about three or four minutes, and the pastor might get mad if I cut into his time. Besides, Christianity really is not a religion of rigid rules. It took me a few decades to realize that.

What I will do is direct you to one particular verse. It’s a verse that you find in three of the gospels (Matthew 22:34–40; Mark 12:28–34; Luke 10:25–28), but I’ll cite Matthew 22:36-40.

When Jesus was asked which commandment was the greatest, he answered, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’”

So straight from Jesus, if you aren’t being loving, you’re doing it wrong. A lot of the behavioral guidelines that we find in the Bible are really just ways to help us be more loving to others. In fact, Jesus said this when he said, “All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

Sometimes that’s easier said than done. People can be annoying and hard to love, and it’s the ones who are difficult to love that we really need to try harder with.

There’s a meme that says following Jesus’s example might include flipping tables, but if we closely at what got Jesus angry, it was religious hypocrites and people who profited from worship at the temple. He sat down talked with the sinners and prostitutes and tax collectors and Romans. The dregs of society.

For us, the list of people we should love includes the people who bug you, the people who bully you, the people who cut you off in traffic and just don’t know how to drive, people who persecute you, your enemies (Matthew 5:44), atheists, trans people, other ethnic groups, foreigners (Leviticus 19:33-34), gays, immigrants (Deuteronomy 10:19), people of other religions, people of different political parties, and anyone else you can think of.

Love God and love people.

And if there is anyone here who is being pushed away from Christ because of the actions of some of his followers, I’d like to close with another observation from the internet:

“To be honest, if I was a Christian because of Christians, I’d likely be an atheist by now. But I’m a Christian because of Jesus, and Jesus is pretty freaking awesome.”

Prayer

Lord Jesus, we thank you for your love and mercy. We know that we all fall short of the ideal. Help us to be better ambassadors for you. Help us to live out what we believe.

We pray that you would give us guidance as we relate to others. Help us to see them as you see them. Help us to love them as you love them. Make us instruments of your love.

In Jesus name, Amen.

From the Racket News

Are Democrats blowing it?

2026-07-10T10:30:06.160-04:00

I’ve said for quite a while that 2026 is an election year that is the Democrats’ election to lose. Lately, they seem quite capable of doing exactly that.

The most recent crisis involves the totally predictable implosion of Graham Platner’s Senate campaign in Maine. As I wrote several weeks ago, the red flags were there, including but not limited to an SS tattoo.

Image by ChatGPT

On Monday, the story broke that Platner was being accused of sexual assault by a former girlfriend. Let’s not sugarcoat it. If the allegations are true, Platner is a rapist. And given his history of sexual misconduct, the allegations are credible.

The good news for Democrats is two-fold. First, party officials are doing what they should have done months ago and calling on him to step down. With that move, the party can maintain some shred of moral integrity, unlike Republicans who seem to accept pretty much anything from their nominees these days.

The second piece of good news is that the Maine Democratic Party has a little time. If Platner withdraws by July 13, he can be replaced on the ballot. Democrats have untilJuly 27 to replace him with another nominee, picked by a nominating committee. Even after that deadline, if Platner withdraws by August 25, he must be removed from the ballot. In that case, Democrats could run a write-in candidate.

The bad news is that Platner has to withdraw. Candidates often are the last to understand that their campaign is toast. (See Joe Biden’s 2024 campaign as exhibit A.) And someone as apparently unstable as Platner might even continue to run out of spite, taking down the Maine Democrats hopes to unseat Susan Collins as revenge for abandoning him.

Time will tell, but at this point, Platner should definitely be abandoned.

In the final analysis, Platner’s latest scandal may prove to be a boon to Democrats. Getting Platner out while there is still time to replace him could salvage Democratic chances in Maine as well as remove a liability to Democrats elsewhere.

But wait, there’s more!

At least 11 Democratic candidates for various offices are self-described socialists. Candidates backed by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) have won congressional primaries in Colorado and New York, where the seats are reliably blue, and are competing in Michigan and Wisconsin, where they are not.

About 39 percent of voters have a positive view of socialism, so socialist candidates start at a general election disadvantage. Only about 21 percent of Americans view the DSA favorably. Worse, most voters who approve of socialism are young, the cohort least likely to vote.

Nominating socialists also makes Democratic candidates nationwide vulnerable to Republican attacks that they are socialist and/or communist (similar to tying the party to a Nazi-tattooed sex predator). The two are not the same, but few understand the distinction, and Republicans are happy to paint with a broad brush.

In fact, the Republican tactic of dumbing down socialism may have contributed to its newfound popularity. For decades now, Republicans have decried everything they don’t like as socialism.

Universal healthcare? Socialized medicine!

Free college? Socialized education!

Higher taxes on the wealthy? Socialized redistribution of income!

As someone pointed out a while back, by painting popular ideas as socialist, Republicans have made socialism sound pretty good to a lot of people.

And that was before Republicans started adopting socialist ideas. Trump has ramped up federal equity stakes in private businesses under the guise of national security, often with a “golden share” or executive, if not controlling, interest. By definition, socialism is “governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods.”

I guess if you can’t beat them, join them. File it under “How Republicans learned to stop worrying and love government seizing the means of production as long as it’s Trump.”

Democratic primary voters are not playing it safe, when that’s what they really should be doing if they want to ensure that Trump is blocked from implementing his authoritarian agenda. Especially when it comes to swing states, the safe picks are moderates who have been vetted in other campaigns. Now is not the time to gamble on radicals or newcomers with no electoral experience.

Going further, I’d like to see both parties take a more moderate stance on the issues and a more strident position on morality and decency. I want to see Trump and MAGA defeated, but I don’t want socialist radicals or trumpy Democrats to take their place. Democrats shouldn’t adopt Trump’s depravity any more than they should take up his socialist and authoritarian policies.

Speaking for independents, we want moderation and sanity. We want candidates who are decent people, candidates who we don’t have to dread seeing in the news every day. That shouldn’t be difficult, but partisan voters are making it so.

The crowning irony of all this is that Democrats are likely to win, even with bad candidates (but not Platner). Trump is just that unpopular. In the end, the Republican Trump mania may be what ushers in a socialist boom in the United States.

Thanks for reading The Racket News ™! This post is public so feel free to share it.

FOURTH POLL We ran a quick Independence Day poll on the platform formerly known as Twitter. Eighty-seven percent of respondents prefer to watch firework displays rather than shooting their own.

From the Racket News

Are the Democrats democratic?

2026-07-10T10:21:32.556-04:00

In the wake of Graham Platner’s withdrawal from the Maine Senate, I’ve seen a resurrection of a complaint that Republicans made after Kamala Harris replaced Joe Biden in 2024. The Democrats, some say, are anti-democratic (with a small “d”) because they overrode the will of the primary voters. This is wrong on a couple of counts.

First, and most obvious, is that strictly speaking, the Democratic Party elites did not force either Biden or Platner out. The lie of this claim can be seen through the simultaneous and contradictory claims that Democrats supported both Biden and Platner. It is logically inconsistent that Democrats could both support and undermine Biden and Platner at the same time.

Image by ChatGPT

In reality, what happened was that new information caused both Biden and Platner to lose support abruptly. (It’s fair to say that both should have lost support earlier.) When the two politicians saw that their campaigns were damaged beyond repair and that there was no way forward, both chose to step down for the good of their party and the country.

The second fallacy is that primary elections are party elections, not governmental elections. When Biden and Platner secured their respective nominations, they won only a place on the ballot, not an office. It makes sense that the parties and the states would consider the possibility that a nominee might not make it from the primary to Election Day. There are legal and procedural steps to follow in such an eventuality.

In the same way that there is a procedure to replace elected officials if they resign or die in office, there are procedures to replace party nominees on a ballot. And just as elected officials might be replaced without an election, nominees can be replaced by party leaders. In one fairly recent example, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp appointed Kelly Loeffler to fill the Senate seat left vacant by Johnny Isakson in 2019. Loeffler went on to lose re-election to Raphael Warnock just over a year later. No one said that Kemp was subverting democracy by appointing Loeffer.

Most people don’t understand that primary elections are a fairly recent innovation. Our system of primaries as the dominant means of picking nominees only dates back to the 1970s. The current system was born out of reforms after the turbulence of the 1960s. Prior to the 70s, primaries were a supplement to the traditional convention nominating process. The “smoke-filled rooms.”

Primaries are a failed experiment, in my opinion. They tend to reward extremism rather than electability or competence. The bottom line is that if a group of partisans gets together to select a nominee, they often choose the most partisan option, even if their ideas are not practical and they lack the skills for the job.

The proof for that argument is in the pudding. Candidate quality has decreased sharply over the past few decades. Joe Biden, Graham Platner, Donald Trump, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, and AOC are only a few examples of what the primary system has given us. The flip side is that many of our good, competent leaders from the past would not be fringe enough to win a primary today.

So, no. The Democrats are not undemocratic for abandoning candidates who were flaming out in real time. The replacements of Biden and Platner are examples of democratic responsiveness in action. Not supporting candidates with obvious flaws should be normalized. It’s a good thing. Sticking with candidates who are bad because they are part of your tribe is the problem.

The Republicans shouldn’t be ridiculing Democrats for dropping bad candidates, especially as they rally behind Donald Trump, an adjudicated rapist, and Ken Paxton, a serial philanderer and abuser of office. Loyalty is not an asset if you’re loyal to bad people.

I applaud the decision to dump Platner and encourage him to step aside. Even if the Democrats lose the race, they will have stood up for their principles and morality at the very real risk of alienating the progressive wing of their party. That’s a lot more than I can say for Republicans over the last decade.

From Racket News