10.Nov.2026

Now We Act

Timothy Snyder gives Senator Chris Van Hollen his say in an unscripted conversation on leadership, at this moment of moral recognition, crisis, and opportunity.

Snyder: So much of authoritarianism is people accepting things that are not normal.

Van Hollen: What authoritarians hope for is for people to shut and go away, so they have the airwaves to themselves...

This was an election that was a referendum on Trump's corruption, on his wars, on his cruelty, on his complete indifference to the plight of working Americans who were being squeezed. So they were firing Trump and his policies, but they weren't hiring Democrats per se. They're investing hope in Democrats, and we do need to follow through. And we need to do it quickly. And we need to address these kitchen table issues, and the political corruption issues because they do go together.

Good, 20 minutes' worth with someone who might be our next Senate Majority Leader. Snyder's subtack post adds context from his POV:

"I believe that voters have given Democrats a chance, and that Democrats have to take that chance, quickly, radically, demonstratively, showing concern for the daily difficulties people face, and getting on the right side of the issue of corruption. Affordability and accountability are connected, as Americans now understand: you can’t get to the underlying economic issues that have made life unaffordable without breaking the hold of corruption and addressing inequality.

"Americans think that the system is broken — and they are right — but they also think that Trump is far, far more corrupt than the system — and there they are also right. This is what gives Democrats their once-in-a-lifetime chance: to show that they are better than they have been, to show that they are better than the system, to show that the system can be changed."

9.Nov.2026

Burgeoning employment opportunity

There was a two-page spread in the four-part front sections of the Sunday NYT, pages 10 & 11, featuring a "First edition in binding" (it looks quite beautiful) of George Orwell's 1949 classic, peering ahead 35 years, and 40 more after that, to today. The Over Holland Foundation (of? and?) The Netherlands leads with a 48 pt banner BEFORE BIG BROTHER BUILDS ANOTHER DATA CENTER, urging a federal moratorium to "allow a pause to consider and block the threat." And this incentive:

"Should it be realized before February 15, 2027—Washington's Birthday—we weill gift this unique first edition of 1984 to the White House Library."

(That's actually "Presidents' Day" next year, but ok. As a dutiful student in the 1960s, I learned about February 22. And the 12th. It was 1968 when George and Abe were merged into the third Monday, which, ironically, will never be on the 12th or the 22nd. The art of compromise.)

I'm not sure that's the right repository for such a fine work, given the current occupant's limited predilection for reading, and excessive predilection for what Orwell predicted:

"Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered."

And every ballroom reconstructed. Have you seen my basement kitchen, and my big beam?

Speaking of ghosts, HCR's November 8 Letter from an American evoked one for me, Richard Nixon ranting about the persecutions being visited upon him. Just a few close aids and that secret tape-recording device were listening, but now, King Lear has his own antisocial medium to type into.

"[H]e insisted that the Democrats are “threatening a lot of people…just because they happen to be Republicans, or Republican supporters.” He said that the Democrats’ promises to investigate the administration are themselves crimes and that he is ordering the Department of Justice (DOJ) to investigate,"

which of course Todd Blanche will be more than happy to do, because he'll do anything for thug, no matter how servile, idiotic, unethical, and illegal. We have to presume he's already written his own pardon, awaiting the ziggy-ziggy-zig of a Sharpie.

The old plot devices are polished shiny from overuse. Every accusation is a confession. "These SLEAZEBAGS should go to jail for what they are doing!" Yes sir, so say we all. After the raving section, this:

"As Perry Stein and Jeremy Roebuck of the Washington Post wrote today, congressional Democrats are already building the investigative staff of the committees they will begin to lead in January. In a line that shows just how much things have changed, Stein and Roebuck write that the congress members have “been hiring from the large pool of former career prosecutors who were fired or departed from the Justice Department since the start of Trump’s second term.”

Delicious.

4.Nov.2026

The day after

Color me surprised to have thug concede the results from the election he and his sub-thugs did their damndest to subvert, right up to the end. The top thug "told The New York Times that we would accept the election results," which used to go without saying, but he's still talking baseless smack about the 2020 election he lost, so it's a step.

What would the alternative have been after an election that is prompting geomorphological metaphors. A landslide, "seismic victories," or "a night of seismic triumph," rending the metaphor, "a tectonic upset," a blue tsunami, and so on. Then the boxing day: a rout, a drubbing, a Big Blue Bludgeoning.

Texas, South Carolina, Georgia, Kansas, Iowa, Maine (farewell Susan Collins!), the House, the Senate, kaBOOM!

Speaking of sub-thugs, Joyce Vance has some action items for the new congress:

"Congress can insist that the Article I branch of government exercise the power of the purse and use it to check presidential excess. It can hold oversight hearings, demand answers, and usher in a return to accountability. And it can impeach and convict officials whose conduct in office richly merits it, like Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Attorney General Todd Blanche, and remove them from office. That can’t happen soon enough."

"Especially Todd Blanche," after his election day stunt, "sending letters to about 20 Democrats informing them they might be targets" of the Wrath of Thug, for their role in getting a second Dan Sullivan on the ballot for Alaska's senate race, after the Alaska Supreme Court ruled there wasn't a problem having them both. (Especially with ranked choice voting!)

The NYT reports that "It could still be a long wait for a call in Alaska’s Senate race. Remaining mail-in ballots will not be fully counted for days, and if neither candidate receives a majority of the vote, a ranked-choice tabulation will occur on Nov. 18."

Right now, Mary Peltola has a 737 vote edge (with more than 213,000 votes counted) over Dan S., incumbent. The also-ran Republican, Gerald Heikes, and the "other" Daniel J. Sullivan Jr., have 8,446 votes between them. "Go figure." For quite a while. It's apparently too complicated (or has not been published by the state?) to report the current ranked choice stats that kick in if nobody has a majority, which it looks like they may not..

In the meantime, the Dems (and allies) have at least 54 senate seats, and 237 seats in the house (with fifty races still too close to call there).

More than enough to impeach a few sub-thugs, but not enough to convict without some cooperation from the enabling GOP.

Election Day, 2026

You're voting, right?

We cast our ballots two weeks ago Monday, "opening day" for Ada Co. early voters, ready to be pollworkers today. But there were ample volunteers* and so we were not called. Then we were asked to work early voting at Meridian City Hall for the last two days of the 10 "early" days, and then unasked for last Friday, after we put in a full day on Thursday.

It's been 50-some years since I first pulled a lever, back in Wisconsin, and I can count the elections I've missed on one hand with fingers left over. I can't imagine not voting, which makes the weeks-long GOTV effort slightly surreal. But necessary, I know.

Thom Hartmann's "DAILY TAKE" email starts by reporting
"58.6 MILLION OF YOU voted in advance ahead of today’s official midterm elections," part of his "tracking the lead-up to today, reporting on the dirty tricks Trump and his cronies are planning."

The question of the day: Are GOP Voter Purges the Hidden Reason Pollsters Keep Getting Elections Wrong? Starting with a bit of recent history, as "the modern Republican purge machine got up to speed,"

"after the 2000 election showed how Jeb Bush’s purges of Black Florida voters just before the election handed the presidency to his brother. (Heavily Black Leon County’s election supervisor later testified that over 50,000 legal voters were disenfranchised by Jeb Bush’s voter purges, and Bush “won” by 537 votes)."

The Brennan Center for Justice's Voter Purges project "works to ensure that [cleaning up voter rolls is] nondiscriminatory and [does] not disenfranchise eligible voters." And they have more than a dozen state-specific articles on Limits on Voter Eligibility Challenges.

The Southern Poverty Law Center offered a "weekend read" 7 years ago with the punch line that's still punching, in the hed: If your vote didn’t matter, they wouldn’t fight so hard to block it.

If you ain't done it yet, DO IT TODAY, for democracy's sake.

2.Nov.2026

'Twas the night before election day

And I had a lot going on today, none of it election-related, all of it unplanned. My outing on the day was a dark-early walk, with the waning crescent moon high in the sky, accompanied by Mars, Jupiter, and Regulus. I was out without glasses, and my phone's "night mode" was blown out by the sun bouncing off the skinny moon.

And now it's gone late, but too early for tomorrow's pins and needles, so I'll just close with Joyce Vance's "Civil Discourse" post: SCOTUS Tells Trump No. It's about damn time!

"There is no opinion, so we don’t know what the Court’s reasoning was. We don’t know whether the decision was unanimous or split, and if it was split, who voted which way. But we do know that the Supreme Court declined to let Trump interfere in the election in California at this late date. It rejected DOJ’s request, which would have forced the state to deal with the junk list of voters the administration thinks might not be citizens....

"The Yiddish word “shanda” comes to mind. It means a shame, a disgrace, a scandal, and an embarrassment—all rolled into one. Scandalously bad behavior. Shanda aptly captures Donald Trump’s efforts to interfere with the election, and I’m relieved that the Supreme Court didn’t let Trump get away with the stunt he tried to pull in California."

1.Nov.2026

Stop me if you've heard this one

After the New York Times threw a bombshell into the Alaskan senate race, they are providing a little fair and balance for someone not on the ballot (but says he wants you to pretend he is) with today's Vol. CLXXVI, No. 61,055 top headline:

Trump's Speech Becomes More Vulgar and Muddled
"His Appearances Onstage at 80 Are Raising Questions About Age and Stability."

Just now, really? But they're not wrong. It's not BREAKING NEWS, even though his vulgarity and instability have been breaking the country since before his horrific second term. It's also not at the top of their home page on the web, but scroll down to the "NEWS ANALYSIS" by Peter Baker and Dylan Freedman, Threats, Gaffes and Men’s Posteriors: Trump’s Talk Gets Wilder.

"A Times review of the president’s public speeches finds that he is more profane, more absolutist, longer-winded and less coherent than he was in 2016."

The lede:

"As he opened his speech at a recent campaign rally in Greenville, N.C., President Trump told the story of the Willie Horton crime case that helped sink the presidential campaign of the Democrat Michael S. Dukakis in 1988.

"And then, 30 minutes later, still speaking at the same rally to the same audience from the same lectern, Mr. Trump told the same Willie Horton story all over again, using some of the same language (and getting the facts wrong both times)."

Dukakis and 1988 were 38 years ago, so you need to be in your mid-40s to have any of that in your own experience. (ICYMI, George Herbert Walker Bush rode Ronald Reagan's coattails to win his first and only term as president, and sort of won the "first" Gulf War without decapitating Iraq, but then sort of reneged on his "read my lips, no new taxes" schtick, and lost to Bill Clinton and Al Gore in '92.) The NYT piece has a link to the whole bloody transcript from Roll Call, which starts with this:

"Thank you very much. I said do I need a coat? Do I need an overcoat? They said, well, it's very marginal, sir, very marginal. So, I said, you know, I'd rather not wear one. I gotta show I'm all man. We're all men. We're all men. We're women. We're whatever the hell we are. But -- But I know one thing. There's only two of us, right? There's not seven of us. There's not six of us. Hello, North Carolina. This is great. I hope -- I hope that you saw the plane fly right over your head. Did anybody notice? Some people aren't quite with it and they might not have noticed it."

Low AF1 flyovers being his latest personal thrill. He hasn't scraped bottom yet, but he's definitely on the way!

The word cloud of the word cloud includes "forgetful and repetitive" (did I say that already?), long-winded, more profane, absolutist (and don't forget prevaricative), more all-or-nothing words like “always,” “never,” “everything” and “totally,” angry, vulgar, garbled, abnormal, inappropriate, "his baffling fixation with admiring men’s posteriors," outrageous, the "freaking genius" who keeps clearing the low bar of the quick test to screen for Alzheimer’s disease or other cognitive impairment that he's weirdly taking over and over and over. Did I say long-winded? He's doubled his average stumper, now stem-winding close to an hour and a half. And really, he should have said much, much less.

"Even Mr. Trump seems astonished at times by what comes out of his mouth — and by how much his supporters embrace him nonetheless. “I could say the stupidest things and you’d clap. ‘Oh, I love you so,’” he marveled [in Clarksville, Tennessee]."

raveling

Tom von Alten