Mitch's Blog

I usually oppose Christmas decorations before Thanksgiving, but I’ll make an exception here because it’s so clever.

It’s on one side of a corner unit of a condo complex. On the other side is this toy village, which I’ve shared here before. I suspect the same creative person did both.

Hegseth has written multiple books describing is conspiracy theories that the US is ruled by a Communist conspiracy launched by Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin and which is now embodied in the Democratic Party, writes Jonathan Chait at The Atlantic.

He believes officers who obeyed orders from Obama and Biden — in other words, officers who did their sworn duty to obey the lawful orders of their commander-in-chief — are traitors who should be dealt with accordingly.

He believes Democrats are traitors who should be overthrown by any means necessary, and he makes no exemptions for any Democrat (including me!).

Chait:

A defense secretary with a tenuous grip on reality, who can’t differentiate foreign enemies from domestic political opponents, and who seems to exist in a state of permanent hysteria is a problem that the United States has never had to survive. The main question I was looking to answer when I started reading Hegseth’s collected works was whether he would follow a Trump command to shoot peaceful protesters. After having read them, I don’t think he would even wait for the order.

Marie Gluesenkamp Perez won a “long-shot Democratic campaign for Congress in a solidly Republican, heavily rural part of Washington State…. FiveThirtyEight estimated her chance of victory at a mere 2 percent. But she won, defeating a burgeoning star of the MAGA movement named Joe Kent,” writes Michelle Goldberg at the New York Times.

Gluesenkamp Perez, whose father immigrated from Mexico, ran an auto shop with her husband and lived in a house they’d built themselves. Her campaign emphasized both her blue-collar bona fides and her support for abortion rights, and she was frank in her denunciations of Donald Trump’s authoritarianism….

But if many on the left were delighted by her victory, they were disappointed by how often she broke with her party once she was in office. Gluesenkamp Perez voted to scrap Joe Biden’s plan for student debt relief. She supported a Republican bill to bar the use of public lands to house migrants and a resolution censuring her colleague Rashida Tlaib for her anti-Israel rhetoric.

…

I’ve heard you say that there’s no “one weird trick” that will end the Democratic Party’s woes. But it seems like maybe the closest thing to one weird trick would just be recruiting more working- and middle-class people to run for office.

Yes. I don’t think more lawyers running for office is the solution here.

Given that you won in a Trump district, you must have won some percentage of Trump voters. When you talk to people who voted for both you and Donald Trump, what do they tell you? Where is the center of that Venn diagram?

Probably cost of living and border security.

Was it just that they felt like you both cared about those issues? Or did they feel like you both had solutions?

It has been a priority for me. The world I’m living in, I’m going to the grocery store and seeing people take stuff out of their cart. Fentanyl is just running rampant. A lot of us felt like Joe Biden’s administration did not take it seriously, and there was a very, very late pivot on the border.

I think there are voters who see Trump and I as real people who are candid. They don’t agree with us about everything, but they have a sense that I’m telling them what I actually think and am listening to them with curiosity and honesty.

On the question of whether Trump is “marching us toward fascism.”

I think one of the dangerous things about that line of questioning is that democracy is not based on a binary vote for president. It is a muscle in normal, ordinary Americans who are showing up to volunteer at school, who are helping their neighbors out, who have a relationship with their community. It is all of these ways that we live our lives. And so when you say it’s just about one person, I think you damage the long-term muscle to resist a drift.

You’ve been forthright in support of the rights of trans people, which Joe Kent tried to use against you, especially when it came to things like trans women in sports. How did you navigate an issue that proved so difficult for Democrats nationally?

I do not think that is why Democrats lost the presidential race. He tried to come for me on it and it did not work.

Because it wasn’t a priority for your voters?

That’s right. In town halls and things like that, people are talking about, like, Spirit Lake and flooding in the Chehalis River Valley. I think views are nuanced on this, and there is some electoral liability for Democrats, but it’s not an Achilles' heel.

She favors reforms such as expanding the House and ranked-choice voting as means of bringing greater representation to the US government.

I think 90 percent of Americans really do agree about 90 percent of the issues, and instead we are allowing 10 things to push us into camps that are not going to build a coalition that could actually pass laws. So power continues to accrue to the most senior members and the least representative districts.

The framework here is that it is a bipartisan, equally divided commission that is thinking in large terms about what will deliver the most utility, not something just for a particular area. If we want more normal, working-class people here, we need electoral systems that open the door to more people participating.

I think rural America has not been well served by single-party control, and I also think our current system means that the most bipartisan members in the middle are also the ones who have to fight for their lives every election. That’s a lot of energy, right? It’s exhausting. It’s hard on your family, and it eliminates the deal makers.

You live in a community where Trump won. How many people in your district do you think voted for him because they want him to do the things he promised, like set up immigrant detention camps and use the Justice Department to take revenge on his enemies? And how many do you think voted for him because they don’t believe he’ll do those things?

When you’re fixing a car, right, I would much rather have it make the same noise predictably. Like, it always clunks when I turn left. Whatever it is, a predictable problem is much better than an unpredictable one. And so that confidence that this person is not trying to make themselves acceptable to you. They’re not putting out celebrity surrogates. They’re just showing up, and you can take it or leave it.

I read the book when I was about 12 and thought it was amazing. It was my first exposure to the type of main character I would learn, years later, is called an “antihero.” I loved the worldbuilding, the imagined technology, and how the characters interacted with it. Some scenes were just dialogue, characters describing what machines were doing and what they were doing to try to get the machines to obey them, and I loved that.

I read it several times as a teen-ager but not since. I wonder whether I would love it today.

Good cover too. Captured the spirit of the book.

It occurs to me now that “Yesterday’s Children” echoes “The Caine Mutiny.”

It was the kind of machine you’d see behind the counter at a Starbucks or in a cafe that serves fancy coffee drinks. They had hooked up a generator and a five-gallon water tank. I asked one of the men what was happening; he said it was a joint promotion between a local running club and a British shoe brand coming to the US.

When we returned that way again about 30 minutes later, a dozen runners were standing around, and they’d set up a 7-foot high shelf unit with cubbies of running shoes for the runners to try the shoes.

You can barely see the coffee machine in the photo above, peeking out behind the cluster of men in the center.

They offered me coffee, but I declined. I do not think about drinking coffee along with strenuous exercise.

Texas education officials are expected to vote this week on a public school curriculum that focuses on Christianity.

From the curriculum:

What is the Golden Rule?
The Sermon on the Mount included many different lessons. Some of these included do not judge others; do not seek revenge, or try to get even with someone; and give to the needy. Beyond the Sermon on the Mount, there are many rules included throughout the Bible. Jesus said that the Golden Rule sums up all of the important teachings from scripture. “So in everything, do unto others as you would have done unto you."'

These are the same types of people who claim, perhaps even sincerely, that Christmas isn’t a Christian holiday because so much of the celebration is secular.

John Gruber:

“Do not judge others; do not seek revenge, or try to get even with someone; and give to the needy” – the very words that Donald Trump himself lives by.