Can Democrats Please Just Focus on Beating Republicans? Please?

12 min readOut on the Weekend(Permanent Musical Accompaniment To The Last Post Of The Week From The Blog's Favourite Living Canadian)I missed Tuesday's elections because I was under general anesthesia for most of the day. I did catch both Michigan senatorial candidates and their early morning We're-Still-In-It speeches and all I could conclude was, damn, that Haley Stevens knows how to clear a room. So, it is left to Abdul el-Sayed, a doctor of medicine, to take on former Representative Mike Rogers, whose relationship to this current president can best be called chameleonic, in this vital Senate campaign. The Republicans have already announced their nuanced approach to this race, referring to el-Sayed by his full first name—Abdulrahman—for the same idiotic reason they refer to the former president as Barack Hussein Obama. It's red meat, but it's spoiled, and it carries the prion disease. More significantly, it appears, although god knows why, el-Sayed is being hit for his association with an "influencer" named Hasan Piker, who admittedly has a track record of saying intemperate things. el-Sayed even is being hit by other Democrats on this one.Do we really have to point out how many wingnut talk-show hosts have said intemperate things without losing their clout with conservative candidates? Do we really have to point out that the current president says intemperate things, in one medium or another, every damn hour of every damn day? I really shouldn't have to point this out to Democrats. He's your nominee, dammit. And the best indication of Democratic jelly-belly is the fact that the most useless political organization in the country has lined up behind the nervous caucus. From The New York Times:“We are preparing for the next war that is coming,” said Jonathan Cowan, the president of Third Way, a leading centrist Democratic group, revealing to The New York Times a new $15 million effort between now and 2028 to discredit democratic socialism. Dr. El-Sayed’s win was not the blowout that some pre-election polls had predicted. But his narrow nomination in one of the country’s signature swing states still represented a critical moment for the party’s middle, which had previously sought to cast the far left’s successes as contained within the country’s most urban and liberal corridors. Their fear: Dr. El-Sayed was paving a path for a progressive to seize the party’s presidential nomination in 2028 — and then go on to lose the general election. “It is deeply troubling to see radical, far-left candidates winning in places that are potentially presidential swing states,” Mr. Cowan added.God, put these people on an ice floe and send them off into the northern sea. First, let's get a grip on our terms here. The Third Way people are not "moderates." They are conservative Democrats, and el-Sayed's positions are not "far left." They are well within the mainstream of Democratic opinion and most of them are popular in the country at large. It is no longer 1992. There is a gathering power within the Democratic party and there is absolutely no need to be afraid of it, or of winning.One good illustration of this gathering power is the results of ballot initiatives in solid-red Missouri and Kansas. In the former, citizen initiatives have been successful in pushing back not only against the state's Neanderthal GOP establishment, but also against the mischief wrought by the carefully cultivated conservative majority on the Supreme Court. Through the initiative process, Missouri voters have legalized marijuana and sports betting. They have expanded Medicaid, and they have overturned a near-total abortion ban. All of these victories were won through amending the state constitution via the initiative process. The legislature then attempted last Tuesday to make that process even harder. Their attempt lost, 80 percent to 20. An attempt to eliminate the state's income tax also lost badly.Meanwhile, across the border in Kansas, the state's Republicans have been dissatisfied with how the state Supreme Court has been ruling so, naturally, they sought to change how the justices are selected by making those jobs electable. From NBC News:The move came after the Kansas Supreme Court dealt conservatives some setbacks in recent years, including a 2019 ruling that the state constitution protected the right to an abortion. Voters sided with that decision three years later after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Tuesday’s ballot measure campaign drew more than $12 million in spending on the airwaves, according to the tracking firm AdImpact, with opponents outspending supporters by more than 2-to-1.(By the way, this was another defeat for our favorite vote-suppressing fanatic, Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach. Huzzah.)This is real political power demonstrating what it can do when properly mustered against authoritarian policy goals, and it ought to make Abdul el-Sayed feel good about his campaign.And look, the Republicans of Tennessee have freed us from having to think about Rep. Andy Ogles, his Islamaphobia, and his gun-toting spalpeens. In Michigan's 8th Congressional District, Thomas Smith, who dropped out of the race in July, beat the president's handpicked candidate, Amir Hassan.In case you haven't noticed, libertarian hero Rand Paul is attempting to criminalize the Fifth Amendment. Last week, Dr. Anthony Fauci looked up from the witness table and saw a bunch of Republicans in kangaroo suits and told them to stick the Fifth Amendment in their ears. So, on Thursday, Aqua Buddha got the kangaroo suits together and passed a resolution citing Fauci for contempt of Congress. This farce will proceed to the House, where it will pass because the House majority is full of loons. But Aqua Buddha saw trouble in the Senate, so he McGyver'ed a way around constitutional rights. From Reuters:Republican U.S. Senator Rand Paul on Thursday asked the Justice Department to prosecute Dr. Anthony Fauci for refusing to answer questions about the COVID-19 pandemic after a Senate committee voted to hold the former ​top infectious disease official in contempt of Congress. Paul sent the referral after the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, which he chairs, approved a contempt resolution on a party-line vote with Republicans in ‌favor and Democrats opposed. The resolution accuses Fauci, 85, of failing to obey a congressional subpoena.It is important to remember that Fauci did indeed answer the subpoena. He just didn't answer questions designed to destroy him. By contrast, Rep. Jim Jordan was subpoenaed to appear before the January 6 special committee and simply did not show up. And that Paul's "investigation" runs on innuendo and skunk piss. Here's the tinhorn part, though.Paul sent the referral, a formal request to consider criminal charges, after the contempt finding. But the Kentucky senator, a longtime Fauci antagonist, bypassed a referral vote by the full Senate. He described a full Senate vote as unnecessary. Democrats said Paul was violating Senate rules by ​skipping the vote, which would likely fail to achieve the necessary 60-vote majority, and called the move dangerous and unprecedented.This is the majority in Congress being asked to dedicate itself to the destruction of a public servant who has done nothing in his life except cure diseases and save lives. Because he doesn't trust his fellow senators, several of whom consider him a nasty rash on the body politic, Aqua Buddha has decided to bypass the Senate and hand things over directly to the president's personal law firm down the street.Members of Congress regularly refer matters to the Justice Department ⁠for potential prosecution, ​but such communications carry no special legal weight. In contrast, the department is legally required to consider a referral for contempt of Congress that ​is approved by either the full Senate or the House of Representatives. Stanley Brand, a lawyer specializing in congressional investigations, said Paul's decision to bypass a full Senate vote could render his referral "null and void." "There's no authority for the Justice Department to take up a contempt of Congress prosecution without following ​the procedures specified in the statute," Brand said. "This won't pass muster."All because the government suggested we all wear masks during a pandemic. We are in the hands of the madmen.Items: Senator Lisa Murkowski announced on Friday that she would be voting against Todd Blanche's appointment as the permanent interim Attorney General. Which means that it all hung on...checks notes, pours drink...Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, who handed Blanche the vote he needed, which also gave Murkowski and Susan Collins permission to vote no. Let the puppet show continue.Also: am I the only one who thinks it's odd that we know every move a deformed raccoon in Seattle makes, but it took us this long to find out whether or not the former majority leader of the U.S. Senate is alive?Weekly WWOZ PickTo Click: "Black Night Is Falling" (James Booker). Yeah, I pretty much still love New Orleans.Weekly Visit To The Pathe Archives: Here, from 1926, a hundred years ago this week, is 18-year old American Gertrude Ederle, who was not only the first woman to swim the English Channel but beat the existing record, held by an Italian swimmer, by nearly two hours. (My friend Glenn Stout wrote the definitive book on Ederle and her swim, Young Woman and the Sea.) Ederle also won a gold medal and a pair of bronzes at the 1924 Paris Olympics. She met President Calvin Coolidge, which must have been more of a drag than swimming the Channel, and she even worked some vaudeville, because that's what famous athletes did in the ancient times before they all had podcasts.If at first you don't succeed, pile up them billable hours on the taxpayer's tab.The administration is now 0-21 in lawsuits attempting to get state voter rolls. Now, it seems El Caudillo del Mar-A-Lago wants to go 0-2 on the plain text of the 14th Amendment. From the AP:The president said he was signing two executive actions on immigration, including one limiting the number of people eligible for U.S. citizenship after being born in the United States, while another focused on stopping people from coming to the U.S. to give birth. The written executive order released later Thursday was narrower in scope than the previous one shot down by the Supreme Court and appeared to focus on restricting automatic citizenship to specific categories of people, including children born to adults with connections to foreign embassies or organizations as well as anyone considered an “alien enemy” of the United States.I'm sure that some federal judge or another is going to be fascinated by who exactly the "enemy aliens" are, especially since Stephen Miller has decided to weigh in from his pestilential piehole. From the BBC:"The idea (is) that people come here pretending to be a tourist, pretending to be a visitor," Stephen Miller, homeland security advisor and White House deputy chief of staff for policy, said while standing beside the president on Thursday. "But the real reason they're here is to have a child, to make that child an automatic citizen, (to) leave our country and then have a US citizen child," he said, adding that those children then gain access to welfare benefits, the voting booth, and "all the other rights and privileges that belong solely to Americans...If you're telling a consular officer you're here as a tourist, but your true purpose and intent is to go to a baby mill, give birth and try to mint an American citizen while you're here and you're committing a fraud against the American government""Baby mills" "minting" American citizens. What a puddle of aging vomit this man is.(Miller also has decided that "the Cold War has come home” because of several results in Democratic primaries:“We spent decades fighting a Cold War with the Soviet Union. I choose my words carefully, but I want to say this—that Cold War has come home. It’s here in America. This is the biggest, greatest, most existential struggle this country will ever face. Because if communists get control of House seats, then Senate seats and governors’ mansions, the American dream that for 250 years our heroes bled and died for is gone, and it won’t come back because they will never let you get it back.” Look, Obercommandant Skippy, I lived through the last Cold War and it was pretty damned active over here. And it was people just like you who shilled for it.)Discovery Corner: Hey, look what we found! From ScienceNorway:She had come looking for millstones. These are stones that were used in hand mills or larger mills to grind grain into flour. In the forest at Hyllestad in Western Norway, there had been large-scale production of such millstones from the Viking Age all the way up to the 20th century. Baug was excavating a huge waste heap, also called spoil heaps, at one of the millstone quarries, hoping to obtain more precise dates for when the quarry was in operation. Then, suddenly, there was a stone cross. And another. And another.In total, Baug and her colleagues found the remains of seven stone crosses. Some were small, perhaps intended for churchyards, while a couple were very large. The biggest measured 1.2 metres in length, but it would probably originally have been 2-3 metres tall if it had not broken and been thrown onto the waste heap. "We already knew that stone crosses had been produced in Hyllestad. But to find the very quarry where the stone crosses were made – that was huge!" she says. Once again, accidental discoveries are the best kind of discoveries. We stumble into the manufacturing district of the age of the Vikings.Hey, KRQE, is it a good day for dinosaur news? It's always a good day for dinosaur news!It’s a discovery over 20 years in the making, paleontologists at the new Mexico museum of natural history and science identifying a new dinosaur, from right here in new Mexico, from a 2005 discovery that paleontologists didn’t think much of at the time.”It was initially misidentified as far as what group it was actually from, so even thought it was initially thought it was dinosaurs called dromaeosaurids, things like velociraptor” said Dr. Steven Jasinski.After realizing it wasn’t part of that group about ten years ago, research from Canada and Mexico pushed teams to take another look. “In doing that, we determined there were a lot of features that we had seen that made it different from every dinosaur we have known about." Announcing their confirmation this week, researchers are calling the new dino species the “Dinevenator,” the name paying tribute to the Navajo people native to the San Juan Basin, where the bones were found.I'm telling you, paleontologists. Why waste time sweating and digging in Mongolia when you could simply explore the abandoned desk drawers and back shelves in America's museums? That can make you happy, too.Just an aside—I was the beneficiary of a great surgical team at The Brigham in Boston this week. My primary doctor was Dr. Borna Dabiri, who happens to be Iranian, and I thank god for him and for this country, where he can practice his skills for the betterment of us all.I'll be back on Monday for whatever fresh hell awaits. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake-line and wear the damn masks, and take the damn shots, especially the boosters and any New One. In your spare time, spare a thought for Rep. Max Miller's wife and child, and for the Iranian people, and the Lebanese people and all the other people downrange in our newest war, and all the people in ICE detention, and the Epstein victims, whose trauma is back in the news again, and Eric Swalwell's victims, and the victims of the Canadian wildfires, and also the ones in Spain, and the victims of the floods in Missouri, and the victims of the heat domes, and those affected around the world by wildfires, and the victims of the Venezuelan earthquake, and for the victims of the earthquake in Japan, and the victims and their families in the Tumbler Ridge school shooting in Canada, and for the shooting victims in Austin, and for the families of the victims of the mosque shooting in San Diego, and in Michigan, and in Virginia, and in Louisiana, and for the victims and their families of the shootings in Wilmington, Delaware and Kansas City, and for the families and victims of the mass shooting in Midland, Texas, and for the brilliant journalists of the Washington Post, and for the citizens of the occupied city of Minneapolis and South Burlington, Vermont, and for all the people in the flooded areas of southern Africa, and in the flooded areas in Ireland, and in the flooded areas of Brazil, and for the storm-clobbered, flooded areas of the upper Midwest, including my alma mater, and in Georgia, and for the people affected by the tornados in Mississippi, and for people suffering from the hantavirus outbreak on the Hondius, the outbreaks of measles, the Hegseth Flu down in Texas, the explosive diarrhea bug, and the Legionnaire's disease outbreak in Harlem, and the victims of the heat wave in Europe, and for our LGBTQ+ citizens, who deserve so much more from this country than they're getting.