Mrs. Smith goes to Washington, though it is a wackadoodle Mrs. Smith. An every person — a nice MAGA hat wearing neighbor. Good person to have a beer with, if you are into that position of conversation, and can shake off full implications. I may even defend the supposed “Jewish Space Lasers”. This was never Jewish weather control devices; it was the Rothschild weather devices. And, you know, look up the one about Francis Bacon being the real writer of Shakespeare plays, a conspiracy theory that was effectively endorsed by the Rocky And Bullwinkle, and something that there are no Jewish people present in– yet, look it up on the Internet and the next link for the thing will be… oh, they call it a pipeline, don’t they?

And nowhere in her late foray into media did anyone ask her, “So, what happened with January 6?”, which is sort of the entry point I have on whether there is any, even a scintilia, of rehabilitation, or if she just got blasted into reality — she signed up for Trump on behalf of fighting “migrant crime” and an incoherent economic populism with the social populism, and at least an adjacent qanon, and found Trump stands for nine of it or little of it — they got their ice agents and prisons and that is about it.

And her reasoning makes sense. There is no “Happy Warrior” cause in a House minority under a Trump Republican Party. This is where the likes of Congresswoman Crockett fall down in belittling her withdrawal — “after a few weeks of ridicule from a handful of differences”. Because, Crockett has a set of principals and causes she would continue working on and against and messaging in a party minority position, with no party stuck beholden to some personality.

A problem comes in, though. In describing her reason for leaving, Marjorie Taylor Greene cites that swamp, bipartisan, corrupt. Sure. Funny thing, a common Republican comment on Nancy Pelosi is buying the amount of money she has now versus when she entered Congress. They begin to do try this with Alexandria Ocasio Vortex — with her it is to belittle her bar-tending job. Do you like AOC’s proposed legislation on stock trading for contractor companies Congress votes on? Marjorie Taylor Greene moves up her bank account off of Palantir stock. Because she, after all, part of the bipartisan swamp.

Whacking and managing to reassemble the algorithm of the personalized YouTube page view, I do have the convenience of getting the side by side on what dominates Fox News versus an assortment of Democratic or liberal (or anti-Trump Republican) feeds. Fox News carries on with the Civil War in the Democratic Party — curious mixings of who to side next to Schumer. They do sneak through the big story — Epstein — in a “mighty suspicious timing”, the edict from on high of messaging from the Republican Party and Trump. Actually if we wanted to expedite the timing to sometime earlier, Johnson could have sworn in Adelita Grijalva earlier — the timing was to the discharge petition as much as anything.

The liberal sphere gives a bit of a range — eventually someone does land on my gambit that, in this great “Traitorous 8 Democrats!” (and Schumer) is… the three Senators you should hate for their messaging at the end of this are Shaheen, Fetterman, and Angus King … on this point, I do finally see someone drop in the spectre of Angus King himself. Fetterman has already transitioned from being a Fox News bogeyman and figure of mockery to Fox News’s favorite Democrat with corollary opposite for Internet-plugged Democrats.

We do get a question — “Where’s JD Vance?”. In the lightest of tin-foil hat speculations, more to the point the Kremlinology of things, it is easy to speculate – – preparations are being made for the Trump downfall, and as Ford and Nixon comparisons go this is a “Welcome to Hell”. (The “Long National Nightmare” mutates.). But as though noting his sudden disappearance out of podcast and socal media land, and speculation of assembling a post-Trump reappearance for Vance version 3 or 4, a Fox News appearance pops in, the images with him standing lovingly behind Trump.

Curious on where Gutfeld and/or “The Five” have for “AOC just made this up!” A stray comment along the lines that “I have Trump supporters asking about joining a Democratic Socialist Party!” The answer on that is lightly complicated. Or, i are now in the interest of examining the seven or so percent of Mamdani voters who voted for Trump. The question being, are they gettable by the coming Marjorie Taylor Greene presidential campaign in her flanking to the left of the mildewed austerity-minded Republican Party on “entitlements”, similar to Trump in 2016 (with an inevitable throw away all pretensions of the second term). Or will they gravitate to the next Ron Paul as they pound a crypto currency / gold revolution and a pure Ayn Rand line but get them by promising not to bomb Venezuelan boats? It is a question that hangs in the air.

I kind of half defend, half don’t a “cave” by the group of Democratic Senators who have called off the shutdown, or appreciate some logic here. You are disappointed because this was the first fight, gumption, the legislative party members have shown. And really, it seems they are just waiting for the election to pass to pull the rug from it and move on. The right least vulnerable Democrats — set to retire or not up in 2026 — getting a couple piddlywinks

This was not going to end well. Yes, it is setting up Health Care against SNAP benefits, leveraging one against the other and causing flight delays in the meantime. But the game was set in the 2024 election. The American people spoke. One party stood for they/them. The other party stood against they/them. There is only so much you can do on this one. An issue has been raised — welfare is strangely popular all of a sudden, though you grasp some question if we are still not floating past the right questions.

And recall America’s short attention span here. 2013-2014. Suddenly as a result of poll crashes for Republicans off of the great government shutdown. Boehner falls on the sword, ends it. Republicans in disarray. Angry “tea party”ers demanding heads. Wait to November and see where that got us. I spy that in going down a list of outraged Democrats with blaring type and graphics of eight Democratic “traitors”, a smattering of Fox News graphics — a few puzzling in its stock image of Schumer and Bernie on the question of who else to insert and they land on in some instance… Gavin Newsom, a guy who is not at all involved in this anywhere much. And maybe indeed Schumer is falling on his sword, but he is old anyways and knows his time is about up.

Lawrence O’Donnell on his msnbc show makes the case for the “traitors” — the two Nevada Senators and the Virginia Senator are looking at the barrel of not abstract but actual human suffering and economic peril. And what they got here — expanded Snap benefits, a vote that puts Republican Senators if not House members on record. Cynically they passed by the Elections, though here the President accommodated everyone by bulldozing the East Wing and holding shindigs around great literary commentary on rich oppulence. The commentators of The Bulwark join the small chorus of “Democrats did as much as they could with the hand voters gave them a year ago”, with one eye toward lobbing a raspberry at the media appearances of Maine Senator Angus King who… has one thing to say regarding him… Not a member of the Democratic Party… so, I guess dude has an out. The one thought on a calibrated politically posturing positioning “Centrist” of his ilk is we really do need the more New York City mayor elects in and about to make the vacuous-ness make a lick of sense.

I am watching some Fox News post mortems on Election 2025. I see where New Jersey’s Republican gubernatorial candidate lost “despite a late endorsement from Donald Trump” — an issue with cause and effect relations there.  Moving on this clip, we have the discussion on the election of New York’s New mayor and the ominous take-away. “You need to talk to your kids about Socialism, because if you don’t, someone else will. “

Wanting to imagine how to approach the issue of Socialism “to the kids” as it has gone in the history of American electoral politics, I look to the Wikipedia entry on Victor Berger, but falter at the line — “helped establish the so-called Sewer Socialism movement“. This is puzzling to me in that I had thought that term “sewer socialism” was a pejorative used from people to Berger’s (and the three Milwaukee mayors) left who eschew electoral politics — deeming them all-out and reformist liberals who come up against actual power dynamics and limitations of the office and so end up doing nothing much more that wrestling the sewer system away from private profit making concerns. But maybe Berger And the others took it as a badge of honor on his way to winning an electorate. I would be curious on how the Fox News pundits wanting to “talk to your kids about Socialism” pivot about the issues of Victor Berger in the broader context of American electoral politics as well as if he offered anything substantive. I suffer the problem that I don’t have any central point to make and would be skipping off on different tangents — all a bit of a mess, ain’t it?