Dumb feature of the political and media landscape is this disproportionate attention to a few elections in the New York metro area. Mamdani and his DSA machine have pulled three candidates to primary, and defacto insta-general, election victories against established Democratic incumbents. Good for them, but in a 435 member congress while it adds up to a hill of beans it does not add up to any more than that.

A little bit of a received opinion, and I haven’t looked too far at these soon-to-be congress critter, but two of them are all right, serious, set to figure in legislating and one of them sucks. So we see Bernie Sanders embracing in full and publicalky endorsing and then congratulating those two and keeping his lips sealed on that third one. But — this is Mamdani’s geo-parcel of the party and he has brought that third one up. And though of course the Republicans and John Fetterman will giddily portray them all as monstrosities — how does this go over in Peoria? — that third one will get a lion’s share of quotations tossed about, broad demands to comment on positions taken. And, I don’t know. If she proved unserious to the job and sticks to the narrow great left omni-cause of unconsidered latest trending sloganeering, she looks like the candidate most likely to go the way of Jamaal Bowman — make an ass of herself and lose in a primary to someone probably a mite to the right of the district but serious. And that will be described as a political earthquake even as everyone else carries along, a stalling of DSA politics. Which — may just show the limitations of their appeal, the factions in that organization naturally divided and factionalized further to the left, the very presence in electoral politics already a sell-out of real Socialist principles anyways.

Funny to see Talarico — and I ponder how Paxton and the Republicans make hay of his snippy commentary of the past. I watch a current favorite of theirs and ponder the meaning — Talarico chides some mega church pastor politicians and their teachings, it transmutes to Talarico hating Christianity. The footage is aired all about Republican media outlets. They cut it off mid-sentence, breathtakingly actually mid-word. Funny though, because the nuanced filler context and explainer for it is probably as politically a bummer as the out of context comment — it aligns him with those nasty secularists after all and this is the Christianity this electorate follows and how they define Christianity. Talarico’s Christian parsing here would probably would serve well in Peoria, but he is not in Peoria — we shall see if he can get over it in Texas.

“Idiocracy!” The common coinage, levelled as we look over at the spectacle of mma cage matches and the sea of shady corporate sponsors. ” We are living in Idiocracy!” And granted, the show out on brings us to Idiocracy. But otherwise, we only wish we were in Idiocracy. President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Camacho? He cares about the state of the nation and brings in the best people he can find to work on our problems, the problems inflicted on us by previous bad corrupt leadership. The guy is digging the nation out of the hole from the malicious idiots the Americans had brought to power previously. We are not living in Idiocracy — we are living through a prequel to Idiocracy.

And when we get to Idiocracy, Fox News and Newsmax (and Bari Weiss’s CNN and CBS) will be right there — marshalling half the electorate against him.

I have to refresh my memory on the controversy which met the Biden Administration at his hosting of the lgbt event — not the event itself, innocuous, but a specific incident. Someone took her shirt off, grabbed some snapshots. A lack of decorum not becoming of the White House, the Biden Administration rightly admonishes her and “won’t invite her” again. I figure it was worth it for her — she got what she wanted. But it is worthwhile to state at her comments:

Montoya defended her post on Instagram and Twitter, saying that “going topless in Washington, DC is legal and I fully support the movement in freeing the nipple.” She said critics of her toplessness affirmed that she is, in fact, a woman, as a man would not face similar pushback. She said she had “zero intention of trying to be vulgar or be profane in anyway,” adding that she covered her nipples with her hands in the video “just to play it safe.”

I am reasonably certain that the Biden White House would not want the men — trans or cis — to throw their shirt off, as much as you’d want to pound this “double standard” angle. The Trump Administration though — apparently not so much.

Somewhat annoying, Wikipedia does not have the primary percentages for South Carolina’s Republican primary. A signal of the decline in Insta-relevance of Wikipedia — any time I the past two decades it would immediately get inserted into Graham’s article and the Senate election article. I find the total elsewhere — 56.8 percent. His nearest challenger, who I would want to look into to see what his coordinates on opposition are — gets a 28.9 percent. Graham has a greater vote share than 2014 and less than 2020. Always considered a bane to the right, he probably got established to the right side in Trump in 2020 — his Kavanaugh performance an obvious inflection point. In the current year, various anti-war Republicans who took parts of Trump’s promises seriously — including Alex Jones and weirdo YouTube guy who has videos showing “on the ground, what’s really going on with antifa at ice protests in Portland” — shift the blame on Iran over to Lindsey Graham, chief neo-con. And I suppose you would have to have a grudging respect for Graham if he was indeed playing a long game — though I don’t know how you mitigate Ukraine in that scenario and mostly just laugh and mock at the half-deal walk-away reportedly in the air tonight. For his part, the commentary on his Twitter feed — happy birthday President Trump, I can’t wait to see this ufc cafe match! Do you believe him on that?

And I guess Graham would not have won if Trump had not stated an endorsed. Normally the President endorses all the incumbents of their party, so we can’t really place it. I known Cornyn lost in Texas, but Trump endorsed Paxton because his endorsement would not have pushed him to victory anyway. I do have one partial defense on Texas Republican voters — four terms in office may just well be enough justification to shift to another guy. The defense falls away, of course, on just what Young Turk they have as replacement. But you want seventy somethings plus in the Senate, you just want them not to be a super-majority. Likewise, you want the majority of them to come out of the Lawyer business and Lawyer educational complex — but you kind of want to throw an oyster farmer or two into the mix

A certain amount of happy talk on James Talarico, which gets undermined in the same breath with a “makes it a race” — fighting chance. Or, where everyone was before — Beto O’Rourke, that football guy in 2024. And unlike them who were behind in every poll you ever saw, he leads in the polls. The Republicans have an effective and tried and true strategy though: just say that he’s gay. Or, Vegan, which is the same difference. See, this way when he floats any shot of him eating meat they can claim he’s hiding it, a sign of desperation! And then float out a tweet celebrating the “first trans candidate” — can’t argue against that without alienating the trans, right?

For his part, we see the problem with the latest Republican “take down the establishment” — Paxton. Amuse yourself with the divorce proceedings by the divorce proceedings — “biblical grounds” — ha ha — I don’t really see how anyone cares, even if it’s politically convenient now-off is amusing. The problem when bringing up his record, the things that had the Texas legislator impeach him, and a record of scandal is in the litany — everyone skips right past “election denier” and a lead role in conspiracy hunting on January 6 — no more a scandal, an assumption.

Definitions for what get defined as “scandal” get fuzzy. Graham Platner of Maine — sordid past and all, but I take a kind of “meh” on the latest, even as it appears to drop one hell of a drop in female support in the polls. The circumstances of the latest are a little curious — he brought up his sexting images and infidelity to his wife, oh — oh, five minutes before he decided to run for Senate — a campaign staffer who is disenchanted with Platner dropped it into the ether just now. A semi-scandalous detail — I guess? — on these oh so hot dating app photo is he covers up his Nazi tattoo — I am not sure what that detail is supposed to suggest, even before he was aware of the genesis of the image it is by now a thing that he realises that it is not so bad-ass looking to the chicks he is trying to attract and cheat on. There is a bunch of commentary on Platner I am annoyed with — the consultant pundit Cilizza chimes in that what he’s want from a Platner is to jump in to a state legislator race and go from there. A couple problems with the assumptions baked into the proclamation — we are in a “Schumer cleared the field for an 80 year old career politico, an older version of people who have gone down to Collins in the past” — where is the more liberal and younger state legislator barn-storming the state for this primary? Also you lose years by that deed and the generation gap decreases.

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