Wednesday, November 11, 2026

Closing Time

So, don’t act like Republicans?🤷‍♂️ Note to self: never shake hands with Sen. Kennedy. (And I do NOT want to know what the context of that statement was, either.) Uh-huh. Does it involve suspending the 5th and 14th Amendments? ‘Cause they already tried that. Otherwise it goes through the courts, and the DOJ has a piss poor track record in cases where the defendant has competent legal counsel, in an Art. III court. The job of the White House Counsel is to give legal counsel to the Office of the President. Not the person holding that office; she/he needs their own lawyer with a duty to their client. White House Counsel doesn’t represent the Office in court, either. When the office is a defendant in a civil suit, DOJ represents the office. (Hence the tremendous conflicts of interest when Trump tried to settle a suit he had filed against the government.)

Scharf is so out of line here it’s not funny. He has no role to play, and no authority, not even the “color of law” around him. In the vernacular, his mouth is writing checks his ass can’t cash. It’s almost funny that he just wants everyone to “follow the rules.” Like Trump, that means only the rules that favor Trump.

Nice work, if you can get it.

I’m not sure he isn’t putting his law license in jeopardy. He’s certainly being a braying ass.

On the other channel, a palate cleanser.
SENATOR-ELECT SCOTT COLOM: We all know that prayer is only a part of our Mississippi faith tradition. You need faith. And I'll tell you, throughout this campaign, there were many times where I had to have faith. There were times that I couldn't get donors to answer the phone. They did not believe a moment like this was possible, but I kept the faith….

There's so many people that have faith in Mississippi at times where it seemed impossible. People like Medgar Evers. I can't help but think about Medgar Evers on Veterans Day. A moment like this, where he served his country and came home to Mississippi when they wouldn't let him vote. But he had faith that Mississippi could make progress. He had faith that one day everybody would have the right to vote. He had faith that a day like this was possible
SENATOR-ELECT COLOM: I've been telling everybody that we're going to win this election. I was saying it 8 or 9 months ago. But every time I said it, I pointed out that people were going to give me too much credit for it because it's not something that I did. It's something that we did.

All I did was have the courage to imagine a night like this. I had the courage to believe in Mississippi. I had the courage to understand that we could show the country that Mississippi matters.
Sen.-Elect Colom: But I want to have a final word to every Mississippian: the ones that voted for me, the ones that didn’t vote for me, and the ones that didn’t vote.

My commitment to you, each and every one of you, is that, first, I’m going to treat your children like I want my children to be treated. I’m going to treat your parents the way I want my parents to be treated. I’m going to treat your future the way I want my future to be.

My commitment is to be someone that continues to stay in prayer, continues to have faith, and continues to work to make every Mississippian’s life better.

That’s what you’re getting.

I make a solemn commitment to each and every Mississippian: In every decision I make, I will never forget: The most important thing is Mississippi matters.
Does that sound “woke” to anybody?

Me, neither.
Military families ERUPTED in anger at a Navy town hall after learning their loved ones fighting Trump's Iran war won't be home for the holidays.

Families described broken equipment, worsening conditions, and a mental health crisis. One spouse said her husband had contemplated suicide FOUR TIMES and was denied help.
The blockade of Iran is hardly costing us anything. 

Closing thoughts: Good night Mr. and Mrs. America, and all the ships at sea. 🌊 
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The Unitary Executive Madman Theory

Do they think they are going to court on this? Do they think the Sinister Six will side with them? Trump’s only power over the Court is to appoint Justices with the advice and consent of the Senate. Congress can eliminate their funding (save their salaries), and render them chamberless (as they were for much of their first 100 years). Congress can alter their jurisdiction. Congress can fuck them over. Hard.

And even a first year would know there’s no 1st Amendment issue here.

The Sinister Six can’t order Congress to give them a building, or fund their staff. And they dare not tread on the separation of powers by ruling on what actual limits there are to legislative oversight and investigation. That would just invite Congress to set limits on the jurisdiction of the Court.

These people should quit now. They can’t intimidate the Congress, they can’t win in court, and Trump won’t say “Well, you tried.” (Ask Harmeet Dhillon).

This is Trump going down in flames.🔥 And taking everybody in the Administration with him. Which, yes, is a problem for the rest of us. Oh, Trump can go to hell. It’s the institutions, like the DOJ, I’m worried about. We’re going to suffer those damages long after Trump is drooling into his sippy cup.


(Let me address the elephant in the room: Trump v. US. Yes, Roberts gave the President immunity, but of a limited kind. It rests on the President’s execution of “official duties.” But what are those? That is a bone the Court left to the lower courts to chew on. The immediate effect of the ruling was to gum up the federal prosecutions. Roberts could not have foreseen, as a fact, that Trump would win reelection. His aim (misguidedly) was to protect the office. The effect was not to give Trump immunity in the cases; but to add a whole new burden to the legal fight, one that would keep the cases in court for a decade or more. A very bad decision, but not an ending to the prosecutions. Trump’s election did that.

And yes, Roberts has given the office an excess of powers; but not the power to tell Congress to fuck off and leave the President a monarch. Even Alito and Thomas know their limitations.

Presidential immunity was made up out of whole cloth; and like the “unitary executive,” it’s a terrible concept which needs correcting with a constitutional amendment (well, both do). But it didn’t give Trump an automatic get out of jail free card. He might still be spending his (much smaller) fortune defending those cases had the 2024 election gone another way. So, would the Court tell Congress to leave the President alone and let him do as he damn well pleases? And, by the way, quit sending out letters because, you know, 1st Amendment?

Not likely. The reasonable response to Trump v. U.S. is to amend the Constitution. The reasonable response to a Court that accepts the arguments in the tweets above, is to remind them who literally, under Article III, made the Court and set it up in business. And still has the power to undo it.)
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😎

And not a peep from Trump. Maybe nobody told him about it.
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To William Scharf, White House Counsel

Lawyer up.
In the letter, which was first obtained by Punchbowl News, Scharf warned Rep. Robert Garcia (D-CA), who is in line to become the next chairman of the House Oversight Committee, that his office is monitoring “the abusive and capricious threats” from Democrats “who seek to abuse the legislative process to intimidate and interfere with the lawful functioning of government.”

“You and your congressional colleagues have asserted they will issue subpoenas to harass, threaten, and deter dedicated members of the administration from further service,” Scharf wrote. “Several have compared their subpoena pledges to handing out ‘candy.’”

Scharf further warned that “threats to executive branch officials designed to deter them from public service... may cross the line into blatant criminality” that could warrant prosecution.
You really should know better:
Raskin: Somebody should tell Todd Blanche and his team to get a Supreme Court decision called Steffel v. Thompson, which says it’s legally actionable to bring an injunction action against the government if the government is trying to scare you out of exercising your First Amendment rights and your constitutional rights.

In our case, it’s not just that these members were exercising their constitutional rights; they were exercising their constitutional duties. We have a duty, as the Article I preeminent branch of government, to conduct oversight operations of the entire government, as well as the economy and other things happening in society.
The statute of limitations is five years. Unless Trump thinks of you very specifically, there is no valid pardon in your future. Keeping Trump happy is not a sound career path. I like her more and more.
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Veteran’s Day 2026

‘Tis a mystery why the country turned against the GOP. I honestly think this would be the impeachment count that gets him removed. It’s far too easy to understand.
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God Only Knows

Did God bless this, too? Now he probably wants to call it “America’s Day.”

It’s a solemn day, so…
Raise money. (For what? There aren’t any elections for two years, he held onto most of his campaign slush fund, and he can’t run again.) A solemn day, indeed. (That soldier knew who he was speaking to. God bless him.)
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Words Are A Stain On The Silence

Wherever they were. The rapid descent is on full display.
Trump on Iran War: Under this administration, and it was about time, somebody fought back. All of us fought back. We fought back. And we seriously fought back. And we won. Just a question of when we want to end it.

We want to make sure we have a total victory. Not a 93% victory. It's got to be total.

Hopefully, we won't have to destroy any more of that country. Got a lot of work to do to put it back.
Trump: The Vietnam War lasted 21 years and we lost 60,000 people. Iraq went on for eight years and we lost more than 4,400 people. Afghanistan was almost 20 years and we lost 2,500 service members and got very little from any of these wars. In our case…

We had Venezuela where we're taking out billions and billions of dollars of oil, and all sorts of other things. Be hundreds of billions very soon. Nobody's ever seen anything like it. To the victor belong the spoils. They used to say. But you can say it again with us under this leadership.
That’s enough of that.
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The Second Coming

"The ceremony of innocence is drowned...."


Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
 Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
World War I ended on this day, 108 years ago. Yeats wrote this poem in January following the first Armistice Day. Criticism of the poem usually focuses on Yeats’ mythology, because it created the structure of his reinvention as a poet in roughly the last quarter of his life. His theory of history; the importance of the “gyres;” his mystical visions; all important stuff in Yeatsian studies. But I think this poem is also a reaction to the war that turned Europe into a charnel house, and created the “Lost Generation” of poets and writers who came on as Yeats was becoming an eminence grise. I’m not advocating a grand new critical theory for reading Yeats. I’m just pointing out this famous poem has a temporal, as well as canonical, location.

Strip away the theory of history, and you have a response to the horrors of that war. It certainly loosed “the blood dimmed tide” on Europe and England (Yeats lost no love for the English, but no one could set aside the slaughter of a generation of young men); “the ceremony of innocence” was certainly drowned. Ask the “Lost Generation.” They thought it so awful that they wondered if, indeed, a revelation was at hand: a disclosure, a revealing, of the true way of things. They thought it did; that’s why they were “lost.”

And the vision out of Spiritus Mundi of the rough, rude beast, may be a metaphor of apocalypse; or it may be a recognition of the loss of European civilization which had seemed so orderly and stable until July, 1914. The Lost Generation thought it an irretrievable loss, too. But Yeats connects it to history in what doesn’t have to be a mystical interpretation of history; just an acknowledgment of cause and effect. In Yeats’ cyclical theory of history even the cycles are not inexorable forces of a mad clockwork, but a product of causation, in this case the reaction of evil to the presence of good. So “twenty centuries of stony sleep” are “vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle.” Or July, 1914 was not sui generis, but the result of causes that exploded into war. And while Yeats couldn’t have foreseen it in 1919, Armistice Day 1918 would only postpone the conclusion of “The Great War” and its causes, with the punishment of Germany the “rocking cradle” that only a quarter of a century later was the next, and even worse, rough beast, that slouched across Europe to be born. Born with even more terrible consequences. Evil and good are not so easily separated, and good conquering evil may leave the world better than it might have been; but it also leaves consequences that may take twenty centuries to recognize. Arguably, that conflict has just shifted continents; but the blood dimmed tide has yet to go back out.

Every act, especially those we deem acts of history, has consequences. That, too, is a lesson of the poem; and of Armistice Day. Not because of the day; but because of how we kept it. At least for the first 25 years. And how have we kept it since?
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Armistice Day 2026


It's funny how conservative you get over time. I've come to prefer "Armistice" to "Veteran's" to label the day, maybe because "Memorial Day" has been taken over as another day to have a spasm of declaring ourselves free because we resemble Rome (with its standing army) more than we resemble Athens (with its citizen soldiers called to battle only when the need arose).

Paths of Glory is the story for today. The story of a French general ordering a suicide charge by his own troops, and then issuing a order to shell his own troops to get them out their trenches and into the fusillade of machine gun fire that would surely cut them down like so many blades of grass.

That's the movie for today.

 "A voice says, 'Cry!" And I say: "What shall I cry? All flesh is grass...."

And grass is the beautiful uncut hair of graves.

A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.

I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.

Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,
A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt,
Bearing the owner's name someway in the corners, that we may
         see and remark, and say Whose?

Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation.

Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,
And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones,
Growing among black folks as among white,
Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I receive them the same.

And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.

Tenderly will I use you curling grass,
It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men,
It may be if I had known them I would have loved them,
It may be you are from old people, or from offspring taken soon out of their mothers' laps,
And here you are the mothers' laps.

This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers,
Darker than the colorless beards of old men,
Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths.

O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues,
And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths for nothing.
I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men and women,
And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring taken soon out of their laps.
What do you think has become of the young and old men?
And what do you think has become of the women and children?
They are alive and well somewhere,
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,
And ceas'd the moment life appear'd.
All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.


"Call the names. Call the names. Call the names."


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Preserving “Armistice Day”

"The ceremony of innocence is drowned...."


"The blood swept lands and seas of red...."

Kurt Vonnegut, b. November 11, 1922, d. April 11, 2007.

I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I was a boy, and when Dwayne Hoover was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.

"The sudden silence was the Voice of God."

 Precisely so. It should always be remembered that way.  Only people start wars.  Only people stop wars.  Aside from Twain's observation that man is the only animal that blushes; or needs to; the distinction of being warriors is also ours alone.

And we never remember what it costs.
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⛽️🙀

Yup:
A month after President Donald Trump announced a controversial deal with Vladimir Putin to bring Russian diesel to the U.S., not a single barrel has arrived, the Wall Street Journal reported, as tankers headed for American ports turned around due to a lack of willing buyers.

Trump pitched the Russian fuel as a way to bring down soaring diesel prices, which pushed up consumer costs ahead of the midterm elections. But "U.S. oil companies are reluctant to handle the cargoes of Russian diesel because of the potential legal and reputational consequences," industry executives and lobbyists told the Journal.

...

Three other tankers turned back last week, according to Kpler data cited by the Journal. Two are headed to Brazil, and a third has arrived in Egypt. All three had listed U.S. East Coast destinations when they left Russia’s Primorsk port last month.

The U.S. doesn’t need the fuel, the Journal noted. Domestic refiners produce more diesel than the country uses and export more than 1.5 million barrels a day. Still, tight global supplies tied to the Middle East conflict have pushed the average price of diesel to $6.16 a gallon, up from $3.75 before the war.
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💃🏾 Dancing With The One What Brung Ya

You mean like Medicare. Or the healthcare Congress gets.

Yeah, marketing was your downfall.
Emmer’s preferred marketing has been too successful. Voters overwhelmingly opted for a serious change. Just a reminder, this 👆 is the marketing that worked. Even in Texas. Rick Scott thinks we need to double down on American imperialism and gunboat diplomacy. Florida, man. Same energy. Right down to the peninsula. Aside from the ones leaving (like Dhillon) who couldn’t give Trump the results he demanded because the law kept getting in the way. (She lost 75% of her staff  because she was ideological, nuts, and incompetent.) But there’s still plenty of chaos to go around. And staff retention efforts are picking up. The nation will be picking up the pieces for years to come.
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Aristotle Has Entered The Chat

OJEDA: I'm not here to become a millionaire. There's not one person in my district voted for me so that I could come here and play stocks and become a multimillionaire. They sent me here to fight for them, and that's what I'm going to do. I didn't come here to learn politics. I came here to teach these people who the hell they work for.
Aristotle would teach you that politics is how people corporately work out how they live together, and get things done for the common good.

And the 534 men and women in Congress will tell you they didn’t come to D.C. to be your students.
OJEDA: These are people that should be impeached and then prosecuted for what they have done. People have been snatched off the streets, given no due process and have ended up in gulags someplace. For what? Because they wanted to come to the United States of America and create a better opportunity for their children. This is unacceptable. That's not American. Immigrants make this country great, you know, for what you do to the least of my brethren, you do unto me. Jesus did not tell you to hate the stranger. Jesus told you to love the stranger. And that's what we need to do. And that's not what we're seeing right now.

I want Hegseth and them prosecuted for what they have done.
While I agree with the critique, Jesus didn’t teach us to fight fire with fire. The last thing we need on our side is a mini-Trump demanding everyone we disagree with be locked up or taught a lesson. 🤦‍♂️
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Tuesday, November 10, 2026

Enjoying The Victory

 Uh-huh.

Wearing a pressed button-down white shirt and slacks, a Haitian boy showed up at a routine immigration appointment in downtown San Diego. Moments later, the neatly dressed 8-year-old was being led away by three immigration officers.
Explain that, asshole. Like 8 year old boys going to court for their immigration hearing? AOC puts it in a rather large nutshell:
Reporter: Tomorrow’s Veterans Day. What are your thoughts on the Taking Care of America’s Veterans Act, which is going to take benefits away from veterans? They’re wanting to put that on the floor for a vote on Veterans Day. What are your thoughts about doing that?

AOC: You know, one thing that we see from this Republican majority and this administration, and I’ve said this over and over again, is they say one thing and they do another.

And they will say that this is good for veterans while gutting the entire infrastructure for veterans’ care.

And they do this over and over again.

They want to privatize the VA. They want it all to go out to contractors. They attack our public infrastructure on veterans’ care as the rationale for further defunding it, instead of actually giving it the appropriate resources, investment, and attention that we actually need.

And so it is insulting.

And what I am glad and happy about is that people are finally catching on to their grift.

Because it is very challenging when they put forward legislation and they say, “This is good for veterans,” and then you’re kind of expecting people to play lawyer and dig through all the lines themselves.

So I’m very grateful that people are at this moment where they’re actually seeing what these Republicans are doing, because their goal—I think that a lot of what they do is sabotaging the VA as opposed to supporting it and making the investments necessary.
"They say one thing, and do another.” A euphemistic way of saying, they are liars, not to be relied on, certainly not to be trusted. Alternatively: how many people on traditional Medicare want to give it up and return to private insurance? And private insurance premiums. Because my Medicare premiums are not $1200 per month.
El-Sayed: What you call it is secondary. What it does in your life is the whole point. None of us ran to name things except for Donald Trump. Most of us ran to actually solve problems in people's lives

Collins: You need Trump’s signature, but to get it passed, you need Democrats to lead on that. Do you think that your party can lead on that?

El-Sayed: I bet if the president came out and said, you know, “I’m gonna sign this if you call it Trumpcare for All,” I think—we might be able to do it.

I’ve been working on this question for my entire career.

But I do think that this is a moment right now where the public really is demanding some real answers to their problems. We saw that in an electoral outcome. And what better way to answer the mandate that the American public gave Democrats than to say, “Hey, look, we can finally, once and for all, solve the challenge of American health care in this country. We can undo medical debt. We can address the challenges that people have so often when it comes to just simply getting sick and being able to see a doctor.”
Carpe that old diem.
El-Sayed: You know, the question of whether or not cabinet members are doing their job well is a secondary question to how do we address the crisis in folks's life.

People are really struggling to be able to afford a tank of gas. They're really struggling at the grocery store. They're struggling to see a doctor.

A lot of that goes back to policies that have been perpetrated by folks like Pete Hegseth or RFK Jr.. But if everything we're doing does not actually address the problem in people's life, I think we're missing the mandate.

So it's really important for us as we investigate, to make sure that every investigation that we pursue actually ties back to the goal of making somebody's life a little bit easier.
And be glad we elected people like this.👆 And this👇:
COATES: One Fox News host called you a bigger threat to the GOP in 2028 than AOC

COLOM: I'm not trying to be a threat to anybody. I'm trying to focus on delivering for Mississippi. I'm not trying to get into national punditry, where we try to figure out, you know, who's this or who's that… I think we got too much celebrity in our politics. We got to get back to leadership that's rooted in serving people.
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🪆 Why Would She Put It In Writing?

Especially after she already quit.

Unfolding the wallet photo holder:
29-1. That’s the kind of record that gets you into the championship game. Against the same opponent 30 times? That’s taking their lunch money.
The departure makes Dhillon the first high-ranking Trump official to resign from the admin in the wake of the midterms, though sources say her exit was long expected after President Trump privately expressed frustrations over a growing number of court losses for the division under Dhillon’s leadership.
Today, I accepted the resignation of Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, who led the Civil Rights Division with conviction the past 18 months. She has defended the civil liberties of every American and enforced the law without fear or favor. The Department is grateful for her dedicated public service, and we wish her every success in her future endeavors.
In the law firm I worked for before law school, we referred to such announcements as “pursuing other interests,” because we knew it meant they’d been shit canned.

And an adjacent failure to read the room (Unpacking the matryoshka 🪆):
I think the Congressional GOP should do this before January 3rd. 🧐

And then never go back home again….
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Is Our Children Learning?

Ojeda: It bothers me that we have so many people that like to rattle the drums of war, and they have no idea what the ramifications are.

There have been a lot of things that have been done wrong that need to be addressed.

You know, we don’t kill people in the Caribbean and just think it’s no big deal. We don’t bomb a school that kills 160-plus little girls and just say that that’s water under the bridge.

Crimes have been committed
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Dear House GOP:

Please make Gym Jordan minority leader of the House.

Dear Santa: 🎅 You can skip me this year, I already got my Xmas wish!
  Pretty sure they already know.
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As I Was Saying

"Here’s how it went: A popular vote loss with a fluke electoral college win (2016); a midterm blowout loss that cost his party the House (2018); an emphatic reelection loss (2020); a general election win by one of the closest margins in history (2024); then finally, the worst midterm loss in half a century, costing his party both houses of Congress (2026). That adds up to a record of 1-5 or 2-3, depending on how you want to score it."
A sound summation which, before the first Tuesday in November of 2026, could have been grounds for despair. But after Trump I and Covid, Biden (more a caretaker, but he did exceedingly well with the problems Trump left, and could not have done better in handling them), then Trump II, this time with tariffs, Epstein, a disastrously stupid and unnecessary war, and corruption that makes historians forget the Taft administration, we now have a Muslim M.D. in the Senate eloquently and persuasively talking about Medicare for All; a Senator from Texas (!) who talked about “top v. bottom” rather than “us v. them” (pure Texas populism, IOW), and a majority in both houses that may actually do things neither Hillary nor Kamala would have tried.

So our national time in the wilderness may start paying dividends.
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🎶 When Will They Ever Learn? 🎶

Did someone expect them to?

The hallmark of GOP officeholders since Gingrich’s Contract on America has been to appeal to the deplorables at election time, and then disappear into an impenetrable bubble denying reality for at least two years.

It doesn’t surprise me that Johnson is publicly denying reality. Gingrich set that pattern, and Trump planted it in concrete. I was just reading that Boebert is contemplating a recount when the final ballots are in. That used to be an unsurprising turn, and even justifying one on the grounds of questions of “irregularities” was not unusual. But Trump’s screeching has made any legitimate review (only Mississippi doesn’t have a law allowing for recounts. There, you have to go to court.) seem conspiratorial, and attacking the integrity of the system. The impenetrable bubble, denying reality.

There’s always been a paranoid streak in American politics; but we’re going to be a long time recovering from the damage Trump did, and that we let him do.
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The Report From The Fringe

No love for Jeffries here, but an alternative candidate has to be…an actual person.  “None of the above” is not an option for Speaker of the House.

And the majority of the people who voted for Democrats in this election have no idea what’s going on, and don’t care.  🤷‍♂️ 
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In Other Texas News

Falling dominoes. And who can say which was the first one?
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The Wages Of Sin Is….

Attorneys in Paxton’s office in Austin turned him in to the FBI because of his corruption. Paxton fired them, they sued, and the suit was eventually settled. Paxton took that settlement agreement to the Texas Legislature for approval and funding, and the Texas House, dominated by the GOP, could no longer ignore Paxton’s corruption. The Texas Senate acquitted Paxton, but Texas voters didn’t, and on the same day cleaned house in the AG’s office, too. 

The suit against Covenant House, a private group formed in El Paso to help the homeless there, has been in court for three years. Now that a Republican will no longer be Texas AG, the staff across the state is saying: “Fuck it.” These cases were going to be dismissed anyway, but MAGA is collapsing like a house of cards. And racist xenophobia (Paxton accused Covenant House of aiding and abetting illegal immigration by treating poor people like… people.) no longer has the cachet it once did.

Even Paxton’s office can read the writing on the wall. Can Miller? Can Trump?
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Monday, November 09, 2026

What Else Happened Today?

Or, that’s what the historic turnout was voting for. A reminder that Massie is not a Democrat. It was just a joke. White declined the offer, anyway. To be fair, Patrick doesn’t have a government job anymore. I think the Lite Guv is a full time position, but he presides over the state Senate, and it won’t meet again until January. I’m not even sure he has to attend and turn over a gavel or anything. Texas government doesn’t really pay unless you’re as corrupt as Paxton. Or Rick Perry, who made out pretty well.

And the worst thing Patrick wants is for the Texas Senate to change the rules and take back the power they gave the Lite Guv under Bob Bullock, power Patrick enjoyed for his tenure. Starting a lobbying firm is small potatoes by comparison.
  There was a strategy? I thought Trump just liked the sound of his own voice. And Franklin Graham rises from the grave: More impotent and ineffectual than ever. 👍 

And, just in time for Xmas: He’s a religious person, ya know.
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Tell Me Again Why People Turned Out To Vote…🗳️

... for Democrats and/ir against Republicans? And certainly not for Trump. Whatever helps. Didn’t he just tell Douthat the deportation policy was too strict? The guy has more positions than a weathervane in a tornado.🌪️  He doesn’t listen to what he says, either. And no bases left in the area to resupply them. But that’s okay; Hegseth already won the war. I am disappointed that no one asked about the supplemental pending in Congress that would allow DOD to start restocking weapons, and is that connected to Trump’s abrupt decision to just keep talking to Iran after all?

Too bad we don’t have elections to replace the press on a regular basis.
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Lame Duck

Taking “Follow the Money” way too seriously. Well, then it’s all okay. 👌 Sun’s going down. Uh-huh. 🤔 Two more years of this; and he knows it. Fox knows it, too. All they have just now are losers who nobody in DC us thinking about. “Retroactive impeachment”? Dude, you quit. And there’s no risk of you coming back.
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🎶 Long Time Passing 🎶

Take this graf, for instance:

Our work has focused on four interconnected priorities: ending the fighting, developing credible postwar security guarantees and arrangements that reduce the risk of renewed conflict, preparing a comprehensive economic and prosperity plan for Ukraine, and advancing humanitarian measures to alleviate suffering and address the human consequences of this war.

Translated from your bullshit it means:
- Disarming Ukraine while giving Russia financial lifelines
- No restrictions on Russian forces, broad limits on NATO deployments.
- You, Witkoff and the rest of your criminal enterprise raping Ukraine on mineral rights.
- No consequences to Putin for wholesale war crimes.

God, at least don't use some Temu Claude to write you garbage. It's transparent.

See you in at the hearings.

Democrats are already telling corporations and law firms that they have questions and expect documents and answers. They’re doing this in part because they know the Administration will stonewall them.

A lot of the relevant evidence sits in the email accounts and files of law firms, corporations and former officials, who are far more likely to comply, and corporate America has gotten the message.

“We can expect subpoenas to go after internal corporate communications, as well as communications between corporate executives and administration officials,” said Daniel Suleiman, a former Justice Department official now at the Covington & Burling law firm.
Todd Blanche is not happy about it:
Attorney General Todd Blanche said Sunday on CNN that he might prosecute members of Congress over what he called intimidation, though he didn’t say what law he thought had been broken.

“They’re talking about going after companies, private companies who happen to have made investments in this country over the past couple years. That is not oversight,” Blanche said.
That’s precisely what it is, actually.

 I’m old enough to remember Congressional hearings that delved into the conduct of corporate, not just how Administrations were doing their jobs. There were even Congressional investigations of organized crime (what, you thought Puzo made that up for “The Godfather”?). If Congress can have oversight of organized crime, it can have oversight of corporations and law firms. Especially if it’s sometimes hard to slip a piece of paper between legitimate and illegitimate enterprises.

The simple fact is, Congress has very broad investigative powers, because Congress needs them to function as a legislature. Congress needs the authority to investigate so it can determine what laws are needed, what laws need to be repealed, modified, added, or clarified. That power is necessarily very broad, and it is allowed to be broad by the courts largely on the separation of powers doctrine.

Blanche is coming perilously close to Bar disciplinary investigations. Generally that takes improper handling of client funds (an unforgivable breach of fiduciary duty), or the wild antics of Giuliani slandering Georgia election workers by name (and even then the lawsuit preceded the disciplinary proceedings). I can see a future, though, where Blanche is removed from office, and then the appropriate Bar gets appropriately interested. He really is dancing right on the edge of the abyss.

In other news, I inherited Caro’s four volume biography of LBJ from my brother, and I’ve just taken up volume 1. Caro’s thesis is that understanding LBJ’s character “is essential to understanding the history of the United States in the twentieth century.” I didn’t realize LBJ was on good terms with FDR (though it makes sense. LBJ was in Congress in 1937), which is notable because Cato further argues that LBJ’s presidency “brought to crest tides of social change that had begun flowing during the New Deal a quarter of a century before.” Of course, after LBJ’s one elected term, and due (Cato asserts) largely to the Vietnam War (which “was essentially a Vietnamese war” when LBJ’s term began, but became thoroughly Americanized in four years). Caro’s point is that LBJ’s term, brief as it was, was a watershed, and we have all, since 1968, been living in the “after.” “After” being the end of the New Deal Era.

I would venture today that a new watershed is before the nation, an electoral repudiation of the last 58 years and what they led to, that is more than an angry spasm and a knee jerk reflex over the cost of housing and the price of eggs. The corruption of the Trump Administration is of a piece with the corruption of every Republican Administration since 1968; Trump is just clumsier and more brazen.  LBJ became a rich man in Congress by helping his friends win government contracts, but that’s by and large how government contracts work. Trump blatantly helps his sons and himself, and brags openly about how rich he’s become. And it’s the corruption of the Administration, as well as the corruption of police power of government (ICE, DHS) that has produced this watershed, and turned even Texas blue. I don’t doubt the Democrats could squander this moment. I just don’t think it will be that easy to lose. Caro’s argument is that LBJ’s personality is a major factor in that change. Especially when he’s put up against Obama, or Biden, or even Bush pere et fil, Trump’s personality is certainly much more a major factor in current events. And if you want to roll the election issues up into one big ball, as Cato does with the 20th century, you can easily say it was Trump’s personality that the nation repudiated and rejected as a guiding national force in the 2026 midterms.

It’s too early to truly say, but in 1968 I knew things had changed, even if I didn’t think the change was permanent. By ‘72 I knew it was, and only this week did I begin to hope things had changed again. Our long national nightmare may actually be over.

At least for 30 years or so.  It is, after all, being touted as a “generational change.” But maybe we can make it last for two generations. 🧐
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