This is what Democrats need! Not just big victories in cities and suburbs, but rural turnout across the country! There is a path for states like mine (West Virginia) to become blue again
The most realistic way for WV to become competitive again were if there was a boom of DC area transplants to the eastern panhandle and Dems went pedal to the metal in Kanawha county (Charleston).
Those cities are both relatively blue, especially Morgantown (I live near Morgantown and it's surprising how liberal it is compared to the rest of the state). It's rural communities in Monongalia and Ohio counties that drag the Democratic vote in the cities down. They just need to expand (and Morgantown is trying to into areas like Brookhaven and Granville)
The only way that would happen would be if West Virginia's infrastructure, economy and transportation system would improve substantially enough to create incentives for those demographics you are referring to.
Unfortunately, much in contraction to those who don't know the Virginias, West Virginia is not Virginia. While Arlington offers much less in housing costs than in cities Los Angeles, NYC and San Francisco and is looked at as one of the safest cities to live in, it along with Alexandria and plenty other cities in VA are much different than in WV where Charleston, Morgantown, etc. are pretty much isolated from where most of the state tends to be.
Isolated from the rural regions as in what goes on in WV cities does not necessarily trickle down to the rural communities and suburbs. There may be a certain degree of trickled down effect but WV for a long time has become increasingly a poorer state and there’s not enough business activity and wealth to really spread across the state beyond cities.
In VA, there’s considerably more wealth spread across from cities to suburbs. Yes, there are rural parts of the state but VA is not Idaho, Wyoming or even Utah.
It’s giving Lloyd Christmas “you’re telling me there’s a chance…”
There’s about greater chance that we make inroads into even more R Wyoming with liberal environmental types moving there and Denver sprawl than we do in WV.
I lived in WV in 2004 as it's slide into the abyss became clear (it wasn't just a "Gore" thing). I'd happily move back if there was a job...but in the meantime I visit.
I agree with Julian that WV could swing with the right message, because it is mostly rural, terribly poor, and not well served by *anyone* since Byrd. But to do so there has to be a real.way to connect to the mining communities, even as mining decreases in importance. It's no accident that Manchin and Justice were elected, because they represent mining that the people hoped would be rejuvenated, but were WISCs. Retraining and data centers won't cut it. But figure it out in WV and you'll make inroads into western Pa, Arkansas, TN, KY, SR Ohio too. Those places used to be blue before the dems abandoned them.
I'm sorry, WISCs=? Also, you don't specify what magic you're thinking of that would somehow convince them that Democrats aren't worse for them than Republicans.
In this context, maintaining the primacy of mining with little support of the miners, except to make Greenness a boogeyman.
Someone smarter than me will have to figure out the message. Maybe Julian can. But it has to include white, low paid, rural folks. Health care is a great start, but there has to be something that rebuilds and diversifies the economy of Appalachia.
The Democrats always send aid to everywhere, irrespective of whether they get any votes there, but it's pretty hard to ask the Democrats to do extraordinary, magical things for places where no-one wants to invest and then continually take it on the chin as the voters there bite the hands that feed them. Don't get me wrong: I'd be irate if Democrats started screwing people for political reasons - they need to keep helping people on the basis of need because that's just the right thing to do. But they are not magicians, and they're competing with a scam artist party that I'd submit they can't defeat among that group of voters based on achievements.
A lot of those “deep red towns” in upstate NY were ancestrally Republican areas that had been carried by Democratic Presidential candidates for years but the Dem strength at the top of the ticket hadn’t trickled all the way down the ballot yet.
And the bottom falling out for Republicans in the suburbs and small cities. Spanberger got 59% in Chesterfield County, that's crazy...Tim Kaine only got 54% and 55% there in his last two elections (the one in 2018 against a disaster of a GOP nominee who lost statewide by almost as much as Earle-Sears). Low GOP turnout in the rurals helped us, and Spanberger did do slightly better than Harris in the rurals, but the overall map tells the story of where Earle-Sears absolutely imploded. Insane, record-setting numbers in the suburbs and small cities. Plenty more examples across the state.
It wasn’t just in New York either. Democrats won big in ancestral Republican areas in North Carolina and Ohio for mayor or town council seats— some by margins that TACO won by last year.
The likelihood of North Carolina Republicans losing one state House (even with the gerrymandering) and losing their supermajority in the other one next year is 50-50 right now. Which sounds nuts two years ago.
In small town Georgetown SC, the Dems threw out the R mayor and all three R councilmen who were on the ballot. Margins were roughly 18%. Rs had won everything they contested in the last 3 elections. It's a rural factory town, now with a closed paper mill and closed steel mill. But with valuable coastal property (overvalued, actually, considering climate change).
"Heritage Foundation report blasts Trump's record on deportations"
Basically, Heritage criticizes Trump for not being xenophobic enough. Excerpts:
The Heritage Foundation, the think tank behind Project 2025, says in a report out Friday that the Trump administration is "significantly off pace" on mass deportations. "The American people voted for mass deportations. They're getting mass communications instead," the report's author Mike Howell tells Axios.
The big picture: President Trump promised to carry out the largest mass deportation campaign since the Eisenhower administration.
Howell writes that the Department of Homeland Security's focus on people with serious criminal records — what Trump now calls the "worst of the worst" — was [already] the agenda of past Democratic presidents.
I was implying that there was a lot of Christians, not that there was a small number of Jewish people. But yes - there is over double the percentage of Jews in Congress than there is nationally (6% vs. 2.3%)
I was fluent in Malay and it took me a week to regain most of my fluency the last time I was there. My French is at an advanced conversational level in practice, and I regained about half of it during a week in Montreal around Memorial Day. My Italian is also at an advanced conversational level in practice, though I didn't formally study it like my 3 1/2 years of French and have read less in it, so my vocabulary is smaller. I regained about half of that in 8 days in Italy 2 Aprils ago. My German is around A2 in European fluency measures, kind of intermediate. I know a smattering of a couple of other languages.
Eh, don't be -too- impressed. As you know, lots of Europeans are fluent or near-fluent in 3 or more languages. I've only ever been fluent in 2, and I think most kids who were moved to a place where almost no-one spoke their language would have learned the local language quickly.
In other words, you would be hard-pressed to find a single American legislator who can compete with your average Dutch politician, who generally is fairly fluent in four languages: French, German and English, in addition to Dutch.
Heck, we ought to make a list of native-born members of Congress who cannot even be considered fluent in English!
I don't have any particular insight, but on the map question, my guess is people didn't understand WHY they needed to vote on this. I pay pretty close attention to things and I had no idea why this was on the ballot other than the fact that it came out of the charter revision commission.
RE Prop 1, I think these are pretty standard (I worked on one of these when I worked in the legislature and they're fairly non-controversial). I do wonder if the number of new voters that came in didn't have the info on this and thought this was some sort of dimunation of parkland or something.
Again, no particular insight, but I think it's plausible that it was a lack of information.
All that makes sense. I also think there are New Yorkers who just oppose all ballot measures just because they don't like them in general or are contrary.
Hell, I voted against all the statewide propositions in Texas because I don't trust what a republican dominated legislature puts on the ballot and what the true intent is behind it.
I wouldn't necessarily trust anyone, and certainly not those guys, but I assume you read the language of the propositions carefully before making up your mind.
I think we all know that ballot proposals can be worded on weird ways that allow bad things to be done, despite them sounding good on the ballot. So, it can seem like the best option is to not support them. I voted for the ski thing in the Adirondacks but it wouldn't actually surprise me if it was a camel nose under the tent toward completely leveling the park.
I remember visiting Taormina, Sicily, after college. If you brought empty bottles to fill at the local winery, you got a hefty discount. That red wine was delicious and so dark it was almost black, and the alcohol content was around 17 percent.
(Yes, I know, a trip down memory lane, with only tangential relevance to the topic at hand. But, hey, that policy did lower wasteful bottle consumption.)
Not exactly the recycling companies’ fault but if we are pushing everyone to recycle, it’s almost like a fad instead of a real concerted effort to actually do anything really substantial about the environment. Congress should have tried to address this problem long ago but hasn’t.
At least with compost, you can be assured it is helping the environment providing the weather is there and you have a compost bin. I’ve composed for a long time and the soil produced is great for gardening.
Accidental typo (which I corrected) but if you want my honest opinion, I do personally put the "soul" in making compost soil from whatever food scraps there are from banana peels to left over food from take out that spoils.
I also voted for the "ski thing in the Adirondacks" and also was a bit skeptical about it, because I didn't really know the details. What land are we selling exactly, what land are we buying?
I mean, why does the city map need to be "digitized"? What does that mean? Does that mean I can't go into city hall and get a paper copy of the city map? Or are our neighborhoods going to be carved up into weird geometrical shapes that don't actually adhere to the real world? Why is this the first time I'm hearing about this?
Those are some of the reasons I can think of that someone might be skeptical of that particular proposal.
Colorado State Senator Faith Winter was killed in a multi-vehicle crash last night. She was a Democrat who represented district 25, which covers Broomfield.
We had errands to run where I am so we had to be on the roads, and it was pretty bad. We’re headed out today to see our extended family in Rhode Island, we’ve found traffic on Thanksgiving to be less bad than the day before.
She had accomplished a lot, but she was only 45. Tragic. Way too many people die on the road. There are important things that could be done to lower that number, foremost among them making cars less needed by building a greater amount of reliable public transportation, but we all know how much sand is throw into the gears of that in the U.S.
There are ways to improve the safety of driving, too. Some of them have been done, but if the country considered tens of thousands of deaths from motor vehicles unacceptable, more would be done.
As I recall, the USA once had the best railway system in the world – and terrific rail-based public transit in many large cities. The automobile industry and petroleum industry systematically sabotaged all this.
Also the tire industry and bus companies. Yep. You used to be able to take trolleys all the way from New York to Boston, quite apart from the railways.
There’s already a link to a music video on the page, but given the day, here’s one more. It’s the song San Antonio Rose by Bob Wills, known as the king of “western swing” music in the 30s and 40s. Wills was from Turkey, Texas.
Happy Thanksgiving! One thing I stumbled across was that in Alaska, Democratic state senator Scott Kawasaki won reelection last year by 3 points to his Fairbanks area seat while Trump won it by over 16 points. Mary Peltola even lost it by just under a point. Other than the eastern Iowa senate special that we flipped earlier this year and the Orthodox Jewish seats in NY and NJ, this might just be one of the reddest legislative districts in the country held by a Democrat.
He is not up for reelection until 2028 and would not need to give up his seat if he ran for governor or Senate. I hope the DGA and DSCC are coordinating with him to run for whichever race that Peltola decides not to run. Unlike Tom Begich and Matt Claman, he’s also relatively young at 50.
Kawasaki wouldn’t have to risk his state senate seat if he ran for something next year, though. It makes most sense for him to go for Senate or Governor, whichever Peltola doesn’t go for.
I hope Tom Arkoosh runs again for attorney general of Idaho. Raul Labradour is pretty weak, underperforming Donald by 6 points in a much redder year in the state downballot.
I have never seen Raul Labrador say or do anything that hasn’t been about getting attention or trying to act like he’s a conservative without trying to be the biggest lightning rod in the world. He really offers nothing, even for conservatives and the far right.
One of his gubernatorial campaign ads, oh my god, Labrador could not explain anything about his candidacy other than basic, typical talk. Very light on anything that would make a voter even want to consider him although in the campaign ad, he did give a decent introduction about how he was raised.
He got 32% of the votes in the 2018 GOP Idaho Gubernatorial Primary compared to Brad Little’s 37.3% of the votes.
Labrador is basically a cross between Jeff Flake and a typical Tea Party politician. Yes, Labrador, like Flake, is Mormon.
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! My side dish is ready and I finally had a chance to relax for a while, after working for 1.5 hours at the nursing home in New Rochelle that's my main gig, getting back to New York, prepping and cooking. I work tomorrow, too. Which is good, of course: I'm glad to have the work.
I should get a red, striped jacket like the Replacements bassist. And since I live in the South, could probably get away with the pink pants too. It would reinforce my nerdy scientist reputation, or maybe it would create a cool scientist rep instead?
Happy American Thanksgiving to my southern neighbours, I hope your labours in the next year bring a change to the centre of political gravity in the nation. I hope you enjoyed many kilograms of good food and imbibed a few millilitres of some quality whisky if you were inclined.
PS all spellings and measurements in this post are correct, God Save the King ;)
I hear you, but you don’t have to choose a smoky whisky like Laphroaig or Ardbeg. Glenmorangie, Aberlour and Tomatin are three whiskies without that peat-flavoured profile – and there are many others.
My own affordable whisky of choice is Balvenie, which has a rather gentle peat profile. But, hey, I’m no fan of Laphroaig.
I wish all those working in retail today on Black Friday good luck. I know a lot of people shop online now but the crowds aren’t totally gone, so I wish any retail employees well.
So far, it's a fairly normal day for me, except that the Metro North train left a couple of minutes early - the weekend schedule - and it's a bit more crowded than usual but still with plenty of space and nothing like yesterday.
Fun Fact this Thanksgiving weekend. On my mother's side, I'm descended from two members of the Mayflower manifest: Richard Warren and Francis Cooke.
One of each of their children married, fast forward a few generations later, their descendents moved to what is now Vermont. There, after the Revolutionary War ended, a daughter married a Hessian POW runaway named Christoph Dieffenbach. I assumed initially he took up the Continentnal Congress' offer of a generous homestead plot to any Hessian who defected, but I was wrong. In fact, it seems he ditched his prisoner column while they were being relocated from Boston to Canada so they could be repatriated to Hesse after the Revolutionary War ended. He anglicized his name to Christopher Tiffany in the first US Census.
"...[I]n the five months that Mr. Menendez, 71, has been in prison, the couple has been barred by the U.S. Bureau of Prisons from seeing each other, even though the federal judge who sentenced them and the prosecutors who tried the case have said they have no objection to such visits.”
I can't read the NYT article to see why they aren't allowed to see each other.
I can read the article, and here is apparently why:
“Ms. Menendez was convicted of shuttling messages and bribes between her husband and several New Jersey businessmen who were seeking political favors. In the interview, she acknowledged that her husband’s willingness to allow his lawyers to depict her as desperate, broke and on the take was a painful moment in their marriage.”
So are they afraid that she would continue to be a go-between for corruption, or is she just pissed at him? I doubt anyone would want to bribe a disgraced, imprisoned former politician.
From what I have read, Nadine Menendez has only been married to Bob Menendez for five years and is not the mother of Rep. Rob Menendez. His first wife Jane Jacobsen, who he was married to from 1976 to 2005, is Rob Menendez's mother.
Apparently Nadine Hernandez had associated with Menendez because of power and status, not so much love. She may be mad at him but that doesn't mean she's without any blame. Her associating with Menendez before and after marriage meant she was trying to use him to get foreign affairs done in her own personal interests. She also had particular ulterior motives that many women normally don't have in coming into relationships.
Normally I do not cite the NY Post but in this case, it reveals quite a damning indictment of Ms. Menendez and what her agenda is. Bob Menendez's problems of corruption happened well before he met her but they were increased substantially with her marrying him.
One could say Nadine Menendez made a mistake associating with Bob Menendez but likewise for him. Let's just say as a guy, I would have walked away from Nadine Menendez if I was in the dating phase in my life.
This is what Democrats need! Not just big victories in cities and suburbs, but rural turnout across the country! There is a path for states like mine (West Virginia) to become blue again
The most realistic way for WV to become competitive again were if there was a boom of DC area transplants to the eastern panhandle and Dems went pedal to the metal in Kanawha county (Charleston).
And Morgantown and Wheeling
Those cities are both relatively blue, especially Morgantown (I live near Morgantown and it's surprising how liberal it is compared to the rest of the state). It's rural communities in Monongalia and Ohio counties that drag the Democratic vote in the cities down. They just need to expand (and Morgantown is trying to into areas like Brookhaven and Granville)
The only way that would happen would be if West Virginia's infrastructure, economy and transportation system would improve substantially enough to create incentives for those demographics you are referring to.
Unfortunately, much in contraction to those who don't know the Virginias, West Virginia is not Virginia. While Arlington offers much less in housing costs than in cities Los Angeles, NYC and San Francisco and is looked at as one of the safest cities to live in, it along with Alexandria and plenty other cities in VA are much different than in WV where Charleston, Morgantown, etc. are pretty much isolated from where most of the state tends to be.
Isolated from what? Those are the cities. Do you mean they're isolated from, like, DC?
Isolated from the rural regions as in what goes on in WV cities does not necessarily trickle down to the rural communities and suburbs. There may be a certain degree of trickled down effect but WV for a long time has become increasingly a poorer state and there’s not enough business activity and wealth to really spread across the state beyond cities.
In VA, there’s considerably more wealth spread across from cities to suburbs. Yes, there are rural parts of the state but VA is not Idaho, Wyoming or even Utah.
Let's not get carried away...
I'd say democrats can win here within the next century or so, for starters
We don't even know if the human race will exist in 100 years.
It’s giving Lloyd Christmas “you’re telling me there’s a chance…”
There’s about greater chance that we make inroads into even more R Wyoming with liberal environmental types moving there and Denver sprawl than we do in WV.
I lived in WV in 2004 as it's slide into the abyss became clear (it wasn't just a "Gore" thing). I'd happily move back if there was a job...but in the meantime I visit.
I agree with Julian that WV could swing with the right message, because it is mostly rural, terribly poor, and not well served by *anyone* since Byrd. But to do so there has to be a real.way to connect to the mining communities, even as mining decreases in importance. It's no accident that Manchin and Justice were elected, because they represent mining that the people hoped would be rejuvenated, but were WISCs. Retraining and data centers won't cut it. But figure it out in WV and you'll make inroads into western Pa, Arkansas, TN, KY, SR Ohio too. Those places used to be blue before the dems abandoned them.
I'm sorry, WISCs=? Also, you don't specify what magic you're thinking of that would somehow convince them that Democrats aren't worse for them than Republicans.
WISC = Wolf in Sheep's Clothing
In this context, maintaining the primacy of mining with little support of the miners, except to make Greenness a boogeyman.
Someone smarter than me will have to figure out the message. Maybe Julian can. But it has to include white, low paid, rural folks. Health care is a great start, but there has to be something that rebuilds and diversifies the economy of Appalachia.
The Democrats always send aid to everywhere, irrespective of whether they get any votes there, but it's pretty hard to ask the Democrats to do extraordinary, magical things for places where no-one wants to invest and then continually take it on the chin as the voters there bite the hands that feed them. Don't get me wrong: I'd be irate if Democrats started screwing people for political reasons - they need to keep helping people on the basis of need because that's just the right thing to do. But they are not magicians, and they're competing with a scam artist party that I'd submit they can't defeat among that group of voters based on achievements.
A lot of those “deep red towns” in upstate NY were ancestrally Republican areas that had been carried by Democratic Presidential candidates for years but the Dem strength at the top of the ticket hadn’t trickled all the way down the ballot yet.
And the bottom falling out for Republicans in the suburbs and small cities. Spanberger got 59% in Chesterfield County, that's crazy...Tim Kaine only got 54% and 55% there in his last two elections (the one in 2018 against a disaster of a GOP nominee who lost statewide by almost as much as Earle-Sears). Low GOP turnout in the rurals helped us, and Spanberger did do slightly better than Harris in the rurals, but the overall map tells the story of where Earle-Sears absolutely imploded. Insane, record-setting numbers in the suburbs and small cities. Plenty more examples across the state.
It wasn’t just in New York either. Democrats won big in ancestral Republican areas in North Carolina and Ohio for mayor or town council seats— some by margins that TACO won by last year.
The likelihood of North Carolina Republicans losing one state House (even with the gerrymandering) and losing their supermajority in the other one next year is 50-50 right now. Which sounds nuts two years ago.
In small town Georgetown SC, the Dems threw out the R mayor and all three R councilmen who were on the ballot. Margins were roughly 18%. Rs had won everything they contested in the last 3 elections. It's a rural factory town, now with a closed paper mill and closed steel mill. But with valuable coastal property (overvalued, actually, considering climate change).
I’m taking a wild guess that Fox News, NYT, CBS and others won’t be accentuating that key factoid.
But Democrats can!
If Ken Martin and the DNC want to use this information against the GOP, that would be awesome.
The wrinkle is that from what I've read, the shooter was repeatedly vetted, so it's probably no-one's fault that he was admitted.
Trump is now weak on the border and immigration.
I don't think that argument would be useful or successful, with him trying to press people to "self-deport".
Or perhaps another way of arguing Trump's record. Doesn't have to be "being weak on the border and immigration."
Now you're talking.
This headline, from a week ago, was interesting:
"Heritage Foundation report blasts Trump's record on deportations"
Basically, Heritage criticizes Trump for not being xenophobic enough. Excerpts:
The Heritage Foundation, the think tank behind Project 2025, says in a report out Friday that the Trump administration is "significantly off pace" on mass deportations. "The American people voted for mass deportations. They're getting mass communications instead," the report's author Mike Howell tells Axios.
The big picture: President Trump promised to carry out the largest mass deportation campaign since the Eisenhower administration.
Howell writes that the Department of Homeland Security's focus on people with serious criminal records — what Trump now calls the "worst of the worst" — was [already] the agenda of past Democratic presidents.
https://www.axios.com/2025/11/21/heritage-foundation-trump-mass-deportations
I just saw this now. Oh my god, the Heritage Foundation is now criticizing Trump for not going far enough?
Let it melt down. I would love to see The Heritage Foundation cease to exist as far as I am concerned.
Wishing you and your Mom a very blessed Thanksgiving!
Enjoy your day! I hope living among your long-lived mother and dog rubs off on you.
She's the only (open) atheist in Congress.
Fun fact: there are only 18 members of Congress who are not either Christian or Jewish - and there are only 32 Jewish members of Congress.
I don't think the Jewish representation is an "only." We're way overrepresented in Congress, compared to our share of the population.
I was implying that there was a lot of Christians, not that there was a small number of Jewish people. But yes - there is over double the percentage of Jews in Congress than there is nationally (6% vs. 2.3%)
Correction: There are a lot of *Christianists* in Congress; however, not so many Christians.
Zohran Mamdani is versed in multiple languages, including Arabic, French, Spanish, and Hindi.
Amazing to be skilled in multiple languages. I am still trying to learn Russian, Farsi and French.
I was fluent in Malay and it took me a week to regain most of my fluency the last time I was there. My French is at an advanced conversational level in practice, and I regained about half of it during a week in Montreal around Memorial Day. My Italian is also at an advanced conversational level in practice, though I didn't formally study it like my 3 1/2 years of French and have read less in it, so my vocabulary is smaller. I regained about half of that in 8 days in Italy 2 Aprils ago. My German is around A2 in European fluency measures, kind of intermediate. I know a smattering of a couple of other languages.
Effing impressive. And totally un-American! ;)
Eh, don't be -too- impressed. As you know, lots of Europeans are fluent or near-fluent in 3 or more languages. I've only ever been fluent in 2, and I think most kids who were moved to a place where almost no-one spoke their language would have learned the local language quickly.
In other words, you would be hard-pressed to find a single American legislator who can compete with your average Dutch politician, who generally is fairly fluent in four languages: French, German and English, in addition to Dutch.
Heck, we ought to make a list of native-born members of Congress who cannot even be considered fluent in English!
I'll start: Tommy Tuberville. Markwayne Mullin
I don't have any particular insight, but on the map question, my guess is people didn't understand WHY they needed to vote on this. I pay pretty close attention to things and I had no idea why this was on the ballot other than the fact that it came out of the charter revision commission.
RE Prop 1, I think these are pretty standard (I worked on one of these when I worked in the legislature and they're fairly non-controversial). I do wonder if the number of new voters that came in didn't have the info on this and thought this was some sort of dimunation of parkland or something.
Again, no particular insight, but I think it's plausible that it was a lack of information.
All that makes sense. I also think there are New Yorkers who just oppose all ballot measures just because they don't like them in general or are contrary.
Hell, I voted against all the statewide propositions in Texas because I don't trust what a republican dominated legislature puts on the ballot and what the true intent is behind it.
I wouldn't necessarily trust anyone, and certainly not those guys, but I assume you read the language of the propositions carefully before making up your mind.
I think we all know that ballot proposals can be worded on weird ways that allow bad things to be done, despite them sounding good on the ballot. So, it can seem like the best option is to not support them. I voted for the ski thing in the Adirondacks but it wouldn't actually surprise me if it was a camel nose under the tent toward completely leveling the park.
I can imagine the city folk stopped reading after they read "yea were keeping this land we stole from the park"
I trust the environmental organizations that endorsed it.
I remember visiting Taormina, Sicily, after college. If you brought empty bottles to fill at the local winery, you got a hefty discount. That red wine was delicious and so dark it was almost black, and the alcohol content was around 17 percent.
(Yes, I know, a trip down memory lane, with only tangential relevance to the topic at hand. But, hey, that policy did lower wasteful bottle consumption.)
One of my favorite things about Italy was you could go to some of the local farms and fill up bottles of olive oil and wine for very cheap.
Not exactly the recycling companies’ fault but if we are pushing everyone to recycle, it’s almost like a fad instead of a real concerted effort to actually do anything really substantial about the environment. Congress should have tried to address this problem long ago but hasn’t.
At least with compost, you can be assured it is helping the environment providing the weather is there and you have a compost bin. I’ve composed for a long time and the soil produced is great for gardening.
Nitpick: Is "soul" a typo? Did you mean humus or loam, perhaps?
Soil.
Accidental typo (which I corrected) but if you want my honest opinion, I do personally put the "soul" in making compost soil from whatever food scraps there are from banana peels to left over food from take out that spoils.
It's not soul food but soul soil. ;)
I also voted for the "ski thing in the Adirondacks" and also was a bit skeptical about it, because I didn't really know the details. What land are we selling exactly, what land are we buying?
The fact that more land was being added than subtracted from the park is what sold it to me.
I mean, why does the city map need to be "digitized"? What does that mean? Does that mean I can't go into city hall and get a paper copy of the city map? Or are our neighborhoods going to be carved up into weird geometrical shapes that don't actually adhere to the real world? Why is this the first time I'm hearing about this?
Those are some of the reasons I can think of that someone might be skeptical of that particular proposal.
It means they don't have to use only a paper map.
Colorado State Senator Faith Winter was killed in a multi-vehicle crash last night. She was a Democrat who represented district 25, which covers Broomfield.
coloradosun.com/2025/11/26/faith-winter-killed-colorado-car-crash/
Damn RIP, i stayed off the roads yesterday because of how crazy it is
We had errands to run where I am so we had to be on the roads, and it was pretty bad. We’re headed out today to see our extended family in Rhode Island, we’ve found traffic on Thanksgiving to be less bad than the day before.
Rip, spent my holiday in Broomfield.
RIP
Colorado has same-party appointments, right?
She had accomplished a lot, but she was only 45. Tragic. Way too many people die on the road. There are important things that could be done to lower that number, foremost among them making cars less needed by building a greater amount of reliable public transportation, but we all know how much sand is throw into the gears of that in the U.S.
There are ways to improve the safety of driving, too. Some of them have been done, but if the country considered tens of thousands of deaths from motor vehicles unacceptable, more would be done.
Lower speed limits, especially in cities, would also help greatly.
As I recall, the USA once had the best railway system in the world – and terrific rail-based public transit in many large cities. The automobile industry and petroleum industry systematically sabotaged all this.
Also the tire industry and bus companies. Yep. You used to be able to take trolleys all the way from New York to Boston, quite apart from the railways.
We do Thanksgiving on the weekend, now that we live in the UK. But happy Thanksgiving to those who are celebrating it today.
There’s already a link to a music video on the page, but given the day, here’s one more. It’s the song San Antonio Rose by Bob Wills, known as the king of “western swing” music in the 30s and 40s. Wills was from Turkey, Texas.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=okNgLm4Ilt4&list=RDokNgLm4Ilt4&start_radio=1&pp=ygUaYm9iIHdpbGxzIHNhbiBhbnRvbmlvIHJvc2WgBwE%3D
Happy Thanksgiving! One thing I stumbled across was that in Alaska, Democratic state senator Scott Kawasaki won reelection last year by 3 points to his Fairbanks area seat while Trump won it by over 16 points. Mary Peltola even lost it by just under a point. Other than the eastern Iowa senate special that we flipped earlier this year and the Orthodox Jewish seats in NY and NJ, this might just be one of the reddest legislative districts in the country held by a Democrat.
He is not up for reelection until 2028 and would not need to give up his seat if he ran for governor or Senate. I hope the DGA and DSCC are coordinating with him to run for whichever race that Peltola decides not to run. Unlike Tom Begich and Matt Claman, he’s also relatively young at 50.
I was in Tackett Lafferty’s district in 2020. There’s a nice lake for kayaking and also hiking trails over in Floyd County.
There was also Jason Probst up until January of this year. He lost reelection in November 2024.
Kawasaki is somebody I would love to see take a stab at higher office
I wonder if he would make a good House candidate, to take on Begich III. Thoughts?
I don't see why not.
Mary Peltola could challenge Senator Dan Sullivan and Scott Kawasaki could challenge Senator Lisa Murkowski in 2028.
Kawasaki wouldn’t have to risk his state senate seat if he ran for something next year, though. It makes most sense for him to go for Senate or Governor, whichever Peltola doesn’t go for.
Perhaps although if Kawasaki runs for Governor, he'd have to face Tom Begich first.
Frankly, as much as it's helpful to win the gubernatorial race, the Senate seats are far more important.
I hope Tom Arkoosh runs again for attorney general of Idaho. Raul Labradour is pretty weak, underperforming Donald by 6 points in a much redder year in the state downballot.
I have never seen Raul Labrador say or do anything that hasn’t been about getting attention or trying to act like he’s a conservative without trying to be the biggest lightning rod in the world. He really offers nothing, even for conservatives and the far right.
One of his gubernatorial campaign ads, oh my god, Labrador could not explain anything about his candidacy other than basic, typical talk. Very light on anything that would make a voter even want to consider him although in the campaign ad, he did give a decent introduction about how he was raised.
He got 32% of the votes in the 2018 GOP Idaho Gubernatorial Primary compared to Brad Little’s 37.3% of the votes.
Labrador is basically a cross between Jeff Flake and a typical Tea Party politician. Yes, Labrador, like Flake, is Mormon.
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! My side dish is ready and I finally had a chance to relax for a while, after working for 1.5 hours at the nursing home in New Rochelle that's my main gig, getting back to New York, prepping and cooking. I work tomorrow, too. Which is good, of course: I'm glad to have the work.
Definitely. But it's normal for us musicians to work while people are relaxing and celebrating. We are the entertainment!
I bet you've seen your share of both sweetness and drama at your gigs.
Absolutely, playing at a memory care unit.
I should get a red, striped jacket like the Replacements bassist. And since I live in the South, could probably get away with the pink pants too. It would reinforce my nerdy scientist reputation, or maybe it would create a cool scientist rep instead?
Happy American Thanksgiving to my southern neighbours, I hope your labours in the next year bring a change to the centre of political gravity in the nation. I hope you enjoyed many kilograms of good food and imbibed a few millilitres of some quality whisky if you were inclined.
PS all spellings and measurements in this post are correct, God Save the King ;)
Yes, indeed – and whisky tends to be far more enjoyable than whiskey!
Eh, I don't like a lot of smokiness in my drinks.
I hear you, but you don’t have to choose a smoky whisky like Laphroaig or Ardbeg. Glenmorangie, Aberlour and Tomatin are three whiskies without that peat-flavoured profile – and there are many others.
My own affordable whisky of choice is Balvenie, which has a rather gentle peat profile. But, hey, I’m no fan of Laphroaig.
Glenmorangie is a good scotch, but it is merely mildly peaty. I prefer bourbon and Irish whiskey, on the whole.
Happy Thanksgiving everyone!
I wish all those working in retail today on Black Friday good luck. I know a lot of people shop online now but the crowds aren’t totally gone, so I wish any retail employees well.
Just a note to say it's not only retail workers who are working today.
Oh definitely. I just felt bad for everyone working in chaotic retail situations right now. Good luck to everyone else too!
So far, it's a fairly normal day for me, except that the Metro North train left a couple of minutes early - the weekend schedule - and it's a bit more crowded than usual but still with plenty of space and nothing like yesterday.
Fun Fact this Thanksgiving weekend. On my mother's side, I'm descended from two members of the Mayflower manifest: Richard Warren and Francis Cooke.
One of each of their children married, fast forward a few generations later, their descendents moved to what is now Vermont. There, after the Revolutionary War ended, a daughter married a Hessian POW runaway named Christoph Dieffenbach. I assumed initially he took up the Continentnal Congress' offer of a generous homestead plot to any Hessian who defected, but I was wrong. In fact, it seems he ditched his prisoner column while they were being relocated from Boston to Canada so they could be repatriated to Hesse after the Revolutionary War ended. He anglicized his name to Christopher Tiffany in the first US Census.
WATN: https://politicalwire.com/2025/11/28/why-nadine-menendez-still-hasnt-visited-her-husband/
"...[I]n the five months that Mr. Menendez, 71, has been in prison, the couple has been barred by the U.S. Bureau of Prisons from seeing each other, even though the federal judge who sentenced them and the prosecutors who tried the case have said they have no objection to such visits.”
I can't read the NYT article to see why they aren't allowed to see each other.
I can read the article, and here is apparently why:
“Ms. Menendez was convicted of shuttling messages and bribes between her husband and several New Jersey businessmen who were seeking political favors. In the interview, she acknowledged that her husband’s willingness to allow his lawyers to depict her as desperate, broke and on the take was a painful moment in their marriage.”
So are they afraid that she would continue to be a go-between for corruption, or is she just pissed at him? I doubt anyone would want to bribe a disgraced, imprisoned former politician.
Here's the tricky part of this:
From what I have read, Nadine Menendez has only been married to Bob Menendez for five years and is not the mother of Rep. Rob Menendez. His first wife Jane Jacobsen, who he was married to from 1976 to 2005, is Rob Menendez's mother.
Apparently Nadine Hernandez had associated with Menendez because of power and status, not so much love. She may be mad at him but that doesn't mean she's without any blame. Her associating with Menendez before and after marriage meant she was trying to use him to get foreign affairs done in her own personal interests. She also had particular ulterior motives that many women normally don't have in coming into relationships.
Normally I do not cite the NY Post but in this case, it reveals quite a damning indictment of Ms. Menendez and what her agenda is. Bob Menendez's problems of corruption happened well before he met her but they were increased substantially with her marrying him.
One could say Nadine Menendez made a mistake associating with Bob Menendez but likewise for him. Let's just say as a guy, I would have walked away from Nadine Menendez if I was in the dating phase in my life.
https://nypost.com/2025/10/01/us-news/how-gold-bar-bob-menendez-wife-nadine-flaunted-her-way-into-his-affections-like-a-moth-to-a-flame/