Happy Thanksgiving everyone! I'm off to New York to visit my relatives.
In honor of New York, I had two questions about it. First, can someone explain why 465,000 NYC voters voted against the ballot proposition to create a digitized city map? That seems to me like the most obvious, uncontroversial ballot measure in a while, and IMO it should've gotten 95% support, so why were so many NYCers against it? (This proposition did dramatically outperform all the other ones on the ballot this year.)
And second, regarding Proposal 1 (which fixed an issue regarding Adirondack Park's land), it passed the legislature almost unanimously, and the counties affected by the proposal voted heavily in favor of it. But it only passed with 52% statewide because 4 of the 5 NYC boroughs voted against it. Why didn't they support it?
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.
Except that even environmental language that sounds good often doesn't work out. Take California's grocery bag bill and beverage container CRV. At first people brought their bags or boxes, but that stopped. People now are using almost as many plastic bags that are much heavier duty and disposing them in the garbage just like the thin ones causing more plastic waste. Plus the markets get 10-15c per bag, a profit center.
On beverage containers, most of the recyclers have gone belly up, so we pay 5-10c per container that ends up in the curbside recycling container, much of which gets diverted to the landfill because there aren't adequate numbers of recyclers.
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?
Yassamin Ansari (D-AZ-3) has joined what I'm guessing is a very short list of Members of Congress who are fluent in more than two languages. She's learned how to speak Spanish, and she's fluent in English and Persian (she is the daughter of U.S. immigrants from Iran). Here's Ansari speaking Spanish:
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 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.
I reflect on Thanksgiving that with all the evil going on in the world, I'm really blessed. I have shelter, food, friends and supportive family, and generally live a pretty happy life.
Last Thanksgiving I was a month post surgery on my left foot, didn't know what the ultimate outcome would be, was wearing an inflatable balloon cast and couldn't walk at all, and not put any weight on the foot at all. This morning I walked my old standard poodle a half mile.
I'm thankful I've got my dog. She's almost 15, and standards usually live to about 12.
Then there is my Mom who defies gravity. She's still with me despite being told last March she had days to live, being told in September when she went on hospice that she had days to live, and she celebrates another Thanksgiving, undoubtedly the last one. But she's 99 and has lived a full life.
I plan to take what comes this next year and fight for good between now and next Thanksgiving.
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.
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.
Cars will always be needed. In New Hampshire's White Mountains alone, there are more than 100 different hiking trailheads, spread out over an area of a few thousand square miles. Public transportation will never be able to accommodate all of those, and especially not on the schedules that many hikers use.
Besides, development patterns in America are simply too spread out for public transportation to be practical in a lot of places.
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.
It's not just about lower speed limits - if you want to slow traffic down, you have to design roads differently, with different physical dimensions. If you build a wide, four-lane road with only a few intersections, and then post a 25 mph speed limit on it, nobody is going to obey that. But a two-lane road, with a cobblestone median and angled parking on both sides, will see much slower traffic (my town's Main St. is just like that, and hardly anyone goes faster than 20 mph on it).
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.
It's being reported that the Afghan shooter yesterday had worked for the CIA and was likely vetted then, but more importantly was granted asylum in April 2025, Trump's 2nd term. So much for blaming it on Biden.
"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 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.
Excellent video by Hank Green, who was discussed as a potential candidate in Montana a few weeks ago, which explains why the Baby Boomer generation is prevalent in American politics more than any other.
Happy Thanksgiving everyone! I'm off to New York to visit my relatives.
In honor of New York, I had two questions about it. First, can someone explain why 465,000 NYC voters voted against the ballot proposition to create a digitized city map? That seems to me like the most obvious, uncontroversial ballot measure in a while, and IMO it should've gotten 95% support, so why were so many NYCers against it? (This proposition did dramatically outperform all the other ones on the ballot this year.)
And second, regarding Proposal 1 (which fixed an issue regarding Adirondack Park's land), it passed the legislature almost unanimously, and the counties affected by the proposal voted heavily in favor of it. But it only passed with 52% statewide because 4 of the 5 NYC boroughs voted against it. Why didn't they support it?
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.
Except that even environmental language that sounds good often doesn't work out. Take California's grocery bag bill and beverage container CRV. At first people brought their bags or boxes, but that stopped. People now are using almost as many plastic bags that are much heavier duty and disposing them in the garbage just like the thin ones causing more plastic waste. Plus the markets get 10-15c per bag, a profit center.
On beverage containers, most of the recyclers have gone belly up, so we pay 5-10c per container that ends up in the curbside recycling container, much of which gets diverted to the landfill because there aren't adequate numbers of recyclers.
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.
Yassamin Ansari (D-AZ-3) has joined what I'm guessing is a very short list of Members of Congress who are fluent in more than two languages. She's learned how to speak Spanish, and she's fluent in English and Persian (she is the daughter of U.S. immigrants from Iran). Here's Ansari speaking Spanish:
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DRkUJabCkMv/?igsh=MXc5aDNtNXltMXF2dg
The above comment of mine was not meant to be a reply to any other comment on here.
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 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.
Happy Thanksgiving
I reflect on Thanksgiving that with all the evil going on in the world, I'm really blessed. I have shelter, food, friends and supportive family, and generally live a pretty happy life.
Last Thanksgiving I was a month post surgery on my left foot, didn't know what the ultimate outcome would be, was wearing an inflatable balloon cast and couldn't walk at all, and not put any weight on the foot at all. This morning I walked my old standard poodle a half mile.
I'm thankful I've got my dog. She's almost 15, and standards usually live to about 12.
Then there is my Mom who defies gravity. She's still with me despite being told last March she had days to live, being told in September when she went on hospice that she had days to live, and she celebrates another Thanksgiving, undoubtedly the last one. But she's 99 and has lived a full life.
I plan to take what comes this next year and fight for good between now and next Thanksgiving.
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.
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.
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.
Cars will always be needed. In New Hampshire's White Mountains alone, there are more than 100 different hiking trailheads, spread out over an area of a few thousand square miles. Public transportation will never be able to accommodate all of those, and especially not on the schedules that many hikers use.
Besides, development patterns in America are simply too spread out for public transportation to be practical in a lot of places.
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.
Agreed completely.
Apparently about 30% of driving fatalities in America involve drunk drivers. That would be a good place to start.
Lower speed limits, especially in cities, would also help greatly.
It's not just about lower speed limits - if you want to slow traffic down, you have to design roads differently, with different physical dimensions. If you build a wide, four-lane road with only a few intersections, and then post a 25 mph speed limit on it, nobody is going to obey that. But a two-lane road, with a cobblestone median and angled parking on both sides, will see much slower traffic (my town's Main St. is just like that, and hardly anyone goes faster than 20 mph on it).
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.
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.
When I think of the Democratic state legislators who represent the reddest districts, I think of Ashley Tackett Laferty and Frank Burns.
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.
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 am always impressed that you spend your holidays taking gigs entertaining old people. I'm sure you make their holiday so much brighter.
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.
https://abcnews.go.com/amp/Politics/national-guard-shooting-suspect-vetted-us-granted-asylum/story?id=127930034
It's being reported that the Afghan shooter yesterday had worked for the CIA and was likely vetted then, but more importantly was granted asylum in April 2025, Trump's 2nd term. So much for blaming it on Biden.
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.
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/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IwgzuSqb7ys
Excellent video by Hank Green, who was discussed as a potential candidate in Montana a few weeks ago, which explains why the Baby Boomer generation is prevalent in American politics more than any other.