With about 88 percent of the votes counted, Graham Platner has about 72 percent of the votes in the Maine Democratic Senate primary. Gov. Janet Mills, who was still on the ballot, got about 19.5 percent, and most of the rest went to another Dem named David Costello. This suggests to me that Platner is still competitive against Susan Collins in the general election. But I don’t know how much of the Platner vote was from early and mail-in votes that might have been cast before the recent negative news about him. Fingers crossed.
Trump is furious about a New York Times story by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, Inside the White House Freakout Over the Epstein Files. This is worth reading. When the Epstein crisis first hit the White House last year, Trump wanted the whole thing buried. Of course, it couldn’t be. J.D. Vance appears to have been the only one to realize that; he lobbied to just release everything and let the chips fall. But others disagreed, and administration officials soon were feuding over what to do about the files. Eventually they adopted a strategy of releasing carefully curated bits while talking about how transparent they were being.
Among other things, it was decided FBI interview notes of Epstein survivors could not see the light of day, ever. I noted this because I understand the survivors have been asking for those notes especially, because they want to read what the notes say about their own interviews. I don’t believe any have been released to this day.
In other news, inflation is now at a three-year high, mostly because of gas prices. Way to go, Trump. Trump and his cabinet all appear to be in denial about how hard things are getting even for people who voted for Trump. See, for example, Paul Krugman’s new substack column, Breaking the Heart of the Heartland.
In brief: Trump officials like Kevin Hassett, the administration’s top alleged economist, say that low consumer sentiment numbers are “being driven by Democrats who have Trump derangement syndrome.” And recently Trump went to Wisconsin to hold a “roundtable” with farmers in which he was the only one at the table and apparently did all the talking. Trump is very sure that farmers all love him. And it was largely rural America that put Trump back in the White House. “In 2024 Donald Trump narrowly won the popular vote, with only a 1.5 percentage point margin. But he won rural areas by 30 points,” Krugman writes. He continues,
Trump won rural areas by such a large margin because farmers were wildly optimistic about what he would do for them. The Purdue/CME Ag Economy Barometer, which is basically an index of farmers’ economic sentiment, surged with Trump’s victory. …
…Today, the rural Trump bump is nowhere to be seen. In fact, white rural voters’ views about Trump’s economic policy have turned astonishingly negative. … They are almost as negative on the economy as the population as a whole, with only 32% of rural whites approving of Trump’s handling of the economy, and 68% disapproving. Trump has made the rural economy so bad that reality has overridden Trump voters’ usual tendency to make excuses for him.
Trump is, apparently, utterly oblivious to this. In his mind all the people who voted for him in 2024 still love him as much as ever.
And it’s not about to get better. In the not-war with Iran, war-like activities between Iran and the U.S. and everybody else in the region are escalating. There is no peace deal on the horizon, and I say there won’t be as long as Trump is president. Oil reserves are running out, and gas prices are likely to climb even higher in the coming months.
Shifting gears a bit — here’s something not about Trump I found genuinely interesting at The Atlantic. See How Britain Became as Poor as Mississippi: A case study in self-sabotage by Idrees Kahloon. First, is Britain really as poor as Mississippi? Kahloon writes,
The country’s output per person is now only just above that of Mississippi, America’s poorest state—and that slight lead is only achieved thanks to London. Outside the capital, in places where tourists do not visit, living standards fall well below Mississippi’s.
In brief — 20 years ago, Britain’s economy was much, much better. Then came the financial sector meltdown of 2008. The government adopted austerity economics — trying to grow out of an economic slump mostly by cutting government spending to reduce the government’s debt.
Rather than increase spending to revive depressed demand, as modern Keynesians would counsel, the government, then led by Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron, opted to slash budgets as revenue plunged. The theory was that fiscal discipline—cutting spending more sharply than Britain’s peer countries—would inspire confidence and spur growth. At the time, deficits and debt were seen as immoral; unlike profligate Greece, Britain would manage its affairs prudently.
You’ll recognize that this is very similar to Republican economics. The only difference is that the Brits didn’t cut taxes on rich people. But even with higher taxes, revenues are down. And among the government services that have declined is the famous National Health Service.
The National Health Service, the celebrated pillar of the British cradle-to-grave welfare state, has a backlog of 6 million patients—almost a tenth of the population—waiting for treatment. The health service now has to spend more money settling maternity-malpractice claims than it does on actually providing maternity care. Many Brits can neither obtain an appointment with a publicly funded dentist nor afford a private one; in a 2023 survey, one in 10 reported doing DIY dental work, in extreme cases extracting their own teeth or gluing broken crowns back together.
The NHS had been underfunded for years before the financial crisis. Maggie Thatcher seems to have tried to starve it to death, as I remember. When I was in Wales in 2005 I remember getting an earful from one of my Welsh cousins about how badly the NHS had deteriorated even then. At the time the UK was paying less per capita for health care than just about any other country in the world. They have a system designed to be cost-effective, but it still requires some funding. And now they’ve just about killed it. Note that killing it didn’t make the economy better.
And, one more time — Keynes was right.
Shifting gears again — for another good read, see Josh Kovensky at TPM, ‘A Crock of Shit’: Amid Misconduct Allegations, Broadview Six Transcripts Offer Rare Window into Grand Jury.
Now, for sports news. A huge number of World Cup tickets remain unsold. What will FIFA do, if anything, to avoid empty seats?
Trump will blessedly be absent for tonight’s Knicks-Spurs game in Madison Square Garden. The weather could be a bit iffy for outdoor watch parties, though. I hope the rain doesn’t fall and the Knicks win and New Yorkers have a great night.
One other bit of randomness: every time Trump imprisons or deports someone, he reduces the economy by their output, and, by their food/clothing/housing spending. I saw an economist suggest that this is probably also counterproductive, and that's before you hit things like, in Texas, most construction sites are abandoned, because too many workers are undocumented. That kind of thing, that's the secondary effect, after you take an economic actor and make them a prisoner, and don't even feed or clothe them decently (thus, ensuring the least economic impact from the private prison industry).
So not only is the Republicans "cut everything, and burn the stubble!" approach stupid, their xenophobia will magnify the effect. And we can just see Trump turning this land into a few coastal preserves and a whole lotta Mississippi where it oughtn't be.
Spot on.
Jimmy Kimmel featured some clips of Trump among the farmers. Of course Kimmel is trying to make a joke, but Trump was actually showing them photos of his reflecting pond and various other projects in DC, completely oblivious to the people around him and their concerns. His voice sounded completely exhausted, yet you could still hear and feel the "meanness" that's engrained in his character, like a permanent groove.
It's pretty bad when the NYT runs a hit piece on Platner without clearly identifying the author – in the employ of AIPAC and whose source is a Republican operative. I suspect Platner will survive, but shame on the NYT. I remember now, why I dropped my subscription.
@WaryTale – you asked about the language of specifications. It's English, similar to the way a user or business analyst would verbally express or write out what they want a programmer to build for them. And like all verbal specs, they can range from vague to clear and precise. This is a good video that explains how the field has changed: What 6 Months of AI Coding Did to my Dev Team
Interesting. I didn't have time to listen to the whole thing, but will try to finish it tomorrow. I have thoughts… (shouldn't be a surprise)
"mail-in votes that might have been cast before the recent negative news about him. Fingers crossed"
Let me fix that for you: "mail-in votes that might have been cast before the recent negative lies about him. Fingers crossed"
To be fair, I don't think the recent controversy is "lies," but, from what I get, their big, big, big, offense is shoving a woman into a bedroom, and telling her to calm down. Now, I dunno about you guys, but the only time I would ever manhandle a woman in that manner, is to protect her, from me protecting myself. I.e., if a woman is trying to hurt me, yes, then, I will shove her into another room, close the door, and say I'm not letting her out, until, etc.
Platner served three combat tours; he came home with PTSD, and along the way developed alcoholism. And the recent kerfuffle is "OMG he was not a pleasant boyfriend!" which, dude, if you have PTSD and drink too much, and the worst they tag you with sounds a lot like protection, not harm, to me, you're probably a fundamentally decent fellow who would never hit a woman who wasn't an enemy soldier.
So, I hear people say, more is going to come out, and it's like, no, I really don't think so. That said, the recent smear piece was more like someone spitting saliva on one's clothing – a hideously inappropriate thing to do, but, meh, it'll come out in the wash.
The one thing I do worry about is, some people are screaming this means character doesn't matter, and, it's like, no, it means character is informed by the past, but not defined by it. A man who posts stupid shit needs to grow up and learn better, and it's easy, because it's only *stupidity* that holds folks back. It's not like there are two equally attractive signposts, one saying "be a bigot," and one saying "learn from *people*, not same-skin/religion/culture/sex." One says "hate" and the other says, not to be too corny or anything, "love." And it really is obvious which one is better. Children tend to know instinctively; it's the grown-ups who are smart enough to screw it up through greed and hate.
Character is acknowledging one's mistakes and issues, repenting and working on fixing them. Platner has done that. No one is in position to judge him for his flaws; we all have them. "He who is without sin…" But I've never seen so much concern troll judging going on. Something they won't do for those on the right. Paxton immediately come to mind, and its telling what they're trying to do with Platner because they're not subjecting Paxton, who has so much baggage I'm surprised he can even move, to the same scrutiny.
The political class justifies all this by saying democrats must hold their own to the same standards they demand of republicans, and yet they themselves won't hold republicans to those standards! Yet we have the “liberal” media doing their bit (Joe & Mika, Chris Hayes, for starters) by asking the same dumb questions over and over, as if someone might get lucky and have Platner break down or slip up. So far he's been consistent.
Bottom line here is they're afraid of Platner (just like they were/are with Mamdani) because he's getting people to see where the real problem lies, with the wealthy and the political class that shills for them, at the expense of working people, and is proposing solutions to fix them that will cost them money.
To be fair the NYT source is a right-wing heritage foundation hack, Platner says she is lying. I believe him, he has been up front about about all of the other scandals, so he has a track record. I'm not going to believe a NYT hit piece who's source works for the GQP, if you want to that is on you, I'm not that fucking naive.
Screwups abound. Dropping the ball on the screw worm may turn out to be the biggest of the lot. Losing the moral high road also a massive one. Add both to the problems Krugman sees plaguing the heartland and red turns blue really fast.
MTG rubbing Trump's nose in his pile of hot steaming Epstein rivals a miracle comeback of the Knicks for uplifting news of the day.