James Joyner is a Professor of Security Studies. He's a former Army officer and Desert Storm veteran. Views expressed here are his own. Follow James on Twitter @DrJJoyner.
Wakey, wakey. For a retiree this business of getting up early because the remodeling contractor is coming is getting old.
NYT is doing one of their pundit round tables, and anything Jamelle Bouie says is worth reading. In particular, I’ve been saying the D’s need an image, a party definition. Bouie observes,
In Virginia and in New York City and in New Jersey, even to an extent, the brand that the top of the ticket Democrats created was: Hey, we want these jobs, first of all, we’re happy to serve you. This was Mamdani’s big thing; he always has a smile on his face. It’s very clear that part of his brand is like: I want to be mayor of New York and I want to serve you.
David French also said something useful,
But if the Democrats are attacking towards reasonable, normal — towards somebody that you wouldn’t be afraid if your kids are around them too much
Note – not toward the ideological center, but toward normal. Spanberger and Sherrill are soccer moms. What’s more normal than a soccer mom? Mamdani isn’t a soccer mom, but NYC has it’s own normal.
The round table mentions affordability a lot. Good for ’25 and maybe ’26. I’d have other stuff established for ’28, “Normal, “dependable”, “hard working”, “caring”, “jobs”. If Republican economic governance holds true to form, the problem may not be affordability in the recession of ’27. In any case, inflation from tariffs is a one and done. Well, one and done if you impose them and quit, maybe not if you keep jacking them around.
I see my local semi-pro newspaper here in red SWFL chose to run the latest AP story on the shutdown with what I assume was the AP headline, “GOP leaders swat down Dem offer”. And the article seems to slant toward GOPs prolonging the shutdown.
For a retiree this business of getting up early because the remodeling contractor is coming is getting old.
When home, 4:30 am is sleeping in late for me and dear wife. She gets up early to walk, feed the feral cats, and say the rosary with her family. Then she leaves around 715 to attend daily mass which is held at 730.
On Tuesdays, DW and I are sitting down by 930 to play bridge with Rose and Evelyn.
The wife’s early wake up time is why I am often posting here before 5 in the morning.
This AM’s NYTs has a decidedly sarcastic article about how the felon’s administration is managing the Kennedy Arts Center. You’d think you were reading the New Yorker and not the grey lady.
First I tried last Sunday. they don’t take blood donation in that hospital on Sundays for some reason… I tried again this morning. Oddly enough, in the questionnaire they asked if I’d taken an NSAID like aspirin and when. I’d never seen that before. I wrote down I took ibuprofen toe days ago. The person behind the counter said “You probably won’t be allowed to donate. I’ll pass this to the doctor.”
Eventually I get called for a sample, where I get asked about the ibuprofen again. After the quick analysis of the sample was done, they tell me the platelet count is low. Not low enough to be a problem, but that I can’t donate blood. And I got asked again about how much ibuprofen did I take, when, and what for.
Well, one pill, two days ago, for a headache.
Oh, you can try again ten days from now. But don’t take any more ibuprofen or other NSAID. Sure, in Hell Week kickoff, when I get some shoulder pain from formatting spreadsheets, data entry, and writing capacity corrections for the questions meeting? No problem!
I’d take Tylenol, but that would give Jr’s grandkids autism somehow.
This hospital is 26 kilometers away. I’m not going to try again.
not toward the ideological center, but toward normal.
I like this. Not Left, not Right but normal, rational, real-world. And I think we need to add, young. As a 71 year-old man I can say this: no more 80 year olds, no more 70 year olds should be out front speaking for the party. Schumer’s day is over and it’s time for him to toddle off the stage. Pritzker is 60, Newsom is 58, Buttigieg is 43, AOC is 36. Old enough to have some experience, not so old you worry about them slipping in the shower.
There is reason to believe that there have been more deaths in Sudan in just the last 10 days than in Gaza over the last two years. And here at OTB we’ve had easily a dozen pieces on Gaza, and, unless I missed something, zero articles on Sudan. And no campus protests.
Why? Are Sudanese children less valuable than Gazan children?
This is actual genocide, not the UN’s deliberately Israel-targeting and frankly bullshit definition, but the real thing: race and religion motivated slaughters, bulldozers digging mass graves, rape as policy.
The reality is that the number of civilian casualties in Gaza has been lower than is typical of urban warfare. The reality is that Israel did allow food and medicine deliveries, although it was a clusterfuck, while the RSF is deliberately using starvation as a weapon. Israel paused action to inoculate Gazan children against polio. Israel has the ability right now today to kill every person in Gaza. And yet, the death toll for their ‘genocide’ after two years stands at ~3% of the population.
No one knows the death toll in Sudan but estimates are between 150,000 and 400,000. Gaza death toll? ~70,000, counting Hamas and civilians. And no one cares.
We apparently DGAF about dead children unless there’s a way to blame Israel. But no, no, no let’s not ever suggest anti-semitism might play a part. It’s purely coincidence. Israelis just happen to be Jews. And chanting the genocidal Hamas slogan, ‘from the river to the sea,’ isn’t anti-semitism, it’s just a catchy slogan.
The Department of Homeland Security has stopped using software that automatically captured and saved trails of communication between officials, according to sworn court statements filed this week. They will now rely on officials to take screenshots to keep records.*
Well, seems someone’s learned to avoid the Nazis’ penchant for providing the evidence needed for the inevitable war crimes trials, eh?
*Thanks again to Sleeping Dog for the definitely snarky piece on the Kennedy Center. This piece was linked at the end of that article.
@Flat Earth Luddite:
From NYT’s piece on DHS’s new system for preserving records…
The policy expects officials to first take screenshots of the text messages on their work phones, send it to their work email, download it on their work computers and then run a program that would recognize the text to store it in searchable formats, according to the department’s guidance submitted to the court.
Yeah, that’ll happen. Once again, mainstream reporting on this administration reads like the Onion.
There’s been a lot of discussion here about messaging and running on issues when the real problem is structural. I’ve been saying it’s a given that strategists talk about issues because positioning and messaging are all they have control over, and what they have to sell. Today’s Krugman Substack is a conversation with a data guy about Tuesday’s results. The consultant, G. Elliott Morris, says somewhat the same thing,
So I call this the strategist fallacy. The fallacy is among strategists in politics who map their model of how they make decisions as voters onto the median voter. In this case, the fallacy is of using issue positions to decide who to vote for. So your strategists will look at politics, will look at candidates and say, “controlling for their party identification, their fundraising ability, their incumbency status, these candidates do better or worse because of the issue positions that they take,” or that voters will vote for them because of certain issue positions.
That might be how a strategist would operate, because they know about the issue positions of various candidates, but we know from most political science research that voters have very poor understanding of what candidates actually stand for at the issue-position level. They also have a very poor understanding of what these ideological labels: moderate, progressive, really even mean.
Change would have to come not from the consultants, but from the party and the candidates. I wonder if some of the easier structural changes wouldn’t be within party management and procedures.
Of Tuesday Morris and Krugman note,
Morris: That is a complete bastardization of the government’s role in providing data to people. In terms of the data, I just keep coming back to this massive change in the voting behavior of people who say the economy is important to them. Trump won that group by 63 percentage points in 2024 and Democrats just won them by 30 points. There’s about a 90 percentage point swing here.
Krugman: Oh my God.
Lest we get cocky, what Morris sees operating is mostly anti-incumbency. It’s what cost Harris the last general and the GOPs Tuesday. And if it hurt the GOPs in ’28 enough to elect a Dem prez, it hurts said Dem in ’32.
@Michael Reynolds:
imuho, it’s not so much about semitism, pro- or anti-, as it is about the long-standing agenda of the “campists” and the defaults of some parts of the media.
For the campist/alt-left, Israel is an exemplar of “Western capitalism/imperialism/racism/ FASCISM!” and Hamas are in the “camp of resistance”.
It’s one of the last “good old causes” of the 1970’s, now the shah is pushing up the daisies, and the Khmer Rouge turned out to be a bit of a disappointment.
Along with “Nuclear power? No thanks!” of course.
Sudan is simply irrelevant to that agenda.
As is Myanmar, or Mali, or Caucasia, or etc.
And the media just seem to be “meh” about the whole entropic collapse of the Sahel and central and north-east Africa.
Whereas the Middle East in general and Israel/Palestine in particular are deemed “real news”.
(I suspect its partly an automatic reflex realting to received wisdom)
I expect European governments are becoming very worried indeed about the entire region.
But absent Washington paying any attention, the options are limited.
(Personally, I’d be inclined to put a naval battle group offshore the UAE and tell them to stop their f@ckery or else, but that’s just nasty old imperialist me. Mea culpa.)
********************@
Wakey, wakey. For a retiree this business of getting up early because the remodeling contractor is coming is getting old.
NYT is doing one of their pundit round tables, and anything Jamelle Bouie says is worth reading. In particular, I’ve been saying the D’s need an image, a party definition. Bouie observes,
David French also said something useful,
Note – not toward the ideological center, but toward normal. Spanberger and Sherrill are soccer moms. What’s more normal than a soccer mom? Mamdani isn’t a soccer mom, but NYC has it’s own normal.
The round table mentions affordability a lot. Good for ’25 and maybe ’26. I’d have other stuff established for ’28, “Normal, “dependable”, “hard working”, “caring”, “jobs”. If Republican economic governance holds true to form, the problem may not be affordability in the recession of ’27. In any case, inflation from tariffs is a one and done. Well, one and done if you impose them and quit, maybe not if you keep jacking them around.
I see my local semi-pro newspaper here in red SWFL chose to run the latest AP story on the shutdown with what I assume was the AP headline, “GOP leaders swat down Dem offer”. And the article seems to slant toward GOPs prolonging the shutdown.
@gVOR10:
When home, 4:30 am is sleeping in late for me and dear wife. She gets up early to walk, feed the feral cats, and say the rosary with her family. Then she leaves around 715 to attend daily mass which is held at 730.
On Tuesdays, DW and I are sitting down by 930 to play bridge with Rose and Evelyn.
The wife’s early wake up time is why I am often posting here before 5 in the morning.
This AM’s NYTs has a decidedly sarcastic article about how the felon’s administration is managing the Kennedy Arts Center. You’d think you were reading the New Yorker and not the grey lady.
Gift link.
So, I failed to donate blood twice in a row.
First I tried last Sunday. they don’t take blood donation in that hospital on Sundays for some reason… I tried again this morning. Oddly enough, in the questionnaire they asked if I’d taken an NSAID like aspirin and when. I’d never seen that before. I wrote down I took ibuprofen toe days ago. The person behind the counter said “You probably won’t be allowed to donate. I’ll pass this to the doctor.”
Eventually I get called for a sample, where I get asked about the ibuprofen again. After the quick analysis of the sample was done, they tell me the platelet count is low. Not low enough to be a problem, but that I can’t donate blood. And I got asked again about how much ibuprofen did I take, when, and what for.
Well, one pill, two days ago, for a headache.
Oh, you can try again ten days from now. But don’t take any more ibuprofen or other NSAID. Sure, in Hell Week kickoff, when I get some shoulder pain from formatting spreadsheets, data entry, and writing capacity corrections for the questions meeting? No problem!
I’d take Tylenol, but that would give Jr’s grandkids autism somehow.
This hospital is 26 kilometers away. I’m not going to try again.
@gVOR10:
I like this. Not Left, not Right but normal, rational, real-world. And I think we need to add, young. As a 71 year-old man I can say this: no more 80 year olds, no more 70 year olds should be out front speaking for the party. Schumer’s day is over and it’s time for him to toddle off the stage. Pritzker is 60, Newsom is 58, Buttigieg is 43, AOC is 36. Old enough to have some experience, not so old you worry about them slipping in the shower.
There is reason to believe that there have been more deaths in Sudan in just the last 10 days than in Gaza over the last two years. And here at OTB we’ve had easily a dozen pieces on Gaza, and, unless I missed something, zero articles on Sudan. And no campus protests.
Why? Are Sudanese children less valuable than Gazan children?
This is actual genocide, not the UN’s deliberately Israel-targeting and frankly bullshit definition, but the real thing: race and religion motivated slaughters, bulldozers digging mass graves, rape as policy.
The reality is that the number of civilian casualties in Gaza has been lower than is typical of urban warfare. The reality is that Israel did allow food and medicine deliveries, although it was a clusterfuck, while the RSF is deliberately using starvation as a weapon. Israel paused action to inoculate Gazan children against polio. Israel has the ability right now today to kill every person in Gaza. And yet, the death toll for their ‘genocide’ after two years stands at ~3% of the population.
No one knows the death toll in Sudan but estimates are between 150,000 and 400,000. Gaza death toll? ~70,000, counting Hamas and civilians. And no one cares.
We apparently DGAF about dead children unless there’s a way to blame Israel. But no, no, no let’s not ever suggest anti-semitism might play a part. It’s purely coincidence. Israelis just happen to be Jews. And chanting the genocidal Hamas slogan, ‘from the river to the sea,’ isn’t anti-semitism, it’s just a catchy slogan.
The Department of Homeland Security has stopped using software that automatically captured and saved trails of communication between officials, according to sworn court statements filed this week. They will now rely on officials to take screenshots to keep records.*
Well, seems someone’s learned to avoid the Nazis’ penchant for providing the evidence needed for the inevitable war crimes trials, eh?
*Thanks again to Sleeping Dog for the definitely snarky piece on the Kennedy Center. This piece was linked at the end of that article.
@Flat Earth Luddite:
From NYT’s piece on DHS’s new system for preserving records…
Yeah, that’ll happen. Once again, mainstream reporting on this administration reads like the Onion.
There’s been a lot of discussion here about messaging and running on issues when the real problem is structural. I’ve been saying it’s a given that strategists talk about issues because positioning and messaging are all they have control over, and what they have to sell. Today’s Krugman Substack is a conversation with a data guy about Tuesday’s results. The consultant, G. Elliott Morris, says somewhat the same thing,
Change would have to come not from the consultants, but from the party and the candidates. I wonder if some of the easier structural changes wouldn’t be within party management and procedures.
Of Tuesday Morris and Krugman note,
Lest we get cocky, what Morris sees operating is mostly anti-incumbency. It’s what cost Harris the last general and the GOPs Tuesday. And if it hurt the GOPs in ’28 enough to elect a Dem prez, it hurts said Dem in ’32.
@Michael Reynolds:
I don’t know what you expect, but there are important issues that need attention, such as google and disney denying us espn…
@Michael Reynolds:
There would be much more interest if there were some Biblical prophecy that made something in Sudan a prerequisite for Jesus to return.
@Michael Reynolds:
imuho, it’s not so much about semitism, pro- or anti-, as it is about the long-standing agenda of the “campists” and the defaults of some parts of the media.
For the campist/alt-left, Israel is an exemplar of “Western capitalism/imperialism/racism/ FASCISM!” and Hamas are in the “camp of resistance”.
It’s one of the last “good old causes” of the 1970’s, now the shah is pushing up the daisies, and the Khmer Rouge turned out to be a bit of a disappointment.
Along with “Nuclear power? No thanks!” of course.
Sudan is simply irrelevant to that agenda.
As is Myanmar, or Mali, or Caucasia, or etc.
And the media just seem to be “meh” about the whole entropic collapse of the Sahel and central and north-east Africa.
Whereas the Middle East in general and Israel/Palestine in particular are deemed “real news”.
(I suspect its partly an automatic reflex realting to received wisdom)
I expect European governments are becoming very worried indeed about the entire region.
But absent Washington paying any attention, the options are limited.
(Personally, I’d be inclined to put a naval battle group offshore the UAE and tell them to stop their f@ckery or else, but that’s just nasty old imperialist me. Mea culpa.)