Another Nothingburger

A week ago Democrats had momentum; they'd won three off-year elections in blue states in November and believed they were "on a roll." What a difference a week makes, to borrow a lyric line from Dinah Washington.

Today a leftist Democrat - Aftyn Behn - was running in a special election to represent Nashville. She sought to replace a Republican who resigned his House seat to start a company. She lost to Trump-backed Republican, Matt Van Epps. 

Tennessee is of course a red state, as the legacy media will hasten to inform you. Funny how they failed to mention VA, NY and NJ were blue states, isn't it? 

The legacy media will tell you Van Epps was supposed to win in TN, and did - no biggie. The Ds who won in VA, NJ, and NYC were supposed to win, and also did. But to hear the media tell it, that set of wins was a biggie. Bias much?

Stupidly, the legacy media believe we imagined mouth-breathers won't notice the spin. How self-indulgent is it to choose to forego half the electorate as readers? Very, it's their funeral and we won't be mourners.

Bottom line ... when the people who should win actually do win, nothing has changed, no great insights can be drawn. In each case the constituencies voted the same way they did in 2024. That in itself is a portent, of sorts.

Negligent

I have no inside information but … some believe it possible, perhaps even probable, that Dr. Fauci was complicit in ordering and providing government funding for the Wuhan gain-of-function research that produced Covid-19.

If his involvement could be proven, he might then be guilty - morally if not legally - of causing the many thousands of deaths attributed to the virus. Call it what … wholesale negligent manslaughter?

Humidifier Update

A quick follow-up note. You'll remember we were getting excessive dust on our furniture while using a "cool mist" humidifier? That problem is gone.

The new evaporative humidifier has solved the problem while using regular, hard tap water. In design it is basically a small "swamp cooler." The water evaporates and leaves the mineral content behind inside the machine.

If I remember, I'll do another follow-up when we clean the machine for the first time. It is, by the way, a chore which I am not anticipating with pleasure.

Update

At midnight eleven twelfths of 2025 will be in the history books. We then will be three weeks from the winter solstice and the technical beginning of winter. Just imagine, in another month we'll be a quarter of the way through another century ... the mind boggles.

Here in the high desert, on the eastern rim of the Mojave, this is our nicest time of year - requiring no air conditioning. Shirtsleeve weather at midday, a light jacket in early mornings and evenings. 

I have labeled our winter home-away-from-home "the Palm Springs of the Rockies." At this far eastern edge of the Pacific Time Zone our days end very early. Five p.m. looks like midnight.

We turned on our outdoor Xmas lights last night, our Thanksgiving visitor has headed home, and another half-day drop-in shows up tomorrow. Friends and relatives come to Las Vegas and we become a side trip from there, which we enjoy.

The webcam shows our WY area finally has snow on the ground, it should persist for the next four plus months. We are happy to be here instead.

Have a Happy Holidays season.

Saturday Snark

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and its Comments section.

Friday Snark, a Day Late

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The Nation's Cartoonists on the Week in Politics.

A Least Bad Choice

Seventy plus years of Communism and the almost forty years since have largely extinguished the Russian public’s optimism about its influence on public policy. Thus I have been persistent in my pessimistic view of the chances of peace in Ukraine.

Relatively few voices in the media have shared my pessimism. Today comes a column for Vox, echoed by msn.com, which says a lot of what I’ve been thinking and writing.

Misled by his deceptively easy successes in Georgia and the Crimea, Putin painted himself into a corner in Ukraine. Now his least bad choice is making the reconquest of Ukraine the hill which he must defend to the death, regardless of cost to the nation.

I’d like to be wrong about Putin’s obsession and Trump’s efforts to achieve peace for Ukraine. That liking is part of what fuels my pessimism.

Our First, Failed Socialist Experiment

Each year at Thanksgiving Power Line reprints an evergreen column written in 2009 for PL by history prof Paul A. Rahe. He relates the Plymouth Colony’s failed experiment with communal ownership aka socialism, and subsequent success with private property, quoting freely from the writings of William Bradford, Governor of the Colony.

As we celebrate our national harvest festival by emulating their feast, we need to remember this part of our history. Socialism didn’t work then, nor has it since. 

When … Not If

September 11, 2001, October 7, 2023, the National Guard shooting in DC, the San Bernardino and Bataclan massacres and so many more. You have to wonder when supposed Islamophobia becomes redefined as patriotic prudence? 

With his condemnations of Somali corruption, CAIR and the Muslim Brotherhood, it seems President Trump begins to sanction the threat posed.

Later … See the following quote from Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL):

We must IMMEDIATELY BAN all ISLAM immigrants and DEPORT every single Islamist who is living among us just waiting to attack.

That didn’t take long. I am reminded of an Ian Fleming Goldfinger quote.

Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.”

As noted above, we are far beyond the third time. 

Why Turkey?

MSN.com echoes a Vox.com column about how the turkey got selected as the entree for the Thanksgiving feast. Spoiler alert. It did not start with the Pilgrim colony in MA, they probably ate venison.

Out of my family history, I’ll add something the article doesn’t mention. During World War II the US had meat rationing for civilians. Big roasts and hams were basically unavailable, unless you knew someone in the butchery business. 

Curiously, turkeys were not rationed; something of which one of my uncles took full advantage. He and his wife raised and slaughtered hundreds of turkeys annually in rural SoCal, with the aid of a cluster of neighborhood women who earned money for Christmas shopping by ‘dressing’ the birds for cooking. 

Uncle sold the turkeys from a store at their farm throughout the Thanksgiving - Christmas - New Years - Easter season during and briefly after the war. When the production of beef and pork caught up with demand, the market for turkey contracted to basically Thanksgiving and Christmas.

I conclude that among the factors making turkey the entree of choice for Thanksgiving, rationing during WW II must be included.

Thanksgiving

Have a happy Thanksgiving Day, as we pause to savor the good things in our lives. I feel very fortunate, I hope you are able to say the same.

Review: The American Revolution on PBS

The new Ken Burns opus for PBS is The American Revolution in six installments. I watched (most of) it and was pleasantly surprised at how little heavy-duty woke was on display. The first 15-20 minutes of the first episode and the last 15-20 minutes of the last episode were preachy and woke, in between it was remarkably free of woke considering it is on PBS.

I viewed "most of" it because I fell asleep a couple of times. That isn't a criticism, I'm old and Burns style, while elegant, is ponderous. 

The other DrC felt it overemphasized the involvement of Native American tribes and enslaved black people. While accurate, I took that as a given on PBS and could mostly ignore it. 

If I have a complaint it is that, with the exception of Washington who was lionized, the other influential architects of our form of government - Franklin, Hamilton, Jefferson, Madison, Adams - were downplayed. 

It is fair to say this program is the history of the fighting as both civil war and uprising against authority. Designing a form of government substantially without historic precedent happens 'off stage' and isn't a major focus. 

White House-ology

Power Line links to a Substack opinion column by Danielle Pletka who purports to explain the confusing signals on Ukraine peace policy coming from the Trump White House. She believes Trump backs Zelensky while VP Vance heads a sub rosa group of isolationists whose foreign policy interests may be limited to the Western Hemisphere. 

If Pletka is right, it would explain the 28 point proposed plan that heavily favored Russia (supposedly a Vance leak) being countered by SecState Rubio dissing that plan and issuing his own Trump-backed 19 point plan that’s much more Ukraine-supportive.

Or just maybe the apparent confusion was intentional. Trump-the-master-negotiator lofting a pro-Russian trial balloon which was widely attacked, followed by a substantially ‘improved’ plan which is still short of what Zelensky seeks. 

Think of this two-step process as a “cooling the mark” scenario to get Zelensky to compromise and settle for the proverbial “half a loaf.” That makes the Pletka story a sign Trump currently favors Rubio over Vance as his successor, with Trump gifting Rubio a policy “win.”

The meta question raised is this. When negotiating, does Trump intentionally play 3-D chess, or is the bargaining game simply intuitive with him?

Pletka is with the American Enterprise Institute and its former VP for foreign and defense policy.

Three Strikes … Still Good Policy

Writing for City Journal, Tal Fortgang makes a good argument that “Incarceration Works.” In short, locking up the roughly one in twenty who commit most of the felonies protects the nineteen in twenty who, mostly, do not. Hat tip to RealClearPolitics for the link.

We had this argument back in the “Three Strikes” era of the early 1990s, and it worked. Very many of those so imprisoned were black. Civil rights activists claimed we were locking up too many individuals whose life experiences ‘doomed’ them to a life of crime. 

This claim of course ignored that many others with similar “life experiences” did not become career criminals. It continues to be true that separating the violent few from the not-violent many is good social policy. And apparently this is an argument we are doomed to repeat every few years.

Ukraine Update

Power Line's John Hinderaker pulls together extended quotes from the New York Post and the BBC to get a handle on the current state of play in negotiations aimed at ending the fighting in Ukraine. Much reported elsewhere has oversimplified the process and been misleading.

In Ken Burns' new PBS documentary on the US revolutionary war, an important point was made. It is claimed Washington realized that he didn't need to win, merely to not lose. The British opponent, on the other hand, needed to win. As long as the colonists continued to fight, the war was a continued drain on the British exchequer and diverted its attention from its peer adversary next door - France.

I wouldn't be surprised if Zelensky has reached the same conclusion and, like Washington, proposes to continue the fight by "not losing." President Trump wants to end the fighting, but that may not be in Zelensky's or Ukraine's interests. 

Plus Putin may have concluded there is no scenario (except outright victory) in which he personally survives ending the Ukraine war. If he believes that, settling for less would be suicidal and he won't agree.

Having staked his reputation on settling the Ukraine war, Trump may have painted himself into a corner.

Weird Dietary Science

Japanese researchers have determined that "arginine supplementation curbs Alzheimers disease pathology in animal models." The even better news is that arginine is commonly available, safe for human use, and occurs naturally in meats, nuts, dairy products, legumes, etc.

It remains to be seen if arginine is effective against Alzheimers in humans. Still, if I were concerned about the disease I would load up on OTC arginine as it is unlikely to be of harm. Hat tip to Instapundit for the link.

More on China

On Monday I noted George Friedman's thoughts on evolving relations between China. and the US. He has had subsequent additional insights on this topic which you can find here. He continues to see hints that China has chosen to be less belligerent towards the US than formerly, 

Friedman believes the change is driven by China's domestic economic issues. He suggests, and I agree, that even autocratic governments respond to shifts in public opinion, though in less obvious ways than in nations with popularly elected governments.

Saturday Snark

Images courtesy of Power Line's The Week in Pictures

and its Comments section.

Friday Snark

Images courtesy of Politico's 

The Nation's Cartoonists on the Week in Politics.

Images courtesy of RealClearPolitics'

Cartoons of the Week.

Thursday Snark

Image courtesy of Lucianne.com, 11-21-2025