Happy Day After the Midterm! I feel as if this should be a holiday from now on. These results not only exceeded my expectations, they exceeded by wildest hopes.

There are still a number of House races yet to be decided. But I calculate that even if Republicans win all the remaining seats, the Dems would still have a 22 seat majority in the House. And I doubt Republicans will win all of the remaining seats. It’s estimated Dems will win about 30 more seats, or roughly half of what’s left.

There are two Senate seats undecided, in Mississippi and Alaska. Everybody says Alaska will need several days to figure out who won. Mary Peltola has a slight lead at the moment, but given the ranked choice system the winner may depend on how people ranked the other candidates.

Mississippi may need a recount. As I write this, Democrat Scott Colom is leading Republican Cindy Hyde-Smith by 43 votes. Yes, 43 votes. With 98 percent of the vote reported.

But the big news, of course, is that the Dems flipped seven Senate seats last night, and the Republicans didn’t flip any. Even if Alaska and Mississippi end up going to Republicans, the Dems will still have a Fetterman-proof majority.

The two big questions of the morning are, What will the Democrats do? And what will the Republicans do? One would think that any Republican looking to run for office iin 2028 would want to back away from Trump asap. And I would think that goes double for any Republican who is toying with running for POTUS. But Claire McCaskill pointed out on MSNBC that the remaining Republican senators and the House Republicans who survived the election are likely to be the reddest of the red. Some of them, especially in the House, may not know how to so much as brush their own teeth independetly from Trump. There may be some Republican senators who were not up for re-election this year who are capable of breaking with Trump, but I don’t know who they might be.

What will the Democrats do? I assume Hakeem Jeffries will be Speaker and Chuck Schumer will be Majority Leader, and neither is exactly a progressive firebrand.

At TPM David Kurtz reminds us that after the 2008 election “Democrats had 56 Senate seats and 257 House seats.” Close to what we’ll have in January. However, if you remember that Congress, a whole lot of those Dems were Blue Dogs who voted with Republicans a large part of the time. The Blue Dog Coalition in the House had 54 members then. And even the ones who weren’t formally Blue Dogs were not progressives by current standards, either. It was the centrist Dems as much as Republicans who forced compromises on lot of what President Obama wanted to do, as I remember. The Democrats in the new Congress will still have squishy centrists among them, but on the whole they appear to be a few degrees more activist that the Congress seated in 2009. A lot of them appear more than eager to start going after Trump and what he’s done these past two years.

See also Say Goodnight, New Democrats. It’s the Era of the New New Democrats.by Michael Tomasky at The New Republic.

I’d love to know how the MAGA faithful are processing the election results. I checked out some Facebook groups that can usually be counted on to attract comments from MAGAts, and they are oddly absent today. I understand MAGA influencers are in meltdown mode, but the articles about them are all behind paywalls.

By all accounts Trump himself is in denial that he is to blame for the wipeout. He’s blaming Fox News and the fact that he wasn’t on the ballots. But see Trump may be literally unable to comprehend that he lost: insider by Matthew Rozsa at Alternet. Michael Wolff says that Trump doesn’t grasp numbers and probably doesn’t comprehend how badly he (and the GOP) were beaten. He doesn’t get how lame a lame duck he really is.

Odd thought: The Israeli Parliament is still trying to patch together a majority. I wonder if Trump’s wipeout will but Netanyahu in a weaker position?

Here’s a call already. Mark Warner has been re-elected to his Senate seat in Virginia, they’re saying on MS NOW.

The digital scanner glitch in Westchester County NY (see last post) appears to be an honest error.

“A change affecting a contest in one municipality required updated election programming, which was subsequently tested and deployed for early voting and for Election Day machines in that municipality,” the New York State Board of Elections said in an Election Day statement. “However, Election Day machines elsewhere in the county continued to use the original programming and therefore could not recognize and accept the ballots being used for Election Day.”

This will slow down counting of votes, obviously. My concern is that if Mike Lawler loses Trump will claim the glitch was a Democratic trick.

Another call: Jon Ossoff wins in Georgia.

Democrat Chris Pappas defeated Republican John Sununu for a Senate seat in New Hampshire.

A couple of incumbent House Deocrats in Florida have been re-elected in districts that had been gerrymandered to get rid of them. I’d say that’s a good sign for the Dems.

Democrat Roy Cooper won a Senate seat in North Carolina. That’s a flip.

Democrat Angie Nixon has lost the Senate race in Florida, but it was close.

Kathy Hochul has won the election for governor of New York, as expected.

Keisha Lance Bottoms will be the next governor of Georgia!

MS NOW has projected that Democrats have taken control of the House.

It look like it might be a while before any more Senate racces are called, so I’m going to take a break. But do keep commenting.

I’m back! Wow, It’s a rout! Bye-bye MAGA.

I woke up in time to see Abdul Ed-Sayed projected to win Michigan. I see Susan Collins has conceded to Troy Jackson.

Gina Hinojosa beat Greg Abbott? Sweet sweet sweet. I thought Talarico would win, but Greg Abbott must wonder what smacked him. Sorry not sorry, Elon.

Remember the five Texas House districts that were redistricted in favor of Republicans? Dems have won three of them and could win the other two.

Westchester County managed to count its votes, and Lawler is out.

I understand it could be several days before we know who won the Alaska senate race, but at least we don’t have to wait to learn if the Dems took the Senate. Because they did.

Music for the Midterms, via Paul Krugman.

And if you need some good cheer, see James O’Keefe’s Minnesota stunt backfires spectacularly by Lisa Needham at Public Notice. O’Keefe and another doofus have been charged with felonies.

See also the TPM Morning Memo by David Kurtz, Trump Waylaid by Amazing Series of Court Setbacks on Election Eve.

I’ll be monitoring the news for reports of anything funky happening at the polls. Let’s hope not. Please feel free to comment about whatever. I plan to blog returns tonight, although some of the close races might not be called for a day or two.

May there be a mighty blue wave.

Update: I didn’t think I’d be reporting on my own neighborhood.

There’s a major voting glitch going on here in Westchester County, NY (population 1,015,743). The county votes by paper ballots that are fed into digital scanners. Today every digital scanner in the county is rejecting the paper ballots. In early news stories county officials were speculating that there was something wrong with the ballots. But that seems odd, because a lot of us voted early and had no problem feeding our paper ballots into the scanners. I assume they were the same ballots and the same scanners.

My part of Westchester is in New York’s 17th congressional district. There is a tossup contest here for our U.S. House seat, between incumbent Republican Mike Lawler and the Democratic nominee, Cait Conley. The district also includes portions of two other counties, but Westchester contains the highest concentration of likely Conley voters.

Update: Another good read — Paul Waldman at the Cross Section writes Haley Stevens proves it again: Centrists are the Democrats’ biggest problem.

Other than the glitch in Westchester County, I’m not hearing any news stories of problems at other polls. Now they’re saying the issue with the scanners appears to be a programming error.

Tech stocks suffered a massive, trillion-dollar sell-off late last week, which I would think would be a big deal. As I very crudely understand it, the tech giants have spent enormous amounts of money preparing for the AI takeovere or whatever it is they’re preparing for. The spending has squeezed their core profit margins and cash flows. Yet the expected profits still seem far away. I understand there has been an AI stock collapse in China as well.

Do see What the Economy Is Sacrificing to AI by Annie Lowrey at The Atlantic, which was written before the tech stock implosion. To mix metapors,, Big Tech putting all its chips on AI is sucking the air out of other parts of the economy.

Investors are more pumped about AI than they have been about any technology since the railroad. If they weren’t directing a torrent of money to the handful of firms finessing algorithms and constructing data centers, the country’s employment level and economic output might be lower. Then again, if they weren’t directing a torrent of money to the handful of firms finessing algorithms and constructing data centers, they might be directing it to everyone and everything else. So is AI fueling the American economy or siphoning gas from it? Is it “crowding out” investment in non-tech enterprises, as economists put it, or boosting investment in an otherwise lackluster expansion?

It’s still not clear to me how AI is eventually going to be monetized, other than by eliminating a lot of jobs. I assume the Tech Bros have some idea how that’s going to work. But I’m also skeptical that AI is going to ever live up to the hype and be as transformative as the Tech Bros assume it will be. We’ll see.

Certainly, AI is pushing up GDP—or, to be precise, the AI build-out is pushing up GDP. In 2020, American businesses spent $3.6 trillion, adjusting for inflation, on investments in durable assets, such as software, warehouses, and trucks. Last year, they spent $4.4 trillion. Oracle, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and Alphabet are shelling out $800 billion on capital expenditures just this year, a sum that has grown eightfold over the decade. It’s a Silicon Valley hard-hat stimulus, bigger than the one Washington passed to counter the Great Recession. And it is transforming national accounts. 

The smart business guys are not always right. I remember for a time during the Reagan Administration my daily commute took me past a strip of land that was filling up with new office buildings. At the time there was a housing crisis and shortage caused by a massive rollback of federal housing programs, high interest rates, and a drop in construction of affordable housing. Which Reagan, of course, dismissed as a nonissue, since he could pick up a newspaper and see houses for sale in the classifieds. But anyway, in New Jersey the smart building money was going into office space. And sure enough, most of those snazzy new office buildings sat mostly empty for the next several years and were eventually bulldozed, although I haven’t been back to see what’s there now.

At the same time, the amount devoted to building housing and retail outlets has dropped 10 percent. Spending on the construction of education facilities is down 13 percent; offices, 14 percent; hotels, motels, and resorts, 15 percent; and manufacturing plants, 24 percent.

Tech enterprises are not merely making it more expensive for non-tech enterprises to finance construction projects. They’re bidding up the cost of labor, land, and materials. They’re spurring landlords and institutional investors to buy Treasuries or stocks instead of bothering with apartment buildings and retirement homes. They’re forcing families to pay more for home loans too. As a general point, high yields are “sucking all the money out of the mortgage market,” Daryl Fairweather, the chief economist at Redfin, told me.

Governments trying to build infrastructure are getting hit by the same increase in borrowing costs. So are families looking to buy a new car or renovate a property. So are young people looking to launch a small business or sign up for a training program.

True Believers in capitalism and free markets will tell you that the economy always adjusts to provide what people need. The famous invisible hand created by the buying decisions of self-interested individuals naturally promotes the general social and economic interests of everybody. If only. When most of the investment money is chasing after something that people really don’t need but which promises to make some rich people richer, what everybody needs gets shoved aside pretty efficiently. And given the pushback against data centers, it appears a lot of the everybodies have realized what’s going on. 

Lowrey concludes her article with “But the more resources the country devotes to AI at the expense of other innovations, the more its future depends on that bet paying off.”

And if you need to be more depressed, see How Trump Is Dismantling America’s Scientific Research Machine at the New York Times.

Meanwhile, Trump continues to lose in court. Yesterday a federal judge ordered the Department of Justice to stop threatening state and local election officials with criminal prosecution.  Another judge has dismissed, with prejudice, Trump’s lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal for publishing the story about the Epstein birthday card.

Virginia and the District of Columbia have filed suits to stop the construction of Trump ginormous Arch that will cast a shadow over Arlington, including over the grave of John F. Kennedy. Arlington County and a group of Vietnam veterans have also filed suits to stop the arch. I hope they succeed. If it’s built the thing will have to be demonlished sooner or later, anyway. And maybe a lot of data centers, too.

Update: This happened today:

If you need a reminder of what a proper campaign rally is supposed to be be  like, do watch President Obama’s Wednesday night speech in Atlanta. Or just watch it if you missed it. This is rah-rah at its finest.

If that doesn’t get out the vote, nothing will.

Trump has been appearing at rallies all over the country. What clips I have seen reveal low energy and a lack of focus. Tuesday night he was in Texas. Greg Sargent wonders who he was trying to persuade.

Take Trump’s rally in Corpus Christi. He repeatedly insisted oil and gas prices are coming down, while claiming our country is making an “absolute fortune” off the Iran war, seemingly meaning in oil exports. …

…It’s possible this will work. But right now, Trump’s rallies look less like a considered strategy than a pure vanity project. After all, in Corpus Christi, the MAGA faithful cheered when he bragged of plundering Iran and Venezuela. They bellowed loudly when Trump called Talarico a “freako.” They were transfixed when he talked about his heroic adventures in renaming things on maps. Up there on that stage, deep in his own head, Trump heard all of America cheering him on. But outside the MAGA bubble, it’s all exhaustion, revulsion, and disgust—and most importantly, a desire to replace all of it with something far, far better.

We’ll see. Here in New York it appears Governor Hochul will win. Current polls give her a double-digit lead over her Republican opponent, Bruce Blakeman. But I’m sweating the U.S. House race in my district between R Mike Lawler and D Cait Conley. Polls say it’s a toss-up. This should be a flippable district given that it went for Harris in 2024. But from what I’ve seen Conley hasn’t been running a strong campaign, and Lawler has been running ads claiming she doesn’t even live in the district, but in Virginia. And I can’t say I have seen an effective response from her on the claim. Note that a lot of Dems voted for Conley in the primary because she is definitely a squishy centrist and therefore the “safe” choice to beat Lawler. So much for that. I do plan on early voting today, so I’ll get one vote in against Lawler, anyway.

Update: I just got back from voting. The polling place was busy. I had a lovely chat with one of the poll workers, who told me that over the weekend there were lines outside the building and a considerable wait to get to vote. (Saturday, October 24, was the first day of early voting here.) This does not happen during a midterm election, he said.

Don’t listen to anyone who claims Netanyahu either won or lost the Israeli elections. There will be weeks of coalition-haggling before we learn which party will put together a majority. But see this report in Axios by Barak Ravid:

After his far-right coalition lost 11 seats in the election, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is trying to discredit the results by claiming there was mass voting fraud in Arab communities.

Why it matters: Netanyahu appears to be trying to spook the opposition bloc out of cooperating with Arab parties to form a new government.

But the opposition is concerned he has an even more ambitious goal: To prevent the results from being certified at all. That would block the swearing in of a new parliament, in which he would lose his majority.

I’ll be grateful if Netanyahu is out when the dust settles, but I’m not expecting it.

About a week ago I mentioned that Alina Habba got a $50 million deal while she was working for the Department of Justice to get some guy a pardon from Trump. Yesterday the New York Times reported that when this story leaked out Trump erupted in fury. Of course, he wasn’t angry about the quid pro quo. Like a mob boss he was angry he hadn’t gotten a cut. He demanded that Habba give a portion of the $50 million to his future presidential library or another Trump-related entity.

I apologize for being absent for a few days. I’m fine, but I’ve had a busy few days. Along with a couple of doctor appointsments I broke down and got a new phone. I’ve been postponing getting a phone for quite a while. I’d had my old phone, an LG model, for somewhere between six and seven years, and for about a year I haven’t been able to update the operating system. So things were starting to not work. But up until recently I was fine with it. It did everything I wanted it to do, so what the bleep?

So I got the new phone, a Motorola model, on Friday. I had ordered it online, so it was shipped to me. And finally today I think I’ve got it pretty much set up, with all the apps working and data transferred and everything. And I’ve received my first Spam Likely call on it, even. I don’t like the ringtone, but I’ll deal with that eventually. Also it will sometimes ping me and I can’t figure out why. But it’s working. At one point I went to a T-Mobile store for help, but what they could do was limited because I didn’t know my google password off the top of my head. It never occurred to me I would need a google password with me. Then I ended up spending about half a day on the phone with T-Mobile technical help to make the data transfer happen. And this is why I hate to buy a new phone.

Israelis are voting today, and I’m reading turnout is very high. Netanyahu’s opposition is led by former Israeli military chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot. And I don’t know enough about Eisenkot to know if he’d be more than an inch or two of improvement over Netanyahu.  Al Jazeera says the polls are very close. And the Associated Press is saying that it could be weeks or months before the outcome is determined. So don’t wait up.

In the last post I mentioned that Jared Kushner allegedly was managng funds for Saudis and Emiratis while employed in the White House during Trump’s first term. Now there’s a story from the same source saying that the Emiratis paid Kushner $50 million to get Rex Tillerson fired as Secretary of State. Tillerson was indeed fired, in March 2008. I thought it was because Tillerson called Trump a bleeping moron. Maybe that, too.

Also, too, see A 28-Year-Old DOGE Operative Gutted USAID. HR Had No Record of Him Working There at WIRED. Somehow the kid — er, young man — was put into the position of head of USAID by Marco Rubio without becoming an official employee of the State Department.

Internal USAID emails reviewed by WIRED reveal that during the three-week period of March 18 to April 4, during which Lewin began canceling lifesaving aid programs and personally signed off on the termination of thousands of USAID employees, he did not sign the paperwork typically required by law to begin work at the agency, despite repeated requests. In fact, his appointment was so mysterious that USAID security was unable to issue him an ID card because they had no records of his employment.

Someday when we have a normal administration again there’s going to have to be a reckoning about the whole DOGE thing. And speaking of Elcon Musk, Robert Reich has a must-read piece up at The Guardian headlined Defund Elon Musk. Just read it.

I don’t want to write about Trump. I don’t want to write about the midterms. This time next week we’ll be waiting for the polls to close. I can’t wait.

This is how screwed we are. This morning the big news was about how Jared Kushner made millions in side hustles with foreign countries while working officially in the White House during Trump’s first term. But so much other badness is going on that the Kushner story has been shoved off the front pages already. But see “Kushner Phone Hack Reveals How Middle East Dictators Bought Him Off” by Edith Olmsted at The New Republic.

Kushner apparently was “managing” money funds for the UAE and Israel. One of these was a foreign policy “slush fund” for the “UAE government’s covert intelligence operations overseas, as well as its secret weapons-purchasing programs.” Kushner was also involved in another account, “at Israel’s Central Bank—at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s urging.”

Unlike the political slush fund, Kushner’s activity in this account indicated that it was for his personal use. The money was difficult to access, and so Kushner would channel requests to Netanyahu for the funds to be released through then-Ambassador David M. Friedman, and then move the money through an account in Cyprus. The former diplomat denied any involvement in the scheme, and claimed that “there are no accounts, and never were.”

Everybody is denying everything. None of this was reported to the IRS or disclosed on any government employee financial forms. But apparently this sort of thing is just not a big deal any more. So let’s go on.

Today the Department of Justice filed a suit to block certification of the Senate election in Alaska if the Republican incumbent loses. The issue is that the Republican incumbent is Dan S. Sullivan, but there is another Repubican on the ballot named Daniel J. Sullivan. The Democratic candidate is Mary Peltola. The polls have Peltola ahead by a hair, or maybe a couple of hairs.

The Justice Department has also accused two former FBI agents of lying about their involvement in the Hunter Biden laptop saga. I’m serious. Is the Regime dredging up the laptop to maybe fire up the base to vote in the Midterms? Or is this just Kash Patel being Kash Palel? Who knows?

I urge you to read What the U.S. Is Really Doing in Venezuela by Anne Applebaum at The Atlantic. What we’re really doing, it appears, is taking oil and minerals and tossing a little money back to the regime in Caraccas, none of which is doing the people of Venezuela any good. None of the oil companies Trump assumed would be eager to resume oil extraction in Venzuela have done so, and they aren’t showing any intention of doing so. None of the investment in rebuilding the oil infrastructure has even begun. And it appears the only reason Trump wanted Maduro out of the way was to get at the oil. But as I’ve written in the past, it isn’t even a huge amount of oil. Applebaum says the people want the opposition party headed by Maria Machado to come back, but Trump is keeping her out because he wants the oil.

On the plus side, see Republicans could lose Texas seats they redrew in their favor, poll finds at the Washington Post.

There’s a whole lot of ugliness out there right now. The Ohio governor’s race is a good example. If you haven’t see the Vivek Ramaswamy ad featuring Dr. Amy Acton’s estranged birth mother denouncing her own daughter as a liar, consider yourself lucky. It’s sickening. But it appears to be backfiring. I hope so, anyway.

The backstory is that Dr. Acton, the Democratic candidate for governor of Ohio, says she was sexually abused by her stepfather as a child, and that her mother knew this and did nothing. Dr. Acton’s brother corroborates this. Years ago the stepfather was indicted for the rape of his stepdaughter by a grand jury, but he and the birth mother fled the state, and he never faced a trial. The stepfather died in 2004. Dr. Acton and her birth mother have not spoken to each other since 1978.

So now the Ramaswamy campaign is using the stepmother, who still carries an obvious grudge against Dr. Action, as their closing argument in the campaign. This is from Politico:

MAGA influencers and allies of Ramaswamy, including Donald Trump Jr., quickly seized on the video as a potential political kill shot in the governor’s race.

That shot backfired spectacularly.

And the backlash crossed partisan lines.Meghan McCainblasted the attack as “dastardly,” while Utah GOP Sen. Mike Lee’s longtime aide Dan Hauserdeleted his own post sharing the video after learning more about Acton’s past.

The video prompted a broad resurfacing of the devastating family history behind it, including Acton’s own harrowing account of childhood sexual abuse by her stepfather, who faced criminal charges even as her mother remained married to him.

Even Republicans close to Ramaswamy are recoiling. “It’s so gross to forsake family members for politics,” a Republican operative close to the campaign told Playbook. “I think it’s bad. It’s just morally bad.”

And there’s a political risk. The operative pointed out the video won’t play well with women “because a lot of women are gonna say, ‘What normal mom would participate in an attack ad on their own child?’”

It’s exactly the kind of closing argument Trump’s political operation knows is not moving the needle, as Republicans lean harder into culture-war attacks and personal scandals in the final stretch.

Early voting in Ohio began October 6, so votes have already been cast. And while there are only 13 days until the midterm election, that does give the Acton campaign some time to respond. According to the New York Times, “The Acton campaign quickly released its own ad featuring Dr. Acton’s brother saying he was abused, but his sister was abused far worse as she sought to protect him.”

More ugliness, entirely on our part: The Telegraph is running a story headlined Ukrainians Turn on US after Russian Strike Kills Baby in Pram. I can’t read the article without wading through several pages demanding I subscribe to the Telegraph. But I do not blame the Ukrainians one bit. As I’ve argued in recent posts, Trump has made the U.S. an ally of Russia against Ukraine. This is disgraceful and disgusting. Our reputaqtion as a nation has been utterly trashed.

Here’s something I don’t think the Republicans thought out carefully enough when they passed the Big Ugly Bill: Those of us on Medicare Advantage plans by now have gotten letters detailing how our current plan will change in 2027. And for millions of seniors the news is that their current plan will no longer exist in 2027. Plans in 40 states are just plain evaporating.  An estimated 4 to 5 million seniors across the country are losing their plans. They’ll still have basic Medicare, but they’ll lose the extra benefits like presciption drug coverage they’ve been getting, usually without paying extra, with Medicare Advantage. Their Eliquis presciptions, for example, will go up to $470 a month. I understand a lot of rural areas will have no Medicare Advantage plans at all now. And I suspect those that will continue into 2027 may cover less than they did or require higher co-pays. Just one more reminder how the Trump Administration is not working for you.

On a personal note, it does’t look like my current benefits will change much at all, but I still need to verify that all my current providers will still take my insurance.

Spreaking of not working for us, yesterday Federal Emergency Management Agency Administrator Cameron Hamilton let it slip that in the future states will  have to take care of disasters on their own. Which makes me wonder why there’s a federal government at all. But I guess they still run the military.

But see ‘I was terrified’: Military families describe their harrowing evacuation from a Navy base in Bahrain by Priya Sridhar at MS NOW. Our armed forces under Trump and Hegseth are in serious trouble, and Trump and Hegseth are covering up a lot of their incompetence.

Oh, and if you missed the story about how Alina Habba got a $50 million deal while she was working for the Department of Justice to get some guy a pardon from Trump, here it is.

Finally, you may have heard that last week the DoJ sent California a list of alleged noncitizen voters on a thumb drive (with the password on a sticky note) and demanded that the state not allow those people to vote without verifying their citizenship status. This is from last week:

The US Department of Justice sued California on Thursday, seeking a court order to prevent the state from tabulating certain ballots cast in the midterm elections.

The suit came two days after the department made a specious demand to the state. On Tuesday, the department sent election officials in Los Angeles county a thumb drive with a handwritten password purporting to contain the names of noncitizens registered to vote. The department asked officials to confirm the citizenship of anyone on the list and set aside ballots from those whose status could not be confirmed. It gave the state 48 hours – an extremely narrow window – to take action. It did not provide details on how it came up with the names on the list. In its lawsuit, filed in federal court in the central district of California, the justice department said it had provided the state with more than 20,000 names of likely noncitizens.

Today David Kurtz at TPM tells us DOJ’s List of Noncitizen Voters Exposed As Crap.

The top election official in Los Angeles County has done a preliminary review of the Trump DOJ’s purported list of alleged noncitizen voters and found it to be … shoddy. Surprising absolutely no one.

Out of DOJ’s list of 20,000 alleged noncitizen voters in California, more than 7,000 had Los Angeles County addresses. Dean C. Logan’s office took a sample of 200 of those L.A. voters and found that 1/4 may have been born in the United States, nearly 1/2 were cancelled or inactive voters, and nearly 3/4 had never voted, according to a new court filing:

On Monday, the Trump DOJ announced charges against 28 Californians for voting crimes, far fewer than the earlier 20,000. But during a press conference, a Trump DOJ official admitted that there may be U.S. citizens mistakenly on their list of 20,000 of suspected “illegal” voters. Do tell. And there has been other reporting that most of the people on the list were registered Republicans.

So basically the DoJ just pulled some random names of Californians off something and put them on a thumb drive and sued California about it. They are probably trying to set up a pretense for challenging the midterm election results. But why California? I would think they would be going after a state that could flip either way. I understand the Democrat is way, way ahead of the Republican in the governor’s race in California, and neither of California’s U.S. senators is up for re-election this year. WTF?

Yesterday there was a headline in the New York Times — Trump Offers Putin Economic Relief in Hopes That Russia Will Return the Favor. So the U.S. is just a supplecant nation to Russia now.

Trump waived all of the sanctions against Russia in the recently passed Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026, which of course he doesn’t have the constitutional authority to do. And this was done in a desperate attempt to lower gas prices before the Midterms, which are 16 days away. And early voting has already started in several states. How is this even supposed to work?

The fourth “K” (see last post) was fired today after only five days in the job of White House Press Secretary. Katie Zacharia was offered the job just a week ago. Per the New York Times: “She was not a deft communicator.” For the Times, that’s going out on a limb. But I suspect she will enjoy holding the record as the shortest-serving White House Press Secretary for a long time. See also Anthony Scaramucci Weighs in on Katie Zacharia Breaking His Record,

Alexandra Petri predicted that since Trump chooses White House Press Secretaries by turning on the teevee and pointing, Zacharia’s replacement will be a Kalshi commercial.

For another bad idea that thankfully died on the vine, Pentagon Pete’s plan to livestream the firing squad execution of Nidal Hasan on YouTube has been canceled. Apparently Trump was for it, but then got swamped by pushback from Congress and even from some of his own staff, and he has nixed it. The livestreaming, anyway. The execution by firing squad is still on. I hate the death penalty. It’s barbaric.

The big story today, IMO, regards Ukraine being cut from Starlink. We’ve known this for a while. Was this Elon Musk’s decision? Apparently not. It’s near certain that the order came from within the White House. But reporting is contradictory. Trump is denying he ordered anything to be cut off from Ukraine. Musk says that Starshield systems are controlled by the U.S. government, Hafiz Rashid writes at The New Republic that Elon Musk and Trump Were Both in on Ukraine Starlink Shutoff. Sounds about right.

Tech CEO Elon Musk reportedly approached President Trump on slowing down his Starlink communications service in Ukraine earlier this week, contradicting both Musk’s statement that it was Trump’s idea and Trump’s statement that he has no idea who did it.

The Telegraph, citing four anonymous sources, reports that Musk proposed slowing down Starshield, the military-grade version of Musk’s Starlink satellite communications system, and that Trump agreed. The move hindered Ukraine’s drone defenses of Russian attacks, and came while Trump is upset with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s decision to target Russian oil refineries and infrastructure after Trump lifted sanctions on Russian fuel. After Ukraine’s Starlink access was restricted, Russia launched a massive aerial attack on Wednesday that continued into the next morning.

Again, we’ve become allies of Russia against Ukraine. Trump and Musk are both denying they had anything to do with this. Sure.