We begin today with Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo attempting to find a silver lining or two in the vote by some Democrats (including my own U.S. Senator) agreeing to make a deal to end the government shutdown without an agreement to continue the ACA healthcare subsidies.
Here’s what I see.
There was a legitimate party rebellion after the March debacle. Democratic voters demanded fight. When the time came, Democrats fought. They held out for 40 days, the longest shutdown standoff in history. They put health care at the center of the national political conversation and inflicted a lot of damage on Trump. At 40 days they could no longer hold their caucus together. And we got this.
That’s a sea change in how the party functions in Congress. And that’s a big deal. Many people see it as some kind of epic disaster and are making all the standard threats about not voting or not contributing or whatever. That’s just not what I see. It’s a big change in the direction of the fight we need in the years to come that just didn’t go far enough. Yet.
I suspect some will say I’m making excuses for the Senate caucus. Not at all. You want to primary Tim Kaine (D-VA)? Great. I already said on Bluesky that should happen. Twenty-four senators demand a new caucus leader? I love it. I’m not making excuses for anyone. Quite the opposite. I take this position because I really don’t care that much about the individual players. I have much bigger ambitions. We’re in a battle for at least the rest of this decade that will require a very different kind of Democratic Party — not one that is more right or left but one that is both comfortable using power and knows how to do it. So I’m going to take this big step in the right direction I’ve seen over the last month and pocket it and move on to the next battle. Meanwhile, keep purging all the folks who can’t get with the new program. If a senator is from a comfortably Blue State and wasn’t vocally in favor of fighting this out, primary them — toss them overboard. After March, Dick Durbin (D-IL) realized he needed to retire. Let’s see some more retirements. But don’t tell me nothing has changed or that this is some cataclysmic disaster. It’s not. This accomplished a lot. It demonstrated that Democrats can go to the mat when the public is behind them and not pay a political price. It dramatically damaged Donald Trump. It cued up the central arguments of the 2026 campaign. It just didn’t go far enough. The ball was fumbled at the end. So we need to demand more.
Dan Rather basically agrees with Marshall at his “Steady” Substack
To understand what happened in Washington on Sunday night, you must recognize one immutable fact: the president was never going to negotiate. This is a game to him. The suffering of the citizenry is just part of his playbook.
The principle of least interest holds that the person who cares least in a relationship has the most power. That is Donald Trump in a nutshell. His repellent disregard for anyone but himself gives him power. It makes him a dogmatic opponent, one with few ways to leverage.
Make no mistake, the senators’ capitulation was a hit to the solar plexus for anyone hoping to stop the president’s full-tilt dismantling of the American political system. However, all is not lost. [...]
Historically, to win a shutdown fight, one party must: blame the other — check; make it about a popular issue — check; make the political pain acute enough to make the other side cave — check (sort of). But these rules apply in normal times. We are not in normal times.
David Corn of Mother Jones writes that having to choose between one kind of Democrat and another kind of Democrat is a false and unnecessary dilemma.
...One can end a debate without an ultimate and final decision. That’s what the Democrats ought to do. There’s never been a clear answer to the center-or-left question. And this election showed that within the party, lefties, such as Zohran Mamdani in New York, and centrists, such as Abigail Spanberger in Virginia and Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey, can each kick ass. Many commentators have made the obvious point: Candidates need to match the local electorate. Mamdani likely could not win statewide office in Virginia, and Spanberger likely could not excite the young voters who turned out in NYC for the democratic socialist.
There’s no need for the Democrats to continue shooting at each other and feeding the notion they have an identity crisis. The message is simple for them: We have a large tent and, dear voters, we offer you a buffet.
Looking for a politician to identify with? We give you a choice: Mamdani, Spanberger, Sherrill, Gavin Newsom, AOC, Andy Beshear, and others. Take your pick. No single one of them must be anointed the leader of the party. Desire a fierce progressive who will (rhetorically) kick Trump in the teeth? There’s this young buck in New York. Want a savvy strategist with a mostly liberal record who strives not to be seen as too liberal? Check out the governor of California. Looking for less-splashy, nose-to-the-grindstone workhorse politicians (big on mom energy), see Virginia and New Jersey. The Democratic Party can be a choose-your-own-adventure party. It is not in disarray. It is diverse. It even has something of a unifying message—affordability—which can be tailored to different electorates. In New York City, Mamdani vowed to address high rents; in New Jersey, Sherrill focused on rising energy prices.
Scott Hechinger writes for The Nation about the decision of Condé Nast to lay off its Teen Vogue politics team and to merge with Vogue magazine.
When I learned that Teen Vogue had been absorbed into Vogue and its politics team had been laid off, it felt like another gut punch in a time of endless bad news. For nearly 10 years, Teen Vogue was an improbable home for some of the sharpest justice journalism in the country. While other outlets chased clicks or softened language, Teen Vogue published incisive essays on prisons, abortion criminalization, police violence, and democracy itself. Its writers didn’t just analyze systems of inequality and injustice—they handed the microphone to those who lived them first hand. [...]
As a public defender for nearly a decade in Brooklyn, I spent long days in crowded courtrooms where lives were being decided in minutes, often with no audience, no cameras, and little understanding from the outside world. What struck me most was how many brilliant voices were being ignored: the people living through injustice every day, the defenders witnessing the system’s failures up close, and the advocates and organizers trying to transform it. That frustration is what led me to found Zealous, an initiative working to help those closest to injustice tell their own stories and shift public understanding of what safety, health, and justice really require.
Teen Vogue quickly became the outlet that brought that vision to life. Zealous has partnered with Teen Vogue on dozens of pieces that taught readers something rare in mainstream media—how justice actually works, and for whom.
These stories chronicled the last decade of American crisis and resistance: from 2018’s exposé of Louisiana’s collapsing public-defense system—where attorneys described “triaging human lives”—to essays on the fight against the “superpredator” myth and the criminalization of trauma survivors. During the Covid-19 pandemic, Teen Vogue and Zealous partnered to publish firsthand accounts from inside Cook County Jail, one of the country’s deadliest outbreaks. In the wake of the George Floyd uprising, we collaborated on coverage explaining how “copaganda” shapes what the public believes about safety. And when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, together we connected the dots between reproductive rights and criminal punishment.
More on the happenings at Teen Vogue magazine here at Columbia Journalism Review.
John Crace of The Guardian says that the BBC’s “alteration” of Trump speech clips from his 1/6/21 speech on the Ellipse was totally unnecessary.
Maybe the BBC could learn a thing or two from The Donald. Or even from Boris. Because when push came to shove, its Panorama team didn’t make a very good job of its untruth. Possibly because it hasn’t had as much practice. For the most part, the Beeb aspires to the highest standards of impartiality in its news journalism. Often to the point where it goes out of its way to find a climate change denier to balance its stories on global warming.
Yet in the Panorama programme on the Capitol riots, the BBC messed up big time. Splicing together two separate clips 50 minutes apart from the same speech to make it sound as if Trump had been inciting violence.
What’s more it was all so unnecessary. Everyone already knew that Trump didn’t accept the result of a democratically held election. There was no need to lay it on any thicker. People understood exactly what The Donald thought. He had been hiding in plain sight. Yet Panorama tampered with the footage and inevitably got caught out. As was bound to happen. After all, it wasn’t even that subtle. [...]
Bashing the BBC is something of a national pastime. Though it’s hard to find another news broadcaster that is quite as trusted anywhere in the world – not to mention its entertainment, education and sport channels – we Brits like nothing more than to give it a kicking. Some on the right reckon it’s a hotbed of well-off Islington socialists; some on the left think it has long been held hostage by the Conservative party. So you might think it was probably getting things just about right. Up until times such as now when it gets it wrong.
Finally today, Dunja Ramadan reports for Der Spiegel that with the opening of the Grand Egyptian Museum just outside of Cairo earlier this month, Egyptian officials feel that its time for the famous Nefertiti bust (now in a museum in Berlin) to return to Egyptian soil.
More than 100,000 artifacts from the Pharaonic, Hellenistic and Roman periods are now on display at the GEM, telling the story of more than 7,000 years of Egyptian history. Among the giants: Queen Hatshepsut and the pharaohs Akhenaten, Khufu, and Tutankhamun, along with golden death mask, throne and chariot.
One of them, however, is missing: Queen Nefertiti, the Egyptian ruler with the swan’s neck, almond-shaped eyes and blue crown.
The 3,400-year-old limestone bust has been in the possession of German state museums for more than one hundred years. And the dispute over the treasure has been raging for roughly just as long. Today, it belongs to the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, and it has been on display at the Neues Museum in Berlin since 2009. [...]
Nefertiti...is more than just a museum exhibit for the German capital as well. She is the Mona Lisa of Berlin, the star of Museum Island. About half a million visitors are thought to come each year to see her.
The museum caption reads: “Prince Johann Georg of Saxony, presentation of the Nefertiti Bust at the find site, 1912, left to right: excavation supervisors Herrmann Ranke, Paul Hollander, Mohammed es-Senussi”
No shade to Leonardo da Vinci, but the bust of Nefertiti is a far more stunning work than the Mona Lisa could ever be...and even Leonardo might agree with that.
Everyone have the best possible day that you can!
