There is no advancement in any human endeavor without failure...
The State
Tuesday’s elections were a political beatdown — a full-scale rebuke of MAGA at the ballot box and a flashing red warning for Republicans who still think grievance is a governing strategy. While off-year elections don’t predict the midterms, they do expose fault lines and offer plenty of lessons to be learned.
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Simply put, the GOP got outplayed by the Democrats.
Now Republicans are stuck in a dangerous game of chicken. If this drags through Thanksgiving and Christmas, the political ads will write themselves — empty dinner tables, missed paychecks and a GOP Congress that has been MIA.
Bottom line: If Republicans don’t fix this fast, 2026 won’t just be a loss — it’ll be an extinction event.
The ability of our Hominid ancestors to make stone tools required millennia of trial and error to reach the perfection archaeologists find in the fossil record…
The Hill
Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) and his Republican leadership team are scrambling for new ideas to end the 38-day government shutdown after it became clear Friday that tactics to pressure Democrats to vote for a House-passed funding bill have failed so far.
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Senate Republican leaders are looking for new tactics to end the shutdown as rank-and-file GOP lawmakers tire of voting repeatedly on a House-passed clean continuing resolution to fund the government through Nov. 21.
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However, they are still smarting from what they viewed as an unforced error earlier in the week by Trump when he blamed the shutdown for the GOP’s poor electoral showing in numerous key races on Tuesday night — a move that buoyed Democrats at a key point in bipartisan negotiations.
Likewise, putting members of our species on the Moon took every ounce of human ingenuity we had to muster, and a heartbreaking number of launch pad disasters to achieve...
New York Times
The parallels between the 1920s and the 2020s are numerous — and ominous. The 1920s economy boomed while America recovered from a deadly pandemic, the flu of 1918. Americans used installment plans — the precursor to today’s ubiquitous “buy now, pay later” plans at online checkouts — to spend liberally on consumer products, and they poured money into speculative new investments. Automobile and telephone stocks were the high-flying tech investments of their day; Tesla and Apple are two of ours.
The prevailing interest rate was around 5 percent, as it is today. And as with today, masses of Americans took advantage of easy credit and ubiquitous stock brokerages to speculate in finance. In 1929, a New York Times editor quoted a major newspaper’s financial expert who said that the “huge army that daily gambles in the stock market” had come to include, in the editor’s words, “the woman nonprofessional speculator,” whose share of market trading grew by one estimate from less than 2 percent to 35 percent. That influx of buying from 1919 to 1929 drove the stock market up more than sixfold over the decade — a growth rate our market has actually surpassed over the past three years.
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Ultimately, the unsustainable cannot be sustained. Between 1929 and 1932, the stock market dropped 77 percent, and the global economy staggered into the Great Depression while unemployment and malnutrition spiked. In 1932, suicide rates soared to their highest in recorded history.
Every day the failure of Trumpism and the MAGA movement becomes more apparent to ordinary Americans…
The New Republic
...Trump spends so much time and treasure prosecuting his fear of democracy—trying to crush dissent, flex as a massively incontinent monarch, fix elections, and disable rivals, including anyone who might open the Epstein files—that he neglects his stated goals. He hasn’t, after all, occupied Canada or Greenland. He hasn’t even wrapped Project 2025.
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As the year has worn on, Trump’s neurotic preoccupations have slowed (Office of Management and Budget Director Russell) Vought’s agenda. Having kicked off the shutdown vowing at last to slash jobs with abandon, Vought has gotten bogged down once again by judges who keep halting the layoffs in response to union lawsuits. Vought has also been busy catering to the big-spending president who insists Vought scramble to find funding for his pet projects, including the popular nutrition program WIC, which would hurt Trump politically if it were cut. All of this maneuvering is so unconstitutional and demanding for Vought that it’s distracting from—and working against—his efforts to end programs like WIC as too woke.
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(Far-right political blogger Curtis) Yarvin, for his part, believes that if democracy were going to yield to Trumpocracy, it would have happened already. He’s now demoralized by the administration’s unwillingness to act more quickly—or violently—to wipe out democracy and the rule of law altogether. Earlier this month, he wrote dejectedly on his blog that the Trump administration is now “failing because it deserves to fail.”
It’ll get worse before it gets better of course, but it will get better...
