Howdy All, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy –
In this issue –
1. Election
2. Alaska
3. Poland
4. Color Revolution
5. Straws
6. Sylvia
7. Starfall
1. Election. Well, that sucked. One of the life hacks I’ve done since 2008 is to never watch election returns before I go to bed. I will see them in the morning. I won’t miss anything. And I will at least get a good night’s sleep doing the Christmas anticipation routine. So, what happened? At best, we are in the Fog of War part of the festivities, where actual analysis is inundated and completely drowned in finger pointing and payback. And there is gonna be some significant payback on the Republican / conservative side of the house after this one. What happened?
- If you believe Data Republican’s numbers, which I tend to do, about 15% of Trump 2024 voters switched to democrat this election. This was constant nationwide, mostly led by some combination of young men, other men, Latinos and evangelicals, with turnout being the underlying mechanism. Of those who changed what they did in 2024, those that didn’t stay home shifted democrat, electing a LOT of democrats. OTOH, democrat turnout was way up, approaching Presidential election levels. Data Republican dropped some data this weekend explaining it. Appears democrats ran a well-funded, NGO based operation aimed at turning out low propensity voters. They were aiming for 19 million, which they apparently got. We saw it tested in the Spanberger election in VA last year, which flipped VA blue. More on this next week as more numbers come in and I attempt to understand what she is saying. American Greatness has perhaps the best recap of the results.
- Outcome? Democrats flipped 7 and perhaps 9 senate seats, depending on what happens in MS and AK (still outstanding / too close to call). They picked up 44 seats in the House with a 250+-seat majority as of this writing. Looks like the great redistricting wars failed, as democrats managed to pick up most of the newly drawn seats. They picked up at least 4 and as many as 6 governors, moving their total control to as many as 30 governorships. They flipped at least 12 legislative chambers from Republican to democrat. The biggest flip was in Texas, with most of the top statewide offices flipping to democrat for the first time in 30 years along with the State House and most of the state supreme court seats on the ballot. The Senate remains tentatively Republican held.
- On the political right, we are well into Placing of the Blame mode, charging weapons on the circular firing squad. Things are gonna be bloody for a while. How bloody is anyone’s guess, though the first fall guy (gal) is Suzy Wiles, WH Chief of Staff, replaced by Stephen Miller Friday morning. Reasons for the loss abound. Ann Coulter blames it entirely on the war with Iran, as does Trump. VP Vance chimed in with his own special little viewpoint Thursday afternoon. The war was a placeholder for any and all criticism of Trump not doing what those who elected him (young men) wanted him to do, though demonstrably the economy is ramping up nicely and close to roaring. Add to this anger over tariffs, high gas prices, high home prices,
- Criticism from evangelicals include fumbling regulations of the Morning After Pill and the 2024 Republican Convention memory holing all mention of pro-life from the party platform, which encouraged them to stay home. Of course, winning the abortion wars, which we did over the time with Dobbs did the identical thing by solving the issue.
- Texas is an interesting case, as Greg Abbott was up for his fourth term. In hindsight, the only exact science, he was well past his sell by date and should have had a succession plan. Both the Bush machine (Karl Rove) and Cornyn, essentially corporate Republicans, did everything in their power to defeat Ken Paxton. A friend of mine in Dallas noted that the only ads he saw for the US Senate race were pro Talarico and anti-Paxton. Another in East Texas reported seeing a lot of red ballots handed in without a vote on the US Senate race. The corruption message aimed at Paxton by democrats and Karl Rove worked well. Expect to see it used against Republicans in the 2028 campaign, which is why DeSantis is already blasting Republican crony capitalism. Additionally, there has been a war in the Texas House for control between the MAGA crowd and the Bush / Cornyn / RINO coalition for years. It usually ends up with that coalition making deals with democrats for legislative priorities. This is where freshly elected US Senator Talarico came from.
- Many on Our Side are highly spun up about newly elected Abdul al-Said, (D, Hamas), who made his victory speech in Arabic, in the best jihadi death to everyone who is not us spirit. He is and will continue to be a real nasty piece of work, a self-selected object lesson, a religious bully. I listened to him but heard echoes, not of jihadis, but of the Chicano movement of half a century ago. Those guys came in swinging their private parts, talking large, trashing everything not them. A lot of them even gave their victory speeches in Spanish. Oh, the humanity. Half a century later, they for the most part aren’t, though there are exceptions like new Cali governor Becera. Why not? Because we are America and you make a boatload more $$$ being part of us than warring with us. You assimilate whether you like it or not. And if you don’t your kids and grandkids will. Note that half a century ago in Iran, the women were running around in western clothes, as where the men and everyone else. Wahhabism is the aberration, a relatively recent one, that will not last, though its acolytes want to die to advance it. Perhaps they should continue to give them what they want. I am starting to think that while as dangerous as an irritated rattlesnake or javelina, radical Islam is equally solvable as it is completely predictable (they wrote about it in a book that everyone has a copy of), and as such there are no surprises. We know who they are. We know what they want. We know their Rules of Engagement (ROE) and how they plan to proceed. And we know there are no western limits to their ugliness or nastiness, which should simplify our response nicely.
- The weirdness of this election is that the conservative ballot initiatives didn’t do all that poorly. Given the enormity of the loss, this may be thin gruel indeed.
2. Alaska. We here in Alaska weren’t immune from the Blue Wave, though most of it was our own darned fault. Democrats running for the State House picked up three seats, two democrats and one democrat pretending to be a Republican. Little change in the State Senate, though the faces changed a bit. Our congress critter Nick Begich appears to have won. US Senator Dan Sullivan is in the fight of his political life, neck to neck with Mary Peltola, who is assisted by about 7.500 votes for a pair of decoy candidates intended to split the Republican vote. This one goes to the RCV process Nov 18. It will take a couple rounds to know who wins. Fingers are crossed. Sullivan, who has been a great US Senator for Alaska can very well win. Governor is worse, with democrat Jonathan Kreiss – Tompkins (JKT) holding a comfortable lead on three Republican candidates for governor. The leader of these is Bernadette Wilson, a feisty small business owner active in local politics for decades. Her two opponents are a former ANC mayor and a former state Attorney General, both of whom Trump asked to get out of the race. All 3 Republicans got more votes in total than JKT. Problem is that the RCV sort exhausts ballots each time a sort is done, dropping the bottom candidate’s ballots from the next round, decreasing the total pool, making it a subtraction game rather than an addition one. If voters for the other two Republicans refused to rank Bernadette as their second or third choice, those ballots drop out of the next sort. Yeah, I know it is stupid. Thank you Lisa Murkowski. Thank you Scott Kendall. Finally, the second attempt to repeal RCV failed by about 7.500 votes, mostly because the repeal initiative did not bypass the popular campaign finance provisions allowing the defenders an easy campaign in support.
3. Poland. As if the 2026 US midterms weren’t sufficient drama, festivities started a couple weeks earlier in Poland where the Prime Minister decided to do a bit of housecleaning in the Polish Constitutional Tribunal (as I understand it, the national Supreme Court), showing up with 5 rejected nominees, the national police, and installing them while the President was on an airplane enroute to Senegal. The president, who had vetoed the five nominees, turned his plane around and returned to Poland. Upon arrival, his plane was denied landing clearance. They landed anyway and showed up at the tribunal building with military escort (Polish military is loyal to the president), cut locks off, and retook the building. This has been going on for a couple weeks without resolution. The Prime Minister is an EU mini-me. The President is a nationalist. The EU is doing its best to intervene without getting any of their perfumed princes killed by enraged Polish military.
4. Color Revolution. Data Republican is a software engineer / data analyst who mapped federal spending, grants and the NGO financial networks. Think of her as someone who was DOGE-adjacent, pushing and steering DOGE rather than being part of it. And for her efforts, she was doxxed. She continues to explore the NGO complex. A couple weeks ago, she released results of perhaps 312 gig of data obtained via a tip of NGO-funded former USAID, current and past intel and DoD officers conspiring to create a Color Revolution here in the US. In their perfect world, they trigger massive street demonstrations large enough to get Trump to pull the trigger on the Insurrection Act, invoke Martial Law, and drop the hammer on the left. In response, the conspirators, including some unstated number of blue state governors (Pritzker from IL is one), declare the federal government illegitimate, dissolving it, just like the Confederacy tried. They then set about the business of creating a new federal government. Lots of things are wrong with this, first and most importantly, what do you do on Day 2 after your little coup is executed? There is also the little problem of what do you do about those of us who don’t support a coup? Implicit in this is control of the military, which is why they are trying to get rid of SECWAR Hegseth. Looks like the color revolution has been delayed a bit following the Blue Wave last Tuesday.
5. Straws. This week’s example of no-good deed goes unpunished or TANSTAAFL (There Ain’t No Such Thing as a Free Lunch) comes courtesy of the RoKs, who did a study comparing environmental impact of paper vice plastic straws. And yes, you guessed it, plastic is easier on the environment than paper. Paper straws cause over 6x higher carcinogenic impact than plastic. They have roughly double the acidification impact on the environment compared to plastic. They require more raw materials, energy and water to manufacture, increasing greenhouse gas and chemical footprints,. They are both difficult to recycle. Nice choice there, greens. Jam a product down our throats that is more carcinogenic, harder on the environment than plastic, the choice made by the marketplace. There’s a lesson there somewhere.
6. Sylvia. Not often that you get the SECWAR firing an Army 3-Star, this one the top planner for JCS. Better yet, the firing is followed by a criminal referral for leaking classified to a reporter. The 3-Star, LtGen Bret Sylvia was the Joint Staff J5, planner. He reportedly failed three polygraph tests, which may or may not mean something. The Joint Staff withdrew a standard “deepest gratitude” press release issued upon his retirement, declining further comment. He was accused of leaking sensitive and classified planning and munitions details and interagency discussions relating to the war in Ukraine.
7. Starfall. Final military piece this week is a successful point to point test for a Starfall capsule last week. This one was a rideshare test launched Oct 20 from the Cape and splashed down about a week later. Cargo this time around was a test load including MREs, field medical supplies, bottled water, desalinator, batteries, and GPS trackers. The capsule was fully instrumented and splashed down in the Pacific. There is some confusion about the length of the time in orbit. Based on the description, it could have been anywhere from 45 minutes to a full week. If it were a week, the capsule should have had some sort of heating capability which would massively increase its complexity. Still, point to point military resupply from space is a nice capability to explore.
More later –
- AG