Morning

I am sure the moderate rebels in the House will save us.

Tuesday Night

Rock on.

Happy Hour

American Manners

Ah, yes, Americans, famous for their refined "manners" and never eating food with their fingers.

The Future Of The Democratic Party

When Eric Adams barely squeaked by, all the advanced politics knowers decided - amazingly - that barely winning a heavily contested primary in New York City somehow meant you were just what the nation was looking for in a politician. It didn't make any sense then, but those are the rules now.

Zohran Mamdani has won New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary, a new vote count confirmed on Tuesday, cementing his stunning upset of former governor Andrew Cuomo and sending him to the general election.

The Associated Press called the race after the results of the city’s ranked choice voting tabulation were released and showed Mamdani beating Cuomo by 12 percentage points.

At Least Some Good News

Though only the good die young, it seems.

US televangelist Jimmy Swaggart, whose multi-million dollar ministry with a global reach was crippled after a sex scandal, has died at the age of 90.

Lunch

Unsurprisingly, the budget passed the Senate.

Tick Tock You Don't Stop

I know it makes me a bad blogger, but I can't be bothered to follow the unfolding vote in the Senate. At some point I realized if it isn't fun to watch the game, you can just find out the score at the end and spend your time doing other things.

Small Pleasures

I think Elon loses here, bigly, but that'll be funny, too.

“I’ve had my share of blowouts with Elon over the years,” Low told POLITICO in a rare interview since Musk’s ugly spat with Trump. “Knowing Elon the way I know him, I do think he’s going to do everything to damage the president.”

I know none of this matters, but allow me my small amusements in the middle of all this.

Reporter: Are you going to deport Elon Musk? Trump: We'll have to take a look. We might have to put DOGE on Elon. You know what DOGE is? The monster that might have to go back and eat Elon. Wouldn’t that be terrible? He gets a lot of subsidies.

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— Acyn (@acyn.bsky.social) July 1, 2025 at 1:28 PM

Let Them Fight

 

Sure, Elon, primary every Republican.

Elon's pretending he cares about the spending and debts while Trump is rightly pointing out that he just cares about free money for himself is funny.

Morning

Get your morning on.

Happy Hour

Get happy

Related

One of the more amusing false choices, presented by the recent brains of the Democrat's polling and messaging.

Is his job to try to win elections, or to try to win elections the right way, with the right coalition?  

Do the people who pay him know the answer to this?

Coalitions

Everybody will tell you that they are just trying to win - that this is their singleminded goal - but the battle within the party is often about precisely which coalition to try to win with.

There was a concerted effort from without and within the party to reject the 2020 Biden-Sanders-Warren coalition, to declare it a failure and reshape a new one. They were trying to tank the 2022 midterms, or at least wishcast that into being, and then use as that an excuse to go back to the happy place of courting Sensible Republicans.  

That this effort was largely sponsored by crypto cash - SBF was the Real Thing - has gone mostly unremarked, largely because many well-connected people narrowly escaped prosecution (I am being vague here, deliberately).

The 2022 midterms didn't go as hoped, for them, as it wasn't the Red Wave that they had been desperately hoping for.   They went on as if it had, as if SBF wasn't in prison.

And here we are.

That story doesn't explain everything, but it explains a lot.  Nothing made sense to me in 2022 until I realized this was happening.

Everybody's Working For The Weekend

Fetterman when asked re: timing

“Oh my God, I just want to go home. I've already my I've missed our entire trip to to the beach…, there's no drama that we know the votes are going to go…And I think, I don't think it's really helpful to put people here till some ungodly hour.”

— Alan He (@alanhe) June 30, 2025

Lunch

eat

President Deals

Hey, his approach worked. Good luck, Canada, he'll never stop!

Canada will rescind a planned digital services tax in order to advance stalled trade talks with the U.S., Ottawa announced on Sunday.

Experience and Competence

Cuomo has many flaws, but one is that he is lazy and incompetent. Ideology aside, he is absolutely bad at running things, including his own campaign.

This one is worth reading from start to finish so I won't provide an excerpt (the only way most people click through).

One point I will emphasize a bit is that many in politics and political journalism want to claim that it was Mamdani who made Gaza/Israel the centerpiece of his camaign, which is a complete fabrication. It was Cuomo who did that.

Remember that when people ask why The Left is so obsessed with Israel, in order to imply something about that.

Seems Bad

Funny how paranoid conservative fantasies are always turned into reality by conservatives.

The Trump administration has, for the first time ever, built a searchable national citizenship data system.

The tool, which is being rolled out in phases, is designed to be used by state and local election officials to give them an easier way to ensure only citizens are voting. But it was developed rapidly without a public process, and some of those officials are already worrying about what else it could be used for.

Whatever the merits of such an idea (none, but let's pretend), a system implemented with no concern for accuracy and no way to correct errors is there for reasons other than the stated ones. 

Morning

Big beautiful Monday.