The effort to muddle the midterms has begun with actions in Alaska and California. It will be imperative that Americans let their displeasure be known with their voices, votes, and brains. A few good things before we start. A federal judge in New York pulled a $20 million ad campaign starring the president off the air. Homeland Security paid for it with your money, three weeks before a midterm, and one of the spots was titled "Final Battle." A judge in San Francisco told the Agriculture Department it cannot pack up the Forest Service headquarters and ship its people to Utah without asking Congress first.
A new low point this week: the Republican candidate for governor in Ohio ginned up a commercial featuring the mother of his opposing candidate. It is so bad, so reprehensible, I would rather you read the news that covered it here.
There are no laws against this form of political battle. It is expected that the voting public will cast their votes and judge accordingly, yet the biggest problem in modern media politics is that we have been dumbed down to want theatre over policy. Trying to steal someone’s character has become more important than understanding how decisions really affect your life.
During the two times I ran for local office, there was actually a decent amount of discussion about policies. Surprisingly, it was the local media that really wanted things to get more personal. It makes sense: more attacks, more advertising. That sells better than any snoozer on the wheels of government. This puts a lot of work on the candidate as well as the citizens to discern something more than the ready-to-go labels.
Conservative, liberal, Democrat, and Republican. But there are many more labels beyond that. To one crowd I was a tree hugger. To another I was a tax-and-spend liberal. To others someone they could vote for instead of voting against.
A label is the cheapest thing in American politics. It avoids all that unnecessary work of learning something deeper about the person. I thought about this while watching a piece on Zohran Mamdani, who has portrayed himself as someone beyond any label, going against incumbents of both parties and not afraid to be himself. Asked how it felt to have Republicans crown him the new face of the Democratic Party, he shrugged and said, "Let them."
Bernie Sanders was in my area this week. While one side applauds him as something of a revolutionary thinker, the other calls him a communist, socialist, or radical. Any person who hears the labels must take an extra step to get past it. The same thing is happening now to Mamdani and the Senate candidate in Michigan, El-Sayed. It’s an old trick. If you can hook people with the label, radical muslim, for example, it makes their argument that much harder to hear.
When Franklin Roosevelt proposed Social Security, his opponents grabbed the word social and called the New Deal a Soviet plot. While Roosevelt was genuinely trying to keep the elderly from the poorhouse, others told the country he was marching it to communism. In January 1944, Roosevelt laid out a Second Bill of Rights, including the right to adequate medical care. He was building toward a national health program when he died in office the next year.
Truman picked up the mantle and got the label treatment. The American Medical Association branded his plan socialized medicine and smeared his administration as followers of the Moscow party line. Truman's answer still shames the people who forced him to give it. Is it un-American, he asked, to visit the sick and comfort the dying? He thought that was just plain Christianity.
The drumbeat never stopped. Clinton’s plan never made it out of Congress, with the assistance of calling his wife a radical feminist. Obama got the Affordable Care Act through but has been hammered with the same two words, communism and welfare, every single day since. The House has voted to kill or injure “Obamacare” many times since.
That’s the power of labels, enough to stop something that every other wealthy nation on earth has built.
If we are to evolve beyond the current administration, we will have to become more open to substantive discussion over the shortcut of labeling. The job Roosevelt started, that Truman carried, that Obama got a piece of, was never for any special interest. It was for us. All of us. And it has been derailed time and again by well-used shortcuts.
Keep that in your head while the labels are flying, especially now, because they are counting on you not to ask questions. Labels have kept us from being where we should have been a long time ago. Don’t let them keep you from supporting those who are fighting for the least of us.
Disagree with me? Think I missed something? Hit reply and tell me directly, or open this issue on the web and scroll to the very bottom, past the poem and the song, to leave a public comment and read what everyone else said. Sign in with the email you get this newsletter at, and you're in.
From the Porcupine Press Shop
Two weeks out. However this one lands, you were awake for it, which is more than most of the people on television can say. The shirt does not argue with anybody. It just notes, quietly, that you stayed in the room and kept count. Comfort Colors, garment dyed, soft enough to wear out or in bed.
Gallup went out in August and found that 43 percent of Americans now say something positive about socialism, the highest it has measured since it started asking, and among adults under 35 the word beats capitalism outright. The younger generation sees the pain of economic indifference.
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Newsweek asked strategists in both parties whether the socialist label still sinks a candidate, and a Republican pollster gave away the whole game. Take away the labels, the policies poll well. Know when you are being trolled.
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Kaiser Family Foundation added up what happened after the enhanced healthcare subsidies lapsed, and the numbers do not need my help: the average deductible jumped 37 percent to a record 3,786 dollars, net premiums rose 58 percent, and over a million people left the market. That’s what the wrong type of public policy from the wrong elected officials gets you.
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Photo by Rach Pradhan on Unsplash
We Know How to Fix Homelessness. Look at Denver.
A reporter went to Denver to find out how a big American city got its street homelessness down 64 percent since 2023, and the answer is almost beyond labels. Police break up the camps. Social workers ride along. And, the part every other city skips, there is a real place waiting at the end of the conversation: a tiny house with a door that locks, a hotel room that feels like an apartment. Enforcement without a bed is a decision bordering on cruelty, but a lack of enforcement is also an out of sight out of mind avoidance. Denver figured out how to do both. I read the whole thing waiting to disagree with something and never got there.
Photo by Jelly Marketing on Unsplash
Living with parents and the end of the suburban model (WSJ)
As our kids have grown and begin spreading out, I have realized very quickly that the choices they face are just as numerous and more expensive. It may beckon a return to the past. For most of human history families lived together or nearby. It was the postwar boom, not some law of nature, that scattered everyone into a separate box with a separate mortgage. That boom is over. Rent outran wages, the arithmetic stopped working, and you need a niche or a side gig just to break even. I am not sure this is the tragedy we are told it is. We tore down neighborhood schools, the community hospital, the ability to walk to things we need, and monetized the help and healthcare that once made caring for your own much more possible. Family under one roof again might be less a defeat than a course correction.
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Hungary's half-turn, what comes after you win (Lucid)
Despite the efforts of our current American regime, even our Vice President traveling to appear with him, Hungary threw out their president this spring. Orban was a clear Russian agent whose corruption was ruining the country. The first thing the new government built was an office to go get the money back. Sixteen years of public contracts and rigged sales moved an estimated sixty billion dollars. The political scientist now running the recovery agency said out loud that she hopes to claw back thirty million of it, and not to expect final verdicts inside her six-year term. Read that twice, because we are going to need this playbook.
When MAGA is finally out, somebody has to rebuild the gears of public service, and somebody has to decide how many years to spend chasing the leeches who turned those services into bankable private holdings. Both at once, on a clock. And be clear about the target. It was a form of mafia-style patronage, not conservatism. A government run on principle needs public servants, which includes true conservatives.
On any ballot in November that carries a wage question next to a candidate, the wage question wins by more. Voters have approved twenty eight of the thirty two state minimum wage measures put to them since 1996, and they have done it in states that went for Trump by double digits. Michigan is the one to watch, where the legislature spent last year unwinding a tipped wage phase-out voters had already approved, and organizers have been working to put it back in front of them. Then watch the winning party read its own name onto a result that was never about it. Nobody out there is endorsing a coalition. They are asking to be paid, and they will ask again in places where they would not vote for the people asking on their behalf.
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Twenty five percent of Americans between 25 and 34 were living in a multigenerational household by 2021, up from nine percent in 1971. That is not a generation failing to launch. That is a generation reading things correctly. Here is my call. Within two years the shame drains out of it and the marketing arrives. Watch for the second kitchen sold as a feature, the suite with its own entrance, and mini homes in the back yard.
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Ford cut five thousand jobs to automation, then led the industry in recalls, then went out and hired back three hundred and fifty veteran engineers, retirees among them, to train the new people and fix the tools. Klarna reversed. IBM is now tripling entry level hiring. Gartner expects half the companies that cut service jobs for AI to be rehiring by 2027, under different titles. Here is my call. People will be rehired, but in smaller numbers, which will force a hard reckoning on how AI benefits the working class.
The Forever Sleep
Marc Yacht
Age does take its toll
Better to smell the roses
Than dwell on being old
Take what life still poses.
The body battles the fleeting days
Perhaps there follows sleepless nights
Added discomforts have their way
Routines continue in dimming light.
Sunset and sunrise, year to year
Decades of memories and souvenirs
One treks along in spite of wear
The need to go on is not clear.
Yet, there are things that hold
Family, music, God's creatures to ever keep
A future to see unfold
Later, there will be ample time to forever sleep.
When you find yourself indoors this week, read something older than you are. A lot of wisdom has already been shared, just forgotten.
Always strive to be a good human.