Hello and happy Saturday. This week was a good reminder that, yes, actually, our politics can get a little weirder. Maine Democrats nominated for Senate a progressive oyster farmer with a covered-up Nazi tattoo and sexting habit, and MAGA supporters are crying foul that a Republican former reality star failed to advance to the runoff in Los Angeles’ mayoral primary.
In Maine, Graham Platner faced no electoral repercussions for a pair of damaging reports that emerged in the final days of his campaign: The Wall Street Journal reported that the married Platner had been sexting several women, and the New York Times spoke with former girlfriends who described Platner as “volatile,” “toxic,” “demeaning to women,” and even “physically threatening.”
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Platner’s good fortune was that his opponent, Maine Gov. Janet Mills, had suspended her campaign back in April and, while she was still on the ballot, mustered only 19 percent of the vote. And Maine Democrats faced a true conundrum, as Kevin Williamson noted. Is it worth elevating an unfit candidate when control of the Senate is at stake? Lamenting that “tribalism always finds a way,” he wrote:
Though a small Democratic majority in the Senate would not be able, on its own strength, to remove Trump (and possibly other members of his administration) from office once the Democrat-controlled House has handed down yet another impeachment (as many observers assume it will, as a matter of course), every jackass with a Kik account and a “D” next to his name who ends up seated in the Senate puts Democrats one step closer to realizing that end.
In a reported piece, John McCormack detailed how the Senate might look with a 51-49 Democratic majority with Platner in it vs. a 50-50 Senate if incumbent Republican Susan Collins wins in November.
What difference does it make if Democrats gain a Senate majority in addition to the House? The two obvious gains are the power to block judicial nominees and the power to block Cabinet nominees. “Who gets confirmed for lifetime judicial seats? Who gets confirmed to lead federal agencies and be our ambassadors overseas? And what do we spend in support of our core national mission?” Democratic Sen. Chris Coons of Delaware told The Dispatch. …“I’ve worked on a number of things with Sen. Murkowski, Sen. Collins … over the years, but when you have a president who is this far out of his appropriate role in the mainstream, I think the best check is a Democratic majority.”
Meanwhile, out in California, Trump-backed former reality star Spencer Pratt ran in second place in Los Angeles’ (technically nonpartisan) mayoral primary during the days after the election, but fell to third after mail-in ballots pushed progressive Nithya Raman into second behind Mayor Karen Bass. While The Dispatch and many other outlets have criticized California’s election procedures for drawing out the vote count, Pratt supporters seized on the late turn of events to suggest a conspiracy.
In Wednesday’s G-File, Jonah Goldberg wasted no time debunking the nonsense:
Both the incumbent Mayor Karen Bass and left-wing firebrand Nithya Raman would have much preferred a runoff with Pratt than another Democrat. The conspiracy theories about how “they” stole the election gloss over this point. So who is “they”? If it’s the establishment controlled by Bass, “they” screwed up. If it was Raman, “they” had to have done it without the help of the people running the city government—or the state government (Steve Hilton, the GOP candidate for governor, made the runoff).
In Boiling Frogs, Nick Catoggio suggested something else is at play—that the hubbub is really about November and sowing doubt in the midterm results. He wrote:
California is especially threatening to Republicans considering that Democrats stand to gain several House seats there from the tit-for-tat partisan redistricting wars. The outcome in those House races might determine which party controls the chamber. If Trump can get people in the habit of viewing Democratic victories in the state as inherently dubious, so much the better for the Stop the Steal 2.0 effort to undo those victories.
I might be going out on a limb, but it looks like we’re in for a wild ride between now and the elections in November. Thanks for reading and have a good weekend.
Suicide contagion is a well-known concept; it basically refers to the phenomenon of other people taking their lives in reaction to another person doing the same. Per ReportingOnSuicide.org, “Over 100 studies worldwide have found that risk of contagion is real and responsible reporting can reduce the risk of additional suicides.” According to the site, the reporter should not “describe or depict the method and location of the suicide,” “describe intimate details about the person who died,” or “present suicide as a common or acceptable response to hardship,” among other things. The site also notes that “including stories on hope, healing, and recovery may reduce the risk of contagion.” Applying these rules to a New York Times piece on assisted dying, however, results in jarring observations. Don’t describe the method or location of the suicide? Ron Curtis died from assisted suicide “in his bedroom overlooking a lake,” and Aaron Wade died with “his partner and two best friends at his side.” Don’t describe intimate details about the person who died? Denise de Ruijter “took comfort in her Barbie dolls when she struggled to connect with people.” Don’t present suicide as a common or acceptable response to hardship? The piece doesn’t portray assisted dying as common. But the gentle tone of the article surely suggests it’s acceptable.
Just months after Adams left office, his eldest son, George Washington Adams, jumped to his death off the back of a steamship in Long Island Sound. In the depths of mourning and depression, Adams was approached to stand for Congress. While it’s difficult to to say how his grief factored in his return to public life, it is certain is that politics and public service were like water and air to him. His parents raised him to serve the country they had sacrificed so much to found. While his wife and youngest son saw a seat in Congress as a demotion and beneath a former president, Adams himself took it as his duty to “once again be launched upon the faithless waves of politics.” So Adams won election and took his seat in Congress in December 1831. The first issue the former president rose to speak on was one that, unbeknownst at the time, would define the remainder of his public life. He rose in the chamber and read petitions from citizens who were praying for an end to the institution of slavery. Although Adams loathed slavery and found it utterly immoral, he believed the abolitionist religious minority in the country to be reckless and their ideas destructive to the fabric of the nation. During the crisis over whether Missouri would come into the country as a free or slave state, Adams had confessed to the privacy of his diary that the issue of slavery would only be resolved by war.
On Sunday, police charged Hector Deleon, an “emotionally disturbed” and homeless 51-year-old, with slashing six fellow New Yorkers in an unprovoked attack at New York’s bustling Penn Station. Deleon, the New York Post subsequently reported, has a vibrant criminal history: another slashing committed in Newark four years ago and six other prior arrests, including “aggravated assault, unlawful possession of a weapon, use or possession of drugs, assault, domestic assault and criminal mischief.” Deleon’s crimes have provoked a now-familiar outcry: Why was a violent criminal, with a string of priors and a history of deranged behavior, on the streets? Why wasn’t he locked up, either in prison or a mental facility? And why do such people seem to cause so much of our crime problem? … That a few offenders commit most of the crime is the closest thing we have to an iron law of criminology. Offending follows what social scientists call a “pareto” distribution or the “80/20” rule: (At least) 80 percent of crime is committed by (at most) 20 percent of offenders. The true concentration may be even greater than that. One 2017 systematic review found that the 10 percent of the population that is most criminally active accounts for 66 percent of all crime, on average.
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