Republicans are the party of child murder
Make them explicitly defend it.
Welcome to a Wednesday edition of Progress Report.
I’m writing this newsletter during our flight back to New York, sitting in the back row next to my toddler son, who will be two years old in a few weeks but has a head start on all the astonishing, delightful, and not-so-delightful things that come with the age. Right now he’s displaying the third option: yelling, kicking, performing loose approximations of hand stands, smacking my computer, rejecting the copious snacks we packed, and definitely losing his toys, all while 35,000 feet in the air.
He’s an adorable maniac.
Admittedly, this kind of all-action display in such a suboptimal environment might eventually sap my deep reservoir of patience, but right now, all I can think about tonight is the text message that a 16-year-old girl sent to her mother during an active school shooting today in Georgia: “I'm sorry I haven't been a perfect daughter. I love you.”
Thankfully, the girl who sent the text survived the attack, but two other students at the school were killed today by their 14-year-old classmate. My brain won’t even let me try to contemplate the depths of despair that their parents must feel. Survival mechanism, I guess.
Classmates have told reporters that they weren’t surprised that the 14-year-old shooter opened fire, and samples from what appear to be his social media accounts suggest that he’d fallen down some pretty dark rabbit holes online. But young Colt Gray’s browsing habits wouldn’t be more than topics for a therapy session or three if he hadn’t had such easy access to the assault weapon that he used to kill two classmates and two teachers at Apalachee High School today.
The shooting was followed by the usual calls for gun control from Democratic lawmakers, including from Vice President Kamala Harris, but they’ve become rote by now, because we’ve all but given up the hope of actually passing the kind of policy that more than 60% of Americans vehemently support. We’re beyond even symbolic votes and posturing for campaign purposes. Republicans will rush to pass law after law to bully queer kids and feed students far-right bile, but keeping them from being blown apart in their classrooms is beyond discussion.
This was the 45th school shooting of 2024, and with classes starting back up across the country, it is a grim reality that it will be far from the last. The right-wing War on Children continues to rage unabated, and it’s long since past the time that it’s become central to political campaigns. For decades, Democrats were terrified to run on abortion, and now it’s central to their message. They ought to do the same thing with gun control, forcing every single parent to contemplate the unthinkable before the cast their votes.
If Republicans want to fear-monger over it, they can explain to Americans why they continue to enable the massacre of innocent schoolchildren.
OK, lots to run through tonight, so let’s keep going.
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California for Never: It took longer than anticipated, but today More Perfect Union published my story on the battle between Silicon Valley billionaires and the people of nearby Solano County. The tech titans, many of whom are right-wing and techno-libertarian megalomaniacs, want to build a brand new city in the middle of protected farmland, which they have spent the past seven years purchasing with a mix of deception and brute legal force.
This is a story about far more than one battle in one rural county; these sorts of land-grabs and ideological experiments in Galt-like government are proliferating around the world, as the piece details. I need the video to perform well so that I can do more stories like this one, so please, please, please watch it.
The ballot initiative was pushed back to 2026, but there’s real concern that the move was more cynical than what was made out to be a bow to public pressure. You’ll see why if you watch the video.
Kremlin content: In a twist that is almost too on-the-nose to be real, the Department of Justice charged two Russian influence-peddlers with laundering millions of dollars to a conservative media network that features some of the dumbest far-right media influencers in the nation.
The indictment accuses Kostiantyn Kalashnikov and Elena Afanasyeva, employees of the Kremlin-operated RT network, of injecting $10 million into an unnamed social channel that is almost certainly Tenet Media. Based in Tennessee and founded by a host for Glenn Beck’s TheBlaze streaming network, it has disseminated more than 2,000 pieces of pro-Trump, Kremlin-approved propaganda, while also funding content by dupes like serial plagiarist Benny Johnson and dim live-streamer Tim Pool.
The influencers haven’t been charged with any wrongdoing, but they did release statements that underscore their stupidity. Pool said that he was shocked by the allegations and considers himself a victim, while Johnson, a smug racist who was fired from nearly every journalism job he ever had before going full propagandist, was evidently too dumb to question why a Russian agent would target him.
Either that or they just don’t want to admit that they had some inkling that the $400,000 monthly paycheck they received in exchange for recording four shitty videos a week couldn’t have been above board.
Nebraska: Need more proof that working class populism is the way to break through in red states where Democrats haven’t had a chance in years? Then allow me to direct you to the latest polling in one of Nebraska’s two Senate races, where independent labor leader Dan Osborn trails incumbent Republican Sen. Deb Fischer by just one point, 39% to 38%.
As the pollster acknowledges, Osborn is an unknown to many voters — he’s never been involved in electoral politics at this level — and he wouldn’t be performing nearly as well if he were officially a Democrat. But the fact that he’s a guy with no political experience so far defying the odds with a pro-worker, pro-union, anti-monopoly campaign indicates that it’s the Democratic brand that’s struggling after so many years of milquetoast appeals to the non-existent center.
I spoke with Osborn in January for the profile below. I knew him previously as the president of BCTGM Local 50G, having covered the strike at Kellogg’s back in 2021. That strike, as it turns out, is what kickstarted his desire to run for office. Then came the railroad contract fiasco a year later, when a bipartisan coalition voted to force commercial railroad workers to take a contract without days off.
“As somebody who's worked over 3000 hours a year, if you do the math, that's about a little over 60 hours a week for the last 20 years,” Osborn said. “I understand what wanting a little bit more work-life balance means. They're working out in the elements, they're missing birthday parties, soccer games, you name it, they're missing it. And they're selling their minutes to this railroads, and these railroads are making these exorbitant profits.
“It was the same thing when we're out on strike: we just want a piece of the pie and we want to be able to live a decent life,” Osborn continued. “Part of living a decent life is making a good wage, but it's also being able to spend time with your family. And that's what [the Senate] voted against.”
Looking at the cross-tabs of the poll, Osborn is taking 18% of conservative voters, while Fischer earns just 11% of liberal voters. He’s also thumping her when it comes to self-identified moderate voters, 49% to 23%. Just as importantly, Osborn is holding his own with voters across the economic spectrum. The three rows below are Fischer, Osborn, and undecided, in that order:
Fischer has six times the cash that Osborn has in the bank, meaning that he will continue to be an underdog up through the election. But this poll is hardly a fluke, as Osborn has been right around Fischer for months now. The outcome could ride on Osborn keeping things close in Nebraska’s two conservative districts and then running up the score in its liberal enclave, where Kamala Harris is beating Trump by four or five points.
Swing state polls: CNN is out today with a new set of polls measuring the big six battleground states. Harris leads in Michigan and Wisconsin, Trump leads in Arizona, while Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Nevada are each too close to call.
Generally speaking, Harris has struggled the most in Arizona, and in looking at the cross-tabs, there are some strange demographic results that are worth pointing out.
First, the poll has Trump beating Harris by six points among voters 18-29, which is more than he’s beating her among voters 35-49, who are traditionally far more conservative. For the sake of comparison, Georgia, which leans ever so slightly toward Trump, young voters give Harris a 54% to 41% lead.
Arizona also has Trump walloping Harris among independent voters, 51% to 37%. In Georgia, Trump leads just 44% to 41%. I’m not saying that the results should be discounted, but the Arizona numbers just don’t seem to track.
Texas: Thrice-indicted Attorney General Ken Paxton is at it again, abusing his office in order to intimidate Hispanic voters from exercising their right to participate in democracy. This time, he is suing Bexar County, home of San Antonio and one of the biggest and bluest counties in the state, for hiring a firm to send voter registration applications to eligible citizens.
Bexar County officials are confident that they’ve done nothing wrong, as its operation is non-partisan and will not provide non-citizens the opportunity to register to vote. Harris County, home to Houston, is looking at ignoring Paxton’s bluster and setting up its own similar program. Though Paxton is maintaining the fiction that such efforts would help undocumented immigrants cast illegal ballots, other opponents simply complain that party affiliation numbers would inevitably benefit Democrats. At least they’re honest.
Speaking of discriminatory intent, LULAC, the organization whose elderly members’ homes were raided in the wee hours of the morning in late August, is now calling on the FBI and DOJ to investigate Paxton’s ongoing intimidation campaign against Hispanic communities.
According to the organization, Paxton has brought charges against 900 voting rights activists who he’s accused of vote harvesting or election fraud, but has won just two convictions. Not a good batting average, Ken.
Ohio: Secretary of State Frank LaRose suffered more humiliation on Wednesday, as Gov. Mike DeWine, a fellow Republican, pushed back against his proposed ban of ballot drop boxes.
“I think we do a very good job in Ohio running elections,” DeWine said. “I think anyone who wants to change what we do has a burden of proof to show there’s a problem with what we do now.”
That’s a pretty brutal broadside against LaRose, who has constantly sought to change election rules in Ohio, even after falling flat on his face during the most recent Senate primary.
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My grandkids have trauma kits in every hallway of their grade school. They run active shooter drills. Guns flood our area from gun mills and iron pipelines like Indiana, sold legally to thugs and lunatics, enabled by corrupt GOP politicians.
Homeschool.
Problem solved.