The analysis of last week’s colossal political upheaval continues. One explanation: education was a major driver of the public’s discontent with Republicans.

Voters were upset about a number of issues, including a voucher program, signed into law by Greg Abbott, the governor, that sent $1bn of public money to private schools. They were concerned about new social studies standards that critics say promote Islamophobia and minimize the impact of slavery. They had seen students detained by immigration authorities, and Abbott threaten to strip district funding if students protested against ICE. And they were angry about a curriculum incorporating Bible verses that felt “forced down the throats” of schools, Palmer said.

Well, yes. I, and just about everyone on the left, has been howling about those kinds of issues for decades. It’s nice to see it’s finally sinking into voters’ minds that the conservatives have been dismantling public education, and that that is a bad thing.

Maybe soon they will recognize that there are certain organizations, often religious, that are loci of spreading corruption, and will work to cut them out.

It seems Lauren Boebert has lost her race to represent Colorado in congress. At least until they scream about voting irregularities, or someone says her name three times.

I might be willing to keep Hakeem Jeffries on as house majority leader.

It might be harder to purge that white asshole next to him

House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries, poised to become majority leader, said on Sunday that he strongly supports impeaching defense secretary Pete Hegseth as a Republican lawmaker prepares to force a House vote.

The top Democrat made his position clear during an appearance on ABC’s This Week, declaring himself a “hard yes” on the impeachment resolution targeting Hegseth.

“I’m a hard yes on the Hegseth resolution. The so-called secretary of defense has abused his power, undermined our national security, and engineered this reckless and costly war of choice in Iran, which has skyrocketed prices on the American people and made the country less safe,” Jeffries said. “Pete Hegseth has got to go.”

But Chuck Schumer still has to step down from leadership of the senate.

Trump has appointed Stephen Miller, acolyte of Satan, to be his new chief of staff, replacing Susie Wiles and declaring his deeper commitment to supporting Nazis. I don’t think he plans on being more accommodating and sensible in the last half of his term. He’s firing a warning shot across the Democrat’s bows.

What is fascinating are Miller’s remarks about his appointment.

Despite the GOP’s catastrophic losses Tuesday, Miller praised Trump, saying he saved the Republican party from the ash heap of history and has made it stronger, more popular, and more resilient than ever before.

If it wasn’t for President Trump, the United States of America would not exist right now, Miller added.

None of that is true. A little exaggeration as repayment for his reward is to be expected, but that is stepping outside of actual accomplishments to making up effusive lies. None of that is believable.

But then we get Miller’s pledge.

I swear to you, and I pledge to you, Mr. President, my absolute loyalty, my unwavering commitment, and my total devotion to your success and the success of this country.

Jesus fuck. That’s way too obsequious. Has any presidential appointment before been so desperate in swearing their fealty to a president? Most people would pledge their loyalty to the Constitution rather than slobbering over an individual. I guess the Constitution is irrelevant now.

Put that man higher on the list of enemies of the state, and put him first in the queue to be issued a blindfold and a cigarette.

He’s afraid. Trump looked at the election results and was terrified that in two years, at most, his legacy was going to be demolished, and his legacy, of course, is the tacky gold geegaws he has glued to the walls of the oval office. That’s his precious. He thinks of himself as a builder, an architectural genius, and that he will be remembered for his gifts to the American people: his stupid ballroom that no one asked for, his line of presidential portraits that mock his predecessors, his helipad, his tasteless golden decorations, his arch, his insufferable efforts to put his name on every cultural landmark. They’re all going to be swept away as one of the first and easiest act of his successor. He knows it. We all know it. Whoever takes the oval office someday, we’re all going to be disappointed if they don’t erase that stupid man’s ugly efforts to mar a historical place.

We know that is what he fears, because he rushed to his office to sign another executive proclamation to say they can’t do that.

In the days since his party suffered historic defeats in the midterm elections, the president has seemingly turned his attention to the many renovation projects he has begun across the nation’s capital. Sitting behind the Resolute Desk on Thursday, Trump declared the Oval Office a national monument.

I’m going to be signing a document which will make them into a landmark for the ages, he told reporters in the gold-covered Oval Office.

According to the president, the proclamation would ensure the West Wing rooms would not be touched by anybody, destroyed, ripped down by stupid people, in order to build something in a slightly different shape.

I just thought it was very important that nobody be allowed to come and take it down and try and do something with it, he said.

Every once in a while they’ll look and they’ll say, oh, maybe what we’ll do is we’ll put some glass up that’s a little bit better or something, and I say no, you’re not going to do anything. We’re going to leave this as it is, he continued.

If anyone ever decides to come and start knocking down walls, you’ll call me wherever I may be, and I will come back here and I will make sure it never happens.

Right. The president who ignored laws and planning regulations to take a bulldozer to the East Wing now thinks his signature is all it takes to keep his petty treasures in the face of all future presidents. He’s stupid.

He’s not King Arthur, who will rise from his tomb to restore his kingdom when it is threatened. He’s going to be rotting in his grave, where the only gold he’ll see is the trickle of urine from all the visitors there to revel in his defeat.

Ted Cruz was crying on Twitter. He dumped a long post on Twitter decrying the “bloodbath” of the recent election, which I’ll spare you, because he really had nothing to say, other than to describe the Republican collapse. Yeah, we noticed. We don’t need a hack to explain it to us.

He just had to admit a glorious fact.

Texas is blue. That is a hard sentence to utter. But Texas, today at least, is blue. As we sit here today, I am the only statewide elected Republican who remains in Texas.

And if he had been on the ballot for re-election, he would have been one of the casualties. Maybe next time.

He quotes an exit poll that summarizes the Republican failure, but don’t be surprised — he won’t admit to being one of the contributors to the disaster.

Take the state of Kansas, for example, a state that has not elected a Democrat senator since 1932. It just did. Here’s what exit polling showed were the top issues in Kansas.

Number one, cost of living, energy, and groceries. That was listed as number one by 30.6 percent of voters.
Corruption. Number two, 18.5%.
The cost of the Iran war, 10.1%.
The candidates are terrible, 7.9%.
The Canada trade war, 7.6%.
The GOP didn’t do enough to support Trump, 6.6%.
Republicans didn’t pass the Save America Act, 5.6%.
Trump’s focus on monuments, 5.5%, and data centers and AI, 3.8%.

Exactly. The cost of living, corruption, and the Iran war are the top 3. The fourth point, the candidates are terrible, is something Ted Cruz has no ability to alleviate. He called the Iran War exactly the right decision when it started. He is totally wrapped up in the most corrupt administration in American history, and endorsed Ken Paxton, the terribly corrupt candidate for Senate. And he’s done nothing to reduce the cost of living.

But OK, I consider the Kansan’s complaints to be valid and something every politician should consider. Does he propose anything substantive to address any of those issues? No, he does not. He instead falls back on the failed strategy Republicans have been following for years: attack the Democrats and lie about what the Democrats are, hypothetically, going to do.

We can be certain that the Democrats in Austin and in Washington will overshoot. In Texas, they will try to raise taxes dramatically. They may even try to adopt a state income tax, or even a California wealth tax. They will try to shut down the energy industry, destroying jobs across our state. They will embrace the radical transgender agenda. They will persecute those they perceive to be enemies, especially Elon Musk.

And in Washington, they will attack Trump every single day, constantly. Impeachment hearings, subpoenas, his family, cabinet members, business leaders, open persecution, and nonstop retaliation. Make no mistake. Nationally, the radicals are in charge. The communists and the Islamists who have taken over the Democrat Party have now taken over the United States Congress. They will be unleashed.

He knows nothing about their tax plans; any increase in taxes should be accompanied by an increase in government services, and keep in mind that the current administration has bloated government spending with personal perks for the rich.

There is no radical transgender agenda. I would hope that the only thing on that agenda is tolerance and respect for equality.

There are no communists and Islamists in the Democratic party.

His concerns are unfounded, but familiar — these are same nonsensical culture war issues the Republicans have relied on. They’re dead boring.

When it comes down to specifics, he mentions only two things, neither of which are going to beneficial.

And for young people, we need to be the party of the future. We need to champion policies that expand their future. Our two single biggest legislative accomplishments of the past two years, Trump Accounts and the school choice tax credit, which will unleash tens of billions of dollars in new scholarships for kids, are generationally powerful. I was proud to author both of those transformational policies, and yet too few candidates all across the country ran on that record.

Trump Accounts — seriously, do you want to attach your brand to Trump even more — are a bit of a boondoggle. They’re like other investment accounts, but with more strings, and the experts are advising that you shouldn’t use them, with one exception.

Adam Michel, director of tax policy studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian public policy research firm, thinks there are better ways to set money aside for children, such as in a 529 or standard IRA account.

“Generally speaking, parents should not put their own money into a Trump Account,” he told CBS News. “The primary use case for the accounts is to receive free money from sources like the government or private donations.”

For example, Michael and Susan Dell on Tuesday said they would donate a total of $6.25 billion — or $250 apiece — to millions of kids in Trump Accounts.

It’s basically a one-time opportunity to grab a little bit of money from a ridiculously wealthy couple.

As for the school choice tax credit…that’s only a benefit to people who are wealthy enough to send their kids to a private school. All of these schemes to benefit private schools hurt public education. It’s only going to help the investor class, which Cruz apparently considers the foundation of the future electorate.

Too few voters were even aware of what we’d accomplished for their kids and their future. But we need to build. We need to expand to continue creating a new investor class for hundreds of millions of Americans, help everyone, every American, become an owner, to have real skin in the game, to create new generations of capitalists ready to reject socialism.

We are already the most capitalist country on the planet. We don’t need more capitalists, we need more people willing to put limits on the excesses of the investor class. But you go ahead, Ted, keep appealing to the Musks and Andreesens and Thiels for help. They’re the next gang going up against the wall.

It’s going to be a fun time in January, and the MAGA leadership is beginning to sweat as the consequences of this week’s elections begins to sink in.

As the Washington Post noted on Monday, Democrats “are laying the groundwork for an array of inquiries into President Donald Trump, his family and his administration.” Various business and political leaders are meeting with their lawyers, worried about what Democrats could uncover with this new power.

“I haven’t seen this much investigative activity in anticipation of a change in control of a house of Congress ever,” Michael Bopp, who runs a congressional investigations division for the law firm Gibson Dunn, told the Post.

There are plenty of signs that it’s dawning on people around Trump that he will be out of office in two short years and that, as the latest Epstein report indicates, the statute of limitations has not run out on many possible crimes committed under the White House’s protection. A recent Zeteo profile of Stephen Miller showed that the White House deputy chief of staff is worried about going to prison if a Democrat wins the presidency in 2028. Congressional Democrats keep talking about impeaching Pete Hegseth, and the defense secretary is clearly anxious, reportedly making calls and begging Sen. Marsha Blackburn to appoint him to her Senate seat if, as expected, she wins the Tennessee governor’s race this week. Having a Senate seat would not only prevent impeachment; it could make prosecuting him for alleged war crimes much harder as well.

Miller is worried about going to prison…I hope he is sleeping poorly right now. Hegseth is aware that he is guilty of war crimes — that he is a murderer — and is frantically looking for an escape hatch.

Another major target for investigation is the richest man in the world, Elon Musk. He threw so much money at Republican candidates, because he knows they are his only buffer sheltering him from prosecution. But they all lost.

On Monday, Trump himself also told the New York Post that widespread pardons are on the table, not just for his staff, but for allies like Tesla CEO Elon Musk. Musk has good reason to be worried. His brief tenure running DOGE has raised a whole host of questions about what laws were broken by him or by staff carrying out his orders. He’s also under suspicion of messing with Ukraine’s Starlink access, crippling its defenses against the invading Russian military. This may explain why Musk spent nearly half a billion dollars — more than any single donor in history — trying to tilt the elections in the GOP’s favor.

We really need to put massive constraints on presidential pardon power. The current corrupt president is demonstrating that the pardons can be massively abused, and it definitely needs to be throttled (I don’t understand why our constitution gives the president a power that belongs more in the hands of an absolute monarch).

It would be delicious to see a man with hundreds of billions of dollars stripped of all his wealth and getting tossed into prison, even a luxurious country club prison. That’s got to make all the people worth mere tens of billions of dollars worry.

And don’t forget the entire goddamn Trump family!

Trump and his family members should also be sweating. Trump has often interpreted the Supreme Court’s grant of presidential immunity as all-encompassing, but as Raskin told the New Yorker, he doesn’t see it that way at all. He outlined how the president has made billions in office, roughly $1 million a hour, and that there’s a great deal to learn about where that money is coming from. The Supreme Court’s decision technically only covers crimes committed during the commission of official presidential duties. By definition, Trump’s external money-making enterprises aren’t that. His children are deeply involved in the family business as well. And as the Epstein report made sure to note, some of the crimes Trump and his associates have been accused of committing with his old friend Epstein carry no statute of limitations.

Epstein is still looming over this whole rotten dynasty. We can hope that will all be finally split open and exposed.

My one worry is that the Democrats will continue to be timid — no, cowardly — and fail to take advantage of this opportunity. Let’s hope they notice that the electorate is getting feisty. We’re looking for justice, and if the Democratic leadership is unwilling to deliver it, they’ll be next in the crosshairs.

I like this summary illustration of the shift resulting from yesterday’s election.

Susan Collins is out at last, as is Greg Abbott and Ken Paxton, and there’s been a general sweep of most of the Trump fanatics getting booted out of office. Unfortunately, my local representation is still Republican, not even a blue tsunami against the patent corruption of the ruling party can dislodge ignorant farmers clinging to the rock of their conservative churches.

I’ll take it. I have avoided looking at the news until just now, fearing disappointment, but it looks like I should be generally optimistic. Progress has been made.

Now the Democrats have to consolidate their wins and accomplish good things. Sure, impeach Pete Hegseth and end the war with Iron, and cripple Trump so that he has nothing to do but play golf, but also pass laws to lock in gay and trans rights, start rebuilding the NIH/NSF, restore health care, repair the economy by finally stripping the rich of their selfish gains, you know, all the easy stuff. There is a daunting amount of work to do.