Politics

Democrats across the country should be grateful for what Republicans are about to do: rid them of a nagging disease known as Betoism. Beto O'Rourke, the erstwhile congressman from El Paso, Texas, who has far more glossy national magazine profiles than winning campaigns, is about to go down to defeat in his attempt to unseat centrist conservative Governor Greg Abbott. Abbott is a popular governor and quite capable in his own right of popping wheelies over most Democrats. But Beto has approached his run with all of his usual nationally tested talking points recycled from his idiotic presidential crusade, designed to go viral on Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and via the T-shirt worn by your daughter's boyfriend who is still trying to find himself after sophomore year.

It’s not often that a senator launches a brutal, frontal assault on a president from his own party. It’s even rarer when he does it just before a national election. But that is exactly what West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin just did to Joe Biden. At issue was Biden’s recent speech attacking coal, a bedrock of the West Virginia economy. Manchin was furious over Biden's promise to shut down all of America’s coal-fired power plants. That view might be red meat for Biden’s audience of green-power advocates and rich California donors, but it is poison in West Virginia. And it is those West Virginians who elected Manchin, the only Democrat still standing in a state that is now deep red. Manchin didn’t just criticize Biden.

Republican House minority leader Kevin McCarthy doesn't like Nancy Pelosi. In this, he's hardly alone — the list of those who don't like Nancy Pelosi is long and includes Republicans, Democrats, moderates, progressives, intelligence officials, hair stylists, health nuts, probably a few farm animals and single-cell organisms. America's speaker of the House is polarizing in the same way that a rocket booster might be said to be noisy. Yet in McCarthy's case, he has good reason not to like Pelosi: she doesn't much like him either. After McCarthy last year criticized a mask mandate in the House of Representatives, Pelosi called him a "moron.

My friend here in rural Pennsylvania is the director of our local anti-hunger program. It’s orchestrated through the YMCA and has been ongoing for years, mostly providing supplemental food for rural children. But the program started running at full throttle when Covid hit in March 2020, and now, more than two years later, my friend tells me they’re doing about 25 food distributions a month — more than they were doing at the height of Covid. What’s more, he’s seeing twice the number of people lining up for free food, and 85 percent of those people have jobs. “When people think of hunger, they think of poverty,” my friend says.

It is midterm election season, an important period on our political calendar as it marks that there's only two years to go until the next presidential election. And while something called the "blue wave" supposedly took hold last summer, the latest polling shows that Democrats are in trouble. How much trouble? You do hate to wish ill on a party running a campaign based on third-trimester abortion access and an imagined threat from brownshirts. But given the choice, here are eight Democrats we wouldn't mind seeing ousted this year. 8. Representative Jerry Nadler Nadler presided over both impeachments of Donald Trump and is a fairly reliable progressive. The New York rep is not the most inept Dem out there — but then he did almost dislocate his nose trying to remove a Covid mask.

San Francisco mayor London Breed held a press conference on October 5 concerning her city’s most deadly problem: the open air drug market in the Tenderloin neighborhood. The speakers included the police chief and two newly appointed allies of the mayor: the district attorney, Brooke Jenkins, and the supervisor for the district adjacent to the Tenderloin, Matt Dorsey. The message from each of them was clear: the police and the district attorney would no longer ignore open drug dealing and public drug use, which has become endemic in downtown San Francisco. “Let’s be clear: selling drugs is not legal,” the mayor said. “Using drugs out in the open is completely unacceptable.” The city could be forgiven for needing the reminder.

In New Hampshire, the race between Democratic senator Maggie Hassan and retired Army Brigadier General Donald Bolduc is heating up. Politico revealed on Friday that the GOP super PAC Sentinel Action Fund, encouraged by Bolduc’s recent surge in the polls, confirmed a $1 million ad buy for the Republican. Do Democrats still think Bolduc’s defeat is a sure thing? During the primaries, Democrat-aligned groups sure seemed to. They found the idea of a Hassan-Bolduc matchup so appealing that they actually boosted the pro-Trump Bolduc by donating to his campaign. Why did they like him so much more than his opponent Chuck Morse? Well, Bolduc is an "election denier.

College Park, Georgia Former president Barack Obama came down to Georgia stump for Senator Raphael Warnock and gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams. But more significantly, the 44th president of the United States dedicated a good chunk of his stage time on Friday to mocking Warnock’s opponent Herschel Walker. In a move reminiscent of his 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner speech — which supposedly provoked Donald Trump to run for the presidency in 2016 — Obama performed a stand-up bit to demonstrate that Walker’s proficiency as a Heisman Trophy-winning football star did not equip him to serve in the US Senate. “Let’s do a thought experiment,” Obama said. “Let’s say you were at the airport, and you see Mr. Walker, and you say, ‘hey!