Easy Sunday: Part Two. The U.S. Department of Education suggests trade schools, not college

The U.S. Department of Education really did this poster. 

Look closely:

Notice the copper pipe work connecting nothing to nothing. And is this a radiator or a sink?

Notice the wrench in the woman's hand that morphs into a pipe.  Try buying one like that.

Notice the size of the pipe wrench the man is holding. The guy is strong!

Notice the odd blue-handled tool in her tool belt.  What does this do?

The two-part message embedded in this Department of Education advertisement is different from the denoted message that people might enter the trades, not go to college.

     1. When you use AI for anything, check its work. 

     2. The Department of Education, or at least with the people in the department left after Trump and DOGE gutted it, is exactly as worthless at Trump claimed it was. 

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Easy Sunday, part One: Trump's Saturday

This is what our president posted in the early hours of Saturday on Truth Social.

Stable genius.

1. A 22-second video depicting him throwing Stephen Colbert into a dumpster

Click

2. A reminder that Trump is still eying Greenland. It is longing? Menace?

3. Doubling down justifying his $1.776 billion theft of public money, a theft so corrupt that even some Republicans admit that it is wrong.

4. A doctored image of Democratic Representative Ro Khanna.

5. A gloating post insulting Republican U.S. Senator Thom Tillis -- who will be in office for seven more months.

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Heads up to Republicans: Trump is not a conservative.

Democrats cannot stop Trump's assault on our democracy.

Conservatives -- and there are a few left -- might. 

Democrats are largely unified in their opposition to President Trump's policies and actions. They oppose his tariffs, his wars, his abandonment of alliances, his ICE tactics, his politicization of the Justice Department, his attacks on health science, his pardons, and his openly corrupt self-serving grift. Lots to dislike.

Republican officeholders dismiss those criticisms. After all, the critics are Democrats, and the complaints are just partisan politics. 

Democrats' sputtering outrage is a feature in the minds of people who see politics as a tug of war between two parties.

Republican delight that Democrats lose battle after battle with Trump blinds inertia-Republicans to the fact that a Trump political victory is often contrary to what they really value. Trump isn't a conservative. He is a right-wing authoritarian populist, a very different thing. It is confusing for life-long Republicans because there is inertia to think that the GOP stands for smaller government, fiscal restraint, and freedom from government meddling in business and personal lives. The Republican brand has remained, but its policies have changed.

Republican conservatism still exists. The establishment Wall Street Journal and the libertarian-oriented Reason Magazine have partially broken free of Republican party inertia. The Wall Street Journal wants orderly, predictable government to support business; Reason magazine wants liberty. Trump wants neither. Both have been publishing commentary that sharply criticizes Trump for many of the things that Democrats criticize him for: tariffs imposed haphazardly and without congressional approval, ICE operations that ignore Constitutional protections, and crony corruption. Note the headlines in the top stories at Reason magazine the day before yesterday:

Here is the lead editorial for yesterday's Wall Street Journal:

Neither the WSJ nor Reason changes thinking; they reflect thinking. They are bookmarks, showing that some ideas remain under the surface. The lawbreaking, authoritarian, crony-capitalist, corrupt part of the Trump government is offensive to conservatives. 

Conservatives don't share the ethnic and religious nationalism that is part of the Trump populist agenda. Trump's expresses a right-populist view of American heritage based on White, Protestant, English and Northern European ethnicity as the real American. Jews, Catholics, Latin Americans, Asians, and non-English speakers are inherently "other" in that view. Without acknowledging it openly, right-populism accepts the underlying premise of the Dred Scott decision: that some people are essentially and forever foreign. You are American by heritage, not by sharing a creed.

Conservatives favor consistency. They understand that if a Republican can abuse the rights of loathed Democrats and if a Republican can take away broadcast licenses of TV networks, and a Republican can play favorites with businesses, then amid the oscillation of political fortune, a Democrat can do the same to them. 

Democrats would profit by putting aside some of their own partisanship and see allies where they exist. In a Trump world, conservatives are allies. At some point Republicans who voted for Ronald Reagan, John McCain, and Mitt Romney will wake up and realize they were enthralled by a con man. It is so obvious now that even a Republican senator can see it.

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Stay Classy

 

Election recap.

Denise Krause has almost certainly won.
It's a matter of math.

Chris Beck won.
Voters liked his voters pamphlet resume.

Denise Krause was one of five candidates for the Democratic nomination for state Senate District 3, the seat held by retiring Senator Jeff Golden.

Chris Beck was one of six candidates for the Democratic nomination for U.S. Representative in Oregon's 2nd congressional district. It is now likely that he had it won from the very beginning. The voters pamphlet won it for him.

It is theoretically possible that Tonia Moro could catch up with Krause, but I think it is nearly impossible. I don't know how many outstanding votes there are still to be counted, but it is likely a small enough number that it would take a massive shift of opinion in those final ballots for Moro to win. Candidate Kevin Stine reminded me of the likely number of votes outstanding:

--  In 2018, there were 16,212 Democratic voters that cast a ballot, amid a 49 percent turnout.

--  In 2022, there were 17,013 Democratic voters that cast a ballot, amid a 52 percent turnout.

--  In 2026, there are 17,215 Democratic voters tallied so far, amid a 54 percent turnout.

It looks like the overwhelming majority of the ballots have already been counted.

The post office delivered to the Jackson County election office all ballots they had as of election day. Let's imagine that there are as many as 1,000 votes still to be counted.  Likely about 30 percent of those will go to one of the other three candidates --  Ruvalcaba, Stine, or Crary -- the pattern of the currently counted votes. Only if those 700 remaining votes broke 450 to 250, or 65 percent to 35 percent, would Moro pick up the 210 votes needed to win. I am aware of no development that would change an essentially dead-even race into that kind of landslide among that group of voters who, in the last day or two of the election, decided to mail the ballot instead of dropping it off. 

Krause is smart to be patient and stand with the position that all the votes be counted before announcing victory, but behind the scenes she should be preparing her general election campaign.

Chris Beck won big, and he won nearly everywhere, even in places where he had a minimal campaign. 

He narrowly lost in the home counties of two of his opponents, but Beck won 18 of the 20 counties in the district, and won the two biggest ones, Jackson County by 19 points and Josephine by 14. He made himself visible across the district with some social media and a brief visit to each county, but the broad sweep of his win makes me think that the campaign was probably won on the day he filed and submitted his voters pamphlet material. 

Voters saw Democrats sharing the same essential message on policy matters and picked the candidate whose background shows some experience in government. He could mention having worked for John Kitzhaber and Barack Obama. He could mention degrees from Ivy League Brown University and Harvard's JFK School of Government. He had related job experience.

New York Times election coverage

He could have blown his advantage. His presence tailgating the town halls of U.S. Senators Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley gave him some Eastern Oregon exposure, even in his short campaign. He has videos on social media showing him in Eastern Oregon settings. Those probably inoculated him from the charge that he had little current physical connection to the district, and none of his opponents hammered on this point. His home is now in the city of Phoenix in Jackson County, the largest county, and the one he did best in.

If any opponent had a chance to overcome the experience advantage reported in the voters pamphlet, it might have come from an opponent with a campaign highly focused on a popular issue for Democrats. This might have been a campaign like that of Republican gubernatorial candidate "Ed No Tax Diehl."

I don't know Diehl's overall policy goals -- I presume he is a typical Republican -- but at least a voter has clarity on one, clear, mentally sticky idea. If you know nothing else, you know that Diehl is anti-tax. Hate taxes, vote for Diehl.

Perhaps a Democratic opponent could have joined the other candidates in the usual policy array for Democrats, but concentrated his or her message on a singular idea that let voters "send a message." Perhaps the candidate would be the focused "anti-Iran-war" candidate, or the one stopping data centers that hog the region's electricity, or the one opposing the slow death of the region's hospitals because of diminished federal reimbursements. Could Mary Doyle, or more likely Rebecca Mueller, have won had she been understood by voters to be the expert on Medicaid reimbursements, and said that we had a crisis because Congressman Cliff Bentz's votes were putting Asante, Providence, Sky Lakes Medical, and St. Charles Medical out of business and it was literally a matter of life and death. Vote: Rebeca "Save our Hospitals" Mueller! It becomes an implied message: Vote Rebecca to save our hospitals. That approach might have firmly branded her to some meaningful outcome, refocusing attention away from who had experience in government, Beck's strong point. As it was, Beck had a point of differentiation in experience, revealed in the one piece of campaign material seen by every voter, the bare-bones voters pamphlet that leads off the description of each candidate with objective criteria of education, occupation, and prior government experience.

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At some point, even Republicans realize that Trump has gone too far

“​There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. . . .

In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.”

          John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath, 1939

John Steinbeck was writing about crushing dismay at watching food be destroyed in the midst of hungry people. The offense that something good, the product of America' fertile land, was being destroyed when it was needed. The crime beyond denunciation was cruelty of loss to so many for the benefit of so few. For Steinbeck, it was food in front of hungry people. For us it is the lingering memory of a great country based on the rule of law, one fought and died for, one that aspired to be an uncorrupted, democratic city on the hill and an example to the world, now openly, shockingly corrupted by a president.

Donald Trump has finally, finally, gone too far.

There is a context, of course. Gasoline prices, the war with Iran, midnight posts, the conflicts of interest with his family businesses, the crypto sales, the tariffs, the prosecutions of political opponents, the purges within the GOP.  Those all add up, but they were not the final straw of total capitulation to corruption. There is a one-two punch, coming together.

The ballroom is the physical manifestation of the craziness, the golden palace, Nero fiddling while Rome burned. It triggers every image of "let them eat cake" cluelessness of the wealthy and powerful, of grandiloquent third-world dictatorships with phony medals of grandeur, of French kings, Scrooge McDuck, the Simpsons' Montgomery Burns, of Captain Queeg, of Captain Ahab, of mad kings.  

The final straw though is the utter corruption of the Justice Department enabling a theft of public money for a secret slush fund that allows Trump to pay off his friends and allies in whatever way he wants. And, more amazing yet, a statement from the Justice Department and IRS never to question, investigate, or audit Trump, the Trump family, or Trump's political friends. What a deal.

Even the Wall Street Journal admits that it stinks of corruption.

By today readers would have learned the mechanism for this open theft. Trump makes a ridiculous legal claim against the Internal Revenue Service for an action an employee took while Trump himself was president. Trump-the-person sues Trump's own government. Trump's own compliant Attorney General makes a settlement with Trump for $1.776 billion dollars, for use any way Trump's appointees, serving at Trump's pleasure, wants, specifically including rewards and payoffs to people who participated in Trump's attempted coup. Trump's commission can pay people who give him campaign contributions. It can pay people to "find" 11,000 votes or to refuse to certify elections that a Democrat wins.  

Even Republicans who live in fear of Trump endorsing a primary opponent see the corruption here. By corrupting the Justice Department -- bad enough on its own -- Trump gets to help himself to free money from the Treasury, and he does it openly. He can, so he does.

This is what the Republican party officeholders and candidates have to swallow and defend. Candidates face a dilemma. Defend it and admit total capitulation to corruption or oppose it and face the wrath of Trump and his MAGA base.

Chris Beck, who handily won the Democratic primary election for Oregon's 2nd congressional district has been offered an enormous gift. Republican incumbent Cliff Bentz mumbles in inobtrusive but consistent support of Trump. He does as Trump directs. Will he oppose Trump's open theft of $1.776 billion? Is there any act of corruption that would cause Bentz to speak up?

Republican members of Congress exist in relative obscurity and get re-elected in red districts by inertia of party loyalty. But sometimes an issue breaks through. Fifty-two years ago Watergate created a blue wave. Thirty-two years ago Hillary Clinton's health proposal, along with the House Bank overdrafts, created a red wave. This is bigger, far worse, and visible. Trump is stealing from us. And it comes on top of the shiny gold ballroom.

This could be a wave year when Democrats get elected in red districts.

[Note: I make a request of Republican readers. Write a guest post defending Trump's deal with his Justice Department. Explain why is is good, reasonable, and not corrupt. I may well publish it.]

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Election results. Don't count your chickens before they hatch.

Too close to call.

In the Oregon Senate District 2 contest to choose the Democratic nominee to replace Jeff Golden, Denise Krause has a 209-vote lead over Tonia Moro.

Krause, from her campaign website

Moro, from her campaign website

Here is the latest updated election tally. Votes are tallied and announced as they are processed.

Results at most recent count

Votes that were counted earlier in the night showed Krause ahead, but by a larger margin. Moro is catching up with her.

Progress report count

The first vote count was announced at 8 p.m. when the polls closed. That tally consisted of votes from early voters. Those earliest voters showed Krause with fewer votes counted but a slightly larger percentage lead. 

First announced result

There is no need to imagine a conspiracy to explain that Moro appears to be catching up. Some people vote early in the two-week balloting period. (I do.) Those ballots had their signatures and bar codes checked as they came in and they were ready to tally and announce. A great many people wait until later in the cycle to vote. They see the two week flurry of advertisements on TV and social media, and direct mail. It does not surprise me that Cristian Mendoza Ruvalcaba, a little-known political candidate at the beginning of the campaign, but who had a giant media blitz funded by the Oregon Nurses Association, did better with people who voted late in the cycle. The ads persuaded some people. They brought his vote percentage up from 14.9 to 17.7 percent. 

Tonia Moro kept advertising throughout the period -- more than did Krause from my casual observation -- and her percentage of votes increased among people who voted closer to election day, but only slightly. It grew from 33.34 to 34.09 percent.

The real story, for people like me who overthink these things, is that:

-- The electorate that votes early is very close to the electorate of later voters. The pattern is set early.

--  The advertising and effort spent in the last days of the campaign do matter. Kevin Stine, who was well known from his long service on the Medford City Council got early votes, but he did not have money for ads, and he did not do as well among late voters. His percentage dropped from 11.38 to 10.26 percent when the later voters were added into the mix.

  

-- It appears to me that Ruvalcaba's votes from people who saw his ad blitz came from people who, earlier in the cycle might have voted for Krause. Moro's percentage didn't change much as Ruvalcaba's grew, but Krause's dropped.

 

-- In close races, tiny changes matter. I expect Krause or Moro to win or lose by a few votes. Those extra 10 doors knocked on, or that last-minute mailer, something earned a vote that will tip the balance.

I personally prefer Krause to Moro, but based on the pattern of later voters I think it is likely that by the time the final votes are tallied, that Moro will win. Krause partisans should not celebrate early. If Moro wins, I won't cry foul and complain that Krause lost only because a losing candidate, Ruvalcaba, "took" her votes. They weren't Krause's votes; they were the citizen's votes. I don't anchor mentally on Krause being ahead and somehow deserving to win. 

This close election is a bit of practice and preparation for the midterms. Donald Trump complains bitterly about every election he loses, starting with an Iowa caucus vote in 2016 against Ted Cruz, and again in 2020. I fully expect him to claim that some early lead by him or a political ally is the "real" outcome in the 2026 midterms, and that later votes counted for an opponent are fake or illegal. He will try to void those votes and come up with pretexts for it. Don't fall for it. Early leads are not the end result. Don't anchor on early leads. We count all the votes. 

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