Dear Friends,
There is a bit of a brouhaha happening in the online ecosystem of the Christian Nationalist right. Mysteries are being clarified, fools are being unmasked, and I thank God I am not within a hundred digital miles of any of it. But I am going to save my thoughts on all that for Friday.
Politico reports that Democrats are on essentially on the verge of panic mode when it comes to holding the Senate. “Dems’ Senate hopes are increasingly running through a single state. And it’s not looking great.” This is not news to Square Inch readers, as I’ve been saying for months that everything is going to come down to the Jon Tester v. Tim Sheehy showdown in Big Sky Country. The story is very informative. It looks like Democrats know Tester is trailing pretty badly and the question facing them now is whether to pull the plug on Tester and try to shift resources somewhere else where they might have a fighting chance. (Hint: there is nowhere else.)
My favorite quote from the story: “Plus, the Montana ad market is nearing saturation, meaning Democrats can’t put more money onto the airwaves even if they wanted to.” To this, I can attest. There is literally nothing for the Tester campaign to spend money on. We are awash—everywhere we turn—in “Shady Sheehy” the “rich out-of-stater” advertisements. If that isn’t moving the needle in the polls, Tester is doomed. Normally that works around here, but these are apparently not normal times.
The sad takeaway from the Politico piece is the news that Democrat Senate candidates are leading basically everywhere else. That’s what the GOP gets for nominating bad candidates (read: hardcore MAGA) in a year ripe with opportunity.
One of the upsides the the U.S. Supreme Court’s overruling of Roe v. Wade is that state-level electoral choices are being demystified. You see, back when abortion was (ahem) a “settled” matter at the Federal level, state candidates never really had to make abortion a front-burner issue. This was particularly true of judicial elections. Cycle after cycle, I had to dig deep into the interwebs to figure out what people running for judge or—more importantly—justices on the state supreme court are likely to think about abortion.
The ACLU has rendered me an excellent service this year. They keep sending me flyers telling me what the judges are likely to think about abortion. They want me, of course, to vote for the person who will protect “reproductive” rights. Well, I’m just going to hang on to those flyers until I get my ballot, and vote for everybody the ACLU doesn’t like.
Pay attention to what is happening in Lebanon because we might be about to witness an all-out war in the Middle East. As you probably know, Lebanon is largely controlled by Hezbollah, a well-armed and trained, Iranian-backed, Shia militia. They routinely launch artillery and rockets into Israel, and many communities in the north have been evacuated for over a year.
Two days ago Lebanon’s hospitals were overrun with over a thousand Hezbollah fighters, seriously injured because their pagers had simultaneously exploded. Possibly a dozen or more died. Among the injured was Iran’s Ambassador to Lebanon (Hmm: why would he have a Hezbollah pager?) This was arguably the most audacious and astonishing intelligence operation in history. Israeli intelligence let it be known that they could monitor Hezbollah’s cell phone traffic; Hezbollah started using old-fashioned pagers. Israel somehow, some way, intercepted a shipment of Hezbollah pagers, injected them with heat-sensitive explosives, let them be distributed among the troops, and then simultaneously detonated all of them.
But there’s more. Today over nine have been killed and 300 injured when Hezbollah’s hand-held radios exploded.
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