Good day to you and yours. Welcome to Tuesday, July 14, 2026. Today is, among other things, Bastille Day, Cow Appreciation Day, Grand Marnier Day, Mac and Cheese Day, Tape Measure Day, Pandemonium Day, and Shark Awareness Day. So, if you’ve ever wanted to use a tape measure to size up a shark, now’s your chance.
Today in History:
1223: Louis VIII becomes King of France upon the death of his father, Philip II.
1420: Hussite forces under Jan Žižka win the Battle of Vítkov Hill against a Crusade army led by Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor.
1456: John Hunyadi's forces defeat the Ottoman fleet on the Danube, relieving the besieged city of Belgrade.
1789: Parisians storm the Bastille prison, an event still commemorated as Bastille Day.
1798: Congress passes the Sedition Act, making it a federal crime to publish malicious criticism of the government.
1881: Sheriff Pat Garrett shoots and kills outlaw William H. Bonney Jr., alias "Billy the Kid."
1933: Germany's ruling government outlaws all political parties except the Nazi Party.
1945: Italy formally declares war on Japan, its former Axis partner.
1958: A military coup overthrows the Hashemite monarchy in Iraq, resulting in the assassination of King Faisal II.
1960: Jane Goodall arrives at Gombe Stream Reserve in Tanzania to begin her groundbreaking chimpanzee research.
1965: Mariner 4 completes a flyby of Mars, capturing the first close-up images of another planet.
2015: New Horizons reaches Pluto after a nine-year journey, sending back the first detailed images of the dwarf planet.
2016: A truck attack during Bastille Day celebrations in Nice kills more than 80 people.
Birthdays today include: Conor McGregor, mixed martial artist and boxer, former UFC featherweight and lightweight champion; Phoebe Waller-Bridge, actress, writer, and producer (TV shows: Fleabag, Killing Eve; Jane Lynch, actress and singer (TV shows: Glee, Two and a Half Men); Matthew Fox, actor (TV show: Lost, films: We Are Marshall, Alex Cross); David Mitchell, actor and comedian (TV shows: Peep Show, Would I Lie to You?); Peta Murgatroyd, dancer (TV show: Dancing with the Stars).
If today's your birthday, too, happy birthday — hope it's a great one!
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Interesting piece from Mark Halperin in the Free Press a couple days ago. (Yeah, I’m a little behind in my reading). The piece sits under a headline that should be pretty obvious to most of my readers: Ditching Platner May Not Be a Win for Democrats.
No kidding?
Democrats still haven't learned the obvious lesson: swapping candidates at the eleventh hour doesn't guarantee an upgrade. Biden's last-minute exit should have driven that home. If it didn't, nothing will.
Two factors explain the failure.
First, Democrats traded former President Joe Biden — a meat puppet running on fumes — for one of the only people alive who makes Hillary Clinton look electable by comparison. That did nothing, but expose a desperation among party leaders, the depth of which is impossible to over- estimate.
Second, and this is the part that actually matters: somebody looked at that mess and decided Kamala Harris was the fix. Not a stopgap. Not a compromise. The fix. That takes a special kind of detachment from reality. It’s the kind that doesn't just miss the target, it forgets there's a target at all.
And then there's the policies Platner pushed. Halperin nails it:
“People are desperate for change,” Platner wrote in his withdrawal letter to the Maine secretary of state. “For this broken system to be righted. For the American experiment to be furthered. Over the past eleven months, thousands and thousands of Mainers poured their hearts, time, and talent into a movement to deliver that vision. I will be forever grateful to them.”
Platner's character flaws weren't the real problem — and let's be honest about what those flaws turned out to be. It started with old Reddit posts where he called himself a communist, endorsed ACAB ("All Cops Are Bastards"), and cheered on armed resistance. Maine Democrats shrugged that off. It ended with a rape allegation from a former romantic partner, the kind of accusation that should end a campaign on its own merits, no platform required. Maine Democrats knew who he was — all 72% of them who handed him the primary — and backed him anyway. That's the real problem. They didn't overlook his baggage; they cheered it, because the baggage wasn't the point. The platform was.
And what a platform it is. Medicare for All, obviously. Platner didn't just support it; he built entire campaign stops around it, standing outside hospitals and promising a single-payer system that no Congress in American history has ever passed. He wanted ICE dismantled outright. A "billionaire minimum tax." A ban on hedge funds buying residential housing. Full Wabanaki sovereignty. The PRO Act, plus a mandate for union labor on every publicly funded project in the state. This isn't a moderate running for a swing-state Senate seat against a six-term incumbent. This is a wish list assembled by socialists who've never had to survive a general election against Susan Collins.
And that's the part no Democrat wants to sit with. A candidate can survive bad optics, sometimes barely, with enough groveling. What Platner wouldn't have been able to survive, and what a party shouldn't survive, is running on ideas so far outside the mainstream that the candidate himself becomes disposable and the ideas stay standing.
Swap out Platner, keep the platform, and Maine Democrats haven't fixed anything. They've just changed the face reading from the same script. Every one of the eight-plus Democrats already lining up to replace Platner, including at least one candidate campaigning explicitly on "the same issues as Platner," has made that plain enough.
That same warped judgment gave us the Biden-to-Harris swap. Same desperation, same refusal to ask whether the fix makes anything better, same instinct to treat the candidate as the problem and the ideology as untouchable. Democrats didn't run from the huge failure of Bidenomics in 2024; they ran from Biden’s massive mental malfunctions. The policies stayed exactly where they were, just wearing a new outfit. Voters noticed and rejected that, too.
Here's what makes Maine worse than 2024, if that's possible: At least Harris was a sitting vice president, a known quantity with a paper trail voters could evaluate on its own terms. Platner's replacement inherits a base that has already told you, both in writing, in polling, in eleven months of enthusiastic door-knocking, and in a primary landslide of 72%, exactly what it wants. Not a better messenger. The same message, delivered by someone who hasn't yet said the quiet part in public, and hasn't yet been credibly accused of anything worse than agreeing with it. (So much for transparency, huh?)
So ask yourself: Is whoever replaces Platner actually better on policy than he was? Or did Maine Democrats just trade one bad answer for another, and call the trade a lesson learned?
It isn't. It's the same lesson, retaken with a different name at the top of the page. Whoever replaces Platner will go down in exactly the same flames Platner himself did. And that’s fine for the moment.
Kamala Harris lost her presidential run in part because of her refusal to reverse course on Biden policies: open borders, tax and spend, the Green New Deal, LGTBQXYZ, and a government growing beyond all reason. The Democrat mayors in the big cities like New York and Portland, Ore., are demonstrating for all to see what happens when the people supporting those policies are given the power of government to enforce them. New York’s mass exodus at the hands of Zohran Mamdani is pretty well documented. Portland is somewhat less so, so let’s look at that.
Portland faced a record general-fund shortfall of roughly $170 million for fiscal year 2026-27, out of a total city budget of $8.5 billion. (Most of that $8.5B is earmarked funds, utility rates, and federal money; the actual crisis is in the ~$900 million general fund that pays for police, fire, and parks.) Mayor Keith Wilson pinned part of the blame on President Trump's 2025 tax act, known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which altered how the federal government calculates business tax — a change that strips the city of an expected $33 million in revenue over two years and is also cutting into Multnomah County and state revenue.
Related: Graham, McConnell, and Platner Gone? How Does This Play Out?
There’s a lot more going on here, but the bottom line is that Trump’s bill removed from the backs of Joe and Jane Flyover the load placed on them by Democrat policies. The message being sent is clear: If you want to keep your tax base, maybe overspending on feel-good, vote-buying socialist projects, thereby chasing away your productive population, isn’t such a great idea.
Thought of the day: If you’re pushing the same policies that have so obviously and so dramatically failed America’s big cities, don’t be shocked when a simple candidate swap doesn’t put the replacement in power.
VIP members: Now's your chance to make a difference. Let's hear your thoughts.
Be careful in all this heat, gang. Today will sport a heat index of 105º around here. Take care of yourselves, gang. I'll look forward to your being here tomorrow.
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