Hello there. Welcome! I'm glad you're here. It's Monday, Aug. 17, 2026 — thrift shops, black cats, and Baby Boomers all sharing the calendar, which feels like it's aiming squarely at half my readership and myself as well.
My calendar says it's Thrift Shop Day, Black Cat Appreciation Day, Baby Boomers Recognition Day, I Love My Feet Day, Vanilla Custard Day, and Workers' Comp Adjuster Day. Hit up a thrift shop, adopt a black cat if you've got room, thank a Boomer for the classic rock catalog, and give your feet some love — we've earned a quiet Monday after last week.
Today In History:
1807: Robert Fulton's North River Steamboat completes its first successful voyage up the Hudson River, proving commercial steam navigation is viable.
1842: Protesters burn an effigy of President John Tyler within sight of the White House after his second veto of a bill to re-establish the Bank of the United States.
1877: Astronomer Asaph Hall discovers Phobos, the second and innermost of Mars's two moons.
1915: A mob lynches Jewish businessman Leo Frank in Cobb County, Ga., after his death sentence for the murder of 13-year-old Mary Phagan is commuted to life imprisonment.
1943: General George S. Patton's 7th Army reaches Messina hours ahead of British forces, completing the Allied conquest of Sicily. Ike ordered Patton not to take Messina. Patton's reply: "Want me to give it back?"
1961: East German guards shoot a young man attempting to flee across the newly built Berlin Wall and leave him to bleed to death, one of the ugliest episodes at one of the Cold War's ugliest symbols.
1970: The Soviet probe Venera 7 becomes the first spacecraft to successfully land on another planet and transmit data back to Earth from the surface of Venus.
1977: The Soviet icebreaker Arktika becomes the first surface ship to reach the North Pole.
1978: Ben Abruzzo, Maxie Anderson, and Larry Newman complete the first transatlantic balloon flight, landing the Double Eagle II in a barley field near Paris after six days aloft.
1987: Rudolf Hess, Adolf Hitler's former deputy, is found dead by apparent suicide in Spandau Prison at age 93, the last surviving member of Hitler's inner circle.
1998: President Bill Clinton becomes the first sitting president to testify before a grand jury as the subject of a criminal investigation.
2008: Swimmer Michael Phelps sets the record for most gold medals won in a single Olympics at the Beijing Games.
Birthdays today include: Mae West, actress, screenwriter (She Done Him Wrong); Robert De Niro, actor (Taxi Driver, Raging Bull); Sean Penn, actor, filmmaker (Mystic River); V.S. Naipaul, novelist, essayist (A House for Mr Biswas); Samuel Goldwyn, film producer.
If today's your birthday too, happy birthday — You're just in time for it.
* * *
The incredulous look currently occupying my face this morning comes courtesy of the Democrat Party. Again.
I'll grant you, that's hardly a shocking sentence on its own — my paycheck literally depends on analyzing that topic with some degree of thoroughness, and Democratic behavior has kept an entire eyebrow-raising factory running at full capacity for over a decade, now, three shifts, no days off. But this morning's particular flavor of amazement is sharper than the usual background hum. The thought has actually been simmering in the back of my head for a while. It finally boiled over this morning.
After spending the better part of a decade trying, and failing both spectacularly and repeatedly, to lay so much as a finger on MAGA, Democrats now appear determined to respond to that entire decade of futility by handing the keys of their own agenda to people who don't merely disagree with the current political order. They want to torch it.
Before anyone reaches for the word "hyperbole," let's try something genuinely radical in political commentary: let's actually read what these people say, in their own words, instead of guessing. Their own words, not mine and not those of my supposed Trumpian overseers. (Dry chuckle)
Start with the Democratic Socialists of America. This crowd doesn't bury the lede. Their own statement of principles calls openly for "popular control of resources and production" alongside centralized economic planning. Their own Toward Freedom document goes further still, explicitly laying out democratic control over production as the goal. Nobody needed to invent this. No shadowy Republican operative sat in a basement dreaming up scary talking points about socialism. The socialists wrote their own description, in plain English, and signed their names to it.
Which brings us to Karl Marx, because apparently that's where every road in this story eventually leads. Marx never treated socialism and communism as two unrelated philosophies that happened to wander into the same bar one night and hit it off. In the Critique of the Gotha Programme, he laid out the actual transition from capitalism to communism, complete with distinct developmental phases. Lenin later sharpened that same framework in The State and Revolution, using Marx's own formulation to separate the lower and higher phases of communist society.
So the next time somebody insists socialism shares absolutely nothing with communism's historical development, maybe suggest they crack open a book written by the actual people who invented the terminology. That gap in reading comprehension might be the single clearest sign that today's socialism cheerleaders have never opened a history text in their lives. It'd do wonders for the national conversation if they did — ideally before lecturing the rest of us about economics. Yeah, I know. Keep dreaming.
Now look at exactly who the Democrat establishment's progressive wing chose to elevate. Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez didn't quietly tolerate Zohran Mamdani from a safe distance. They endorsed him outright. They campaigned for him in person. They spent real political capital backing him. And it worked beautifully — the flock followed right where the shepherds led. Mamdani won the Democrat nomination and now sits as mayor of New York City, and he never bothered hiding his economic philosophy along the way. He's said, repeatedly and on the record, that billionaires should not exist.
Heavens to Murgatroid, that's something of a bold position to elevate, in a city that happens to house a substantial concentration of exactly those creatures who already pay the majority of the taxes in that city. And now everybody involved acts shocked, genuinely shocked, when those same billionaires start voting with their feet, fleeing the socialist paradise Mamdani's busy constructing in the city that's arguably the beating economic heart of the entire country and, for that matter, the remainder of the West.
Then Michigan happened. Abdul El-Sayed won the Democratic Senate primary there with Sanders and AOC both fully in his corner, and contemporary coverage framed the whole race as a referendum on which direction the party's soul was heading. Follow the money, like Rush always said, and you land on something worth sitting with: El-Sayed's campaign pocketed more than $115,000 from CAIR-affiliated donors. I doubt I'm alone in suspecting that figure got seriously under-reported.
Let's stay intellectually honest here, because I actually mean that. I'm sure I'll be informed in angry tones that a donation from someone connected to CAIR doesn't automatically prove the recipient supports Hamas or terrorism or anything else. I know that's not how evidence works, and I won't pretend otherwise. But the donations exist. The affiliations exist. And that combination absolutely earns serious scrutiny, not a shrug.
Notice, please, that none of these are fringe candidates nobody's ever heard of, gathering dust on the far edge of the political map. These are people winning real Democrat primaries with the full-throated backing of two of the most recognizable names the party's progressive wing has to offer.
Then Wisconsin delivered what might be the funniest demonstration of the whole pattern. Francesca Hong, a proud democratic socialist, entered the gubernatorial primary carrying serious progressive momentum, along with a healthy backlog of previous statements that suddenly had political strategists everywhere rediscovering the lost art of nuance. Among the highlights: support for defunding police and a 2020 post calling for Thanksgiving to get canceled outright. Yeah. That one was always going to land well and create a lot of support with voters. [/sarcasm]
Associated Press reported that Hong faced renewed scrutiny over those old statements — and noted, almost in passing, that Sanders and AOC never endorsed her. She lost by roughly 3,000 votes, after leading the race by a substantial margin in earlier polling.
Here's where it gets genuinely interesting. Sanders explained he skipped the endorsement because his organization simply can't get involved in every race. Fine. I'll take that explanation at face value, for the moment. But even granting it fully, the larger political lesson still isn't hard to spot, even for the party's most committed true believers. When the progressive agenda arrives sufficiently polished and carefully repackaged, Sanders and AOC happily deploy their considerable political machinery behind it. The moment a candidate's own past statements make the underlying philosophy too obvious to disguise, that same machinery suddenly develops a severe, convenient case of unavailability.
Nobody's claiming that proves some grand coordinated conspiracy. It does, however, raise an exceedingly inconvenient question: does the Democratic left actually object to the agenda itself, or does it only object to voters catching the unedited version of it? Those are two very different problems, and voters increasingly seem to be spotting the difference themselves, reaching conclusions that don't flatter Democrat leadership one bit.
As I noted yesterday, Democrats have bled real ground in partisan registration and identification across multiple states since 2020. Nobody should pretend every departing Democrat instantly becomes a Republican — plenty land as unaffiliated instead, and state tracking systems vary. But the broader drift away from the party is real, not imagined, and it's not slowing down.
Here's the part I find genuinely astonishing:
After ten straight years of warning the country that MAGA represents an existential threat to democracy itself, you'd expect the party to eventually pause and ask an obvious question: why do so many people keep voting for the thing you keep insisting is dangerous? Instead, much of the party landed on a different diagnosis entirely. The ideology was never the problem. The marketing was. If voters recoil from the word "socialism," rebrand it. If they dislike a particular candidate, find one who photographs better. If a policy sounds bad out loud, rename it. Never call it socialism outright, and certainly never call it fascism, no matter how often the tactics used to whip the rank and file into line start resembling exactly that. And if voters start asking uncomfortable questions about where any of this actually leads, whatever you do, don't hand them the source material. Just slap "democratic" in front of "socialism" and call the problem solved.
Except it isn't fixed at all. That's about as effective a fix as holding the door of the submarine closed with duct tape.
The Democrat Party has backed itself into a genuinely remarkable contradiction. On one hand, it warns voters with every breath and at every opportunity that MAGA threatens the survival of American democracy. On the other, increasingly influential factions inside that same party openly champion candidates and organizations pushing to fundamentally restructure the American economic and political system from the ground up, and away from the very system Democrats will tell us if asked, they support.
That's not a garden-variety policy disagreement. That's a full philosophical fight over what America is even supposed to be, and an attempt to swap it out for something the founders never even remotely intended. Democrat leadership shows zero interest in having that particular conversation out loud with the electorate, and I suspect I know why: voters might answer it in a way leadership finds extremely inconvenient. Actually, I think they're about to do that anyway, come November.
And that's what makes the current strategy so fascinating to watch unfold in real time. The party spent a full decade trying to destroy MAGA. It failed to make Trump politically radioactive. It failed to convince enough Americans that the Republican alternative amounted to the promised existential catastrophe. And now, after absorbing all of that, its answer is: double down and move further left.
That's not a comeback strategy, kids. That's a gambler shoving his last chips back onto the table after the dealer's already cleaned him out once.
Maybe it works anyway. Maybe voters suddenly decide the cure for their worries about government overreach is even more government, the cure for their concerns about economic control is tighter economic control, and the cure for creeping political extremism is, somehow, considerably more of it. Stranger things have happened, I suppose. But if the Democrat Party genuinely wants to understand why voters keep walking out the door, somebody in that overly loan- leveraged building might try suggesting they stop chasing those voters down the street with the exact ideology they're actively fleeing.
Ten years of consecutive losing should have taught somebody in that party something useful by now. Instead, the lesson they apparently absorbed is: "We simply weren't radical enough." It's the four drunks in the car heading straight for the cliff's edge, and the driver, deep in his stupor, decides the only sensible fix is flooring the gas pedal harder. Wow, what a ride, huh?
I would think they would see the problem and take corrective action. Part of me keeps hoping they will. Overly optimistic, I suppose. Instead, they add to their problems. Then again, never let it be said I wasn't generous in my assessment of Democratic political smarts.
The only out I see here is Democrat voters taking the back of their hands to the leadership, which, given my column the other day about how Dems are bleeding support away at a furious rate, might actually be happening. We'll see.
Thought for the Day: A mob burned Tyler in effigy over one veto, and history barely remembers the outrage — proof that today's five-alarm political fury rarely survives long enough to make next century's footnote.
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I'm off to the thrift store to see about a small desk to sit next to my big one.... the third computer needs some space. Take care, gang. I'll see you tomorrow.
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