As Maine Goes

The 2026 Maine Democratic Primary for US Senate took place yesterday.  The New York Times lost.  

The rest of us won.  In a document on Graham Platner's campaign  website detailing what he calls his Defend Democracy Agenda is this paragraph:

For too long, the promise that all people are created equal has remained unfinished business in our Constitution. Passing the Equal Rights Amendment would help complete that work by making clear that equality under the law cannot be denied because of sex. But we must also confront how protections like those in the Fourteenth Amendment—written to defend the freedom of formerly enslaved people and guarantee equal rights—have been twisted over time to shield powerful corporations while the rights of real people are attacked. Communities of color, LGBTQ Americans, immigrants, and others have too often found those protections turned against them instead of working in their defense. We need a 21st-century Constitution that restores the original purpose of these guarantees: equal rights under the law, protected for every person in this country

Women's issues come up repeatedly in Platner's platform. Defending the right to choose abortion; legislating against government intrusion into women's lives; passing the Equal Rights Amendment to constitutionally guarantee equality in the law for women.  All are on Platner's agenda for the Senate.  Additionally, Platner is a proponent of policy that improves the lives of working women (and men):  early childcare for all; healthcare reform including Medicare for All; funding and protecting Public education; clean air and water and a healthier environment.  

The 989 American billionaires and the megacorporations who offshore their wealth fare less well. Platner's tax plan to "End Billionaire Welfare" is a must read for understanding how Platner intends to work for legislation that imposes a modicum of burden on the ultra wealthy in repayment of the some of the debt they owe society for their obscene riches.  Is there a better equally non-violent way to take care of the billionaire problem than electoral politics and popular legislation?  If I were a billionaire I wouldn't want to find out.  For the rest of us, Platner promises to work to ease the burden with protections to social security, increases in the Child Tax Credit, and a buffer against tax hikes on the poor and working classes thanks to "making the wealthy pay their share."  

Also in the platform are policies that address campaign finance flaws and other crises of democracy; housing (including the epidemic of private homes being sucked up by hedge funds while home buying becomes more out of reach for each generation)l; tribal rights; increased protections and enhancements of quality of life for the disabled; the promise to prevent pointless wars, overspending on the military budget-- including especially to aid Israel's genocide in Gaza-- while underspending on those who sign up for the military or who have served.

Platner's run-of-the-mill Centrist Democratic Primary opponent (and Chuck Schumer's pick), Governor Janet Mills had already seen the writing on the wall and suspended her campaign, so one has to wonder what this outburst of anti-Platner propaganda in the past few weeks has been for.  Maine voters foiled the campaign of the mainstream media and the Democratic and Republican establishment who are terrified of a candidate who promises to bring change to the system that elevated our feeble-brained elite and its infrastructure in an effort to rise the tide and lift the boats of all of his constituency.  But do not count the media campaign out just yet, because the stakes are not just about Maine, but about what a Platner defeat of  Susan Collins portends for the nation.  It's an effort to besmirch Platner before his energy infests the Senate.

Privilege is when your identity comes before your socialism.  But a socialist whose platform is not for women, for African Americans, for Native Americans, for new and would be Americans, for Gay and Trans men and women, for working men and women of all identities, for old and young and in between, for solidarity with those across the globe, isn't really a socialist.  Take time with Platner's extensive Platform and it is impossible to to miss why the Privileged and powerful and the bought gatekeepers of the status quo in the mainstream media do not want what he brings to the table in its full power and glory.

Losing Time

I recently got into my head a notion I couldn't shake to read 107 Days, Kamala Harris's new book about the 2024 election.  Nearing completion of a book with nothing else in particular lined up I found myself scanning the list of current titles in the Apple Book store, and Harris's book appealed to me as a quick settlement of the what's next question.  I made the purchase and was dismayed to discover I had accidentally selected the audiobook instead of the ebook.  Being frustrated in my efforts to figure out how to make an exchange (it seems to be impossible), I resigned myself to the audiobook delivery method.  It paid off: at double speed, I was able to finish the unabridged book, read by Harris herself in about 4 and half hours.   That was really about all the investment I had hoped to give it anyway.*

I can't say I didn't have an agenda in even considering Harris's book.  I have been maintaining for months that the impulse felt by so many single-issue leftists to punish Kamala Harris as a proxy for Joe Biden, particularly over Biden's Gaza policy by voting third party (or abstaining altogether) without regard to what a Trump victory would mean instead was a tragically misguided mistake.   The "cease fire" just negotiated comes when Gaza has been flattened after months of  intensified bombing by Israel after unilaterally breaking a January cease-fire in March.  Israel continues to starve those who remain.  Trump did not get the Nobel Peace prize this year-- another few years of degradation and it should be his-- but it's all he wants out of it -- he couldn't give a shit was happens to Palestinians.  And if he doesn't wind up profiting from Israel's development of Gaza's beachfront real estate (as he has certainly indicated are his designs) it will only be because we have been transported to another dimension.  Would a Kamala Harris administration have been any different?

I don't make a habit of reading political memoirs, but it strikes me as a given that politicians who want to continue their careers do not serve themselves by speaking unvarnished truth in their public utterances.  If I were a politician, I would certainly have to hide my atheism and reflexive eye rolling at displays of patriotism and expressions of American exceptionalism.  Not only do I think we should expect politicians to be somewhat hypocritical and duplicitous in their public lives, but I almost think we should want them to be at least in certain relatively benign respects.  If Kamala Harris had said in her book that Joe Biden was the albatross around her neck that prevented her from soaring to the presidency it would have been truthful but might have had a ring of unseemliness coming from her.  For this reason, I was not expecting Kamala Harris to come out and say, "As President, I would have forced Israel to stop bombing Gaza and done what I could to see Netanyahu and Israel punished for war crimes." and she does not, but I did expect to see some coded signals of differences between herself and both Joe Biden and Donald Trump, and I was not disappointed.  She speaks about generational differences between herself and the reflexively pro-Israel Biden, as well as the importance of International consensus and her preference that Israel and the US not be opposed to the rest of the world in wanting to proceed with the destruction of Hamas regardless of the cost to Gaza and its innocent 2 million inhabitants.

In undertaking Harris's book, I was partially interested in seeing if I could get to the bottom of the question “Would Kamala Harris have been a continuation of Joe Biden?  Did Kamala Harris deserve to be punished for Joe Biden’s administration?”  While she doesn’t come out and say, “Are you fuckin’ kiddin’ me?  Of course I would have wiped the floor with Joe Biden’s first term, ” she does codedly indicate that Joe Biden’s Israel steadfastness prevented him from seeing Palestinians as people whom Israel was unjustly immiserating.  We learned last spring that Biden's sense of timing with the demands for loyalty that he placed on his hand-picked replacement was impeccable as on the eve of her debate with Trump three months after Biden's own pratfall of a performance hastened his exit from the campaign when he urged her to allow "No daylight, Kid" between herself and him in public assessments of his administration and promises of how hers might depart from it.  It's also clear that in 4 years of being the racist and sexist Biden's ethnic and feminist beard as his DEI Vice President, she did not get a lot of support and loyalty from the Bidens before or after she took over the ticket, and attributes the deficit in public recognition she was handicapped with at the start of her curtailed campaign to her purposeful invisibility as Biden's second in command.  Notably, she regrets not having had the courage to talk the poorly aging Biden out of seeking a second term (she thought it would be perceived as being self-serving at the time but in retrospect she thinks it would have been the right thing to do for the country.)  Nevertheless, with the microphone hers, she openly mocks some of Joe’s senile foolishness around the election such as his ideological discomfort in pushing the wedge issue of reproductive choice in contrast with Trump's role in gutting it, as well as incidents of tomfoolery on the campaign trail such as actually putting on a MAGA hat that someone handed to him at an event they both appeared at following his dropping out of the race providing helpful fodder for mockery from alt-right media.

My big takeaway is that she called the book 107 Days --not to echo 10/7 as some dummies have suggested-- but rather to emphasize that the curtailed campaign was the obstacle she could not overcome, that it forced her to make decisions and edits and snubs that she would not have taken if she’d had the whole 2 years and left her at the mercy of "the conversation" that was already underway, such as her failure to negotiate an opportunity to speak to Joe Rogan's audience of disaffected young men-- Rogan had congealed as a Trump endorser before she was able to persuade him to have her as a guest.  (Of course she probably would not have been the candidate if there had been an actually open Democratic primary as there should have been.)  

One of the highlights of the book is when campaign adviser David Plouffe tells her too late in the game for her to re-adjust her strategy the thing she needed to hear from a strategist on her side much sooner: “People don't like Joe Biden”.  But the campaign was already lost by then and it was too late to pivot from its focus on peeling wishy washy Republicans from Trump’s side to add to what she assumed was Biden’s solid support.  More malpractice.   Low point of the book: she talks about her appearance on the View, which she says was marred by an answer to a Whoopi question to the effect of She would have done nothing differently from Joe Biden if she had been president.  She was not prepared for the question she said and she gave a perfunctory answer.  But that’s not the low point.  The low point is that she was prepared to say that she would have had a Republican in her cabinet.  (In keeping with what she thought her strategy was supposed to be.)   Because she blew Whoopi’s question, she actually made a point of slipping her prepared Republican in the cabinet remark into a reply to someone else’s question.  She apparently did not ever see that if “People hate Joe Biden” it’s not because he didn’t coddle enough Republican genitals.  

I’ve probably left important stuff out but the thumbnail is, as an adult who has seen a lot of elections and politicians and as an American in October 2025 who can tell the difference between a fascist creep and a smart enough if rather typical post-Obama democrat, I feel satisfied that I was not deluded that regardless of what Joe Biden was forcing her to say at the time, she would have been a break from the stench of the America of both Donald Trump and Joe Biden.  Not a savior of anything but America from more of the same old old man stink.  

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* The downside is that when I appear to be quoting the book I am actually paraphrasing it and paraphrasing it from memory at that, and from memory pieced together from whatever snippets of attention my ADHD brain was devoting to it at the time.

BOGE

I thought Elon Musk was IT.  Isn't part of the rationale of electing business people rather than technocrats that we want government run like a business?*  No decent business that I know would stomach Musk's willy-nilly implementation of change without a Change Control process.

In IT  (and perhaps in your line of work) we have a little thing called Change Control—an annoying little process you have to go through before you make any change to production systems in order to ensure that the change will not break what it’s supposed to fix or break anything you didn’t take the time to consider would be  impacted.  You’re supposed to have a plan, one which involves understanding the requirements of the change; developing it in an environment isolated from the one people use for their jobs; testing it, debugging it and testing again; developing a test plan for users involving actual use cases from their jobs, socializing the change with others whose impacts you may not have considered and getting buy-in from all before you’re allowed to proceed, communicating the change beforehand to all including a thorough explanation of why the change is being made, what is expected to be impacted, what users are expected to do before, during and after the implentation.  And if the change goes badly you’re supposed to have a plan for rolling it back. And if you're rolling it back as much as you're rolling it out, your process is ass.  Even in the best processes, things are overlooked, someone did not fully understand the impact a change would have and because change sucks, users will still be unhappy with it.  That is supposed to be addressed.  The idea being Do No Harm.  

As much as we hate the change control process, there is something to be said for making the social outcasts who do IT think about other people and what they need and want to get out of a system before they get their gloms on it.  But where are any of the precepts of Change Control in DOGE’s process?  It is the sloppiest fucking change I’ve ever seen.  Unprofessional. Noob. Bogus.  Shameful. Fireable.  And no one whose systems are being mauled by Musk's minions asked for it, least of all the voters who put Musk's figurehead in the White House. Again.  (Probably because they were afraid or unhappy or incurious about the actual unknown change of the alternative.)  

No one likes change.  But there are two kinds of it.  One, the kind that Elon Musk (and as recently seen in the Tariffs fiasco, the entire Trump administration) is not practicing is the end result of a well thought out, intentional, purposeful, carefully executed process that is in place to serve the needs of the users of a system and if thought out and done well, improve it.

The other we call disaster. 

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* Those who have bought the truism that the solution to government is to run it like a business forget that ideal government serves the people; ideal business serves only those who own it.  It should be fucking obvious now.