"'Democrats create Project 2027'... Oh, it's 'Democrats' comma 'create Project 27.' It's advice to Democrats. By Juan Williams. Ha ha."

Say I, aloud, reading a headline at The Hill.

It's Juan Williams, "Democrats, create Project 2027 and hope your wave comes."

We sigh in disappointment.

I was just saying nobody talks about Project 2025 anymore, and Meade said he was just reading about it, so I did a search and came up with that dispiriting Hill headline.

Let's read: "After devastating defeats in 2024, Democrats are closing out 2025 with wind in their sails.... Republicans and Democrats now talk openly of a likely tsunami of wins for Democrats in the 2026 midterms. If true, Democrats better get a surfboard and make plans to ride that big wave into the 2028 presidential election...."

He got that water metaphor going but recommends surfing in a tsunami. I asked Grok to make a list of other metaphors that are as good but bad as surfing in a tsunami. I got things like: "Having barely survived the forest fire of 2024, Democrats now have a raging wildfire at their backs. Better grab some marshmallows and roast them all the way to victory!" And: "After the dam broke and drowned them in 2024, Democrats finally have the floodwaters moving their way. Grab a pool floatie and ride this deluge to glory!"

"If Congress fails to fund the government next week, the White House is preparing for a shutdown that would reflect the purest version of President Donald Trump’s vision for the federal government..."

"... guided by White House budget director Russell Vought, an architect of the controversial Project 2025 playbook for Trump’s second term. Federal funds expire when the fiscal year ends Tuesday night, and Congress appears deadlocked over a stopgap measure that would keep agencies online for seven weeks while long-term negotiations continue. Under the Vought plan, the only agencies that would remain operating apace are those that received money in Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, the $4.1 trillion tax and immigration package that Congress passed in July. The Defense and Homeland Security departments were the main beneficiaries.The result, both during and potentially after a shutdown, could be a federal government dramatically reoriented to defense, immigration and law enforcement — and not much else...."

I'm reading "Trump’s shutdown plans: Mass layoffs, deregulation, military deployments/The White House’s call for mass layoffs in a looming shutdown tracks with past administration efforts to defang much of the federal government" (WaPo)(gift link).

Is this something like a return to DOGE? DOGE had "Musk’s high-visibility 'move fast and break things' ethos. But Vought, people in and around the administration say, has been quietly potent, drawing on four years out of government to surgically plan measures that overhaul the executive branch and Trump’s power."

So Vought is low-visibility, move slow, and wait for Congress to break everything, then put it together in the way you've been quietly calculating for decades. 

They're shovel-killing the dogs.

"Project 2025 mastermind allegedly told colleagues he killed a dog with a shovel/Revealed: former colleagues claim Kevin Roberts told them he killed a neighbor’s pit bull around 2004" (The Guardian).

“My recollection of his account was that he was discussing in the hallway with various members of the faculty, including me, that a neighbor’s dog had been barking pretty relentlessly and was, you know, keeping the baby and probably the parents awake and that he kind of lost it and took a shovel and killed the dog. End of problem,” said Kenneth Hammond, who was chair of the university’s history department at the time.

Lex Fridman does a distinctive interview with Donald Trump...

... and even provides a transcript and a Table of Contents:

The classic "Fear and" title is "Fear and Loathing," but somehow, in these days of loathing, we've got "Fear and Joy."

I'm so skeptical... as I'm reading "Fear and Joy in Chicago/The excitement that radiated through the Democratic National Convention was the other side of what had until recently been a deep despair" by Fintan O'Toole (NYRB).

[T]he Democrats in Chicago were singing a redemption song. It had three parts: valediction, malediction, and benediction....

Having taken a break to listen to "Redemption Song" (see below), I will concentrate on the malediction:

[B]ad-mouthing Trump at a Democratic convention is not that hard. Yet it too had its complications. Just as the Democrats had to navigate between loving Joe and giving him a jubilant cheerio, they had to figure out how to manage another contradictory feat: cutting Trump down to size while retaining a clear sense of the threat he poses to the very existence of the American republic...

They seemed — to O'Toole — to be trying "to reconfigure Trump as the Wizard of Oz, a little man who has conjured an illusion of MAGA magnitude." 

Even the renegade Republican Adam Kinzinger was entirely on message when he called Trump “a weak man pretending to be strong. He is a small man pretending to be big…. He puts on quite a show, but there is no real strength there.”

I add my favorite blog tag, "big and small." 

I didn't watch the Kamala Harris convention speech — way too late for me — but how can I catch up now?

When things are happening live, you sit through them as they happen, including long breaks, such as the one that impelled me to switch off the TV last night. The stage was empty, music was playing, the conventioneers were waving American flags, and the voice-over commentators were enthusing inanely about how wonderful it was to see such a large crowd waving flags. 

I knew that in the morning, all the speeches would be on YouTube, but when you have recorded speeches, are you really going to watch them through? I'd like to, just so I could write about the effect. Did Kamala do what she needed to do with this speech? We went for a long walk yesterday, and one topic was predicting how well the speech would go. I had a scale from 1 to 100 — 1 being the worst possible speech and 100 the best possible. Think of the absurdities. 50 was just: She did what she needed to do, nothing wrong, nothing special. Meade predicted 51, and I took the "under" bet. 

So there's a vague need to figure out where she did on my scale. I've skimmed the headlines and the text of the speech, but I'm disinclined to watch the whole YouTube. Can I just rely on Mickey Kaus?

Haven't read anyone else's comments on Kamala speech. Here are mine: 

High point: "out of their minds" 

Other effective themes: Caring for one another, non-Dem outreach, Project 2025 attacks (however disingenuous); not a series of ethnic or interest group panders--represents broad American interest. 

Low points: All that family stuff, all the furrow-browed pleading ( joy?), general blandness of text; oratorical Olestra. 

Bottom line: Job of speech was to make her plausibly presidential. Mission not accomplished. I doubt this will hurt her campaign but a big missed opportunity. Hollywood trainers could not transform her (which is kind of reassuring).

ADDED: The "out of their minds" bit was this:

And get this. Get this. He plans to create a national anti-abortion coordinator, and force states to report on women’s miscarriages and abortions. Simply put, they are out of their minds. And one must ask — one must ask, why exactly is it that they don’t trust women? Well, we trust women. We trust women.

Language tip: It's better to say "They are out of their mind," singular, because each person only has one mind. 

"[American media] have become a stampeding herd producing an avalanche of stories suggesting Biden is unfit, will lose and should go away..."

"... at a point in the campaign in which replacing him would likely be somewhere between extremely difficult and utterly catastrophic. They do this while ignoring something every scholar and critic of journalism knows well and every journalist should. As Nikole Hannah-Jones put it: 'As media we consistently proclaim that we are just reporting the news when in fact we are driving it. What we cover, how we cover it, determines often what Americans think is important and how they perceive these issues yet we keep pretending it’s not so.' They are not reporting that he is a loser; they are making him one. According to one journalist’s tally, the New York Times has run 192 stories on the subject since the debate, including 50 editorials and 142 news stories. The Washington Post, which has also gone for saturation coverage, published a resignation speech they wrote for him. Not to be outdone, the New Yorker’s editor-in-chief declared that Biden not going away 'would be an act not only of self-delusion but of national endangerment' and had a staff writer suggest that Democrats should use the never-before-deployed 25th amendment. Since this would have to be led by Vice-President Kamala Harris, it would be a sort of insider coup. And so it goes with what appears to be a journalistic competition to outdo each other in the aggressiveness of the attacks and the unreality of the proposals. It’s a dogpile and a panic, and there is no one more unable to understand their own emotional life, biases and motives than people who are utterly convinced of their own ironclad rationality and objectivity, AKA most of these pundits."

Writes Rebecca Solnit, in "Why is the pundit class so desperate to push Biden out of the race?" (The Guardian).

Solnit is very anti-Trump, as you'll see if you read the rest of the column. She goes on to say — "Speaking of coups" — that Trump "orchestrated a coup attempt to steal an election" and is planning "yet another coup" through the implementation of Project 2025. She even uses the word "coup" to describe what the Supreme Court — with its Trump appointees — did in finding presidential immunity and in "dismantling the regulatory state."

I'm quoting her anyway, because she's questioning the motives and judgment of liberal media. I'd really like to know who decided a stampede was the right approach and unleashed it while the President was still on the debate stage. Immediately after the debate, CNN's John King was cued up to describe a stampede already in motion: