"For his part, Youngkin threaded the needle nicely on Trump."

"When this race began last summer, Glenn Youngkin was unknown in Virginia politics. Those who did know his name remembered him as a high school basketball star in the Tidewater area whose father played hoops at Duke. Youngkin himself played collegiately at Rice before going into business. With wealth accrued as a partner in a private equity firm, Youngkin was able to self-fund a Republican primary campaign in which he dispatched with not one, but two, Trump disciples. But he managed to do so without alienating the former president. Trump might have preferred one of the others, especially when Youngkin quietly rebuffed his offer to come campaign. But Trump clearly appreciated that Youngkin never bad-mouthed him, and the 45th president responded accordingly: He told his supporters to flood to the polls. Successfully negotiating the mine field of Trump’s prickly ego not only helped Youngkin win on Tuesday. It also illuminated the path for future GOP candidates competing in states and districts that aren’t deep Republican red."

That's Reason #5 from "Seven Reasons Democrats Lost Virginia" by Carl M. Cannon (RCP).

By the way, don't you think it helped Youngkin that Trump wasn't on Twitter? Maybe one way for Democrats to stage a comeback would be for Twitter (and Facebook) to put Trump back where people are going to see him all the time.

"Some clichés about the cycle of life are true.... And when you’re a woman, you will, at about age fifty, become invisible.... Is nakedness invisibility’s opposite?"

"Maybe not, but, if it’s voluntarily, unapologetically displayed, it can be a kind of antidote to diminishment and erasure. A nude portrait of a woman older than, say, sixty is an unusual image—even a taboo one. To make such photographs, and, even more so, to pose for them, is an act of defiance.... 'The camera can be very cruel depending on how you use it.... There’s a whole tradition of photography that’s based on criticality and cruelty. Diane Arbus—whom I love, by the way—looked for unflattering moments to create a sense of drama. Sometimes that can be done with the juxtaposition of elements in a space, the exaggeration of the appearance of wealth or poverty, harsh lighting.' Lee said that, by contrast, her work had sometimes been criticized for being 'too earnest or romantic.'"

From "Jocelyn Lee’s Older Women in the Nude/Is nakedness invisibility’s opposite? Maybe not, but, if it’s unapologetically displayed, it can be a kind of antidote to erasure" by Margaret Talbot (The New Yorker)(photographs at the link).

"How quickly Democrats absorb Tuesday’s results and begin to respond will determine how well they can hold down expected losses in the coming midterms."

".... Democrats would be foolhardy to underestimate what happened Tuesday. To lose a state like Virginia, which has been trending Democratic for a decade, and to struggle so much in New Jersey suggests that, unless things change, only the bluest of states or districts are likely to be safe in 2022.... It wasn’t just Virginia or New Jersey that suggested Democrats will need to regroup. In races across the country, there were signs that voters see the party as having moved too far to the left, even as its progressive wing has been flexing its muscles. In Virginia, the exit polls showed that a majority of voters said the party is too liberal. New Yorkers elected Democrat Eric Adams as their new mayor after a campaign in which he made public safety a prime issue and presented himself as more centrist than liberal. In Minneapolis, voters overwhelmingly defeated a referendum to dismantle the police department a year after the Black Lives Matter movement had elevated the issue of police reform to the front of the progressive agenda. In Buffalo, Mayor Byron Brown, who lost the primary to socialist India Walton, appeared to have been reelected as a write-in candidate...."

Writes Dan Balz in "A sobering reality hits Democrats after Tuesday’s elections losses" (WaPo).

We'll see if Democrats quickly reset after this kick in the head. 

ADDED: Here's my post from last June when India Walton won the Democratic Party primary in Buffalo:

"Mommy!! I won!!! Mommy, I'm the mayor of Buffalo!!! Well, not until January, but yeah. Like, yes. Yes, mom."... The NYT article points out that Walton will be "the first socialist mayor of a major American city since 1960, when Frank P. Zeidler stepped down as Milwaukee’s mayor."

It was assumed she automatically win in the general election. Didn't happen: "Byron Brown claims victory in Buffalo mayor's race; write-in ballots swamp India Walton" (Buffalo News):

"At the very beginning, they said we can’t win, that it was impossible to win as a write-in,” the mayor shouted to cheering supporters. "But you know, you can never count a Buffalonian out."

"When every vote is counted — and every vote will be counted — we hope to have a celebration."

NEW! @GovMurphy wraps brief almost victory celebration as we wait final vote count later Wednesday. @NBCNewYork pic.twitter.com/o5tdyER3O3

— Brian Thompson (@brian4NY) November 3, 2021

New Jersey Governor Murphy can't lean too hard into challenging the results of the election. Expressing skepticism about the announced result is dangerously similar to Donald Trump. It will be interesting to see how mild-mannered Democrats will be in the face of a slim victory for the other side in an election that you and your supporters believe you were supposed to win. I don't want to see any hypocrisy!

Isn't this in the category of things that includes levitating the Pentagon?

You remember: "Fifty Years Ago, a Rag-Tag Group of Acid-Dropping Activists Tried to 'Levitate' the Pentagon/The March on the Pentagon to end the Vietnam War began a turning point in public opinion, but some in the crowd were hoping for a miracle" (Smithsonian).

That's what springs to mind when I see — in today's Washington Post — "Why hundreds of QAnon supporters showed up in Dallas, expecting JFK Jr.’s return." 

It means something, but it doesn't mean they really believe.

At the site overlooking where President John F. Kennedy was assassinated nearly six decades ago, scores of QAnon believers outfitted with “Trump-Kennedy 2024” shirts, flags and other merchandise gathered. They forecast the president’s son John F. Kennedy Jr., who has been dead for over 20 years, would appear at that spot, emerging from anonymity to become Donald Trump’s vice president when the former president is reinstated. The prophecy foretold online, of course, did not come true.... 

The spectacle captivated people, some amused at the ridiculousness of the far-fetched theory that Kennedy faked his death. But the size of Tuesday’s gathering was concerning for Jared Holt, a resident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab who researches domestic extremism. The claim about Kennedy Jr. is considered fringe even for supporters of QAnon, a collective of baseless conspiracy theories revolving around an idea that Trump is battling a Satan-worshiping cabal that traffics children for sex. The sprawling set of false claims that have coalesced into an extremist ideology has radicalized its followers and incited violence and criminal acts. The FBI has designated it a domestic terrorism threat....

"When you don’t remember something, you have no idea of its existence. And upon awakening after the surgery, I remembered nothing."

"But it wasn’t a disorienting feeling. If I had known I was a guitarist, if I had known those two people standing by my bedside in the hospital were in fact my parents, I then would’ve felt the feelings that went along with the events. What they went through and why they were standing there looking at me then would’ve been very painful for me. But it wasn’t painful because to me they were just strangers.... I had to start from Square 1.... But once I made the decision to try, it activated inner intuitive familiarities, like a child who hasn’t ridden their bicycle for many years and tries to do so again to reach a destination. There are moments of imbalance, but it’s subliminal, and it emerges after some mistakes, and then it strengthens."

Said Pat Martino, quoted in "Pat Martino, Jazz Guitarist Who Overcame Amnesia, Dies at 77/He was one of the genre’s most acclaimed players when brain surgery left him with no memory. But he recovered and made music for another three decades" (NYT).

When are we going to stop doing this? When there's a third black mayor? A fifth? A tenth? Never?

When does it become obviously insulting, to make the very first thing you say about a black person's achievement that he's a black person achieving it. He's a specific person!

That screen shot is from the front page of today's NYT. The headline when you click through is "Eric Adams Is Elected Mayor of New York City/Mr. Adams, a Democrat and former police captain, will be the second Black mayor in the city’s history."

"I said #@!%@**# the kids in '67, let's do something for us."

I love this ad for the Village Voice that appeared in the NYT on June 11, 1967, "Now that you're tried Psychiatry, Self-Improvement Books, and Ceramics, try The Village Voice. It's cheaper." In choosing the form to fill out to subscribe, you're given 6 choices and encouraged to use the one that's the real you""

Why am I reading that this morning? I was thinking about yesterday's elections and the effect they may have on the Democrats' ambitious spending programs, and it got me thinking about the controversy — which I remember well from half a century ago — about the insanely high cost of building the Superdome. 

I went to the Wikipedia article on the Superdome just to find the price — $135 million — and got distracted by "[Sports visionary David] Dixon imagined the possibilities of staging simultaneous high school football games side by side and suggested that the synthetic surface be white." 

I had to check the source, and it was in that 1967 issue of the NYT: "How would you feel about white?... A white playing field and an orange football with luminous paint. When a quarterback throws a pass, we turn the lights out while the ball's in the air. Wild?"

Things were so much wilder then. Let's talk about Youngkin now.

"The domination of the shared countryside for one man’s personal satisfaction is just not acceptable."

Said a group called Keep the Wannies Wild, quoted in "Viscount Devonport wins battle to erect ‘giant toothpick’ in Queen tribute" (London Times).

The objected-to sculpture is a 55-metre sliver of steel poked into a hilltop. It supposedly expresses the Viscount's idea of the Queen's "anchoring of the Commonwealth around shared values of tolerance, respect and understanding." It's the Viscount's land, and the project is privately funded.

What are "the Wannies"?

Sunrise this morning came at 7:35.

It looked like this at 7:26:

 

This is 7:36: 

 

This is 7:47:

 

And this is 7:50: 

This CNN headline seems like it's trying to portray the Democratic candidate for governor of New Jersey as the underdog: It feels like pre-spinning a feared defeat.

"Phil Murphy tries to become first Democratic governor to win reelection in New Jersey in more than 40 years."

IN THE COMMENTS: Balfegor has a sound interpretation that I want to sign onto:

I mean, [that headline is] what it leads with, but it also notes:

Murphy's lead over Republican nominee Jack Ciattarelli in a number of late polls appears to be at or near double digits,

I don't think it's pre-spinning a feared defeat in New Jersey at all. I think it's trying to set up a counter-message against a feared defeat in Virginia, where Republicans do seem to have a good chance. If Republicans win there after Democrats won by 10 points in 2020 (much of the civil service living and voting in Northern Virginia), that would be a shocking reversal. But if you can counterprogram by saying Democrats beat a 40 year trend to win in New Jersey, it might help guard against demoralisation heading into 2022....

Right. The idea is to make Murphy's victory seem amazing. 

"There’s no debate, there’s no discussion. That’s something I want to disturb. I want to disturb the fact that we’re not encouraged to discuss it."

"I believe that [the artist's] job is to disturb the status quo. The censoring that’s going on in the world right now, that’s pretty frightening. No one’s allowed to speak their mind right now. No one’s allowed to say what they really think about things for fear of being canceled, cancel culture. In cancel culture, disturbing the peace is probably an act of treason.... The thing is the quieter you get, the more fearful you get, the more dangerous anything is. We’re giving it power by shutting the fuck up completely.... Ever since I stuck my finger in the cigarette lighter in the car, I kept pushing it and playing with it. Every kid does it and your parents tell you, 'don’t touch it, you’re going to burn your finger.' All you have to do is tell me that, and I need to touch it."

Said Madonna, in a V Magazine interview. She was asked about a quote of hers: "Artists are here to disturb the peace."

ADDED: That makes me want to embed my personal favorite Madonna song/video:

Believe the science... of tossing coins into fountains.

These maniacs are flipping coins into a fountain for good luck on fighting climate change after they flew their private jets to hang out and talk.

Stop the madness. pic.twitter.com/egt3A0HNhc

— Pomp 🌪 (@APompliano) November 1, 2021

"McAuliffe told a modest crowd outside a Fairfax brewery Monday night at his final rally. 'He is doing an event with Donald Trump here in Virginia.' That was a lie."

"Trump wasn’t in Virginia and he never campaigned with Youngkin.... Thirty miles away, at the Loudoun County Fairgrounds, a crowd several times the size of McAuliffe’s was waiting for Youngkin to take the stage. You got a hint of why McAuliffe was desperate to manufacture the fake Trump event... [H]is Monday audiences in Richmond and Fairfax, where we caught up with him, were modest and listless. Youngkin’s were large and rollicking, with many of the trappings of a MAGA rally — a similar dad rock playlist, hats and flags and T-shirts paying homage to the former president — but, to the great disappointment of Democrats, not Trump himself."

From "POLITICO Playbook: Youngkin’s crowds dwarf McAuliffe’s on election eve."

The spirit of Trump is pervasive and evasive. It even made poor Terry McAuliffe lie about it. I certainly hope the vote count at the end of the day shows that McAuliffe has lost, because if it doesn't, people won't believe it, and I don't like that kind of chaos.

"No more blah blah blah."

Greta Thunberg, the environmental activist, joined protesters outside the United Nations climate conference in Glasgow and accused political leaders of inaction in the fight against the climate crisis. https://t.co/VRYbuTNehl pic.twitter.com/23ZqHuduLx

— The New York Times (@nytimes) November 1, 2021

If that seems crazy, it must not have been an "insurrection."

"Lindsey Graham Reportedly Called for Law Enforcement to Shoot Jan. 6 Rioters During the Attack: 'You’ve Got Guns. Use Them'" (Mediaite).