A few months ago, I hoped that the Republicans would overreach as well as enter the fall months internally divided and with a less than optimal field of candidates. Well that has happened and much more, thereby transforming the November elections into a race that is too close to call. Recent polling bears this out.

What should illuminate political practice – strategy, tactics, demands, and actions – is, first of all, life itself. And yet, in the minds of more than a few political practioners on the left, political practice springs, not from the dynamics, novelty, and new challenges that life inevitably presents, but from political texts that were never designed to capture the full complexity and dialectics of political life.

This is a problem. But not everyone sees it that way. As a result, we see the phenomenon of some people on the left scrambling around and performing tortuous textual somersaults to legitimize their practice in a moment that insists on broadly constructed strategic concepts and flexible tactical rules. Is it really necessary? Sometimes, a little common sense and political knowhow will get us to where we want to go.

Listening to the Band, while unpacking in our new/old coop apartment in the Bronx. Thinking how much I would have loved to see them live. Great musicians, three lead singers, and one great song writer. I saw Levon in his later musical iteration at his barn in Woodstock – The Midnight Ramble – and what a treat that was.

Trump and his MAGA base are co-created and co-dependant. To assign all agency for this odious and dangerous phenomenon to Trump is not only mistaken, but potentially disarming.

It’s a year since the Afghanistan withdrawl and we hear that if the U.S. had left a residual force of 2500, plus Nato and contractors, all would be well there. I’m no expert, but it strikes me as a case of magical thinking.