Condemning a Nazi Tattoo Shouldn’t Be This Hard: Why aren’t more Democrats calling out Graham Platner? - "Platner has a unique personal story, having reinvented himself from high-born prep-school student to blue-collar oyster farmer, and from willing Marine who talked about wanting to go to war to kill people (and who later worked for a military contractor) to a victim of Collins's vote to authorize the Iraq War. Although Platner is by no means the first politician to reshape his personal narrative during a campaign, he is likely the first to attempt an innocent explanation for having had, for 18 years, a tattoo of a Totenkopf, the insignia of the Schutzstaffel, or SS - the most dedicated and fanatical component of the Third Reich, whose members were the architects and executioners of the Final Solution."
The Spanish Exception: The country’s leaders avoided a populist backlash by engineering an economic boom. Now the boom is creating problems of its own. - "The new arrivals injected life into the Spanish economy. By filling labor shortages, they allowed existing businesses to expand to serve more customers, which, in turn, created the need for even more workers. The migrants were also, of course, consumers, who bought goods and services. Many also started their own businesses. Rather than harming native-born workers, the immigration surge seems to have helped them. The unemployment rate for native-born Spaniards has plummeted while incomes have risen by double digits; the poorest workers experienced the largest increase. A report from the Bank of Spain estimates that a quarter of the rise in the country's per capita GDP from 2022 to 2024 could be attributed to immigrants. "I've been writing about Spain for 50 years at this point, and I've never seen its economy perform quite like this," William Chislett, a senior fellow at the Elcano Royal Institute, in Madrid, told me. 'And there's little doubt in my mind that immigration is the most important factor.'" [ed. note: but housing costs skyrocketed]
D.C. Progressives’ Great Socialist Hope: The bitter contest for Washington’s mayor has replicated the Democrats’ central ideological struggle. - "Her second pledge is to build 72,000 homes in five years. While Lewis George is pledging to liberalize zoning laws and reduce permitting times - a nod to the yes-in-my-backyard urbanism that has gained force among wonky D.C. Democrats - her pledge would be extraordinarily difficult for private developers to deliver amid the deep recession that the D.C. housing market is in. House prices peaked in May 2021. Since then, they have fallen 26 percent in inflation-adjusted terms, making investments in new-home construction less likely to pay off.
"'A couple of years from now, we're looking at almost no housing production going forward,' Emilia Calma, the director of housing studies at the D.C. Policy Center, told me. Calma attributed the problem to high interest rates, high rates of rent nonpayment, and an extremely slow eviction process. D.C. has also just come off an incredible construction boom: From 2019 to 2026, the District added 45,000 new homes. As a result, real rental prices dropped by nearly 11 percent (even as rents rose across the country). Already discouraged developers will not exactly be lured back by the new tenant protections and expanded rent-stabilization laws that Lewis George is proposing."
Democrats Must Learn to Talk Sports: Politicians need as much attention as possible, as frequently as possible, while seeming as relatable as possible. A cheat code exists to hit all three objectives. - "Indeed, the sports world offers fertile terrain for class politics. Progressive Democrats have been trying, with limited success, to convince Americans that billionaires are their true enemy. Well, guess who loves to hate billionaires: aggrieved sports fans. Why not take a break from complaining that billionaires don't pay their fair share of income taxes to focus instead on team owners' obsession with avoiding the luxury tax by trading away their best players? Perhaps AOC could earn some support in Staten Island if she hammered Hal Steinbrenner, the owner of the New York Yankees, for letting Juan Soto go to the crosstown Mets to save on his tax bill."
The Ordinary Miracle of Existing: Being alive at all is the most extraordinary stroke of good luck any of us will ever experience. - "Being alive at all is the most extraordinary stroke of good luck we will ever experience. Yet it is the easiest to overlook, to take for granted. We wake up in the morning, have our coffee, make breakfast, send the kids off to school, go to our jobs, move through our routines, worry about deadlines, check off items on our to-do list. And we forget that beneath all of it lies something profoundly rare: existence itself. The simple fact that we are here, conscious and aware, is so unlikely that it borders on the miraculous. Because we experience that miracle every day, we treat it as ordinary, even guaranteed, mostly unnoticed at all. We postpone joy, assuming there will always be more time. We don't see the beauty in small moments. We simply go about the business of life, without taking a second to notice life itself. In making this comment, I am aware that in the time-driven, frantic pace of our world today, many people do not have the luxury of pausing to take stock of such moments."
