Charlie Sykes, former Wisconsin radio host, on the primary for the open Wisconsin Supreme Court seat that happens this Tuesday:

But now we get to the strangest twist in this high-stakes story: After decades of ignoring or downplaying crucial judicial elections like this one, Democrats and their allies are very much focused on the Wisconsin contest.

Meanwhile, Wisconsin conservatives have chosen this moment to crack up.

While progressive dollars pour into the state, Republicans have launched a bitter, high-stakes, and often quite personal, civil war that seems designed to take out the candidate who may give them the best chance to hold onto control of the state’s high court.

The increasingly divisive campaign between the two conservatives — Dan Kelly and Jennifer Dorow — is not about ideology, or even much substance at all. Both are committed conservatives, on the right edges of the legal spectrum, and are even graduates of the same low-ranked law school.

But this has not stopped an increasingly vitriolic right-on-right slugfest.

And etc.

What’s going on? My favorite and belabored topic – apologies and that sort of thing – of course: the toxic culture of the GOP coming to the fore.

• The libertarian streak of justifying selfish behavior as being good for society (read a decade of REASON Magazine and that’s the strongest lesson coming out of your experience, I’ll just about guarantee it);
• A belief that compromise, much like taxation & regulation, is an evil practice, in this case applicable to the idea of voting for the Republican who you didn’t support, but who won the primary;
• The Gingrich motto, Win at all costs!, leads to a willingness to do or say anything to win even a primary, a tactic alienating independents and Republicans that still believe in civility, not civil wars.

This is reinforced by the induction of new GOP members who fit the above bill, who think politics is absolute war and not The Art Of The Possible, and that their arrogance means they’re right.

A war between the Republican candidates? This is not a surprise. And there’s no gerrymandering this race, as it’s state-wide. So long as the Democrats don’t strain the conservative leaning independent segment of the Wisconsin electorate with their nominee, I expect we’ll see the Democrats narrowly winning the Supreme Court seat in the general election this April. And this would lead to a 4-3 liberal dominance of the Court.

A liberal victory may result in another go at redistricting in the State, while a conservative victory seems likely to be status quo.

Subnivium:

ECOLOGIST Jonathan Pauli used to spend a lot of time keeping track of animals over winter – often across cold, harsh landscapes that seemed inhospitable to life. It always surprised him that as soon as the weather got warmer in early spring, insects would pop up. “Snow fleas would emerge from underneath the snow,” Pauli recalls. Where, he wondered, had they been hiding?

Eventually, he discovered some old scientific papers from the 1940s and 1960s. They revealed a secret world that Pauli, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has been studying ever since: a hidden ecosystem under the snow. It is found in a clandestine space between the snowpack and the soil beneath, which is sheltered from the bitter cold and is where some insects, spiders, frogs and even small mammals spend at least part of the winter. Concealed from the world above, flies buzz, plants thrive and animals forage, hunt and give birth in this so-called subnivium (from the Latin sub, meaning under, and nivis, meaning snow). But what will happen to this winter wonderland and all the creatures it shelters as the climate warms up? That’s the topic of Pauli’s most recent research. [“Subnivium: The secret ecosystem hidden beneath the snow,” Ute Eberle, NewScientist (17 December 2022, paywall)]

A horrible thought, eh? Presidential election politics already?

But it’s true, the ambitious are already in play. Governor DeSantis (R-FL) and Trump have been working at it for months, as seen in the governor surreptitiously flipping positions on vaccines, and the former President following up his entry into the race announcement with <strangled laughter> his announcement that he will sell NFTs of pictures of his head on various muscled bodies.

I kid you not. Maybe it’s the joke that Philip Kennicott thinks it to be:

Another name mentioned nationally is Governor Youngkin (R) of Virginia, the man who led the upset of the Democrats in Virginia in 2021. In the following 2022 election, he chose to compete with the former President in the endorsement arena, and it didn’t go well:

Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) defended his record in only five of the 15 GOP gubernatorial candidates he campaigned with winning their races in the midterm elections last month.

“We picked hard races, races where the states were set up a bit like Virginia, where Joe Biden had won by 10 points, and we went to work to try to flip those states,” he told Fox News’ Martha MacCallum in an interview.

Youngkin said Republican candidates’ performances showed that their message “carries,” but unseating an incumbent is difficult.

In the midterms, Republicans were only successful in defeating one Democratic incumbent governor, Steve Sisolak in Nevada. GOP nominees failed to win races in key states like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. [The Hill]

A brave, even smart thing to do, but while it may seem like your message got through despite losing, it’s important not to fool one’s self: the Republican message is primarily anti-Democrat, followed by hollow echoing of the religious tenets of lower taxes and less regulation will lead to prosperity, unless you’re Trump, in which case it’s whine whine whine about the 2020 election.

The truth of the matter is that the last three national elections, which are 2018, 2020, and 2022, the Democratic performance has exceeded expectations, and the Republicans have failed to meet expectations. In the 2022 election the Republicans predicted a gain of sixty seats in the House, and gained … nine. Worse yet, the Democrats gained a seat in the Senate. Republican expectations of retaining the Pennsylvania Senate seat while flipping Senate seats in Nevada, Washington, New Hampshire, and a few other States ended in bitter disappointment, often by large margins. Even consolation was bitter as victory margins in several traditional strongholds didn’t match their historical norms. For example, Senator Grassley of Iowa once again won reelection, but fell far short of his average victory margin of 33 points.^[1]

Youngkin’s endorsements didn’t work out? He might want to consider it an important lesson. He simply doesn’t have enough influence to lift underdog candidates to victory, meaning his national reach is not forceful. On the other hand, Virginia governors are term-limited at one term, meaning he can only serve non-consecutive terms. Maybe he needs a hobby.

But conservative leaders are apparently appraising their movement and have decided some careful management of the herd base is necessary, starting by tossing the former President out on his ear, while assuring everyone that No, there’s nothing really wrong with the conservative movement. Erick Erickson chose the Start with unhappy truths and finish with a fantasy approach to this challenge:

We now have the USA Today and the Wall Street Journal polling — both, I would note, were pretty reliable in 2022. Those outlets and their pollsters suggest most Republicans are ready to move on from Trump. From USA Today:

By 2-1, GOP and GOP-leaning voters now say they want Trump’s policies but a different standard-bearer to carry them. While 31% want the former president to run, 61% prefer some other Republican nominee who would continue the policies Trump has pursued.

Over the past two years, and really after the midterms, callers to my radio show have also begun to move on.

The consensus is that people want Trump policies, but they are not sure he is the best standard bearer moving forward.

People genuinely do appreciate what President Trump did for the country. They appreciate his fight. They appreciate his judicial picks. They appreciate his robust defense of the United States worldwide and his tough stance with China, Iran, and others.

But, as he notes in his graph on the right here, the MAGA conservatives have no intention of moving on from Trump. The red arrow is the day he posted an anti-Trump screed to his paying subscribers only, and the graph shows the impact on his paying subscriber base.

Up to here, Erickson’s putting the best spin he can on a bad situation, and if he chooses to ignore some gaping chasms, such as the SBC debacle, the abortion disaster, the precarious problem of GOP leadership in the House, and a number of other conundrum, well, self-delusion can be its own punishment.

But this is the sort of thing I’d classify an outright lie:

The media is going to elevate the loud voices of NeverTrump and OnlyTrump. To stay relevant, any good candidate will be defined as the second coming of Trump by NeverTrump, and a weak-kneed establishment sell-out hack by OnlyTrump. Both need Trump to stay relevant.

The upside for the GOP and the nation is that neither do. The Republican Party has a very deep bench of talent. While the midterms were not what we wanted.[sic?] The future is bright.

My bold, and follow that with No, it’s not. The future, that is, for the GOP. Oh, I could be wrong. Maybe all the good future candidates aren’t yet apparent. But the lesson from this election, and the January 6th Insurrection fallout, is that if your leadership is McCarthy, McConnell, Cruz, Hawley, Gaetz, Greene, Madison Cawthorn, Boebert, Ralph Norman, and other folks who, in some cases, managed to put safe Republican seats at risk, well, you don’t have enough intelligent people to fill the seats you’re winning. Gohmert, Gosar, Biggs? No, no, and no. Here is CO-3, Rep Boebert’s seat, results:

And Erickson knows this. From a different post:

It is official. Republicans have taken back the House of Representatives. They gathered yesterday to announce their first official act: an investigation into Hunter Biden.

Dumbasses.

What a bunch of idiots. The American people just rejected the GOP “own the libs” strategy. They signaled they’d love to have responsible adult Republicans in charge. In fact, from NEW YORK STATE !!!! to Arizona, voters elected Republicans who ran on local issues tied to the economy and crime.

I think it's clear that the GOP suffers from a poison at its very heart. Senator Goldwater (R-CO) knew it 60 years ago. It manifests as blind arrogance, as team politics, as an adherence to political positions as if they're religious mantra. This all leads to deeply substandard candidates being elected, repelling the independents who are often key to winning elections.

The question isn't really about the GOP, is it? No. It's about the Democrats. Are they swirling down their own vortex?

¹ I think Grassley was fortunate to win at all, and my friends to the south have committed a major foul by nominating and then electing him again, given his recent history of mendacity and/or dementia.

So we had a mid-term election, and, like any good compromise, no one’s happy. The Republicans had, to some degree, bought into the mantra that It’s the economy, stupid!, and thus ignored their gaping flaws in their reaction to Trump’s January 6 Insurrection, which will loom over them as a black cloud of utter condemnation, the Dobbs decision, permitting the imposition of religious dogma on the American people via proposed Federal regulation, election denying, which is a strike against the very heart of how we handle transfer of political power, adherents to a set of economic tenets that are inferior, and a general incompetency. They thought Congress would be handed to them on a platter.

You’d think the Democrats could have run the table.

But they have too many flaws, and a few burdens, of their own. Chief among their current set of flaws is an autocratic thread that sets independent teeth on edge. I’ve mentioned this before, so I’ll keep it brief. It has become painfully apparent in their culture wars, chiefly in their style of managing the transgenderism issue, that rather than have a civilized discussion of the serious issues surrounding this small group of people, first they promulgated regulations that impacted a huge number of people, including the most vulnerable members of society, and then, when various folks try to have a discussion on the issue as required by the tenets of liberal democracy, the transgenderism advocates run around screaming BIGOT!

This is not in keeping with liberal democracy, or for that matter being an adult. But that first point, indicating an abrogation of their responsibilities under the social contract of being members of liberal democracies, is the most important.

Among their burdens is communications of difficult subjects. As a single example, the Republicans like to make that they’re the ones to trust on the economy, but all the studies I’ve seen show the stock market hates Republicans, the Federal budget hates Republicans, and the jobs report barely tolerates them. But this is not an easy message to communicate. When inflation kicked in, Democrats were in trouble, and then to compound it they didn’t have an effective counter-message. If asked, I would have advocated for a message of The Democrats are cleaning up after the incompetent Republicans, and just din that into everyone’s ears until they stuffed their ears with rags.

Would it have worked? I dunno. But they should have done more than they did.

Erick Erickson tries to tiptoe through the tulips with this post today:

This is the United States Balkanizing

Our united states seem more and more like a forced coalition of people who do not like each other.

Working-class neighborhoods of nonwhite voters shifted a bit to the right. White, rich neighborhoods that had long propped up the GOP shifted hard left.

In Republican states, the GOP did well. In Democrat states, the Democrats fared well. Republicans helped the Democrats in Maryland get the Governor’s Mansion. Democrats in Florida and Georgia voted for DeSantis and Kemp.

And, no doubt, Professor Turchin is muttering about the dilution of asabiya this morning, asabiya being the intellectual or spiritual bonds that hold diverse groups of people together. He might you that the collapse of the Soviet Union has led to this mess.

But Erickson (not Turchin) won’t tell you how much he and his ilk have contributed to this situation. From calling Democrats baby-killers, and thus not taking the entire subject seriously, to his really bad, context-free, nuance-free arguments, the angling of far-right conservatives for power, to grift, to generally act in a self-centered manner when that is not appropriate, has been a major factor in this situation.

But, as I mentioned earlier, the Democrats have their own horse in this race.

How bad is it? As I typed this, Senator Johnson (R) of Wisconsin, a conspiracy rumor nut, grifter, and probably certifiable crazy, has had his reelection race called in his favor. He may have won by a whisker, but he appears to have won – and he joins Senator Grassley (R) of Iowa in the victory dance, Grassley of 88 years of age, who makes a hobby of mendacity and potentially was involved in the January 6th Insurrection. He won far more easily than Johnson, so easily that I can only ask my neighbors to the south What the fuck are you thinking? And for those who think that two out of one hundred isn’t so bad, I urge you to examine Senators Feinstein (D-CA) and Collins (R-ME) for signs of dementia as well.

What does the future hold? We may see new political parties formed. I hope they discard the arrogance that each of our two major parties are displaying to their mutual costs, or they’ll never become large parties.

Erickson forgets one thing in his calculations: the senior generations responsible for this mess, especially on the Republican side, are inevitably dying out, and new generations are observing how badly this is going. I think Erickson believes this’ll be a long-term Balkanization, but I think that as younger generations start taking up positions of authority, this’ll turn into something else.

How it’s shaped by overpopulation and climate change remains to be seen.

Sometimes staring at the trees just yields trees, so here’s a chart, as fragmentary and with some low-confidence data, that might give the reader some thought:

This chart shows, for all incumbent GOP Senators running for reelection for which there's current poll data available, their margin of victory in 2022 2016 in the red bar, and their current lead, according to pollsters, in the blue bar.

Yes, Johnson's lead is currently 0.

The most doubtful data is Indiana ("Internet poll" of the challenger) and Iowa ("commissioned by the challenger").

But what this small, but significant data sample indicates is that the independent voters are abhorring the Republicans. No doubt there are moderate Republicans who finally cannot vote for their own people, too, as those candidates are either too extreme, or are exhibiting unacceptable behaviors, such as Grassley of Iowa or Johnson of Wisconsin. But I suspect that mostly its the independents who find Republican philosophy and behaviors repellent.

And this leaning away from what passes for Republicans indicates a repudiation of the politics that, in many case, these political newcomers have brought with them: rank anti-abortionism, election-denying, already exhibited in the primaries, and a thirst for conspiracy rumors that support their most desperate wishes - rather than the ability to digest reality as it presents itself.

In some ways, this is a repudiation of their philosophy, which is a collage of anti-science, anti-experts, and a preference for irrationality, whether it be for that of Biblical literalism that often seems conveniently discarded, or the QAnon litany of nuttiness that appeals to those who find social media addictive and bizarre theories appealing.

Lee may be the most terrifying case for Republicans. A lead in excess of forty points has evaporated to two, and there's still more than a month left for Utah voters to learn what has disgusted their fellow voters about Senator Lee (R).

But any of the samples in this graph could suffer Lee's fate, because, not displayed here, none of the incumbents have reached the 50% level of support. They're still vulnerable if enough of the undecided voters decide to break to the left.

This may be one of the most important results of the upcoming election. Not that these incumbents lose or win, but that these GOPers lost this much support, even in Republican safe states such as Utah, Oklahoma, and Arkansas. It really makes me wonder about those states that are unpolled, such as the Dakotas and Alabama.

While reading this WaPo article on imminent restrictions to the uses of the Colorado River, one of the most significant rivers of the American West, it occurred to me that I don’t really have a feel for its course or the cities it serves, unlike the Mississippi. The latter, I know without looking it up, starts a little north of the Twin Cities at Lake Itasca in Minnesota, goes through the Twin Cities, divides Minnesota from Wisconsin, Wisconsin from Iowa, Iowa from Illinois, serves Pepin, WI, which I only mention for its delicious restaurant, Harbor View Cafe, serves St. Louis and eventually ends up entering the Gulf of Mexico at NOLA (New Orleans, Louisiana).

So let’s see a map!

The Colorado River
Source: American Rivers

Sourcing out of the Rocky Mountains, the Colorado River flows through Grand Junction, CO, Moab, UT, the artificial Lake Powell on the Utah / Arizona border, all the while picking up contributions from tributaries. Crossing Arizona, it passes into Lake Mead, another artificial reservoir formed by the operation of the famed Hoover Dam and that I’ve alarmed over before, and near Las Vegas, NV. Heading south, it passes by some smaller cities and forms the border between Arizona and California, before passing into Mexico and, at one time, eventually feeding into the Gulf of California, that gulf on the west side of Mexico formed by Baja California and the Mexican mainland, as it were. Now I read it no longer makes it there.

But going over this by river only isn’t a wise course. In the map above, the olive and turquoise areas serve to illuminate the Colorado River basin, and it’s that area to which the Colorado River provides water. This includes most of Arizona, including Phoenix, Scottsdale, and Flagstaff. The Water Education Foundation states the Colorado River provides water to 40 million people and more than 5 million acres of farmland in a region encompassing some 246,000 square miles. American Rivers suggests the number is 36 million.

Not quite sure what that means? The recent US Census effort suggests the United States has a population of roughly 330 million people. That means, roughly, that 10%-12% of the US population has some sort of direct dependency on the Colorado River.

In other words, the water source for 12% of the United States population is at risk of becoming inadequate.

So what’s going on?

First, population has been growing. Macrotrends has the last four years’ population estimates for the Las Vegas metro area growing at about 2.7% annually. That’s not small over twenty years. Phoenix is growing at a similar rate, according to World Population Review.

Second, everyone wants water without paying for it. Face it, this is an American tradition. Speaking as a four-time visitor to India, it’s not a world-wide tradition. There you ask for bottled water and you may be charged for it. But here we tend to use water with little thought; we even talk about spending money like water to describe the profligate.

Third, as this WaPo article notes, the Colorado River is being starved of water due to a drought:

The root of the problem is an ongoing 23-year drought, the worst stretch for the region in more than a millennium. Mountain snowpack that feeds the 1,450-mile river has been steadily diminishing as the climate warms. Ever-drier soils absorb runoff before it can reach reservoirs, and more frequent extreme heat hastens evaporation.

“The prolonged drought afflicting the West is one of the most significant challenges facing our communities and our country,” Beaudreau said. “The growing drought crisis is driven by the effects of climate change, including extreme heat and low precipitation.”

Climate change that we had a chance to ameliorate and foolishly threw away that chance over the last, at least, decade. California is beginning to bend a bit, at least:

Grass is the single largest irrigated “crop” in America, surpassing corn and wheat, a frequently-cited study from NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration found. It noted by the early 2000s, turfgrass, mostly in front lawns, spanned about 63,000 square miles, an area larger than the state of Georgia.

Keeping front lawn grass alive requires up to 75% of just one household’s water consumption, according to the study, which is a luxury California is quickly becoming unable to afford as the climate change-driven drought pushes reservoirs to historic lows. [CNN]

Lake Powell is nearly not a lake any longer.

The remarks of the fishing guides interviewed by the journalist are more than a little unsettling. I hope there’s a special explanation for the huge implied drop in water levels at Lake Powell.

Of course, if you look hard enough it’s possible to find some lemonade. In Europe, if they can gather the gumption and money, they have an unexpected chance to clear part of the Danube River in Serbia of dangerous World War II debris:

This week, low water levels on the Serbian section of the Danube River exposed a graveyard of sunken German warships filled with explosives and ammunition. The vessels, which emerged near the port town of Prahovo, were part of a Nazi Black Sea fleet that sank in 1944 while fleeing Soviet forces. More ships are expected to be found lodged in the river’s sandbanks, loaded with unexploded ordnance. [WaPo]

But that’s a real weak lemonade. The point here is to ask whether we are willing to do what’s necessary to continue to live in those areas of the country, such as no more green grass lawns and irrigating farms, or if it’s just time to move out.

In Wisconsin, Republican Speaker of the House in Madison Robin Vos has fired a former member of the Wisconsin Supreme Court who had been hired to investigate the 2020 Election – and made his task into a public display of utter incompetence:

“After having many members of our caucus reach out to me over the past several days, it is beyond clear to me that we only have one choice in this matter, and that’s to close the Office of Special Counsel,” Vos said in a written statement. [WaPo]

If it’s true that multiple members of the Republican caucus have indicated dismay at Gableman’s antics to Vos, this may show that the Wisconsin GOP has at least a few moderate members who understand that competency and fair play is far more important to the voters than pre-determined investigation results and general clowning around.

Gableman took months to set up his office and spent the early stage of his review performing online research from a public library in suburban Milwaukee. He toured the site of a frequently criticized GOP-led ballot review in Arizona and attended a seminar in South Dakota hosted by Mike Lindell, the MyPillow chief executive who has spouted false claims about the 2020 election.

So maybe the Wisconsin GOP still has some respectable members.

But it does leave open the question: How the hell did Gableman ever get himself elected to Wisconsin’s SCOTUS? I mean, really? Unless he’s into early-stage dementia, he should have never been allowed anywhere near a judge’s chamber, except as a defendant.

Such are the results of straight ticket voting.

While the transmission of fake electoral materials by fantasizing half-wits in Arizona and other States is a serious business, this addendum made me laugh:

It’s worth noting that while Arizona’s forged materials originally looked a little different, we learned yesterday that there were actually two different sets of Republicans that created fake documents in the Grand Canyon State — both of which were sent to the National Archives as if they were real — and while one was unique, the other matched the materials in Wisconsin, Michigan, Nevada, and Georgia. [Maddowblog]

Competing criminals? Trying to reinforce their point?

Tripping over their own feet?

It’s just emblematic, even if it’s a false perception on my part, of the basic incompetency of the right. The left has its own problems, but right now what passes for conservatives seem to have a problem with their best foot.

It’s a fairly awful foot.

Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) is entering the sweepstakes:

How to steal an election: “Seeding an area heavy with potential Democratic votes with as many absentee ballots as possible, targeting and convincing potential voters to complete them in a legally valid way, and then harvesting and counting the results.”

The quote is from an article in The American Conservative on the Democratic win in the Presidential Election in Wisconsin. The significance of the statement is that Paul, despite the fact that, to the critical reader, this is basically a “so what” statement, there’s nothing skanky here unless the responsible officials then refused to send absentee ballots to Republican areas, which I suspect would be illegal and would get them sued, has issued it. What does that say about his opinion of his audience, his base?

It’s an insult: it’s written on the assumption that they aren’t critical readers. They’ll take this exercise in victimology, incorporate it into their psyche, and continue to be resentful. He’s basically adding a bit more cement to the concrete that is his base, and he doesn’t care if he is insulted over it, or not, just so long as his base swallows it.

And why is this important? 2022 is an election year for his Senate seat.

Paul doesn’t mind looking stupid to the rest of the world, not when he’s solidifying his chances for re-election.

I’ve been meaning to post about this and kept being forgetful. From gCaptain:

The first new U.S.-flagged Great Lakes freighter to be built in nearly 40 years was launched [October 28] at the Fincantieri Bay Shipbuilding shipyard in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin.

The Interlake Steamship Company vessel, M/V Mark W. Barker, is self-unloading bulk carrier that will transport raw materials such as salt, iron ore, and stone to support manufacturing throughout the Great Lakes region.

The new River-class vessel is believed to be the first ship for U.S. Great Lakes service built on the Great Lakes since 1983. Delivery is planned for Spring 2022.

The first in 40 years? What’s triggered this? Just a worn out fleet? Or is shipping increasing on the Great Lakes?

Reverse strike:

Nelson was the county executive of Wisconsin’s Outagamie County in 2017 when the Appleton Coated paper mill was forced into receivership by its creditor PNC Bank—one of several mill shutdowns in the Fox River Valley paper-manufacturing region. Appleton Coated was the economic mainstay of the town of Combined Locks, providing it with 620 high-paying jobs and tax revenue, and its managers insisted it would be profitable after it weathered a rough patch of high wood-pulp prices and depressed markets and introduced new product lines. Nelson recounts that PNC claimed otherwise and that it used provisions in a loan agreement to take control of the mill and auction it to another company that planned to shutter and scrap it. Appleton Coated’s community rallied to its cause: Workers staged a “reverse strike” and kept the mill operating; the United Steelworkers Union local representing them filed an objection to the receivership sale in court and set about finding another buyer that would keep the mill up and running; and Nelson filed his own objection in court, citing the economic damage to the county that would result if the mill closed. A heated legal battle ensued, and the mill won a reprieve thanks to concessions from the union and government aid that Nelson pitched in. As a result, Appleton Coated duly made its way back to profitability in 2018. Over the course of this book, Nelson sets the mill’s story against a panorama of Wisconsin politics and economic issues, examining a rash of similar mill shutdowns and accusing Republican Gov. Scott Walker, who served from 2011 to 2019, and the state legislature’s Republican majority of being indifferent to the plight of the paper industry even as it gave electronics manufacturer FoxConn billions in subsidies for a new factory. [“ONE DAY STRONGER: HOW ONE UNION LOCAL SAVED A MILL AND CHANGED AN INDUSTRY—AND WHAT IT MEANS FOR AMERICAN MANUFACTURING,” THOMAS M. NELSON, Kirkus Reviews]

In other words, continuing to work when instructed to not do so.

Mr. Nelson is an early contender for the Democratic nomination to the 2022 race for the Senate seat in Wisconsin, currently occupied by Senator Ron Johnson (R).

In a recent legal action by Trump:

Despite the chaos of election night and the days which followed, the media has consistently proclaimed that no widespread voter fraud has been proven. But this observation misses the point. The constitutional issue is not whether voters committed fraud but whether state officials violated the law by systematically loosening the measures for ballot integrity so that fraud becomes undetectable. [Texas v. Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin: Motion of Donald J. Trump to Intervene]

Or, in other words, The fact that we can’t find widespread fraud means fraud occurred.

But I’m not here to poke fun at this blot on someone’s legal history, but to present a question that applies to Trump and, by implication, every single Trump supporter who’s running around with their eyes bulging and their hair on fire:

Prior to the Election, what were your criteria for accepting that Joe Biden won the election?

If the response is

Well, none. We couldn’t lose!

Then it’s time to ask them when they abandoned the principles of the United States and embraced the principles of the Chinese Communist Party, where it’s seize power and never let go, laws be damned.

It’s a question I plan to use if a MAGA hat lover ever accosts me.