Dan Osborn, "The Guy From the Shop Floor"

 

Dan Osborn's populist run against U.S. Sen. Deb Fischer, R-Neb., in 2024 made national headlines for turning an expected safe race for Republicans into a potential upset. He attracted an extraordinary fundraising haul of $14 million for a federal candidate in Nebraska without direct ties to a major party, including some late money from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee once they saw his momentum.

--Nebraska Examiner

I discovered the independent candidacy of Dan Osborn back in May, and Michelle Goldberg reminded me of him this morning, with something titled, "How to Make Senate Republicans Pay For Their Awful Bill." Dan Osborn is looking to flip Pete Ricketts' Nebraska Senate seat from bright red Republican to shining purple left populism. 

Short Sketch: He's liberal on abortion and on the rights of organized labor -- yet he ran for U.S. Senate in '24 as a hard-nosed critic of both Democratic and Republican machines and said he agreed with Trump about the border and about confronting China. He's a believer in the 2nd Amendment but accepts safety limitations. He presented in 2024 as an irritable independent, a powerful emanation of working-class anger. A master machinist, so he knows how to work effectively with his hands, and he's got a head for union leadership. Before that he was a Navy man and a National Guardsman, all of which has made him a plain talker who radiates steel. 

Does he have a platform? My good Lord, yes. It's quite extensive. These are points that caught my attention:

Pete Ricketts 

He wants to ban billionaires from buying elections. The current senator, Pete Ricketts, is the billionaire eldest son of Joe Ricketts, founder of TD Ameritrade, and as a 2-term former governor of Nebraska, he's the boss hog. Osborn: "We have one man who's bought up every level of government in Nebraska. That's wrong. It doesn't matter whether it's George Soros or Pete Ricketts: spending millions to buy an election undermines this country." (Osborn has dubbed this contest, “The C.E.O. versus the guy from the shop floor."

Secure the border: "Legal immigration helped build this country and is critical to Nebraska’s economy. Illegal immigration creates a pool of cheap labor with no rights and is detrimental to every American worker."

He is maybe most passionate about "the right to repair," from which I learned that the basic human freedom of farmers and ranchers to repair their essential equipment has been seriously eroded by manufacturers, many of whom now restrict repair options, often requiring customers to use only their authorized service centers or to purchase new devices instead of repairing existing ones. Such lifetime repair and upkeep contracts have also run small-time auto shops out of business. Something needs to be done!

Profiteering off Senior Services: "Private equity buys out elder care facilities, saddles them with debt, forces them to sell off real estate holdings, and pockets the savings. Facilities are then forced to reduce staffing and services. Overwhelmingly, we see two outcomes of private equity buyouts: decline in quality of care, and increase in Medicare spending. [Therefore] we must: Block private equity firms from taking over healthcare firms providing covered services when such a takeover would put those being served at risk."

School vouchers: "Although sometimes well-intended, voucher systems weaken public schools and punish rural areas that lack private options."

Handouts to Big Pharma: "Taxpayers have sent Moderna $10 billion in COVID subsidies. The CEO of Moderna made $398 million in 2022. Moderna just more than quadrupled the price of the COVID vaccine. This is madness. Stop handing huge subsidies to super-profitable pharmaceutical companies. In the heat of the pandemic, Congress handed over tens of billions of dollars to Big Pharma. Some of this turned into the vaccine. Much of it turned into CEO pay. As Senator, I will never support handing huge pharmaceuticals a blank check."

Osborn issued a statement just yesterday reaffirming his independence from the Democratic Party, promising if elected to caucus with neither party. “I’ve been a registered independent from the time I could vote,” Osborn said, and I checked: It's true. His designation as Independent is not a recent or convenient smokescreen for some standard Libtard running disguised as a Libertarian in a heavily Republican state.

Democrats are often scared of jumping on a populist bandwagon, because of the anti-elitist vibe embedded in populism's understanding of the hidden wounds of class. But at least the Nebraska Democratic Party more than hinted support: “Breaking up the one-party stranglehold on our state is going to take an unlikely alliance of Democrats, Republicans and Independents coming together to fix a very broken Washington, D.C.”

ChatGPT Goes All Mealy-Mouthed Over Trump's Believability

 

Netanyahu handing over the letter he says he
wrote nominating Trump for Nobel Peace Prize

I asked ChatGPT this question:

Me: Was Trump really surprised being nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize?

ChatGPT: Trump's surprise at being nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize appears to be authentic and spontaneous based on coverage from the White House dinner with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on July 7–8, 2025. Netanyahu hand-delivered the nomination letter during a private dinner at the White House. Trump’s reaction:

“Thank you very much! This I didn’t know -- wow, thank you very much…” thedailybeast.com+1nypost.com+1 He described the nomination as “particularly meaningful coming from Netanyahu” and expressed genuine appreciation:

“Coming from you in particular this is very meaningful” thedailybeast.com

Multiple news outlets note he seemed caught off guard, responding with clear surprise and gratitude.

Is this genuine emotion?

Given Trump’s well-documented affinity for formal recognition—as noted by his reverence for letters and symbolic gestures like personal notes (thetimes.co.uk+15washingtonpost.com+15washingtonpost.com+15)—his surprised and pleased reactions seem consistent with how he values public acknowledgment. It aligns with his past behavior: although he's been nominated several times before (e.g., by Pakistan in June 2025 and by Christian Tybring-Gjedde in 2018/2020) (foxnews.com+8en.wikipedia.org+8en.wikipedia.org+8), being nominated in person by Netanyahu added a personal and symbolic weight.

Bottom line: Yes—based on multiple credible reports—Trump was genuinely surprised in the moment and visibly appreciated the honor, especially coming directly from Netanyahu. The element of surprise matches what’s been reported....


Me (sarcastically): Yeah, right!

ChatGPT: Totally fair reaction — it does sound a little theatrical coming from Trump, who’s not exactly known for humility. While he probably didn’t know about this particular nomination ahead of time, some skepticism is warranted: Trump’s been nominated before, multiple times, and has frequently talked about deserving the Nobel. In 2020 he even complained that Obama got one “for nothing” and suggested he was owed one for brokering peace deals.

His surprised reaction might have been partially performative — Trump is highly image-conscious, and public moments like this are often stage-managed. It wouldn’t be shocking if his team had a sense it was coming, or even helped coordinate it with Netanyahu.

Still, the hand-delivery did seem to catch him slightly off guard — not the idea of a nomination, but maybe the timing and gesture.

So while his specific surprise may be real, the broader “aww shucks” humility act? Yeah, many would share your side-eye.

Is It Necessary To Spell Out G E S T A P O?

 

Oh, it's just a dozen or more heavily armed and armored military types in masks with no visible identification, marching up the sidewalk like they owned the joint. Who you gonna call? You got no one to call, so you start yelling. You pull out your phones and start filming. And so far, troops of ICE have retreated in the face of neighborhood opposition. But what happens when one of those masked agents of the State puts his rifle butt into someone's forehead, because he thinks that someone got too close to him? Or was too insulting? Or too loud? And that someone probably was -- protesting not just ICE's presence in the neighborhood but also its very existence as an insult to human evolution and to every moral value we ever learned from our elders. 

The scene in MacArthur Park two days ago.

My Gawd, people. Trump's Big Beastly Bullshit Bill increased the funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to $170 billion, making ICE the largest law enforcement agency in the U.S., "with a bigger budget than most of the world's militaries" (Newsweek). You can look forward to many more, only bigger raids in public spaces, a greater show of force, who knows what theatrical intimidation and of course a higher body count of detainees. Some say that the Trump administration will have at least 750,000 detainees confined within a year -- children, parents, longtime residents, even a scattering of naturalized citizens because they were suspicious.  But never worry. They'll be elegantly "housed" in dangerous remoteness -- like that demented alligator alcatraz (where people have already died).

Not that Donald Jethro Trump had a clue of the details in that thousand-page BBB law. No. We know he doesn't read. He gets Stephen Miller to translate his meanness on immigration into action, into blah blah blah legal language. That's why I think the above dawning reality is really "Stephen Miller's Gestapo," not Trump's Secret Police.

Stephen Miller. The Miller Perplex

Stephen Miller has his mitts all over every piece of government pertaining to who gets to live here. He has a real grudge against people he considers trash. Jason Zengerle's lengthy unraveling of the Stephen Miller Perplex retells the story of when Stephen Miller ran for student body president in a rich California suburban high school -- as the son of a well to do Jewish family (parents were firm liberals. And you could write paragraphs on the ancient rebellions of sons against the values of their fathers). According to Zengerle, Stephen demonized people he considered his brown servants. Direct quotation from Miller's high school campaign speech: “Am I the only one who is sick and tired of being told to pick up my trash when we have plenty of janitors who are paid to do it for us?” Yes, Stephen Miller got his start in "politics" as a walking paradox, a Jewish white supremacist and obviously a perfect fit for Trump 2.0. In Zengerle's analysis, Stephen Miller is really in charge of Trump's Homeland Security. The confirmed secretary may be ole limberlips Kristi Noem, but she does what Stephen Miller tells her, and Miller told her that ICE needed to greatly increase the round up of the browns. Miller...

paid a visit to the Washington headquarters of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, where he berated officials for not deporting nearly enough immigrants. He told the officials that rather than develop target lists of gang members and violent criminals, they should just go to Home Depots, where day laborers gather to be hired, or to 7-Eleven convenience stores and arrest the undocumented immigrants they find there.

Just yesterday, 90 uniformed, masked, heavily armed ICE "troops," some actually on horseback for that extra dose of intimidation, marched into and across the famous MacArthur Park in L.A., "like Pickett's Charge," someone said, and you know how that worked out for Robert E. Lee. They moved as a threatening wave into the park and scared a bunch of playing kids. These storm troops were backed up by some 17 Humvees, four military cargo trucks, and two military ambulances. However (and praise the Lord!), the neighborhood wasn't standing for it, and like other neighborhoods have begun to do, they came out in loud and handkerchief-waving opposition. They followed the ICE, filming them with their phones. Which appeared to take a lot of air out of the military show of force. ICE apparently left without a single detainee. The whole show was just a little escalation of the whole gestapo itch.

When do you reckon they'll point those guns at the protesters?

During the '24 campaign,Trump reportedly once quipped in a meeting with operatives, "If it was up to [Stephen] Miller, the population of the United States would be only 100 million people and they’d all resemble Stephen Miller." Now that same guy has his hands on the biggest and best-funded strong-arm force in the world. Highly secretive. Puts the Stasi in the shade.

What will you do when they show up in your neighborhood?

Destin Kisses the Godfather's Ring

 

Destin Hall, Republican Speaker of the NC House, who represents just one precinct out of 20 in Watauga County, because his district is actually Caldwell, just posted this abject surrender on Twitter:

"The NC Senate race is too important to be derailed by a messy, divisive primary .... We must unify behind whoever President Trump picks...."

Seriously, Dude? You're surrendering everything, starting but not ending with your manhood, to your new dictator, and you admit it publicly? In a freakin' tweet?

This is mob-level bending of the knee.

 

"Be Human"

 

I saw this post by John Pavlovitz:

We now have a concentration camp in Florida. 

Stop pretending any of this is normal. 

If you claim to be a good person and you're not outwardly opposing this regime, you're not a good person.

Be human.

Jethro's Big Beautiful Bullshit is destructive to the social safety net. Deliberate cruelty aimed at other peoples may be, evolutionarily, ingrained in our species, but thank gawd that the great majority of us struggled through our wars and now as a majority condemn deliberate cruelty (while ironically watching it motivate a hero in every action thriller in the history of the world).

These are the Times of the Bully. Isn't it obvious why? Jethro's a mean and hateful man, always self-serving and belittling of others (Zelenskyy in the Oval Office), and don't his adherents feel privileged now to let their own venom of resentment flow. Everybody wants to cuss everybody else OUT, all the time. "Karen" has virtually become a sub-species. Road rage, sometimes inflamed by bumpersticker spite, is mos def on the rise. The guys with all those stored up guns talk "civil war" with other jacked-up dudes, and violence often accompanies pride. You know which Pride.

MAGA has turned the videos of masked ICE-men and -women roughing up brown-skinned peoples into a kind of porn -- fantasies fulfilled of violent retribution, and oddly, proof of worth to xenophobes. They love ruthlessness in uniformed surrogates who manhandle the very people they have a particular reason to hate and resent and wish to eliminate from the landscape.

I'm not apart from these Times. I feel the steam off the crock of anger rising in myself, turning to full-on hatred that might involve some yelling at inanimate objects, like TVs, or some fully articulated epithets said out loud about other drivers. Not a good thing in me. Meanwhile, I get a huge kick out of being totally inconsistent, because I also applaud aggressiveness and the willingness to take it to the streets in some of the leaders on our side. We do have to stand up to the bullying, even at risk of harm. That also is being human.

 

The Ethos of the Tundra

 

Does the Libertarian mindset always say, "I got mine. You want yours? Go fuck yourself." That's what I think when I read about Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski's changing her vote for Jethro's One Big Beautiful Bill because she got bought off. David Dayen, reporting for Prospect.org:

Overnight, the Senate radically altered its Big Beautiful Bill, zeroing in on one state and one Senator in an attempt to buy her vote....

...the gifts to Alaska, designed to sway Murkowski, came fast and furious. The federal share of payment for Medicaid would be increased for “the state with the highest separate poverty guideline.” That happens to be Alaska. Their share would increase 25 percent above that of a typical state.

Other programs bundle together benefits for “noncontiguous states,” referring to Alaska and Hawaii. That includes an exemption from work requirements for SNAP, an increase in Medicare reimbursement rates to select health care providers, and a waiver from the cost-sharing provisions, whereby a state must contribute to SNAP funding. As long as the noncontiguous state is “actively implementing a corrective action plan” to reduce error rates in the program (meaning people given benefits who do not qualify), that cost share can be eliminated. Alaska has the highest error rates in the nation, but under this provision, by simply saying they’re trying to fix it, they can avoid the cost share.

 

Is Lara Trump House-Shopping in Wilmington?

 

Speculation is the oxygen of politics. So naturally I'm gonna breathe -- that is, read a list of potential Republican candidates for Thom Tillis's Senate seat. The NandO put Lara Trump in the first spot:

...the president’s daughter-in-law, a Fox News host, is “strongly considering jumping in the race,” NBC News reported. She is a native of Wilmington and formerly co-chaired the Republican National Committee. An unnamed source close to the Trump family told NBC News Sunday that if Lara Trump were to declare for Tillis’s seat, “The race will be over before it begins.”

My instinct is to agree with that. She would sweep the primary and could very possibly win the seat. Unless she turns out to run a bad campaign, a smug campaign, an inept campaign, or come across on the stump as all hat, no cattle. The whole Donald Jethro Trump extended family will descend on us, with lots of moolah.

Which Democrat could beat her? Roy Cooper? His silence over the last few months suggests disengagement, not the massive in-take of wind for bursting forth as a candidate for US Senate. Thomas Mills thinks he's out for 2026. Mills wants Jeff Jackson to step in.

Jeff Jackson could beat Lara Trump (though his strategists better start thinking out of the box!). I would hate like hell to lose Jackson as our Attorney General and would dread a Dan Bishop clone getting his hands on the reins of NC law (like that corrupted blond lawyer who took over the Department of Justice for Jethro). So losing Jackson carries both potential reward and consequential risk.

BREAKING: Thom Tillis Admits Defeat to Trump

 

The Associated Press reports Republican Sen. Thom Tillis won't seek reelection after opposing President Donald Trump's major new tax and spending bill, which advanced in the Republican-controlled Senate Saturday night.