Rant

John Bull farting merrily in the face of a portrait of King George III in response to the 1798 suspension of habeas corpus rights in Britain (passed by Parliament to allow the king to order the arrest without evidence for sedition of the members of English Jacobin clubs during the war with France) while a neighbor accuses him of treason, as President Trump accused The New York Times's David Sanger of treason last week for suggesting that Trump's Iran war might not be a brilliant victory, at least not yet. Caricature via Wikipedia by Richard Newton, who was not arrested for the work, though he sadly died that year of typhus, at the age of 21.

JD Vance argues that Democrats don't actually believe in "No Kings" because they didn't protest King Charles 🥴🥴🥴

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) May 19, 2026 at 2:31 PM

Uh, no. Charles III isn't the kind of king we have in mind. The last time Britain had a king comparable to Trump, particularly in the line of trying to bypass the parliamentary power of the purse and making spending decisions on everything from disaster relief to public architecture without consulting the legislature, especially imposing taxes without their consent as Trump keeps trying to do with his stupid tariffs, they cut off his head. 

Notes on Platner

Note: Revised this quite a bit for the Substack version, too lazy to redo it here,

All-electric zero-emission Freightliner Cascadia 2025, by Daimler Truck North America, via Beverage Industry.

Over the weekend, presumptive Maine Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner released his "Take Back American Power" energy plan, attacking the ferocious rise in energy prices that Americans including Mainers have been suffering with over the last couple of years for heating, driving, and running farm equipment: he offers to cut prices by eliminating the federal gas and diesel tax; subjecting oil companies to the windfall profits tax proposed by the Biden administration in 2022 and currently pushed under the leadership of Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse and Rep. Ro Khanna, which is supposed to encourage them to stop price gouging; and inviting states to freeze or lower their electrical utility rates in return for money to finance low-cost clean-energy infrastructure projects (carrying on the legacy of the Biden Infrastructure and Jobs Act of 2021). 

And a bunch of other stuff, including a genuinely socialist-sounding supplement to the Biden Energy Infrastructure Reinvestment Program but bypassing the private capital, which

would issue debt backed by the full faith and credit of the federal government, and partner with state lending authorities to provide cheap capital directly to utilities, rural electric co-operatives, public energy authorities, and other developers of low-risk clean energy projects. Developers of fully permitted, shovel-ready transmission lines or offshore wind projects, for example, could tap the Infrastructure Fund at rates close to the federal funds benchmark – considerably lower than their borrowing costs on private debt and equity markets – and pass tens of billions in savings on to ratepayers.

That's an Elizabeth Warren proposal, and the most interesting thing in the list to me, though I'm pretty enthusiastic about the windfall profits tax (per barrel of oil, charging 50% of the difference between the prices of the current year and the previous year), which has a realistic prospect of passing if we elect a Democratic Congress in November, which is of course more likely if Platner takes the Maine seat from Concerned Susan Collins.

The canceling of the federal gas and diesel tax, in contrast, seems more than a bit off target, given the tax's aim of discouraging fossil fuel use while funding clean energy projects. Whitehouse-Khanna have a better proposal with their version of the windfall profits tax, offering cash rebates to everybody (including nondrivers). Besides, the federal gas tax is apparently a pretty modest part of the cost of driving, substantially less than state and local gas taxes, to say nothing of what drivers have been paying on top of that for Trump's Iran war, per this NBC report (whole chart at the link):

Gerrymandering for Democracy

Michigan's notorious old 14th District (2013-2023), drawn after the 2010 census to squeeze two districts' worth of Democratic voters into one district. I guess that would be fine with the Supreme Court since it was partisan in intent, though it also concentrated the state's Black, Arab, and Bangladeshi voters, but the newly founded Michigan Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission got rid of it after 2020, creating a map that has divided the House delegation into 6 Democratic and 7 Republican seats.

Somewhat weird perspective on the consequences of the Supreme Court's ruling in Callais v. Louisiana and the "race to the bottom" it has sparked, in a piece by The New York Times's Nick Corasaniti, who was also on the radio talking about it the other morning:

In Florida, Republicans could hold 24 of 28 congressional seats after they approved a new map this week that was drawn in anticipation of the Supreme Court’s decision. The math is stark: In a state where Vice President Kamala Harris won 43 percent of the vote two years ago, the G.O.P. could control 86 percent of House seats. 

Democratic state lawmakers mentioned that lopsided statistic often on Wednesday as they tried unsuccessfully to stop the new map.

“You think that this is just about preserving a Republican majority in the midterm,” State Representative Fentrice Driskell of Tampa, the House minority leader, told her Republican colleagues. “I stopped by to tell you today that you are destroying democracy with this vote.”

Yet Democrats did something similar in Virginia last week, most likely giving their party 10 of the state’s 11 Congressional seats, or 90 percent of the congressional delegation, in a state where Mr. Trump won 46 percent of the vote.

Like, "Yet the Ukrainian military has been doing something similar in Russian-occupied territory and even Russia itself, targeting Russian forces with all the ferocity they can muster." Don't they know there's a war on?

Trump Administration War on Housing

 

From Don Moynihan's Substack, urging folks to submit official comments to the Federal Register on the proposed work requirements rule for federal housing rental assistance by midnight tonight if they want it to be counted, here (I'd advise reading Herd's and Moynihan's post, as I did, before preparing your own—it's full of valuable facts and links).  Don't think I've made such a formal move before, and I feel pretty good about it.  I'm failing to do much for today's May Day General Strike, though my shopping will be very limited, and I don't suppose this is "substantive" enough to get a return comment, but I'm happy to have added at least to the numbers. 

I'm writing to express concern about the HUD's proposed rule for imposing "work requirements" as they are called on beneficiaries of housing rental assistance, that their effect will be to make the ongoing housing crisis even worse than it already is. There seems to be a perception at HUD that there is a large segment of the population that needs rental assistance because they are too lazy to work, but nothing could be further from the truth: better than half are elderly and/or disabled adults, and most of the rest are adults with children who can only work if they have expensive and hard-to-find childcare. Most of these do in fact work, but have difficulty nevertheless, because the real problem is that their wages are too low and their rents are too high to allow them to find a place that won't cost them more than 30% of their monthly income (which is what the existing program asks them to pay, subsidizing the rest--it's not giving them apartments for free, it's making them affordable).

The requirements that already exist in filling out paperwork for the program--proving your age, your income, your ability or inability to work, the ability or inability to take care of your children, etc.--is already so burdensome that three out of four people qualified for the benefit don't get it. Moreover, the authorities are badly understaffed and the wait times for receiving benefits stretch out for years in many states, and many landlords refuse to accept the terms of the program, and the program thus fails a large majority of those citizens who need it most. Adding a "work requirement" will only make that failure worse, as so many of those have multiple  irregular or "gig economy" jobs that are unpredictable and sometimes very difficult to document.

This is exactly what happened when Arkansas adopted work requirements in its Medicaid program: 95 percent of those targeted by the program were already employed or should have been exempted due to disability, but the work requirements in the state reduced Medicaid enrollment by 12 percentage points and at the same time failed to increase labor force participation, and majorities of Arkansans who lost their Medicaid coverage ended up facing serious medical debt, delaying care, or skipping medications, because they couldn't afford healthcare. A rule like the proposed, expanded to all 50 states, will only increase homelessness and probably joblessness as well (it's a lot harder to hold a job when you're living on the street). Children, who have nothing to do with the problem, will suffer the most.