Hey Issa, party’s over thanks to trump, now get lost

Congressman Darrell Issa, who’s made it through three districts in Southern California in his years of peddling a bundle of arrogant lies, is officially on the chopping block for the upcoming election in the 48th Congressional District.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has added Rep. Issa’s congressional district to its list of California targets. This move comes after voter-approved (65-35) Proposition 50 redistricted (on a temporary basis) the State’s Congressional map to make Republican-held seats more competitive.

Under the terms of this redistricting, the 48th District swung from a 12 point GOP voter registration advantage to a more than 4 point Democratic one. The shift in borders alone wasn’t enough to add Issa’s district change to the DCCC’s “2026 Districts in Play,” contests, where dedicated resources are used in hopes of flipping the House of Representatives.

President Donald Trump’s sagging approval levels and outsized wins by Democratic candidates in special and local elections also contributed to the decision. On Tuesday, Miami voters broke a three decades long GOP streak by overwhelmingly picking Democrat Eileen Huggins as mayor.

Issa, whose lack of empathy and gruff demeanor have defined him politically, has been a staunch Trump ally. He gave up his seat in the 49th District in 2020, facing changing demographics along with persistent activist protests. Recently Issa was rumored to be considering running for the House of Representatives in Texas, but he apparently decided it was too big a jump.

Some of the same people who dogged Issa in the 49th, along with other North County Indivisible activists, are holding weekly protests outside the Congressman’s Escondido office.

Those weekly protests (which include a food drive benefitting Interfaith Community Services in Escondido the last Friday of the month) are soliciting for additional participants via an online site with a lead graphic saying “No MAGA in San Diego.”

Rep. Darrell Issa, with all due respect to The Drifters, goes up on the roof to surveil protestors at his Vista office in 2018./Facebook

Donald Trump’s political burdens are Darrell Issa’s, and the primary election next spring provides an excellent opportunity to highlight issues as the President stumbles through his tour in support of GOP candidates.

On Tuesday, Pennsylvania voters got to see the grand opening of the Trump show, packed into a casino hall. The 97 minute speech, which was supposed to focus on affordability issues, spiraled into racist taunts, conspiracy theories, and economic falsehoods. Resurrecting a remark that he once denied making, he told the crowd how he’d once asked why the United States takes people from “shithole countries” instead of places like Norway or Sweden.

• “Why can’t we have some people from Norway, Sweden, just a few. Let us have a few. From Denmark … send us some nice people. Do you mind? But we always take people from Somalia, places that are a disaster, right? Filthy, dirty, disgusting, ridden with crime. The only thing they’re good at is going after ships.”

Miles Taylor, who frequented the Oval Office representing the Department of Homeland Security during the first Trump administration, commented on the racism in the speech, pointing out that the “private” persona of the President had finally merged with his “public” persona in that speech.

• And that matters, because the language has always been the policy. You cannot systematically target majority-Black and Muslim countries for exclusion from America without first convincing your audience that those places are “filthy” and “disgusting.” You cannot normalize mass deportation without framing entire populations as contaminants. What’s more, you cannot argue for “reverse migration” without first convincing people that America is being polluted by “scum” and “trash.”
• Mainstream Trump supporters have clung to the idea that his racism has been inflated by critics or distorted by enemies. Hell, I even shared that view at one point. Before I entered the Trump administration and saw it firsthand, I thought that the man’s purported racism must be an exaggeration. But last night, the president personally removed that last refuge and any doubt. He authenticated himself.
• Years from now, history will not debate whether Donald Trump harbored bigoted views. He settled that question in his own voice. The only question that will remain is whether the American people — with eyes fully open — let such a man define them. And on that account, the jury is still out.

There’s no doubt at this point in the process that the President is unhinged, and his administration is clearly corrupt. Republicans in general are about to hand Democrats a winning campaign issue, as the support for insurance premiums under the Affordable Care Act will expire without even the possibility of an alternative.

Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear, newly elected as chair of the Democratic Governors Association, reacted to the Trump speech:

• “If Donald Trump wants to say that affordability is a hoax, if he wants to say that the economy is perfect, I hope he goes to every battleground state.”

The other issue coming down the pike should be a predictable split within elected Republicans once Trump makes it official that he’s telling Ukraine to fuck off. It will be interesting to see if Issa, ever the war hawk, sticks with the President.

If Issa takes the expected course in campaigning, he’ll limit his public exposure, meeting with supporters behind closed doors. In public, we can expect the usual drool about crime, gays, and guns.

There are currently 11 Democrats who have declared for next year’s D48 primary. The DCCC won’t likely jump in behind a candidate until the general election. Ammar Campa-Najjar and Marni von Wilpert are the candidates with the highest name recognition and polling results.

President Donald Trump, left, greets Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., in the Diplomatic Reception Room of the White House in Washington, Monday, Aug. 14, 2017, before an event to sign a memorandum calling for a trade investigation of China/Alex Brandon

In the meantime, protest, protest, protest! Steadily noisier crowds at Issa office in Escondido will drive home his weaknesses. We all owe the activists (largely with Indivisible groups) who’ve kept Issa name as symbolic of things wrong with the administration a REALLY BIG THANK YOU.

USA Included on Danish Threat Assessment List for the First Time by Miriam Lauvfoss at Conflingo News

• The United States has, for the first time, been identified as a negative factor in Denmark’s official threat assessment, according to a report by Berlingske. Thomas Ahrenkiel, head of the Danish Defence Intelligence Service, stated that Denmark is “balancing between two poles” in the current security environment.
• The intelligence report notes that the United States is now leveraging its economic and technological power as a means of influence, including towards its allies and partners. This development comes ahead of the Defence Intelligence Service’s scheduled release of its annual threat assessment report on Wednesday.
• This marks a significant shift in Denmark’s security outlook, as the United States has traditionally been regarded as a close ally. The inclusion reflects evolving international dynamics and the increasing complexity of global relations, where even longstanding partnerships are subject to reassessment in light of changing policies and strategies.

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Scientists Thought Parkinson’s Was in Our Genes. It Might Be in the Water by David Ferry at WIRED

• Most of the conditions we worry about, instead, stem from a complex interaction between our genes and our environment. Genetics loads the gun, as former National Institutes of Health head Francis Collins put it, but the environment pulls the trigger. Rather than revealing the genetic origins of disease, genomics has done the opposite. Only 10 percent of breast cancer cases are purely genetic. Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease? Rheumatoid arthritis? Coronary heart disease? All hover around 20 percent. The primary driver of disease is considerably more terrestrial: It’s the environment, stupid.
• Yet only 1 percent of the roughly 350,000 chemicals in use in the United States have ever been tested for safety. In its 55-year history, the EPA has banned or restricted about a dozen (by contrast, the EU has banned more than 2,000). Paraquat, the pesticide that appears to cause Parkinson’s in farmworkers, has been banned in Europe and China but remains available in the US. And in January, a month after the EPA’s ban on TCE was finalized, the Trump administration moved to undo it, even as new evidence emerged of Parkinson’s clusters in the rust belt, where exposure to trichloroethylene is high.
• It’s easy to mock the MAHAs and the TikTok trad moms making their own food coloring, but the chemical regulatory system in America does not inspire confidence. No one really knows what the chemicals we’re interacting with every day are doing to our bodies.

Issa in 2013 holding up a piece of paper that he said was coming close to “a smoking gun” in his IRS ‘scandal’ that was debunked completely/Facebook

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The Real “Digital Divide” by Jill Filipovic

• Educators report that students are behind, that eighth graders can’t get through a novel, that high schoolers and even college students cannot comprehend the kind of writing that was assigned for decades, that students are showing up at college having never read a whole book. Public schools now rely heavily on screens in the classroom thanks to school-issued laptops that aren’t just used for typing up papers, but as replacements for textbooks, with PDF readings sent via app. Kindergartners are learning to count via YouTube video. Wifi-connected devices of course allow students to spend class time scrolling, chatting, playing, watching videos, and otherwise distracting themselves (and who can blame them? Put a screen in front of me and I do the same thing).
• One difference, though, is that highly-educated and highly-resourced parents are fighting back. Some of them are putting their kids into private schools where screens are less common, and while it seems even an expensive private education doesn’t necessarily mean a screen-free one, elite private institutions are currently grappling with the question of how to deal with phones, laptops, and AI – and I suspect that at these institutions, we’re going to see a shift away from new technologies and a return to more traditional education processes (textbooks, hand-written notes, blue book essays). In the homes of parents who have gotten the memo on screens, I think this current generation of very little kids are going to grow up with far less time on iPads and online than the poor internet-addled Zoomers did. But the memo about screens has not been universally circulated. In a lot of families, there’s no easy way to implement it. I suspect that the nation’s least-resourced schools, which tend to serve the nation’s least-resourced families and have the country’s most over-worked teachers, will be among the last to move away from the tech tools we know are not serving children well. Which will mean, I suspect, that kids who already have many advantages will see the gap between them and their less-lucky peers grow.