[Preface: As a personal note, I realize that this is a day of national remembrance, but I am mostly going to leave it to others to mark the significance of this anniversary. Earlier this year, while on vacation, I found myself near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, so I went to visit the 9/11 memorial there. It is a somber place and a grim reminder to what took place there. There is nothing really to see, just a field and the edge of some woods, with no visible scars or other indicators of the deaths which happened there. All of that was cleaned up before the memorial was even built, of course. But the monument itself, while low-key, is indeed impressive and quite solemn, and it is worth visiting for anyone who finds themselves crossing the Allegheny Mountains on the Pennsylvania Turnpike.]

 

We're going to begin today with a record-setting number. Today, the nationwide average of the price of diesel fuel hit a new high of $6.05 per gallon. It's the first time in American history that diesel has sold for more than six bucks a gallon, in fact. The price of diesel has risen around 20 cents within the past week, which is going to be felt by everyone. Your car or truck may not run on diesel, but you know what does? Farmers' tractors and all their other farm equipment. And the trucks and trains that transport all the food farmers produce -- as well as just about everything else you buy -- to your local stores and supermarkets.

Meanwhile, gasoline prices have also never been this high in the period just after Labor Day. They've also risen noticeably in the past week and now stand at $4.30 per gallon. That's not quite as high as they were at the beginning of the summer (when they topped $4.50), but it's high enough to be painful for millions of drivers. The worldwide price of oil is over $100 per barrel again (even briefly hitting $110 today). And all of these prices seem to be headed upward with no end in sight. An analyst at GasBuddy.com summed up the situation rather nicely:

with diesel prices $2.25/gal higher than a year ago, businesses are paying $284 million more per day on diesel, while gasoline stands $1.02/gal higher than a year ago, consumers are paying $377 million more per day, adding up to a *$4.63* billion additional surcharge every week

Donald Trump has now taken a remarkably lackadaisical attitude towards all of this. His basic stance is now: "Who cares? It'll solve itself at some point, somehow." Think that's an exaggeration? Here is how he addressed the problem when asked about it this week: "Right after the election, oil prices are going to be tumbling downward." He repeated this when asked again, predicting the war will end "immediately after the election." Earlier this week, Trump called the war "small potatoes." And here's how his secretary of Energy brushed off the main stated U.S. objective for the war this week: "There may not be a nuclear agreement [with Iran]... [a deal] may await a next administration in Iran. We simply don't know."

This is all pretty alarmingly passive, you will note. Both of these quotes show in a remarkable way that Iran is in total control of the situation right now. Meaning we aren't. Apparently, we're just a bystander to the whole process.

It was not reported by many U.S. news outlets, but this week Iran launched an attack on an American military base in Jordan that destroyed one A-10 Thunderbolt warplane and damaged "roughly eight F-15s." This, despite the American forces launching "more than 30 Patriot missiles" in defense. A little over one month ago, a defense-oriented think tank estimated that the U.S. stockpile of Patriots had shrunk from a pre-war high of 2,330 to only 759-827 remaining. If we're using them up at the rate of over 30 per Iranian attack, you can see how dire the situation truly is (and is going to get, in the near future).

Iran also reportedly was bold enough to lob a few missiles at an American aircraft carrier, which is a new development in this war. The Iranians seem to be getting bolder, while we seem to be in a reactive crouch. We sank or disabled a number of Iranian oil tankers in response to all of this, but we certainly don't seem to be in any kind of control over events in the region.

Of course, none of this was mentioned much at the Trump-a-Palooza midterm Republican convention in Dallas this week. Trump promised -- for the umpteenth time -- that we would "win the war" at some future unspecified date. He seems to have forgotten the fact that he has already declared victory ("We won the war") multiple times now. And then gas prices will magically come back down to less than two bucks a gallon, of course. Also not mentioned during the convention (unless you count Trump blatantly lying and gaslighting about it) is Trump's rather dismal record of making good on his promises to bring prices way down across the board.

About that convention... the best commentary we read this week came from Salon (the whole article is worth reading, but this one phrase stood out for us):

In light of all this, it's obvious what the Republican National Committee, which is nicknaming the convention "Trumpapalooza," hopes to achieve: enough ego gratification for Trump to calm him. Perhaps they hope to buy enough peace to last for a few days, maybe even weeks, to focus on the upcoming midterm elections. Either way, it's a very expensive and public equivalent of giving a pacifier to an infant.

Sounds about right. The convention had no other real purpose, after all. Trump spoke both nights. None of the other speeches were worth noticing, consisting largely of: "Democrats are communists! Be very afraid! The commies are coming for you and will take from you everything you own! Ahhhh!" One man stood up while Ted Cruz was speaking and called out "He should be shot!" for a number of Democrats Cruz named in his speech. So far, we haven't heard of a single Republican denouncing such rhetoric from among their own ranks.

Before the Trump-a-Palooza started, many media outlets had some fun counting up all the Republican politicians who weren't going to attend. It was a very long list, apparently -- which isn't too surprising when you consider that they were all charged a whopping $25,000 for the privilege of giving Trump his pacifier.

Trump said some truly bizarre and outlandish things during his first speech (which, as usual was just chock full of lies), including repeatedly insisting (in classic "Who are you going to believe, me or your lyin' eyes?" fashion) that the arena was packed to the rafters with people (spoiler alert: it wasn't, there were plenty of empty seats, especially in the upper decks). But our favorite idiotic moment was the point when he proudly proclaimed that he had made English the official language of the United States, right before he started denouncing the "mutilization" of children (he was trying to refer to gender-reassignment surgery). For those of you scratching your heads -- no, "mutilization" is not an actual word in the English language, no matter how many times Trump repeated it during his speech. It is, to be strictly accurate, a verbal mutilation of English.

But Trump's big news from his convention appearances was his outlandish promise (which will never be fulfilled) to send out a whopping $5,000 to "every adult citizen" in the country after the election -- but only if the Republicans win enough seats to retain control of the House and Senate. Safety warning: please do not hold your breath waiting for this free money to arrive in your mailbox, because it is never going to.

Remember Elon Musk's chainsawing of the federal government? He proclaimed he was going to save $2 trillion from the federal budget. And then Trump doubled down on this outlandish nonsense by promising that he would refund 20 percent of this money to every American. This, of course, never happened (Musk fell woefully short of his promise, and Trump never lifted a finger to send out any money at all).

Last November, Trump bragged about how much money his wonderful tariffs were bringing in to the government, and explicitly promised "at least $2,000" would be refunded to every American, as a sort of tariff dividend. That money never arrived either, because Trump conveniently forgot he had ever promised any such thing.

His recent promise of $5,000 in free money to everyone is going to be the next big promise on this list of things that never actually appear, plain and simple. It isn't even popular among Trump's own Republicans, since actually making good on this promise would cost anywhere from $1.2 trillion to $1.5 trillion. The ultraconservative National Review trashed the idea in an article titled: "Trump Breaks Glass, Joins Socialists, Embraces Bribery." It's a fair point to make, especially after all the fulminating and frothing at the mouth all the Republican speakers did during the convention warning darkly against all the evils of socialism.

And Trump being Trump, "there's a tweet for that." In 2012, he darkly warned against using promises of free money to try to win elections, saying: "Don't let Obama buy the election by handing out unlimited free money to states."

The ultimate insult (by Trump's own standard) for all of this was that the ratings for Trump-a-Palooza were absolutely dismal. He got a smaller audience on Fox News than their usual programming for the night regularly gets. The broadcast networks didn't air a single minute of his speech. And the most boneheaded move of all (in a very boneheaded event) was to have scheduled the two nights in competition with the first two games of the N.F.L. season. As one Texas politician famously said a while back during a debate: "Oops."

Tossing out red meat to the base while absolutely refusing to even make the attempt to appeal to undecided or independent voters turned into a very boring and dismal failure of a national political convention.

Let's see... as usual, there was a flurry of craziness emanating from the White House this week, so we'll just run down a few of the most laughable items to close on. Not satisfied with his attempt to rename Lake Ontario to Lake America, Trump decided that renaming a U.S. state would also be fun to do. Of course, he has no power to do so, but since when does that stop him from trying? If Trump had his way, he'd rename New Mexico to "New America," which doesn't even make any sense (but again, when does that stop Trump from trying?).

Trump also produced a fantasy new map showing all of North America (with Iceland thrown in, for good measure) as the expanded United States. Iceland, in particular, was not amused.

Trump rolled out new Space Force uniforms that either resemble (take your pick) the fascist military portrayed in the movie version of Starship Troopers or the Empire's military uniforms from the Star Wars franchise. Remember when America wanted to be seen as the good guys and not the baddies? Yeah, those were the days....

Trump threatened to end all trade with any country he doesn't like, if the Federal Reserve doesn't lower interest rates (and Trump did actually ban some imports from Canada, as his renewed trade war with them continues to heat up). But today's inflation number means it is more likely that the Fed is going to increase interest rates at its meeting next week, which is likely to cause Trump's head to explode (since his hand-picked guy will be defying him by doing so) -- so we've all got that to look forward to.

 

We have two Honorable Mention awards to hand out this week, both going to insurgent candidates who dethroned sitting Democrats in the Rhode Island primaries.

Helena Foulkes beat Governor Dan McKee for the nomination in the gubernatorial race, while David Morales beat Providence Mayor Brett Smiley. This was a mixed ideological message from the nation's smallest state, since Morales is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America while Foulkes is a "former CVS executive." But both of them deserve recognition for achieving the almost-impossible task of dethroning a sitting incumbent.

But our Most Impressive Democrat Of The Week award goes to New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

Earlier this week, in advance of today's anniversary, Mamdani released 170,000 pages of government documents that clearly showed that the public was blatantly lied to in the aftermath of the 9/11 attack. In specific, everyone from Rudy Giuliani (who was the city's mayor at the time) on down just completely lied about the air quality in lower Manhattan after the attack. They said the air was safe. It wasn't. It was toxic. This has caused longterm medical problems for many of the first responders and cleanup crews ever since. And up until now, the city has been stonewalling the facts.

Mamdani exposed the reality of what the government knew at the time, as opposed to what it was officially telling the public. Today, Mamdani shook hands with Giuliani at the memorial service for the anniversary, even though Giuliani has been badmouthing him in recent days, saying Mamdani shouldn't have even attended the ceremony.

A new poll also came out this week, and it showed that 74 percent of New York City residents disagreed with Rudy and thought that Mamdani should indeed be there. This poll (taken before the release of the damning documents) also showed Mamdani enjoying some rather wide support. For all the dark and dire warnings from Republicans (and from far too many fellow Democrats) before he got elected, of how Mamdani was going to turn New York City into a hellscape of despair, he now has 56.6 percent of the people saying he is either doing an excellent or good job in office. An even higher number -- 61 percent -- say that he's doing better than they expected him to do in the job.

That's pretty impressive. And that was even before he released all those documents proving what a liar Rudy (and everyone else) was in the days after the 9/11 attack. Which is why Zohran Mamdani is this week's Most Impressive Democrat Of The Week.

[Congratulate New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani on his official contact page, to let him know you appreciate his efforts.]

 

This one's pretty easy, this week. Our Most Disappointing Democrat Of The Week once again (for the umpteenth time) was Senator John Fetterman.

In fact, it was such an easy choice that it is easy to explain why: Fetterman appeared (via video) at the Republican Trump-a-Palooza convention this week. His little vignette was ostensibly in support of steelworkers, but it was nothing short of a gratuitous thumb in the eye of all his fellow Democrats. Not since the days of Joe Lieberman have we witnessed anything so egregiously offensive from a sitting Democratic senator.

In fact, there's really nothing more to say about it. John Fetterman was clearly the Most Disappointing Democrat Of The Week this week, hands down.

[Contact Senator John Fetterman on his Senate contact page, to let him know what you think of his actions.]

 

Volume 856 (9/11/26)

Before we begin with this week's talking points, we have a contrasting view to offer from an excellent article in the New York Times this week from Ben Rhodes. His argument is one of inclusion and unity for the party, and it is well worth reading in full. Titled "Voters Have Spoken. Why Aren't Democrats Listening?" the article makes the case that the Democratic Party should embrace both the centrists and the insurgents within the party, since neither one of them has a message that will work everywhere in the country. Rhodes writes "at a time when Democrats desperately need new energy" ignoring or even actively fighting the democratic socialist politicians chalking up gains risks making "the Democratic Party look afraid of its own voters." He goes on to caution: "Particularly when set against the cultlike uniformity that has characterized MAGA Republicans, Democrats should be embracing pluralism as a strength. The most innovative Democratic campaigns waged since Mr. [Donald] Trump's re-election show that populism can resonate from the center and the left. The goal should be threading them together."

The article has a lot of such commonsense advice within it. Here are a few more things he had to say:

Between now and November, the Democratic establishment should step back and let a talented assortment of candidates be the face of the party. Doing so will give Democrats a chance to learn from what is working in different parts of the country. If those lessons are uncomfortable in Washington, they must be urgently heeded instead of disappearing into business as usual. Because as soon as the midterms are over, attention will turn to the election cycle that will end the Trump era. Unless Democrats can win back the trust of the broader electorate, they will not be credible when they promise to bring the change America desperately needs.

. . .

Yes, a democratic socialist platform in New York City should not be replicated in an Iowa or Kansas Senate race. Yes, progressives should be counseled away from reprising the culture wars of the recent past. But rather than attacking the D.S.A. as the enemy, Democrats should ask themselves why so many voters are siding with insurgents. When you have lost all national power to a right-wing populist movement, it is obtuse to slam the door on your own populist insurgents.

. . .

Talking points will not fill that void. Democrats must ground their arguments in the language of values that have gone missing: fairness, dignity and community. That kind of message has already propelled younger politicians as different as Mr. [Zohran] Mamdani and James Talarico from obscurity to prominence in just over a year. I believe most Americans understand that we can have a secure border without ICE ripping our neighbors out of their homes and that we can address injustice without constantly shaming people.

A Democratic Party that remakes itself into that kind of vehicle for change can unburden itself of the careful messaging, identity politics, internal squabbling and establishment sheen of the past decade. With Mr. Trump receding into the past, Democrats have an opportunity to be much bigger than the party that struggled in his shadow -- but only if they are willing to let the party become a vehicle to take back power for people who feel they have none.

As mentioned, that line "Talking points will not fill the void" kind of runs counter to this segment of the program, but we were so impressed with the whole article that we decided we had to feature it as an opposing viewpoint this week.

We still do think talking points are important for Democrats to use, and as usual we've got some of our own to offer up this week.

 

   Six bucks a gallon

Hammer this one hard.

"The average nationwide price of diesel fuel just passed six bucks a gallon. That is the highest price Americans have ever had to pay for diesel. Now, you might think 'I don't have a diesel car or truck, so it doesn't really affect me,' but you would be very wrong about that. All the farmers who grow the food you eat use diesel in all their farm machinery. And all that food moves on trucks and trains to get to your supermarket. So the sky-high price of diesel -- over six bucks a gallon! -- does indeed affect you, every time you go to the supermarket or buy anything else that had to be moved on a truck. Trump's stupid war with Iran is the reason you are paying more for everything you buy, period."

 

   No plan, no clue

Pin the blame squarely where it belongs.

"Donald Trump entered into his disastrous war with Iran out of choice. He is just flat-out lying when he says Iran would have had a nuclear weapon in two weeks if he hadn't attacked. And now he has absolutely no plan for how to get out of his war of choice. He has no clue, plain and simple. Even though the election is still almost two months away, he said this week that gas prices wouldn't come down before then -- which just goes to show he simply has no idea whatsoever about what to do about the situation. Gas prices are higher than they have ever been at this time of the year. He said gas prices were going to come down at the end of the summer, but instead, they are going back up again. Gas was selling for $2.75 in January, before this fiasco started. And now that it's topping $4.30 a gallon, Trump has no clue whatsoever about what to do about it."

 

   Convention flop

Laugh at him. Mostly because he hates it.

"Donald Trump got what he wanted this week -- a two-day political rally featuring him above all others. Except that he couldn't even fill the arena he spoke at. And he scheduled it for the two nights that featured the beginning of football season, which meant that pretty much nobody tuned in to see it. His ratings were worse than an average night on Fox News. And even though he talked for more than two hours over the course of two nights, the only new idea he had is such a joke that his own Republicans are secretly laughing at its idiocy. Just like everything else Trump touches, his convention was nothing short of a gigantic flop."

 

   Yeah, and I got a bridge to sell you, too...

This also deserves all the laughter you can heap on it.

"Trump's big new idea was that he was offering a bribe to all voters of a whopping five grand -- but only if Republicans win the midterm elections. Yeah, I expect that check to appear in my mailbox right after I see a flock of pigs fly by my house.... Remember the DOGE dividend Trump promised us all? It never arrived. Remember the $2,000 dividend we were all going to get because Trump's tariffs were so awesome? That one didn't appear either. So for anyone eagerly awaiting a check for $5,000 to appear in the mail right after the election, I have a dandy investment opportunity for you right now -- which you should get in on even before that check arrives! Because time is limited to get in on the ground floor of this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. So send me five grand today! Go ahead -- you can afford it, because you'll be getting a check from Trump in the mail real soon now to cover your investment in buying the Brooklyn Bridge!"

 

   Even Republicans are throwing in the towel

This was a rare rebuke for Trump from within the ranks of his own party.

"Several Republican secretaries of state, as well as at least one governor and over two dozen local GOP elections officials, just sent a letter to the Supreme Court begging them not to allow Donald Trump's new mail-in voting scheme to move forward before this year's midterm elections. They are throwing in the towel on Trump's big push to disenfranchise voters for a simple reason -- it is too close to the election. Attempting to change all the rules now would lead to chaos, plain and simple. Trump's own fellow Republicans are telling the high court to use some common sense and block any last-minute changes to elections rules, and the Supreme Court should take their advice."

 

   Republicans need to denounce political violence, period

This really needs saying, once again.

"This week marked the one-year anniversary of Charlie Kirk's assassination. Many Republicans marked the milestone with pious words condemning political violence. But virtually all of those voices were silent when political violence or the threat of political violence comes from within their own ranks. While Ted Cruz was speaking at the Republican convention this week, a man in the crowd stood up and yelled 'He should be shot' when Cruz was demonizing several Democrats. Cruz didn't interrupt his speech to denounce this, and no Republican who appeared after him even mentioned it, even though it was the anniversary of Kirk's death. A man lunged for the Ohio Democratic candidate for governor this week. The Republican candidate, Vivek Ramaswamy, had earlier said: 'The Second Amendment was made for times like these.' If you only denounce political violence when it comes from the other side of the aisle, you are giving a green light for people on your side of the aisle to commit such violence. Republicans need to speak very loudly whenever any political violence either happens or is threatened, because otherwise they're just proving what hypocrites they truly are on the subject."

 

   Democrats have a 10-point gap

There was one very interesting poll out this week that deserves pointing out.

"Gallup just released a new poll that showed that 49 percent of the public identifies themselves with the Democratic Party while only 39 percent identify with the Republicans. This is a fairly recent development -- it wasn't that long ago that Republicans had better numbers than Democrats. But this year, more and more Americans are rejecting the GOP and turning to the Democratic Party instead. This is great news for Democrats, heading into the midterm election season. A 10-point lead is a good place for Democrats to be, less than two months before Americans go to the polls to vote."

-- Chris Weigant

 

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant

Cross-posted at: Democratic Underground