Could 2026 Finally Be a Year of Progressive Political Change?
Dare we think that the new year will hold tremendous promise for progressive change? Yes!
As practically every pundit has noted, Donald Trump’s White House menagerie of billionaires, grifters, haters, prima donnas, and ideological kooks has soured even many MAGA faithful. More importantly, grassroots progressives have been organizing and mobilizing across the country, and like eager ball players looking forward to a good season, they’re pumped up! So what could go wrong?
Don’t look now, but the national Democratic Party’s “Washington Club” of high-dollar donors, clueless consultants, corporate lobbyists, and old-line politicos are still controlling much of the party’s money, strategy, and messaging. Possessing all the magnetism of their go-slow leader, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York, their game plan is the same as always: Run a big money, don’t-rock-the-boat, Washington-based campaign, shove aside grassroots activists, rely on negative attack ads, and tell everyone again that Trump will defeat himself.
As Casey Stengel wailed when he managed the comically inept 1962 New York Mets baseball team, “Can’t anyone here play this game?”
Luckily, though, those insider losers are no longer our real Democratic team. While they’ve been piddling around in Congress playing Wiffle ball with the Trumpsters, Bernie-style progressives have been rebuilding the Party of the People in every state with hard-hitting, slick-fielding, big-league DEMOCRATS.
And voters are responding with an enthusiastic “YES!” from coast to coast, already lifting Zohran Mamdani to victory in New York City, Katie Wilson in Seattle, Washington, and winning seats in state legislative races in Iowa, Georgia, and Mississippi.
Let’s keep pushing to make 2026 the year we quit moaning about the lackluster Democratic Party and turn it into the bright new majority party.
Look, up in the Sky! It’s a Bird, a Plane . . . It’s an AI Data Center?
In my childhood years, I got to experience something I’ve cherished ever since: starry nights.
I was lucky to spend time during the summers on my Aunt Eula and Uncle Ernest’s tenant farm in Northeast Texas. With no television or electronics, we made our own entertainment in the evenings, including “turning on” nature’s Big Show. This meant rolling an old bed outdoors as darkness fell, so we could lay back, look up, and marvel at the endless expanse of comets, constellations, planets, the Milky Way, and other wonders of the cosmos. Today, though, 80 percent of North Americans never see the starry night because the artificial glare of city lights blots out nature’s spectacular display.
But wait—billionaires are coming to the rescue! Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and other high-tech demigods, who are spending trillions of dollars to foist a brave new world of artificial intelligence upon us, claim that their scheme will put data centers in space and relight the night sky!
For real? Of course not.
It turns out that they can’t get enough cheap land and energy on Earth to supply the phantasmagoric sprawl of data centers their AI hustle will demand. So they’re going to put massive clusters of these systems into orbit, tethered to miles of solar panels stretching across our sky. While that means nature’s stars and stuff will be even more obscured, they say that instead of watching the cosmos, we earthlings can enjoy the artificial twinkle of their corporate data centers.
Lest you think surely they wouldn’t do this, note that those arrogant billionaire Lords of the Night are already investing humongous sums of money in space data centers. As the chief executive officer of one called “Starcloud” bluntly says: “It is not a debate. It is going to happen.”