Susan Collins sucks. And yet it does not look like Democrats have any plan to defeat her except relying on Janet Mills to run–who is a mere 77 years old, making her the perfect candidate for the Democratic Gerontocracy. A bit young perhaps. After all, she’s only 5 years older than Collins. And Mills may well not run. There are cases where this might make sense–Ohio with Sherrod Brown is an obvious example. No one could win in Ohio right now and Brown might not be able to either. But while Maine voters are obviously dupes for Collins’ bullshit, Democrats can quite clearly win a statewide race there. And yet the Democratic establishment hope is someone nearly the average age of death for American.
“We need to stop using the exact same playbook that keeps losing over and over and over again,” said Mr. Platner, a political unknown who serves as the local harbor master in the tiny town of Sullivan. “Running establishment candidates who are chosen or supported by the powers that be in D.C. — in Maine specifically — has been a total failure, certainly in attempts to unseat Susan Collins. It is time for us to try something new.”
I mean, if Mills ran, maybe that would be better, I don’t know, but a 77 year old is not exactly the clear message of change–a sentiment which has little to do with policy–that clearly defines the American electorate today. I’d vote for Platner based strictly on him not being 77 years old.
Today, around 8,200 or so Americans will turn 21. Which means, of course, they will become eligible to engage in that time-honored habit of adulthood: drinking alcohol. (I’m sure absolutely none of them did so before they turned 21. I certainly did not, or at least, would not admit to doing so in this piece, which I know my parents read.)
Yet those who get the chance to legally order a beer or a wine or, God help them, a Long Island iced tea, may find the bar a little less crowded these days. According to a new survey released by Gallup this week, just 54 percent of Americans now say they drink alcohol. That’s the lowest share since Gallup began tracking the question way back in 1939, six years after Prohibition was repealed.
Even Americans who do continue to drink say they are drinking less, and say they’re increasingly concerned about the health impacts of alcohol. A narrow majority of Americans say that even moderate drinking is unhealthy, while reported drinking frequency also hit record lows. (Only 24 percent reported having a drink over the past 24 hours, while 40 percent said it had been more than a week since their last glass.) And while you might be skeptical of self-reporting drinking habits — doctors certainly are — the most recent sales data says that per-capita ethanol consumption in the US has fallen from nearly 2.8 gallons in the early 1980s to around 2.5 in 2022.
Unless you happen to be in the booze business, this shift is 100-proof good news (with a few caveats). Drinking can lead to various social and medical ills, from the familial and financial devastation of alcoholism at the high end to increases in the risk of cancer and other diseases even at the lower end.
But in a culture which seems to celebrate and encourage drinking, what’s up with more Americans putting down their glasses?
No safe level
Americans of a certain age — i.e., me — probably remember hearing that a glass of red wine a day could be good for you. Which, looking back, seems absurd. Ethanol in any form is a toxin. But thanks in part to what became known as the “French paradox” — the fact that the French showed low levels of heart disease despite their love of rich, fatty foods and glasses of Bordeaux — conventional wisdom settled on the idea that moderate drinking could actually benefit our overall health.
If only. In the argot of Alcoholics Anonymous, medical science is having a “moment of clarity” around alcohol. It turns out that “no level of alcohol consumption is safe for our health,” as the World Health Organization put it in 2023. One major meta-analysis that same year found that there are in fact no mortality benefits at low levels of alcohol consumption, and that risk for a number of health threats rises as consumption increases.
Whether or not American adults are actually listening to their doctors, the decline in alcohol consumption is real. What’s even more remarkable — and even better news — is the sharper decline in drinking among people who legally shouldn’t be doing it at all: the underage.
In 2024, according to one long-running youth survey, 42 percent of 12th graders reported drinking alcohol, down significantly from 75 percent in 1997 (which happens to be the year I graduated high school, and no, I will not be commenting on which side of the survey I fell on). For 10th graders it was 26 percent (down from 65 percent) and for eighth graders it was 13 percent (down from 46 percent in 1997, which yikes). For those underage Americans who are drinking, the percentage who engage in binge drinking has also fallen in recent years, albeit less sharply.
Here’s one of the more unbelievable stats I’ve ever seen: scholars believe that something like 40 percent of all murders involve the use of alcohol. That’s just one example of the effects of dangerous levels of alcohol consumption. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates around 178,000 excess deaths each year from alcohol abuse, of which over 12,000 were deaths in drunk driving accidents — meaning one out of every three car crash deaths might not have happened without alcohol.
Less alcohol consumption means less of all of this. Fewer violent deaths in drunken homicides or car crashes, and fewer lives cut short over the long term because of alcohol-connected illness. It means fewer families torn apart by alcohol abuse, and fewer children who endure the long-term trauma of being the child of an alcoholic.
To be clear, I’m not suggesting everyone stop drinking — or start drinking just to make friends. I myself enjoy a drink, and for now I’m comfortable with the trade-off that comes with moderate drinking. But the benefits to the country overall of less drinking are impossible to dismiss. That’s worth raising a mocktail to.
A version of this story originally appeared in the Good News newsletter. Sign up here!
CNN data guru Harry Enten calls the Epstein story a "nothingburger" because Google searches have fallen off in the past week, says Trump's approval rating is "pretty gosh-darn good" right now, and commends Trump for having "some of the best political instincts of any politician I‘ve seen."
There are two intelligence-insulting hack moves here:
1)Note that in order to imply that Trump is very popular the only baseline Enten uses to compare Trump’s current approval rating is Trump’s even less popular first term.
2)Enten’s cited 45% approval rating is an outlier — aggregate approval ratings (which any serious analyst would use) suggest he’s south of 43%.
If he’s not popular with the public, though, he’s apparently very popular with the management at CNN.
I get about a half dozen texts like this every day, although the volume goes down when I remember to reply STOP to them:
sobbing . . . HAPPY TEARS! Barack Obama just changed EVERYTHING. You have to see this: [Link to a quote from Obama, followed by a plea for donations to help pass the No Kings Act].
Where is the money to pay for this constant blizzard of messages coming from, and where does the revenue generated go?
The illusion of a sprawling grassroots movement, with its dozens of different PAC names, quickly gave way to a much simpler and more alarming reality. It only required pulling on a single thread—tracing who a few of the most aggressive PACs were paying—to watch their entire manufactured world unravel. What emerged was not a diverse network of activists, but a concentrated ecosystem built to serve the firm at its center: Mothership Strategies.
To understand Mothership’s central role, one must understand its origins. The firm was founded in 2014 by senior alumni of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC): its former digital director, Greg Berlin, and deputy digital director, Charles Starnes. . . .
After leaving the DCCC, Berlin and Starnes effectively privatized this playbook, building a business around the party’s most aggressive tactics and turning an internal strategy into a fundraising powerhouse for the Democratic Party—or so it might seem on the surface.
They became the operational heart of a sprawling nexus of interconnected political action committees, many of which they helped create and which now serve as their primary clients. These are not a diverse collection of grassroots groups; they are a tightly integrated network that functions primarily to funnel funds to Mothership. Their names are likely familiar from the very texts and emails that flood inboxes: Progressive Turnout Project, Stop Republicans, and End Citizens United to name a few.
The relationship between the firm and this network is cemented by blatant self-dealing. The most glaring example is End Citizens United. In 2015, just one year after founding their consulting firm, Mothership principals Greg Berlin and Charles Starnes also co-founded this PAC. It quickly became one of their largest and most reliable clients, a perfect circle of revenue generation that blurs the line between vendor and client.
How does this structure end up working exactly?
To understand the scale of this operation, consider the total amount raised. Since 2018, this core network of Mothership-linked PACs has raised approximately $678 million from individual donors. (This number excludes money raised by the firm’s other clients, like candidate campaigns, focusing specifically on the interconnected PACs at the heart of this system.) Of that total fundraising haul, $159 million was paid directly to Mothership Strategies for consulting fees, accounting for the majority of the $282 million Mothership has been paid by all its clients combined.
But the firm’s direct cut is only part of the story. The “churn and burn” fundraising model is immensely expensive to operate. Sending millions of texts and emails requires massive spending on digital infrastructure. For instance, FEC filings show this network paid $22.5 million to a single vendor, Message Digital LLC, a firm that specializes in text message delivery.
The remaining hundreds of millions disappeared into a maze of self-reported categories: $150 million to consulting/fundraising, $70 million to salaries and payroll. There are some disbursements to what seem to be legitimate advocacy and organizing–for instance Progressive Turnout Project reports paying Shawmut Services $19 million for canvassing. However, most of the unclassifiable expenditures appear to be administrative costs or media buys that feed back into the fundraising machine itself.
After subtracting these massive operational costs—the payments to Mothership, the fees for texting services, the cost of digital ads and list rentals—the final sum delivered to candidates and committees is vanishingly small. My analysis of the network’s FEC disbursements reveals that, at most, $11 million of the $678 million raised from individuals has made its way to candidates, campaigns, or the national party committees.
But here’s the number that should end all debate:
This represents a fundraising efficiency rate of just 1.6 percent.
Here’s what that number means: for every dollar a grandmother in Iowa donates believing she’s saving democracy, 98 cents goes to consultants and operational costs. Just pennies reach actual campaigns
And why would the Democratic party “leadership” tolerate this cozy little arrangement?
This parasitic ecosystem could not thrive without the tacit approval of the Democratic establishment. The relationship between the Mothership network and the official party is not adversarial; it is deeply symbiotic.
The firm’s founders are, as noted, alumni of the DCCC. They didn’t just bring their contacts; they brought the “churn and burn” playbook, which was developed and honed inside the party’s own campaign arm. They simply privatized the party’s dirtiest tactics. This is not a rogue operation; it is an outgrowth.
Trump’s astounding personal corruption is both cause and symptom, like some sort of contagious cultural cancer.
If the Nazis or Dutch police caught the sisters, they might have killed them. However, the fact that they were both young girls—and Freddie looked even younger when she wore braids—meant that officials were less likely to suspect them of working for the resistance. This might be one of the reasons why, in 1941, a commander with the Haarlem Resistance Group visited their house to ask their mother if he could recruit Freddie and Truus.
Their mother consented and the sisters’ agreed to join. “Only later did he tell us what we’d actually have to do: sabotage bridges and railway lines,” Truus told Jonker. “‘And learn to shoot, to shoot Nazis,’ he added. I remember my sister saying: ‘Well, that’s something I’ve never done before!’”
In at least one instance, Truus seduced an SS officer into the woods so that someone from the resistance could shoot him. As the commander who recruited them had said, Freddie and Truus learned to shoot Nazis too, and the sisters began to go on assassination missions by themselves. Later on, they focused on killing Dutch collaborators who arrested or endangered Jewish refugees and resistance members.
I have to admire the Oversteegen sisters. They were doing good work. We should be more like Freddie and Truus.
On these missions, Freddie was especially good at following a target or keeping a lookout during missions since she looked so young and unsuspecting. Both sisters shot to kill, but they never revealed how many Nazis and Dutch collaborators they assassinated. According to Pliester, Freddie would tell people who asked that she and her sister were soldiers, and soldiers don’t say.
Consequently, we don’t have too many details about how their “liquidations,” as they called them, played out. Benda-Beckmann says that sometimes they would follow a target to his house to kill him or ambush them on their bikes.
Their other duties in the Haarlem Resistance Group included “bringing Jewish [refugees] to a new hiding place, working in the emergency hospital in Enschede… [and] blowing up the railway line between Ijmuiden and Haarlem,” writes Jonker.
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