Going Deep...

...Space 9.

Good afternoon, and Happy Wednesday, reader(s) of Stroock's Books.

In the end the TN07 special congressional election wasn't all that close, with the GOP winning nearly a nine-point victory. Yes, Matt Van Epps underperformed vis-a-vis 2024, which is normal for the party in power during a special election or the midterm elections. Blue wave crashes on red rock, we suppose.

That's an 8.9 percent victory in a + 10 GOP district. We don't want to overdo it, this is trouble for the GOP, which certainly deserves trouble (what's congress been doing the last 6 months?). But the Dems thought they could pull off an upset and missed badly. You don't get a silver medal in a two-man race. A win's a win. 

This from Powerline seems prescient, 'His victory does not portend a glorious future in next year’s midterm elections, but by itself it appears not to signal a meltdown either.' Right now we think we may see a midterm similar to what we saw in 2022, where the blue stays blue and the red stays red. We await events. 

At PJM, Tim O'Brien asks, 'Is Ireland About to Erupt Into a Civil War Over Illegal Immigration?' O'Brien posts video of The New Republican Movement, threatening violence over mass migration. In the video three masked men bear guns while one of them reads an anti-government, anti-mass migration statement. Having spent the last 18 months researching The Troubles, the video looks soooooo familiar. Nut graph, as the J-School losers would say, Ireland's done it before and can do it again. Think of a generation of young, angry people raised on stories of The Troubles....chilling. Exit question: what if Catholic and Protestant unite against mass migration?

What Will's Watching: Star Trek: Deep Space 9. We're half a dozen episodes into DS9. We haven't watched the show in 25 + years. Just as we recall, DS9 is a somewhat darker version of TNG. There's a lot of chief engineer Miles O'Brien so far and Dax is under utilized. Security chief Odo hasn't quite developed. Doctor Bashir comes off as a naive adventurer. Commander Sisko is subdued and less dynamic than TNG Captain Jean Luc Picard, something for which Avery Brooks took a lot of criticism back in the day. But for us Brook's portrayal works as a contrast to the passionate performance of Patrick Stewart. In the end, we're entertained, 3/4. 

First World Problems, as Ace would say. Our four-year-old dishwasher has been beeping intermittently for a couple of years now. Sometimes it just shuts off. A repairman wanted half the purchase price to replace the motherboard. We said no. Recently we speculated that the water hose wasn't lining up with the sprayer when we pushed the top rack in. We've been doing so more carefully and deliberately. The last four washes have been trouble free. Infernal machine. 

DOGE Report: Okay, we read through the Thatcher's War whip around chapter. The scenes are fine, but we're not entirely satisfied with the scene order. What's Al Gore making a speech in the senate doing in the middle there between Cuba and Iraq? We may be over thinking [Not typically a problem for you, Knobhead-Ed]. And then we read the IRA attempt on Thatcher, chapter. Is it perfect? No. Is it good? Yes. Good enough? Maybe.