Week beginning 11 November 2026

Michael Arntfield Cop TV The Extraordinary Untold Stories of Television Crime Shows Globe Pequot| Lyons Press, February 2027.

Thank you, NetGalley, for providing me with this uncorrected proof for review.

Michael Arntfield has gathered an immense amount of information, historical, theoretical, sociological and cultural, economic, and political and has made an exciting effort to bring it all under control. Put all this together with the detailed accounts of cop television shows, with films added, the world of producers, advertisers and actors, and personal accounts, and the information becomes difficult to manage in a streamlined way. At times I felt that I was required to study too many diverse concepts and practical aspects of producing a cop show with no central core to the argument. At others, everything fell into place smoothly and I recognised the value in taking the time to absorb what I wanted to understand at the time and return to digest another range of ideas and observations at another time. Or even take what I wanted, and let some of the material, as fascinating as it might be, go. The almost bubbling over enthusiasm Arntfield has for his material makes this difficult! His explanation of the way in which he chose to develop his argument and themes to avoid becoming ‘modular and linear,’ preferring ‘hop on and hop off points’ fits well with my choice to indeed hop on and hop off at various points in the narrative.

I was particularly interested in the way Arntfield argues that cop shows shape and are shaped by social expectations and understandings. He has developed this theme throughout the work. He has also introduced detailed analysis of some shows and pointed to fascinating aspects of others. The introductory and final voiceovers he refers to are a reminder of old shows, but also at times had a moral aspect which fits into the way in which Arntfield sees cop shows shaping society. For example, Naked City’s “There are eight million stories in the naked city. This has been one of them” reflects upon anonymity, the possibility of danger despite this, and the somewhat unrewarding lives many city dwellers lead. Later in the book, reflecting more meaningfully on the idea of the city and identity. Sometimes he acknowledges that a later chapter will discuss further ideas he raises earlier, and perhaps it is here that one should move on to that chapter to facilitate the argument.

Each chapter includes bibliographical references and some notes, but Michael Arntfield also brings strong personal convictions to the work. At times, he expresses these forcefully, deliberately departing from an academic approach—a choice he acknowledges. The result is an engaging narrative of ideas and observations, perhaps best read as he chose to write it: by hopping on and off rather than following a linear path.

Brontës Season: live online

Coming up next:
• Saturday 7 November 2026. Greta Colombani, The Poetry of Emily Brontë. Nearly sold out.
• Saturday 9 January 2027. Clare Walker Gore, Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (1847). Nearly sold out.
• Saturday 13 February 2027. Corinna Russell, Charlotte Brontë, Villette (1853)
• Saturday 13 March 2027. Alison Hennegan, Anne Brontë, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848)
Live online lectures and seminars. Do join us.

Further information is on our website.

Bookings open soon for our 2027 Summer course on Women Writers of the 1920s.

The course will run twice: first, live online, Thursday 22 July to Monday 26 July 2027 (includes the weekend). Then in person in Cambridge, Sunday 5 September to Friday 10 September 2027.

Set Reading
• Rosamond Lehmann, Dusty Answer (1927)
• Katherine Mansfield, The Garden Party and Other Stories (1922)
• Winifred Holtby, Land of Green Ginger (1927; Virago, 2011)
• Sylvia Townsend Warner, The True Heart (1929; Penguin, 2021)
• Elizabeth Bowen, The Last September (1929)
Plus Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1929).There will be lectures, tutorials, talks, and (in Cambridge) visits and walks to places of interest.
Talks include• Clara Jones on Women and Socialism in the 1920s• Imogen Cassels on the poetry of Frances Cornford• Ann Kennedy Smith on Women in Cambridge in the 1920s• Woman artist in the 1920s (tbc)… and more.
More information is on our website. Bookings open soon.
Photo: Ann Kennedy Smith at Newnham College, Summer Course 2023, by Seb Peters.

Best wishes, Trudi
Dr Trudi Tate
Director, Literature Cambridge Ltdhttps://www.literaturecambridge.co.ukFind us on Substack

American Politics

There are several articles well worth reading, so to deal with the large amount of material I have posted the beginnings of several, and the whole article in Further Commentary and Articles arising from Books* and continued longer articles as noted in the blog. Below are discussions on the outcomes of the Midterm elections in America, by in the New York Times, Heather Cox Richardson (2) and Joyce Vance.

On Politics: Five races that tell the story of the blue wave

Tonight, we break down Democrats’ sweeping victory in the House.

The Democrats are still processing just how big their victory was on Tuesday. Today, as more votes were counted, their majority surged past 250 seats — the biggest for either party in nearly two decades.

How did they do it?

Representative Hakeem Jeffries, who is in line to become the next speaker of the House, pointed yesterday to the willingness of candidates to run in difficult districts — the kinds of places that might have seemed out of reach.

Here are five very different contests that help explain how the Democrats won so big.

New York’s 17th: The end of the blue-district Republican

A handful of congressional districts have bedeviled Democrats for years: The ones that elect Democrats for president and moderate Republicans to the House. On Tuesday night, Democrats captured three of those targets.

One of them was in New York’s Hudson Valley, where Cait Conley, a former Biden administration official with a long military résumé, beat Representative Mike Lawler, a two-term Republican who hoped his efforts to lower taxes in his affluent district could save him.

More races like this:

Pennsylvania’s First District, in the Philadelphia suburbs, where the Democrat Bob Harvie beat the longtime Representative Brian Fitzpatrick. Nebraska’s Second District, in and around Omaha, which had long been held by the retiring Republican, Don Bacon. There, Denise Powell, a Democrat, beat the Republican Brinker Harding.

North Carolina’s Ninth: A stunning upset

Representative Richard Hudson, a Republican, is the chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee. It was his job to try to protect Republicans’ House majority. But on Tuesday night, he narrowly lost his seat to Richard Ojeda, a military veteran who first came to prominence in West Virginia during a 2018 teachers’ strike.

The race was barely on national Democrats’ radar, although Ojeda got some support from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee late in the game.

There were plenty more shocking upsets:

Missouri’s Second District, outside St. Louis, where Fred Wellman beat Representative Ann Wagner.North Carolina’s 14th District, where Lakesha Womack, a Democrat whose campaign raised just $56,000, beat Representative Tim Moore. Indiana’s Fifth District, which President Trump won by more than 16 percentage points in 2026. There, Representative Victoria Spartz, a Republican, lost to J.D. Ford.

Texas’ 35th: Latino voters remake Trump country

Republicans gerrymandered this majority-Latino district, in the San Antonio metropolitan area, under the assumption that the Hispanic voters who backed Trump in 2024 were part of their coalition for the long haul.

That assumption turned out to be wrong. Now, Democrats are hoping that Johnny Garcia, a sheriff’s deputy and former construction worker from San Antonio’s West Side, can keep the district blue.

More Texas races where Latino voters lifted Democrats:

The 23rd District, where Katy Padilla Stout beat Brandon Herrera, a Republican gun influencer best known as “the AK guy.” The 15th District, where the Tejano singer Bobby Pulido won by 25 points.The 28th District, where Representative Henry Cuellar easily fended off a challenge.

Iowa’s First: A big win in a rural area

After their defeats in 2024, Democrats worried that their deep losses among white voters had put rural areas permanently out of reach. But Trump’s economic policies buffeted farmers and ranchers, fomenting a backlash that lifted the likes of Christina Bohannan, a state representative and law professor, over Representative Mariannette Miller-Meeks in Southeastern Iowa. Democrats flipped Iowa’s second and third districts, too.

More rural districts Democrats picked up:

Wisconsin’s Third: Rebecca Cooke defeated Representative Derrick Van Orden. Montana’s First: The smokejumper Sam Forstag defeated the combat veteran Aaron Flint to become the first Democrat to represent the state in the House in decades.

Alabama’s Second: Defying a gerrymander with deep support from Black voters

Alabama Republicans went all-out to oust Representative Shomari Figures. They delayed primaries so they could redraw his district after a Supreme Court ruling cleared the way this year, removing his hometown, Mobile, and shifting the district to Montgomery. If the district had existed in 2024, it would have backed President Trump by more than 14 percentage points.

But Montgomery is the birthplace of the civil rights movement. And it was an ideal place for Figures to seize on the anger of Black voters, many of whom believed Republicans had tried to disenfranchise them after the weakening of the Voting Rights Act.

In a sign of the district’s symbolic importance, Representative Hakeem Jeffries made a stop there in the final days of the campaign.

Figures won by more than seven points.

Still counting

Election Day is over, but the counting is not.

Here’s the latest on the two major Senate races that haven’t yet been called:

Mississippi: The closeness of the Senate contest between the Republican incumbent Cindy Hyde-Smith and Scott Colom, her Democratic challenger, was an election night stunner. And their race, which remains too close to call, has grown even tighter as officials tabulate a trickle of mail and provisional ballots. As of this afternoon, Colom leads by just over 1,800 votes.

Alaska: The Senate race between Mary Peltola and the incumbent Republican, Dan S. Sullivan, is another nail-biter. About a quarter of expected votes remain uncounted, and Alaska, a notorious ballot-counting laggard, can keep adding them up until Nov. 18. At that point, ranked-choice tabulation will begin, should neither candidate cross the 50 percent threshold needed to win outright. (Check the results here.)

Heather Cox Richardson from Letters from an American <heathercoxrichardson@substack.com> November 4, 2026

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And so, one era passes and another begins.

Yesterday, voters flipped control of both chambers of Congress from the Republicans to the Democrats. Votes in some races are still being counted, but NBC News projects that the Democrats will win at least 259 seats in the House of Representatives, far more than the 218 they needed to win a majority.

A Democratic victory in the House had been widely expected, but what would happen in the Senate, which had a bad map for Democrats this cycle, was unclear. There, too, voters were emphatic. Democrats flipped seven seats in the Senate: Iowa, Kansas, Maine, North Carolina, Ohio, South Carolina, and Texas.

The Senate race in Alaska hasn’t yet been called, but Democratic challenger Mary Peltola is currently slightly ahead of Republican incumbent Dan Sullivan there. Even more eye-popping, as of this writing, Democratic Senate candidate Scott Colom is ahead of the Republican incumbent in Mississippi. If he wins, he will be the first Black senator from Mississippi since Reconstruction.

In governors’ races, Democrats flipped Iowa, Georgia, Ohio, Nevada, and Texas. None of the new Democratic governors will be hamstrung by a Republican supermajority in the state legislature. Republicans in Kansas, Iowa, North Carolina, and Ohio either lost or failed to regain supermajorities that could override a governor’s veto.

The topline races don’t tell the whole story. Voters elected Democrats up and down the ballot. In Texas, the most prominent example of this phenomenon, Democratic senatorial candidate James Talarico won by about 12 points. Democratic gubernatorial candidate Gina Hinojosa won by 7 points. Voters flipped two congressional seats in districts Trump won by at least 14 points in 2024. Voters elected a Democratic attorney general and four Democratic supreme court justices, and they flipped control of the lower chamber of the legislature.

Many of the races across the country were not close. Some races flipped by double digits from the margins of 2024. Some flips were as high as 20, 30, or even 40 percent. Observers called the results “seismic” and “jaw-dropping,” not just a blue wave but a “tsunami.”

The 2026 midterm elections marked a revolution in American politics. Election scholar Michael McDonald estimates that about 124.3 million people, or just under 50% of those eligible, turned out to vote. That rate is just under the voting rate in the 2018 midterms, which itself was the highest midterm turnout rate since 1914.

The election came off without anything more than the usual hitches, a tribute to the quiet work of dedicated lawyers and voting rights groups who have been fiercely contesting the administration’s efforts to rig the vote or to stir up opposition to accept the outcome. It was, as organizers had hoped, “too big to rig.” After months of suggesting he would contest the outcome of the election if Democrats won, Trump told New York Times reporters Erica L. Green and Tyler Pager that he would accept the results.

The historic nature of this election cannot be overstated. It is a rejection of Trump, who insisted voters should imagine he was on the ballot. But more than that, it is a rejection of the Republican ideology that has driven American politics since the 1980s: the idea that some people are better than others and have the right to rule.

That ideology took root in American politics in the late 1970s, in response to the nation’s push toward equality for racial minorities and women. The 1965 Voting Rights Act protected the right of Black and Brown Americans to vote, while the introduction of reliable birth control that same year began to permit women to enter the workforce on terms equal to men. It seemed that the equality promised in American democracy was within reach.

But to win election, Richard M. Nixon brought into the Republican Party voters who opposed the expansion of American democracy while Democrats looked to expand their tent. In 1972, even as Nixon won in a landslide, Democrats sent to Congress giants like Barbara Jordan of Texas, the first Black woman elected to Congress from the South and the first woman to deliver a keynote address at a Democratic National Convention.

In 1974, voters infuriated by Watergate flipped 49 House seats and 5 Senate seats from Republican to Democratic and elected 93 new members of Congress, 76 of whom were Democrats. In 1976 they sent Democrat Jimmy Carter to the White House, where he signed legislation that made it illegal to fire women or cut their pay because they were pregnant, expanded contracting rules to boost Black-owned businesses, worked to end racial discrimination in hiring, and created the Department of Education.

Carter’s Republican successor, Ronald Reagan, won election by attacking the modern American state and warning that people like the “Welfare Queen,” a Black woman who abused the welfare system to live large, were taking money from hardworking white people. The government should get out of people’s lives, he said, and he promised to slash taxes and regulations to permit people to accumulate wealth. In turn, he claimed, they would invest in the economy, creating jobs for everyone. Reagan and his allies tied racial and gender inequality to economic prosperity.

That combination worked—more or less—to attract voters until Trump’s second term tore it apart. Trump and appointees like Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have purged the government of minorities and women and undermined the health and well-being of nonwhite Americans, immigrants, and women. But rather than benefiting regular Americans, those policies have hurt them. And administration leaders have been quite open about their intention of using the government to loot the country for themselves and their cronies.

In their determination to stop Trump and MAGA, Americans came together across the artificial lines that Republicans have exploited for more than a generation to stand against what the nation’s founders would have called tyranny. The rural areas that have made up the backbone of MAGA support joined more Democratic urban areas to elect Democrats. The racial, gender, and cultural divisions Republicans have exploited to stay in power have collapsed in the face of a rising oligarchy.

Even billionaire Elon Musk’s investment of close to half a billion dollars in Republicans in the midterms could not overcome voters’ frustration with a government that works only for the very wealthy. People across the country, organized in No Kings rallies, along overpasses, in webcasts, and in everything from political clubs to knitting communities, have come together to stand against the extraordinary corruption of the Trump regime, to oppose Trump’s rejection of constitutional limits in favor of autocratic power to declare tariffs and start wars, to demand the government address the needs of Americans, and to insist on the rule of law. Yesterday, they voted.

In Georgia, voters elected Keisha Lance Bottoms to be the first Black female governor in the nation. In New Hampshire, voters elected Chris Pappas to be the Senate’s first openly gay member. In Texas, voters elected Gina Hinojosa to be the state’s first Latina governor and the state’s first Democratic governor in more than 30 years. In New Mexico, voters elected former Interior secretary Deb Haaland to be the nation’s first female Indigenous governor. Voters in Minnesota sent Ojibwe Peggy Flanagan to the Senate. In Michigan, voters elected Abdul El-Sayed, the nation’s first Muslim senator. Voters in Ohio sent Brian Poindexter, a union ironworker, to the House of Representatives and returned Sherrod Brown, known for his defense of unions, to the Senate.

It is a historic rebuke of the Republican ideology that derailed the movement for equal rights in the 1970s in order to sway the system back toward wealthy white people.

This sea change has some immediate repercussions. By putting Congress under the control of Democrats, last night’s results will mean that it will focus on Americans’ needs and will check Trump and his administration.

Asked if the Democrats would focus on costs or corruption, Senator Rafael Warnock of Georgia told CNN that the Democrats could “walk and chew gum at the same time.” Today Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker, reelected for a third term yesterday with almost 60% of the vote, released a 75-page road map for the congressional majority, asking it to end the war in Iran, raise the minimum wage, pass comprehensive immigration reform, provide universal healthcare and childcare, put guardrails around AI, and codify abortion rights into law.

Just after 10:00 last night, Eastern time, as Democratic victories piled up, the incoming chair of the House Oversight Committee, Robert Garcia of California, had one comment for administration loyalists. On social media, he wrote: “LAWYER UP.” See Further Commentary and Articles arising from Books* and continued longer articles as noted in the blog.

Heather Cox Richardson from Letters from an American <heathercoxrichardson@substack.com> November 5, 2026

Incoming chair of the House Judiciary Committee Jamie Raskin (D-MD) posted today: “House Democrats are in the fight to bring government back from the brink of authoritarianism. We will shine a light on President Trump’s quid pro quo, coin-operated, pay-to-play corruption and renew American government as an instrument for the common good.”

Raskin told MS NOW that he intends to subpoena the law firms that struck deals with Trump to learn more about alleged coercion from Trump. He also said he intends to investigate Attorney General Todd Blanche for his refusal to produce documents required by the Epstein Files Transparency Act and for the Department of Justice’s persecution of those Trump considers enemies, including James Comey, Letitia James, Adam Schiff, Mark Kelly, Maggie Goodlander, and Jason Crow.

Raskin also told Greg Sargent of The New Republic that the Judiciary Committee will work with Democratic appropriators to defund Trump’s corrupt prosecutions. “We have the power of the purse,” Raskin told Sargent. “We’ll be working closely with our Appropriations Committee partners to make sure that we’re doing everything we can to cut off money that is being used for political harassment and persecution.”

Representative Robert Garcia (D-CA) is in line to chair the House Oversight and Reform Committee. Yesterday, he told reporters the committee would focus on four major areas. The first is “the Trump crime family.” Garcia noted that a Russian oligarch paid for Don Jr.’s wedding party, the Saudis invested $2 billion in Jared Kushner’s business, and Eric Trump is on the board of companies that are getting Pentagon contracts. Trump himself has pocketed billions from crypto schemes.

The other three areas on which the committee will focus are the Department of Homeland Security and the abuses of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, corporate corruption, and those associated with sex abuser Jeffrey Epstein.Eamon Javers of CNBC reported today that “Sen[ator] Ron Wyden’s Finance Committee staff intend to dig into JP Morgan’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, with a particular focus on the conduct of high ranking executives and their handling of the bank’s relationship with the disgraced financier.”

Yesterday the Senate posted new job listings, including one for an attorney to lead the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee’s work on “government ethics and anti-corruption legislation and to participate in the Committee’s oversight and investigations work.”

Gabe Kaminsky of CBS News reported today that Democrats plan to investigate the finances behind Trump’s presidential library. Last March, Trump said he doesn’t “believe in building libraries or museums” and that the building is “most likely going to be a hotel.” Nonetheless, Trump’s foundation, which is run by Trump’s son Eric and son-in-law Michael Boulos, told the IRS it was building a library.

The foundation says it will raise $950 million by the end of 2027. Money has poured into the foundation from companies Trump sued and that settled based on promises to contribute to the fund. People eager to avoid Trump’s wrath have also contributed. A former advisor told Kaminsky: “The library is one of the last few places he can squeeze people for money.” See Further Commentary and Articles arising from Books* and continued longer articles as noted in the blog.

Heather Cox Richardson from Letters from an American <heathercoxrichardson@substack.com>

This is the end of a longer email from Heather Cox Richardson, which begins with President Trump’s increasingly bizarre reactions to the Blue Tsunami. These observations can be read in many news outlets. However, I thought that the following was worth adding to the discussion around the Trump Presidency.

…One hundred and fifty years ago, after the Civil War, General Ulysses S. Grant believed the cause of the Confederacy was “one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and for which there was the least excuse.” But when he accepted General Robert E. Lee’s surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia in the hamlet of Appomattox Court House, Virginia, in April 1865, he allowed Confederate soldiers to go home with only a promise that they would not take up arms again, in the hope that they would “be able to put in a crop to carry themselves and their families through the next winter.” It was a humanitarian gesture and also a practical one, for southerners were starving, and if they missed planting season, the devastation would get worse.

Grant’s amnesty also reflected the widespread belief among northerners that the blame for secession and the war that killed more than 600,000 Americans fell on the political leaders who had taken their states out of the Union to create a new slave-holding nation they could dominate. But President Andrew Johnson, who took office after the death of President Abraham Lincoln at the hands of an assassin, made a partisan decision to pardon all but about 1,500 of those leaders, returning to them all the privileges of citizenship in a nation they had tried to destroy in hopes that they would support him.

Never facing accountability for their attack on the United States, southern white leaders resurrected the ideology the North had defeated during the war. They changed the memory of what had happened at Appomattox, turning Grant’s clemency into something entirely different. Rather than being a gesture of a victor’s mercy, it was, they argued, a recognition of the superiority of the southern cause, proof that the Confederates were right all along and had lost only because they were overawed by the North’s superior firepower.

The lack of accountability for attacking the United States of America meant that the Confederates’ treason never became odious. Former Confederates were able to spread their ideology across the country in the postwar years. In 1871—just six years after the surrender at Appomattox—the first Confederate secretary of state, Robert Toombs, was being quoted in northern newspapers about the dangers of permitting poor men, especially poor Black men, to vote and his advocacy for a property requirement for voting.

Within a decade, white southerners were lamenting the “Lost Cause,” and northern sympathizers threw Black Americans overboard in their rush to reunite with white southerners against a government that worked for all Americans. The true history of the Confederacy—a brief rebellion against the United States to create a slave-holding nation—was whitewashed as a stand against federal overreach. As such, it endured, carrying racism and rebellion forward for more than a century. In 2021, when rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, some of them carried Confederate battle flags.

That same partisan reworking of history took place after President Gerald Ford issued a preemptive pardon to President Richard Nixon for his actions surrounding the 1972 break-in at the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C. Although Ford relied on the 1915 Burdick v. United States decision that said accepting a pardon carries with it “an imputation of guilt, acceptance, a confession of it,” Nixon never publicly accepted responsibility for his obstruction of justice, abuse of power, and contempt of Congress.

Instead, Nixon blamed the press, whose members designed their “leaks and accusations and innuendo” to destroy him. “When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal,” Nixon told interviewer David Frost in 1977. He went even further, suggesting that a president could “authorize” his staff members to break the law, as well.

The theme that accountability for lawbreaking is somehow a partisan plot by those who hate Republicans continued to fester. Over time, it bolstered the right-wing drive to declare a strongman president above the law.

Confident that presidents would not be held accountable for lawbreaking, President Ronald Reagan’s advisors ignored both U.S. sanctions on Iran’s revolutionary government and the law prohibiting aid to the right-wing Contra rebels trying to overthrow Nicaragua’s Marxist Sandinista government. In what became known as the Iran-Contra affair, they sold highly marked-up arms to Iran, and sent the proceeds—off the books—to aid the Contras.

During Reagan’s administration, the Office of Legal Counsel expounded a new theory of the “unitary executive” that said because the president was the head of one of the three independent branches of government, neither of the other two branches—the legislative branch (Congress) or the judicial branch (the courts)—could check him.

In 1989 the head of the Office of Legal Counsel, William Barr, wrote a memo warning officials in the George H.W. Bush administration to be wary of “legislative encroachments” on the president’s authority. When he later became attorney general, he backed Bush’s pardons of the eleven Reagan officials charged in the Iran-contra affair.

Lawrence Walsh, the independent prosecutor in the case, worried that pardoning the officials removed accountability and thus weakened American democracy. It “undermines…the principle…that no man is above the law,” he said. “It demonstrates that powerful people with powerful allies can commit serious crimes in high office, deliberately abusing the public trust without consequences.”

Barr went on to become the attorney general in Donald Trump’s first administration, and that administration continued the push against accountability. Then, after one grand jury charged Trump with 40 criminal counts for retaining and mishandling classified documents after he left office and then obstructing justice to cover up that retention, and a second charged Trump with four felony counts related to his attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, Trump moved to dismiss the cases on the grounds that “a President has absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions performed within the outer perimeter of his official responsibilities.”

On July 1, 2024, in Trump v. United States, the Supreme Court agreed, shattering the fundamental principle of U.S. democracy: that no one is above the law. Since returning to office, Trump has taken advantage of that immunity by turning the machinery of the federal government against those he perceives as his enemies.

But now, with the prospect of investigations into behavior that might fall outside a president’s official duties, Trump is trying to convince the American people that enforcing the rule of law is a partisan attack.

In fact, it is the opposite. The true rule of law is nonpartisan. It is the fundamental rule under which the American government was conceived.

“[W]here, say some, is the King of America?” Thomas Paine wrote in Common Sense, the 1776 pamphlet that convinced British colonists in North America to cut ties with their king and start a new nation. “[I]n America the law is king. For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be king; and there ought to be no other.”

Notes:

Ulysses S. Grant, Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant, vol. 2 of Memoirs and Selected Letters, selected by Mary Drake McFeely and William S. McFeely (New York: Library of America, 1990), p. 735, 740.

Trump’s Truth: statuses/43507; statuses/43509; statuses/43513

Bluesky: ctrlaltresist.com/post/3mztau3p5ab2t; atrupar.com/post/3mzsmisfmx22c

The Candidates Who Won

Joyce Vance from Civil Discourse <joycevance@substack.com> 8 November 2026 Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more

Saturday night is for celebrating, especially after the amazing bluenami earlier this week. Instead of taking up any of the fresh issues of the day, like new White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, whose wife says she didn’t bother to vote, or Todd Blanche insisting on talking about Fight Club, I thought we’d savor the week that was and revisit our Friday night interviews with three candidates who were not expected to win when we spoke with them, but they did. The posts are all out from behind the paywall for you to enjoy.

Gina Hinojosa, Texas Governor Elaine Luria, U.S. House, Virginia District 2 Josh Turek, Senate, Iowa

We’ve been indulging in the good stuff (the photo of Moet was removed as it could not be reduced) I hope you’re enjoying the moment too and will spend some time with these three at your leisure. I’ve also taken the paywall off of last night’s Five Questions interview with elections expert Justin Levitt.

As I reread it this afternoon, I realized it’s something everyone needs to read right now. I am reminded of the importance of understanding that while who you vote for is a political choice, your right to vote is something that’s fundamentally American, something that should be available to all eligible citizens. The people who’ve worked to make sure that happens, like Justin, are the heroes we need.

We’ve got work ahead of us, but let’s enjoy the moment.

We’re in this together, Joyce

Americans Must Push But Not Undermine The New Democratic Majority

The Daily with Sarah Jones <politicususa@substack.com>

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The Daily is 100% independent and committed to delivering opinion and analysis that protects democracy and freedom.

It is important that the American people push Democrats in the direction that they want without undermining them and becoming divided.

Sarah Jones thought back to what happened during the internal fight over Obamacare on Chew’s Views:

When Obama got elected, and then it was the 2010 midterms- and Republicans took over. Who trolled Obama the most? A lot of Democrats. The left. Yeah. Yeah. The far left. The far left. The far left did. And the far left, and some of it was even racist, right?

And they did it to undermine Obamacare because it didn’t go far enough in their mind. Obamacare has helped millions of people get healthcare. I’m one of them. And so I know as an independent contractor that I’ve been throughout my life when I worked in different in TV and different parts of my career we didn’t have access to health insurance.

So here was Obamacare addressing this huge problem of all these people that maybe they own a business, and you can’t afford health insurance for one person on a business if you’re, you can’t pay $2,000 a, a month. Anyway, my point is, I, that’s the first place my brain went to was because I think, so let’s harness the anger. The anger is appropriate. Harness the feeling, harness the organizing energy that, and those, that has already been created. That’s the hard work, the first step in the hard work.

Sarah pointed out that there is a difference between organizing and self-sabotage.

She continued:

And we already saw people out protesting Chuck Schumer over the AI vo- data bill vote that’s coming up, and I think that’s great. Yes, use these organizing structures that you have. Get out there and push these lawmakers to go in the direction that we have demanded they go. That’s what this election was all about. But no, and I hope that the Democrats learn this lesson, you have to give these, your lawmakers, your elected officials political cover.

They have to have your support or they can’t make these changes. So you can’t undermine them using the language and the framework of the right, because the right’s already doing that. And they are also, we have foreign countries right now exploiting those divisions within the left and within the Democratic Party. So you have to be aware of all of that and keep an eye on not undermining the Democrats to the point where they can’t get anything done.

There is a difference between pushing, lobbying, and undermining.

Historically, some Democrats have a bad habit of winning elections and then thinking that the job is done, and they can go to sleep, and the people that they voted for will take care of it.

Winning the election is step one. The bigger work comes in holding the people that were elected accountable to make sure that they do what they were elected to do.

The time is now to make sure that Democrats follow through, but blowing up the 2026 coalition with infighting will make it impossible for Democrats to get anything done.

AOC Shuts Down Media’s Horse Race Baloney*

The Daily with Sarah Jones <politicususa@substack.com>

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The Daily is 100% independent and committed to delivering opinion and analysis that protects democracy and freedom. Please support us by becoming a paid subscriber.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez corrected reporters badgering her about her 2028 plans, saying voters want them to focus on investigations and legislation.

There’s nothing DC media loves more than a horse race. Well, okay, maybe they love a false conflation more than horse-race journalism, but it’s a close call.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) was hounded by reporters Monday evening, demanding to know her thoughts on various elections unrelated to her, as well as her 2028 plans. She was not impressed.

First, she was asked about leadership in that other chamber, the Senate. Should Senate Minority Leader (presumed to be Majority Leader) Chuck Schumer (D-NY) go?

“I mean, listen. I think that Senator Schumer is out there making his case, and you have a wide diversity of members of the Senate. We dealt with the same thing here with Speaker Pelosi. There were members who, you know, voted or not, and I think that it’s up to whoever’s running to run their whip operation. Senator Schumer has been leader for many years. He served in the Senate for many years,” she answered diplomatically.

Reading between the lines, it’s likely she thinks he should go, but the Senate is not her chamber and it isn’t a good look to be seen as telling the other chamber how to conduct their business. AOC is someone who came into the House as a freshman and after butting heads with then Speaker Pelosi, she learned from the best about how to navigate the politics of the U.S. House. She has excelled.

AOC was then asked if she was considering running against Schumer in 2028, and that’s when she slammed the media for their horse race obsession.“The thing that’s important here is the last thing that people want to hear from me or any other politician here is about the next election, and what they actually want to hear from us is about what we are going to do with the electoral results they just gave us on Tuesday,” the progressive Democrat from New York replied.“

So I think people are less concerned about the horse race, and they want to know what are the investigations we’re going to be starting, what is the legislation that we’re going to be starting, what are we going to do about the ACA subsidy cliff and the Medicaid cliff that’s coming in January. That’s what people want to hear about with what we’re going to do with the power that they just gave us, as opposed to being exhausted and talking about an election.”

Horse Race Journalism

Far too many beltway outlets deliberately treat politics like a sporting event, rather than focusing on the very real impact politics has on the lives of the American people.Horse race journalism is not about the people; it’s about clicks and eyeballs and drama, like Reality TV. It has very little to do with the people’s needs.I’d also suspect that smart Democrats will see how the next year goes before they commit publicly to their 2028 plans. Will their party live up to the demands of this time and the promise of the beginning of a new age?AOC had also, in an earlier Instagram live, laid out the functions of the Speaker of the House in clear terms that explain why she is not interested in the job, largely because one of their primary jobs is political, including fundraising and expanding the House Democratic caucus.

AOC doesn’t want to spend her time dealing with the kinds of donors required to keep that operation afloat, and who can blame her. Part of her appeal is that she doesn’t deal with that kind of money.

Whatever her future involves, AOC is a rare political talent whose career could take her to the White House one day. She stays focused on what brought her to the House in the first place, which is the needs of the people and protecting democracy.Ginning up conflict between Schumer and AOC is just a show being put on to distract you with bread and circuses. It’s two years away. It has nothing to do with the takeaway from the seismic, historic midterm results. Yes, there is leadership drama going on in the Democratic Party, but that itself is about the message the voters sent. The point is not the drama, but the results the people are demanding.The real work is in action, what are these people doing for us and how are they holding corrupt people accountable.

* See my review of Take Up Space in Blog March 12, 2025. Part of the last paragraph reads as follows:

Cindy Lou has her first meal at a Braddon food truck.

Moving to this area has made numerous restaurants and cafes available. Some of these are the food trucks – pizzas, Indian, Tibetan, steak sandwiches etc. are available, and very popular. The seating is innovative, the environment buzzy, and the food very good, and cheap. On this occasion Moowing Steak provided a simple meal which was delicious. The steaks were thin (thank goodness) and the salad accompaniment abundant. The burger included salad as well, with an egg and cheese in a soft bun.

Easy Tiger options Dervla McTiernan’s ‘Three Reasons for Revenge’

Staff Writer· BusinessNewsTV & Streaming ·November 5, 2026

Dervla McTiernan (right).

Easy Tiger Productions has secured TV rights to Dervla McTiernan’s best-selling psychological thriller Three Reasons for Revenge, with The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Snowtown scribe Shaun Grant on board to write the screenplay.

The deal was negotiated by Dan Conaway and Tom Ishizuka for Writers House in what was described as “a heated auction”.

Published this year, Three Reasons for Revenge was no. 1 on the Australian bestseller charts across all genres. It tells the story of three seemingly unconnected people caught in a lethal web of deceit and unhealed wounds. Three mysterious gifts are delivered to three very different houses in Melbourne; each gift is perfectly tailored to its recipient – and each will tear apart the life of its intended victim.

McTiernan is the author of seven novels, which have sold more than 1 million copies. Born in Ireland, she and her family relocated to Perth in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis in 2008.

Easy Tiger CEO Rob Gibson said the company was delighted to be working with both McTiernan and Grant.

“There’s no doubt Dervla’s highly entertaining book will find a place not only on your shelves but on your TV screen. Dervla is a master at creating a gripping thriller plot and Shaun is the perfect writer to adapt her book,” he said.

Grant added: “From the moment I first read Three Reasons for Revenge I immediately envisaged it as a television series. It is a supremely crafted thriller full of surprises, and I thank Dervla for entrusting Easy Tiger and myself with her creation. I’m excited by the journey ahead.”

Another of McTiernan’s novels, The Ruin, was optioned by Hopscotch Features in partnership with Colin Farrell’s production company back in 2019, before being brought over to Brouhaha Entertainment when Troy Lum and Andrew Mason launched the new banner in 2021.

My review of Three Reasons for Revenge, initially posted earlier this year.

Dervla McTiernan Three Reasons for Revenge HarperCollins Publishers Australia | HarperCollins AU, April 2026.

Thank you, NetGalley, for providing me with this uncorrected proof for review.

Dervla McTiernan is a writer I follow, and on this occasion my interest was piqued by her early engagement with readers about the novel which was to become Three Reasons for Revenge. In an email she described three possible novel scenarios from which prospective readers could choose one. Further emails discussed some of her approaches to the chosen novel. However, true to her ability to adroitly manoeuvre plot, characterisation and locations none of this early material provided the slightest of clues to the outcome. Once again Dervla McTiernan has produced a novel that, while providing plenty of twists and turns, is also a successful work of logical advancement of plot and characterisation.*

A gentle prologue, children on the beach playing and feeding mussels to fish and crabs, introduces Renee and Margaux. And yet, is this image truly benign? As the sun sinks over the ocean, they hesitatingly return home. In contrast to the initial scenes, early chapters introduce an unrelentingly gritty environment as Detective Sergeant Judith Lee interviews sexual assault victim Alexis Turner. Linking Judith with her interviewee, is her boss’ comment upon her bruised face. Following this, he makes a personal comment when he refers to Judith’s neglect of her mother’s phone calls. Consequently, early in the novel the possible links between police, families and victims through public experience and private relationships are uncovered.

McTiernan makes an initial return to a more comfortable location when Judith questions Doctor Walker in his home; his wife Vanessa returns after anchoring her morning television show; and a courier arrives with a gothic wrapped parcel. It is a USB accompanied by an opaque message. More beautifully wrapped parcels, complete with similarly opaque notes, are sent to various characters, auguring catastrophic events for their recipients. Judith’s past impacts her investigations as she interacts with friends, her co-workers and suspects.

Police investigations provide only one thread in this gripping work which lays bare the impact of childhood damage, malice, and the importance of female friendship. Another thread is the depiction of different domestic environments, McTiernan deftly weaving together positive and negative aspects of partnerships, marriage and parenting with social commentary. Further, complexity in characterisation is compounded by depicting police, suspects, victims and perpetrator in both domestic and working environments.

Three Reasons for Revenge could be read as simply a mystery, with Detective Sergeant Judith Lee’s investigation and resolution of the crimes a satisfactory conclusion. However, it is also valuable social commentary, raising the issues of domestic violence, gender issues in the workplace, and the wide ranging and lasting impact of trauma. Judith Lee is an appealing character, and it would be good to see her reappearance in another Derval McTiernan novel of this calibre.

*See Blog, 27 August 2025.