DL Open Thread: Wednesday, November 26, 2025
Has Al (Not A I) used Ballroom Blitz yet?:
President Donald Trump has argued with the architect he handpicked to design a White House ballroom over the size of the project, reflecting a conflict between architectural norms and Trump’s grandiose aesthetic, according to four people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal conversations.
Trump’s desire to go big with the project has put him at odds with architect James McCrery II, the people said, who has counseled restraint over concerns the planned 90,000-square-foot addition could dwarf the 55,000-square-foot mansion in violation of a general architectural rule: don’t build an addition that overshadows the main building.
This entire project is utterly obscene. But you already knew that.
This Should Do Wonders For Tourism:
The Trump administration will raise prices and add new fees next year for international tourists visiting national parks, the latest change amid steep cuts, understaffing and bureaucratic turmoil at the National Park Service and a significant decline in foreign tourism.
In a statement on Tuesday, the Interior Department, which manages federal land, said that, as of Jan. 1, it would more than triple the price of an annual park pass for nonresidents, from $80 to $250. Foreign tourists without an annual pass will also be charged $100 on top of the standard entrance fee to visit each of the 11 most popular national parks, including Yosemite, Yellowstone, Rocky Mountain and the Grand Canyon.
“President Trump’s leadership always puts American families first,” Doug Burgum, the secretary of the interior, said in the statement. Foreigners who live in the United States will not be charged the new fees.
Ho-kay.
In Which I Agree With Kos–Wholeheartedly. Ya see, because I almost never agree with Kos–until now:
Party leaders are beginning to explore whether ranked choice voting could make the 2028 primary fairer, less divisive, and better at producing a nominee who reflects the full breadth of the Democratic coalition. It’s a quiet development, but a potentially transformative one, and Axios reports that senior Democratic National Committee officials have met with reform advocates to discuss making it real.
Ranked choice voting is simple at its core. Instead of marking only a single candidate on their ballot, voters rank the candidates in order of preference—first choice, second choice, third choice, and so on. If someone wins a majority of first-choice votes outright, the election is over. If nobody wins a majority, the last-place candidate is eliminated, and voters who ranked that candidate first have their second-choice votes counted. The process continues until one candidate grabs a majority of the vote.
The goal is to give voters more freedom to vote their values without worrying about “spoiler” candidates, while also encouraging campaigns to build broader coalitions.
Party stalwarts know the challenges primary season brings—the formation of camps as activists and rank-and-file Democrats pick their candidates. It is rarely enough to simply support one’s own; people feel pressure to tear down everyone else. Few of us are immune to those dynamics, including me. We are human, after all.
But ranked voting changes that dynamic. You can no longer alienate supporters of other candidates; you need them. Candidates have to court those voters, convince them that even if their first choice is someone else, they’re still worthy of a high ranking. Obnoxious, destructive behavior serves zero purpose.
The think-piece goes on from there. Question: Is there any reason why state parties can’t adopt this on their own? I’d sure like to see Delaware adopt this.
Josh Marshall’s Interesting Take On A I (not Al):
TPM Reader EB emailed today to tell me something that hadn’t come across my radar: the cost of computer memory is going absolutely through the roof. Just do a Google search for something like rising cost of computer memory and you’ll see a ton of articles. To give you a sense of scale the cost increases are approaching 200% year over year and as much as 30% for certain kinds of gaming RAM recently in one week. The cause is what you’d expect: the insatiable demand for memory created by the AI server farm buildout. I buy computer memory too but I don’t think I’ve tried to buy recently enough to be aware of the surge.
…I’m familiar with both the techno-optimist nutball theories of the AI boom as well as those I consider reasonable and fact-based. It’s obvious that we’re in a bubble. But that doesn’t really answer the most important question.
But this little data point, the cost of computer memory at the consumer and gamer level captured things for me in a new way. Say what you will about valuations, theories, AI-driven sky-high equities market numbers – this small fact point brought it home for me. There’s never been anything quite like this. You didn’t have other industries scrambling to find steel during the railroad boom…But the boom didn’t drive these wild scarcities for things that are basic building blocks of early 21st century society. That’s new, and it’s different. (And yes, I know there are similar things happening with water and electricity. There are many versions of this. I’m just saying what pushed my perception of the situation into a different place.)
So let’s not talk about a bubble, which is inevitable. Maybe I should call it a fakeness bubble, something that is not just turbulence and creative destruction on the path to building out a societal transformation but some more fundamental misallocation of resources that was based on bad facts and over-concentrated decision-making power. Is it a fakeness bubble?
Whatever the future of AI might be you cannot separate this situation from the wealth concentration and platform dominance of the big tech companies. By which I mean how the decisions of a relatively few people can have such a vast impact on the resource allocation decisions of the whole society, of the whole world.
Read the entire thing. One key reason why I love Josh Marshall is that, confronted with information he didn’t previously have, he thinks things through and shares his thoughts. Curiosity–it’s a wonderful trait.
Is Julianne Murray Acting Illegally? Sure looks like it. Even Chris Coons resurfaced from his self-inflicted torpor to opine that her continuing to serve is ‘probably illegal’. Thanks, Chris. Back to hibernation and fund-raising. But, I digress:
Is Delaware’s “acting” U.S. attorney, a loyalist of President Donald Trump who chaired the state Republican Party immediately before her appointment, serving in the post illegally?
That’s a question now being asked about Julianne Murray as federal courts around the country have ruled that five other U.S. attorneys were unlawfully put in their posts on an “interim” or “acting” basis by U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi.
Bondi installed Murray as Delaware’s “interim” U.S. attorney in July. The 120-day limit for interim appointments ended this month, when Bondi changed Murray’s status as Delaware’s chief federal law enforcement officer to “acting.”
Under the U.S. Constitution, federal law and longstanding practice, U.S. attorneys are nominated by the president and must be confirmed by the U.S. Senate.
Bondi, however, has chosen a nontraditional route with some appointments, only to have her end-around maneuvers declared unlawful in New Jersey, Virginia, Nevada, New Mexico and California.
While no formal legal challenge has been brought against Murray’s appointment (why the fuck not?), the details surrounding her installation have similarities to the others that have been contested and ruled invalid.
Since Trump has not formally nominated Murray or anyone else to the Delaware post, the state’s chief federal judge, Colm F. Connolly, publicly sought applications for the post in September.
That’s when Connolly issued an order that said “the court would only appoint a person the court deems qualified for the position.”
The judges ultimately decided that Murray, who had never been a prosecutor before joining the U.S. Attorney’s Office in July, was not qualified.
Well. Something to look forward to…
It’s Official–Strike The ‘e’ From Brandon Toole’s Last Name:
On Monday, Councilwoman Janet Kilpatrick and Councilman Brandon Toole introduced legislation that would defang many of the rules proposed within the pending data center regulations, including those around noise and energy-efficiency.
Kilpatrick told Spotlight Delaware that she feels Carter’s legislation may cause Starwood Digital Ventures, the developer of the Delaware City data center plan, to abandon the plan entirely. And, she said, “If Starwood walks, the rest of them will walk.”
“I want to have guidelines, just like with anything else (a lie), but we have so many industries that have left,” Kilpatrick said. “You have to have economic development, or you die.”
In response to Kilpatrick and Toole’s last-minute amendments, Carter asked the council to delay the vote on the regulations for two weeks so the county’s Department of Planning could have more time to review the changes and their potential effects on his ordinance.
Carter told Spotlight Delaware that while he plans to put his ordinance on the agenda for the Dec. 9 council meeting, he may give the Department of Planning more time to do a thorough technical review before a vote.
He also said that if the council ultimately votes against his proposed regulations, he may try to introduce another ordinance regulating data centers in the future – evidence of his concern over their potential impact on the community and energy prices.
There you have it. Brandon Tool was elected under false pretenses (his own). He went to a bundling party with developers the very night that he and Kilpatrick introduced their regulation-killing legislation. He’s officially a sell-out.
Safe travels, everybody.
What do you want to talk about?
The notion that a data center represents “economic development” is pure bullshit. It will require 100 or so jobs once it’s built.
The construction unions want it because that’s the nature of construction jobs – once you finish building something, you have to build something else – and a Democratic Party that’s beholden to construction unions will always be working against, well, almost everyone not in their families.
Needless to say, nobody in any construction union is going to pay the $70 a month this boondoggle will add to your electric bill.
Chris Coons thinks the end-run appointment of Julianne Murray, first as interim and now acting U.S. Attorney, is “probably illegal.” He is also “gravely” concerned about the politicization of the Department of Justice.
Consider his brow furrowed.
https://whyy.org/articles/julianne-murray-delaware-acting-us-attorney/
…and his sports coat permanenty unbuttoned.
Either Murray needs to go or she needs to start indicting some democrats I don’t like. There are plenty of corrupt ones hanging around Delaware. Easy pickins and good for her and us. This is the sort of bipartisanship I could get behind.
Capitulating to Capital, season 40, episode 21
Why is having a huge data center like mandatory? If they walk away, good.
I mean they can’t DExit if they never enter, right?
Our electrical grid is obsolete. Delaware City data center is to big for our state with overwhelming problems and not a good fit for Delaware’s businesses, Citizens, aqufores, environment and our health . Robots will replace a lot of people and kill all property values in Delaware. The building trades, they don’t care. Any politician will lose their seat in a primary voting for data center at Delaware city no exceptions .
Might mean something, might mean nothing.
On occasion, I go down the daily list of every single post that at least one person has clicked on.
I’ve recently noticed that there have been quite a few clicks on several of the articles directly and indirectly related to the ongoing underreported scandal at Fort DuPont.
By ‘indirectly’, it includes our reporting on how State Auditor Tom Wagner covered up the dirty deeds of disgraced former legislator Dick Cathcart, who went on to be the first guy to hand out the big bucks in the Fort DuPont era.
Several possibilities–is the current auditor looking at this? Are the reporters at Spotlight Delaware and WHYY looking at this (they should be)? Is a potential challenger to Nicole Poore looking at this? Is the AG looking at this?
My hope? All of the above.
Tip to reporters and others. Just type in Ft. DuPont into our search feature and go to town. If you only have time to read one article, read this one:
https://delawareliberal.net/2017/02/28/how-a-potential-boondoggle-became-a-full-fledged-boondoggle/
Then, follow the link to this one:
https://delawareliberal.net/2012/02/09/tom-wagner-first-the-coverup-now-the-whitewash/
I think anyone who votes to kill the data center regulation bill is toast. This data center is wildly unpopular. Guys like Tool and Val George (both up in 26) think a bunch of mostly Republican building trades guy are going to get them over the hump? Calling candidates now. The money from actual people will flow to primary them