DL Open Thread Wednesday, Feb. 25, 2026

I don’t watch State of the Union speeches because I avoid self-promotion no matter who the president happens to be, but apparently the Screeching Shitbag delivered the longest-ever such speech, apparently so he could cram in all the lies. I’ll chalk it up as a win for Trump on the basis that he didn’t foam at the mouth or shit his diaper. The mainstream news media sanewashed it, of course. Josh Marshall at TPM described it as low-energy and said the Democrats’ refusal to clap or stand for any of it got under his graphene-thin skin.

I can’t claim Maine is a good barometer for the country as a whole, but polling there shows the states Democrats are in no mood for business-as-usual centrism. The Democratic Senate primary there for the opportunity to challenge concern troll Susan Collins pits aging moderate Gov. Janet Mills against upstart oyster farmer Graham Platner.

The University of New Hampshire’s Pine Tree State Poll, released Tuesday morning, showed that Platner has built momentum since October. Five months ago, 58% of likely Democratic voters said the 41-year-old oyster farmer was their first choice to be the state’s next senator, compared with 24% who preferred the governor.

Now, with the June primary less than four months away, undecided voters have broken hard in Platner’s favor: 64% said he’s their first choice, while Mills has only jumped up to 26%.

It’s perhaps an unsurprising result, as Democratic voters overwhelmingly support the kind of economically populist anti-oligarchy politics that Platner – a proponent of Medicare for All and a federal billionaires’ tax, with backing from labor unions and Sen. Bernie Sanders – has unapologetically championed.

But Tuesday’s poll suggests his message is resonating beyond Democrats. Where a race between Mills and Collins has the Democrat leading by a single point, within the margin of error, Platner would be expected to win the general election comfortably with 49% of the vote to just 38% for Collins.

With the nation’s military poised to strike Iran, why hasn’t Trump pulled the trigger yet?

According to the reports, in a recent White House meeting with many top officials present, Gen. Dan Caine – whom Trump selected, and has since highly lauded, as chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff – said that a shortage of munitions and the absence of any allies would make a prolonged war with Iran very difficult. (In previous conflicts with Iran, some Gulf allies in the region have actively assisted; this time, they say they won’t even allow U.S. or Israeli planes or missiles to fly over their territory.)

Perhaps Trump figured it would be easy to bring the mullahs of Tehran to their knees. Steve Witkoff, Trump’s former fellow real-estate tycoon, now his chief emissary to crises around the world, suggested as much in an interview on Fox News over the weekend. Witkoff said Trump was “curious” as to why Iran hadn’t “capitulated” to the looming threat of an American attack. “Why,” Witkoff wondered, “under this pressure, with the amount of sea power and naval power over there, why haven’t they come to us and said, ‘We profess we don’t want a weapon, so here’s what we’re prepared to do’? And yet, it’s sort of hard to get them to that place.”

Of all the remarks that Witkoff has uttered over the past year signifying his unsuitability for the job he’s been inexplicably handed, this one might take the proverbial cake. Why haven’t the Iranians surrendered before a shot is fired? Maybe because: A) Trump has offered them no serious way out of the crisis (the negotiation positions that Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, have put on the table would be unacceptable to any head of state B) he’s left American military personnel and allies in the region vulnerable to a retaliatory attack, and C) he’s explicitly threatened to bring down Iran’s regime, so retaliation would likely be extreme, as there would be no reward for restraint.

The Trump regime’s war on Minnesota goes beyond the ICE attacks. The unbridled greed of Republicans threatens to unleash ecological disaster on a sensitive wilderness area.

The House of Representatives, at Rep. Pete Stauber’s urging, voted to roll back a ban on mining in Minnesota’s Superior National Forest. The 20-year “mineral withdrawal,” first implemented during the Obama years, had been reestablished by the Biden administration to protect the crown jewel of Midwestern federal lands — the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. The GOP vote to rescind the ban relied on an arcane legal maneuver and was a handout to one primary beneficiary — the Chilean mining giant Antofagasta Plc and its subsidiary Twin Metals Minnesota, which are seeking to build a copper-nickel mine on national forest land just outside the borders of the Boundary Waters. Conservationists see the mine as a major pollution risk that could contaminate the region’s interconnected waterways, including the lakes and rivers within the wilderness area itself.

The wilderness area sits in a region which contains a major complex of copper, nickel and other platinum-group minerals. As AI data centers, electric vehicles and the like drive up copper prices, Twin Metals Minnesota wants those riches, and has worked the levers of power in Washington D.C. for more than a decade to get its way.

While the company pours money into lobbying efforts, it has found numerous energetic allies on Capitol Hill, chief among them Rep. Stauber. Last summer, he and his fellow Republicans on the House Natural Resources Committee introduced a provision into Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill that could have provided Twin Metals with mining leases in perpetuity, while blocking judicial review of those leases. That provision ultimately failed, but Stauber is back for another round of political maneuvering.

Last month’s House vote to rollback the 20-year mining ban in Minnesota was accomplished using a little-known law called the Congressional Review Act, or CRA, which allows Congress to rescind regulatory rules issued by federal agencies. The 1996 law was rarely used before Trump’s first term, but Congressional Republicans have in recent years relied on it with increasing frequency to gut regulations that they dislike.

The floor’s yours.