Could This Impact Suxco Races?:
As Delaware’s primary election quickly approaches, a controversial affordable housing policy has become a flashpoint in Sussex County, dominating both closely watched primary races and local governments across the region.
Senate Bill 23, also known as the Housing for Every Delawarean Act, requires municipalities to adopt provisions aimed at increasing their affordable housing stock, including foregoing public hearings for some projects. The law has generated an outsized reaction in Sussex County compared to its northern counterparts.
This reaction has included Sussex County leaders calling the legislation “insidious,” and pausing public hearings on housing development proposals for an undetermined period of time. Some localities, including Lewes and Milton, have followed suit, also halting consideration of subdivision applications.
In addition to these government responses, the law has become a defining point of some of election campaigns, including a competitive Lewes-area statehouse Democratic primary and two Sussex County Council races.
Elected officials, candidates, political experts and residents have a number of explanations as to why SB 23 has overtaken the political conversation in Sussex County. But most reasons boil down to two topics consistently at the forefront of discourse within Delaware’s southernmost county: rapid development and local control.
While the legislation’s long-term impacts on Sussex County remain to be seen, campaign yard signs calling for the repeal of the bill and elected officials’ comments criticizing its enactment continue to dominate the region’s political discourse.
In a Democratic primary in the historically competitive 20th Representative District, which encompasses Lewes and Milton, the election has become what some — including challenger Ruby Keeler Schaeffer — are describing as a referendum on SB 23.
Elected officials and residents in the area say the legislation has become a marquee issue because Lewes and Milton are where the heaviest development has taken place in recent years.
Others, however, argue a more chicken-and-egg situation is taking place. Because Schaeffer has chosen to center her campaign on the measure, some say, it has taken center stage in the primary election discourse.
Berry, who co-sponsored SB 23, said she is not surprised the legislation has become a prominent topic this primary season because the affordable housing crisis has been such a “longtime conversation” in Sussex County.
Schaeffer has concentrated her campaign platform on her opposition to SB 23 in yard signs, social media posts and town hall forums. She describes the law as having stripped away “people’s rights to comment.”
While Schaeffer was clear that her mission is to repeal SB 23 if elected, she did not respond to questions about whether she has an alternative affordable housing proposal.
When you otherwise have nothing, find an issue and demagogue it to death. Who knows, maybe it’ll work.
One by one, Republican speakers at President Trump’s midterm convention in Dallas this week turned to a far-fetched argument with echoes of the Cold War.
Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana claimed, “Next year the communists will be in Congress — that’s what’s so frightening.” Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the No. 2 House Republican, said implausibly that there had been a “Bolshevik Revolution in the Democrat Party.”
And when Mr. Trump, the ringleader of this new Red Scare, took the stage, he returned — again and again and again — to baseless claims that Democrats were running as communists in the midterms.
“It’s going to be a communist country if they win,” he predicted, one of at least 60 times a speaker at the convention mentioned communism or communists.
Kinda like North Korea? Oops, sorry, bad example.
The One Where Your Pool Guy Won’t Spout Your Propaganda:
The contractor that refurbished the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool acknowledged that its own faulty work — not sabotage — led the newly installed liner to become damaged, according to a new report.
President Donald Trump repeatedly blamed vandals after sections of the liner began peeling away shortly after the president’s multimillion-dollar refurbishment was completed this summer.
“I saw it. They cut it. They cut it very violently,” Trump told reporters in June, alleging that a “box-cutter or a knife of some kind” had caused what he described as a “350-foot slit” in the pool’s lining.
Uh, no:
But Atlantic Industrial Coatings, the contractor, told the Trump administration in reports that its design and implementation of the renovation project had fallen short, The New York Times reported. The report was based on government documents, but few specifics were given about them.
For one, the company stated, workers applied too little primer because of “human oversight,” causing the liner’s layers to adhere to one another.
The “American flag blue” liner also contained two “incompatible” chemicals.
“The chemical on top reached a temperature hotter than what the compound underneath could withstand, and the heat caused the bottom layer to blister and come loose,” the Times reported. “The contractor said it had not expected that outcome because it was very uncommon to mix the two products in that way.”
We all know the truth:
The world’s most valuable energy corridors are pinching shut.
On Friday, Houthi militants backed by Iran expanded their control of the Red Sea, threatening a critical route for Persian Gulf crude. That left the region with few alternatives, since shipping traffic through the Strait of Hormuz — once the world’s primary oil transit point — remains significantly constrained and far below what it was before the war.
And oil exports from Saudi Arabia, long the most important producer in the Middle East, plunged last month to their lowest point in at least 13 years.
“These waters aren’t safe,” said Michelle Wiese Bockmann, an analyst at Windward, a maritime intelligence company.
As the war in Iran nears its seventh month, it appears to be spinning out of control, analysts said. With no diplomatic end in sight, the Middle East, the epicenter of energy production, is facing its most severe supply crisis in decades.
Oil prices on Friday briefly topped $108 per barrel after escalating attacks from the Iranian-backed Houthi militia. That is roughly 50 percent above prewar levels. Average U.S. gasoline prices have climbed above $4 a gallon — over $1 more than they were a year ago. Also on Friday, the average cost of diesel, a staple fuel for trucking, farming and industry, topped $6 a gallon in the United States.
Mr. Trump said this week that he believed the war in Iran would not end until after the U.S. midterm election in November, but claimed gas prices would come “tumbling down” after the voting. In truth, analysts said, the Trump administration has few options left for ending the war or lowering energy prices. Last month, administration officials imposed tight new economic sanctions on Tehran in the hope the move would topple the regime, but it has not.
Wasn’t it Sen. George Aiken of Vermont who suggested during the height of the Vietnam War, that the United States should ‘just declare victory and go home’? That’s what Trump will ultimately have to do.
What do you want to talk about?
