Greets! Welcome to Tuesday, Aug. 4, 2026. Today is primary day in five different states around the country:
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Michigan – High-profile races include the Democratic U.S. Senate primary to replace retiring Sen. Gary Peters, the Republican gubernatorial primary, and several closely watched U.S. House contests.
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Kansas – Voters are selecting party nominees for governor, Congress, and state offices, and deciding a significant ballot measure concerning judicial selection.
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Missouri – Congressional primaries, state legislative races, and several constitutional amendments are on the ballot. The Democratic rematch between Cori Bush and Wesley Bell is drawing national attention.
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Virginia – Primaries for U.S. House seats and the Republican U.S. Senate nomination are the marquee contests.
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Washington – Uses its nonpartisan “top-two” primary system, where all candidates appear on one ballot and the top two vote-getters advance to the general election regardless of party. Primaries today for U.S. House rep as well as several state legislative and court seats.
Of course we’ll be watching those races. Check back to the front page here at PJ Media for updates as they come in.
Cookies, wine, and the Coast Guard are also sharing the calendar today, which is either a great combination or a terrible one depending on the order you tackle them in. It’s Chocolate Chip Cookie Day, Night Out Day, Coast Guard Day, White Wine Day, Owl Awareness Day (Who?), Single Working Women’s Day, Clouded Leopard Day, Assistance Dog Day, and Hooray for Kids Day. Remember to vote today, bake some cookies, pour some wine, thank a Coast Guardsman, and get outside for Night Out, just maybe not all in that order.
Look up: If the skies are clear in your area of the country tonight, you might want to sneak outside after midnight for a look. We’re in the midst of the Perseid shower, which is ramping up to its predicted peak on Aug. 12. That lines up perfectly with the new moon, which means a darker sky, making it easier to see fainter meteors. It’s a combo we won’t see again until 2045.
Today in History:
1735: A jury acquits printer John Peter Zenger of seditious libel, a landmark early victory for freedom of the press in colonial America.
1790: President George Washington signs legislation creating the Revenue Cutter Service, the forerunner of the U.S. Coast Guard — the very reason today is Coast Guard Day.
1792: English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley is born in Field Place, England.
1830: The city of Chicago is formally platted and laid out.
1892: Andrew and Abby Borden are found hacked to death in their Fall River, Mass., home; their daughter, Lizzie, stands trial and is acquitted.
1914: Britain declares war on Germany as World War I expands, while the United States proclaims its neutrality.
1936: Greek Prime Minister Ioannis Metaxas suspends parliament and the constitution, establishing the authoritarian “4th of August Regime.”
1944: Nazi police raid a secret annex in Amsterdam on a tip from an informer, arresting eight people hiding there, including 15-year-old Anne Frank.
1964: The bodies of murdered civil rights workers Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney are found buried in an earthen dam in Mississippi.
1977: President Jimmy Carter signs legislation creating the U.S. Department of Energy.
1985: Tom Seaver notches his 300th career win the same day Rod Carew collects his 3,000th career hit.
Birthdays Today Include: Barack Obama, 44th President; Louis Armstrong, jazz trumpeter (“What a Wonderful World”); Billy Bob Thornton, actor (Sling Blade); Meg Whitman, businesswoman politician; Tim Winton, novelist; and Jeff Gordon, NASCAR driver.
If today’s your birthday, too, happy birthday!
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I note Kurt Schlichter at our sister site, Townhall, this morning:
Socialism is not about making lives better or creating prosperity or security or any of those things. It’s about jerks living out their personal psychodramas while they get off on making you miserable.
Nothing demonstrates that more than the idea of defunding the police and getting rid of prisons. After all, you wicked normal people deserve to have thugs, junkies, murderers, rapists, and other Democrat constituencies turned on you to make you pay for the crime of being you. You need to understand the deep hate that lives within all these people, and that’s why, in every single leftist sector of society, you see the actual criminals not merely being ignored but being idolized. The DSA types would free these barbarians for the express purpose of allowing those barbarians to hurt you, because you deserve to be hurt. You deserve to be killed. You deserve to be raped. Why? Because these freaks don’t like you and it amuses them to see you in pain.
But there’s a practical side to it too. The old Soviet Union understood it. Regular criminals were victims of society, and you, being the foundation of society, need to be victimized in return. If you were a regular criminal, you were treated infinitely better than someone who committed a real crime, that is, a political crime. If you opposed the regime, then you were a real criminal.
Glenn Reynolds comments at Instapundit, with his usual and remarkable succinctness, “Leftists still think that way.”
Well, yes, and as a result, I suspect that even many rank-and-file Democrats are to the point of shying away from their party’s ballot offerings, let alone the independent and Republican voters. People have started to recognize, with an intensity they’ve not had for years that, as Kurt says:
…the evil of socialism is not a bug, but rather a feature. Remember, it’s driven by hate—hate of the normal, hate of the smarter, hate of the better, hate of your parents who just didn’t get you. And every single time it’s put into practice, we see the same thing. Since everything in socialism goes against human nature, you need an apparatus of repression designed to force people to accept what nature rejects. There’s not a socialist country without thuggish police. There’s not a socialist country where you can speak freely. There’s not a socialist country where you are free because your freedom defeats the whole purpose of socialism, which is ensuring your submission to the cadres.
John Fogerty expressed his doubts in these matters, describing them as “Five year plans and new deals, wrapped in golden chains.” That’s as apt a description as you’ll ever find for what the far left is offering.
Let’s take a stroll through the graveyard of socialism’s greatest hits, conveniently alphabetized for your browsing pleasure, like a morbid tourist brochure nobody asked for:
Angola, Algeria, Albania, Aragon, Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Austria, Benin, Bulgaria, Burkina Faso, Belarus, Catalonia, Cape Verde, Cuba, Cambodia, China, Chile, Congo, Czechoslovakia, Djibouti, Egypt, Estonia, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Grenada, Gambia, Ghana, Georgia, East Germany, Hungary, India, Iraq, North Korea, Kampuchea, Libya, Latvia, Lithuania, Marquetalia, Mozambique, Mongolia, Mali, Mahabad, Myanmar, Madagascar, Mauritania, Nicaragua, Poland, Romania, Russia, Syria, Slovenia, Senegal, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Tunisia, Tuva, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, Venezuela, Yemen, Yugoslavia, Zambia, Zanzibar, and Zimbabwe.
That’s not a list of nations that merely stumbled on the road to utopia — that’s a full alphabet’s worth of breadlines and secret police, every single one of them promising the exact same paradise, and every single one of them delivering the exact same rubble instead. Sixty-plus failures so profound, they have a large body count. At some point, that stops being bad luck and starts looking suspiciously like a pattern — but don’t tell that to the true believers, because math has never once slowed them down.
Which brings us to the “Democratic Socialists of America” (DSA), that adorable little clown car of ideologues who will absolutely, positively, cross-their-hearts insist that none of the above counts as “real socialism.” Never mind that they can’t agree among themselves what “real socialism” actually is — ask five DSA members for a definition, and you’ll get six answers, four contradictions, and at least one lecture about how asking the question at all makes you the problem.
Funny, that’s the same trick they pull when you ask them to define “woman.” Definitions, you see, are for suckers and oppressors. Nail these people down to an actual meaning, and their whole agenda collapses like a lawn chair that’s been left out in the weather for 40 years. They simply refuse to hold still long enough to get pinned. And when you press them anyway? That’s when you learn that words themselves — your words specifically, the ones daring to ask for clarity — apparently constitute violence. Never mind the gulags; the real violence is your follow-up question.
Related: Outsourcing Charity to Government: Redistribution With a Permission Slip
So here’s my prediction, free of charge: Some of these born-again socialists currently in the process of body-snatching the Democrat Party will manage to squeak through their primaries and land on the general election ballot.
You know what? Fine. Let them. Those races are precisely where the GOP is going to clean house in November. Every district dumb enough to nominate someone auditioning for the sixty-third entry on that list up there is a district handing Republicans a seat on a silver platter, gift-wrapped, with a bow made of failed five-year plans. Matt Margolis made the point yesterday in a VIP article (Why are you still not a VIP member?) that the Democrat establishment is in real trouble as a result of the DSA. The DSA may thrill the far left, but they terrify the swing voters, and they certainly motivate the GOP rank and file to get the DSA back into its electoral cage. Guess how that’s going to turn out when the votes are finally counted in November?
Thought for the Day: As I mentioned in the history section, a tip from an informer ended Anne Frank’s freedom in an afternoon — proof that the machinery of tyranny rarely needs an army, just a neighbor willing to point.
VIP Members: What are your thoughts on the outcome of the DSA’s efforts, both now and in November? Remember that your voice matters here.
Take care, gang. I hope I’ll see you here tomorrow.
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