The Graham Platner Candidacy in Maine Reaches Signature Significance Status on Many Fronts

Yikes.

I haven’t written much about the Graham Platner debacle in Maine. I will have to now, because he is a walking, talking, lying human ethics train wreck, and strong evidence of the contempt our political parties have for both the Republic and its voters. Democrats think they have a real shot at defeating long-time “centrist” Republican Senator Susan Collins, who is pretty much a NeverTrumper. The fact that Platner is running unopposed in the Democratic primary to be the party’s choice to oppose her has been looking for some time as if the Mad Left is whistling past the graveyard, and incidentally, desperate, deluded and nuts. I summarized Platner’s virtues exactly a month ago here, writing in part,

He has said women who are raped are at fault. He said that blacks don’t tip. He has called called white, rural Maine dwellers stupid. He uses “fag” to describe gays. Platner praised Hamas, rationalized urinating on corpses, and has denigrated police officers. He once referred to Jesus as a “zombie” and the Virgin Mary as a “skank.” He also had a Nazi tattoo on his chest and defended it for years. On the plus side, Platner approves of political violence, so at least in that sense he’s a mainstream 2026 Democrat.”

And the hits just keep on coming for Platner. Today we learned that his supposed occupation as a small town Maine harbormaster—-See? He’s a real Maine-y blue collar guy!—is a rather wan resume item. The Washington Free Beacon reports,

“Platner’s town of Sullivan got by without a harbormaster from February 2022, when Platner’s predecessor resigned, until September 2023, when town officials tapped Platner to serve as “an interim Harbor Master until one could be hired,” records show. Platner had volunteered for the role in case Maine law required Sullivan to have one, though the town’s Harbor Committee noted at the time that it was “not clear” he was needed because “operations in the Harbors are handled by those who use the Harbors without dispute” and because the role’s “largest challenges are clerical” and “can be handled by the Harbor Committee.”Platner dropped the “interim” title in March 2024, when he completed the basic training required to be considered a “qualified Harbor Master.” He served in the role until the summer of 2025, when he launched his candidacy, according to Sullivan town manager Ray Weintraub, who told the Free Beacon that being town harbormaster generally consisted of collecting rent fees for Sullivan’s fewer than two dozen permitted moorings, where boats can anchor offshore. “We don’t really have any working waterfront, so to speak, other than a couple of boat launches,” Weintraub explained.”

Wow, this guy is really qualified to be a U.S. Senator! You wonder why “the country’s in the very best of hands” and ends up with idiots, crooks, fakes, poseurs and dolts in Congress? You know, like Republicans George Santos, Lauren Boebert, Margery Taylor Greene, and (oh, let’s pick a Democrat out of the hat) Ex-Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick of Florida, who resigned from Congress moments before the House Ethics Committee was going to sanction her, among other offenses, stealing nearly $5 million in Federal Emergency Management Agency funds for her campaign? It’s because parties keep nominating ridiculous, untrustworthy, unqualified people. Platner, however, is special.

He’s also been endorsed by Senator Bernie Sanders and AOC, another unqualified, incompetent boob.

The juiciest revelations about Platner came from his wife, who, the New York Times revealed, warned his campaign that her lovey-bug has a habit of sexting other women during their marriage. Classy! An Anthony Weiner wannabe! But that’s not all! Here is the transcript of the cringe-worthy video the Platner campaign persuaded his wife to post (hold onto your head!):

The “Who Cares?” Anti-Trump Judicial Ruling Of Them All

Even Trump doesn’t care, raising the question of why it’s such a big deal to the Trump Deranged. From the Washington Post:

“A federal judge issued a ruling this week temporarily blocking key parts of President Donald Trump’s effort to transform the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, throwing the institution’s future into a state of uncertainty…He installed himself as the Kennedy Center’s board chair and brought in loyalists as trustees who voted last year to add his name to the building. Programming priorities shifted, acts have withdrawn or dropped out, ticket sales plummeted and more than 100 employees resigned or were laid off.

“In March, the board agreed to Trump’s plan to close the center for a two-year renovation. But U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper on Friday granted in part a request from Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-Ohio), temporarily blocking steps toward the closure. He also ordered Kennedy Center officials to remove Trump’s name from the center’s building and branding.

“…Cooper has ordered the removal of Trump’s name from the building’s white exterior wall, a little more than five months after it was installed when the board, stacked by Trump with those loyal to him, voted to rename the institution “The Donald J. Trump and The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.” They have two weeks to remove it and scrap references to it from the website.

“Congress gave the Kennedy Center its name,” Cooper wrote in his opinion, “and only Congress can change it.”

That’s nice. I’m sure all of my friends and colleagues in the arts community will be happy now. Actually no, I know they won’t. My Trump Deranged friends and colleagues have made it quite clear that they won’t be happy until Donald J. Trump is dead and hanging like a pinata on a tree somewhere, and can be pelted with rotten fruit by people screaming like banshees. Ann Althouse this morning raised a fascinating conspiracy theory regrading “What’s going on here?” Her take: “I’m going to assume he didn’t want to fix this place, and the best — or most entertaining — way to avoid blame for letting it rot was to bait a judge into preventing him from saving it.”

Actually, he did more than that. When the President put his name on the building, it naturally caused the infants in the arts community to cut off their metaphorical noses to spite their faces. After duly noting how silly the re-naming of the building was in this post, I wrote in this one:

Unethical Quote of the Month, and More “Good Bigotry”: New Mexico’s Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham

“If women, Democratic women, just show up and vote, we’re good. We don’t need any of the men.”

….New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham

The Governor’s unethical and bigoted statement was made at the recent DNC Ruled and By-laws Committee meeting.

It isn’t only men who should be disgusted with Grisham’s statement, her vision and her attitude. Women of any partisan persuasion should as well. Hers is the feminist equivalent of Nikita Khrushchev’s infamous “We will bury you!” threat. “We have enough power that we don’t have to care what you think, want, believe in or need,” is her message to half the nation.

“Swinging Dick” Ethics

In a case involving a spa for women that refused ​service to a transgender woman, Circuit Judge Lawrence VanDyke’s dissented from ‌the full court’s decision not to review the spa’s claims that a Washington state anti-discrimination law violated its constitutional rights. (You know, Washington state. It was discrimination not to allow a biological male who had decided he was now female to join and all-female spa and undress in a women’s locker room.) VanDyke’s dissent begins, “This is a case about swinging dicks.”

“You may think that swinging dicks shouldn’t appear in a judicial opinion,” the judge continued. “I hope we all can agree that it is far more ​jarring for the unsuspecting and exposed women at Olympus Spa — some as young as 13 — to be visually assaulted by the real thing.”

Twenty-seven judges denounced VanDyke’s comments as “vulgar barroom talk” that could undermine public trust in the ⁠courts, including my old Georgetown Law Center classmate, Circuit Judge M. Margaret McKeown, who wrote separately that VanDyke’s “crass” language served only to distract from what she said was a routine case involving discrimination in public accommodations.

“It is certainly not a case involving ‘woke regulators’ and ‘complicit judges’ out ​to harm ‘women and young girls,'” she wrote.”Those assertions describe a case entirely different from the one presented to the panel.”

I hate to disagree with my distinguished classmate, especially since she’s judge and I’m just a…hell, I don’t know what I am. But the case was indeed about “swinging dicks.” Here’s the first paragraph of the decision:

The Freedom 250 Concert Ethics Train Wreck

Would it be too much to expect all of America’s talented performers to unite in patriotic passion and non-partisan good will to help the nation celebrate its 250th anniversary?

Apparently, yes! As John Lennon would have said if he were possessed by “Bob” from “Twin Peaks”: “All you need is HATE! Bwahahahahahahaha!” Well, hate and stupidity.

Would it be too much to expect that those in charge of organizing such an event to be willing and able to enlist performing artists who are in their primes, widely popular, and invited on the basis of their achievements and skills rather than their political endorsements?

Also, tragically, yes. What drooling yahoos selected that bunch of has-beens, geezers and B acts to headline “The Great American State Fair”? And Milli Vanilli? Is that a joke? Please let it be a joke! Milli Vanilli is to singing groups as Joe Biden was to the Presidency. It was a fake group. It was caught lip-synching on live TV! Quite appropriately, many conservative, Republican and MAGA supporters are disheartened by these bottom-of-the-barrel scrapings, as this selection of tweets highlighted by “Not the Bee” demonstrates:

From the other end, the Left is seeking an encore of their anti-American tantrum in 2017, when any half-decent performer who wasn’t already an outspoken MAGA captive was threatened with shunning by all the Woke and Wonderful if they performed at any of Trump’s inauguration festivities, leaving the President with community theater stars and marginal performers who would only appear at the Grammys if they bought tickets to the balcony. Last week fading country star Martina McBride joined the list of performers backing out of the upcoming “Freedom 250” concerts. Morris Day, Young MC, and the Commodores, also announced they were dumping the gig. The series is being produced by an organization founded by Donald Trump, see, so that means that the concerts are…

How Bonkers Is Woke America’s Obsession With Normalizing The Transgender Fad? This Bonkers:

How far gone does a fanatic have to be to have an event like this and not expect most people to conclude that the organizers are out of their minds? Menstrual equity? Free period underwear?

The event is scheduled for June 17 and supported by Boston Mayor Wu’s “Office of LGBTQ Advancement.” I am solely tempted to do a riff on this, but I’m going to resist. Mayor Wu, who is about as wokey as a human being can get, is really getting away with this somehow. Wow. Talk about pandering to a minority! This may be an all time record.

Memorial Day Ethics Reflections…

Nice.

The Democratic National Committee decided to use Memorial Day to attack the President of the United States. Of course it did. Despite all of the party’s rhetoric about saving democracy (while it was undermining it to a degree never before seen in U.S. history—go ahead, challenge that!), this is a party that literally doesn’t like the United States (maybe hate is too strong).

That tweet was so offensive, even Democrats objected. Sen. Tammy Duckworth, (D-Ill.) tweeted, “It is incredibly distasteful to use our heroic dead for a political attack on Memorial Day. I’m a Democrat and I condemn this post by the DNC.”

And the DNC pulled it, replacing it with this…

…without comment, apology, anything. Tweet? What tweet? But it was the fact it could be tweeted at all that is signature significance. The party is blaming the “kids” that it had in charge of social media during the holiday, but this just means the Gen Z radicals the party has indoctrinated in our schools and with its media don’t yet understand that the mask has to stay on a bit longer or else…

Can’t have that.

The DNC was just one example. I wrote yesterday about Democrats declaring the holiday “Celebrate a Dead Arrest-Resisting Street Thug Day,” including Minneapolis’s woke mayor, who had to be reminded it was also a holiday to honor patriots and heroes. I note that Fark, the often funny, left-biased satirical news aggregator, posted this yesterday…

If challenged, I’m sure Fark would say that it was satirizing the Trump Deranged progs who still think the Epstein files hold damning evidence against the President. You know the old saying though…”Fool me once..”? I’ve checked Fark for years. It’s about as non-partisan as Stephen Colbert. As for Fark’s favorite party—well, do you remember the Memorial Day message posted by Kamala Harris—you know, that whizbang, smart-as-a-whip candidate for President who only lost because American are racists and sexist? Here , let me refresh your memory…

Unethical (and Tasteless) Tweet Of The Month: Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) [Updated and Expanded]

Call me sentimental and patriotic, but on Memorial Day 2026, I believe we have better people to remember than George Floyd, and almost anyone is more appropriate to honor.

We can and should blame President Trump, along with the foolish voters of Georgia, for the fact that someone as unqualified and ethically inert as Sen. Warnock is in Congress today and not haunting a ramshackle church somewhere. You will recall that Trump made the two 2021 special Georgia Senate elections into referendums on the January 6 riots and his claims of a stolen election, and managed to snatch two defeats from the jaws of victory.

Still, using Memorial Day to extol a lifetime street punk who was overdosing on fentanyl while resisting arrest demonstrates a special kind of sick priorities. There is literally nothing, zero, nada, to admire, respect or honor George Floyd for. He was in the right wrong place at the right wrong time, and an audacious cabal of race-hustlers exploited his accidental death by bad cop to extort all manner of weak principled businesses and institutions into white guilt seizures, causing extensive, perhaps irreparable harm to the nation, society, race relations, the justice system and more. Poor dumb, useless George wasn’t at fault for any of this, but Senator Warnock and ethics villains like him were.

Brilliant! Democrats Kill The National Womens’ Museum Because It Wouldn’t Include Non-Women! [Revised and Expanded]

Wow.

A veteran EA commenter today who excels in the contrived “gotcha!” accused me of “name-calling” because I consistently describe today’s Democratic Party as aspiring totalitarians, Machiavellian, and cheaters, and say Democrats want to gut the Constitution. It reminded me of the objection in the Continental Congress (as portrayed in “1776”) over Thomas Jefferson’s use of the word “tyrant” to describe England’s King George. Jefferson’s justification of his choice of words: “He is a tyrant.” I bet my critic really be incensed as I write—now—that today’s vote in Congress indicates that the party is also silly, doctrinaire and…wait for it….moronic.

Because it does, and it is.

Democrats, along with a few Republicans who should go the way of Thomas Massey, voted to cancel the Smithsonian’s planned Women’s History Museum because Republicans added language to its astablishment bill defining women in a manner that leaves out Renee Richards, Caitin Jenner, and the fully, ah, “intact” male “transitioners” who have been slaughtering female competitors in amateur swimming, wrestling, volleyball, and track and field. You know, like this person known as “Lia Thomas.”

The measure to establish the museum was defeated 216 to 204. Not a single Democrat voted for it, so chained is the party to radical LGBTQ propaganda.

Amazing. Amazing. The fact that most women still support a party that is so hypocritical regarding women’s welfare and rights—this is the party, remember, who made serial sexual predator Bill Clinton the keynote speaker at its national convention proclaiming the “Year of the Woman”!— is as incomprehensible as the fact that so many American Jews still vote for the party that increasing supports Hamas.

In fact, irony and hypocrisy are everywhere in this vote. The Axis of Unethical Conduct (“the resistance,” Democrats and the news media) like to say that Congressional Republicans refuse to swerve from the MAGA script, but the GOP virtually never gets 100% agreement. Every House Democrat, however, wants to see a Women’s History Museum that has a special exhibit honoring this recent Democratic administration official:

How “inclusive.”

Because the proposed museum wouldn’t be pandering to anomalies like Admiral Rachel Levine and the former cute-as-a-bunny actress playing Achilles in the new Odyssey film…

…Democrats decided en masse that American women who were crucial to the founding and development of this nation despite being marginalized, abused and discriminated against shouldn’t have their fascinating and inspiring stories told at all. Their museum wouldn’t sufficiently validate the social pathogen causing parents to allow their children to be mutilated and sports to undermine the cause of female athletes after they fought so hard to compete, you see.

An earlier version of the bill was co-sponsored by 127 Democrats. Republicans on the House Administration Committee added new language to the bill last month to dedicate the museum to “preserving, researching, and presenting the history, achievements, and lived experiences of biological women.”

As opposed to, you know, men who decided they were women, wanted to be regarded as women, or pretended to be women.

Republican New York Rep. Nicole Malliotakis resigned as vice chair of the Problem Solvers Caucus today in response to the Democrats’ ridiculous tantrum, being appropriately disgusted by the vote even though 20 Democrats on the caucus co-sponsored the bill. In a letter to the committee’s co-chairs, Malliotakis pointed to Democrats on the committee refusing to cross party lines on pieces of legislation.

“If not one Problem Solvers Democrat would vote for a straightforward measure to transfer federal land for a women’s history museum simply because it was amended through regular order, during the committee process, to ensure that only biological women are exhibited, then what can we actually rely on the Caucus’ Democrats to join us on? I therefore submit my resignation as vice chair and member of the Problem Solvers Caucus, effective immediately,” Malliotakis wrote.

Good for her.

[Incidentally, I am not unalterably opposed to a National LGBTQ Museum that includesaccomplished and significant trans individuals, if they ever stop killing people…]

Making Americans Dumber and More Ignorant Every Day: MSNow!

Jonathan Turley quoted a gobsmacking statement from MSNow’s consistently ridiculous Katy Tur that is, I kid you not, too stupid to qualify for Unethical Quote of the Month.

Commenting on Speaker Mike Johnson’s evocation of natural rights at the “Rededicate 250” rally on the mall in Washington, DC., she said, “What about this passage from Mike Johnson declaring that our rights do not derive from government? They come from “you, our creator and heavenly father.” Is this him putting God over the Declaration of Independence?”

No, you moron, it is him correctly interpreting what Thomas Jefferson wrote about natural rights, the core of the American philosophy of liberty and individual determinism over government domination. The Declaration states without equivocation, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Who or what “The Creator” is was consistently left up to individual faith and judgment by the Founders, who often used neutral terms like “Providence” to describe the origins of life, humanity and the universe. Jefferson’s point, which of course statists like the Axis of Unethical Conduct and its mouthpieces like Tur want to ignore, is that certain rights accrue in a just society to an individual automatically, and government cannot ethically or morally take those rights away. To maintain that such rights have to be granted by the government is to declare humanity unacceptably dependent on the power and will of others. The Declaration, Constitution and the Bill of Rights explain what the government can’t do.

How can someone who doesn’t understand this—because they never learned it, presumably—get to be a network news host? It’s horrifying. Similarly horrified by Tur’s ignorance, Jonathan Turley wrote today,

“The Revolution was fought over natural rights that belonged to colonists as human beings, bestowed by God and defended by the American Revolution. The Constitution created a system that guaranteed the protection of those rights contained in the Declaration of Independence.Speaker Johnson was speaking directly to the foundation of this Republic in reaffirming his faith in natural rights. Of course, the rejection of natural rights in academia and politics is consistent with the view that our rights evolve with a “living Constitution.” What the government giveth, the government may taketh away. The debate reflected in Tur’s comments could not be more timely or elemental on our 250th anniversary. We must again decide not just who we were then but who we are now as Americans. There are many who want to decouple our system from natural rights as they “reimagine” American democracy and “trash” the American Constitution.”

No wonder so many Americans are gulled by the Democrats’ cynical claim to be “protecting democracy.” They don’t know what American democracy is.