Daily Archives: 6 November 2026

Blaming Trump for the Erasure of the Republican Party?

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In most of the post-election analyses going on, a major theme is that it’s all Trump’s fault. Typical of that is the house editorial in the WSJ.

True to form, President Trump [R] is already blaming everyone else, but he is the main architect of this rout. He’ll say the Senate didn’t break the filibuster or pass his Save America Act. But neither would have saved the GOP this year, even if there had been enough votes to do either. He’ll blame Karl Rove and Texas Senator John Cornyn [R] for the shocking defeats in the Lone Star State, but failed Senate candidate Ken Paxton was his man—and his choice helped bring down Governor Greg Abbott [R] too.

The editors aren’t far wrong as far as they went, but they cast their analysis too narrowly.

Trump’s late season campaign rallies that were all “Yay me,” instead of touting the particular candidate and pushing to get out the vote for him/her, also were counterproductive.

Major contributing factors, though, were the Republicans’ Chaos Caucus in the House that blocked too many of the party’s priorities and the Establishment Republicans in the Senate (not only Thune) who were too timid to force on-the-record votes or otherwise actually to fight for the party’s priorities.

And too many of the candidates themselves, who kept arguing how wonderful our economy is on the national level (and it is), but who didn’t talk directly to their constituents about how they would help, explicitly, those constituents, most of whom weren’t experiencing any of that national wonderfulness at their local grocery stores, local gas pumps, or their local utility bills.

Republicans, if they’re to have any chance of recovery, will need to stop playing at the obstreperous loyal opposition and act like they deserve to be in charge. That will require more than just greater internal unity than the Chaos Caucus has been interested in. It will require, also, vastly overhauling what they use for their communications game and talk often and freely to their constituents—not at them—about those constituents’ problems independently of national conditions, and each Republican needs to lose his fear of specifics and talk to his constituents about what policies he’ll fight for that particularly address those problems.

Republicans also need to learn from the Progressive-Democrats and load up their own saps and use them. Not to smear and lie; leave those to the Progressive-Democrats, instead to call out their specific opponents and identify, with facts and specific outcomes, the emptiness of those opponents’ words and promises and those opponents’ policy failures.

Negligence

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A wave of hacks that involves spoiling food by getting into Internet-connected refrigerators and freezers and turning the temperatures up to as high as 120oF has run across Europe in the last few weeks.

The hackers—whose identities and motives remain unknown—had found a way to take control of internet-based computers that supermarket chains and refrigeration firms use to oversee the systems, cybersecurity researchers said. In some cases, hackers appeared to target systems with outdated software.

Leave aside the foolishness of connecting these devices to the Internet in the first place, no matter the convenience of doing so. (How convenient is it for a supermarket to toss whole freezers-full of food because the food was spoiled by those hacks?) Given that companies are going to do so, there are obvious steps that can be taken to minimize this threat.

France’s cybersecurity agency issued an alert about refrigeration-system controllers made by Danfoss, a Danish maker of refrigeration equipment, and US-based Copeland. The agency warned that the controllers were prone to being hacked and urged users to bolster their security or remove them from the internet.

Indeed. Find another controller company if these two (for instance) are too slow to update and patch their software.

And this, especially:

The default administrator password for the Danfoss controller is set to “12345,” according to documentation on the manufacturer’s website. If a supermarket chain or its refrigeration contractor didn’t change the password, that would create a gaping security hole.

That’s no knock on Danfoss. Of course any company producing this kind of device must deliver it with an easily discerned password so that the user can gain entry and set up its network security parameters. The first thing the installer should do, before connecting the device to the Internet, is change that password to a strong password that includes upper and lower case letters, numbers, and special characters. Not doing that simple step isn’t just lazy; it’s appallingly negligent. (Aside to individual readers: have you changed the password on your WiFi device in your home’s network that connects you to the Internet away from the manufacturer’s default? On your TV? Your refrigerator?)

For a business to not take even these minimal network security steps isn’t just negligence. I claim it’s criminal in its magnitude. IT types and company CEOs and equivalents who tolerate these failures need to be held criminally as well as personally civilly liable. And yes, that includes the Mom-and-Pops, who in the aggregate form much of the backbone of an economy’s food distribution infrastructure.

Other distribution infrastructures in an economy—electricity, fuel, water—similarly have no excuses for not securing their networks from this sort of hacking.