The case against every Republican in Washington, and even Harrisburg, is simple- everything costs too much, and their policies made it so. By kneeling before a mad man President, they created a monster. An inflation crisis that was slowly improving is now an inflation disaster- gas, health care, food, and housing, essential core building blocks of life that we cannot skip as people, cost too much. The “Big, Beautiful Bill,” a failed trade war, a botched and unnecessary war in Iran, and rampant and undeniable corruption have wrecked our economy, made our country weak, and destroyed our place in the world. Republicans are heading towards a brutal wipeout that they earned.
Of course, the problem with this is that the Democratic Party is troublesome right now. As a lifelong Democrat, I am trying to navigate the mess we have made. I’ve sent thousands of dollars from the pac I work at to candidates this week, some of whom I have issues with. Small problems that are actually big ones, things like whether a candidate wants to scrap the Affordable Care Act for a larger, unworkable government plan, I’m overlooking, basically because ending Trump’s functional power as President is more of a priority. More core, fundamental things, such as embracing antisemitism, calling for the abolition of borders, police, and prisons as a whole, are not. The truly personally terrible few who are running. Candidates who would steal from their own family? I’m taking a hard pass there. A crook is no more worth a vote than an imbecile.
I obviously won’t vote for Ryan Mackenzie. He’s awful. But Bob “Crooksy” Brooks? I’m still a hard no on him. I’ll just leave it blank. Why? Because what they’re saying about him is true. So even as I send out checks and independent expenditures to candidates in Alaska, Florida, Wisconsin, Maine, California, and other places in the hopes of the Democrats ending Trump’s reign of terror on the world, here at home I just can’t stomach our local version of John Fetterman and Graham Platner.
Democrats spent the last decade chastising the GOP for putting “party over country.” Voting for some of these folks we are running would prove we were nothing but scolding hypocrites who would do the same thing in pursuit of power. Most people already believe that, which is why they allowed themselves to vote for Donald Trump to begin with. I have quite a few friends happy to prove them right, apparently.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ll vote for Josh Shapiro in the end, I guess. Stacey Garrity (Did I spell that right) is the worst Gubernatorial nominee in Pennsylvania that I’ve seen from either party in my lifetime. She holds lunatic views, if you even give her credit for coherent views, can’t really articulate them, and lacks any sort of political identity for any of us to even pretend we’re attacking. You can sort of just rule her out through the ear test- listen to her give a speech or two, and you just know this person isn’t capable of running a civilized place, let alone a state the size of Pennsylvania. This is the closest thing to a default election we’ve had. Scott Wagner and Dougie Mastriano were at least easily classified as angry conservatives.
Let’s be honest though, I wish I wasn’t forced to vote for Governor Josh “GPT” Shapiro. As I said last week:
As for Josh Shapiro? Whatever. What has he done? Shorty worked hard on building data centers and passing school vouchers, while SEPTA funding, property tax reform, and adult recreational weed legalization went nowhere. What’s the point of high approval if all you want to do is take it with you to South Carolina in January? To be fair, he made the smart decision to Xerox the Wolf budgets and maybe add the inflation rate to the numbers. I guess he also fixed twenty yards of road in Philly too one time. Get shit done, right? Still, the guy is basically competent and kept the state from going off course in his first term. Stacy Garrity is incompetent and has bad ideas. Nobody needs her as Governor.
I mean, it’s a step down from Tom Wolf, who was honestly a step down from Ed Rendell, but hey, it’s like complaining about spam when the alternative is starvation. You’ll take it, you guess. Of course, Josh would have a problem with a credible alternative though. As data center politics energize rural Pennsylvania, and even the suburbs, Shapiro is pretending now that he’s standing in the way of irresponsible development. He’s running ads saying his opponent is awful on data center development and putting out executive orders in the 11th hour of his term to set rules on the structures. I mean, it’s a super complicated issue and I appreciate his wanting to get it right now, but wow the revisionist history. Just Google Josh Shapiro record on data centers. I mean, the guy secured $20 billion from Amazon Web Centers to build data centers all over Pennsylvania when he thought it was popular. Oh, and there was this:
Other groups are more skeptical of Shapiro’s proposal. The Better Path Coalition, a grassroots consortium of environmental groups, pointed to the administration’s behind-the-scenes communications with Amazon, which is developing multiple data centers in the commonwealth, as a cause for concern.
A group of Montour County residents who organized against data center development obtained a trove of emails from the administration through a Right-to-Know request, which showed that a top staffer sent an Amazon lobbyist a “feedback draft of the principles” that the administration planned to lay out in GRID before the standards were public.
The records, which were previously reported by Heatmap, also included an email that state Secretary of Community and Economic Development Rick Siger sent to Amazon. He told the company the GRID standards are “intended to be voluntary,” and said Shapiro is “not proposing to ban or even discourage data centers or other large loads that don’t agree to implement them from siting here.”
That, the Better Path Coalition wrote in a recent statement, shows Shapiro’s GRID standards are “strictly performative.”
Now, he’s doing this:
The executive order asks developers to sign an agreement that they will follow the governor’s GRID standards, which include clean energy and job creation requirements. In exchange for signing, they get permit review and approval on a rolling basis.
It requires that developers show proof of local approvals before they can receive any state permits or authorizations.
It puts conditions on Pennsylvania’s data center sales tax exemption — if developers don’t follow the GRID standards, the state Department of Revenue won’t acknowledge applications for the tax credit.
It bans agencies under the governor’s control from signing NDAs in connection with data center projects. (The order doesn’t prevent local government officials from signing such agreements.)
It kicks data centers out of Fast Track, a Shapiro administration initiative to speed up permitting of major projects. (Previously, Shapiro had said he was giving this extra permitting attention to data center projects that followed his GRID standards.)
So basically, all the easy permitting he promised, and the tax breaks he promised, now he’ll make you pay off the locals first (I wonder how he raised so much, don’t you?), then you can have them. Look, I get it, I do think the eventual answer on data centers and AI from Democrats has to be yes, but Governor GPT started out with the red carpet out for them, and now he wants to pretend he’s making it hard for them. The answer should be “pay for the infrastructure and utility costs, actually help the towns you invade in ways they need, and then meet our state standards,” and this is closer to that, so good. It still feels hypocritical as hell though. The truth is that Shapiro saw something that made potential 2028 donors and major unions who support him both feel happy, and he tried to be the champion for that, until he realized that public sentiment was way behind on it. So now we get the Shapiro shuffle.
Of course, Josh Shapiro is also asking us to vote for his hand picked Congressional candidate, Bob “Crooksy” Brooks in the Lehigh Valley, a man who can’t string together thinking nearly as advanced as Shapiro on data centers. Crooksy is a stone cold moron who stiffed his ex-mother-in-law out of money, and well, he’s probably confused on this issue. On one hand, Crooksy knows a couple of unions made him a serious candidate for Congress, and he’s probably just waiting to be told what he thinks on this issue, which will probably be to build them. On the other hand, Uncle Josh is moving his position in response to activists like the ones in Carbon County, in South Whitehall, and in Lower Mount Bethel who are opposing data centers, and Crooksy doesn’t know how to make those folks happy without just saying what they want.
Knowing Crooksy, we know his answer- both. A friend of mine said back in the Spring that they attended a Crooksy talk to local Muslim leaders where he said Israel “had committed a genocide in Gaza,” but they were less than convinced that he really understood his answer. I was too, based on the since removed video of him at Lehigh Valley for All completely avoiding the question and pulling his shirt over his face. Look, these are tough questions. If you can keep your answers private, you can get away with giving a different answer to everyone who cares about them. If you’re kind of dumb, why not try that on data centers too? I get it, do what you can get away with, bro.
Pip: Every election cycle, someone promises the apocalypse is finally arriving on schedule — and every cycle, the map barely moves.
Mara: That's the territory Rich Wilkins has been mapping on Apocalypse Vibes — the structural limits on Democratic ambitions in 2026, the candidate quality problems making those limits worse, the progressive left's Israel politics, and what America's 250th birthday actually means when you're paying attention. Let's start with where the 2026 wave is, and isn't, headed.
The 2026 Map: Real Gains, Real Ceilings
Pip: The central argument in "Political Gravity in 2026" is that Democrats are probably winning the House, but the landslide narrative is running ahead of the actual numbers.
Mara: The post puts it plainly: "The best way to understand American politics is to understand that our country has been stuck in a 48-46% split for a quarter century or so now." That's the floor and the ceiling both.
Pip: Which means gerrymandering doesn't even need to work that hard — the electorate is doing most of the structural work already.
Mara: The post estimates roughly 400 of 435 districts are drawn so partisanly that even a wave doesn't move them, projecting a net Republican loss of fifteen to twenty seats. "The Delusions of the Progressive Populist Left" and "What Democrats Got Wrong" both reinforce why: the party is consolidating leftward while independents — now 45 percent of Americans — are calling themselves moderate, and they are not moving toward the Democratic Party as it shifts.
Pip: So the wave is real, the ceiling is low, and the party is spending energy debating whether to go further in the direction that's already not working.
Mara: That's essentially the argument. Which brings us to the candidates Democrats are actually fielding.
Crooksy Brooks: A Case Study in Self-Inflicted Damage
Pip: "Crooksy's Loose Lips" opens with a scene that pretty much writes the rest of the segment for us — Bob Brooks, at a private lunch, cracking jokes about a popular mayor's spelling while his own social media history is a liability archive.
Mara: The post is direct about the strategic problem: "The blueprint for Crooksy was written by literally the same people who created Nazi oyster farmer Graham Platner in Maine and John Fetterman here in Pennsylvania." Same consultants, same pitch, same early polling lead that is already shrinking.
Pip: A 47-43 internal in July, per "Bernie, Platner, Crooksy" — which also notes the NRCC didn't wait long to tie Brooks directly to the Fight Agency consultants behind Platner's campaign.
Mara: "Crooksy Goes to Court" lays out the financial record: money loaned in 2004, a signed promissory note from 2008, an appeal lost in 2022, and a reported hundred dollars paid to date. The post also notes an ethics complaint was filed with the House during the primary.
Pip: A hundred dollars. Over twenty-two years. That is a commitment to a position.
Mara: "The NRCC's File on Crooksy" details four lines of attack the Republicans have already assembled — unpaid workers' compensation insurance, racist social media posts, the mother-in-law lawsuit, and a pay raise Brooks took while cutting spending on actual union member advocacy. The post notes this probably is not everything they have.
Mara: Then there is the firefighter issue. "Bob Crooksy Brooks Doesn't Just Hate Barack Obama, He Hates the Folks Who Save Your Life" covers his social media posts calling IAFF members who also volunteer "scabs" and "shitbags." "Someone Ask Crooksy How Many Scabs Helped Fight Last Week's Massive Fire in Allentown" puts a concrete number on what that argument looks like in practice: over a hundred firefighters from as far as Carbon County, working for more than seven hours.
Pip: His pathway to victory, the post argues, runs through turning out the Susan Wild coalition — the very voters he most repulses.
Mara: And the through-line across all of this is candidate quality as a structural problem, not a one-race accident. Which connects directly to what's happening on the Israel and progressive politics front.
The Progressive Left, Israel, and the Limits of the Movement
Pip: "These Folks are Mentally Ill" is about the New York primaries, but the argument is really about where the progressive left can and cannot win.
Mara: The post draws the line precisely: "these embarrassing freaks are only winning certain kinds of races — very blue district, legislative races that usually have more than two candidates." Safe seats, low-turnout fields, places where you never have to acknowledge Republicans or moderate Democrats exist.
Pip: The Gaza politics driving a lot of these candidacies gets its own full examination in "For All the Talk About a Free Palestine, Nobody Has a Plan for Who Would Lead It."
Mara: That post walks through the practical obstacles — two separate governing authorities that do not recognize each other, Abbas whose term ended in 2009, Hamas, skeptical neighboring states, and an Israeli electorate that roundly rejected the idea after October 7th. The conclusion is that attaching conditions to foreign aid is reasonable; promising a functioning Palestinian state in the near term is not.
Pip: Serious conditions on aid — yes. Promising a flying cow — also apparently on the table, and the post is not more optimistic about one than the other.
Mara: From there, the question becomes what any of this means for a country about to turn 250.
America at 250: Pride Without Amnesia
Pip: "Happy Birthday America" is the outlier in tone — a genuine defense of patriotism that holds the country's failures and its achievements in the same frame.
Mara: The post names the failures directly — slavery, Japanese internment, Jim Crow, January 6th — and then pivots: "We're also the greatest country on Earth. There is a reason my friends in foreign countries want to come here." The argument is that a nation is more than the sum of its government and its worst moments.
Pip: Ho Chi Minh quoting Thomas Jefferson in Vietnam's own Declaration of Independence is the detail that earns that argument.
Mara: The post closes on that note — that the ideals in the Declaration of Independence matter more than the day-to-day failures, and that billions live in greater freedom today at least partly because of what this country did and inspired.
Pip: A structurally frozen electorate, a candidate class that keeps finding new ways to underperform it, and a birthday party anyway.
Mara: The through-line is the gap between what the moment calls for and what the parties are actually offering. That gap isn't closing before November — we'll see if it narrows at all.
Brooks uses Fight Agency, the same consultants tied to Platner’s campaign, and has shown no interest in dropping them.
“Bernie Bro Bob Brooks is backed by far-left political allies who helped prop up alleged sexual abuser Graham Platner. Brooks won’t distance himself from them because he is exactly what the Democrat machine produces: a self-serving socialist who protects the system, not families.” – NRCC Spokesman Reilly Richardson
You know, it’s about time for this “revolution” to die. I have to hand it to Crooksy though- he’s maybe not a Russian asset, Nazi, or Shrek, but he did stiff his former mother-in-law. Bernie and Fight Agency are really picking out some fantastic people to run for Congress.
The NRCC has put up it’s first “red box” page on Bob “Crooksy” Brooks in PA-7, and it’s a mix of things we expected and knew, and things that are expansions on his other laundry list of problems. The four main hits they put up:
I have to admit that I’m surprised they limited themselves to just four things with this guy, but as I found in the primaries, there’s so much more than you can actually print legally about him. They’re hitting on the obvious stuff, being a racist who stiffed his family. They’re also hitting him though right where his message is most vulnerable- he’s not a champion of blue collar Americans. They’re going to call him a “union boss,” an attack with a false meaning for the most part, by hitting him for his compensation in the job and job performance. I mean, I guess that works with Republicans, but I don’t know there. The first hit, that he doesn’t have workman’s compensation insurance for his landscaping business could expose him to some serious issues legally, and also open up the long rumored issues of how he got the business. Of course they have videos of Crooksy saying crazy things and also avoiding talking (see above) on the page as well. I doubt this is everything they have, but it’s probably enough to pull Crooksy down a bit. I’m sure they’re going to use the deadbeat stuff and racism to really nuke him, because well, it’s true.
The other day Bob “Crooksy” Brooks was sitting for a lunch with friends. As one would expect from Crooksy, he said something stupid. He made a joke about Mayor Sal Panto’s social media posting, saying something along the lines of he got drug for his social media postings, but at least he spelled them right. He probably figured he was sitting with friends, and he was. But well, the walls have ears when you run for Congress, and the walls couldn’t wait to tell me about it. Was his joke mildly funny? Sure. But Sal Panto is popular in Easton, and with good reason, he’s the best Mayor the city has ever had. Also though, Crooksy’s social media postings are cringe, cringe, cringe. And more cringe. He all but defends violence. Like the problem here isn’t whether or not Bob can put together a complete sentence (he barely can), it’s more that he spent most of his adult life spouting off offensive, racist shit before he decided he was a working class hero leftist politician. But that’s neither here nor there, he’s nominated now, amiright?
The right wing is just starting to tee up their line of attack against Bob for later this Fall. They dug up his hits on IAFF Fire Fighters who are volunteers too, and kind of easily, because the guy must not have his Facebook locked down. I mean, you’re running for Congress, man. The graphic above from Fox News ironically just uses his own words against his campaign statements, they didn’t even have to lie for once. Look, pro tip here- a former bartender should have a consistent position on how we tax tips for bartenders. Going on some bro podcast and calling Trump’s so-called (it’s not really, or at least not fully) “no tax on tips” position “garbage,” then having your handlers say you support it is campaign malpractice that’s impressively bad even for a knuckle dragger like Crooksy. The question is, is he dishonest, stupid, or both? I’m going with both. The result of that is he just shoots from the hip on policy questions and tells the room whatever he thinks they want to hear. Kind of makes sense now that he recently told a room of mostly Muslim Americans that Israel’s war in Gaza is a genocide, but when he was asked about cutting aid to Israel at a Lehigh Valley for All meeting a few months ago, he pulled his shirt over his face like he was afraid of the question. This guy believes whatever he’s told to believe. Consistency isn’t his thing.
If you believe the Democrats are going to win 30 seats and take the House in a wave this year, none of this will matter. Crooksy will win because Democrats win, and frankly any complaints I have against him won’t mean anything because the race will be too far gone. I don’t believe that at all. These midterm elections are going to be way more competitive than most Democratic activists want to believe. This is what happens when activists and electeds just talk to each other and confirm each other’s biases. The fact is that battleground voters think Democrats are nuts right now. They think we are more extreme than Republicans. They thought this in 2024 too, and then voted for Republicans. Now we’re nominating embarrassing, Mamdani-DSA candidates around the country.
The blueprint for Crooksy was written by *literally* the same people who created Nazi oyster farmer Graham Platner in Maine and John Fetterman here in Pennsylvania. The idea they sold voters on is that Crooksy would win back (white) working class voters because he’s a working class, union President with a bald head that said some stupid things on social media that makes him “authentic.” It’s literally the same as Platner’s story, to the word. We heard some of the same rhetoric around James Talarico’s campaign in Texas too. Well, how’s it going? Platner’s once mighty lead in Maine is gone, because his personal baggage is out now (oh hey, Crooksy), and he’s getting absolutely housed among white, non-college educated voters in Maine, the people he was supposed to pull back to the Democrats. Oops! Talarico is doing even worse. There’s less than zero reason to think that Crooksy is doing better with white non-college educated voters here, or frankly any other group that didn’t vote Democratic in 2024. He’s not. He’s probably going to be lucky to flip any individual precincts on Mackenzie, let alone communities, and therefore his pathway to victory will be motivating more core Democrats, the type that were the backbone of Susan Wild’s coalition, to show up. Frankly, he repulses a lot of those activist types, and I doubt he does much better with the 30 or 40 something year old college graduate couple living in the suburbs either.
Crooksy’s continual mistakes are going to burn him. And he’s going to keep making them.
Ok, as usual here- those are Bob “Crooksy” Brooks own words, right? Crooksy said recently that IAFF members who also serve as volunteer fire fighters and respond in areas where other IAFF members work are “scabs.” I talked about how ignorant of a thing this was for Crooksy to say here. Look, it was an ignorant statement, and Crooksy is an ignorant guy, but I do get it in theory. If IAFF members were undercutting other IAFF members by working for some sort of renegade department that went into their municipalities and worked for free, they would legitimately be “scabs.” That’s never how it works though. Basically, some IAFF members also serve as volunteers in their home communities, either out of civic duty or for the benefits Pennsylvania offers them to do so. Sometimes they get called in to towns with professional fire fighters, because there is a fire so big and awful that it requires a lot of extra, outside help. Even professional forces don’t always have enough guys. So they ask neighboring communities for help. You know, like during a six alarm fire in Allentown…
“Most of those homes are displaced, some of them sustained significant damage. Fire crews worked an offensive attack, as soon as the fire jumped the street, in order to save these homes. The homes are salvageable, but they are significantly damaged,” says Steed.
One resident tells us they saw flames shoot up into the sky from several blocks away.
“I saw the flames, they were way beyond the building height right now, I felt the heat, and I’m like ‘Yo man, I hope they get this taken care of,” says Charles Shafer of Allentown.
Others say they smelled the fire before even seeing it.
Danitza Lopez of Allentown says, “It smelled like my house was on fire, I smelled the smoke, it was like engulfing my house, and then thankfully I looked around everywhere, and there was no fire, but then I came outside, and the whole building was engulfed in flames.”
For more than 7 hours, over a hundred firefighters from as far as Carbon County were entrenched, snuffing out the blaze inside the vacant industrial building.
Oh, yikes. I have no idea what Crooksy meant when he was spouting off online, and judging from the quality of his other posts, I doubt he knows what he meant either. I’m going to say that I hope he wasn’t talking about situations like this, because honestly, that would be brain dead. For the record, two juveniles have been charged with setting the fire. I’m going to take a guess that a lot of “scabs” were on site.
I suppose it’s possible that some volunteer force somewhere is trying to respond to calls in a town that has professional fire fighters, and in this hypothetical it would make sense for a union leader to make a statement against that. I have no idea what kind of ass backwards place that’s happening in, but I won’t say it’s impossible. I just will take a guess that it’s not happening in Allentown. So thank you to everyone who responded to the fire, both the professionals and those who were volunteering. Most folks appreciate you.
Bob Brooks is a pile of human garbage that anyone should be ashamed of. If you’re defending him, it’s because you want a Congressional staff job and the benefits, let’s be honest. Don’t tell me it’s because you have Democratic values, the man hates Barack Obama. He is accused of committing mortgage fraud, entirely so he could stiff his mother-in-law. He’s not just a random deadbeat. No, he’s much worse than that.
A couple years ago, you might have heard that I was almost dead. Literally a couple *weeks* ago, a keyboardist had a heart attack in my basement during band practice. Both times, the incredible folks of Suburban EMS came to save the day. There’s not enough things I can say about these people, I’d be cremated or in a box somewhere without them. When the keyboardist had his heart attack, these EMT’s were joined by the good people of the Palmer Township Police Department and our *volunteer” fire fighters. What does Crooksy think of them? From Bernie:
The Beacon’s Chuck Ross has some up with something I failed to cover during the primary, and that is Brooks’ revulsion at professional firefighters who dare act as volunteer firefighters in their own communities. Ross points to angry social media posts from Brooks, calling them “scabs” and “shitbags.”
I understand that Brooks may have no issue with volunteer firefighters so long as they stay out of a municipality covered by a professional and unionized fire department. But does that make sense. The Lehigh Valley’s three cities have all had major fires over the years during which volunteer firefighters from other municipalities assist. The most recent example of this is at an Easton hotel. Should a professional Easton or Bethlehem firefighter refuse to assist if he is also a volunteer at Plainfield’s fire department and that company responds? Should they just stand by and watch a building burn?
As I said before the primary, Republicans had more on this pile of donkey loaf than I did. I did not have these social media posts. Of course they had the goods here:
In the original article they go on to point out that this post from Brooks is nonsense. Of course a volunteer force should not go into Easton, Bethlehem, Wilson, Allentown, or Emmaus uncalled and undercut unionized, paid members who fight fires for a living. What Crooksy doesn’t point out here is *that doesn’t happen in reality.* There aren’t volunteers from Nancy Run going into his former turf of the city of Bethlehem and responding to routine fire calls. Far from. Almost always, the volunteers are called in because there aren’t enough paid fire fighters on call, or in some cases on the force at all, to respond to the severity of the fire. The reality is that our society doesn’t have the resources to keep people safe all of the time. These folks volunteer to help us deal with that.
I’ll take a guess that this human pile of sewage will say is that these professional fire fighters are “taking advantage” of the real estate tax rebates. Yeah well, our society offers those because we can’t take care of ourselves. God bless these guys to give their time off for the rest of us. I sleep better at night knowing anyone would give of the most important resource we have, time. He knows this though. His union was pleading for more resources from the City of Bethlehem in last year’s budget because *they need more fire fighters.* I even agree with him for the most part. Apparently he doesn’t hold the courage of his own convictions.
Crooksy is just a garbage human being. He should drop out of this race today and just admit the con. Maybe we could still convince the former Congresswoman to take his place.
There are rumors that Crooksy is drawing a look from the U.S. Attorney’s office, and I’m sure the Attorney General would like to take a crack at him over his “quit claim” on the property he stiffed his mother-in-law for. I actually don’t think it would be wise for either to open an investigation unless the statute is about to run out on this. He’ll still be as guilty or not next year and it would look nakedly political. Besides, it looks as though Deadbeat Bob will be spending significant general election time in the court room arguing this case anyway. Bob’s defenders have taken in private to criticizing the woman he stiffed out of the money, and I think it’s just a matter of time until they start trying to call her crooked, unhinged, and other evil words. Maybe she is. That doesn’t matter a single iota, as Bob signed the promissory note to pay her back. He acknowledged that he owed her the money, and he then did everything possible to not pay her. If he weren’t your political candidate, you’d call him a deadbeat.
Ryan Mackenzie deserves to lose in 2026. He voted for everything Donald Trump asked him to vote for, and Donald Trump is about as popular with the electorate right now as athlete’s foot. So of course the consultant class in DC and Harrisburg have saddled us with a pile of cow dung to get elected in this district. My plan is to just leave the race blank right now see what comes around in two years.
