I suppose this is kind of a "Still Counting" question, but I'm open to any approaches really.

I'm so curious about how we should think about the upper limit of what is possible from the Dems during the next two years. It seems like there are basically two prongs to focus on: 

1. Messaging bills for Trump to veto

2. Some kind of accountability through investigations and impeachments. 

So how do we determine the upper limit of what is possible? Or what is effective? Like, impeaching Hegseth doesn't take zero time and zero staffers. Sending a bill to Trump's desk for DC statehood doesn't take zero time and zero staffers. 

So how do we think about what the upper limit is of what is actually possible? And as a subquestion: is maximizing that good? 

I'm basically wondering how we min/max the next two years for those RPG players out there. 

"I'm a piece of shit." - Jensen Huang, talking about himself.

Ok Schumer

Will Senate Democrats kick Chuck Schumer to the curb? Progressives are lining up behind a challenger to the party’s longtime head honcho in the Senate.

• Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) isn’t exactly keeping it humble about the likelihood he’ll become the Senate majority leader once Democrats seize power in January. “I have the votes,” he tweeted yesterday. Translation: Don’t challenge me, because it’s in the bag!

• One senator didn’t get the message: Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD). At Crooked Con last weekend, Van Hollen told me that Senate Democrats shouldn’t stage a “coronation.” They should get a choice. So, it wasn’t too shocking when the Maryland senator announced last night that, yes, he’s throwing his own crab cakes down on the table.

• Schumer remains the obvious favorite to win. But Van Hollen’s challenge speaks to a larger debate consuming Democrats: How far left should the party move after its sweeping victory in the midterms? And who should be trusted to shepherd the rank and file through the final era of Donald Trump?

• “We should not be preserving our institutions if they are not delivering for the American people,” Van Hollen said at the What’s Next political conference today. “We should be making delivering for the American people the single mission of our government, even when that means shaking things up. And that is why I’m running.”

• More Democrats currently support Schumer’s bid than Van Hollen’s — at least publicly. The vote for majority leader is a secret ballot, which is exactly what it sounds like: We won’t know who votes for who, unless that information leaks. The vote is scheduled for December 1.

Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) is weighing the arguments for and against re-electing Schumer, he told What A Day.

• Schumer deserves credit for helping to recruit winning Senate candidates, said Kaine, a longtime Schumer ally. Schumer can claim a central role in convincing Ohio’s Sherrod Brown, North Carolina’s Roy Cooper, and Alaska’s Mary Peltola to run. (Notably, Schumer didn’t initially support Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed, and he also called the wrong shots in Maine.)

• Schumer’s experience handling Trump could also be valuable over the next two years, Kaine added.

• “Chuck probably knows Trump better than anybody else in our caucus,” the senator said, noting Schumer’s Oval Office meetings with Trump during the first term. “That knowledge is not a minor thing when you’re dealing with a super unpredictable guy like President Trump.”

• The chief argument against Schumer (aside from the fact that he’s 75 years young) is that he’s synonymous with the Democratic establishment. After all, Democrats found themselves stuck with Trump for an entire decade, while Schumer manned the ship.

• While Van Hollen isn’t exactly a spring chicken himself, he has made a name for himself as a staunch progressive. He was willing to fly to El Salvador to challenge Trump’s deportation policies, and has repeatedly called out the Israeli government for its violence against Palestinians and voted to restrict arms sales to its military.

The need for change isn’t lost on moderate senators like Kaine. “We’re hearing overwhelmingly from folks that they want to see change, and change generally. I mean, it isn’t just about Chuck,” he said. “We have to respect what we’re hearing and factor it all in.”

Watch: Pod Save America: Will Dems Chuck Chuck?

Meanwhile On The Pod...

Scott Colom Saw A Path To Victory In Mississippi When Other’s Didn’t (11/12/26)

Look No Further Than Crooked Media

LEIGH MCGOWAN is co-host of HYSTERIA!

You might know Leigh McGowan as Politics Girl on social, but now she's got a new title: co-host of Hysteria! Yes, that's right! Leigh is joining Erin Ryan on your fav podcast for people who love democracy, culture, and not losing their minds while keeping up with it all. This week, Erin and Leigh cover a LOT of ground— they're digging into the aftermath of the blue Tsunami and so much more. Listen to Hysteria every Thursday, wherever you get your podcasts.

I Spy...

Donald Trump has long insisted that humanity has nothing to fear from artificial intelligence. His own administration may not be so lucky.

The raucous scandal that brought down Jensen Huang, former head of chipmaker Nvidia, is now rattling the windows of Trump’s White House.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent slammed Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick for failing to restrict Megaspeed, the Singapore-based company at the heart of the Nvidia imbroglio, from buying semiconductors from the tech giant.

Multiple departments, including Treasury, favored putting restrictions on Megaspeed for months, Bessent told CNBC this morning. “But Commerce … has the pen. And you will have to ask them about their internal processes.”

In simpler terms: If Commerce had blacklisted the company, this crisis — which threatens to put a dent in the AI industry — could’ve been averted. The president and other top officials actually knew about Huang’s affair months ago, according to recent press reports.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang resigned yesterday after reports of affairs, including one with a suspected Chinese spy who led Megaspeed. (Donald Trump reportedly urged Huang to fight for his job earlier this week.)

It’s unclear whether China gained any valuable intel from the suspected fatale’s efforts. But lawmakers fear that Huang’s affair could have national security implications. The U.S. has tried to stop China from accessing Nvidia’s chips, which are critical for developing advanced AI technologies.

Huang’s affair with the spy is “potentially very damaging,” Sen. Kaine told me. When Democrats take control in January, “we will have very robust investigative tools at our disposal,” Kaine said. “And this Nvidia scandal is probably one of the first that will come up.”

Lutnick agreed to testify in front of the Senate about the Nvidia scandal next month.

What Else?

The FAA issued a nationwide groundstop to all airports across the country this afternoon, citing “extraordinary circumstances.” The extremely rare directive followed “communication issues” that impacted air route traffic control centers, the agency said in a statement.

Former President Joe Biden doesn’t have any regrets about running for re-election, he writes in his new memoir. “Today there is no shortage of people who think I blindly raced to run again. Driven by ambition. Selfishness. Unaware of the concerns about my age,” Biden wrote. “I knew better than anyone how old I was. I knew what I was — and wasn’t — capable of doing. I carefully monitored how I was meeting the demands of the job. And there is not a single example of me failing to handle my responsibilities.”

Trump praised Senator-elect Scott Colom (D-MS) for courting MAGA supporters at one of the president’s rallies in Mississippi. “We had lines that went 10 miles long, and he campaigned on that line, telling everybody on the line what a good job he did,” Trump said on Stephen A. Smith’s podcast. “I give him a lot of credit for that.”

Vice President JD Vance hasn’t made up his mind on whether he wants to run for president, especially after the GOP’s devastating loss in the midterms, CNN reports. Former Vice President Mike Pence, however, is thinking about running again. “We’ve been hearing from a lot of people around the country,” Pence told Fox News.

Microsoft’s email service was “approaching normal levels” this afternoon, as the company scrambled to fix a global outage that affected millions of users around the world. One think tank estimated that the outage caused a loss of productivity equivalent to $7 billion. Did the think tank factor in the people who resorted to using fax machines??? The funniest line I saw about this online: “Windows 364.”

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Light At The End...

Cybertruck fans are lashing out at Elon Musk and Tesla for discontinuing their ugly dumpster-esque vehicles. An administrator of a popular Cybertruck Facebook group told Wired: “I’ve had people reaching out to me through the group, asking me, like, ‘What are you going to do?’” he said. “And I’m like, ‘Dude, I don’t know.’”

Pope Leo visited the town in Peru where he served as a local bishop for years. Residents remember Leo as a humble, compassionate community leader, and some still call him “monseñor” or “Padre Robert.” He’s something of a mascot: One restaurant has a cutout of the pope lifting his right hand, and holding a sandwich in his left. Where can I get one of those?

U2 released a new song that celebrates Rosalía, the 34-year-old genre-bending singer. Why? Because she’s just that amazing, Bono said. “We normally just write songs about people in jail or dead people. You know, dead heroes, or trying to get them out of jail,” Bono told Rolling Stone. “This is just celebrating somebody just because they’re an extraordinary artist.” Here’s the U2 song, and one of Rosalía’s operatic bangers.

Production of Rubik’s Cubes is moving back to Hungary, where the beloved (and often frustrating, at least for me) toy was invented in 1974. Hungary “is the home of the cube. The cube was born here,” Ernő Rubik said at the new production facility. Yes, that’s the guy it’s named after.

Researchers discovered that male franciscana dolphins, which live off the coast of South America, babysit their little ones. It’s extremely rare for male mammals to be caretakers, but the mother dolphins are the primary hunters among this type of dolphin. Someone’s gotta watch the kids! A potential reason for the behavior “is that they’re trying to impress the females,” one researcher told the New York Times. “‘I’m a nice guy, wouldn’t you like to mate with me?’ kind of thing.”

This is the best news I’ve heard all year: Punch the Monkey has made new friends at his zoo and is even caring for a baby monkey, months after heartbreaking accounts of his social isolation. Look at Punch cuddle with another buddy! 😭

Enjoy

Meet Kaia! She’s a 5-year-old rottweiler.

“Kaia is a beautiful girl who loves to eat and bark.”

— Donna

Very timely given the two interviews he did this weekend at CrookedCon! Including the one that dropped today. Go Chris!

"Congratulations, you're stupid." - Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA), on Republicans who downplay Dems' midterms victory.

(Not) Seeing Red

Republicans are freaking out about a once-unimaginable political reality: The GOP is losing its grip on the South.

• Democrats popped bottles after Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico won Texas, which the left spent the last decade trying, and painfully failing, to flip. They looked on in awe as The Lone Star State voted in a Democratic governor, lieutenant governor, state House of Representatives majority, attorney general and comptroller. And you can’t forget Kansas! Pastor Adam Hamilton will become the first Democratic senator from The Sunflower State in nearly a century.

• Amazingly, that’s not the end of Democratic wins in the South, in a series of victories that is shaking up a region that Republicans have taken for granted as their home turf for over a generation.

• After a drawn-out ballot count, Democrat Scott Colom defeated Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-MS), becoming the first Black person elected to the Senate from Mississippi since the Reconstruction era following the Civil War. North Carolina is now just a few hundred votes away from seeing Democratic control of its entire state legislature, with one state senate seat still too close to call. And Republicans still can’t believe that Democrat Annie Andrews will take * checks notes * the late Sen. Lindsey Graham’s (R-SC) old seat in South Carolina.

• Polls predicted that Texas and Kansas could turn blue. But even the most tuned-in political nerds were stunned by wins in Mississippi, North Carolina, and South Carolina.

• “I feel like I’m dreaming,” Charles Taylor, executive director of the Mississippi State Conference NAACP, told the What A Day podcast while discussing Colom’s victory. “Mississippi was always on a trajectory to get here, but there’s something still unreal about it.”

Some Republicans blame their own side for the historic losses.

• One Republican operative in South Carolina said that his party deserved to lose. “Quite frankly, I think we got the ass-kicking we needed,” Trey Walker, who served as Gov. Henry McMaster’s (R-SC) chief of staff, told the Wall Street Journal. Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) struck a similar tone on Fox News: “This was not a normal midterm election loss,” Kennedy said. “If you think that, congratulations, you’re stupid.”

• This election “wasn’t just a rout. It was a reckoning,” former Vice President Mike Pence told Fox News today.

• How do Democrats keep power in the South? It’s all about making it easier for Americans to vote, said Kate Barr, a North Carolina-based activist who founded YALLvote. (Barr once ran as a “fake Republican” in North Carolina to bring attention to the state’s gerrymandering.)

• “I think a lot of the Democratic Party writ large has written the South off as just being Republican. But we aren’t,” Barr told What A Day. “We’re just suppressed. Whether that’s through gerrymandering, a lack of investment, or intentional voter suppression policies, like voter ID laws.”

• After the midterms, Senate Democratic leadership faced criticism for failing to invest enough (or at all) in states where the left almost posted major upsets, such as Louisiana and Florida. Colom’s campaign received $500,000 from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee in late October — after the group skipped him in their initial $40 million batch of contributions to battleground states.

Activists in the South hope this election serves as a wake-up call for the party’s leaders. “We did this ourselves,” Barr said. “It’s such an opportunity to get some cool stuff done that actually makes people’s lives better.”

Read: Message Box: How Republicans Are Choosing to Lose Again by Crooked’s Dan Pfeiffer

Meanwhile On The Pod...

Will We See Republicans Join Democrats Against Trump? (w/ Jake Sherman) (11/11/26)

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What Else?

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang resigned today, after the New York Times reported that he had an affair with a company executive who reported to him. The Times bombshell followed news of his other affair with an alleged Chinese spy two weeks ago. Reuters just reported that Huang had yet another affair with an employee. The tech company’s stock tumbled as a result, roiling the AI industry.

The suspect who shot and killed one person in a gym before fleeing and wounding four others in Washington D.C.’s Logan Circle neighborhood this morning was an emergency physician, who had an active lawsuit against his building’s condo association for alleged water leaks into his penthouse apartment, City Cast DC reports. After the shooting, the man fled to a nearby apartment and spoke with officers for about an hour before fatally shooting himself, according to local police. (This piece by a Washington Sun reporter who spoke with the shooter last year is unbelievable.)

Israel killed at least six people and wounded dozens of others in a strike on a hospital in southern Gaza overnight, according to local health officials. Israel’s military said it was targeting Hamas militants. But the victims included healthcare workers and patients, the health officials said.

Donald Trump crashed out on social media today, saying that “we don’t need a deal with Iran.” He also instructed Vice President JD Vance to focus on “Massive Corruption and Crime taking place in Democrat run Cities and States” instead of ending the war. One day, Trump says he wants to work with Democrats. The next day, he attacks them. I’m getting tired of his lame-duck shtick already.

ICE deported more than 480,000 people during the fiscal year ending in September, according to DHS data obtained by CBS News. The record number of deportations came despite Americans’ souring on Trump’s aggressive immigration agenda, which likely contributed to Republicans’ walloping in the midterms.

A man who died months ago while campaigning is expected to win his race for a seat on the board of supervisors in Calaveras County, California. One candidate who lost in the primary said that he planned to vote for the deceased man: “I’m still going to vote for him because he’s going to be on the ballot,” the former candidate told a local paper. “He’s the best guy for the job, even in this situation, unfortunately.”

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Light At The End...

Pete Hegseth awarded a Joint Service Commendation Medal to the U.S. Army sentinel who yelled at the defense secretary’s giggling entourage at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. “We love soldiers. We love standards. Well done, Specialist,” Hegseth tweeted. “Carry on Patriots.”

Rep.-elect Matt Little (D-MN) had to shut down rumors that he’s actually comedian Nathan Fielder in disguise. He has also been compared to Adam Scott’s and Ben Schwartz’s characters in “Parks and Recreation.” “I am a real person,” Little asserted.

A Virginia animal shelter has raised $290,000 by selling merch inspired by a local raccoon who broke into a liquor store and helped itself to some booze (before passing out on the bathroom floor). I need one of these “Trashed Panda” shirts. The Halloween-themed “Trick-or-Trashed” shirt is also pretty awesome.

A family falafel shop in Beirut that’s been serving customers since before Lebanon’s founding has no plans to close its doors, as it successfully weathers wars and conflicts in the region. “I have clients spread all over the world,” the 82-year-old owner, who is passing down the tradition to his 40-year-old son, told the Associated Press. “They all come to eat falafel because they know the flavor and the taste.” Brb, booking my flight to Beirut.

Pop star Dua Lipa brought together some of her favorite authors — including Douglas Stuart, Brit Bennett, Patti Smith, Roxane Gay, Jennifer Clement, Patrick Radden Keefe, and Min Jin Lee — to talk about their love of reading, the future of AI in books, and her incredibly popular Service95 book club. Here are some recommendations from those authors, and Dua herself.

Enjoy

AF Media on Instagram: "Non-denominational ways to respond to a sneeze: -stop -that was really annoying -I hate when you do that - WOW"

I got the SuperCast subscription since it seems to include everything together, videos, ad free pods, etc. They don't have Pollercoaster listed as a podcast so I have to scroll through the list of all episodes to even find the most recent. At first I thought it didn't have any Pollercoaster episodes and as data girlie I was about riot. Honestly, the only reason I have a subscription is to access this series. Also, Pollercoaster isn't a flair option either. Justice for Pollercoaster!! Anyone else having this issue with SuperCast?

Edit: I see Pollercoaster flair on other posts but I don't have access womp womp