Month: December 2022

Here’s an interesting post over at Post (one of the new twitters) from Neal Katyal about his argument before the Supreme’s in Moore v. Harper:

I gave 1 interview about my Supreme Court oral argument in #MoorevHarper to Lawrence O’Donnell on @Msnbc, earlier this week. Without getting into case specifics, I tried to bring people behind the curtain into how I prepare to argue before 9 different Justices, and most important, how much other people helped in developing the points made at oral argument.

The “9 different courts” point is more nuanced than what a minute on TV can allow–it’s 9 different perspectives, to be sure, but there is also intersection among them (particularly in live oral argument). I find that the conversation among the 9 is often more important than the views of any 1 perspective, and sometimes I view my role as less of an “arguer” and more of an “interlocutor” facilitating a discussion among them.

A true privilege to orally argue this case, and to work with an incredible team, including of course the great @judgeluttig.post.

Very interesting. So much of this stuff is really about psychology and temperament. It’s kind of terrifying when you think about it. But nobody’s come up with anything that isn’t so I guess we’re stuck with it for now. It might be better if they had a few more justices, however, and they served something like 18 year terms instead of lifetime appointments. I think what makes everyone so desperate about a court with a strong majority that’s out of step with the country is that there just seems to be no end to it.

It’s Happy Hollandaise time here at Hullabaloo. If you’d like to throw a little something in the old Christmas stocking it would be most appreciated.

Trump’s world has gotten smaller and smaller, with ever more unqualified sycophants serving his every need. No one even tries to tell him anything he doesn’t want to hear:

When Donald Trump invited the rapper formerly known as Kanye West and white supremacist Nick Fuentes to join him for dinner on the patio of his Florida club last month, the former president had no chief of staff or senior aide at his side.

There was no scheduler, either, nor a press aide. Only one person staffed Trump at the gathering with antisemites that drew days of denunciations: Walt Nauta, a cook and military valet in the Trump White House who is now employed as an all-purpose gofer for the former presidentand who ushered the group to the table before leaving them alone to talk. Nauta has continued to serve Trump loyallyat Mar-a-Lago, even as he has emerged as a key witness in the Justice Department’s investigation of whether Trump purposely hid classified documents storedat the club from authorities.

TheNov. 22 dinner, described by three people familiar with the event, neatly encapsulates Trump’s post-presidential life — a reminder of how a former president who worked steadily to dismantle the government guardrails imposed by his elected office is now almost entirely without restraint.

From almost the instant it became clear he had lost the 2020 election, Trump refused to accept the results, creating a disorganized transition process during which he rebuffed efforts to prepare for his post-presidency.

In the two years since he left office, Trump has re-created the conditions of his own freewheeling White House — with all of its chaos, norm flouting and catering to his ego — with little regard for the law. With this behavior, Trump prompted a criminal investigation into his post-presidential handling of classified documents to compound the ongoing one into his and his allies’ efforts to overturn the 2020 election results — which presents potential legal peril and risks hobbling his nascent bid to be elected president again in 2024.

Even as he works to convince supporters that the documents probe is the result of an overblown paperwork dispute, and that the FBI’s Aug. 8 search of his Mar-a-Lago Club was an abuse of power, the investigation is in fact a product of how Trump has approached post–presidential life.

Though few rules guide the life of a former president, Trump has exhibited a characteristic disinterest in following any of them. These days, he is served almost exclusively by sycophants, having replaced successive rounds of loyal yet inexperienced aides with staffers even more beholden and novice.

Natalie Harp, one of Trump’s employees and a former host on the pro-Trump cable network One America News, often accompanies Trump on his daily golf outings, riding the course in a golf cart equipped with a laptop and sometimes a printer to show him uplifting news articles, online posts or other materials.

On some quiet days, another aide, Molly Michael, who served asTrump’s assistant in the White House, has called around to Trump’s network ofallies across the country requesting that they dial the former president to boost his spiritswith positive affirmations. There’s nothing going on, she has told them, adding that his friends know how restless he gets when nothing is going on, according to people who have heard her appeal.

Multiple Trump advisers said there is no senior aide living in Florida full time, with advisers flying in and out as needed. “He needs someone there to say, ‘Here’s a really bad idea, and this is why.’ I don’t think he has that kind of crowd around him right now. Nor does the president want anybody like that,” said David Urban, a longtime Trump adviser turned critic.

Like he did as president, Trump has looked for ways to turn a profit with his new arrangement: Trump’s staff tried, unsuccessfully, to get the General Services Administration to pay rent at Mar-a-Lago — potentially for his lifetime — for the office space he has created for himself above the club’s ballroom.

A longtime Trump confidant termed his Mar-a-Lago existence, where he has tried to re-create the trappings of the presidency, as “sad.” Comparing it to life at the White House, this person added,“It’s like a Barbie Dream House miniature.”

Does he have what it takes to run for president again? I’m really beginning to wonder. He’s about to face the full force of the federal government and his people a re bound to get agitated over it. Maybe that will reinvigorate him. But he seems to be retreating more and more into a sort of Howard Hughes-like existence.

Here’s a sampling of what he sharing with his cultists this weekend:

And the problem is that nobody cares. Social media is obsessing over the other weird, rich, white guy and his persecution complex. He just seems so tired.

It’s Happy Hollandaise time here at Hullabaloo. If you’d like to throw a little something in the old Christmas stocking it would be most appreciated.

Tim Miller has some smart thoughts on the current brouhaha over moderation at Twitter and elsewhere:

A couple years ago when chinless Trump spokesperson Jason Miller launched Gettr, one of the myriad alt-right “free speech” social media platforms, I wrote about the pitfalls he was going to face and summed up his challenge this way:

The question has persisted for sites big and small since the days of the very first usenet groups: How do you balance user experience with the internet’s promise of unhindered expression?

This is the great content moderation paradox. Gettr crashed and burned in its attempts to navigate it. But Miller wasn’t alone. From scammers to bots to trolls to obnoxious jerks to impersonation to threats (and what constitutes a threat) to sending “assassination coordinates,” countless forum moderators have failed to come up with a clean answer. Some have done better than others. All have failed to please everyone.

If you allow completely unfettered speech, your forum becomes a wasteland for the dregs of society. If you over-moderate, some users will get upset and accuse you of stifling them. There’s no winning. In fact what is happening right now, today, on Twitter is really just a high-visibility replica of the fight that brought down my beloved GWHoops.com which eventually collapsed when the annoying, harassing, imposters became too big of a hassle for the post-and-let-post head-man in charge.

The best we can ask for is people at the helm who try in good faith to navigate this paradox in a manner that engenders trust—even if every decision is ultimately unsatisfying.

This has been my big problem with the “Twitter Files” brouhaha. The journalists participating in it treat the moderation question as if there is an obvious pro-free speech answer that Jack Dorsey et al. refused to implement because of their bias. They seem to think that there was some fundamental corruption in the old guard that needs to be rooted out and brought to light.

But to observers whose brains haven’t been broken by the message-board wars, what actually happened is quite run of the mill. Twitter was run by human beings who, like all human beings, have inherent biases (in this case, mostly liberal) and they were doing the best they could to solve an unsolvable puzzle.

Consider: When you strip everything down to the most basic facts, what did the previous Twitter moderation regime do?

They tried to crack down on the hate speech, harassment, Russian bots, and impersonators which flooded the platform in 2016. They had some success in this regard, driving the worst offenders to different social media platforms that were more welcoming to their hateful speech—to the relief of the site’s core users. As part of this process Twitter made one pretty clear screw-up: delinking a New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop after wrongly assuming it was part of a Russian plot. In less than two days Twitter remedied that error and apologized for it.

They also had one very high-profile judgment call: What were they supposed to do about a lame-duck president who had just sicced a mob on the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to execute America’s first coup d’etat? In the face of this unprecedented situation Twitter banned him from the platform. Say what you will about this choice—and certainly it was undermined by Twitter not holding other autocrats to the same standard—any reasonable observer would concede it was defensible.

As a result of these moves, many on the right criticized Twitter’s management for overreach. Twitter made some changes to address its worst excesses and multiple competitors offering town squares more accommodating to right-wing hate speech sprouted up as alternatives.

Not a bad outcome, right?

Well, a handful of supposed free-speech absolutists were enraged by it. So the old guard at Twitter was replaced by a mad king who purchased the site so that he could implement different policies. His solution has been to reopen Twitter’s pearly gates to Nazis while indiscriminately banning users who offend him—most recently for tweeting links to public information about his private jet (a practice that is common to anyone familiar with college football coaching searches).

This, to me, does not seem like much of an improvement? Not because I am upset that Musk has chosen to employ content-moderation policies. But because I think his moderation priorities are stupid. Hopefully the public outcry will result in Musk doing exactly what Dorsey did: backing off from his worst decisions in an attempt to make the platform maximally useful to the largest number of users. (I am not optimistic, but we’ll see.)

I’m not optimistic either unless he finds a way to unload the thing. It’s driving him crazy and he’s acting in impulsive eccentric ways. It’s his $44 billion toy and he can do with it what he wants.

As for moderation, it’s just a Miller says. It’s necessary and very, very difficult. I went though it on a tiny scale with this site about 10 years ago and ended up removing comments and have never looked back. I didn’t want to but I was being overrun by trolls day in and day out and didn’t have the time to spend moderating the space. Once that happens the community is broken and even people who just want to read what you write are drawn into the fray and the whole place goes to hell. It’s a real challenge to keep your head in that cacophony.

I don’t think social media is going anywhere. But the first generations of Facebook and twitter may not go the distance. But there will be new ones to take their place.

Musk now says that you are not allowed to link to your other social media sites on twitter and will be banned if you do. This is a remarkably petty thing to do but he’s obviously a very petty man.

If you want to find me on those alternatives you can do so at
@digby@mastodon.social
@digby@counter.social
@digby@post.news

And, for the moment, I’m still on twitter @digby56. Where all this is going to end up I do not know. But this little corner of the universe seems to be safe for the moment. We’ll be here. Maybe I’ll even put comments back on at some point … maybe.

It’s Happy Hollandaise time here at Hullabaloo. If you’d like to throw a little something in the old Christmas stocking it would be most appreciated.

The big cat who changed the world

On Friday night’s soother I wrote about the four new mountain lion cubs that are being tracked in the Santa Monica mountains and I noted that P-22, LA’s beloved denizen of Griffith Park, was being evaluated for possible euthanasia or relocation to a sanctuary after he had been acting erratically. Sadly, they decided he had to be put down and he is gone.

I think the whole city is in mourning today.

This eulogy from Beth Pratt of the National Wildlife Federation says it all:

“I write this eulogy while looking across one of the ten-lane freeways P-22 somehow miraculously crossed in 2012, gazing at a view of his new home, Griffith Park. Burbank Peak and the other hills that mark the terminus of the Santa Monica Mountains emerge from this urban island like sentinels making a last stand against the second largest city in the country. The traffic noise never ceases. Helicopters fly overhead. The lights of the city give the sky no peace.

“Yet a mountain lion lived here, right here in Los Angeles.

“I can’t finish this sentence without crying because of the past tense. It’s hard to imagine I will be writing about P-22 in the past tense now.

“Biologists and veterinarians with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife announced today they have made the difficult decision to end P-22’s suffering and help him transition peacefully to the next place. I hope his future is filled with endless forests without a car or road in sight and where deer are plentiful, and I hope he finally finds the mate that his island existence denied him his entire life.

“I am so grateful I was given the opportunity to say goodbye to P-22. Although I have advocated for his protection for a decade, we had never met before. I sat near him, looking into his eyes for a few minutes, and told him he was a good boy. I told him how much I loved him. How much the world loved him. And I told him I was so sorry that we did not make the world a safer place for him. I apologized that despite all I and others who cared for him did, we failed him.

“I don’t have any illusion that my presence or words comforted him. And I left with a great sadness I will carry for the rest of my days.

“Before I said goodbye, I sat in a conference room with team members from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, and the team of doctors at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park. The showed me a video of P-22’s CT scan, images of the results, and my despair grew as they outlined the list of serious health issues they had uncovered from all their testing: stage two kidney failure, a weight of 90 pounds (he normally weighs about 125), head and eye trauma, a hernia causing abdominal organs to fill his chest cavity, an extensive case of demodex gatoi (a parasitic skin infection likely transmitted from domestic cats), heart disease, and more. The most severe injuries resulted from him being hit by a car last week, and I thought of how terrible it was that this cat, who had managed to evade cars for a decade, in his weakened and desperate condition could not avoid the vehicle strike that sealed his fate.

“As the agency folks and veterinarians relayed these sobering facts to me, tissue boxes were passed around the table and there wasn’t a dry eye in the house. This team cares just as much for this cat as we all do. They did everything they could for P-22 and deserve our gratitude.

“Although I wished so desperately he could be returned to the wild, or live out his days in a sanctuary, the decision to euthanize our beloved P-22 is the right one. With these health issues, there could be no peaceful retirement, only some managed care existence where we prolonged his suffering — not for his benefit, but for ours.

“Those of us who have pets know how it feels when we receive news from the veterinarian that we don’t want to hear. As a lifelong dog and cat owner, I have been in this dreadful position too many times. The decision to let them go is never easy, but we as humans have the ability, the responsibility, and the selflessness to show mercy to end the suffering for these beloved family members, a compassionate choice we scarcely have for ourselves.

“I look at Griffith Park through the window again and feel the loss so deeply. Whenever I hiked to the Hollywood sign, or strolled down a street in Beachwood Canyon to pick up a sandwich at The Oaks, or walked to my car after a concert at the Greek Theater, the wondrous knowledge that I could encounter P-22 always propelled me into a joyous kind of awe. And I am not alone — his legion of stans hoped for a sight of Hollywood’s most beloved celebrity, the Brad Pitt of the cougar world, on their walks or on their Ring cams, and when he made an appearance, the videos usually went viral. In perhaps the most Hollywood of P-22’s moments, human celebrity Alan Ruck, star of Succession, once reported seeing P-22 from his deck, and shouting at him like a devoted fan would.

“We will all be grappling with the loss of P-22 for some time, trying to make sense of a Los Angeles without this magnificent wild creature. I loved P-22 and hold a deep respect for his intrepid spirit, charm, and just plain chutzpah. We may never see another mountain lion stroll down Sunset Boulevard or surprise customers outside the Los Feliz Trader Joe’s. But perhaps that doesn’t matter — what matters is P-22 showed us it’s possible.

“He changed us.  He changed the way we look at LA. And his influencer status extended around the world, as he inspired millions of people to see wildlife as their neighbors. He made us more human, made us connect more to that wild place in ourselves. We are part of nature and he reminded us of that. Even in the city that gave us Carmeggedon, where we thought wildness had been banished a long time ago, P-22 reminded us it’s still here.

“His legacy to us, and to his kind will never fade. He ensured a future for the entire population of mountain lions in the Santa Monica Mountains by inspiring us to build the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing, which broke ground this spring.

“P-22 never fully got to be a mountain lion. His whole life, he suffered the consequences of trying to survive in unconnected space, right to the end when being hit by a car led to his tragic end. He showed people around the world that we need to ensure our roads, highways, and communities are better and safer when people and wildlife can freely travel to find food, shelter, and families. The Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing would not have been possible without P-22, but the most fitting memorial to P-22 will be how we carry his story forward in the work ahead. One crossing is not enough — we must build more, and we must continue to invest in proactive efforts to protect and conserve wildlife and the habitats they depend on — even in urban areas.

“P-22’s journey to and life in Griffith Park was a miracle. It’s my hope that future mountain lions will be able to walk in the steps of P-22 without risking their lives on California’s highways and streets. We owe it to P-22 to build more crossings and connect the habitats where we live now.

“Thank you for the gift of knowing you, P-22. I’ll miss you forever. But I will never stop working to honor your legacy, and although we failed you, we can at least partly atone by making the world safer for your kind.”

This piece in the LA Times reports all the things P-22 was responsible for changing including the banning of certain kinds of rat poison in California and the building of the land bridge for the big cats to be able to roam north from the Santa Monica Mountains. He really did change the world.

RIP beautiful boy. You made this big, cold city a more humane place.

It’s Happy Hollandaise time here at Hullabaloo. If you’d like to throw a little something in the old Christmas stocking it would be most appreciated.

Many thanks to everyone who has put a little something in the Hullabaloo stocking this year. It’s so reassuring to know that in these turbulent times online, this old site still has something to offer. Thank you, thank you, thank you!

This 20 year anniversary is making me think about how incredibly lucky I am to have been at the right time in my life to be able to transition to spending my time doing something I feel passionate about. It’s not that I didn’t like my previous career working in the film business. I certainly did. It was a good career for a young person, lots of excitement, travel and fun. But as time went on I lost interest in the process and grew to hate the game.

I had always been a political junkie but, like a lot of people, as I got older I found myself more and more interested in current events and non-fiction than the obsessive interest I’d always had in film and entertainment. Strangely enough, it turned out that the years I spent in the movie business (as well as my peripatetic youth) helped prepare me for a laser focus on politics in the 21st century.

I recall, in particular, back in 2015 when Donald Trump came down that escalator. Most people thought he was a joke. But my experience in the entertainment business showed me that he had power that was being overlooked. I wrote the next day:

[T]here is something else he has that may be even more valuable than money: stardom. I don’t think it’s possible to place a political value on the fact that Trump has had a prime-time network TV show for over 10 years with “The Apprentice” and “Celebrity Apprentice.”

“The Apprentice” averaged 6 to 7 million viewers a show with finales sometimes getting between 10 and 20 million viewers. Last year’s “Celebrity Apprentice” averaged 7.6 million a show. Fox News’ highest rated shows rarely get more than a couple of million viewers and they are all elderly hardcore Republicans. The Donald has a wider reach and might even appeal to the most sought-after people in the land: non-voters.

It’s impossible to know if that’s a serious possibility. But it’s fair to say that many more people in the country know the name of Donald Trump than know anyone else in the race (with the possible exception of Jeb Bush). It’s hard to quantify that kind of name recognition but it’s certainly not worthless in our celebrity-obsessed culture. And remember, Trump would not be the first show business celebrity who everyone assumed was too way out there to ever make a successful run for president. The other guy’s name was Ronald Reagan.

Donald Trump was a character I was familiar with because I’d worked with people like him. And I knew he was bad news. I could tell that he was a perfect right wing avatar in this political moment because I’d been closely documenting the conservative movements descent into lunacy for many years — and watching domineering celebrities like him bulldoze their way to success relying on instinct and chutzpah alone. It was a match made in heaven.

I don’t know if his show has gone stale and people are ready to move on . He certainly seems to have lost some of his shine. But I wouldn’t dance on his grave just yet. If there’s one thing Americans love, it’s a comeback. It’s the oldest story in the book.

I’m a little tired right now and I’m sure you are too. All this sturm und drang for the past few years has taken its toll. But the world won’t stop even if we want it too so starting next year I’m afraid that we will have to gird ourselves for the Great Revenge Tour 2024 and the DeSantis “Great Whitebread Hope” Salvation Crusade whether we want to or not. The stakes are too high to turn away.

We will be here as long as we can and anything you can do to help keep the lights on is very appreciated. It’s a dirty job but somebody’s gotta do it!

And Happy Hollandaise everyone!

You know, megalomaniacs

Alexandra Petri sees shades of “The Madness of King George” in Elon Musk’s post-purchase antics on Twitter. The Doge of Mar-a-Lago must be grinding his false teeth to nubs over the attention the reported world’s richest man gets lately. Musk’s banning of multiple journalists from the site last week created more of a stir than a Donald Trump rally featuring assaults on protesters or post-rally Covid outbreaks. So, here we are, like the mad king’s doctors, spending “considerable time and effort to squinting at the contents of the king’s chamber pot” to fathom Musk’s motives.

Of all the things to which Musk might aspire, he’s chose to be a Twitter troll, Petri laments, and not even a funny one.

“Maybe if we are lucky Musk will start doing more of the fun caesar things, such as trying to get a horse into the Senate, and will stop his mission to turn Twitter into a hateful cesspool! But somehow I doubt it.”

But we don’t have to examine Musk’s stools to find the source of his antipathy towards journalists, the New York Times’ Max Fisher explains in a series of Tweets on Musk’s new $44 billion-dollar toy. Fisher’s new book, “The Chaos Machine,” examines how social media impacts human culture. His tweet thread extracts passages relating to Silicon Valley moguls’ vision of a technological utopia.

It comes out of a Valley utopianism has said since the 90s that all legacy institutions are ultimately barriers to progress, but that the enlightened minds of the tech world, guided by the pure science of engineering, will one day liberate us by smashing the old ways.

— Max Fisher (@Max_Fisher) December 16, 2022

“People really need to understand how mainstream it has become in some tech VC [venture capitalist] circles to argue that journalism itself is dangerous as an idea and should be abolished, and that it will be up to the tech world to carry this out,” Fisher begins. “It comes out of a Valley utopianism has said since the 90s that all legacy institutions are ultimately barriers to progress, but that the enlightened minds of the tech world, guided by the pure science of engineering, will one day liberate us by smashing the old ways.”

Musk is simply one of many techies holding such views, Fisher argues. “The idea of rejecting institutions to build a purer society on the internet, in vogue in tech in the 90s, by the 2010s had become a mandate to abolish and remake those institutions in big tech’s image.”

Programmers would be “the new counterculture vanguard, kung fu rebels who would break the chains of human bondage.”

“We offered the world order!” — Khan Noonien Singh

People like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg would be one. And Musk another. PayPal co-founder and Republican mega-donor Peter Thiel would do it.

“The politics of PayPal founders leaned severely libertarian: socially Darwinian, distrustful of government, certain that business knows best,” writes Fisher. Peter Thiel decided only tech firms could safeguard liberty if “unshackled from ‘politics,’ which seemed to mean regulation, public accountability, and possibly the law.”

“I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” Thiel famously wrote in 2009. “In our time, the great task for libertarians is to find an escape from politics in all its forms — from the totalitarian and fundamentalist catastrophes to the unthinking demos that guides so-called ‘social democracy.’”

Fostering rejection of democracy may be, in part, what makes Thiel a Republican mega-donor.

Thiel, Fisher adds, “backed projects meant to bring about corporation-run floating cities and colonization of space, all outside the jurisdiction of any government. The sci-fi fantasies merely exaggerated an old idea in the Valley.”

“Engineers and startup founders knew better. It was their responsibility to tear down the status quo and install a techno-Utopia in its place, just as the 1990s manifesto riders had foretold. If government or journalist objected, it was just the old incumbents clinging to authority that was no longer theirs.”

Shades of Khan Noonien Singh, don’t you think?

James T. Kirk: Who the hell are you?

Khan: A remnant of a time long past. Genetically engineered to be superior so as to lead others to peace in a world at war. 

You know, megalomaniacs. Zuckerberg, Musk, Thiel and more, “claiming to champion free speech when in fact what they most prized were limitless profits,” as the blurb for Fisher’s book says, plus limitless power. And here we are with no Captain Kirks in sight.

It’s Happy Hollandaise time here at Hullabaloo. If you like to throw a little something in the old Christmas stocking it would be most appreciated.

Lake Mead threatens to reach “dead pool”

It was the dawn of the Atomic Age. Isaac Asimov had published his Foundation series. Everything was atomic-this and atomo-that. Man had split the atom, destroyed entire cities with it, and sailed beneath North Pole ice in the USS Nautilus, the world’s first operational nulcear-powered submarine.

But the U.S. had lost its monopoly on the atom in 1949. School children practiced “duck and cover” drills in anticipation of Soviet atomic bombs. I watched science fiction movies on black and white TV after school. All the promise and fears of the time reduced to reels of aliens and radiation-spawned monstrocities. Or into post-apocalyptic fiction such as “A Canticle for Leibowitz,” set in the American southwest.

Nowadays, some of those apocalyptic tales seem less science fiction than southwestern science fact (Los Angeles Times):

The Colorado River’s largest reservoirs stand nearly three-quarters empty, and federal officials now say there is a real danger the reservoirs could drop so low that water would no longer flow past Hoover Dam in two years.

That dire scenario — which would cut off water supplies to California, Arizona and Mexico — has taken center stage at the annual Colorado River conference in Las Vegas this week, where officials from seven states, water agencies, tribes and the federal government are negotiating over how to decrease usage on a scale never seen before.

Outlining their latest projections for Lake Powell and Lake Mead, the nation’s two largest reservoirs, federal water managers said there is a risk Lake Mead could reach “dead pool” levels in 2025. If that were to happen, water would no longer flow downstream from Hoover Dam.

Um, that would be, as they say, bad.

A “23-year megadrought supercharged by global warming” has left water supplies along the Colorado River in crisis. The western drought has Lake Powell in bad shape as well. Tom Buschatzke, director of the Arizona Department of Water Resources, tells the conference “it might be too late to save the lakes.”

Negotiations between seven western states dependent on the river for water supplies have failed to reach an agreement to cut back on water usage in the already overtaxed Colorado basin. The Times reports that “voluntary cuts states and water agencies have proposed remain far from the federal government’s goal of reducing water use by 2 million to 4 million acre-feet per year — a decrease of roughly 15% to 30%.”

A federal August deadline for reaching an agreement for voluntary cuts came and went without one. The Biden administration might have imposed unilateral cuts but did not, undercutting the pressure on state authorities to act.

The Anasazi had experience with this sort of thing. But they aren’t available for consultations.

John Entsminger, general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority, warns:

“One way or another, physics and Mother Nature are going to dictate outcomes if we don’t come up with some solutions,” Entsminger said. “I would like every water user on the Colorado River to recognize that the 21st century has substantially less water than the 20th century. And all of the institutions we built in the 20th century need to be adjusted — in months, not years — in order to face the reality of less water for every user, in every sector, in every state.”

This is not the sort of crisis some clever scientist resolves in the nick of time in the third act.

“If you can’t get water through Hoover Dam, that’s the water supply for 25 million Americans,” John Entsminger said.

Washington Post:

Across the West, drought has already led to a record number of wells running dry in California, forced huge swaths of farmland to lie fallow and required homeowners to limit how much they water their lawns. This week, a major water provider in Southern California declared a regional drought emergency and called on those areas that rely on Colorado River water to reduce their imported supplies.

The problems on the river have been building for years. Over the past two decades, during the most severe drought for the region in centuries, Colorado River basin states have taken more water out of the river than it has produced, draining the reservoirs that act as a buffer during hard times. The average annual flow of the river during that period has been 13.4 million acre-feet — while users are pulling out an average of 15 million acre-feet per year, said James Prairie, research and modeling group chief at the Bureau of Reclamation.

Perhaps Finch‘s robot, Jeff, and dog, Goodyear, would find use for an abandoned Hoover Dam.

It’s Happy Hollandaise time here at Hullabaloo. If you like to throw a little something in the old Christmas stocking it would be most appreciated.

You love to see it

It isn’t just the House Speaker race that has the conservatives in chaos. The RNC is in disarray too. Imagine that:

Struggling to unify after another disappointing election, the Republican National Committee is consumed by an increasingly nasty leadership fight as the GOP navigates its delicate relationship with former President Donald Trump.

With a vote for RNC chair not scheduled until late January, the public feud may get worse before it gets better.

“It’ll be ugly as hell for a while,” says longtime RNC member Ron Kaufman.

The family fight to lead the party has been largely overshadowed for national attention by the equally contentious struggle to become the new Republican House Speaker, with that election set for the first week in January. But both represent critical selections as the GOP works to overcome six years of electoral underperformance heading into another presidential election.

As the Republicans’ national political arm, the RNC will raise and spend hundreds of millions of dollars in building or rebuilding the party’s framework, in campaign messaging and in the year-long presidential nomination process that will begin in earnest before long.

Ronna McDaniel, Trump’s hand-picked choice to lead the committee and the niece of Utah Sen. Mitt Romney, is running for a fourth consecutive term. But the 49-year-old is facing a rising wave of discontent from Trump’s “MAGA” movement, even as the former president stays silent — at least, for now.

[…]

California attorney Harmeet Dhillon has emerged as the MAGA favorite to challenge McDaniel, who secured commitments from more than 100 of the RNC’s 168 voting members earlier this month. Dhillon is working aggressively to peel away some of that support ahead of the formal vote at next month’s annual winter meeting in southern California…

Dhillon, whose law firm earned more than $400,000 representing Trump and his political organizations in the 2022 midterms, said she would leave her law practice if elected chair. The 53-year-old California attorney, who was born in India, also vowed to remain independent in what is expected to be a crowded 2024 presidential primary contest.

Still, Dhillon defends Trump against those Republicans who blame him for the party’s disappointing performance in the November midterm elections. The GOP won a narrow House majority, but a host of Trump’s hand-picked candidates lost key elections for the Senate and governor.

“It’s not any one person’s fault. And I frankly think it’s a little too convenient to say it’s Donald Trump’s fault. Donald Trump hasn’t been the president for the last two years,” Dhillon said.

Instead of criticizing Trump, Dhillon railed against Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, a frequent Trump target, for not investing enough money in important Senate contests. Actually, McConnell and his allies spent tens of millions of dollars more than Trump’s political action committee in the midterms.

“You have Mitch McConnell, because he hates Trump, refusing to support candidates that President Trump endorsed, which I think is really appalling. And I blame him for the Senate losses,” Dhillon said.

Meanwhile, McDaniel is facing criticism from a growing chorus of Republicans largely outside the RNC’s 168 voting members who are eager to change course after three consecutive disappointing election seasons. Her critics include several high-profile Trump loyalists, including Fox News hosts and prominent MAGA figures on social media.

She has some unlikely supporters within the committee as well.

One frequent Trump critic, RNC member Bill Palatucci, said he would support Dhillon because McDaniel has essentially become Trump’s “tool” in recent years. He cited her decisions to stay silent on some of Trump’s more egregious behavior and to spend millions of dollars on his legal fees.

“There’s just gotta be a change,” Palatucci said, describing the committee commitments to McDaniel as “soft.” “RNC members are experienced pols who know how to look you right in the eye and say, ‘I love you,’ and then walk into the voting booth and slit your throat.”

At the same time, those RNC members are being flooded with emails from rank-and-file Republican voters and activists who support Dhillon’s candidacy. The deluge comes after Dhillon and her allies shared the entire committee’s personal emails on social media.

Steve Scheffler, an Iowa-based RNC member who supports McDaniel, said he’s receiving 50 to 70 emails each day from Republicans, many of them angry, weighing in on the leadership fight.

“Most of them are like, ‘Ronna’s gotta go,’” Scheffler said.

The GOP circular firing squad is especially lethal. They’re all armed with AR-15s.

I feel nothing for McDaniel because she deserves it. At one point she called January 6th “normal political discourse.” which is just amazing. She also dumped her professional name of Romney because Dear Leader required it. She’s his creature and if she goes down as a human sacrifice to the Trump cult she has no one to blame but herself.

But, oh dear. Her challenger is the Trumper from hell:

Dhillon, a co-chair of Women for Trump, doesn’t have the same ties to establishment Republicans as McDaniel. But her support for various conspiratorial election lawsuits in 2020 and beyond has earned her praise from extremists in the GOP. She certainly appears to be a more viable challenger to McDaniel than fellow Trump loyalist and My Pillow CEO Mike Lindell.

The most important thing to know about Dhillon? If elected, she’d make a key aspect of Trumpism — voter suppression and election denial using the court system — more common in the GOP.

Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk has become a right-wing kingmaker of sorts, and he’s made Dhillon’s potential control of the RNC a cause célèbre for his organization for this exact reason. (Note: She’s also a frequent guest on his show). 

“We are in the era of lawfare and we keep on losing in the courts,” he said after welcoming Dhillon to his web show Tuesday. “Maybe we should have a chairwoman of the RNC that’s a lawyer that has a killer instinct.”

Dhillon clearly agrees. During their conversation, she accused the McDaniel-run RNC of an “appalling” misuse of funds, claiming the leadership buys RNC chair votes “with donor money.” And she suggested the RNC should invest in an army of election lawyers to help challenge electoral processes. She seemed to be referring to the very kinds of failed, conspiratorial lawsuits she supported after Trump lost the 2020 election. 

“As a result, we don’t have a cadre of lawyers who’d be specializing in election litigation and willing to do it year-round,” she complained.

Dhillon, who touted her dubious work as an election lawyer for failed Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake and failed Senate candidate Blake Masters, used her interview this week on Fox News to repeatedly call for the RNC to fund rabid, Republican attorneys like her who she envisions spending the bulk of their time trying to restrict voting rights and voter access through the courts. 

Oh boy …

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He’s suffered more than most

Right wing cynics like to portray Biden’s role as “consoler in chief” as a schtick but it really isn’t. Biden is one of those people who has had more than his share of deep personal grief, losing his wife, daughter and oldest son and going through the pain of watching a beloved child suffer from addiction and public humiliation. It’s more than anyone should have to bear. But he does it with grace and empathy and I think he does it earnestly.

It’s been 50 years since he lost his wife and daughter in a terrible car crash that came close to killing his two sons as well:

https://twitter.com/SpiroAgnewGhost/status/1604182878287384576?s=20&t=zhfLrggN5Tkkz_92vGf8SQ

The Washington Post dug up a detail about that time that shows even the worst of the worst can sometimes show decency toward their political enemies:

Joe Biden’s first wife, Neilia, and baby daughter, Naomi Christina, had just been killed in a car crash. His sons, Beau and Hunter, ages 3 and 2,had been critically injured. It was a week before Christmas and a tragedy for the young politician from Delaware.

“I could not speak,” the future president wrote in his autobiography, “Promises to Keep: On Life and Politics,” and “only felt this hollow core grow in my chest, like I was going to be sucked inside a black hole.”

It was Dec. 18, 1972, 50 years ago on Sunday. The next day, President Richard M. Nixon called.

The Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum has a recording of the brief call between two men whose lives were to take different arcs through American history. Nixon had just won reelection to a second term in a landslide victory over the Democratic candidate, George McGovern.

But six months earlier, a team of White House agents were arrested trying to break into Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington, lighting the fuse on the Watergate scandal that would lead to Nixon’s demise.

Biden had just turned 30. He’d been elected a U.S. senator but had not yet been sworn in. He was on Capitol Hill in Washington with his younger sister, Valerie, in a borrowed office, interviewing staff.

His wife was home in Wilmington, Del., intending to have breakfast with Biden’s brother, James. She planned to do some Christmas shopping and buy a tree, the future president wrote in his book. It was a Monday.

“Val and I were sitting in the office … when Jimmy called from Wilmington,” Biden wrote. “He wanted to talk to Val. When she hung up the phone, she looked white. ‘There’s been a slight accident,’ she said. ‘Nothing to be worried about. But we ought to go home.’”

He had a sudden sense of dread about his wife. “I could already feel Neilia’s absence,” he wrote. “‘She’s dead, I said, ‘isn’t she?’”

His wife’s car had collided with a truck on a rural road in Hockessin, Del. The Bidens had been married for six years.

Nixon, who had expressed admiration for Biden’s campaign, read about the crash in the newspaper the next morning, according to White House recordings. “Good God,” Nixon said.

He had lost an older brother, Harold, to tuberculosis at age 24, and a younger brother, Arthur, to tubercular encephalitis at age 7, according to the Nixon library.

Nixon telephoned Biden at 12:21 p.m. It’s not clear where Biden was at the time. He may have been at the hospital, where, he wrote, he was a constant presence in his sons’ room.

Courtesy of the Nixon library, this is a transcript of the call, which lasted for one minute and seven seconds:

Operator: Mr. President, Senator-Elect Biden for you.

Nixon: Yes

Nixon: Hello?

Operator 2: Just one minute Mr. President.

Biden: Hello, Mr. President, how are you?

Nixon: Senator, I know this is a very tragic day for you, but I wanted you to know that all of us here at the White House were thinking about you, and praying for you and also for your two children, and —

Biden: I appreciate that very much.

Nixon: I understand you were on the Hill at the time, and your wife was just driving by herself.

Biden: Yes, that’s correct.

Nixon: In any event, looking at it as you must in terms of the future, because you have the great fortune of being young, I remember I was two years older than you when I went to the House. But the main point is you can remember that she was there when you won a great victory, and you enjoyed it together. And now, I’m sure that she’ll be watching you from now on. Good luck to you.

Biden: Thank you very much, Mr. President. I appreciate your call. I appreciate it.

Biden was sworn in as senator a month later in his sons’ hospital room in Wilmington.

Two years later, on Aug. 9, 1974, facing impeachment over the Watergate scandal, Nixon resigned from the presidency in disgrace.

He was a rotten person but he did have a small shred humanity that allowed him to feel the grief of a fellow human being. I’m quite sure Trump would not have done this — recall how he treated John McCain.

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He thought it would be a cakewalk

I’m sharing this with a gift link for those of you who don’t subscribe. This story is well worth reading and the interactive aspect is super well done. But you might want to make yourself a hot toddy and settle in first. It’s a doozy:

They never had a chance.

Fumbling blindly through cratered farms, the troops from Russia’s 155th Naval Infantry Brigade had no maps, medical kits or working walkie-talkies, they said. Just a few weeks earlier, they had been factory workers and truck drivers, watching an endless showcase of supposed Russian military victories at home on state television before being drafted in September. One medic was a former barista who had never had any medical training.

Now, they were piled onto the tops of overcrowded armored vehicles, lumbering through fallow autumn fields with Kalashnikov rifles from half a century ago and virtually nothing to eat, they said. Russia had been at war most of the year, yet its army seemed less prepared than ever. In interviews, members of the brigade said some of them had barely fired a gun before and described having almost no bullets anyway, let alone air cover or artillery. But it didn’t frighten them too much, they said. They would never see combat, their commanders had promised.

Only when the shells began crashing around them, ripping their comrades to pieces, did they realize how badly they had been duped.

Flung to the ground, a drafted Russian soldier named Mikhail recalled opening his eyes to a shock: the shredded bodies of his comrades littering the field. Shrapnel had sliced open his belly, too. Desperate to escape, he said, he crawled to a thicket of trees and tried to dig a ditch with his hands.

Of the 60 members of his platoon near the eastern Ukrainian town of Pavlivka that day in late October, about 40 were killed, said Mikhail, speaking by phone from a military hospital outside Moscow. Only eight, he said, escaped serious injury.

“This isn’t war,” Mikhail said, struggling to speak through heavy, liquid breaths. “It’s the destruction of the Russian people by their own commanders.”

President Vladimir V. Putin’s war was never supposed to be like this. When the head of the C.I.A. traveled to Moscow last year to warn against invading Ukraine, he found a supremely confident Kremlin, with Mr. Putin’s national security adviser boasting that Russia’s cutting-edge armed forces were strong enough to stand up even to the Americans.

Russian invasion plans, obtained by The New York Times, show that the military expected to sprint hundreds of miles across Ukraine and triumph within days. Officers were told to pack their dress uniforms and medals in anticipation of military parades in the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv.

But instead of that resounding victory, with tens of thousands of his troops killed and parts of his army in shambles after nearly 10 months of war, Mr. Putin faces something else entirely: his nation’s greatest human and strategic calamity since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

I think most of us anticipated that it was going to be a very quick military operation. Russia vs Ukraine? Come on. But the Russians believed their own hype and assumed the west would quickly abandon Ukraine and it did not work out the way they planned it.

The ongoing destruction is horrific. And it doesn’t look like this thing is wrapping up any time soon. But Russia is definitely not winning. I urge you to read the whole thing.

If you’d like to throw a little something in the old Hullabaloo stocking, it would be most appreciated. Happy Hollandaise everyone!