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Month: December 2022

The anti-antis covering their bases

Published by digby on December 13, 2022

McConnell emerges from the crypt to take a swipe at Trump. For the moment:

Yeah, whatever. He’ll still back him if he’s the nominee so…

Speaking of Mitch, JV Last at the Bulwark takes a look at the motivations of the anti-anti-Trump Republicans — you know, the ones who know very well that Trump is a toxic menace but want to ride the upside.

Over on The Bulwark subreddit, a reader asks an interesting question about anti-anti-Trump Republicans:

Their theory of the case, and I’m not always sure they even know this, is that they are going to use their own extreme flank . . . to its maximum advantage. . . . DJT et al have created a space for us to “grow” our voter base to the right and we are going to take it! . . .

They were always waiting for DJT to be caught by the cops. To be prosecuted. To be dealt with by the inherent honesty of the system. The inherent decency of America finally caught up with Mr. Trump as they aways knew it would. And now that that is coming true they are just going to ride the wave. . . .

What do you think?

Here is what I think: The anti-anti-Trump position was always likely to win. If the Republic survived the Trump years, then the anti-anti-Trumpers were going to have been “correct.” Any outcome short of the end of democracy and they would emerge saying, “See? Told you so.”

It’s grotesque, sure. Like a guy setting fire to a house, then throwing rocks at the firefighters when they show up, and then—so long as the house doesn’t burn all the way to the ground—saying, “See? It all worked out!”

But this dynamic was obvious from the start. There was never going to be a day when Matt Schlapp or Rich Lowry woke up and said, “My God—we were wrong about everything. Thank goodness other people stepped into the breach to stop that dangerous movement.”

The authoritarian attempt was always going to end in one of two ways. Either democracy would fail, or it would survive—and the people who blew up their professional lives to try to help save it would be excommunicated and regarded as traitors and/or suckers.

The anti-anti-Trump position was most clearly articulated by Mitch McConnell on January 11, 2021. Discussing the second impeachment of Trump, McConnell remarked, “The Democrats are going to take care of the son of a bitch for us.”

McConnell knew that Trump was dangerous. But he also knew that confronting Trump would cost him political power. So he counted on Democrats to protect American democracy for him—even to the point of publicly working against them while privately hoping they would succeed. McConnell believed that he didn’t need to pay the price because someone else would pay it for him.

And he was right.

There’s a lesson in this, but it’s not a very nice one


I’m withholding judgment about whether or not Trump is really on the run. He hasn’t cleared the field and there seems to be quite a line-up of hopefuls at the moment. The latest Great Whitebread Hope,Ron DeSantis, seems to be popular but we’ve seen dreamboats in his position crash and burn before.

They will all fall in line. Ed Kilgore agrees but notes that the possibility of Trump being a loser to Biden could change the calculation for the GOP base. He writes:

[T]here is one measurable optic that could affect Republican voter preferences from sea to shining sea if they show a glaring disparity: perceived 2024 electability. Just as Democrats who might have preferred a younger or more progressive nominee in 2020 settled on Biden as the most electable option against the much-hated Trump, Republicans could dump Trump in 2024 if he’s perceived as a sure loser while alternative candidates aren’t. So it’s probably a good idea to keep an eye on general-election polling along with primary polling.

As I posted earlier there is a poll out today that shows DeSantis beating Biden while Trump loses to him so maybe Kilgore is right. But I’ll believe it when I see it. Trump is still very popular among Republicans and once the battle is joined he’s going to hit Desantis hard. It will be a brutal fight which will re-establish faith in Trump among a good many of his die-hard followers. They love it when he destroys people, even Republicans they like.

Trump will also tell his followers that the polls are lying and many of them will believe him. He is their orange Jesus after all, persecuted and tortured by his enemies. Once Trump positions DeSantis as his enemy, that grievance will be transferred to him. The only question is how many people does Trump represent? It was tens of millions before. Will there be enough to secure him the nomination this time?

By the way:


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Playing the long, long game

Published by digby on December 13, 2022

It’s hard to imagine they could ever be successful in doing this. But with the growing embrace on the right, not just of fundamentalist Christianity as a political ideology but the Great Replacement Theory which requires white American women to bear many more children to keep the country “pure”, I suspect they are serious as a heart attack about it. They will just chip away at it year after year.

Ian Millhiser at Vox explains:

Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Trump appointee to a federal court in Texas, spent much of his career trying to interfere with other people’s sexuality.

A former lawyer at a religious conservative litigation shop, Kacsmaryk denounced, in a 2015 article, a so-called “Sexual Revolution” that began in the 1960s and 1970s, and which “sought public affirmation of the lie that the human person is an autonomous blob of Silly Putty unconstrained by nature or biology, and that marriage, sexuality, gender identity, and even the unborn child must yield to the erotic desires of liberated adults.”

So, in retrospect, it’s unsurprising that Kacsmaryk would be the first federal judge to embrace a challenge to the federal right to birth control after the Supreme Court’s June decision eliminating the right to an abortion.

Last week, Kacsmaryk issued an opinion in Deanda v. Becerra that attacks Title X, a federal program that offers grants to health providers that fund voluntary and confidential family planning services to patients. Federal law requires the Title X program to include “services for adolescents,”

The plaintiff in Deanda is a father who says he is “raising each of his daughters in accordance with Christian teaching on matters of sexuality, which requires unmarried children to practice abstinence and refrain from sexual intercourse until marriage.” He claims that the program must cease all grants to health providers who do not require patients under age 18 to “obtain parental consent” before receiving Title X-funded medical care.

This is not a new argument, and numerous courts have rejected similar challenges to publicly funded family planning programs, in part because the Deanda plaintiff’s legal argument “would undermine the minor’s right to privacy” which the Supreme Court has long held to include a right to contraception.

But Kacsmaryk isn’t like most other judges. In his brief time on the bench — Trump appointed Kacsmaryk in 2019 — he has shown an extraordinary willingness to interpret the law creatively to benefit right-wing causes.

This behavior is enabled, moreover, by the procedural rules that frequently enable federal plaintiffs in Texas to choose which judge will hear their case — 95 percent of civil cases filed in Amarillo, Texas’s federal courthouse are automatically assigned to Kacsmaryk. So litigants who want their case to be decided by a judge with a history as a Christian right activist, with a demonstrated penchant for interpreting the law flexibly to benefit his ideological allies, can all but ensure that outcome by bringing their lawsuit in Amarillo.

And so, last Thursday, the inevitable occurred. Kacsmaryk handed down a decision claiming that “the Title X program violates the constitutional right of parents to direct the upbringing of their children.”

Kacsmaryk’s decision is riddled with legal errors, some of them obvious enough to be spotted by a first-year law student. And it contradicts a 42-year-long consensus among federal courts that parents do not have a constitutional right to target government programs providing contraceptive care. So there’s a reasonable chance that Kacsmaryk will be reversed on appeal, even in a federal judiciary dominated by Republican appointees.

Nevertheless, Kacsmaryk’s opinion reveals that there are powerful elements within the judiciary who are eager to limit access to contraception. And even if Kacsmaryk’s opinion is eventually rejected by a higher court, he could potentially send the Title X program into turmoil for months.

That’s frosting on the cake for sure. They’ll keep working on this as long as it takes. If all they can get is to force more young girls and women into forced childbirth and premature motherhood they will have done their job. Making women miserable is the strategy. I don’t see how that will result in victory for their side but they seem to be determined to do it anyway.

If you would like to put a little something in the Holiday stocking it would be most appreciated. You can use the snail mail address on the side bar or the button below. Happy Hollandaise!


Ronnie D’s gruesome plan

Published by digby on December 13, 2022

He’s hitting Trump from the right

Just last week I wrote a column that was headlined:

Ron DeSantis’ gruesome campaign plan: I’m the genius who defeated COVID — and let thousands die

I discussed the Senate’s major report released last week about the Trump administration deadly response to the pandemic and the government’s lack of preparedness. They condemned the lack of a quick and clear mitigation strategy in the early months but complimented the “Operation Warp Speed” as the administration’s one major success.

I noted that Ron DeSantis is an anti-vaxxer and COVID denier who thinks that’s his ticket to the White House:

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is riding high on his pandemic-response reputation. Despite the fact that Florida has among the higher per-capita death tolls in the country, DeSantis has bamboozled the media into seeing him as a crusader for common sense public health measures. Apparently his “maverick” image on the pandemic is considered the key to his potential presidential campaign. (Appointing an anti-vaxxer as Florida’s surgeon general was a sweet way to own the libs, you must admit,) Evidently, he plans to run to Trump’s right as the guy who didn’t succumb to all that weak-kneed, girly-man, Fauci-loving, vaccination nonsense.

Well, lookee here:

DeSantis and his quack surgeon general are currently holding an anti-vax roundtable event

DeSantis: “Today, I’m announcing a petition with the Supreme Court of Florida to enpanel a statewide grand jury to investigate any and all wrongdoing in Florida with respect to covid-19 vaccines.”

DeSantis's quack surgeon general is using this anti-vax roundtable to suggest that covid vaccines can kill you (scientists have found that the benefits of vaccination outweigh any risks https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/adverse-events.html)

DeSantis announces a new anti-CDC: "Our CDC, at this point, anything they put out, you just assume, at this point, that it's not worth the paper it's printed on … we're creating what we're calling the Public Health Integrity Committee."

Originally tweeted by Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) on December 13, 2022.

This is where he’s going. Is he on to something? Are mainstream Americans now so anti-science that they want to vote for someone who will happily kill hundreds of thousands of them to own the libs?

There’s a new poll out today from USA Today. Republicans are ecstatic over DeSantis and are cooling toward Trump, bigly.

By 2-1, GOP and GOP-leaning voters now say they want Trump’s policies but a different standard-bearer to carry them. While 31% want the former president to run, 61% prefer some other Republican nominee who would continue the policies Trump has pursued.

They have a name in mind: Two-thirds of Republicans and those inclined to vote Republican want Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to run for president. By double digits, 56% to 33%, they prefer DeSantis over Trump. 

While Biden now leads Trump, he trails DeSantis in a head-to-head race, with DeSantis at 47%, Biden at 43%. 

This anti-vax, COVID denial may be the only thing that would make me actually miss Trump. His Operation Warp Speed was literally the only thing he did right.

It’s Happy Hollandaise time! If you’d like to drop something in the old Hullabaloo stocking you can use the address on the sidebar or hit one of the buttons below.


Merry, merry, merry

Published by digby on December 13, 2022

*scroll down for newer posts

Yes, it’s Happy Hollandaise time again here at Hullabaloo and I hope you will bear with me as I do a little reminiscing about the last 20 years of writing this blog. It’s still amazing to me that it’s still going strong, but here we are.

When I first started writing this thing I was part of a burgeoning new community we called the liberal blogosphere. Back in 2003, most bloggers were right wingers, called “war bloggers” for obvious reasons. We provided some balance to the big debates that were starting to flourish on the internet.

It was a heady time. We quickly formed online friendships and organized around politicians and political causes and the whole concept of online activism took shape in those early years. Early bloggers like me were treated like minor celebrities which was fun.




But I don’t miss those days because it was also a terrible time. When I started, the Iraq war was about to begin and we all knew what a nightmare it was going to be. The media was beside itself with excitement, “embedding” with the military, dressed in Prada khakis and generally making absolute fools of themselves. We pushed back but it was of little use. The country was awash in jingoism and blood lust and there was just no stopping it.

It’s easy to forget all that now because of the lunacy that has overtaken our politics. We are now dealing with an internal threat from domestic terrorism that’s complicated and difficult to prosecute. Everything feels tremendously unstable, mainly because it is. But that doesn’t mean it was better then. In fact, our troubles today can largely be traced to that period and the one that came just before it. Our politics have been dissolving into chaos for quite a while and whenever a world shaking event like 9/11 or the financial crisis or a global pandemic happens it weakens just a little bit more. We’re on shaky ground.

Nonetheless, I’m always a little bit surprised at how resilient we actually are. Yes, the right has been going off the rails for decades now, becoming more extreme and dangerous. But the opposition has not given up and, in fact, I see more sophisticated tactics and strategy from the center and the left than I have ever seen in my lifetime which is encouraging. And it’s been done largely by refusing to sacrifice the idealism and inspiration that animate the better angels of our nature. The advances we see in our culture toward inclusion and diversity are furiously opposed by the neo-fascist right, of course. But instead of crawling back into the easy “don’t make trouble” mode, the center and left have decided to harness the idealism to create energy and momentum.

Right now, we are still in something of a stalemate. And things could go sideways in an instant. But I’m actually feeling encouraged at the moment. This last election wasn’t a gimme and the “tired old donkeys” managed to hold back the red tide once again.

I’d like to think that some of us who have been toiling away for the past couple of decades in this new medium, trying desperately to get the country to wake up and smell the fascism have played a tiny part in all that.

These next two years are going to be uhm … eventful, to say the least. I think we have something to offer here at Hullabaloo, especially considering the unfortunate churning that’s going on in social media. If you feel the same and would like to help us keep going, we would be most grateful for your support.

Happy Hollandaise everyone!


Meaning it

Published by Tom Sullivan on December 13, 2022

The voiceless and voteless

Alec Karakatsanis of Alec’s Copaganda Newsletter referenced on Monday a summer post of his about how journalists too often report uncritically asserted motivations of politicians as their actual motivations. People are often not honest about their actual motivations.

Insincerity and mock outrage run wild in the U.S. Congress. Witness anytime Rep. Jim Jordan (R) of Ohio peppers witnesses he opposes with accusations and character attacks. Jordan is sincerely an asshole, but trust nothing beyond that.

Video of Rep. Vicky Hartzler (R-Mo.) went viral Thursday after she shed tears while begging colleagues to vote against the Respect for Marriage Act. President Joe Biden will sign the bill into law today. The act codifies federal protections for same-sex and interracial marriages. Hartzler’s gay nephew, Andrew Hartzler, took issue with her claim that the bill will harm “institutions and people of faith.” That they’ll feel “silenced.”

Andrew responded, “It’s more like you want the power to force your religious beliefs onto everyone else.” As the saying goes, When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.

There are plenty of people in this country who know what oppression really is. And too few in politics to represent them. Democratic National Committee Chair Jaime Harrison is one. He spoke tearfully over the weekend of underprivileged and undereducated and undervalued people who are “many times voiceless and voteless.”

Judge for yourselves whose motivations are more sincere and worthy of taking seriously.

If you would like to put a little something in the Holiday stocking it would be most appreciated. You can use the snail mail address on the side bar or the button below. Happy Hollandaise!


More about the Mark Meadows texts

Published by Tom Sullivan on December 13, 2022

Desperately seeking to subvert the will of the people

Talking Points Memo rolled out a series of posts Monday chronicling hundreds of text messages involving Trump White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and 34 members of Congress. The texts “obtained from multiple sources” sent before, during, and after the Jan. 6 insurrection pull back the curtain on behind-the-scenes Republican efforts to overturn 2020 election results. They also reveal the lengths to which Trump’s lieutenants would go to subvert the will of the people, the law, and the U.S. Constitution to install Trump the loser as president.

Maybe I missed something, but the TPM scoop is getting the Big Ignore from a lot of major news outlets. Not even to mention that they have not reviewed the texts themselves.

So determined was the insurrection caucus that their efforts persisted even after the Jan. 6 ransacking of the Capitol by the Tump mob. Rep. Ralph Norman (R-SC) texted Meadows three days before Joe Biden’s inauguration pleading for Trump to call out the military to stop it (TPM):

The text, which has not previously been reported, is a particularly vivid example of how congressional opposition to Biden’s election was underpinned by paranoid and debunked conspiracy theories like those about Dominion voting machines. Norman’s text also showed the potentially violent lengths to which some congressional Republicans were willing to go in order to keep Trump in power. The log Meadows provided to the select committee does not include a response to Norman’s message. 

Reached via cell phone on Monday morning, Norman asked TPM for a chance to review his messages before commenting. 

“It’s been two years,” Norman said. “Send that text to me and I’ll take a look at it.”

TPM forwarded Norman a copy of the message calling for “Marshall Law!!” We did not receive any further response from the congressman.  

A Dec. 30, 2020 text to Meadows from Trump campaign adviser Jason Miller identified Congressman Mo Brooks of Alabama (who wore body armor to the Ellipse rally) as the ringleader of the effort to block the Jan. 6 electoral vote count. Brooks confirmed to TPM that he took a leadership role. He focused on a bipartisan 2005 report co-authored by former President Jimmy Carter and James Baker III that, while suggesting “potential fraud,” found “no evidence of extensive fraud in U.S. elections.”

When pressed on conclusions from experts and from Trump-appointed officials that there was no significant fraud in the 2020 election, Brooks hung up the phone. 

Based on the log, some of the election objectors saw themselves as participating in an epic battle. Rep. Brian Babin (R-TX) sent at least 21 messages to Meadows and received at least four responses. On November 6, he dramatically urged Meadows to refuse to give up.

Pro tip: Whenever a MAGA Republican tosses out a smear like Marxist, Communist or socialist, mentally replace it with “poopy-head.” That’s how they really use it.

“Babin and his office did not respond,” TPM reports.

Based on Meadows’ text log, overheated battle cries began streaming into his phone as the votes were still being counted on Election Day, Nov. 3, 2020. Texts the committee identified as coming from members of Congress declared “our Trump team is kicking ass today” and “Fight until hell freezes over than fight them on the ice.” 

On Nov. 4, 2020, the day after the election, Rep. Billy Long (R-MO) wrote Meadows claiming he was personally aware of two instances of alleged fraud where people voted twice in Nevada. Based on this claim, he urged Meadows to push for a review of the race in that key state. 

“I know of at least 2 people who told me they mailed in their ballots and voted in person so you can tell them they might be interested in going over all votes in Nevada,” Long wrote.

“Ok,” Meadows replied.

Long did not respond to a request for comment. 

No comment was a theme. Meadows had not responded to multiple requests for comment as of 3:31 p.m. Monday when the story went live.

Other members of Congress sent Meadows questionable legal theories and wildly undemocratic plans to have the vote overturned at the state level. Rep. Mark Green (R-TN) pointed to a segment on the far-right cable network Newsmax where the political operative Dick Morris argued Republican state legislatures had the power to “declare” Trump the winner based on unproven allegations of fraud. 

The text log does not include responses from Meadows to these texts from Babin, Cramer, and Green. Green’s communications director, Rachel del Guidice, provided a statement to TPM that suggested his ideas came from people in his district rather than the congressman himself.

“Congressman Green was passing along what constituents were sending him to keep the White House informed on the sentiments of his constituents,” del Guidice said. “He wasn’t advocating for any specific course of action.”

TPM founder Josh Marshall commented in a tweet thread (yes, he’s still there):

Once again, “Jordan and his office did not respond to a request for comment. “

There is plenty more, including a few curt replies from Meadows and a list of 34 members of Congress identified in the Meadows call log. How many actually participated beyond rash talk and electoral count hijinks in Trump’s failed insurrection is not yet evident.

Freedom Caucus Chair Scott Perry’s Work To Overturn 2020 Election Included A ‘Cyber Team’ And An Italian Job

As The 2020 Election Slipped Away, Andy Biggs And Mark Meadows Schemed To Reverse The Vote In Arizona 

We have yet to hear much about communications between the White House and players in the Willard Hotel “war room.” There is likely more opportunity for potential prosecution over the 2020 insurrection than there was “potential fraud.”

If you would like to put a little something in the Holiday stocking it would be most appreciated. You can use the snail mail address on the side bar or the button below. Happy Hollandaise!


Believe what you see, folks

Published by digby on December 12, 2022

Elon Musk is exactly what he seems

I can hardly believe it but there seems to be some kind of beltway reluctance to admit that Elon Musk is a right wing troll and objectively pro- fascist. The fact that he is in favor of electric cars and once gave money to Obama doesn’t change that.

Here’s Philip Bump in the Washington Post to refute that ridiculous idea:

When you take just a step or two back, the picture isn’t that complicated. A billionaire business executive who has given to both Democratic and Republican candidates begins to make clear that his personal politics lean more heavily to the right. This seems in part to be a function of the media environment in which he operates. It is clearly exacerbated, too, by frustration at critical reporting from traditional news outlets.

The next thing you know, he’s sharing overtly right-wing content and cocooning himself in a universe of allies — even to the detriment of his own credibility. Once just a rich celebrity, suddenly the guy is a central component of a political movement. And leaning into it.

So it was that Donald Trump became president.

Oh, did you think I was talking about Elon Musk? Well, yeah, I was. That carefully articulated outline of behavior applies to both men by design. But that doesn’t mean that the parallels are contrived. Musk’s willing step into the spotlight has left little doubt about his current political inclinations, just as Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign made very clear — if more explicitly — where he stood.

This is worth mentioning because of a column published by the New York Times over the weekend. In it, Jeremy Peters notes that Musk’s politics can be hard to categorize, in large part because his discussions of politics tend to occur within the context of Twitter, the social media site he owns, and in part because of Musk’s political history. Is it safe to say that a guy who has given to Democratic candidates and insists he’s voted Democratic in the past and may again in the future is antithetical to the Democratic Party?

The answer is yes, for several reasons.

The first is that the contribution patterns of wealthy business executives should probably not be treated as clear indicators of their own ideologies. Giving the maximum allowable contribution to every candidate in every House and Senate race will cost you less than $3 million, money that, for a multibillionaire, is chicken scratch. Business executives admit regularly that they give to both parties to advance their interests; it was actually a central part of Trump’s shtick in 2016!

Then, of course, there’s the difference between politics and partisanship. In 2004, Trump said that he identified more as a Democrat than a Republican. Until 2008, in fact, he was registered as a Democrat — after having switched to the party from being an independent, after having been a Republican. This partisan history did not end up being a good guide to his politics.

In the months since Musk took over Twitter, he’s been more overt about both his partisanship and his politics. He’s said he would support Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) in a potential 2024 presidential bid and encouraged Twitter users to vote Republican in the midterm elections as a purported counterweight to the left.

But that’s fundamentally less important than the political rhetoric he has embraced and amplified. His purchase of Twitter — a commitment, it’s worth remembering, that he tried quite hard to wriggle out of — has allowed him to occupy a much larger share of the public (and “elite”) conversation than he used to. And as he’s done so, he’s aligned both directly and indirectly with right-wing voices and arguments.

Let me share a couple of things with you just from today:

He is spending all day tweeting junk like this. And you don’t want to see the sycophantic replies. If this keeps up there’s going to be quite the competition between Trump and Elon for cult members. In fact, Trump may be forced to come back and go mano a mano. In the meantime, Elon is certainly keeping the wingnuts excited.

After tweeting yesterday that the previous twitter safety chief is a pedophile, the man has had to move out of his home because of the death threats. That’s where we are, folks. Stay tuned. The fever has definitely not broken.

If you would like to put a little something in the Holiday stocking it would be most appreciated. You can use the snail mail address on the side bar or the button below. Happy Hollandaise!


The Mark Meadows Texts

Published by digby on December 12, 2022

Ooh Baby. Hunter Walker at Talking Points Memo has a gigantic scoop. He obtained Mark Meadows’ emails. Here’s what he says about it:

TPM has obtained the 2,319 text messages that Mark Meadows, who was President Trump’s last White House chief of staff, turned over to the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack. Today, we are publishing The Meadows Texts, a series based on an in-depth analysis of these extraordinary — and disturbing — communications. 

The vast majority of Meadows’ texts described in this series are being made public for the very first time. They show the senior-most official in the Trump White House communicating with members of Congress, state-level politicians, and far-right activists as they work feverishly to overturn Trump’s loss in the 2020 election. The Meadows texts illustrate in moment-to-moment detail an authoritarian effort to undermine the will of the people and upend the American democratic system as we know it. 

The text messages, obtained from multiple sources, offer new insights into how the assault on the election was rooted in deranged internet paranoia and undemocratic ideology. They show Meadows and other high-level Trump allies reveling in wild conspiracy theories, violent rhetoric, and crackpot legal strategies for refusing to certify Joe Biden’s victory. They expose the previously unknown roles of some members of Congress, local politicians, activists and others in the plot to overturn the election. Now, for the first time, many of those figures will be named and their roles will be described — in their own words. 

Meadows turned over the text messages during a brief period of cooperation with the committee before he filed a December 2021 lawsuit arguing that its subpoenas seeking testimony and his phone records were “overly broad” and violations of executive privilege. Since then, Meadows has faced losses in his efforts to challenge the subpoena in court. However, that legal battle is ongoing and is unlikely to conclude before next month, when the incoming Republican House majority is widely expected to shutter the committee’s investigation. Earlier this year, Meadows reportedly turned over the same material he gave the select committee to the Justice Department in response to another subpoena. These messages are key evidence in the two major investigations into the Jan. 6 attack. With this series, the American people will be able to evaluate the most important texts for themselves.  

Meadows has not, thus far, responded to multiple requests for comment. The texts Meadows provided to the select committee encompass the period from election night in 2020 through President Joe Biden’s inauguration on Jan. 20, 2021. It is not clear which, if any, texts Meadows withheld from the committee, but the text message log offers multiple hints it is only a partial record of his conversations. There are discussions that clearly lack prior context and messages where participants indicate there is further communication taking place on encrypted channels. 

But despite the seeming gaps, Meadows’ text record is still incredibly revealing. Some of the contents of the log were published in “The Breach,” a book about the Jan. 6 attack that I co-wrote with Denver Riggleman, a former Republican congressman and senior technical adviser to the committee. In our book, Riggleman described how he and his fellow committee investigators dubbed Meadows’ text log “the crown jewels” because they served as the “road map to an insurrection.” Along with the text messages that appeared in “The Breach,” some of Meadows’ messages have also been revealed by media outlets. The Washington Post published his exchanges with Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Some of Meadows’ conversations with Fox News personalities and other members of the media were disclosed by the select committee. CNN and I have published Meadows’ conversations with some Republican members of Congress including; Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX), Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-NY), Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA), and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA). Additionally, CNN has published Meadows’ texts with Fox News personality Sean Hannity and his messages from the period directly surrounding the Jan. 6 attack. However, there’s more. So much more. 

TPM is kicking off this series with an exclusive story showing that the log includes more than 450 messages with 34 Republican members of Congress. Those texts show varying degrees of involvement by members of Congress, from largely benign expressions of support for Trump to the leading roles played by Reps. Jim Jordan (R-OH), Jody Hice (R-GA), Mo Brooks (R-AL), and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) in the plot to reverse Trump’s defeat. We reached out to all these legislators, and will be detailing their roles and responses to our questions in the first installment of the series, which is coming later today.

Click over to see what they have up later today.

I’ve written a lot about Meadows. He was an unusually inept dolt to be in such a powerful position, even for the Trump administration. And it seems that every crank and crackpot in the Republican party had direct access to him.

Meadows has been strangely quiet in the post election period. Of course, he’s in trouble what with having committed vote fraud and conspiring to overthrow the election and all. And ever since he told the world that Trump looked disheveled when he had COVID, he’s been on Trump’s shit-list. But there is no one other than Donald Trump who was more involved in the coup attempt. He was at the center of it all, even relaying messages to the insurrection plotters like Roger Stone and Steve Bannon.

I’m sure he’s claiming executive privilege or taking the 5th or even just outright lying to the Department of Justice and other prosecutors in the myriad legal cases that are unwinding in the courts right now. But he can’t deny what he wrote. And from what we already know, he was amazingly indiscreet. If this is the stuff he turned over we can only imagine what the stuff he refused to turn over must look like.

Happy Hollandaise everyone! If you’d like to drop something in the old Holiday Stocking you can do so with the snail mail address on the side column or with this:


Mitt Romney could do something important

Published by digby on December 12, 2022

If he chooses …

Greg Sargent wrote this piece last week about the Sinema/Tillis immigration proposal and as annoyed as we are about Sinema’s announcement, it’s not a good idea to dismiss it:

You’re in luck, Senator Romney. You and other like-minded GOP colleagues have a big opening right now to demonstrate your seriousness of purpose — by supporting an emerging compromise on immigration reform that would address numerous significant problems all at once.

A big question is whether 10 GOP senators will support reforms being negotiated by Sens. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.). The compromise would create a path to citizenship for 2 million “dreamers” brought here as children and invest a lot of money to speed the processing of the asylum seekers overwhelming infrastructure at the southern border.

Right now, negotiators are discussing including $25 billion to $40 billion in funds for border security and other border-related reforms, sources familiar with the talks tell me. Will Republican senators really forgo this opportunity?

To see why they shouldn’t, consider a newly relevant episode from the last presidency. In 2018, a bipartisan group of lawmakers offered President Donald Trump a deal that included $25 billion for his border wall and a path to citizenship for 1.8 million dreamers.

Trump rejected it. He did so under pressure from hard-liners who despised the thought that people brought to the United States as children — through no fault of their own — should gain citizenship after growing up in this country with little connection to their countries of birth.

With Trump raging from the sidelines, 10 GOP senators can now back a framework that should be seen as an even better one, from their perspective. Unlike the previous deal, which would have dumped billions on a mostly symbolic border wall, the new one would more directly address genuine problems at the border.

Dante Atkins had a nice thread succinctly explaining why this would be win-win for both Democrats and Republicans:

Greg has been talking about this for a few days now, and I want to amplify how big a deal it would be to pass the Sinema-Tillis compromise (I know, I know, but hear me out here)

FIRST: getting the 2 million dreamers off of their legal cliff and guaranteeing them citizenship to enable their de facto home country to also be their de jure home country should be our most important priority, and we should be willing to agree to concessions to get it done.

SECOND: the way we handle asylum claims now is an underfunded, ridiculous mess, and that’s part of what enables trolls like DeSantis to commit and justify their migrant trafficking to liberal enclaves, and also part of why Title 42 has become an unnecessary controversy.

conservatives have every reason to support this. currently, our international obligations require asylum seekers to be released into the United States, where they wait for years with uncertain status waiting for their hearings. They blame this for the border “crisis.”

the conservative logic is, if people can legally apply for asylum at the border, be released into the United States, and then live here in limbo until they run afoul of the law in some other way, it creates incentives for more people to overwhelm the system.

the left, meanwhile, has every incentive to better fund and structure our asylum claim system, which is a total shambles right now. So, everyone wins in this deal.

2 million dreamers get citizenship; our asylum system gets an overhaul; human rights and international law are respected; and if conservatives are right that our asylum system is incentivizing mass migration, they get a fix for that.

that said, I don’t think conservatives will accept a deal that allows for 2 million more younger, mostly non-white citizens, because their key goal is controlling the electorate. If the deal doesn’t get enough Republican votes, that’s the reason why!

Originally tweeted by 🕷Dante Atkins🕷 (@DanteAtkins) on December 11, 2022.

He’s probably right. But this is a good opportunity to push, as the Republicans are in chaos and feeling some distance from Trump in the wake of failing to win the Senate in November. It’s just possible that they can find the 10 among the handful of Trump apostates and retirees to actually do something on this. They should at least try.

If you’d like to drop something in the old Hullabaloo Holiday stocking you can do so here or via the snail mail address on the left. Happy Hollandaise everyone!


It’s Happy Hollandaise Time!

Published by digby on December 12, 2022

*please scroll down for newer posts…

If you can believe it, it’s been 20 years this January that I published my first post on this old blog. Oh my dear God, where has the time gone?

Hello? Is this thing on?

Published by digby on January 1, 2003

OK. There’s no point in putting it off. My New Year resolution is to go ahead and start this up and let the chips fall where they may. Knowing myself, it is entirely possible that I will lose interest in it within a matter of days and will slink off into even more obscurity than that in which I already happily exist. However, I join the blogging fray today with more enthusiasm than I have usually have for resolutions, which generally last until about noon on January 1st when I compulsively begin to eat, drink, smoke, watch or read the things I had promised just 12 hours before to not eat, drink, smoke, watch or read. This is a very promising beginning, indeed. It is now 1:24 pm.

Happy New Year everybody. May the Mighty Casio shake the firmament and wake up the neighborhood.

I don’t know if I woke up the neighborhood but I did not lose interest. How could I? This has been an incredibly fascinating time in politics and world events, from 9/11 to Iraq to the financial crisis to Obama to Trump and everything in between. In fact, I’ve posted about it every single day without fail for the last 15 of those 20 years. To say we live in interesting times is an understatement.

The truth is that I feel that I owe it to you, my faithful readers, to weigh in on the latest news every day because I know you have better things to do than scour the internet and compulsively flip through the news channels, cursing and crying and rending your garments as I do. (Pity my poor spouse … and my cats.) It is my mission to try, as best I can, to witness what’s happening in this crazy time and put it out there. It’s therapy for me and, I hope, informative for you.

Things have changed a lot since I started this thing. Back then blogging was in its infancy, poised to become the next big thing. Bloggers were getting profiles in major newspapers. We were being invited to Washington and feted by politicians eager for our endorsement. That is no longer the case, of course. Facebook and twitter and Instagram and Youtube and Substack all the other social media platforms usurped the power of the blogs long ago and there are only a few of us left still plugging along using this model.

But with the incipient demise of twitter and the ongoing degradation of Facebook, I have a feeling that we may all be migrating to other places for short takes and analysis and I hope you know that I’ll still be here doing my thing as I’ve been doing for the past 20 years. With people like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg putting their vast wealth to the task of turning the information sphere we’ve all come to rely upon to serve their interests alone, small independent outposts like this may be our best refuge.

There are no ads here, no rich fascist owners making the rules, just old fashioned independent blogging. And in order to keep doing that I could use your support as always. I’m happy to offer our scribbles for free to anyone who cannot pay and for those who feel their money is better spent elsewhere. But if you value what we offer here and feel that it’s worth a few bucks to keep the lights on and the machinery well oiled, I would be most appreciative of anything you can throw in the old holiday stocking.

If it weren’t for you, my loyal Hullabaloo readers, I can guarantee that I wouldn’t have been able to keep doing this for two decades and I will never be able to fully express my gratitude for that. If any of you can donate this year it would mean the world to me.

You can send holiday cheer to the snail mail address on the left or via the links below.

Happy Hollandaise everyone!