At least we don’t have to put up with her cackle. And egg prices.
"what digby sez..."
Month: August 2025
So is the Christian Right as he knew it
It wasn’t long ago that the death of an important figure in the Christian Right would have been big national news. These were people held in high esteem by the political establishment, credited with electing Republican politicians to high office and protecting the nation’s moral character. But last week one of the most influential religious right figures in our history, Dr. James Dobson, passed away and it was a passing story even in right wing media. Now that they have a full-fledged demagogue and cult leader running the country, it appears the American right is no longer interested in the conservative Christian leaders of yesteryear. But you would think they would at least give them a proper memorial. After all, Donald Trump and his MAGA movement would never have come to power without them.
There have always been charismatic preachers with devoted followers in American life. It’s one of our defining characteristics. But there was a time when they, and the activists who sold their ideas, were more important than the politicians. Billy Graham and his crusades, Pat Robertson of the 700 Club and the Christian Broadcasting Network, Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority among others were prominent figures in the conservative moment and helped shape American politics for more than 50 years. But James Dobson was one of the most instrumental of those leaders in cultivating the culture war we are still dealing with today.
Dobson grew up in the fundamentalist Church of the Nazarene, one of those extremely conservative evangelical faiths that don’t allow dancing or dating, and remained a devoted adherent his entire life. But he was an ambitious type who saw the possibilities of combining his Christian faith with something a little bit more modern in the field of psychology. That led him to get a Phd from the University of California where he went on to teach as a professor for over a decade. But he came to national prominence with the publication of his book, Dare to Discipline, in 1970.
The timing was propitious. The baby boomers were charging through American society at warp speed challenging all the prevailing morals and mores, terrifying large numbers of American who felt that the fabric of the nation was unraveling. His book was little more than a permission slip for corporal punishment, something that a good many people believed was sorely lacking in the homes and the schools of all those young people with their long hair and their loud music. It was a big hit (no pun intended) and the sequel called The Strong-Willed Child was even bigger.
Dobson believed that children are little performers who manipulate adults and need to be tamed. It wasn’t enough to simply spank them, they had to be spanked until they lost their will to protest. In The Strong-Willed Child there is a very famous and horrific description of his beating of the family daschund named Siggy (for Sigmund Freud) when he refused to go into his crate:
“I had seen this defiant mood before and knew there was only one way to deal with it. The only way to make Siggie obey is to threaten him with destruction. Nothing else works. I turned and went to my closet and got a small belt to help me ‘reason’ with Mr. Freud….. “I hit him again and he tried to bite me . . . That tiny dog and I had the most vicious fight ever staged between man and beast. I fought him up one wall and down the other, with both of us scratching and clawing and growling and swinging the belt.”
This was how the great conservative Christian psychologist recommended people behave toward the innocent people and creatures who depended upon them. It was truly sick stuff.
Dobson entered the political scene around the same time as Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority in the late 70s. His schtick was a little different — he was a far right evangelical but he wasn’t a preacher. His fame as an author was such that he was soon ready to get into media full time and he started Focus on the Family a “parachurch” organization that openly combined his family psychology practice with evangelical religion and politics. His show was heard daily on stations all over the country and it tilled the ground for what later became right wing hate radio. Many years before Rush Limbaugh became a household name James Dobson was spewing patriarchal vitriol.
He pushed creationism, religious home schooling, anti-pornography and gambling the whole wish list of the Christian Right. But he spent most of his energy excoriating LGBTQ people and feminists, particularly those who advocate for abortion rights. Over the years his show became more and more explicitly partisan as the Republicans embraced the Christian Right as their most important organizing faction. Millions of people heard the call.
During the 1980s he created the Family Research Council with a couple other conservative psychologists to be a sort of evangelical think tank, writing and recommending policy to Republican office holders. By the 2000s he was a kingmaker in the Republican Party feted by every GOP politician who coveted his endorsement.
An entire generation of conservatives grew up in households that were under the influence of this man and his work. They heard him day in and day out on the radio and were indoctrinated into the hard right culture war mentality that still pervades the Republican Party today.
However, the Christian Right has today been usurped by the MAGA movement, a quasi religious cult of personality devoted to Donald Trump and Dobson became an enthusiastic supporter. Sure, many of the MAGA voters still consider themselves to be Christians and some no doubt still attend church. But they have shown remarkable flexibility when it comes to the morality of their new leader and while their culture war still goes on, it’s not explicitly religious anymore. Today it’s all about fighting the “woke” left, which refers to the same enemies (LGBTQ people and feminists mostly, along with Black and brown people who want to acknowledge their presence in American society) as before. But there’s nary a peep about the Bible in GOP politics these days except for a few lone holdouts like House Speaker Mike Johnson, who sounds like a voice from the past when he brings it up. But then, how can there be with a mendacious, felonious, libertine as their standard bearer?
James Dobson spent many years at the pinnacle of social power and political influence in America. He lived to see Roe vs Wade overturned which must have made him happy. And the right still hates the same people he hated so there was probably some satisfaction in that. But the Religious Right as it was when he died last week was no longer the political powerhouse it was during his era. Donald Trump is the GOP’s messiah now and Christian leaders like James Dobson paved the way for his ascension. You have to wonder if, at the end of his life, he realized whose work he had really been doing all those years.
Salon
And his march toward despotism
If the emotionally stunted man-child in the Oval Office had never developed object permanence, he’d forget about things like wind turbines and political adversaries as soon as they were out of sight. Alas:
President Trump on Sunday threatened to investigate former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey over a 2013 political scandal, days after the F.B.I. raided the home and office of another former Trump official turned critic.
Mr. Trump made the threat on social media after Mr. Christie said during an appearance on ABC News that the president “doesn’t care” about maintaining a separation between his office and criminal investigations.
And those “windmills” too:
The Trump administration on Friday ordered that all construction stop on Revolution Wind, a $4 billion wind farm off the coast of Rhode Island that is already mostly built.
The 65-turbine project had obtained all necessary permits from the Biden administration, and nearly 70 percent of the turbines have been installed. The developers behind the project had said it was on track to produce enough electricity for more than 350,000 homes in Rhode Island and Connecticut by next spring.
Digby wrote, “This is a man who thinks there’s a big valve that can release all the ‘water from Canada’ to California. Why would we doubt that he honestly thinks that wind and solar are too ‘ugly’ for us to use in the United States?”
Seems to me that the answer is for Trump to gold-plate the wind turbines. And why not Chris Christie too. A Bond villain would.
Maybe a despot too. Bill Kristol this morning ticks off a partial list of Trump’s actions in our “slide toward authoritarianism.” Make that “a march toward despotism,” Kristol amends himself. Because “does anyone think they’re going to all this trouble to accumulate power so they can willingly hand it over in 2028?” There’s no reason anymore to “sugarcoat what we’re seeing.”
The “enemies of a free society” are busily demolishing the republic. Stopping their march cannot wait until 2026, much less 2028.
* * * * *
Have you fought dicktatorship today?
50501 – Labor Day events
May Day Strong Labor Day Events
No King’s One Million Rising movement
The Resistance Lab
Choose Democracy
Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink – Search on Labor Day events near you
You Have Power
Chop Wood, Carry Water
Thirty lonely but beautiful actions
Attending a Protest Surveillance Self-Defense
So let’s get real
Something Jason Sattler wrote yesterday needs repeating this morning:
Everything we do makes it easier for our neighbors to stand up or sit down for this regime. We all know there’s a crisis coming that will force all who pay attention to make a choice that could define the rest of their lives.
Will people do it? In most cases, it depends on what they see us doing next.
SEE us doing. That’s the key.
How the less-engaged make up their minds about political matters, Anand Giridharadas observed (based on Anat’s work), is more akin to how they decide to buy pants: What’s everyone else wearing this year? What are normal people like me doing? Not in one-and-done big rallies but every day. Your resistance must be visible and persistent for that to work and give the less engaged permission to join the resistance movement. Calling your senator five days a week is fine, but which of your neighbors sees that?
Plus, if you want people to join your party, throw a better party. We’re out in the streets multiple times a week now. I bring dance music.
A friend pointed to this TikTok by someone going by @logicnliberty. She advocates a unified front by blue-state governors with trifectas. It’s not that they are not already unified, coordinating, and suing. They are. Govs. Gavin Newsom, JB Pritzker, Kathy Hochul are speaking out and holding press conferences. (State AGs too.) But not necessarily as a team. Are they leveraging their trifectas proactively to erect firewalls in their states against Trump’s gutting of the Constitution? They should.
@logicnliberty Send the letter in my bio! Go to the linktree. Hold the line, Blue State Governors! All comments that aren't productive will be deleted. Any comment that is simple-minded will deleted Any misinformation will be deleted #bluestates #governors #defense #california #ice ♬ original sound – Logic & Liberty 🇺🇸 🚫🍊
Would the press cover it if they did? We are already in the slow civil war Jeff Sharlet described. The blue and the gray meets the blue and the red. Run with it. The press loves controversy. Generate more, blue state governors.
Josh Marshall has been writing about how to leverage the separate sovereignty of the states against Trump. “Strategic depth,” he calls it, from military studies:
There are key areas where Democrats in Congress may have moments of power, the ability to slow a few things down. But to a great degree, the battle is already lost within the federal government until the next election. It’s only in the states where opponents of Donald Trump hold executive power outside the reach of and the hierarchies of the federal government. That’s where the whole game is. It is strategic depth not in extent or remoteness of territory but in the structure of government and the state. And states have vast amounts of power, far more than we tend to realize because we’ve never been in a position where the mundane daily activities of state and local government have become so critical — its taxing powers, its policing powers, the ways in which the federal government actually struggles to effectively extend its powers to the local level at scale without the active participation of local government.
Understanding the critical role of the sovereign powers of the states as a redoubt beyond the reach of Trump’s increasingly autocratic power is really the entire game right now, at least for the next 18 months and, in various measures, almost certainly through the beginning of 2029. People can march, advocate, campaign, donate to candidates, all the stuff. But in many ways the most important thing right now is both communicating to and demanding of state officials that they act on this latent power.
And those actions must be not only public, but in-your-face public. Their actions and yours.
Update: Read it. It’s where your neighbors are.
The human heart hangs on to hope until there’s no other choice. People will not fight back in the ways that will work, until they realize there is no other choice, until the only other choice is their own imprisonment or death, or that of someone they love. For many of us, that moment is already here. But for most of us, it’s not.
* * * * *
Have you fought dicktatorship today?
50501 – Labor Day events
May Day Strong Labor Day Events
No King’s One Million Rising movement
The Resistance Lab
Choose Democracy
Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink – Search on Labor Day events near you
You Have Power
Chop Wood, Carry Water
Thirty lonely but beautiful actions
Attending a Protest Surveillance Self-Defense
Krugman on the impending energy crisis:
We’re hearing a lot of talk about stagflation now, for good reason. Tariffs and mass deportations are both stagflationary: They increase inflation while depressing growth.
It’s becoming increasingly clear that there’s a third major stagflationary force coming into play: Soaring electricity prices, which will also hurt growth while increasing inflation.
Now, during the 2024 campaign Donald Trump boasted a lot about how he would bring down energy prices. He talked very big, and made specific promises. Notably, he declared that he would cut the price of electricity in half within 12 months of taking office:
So how’s that going?
And this is only the start. Many analysts expect further large increases in electricity prices over the next year or more, largely because of surging demand from AI data centers. The electricity outlook is sufficiently scary that Texas — Texas! — has passed a new law giving the grid operator the right to cut off data centers during periods of power shortage.
An aside: In the America I grew up in, people who made big boasts about what they would achieve then completely failed to deliver were considered unserious blowhards. What happened to that country?
But Trump has a scapegoat, which probably won’t surprise you — renewable energy:
It’s unclear what his theory is. How does adding wind and solar generating capacity — increasing electricity supply — lead to higher prices?
To the extent that there is a story here, it involves what I’ve called MAGA brain, “the belief that the only way you can get results is by being tough and nasty, avoiding anything that might be considered woke” — which includes renewable energy.
As it happens, the data overwhelmingly reject Trump’s claims about renewables and prices. The Department of Energy has data on the share of each state’s electricity generated by renewable sources. For example, Iowa gets 80 percent of its utility-scale power from renewables, mostly wind, while New Jersey only gets 4.6 percent from renewables. Yet Iowa’s electricity prices actually fell slightly from May 2024 to May 2025, while NJ prices rose 10 percent.
Trump is hallucinating again:
Except New Jersey doesn’t have any windmills. There have been proposals for large offshore wind farms, but they have never come to fruition — and Trump has signed executive orders that will effectively ban future offshore wind development.
He’s actually stopping wind farms that are about to come on line. Insane.
Krugman goes on to point out that prices are mostly soaring because of power consumption by data centers driven by AI and Crypto. Needless to say, Trump has no solutions to that problem. He’s actively blocking the renewable energy that has been boosting our supply in recent years because he thinks they’re ugly.
So the electricity crisis is set to get worse. And it will matter a lot. Households spend a substantial share of their budgets on electricity, but the overall impact of electricity prices goes well beyond your utility bills: electricity is an important cost of doing business, and an increase in that cost will be passed on to consumers. By my estimate, overall spending on electricity — both direct spending by consumers and spending by businesses that ultimately gets passed on to consumers — is about 2 percent of GDP. So large electricity price increases could have a significant effect on the cost of living.
He writes that business will also be adversely affected and it could end up being the AI boom to a “screeching halt” — and it’s what’s holding up the financial markets. Without it we’re effectively stalled.
So the electricity crisis is serious, adding significantly to the risk of stagflation. Unfortunately, it would be hard to find policymakers I’d trust less to deal with this crisis than the Trump administration, whose energy policy is driven by petty prejudices (Trump is still mad about the windmills he thinks ruin the view from his Scottish golf course), macho posturing (real men burn stuff), and hallucinations (the imaginary windmills of New Jersey.)
So … accelerating climate change and pollution, destroying the economy and raising prices on average consumers. And Trump is bragging about it. Yet another atrocity.
The NY Times has a super interesting piece today about what the cuts to bio-medical research are going to do to Americans. (gift link.) It’s stunning. They interview a number of researchers who are all simply appalled at what is happening:
Dr. Kamila Naxerova is trying to understand how cancer spreads in the body. Dr. Rachael Sirianni is trying to find new ways to deliver drugs for childhood brain cancer. Dr. David Ho is trying to make breakthroughs in H.I.V. research.
These researchers and so many others worked to ensure that Americans had access to the best medical treatments available and that they had first access to those treatments. That is, they worked until Trump administration gutted funding to the National Institutes of Health and froze grants to universities across the country. You can put a dollar amount on how much has been saved, but the cost of what has been lost is incalculable.
“It’s people who will get cancer in 10, 20 or 30 years who will really pay the price for these cuts,” Dr. Naxerova said.
I have always thought that right wingers really don’t seem to love their children very much. Climate change denial is the greatest example up until now. This is even worse only because while climate may seem abstract, this is something everyone understands.
Use that gift link to watch the video of these scientists explaining just how destructive these policies really are. I can hardly believe this is happening. It’s not about me — it’s about the kids and grandkids who will be denied the life-saving care they would have had. Why are Americans allowing this to happen?
No they aren’t…
Trump’s planning to send troops into major American cities for no reason. He’s already doing it in two of them. Now he’s getting ready to do it in a third. More to come for sure.
Sending the National Guard into another Democratic-led city would be another escalation in the president’s pledge to “make our country safe” and his willingness to stretch the bounds of presidential authority.
- D.C. residents overwhelmingly opposed Trump’s takeover of the District’s police and the mobilization of Guard members and federal law enforcement, according to a recent according to a Washington Post-Schar School poll.
But less than two weeks after Trump’s announcement, the White House has touted a successful operation — and now, the president claims that Chicagoans, including “African American ladies,” are “screaming” for him to target their city.
- Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker (D) has pushed back, saying there is “no emergency that warrants the President of the United States federalizing the Illinois National Guard, deploying the National Guard from other states, or sending active duty military within our own borders.”
He says he’s going after New York too. But Chicago has been on his mind from the start. It’s a very blue city, like Los Angeles and DC. It must be punished.
The Washington Post first reported that the Trump administration has been planning a deployment to Chicago for weeks. CNN also confirmed those preparations.
- A Defense official declined in a statement provided to Axios to “speculate on further operations, saying, “[t]he Department is a planning organization and is continuously working with other agency partners on plans to protect federal assets and personnel.”
- Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson said in a Friday statement that the city had not received any formal communication regarding federal law enforcement or military action, slamming Trump’s approach as “uncoordinated, uncalled for, and unsound.”
- Asked Friday if there had been concrete steps taken by the administration to target Chicago, Trump said “when we’re ready, we’ll go ahead” and slammed Johnson as “grossly incompetent.”
Mobilizing the Guard to Illinois would be reminiscent of the president’s operation in Los Angeles earlier this year, when some 4,000 National Guard personnel and 700 Marines were deployed against the will of state and local leadership.
Trump said this morning in his post about Wes Moore and Baltimore see my earlier post) that it’s the liberal states and cities that are fudging the numbers. He claimed that we are are overrun with violence and cowering in our beds begging for the president to rescue us. He may even believe it. He no longer exists in any kind of reality.
The people around him, however, like Stephen Miller and JD Vance, have lots of neat ideas about how to take advantage of the president’s addled mind and make this fascist takeover stick. What we have to watch out for is the frog in slowly boiling water phenomenon. (Yes, I know it’s not a real thing.) Are we getting used to this stuff? Is it becoming as normalized as all the other Trump atrocities? That’s a real danger.
The Wall St. Journal reports on GOP officials between a rock and moron:
During an April 28 meeting at the Capitol Hill Club near Congress, the chief of staff for Sen. John Curtis (R., Utah) told the group of CEOs and other executives that the senator was sensitive to the costs of tariffs on businesses in the state, according to people familiar with the conversation, including attendees of the meeting. The chief of staff said the senator planned to support those businesses by voting for a bipartisan resolution that would have ended the emergency authority used for President Trump’s so-called reciprocal tariffs, the people said.
The morning of the April 30 vote, Curtis himself told business leaders that he would consider supporting measures to curtail Trump’s tariffs if they had a chance of passing in Congress, according to people familiar with that conversation, including attendees. But that afternoon, Curtis ended up casting what proved to be a decisive vote against the measure, which failed in a 49-49 vote, after pressure from Senate GOP leadership and a visit from U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, who joined a Senate Republican lunch the day before the vote.
Don’t worry. The Utah Chamber of Commerce still backs him. It’s all good. They will immolate themselves before they ever even consider bucking Dear Leader and that includes business and politicians alike.
It is a tough spot for these Republican lawmakers to be in. Criticism of the president’s policies could earn a public rebuke from the White House. But embracing the new duties could be politically risky: Voters disapprove of the president’s handling of the economy, inflation, and tariffs, according to recent polling by The Wall Street Journal.
Oh boo hoo hoo. These guys are so cowardly. Imagine what would happen if they all stood up together and said no to Trump?
They won’t though. Many know he’s destroying businesses and the boarder economy but they’re just hoping that somehow it all works out. And there is a large contingent who have bought into the myth that Trump “knows things” or has some kind of quasi magical power that allows him to defy all reason. After all, he escaped two impeachments, indictments, convictions and an attempt to overthrow the government and was re-elected to the presidency. They believe he is invincible.
If it’s real, it’s still ugly and taxpayers are on the hook for it.
American presidents have traditionally eschewed the trappings of monarchy — because we aren’t a fucking monarchy. Or, at least, we didn’t used to be.
People used to accuse the Reagan’s of being ostentatious. Ronnie’s oval:
How about the “imperial presidency” of Richard Nixon:
It’s downright humble compared to Trump’s.
At best, Trump’s oval office looks like Saddam Hussein’s palace, not Versailles. In reality it looks like a crappy room at the Trump Taj Mahal or a cheap Las Vegas bordello.
FYI, some examples of Saddam’s “interior design.” Look familiar?
If anything, Saddam’s taste is understated compared to Trump’s.
If you look around, you can see what happened to all this gilt garbage when Saddam was deposed. It’s very satisfying. Keep it in mind.
Of course he is lying — or having another hallucination, it’s hard to know which these days:
The Guardian has the story of Baltimore’s amazing drop in crime:
Violent crime in America’s big cities has been receding from pandemic highs for about two years. But even in comparison, Baltimore’s improvement is breathtaking: fewer people have been killed in the city over the last seven months than in any similar period in the last 50 years.
As of 15 August, the running 365-day total for murders in Baltimore stood at 165 dead. Assuming the city remains on that pace, its murder rate would finish below 30 per 100,000 residents for the first time since 1986. If it remains on the pace set since 1 January, it would finish 2025 at 143 murders, a rate of about 25 per 100,000, last seen in Baltimore in 1978.
It confounds Baltimore’s bloody legacy. An army of social workers, violence interventionists, prosecutors, community leaders, and even cops all pulling in the same direction for once has made David Simon’s stories from The Wire or Donald Trump’s exasperating trash talk less relevant.
Mayor Brandon Scott is one of the best mayors in the nation:
The first time Brandon Scott saw someone get shot in Park Heights, he wasn’t quite seven years old.
Scott, a former city council member, had long been a keen observer of violence-prevention strategy before becoming mayor in 2020. An academic consensus looking at research done in Chicago and elsewhere about violence had long suggested that a dollar spent on policing reduced violence less than a dollar spent on intervention. But political leaders find it hard to justify cuts to police budgets under the best of circumstances. And Baltimore in 2021 did not have the best of circumstances.
Scott had been mayor of Baltimore for about three months when the American Rescue Plan Act (Arpa) passed in Congress, giving him an option to supercharge his violence-prevention strategy without a massive political battle. The $1.9tn economic stimulus package passed in March 2021, sending $1,400 checks to taxpayers, paying unemployment benefits at a higher rate and granting money to cities to recover from the pandemic however they saw fit. Using Arpa money, the city could fund the new data-driven project without using the police budget, sidestepping the thorny “defund the police” rhetoric that had hamstrung previous efforts around the country.
“When we said we were going to reduce violence by 15% from one year to the next, folks laughed at me,” Scott said. “Folks said that we couldn’t do it this way. The only way that we could do it is we went back to zero-tolerance policing, which actually didn’t do it in the first place.”
Against a Baltimore police budget topping half a billion dollars – the largest police budget per capita of any large city in the US – Baltimore’s political establishment gave its new millennial mayor room to experiment with $50m in Washington’s money.
Trust was in short supply after years of scandal. The first step was to get everyone on board – the cops, the hospitals, the jails, the schools, the social services teams, the state government and the feds. Scott appointed Richard Worley as the city’s new police commissioner in June 2023; Worley was a life-long Baltimore officer picked in part to bring the rank and file in line with Scott’s antiviolence program. Scott emphasizes partnerships as an important part of the plan’s successes.
Other federal grants, from the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, emerged in 2022 to help support the network of non-profits needed for the plan. The funding came from the first federal gun-control legislation enacted in 28 years, with the support of 15 Senate Republicans and $250m over five years for community violence-intervention programs under the Department of Justice.
Baltimore’s approach is tailored and personalized. The social worker who knocks on someone’s door carries a letter written for that person from the mayor, with an offer of help – and a threat.
“We focus on the individuals and groups that are most likely to be a victim or perpetrator of that gun violence, and we go to them,” Scott said. “They actually get a letter from me. And if they don’t do that – if they don’t take us up on that help to operate their lives in a different way, to not put themselves at risk of being a victim or perpetrator or get involved in illegal and violent activity, then we remove them through our law enforcement partnership with the police department that obviously works at my direction, or with our attorney general, our state’s attorney and our federal law enforcement partners, and we’re holding people accountable.”
Crime charts start showing the decline in September 2022, when the comprehensive plan had been up and running for about a year, Scott said. About three out of four people offered services by the program accepted them, and the city today has less violence than at any point in his life, he said.
“Of the folks that we’ve been able to work with through our partners … 95.7% of them have not been re-victimized, and 97.7% of them have not recidivated,” Scott said. “You’re talking about, in any city, a very relatively small group of people who are at the highest risk. For us to be intensely focusing on them, and to have that few of them become victims again, or recidivate into their previous life, is very impressive.”
Read the whole article. You’ll see that the police state tactics Trump is using were one of the reasons crime was so high in the past.
I feel sick to read something like that incoherent rant from the president. It’s not hyperbole. He’s following through on all his lunacy these days, from turning the oval office into a cheap bordello to bombing Iran and wildly manipulating the economy to deploying the military into America’s cities and wreaking revenge on his enemies. I will never say again “oh he can’t really do that.” No one with the capability of stopping him — the Republicans in congress and the Supreme Court in particular, are even trying.