"what digby sez..."
Month: December 2025
It’s been a rough 11 months but we’re almost through the first year. Let’s raise a glass to our resilience and perseverance. We made it this far.
Now we’ll just take a beat, enjoy the rest of our holiday and then put our shoulders to the wheel to get through the next three.
Thanks again to all of you who’ve supported this rickety old site in the past and once again this year. You are the reason I’m still here and I’m enormously grateful. You are the best!
Keep the faith,
digby
It’s been a sad holiday season for many of us in this little corner of the political world. Our good friend Howie Klein passed away on Christmas eve after battling a long illness. He wrote about it philosophically on his seminal blog Down With Tyranny and being an extremely spiritual person, his insights into the journey were typically heartfelt and inspiring.
Howie had the most interesting life of anyone I’ve ever met. He was a world traveler — he’d been everywhere — and continued his gallivanting up until this year. Back in the 60s he was one of those itinerant hippies who traveled by bus through Afghanistan to India and beyond, also living in Europe for years working at a variety of different jobs. I’m pretty sure he’d been to every continent, some many times over.
Back in the states he was a member of the 70s NY music scene hanging out at CBGBs with the likes of Lou Reed and Patti Smith. Settling later on the west coast in San Francisco he was a DJ at the legendary college station KUSF, playing the new emerging music of the New Wave that was hopping in that city during the 1980s. (I used to listen to his show while I was in college there.) He eventually started his own indie record label called 415 which featured a number of great local bands like Romeo Void, Red Rockers, The Nuns, and Pearl Harbor and the Explosions. The label caught the attention of Warner Brothers where Howie eventually ended up becoming the president of the Reprise label.
Throughout all this he was a fierce progressive activist, always fighting for free speech, LGBTQ rights and the cause of civil rights and civil liberties. He served on the board of People for the American Way, testified before congress and always stood up for artistic freedom. At heart he was always a revolutionary.
I met Howie about 20 years ago as the budding Los Angeles blogging community was coming together. He and John Amato, David Dayen, Kevin Drum, Jane Hamsher and others met in the flesh at various venues and began what was to become a flourishing progressive blogging scene. At some point around 2006 we formed Blue America PAC, dedicated to helping progressive candidates.
It was Howie’s baby all the way. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of the House of Representatives and knew where all the bodies had been buried for many years. He was a strong critic of the Democratic establishment (to say the least) and worked tirelessly to upend the status quo and create a better, more progressive party. He did all the work, searching out and vetting progressive candidates, mentoring them and giving generously of his time and attention. The country is full of candidates, winners and losers alike, who learned what it is to be a real progressive from Howie Klein.
There are many characteristics that defined him, from kindness and generosity to a wonderful sense of humor. His devotion to good food was legendary and virtually every great meal I’ve ever had in L.A was shared with him. But the one character trait that stood out for me, and I think for everyone who knew him in the political world, was integrity. The man had principles and he fought for them. He was never afraid to stand up and be counted and he did that while being one of the sweetest, most generous people I’ve ever met.
Howie was a a true mensch of all menches and his fearless spirit will be with me as we face the challenges ahead. The world is a better place for having had him in it. I will miss him forever.
I guess after Trump’s heinous Rob Reiner post, we shouldn’t expect anything less than this, but it’s still sickening that the president of the United States is a crude, classless jackass.
Yesterday, the Kennedy family announced the death of JFK’s granddaughter, Tatiana Schlossberg, Caroline’s 35 year old daughter. She had bravely faced a fast moving, deadly leukemia diagnosis, writing about it soulfully for the New Yorker, just last month. It was the latest tragedy for the Kennedy family and I think most Americans would agree that the president should have more decency than to post this sort of thing on a day that a member of that family which has given so much to our country has died.
There were no condolences from the president who just usurped the memorial to her dead grandfather. Instead he retweeted all this (which he must have gone to some trouble to compile.)
Everything they’re saying there is total bullshit. But what else would we expect? These are just horrible people, all of them.
If you happen to be tuning into this alleged blockbuster revelation of childcare fraud in Minnesota, you are probably missing a lot of important context. It is, as you might have guessed, another MAGA outrage fest designed to create more racist, culture war animosity. Dave Weigel posted this the other day on BlueSky:
I feel like “attention hacking” is most of politics now. The Minnesota aid fraud story is becoming a perfect example.
Recap: In 2022, the Biden DOJ filed the first charges against dozens of fraudsters, many of them Somali-American, who’d fleeced a state food aid program.
This happened right as early voting began in state elections; voters re-elected Gov. Walz and gave Democrats a trifecta. It was a damaging scandal, but hardly covered up. Rs whacked at it when Walz became VP nominee, but it didn’t become a decisive issue.
I actually agree w conservatives who think this insane scandal didn’t become a huge national story in 2022 because of newsroom choices, desire not to inflame racial tensions, etc. But the Biden-era DOJ was all over it.
The Minnesota press did cover it extensively and Walz was re-elected easily in spite of it, mainly because people didn’t blame him for the problem.
Let’s face it. This is only now a big story because of Trump’s new racist, xenophobic jihad against Somali immigrants largely based upon his and his base’s hatred for Ilhan Omar. (You’ll notice that the most vociferous, grotesque attacks on immigrants have been against those who happen to be Black — Haitians and now Somalis.) The right wing media is running with it and the MSM follows. We’ve been here before.
Naturally the Trump administration is responding by pulling all federal funding for child care in Minnesota. That’s how we do things now. All children must suffer so that Trump and his cult can take onanistic pleasure in their suffering.
We’re setting records all over the place. The number of measles cases in the U.S. is higher than it’s been in 30 years:
This year’s surge in cases and prolonged outbreaks could cause the U.S. to lose its globally recognized measles “elimination status” for the first time in decades by the end of January 2026.
- The outbreaks come amid Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s efforts to downplay the risks of measles and spread misleading claims about the vaccine, while suggesting other alternatives without evidence.
There were 2,012 measles cases reported nationwide as of Dec. 23, per the CDC. Of those cases, 1,988 were reported across 44 jurisdictions.
- The CDC says 87% of those cases came from 50 different outbreaks, and some 93% of those infected were either unvaccinated or have an unknown vaccination status.
- Texas has reported the highest number of cases this year (803), followed by Arizona (187) and South Carolina (156).
Only 285 confirmed measles cases were reported in 2024.
Gee, I wonder what’s happened?
I’ll just leave this famous piece from Roald Dahl here. I just wish some of the fools who are refusing to vaccinate their kids would read it:
My eldest daughter caught measles when she was seven years old. As the illness took its usual course I can remember reading to her often in bed and not feeling particularly alarmed about it. Then one morning, when she was well on the road to recovery, I was sitting on her bed showing her how to fashion little animals out of coloured pipe cleaners, and when it came to her turn to make one herself, I noticed that her fingers and her mind were not working together and she couldn’t do anything.
“Are you feeling all right?“ I asked her. “I feel all sleepy,” she said.
In an hour, she was unconscious. In 12 hours she was dead.
The measles had turned into a terrible thing called measles encephalitis and there was nothing the doctors could do to save her. That was 24 years ago in 1962, but even now, if a child with measles happens to develop the same deadly reaction from measles as Olivia did, there would still be nothing the doctors could do to help her.
On the other hand, there is today something that parents can do to make sure that this sort of tragedy does not happen to a child of theirs. They can insist that their child is immunised against measles. I was unable to do that for Olivia in 1962 because in those days a reliable measles vaccine had not been discovered. Today a good and safe vaccine is available to every family and all you have to do is to ask your doctor to administer it.
It is not yet generally accepted that measles can be a dangerous illness.
Believe me, it is. In my opinion, parents who now refuse to have their children immunised are putting the lives of those children at risk.
In America, where measles immunisation is compulsory, measles, like smallpox, has been virtually wiped out.
Here in Britain, because so many parents refuse, either out of obstinacy or ignorance or fear, to allow their children to be immunised, we still have a hundred thousand cases of measles every year.
Out of those, more than 10,000 will suffer side effects of one kind or another.
At least 10,000 will develop ear or chest infections. About 20 will die.
LET THAT SINK IN.
Every year around 20 children will die in Britain from measles.
So what about the risks that your children will run from being immunised?
They are almost non-existent. Listen to this. In a district of around 300,000 people, there will be only one child every 250 years who will develop serious side effects from measles immunisation! That is about a million-to-one chance. I should think there would be more chance of your child choking to death on a chocolate bar than of becoming seriously ill from a measles immunisation.
So what on earth are you worrying about?
It really is almost a crime to allow your child to go unimmunised.
The ideal time to have it done is 13 months, but it is never too late. All school children who have not yet had a measles immunisation should beg their parents to arrange for them to have one as soon as possible.
Incidentally, I dedicated two of my books to Olivia, the first was “James and the Giant Peach.” That was when she was still alive. The second was “The BFG,” dedicated to her memory after she had died from measles. You will see her name at the beginning of each of these books. And I know how happy she would be if only she could know that her death had helped to save a good deal of illness and death among other children.
He wrote that in 1986. You’ll notice that he says in America measles was nearly eradicated because everyone got vaccinated. Sadly, not anymore. And it’s all because of this nonsensical “wellness and wingnut” coalition of antidiluvian fools who follow destructive know-nothings like RFK Jr and refuse to get their kids vaccinated.
That’s what the Trump administration is pushing next year. No, it’s not for the impending war with Venezuela. (That’s probably a whole other massive expense.) It’s for ICE. And just look at what they’re planning to recruit. Gift link:
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials are planning to spend $100 million over a one-year period to recruit gun-rights supporters and military enthusiasts through online influencers and a geo-targeted advertising campaign, part of what the agency called a “wartime recruitment” strategy it said was critical to hiring thousands of new deportation officers nationwide, according to an internal document reviewed by The Washington Post.
The spending would help President Donald Trump’s mass-deportation agenda dominate media networks and recruitment channels, including through ads targeting people who have attended UFC fights, listened to patriotic podcasts or shown an interest in guns and tactical gear, according to a 30-page document distributed among officials in this summer detailing ICE’s “surge hiring marketing strategy.”
The only bright spot in all this is that most of these “gun enthusiasts” and UFC fans are the usual out-of-shape cosplayers who are far from the Spartan warriors they think they are. There may be a few who have the discipline to be cops and soldiers but most of them are just posers.
Just look at this ridiculous BS:
It would be funny if it weren’t so lethally stupid.
Here is one final NYT gift link for this incredible story about the unraveling of the U.S. Ukraine relationship under Donald Trump. I don’t think the world could be any more threatened than it is by this president.
An excerpt:
The next morning, the president posted his own announcement, on Truth Social. He had just finished a “highly productive” call with Mr. Putin; their teams would start negotiations immediately.
On the call, according to two U.S. officials, Mr. Putin had praised Mr. Witkoff. He would lead Mr. Trump’s team, along with John Ratcliffe, the C.I.A. director; Marco Rubio, the secretary of state; and Mr. Waltz. The post did not mention the special envoy for Ukraine and Russia, Mr. Kellogg.
In Germany on Feb. 14 for the Munich Security Conference, unsure whether he still had a job or what it entailed, Mr. Kellogg encountered European and Ukrainian leaders in their own storm of confusion. “Do we still have an alliance?” the Polish deputy prime minister, Radosław Sikorski, asked. Mr. Kellogg sought to reassure them, describing himself as “your best friend” in the administration.
A Hegseth loyalist at the conference, though, rendered it differently in messages to Washington, accusing Mr. Kellogg of claiming, “I’m holding the line against these isolationists in the administration.” This only cemented the envoy’s outsider status, as did a Fox News item juxtaposing his latest social media post about Mr. Zelensky (he was “the embattled and courageous leader of a nation at war”) with one from Mr. Trump (he was “a dictator without elections”).
When Mr. Kellogg visited the Oval Office soon after, the president pounced.
“So you call Zelensky embattled and courageous?” he snapped, according to two officials.
“Sir, he is,” Mr. Kellogg responded. “It’s an existential fight on Ukrainian soil for his nation’s survival. When was the last time an American president faced that? It was Abraham Lincoln.”
Recounting the episode later to other advisers, Mr. Trump grumbled, “He’s an idiot.”
There is only one leader who can compare to Abraham Lincoln and we know who that is, don’t we? And let’s just say that Lincoln doesn’t really compare favorably.
That’s the tip of the iceberg. We are led by morons, greedheads and warmongers. But you knew that.
People ask this question all the time: if Trump really were a Russian asset, what would be the difference?
Read the whole thing when you have time. If this is the first draft of history I hesitate to think what we’re going to find out as time goes on. It’s much worse than I thought.
Low bar, for sure
“Scoundrel of the Year” is a moniker someone as vile as Stephen Miller likely adds to his trophy wall. We know the type. One local Republican here once proudly displayed on his office wall political cartoons lampooning him. He took liberal condemnation as a sign that he was doing his job. He targeted locals the way Trump targets the left nationally.
Men like Donald Trump and Miller assume others are motivated by impulses just as base as theirs. What Miller did not count on, Greg Sargent argues in The New Republic, is that Americans on the whole really are better than them. The deputy xenophobe-in-chief’s efforts to ethnically reengineer America has provoked widespread backlash from coast to coast. Miller’s plans for arresting 3,000 non-citizens a day and deporting one million per year will fall far short in Trump’s first year back in office.
Still, Miller has other goals he has helped Trump pursue since January 20:
He has stated plainly that he wants to functionally end due process for migrants entirely. He also appears to envision Trump assuming the authority to simply decree that undocumented immigrants are criminal gang members—or terrorists, or members of a hostile invading army—all by presidential fiat. He wants Trump to assume an unreviewable, quasi-unlimited power to remove people regardless of what any court says.
Miller has done extensive damage to the rule of law, and he and Trump have consigned some migrants to a netherworld beyond the law entirely. But broadly speaking, the courts have continued to function. Trump has not assumed the unchecked authorities Miller wants him to. Miller’s biggest test case for getting Trump to exert such unconstrained powers—that of the wrongfully deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia—has thus far failed.
Trump, Miller, and Trump lackeys have turned the Department of Homeland Security’s X feed into “a white nationalist sewer pit,” Sargent writes. “Miller hoped the combination of brutal police-state tactics plus relentless state propaganda would shock the American people into embracing—or accepting—a semi-conscious ethnonationalism.” But, surprise. Americans are not having it, “and the public backlash to Miller’s masked storm troopers only grows.”
We may yet survive Miller’s nightmarish plan for remaking America as a white ethnostate (albeit with our national image tarnished perhaps permanently). But emerging on the other side of Trumpish disruption will likely not be at the hands of us geezers.
Jon Grinspan, a curator of political history at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, offers a possible path forward drawing on how America emerged from the first Gilded Age. Out of that freewheeling period came one in which Americans saw need for restraint. Early reformers’ vision of reform, he writes, “usually meant returning to an older way of life, dimly recalled from before the Civil War. As long as reform meant going backward, it lost at the ballot box, the stock exchange and the corner saloon.” Most generations double down, Grinspan argues and “few truly innovate.”
What Grinspan describes from the period of progressive reform is not entirely the sort we would embrace today. His framing of restraint as a “core value” of the 20th century feels forced. What doesn’t is his argument that it is likely Gen Z or Gen Alpha that will turn away from a present “so saturated in its era, so sick of its recklessness” to innovate anew and clean up the mess we’ve made of the country.
Let it be so in 2026. I tell my younger activists that I’m now an adviser. They are the doers. They have the tools. They have the talent.
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Resolve to not be political roadkill in 2026.
A New Year’s Eve sermon
I don’t do this often, but on this New Year’s Eve I’m reposting Thank God For Readers from September 2021:
Heather Cox Richardson reminisces about how her Letters from an American newsletter came to be two years ago. She has persisted through the turmoil and scandal of the last two years buoyed by the kindness of her readers as we all watch to see whether government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall (or shall not) perish from the earth.
Richardson writes:
If you are tired, you have earned the right to be.
And yet, you are still here, reading.
I write these letters because I love America. I am staunchly committed to the principle of human self-determination for people of all races, genders, abilities, and ethnicities, and I believe that American democracy could be the form of government that comes closest to bringing that principle to reality. And I know that achieving that equality depends on a government shaped by fact-based debate rather than by extremist ideology and false narratives.
And so I write.
But I have come to understand that I am simply the translator for the sentiments shared by hundreds of thousands of people who are finding each other and giving voice to the principles of democracy. Your steadfast interest, curiosity, critical thinking, and especially your kindness—to me and to one another—illustrates that we have not only the power, but also the passion, to reinvent our nation.
Richardson speaks for me. Thank you for coming back, day after day, to listen to us rant.
Another Heather, this blog’s proprietor, began writing here New Year’s Day 2003 after attracting a following at Atrios’s blog. She wrote that being invited to write by Atrios was “kind of like having Eddie Van Halen invite you up on stage to join him in a guitar solo.”
That’s how I felt when Digby invited me to join her in August 2014. (We’d met at a conference in 2009.) I began writing occasional commentaries for the Asheville Citizen-Times in mid-September 2003, got named an official (unpaid) “community columnist” in 2005, and finally started up my own blog in March 2006. (It’s still out there gathering electrons.) Eventually, a local rabble-rouser invited me to join Scrutiny Hooligans (R.I.P.) before Digby asked me to fill in over a weekend. The weekend never ended. The Citizen-Times’ then-editorial editor, a Digby fan, greeted me at an event, smiled broadly, shook my hand and said, “My friend, you have arrived.”
And so I write.
Rising early to write each day, three time zones ahead of Digby, is not only a matter of passion “to reinvent our nation.” It is a matter of mental health (as much as daily exercise). In such times, I suspect it is for Richardson as well. The platform allows me to play the inside-outside game. Inside Democratic Party politics and outside throwing occasional rocks. As I told a cynical friend recently, it beats feeling like political road kill:
Sometimes in politics you get run over. But being in the fight means I stopped feeling like road kill decades ago. The antidote to cynicism and despair is stepping back into the fight the way Rick Blaine does at the end of Casablanca. I told him it’s empowering especially when you feel powerless.
Also, the struggle must bring out the Irish in me, I said.
Is this a private fight or can anyone join?
Thanks be to Digby.
Resolve to not be political roadkill in 2026.