None of it’s a “distraction.” He’s doing this stuff because he wants to do it!
He’s really doing it and it’s all illegal, corrupt, unconstitutional, destructive and dangerous.
All. Of. It.
That’s what it’s all about, now. Oligarchy. He always promised that by making him and his buddies even richer, everyone would reap the rewards. He’s getting the first part. The second, not so much.
Apparently, the fact that Trump has always made it obvious that he’s a racist, sociopath didn’t tip her off that he would eventually want to use the military to kill some people, including Americans if that’s what it takes to slake his thirst for blood, if given the opportunity. He certainly has never made it a secret that he thinks America can steal any resources it wants.
That’s what he meant by America First.
In the first term he was still restrained by the prospect of losing public opinion and his own lack of confidence in his decision making. That’s all changed. It’s not that he’s learned anything, it’s that he just doesn’t give a damn anymore. After all he has always gotten away with everything and even became president twice in spite of it.
Marge is belatedly realizing that he is full of shit. I don’t think she’s all the way there yet but the veil has obviously lifted. She’s still a right wing extremist in her own right but she’s left the cult. I will be curious to see if any of her fellow cultists will follow.
The day after the first boat strike last September, I wrote this:
America has never been even close to perfect, a fact the Trump administration is going to great lengths to obscure. They insist that any mention of the country’s flawed history demeans and ignores what it has done right, and therefore any failures must not be mentioned at all. In truth, President Donald Trump probably believes the simplified fables he learned as a boy in the 1950s — like George Washington and the cherry tree — are all anyone needs to know about American history. The consequences of this ignorance are putting the country, and the entire world, in grave danger.
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana famously wrote in “The Life of Reason.” For instance, if Trump had an understanding of the Vietnam War — perhaps if he had joined many in his generation in protesting America’s involvement, or if his father hadn’t arranged for him to avoid the draft with a dubious medical deferment — he would know what led to nearly 60,000 Americans, and millions of Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodians, losing their lives. He would understand that creating a pretext for war leads to disaster.
The U.S. became involved militarily in Vietnam in the 1950s as part of the growing anti-communist crusade during the Cold War. According to the “domino theory,” countries around the world would fall to communism one-by-one — unless America stopped its spread. By 1964, with U.S. “military advisers” on the ground supporting the South Vietnamese government against the communist insurgents of the North, President Lyndon Johnson and his advisers decided — foolishly, in retrospect — to commit U.S. troops. To do so, they used two isolated incidents of North Vietnamese patrol boats attacking a naval destroyer in the Gulf of Tonkin.
It was only later the country learned there had only been one incidental attack, and the second was created as pretext to call it a provocation that required a massive American response. Johnson ordered U.S. Navy planes to bomb North Vietnamese torpedo boat bases and called on Congress to authorize the use of force. With congressional support, and within a few months, there were more than 100,000 American troops on the ground in Southeast Asia — and we all know how it turned out.
Unfortunately, some American leaders learned all the wrong lessons from that debacle. After 9/11, President George W. Bush had little trouble getting approval to invade Afghanistan to go after the perpetrators. But his administration then wanted to use the patriotism — and war fever — ignited by the terrorist attacks to invade Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with 9/11 but had been on the radar of right-wing hawks ever since the 1991 Gulf War. They manipulated intelligence that was just as thin as the Gulf of Tonkin incident to fashion a pretext for war, and after a lengthy, vociferous debate, the administration managed to get Congress to authorize the use of force. And we all know how that turned out too.
These have become infamous examples of how the government can lie the nation into war, and as bad as they both are, at least the administrations attempted to adhere to the notion of following domestic law; they knew they needed congressional authorization. While they failed to get actual declarations of war, as required by the Constitution, they realized it was important to preserve the idea of using actual legal authority for military force.
On Tuesday, the Trump administration decided that such norms and measures were a waste of time. A U.S. naval ship blew up a vessel in the Caribbean that the president claimed belonged to a drug cartel and was being used to smuggle illegal narcotics. Its crew of 11 were killed. Trump proudly released the video of what can only be called a murder by the U.S. government, posting on Truth Social that it was done “against positively identified Tren de Aragua Narcoterrorists.”
This president has made it clear: He believes he has unlimited power, is answerable to no one and is not required to even pretend that he needs any authority other than his own to do anything. That odious power grab has now escalated to military action, and is the latest of the administration’s moves in the Caribbean.
This president has made it clear: He believes he has unlimited power, is answerable to no one and is not required to even pretend that he needs any authority other than his own to do anything. That odious power grab has now escalated to military action, and is the latest of the administration’s moves in the Caribbean.
I speculated at the time that they were pressuring Maduro to leave the country or provoke him into overreacting, justifying a regime change. (I think Suzy Wiles validated the first one.)
The point is that this entire thing is completely unjustified, illegal and unconstitutional. They did not not even notify Congress that they were sending in troops to grab him last night.
Trump is unrestrained by any rules, laws, international agreements, the constitution or public opinion. To the extent he believes in anything he believes that money talks and might makes right. There’s nothing more complicated about him than that.
I wrote this a month later. A little bit more history for us to contemplate:
Since Sept. 1, the United States has been blowing up boats in the Caribbean Sea and killing people on board with apparent impunity. The current known death toll stands at 32. According to President Donald Trump, the dead — and those the Navy continues to target — are Venezuelan “unlawful combatants” and “narco-terrorist” members of the Tren de Aragua gang and are alleged to be transporting drugs bound for America. This amounts to war on drug cartels, Trump has said, allowing the U.S. to act in self-defense.
As Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir has written, this “phony war” is indicative of the twisted pathology of Trump’s worldview. Reporting over the last week has made it clear: The danger of this situation going sideways becomes greater every day. And considering America’s history in the region, such an outcome almost seems pre-ordained.
Last week, Adm. Alvin Holsey, who heads the U.S. Southern Command, which oversees operations in Central and South America, resigned less than one year into his three-year term. Although the Pentagon did not give a reason for his departure, the New York Times reported that he had raised concerns about the boat attacks, as well as the larger drug counter-mission.
Holsey’s is a high-ranking resignation, but he is not the first to resign or be forced out over the strikes against Venezuelan boats. On Oct. 15, CNN’s Natasha Bertrand reported on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s destruction of the Judge Advocate General’s Corps, with “multiple current and former JAGs telling CNN that the strikes do not appear lawful.” Doubts have also been raised within the defense department’s Office of General Counsel. The Pentagon has denied these reports, saying there is unanimous agreement that the strikes are lawful.
They are not. As Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., said on “Meet The Press” on Sunday, “[W]hen you kill someone, if you’re not in a declared war, you really need to know someone’s name at least. You have to accuse them of something. You have to present evidence. So all of these people have been blown up without any evidence of a crime.”
The president, though, does not seem to feel any moral obligation — or pressure — to produce any evidence, and over the weekend he inadvertently revealed the vacuity of the administration’s arguments. “It was my greatest honor to destroy a very large DRUG-CARRYING SUBMARINE that was navigating towards the United States on a well known narcotrafficking transit route,” he said in a social media post. While two were killed, Trump announced that the “two surviving terrorists are being returned to their Countries of origin, Ecuador and Colombia, for detention and prosecution.”
Can we see the problem here? He killed two people because they were allegedly unlawful combatant terrorists with whom we are at war. But then he sent their two compatriots back to their home countries for prosecution? How does that make any sense?
On Saturday night, Colombian President Gustavo Petro, went public with an accusation that in September, the U.S. murdered an innocent Colombian fisherman whose boat was in distress. Trump responded that Petro is an “illegal drug dealer” with “a fresh mouth toward America.” He announced that he would immediately halt all counter-narcotics aid payments to Colombia — which seems counterproductive — and, needless to say, he also vowed to raise tariffs.
On Sunday, Hegseth announced yet another boat strike. This time, its three passengers were alleged to be members of yet another gang — the Colombian Ejército de Liberación Nacional (ELN), which has long been a designated foreign terrorist organization. The timing certainly suggests the strike could be another of Trump’s patented paybacks, this time to the Colombian president with the “fresh mouth.” It appears that America has escalated its military mission to include yet another South American nation.
If all of this weren’t enough, last week Trump declared that he had approved covert operations in Venezuela, which certainly challenges the meaning of the word covert. The CIA has a long and checkered history in the region over many years, but I don’t think any president has been dim enough to announce it in advance. American interference in Latin American affairs has almost always led to total disaster. It’s hard to imagine that this crazy scheme won’t end up being the worst of all.
[I guess we know what that was all about now, don’t we? — digby]
Perhaps the most famous American fiasco in the region was the Bay of Pigs. Conceived under President Dwight Eisenhower and greenlit in the early months of President John F. Kennedy’s administration, the aim was to overthrow Fidel Castro in Cuba. But it was a debacle of epic proportions and massive embarrassment for the U.S. Castro remained in power until 2008.
Before that came the U.S.-backed coup in Guatemala in 1954, during which the CIA deposed a democratically elected leader, ushered in decades of dictatorship and wars, and showed that even when the agency’s plans were successful there was calamity. Later, the U.S. government didn’t stop a military coup in Brazil, helped dissidents assassinate the leader of the Dominican Republic and covertly supported the insurgent contras in Nicaragua, leading to the Iran-Contra scandal.
But the most grotesque of U.S. interference in the region was the government’s complicity in the so-called “dirty wars” of Argentina and Chile in the 1970s. Under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, Secretary of State (and Nobel Peace Prize laureate) Henry Kissinger approved the repression of Argentina’s left-wing under the military junta that had overthrown the democratically elected government. At least 10,000 people were disappeared, murdered and tortured. In Chile, the U.S. backed a coup of the democratically elected socialist President Salvador Allende. The result was the brutal dictator Augusto Pinochet, whose spy master brought together all the right-wing governments in the region — including Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Paraguay and Uruguay — in support of Operation Condor, a campaign of repression against leftist movements and assassinations of individuals throughout the region.
But the apparent template for Trump’s obsession with Venezuela was America’s invasion of Panama in 1989, which removed dictator Manual Noriega from power. According to official numbers, 514 Panamanian soldiers and civilians were killed in the invasion. Local tallies, though, placed the number “close to 1,000. Noriega was eventually arrested and brought to the U.S., where he was convicted on charges of drug trafficking, racketeering and money laundering. Since Noriega was actually a CIA asset, one might have thought the government could have removed him from power without all the fireworks. He was released to France in 2010…
Presidential administrations have meddled in Latin America for decades. While Trump is clownishly crude in his approach, he certainly isn’t the first president to use a “splendid little war” to prove U.S. dominance. And like all those before him, he’s almost certainly going to create a whole lot of human misery in the process.
And so it begins again, only this time America is an international pariah and the country is run by an unprecedentedly immoral, power-mad president and a group of flunkies determined to cash in on the bonanza of corruption in which he and his family are engaging. It’s a Mafia administration.
Update — Looks like the GOP is behind him:
He says he’s not afraid of American boots on the ground.He later clarified that we’ll probably need them to protect the oil. So that’s good.
It wasn’t long ago that we did a big regime change. It didn’t work out too well. They didn’t exactly greet us with flowers, did they?
Ret. Gen. Mark Hertling wrote about that prospect last month for The Bulwark:
THE U.S. MILITARY LEARNED A LOT of important lessons from the Iraq War—ones that our civilian leaders would be well advised to ask about, and our military leaders ought to reinforce with their civilian counterparts.
The first is that military victory does not equal political success. Toppling a regime can be fast; stabilizing a country never is. The most successful cases of American “regime change” took years: The American military occupied part of Germany for four years after the end of World War II. In Japan, the occupation lasted seven years—and American forces remain stationed in both countries to this day.
The second lesson is that dismantling or hollowing out state institutions creates chaos by design. Police and military forces do not simply vanish without consequence. Neither do bureaucracies and economic systems. Left behind are armed men, unpaid officials, and populations desperate for order.
Another lesson is that external actors always rush into the vacuum. Iran, militias, criminal networks, and proxy forces did not wait politely in 2003. Likewise, Venezuela has friends in Cuba, China, Russia, and Iran, and the region is chock full of organized, sophisticated criminal groups, as the administration well knows.
We should have also learned from our time in Iraq that legitimacy cannot be imported. Governments derive legitimacy from their own people, not from foreign flags, friendly ex-pats, or external timetables.
Finally, time horizons stretch. What is brief in planning becomes prolonged in practice. Months turn into years, years turn into decades.
The United States eventually adapted in Iraq, learning painful lessons about counterinsurgency, governance, oil economies, and coalition warfare. But that learning came at enormous cost—in lives, credibility, and strategic position. The tragedy is not that Iraq was hard. The tragedy is that we acted as though it would not be.
If regime change is being seriously considered, we have learned that the military will have to plan for a significant, sustained force presence and a draining long-term internal security mission. The military and our country’s civilian leaders will have to accept that casualties will occur and continue long after any combat operations end.
And then there’s this which Trump didn’t seem to even consider:
ONE OF THE MOST CONSISTENT FAILURES in regime-change planning is the absence of honest red-teaming, i.e., calculations of the enemy’s options to respond. Regimes facing existential threats do not capitulate quietly. They repress harder. They mobilize nationalism. They seek external patrons. They sabotage infrastructure. They create humanitarian crises that complicate intervention and fracture international support. Dense urban populations, of which Venezuela has plenty, increase civilian risk. Long coastlines enable smuggling and external interference, and Venezuela’s is 1,700 miles long, the same distance between Boston and Key West. Criminal networks embed themselves in political and economic life, and thrive when the government is dysfunctional. Armed paramilitary groups enforce loyalty through fear. Foreign intelligence services exploit chaos. None of these issues is hypothetical. These are predictable dynamics. Ignoring them does not make them disappear. It ensures surprise.
American leaders owe the public clarity about the risks they are willing to accept with any actions against Venezuela. Not precise numbers, but honest ranges. Not promises of gratitude by the Venezuelans, but acknowledgment of resistance. Not assurances of quick exits, but recognition of long commitments. History offers little support for claims that populations universally greet external regime change with enthusiasm—particularly in Latin America, where memories of U.S. intervention run deep.
Anyone advocating regime change in Venezuela is implicitly advocating for a long, bloody, expensive commitment—whether they acknowledge it or not. If the United States justifies regime change because it dislikes a government or covets resources, it erodes every argument it makes against aggression by others, such as Russia attacking Ukraine or the potential of China attacking Taiwan. Norms do not survive selective application.
The most important question is not whether regime change is desirable in the abstract. It is whether the United States is prepared—politically, militarily, morally, and financially—to own another country’s future for years. Clausewitz warned that war is a continuation of politics by other means. Regime change is the transformation of another country’s politics by all the means at our disposal. If ends are unclear, ways improvised, and means insufficient, the outcome is not strategy. It is a gamble.
It’s a bad gamble. These people are stupid and crazy.
Trump said that the “people behind me” meaning Rubio, Hegseth, Ratcliffe and Caine, would be running the country.Ok.
Nobel Prize winner Maria Corinna Machado will not be running the country:
“I think it’d be very tough for her to be the leader. She doesn’t have the support or the respect within the country. She’s a very nice woman but she doesn’t have the respect.”
She had been one of the staunchest supporters of Trump’s aggression against Maduro. Bad call. He obviously has some right-wing billionaire buddies who obviously have a puppet in mind.
Some highlights:
This war is his. He admits it.
Meanwhile:
Is this the end? Not bloody likely:
“And I’ve asked her number times, ‘Would you like us to take out the cartels?’ … something is gonna have to be done with Mexico”
The Hill contributor Chris Truax of the conservative Society for the Rule of Law on Friday predicted, “Come Monday, it’s going to be all Epstein all the time.” That was before some rogue president of some rogue, illiberal democracy attacked Venezuela and abducted its president on Saturday.
His reasoning at the time amounted to:
That’s because the Department of Justice has made a complete hash of releasing the Epstein files. A year ago, the department was the finest legal organization in the world. President Trump has forced out at least one-third of the Justice Department’s leadership, and the unprecedented brain drain is starting to show. The unattractive combination of willfulness and incompetence with which the department has handled these documents’ release ought to be a bigger story than the files themselves.
Written explanation of redactions as required by the Epstein Files Transparency Act for documents already released are still MIA. That’s on top of the “embarrassing” incompetence of remaining DOJ employees to properly redact the files so what’s hidden is not recoverable with a simple copy-and-paste.
Even worse, when the information was recovered, it was sometimes apparent that these failed redactions were themselves illegal. In one example, the Justice Department tried to redact an exhibit in a civil case from the Virgin Islands that discussed, among other things, how Epstein tried to cover up his crimes and where he paid property taxes. Since none of this has anything to do with the information that the law allows the government to redact, we can only assume that the remaining redactions are equally improper. Certainly, we have no reason to take the Justice Department at its word and assume that it is following the law.
Whether incompetence or malice (why not both?), AG Pam Bondi’s DOJ cannot be trusted with this task, Truax argues. He offers a solution:
If Republicans end up needing the Democrats to help them keep the government open at the end of January, and they will, one of the things Democrats should insist on is that every single unredacted page of the Epstein files should be turned over to a new House committee tasked with publicly releasing them. This might cause the release to drag out over a few extra months. But the litigation over the Justice Department’s handling of the files will drag on for years anyway. This way, at least people will have some trust in the process.
At this point, the Epstein files are bigger than Trump. As a country, we need to move past this, and the only way to do that is to get the information into the public domain. And one way or another, the information will come out, whether through a clean, quick document release or through death-by-a-thousand-cuts litigation. Let’s get this over with.
What was released by law on December 19, write Bruce Maiman of Just Asking Questions, “was a masterclass in bureaucratic contempt.” The DOJ treated its legal mandate “like a polite suggestion printed on tissue paper,” Maiman writes:
What makes the situation worse — far worse — is that the Justice Department has taken the extraordinary step of warning the public not to trust the very documents it has released. Some of the materials, DOJ officials note, include unverified claims, forged letters, fake videos, and FBI tip forms containing fantastical allegations. That is technically true. It is also beside the point.
The law requires the release of files related to the Epstein investigation, not the curation of a narrative. Dumping disorganized, context-free material into the public domain, while burying anything substantive under black ink, has predictable consequences. Confusion flourishes. Conspiracies metastasize. And the government, having created the chaos, shrugs and says: Don’t blame us if people draw the wrong conclusions.
This outcome was not an accident. It was inevitable.
The Guardian considers why “Epstein avoided serious and meaningful punishment for his crimes” for so many years. Prosecutorial culture may have played a role:
“The Epstein and Maxwell problem is twofold. First, law enforcement agencies, especially at the local level, do not communicate well with one another,” Neama Rahmani, founder of West Coast Trial Lawyers and a former federal prosecutor, said. “Second, prosecutors are risk-averse and do not want to prosecute difficult cases.”
More, authorities can see sexual abuse cases as risky propositions in terms of success.
“Sexual assault and sexual abuse prosecutions are often ‘he said, she said’ cases where the defense argues consent, or that the sexual contact never happened,” Rahmani said, explaining that prosecutors are expected to win every time. “They may hesitate taking difficult cases to trial, especially against defendants with significant resources.”
“Cynics may also argue that Epstein wasn’t prosecuted because of his friendships with powerful elected officials. Some of this case has changed with #MeToo, more victims coming forward and being willing to testify, and more resources and changes in philosophy when it comes to prosecuting sex crimes,” Rahmani said.
“But it’s still not enough and the victims were let down.”
Here is a particularly interesting analogy:
John Day, founder of John Day Law and a former prosecutor in New Mexico, pointed to seeming intelligence failures when it came to pursuing cases.
“Maybe the best explanation is rooted in why all the signals about Bin Laden were ignored until 9/11 – plenty of law enforcement [and] CIA analysts had him on their radar screens, but the information was never collated in a way that got understood until it was too late?” Day said. “Could this have been the equivalent for Epstein?”
The two cases are clearly not equivalent, Jay insists. Nonetheless, “these timeframes were roughly parallel.”
But, Day also said: “This is separate from understanding why Epstein got such a sweetheart deal in Florida from US attorney Alexander Acosta.”
Trump and his cronies are desperate enough to bury this story that he’s abducted the leader of Venezuela and plans a show trial to keep the press entertained. “Flood the zone with shit,” as Trump first term chief strategist Steve Bannon once advised. Sadly, the left lacks the discipline to flood the zone right back with all Epstein all the time.
Donald Trump is a felon, a convicted criminal who, as president, pardons and releases back into the wild other criminals. A criminal who twice swore an oath before the world to uphold an American constitution in which he never believed and mocks with his every action.
Like this helluva distraction from what’s in the Epstein files (The New York Times):
President Trump said on Saturday that the United States had captured the Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro, and was flying him out of Venezuela, in what would be a stunning culmination to a monthslong campaign by Mr. Trump’s administration to oust the authoritarian leader.
It is too early to assess casualties on the ground, although the BBC has identified targets:
So far, we have confirmed three locations.
- Generalissimo Francisco de Miranda Air Base aka La Carlota – footage filmed at a distance shows two plumes of smoke and an explosion close to this military airfield in Caracas
- Port La Guaira – Caracas’ main conduit to the Caribbean Sea, located in Miranda state. Footage filmed nearby shows several plumes of smoke rising into the air, and at least one fire burning
- Higuerote Airport – also located in Miranda state, just east of Caracas. Footage filmed from two angles shows fire and repeated flashes on the ground, a possible indication of secondary explosions
Trump administration officials apparently will not separate families when it suits them. Per one report, the earlier indictment did not include Maduro’s wife:
Sam Stein of The Bulwark reminds readers that in her Vanity Fair interview, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles said that a land attack against Venezuela would require congressional approval. Trump did not ask for one.
“Based” Sen. Mike Lee (R) of Utah questioned the legality of this action at 3:22 a.m. ET in a pro forma tweet:
I look forward to learning what, if anything, might constitutionally justify this action in the absence of a declaration of war or authorization for the use of military force.
By 5:16 a.m. Lee had fallen in line:
Just got off the phone with @SecRubio
He informed me that Nicolás Maduro has been arrested by U.S. personnel to stand trial on criminal charges in the United States, and that the kinetic action we saw tonight was deployed to protect and defend those executing the arrest warrant
This action likely falls within the president’s inherent authority under Article II of the Constitution to protect U.S. personnel from an actual or imminent attack
Thank you, @SecRubio, for keeping me apprised
SecState Rubio means to keep other Republicans in line as well, reposting his own tweet from July:
Rep. Melanie Stansbury (D) of New Mexico tweets:
The White House is confirming U.S. military operations in Venezuela tonight. Let us be clear: these strikes are illegal. The President does not have the authority to declare war or undertake large-scale military operations without Congress. Congress must act to rein him in. Immediately.
Sen. Andy Kim (D) of New Jersey reacts:
Secretaries Rubio and Hegseth looked every Senator in the eye a few weeks ago and said this wasn’t about regime change. I didn’t trust them then and we see now that they blatantly lied to Congress. Trump rejected our Constitutionally required approval process for armed conflict because the Administration knows the American people overwhelmingly reject risks pulling our nation into another war.
This strike doesn’t represent strength. It’s not sound foreign policy. It puts Americans at risk in Venezuela and the region, and it sends a horrible and disturbing signal to other powerful leaders across the globe that targeting a head of state is an acceptable policy for the U.S. government. This will further damage our reputation – already hurt by Trump’s policies around the world – and only isolate us in a time when we need our friends and allies more than ever.
Nicholas Kristof of the Times:
Several contradictory things are simultaneously true:
1. Maduro was an oppressive, unpopular and illegitimate ruler, disastrous for his country and the region.
2. Using the US to remove him may have been equally illegitimate.
3. Venezuela would be better off with a new government under the opposition’s Edmundo Gonzalez (who probably won the presidential election but is now exiled).
4. It’s not clear that Maduro will be replaced by Gonzalez. Maduro’s VP is still apparently in power, as are other regime figures and the Cubans who back them.
5. As we’ve seen in Iraq and Libya, it can be easier to topple a leader than to establish a new government; sometimes you get a worse leader, or Somalia-style chaos.
Democratic strategist Adam Parkhomenko:
If Nicolás Maduro is convicted and sentenced by the U.S. government for running drug trafficking networks, would Trump then pardon him the same way he just pardoned the former Honduran president who was also convicted and sentenced in the United States?
I think the bigger question is this: why did Trump protect and pardon Juan Orlando Hernández, a convicted drug trafficker, while turning Maduro into a political trophy? And the answer probably has a lot less to do with justice and a lot more to do with who was useful to Donald Trump at the time.
Marcy Wheeler at emptywheel:
This kidnapping of Maduro is not about drug trafficking, though the indictment against him is real.
It’s about getting a piece of the action.
Rick Wilson of the Lincoln Project posts, “MAGA will conflate being critical of unconstitutional kidnappings with being Pro-Maduro. Watch. China just got a huge green light.”
Imperialist Russian President Vladimir Putin, invader of Ukraine, be like:
Meanwhile, back at the Epstein files: Pam Bondi Faces Fresh Fallout Over Withheld Epstein ‘Rape Island’ Docs
A Happy New Year story:
There are good people in this world.
Beavers are essential “ecosystem engineers.”
Kodi Jo Jaspers, manager of the Wenatchee Beaver Project, refers to beavers as “ecosystem engineers.” Aside from humans, beavers do more to shape their environment than any other species. These animals are not particularly fast or strong. Instead, they rely on their construction ability for protection from predators. Beavers use their sharp front teeth to harvest branches and trees as building material for their dams. A beaver dam creates a deep pond of water, at the center of which a beaver will construct its home. The pond then acts as a barrier between the beaver’s dwelling and potential intruders, much like a moat around a castle.
Beaver dams benefit a multitude of other species, including cold-water-loving trout and salmon. Beaver ponds store cool water in summer, creating habitat for the region’s important native fish species, like endangered steelhead and spring Chinook. This is especially important today with record high summer temperatures and longer periods of low flow conditions predicted to continue across the Pacific Northwest in coming years.
Additionally, beaver ponds store groundwater which fuels riverside vegetation. This vegetation, in turn, shades rivers and streams, further cooling the water for native fish. In many cases the stored groundwater also returns to surface flow in downstream reaches, providing important cool water to chill too-warm summer streams. This means that a healthy beaver population acts to conserve native fish species in the Wenatchee Valley, allowing future generations to witness iconic trout and salmon on this picturesque landscape.
Jaspers explains that beaver “affect our landscape on a big level when it comes to fire and climate resiliency.” Recent research suggests that beavers help to protect people and their property from wildfires. Riverside vegetation fed by beaver ponds acts as a fire break, stopping wildfires from advancing across the landscape. In 2021, twenty times more land was burned by wildfires in Washington and Oregon than in 2020. With increasing rates of wildfire in the region, beavers may be an important defense against fire-induced property damage and destruction.
They are on a mission from God:
It’s the Eisenhower Executive Building which I’m sure he’s going to rename for himself after he paints the whole thing white for some unknown reason. WTF is is he doing? (And why not gold??? Although I’m sure he’ll “decorate ” it with all that tacky gilt Home Depot garbage.)
Get a load of this:
He’s paying for it himself? Sure he is…
The comments indicate that his MAGA cultists love that he’s doing all this “for the country.”
God help us.
Andrew Prokop at Vox looks at the dynamics of Twitter since Musk took over and I think his analysis is correct.
Key takeaways
- Elon Musk’s changes at X (such as rolling back content moderation policies and creator payouts), plus progressives’ departure, have turned it into a platform where the right mainly argues with the extreme right.
- Now, even right-wingers like Christopher Rufo are perturbed by how popular bigotry and conspiracy theories are becoming on X, as feuds and controversies erupt there and shake the GOP.
- Meanwhile, the Trump administration remains obsessed with pandering to the online right, putting them out of touch with ordinary voters and endangering the multiracial MAGA 2.0 coalition.
He goes into the details of these bitter feuds and it’s very interesting. I follow it because even though I haven’t participated on X in years (I save my commentary for Blue Sky) I do read it and share videos here because it still provides information that I think is important. It’s a hellscape and nightmare fuel but I’ve never believed that putting your head in the sand is a good way to live in this world. But I see no reason to participate. Let them fight among themselves.
Prokop points out that this is happening largely because Musk himself made made changes that favor the right.
It turns out that once guardrails against bigotry and misinformation are removed, there’s a huge audience-side “demand” on the right for both.
“On the right, the public mind is now shaped by the X algorithm,” right-wing activist and X power-user Christopher Rufo recently wrote, arguing that X has usurped the role formerly held by Fox News. But, he went on, “the platform’s algorithm seems increasingly hijacked by bad actors who peddle baseless conspiracies” for “clicks, dollars, and shares.”
You don’t say.
In all this lies the seeds for the potential destruction of the MAGA 2.0 coalition. Controversies over antisemitism are shaking right-wing institutions like the Heritage Foundation. Overt bigotry and an obsession with online nonsense seem ill-suited to retaining the loyalty of the voters of color who backed Trump for the first time in 2024.
Prokop lays out the case for why the platform remains important and it’s mainly because political and media elites are still participating. But there’s more to it than that. It’s a window into the right that you just can’t get anywhere else.
He notes that before Musk, the progressive side of Twitter often went too far using twitter’s most powerful tool, the pile-on, resulting in infighting and empowerment of the extremes. (It arguably created much of the backlash against “woke” simply by elevating some of the more fringe ideas.)
Now the worm has turned and I would suggest that progressive politics were far less damaged by that than what is happening on he right simply because whatever excesses there were didn’t bleed into mainstream politics nearly as much. Nazis and masked secret police are just a little bit more threatening to real life than some college kids demanding that people put their pronouns on their social media feeds. The first is an extremely dangerous political shift that has some very profound historical echoes while the second is more of a consciousness raising exercise (and even something of a fad at times.) People are annoyed by woke. They are terrified of fascism.
The progressive exodus from Twitter combined with Musk’s heavy hand resulted in huge changes to the culture of the platform:
All this helped change right-wing norms and standards on what is acceptable to say publicly, to the dawning horror of some in the movement. After being bombarded with anti-Indian attacks in October, conservative commentator Dinesh D’Souza — not exactly the most politically correct guy around — wrote: “In a career spanning 40 years, I have never encountered this type of rhetoric. The Right never used to talk like this. So who on our side has legitimized this type of vile degradation?”
Rufo, for his part, is not exactly uniformly opposed to racially charged conspiracy theories: He happily spread the accusation that Haitian immigrants were eating pets in Ohio last year. But he’s been perturbed by three ideological trends he saw gaining steam among parts of the right: racialism, antisemitism, and conspiracism. These trends have only worsened as the year continued — for instance, in the conspiracy theories over the murder of Charlie Kirk.
Oh heck. That’s quite a problem isn’t it? Not one that most of us who’ve been watching the right for a long time weren’t aware of, however. These attitudes have been present as long as I can remember and have been rising to the surface ever since Rush Limbaugh and newt Gingrich started pushing it out over 40 years ago. Where did they think this was going to lead?
X has grown more extreme amid a remarkable context: The second Trump administration is the most online in US history, with many current top officials positively obsessed with how they are viewed among the online right, and turning to X first to assess that.
Indeed, Trump administration policy seems to be driven in part by Trump’s own personalistic whims, in part by White House adviser Stephen Miller’s anti-immigrant fanaticism, and in part by various officials’ independent attempts to try and impress online right influencers.
[…]
This continued obsession with pleasing the fringiest figures on the right does not seem to have been very successful at making Trump popular — his approval rating is mired at about 42 percent, with 54 percent disapproving of his job performance. Yet his administration has plowed ahead with its base-pleasing strategy regardless, either mistaking X for ordinary voter sentiment, or thinking X is more important to their future career prospects than ordinary voters are.
Prokop points to the Minnesota Somali story as an example of the right trying to unite around a liberal target and it’s always possible they can create enough noise to get Tim Walz’s scalp. But that won’t solve their problem The power struggle is real and it’s not going anywhere.
President Donald Trump said he’s dropping — for now — his push to deploy National Guard troops in Chicago, Los Angeles and Portland, Oregon. “We will come back, perhaps in a much different and stronger form, when crime begins to soar again – Only a question of time!” he said in a social media post Wednesday.
He just decided to do it because well, he just did. The fact that even his toadies on the Supreme Court refused to issue an emergency order overturning lower court decisions that he’d exceeded his authority had nothing to do with it.
This was one of his few setbacks from the high court and, of course, he couldn’t admit it.
Perhaps more importantly, I think he feels he doesn’t really need to send in the National Guard now that he’s got the money flowing to fully staff his secret police force. They only answer to Stephen, Kristi and Corey Lewandowski rather than a bunch of military stiffs who have been brainwashed into thinking there are rules and laws. By this time next year, we will probably have tens of thousands of masked psychos and criminals marauding through the streets rousting anyone who looks at them sideways.
If Trump gets lucky they will be violent enough to provoke serious resistance allowing him to invoke the Insurrection Act. That’s always been Plan B. He’s not worried.