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Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

He Brought Prices Way Down!

Published by Tom Sullivan on May 2, 2026

And “terminated” the war he launched

https://gasprices.aaa.com/

An unnamed pollster told Joe Gallina that Donald Trump’s speech to The Villages in Florida on Friday marks the end for Trump. Trump mocked affordability as “one good line of bullshit.”

See for yourselves:

“It’s over,” the pollster texted.

No, it won’t be that speech.* But it could be pain at the pump. Trump and his sychophants seem to think they can Jedi mind-trick Americans into believing that these aren’t the gas prices they’re paying at the pump.

Average gas prices here have risen 20 cents over the last week. Nationally, the spike is much higher.

Over half of Republicans blame Trump for higher gas prices. Nearly two-thirds of Americans believe Trump’s Iran war is not worth the costs he expects them to bear on his say so.

CNN’s Harry Enten is back with polling:

War is ‘terminated’, saith Trump

Trump’s 60 days is up, explains The Washington Post:

The War Powers Resolution of 1973 requires presidents to remove U.S. forces from any conflict that Congress has not authorized within 60 days of the White House notifying Congress of hostilities — a deadline that Trump hit on Friday.

Trump wrote in his letter to lawmakers Friday that the conflict has been effectively over since the United States and Iran agreed last month to a ceasefire.

“There has been no exchange of fire between United States Forces and Iran since April 7, 2026,” Trump wrote in the letter, obtained by The Washington Post. “The hostilities that began on February 28, 2026, have terminated.”

Sen. Chuck Schumer (D) of New York for once said what you are thinking.

“President Trump declaring the war with Iran ‘terminated’ doesn’t reflect the reality that tens of thousands of U.S. service members in the region are still in harm’s way, that the Administration continually threatens to escalate hostilities or that the Strait of Hormuz remains closed and prices are skyrocketing at home,” Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (New Hampshire), the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said in a statement. “President Trump entered this war without a strategy and without legal authorization and today’s announcement doesn’t change either fact.”

Trump’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz continues. How many Americans will buy his “terminated” claim and claims that the prices of gas and groceries have come down?

Americans can be pretty stupid sometimes — they elected Trump twice — but they’re not that stupid. H. L. Mencken famously wrote in 1926, “No one in this world … has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.” What’s usually lost is Mencken’s next line: “Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.”

An awful lot of Republicans in Congress are about to see that proposition tested.

* And I hate when Democrats use the word “affordability.” It’s an abstraction, cold and bloodless.

Friday Night Soother

Published by digby on May 1, 2026

The research behind this is wild. A baby owl can sit and starve to death right next to a pile of food. Put a stuffed owl next to it, like in the video, and suddenly it’ll eat.

An Austrian zoologist, Konrad Lorenz, won the 1973 Nobel Prize for figuring out why. He showed that young birds aren’t born knowing who their mom is. In the first few days of life, their brain takes a kind of mental photograph. Whatever they see moving around gets locked in as “parent.” After that, only that figure can switch on their feeding instinct. He called it imprinting.

Owls have it worse than most birds. They’re born blind, naked, and totally helpless. A baby barn owl needs feeding every two to three hours for weeks. It can’t even keep itself warm until its feathers come in. And right around the time its eyes finally open, between days 15 and 20, its brain locks onto whoever’s been taking care of it. Miss that window with the wrong face nearby, and the owl is wired wrong for life.

Even the begging is automatic. In the 1950s, a Dutch scientist named Niko Tinbergen ran experiments with baby seagulls. He found the chicks were pecking at a specific shape. A long thin thing with a colored spot was enough to trigger the full begging routine, even when it was just a painted wooden stick. Take the stick away and the whole sequence shuts down. The chick can be staring straight at food, but if there’s no parent-shaped trigger, its body doesn’t know how to swallow.

There’s a tiny patch in the bird brain that runs this whole show. It’s the same part that learns and stores faces. Researchers at Cambridge and labs in Japan have mapped it down to the chemistry. They’ve even found a hormone that, if you inject it in the right spot, can re-open the imprinting window after it closes.

That dummy owl in the video carries 40 years of conservation work behind it. In 1982 there were only 22 California condors left in the entire world. The San Diego Zoo started feeding hatchlings with hand puppets shaped like adult condors, hiding the human handler behind a curtain. The condor population is now 607. The Bronx Zoo did the same thing last spring with a baby king vulture.

The Barn Owl Trust in the UK feeds orphaned owls through owl puppets while wearing camouflage hoods, because an owl raised by humans can never be released back into the wild. It’ll fly toward people, beg from them, and starve. The dummy is the only signal the chick’s brain still accepts as “mom.” Evolution carved a very specific lock into its brain, and only the right shape fits.

Who knew?

Speaking of baby birds, California’s beloved bald eagle pair, Jackie and Shadow have some new eaglets that we’re all avidly watching grow up. Some third graders named them Sandy and Luna.

Here’s the live cam if you are looking for a way to decompress. It’s lovely.

Gettin’ Crispy

Published by digby on May 1, 2026

I can’t watch this show because this kind of “pointy-counterpoint” is just tiresome. The right wingers, especially Scott Jennings are just hacks spouting nonsense and the argument is just exhausting. I think it’s a big waste of Abby Phillips because she’s actually a good journalist.

Anyway, the following exchange happened last night and is making the rounds. It illustrates how the Republicans are being reduced to pounding the table these days trying to defend Trump and pass on blatant lies that everyone can see with their own eyes. Go to about the 11:47 mark:

He did not have his hand in his face. He was gesturing in exactly the same way he’d been gesturing throughout the segment and it wasn’t anywhere near there. Jennings just got frustrated and shut the thing down by saying “get your hand out of my fucking face” to derail the debate he was losing. Cheap, tawdry and … typical.

Believe Me Or Believe Your Eyes

Published by digby on May 1, 2026

Krugman looks at the incredibly disturbing phenomenon of Republicans fanning out all overt television this week to tell viewers that the price of gas is way down. I’m not kidding:

No, there is a huge spike in gas prices as you can see by that chart above.

Why, then, do Republicans believe that these lies will work for them politically?

Part of the explanation is their belief that they can flush the majority of Joe Biden’s presidency down the memory hole, that they can pretend that Trump took office just after the inflation surge of 2021-2022, not after the “immaculate disinflation” — falling inflation without high unemployment — that followed. ..

Will these games with the timeline persuade voters that Trump is actually doing a good job on prices? No. That ship has already sailed (and sunk). As the chart at the top of this post shows, independents disapprove of Trump’s handling of the cost of living by a remarkable 5-to-1 margin, and false claims on Fox News won’t change that.

So what’s the purpose of these MAGA lies? The answer, of course, is that they’re aimed at an audience of one. Voters know that gas prices are way up and that inflation is elevated, but Donald Trump, swaddled in his Mar-a-Lago bubble, doesn’t. Trump says that we have no inflation. He recently insisted that inflation was 5 percent at the end of Biden’s term and took credit for falling inflation before he took office. So Republicans determined to say whatever he wants to hear — which means everyone still in the party — feel obliged to praise his inflation record, the facts be damned.

It’s hard to imagine how this insane dynamic can continue but apparently, they’re still convinced that failing to slavishly lick Trump’s boots will be a death blow to their careers — or they want in on the grift. I’m guessing more of the latter are out there than we might think.

The Polarization Trap

Published by digby on May 1, 2026

Jake Grumbach at Slate has an original take on the Supreme Court voting rights horror. I think he’s on to something. He begins by discussing the obsession among many of the punditocracy with “polarization” as an explanation for all of our troubles. I’m sure I’ve done it myself. Grumbach thinks that’s part of what’s led us to this awful place:

The Supreme Court just revealed where that project was leading. In Louisiana v. Callais, the court’s conservative majority held that when a legislative district is polarized along party lines, it cannot simultaneously be found to be polarized along racial lines under the Voting Rights Act. The consequence is devastating: In a country where over 90 percent of Black voters vote Democratic and over 70 percent of White voters vote Republican, any racially discriminatory map can now be laundered as merely a partisan one. The VRA’s protection against racial vote dilution has been nullified—using a conceptual weapon that liberals and moderates spent years building and lending prestige to.

The ruling also rests on a methodological error that would earn a failing grade in a graduate statistics course. The court treats race and party as competing explanations, as if controlling for one neutralizes the other. But for millions of American voters, race explains party affiliation. The vast majority of Black Americans did not randomly sort into the Democratic Party. Already trending blue since the New Deal, they were pushed fully into the Democratic Party by Barry Goldwater’s opposition to the Civil Rights Act and Republicans’ Southern Strategy over the decades since. To “control for partisanship” when assessing racial gerrymandering is to erase the very mechanism through which racism travels. Consider the analogy of a court ruling that a company didn’t discriminate by gender in pay because, once you control for being a manager or executive—positions from which women were systematically excluded—the gap disappears. Or that if you exclude people with high blood pressure, then a high sodium diet appears to have no effect on your risk of stroke.

The polarization nostalgists also badly misread the history they claim to be mourning. American politics has almost always been polarized by party. The exceptional era was that of the New Deal coalition of the mid-20th century, when the staunchest segregationists and the most anti-racist politicians in the country coexisted within the same Democratic Party only by keeping civil rights off the agenda. To conclude that partisan divisions negate racial divisions would be to assume that even the Civil War had nothing to do with race.

He has a point. Seeing “polarization” as the cause of our problems elides the underlying reasons why we are polarized. And it gave this misbegotten court a nice little rationale for proclaiming that racism is no longer a problem, it’s partisanship and that, my friends, is perfectly legitimate.

When we spend years insisting that partisan division is the master pathology of American life, we delegitimized arguments about racism as divisive. We created a cultural climate in which conflating race and party seems like a sophisticated, noninflammatory intervention rather than an evasion. And we’ve handed five Supreme Court justices a respectable intellectual framework for a ruling that would otherwise look nakedly like what it is.

Polarization is a description of political temperature. It tells you nothing about what is being fought over or who is being harmed. A democracy polarized between those who want to preserve multiracial voting rights and those who want to destroy them is not suffering from the same illness as one polarized between competing visions of the capital gains tax.

The court absorbed decades of elite discourse that trained us to distrust racial explanations and reach for partisan ones instead, then took that discourse to its logical conclusion. If everything is partisan, nothing can be racial, and the law that Congress designed to specifically fight against racial discrimination can no longer operate within its legislative intent.

They are acting in bad faith, of course. What else is new? They know very well that racism .(and any number of other cultural pathologies) are at the root of the stark differences between the two parties. It’s that they are either racists themselves or such pure partisans that they were determined to turn this into an advantage for their own team. Or both.

And they did. Shamelessly.

86 The Nachos

Published by digby on May 1, 2026
The Trump Tower version

Wall St. has another cute little anagram:

President Donald Trump’s back-and-forth with Iran over opening the Strait of Hormuz has led to a new nickname inspired by TACO, the president’s acronym nickname for issuing and reversing threats.

“We thought we were getting a TACO, ‘Trump Always Chickens Out.’ But so far we are getting a NACHO, ‘Not A Chance Hormuz Opens,’” Bloomberg columnist Javier Blas wrote on X.

The new nickname, bestowed by a financial trader, according to Blas, reflects the public’s frustration with the on-again, off-again blockade in the Strait that has disrupted global oil supply, causing gas prices to rise.

Forget the public. Who cares what they think? WTF is going on with the markets?

I guess we have to assume that they are still in thrall to the AI companies and are just playing the TACO Trump game of 2nd guessing what insane things he’s going to do next — like the prediction markets. Reality doesn’t seem to be relevant at the moment.

I have the sneaking suspicion that they’ve bought into the Magic Trump theory — “it’ll all work out, it always does…”

Look At This Trainwreck

Published by digby on May 1, 2026

Trump: “As far as peace, I settled 8 wars. And people try to dispute it but then they go over them, and almost in every case they sent letters thanking me and letters to the Nobel Committee. I don’t care about that. Maria was very nice. She gave me her Nobel Peace Prize because she said she didn’t deserve it.”

Oy vay…

Show, Don’t Tell

Published by Tom Sullivan on May 1, 2026

Earn back voters’ trust

Former congressional candidate Kat Abughazaleh, 26, appeared with The Ink’s Anand Giridharadas on “Morning Joe” to discuss what Democrats must do differently to win back the trust of working people. She built her campaign on aiding people in her district. After finishing second in a field of 16, she founded Kapow to keep her community together. Democrats need to show, not tell that they are fighting for working people. Create a home for them.

Abughazaleh spared no criticism of her party.

“We’re doing the same things over and over again and expecting different results, and that’s just not going to happen,” she told her hosts. “We have to do something different, and I think that should start with helping people.”

Some in her own party stand in the way of unity, she believes. Democrats have to be unified in their goal of fighting for the working class, a party of the New Deal and the Civil Rights Act.

I see the same. Democrats are reactive, not proactive. They don’t think outside the box. They built the box. It’s what prompted an exasperated Giridharadas a year ago to declare, “I feel so fucking undefended by these people. Like what are they doing, any of them?”

Riffing on that last year, I wrote:

I watched most of the DNC’s 12-1/2 hour winter meeting days earlier. Most of the speeches were dispiriting. They could have been written 30 years ago. Members said what they what they were expected to say as good lefties, what they learned to say years earlier then stopped learning.

It was speech after speech of Democrats saying what Democrats are expected to say to Democrats who expected to hear it.

Here in North Carolina in 2004, Democrats were 48 percent of registered voters. Republicans were 34 percent. Independents (“unaffiliated” here) were an afterthought at 18 percent. Twenty-two years later, independents are 39 percent, Republicans and Democrats are tied at 30. Democrats have lost 18 points in registration while independents have gained 21. Likely something similar has happened where you live.

Democrats as a party seem not to have noticed. They’ve certainly not changed their campaign formats over that time. A former campaign manager complained to me about that just yesterday. They update their software and adopt new digital tools, but in service to strategies as stale as those DNC speeches.

Yes, since 2004 we’ve seen big cultural and political shifts. Millennials and Gen Z especially see no reason to join parties seen as slipping into irrelevance. They’ve lived through Sept. 11 and the so-called War on Terror. They’ve experienced the Great Recession, a global pandemic, and the Jan. 6 insurrection as well as Trump’s war on immigrants, the Supreme Court’s war on civil and voting rights, and the resurrection of a fascist movement. Their economic prospects are shrinking. And yet Democrats keep plodding along as if nothing has changed. Not only do voters feel undefended, as Giridharadas does, but young people have “never really felt seen” by either major party.

It’s no surprise. Democrats have noticed neither them nor the political ground shifting beneath them. Much less make adjustments over the last two decades. They’ve lost people’s trust and we all have nearly lost our country. Democrats see Trump’s approval ratings falling like a rock, as Giridharadas notes in the video [timestamp 5:48]. But where has that historic unpopularity become support for Democrats? There has been no real reckoning with their disconnect from communities and with that loss of trust.

“Movements need to be homes, not just opinion factories,” Giridharadas says. People around the country may vote for the Democratic Party, but they don’t feel the party speaks to them.

Maybe start with making them feel seen. Week after week, commuters honk, wave, and cheer for a dancing old man who struts around like Mick Jagger. He displays message signs that don’t bark about his pet political issues but address their lived experiences. It’s not a model for how Democrats should retool their campaigns, but at least it’s not the same old shit.

Update: And maybe not “take shit lying down.” And take no prisoners.

He’d Be Fired from ‘Presidential Apprentice’

Published by Tom Sullivan on May 1, 2026

Americans aren’t buying Trump’s war (The Washington Post):

President Donald Trump’s war in Iran is as unpopular among Americans as the Iraq War during the year of peak violence in 2006 and the Vietnam War in the early 1970s, according to a Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll, amid growing economic pain and fears of terrorism as a result of the military campaign.

Sixty-one percent of Americans say that using military force against Iran was a mistake, with fewer than 2 in 10 Americans believing that the U.S. actions in Iran have been successful. About 4 in 10 say it has been unsuccessful, while another 4 in 10 say it is “too soon to tell.” The polling numbers indicate a broadly unpopular war effort and growing economic fallout at a time when the White House has been trying to convince Americans that they are better off under Trump than under Democrats.

Um, nope. Nice try, Scalise.

How long will Americans tolerate having these people lie to their faces?

And yet on Earth 2, Trumpish Jedi mind tricks still work on the cult.

There’s almost no hope for them.

If You’re Interested …

Published by digby on April 30, 2026

I keep forgetting to post these. If you have time and want to catch up with Brad, Desi, Drift glass and me:

‘86 47’ or ‘Weekend at Donnie’s’: Today's #BradCastGuests: Heather @digby56.bsky.social Parton of Salon, @driftglass.bsky.social of 'Pro Left Podcast' on the SCOTUS VRA ruling and fallout, the ballroom, Iran, Comey, Kimmel and much more!…FULL STORY, LISTEN: bradblog.com?p=16474

— Brad Friedman / The BRAD BLOG (@thebradblog.bsky.social) 2026-05-01T01:39:49.986Z