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Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Just Say No, Part 77

Published by digby on May 2, 2026

This is low, even for them:

Test strips used to determine if illicit drugs contain deadly contaminants including fentanyl will no longer be covered by federal funding, reversing a position the Trump administration held as recently as July and leaving public health organizations worried that the U.S. will lose the progress it has made combatting fatal overdoses. 

In a letter reviewed by CBS News, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration said that agency funding cannot be used to purchase test strips used to check drugs for dangerous adulterants like fentanyl, xylazine and medetomidine.

Test strips cost about $1 each and can be used to check drugs — from powders to pills to party drugs — for contamination. They are a “critical, life-saving tool” that can prevent fatal overdoses, said Maritza Perez Medina, director of federal policy at the Drug Policy Alliance. Medina said the sudden change in policy has left advocates scrambling. 

“People are just astonished,” Medina said. “There has been a lot of confusion about where this came from.”

The “Dear Colleague” letter references an executive order signed by President Trump in July 2025 that declares SAMHSA funding cannot be used for programs that “only facilitate illegal drug use.” A Health and Human Services spokesperson said that the letter clarifies guidance for SAMHSA grantees and furthers the agency’s clear shift away from harm reduction and “practices that facilitate illicit drug use and are incompatible with federal laws.” 

These strips have saved many lives. But the Trump administration, which just loosened laws on certain psychedelic drugs, says they are “drug paraphernalia which 45 states and Washington, D.C define otherwise. Virtually no one but right wing extremists think it’s better for people to die from fentanyl laced drugs than to provide these tests.

It’s also about the indiscriminate budget cuts the Trump administration continues to make even as they explode federal spending to finance their police state and war machine. It’s just perverse.

Genius

Published by digby on May 2, 2026

Just a few highlights of the president’s into madness. For the record.

Just A Mopping-up Operation

Published by Tom Sullivan on May 2, 2026

The “dead letter” VRA and the elimination of dignity

Vann R. Newkirk II writes a “Requiem” for the Voting Rights Act in The Atlantic (gift link):

The best things shine bright, but never long. So it was for the Voting Rights Act, the 1965 legislation that protected Black suffrage by neutralizing voter suppression in southern states, and became the foundation for equal ballot access for all Americans. Of the 250 years since the country’s founding, less than a quarter unfolded under the aegis of universal suffrage. Color television, credit cards, and Barbie dolls arrived earlier than the VRA and will survive longer. The reign of Queen Elizabeth II lasted a decade longer than the guarantor of democracy in America.

The ruling SCOTUS handed down its Callais decision this week “renders Section 2 all but a dead letter,” wrote Justice Elena Kagan in her dissent.

“Like previous VRA-related decisions, Callais was “narrow,” in that it did not strike down the law itself, Newkirk writes. “But although the edifice built at great expense—by Fannie Lou Hamer, by John Lewis, by the bloodied limbs of Mississippi sharecroppers and Alabama marchers—has not been entirely bulldozed, only the facade remains.”

The rest of the essay you can read at the link. Newkirk reflects on the law’s impacts over the last 60 years, Republican efforts to subvert or neuter it, and how through legal “engineering, Roberts, Alito, and their allies have created a trap for voting-rights cases” that renders them dead on arrival.

The final two paragraphs carry meaning Newkirk may not have considered:

But representation in Congress was never the ultimate goal of the VRA, nor will that be the primary problem the country faces after its fall. The point of the Voting Rights Act, as stated by Lyndon B. Johnson, the president who signed it into law, was to force the opponents of liberty to “open the gates to opportunity” to all Americans. Voting rights were, to him, a matter of the “dignity of man and the destiny of democracy,” and the law itself was meant to be a proactive guarantor of that destiny. Without it, no American should consider their dignity to be secure.

This is something that Black voting-rights advocates, from Frederick Douglass to Kwame Ture, long understood; that no person’s rights could really be inalienable if any person’s rights were trampled. The Voting Rights Act was the true instantiation of the Declaration of Independence. For centuries, Black people fought for the ballot, not just to have a say in their government, but to demonstrate their own value, both to themselves and to others. And, for a while, they succeeded.

No offense meant to Newkirk, but what Americans and the world witnessed after Donald Trump and his merry band of brigands reoccupied the White House in January 2025 was the actual closing of the gates Johnson forced open. Not just Black people, but all nonwhite people, all undocumented residents, and all non-MAGA Americans began seeing their dignity stripped as soon as Trump 2.0 launched its ICE assault on city after city beginning in January 2025.

An America exclusively of, by, and for white, Christians was Stephen Miller’s obsession, Russell Vought’s Project 2025 blueprint, and a post-Constitutional Republican Party’s means to rule indefinitely over what they once smugly declared a republic, not a democracy. Trump simply wants subjects, and his name and his mug plastered everywhere. Trump 2.0 gave ICE agents carte blanche permission to ignore the Constitution and to brutalize and jail citizen and noncitizen alike. They signaled to Trump’s enemies/subjects via shock-and-awe that “no American should consider their dignity to be secure.”

The conservative Court majority rendering the Voting Rights Act a dead letter this week is just a mopping-up operation.

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 sycophants 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 are 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…