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Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Insanity Is Not A Strategy

Published by digby on March 13, 2025

At least some people are taking the fact that Trump is losing his mind seriously:

He was even worse today with the NATO Secretary. It’s getting very bad.

I know you know this but I might as well post it anyway:

“The Army Corps of Engineers colonel responsible for releasing water from two California reservoirs at President Donald Trump’s direction in January knew that it was unlikely to reach the southern part of the state as Trump had promised, according to a memo obtained by The Washington Post.”

“A memo written four days after the release, obtained by The Post through a public records request, shows how federal officials rushed ahead with the plan to release irrigation water despite objections from the state’s elected officials and some local farmers.” “Col. Chad W. Caldwell, commander of the Army Corps’ Sacramento district, wrote that the water that poured out of Lake Kaweah and Success Lake ‘could not be delivered to Southern California directly.'” “the episode, a week and a half into Trump’s second term, drew criticism from farmers and officials from both parties in the Central Valley.”

“Many were alarmed when they found out.” “For the farmers in the Central Valley, it was not irrigation season, and this was their precious summer supply.” “Caldwell soon heard from elected officials and others in the Central Valley, including Republican Reps. Vince Fong and David G. Valadao, ‘to ask why the water was being released as it was typical to reserve as much water as possible for the summer growing season.'” “The Army Corps turned off the spigot Feb. 2 after letting out 2.511 billion gallons, according to Caldwell.”

He went on:

I don’t think I need to explain. I guess he really believes this.

He has the nuclear codes.

Good Morning!

Published by digby on March 13, 2025

A little presidential lunacy to start your day:

(None of those things are true. None of them.)

There is no champagne business in the United States

We have “Stupid President” and he is ripping us off.

If you think he’s all there you’re kidding yourself:

QOTD: Michelle Goldberg

Published by digby on March 13, 2025

The NY Times Patrick Healy asked Michelle Goldberg to discuss an issue or person or moment that she believes defines “how Trump has used power during his first 50 days.” Her answer left me shaken:

Michelle Goldberg: Sure. There’s a few, but one that stands out for me is the gutting of U.S.A.I.D., because it’s illegal and because it’s so flagrantly immoral and utterly self-destructive.

During the first Trump term, I would sometimes have to catch myself because even though I thought and think that Trump is uniquely despicable and dangerous, the fact remains that if you just want to look at the number of lives lost and global damage done, George W. Bush really outstripped him. Trump is maybe a worse person, but the damage that he did in his first term was much more contained.

I think that in the second Trump term he’s changed that very quickly. Not just by taking America’s soft power and setting it on fire in all sorts of ways, but really making these abrupt decisions that are going to kill hundreds of thousands and maybe more than a million people and he’s doing it in this incredibly arbitrary, careless way.

And I just want to say something really quick before we get to Frank: I have a 12-year-old son who, as he learns more about various kinds of dark chapters in American history, can get really down on this country. So I often find myself in the strange position of trying to talk up American greatness because I don’t want him to feel despair about the country that he’s growing up in. It’s occurred to me that every single thing that I have pointed out to him as a sign of American greatness or goodness, whether that be foreign aid, whether that be our support for Ukraine, our success in welcoming immigrants and refugees, or scientific pre-eminence, everything that I thought was best about America, Trump has either destroyed or tried to destroy in less than two months.

I don’t know what to say to kids about all this. But I despair for them.

Read ‘Em And Weep

Published by Tom Sullivan on March 13, 2025

Out-gunned and out-invested by the right

Direct your attention to a Sunday post by strategist Rachel Bitecofer, “Here’s Why Democrats Can’t Meet This Moment.”

Bitecofer’s post concerns the 2024 book by Tina Nguyen, now with The Verge. Formerly with Puck/Politico/Vanity Fair, Nguyen was also formerly and briefly “employed” by The Daily Caller (more on that in a moment). Her memoir, “The MAGA Diaries,” details her upbringing as a young libertarian and Claremonster (a student at Claremont McKenna College where John Eastman is or was on the faculty) and her eventual escape from conservative politics. Subtitle: My Surreal Adventures Inside the Right Wing & How I Got Out.

Bitecofer recounts from the book how Nguyen, an aspirng journalist, realized she’d been groomed instead as a propagandist:

Then she got what felt like a the break of a lifetime for an aspiring conservative “journalist”: a job at The Daily Caller working with a pre-Fox News Tucker Carlson.

A few months into that job, where she was hired to cover the tech beat, it began to dawn on her that things at The Daily Caller were not what they appeared to be. The moment of realization hit when a co-worker asked her to lunch and she responded she was waiting for edits from her editor, John Henke: a man her co-worker had never heard of.

That got Nguyen asking herself, if the Daily Caller isn’t paying me, who is?

Turns out her real boss was a Republican communications firm and what they wanted from her wasn’t reporting, they wanted her to write hit pieces on their political and corporate enemies.

Before she could resign, Nguyen got fired as “not a good fit.”

Those who have read closely know that the left and Democrats are in an asymmetrical political battle with a network of right-wing think tanks and media outlets supported by conservative billionaires who, unlike moneymen on the left, think like longterm investors. The biggest lefty funders get behind the latest shiny object that promises a quick win.

The left doesn’t build the kind of infrastructure the right has spent the last half century building. The right mentors promising conservative college kids like Nguyen, sends them to training camps, connect them to conservative networks, and gets them placement at media outlets until they appear, as if fully formed, on your TV screens or in your news feeds.

It wasn’t until she left that world and joined Vanity Fair that Nguyen realized that “there is no such thing as the professional left.” Bitecofer summarizes:

She was pitched a story about a program Dems launched in 2005 to supposedly build the bench (a problem, by the way, we still have today despite at least 5 groups I can think of working on it for two decades) which was pitched to her as “revolutionary, unique, and new.”

The Republicans had The Heritage Leadership Institute so the idea of an organization to build the bench did not sound “revolutionary, unique, or new” to Nguyen. Her first thought was, “I thought the Democrats had the same resources my old team did?”

SPOILER ALERT: We don’t.

The Heritage Leadership Institute’s Young Leaders program has graduates like Josh Hawley, who they basically grew in a lab.

I finished Nguyen’s audiobook in the car yesterday. Nguyen’s bigger shock was finding out years later that the Claremont mentor who helped her get The Daily Caller gig belonged to a secret network screening for young white nationalists, grooming them in mentoring networks, and working to place them at outlets where they could sublty advance white nationalist ideology. Nguyen told the Columbia Journalism Review that “in no universe” would the Caller “have ever explicitly courted white nationalists when I was there.” Yet her WTF moment was realizing that she herself had been nurtured by that system.

Bitecofer concludes that the right out-invests the left and it shows:

So, if you want to understand why Democrats seem inept right now its because we have no brain trust. We have no small room of very smart people with a shit ton of money and authority strategizing on to how fund, build, and run the infrastructure we need to compete with the propaganda machine Republicans have spent decades financing and perfecting.

Instead we have a series of barely connected party organizations, tons of 501c3s, and SuperPACs like Future Forward, who managed to waste nearly a billion dollars on positive ads on Harris that allowed 60% of swing voters to have positive memories of Trump’s first term.

And many of them duplicate each others’ work while struggling to find funding.

These are things most of us already know. But reading Nguyen’s first-hand account as a product of the conservative farm system carries more punch.

* * * * *

Have you fought the coup today?
Choose Democracy
Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink
You Have Power
Chop Wood, Carry Water
Thirty lonely but beautiful actions

N.C. Rally Against DOGE 

Published by Tom Sullivan on March 13, 2025

Travel my way, take the highway that is best 

Hundreds filled Raleigh,NC’s Bicentennial Plaza Wednesday to protest Elon Musk’s DOGE cuts to popular government programs.

Donald Trump brought two of his friends (at least in puppet form) to an anti-DOGE rally organized by the North Carolina Democratic Party across from the North Carolina State Legislative Building on Wednesday. Perhaps 400-500 people filled Bicentennial Plaza to protest Elon Musk’s and Donald Trump’s chainsaw approach to (ostensibly) making government more “efficient.”

Raleigh News & Observer:

“Stop the GOP Coup.” “America Has No King.” “DOGE Musk Go.”

Hundreds wielded signs with messages like these in Raleigh’s Bicentennial Plaza on Wednesday, protesting the Trump administration’s Elon Musk-led cost-cutting initiative known as the Department of Government Efficiency.

Hosted by North Carolina Democrats, the protest kicked off around noon with a speech from NC Democratic Party chair Anderson Clayton. She spoke in support of federal workers and defended programs like Medicaid and Social Security.

Hampton Dellinger returned to North Carolina to speak at the rally. Dellinger, former head of the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, was preparing to restore fired federal workers to their jobs before Trump fired him. A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit upheld his firing on Monday.

Former federal watchdog, Hampton Dellinger, addressed the rally on Wednesday.

“We need to let Republicans know how much the cuts are actually hurting North Carolina. That’s the point of what we’re doing today. And yes, it’s specifically targeted at Republicans because my legislative colleagues need to be talking to Senator Tillis, Senator Budd, their Republican colleagues in Congress and saying, Congress, do your job, take care of our people, take care of our state,” said Sen. Graig Meyer, a Democrat who represents Orange, Caswell, and Person counties.

Debbie from Greenville told WRAL she worries about children not being fed, “I’m concerned about children not being covered under Medicaid if that gets canceled.” Other programs targeted by DOGE impact her life:

“Today it’s the Department of Education,” Debbie said. “Next week, it might be Social Security. It might be Medicare. I’m on Medicare … I’m concerned.”

On Tuesday, Department of Education leaders announced plans to lay off more than 1,300 of its employees as part of an effort to halve the organization’s staff — a prelude to President Donald Trump’s plan to dismantle the agency.

ABC11 Raleigh:

Our friend Lauren Windsor of The Undercurrent brought the puppets.

As a practical matter, I-40 begins in Wilmington, runs the length of North Carolina, and extends west to Barstow, California, joining the legendary Route 66 in Oklahoma City. I’ve driven most of its 2,556.61 miles and drove 500 round-trip in North Carolina on Wednesday. One wonders how long it will be before DOGE will decide that federal highway funds that support placing rest areas about every 50 miles represent waste, fraud and abuse.

If the poors can eat cake, they can pee into empty bottles.

* * * * *

Have you fought the coup today?
Choose Democracy
Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink
You Have Power
Chop Wood, Carry Water
Thirty lonely but beautiful actions

White House Infomercial

Published by digby on March 12, 2025

Coincidentally:

Elon Musk has signaled to President Trump’s advisers in recent days that he wants to put $100 million into groups controlled by the Trump political operation, according to three people with knowledge of the matter.

It is unheard-of for a White House staffer, even one with part-time status, to make such large political contributions to support the agenda of the boss. But there has never been someone in the direct employ of an administration like Mr. Musk, the world’s wealthiest person, who is leading Mr. Trump’s aggressive effort to shrink the federal government, the Department of Government Efficiency.

In case you forgot:

In fairness, Musk doesn’t really have conflicts of interest. It’s just outright corruption. He and Trump never promised they wouldn’t steal the country blind.

Musk Isn’t Popular And It’s A Leverage Point For the Democrats

Published by digby on March 12, 2025

Musk is Trump’s albatross:

Trump has spent his first months back in office seeking to sharply cut spending and reduce the federal workforce. The public’s views of that effort and Elon Musk, to whom Trump has given a prominent role, are largely negative.

Just 35% of Americans express a positive view of Musk, with 53% rating him negatively and 11% offering no opinion – making him both better known and more substantially unpopular than Vice President JD Vance (whom 33% of Americans rate favorably and 44% unfavorably, with 23% having no opinion.) Roughly 6 in 10 Americans say that Musk has neither the right experience nor the right judgment to make changes to the way the government works. There is uneasiness about Musk even among some of the president’s supporters: 28% of those who see Trump’s changes to the government as necessary doubt the tech billionaire has the judgment to carry them out.

A 55% majority of Americans say that the Trump administration’s changes to the federal government are being made largely to advance his agenda, with 45% calling the changes necessary to ensure the government functions properly.

Asked to weigh whether they’re more concerned about the Trump administration’s cuts to the federal government going too far or not far enough, 62% of Americans say they’re more worried about the former and fear important programs being shut down. The other 37% say they’re more worried about the cuts not going far enough in eliminating fraud and waste in the federal government. Nine in 10 Democrats and 69% of independents say they’re more concerned about losing important federal programs, while 73% of Republicans say they’re more concerned that fraud and waste will remain an issue in the government.

We’re currently watching the saga of the Continuing Resolution to keep the government open until September unfold in the Senate. The Democrats can filibuster this one but it’s unclear if they are going to be willing to do it. (I know….)

I believe they should filibuster with one demand: Trump must get rid of Musk and DOGE. Nothing less. If he does that they will vote for the CR. I don’t expect he will do it but after a period of him defending his “right”to have a billionaire slashing the government and angering the people even more, the Democrats could finally agree to break the filibuster making it clear that Trump is willing to put his billionaire boyfriend ahead of the American people.

There is such a thing as “losing well” and I think those numbers above show that the public is not happy with Trump’s buddy destroying the federal government. They should use the meager leverage they have to highlight that to the whole country and push Trump’s approval ratings even lower.

The Wall St Bears Are Waking From Their Hibernation

Published by digby on March 12, 2025

They aren’t in a good mood:

President Donald Trump’s tariff salvos have deeply rattled a stock market previously bullish about his supposedly pro-growth agenda. With recession fears mounting, a widely respected economist at Goldman Sachs has decided to downgrade the entire U.S. economy. 

No longer looking toward share prices for signs of success and approval, the president and his economic officials have signaled they will look past short-term pain in their bid to reshape America’s finances. On Tuesday, Goldman chief economist Jan Hatzius revealed the storied investment bank forecasts U.S. GDP growth to come in below Wall Street’s consensus for the first time in 2½ years. 

Goldman’s GDP projection for 2025 now sits at 1.7%, down from 2.4% at the start of the year. That’s because the firm now sees the average U.S. tariff rate rising by 10 basis points this year, twice Goldman’s previous forecast and about five times as high as the increase during Trump’s first term.

Disappointing economic data over the past few weeks did not prompt the new projection, said Hatzius, who gained renown for his bearish forecasts prior to the onset of the great financial crisis in 2007. 

“Instead, the reason for the downgrade is that our trade policy assumptions have become considerably more adverse, and the administration is managing expectations towards tariff-induced near-term economic weakness,” he wrote Tuesday in a note to clients. 

Members of the starry eyed “Trump is awesome” set have awakened as well:

President Trump’s stop-and-start trade policy and uneven economic messaging have rattled some of his own allies, triggering a flood of calls from business executives, concerns from Republican lawmakers and tension in the White House.

Senior officials, including White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, have received panicked calls from chief executives and lobbyists, who have urged the administration to calm jittery markets by outlining a more predictable tariff agenda, according to people familiar with the discussions. Many in the business community have abandoned efforts to get the president to reverse course on trade, instead pleading with the White House for clarity on his approach, the people said. 

In a meeting Monday in the White House’s Roosevelt Room, the president and his top advisers huddled with the chief executive officers of International Business Machines, Qualcomm, HP and other tech companies. Some of the CEOs voiced their concerns about Trump’s tariffs, warning that they could hurt their industry, according to a person who attended the meeting. Trump told reporters that attendees at the meeting talked about investing in the U.S.

I just love this:

The mixed messages from the president and his advisers have raised concerns among some Republicans that Trump lacks a cohesive economic plan.

Ya think?

I guess these people, mostly men, were so excited about being allowed to say pussy at the office again that they couldn’t hear anything else he said, or didn’t say, during the campaign. Well, at least they’re getting some tax cuts. At some point. Right?

Doomsday Prevention

Published by digby on March 12, 2025

Who needs it?

Following up on my piece this morning about the COVID amnesia and America’s new quest to destroy all the scientific institutions that keep us safe, here’s another bit of fodder for our nightmares:

In December 26, 2004, the geological plates beneath Sumatra unleashed the third-most-powerful earthquake ever recorded. A gargantuan column of water raced toward Sri Lanka, India, Thailand, and Indonesia. None of these countries had advance-warning systems in place, so no one had time to prepare before the surge hit. Some 228,000 people died—the highest toll of any natural disaster so far this century.

Setting up prevention systems would have been inexpensive, especially compared with the countless billions the tsunami ultimately cost. But governments typically spend money on preventing disasters only after disasters strike, and the affected countries hadn’t experienced a major tsunami in years. After the events of 2004, USAID spent a tiny fraction of its budget to help fund an advance-detection system for the Pacific, which might have saved hundreds of thousands of lives had it been in place sooner. But some people would have seen such an investment as a “waste”—inefficient spending that could have gone toward some more immediate or tangible end.

DOGE has turned this dangerously flawed view into a philosophy of government. Last week, Elon Musk’s makeshift agency fired one of the main scientists responsible for providing advance warning when the next tsunami hits Alaska, Hawaii, or the Pacific Coast. The USAID document that describes America’s efforts to protect coastlines from tsunamis, titled “Pounds of Prevention”—riffing on the adage that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure—now redirects to an error message: “The resource you are trying to access is temporarily unavailable.”

More than 800 workers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have lost their job in recent weeks, including many who helped mitigate climate disasters, track hurricanes, predict ever-stronger storms, and notify potential victims. Meanwhile, cuts to volcano monitoring are crippling the government’s ability to measure eruption risk. DOGE is also reportedly preparing to cancel the lease on the government’s “nerve center” for national weather forecasts.

Musk has categorized as superfluous a good deal of spending that actually makes the country more resilient, at a time when catastrophic risk is on the rise. We never see the crises that the government averts, only the ones it fails to prevent. Preparing for them may seem wasteful—until suddenly, tragically, it doesn’t.

The modern, globalized world is the most complex and interconnected environment that humans have ever navigated. That’s why the potential for catastrophic risk—that is, the risk of low-probability but highly destructive events—has never been greater. A single person getting sick can derail the lives of billions. A crisis in one country’s banking sector can crash economies thousands of miles away. Now is precisely the time when governments must invest more heavily in making themselves resilient to these kinds of events. But the United States is doing the opposite.

Why? Does anyone really know the answer to that question because I honestly don’t. Project 2025 wants to remake the United States into a Christian nationalist theocracy so they need to destroy all government and science which interferes with their need for patriarchal authoritarianism. But that’s not Musk’s goal. He thinks the techno nerds should run everything but he’s clueless about what “everything” is just assuming that he and his nerds will figure it all out later. Ok. And we know that Trump is just bent on destroying everything in his quest for vengeance and the delusions that it will somehow make him into the Emperor of the world.

The rest of the elected Republicans are just cowardly people of low character who are willing to help them all destroy the world and I’m afraid that the MAGA voters are simply too brainwashed and addled by Trump’s demagoguery and conspiracy theories to even grasp what’s actually happening.

So is it just that these people all have different goals that just happen to be served by a leader who is so imbecilic and psychologically damaged that he will let them use the United States of America as their tool? I think so. And what it adds up to is chaos and catastrophe.