Once again, thank you everybody for your kind generosity. I am so incredibly grateful and feel more motivated than ever to keep forging ahead. We’re facing some stiff political headwinds but I believe that with all of you at our backs we’ll be able to come through even stronger on the other side.
The MAGA cult is feeling its oats right now but reality is going to bite very soon. We’ll be here to document the victories and the atrocities and I hope you’ll all stop by frequently to see what we’ve dug up, analyzed or otherwise just observed with dismay or delight. Barring a round-up to the camps we’ll be here 7 days a week doing that thing we do.
I’m going to leave this up until New Year’s just in case there are any stragglers. And thank you again, from the bottom of my heart.
JV Last made an excellent observation about this Musk vs MAGA flap. This is from his Bluesky account.
These guys are super into H1B precisely because they’re also into corporate tax cuts. They want to offload the expense of creating an educated workforce and just conjure labor out of thin air.
This worldview makes sense if “efficiency” is your highest goal. You can outsource expenditures for human infrastructure to other countries and then import that fully formed human capital.
It’s also a worldview in which the government’s primary function is to support corporations and all policies are downstream from that goal.
Anyway, it’s absolutely impossible to reconcile “forgotten man” MAGA with the Elon/Vivek corporate ubermensch MAGA. The only thing that united them was that they hate trans people and NYT columnists.
That works if you’re in the outside. But once you have power you have to make choices on how to apply it. And the zero-sum game pits the two factions against one another.
Corporate MAGA is betting that the rubes won’t really know what’s going on. That’s probably right. If Trump can make enough noise and trigger the libs hard enough, the avg forgotten man voter will be happy. But at the MAGA elite level there’s going to be a death struggle for dominance.
Here’s a little taste of the incoherent rage on Twitter over the last couple of days. it’s really something:
Charlie Kirk fires back at Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy.
"It's what the American people want. The American people overwhelmingly voted for less immigration and the prioritization of the American children and the American worker— not the American oligarch."
There is a full-fledged WAR raging between Trump's biggest, most vocal supporters and President Musk. Steve Bannon, for instance, calls Elon "a total and complete phony" and says he's owned by the CCP.
Basically, the MAGA folks are saying that they don’t like any dark skinned foreigners while the Tech bros insist they need to import skilled dark skinned foreigners they can exploit for low wages as indentured servants. (They all seem to agree that white immigrants like Musk and Melania are a-ok, of course.)
The bigger picture is that this argument has exposed the essential incoherence of the MAGA coalition between the billionaires, the CEOs and the professional Trump cultists. As Last argues, this battle for dominance is very real. The corporate people control the money and the professional Trump cultists control the rubes. Trump has come down on the side of the money on this one. It will be very interesting to see where this goes.
🚨DONIE O'SULLIVAN: "You can just go on to X and see the vitriol around this conversation. They try to say it's about visas and everything else but you don't need to scratch the surface too far to see the levels or racism and hate and ugly stuff that are happening on the… pic.twitter.com/9T79cP0QVs
Who among us hasn’t accidentally texted the wrong person? But I don’t think any of us have accidentally posted on social media instead of texting. Then there’s Donald Trump… Trump posted a private message meant for Elon Musk on Truth Social by mistake.
Trump-Musk Bromance Alive and Well?
Who among us hasn’t accidentally texted the wrong person? But I don’t think any of us have accidentally posted on social media instead of texting. Then there’s Donald Trump…
Haha. Was he trying to make him jealous with Bill Gates? Too funny.
The CNN reporter says that this suggests that Trump isn’t unhappy with Musk but who knows? If he isn’t I’d guess it’s because Trump is hoping for that rumored merger of Truth Social and X which will bring him a huge payday. But there is serious trouble in MAGA land with Elon and Vivek threatening his loyal followers like this:
I doubt Trump cares at all about this visa issue. He’s happy to give Elon what he wants. But it will be interesting to see how he deals with the conflict which is getting very hot among the MAGA activists. So far, he hasn’t said a word.
Update —
He’s with Elon and Vivek:
President-elect Trump told The Post Saturday he supports immigration visas for highly skilled workers, appearing to side with Elon Musk in the roiling intra-MAGA debate on the issue.
“I’ve always liked the visas, I have always been in favor of the visas. That’s why we have them,” Trump said by phone, referring to the H-1B program, which permits companies to hire foreign workers in specialty occupations.
“I have many H-1B visas on my properties. I’ve been a believer in H-1B. I have used it many times. It’s a great program,” added Trump, who restricted access to foreign worker visas in his first administration and has been critical of the program in the past.
Musk and other tech barons argued this week that the H-1B visa program is critical to ensuring American companies can find highly skilled labor which may not be easily available in the U.S. labor force and must be expanded.
MAGA hardliners want Trump to follow through with his promise to promote US workers and impose tougher restrictions on immigration.
Hmm. That’s not what he said before. I guess the puppet master pulled his strings:
I had heard that this hustle was making headway in the Latino community and it explains a lot:
The Lehigh Valley Barbershop was bustling with the next generation of American strivers. The mood among the young men, mostly first- or second-generation migrants from the Caribbean, was hopeful. Their candidate, Donald Trump, had just won the presidential election.
Sitting in high-end silver chairs, the young men talked about the businesses they had built, or would build. That would be more possible, they hoped, with the return of Trump, someone to whom they could relate — a businessman who has made mistakes, they said, but still keeps striving.
“Kamala said, ‘Trump is for the rich, I fight for the poor.’ But I don’t want to be low-class — I hope that’s not a bad way to say it. But I don’t want to be there,” said Christian Pion, 31, referring to Vice President Kamala Harris. He became a U.S. citizen last year, a decade after coming to the United States from the Dominican Republic,and cast his first presidential ballot for Trump. “God doesn’t want you to be poor.”
Next to him, his best friend, Willy J. Castillo, 39, who owns the shop and others, worked the register as he talked about Trump’s drive to succeed, overcome and survive. Castillo, who also voted for Trump, identifies with that: “The Bible says ‘God helps those who help themselves,’ right?”
The mix of hope, drive for success and belief in a God who rewards faith, sometimes with financial accomplishments,has become dominant across the United States and Latin America, experts on Latino religion say. The belief system is sometimes called “seed faith,” “health and wealth gospel,” or “prosperity gospel.”
What a con game. Trump and Musk were both born into wealthy families and yet they are used as examples of being rewarded for their faith In God which neither of them have. What a crock.
Elon Musk pledged Friday night to go to “war” to defend the H-1B visa program for foreign tech workers, branding some Republican opponents as “hateful, unrepentant racists.”
Why it matters: The MAGA-DOGE civil war that erupted over the last 48 hours has now come to a tipping point, with President-elect Trump’s new techno-libertarian coalition of billionaires taking full aim at his traditional base.
Trump, who has remained silent thus far on the schism, faces a quickly deepening conflict between his richest and most powerful advisors on one hand, and the people who swept him to office on the other.
Someone should turn this into one of those satirical Demotivational posters.
This will not end well:
Zoom in: Just before midnight Friday, Musk once again defended the H-1B program in vulgar, all-caps terms, saying the program was the key to the success of his (and other big American) companies.
“Take a big step back and F–K YOURSELF in the face. I will go to war on this issue the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend,” Musk wrote.
In a separate post, he pledged to “fight to my last drop of blood” to keep America a meritocracy.
Meanwhile, Trump supporters are engaged in as much wishcasting about whose benefits Trump sill slash (not theirs, just those low-caste Irresponsibles) as lefties who believed after the Berlin Wall fell that the “peace dividend” would be a boone for social safety net programs.
Anticipating Donald Trump’s “promised revenge tour,” Josh Marshall floated the idea of about ten days ago that anti-Trumpers with deep pockets assemble a big pile of money for the legal defense of women and men on his enemies list.
Marshall is back to report there is movement on this effort in a good-news, bad-news sort of way. Since then, he’s become aware of “groups or consortia that are organizing to be the place that Trump targets can go when they get their subpoena or their lawsuit,” but for now they are keeping their identities below the radar:
For very real reasons these groups don’t want to draw a lot of attention to themselves. They don’t want themselves to become the targets of harassment and lawfare when they’re trying to defend others from it. If they themselves get run out of business who’s going to be around to help everyone else? So I can’t give websites for these operations that you’d want to look up if you’re a target or show you how to contribute money. They’re not set up that way and they don’t want the attention.
Marshall wonders how this might work and was initially dubious of the approach. But his thinking has shifted:
It’s not just Trump and official MAGA we have to worry about. We’re really facing an era of broader civic disinhibition, in which public and private actors will be declaring war on civil society, government employees and more in ways that simply haven’t happened in the past. There’s no one group that can combat that. And these nascent efforts are going to be a critical part of the equation — for the civil servant who gets harassed, for the nonprofit which needs legal assistance fending off financially ruinous subpoenas. And by this I don’t mean just to say … well, the small stuff. What I mean is that there’s going to be a lot of stuff, across society, across multiple layers of government. There’s a lot to go around. And not every individual or entity wants to become a poster child for MAGA abuses of power. Often they just need someone to pick up the legal work that would have bankrupted the organization or made an individual lose their home.
And defenders of civic society may not care for Trump sending his flying monkeys their way. (“I understood that reference.“)
Marshall floats how his Big Pile of Money (BPM) group might operate. As lawyerly Equalizers, in my view:
One of the best ways I can think of to describe what I’m looking for is by an illusory hypothetical. Let’s imagine there was another billionaire out there — a non-decadent, non-degenerate version of Musk — who said: I believe in America. Every person Trump targets, I’m going to send them a contact number at mega law firm X, which I’ve retained, and it’s an open tab for as long as they need. And if you’re out there wondering if you’re willing to take the risks of doing the right thing over the next four years, I’ll be sending you a contact number too. And I’m going to do more than that. I’m going to use the channels of these abusive lawsuits and criminal investigations to load these folks down with every discovery motion you could have imagined. I’m going to use my cash and the courts not just to protect people but to embarrass and humiliate the abusers, make them wish they’d never started.
That is, after all, how Trump has for decades used lawsuits to harass creditors until they run out of fight (and money) and go away. Defenders must exact a cost on those who would foul the civic square to create a “penumbra of fear,” in Marshall’s words.
But in an age when politics is a pro-wrestling spectacle, BPM groups must be seen doing it. Landing punches, and “damaging and embarrassing and humiliating the other side.” Turning idle spectators into fans and investors in creating a penumbra of safety. Because right now there is only one fighter in the ring throwing folding chairs.
How many Rocky movies?
Marshall concludes:
Any operation that doesn’t play in that realm isn’t playing this performative, public role. That’s critical. It also operates a virtuous or at least non-vicious circle. People need to open their pockets — billionaires and average people. People open their pockets when they’re seeing points put on the board, when they see punches being landed.
First, like it or not, the public wants Thunderdome. The press covers Thunderdome. Thunderdome draws eyeballs in this attention economy. Again, and again and again: How many Rocky movies did Stallone make?
People pay money to see that. They want to cheer for the little guy with heart facing insurmountable odds. They want to watch The Equalizer squash baddies the law cannot touch. Seen any of those lately?
Maybe the Big Pile of Money could run a classified ad.
Niall lives in Thailand and runs a street dog rescue. Every day he has an amazing story about what he does often featuring the story of one dog he’s found in some terrible situation whom they bring back to what he calls “the land” and they fix the pup up both physically and psychologically. Then they find many of them a home there in Thailand and all over the world. One of the dogs was even adopted by Liam Gallagher from Oasis
He also runs sterilization clinics, feeds hundreds of street dogs and gives medication to those who need it every day. And he works closely with the locals to help them take care of their dogs and provides education and medical care. His rescue operation, in which he employs a number of Thai helpers and which also has dedicated volunteers, has satellites in several places around the world and he’s in the process of building an animal hospital on the rescue property.
He is the heart of the operation, a man who just a few short years ago was suffering from alcohol and drug dependency who was saved by saving dogs. It’s a great story. And every day he shares a series of posts about a dog who’s been rescued, rehabbed and very often eventually finds a home. You can see them come back to life and become loving pets after enduring unspeakable hardship. It will make your day.
Here’s a recent one that made me smile the whole day:
This is what a street dog rescue involves from start to finish. Very tough but what a result for Rolo in the end! 🐕
This is a bit of a longer watch but everybody has plenty of time at this time of year 😂 pic.twitter.com/qmsod7QGJG
With all due respect, the look that Prince William sported at the starryreopening of Notre-Dame in Paris this month was nothing special: a well-tailored overcoat, a dark blue tie, a pressed white shirt. And, naturally, his new beard.
But that simple outfit did not fail to wow one luminary.
“He looked really, very handsome last night,” President-elect Donald J. Trump said about the future king of England, according to The New York Post. “Some people look better in person? He looked great. He looked really nice, and I told him that.”
His praise was just the latest instance in which Mr. Trump, 78, had complimented another man’s looks, part of a larger pattern of obsession he has with the personal appearance of individuals. That includes during the presidential campaign, when Mr. Trump often waxed poetic about the pilots posted to Air Force One, during his first term, likening them to taller versions of Tom Cruise.
In the last three months alone, Mr. Trump has praised the looks of a sheriff in Tempe, Ariz.; a Mexican government negotiator; Shinzo Abe, a former leader of Japan; Senator Eric Schmitt, Republican of Missouri; and Mike Pompeo, his former secretary of state, who he noted had lost weight. (“You look so handsome,” he said about Mr. Pompeo.) He also famously alluded to the size of genitalia of the deceased golfer Arnold Palmer, whose looks Mr. Trump has also apparently approved of.
“They look like Arnold Palmer,” Mr. Trump said about a group of gun-toting security officials at an event in October. “Can’t look better than Arnold.”
Mr. Trump’s focus on being easy on the eye seems to extend to personnel decisions, as he has an apparent desire for those serving under him to fit the mold of “central casting,” a superficial but significant strategy of finding telegenic surrogates who look the part, regardless of their actual job qualifications.
Cases in point: Pete Hegseth, Mr. Trump’s pick for secretary of defense after his run as weekend host on Fox News; and Mehmet Oz, also known as Dr. Oz of daytime television fame, tapped to run the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Mr. Trump has also spoken glowingly of the looks of Scott Bessent, his choice for Treasury secretary, who would be serving in his first government job after a long career in finance.
The story actually goes on for quite a while listing dozens of the men Trump has said were handsome. Of course, he constantly talks about his own allegedly exceptional good looks as well and he certainly notices how hot (or not) women are. (He practically had a meltdown over the Time magazine cover of Kamala Harris shrilly insisting that they went back and redid the portrait to make her look better than she is.) He is obsessed with looks. In fact, he makes many of his important decisions based upon what people look like.
Psychologists are interviewed and they say things like it’s “a classic indicator of a narcissist’s need for social conquest” and the need to be a “man’s man.” Perhaps. But I think it’s simpler than that. He does not have the capability of critical thinking and doesn’t understand what most people are telling him. And yes, he is certainly a narcissist. But the chilling fact is that he is simply the shallowest man who ever occupied the presidency.
Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and President-elect Donald Trump’s“first buddy,” revealed on Christmas night that he was using the medication Mounjaro for weight loss while dubbing himself “Ozempic Santa” in a holiday-themed social media post.
The revelation also comes just a couple of weeks after he clashed with Trump’s designated Health and Human Services chief Robert F. Kennedy Jr. over the widespread use and long-term benefits of GLP-1 inhibitors in battling obesity.
Bobby Jr says that we need to ban junk food and sugar and people will eat healthy and they’ll be fine. Isn’t it pretty to think so? (Meanwhile, he’s been seen using Zyn nicotine pouches and if he isn’t using steroids he’s a freak of nature. )
Musk is an acknowledged user of many different drugs, some of which I’ll bet he was using during his Christmas tweet storm (and it wasn’t Ozempic.)
Earlier this month, a rift appeared to grow between Kennedy and Musk over the best way to make the American public healthier, considering that 40 percent of American adults are now considered obese.
During an appearance on Fox News’ Gutfeld! last month, Kennedy argued that making GLP-1 inhibitors available to all overweight Americans would cost taxpayers trillions of dollars, claiming it would be much cheaper just to provide healthier food to the public.
“If we spend about one-fifth of that giving good food, three meals a day, to every man, woman and child in our country, we could solve the obesity and diabetes epidemic overnight,” he said at the time. Of course, this also came as he was infamously forced to pose with Musk and Trump as they dug into a post-election McDonald’s feast on the president-elect’s private plane.
While Kennedy continued to insist that lifestyle change and greater access to organic foods were the keys to making America healthier, Musk contended this month that the expensive weight-loss drugs would make the biggest difference. “Nothing would do more to improve the health, lifespan and quality of life for Americans than making GLP inhibitors super low cost to the public,” Musk wrote on December 11. “Nothing else is even close.”
They’re both right. We should have healthy food available to everyone and the weight loss drugs should also be available at super low cost to the public.
Win-win, MAGA! Get behind that one and you really might have a legacy that isn’t a toxic wasteland.
Here’s another Washington Post story that’s worth reading in full. (gift link) Yes, it’s another one of those “what do the Trump voters really think” stories but this one is a real doozy. They went to Pennsylvania to speak to low income voters who voted for him.
Here’s an example of what they said:
“We helped get you in office; please take care of us,” Mosura said, shifting the conversation as though she were speaking to Trump. “Please don’t cut the things that help the most vulnerable.”
“Trump won’t cut necessary programs, and nowhere has he said he is cutting any of that,” Ryan said. “He is cutting bloated government. He is not cutting programs that work for the American people.”
“It’s not cutting government programs, it’s cutting the amount of people needed to run a program,” Tillia, who said he is unable to work after suffering from mini strokes, said. “They are cutting staff, which could actually increase the amount of the programs that we get.”
Davis, a retired artist, subsists on a monthly $1,300 Social Security payment & $75 in food stamps. She rents her studio apartment for $385 per month. … “We are old & tired & just want to be taken care of, & Trump has too much common sense, so I don’t think he is going to do anything to hurt us.”
I will admit that there’s a huge part of me that thinks these people are getting what they deserve. They are adults and they have agency. They could have resisted the siren’s call of Trump’s Big Hatefest Show. But when you think about the the fact that they all live in communities and among families that are red-pilled Trump cultists and the media diet they are comfortable with is full of propaganda, it’s really not surprising. They simply don’t hear anything else.
(On the other hand I’m going to guess these people are among those who believe that they are entitled to their benefits, it’s just all those undeserving Black and brown people who are eating out of the government through and bankrupting he country. That’s usually how it goes anyway.)
Wishing you & the ones you love (and those you side eye) the #holiday season you deserve! visit shop.franchesca.net to get my new digital album “where’s that leopard lady?” #merrychristmas#leopards#election2024#fyp#fypシ
If you have time to read one long story today, I recommend this one about the South Korea coup attempt in the Washington Post. I’m including a gift link so you can read the whole thing. Let’s just say the echoes are deafening:
Piecing together their accounts shows that Yoon’s plan had probably been months in the making and that he intended to use martial law to target political opponents and pursue baseless election fraud claims — a much more extensive agenda than he has claim
[…]
There was Yoon’s increasingly sharp rhetoric about his opponents. Then came the surprise appointment of his friend as defense minister. Then that minister surrounded himself with loyalists at the top of the chain of command. It seemed as if something as extreme as martial law could be in the works, said Park, formerly the nation’s deputy intelligence chief.
“We knew they were an extremely right-wing force, and they would do things we cannot imagine,” he said. “I warned this is a dangerous situation, it’s going to change quickly.”
All year, South Korea’s domestic political scene had been consumed by scandals — relentlessly targeted by the opposition — alleging corruption involving Yoon’s wife. The government declined to investigate, and the opposition blocked government initiatives, including budget measures, in response.
Yoon became increasingly isolated as he grew more frustrated, analysts say, leaning on a tiny group of loyalists, including Defense Minister Kim Yong-hyun. This made Yoon more volatile, said Park Sung-min, a veteran political consultant.
Yoon’s decision in September to appoint Kim as the top defense official had prompted concerns, Park said. Not only was Kim known to be close to Yoon, the change was highly unusual ahead of the U.S. presidential election, given Seoul’s dependence on Washington for its security, the political consultant said.
Kim’s appointment also drew attention to the use of powerful school connections, which raised flags even in a nation that strongly values alumni networks.
Apparently, he was especially focused on manufactured charges of election interference and fraud. And yes, he did call out the military.
You have to read the whole thing. It’s such a cautionary tale. But then South Korea is apparently a much more highly developed democracy than America (despite our being 250 years old…) so they are actually managing to get rid of the guy who corrupted their government. We don’t do that here. When one of our presidents attempts a coup we send him home to his mansion for a few years to collect a bunch of money and then elect him again.
