Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

We’ve lost a true auteur.

This tribute by Kyle Mclaughlin is one of the best I’ve ever read:

Forty-two years ago, for reasons beyond my comprehension, David Lynch plucked me out of obscurity to star in his first and last big budget movie. He clearly saw something in me that even I didn’t recognize. I owe my entire career, and life really, to his vision.
What I saw in him was an enigmatic and intuitive man with a creative ocean bursting forth inside of him. He was in touch with something the rest of us wish we could get to.

Our friendship blossomed on Blue Velvet and then Twin Peaks and I always found him to be the most authentically alive person I’d ever met.

David was in tune with the universe and his own imagination on a level that seemed to be the best version of human. He was not interested in answers because he understood that questions are the drive that make us who we are. They are our breath.

While the world has lost a remarkable artist, l’ve lost a dear friend who imagined a future for me and allowed me to travel in worlds I could never have conceived on my own.

I can see him now, standing up to greet me in his backyard, with a warm smile and big hug and that Great Plains honk of a voice. We’d talk coffee, the joy of the unexpected, the beauty of the world, and laugh.

His love for me and mine for him came out of the cosmic fate of two people who saw the best things about themselves in each other.

I will miss him more than the limits of my language can tell and my heart can bear. My world is that much fuller because I knew him and that much emptier now that he’s gone.

David, I remain forever changed, and forever your Kale. Thank you for everything.

How beautiful.

You’re welcome.

They seem serious:

A pair of 50-page policy proposals laying out the plan in detail. Discussions about the specifics with President-elect Donald J. Trump and his advisers. And talks with cabinet nominees about how to pay for it.

On the eve of Mr. Trump’s inauguration, the cryptocurrency industry is pushing his incoming administration to execute an audacious plan that would have seemed unimaginable just a year ago: a government program to buy and hold billions of dollars in Bitcoin.

As he campaigned last summer, Mr. Trump vowed to create a federal “Bitcoin stockpile” that would serve as a “permanent national asset to benefit all Americans.” Bitcoin enthusiasts hailed the idea as potentially transformative, claiming that it would help reduce the national debt. Mr. Trump could still abandon the plan, and its details are under debate. But industry executives have spent weeks lobbying to shape the proposal, raising hopes that Mr. Trump might act soon after taking office.

The Bitcoin-bros have been working with David Sachs, Musks’ fellow South African loon who Trump has named his “crypto Czar.” They’re trying to sell it as a way to pay off the national debt and “U.S. economic dominance if the global economy someday runs on cryptocurrencies.” Right.

But the most obvious beneficiaries would be people who already own Bitcoin, which surged to a record price of $100,000 last month. Any indication that the government plans to buy it is likely to send prices even higher. In September, Mr. Trump rolled out his own crypto venture, World Liberty Financial.

You don’t say.

This is clearly a scam designed to boost the price and prepare for a big government bailout when the whole thing comes crashing down.

Brad Garlinghouse, the chief executive of the crypto company Ripple, said in an interview that he had recently had dinner with Mr. Trump at Mar-a-Lago, and that he had encouraged the president-elect and his advisers to establish a federal stockpile containing Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, including XRP, a coin closely tied to Ripple’s business.

“He cares about really living up to his desired legacy of being the crypto president,” Mr. Garlinghouse said.

Have we ever seen such delusions of grandeur from any president? Of course, the main legacy will be as the most corrupt president in US history.

Remember this from the TIME interview with Trump?

Can I ask, Did Elon Musk meet with the Iranians at your behest? 

I don’t know that he met with them.

Reportedly he met with the Iranians.

I don’t know. He didn’t tell me that.

That was regarding the stories that were circulating about Musk meeting with the Iranian UN ambassador for an hour in New York and nobody knew exactly why.

Since Trump is a pathological liar it’s possible that he knew very well what Musk was doing and may have even dispatched him to do it. Or maybe not.

It looks like we now know why:

Last week, the journalist, Cecilia Sala, 29, was released from prison in Iran, and days later an Iranian engineer whom Italy had detained on an American extradition request was also freed. The engineer was accused of providing material for drones used in an Iranian-backed militia attack on a U.S. military base that killed three American servicemen.

Mr. Musk helped secure the release of Ms. Sala by reaching out to Iran’s ambassador to the U.N., Amir Saeid Iravani, according to two Iranian officials, one a senior diplomat at the Foreign Ministry, who are both familiar with the terms of the prisoner exchange. They asked that their names not be published because they were discussing a sensitive issue.

[…]

Ms. Meloni said at a news conference last week that Ms. Sala’s release was the result of a “complex work of diplomatic triangulation with Iran, and obviously also with the United States of America.” Her office and the Italian Foreign Ministry declined to comment for this article.

A senior Biden administration official said the American government had not been consulted about the negotiations, had not been given advance word about the releases, and disapproved of the deal. John Kirby, the spokesman for the National Security Council, said that the deal had been “an Italian decision from soup to nuts.”

Meloni says she didn’t know anything about Musk’s role either. Sure. Musk is backing far-right parties like Meloni’s all over Europe and is also pushing his own business interests:

Italy, for example, is currently exploring a potential deal with Mr. Musk’s SpaceX to provide secure communications for government and military officials through Starlink.

According to the Times the whole thing was orchestrated by the journalist’s boyfriend who happened to know that Musk has an inside track with the Iranians (he does?) and he’s also close with Trump.

This whole story stinks to high heaven. I’m not sure if it’s better or worse if Trump and Meloni didn’t know anything about it or if they did. Is he just operating as a rogue agent doing anything he wants or has Trump been running back channels to Iran while out of office?

Regardless, Musk is now known to have secured the release of an Iranian terrorist who is responsible for the deaths of three American servicemembers. You don’t even want to think about what a hue and cry this would raise if it had been done off the books by a buddy of Joe BIden.

Charlie Kirk just exuding that “masculine energy” Mark Zuckerberg is going on about.

You won’t believe this but that is Trump’s official inauguration portrait.

“Trump went with the mugshot aesthetic for the new Presidential Portrait. Trump chose violence,” YouTuber Benny Johnson posted on Elon Musk’s social media site, comparing the two images. “President Trump’s new presidential portrait has been revealed. BADASS,” conservative political commentator Nick Sortor posted. “This goes HARD. Total mugshot vibes.”

“Love it!!” MAGA talking head Laura Loomer added. Over on Instagram, one person hailed the image as the “supervillain pic of the year,” while another person added: “That look mean it’s going down.”

Has lead in the water caused massive delayed adolescence?

The Wall St. Journal’s Callum Borchers wrote about the new moves among corporations to end their DEI programs. It seems like it’s coming in an avalanche — McDonalds, Walmart, Meta and many others have announced in recent days that their commitment to making their workplaces more diverse and equitable is over.

But that means mediocre white guys no longer have any excuse:

I wondered how these self-described DEI casualties are feeling. So, I spoke this week with the aggrieved engineer and seven others who contacted me with stories about doors allegedly closed on them because they were the wrong race or gender. Most feared for their jobs and insisted I not name them publicly. 

They generally believe they’re more likely to get hired or promoted in an environment where Donald Trump is president, Robby Starbuck’s name-and-shame threats loom over corporate America, and Mark Zuckerberg heralds “masculine energy” on Joe Rogan’s podcast. Their optimism isn’t unbridled, however. Some told me they worry about a bro renaissance going too far and harming women and people of color. 

And a few are mulling an ego-rattling possibility: What if I’ve pinned my failures on diversity, only to discover that the stumbling block is…me?

They say the retreat of corporate DEI removes a barrier for them—or, perhaps, an excuse they’ve used to rationalize life’s losses.

A 26-year-old chief of staff at a New York software startup suspects his college and career prospects were dimmed because he doesn’t advance diversity goals as a straight, white man. He remembers his high-school guidance counselor telling him he wouldn’t get into the Ivy League for this reason, and in subsequent years he has chalked up professional disappointments to the effects of DEI.

Now he’s considering whether diversity was a boogeyman.

“I’m sure there have been times that I attributed too much to DEI when I didn’t get an opportunity,” he says. “Maybe I didn’t come across well in an interview and I could do more introspection.”

Somehow I doubt there’s going to be much introspection among most white bros who aren’t making it. Long before there was anything called DEI, they were finding ways to blame others for their shortcomings.

I’d start looking for another three letter acronym Boogeyman now that CRT and DEI have done their work. There must be some other program designed to help women, LGBT and people of color they can demonize. I guess there’s always the disabled.

That pig Donald Trump demanded that they raise the flags that are lowered for Jimmy Carter for him and his submissive pet Mike Johnson saluted smartly and said yes sir. They will be raised for Dear Leader.

You can bet Nixon didn’t think much of Truman. But even he didn’t deign to disrespect him the way Trump is disrespecting Carter.

A clear and present danger

After the obligatory niceties and review of his accomplishments in office, President Joe Biden’s farewell address from the Oval Office got to the nub of it: America is at risk. That is, from “the dangerous concentration of power in the hands of a very few ultrawealthy people.”

Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead. We see the consequences all across America. And we’ve seen it before.

More than a century ago, the American people stood up to the robber barons back then and busted the trusts. They didn’t punish the wealthy. They just made the wealthy play by the rules everybody else had. Workers want rights to earn their fair share. You know, they were dealt into the deal, and it helped put us on the path to building the largest middle class, the most prosperous century any nation the world has ever seen. We’ve got to do that again.

The ultrawealthy and their enablers among the Republican Party have made no secret for decades that their goal is eradicating post-New Deal America and returning to the McKinley era of robber barons.

William Greider warned two decades ago:

The movement’s grand ambition—one can no longer say grandiose—is to roll back the twentieth century, quite literally. That is, defenestrate the federal government and reduce its scale and powers to a level well below what it was before the New Deal’s centralization. With that accomplished, movement conservatives envision a restored society in which the prevailing values and power relationships resemble the America that existed around 1900, when William McKinley was President. Governing authority and resources are dispersed from Washington, returned to local levels and also to individuals and private institutions, most notably corporations and religious organizations. The primacy of private property rights is re-established over the shared public priorities expressed in government regulation. Above all, private wealth—both enterprises and individuals with higher incomes—are permanently insulated from the progressive claims of the graduated income tax.

They reactionary rich were patient, Grieder continued, methodical. They “understand that three steps forward, two steps back still adds up to forward progress. It’s a long march, they say. Stick together, because we are winning.” And well-funded. Extremely well-funded.

Biden the D.C. long-hauler might not have seen it in 2003, but he sees it now:

You know, in his farewell address, President Eisenhower spoke of the dangers of the military-industrial complex. He warned us that about, and I quote, “The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power.” Six days — six decades later, I’m equally concerned about the potential rise of a tech-industrial complex that could pose real dangers for our country as well.

Americans are being buried under an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation enabling the abuse of power. The free press is crumbling. Editors are disappearing. Social media is giving up on fact-checking. The truth is smothered by lies told for power and for profit. We must hold the social platforms accountable to protect our children, our families and our very democracy from the abuse of power. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence is the most consequential technology of our time, perhaps of all time.

Just as the GOP teamed up with the religious right to usher in the Reagan era, the oligarchy greasing palms in Donald Trump’s America has teamed not only with Christian nationalists, but with autocrats, white supremacists and, as I’ve argued, rump-royalists who would rather be subjects than citizens. Not in McKinley’s America from the end of the 19th century, but in the Old South at the end of the 18th. (Someone must have drawn up a Venn diagram.)

This is serious, and it’s not as if any of it is new. Biden twice argued that to undo the new Gilded Age that the ultrawealthy must again be made to pay their “fair share” in taxes.

Though of lesser international stature than Biden, historian Rutger Bregman made the same case five years ago, not into a camera but into the very faces of the world’s economic elite.

I just have one question….

Give Trump’s cabinet nominees this much: they were thoroughly coached for their confirmation hearings.

Whenever a Senate committee member this week asked Fox News weekend co-anchor Pete Hegseth (nominee for secretary of defense) to answer allegations of drunkenness or whatever, his default answer was “anonymous smears.” Over and over. Despite senators telling him to his face that the committee has documents naming the people, including Fox co-workers, who made those allegations.

When Democratic senators on Wednesday asked Pam Bondi (nominee for attorney general) if she agreed with positions taken by her prospective employer (Donald Trump), the former Florida attorney general defaulted multiple times to variations on “I’m not familiar with the statement.”

To date, no Democrat has as I suggested asked any Trump nominee if they had reason to doubt their qualifications for the job, and if they did, why they accepted anyway.

But another question that came up a couple of times in Bondi’s hearing was whether she would admit that President Trump lost the 2020 election. Hegseth and other Trump supporters have similarly refused to say so.

It must appear to the casual observer, and especially to MAGA Republicans, like a “gotcha” question, a trap to draw Trump’s ire. Everyone knows that Trump refuses to admit he lost. To salve his bruised ego, he still claims the election was stolen. Trump considers it a sign of fealty and obeisance, like kowtowing to the emperor, that his subjects agree. To the likes of Hegseth and Bondi, the question must feel like an anti-inquisitor’s demand to renounce the MAGA faith. But for people pursuing the responsibility for upholding the U.S. Constitution and the republic it is more meaningful than that.

Asking a Trump cabinet nominee — yes/no — whether Donald Trump lost the 2020 election is not a “gotcha” question. It’s a test. Do you have the spine, the personal integrity, to disagree with your future boss when he’s wrong or demands you do something improper or illegal?

Pam Bondi doesn’t have a spine. Nor does Pete Hegseth, though he may have faced bullets in combat.

Bondi, Hegseth, MAGA Republicans in elected office, and the foot soldiers at Trump’s rallies have mistaken bluster for courage. The more they double down on the former, the more obvious it is that they lack the latter. And they’ll never admit it. They’re lying to themselves and to us.

Their refusal marks them as subjects, not citizens. They have no business serving in a democratic republic. But then, that’s not Donald Trump aim for this country, is it?

This has been a public service announcement.