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Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Friday Night Soother

Published by digby on April 24, 2026

Bat-eared fox kits. Awwww…

They’re little canines!

This peculiar-looking canine lives in the open savannas and shrublands of Africa, where it burrows underground and uses its exceptional hearing to hunt for termites and beetles.

What does a bat-eared fox look like?

As members of the Canidae family, these animals resemble small, thin dogs. Notably, they have exceptionally large ears, making them look almost like giant bats. 

Their bodies are covered in a silvery-brown fur coat, with a distinctive raccoon-like mask covering their eyes, and black lower legs, feet, and tail tips. They usually weigh between 7 and 12 pounds, similar in size to a large house cat.

Bat-eared foxes are found in two distinct subpopulations in eastern and southern Africa. The animals are adapted to live in the grasslands and savannas of these regions, where wide-open vistas make it easy for them to spot predators and hunt for prey. 

These foxes are prolific diggers, excavating large dens and burrows with the aid of long claws on their forefeet. The dens serve as a shelter and a place to raise their young. The foxes typically sleep in these dens during the daytime and emerge around twilight, although this can vary based on the activity level of their preferred prey.

Bat-eared foxes can have several large dens in their territory. Multiple entrances and exits in each den help them slip by predators, including jackals, eagles, and hyenas. 

What do bat-eared foxes eat?

Primarily insects! Bat-eared foxes are the only member of the dog family that specializes in eating insects. Around 90 percent of their diet in the wild is made up of insects, particularly the harvester termite. 

The remaining part of their diet is just about anything else they can find — fruits, berries, seeds, lizards, eggs, rodents, grasshoppers, beetles, scorpions, crickets, and even some species of fungi. 

Bat eared foxes have the most teeth of any placental mammal — 46 to 50 in total — which scientists believe is an adaptation to help them crunch up insects. 

Bat eared foxes get their name from their ears—and it’s easy to see why. Their ears can reach 5 inches (13 centimeters) long, which helps explain their incredibly good hearing. 

Their hearing is so strong they can pick up on beetles and termites burrowing underground. 

Their ears also help them regulate heat, a handy adaptation for life on the African savanna. By pumping blood through their ears, they can cool themselves off when the weather gets too hot. 

Florida Dummymander, Comin’ Right Up

Published by digby on April 24, 2026

After all the rending of garments and gnashing of teeth over the Virginia redistricting voter being “undemocratic” and “disenfranchising” rural voters, get a load of what Ron Desantis has up his sleeve:

Florida bans lawmakers from intentionally creating congressional seats to give their party an advantage. But Gov. Ron DeSantis quietly has launched a three-tiered power play to evade the ban — and create more GOP-friendly seats — in November.[…]

DeSantis rejected lawmakers’ calls to have an open process and draw the maps during the regular January lawmaking session. Instead, he’s embarked on a plan to have his office redraw Florida’s map, rush the plan through the legislature — and try to run out the clock on Democratic court challenges as the state gears up for the Nov. 3 elections. DeSantis’ clock-management strategy is rooted in three factors:

  1. The “Purcell Principle” — Named after a 2006 U.S. Supreme Court case, this generally limits lower courts from overturning election laws too close to an election to avoid voter confusion.
  • Critics have long complained that Purcell rewards lawmakers who manipulate the clock with late-breaking redistricting changes.

2. The Apex Doctrine and executive privilege — Because his employees are drafting the maps, DeSantis’ team is expected to argue in court that executive privilege shields them. His office argued that in a 2022 redistricting court challenge.

  • In that case, top DeSantis officials involved in drafting those maps also fought to avoid depositions under the Apex Doctrine, which forces a plaintiff to first exhaust efforts to examine low-level employees before targeting high-level ones. That burns court time.

3. Secrecy — DeSantis’ office is drafting the maps in such secrecy that plaintiffs could have trouble finding whom to depose and what records to look for. That would cause more delays.

  • In 2022, DeSantis became the first Florida governor in recent history to submit his own congressional maps that were drafted out of the public eye. Normally, the maps are drawn by legislators, providing a record that court challengers could use draw from to prove intent.
  • DeSantis’ process is so clandestine that Florida legislators who are to vote on the new maps Tuesday hadn’t seen them as of Thursday night.

It’s pointless to call out GOP hypocrisy since they are completely shameless but this is so bad you have to almost admire their chutzpah. They really don’t give a damn about any kind of integrity anymore.

There’s another reason why they’ve been delaying doing this. It’s because they’re already about as gerrymandered as you can get with safe seats. If they do this they may regret it:

There’s a risk in creating more Republican seats in Florida, which requires breaking up Democratic districts or diluting them. That can make surrounding GOP-held seats vulnerable as they get more Democratic voters.

  • And as gas prices climb and Trump’s poll numbers fall, Republicans could lose once-safe seats as Democrats and independents are added to a district.
  • “It’s yin-and-yang: To make blue seats more purple, you have to make red seats more purple,” said one Florida legislative Republican.

Nevertheless, national Republicans who aren’t familiar with the vagaries of Florida’s political geography hope DeSantis will somehow carve out about four new GOP-leaning seats.

Go for it Ron.If it works you’re a hero. If not you’ll go out of office in a blaze of glory (hopefully set back so much that you won’t even have the nerve to run for president in 28. )

Sleepy Donald

Published by digby on April 24, 2026

Maybe if he didn’t stay up all night writing gibberish on Truth Social he wouldn’t be so tired.

Sam Alito, Maga Martyr

Published by digby on April 24, 2026

TPM’s Kate Riga reviews Mollie Hemingway’s new book on the right wing firebrand Justice and it’s so revealing:

At first glance, Federalist Editor-in-Chief Mollie Hemingway’s Alito: The Justice Who Reshaped the Supreme Court and Restored the Constitution is certainly delusional, but not in a way that’s particularly interesting or insightful for a MAGA movement rooted in a cult of personality.

The hagiography of the Court’s most openly partisan archconservative, premised on insider access to the justices and those in their orbit, reads like the gushing raptures of a K-pop stan. 

“Years before the attacks on the Court intensified and conservative justices could still be seen in public, Justice Alito and his wife attempted to get brunch in New Haven, Connecticut, after a speaking event at Yale. Turned away because of a long line and lack of reservation, they ‘calmly walked away and went down the street,’” she writes, his not forcing himself into a packed restaurant apparent proof of a rare moral rectitude. 

But as I reread, the humor in her labored attempts to dredge up proof of the curmudgeonly justice’s humanity — his devotion to the Phillies does much of the heavy lifting — curdled into something much darker. 

Hemingway seeds her book with the omnipresent threat of leftist violence from its opening pages, where her treatment of anti-Kavanaugh protesters (with no mention of why they were protesting his nomination) puts them on par with the January 6 insurrectionists. 

“One woman scaled the gigantic statue Contemplation of Justice on the left side of the main steps and perched, first raised, on the marble lap of the seated female figure. The activist later justified her lawbreaking by declaring, ‘This is our court, these are our steps, these are our institutions!’” she writes. 

That harrowing anecdote, page 3, is around where her examples of left-wing violence untether from reality completely.

Right. A woman scaling a statue and claiming the court belongs to the people is far worse than beating up police, and storming the Capitol to stop the peaceful transfer of power, not to mention the chanting of “hang Mike Pence” with a gallows conveniently assembled outside on the lawn. Certainly the fact that the president of the United States invited them to do it no big deal compared to the alleged leftist violence that has Republicans terrified of being dragged from their beds and lynched on the spot.

Riga totally gets it:

Paeans to Alito’s brilliance and humility can only produce so much juice; this book, like the MAGA movement, needs at least the threat of violence to justify its sense of being under siege. 

In her telling, the still mysterious leak of Alito’s Dobbs opinion, which would overturn Roe v. Wade, is less a shocking piercing of the Court’s well-insulated bubble and more an open declaration of war on the conservative justices. 

“Abortion supporters had an incentive to kill one or more of the justices in the majority to change the outcome,” she writes, straight-faced. 

Fergawdsakes. Get over yourself Mollie.

She actually goes on to name the liberal clerks she suspects are the ones who leaked it. Nice.

Alito is a far right ideologues badly infected with Fox New brain rot, barely able to contain himself. His wife can’t. To paint him as the middle of the road, dispassionate jurist battling the forces of far-left extremism is kind of hilarious. But it’s a perfect example of how they think.

Oh Boo F-ing Hoo

Published by digby on April 24, 2026

Gee, I wonder how they got themselves into this dilemma? Oliver Darcy reports:

Journalists across Washington are trying to determine how to respond if Donald Trump derides the press at Saturday’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner, Status has learned. “There are lots of discussions about it,” one high-profile Washington journalist told me Thursday. “If he starts attacking us, I think it is a fair question as to what the appropriate response is. Obviously some people will want to walk out, but the question about such a thing is: does that not give him exactly what he wants, making us the opposition, not the Fourth Estate? Making us the story instead of the journalists covering the story? And, suggesting that we can dish it out but we can’t take it? And so I don’t think there is any easy answer.”

Of course, that’s precisely right. There is no great answer for how to respond in such a scenario—which is why some journalists have said it is better to skip the event entirely, given the WHCA’s decision to invite Trump. Perhaps outlets like MS NOW will give their talent more leeway in how they respond. And, with thousands of journalists in the room, my guess is there could be some audible boos or voicing of disagreement with any attacks. In any case, most journalists will not want to make themselves the story, putting them in an awkward position as the cameras pan. But trying to laugh it off risks projecting the wrong optics, too. So what is the right response?

► Related: The NYT explained why it has for years opted against attending the annual dinner: “We don’t want to leave readers with any questions about our independence and credibility by seeming to be overly friendly with people whose words and actions we need to report on.”

This was when I knew the event had jumped the shark. It was 2002:

I only wish he had broken out into a rousing rendition of “War Pigs.” It would have been so apropos for 2002.

The only one of these things that’s been truly worthwhile was this one:

Ballsiest performance I’ve ever seen.

The Brain Is Mush

Published by digby on April 24, 2026

What the SPLC has to do with the 2020 election is anyone’s guess but for some reason his scattered mind rushes to any excuse to remind people of his devastating, humiliating loss. He’s obsessed with it to such a degree that it’s warped whatever small piece is sanity was left and eats away at him like a parasite devouring him from within.

But sure, he’s fine. That kind of statement from the president of the United States is no reason to worry that we might be in some kind of existential danger. Carry on.

People Express hasn’t existed since the 1980s and if he’s talking about Jet Blue, it was Biden not Obama. But ok. Biden was just so old.

You should watch that whole press event if you get the chance. It’s … something.

The Wheels Are Coming Off

Published by Tom Sullivan on April 24, 2026

MAGAs are losing it

Local cookie aisle, April 19.

Win McCormack at The New Republic contemplates what makes bullies like Donald Trump cave. It may be, he considers, Trump’s saving grace:

My principal concern right now is the midterm elections, and whether our system of democracy will continue to prevail or be seriously compromised or even snuffed out completely by Trump. I didn’t mention above my conviction that Trump is, above all, a destroyer, and his goal, consciously or unconsciously, is to destroy every good aspect of the American project, top to bottom, in every field of endeavor and accomplishment. But I also didn’t mention what I consider his saving grace, though that might not be the right term for it. I refer to the all-important fact that he is, I believe, quintessentially a coward, with a host of fears that run very deep and haunt him. He can be brutal, but only when it is easy and safe to be brutal—when he thinks the field before him is wide open to such behavior.

What concerns me is not just what Trump will do in the days leading up to and after the November election, but how his ride-or-die supporters will react to Dear Leader and MAGA Republicans gettting body-slammed by voters and facing in a Democrat-controlled Congress honest-to-god, rigorous investigations of adminstration perfidy (fingers crossed). They are painfully aware of how bad the economy is. They know his promise to lower prices “starting on Day One” was a fraud. He’s irrational besides, writes McCormack.

The tariff issue, on which The Donald still refuses to acknowledge that tariffs are paid by the receiver of foreign goods rather than the sender, is one example of the actual operation of his befuddled mind.

His supporters are paying the price for it.

Trump has betrayed them on keeping America out of foreign wars. The Iran war has driven up the cost of everything. They know it every time they fill up or buy groceries. Any reminder drives some of them ape-shit.

Ten days ago I recounted the reaction of one driver to a roadside message: PLAN NOW FOR YOUR $5/GAL STAYCATION. The driver of a work truck doing about 35 mph, popped open his door and stepped out onto the running board of the vehicle he was driving to scream at Sign Guy. He risked his life, the life of his passenger, and the lives of surrounding motorists in the process. He was that out of control.

Everyone feels like the wheels are coming off the country. So the point of such a message is not to goad MAGAs (a minority here; the county went 61-37 for Kamala Harris in 2024). It is to acknowledge commuters’ struggles, to help them feel seen. But it’s also a Rorschach ink blot that an unbalanced handful perceive as a poke in the eye.

This week features a sign inspired by the cookie aisle at the grocery store (image above): $4 OREOS IN 2024 NOW COST OVER $6. * It’s a product everyone knows, fondly remembers from childhood, and buys for their kids. It’s not an economic abstraction. It’s personal. And in Trump’s economy, it’s become unaffordable. The entire cookie aisle on Sunday was lined with sale stickers. No one’s buying. Guess why.

A driver this week was so incensed at being reminded that $4 OREOS IN 2024 NOW COST OVER $6 that he exited and initiated a physical altercation that ended with the intervention of pedestrians. I asked if he really wanted to explain to a judge that he assaulted a senior citizen over the price of Oreos. But they are that crazy.

It will get worse before it gets better, others have said before me. But if they’re this crazy now, the worse the economy gets for them and for Trump through the summer, and the worse prospects look for Republicans heading into November, they’ll feel even more like cornered animals. Buckle up.

On advice of friends, Sign Guy ordered a body camera.

Update: Photos by Julie Harrison

* One woman threw her hands wide behind her windshield and said (I could read her lips), “I know, right!?”

Tucker Isn’t Sorry For Being Tucker

Published by Tom Sullivan on April 24, 2026

The come-to-Jesus apology that isn’t

Michelle Goldberg considers the press that Tucker Carlson is getting this week over his admission(?) that he’d “be tormented for a long time by the fact that I played a role in getting Donald Trump elected. And I want to say that I’m sorry for misleading people.”

Carlson went on, speaking to his brother, Buckley: “You and I and everyone else who supported him – you wrote speeches for him, I campaigned for him – I mean, we’re implicated in this for sure,” Carlson said. “It’s not enough to say, ‘Well, I changed my mind’. “

That’s the exchange that drew all the headlines. But the brothers Carlson were not done. They went on to construct a conspiracy theory for explaining where Trump went wrong.

Goldberg writes (gift link):

I’m all for embracing converts to the anti-Trump cause. But if you listen to the dialogue between Tucker and his brother, it’s clear that rather than honestly reckoning with their role in America’s derangement, they’re developing a new conspiracy theory to explain it away.

Trump, they strongly imply, has been compromised — maybe even blackmailed and physically threatened — by Zionist or globalist forces seeking the deliberate destruction of the United States. On Tucker’s podcast, Buckley described a systematic undermining of America through the George Floyd protests, mass migration and now the war with Iran.

“It can’t be a confluence of random events,” Buckley said. “It is clearly by design. It’s clearly been a long-term plan.”

So is his brother Tucker’s career. Trump is on his way out. So Tucker Carlson is putting some daylight between himself and Trump without putting daylight between himself and the MAGA audience that keeps him living the celebrity lifestyle to which he’s become accustomed. Tucker will need them to keep buying what he’s selling in a post-Trump America. Knowing they’ll choose a TV huckster rather than a competent lawmaker, perhaps as some speculate, he even sees an opening to run for president himself. This isn’t Carlson’s come-to-Jesus moment some are celebrating. It’s positioning.

Goldberg lets the hot air out of the Carlsons’ ass-covering, “the Jews made Trump do it” theory. The plain truth is, Goldberg explains, Trump has “never been better than this, and he didn’t need to be manipulated to make everything in America worse.”

Nor did Tucker Carlson, as Jon Stewart pointed out on CNN’s “Crossfire” 20 years ago.

Rolling Stone reminds its readers that Carlson’s performative career has always involved presenting one face to the right wing media-consuming public while keeping his real opinions to himself:

In private text messages to his colleagues at Fox News — which were only revealed after the network was sued for defamation by Dominion Voting Systems — Carlson referred to the president as a “demonic” around the time of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. “I hate him passionately,” Carlson wrote at the time. “I can’t handle much more of this.”

And yet within a year, he was campaigning for Trump’s reelection and floating conspiracy theories that the Jan.6 attack on the capitol was simply the work of “tourists.”

If Carlson had reservations about the president — and we know he did — he pushed them down and did what he swore he would never again do after being burned by the Iraq war. He once again set aside his own concerns, his disdain, and his supposed principles, in service of the right-wing movement du jour. Carlson likely did so believing that even though he despised the president, the ends would justify the means, and he could use his platform and connections to influence outcomes and check the excesses of the man he once called the “single most repulsive person on the planet.”

Carlson’s admission that he had fallen for the charlatan figurehead of this movement should not be mistaken for an act of true contrition. His break with the president comes after years of documented disgust of Trump, and at a moment where a public rebuke of the president comes with no severe political cost. The Iran war is unpopular, Trump’s approval is at a historic low, and his conservative allies are becoming increasingly comfortable breaking with him on an issue-by-issue basis — or entirely.

Before I’ll credit him with conversion, I’ll wait until Tucker Carlson apologizes for being Tucker Carlson.

Guess What’s Coming…

Published by digby on April 23, 2026

This time Trump has a blank check and it’s a recipe for disaster. Trump wants the government to buy the most detested, failing airline in the country and I have to say, it makes sense for him. After all, he is the most detested failing president.

Catherine Rampell writes:

IF DONALD TRUMP HAS HIS WAY, America’s Worst Airline™ might soon become our national flagship carrier. Yes, I’m talking about Spirit Airlines.

The ultra-low-cost carrier is going bust. It’s been in trouble for a while: It filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection last summer, for the second time in less than a year, and is now facing the prospect of liquidation. That’s largely because it cannot survive the sky-high1 jet-fuel prices caused by Trump’s Iran war, which is expected to raise Spirit’s costs by an estimated $360 million this year. You can’t sell enough $40 fares to fill that hole in the balance sheet.

One solution Trump is considering? A bailout, on the taxpayer’s dime.

The Trump administration is considering dumping $500 million in taxpayer money into the struggling airline. In exchange, the government would receive warrants allowing it to take up to a 90 percent stake in the company.

“We’re thinking about doing it. Helping them out, meaning bailing them out. Or buying it. I think we just buy it,” Trump said in the Oval Office on Thursday evening. “We’d be getting it virtually debt-free. They have some good aircraft, some good assets, and when the price of oil goes down, we’d sell it for a profit. I’d love to be able to save those jobs. I’d love to be able to save an airline. I like having a lot of airlines so it’s competitive. . . . If we could get it for the right price, I’d do it.”

He wants to save these jobs but presided over the biggest job loss of federal employees in history and laughed about it.

His last foray into this went belly up but this time he has the full faith and credit of the United States behind it. Just watch. He will rename it Trump Air.

By the way:

[C]onsider that Trump actually tried to run an airline before. It was called Trump Shuttle, and it was a spectacular failure, lasting a whopping three years without ever turning a profit. That may have had something to do with his jets, which were decked out with gold-colored bathroom fixtures.

But what finally put Trump Shuttle under was—drum roll, please—high jet-fuel prices, caused by a war in the Middle East. But sure, let’s put another failing airline3 under his purview, or better yet the purview of his Department of Transportation. It’s not like there are any problems over there.4

Is there anything in his life that isn’t a do-over????

All The President’s Moods

Published by Tom Sullivan on April 23, 2026

Is being an asshole in his genes too?

Politico:

The Trump administration saw yet another high-profile departure Wednesday, with Navy Secretary John Phelan heading to the exits. Senate Republicans are bracing for even more.

President Donald Trump’s recent administration shakeup — the sacking of Kristi Noem and Pam Bondi as well as this week’s departure of Lori Chavez-DeRemer — has created openings for a slew of potential confirmations, and GOP senators are contemplating who might be next and how quickly Trump should make any further changes.

No Republicans are publicly urging any particular oustings. But privately GOP senators believe Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and FBI Director Kash Patel could be at risk of leaving — voluntarily or not.

“He’s in a bad mood,” one GOP senator said about Trump. “He’s preparing to really let a lot of them go.”

So, situation normal.

Norm Eisen, former White House Special Counsel for Ethics and Government Reform, as well as former and board chair of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), is exactly the kind of American Donald Trump hates: someone with ethics. Especially since Eisen served as special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee for Trump’s first impeachment.

Trump went after Eisen on Truth Social Wednesday night.

He IS in a mood, isn’t he? I’d missed this (Newsweek):

President Donald Trump has called for Fox News host Jessica Tarlov to be taken off the air, calling her “one of the least attractive and talented people” on television.

Writing on Truth Social on Thursday, Trump said: “Her voice is so grating and terrible, I had to ‘turn her off!’”

Yes, but does Trump run out of the room when he hears her voice like my spouse does with his?

Tarlov, a former Democratic Party strategist and co-host of Fox News’ The Five, said on Thursday that Trump now had a “35 percent approval rating in most polls,” adding that “no Americans wanted the tariffs, they didn’t want the war in Iran, and they don’t want the ballroom.”

That explains his dumping on Tarlov. Eisen told Jennifer Rubin the Department of Justice should be renamed the Department of Trump.