Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Avarice and Artifice

Since before the days of traveling medicine shows, Americans displayed a knack both for peddling bullshit and for buying it. Cultural touchstone: Dorothy’s Professor Marvel. Paradigm case: the 2024 presidential election. But the latter is simply a more visible instance of the phenomenon. Let’s look at two cases of Americans’ willingness to believe that private capitalism is always superior at delivering services over collective, government, not-for-profit programs. As with snake oil, it begins with a con man. With avarice and artifice.

Timothy Noah this morning considers efforts to privatize Medicare. Donald Trump claims he won’t. (Trump also makes claims about his height, weight, and net worth.) Noah cites a Wall Street Journal report from Wednesday (I don’t have access) that shows that despite widely touted claims that the private sector is more efficient at providing health care, well, it does not. In fact, private health care for seniors is an extraction industry where Medicare Advantage policies excel “in the filing of fraudulent claims.”

Insurance industry whistleblower, Wendell Potter, cautions that the real “Advantage” is for insurers, not the insured. And not for the taxpayer, Noah explains:

Medicare Advantage looks to people over 65 like a better deal because it covers things traditional Medicare doesn’t, such as visits to the dentist or the eye doctor. Some plans even cover acupuncture! But if you get seriously ill and need to be referred to a specialist, Medicare Advantage isn’t so great. An April 2022 study by the Health and Human Services department’s inspector general found that 13 percent of the referrals denied under Medicare Advantage would have been approved under traditional Medicare.

Medicare Advantage also shows that health care privatization is a lousy deal for taxpayers. Medicare Advantage costs the federal government 7 percent more per enrollee than traditional Medicare, according to an August 2024 study by the fiscally conservative Peter G. Peterson Foundation. For enrollees with similar health profiles, Medicare Advantage costs 22 percent more, according to the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission.

Perhaps that’s because, as the Journal’s investigations found, Medicare Advantage insurers routinely pad their government reimbursement requests with spurious diagnoses. For example, an astounding 66,000 Medicare Advantage patients were diagnosed with diabetic cataracts even after these patients had surgery to correct them, making that diagnosis, in the Journal’s words, “anatomically impossible.” In other instances, patients whom Medicare Advantage insurers reported as HIV positive received none of the recommended treatments. If a doctor failed to furnish a desired diagnosis, insurers dispatched a nurse to the patient’s home to find one. Medicare Advantage insurers also conned veterans into enrolling in the program even though they were already covered adequately by the Veterans Administration health system, which has repeatedly been demonstrated to be superior to private hospital care (something else the public is reluctant to believe).

But then there’s a future electorate born every minute. “The challenge with all privatization schemes is that private sector doesn’t aspire to save the government money,” Noah concludes. “Why should it?” That’s at odds with maximizing profit.

Education Advantage

My friend Jeff Bryant, a public schools advocate, pointed on Thursday to The Progressive‘s critique of the movement to privatize public schools. Carol Burris begins with a 2017 “rightwing billionaire-funded documentary created by the late Andrew Coulson,” Schools Inc., which argued “that for-profit schooling, funded by parents without government involvement, is the best delivery model for education.” Detect a theme here?

The “school choice movement,” which Coulson’s documentary promoted, has always been a classic bait-and-switch swindle: Charter schools were the bait for vouchers, and vouchers the lure for public acceptance of market-based schooling. While narrow debates about accountability, taxpayer costs, and the public funding of religious schools raise important concerns, the gravest threat posed by the school choice movement is its ultimate objective: putting an end to public responsibility for education. 

This goal is not a secret. The libertarian right has openly dreamed of ending public education for the past seventy years—the economist Milton Friedman advocated for school choice as early as 1955, and his acolytes have continued to do so ever since.

It’s a wonder that public school privatization advocates don’t call voucher schemes Education Advantage.

Burris continues:

The America First Policy Institute, where Trump’s Secretary of Education nominee Linda McMahon serves as board chair, states in its recent policy agenda that “the authority for educating children rests with parents.” As public responsibility for schooling shifts to parents, educational subsidies will be gradually reduced until Friedman and Coulson’s dream of a fully for-profit marketplace that competes for students is achieved.

This is a twofer for the Midas cult. As I’ve noted repeatedly, education spending is the largest portion of the annual budget in all 50 states and mandated in state constitutions from coast to coast and beyond. The Market demands its cut:

The impulse among conservatives to privatize everything involving public expenditures – schools included – is no longer just about shrinking government, lowering their taxes and eliminating funding sources for their political competitors. Now it’s about their opportunity costs, potential profits lost to not-for-profit public-sector competitors. It’s bad enough that government “picks their pockets” to educate other people’s children. But it’s unforgivable that they’re not getting a piece of the action. Now they want to turn public education into private profits too.

School deserts

Donald Trump once said, “I love the poorly educated.” So does the Midas cult. They’ve offshored jobs to countries with lower labor costs where those countries’ taxpayers pay to educate them, not ours. Thomas Wilson, former CEO of Allstate, explained offshoring jobs bluntly, “I can get [workers] anywhere in the world. It is a problem for America, but it is not necessarily a problem for American business …” Higher-skilled workers they can import. Ask Elon Musk.

Burris continues:

And what about those who refuse to pay? Former Arizona legislator Paul Mosley wanted to end compulsory schooling in his state, claiming that what was once a privilege was now “being forced down everyone’s throat.” The Cato Institute has similarly signaled its approval of “unschooling,” a practice of eschewing formal education altogether in favor of informal learning. If education is governed as a marketplace, they claim, you have the right not to shop at all. 

The implications of this approach are profound. In a pay-as-you-go system, few families will have the financial means to educate a special needs child outside the home. What’s more, families in rural areas will be left with few options, if any: In the for-profit marketplace, why go where customers are few and nonaffluent? If your Muslim or Jewish child lives in a town where the majority “choose” a Christian school, there may be no secular option. Schools opening and closing based on profit margins will be commonplace—more than one in four charter schools already closes by its fifth year of operation.

Can you say school deserts? That’s how it works with groceries, eh? Poorly educated workers desperate to do menial, low-paying jobs are a corporatist’s wet dream. And a countryside filled with them is a stake in the heart of a democratic republic. It begins with a con man. It ends with oligarchy, or worse.

Any more like Massie on the back bench?

Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.) is still working to secure enough votes to re-up his speakership despite the endorsement of the president-elect. The House votes to elect a speaker for the 119th Congress at noon today (Friday). With the GOP’s razor-thin margin, more than two defections can sink him.

The Hill:

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) affirmed his decision to not support Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.) in the Speaker’s race, even if his colleague Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) would land a top spot on the House Rules Commitee. 

Massie was asked by former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), a new host on One America News Network, if he would vote for Johnson if Roy would become the chairman of the influential committee.

“Oh no. You can pull all my fingernails out, you can shove bamboo up in them, you can start cutting off my fingers,” Massie responded late Thursday.

“I am not voting for Mike Johnson tomorrow, and you can take that to the bank,” he told his former colleague.

With Gaetz’s resignation last month, the GOP caucus has just 219 members, assuming they are all present. Johnson needs 218 votes if he expects to win on the first ballot. An acrimonous, weeks-long, Republican circus elected him to the post in October 2023.

Place your bets.

KILMEADE: “Do these Republicans realize how embarrassing and humiliating it was last time they couldn’t pick a speaker?” pic.twitter.com/Y3f1fQVr94

— The Tennessee Holler (@TheTNHoller) January 3, 2025

He’s itching to do it

The Republicans in Congress are also very, very thirsty for a shooting war. Normally, they’d be agitating for something in the middle east, maybe China, maybe even Ukraine. But since Trump took over they have to pretend that they’re pacifist isolationists. So Mexico it is, at least at first. I wrote about this earlier, based on a lot of reporting by Rolling Stone. They are taking about a “soft invasion” in which they drop in Special Forces to “take out” the leaders of the cartels. (The other option is an actual invasion force at the border.)

They just published an update:

Rolling Stone talked to half a dozen former special operations soldiers and intelligence agents to see what this saber-rattling might look like in practice. On paper, they argued it was an easy operation to dismantle the cartel leadership, something that our military — particularly units like SEAL Team Six and Delta Force — has mastered after two decades of war in Iraq and Afghanistan. To a man, all said they’d volunteer for the mission.

But Carolyn Gallaher, a professor studying guerrilla and paramilitary violence at American University’s School of International Service, calls the idea folly. She researched cooperation between U.S. and Mexican law enforcement in the mid-2000s and says one takeaway from the Mexicans was that it was a mistake to target cartel leaders.

“All you do is create a succession crisis,” she says. “And a succession crisis in a drug cartel looks different than a succession crisis in, like, [Rupert] Murdoch’s empire, right? It’s basically settled with violence.”

Case in point: After Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, a longtime leader of Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel, was taken into custody in July, rival factions have been clashing in the state of Sinaloa.

Trump’s proposal is doubling down on a failed strategy, Gallaher says.“You have to go back and think of a new strategy,” Gallaher tells me. “And going and killing capos is not only not a new strategy, but it is the most failed part of the strategy on both sides of the border.”

Mexico has already said it will not accept an “invasion” by U.S. forces, with Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum describing the strategy as “entirely a movie.”

RS quotes a former Green Beret saying that this is the only way to defeat the cartels and that the Mexican government would be on board in back channels. Ok.

Plans presented to Trump have included airstrikes on cartel infrastructure, assassinating cartel leaders, and training Mexican forces, Rolling Stone reported. The scheme would most likely include covert operations and patrols just over the border to stem the flow of drugs across the frontier.

“That sounds a whole lot like what we did in Afghanistan for 20 years unsuccessfully,” says a former Marine officer who worked with special operations in Afghanistan.

The former Marine officer says the Hollywood part is attractive, pointing to Harrison Ford’s Clear and Present Danger as a movie that tickles the imagination.

“Who doesn’t want to throw a satchel charge into an underground drug lab?” he says, laughing. “That’s super sexy stuff that we sign up to do. But if you’re going to door-kick, you know what people forget is that gunfighting ultimately comes down to guns in the fight.”

Some experts say that cartels are actually very competent paramilitaries saying, “such a move would not just force the American military into another quagmire; it would drop them into a morass up to their metaphorical waist.” Others pooh-pooh this notion insisting that they are no match for US Special Forces.

I really felt like I was in the middle of a Hollywood studio pitch meeting as I was reading this. It’s absurd. Regardless of the relative competence of cartels and Special Forces, the consequences of these operations could be extremely dire:

The real fear is that the violence wouldn’t stay confined to south of the border. A Green Beret-turned-CIA operator says past administrations considered using CIA Ground Branch — hybrid intelligence agents and commandos usually made up of former special operations soldiers — to combat the cartels, but the fear of cartel retribution against the operators and their families in the U.S. made it too risky. But the bigger danger could be to the estimated 1.6 million U.S. citizens living in Mexico, All Source News tells me.

Americans in Mexico as targets for terror campaigns?” asks All Source News.

There are a LOT of Americans living and working in Mexico. To think they wouldn’t go this way is insane. But I suppose the Trump administration probably thinks they get what they ask for if they live in a shithole country.

Apparently, most of the special forces people argue for a Plan Columbia type of operation which is based upon cooperation with the government and working through the local security forces, not dropping Rambo into the country to mow down cartel leaders. It’s a very expensive operation and would take a long time and I suspect Trump just wants some exciting video and the chance to thump his chest so anything covert is unlikely to be on his agenda.

RS concludes by pointing out that we should know by now that our desire to shoot out way to a quick victory is a fools game:

“If it’s to kill the cartel, how do you know when you’ve accomplished the mission?” the former Marine officer says. “What’s the metric that these people are going to use that says, oh yeah, we’ve achieved a victory? We’re not fighting an army. We’re fighting poverty. Let’s fight desperation. Let’s fight hopelessness.”

That starts with determining an end state — something the United States didn’t do during its last foreign adventures.

The country’s longest Forever War isn’t Iraq or Afghanistan. It’s the War on Drugs and it looks as though Trump and his cronies are intent upon turning it into a hot war. This is very bad news.

Chief Justice John Roberts is mad as a hornet about all the criticism:

Chief Justice John Roberts on Tuesday blasted what he called “illegitimate activity” aimed at undermining the independence of the judiciary.

While facing criticism of contentious court rulings is part of the job for judges, some recent actions have crossed the line, Roberts said in his annual end-of-year report.

He outlined four areas of concern: violence, intimidation, disinformation and threats to defy court judgments.

All four “undermine our Republic, and are wholly unacceptable,” Roberts wrote.

It’s pretty clear from the report that what he’s really angry about is the criticism that some of the Justices are corrupt and partisan. But it’s also highly unlikely that he’s talking about Trump who calls them every name in the book if they rule in a way he doesn’t ‘t like. Perhaps that explains this:

When we say that Trump “won” this election, it should always have an asterisk – because his candidacy would never have been viable if not for the shameless, repeated, illegitimate interventions by MAGA-aligned, Federalist Society-approved justices on the Supreme Court and the federal bench. In any other country, we would understand those interventions as part of an autocratic takeover, not a democratic victory.

These interventions include cases from before Trump’s time that were designed to empower Republicans and the ultra-wealthy, and that laid the groundwork for the MAGA blitzkrieg against our democracy.

These charts helped make clear the egregiousness of the abuses.

As the following chart makes clear, in the last two years:

• Every time he has faced a grand jury, Trump has been indicted;
• Every time he has faced a trial jury, Trump has been found guilty;
• Every time his cases have come before judges he didn’t appoint, including those appointed by previous Republican presidents, Trump has lost;
• Whenever surveys have asked, a majority of Americans say Trump has committed crimes;
• But every time he has come before the justices and judges he appointed, Trump has had his way.

He actually claims in his report that they have absolutely no political bias.

As recently as 2000, three quarters of Americans approved of the Supreme Court. Even more remarkably, there was no partisan divide; Democrats and Republicans were nearly equally approving. But, in stair steps since then, approval has plummeted, dipping below fifty percent. Unsurprisingly, though, the Court has retained its credibility with Republican voters – while plummeting to historic lows with Democrats and Independents.

As I explained in “Tipping the Scales: The MAGA Justices Have Already Interfered with the 2024 Elections” and “Breaking the Law: Trump Is the Means, Not the End,” Roberts stands alone in bringing no one outside of his ipse dixit majority along for any of his most significant rulings.

Those are excerpts from a superb post from Michael Podhorzer and he makes quite a case that the Supremes are at the heart of our problem with democracy. It’s well worth reading.

Roberts’ whiny screed really is beneath him. He has a huge problem with credibility and corruption on the Court and all he could do is complain that the people are being mean to them. Obviously, there’s no room for violence and intimidation. But the Court is behaving in ways that are inviting distrust and disdain. He needs to clean his own house.

This is terrifying:

This is even more terrifying:

The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 was one of President Joe Biden’s chief legislative victories and the largest investment to fight the climate crisis in U.S. history. Trump and congressional Republicans have taken aim at the law to unwind much of Biden’s legacy and spur domestic fossil fuel production.

Among the moves that could raise revenue: revoking the law’s $7,500 electric vehicle tax credit, new vehicle emissions rules and other incentives for clean energy production. Trump and the GOP could also green-light a major expansion of energy production on protected federal lands. Together, the CRFB projected, that could produce $700 billion in cost savings and new revenue over the next decade.

One step forward two steps back. It’s a terrible, terrible mistake but I’m fairly sure this will be a priority.

More infighting in MAGAworld:

Billionaire Trump surrogate Elon Musk defended his decision to strip critics of their ability to monetize content on X after cracking down on dissent on the social network.

Responding to a supporter who defended “people getting demonetized for their inexcusable behavior,” Musk declared, “Exactly. The first amendment is protection for ‘free speech’, not ‘paid speech’ ffs.”

He demonetized people who criticized him specifically. I don’t know why anyone would be too surprised by that. He’s essentially an employer of people making money on X and employers have every right to muzzle speech on the job. Of course he did that. All you have to do is read his Twitter feed to see what an onanistic, self-indulgent, narcissist he is.

In any case, his “free speech” crusade is very contingent on whose speech should be protected, not what or where. He likes to have it both ways. He argued that Twitter should not be in the business of censoring people at all — that it’s something of a town square — when it applied to Donald Trump or extremists he believed should have been allowed to post disinformation during the pandemic. But he also exercises his prerogative as an owner to censor (suspend)and demonetize people who criticize him personally. It’s all about his whims.

I’m a little bit curious about what Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, Lee Fang, and authors Michael Shellenberger, David Zweig and Alex Berensons have to say about all this. They wrote the so-called investigation of the infamous “Twitter files” alleging that the service censored people during the Trump administration. I haven’t heard a word about any of this from them. Odd.

Fuentes is one of the top white supremacists on the site. He wasn’t censored. His racist views aren’t a problem. But he has defended some of his groyper buddies who criticized Musk’s immigration views.

Ernie Tedeschi, the director of economics at the Yale Budget Lab who in March wrapped up a three-year stint on the White House Council of Economic Advisers was asked by Business Insider, “was the “vibecession” fake?  He replied:

  “The short answer is no. The vibecession was not fake. The long answer is no, but … ,” he said. Perceptions of the economy have to do with more than the economy itself. That doesn’t mean that people were lying or that their answers didn’t have some real economic motivation, but there’s clearly more to it than the material conditions in front of them — it’s also about their ideological leanings and how that shapes what they believe is ahead.”Perceptions of the economy are definitely deeply partisan,” Tedeschi said.

That’s right. Republicans are now very rosy on the economy and Democrats are gloomy (although the GOP voters’ abrupt switch is far more dramatic.) BI continues:

It’s easy to say the shift in sentiment is partisan flag-waving — now that Donald Trump is headed to the White House, Republicans are going to say everything’s great, and to the Democrats, it’s all terrible. But that’s not really what’s happening, said Joanne Hsu, the director of consumer surveys at the University of Michigan. When people say their expectations are better or worse, it’s not simply the outcome of the election they’re responding to but the policies they believe are on the horizon.

“With the election of Trump, people have an idea of how economic policy might change over the next year and over the next four years. So people are expecting tariffs. They’re expecting action on immigration,” Hsu said. “The thing is that people across the population really disagree on whether or not these policy changes are a good thing or a bad thing for the economy.”

Democrats are worried that Trump’s threatened tariffs and promise to undertake mass-deportation efforts will make things pricier. Republicans, on the other hand, think that these policies will be good for the economy and that Trump will help bring down inflation. Independents, Hsu said, are in the middle.

Democrats beliefs are shaped by economic experts who are evaluating the policies based upon empirical evidence and history while Republicans are basing their beliefs on a shared worship of their cult leader they erroneously believe is a self-made businessman when he is actually a spoiled heir to a fortune he squandered and then created a fake image on reality TV.

But sure, both sides…

Businesses don’t love the idea of tariffs, but many are hopeful that there are ways they can get around them or that the president-elect isn’t so serious about them. Or they just plan to pass along any price increases to consumers anyway. (There may be some amount of denial going on among corporate executives and Wall Street investors, all of whom seem to be ignoring some of the potential downsides of Trump’s policy promises and the instability he could represent.)

Ya think?

No, they’re excited about their tax cuts and deregulation and very likely the fact that they can gouge their customers with tariff rationales if they are enacted. Whatever works.

The Real American MAGAs will pay, one way or another, but they’re fine with that. After all, these are people who happily send their life savings to a billionaire.

I don’t mean to sound hopeless. I’m really to the point that I’m just hoping Trump can be stopped from doing his worst even if he pretends he’s hugely successful. I keep my fingers crossed that world events don’t catapult out of control and that we get out of this without a catastrophe like the COVID pandemic or war. That’s about it.

Right now, we just need to survive this with as little damage as possible. It’s a huge lift but it can be done.

I don’t know what comes after him, but I don’t think anyone has quite the constellation of talents and flaws that Trump does so there’s little point in anticipating Trumpism as an ongoing political force. It will be something different.

Not Gonna Happen

To quote Joey from Blossom, "Whoa!"…

We're underselling the smallness of the new GOP House majority. It won’t be the smallest since 1931. Due to vacancies, it will be the smallest at the start of a 1st session since at least 1917!

Johnson's speakership is very precarious. pic.twitter.com/l9cwpVLxGu

— (((Harry Enten))) (@ForecasterEnten) January 2, 2025

Trump has a tremendous amount of power as the executive (some of it still subject to judicial interpretation.) But anything he wants to do that requires Congress is going to be an extremely heavy lift. Notus reports:

But as Republicans try to shake off a close call with a government shutdown and prepare for Donald Trump’s first 100 days, lawmakers are starting to grapple with a simple reality: They may not be able to do much of anything.

“They can’t even extend government funding,” a frustrated Sen. Josh Hawley told NOTUS in December, as the House GOP nearly imploded over a stopgap spending bill. “They’re going to do this all over again in March. There’s a debt ceiling fight coming up,” he said. “Good luck.”

Before Trump even takes office on Jan. 20, House Republicans must elect a speaker — a delicate, historically difficult task given the mutiny currently on Mike Johnson’s hands. Republicans then had to agree to a rules package, which was released on Wednesday. Those rules are rife with potential trip wires, like the nine members required to hold a vote to oust a speaker, and are already under negotiation as Johnson tries to secure the votes he needs for the speakership.

That’s just the beginning. In the first hundred days, Trump wants to confirm his rogues gallery of unqualified, dangerous miscreants to the cabinet, they want an expensive, draconian immigration package to fund mass deportation, drill baby drill and a huge increase in defense spending all done through reconciliation.

Or maybe Republicans plan to first do a tax bill through reconciliation. Or maybe they plan to do just one reconciliation bill for the whole lot. There hasn’t been clarity on the plan, but there’s already a lot of debate.

The continuing resolution expires on March 15th and they will have to negotiate some kind of budget to fund the government for the rest of the year. Maybe.

Throughout those early days, Republicans and Democrats will also be negotiating a larger spending package to carry the government through the rest of the fiscal year, until October. They will likely need Democratic votes for that but it doesn’t look good, especially if Trump lets ELON and Vivek play with their toys. There could easily be a government shutdown in the first 100 days.

They wanted destruction and they may get it. I hope the elected Republicans understand that they’ve entered into a career suicide pact.

Chuck Schumer weighs in on DNC chair race

This is new (Politico):

Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer is endorsing Ben Wikler to lead the Democratic National Committee, a boost for the Wisconsin state party leader in a race that has drawn little attention and few big names.

Schumer’s endorsement — shared first with POLITICO — comes as Democrats prepare for a month-long campaign to run the DNC, with four candidate forums in January. Following the party’s bruising losses in November, members of the committee will elect their new chair on Feb. 1.

Schumer, the most prominent Democrat so far to weigh in publicly on the race, called Wikler a “tenacious organizer,” a “proven fundraiser” and a “sharp communicator” in a statement. He emphasized Wikler’s work in 2024, when Democrats in Wisconsin held on to their Senate seat and flipped 14 state legislative seats, even though Kamala Harris did not win the state.

“Ben has what Democrats need right now — proven results — and that’s why I’m backing Ben,” Schumer said.

Kudos to Wikler, 43, who I met in 2019. But the Democratic Party needs more than a solid field guy running the DNC.

There is a serious discusssion going on among friends about decades-old narratives deeply embedded in people’s preceptions of the country, their place in it, what Democrats have to offer, and whether people can even hear that offer, however well-crafted, amid the din of what early bloggers once called the right’s Mighty Wurlitzer. That’s a long-term challenge not easily addressed by swapping out personnel.

(Still, I can think of more than a few personnel I’d like to see Democrats swap out on Capitol Hill.)

After stinging losses like Democrats experienced in November, the finger-pointing and plethora of hot takes on what Democrats did wrong obscures what (and where) Democrats did right. That’s where Wisconsin comes in, as Peter Slevin writes at The New Yorker. “How Much Do Democrats Need To Change?” reads the headline. Not that much, if they emulate Wisconsin (or North Carolina, I’d argue; emphasis mine):

The mood among Democrats on a December morning in the Wisconsin state capitol was celebratory. Ten Assembly candidates—among them a school administrator, a tavern owner, an accountant, and a county politician—had flipped Republican seats after the state Supreme Court threw out a heavily gerrymandered map. “I am super excited. Who else is super excited?” Representative Lisa Subeck, the caucus chair, said. Some of the newly elected spoke about what they hope to deliver: affordable housing, broadband, clean energy, and more money for public schools. One said he wants to show “that government can be a force for good.”

In addition to the Assembly candidates, four Democratic state Senate candidates won Republican-held seats. Though the G.O.P. still controlled the state legislature, its margins narrowed significantly. Further up the ticket, Senator Tammy Baldwin, a widely liked Democrat, won a third term. Though Kamala Harris lost her Presidential bid, the popular vote, and seven swing states to Donald Trump, the message—even in Wisconsin, which Harris lost—is not so straightforward. The same is true in North Carolina, where Harris was defeated by Trump but Democrats swept the other six statewide races. Of the five battleground states where a Senate race was on the ballot, Democrats won four, losing only Pennsylvania’s, and that one by a mere fifteen thousand votes, or 0.2 per cent. Looked at another way: Donald Trump won the national popular vote, but if one hundred and fifteen thousand of the eight million Trump voters in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania had voted instead for Harris, she would be headed to the White House.

“I’m not setting fire to any playbooks around here,” says Ryan Spaude, 30. He flipped a Republican-held seat near Green Bay. “We nudged this district to the left on a day when the whole country was moving to the right,” adding that an idological pivot is not what’s needed.

“Just tell working folks how you’re going get more money in their pockets,” says Ryan Spaude. Telling working folks is the rub. Democrats have no billionaire owned and funded Wurlitzer.

Rebecca Cooke who lost her bid for WI-3 by three points thinks national Democrats have a branding problem. If so, it is among their problems.

Organizer Bill Hogseth thinks branding is not it exactly:

What struck him most as he knocked on doors this year was how few voters even mentioned the Presidential race. “I can count on my hand the times where I heard people say, ‘Well, hopefully So-and-So gets elected and then this will change,’ ” he told me. “More often than not, it was, ‘Something needs to happen in my local community,’ ‘We need to take on the landlords,’ or ‘There needs to be rent control.’ ”

Wikler’s influence and staffing a year-round organizing effort has been what’s pivotal.

Donald Trump plans to upend government within hours of his inauguration. He’ll pardon Jan. 6th convicts and arrestees and launch a deportaion program that will besmirch whatever positive brand America has left in the world.

That will be followed by a raft of other combative moves, including a Republican attempt to extend the 2017 tax cuts that favored corporations and the wealthy. As Wikler put it, “We’re about to have a big defining battle that gives us a chance to show who we are.”

Same-old at the DNC won’t cut it. Even Schumer seems to understand that. There is too much focus on what Democrats (Harris) might have done wrong in an otherwise impressive short-schedule campaign, and too little being learned from states where things went right and why.

Coincidences or not?

As authorities investigate Wednesday’s New Orleans truck attack on Bourbon Street and the Cybertruck explosion in front of the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas, one odd detail links the two. Or doesn’t. Both vehicles were rented using the peer-to-peer rental app, Turo.

Axios reports that Clark County/Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Sheriff Kevin McMahill said “there was no immediate indication of a connection between the two events, but ‘we are investigating every aspect of this.’ “

The New York Times reports:

The owner of the Ford pickup truck used in New Orleans recognized his vehicle when he saw footage showing the truck and license plate on the news. He had rented the truck to a 42-year-old Army veteran who then used it to ram into crowds on Bourbon Street, killing at least 15 people and injuring dozens more.

[…]

In Las Vegas, the police said during a news conference that the Tesla Cybertruck that exploded outside the Trump Hotel’s lobby entrance, killing one and injuring at least seven others, was also rented from Turo. Officials called it a “coincidence” and said they were continuing to investigate any possible connections.

The driver in the New Orleans attack, identified as Texas-born Shamsud-Din Jabbar, was killed in a shootout with police.

In another blurb from The New York Times:

The Army veteran who rammed a pickup into New Year’s revelers on Bourbon Street was “inspired by” the Islamic State terrorist organization, President Biden said Wednesday night in a short address from Camp David. In videos posted to social media shortly before the attack in New Orleans that killed at least 15, the man indicated that he had a “desire to kill,” Mr. Biden said.

Elon Musk and Tesla are issuing statements and doing spin control, as is Eric Trump, executive vice president of the Trump Organization.

Turo issued a statement saying, “We do not believe that either renter involved in the Las Vegas and New Orleans attacks had a criminal background that would have identified them as a security threat.” The company is cooperating with the FBI on the New Orleans investigation, reports the Associated Press.

That’s two coincidences

A Colorado man rented the Cybertruck and drove it to Las Vegas. Police were still working on extracting the body late Wednesday. Like Shamsud-Din Jabbar, Matthew Livelsberger of Colorado Springs was an Army veteran. He was 37.

Denver7 fills in some details:

The driver of the Tesla Cybertruck that exploded in front of a Las Vegas hotel on New Year’s Day has been identified as an Army veteran who lived in Colorado Springs, multiple informed sources told Denver7 Investigates.

Those sources tell Denver7 the driver was Matthew Livelsberger, who has multiple Colorado Springs addresses associated to him. FBI agents were staking out one of those addresses on Marksheffel Road late Wednesday awaiting a search warrant.

Make that three coincidences

Denver7 adds this:

Late Wednesday, Denver7 Investigates learned that Livelsberger served at the same Army base as Shamsud-Din Jabbar, the suspect in a New Orleans truck rampage hours earlier.

A lot of people serve in the Army. There is no reporting that Shamsud-Din Jabbar and Matthew Livelsberger served at the same base at the same time. Authorities and reporters are scouring the men’s social media accounts for evidence of motive and/or radicalization.

Newsweek:

Jeremy Schwartz, acting FBI Special Agent in Charge for the Las Vegas office, at a news conference: “I know you have a lot of questions.”

“We don’t have a lot of answers,” he added.