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Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Tech-bro Thielology

Can I get an ‘Amen’?

Mega money doesn’t necessarily go with megalomania. But one can find plenty of evidence for a correlation.

Josh Marshall unearths a fine example in “Donald Trump’s Greenland jones” originating perhaps with tech-bro Dryden Brown.

When money goes to your head, what does it do there? In Brown’s case, convince you you can fly into a poor country unannounced and try to buy it. In Peter Thiel’s case, prompt you to send an essay packed with “just asking questions” conspiracy theories and get the august Financial Times to print it.

Kieran Healy, a Duke University Professor of Sociology, read Thiel’s offering and commented:

This Thiel Op-Ed is really nuts. I mean, truly. His focus of attention is like a pinball careening around in a machine where every bumper and paddle is a noisy, flashing conspiracy topic. I get more measured and carefully-reasoned emails on these topics every other week from mentally-ill cranks.

It’s never clear just what Thiel’s point is. Something about the intersection of the internet and Donald Trump’s return to the White House representing the fall of the ancien regime (the reality-based community) and the revelation of dark secrets that for decades it’s concealed from truth suckers seekers.

Free speech in Elon Musk’s conception must be free, free of grounding in fact. Let the internet decide what truth is. In the Digital Dispensation, the truth about the Kennedy assassination, Jeffrey Epstein’s death, and Covid-19’s origins shall be revealed:

Did [Dr. Fauci and his advisers] suspect that Covid spawned from US taxpayer-funded research, or an adjacent Chinese military programme? Why did we fund the work of EcoHealth Alliance, which sent researchers into remote Chinese caves to extract novel coronaviruses? Is “gain of function” research a byword for a bioweapons programme? And how did our government stop the spread of such questions on social media?

Why does the porridge bird lay his egg in the air?

Our First Amendment frames the rules of engagement for domestic fights over free speech, but the global reach of the internet tempts its adversaries into a global war. Can we believe that a Brazilian judge banned X without American backing, in a tragicomic perversion of the Monroe Doctrine? Were we complicit in Australia’s recent legislation requiring age verification for social media users, the beginning of the end of internet anonymity? Did we muster up even two minutes’ criticism of the UK, which has arrested hundreds of people a year for online speech triggering, among other things, “annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety”? We may expect no better from Orwellian dictatorships in East Asia and Eurasia, but we must support a free internet in Oceania.

Do you walk to school or carry your lunch?

“Darker questions still emerge in these dusky final weeks of our interregnum,” Thiel declares in breathless prose. There will be no return to the “pre-internet past.”

I SEE JESUS!

With the help of the tech-bros, Trump finally has overthrown the ancien regime. He will ignore America’s unrectified historical failings to concentrate on prosecuting the malefactors of identity politics who’ve rendered America Not-Great, Thiel promises.

“The apokálypsis cannot resolve our fights over 1619, but it can resolve our fights over Covid-19; it will not adjudicate the sins of our first rulers, but the sins of those who govern us today.”

HALLELUJAH!

Blessed are the poor, for they are less prone to wealth-induced delusions.

North Carolina’s Mini-Me Court

Laboratories of election thievery

In the District of Columbia this week, the U.S. Supreme Court denied Donald Trump’s demand to delay his Friday sentencing in the New York hush money case. But in Raleigh, North Carolina, SCOTUS’s Mini-Me court accepted the demand by Judge Jefferson Griffin to delay certification of the race he lost in November. Griffin’s team hopes to have the state Supreme Court election overturned by the state Supreme’s Republican majority.

Basic fact: After multiple recounts, incumbent Associate Justice Allison Riggs (D) defeated NC Court of Appeals Judge Jefferson Griffin (R) by 734 votes.

I’ve already briefed you on this saga here, here, here, here, here, and here.

The New York Times contacted several citizens among the 60,000 whose votes the NC GOP proposes voiding in an “extraordinary effort“:

“Anyone who is trying to invalidate my personal vote as fraudulent — that’s a direct attack on the voters,” said Mr. Clay, who voted for Judge Griffin, who now sits on the North Carolina Court of Appeals. “It’s inexcusable to contest these legal ballots. He’s a sore loser. It is what it is, whether it be by one vote, 100 votes or 1,000 votes. We have spoken.”

Griffin and his backers won’t hear it.

In mid-November, after a final vote count showed Justice Riggs winning, Judge Griffin filed a protest with the State Board of Elections, which has a Democratic majority. Judge Griffin argued that the forms that tens of thousands of voters were given to fill out did not ask for some information that they should have under the law.

The board turned the protest down in a series of votes that went largely along party lines, noting that what were apparently clerical errors on the part of county election officials were not the fault of the voters.

The state Board of Elections asked a federal district judge to oversee the legal challenge Griffin launched based on the federal Help America Vote Act (HAVA). When that Trump-appointed judge pitched the case back to the Republican-controlled state Supreme Court, the State Board filed an appeal with the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. That’s still pending.

The Democratic National Committee on Friday jumped into the fray.

Democracy Docket adds:

The DNC filed a brief urging the court to reject the Republicans’ request, arguing that they “seek to delete the votes of tens of thousands of voters in every state and municipal election not because those voters are ineligible or did anything wrong, but because of an alleged record keeping problem.” The Democrats added that all of these voters singled out by the GOP provided ID information at one point, like when they first voted.

Also, the DNC cited state and federal laws that establish that once an eligible voter is added to the voter rolls, a minor issue with their registration application is not grounds to nullify their vote.

[…]

The DNC explained that the Republicans are not only seeking to remove votes in the court race but in all state and local races, “including elections that were completely undisputed.”

Meaning, if this HAVA-based challenge succeeds in North Carolina, they will sue to reverse any race Republicans lose narrowly anywhere in the country based on this precedent.

People once said what starts in California eventually works its way east. But when it comes to euthanizing American self-governance, not so much. Here in one of David Pepper’s “Laboratories of Autocracy,” Griffin is still trying to steal an election the way Donald Trump and Team MAGA tried to steal the presidency in 2020.

Pay attention. If they succeed here, your name could be next on the list of voters whose ballots they throw out in your state.

My concern is that Democrats will throw all their efforts behind Defense rather than playing Offense via outside-the-box thinking (à la Spocko) that puts Griffin (and his team of attorneys) on his back foot. Beating the bullies in court is not enough. They need their noses bloodied.

Friday Night Soother

I would post something about the animals and the fires but I just don’t have the heart. I put up some links last night if you want to check out some of the various organizations that are working in that area. The devastation is going to be immense for them just as it is for the humans. It’s all bad.

Here are some zoo animals frolicking in the snow. It made me feel better, anyway.

Get Ready For $10 Oranges

They aren’t even waiting until their Dear Leader is inaugurated:

Acres of orange fields sat unpicked in Kern County this week as word of Border Patrol raids circulated through Messenger chats and images of federal agents detaining laborers spread on local Facebook groups. 

The Border Patrol conducted unannounced raids throughout Bakersfield on Tuesday, descending on businesses where day laborers and field workers gather. Agents in unmarked SUVs rounded up people in vans outside a Home Depot and gas station that serves a breakfast popular with field workers. 

This appears to be the first large-scale Border Patrol raid in California since the election of Donald Trump, coming just a day after Congress certified the election on January 6, in the final days of Joe Biden’s presidency. The panic and confusion, for both immigrants and local businesses that rely on their labor, foreshadow what awaits communities across California if Trump follows through on his promise to conduct mass deportations.

“It was profiling, it was purely field workers,” said Sara Fuentes, store manager of the local gas station. Fuentes said that at 9 a.m., when the store typically gets a rush of workers on their way to pick oranges, two men in civilian clothes and unmarked Suburbans started detaining people outside the store. “They didn’t stop people with FedEx uniforms, they were stopping people who looked like they worked in the fields.” Fuentes says one customer pulled in just to pump gas and agents approached him and detained him.

Growers and agricultural leaders in California and across the nation have warned that Trump’s promised mass deportations will disrupt the nation’s food supply, leading to shortages and higher prices. In Kern County this week, just the word of the deportations inspired workers to stay away from the fields.  

“People are freaked out, people are worried, people are planning on staying home the next couple of days,” said Antonio De Loera-Brust, director of communication for the United Farm Workers. De Loera-Brust said the Border Patrol detained at least one UFW member in Kern County as they “traveled between home and work.”  

They were stopping cars and asking for papers.

On social media, Gregory K. Bovino, the Border Patrol chief in El Centro, called the sweeps “Operation Return to Sender.” 

“We are taking it to the bad people and bad things in Bakersfield. We are planning operations for other locals (sic) such as Fresno and especially Sacramento.”

Sacramento would be the state capitol.

And so it begins.

The Unaccountable President

Michael Tomasky wrote an excellent piece today about the unaccountable president, laying out the process by which he gets away with everything. No one expects anything of him and no matter what he says, the right wing media, the Congress and his allies in the judiciary will back him up.

As an example he suggests that even if Trump were to be found to have given nuclear secrets to North Korea he would either claim it was fake news and the entire wingnuts apparatus would launch into gear calling it another hoax or he would admit it, saying it was a perfect move of a very stable genius and they’d all back his decision as necessary for national security despite its madness. That is not an exaggeration. I believe there is nothing that can make them abandon their support at this point.

He writes:

Trump will be a completely unaccountable president, then, for this very simple reason: The only three power systems capable of holding him to account—the right-wing media, Republicans in Congress, and the Supreme Court—have no interest in doing so. The mainstream media will try to hold him to account, or at least we hope it will; but the mainstream media means nothing to Trump, his party, and his base. Ditto Democrats in Congress.

I can’t imagine a single scenario in which the right-wing media or the GOP Congress or the high court will show backbone or independence. In the meantime, these three entities, especially the right-wing media, have by now been trained to immediately and reflexively aim their fire at Democrats and liberals for every single thing that may go wrong during Trump’s presidency.

We’re getting a little taste of that now. Once upon a sweet old time, the barely imaginable horror of the Los Angeles fires would have been given a little time to marinate before us as a merely human tragedy. It’s entirely appropriate to ask questions and hold leaders accountable—of course. But historically, we tend to get a few days of unified mourning before we get to that. And those days of unified mourning serve a civic and national purpose of reminding us that we are one people.

No longer. Within hours or even minutes of the fires spreading, conservatives took to social media to let the world know that there was nothing accidental or capricious about any of it—it was all the fault of Governor Gavin Newsom and Mayor Karen Bass and, most of all, DEI, which stripped the LAFD of the kind of manly white men whom the fires would have taken one look at and retreated back to the hills in fear.

In case you haven’t been following that story, get a load of this:

He tells the Democrats that they need to realize what they are up against.

There is a powerful disinformation and propaganda apparatus (1) for which Trump can do no wrong and (2) which, in all cases of conflict, will instantly advance a narrative, whether true or false or somewhere in between, that it’s the fault of Democrats, liberals, or the woke left. Thus the paradox of the new Trump era: The only institutions that will try to hold Trump accountable are powerless to do so, while the only ones with the power to punish him will never do it.

That’s correct. The only institutions that can spare us these next two years are run by Republicans.If we’ve learned nothing else, we should have learned that that is a pipe dream.

Once again, I will just say that our best hope for survival (and greatest threat of destruction) is Trump’s ignorance and incompetence. It’s a thin reed to hang on to but it’s really all we’ve got.

Update —

Media Matters has published a compendium of right wing lies and propaganda around the firestorm. I would say it’s unbelievable but it isn’t.

Who Needs DOGE?

From DonkeyHotey

Here are the preliminary spending cut proposals from the GOP. Pay no attention to the Orwellian headings. The proposals are often the opposite of what they say. (For instance “strengthening Medicare for seniors” by cutting it by $479 billion makes no sense.)

Anyway, take a look.

SPENDING REFORM OPTIONS
Policy Explainer
Topline Savings: $5.3 – $5.7 T

  1. REPEAL MAJOR BIDEN HEALTH RULES ($420B)
  2. STRENGTHEN MEDICARE FOR SENIORS ($479B)
    o Site Neutral – $146B
    o Uncompensated Care – $229B
    o Bad Debt – $42B
    o BCA Mandatory Sequester Extension – $62B
  3. MAKING MEDICAID WORK FOR THE MOST VULNERABLE ($2.3T)
    o Per Capita Caps – up to $918B
    o Equalize Medicaid Payments for Able Bodied Adults – up to $690Bo Limit Medicaid Provider Taxes – $175B
    o Lower FMAP Floor – $387B
    o Special FMAP Treatment for DC – $8B
    o Repeal American Rescue Plan FMAP Incentive – $18B
    o Medicaid Work Requirements – $120B
  4. REIMAGINING THE AFFORDABLE CARE ACT (ACA) ($151B)
    o Recapture Excess Premium Tax Credit – $46B
    o Limit Health Program Eligibility Based on Citizenship Status – $35Bo Repeal the Prevention Public Health Fund – $15B
    o Appropriate Cost Sharing Reductions – $55B
  5. ENDING CRADLE-TO-GRAVE DEPENDENCE ($347B)
    o Reinstate the Trump-era Public Charge Rule — $15B
    o Reduce TANF by 10 Percent – $15B
    o Eliminate the TANF Contingency Fund — $6B
    o Reform the Thrifty Food Plan — up to $274B
    o Eliminate the Social Services Block Grant – $15B
    o SNAP Reforms – $22B
  6. REVERSING BIDEN CLIMATE POLICIES ($468B)
    o Discontinue the Green New Deal Provisions in the 2021 Infrastructure Bill – $300Bo Repeal EV Mandate – $112B
    o Repeal IRA green energy grant s– $56B
  7. OTHER: ($917B-$1T)
    o End the Student Loan Bailout – $200-330B
    o Rescind all Unspent COVID Money – $11B
    o Auction Spectrum – $60 billion
    o Repeal Orderly Liquidation Authority – $22 billion
    o Increase FERS Contributions – $45 billion
    o Other federal employee benefit reforms – $32 billion
    o Restrict emergency spending to recent average—$500B
    o Eliminate the TSP G Fund Subsidy – $47B
  8. POTENTIAL TAX OFFSETS: ($227-$527B)
    o Green energy tax credits – $200 – $500B, depending on political viability
    o SSN CTC Requirement – $27B

It’s all very bad. But sitting here in Santa Monica where the smoke hasn’t yet cleared and the fires still rage, it’s stunning that they are prepared to slash all climate change mitigation policies, even Green new Deal programs that bring jobs to their own constituents.

They’re trying to kill us. That’s all there is to it.

Putin Can’t Wait To Pull Trump’s Strings

Apparently:

Putin is very eager to meet Trump face to face, the Kremlin is making no prerequisite demands for the meeting to take place. There has presumably been a lot of back channel diplomacy before this official meeting. The Russian side aims to exclude Ukraine from the process completely and present itself to Trump as the side willing to compromise, while blaming Kyiv (and Biden’s administration) for the continuation of the war.

Sounds totally believable. I wonder if Trump will let anyone take notes.

Two buds hands in glove.

One Man Is Above The Law

A meaningless sentence empowering him further

It’s done:

The historic New York criminal case against Donald Trump — the first of its kind against a former president — closed with a whimper Friday morning, with the president-elect facing no consequences for faking business documents to cover up a sexual affair from American voters in 2016.

“Never before has this court been presented with such a unique and remarkable set of circumstances,” Justice Juan Merchan said from the bench. “This has been a truly extraordinary case.”

However, the judge pointed out that the soft landing to such a weighty case was directly due to Trump’s impending return to office — and he reminded Trump that the legal protections sparing him what could have been a more serious sentence, which could have included years in jail, belonged not to a man but to the person who temporarily sits at the White House’s Resolute Desk.

“Ordinary citizens do not receive those legal protections,” Merchan said as he delivered his sentence.

“To be sure, it is the legal protections afforded to the office of the president of the United States that are extraordinary — not the occupant of the office,” he said.

Yeah, whatever.

Trump whined:

“It’s been a political witch hunt. It was done to damage my reputation so I would lose the election, and obviously, that didn’t work.”

Every day I am reminded that tens of millions of my fellow Americans endorsed not just Trump but the idea that a president should be immune from all accountability for everything he does. It’s nihilistic and shallow to just throw up your hands and say “nothing matters.” But damn, some days it’s really hard not to think that.

Update —

Why is it up to a former RNC chair to make this argument right now?

Opening the “Black Box”

Know your DNC members

Over at The American Prospect, Micah Sifry has assembled a list of DNC members ahead of the election of new party officers on Feb. 1. The New York Times reported on the two front runners in November. (I have a favorite for chair.) Your state’s members might want to hear from you about yours. March for our Lives co-founder and Parkland school shooting survivor, David Hogg, is running for 1st vice chair. I haven’t followed who else is running.

Sifry writes:

So, while some joke that the race for DNC chair is the ultimate high school class president election, whoever holds the office will have a significant role in how Democrats respond to Trump, how they rebuild, what changes they make to their media, technology, and fundraising practices, and how the 2028 presidential selection process plays out.

The problem is that the DNC member list is not publically available. Some state parties publish the list of their members (mine does), but others do not. Some you can figure out. Kinda.

Michael Kapp, a DNC member from California who was first elected to that position by his state party’s executive committee in 2016, told me the list isn’t public “because it’s the DNC—it’s a black box.” He told me that leadership holds tightly to the list to prevent any organizing beyond their control.

Kapp adds later:

“There are incentives for the DNC to keep us [members] apart,” Kapp added. “So we can’t organize, so we can’t talk to one another, so we can’t grow and learn.” Most crucially, “so we can’t organize against, or, if we wanted, in favor of whatever leadership wanted. By keeping us apart, they’re really able to organize and control these meetings from the top down.”

That sounds familiar. When years ago I assembled county chair contact lists by state for distributing For the Win, there appeared to be no public listing of county chairs on the New York state party’s website (which seemed to exist primarily for soliciting donations; that has since changed). A former member of New York’s City Council at the time told me the reason was that the old boys in Albany didn’t want any independent organizing among their members either. (Albany County, BTW, seemed to have two live websites, one an obvious draft, misspellings and all.)

Sifry and TAP are providing the list so people outside the party’s inner circle might weigh in with their state’s members on who leads the Democratic Party after Feb. 1.

The list we are publishing was leaked to me by a trusted source with long experience with the national party. Like Kapp, this person thinks it’s absurd that the party’s roster of voting members is secret. Indeed, since there is no official public list, each of the candidates running for chair and other positions has undoubtedly had to create their own tallies from scratch—making it very likely our list comes from a candidate’s whip operation.

To protect individuals’ privacy, we’ve removed everyone’s phone numbers and email addresses—though in some cases people do make that information public on their own. By drawing on that data along with publicly available information from state party websites, news reports, and other biographical information online, we’ve been able to confirm the accuracy of most of the names provided. (One note: There are 449 names on the list, but chair Jaime Harrison is technically not a voting member, leaving 448 who will select the next chair.)

Read the whole thing and have at it.

“Little Fish”

President-elect idiocy

Photo Doug Kruetz, Arizona Daily Star.

Believe it or not, the same guy who doesn’t know how maps work doesn’t understand engineering either.

It’s Friday. Allow me to geek out a bit. I worked for decades as a mechanical engineer, a P.E., specifically in piping departments of major consulting firms, even more specifically, in pipe stress analysis. (Here’s the Generative AI explanation.) The nonsense being spewed by Trump 2.0 and other RW hacks about the fires in Los Angeles and hydrants with no water gets under my skin. Especially Trump’s “little fish” idiocy.

Variety:

Thursday night’s late-night shows were focused on the devastation of the Los Angeles fires, as well as incoming President Trump’s bizarre response to them.

“Daily Show” host Desi Lydic played a clip of Trump rambling on about smelt, continuing to spread a debunked conspiracy theory about the state’s water supply.

“I tried to get Gavin Newsom to allow water to come — you’d have tremendous water out there — they send it out to the Pacific, because they’re trying to protect a tiny little fish — which is in other areas, by the way — called the smelt. For the sake of the smelt, they have no water,” Trump said.

Lydic offered a rebuttal, saying “And for the record, no, the L.A. fires have nothing to do with smelt. But in Trump’s defense, words are hard. And smelt only has one syllable, while climate change has three.”

In fact, “not in their own minds” experts tell the Washington Post that California’s reservoirs stand at historically high levels. Supply is not the problem. Demand is. Getting the water to where you need it is.

To provide reliable water pressure in hilly areas, cities install holding tanks like those at the top, positioned strategically at the top of local mountains, the way cities in flat areas pump water, slowly, to fill water towers standing high above the local terrain. In both cases, gravity does the rest. Keeping these tanks filled in a system under severe stress is a problem (emphasis mine):

Janisse Quiñones, head of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, said the ferocity of the fire made the water demand four times greater than “we’ve ever seen in the system.”

Ms Quiñones said hydrants are designed for fighting fires at one or two houses at a time, not hundreds, and refilling the tanks also requires asking fire departments to pause firefighting efforts.

Refilling those tanks while the water system down below is under historic demand too is even tougher. In the case of the Pacific Palisades fire, like I said (Washington Post):

In order for water to be piped uphill to hydrants in Pacific Palisades, it is collected in a reservoir, pumped into three million-gallon, high-elevation storage tanks, then propelled by gravity into homes and fire hydrants.

DWP spokesman Bowen Xie said the agency had filled its 114 water storage tanks before the blaze, but after the Palisades Fire erupted on Tuesday, water demand quadrupled in the area, lowering the pressure required to refill the three local storage tanks.

By 4:45 p.m., the first of the three tanks ran out of water, said Janisse Quiñones, DWP’s chief executive and chief engineer. The second tank ran empty about 8:30 p.m., and the third at 3 a.m. Wednesday.

“We had a tremendous demand on our system in the Palisades,” she said at a Wednesday briefing. “We pushed the system to the extreme.”

Supply is not the problem.

Marty Adams, former general manager and chief engineer at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, echoed those concerns. He said the agency’s water pump-and-storage system, like others nationwide, was designed to meet fire protection standards based on the water needed to battle fires at several homes or businesses, not wildfires that consume whole neighborhoods.

“None of that’s ever been based on the entire neighborhood going up. If that’s the new norm, that’s something that’s got to be figured in,” he said. “Nobody designs a domestic water system for that. It would be so overbuilt and so expensive.”

Nobody would pay for that. Let’s get real. We heard similar complaints (from RW critics looking to score points) after Hurricane/Tropical Storm Helene hit my town.

Helene’s apocalyptic flooding at the end of September ripped out the major water mains supplying Asheville, leaving us without water pressure for weeks and without water certified drinkable until mid-November. Oh, but those lefties running Asheville who replaced the water mains that washed out in 2004 flooding were responsible/irresponsible because they buried the replacement lines ONLY 25 ft deep!

Donald Trump is not the only walking advertisement out there for the Dunning-Kruger effect.

Update: “I don’t know a water system in the world that is that prepared for this type of event,” said Greg Pierce, a water-resource expert at UCLA.

https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/10/us/california-la-fires-emergency-prep-invs/index.html