Rep. Brandon Gill: "President Trump is bringing us into a golden age of America. This is the new Manifest Destiny. Reacquiring the Panama Canal, acquiring Greenland, renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. This is the light of America expanding." pic.twitter.com/emC1yGUx3e
The Republicans are back, baby! They sound like the warmongering assholes we’ve always known and hated. I knew it was only a matter of time.
I haven’t thought about Manifest Destiny since about the 8th grade. It’s a ridiculous concept in the 21st century but then virtually everything Trump is doing and saying is about returning to the 18th and 19th centuries.
I have yet to read a good explanation of where Trump and his moronic followers are getting this stuff. We know Trump doesn’t read books. And while I certainly believe that he may have come up with the idea of taking over the world all by himself, the extolling of the gilded age and McKinley and all that has to have come from someone else. In the past I would have thought it was Steve Bannon but he doesn’t have trump’s ear anymore on this kind of thing. I wonder who does?
“It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch…Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen.” Raymond Chandler
I don’t see the kind of wall to wall coverage I might expect from the national news media if this horrific disaster Los Angeles is experiencing was taking place in the east. But I’m sure you’ve seen something about it and it’s actually much worse than you know. Luckily there is robust local news covering this so people in the area are able to get real news. They certainly aren’t on Twitter which is a total shithole during times like these since Elon fired their disaster team and Facebook is equally unreliable. Bluesky is good but it doesn’t quite have the scale to do what Twitter used to do.
I was going to share some pictures here but I don’t have the heart to do it. It’s just devastating.
And keep a good thought for all the animals in the mountains that are on fire here in southern California. It breaks my heart.
By the way, if anyone tells you this has nothing to do with climate change and everyone should just rake the forest, they are wrong. This 2015 article in Rolling Stone by Tim Dickinson explains it well:
This is the present, and the future, of climate change. Our overheated world is amplifying drought and making megafire commonplace. This is happening even in the soggy Pacific Northwest, which has been hard-hit by what’s been dubbed a “wet drought.” Despite near-normal precipitation, warm winter temperatures brought rain instead of snow to the region’s mountains. What little snow did hit the ground then melted early, leaving the Northwest dry — and ready to burn in the heat of summer.
The national data is as clear as it is troubling: “Climate change has led to fire seasons that are now on average 78 days longer than in 1970,” according to a Forest Service report published in August. In the past three decades, the annual area claimed by fire has doubled, and the agency’s scientists predict that fires will likely “double again by midcentury.”
The human imprint on the bone-dry conditions that lead to fire is real — and now measurable. According to a major new study by scientists at Columbia and NASA, man-made warming is increasing atmospheric evaporation — drawing water out of Western soil, shrubs and trees. In California alone, the epic drought is up to 25 percent more severe than it would have been, absent climate change. And this impact doesn’t respect state borders. The study’s lead author, Columbia scientist Park Williams, tells Rolling Stone, “There’s the same effect in the Pacific Northwest.”
The fiery future is upon us…
With our nation’s firefighting resources tapped out by the fires of the present, America finds itself woefully unprepared for the blazes to come, much less the worst-case scenario: a Katrina by fire.
If you have a sub, read the whole thing. It may just be happening right now.
And yet:
America just put this fucking imbecile back in charge:
TRUMP: Well, we need Greenland for national security purposes. People don't even know if Denmark has any legal right to it. But if they do, they should give it up. pic.twitter.com/D74jFXZsln
Many people don’t have the stomach to follow politics these days after the disappointment of the last election and the return of the Trump three ring circus to Washington. It’s depressing and nerve-wracking even if you just hear snippets in passing or read a few paragraphs of a news story about billionaires at Mar-a-Lago or strange D-list celebrity political figures being lifted into positions of great responsibility. There’s only so much you can take.
But I do wish that everyone could bring themselves to watch at least some of President-elect Trump’s press conference yesterday. Yes, much of it was the standard lunacy about shower heads and whales and windmills. He always plays his greatest hits. But he’s got some new material that I think people should be aware of.
I’ve been saying for years that his schtick about being some kind of peacenik was a crock. First of all, it was obvious that he adopted that pose in order to position himself as the opposite of both Bush and Obama who were criticized for their foreign policy. He has almost no understanding of international affairs, even now, so his shorthand decision making was to simply say that anything his predecessors did was stupid and made the world laugh at us and he promised to reverse their policies.
But he did have a worldview. His central conceit all the way back to 2016 was that he’s a man of peace who wanted to put America first which people misinterpreted as a sort of pacifist isolationism. It was not. He wanted to spend massive sums to build up the US military to make allies pay up for protection and he believed that tariffs should be used as economic weapons to dominate other countries. In other words, he believes that US power should be used to bend the world to his will.
His recent comments about Mexico, Canada, Panama and Greenland show that this strategy has matured beyond just extorting money from other countries at the end of some very big guns, both military and economic, and has now become a full-fledged policy of territorial expansion.
That wasn’t all, however. Earlier in the day we had all been treated to reports that Donald Trump Jr. and activist Charlie Kirk had been dispatched to Greenland to take the temperature of locals to see if they wanted to be annexed by Donald Trump. It was embarrassing, needless to say.
And when asked in the press conference if Trump actually planned to seize the island, and the Panama Canal as well, Trump said it was necessary for national security, the same rationale Vladimir Putin used to invade Ukraine which Trump called “savvy” and “genius” at the time. It is quite clear that Trump is serious about this. When asked directly, he would not rule out using the military to accomplish his goal.
Reporter: Can you assure the world that as you try to get control of Greenland and the Panama Canal, you are not going to use military or economic coercion?
He is also quite serious about using US troops to stage military operations in Mexico, ostensibly against the drug cartels. And for all of his “joking” about Canada being the 51st state as a way to emasculate Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, he conceded that he only planned to use economic force to bend Canada to his will, which was very restrained of him.
The Atlantic’s David Frum discussed what a change this was from the way the world has been organized since the end of WWII when the world was in rubble and the United States made the decision to help rebuild it:
Americans sought to achieve security and prosperity for themselves by sharing security and prosperity with like-minded others. The United States became the center of a network of international cooperation—not only on trade and defense, but on environmental concerns, law enforcement, financial regulation, food and drug safety, and countless other issues.
And yes, we also exploited other countries, chased phantom ideological goals and otherwise betrayed our ideals but this was central to how we organized our tremendous military and economic power in the world. After the searing experiences of two world wars, a global Great Depression and the long slog of the Cold War, the hard won lesson was that everyone was safer and more prosperous under mutual cooperation. The international institutions, alliances and treaties that sprang from that understanding were devised to at least make it difficult to completely abandon those ideals.
That concept is no longer operative. Here you have one of Trump’s glib minions wondering why America shouldn’t expand its territory. It’s as if the last century never happened.
Rogin: America is not an expansionist military power..
With Trump saying that the US needs Greenland and the Panama Canal for national security reasons it’s pretty clear that they are laying the groundwork for military action. (Nobody is going to “sell” either of them.) I doubt that there will be any serious actions, economic or otherwise against Canada because America does lots of business with them. But Trump is stirring up a tremendous amount of resentment for no good reason. And we have every reason to believe that he’s serious about some kind of military action in Mexico. (And don’t be surprised if he proposes a Venezuelan invasion. He wanted to do it in his last term.)
Nobody voted for any of this. It wasn’t even a “vibe” in last November’s election.
Trump appears to have taken some inspiration from Vladimir Putin’s Ukraine invasion which he thought from the beginning made perfect sense. His Defense Secretary nominee put it in terms Trump probably liked very much. He called it “Putin’s give me my shit back war”:
Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, dismisses the danger of Putin invading other Eastern European countries if he isn't stopped in Ukraine:
“It feels like Putin’s give me my shit back war…We used to have the Soviet Union, and Ukraine was part of it, and I… pic.twitter.com/MBJIoFogDL
I have always said that even if you believed that America’s role in the world was too broad and too expensive and perhaps outdated, just taking a wrecking ball to it without anything to replace it would be a horrible mistake. Well, Trump has something to replace it now. When he says “America First” he means “America Uber Alles .”
And guess what? Other countries aren’t eager to go along with that. So they’re arming up:
Macron urges a new European military coalition as an alternative to NATO to help combat Russia and other threats. "We can't rely on (the US) or rest of the world."
The plan is to create a European army with France, UK, Italy, Poland, Baltic states and everyone who seeks to… pic.twitter.com/89HxdLsarP
“Look at the size of this. It’s massive,” said Trump.
Donald Trump refuses to rule out taking military or economic actions against a NATO ally (Denmark) to take control of Greenland or to annex the Sudetenland Panama Canal.
Republican strategist Kristen Soltis Anderson argues this morning that Trump is misunderstood (Raw Story):
“What Donald Trump is trying to argue is that there are many other conflicts around the world where it’s not in our interest to be involved,” said Republican strategist Kristen Soltis Anderson. “We’ve gotten too overextended, [Trump says] but this is in our interest. This is in our hemisphere, this is something that is important for us to do, and in a way, I think the reason why you see Donald Trump so animated about all of this is I think he views it as a really big real estate transaction. What does Donald Trump do? Big real estate transactions, branding – the Gulf of America. I mean, this is this is just Donald Trump taking the same playbook he’s been running for decades and now trying to apply it to the U.S. government yet again.”
C’mon, Gulf of America is hardly the first choice for the guy who gets a fee for slapping his name on buildings he doesn’t own. But I digress.
CNN legal analyst Elliot Williams agreed that Trump wasn’t fully serious about his imperialist ambitions, but he cautioned against dismissing his comments altogether.
“We were here four years ago where the former president, president-elect will make these claims that in many ways are kind of preposterous, but there’s an element of truth to them,” Williams said. “Like, yes, we technically could under the laws of the military annex another nation if we so chose. But here we are once again, assessing the seriousness of these kind of harebrained, almost schemes being cooked up by the former president. That could be the future of America, but it’s hard to know where we go from here.”
As everyone knows, Trump is obsessed with size. He famously assured voters his hands were not really small and indicated nothing about the size of his tool. Trump admires Russian President Vladmir Putin who is richer, smarter, more ruthless, and controls a much larger swath of territory than the U.S. president-elect.
Seriously? Trump desperately wants an invitation to the International Autocrats Club (Putin, Kim Jong Un, Viktor Orbán, et al.), that would never have a flaccid imbecile like him as a member. He imagines that grabbing a big hunk of land like Greenland would be his ticket to admission (plus his throwing millions out of the country and building concentration camps to hold them until he can). It’s a Charlie the Tuna move. Sorry, Donny.
MSNBC’s Alex Wagner on Tuesday recounts that one of Trump’s billionaire friends first floated the idea to Trump of “acquiring” Greenland. He was so obsessed with the idea, reported Peter Baker that “Greenland was one issue that absorbed the National Security Council staff for months.”
“Part of Trump’s fixation with buying Greenland,” Wagner said, “may have stemmed from his failure to understand how maps work.” Wagner provided graphics to explain the Mercator projection to the size-obsessed, idiot president-elect who wasn’t watching.
The Mercator projection distorts the size of land masses near the poles and makes them unrealistically large. Greenland is not nearly as large as it looks on a flat map.
Trump once said, “I love maps. And I always said: ‘Look at the size of this. It’s massive. That should be part of the United States.’”
Little Donny pictures TRUMP plastered across Greenland being visible from outer space.
When Republicans win elections, they celebrate and move on. When they lose, they scream foul and launch lawsuits. And insurrections. Americans marked the fourth anniversary of the Trump insurrection on Monday. Donald Trump was impeached and indicted for trying to steal the presidential election he lost in 2020.
North Carolina Republicans now mean to steal 60,000 votes and an entire statewide election. In broad daylight. In court. For a Republican state Supreme Court candidate, a judge yet. Two recounts confirm that Jefferson Griffin lost his election to incumbent Associate Justice Allison Riggs by 734 votes. Griffin’s attorneys hired Republican political consulting firm Coldspark to identify potential votes for challenge.
Allison Riggs won and the recount confirmed it. Republicans want to toss thousands of legal votes in the trash because they don’t like the outcome. This shouldn't be about party politics-this should be about making sure every vote counts & that our elections still mean something.
Four people I know, friends, including the former local president of the NAACP, are among the 60,000 Democrats, Republicans and independents whose votes Judge Griffin wants vacated so he can sit on the state’s highest court. Griffin means to steal the election ecumenically.
Robert Orr, former associate justice on the state Supreme Court (a former Republican), told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes Tuesday night that the NCGOP likely had this challenge teed up in advance “in case Trump lost North Carolina” by a narrow margin. They’re using that playbook to overturn Riggs’s election instead.
On Tuesday morning, the state board of elections appealed to the 4th Circuit, just a few hours after a federal district court judge granted Republican judicial candidate Jefferson Griffin’s motion to remand his election protest to the state Supreme Court.
The elections board’s federal appeal notwithstanding, the North Carolina Supreme Court’s conservative majority issued a temporary stay blocking the state elections board from certifying Griffin’s electoral loss to Democrat Allison Riggs, the incumbent justice he’s trying to unseat.
The crisis of democracy didn't end with Trump's victory—it got worse. When North Carolina's state Supreme Court is blocking certification of a state Supreme Court election, the house is on fire.
Lawyers for Griffin use language echoing Donald Trump’s complaints about his 2020 loss to Joe Biden, the very complaints he used to launch that the infamous insurrection. The GOP playbook is familiar, Rolling Stonenoticed. Griffin held a sizable lead on Election Day but saw it evaporate after the counting of all absentee and provisional ballots. Fraud, clearly.
Most of the votes Griffin wants thrown out are those his campaign claims were cast by people who did not include a driver’s license or partial Social Security number on their voter registration applications. People who did not include those numbers on their applications are not legally registered, Republican lawyers have argued. Many of those voters have been voting regularly for years.
John Eastman-level skeevy
Griffin’s attorneys base their challenge on registration requirements added under the federal Help America Vote Act (HAVA) passed in 2002 (NC Newsline):
The state Board of Elections’ written order filed after it rejected Griffin’s protests says that just because driver’s license or partial Social Security numbers didn’t show up in the voter registration file doesn’t mean voters didn’t supply them.
A brief filed on behalf of the League of Women Voters of North Carolina and individual voters emphasizes that point. Griffin’s target list is inaccurate, the brief says, because it fails to account for voters who did not have to supply the information or for data entry errors or database mismatches that resulted when women married and changed their last names.
Anne Tindall, one of the lawyers with the Protect Democracy Project representing the League and individual voters, said in an interview last week that the women and non-white voters were overrepresented on the list of 225,000 people Republicans originally wanted purged from the rolls. Those are voters who are more likely to have hyphenated names or names people misspell, she said.
Those aren’t the only votes at risk. Also under threat are nearly 300 ballots from voters living overseas, Rolling Stone reports, “including members of the military, a category of voter known as UOCAVA, short for the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act, a federal law.” These include voting-age citizens born to Americans living overseas (to parents from N.C.) but who’ve never actually lived in the state. Federal and state law provide for these Americans to vote in the state of their parents’ last residency. Republicans are challenging their votes as illegitimate anyway.
This is John Eastman-level, skeevy lawyering. The California State Bar Court recommended Eastman’s disbarrment (his license has been suspended). His license to practice law in the District of Columbia is suspended. He still faces criminal charges in Georgia and Arizona.
How this case impacts you
The (more) insane part of this affair is that Griffin’s election challenge is based on HAVA, a federal law. Throwing the case back to the state Supreme Court makes zero sense. Unless you’re a Trump judge like U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, and U.S. District Judge Richard Myers II is.
Secondly, if Republicans succeed in stealing Riggs’s seat based on HAVA, they will deploy the same tactic wherever and whenever they lose elections going forward. They may gut HAVA protections they dislike through congressional action, but will be sure to preserve provisions that allow them to steal elections (and your votes) the way Trump and Eastman attempted to with their fake electors scheme.
Griffin and his legal team are going to fight his election loss all the way to the Supreme Court, and they don’t care if it’s the state’s or SCOTUS. They’re both majority GOP.
The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals may yet step in and wrest back jurisdiction in this case. The N.C. Supreme Court acknowledged that in its stay order. But unlike Trump whose go-to gambit is delay, delay, delay, “because it concerns certification of an election,” they’re in a hurry to wrap up the steal by the end of January.
Every time someone ineligible casts a fraudulent ballot, Republicans insist, it “steals your vote.” Your vote. They make it personal. Under cover of that faux outrage they’ve launched a thousand efforts at vote suppression. Like this one. They’re coming for your vote next.
UPDATE: Perhaps feeling the heat, Republican justices on the state Supreme Court revised their previous order to include justice statements. What was a 5-1 opinion now stands at 4-2 with Republican Justice Richard Dietz joining Democrat Anita Earls in dissent.
In my view, the challenges raised in this petition strike at the very heart of our state’s Purcell principle. The petition is, in effect, post-election litigation that seeks to remove the legal right to vote from people who lawfully voted under the laws and regulations that existed during the voting process. The harm this type of post-election legal challenge could inflict on the integrity of our elections is precisely what the Purcell principle is designed to avoid.
Any issue Dietz may have with State Board rules in place long before the election, he writes, should have been litigated long before the election, not now. Voters bear no responsibility for that.
Permitting post-election litigation that seeks to rewrite our state’s election rules—and, as a result, remove the right to vote in an election from people who already lawfully voted under the existing rules—invites incredible mischief. It will lead to doubts about the finality of vote counts following an election, encourage novel legal challenges that greatly delay certification of the results, and fuel an already troubling decline in public faith in our elections. I therefore believe our state version of the Purcell principle precludes the relief sought in the petition and respectfully dissent from the Court’s decision not to deny it outright.
Also note that this Supreme Court contest is just one of hundreds held acrsoss the state (already certified), some of which were lost by Republicans by a mere handful of votes. What remedy could this GOP court order at this point if it permits the cancelling of any portion of the contested 60,000 votes?
Trump is fighting tooth and nail to keep Jack Smith’s report from being released to the public and you have to wonder why. He beat them all. He’s not going to be prosecuted. But as Bill Kristol points out, there is a good reason for him to want to keep it out of the public record:
Trump knows how crucial his rewriting of the history of January 6th was to his victory in November. If most Republicans had held to their original judgment of January 6th as a day of shame—if they had continued to believe that it was what Trump the very next day called a “heinous attack” that “defiled the seat of American democracy”—Trump would not have been the 2024 GOP nominee. If most Americans had thought January 6th not just an unfortunate event but a disqualifying disgrace, Trump wouldn’t have won the general election.
The whitewashing of January 6th was key to Trump’s political comeback.
And Trump has the sense—and I think he’s right about this—that he must make sure that January 6th stays whitewashed for the sake of his political success going forward.
Kristol goes on to note that the Southern segregationists of the mid-20th century understood very well that it would not be enough to defend their racist policies and that in order to maintain legitimacy they needed to defend their “nobility of the Southern effort in the “War Between the States,” the depredations of Reconstruction, and the historic legitimacy of states’ rights.”
Trump also must defend his traitorous behavior on January 6th and to do so he’ll demand that everyone around him are election deniers and that they will attack those who tried to hold him accountable. And as he says, plenty of otherwise “respectable” types may not extoll the virtues of January 6th, but they’ll find plenty of ways to make sure it’s minimized.
Sadly, as Kristol concludes, even if the report is released:
In a sense, the release now of Smith’s report will simply signify the failure of the effort, over the last four years, of accountability and truth-telling about January 6th. It will be the last gasp, for now, of a lost cause.
As I write this, the report is supposed to be released on Friday pending the decision by the 11th circuit which is reviewing the stay issued by none other than Trump’s judicial poodle Aileen Cannon. We’ll see.
If they decide to bury it, I just hope there’s a Daniel Ellsberg out there brave enough to leak it anyway. We just can’t survive as a nation if this total collapse of accountability continues. The record must at least be preserved and the only way to do that is to make it public.
Rumors have been flying that Trump is only planning to pardon most of the insurrectionists not all of them and the J6 choir is very unhappy about it, assuming that they will be the ones left in jail since they are the violent criminals. I’ll bet he comes through for all of them, saying that all the prosecutions are political. He appreciates what they did for him.
California likely will not have a budget deficit next year, but incoming President Donald Trump’s agenda portends an uncertain road ahead for California’s budget, Gov. Gavin Newsom announced on Monday.
The budget outlook Newsom describes is a major turnaround from the $47 billion deficit last year and the $32 billion shortfall the year before. Newsom and the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office, which makes budget projections for the Legislature, both attribute the improvement to stock market gains by the state’s wealthiest taxpayers and cuts in previous years.
But, Newsom cautioned, the steep cuts to federal government spending that Trump has promised could darken the bright picture he painted of California’s economy. Newsom said the incoming president could impact California’s budget depending on how his trade, tariff and immigration policies play out. That happened last time Trump was in office, Newsom said.
“Even as we were working with the Trump administration, they were still assaulting our values and programs and hard-earned rights under the law,” Newsom said. “We should anticipate nothing less than that.”
His proposal would largely keep state spending consistent with what he and lawmakers agreed to last year, with some increases in a few areas.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is making sweeping changes to the social internet, all in line with the desires of President-elect Donald Trump and his supporters. Out with the fact-checkers that conservatives deride. In with more permissive rules for posting conservative opinions.
The recent elections “feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech,” Zuckerberg said in his announcement, justifying relaxed new content moderation rules on Facebook, Instagram and Threads.
“Governments and legacy media have pushed to censor more and more,” Zuckerberg said, repeating a right-wing talking point used to undermine fact checking.
Because Meta is such a dominant force in the industry, with billions of users on its platforms worldwide, the changes will resonate even more widely, reshaping whole swaths of the internet in MAGA-friendly ways
I can’t understand what these billionaires think they’ll accomplish with this destruction but it appears to me that they are just playing schoolyard games with each other, currying favor with Trump and trying to outcompete each other.
They even announced it on Fox and Friends:
Tuesday morning’s announcements seemed like they were addressed directly to Trump, especially since Meta first gave the news exclusively to “Fox & Friends,” one of the president-elect’s favorite TV shows.
The company’s newly promoted policy chief Joel Kaplan, a former senior adviser to George W. Bush, sat with the Fox co-hosts and fully agreed with the show’s “censorship” versus “freedom” framing. Kaplan’s appearance was the latest sign of Meta recalibrating in advance of Trump’s second term in office.
Trump and some key allies have been harshly critical of Zuckerberg and Facebook in the past. Trump once accused Zuckerberg of election interference and threatened to send him to prison for “the rest of his life.”
They all have business with the government and are also terrified of Trump and his henchmen.
This is the Orban/Putin model. I just can’t believe how obvious they’re being about it. But why not? If Trump has proved anything it’s that there are no consequences for total shamelessness. Who cares?
I gave up Facebook a long time ago and I will give up X too just as soon as Blue sky finally attains the scale I need to do my work (and allows me to embed and play videos on to the site.) Social media is about to make a major leap into the abyss and I’m not sure what happens now.
