Author: Tom Sullivan

Were we born under a bad sign?

The Ink and Adam M. Lowenstein this morning consult with a researcher on “the internet and social media shape the intersection of politics, propaganda, and people.” Renée DiResta, an associate research professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown has assembled some of her conclusions in “Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality.”

DiResta’s and colleagues’ work for the Stanford Internet Observatory pissed off House Republicans enough that Stanford pulled the plug on the research after five years. Let that be a lesson to libtards everywhere:

The shutdown comes amid a sustained and increasingly successful campaign among Republicans to discredit research institutions and discourage academics from investigating political speech and influence campaigns. 

SIO and its researchers have been sued three times by conservative groups alleging that its researchers colluded illegally with the federal government to censor speech, forcing Stanford to spend millions of dollars to defend its staff and students.

(I just grabbed the audiobook. It’s how I “read” books these days.)

Her book, DiResta says, is not about social media per se, but about how “Propaganda evolves to fit the technological and communication landscape of the day.” She continues:

The content is different, the style is different, and the messages often largely remain the same, because they appeal to people psychologically. But you can’t really separate the medium and the message. That was one of the things that I wanted to highlight.

It’s also one of the things leading Democrats don’t understand. Yes, they have a problem finding a message that reaches people, but leaders who cut their political teeth in the pre-internet era of network news don’t understand how to interact with the public via any medium more relatable than a press conference.

There was a funny interview I read with Jamelle Bouie, who’s a New York Times columnist. It was saying he really cracked the TikTok code. It’s talking about him just walking around the neighborhood talking, and how this is not a thing that most journalists do. Here’s somebody who’s quite clearly “media” in his day job, but as he’s describing it in this interview, he’s not seen as media when he’s on TikTok doing his walk-and-talks. He’s just a guy. There is that almost performing-by-not-performing component of it. How can you be as relatable as possible?

Relatability connects, and most Democrats don’t come across as relatable. There’s more in the interview about the “bespoke reality” many people inhabit these days. Trying to present accurate data to refute conspiracy theories is pointless when congressional bad-faith actors are ” just going to move the goalposts, and whatever you did turn over, they’re going to find six words to hang you with.”

But the relatability problem is why Democrats are long overdue to turn over their top leadership to a younger generation. (Younger than 50, please.) Many of our politicians have not drawn private-sector paychecks in years. As soon as most leave office, some of the side gigs that supplement their congressional salaries will dry up unless they become lobbyists or pundits. So there are strong incentives to hang on into senility. But as much as we may respect their experience and accomplishments, they clearly are not equipped to press the attack on ideological adversaries in the 21st-century media battlespace.

Happy Hollandaise!

Let’s hang together, shall we?

It’s Christmas week. That means drama out of Washington will subside for a couple of days. But not entirely.

President Joe Biden, largely out of sight since the election, announced he would commute the sentences of 37 of the 40 prisoners on federal death row to life imprisonment. The three who remain are the worst of the worst: “Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of two brothers responsible for the deadly Boston Marathon bombing in 2013; Dylann Roof, a White nationalist who massacred nine people at a historically Black church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015; and Robert Bowers, who killed 11 worshippers at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue in 2018.”

The House Ethics Committee is expected to release its report Monday on former Republican congressman Matt Gaetz of Florida. CBS reports early this morning that it obtained a copy of the final draft of the 37-page report. Investigators found Gaetz “paid numerous women — including a 17-year-old girl — for sex, and to have purchased and used illegal drugs, including from his Capitol Hill office.”

“The Committee determined there is substantial evidence that Representative Gaetz violated House Rules and other standards of conduct prohibiting prostitution, statutory rape, illicit drug use, impermissible gifts, special favors or privileges, and obstruction of Congress,” the 37-page report concludes.

Following the ABC News defamation settlement with Trump, the incoming administration is poised for war with the press and any members it deems insufficiently obeisant to his Second Coming. He smells blood:

Steven Cheung, a Trump spokesman, said the president-elect plans to focus on “blatantly false and dishonest reporting, which serves no public interest and only seeks to interfere in our elections on behalf of political partisans.”

If only. Longtime readers will recall our 2019 run-in with Trump the Litigious.

I won’t sugar-coat this. The next couple of years will be rough. How rough is anyone’s guess. But a holiday party conversation with a retired FSO on Sunday brought up a perspective it will help us all to preserve.

We shared our mutual shock at the election — reelection — of the worst president in American history. Historians normally take decades to render judgment on a presidency. Trump’s place as worst of the worst, he noted, is already secure. Trump selecting Kimberly Guilfoyle and Charles Kushner, Jared Kushner’s ex-con father, as ambassadors to Greece and France was particularly irksome, a thumb in the eye to our NATO allies as well as to the U.S. diplomatic corps.

When I remarked that I know people who have left the country already, the career public servant was adamant. He’s not going anywhere. For friends asking how bad it can get, he offers instead not predictions but “glimmers.” Of hope.

At such gatherings, I tell people I write each day for a website out of Los Angeles. As morning guy, I have a three-hour news jump on Digby. I don’t prepare a lot of posts the night before. Much breaking news drops about 5:30- 6 a.m. Eastern. There’s just enough time in the morning to review headlines, skim stories over coffee, and make a few observations before 9 a.m. my time. I try to offer glimmers where I find them.

Digby asked if I’d fill in while she was away over a weekend in August 2014. Cool! What a privilege. When she got home Sunday evening, I asked if I was done. Not if you don’t want to be, she said. And here I am.

Some weeks later, an editorial page editor for the Asheville Citizen-Times spotted me at a political debate. (I’d written op-eds for them.) He strode across the room wearing a broad smile, shook my hand, and said, “My friend, you have arrived.” I still feel that way. I didn’t know Jim was a Hullabaloo reader.

One thing I love about Hullabaloo’s old-school format in the age of substacks designed to monetize everyone’s online activity is no paywall.* We want readers here. Your contributions to the annual fundraiser tell us you value what we do here too. They keep the lights on.

Ten years on, it’s still a privilege to write for you. Who knew when I met Digby in 2009 that I’d be living at one of the epicenters of GOP election fuckery? In this increasingly insane world, it helps me retain my sanity, and I hope what we post helps you maintain. Thank you for hanging with us each day. Let’s try not to hang separately.

Happy Hollandaise!

* And no advertising. Some salesman wrote last week offering to “leverage” our audience and “optimize” our revenue. Thank you and goodbye.

And vampire squids

Some friends and stilletto-sharp thinkers lately are busy discussing the meaning and implications of Cory Doctorow’s “enshittification.” ICYMI, Macquarie Dictionary declared it the word of the year, defined as: “The gradual deterioration of a service or product brought about by a reduction in the quality of service provided, especially of an online platform, and as a consequence of profit-seeking.”

As Doctorow explained a couple of years back:

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a “two sided market,” where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, holding each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.

Dave Roberts (a.k.a. Dr. Volts) spoke with Doctorow a couple of weeks ago on how enshittification is impacting the right to repair, monopoly power, and the clean energy economy:

But you know, products you pay for get rampantly enshittified — like, you know, John Deere tractors and iPhones and EVs, these are not free. And paying for the product does not make you not the product. Right? It’s, you know, payment is not like a consumer loyalty program where if you pay, suddenly the venal, callow tech-boss suddenly thinks you’re worthy of dignity and respect and stops screwing you. Tech bosses screw you if they can. And right now, we are at a point where they can. So, in this second phase, things are made worse for these platform’s business customers as well.

If you are in the mood to chew through your cheek about that this morning, read “Never Forgive Them,” the Sunday-length installment on enshittification and the Rot Economy at Ed Zitron’s Where’s Your Ed At. Doctorow will at the end of his interview at least provide an escape hatch to computer users enslaved by Microsoft or Apple and for-profit online platforms.

I spent a career in consulting work for national and international clients whose products you likely own and use. I’d bet money I’ve been on the inside of more factories than 99 percent of you where they make everything from clothes to paper to tires to plastic to biotech medicines to the white-powder Ms on your M&M’S®. Nevertheless, I am a bad capitalist. I don’t object to capitalism, per se. I just object to the enshittified version that, as Matt Taibbi once wrote, behaves today like “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”

Now that oligarch-branded capitalism has a stranglehold on our freedoms. It is strangling values like fairness and privacy like an infant in a crib, and enshittifying your experience of being an American.

Not to cast shade on my many friends on Substack (Roberts is there), but I’m rather fond of Digby’s old-school approach to delivering content for readers here. It’s free. There are no paywalls, no ads, pop-up or otherwise. Subscribing is voluntary, donating is voluntary. Nobody’s trying to extract value from your attention without your consent. What a concept?

We trust your experience here is not gradually deteriorating.
Happy Hollandaise!

Whether you’ve been bad or good

IYKYK: The South lost the Civil War but won Reconstruction, neutered the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments across the South, and maintained a rigid system of Jim Crow oppression for the next 100 years.

IYKYK: Each July 4th, we celebrate America’s war to overthrow rule by hereditary royalty and landed gentry and to create on these shores democratic self-rule … plus a little slavery to appease the South’s economic royalty.

Like the Civil War, the American Revolution now seems to have failed. Is there any doubt?

Former bartender, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, doesn’t think so. Her Instagram followers asked about American oligarchy, and one oligarch in particular from the South (Africa).

AOC: “Oh, I don’t think we’re witnessing the START of an oligarchy. I think we are fully here.”

@aoc

Answering questions over on Instagram tonight – @aoc

♬ original sound – Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

AOC: “Republicans don’t know who their Daddy is.”

@aoc

Answering questions over on instagram tonight – @aoc

♬ original sound – Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

Democrats might have had AOC as ranking member of the House Oversight Committee next year. What happened there?

“What we are looking at here is oligarchy”

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders could teach a master class in class politics. He sees it too.

Sanders: “My friends, what we are looking at here has nothing to do with democracy. What we are looking at here is oligarchy. This is up and up government by the billionaire class, for the billionaire class.”

Sanders: “What we are dealing with right now is that the billionaire class, which owns so much of our economy, which owns so much of our media, they are now moving aggressively to own our political system as well.”

Ten years ago to the day, I commented on an interview with historian Steve Fraser in which he warned about this second Gilded Age:

Bill Moyers’ guest, historian Steve Fraser, deconstructs how the second Gilded Age differs from the first. Then, people banded together and rose up to challenge their newfound serfdom. But these are “acquiescent times,” says Fraser. We live in a fable of capitalism as “a democracy of the audacious who will make it on their own, while in fact most of the people are headed in the opposite direction.”

Then on Christmas Eve in 2014, I returned to Fraser’s comments:

What Milton Friedman called capitalism in 1962 looks more like an economic cult today. Question the basic assumptions behind corporate capitalism, publicly point out its shortcomings and suggest we are overdue for an upgrade, and the Chamber of Commerce practically bursts through the door like the Spanish Inquisition to accuse you of communism and heresy. Why you … you want to punish success! It’s weirdly reflexive and a mite hysterical. What their blind fealty and knee-jerk defense of this one particular style for organizing a capitalist enterprise says about them, I’ll leave for now. It suffices to say I find it rather peculiar.

We think we invented capitalism. Yet there have been “capitalist acts between consenting adults”* since before Hammurabi. We don’t call one capitalist enterprise the world’s oldest profession for nothing. There’s a restaurant in China that has been in operation for nearly 1000 years. And pubs in England that have been in business for 900. All without being incorporated in Delaware or the Cayman Islands. (Communists?)

The fetish for the current economic model isn’t about money or ideology, but, like The Matrix, about control. For some and not for others. Working people in the first Gilded Age, says Fraser, “summoned up a kind of political will and the political imagination” to civilize capitalism,” to say to themselves, “we are not fated to live this way.”

Now, corporate capitalism is pretty successful at what it does. But then, so is kudzu, another invasive species. I used to live on the edge of a field of kudzu. In the summer, I had to cut it back with a machete each week to keep it from taking over my yard and eating my house. On those hot, summer afternoons, not once did a passing neighbor wag a finger in my face and accuse me of “punishing success.”

Corporate capitalism has become an invasive species that has taken over government of, by, and for the People. Sen. Elizabeth Warren very publicly called out one such creeping pest recently. She suggested it was time we cut it back. She’s right.

We upgrade our hardware and software every couple of years. When was the last time capitalism got a new operating system? And what might that look like?

We’d damned well better start answering those questions or the Elon Musks and Lords of Silicon Valley will answer them for us. Corporate capitalism and our teetering republic need upgrading, but nearly half the country is just fine with being ruled instead of governing themselves. What’s it going to take for that to sink in? Making our oligarchs wear powdered wigs?

Is that lump in your stocking or in your throat?

We’re not giving up if you’re not.
Happy Hollandaise!

Coal-rolling Trump’s enemies

The old, red-brick Memorial Auditorium where the spouse as a tween saw The Monkees is long gone. Its replacement sports a plaza in front, a modern, electronic marquee, and a name that expires with its corporate sponsorship. Before pyrotechnics, before Vince McMahon made professional wrestling professional and a media empire, the old joint is where Monday Night Wrestling was as much local culture as ambulances and cop cars outside west-end beer joints on Saturday nights. What the hell, I thought. A friend and I went out for pizza and beer, then took in the show once. Once.

Wrasslin’ wasn’t the spectacle it is now. It wasn’t even mildly entertaining. But for fans it was a weekly morality play of “The Drunkard” sort. Clean-cut heroes. Snidely Whiplash villains (heels) to hiss, and The Foreign Menace. Like McMahon’s empire, Donald Trump’s MAGA show offers obvious heroes and dastardly, America-hating villains. It’s more mildly threatening than mildly entertaining. But it’s a kind of theater with similar morality-play charm for a similar audience. As my high school journalism teacher said of supermarket tabloids, at least people are reading.

David Kurz of TPM sees the wrestling parallels in the just-averted budget showdown:

This week’s debacle is not your grandpappy’s horse-trading in a smoke-filled room or LBJ dishing out the Johnson Treatment. The only arm-twisting going on is the kind you see in pro wrestling, which is probably the best parallel for what the GOP’s performative politics amounts to. Spending bills, speakership elections, and other real and pressing matters of government put the GOP’s kayfabe under extreme duress. When that happens, we get eruptions like this one that periodically pull the curtain back on what is really up.

We’re more than a decade now into the GOP’s performative politics of destruction. It gains power by touting its aim to break stuff and then runs into a brick wall when it’s forced to make the hard choices that come with holding power. Any GOP effort to govern at least temporarily is susceptible to being undermined by its many bombthrowers, who can exert leverage by striking a purer “blow it all up” posture.

Performatively breaking “the rules” is part of the show in the wrasslin’ world. The bad guys become good guys and vice versa, just to keep things interesting. Performers getting even for “done me wrongs” sells tickets to the next event.

The financially struggling news media hasn’t caught on to that. Kurz provides examples of anodyne headlines from media outlets that while “literally true … fail to capture the true dynamic.” I’m not arguing that headlines should be as sensational as the tabloids, but if you want to sell papers and draw public attention to events that impact people’s for-real lives, perhaps a little more showmanship is in order. Republicans are hanging truck nuts on America’s trailer hitch fergawdsakes. MAGAs in Congress are coal-rolling Trump’s enemies. Maybe say so.

When is revenge not revenge?

The Bulwark’s Tim Miller spoke with recently incarcerated Steve Bannon, “Trump’s on-again-off-again adviser,” about plans for not-revenge against Trump’s enemies (and Kash Patel’s). The law firm of Bannon, Patel, Musk, and Trump will instead attempt “cleansing of institutions that Trump and the MAGA movement believe are fundamentally broken,” Miller explains, and break them some more. There will be a heavy focus on the January 6 “fedsurrection” plot by the FBI to pin the Capitol assault on MAGA “patriots“:

“I think there will be a massive investigation. The vast criminal conspiracy, including the media’s—what was it, Andrew Weissmann and all those FBI guys that work on MSNBC—I think there will be big investigations into all these people, I just do. I think there is going to be a huge investigation, I believe, into 2020. I think it’s going to be a huge investigation on January 6th, the fedsurrection, I think it’s going to be a huge investigation about the vast criminal conspiracy against President Trump.”

The facts won’t matter. The play’s the thing that will catch the attention of the MAGA king and his rabid fans. They want a show. He’ll give them the circuses if not the bread. The press will dish up bland.

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Happy Hollandaise!

Does Musk own a hollow volcano somewhere?

Our oligarch overlords have long treated the land of the free as the home of the knave. Now that President Musk, our first non-native-born chief of state is calling the shots, that state of affairs is even more apparent, if less publicized.

“Why is corporate media not covering this more?” asks Dean Obeidallah. Mediaite:

Democratic Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) accused Elon Musk of working to kill Speaker Mike Johnson’s (R-LA) initial bipartisan spending proposal because it would have regulated his investments in China.

DeLauro said in a statement Friday she “sent a letter to congressional leadership raising concerns that Elon Musk may have upended the government funding process to remove a provision that would regulate U.S. investments in China.” Her statement added:

“The four corners of the Appropriations Committee and Congressional leadership reached a government funding deal earlier this week that included a key provision that would screen U.S. investments in critical sectors in China,” said DeLauro. “Musk’s investments in China and his ties with the Chinese Community Party have only grown over the last few years with Tesla’s Shanghai plant producing about 50 percent of Tesla’s global automobile output. It is no surprise ‘President’ Musk does not want to see a funding deal containing this provision be signed into law.”

In the letter she wrote, “ It is particularly disturbing that Musk may have sought to upend this critical negotiated agreement to remove a bipartisan provision regulating U.S. investments in China in order to protect his wallet and the Chinese Communist Party at the expense of American workers, innovators, and businesses.”

Disturbing? Yes. Surprising? No.

Why is corporate media not covering this more? "House Dem Accuses Musk of Killing Initial Spending Deal to Protect His Investments In China." No debate that the second GOP budget bill took out the ban out on China investments and China is Musk's second biggest market www.mediaite.com/politics/hou…

— Dean Obeidallah (@deanobeidallah.bsky.social) 2024-12-21T12:24:34.969Z

Musk responded with his characteristic panache.

Musk responded to DeLauro’s accusation by ridiculing the 81-year-old lawmaker’s appearance. Musk posted an AI-generated image of DeLauro as a kind of monster and wrote, “Turns out that Washington DC swamp creatures are real.”

Musk really is an Octopussy-level Bond villain.

Thank you visiting with us each day. And look! You’ve even taken time out from last-minute shopping to be here! Know we appreciate your support.

Happy Hollandaise!

For Republicans, for Democrats, for the republic

In yesterday’s Starting The Steal, we discussed the Republican legal challenge to losing the North Carolina state Supreme Court race in November. But today consider the national implications. Even a Republican gets it (sort of).

Andrew Dunn of Longleaf Politics believes it a bad idea for Court of Appeals Judge Jefferson Griffin to fight his loss all the way to the GOP-controlled state Supreme Court he’s desperate to join. Republicans want to throw out 60,000 votes “on technicalities in voter registration.” Read more about that here and here.

“I’m not sure who’s leading the push here — but it needs to end now,” writes Dunn:

If the Supreme Court sides with Griffin, the fallout will be immediate and brutal. This isn’t just bad optics; it’s potentially a credibility-shattering disaster for the court, the party, and conservatism in North Carolina. Overnight, this becomes a national story about Republicans “stealing” a Supreme Court seat. The allegation would be impossible to defend against.

And it wouldn’t end there. A ruling for Griffin would hand Democrats the perfect weapon: a story that’s simple, emotional, and devastating. It’s not hard to imagine Republicans losing judicial races — and even key legislative seats in 2026 — because of the stink this case would leave behind.

If Griffin loses the appeal, the damage is only slightly contained. The party will have spent months locked in a fight that divides its base and gives Democrats fresh ammunition for future campaigns. This appeal makes future judicial races even harder.

NEW: Voting rights groups launch public service campaign calling on Jefferson Griffin to end shameful attempt to throw out votes of 60,000 North Carolinians – bit.ly/3VPFQLL #ncpol

— Common Cause NC (@commoncausenc.bsky.social) 2024-12-20T17:51:25.927Z

Dunn is neglecting the national fallout.

REDMAP, the 2010 GOP effort to win control over 2011 redistricting/gerrymandering, was midwifed by North Carolina’s Thomas B. Hoffeler, as was the Republican effort to rig the 2020 census. After Roy Cooper ousted N.C. Republican Gov. Pat McCrory in 2016, Republicans called a lame-duck session to strip Cooper of many powers of his office before inauguration. The tactic spread to Wisconsin in 2018 when Democrat Tony Evers defeated Republican Gov. Scott Walker. (North Carolina wrote the playbook Wisconsin and Michigan are using to undermine democracy.) N.C. Republicans just succeeded again in stripping Democratic governor-elect Josh Stein of some of his appointment powers.

David Pepper calls the states “Laboratories of Autocracy.” North Carolina is chief among them. If North Carolina Republicans succeed in cancelling 60,000 voters’ ballots (including Republican voters; they’re not safe when stealing an election is in play) because their voter file lacks a driver’s license number or the last four digits of their Social Security number, that challenge tactic too will spread to other states. Yours very likely.

Update: Added Common Cause post from Bluesky

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Happy Hollandaise!

Welcome Chaos Games

With so much chaos this morning in Washington, D.C., I don’t know where to focus.

Government shutdown looms, blares CNN unless that’s changed since I last hit Refresh.

Kate Riga at TPM wonders just where “on the spectrum of incompetence to malice” the incoming Trump II administration will land.

It appears Donald Trump has ceded the presidency to, in NewsHoundEllen’s view, a “likely illegal immigrant.“

David Rothkopf wonders how a great nation functions with three presidents at once. The official president is “currently MIA. Our president-elect has been acting since the first week of November like he has already taken office, meanwhile, but has also effectively appointed a shadow president in Elon Musk, who appears to be the one of the three with the most clout right now.”

The rule of law is going on holiday except for punishing them what’s done Trump wrong:

U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan says she has often reassured police officers traumatized by the violence of Jan. 6, 2021, that “the rule of law still applies.”

But as President-elect Donald Trump — once a defendant in Chutkan’s very court — prepares to retake the White House and pardon many Jan. 6 perpetrators, Chutkan now says, “I’m not sure I can do that very convincingly these days.”

“You like me. You really like me”

El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago is too busy enjoying his popularity with men richer than himself that he hasn’t noticed Elon Musk embezzling his presidential power. “Everybody wants to be my friend,” Trump gushed on Monday after tech CEOs like Jeff Bezos planned pilgrimages to see him.

“To settle who he loves more, Elon and Bezos are going to put Trump down in the middle of the room and see who he goes to first: ‘All right, here boy!’” — JIMMY FALLON

For once, Democrats seem to have settled on a message they’ll all sing in harmony. They’re repeating “President Musk” and calling Trump Musk’s “chief of staff” in an effort to drive a wedge between the two. The beauty of it is, even if Trump sees that that’s exactly what they’re doing, it won’t make any difference in it getting under his thin skin.

Thank you sharing this Sanctuary of Sanity with us each day.
Happy Hollandaise!

Stealing your 60,000 votes

Despite what you’ve heard, the 2024 election is not over. Republicans treated Donald Trump’s failed 2020 effort to reverse his loss to Joe Biden in court and via an insurrection on the Capitol steps as a how-to manual. They’re emulating Trump right now in North Carolina.

Republican Kari Lake lost the Arizoina governor’s race in 2022 to Democrat Katie Hobbs. No way, said Lake. She refused to concede and fought it out in court deep into 2024. Lake still refused to acknowldge losing even as she ran for and lost her 2024 U.S. Senate race.

Bryan Anderson of Anderson Alerts substack comments on the North Carolina Supreme Court race in which Justice Allison Riggs defeated Republican Court of Appeals Judge Jefferson Griffin by 734 votes after multiple recounts. Griffin is going to court:

North Carolina Court of Appeals Judge Jefferson Griffin on Wednesday asked the 5-2 conservative majority state Supreme Court to intervene in a race where he presently trails Democratic Supreme Court Justice Allison Riggs by 734 votes.

Griffin is specifically asking the high court to step in by Monday to prevent certification of the election, bypass a lower court and discard the ballots of more than 60,000 voters who state and county elections administrators have concluded were legitimately cast. In doing so, he believes he could overtake Riggs’ lead.

Griffin is largely seeking to toss out ballots of people whose voter registrations don’t include driver’s license or the last four digits of their Social Security number, arguing that such incomplete registrations render their votes ineligible.

That argument was partially rejected in federal court shortly before the November election, with a Trump-appointed judge concluding such intervention could move the country “away from a democratic form of government.”

The rest is behind a paywall, but you get the point. Four friends from my county are on Griffin’s list.

Remember, Griffin ran for and lost a seat on the state’s Supreme Court. Gene Nichol, a UNC-Chapel Hill law professor and News & Observer columnist, reminded readers last week, “In embracing the North Carolina Republican ‘politics of façade,’ Griffin shows he shouldn’t become a justice.” Griffin means to prove Nichol right by litigiating his loss until he wins or can litigate no more.

It’s a Trumpish variation on an old Republican theme. If they win, the election was fair. If they lose, Democrats cheated. Normally, the perps are those ubiquitous yet invisible voter fraudsters:

Voter fraud frauds have for years scare-mongered Republican voters that should anyone anywhere cast even a single ballot improperly, it “steals your vote.” Your vote. They are careful to personalize it for their white audience. They have spun the all-but-nonexistent problem into a widespread one (that isn’t) requiring draconian voting restrictions. Those laws, in their “majestic equality,” apply to all yet, just coincidentally, predominantly impact minorities of voters that tend to vote for Democrats.

Griffin and accomplices in this case are themselves trying to steal 60,000 of “your votes” in broad daylight with court filings. Shamelessness is their superpower.

Thank you sharing this Sanctuary of Sanity with us each day.
Happy Hollandaise!

TweedleDim and TweedleDoofus

Democrats trolled Donald Trump as Elon Musk’s chief of staff after “President Musk” blew up House Speaker Mike Johnson’s (R-Louisiana) three-month continuing resolution with a five-word tweet early Wednesday: “This bill should not pass.” TweedleDim is not known for being loquacious.

Before it’s begun, this is what Trump’s second term amounts to (The Daily Beast, emphasis mine):

Elon Musk sticking his fingers in congressional affairs before his new pal Donald Trump is even sworn in as president had many Democrats referring to the tech figure as “President Musk” Wednesday.

The billionaire Tesla CEO successfully lobbied—with Trump’s help—for the death of a bipartisan spending bill Wednesday that would have staved off a shutdown and funded the government through March—leaving the Capitol in chaos as Congress scrambled to keep Washington running as the Christmas holiday looms.

Regarding the pair’s efforts to kill the spending bill that House Speaker Mike Johnson had painstakingly negotiated with Democratic leaders, New York Rep. Daniel Goldman told MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell: “It’s not Donald Trump asking for this. It’s very clearly President Elon Musk asking for this.”

“The fact that Donald Trump has been completely AWOL during these negotiations to the point where only after Elon Musk publicly tweets about his displeasure, about this budget deal,” he continued, “all of a sudden Donald Trump, chief of staff to Elon Musk, comes trotting in and blows up the deal.”

Those of us living in a disaster zone knew we’d be abandoned as soon as election results rolled in on Nov. 5. The CR contained “more than $100 billion in aid for natural disaster survivors, bipartisan health-care policy changes and other unrelated provisions,” reports the Washington Post:

In scrapping Johnson’s plan, Republicans cast doubt on his ability to maintain the speaker’s gavel in next year’s Congress. Johnson must run for the position again when the new House is sworn in on Jan. 3, and enough GOP lawmakers to deny him the position have already declared they won’t support him, according to two members who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations.

Everything Trump touches dies (ETTD), as the Bulwark’s Rick Wilson reminds us. His Republican former colleagues seem not to listen.

Eugene Robinson Wednesday night reminded those with ears to hear what fealty to Trump brings:

Titans of industry and commerce, beware. When you bend the knee to the Mad King, when you shower him with money and bathe him in flattery, he will receive your gifts with apparent gratitude. But he will want more. He will always want more.

Industry’s titans have made pilgimage to Mar-a-Lago to fall at Trump’s feet since his election. Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, Apple’s Tim Cook (Tim Apple), Jeff Bezos of Amazon, and others. These three kings and others have showered the reborn king with lavish donations to his inauguration.

They may feel a fiduciary duty to shareholders to make the most of their access to Trump (I wouldn’t call it friendship), There are zillions in government contracts and profitable policies on the line, says Robinson.

But the business leaders should remember what it is about our system that has allowed their companies to grow and thrive — the rule of law and the impartiality of justice; immigration policies that welcome brains, talent and ambition from around the world; ample funding for basic research that leads to world-changing breakthroughs. Government shapes this landscape, and Trump threatens to alter it dramatically.

A sharp turn toward nationalism and xenophobia would be bad for the nation and the world, but it would be nothing short of disastrous for companies such as Apple or Meta or Alphabet. Maybe these executives believe they can convince Trump that mass deportations are a bad idea and that immigration greatly boosts the U.S. economy. Or that arbitrary and excessive tariffs would needlessly burden the American consumer. Or that unnecessary regulations should be eliminated with tweezers, not a lawn mower.

But it is hubris characteristic of these moguls to believe Trump won’t trash them as soon as he sees them as disloyal or snatching too much of the attention he cannot live without.

So remind TweedleDoofus that President Musk views him as his chief of staff every chance you get. The sooner Musk, Ramaswamy, and company fall out of Trump’s favor, the less chance the oligarchs will have to turn the U.S. government into their wholly owned subsidiary. They may already see a 25th Amendment solution to his brand of chaos, warns a friend, and J.D. Vance as more controllable.

Move fast. They will.

Thank you sharing this Sanctuary of Sanity with us each day.
Happy Hollandaise!