Author: Tom Sullivan

Sununu: [Musk is] so rich he’s so removed from the potential financial influence

Donald Trump sold himself as so rich that he couldn’t be bought. He would spend $600 million of his own money to win the presidency. “I mean, part of the beauty of me is that I’m very rich,” he told ABC in 2011. And in the fullness of time, the man sold NFTs of himself and Trump sneakers and Trump Bibles and Trump scents.

New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu (R) reassures CNN’s Dana Bash that Elon Musk is incorruptible like that. He’s got both hands in the Trump 2.0 administration, sure. But he’s not “doing it for the money.” He’s not into making money for the money but for the betterment of all mankind. Musk loves mankind from which “he’s so removed.” It’s people he can’t stand. How dare we ask him to pay more in taxes to benefit them?

BASH: One of the concerns is that Elon Musk has billions tied up in govt contracts. You don't see a conflict of interest?CHRIS SUNUNU: Everyone has a conflict of interestBASH: But that's a pretty big oneSUNUNU: He's so rich he's removed from the potential financial influence

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2024-12-29T14:47:39.372Z

Three years ago, Paul Krugman wrote (gift link):

Elon Musk doesn’t think visionaries like him should pay taxes the way little people do. After all, why hand over his money to dull bureaucrats? They’ll just squander it on pedestrian schemes like … bailing out Tesla at a crucial point in its development. Musk has his sights set on more important things, like getting humanity to Mars to “preserve the light of consciousness.”

Billionaires, you see, tend to be surrounded by people who tell them how wonderful they are and would never, ever suggest that they’re making fools of themselves.

But don’t you dare make fun of Musk. Billionaires’ money gives them a lot of political clout — enough to block Democratic plans to pay for much-needed social spending with a tax that would have affected only a few hundred people in a nation of more than 300 million. Who knows what they might do if they think people are snickering at them?

[…]

What I suspect, although I can’t prove it, is that what really drives someone like Musk is an insecure ego. He wants the world to acknowledge his unequaled greatness; taxing him like a “$400,000-a-year working Wall Street stiff” (my favorite line from the movie “Wall Street”) would suggest that he isn’t a unique treasure, that maybe he indeed doesn’t deserve everything he has.

Sununu should be embarrassed to make this argument in public. Should be.

Random notes

Before we issue a sure-to-be-ignored word of caution to MAGA, let’s set the scene. I get that, with the reelection of King D, MAGA types just might be feeling their oats about taking back America from, you know, THOSE PEOPLE.

The Daily Show‘s Ronny Chieng discourses on patriotism and education. He was born in Malaysia (like you’d care), but how would you know?

 

 

 

 

 

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A post shared by Karen Cahn (@karencahn)

Let’s got to Politico:

A Colorado man is facing possible bias-motivated charges for allegedly attacking a television news reporter after demanding to know whether he was a citizen, saying “This is Trump’s America now,” according to court documents.

Patrick Thomas Egan, 39, was arrested Dec. 18 in Grand Junction, Colorado, after police say he followed KKCO/KJCT reporter Ja’Ronn Alex’s vehicle for around 40 miles (64 kilometers) from the Delta area. Alex told police that he believed he had been followed and attacked because he is Pacific Islander.

Forty miles.

Egan, a taxi driver, pulled up beside Alex at a Grand Junction traffic light and allegedly shouted, “Are you even a U.S. citizen? This is Trump’s America now! I’m a Marine and I took an oath to protect this country from people like you!”

Egan followed the reporter to the station and chased Alex to the door, demanding to see his identification.

Egan then tackled Alex, put him in a headlock and “began to strangle him,” the affidavit said. Coworkers who ran out to help and witnesses told police that Alex appeared to be losing his ability to breathe during the attack, which was partially captured on surveillance video, according to the document.

According to the station’s website, Alex is a native of Detroit. KKCO/KJCT reported that he was driving a news vehicle at the time.

Let’s hope that in 2025 few MAGA zealots behave like that jerk in Colorado.

Maybe do something more patriotic. Do your homework for your country. Learn math.

A friend with an Arabic name and look lives in Vermont. Someone asked him once if he ever felt threatened there. Not really, he said. Okay, now and then some a-hole will shout “Go back to where you came from!” His shrugging response is, “You want me to go back to North Dakota?”

An old friend here looks Korean. Naturally. His parents are from South Korea. My friend was born and raised here.

One would think Mr. “I’m a Marine” might have figure out during his service that not all Americans look like their parents hail from Jolly Olde England. One would think that, with all that manly Marine training, Colorado Man might not be so easily threatened by the mere presence of an AAPI-looking guy from Detroit driving alone in a marked news vehicle.

Forty miles?

There’s no indication that Mr. Egan asked to see Mr. Alex’s H1B visa.

@thejourneyofteej

♬ original sound – TheJourneyOfTeej

Update: From Rick Wilson

You may have heard there's a MAGA civil war underway on social media over the past week, @theRickWilson tells you exactly why here: pic.twitter.com/yJIBFcBOPy

— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) December 28, 2024

It couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch

Make America Grouse Again (Axios):

Elon Musk pledged Friday night to go to “war” to defend the H-1B visa program for foreign tech workers, branding some Republican opponents as “hateful, unrepentant racists.”

Why it matters: The MAGA-DOGE civil war that erupted over the last 48 hours has now come to a tipping point, with President-elect Trump’s new techno-libertarian coalition of billionaires taking full aim at his traditional base.

• Trump, who has remained silent thus far on the schism, faces a quickly deepening conflict between his richest and most powerful advisors on one hand, and the people who swept him to office on the other.

This will not end well:

Zoom in: Just before midnight Friday, Musk once again defended the H-1B program in vulgar, all-caps terms, saying the program was the key to the success of his (and other big American) companies.

• “Take a big step back and F–K YOURSELF in the face. I will go to war on this issue the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend,” Musk wrote.
• In a separate post, he pledged to “fight to my last drop of blood” to keep America a meritocracy.

Meanwhile, Trump supporters are engaged in as much wishcasting about whose benefits Trump sill slash (not theirs, just those low-caste Irresponsibles) as lefties who believed after the Berlin Wall fell that the “peace dividend” would be a boone for social safety net programs.

Equalizers on retainer

Anticipating Donald Trump’s “promised revenge tour,” Josh Marshall floated the idea of about ten days ago that anti-Trumpers with deep pockets assemble a big pile of money for the legal defense of women and men on his enemies list.

Marshall is back to report there is movement on this effort in a good-news, bad-news sort of way. Since then, he’s become aware of “groups or consortia that are organizing to be the place that Trump targets can go when they get their subpoena or their lawsuit,” but for now they are keeping their identities below the radar:

For very real reasons these groups don’t want to draw a lot of attention to themselves. They don’t want themselves to become the targets of harassment and lawfare when they’re trying to defend others from it. If they themselves get run out of business who’s going to be around to help everyone else? So I can’t give websites for these operations that you’d want to look up if you’re a target or show you how to contribute money. They’re not set up that way and they don’t want the attention.

Marshall wonders how this might work and was initially dubious of the approach. But his thinking has shifted:

It’s not just Trump and official MAGA we have to worry about. We’re really facing an era of broader civic disinhibition, in which public and private actors will be declaring war on civil society, government employees and more in ways that simply haven’t happened in the past. There’s no one group that can combat that. And these nascent efforts are going to be a critical part of the equation — for the civil servant who gets harassed, for the nonprofit which needs legal assistance fending off financially ruinous subpoenas. And by this I don’t mean just to say … well, the small stuff. What I mean is that there’s going to be a lot of stuff, across society, across multiple layers of government. There’s a lot to go around. And not every individual or entity wants to become a poster child for MAGA abuses of power. Often they just need someone to pick up the legal work that would have bankrupted the organization or made an individual lose their home.

And defenders of civic society may not care for Trump sending his flying monkeys their way. (“I understood that reference.“)

Marshall floats how his Big Pile of Money (BPM) group might operate. As lawyerly Equalizers, in my view:

One of the best ways I can think of to describe what I’m looking for is by an illusory hypothetical. Let’s imagine there was another billionaire out there — a non-decadent, non-degenerate version of Musk — who said: I believe in America. Every person Trump targets, I’m going to send them a contact number at mega law firm X, which I’ve retained, and it’s an open tab for as long as they need. And if you’re out there wondering if you’re willing to take the risks of doing the right thing over the next four years, I’ll be sending you a contact number too. And I’m going to do more than that. I’m going to use the channels of these abusive lawsuits and criminal investigations to load these folks down with every discovery motion you could have imagined. I’m going to use my cash and the courts not just to protect people but to embarrass and humiliate the abusers, make them wish they’d never started.

That is, after all, how Trump has for decades used lawsuits to harass creditors until they run out of fight (and money) and go away. Defenders must exact a cost on those who would foul the civic square to create a “penumbra of fear,” in Marshall’s words.

But in an age when politics is a pro-wrestling spectacle, BPM groups must be seen doing it. Landing punches, and “damaging and embarrassing and humiliating the other side.” Turning idle spectators into fans and investors in creating a penumbra of safety. Because right now there is only one fighter in the ring throwing folding chairs.

How many Rocky movies?

Marshall concludes:

Any operation that doesn’t play in that realm isn’t playing this performative, public role. That’s critical. It also operates a virtuous or at least non-vicious circle. People need to open their pockets — billionaires and average people. People open their pockets when they’re seeing points put on the board, when they see punches being landed. 

Once again:

First, like it or not, the public wants Thunderdome. The press covers Thunderdome. Thunderdome draws eyeballs in this attention economy. Again, and again and again: How many Rocky movies did Stallone make?

People pay money to see that. They want to cheer for the little guy with heart facing insurmountable odds. They want to watch The Equalizer squash baddies the law cannot touch. Seen any of those lately?

Maybe the Big Pile of Money could run a classified ad.

The ballot counting is over but not the litigation

Welcome to the Great State of North Carolina (ProPublica):

Months before voters went to the polls in November, a group of election skeptics based in North Carolina gathered on a call and discussed what actions to take if they doubted any of the results.

One of the ideas they floated: try to get the courts or state election board to throw out hundreds of thousands of ballots cast by voters whose registrations are missing a driver’s license number and the last four digits of a Social Security number.

But that idea was resisted by two activists on the call, including the leader of the North Carolina chapter of the Election Integrity Network. The data was missing not because voters had done something wrong but largely as a result of an administrative error by the state. The leader said the idea was “voter suppression” and “100%” certain to fail in the courts, according to a recording of the July call obtained by ProPublica.

This novel theory is now at the center of a legal challenge by North Carolina appeals court Judge Jefferson Griffin, a Republican who lost a race for a state Supreme Court seat to the Democratic incumbent, Allison Riggs, by just 734 votes and is seeking to have the result overturned.

The state election board dismissed a previous version of the challenge, which is now being considered in federal court. Before the election, a Trump-appointed judge denied an attempt by the Republican National Committee to remove 225,000 voters from the rolls based on the same theory.

Copland has been voting since 1988, and after surviving Hurricane Helene, she just wants her voice to be heard. Jefferson Griffin doesn’t think her vote, nor the votes of her Western NC neighbors, should count.Add your name against the campaign to throw out 60,000 votes: ccnc.me/WeMatter

— Common Cause NC (@commoncausenc.bsky.social) 2024-12-26T20:27:36.462Z

I’ve tangled before with one of the scheme’s backers. He’s been at challenging votes for years:

In July 2024, the North Carolina chapter of the Election Integrity Network convened online to plan its efforts ahead of the presidential election. Worried about a surge of voter registrations from nonwhite voters who they believed would back Democrats, the activists discussed how to assemble a “suspicious voters list” of people whose ballots they could challenge.

Then, one of the group’s board members, Jay DeLancy, said he had another idea “that’s a lot slicker.”

DeLancy said that if a candidate lost a close election, the loss could be overturned by questioning the validity of voters whose registrations are missing their driver’s license and Social Security information. “Those are illegal votes,” he claimed. “I would file a protest.”

Jim Womack, the leader of the chapter, immediately pushed back: “That’s a records keeping problem on the part of the state board. That’s not illegal.”

But it’s nothing ventured, nothing gained in the election-rigging business.

By any means necessary

Though Griffin’s challenge of Riggs’ victory is now being considered in federal court, legal experts say it could still end up back where he intended: in front of the state Supreme Court.

Griffin’s petition is making what experts describe as extreme asks to the Supreme Court: to allow him to bypass the lower courts, to allow ballots to be thrown out without proving that voters did anything knowingly wrong and to essentially decide whether to change its composition to six Republicans and one Democrat.

Getting this dubious case somehow to the state Supreme Court is the endgame here. If not to throw the election to Griffin, then to force a new election.

And this Griffin guy want to sit on the same Supreme Court.

A Boxing Day survey of storm devastation off the beaten path

Ridgetops look like they’ve been bombed. Riverbeds are scoured, banks ripped open and lined with trash. Trees that once obscured the views are uprooted, toppled and lying in ranks. You’ve likely seen post-Helene images from western North Carolina. Many are of the River Arts District in Asheville and of devastation in nearby Swannanoa to the east. The Washington Post this week profiled Swannanoa flood victims from a row of mill houses left over from the days of the Beacon blanket factory, long gone.

A month ago, I told readers the region was out of the news but not out of the woods. That’s still true. Except on Boxing Day I surveyed some of the worst damage myself for the first time and came home stricken. The photos cannot convey the impact of the storm where news crews don’t go.

The bottom fell out of the sky on Sept. 25, two days before the remnants of Hurricane Helene even reached WNC. The rainfall was torrential and the ground saturation thorough. When the winds arrived on Friday morning, trees, big ones still in leaf, leaned over and fell everywhere in the city, shredding power lines and snapping power poles. Only more so did along exposed ridges. Picture the bomb damage in Gaza, only with trees instead of concrete. Where chainsaw crews cut downed trees off remote roadways, their carcasses line the highway for miles. When some agency will remove the debris, if ever, is anyone’s guess. Patching washed-out sections of roadway merits higher priority.

The winds hit hardest at elevation. Down below along waterways it was the flooding.

Along Paint Fork Rd. south of Barnardsville, flooding washed out culverts by the dozens. Fresh gravel drives covering shiny, new galvanized culverts lead to homes on the west side of the creek. In Barnardsville proper, flooding along Ivy Creek widened the streambed dramatically and left at least one destroyed bridge sitting in it downstream of where it once stood.

Forty-three died in Buncombe County alone, most from drowning, others killed by falling trees. In Swannanoa proper, where the Swannanoa River runs beside U.S. 70 in a low, flat valley, floodwaters spread out across a broad area and inundated homes and businesses. Much of the national news coverage you’ve seen focuses there.

But downstream and west of I-40 exit 59, the river loops north, west, and then south again. It flooded flat farmland before turning south and funneling itself into a narrow valley adjacent to the Botany Woods neighborhood. The waters rapidly filled the valley, tearing away vegetation and carrying away homes and residents.

I’d heard about the damage to this section of the county in October, but seeing it in person now that roads are serviceable again was shocking. Debris in some places hung in the trees 30 feet above the normal river level on Thursday. Trying to picture the scene was horrifying. Rain and wind now trigger survivors’ PTSD. It might be one of those internet “facts,” but more than a few here have told me we are among the few humans to witness a geologic event in their lifetimes.

So much Helene damage was never visible to national cameras. Flooding at PVC pipe manufacturer Silver-Line Plastics washed 10-ft lengths of pipe of various diameters downstream along the French Broad River north of Asheville. White plastic pipe hangs in the remaining trees lining the riverbanks for 30 or so miles like so much spaghetti.

“Silver-Line says it has hired a company to clean up the pipes,” Asheville Watchdog reports:

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is often tasked with maintenance and debris removal in rivers. David Connelly, a spokesperson for the Corps, explained how the system works in these types of disasters.

“Obviously the Silver-Line Plastics debris is an issue and is definitely on the radar; however, it is just one part of the estimated 10,445,000 cubic yards of debris across 27 counties in Western North Carolina we are working on,” Connelly said via email.

Upstream inside Asheville city limits, storm debris washed down the Swannanoa is not going anywhere soon.

@wlos_news_13 Destruction from Hurricane Helene on Thompson Street in Asheville, N.C. #helene #heleneaftermath #asheville #ashevillenc #ashevillenorthcarolina #ashevilleflood #ashevillenctravel #news #newstory ♬ original sound – WLOS News 13

First priority goes to direct relief efforts to people who’ve lost homes, belongings, businesses and jobs. River cleanup is almost a tertiary effort, if I read the reporting right. Where counties and states cannot handle the cleanup tasks, FEMA tasks the Corps to help. But that could take months. Removal of downed trees in remote areas like I drove though on Thursday could take longer. Years maybe. Or never.

When election results rolled in on November 5, among our first thoughts here was federal relief will dry up under Trump 2.0. Already the Republican majority in Raleigh seems bent on cutting off state relief to devastated counties that shifted bluer. The continuing resolution passed in Washington a week ago provides “about $100 billion in aid for states stricken by hurricanes Helene and Milton, along with other disasters.” However, N.C. Gov. Roy Cooper (D) estimated in late October that North Carolina’s need alone tops $53 billion.

She’s Ba-aack

The Hill this morning:

Former presidential candidate Marianne Williamson on Thursday launched a bid for chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), jumping into a crowded field of candidates vying to rebuild the party after its general election losses last month. 

Well, I do agree with this:

In fact, it’s important that we recognize the psychological and emotional dimensions of Trump’s appeal. We need to understand it to create the energy to counter it. MAGA is a distinctly 21^st century political movement and it will not be defeated by a 20^th century tool kit. Data analysis, fundraising, field organizing, and beefed-up technology – while all are important – will not be enough to prepare the way for Democratic victory in 2024 and beyond.

Ignore for a moment that 2024 is all but over. Williamson is older than I am, and I would never pitch myself as a leader for a new generation. With her campaign record, winning the DNC chair would take a miracle. Maybe a full course in miracles. Turns out she has written a manifesto too.

Policy doesn’t drive voting behavior

There are many changes Democrats might and should undertake going forward. Not because of Donald Trump. Because of Democrats. Among them, replacing their gerontocracy with younger leaders with 21st-century media skills. But we’ve been over that. Another is finding a work-around for conservative media dominance. While Democrats’ branding and message discipline is slowly improving, no amount of narrative brilliance will penetrate the public mind until they’ve addressed their “when a tree falls in the forest” problem.

It is an idée fixe on the left that politics is about kitchen-table issues and policies. So many post-mortem criticisms explain Donald Trump’s November win as Kamala Harris focusing too little on this or too much on that. Focusing too much on this group and not enough on another, as though minor tweaks (more attention to the critic’s complaint) might have changed the outcome.

Typical is a Jacobin article floated yesterday on a lefty listserv: “No, Economic Populism Did Not Lose This Election.” Economic populism works, the authors argue. Populism is popular. Polls show it. Studies show it across “a variety of statistical specifications, and accounting for an array of district characteristics,” etc.

So why did Harris lose? Because her campaign was insufficiently populist. Because she was insufficiently populist. And Joe Biden too. While his Build Back Better plans started out that way, “the policies that ultimately passed — the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, the CHIPS Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act — while steps in the right direction, were simply not ambitious enough to demonstrate that the party is serious about delivering for the working class.” Etc. And “Biden was simply not capable of connecting with the people to convey his economic vision.”

The critique triggered a memory of something Rick Perlstein observed about conservatives almost 20 years ago while presenting at a Princeton University conference, “The Conservative Movement: Its Past, Present, and Future.” The event featured a roster of conservative luminaries and one liberal turd in their punchbowl: Perlstein. Conservatives, he argued, debate whether this or that figure claiming the mantle is or is not a “real” conservative. He later wrote (emphasis mine):

In conservative intellectual discourse there is no such thing as a bad conservative. Conservatism never fails. It is only failed. One guy will get up, at a conference like this, and say conservatism, in its proper conception, is 33 1/3 percent this, 33 1/3 percent that, 33 1/3 percent the other thing. Another rises to declaim that the proper admixture is 50-25-25.

It is, among other things, a strategy of psychological innocence. If the first guy turns out to be someone you would not care to be associated with, you have an easy, Platonic, out: with his crazy 33-33-33 formula–well, maybe he’s a Republican. Or a neocon, or a paleo. He’s certainly not a conservative. The structure holds whether it’s William Kristol calling out Pat Buchanan, or Pat Buchanan calling out William Kristol.

Or a critic at Jacobin or The New Republic or The Nation calling out Harris and Biden for not being a real populist or a real progressive. As Digby once observed, “‘Conservative’ is a magic word that applies to those who are in other conservatives’ good graces. Until they aren’t. At which point they are liberals.” Per the horseshoe theory of politics, the same dynamic explains how the left accounts for its own failures and defends its political dogmas.

Read the room, people. Look who a majority of Americans just elected president again knowing all they know about him. Yet it is an idée fixe on the left that politics is about kitchen-table issues and pet policies. On TikTok, @legaldad confronted the notion directly: All the policy stances MAGA says it cares about, it doesn’t really care about. They’re not what drives voting behavior. Deeper urges do. Yes, some of them are economically tinged.

The same day, the Washington Post ran a story that Latino men flocked to Trump’s puffed-up image of success driven by the prosperity gospel:

“Kamala said, ‘Trump is for the rich, I fight for the poor.’ But I don’t want to be low-class — I hope that’s not a bad way to say it. But I don’t want to be there,” said Christian Pion, 31, referring to Vice President Kamala Harris. He became a U.S. citizen last year, a decade after coming to the United States from the Dominican Republic, and cast his first presidential ballot for Trump. “God doesn’t want you to be poor.”

[…]

In the past half-century, driven by larger-than-life pastors, it has overtaken other more traditional theologies centered on God’s priority being poor and disenfranchised people, some experts said. This belief system, they said, helps explain what exit polls showed was a significant shift among Latino Christian voters to Trump, who they see as an uber-successful, strong and God-focused striver.

Policies that deliver tangible results matter. They instill confidence that government can be a force for good in people’s lives. But these days, policies don’t drive voter behavior as liberal intellectuals think they should. When Covid relief checks landed in people’s mailboxes with Trump’s name on them, voters credited Trump with delivering money that Congress appropriated. It wasn’t the policy that won him support so much as the marketing.

Do Democrats need to win back more of the working class? Sure. But in an identitarian era more than ever, nobody wants to be seen as poor. Populism may be popular in polling, but voting behavior is not economic policy-driven, if ever it was. So long as the left fails to question its political dogmas and address grittier structural issues and voters’ psychological drives, we’ll be seeing the same critiques Perlstein saw again and again, only on the left.

Is it still there?

Thanks to Brian Klaas at The Garden of Forking Paths for the story of the Gävle, Sweden’s Christmas Goat:

The Gävle Goat is currently being protected by 24-hour guards who patrol the perimeter nonstop, two security fences, CCTV, and the constant vigilance of volunteers around the world who watch a streaming image of it to detect and deter any malfeasance.

“While the town of Gävle diligently tries to protect its magnificent Goat, it rarely succeeds. In the last 57 years, the Goat has survived intact until New Year’s just 19 times.”

From the goat’s own website:

From the first Sunday of Advent, the thirteen-meter-tall Gävle Goat lights up Rådhusesplanaden in Gävle – a beloved landmark and symbol of our Christmas tradition. With its central location, the goat becomes a natural gathering spot along the bustling holiday walkways, inviting people to explore Söder’s cozy shopping district. Be sure to visit Agnes Cultural House as well, welcoming Gävle locals and visitors with inspiration and culture from December 6.

If you can’t access Klaas’s more colorful account, there’s some history here, including the town’s efforts to keep vandals from burning down the goat, part of an unsanctioned local tradtion of destroying the symbol of Christmas. Check and see if it’s still there via the goat-cam.

Happy Hollandaise!

Enjoy

This charming song and arresting video by local artist Lord Stryrofoam (Robert Henderson) is a holiday tradition in our household. Notice the sun traverse at 1:35.

It seems His Lordship survived the hurricane (Nov. 6): “All I can do is try to be compassionate and truthful, even though those things are now completely out of fashion.”

Eyes get misty.

A couple more tuneful cuts here including a snappy Kate Bush cover.

Merry Christmas!