Author: Tom Sullivan

But it’s not just about mental acuity

I’ve been on a rolling rant lately about the age of Democrats in top leadership. I’m not the only one concerned about the gerontocracy. Charlie Sykes comments on the disappearance of Rep. Kay Granger (R-Texas), 81, who seems to have vanished from Congress in July.

“Since early September, my health challenges have progressed making frequent travel to Washington both difficult and unpredictable,” Granger said in a statement to Axios this week. She’s now in an assisted living facility. Her son told reporters she’s having “dementia issues.”

Sykes writes:

Once again, the moral questions of America’s political gerontocracy reveal themselves. This is an especially sensitive subject, because so many of us have loved ones—parents, grandparents, siblings—who are in cognitive decline. They deserve our consideration, compassion, and honesty. That’s also true for members of Congress, Supreme Court justices, and presidents. But the stakes there are much higher, and in those cases, sometimes compassion means being truthful about when it’s time to move on.

Sykes mentions Joe Biden’s decline. And Senator Dianne Feinstein and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg who both died in office.

“For much of this year, our politics has been dominated by octogenarians, including Mitch McConnell, Nancy Pelosi, and Chuck Grassley (who, at the age of 91, is actually a nonagenarian),” Sykes muses. “But Joe Biden’s decision to run for reelection at the age of 80 was the strongest case against the gerontocracy.”

I was still living in South Carolina in the mid-1980s when mental decline anecdotes went around about Sen. Strom Thurmond, then deep into his 80s. Thurmond was in meet-and-greet mode at an event, an attendee related at the time, when Thurmond’s young son walked up to his dad and the aging senator thrust out his hand and introduced himself.

After a closed Senate Judiciary hearing for organizing the Clinton impeachment trial over a decade later, a reporter related (on NPR, IIRC) that Thurmond, 96(?), had exited the meeting room and, mistaking him for an aide and needing an escort, took the reporter’s arm and shuffled down the hall to visit the men’s room.

But mental acuity is not the only reason for those in power to know (or to be told) when it’s time to hang it up and call it a career.

There is no substitute for long experience. But for a political party to remain vital, vibrant, and competitive, it has to have regular infusions of young blood, fresh ideas, and modern skills. Democrats are at a structural disadvantage and faced with a media environment dominated by outlets run by right-wing billionaire-ideologues. That is not the world as we’d like it, but it is the world as we find it.

Democrats’ top leaders cut their political teeth in the pre-internet era of network news. It is clear that, despite their deep political experience, they don’t understand how to interact with the media via any medium much more relatable than a press conference. Younger rising stars know how to draw attention and reach citizens more effectively in the age of social media and hostile media conglomerates. But so long as their elders hang on to their sinecures indefnitely, Democrats will struggle with 20th-century skills to meet the communication challenges of the 21st.

Moerover, with older pols hanging on beyond their expiration dates, attracting young talent to political work becomes that much harder when college graduates do not see paths for themselves into political leadership posts or jobs. (See AOC v. Connolly.) Why is turnout among young voters so low?

Wisconsin state chair Ben Wikler, 43, and David Hogg, 24, of Leaders We Deserve would like to win top DNC jobs in February. I’m not optimistic.

@davidhogg.bsky.social: “One of the biggest things that I'm doing in my run for vice chair is encouraging our party to stop paying consultants to shove our fingers in our ears so far that we just don't hear the voters.”

— Inside with Jen Psaki (@insidewithpsaki.msnbc.com) 2024-12-22T20:20:19.388360Z

Happy Hollandaise!

Not so fast

It’s one of the classic blunders. Not the most famous — “never get involved in a land war in Asia” — nor the most recent — “everything Trump touches dies” — but it’s up there. Men assume their expertise in one area of human endeavor makes them experts in another. (It’s always men, isn’t it?)

President Elon Musk and billionaire-dilettante Vivek Ramaswamy are joining the Trump 2.0 administration (1st classic blunder) to operate as his proposed, informal Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Never having worked in government before, the pair mean to “to cut the federal government down to size.” And inflict pain on the little people. Piece of cake.

Except.

The irony come Jan. 20 is that Trump, the naif in 2016, now brings experience, if not wisdom, to his White House job. Musk and Ramaswamy are the overconfident naifs (2nd classic blunder).

MSNBC’s Jen Psaki invited Bob Bauer, former White House Counsel to Barack Obama and Jack Goldsmith, former Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Counsel under George W. Bush, onto her show Monday night to discuss the obstacles Musk-Ramaswamy may face in implementing government of, by, and for oligarchs through a presidential advisory commission.

 

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Whaddya mean, I can’t just slash shit?

Trump 2.0 may attempt to incapacitate agencies from within through firing and not hiring, and by installing unqualified MAGA loyalists to run agencies. But Bauer and Goldsmith write in their new substack that the Musk-Ramaswamy effort to drown government in the bathtub simply may not be legal:

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), to be led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, is one tool that the Trump administration will use to deregulate. Trump says DOGE “will pave the way for my Administration to dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies.” According to Musk and Ramaswamy, DOGE will work closely with the White House Office of Management and Budget. The two men will “serve as outside volunteers, not federal officials or employees,” and will “advise DOGE at every step to pursue three major kinds of reform: regulatory rescissions, administrative reductions and cost savings.” This will raise a hornet’s nest of legal issues.

One is the legal status of DOGE itself. It appears it will be a group of non-government officials who lack policy-implementing power and instead will advise the White House on various deregulatory steps. If so, DOGE would likely be governed by the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA). FACA defines an “advisory committee” subject to its rules as “any” committee, task force, “or other similar group” which (among other things) is “established or utilized by the President.” FACA, if it applies, will slow DOGE down, since it has rules about transparency, record keeping, and conflicts of interest. The incoming Trump administration is surely looking for ways to avoid FACA compliance—perhaps by “taking on an informal structure and rendering advice as individuals rather than as a group,” or by going all in on a 1974 Antonin Scalia Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) opinion that elements of FACA are unconstitutional. DOGE’s operation will likely be litigated.

A lot will hinge on “likely be governed” and “likely be litigated.” The first instinct of Trump and his allies in oligarchy will be to treat inconvenient regulations as “likely to be ignored.” Like conflict-of-interest rules and transparency regulations. But a more glaring problem for Musk-Ramaswamy, says Goldsmith, is that as nongovernmental advisers they’ll lack real authority to impose any government shrinkage they recommend. Plus there are a hornet’s nest of federal laws and regulations that may impede the efforts of these wannabe masters of the universe to build better worlds in their image.

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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Thank you for coming to our “show” each day.
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

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