Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Republicans are fine with this. Remember that:

President Trump has repeatedly promised his top administration officials pardons before he leaves office, according to people who have heard his comments.

“I’ll pardon everyone who has come within 200 feet of the Oval,” Trump said in a recent meeting to laughs, according to people with knowledge of the comments. That radius appears to be expanding as the president repeats the line. Another person who met with Trump earlier this year said the president quipped about pardoning anyone who had come within 10 feet.

In one conversation with advisers in the dining room next to the Oval Office last year, Trump said he would host a news conference and announce mass pardons before he left office, some of the people said. The people said they weren’t aware of specific pardons being offered to specific people for specific acts.

They’re acting like this is just a joke. It is not. Trump issued a blanket pardon to all the J6 defendants and has already used his pardon power indiscriminately, 1600 in total. We know that he will do it.

Many have gone to allies and donors, or those who had hired them, coming after a social pull-aside or a round of golf. Some have received bipartisan criticism, including one to a crypto billionaire whose company boosted Trump’s own digital-currency company, and another to a former Honduran president convicted of conspiring with cartels to ship cocaine to the U.S. In Trump’s first term, he signed fewer than 250 pardons and commutations. 

He has apparently said repeatedly that he will pardon people when they tell him they could face prosecution for his orders. And let’s be frank — the kind of people who are willing to work with him are also the kind of people who will commit crimes without any pangs of conscience knowing they will suffer no consequences.

Naturally, everyone’s blaming Biden for pardoning the J6 Committee, Hunter and Fauci saying that broke the norm and Trump is just following his lead. That’s not true. Trump pardoned Manafort, Roger Stone, Steve Bannon and Michael Flynn in his first term and he knew that Biden was not going to go after his family. He did not test the norm that said a president couldn’t pardon himself so I guess there’s that.

I certainly don’t blame Biden for pardoning those people. Trump had made it clear that he was prepared to pursue vengeance against his political enemies and has taken steps to do it. They just opened an investigation into Cassidy Hutchinson!

I have zero doubt that he will pardon everyone before he leaves office. The whole staff and every single political appointee. I might even put money on the prediction market.

No halos here

It seems Kansas Republicans have made a song by Sting and The Police into state policy:

Republican legislators overrode Gov. Laura Kelly’s veto to create a 25-foot buffer around law enforcement and emergency personnel, a move the Senate leader said ensures Kansas won’t become like Minnesota.

Senate President Ty Masterson said in a news release that House Bill 2372, referred to as the Halo Act, keeps “radical protesters” from interfering with law enforcement and keeps officers and bystanders safe.

Masterson referred to riots in Minnesota when U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers injured and killed bystanders while detaining immigrants.

The bill makes it a misdemeanor crime to go within 25 feet of a first responder while they are working. A violation can result in a fine up to $1,000 and jail term of up to six months.

The new law would also keeps reporters 25 feet away and virtually end documentation by citizens with cell phones. They’d need cameras with long lenses and shotgun mics to record what officers are doing with (or to) detainees. Cell phones won’t cut it.

Darnella Frazier, then 17, was filming with her cell phone from a sidewalk a few feet away from Minneapolis police when in 2020 they pinned George Floyd to the pavement and squeezed the life out of him. She was close enough to both see and for her phone to pick up audio of Floyd’s cries of “I can’t breathe” as he died.

Frazier received a special citation from the Pulitzer Prize board for documenting Floyd’s murder. The board cited “the crucial role of citizens in journalists’ quest for truth and justice.”

Just not in Kansas.

Kansas Republicans pass law making it illegal to stand "too close" to ICE—6 months in jail for first offense.

Agents have complete control to decide if they feel "uncomfortable" or "distracted"—then they can arrest anyone within 25 feet.

MAGA want to stop people filming ICE so… pic.twitter.com/xdVMl0ou3I

— LongTime🤓FirstTime👨‍💻 (@LongTimeHistory) April 11, 2026

Say something. Do something. Hell, sing something!

We may not have peace in our time. Not from our self-described “peace president.” But we have each other.

There are clips on the net showing how Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band open the Land Of Hope And Dreams American Tour they launched, appropriately, in Minneapolis on March 31. Springsteen’s monologue closes by the band launching into Edwin Starr’s “War”.

But someone overnight put up a clip of how Springsteen closes the show, referencing slain Minneaplis protesters Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

I wanted to share a piece of the transcript:

So when you go home tonight, hold your loved ones close. And in the morning, do as Renee did. Find a way to take aggressive, peaceful action to defend our country’s ideals. And as the great civil rights leader, John Lewis, said, go out and get into good trouble.

Say something. Do something. Hell, sing something! 

If you’re feeling helpless, hopeless, betrayed, frustrated, angry, I understand. I have felt that way too. This is a tour that wasn’t planned. But that’s why the E Street Band is here tonight. Because we needed to feel your strength. And your hope. And we needed to bring you some strength and some hope in these times. I hope we’ve done that for you tonight.

View on Threads

It’s easy to lose hope. Who saw the United States becoming a rogue nation led by a murderous lunatic? It’s not the country I expected to retire into. But you’re not living in a bombed-out building in Gaza, I tell myself. Like Springsteen said, do something to make things better.

The commuters who honk, smile, wave, applaud, and cheer Sign Guy five rush hours a week keep me from losing hope. Dancing like an idiot for about 15,000 of them each week feels like community service. I hope it keeps them from losing hope. The thank-yous just keep coming. The smiles alone are worth it.

You get the America you fight for.

Baby mountain lion. Awwww.

Crimson CUBdate:this little rescued mtn lion cub continues to improve!

Crimson’s little purple dinosaur may look like just a toy, but it actually helps him learn to stalk, pounce, and play— all behaviors we want to see in a developing young puma.

📸: Keeper Nikki pic.twitter.com/pKhrKybtSy

— Oakland Zoo (@oakzoo) April 9, 2026

Poor little baby:

It was an unusual scene. A lion cub alone for days in southern California’s sprawling Santa Monica mountains, emitting a noise that sounded like a cross between a purr and a light squeal, perhaps calling out for his mother.

Where was his mother? The National Park Service’s biologists, who monitor the recreation area’s small mountain lion population, visited the cub’s location on several occasions. They surmised that his mother had likely moved to another den, abandoning the cub in the process.

The lion kitten’s health was taking a turn for the worse. He appeared weaker and was losing weight. In consultation with the California department of fish and wildlife, the biologists swooped in to rescue the kitten, which would land in the care of the Oakland Zoo.

The 3-week-cub, later named “Crimson”, arrived in late March to the Oakland Zoo, emaciated and unable to stand, according to the zoo’s chief executive officer Nik Dehejia. He was “extremely tiny”, Dehejia said. The newborn cub could fit into cupped hands.

It’s rare for mountain lions to abandon their offspring. It’s unclear why exactly Crimson’s mother left him. “Often times we’ll never know,” Dehejia said, although one hypothesis emerged that the cub’s abnormality – missing toes – could have signaled to his mother that he would not be able to survive as well. “It’s hard to know how many cubs were potentially there, how many cubs the mother was taking care of.”

Now at the Oakland Zoo, Crimson is in an intensive care unit at the zoo’s veterinary hospital, Dehejia said. He has received bottle feedings every 3 hours to pump nutrients back into his body. He is the 33rd mountain lion that the Oakland Zoo has rescued. Another young mountain lion, a three-month-old named Clover, is currently at the zoo as well.

“We never want to pull a mountain lion from the wild,” Dehejia said. While the zoo is proud to be rehabilitating Crimson, they want cubs to be with their families, he said. “These cubs need their mother actively for nursing and socialization.” Crimson was abandoned by his mother. But, other factors including habitat fragmentation, urban development and human-wildlife conflict have contributed to the zoo receiving distressed animals, Dehejia said.

“More often than not we are in their habitat versus they being in ours. This is a broader scale issue over how we build, how we live, how we co-exist with wildlife around us.” For now, the zoo is focused on helping Crimson grow strong and weaning him off bottle feedings, Dehejia said.

Crimson and Clover being close in age could make them well-suited companions, although it’ll be weeks before the zoo gradually introduces the two.

Dead enders are still out there

We’ve been waiting for MAGA Fever to break for years. It hasn’t happened. Americans elected a walking sheaf of personality defects to the White House twice, the second time after two impeachments and multiple felony convictions. The American electorate has its own issues, clearly. Lots of them. But it seems that Donald Trump’s illegal Iran war and his threat to destroy “a whole civilization” on “Bridge Day” was (no pun intended) a bridge too far. A woman at a street protest told me on Thursday that Trump’s threat made her physically ill. It finally broke some of his strongest supporters.

Marjorie Taylor Greene, Candace Owens, Megyn Kelly, Tucker Carlson, and Alex Jones stared long into the abyss only to be shaken by what stared back.

There are now MAGA calls for Trump’s removal from office:

Tucker Carlson helped get Donald Trump elected president in 2016, but now he’s warning Christians they should abandon support for the president as he commits immoral crimes against humanity.

Like rats fleeing a sinking ship pic.twitter.com/eMotkQRA9d

— Molly Ploofkins (@Mollyploofkins) April 10, 2026

Alex Jones was already done with Trump, but Trump’s “supervillain” statements about Iran and Melania Trump’s Epstein statement on Thursday made him withdraw his support. “The ship is sinking.”

Alex Jones reacts to Trump attacking him, saying Trump is possessed by demonic forces and Melania contradicted him on Epstein with her surprise press statement: “It looks to me like she’s breaking with Trump because she knows the ship is sinking. He’s acting like he’s guilty.” pic.twitter.com/GeYVDZT0q2

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) April 9, 2026

Alex Jones calls for Trump's removal via the 25th Amendment.pic.twitter.com/SW9Vsd1zDJ

— The Dive Feed (@TheDeepDiveFeed) April 7, 2026

Ryan Grim remarks on a “damning portrait” of MAGA collapse.

This is quite a well put together summary from @megynkelly but what’s interesting about it is that if you take each piece on its own, not a single piece of it is even remotely controversial. Yet adds up to such a damning portrait of this moment. pic.twitter.com/oF6j4GCjUR

— Ryan Grim (@ryangrim) April 10, 2026

I’m not holding my breath. I’ll wait for mass resignations from the White House. As I noted the other day, the dead enders are still out there. They know. They just haven’t processed their betrayal yet.

“The dead-enders are still with us, those remnants of the defeated regimes who’ll go on fighting long after their cause is lost.”
— Donald Rumsfeld

The Art of Walking Away

“If this was victory, I’d hate to see what failure looks like,” writes Susan B. Glasser in The New Yorker. “‘Unconditional surrender’ this was not,” she writes in her Iran war scorecard Glasser begins by quoting the hyperventilations of victory by Secretary of WAR! Pete Hegseth. “Operation Epic Fury, he exulted, ‘achieved every single objective, on plan, on schedule, exactly as laid out from Day One.’”

Hegseth sounds like he closely studied the tape of Sean Spicer berating Press Room reporters for not highlighting the collossal size of his malignant narcissist boss’ smallish first inaugural crowd. Well done, Padawan.

10/10. No notes. pic.twitter.com/YQ3JPNIR02

— Barney Panofsky's Best Intentions (@mynamesnotgordy) April 8, 2026

Glasser is not one for vulgar slang in print, but in her review of Trump’s humiliation in a war he started for reasons the remain unclear, it pops up:

How awful, then, to have to admit what we Americans have seen for a decade now—this is not a new Trump but a very old one. Defeat will not temper his mania. There is no strategic setback so big as to embarrass him. Unchastened by failure, Trump, on Thursday morning, was shit-posting on social media about his plans for the U.S. military’s “next Conquest.”

To Trump, the inability to achieve the goals he himself articulated in a war of his choosing against Iran is just one more screwup. He has, after all, made a lifetime of catastrophic mistakes and still ended up as President—twice. He’ll handle this like all the rest by moving on and getting over it even before the cleanup crews have finished in Tel Aviv and Tehran.

Trump’s capital-V victory is in all the cleanup jobs he’s created. I immediately thought of the little guy who cleans up after Mr. Peabody’s imperial parade. He’d never make Trump’s Mar-a-Lago guest list.

Catherine Rampell writes:

A LOT OF PEOPLE ARE GETTING RICH off the Trump presidency. Donald Trump himself tops the list, of course, but it also includes his kids and in-laws; other grifting nepo-babies; cabinet members (as well as their staff and children), senior aides; and other well-connected friends, investors, and firms.

You know who isn’t on that list?

You.

Yes, you, dear reader—at least assuming you’re not among the small community of courtiers sucking public funds dry. Instead, in virtually every way imaginable, Trump has made it easier for all those insiders to profit and, in turn, rip you off. If you bet on or invest in anything Trump might influence and you don’t have inside information, you’re a chump.

As the expression goes: If you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.

Keep up with all our newsletters, articles, podcasts, and livestreams—and decide which ones show up in your inbox:

The recent rash of curiously well-timed trades in prediction markets is one example of how those who have drawn up chairs to Trump’s banquet table appear to be feasting at public expense.

Yep. The corruption is epic. To appropriate a certain phrase, “we’ve never seen anything like it.” And in this case that’s literally true.

But not to worry, the White House has asked politely that their people not to commit crimes:

The White House warned staff against improperly leveraging ​their positions to place bets in ‌futures markets in an email on March 24, a day after President Donald Trump ordered a brief pause in ​some Iran strikes, a White House ​official said on Thursday…

Ethics rules already prohibit executive workers from gambling while on federal property, and there are rules on the books barring the use of government information for private gain. A senior administration official who received the email described the warning as a timely “refresher” given the fact that suspicious monster bets in futures markets are “hot in the news.” 

I feel much better now, don’t you? I’m sure they would never do anything that might be construed as unethical.

I have to say that the “Christian Crusade” stuff is one of the most, if not THE most creepy aspects of this war with Iran. Yes, Trump is insane, but so is this guy:

Hegseth has persisted in framing the war in Iran, which reached a temporary ceasefire on Tuesday after six weeks of fighting, as divinely sanctioned, repeatedly invoking “God’s almighty providence” and expressing surety that God is on the side of the US military. Amid boasts about the US’s superior firepower and theatrical disdain for “stupid rules of engagement”, the defense secretary has promised to give “no quarter” to the “barbaric savages” of the Iranian regime and called on the American people to pray for victory “in the name of Jesus Christ”.

Hegseth’s distinct combination of piety and bloodlust was most prominently on display at the 25 March worship service at the Pentagon, the first since the war in Iran began, when he prayed for “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy”. The prayer was so shocking that it appears to have provoked a direct rebuke from Pope Leo, who preached on Palm Sunday that God ignores the prayers of those whose “hands are full of blood” from making war.

Hegseth will hardly mind harsh words from the head of the Catholic church, however. The 45-year-old US army veteran and former Fox News host is a member of an obscure, deeply Calvinist wing of evangelical Christianity – John Calvin broke from the Catholic church during the 16th-century Protestant Reformation – that rejects the pope’s authority and is rooted in a belief in predestination.

“They believe that nothing happens that isn’t in God’s will,” said Julie Ingersoll, a professor of religious studies at the University of North Florida, who researches this branch of Reformed Christianity. “They believe that God directs everything that happens.”

Even a bomb falling on an elementary school full of children?

He is a real life Christian crusader. After all:

In 1862, the future King Edward VII of England, then Prince Albert, visited Jerusalem. He recorded in his diary that he had been tattooed there by “a native.” Just 20 years later, his son, who would become King George V, repeated this experience, writing to his mother that he had been tattooed “by the same old man that tattooed Papa, and the same thing too, the five crosses.” This is the Jerusalem cross, also known as the Crusader cross: square (unlike the more usual elongated versions of the Christian symbol), and with a smaller square cross in each of the four quadrants. 

This very same cross has been in the limelight recently, emblazoned — far, far larger than King Edward VII’s version — on Pete Hegseth’s chest.

Hegseth, a Fox News anchor and former member of the National Guard, is Trump’s pick for secretary of defense. It’s by no means his only tattoo. He also has a “Chi-Rho,” the first two letters of the Greek word for Christ and one of the earliest forms of a so-called Christogram (letters formed into a monogram expressing the essence of the religion). Perhaps the most contentious is the Christian expression on his bicep: “Deus Vult,” meaning “God Wills It,” believed to be a Crusader battle cry. Τhere is another cross with a sword, referencing a verse in the Gospel of Matthew reporting the following words of Jesus: “Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.” “Yeshua,” Jesus’ name in Hebrew, can be read across his elbow. 

Cal me crazy, but if someone goes to the trouble of tattooing specific symbols on their chest, maybe it’s a sign that they’re trying to tell us something? Just saying.

The best part is when, after dragging these people through the mud, paragraph after paragraph, he says “but I no longer care about that stuff, I only care about doing right for our Country.” He literally sounds like a child.

It’s hard to believe it’s even real. Yet, his followers and corrupt apologists all say that he’s a master communicator who does this inane stuff for a higher purpose that we are all too simple-minded to understand. He’s not rapidly descending into dementia, he’s playing 37 dimensional chess. I think they actually believe that.

More bad news for Trump

The March Consumer Price Index jumped. I’m surprised the Trump administration released it:

U.S. inflation surged in March as the energy shock stemming from the war in Iran rippled across the economy.

The Consumer Price Index report showed that inflation jumped to 3.3 percent compared to the same time last year, almost a full percentage point increase from February’s annual pace. Overall prices rose 0.9 percent over the course of March, the highest monthly gain since the peak of the post-pandemic inflation crisis in June 2022.

“Core” inflation, which strips out volatile food and energy prices, increased modestly. This measure of underlying inflation rose to 2.6 percent on a year-over-year basis following a 0.2 percent increase in March.

Purchasers of groceries and gasoline can take heart that the cost of what they’re not buying every week is increasing by only 2.6 percent per year.

The Washington Post:

“Even if the negotiators in Pakistan stick the landing and the ceasefire turns into a durable period of non-conflict, the lagged impact of the oil and energy shock will impact consumers in a variety of ways through the remainder of 2026,” said Joe Brusuelas, chief economist at RSM.

The New York Times adds:

After more than five weeks of conflict before a cease-fire was called, the economic effects are becoming clearer. Gas prices have topped $4 a gallon on average. Utility bills have climbed and consumers are facing higher costs for groceries and air travel — prices that are unlikely to return to prewar levels anytime soon.

And groceries? I walked down the cookie aisle on Wednesday and found it lined with bright, yellow sale stickers. Family Size bags of cookies priced at under $4 in 2020 and over $6 today were $1 off.

By Grabthar’s hammer … what a savings.