Skip to content

Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Strength And Hope In These Times

Published by Tom Sullivan on April 11, 2026

Say something. Do something. Hell, sing something!

Photos byJulie Harrison.

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.

Friday Night Soother

Published by digby on April 10, 2026

Baby mountain lion. Awwww.

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.

Of Rats And Ships And The Abyss

Published by Tom Sullivan on April 10, 2026

Dead enders are still out there

Gothic fantasy art titled “On the Edge” by artist Yaroslav Gerzhedovich.

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.

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.”

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

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

“Defeat Will Not Temper His Mania”

Published by Tom Sullivan on April 10, 2026

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.

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.

Chumps Are Us

Published by digby on April 10, 2026

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.

Crusader Pete

Published by digby on April 10, 2026

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.

He’s Doing Great, Why Do You Ask?

Published by digby on April 10, 2026

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.

Inflation Surges

Published by Tom Sullivan on April 10, 2026

More bad news for Trump

Still image from Galaxy Quest (1999).

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.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2026/04/10/inflation-march-iran-war/

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.

https://navigatorresearch.org/americans-blame-trump-for-rising-gas-prices/

https://navigatorresearch.org/americans-blame-trump-for-rising-gas-prices/

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.

Ruh Roh! 

Published by Tom Sullivan on April 10, 2026

Melania speaks out of turn

Something’s brewing in Trumplandia:

Melania Trump summoned reporters to the White House Thursday afternoon to give a surprise statement about Jeffrey Epstein, saying she had no relationship with him, was not a victim of his and had no knowledge of his crimes.

In remarks that lasted just under six minutes, she said she wanted to clear “my good name.” She addressed rumors about the origin story of how she met her husband, the president of the United States. And she called on Congress to give a hearing to victims of Mr. Epstein’s crimes.

Shorter Melania: “I know nothing! I see nothing! I hear nothing!”

Nothing is what you should see, says her husband.

So why this statement, and why now? We suspect something unflattering is about to drop and she’s trying to get ahead of the negative press. The timing of Melania Trump’s call for victim testimony in public hearings sounds more like a warning than victim advocacy. Victim Marina Lacerda thinks it’s a threat to re-traumatize them.

Consider: Donald Trump’s personal law firm, the former Department of Justice, has “in recent weeks” asked its civil rights division to investigate star January 6 hearings witness, Cassidy Hutchinson, over allegations of lying to Congress under oath. The move came ahead of former AG Pam Bondi’s firing, sources tell The New York Times, in an effort “to shore up her shaky standing with the president.”

The possible message to Epstein victims is, implicate Trump in anything and it will come back to bite you. Lawyer up.

About those Epstein victims. A group issued a statement:

Survivors of Jeffrey Epstein have already shown extraordinary courage by coming forward, filing reports, and giving testimony.

Asking more of them now is a deflection of responsibility, not justice.

It added:

It also diverts attention from [former attorney general] Pam Bondi, who must answer for withheld files and the exposure of survivors’ identities.

Those failures continue to put lives at risk while shielding enablers. Survivors have done their part. Now it’s time for those in power to do theirs.

If rumors that the president launched his attacks against Iran to divert public attention from the Epstein saga are true, his wife just torpedoed that effort:

“And why is this happening today? He’s spent the past six weeks trying to bomb this Epstein story out of the headlines. Two days after the cease-fire, she puts it right back on top. She must really hate him. I don’t know how else to explain it.” — JIMMY KIMMEL

BTW, Melania Trump’s approval ratings have cratered.

Watch that space.

You walk into the room with your pencil in your hand
You see somebody naked and you say, “Who is that man?”
You try so hard but you don’t understand
Just what you will say when you get home
Because something is happening here but you don’t know what it is
Do you, Mr. Jones?

Kiss Of Death

Published by digby on April 9, 2026

Viktor may rue the day he sucked up to Trump. (Gift Link:)

Writing on Truth Social in late March, President Trump expressed solidarity with Viktor Orban, Hungary’s prime minister. Looking ahead to Hungary’s parliamentary election this Sunday, Mr. Trump called Mr. Orban “a truly strong and powerful Leader” who “fights tirelessly for, and loves, his Great Country and People.” In case there was any doubt where his support lay, he concluded: “I AM WITH HIM ALL THE WAY!”

This was no isolated enthusiasm. Despite Hungary’s small size, with a population of under 10 million, many Trumpian figures see its longtime prime minister as a key political ally. In the fall, the administration’s National Security Strategy pledged to help “healthy nations” in Central and Eastern Europe, like Hungary, resist the “civilizational erasure” supposedly threatening the continent. “It’s in our national interest that Hungary be successful,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio summarized in February. For Mr. Trump, it’s simple. Mr. Orban is, he says, a “fantastic guy.”

His embrace may be a kiss of death for the Hungarian leader. Though MAGA supporters see Hungary as a conservative utopia, many Hungarians aren’t so happy for their country to play this role. Worse are the effects of Mr. Trump’s policies, aggravating an economic downturn and threatening the prime minister’s electoral support. In recent years, far-right parties around Europe have cultivated close ties with Mr. Trump; Hungary’s election may be a warning against getting too close. For if Mr. Orban falls, it will be in no small part thanks to his fan in the Whit

Orban won’t be the only one who has regrets.