Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

It’s not just Democrats:

I think by now that everyone understands that they might find themselves in a situation where they might need to buy health insurance for themselves. Lose a job, move someplace and often if you start a new job you have to wait for a few months before you qualify for the employer health care and you need a stop gap. (A lot of those people might qualify for Medicaid too so they ought to be concerned about that as well.)

The ACA is now an intrinsic part of the American health care system and it relies on government support. I think people understand that and they don’t want it messed with.

Unfortunately, most people don’t know that the Republicans feel the subsidies should go up because they really enjoy making people suffer:

It’s on Democrats to get the word out because the last the the Republicans want is for more people to know about it. That is the logic of the shut down. They are trying to break through the noise. And it’s working. The WSJ reported yesterday:

President Trump has projected unwavering confidence that he is winning the messaging war over the government shutdown. But behind the scenes, his team is increasingly concerned that the issue at the center of the debate will create political vulnerabilities for Republicans.

Advisers are worried that the GOP will take the blame for allowing healthcare subsidies to expire, raising costs for millions of Americans ahead of next year’s midterm elections, according to administration officials.

Inside the White House, aides are discussing proposals to extend the enhanced subsidies for Affordable Care Act health-insurance plans, the officials said. Trump hasn’t yet decided whether he will endorse such a proposal, according to the officials. Republicans say they will only hold negotiations with Democrats on the matter after the government is reopened.

Yeah, that’s not going to work guys. You are liars and cheats and your word isn’t worth the toilet paper its printed on. Pass the extensions, then talk about re-opening. And we’ll be needing to see Russ Vought put on a chain because he’s made it clear that any funding the Congress makes is just a suggestion.

Update — Oh my, this is interesting:

Paragon Health Institute was established in 2021 and has only 11 full-time staffers, but founder Brian Blase is credited with formulating many of the proposals that became the basis for nearly $1 trillion in Medicaid cuts enacted as part of the GOP megabill. The group’s success is thanks in large part to its vast alumni network spread out across the highest levels of government, from the speaker’s office to the Trump administration.

Now Blase is looking to exert his clout again, mounting a fierce campaign to convince lawmakers to let enhanced Affordable Care Act tax credits expire at the end of the year. Democrats have made an extension of the boosted Obamacare subsidies, first approved by Congress in 2021, as their centerpiece demand in the current government funding fight. Republicans need to figure out if they’re willing to deal — and Paragon doesn’t want them to bend at all.

“Brian is exceptionally smart, principled, and motivated by good intentions,” said Paul Winfree, the president and CEO of the Economic Policy Innovation Center — another conservative think tank — who served as a top economic official in the first Trump White House. “He truly wants to solve problems in health policy and believes — I think correctly — that the government is the cause of many of them.”

But Paragon is making a key segment of congressional Republicans uncomfortable, according to interviews with a dozen House GOP lawmakers, senior aides, White House officials and people close to the administration, many of whom were granted anonymity to provide their candid views or describe private conversations.

Though conservatives are largely complimentary of the think tank, a swath of House Republicans, including some of the conference’s most vulnerable incumbents, privately say Paragon is dead-set on notching conservative policy wins irrespective of the damage they might do to the GOP’s fragile majority in the midterms.

Hmmm. Maybe the Democrats knew something the rest of us didn’t? Big, if true.

Posted by the President of the United States. pic.twitter.com/hKKOhif5Nb

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) October 3, 2025

Donald Trump just posted this.

We are not a serious country anymore. pic.twitter.com/wfpGSiQdsb

— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) October 3, 2025

How about this?

Whoever made this deserves an award! pic.twitter.com/A30QnsyRx4

— Joe G (@EastEndJoe) October 3, 2025

I hate this AI crap but I think it’s worth seeing the difference between the juvenile pablum from the 79 year old president’s team and people who know how to use it.

TAPPER: How does the DOJ going after Hunter Biden and the special counsel investigation of President Biden himself fits into your theory of Democrats weaponizing the DOJ?

MIKE JOHNSON: They were not going after the Bidens. They did the bare minimum. pic.twitter.com/iKG81dileq

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 28, 2025

With the federal government now officially shut down, the House of Representatives has a lot of time on its hands. All the action is now centered in the Senate, where all but three members of the Democratic caucus are refusing to go along with Republicans to pass the House’s continuing resolution — or the Senate’s own alternative — that would reopen the government and extend funding at current levels until Nov. 21. 

House Democrats have made a point of staying in Washington, D.C., to continue working. Meanwhile, Republican Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana sent his caucus home to wait out the shutdown — and to apparently avoid swearing in newly elected Democratic Rep. Adelita Grijalva of Arizona, who represents the final vote needed to pass a discharge petition requiring the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files. 

While Senate Republicans refuse to negotiate with their Democratic counterparts on extending health subsidies to reopen the government, the House could spend this time going over the Epstein files with a fine-tooth comb to get to the bottom of what appears to be the biggest sex trafficking scandal in American history. But the president has made it clear that’s not going to happen. 

Instead, some Republicans members are likely preparing for another game of smoke-and-mirrors when the shutdown is over: Rewriting the narrative of what happened on Jan. 6, 2021.

Since we all saw what happened in real time on live television, this may mark their most ambitious attempt yet to bend reality to President Donald Trump’s will. But it’s not simply about satisfying the president. House Republicans seem intent on revenge.

According to POLITICO, the GOP caucus is still seething over the original investigation by the Jan. 6 select committee, which was largely composed of Democrats and implicated Trump in the violence and destruction perpetrated by his supporters. The original committee, led by Democratic Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi and former GOP Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, “was rigged,” according to Johnson. 

The new probe, the speaker said, would be “a committee investigating the previous committee” led by Rep. Barry Loudermilk, R-Ga, who apparently seems to think that nobody really understands what happened. “We need to look at it from a factual standpoint,” Loudermilk told POLITICO. “It’s dangerous out there. There were a lot of civilians, as well as members of Congress and staff and even press that were here on Jan. 6. And I think we’re all interested to know, why did the Capitol get breached — regardless of who did it — how did it get breached?”

I’m pretty sure we know how and why it happened. We all saw it with our own eyes, and there are hours of horrific video footage filmed from nearly every possible angle. Trump’s followers were all worked up over his big lie that the 2020 election had been stolen by President-elect Joe Biden and the Democrats. As Trump spoke to the crowd that day on the Ellipse, he told them that unless Mike Pence, his own vice president, “does the right thing,” they were going to be cheated out of their right to have the president they wanted. He said they could go to the Capitol to make their wishes known, and he indicated that he might join them. 

They were listening. After Trump departed, the crowd marched to the Capitol and broke into the building. They breached security barriers and violently assaulted police, forcing members of Congress and their staffs to evacuate the Capitol complex, or to shelter in place. While Trump — and all of us — watched on television, they desecrated the world’s greatest shrine to democracy and succeeded in delaying the legal certification of the presidential election. 

There is no mystery to be uncovered.

Besides the findings of the Jan. 6 committee, there have been investigations into the security concerns around that day from the Capitol Police inspector general, a bipartisan Senate investigation and an outside review led by retired Lt. Gen. Russel L. Honoré. 

But Loudermilk is partially justifying his ongoing obsession about Jan. 6 as if there was some dark cover-up. As chair of the House Administration Subcommittee on Oversight, he’s been working the angles on this story since 2023, claiming that he couldn’t get the cooperation he needed to really get to the bottom of it. Trump, apparently, finally listened, and the White House stepped in to push a reportedly reluctant Johnson to convene a new select subcommittee that will give Loudermilk subpoena power.

Both Trump and Johnson have recently been touting a misleading report from a right-wing source that 274 FBI agents were “secretly placed” in the crowd to agitate the otherwise peaceful protesters into storming the Capitol. This would, of course, relieve Trump of any responsibility for the violence and mayhem that ensued. But as POLITICO reported, the Justice Department’s inspector general revealed ten months ago that the agents were dispatched after the riot had started — and only to support the Capitol Police in attempting to contain the crowd.

I can’t imagine why the administration would consider it a good idea to dredge up the nation’s collective memory of Trump’s worst day in office, when he was truly toxic for a brief moment in time. Since he announced his first bid for the presidency in 2015, Trump has exhibited a remarkable ability to make a lot of people believe a demonstrably untrue narrative if he repeats it often enough. 

But not this time.

And in your employees’ mouths

If it was not clear before, the executive branch of the U.S. government is now a fully owned subsidiary of the Trump Organization.

“The White House ballroom, should it be completed, will stand as another symbol in the ongoing project of rebuilding American democracy in the image of one man’s brand,” the Trump brand, proposes Debbie Millman, brand strategist and host of the “Design Matters” podcast.

She illustrates her own op-ed:

Between Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of staff and Trump’s own remora, and Russ Vought, OMB director and principal author of Project 2025, the functioning of the executive branch down to its finest details is now the Trump Organization too.

I’ve said frequently that the GOP does not want to govern, it wants to rule. That’s true of Donald Trump as well, but in his mind dominating is a byproduct of branding. His logo is not yet on government stationary, but he’s got people working on it (Federal News Network):

Furloughed staff at the Education Department say out-of-office messages for their government email accounts have been automatically updated.

The new out-of-office message blames an ongoing government shutdown on Senate Democrats who didn’t vote on a stopgap spending bill that would keep the government funded through Nov. 21.

“Thank you for contacting me. On September 19, 2025, the House of Representatives passed H.R. 5371, a clean continuing resolution. Unfortunately, Democrat Senators are blocking passage of H.R. 5371 in the Senate which has led to a lapse in appropriations,” the new out-of-office message says. “Due to the lapse in appropriations I am currently on furlough status. I will respond to emails once government functions resume.”

An Education Department employee told Federal News Network that they discovered the updated message on Thursday.

“Those were not my words,” the employee said.

The New York Times adds:

In response to a request for comment, an automatic reply from an Education Department spokeswoman, Madi Biedermann, did not include the politically charged language. Instead, it read, “Thank you for your email. There is a temporary shutdown of the U.S. government due to a lapse in appropriations.”

About an hour later, Ms. Biedermann sent another response referencing the continuing resolution that would have funded the government: “The email reminds those who reach out to Department of Education employees that we cannot respond because Senate Democrats are refusing to vote for a clean C.R. and fund the government. Where’s the lie?”

Did they up her dosage in the interim? The Times does not include a current photo that might indicate whether Biedermann posseses a thousand-yard stare, the flat affect found among cult members and combat veterans suffering PTSD.

* * * * *

Our friend Susie Madrak is experiencing a cash crunch. She’s looking for whatever help you might lend this week. Making things worse is an insurance settlement delayed on account of paperwork. Plus:

In the meantime, my neurologist suspects I have an obscure lupus-like autoimmune disorder that’s causing all kinds of weird symptoms (for one thing, she says the signals my brain are sending to my feet aren’t making it through and I’m off balance) but first she has to rule out blood cancers, etc. There’s also a lesion on my lung and they want an MRI.

Susie has been posting at Suburban Guerrilla and Crooks & Liars for 20 years. It’s a calling, not a great-paying gig. We need to stick together. Help out Susie if you can.

Butt Crack and Beer Belly not available online

Taking my own advice.

Old items: Carhartt cargo pants (khaki) and heavy web belt (not shown) from Cabelas; 511 desert tactical boots (not shown) from Amazon; Men’s Sonoma Goods For Life® Supersoft Crewneck Tee from Kohls. New: SUVIYA Personalized Custom Tactical ID Patch with Hook Backing and Loop; KBETHOS Low Crown Cotton Baseball Cap; and YAKEDA Tactical Airsoft Vest for Men from Amazon. Masks have been banned in North Carolina.

Point being, any yahoo can dress like one of Donald Trump’s non-uniformed, unbadged secret policemen, even those not sporting butt cracks and beer bellies. (Butt Crack and Beer Belly not available online.) That’s why agents masking is BS, as U.S. District Court Judge William Young found this week (Footnote 29). It’s meant to “to terrorize Americans into quiescence.” Except real ICE agents or imposters are unlikely to stand at a busy intersection at rush hour advertising that ICE stands for I Can’t [get an] Erection.

Chris Hayes Thursday night had more on 300 CBP and ICE agents storming a Chicago apartment building and rousting out all the poor tenants (including children). The assault might have resembled something from Apocalypse Now if only the Blackhawk chopper had come in blaring “Ride of the Valkyries.” This isn’t law enforcement. It’s terrorism.

At the same time, if we expect people to pay attention and engage without tuning out to preserve their mental health, humor is a weapon we dare not deploy. Too much outrage leads to numbness. Rachel Maddow on Monday played a clip of the bicycle delivery guy taunting CBP agents in Chicago who then gave chase and failed to catch him. She said about all that was missing was the Benny Hill theme (“Yakety Sax”). The clip went viral.

Mockery has a place here. I’ve watched clips of protesters confronting ICE for days at the Broadview facility outside Chicago to little effect. It’s clear from ICE behavior that Kristi Noem is hiring brutish testosterone junkies not law enforcement professionals. Angry confrontation just gives them the chance they’re looking for to bust heads under color of law. What they need to prove, as does Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump himself, is how freaking manly they are. Feeling laughed at has gnawed at Trump his entire life. It’s a glaring soft spot. Maybe leave an indelible impression of his secret police based in humor rather than outrage. 

Commuters (women especially) who’ve laughed and cheered at me costumed and spinning this 2-sided sign overhead at rush hour won’t forget it either. Two different drivers shouted thanks out the window for the laugh they’d been needing. (It’s a community service.) Part of building the movement is not numbing potential allies into immobility.

* * * * *

Our friend Susie Madrak is experiencing a cash crunch. She’s looking for whatever help you might lend this week. Making things worse is an insurance settlement delayed on account of paperwork. Plus:

In the meantime, my neurologist suspects I have an obscure lupus-like autoimmune disorder that’s causing all kinds of weird symptoms (for one thing, she says the signals my brain are sending to my feet aren’t making it through and I’m off balance) but first she has to rule out blood cancers, etc. There’s also a lesion on my lung and they want an MRI.

Susie has been posting at Suburban Guerrilla and Crooks & Liars for 20 years. It’s a calling, not a great-paying gig. We need to stick together. Help out Susie if you can.

PM of Albania having a good laugh with President of Azerbaijan and Macron about Trump repeatedly claiming that he ended the war between their two countries which were not at war with each other. pic.twitter.com/5lP6XTps2J

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) October 2, 2025

Yep. They’re laughing at him again. How can they not?

Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama jokingly scolds his colleague French President Emmanuel Macron that he didn’t congratulate Albania and Azerbaijan for brokering a peace deal thanks to the U.S. president, saying the countries worked “very hard” to achieve the deal.

“You should make an apology to us because you didn’t congratulate us for the peace deal that President Trump made between Albania and Azerbaijan,” Rama said while Macron and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev laugh.

Macron responded to the joke with a mock apology, saying, “I am sorry for that.”

Trump has been told that he “ended” seven wars for which he is owed a Nobel Peace Prize but he doesn’t know what they are. This one was between Armenia and Azerbaijan the latter of which he couldn’t pronounce. He couldn’t find either country on a map.

You have to laugh or you will never stop crying.

Today:

The Democrats should know that they put the White House and the president in this position. And if they don’t want further harm on their constituents back home, then they need to reopen the government. It’s very simple: Pass the clean continuing resolution, and all of this goes away.”

That’s from the White House Secretary Karoline Leavitt today, openly threatening to inflict pain on Americans who don’t agree with Donald Trump unless they bow down and lick his feet.

Yeah.

I was going to write about this piece by Andrea Pitzer that’s been making the rounds but it seems everyone in the world has already weighed in so I decided to let it go. I pretty much agree with Josh Marshall here and you should read it and come to your own conclusion. But Josh goes on to make another point that I think is vitally important (and have written about myself in the past.)

It’s about the necessity to understand how to lose well:

So what do I mean when I saw that being prepared to lose well is usually the prerequisite to winning well? I mean two things by it, first a recognition and second a calibration, a heuristic. First it’s a recognition that we live in history and sometimes — actually, a lot of time — you can have the right values, a great strategy and give it your all and still lose. That’s history and that’s life. It’s a recognition and a reminder that perseverance is a more important quality than cleverness or ingenuity.

The calibration point is a bit more idiosyncratic. If you lose an important fight you want to know you did everything you could. You left it all on the field, as they say. You don’t want to have made any dumb mistakes you’ll be kicking yourself over later. In a football game you can have a great strategy, the whole team gives it everything and you come up short. There’s no shame in that. Disappointing but no shame. You want your politics to work the same way.

The additional factor is that dignity — knowing who you are, not being lost — is an essential part of both winning battles and the perseverance that is necessary to endure and come back from defeats. The one thing you never want to do is fight over something important, see reverses, freak out, trade away all the things and the values that are most dear to and still lose. Then you’ve sort of lost everything. Your dignity, your sense of who you are … all in addition to the thing you were fighting over in the first place. If you’re on the wrong track and you ask yourself this question, you’ll know.

Democrats faced such a question in early 2005 when George W. Bush appeared to be on his way to phasing out Social Security in favor of a system of 401k-like private accounts. Responding with a flat “no” to any version of this kind of phaseout wasn’t just good political strategy, as none of it was popular. It also gave the Democrats a clarity of purpose and a mix of morale and motivation that added to their power. Various actors quickly bullied straggling members of Congress to adopt that line. It worked.

This isn’t or should be a straightjacket. There’s a certain kind of person who thinks that any accommodation of public opinion or tactical adjustment is a betrayal or abandonment of this or that group of value or whatever. That’s at least not how I see it. Or it’s not what I’m saying. When I ask myself these kinds of questions it’s really, Is this the most effective approach available? Am I focused on what’s most important?

I may be too much of an instinctive pragmatist that quizzing myself about my “values” feels too treacly or precious. How will I feel losing on these terms, with this approach is probably my version of it. If you look at what you’re doing and the beam is straight and true, you’ll know. And it’s not just a matter of being at peace with yourself, though that’s nice. You really don’t want to lose. Because losing may mean losing a lot. When that beam is straight and true it has a way of bringing everything into alignment. It makes people motivated. It drives morale. Because everything being in alignment, being prepared and ready to lose well is the best way to win too, and not just in some touchy-feely way. It aligns motivation, commitment and a sense of solidarity.

When you have no institutional power you make the case, stand up for principles, stick together. You might just win and if you lose at least the American people know what you stand for.

From the moment Trump took office he was committed to going after Palestinian protesters. I guess it’s just because they were supported by left wing students? That seems like a stretch even for them and I wonder if there was more to it. A special favor for Bibi perhaps? Who knows?

Anyway, they went full STASI on this, right out of the gate:

When Rumeysa Ozturk was grabbed by masked federal agents outside her Massachusetts home in March, the video of the Turkish graduate student being handcuffed and hustled into an unmarked vehicle spread around the world.

A federal trial that ended Tuesday revealed for the first time the story behind the images, showing how the government assigned a special team to target Ozturk and other pro-Palestinian activists, laying the groundwork for their highly unusual arrests.

Ozturk had committed no crime, yet her detention was a priority for the new Trump administration.

[…]

On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge William Young in Boston ruled that the push to target Ozturk and other students was blatantly unconstitutional. The White House vowed to appeal the decision.

The bench trial — decided by a judge rather than a jury — generated thousands of pages of depositions, court transcripts and filings that provided a detailed picture of the machinery that led to the arrests.

Among the findings: White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, a top ally of President Donald Trump and architect of his mass deportation campaign, spoke with senior officials at the State Department and DHS more than a dozen times in March to discuss student visa revocations.

Homeland Security Investigations, an arm of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement that investigates transnational crime, took the lead. HSI researched the protesters and referred dozens of cases to the State Department, sometimes citing an obscure statute for revoking visas. Then it carried out the arrests.

[…]

While Trump administration officials have repeatedly accused the students of being “terrorist sympathizers” and “Hamas supporters,” no evidence of any connection to violence or terrorism was presented at trial.

That video of Ozturk still makes my blood run cold. It was the first of many but it’s still emblematic of the terror these people are inflicting on our streets. And anyone who thinks their citizenship will protect them from these people is living in a dream world. This is just their opening gambit.

The judge in the referenced case produced an astonishing opinion that’s well worth reading in its entirety. It’s written by an 85 year old Reagan Appointee who has produced one of the most cogent critiques of Trump’s assault on free speech I’ve yet seen (proving that not all elders are too addled to serve — his wisdom here is welcome.)

Here’s a rundown of it by Chris Geidner. An excerpt:

Young does more in one decision than perhaps any public official has done this year to detail the specific methods President Donald Trump and the Trump administration use to act illegally and unconstitutionally, the many ways the other branches and outside institutions have capitulated to those acts, and the essential and powerful ways people — and the legal system — can push back.

It is, however, ultimately a challenge to America.

Young is aware — as he detailed in a 10-page section of his ruling explaining “Justice in the Trump Era” — that he and the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts cannot hold the line. In a conclusion that first quoted Ronald Reagan’s 1967 statement that freedom is “never more than one generation away from extinction,” Young then wrote:

I fear President Trump believes the American people are so divided that today they will not stand up, fight for, and defend our most precious constitutional values so long as they are lulled into thinking their own personal interests are not affected.

Is he correct?

That fear and question might have felt forced or exaggerated for emphasis elsewhere, but, by time it was posed on page 160 of Young’s ruling, it was simply a statement from a judge who has been on the federal bench for 40 years, has been alive for more than double that time, is overseeing multiple cases addressing this administration’s actions, and is questioning what’s to come.

I think we know what’s to come unless we can save ourselves.

He promised to fix it. But he didn’t….

Americans say it’s harder to afford their groceries now than it was a year ago, a warning sign for President Trump and Republicans, in the latest Axios Vibes survey by The Harris Poll.

Why it matters: Everyone’s gotta eat. High food prices disproportionately impact working-class voters, the very people Trump promised lower grocery prices on the campaign trail a year ago.

• Just 1 in 5 respondents say it’s easier to afford groceries now than this time last year; nearly half say it’s harder, while 1 in 3 say it’s about the same.

The big picture: 8 in 10 Americans say they believe the president has “significant influence” over the U.S. economy, but just 47% say the Trump administration has had a positive impact on the economy this year.

What they’re saying: “The midterms might hinge on a ‘Cleanup on Aisle 4!’ ” said John Gerzema, CEO of The Harris Poll.

• “It’s such a visible signal that life is harder today than it was even last year when we were in an election cycle,” Gerzema said of grocery bills. Respondents “don’t feel like things are changing fast enough. This is going to be a significant issue for the president.”

Trump says it’s all Biden’s fault so never mind. In fact, he says prices on groceries are actually lower. Ok:

Reality check: Three factors appear be contributing to Americans’ discontent over those higher prices.

• Prices for certain staple items many people consume nearly every day have risen much more than the average, including ground beef (up 12.8% in the past year), eggs (up 10.9%) and coffee (up 20.9%).
• Moreover, the price rises now are coming on top of earlier price surges in the 2021-2022 period, which slowed down in 2023 and 2024 but never reversed. Over the last five years, grocery prices have risen by more than 30%.
• The job market is weaker and wages aren’t rising as quickly as they were earlier in this economic cycle, so any given rise in grocery bills may pinch harder than it did when employers were racing to give employees wages.

Zoom out: This is part of a broader phenomenon in which consumer sentiment and confidence data is depressed, despite many measures of well-being — the unemployment rate, the stock market, GDP growth — looking pretty good.

Tariffs weigh on sentiment

By the numbers: Less than 1 in 3 say Trump’s tariffs have been good for the U.S. economy, U.S. businesses or personal finances; 63% worry about shortages of key goods they rely on due to tariffs.

• Less than half (47%) say 2025 has been a better year than 2024. Nearly two-thirds (65%) say they’re financially squeezed each month.

I think Trump is planning on simply blaming Biden and the Democrats for everything and assuming people will believe it. But one of the downsides of being so ubiquitous and doing so much right in everyone’s faces is that it’s made the Biden administration feel like it happened a decade ago. I don’t think that’s going to work much longer.

Whether this inflation will be enough to break this electoral log jam is yet to be determined. But I do remember a time not really so long ago when the price of eggs had people very upset, so upset that they were willing to vote to put a known criminal back in the White House to fix it. Will they be upset enough to toss out his accomplices next year?