Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Preserve your sanity

If coping with news overload is becoming a challenge, James Fallows recommends an essay by Degenerate Art writer Andrea Pitzer. In “Minding the Gap,” she emphasizes that there is a “difference between being aware of or criticizing what’s happening and taking action.” Action not only beats despair, it staves off despair.

“It’s possible to be aware of the bad acts underway without letting them paralyze you,” Pitzer advises. “Instead, let each day’s events remind you how important it is to do something, and that publicly doing your part can help turn the tide.”

The “publicly” part is important. We’ll come back to that.

It’s great if you keep up with your favorite pundits, legislators and lawyers. “But in our society as it exists today,” Pitzer continues, “I think there’s a real danger among the general population of mistaking online engagement itself for action.”

Pitzer warns:

The danger for the left now is to get caught up in critiques of those who are actually doing things, in which the people doing the critiquing will mistake their contribution for something useful. At this stage, facing a closing window for outcomes without significant increase in state violence, putting your weight into the societal shift we need is far more valuable.

Much of that will take the form of small actions in your community. And that shift might be easier than you imagine.

Fallows adds:

Perhaps you’ll not be surprised to hear that she ends up with an exhortation to do something, right now, at the local level. (For instance, at food banks—as grocery prices soar, and federal aid is cut off.) I found it heartening to read someone who doesn’t have all the answers but is wrestling with the same questions I do.

Boiler-plate advice from Indivisible and other activist groups is that you write or call your representatives multiple times a week. Fine. But none of your neighbors see that. They need to see resistance.

There are two key takeaways from the major intersection protests I’m engaged in 4-5 times a week. (The one pictured at the top is the largest.)

First, it feels good to be doing something more than screaming at your TV, and doing it with friends reinforces the effect. It takes introverts outside of their comfort zones, sure, but it’s easier in a crowd and it’s empowering.

Second, neighbors still putting in their nine-to-five need you out there. (The group at the top is mostly retirees; we have the time.) You are not the only ones losing sleep and grinding your teeth over ICE raids and the president’s mania. The smiles and honks and waves and thumbs-up say you are lifting spirits that need lifting. (I play dance music.) The occasional middle fingers let you know you’ve made a Trump supporter’s ride home less enjoyable (if you’re into that kind of thing).

At a corner where I went solo with a “GRAB HIM BY THE | EPSTEIN FILES“ sign:

The response, especially from women, was loud and vigorous. There were not only horn toots, waves and thumbs-up aplenty. People cheered! Carloads of women cheered and applauded as they drove by. A passenger waiting at a light climbed out of his window to cheer and pump his fist over the roof of the car. A woman jogger told me all the bastards need to go, and then “the orange menace.”

Talk about an endorphin rush. But there’s more.

Week after week after week on the overpass, pedestrians under 35 — especially women — thank me when they see YOUR LIFE SHOULDN’T BE THIS HARD  and stop and ask to take a photo. A professional woman coming from work says it lifts her spirits to see me there each week. A young woman with tattoos headed to work. A Black veteran, mid-30s, says, “You’ve got that right, brother,” and slaps my back as he passes.

A young woman on a scooter stopped on the overpass last Friday to thank me. (I mean looks me square in the eyes THANK YOU.) She rode to the end of the bridge, turned around and came back, asked if she could take a photo, and thanks me again.

You are not the only ones struggling. Your neighbors need to feel they’ve been seen and heard. They need to know that they are not alone in the fight. Your public actions may not shift policy in D.C. or by themselves turn out “the orange menace,” but lifting spirits is worth doing. It feels good too and encourages others to get involved. The group at the top, about 40, started weeks ago as a mere handful.

* * * * *

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.

When is this stuff going to become a serious story? He. Is. Out. Of. It.

Fred Kaplan at Slate has the low down on the “big meeting” between Trump and Netanyahu today:

President Donald Trump appeared before the White House press corps Monday, proclaiming it “one of the great days ever in civilization … a historic day of peace … let’s call it eternal peace” for Gaza and the entire Middle East. But then, after 45 minutes of mutual back-rubbing, he and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said they would not take questions because they were waiting for “signatures and approvals” on many documents.

So does this mean the two leaders and the Arab powers in the Middle East didn’t make peace in our time?

Most crucially, Trump and Netanyahu admitted that Hamas had not agreed to any of the 22 articles in a peace proposal written mainly by Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff; Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, who helped write the Abraham Accords in his first term; and Tony Blair, the former British prime minister, who has been involved in several Middle East peace ventures.

If Hamas still refuses to sign, Trump made clear, Israel would have the right to finish the war any way it wants—and the United States would support the assault.

That should probably be the lede here—Netanyahu got Trump’s endorsement for extending the war in Gaza to some vision of total victory—because, first, Hamas has rejected most of these terms in the recent past and, second, it is not clear that the Arab and Muslim powers in the region have agreed to all of the articles either.

There you have it.

The press conference was so bad I had to turn it off. The two of them congratulating themselves was just too much to take especially since it was pretty obvious that nothing substantive had happened except that Trump had promised if Hamas didn’t come to heel within 72 hours he gave permission to keep killing and destroying at will.

It was when Trump announced the “Board of Peace” for Gaza chaired by him that I had to check out, especially after listening to this garbage for more than half an hour:

Trump spent much of his monologue in the press room boasting, as he has many times, that no other president could have done this, especially “Sleepy Joe” Biden, whom he condemned or ridiculed three times. He also spent a few seconds moaning once more about the U.N. teleprompter that malfunctioned right before his speech to the General Assembly. (He noted that he delivered remarks “from the heart” anyway, adding, “Could Biden have done that? I don’t think so.”)

Yeah whatever. Kaplan concludes with this sad dose of reality:

If Trump and the Arab leaders are serious about making peace in Gaza, they will have to mount the same sort of pressure: Trump on Netanyahu, the Arabs (especially Qatar) on Hamas. Nothing in this proposal or in Monday’s press conference indicates that any of the outside powers are ready to impose such pressure. So the war is likely to thunder on.

Just another photo op in the gaudy, golden oval for Trump.

I really wish the Democrats would make a bigger point of this:

What is different about the 2025 budget fight than previous ones?

A lot of the dynamics are still the same. You still have partisan fighting. And you still have some divides within the two parties that I think are worth mentioning. One example: There was a Senate vote just the other day on one of these budget resolutions, and a couple of Republicans voted with the Democrats. So for some of these more deficit-hawk Republicans, that concern is still playing a role.

What’s new this time around is this element of rescissions. This is a tool that’s been available since the 1970s in which presidents ask Congress to rescind spending that they had allocated. This is what happened earlier this year with the rescissions on public broadcasting – NPR and PBS – that got a lot of attention, as well as on USAID. Trump said he wanted to cut funding for public broadcasting – the GOP in the Senate and House voted to let him. They didn’t need 60 votes in the Senate for a rescission, either. Just a majority for this move.

So in this case, Democrats are looking at this and thinking, “Why should we negotiate, if you’re just going to rescind that later on without our consent?” That’s a major element that’s changed. While it’s a power that has been in place for a while, Trump and the Republicans have been really willing to wield that.

This seems to me to be the essential argument that plays into the administration’s autocratic approach to everything. They believe the Congress is irrelevant. Russell Vought will use the rescission power to spend money as the administration wants it spent regardless of the appropriations process. And the Republicans will come along later and co-sign whatever he does because they are a bunch of potted plants who no longer have minds of their own. They have already done it once and they’ll do it again.

There is no such thing as a “deal” on government spending anymore, whether it’s one that the Republicans jam through in the congress or whether it’s one with the Democrats under the threat of a government shutdown. The administration will do whatever it wants.

I don’t know where this leads us in terms of the current showdown. The Democrats have to hang tough because it’s the only power they have and their constituents are demanding that they use it. And there is a chance they might prevail temporarily because we’re going into an election cycle which has some Republicans worried about these Obamacare subsidies hitting hard. So, the Dems might pull off a “win.” But I would assume that Vought will rescind them again after the election because the whole point is to show that the president is king and they will do what they want.

By the way, I would also assume that the Supreme Court majority will back them. They too believe that Congress is a sort of ceremonial institution there for the purpose of naming post offices and tugging their forelocks for the president.

Here’s a gift link to a story by the NY Times today about Vought. If you are a regular reader here you already know about this miscreant but it’s good to see the mainstream press focusing on him at long last. He and Stephen Miller are running the government. And they are both very, very dangerous people.

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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.

Here’s a story by Nick Valencia about just one of tens of thousands of people who are being abducted by the government and essentially disappeared.

— On September 16, newlyweds Tucker and Barbara May walked into the downtown Los Angeles federal building believing they were there for her green card interview.

Married this spring, they had followed every rule, filed every form, and spent every dollar to prove their marriage was real.

But their interview was a trap.

“It was never going to be an interview,” he told Nick Valencia News. “It was always a setup.”

Not only was she lured there, her husband said, once inside ICE agents separated her from her lawyer with the excuse of a broken copier. Then, they put her in handcuffs.

“One officer smiled for a selfie with her as she cried,” he added.

By Saturday night, Tucker didn’t know where his wife was.

They sent her to a detention center and was told “we don’t care” when she told them she that a habeas petition and a temporary restraining order had been filed. The facility withheld the legal documents her lawyer had sent which were required to re-open her case until she had already been shipped out to an unknown location.

At every stage, the process her husband described has been calibrated not for justice but for delay—for erasing options, running out the clock, and breaking faith.

“These are abductions,” Tucker said flatly.

The government says that she missed an immigration hearing she was never told about. The government has produced no proof that they ever tried to notify her.

As the article points out, the business model for these detention centers is to have bodies kept there as long as possible. We knew that was the case didn’t we?

There was a time when the whole country was up in arms about family separations, remember? Apparently it’s just not a big story anymore. This man had to beg for a member of the press to write about it and Nick Valencia is the only one who did. I guess the fact that we’re a fascist state just isn’t big news anymore.

Read the whole thing.

That’s the new editorial page editor of the Washington Post sharing their allegedly non-partisan editorial policy.

Can you see the problem here? I knew that you could. He praises Trump for wanting to go back into Afghanistan and also “praises” Democrats who criticize other Democrats he thinks are too radical. Why would anyone think they might have a pro-Trump or partisan GOP agenda? I can’t imagine.

It’s very sad to see the Post go down this road but like so many other institutions the ownership/leadership automatically bent the knee to Trump either because they actually really like the orange freak or they decided that they couldn’t take the risk that he would weaponize the government against some of their precious billions so it’s worth it to sell out the country and humiliate themselves personally.

But then the Post is owned by this piece of work with his wife who for some unknown reason thought it was appropriate to show her bra at the inauguration:

Fox News and Karoline Leavitt working hard to link yesterday's Michigan shooter to the left but can't find a connection. Oops! pic.twitter.com/96AeDx7QBD

— Ron Smith (@Ronxyz00) September 29, 2025

He just hated Mormons so he might as well be Antifa:

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt revealed on Monday that the Mormon church shooter “hated” members of the faith.

Leavitt said on Fox & Friends that she had a conversation with FBI director Kash Patel about Thomas Jacob Sanford, who drove his pickup truck Sunday into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Grand Blanc Township, Michigan, opened fire on worshippers, and set the building ablaze.

“From what I understand, based on my conversations with the FBI director, all they know right now is this was an individual who hated people of the Mormon faith, and they are trying to understand more about this, how premeditated it was, how much planning went into it, whether he left a note,’ she told Fox News viewers.

“All of those questions have yet to be answered, but certainly will be answered by the FBI. I think the American people in your audience can be assured.”

What? He’s not transgender Antifa? I thought all these shooters were the result of all of us commie leftists being mean to Donald Trump.

Weirdly, it seems he might even be a big Trump guy although that wouldn’t explain why he wanted to kill a bunch of Mormons.

Like all the other lone wolf shooters (and that would be 99% of it) he was clearly a screwed up person with a gun. Period. The attempt to turn all shooters into left wing terrorists is ridiculous since to the extent any of them are political, they tend to be right wing not left wing. And they’re all nuts. But that won’t stop Stephen Miller from deploying the government against all liberals as a national security threat.

BTW: he was a Trump supporter. Note the sign. Of course the two big American flags flying off the back of his Silverado was kind of a tip off too.

Trump referenced a weekend conversation with Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek, and he alluded to being told by Kotek that the reality in Portland is different from what’s being portrayed to him.

“I spoke to the governor, she was very nice,” Trump said. “But I said, ‘Well wait a minute, am I watching things on television that are different from what’s happening? My people tell me different.’ They are literally attacking and there are fires all over the place…it looks like terrible.”

His people are liars and Fox news shows “B” roll of the 2020 George Floyd protests all the time whenever they talk about Portland. He is clueless.

There are no riots in Portland. There is one ICE building that has a few scattered protests outside. That’s it.

All weekend people were posting pictures of families having picnics and downtown coffee shops filled with customers with the hashtag #warravagedportland

Idiocracy is funny but it’s dangerous.

Update: Philip Bump has more on this. It’s insidious.

It’s on. You’re in it. Fight it.

Why we fight the budget battle this week cannot be a process fight. A both sides fight. The media will frame it that way because that’s what the media does. LOLGOP with help from Marcy Wheeler and Anat Shenker-Osorio suggested last week that you, Dear Reader, have a roll to play:

We must say loudly and proudly, “No dollars for dictatorship,” emphasizing that this fight isn’t just about Trump ripping healthcare from those who need it most to bail out billionaires. It’s also about restoring Congress’s place in our Constitutional order and rejecting the normalization of authoritarianism.

[…]

From the links we click to the posts we share, to the words we say on any platform, to whatever following we have, it all matters. It all makes the reality that the mainstream media will be feeding back to Democratic members, who must be motivated not to cave.

“We must act as if we are part of the fight, that we have some agency, and we’re not just victims of our often feckless Democratic leadership,” Jason Sattler explains.

As Marcy notes, hectoring weak Democratic leaders like Chuck Schumer will not advance the ball. Our pressure campaign on this budget has to focus on Republicans and the war they are waging against the American people. In Anat-speak, “Continuing to finance fascism means … that this isn’t fascism.”

Thrilled to see growing consensus that Dems must step up in the Continuing Resolution fight. Key to doing so? Refuse to frame this as "shutting down government." Instead, call it what it is – refusing to be an accomplice to turning the government into a weapon against the American people.

— Anat Shenker-Osorio (@anatosaurus.bsky.social) 2025-09-08T22:04:20.453Z

Check out Marcy’s and Anat’s vids on this.

* * * * *

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.

From Beer Summit to Beer Hall Putsch.

Seth Masket at Tusk came away shaking his head after Ezra Klein’s recent interview with conservative commentator Ben Shapiro about his new book “Lions and Scavengers.” Klein works “extremely  hard,” in Masket’s view, to take his arguments seriously. Perhaps because Shapiro takes himself so seriously. (There is a humility shortage on both the far right and the far left.)

Despite the massive, national backlash over the White House assault on freedom of speech, despite our horror at seeing the rule of law gutted by the Trump 2.0 administration, despite the Republican Party’s rejection of the principles of democracy, and despite their embrace of Christian nationalism and strongman rule, Shapiro argues (I haven’t read the book) that what radicalized conservatives is that the left, Klein summarizes, “has turned against the foundations of Western civilization.”

Yes, Shapiro is serious.

“It used to be a fight about policy, but now it’s a fight about whether all this is good or not. And that’s a much more fundamental kind of conflict,” Klein proposes and asks Shapiro what has changed.  

Shapiro explains that it was 2012:

So in 2008, Barack Obama ran as a unifying candidate, like him or hate him. I didn’t vote for him. I was not a fan. But Barack Obama ran as somebody who was, in his very personage, unifying America. There was no red America, there was no blue America, there was just the United States. There was no Black or white America.

There were just Americans. And the idea was that he was sort of the apotheosis of the coming together. He was going to be the culmination of a lot of these strands of American history coming together to put to bed so many of the problems that had plagued America over the course of our tumultuous history….

So he runs, he wins. Obamacare happens. There’s a big blowback in the form of the Tea Party. And he reacts to that by essentially polarizing the electorate. He decides that instead of broadcasting to the general electorate an optimistic message about America, he is going to narrowcast his election in 2012. He’s going to base it on a much more identity-groups-rooted politics. He’s going to appeal to Black Americans as Black Americans and gay Americans as gay Americans and Latino Americans as Latino Americans.

Yes, Shapiro is serious. What electing Obama was supposed to mean for conservatives (like Gerald Ford pardoning Nixon) was that the country would declare “the long national nightmare” of racial animus was over and finally would move on without reckoning with it.

Masket writes:

Shapiro offers a few examples, such as:

• The 2009 arrest of Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. for breaking into his own home in Cambridge; Obama said that the police “acted stupidly,” and then convened a White House “beer summit” with Gates and the arresting officer.
• The 2012 killing of Trayvon Martin, after which Obama empathized, “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.”
• The 2014 Ferguson riots, during which Obama said that “a deep distrust exists between law enforcement and communities of color. Some of this is the result of the legacy of racial discrimination in this country.”

Never mind that the Gates arrest was in July of 2009, not during the 2012 campaign. Or that the poster below began circulating in September 2009. No, it was that in 2012 that Democrats decided that demography was their destiny and Republicans felt it was their demise.

“We’re just demographically losing the argument,” Shapiro says of conservatives. So Republicans “need to run the biggest pulsating middle finger that we can. That pulsating middle finger is Donald Trump — so we’re going to run him in 2016.” Time to burn it all down.

Or as Otter put it decades earlier, “I think that this situation absolutely requires a really futile and stupid gesture be done on somebody’s part!”

That’s the rationalization for conservative radicalization. Not the country electing a Black president and not embracing conservative demands that we stop talking about race (see poster above again).

Masket again:

Basically, it was moments of abuse or violence inflicted upon Black people and Obama pointing out that race was a factor. The exchange after that is interesting:

Klein: It’s hard for me when I look back on that, on the “beer summit” in particular, to hear: That’s what radicalized you all?

Shapiro: Yes. And the reason is: The implicit promise of Barack Obama was the worst conflict in the history of America — which is the racial history of the United States, which is truly horrifying. That in his person, he was basically going to be the capstone of the great movement toward Martin Luther King’s dream.

And when, instead, things seemed to move in the opposite direction, which was: Well, you know, it turns out that Black people in America, they’re inherently victimized by a white supremacist system that puts Black people underfoot….

Klein: It kind of sounds like the interpretation of Obama, at least to you, was that if he’s elected, we’ll agree we’ve gotten past all this — that it’s supposed to make us feel better, and then when it didn’t, that was understood as the betrayal of a promise.

Shapiro: That is how I think most Americans saw it.

This is an important narrative, and it’s not a position just held by Shapiro. Quite a few conservative authors make a similar argument, and I’ve heard similar sentiments from some local political figures I’ve interviewed. The basic idea was that there was some sort of deal: If conservatives permit the election of the first Black president, that will essentially signal the end of institutional racism in the United States, and then we won’t have to talk about race anymore. And any time Obama brought up race he was reneging on that deal.

Now, that narratives breaks down somewhat in a few key areas, such as the fact that this “deal” only existed in conservatives’ minds, and they didn’t vote for Obama anyway. Also, MLK’s dream was about equality and justice, not about putting a Black man in the White House. But Obama, in his style of campaigning in 2007 and 2008, surely did a fair amount to suggest a “post-racial” United States, and sought to allay conservative whites’ fears that he would mainly prioritize Black voters.

My own perspective and Shapiro’s perspective on the past several decades of US politics clearly differ, but there’s a common thread in that racial politics is the main driver. Klein’s question about the Gates beer summit — “That’s what radicalized you all?” — is the right one, and the answer is yes. But it was always about more than a beer summit.

And here we are. We’ve gone from Beer Summit to Beer Hall Putsch.

* * * *

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.