Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

It’s a GOP priority

Little did Digby know when she asked me to join her in August 2014 that I’d be writing from one of the nation’s premier hotbeds of Republican mischief. After their 2010 REDMAP victories, the GOP had gerrymandered the hell out of North Carolina. They had passed their 2013 Voter Identification Verification Act (found in 2016 “to discriminate against African American voters” with “almost surgical precision”). But they had yet to pass their infamous 2016 “bathroom bill.” Republicans in late 2016 had yet to strip incoming Democratic Governor Roy Cooper’s “control over state and county elections boards and its powerful university system.” Republicans had yet to redraw congressional districts multiple times in response to Democrats’ court challenges, or to contest a 2024 state Supreme Court election they’d lost with six months of recounts, court battles, and an attempt to throw out tens of thousands of ballots.

But here we are. And they are at it again. As David Pepper warned, schemes cooked up in these “laboratories of autocracy” may eventually find their way to where you live.

Remember the GOP’s alleged commitment to the notion that “government closest to the people is the one that governs best”? That was then. The GOP still mouths it. They just don’t believe it. This comes via Carolina Forward:

A major issue brewing in our state legislature today is over what to do about property taxes in North Carolina.

Pretty much since forever, property taxes have always been decided on the local, county level. Local elected officials – each county’s Board of Commissioners – sets its own property tax rate based on whatever it is their local voters want and need.

But now, that might change. The leaders of North Carolina’s state legislature are now considering whether to take away local counties’ ability to set their own property taxes based on local needs, and lock them into a formula – set and controlled, of course, by the state legislature.

For almost 150 years, voters in North Carolina have decided their own local property tax rates through local elections. Don’t like your property taxes? Go elect some different county commissioners. People do it all the time. After all, it just makes sense that the people of Polk, Cabarrus, Clay, Wake, Bladen or Gates counties choose different tax rates, since the counties are all very different themselves. Local elected officials, who are closest to their voters, are usually the best-informed about their needs.

But the leaders of North Carolina’s state legislature are no fans of local control. Many of them seem to be of the mind that they – not the local voters most affected – should decide the matter. Through some combination of levy limits and/or assessment caps, state lawmakers may soon end North Carolina’s 150-year tradition of local control over property taxation.

Here’s something for everyone to consider, though: it’s easy for our centralized state government to take power away from local counties. It’s very hard to give it back, and it doesn’t often happen.

Power flows from the pursestrings. When counties’ ability to raise revenue is limited, they’ll become more reliant on the state legislature. More and more counties will need to pay for lobbyists to prowl the halls of our legislature; county commissioners will need to spend more time in Raleigh pleading their cases.

Local elections matter. Tomorrow, they may just matter a little less.

I wrote here in 2017:

GOP-led legislatures are implementing changes to governance and revenue streams, strategically starving cities of revenue, leaving city leaders with no choice but to raise taxes and/or cut services and piss off voters. It’s happening in North Carolina and elsewhere [dead link is corrected]:

After a couple of cycles, Republicans will be running candidates who blame North Carolina cities’ financial woes on “mismanagement and waste” by Democrats, and counting on voters to forget by then who precipitated the crisis in the first place. They’ll succeed if we don’t remind voters at every opportunity that it’s their strategy. It is deliberate.

About that N.C. Supreme Court election mentioned above. The court’s GOP majority may have picked up the delay, delay, delay gambit from the sitting president (WRAL):

The North Carolina Supreme Court on Thursday threw out the multibillion-dollar plan to improve North Carolina’s public schools in a ruling that ended the long-running lawsuit known as Leandro.

Hoke County Board of Education v. State of North Carolina was initially filed in 1994 and accuses the state of not providing an adequate education to the state’s more than 1 million students. The lawsuit has sought to shore up education in the state and improve outcomes for the state’s students.

Parties had come to an agreement on a plan in 2021 that would have drastically increased funding by more than $5 billion — funding for things such as special education, teacher pay, counselors, social workers and school nurses. It also included many policy changes, on things such as school improvement.

The court threw out that plan Thursday in a 4-3 decision. The ruling invalidates the last decade’s worth of actions in the case. But instead of remanding the lawsuit for further action on the claims of the original five school boards that sued — Cumberland, Hoke, Halifax, Vance and Robeson — the court dismissed the case entirely without giving parties the ability to re-file. Justices in the majority tossed the case in part because they contended that today’s education system has changed too much in the past 20 years and that the lack of any current students as plaintiffs means no plaintiffs have their rights at issue. 

Of the 50 states, North Carolina ranks second-to-last in cost-adjusted, per-pupil funding.

Did I mention that North Carolina is nine months into its budget year and the GOP-controlled state legislature has yet to pass a budget? Or that it has not had a new budget since 2023? Even in the wake of Hurricane Helene?

They don’t want to govern. They want to rule.

(h/t NK)

What could go wrong?

Pete Hegseth is the joke. And he has a message from your Department of WAR!

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth signed a memorandum directing military installation commanders to allow War Department personnel — namely, uniformed service members — to request to carry privately owned firearms while in their nonofficial duty capacity on DOW property within the United States. 

“Before today, it was virtually impossible … for War Department personnel to get permission to carry and store their own personal weapons aligned with the state laws where we operate our installations. … Well, that’s no longer,” Hegseth said during a social media video released today. 

In requesting private carry, there will be “a presumption of approval.”  Including at the Pentagon. Just not inside the building.

Rather, it states that the Pentagon Force Protection Agency must allow fair consideration for Pentagon personnel to “store a privately owned firearm in a vehicle on the Pentagon Reservation,” pursuant to the Code of Federal Regulations.  

Our military installations have been turned into gun-free zones—leaving our service members vulnerable and exposed.

That ends today. pic.twitter.com/IQ204YepZ0

— Secretary of War Pete Hegseth (@SecWar) April 2, 2026

Jack them up. Teach them to kill, kill, kill. And be sure they can walk around the base packing their own pistols. Or worse?

There seem to be no restrictions on what kind of private heat. Will troops be allowed to carry their tricked-out AR-15s into the mess hall? Or multiple weapons? Watch that space.

“Not all enemies are foreign, nor are they all outside of our borders — some are domestic,” he said, in reference to the oath all U.S. uniformed service members take upon swearing to serve their country. 

Enter Acting AG Todd Blanche

According to reports early this afternoon, Pam Bondi is no longer attorney general. She’s been fired (The New York Times):

The dismissal of Ms. Bondi, 60, ends a turbulent 14-month tenure as attorney general in which she tried desperately to appease a boss who demanded unimpeded control of the Justice Department to pursue politically motivated investigations against targets of his choosing, even when prosecutors warned that there was no evidence to do so.

The president’s support for Ms. Bondi has been steadily eroding since last summer, when her initial mistakes in managing the release of the Epstein files created a political liability for Mr. Trump among his supporters. He has also complained about her shortcomings as a communicator and TV surrogate — a role he thought would suit her talents.

That did not take long.

Trump posted that just after a drone(?) camera video of the destruction of a bridge being constructed in Karaj, Iran. Iranian media claims two people were killed.

CNN:

Trump had in recent days talked to allies about the possibility of firing Bondi, and he talked with her personally on Wednesday about the possibility it would happen, sources said. In the conversation, which one source described as “tough,” Trump indicated Bondi was not long for her role and he would be replacing her in the near future, sources said.

Sources said Bondi was told she would be given a different job later. In their conversation, two sources said, Trump floated the possibility of appointing her as a judge after her departure from the Justice Department.

The big question now is whether that “Truth” was Bondi’s notice or whether Trump had the nerve to fire her in person. The next question is whether she’ll have anything to say about it as barbed as her comments in congressional hearings.

Trump has appointed Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, a former Trump personal lawyer, as acting AG.  (He can serve for 210 days.) He’s no improvement. A number of names are in the mix for Bondi’s replacement, including Administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Lee Zeldin, an election denier. Anyone Trump nominates will face a very tough confirmation. That’s why Trump filled many high-level jobs in his first term with acting officials.

NPR reported in March 2020:

Trump has often said he likes installing “acting” officials because it gives him more flexibility. His administration has been sued over this, and recently lost a court case over the practice, when a federal judge found that it hired a top immigration official unlawfully.

Now the Trump administration is increasingly turning to the more obscure tactic that leads to those lengthy titles. It’s known as delegation.

“That’s the shocking thing — just how many positions are working because of these delegations,” says Anne Joseph O’Connell, an expert on administrative law at Stanford Law School.

Why not just name acting directors and deputies to fill these open positions? The answer, O’Connell says, lies in a law known as the Federal Vacancies Reform Act, which lays out extensive rules about who can be appointed to serve in Senate-confirmed jobs, and for how long.

But that was in Trump’s first term. His entire administration is operating in a rules-optional manner. God knows what we’ll see in Trump 2.0 now that he needs a new AG.

Not that it isn’t deserved but it’s interesting that Trump has only fired women from his cabinet this term. Word is that Tulsi is next. I guess it’s natural. They’re “DEI” hires after all.

Unfortunately for the country, Todd Blanche is even worse than Bondi. And if Trump does put Lee Zeldin in as replacement, he’ll be equally unacceptable. Still, I don’t think anyone will miss Bondi. That performance before the Congress was the worst in history. That’s not why she was fired, of course. But it should have been.

Asawin Suebsaeng and Andrew Perez note the day:

On this day in 1992, a New York jury found mob boss John Gotti guilty on 13 counts, including murder. A key witness was Sammy “The Bull” Gravano, a former Gotti lieutenant who confessed to 19 killings and who would one day make headlines by endorsing Donald Trump. “We need a gangster,” Gravano said in 2024.

They write about Iran and it’s a banger:

Trump’s own administration – are actually buying his effort to declare victory in Iran and move on. “However poorly you think the war is going, it is worse,” one senior administration official said in recent days. A different senior US official bluntly stated: “Iran can declare victory, too,” adding that “nobody will buy our attempt to sell this as a big win.”

Still, if you are the US commander in chief, and you’re one month into a major war that you launched, the one communications job you have is to be able to go on live TV and project calm, confidence, and reasonably high energy to the American people, when you’re telling them how well the war is going.

On Wednesday night – April Fools’ Day, funnily enough – President Trump couldn’t even be bothered to do that. (He’s a former reality TV star; he is supposed to be good at doing TV.) Setting aside for a moment the typically incoherent jumble that pervaded his televised address, the American president delivered a jarringly listless, elderly-seeming speech that did little to inspire confidence – including in his own ranks.

During and after his address, an array of Trump advisers, administration officials, allies on Capitol Hill, and rich Mar-a-Lago buddies gave Zeteo their snap reviews of Trump’s message and delivery. (Yes, they asked for the cloak of anonymity, so as to not piss off God King Donald.) Virtually across the board, the president was panned by his own people, with some denigrating the speech as pointless, and others reiterating how much senior members of the administration never wanted this to happen in the first place.

One Trump administration official said the following on Wednesday night: “It reminded me of listening to Joe Biden speak.”

In Trumplandia, that is perhaps the worst possible thing you could say about anyone, much less the sitting president and leader of the GOP.

So today he calls Bruce Springsteen a “dried up old prune” and we hear that he’s going to fire Pam Bondi cementing the impression that his mind is actually mush. Biden never sounded so confused, much less were his policies totally incoherent. In reality the worst thing you can say about anyone is that they remind you of Donald Trump.

The best excerpt?

Before the speech, Politico reported that Trump intended to use his address to tell Americans the war is winding down. But the visibly deteriorating president didn’t seem prepared to pick a lane, and viewers were hard-pressed to find a message that didn’t sound like it was scrawled in a notebook by a serial killer.

I was unable to watch the speech in real time so I just got to it today. Oh my God. He is not well.

Josh Marshall’s pithy take is the best one I’ve read:

I think any press person who watched President Trump’s Iran cheer-up session speech on truth serum would have to concede that this was a speech he shouldn’t have given. He meandered. He looked bad and worn out. He had the requisite moments when his degenerate inner monologue creeps into the open: he said that free passage through the Strait of Hormuz is something for importer countries in Asia to deal with, that they should “grab and cherish” the strait, as though it were some underage beauty pageant contestant Trump was hungering to assault. What is important is that in political and public opinion terms, there was nothing new or newsworthy in this speech. They didn’t even manage to accomplish this in the narrow and cynical sense of saying anything new that could be a fresh point of public discussion. It was a rambling set of unconvincing excuses no one with any real concern or anxiety about this war (the only real audience) would find convincing. Why are you complaining, he asks? This war hasn’t gone on nearly as long as World War II! LOL.

Market watchers will note that the White House is now solidifying around the idea that free passage through the Strait of Hormuz is something importer countries will have to deal with, that it’s not America’s problem. That means that the economic fallout of the war will continue unabated. This is simply rebranding a massive strategic defeat as some kind of America First swagger. Of course, oil markets are global. It doesn’t really matter if the U.S. makes as much oil as it consumes. That’s not how prices work.

The “middle powers” as Mark Carney calls them have already banded together to come up with a solution to the problem without U.S. involvement. Trump will proclaim that as a personal victory but, in fact, it is the beginning of an alliance of erstwhile allies against our mutual adversaries — and us. Together, they are as powerful as we are.

What choice do they have? Any country that would elect that decrepit pile of bronzer and malice as their leader twice simply cannot be trusted to protect global security.

Gas prices are all Iran’s fault, claims real estate Developer-in-Chief

At an event the other day, I overheard someone complaining that the price of blueberries had shot up to $7. A visit to Trader Joe’s confirmed that. It’s now common to walk down the cookie aisle of a supermarket and see packages that once sold for $3-$4 now priced a $5 or more. And breakfast cereal? Fuhgeddaboudit!

Gasoline is now over $4 per gallon according to GasBuddy. Donald Trump last night claimed the price hike is “entirely the result of the Iranian regime” that closed the Strait of Hormuz after Trump attacked them.

At home, Americans’ patience has worn thin. Department of Homeland Security employees are working without paychecks for another week as Congress cannot get its act together (The Atlantic):

Instead of considering the DHS bill, Speaker Mike Johnson denounced the bipartisan compromise and then sent the entire chamber home for a two-week Easter recess. The move all but guaranteed that the government’s third-largest department would remain unfunded indefinitely as the nation wages war against Iran. Meanwhile, as lawmakers enjoy time with their families—or jet off on vacations and taxpayer-financed junkets overseas—millions of Americans are struggling with a spike in gas prices caused by the war.

[…]

Public anger is rising rapidly. The president’s approval ratings—which were already anemic—have sunk to new lows, and Republicans are facing the prospect of an electoral wipeout in this fall’s midterm elections. The GOP’s hold on the House majority has appeared precarious for months, but now its more comfortable advantage in the Senate may be in jeopardy too. Even TMZ is channeling the national discontent: The website known for trailing  celebrities has begun hounding members of Congress, encouraging its readers to send in photos and video of lawmakers fleeing Washington, D.C., and living it up while the public servants responsible for protecting the homeland go unpaid.

TMZ has photos of the Scotland trip. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R) of South Carolina took off for Disney World.

Gas and grocery prices will have many Americans planning staycations this summer.

One young Democrat who works as a health-care administrator said his girlfriend’s luxury car has been sitting at home for the past month because it needs premium gas, which is almost $6 a gallon. He blames Congress: “It’s ridiculous.” A middle-aged woman whose truck sported a Don’t tread on me sticker matter-of-factly summed up her feelings about the country’s lawmakers: “Everything is terrible.”

Sign Guy’s message for the week reads: ARE YOU WORKING TWO OR THREE ‘GOOD’ JOBS?

Lexus and Mercedes drivers don’t get it. Those who do shout, honk, and pump their fists. They feel seen.

Is this a tween mean girl or the president of the United States?

One of the things that worries me greatly these days is the fact that this man has been a dominant force in the culture for the past decade and I’m afraid this malignant attitude has become the accepted way for adults to publicly communicate. There are kids who have seen this behavior as normal nearly their whole lives.

Whether we like it or not, presidents are role models. My God.

Who’s next to be fired?

Headlines suggest that Donald Trump is not feeling as sheathed in a coccoon of warm, sychophants as he’s used to. This makes Captain Insecure agitated and unnerved. Answer? Fire someone.

AG Pam Bondi is in the headlines for just that reason (New York Times):

President Trump has discussed firing Attorney General Pam Bondi in recent days as he grows frustrated with her leadership at the Justice Department and her handling of the Epstein files, according to four people familiar with the conversations.

Mr. Trump has floated the idea of replacing Ms. Bondi with Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, the people said. They spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private deliberations by the president.

Mr. Trump has not made a final decision, and Ms. Bondi’s allies pointed to photos of her and the president traveling to the Supreme Court on Wednesday to dispute the notion that the president is planning to fire her.

Rumors are also flying about DNI Tulsi Gabbard (The Guardian):

Donald Trump has privately asked cabinet officials in recent weeks whether he should replace his director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, venting frustration that she shielded a former deputy who undercut his rationale for war with Iran, according to two people briefed on the discussions.

It is not clear that Trump will actually fire Gabbard over the episode. Currently, there is no standout candidate to take the job, and advisers have cautioned that creating a high-profile vacancy before a successor is ready could cause unhelpful political distractions.

Like the war in Iran he started, the firings could distract Trump from deciding what flooring and chandeliers to pick for his now-on-hold ballroom, suggests New Yorker cartoonist Matt Reuter.

Today’s Daily Cartoon, by Matt Reuter. pic.twitter.com/sKGM1rKzK2

— The New Yorker (@NewYorker) April 1, 2026

News Nation:

Trump was taking questions from reporters aboard Air Force One when he began holding up a series of architectural drawings and talked at length about the project he began pursuing early in his second term.

“We have all bullet-proof glass, we have drone-proof roofs, ceilings,” the president said as he shuffled through the renderings. “Unfortunately, we’re living in an age when that’s a good thing.”

Unfortuately, we’re living in an age dominated by billionaire tech bros and a president as incompetent as the people he hires to cover his ass.

You won’t get a straight answer from the man responsible

Donald Trump addressed the country Wednesday night to provide an update on his war/not-war with Iran. In Trump’s view, what he’s dubbed an excursion (that’s incursion) is “nearing completion.” Yet he repeated threats to destroy Iranian infrastructure, including power plants, to hit Iran “extremely hard,” and to bomb Iran “back to the Stone Ages” if it did not make a deal on ending the war/not-war. Except Trump presented no details of any proposed “deal.”

“Trump only repeated “the same statements he has been circulating for weeks,” Al Jazeera commented. “The US president did not provide details on how the war would actually end or what kind of deal he is seeking with Iran.”

David Rothkopf lambasted the address in the Daily Beast:

The U.S. president, looking addled and unsure of himself, unleashed a torrent of lies, untruths, misrepresentations, deceptions, and distilled nuggets of crapola so vast that it may well live up to the most Trumpian of descriptive phrases: “nobody has ever seen anything like it before.”

Compounding the fact that he managed to speak for almost 20 minutes without uttering nearly a single truth was the equally mind-numbing reality that, despite the White House having advertised his national TV appearance as a major address on the Iran war, nothing newsworthy crossed his thin, ever-so-lightly glossed lips.

His address was not so much a speech as it was a greatest hits compilation from his Truth Social account since the beginning of the current war in Iran, known to those who know as Operation Epic Fiasco.

With nothing new to say, Rothkopf writes, “the reason for this speech is that the opposite of everything Trump was saying was true and it is bad news and he wants to hide it.”

Iran’s fissile material is still there. The world is less safe than it was before Feb. 28. The world’s economy is shaken. Iran’s leadership is more hardline than ever and determined to wait out Trump’s shrinking attention span. As a Taliban leader reportedly said to the U.S. in Afghanistan, “You have the watches, but we have the time.”

Trump appears ready to abandon his effort and leave others to clean up his mess:

And the countries of the world that do receive oil through the Hormuz Strait must take care of that passage. They must cherish it. They must grab it and cherish it. They can do it easily. We will be helpful, but they should take the lead in protecting the oil that they so desperately depend on.

“Go to the strait and just take it, protect it, use it for yourselves,” Trump advises in what sounds unnervingly like echolalia. Because Not. My. Problem. says the Great Deal Maker. U.S. adversaries including China and Russia are gleeful.

It would all be humorous if not for the death, destruction, and worldwide economic disruption. Again, not Trump’s problem. It’s never Trump’s problem.

The BBC’s “Friday Night Comedy” last week found some humor nevertheless, and made more sense of Trump than Trump. “What the fake is going on?” You won’t get a straight answer from the man responsible.

@bbcradio4

Has Donald Trump been spreading ‘fake news’ about the war in Iran? From The Skewer’s Jon Holmes and host Andrew Hunter Murray, this week’s Friday Night Comedy looks at a fresh way of dressing the week’s news in the altogether and parading it around for everyone to laugh at. Friday Night Comedy | Listen on BBC Sounds

♬ original sound – BBC Radio 4

(Trump’s address came after his morning glare-a-thon at the Supreme Court — I got that wrong; he actually did attend, but only for Solicitor General John Sauer’s arguments that fell flat with most justices.)