Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

He didn’t like Pope Francis either. Get a load of this excerpt from the Vanity Fair article about Bannon and Jeffrey Epstein’s very close friendship, which is a real mind-blower:

 In November 2018, as Bannon was hatching a plot to export MAGA-flavored nationalism abroad after his success storming Washington with Trump, Epstein suggested he build his campaign around a media company, not an NGO. The latter would afford less privacy and invite more scrutiny. “Press. Private. Protected,” Epstein told Bannon. “Think of it as a battle plan. You have made great strides. Forged ahead. [At] some time you stop and build a fort to protect your gains.”

Within a year, Bannon launched War Room, a live podcast beamed out daily from a basement studio near Capitol Hill. He styled himself as a general barking orders to the shock troops of the MAGA movement. The extent to which Epstein inspired the launch of War Room, which The Washington Post once described as “a far‐right Meet the Press,” is unclear, and Bannon hardly mentions his old friend anymore. The crimes of Epstein—who a medical examiner determined died by suicide as he awaited trial—have been a fixation of Trump’s base for years, yet these days they barely merit a mention on War Room.

One possible reason for that came into focus last year as Trump’s Justice Department, under pressure from Congress, began to dump out millions of documents from their cache of files related to the Epstein case. These documents further illuminated the extent of the friendship between Bannon and Epstein, whose private exchanges are jocular, even affectionate at times.

Epstein sent Bannon caring messages about his health and offered him stays at his properties and trips on his plane. After organizing a flight for Bannon, Epstein joked that he was “the most highly paid travel agent in history,” and added: “Massages. Not included.” In one text from 2018, Bannon actually messaged Epstein, “You up???” In another, he told Epstein that a Fox Business anchor who had him on her show was “so wet” during their interview. When prosecutors upheld Epstein’s 2008 plea deal, the two celebrated: “Dude!!!!!!” Bannon messaged. “Tell me this is real.” They seemed to relish in confiding in each other about Trump’s struggles in office, including in one exchange where Bannon called Trump “stupid” and another where he mocked him as a “stable genius.” Epstein once messaged Bannon, “Now you can understand why trump wakes up in the middle of the night sweating when he hears you and I are friends.”

And yet Bannon remains in very good graces with the MAGA set. In fact, he’s one of their most respected intellectual strategists.

I love this part:

For Bannon, Epstein was a conduit to an international network of elites. For Epstein, Bannon offered insight into Trump, an old friend he remained fascinated by. “They were both using each other,” the source who knows both men explained. “Jeffrey would introduce people together a lot, as a way of making himself useful for his patrons.” (The files also demonstrate that despite Bannon’s frequent diatribes against “the ruling class,” he remains a Barbour-clad member of the cosmopolitan elite himself. This is a man who stays at The Pierre when he visits New York and Le Bristol when he’s in Paris. His quest to spread populist nationalism across the globe was aided by private jet travel. In one exchange, eager to get to Paris from Rome, Bannon asks Epstein: “Is it possible to get your plane here to collect me[?]”)

FFS…

As for the Pope, Bannon and Epstein apparently plotted against Pope Francis:

Steve Bannon, a former White House adviser to Trump, told Epstein that he wished to “take down” the leader of the Catholic Church. In June 2019, Bannon wrote to Epstein: “Will take down Francis. The Clintons, Xi, Francis, EU – come on brother.”

In the text exchange, Bannon references the book In the Closet of the Vatican, which exposed much of the secrecy and hypocrisy at the highest levels of the Catholic Church. Another text exchange from April 2019 shows Epstein emailing himself “in the closet of the vatican.” He then sent Bannon an article titled “Pope Francis or Steve Bannon? Catholics must choose.” Bannon responded: “Easy choice.”

Rome and the Vatican were once a very important priority for Bannon. In 2014, the former Trump adviser established a Rome bureau while he was running the right-wing outlet Breitbart News. He also wanted to set up a “gladiator school” for Judeo-Christian political training near the city. Those plans were blocked by the Italian government in 2021; Bannon reportedly was furious.

Now he’s saying the conclave that elected Pope Leo was rigged. Lol. You can read the whole story of the plot against Francis here. It’s a doozy.

If you get the chance to read the Vanity Fair article it’s a really great distillation of all the evidence that’s come out about the Bannon Epstein friendship. He was talking to him and making plans to hang out all the way up until the day he was arrested in 2019.

And it’s all good in Trump world. No big deal at all.

Remember how Donald Trump tore up the Iran nuclear deal and then four years later bombed their alleged nuclear program and Trump said it was “completely and totally obliterated? ”

So why are they trying to make a nuclear deal with Iran less than a year later?

President Trump’s top advisors reportedly warned him that making a deal with Iran on its nuclear program is historically “difficult to impossible.”

Trump asked special envoy Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner what the chances were of reaching an agreement with Tehran, according to a senior US official, Israel’s Channel 12’s Barak Ravid said on Telegram Saturday.

The pair told the president history shows the West has never been able to strike a positive deal with the Islamic Republic leaders, but that they would continue to “take a tough line” during negotiations, Ravid reported.

Trump has vowed to use military force if the Ayatollah doesn’t agree with the US, threatening that Iran would face a “very traumatic” moment.

At his campaign event in Ft. Bragg on Friday:

 U.S. President Donald Trump on Friday embraced potential regime change in Iran and declared that “tremendous power” will soon be in the Middle East, as the Pentagon sent a second aircraft carrier to the region.

[…]

Asked if he wanted regime change in Iran, Trump responded that it “seems like that would be the best thing that could happen.” He declined to share who he wanted to take over Iran, but said “there are people…For 47 years, they’ve been talking and talking and talking,” Trump said after a military event at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. “In the meantime, we’ve lost a lot of lives while they talk. Legs blown off, arms blown off, faces blown off. We’ve been going on for a long time.”

Trump has threatened strikes on Iran if no agreement is reached, while Tehran has vowed to retaliate, stoking fears of a wider war as the U.S. amasses forces in the Middle East. The U.S. targeted Iran’s nuclear facilities in strikes last year. When asked what was left to be targeted at the nuclear sites, Trump said the “dust.” He added: “If we do it, that would be the least of the mission, but we probably grab whatever is left.”

[…]

The Gerald R. Ford, the United States’ newest and the world’s largest carrier, has been operating in the Caribbean with its escort ships and took part in operations in Venezuela earlier this year. Asked earlier on Friday why a second aircraft carrier was headed to the Middle East, Trump said: “In case we don’t make a deal, we’ll need it … if we need it, we’ll have it ready.”

He’s really working that Nobel Prize Committee, isn’t he?

Erecting barriers to barriers

Remember, kids, when Republican-controlled states passed photo ID laws then began closing down DMV offices where people could apply for them? Now Republicans want to require you to present a passport for voting and they’re stopping some libraries from processing passport applications:

The U.S. State Department has ordered certain public libraries nationwide to cease processing passport applications, disrupting a long-standing service that librarians say their communities have come to rely on and that has run smoothly for years.

The agency, which regulates U.S. passports, began issuing cease and desist orders to not-for-profit libraries in late fall, informing them they were no longer authorized to participate in the Passport Acceptance Facility program as of Friday.

“We still get calls daily seeking that service,” said Cathleen Special, executive director of the Otis Library in Norwich, Connecticut, where passport services were offered for 18 years but ceased in November after receiving the letter. “Our community was so used to us offering this.”

A State Department spokesperson said the order was given because federal law and regulations “clearly prohibit non-governmental organizations” from collecting and retaining fees for a passport application. Government-run libraries are not impacted.

The spokesperson did not respond to questions as to why it has become an issue now and exactly how many libraries are impacted by the cease and desist order. In a statement, they said, “passport services has over 7,500 acceptance facilities nationwide and the number of libraries found ineligible makes up less than one percent of our total network.”

But then elections are often about narrow percentages, aren’t they?

FYI:

Public libraries are organized differently in each state. In Pennsylvania 85% of public libraries are non-profit organizations, versus being a department of a local municipal government. In Maine, it’s 56%; Rhode Island, 54%, New York, 47% and Connecticut, 46%, according to the American Library Association.

Pennsylvania Reps. Madeleine Dean, a Democrat, and John Joyce, a Republican, have proposed bipartisan legislation that would allow 501(c)(3) non-profit public libraries to continue to serve as passport acceptance facilities by amending the Passport Act of 1920. A similar companion bill is pending in the Senate.

Dean, who first learned about the policy change from a library in her district that has provided passport services for 20 years, called the State Department’s interpretation of the law “nonsense.”

It takes a criminal mind.

The American people are getting angry

Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, and their wilding DHS brownshirts are pissing off Americans from north to south, from east to west, and from South Texas to New Jersey. They are pissing off Americans uncomfortable with being pissed off enough at their government to stand up and do anything about it. Until they do.

Joe Walsh posts:

ICE stopped a U.S. citizen. Smashed her car window. Dragged her out. Threw her U.S. passport into the street. Agents wore masks and refused to identify themselves.

Let that sink in.

We asked http://PAXIS.app what the law says and what should come next:

ICE enforces immigration law under Title 8. It has no authority over U.S. citizens. The Fourth Amendment protects every person from unreasonable seizures and excessive force. An administrative ICE warrant does NOT authorize breaking windows. It does NOT authorize assault. It does NOT suspend the Constitution.

This is not routine enforcement. It is a potential constitutional violation.

This should be reported.

File a police report for the property damage. Create an official record. Report it to the DHS Office of Inspector General and the DHS Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. Preserve photos, video, medical records, and witness names.

Federal power is not above the Constitution. Document everything. Demand accountability.

Help support PAXIS and get it into the hands of every immigrant and ally in the USA: https://gofundme.com/f/PAXIS

This New Jersey man has had all he can stand. His government is terrorizing school children. That did it for him.

 

 

 

 

 

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There is a tradition in this country (or at least a popular myth) about Americans as a people being slow to anger. Don’t get them angry. Let’s hope Trump, Miller, Bondi, Vought, Noem, Hegseth, and the rest of the Trump bootlickers get to find out what happens when you do.

Thousands of immigrants (not counting all the citizens) are being unlawfully detained and the administration simply continues despite judges all over the country telling them to stop. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court is apparently snoozing through the fascist takeover.

Hundreds of judges across the nation have ruled over 4,400 times that President Donald Trump’s immigration enforcement arm is detaining people unlawfully, according to a new Reuters review of court documents. And that’s just since October. 

The Trump administration’s immense increase in detainments rests, in part, on their decision to detain people while their immigration cases are moving through the system—a departure from previous administrations’ interpretation of immigration law. This has led to a steep increase in immigrants petitioning the courts to be released, as Reuters reports, and the thousands of rulings finding that these prolonged detainments were unlawful. 

Tricia McLaughlin, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson, told Reuters that the increase in lawsuits came as “no surprise” because “many activist judges have attempted to thwart President Trump from fulfilling the American people’s mandate for mass deportations.” But not all of the judges challenging the Trump administration’s mass deportation mechanism were appointed by Democrats. 

It’s always rigged when it goes against them. The greateest whiners in world history.

Guess what? Your ethnic cleansing plan is killing your own allies:

Construction executives have held multiple meetings over the last month with the White House and Congress to discuss how immigration busts on job sites and in communities are scaring away employees, making it more expensive to build homes in a market desperate for new supply. Beyond the affordability issue, the executives made an electability argument, raising concerns to GOP leaders that support among Hispanic voters is eroding, particularly in regions that swung to Trump in 2024.

[…]

“I told [lawmakers] straight up: South Texas will never be red again,” said Mario Guerrero, the CEO of the South Texas Builders Association, a Trump voter who traveled to Washington last week. He urged the administration and lawmakers to ease up on enforcement at construction sites, warning that employees are afraid to go to work.

The construction industry is one of the latest and clearest examples of how the president’s mass deportation agenda continues to clash with his economic goals of bringing down prices and political aims of keeping control of Congress. Even the president’s allies fear disruptions to labor-heavy industries will undermine the gains with Latino voters Republicans have made in recent years, in large part because of Trump’s economic agenda.

These concerns were the central focus of a White House meeting this week between chief of staff Susie Wiles, Speaker Mike Johnson, and a group of Republican lawmakers, according to three people with knowledge of the meeting, granted anonymity to discuss it. The group talked about growing concerns that Hispanic voters are abandoning the Republican Party in droves, as well as the policies driving these losses — immigration and affordability concerns.

I guess nobody mentioned the economic effects of Miller’s draconian deportation plans. And Trump is too distracted by his hideous ballroom and quest for the Nobel Peace Prize to care. (Not to mention he’s too dumb and addled to think beyond the last phone call he got from some bootlicker.)

They may very well begin to ease up on the industries that Trump values like farming and building. It is the Democrats job to keep this albatross tied around their necks and then set it a fire for the next three years. They must be relentless in their condemnation with endless visual reminders of what these people have done to the immigrant population in this country, whether they pull back from their most extreme policies or not.

Never forget. This is the ugliest policy the U.S. government has undertaken since Jim Crow and the Republican Party cannot be allowed to run from what they’ve done.

The wildest story you will read this week and that’s saying something. I know you’ve probably heard about the Pentagon shooting down a party balloon with an experimental drone laser weapon which caused the FAA to shut down the El Paso airport last week. It’s way crazier than we knew (gift link) and I can’t believe it isn’t a bigger story.

Last spring, in the early months of Steve Feinberg’s tenure as deputy defense secretary, Pentagon staff members briefed him on plans to employ new high-energy laser weapons to take out drones being used by Mexican cartels to smuggle drugs across the southern U.S. border.

But their use was conditioned on getting a green light from aviation safety officials.

[…]

Now the question of whether the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security followed proper procedures and the law in deploying the laser weapon has become a flashpoint within the Trump administration. Working alongside military personnel, agents from Customs and Border Protection, which is part of the Homeland Security Department, used the weapon this week not far from El Paso International Airport, prompting fury inside the F.A.A. and a brief shutdown of the airport and airspace in that region.

Late Tuesday night, the F.A.A. administrator, Bryan Bedford, caught off guard that the system was being used without authorization and concerned for public safety, believed he had little choice but to close the airspace for 10 days, according to more than a half-dozen people. It was an extraordinary decision that surprised the flying public and local officials.

Under pressure from the White House, Mr. Bedford rescinded the order on Wednesday, setting off a bout of finger-pointing within the administration that continued throughout the week. Administration officials told reporters that the F.A.A. did not warn the White House or the Pentagon that it was about to severely limit flights over a city of nearly 700,000 residents.

But internal government communications reviewed by The New York Times tell a very different story. In one email, dated Feb. 6, the F.A.A.’s top lawyer warned a Pentagon official that deploying the laser system without restricting flights created “a grave risk of fatalities or permanent injuries” to Americans traveling through that airspace.

[…]

White House officials declined to comment on Friday, and referred to a social media post from Mr. Duffy, published on Wednesday, that said the administration “acted swiftly to address a cartel drone incursion.”

But that narrative was disputed by multiple people familiar with the situation who said the border protection unit ended up shooting down a party balloon, rather than a drone. Military service members were present during the incident, the people said.

And yes, this was a Hegseth AND a Noem special. Both the Pentagon and CBP were involved. God help us:

Then in the dark morning hours of Feb. 9, members of a C.B.P. tactical unit, who had been trained how to use the counter-drone lasers by the Army, decided to deploy one, while members of the military looked on. They aimed the laser at what they thought was a drone flying near the Army’s Fort Bliss, though it turned out to be a metallic balloon.

It was the first known domestic use of the weapon by federal officials outside of a controlled environment, according to two people with knowledge of the technology, and it was done without the F.A.A.’s approval, in a possible violation of the law

Read the whole thing. You won’t believe it. We have clowns, jokers and Buck Turgidsons in charge of aviation safety and the military and more innocent people are going to be killed before this is all over.

We’re always talking about Trump having “the nuclear codes” as if it’s some kind of remote possibility, or even a joke, that something could happen. But these people really are nuts and I genuinely think anything could happen.

NEW – Rubio says Europe and U.S. belong together bound by "centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry" and that since WW2 mistakes have been made: outsourcing "our sovereignty to international institutions," imposing energy policies that… pic.twitter.com/O5jbOcy9i4

— Disclose.tv (@disclosetv) February 14, 2026

There was a whole lot of “blood and soil” bullshit in that speech that most people are just glossing over. Not Tom mention the fact that, mlike Trump, he is determined to kill massive numbers of people by ignoring climate change. (Of course he already did that with the destruction of USAID, which he gleefully carried out at Elon’s direction.)

I thought this analysis was spot on:

A change of tone. Rubio brought a lot of white paint to Munich to cover the cracks caused by the great rupture. From the Beatles and Michelangelo to German beer and the common victory in the Cold War, he invoked all the symbols of culture that are meant to unite us into a single Western civilisation. Europe and the US are connected. That much was clear.

But what about the values that once held the transatlantic community together? According to Marco Rubio, international law is no longer working. That was supposed to be holding us together. Other fundamental principles – like democracy or true freedom of speech were simply not mentioned.

So is it now clear that this is all about interests, not common values. And do we actually have common interests? I am not sure that Europeans see the announced civilisational decline, supposedly caused mainly by migration and deindustrialisation, as a core uniting interest. For most Europeans, the common interest is security. And according to the Secretary, Europe has to defend itself on its own, otherwise NATO looks weak.

This was not a departure from the general position of the US administration. It was simply delivered in more polite terms. I am not sure the white paint will hold.

There’s also the fact that any country that would elect Donald Trump a second time after everything he did the first time simply cannot be trusted. Something is so haywire in American society that it’s terrifying that we have the money and military might that we have. The rest of the world would be idiotic not to look elsewhere for security.

I mean, come on…

Lolololol!!!

Yeah. Judicial scholar Trump is on a roll::

He’s fine. Don’t worry about a thing.