You can’t really blame them. Most voters made it pretty clear that they don’t give a damn about female equality or even autonomy. So why pretend? The GOP knows which way the wind is blowing and it’s not into a future where female leadership is considered important or, frankly, even acceptable.
We need to concentrate on coddling young men and reassuring white males that they still run the world. All this women stuff only hurts the ball team.
Yes, that’s your next Commander in Chief. “And that’s how MAGAts started shooting down small private airplanes all over America,” a friend quips.
For weeks, citizens across New Jersey — as well as New York, Pennsylvania and Connecticut — have reported seeing clusters of drone-like objects flying low in the sky at night, yet information remains scarce, even as state officials now say they’ve seen the drones firsthand, received mixed information from federal agencies and pushed the FBI for answers.
Citizens report seeing “drones the size of cars” overhead.
With those red and green lights, I suspect we’re simply seeing those giant flying cats The Weekly World News told us years ago were terrorizing New Jersey. The flying kitties are just showing off their Christmas spirit.
Donald Trump has none. And he hates pets. Especially oversized flying ones.
Election rigging has been Republican SOP at least since their REDMAP project in 2010. The gerrymandered districts they drew in 2011 continue to pay dividends a decade and a half later.
Republicans are now so brazen about their intentions to seek power above all else that they’ve said so into microphones in state after state. Thomas Mills of Politics NC that the latest comes from (you guessed it) North Carolina:
On Wednesday, the state house overrode Governor Roy Cooper’s veto of the bill that strips power from the in-coming Democrats elected to executive branch offices. Out-going Speaker and Congressman-elect Tim Moore told Steve Bannon, “This action item today is going to be critical to making sure North Carolina continues to be able to do what it can to deliver victories for Republicans up and down the ticket.”
Yes, you read that right. The bill was not about disaster relief. It was not about good government. It was not about the people of North Carolina. It was about consolidating power and rigging elections for Republicans.
Bolts reminds us that Moore is headed to Congress from the district he gerrymandered for himself. I’ll remind you that it was Moore who brought the independent state legislature theory, “probably the most intractable constitutional con in history,” before the U.S Supreme Court.
Mills again:
Republicans have rigged the state by subverting democracy. They used extreme gerrymandering to give themselves almost veto-proof majorities in both houses of the legislature. With a partisan and complicit state Supreme Court, they have few restraints on their power. Now, they are trying eliminate the checks and balances of the executive branch to further consolidate their power. As one friend wrote, “They’re now using all three branches to guarantee their hold on power.”
What do you think will be Job One for a guy like Tim Moore in his new Capitol Hill job?
Watch this guy closely. You’ll be hearing his name moore soon.
Bobo the cat! (And a spry almost 99 year old Dick VanDyke)
He was particularly worried about his cat. Luckily, he survived!
Dick Van Dyke’s Beloved Cat Bobo Has Been Found After He And His Wife Were Forced To Leave Him Behind Amid Malibu Wildfire Evacuations
Dick, 98, previously told concerned fans that Bobo the cat had escaped as he and his wife evacuated their Malibu home with their other pets on Tuesday evening.
Among these residents was legendary actor Dick Van Dyke, 98, and his wife, Arlene Silver, who reassured fans on Tuesday that they’d safely escaped the danger zone.
However, one beloved family member ended up being left behind: Dick and Arlene’s beloved cat, Bobo.
Posting to his official Facebook page, Dick explained that they’d managed to leave with most of their pets, but Bobo had sadly escaped at the last moment.
Commenting on the original Facebook post late on Wednesday evening, Dick confirmed that Bobo was dutifully waiting for his owners at home when they returned.
Bobo doesn’t look too thrilled about all the attention. But he’s an Orangy. Waddya gonna do?
“I’ve studied automation, and know just about everything there is to know about it.”
There are many, many stupid things to read today. But that has to be the dumbest.
Trump is promising not to automate America’s ports on behalf of the East Coast Longshoreman’s union. (The West Coast union already made a deal to accommodate it but I guess they don’t know what they’re doing.)
I posted about this yesterday but it’s worth doing it again in light of his bragging about his vast knowledge of how the supply chain works:
You know, the supply chain is still broken. It’s broken. You see it. You go out to the docks and you see all these containers. And I own property in California, in Palos Verdes. They’re very nice. And I passed the docks, and I’ve been doing it for 20 years. I’ve never seen anything like it. You know, for 17 years, I saw containers and, you know, they’d come off and they’d be taken away—big areas, you know, you know, in that area, you know, where they have the big, the big ships coming in—big, the port. And I’d see this for years as I was out there inspecting property and things, because they own a lot in California. And I look down and I see containers that are, that are 12, 13, 14 containers. You wouldn’t believe they can hold each other. It’s like crazy. No, the supply chain is is broken. I think a very bad thing is this, what they’re doing with the cars. I think they lost also because of cars. You know, there are a lot of reasons, but the car mandate is a disaster. The electric, the EV mandate.
Obviously it no longer matters if a president is even sentient. As long as he tells people what they want to hear they’re happy. And I suppose that they want to hear that the president is an expert on every single subject. He has said that he understands immunology and epidemiology better than anyone, for instance. That explains why he led the country through the pandemic so effectively. But then his uncle taught at MIT, which obviously makes him a genius, so it’s not surprising.
Still, it is newsworthy that he’s also an expert on automation and has such a thorough understanding of how the ports work simply from “passing the docks.” Who knew?
Who knew Carlson was such a comedian?
Only 52% of the public would be bothered a lot by this? Is this a great country or what? But this is interesting:
Trump suggested during the presidential campaign that he could suspend some laws and constitutional provisions to go after political enemies in his second term. The public is divided on whether this is something he will seriously do (48%) or if it is more of an exaggeration (47%). Most Democrats take these statements seriously (77%) while most Republicans tend to see them as an exaggeration (71%). Republicans are somewhat less likely to takes these statements seriously now (21%) then they were six months ago (33% in June).
Republicans don’t take his threats seriously. I guess they really do believe it’s just a show. But the truth is that if this happens, Kash and Pam will just say they’re criminals and Republicans will swear that it has nothing to do with Trump taking his revenge.
The Trump transition team has started to explore pathways to dramatically shrink, consolidate or even eliminate the top bank watchdogs in Washington.
In recent interviews with potential nominees to lead bank regulatory agencies, Trump advisers and officials from his newfound Department of Government Efficiency have, for example, asked whether the president-elect could abolish the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., people familiar with the matter said.
Advisers have asked the nominees under consideration for the FDIC, as well as the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, if deposit insurance could then be absorbed into the Treasury Department, some of the people said.
Any proposal to eliminate the FDIC or any agency would require congressional action. While past presidents have reorganized and rebranded departments, Washington has never shut down a major cabinet-level agency and rarely closed other agencies like the FDIC that are not.
Bank executives are optimistic President-elect Donald Trump will ease a host of regulations on capital cushions and consumer protections, as well as scrutiny of consolidation in the industry. But FDIC deposit insurance is considered near sacred. Any move that threatened to undermine even the perception of deposit insurance could quickly ripple through banks and in a crisis might compound customer fears.
This is so crazy I can’t imagine even these freaks would actually do it. But consider that this is the kind of thing that’s never necessary until we have a financial crisis so people may not realize how important it is until it’s too late. Luckily we haven’t had one in … checks notes … 16 years. So, not a problem.
I wish I had more faith that the Democrats would find a way to stop this and exploit it but instead I’m seeing nonsense like this from progressives:
I’m sure they’ll be thrilled to only cut the parts of government thast progressives want them to cut. No need to worry about all the rest of it.
Politico reports that the sucking up has just begun.
As President-elect Donald Trump prepares to install Musk as the federal government’s cutter-in-chief, some ambitious Democrats are taking a warmer approach to the billionaire businessman than their party leaders have in the past as he has become one the most influential people on the planet.
“He’s had an undeniable impact on the Pennsylvania election, and I think the election overall,” Fetterman, the Democratic Pennsylvania senator, told POLITICO. “I’ve warned Democrats, if you’re just going to make fun of it or to dismiss it, you do it at our peril. And I think that’s very clear what happened.”
Musk is the world’s richest man, and his companies are helping determine the future of space exploration, electric vehicles, AI and social media. Democrats who are making friendly overtures to him said that they want to shape the thinking of someone who will have an outsize microphone regardless of what they do. They are also eager to encourage him to develop his businesses in their backyards.
Some of them are also eyeing presidential runs in 2028, and may want to avoid getting on his bad side for political reasons. Musk spent $280 million this year supporting Trump and other Republicans.
[…]
But increasingly, some Democrats are arguing that was the wrong approach and think Musk played an outsize role in helping elect Trump — the latest sign that the left is confronting the president-elect differently this time around. It’s an open question whether other Democrats will follow suit, and either benefit or suffer consequences.
Some Democrats remain deeply skeptical of Musk, who is one of several billionaires and tech leaders Trump has tapped to staff his administration. They see Musk as an oligarch, and are concerned about his plans to slash the federal government with entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy as incoming co-leaders of Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency.
“I reserve the right to be surprised, but this looks to me like a coming kleptocracy, in which all these billionaires are running the government in order to rig the rules,” said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.). “So I’m pretty fucking skeptical that this is a legitimate effort.”
Yeah, I’m pretty fucking skeptical too. But progressives seem to be very open to working with him to cut the things they want cut. Please:
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) told POLITICO that “If Elon Musk wants to change government contracting to cut billions of dollars of waste out of the Pentagon budget, count me in.” Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) said that “I’m all in for cutting waste, making our government efficient and delivering for the people of Georgia” and “I’ll work with whomever I have to work with, if I can, to get that done.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) likewise posted on X, “Elon Musk is right. The Pentagon, with a budget of $886 billion, just failed its 7th audit in a row. It’s lost track of billions.”
Do these people really think Elon’s their guy? He’s totally red pilled, and he’s not going back. And he’s an oligarch fergawdsakes!
Populist Democrats lining up to work with the richest man in the world to cut government. My God.
One of the most famous episodes in the Watergate saga 50 years ago was when CBS News reporter Daniel Schorr got a hold of Richard Nixon’s “enemies list” and read it cold on the air, only to find himself listed at number 17.
The Nixon White House actually committed dozens of abuses that came to light during the investigations spawned by the Watergate break in and one of them was the use of the FBI to investigate his enemies list. After discovering the full extent of the former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s overwhelming misuse of the bureau for decades, including blackmail, harassment and persecution, the Congress erected some strong guardrails designed to prevent such things from happening again. The Senate Judiciary Committee report explained:
The purpose of the bill is to achieve two complimentary objectives. The first is to insulate the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation from undue pressure being exerted upon him from superiors in the Executive Branch. The second is to protect against an FBI Director becoming too independent and unresponsive.
They added, “it is the great value of the FBI as a criminal investigative agency as well as its great potential for infringing individual rights and serving partisan or personal ambition that makes the office of FBI Director unique.” Indeed it is as the decades of abuse by Hoover so amply demonstrated.
The main constraint they devised was the one ten year term and a requirement that a president has good cause to fire him before that term is up. All presidents since the law was enacted have had to deal with an FBI Director that was chosen by a predecessor and every single one of them, no matter who appointed him, has been a Republican. The idea that any FBI Director or the Institution itself is some bastion of woke liberalism is absurd,.
There have only been two firings over that half century. The first was when Bill Clinton, following an investigation by the George H.W Bush administration, did so due to the Director’s ethical lapses. The second was when Donald Trump fired James Comey using the eye-rolling excuse that his public pronouncements regarding the Clinton email investigation were the reason. (As if that wasn’t Trump’s favorite thing about him.) But it was, as we subsequently found out, done because Comey refused to pledge his personal fealty to Trump and gave the go-ahead for the Russia investigation.
It has long been assumed that Trump would probably fire Comey’s successor Christopher Wray as well if he won the presidency even though he was the one who appointed him in the first place. He was angry with Wray almost from the beginning when he resisted GOP House efforts to declassify a memo that claimed the Russia investigation was politically motivated. Wray rode that out but it soured Trump on him permanently.
Trump was also, as we know, very worked up over the George Floyd protests in 2020 and he blamed Wray for failing to uncover the “funding” of the alleged ANTIFA movement which he believed was responsible for them:
He probably would have fired Wray if he’d won in 2020 but it was during his exile in Florida that he came to truly despise him. He complained bitterly about the classified documents search and blamed Wray for it, telling Kristen Welker on Meet the Press “he invaded my home, he invaded Mar-a-Lago.” (The fact that they found hundreds of classified documents being held in a bathroom, a crime that would have had anyone else hauled off in handcuffs, is irrelevant.) And he was livid at Wray for his testimony before Congress about the assassination attempt last summer. Wray said:
There’s some question about whether or not it’s a bullet or shrapnel that hit his ear. As I sit here right now, I don’t know whether that bullet, in addition to causing the grazing, could have also landed somewhere else.
Trump told Welker:
I certainly cannot be happy with him. Take a look at what’s happened. And then when I was shot in the ear, he said, maybe it was shrapnel. Where’s the shrapnel coming from? Is it coming from heaven? I don’t think so.
The FBI did confirm that Trump had been hit by the bullet but I think Wray’s comment clinched it for him. Failing to be properly reverent about Trump’s wound is akin to treason in MAGA world.
We knew it was actually happening when Trump posted on Truth Social a couple of weeks ago that he planned to name Kash Patel as the Director of the FBI.
Considering all that history and Wray’s reputed veneration of the Bureau, it was expected that he would make Trump fire him in order to at least uphold the idea of the independence of the Bureau. He had three years to run on his term and Trump does not have any just cause to fire him as he is required to do under the law. To allow him to dismiss yet another FBI Director because he doesn’t feel he is loyal enough to him personally is an affront to the rule of law and the agency Wray reveres.
So naturally, Wray politely announced that he plans to resign this week in order to make it easier for Trump to break both the spirit and the letter of the law — again. Trump was his usual gracious self, declaring on Truth Social that his resignation is a great day for America:
There is no doubt that Wray understands the threat that Trump and his henchmen pose to the country and the world. He’s seen him up close and probably knows a lot more than the rest of us do. He should have put up a fight even knowing that he would lose. There is great value in people like him standing up for the law and making Trump break it openly rather than facilitating it for him.
As James Fallows wrote in his Breaking the News newsletter this week:
One of Donald Trump’s main tools, as the GOP has collapsed into subservience, is the perception of un-stoppability. He’s going to get his way in the end. So why waste your time standing up to him? Thus Lindsey Graham, Nikki Haley, “Little Marco,” and countless others have etched their role in history.
By making it slower and harder for Trump to get his way with the FBI, Director Wray might have protected the institution itself, and its dignity, and its commitment to continued leadership through changes of administration, for that much longer. Crucially, he might have slowed down Donald Trump on other fronts, by inflicting on him another “loss.”
Right now Trump is busily flooding the zone, threatening people, making it seem as if he is a juggernaut who can’t be stopped and any opposition is impotent. That’s just not true. Yes, he has the trifecta and he’s threatening any of his own party who might stand in his way. But there is no reason for people to make it easy for him. Anyone in a position to do so should delay everything they can, fight on any front, and make him work for every single abuse he’s planning to inflict.
Christopher Wray let the country down with this namby-pamby exit. He was in a position to expose Trump’s disregard for the institution he purports to love and demonstrate his disrespect for the law and the constitution and he didn’t do it. Let’s hope we see more passive resistance coming from the rest of the federal employees.
Yes, I know it won’t stop him. But it will slow him down and it won’t be long until he’s officially a lame duck and all those Republicans will have to face the voters again. Then there will be a chance to deprive him of congressional power and reset the system of checks and balances.
The New York Times offers one of its regular “Best of Late Night” installments this morning, “a rundown of the previous night’s … comedy.” Perhaps I’ve missed it before, but the Times suddenly considers Dana Perino funny and the Fox News Channel’s “Gutfeld!” a “comedy” show.
Trish Bendix includes the regular set of quotes from last night’s late-night. Nestled among quotes from Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon, Seth Meyers, and Stephen Colbert are three from George W. Bush’s former press secretary regarding Donald Trump being named Time magazine’s Man of the Year:
“Trump said the honor feels just as exciting as the birth of his child, except he was present for the award.” — JIMMY FALLON
“So it’s the second time he’s had the honor, with the first coming after his presidential win in 2016. That was also the same week Hillary Clinton canceled her subscription and smashed her server with a hammer.” — DANA PERINO, guest host of “Gutfeld!”
“The editorial board mentioned Trump’s historic comeback, his impact on global politics and how we increased his votes from Blacks, Latinos and people named Biden.” — DANA PERINO
“The difference: In 2016, the cover called him ‘President of the divided states of America.’ This year, it’s simply his name, even though there was plenty of room for ‘Cry harder, losers.’” — DANA PERINO
It’s not simply three quotes from Perino, but three in a row, up top, so readers who click away won’t miss their inclusion. A cursory search of past “Best of Late Night” installments suggests including Perino and “Gutfeld!” is something new. Trump 2.0 is coming. The Times is obeying in advance.
See you down at the bar.
