I’m sure the contemptuous, unpitying masters of other continents are dangerous. But right now that sounds more like the contemptuous, unpitying masters of this country…
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The Dems also lost only their two most red state Senators (which was not unexpected) and won a whole bunch of state legislators and judges. But sure:
I feel like I’m losing my mind.
Former US Attorney Joyce Vance wrote in her newsletter last night:
There are lots of attempts to explain the 2024 election. Many voters said something along the lines of, they were unhappy with the government and wanted to try something new. These voters were concerned about the economy (although even The Wall Street Journal conceded it was the strongest in the world), the price of gasoline, and other similar issues that amounted to little more than a permission structure for voting for Trump. It was all summed up for me a few days after the election, in a conversation with an acquaintance who said they’d voted for Harris, but at least “my portfolio is doing great this week.”
Voters who ignored the facts about the economy and used them as an excuse to vote for Trump weren’t people who wanted a change. They were people who, actually, didn’t want any change at all. They didn’t like new policies advanced by the Biden-Harris administration, a more inclusive vision of America where traditionally marginalized people had equal opportunity. They didn’t want a new generation of leadership. They wanted the “old stability,” the patriarchy that has run the country for generations. In many ways, that’s what’s at the heart of the conservative coalition. It’s not a rejection of the established order; it’s an embrace of it.
[…]
Thinking a vote for Trump was a rejection of “elites” is part of the weak tea biography Trump sold to far too many Americans—the idea that he, the guy who started out on third base, hit and would continue hitting homes runs for them. Trump appeals to people who want to slide into home without having to run all the bases; that’s his ultimate appeal, the cheat who somehow manages to succeed, surrounded by his billionaire friends.
Two things there that ring especially true to me. The votes for Trump on the economy “amounted to little more than a permission structure for voting for Trump.” Yes. It was a rationale that people used to be respectable. It was not the real reason. And that reason was that they admire Trump because he is the cheat who manages to succeed. He slithers out from all accountability and they love him for it. It makes him supernatural, invincible.
How do you fashion a political strategy around that? I don’t know but I do know that coming up with a better set of 10 point plans on the economy isn’t gonna do it.
WTF are we seeing with this body-double Trump? pic.twitter.com/E43Sa1fcnr
— Jeremy H🇺🇸 (@jeremyfromga) November 20, 2024
You may recall during the campaign Donald Trump waxing on interminably during “the weave” about the time he watched Elon Musk’s picture perfect spacecraft landings. He would say, ” Elon with his rocket ships that land within 12 inches on the moon where they want it to land…” Trump travelled to Texas yesterday with his bff Musk to observe the latest Starship SpaceX test of one of those perfect landings. He and the rest of his entourage watched as the spacecraft aborted its second attempt to catch the returning booster at its launchpad and splashed in to the Gulf of Mexico instead.
I think we’re all hoping this is a metaphor for Trump’s administration: lots of hype but they just can’t stick the landing.
It’s certainly possible. Virtually none of the people he is choosing to lead the various departments have any qualifications for the jobs he’s putting them into and little or no management experience of any kind. He’s generally named people he’s seen on TV which I suppose makes sense since that was his only qualification for the presidency and in his mind he’s the greatest leader the world has ever known. What other qualification do you really need?
On Tuesday he even chose another reality show veteran and Fox Business host former congressman Sean Duffy as Secretary of Transportation and TV talk show host Dr. Oz to head up the CMS which administers Medicare and Medicaid. Oz promised to work closely with the equally unqualified conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr who has been tapped to head the Department of Health and Human Services, so that’s double helping of kookiness.
All of the other nominees we’ve seen thus far, with a small handful of exceptions, are quacks and hucksters chosen for their loyalty to Trump and their stated eagerness to take a wrecking ball to the departments they’ve been hired to oversee. The question at this point is whether or not they are capable of doing that or will spend most of their time on Fox News sucking up to the big boss, which is how they got the nod for their jobs in the first place. They will go in knowing next to nothing and will be staffed with cranks and scammers who know even less. Perhaps the best we can hope for in some of these agencies is that they’ll flounder about for a while without any serious results.
There is some talk that many of these choices are actually designed as much to keep the Senate in line as anything else. The idea is that by forcing his own Republican caucus to vote for these extremists and buffoons against their will Trump will have demonstrated his dominance once and for all. One Trump transition member told Rolling Stone, “He wants to bend them to his will until they snap in half and then thank him for the privilege.” I doubt they’re going to give him any trouble. They’ve shown over and over again that the quaint notion of an equal branch of government with its own prerogatives is something for the history books.
But for all the nuts and kooks Trump is appointing to some of the top jobs to accomplish his revenge agenda there are some areas where he’s stocking the administration with some people who are determined to fulfill their own. Many of them are Project 2025 veterans.
It’s clear that the tag team of Stephen Miller and Tom Homan are prepared to initiate Trump’s mass deportation program immediately upon taking office. Trump has said there’s no price tag so there is already a tremendous amount of activity taking place in the private sector, with private prison and airplane businesses gearing up for some major government contracts. These people are serious about doing this. It’s unlikely that they can accomplish their goal of deporting every undocumented person in America but they’re going to destroy a lot of lives in the attempt, including those of citizens who “harbor” them, according to Homan.
Then there is the promotion of FCC chair Brendan Carr, another one of the authors of Project 2025, to head the commission. Carr told Fox News on Tuesday that he may obstruct the planned merger between Paramount Global and Skydance because CBS refused to release the transcript of the Kamala Harris 60 Minutes interview, a silly Trump conspiracy theory suggesting that they were covering for her. And you will not be surprised to learn that he is a big promoter of expanding internet access through low-earth satellite technology—including Elon Musk’s SpaceX’s Starlink and Jeff Bezos’s Amazon’s Project Kuiper.
Trump has also appointed his good pal and transition chief Howard Lutnick to head the Commerce department. As the longtime CEO of the investment firm Cantor Fitzgerald he is at least experienced at running a large organization so that appointment makes some sense. He had reportedly wanted to be Treasury Secretary, and was backed by Musk for that job, but according to the NY Times has annoyed Trump in recent days by hovering too closely and seemingly cozying up for his personal benefit. And anyway, Trump is still looking for that perfect man out of Central Casting who can simultaneously keep the markets calm while helping Trump implement his monumentally idiotic tariff scheme, a job for a magician rather than afinancial expert. That appointment is still to come.
And then there is Russell Vought, one of the real movers and shakers of Project 2025. I wrote about him back in June, concerned that the self-described Christian nationalist was going to wind up in an important position in a possible Trump administration. At the time people were talking about him as a good bet for Chief of Staff but Trump chose his campaign manager Susie Wiles instead. Vought was the person charged with writing the chapter on the executive office of the president for Project 2025 and was said to be in charge of the planning for the first 180 days of a new Trump administration.
Politico reported on Tuesday that he may be tapped for the Office of Management and Budget, the job he held in the previous Trump administration in the final years. Vought would be working closely with Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy:
On [Tucker]Carlson’s show, Vought said he expects to work with their new agency — the Department of Government Efficiency — to use recent court decisions limiting federal agency powers to pursue a “massive deregulatory agenda.” They will also be “as radical or aggressive as you can” in reducing full-time federal employees and contractors, he added.
We knew Trump was lying when he said during he campaign that he’d never heard of Project 2025 while simultaneously insisting that he didn’t agree with it. He certainly never read it personally but he knew many of the people involved because they had been in his first administration. They were among the most loyal of the loyal and there was never any doubt that Trump would hire many of them in a second term.
These are not the instruments of vengeance like Gaetz, Gabbard et al, who Trump wants to use to pay back his enemies. These are people for whom Trump is their instrument to achieve their own long standing goals. It looks like they’re going to have free rein.
Salon
Billionaire hedge fund managers
As X swirls around the Musk sewer, social media users not of the MAGA persuasion are fleeing to Bluesky. What was a sleepy outpost with little traffic (at least for me) is now surging as an alternative. My follows have over tripled since the election.
That means it’s time for a culling by billionaires with more money than sense.
Case in point: Bill Ackman, a billionaire hedge fund manager and big Democratic donor. He proposes buying and shutting down Bluesky to “prevent further fracturing of the town square.”
On October 19, Axios considered America’s gullibility crisis and found Ackman there:
Bill Ackman, a hedge fund billionaire with 1.4 million followers on X, obsessively promoted allegations from an ABC News “whistleblower” that the network had given Harris questions in advance of her debate with Trump. On Wednesday, more than a month later, Ackman admitted it was “fake.”
Zachary Basu wrote:
The big picture: The misinformation crisis may be playing out online, but the real-world implications are vast.
- The deadly hurricanes that swept across the Southeast in recent weeks exposed the staggering extent to which people have become prone to conspiracy theories, spurring threats against emergency responders.
- “The truth is, it’s getting harder to describe the extent to which a meaningful percentage of Americans have dissociated from reality,” The Atlantic’s Charlie Warzel wrote in an article about hurricane conspiracies headlined: “I’m Running Out of Ways to Explain How Bad This Is.”
- 54% of respondents in an Axios Vibes survey published last month agreed with the statement, “I’ve disengaged from politics because I can’t tell what’s true.”
The bottom line: Never before have so many people been so exposed to so much misinformation. Given the increasing ubiquity of AI-generated content, this may be only the beginning.
Thank you, Dear Readers, for sustaining this humble little island of sanity.
Update: Melissa Ryan shares her take on why “people are rediscovering that social media can only be social if there are consequences for antisocial behavior.”
The “disaster” is the NC GOP losing
As the nation braces for another game of “What Are the Chances?” with Donald J. Trump the returning contestant, the 2024 election is still in overtime in North Carolina.
Via Democracy Docket:
While the dust settles on the outcome of the presidential race, North Carolinians are still waiting to see who’ll sit on the state’s highest court.
Justice Allison Riggs, one of two liberals on the seven-member court, is locked into a tight race with appeals court Judge Jefferson Griffin (R). Griffin was leading on Election Day but was surpassed by Riggs, who’s ahead by a few hundred votes.
The race isn’t North Carolina’s first judicial match to span several weeks. In the 2020 general election, now-Chief Justice Paul Newby (R) beat then-incumbent Justice Cheri Beasley (D) by just 401 votes. That race also involved a recount and didn’t conclude until December of 2020, when Beasley conceded.
The Riggs lead this morning stands at 625 votes. Tell us again that your vote doesn’t count.
A recount in the Riggs race starts today across most of North Carolina. (It started in my county on Tuesday and will take days; I was there Tuesday as an observer.)
Riggs is on track to defeat her Republican challenger by a couple of hundred votes more than Republican Paul Newby turned out Chief Justice Cheri Beasley in 2020.
I don’t have hard numbers on absentee ballot cures Democrat volunteers secured between Nov. 5 and Nov. 14 (the deadline), but Katherine Jeanes, Deputy Digital Director for NCDP, posted this estimate on Monday: over 800.
The Republican response to losing judicial races here is, as The Dude might say, “This aggression will not stand, man.”
So like clockwork, Republicans running the North Carolina legislature are scrambling to change ballot curing rules before the next election and, with Democrat Josh Stein the incoming governor, before they lose their veto-proof majority in January.
It’s a thing they do when they lose races: change the rules for the next one. After Judge Michael Morgan (hint: he’s Black) in 2016 won a North Carolina Supreme Court in what were nonpartisan judicial races (tipping the court majority in Democrats’ favor), the Republican-controlled legislature responded by switching the contest to a partisan one over the veto of newly elected Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat.
After it was clear Cooper had turned out incumbent governor Republican Pat McCrory in 2016, Republicans set about stripping the governor of powers (as Wisconsin Republicans tried with Democrat Tony Evers). Jamelle Bouie, then at Slate, called it “a new nullification crisis.”
Republicans are at it again now. Their vehicle this time? An amendment to a disaster relief bill:
The North Carolina House passed a bill Tuesday stripping incoming Democratic Gov. Josh Stein of all appointments to the State Board of Elections and giving them to a newly elected Republican official.
Currently, the board’s members are appointed by the governor, who is allowed to appoint a 3-2 majority of their own party. That means Democrats have controlled the board since 2017, when Gov. Roy Cooper took office, and would continue to do so throughout Stein’s term.
However, a provision tucked into a 132-page disaster relief bill would transfer all appointments to the state auditor, a position that was just won by Republican Dave Boliek after 16 years of control by Democrats.
The bill passed the House 63-46 Tuesday evening, just hours after it was made available to the public.
Democrats slammed Republicans for moving the complex bill so quickly and for tying it to hurricane relief efforts.
“This is a transparent power grab pushed through by a supermajority that’s not happy with the recent election results,” Rep. Lindsey Prather, a Buncombe County Democrat, said. “And you’re calling it a disaster relief bill. This is shameful and Western North Carolina isn’t going to stand for it
But jerking around with State Board of Elections appointments is only part of it. A State Board summary provided to me bulleted a few of the vote-counting rules SB 382 would change. Many involve ballot curing and provisional ballot counting. Go figure:
Election Administration Changes
3A.4(a) — Requires corrections to VR forms from voters (cures) to come in 3 days after election instead of by the day before canvass. Eliminates 6 days to cure.
3A.4(b) – Requires the use of the State Board’s template voter assistance log at the polling place.
3A.4(c) – Eliminates 6 days to cure HAVA ID required after election day; now noon on the third day after election.
3A.4(d) — Eliminates 6 days the opportunity to return with ID to cure lack of ID at the polls; now noon on the third day after election.
3A.4(e) — Requires counting of all provisional ballots by 5 pm on the third day after Election Day.
3A.4(f) – Request deadline for absentee ballot moved up one week to two weeks before Election Day.
— Absentee cures cut down 6 days, must be done by noon on Friday after election day.
3A.4(g) — Requires all election day absentees to be counted on election day night in an ongoing meeting starting at 5 pm
— Supplemental absentee meeting is only permitted for UOCAVA ballots
— Absentee ballot tallies must be announced at 5pm three days after Election Day (meaning all civilian absentees must be tallied included those that could have cured by noon that same day)
3A.4(h) – the above changes become effective Jan. 1, 2025.
This is in the weeds, but bear with me.
If a county party in North Carolina has a building fund for purchase, payoff or operating of a party headquarters, it may accept corporate contributions. The proposed change would turn that building fund into a corporate-funded slush fund for challenging election results:
Campaign Finance Changes
3A.5(a) — As of Jan. 1, 2025, political parties may use their party headquarters building funds to fund a legal action as defined in G.S. 163-278.300(4) or to make donations to candidate legal expense funds organized under Article 22M of Chapter 163. Building funds may accept unlimited corporate contributions. Candidate legal expense funds may already accept limited corporate contributions.
So. Here we go again.
Late Update: Told ya.
Republicans in North Carolina rushed a bill through the legislature this week to boost their power before they lose their supermajority, approving a measureto give their party more control over elections, eliminate the jobs of judges who have ruled against them and limit the authority of the incoming Democratic governor and attorney general.
[…]
Republicans’ last-minute move to hamper the power of Democrats echo their efforts in 2016 to limit the authority of Cooper in the weeks between his election as governor and his inauguration. Two years later, Republicans in Wisconsin’s legislature took the same step before Democrats were sworn in as governor and attorney general.
Oh look, Trump’s nominee to head the DOD isn’t just an enthusiastic supporter of war crimes. He’s a full-fledge Christian Nationalist fruitcake. Those tattoos mean exactly what we thought they meant.
When Donald Trump announced his intention to nominate Fox News host Pete Hegseth to serve as Secretary of Defense, concerns were raised immediately about Hegseth’s undisguised Christian nationalism.
Hegseth, who has admitted that his multiple crusader tattoos got him “deemed an extremist” by his own National Guard unit, has deep ties to misogynistic Christian nationalist pastor Douglas Wilson.
On Monday, Hegseth appeared on the “CrossPolitic” podcast, which is hosted by Toby Sumpter and Gabe Rench, both of whom are closely tied to Wilson and his church.
During the discussion about Hegseth’s book “Battle For The American Mind,” Hegseth said that he is working to create a system of “classical Christian schools” to provide the recruits for an underground army that will eventually launch an “educational insurgency” to take over the nation.
“I think we need to be thinking in terms of these classical Christian schools are boot camps for winning back America,” said Sumpter.
“That’s what the crop of these classical Christian schools are gonna do in a generation,” Hegseth agreed. “Policy answers like school choice, while they’re great, that’s phase two stuff later on once the foothold has been taken, once the recruits have graduated boot camp.”
“We call it a tactical retreat,” Hegseth continued. “We draw out in the last part of the book what an educational insurgency would look like, because I was a counterinsurgency instructor in Afghanistan and kind of the phases that Mao [Zedong] wrote about. We’re in middle phase one right now, which is effectively a tactical retreat where you regroup, consolidate, and reorganize. And as you do so, you build your army underground with the opportunity later on of taking offensive operations in an overt way.”
Sounds great. And, by the way, this didn’t happen two years ago. He went on this show on Monday night, as the nominee to run the Department of Defense. This shows his excellent judgement…
I assume that most of you are aware that they went down to Mar a Lago last week to kiss the ring. They claim it won’t change their coverage but, come on.
This makes me sick to my stomach although it probably shouldn’t considering the behavior of various billionaire media magnates before the election. Just like all the Republican officials before them, they are either cowards or opportunists. Either way, I wouldn’t count on the media to be saying “Democracy dies in darkness” this time. It’s clear which way the wind is blowing.
Poynter reports that Trump told Fox he has “an obligation to the American public, and to our country itself, to be open and available to the press.”
And here drops the other shoe: “If not treated fairly, however, that will end. The media is very important to the long-term success of the United States of America,” Trump said.
Are we supposed to pretend that we don’t know who this cretin is after 8 long years of him dominating our days and nightmares? Come on. Nothing has changed. He will be exactly as he always is.
However, now that he has total immunity and a GOP that is subserviant to the point of grovelling, members of the press are apparently terrified of him, even extremely wealthy celebrities who could pick up and leave the country at a moment’s notice if they had to.
According to two sources with direct knowledge of the matter, Scarborough and Brzezinski were credibly concerned that they could face governmental and legal harassment from the incoming Trump administration.
Knowing that Trump has threatened retribution against his perceived political opponents, and that Trump has promoted lies about Scarborough and Brzezinski in the past, the MSNBC hosts decided to reach out to the president-elect, the sources told CNN.
The two sources generally agreed with Scarborough and Brzezinski’s impression of the situation at hand – namely, that the incoming Trump administration could use its wide-ranging powers to punish people deemed enemies. (Trump ally Elon Musk wrote on X overnight, in a post supporting Matt Gaetz for attorney general, that America needs Gaetz to “put powerful bad actors in prison.”)
Not exactly profiles in courage are they? Luckily, none of this changes my viewing habits since they are off the air before I turn on the TV. (A blessing of living on the west coast.) But this show sets the table for the political news cycle every morning. Their cowardice is very likely to spread.
Trump’s failed Truth Social company (DJT) brought in a little bit more than 2 million dollars this year and lost about 20 million but is nonetheless valued at over $7 billion. With a B. It’s has nothing to do with the company and everything to do with Trump in whom people apparently want to invest their money. Now DJT wantsto buy a crypto exchange. Why???
Here’s a bit of an explainer from JV Last:
Crypto exchanges exist in a murky regulatory space. Some cryptocurrencies are considered by the government to be securities, and as such they fall under the jurisdiction of the SEC. Markets that function as clearinghouses for such crypto securities are similarly subject to SEC regs.
If a crypto exchange could guarantee that it would not be investigated by the SEC or become subject to any new SEC regulations, that would be a valuable asset.
Raise your hand if you think there is any chance—any chance at all—that under President Trump the SEC would dare to so much as look in the direction of a crypto exchange owned by DJT.
As it turns out this exchange is currently owned by a company called Bakkt a subsidiary of Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) and Bakkt is also unprifitable. But it has a Trumpy pedigree . According to the Financial Times:
Bakkt’s first chief executive was Kelly Loeffler, a former head of marketing at ICE and a Republican ex-senator for Georgia during Trump’s first presidency. She is co-chair of the committee organising his inauguration in January. She is also married to Jeff Sprecher, ICE’s founder, chair and chief executive.
Loeffler’s husband is the majority ownber of Bakkt.
Here’s Last:
Trump is looking to buy a moribund crypto exchange owned by the husband of one of his Republican sycophants/allies/donors. He’s going to pay for the acquisition with stock, the price of which is inflated to ludicrous levels by a combination of cultists, speculators, and people seeking to influence him.
The value proposition for this merger is that, as president, Trump can make sure the SEC doesn’t touch this exchange, while also giving actors who hope to influence him another way to shove money in his direction.
And all of this is so commonplace and unremarkable that no one is going to even pause for a moment to question it.
As he points out, this is pure banana republic stuff. He’ll ensure that this grift is unregulated by his SEC even as he’s providing his big money buddies with a nice easy way to pay him off. Win-win.
The first term was overwhelmingly corrupt. He made many millions from his hotels and resorts among other things. This second term, it’s going to be billions. And since he literally can do anything he wants without any fear of repurcussion there is no stopping it.
They lied
Representative-elect Sarah McBride is transgender. And that thirsty harpy Nancy Mace is in front of the cameras as usual behaving like the harridan she is:
This was never about girls competing in athletics. It was always about shunning transgender people, embarrassing them, making their lives a living hell.
This is heartbreaking. There is no reason to do this to this person other than rank cruelty.
Oh, and by the way: