Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

But it’s not just about mental acuity

I’ve been on a rolling rant lately about the age of Democrats in top leadership. I’m not the only one concerned about the gerontocracy. Charlie Sykes comments on the disappearance of Rep. Kay Granger (R-Texas), 81, who seems to have vanished from Congress in July.

“Since early September, my health challenges have progressed making frequent travel to Washington both difficult and unpredictable,” Granger said in a statement to Axios this week. She’s now in an assisted living facility. Her son told reporters she’s having “dementia issues.”

Sykes writes:

Once again, the moral questions of America’s political gerontocracy reveal themselves. This is an especially sensitive subject, because so many of us have loved ones—parents, grandparents, siblings—who are in cognitive decline. They deserve our consideration, compassion, and honesty. That’s also true for members of Congress, Supreme Court justices, and presidents. But the stakes there are much higher, and in those cases, sometimes compassion means being truthful about when it’s time to move on.

Sykes mentions Joe Biden’s decline. And Senator Dianne Feinstein and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg who both died in office.

“For much of this year, our politics has been dominated by octogenarians, including Mitch McConnell, Nancy Pelosi, and Chuck Grassley (who, at the age of 91, is actually a nonagenarian),” Sykes muses. “But Joe Biden’s decision to run for reelection at the age of 80 was the strongest case against the gerontocracy.”

I was still living in South Carolina in the mid-1980s when mental decline anecdotes went around about Sen. Strom Thurmond, then deep into his 80s. Thurmond was in meet-and-greet mode at an event, an attendee related at the time, when Thurmond’s young son walked up to his dad and the aging senator thrust out his hand and introduced himself.

After a closed Senate Judiciary hearing for organizing the Clinton impeachment trial over a decade later, a reporter related (on NPR, IIRC) that Thurmond, 96(?), had exited the meeting room and, mistaking him for an aide and needing an escort, took the reporter’s arm and shuffled down the hall to visit the men’s room.

But mental acuity is not the only reason for those in power to know (or to be told) when it’s time to hang it up and call it a career.

There is no substitute for long experience. But for a political party to remain vital, vibrant, and competitive, it has to have regular infusions of young blood, fresh ideas, and modern skills. Democrats are at a structural disadvantage and faced with a media environment dominated by outlets run by right-wing billionaire-ideologues. That is not the world as we’d like it, but it is the world as we find it.

Democrats’ top leaders cut their political teeth in the pre-internet era of network news. It is clear that, despite their deep political experience, they don’t understand how to interact with the media via any medium much more relatable than a press conference. Younger rising stars know how to draw attention and reach citizens more effectively in the age of social media and hostile media conglomerates. But so long as their elders hang on to their sinecures indefnitely, Democrats will struggle with 20th-century skills to meet the communication challenges of the 21st.

Moerover, with older pols hanging on beyond their expiration dates, attracting young talent to political work becomes that much harder when college graduates do not see paths for themselves into political leadership posts or jobs. (See AOC v. Connolly.) Why is turnout among young voters so low?

Wisconsin state chair Ben Wikler, 43, and David Hogg, 24, of Leaders We Deserve would like to win top DNC jobs in February. I’m not optimistic.

@davidhogg.bsky.social: “One of the biggest things that I'm doing in my run for vice chair is encouraging our party to stop paying consultants to shove our fingers in our ears so far that we just don't hear the voters.”

— Inside with Jen Psaki (@insidewithpsaki.msnbc.com) 2024-12-22T20:20:19.388360Z

Happy Hollandaise!

Not so fast

It’s one of the classic blunders. Not the most famous — “never get involved in a land war in Asia” — nor the most recent — “everything Trump touches dies” — but it’s up there. Men assume their expertise in one area of human endeavor makes them experts in another. (It’s always men, isn’t it?)

President Elon Musk and billionaire-dilettante Vivek Ramaswamy are joining the Trump 2.0 administration (1st classic blunder) to operate as his proposed, informal Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Never having worked in government before, the pair mean to “to cut the federal government down to size.” And inflict pain on the little people. Piece of cake.

Except.

The irony come Jan. 20 is that Trump, the naif in 2016, now brings experience, if not wisdom, to his White House job. Musk and Ramaswamy are the overconfident naifs (2nd classic blunder).

MSNBC’s Jen Psaki invited Bob Bauer, former White House Counsel to Barack Obama and Jack Goldsmith, former Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Counsel under George W. Bush, onto her show Monday night to discuss the obstacles Musk-Ramaswamy may face in implementing government of, by, and for oligarchs through a presidential advisory commission.

 

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Whaddya mean, I can’t just slash shit?

Trump 2.0 may attempt to incapacitate agencies from within through firing and not hiring, and by installing unqualified MAGA loyalists to run agencies. But Bauer and Goldsmith write in their new substack that the Musk-Ramaswamy effort to drown government in the bathtub simply may not be legal:

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), to be led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, is one tool that the Trump administration will use to deregulate. Trump says DOGE “will pave the way for my Administration to dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies.” According to Musk and Ramaswamy, DOGE will work closely with the White House Office of Management and Budget. The two men will “serve as outside volunteers, not federal officials or employees,” and will “advise DOGE at every step to pursue three major kinds of reform: regulatory rescissions, administrative reductions and cost savings.” This will raise a hornet’s nest of legal issues.

One is the legal status of DOGE itself. It appears it will be a group of non-government officials who lack policy-implementing power and instead will advise the White House on various deregulatory steps. If so, DOGE would likely be governed by the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA). FACA defines an “advisory committee” subject to its rules as “any” committee, task force, “or other similar group” which (among other things) is “established or utilized by the President.” FACA, if it applies, will slow DOGE down, since it has rules about transparency, record keeping, and conflicts of interest. The incoming Trump administration is surely looking for ways to avoid FACA compliance—perhaps by “taking on an informal structure and rendering advice as individuals rather than as a group,” or by going all in on a 1974 Antonin Scalia Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) opinion that elements of FACA are unconstitutional. DOGE’s operation will likely be litigated.

A lot will hinge on “likely be governed” and “likely be litigated.” The first instinct of Trump and his allies in oligarchy will be to treat inconvenient regulations as “likely to be ignored.” Like conflict-of-interest rules and transparency regulations. But a more glaring problem for Musk-Ramaswamy, says Goldsmith, is that as nongovernmental advisers they’ll lack real authority to impose any government shrinkage they recommend. Plus there are a hornet’s nest of federal laws and regulations that may impede the efforts of these wannabe masters of the universe to build better worlds in their image.

Nate Cohn at The Upshot makes a useful observation in his newsletter today (gift link)

There’s a lot about politics that’s hard to predict, but there’s something you can count on every four years: One party loses a presidential election, and the recriminations begin.

Every four years, the post-election fight seems to play out the same way. Every move of the losing campaign is questioned and scrutinized. The party’s center blames the activists for alienating swing voters. The activists blame the center for failing to mobilize the base.

And no matter what, you’ll find each pundit concluding that the party’s way forward is to do exactly what that pundit has been arguing for all along.

While you might not guess it from my tone, these debates do matter. They shape the strategy of the next midterm campaign, they can change the policies supported by elected officials, and they even influence how ordinary voters cast their ballots in future presidential primaries.

Still, there’s a reason you could probably tell my eyes roll at the prospect of most election postmortems. In hindsight, they don’t usually look great.

In fact, many look so bad that there may be more lessons for today’s Democrats in the failure of past postmortems than in any analysis of Kamala Harris’s campaign.

He recaps the postmortems of 2004, 2012, 2016 and 2020 and notes correctly that they were all wrong. That’s not to say they this time the insistence that Democrats abandon their allegedly “woke” agenda (which Harris did not run on) and hit immigration and crime as hard as possible is wrong. (Today, I’m hearing a lot of bellyaching about Biden’s commutation of federal prisoners in order to deprive Trump of yet another bloodthirsty execution fest.) But I doubt it. None of the autopsies strike me as adequate to explain what happened or the give very good advice about what to do next. So much will depend on events that haven’t happened yet.

Cohn points out that the election was actually very close but also that trying to reclaim voters that have gone over to the other side is harder than it looks. But still, over the past few cycles, the out party has succeeded in coming back anyway. He writes:

Finally, there’s the most important reason the autopsies haven’t panned out: the desire for change. The president’s party has retained the White House only once since 2004, mostly because voters have been unsatisfied with the state of the country for the last 20 years. No president has sustained high approval ratings since Mr. Bush, in the wake of Sept. 11.

As a result, losing parties haven’t needed to make brilliant changes to return to the White House, even though the postmortems almost always imply such changes are necessary. The implication is that the most important factors shaping the next election probably aren’t in the hands of the loser, whether it’s the state of the economy or the conduct of the party in power.

Looking even further back, the president’s party has won only 40 percent of presidential elections from 1968 to today. With that record, perhaps it’s the winning party that really faces the toughest question post-election: How do you build public support during an era of relatively slow growth, low trust in government and low satisfaction with the state of the country?

Here, the ball is in Mr. Trump’s court. If he and his approach are popular in four years, there might be little Democrats can do. Recent history suggests, however, that Democrats might well have an opening…

Whatever the case, a simple desire for change might be all Democrats need to return to the White House. Of course, they would need a theory of what’s wrong with America during their campaign, and one that contrasts with the vision of the party in power.

We are living in a very turbulent time in which incumbents are being kicked out all over the world. Here in the US we’ve been going back and forth in both the presidency and the congress for over 30 years. People are perpetually unhappy with the status quo and it’s been turbo-charged by the rise of social media which makes everybody outraged and angry all the time.

If very bad things happen (a recession, inflation, war…) during Trump’s term, which is certainly possible, change will almost certainly be called for. But even if things go along as they are, the Trump show is already stale. People may very well want to change the channel and yet Republicans will necessarily have to push his anointed successor.

In any case, it’s much too early to make any decisions about what the “message” should be for 2028. Nobody knows what the world and politics are going to look like then. Everyone needs to take a breath and let things unfold for a bit.

As I had hoped, Joe Biden commuted the death sentences of all but three federal prisoners to life without parole. Considering that he is a committed Catholic and the pope himself petitioned him to do it, I’m not surprised. He left three heinous mass murderers (Tree of Life, Boston Bombing and the Charleston Church) on death row which is disappointing for those of us who believe that the principle at stake is that the state should not be in the business of killing people. But I can understand why he would do it, particularly considering the inevitable blowback for the commutations, which is fierce.

Salon reports:

President Joe Biden heeded the calls of anti-death penalty campaigners and spared all but three federal prisoners from the threat of execution on Monday, commuting a total of 37 sentences to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

In a statement, Biden, who has overseen a moratorium on federal executions even as federal prosecutors continue to seek the death penalty, cast the move as an act of mercy. It comes after President-elect Donald Trump, during his previous term, executed 13 federal prisoners in the span of six months, more than the previous 10 presidents combined.

“Make no mistake: I condemn these murderers, grieve for the victims of their despicable acts, and ache for all the families who have suffered unimaginable and irreparable loss,” Biden said in a statement explaining his decision. But he argued that taking their lives would not constitute justice.

“[G]uided by my conscience and my experience as a public defender, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Vice President, and now President, I am more convinced than ever that we must stop the use of the death penalty at the federal level,” Biden said. “In good conscience, I cannot stand back and let a new administration resume executions that I halted.”

This was the right thing to do.

The Guardian’s Margaret Sullivan wrote about Biden last week and I thought it was quite good:

As with many a lame-duck president in the past, it feels as if Joe Biden has already left the national stage even though he has a month left in his term.

In his case, that disappearing act is vastly exaggerated by the man who was his predecessor and will be his successor. Donald Trump sucks up every bit of oxygen in the room with his daily outrages – horrifying cabinet choices, transactional friendships with oligarchs, appalling social media posts. With all the lack of grace we’ve come to expect, he is threatening and bragging his way to inauguration day.

Biden, by contrast, is mostly low-key and taciturn.

[…]

Some major news organizations are giving Biden an extra shove into the wings with coverage that emphasizes what we already know: that Biden, at 82, is old and less than vibrant. A Weary Biden Heads for the Exit, read a headline in the New York Times, with observations, in the newspaper’s own voice, that Biden “looks a little older and a little slower with each passing day”, and that “it is hard to imagine that he seriously thought he could do the world’s most stressful job for another four years.”

The Wall Street Journal reprised its once disparaged and now praised coverage from last spring about the president’s increasing frailty with a story about how staff shored him up and distracted the public and the press: “Aides kept meetings short and controlled access, top advisers acted as go-betweens and public interactions became more scripted.”

But even in this diminished state, and even amid low approval ratings and endless criticism, Biden remains himself to a large extent: decent, optimistic, patriotic and empathetic. In an extensive video interview published recently by the progressive, independent media organization MeidasTouch Network, Biden sounded cogent and thoughtful as he answered questions from founder Ben Meiselas.

Granted, the interview was non-combative; rather, it was notably tactful and respectful. But it was also substantive, and Biden sounded the familiar notes as he pledged to attend next month’s inauguration and explained why he invited Trump to the White House, despite having often depicted him as a threat to democracy.

“Because it’s who we are as a nation, it’s how we’re supposed to be … ” he said about the peaceful transfer of power. He emphasized his belief in the American people and joked about being what he called “congenitally optimistic”.

I’m not sure I share those rosy views, given the outcome of the election and the way things are unfolding day after day. But that’s vintage Biden. And as I watched and listened to him answering Meiselas’s questions, I somehow felt nostalgic – yes, nostalgic for a presidency that hasn’t even ended, though it is fading fast.

I couldn’t help but think that – despite all Biden’s well-documented faults and misjudgments (including failing to step away much earlier from the presidential campaign) – this president has done a lot right. His accomplishments are real, and his decency as a human being is, too. Some of us, at least, are going to miss him when he’s gone. Even if it seems like that has already happened.

America wanted a freak show not a decent, competent old man (or an accomplished, vibrant Black woman.) And they got what they wanted.

Here’s the Meidas Touch interview:

GOP Sen. Markwayne Mullin on Matt Gaetz: “We had all seen the videos he was showing on the House floor … of the girls that he had slept with. He’d brag about how he would crush ED medicine and chase it with an energy drink so he could go all night”
(April)pic.twitter.com/dtZcAMR1bM

— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) November 13, 2024

The House Ethics Committee released the Gaetz report today. It was even worse than we thought:

Former Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., paid for sex with a 17-year-old who “had just completed her junior year in high school,” according to a House Ethics Committee report that accuses the one-time attorney general nominee of potentially spending more than $90,000 on sex and drugs while a member of Congress.

A draft of the final report, first obtained by CBS News and other outlets, was made public following a committee vote earlier this month to release the panel’s findings. Gaetz, who was investigated for alleged sex trafficking by the Department of Justice, has not been charged with a crime.

“The Committee determined there is substantial evidence that Representative Gaetz violated House Rules and other standards of conduct prohibiting prostitution, statutory rape, illicit drug use, impermissible gifts, special favors or privileges, and obstruction of Congress,” the report states, per CBS News.

In particular, the report — based on interviews, text messages and a review of Venmo and PayPal receipts — accuses Gaetz of paying $400 to have sex with an underage girl, while noting that “she did not inform Representative Gaetz that she was under 18 at the time, nor did he ask her age.”

Investigators also allege that there is “substantial evidence” that Gaetz routinely used illegal drugs, referred to as “vitamins” and “party favors” in text messages, some of which he appears to have purchased from his Capitol Hill office.

That’s the man Trump chose to lead the United States Department of Justice. I have to assume it was largely because he related to him. After all:

Four women who competed in the 1997 Miss Teen USA beauty pageant said Donald Trump walked into the dressing room while contestants — some as young as 15 — were changing.

“I remember putting on my dress really quick because I was like, ‘Oh my god, there’s a man in here,’ ” said Mariah Billado, the former Miss Vermont Teen USA.

Trump, she recalled, said something like, “Don’t worry, ladies, I’ve seen it all before.”

Three other women, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of getting engulfed in a media firestorm, also remembered Trump entering the dressing room while girls were changing. Two of them said the girls rushed to cover their bodies, with one calling it “shocking” and “creepy.” The third said she was clothed and introduced herself to Trump.

[…]

Three days before Kind made his statement, CNN reported on comments Trump has made about women to radio talk show host Howard Stern over the years. In a 2005 interview, Trump talked about walking in on naked contestants — but that was in response to a discussion about the Miss USA and Miss Universe pageants, whose contestants are adults. Trump said:

Well, I’ll tell you the funniest is that I’ll go backstage before a show, and everyone’s getting dressed and ready and everything else, and you know, no men are anywhere. And I’m allowed to go in because I’m the owner of the pageant and therefore I’m inspecting it. You know, I’m inspecting, I want to make sure that everything is good.

Trump repeatedly said that he wished he could date his daughter. And, needless to say, he is credibly accused of assaulting dozens of women, including E. Jean. Carroll.

A pig knows a pig. And they’re both pigs.

Yesterday at the Turning Point MAGAlo confab, Trump called Gaetz his friend and said he has a big career ahead of him. Gaetz said he might run for Rubio’s seat. Who knows? The way we’re going he’ll be the GOP nominee in 2028. He’s certainly got the right credentials to be the successor to Dear Leader.

Thanks again, friends. I am so very grateful for your support after all these years. I can hardly believe it, to tell you the truth. It’s a Christmas miracle every year. It means we can keep going over the next year as we confront whatever this weird political zeitgeist is about to bring us.

I wanted to take a moment today to say thank you to my good friend Tom Sullivan. He has been holding down the morning shift for many years here at Hullabaloo and I thank my lucky stars every day that I asked him to contribute here all those years ago.

I had liked him the minute I met him and his lovely wife Sarah at a Netroots confab back in the day and I especially liked his writing and commentary. He’s a natural blogger, someone who understands the form (and yes, there IS a specific form) and executes it perfectly. I couldn’t ask for anything more in a co-blogger.

But Tom is also doing God’s work down in North Carolina which has become a petri dish for right wing electoral shenanigans. He’s been working in Democratic politics in Asheville for years and this cycle helped elevate the state Democratic Party’s rising star Anderson Clayton, who led the party to win all the top jobs in the executive branch this year. He served as a Dem delegate to the DNC and was working diligently to make sure they get out the vote when Hurricane Helaine hit his hometown.

Tom was right in the middle of that horror, no power, no water for weeks and yet was out there helping to dispel disinformation on social media and ensure that the Democrats were able to get out the vote despite the crisis. For years, Tom has been distributing his “For The Win” pamphlet to Democrats all over the country with some novel ideas to help get out the vote.

All the while, unless there’s a massive hurricane, Tom writes interesting and useful posts every morning seven days a week here on Hullabaloo. It truly was my lucky day when he said yes.

I’m happy to say that he’s going to be here through the tough times ahead and between the two of us we’ll try to stay on top of the unfolding horrors. It’s going to be a very bumpy flight and I wouldn’t want anyone but Tom to be my wingman.

If you would like to help keep this going, I would be most grateful.

cheers,

digby

And Happy Hollandaise!|

Trump’s on a new crusade to seize territory

One of the more annoying conceits of the MAGA cult is its insistence that Donald Trump is some kind of religious figure dedicated to bringing world peace and mutual understanding among all of humankind. They even insist that he’s been cheated out of a well-deserved Nobel Peace Prize. That anyone could believe that about the most hostile, aggressively insulting, vengeance seeking, demagogue this country has ever elected to high office is enough to make you wonder if there are hallucinogens in the water supply.

Setting aside his promises to wreak revenge on his political opponents and round up and deport mass numbers of people, including American children, there is the simple fact that his first term did not feature no war or death at the the hands of the US military as he and his acolytes so often claim. Despite his promise to end the “forever war” in Afghanistan it continued under his watch. It was left to President Biden to do the difficult task of ending it and take the heat that he was too cowardly to take. And naturally Trump criticized him for it.

He bombed Syria, carried out assassinations and massively escalated the drone war, simply removing all accountability and transparency and creating what the ACLU called “a presidents’ unchecked license to kill.” He pardoned war criminals (at the behest of the man he now wants to put in charge of the Department of Defense.) He exhorted the heads of the DHS and the DOD to shoot migrants and protesters. If this is a man of peace, then the word has no meaning.

He’s also supposedly an isolationist in the old “America First” tradition. Supposedly, under Trump there will be no more “interventionism” abroad. It’s none of our business what other countries do. If they decide to invade their neighbors and take their land, that’s their privilege. We have no stake in any kind of international order or stability. In fact, Trump proposes to build “a great Iron Dome over our country, a dome like has never seen before” to keep us safe from everyone else in the world. Experts told ABC News that’s “it’s unrealistic, unaffordable and unachievable.” It’s also unnecessary but I don’t think anyone will be surprised if Trump’s major domo. Elon Musk, gets a fat government contract to attempt to make it happen.

However, let’s not fool ourselves that Trump is actually an isolationist. He never has been, at least in any coherent definition of the term. He generally prefers to use economic threats to bring the rest of the world to heel, but he is all about American dominance. And in his second term it appears that he has decided that American First means a return to American expansionism.

It’s hard to say what inspired him to start threatening to seize other nations’ lands. Maybe he’s just feeling his oats and thinks he pretty much runs the world like a Roman Emperor now. Or perhaps he’s just watching his idol Vladimir Putin waging war against Ukraine and feels he should be able to do the same thing. Whatever the reason, Trump’s been on a tear in the last month threatening America’s neighbors (and some others) in increasingly hostile ways.

We knew that in the first term Trump had mused about launching missiles into Mexico to “destroy the drug labs.” He wanted to keep it on the QT back then, suggesting that “we could just shoot some Patriot missiles and take out the labs, quietly,” and “no one would know it was us.” But since then he’s been openly calling for military action.. But then virtually all the presidential candidates in the Republican primary were also slavering over the idea so it’s not just one of his rash ideas that nobody took seriously.

Florida Governor Ron Desantis said he would “do it on day one” when he was asked if he’d send troops over the border. The allegedly moderate former S. Carolina Governor Nikki Haley told Fox News, “when it comes to the cartels, we should treat them like the terrorists that they are. I would send special operations in there and eliminate them just like we eliminated ISIS.”

That “terrorist” designation is important because that would give the White House quasi-legal authority to send in special forces or possibly even an invasion force. That’s not off the table. Vice President-elect JD Vance said at the time:

“We need to declare the Mexican drug cartels a terrorist organization because that’s exactly what they are. It allows our military to go into Mexico, to go on our southern border, and actually do battle with them.”

Rolling Stone reported last month that members of the incoming administration have been actively brainstorming “how much” to “invade Mexico.”

Recently, Trump has decided that our neighbor to the north also looks mighty tempting. He’s been taunting the Canadians with the idea that they should be the 51st state because the US is supposedly “subsidizing” them which is his definition of trade. (He thinks that anything America pays for Canadian goods is a subsidy regardless of what we get in return.) That hasn’t gone over very well among Canadians who know they are a sovereign country and are entitled to respect. So far, Trump hasn’t threatened them with military action but with the way he’s been talking, they probably shouldn’t assume it’s all just a big joke.

Over the weekend, Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform that he intends to take back the Panama Canal, which was given by treaty to the Panamanians back in 1977 and finally completely 25 years ago. He lambasted the country for allegedly charging “exorbitant fees” (of course) and said that if they don’t change it he would “demand that the Panama Canal be returned to us, in full, and without question.” When the president of Panama responded by saying, “the sovereignty and independence of our country aren’t negotiable” Trump posted “We’ll see about that!” and then later posted a picture of the canal with the words, “welcome to the United States canal.”

On Sunday night the once and future president announced yet another possible conquest. While announcing the nomination of his ambassador to Denmark, he threw in this bizarre statement:

“For purposes of National Security and Freedom throughout the World, the United States of America feels that the ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity.”

You may recall it was reported that in his first term, Trump floated the idea of trading Puerto Rico for Greenland. He also believed that it could be bought from Denmark which was, according to Peter Baker and Susan Glasser in their book The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021, an idea he got from billionaire Ronald Lauder and the idea actually obsessed him for months causing much concern among members of the cabinet. When the Danish Prime Minister called the idea absurd, Trump had a temper tantrum and canceled a planned trip to the country so this latest declaration may be yet another of his vendettas.

As one BlueSky commenter quipped, “threatening to invade and annex all our neighbors sure does cross off another item on the list for the ‘he’s not technically a proper fascist!’ folks.” At the very least it sure does look like “Donald the Dove,” as the NY Times Maureen Dowd fatuously named him back in 2016, is looking to make American territorial expansion great again. That Nobel Peace Prize is right around the corner.

Salon

Were we born under a bad sign?

The Ink and Adam M. Lowenstein this morning consult with a researcher on “the internet and social media shape the intersection of politics, propaganda, and people.” Renée DiResta, an associate research professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown has assembled some of her conclusions in “Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality.”

DiResta’s and colleagues’ work for the Stanford Internet Observatory pissed off House Republicans enough that Stanford pulled the plug on the research after five years. Let that be a lesson to libtards everywhere:

The shutdown comes amid a sustained and increasingly successful campaign among Republicans to discredit research institutions and discourage academics from investigating political speech and influence campaigns. 

SIO and its researchers have been sued three times by conservative groups alleging that its researchers colluded illegally with the federal government to censor speech, forcing Stanford to spend millions of dollars to defend its staff and students.

(I just grabbed the audiobook. It’s how I “read” books these days.)

Her book, DiResta says, is not about social media per se, but about how “Propaganda evolves to fit the technological and communication landscape of the day.” She continues:

The content is different, the style is different, and the messages often largely remain the same, because they appeal to people psychologically. But you can’t really separate the medium and the message. That was one of the things that I wanted to highlight.

It’s also one of the things leading Democrats don’t understand. Yes, they have a problem finding a message that reaches people, but leaders who cut their political teeth in the pre-internet era of network news don’t understand how to interact with the public via any medium more relatable than a press conference.

There was a funny interview I read with Jamelle Bouie, who’s a New York Times columnist. It was saying he really cracked the TikTok code. It’s talking about him just walking around the neighborhood talking, and how this is not a thing that most journalists do. Here’s somebody who’s quite clearly “media” in his day job, but as he’s describing it in this interview, he’s not seen as media when he’s on TikTok doing his walk-and-talks. He’s just a guy. There is that almost performing-by-not-performing component of it. How can you be as relatable as possible?

Relatability connects, and most Democrats don’t come across as relatable. There’s more in the interview about the “bespoke reality” many people inhabit these days. Trying to present accurate data to refute conspiracy theories is pointless when congressional bad-faith actors are ” just going to move the goalposts, and whatever you did turn over, they’re going to find six words to hang you with.”

But the relatability problem is why Democrats are long overdue to turn over their top leadership to a younger generation. (Younger than 50, please.) Many of our politicians have not drawn private-sector paychecks in years. As soon as most leave office, some of the side gigs that supplement their congressional salaries will dry up unless they become lobbyists or pundits. So there are strong incentives to hang on into senility. But as much as we may respect their experience and accomplishments, they clearly are not equipped to press the attack on ideological adversaries in the 21st-century media battlespace.

Happy Hollandaise!

Let’s hang together, shall we?

It’s Christmas week. That means drama out of Washington will subside for a couple of days. But not entirely.

President Joe Biden, largely out of sight since the election, announced he would commute the sentences of 37 of the 40 prisoners on federal death row to life imprisonment. The three who remain are the worst of the worst: “Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of two brothers responsible for the deadly Boston Marathon bombing in 2013; Dylann Roof, a White nationalist who massacred nine people at a historically Black church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015; and Robert Bowers, who killed 11 worshippers at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue in 2018.”

The House Ethics Committee is expected to release its report Monday on former Republican congressman Matt Gaetz of Florida. CBS reports early this morning that it obtained a copy of the final draft of the 37-page report. Investigators found Gaetz “paid numerous women — including a 17-year-old girl — for sex, and to have purchased and used illegal drugs, including from his Capitol Hill office.”

“The Committee determined there is substantial evidence that Representative Gaetz violated House Rules and other standards of conduct prohibiting prostitution, statutory rape, illicit drug use, impermissible gifts, special favors or privileges, and obstruction of Congress,” the 37-page report concludes.

Following the ABC News defamation settlement with Trump, the incoming administration is poised for war with the press and any members it deems insufficiently obeisant to his Second Coming. He smells blood:

Steven Cheung, a Trump spokesman, said the president-elect plans to focus on “blatantly false and dishonest reporting, which serves no public interest and only seeks to interfere in our elections on behalf of political partisans.”

If only. Longtime readers will recall our 2019 run-in with Trump the Litigious.

I won’t sugar-coat this. The next couple of years will be rough. How rough is anyone’s guess. But a holiday party conversation with a retired FSO on Sunday brought up a perspective it will help us all to preserve.

We shared our mutual shock at the election — reelection — of the worst president in American history. Historians normally take decades to render judgment on a presidency. Trump’s place as worst of the worst, he noted, is already secure. Trump selecting Kimberly Guilfoyle and Charles Kushner, Jared Kushner’s ex-con father, as ambassadors to Greece and France was particularly irksome, a thumb in the eye to our NATO allies as well as to the U.S. diplomatic corps.

When I remarked that I know people who have left the country already, the career public servant was adamant. He’s not going anywhere. For friends asking how bad it can get, he offers instead not predictions but “glimmers.” Of hope.

At such gatherings, I tell people I write each day for a website out of Los Angeles. As morning guy, I have a three-hour news jump on Digby. I don’t prepare a lot of posts the night before. Much breaking news drops about 5:30- 6 a.m. Eastern. There’s just enough time in the morning to review headlines, skim stories over coffee, and make a few observations before 9 a.m. my time. I try to offer glimmers where I find them.

Digby asked if I’d fill in while she was away over a weekend in August 2014. Cool! What a privilege. When she got home Sunday evening, I asked if I was done. Not if you don’t want to be, she said. And here I am.

Some weeks later, an editorial page editor for the Asheville Citizen-Times spotted me at a political debate. (I’d written op-eds for them.) He strode across the room wearing a broad smile, shook my hand, and said, “My friend, you have arrived.” I still feel that way. I didn’t know Jim was a Hullabaloo reader.

One thing I love about Hullabaloo’s old-school format in the age of substacks designed to monetize everyone’s online activity is no paywall.* We want readers here. Your contributions to the annual fundraiser tell us you value what we do here too. They keep the lights on.

Ten years on, it’s still a privilege to write for you. Who knew when I met Digby in 2009 that I’d be living at one of the epicenters of GOP election fuckery? In this increasingly insane world, it helps me retain my sanity, and I hope what we post helps you maintain. Thank you for hanging with us each day. Let’s try not to hang separately.

Happy Hollandaise!

* And no advertising. Some salesman wrote last week offering to “leverage” our audience and “optimize” our revenue. Thank you and goodbye.

It’s not beyond the realm of possibility

I don’t mean to give you nightmares but no matter how much we may want to ignore how close we are to something very dark, we really shouldn’t.

Mother Jones’s Pema Levy lays out what could happen if the Supreme’s follow the lead of the 5th Circuit. It’s Leonard Leo’s dream:

Imagine Obamacare is dead and millions of Americans have lost health coverage. Abortion is illegal nationwide, pills to end pregnancies are off the market, and doctors wait until the mother’s death is imminent before attempting lifesaving care. Domestic abusers freely carry guns and government attempts to stop untraceable homemade semiautomatic rifles have been quashed, rendering gun licenses and background checks useless. Environmental regulations founder as climate change worsens. With the sidelining of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Wall Street has returned to its greediest days, making bets that threaten economic stability and preying on consumers with predatory loans and hidden fees. Officials are barred from even asking social media platforms to stem disinformation or calls to violence. Police, unrestrained by federal immigration law, round up, detain, and deport suspected immigrants. Washington can no longer fulfill treaty obligations as states erect barriers along US borders, causing international chaos. And organizing a protest against any of the above may result in you being sued successfully, making free speech an expensive proposition.

These are not mere hypotheticals. The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals—transformed by appointees of former President Donald Trump—has issued decisions greenlighting every one of these eventualities. While some were put on ice by the Supreme Court, others remain in effect in Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi, the three states the circuit covers. In those states, women have no right to end pregnancies that threaten their health, the enforcement powers of dozens of federal agencies are in doubt, and protest organizers are vulnerable to legal retribution. Other 5th Circuit decisions, from a ruling hamstringing the SEC and similar agencies to one legalizing bump stocks—the device that enabled a lone shooter in Las Vegas to kill 60 people and injure more than 500 in just 10 minutes—are now the law of the land. This is neither the outer bounds of what this radical court will do, nor the end of its impact on all Americans. It is the beginning.

These are far right radicals intent upon transforming America into a Christian nationalist, far right, oligarchy. Can we be at all sure that the Supreme Court majority won’t sign off on any or all of those things? I certainly have no confidence in that assumption. Counting on some combination of Federalist Society members Kavanaugh, Barrett and Roberts to band together to stop it just doesn’t seem all that likely to me.

Here’s a reminder of the Federalist Society’s evolution which started as a campus debating society and quickly grew into the most influential group in the American judiciary:

Beginning with Ronald Reagan, the Federalist Society has developed extensive connections with every Republican administration. The organisation and the GOP have created a pipeline to the judiciary, making Federalist Society membership almost a prerequisite to gaining a judicial appointment during periods of Republican control. All six of the Republican-appointed justices currently on the Supreme Court are affiliated with the society, as were nearly all of the federal judges appointed by Trump.

Leonard Leo, the society’s executive vice president, has been perhaps the single most influential person responsible for building the Supreme Court’s conservative majority, having played major roles in the confirmation of all six conservative justices. Leo personally drafted lists of acceptable nominees for each of Trump’s three Supreme Court picks, and he helped both presidents Trump and George W Bush strategise about how to get their picks confirmed. Leo’s control over the Republican nomination process has been so extensive that the Trump White House was said to have “outsourced” the process to Leo.

[…]

When it suits the conservative agenda, the Federalist Society and its disciples hamstring the power of states, such as the Supreme Court’s decision last week to strike down New York’s open-carry gun regulations. At other times, however, they act as strong advocates for states’ rights. We have just seen this in their latest decision on the issue of abortion, where they moved the power back to the states at the cost of practically erasing women’s right to abortion.

Rather than an independent proponent of a coherent and overarching set of political principles, the Federalist Society’s so-called commitment to “textualism” largely serves as an enforcement arm of other conservative interests, using the judiciary to push through the agendas of the NRA, the Religious Right and other wings of the current Republican coalition.

But hey, maybe we’ll get lucky and the high court will refuse to hear some of these cases or take a middle ground that won’t be so bad.

Are you feeling lucky?