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.”
Every day is a like a new fork to the brain by people with lunatic money and absolutely no f***ing sense
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.”
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.
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.
🚨 After two weeks of counting, Justice @AllisonJRiggs will return to the bench as a champion for justice and reproductive freedom. 🥲⚖️
We won by ✨ 6️⃣2️⃣3️⃣ ✨ votes after North Carolina Democrats helped a little over 800 voters cure their ballots! pic.twitter.com/pEKsV6cqsZ
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.
In a bill NC's GOP-controlled legislature is expected to vote on today, lawmakers are proposing moving the State Board of Elections under the purview of the auditor. A Republican will hold the office come Jan., after a Democrat has held the office for more than a decade. #ncpolpic.twitter.com/ubvmyI1tPJ
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.
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.
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.
Leave it to Jon Stewart 💥
Mika Brzezinski: “Joe and I went to Mar-a-Lago to meet personally with President-elect Trump. And for those asking, why would we speak to the president-elect during such fraught times… I would ask back, why wouldn’t we?”
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???
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.
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:
REPORTER: Is this effort in response to Congresswoman McBride coming to Congress?NANCY MACE: Yes, and absolutely, and then some. Someone with a penis in the women's locker room — that's not ok. I'm a victim of abuse myself. I'm a rape survivor.
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:
When Nancy Mace enrolled at The Citadel, they changed their bathroom policy ON HER BEHALF
President-elect Donald Trump signaled in a Truth Social post on Monday that he means to declare a national emergency as a component of his plans for mass deportations (CNN):
CNN reported over the weekend that Trump’s team is evaluating a national emergency declaration to unlock Pentagon resources and tailoring that declaration to pave the way for expanding detention space.
In his first term, Trump declared a national emergency on the border with Mexico to circumvent Congress and use Pentagon funds for his border wall—a move that was faced with numerous lawsuits.
The incoming administration’s sweeping immigration plans are beginning to come into focus, sources previously told CNN, including implementing strict border measures, striking down Biden-era policies and kicking off the detention and deportation of migrants at large scale.
People close to the president-elect and his aides are laying the groundwork for expanding detention facilities to fulfill his mass deportation campaign promise, including reviewing metropolitan areas where capabilities exist.
But they are also preparing executive actions that are a call back to his first term in office and could be rolled out as soon as Trump takes office, the sources said.
I remember when the right-wing panic of the day was mythical Obama FEMA camps. Digby reminded readers last February that the huge conspiracy theory died off as soon as Trump took office (like the stolen-election conspiracy this year). Also, detaining vast numbers of “undocumented Central American residents and 4000 American citizens whom the US Attorney General had designated as ‘national security threats’” was originally a Reagan-administration idea:
It’s a Republican thing.
Trump’s top henchman Steven Miller has been floating the idea of “deportation camps” and one of Trump’s big plans is to do sweeps in American cities and put the homeless into camps as well.
[Trump’s] team plans to stop issuing citizenship-affirming documents, like passports and Social Security cards, to infants born on domestic soil to undocumented migrant parents in a bid to end birthright citizenship.
David Badash, founder and editor of The New Civil Rights Movement, writes:
Constitutional law professor and political scientist Anthony Michael Kreis last week said, “Birthright citizenship is a foundational concept in American constitutional law. It is a betrayal of the 14th Amendment to suggest otherwise or that it can be discarded with ease. We settled any doubt about this in Wong Kim Ark in 1898. We should not budge one solitary inch.”
But Trump himself has declared, “going forward, the future children of illegal aliens will not receive automatic U.S. citizenship.”
That would, as Professor Kreis notes, directly contradicts the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which also bans Americans who “have engaged in insurrection” from holding office.
If Trump is allowed to revoke the citizenship of some people born in the United States, what’s to stop him from expanding dispossession to anyone he deems insufficiently servile, including Black Americans for whom the post-Civil War amendment was principally written? What other amendments or clauses might Trump dismiss with a wave of his stubby fingers?
Defiance of the 14th Amendment regarding U.S.-born citizens sets up a showdown (or not) between the U.S. Supreme Court and Dear Leader. We’ve already established that if a Republican Senate confirms Matt Gaetz, Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard, and RFK Jr. to Cabinet positions, an utterly cowed GOP caucus will do anything their liege lord asks. (Trump made new health czar RFK Jr. eat McDonald’s, observes late-night host Jimmy Kimmel. “That’s what he does, these are subservience tests.”) Trump’s open defiance of the Constitution would leave the Court with an unsolvable problem once His Lordship’s actions are challenged in court.
They have immunized a man whose administration is openly toying with the idea of defying their authority.
Let’s think through this dynamic together.
If Trump were to pursue a case all the way to the Supreme Court, and the Court were to rule against him, and Trump were to decide not to abide by that ruling . . .
What happens next?
Sorry, wait: What happens next if the attorney general, the head of the FBI, the secretary of defense, and the Joint Chiefs and their general staffs are all personally loyal to Trump and Trump has both (a) blanket criminal liability for himself and (b) the power to pardon anyone who commits a crime he orders?
There’s your worst-case scenario.
So here’s the logic chain:
SCOTUS must understand that it has put itself in this box.
It also must understand that if it ruled against Trump on a matter of sufficient importance, then Trump might be inclined to defy its ruling.
And if the president exhibited such defiance, then the high court’s position in American politics would be utterly, irrevocably exposed.
Ergo, the chief justice would not—under any circumstances—allow the Court to rule against Trump if he believed that Trump might attempt to defy the ruling.
And that, my friends, is the sum of all fears. A system of government so fully perverted that it is not possible to chart a path back to liberalism and the rule of law.
Is this scenario likely? No.
Is it possible? Let’s call it 1-in-100 odds.
Then again, what were the odds you’d see a losing presidential candidate attempt to overthrow the election? What were the odds you’d witness a violent mob storm and sack the U.S. Capitol after battling police for hours while said loser watched on TV and did nothing? For that matter, what were the odds that a sitting president would threaten this little blog?
“If we assumed—just for the sake of argument—that Trump was trying to bring about this worst-case scenario . . . what would he be doing differently?” asks Last. “Nothing.”
Which is to say: Trump’s actions to date are entirely consistent with a man looking to remake our system of government. If he was intent on the worst-case scenario, there is nothing he’d be doing differently.
Should Trump attempt to revoke birthright citizenship, he will set up the nine SCOTUS justices to somehow accede his demand or else become legal eunuchs.
I’ve watched too many unimaginable scenarios play out in my life not to worry.
There is an interesting story about how the chicken of the 1930s (on the left) became the chicken of the 21st century (on the right). It’s not just a tale about how antibiotics created bigger chickens (presumably even your organic, no-antibiotics, free-rangers are a product of that selective breeding), but about how monopsony makes prices higher by eliminating competition, not among manufacturers but among buyers upstream of consumers (the Tysons and Perdues, and the ADMs and Walmarts, etc.)
Bloomberg’s three-part “Beak Capitalism” podcast explains how chicken farmers became Uber-style independent contractors before there was an Uber, and how Big Chicken learned to outsource its risk. Uber was late to that party.
Consolidation among chicken processors meant farmers had fewer places to sell their birds (um, the processors’ birds, actually) and had to become all-but employees of Big Chicken. Chicken farmers these days raise the birds as contractors.
Once chicken became a staple rather than a luxury (and under cover of the Covid pandemic), Big Chicken found it could raise prices and make more money selling to fewer customers. Without competitors in the market, they could simply set their own prices while blaming inflation, the inflation helped sink Kamala Harris.
That economic model is now everywhere. Like chickens, under a Project 2025 administration it’s likely to get even bigger.
A lot of early analysis of the 2024 presidential election has suffered from three overlapping problems.
First, that vote margins can be influenced by changes in turnout as well as changes in vote preference. If voters stay home, the candidate they would have supported receives fewer votes. And it looks like a lot of 2020 voters stayed home in 2024.
But — second — not as many as one might have thought in the first few days after the election. Many immediate analyses of what happened exaggerated the decrease in Democratic votes or suggested that Donald Trump won an outright majority of votes cast, both errors that were a function of failing to consider (particularly) California’s sizable, slow-to-count vote total.
The third problem is that the shift to Trump in the voting — real and widespread — is being conflated with broad support for Trump, which is far less dramatic. It’s the difference between noting that exit polls show Trump fared much better with voters under 30 than he did in 2020, and acknowledging that he lost that age group to Vice President Kamala Harris. He didn’t lose them by as much, but he still lost them.
Which, again, overlaps with other problems. Our analysis suggests that this improvement came as the number of younger voters fell relative to 2020. Harris lost votes relative to Biden; Trump got about the same number of votes from people under 30 that he got four years ago — according to exit polls, anyway, which is a big caveat.
He goes on to describe the strutting and chest pounding about Trump’s alleged landslide which is predictable. He said he wont 2020 in a landslide too. But even when it comes to the electoral college, it’s anything but a landslide:
In 2016, Trump lost the popular vote but won 57 percent of electors — thanks to fewer than 100,000 votes nationally. In 2020, Joe Biden won 57 percent of electors, thanks to a slightly larger number of votes in several states. Now, in 2024, current data indicate that Trump will win 58 percent of electors, thanks to 233,000 votes in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. Take those away (or see improvement to that extent for Harris) and Trump’s victory vanishes.
As the votes have come in we’ve now seen that Trump didn’t even win a majority. “It’s the narrowest margin for a Republican since 1968 — ignoring the two times since then that candidates (including Trump) won the presidency while losing the popular vote.”
Bump concludes:
We understand why Trump and his supporters want Americans to think that he is overwhelmingly popular and has received America’s acquiescence to do what he wants. He has that power, certainly, but he doesn’t have that mandate.
Sadly, power is all he needs.
By the way, as votes are still being calibrated, Trump’s popular vote lead conmtinues to shrink:
Newly tabulated ballots in New Jersey slightly narrow Trump's popular vote lead. Today's additions:
