He’s the Peace President, dontcha know.
"what digby sez..."
Digby's Hullabaloo Posts
It really is Donald Trump’s world and we’re just living in it
If you were wondering if the anti-DEI crusade is anything more than rank bigotry and segregationism, wonder no more. It is not:
For years, a National Park Service webpage introduced the Underground Railroad with a large photograph of its most famous “conductor,” Harriet Tubman. “The Underground Railroad — the resistance to enslavement through escape and flight, through the end of the Civil War — refers to the efforts of enslaved African Americans to gain their freedom by escaping bondage,” the page began.
Tubman’s photograph is now gone. In its place are images of Postal Service stamps that highlight “Black/White cooperation” in the secret network and that feature Tubman among abolitionists of both races.
The introductory sentence is gone, too. It has been replaced by a line that makes no mention of slavery and that describes the Underground Railroad as “one of the most significant expressions of the American civil rights movement.” The effort “bridged the divides of race,” the page now says.
It “bridged the divide of race???? What fatuous gobblydygook is that?
When you think about it, why keep any mention of Tubman at all. It makes some white people feel icky that at one time enslaved Black people tried to run away from those who “owned” them when we all know that they were perfectly happy in their lives working for the benevolent plantation owners who took excellent care of them. After all, they were immigrants to America who immediately had jobs and a place to live. What more could they have wanted? Surely very few wanted to run away and those who did were troublemakers.
The war of Northern Aggression changed all that, subjugating the southern landowners and destroying their economy and the sacred right of “states.” Generous white people granted the free Black population all kinds of rights and privileges which they took advantage of leading to the unequal society we see today in which non-whites and women get everything and white men are left scrambling for the crumbs of American society because of DEI.
The end.
The Social Security Administration is in total chaos
I liked the straightforward reporting in this piece in the Guardian:
Office closures, staffing and service cuts, and policy changes at the Social Security Administration (SSA) have caused “complete, utter chaos” and are threatening to send the agency into a “death spiral”, according to workers at the agency.The SSA operates the largest government program in the US, administering social insurance programs, including retirement, disability and survivor benefits.
An average of almost 69 million Americans per month will receive a social security benefit in 2025, totaling about $1.6tn in benefits paid during the year and accounting for 22% of the federal budget. While expensive and challenged by an ageing population, social security remains overwhelmingly popular with Americans. But the agency has been dubbed a “Ponzi scheme” by Elon Musk, the billionaire whose so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) is currently slashing its staff and budgets.
“They have these ‘concepts of plans’ that they’re hoping are sticking but in reality, are really hurting American people,” said a longtime SSA employee and military veteran who requested to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation. “No one knows what’s going on. They’re just coming up with ideas at the top of their head.”
The SSA website has crashed several times this month. Wired reported Doge staff want to migrate all social security data and rewrite code in months, which could cause system collapse and further outages.
The agency plans to eliminate the jobs of 7,000 workers at the agency through voluntary buyouts, resignations or firings, though the union representing SSA employees anticipate even more firings beyond cutting staff to 50,000 workers.Acting commissioner Leland Dudek has acknowledged to staff that Doge are making the decisions at the agency. Musk, Donald Trump and others have claimed action is being taken to tackle widespread fraud at the agency.
Dudek was appointed acting commissioner after he reportedly secretly shared information with Doge staff. He has threatened to shut down the agency in response to a court order barring Doge from accessing the data.
“It’s just been a lot of craziness, a lot of foolishness. Until they get rid of Doge and the person in office right now, and the Republicans actually get a backbone and stand up for something for once in their lives, things are just going to be complete chaos. That’s really the best word to describe SSA right now, just complete, utter chaos,” the worker added. “They couldn’t understand the coding, so everything they said SSA was doing illegally, they weren’t. Common sense is something they lack. They don’t know what they’re doing.”
Other than that, it’s all going great.
I saw some complaints that there too many old people at the rallies yesterday. (It’s “cringe” apparently.) I guess we want the demonstrations to be more beautiful and glamorous. But the fact is that for a lot of these folks their immediate well being is on the line. They are fiddling with their economic lifeline, their health care which they need desperately and purposefully creating inflation which, for people on fixed incomes, is especially painful. And incidentally they are the most reliable voting bloc. The more of them taking to the streets the better.
They’ve been doing it their whole lives:
No, Mr. Reuveni, I expect you to lie.
Maybe I just missed it in my younger days, but lying through your teeth (under oath) during Senate hearings did not seem like as prevalent a phenomenon decades ago, especially for Supreme Court nominees and prospective cabinet officials. Where not plainly lying, Donald Trump nominees from Bill Barr to Pete Hegseth and Pam Bondi have raised prevarication to an art form.
Trump officials will lie and prevaricate or face consequences. ABC News:
The Justice Department has placed on indefinite paid leave the attorney who argued on behalf of the government on Friday in a lawsuit brought by a Maryland man who was deported to El Salvador in error, sources familiar with the matter told ABC News.
Sources said Erez Reuveni, the acting deputy director for the Office of Immigration Litigation, was told by officials at the DOJ that he was being placed on leave over a “failure to zealously advocate” for the government’s interests.
“At my direction, every Department of Justice attorney is required to zealously advocate on behalf of the United States,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a statement on Saturday. “Any attorney who fails to abide by this direction will face consequences.”
Judge Paula Xinis of the US District Court in Maryland On Friday asked to Reuveni to explain why the goverment that mistakenly sent Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia to a Salvadoran maximum security prison could not return him.
At one point in the hearing, Reuveni was asked by Xinis under what authority law enforcement officers seized Abrego Garcia.
“Your honor, my answer to a lot of these questions is going to be frustrating, and I’m also frustrated that I have no answers for you on a lot of these questions,” Reuveni said.
Wrong answer. Xinis ordered the government on Friday to return Abrego Garcia to the U.S. no later than 11:59 p.m. on April 7. The government appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit:
“The United States does not have control over Abrego Garcia. Or the sovereign nation of El Salvador. Nevertheless, the court’s injunction commands that Defendants accomplish, somehow, Abrego Garcia’s return to the United States in give or take one business day. That order is indefensible,” Justice Department lawyers wrote. The appeal argues at length that the government has no power to return Abrego García because he is in the custody of the Salvadoran government, though the Trump administration says it is paying El Salvador about $6 million for the detention of deportees.
Under George W. Bush’s extraordinary rendition regime, whisking away innocents to places like a Salvadoran gulag became known as “Outsourcing Torture.”
Bondi placed Reuveni on indefinite paid leave for not lying in court. Until the heat dies down, of course. Then he’ll likely be fired for telling the truth to a federal judge.
* * * * *
Have you fought autocracy today?
The Resistance Lab
Choose Democracy
Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink
You Have Power
Chop Wood, Carry Water
Thirty lonely but beautiful actions
Attending a Protest Surveillance Self-Defense
“How many here are paid protesters?”
“Someone tell Marjorie Taylor Greens she’s a government worker,” one of our “Hands Off!” speakers quipped on Saturday. There were a lot of retirees among the 8,000 or so at the rally in Asheville, N.C. But a lot of current and former government workers too, including veterans. It is well known that the postal service is the largest employer of American veterans. The V.A. hospital here is (or was until recently) one of the best regarded in the system and a draw or veterans needing care now threatened by Elon Musk’s and Donald Trump’ vandals. No one took a poll, but it is likely this was the first time in the streets for many.
What binds them together is a desire to serve their country. Aside from many elected officials at the national level, perhaps, people don’t go into government work to get rich. Their motivation is intrinsic, not extrinsic. They are there for the mission not for the money.
A postdoctoral research fellow from the National Institutes of Health tells the New York Times that after ten years of study in neuroscience, he draws less than $70,000 per year.
People among the 2.4 million civilian federal workers who keep the lights on in America, writes Micah Sifry, are “by their nature, generally patriotic and politically moderate. Nearly 30 percent of them are veterans. They all take an oath to defend the Constitution.” They are, like the Americans they serve, working and middle class. And not happy to be demonized and discarded:
Human beings also don’t like being told that their life’s work is being fed “into the wood chipper,” as Mr. Musk gleefully described DOGE’s destruction of agencies like the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
It’s still early days. Many government workers are keeping their heads down, hoping to avoid attention and keep their jobs. Some are doing what they can to throw sand in the gears, by leaking damning news to reporters. Many of their unions — who just had their longstanding contracts canceled by Mr. Trump — are fighting back in the courts. And every week, more of the rank and file are speaking out, sharing their stories and organizing.
They take oaths to serve the Constitution as well, and they don’t recite those oaths like lines read from a TV script as Donald Trump did and quickly dismissed.
As the blast radius of Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk’s cuts and chaos spreads, federal workers and their message will only resonate further. It’s like the Joni Mitchell lyric: “You don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone.” The health workers, scientists, park rangers, veterans care providers, letter carriers, air traffic controllers and many others who are speaking out aren’t just trying to save their jobs — they’re trying to save programs and investments that were providing irreplaceable services to regular Americans. By going after the federal work force, Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk are radicalizing the very people who can best explain how the government does so much good for so many.
Those of us who lived through Helene’s wrath in rural Western North Carolina have recent experience with what it’s like when the lights go out and the taps run dry … and the mail doesn’t arrive and the roads and bridges have collapsed into rivers … and we spend weeks fetching creek water to flush toilets. That was a deadly natural disaster from which we are still recovering. A major road in Asheville reopened on Friday after six months of cleanup and rebuilding by the very sort of people Musk wants fed into a wood chipper. I-40 west of here is still being rebuilt. We learned what we had when it was gone overnight.
Musk and Trump have never faced that. They’re now cutting recovery funds and threatening to dismantle FEMA as well as other chunks of U.S. infrastructure that make this the world’s richest country.
Trump 2.0 is a manmade disaster with effects much more immediate than the climate change that spawned Helene and killed my neighbors. Musk-Trump’s vandalism, especially of federally funded health programs and medical research will kill more out of malice that Helene lacked. People across the country know it. on Saturday, a half million showed it.
“How many here are paid protesters?” asked one of our speakers. Thousands howled with laughter.
* * * * *
Have you fought autocracy today?
The Resistance Lab
Choose Democracy
Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink
You Have Power
Chop Wood, Carry Water
Thirty lonely but beautiful actions
Attending a Protest Surveillance Self-Defense
Stand, you’ve been sitting much too long
There’s a permanent crease in your right and wrong
Stand, there’s a midget standing tall
And a giant beside him about to fall
— from “Stand” by Sly & the Family Stone
It isn’t nice to carry banners
Or to sit in on the floor,
Or to shout our cry of Freedom
At the hotel and the store.
It isn’t nice, it isn’t nice,
You told us once, you told us twice,
But if that is Freedom’s price,
We don’t mind.
— from “It Isn’t Nice” by Malvina Reynolds
Well…it’s been an eventful week for the resistance:
WASHINGTON (AP) — In a feat of determination, New Jersey Democratic Sen. Cory Booker held the Senate floor with a marathon speech that lasted all night and into Tuesday night, setting a historic mark to show Democrats’ resistance to President Donald Trump’s sweeping actions.
Booker took to the Senate floor on Monday evening, saying he would remain there as long as he was “physically able.” It wasn’t until 25 hours and 5 minutes later that the 55-year-old senator, a former football tight end, finished speaking and limped off the floor. It set the record for the longest continuous Senate floor speech in the chamber’s history. Booker was assisted by fellow Democrats who gave him a break from speaking by asking him questions on the Senate floor.
It was a remarkable show of stamina as Democrats try to show their frustrated supporters that they are doing everything possible to contest Trump’s agenda. Yet Booker also provided a moment of historical solace for a party searching for its way forward: By standing on the Senate floor for more than a night and day and refusing to leave, he had broken a record set 68 years ago by then Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, a segregationist and southern Democrat, to filibuster the advance of the Civil Rights Act in 1957.
“I’m here despite his speech,” said Booker, who spoke openly on the Senate floor of his roots as the descendant of both slaves and slave-owners. He added, “I’m here because as powerful as he was, the people are more powerful.”
On Wednesday, some familiar faces from Russia picked up the torch:
Pussy Riot, the provocative, political Russian punk band, came to Washington Square Park Wednesday to deliver a stern warning: “Wake up, America!”
Their faces hidden behind red ski masks, six members of the feminist art collective marched down Fifth Ave. and into the Greenwich Village park around 1 p.m. Standing in front of the Washington Square Arch, they unfurled two large banners bearing messages: “Don’t Give Up” and “Freedom of Speech?”
Two other members of the group held up a rotating collection of placards with phrases like “Fever Dream,” “1984” and “Great Again: The Greatest Greatness But Mine Is Greater (Again).”
“We’ve been imprisoned in Russia,” said band member Masha Alyokhina. “We’ve been persecuted. We are in federal wanted lists in our country. So if we appear on the border, we’ll be immediately arrested for our anti-Putin and anti-war — [a war] which he started — activities.
“We are here now because we see the [rise] of authoritarian[ism] here. We want to call people to not be silent and we want people to remember to not to give up, even in the difficult conditions — to have hope inside, to have belief.”
Well, someone was paying attention:
Protesters across the U.S. rallying as part of the “Hands Off!” movement on Saturday are taking to the streets, state capitals, federal buildings, congressional offices and city centers to protest the Trump administration.
Why it matters: President Trump’s political, economic, social, health and legal changes have mobilized a wide cross-section of Americans.
State of play: Demonstrators are also speaking out against Elon Musk’s involvement in the federal government as an unelected official running DOGE.
The anticipated protests prompted the White House to reschedule its Saturday White House spring garden tours.
By the numbers: More than 1,100 rallies, visibility events and meetings were scheduled in all 50 states as of Wednesday.
Organizers said they had more than 500,000 RSVPs as of Friday night. Dozens of advocacy organizations partnered to support Saturday’s mass mobilization
As I am writing this midday Saturday, it’s going pretty, pretty, well:
Looking strong here in the Pacific Northwest, too. Hail Portlandlandia:
Not too shabby here in Seattle today, either:
I’m sorry to hear the White House had to reschedule its Saturday White House spring garden tours, but as Malvina Reynolds sang…if that is Freedom’s price, we don’t mind. In the spirit of solidarity, I’ve picked a few more golden greats guaranteed to mobilize the troops.
The Beatles – “Revolution”
Frank Zappa – “Trouble Every Day”
Elvis Costello – “Night Rally”
Green Day – “American Idiot”
The Clash – “Clampdown”
Woody Guthrie – “All You Fascists Bound to Lose”
Bob Marley & the Wailers – “Get Up, Stand Up”
The Style Council – “The Whole Point of No Return”
Tracy Chapman – “Talkin’ About a Revolution”
John Lennon – “Power to the People”
Sly & the Family Stone – “Stand!”
Heaven 17 – “(We Don’t Need This) Fascist Groove Thang”
Public Enemy – “Fight the Power”
Rage Against the Machine – “Take the Power Back”
Gil Scott-Heron – “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”
The Honeydrippers – “Impeach the President”
The Buffalo Springfield – “For What It’s Worth”
Billy Bragg – “There is Power in a Union”
Malvina Reynolds – “It Isn’t Nice”
Pete Seeger – “We Shall Overcome”
Previous posts with related themes:
On Mad Kings, Death Cults, and Altman’s Secret Honor
In the Seattle Mist with Confederate Dead
Now We See the Light: A Mixtape
More reviews at Den of Cinema
— Dennis Hartley
It’s a massive demonstration and it’s not just in the big blue cities:
That’s just a smattering of the posts coming from all over the world.
People are desperate to DO SOMETHING. This won’t change things in itself but the timing is perfect. Trump just crashed the world economy because he’s demented. This is just the beginning.
Aaaaand. It’s still all good!
Lol. Nothing to see here…
Political scientist Alan Abramowitz says in his new paper about the white working class in America, “it’s not the economy, stupid.” I think we knew this but it’s good to see some empirical study into the phenomenon. Pace Karl Marx, “class” is not just an economic designation.
Key points:
— While the state of the economy was likely an important factor in the 2024 presidential election and other recent contests, discontent over economic conditions doesn’t really explain the movement of white working class voters to the Republican Party in the longer-term.
— Rather, ideological realignment was probably a larger driver of white working class voters, once the base of the Democratic Party decades ago, into the Republican column.
Racial and cultural issues better explain GOP dominance with white working class
[…]
The dramatic shift in the partisan alignment of white working class voters over the past several decades, and especially the overwhelming support of this voting bloc for Donald Trump, has led to considerable speculation about the reasons for the rise of white working class Republicanism. Much of this speculation has focused on changes in the U.S. economy that have had a detrimental impact on the economic security and standard of living of this group. Since the 1970s, according to this theory, the loss of millions of manufacturing jobs in the U.S. as a result of automation and competition from low-wage countries like China and Mexico has devastated many working class communities and led to growing disillusionment with the Democratic Party, whose leaders were seen as complicit in these changes. Donald Trump, with his focus on the grievances of those who felt left behind by changes in American society, was especially effective in appealing to these disillusioned white working class voters.
In this article, I examine the rise of white working class Republicanism in American politics. Contrary to much of the conventional wisdom, I argue that economic discontent has very little to do with this phenomenon. Instead, I argue that the growing attraction of white working class voters to the Republican Party is a result of the ideological realignment of the political parties over the past 50 years. The growing divide between the Democratic and Republican parties over economic, racial, and cultural issues has led to an ideological realignment within the electorate. Groups with relatively conservative policy preferences, including white voters without college degrees, have shifted their allegiances to the Republican Party while groups with relatively liberal policy preferences, including white college graduates, have shifted their allegiances to the Democratic Party. These findings have important implications for the future of electoral competition and for party strategies.
I know you know this. We’ve traveled down the “economic anxiety” road for years now trying to explain Trump’s appeal. It’s really about hostility and grievance toward “the other” and Trump is a master at stoking that hatred.
But that’s not to say the economy isn’t relevant. Trump’s salesmanship and good fortune gave him a strong economy from Obama that was in the final phase of a recovery from the hell that he’d inherited from George W. Bush. He was constrained from doing all the cockamamie plans he had in his mind by people around him but also the Republicans in congress who were not yet united in their worship of the Golden God Trump. In the first two years they spent all their capital on tax cuts and banning Obamacare and came very close to achieving both. He lost the House in the midterms and hadn’t yet figured out that he was untouchable and could literally do anything he chose by executive fiat and no one would stop him. And then there was COVID.
This time he won on the basis of a “vibe recession” basically a bad hangover from the pandemic in which people just didn’t feel good about anything. He promised to fix everything on day one, particularly the cost of living and it is highly probable that his margin of victory consisted of people who were voting on the basis of their pocketbooks and just wanted to throw the bums out. What he’s doing now is going to send shock waves through the entire country and even some MAGAs are going to be shaken up by it. So the economy does matter and it is often a sort of stand-in for general discontent.
But what Abramowitz says is clearly the reason for the permanent migration of much of the white working class to the Republican Party. It’s a very big group and it’s what makes it hard to get beyond the polarization that makes our politics so fraught and our elections so close. I keep hoping that over time, as people grow up with diversity in our culture being just a normal fact of life that this will smooth out. But the backlash to this transition from a traditional white dominant American culture to a modern multi-cultural one is fierce and it looks like we’re going to go back and forth between “woke” and “broke” for a while.
Trump skipped a ceremony for fallen soldiers to play golf but don't forget the time Biden did something worse: attended the same ceremony and looked at his watch pic.twitter.com/1uI5sUvAUb
— The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) April 4, 2025
Yes, Trump went to a golf event at his club in Florida rather than attend the dignified transfer ceremony of the soldiers who died in Lithuania last week. But then they’re just a bunch of suckers and losers so what would we expect?
This is a minor atrocity by comparison to all the major atrocities of the last week but I just had to note it. All the years we’ve had to put up with the right waving the flag and “love it or leave it” and “these colors don’t run” and today they worship a man who could barely even be bothered to mention dead soldiers much less attend the ceremony to receive them back to the United States.
This isn’t a new thing for him. Recall in the first term:
In the world of President Donald Trump, he has paid his respects to “many, many” returning soldiers killed in the line of duty, with daughter and top presidential aide Ivanka Trump adding that “each time” she has stood by his side at one of these ceremonies, it has hardened his resolve to bring troops home.
In the real world, Trump has traveled to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware exactly four times ― fewer than half as many times as his vice president ― and avoided going at all for nearly two years after getting berated for his incompetence by the father of a slain Navy SEAL, according to a former White House aide who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Bill Owens, the father of William “Ryan” Owens, refused to shake Trump’s hand at that Feb. 1, 2017, encounter, the aide said, and then told Trump that he was responsible for his son’s death for approving the disastrous raid in Yemen without bothering to understand the risks.
“He refused to go back for two years, he was so rattled,” the aide said, adding that the main reason Trump had approved the raid just five days after taking office was that predecessor Barack Obama had refused to do so.
What’s more, Trump made the decision at a social dinner that included his son-in-law and top adviser, Jared Kushner, and then-chief strategist Stephen Bannon, rather than his National Security Council staff.
That’s how he rolls. And he’s getting worse.