Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Lutnick: "Donald Trump is saying the Panama Canal is fundamental to our security, and he's gonna take care of America. Now Greenland is much easier. We are a great democracy. Greenland is going to join America if the people of Greenland want to vote to join America." pic.twitter.com/R9yr7CEj55

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 14, 2025

Yeah, that’s not going to happen:

Greenland’s leading political parties have issued a joint statement to condemn Donald Trump’s “unacceptable behaviour”, after the US president seemed to escalate his campaign to take over the island.

The show of unity saw all leaders of parties in the Inatsisartut – the parliament – release a joint message saying they “cannot accept the repeated statements about annexation and control of Greenland”.

It follows a meeting between Trump and Nato’s secretary general Mark Rutte on Thursday, where the president seemed to double down on his annexation plan.

Greenland’s joint statement was orchestrated by outgoing Prime Minister Mute B Egede, whose party was defeated in an election on Tuesday.

“Our country will never be the USA and we Greenlanders will never be Americans,” Egede wrote on Facebook. “Don’t keep treating us with disrespect. Enough is enough.”

I’m sure that’ll just make Trump angry and he’ll double down. Here’s what he said to the NATO Secretary last week:

Greenland was already on the defensive about Trump’s annexing talk, but his comments to Rutte at the White House sent further shockwaves when he implied that Nato’s help might be needed to seize the island.

“You know, Mark, we need that for international security… we have a lot of our favourite players cruising around the coast, and we have to be careful,” Trump said.

“We’ll be talking to you,” he added.

When asked about the prospect of annexation, Trump said: “I think that will happen.”

Rutte has been criticised in both Greenland and Denmark for not reprimanding Trump. Instead, he said he would “leave that [issue] outside… I do not want to drag Nato into that”.

He then pivoted to praise – something several world leaders have used when dealing with Donald Trump – saying he was “totally right” that security in the Arctic must be maintained.

Rutte doesn’t take him seriously and also felt the need to keep the Mad King happy by telling him that he’s “totally right.” but at some point people are going to have to realize that Trump means this.

The Greenlanders get it:

Outside of the US consulate.

Nuuk, Greenland 🇬🇱
March 15, 2025 pic.twitter.com/YWCBo0IjIC

— Orla Joelsen (@OJoelsen) March 15, 2025

As do the Canadians. His dream of a “beautiful formation” of the U.S., Canada and Greenland isn’t going to happen.

Trump: "When you take away that artificial line that looks like it was done by a ruler … you look at that beautiful formation of Canada and the US, there is no place anywhere in the world that looks like that. And then if you add Greenland, that's pretty good." pic.twitter.com/O4mm9VKHUV

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 11, 2025

They’re torturing people

What in God’s name is going on?

A New Hampshire man with a green card was detained by immigration officers at Logan Airport and is being held by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement at the Donald W. Wyatt detention facility in Central Falls, Rhode Island.

Fabian Schmidt’s family said they are unsure of why he is being held. They said he has a recently renewed green card, and no active issues in court.

Schmidt had been visiting Luxembourg and flew back to the U.S. on Friday. His partner had gone to pick him up at Logan Airport, and waited four hours before calling authorities.

“It was just said that his green card was flagged,” said Astrid Senior, his mother. She said she didn’t hear from her son directly until Tuesday, when she learned he’d been hospitalized.

Senior described Schmidt being “violently interrogated” at Logan Airport for hours, and being stripped naked, put in a cold shower by two officials, and being put back onto a chair.

She said Schmidt told her immigration agents pressured him to give up his green card. She said he was placed on a mat in a bright room with other people at the airport, with little food or water, suffered sleep deprivation, and was denied access to his medication for anxiety and depression.

“He hardly got anything to drink. And then he wasn’t feeling very well and he collapsed,” said Senior.

He was transported by ambulance to Mass General Hospital. He didn’t know it at the time, but he also had influenza.

On Tuesday, Schmidt was transported to the regional headquarters for ICE in Burlington, Massachusetts, and then transferred to the Wyatt facility. The family, including his partner, who is a cardiologist in Nashua, have acquired attorneys and been working with the German consulate in hopes to have him released on bail.

Schmidt and his mother moved to the U.S. in 2007, and received green cards in 2008. He moved from California to New Hampshire in 2022.

Senior described her son as a hardworking electrical engineer with a partner and 8-year-old daughter who are both U.S. citizens.

We’re THAT country now. Any green card holder should probably consider moving back to their home country. The brain drain would be substantial but I’m afraid they aren’t safe here anymore. We have an out-of-control police state that’s been let loose by a president who has declared war on the rest of the world.

So apparently he was being “sarcastic.” pic.twitter.com/CrVNbpdYAA

— Luke Beasley (@lukepbeasley) March 15, 2025

No he’s just always full of shit. It’s obvious. The question is why anyone would vote for that.

NBC News reports:

Eight years ago, President Donald Trump spoke about the U.S.-Canada relationship in glowing terms.

He hosted Prime Minister Justin Trudeau at the White House in February 2017 for one of his first joint appearances alongside a foreign leader. Trump opened by noting the nations “share much more than a border,” highlighting “the special bonds that come when two nations have shed their blood together — which we have.”

[…]

“Canada only works as a state,” Trump said Thursday. “We don’t need anything they have. As a state, it would be one of the great states anywhere. This would be the most incredible country, visually. If you look at a map, they drew an artificial line right through it, between Canada and the U.S. Just a straight, artificial line. Somebody did it a long time ago, many many decades ago. Makes no sense. It’s so perfect as a great and cherished state.”

“But why should we subsidize another country for $200 billion?” Trump continued, adding, “And again, we don’t need their lumber, we don’t need their energy. We have more than they do. We don’t need anything. We don’t need their cars. I’d much rather make the cars here. And there’s not a thing that we need. Now, there will be a little disruption, but it won’t be very long. But they need us. We really don’t need them. And we have to do this. I’m sorry.”

[…]

A source with direct knowledge of the discussions told NBC News that Trump is heavily focused on Canada in conversations with aides, who believe he is completely serious about making the country the 51st state — even with Trudeau out of power and a new prime minister in place.

Why is he so fixated now? No one knows. He never raised the issue before.

In private, Trump has made specific demands the Canadians say they could never agree to. The president made clear in a phone call with Trudeau last month that he wants to revise the boundary between the two nations set by a 1908 border treaty, as two Canadian officials said and was previously reported by The New York Times and Toronto Star…

The president has also mentioned renegotiating agreements that dictate how the Great Lakes and Columbia River are governed, the official told NBC News, adding that Trump wants to control the Northwest Passage, a maritime path that begins west of Greenland and cuts through Northern Canada to the Arctic Ocean.

“He wants our water,” the Canadian official added. “He wants to take the water.”

Marc Miller, the Canadian minister of immigration, refugees and citizenship, said that for Trump, Canada’s allure is its natural resources. The president separately wants American access to Ukraine’s rare earth minerals as compensation for the aid given to the war-torn country.

He’s got it in his head that he’s some kind of Roman conqueror. (He said he “invaded” Los Angeles the other day too.)

Mark Carney, the former Canadian and British central banker who was sworn in as prime minister on Friday, described “dark days” ahead for his nation after being elected to lead the Liberal Party.

“These are dark days — dark days brought on by a country we can no longer trust,” he said. “We are getting over the shock — but let us never forget the lessons. We have to look after ourselves and we have to look out for each other.”

There is no rational explanation for this.

This is not showmanship or “transactionalism.” He has dementia, just like his father, and this global conqueror fantasy isn’t the only sign. His inane obsession with the California water is part of it too. In fact there are dozens of examples in which he’s just way more erratic and bizarre than he used to be (and that’s saying something.) The people around him almost certainly see it and you know that Musk does too.

Fighter for me or not fighter for me?

While grocery shopping the other day, a friend asked how we were doing (in Trump 2.0). A lot of stress-eating, I said. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is hearing the same sort of thing as he travels the country.

There are a couple of reasons for my stress just this week, but even people who don’t immerse themselves in politics (and blog politics every day) are feeling it. People on Donald Trump’s target list are feeling it.

Sanders asks his audiences how living in this America makes them feel. He asks about their stress level, and it connects more than a discussion about policy. It is a big change from the Sanders who campaigned for president in 2016 on income and wealth inequality in a rigged economy. In 2020, he ran on people’s pain. Anand Giridharadas writes at The Ink:

It was something of a departure for a man who is not necessarily the most touchy-feely guy you’ve ever met. I tried to dig in to what Sanders was doing, and why. I spoke to many of his advisers and his wife and him. What I learned is excerpted below.

It was, in short, that he was trying to help citizens better connect their individual pain to the larger forces misgoverning the country.

And it appears now that he is doing it again. While many are banging the drum about fascism and a coup and all the rest, Sanders is reminding us that connecting those issues to the emotional life of voters is vital.

Oligarchy and autocracy and the like are not textbook concepts. They make life suck.

@bernie

In America today, working class people live, on average, 7 years shorter lives than the wealthy. Stress kills. In Altoona, Wisconsin this weekend I asked people how economic stress impacted their lives. The responses I got were painful, but not surprising.

♬ original sound – Bernie Sanders

Democrats need to learn from Sanders, Giridharadas explained this week on “Morning Joe.” Because the key decision point for politically less-engaged people (unlike blog writers and readers) may not be left/right, Democrat/Republican, but “fighter for me or not fighter for me?”

Or as I use again and again, How many Rocky  movies did Stallone make?

Voters want leaders — even phony ones — willing to fight for them and to risk themselves in the effort. Wimps need not apply. Stern words to not count.

Democrats have a lot of work to do on that.

* * * * *

Have you fought the coup today?
Choose Democracy
Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink
You Have Power
Chop Wood, Carry Water
Thirty lonely but beautiful actions

Marco Rubio’s adventures in diplomacy

It’s said that Donald Trump has no friends. Not real ones. Sycophants, yes. Transaction partners, sure. Plus dictators who leverage his ignorance and pliability to use him. But making friends is not his strong suit. Quite the opposite.

Trump’s knack for alienating people is manifest in the government he now leads. See how he goes out of his way to piss off the country’s closest ally, Canada, and calls the “European Union ‘nasty’ while sitting alongside NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte.“

He’s rubbed off on Secretary of State Marco Rubio who, in a rare move, is expelling South Africa’s ambassador over comments taken as hostile to Trump and his proclivities:

“South Africa’s ambassador to the United States is no longer welcome in our great country,” Rubio posted on X on Friday.

Rubio accused ambassador Ebrahim Rasool of being “a race-baiting politician who hates America and hates @POTUS”, referring to Trump by his White House X account handle. “We have nothing to discuss with him and so he is considered persona non grata.”

The up-is-downism in that statement is obvious.

Neither Rubio nor the state department gave an immediate explanation for the decision. However, Rubio linked to a Breitbart story about a talk Rasool gave earlier on Friday as part of a South African thinktank’s webinar in which he spoke about actions taken by the Trump administration in the context of a US where white people would soon no longer be a majority.

Rasool pointed to Elon Musk’s outreach to far-right figures in Europe, calling it a “dog whistle” in a global movement trying to rally people who see themselves as part of an “embattled white community”.

Rubio this week dropped a peace demand that Russia return the children it abducted in its Ukraine invasion. It was, as Digby pointed out, a concession to Vladimir Putin, but also another jab at our friends in Ukraine. But then, Trump and friends….

Maybe Rubio really is too “little” for the job.

More up-is-down

In a precedent-breaking visit by a president to the Department of Justice, Trump railed in a speech against his own employees, calling department officials and private attorneys who took legal action against him “scum,” judges “corrupt” and the prosecutors who investigated him “deranged.”

He called for his opponents to be prosecuted:

“It’s a campaign by the same scum you’ve been dealing with for years,” Trump said of the lawyers and officials who have targeted him. “We will expel the rogue actors and corrupt forces from our government. … We will restore the scales of justice in our country.”

Then he defended Judge Aileen Cannon, the Florida federal judge who ran interference for him in cases brought by the DOJ. Criticism of judges should be “illegal,” Trump insisted.

Yes, that guy: Trump escalates attack on ‘Mexican’ judge.

Undesirables

What’s yet to be seen is the extent of the career con man’s and his SecState’s fluid definition of “rogue actors and corrupt forces.” It could be, like the South African ambassador, whoever rubs Donald Trump the wrong way. Like Mahmoud Khalil. Or the Rhode Island doctor who traveled to Lebanon recently to visit family:

Dr. Rasha Alawieh, 35, had been studying and working in the U.S. for the last six years and had been in Rhode Island, working for Brown Medicine in the Division of Kidney Disease & Hypertension, since last July, said her friend and fellow doctor Basma Merhi.

Alawieh was returning to the U.S. on an H-1B visa she had recently acquired at the American consulate in Lebanon, said lawyer Thomas S. Brown, who handles immigration and visa issues for doctors affiliated with Brown Medicine.

She is being detained at Boston’s Logan Airport and awaits deportation over some “wrinkle” in her visa application approved and issued by Rubio’s department. Unless they already deported her Friday night as officials indicated.

Lebanon is not even among the 43 undesirable countries on Trump’s new travel ban proposal.

Watch your backs.

* * * * *

Have you fought the coup today?
Choose Democracy
Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink
You Have Power
Chop Wood, Carry Water
Thirty lonely but beautiful actions

Armadillo quadruplets!

ICYMI: Our nine-banded armadillo Patsy gave birth to female identical quadruplets! Mom and babies are all doing well and bonding behind-the-scenes. #Funfact– Nine-banded armadillos (almost) always give birth to identical quadruplets! pic.twitter.com/QaojUO4A1h

— Roger Williams Park Zoo (@RWPZoo) March 12, 2025

They always give birth to quadruplets:

 All litters of this species derive from a single fertilized egg that divides into four. The same-sex pups arrive in the spring, and even as newborns look like miniature adults. Armadillo pups nurse for two to three months before switching to an adult diet. 

When startled or scared, these armadillos can jump four to five feet high. Usually this surprises any creature trying to have it for lunch. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work so well when startled by a moving car, which is why they are common road kill.

These guys are insectivores. They mostly eat bugs, beetles, grubs, worms, spiders and termites. Once in a while they do eat fungus, fruits and seeds, as well as some carrion. But they love bugs the most.

These little armored mammals are actually good swimmers when they need to be. They can also hold their breath for up to six minutes and are really skilled at walking underwater to cross streams.

And another atrocity

Greg Sargent reports that Marco Rubio, the alleged diplomat, has been speaking out of both sides of his mouth during peace talks as his state department helps the Russians evade responsibility for their war crimes:

The State Department has quietly terminated a contract that was in the process of transferring evidence of alleged Russian abductions of Ukrainian children—a potential war crime—to law enforcement officials in Europe, two people familiar with the situation tell The New Republic.

The nixed award could make it harder to continue tracking down the kidnapped Ukrainian kids and complicate efforts to seek accountability for the abductions, says one of the sources, who has direct knowledge of the ongoing operation.

One of Ukraine’s central demands for any peace deal is the return of Ukrainian children who have allegedly been the victims of a Russian program of coerced adoption. Russia has claimed this program is a humanitarian one that benevolently adopts Ukrainian kids and makes them citizens. But under President Biden, the State Department strongly condemned it as the “forcible transfer and deportation of Ukraine’s children to camps promoting indoctrination in Russia.”

Indeed, as The New York Times reported, Russia has not just transferred children from Ukrainian orphanages to Russian camps; it has also taken kids whose relatives want them back. The Times noted that the abductees number in the “thousands,” and concluded: “This mass transfer of children is a potential war crime.”

The contract is with Yale School of Public Health which uses sophisticated technological analysis  to identify and track these kids.

They were supposed to transfer the data to Europol, the EU’s police force, but this cancellation has interrupted it. It’s very hard to see why they would do this unless Russia demanded it which is entirely possible since the lab released an explosive report to the United Nations last December which resulted in a referral to the International Criminal Court.

There is much more at the link about the horror of these mass abductions and the response to it here in the US and around the world. Until recently, even under Rubio, this was considered to be a top issue in any peace deal. Rubio appears to have decided it doesn’t matter.

He has a place reserved in the VIP section of hell.

Pam Bondi: "If you're gonna touch a Tesla, go to a dealership, do anything, you better watch out, because we're coming after you." pic.twitter.com/lFuFbfu6il

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 14, 2025

Meanwhile, according to Tara Palmieri at Puck:

The tolerance for Elon Musk inside of the White House is wearing thin, as they deal with the fallout of his calamitous interview with Larry Kudlow when he touched the third rail – entitlements. Even though Trump’s staffers are terrified of Musk, they know that if you try to cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, you die, politically speaking.

“It’s no longer simmering resistance, people are fucking furious,” said a source with knowledge of the situation.

“Medicaid is not just for Black people in the ghetto, these are our voters,” said a Republican operative close to the White House.

I mean, if it was just for the Black people that would be one thing…

According to Palmieri, the White House pollster, Tony Fabrizio, says he isn’t polling on Musk but it’s clear from outside polls that he is extremely unpopular. The people in the White House hate him:

I can’t even begin to explain the anger I’m hearing from within the White House and agencies over Musk. If he’s telling the Polish Foreign minister Radosław Sikorski, “Be quiet, small man” and reminding Trump’s cabinet that he’s the billionaire in the room, then you can only imagine how he treats a White House official, even at the deputy chief of staff level, and there are many of them in this top-heavy White House.

“He’s demonstrably dismissive of people who have incredibly important jobs because he doesn’t understand the government,” said the source with knowledge of the matter.

I’ve been reporting for months that Musk has been disrespectful to Chief of Staff Susie Wiles. .. “He treats [Wiles] like a secretary in front of people,” the source with knowledge of the matter said. “The second most powerful person in Washington, the first woman and someone who has done a good job of keeping the trains running on time.”

But I’ve heard that it’s even become too much for Wiles, who for the most part has been delivering on what matters most to Trump—producing the Presidency with a daily event featuring co-star Musk and a cast of cabinet members for the press. She’s a professional and a survivor, but she’s being bombarded with calls from cabinet secretaries furious over cuts and members worried about state programs…

“He treats cabinet secretaries like they’re messenger boys,” the source with knowledge of the matter said.

Apparently, Trump is fine with it even though Musk is wrapped around him like a hungry anaconda:

For now, Trump likes having Musk around, even though Musk is extremely clingy and Trump likes his space. (It’s clearly a quality he appreciates in his wife Melania.) So their love affair seems to be lasting. Perhaps the only thing that might break them up is Musk’s clinginess.

Trump is thrilled that the richest man in the world licks his boots. It’s one of the main reasons he believes he is invincible. With the power of the presidency back in his hands, Supreme Court immunity and the wealthiest people on earth sucking up to him he believes he can literally do anything he wants. And maybe he can.

Media Matters took a look at alternative media and it’s very bad news for the good guys:

As Americans increasingly get their news from online shows and streamers, the influence of this media ecosystem becomes more prominent — and Media Matters has found that the most popular of this content is overwhelmingly right-leaning.

In a new study, Media Matters assessed the audience size of popular online shows — podcasts, streams, and other long-form audio and video content regularly posted online. To do so, we gathered data on the number of followers, subscribers, and views across streaming platforms (YouTube, Spotify, Rumble, Twitch, and Kick) and social media platforms that are used to amplify and promote these shows (Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok). Apple Podcasts does not publicly provide follower counts on its platform, so it was not included in the audience data.

This analysis was based on 320 online shows with a right-leaning or left-leaning ideological bent. We found that right-leaning online shows dominate the ecosystem, with substantially larger audiences on both politics/news shows and supposedly nonpolitical shows that we determined often platformed ideological content or guests.

Key findings:

• We found 320 online shows — 191 right-leaning and 129 left-leaning — that were active in 2024 and covered news and politics and/or had related guests. These shows had at least 584.6 million total followers and subscribers.
• We found substantial asymmetry in total following across platforms: Right-leaning online shows had at least 480.6 million total followers and subscribers — nearly five times as many as left-leaning.
  • Across platforms — YouTube, Rumble, Twitch, Kick, Spotify, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok — right-leaning online shows accounted for roughly 82% of the total following of the online shows we assessed.
  • Comparatively, left-leaning online shows had nearly 104 million followers and subscribers across the eight platforms — nearly five times less.
• Nine out of the 10 online shows with the largest followings across platforms were right-leaning, with a total following of more than 197 million. The only left-leaning show among the top 10 was What Now? with Trevor Noah, which had 21.1 million total followers and subscribers across platforms.
• Our analysis — which looked entirely at shows with an ideological bent — found over a third self-identify as nonpolitical, even though 72% of those shows were determined to be right-leaning. Instead, these shows describe themselves as comedy, entertainment, sports, or put themselves in other supposedly nonpolitical categories.
• Out of 320 online shows, right-leaning programs categorized as comedy — 15 shows in all — had 117.5 million followers and subscribers, or 20% of the total following of all programs we assessed. This category included The Joe Rogan Experience, This Past Weekend with Theo Von, and Full Send Podcast.
• Right-leaning shows accounted for two-thirds of the total YouTube views on videos from channels affiliated with the shows we assessed — 65 billion views in total. Comparatively, left-leaning online shows totaled 31.5 billion total views.
• Right-leaning shows use Rumble to expand their audience — gaining millions of subscribers and billions of views for their content.

This is a chronic problem for Democrats mainly because their alternative media are under funded probably because the people who do it read the NY Times and watch CNN and figure there’s plenty of media out there for liberals. This is very, very short-sided these days because this media is where a whole lot of people get their information and they are being flooded with bullshit.

And no, that doesn’t mean you have to do what Gavin Newsom is inexplicably doing and kiss up to Steve Bannon and Charlie Kirk on a podcast. There has to be a better way. Maybe Trevor Noah has the right formula. (And by the way, there is big money it if someone can do it right.)