Skip to content

Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

The Adults In The Room Are Throwing Their Food

Published by digby on February 1, 2024

If you think the Republicans in the Senate are the more sane members of the MAGA GOP, think again. They’re just as cravenly partisan as the nuts in the House. Remember Thom Tillis, the “brave” Senator who has been criticizing the House Republicans for refusing to even consider the border and Ukraine deal? Well…

The House passed its $78 billion, bipartisan tax bill with a lopsided 357-to-70 vote on Wednesday, in which the measure attracted slightly more Democratic than Republican support as it overcame opposition from hardline conservatives.

Now comes the hard part: Winning over GOP senators. Republicans in the upper chamber are already expressing deep skepticism toward the legislation, which combines several business deductions with an expansion of the Child Tax Credit that would all sunset at the end of 2025.

Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., said Wednesday that he’s been advising Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and other GOP Senate leaders that it would be “a mistake” to pass the bill. Speaking to Semafor, he argued that Republicans should hold out for a potential Trump presidency to make major tax policy decisions, especially since Congress is preparing to renegotiate much of the IRS code next year ahead of when large swaths of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act are set to expire.

“I think everything should be on the table there, including the future of the child tax credit provisions [that] are being proposed now,” Tillis told Semafor in a separate interview.

Meanwhile, Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa told Semafor he was concerned that expanding the child credit would aid President Biden’s re-election chances.

“I think passing a tax bill that makes the president look good mailing out checks before the election means he could be reelected and then we won’t extend the 2017 tax cuts,” the former Senate Finance chair said. He added that he believes the bill would give up some of the GOP’s leverage ahead of next year’s big tax fight, but said he’d take a closer look at the bill once it passed the House.

Though a number of Republicans on and around Capitol Hill have raised concerns that the bill would let Biden send out cash around election time, tax experts have dismissed those fears as essentially a misunderstanding. The GOP-led House Ways and Means panel said in a recent statement that the Biden administration is “explicitly prohibited” from sending “politically-timed refund checks.”

They are criticizing the House kooks for demanding a stronger border bill because of the “crisis” and then refusing to pass it because only Trump can really fix it and it might help Biden in the election. The only difference here is that Republicans in the Senate don’t care about poor families. And it might help Biden in the election.

There are no Republicans “grown-ups” in the room. Ever. Because there are no Republican grown-ups.

A Little Truth

Published by digby on February 1, 2024

The media is not telling the real story, as usual. It’s just a “crisis” or a “caravan” or a “catastrophe” without any context or nuance. They have been doing this for years. I know they aren’t this incompetent. They can’t be.

“A Post-Constitution World”

Published by digby on February 1, 2024

Texas Congressman Chip Roy is not one of the MAGA goofballs. He even endorsed DeSantis over Trump. He was once Ted Cruz’s chief of staff so he’s an extremist but he isn’t stupid. As Judd Legum notes in his newsletter, there’s a method to his madness:

Congressman Chip Roy (R-TX) is publicly urging Texas to ignore the Supreme Court. In previously unreported comments, Roy explained that he feared his position would push the country into “a post-constitutional world.” But, Roy said, the Supreme Court is “pushing our hand” by issuing a ruling related to the southern border that he opposes, and the Supreme Court needs to “feel the pressure.” 

The next day, Roy told Fox News that Texas should “tell the court to go to hell.” 

On January 24, in a little-noticed interview with right-wing conspiracy theorist Charlie Kirk, Roy expanded on his thinking. Roy explained his position pushes the country to a “post-constitutional world.” But Roy said he was willing to take that risk because he believed the threat of a Constitutional crisis would pressure the Supreme Court to issue more favorable rulings in the future.

I say this respectfully. I say it with the fear of what I’m saying. I do not want to live in a post-constitutional world, but this Court is pushing our hand, and the Court needs to know that… I want them to feel the pressure, because if they’re political animals, they need to know it. We were out there defending Amy Coney Barrett when her house was being protested, we said that the law should be enforced to protect her. Where is she when the people of Texas need to be protected? Totally M.I.A.

Roy also said that his “first duty” as Congressman was not to comply with the Constitution, which establishes the Supreme Court as the ultimate legal authority. Rather, Roy believes he should take whatever actions are necessary, in his own mind, to “make sure our people are protected and secure and safe.”

I want to preserve and protect the Republican form of government that our country is built upon, and I want a strong America standing in front of the American flag. But my first duty as an elected official is, yes to the Constitution, but my first duty is to make sure that I’m protecting and following my job to make sure our people are protected and secure and safe. That’s what leaders of a state, of a sovereign entity, have to be concerned about, and so, that’s what we’re up against.

In other words, Roy believes his own opinion about what is required to keep people “secure and safe” trumps the Constitution. This is a radical view that would upend the nation’s legal system. 

Roy is a lawyer. He knows very well what he is saying. He’s trying to intimidate the Supreme Court — and if that doesn’t work, he’s ready to burn the Constitution.

Does he mean all this or is he just performing for the crowd? It’s hard to know. He’s also the guy who railed against his own party not long ago complaining that they hadn’t gotten anything done. (Perhaps we should ask just what it is he thinks should have been accomplished.) He’s a show boater just like his mentor Ted Cruz. But what he’s saying about defying the Supreme Court is a rank betrayal of his oath of office, either way.

What’s Nikki Up To These Days?

Published by digby on February 1, 2024

Well, she’s being a true daughter of South Carolina:

It’s not like Harris was in the Obama administration or really had anything to do with him. She’s against Harris being president because Black presidents are “divisive.” Until Obama was elected and divided us, we didn’t have any of these “problems.” Harris will obviously do the same thing. Because she’s Black. And you know how they are.

And she said it on The Breakfast Club a podcast hosted by Black people. Jesus.

And then there’s this:

Actually, it can’t secede. As that old woke Justice Antonin Scalia said, “If there was any constitutional issue resolved by the Civil War, it is that there is no right to secede.”

Haley is campaigning in her home state of S. Carolina a state that knows from secession.

Self-exile

Published by Tom Sullivan on February 1, 2024

America: If you love it, hate it

(Photo: Facebook/David Miles)

Oliver Darcy on Tuesday wrote, “Conservatives are going into self-exile.”

The Formerly Republican Party, like Formerly Twitter, “is now led by far-right media forces hoping to cash in on attention from raging culture wars, sealing off its adherents from the rest of society.”

One wonders what’s left of America for Republicans to love. Red-hatted Make America Great Again believers are systematically excommunicating anyone and everyone not not eaten up with gnawing grievances. They have demonized DEI efforts (diversity, equity and inclusion) and seem bent (apt?) on making their clan “the most restrictive country club in America.”

In the 1960s, the conservative slogan was, America: Love it or leave it. Today the message is, America: If you love it, hate it.

Darcy writes:

From a bird’s eye view, the state of affairs among MAGA Media diehards as it sits today is remarkable. A subset of America actually purports to boycott Disney, the world’s preeminent entertainment company; Bud Light, once America’s most popular beer; Target, the quintessential brick-and-mortar shopping destination; Pfizer, the pharmaceutical company that produced life-saving Covid-19 vaccines; Major League Baseball, the nation’s favorite pastime; and now Taylor Swift, a generational icon and one of the most successful musical artists of all time.

“There’s something striking about watching the far-right tying itself in knots and attacking Swift and [her boyfriend Travis] Kelce that demonstrates how badly the far-right media has alienated itself from most of society,” Charlie Warzel, a staff writer at The Atlantic who covers the intersection of politics, technology, and culture, told me Tuesday.

The culture MAGA Republicans are at war with is America. What does that make them?

MAGA’s political wing of miners and sappers means to sabotage any effort to put the government they serve to work making Americans’ lives better.

Steve Benen teased his latest blog post on Blue Sky:

Democrats: Republicans are deliberately refusing to solve problems because they care more about elections and partisan games.  

Republicans: Yep, pretty much.

NBC News reported overnight:

The House voted Wednesday night to pass a $78 billion tax package that includes an expansion of the child tax credit, sending it to the Senate, where its path is uncertain.

The Republican-led House passed the bipartisan measure 357-70, using a fast-track process that requires a two-thirds majority. The legislation received broad support from each party: 169 Republicans and 188 Democrats voted for it, while 47 Republicans and 23 Democrats voted against it.

Steve Benen writes this morning that for this House-sponsored bipartisan achievment to amount to much it first has to get by the Senate and Chuck Grassley:

Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, cast doubt Wednesday on passing a bipartisan tax bill, saying it could make President Joe Biden “look good” and improve Democrats’ chances of holding the White House in the 2024 election.

Grassley said re-electing Biden could hurt Republican hopes of extending Trump-era tax cuts.

Not even subtle

Benen adds:

The problem is not that the Iowa Republican opposes the underlying legislation; the problem is that his principal concern is avoiding governing successes that might make President Joe Biden “look good” in an election year.

Can’t have that, Benen explains. Because “reducing child poverty is fine, but helping the Republican Party’s electoral strategies is better.”

Some might be tempted to believe that both parties think this way. That’s wrong. As recently as 2020, congressional Democrats put aside partisan considerations and worked to put money in Americans’ pockets during a crisis — without regard for whether it might improve Donald Trump’s re-election prospects. The focus was on families’ needs, not partisan tactics.

Four years later, Grassley’s instincts push him in the opposite direction. He isn’t even being subtle about it.

What’s more, he’s not alone. About a month ago, Republican Rep. Troy Nehls said he’d oppose a different bipartisan compromise for the same reason. “Let me tell you, I’m not willing to do too damn much right now to help a Democrat and to help Joe Biden’s approval rating,” the Texan said. “I will not help the Democrats try to improve this man’s dismal approval ratings. I’m not going to do it.” Nehls echoed the same sentiment this week.

How about that? Republicans are boycotting their own jobs.

Biden Works The Laser Eyes

Published by Tom Sullivan on February 1, 2024

Biden-Harris HQ goes after Donald Trump. Hard.

‘Dark Brandon’ Rises, the New York Times reported in August 2023. He’s not backing off.

While we were reading accounts of the latest GOP insanities in D.C. and in the states, and about the Fox/MAGA conspiracy freakout over Taylor Swift, plus a random, MAGA-inspired(?) beheading straight out of Se7en, Team Biden was going hard at getting under Donald Trump’s skin. And rubbing his nose in it on Truth Social (Huffington Post):

President Joe Biden’s 2024 campaign flipped former President Donald Trump’s excuses for his verbal stumbles right back at him in a new ad.

The 60-second spot features multiple Trump stumbles and the Republican front-runner’s claims that he does it “purposely” or because he speaks “in long, complex sentences.”

“Have you noticed he’s a little confused these days?” Biden asks in speech footage that is featured towards the end of the clip. The video concludes with reports that Trump is “rattled by Biden’s efforts to get under his skin.”

Yup, this one:

The ad above posted at 1:03 p.m. Wednesday on Formerly Twitter, the Now Muskian white-nationalist cesspool. It was only one of a flurry of ads from Biden-Harris HQ. I’ve not included all from yesterday, but damn, look at these timestamps.

They’re going hard against Trump’s cognitive decline but also against Trump’s phony worker populism.

And let’s not forget Trump’s responsibility for killing Roe.

Don’t forget Biden’s record recovery.

It was the same on Tuesday. It’s relentless. I like relentless.

On the Taylor Swift theme, how much is she, as they say, living rent-free in MAGA heads? She’s got Sean Hannity reinforcing for his audience the branding that MAGAs are “racist and sexist and homophobic and xenophobic and transphobic,” etc. That’s stunningly bad practice.

The Lincoln Project can be relentless too.

“No Collusion! No Obstruction!”

Published by digby on January 31, 2024

“The election was rigged, I won in a landslide!”

This is how Trump convinces his cult that up is down and black is white. He just says something that’s outrageously false, the polar opposite of the truth, with total confidence, over and over again. In fact, his deluded followers often tell reporters that the thing they admire about him the most is that he always tells the truth.

Has there ever been a demagogue in history who was so willing to lie so blatantly about clear, observable facts? They always lie, of course. And they are outrageous in their rhetoric. But this brazen defiance of reality seems to me to be pretty unique. I think religious cult leaders do this and get away with it with their flock. But I don’t know that political leaders have been able to get away with it like this. Obviously, it takes a supporting propaganda infrastructure and a monstrously stupid following. But still, give Trump his due. I think he may be the most flagrant, obvious liar in world political history and he’s succeeded in making tens of millions of people believe everything he says.

Foxlandia

Published by digby on January 31, 2024

They’ve already seceded…

Scott Rosenberg’s Hopium Chronicles today provides a vivid description of what’s happened to the right wing in this country, beginning with the descent of Fox News into a full-blown propaganda machine that actually communicates in a discrete language spoken by the MAGA cult:

My friend Greg Sargent once referred to this fictional world as Foxlandia. It’s a place they go where Trump is a strong leader, the economy is in recession, eggs cost $27 a piece, inflation is still raging, Putin is an ally and the West is sinister, antifa is ISIS, dozens of American cities burned to the ground in 2020, vaccines give you COVID, insurrectionists are hostages, children carrying their rapist’s babies is a blessing, assault weapons bring freedom, etc. It is, to borrow from one of my favorite TV shows, Stranger Things, the upside down.

[…]

In thinking about it today what I am describing perhaps should be understood as a form of succession from the United States and our democratic heritage. MAGA may still be physically here in the US, but many of its followers have left our shared information space, and now live in their heads some place else – Foxlandia, the upside down, MAGA – a place of untruth, of strongmen, of Trumpian ding-ding, of danger for the rest of us.

That place of untruth is evident in the MeidasTouch clip above. Trump is no longer it appears even trying to make sense when he speaks. He is so far gone, and the movement is far gone, that you can’t even follow what he is talking about any longer. But this alternative world of untruth is not just a place where Trump lives, most of the Republican Party is there with him now. He is going to be their nominee, their leader, and consider what they are asking us to believe and accept as reasonable right now:

-that the border is a crisis, an invasion is underway, but they will not negotiate a solution to it, are disregarding a Supreme Court decision which would put the Federal government back in charge of the border, and seemingly want it to remain a crisis through the election and ensure millions of “terrorists and criminals” continue to pour into the country; and yes, then it will all be Biden’s fault, and yes we are Impeaching the guy in charge of the border while it is in crisis because he “doesn’t enforce” immigration laws – whatever the fuck that means – something by the way the state of Texas and MAGA are preventing him from doing right now (there may no greater place of right wing lunacy and untruth than on border and immigration issues)

-that their holding up of aid to Ukraine and Israel, their months of degrading both the Defense and State Departments, haven’t emboldened our enemies and caused our troops – somehow Biden’s “weakness” did that

-that we shouldn’t be spending money on Ukraine, but spending it here at home; and then of course they come out for massive cuts of spending here at home

-that Democrats are the party of debt and fiscal recklessness when the last 3 Democratic Presidents saw deficits plummet on their watch, and the last Rs saw them skyrocket

-that the country is being gripped by a crime wave when murder and violent crime rates are plummeting and are a fraction of what they were 30 years ago

-that Biden’s imaginary “war on energy” drove up gas prices/inflation and left us more dependent on foreign sources of energy when in fact oil and renewable production set records in 2023, leaving us more energy independent than in decades; and that high gas prices were actually caused by COVID and disrupted supply chains, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and OPEC’s repeated price hikes, and were of course not somehow caused by anything Biden did for he was doing the exact opposite of what they’ve claimed!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

-that Taylor Swift’s rise is somehow a plot by the deep state; that Hillary Clinton ran a “pedo” mill in the basement of a pizza place not too far from my house; that Biden somehow cheated and stole the 2020 election; that Russia never launched a massive campaign to get Trump elected in 2016;

I could go on for days on all this stuff. Lies. Invention. Untruth. Foxlandia. When you put it altogether it is truly shocking. How in the world did all of this happen? How did the GOP become so idiotic, so far gone, so full of cowards that they couldn’t stop this dramatic and ongoing betrayal of our democracy? How could they embrace Trump, the most unfit man we’ve all ever seen, and this insane agenda:

Republicans want Putin to win, the West to lose. The border to stay open. The economy to crash. Women, people of color to lose more freedoms and rights. The planet to warm faster. 10 year olds to carry their rapist’s baby to term, and for more women to die on an operating room table. Tens of millions to lose their health insurance. More dead kids in schools. A restoration of pre-Civil Rights era white supremacy. Big tax cuts for their donors, higher deficits and less for everyone else. Books banned across the US. Teenagers to work night shifts in meat packing plants and not go to school. The minimum wage to stay at $7.25. Mass arrests and mass deportations of immigrants long settled in the US. Insurrectionists to get pardoned. To end American democracy for all time…..

It is not hysterical to point this out. The stakes really are this high. The good news, as Rosenberg points out every day, is that the Democrats are doing much better than you think. They are winning elections and ballot initiatives all over the country and have been for years and the strong economy is finally penetrating the national consciousness. It’s going to take effort to beat them but it can be done.

Don’t Count On The Legal System

Published by digby on January 31, 2024

It continues to let us down

These numbers appear to be promising:

The Bloomberg News/Morning Consult survey found that among voters in the swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, 53 percent of respondents said they were unwilling to vote for the former president if he is convicted in one of his multiple criminal cases.

Forty-six percent of respondents said they are “very unwilling” to cast their ballot for Trump if he is found guilty, while 7 percent said they are “somewhat unwilling.” Twenty-nine percent of respondents said they were “very willing” to vote for Trump if he is convicted of a crime, and 11 percent said they are “somewhat wiling.”

The survey found that female voters, voters over 65 and voters with a bachelor’s or post-graduate degree were more likely to say they were unwilling to vote for the former president if he is convicted.

Black and Asian voters were also more likely to say they would not vote for Trump if he is convicted. Three-quarters of respondents who identified as atheist said they would be unwilling to vote for Trump if he is found guilty

I would say that it’s hard to believe 40% of the country is willing to vote for a convicted felon but I do believe it. He could shoot someone on 5th Avenue, yadda, yadda, yadda.

But what happens if the court declares that he has immunity? Considering the long delay now in the District Court I think we have to entertain the real possibility that it might happen. At the very least I think we have to prepare ourselves for the idea that none of the major cases are going to reach a jury before the election. All we might get are the civil trials and maybe Stormy Daniels which is very likely to end in acquittal.

I hope I’m wrong. And if he loses the election hopefully he will face justice in the end. But counting on it to help ensure he doesn’t get re-elected is probably not worth investing too much emotional energy.

A Good Message

Published by digby on January 31, 2024

Michigan are you listening?

Supposedly Fox viewers are working class Joe’s who just can’t stand the coastal elites who are ruining their livelihoods. Yet these people have never been particularly union friendly. But it’s a good thing for a union leader to go on Fox and make the case that Trump was bad for the working man, just in case some retired auto workers in Michigan might be watching. You never know …