Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

If you are a person who understands the trauma that October 7th caused to Israelis and Jews around the world, you should see the reality here. The ongoing carnage in Gaza cannot be defended and Israel is very close to losing the support of the rest of the world that currently supports it:

US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said Israel risked “strategic defeat” in its war with Hamas if it fails to heed warnings about the mounting civilian death toll.

“I have personally pushed Israeli leaders to avoid civilian casualties, and to shun irresponsible rhetoric, and to prevent violence by settlers in the West Bank,” Austin said in a speech to the Reagan National Defense Forum in Simi Valley, California, on Saturday.

Austin’s comments come as top US officials have grown increasingly vocal in their warnings to Israel about the death toll in the Gaza Strip. Those warnings, previously confined to closed-door meetings, have been thrust into the open by mounting pressure from Israel’s Arab neighbors, human-rights activists and opinion at home — including the left of President Joe Biden’s Democratic Party.

While Austin and other US leaders have vowed to continue supporting Israel, they worry that American support could become untenable if civilian casualties continue to mount.

“I learned a thing or two about urban warfare from my time fighting in Iraq,” he said. “Like Hamas, ISIS was deeply embedded in urban areas. And the international coalition against ISIS worked hard to protect civilians and create humanitarian corridors.”

“The lesson is not that you can win in urban warfare by protecting civilians. The lesson is that you can only win in urban warfare by protecting civilians,” he said. “In this kind of a fight, the center of gravity is the civilian population. And if you drive them into the arms of the enemy, you replace a tactical victory with a strategic defeat.”

Natanyahu is a bloodthirsty, self-interested monster who will continue the killing as long as he thinks it will keep him in power. The Israeli people must get rid of him. If they don’t find a way to do that they are consigning themselves to the pantheon of collective punishers and will be shunned by the rest of the world.

DeSantis tries to ape Trump again, in the stupidest way possible:

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that he would replace Obamacare with a “better plan” — part of an interview in which he criticized former President Donald Trump for failing to deliver on numerous policy promises during his term in the White House, including frequent pledges to replace the health care law.

“Obamacare hasn’t worked,” DeSantis said in the interview with moderator Kristen Welker, which aired Sunday morning. “We are going to replace and supersede with a better plan.”

He declined to provide details about how his plan would “supersede” Obamacare, also known as the Affordable Care Act, adding that his campaign would most likely roll out a proposal in the spring.

I can’t wait.

I think this is good. With all the Republicans now falling in line to repeal Obamacare and kill Social Security and Medicare, in addition to their hostility to abortion rights, I think we have the makings of a good domestic argument about the future. And they are on the wrong side of it.

Trump has always been a sloppy speaker. But he’s not the same person he was, that’s clear. Someone pointed out the other day that the past and the present seem to be merging in his mind at times. The stuff where he’s talking about golden showers and how his wife took it and constantly saying that Obama is president are tells that something is off in his sense of time and place.

Here are a couple more excerpts from speeches he gave this weekend. They are bizarrely disjointed even for him. Some are just the usual misspeaking but he doesn’t seem to realize he’s done it. In the past he would do some verbal gyration to cover it (of course, he would never say “excuse me” and correct himself as normal people do) but he just sails past this stuff now.

This is just delusional:

This is a massive Freudian slip:

Of course, he’s also the same jackass he always was:

The Flock of Seagulls hairdo gets more elaborate by the day. Can he not see it?

Via Axios:

Muslim Americans in several swing states are scheduled to gather in Michigan on Saturday to start a campaign they’re calling #AbandonBiden, a reflection of their outrage over President Biden‘s handling of the Israel-Hamas war.

 Arab American and Muslim American anger could hurt Biden’s re-election prospects in most of the 2024 swing states he won in 2020, as those groups have been heavily Democratic.

Muslim American leaders from Michigan, Minnesota, Arizona, Wisconsin, Florida, Georgia, Nevada, and Pennsylvania are expected to meet in Dearborn, Mich., to start the new campaign.

“This #AbandonBiden 2024 conference is set against the backdrop of the upcoming 2024 presidential election and the decision to withdraw support for President Biden due to his unwillingness to call for a ceasefire and protect innocents in Palestine and Israel,” the group said in a statement.

“Leaders from swing states will work together to guarantee Biden’s loss in the 2024 election.”

The campaign primarily will focus on social media for now, organizer Jaylani Hussein of Minneapolis tells Axios.

Hussein said Muslim leaders acknowledge that not supporting Biden could result in the re-election of former President Trump, who is disliked by many Muslim Americans because of his racist retweets about them and his efforts to ban Muslims from migrating to the U.S.

Last night:

“We recognize that, in the next four years, our decision may cause us to have an even more difficult time. But we believe that this will give us a chance to recalibrate, and the Democrats will have to consider whether they want our votes or not.”

I guess if you’re in a detention camp there’s lots of time to “recalibrate.” Nice to have that “chance.” But at least this will result in helping the people of Gaza.

Right?

There are dozens

A Newsweek headline on Saturday caught my attention:

Democratic 2024 presidential candidate Marianne Williamson compared the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the Florida Democratic Party to the now defunct Soviet Union, telling Newsweek on Saturday that their actions ahead of the primaries are “essentially authoritarian.”

Williamson, along with fellow Democratic contenders Cenk Uygur, a political commentator and creator of the The Young Turks, and Representative Dean Phillips of Minnesota, has slammed the Florida Democratic Party’s decision to not include their names on the primary ballot. Instead, Democratic voters in the southern state will only see Biden’s name listed—unless the decision is reversed.

In an earlier story, Newsweek reminded readers that Uyger is ineligible to serve as president. But that’s an aside. As for the Florida Democratic Party, it’s been a mess for some time. Not that we can talk here in North Carolina where Democrats in 2022 opposed Green Party recognition. Unwisely, I think. I hope that’s changed.

As for Democrats nationally and the DNC, let’s review. There is no The Democrats (from 2020):

One of the leaders of North Carolina’s Bernie Sanders delegation to the 2016 national convention in Philadelphia called to say he’d just come out of his first caucus meeting with the convention’s 57 delegations.

Fifty-seven? Right. Fifty states, the territories, the District of Columbia, and Democrats Abroad. As often as critics condemn the Democratic Party, the call brought home that there is no The Democrats. There are 57 party organizations that trickled into the union over nearly two centuries, each with its own charter and bylaws, local history, and local languages and customs (not all of them European). The Democratic National Committee may organize the quadrennial convention and administer the national voter file, but it is not the One Ring that rules them all. Chairman Tom Perez runs the DNC. He does not run the party.

Beyond those 57 delegations are several other major players pursuing independent agendas.

The Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee (DLCC) recruits and raises money for state legislative candidates.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) recruits and raises money for congressional candidates, including for reelecting its congressional incumbents.

The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) recruits and raises money for U.S. Senate candidates, including for reelecting its Senate incumbents.

See a pattern?

Guess what the Democratic National Committee’s primary job is? And it’s not running the other 60 organizations. That it does is an internet rumor, an urban legend.

That’s not to say that a lot of thinking among the old boys in many of those groups is not medieval (and defensive when it needs to be aggressive). But changing that won’t happen by changing the top. Change happens from the bottom up.

FYI.

Sleepwalking into dictatorship

The first time I heard colonizer used was (IIRC) in Black Panther (2018). Since then the smear has caught on a bit, and not in a Martin Luther King sort of way. But that single word of dialogue served in the film to instantly replace the European view of Africa with an African view of Europeans. It carries racial connotations, but is anchored not as much in skin color as behavior, on what Europeans do.

We’ve used enablers in the past to describe Donald Trump’s allies inside and outside of government. Former Rep. Liz Cheney offers on “CBS Sunday Morning” a more pointed term for Trump’s confederates based on what they do. They are collaborators, and she doesn’t mean colleagues. She deploys collaborators as the French Resistance might against the Vichy government.

“If you look at what Donald Trump is trying to do, he can’t do it by himself,” Cheney tells John Dickerson. “He has to have collaborators. And the story of [Speaker] Mike Johnson is the story of a collaborator.”

“The Speaker of the House is a collaborator to overthrow the last election,” Dickerson suggests in this clip.

But Cheney means more. Johnson, et al. are collaborators in Trump’s plan for overthrowing the United States Constitution should he get reelected. Trump is blunt about his plans.

“One of the things that we see…is a sort of a sleepwalking into dictatorship in the United States.”

Something to ponder from Pwnallthethings (@pwnallthethings.bsky.social):

Humans have an incredible ability to underestimate how much worse life can get for them personally, and to rationalize themselves as the exception to what would come from putting people like this in charge of the apparatus of government

Update: Here’s the link to the full story.

A lot!

Joyce Vance gives us the low down:

Friday night, Judge Chutkan rejected Trump’s “big” argument that he couldn’t be criminally prosecuted for acts committed during his presidency because he had blanket immunity. We discussed the motion when he filed it in early October (read here if you want a refresher on its substance). At the time, I characterized the argument as a flawed one, likely to be a swing and a miss.

Judge Chutkan agreed. “The Constitution’s text, structure, and history do not support that contention [that the charges should be dismissed],” she wrote in her opinion. “No court—or any other branch of government—has ever accepted it. And this court will not so hold. Whatever immunities a sitting President may enjoy, the United States has only one Chief Executive at a time, and that position does not confer a lifelong ‘get-out-of-jail-free’ pass.’” Read her entire opinion here.

She wrote: “Defendant’s four-year service as Commander in Chief did not bestow on him the divine right of kings to evade the criminal accountability that governs his fellow citizens.” That is what his lawyers argued, that Trump was above the law. As much as the delays and the timing insert an element of uncertainty into all of this, increasingly, there are signs we have judges who believe in this fundamental American principle and are committed to putting it into action.

Judge Chutkan also ruled against Trump’s motion to dismiss on the grounds that his conduct was protected by the First Amendment. “It is well established that the First Amendment does not protect speech that is used as an instrument of a crime, and consequently the Indictment—which charges Defendant with, among other things, making statements in furtherance of a crime—does not violate Defendant’s First Amendment rights,” she wrote. In other words, if Trump pointed a gun at a random passerby and said “stick ‘em up” as a prelude to robbing them while president, he could be prosecuted for that crime and his words would be evidence of and part of the commission of the crime.

The Judge did not rule on Trump’s other pending motions, including ones to dismiss on statutory grounds and due to alleged selective and vindictive prosecution. We discussed all of the dispositive motions in some detail here. She could issue her order on the remaining motions at any time. They are even less likely to be successful than the ones dismissed tonight.

But the Constitutional issues Judge Chutkan has ruled against Trump on are the ones he can appeal in advance of trial. By ruling promptly, She has set that process in motion. Appeals mean delay—not the sort of strategic, excessive delay that is Trump’s hallmark in court proceedings, but delay as a necessary incident to the process. That doesn’t make it any less concerning as the clock continues to tick. But in another interesting development today, that may suggest an appeal could be concluded promptly, the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled against Trump on the presidential immunity issue in a civil case that has been pending for about a year. Although one case is civil and the other criminal, the legal issue is based on the same notion of immunity, that presidents can’t be prosecuted for conduct committed in the scope of their presidency.

In its decision Friday, the appellate court wrote, “When a first-term President opts to seek a second term, his campaign to win re-election is not an official presidential act.” They held the case would move forward and that while Trump could be permitted to argue that the official nature of his conduct means he can’t be held civilly accountable for it, he can’t end the case at this point on that basis.

As we have often noted here in a variety of legal proceedings where he has raised this issue, President Trump may have been entitled to immunity, but candidate Trump is not. The panel wrote, “In the proceedings ahead in the district court, President Trump will have the opportunity to show that his alleged actions in the run-up to and on Jan. 6 were taken in his official capacity as president rather than in his unofficial capacity as presidential candidate.” Good luck convincing a jury that trying to prevent state’s tallies of their citizen’s votes from being counted falls within the scope of presidential duties.

By analogy, the appellate court, with this precedent now on the books, could rule that Trump cannot dismiss the indictment at this point in the proceedings. That would let the case proceed to trial, where Trump can raise his defenses. And the appellate court in DC could do that quickly, with an expedited briefing schedule, as the legal issues were comprehensively briefed before the district court.

[…]

Democracy is on the ballot in 2024, but it’s also on the docket—the courts’ dockets. Their job is to make sure there is a process for Trump that is fair and efficient, but also one that gets the criminal cases in position, consistent with due process concerns, for juries to decide the question of Trump’s guilt, or not, in each case. That’s how our system works. Excessive delay, whether it’s a Trumpian strategy or court condoned/imposed is unacceptable. Americans need to know how juries of our peers assess the evidence against the former president before we vote in 2024. Only the courts can make sure that happens.

I wish I felt confident that any of these cases were going to go forward before the election or that Trump will be found guilty if they do. But this is a good sign, at least as far as it goes. Let’s see if the appellate courts cooperate. Fingers crossed.

Philip Bump takes the time to outline all the ways that Trump has already shown that he will fulfill the plans he’s touting on the campaign trail

[T]his would not be comparable to his inauguration in 2017, an event that took most people by surprise and demanded that he quickly figure out what, exactly, he was going to do. Positioned between the base that devoured his hostile rhetoric and the party that facilitated his election, he split the difference, bringing with him advisers (Stephen K. Bannon and Reince Priebus, respectively) from each camp.

He learned his lesson. The latter camp encouraged him to respect the informal (and, of course, formal) boundaries that accompanied the job. The former camp let him do what he wanted. By the end of his term, nearly all that was left was those enablers, and he’d discovered that most of the boundaries he’d been encouraged to respect were transparently thin. That’s the recognition that he’d take into January 2025.

Trump’s rhetoric, as the likelihood of his being renominated increases, has been less constrained even than it was on the campaign trail in 2015. He promises in explicit terms to use government power against his opponents and in support of himself. He talks about the presidency as though it is meant to be returned to him rather than as something for which he is offering himself as a candidate.

The likelihood of his renomination and his musings about what he would do if given the power of the presidency have spurred discussion about how he might use his position should he win next year. But this discussion ignores an important point: Many of the fears people have raised about what Trump might do reflect things that he did or tried to do the first time around.

We can very obviously begin at the end. Would Trump be content with two terms in office or would he seek to retain power after his second term? Well, as you’ll recall, he and his allies worked tirelessly from Nov. 3, 2020, to Jan. 6, 2021, on retaining his position despite his having lost the presidential election. He deployed nearly every tool he or his allies could think of to subvert the electoral college votes cast by states he lost. He entertained theories about special investigations, seizing voting machines and upending federal law enforcement. He pressured state actors to overturn the results without success, though at a far more substantial cost to those state officials than he has yet paid.

This is informative particularly because it shows how little attention Trump paid to institutional boundaries in a moment where he had few dissenters on his team. Oh, the 22nd Amendment says that presidents can serve only two terms in office? Rest assured that Trump can find some pliant attorneys willing to argue that there’s wiggle room. He’ll just wait in the White House until the dispute has been resolved.

Trump also entertained the idea of deploying federal troops to aid his efforts to retain power, using the authority given to him under the Insurrection Act. (Given the tumult that would have followed, there probably would not have been much time spent considering the irony of using the act to foment an insurrection.) The Associated Press recently explained how the act might allow Trump to use federal troops should he again be elected. But it’s not as though he hadn’t explored the idea while in office.

When protests emerged in the late spring of 2020, Trump repeatedly suggested that he wanted to deploy troops against the (mostly left-wing) protesters; he has subsequently stated that he wished he had. His administration deployed unidentified law enforcement officers into the streets to tamp down the unrest. When Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper publicly objected to using the act, Trump was reportedly incensed. Concern was so widespread in the last days of Trump’s administration that senior military officials released a statement reminding those in the military of their duty to defend the Constitution.

[…]

Trump has also recently mused that the various indictments he faces — including one for trying to overturn the 2020 contest — give him leeway to deploy federal law enforcement against his political opponents. But here, too, we’ve already seen Trump cross a putative boundary.

He entered office under the cloud — using his word — of the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Trump was frustrated that the Justice Department didn’t do more to curtail the probe. He fired Attorney General Jeff Sessions after the 2018 midterms and nominated former attorney general William P. Barr to take his place. Barr had been publicly critical of the Russia probe and quickly appointed U.S. Attorney John Durham to conduct an investigation into the investigation.

The Durham probe ended up lasting longer than the Russia investigation itself, extending into Biden’s presidency under the protection of Durham’s being appointed special counsel. But it failed; Durham showed no significant new evidence that the Russia investigation should not have been undertaken or was a function of anti-Trump bias. Durham obtained an indictment against a lawyer linked to Trump’s 2016 Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, but the lawyer was acquitted at trial.

That’s just one point of leverage Trump’s administration deployed. His former chief of staff also revealed that Trump sought to have the IRS target his political opponents with audits.

One way in which Trump hopes to reduce friction in a second term in office is by overhauling the federal bureaucracy, allowing him to install sympathetic actors more broadly. This, too, he tried to effect during his term in office. In October 2020, he signed an executive order making it easier to fire longtime government workers, but he ran out of time to implement it.

The Biden administration tried to institute a safeguard against Trump’s policy change, but it probably would be trivial for a second Trump administration to sidestep it. It is therefore safe to assume that Trump would move more quickly to upend the bureaucracy should he win in 2024.

On Tuesday, Trump suggested on social media that the government should “come down hard on” MSNBC “and make them pay for their illegal political activity” — casting the channel’s frequent criticisms of him and his politics as somehow violating federal regulations. He’s long been outspoken in his dislike of the media and critical coverage, including by disparaging reporters personally. But there were also reports during his presidency that he aimed to use government regulators to block a merger involving the parent company of CNN, one of his most frequent targets.

There are other things that could be collected in the category of “warnings that Trump has already manifested,” like his use of pardons to benefit himself. But the point has presumably been made: Trump already did or explored doing many of the things that observers now warn he might do during a second term in office.

And, importantly, he has to date paid little to no cost for doing so. He learned that he could do what he wanted and still retain power, still be his party’s nominee. So why not try again?

He’s not just blowing smoke or talking trash on the trail. I would hope we’ve learned by now that assuming he’s just a harmless entertainer is absurd. Yes, he’s full of shit with the bragging and the lying. But he has taken actions that should prove that when he says he’s going to do something, he means it. In the past he was unaware of just how much power he could wield. You can bet that if he were to reclaim the White House he will believe that it is unlimited.

Check this out:

They have lost their minds

He’s not lying.