Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

It’s a mess and it’s getting messier

It appears that Speaker of the House Mike Johnson’s honeymoon is coming to an early conclusion. The Freedom Caucus is hopping mad that he allowed the Defense Authorization Bill to pass with Democratic votes, a big no-no signifying that the bill was obviously much too good. According to Puck’s Tara Palmieri, they accused Johnson of going behind their backs and using a “page ripped from the Boehner playbook” referring to the former speaker who, like Kevin McCarthy, was also chased out of the job for passing bills with Democrats.

Palmieri reports that a senior GOP aide told her that “people are turning on Mike fast; he won’t make a decision” because he wouldn’t choose between two competing bills. And apparently it has finally occurred to them that his lack of experience and expertise might be a problem, quoting the same aide saying, “his operation is minor league compared to Kevin’s team. At least they knew what they were doing and how the place ran. Mike’s team has no idea what they’re doing, and it’s pissing people off. We used to be able to get answers from people.” Who could have seen that coming?

It’s clear from his record that Johnson would love nothing more than to stand by their side and throw tantrums but his job as Speaker is coming into conflict with his ideology as a MAGA warrior and it’s probably not going to end well for him.

He has certainly gone out of his way to show the hardliners that he’s one of them. He immediately made the required pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago to kiss the ring and then enthusiastically delivered his endorsement making it clear that he is still MAGA all the way. And despite just a few weeks ago suggesting that impeachment was no longer necessary since President Biden’s polls numbers are weak (therefore admitting that the whole thing is a partisan sham) he delivered for Trump and the MAGA faithful on their biggest priority this week. He brought the vote to formalize the inquiry to the floor and persuaded the so-called moderates in the party to go along. You’d think that would have appeased the Freedom caucus but let that be a lesson to him: that is simply not possible.

All the usual suspects have been making the rounds since the vote suggesting that the party line vote (which Johnson once insisted could destroy the Republic) shows that they have the goods. But once again, they are lying. They have still produced not one sliver of evidence that Joe Biden did any of the things they are implying he did with their histrionic innuendo about “the Biden Crime Family.”

Interestingly, there is one member of the House who may have actually done the things he’s accusing Biden of doing. A few weeks ago Roger Sollenberger of the Daily Beast broke a story about some shady dealings by House Oversight Chair James Comer that resembles some of the crimes he’s accusing Biden of committing. In a new report the AP unearthed new details and now it’s now pretty clear that his crusade is a clear example of projection.

Comer has been yammering about “the Biden family” shell companies, which Joe Biden had nothing to do with and were actually completely legitimate companies with real purposes, for months. He even once told Fox Business, “nobody creates shell companies.”

Actually, some people do. In fact, Comer himself has a shell company which grew from $50,000 and $100,000 at the time of purchase to between $500,001 and $1 million today. Evidently, he’s conveniently forgotten to report the assets within it which goes against House rules which require members to disclose assets held by companies worth more than $1,000. Oh, and this shell company was formed from a transfer of a piece of land co-owned with one of his major campaign donors and nobody can figure out what the purpose of it was or why he has gone to such lengths to obscure it.

When asked about this, he keeps saying that the questioner is “financially illiterate” which is hilarious considering the total illiteracy of his charges against Joe Biden. If you don’t believe that, I highly recommend this thorough fact check by the Washington Post’s Philip Bump or this one by Factcheck.org. It would be sad if it wasn’t so outrageous.

But the point of all this is to dirty up Joe Biden as corrupt to give some red meat to the Trump followers and make the rest of the country assume “where there’s smoke there’s fire” which is something they’ve been successful at doing against their enemies for decades. I’m sure I don’t have to remind people about Whitewater which bears some similarities with this current bogus scandal in both its lack of evidence or its relevance to the current presidency. The memory of Benghazi and “But Her Emails” against Hillary Clinton are still fresh. The Birther scandal enraptured the right wingers throughout the Obama presidency and launched Donald Trump’s political career.

This is what they do. And more often than not, when you examine these scandals closely you’ll find that it’s the Republicans doing the accusing who are actually guilty of the crimes. James Comer’s flagrant hypocrisy is just par for the course.

Donald Trump wants revenge for his two impeachments and if there was time he would demand that they impeach Biden three times just so he’d have one more than him on his record. And because they’ve pounded this story on right wing media for years now, the MAGA base is slavering over the prospect of taking down the president. It has nothing to do with any real crimes or evidence or anything else that would justify an impeachment.

Those Representatives from swing districts who voted to open the inquiry this week may believe this was essentially a free vote and hope that they won’t be asked to vote for an actual impeachment but I think they are deluding themselves. The constitutional standard for impeachment is “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors” but in practice, as the late president Gerald Ford put it, “an impeachable offense is whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history.”

At this moment in history, Donald Trump, James Comer and Jim Jordan will be deciding what it is and it’s clear that their standard is literally nothing. They’ll do it because they can. That’s the only reason they need.

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Wouldn’t you rather try Hopium?

Many of us have them in our lives or in our families, people who over the Trump years slid from left to right. For some it was the terror and isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic. For others it began sooner than 2020. Most are unknowns, but they often follow better-knowns down the rabbit hole.

Michelle Goldberg considers the phenomenon in light of an In These Times essay by Kathryn Joyce (“The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking and the New Gospel of Adoption“) and Jeff Sharlet (“The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War“) and with a little help from Naomi Klein’s “Doppelganger.”

Goldberg writes:

There have been plenty of high-profile defectors from the left in recent years, among them the comedian Russell Brand, the environmentalist-turned-conspiracy-theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and the journalist Matt Taibbi, a onetime scourge of Wall Street, who was recently one of the winners of a $100,000 prize from the ultraconservative Young America’s Foundation.

What gives this migration political significance, however, are the ordinary people following them, casting off what they view as a censorious liberalism for a movement that doesn’t ask anyone to “do the work” or “check your privilege.” Joyce and Sharlet write, “We, the authors of this article, each count such losses in our own lives, and maybe you do, too: friends you struggle to hold onto despite their growing allegiance to terrifying ideas, and friends you give up on, and friends who have given up on you and the hope you shared together.”

What spurs some to lurch right is rejection by the left. Trust me, I’ve heard that one. Some new volunteers are quickly discouraged at not being elevated to positions of prominence and authority in political campaigns that are mostly grunt work directed by the more experienced. Grunt work is beneath their dignity. They are “big ideas” people.

We see something similar among better-knowns of the post-left. Klein’s book examines the shift with her shadow, the former feminist celebrity Naomi Wolf:

A key question for the left is why this is happening. For some celebrity defectors, the impetus seems clear enough: They lurched right after a cancellation or public humiliation. Klein writes that a turning point for Wolf was widespread mockery after she was confronted, live on the radio, with evidence that the thesis of the book she was promoting was based on her misreading of archival documents. Brand’s right-wing turn, as Matt Flegenheimer wrote in The New York Times Magazine, coincided with the start of investigations into sexual-assault accusations against him. But that doesn’t explain why there’s such an eager audience for born-again reactionaries and why, in much of the Western world, the right has been so much better than the left at harnessing hatred of the status quo.

Part of the answer is probably that the culture of the left is simply less welcoming, especially to the politically unsure, than the right. The conservative movement may revel in cruelty toward out-groups — see, for example, the ravening digital mobs that descended on the podcaster Julia Mazur for a TikTok she made about the pleasures of life without children — but the movement is often good at love-bombing potential recruits. “People go where people accept them, or are nice to them, and away from people who are mean to them,” the Marxist Edwin Aponte, one of the founders of the heterodox but socially conservative magazine Compact, told Joyce and Sharlet.

But I think there’s a deeper problem, which stems from a crisis of faith in the possibility of progress. Liberals and leftists have lots of excellent policy ideas, but rarely articulate a plausible vision of the future. I sometimes hear leftists talk about “our collective liberation,” but outside a few specific contexts — the ongoing subjugation of the Palestinians comes to mind — I mostly have no idea what they’re talking about.

This is important. The left can be censorious, purist, and unwelcoming, especially glass-half-empty progressives for whom every victory is a sellout. They find a dark cloud in every silver lining, As smart and well-informed as they are, they never seem to grasp why more aren’t eager to join the pity party. What they get out of relentless negativity is beyond me. Patience, flexibility is not selling out. As Anand Giridharadas found, it’s movement-building:

A repeated theme in Anand Giridharadas’s “The Persuaders” is “Is there room among the woke for the waking?” Do those on the left edge of the left — at the cutting edge of consciousness, if you prefer — possess enough critical mass to achieve the progressive goals they seek:

Veteran activists Giridharadas profiles have decided they do not. Success means expanding their movements without compromising them. They’ve learned to “call in” progressives with whom they mostly agree rather than just calling them out for their failings, to focus more on conversion than on hunting heretics. They walk a fine line seeking to coalition with more moderate allies without watering down their own goals.

“Was any movement ever made stronger by subtraction?” ask Joyce and Sharlet:

Meanwhile, the Right knows the power of addition. For Steve Bannon, his new War Room regular Naomi Wolf is just one more wedge he can use to peel pandemic-aggrieved suburban ​“wellness moms” away from the Democratic Party, just as he’s pulled the ​“white working class” toward Trump.

For every Wolf, for every Taibbi, there are so many everyday people following them rightward. Not selling out but breaking up, sometimes cracking up, giving into knowingness and the elation of ​“seeing through” the con— of Covid, or pronouns, or ​“the Russia hoax” or ​“Trump Derangement Syndrome.”

We, the authors of this article, each count such losses in our own lives, and maybe you do, too: friends you struggle to hold onto despite their growing allegiance to terrifying ideas, and friends you give up on, and friends who have given up on you and the hope you shared together.

Hope, after all, is earnest, and earnest can be embarrassing, especially now as the odds seem to lengthen. But as media critic Jay Rosen puts it, what matters more than odds are stakes. We, the authors of this article — such an earnest phrase — have spent much of the past 20 years documenting the mutations of the Right in the United States and around the world. We’ve taken courage from the fault lines such close examination reveals: that there is no singular Right, but many, so often squalling, like the GOP House conference that just spent a month searching for a speaker. 

But in this age of Trump, his presence and his shadow, we’ve witnessed more right-wing factions converging than splitting, putting aside differences and adopting new and ugly dreams. They, of course, do not see the dreams as ugly, but beautiful. Utopian, even, with MAGA as merely prelude to what the intellectuals among them sometimes refer to as ​“sovereignty,” ​“greatness” or ​“the common good”: sweet-sounding phrases that find their purest expression in the image of the gallows erected outside the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. The greater the spectacle, the stronger its gravity. That’s what makes fascism so scary when it genuinely flares. It consumes. It grows.

Ron Brownstein in The Atlantic Thursday cites a study that amplifies an economic message that research finds has appeal where Democrats remain weak:

To close that gap, the study argues, Biden and Democrats must shift the debate from which party is best equipped to grow the overall economy to which side can help families achieve what the report calls a “better life.” The study argues that Democrats can win that argument with a three-pronged message centered on: delivering tangible kitchen-table economic benefits (such as increased federal subsidies for buying health insurance), confronting powerful special interests (such as major corporations), and pledging to protect key personal liberties and freedoms, led by the right to legal abortion.

The study was conducted by Way to Win, a group that provides funding for candidates and organizations focused on mobilizing voters of color, in conjunction with Anat Shenker-Osorio, of ASO Communications, a message consulting firm for progressive candidates and causes. Last year, Way to Win was among the top advocates pushing the party to stress a message of protecting personal freedoms and democracy—an approach that helped Democrats overperform expectations despite widespread discontent about the economy.

Reversing the advantage Donald Trump and the GOP have on the economy will require Democrats to highlight “the tangible improvements their policies have made in people’s lives, in lieu of speaking of abstract economic gains, as well as touting their future agenda of expanding on these gains, taking on corporate greed and the MAGA Republicans who aim to rule only for the wealthy few,” concludes a memo summarizing the research that was provided exclusively to The Atlantic.

I hate to break it to Brownstein, but these are people dedicated to sharing their findings widely. ASO Communications posts on its web site most of what it’s paid to produce. Keeping it proprietary defeats the mission.

What Brownstein reports about Democrats’ economics message and what Goldberg sees is that a “plausible vision of the future” is what’s missing on the left, what Shenker-Osorio calls painting the beautiful tomorrow.

Brownstein:

“If the argument is who [handles] the economy best, even though it’s not true in any sense, that’s their brand advantage,” Shenker-Osorio told me. “If the question is who is going to create the best future for your family, that is a Democratic-brand advantage. That is a story we can tell. It’s a credible story, and it’s a story that people care more about.”

There’s plenty of negativity to report. But what we try to do here is mix in a dose of Hopium as well. How else to get out of bed every day?

It’s Happy Hollandaise Time! You help keep lit this beacon of sanity.

Clay Higgins is on the case

Brandi Buchman’s offering was the first thing that popped up on the hellsite this a.m. Clearly, former Louisiana lawman Rep. Clay Higgins, perpetually in high dudgeon (I love that phrase), is enjoying his moment in Lara Logan’s Truth in Media spotlight.

“The Cajun John Wayne,” the man who accused the FBI of sending “ghost busses” filled with agents to Washington, D.C. on Jan. 6 to impersonate Trump supporters and spark the riot, has “done his research.” Again. Higgins insists that the Biden administration has weaponized the government (MAGAs love that phrase) to track Trump supporters.

Higgins is gonna gear up, lock and load, expose ’em, flush ’em out, nip it in the bud:

“I’m telling you, we’re in uncharted waters as it relates to the weaponization of our government against the American people. I am not frightened of these people. I’ve spent my life serving others, and I love my country. This thing is not going to just slip away. They’re not going to take us without a fight. I’m going to fight legally and peacefully and within the parameters of the constitution that I’ve sworn to serve. But they’re going down. These men and their high perch and their position of power and authority that are walking upon our entire history, our deepest core principles. They’re not going to get away with it.”

Ok Clay https://t.co/8AzqZFI4Wj

— Brandi Buchman (@Brandi_Buchman) December 15, 2023

Higgins gets too little attention for his skill at generating word salad like: “You millennial leftists who never lived one day under nuclear threat can now reflect upon your woke sky. You made quite a non-binary fuss to save the world from intercontinental ballistic tweets.”

And gems like this that it took Jeff Sharlet to translate:

“President Trump said he has been summoned to appear at the Federal Courthouse in Miami on Tuesday, at 3 PM. This is a perimeter probe from the oppressors. Hold. rPOTUS has this. Buckle up. 1/50K know your bridges. Rock steady calm. That is all.”

How about the sanction Higgins drew over a Facebook post:

The beauty of Facebook posts is that screenshots allow preservation of the impulsive madness of posters. Higgins, R-Lafayette, posted a picture of Black men carrying assault-style rifles and other tactical gear. Higgins said that anyone arriving in the state “aggressively natured and armed” would have a “one way ticket.”

“I’d drop any 10 of you where you stand,” said the post, which was removed not long after appearing on Higgins’ official campaign account. “Nothing personal. We just eliminate the threat. We don’t care what color you are. We don’t care if you’re left or right. if you show up like this, if We recognize threat … you won’t walk away.”

Facebook removed the post for breaking the company’s “Violence and Incitement” policies, a company spokesperson confirmed late Tuesday.

Higgins will be the first to let you know when the revolution is here:

“America is being manipulated into a new era of government control. Your liberty is threatened from within. Welcome to the front lines, Ladies and Gentlemen. I suggest you get your mind right. I’ll advise when it’s time gear up, mount up, and roll out.”

Mount up, Pilgrims.

Update: Adding this from about 10:30 ET on the hellsite.

It’s Happy Hollandaise Time! You help keep lit this beacon of sanity.

They sneaked it into the defense bill

The Hill reports:

Congress has approved legislation that would prevent any president from withdrawing the United States from NATO without approval from the Senate or an Act of Congress. 

The measure, spearheaded by Sens. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) and Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), was included in the annual National Defense Authorization Act, which passed out of the House on Thursday and is expected to be signed by President Biden. 

The provision underscores Congress’s commitment to the NATO alliance that was a target of former President Trump’s ire during his term in office. The alliance has taken on revitalized importance under Biden, especially since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

“NATO has held strong in response to [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s war in Ukraine and rising challenges around the world,” Kaine said in a statement. He added the legislation “reaffirms U.S. support for this crucial alliance that is foundational for our national security. It also sends a strong message to authoritarians around the world that the free world remains united.”

Rubio said the measure served as a critical tool for congressional oversight.

“We must ensure we are protecting our national interests and protecting the security of our democratic allies,” he said in a statement. 

Biden has invested deeply in the NATO alliance during his term, committing more troops and military resources to Europe as a show of force against Putin’s war. He has also overseen the expansion of the alliance with the inclusion of Finland and ongoing efforts to secure Sweden’s full accession.

Trump, the front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination, has sent mixed messages on the alliance ahead of 2024. The former president’s advocates say his tough talk and criticisms of the alliance served to inspire member-states to fulfill their obligations to reach 2 percent of defense spending, lightening the burden on the U.S.

But Trump’s critics say the former president’s rhetoric weakens the unity and force of purpose of the alliance. And they expressed concerns that Trump would abandon the U.S. commitment to the mutual defense pact of the alliance or withdraw the U.S. completely. 

You have to love Trump supporter Marco Rubio proving once again that he talks out of both sides of his mouth. He publicly gives him kudos and slams Biden but clearly knows that Trump is a massive threat.

Also, Trumps critics are right. Even if he can’t unilaterally withdraw from NATO, he can easily destroy it just by letting his buddy Vladimir Putin have his way:

In an interview with columnist Thomas B. Edsall of The New York Times, Council on Foreign Relations senior vice president James Lindsay believes that a second Trump term would be a massive windfall for Russia’s Vladimir Putin, currently mired in a disastrous invasion of Ukraine that has evolved into a costly stalemate.

“Trump could effectively gut NATO simply by saying he will not come to the aid of NATO allies in the event they are attacked,” said Lindsay. “The power of Article V rests on the belief that alliance members, and specifically, the most powerful alliance member, will act when called upon. Destroy that belief and the organization withers. Walking away from Ukraine would damage the alliance as well even though Ukraine is not a member of NATO. Member countries would read it as a signal that Trump is abandoning Europe.”

Even in his first term, Trump was often hostile toward the NATO alliance, complaining that other member states needed to pay more in military spending to secure American support, and he frequently praised Putin on the world stage — to this day saying he trusts the Russian autocrat more than the U.S. intelligence agencies, whom he believes were out to get him.

“Trump’s hostility toward alliances, skepticism about the benefits of cooperation writ large, and his belief in the power of unilateral action will lead him to make foreign policy moves that will unintentionally provide strategic windfalls to China, Russia, Iran or North Korea,” Lindsay continued. “The scenario in which he withdraws the United States from NATO or says he will not abide by Article V is the most obvious example.”

The actual motivation of Trump in doing this, “will be to save money and/or free the United States from foreign entanglements,” Lindsay added. “But Vladimir Putin would love to see NATO on the ash heap of history.”

Putin is clearly going to hold out until next November in the hopes that Trump will win. And I’m sure he’ll do what he can to help. It wouldn’t be the first time. And now, Trump has the entire Republican Party on board the Putin train as well.

https://t.co/13acPoJVM9 pic.twitter.com/zjG7FsQBSE

— Julia Davis (@JuliaDavisNews) December 14, 2023

Here’s Julia Davis’ report from last week:

Republicans voted to block a $110.5 billion emergency spending bill to aid Ukraine and Israel Wednesday night, sparking celebrations in Moscow where they believe the U.S. will withdraw support for Kyiv allowing them to win the war.

A classified briefing with administration officials reportedly devolved into a meltdown on Tuesday afternoon, making it clear that the measure would fail. “We are about to abandon Ukraine,” Senator Christopher S. Murphy told the press as he left the briefing. “When Vladimir Putin marches into a NATO country, they will rue the day they decided to play politics with the future of Ukraine’s security.”

These developments prompted jubilation in Moscow. During Wednesday’s broadcast of a state TV program 60 Minutes, Evgeny Popov said Ukraine was now in “agony” and it was “difficult to imagine a bigger humiliation.”

During his morning show Full Contact on Wednesday, top pro-Kremlin propagandist Vladimir Solovyov joyfully noted: “[Janet] Yellen screamed, “Don’t you dare!” [Joe] Biden screamed, “Don’t you dare!” but Republicans said, “Go to hell! We won’t give your khokhols [slur for “Ukrainians”] any money.” The segment was entitled, “No one needs Ukraine anymore—especially the United States.”

Appearing on his program, America analyst Dmitry Drobnitsky noted, “The downfall of Ukraine means the downfall of Biden! Two birds with one stone!”

During his appearance on 60 Minutes, Dmitry Abzalov, president of the Center for Strategic Communications, predicted that the fiasco with the funding for Ukraine will spell the political demise of Biden. Host Olga Skabeeva added, “We’ll have no pity for him! To the contrary, we’re ready to hammer those final nails right in!” With a happy grin, Skabeeva said, “Well done, Republicans! They’re standing firm! That’s good for us.”

Roman Golovanov, the host of Golovanov’s Time on Vladimir Solovyov’s channel Solovyov Live, pointed out, “This will be a great revelation to other countries. It is even more dangerous to be a friend of the United States than its enemy. In the end, they will abandon you, leaving nothing but the scorched earth on your territory.”

The turmoil comes at a critical point in time, with Russia facing internal issues, while its invasion failed to proceed at the rate anticipated by the experts. The population is tired of the war but is predictably hesitant to express that for fear of being arrested or otherwise persecuted. Instead, many show their displeasure by tuning out the relentless war coverage. On Wednesday, Solovyov noted, “We lived in peace for too long and now we have to get used to living through war… With great interest, I’m observing the negative growth on my Telegram channel, meaning that the number of followers is sharply declining. Oh well, that’s life.” Solovyov previously complained that every day Russians are losing interest in Putin’s war.

The GOP’s willingness to jeopardize Ukraine’s ability to defend itself provided a sudden boost to the faltering Russian propagandists—a crucial element of Putin’s war effort that is used to motivate the masses. In recent months, their rhetoric devolved from “When we win” to “If we win,” reflecting realities on the ground. Winter’s arrival added another layer of concern. The Republicans brought back the joy for Putin’s gloomy propagandists, reviving their musings as to how they will “punish” Ukrainians once Russia wins.

The only news that dampened the celebration in Moscow was the revelation that Taylor Swift–and not Vladimir Putin–was named TIME Magazine’s Person of the Year. The host of The Meeting Place Andrey Norkin angrily complained, “Taylor Swift! No one knows who that broad is, but Americans worship her.”

As she says, they are very happy with the GOP but they are ecstatic about the potential return of Trump.

I don’t think there’s any doubt that the entire panoply of alliances that have been the bulwark of the post WWII world will be blown up. And maybe you think it’s time for a reevaluation of our national security and foreign policy in that regard which is certainly arguable. But I don’t think anyone with any sense would think that in a time of existential global threat of climate change and various new emerging threats it makes sense to just blow everything up with nothing but Donald Trump’s dazzling personality to put in its place.

For instance, this should work out well:

Trump may be prepared to give up on even attempting to convince Kim to dismantle his country’s nuclear weapons if he wins another term in 2024. At least part of his motivation, the people said, would be to avoid wasting time on what he sees as futile arms talks — and focus instead on the larger task of competing with China.

Trump, one of the people said, is highly motivated to get an agreement with North Korea. “He knows he wants a deal,” this person said of Trump. “What type of deal? I don’t think he has thought that through.”

“Thinking it through” would be a first.

That’s the kind of thing we’re looking at if Trump wins. His approach to foreign policy is just as lethal as his fascist domestic policy. It’s terrifying.

It’s Happy Hollandaise time, folks. If you’d like to contribute you can do so below:

It’s overrun by horrible people and the bots that impersonate them

The First lady shared this innocuous Christmas video and then all hell broke loose:

A bit of magic, wonder, and joy brought to you by the talented tappers of Dorrance Dance, performing their playful interpretation of The Nutcracker Suite.

Enjoy! 💕 pic.twitter.com/qXtCm4t37o

— Jill Biden (@FLOTUS) December 13, 2023

Here’s a perfect example of everything that’s wrong with Xitter. First look at this fun White House Christmas video shared by the First Lady:

So what’s the problem?

Well:

They seem nice, don’t they?

It goes on like that for days. I think Amanda Marcotte nailed it. It’s obvious:

I know! It’s tap-dancing, it’s not pole dancing fergawdsakes. And the choeography dancing through the White House was impressive! But yeah, some of the dancers are black and some are gay. And they are (apparently) too exuberant which means they don’t know their place. It’s pretty clear what these critics are upset about.

Honestly, there is nothing these homophobic racist jerks won’t whine about. Nothing…

It’s Happy Hollandaise time, folks. If you’d like to participate, you can do so below. 🙂

Let’s hope it goes better than it did 23 years ago

The Republican party’s descent into post-ideological madness has been well documented over the years, here and elsewhere. Those of us who have been around a while started seeing it back in the 1980s when Newt Gingrich and his gang started to adopt scorched earth tactics to destroy their political opponents and it gained steam during the Clinton years with a tabloid strategy designed to titillate the electorate and offend the allegedly pious right wing Christians.

But it shifted into something more dangerous in the 2000 election when they decided that there were no holds barred when it came to holding on to power.

I was reminded of all that yesterday when this popped up in my social media feeds:

I assume that you all know what went down in that case so I won’t belabor it. In a nutshell, when the Republicans pulled out every shady stop in a state run by the candidate’s brother to ensure that recounts were stopped so that his rival would never go ahead in the election, we should have known that our democracy was more fragile than we thought. And when the Supreme Court surprisingly stepped in and two Justices, who had been nominated to the court by the candidate’s father, made up the 5-4 majority that ended the count and put their boy into the White House it was a warning shot across the bow.

The inherent corruption of the Republican party and the weakness of our democracy was on full display but we turned away. They all told us to “get over it.” They won, we lost.

It was only 16 years later that once again we had an election in which the winner of the popular vote lost the electoral college. And then it happened again in 2020, with each time the margins becoming exponentially larger. And the Republicans, emboldened by their previous victories and the enthusiasm of their deluded base for a celebrity demagogue, went all in with the electoral corruption.

Donald Trump put three justices on the Supreme Court, two of them through corrupt means engineered by the gravedigger of democracy, Mitch McConnell. Now, they have agreed to look at a couple of cases that could end the Special Counsel’s pursuit of justice for Donald Trump’s coup and insurrection in 2020. Everything is on the line this time.

The first concerns the charge of obstruction of an official proceeding which has been used against many of the January 6th insurrectionists and is one of the charges against Trump. The other is the specious notion of blanket presidential immunity, which the court agreed to consider but which has also been taken up by the DC court of appeals on an accelerated basis. Both of them will have serious consequences for the rule of law and the upcoming election.

It was inevitable that the Supremes had to weigh in eventually so it’s probably better that they do it sooner rather than later. I wish I had more confidence that they will do the right thing but having been scarred by that earlier intervention, and with the court majority made up of right wing ideologues and partisan hacks, I’m not sanguine.

But I am hoping for the best, as always. What else can we do?

Here at Hullabaloo we’ll be following this closely. We have no lawyers on board but we do read and watch the news obsessively and will try to bring you the best coverage and analysis we see. The legal maneuverings are some of the most important stories out there.

Here’s why it matters so much:

If you could help us keep this place going for the next year as we face the most important election of our lifetimes (and I really mean that!!!!) it would be most appreciated. Your generosity in the past has meant so much and I will always be grateful

I sincerely hope everyone can take a break from all the crazy, rest up and get ready for what’s going to be a very bumpy year.

Cheers,
digby

Happy Hollandaise everyone!

Dreamy Paul Ryan has some thoughts about Donald Trump

The Guardian has a write up on his comments on a podcast from last month that’s only now making the rounds. He doesn’t say anything we all didn’t already know but it might mean something to a few swing voters who remember him as a normal Republican:

Ryan, from Wisconsin, left Congress in 2019 and now sits on the board of Fox Corp, parent company of Fox News. He was speaking to Kevin Kajiwara, co-president of Teneo Political Risk Advisory, in a podcast interview recorded in November but widely noticed this week.

Voices on both sides of the main political aisle have criticised Ryan for not strongly opposing Trump when he ran for the Republican nomination in 2016, or through four chaotic years in the White House that ended in the deadly January 6 attack on Congress.

When stepping down Ryan praised Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, widely blamed for increasing inequality and the national deficit, as one of his biggest achievements along with increasing defense spending.

Trump was impeached twice, including for January 6, but escaped conviction and now dominates polling for the next Republican presidential nomination.

He does so despite facing 91 criminal charges, including 17 related to attempted election subversion, and civil threats including a business fraud trial and a defamation suit arising from a rape claim a judge called “substantially true”.

Kajiwara asked Ryan how he thought history would judge Kinzinger and Cheney, conservative Republicans from Illinois and Wyoming who stood against Trump and sat on the January 6 committee before being forced out of Congress.

“Look,” Ryan said, “Trump’s not a conservative. He’s an authoritarian narcissist. So I think they basically called him out for that. He’s a populist, authoritarian narcissist.

“… All of his tendencies are basically where narcissism takes him, which is whatever makes him popular, makes him feel good at any given moment.

“He doesn’t think in classical liberal-conservative terms. He thinks in an authoritarian way. And he’s been able to get a big chunk of the Republican base to follow him because he’s the culture warrior.”

Ryan, an economic conservative who was Mitt Romney’s running mate in 2012, continued: “There has to be some line, some principle that is so important to you that you’re just not going to cross, so that when you’re brushing your teeth in the morning, look yourself in the mirror, you like what you see. I think Adam and Liz are brushing their teeth, liking what they see.

“And I think a lot of people in Congress … on the second impeachment, they thought Trump was dead. They thought after January 6, he wasn’t going to have a comeback. He was dead, so they figured, ‘I’m not going to take this heat, vote against this impeachment, because he’s gone anyway.’

“But … he’s been resurrected. There’s lots of reasons for that. But he has been. So I think there’s a lot of people who already regret not getting him out of the way when they could have. So I think history will be kind to those people who saw what was happening and called it out, even though it was at the expense of their wellbeing.”

@accountablegop Former House Speaker Paul Ryan praises Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney for standing up to Trump: “Trump's not a conservative. He's an authoritarian, a narcissist…Adam and Liz stepped out of the flow and called it out and paid for it with their careers.” #republican #accountability #gop #nevertrump #never #trump #politics #political #fyp #foryou #washingtondc #conservative ♬ original sound – AccountableGOP

Did Ryan call it out early? I don’t remember that.

But better late than never, I suppose. But it would be good if he appeared in some places other than an obscure podcast to make these comments. Like Fox news, for instance. He’s on the board for crying out loud.

Sure the MAGA crowd will reject him as the worst RINO. They did that all the way back in 2016. But there might be a few people who need to hear this that could be persuaded not to vote for him.

I don’t expect Paul Ryan to come out for Biden. (I suppose it’s possible since it’s looking more like Cheney and Kinzinger will do it, but I’d be shocked.) Still, if he made the case for staying home or writing in someone else it could help. Just saying this stuff is better than nothing but he could do a lot more.

Everybody knows that he’s not the only Republican who thinks this. Maybe his coming forward will motivate some of them to speak out as well. I’m not counting on it, but you never know.

Happy Hollandaise everyone! If you’d like to help keep the lights on I’d appreciate it:

It appears that James Comer is quite the financial operator

Roger Sollenberger at the Daily Beast broke a story about Comer’s shady financial dealings with his brother a couple of weeks ago. When confronted with it in a hearing by Florida Congressman Jared Moskowitz, he got so mad he lost control and called Moskowitz a smurf.

Now the AP has filled in some more blanks on Comer’s finances:

Rep. James Comer, a multimillionaire farmer, boasts of being one of the largest landholders near his rural Kentucky hometown, and he has meticulously documented nearly all of his landholdings on congressional financial disclosure documents – roughly 1,600 acres in all.

But there are six acres that he bought in 2015 and co-owns with a longtime campaign contributor that he has treated differently, transferring his ownership to Farm Team Properties, a shell company he co-owns with his wife.

Interviews and records reviewed by The Associated Press provide new insights into the financial deal, which risks undercutting the force of some of Comer’s central arguments in his impeachment inquiry of President Joe Biden. For months, the chairman of the House Oversight committee and his Republican colleagues have been pounding Biden for how his relatives traded on their famous name to secure business deals.

In particular, Comer has attacked some Biden family members, including the president’s son Hunter, over their use of “shell companies” that appear designed to obscure millions of dollars in earnings they received from shadowy middlemen and foreign interests.

Such companies typically exist only on paper and are formed to hold an asset, like real estate. Their opaque structures are often designed to help hide ownership of property and other assets.

The companies used by the Bidens are already playing a central role in the impeachment investigation, which is expected to gain velocity after House Republicans voted Wednesday to formally authorize the probe. The vote follows the federal indictment last week of Biden’s son Hunter on charges he engaged in a scheme to avoid paying taxes on his earnings through the companies.

But as Comer works to “deliver the transparency and accountability that the American people demand” through the GOP’s investigation, his own finances and relationships have begun to draw notice, too, including his ties to prominent local figures who have complicated pasts not all that dissimilar to some of those caught up in his Biden probe.

[…]

The AP found that Farm Team Properties functions in a similarly opaque way as the companies used by the Bidens, masking his stake in the land that he co-owns with the donor from being revealed on his financial disclosure forms. Those records describe Farm Team Properties as his wife’s “land management and real estate speculation” company without providing further details.

It’s not clear why Comer decided to put those six acres in a shell company, or what other assets Farm Team Properties may hold. On his most recent financial disclosure forms, Comer lists its value as being as much as $1 million, a substantial sum but a fraction of his overall wealth.

Ethics experts say House rules require members of Congress to disclose all assets held by such companies that are worth more than $1,000.

“It seems pretty clear to me that he should be disclosing the individual land assets that are held by” the shell company, said Delaney Marsco, a senior attorney who specializes in congressional ethics at the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center in Washington.

[…]

Comer created the company in 2017 to hold his stake in the six acres that he purchased two years earlier in a joint venture with Darren Cleary, a major campaign contributor and construction contractor from Monroe County, Kentucky, where the congressman was born and raised.

It’s not clear how Comer came to invest with Cleary, who did not respond to an interview request. They have offered mutual praise for each other over the years, including Comer having called Cleary “my friend” and “the epitome of a successful businessperson” from the House floor.

Cleary, his businesses and family have donated roughly $70,000 to Comer’s various campaigns, records show. He has also lauded Comer on social media for “For Fighting For Us Everyday” and has posted photos of the two on a golf course together.

At the time he and Comer entered their venture, Cleary was selling an acre of his family’s land to Kentucky so it could build a highway bypass near Tompkinsville, which was completed in 2020. He sold Comer a 50% stake for $128,000 in six acres he owned that would end up being adjacent to the highway.

Comer, a powerful political figure in this rural part of Kentucky, announced his bid for Congress days after purchasing the land.

Marketing materials described the land as “choice” property and play up its proximity to the bypass. The partnership sold off about an acre last year for $150,000, a substantial increase over its value when purchased, property records show.

Farm Team Properties has also become more valuable. On Comer’s financial disclosure forms, it has risen in value from between $50,000 and $100,000 in 2016 to between $500,001 and $1 million in 2022, records show.

As House Oversight Committee chairman, Comer has presented himself as a bipartisan ethics crusader only interested in uncovering the truth. As evidence, he has pointed to a long career as a state legislator and official who sought to build bridges with Democrats and to “clean up scandal, restore confidence, and crack down on waste, fraud, and abuse.”

Interviews with allies, critics and constituents, however, reveal a fierce partisan who has ignored wrongdoing by friends and supporters if they can help him advance in business and politics.

“The Jamie Comer I knew was light and sunshine and looking for common ground. Now he’s Nixonian,” said Adam Edelen, a former Democratic state auditor and friend, comparing the lawmaker to a disgraced former president who resigned from office amid the Watergate scandal.

He’s beyond Nixonian. He’s Trumpian which is even worse.

Everyone who’s known him says that he’s made an abrupt turn in the last couple of years from being a fairly moderate (for Kentucky), easygoing, guy who was willing to work with others. Now he’s an unapologetic MAGA crusader. If I had to guess, I’d say that being on TV all the time is a very intoxicating thing for some people. He’s on TV a lot.

By the way, Donald Trump has over 500 shell companies. Nobody knows where half of his money is. He’s being sued for fraud by the state of New York and has had to settle one massive lawsuit after another. Oh, also both of his sons, his daughter and his son-in-law were selling access to any foreigner with cash throughout the Trump presidency as was the president himself with his pay-to-play properties all over the world.

But hey, Burisma! Also Biden paid Hunter’s car payment.

Honestly, the biggest regret for me about Trump’s first term was that they never went after him for all the corruption that was going on right in front of our eyes. I know they felt they had to pick their battles but this was really low hanging fruit and they never wanted to go there. It was a mistake.

It’s Happy Hollandaise time. If you’d like to help …

Paul Ryan on MAGA

Howie Klein (Down With Tyranny!) posts this morning on former speaker Paul Ryan’s interview from two weeks ago.

“The entertainers took over Congress,” Ryan told Teneo Insights [timestamp 2:10]. When “a handful of nihilists who go to Congress not to legislate but to be provocative entertainers, this is what happens.”

The Party of Trump was not amused, Howie observes:

Now remember, this is the guy who predicted that if Trump is the nominee, Republicans will lose next year. He predicted Biden would beat Trump and said he thinks “leaders should endeavor to be honest, ethical, moral people who try to set standards for themselves and lead by example across the country. Donald Trump doesn’t try to do any of that. He does the opposite, frankly. So I just don’t think he’s fit for the job here… Do you think those suburban voters like Donald Trump more since Jan. 6? I mean, good grief. They didn’t vote for him this last time, they’re not going to vote for him again.” Nor was he excited about the congressional Republicans: “It’s nihilism, is what it is. We look like fools. We look like we can’t govern.” In the video below, he also predicted that if Trump is the nominee– he will be– the GOP will lose House and Senate seats. He’s correct.

Mediaite published the video of Ryan slamming Trump again yesterday. Kevin Kajiwara asked Ryan how he thinks history will remember Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, both Republicans whose political careers in the House of Representatives came to an end after they stood against the former president. Trump will go ballistic when he reads Ryan’s response:

Look, Trump’s not a conservative. He’s an authoritarian narcissist. So I think they basically called him out for that. He’s a populist, authoritarian narcissist. So historically speaking, all of his tendencies are basically where narcissism takes him, which is whatever makes him popular, makes him feel good at any given moment… He doesn’t think in classical liberal-conservative terms. He thinks in an authoritarian way. And he’s been able to get a big chunk of the Republican base to follow him because he’s the culture warrior.

And so I think Adam and Liz stepped out of the flow and called it out and, you know, paid for it. Paid for it with their careers. But I think, again, back to my earlier point, I don’t think he is really very good at these jobs unless you’re willing to lose these jobs. And there has to be some line, some principle that is so important to you that you’re just not going to cross so that when you’re brushing your teeth in the morning, look yourself in the mirror. You like what you see.

Mediaite adds:

Ryan has been on Fox Corporation’s board of directors since 2019. This has been a recurring point of contention for Trump, his allies, and Trump media backers like former Fox News host Tucker Carlson have accused Ryan of meddling behind the scenes.

Maybe yes, maybe no. But why not get well paid for doing it, eh?

Somewhere recently I read that once the war against the Axis powers was over, people all over France began claiming they were part of La Résistance against the Nazis and the collaborationist Vichy régime. A national case of stolen valor. So it may be in this country once MAGA is no more.

Cheney and Kinzinger earned their plaudits for standing up to Donald Trump while they were still in office.

It’s Happy Hollandaise Time! We’re glad you came.

Martin Niemöller got it wrong

“First they came for the socialists,” etc. Per the Holocaust Museum’s Encyclopedia, Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller “sympathized with many Nazi ideas and supported radically right-wing political movements” in the 1920s and early 1930s. But once Hitler came to power and began interfering with the church, he became a critic. Niemöller spent WWII in Nazi prisons and concentration camps. He wrote “First they came for…” after the war.

Niemöller got it wrong. He was a man, after all.

First they come for the women.

First it was the Dobbs decision revoking half a century of women’s right to bodily autonomy. We’re throwing the abortion question back to the states, the court said. Let them decide.

Then came a string of ballot measures and laws passed protecting women’s rights. Ohio Republicans immediately declared the voters’ will was not binding on their gerrymandered legislative majority. They would revoke state courts’ jurisdiction over cases brought under the new constitutional amendment protecting reproductive rights.

Texas passed its highly restrictive abortion law while assuring the public that exceptions were built in to protect women’s lives. Then AG Ken Paxton, backed up by the state’s Supreme Court, proved that the exceptions were a sham.

The Arizona Supreme Court on Tuesday heard arguments in a case involving an 1864 law still on the books:

At stake in the case is the future of that Civl War-era law, which criminalized abortion by making it a felony punishable by two to five years in prison for anyone who performs or helps a woman obtain one. The law — which was codified again in 1901, and once again in 1913, after Arizona became a state — includes an exception to save the woman’s life.

A more recent law from March 2022 snapped into effect weeks after Roe was overturned banning abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. The law makes exceptions for medical emergencies but not for rape or incest. 

Simmering in the background was the Texas case challenging women’s access to pharmaceutical abortion. Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern write:

The Supreme Court agreed on Wednesday to consider a challenge to access to mifepristone, the first drug used in medication abortion, teeing up the most important dispute over reproductive rights since Roe v. Wade’s reversal in June of 2022. Based on the narrow scope of the issue the court ultimately agreed to hear, there is good reason to believe that a majority of justices will quash the case by deciding that the plaintiffs had no business suing in the first place. Such a decision, which will come down months before the 2024 election, will probably be hailed as proof of the high court’s sober moderation. It will, in reality, prove no such thing. Rather, that outcome would leave the smoking wreckage of abortion access post-Dobbs intact, while pushing off, for now, its most unhinged expansion by a court below. More dramatically, such a move would leave open the possibility that a future Republican president could ban abortion nationwide without enacting a single new law by exploiting the puritanical Comstock Act of 1873. If, while protecting access to medication abortion, SCOTUS opts to keep this loaded gun on the table, then the legality of abortion in all 50 states will very much be on the ballot next year.

Jessica Valenti writes at her Abortion, Every Day substack:

What’s most important to know is that SCOTUS will not be looking at the original challenge to FDA approval of the drug. Instead, they’ll review the 2016 and 2021 changes to restrictions around mifepristone, and whether or not the Alliance of Hippocratic Medicine (the anti-abortion group who brought the lawsuit) has standing. 

In short, the legality of mifepristone shouldn’t be at risk, but access and availability of the medication is. It’s a reduced scope than what the anti-abortion movement was hoping for, and as Chris Geidner writes at Law Dork, it represents “a best-case scenario for abortion rights supporters.”

Still, the restrictions they’re reviewing are meaningful ones—like tele-health access, the ability to receive abortion medication in the mail, and how far into pregnancy you can take the pills. (Right now it’s 10 weeks, these restrictions could put it at 7 weeks.)

“They’re ready to be cruel. They’re watching themselves be cruel,” Valenti told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes Wednesday night. “They just don’t care.”

Niemöller got it wrong. First they come for the women.

And the extremists’ autocratic bent is about more than abortion.

“Government governs best that governs least,” conservatives intoned solemnly for decades. Until they gerrymandered themselves into legislative seats resistant to democracy. Now Republicans in control of state capitols are engaged on a war on blue cities. And universities. And women.

Republicans tolerated democracy so long as they felt it gave them a route to power and a smidgen of legitimacy. And now? They’ve abandoned democracy. A large swath of their party wants to elect Donald Trump again, a man whose rhetoric now echoes Hitler and Mussolini and who admires the world’s autocrats.

Remember the Russkies? Republicans spent the Cold War decades as the staunchest anti-Russia hawks. President Ronald Reagan, among the staunchest of them. And now? They want to be like them. They’re taking advice from Hungary’s autocratic Prime Minister Viktor Orban on abandoning Ukraine to Putin’s Russia.

We have a Holocaust Museum. Perhaps it’s time for a Hypocrisy Museum.

It’s Happy Hollandaise Time! We’re glad you came.