Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

I’m a HUGE fan of A Closer Look on the Seth Meyers show. It’s written by Sal Gentile and the supervising producer is Emily Erotas. They have a limited series podcast called A Closer Look Back, talking about what they learned during Trump first term & what they can do to prepare for Trump 2.0. It’s insightful & funny and I highly recommend it. I was on the Nicole Sandler Show on 12-2-2024 singing the praises of Sal and A Closer Look. I mentioned my idea on the show, here it is cued up.

Listening to their podcast and Rachel Maddow’s recent show on preparing for Trump’s next term got me thinking.

Who has a media and social media strategy to mess with Trump this time around? And, because nothing seems to hurt Trump, who is focusing on busting his nominees & minions? I ask because I don’t see the Dems doing it.

I wondered what I can do. Who can I help that I think is doing good work to counter the RW narrative? I looked at what was breaking thru the RW narrative IN MULTIPLE SPACES. One was comedy. So I wrote the best comedy writers & producers I knew about & asked them this question:

Dear Sal & Emily:

How can we on the left help you prepare for the scandals of nominees, so the COMEDY bits can be used to define them first?

What struck me in your A Closer Look back podcasts was how you talked about what you learned during the first Trump term and how you were overwhelmed by new scandals daily. You said you forgot about some scandals, but you remembered the jokes. I believe the same is true for a LOTS of people. 

You know that people need something goofy to see & discuss about people and issues. You saw how Weird got a reaction. It reached Trump & Fox News, but the scandals didn’t, so I’m looking for things that have broken through to the right, and want to make more of them. 

For Trump 2.0. I think getting out the weirdest information about Trump’s nominees & minions is one way to hurt them, since nothing seems to hurt Trump. So my question is,

How can I help you “flood the zone with good jokes about Trump’s nominees?”

Spocko’s question to Seth Meyers’ writers & producers

I KNOW that jokes aren’t enough, but when I hear “Follow the money” from the Watergate days, I point out that today, if it’s from the Koch’s & the usual suspects, it’s totally legal! Thanks Citizens United!  

You talked about how hard it is to keep up with the news about the nominees. My friends at The Democracy Labs created a tool that shows the links between the Billionaires, the cabinet picks, Project 2025 people and Influencers to Trump. I talked to the creators and suggested they should add YouTube links to the people’s names so you can do research for A Closer Look.

Here is the link to the tool. https://thedemlabs.org/2024/12/01/trump-nominees-map-dec-1-2024/

I used the tool/site to look up information and links on Sean Duffy, Trump’s nominee for Department of Transportation. Trump picked Duffy because he saw him on TV and he looks like a MANLY MAN, especially compared to the GAY Pete Buttigieg. Sure Pete was in combat, but DUFFY was a LUMBERJACK* contest winner! 

 I expect Duffy will attack Pete Buttigieg for this year’s “Christmas Transportation” problems that Duffy, the LUMBERJACK, will fix by throwing axes at them, just like Pete Hegseth! (Who happens to be Duffy’s wife co-host on Fox and Friends Weekend!)

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We know Fox will position Duffy as being there for travelers with families, unlike Buttigieg who Duffy attacked for being on paternity leave and not doing anything about Transportation problems!  Duffy WOULD never go on Paternity leave, even though Duffy & his wife have 9 kids. But we can’t talk about politicians kids, especially since one of them has Down’s syndrome, HOWEVER you can talk about Duffy’s traveling with kids during the holidays. How do they do it!?

How many nannies do the Duffy’s have? Are they here legally?  Have the Duffy’s paid them correctly?

Where will the Duffy’s go for Christmas? To the 50-acre Hawaiian ranch they just bought for $3.5 million.  

Where did the Duffy’s get the money? Their Fox News salaries are one area. You might point out Duffy quit Congress because he said couldn’t live on $174K a year. The boring “Follow the money” people would ask, “Did you know that since 2019 Duffy has accepted almost $1 millions from BRG Group to lobby for the airlines, and transportation companies?” Link to Duffy and OpenSecrets lobbying profile. BUT WHO CARES!? It’s totally legal! BORING!!! 

But, what if you heard Rachel Campos-Duffy got a $1 million dollar settlement from Fox News for sexual harassment? EXCITING!

Sadly nobody will talk about sexual harassment at Fox News because both of them work there.  Also, she likely signed an NDA, and it was around the time she was named co-host of Fox and Friends Weekends. HOWEVER, you could play this clip from 2017,  when she talked about Al Franken and said,

“There are a lot of sexual harassers on the Hill who are quivering in their boots right now… Talk about draining the swamp. Let’s get rid of them. Let’s get rid of this secret fund that they have. Let’s let constituents know who are these people who’ve been accused of sexual harassment and are using a secret taxpayer fund to quiet their accusers.” — Rachel Campos-Duffy Nov 17, 2017

link to the video: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=10155941251265238

If that’s too serious for A Closer Look, I want to direct you to some wacky comments from his wife, Rachel Campos-Duffy. 

“Former reality TV star Rachel Campos-Duffy has spent eight years spreading extremism and conspiracy theories as a contributor and host at Fox News, where she has pushed the racist “great replacement” conspiracy theory, complained about “the eugenics mentality of the pro-choice movement,” and claimed that feminism is about “abortion and communism.”

Here is a link to a BUNCH of her wacky comments from my friends at Media Matters.

Link https://www.mediamatters.org/rachel-campos-duffy/reality-tv-warping-reality-rachel-campos-duffy-has-made-career-pushing

* Sean Duffy’s Lumberjack videos

Duffy Bulls Eye throwing axes 
Duffy Climbing poles
Duffy log rolling

You could compare Sean Duffy’s Axe Throws and Pete Hegseth’s (Which I know you love) But that’s not enough, when people see Lumberjack they instantly think of the Monty Python song, maybe you can use that as a connection. Remember the lyrics to that song? 

MOUNTY CHORUS

He’s a lumberjack and he’s OK
He sleeps all night and works all day
PALIN
I cut down trees, I wear high heels
Suspenders and a bra
I wish I were a girlie
Just like my dear papa

Thank you for your work on A Closer Look. I’m a big fan. I even have a Corrections jackal mug and a Late Night with Seth Meyer’s t-shirt.

LLAP 
Spocko
Mastodon: @spocko@mastodon.online 
Bluesky: @spocko.bsky.social  
Twitter/X @Spockosbrain 

P.S. BTW, I suggested to my one rich Democrat friend that he pay me to feed you folks raw material to work with in advance so you can confirm it & write some of the 100 jokes Seth demands every day. He suggested I do it for free, because I love Democracy. Frankly, if the Democrats were smart, they’d hire comedy writers to help them with Zingers. I’ll bet Scollins or Baze would love to write jokes for Chuck Schumer…

Cross Posted to Spocko’s Brain #SethMeyers #ACloserLook #SeanDuffy #PeteHegseth #Lumberjack song #MontyPython #AxeThrowing #RachalCampos-Duffy #FoxNews #SexualHarassment

People voted for a fictional Trump they made up in their heads and the question is whether the massive propaganda apparatus behind him can maintain that fiction while he does all the things many of his voters told themselves he wouldn’t do bsky.app/profile/carl…

— Adam Serwer (@adamserwer.bsky.social) 2024-12-19T13:40:18.457Z

Here’s the poll:

A majority of Americans oppose Donald Trump’s plans to use the U.S. military to deport millions of undocumented immigrants, to instruct the U.S. Justice Department to investigate his political rivals and to pardon rioters charged with breaking into the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, according to a nationwide Washington Post-University of Maryland poll.

Even larger majorities of Americans oppose Trump’s plans to jail reporters for writing stories he doesn’t like and having police use force against anti-Trump protests.

The survey of 1,251 Americans was conducted weeks after Trump’s victory and sought to examine public sentiment about positions espoused by the president-elect that challenge democratic principles and strain constitutional norms, as well as views on the legitimacy of American elections after Trump’s win. Trump has claimed a broad mandate for his proposals and has selected cabinet secretaries and other executive branch officials who have expressed eagerness to carry them out. But the poll results indicate that Americans reject many of the proposals that experts say could erode the guardrails that help keep presidential power in check.

I think Serwer’s got it right. People told themselves he wouldn’t really do any of the things he said he was going to do. It was just a show. He’s just owning the libs! No more tampons on boys bathrooms! No more schools doing transgender surgery! Hahahaha!

What they are getting instead is a possible government shutdown because Elon Musk objected to the bipartisan deal and once Trump came off the golf course he went along. (He had been privy to all the negotiations. He’s lying when he says he wasn’t. Johnson doesn’t make a move without him. ) Now the Republicans are negotiating among themselves without the Democrats and they will try to pass a bill through the House without Democratic votes and now, it appears likely, without all the Republicans either which means it will fail. There’s also a Democratic Senate and there’s no way they’ll get 60 votes there.

They think they can then blame the Democrats for the shutdown but I’m pretty sure that’s not going to work. Republicans always get the blame for shutdowns because they are always the ones responsible. They’ll get the blame this time too. Democrats were going to vote for the CR that was negotiated in good faith between both parties until President Musk and his puppet decided to kill it.

Let the games begin:

Donald Trump and Mike Johnson made “a deal” with themselves. Maybe they should’ve checked with other people on it.

It’s not just Dems who are a ‘hell no!’ either.

So much for Trump declaring victory on his social media app. https://t.co/Tfz2wCpGPS

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) December 19, 2024

Thanks to Elon Musk and Donald Trump, Republicans cut $190 million for pediatric cancer research from the funding bill.

Congrats to DOGE on their first victory. pic.twitter.com/6S2Vu9Lrhc

— Sawyer Hackett (@SawyerHackett) December 19, 2024

Chip Roy says he is a “hard no” on the new deal. Trump says he is going to back a primary opponent against him. Then Pence weighs in. pic.twitter.com/P2ztnmn7u3

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) December 19, 2024

Reps. Andy Ogles & Ralph Norman, members of the Freedom Caucus, both tell me they are a NO on the new CR deal.

Both cited concerns with the two year suspension of the debt ceiling.

— Melanie Zanona (@MZanona) December 19, 2024

Tip o’ the iceberg. The chaos is overwhelming.

As I write this the saga over the continuing resolution is still ongoing and nobody knows what’s going to happen. It’s a moving target.

Paul Krugman writes that it’s not just the rubes who believe the Trump Show is just a fun comedy:

[S]ince the election financial markets have clearly been betting that Trump will do very little of what he promised during the campaign — that we won’t really have a trade war, just some minor trade skirmishes, that we’ll have symbolic deportations rather than a mass roundup of immigrants, and so on. Markets have, in effect, discounted the disastrous consequences that would follow if Trump honored his own promises.

But a government shutdown in response to completely false claims about what’s in an innocuous short-term funding measure suggests that the peddlers of misinformation are high on their own supply. Trump may really believe that foreigners will pay tariffs, that U.S. trade deficits subsidize the rest of the world, that there’s a reserve army of American workers available to fill the gaps deportation would create. I don’t want to put too much weight on the latest market fluctuations, but it is starting to look as if investors are questioning their own complacency.

Nobody believes Trump will do what he says he’s going to do. That should strike them as weird but apparently they just think that somehow, behind the scenes, very competent producers are going to make sure that everything continues smoothly without any real disruption. Nope. To the extent those people exist, they are going to get rid of every last one of them. This is just a preview.

Elon Musk, high on something, is running the show from his Truth Social platform while Trump plays golf and holds court. Nobody knows what’s going to happen but we know it’s going to be bad. Somebody should tell the people.

Thank you once again for your support for this old blog this year. I am so very grateful for all my readers and truly appreciate those of you who are able to put a few bucks in the kitty. It means everything, especially in tough times like these.

When we say these are turbulent times, the only comfort is that the US isn’t the only place it’s happening. While it’s true that few countries have a freak show like the Musk administration, all the leading democracies are under strain. The danger, of course, is that with the whole world under such strain, it’s possible that things could go sideways very quickly.

The Wall St Journal reported this over the weekend:

One lesson from an unprecedented year of elections around the world is that voters in industrialized countries are particularly unhappy, ready to boot unpopular leaders out of office and making it more difficult for politicians in power to enact bold programs of change.

Rarely have the rich world’s political leaders been so widely disliked. No leader of an industrialized country other than tiny Switzerland has a positive rating, according to a survey of some 25 democracies by pollster Morning Consult. Ruling parties that went to the polls this year largely got a drubbing, including in the U.S. and U.K. 

President Biden has a 37% approval rating. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has 26% approval, while France’s Emmanuel Macron sits at 19% and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz at 18%, according to Morning Consult. Donald Trump’s popularity has been rising since he won the November election, but he still may start his term with a negative net rating, and he was the only president in modern history to start below 50% during his first term. 

Voters in industrialized nations are anxious and angry after years of uncertainty caused by the pandemic, war in Europe, high inflation, stagnant real wages and surging immigration. Leaders are struggling to respond, constrained by tepid economic growth, higher borrowing costs and ballooning deficits that mean they are increasingly offering voters tough choices and trade-offs. 

It’s a message many voters don’t want to hear, setting the stage for an era of increasingly fractious politics as parties squabble over how to share an economic pie that, with the notable exception of the U.S., isn’t growing. In European countries, it also threatens a kind of political doom loop, where unpopular leaders, often trying to hold together disparate coalition governments, struggle to pass meaningful legislation, preventing them from solving the problems voters elected them to fix in the first place. 

France’s government collapsed last week for the first time since 1962 after a fight over budget cuts under Macron, who on Friday announced a new centrist prime minister. In November, Germany’s fractious coalition government collapsed over disagreements on economic policy, triggering a vote in February that spells likely defeat for Scholz. South Korea’s unpopular president, Yoon Suk Yeol, faces a second impeachment attempt this weekend after he recently declared a brief period of martial law, also linked to fights over budgets.

The upshot: Brace yourself for more political turbulence. This dysfunction is creating fertile ground for opposition parties, populists and antiestablishment politicians, from Trump in the U.S. to the far left and far right in Europe. And aided by social media, political cycles are going into overdrive. In the U.S., the incumbent party has now lost three consecutive elections for the first time since the 1890s. 

Check this out:

I know I’ve written about this before as one explanation as to why we ended up with Trump again. Our curse is that the damned Republicans put up the guy we already turfed out four years ago again and we’re stuck with him for another term.

This is a sobering set of facts that people really need to absorb before they go on about how the Democrats failed because of their policy on this or that. I’m sure that’s why people are telling themselves that it happened but it’s obviously much bigger than that. This is a phenomenon confined to the rich world which is much angrier than the developing nations. Why?

The Journal offers up all the usual reasons for the dissatisfaction from immigration to status anxiety to ballooning deficits (what?) I’m sure there are many. One article that challenges that thinking is by a writer named Toby Buckle with an essay called “A Disease of Affluence” which I highly recommend you read when you have time.

He challenges the ubiquitous notion that working class Americans voted for Trump because of their economic anxiety pointing out the fact that lower income working people voted for Harris and vote for Democrats in every election. The average Trump voter is actually doing quite well.

He argues the opposite — that Americans, on the whole, are so relatively affluent that we’ve lost the social hierarchy that allows people to feel superior over their lessers. It’s a thought provoking riff on the economic and cultural argument that takes to task both the usual socialist bromides as well as the culture war rationales. It doesn’t explain everything but it certainly adds to the mix of ideas as to why the whole developed world is having a meltdown.

There’s a lot more to unpack on all this and we will do our best to do that as time goes by. We’re here seven days a week, sorting through the media, synthesizing it as best we can. If you have the means to help us keep doing that it would be most appreciated.

And Happy Hollandaise everyone!

cheers,
digby

Mike Lee calls for Vivek Ramaswamy or Elon Musk to be the next Speaker of the House pic.twitter.com/orFWNdFnhA

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) December 19, 2024

Ok sure. I’m not sure that an immigrant can be in the line of succession but I’ve never heard otherwise. But why would Musk want such a thing? He can run the country just by pulling Trump’s strings and shitposting on his personal social media platform. Why would he want to do all that dirty work? Just give it Marjorie Taylor Green or some other MAGA cultist and have them do his bidding.

I must admit that I’m a little bit surprised that it’s gone so far off the rails already. It’s not even Christmas!

This morning Trump is saying that he wants to eliminate the debt ceiling altogether, which is actually a great idea. If that were to happen the Democrats would have to help because his Republican zealots will never vote for it. The big question right now is whether they will do it.

I’m torn. It would be great if we could eliminate the debt ceiling. Democrats have been for that ever since the Republicans decided to use it as a weapon to threaten government shutdowns which they did even when Trump was president. (The Democrats never do that.) But should they help the Republicans get over this hump right now? Normally I’d say yes but this time….?

Consider this: if Elon succeeds in shutting down the government until January 20th, as he ordered on Twitter yesterday, there will be no inauguration. I think it might be worth it.

After a long day on the golf course and a big dinner with his other new best billionaire pal Jeff Bezos, Little Donny was very happy indeed. Everybody loves him. All the fancy ladies in their glittery gowns want to take their picture with him and all the important men want to bow down to kiss his tiny ring.

Meanwhile, his bestest friend, the richest man in the world, told all the bad people to shut down the government so America can be great again. And they did!

He is the luckiest boy ever.

The End

Stealing your 60,000 votes

Despite what you’ve heard, the 2024 election is not over. Republicans treated Donald Trump’s failed 2020 effort to reverse his loss to Joe Biden in court and via an insurrection on the Capitol steps as a how-to manual. They’re emulating Trump right now in North Carolina.

Republican Kari Lake lost the Arizoina governor’s race in 2022 to Democrat Katie Hobbs. No way, said Lake. She refused to concede and fought it out in court deep into 2024. Lake still refused to acknowldge losing even as she ran for and lost her 2024 U.S. Senate race.

Bryan Anderson of Anderson Alerts substack comments on the North Carolina Supreme Court race in which Justice Allison Riggs defeated Republican Court of Appeals Judge Jefferson Griffin by 734 votes after multiple recounts. Griffin is going to court:

North Carolina Court of Appeals Judge Jefferson Griffin on Wednesday asked the 5-2 conservative majority state Supreme Court to intervene in a race where he presently trails Democratic Supreme Court Justice Allison Riggs by 734 votes.

Griffin is specifically asking the high court to step in by Monday to prevent certification of the election, bypass a lower court and discard the ballots of more than 60,000 voters who state and county elections administrators have concluded were legitimately cast. In doing so, he believes he could overtake Riggs’ lead.

Griffin is largely seeking to toss out ballots of people whose voter registrations don’t include driver’s license or the last four digits of their Social Security number, arguing that such incomplete registrations render their votes ineligible.

That argument was partially rejected in federal court shortly before the November election, with a Trump-appointed judge concluding such intervention could move the country “away from a democratic form of government.”

The rest is behind a paywall, but you get the point. Four friends from my county are on Griffin’s list.

Remember, Griffin ran for and lost a seat on the state’s Supreme Court. Gene Nichol, a UNC-Chapel Hill law professor and News & Observer columnist, reminded readers last week, “In embracing the North Carolina Republican ‘politics of façade,’ Griffin shows he shouldn’t become a justice.” Griffin means to prove Nichol right by litigiating his loss until he wins or can litigate no more.

It’s a Trumpish variation on an old Republican theme. If they win, the election was fair. If they lose, Democrats cheated. Normally, the perps are those ubiquitous yet invisible voter fraudsters:

Voter fraud frauds have for years scare-mongered Republican voters that should anyone anywhere cast even a single ballot improperly, it “steals your vote.” Your vote. They are careful to personalize it for their white audience. They have spun the all-but-nonexistent problem into a widespread one (that isn’t) requiring draconian voting restrictions. Those laws, in their “majestic equality,” apply to all yet, just coincidentally, predominantly impact minorities of voters that tend to vote for Democrats.

Griffin and accomplices in this case are themselves trying to steal 60,000 of “your votes” in broad daylight with court filings. Shamelessness is their superpower.

Thank you sharing this Sanctuary of Sanity with us each day.
Happy Hollandaise!

TweedleDim and TweedleDoofus

Democrats trolled Donald Trump as Elon Musk’s chief of staff after “President Musk” blew up House Speaker Mike Johnson’s (R-Louisiana) three-month continuing resolution with a five-word tweet early Wednesday: “This bill should not pass.” TweedleDim is not known for being loquacious.

Before it’s begun, this is what Trump’s second term amounts to (The Daily Beast, emphasis mine):

Elon Musk sticking his fingers in congressional affairs before his new pal Donald Trump is even sworn in as president had many Democrats referring to the tech figure as “President Musk” Wednesday.

The billionaire Tesla CEO successfully lobbied—with Trump’s help—for the death of a bipartisan spending bill Wednesday that would have staved off a shutdown and funded the government through March—leaving the Capitol in chaos as Congress scrambled to keep Washington running as the Christmas holiday looms.

Regarding the pair’s efforts to kill the spending bill that House Speaker Mike Johnson had painstakingly negotiated with Democratic leaders, New York Rep. Daniel Goldman told MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell: “It’s not Donald Trump asking for this. It’s very clearly President Elon Musk asking for this.”

“The fact that Donald Trump has been completely AWOL during these negotiations to the point where only after Elon Musk publicly tweets about his displeasure, about this budget deal,” he continued, “all of a sudden Donald Trump, chief of staff to Elon Musk, comes trotting in and blows up the deal.”

Those of us living in a disaster zone knew we’d be abandoned as soon as election results rolled in on Nov. 5. The CR contained “more than $100 billion in aid for natural disaster survivors, bipartisan health-care policy changes and other unrelated provisions,” reports the Washington Post:

In scrapping Johnson’s plan, Republicans cast doubt on his ability to maintain the speaker’s gavel in next year’s Congress. Johnson must run for the position again when the new House is sworn in on Jan. 3, and enough GOP lawmakers to deny him the position have already declared they won’t support him, according to two members who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations.

Everything Trump touches dies (ETTD), as the Bulwark’s Rick Wilson reminds us. His Republican former colleagues seem not to listen.

Eugene Robinson Wednesday night reminded those with ears to hear what fealty to Trump brings:

Titans of industry and commerce, beware. When you bend the knee to the Mad King, when you shower him with money and bathe him in flattery, he will receive your gifts with apparent gratitude. But he will want more. He will always want more.

Industry’s titans have made pilgimage to Mar-a-Lago to fall at Trump’s feet since his election. Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, Apple’s Tim Cook (Tim Apple), Jeff Bezos of Amazon, and others. These three kings and others have showered the reborn king with lavish donations to his inauguration.

They may feel a fiduciary duty to shareholders to make the most of their access to Trump (I wouldn’t call it friendship), There are zillions in government contracts and profitable policies on the line, says Robinson.

But the business leaders should remember what it is about our system that has allowed their companies to grow and thrive — the rule of law and the impartiality of justice; immigration policies that welcome brains, talent and ambition from around the world; ample funding for basic research that leads to world-changing breakthroughs. Government shapes this landscape, and Trump threatens to alter it dramatically.

A sharp turn toward nationalism and xenophobia would be bad for the nation and the world, but it would be nothing short of disastrous for companies such as Apple or Meta or Alphabet. Maybe these executives believe they can convince Trump that mass deportations are a bad idea and that immigration greatly boosts the U.S. economy. Or that arbitrary and excessive tariffs would needlessly burden the American consumer. Or that unnecessary regulations should be eliminated with tweezers, not a lawn mower.

But it is hubris characteristic of these moguls to believe Trump won’t trash them as soon as he sees them as disloyal or snatching too much of the attention he cannot live without.

So remind TweedleDoofus that President Musk views him as his chief of staff every chance you get. The sooner Musk, Ramaswamy, and company fall out of Trump’s favor, the less chance the oligarchs will have to turn the U.S. government into their wholly owned subsidiary. They may already see a 25th Amendment solution to his brand of chaos, warns a friend, and J.D. Vance as more controllable.

Move fast. They will.

Thank you sharing this Sanctuary of Sanity with us each day.
Happy Hollandaise!

The House is scrapping Mike Johnson’s year-end spending plan after Republicans had a shit-fit led by chief cheerleader the Real President of the United States, Elon Musk. They are back to the drawing board with the government set to shut down on Friday night. At the end of the day he told his puppet and vice-puppet to bless his efforts publicly and it was done:

Musk spent Wednesday stirring Republicans into a frenzy over the stopgap spending bill filed by Johnson — one loaded up with $100 billion in disaster aid funding, billions more in farm assistance and dozens of other side deals that pushed the final product past 1,500 pages.

His daylong flurry of dozens of postings on his X account appears to have succeeded: President-elect Donald Trump and Vice President-elect JD Vance came out against the bill this evening, calling instead for a pared-back measure coupled with a debt-limit increase.

Not even disaster funding? Man, that’s cold.

Musk knows nothing about policy, budgets or politics. Politico did a fact check:

But among the 100-plus tweets Musk sent Wednesday were a number of misleading or outright false claims — a worrying start to the mogul’s new role as co-leader of a Trump-blessed effort to slash government funding.

— Government shutdowns aren’t painless: Musk is repeatedly posting on X that a government shutdown wouldn’t have any significant consequences for the country. He responded “YES” to a post that read, “Just close down the govt until January 20th. Defund everything. We will be fine for 33 days.” Another Musk post said a shutdown “doesn’t actually shut down critical functions.”

File this one as a half-truth: Yes, essential government functions and personnel are allowed to continue during a shutdown. But there are significant real-world effects: Other government employees will halt their day-to-day work and miss paychecks. While Social Security checks will go out and mail will be delivered, agency shutdowns cause massive lost productivity. A five-week shutdown from 2018 to 2019 caused the economy to lose about $3 billion, according to estimates from the Congressional Budget Office.

— Member pay won’t be raised 40 percent: Both Musk and the X account for his “Department of Government Efficiency” got the facts surrounding lawmaker paychecks wrong: Members of Congress have not had a raise to their $174,000 salaries since 2009, after repeatedly freezing a law implementing automatic cost-of-living increases.

The pending CR does not include a COLA freeze, but that would not result in a 40 percent boost in pay — far from it. The maximum potential pay adjustment would be 3.8 percent, an increase of $6,600. Even if lawmakers had given themselves all 15 years of rejected COLAs — which, again, they are not doing — it would only result in a 31 percent increase, according to the Congressional Research Service.

— Taxpayers aren’t paying for a new stadium: Musk reposted a claim that the bill would provide $3 billion for a new NFL stadium in Washington. Not true: The bill transfers control of the site of the existing RFK Stadium to the D.C. local government for redevelopment, which could potentially include a stadium. No federal funds are changing hands as part of the transaction.

There is a possibility that D.C. taxpayers could eventually be on the hook for the project: Mayor Muriel Bowser has floated using local funding to cover environmental remediation costs and upgrade underlying infrastructure. But any redevelopment plan would be subject to D.C. government approval and wouldn’t involve any federal dollars appropriated in the pending bill.

— The bill isn’t shielding the Jan. 6 committee: Musk said it was “[o]utrageous” that the bill would block House Republicans from investigating the Jan. 6 select committee established in the prior, Democratic-majority Congress. Not exactly: The section of the bill cited by the convicted Jan. 6 rioter that Musk quoted has nothing to do with internal House investigations.

Rather, it’s language meant to clarify that House data stored on outside digital platforms remains under control of House offices — and thus subject to House rules and procedures for accessing it: “A House office shall be deemed to retain possession of any House data of the House office, without regard to the use” of any particular platform, the bill reads.

— No “bioweapon labs” here: Musk reposted a screenshot from a conservative account Libs of Tiktok claiming that the legislation would fund “bioweapon labs.” That is false: The provision in question would establish regional biocontainment laboratories as part of a larger pandemic preparedness plan. Their stated purpose is “conducting biomedical research to support public health and medical preparedness,” not creating bioweapons. The provision is part of a long-sought reauthorization of the Pandemic and All Hazards Preparedness and Response Act.

This is what happens when you put a red-pilled,conspiracy theorist, politically ignorant troll in charge of the US government. And I’m not talking about Trump.

I really need the inevitable break up between the two Big Narcissists to happen sooner rather than later. Right now it sure looks like Trump is just an old guy playing golf, having dinner with friends and talking to the clouds. Unfortunately there’s a new MAGA King in town and he’s just as bad.

President Musk just took over the Republican Party and blew up the bipartisan agreement on the budget. Now they’ve come up with a GOP-only bill that many Republican members won’t vote for and it needs 60 votes in the Senate.

They will need Democrats to vote for it and this should be their answer:

I offer this excellent piece by Jamelle Bouie with a gift link.He writes that Democrats may be in the minority but they are not yet the opposition and there’s a distinction. An excerpt:

An opposition would use every opportunity it had to demonstrate its resolute stance against the incoming administration. It would do everything in its power to try to seize the public’s attention and make hay of the president-elect’s efforts to put lawlessness at the center of American government. An opposition would highlight the extent to which Donald Trump has no intention of fulfilling his pledge of lower prices and greater economic prosperity for ordinary people and is openly scheming with the billionaire oligarchs who paid for and ran his campaign to gut the social safety net and bring something like Hooverism back from the ash heap of history.

An opposition would treat the proposed nomination of figures like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Kash Patel and Pete Hegseth as an early chance to define a second Trump administration as dangerous to the lives and livelihoods of ordinary Americans. It would prioritize nimble, aggressive leadership over an unbending commitment to seniority and the elevation of whoever is next in line. Above all, an opposition would see that politics is about conflict — or, as Henry Adams famously put it, “the systematic organization of hatreds” — and reject the risk-averse strategies of the past in favor of new blood and new ideas.

It’s about conflict and in this case all they have to do is say no and let the Republicans tear themselves apart:

Please read the Bouie piece and email it to your Democratic Representatives and Senators. They need to know that while we may have taken a break after the Great Disappointment, we are still here and we have expectations.

Bret Stephens of The NY Times has written a fatuous piece abandoning his “Never Trump” status (which, I admit, I didn’t even realize he had obtained. Really?) Anyway, he says Trump’s not bad and never was and everyone is being hysterical. This is something I’m hearing from a lot of people. I’m not going to offer a gift link to it because it’s really not worth it. Unless you have amnesia of the last 10 years it’s anything but persuasive.

Instead I want to direct you to the Bulwark’s JV Last’s response which he has posted outside the paywall so you can click over to read the whole thing. Here is a small piece of it. It’s really good:

I want to take Stephens’s larger point: That Trump’s critics were wrong about the dangers Trump posed in 2016, 2020, and 2024.

It’s impossible to enumerate all of the warnings made about Trump and different people focused on different aspects of the danger he presented. But I think we can reasonably summarize the general concerns as:

• Trump is dangerously ignorant of basic reality.
• He is easy to manipulate.
• In a time of crisis, he can not be trusted to make sound judgments.
• His commitments to democracy and the rule of law are weak and his attraction to authoritarianism is strong.
• In a second term, he would surround himself with dangerous button men and be focused on retribution against perceived domestic enemies.

Now what did the reality of Trump deliver?

• He attempted to blackmail the president of Ukraine into lying about his likely 2020 election opponent.

• His handling of COVID represented the single greatest failure of the federal government in American history.2
  • He disbanded the government’s pandemic response team in 2018.
  • He coddled the Chinese dictator at the outset of the outbreak.
  • He failed to push forward aggressively on the production of testing kits and PPE during the opening months.
  • He muddled public health messaging coming from the government.
  • His one COVID success was the creation of Operation Warp Speed, to accelerate the development of a vaccine. That project worked. But Trump then botched the rollout of the vaccine.
  • And in the wake of the creation of the vaccine, Trump created a political atmosphere in which his supporters turned against first the COVID vaccine and then all vaccines.
• He surrendered Afghanistan to the Taliban and committed America to a hard deadline for withdrawal without securing any meaningful concessions from the Islamists.
• He refused to accept the results of the 2020 election and plunged the country into a crisis by lying about it.
• He summoned a mob to Washington on January 6th. He knew that this mob was armed. He directed the mob to march on the Capitol so as to prevent Mike Pence from certifying the electoral vote count. When this mob turned violent, he declined to send the National Guard to break it up.
• He allegedly stole classified government documents and then allegedly lied about it.

I’ve written this before, but the reality of Trump’s first term came pretty close to the worst-case scenarios. It is simply not true that Trump’s critics oversold the danger he represented. If anything, they underestimated it.

He goes on to discuss everything we’re already seeing for Trump II and I think people are very much underestimating his intentions. Whether he’ll be able to accomplish his toxic agenda is yet to be determined.

Never Trumpers and the rest of us who saw what Trump was, and see what he is today, are taking quite a bit of incoming from a number of different directions. We are outside the mainstream right now. But the idea that people who correctly anticipated Trump’s atrocities and called them out in real time are the ones who empowered him, as Stephens contends, is ridiculous. It’s the squishes and hacks like Stephens who are, this very minute, enabling yet another assault on democracy and the rule of law by pretending that he and this freak show he’s putting into government are normal and benign.

I don’t feel like there’s a whole lot I can do about Trump. I’m anything but a billionaire and I don’t have powerful connections. But I can try to convey the truth as I see it as clearly as possible. And what I have been seeing ever since he came down the golden escalator is an unfit, ignorant, immoral, narcissist who has no business being in charge of anything, much less the most powerful country on earth. Just because some people seem to really like all that about him doesn’t make it untrue.