Christmas Lights at the zoo!
I had no idea this was a thing. I might just go check out the LA Zoo lights this weekend. It looks magical.
"what digby sez..."
Digby's Hullabaloo Posts
December 20, 1924, the NY Times published this:
That didn’t work out any better than letting Trump off the hook for staging a coup and sending him into exile at Mar-a-Lago. I guess the fascist heart wants what the fascist heart wants.
I thought of that when I read this today:
Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and a close adviser to President-elect Donald J. Trump, on Friday endorsed Germany’s far-right party, a group with ties to neo-Nazis whose youth wing has been classified as “confirmed extremist” by German domestic intelligence.
“Only the AfD can save Germany,” Mr. Musk posted to X, referring to the anti-immigrant party, the Alternative for Germany, by its German initials.
In doing so, he is wading into German politics at a moment of turmoil, and at the very same time that he has wielded his influence in Washington to help blow up a bipartisan spending deal that was meant to avoid a government shutdown over Christmas. The German government recently collapsed, resulting in early elections, which are planned for next year.
Mr. Musk’s post was in response to an English-language video by a 24-year-old German far-right influencer, Naomi Seibt. She harshly criticized Friedrich Merz, whom polls show leading the race, for dismissing a rival’s suggestion that Germany look to Mr. Musk and another firebrand, President Javier Milei of Argentina, for ideas about reforming the country.
No, it’s nothing like Barack Obama’s Democratic Party:
The AfD is controversial even among other European far-right parties because many of its leaders are not shy about expressing Nazi sympathies. In May, France’s far-right party led by Marine Le Pen split from the AfD in its European Parliament coalition after the German party’s top candidate, Maximilian Krah, said that a person was “not automatically a criminal” just because they had been a member of the SS, Adolph Hitlter’s paramilitary organization.
Reports that AfD members held a covert meeting regarding the mass deportation plan led to protests earlier this year, but despite this, the party is polling in second place at 19 percent —behind Merz’s CDU/CSU political alliance at 31 percent—in the lead-up to Germany’s snap election in February 2025.
Right. The party that’s too Nazi for Marine LePen is just like Democratic Party in the US. That’s so dumb I can’t even believe I’m typing it.
We have a huge problem with billionaires and this billionaire in particular. I don’t know where it’s going but I have a sneaking suspicion he sees himself as this guy:
A group of high-level managers at the Louisiana Department of Health walked into a Nov. 14 meeting in Baton Rouge expecting to talk about outreach and community events.
Instead, they were told by an assistant secretary in the department and another official that department leadership had a new policy: Advertising or otherwise promoting the COVID, influenza or mpox vaccines, an established practice there — and at most other public health entities in the U.S. — must stop.
NPR has confirmed the policy was discussed at this meeting, and at two other meetings held within the department’s Office of Public Health, on Oct. 3 and Nov. 21, through interviews with four employees at the Department of Health, which employs more than 6,500 people and is the state’s largest agency.
According to the employees, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they fear losing their jobs or other forms of retaliation, the policy would be implemented quietly and would not be put in writing.
Staffers were also told that it applies to every aspect of the health department’s work: Employees could not send out press releases, give interviews, hold vaccine events, give presentations or create social media posts encouraging the public to get the vaccines. They also could not put up signs at the department’s clinics that COVID, flu or mpox vaccines were available on site.
That just makes me sad. There’s no sense in any of it. It’s all a result of propaganda, conspiracy theories and a political party led by a demagogue who exploits it for power.
We used to be a culture that, for all its faults, looked to the future and embraced scientific progress. It looks like those days are gone.
I mean, this is where we are these days. It’s 2025, people.
And yet he’ll probably die being hated because he was old
Those numbers are the envy of the world. The US under Joe Biden and the Democrats engineered a soft landing from a global economic catastrophe. I wonder if anyone will ever take the chance again. Doing the right thing turned out to be politically suicidal.
The U.S. economy grew at a 3.1% annualized pace in the third quarter — stronger than previously thought, the Commerce Department said on Thursday.
The revision suggests 2024 was yet another shocker year in which the U.S. economy surprised to the upside, as other major nations grappled with sluggish growth.
The revision is an upgrade from the initial estimate of 2.8% growth in the July-Sept. period.
- It largely reflects stronger exports and better consumer spending, offsetting a bigger-than-estimated drag from inventory investment.
The third quarter grew at a slightly quicker pace than the prior quarter, which expanded at a 3% annualized rate.
- A tool developed by the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta estimates the economy might be even stronger in the current quarter, with 3.2% growth.
The Fed cut borrowing costs for the third time on Wednesday, but signaled fewer cuts ahead in 2025. One reason: the economy is hanging on while progress on slowing inflation has come to a halt.
- “What we see happening in the economy again is most forecasters have been calling for a slowdown in growth for a very long time, and it keeps not happening,” Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell told reporters at a press conference on Wednesday.
President-elect Trump will inherit a strong economy. Still unclear is how his proposed policies on immigration, taxes and tariffs will shape growth in the months to come.
Just as he did last time and he’ll seize credit for it. If you ever thought life was fair, think again.
By the way, Democrats are gloomy about the economy, and Republicans are optimistic. I don’t think it’s just pure partisanship on the Dems part. They’re worried about the tariffs, tax cuts and deportation which isn’t irrational. If Trump carries out his plan the risk of killing this economy is very, very high. Of course, he’ll just blame the Democrats so…
Here’s his latest:
Biden is a ghost and the Democrats are nowhere to be found. Everyone knows it’s a GOP shitshow show. Let’s hope most people see the truth.
Our new president is a different kind of MAGAmaniac
Back in 2016, the whole country was left in shock when celebrity businessman Donald Trump managed to take over the Republican Party and win the presidential election. At the time there was quite a bit of resistance within the GOP establishment due to the fact that Trump had not run as an ordinary conservative but rather as a populist demagogue and they had no idea that their voters were so hungry for his message. Gone were all the usual paeans to small government and family values and even his strong advocacy for expanding the military was coupled with a discordant isolationist stance that harkened back to the pre-WWII America First movement. (Trump had no idea about that history — he thought he came up with it himself.)
However he was all for tax cuts for the wealthy, which is the lifeblood of the Republican party. And he was reflexively hostile to anything his predecessor Barack Obama ever did which meant that he was willing to reverse much of the progress that had been made in the previous eight years, pleasing Republicans to no end.
The activist base that had recently fashioned itself as the Tea Party after Obama’s election in 2008, quietly reinvented itself as the MAGA movement and lost all interest in fiscal austerity the minute Trump came on the scene. But there has always been some restiveness among the right wing ideologues in the House and Senate who really want to massively cut discretionary spending and the so-called entitlements to the bone. They’re true believers in the idea that government should not help people, period. They were relegated to the back bench during Trump’s first term and spent most of their time tilting at windmills because Trump was happily spending like the treasury was his own credit line at Deutsche bank.
He had no appetite for big spending cuts that might hurt his chances for re-election. After all, he didn’t run as a budget cutting deficit hawk. He always claimed that he didn’t need to drastically cut spending because the debt would disappear with tariffs and unprecedented growth. He said the same thing during the 2024 campaign, insisting that it would even pay for government funded child care, the worst of all possible worlds.
He pays lip service to cutting spending but he doesn’t really care about it. He’s told people he’s not worried about a US debt crisis as he’ll be out of office by then. And he’s got stuff he wants to spend a lot of money on, like deporting millions of immigrants!
That’s never been clearer than this week when Speaker Mike Johnson presented the bipartisan Continuing Resolution to fund the government until March and all hell broke loose in the House. Those rascally, back bench Tea Party/Freedom Caucus ideologues finally got the leader they’ve been waiting for and his name is Elon Musk, the richest man in the world.
It was a given that the Freedom Caucus gang would not vote for the bill. They vote no on everything. It had been negotiated by the bipartisan negotiators in both houses with the knowledge that the Senate was still in Democratic hands and the tiny GOP majority in the House requiring a bipartisan compromise.
Everyone knew that the screamers in the House would have a fit and call for Mike Johnson’s head (which is why they changed the rule raising the threshold from one member to nine.) . And since the Speaker knows better than to go to the john without getting Trump’s permission, you can be sure that Trump was kept informed of all of this. They all agreed that they would get rid of this hot potato, adjourn quickly and go home for the holidays.
That didn’t work out the way they planned it. Trump thought he had cleverly boxed Elon Musk out of real power by creating a powerless “commission” for him and his sidekick Vivek Ramaswamy to come up with enormous spending cuts to reduce the federal government by as much as a third, which knows won’t happen. But Trump has essentially empowered Musk to speak for him by having him by his side every minute in the last three months. And seeing as he’s the richest man in the world who owns a major social media platform, he has plenty of power all on his own.
Apparently, Musk decided that it was time to show the world who’s really in charge. As the anointed budget cutter in chief he took great umbrage that anyone would think of passing legislation that didn’t pass muster with him personally and he took to his social media platform to demand that the Republicans refuse to pass the bill, ordering a government shutdown until Trump takes office.
The bill quickly fell apart prompting Donald Trump, who clearly had no idea what was going on, to rush out with a statement that it was he who ordered that the bill be scrapped:
“As soon as President Trump released his official stance on the CR [continuing resolution], Republicans on Capitol Hill echoed his point of view. President Trump is the leader of the Republican Party. Full stop,”
But it was too late. The memes had already taken hold: Elon Musk is the actual president and Trump is just an old guy playing golf and holding court at his gaudy beach club in Palm Beach every night.
Trump then came up with what he thought was a clever idea to take control by demanding that they only pass a bill if it also delayed or eliminated the debt ceiling, which just showed how out of touch he is with the dynamic in the House. (As I said, Trump has a lot of spending to do and he doesn’t want the debt ceiling hanging over his head.) But if President Elon’s accomplices in the Freedom Caucus are on a crusade against more government spending, why in the world would they agree to eliminate the debt ceiling?
Trump no doubt thought the Democrats would bail him out because they have often done so in the past and they always wanted to get rid of that silly contrivance. Sadly for him, they said “hell no” and refused to vote for the pared down bill Johnson and the Republicans proposed without Democratic input. 38 Republicans also voted against it because of the debt ceiling demand Trump has inserted which is a full slap in the face of Dear Leader.
It’s Elon Musk’s House now. In fact, a bunch of Republicans are proposing that they fire Johnson and make him Speaker instead.
Musk is now furiously trying to mend fences with Trump by threatening to primary Democrats, blaming them for what he actually did. It’s highly probable that his demand for a government shutdown over Christmas, which Trump knows will be blamed on the Republicans because they are always the ones who cause these things, has killed Trump’s honeymoon.
What we are seeing is an emerging crack in the GOP coalition between the MAGA populists like Trump and JD Vance who want big government for their own ends and the fiscal hawks like Musk and Ramaswamy who want to burn the whole place down. There are many overlapping interests within the two camps but it’s clearly starting to come apart largely because Trump made himself a much lamer duck than he needed to be.
Trump wanted the richest man in the world by his side, for both the glamour and the lucre he brings with him, and it’s blowing up in his face. How’s Trump going to get rid of Musk now that he’s shown he has more clout with the base than he does? Who owns the MAGA brand now?
Salon
For Republicans, for Democrats, for the republic
In yesterday’s Starting The Steal, we discussed the Republican legal challenge to losing the North Carolina state Supreme Court race in November. But today consider the national implications. Even a Republican gets it (sort of).
Andrew Dunn of Longleaf Politics believes it a bad idea for Court of Appeals Judge Jefferson Griffin to fight his loss all the way to the GOP-controlled state Supreme Court he’s desperate to join. Republicans want to throw out 60,000 votes “on technicalities in voter registration.” Read more about that here and here.
“I’m not sure who’s leading the push here — but it needs to end now,” writes Dunn:
If the Supreme Court sides with Griffin, the fallout will be immediate and brutal. This isn’t just bad optics; it’s potentially a credibility-shattering disaster for the court, the party, and conservatism in North Carolina. Overnight, this becomes a national story about Republicans “stealing” a Supreme Court seat. The allegation would be impossible to defend against.
And it wouldn’t end there. A ruling for Griffin would hand Democrats the perfect weapon: a story that’s simple, emotional, and devastating. It’s not hard to imagine Republicans losing judicial races — and even key legislative seats in 2026 — because of the stink this case would leave behind.
If Griffin loses the appeal, the damage is only slightly contained. The party will have spent months locked in a fight that divides its base and gives Democrats fresh ammunition for future campaigns. This appeal makes future judicial races even harder.
Dunn is neglecting the national fallout.
REDMAP, the 2010 GOP effort to win control over 2011 redistricting/gerrymandering, was midwifed by North Carolina’s Thomas B. Hoffeler, as was the Republican effort to rig the 2020 census. After Roy Cooper ousted N.C. Republican Gov. Pat McCrory in 2016, Republicans called a lame-duck session to strip Cooper of many powers of his office before inauguration. The tactic spread to Wisconsin in 2018 when Democrat Tony Evers defeated Republican Gov. Scott Walker. (North Carolina wrote the playbook Wisconsin and Michigan are using to undermine democracy.) N.C. Republicans just succeeded again in stripping Democratic governor-elect Josh Stein of some of his appointment powers.
David Pepper calls the states “Laboratories of Autocracy.” North Carolina is chief among them. If North Carolina Republicans succeed in cancelling 60,000 voters’ ballots (including Republican voters; they’re not safe when stealing an election is in play) because their voter file lacks a driver’s license number or the last four digits of their Social Security number, that challenge tactic too will spread to other states. Yours very likely.
Update: Added Common Cause post from Bluesky
Thank you sharing this Sanctuary of Sanity with us each day.
Happy Hollandaise!
Welcome Chaos Games
With so much chaos this morning in Washington, D.C., I don’t know where to focus.
Government shutdown looms, blares CNN unless that’s changed since I last hit Refresh.
Kate Riga at TPM wonders just where “on the spectrum of incompetence to malice” the incoming Trump II administration will land.
It appears Donald Trump has ceded the presidency to, in NewsHoundEllen’s view, a “likely illegal immigrant.“
David Rothkopf wonders how a great nation functions with three presidents at once. The official president is “currently MIA. Our president-elect has been acting since the first week of November like he has already taken office, meanwhile, but has also effectively appointed a shadow president in Elon Musk, who appears to be the one of the three with the most clout right now.”
The rule of law is going on holiday except for punishing them what’s done Trump wrong:
U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan says she has often reassured police officers traumatized by the violence of Jan. 6, 2021, that “the rule of law still applies.”
But as President-elect Donald Trump — once a defendant in Chutkan’s very court — prepares to retake the White House and pardon many Jan. 6 perpetrators, Chutkan now says, “I’m not sure I can do that very convincingly these days.”
“You like me. You really like me”
El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago is too busy enjoying his popularity with men richer than himself that he hasn’t noticed Elon Musk embezzling his presidential power. “Everybody wants to be my friend,” Trump gushed on Monday after tech CEOs like Jeff Bezos planned pilgrimages to see him.
“To settle who he loves more, Elon and Bezos are going to put Trump down in the middle of the room and see who he goes to first: ‘All right, here boy!’” — JIMMY FALLON
For once, Democrats seem to have settled on a message they’ll all sing in harmony. They’re repeating “President Musk” and calling Trump Musk’s “chief of staff” in an effort to drive a wedge between the two. The beauty of it is, even if Trump sees that that’s exactly what they’re doing, it won’t make any difference in it getting under his thin skin.
Thank you sharing this Sanctuary of Sanity with us each day.
Happy Hollandaise!
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!)
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.
* 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
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:
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