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Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Lindsey Graham’s Wet Dream

Published by digby on January 30, 2026

I’m pretty sure this is all Graham’s doing. He’s been licking Trump’s boots about the “peace president” bs and has no doubt convinced his that they will not be able to deny him the Nobel Prize if he bombs Iran into submission. Trump is losing what’s left of his mind so he probably believes it:

U.S. President Donald Trump is weighing options against Iran that include targeted strikes on security forces and leaders to inspire protesters, multiple sources said, even as Israeli and Arab officials said air power alone would not topple the clerical rulers.

Two U.S. sources familiar with the discussions said Trump wanted to create conditions for “regime change” after a crackdown crushed a nationwide protest movement earlier this month, killing thousands of people.

To do so, he was looking at options to hit commanders and institutions Washington holds responsible for the violence, to give protesters the confidence that they could overrun government and security buildings, they said. Trump has not yet made a final decision on a course of action including whether to take the military path, one of the sources and a U.S. official said.

The second U.S. source said the options being discussed by Trump’s aides also included a much larger strike intended to have lasting impact, possibly against the ballistic missiles that can reach U.S. allies in the Middle East or its nuclear enrichment programmes. Iran has been unwilling to negotiate restrictions on the missiles, which it sees as its only deterrence against Israel, the first source said.

You may recall that we had a deal like this which Trump trashed in his first term on the word of the likes of Lindsey Graham who really just wants to bomb Iran into submission.

We are a very short trip to Trump becoming the worlds biggest neocon, invading other countries to “free” them. I’m sure Graham’s got him believing they’ll greet him with flowers.

Update —Not his only wet dream apparently:

Saving Lives Is No Longer On The Menu

Published by digby on January 30, 2026

You may have heard that Moderna is no longer going to be funding vaccine trials:

Moderna chief executive officer Stephane Bancel said the company does not plan to invest in new late-stage vaccine trials because of growing opposition to immunizations from health officials in the United States. 

His comments were made last week during the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. 

“You cannot make a return on investment if you don’t have access to the U.S. market,” Bancel told Bloomberg TV. He said the vaccine market in the United States is much smaller as more anti-vaccine guidelines have become the norm.

Since last May, the Department of Health and Human Services under Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s leadership has greatly reduced general recommendations for COVID-19 vaccines, and most recently cut the number of recommended childhood immunizations from 17 to 11. Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla, also in attendance in Davos, remarked Kennedy’s policies are “almost like a religion” and “anti-science.”

Economic analysts said Bancel’s comments mean Moderna’s phase 3 clinical trials for vaccines will likely be on the chopping block. Moderna has already been facing declines in sales after a boom during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

This is a tragedy:

The COVID vaccines saved millions of lives but because we have a stupid, superstitious, conspiracy-addled faction in America that’s pulling the strings, we’re going to deny the world anything like that in the future. We’re just determined to kill the human species one way or another.

I Do Not Regret To Inform You

Published by Tom Sullivan on January 30, 2026

“that we are going to win”

https://bsky.app/profile/thetnholler.bsky.social/post/3m7ikj3hdx22b

Looking back through the archives, I’ve advised celebrating little victories again and again and again and again. Just not recently.

But over at The New Republic, Perry Bacon interviews Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University, on keeping our eyes on the prize, as it were.

Táíwò began garnering attention last fall for saying repeatedly, “I do not regret to inform you that we are going to win.”

The point of hyper-violence, Táíwò tells Bacon, is to keep us back on our heels and “to keep us from realizing how much power we have to resist.”

I do not regret to inform you that we are going to win

— Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò (@olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social) 2025-10-21T23:40:12.060Z

But why this phrase and not “we are winning,” asks Bacon:

Táíwò: Yeah, I think that phrasing is important because one of the things that I alluded to when I first explained why I use that phrase is: what I’m not trying to do is look at these heinous murders, look at this mass campaign of ethnic cleansing, and say nothing bad is happening or “this is what victory looks like.”

That is absolutely not the impression that I’m trying to give. In fact, it’s the exact opposite. Why I’m saying this is because things look so dire. And the ability of federal forces to concentrate on slivers of the country and generate these spectacles of hyper-violence is part and parcel of their political strategy to make it look like they have power that they don’t, in fact, have.

Donald Trump is a creature of reality TV. He’s about creating spectacle. Of course, he’s choosing cities he targets not only for maximum media coverage, but also for political payback. The strategy cannot work everywhere, Táíwò believes:

This is a massive country. They’re facing massive resistance even in the large cities that they target—and that resistance is effective, by the way. They can’t deploy this strategy everywhere, right? So they depend on generating these spectacles, generating a social media environment of fear and capitulation as a force multiplier.

If they can just harass and attack this many children, they think they can convince people that their victory is inevitable. And it is important now, more than ever, to remind people that’s not, in fact, true. The brave people risking their lives on the streets of Minnesota are in fact doing something that is effective; they are in fact doing something that we can and must learn from and are in fact doing something that can work at scale.

The more we pay attention to how they’re resisting, rather than just the evil they’re resisting, the likelier we are to realize that we can win, we must win—and we will.

Not unlike Donald Trump’s attempts as we speak to rewrite the history of his 2020 loss to Joe Biden, the right has spent decades trying to reverse its “world-historical defeat of the politics of segregationism and apartheid.”

And this hysterical, comic-book villainy is their attempt to spectacle and meme and “earned media” their way out of the reality that no one likes what they stand for.

I’d quibble with that last bit, considering that, as I noted earlier, Americans as a people elected Trump not once but twice, the second time as a twice-impeached, convicted felon. Or perhaps a portion of his 2024 national majority know what he stands for and simply don’t care.

The rest is at TNR (subscription req’d), but the video above has it all.

Do We Have Any Decency?

Published by Tom Sullivan on January 30, 2026

Have a look in the mirror

Osama bin Laden is applauding from his watery grave.

Cognitive scientist George Lakoff famously argued (contra liberal “best interests” arguments) that people do not vote their interests; they vote their identities. So, just who are we? Americans should do some soul-searching and ask themselves. Do we have any decency? We elected Donald Trump not once but twice, the second time as a twice-impeached, convicted felon. We knew just who and what he was and installed him back in the Oval Office, some say over the price of eggs. (Jonathan Swift could write a biting satire.) What kind of people do that?

The world is asking (The Washington Post, gift link):

Outside the U.S., the perceived havoc wrought by federal agents has also left its mark. This week, Giuseppe Sala, mayor of Milan, spoke out against the expected arrival of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents as part of a routine deployment of U.S. personnel to the Winter Olympics in Italy. “I’m sure that the Milanese are unhappy with having this sort of militia” here, “which kills people in the U.S., entering houses without permission,” Sala told my colleagues, referring to recent events in Minneapolis. Of the Italian government, he asked: “Is it possible that you could say ‘no’ once to Mr. Trump? Once! Quite simply.”

Then of course there was the attempted breach of the Ecuadorian consulate in Minneapolis this week. Nations from around the world with diplomatic missions stationed here must be questioning the safety of their personnel.

Trump’s Interior Ministry

Germany has issued a travel advisory to its citizens.

Trump officials balk at criticism of their actions, and have cast descriptions put forward by Democratic lawmakers and activists of ICE as a modern-day “Gestapo” as endangering U.S. federal officers. But viewed from afar, the developments in the U.S. seem familiar. “You have your own Interior Ministry,” an Arab business executive told me on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last week.

They were gesturing to the all-powerful policing apparatuses that exist in other countries, especially autocracies where strongmen leaders lean on security forces distinct from the army to consolidate control and suppress dissent. During the upheavals of the Arab Spring more than a decade ago, for example, it was the notorious Interior Ministry of Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak that was the focal point of popular rage.

The whole world is watching.

In its cover story this week on the excesses of ICE, the Economist pointed to three “warning signs” of states giving way to “paramilitarism”: “One is when governments start to rely on armed force as a first resort, rather than the last. Another is when internal disciplinary mechanisms cease to function properly,” noted the British publication. “A final red flag is when forces looking for bad guys treat local civilians ‘as support networks of the enemy,’ perhaps because polarizing politicians describe them as such.”

I’ve entertained the notion of creating a protest sign reading HONK IF YOU’RE A DOMESTIC TERRORIST.

Joy Reed early this morning posted a collection of political cartoons inspired by current events. The one at the top struck a nerve and inspired this post.

View on Threads

We Built It, They Are Using It

Published by digby on January 29, 2026

Here’s the creepiest thing you’ll read all day:

Federal immigration officers fanning out across Minnesota and other parts of the country are newly equipped with an array of state-of-the-art surveillance technologies, thanks to a bill passed last summer thattransformed Immigration and Customs Enforcement into the country’s most highly funded law enforcement agency. ICE has wasted no time spending its war chest, buying new tools ranging from biometric trackers to mobile phone location databases, spyware and drones, while loosening restrictions on how it uses some of these technologies.

These new surveillance powers come at a time when ICE is also pushing the bounds of its traditional role of immigration enforcement. In recent months, ICE leaders, backed by top Trump administration officials, have asserted the authority to use all available tools to monitor and investigate anti-ICE protester networks, including U.S. citizens. Democratic lawmakers and civil rights groups say the agency’s expanding use of its surveillance tools infringes on privacy and free speech rights of immigrants and U.S. citizens alike.

The Department of Homeland Security, of which ICE is a part, disclosed in an annual report on Wednesday that the agency has significantly expanded the operational scope for its use of facial recognition, AI and other advanced technologies. In a statement to the Washington Post, DHS said ICE’s use of innovative technologies in investigations is “no different” than other law enforcement agencies. “We are not going to divulge law enforcement sensitive methods,” it said.

This is a gift link to the whole article. The Post lays out the full array of tools they are using and it is beyond chilling. It’s like something out of a dystopian Sci-Fi novel.

But what did we expect? They have basically given a secret police agency and unlimited budget and they are going to spend it.

And it’s not only on high-tech spying equipment against Americans. Get a load of this:

Despite protests in small towns and cities across the US, the Trump administration is pushing ahead with the purchase of warehouses it plans to convert into immigration jails in what could be the largest expansion of such detention capacity in US history.

The cost for acquiring two warehouses alone was $172 million. A third in El Paso, Texas, could be among the largest jails of any kind in the country if completed as envisioned, with 8,500 beds. The deals mark the latest turn in US Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s plan to use as many as 23 warehouses for detaining thousands of immigrants arrested by federal agents in Minneapolis and other cities. Those aggressive enforcement actions have ignited clashes with protesters and led to agents killing two US citizens.

On Jan. 16, the administration paid $102 million for a site near Hagerstown, Maryland, according to a local court filing. A week later, the government paid $70 million in cash for a warehouse in Surprise, Arizona. The price tags — roughly in line with the industry average for the warehouse market — cover just the acquisition of the sites, which are currently empty shells. ICE still has to pay companies to outfit the buildings with toilets, showers, beds, dining and recreation areas and then run them as detention centers.

The El Paso site was purchased by the Department of Homeland Security recently, according to people familiar with the transaction who asked not to be named discussing a confidential process. But the sale price hasn’t yet been made public. Other transactions appear to be near completion. Canadian billionaire Jim Pattison’s company said in a statement that it had accepted an offer to sell its 550,000-square-foot warehouse in Ashland, Virginia, to a US government contractor. “Some time later, we became aware of the ultimate owner and intended use of the building,” it said. “This transaction is still subject to certain approvals and closing conditions.”

It’s a massively corrupt boondoggle. As we knew it would be when they passed that grotesque bill last summer.

They have to get rid of this agency and start over. The expense is obscene and the power they’ve vested in it is enormous. We won’t survive as a democracy if we don’t.

Tulsi’s Busy

Published by digby on January 29, 2026

Apparently, she’s also involved in Trump’s 2020 Big Lie project as well. She showed up in Georgia yesterday when the FBI seized the 2020 ballots.

I just like to give a big shout-out to all the lefties who boosted her career because she was cute. The evidence was always there that she was a snake but they didn’t want to see it. (Howie Klein did...)

Trump Antoinette Strikes Again

Published by digby on January 29, 2026

He needed a good fluff session today

He really hates that affordability message:

The rest was no better. He’s promising much more pollution and a nuclear accident and took credit for things that happened before he became president. RFK Jr is pushing a health care bill that doesn’t exist, Lutnick showed why they call him Nutlick, Bessent said the economy is roaring and Witkoff said the Russians deserve a lot of credit.

And he repeated almost word for word an earlier anecdote about telling Macron that he’d better raise drug prices on the French people or he’ll hit them with tariffs on French wines and he fat-shamed an anonymous friend of his again, which he seems to be doing at every appearance these days for some reason, also word for word. That’s very weird.

Anyway:

Did You Think It Was Over?

Published by digby on January 29, 2026

Pro-choice advocates would like a word

The people behind it are the usual suspects. If you ever believed it was just about killing babies, you were wrong. It’s all the usual suspects:

Gotta make a living, dontcha know?

I wouldn’t think they could get very far with this. After all, even Trump has married gay men with kids in his cabinet. But these people play the long game. They’ll keep at it and the moment there’s a real opening they will go for it.

The Normies Have Been Engaged

Published by digby on January 29, 2026

At the Golden Globes on Jan. 11, allegedly progressive Hollywood barely mentioned the Immigration and Customs Enforcement siege taking place in Minneapolis. Most didn’t gesture to the Trump administration’s war on free speech, particularly in the media. (In fairness, there were some who spoke out on the red carpet, and others wore pins indicating their support for Renee Good, who had been killed four days before by an ICE agent, but it was a very small contingent.) 

The reluctance shouldn’t have been too surprising. America’s elite institutions and wealthy individuals have been among the most cowardly of all stakeholders in the country since Donald Trump returned to office in January 2025. Still, of all of them, Hollywood should have been out there saying something. The film industry has experience with blacklists and government witch hunts, and they should have realized what’s at stake — and how much they could stand to lose. 

But Saturday’s fatal shooting of Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old intensive-care unit nurse at a local Veterans Affairs hospital, by Border Patrol officers in Minneapolis seems to have broken the entertainment industry out of its stupor. In the last few days there have been numerous statements from actors and musicians condemning ICE’s actions and demanding that the Trump administration end its mass deportation campaign and hold the perpetrators accountable. Reddit forums like FauxMoi are featuring anti-ICE statements from celebrities over the past few days — including Glenn Close, Billie Eilish, Ethan Hawke, Natalie Portman, Katy Perry, Edward Norton and many others — while also posting videos and commentary usually confined to political sites.

But it’s not just artists who are speaking out. As the Washington Post reported, “influencers devoted to adventure biking, baseball and Lord of the Rings to travel, sewing and women’s personal finance” have posted their outrage at Pretti’s killing, and their followers are weighing in with similar sentiments. Even a sub-Reddit devoted to playing your cat’s behind like a bongo — which has 800,000 participants! — came out swinging against ICE, with its moderator declaring, “If you still support Trump/ICE even slightly, you’re not welcome in this sub. We can no longer tolerate the people who are supporting or making excuses for this.” 

Other cat lovers have also been taking a stand. On his Instagram “Business Cats” feed, comedian Drennon Davis has been posting his cats singing protest songs for the last couple of weeks. He similarly invites his followers who disagree to deport themselves to another forum if they don’t like it. In both cat cases, the up votes far outnumber the down votes. Everyone from fitness influencers to military groups to quilters are weighing in, and there is surprising agreement in the comments. Even a Reddit sex forum devoted to large penises waded into the topic.

Apolitical institutions are speaking out as well. Minnesota’s professional sports teams issued a joint statement calling for the “immediate de-escalation of tensions,” and the National Basketball Players Association announced that they “stand in solidarity with the people in Minnesota protesting and risking their lives to demand justice.” At an NBA game on Sunday, the Minnesota Timberwolves held a moment of silence for Pretti, and fans followed by yelling “F**k ICE!” and holding up protest signs throughout the arena. No altercations were reported.

Even in Silicon Valley, which has famously cozied up to Trump, “more than 800 employees, including those from Google, Microsoft, and Meta, called on their bosses to condemn ICE,” according to a Semafor. A couple of the big bosses, Sam Altman of Open AI and Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei, spoke out against the agency’s authoritarian tactics. (They also bowed and scraped to Trump at the same time, but baby steps.) 

Social media is responsible for this swift evolution. In the immediate aftermath of Saturday’s shooting, the administration disseminated a narrative that was belied by the many videos of Pretti’s killing that were circulated across all the platforms. The graphic footage went instantly viral, with trusted influencers all over the internet sharing it and offering their own opinion, which created a permission structure and an invitation for people who are not immersed in politics to take a position. 

Suddenly, what had always been apolitical forums have become platforms for the famous and non-famous alike to condemn the Trump administration’s deportation tactics — and that may have marked a turning point in the Trump administration’s assault on democracy. The normies got involved.

With the extreme polarization of our political information ecosystem, most of us exist, at least to some extent, inside media echo chambers. Regular people now pick up on current events in a more random fashion. After the 2024 presidential election, many Americans holding more mainstream, centrist beliefs backed off from participating in the political conversation, and they have been reluctant to join in again because of how chaotic and emotionally charged it has become. But when your quilting group on Facebook starts posting “F**k ICE” quilts and your favorite Instagram cats are singing protest songs, you start to pay attention. 

On Wednesday, Bruce Springsteen — who has been a steady voice for the downtrodden throughout his long career — released “Streets of Minneapolis,” a moving protest anthem based on his Academy Award-winning song “Streets of Philadelphia.” The Boss’ lyrics — “Oh our Minneapolis, I hear your voice / Singing through the bloody mist” — have struck a chord; the track instantly garnered national media attention and has gone viral online.

The people Springsteen is singing about — the thousands of regular folks in Minneapolis who have emerged from their homes in bitterly cold weather to take to the streets in peaceful protest against Trump’s occupying paramilitary force — are a model of courage for the rest of America. And the horror of seeing two of them shot down by masked federal agents has sent a shock wave through the population. Politics has escaped the news silos — the true story of what’s happening in Minneapolis is now out in the world in a way that few stories ever are these days. 

Even some Trump voters are starting to rebel. The gun groups, who were slow off the mark, are now condemning the administration’s line, reiterated by Trump on Tuesday, that Pretti shouldn’t have had a gun, despite possessing a conceal-carry permit. Polls show a sharp decline in support for the president’s mass deportation policy, and his approval ratings are continuing their descent into the 30s. The response of focus groups of voters who chose Trump in 2024 after going with Biden in 2020 should send chills down GOP spines. “You know, they killed that young man and they killed that young lady a couple weeks ago too,” one participant said. “They’re out of hand. [Trump’s] main priority, I think, for the last couple of months, [has] been the Nobel Peace Prize which is ridiculous.”

It is indeed ridiculous, as is the fact that the president’s first words after Pretti’s shooting was a lengthy Truth Social screed complaining about a possible delay of his precious White House ballroom. 

Average Americans are seeing that Trump is more and more out of touch, and they’re recognizing, as that Trump voter has, that his administration is more and more out of hand. They likely wouldn’t be seeing it now if not for the influencers and others who are using their platforms to share their outrage in online communities where politics isn’t usually discussed. For all its toxicity — and it is profoundly toxic — in this instance, social media actually did some good.

Bruce speaks for most of us: