Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

How’s that for retribution?

The FB post below deserves a wider audience. Sara Robinson is a futurist friend who’s written for Orcinus with David Neiwert and for America’s Future and AlterNet. She commented a few weeks ago on Vivek Ramaswamy’s plans for “revolution” in Washington, D.C.

Ramaswamy’s pitch is another riff on Republicans’ and the Heritage Foundation’s plan to “Schedule F” away the “administrative state” both by replacing tens of thousands of career civil servants with MAGA ideologues and by killing off entire agencies. Think of the Trump administration on steroids.

For the MAGA faithful who still believe their spray-tanned savior was cheated of his rightful kingship by the deep state, eliminating 75 percent of the federal workforce may hold retributive appeal. Robinson spells out what that really looks like out in so-called “real America.”

“The people who will be hurt most by the this are, of course, rural Republicans,” Robinson writes, in small towns already clinging to life supported by government presence:

Every last town with the lights still on is doing it with large amounts of either state or federal money. They’re the county seat — so they have the courts, the jail, the hospital, and the community college. There’s a military base, a dam, national lab, prison, or some other large piece of infrastructure. Or a state or national park nearby that draws in tourists and employees. They’re the port town on this part of the river or coast, built long ago and still maintained on ample public investment; or they’re fortuitously sited near the intersection of two interstates or railroads that funnel in traffic and money to support private business.

The props take a lot of forms, but the source is the same. Apart from a scant handful of places where the old factory or mine hasn’t yet been closed up and shipped abroad, we have yet to find a surviving small town that isn’t standing on an economic foundation of some kind of government investment.

A lot of conservatives listening to Ramaswamy hear him promising the death of the deep state — without realizing that what he’s really talking about is killing dozens or hundreds (or, in a base town, thousands) of the jobs that are the last thing sustaining their own local economies. If he gets his way, the last people in town with a college education and/or a middle-class wage will be forced to move on. Schools and hospitals will close. Real estate values will crash. And their town will just become another boarded-up, desiccating, depopulated blip on a county highway.

Unable to think past FOX-planted stereotypes, they think that “government jobs” are universally held by Those People — the non-white ones, the ones in the cities. It never seems to occur to them that it’s their own neighbors — the nurse at the county hospital, the state trooper, the guy who manages the local airport, the woman who runs the ranger station up at the state park, the fish-and-game guy, the farm bureau staffer, the sweet kid who teaches their son’s first-grade class — who are going to take it in the neck here as the money that funds their jobs dries up. And when they go, so does the tax base that literally keeps the streets paved and the lights on.

When they’re gone — well, to paraphrase one of their heroes, “you’re not gonna have a town any more.” They think they’re winning. But they’re the ones with the actual targets on their backs. Ramaswamy’s plan is their pathway to a future of destitution, drugs, and deaths of despair.

Think beyond negative partisanship for once, neighbors. Look over your shoulder into the mirror for the target the right stuck to your back.

Same old, same “too old”

Stop the handwringing, okay? Mehdi Hasan Sunday night addressed the press promotion of the “Biden’s too old” narrative. Meantime, President Joe Biden, 80, is out bicycling.

Tonight, in my monologue on @MSNBC, I gave 3 main reasons – political, historical, & psephological – for why folks shouldn't panic over polls showing Trump beating Biden, & Biden being too old to win.

I brought receipts. Lots of them.

Watch/share:pic.twitter.com/W7hfEhGegg

— Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan) September 11, 2023

Had a conversation just yesterday with a voter who brought up the “Biden’s too old” concern. Why? Because the media’s all aflutter with it and one thing Democrats are good at is self-doubt.

Listen, the next general (not just presidential) election is 14 months out. Between now and then much can happen, usually does, and probably will.

Yes, it’s important for Democrats to hold the White House. But it’s also important that they retain the Senate, take back the House, and regain strength in state legislatures where Republicans are running laboratories of autocracy.

I’m focused on keeping this lunatic out of North Carolina’s governor’s mansion. The irony is that however tight polls suggest that race looks today, it’s a long way to Tuesday, November 5, 2024. Between now and then, there is a lot of work to do.

Here’s what I don’t get: this administration’s reworking of global relationships is the biggest story in at least a generation in foreign affairs— probably more. Why on earth would you downplay that major story to focus on Biden’s well-earned weariness after an epic all-nighter? https://t.co/fSiGNUwmDl

— Heather Cox Richardson (TDPR) (@HC_Richardson) September 11, 2023

He aced it:

The off year elections have been positive for the Dems:

Looking ahead to 2024, Democrats concede some cause for concern — including President Joe Biden’s anemic approval rating and early polls forecasting a repeat race against former President Donald Trump in which Biden either ties or trails, due in part to a notable chunk of undecided voters and apprehension over Biden’s age and acuity, which he has repeatedly dismissed.

But Democrats also say that based on 2023 so far, they see plenty of reason for optimism about their chances with voters.

An analysis from FiveThirtyEight found that in 38 special elections held so far this year, Democrats have outperformed the partisan lean — or the relative liberal or conservative history — of the areas where the races were held by an average of 10%, both romping in parts of the country that typically support the party while cutting down on GOP margins in red cities and counties, too.

For instance, the Democratic candidate in a Wisconsin State Assembly special election last month lost by just 7 points in an area where Republicans have a 22-point edge and where Trump beat Biden by almost 17 points in 2020.

In a New Hampshire special election in May for a state House seat, the Democrat won by 43 points, far beyond the party’s estimated 23-point edge in the district.

The data from FiveThirtyEight does not include regularly scheduled off-year elections, including the Wisconsin Supreme Court race earlier this year in which the liberal candidate, now-Justice Janet Protasiewicz, won by 11 points — in a state famous for its wafer-thin election margins.

“I think when you when you look at things like this, one special election doesn’t mean much on its own. But when you start to see real consistency, it can certainly become predictive of the next election cycle,” said Ben Nuckels, a Wisconsin Democratic strategist who consulted on Protasiewicz’s campaign.

For comparison, according to FiveThirtyEight, Democrats outperformed the weighted partisan lean by about 4% in special elections held between the 2018 midterms and the 2020 elections, when Biden won the White House by 4.5% but Democrats underperformed in House races.

Conversations with eight Democratic and Republican operatives in swing states show some repeated explanations for this success: the public’s general support for abortion access after the Supreme Court reversed the national guarantee for the procedure last year along with angst and anger over Trump’s comeback bid, given how divisive he remains — two factors which might even overcompensate for Biden’s sagging approval ratings.

“Republicans have not had a good election night since before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. And, honestly, it seems like post-Roe Republicans couldn’t find their groove even if a DJ played their favorite song on repeat,” Nuckels said. “So I think Democrats are in a very good position here going forward.”

They did elect Glenn Youngkin in 2022 and created the myth that he’s the Great Whitebread Hope but other than that they haven’t done much of anything.

This does not mean that Biden is a shoo-on. But the negative politics associated with abortion policy and Trump goes a long way toward mitigating the age question. And the economic news is actually good and getting better.

But it’s going to be a pitched battle, don’t ever doubt it. Almost half the country has lost its collective mind.

So Trump has a government funded office that nobody knows about and it’s piled up with his “boxes.” And the people who have worked there, paid for by the government, are part of his campaign, which is a no-no. Of course:

Several Trump aides on the payroll of his Save America political action committee, his 2024 presidential campaign or both have worked at the post-presidential office since it opened two years ago, according to campaign finance records and people familiar with the office. Cheung did not respond to a follow-up email seeking details about the office and its operations, including whether aides on Trump’s political payroll who have worked there are also paid by the government or a private noncampaign entity.

It is possible for one person to split time between a campaign and government work, according to election finance experts. For example, most executive branch employees — including political appointees — can participate in certain partisan political activities outside of work, so long as they don’t use government resources. And it could be that Trump’s aides are careful not to mix political work with official business.

But there is a strict prohibition on performing political duties on government time — or in a government-occupied building or room. It is not clear what steps Trump is taking to ensure a wall of separation between official and campaign business for aides who are on his political payroll.

“The general rule is, even where dual-hatting is allowed, and even when it’s being done without pay on either or both jobs, you definitely cannot conduct [political] work in your government office,” said a former Federal Election Commission lawyer who asked to remain anonymous to discuss the Trump situation. “That is pretty close to an ironclad rule.”

Most former presidents don’t have to contemplate mounting a legal defense and a presidential campaign as their aides reply to correspondence from fans and dignitaries.

“Donald Trump is the first ex-president of our time who has declared for re-election. At the same time, his political fundraising committees are contributing money to his personal legal defense,” said Michael Beschloss, a presidential historian. 

“Since Nixon’s rocky and much-criticized first months out of office, American ex-presidents have abided by fairly strict traditions and practices,” Beschloss said. “Such practices would not include non-government officials using American taxpayer-funded office space and services to conduct an ex-president’s campaign or to work on his private legal defense, if either of those things happened.”

Political Payroll

When a surprised-to-be-packing Trump left the White House in January 2021, his aides scrambled to collect the items he wanted to take with him and ship them to multiple locations, including Mar-a-Lago and a temporary transition office in the Washington suburbs.  

Toward the end of the six-month transition process, Trump aides worked with GSA to relocate the office in the Washington suburbs to West Palm Beach. Kathy Geisler, the GSA point person for the transition, noted in an email to Trump aides that the agency would pay for only one location — meaning that the “correspondence office” had to be either at a West Palm Beach suite or at Mar-a-Lago, not both. 

“If the Former President’s Office determines that the Correspondence Office in West Palm Beach will be the single office that GSA provides and furnishes, furniture and other items from the Mar-a-lago location will need to be moved [from] the existing location to the new location,” Geisler wrote to Trump’s team in June 2021. 

The office on North Flagler Drive appears to be the final location for that “correspondence office,” also known as the office of the former president. Trump, who continues to falsely claim that he won the 2020 election, does not refer to himself as a “former” president and his staff generally avoid that construction, as well.

It is “the only office space that GSA has rented for Former President Trump’s Office,” a GSA spokesperson said.

Several of his aides, all of whom worked in operations or correspondence roles at the White House, have been seen at the North Flagler Drive office since it opened in late 2021, according to two of the people familiar with the office. The set includes Beau Harrison, Molly Michael and Desiree Thompson, these people said.

Michael, who no longer works for Trump, was on the payroll of his Save America political action committee from July 2021 until September 2022, the month after the FBI raided Mar-a-Lago in search of classified documents. An attorney for Michael did not respond to questions about the work she did for Trump at the North Flagler Drive office.

Harrison was at times paid by Save America — for advance work, a year-end bonus, basic pay and reimbursement for travel and office expenses — according to the PAC’s federal finance disclosures. The last payment was on Aug. 15, 2022, a week after the raid on Mar-a-Lago. Harrison did not respond to a text message from NBC. 

Cheung, the Trump spokesman, confirmed Wednesday that Thompson still works for Trump. She remains on Save America’s payroll, earning a salary of about $120,000 per year, according to the PAC’s most recent filing. Reached briefly by phone Friday, Thompson politely said she had to “refer” questions about the office. She did not call back. 

Classified material

When the FBI raided Mar-a-Lago on Aug. 8, 2022, a box that contained Trump White House schedules, including some with classified markings, was sitting at a West Palm Beach office uninspected, The Guardian reported earlier this year. 

According to the newspaper, a junior aide who went by the nickname ROTUS — receptionist of the United States — had moved the box from a Mar-a-Lago workspace to a government-leased West Palm Beach office when she was relocated to the office in 2022. She was later moved back to Mar-a-Lago, along with the schedules, and she had also scanned them into a laptop, the paper reported, citing two sources familiar with the matter.

ROTUS is a moniker used by Chamberlain Harris, who held the informal title at the tail end of the Trump administration. One of the people familiar with the office confirmed that she worked there for a time. Harris did not reply to a text message or a LinkedIn message seeking comment on her work at the North Flagler Drive office and asking her whether she moved the box of schedules to Mar-a-Lago.

Harris has been on the Save America payroll since July 2021 and has been on Trump’s re-election payroll since December 2022, according to campaign finance records. Together, Trump-affiliated political committees paid her $163,000, including travel reimbursements, from July 2021 through June 30, 2023, which is the last date for which campaign finance records are available.

In late 2022, federal investigators pressed Trump’s lawyers to turn over any remaining classified material in the former president’s possession. That prompted his legal team to hire a private firm to conduct searches at several locations, including the North Flagler Drive office, according to a person familiar with the probes.

The person said there were no additional classified materials discovered by the private team. There is no indication that the FBI ever searched the premises for classified documents or other materials that belong to the government under the Presidential Records Act.

The FBI did not respond to a request for comment.

He’s a stickler for following the rules and the law to the letter so we don’t need to worry about any of this.

So the wingnuts are having a field day because Biden responded to a question about what he was going to do next by saying that he planned to go to bed. Naturally this is being spun as a further sign of his decrepitude. It’s actually the opposite as even Fox News reports:

Fox News White House correspondent Peter Doocy reported that President Joe Biden was “working through the night” despite constant attacks on his age.

Doocy revealed the 80-year-old president’s work schedule during a trip to Vietnam on Sunday.

During the live report, Doocy seemed annoyed by the presence of presidential envoy John Kerry in the moments before Biden was set to speak.

“And so, we expect maybe some climate talk here in Hanoi,” Doocy said. “We expect a short statement off the top, just about how the G20 went in India and how his meetings went here with the Communist Party in Vietnam. And then, as many questions as he wants to take.”

“He has been basically working all through the night, the equivalent of an all-nighter Eastern time,” he added. “So, he’s probably pretty tired, pretty jet-lagged. But, he should take at least a handful.”

He’s 80 and he’s pulling all-nighters with jet-lag. I couldn’t do that.

This from Eric Loomis at LG&M struck me because I just love the fact that unions are finally getting some traction after all these years. It’s a wonderful development and I have high hopes that this new generation will be successful in reforming the workplace through collective action. However, they do need to keep their eyes on the prize:

As a labor person who is not one of these lefty labor-intellectual types who think that the real goal of the labor movement or the left should be to “emancipate” ourselves from labor entirely, I am not of the utopian type frame of mind. I admit that my brain mostly works within the 20th century socialist framework much more so than the 21st century left-libertarian-individual freedom framework. So when I see odd collective bargaining demands from workers who are more of the individualistic mindset, it kind of breaks my brain. Workers can collectively bargain for whatever they want. But I am trying to imagine walking to negotiations and trying to work out the demands of these Philadelphia coffee shop workers. I am going to present here what the employers’ lawyer says, which you can dismiss if you would like. But then the workers themselves basically confirm that these are the demands, though they frame them in a slightly different way.

“We’ve been working through some very unusual union proposals,” Paisner said.

At Ultimo Coffee, for example, union leaders proposeda layoff procedure “not based on seniority or ability, but rather, on how much money employees claim to have in their bank accounts,” and a lateness policy that “would excuse employees from any consequence even if they arrive hours late for an unverifiable reason,” according Paisner, the employer’s lawyer.

Union negotiators agree that their approach is novel.

Is that real?

Kate Lord, lead negotiator for Ultimo Coffee’s union, says the union’s layoff language didn’t mention bank account balances but considered employees’ alternative income sources to avoid terminating “the people who would be the most greatly impacted by layoffs.”

She said the lateness policy idea wasn’t meant to allow tardiness for no reason but to “shift away from fear and toward building culture rather than having policies that are about force.”

“To call our proposals ‘unusual’ doesn’t mean that they are flawed in some way, it just means we’ve approached things a little differently, and we’re proud of that,” Lord said.

Well then.

The first thing that comes to my mind is that SHARING PERSONAL FINANCIAL WITH THE EMPLOYER IS THE WORST IDEA I HAVE EVER HEARD!!!! Seriously, there is nothing good that can come of this. If you want to critique the seniority principle for hiring and firing that unions have held to forever, well, there’s room to do that. The problem is coming up with something better. And allowing the boss to see your personal financial information to make those decisions is so rife with problems as to make my heart stop. DO NOT GIVE YOUR EMPLOYER MORE INFORMATION ABOUT YOU PERSONAL LIFE FOR CHRIST’S SAKE!!!

I’m old enough that I was once told that I couldn’t get a raise because I was young and didn’t have a family like my male co-worker who was married and he needed the money more than I did. I didn’t think that was fair because he was shitty worker and spent most of his time in the boss’s office talking about sports. And it wasn’t.

Kids you do not want to do this. I get that the “meritocratic” system is flawed but just wait until you are on the receiving end of this sort of decision which is always going to be subjective. Who can say who has “enough” money and who doesn’t?

Also, what Eric says. Don’t ever give your employer this kind of knowledge about you. My God, that’s stupid.

Then the lateness policy, I mean this is just completely unworkable, at least as far as I can tell. The reality is that unions have long been part of the force disciplining labor. That’s part of what collective bargaining does. It commits the workers to rules too. This is not emancipatory. This part of the reason why the Industrial Workers of the World always eschewed contracts. If your goal is to give the store over to the workers, well, I guess you can try to bargain that. But even if you had an employee-owned cooperative, there is no way this would work. In the end, you have to rely on people to show up, if to relieve other workers stuck there while you get around to coming in if for no other reason.

Sometimes, I have no words. It’s not often I sympathize with employers. And I don’t exactly sympathize with them here. But I can see how they would be completely flummoxed at figuring out how to deal with the specific demands of these workers. We are a long ways from pure and simple unionism.

Again, just wait until you’re forced to miss your class or your ride because your co-worker is repeatedly late to work. Or you’re forced to pick up the slack repeatedly during the busy time in the coffee shop and nothing can be done about it. A company can’t run if nobody knows what time people are going to show up.

I understand that people would like a humane workplace where no one is subject to coercion. Workers are often at the mercy of capricious bosses and it sucks. I’m sure there are ways to make it better but this isn’t it. Employers are often unfair but your co-workers aren’t always saints either.

And it’s not Tuberville

Johnson: All this climate alarmism is based on bad science completely ignoring the impact of clouds… These windmills are killing the whales pic.twitter.com/uTEGtAyEMB

— Acyn (@Acyn) September 10, 2023

“We’re going to give money to nations like Angola and Africa to develop solar energy” pic.twitter.com/nmxnK3OFgL

— Acyn (@Acyn) September 10, 2023

Wisconsin just re-elected this person.

Indicted former president gets a mixed welcome

All the red was not for him.

There were chants of U-S-A when TFG arrived Saturday at Jack Trice Stadium for the Iowa-Iowa State football game. But other football fans gave Donald Trump a less than warm welcome.

The New York Times:

The former president entered the game to a mix of applause and audible boos, as a plane with a banner reading “Where’s Melania?” flew overhead — a nod to the absence of his wife from the campaign trail. Some attendees gave him the middle finger from the stands while he looked on from the glass-paneled box from which he watched the game.

In case you’re wondering how Trump’s football game went pic.twitter.com/9BaSBjl6hQ

— Rachel Bitecofer 🗽💡🔭🦆 (@RachelBitecofer) September 10, 2023

New photos are emerging showing the crowd at an Iowa football game flipping off Trump as he waved from behind glass. pic.twitter.com/XXykfgthJa

— No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen (@NoLieWithBTC) September 9, 2023

“Big strong men, big burly football fans, with tears in their eyes, coming up to me saying, sir, I’ve never told a former president to fuck off before, sir, but …” pic.twitter.com/qoiO5qpqZt

— Kevin M. Kruse (@KevinMKruse) September 9, 2023

Of aliens and alienation

The United States pulled itself together again somehow after the trauma of the Civil War. Or rather, slavery ended formally only to be replaced by a system that rendered the South’s once-enslaved persons free in name only for another 100 years. What persisted was one nation with two systems deeply divided by culture.

Those war’s psychic wounds were thinly disguised behind monuments to the Lost Cause that the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) spent decades planting across indivisible nation. Meanwhile, the Invisible Nation enforced white supremacy for nearly a century. The North won the Civil War, but the South won the peace, at least regionally.

The trauma of electing the country’s first black president in this century reopened the wounds to white pride that never fully healed after Appomattox. Donald Trump, his own psychic wounds worn on the outside, exploited that grievance to win the presidency immediately following Barack Obama’s White House tenure. Talk of a second civil war persists among Trump’s red-hatted brownshirts and did so even before Trump lost reelection in 2020. A New Lost cause was born. Or the old one got a makeover.

Where that leaves our indivisible nation now is anyone’s guess. How long it may take the country to recover from the MAGA insurrection I can only speculate. One wonders if even the appearance of space aliens could knit the country back together the way World War II seemed to, at least for a time.

Susie Madrak of Crooks and Liars posted that she’d recently rewatched Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). It was better than she remembered. I watched it last night, after decades. Susie’s right. It holds up pretty well. Steven Spielberg’s aliens (also E.T. from 1982) are quite a contrast with spiky, stabby black aliens from Apple TV’s series Invasion.

But one doesn’t suppose even a hostile alien invasion could mollify the intra-human grievances of centuries.

The sense of being alien in one’s own home is nurtured among a certain brand of Christian. There is us, the believers, and them, the unsaved tools or allies of the Devil. Or gays or transgenders or liberals or anyone distrusted as not “us.” Outsiderism is a defining identity reinforced in many churches weekly. An old (secular) friend who has worn that identity his entire life once said that if he ever found himself on the inside of some social group, he would have to create an outside just to feel normal.

As for our new(ish) faction of rebels, it is difficult to see how they embrace a common national identity once Trump is gone. Pondering how an even more alien species’ appearance could achieve that brought to mind a scene in “The Last Battle” from the C.S. Lewis Narnia series.

A multicultural society of humans and talking beasts, Narnia has been invaded by the Calormenes. The last Narnians have taken final refuge in a stable. But the dwarves have decided that they can trust no one but themselves. Aslan the lion (Lewis’ Christ figure) appears inside the stable to rescue his faithful, but in their bitterness and cynicism, the dwarves can no longer see him.

As blogger Brenton Dickieson put it:

Their skepticism isn’t just, “I need to be convinced by the evidence,” but “I will not be taken in, so I’ll just stick with my own kind.” 

Readers do not reminding of the MAGA response to the country’s invasion by COVID-19.

The scene plays out:

Aslan raised his head and shook his mane. Instantly a glorious feast appeared on the Dwarfs’ knees: pies and tongues and pigeons and trifles and ices, and each Dwarf had a goblet of good wine in his right hand. But it wasn’t much use. They began eating and drinking greedily enough, but it was clear that they couldn’t taste it properly. They thought they were eating and drinking only the sort of things you might find in a Stable. One said he was trying to eat hay and another said he had got a bit of an old turnip and a third said he’d found a raw cabbage leaf. And they raised golden goblets of rich red wine to their lips and said, ‘Ugh! Fancy drinking dirty water out of a trough that a donkey’s been at! Never thought we’d come to this.’

But very soon every Dwarf began suspecting that every other Dwarf had found something nicer than he had, and they started grabbing and snatching, and went on to quarreling, till in a few minutes there was a free fight and all the good food was smeared on their faces and clothes or trodden under foot.

But when at last they sat down to nurse their black eyes and their bleeding noses, they all said: ‘Well, at any rate, there’s no Humbug here. We haven’t let anyone take us in. The Dwarfs are for the Dwarfs!’

‘You see,’ said Aslan. ‘ They will not let us help them. They have chosen cunning instead of belief. Their prison is only in their own minds, yet they are in that prison; and so afraid of being taken in that they can not be taken out.’

There is no brotherhood of Man for MAGAstan, no solidarity, no coming together, not even in the name of preserving the country, humanity or their own lives. Their prison is their own minds.