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Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

A little something to keep you up at night

Published by digby on April 13, 2023

Oh no:

Republicans have talked themselves into believing that 2024 is absolutely, positively, the last time they’ll have to deal with Donald Trump. Yesterday Benjy Sarlin brought the room down by arguing that even if Trump loses in 2024, he might run again in 2028, actuarial tables be damned.

Is that possible? Absolutely. If Trump loses in 2024, he could easily mount another campaign—though this is as much an indictment of Don Jr. as a plausible heir as anything else.

But let me take this a step further.

During the Republican primaries, one of the arguments that Good Republicans will deploy against Trump as a way of passively challenging him will be to say something along the lines of, “Trump is great! But if Trump is the nominee, we can only get four years, because he couldn’t run for reelection in 2028. We need a Republican nominee who can give us eight years.”

Well I come to you from the future and I’m here to tell you that Donald Trump will respond with the following:

A lot of people are saying that, actually, I could run again. I was treated so unfairly during my first term—the Russia hoax, the witch hunt, the lovers—more unfairly than any president in history. [sniffs] And so I should get a third term. Let me tell you that we’re looking into it and we’ll have a statement very soon. It’ll be a strong statement. And I think a lot of you are going to be very happy with it.

In response, his Republican challengers will gape and sputter and twist their toes in the dirt. But they won’t say that a third term is impossible. Elite Republicans in elected office will decline to comment. And the various precincts of Conservatism Inc. will either ignore this claim, coyly play along with it, or roll their eyes and say, “Well of course this is nonsense so it doesn’t matter. Trump just says stuff.”

Why am I certain that this future is coming down the pike?

Because Trump already did it in 2020.

Look, there was a lot going on in 2020. Impeachment. A pandemic. Massive unemployment. Hundreds of thousands of Americans dying. A presidential campaign. So much to keep track of.

So you probably don’t remember this moment at a rally in Wisconsin in August of 2020:

“We are going to win four more years,” Trump said at a rally in Oshkosh, Wisconsin on Monday. “And then after that, we’ll go for another four years because they spied on my campaign. We should get a redo of four years.”

The crowd went wild. Republican voters loved it. And this idea wasn’t a one-off bit of improv. It was a staple. In September at a Nevada rally he said,

And 52 days from now we’re going to win Nevada, and we’re going to win four more years in the White House. And then after that, we’ll negotiate, right? Because we’re probably — based on the way we were treated — we are probably entitled to another four after that.

Do you remember what Republican elected officials and people in conservative media said about the frequent assertion by their candidate that he would flout the Constitution in pursuit of a third presidential term?

All of this has happened before. All of this will happen again.

So get ready for the Trump Gets a Third Term argument. It’s coming.

I knew Trump would run again in 2024. I said it on the day after the election was called. But I’m not sure we’ll see him run again in 2028 if he loses. Losing twice seems like a death knell, even for him.

But this? I think there’s an excellent chance that he’ll argue that he deserves a third term because people were mean to him in his first. Would it work? Who Knows. But by that time we might not even be having elections anymore. And his status as a super-hero among the cult will be unassailable. Yes, it could happen.

Have a nice rest…

Fox News spills the beans

Published by digby on April 13, 2023

The Dominion case implicates Trump bigly

Of course they knew. And yet, one month later, Trump called Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger and asked him to “find” just one vote more than needed to declare victory.

There is no doubt that they were lying. And Fox News was a huge help. I’ll bet District Attorney Fanni Willis is thrilled to see this.

Meanwhile in Florida

Published by digby on April 13, 2023

Uh huh:

Gov. Ron DeSantis’ political operation has started calling Republican members of the Florida congressional delegation to consolidate support after four members publicly backed Donald Trump in his 2024 presidential bid.

Sources with four of the six members contacted by DeSantis’ team shared the outreach with NBC News; each requested anonymity to confirm the calls.

As Trump continues to lead in the polls for the GOP presidential nomination, DeSantis is trying to stop defections in his own backyard ahead of his expected run. DeSantis has no endorsements from the 20 Republicans in the state congressional delegation.

The efforts started after Trump picked up the backing of Rep. Byron Donalds, who has been a DeSantis ally. The three earlier endorsements were from Reps. Anna Paulina Luna, Matt Gaetz and Cory Mills, who are vocal Trump boosters and whose support wasn’t surprising.

Since Donalds came out for Trump, DeSantis’ team has called at least six members of Florida’s congressional delegation, asking that they hold off on making any endorsements in the near future. They are: Reps. Aaron Bean, Vern Buchanan, Kat Cammack, Mario Diaz-Balart, Laurel Lee and Greg Steube.

Ryan Tyson, a longtime GOP pollster and mainstay in DeSantis’ political orbit, has led the effort. Tyson has initiated the calls, reaching out to schedule later calls between the members of Congress and DeSantis himself.

“There is clearly some angst from the DeSantis camp that so many members of the state’s congressional delegation are throwing their support behind Trump,” said a GOP consultant for one of the members contacted by DeSantis’ team. “Gaetz going with Trump is one thing, but Byron’s endorsement of the former president undoubtedly rattled some cages.”

This hissing sound you hear? It’s the sound of the air going out of the DeSantis balloon.

Heckuva job Maga

Published by digby on April 13, 2023

I wonder why this is?

They won’t stop. They are living in an alternate universe. Right now they are focusing like a laser on Hunter Biden’s laptop and the Manhattan District Attorney.

“The rule of ideology, enforced with violence”

Published by digby on April 13, 2023

Radly Balko’s analysis of the vigilante case down in Texas is a must read in its entirety. He knows his stuff. It’s vitally important to understand what’s really driving these people. It’s not good:

Incredibly, Tucker Carlson just had Kyle Rittenhouse on his show to discuss Perry’s conviction. The far right has been eager to draw parallels between Rittenhouse and Perry. And the two cases are similar, just not in the way they’re claiming. As Texas criminal defense attorney Mark Bennett has pointed out, when it comes to self-defense law, if we’re going to compare the two cases, the person in a posture most similar to Rittenhouse’s is Foster, not Perry.

Rittenhouse may have been reckless rush to the Kenosha protests with his rifle (and I believe he was), but doing so wasn’t illegal, and under state law, he should not have been charged. According to Rittenhouse — and a good deal of the evidence — the protesters in Kenosha mistook his lawful carrying of a rifle as an immediate threat, attacked him, and, as a result, he was justified in using lethal force in response.

Similarly, whatever you may think of Foster’s decision to bring a rifle to the Austin protest, it was perfectly legal. The fact that he and other protesters were in the street might have been a misdemeanor, but as Bennett notes, that isn’t relevant to Perry’s self-defense claim. It was Perry’s actions that presented an immediate threat, and it was Perry who then mistook Foster’s legal actions as a threat.

The only difference between the two is their respective politics and the fact that Rittenhouse was more reckless (he took his gun and rushed into a hostile protest, Foster was among supporters), and Rittenhouse killed his mistaken attackers before they could seriously harm him. Foster showed restraint — and was killed for it. Yet Rittenhouse is made into a hero, while Foster is turned into a villain.

It’s also notable that Abbott and others defending Perry seem to think there’s something inherently illegitimate about a BLM protester with a gun, but not the armed militia members who shut down a Michigan legislative session. We’ve also seen far right activists bring rifles to protest drag events, or while milling about outside of polling places, yet when a member of the Black Panthers stood outside a polling place with a club, it made headlines on Fox for weeks.

These are contradictions, but it isn’t quite correct say the right is being inconsistent. What they’re doing is perfectly consistent; it’s just that it has nothing to do with the Second Amendment or self-defense. The consistent theme running through all of these positions — defending Rittenhouse, smearing Foster, legalizing running down protesters, the Michigan capital protest — is the legitimization of violence and the threat of violence against their political opponents.

For all the degeneracy on the political right in the Trump era, this is what I find most alarming — the dehumanizing of political opponents to the point where violence isn’t merely justifiable, it’s almost a moral imperative. Their opponents aren’t just wrong, they’re criminal. People accused of crimes aren’t just presumed guilty, they deserve to be abused by police. Immigrants aren’t just crossing the border illegally, they’re mostly rapists and criminals. Protesters aren’t merely misguided, they should be flattened by big-ass trucks.

You only valorize Garrett Foster’s killer if you’ve convinced yourself that Foster deserved to die. And the only real evidence against Foster offered up by the right has been that was participating in a Black Lives Matter protest. So the math here isn’t difficult.

If Abbott and the Texas pardon board want free Perry and clear his record, they have the power to do it. But we ought to be clear about why they’re doing it. This isn’t about the rule of law. It’s the rule of ideology, enforced with violence.

As Charlie Sykes noted in his newsletter: “This is how a cold civil war becomes a hot one.”

I disagree about Rittenhouse. I think it is incredibly dangerous to allow people to attend political events armed with assault weapons. It literally makes no sense to me. And the kid obtained that gun illegally and went looking for trouble. Of course he should have been tried. But unlike these freaks in Texas, I accepted the verdict.

The defining characteristic of the right these days is a total unwillingness to admit that they might be wrong, that people might disagree with them or that they might lose. They simply won’t accept it. It’s a case of mass arrested development. They are spoiled children. Dangerous spoiled children with guns.

Dazed and confused

Published by digby on April 13, 2023

Republicans are twisting themselves into pretzels talking about abortion

There are some who do have their rationale at the ready, however:

A Nebraska Republican state senator argued Wednesday for a six-week abortion ban by claiming there are too many foreigners living in the state, invoking a racist conspiracy theory.

Since Roe v. Wadewas overturned, abortion is allowed in Nebraska up to 21 weeks and six days of pregnancy. But on Wednesday, the Senate began debating a bill that would ban abortion after six weeks, before many people even know they are pregnant.

Senator Steve Erdman decided that the best argument in favor of the ban was the “great replacement theory,” which the Southern Poverty Law Center defines as a “racist conspiracy narrative [that] falsely asserts there is an active, ongoing, and covert effort to replace white populations in current white-majority countries.”

“Our state population has not grown except by those foreigners who have moved here or refugees who have been placed here,” Erdman told the chamber.

Erdman also said that all of the aborted fetuses “could be working and filling some of those positions that we have vacancies.”

Don’t kid yourself. The Great Replacement theory is a major motivation for these abortion bans on the right. The Viktor Orban doctrine is all about that.

I wonder if anyone has told Tim Scott about this?

Morning tantrum

Published by digby on April 13, 2023

That’s what I call a very stable genius.

Late night tantrum:

I know this sounds like one of those Tom Friedman taxicab stories, but I swear it’s true. I was visiting a rural Walmart not too long ago and overheard a group standing around talking politics. And one of them said about Biden, “we’ve got to get rid of that idiot in the White House. All he ever does is whine and brag…”

You think they don’t live in Bizarro World?

A scoop on those stolen classified documents circulating on the internet

Published by digby on April 13, 2023

What in the world?

I don’t know what to think about this story but it might be the weirdest tale I’ve heard in a long time. According to the Washington Post, the trove of classified documents that were recently discovered on the Discord social media platform were posted by a young man who works in a military facility for a bunch of teenagers for no discernible reason other than to show off for them. It’s truly bizarre.

Here’s a brief rundown by CNN.

The person behind a massive leak of classified US military documents worked on a military base and posted sensitive national security secrets in an online group of acquaintances, The Washington Post reported Wednesday.

The Post reporting, which CNN could not independently verify, covers new ground in identifying the supposed leaker of highly classified documents – including some that paint a pessimistic US view of the war in Ukraine – and provides the first known details about who may be behind a major national security breach that has rocked Washington in recent days.

The leaker, described in the Post story as a lonely young man and gun enthusiast, was part of a chatroom of about two dozen people on Discord – a social media platform popular with video gamers – that shared a love of guns and military gear, The Post reported, citing an interview with the leaker’s friend who was also part of the group.

The friend told the Post he would not reveal the identity of the alleged leaker or their location to authorities.

The leaker, going by the moniker “OG,” began posting messages to the Discord chatroom last year that referenced military jargon, The Post reported. In the months that followed, the leaker posted messages in which he appeared to transcribe classified information from US documents, according to the report.

“They were, he recalled, what appeared to be near-verbatim transcripts of classified intelligence documents that OG indicated he had brought home from his job on a ‘military base,’ which the member declined to identify,” the Post reported, referring to messages posted by the anonymous user.

“OG claimed he spent at least some of his day inside a secure facility that prohibited cellphones and other electronic devices, which could be used to document the secret information housed on government computer networks or spooling out from printers,” according to the Post.

The report went on to describe the Discord server apparently controlled by “OG,” where recently leaked classified documents were posted, as a “pandemic refuge, particularly for teen gamers locked in their houses and cut off from their real-world friends.”

A Discord spokesperson told CNN on Sunday that the company is cooperating with law enforcement on the investigation but declined further comment. CNN has reached out to Discord following The Washington Post reporting.

“He wanted to ‘keep us in the loop,’” the group member told the Post. And “OG” “seemed to think that his insider knowledge would offer the others protection from the troubled world around them,” according to the Post report.

“If you could think it, it was in those documents,” the friend and member of OG’s Discord group told the Post.

The Discord chatroom, or “server,” disappeared from online after news of the leaks broke last week, according to a CNN review of Discord servers. Some of the documents were subsequently posted by Discord users to another invitation-only server. Some Discord users thought the documents were fake because they didn’t think anyone would be brazen enough to post them online, according to a CNN review of messages on the platform.

Bellingcat, an investigative outlet, first reported on the connection between the leaked documents and the two Discord servers.

WTH???

Somehow he managed to transcribe some of the documents and then photograph some others. The teenager who spoke with the Post hasn’t been approached by the FBI, which is also very curious. He and another member of the group are refusing to give the man’s name but if this story is true then I would expect we will see an arrest very soon.

The Post also reported:

In a video seen by The Post, the man who the member said is OG stands at a shooting range, wearing safety glasses and ear coverings and holding a large rifle. He yells a series of racial and antisemitic slurs into the camera, then fires several rounds at a target.

The teenager explains to the Post that the government is bad and the only reason it would keep intelligence like this a secret is because they have something to hide.

Okayyyy.

Stay tuned. There’s got to be more to this story.

Update: Bellingcat had some other details on this story. This was interesting:

This server was not especially geopolitical in nature, although its users had a staunchly conservative stance on several issues, members told Bellingcat. Racial slurs and racist memes were shared widely.

Update II:

What???:

The leader of a small online gaming chat group where a trove of classified U.S. intelligence documents leaked over the last few months is a 21-year-old member of the intelligence wing of the Massachusetts Air National Guard, according to interviews and documents reviewed by The New York Times.

The national guardsman, whose name is Jack Teixeira, oversaw a private online group named Thug Shaker Central, where about 20 to 30 people, mostly young men and teenagers, came together over a shared love of guns, racist online memes and video games.

Two U.S. officials confirmed that investigators want to talk to Airman Teixeira about the leak of the government documents to the private online group. One official said Airman Teixeira might have information relevant to the investigation.

Federal investigators have been searching for days for the person who leaked the top secret documents online but have not identified Airman Teixeira or anyone else as a suspect. The F.B.I. declined to comment…

The Times has been able to link Airman Teixeira to other members of the Thug Shaker Central group through his online gaming profile and other records. Details of the interior of Airman Teixeira’s childhood home — posted on social media in family photographs — also match details on the margins of some of the photographs of the leaked secret documents.

The Times also has established, through social media posts and military records, that Airman Teixeira is enlisted in the 102nd Intelligence Wing of the Massachusetts Air National Guard. Posts on the unit’s official Facebook page congratulated Airman Teixeira and colleagues for being promoted to Airman First Class in July 2022…

It was not immediately clear if a young Air National Guardsman in his position could have had access to such highly sensitive briefings. Officials within the U.S. government with security clearance often receive such documents through daily emails, one official told The Times, and those emails might then be automatically forwarded to other people.

Airman Teixeira’s mother, Dawn, speaking outside her home in Massachusetts on Thursday, confirmed that her son was a member of the Air National Guard and said he had recently been working overnight shifts at a base on Cape Cod. In the last few days, he had changed his phone number, she said.

A 21 year old, right wing National Guardsman has access to top secret documents? Really?

Nothing to see here, swim along

Published by Tom Sullivan on April 13, 2023

Does Gov. Wokety-woke DeWoke own white hip waders?

Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood Int’l Airport (FLL) is closed. It’s just a minor, 1-in-1,000 year rainfall event in South Florida:

Between 14 and 20 inches of rain have drenched the greater Fort Lauderdale metro area since Wednesday afternoon, according to a Thursday morning update from the National Weather Service office in Miami.

“This amount of rain in a 24-hour period is incredibly rare for South Florida,” said meteorologist Ana Torres-Vazquez from the weather service’s Miami forecast office.

Rainfall of 20 to 25 inches is similar to what the area can receive with a high-end hurricane over more than a day, Torres-Vazquez explained.

When you’re already soaked through, what the hell?

Speaking of miners, go ahead and burn a few more West Virginia mountains, Joe Manchin. At 1,654 ft. mean elevation, coastal flooding is someone else’s problem.

The buffoonish failure of Fortress MAGA

Published by Tom Sullivan on April 13, 2023

The “antisemitic logic” behind the conservative counterrevolution

A gyrating guitar player from Tupelo and four lads from Liverpool were part of a Communist conspiracy to poison the minds of twentieth-century youth. Or that’s how conservatives saw it then and perceive how culture works now.

Greg Sargent points to a thread by Seth Cotlar on the right’s perception that “woke elites” are “orchestrating liberal cultural change.” Cotlar proposes that the right’s mantra that “politics is downstream of culture” has roots in the paranoid style of politics that sees sinister forces behind prosaic cultural changes.

“Antisemitic logic,” writes the Willamette University professor of history, drives the conservative mind to postulate such notions that “((Hollywood))) secretly controls American culture and politics.”

“It’s the genealogical descendent of the idea from the 1960s that the anti-christian (((Communists))) must be the force behind this rock and roll music that is poisoning the minds of white children and making them sympathetic to the civil rights movement.” Cotlar tweets.

It’s similar to the most recent freakout over Bud Light advertising to LGBTQ people. As if somehow Budweiser corporation is responsible for there being trans people in the world, rather than Budweiser responding to cultural changes in order to, you know, sell beer.

https://twitter.com/SethCotlar/status/1645800052273864704?s=20

Authoritarian leaders and followers (and evangelicals — same thing?) are predisposed to believing cultural change is not organic, but engineered by someone(s). By the Devil. By Communists. By the international Jewish conspiracy. They view events as driven from the top down. Their counterrevolution, naturally, involves top-down responses.

The right’s grievously inaccurate diagnosis of how culture works, like any inaccurate diagnosis, will lead them to devise “cures” that won’t work. Like, if you think you’re tired because 5G waves are weakening your brain and you wrap your house in tin foil…it won’t work.

So if you think “young people seem to really like John Oliver and Trevor Noah and so we’ll just bankroll Steven Crowder and that’ll bring the youths into the GOP!” then you’re mostly just enabling Crowder to get rich off your credulity.

Gov. Ron DeSantis’ crude cultural crackdown against “wokeness” in Florida, for example. The political debacle last week precipitated by Tennessee GOP legislators’ attempts to quash gun-control protests. Both are prime examples of thinking culture can be controlled, even dictated, from above. Everything from “from insanely broad book bans to shockingly harsh proposed punishments for abortion to anti-transgender crackdowns” flow from this “Fortress MAGA” mentality, writes Sargent, and has a way of blowing up in reactionaries’ faces:

If the adage was “all politics is local,” we can now say that “all local politics is in danger of going viral.” And the more onerous the use of state power in these situations, the more attention it gets.

Tennessee illustrates the point: If Republicans hadn’t sought to expel the Tennessee 3, you might never have heard of them. As commentator Charlie Sykes puts it, Republicans both “look horrible” and have turned the Tennessee 3 into national “superstars.”

But hand it to Republican Jim Jordan (Ohio-reactionary). Unchastened by Republicans’ faceplant in Nashville, he expects to steer the national narrative by staging a Trumpish sideshow in Manhattan built “around the overriding goal of generating content for Fox News,” Sargent writes this morning:

Now, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) is set to chair a Judiciary Committee hearing in New York City on Monday that will target Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s indictment of former president Donald Trump. But the emerging details are already shining a harsh light on what you might call the “governing by Fox News” problem, in which Republicans use committee hearings to create right-wing media boomlets but ultimately run into the buzz saw of outside scrutiny.

Jordan’s hearing will purportedly highlight “victims of violent crime in Manhattan.” This is meant to serve as the next chapter in Jordan’s attempt to weaponize his committee against Bragg’s prosecution of Trump by dramatizing the GOP talking point that the district attorney is illegitimately prosecuting Trump while letting countless “real” criminals walk free.

While Jordan is swinging a bat at woke beer, Democrats on the committee will use his venue market their message that the daily slaughter of gun violence must stop to an audience that actually wants to buy.