Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Four months and counting

Among Republicans’ antidemocratic weaponry are such diverse elements as [your Spanish Inquisition riff here]. Also, a variety of moving-the-goalposts tactics like obstacles to registering voters. They’ve tried to restrict third-party voter registration drives across the country. North Carolina now proposes making it a misdemeanor for voter registration groups to use actual voter registration forms.

Sometimes the gambit moves the goalposts farther. Sometimes it moves the goalposts closer. But as we’ve seen, the operative principle behind them all is: Heads, I win, tails, you lose. Recall Republican demands that voting happen only on Election Day and that ballots be counted and the election settled on Election Day? But that principle is flexible. So when necessity arises, Republicans behind in the vote count will keep postponing the day of reconning the way Donald Trump delays, delays, delays his reconning in court.

David Graham of The Atlantic examines how a losing Republican state supreme court candidate in North Carolina (familiar to readers here) has pushed back his day of reconning for four months now:

The problem is not that no one knows who won. Justice Allison Riggs, an incumbent Democrat, won by a tiny margin—just 734 votes out of 5,723,987. That tally has been confirmed by two recounts. But certification is paused while Republican challenger Jefferson Griffin, a judge on the state court of appeals, asks courts to throw out roughly 60,000 votes and put him on the state’s highest court.

Preposterous

We’ve covered the details before. All Griffin wants to do is this: he just wants to find 735 votes, which is one more than he needs because he won the state. Sound familiar?

But as I’ve said, you should care how this North Carolina drama plays out. Donald Trump has taught his children well (emphasis mine):

All of this may be an affront to North Carolinians, but voting experts told me that the outcome matters for America as a whole as well. Rick Hasen, a law professor at UCLA who has contributed to The Atlantic, told me it could end up at the U.S. Supreme Court. “Many of us were worried about subverted election outcomes at the presidential level starting in 2020,” he wrote in an email. “But this is the first serious risk at a lower level. Raising these kinds of issues after the election to disenfranchise voters and flip election outcomes risks actual stolen elections potentially blessed by a state supreme court.”

North Carolina has historically been an early indicator for future national voting battles. It has long seen some of the more preposterous congressional maps in the United States. When the Supreme Court struck part of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, North Carolina Republicans moved within hours to change laws. An effort by Republican Governor Pat McCrory to challenge his 2016 election loss presaged Donald Trump’s 2020 “Stop the Steal” push. North Carolina also sent important cases about partisan gerrymandering and the controversial “independent state legislature” theory to the Supreme Court. If Griffin prevails, his playbook could go national as well.

Trump’s delaying tactics, enabled by a MAGA federal judges, left a man convicted of 34 felonies and with no regard for the rule of law eligible to run for the presidency again and win. He now enjoys criminal immunity granted him for which Trump personally thanked Chief Justice John Roberts on Tuesday. (The real headline is Trump thanking anyone for anything.) Within weeks, the downstream effects are being felt across the country, across the planet, and perhaps inside your homes.

Graham concludes:

A world in which losing candidates can indefinitely delay the certification of elections with ex post facto challenges is one that could paralyze democratic government. Given the contempt for voters on display here, maybe that’s the point.

Just like cruelty that way.

* * * * *

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Thirty lonely but beautiful actions

Let’s party like it’s 2009!

What great news:

Layoffs announced by U.S.-employers jumped to levels not seen since the last two recessions amid mass federal government job cuts, canceled contracts and fears of trade wars, offering the clearest sign yet of the toll taken on the labor market by the policies of President Donald Trump’s administration.

Global outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas said on Thursday that planned job cuts vaulted 245% to 172,017 last month, the highest level since July 2020, when the economy was in the grips of the COVID-19 pandemic. It was the highest February total since the Great Recession 16 years ago.

These numbers won’t show up in the jobs numbers for a couple of weeks but they’re going to show up. I’m sure the Trump henchmen will be seeking some way to fudge those numbers but it won’t change the fact that it’s happening, first because of the massive federal layoffs and then when private employers, seeing the recession on the wall, start doing it too.

The Wall St. Journal reported earlier this week:

Stagflation has entered the chat. President Trump’s decision to dramatically raise tariffs on imports threatens the U.S. with an uncomfortable combination of weaker or even stagnant growth and higher prices—sometimes called “stagflation.”

The U.S. has imposed 25% tariffs on Mexico and Canada, and another 10% hike on China following last month’s 10% increase. They “will be wildly disruptive to business investment plans,” said Ray Farris, chief economist at Prudential PLC. “They will be inflationary, so they will be a shock to real household income just as household income growth is slowing because of slower employment and wage gains,” he said.

Trump announced today that he has rolled back the tariffs on Mexico and Canada for another month. The markets were not impressed. This incoherence is making them crazy.

I’m sure most of you remember 2008/2009 and 2020/2021. It would be foolish not to see this unpredictable moron’s wild incoherence as a serious danger to our economic well-being.

Meanwhile, here’s the Treasury Secretary today:

“Access to cheap goods is not the essence of the American dream,” Bessent said during a speech to the Economic Club of New York.

That’s going to come as a surprise to your buddy Jeff Bezos, fella:

And this:

Canada immediately imposed 25% tariffs on C$30 billion of U.S. imports and Trudeau said those measures would remain in place until the Trump administration ended its trade action.

Bessent made clear the administration’s unhappiness, telling an event in New York that “If you want to be a numbskull like Justin Trudeau and say ‘Oh we’re going to do this’, then tariffs are going to go up”.

He seems nice. He’s also stupid. He seems to think that being an erratic, unstable thug toward our friends and allies is a successful economic strategy and it is not. Trump is nuts, true, and everyone knows it including him. He just thinks they can get through this, tell Trump he’s a genius and give him a parade and everything will be ok.

Krugman wrote this yesterday:

Just two days ago Steven Rattner published an article in the New York Times describing the mood among big-business leaders, which I would summarize as smug complacency. Donald Trump, they appeared to believe, was basically their guy, someone who would cut their taxes and remove those pesky environmental and financial regulations. He might be saying some crazy things about trade wars, appointing strange people to top policy positions and threatening our allies, but no need to take that stuff seriously.

Are they still feeling smug? Or are they starting to realize that Trump’s ignorance, irresponsibility and whiny belligerence weren’t an act?

[…]

One thing that really struck me from Rattner’s piece — something I’ve heard from other sources — is that big businessmen think Elon Musk is doing a good job. I guess this is one of those cases where power and privilege make you blind to things that are obvious to everyone else.

What those of us not cocooned in our corner offices see is that Musk let a bunch of Dunning-Kruger kids — too incompetent to realize that they’re incompetent — loose on federal agencies, where they began firing workers without trying to understand what these workers do or why it might be important. These firings have been followed in several cases by desperate attempts to rehire the lost workers, who turn out to have been doing things like, um, securing the nation’s nuclear weapons.

Now, Musk’s DOGE claims that it has already saved taxpayers tens of billions of dollars, but it has provided no evidence to back those claims. Instead, last month it released what it called a “wall of receipts,” purportedly documenting some of the claimed savings. That document, however, turned out to be riddled with huge errors, including misreading an $8 million contract as $8 billion and counting the same canceled contract three times. Last week it released a revised, much smaller “wall” — but that version also turns out to be full of major errors, and DOGE has already retracted 5 of its 7 biggest claims about cost savings.

Krugman points out that if someone did this in the private sector they would be fired immediately. But not, of course, by Donald Trump who is too stupid to understand what he doesn’t understand and only listens to people who are slurping on his golf shoes.

I don’t know what will make these Big Money Boyz see that Trump is not a supernatural genius who can act like a petty tyrant on the world stage and empower a drug-addled weirdo like Musk to dismantle the government and come out a winner. Maybe when the stock market really crashes and burns?

They’re all in and they’re going to take us over the cliff. And frankly, I think that may be the only way they can be stopped. The question is how much people have to suffer in the meantime. And once it’s done, I’m afraid we’ll look around at the wreckage and have to accept that we will never be the same.

If you think that they aren’t going after Social Security, think again:

he newly installed caretaker at the Social Security Administration acknowledged this week that Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service is calling the shots as the agency races to slash thousands of jobs and shrink its budget, telling a group of advocates, “Things are currently operating in a way I have never seen in government before.”

In a meeting Tuesday with his senior staff and about 50 legal-aid attorneys and other advocates for the disabled and elderly, acting SSA commissioner Leland Dudek referred to the tech billionaire’s cost-cutting team as “outsiders who are unfamiliar with nuances of SSA programs,” according to a meeting participant’s detailed notes that were obtained by The Washington Post.

“DOGE people are learning and they will make mistakes, but we have to let them see what is going on at SSA,” Dudek told the group, according to the notes. “I am relying on longtime career people to inform my work, but I am receiving decisions that are made without my input. I have to effectuate those decisions.”

His remarks to skeptical advocates came on Dudek’s 12th day in a role that the White House rewarded him with after he secretly shared information with DOGE, which stands for the Department of Government Efficiency. His short tenure — while President Donald Trump’s nominee to permanently run the agency waits in the wings — has been consumed by a whirlwind downsizing of the staff in charge of the safety-net program used by 73 million retired and disabled Americans.

Dudek is the data guy who replaced the former commissioner after she was fired for reprimanding him for helping DOGE. It doesn’t look like he’s long for the job either.

If you think this isn’t a plan to destroy the system you aren’t paying attention. Musk says it’s a Ponzi scheme and that empathy is a weakness. He wants to end it. Period. And the GOP trained seals are just standing there letting it happen.

By the way:

The Social Security Administration wrote in a Thursday morning email that employees can no longer read news websites on work devices.

If they don’t read the news they won’t know that Trump and Musk are destroying the country. I guess that’s good.

Trump is going to make Ukrainians pay and pay hard for failing to immediately surrender to his “brilliant”, “savvy” friend Vladimir Putin three years ago:

U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration is planning to revoke temporary legal status for some 240,000 Ukrainians who fled the conflict with Russia, a senior Trump official and three sources familiar with the matter said, potentially putting them on a fast-track to deportation.

The move, expected as soon as April, would be a stunning reversal of the welcome Ukrainians received under President Joe Biden’s administration.

He’ll be deporting everyone under temporary immigration statuses including Afghans, Cubans, Haitians, etc. But I think the deportation of Ukrainians in the middle of the war is a Trump bully tactic to try to force Zelensky to lick his boots. It’s just cruel.

The Trump administration last month paused processing immigration-related applications for people who entered the U.S. under certain Biden parole programs – placing Ukrainian Liana Avetisian, her husband and her 14-year-old daughter, in limbo. Avetisian, who worked in real estate in Ukraine, now assembles windows while her husband works construction.

The family fled Kyiv in May 2023, eventually buying a house in the small city of DeWitt, Iowa. Their parole and work permits expire in May. They say they spent about $4,000 in filing fees to renew their parole and to try to apply for another program known as Temporary Protected Status.

Avetisian has started getting headaches as she worries about their situation, she said.

“We don’t know what to do,” she said.

This comes on the heels of Trump ordering the suspension of all military aid and the sharing of intelligence with Ukraine. He’s hanging them out to dry.

Here’s a fascinating look at the DOGE actions by Harvard political scientists Ryan Enos and Sam Fuller. I urge you to read the whole post which but here’s the essence of their findings and it should give us some heart:

Trump’s actions, matters of complex questions relating to civic and constitutional norms, are incredibly unpopular: they are not supported by an overwhelming majority of Democrats (unsurprising), a significant majority of Independents (more surprising), and nearly half(!) of Republicans (extremely surprising). And, particularly among Republicans, if you cut through the partisan blinders and remind people these actions are illegal and unconstitutional, people are even more likely to disapprove of his actions.

We see this in data that comes from questions we asked about Trump’s actions on the most recent Harvard CAPS/Harris poll.1 In particular, we asked people how much they support the following authoritarian actions (full questions can be seen at the end of the post):

1. Working with Elon Musk to purge the government of disloyal civil servants.
   
2. The closing of USAID without Congressional approval.
   
3. The firing of FBI agents and DOJ attorneys who had investigated the January 6^th, 2021 attack on the US Capitol.
   
4. The proposal to close the Department of Education by executive order.
   
5. The firing of 18 Inspectors General without cause.

Responses were on a five-point scale from “strongly support” to “strongly oppose”. For ease, we’ll bin those into “support” and “no support” where we put the people in “neither support nor oppose” in the “no support” category. Thus we are isolating levels of support (full response distributions are at the end of this post). For each of these questions, we also included an experiment where about half of our respondents were asked the question with additional text reminding them that these actions are illegal and/or unconstitutional. For example, the question: “President Trump’s [unlawful] firing of FBI agents and Department of Justice Attorneys who had investigated and tried cases involving the January 6th, 2021 attack on the United States Capitol” for some respondents included the treatment of “unlawful” and for some it did not.

Let’s start with overall support:

This finding is not driven by Democrats alone, look at Independents:

Republicans:

Yes, a majority of Republicans love to see people suffer, we know that. But it’s not a huge majority. That shows some serious weakness.

I would hope that Democrats could do something with this in the next election but that’s a long way away. (They need to get started now, however, to build a narrative that could compete with the Trump triumphalist lies.)

But what this tells us is that there is power on the ground for the people to get vocal and be aggressive about what’s going on. I am finding that people in my personal life don’t want to talk about it. It’s uncomfortable and maybe even boring. But I think that those of us who are following this closely need to be willing to risk being uncomfortable bores in order to get the word out about what’s going on. People don’t like it but they need to know that it’s a national emergency as threatening as the pandemic or 9/11.

I don’t want to be that person and I assume most of us don’t. But we have to. It’s going to take everything we have in us to compete with this Trump noise over the next couple of years and we know those trained seals in the US Congress aren’t going to do anything about it. It’s on us.

Perfectly sane, perfectly normal.

Lol. Yeah right.

Uh huh.

At least it didn’t get under his skin or anything…

He’s fine though. Don’t spend even a minute worrying that this manchild has the nuclear codes.

It’s not a joke anymore

“This is not a joke anymore,” and normal is not dead. Yet. (CBC):

The man behind an iconic Canadian beer ad is back, 25 years later, with a new patriotic rallying cry.

But this time, it’s not about selling drinks.

Jeff Douglas, from Truro, N.S., became a national sensation after starring as flannel-wearing Joe Canadian in Molson Canadian’s 2000 ad “The Rant,” which was a huge success for the beer company and popularized the slogan, “I am Canadian!”

On Wednesday, a new video appeared on YouTube featuring Douglas, back on stage in flannel, this time defending Canada from attacks by U.S. President Donald Trump, before launching into a similar string of boasts about his home country. 

After my post below, I needed this. You probably do too:

For reference, here’s the original Molson ad from 2000.

(h/t ER)

* * * * *

Have you fought the coup today?
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Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink
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Chop Wood, Carry Water

Next stop, Hell

A couple of lines rattle around behind my eyes this morning. “The Last Days of Pompeii” is one. Another is “Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.”

“The Trump people are living in a bubble and it’s affecting their ability to understand the world around them,” Digby wrote yesterday, reacting in part to this passage from Anne Applebaum:

Europeans can also see that this alternative reality is directly and profoundly shaped by Russian propaganda. I don’t know whether the American president absorbs Russian narratives online, from proxies, or from Putin himself. Either way, he has thoroughly adopted the Russian view of the world, as has Vance.

They’ve gone down a rabbit hole and mean to take the country and the world with it.

The Russians are certainly playing Trump and his circle, but there’s more to it.

Republicans as a party have habituated themselves to lying and to living inside the bubble of lies they tell. This tendency predates the rise of Trumpism. We might trace it to Newt Gingrich’s cynical strategies of the 1990s like his “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control.” Or to their drilling it into their voters’ heads starting decades earlier that large numbers of, you know, THEM, were voting improperly, or illegally, or most importantly, not for Republicans. Evidence was irrelevant. It became an article of faith, and lying a habit of mind.

The Republican Party has come unstuck in reality

Synthesizing Roy Cohn’s three rules about power and Norman Vincent Peale’s teachings about the power of positive affirmation, Trump treats reality as maleable, truth as instrumental, and all human interactions as transactional. He believes he can bend reality to his iron will. He not only insists he always wins but has trained himself to believe it. His father, Fred, trained him that the way to run a successful business is to lie, cheat and steal. Do unto others before they do unto you. Members of Trump’s cult of personality know to follow Dear Leader if they know what’s good for them, to do as he does, and to repeat the lies until they become reality.

1. Attack! Attack! Attack!
2. Admit nothing and deny everything.
3. No matter what happens you claim victory and never admit defeat.

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The Big Lie is now a habit of mind. Trump failed (he won, you know) to upend the 2020 election with it. But he’s now deploying another Big Lie to topple Social Security.

The Republican Party has come unstuck in reality, untethered from truth, dismissive of facts and science. The party that spent well over half a century railing against the Russians and Russian propaganda now embrace both.

In 2016, I called it Quantum Conservatism:

It is a dimension of belief, not fact, where up is down, black is white, in is out, and wrong is right. Where Ann Coulter’s cat can be both alive and  dead. Where the Kentucky Fried Chicken company is a person … headquartered in Louisville … in a bucket.

Someone the other day asked a filmmaker how they could create fictional stories that have resonance in a world that’s stranger then fiction. How indeed, where the Russians are the guys in white hats?

Andy Borowitz is in the business of satirizing that sad unreality. He offers this morning:

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—In one of the more ominous moments from his speech to Congress on Tuesday night, Donald J. Trump blamed a surge in transgender mice on “Haitians eating all the cats.”

“For four years, mice swarmed over the border, looking for sex-change operations that Sleepy Joe Biden would pay for,” he alleged. “These mice had nothing to fear because they knew that all the cats had been eaten.”

Vowing to usher in what he called a “golden age for cats,” he vowed to use billions in tariff revenue to establish a Strategic Cat Reserve.

Trump spent the rest of his speech listing his second-term accomplishments, boasting, “I have already caused more damage than all other presidents put together.”

That last line is not satire, but the truth. The rest counts for truth deep inside the MAGA rabbit hole. If Trump had said it, Speaker Mike Johnson, Fox News talking heads, and the MAGA faithful would repeat it until it becomes the only reality they know.

* * * * *

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Via Mediaite:

JAKE TAPPER, CNN ANCHOR: The first results of CNN’s instant poll are in. Let’s get right to CNN’s bureau chief and political director, David Chalian.

David, how did the voters that you snap-polled feel about the speech?

DAVID CHALIAN, CNN POLITICAL DIRECTOR: Well, first, I just want to mention, Jake, this is a poll of speech watchers, not a poll that is representative of the country overall, or what an electorate, an election looks like. And what we know is that people who tend to be fans or partisans with the president no matter which party the president is in, tend to tune in more on speeches like this.

And that’s the case in tonight’s survey as well because 21 percent Democrat, 44 percent Republican in this sample. 35 percent independent. That’s about 14 points more Republican than the overall general population. So keep that in mind when you see these results of speech watchers.

To the results. What was your reaction to Trump’s speech? 44 percent of speech watchers in our instant poll tonight say they had a very positive reaction to Trump’s speech, 25 percent somewhat positive, 31 percent negative. How does that stack up against Donald Trump’s previous addresses to Joint Sessions of Congress or State of the Union addresses? Look here, for all the years we have data for, 44 percent very positive reaction is actually his low watermark in all our instant polls after his previous addresses.

You see, in 2019, ’18 and ’17, he was higher in terms of very positive speech reaction. And what about to his modern-day predecessors? How does this 44 percent very positive stack up?

Again, it’s the bottom of the barrel here. 51 percent in 2021, when Joe Biden gave his first joint address, were very positive. Donald Trump himself was at 57 percent in 2017. And you see that Bush and Obama even higher than that. So this was not Donald Trump’s best speech, but obviously still the plurality of speech watchers had a very positive reaction to it, Jake.

The ratings were actually pretty good. Mostly old Republicans too But it didn’t seem to help…

Viewership peaked at 37,895,000 from 9:45 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET, Nielsen said. Trump attracted the most viewers, 47.7 million, in his address to Congress in 2017.

Of viewers watching Trump on Tuesday:

5.7% were aged 18-34.

20.5% were aged 35-54.

70.7% were aged 55 and older.

A bunch of his own people were obviously appalled.

It’s nothing more than a protection racket.

There’s a lot of bullshit in that interview but this is the nut:

The president knows that if you want a real security guarantee, if you want to ensure that Vladimir Putin does not invade Ukraine again, the very best security guarantee is to give Americans economic upside in the future of Ukraine. That is a way better security guarantee than 20,000 troops from some random country that hasn’t fought a war in 30 or 40 years.

Let’s take that last part first, shall we? The NATO countries have been fighting alongside America troops for the past 23 years in all of our foreign adventures in the middle east. Maybe JD doesn’t consider those real wars but if he doesn’t then the US hasn’t been fighting any of them either. No, it’s just a straight up insult to the Europeans, a slap in the face and he knew exactly what he was saying.

But the first part really gives away the game. He’s basically saying that unless Ukraine gives Trumpie a nice taste, he’s going to let them be killed by the Russians. In fact, if you look at what they’ve been doing the last few days with the stopping of arms shipments, the refusal to share intel and apparently the talking behind the scenes with some Ukrainians (and Russia?) to topple Zelensky, I think it’s fair to say that he’s now helping the Russians outright.

This is a protection racket. Give us money and we’ll “protect you.” If not, something bad might happen to your little country and there won’t be anything we can do about it. In this case, Trump’s obviously working with the Russians to get Ukraine to surrender so they can split the spoils.

And I don’t care how much “raw earth” as Trump calls it Ukraine signs over, it’s now obvious that America’s word isn[t worth the paper it’s printed on. We are not an ally, we are only in it for ourselves and that could mean anything. So anyone who’s been depending on the US had better find another way to protect themselves. In fact, they’d better find themselves a way to protect themselves from us.

The Thug strategy in action:

Trump has repeatedly proposed that if Canada wants to avoid the tariffs they should consider joining the United States as its ’51st state’.

White House Press Secretary was asked about the issue during her Wednesday briefing. 

‘He feels strongly that it would be very beneficial for the Canadian people to be the 51st state of the United States,’ she said. ‘They wouldn’t be paying for these tariffs. 

‘They’d have much lower taxes if they were part of our great country.’

People are saying that he’s just employing Nixon’s madman theory which was designed to make people think he might be so nuts enough to drop a nuke so they’d better be willing to negotiate. The problem is that Trump’s actually a madman. And while Nixon wasn’t exactly a picture of stability at least he was an ignoramus.

By the way, that Truth Social post Trump issued today threatening Hamas with annihilation if they don’t immediately release the hostages? Well:

Direct talks between the US and Hamas have hit a snag since their existence was leaked to the media on Wednesday, a government official briefed on the talks told The Times of Israel.

The negotiations — unprecedented in nature — have largely been focused on securing the release of American-Israeli hostage Edan Alexander along with the bodies of American-Israelis Itay Chen, Omer Neutra, Gadi Haggai and Judi Weinstein, the official said.

Israel was not fully briefed on the talks ahead of time, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is unhappy with their existence, the official said. The premier’s office issued a terse statement following an Axios report revealing the existence of the first-ever direct talks between the US and Hamas, saying, “Israel has expressed to the United States its position regarding direct talks with Hamas.”

Who cares what they think, amirite?