Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Do Republicans build anything?

Temperatures here are expected to fall steadily over the next 24 hours. There is also a wind advisory.* How do I know? The National Weather Service. Where do you think The Weather Channel and other weather information sites get their information? From a bevy of satellites owned or operated by NOAA, NWS’s parent organization.

I rather like having that info free and at my fingertips. I rather like that air traffic controlers from the FAA keep my flight from colliding with others in the sky nearby.

But our Republican friends are not into that so much. Nor into public education, as we’ve long known:

Cultists’ push to charterize, voucherize, or tax-credit scholarship public education out of existence — supported by a religious right profiteers have co-opted — is a betrayal of the country’s founding vision. Public education is the largest portion of annual budgets in all 50 states. The cult sees public schools (and children) as resources to strip-mine.

Donald Trump nominating vaccine skeptic RFK Jr. to head the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is another brick knocked out of the schoolhouse wall.

Casey Quinlan writes at The New Republic that Kennedy’s opposition to childhood vaccinations will further undermine public support for public schools and advance right-wing efforts to shrink systems until they can be drowned in the bathtub:

Anti-vax movements align well with conservative designs for public education. Under Project 2025, which is essentially the agenda of Trump’s second term, concocted by the Heritage Foundation, the Trump administration plans to greatly weaken the public education system through several policy changes, such as having states eventually take over Title I funding, which provides financial assistance to school districts with a high concentration of low-income students.

Trump has said he would dismantle the U.S. Department of Education—though it’s unclear how long this planned deconstruction will take. In the meantime, his choice of Linda McMahon, the former CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment, is at the very least a demonstration of Trump’s commitment to reducing education funding. She is the chair of the board at the America First Policy Institute, a conservative think tank that supports a “cut in federal education spending and redirected resources toward school choice.”

[…]

The movement for parental rights is no grassroots campaign. It’s spawned wholesale from conservative think tanks and advocacy groups such as the Heritage Foundation and American Principles Project, which have helped power legislation opposing all mention of LGBTQ people and people of color in schools. Some of the groups and activists involved in stoking the parental rights movement have been vocal opponents of public schooling more broadly. This lines up well with long-standing conservative pushes for more school privatization and less support for public schools.

I’ve said it before, the end game is to divert all education funding mandated by state constitutions to private, for-profit actors for the same reason Willie Sutton robbed banks: it’s where the money is in the budgets of all 50 states.

Do these people build anything?

* Wind events here these days induce PTSD among some survivors of Helene.

And spaghetti against the wall

Political skulduggery is born here and raised elsewhere. The North Carolina GOP should advertise.

When Republicans won control of North Carolina’s state Supreme Court in 2022, the new 5-2 court quickly reversed a previous ruling and ordered a new redraw of the state’s congressional districts. The new map turned a 7-7 partisan balance in this evenly divided state into an 11-3 split favoring Republicans. Results borne out on Nov. 5 will be felt on Capitol Hill and across the nation. Down-ballot races matter. A lot.

A month after Election Day, political power struggles continue in North Carolina. The GOP supermajority in the state House will attempt today to override Gov. Roy Cooper’s veto of a bill marketed as “disaster relief” for western North Carolina. Branded “a sham” by Cooper, the bill “appropriated no new money for areas hit by Helene, nor created the small-business grants requested by local business leaders and Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat.” But the measure does strip powers from Democrats elected on Nov. 5 to the state’s executive branch. The veto override hangs on the votes of three WNC Republicans who voted against bill.

Also today, the state’s Board of Elections is expected to hear election protests by Court of Appeals Judge Jefferson Griffin in his race for a seat on the state Supreme Court. The Board on Tuesday issued a press release denying Griffin’s request for a statewide hand recount. After multiple recounts, Griffin trails incumbent State Supreme Court Justice Allison Riggs by 734 votes.

Griffin has challenged the validity of 60,000 votes cast across the state, nearly 1,600 in my county alone, four of them my friends. Griffin alleges those voters, some of whom have voted for decades, are ineligible to cast ballots.

Chris Cooper, a political science professor at Western Carolina University, believes Griffin’s “incentive is to throw everything at the wall and see what sticks.”

End game

The Raleigh News & Observer reports:

The final count of votes in the race on Tuesday upheld Democratic incumbent Allison Riggs’s victory, reports Kyle Ingram. That means Griffin’s protests, which the North Carolina Democratic Party has challenged in federal court, may be his only avail. If they’re accepted, it could change the race’s outcome.

[…]

If the board rules against Griffin, he could appeal to the Wake County Superior Court. From there, he could eventually appeal the case to the state Supreme Court.

This is the GOP’s end game, suggests a former Democratic consultant:

“The question is, can the Republicans take what’s going on here and turn it into a semi-legitimate case?” said Pope McCorkle III, known as Mac, a former Democratic political consultant and professor of public policy at Duke University. “If they can, Riggs might lose.”

The odds are stacked in a North Carolina court that’s already handed control of the U.S. House of Representatives to Republicans.

“What’s happening in North Carolina is sinister, and it will have a chilling effect on our democracy and our country if they’re able to get away with what they’re trying to achieve,” said N.C. Democratic Party chair Anderson Clayton at a Tuesday news conference.

But there is something more sinister going on than Griffin’s challenge to 60,000 voters in his race. If state Republicans can make their ineligible voter allegations stick in court, they might trigger a state provision for holding new elections in multiple races, not just in his. By triggering a do-over, they could get a second chance to hold onto the veto-proof majority they lost in the House on Nov. 5.

§ 163-182.13.  New elections.

(a) When State Board May Order New Election. – The State Board may order a new election, upon agreement of at least five of its members, in the case of any one or more of the following:

(1) Ineligible voters sufficient in number to change the outcome of the election were allowed to vote in the election, and it is not possible from examination of the official ballots to determine how those ineligible voters voted and to correct the totals.

(2) Eligible voters sufficient in number to change the outcome of the election were improperly prevented from voting.

(3) Other irregularities affected a sufficient number of votes to change the outcome of the election.

(4) Irregularities or improprieties occurred to such an extent that they taint the results of the entire election and cast doubt on its fairness.

Utterly specious

Republicans in the state have long loathed Gene Nichol, a UNC-Chapel Hill law professor and News & Observer columnist. NC Republicans are “trying to break down the fundaments,” he argued in his 2020 book, “Indecent Assembly.” Nichol adds, “That’s a bigger transgression than being wrong or being stupid. It’s a rejection of what it means to be a North Carolinian, what it means to be an American.”

Nichol writes in Tuesday’s News & Observer:

Jefferson Griffin thinks his fanciful, already judicially-rejected, election-busting ideological claim counts more than the personal franchise of tens of thousands of Tar-Heel citizens. He also likely has a quiet confidence that the most partisan state supreme court in the United States — which he is anxious to join — will ignore the law and sweep him in. Though it now appears Democrats are trying to head this off in federal court.

In embracing the North Carolina Republican “politics of façade,” Griffin shows he shouldn’t become a justice.

We’re awfully familiar with “façade” politics in Carolina. When Republican lawmakers used “surgical precision” to disenfranchise Black voters with a “monster” voter ID bill, federal courts found the proffered interest in “ballot integrity” was mere ruse, since no evidence of voter fraud could be produced.

Mere ruses and voter fraud smoke bombs are SOP for the GOP everywhere.

Utterly specious justification takes one a long way in North Carolina Republican politics. The first Republican president Abraham Lincoln advised: “Tell the truth and you won’t have so much to remember.” They must have dropped that from the platform.

Oh, decades ago.

Will the Real Americans in Trump country put their money where their votes are or will they fight as hard as they usually do against Democrats when they make even the slightest attempt to have kids eat vegetables or go outside to play:

The Archer Daniels Midland wet mill on the outskirts of Decatur, Ill., rises like an industrial behemoth from the frozen, harvested cornfields of Central Illinois. Steam billowed in the 20-degree cold last week, as workers turned raw corn into sweet, ubiquitous high-fructose corn syrup. Three miles away, a Primient mill, which sprawls across 400 acres divided by North 22nd Street, was doing the same.

To Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President-elect Donald J. Trump’s nominee for secretary of health and human services, this bedraggled city — set deep in Trump country — is the belly of the agribusiness beast, churning out products that he says poison America, rendering its children obese and its citizens chronically ill.

To the workers here, those mills — the largest in the world — are their livelihoods.

“It’d have a huge impact,” a 37-year-old electrician who would identify himself by only his first name, Tyler, said of Mr. Kennedy’s declaration of war on corn syrup and corn oil. He was grabbing lunch at Debbie’s Diner in the shadow of the mills. “That shuts down Central Illinois, if A.D.M. shuts down.”

Mr. Trump’s alliance with Mr. Kennedy during the presidential campaign was the ultimate marriage of convenience, uniting a right-wing populist presidential candidate with a scion of the nation’s most famous Democratic family, whose appeal to would-be Trump voters rested mainly with his conspiracy theories on Covid-19 and vaccines. Mr. Kennedy said at the time that Mr. Trump had promised him control of the nation’s public health agencies.

Mr. Kennedy’s other track record — on environmental protection and an abiding hatred of America’s unhealthy diet — may have been less of a draw to the fast-food-loving, regulation-hating Mr. Trump, but the former and future president said he would keep Mr. Kennedy’s environmentalism in check while letting him “go wild” on health.

Then Mr. Trump nominated him to head the sprawling Department of Health and Human Services, which has partial purview over America’s diet through a powerful subsidiary, the Food and Drug Administration, and enormous influence on health through its control of Medicare and Medicaid.

Now a brewing battle over corn syrup and vegetable oils is raising the prospect of a fight between Mr. Kennedy and Mr. Trump’s own voters in farm country.

I doubt Trump really cares about any of this. He doesn’t think he owes the farmers or Big Ag anything. He doesn’t owe anyone anything. And he certainly doesn’t care about the health of the economy or the American people. But if the local Senators come begging and scraping or if Big Ag can find a way for him to wet his beak, he might step in and put a leash on Bobby.

Whatever happens, it will be interesting to see how Trump voters react. I’m pretty sure they’ll find a way to rationalize it even if Trump gives him the go ahead. The cult is just that strong.

Eric Trump at the Bitcoin Conference

Incredible photos throughout this piece by Tamir Kalifa. This event just happened a few hours ago in Abu Dhabi drawing not just Eric Trump, but Steve Witkoff (DJT golfing buddy/real estate executive) and Paul Manafort and Justin Sun, a crypto exec facing fraud charges from the S.E.C.

— Eric Lipton NYT (@ericlipton.nytimes.com) 2024-12-10T20:47:51.397Z

This is simply jaw dropping. They aren’t even pretending anymore. The presidency and Donald Trump’s personal finances are fully merged:

Eric Trump flew across the world to headline a cryptocurrency conference in the United Arab Emirates this week and told thousands of enthusiastic attendees that he and his father, the U.S. president-elect, were effectively working in tandem to push crypto, a business sector the family is directly invested in.

The message was notable because it contrasted drastically with the promise the family made when Donald J. Trump entered the White House four years ago, to keep business and government operations separate.

Eric Trump said he had even phoned his father — “Pops,” he said he calls him — to celebrate when the price of Bitcoin hit $100,000 after the president-elect announced he intended to appoint a crypto-friendly lawyer as the new chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, which regulates the industry that the family now profits from.

“You’re going to have the most pro-crypto president in the history of America,” Eric Trump told the crowd. “Think about a president who isn’t going to allow Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies to be overregulated and stifled.”

He’s making it crystal clear that Trump Inc., at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. is open for business.

Eric told the rapt audience that their embrace of crypto is at least partially based on vengeance against the big banks that they believe turned their backs on them:

“The attacks on the family, the attacks on our company, the nastiness of the system, the hell that they put us through,” Eric Trump said, recalling the periods when his father was first in the White House and after Jan. 6, which led to many companies dropping the Trump Organization as a client. “Had it not been for those attacks, I don’t think my eyes would have been as open to the crypto industry.”

Off the main stage at this event, a feeding frenzy was underway as crypto investors tried to gain access to people in Mr. Trump’s orbit.

The conference was heavily attended by people who are in finacial trouble with the law in the United States. Of course.

The piece quotes Lawrence M. Noble, who served as the FEC general counsel for a decade:

“This is taking it to a different level,” Mr. Noble, who now teaches law at American University, said. “This is a direct conflict of interest. We have not seen anything like this before. We have moved so far away from the ethical norms of past presidents, where they divested themselves of financial interests.”

Waddya gonna do?

So what are the possible consequences of this? They are myriad but I think there are quite a few heavy players, including the Trumps, who understand the risk of implosion very well (it is, after all, hardly more than a Ponzi scheme) and by pushing it to the brink they can make it “too big to fail” at which point they will all be bailed out by the taxpayer. That moral hazard was well covered back in 2008 but all it did was offer insurance for con artists and scammers.

As I’ve been saying, Trump only truly cares about two things right now (aside from making people kiss his ass which he loves.) He cares about revenge and making as much money as humanly possible as president of the United States. He sees no reason he cannot do both of those things openly and without fear of accountability because he knows there is none.

Update —

Republicans have long accused Hunter Biden — the son of President Joe Biden — of taking a board seat on a Ukrainian gas company called Burisma, which he held from 2014 to 2019, in exchange for influence in US – Ukraine policy decisions.

The claims led to investigations in both the House and the Senate, which led to myriad issues, as the conservative-led inquiries became a means to undermine President Joe Biden’s credibility by targeting his son.

But the same Senators and House members behind the investigations are now silent as Donald Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr, takes board seats at two companies in advance of his father’s second term. The move, like Hunter Biden’s board seat, raises concerns that his inclusion could sway key policy decisions affecting those businesses.

In the last week, Trump Jr took a board seat at Public Square — an e-commerce platform that labels itself as “anti-woke” and aligns itself with conservative brands and products, and Unusual Machines — a Florida-based manufacturer of drone components.

As the article points out, HunterBiden had no official or even quai-official relationship with the Obama administration and neither was he involved in any of this father’s campaigns. He never served as a surrogate for his father or the administration on television or elsewhere. He may have gotten hired because of his father’s name but there was no evidence, despite investigations by the press, the DOJ and the congress that it was anything more than that. Junior, on the other hand, is intimately involved in choosing his father’s cabinet, including the Vice President, and is highly influential on policy also serving as one of his father’s most common surrogates on television and elsewhere.

Any problem? Not so far.

Update II–

This is the best thing I’ve read about crypto — and the weird new state of our society in general (for anyone over 40 anyway) — in a good long while. Highly recommend.

That new Willie Brown ad was just the beginning

Harris was just saying that she would uphold the law. That ad was probably decisive in her loss and it was a grotesque attack on transgender people. They’re now going to change the laws so they can overtly discriminate against them.

This is a crime against humanity in my book. In fact, it sounds like something out of Nazi Germany:

Earlier this fall, Florida officials ordered transgender women in the state’s prisons to submit to breast exams. As part of a new policy for people with gender dysphoria, prison medical staff ranked the women’s breast size using a scale designed for adolescents. Those whose breasts were deemed big enough were allowed to keep their bras. Everyone else had to surrender theirs, along with anything else considered “female,” such as women’s underwear and toiletry items.

This article was published in partnership with the Tampa Bay Times.

The examinations came after people who had been diagnosed with gender dysphoria by the prison system’s own providers were brought into meetings at the end of September and told of the prisons’ new policy, which would make it nearly impossible for them to get hormone therapy and other gender-affirming medical care, according to interviews and emails with more than a dozen transgender women who said they attended the meetings.

Josie Takach, who is incarcerated in a men’s facility south of Tallahassee, said a male doctor told her to lift up her shirt, then glanced at her breasts and wrote something down without saying a word. When she tried to ask a question, a nurse “told me not to ask any questions and to just shut up and do what I’m told,” she recalled.

“It felt like I was being treated less than human,” she said.

Unless the whole world regresses to the dark ages, which is certainly possible, this period is going to be looked back on as akin to Jim Crow for its bigotry and cruelty. I honestly can’t believe I’m seeing what I’m seeing.

They’re making these women get a buzz cut and wear men’s underwear. And for what? So they can prove that transgenderism doesn’t exist?

So far, the courts have decided that gender affirming care is required but that’s being tested. Just last week the Supreme Court heard the case from Tennessee in which the state banned such care for minors and it certainly seemed that they were ready to uphold that ban. That case is seen as a gateway to a whole panoply of other anti-trans laws, depending on the criteria upon which they base their opinion.

As Tatyana Tandanpolie at Salon wrote:

Against a virulently anti-trans social and political landscape, a Supreme Court decision in U.S. v. Skrmetti, which is expected by July 2025, in favor of Tennessee could also have broader impacts on the trans community as a whole, Colker argued. 

“There’s nothing to stop a state from banning this kind of medical treatment for all transgender people. There’s nothing special about youth,” she said, adding: “Will we start seeing more and more of these restrictions for adults, and then will Congress decide to get into the game and ban this treatment nationally for both youth and possibly adults as well? Those are scary thoughts.” …

Meanwhile, the community’s rights and freedoms remain in flux and at risk of further rollbacks as state legislatures ramp up the number of proposals aiming to curtail youth access to gender-affirming care, limit participation in sports and restrict bathroom usage by sex assigned at birth. According to Trans Legislation Tracker, more than 650 anti-transgender bills, including 274 carried over from 2023, are under consideration in state legislatures this year. 

This is a war on transgender people. It’s sick. Why in the world do these people think this is such a terrible problem? I just don’t get it.

7,309 votes were the difference between a Dem and GOP majority. Obviously, the Democratic Party needs to completely renounce its values, policies and agenda if they ever expect to win another election.

By the way, Trump’s landslide victory is now at 1.4%.

Full Interview: Stephen Miller (@StephenM) joins Sunday Morning Futures w/ Maria Bartiromo (@MariaBartiromo) to discuss investing in Border Security, a Tax Reform Package (Tax Cuts), what exactly the Senate is expected to do once President Donald Trump takes office, squashing the… pic.twitter.com/hWqNau7IUS

— Dusty (@thatdudedusty) December 8, 2024

Stephen Miller appeared on Fox and laid it all out. He declared that it was Trump’s number one priority ahead of everything else including tax cuts, tariffs and “drill, baby,drill” which Trump asininely says it what he plans to do on day one. Apparently, they’re looking at something in the neightborhood of $120 billion dollars:

Miller said on Fox News that first, incoming Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) have “promised that they can get a full funding package for the border, the most significant board of security investment in American history … to the president’s desk in January or early February.”

That would mean a “massive increase” in Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers working on Trump’s deportation operation and a “historic increase in border agents,” with both getting a pay rise, Miller told Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo.

There would be “full funding for ICE beds, full funding for air and marine operations, full funding for all of the barriers and technology that you need to ensure there’s never another got-away entering this country,” Miller added.

Trump aides have previously said the president-elect would prioritize deporting dangerous criminals — something the federal government already does.

An Axios review of the most recent immigration court records found that less than .5% of over 1 million cases last year resulted in deportation orders for alleged crimes other than illegal entry into the U.S.

After Trump has signed executive orders to “seal the border shut” and begin deportations, the senators would “move immediately” in the same timeframe “to the comprehensive tax reform package,” Miller said.

“What they’re talking about doing is, before government funding expires in March, before the debt ceiling expires in June, just days after he puts his hand on that Bible …” added Miller before Bartiromo asked if waiting until later in the year to extend tax cuts through a separate reconciliation process could risk it not happening.

“There’s zero chance of that because, as you know, the tax cuts expire this year,” Miller replied.

“And you’re not just going to have tax cuts, but you’re going to have other fiscal reforms … going to have energy reforms, maybe additional border reforms. But the very important point in all of this is that, with the current [slim] size of the majority in the House, there isn’t a proposal to pass taxes in February,” he added. “That’s going to take some period of time.”

So, how do they plan to pay for all this? Well:

Incoming Senate GOP leader John Thune (R-S.D.) is actively seeking ways to make next year’s border and defense package deficit-neutral, if not deficit-negative. […]

The border portion of the first reconciliation package — which also includes energy and defense — could be as much as $120 billion, a source familiar told Axios.

It would go toward wall and border agents but also build out infrastructure at Immigration and Customs Enforcement for Trump’s deportation efforts.

After pressure from some Senate Republicans, Thune is gathering ideas for ways to pay for the package likely to include hundreds of billions of dollars for defense and the border — though the exact total is not clear.

One idea: Overturning President Biden’s student loan program, which could free up to $200 billion, sources familiar with the conversations told Axios.

$120 billion? To put that in context, if you add up ever single Border Patrol budget from 1990 through 2024, adjusted for inflation, it’s $121 billion. That’s THIRTY-FOUR YEARS of funding. They did say it included defense but we don’t know it that’s the full defense bill or just some part of it. Energy supposedly is a revenue offset.

I wonder what DOGE has to say about this? I didn’t think they wanted to do anything deficit neutral. And surely they want to cancel that student loan program to lower the deficit not pay for new spending, right? And they’ve got all those tax cuts coming too. What a dilemma.

I’m going to guess that Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare are definitely coming into focus as targets of their cuts. After all, they always wanted to eliminate them anyway.

Here’s another Republican talking about it:

Rep. Mark Alford: "It's gonna mean cuts to the 24 percent of the discretionary spending that we have. And it's also going to mean looking long term at the front end of some programs like Social Security and Medicare … we can move the retirement age back a little bit." pic.twitter.com/utj2x4yO5t

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) December 9, 2024

It should be noted that the House isn’t exactly on board with splitting the reconciliation bill. But from what we’re seeing at the moment, what Trump wants, Trump gets. So I have to assume they’ll all go along or face some very unpleasant threats from MAGA. That’s how it works now.

Ingraham: The instagram posts from nut bag people ..people celebrating. This this is a sickness, honestly, it's so disappointing, but I guess we shouldn't be surprised.. up next, the other big news out of New York, Daniel Penny, a lot of people think he is a hero. pic.twitter.com/DRi5d1QNTv

— Acyn (@Acyn) December 10, 2024

Here’s how the next segment started

— Acyn (@acyn.bsky.social) 2024-12-10T00:43:47.240Z

Jeanine: It's a good day for America. I started by saying that Danny Penny was acquitted. This guy was arrested. pic.twitter.com/v3EVtFsMcC

— Acyn (@Acyn) December 9, 2024

Watters: He’s way too soft. He’s going to get annihilated. If he's not going to get the death penalty, maybe someone will do him justice behind bars

Jeanine: You should stop there pic.twitter.com/NFuvKNhshv

— Acyn (@Acyn) December 9, 2024

Basically: Vigilante who kills homeless Black man on train good, vigilante who kills rich white guy on sidewalk bad.

That’s your right wing morality, right there.

(And yes, I know there are people on the left taking the opposite POV but they aren’t on what amounts to state TV flagrantly spreading their hypocrisy to millions in the same breath.)

Ben Wikler on “The Daily Show”

Ben Wikler, Democratic Party of Wisconsin chair, appeared Monday night on “The Daily Show” and made an impression on host Jon Stewart. That’s not easy to do for a political operative. Wikler, 43, a founding producer for Al Franken’s Air America radio show and former national adviser to MoveOn, is running for Democratic National Committee chair.

“The passion that you’re bringing, that feels like what it needs in this moment,” Stewart said, remarking that DNC chairs he’s interviewed before felt much more corporate.

“You are approaching [politics] from a much more populist, bottom-up standpoint than I’ve heard in the past. Other than Howard Dean’s 50-state strategy.” At that Dean reference, the audience applauded.

I’ve mentioned Wikler in the context of the DNC chair’s race twice already. The two front runners for the position are Wikler and Minnesota’s DFL chair Ken Martin. I met Martin in passing this year at a North Carolina party meeting. He’s known, experienced, impressive, and connected. But indulge me. How I met Wikler says worlds about the man.

Netroots Nation held its 2019 conference in Philadelphia. A few weeks earlier, I’d sent Wikler a link to For The Win via IM. At an after-hours party in a hotel suite packed elbow-to-elbow, I’d slipped into an adjacent bedroom for a conversation where the din was somewhat less. While attendees in the main room sipped beers, ate cheesesteaks, and traded political gossip, a guy sat in the corner of the bedcoom in a cushioned chair with his nose in a laptop: working. Seriously, working. I caught a glimpse of his name badge: Ben Wikler.

When he came up for air, I walked over and introduced myself. He recognized my name.

“Didn’t you send me a message recently?” Wikler asked.

“Yes,” I replied.

“Did I respond to it?” Wikler asked, recalling what I’d messaged about.

No, he hadn’t.

“I’m putting you in touch with my training director,” Wikler said, pulling up an email form and e-introducing us on the spot. I had a 45-minute call with her the next week.

That’s the kind of chair Democrats need running their national party. A guy who understands and appreciates field work and is passionate about boots on the ground work. It’s what Stewart saw across the table last night.

Update: Let me say again, There is no The Democratic Party. A lot of the negatives Stewart reacts to as “the Democratic Party” are more a feature of the Beltway caucus fundraising arms — the DCCC and DSCC — than activists farther down the food chain. But the DNC chair gets more media face time than the heads of those groups and can set a new tone and agenda, as Howard Dean did and caught grief for inside the Beltway:

“We’re going to be in places where the Democratic Party hasn’t been in 25 years,” Dean likes to say. “If you don’t show up in 60 percent of the country, you don’t win, and that’s not going to happen anymore.”

50-state worked while Dean lasted.

The anger of the crowd and the pettiness of plutocrats

Princeton economist Paul Krugman just published his final New York Times column in a body of work begun in January 2000. He considers how the world has changed over 25 years. It’s a grimmer place:

What strikes me, looking back, is how optimistic many people, both here and in much of the Western world, were back then and the extent to which that optimism has been replaced by anger and resentment. And I’m not just talking about members of the working class who feel betrayed by elites; some of the angriest, most resentful people in America right now — people who seem very likely to have a lot of influence with the incoming Trump administration — are billionaires who don’t feel sufficiently admired.

Krugman doesn’t mention Trump again, but he’s the most prominent of those resentful billionaires.

In early 2000, Krugman writes, “Polls showed a level of satisfaction with the direction of the country that looks surreal by today’s standards.” One could point to many reasons for the public mood, but the collapse of public faith in elites features prominently. “The public no longer has faith that the people running things know what they’re doing, or that we can assume that they’re being honest.”

Krugman touches on the financial crisis of 2008 as one reason, eliding the crisis of confidence in American invulnerability that was the fallout from the September 11 attacks. Still, the Great Recession hit more Americans where they live, and their resentments swelled.

Wall Street’s  Masters of the Universe were uncontrite and escaped well-earned criminal prosecutions, adding to public cynicism. They kept their bonuses but lost stature in the public eye. They responded with “Obama rage” to the 44th president’s suggestion that they were, you know, in some small part to blame.

These days there has been a lot of discussion of the hard right turn of some tech billionaires, from Elon Musk on down. I’d argue that we shouldn’t overthink it, and we especially shouldn’t try to say that this is somehow the fault of politically correct liberals. Basically it comes down to the pettiness of plutocrats who used to bask in public approval and are now discovering that all the money in the world can’t buy you love.

There is not enough money on the planet to fill an empty soul. So not to overthink things, then, it is clear that the incoming 47th president has been trying to buy love his entire career. As have many of the billionaires with which he plans to populate the White House next year. Trump chief among them demands worship. Wealth equals worth in the billionaire universe, and in the country club of the gods.

Venture capitalist Nick Hanauer famously deconstructed billionaire’s mythmaking in a 2012 TED talk. He told MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell:

“When a capitalist like me claims to be a ‘job creator,’ it sounds like we’re describing how the economy works, but what we’re doing is something far more interesting. What we’re doing is making a claim on status and privilege. Look, there’s a small leap from ‘job creator’ to ‘The Creator’ — someone at the center of the economic universe…

But elites in general have taken it on the chin over the last 25 years, not just the One Percent. The public mood has curdled, in Krugman’s view, towards elites in particular, and of any kind.

The Washington Post reports this morning, “University leaders are bracing for an onslaught of aggressive legislation and regulations amid growing hostility from an ascendant Republican Party that depends less and less on college-educated voters.”

This is not a new trend. Attacks on elite academies by state legislatures have taken place in the last decade in North Carolina and Wisconsin. Only now they may come from Washington, D.C.:

For years, conservatives have seen colleges and universities as unwelcoming and disdainful of their values. Tensions between Republicans and higher education have been rising over questions of free speech, the cost of college, diversity, race and more.

Now that rift has become a rupture.

In a “Morning Joe” interview aired Monday, President Bill Clinton commented on how “deeply and yet closely divided” the U.S. is as a country.

That divide, distrust of learning and expertise is both organic and cultivated, seeded and nurtured by the very petty plutocrats whose wealth can’t buy love.

Commenting on the Clinton interview, a Bluesky commenter notes, “Since Reagan, the GOP has worked to increase citizens’ cynicism about government, and then campaigned against government. Now, under Trump, the GOP is working to increase citizens’ cynicism about democracy, and then campaigning against democracy.”

Is there a way out? Krugman offers:

We may never recover the kind of faith in our leaders — belief that people in power generally tell the truth and know what they’re doing — that we used to have. Nor should we. But if we stand up to the kakistocracy — rule by the worst — that’s emerging as we speak, we may eventually find our way back to a better world.

May you all live to see it.

For now, the satire of Idiocracy (2006) bites deeper than ever and we seem a long way from the corner Joe Bowers turned in his inaugural speech:

And there was a time in this country, a long time ago, when reading wasn’t just for fags and neither was writing. People wrote books and movies, movies that had stories so you cared whose ass it was and why it was farting, and I believe that time can come again!