Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Per Jake Tapper on X: The exec dir of the Colorado County Clerks Association, GOP former Arapaho County Clerk Matt Crane, applauded the verdict: “Clerks across the state are pleased to see justice done today. …grateful to see the justice system hold those who would harm our elections accountable”

“Portraying her as a ‘political prisoner,’” Crane writes of Peters, “is a deliberate lie told to keep voters angry and misinformed, while undermining faith in our institutions.”

This is how Trump is dealing with the fact that Colorado is refusing to honor his unconstitutional pardon of Peters:

Miffed at Colorado’s votes against him in three successive elections and furious at its refusal to free Tina Peters, a convicted election denier and ardent Trump supporter, Mr. Trump has opened an assault against the Democratic-run state. His administration has cut off transportation money, relocated the military’s Space Command, vowed to dismantle a leading climate and weather research center and rejected disaster relief for rural counties hammered by floods and wildfires.

A major escalation to Mr. Trump’s attacks on the state came on Tuesday, when he used the first veto of his second term to kill a pipeline project to provide clean drinking water to the state’s eastern plains, a largely conservative area.

There’s also this:

Colorado MAGA Representative Lauren Boebert is claiming that President Donald Trump killed a massive clean water project in her district as punishment for her voting to release the Epstein files, even after Trump pressed her not to. 

[…]

Boebert was incensed. 

“President Trump decided to veto a completely non-controversial, bipartisan bill that passed both the House and Senate unanimously. Why? Because nothing says ‘America First’ like denying clean drinking water to 50,000 people in Southeast Colorado, many of whom enthusiastically voted for him in all three elections,” she wrote in a statement. “I thought the campaign was about lowering costs and cutting red tape. But hey, if this administration wants to make its legacy blocking projects that deliver water to rural Americans; that’s on them.”

You defy Orange Julius Caesar and people are going to suffer. That’s just how our country works now.And apparently tens of millions of our fellow Americans think that’s just great.

Well, until it hits them. But their cult leader will tell them it’s all Joe Biden and the Democrats’ fault and they will end up feeling even more justified in their vote for Trump. Brainwashing is a powerful thing.

Update —

That hysterical scandal unfolding on right wing media to justify Trump’s disgusting racist attacks in Somali Americans has led to this ridiculous new policy:

The Department of Health and Human Services is freezing all childcare payments to all states, an official for Donald Trump’s administration told ABC News in a report published Wednesday. States’ funds will be released “only when states prove they are being spent legitimately”.

The report came a day after Jim O’Neill, the HHS deputy secretary, and Alex Adams, an HHS assistant secretary who oversees the Administration for Children and Families (ACF), appeared in a Tuesday evening video message. O’Neill declared that the department had “activated our defend-the-spend system for all ACF childcare payments across America” and would now require “justification, receipt or photo evidence before we make a payment”.

Originally, O’Neill and Adams’s message was interpreted as an announcement that HHS would stop childcare funding in Minnesota, not all 50 states. However, the Associated Press reported late Wednesday that the freeze would apply to every state and that all states would need to provide more documentation about their childcare programs before receiving federal money.

I don’t have the energy to go into the full scope of this scandal.Suffice to say that it isn’t new, that the Biden administration was on it and that it’s really just another right wing hate fest that they’re using as an excuse to try to ruin childcare in America. Why they think this will hurt immigrants more than it will hurt working Americans I do not know.

I realize that they are on a mission to send women out of the workforce but it’s hard to imagine this will help them do anything but create resentment among the people that need child care.

During the campaign Trump was asked about the childcare crisis and his answer was that there would be so much money from the incredible growth from tariffs that there would be tons of money to pay for it.

I’ll just leave that there.

Less than a month before he was gunned down in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy gave a memorable speech — the last major one of his life — at Amherst College. He spoke at length about the role of art in a free society, discussing its functions of challenging the status quo and holding a mirror to the nation’s strengths, as well as its flaws. Importantly, he exhorted artists to always remain true to themselves. 

“If art is to nourish the roots of our culture,” he said, “society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him. We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth.”

Considering these words, it’s obvious why, when Congress debated what kind of monument they would build to honor the slain president, the consensus was that it would be most appropriate to build a living memorial in the form of a world class arts center to honor Kennedy’s ideals. When his successor Lyndon Johnson broke ground on the center in 1964, he did so with the same spade that had been used for the Lincoln Memorial in 1914 and the Jefferson Memorial in 1938. It was considered a sacred task. 

For more than 50 years, the Kennedy Center has served as the capital’s premier cultural center — until now. Donald Trump, who has no concept of the meaning of either art or culture, had his flunky board commandeer Kennedy’s memorial by renaming it “The Donald J. Trump and The John F. Kennedy Memorial Performing Arts Center.” It’s bizarre that any living president, much less one who is still serving, would want his name on a memorial to a dead man, particularly one who is still revered by many Americans. But Trump is single minded in his desire to mark his territory no matter where his tinkle, to use a famous Nancy Pelosi term, splashes. 

But all hasn’t gone according to Trump’s cultural coup. Many artists who have previously been honored to perform at the Kennedy Center, respectful of the former president who so poetically venerated their role in our culture and society, are now refusing to perform there. They don’t wish to sully this artistic institution and its history by participating in its seizure by a man whose ego is so large he insists on branding everything in sight, as if it’s the only way he can be sure he even exists. 

The administration is threatening to sue these artists for millions, and no doubt they will try to find ways to intimidate and defund any organizations with whom they might be affiliated. But that won’t stop them. Artists, musicians, writers, film makers and performers of all kinds are rebelling, one of the most profound forms of resistance to a repressive regime. 

In America, we’ve long had sharp political humorists, including Mark Twain — our greatest social commentator and acute observer of human nature — Will Rogers, Dick Gregory, Molly Ivins and, more recently, Stephen Colbert. Writers like Upton Sinclair, Langston Hughes, Kurt Vonnegut, Paul Beatty and Joseph Heller, among others, work in that grand tradition. Political cartoonists have bravely sent up the powers-that-be for centuries. Singers, songwriters and musicians from Joan Baez, Odetta, Bob Dylan and Mavis Staples to Childish Gambino, S.G. Goodman, Jason Isbell, Rhiannon Giddens and Jesse Welles have written and sung truth to power.

But from time to time, our government will actually step in and cast a chill on the arts, demanding that they produce propaganda, or requiring the moneyed interests that fund their work enact censorship policies. Perversely, it’s times like these, when subversion and subtlety are required, that creativity flourishes. 

The country endured one of the most repressive periods in the 20th century in the wake of World War II. After seeing the effects of fascism and coming to terms with the repression of the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin, you would have thought the U.S. would have celebrated its freedom and diversity of thought. Instead, the government, along with many institutions, retreated into a paranoid state, creating a tyrannous partnership with private interests to oppress dissent. 

As part of the Red Scare of the 1940s, the government targeted the film industry, enlisting movie studios to blacklist those they saw as threats. The studios gamely went along, ruining the lives of a number of their creative talent who refused to disavow their pasts. That didn’t stop movies from telling the story of their time anyway. 

Studios had “B” units, which produced the lower half of a double bill. After the war they were mostly manned by veterans who created what we’ve come to call film noir, a genre that reflected the dark, underbelly of an America that was being devoured by an irrational, paranoid faction determined to punish dissidence and nonconformity. Films such as “Kiss Me Deadly,” “In a Lonely Place” and “The Killers” came out of those units and told the story of an America that was profoundly traumatized by the years of the Great Depression and World War II. 

Likewise, many well-known geniuses like Billy Wilder, Otto Preminger and Fritz Lang, who were chased out of Europe by the Nazis, brilliantly exposed the hypocrisies and soul deadening conformity of mainstream American culture. Alfred Hitchcock, Carol Reed, Orson Welles, Stanley Kubrick and many others made incredible films that directly contradicted the edicts of studio bosses at the behest of the government. 

These films, along with theatre such as Arthur Miller’s McCarthy era allegory “The Crucible,” and surreal, avant garde works like Jean Paul Sartre’s “No Exit” and Samuel Becket’s “Waiting for Godot,” tested the assumptions of bourgeois 1950s America and led the way to the creative explosion of the following decades. 

While they didn’t know it at the time, all those oppressive scolds and tyrants of the McCarthy era achieved was to open the door to a period of intense inspiration and artistic innovation that influenced the American public far more powerfully than their show trials and polemics ever could. 

Today we are seeing media companies being swallowed up by big tech oligarchs who are eager to work in tandem with the Trump administration for their mutual benefit. The last year has shown that his administration is ready to use its power to suppress opinions and dictate what artists and commentators may produce. There are no doubt plenty who will acquiesce to their demands. But the art is still coming, and it’s telling the real story. 

One example is “One Battle After Another,” Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest film that is loosely based on Thomas Pynchon’s post-Watergate novel “Vineland.” Set in a surreally rendered present day, it accurately captures the emotion and the aesthetic of our time, reflecting the relentless nature of our current challenge. Using satire and humor in the vein of an equally powerful film of the early 1960s, “Dr. Strangelove,” it exposes the grotesque, absurd nature of the Stephen Millers and Gregory Bovinos more accurately than a documentary ever could. We see the racist underbelly of our culture in ways that are both painful and hopeful. 

This is what art can do, and we can expect to see much more of it in the months and years ahead. America’s artists will resist this latest attempt at dictating conformity in a hundred different ways. They will resist, they will refuse, they will mock and they will summon all their talent and creativity to tell the truth. There is no way that Trump and his lame attempt at branding America in his image can possibly compete with that. 

As Kennedy said at Amherst, “The artist, however faithful to his personal vision of reality, becomes the last champion of the individual mind and sensibility against an intrusive society and an officious state.” 

His name will be on that memorial long after Trump’s is relegated to the forgotten pile of obscure presidential failures. The artists will see to that.

Think and act outside the box

Chuck your lefty handbook in 2026. Try thinking outside the box. Throw some Hail Marys. The same-old ain’t working.

The headline, “USPS changed postmark rules; why your mail could be late now,” caught my attention Tuesday morning. The change “could cost you late fees and penalties for anyone mailing time-sensitive documents such as tax returns or bill payments.” Readers will immediately see what’s not on that list of time-sensitive documents.

I never would have thought of changing USPS postmark rules for screwing with mail-in ballots. Nor would you. “That’s because you don’t have a criminal mind,” a restaurant diner once observed. But our opponents would. They are creatively devious. They will look for and try any way to rig elections in their favor (even if it hurts their own voters) up to and including sparking a violent insurrection. They will submit “alternate” slates of electors. They will redraw congressional districts mid-decade. The list of election fuckery could fill the rest of this post.

“They’re such bastards,” a friend in state elections texted back late Tuesday.

The point is that Democrats as a party and lefty activists are forever playing defense against such tactics. Our idea of taking our game to the next level is doing the same thing we’ve always done, the way we always do it, just more of it. It’s stale and predictable. From writing your congressman, to the language we use, to our 20+ year-old voter database, and how we use it.

Get out of your defensive crouch. Try. Something. Different. Something bold.

I’ve written several times about the signs I’ve been displaying since August. (Here’s a short how-to.) I’m trying something off the wall. Today I thought I’d lay out the strategy. I don’t do the usual, tired, issue-based directives like “Save Social Security” or “Fund Public Education” people expect. I’m not declaring what policies I support, or what policies I want commuters to support, what wars I oppose, or how much I dislike the Orange Menace. I’m trying to build commuters’ trust. In me.

In three to six-or-seven words, I’m giving evening commuters something to ponder on their way home. Four or five rush hours per week in different locations. Sometimes with others. Sometimes solo. Every week, like clockwork. Your friendly neighborhood Sign Guy, juking on the corner or on the overpass like a human air dancer.

Last night, I was at a major intersection (my usual Wednesday solo gig) with the sign above that I crafted for holiday traffic.

A guy in a black pickup pulled off the road, parked a feet away, and rolled down his window to ask what my answer was. I told him I didn’t have to have an answer, “You have to have an answer.”

“I voted for Trump,” he replied.

“Good luck with that,” I smiled and went back to performing for commuters. If he was expecting hostility or an argument, he didn’t get it. When he drove off, I spotted the Trump sticker in the back window.

But here’s the thing. Mr. Curious interrupted his New Year’s Eve drive home to ask what this loon with the sign was about. He’ll be thinking about it all night. He’ll tell the wife what the sign said. Score one for me.

Democrats and the growing pool of independent voting and non-voting commuters each week are smiling, waving, honking, etc., not for the message anymore so much as for their friendly neighborhood Sign Guy. It’s interactive. He waves back. He points back and smiles. He’s become a friend.

The Sign Guy offers talking points and a chuckle on the way home. He’s someone they can count on whose name they don’t even know. He reassures them that the entire world has not gone mad. Like the Freeway Blogger, only in person. I think of it as highway “deep canvassing.” Instead of visiting the same doors repeatedly, the doors come to me. And on the overpass, that’s ~3,600 doors (and ~4,700 pairs of eyes) per hour. *

Next fall the messages will be less anodyne. That trusted messenger will be asking commuters and passing pedestrians to vote. Not for anyone in particular. Just to vote. But like I train poll greeters, if people trust you, they will vote with you. Commuters already know Sign Guy’s lean without being lectured. Independents respond poorly to being lectured.

It’s a Hail Mary. Electorally, will it make a measurable difference? I don’t know.

I’m not suggesting that this is what any of you should do, but to do what you can with what you’ve got. Take risks. Try new things. Just, please, not the same-old, same-old that frankly ain’t working anymore. Campaign hacks will argue that my sign strategy fails to capture any data about passing drivers, doesn’t target probable voters, etc. But I’ve already rendered an opinion on that:

There is a systematic overreliance on tech to solve Democrats’ problems. When I hear, “Our campaign will be data-driven,” I wince. Too many political problems cannot be solved with more tech. NC Democrats’ new chair, Anderson Clayton, 25, scolds, “Democrats don’t have a messaging problem. They have a showing-up problem.”

So show up in 2026. Throw some Hail Marys.

* Sorry, I don’t have any photos of me on the overpass. OTOH, when rush hour traffic stops, plenty of passengers take pictures. I make my signs readable from 75-100 feet away.

May Mike Luckovich help us get through it

What Digby said.

pic.twitter.com/B71FM3jrAS

— mike luckovich (@mluckovichajc) December 31, 2025

The final Calvin and Hobbes strip, published 30 years ago.

Happy New Year Everybody!

It’s been a rough 11 months but we’re almost through the first year. Let’s raise a glass to our resilience and perseverance. We made it this far.

Now we’ll just take a beat, enjoy the rest of our holiday and then put our shoulders to the wheel to get through the next three.

Thanks again to all of you who’ve supported this rickety old site in the past and once again this year. You are the reason I’m still here and I’m enormously grateful. You are the best!

Keep the faith,
digby

It’s been a sad holiday season for many of us in this little corner of the political world. Our good friend Howie Klein passed away on Christmas eve after battling a long illness. He wrote about it philosophically on his seminal blog Down With Tyranny and being an extremely spiritual person, his insights into the journey were typically heartfelt and inspiring.

Howie had the most interesting life of anyone I’ve ever met. He was a world traveler — he’d been everywhere — and continued his gallivanting up until this year. Back in the 60s he was one of those itinerant hippies who traveled by bus through Afghanistan to India and beyond, also living in Europe for years working at a variety of different jobs. I’m pretty sure he’d been to every continent, some many times over.

Back in the states he was a member of the 70s NY music scene hanging out at CBGBs with the likes of Lou Reed and Patti Smith. Settling later on the west coast in San Francisco he was a DJ at the legendary college station KUSF, playing the new emerging music of the New Wave that was hopping in that city during the 1980s. (I used to listen to his show while I was in college there.) He eventually started his own indie record label called 415 which featured a number of great local bands like Romeo Void, Red Rockers, The Nuns, and Pearl Harbor and the Explosions. The label caught the attention of Warner Brothers where Howie eventually ended up becoming the president of the Reprise label.

Throughout all this he was a fierce progressive activist, always fighting for free speech, LGBTQ rights and the cause of civil rights and civil liberties. He served on the board of People for the American Way, testified before congress and always stood up for artistic freedom. At heart he was always a revolutionary.

I met Howie about 20 years ago as the budding Los Angeles blogging community was coming together. He and John Amato, David Dayen, Kevin Drum, Jane Hamsher and others met in the flesh at various venues and began what was to become a flourishing progressive blogging scene. At some point around 2006 we formed Blue America PAC, dedicated to helping progressive candidates.

It was Howie’s baby all the way. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of the House of Representatives and knew where all the bodies had been buried for many years. He was a strong critic of the Democratic establishment (to say the least) and worked tirelessly to upend the status quo and create a better, more progressive party. He did all the work, searching out and vetting progressive candidates, mentoring them and giving generously of his time and attention. The country is full of candidates, winners and losers alike, who learned what it is to be a real progressive from Howie Klein.

There are many characteristics that defined him, from kindness and generosity to a wonderful sense of humor. His devotion to good food was legendary and virtually every great meal I’ve ever had in L.A was shared with him. But the one character trait that stood out for me, and I think for everyone who knew him in the political world, was integrity. The man had principles and he fought for them. He was never afraid to stand up and be counted and he did that while being one of the sweetest, most generous people I’ve ever met.

Howie was a a true mensch of all menches and his fearless spirit will be with me as we face the challenges ahead. The world is a better place for having had him in it. I will miss him forever.

Update — John Amato has some thoughts as well.

I guess after Trump’s heinous Rob Reiner post, we shouldn’t expect anything less than this, but it’s still sickening that the president of the United States is a crude, classless jackass.

Yesterday, the Kennedy family announced the death of JFK’s granddaughter, Tatiana Schlossberg, Caroline’s 35 year old daughter. She had bravely faced a fast moving, deadly leukemia diagnosis, writing about it soulfully for the New Yorker, just last month. It was the latest tragedy for the Kennedy family and I think most Americans would agree that the president should have more decency than to post this sort of thing on a day that a member of that family which has given so much to our country has died.

There were no condolences from the president who just usurped the memorial to her dead grandfather. Instead he retweeted all this (which he must have gone to some trouble to compile.)

Everything they’re saying there is total bullshit. But what else would we expect? These are just horrible people, all of them.

If you happen to be tuning into this alleged blockbuster revelation of childcare fraud in Minnesota, you are probably missing a lot of important context. It is, as you might have guessed, another MAGA outrage fest designed to create more racist, culture war animosity. Dave Weigel posted this the other day on BlueSky:

I feel like “attention hacking” is most of politics now. The Minnesota aid fraud story is becoming a perfect example.

Recap: In 2022, the Biden DOJ filed the first charges against dozens of fraudsters, many of them Somali-American, who’d fleeced a state food aid program.

https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/us-attorney-announces-federal-charges-against-47-defendants-250-million-feeding-our-future

This happened right as early voting began in state elections; voters re-elected Gov. Walz and gave Democrats a trifecta. It was a damaging scandal, but hardly covered up. Rs whacked at it when Walz became VP nominee, but it didn’t become a decisive issue.

I actually agree w conservatives who think this insane scandal didn’t become a huge national story in 2022 because of newsroom choices, desire not to inflame racial tensions, etc. But the Biden-era DOJ was all over it.

The Minnesota press did cover it extensively and Walz was re-elected easily in spite of it, mainly because people didn’t blame him for the problem.

Let’s face it. This is only now a big story because of Trump’s new racist, xenophobic jihad against Somali immigrants largely based upon his and his base’s hatred for Ilhan Omar. (You’ll notice that the most vociferous, grotesque attacks on immigrants have been against those who happen to be Black — Haitians and now Somalis.) The right wing media is running with it and the MSM follows. We’ve been here before.

Naturally the Trump administration is responding by pulling all federal funding for child care in Minnesota. That’s how we do things now. All children must suffer so that Trump and his cult can take onanistic pleasure in their suffering.