Skip to content

Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Some Serious Reading

I thought I would share some good stuff I read this morning with gift links. This article in the NY Times is well worth reading in full. In fact, it’s delicious:

Late in the summer of 2003, a team of television producers stepped off the elevator on the 26th floor of Trump Tower eager to survey the set of their next reality show. After years filming “Survivor” in jungles around the world, training cameras on exotic spiders and deadly snakes to evoke danger, they came looking for a different set of sensory clues, the tiny details that would convey wealth and power.

Right away, they knew they had a problem.

The first thing they noticed was the stench, a musty carpet odor that followed them like an invisible cloud. Then they spotted scores of chips in the finish of the wooden desks and credenzas. The décor felt long out of date, making the space seem like a time capsule from when Donald J. Trump opened the building early in his first rise to fame.

The place did not exactly buzz with energy either. Fewer than 50 people worked at Trump Organization headquarters in midtown Manhattan. At the office’s spiritual center, Mr. Trump’s own desk bore no evidence of work, no computer screens or piles of contracts and blueprints, just a blanket of news articles focused on one subject: himself.

“When you go into the office and you’re hearing ‘billionaire,’ even ‘recovering billionaire,’ you don’t expect to see chipped furniture, you don’t expect to smell carpet that needs to be refreshed in the worst, worst way,” recalled Bill Pruitt, one of the producers of the new NBC show.

Interesting, no? Here’s the NY Times gift link.

Here’s another one you should read, from Huffington Post:

Key allies and advisers aren’t mincing their words: In order to carry out Trump’s mass deportation agenda, the United States will need enormous prison camps for immigrant families, part of an effort to deport millions of people at a record pace.

The mass deportation operation will be a “bloody story,” Trump said last weekend. And key advisers have promised a historic infrastructure project to churn people out of the country.

The camps will be built “on open land in Texas near the border” and should have the capacity to house as many as 70,000 people, which would double the United States’ current immigrant detention capacity, Stephen Miller, the main point man on immigration in Trump’s White House, said last year. In multiple interviews, Miller has gleefully described daily flights out of the camps to all corners of the world, an undertaking he said would be “greater than any national infrastructure project” in American history.

“Trump comes back in January — I’ll be on his heels coming back, and I will run the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen,” Thomas Homan, who served as acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement during the Trump administration, said in July at a conference for Trump-aligned conservatives.

“They ain’t seen shit yet,” Homan said. “Wait until 2025.”

Yeah, Read the whole thing.

Here’s one from Adam Serwer in the Atlantic on the real DEI candidates:

Conservatives have taken to referring to DEI as “didn’t earn it.” But to the extent that the candidates are running on unearned advantages related to personal biography, this better describes Trump and Vance than it does Harris, who worked her way up from local to state to federal office over the course of decades.

Trump was born a multimillionaire who drove one business after another into the ground, and his reputation as a brilliant businessman is largely due to him playing one on television. His term as president was mired by incompetence and corruption despite being relatively uneventful, and when faced with a real crisis—the coronavirus pandemic—he proceeded to bungle it in a catastrophic fashion that led to needless deaths and economic calamity. Vance has spent very little time in elected office, an office he won mostly on the success of his memoir and a Trump primary endorsement in a red state. He appears to have been selected as the vice-presidential nominee on the basis of his willingness to debase himself on Trump’s behalf. Neither of them has a compelling record of public service.

Trump is still unqualified even after serving as president for four years because he is incapable of learning anything. JD Vance is a 39 year old dilettante who has serve 1 year and 8 months as a Senator.

Plue they are both monsters.

He Went Down The Rabbit Hole

The husband had been a conspiracy theorist even before COVID came along. His wife described him as almost “cultlike” in his anti-vax beliefs. It’s clear he had untreated mental illness but the anti-Vax movement sent him into a spiral that resulted in this terrible tragedy. Via The Atavist:

Over the course of their marriage, Hu had watched as her now ex-husband, Stephen O’Loughlin, became obsessed with pseudoscience, self-help gurus, and conspiracy theories, spending long nights watching videos online, then sharing the details of fantastical plots with Hu, their friends, and people he barely knew. The COVID-19 pandemic had only made things worse. O’Loughlin huddled for hours at his computer streaming YouTube clips and poring over right-wing websites—what he called “doing research.”

One of O’Loughlin’s fixations was vaccines. He believed that Pierce had been damaged by the routine inoculations he received as a baby. O’Loughlin was adamant that the boy be given no more shots—not for COVID-19, when a vaccine was eventually authorized for kids, nor for any other disease.

In 2020, Hu had filed for the sole legal right to make decisions about her son’s medical care, which would empower her to vaccinate Pierce regardless of what her ex wanted. She felt good about her chances in court. On January 11, as a condition for a continuance he had requested in the medical custody case, O’Loughlin suddenly agreed to let Pierce receive two vaccinations. In retrospect, according to Hu’s attorney, Lorie Nachlis, “it all seemed too easy.”

He killed his boy and himself.

And I’m quite sure he came across Bobby Kennedy Jr’s “research” along the way.

From The You Can’t Make This Stuff Up File

Last night, Bill Maher made a joke about Trump and Laura Loomer having an affair. (It was cruder than that but basically that was it.) That theme was all over social media yesterday, starting with the big kahuna. above.

Loomer was very, very upset about it:

She should know about defamation and character assassination. It’s her entire brand:

Uh huh:

How To Explain This?

Ok. It’s Donald Trump who believes he can change reality simply by saying something over and over again. And for about 46% of voters, it appears that he can.

Not even a 3 point lead.

Yes, I still think Harris will pull out a narrow win. But what do we do about the 46% of our fellow Americans who think that bigoted conman should run the country? Their willingness to believe his lies (or rationalize them) makes them monsters too, doesn’t it? (Or dangerous fools, if we want to be generous about it.)

I knew we had been a racist, violent people. But I thought we had progressed further than this, I really did.



Is It Something In The Dust Storms?

Another family feud over a GOP candidate in AZ

Most of us have them, family members who for reasons unfathomable have gone full red-hat. For other unknown reasons a lot of them run for office in Arizona.

Six members of Rep. Paul Gosar’s (Ariz.-R) family made a point of asking people not to vote for him. Several appeared in attack ads against him and after Jan. 6 called for his ouster from Congress:

“I consider him a traitor to this country. I consider him a traitor to his family,” Gosar’s brother, Dave, a Wyoming attorney, said. “He doesn’t see it. He’s disgraced and dishonored himself.”

Now it’s Wonder Woman actress Lynda Carter’s turn, reports Mother Jones. Her sister, Pamela, “an activist prayer warrior,” is running for a state house district in suburban Maricopa County. Lynda’s distancing herself:

In their quest to hold onto the legislature, Republicans have turned to a member of a famous Arizona family—Pamela Carter, older sister of the original Wonder Woman, Lynda Carter. On the campaign trail, the candidate Carter has talked up her work as a successful entrepreneur and a record of academic accomplishment, and boasts of having “my family’s full support” for her state house run. But a review of her record and past statements tells a much different story: In contrast to the fourth district’s moderate profile, Carter is a fervently anti-abortion minister who has been “blessed with end-time revelation” and who has made confusing claims about her past. And one notable member of her family is not on board—her famous sister, an advocate for reproductive rights.

“On her website, Pam claims to have her ‘family’s full support,’” Lynda Carter said in a statement to Mother Jones. “I have known Pam my entire life, which is why I sadly cannot endorse her for this or any public office.” 

Pamela Carter’s resume is a mite muddy, the Mother Jones story explains in detail. She’s also from the Seven Mountains wing of evangelical Christianity when she’s not multi-level marketing and prophesying.

She talked frequently about building influence on the “Media mountain” and said in 2011 that she was part of “God’s media army…to be raised up for such a time as this, to take possession of the arts, the entertainment media, the internet.”

The term is often used by proponents of a Christian nationalist movement sometimes called the New Apostolic Reformation and a belief its adherents subscribe to known as Seven Mountains Dominionism, which aims to take gain influence over the seven spheres (or “mountains”) of government, education, media, family, entertainment, religion, and business.

Sister Lynda, like Gosar’s siblings, is having none of it.

In her statement opposing Pamela Carter’s candidacy, Lynda Carter praised the late Republican Sen. John McCain for his “decency, justice, and freedom,” while explicitly endorsing both of the Democrats running against her sister:

“As a native Arizonan, I am proud to endorse Kelli Butler and Karen Gresham to represent LD4 in Arizona’s State House. Kelli and Karen are both strong, experienced candidates, born and raised in Arizona,” she said. “They are working mothers fighting for the rights that matter most to Arizonans, especially every child’s right to a quality education.”

Who knows what truths the Lasso of Hestia would tease out of Pamela?

Explainers

Compiled for sharing

If you’re in the mood for a breathless summary of superconmisogynisticextrabragadocious Trumpy lowlights, Seth Meyers has you covered. Bookmark it for Thanksgiving.

This Zak Kimball guy has a set of explainers on his TikTok page, but this one answers The Donald’s debate challenge to Vice President Kamala Harris about why she hasn’t accomplished the things she proposes in 3-1/2 years in that office. For the civics-challenged.

Tom Bonier explains why the polls are so screwed up and why they now overestimate Repunblicans’ support.

And for those of you paying attention, voter registration has been way up since Biden handed Harris the baton.

Voter registration has been spiked insanely since Harris trounced Trump in the debate and Taylor Swift’s endorsement.

Enjoy.

Update: Knew Rosenberg had these but could not find them earlier

https://x.com/SimonWDC/status/1835017466868908190

Friday Night Soother

The Wolves of Yellowstone

Gray wolves were reintroduced into Yellowstone National Park in 1995, resulting in a trophic cascade through the entire ecosystem. After the wolves were driven extinct in the region nearly 100 years ago, scientists began to fully understand their role in the food web as a keystone species.

TRANSCRIPT: In 1995, something really exciting happened in the nation’s first national park, Yellowstone. 41 wild wolves are reintroduced here by scientists. After 100 years of being hunted, wolves could once again call this place home.

The wolves thrived, but something else very surprising happened. Their return had a spectacular effect on the landscape, an effect that spread wider than anyone thought possible. So how did this all happen?

In the past, wolves were seen as a risk to people and livestock, and they were exterminated from the Yellowstone area in the 1920s. The elk’s main predator was gone, and their population more than doubled. Elk are both grazers and browsers, so they eat grass, shrubs, and trees. They overgraze the entire park, upsetting the natural balance of the ecosystem.

Mammals like mice and rabbits could not use the plants to hide from predators, and their populations fell dramatically. Grizzly bears suffered as the elk munch away their berry supply, which they badly need to build up fat before hibernating. Pollinators like bees and hummingbirds had fewer flowers to feed on, songbirds less trees to nest in.

Perhaps the elk’s most devastating impact was how they affected the park’s riverbanks. When the wolf was around, elk were vulnerable when they moved down towards rivers to drink. They would never spend too long by the water, where they could be ambushed. But with the apex predators gone, they gorged themselves faster than the shrubs could grow and gathered in great herds on the lush river banks. The massive elk’s hooves eroded the riverbanks, so the rivers and streams clouded with soil.

The fish inherited murky homes, and without trees and clean water, beavers couldn’t build their dams to live in. Without the protection of the dams, fish, amphibians and otters suffered even more, and all because of the missing wolf.

Now, with as many as 100 gray wolves in Yellowstone National Park, their reintroduction is having an effect that even surprised scientists. Wolves have contributed to bringing elk numbers down from 17,000 in 1995 to just 4,000 today. Since only the healthiest of elk survived, the population is much more robust.

All of these elk kills mean more carcasses for scavengers like coyotes, eagles, and ravens. Grizzly bear numbers have increased, too. The grizzlies benefit from the wolves’ elk kills, and less elk also means more berries, and just the elk’s fear of wolves gives the riverbank trees, like aspen and willow, a chance to regenerate. They can grow to five times their original size in just six years.

The songbirds are returning, too, and the bigger trees along the rivers means greater root structures, which means stronger riverbanks and less erosion. Clean water and big trees, beaver paradise. The return of the beaver dams creates new habitats for fish, amphibians, reptiles, and even otters.

This shows just some of the trickle-down effects of the wolves’ reintroduction, known to scientists as a trophic cascade. The trophic cascade doesn’t stop there, though. The wolves are even helping us. In 2005, over 100,000 visitors went to Yellowstone National Park just to see the wolves, pumping $30 million into the local economy, money for jobs and livelihoods.

Factor in that wolves contribute to the health and diversity of all Yellowstone’s wildlife, and its impact is staggering. The wolf’s benefits also cascade down to the 106,000 residents of Billings, Montana. Their drinking water, Yellowstone River, is now cleaner. Who would’ve thought that just bringing back some wolves could produce such far-reaching benefits for nature and for people? From the tips of taller trees down to its cleaner rivers, these wild wolves have rebalanced and restored our nation’s very first national park.

Wow, just wow.

What Does JD Really Want?

Politico takes a look at the movement behind Vance’s ascent to power:

Now that Vance is accompanying Trump on the top of the Republican ticket, this paradox has opened Republicans up to fresh criticisms. How populist can Vance really be while cozying up to billionaires in Silicon Valley? What does a Yale-educated attorney and ex-venture capitalist understand about the lives of Trump’s blue-collar voters? Is a guy who owns not one but two million-dollar houses a credible mouthpiece for the GOP’s fledgling economic populism?

But the deeper I’ve dug into the conservative world Vance comes from — often referred to as the “New Right” — the more I’ve come to see Vance’s split identity as a feature rather than a bug for his ideological supporters.

In fact, Vance embodies an archetype that has been theorized about at length in New Right-adjacent books and podcasts (many of which Vance has read and listened to). By forging an alliance between the elite “New Right” and the MAGA masses, Vance, according to this reading, could serve as the leader of a new movement to institute an illiberal and explicitly reactionary political order. Though adopting the rhetoric of conservatism populism, this new order would be a fundamentally elitist one: It would expel America’s current ruling elite in order to replace it with a new, more conservative one, drawn from the ranks of the New Right.

The details of this plan differ between the various writers and thinkers that have influenced Vance — people like the Notre Dame political theorist Patrick Deneen, the internet philosopher Curtis Yarvin and the Silicon Valley venture capitalist Peter Thiel. But taken together, their prescriptions amount to a kind of three-step plan for the New Right’s project: Identify a member of the New Right elite who can tap into the energies of an ascendant right-wing populist movement, ride those energies to political power, and then carry out a top-down transformation of American society along illiberal lines. It is, in effect, a plan to accomplish through elite rule what even the MAGA movement has failed to accomplish through democratic control: The creation of a social order built around conservative values, even if those values remain broadly unpopular with the American people.

[….]

“One of the ways in which I’m very much populist is that I think people need to have elected representatives [who] try to channel their frustrations into solutions that will make their lives better,” Vance told me when I interviewed him in his Senate office in December 2023. “One of the ways I’m very much not a populist is that I think every populist movement that has ever existed has failed unless it’s captured some subset of the people who are professionally in government.”

He added: “You can’t just run a political movement purely with voters — you need voters, you need bureaucrats, you need lawyers, you need business leaders, you need the whole thing.”

I don’t think you can call those “conservative values.” It’s a movement built on fascist ideology. But then these days that’s just a small semantic difference.

Vance is a very dangerous fellow as are the techbro elites that support him. They are the likely future of the Republican party and they have a whole lot of money to throw at their project.

Read the whole thing if you can. But pour yourself a good stiff drink first.

What Springfield Is All About

They are having to shut down elementary schools in Springfield today because of threats. Haitian immigrants are keeping their kids at home and fear going to the store. It’s only a matter of tie before something terrible happens.

Trump said today at his press conference that he specifically plans to deport all the immigrants in Springfield. Of course, they are here legally but that doesn’t matter. Neither does it matter that he said he would deport them all to Venezuela. They are, of course, Haitian but to him all the “shitholoe countries” are the same.

His demagoguery is getting worse and worse. And his partner in crime JD Vance doubled down today:

Those immigrants were invited to fill the jobs that the locals couldn’t fill. The town was dying. losing population by the thousands. They are considered by the local businesses to be their best workers:

What we are seeing is true fascist demagoguery. And it’s being promulgated as much by the new generation leader JD Vance as it is the elderly psychopath Donald Trump. This is the GOP.