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Digby's Hullabaloo Posts
What???
Trump has so many weird friends:
As Donald Trump gathered his supporters, family and friends at Mar-a-Lago on US election day last month to wait for the results to trickle in, a small group of far-right Germans went largely unnoticed.
Among them was the purported semi-professional, one-time porn actor, self-confessed former cocaine user, convicted thief and hard-right candidate for the German parliament Phillipp-Anders Rau. Together with a compact delegation of young political activists and influencers, Rau posed for the cameras with the American president-elect at his invitation, chanting “Fight! Fight! Fight!” in English and German.
Members of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party had already been making inroads with the Trump camp for several months before the US vote, as Europe’s populist anti-migration forces attempt to harness Maga’s momentum before Germany’s general election in February.
Alice Weidel, the AfD leader, became one of the first politicians abroad to welcome Trump’s victory, and party members say they are cultivating proximity to the incoming administration, with a few planning to attend next month’s inauguration in Washington.
Rau, an AfD candidate for the Bundestag from Saxony-Anhalt state, posted snapshots on Instagram of his brief encounter with Trump in Florida on 5 November, with voting still under way.
“It will remain an everlasting memory, being allowed as the first and until now only member of the AfD to shake the hand of @realdonaldtrump on the day of his victory,” he wrote. “We hope that Donald Trump will create the renewal for his country that we as the AfD plan for our country.”
They all chanted “Fight, Fight, Fight” in both English and German, so that was nice.
[T]he young men’s enthusiasm for Trump, 78, and giddy bewilderment at their arrival at his private club are less surprising than how they ended up at his side in the first place, with the meeting’s origins remaining murky.
Rau is a divisive figure even within the anti-migrant, anti-Islam AfD. He belongs to a state chapter that the domestic security agency has classified as confirmed rightwing extremist, while the national party has been deemed suspected rightwing extremist.
The 41-year-old has taken legal action against the Magdeburger Volksstimme newspaper, which published a series on a number of suspected scandals in Rau’s past.
He denies being a “paid porn actor” but the courts have ruled that he was. He was also convicted of fraud and theft so you can certainly see why Trump likes the guy. They have a lot in common. And according to the articcle, these aren’t the only German neo-Nazis Trump has been seen with in recent years. They seem to be very welcome in the Trump inner circle.
This particular group has ties to the New York Young Republicans, which figures:
Last April, in exchange, young New York Republicans were invited by the AfD to Berlin and Magdeburg, the capital of Saxony-Anhalt state – while Rau, Schmidt and other AfD officials later photographed themselves volunteering with Trump’s campaign in Florida. “As a thank you there was a handful of tickets for Trump’s election party,” said Bild, which quoted Schmidt as saying he and an entourage would be at the inauguration in January.
The new Fugitive Slave Law
I suppose it was only a matter of time before this entered the conversation:
New plans are being discussed in Jefferson City [Mo.] this week, including a proposed bounty hunter program for illegal immigrants. The proposed bill would pay people to catch those they believe to be in the United States illegally.
Senate Bill 72 was pre-filed to the Missouri legislature. It is sponsored by House Representative David Gregory. Gregory wants to pay Missourians $1000 to find and detain illegal immigrants in the state.
The first part of the bill reads that someone in Missouri illegally is “prohibited from voting in any election, receiving any permit or license to drive, receive any public benefit, and becoming a legal resident of this state.”
It’s important to note that it is already illegal to vote if you are not a citizen.
It also states the Department of Public Safety should develop an information system for people to report violations.
Civil rights attorneys are alarmed of course. But honestly, they’re already going so far with this already that I can’t see why they wouldn’t propose this and if the courts are going along with everything else they’re doing it’s hard to imagine they wouldn’t see this as perfectly reasonable. After all, they’re talking about ending birthright citizenship. Why would a little law that helped precipitate the civil war be a problem?
Here’s a piece by Harold Meyerson from 2018 on this subject:
In case you don’t remember your U.S. history: An 1842 court ruling absolved states of any duty to cooperate in the recapture of former slaves who’d freed themselves by fleeing to the North.
In response, as part of the Compromise of 1850, the Congress passed and President Millard Fillmore signed the Fugitive Slave Act, which not only required state and local governmental officials to aid owners and their agents who’d come North to capture and re-enslave the runaways, but also required the same level of cooperation from all citizens. If a slaver was in the act of recapture, bystanders were required to help out.
Not surprisingly, the North greeted the new law with fury and resistance. Vermont, Maine, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Michigan and Wisconsin all enacted “personal liberty laws” — the 1850s equivalent of California’s sanctuary state law — forbidding public officials from cooperating with the slave owners or the federal forces sent to back them up, denying the use of their jails to house the captives, and requiring jury trials to decide if the owners could make off with their abductees.
The Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled that the Fugitive Slave Act violated the Constitution’s 10th Amendment, which gave states the power to enact laws not specifically preempted by federal authority. (The Southern-dominated U.S. Supreme Court overturned that ruling on the eve of the Civil War).
Opponents of the Fugitive Slave Act also took to the streets (and jury rooms, where verdicts were rendered that freed some of the captives). Crowds would form to oppose and resist, sometimes forcibly, the apprehensions of African Americans.
According to H. Robert Baker, a historian at Georgia State University, “Whole sections of Milwaukee, Chicago, New York City and Boston became no-go zones for slave catchers.” Confronted with this level of resistance, Fillmore sent in federal troops to assist and protect the slave catchers.
History doesn’t repeat itself, but in our dispute over immigrants in the country illegally and our predecessors’ dispute over fugitive slaves, it takes no leap of logic or imagination to find the rhymes. Now, as then, one part of the country (President Trump’s disproportionately rural, white nationalist base) has enlisted federal power to enforce a legal regime in a different part of the country (racially diverse, immigrant-heavy cities) that views the law as morally repulsive and destructive of the social fabric.
Just as the slave catchers argued, speciously, that freed Negroes imperiled the antebellum North, today’s anti-immigrant forces, beginning with Trump, argue that immigrants pose a threat to public safety, though crime has fallen precipitously during the past quarter-century.
The only “crime” that most undocumented immigrants have committed — and the only one that places them in federal legal jeopardy — is that of being undocumented. Likewise, the only “crime” that most escaped slaves had committed — and the only one that placed them in federal legal jeopardy — was escaping.
Meyerson suggested at the time that there should be civil disobedience to protect undocumented immigrants, even sit-ins at ICE offices. I haven’t heard word of anything like that. I suppose everyone’s waiting to see what actually happens.
Trump said this morning that all undocumented people, not just criminals, have to be deported. And he also said that their American children will have to go with them because he “doesn’t want to break up families.” He did seem to make some exception for DREAMers, saying that he’ll talk to the Democrats about that. (I’m sure that just about putting together some proposal with a heinous poison pill the Dems can’t vote for so they can blame them for refusing to help the DREAMers.)
He once again declared that there will be a moment when a “beautiful young woman is being dragged out crying” and everyone will be upset but “we have to do it.” I think he’s looking forward to it.
And a true leader
What an excellent choice to lead the military.
I sill leave it to others to analyze what’s happening in Syria and the ramifications for the region and the rest of the world. I’ll link to good ones I run across later. But one thing does seem clear. The Russian government is on a losing streak and for good reason. Charlie Sykes offered this concise take:
Let’s start with V. Putin’s crappy weekend, shall we? The fall of Vlad’s Syrian bitch extends a remarkable run of reverses for the Russian czar-manque.
Phillips P. OBrien notes that since his invasion of Ukraine, Putin’s actions have “caused Sweden and Finland to join NATO and it looks like Russia [is going] to lose its base in Syria because it can’t keep enough forces in the area.” And since we’re toting up the butcher’s bill, Putin has managed to seize only “a relatively small part of Ukraine,” while Russia has “suffered more than 750k casualties and seen millions of young, educated people flee the country. Oh, and they squandered billions and billions of dollars and dislocated their economy.”
Another commenter put this into context: Since invading Ukraine, Putin has lost:
1. Black Sea Fleet, and Sevastopol;
2. Kursk region;
3.Finland and Sweden ending neutrality, joining NATO;
4. Syria, navy port in Tartus;
5. Georgia in process of decoupling;
6. Romania drifting away.
As he says,
And yet, Vlad always has Donald, Tulsi, and Pete…
On Meet The Press this morning, Trump was very weird when asked about whether he had spoken to Putin:
This continues to be very weird. In his comments yesterday on Truth Social he didn’t mention his good pal Erdogon and his interests in Syria and neither did he seem to understand that the US has been involved there for years, including when he was president. But then he doesn’t really care about any of that either so it’s not surprising. He did seem to be directing his Truth Social post to Putin saying something about how now is the time for the Ukraine war to end but it was incoherent. The whole thing is very odd.
He appeared on Meet The Press this morning. I’m sure it’s the last thing many of you want to see. But here are a few highlights you should probably watch.
I don’t know about you but I felt my energy and anger return at seeing that miscreant say that he’s going to deport American citizens and well … everything else. He’s feeling his oats and he clearly wants revenge. And he’s obviously is counting on his henchman and hencwoman Patel and Bondi to help him get it. There is simply no doubt about it.
(By the way, I still have to use twitter for these because Blue Sky videos don’t render properly on this platform. Yet.)
WTF is he talking about?
Huh???
He’s right that Assad has been deposed and that Russia and Iran basically said “we’re out” and let it happen. Other than that, this is the usual contradictory, puerile nonsense he spews when he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He’s over in Paris acting like the president so he’s putting out statements like they are official US policy. They are not, at least not yet. He should just keep his mouth shut but he is incapable of that.
BTW, the US has almost a thousand troops in Syria but whatever…
Celebrating a murder
This story sent chills (TMZ):
Internet sleuths believe they have found the jacket worn by the gunman who killed UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson … and now it is morbidly flying off the shelves.
On Reddit, a user speculated the suspect’s jacket was a Sherpa Lined Two Picket Hooded Trucker Jacket by Levi’s … sold at Macy’s for the retail price of $225.
The jacket’s popularity has since spread like wildfire on the company’s website … where more than 6,000 people were viewing the jacket at the same time — and nearly 700 were sold in the past 48 hours, according to an item popularity tool on Macy’s site.
The New York Times follows up (Gift link):
A grainy image of his face drew comparisons to Hollywood heartthrobs. A jacket similar to the one he’s wearing on wanted posters is reportedly flying off the shelves. And the words written on the bullets he used to kill a man in cold blood on a sidewalk on Wednesday have become, for some people, a rallying cry.
Three days after a gunman assassinated a top health insurance executive in Midtown Manhattan and vanished, the unidentified suspect has, in some quarters, been venerated as something approaching a folk hero.
The authorities have pleaded for help from the public to find the person who killed the UnitedHealthcare executive, Brian Thompson, who was a husband and father of two children. But in a macabre turn, some people seem to be more interested in rooting for the gunman and thwarting the police’s efforts.
Look, we’re all traumatized by what the Second Coming of Trump represents. Yes, wealth inequality that was bad got worse over the Reaganomics decades. Venture capitalist and early Amazon investor Nick Hanauer is famous for his almost-banned TED talk and his caution a decade ago to “Fellow Zillionaires” that pitchforks are coming for them. His message then:
Wake up, people. It won’t last.
If we don’t do something to fix the glaring inequities in this economy, the pitchforks are going to come for us. No society can sustain this kind of rising inequality. In fact, there is no example in human history where wealth accumulated like this and the pitchforks didn’t eventually come out. You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state. Or an uprising. There are no counterexamples. None. It’s not if, it’s when.
Hanauer has been preaching that message ever since, including in his Pitchfork Economics podcasts. But until this week the pitchforks always seemed metaphorical. Vivid imagery harkening back to 1931’s pre-Code Frankenstein, but metaphorical.
The celebration of a health insurance company CEO’s murder, even if a fringe phenomenon, lifts the lid on a submerged mood in the country that Hanauer saw ten years ago. It’s not unrelated to the racial and xenophobic animus that peeked out from under the sheets with the T-party after the election of Barack Obama. Donald Trump identified that mood and exploited it to get himself elected in 2016. Then after losing reelection in 2020 he threw accelerant onto it and loosed a MAGA mob against the seat of government in Washington, D.C. I’m still traumatized by that.
I’m as big a critic of the modern corporation as anyone. We make Douglas Adams-inspired jokes about corporate bozos being “the first against the wall when the revolution comes.” But calling forth a real revolution with guns or guillotines and targeted murder against elites is a path this country should try to avoid.
It is as chilling as pitifully ironic to see blood lust for corporate moguls bubbling up on the website of Macy’s.
This story is breaking … elsewhere
- Syria’s armed opposition says its fighters have captured the capital, Damascus, and that President Bashar al-Assad has fled. His whereabouts remain unknown.
- The commander of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, Abu Mohammed al-Julani, says all state institutions will remain under the supervision of al-Assad’s prime minister until they are handed over officially.
- The announcements come hours after the opposition groups seized several cities in a lightning offensive.
- Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, Iraq, Iran, Turkiye and Russia issued a joint statement earlier in the night, describing the crisis as a “dangerous development” and calling for a political solution.
Seems the Islamist rebels already have their solution. The autocrat is gone. What comes next is the question. ISIS? A Taliban? Al-Qaeda?
More from Al Jazeera:
Cars flooding into Syria after al-Assad’s ouster
Nour Qormosh, reporting near Idlib, Syria
We are here, by the N-5 Highway. Cars are moving on the highway with people returning to their homes in Syria for the first time in 14 years.
The joy of the people is insurmountable. We’ve talked to the civilians here as they transport their belongings back into the country. Their joy is shared across the Syrian geography – from Idlib to Hama, Homs, Damascus, and Deraa.
This is the most significant moment in the history of the Syrian revolution.
Two senior Syrian officers told Reuters that Assad had fled Damascus, his destination unknown. The report could not be independently verified.
The senior Emirati diplomat Anwar Gargash declined to say whether Assad was fleeing to the United Arab Emirates.
“When people ask where is Bashar al-Assad going to, I say, you know, when you really look at this, this is really at the end of the day a footnote in history,” he told reporters at a conference in Bahrain.
When opposition forces threatened Assad a decade ago, other government worried that an Islamist government might replace him (Washington Post):
What if Assad fell, analysts asked, only to be replaced by groups that Washington regarded as terrorists? The scenario was given a name: the “catastrophic success.”
The same question is being asked with urgency as intelligence agencies around the world contemplate the sweeping gains over the past week by the Syrian rebel group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS — an Arabic name that translates to the Organization for the Liberation of the Levant.
The group’s pedigree is well known, with historic links to both the Islamic State and al-Qaeda. From Jerusalem and Amman to Washington and Paris, governments are bracing for the real possibility that Damascus could come under the sway of a militant faction that the United States has officially labeled a terrorist organization.
Updates are rolling in every few minutes. It’s too early to know much more. Not that the Sunday talkies won’t spend the morning asking “experts” to speculate. So if speculation your jam, have at it. The dust won’t clear for days.
The Steve Bannon plan is to overwhelm the media with Trump’s horrible nominees. What gets to the MSM, that makes them disqualified, isn’t the same as what makes it to late night comedy shows, or to Fox News, or RW social media.
Part of what we can do with our audiences is to show how weird these people are. There are serious reasons these people are horrible, that would disqualify them to normal people like us. But we need to also point out stuff that the MAGAs have a hard time with, but we can’t reach their channels. If we tried they’d say, “I thought you were COOL WITH DEI, gays, and leather daddies!” So we put stuff out saying, “We’re cool them being gay or leather daddies, but we are not cool with their policies to destroy our national security, are you?”
Frankly I don’t know which weird, corrupt, sick, incompetent or illegal activity of Trump’s nominees will knock them out of the process. But we need to find them and share them. And if we don’t succeed in knocking them out, we need to prepare for weaknesses in the crappy choices number 2 & 3.
Marcy Wheeler was on the Nicole Sandler show talking about all the things the Dems need to point out in other candidates, like Pam Bondi, that we can hammer on during the nomination process.
What we find disqualifying, like failing to protect the people of Florida from bank fraud, THEY like! Such as when Bondi fired the Florida AG staff who were prosecuting the banks offering fraudulent loans. She got donations from one of the companies behind the fraud. The corporations would LOVE and AG that gives them a pass for fraud. So, we have to show all the Trump supporters who were harmed by Bondi’s failure as Florida AG, that she is not going to protect them in the future. (Sadly, people who lost their homes to mortgage fraud, and the attorneys who resigned or were fired don’t have a big lobbying arm, but they are available to talk on camera during a nomination hearing.
Maybe that’s not sick enough, so I look forward to retelling the story of the time Pam Bondi delayed an execution so she can party
Cross posted to Spocko’s Brain @spocko.bsky.social @spocko@mastodon.online