Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

This is my normal very normal handshake 😂 pic.twitter.com/wuhNyq1nEg

— Luke Zaleski (@ZaleskiLuke) December 7, 2024

It’s over folks:

In February 1941, Henry Luce, the influential publisher of Time and Life magazines, penned an article heralding the “American Century,” a post-war era in which the United States would apply its newfound standing as the “dominant power in the world” to spread “free economic enterprise” and “the abundant life” around the globe. Luce envisioned the United States as “the principal guarantor of the freedom of the seas” and “the dynamic leader of world trade,” and saw in this future “possibilities of such enormous human progress as to stagger the imagination.”

Until now.

Donald Trump’s second presidential victory represents a sharp break, and perhaps a permanent one, with the American Century framework. It’s a framework that rested on four key pillars:

A rules-based economic order that afforded the U.S. free access to vast international markets.

A guarantee of safety and security for its allies, backed up by American military might.

An increasingly liberal immigration system that strengthened America’s economy and complemented military and trade partnerships with the rest of the non-Communist world.

And finally, in Luce’s words, a “picture of an America” that valued — and exported to the rest of the world — “its technical and artistic skills. Engineers, scientists, doctors … developers of airlines, builders of roads, teachers, educators.”

Though this was the second time Trump won the presidency, the meaning of the 2024 election is different. For one, he won the popular vote — becoming the first Republican to do so in the last 20 years. What’s more, in his most recent electoral bid, Trump and his advisers (including his running mate) made tariffs, rapprochement with foreign dictators, a drawback from NATO and gutting federal agencies core themes of their campaign. Much more so than in 2016, when Trump lacked any demonstrated track record in political office, this campaign was very specific about the world it intended to construct — and nearly 50 percent of voters endorsed that program. This time, the president-elect is quite serious about ending the American Century. In fact, he’s already making moves to tear it down.

Maybe it’s for the best. Empires are costly. But it would have been nice if we didn’t just take a wrecking ball to the world order with nothing to replace it but ego and bluster — and nuclear weapons.

The article traces the development of the “American Century” and what it came to mean. To the extent it was a good thing (and it often wasn’t) we will lose more than the rest of the world when it’s gone.

This is America:

Trump: We had a great relationship… The people of France are spectacular. It’s one of our largest groups in the US. French people. We respect and love them. Very talented people. Extremely energetic people as you know.. We had a good time together and we had a lot of success..… pic.twitter.com/5vq8cVlV2E

— Acyn (@Acyn) December 7, 2024

We had a lot of success working together on defense and offense too…

It’s so damned embarrassing.

Here’s another example of how the champion of the working man Donald Trump is filling cabinet with robber barons and their henchmen (and women.)

Over the past six years, Pam Bondi has worked as a Washington lobbyist for one of the top firms in the country, representing corporate behemoths such as Amazon and Uber.

Now, some of the same clients her firm represents are squaring off against the Department of Justice she’s poised to lead. And corporate interests are cautiously optimistic that her selection will shepherd in an administration more friendly to their interests than President Joe Biden’s.

Her appointment, lobbyists say, could be a win for major U.S. corporations that find themselves crosswise with the Justice Department, including health care giant UnitedHealthcare and social media company TikTok. Those companies have paid tens of thousands of dollars this year to Bondi’s current employer, Ballard Partners, according to lobbying disclosures.

Bondi’s confirmation as attorney general would also pose a myriad of ethical questions about what kind of access she will grant her firm and whether she will recuse herself from issues involving Ballard.

She’s not one of the 14 billionaires he nominated. She just does their bidding. No wonder the Big Money Boyz are so excited. And she will never recuse. Trump considers that a personal betrayal.

On every level this is the beginning of a new gilded age. As Brian Beutler wrote:

Taking Republicans literally, and watching Trump build a government, the incoming administration really does seem to want to establish a new Gilded Age. To shed Reagan-era pretenses of top-down prosperity and just loot the place.

“The change in ideology is clear from Trump’s cabinet picks,” wrote the historian 

Heather Cox Richardson. “While the total net worth of the officials in Biden’s Cabinet was about $118 million, Laura Mannweiler of U.S. News and World Report noted, a week ago she estimated the worth of Trump’s roster of appointees to be at least $344.4 billion, more than the gross domestic product of 169 countries. That number did not include his pick for treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, whose net worth is hard to find.”

And of course Trump’s cabinet doesn’t include his interloping co-president, Elon Musk, the richest man in the world. When Musk isn’t fusing his business interests to Trump’s political ones—hectoring and threatening critics, steering contracts his own way—he’s drawing up plans to cut trillions of dollars out of health-care spending for poor and working class people.

[…]

Robber Barons—not as hyperbole, but in their self-conception. Trump in particular seems to valorize the Gilded Age (or what he knows of it) because the industrialists who purchased the government back then lived opulent lives in gaudy mansions. As best I can tell, that’s why he says silly things like, “in the 1890s, our country was probably the wealthiest it ever was.”

And, I think it’s no coincidence that the GOP’s new appeal to voters is largely bereft of Reaganite cliches. They’ve turned the clock back a century further than that. They don’t talk about freedom or liberty. The speak instead in the language of fiat, coercion, zero-sum conflict, and sacrifice. (Other people’s, naturally.)

Well at least the bathrooms will be safe from trans people. Apparently, that’s the most important issue we face.

Catherine Rampell on the new orders to return to the office:

Declines in remote work — and the recent proliferation of high-profile firms ordering workers back to the office — are a sign that the labor market is weaker than it might appear. That’s because return-to-office mandates are, effectively, an invisible pay cut. Let me explain.

Like other employment benefits (e.g., health insurance, paid leave), telework is not available to everyone. Only about 38 percent of full-time workers report being hybrid or fully remote, according to the Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes. Those jobs are disproportionately in higher-paid, white-collar occupations.

This amenity has real value to these workers. It saves them commuting time and transit costs, lets them live farther away (where housing might be cheaper), and offers other conveniences (quiet working spaces, less surveillance from bosses). Some economists have even quantified the value of all these benefits: On average, Americans value the option to work from home two or three days a week at an estimated 8 percent of pay (the equivalent of about $5,000 for the typical worker).

Some workers, such as those in their 30s, with kids or with a university degree, value it even more — at the equivalent of 10 to 15 percent of their pay, says Nick Bloom, a Stanford economics professor and longtime researcher on remote work.

In other words, many workers effectively banked a sizable raise around the start of the pandemic. And it didn’t even cost employers anything! At least, it didn’t show up on pay stubs, per se.

There are many ancillary expenses you don’t have when you can work from home. All those lunches out, dry cleaning, work clothes, wear and tear on your car etc. It costs money to go to the office.

I’m not sure why the companies are requiring their people to come back to the office. I suppose some of them believe they aren’t getting the productivity they should when they aren’t there to crack the whip? Probably not true. My experience of years in the corporate workplace was that massive amounts of time was wasted in useless mettings, shooting the shit, paper shuffling and many other activities that didn’t translate into anything one would call productivity. I think that many people are much more efficient at home.

I also recall that for many years the idea of remote work was one hope for the future of the planet since the elimination of the commute would have a positive effect on pollution and ultimately climate change. I guess we’ve all decided that doesn’t matter anymore.

It’s about control, nothing more. Bosses like to be able to intimidate their workers and direct their working habits regardless of whether it works best for the worker or positively affects the outcome. Working from home changes the relationship of boss and worker and the bosses don’t like it.

Maybe Donald Trump doesn’t have the actual energy to do the job. Maybe letting Elon Musk basically conduct diplomacy and talk to Hill lawmakers while Trump collects awards from his fans is just the division of labor Trump can handle,” –— Chris Hayes

I’ll have more of that, please…

It’s that day again

There are other days that evoke memories, of course, even for those of us not there to see them. But this one….

Pearl Harbor attack was eighty-three years ago today:

— Michael Beschloss (@beschlossdc1776.bsky.social) 2024-12-07T13:55:36.291Z

That Star-Bulletin box headline above points to the “other” Pearl Harbor day attack in the Philippines. Not sure I even knew about that one. Have another cup of coffee:

In the early morning hours of December 8, 1941 (still December 7 in Hawaii), Japanese land-based naval bombers and Zero fighters from Formosa were detected by radar heading over Lingayan Gulf in the direction of Manila. American planes were alerted and took off from Clark Field and Iba Field but, after hours of searching, they failed to make contact. The Japanese, on the other hand, had no problem finding their American targets.

The most serious aspect of the raid was the destruction of and damage to the 18 Boeing B-17 Flying Fortresses that were on the ground at Clark in the midst of refueling and rearming when the attack came. Most of the Curtis P-40 Kittyhawk fighters of the 20th Pursuit Squadron were lost when 10 of the warplanes were caught in the Japanese bomb pattern as they were preparing to take off, while several of the 3rd Pursuit’s fighters ran out of fuel and had to crash-land. The radar facility at the remote airfield at Iba was destroyed.

But half of the 35-plane force of B-17s had been deployed to Del Monte Field at Mindanao, and more than half of the P-40s in the islands had not been involved in the attacks at all. Although its strength had been greatly reduced, the U.S. Army Air Force in the Pacific was still very much in the war.

On Dec. 7, 1941, the Empire of Japan launched an air raid on the U.S. Navy base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, killing more than 2,300 Americans. The United States declared war against Japan the following day.Read more about what happened on this date: t.ly/sJ7Un

— The Associated Press (@apnews.com) 2024-12-07T13:41:17.319Z

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Alexander is not weeping just yet

I’m neither rich enough nor libertarian enough to have invested my time in deciphering how cryptocurrency works, much less invested any of my money. But uber-rich crypto investors, Chris Hayes reports, now have a president-elect ready to backstop their funny money with public money. Even after watching his Friday night report, I still don’t understand how crypto works. But he confirms how oligarchy does.

Like much libertarian dogma, protestations by these shrugging Atlases that government stay out of the way of their Randian penis-enhancement schemes is so much Trumpian puffery. Government is not their enemy. It’s a tool of the moneyed class for making more money.

Matt Taibbi in his heyday understood this. He wrote in Griftopia (2011), “There are really two Americas.” For the grifter class, government is “a tool for making money,” while “in everybody-else land, the government is something to be avoided.”

Elon Musk invested — what other word is there for it? — over a quarter billion dollars in getting Donald Trump reelected. Now it’s time for Trump to pay dividends. Not from his own stash, of course. From America’s. “They’re just backing the truck up to the government,” Hayes warns.

Brendan Greeley opines at The Financial Times:

In July, Cynthia Lummis, a US senator from Wyoming, introduced a bill to establish what she called a “strategic bitcoin reserve”, a programme instructing the Treasury and the Federal Reserve to buy a million bitcoins over the next five years to then hold them for at least 20 more years.

Greeley roughs out the basic details but, more importantly, explains what this reserve would mean to the hodlers (I had to look it up):

The bill lays out a mechanism for paying for the reserve. Any surplus the Federal Reserve returns to the Treasury would be spent instead on bitcoin. The Fed doesn’t currently return any money to the Treasury. No matter. The bill also proposes that Fed banks mark all their gold certificates to the current market price of gold, then remit the difference to the Treasury to buy bitcoin. This is all plausible, but the bill doesn’t answer the most important question facing any piece of legislation: how will this change anything at all, for anyone?

A reserve would present both a consummation and an irony for bitcoin’s hardcore supporters — the hodlers. The state would recognise what hodlers call freedom money, but also prop that up with a state programme. The preamble to Lummis’s bill argues that in return, a million bitcoin would diversify America’s assets, improving financial and monetary resilience. Unlike a traditional banking reserve, however, they would be held by the Treasury and couldn’t start to be sold until 2045. An asset you cannot sell does not give you resilience. It gives you storage costs.

Greeley considers the financial ins and outs of this effort by the oligarchs, but there is another more insidious aspect of this scam.

‘Tis the season for Hans Gruber to fall to his death from the Nakatomi building. Before that, Gruber (the late Alan Rickman) quotes a version of another of those spurious quotes that spread wildly in the Internet Age: And when Alexander saw the breadth of his domain, he wept, for there were no more worlds to conquer.”

What do men with more money than God, like Elon Musk, do with themselves when adding to their dragon hoards is as pointless as making the rubble bounce after a nuclear exchange?

Money is a kind of power. Controlling billions of dollars is even more power. But it’s like bitcoin that way. Money power is not altogether tangible. If an oligarch wants real power, life-and-death power, he wants political power. Naturally, without the bother of rich narcissists having to serve humanity, perfect the union, defend the proposition that all persons are created equal, or any of that nonsense.

Oligarchs have discovered there are indeed more worlds to conquer: yours.

Christmas arrived early in the Kibwezi Forest: We just received the most beautiful gift, in the form of Lima Lima’s brand new baby boy! He is Lima Lima’s first child and our second Umani grandbaby.

Read this extraordinary story at https://t.co/EBleaWqKRP pic.twitter.com/2bPfPOwmak

— Sheldrick Wildlife Trust (@SheldrickTrust) December 5, 2024

Yay!

Christmas arrived early in the Kibwezi Forest: We just received the most beautiful gift, in the form of Lima Lima’s brand new baby boy! He is Lima Lima’s first child and our second Umani grandbaby.

The story began on Tuesday, 3rd December 2024. That morning, Lima Lima and her fellow ‘nightclubbers’ linked up with the dependent orphans, as they always do. At the mud bath, we noticed Lima Lima rolling around on the dust pile, clearly trying to soothe her heavily pregnant belly. When she got to her feet, Keeper Evans put his ear to her side — as we joked, she was getting a house call from her personal obstetrician!

The story began on Tuesday, 3rd December 2024. That morning, Lima Lima and her fellow ‘nightclubbers’ linked up with the dependent orphans, as they always do. At the mud bath, we noticed Lima Lima rolling around on the dust pile, clearly trying to soothe her heavily pregnant belly. When she got to her feet, Keeper Evans put his ear to her side — as we joked, she was getting a house call from her personal obstetrician!

In hindsight, Lima Lima was in the early stages of labour. She had been moving slowly and showing obvious discomfort in recent days, so we wondered if this moment was on the horizon. However, the rest of Tuesday passed normally. All the orphans, both dependent and independent, spent the afternoon together before going their separate ways in the evening.

The next morning, more unusual behaviour was afoot. Quanza — who is typically a quiet, placid elephant — ran over to the staff quarters and started making a huge commotion, charging around and trumpeting at the top of her lungs.

A short while later, we understood why Quanza was behaving so uncharacteristically: She was heralding the arrival of a brand new family member! As Umani Head Keeper Philip drove back from the mud bath, Quanza intercepted him and directed his attention to an area just outside the stockades. Philip saw Lima Lima and Sonje standing sentry, with a tiny, newborn baby sleeping between them.

As soon as word got out, the other Keepers and orphans rushed over. This was exactly the moment Lima Lima had been waiting for: She proudly showed off her baby to her human-elephant family, inviting everyone to come close and admire her son. The celebration was off the charts, with happy rumbling and mile-wide smiles as we welcomed a new baby into our midst.

There’s more at the link and it gets even cuter.

This is part of he Trust’s Orphan Project, which is really great. It’s worth checking out.

Established in 2004, Ithumba is one of our most successful Reintegration Units, where dozens of orphaned elephants have reclaimed their place in the wild. Located in the vast, untouched northern sector of Tsavo East, it has become a hub for wild elephants, with herds visiting… pic.twitter.com/cKgPXW2T9M

— Sheldrick Wildlife Trust (@SheldrickTrust) December 6, 2024

In the Atlantic (gift link) Law professors  Akhil Reed Amar, Josh Chafetz, and Thomas P. Schmidt analyze Trump and Co’s nefarious plan to circumvent the Senate’s advise and consent role:

The Senate’s check on the president can of course lead to friction and frustration at the start of an administration, while a new president’s nominees are considered and sometimes even rejected by the Senate. Advice and consent takes time. But as Justice Louis Brandeis famously observed, checks and balances exist “not to promote efficiency but to preclude the exercise of arbitrary power.” The purpose of the Constitution “is not to avoid friction” but “to save the people from autocracy.”

Trump would prefer that the Senate agree to recess so that he can install the rogues gallery of drunks, traitors, rapists and freaks to the cabinet positions he needs to wreak revenge on his enemies. So far, it doesn’t seem that the Senate is willing to go along, preferring to maintain their prerogatives. For now, at least.

But Trump has a Plan B, which I’ve written about before. The authors say it’s unconstitutional on its face:

[S]ome House Republicans have begun to discuss a more extreme scheme, one Trump considered during his first term: Trump could instead send the Senate home against its will and fill the government during the resulting “recess.” This is flagrantly unlawful.

How, one might ask, would such a plan even work? After all, the president, unlike an absolute monarch, does not have the power to dismiss Congress whenever he wants. Three of the first six “abuses and usurpations” charged in the Declaration of Independence related to King George III’s treatment of legislatures: He had “dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly,” he had refused to hold elections after these “dissolutions,” and he had “called together legislative bodies” at “distant” and “uncomfortable” places. The Framers were careful not to entrust the new office of president with such potent tools of “tyranny.” Instead, the president was given the power to “adjourn” the houses of Congress in only one narrow circumstance: “in Case of Disagreement between them, with Respect to the Time of Adjournment.” This power is so limited that it has never been used in all of American history.

The plan is for Trump and Mike Johnson to collude to create a phony “disagreement” by passing a resolution to recess after which the senate supposedly will resist and refuse to pass it. Then Trump will say they disagree and adjourn both houses and appoint all the weirdos he chooses. They say this isn’t the way any of this works:

Under the Constitution, each house can generally decide for itself how long it will sit. As Thomas Jefferson, an expert on legislative procedure, wrote in 1790: “Each house of Congress possesses [the] natural right of governing itself, and consequently of fixing it’s [sic] own times and places of meeting.”

The Constitution limits this autonomy in one key way: “Neither House, during the Session of Congress, shall, without the Consent of the other, adjourn for more than three days, nor to any other Place than that in which the two Houses shall be sitting.” In other words, if one house of Congress wants to leave in the middle of a session, it has to get the permission of the other house. The House of Representatives can’t just skip town if the Senate thinks important legislative business remains. But note that this provision limits each house’s power to “adjourn,” and not each house’s power to remain “sitting.” Neither house needs the agreement of the other to stay in session. If the Senate wants to let the House of Representatives leave while it considers appointments or treaties, that is perfectly fine. Indeed, there are plenty of examples of one house giving the other permission to go home. Under Article I, then, each house requires consent of the other to quit, but not to sit.

Hence the trouble for the House Republicans’ plan: If the House of Representatives wants to recess, the Senate can simply let it. And if the Senate agrees to let the House go, the House can leave and there is no relevant “disagreement” for the president to resolve by adjourning Congress. The Senate would still be in session as normal.

The president’s adjournment power is not a backdoor way for one house of Congress to force the other into recess against its will. If both the Senate and the House want to leave, but cannot agree on a “time of adjournment,” then the president can step in.

Here is their advice:

If the House attempts this maneuver, the Senate should resist it by continuing to meet, and the courts should refuse to recognize any resulting appointments. The threat to adjourn the Senate should be seen and called out for what it is: an autocratic move that is not just unlawful but contemptuous of constitutionalism.

For some reason, my first impulse was to think “well, that means they’re definitely going to do it.” That’s because the majority is obviously contemptuous of constitutionalism and I suspect the courts are highly unlikely to defy the president’s prerogative to do what he wants.

Whether Trump has to do this is another story. My guess is that the senate will approve any picks he wants them to approve. What we’re seeing is that Tump doesn’t really care that much about any of this and will dump them if they’re too much trouble. So, it probably will never come to this. They’ll give him what he wants.

I wrote the other day about the Elon and Vivek show planning to cut the so-called “entitlements.” That plan is becoming clearer by the day.

Philip Bump writes:

Data from the White House Office of Management and Budget indicates that about 12 percent of federal spending this year will be on Medicare, about 1 in 8 dollars the government disburses. Spending on Medicare is equivalent to 95 percent of the amount spent on national defense.

This means that those interested in cutting federal spending — like President-elect Donald Trump’s allies (and fellow billionaires) Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy — were almost necessarily going to eventually arrive at the idea that the government should spend less on programs such as Medicare and Medicare specifically. They like to talk about how they will trim federal spending by targeting the federal workforce, but firing every single nonmilitary employee would eliminate only about 4 percent of the budget. If your plan is to cut a third of the budget (as Musk has said he wants to do)? You’ve got to aim higher than that.

On Thursday, as YouGov was asking people about their insurance coverage, Fox Business was reporting that such cuts were under consideration.

“Nothing is sacrosanct,” Rep. Ralph Norman (R-South Carolina) said after a meeting with Musk, Ramaswamy and Republican lawmakers. “Nothing. They’re going to put everything on the table” — which, the Fox host noted, included Social Security and Medicare.

During the campaign, YouGov asked voters to evaluate the importance of different health-care issues. Nearly three-quarters of those age 65 and over said that Medicare and Medicaid were among their most important issues. Those older voters were also more likely than younger ones to say that they trusted Donald Trump on the issue — and were the only group to say they trusted Trump more than they trusted Vice President Kamala Harris.

Those older voters were stupid to take the greatest liar in world history’s word for anything and Republicans have been lying about their plans to cut them for years as well. What a mistake.

Bump makes the point that I’ve been making about all this: Trump isn’t running again and doesn’t have to care about the plebes anymore. However, GOP legislators do:

But there are a lot of Republican legislators, like Norman, who will need to go back to voters in 2026 or 2028, and the Billionaire Boys’ interest in submarining older Americans’ health-care program might be expected to turn up in a lot of campaign ads. Trump has never indicated much concern about the broader Republican Party; his second term in office is poised to put that indifference to the test.

He will not care. It’s all about him. Musk and Ramaswamy know nothing about politics or governance and they are happy to take a meat ax to programs that are irrelevant to them and their rich firends in the name of “efficiency.” Republicans generally are so cowed and flaccid now that a whole bunch of them may put themselves on the chopping block to appease Dear Leader but with a small handful of votes in the House majority I’d bet money that a few will not be willing to sacrifice themselves for this. We’ll have to see.

I hope they try it. It might be the wake up call (woke call?) people need to understand who it is that actually gives a damn about the people and who are living in some abstract dream world where they own the libs and everyone lives happily ever after.

Update—

Josh Marshall weighs in on this as well:

Just Wednesday Ramaswamy went on CNBC and in addition to discussing various other ideas about innovation and efficiency noting that there are “hundreds of billions of dollars of savings to extract just from basic program integrity measures” out of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. The rest of the quote suggests he thinks he can claw back these savings by cutting off benefits to people who don’t really deserve them or are legally entitled to them.

Whatever!!!

‘Tis not for me to question why one of Donald Trump’s budget cutting czars says he wants to cut hundreds of billions of dollars from Social Security and Medicare and another seems to want to abolish Social Security altogether. All that matters is that they do.

Are you represented by a Republican member of Congress? Or really are you represented by a Democratic one? I would right away call their office and ask if they support this plan to make these drastic cuts to Social Security and Medicare. He says “hundreds of billions”, draconian level cuts. They’ve made numerous comments like this over the last few days. But the clearest is this comment to CNBC which I linked above. Ask if they support this or have a position on it. And I’d be grateful if you let me know what you heard.

Thanks.

That’s a good idea. Blogs and indy websites used to gather information like this when Bush was trying to cut social security. It has an effect.

Chip Roy dismisses the Pete Hegseth rape allegation: "We've all had some indiscretions in our past and things like that." pic.twitter.com/qrngbpzCtl

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) December 6, 2024

Indiscretions = rape, sexual harrassment, financial mismanagement and serious alcohol use disorder.

Roy is not alone in that belief, of course. After all, the man they all worship is guilty of all but the alcohol problem. He’s an adjudicated rapist, fraudster and sexual harrasser. And 75 million or so Americans voted for that so you can’t say that it’s a deal breaker.

I don’t know if Hegseth will make it. But I won’t be surprised if he does. He’s a quintessential Republican alpha male.