And these are just for starters Judd Legum came up with a good Top 10 Trump dictatorial promises. I might have put invading Mexico and destroying NATO in the top 10 but that’s just me. Anyway, the first is his explicit promise to be a dictator on Day One. The following are the other nine: Trump says election fraud in 2020 gives him the power to “terminate” the Constitution On December 3, 2022, Trump posted the following message about the 2020 presidential election on his social media platform, Truth Social: Following a backlash from some Republican elected officials, Trump later claimed reports that he was open to terminating the Constitution were “fake news.” Trump says he will issue “full pardons” to January 6 insurrectionists Trump has promised to issue pardons to those involved in the January 6, 2021 Capitol insurrection.
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He doesn’t have the requisite gaudy glamour but he’s got something else. Just look at the arrogance of this conspiracy addled freak show saying that someone else isn’t living in reality: Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) on Monday dug into Sen. JD Vance’s (R-Ohio) recent remarks against sending further aid to Ukraine, calling the Ohio Republican’s comments “total and unmitigated bull‑‑‑‑.” Vance, in an interview with former White House aid Steve Bannon earlier Monday, claimed some lawmakers are looking to cut Social Security benefits for more aid to Ukraine that he argued will be used so one of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s ministers “can buy a bigger yacht.” When asked about Vance’s remarks later on Monday, Tillis told reporters, “I think it’s bull‑‑‑‑.” “If you’re talking about giving money to Ukrainian ministers — total and unmitigated bull‑‑‑‑,” Tillis continued.
Huzzah! Maybe that’s a little bit dark. Sometimes I wake up in the morning and read the papers and turn on the news and it takes a while for my sunny disposition to reassert itself. (Ok, maybe I’m not that naturally sunny…) But I have to say after being on this earth for a long time now and writing about politics every single day for over 20 years, I do think I’ve developed a pretty good sense of when the political culture is going off the rails and when it’s business as usual. This may be the worst period I’ve experienced. I have some recollection of the 60s but I was a little kid and mostly absorbed it through my older brothers, one of whom went into the navy and the other who was a draft resistor and activist — along with my father the military man. It was fraught, to say the least. The 70s were my coming of age period and they were not pretty. Economically it was just awful. But I was young and having fun and somehow I just thought that scrambling for coins in the couch cushions was the way it was. The 80s were what I think of as my coke, MTV and Reagan years. I spent much of them travelling and then trying to build a career.
The NY Supreme Court allows the Democratic majority to draw the congressional maps Whew! New York’s highest court ordered the state to redraw its congressional map on Tuesday, delivering a ruling that immediately threw New York’s political landscape into chaos and reopened a process with sweeping national implications. State Democrats are now widely expected to try to shift anywhere from two to six Republican-held seats, from Long Island to Syracuse, toward their party — a major pre-election intervention in the 2024 fight for the House that could alter a key battleground. Powered by a new liberal majority, the State Court of Appeals effectively wiped out the highly competitive map that helped Republicans flip four seats and win the House majority. It said the neutral lines, which it had imposed just last year, were meant only to be a temporary fix. By a four-to-three vote, the court directed the state to restart a mapmaking process that would ultimately return control over the state’s 26 congressional districts to the Democratic-controlled State Legislature. The court had stripped away that power in 2022 after an attempted gerrymander.
I don’t know if Lindsey Graham has ever been more inappropriate or more fatuous than he’s being now. Ukrainian president Zelensky went up to Capitol Hill where he was treated very disrespectfully by the House and lectured by Graham in the Senate: “The key is to get the commander in chief involved in the negotiations. Sen. Murphy — I have no confidence he’s ever going to get a deal we can live with, because he’s worried about selling it to the left,” Graham said. “The commander in chief — if there’s a deal to be made — is going to have to get involved in the negotiations. It’s his job above all others.” The South Carolina Republican, who has been part of border discussions in recent weeks, also complained that Murphy has been “very unhelpful” and that his “attitude about what’s going on is off base.” “We’re not holding the border hostage. We’re trying to protect the American people,” Graham said. Murphy declined to comment directly on Graham’s remarks, saying only that, “You’ll have to ask Sen.
Trump accuses DeSantis of trying to steal Iowa Ed Kilgore has the story: Donald Trump famously likes to allege voter fraud against Democrats; it was the centerpiece of his “stolen election” claims in 2020 and in turn became the centerpiece of his campaign of retribution in 2024. But it’s been a while since he’s accused fellow Republicans of “rigging” elections … nearly eight years, to be exact, since he accused 2016 Iowa Caucus winner Ted Cruz of stealing that contest via false rumors his campaign allegedly spread about Ben Carson dropping out (it was a complicated conspiracy theory, to be sure). Though the odds of Trump losing Iowa this year are very low, his campaign issued a statement on Friday accusing Ron DeSantis, his most formidable opponent in the state (per the polling averages), of trying to steal this one: The backstory of this charge is pretty clear; it stems from a joint appearance DeSantis and his wife, Casey, made on Fox News on December 8, as the Washington Post reported: This remark turned a lot of heads, and not just at Mar-a-Lago.
And welcome to our annual celebration of the Great War on Christmas Yes, it’s that time of year again when we all eat too many goodies, wear ugly sweaters and pose with Santa Claus alongside our semi-automatic weapons. It’s Christmas time in America. And here at Hullabaloo it’s the time of year I ask you, my loyal readers, to put a little something into the old stocking to keep us going for yet another year. I think you all know how vital political information is right now. In fact, it’s never been more vital. Back when I was a young person, the biggest problem for most Americans was trying to wade through the conventional wisdom of the establishment media to find out the truth of what our government was really doing. That’s still an issue today but in the last few years we’ve had to confront the overwhelming problem of cacophonous propaganda bombarding us from every direction via our now ubiquitous social media. It is very hard to sort through it all, even for me and I have no life! Take this, for instance, from just this past weekend: You can say this is just fringe, and it should be.
The case is “at the apex of public importance” Josh Kovensky at TPM reports: Special Counsel Jack Smith asked the Supreme Court on Monday to take up Donald Trump’s claim of presidential immunity, seeking to speed up a question which could delay the former president’s trial on charges he conspired to subvert the 2020 election. The trial is currently scheduled for March 4, 2024 in D.C. Trump lost his claim of absolute immunity at the district court and has appealed that ruling to the DC Circuit Court of Appeals. But rather than wait for the appeals court to hear the case, Smith is now asking the Supreme Court to weigh in on whether presidential immunity protects Trump from prosecution for crimes related to his efforts to reverse his defeat in the 2020 election. “It is of imperative public importance that respondent’s claims of immunity be resolved by this Court and that respondent’s trial proceed as promptly as possible if his claim of immunity is rejected,” Smith wrote in the petition for writ of certiorari. Smith asked the high court to consider two issues.
Kate Cox, the Texas woman who is carrying a fetus with a fatal anomaly, has been forced to leave the state to get her needed abortion: The announcement came as Kate Cox, 31, was awaiting a ruling from the Texas Supreme Court over whether she could legally obtain an abortion under narrow exceptions to the state’s ban. A judge gave Cox, a mother of two from the Dallas area, permission last week but that decision was put on hold by the state’s all-Republican high court. “Her health is on the line. She’s been in and out of the emergency room and she couldn’t wait any longer,” said Nancy Northup, president and CEO of the Center for Reproductive Rights, which was representing Cox. This is horrifying. Cox has the ability to pay for this and pay for an attorney. Other women in her position aren’t. The horror of these creepy men like the criminal Ken Paxton and that grotesque anti-abortion zealot Supreme Court just John Devine deciding such issues is overwhelming. I think this will be a problem for the Republicans politically but many, many people will have to suffer in the meantime.
They’re making an effort. Will it be enough? Columbia Journalism Review’s Jon Allsop takes a look at how the media is handling Trump’s threats to democracy. He notes the flurry of articles in recent days exposing the authoritarian Trump agenda for his second term and examining his increasingly fascistic language and makes the same observation that I did earlier about the Trump campaign obviously getting nervous about it. However: Back in January, as part of an article laying out the media dynamics CJR’s staff would be watching this year, I wrote that I would be interested to see how media outlets continued to center—or didn’t—threats to democracy; I’d observed some progress on this front in 2022, but also feared that last year’s midterms—which brought defeat for the most ardent Trumpian election deniers running to assume oversight of the country’s election infrastructure—could push the question down the media agenda even though the threat hadn’t dissipated.