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Tom and Jerry in The Night Before Christmas (1941)The toys under the tree accurately represent what was available at the time. This is also the first time Tom and Jerry called a truce. If they can do it, maybe we all can.Merry Christmas, everyone. 🐈🐭🎅 pic.twitter.com/DMzxFH3b1m — The Sting (@TheStingisBack) December 24, 2024 Tom and Jerry in The Night Before Christmas (1941) The toys under the tree accurately represent what was available at the time. This is also the first time Tom and Jerry called a truce. If they can do it, maybe we all can. Merry Christmas, everyone. — Thanks again, folks, for your generosity. I appreciate it from the bottom of my heart. Here’s hoping you have a lovely Christmas Eve, whether you celebrate with friends and family or are happily solo relaxing and enjoying the long winter night. (Or for those of you in the southern hemisphere, enjoying the beautiful summer weather!” ) Happy Hollandaise! cheers,digby

Trump’s on a new crusade to seize territory One of the more annoying conceits of the MAGA cult is its insistence that Donald Trump is some kind of religious figure dedicated to bringing world peace and mutual understanding among all of humankind. They even insist that he’s been cheated out of a well-deserved Nobel Peace Prize. That anyone could believe that about the most hostile, aggressively insulting, vengeance seeking, demagogue this country has ever elected to high office is enough to make you wonder if there are hallucinogens in the water supply. Setting aside his promises to wreak revenge on his political opponents and round up and deport mass numbers of people, including American children, there is the simple fact that his first term did not feature no war or death at the the hands of the US military as he and his acolytes so often claim. Despite his promise to end the “forever war” in Afghanistan it continued under his watch. It was left to President Biden to do the difficult task of ending it and take the heat that he was too cowardly to take. And naturally Trump criticized him for it.

Nate Cohn at The Upshot makes a useful observation in his newsletter today (gift link) There’s a lot about politics that’s hard to predict, but there’s something you can count on every four years: One party loses a presidential election, and the recriminations begin. Every four years, the post-election fight seems to play out the same way. Every move of the losing campaign is questioned and scrutinized. The party’s center blames the activists for alienating swing voters. The activists blame the center for failing to mobilize the base. And no matter what, you’ll find each pundit concluding that the party’s way forward is to do exactly what that pundit has been arguing for all along. While you might not guess it from my tone, these debates do matter. They shape the strategy of the next midterm campaign, they can change the policies supported by elected officials, and they even influence how ordinary voters cast their ballots in future presidential primaries. Still, there’s a reason you could probably tell my eyes roll at the prospect of most election postmortems. In hindsight, they don’t usually look great.

I wish I could say with confidence that a headline like that (on Christmas Eve no less!) Matt Gaetz is toast but I’m afraid I just can’t. Even that headline in the Wall St. Journal probably doesn’t hurt his chances of winning office or becoming a Fox star. MAGA loves him. I could easily see him becoming the Governor of Florida. It’s possible that the only thing normal people will get out of this disgraceful episode is Gaetz’s departure from the back bench of the House and some moments like these: Classic Meidas moment pic.twitter.com/xndiBP3fL2 — MeidasTouch (@MeidasTouch) December 24, 2024

Thanks again, friends. I am so very grateful for your support after all these years. I can hardly believe it, to tell you the truth. It’s a Christmas miracle every year. It means we can keep going over the next year as we confront whatever this weird political zeitgeist is about to bring us. I wanted to take a moment today to say thank you to my good friend Tom Sullivan. He has been holding down the morning shift for many years here at Hullabaloo and I thank my lucky stars every day that I asked him to contribute here all those years ago. I had liked him the minute I met him and his lovely wife Sarah at a Netroots confab back in the day and I especially liked his writing and commentary. He’s a natural blogger, someone who understands the form (and yes, there IS a specific form) and executes it perfectly. I couldn’t ask for anything more in a co-blogger. But Tom is also doing God’s work down in North Carolina which has become a petri dish for right wing electoral shenanigans.

Not so fast It’s one of the classic blunders. Not the most famous — “never get involved in a land war in Asia” — nor the most recent — “everything Trump touches dies” — but it’s up there. Men assume their expertise in one area of human endeavor makes them experts in another. (It’s always men, isn’t it?) President Elon Musk and billionaire-dilettante Vivek Ramaswamy are joining the Trump 2.0 administration (1st classic blunder) to operate as his proposed, informal Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Never having worked in government before, the pair mean to “to cut the federal government down to size.” And inflict pain on the little people. Piece of cake. Except. The irony come Jan. 20 is that Trump, the naif in 2016, now brings experience, if not wisdom, to his White House job. Musk and Ramaswamy are the overconfident naifs (2nd classic blunder). MSNBC’s Jen Psaki invited Bob Bauer, former White House Counsel to Barack Obama and Jack Goldsmith, former Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Counsel under George W.

It’s a bloody battle, fought in the trenches. But the good guys won. All hail Donald Trump, the new baby Jesus.

Whether you’ve been bad or good IYKYK: The South lost the Civil War but won Reconstruction, neutered the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments across the South, and maintained a rigid system of Jim Crow oppression for the next 100 years. IYKYK: Each July 4th, we celebrate America’s war to overthrow rule by hereditary royalty and landed gentry and to create on these shores democratic self-rule … plus a little slavery to appease the South’s economic royalty. Like the Civil War, the American Revolution now seems to have failed. Is there any doubt? Former bartender, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, doesn’t think so. Her Instagram followers asked about American oligarchy, and one oligarch in particular from the South (Africa). AOC: “Oh, I don’t think we’re witnessing the START of an oligarchy.

And vampire squids Some friends and stilletto-sharp thinkers lately are busy discussing the meaning and implications of Cory Doctorow’s “enshittification.” ICYMI, Macquarie Dictionary declared it the word of the year, defined as: “The gradual deterioration of a service or product brought about by a reduction in the quality of service provided, especially of an online platform, and as a consequence of profit-seeking.” As Doctorow explained a couple of years back: Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a “two sided market,” where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, holding each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them. Dave Roberts (a.k.a. Dr.

Everyone’s been saying that Elon’s really in charge. And it stands to reason. Poor Trump is obviously past his prime. He’s 78 and fading fast. It happens. But he’s not happy about it: He’s rattled. And I don’t think he got quite the crowd reaction he was expecting… Trump most definitely does not like having smart people around him and he certainly doesn’t like having someone who take the spotlight as Musk does. It’s bothering him. But I don’t know if he can get rid of him. He’s scared of Musk’s money and the fact that Musk is now a MAGA leader means he is a competitor. He showed that this week with the wrecking ball he took to the continuing resolution that Trump had signed off on. And yes, he did sign off on it, despite what the Trumpers are saying. The Washington Post has a good tick-tock on how it all fell apart (gift link): Several people close to Johnson say the speaker talked frequently with the president-elect and kept him abreast of ongoing negotiations. But another Trump adviser described him as blindsided by the bill’s contents and furious.