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.
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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.
Someone got an earful from someone last night… I’m guessing someone told him about the fees and he got all excited and happy that he has something new to complain about. But he obviously subbed out this tweet to a donor or adviser because it’s far too coherent. I think what the important Heather said was correct: In the old days I would have said Steve Bannon but I’m not sure who it is today. One thing we can be sure of is that Trump isn’t reading anything. Unless it’s the Classic Comics version of the McKinley era. It sure seems as though Trump is on an expansionist tear these days. Personally I expect that the pending Mexico invasion is the most likely but who knows? Maybe someone should tell him to colonize Alaska. He almost certainly doesn’t know it’s already a state. Update — Of course. It’s revenge:
Were we born under a bad sign? The Ink and Adam M. Lowenstein this morning consult with a researcher on “the internet and social media shape the intersection of politics, propaganda, and people.” Renée DiResta, an associate research professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown has assembled some of her conclusions in “Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality.” DiResta’s and colleagues’ work for the Stanford Internet Observatory pissed off House Republicans enough that Stanford pulled the plug on the research after five years. Let that be a lesson to libtards everywhere: The shutdown comes amid a sustained and increasingly successful campaign among Republicans to discredit research institutions and discourage academics from investigating political speech and influence campaigns. SIO and its researchers have been sued three times by conservative groups alleging that its researchers colluded illegally with the federal government to censor speech, forcing Stanford to spend millions of dollars to defend its staff and students. (I just grabbed the audiobook.
The Washington Post sounds an alarm about the erosion of press freedom. They outline all the cases that are pending and the collapse of the ABC case, all of which sounds pretty bad when you see it all together. They seem to be serious. It is hardly unusual for a president to clash with the press. Richard M. Nixon kept journalists on his enemies list, while his vice president, Spiro Agnew, dubbed them “nattering nabobs of negativism.” Bill Clinton griped about coverage of his White House sex scandal, and Barack Obama’s administration brought a record number of prosecutions against journalists’ sources for leaking government information. But legal experts say Trump has taken attacks on the press to an entirely new level, softening the ground for an erosion of robust press freedom. “The Fake News Media should pay a big price for what they have done to our once great Country,” Trump posted on Truth Social in September in an attack on NBC News. Experts in polarization said that Trump’s posture toward the press has eroded trust in the Fourth Estate. From the Oval Office, he can do even more.
The Bulwark’s Tim Miller went to the TPUSA pre-Christmas “Gathering of the MAGAlos” as he does every year. He’s very brave: I was standing beside the step-and-repeat at James O’Keefe’s annual AmFest afterparty nursing a bourbon and coke when out of the corner-of-my-eye emerged a face that was mostly familiar, minus the signature sepia blur. The face was approaching fast. Wide TV anchor smile. Caked on make-up. Main-character energy. I quickly realized I was in its sights. Immediately I’m greeted with the familiar booming, midwestern-announcer voice. Knowing that I was on enemy turf I attempted a pleasant return greeting, hoping to disarm and signal that I came in peace. “DON’T TOUCH ME,” Kari Lake screams in my face, I assume in reference to a bit of discomfort with mid-interview physical contact that I had expressed in our last encounter. “YOU ARE A PIECE OF SHIT.” The face briefly collects itself and appears to look back and see if her husband was taping the exchange.