Well, it’s been one heck of a year. ::shaking head:: Although I love getting those end-of-year postcards from folks, I’ve never managed to make them. Instead of recounting my familial adventures and emotional trials and tribulations, I thought I could at least step back and reflect on some professional endeavors over the last year, many […]
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After a long day on the golf course and a big dinner with his other new best billionaire pal Jeff Bezos, Little Donny was very happy indeed. Everybody loves him. All the fancy ladies in their glittery gowns want to take their picture with him and all the important men want to bow down to kiss his tiny ring. Meanwhile, his bestest friend, the richest man in the world, told all the bad people to shut down the government so America can be great again. And they did! He is the luckiest boy ever. The End
Ok sure. I’m not sure that an immigrant can be in the line of succession but I’ve never heard otherwise. But why would Musk want such a thing? He can run the country just by pulling Trump’s strings and shitposting on his personal social media platform. Why would he want to do all that dirty work? Just give it Marjorie Taylor Green or some other MAGA cultist and have them do his bidding. I must admit that I’m a little bit surprised that it’s gone so far off the rails already. It’s not even Christmas! This morning Trump is saying that he wants to eliminate the debt ceiling altogether, which is actually a great idea. If that were to happen the Democrats would have to help because his Republican zealots will never vote for it. The big question right now is whether they will do it. I’m torn. It would be great if we could eliminate the debt ceiling. Democrats have been for that ever since the Republicans decided to use it as a weapon to threaten government shutdowns which they did even when Trump was president. (The Democrats never do that.) But should they help the Republicans get over this hump right now?
Once more, many thanks for your contributions to the Happy Hollandaise fundraiser so far. I am so grateful for all who come here every day to read our work and for those of you who support it. Merci beaucoup! When we say these are turbulent times, the only comfort is that the US isn’t the only place it’s happening. While it’s true that few countries have a freak show like the Musk administration, all the leading democracies are under strain. The danger, of course, is that with the whole world under such strain, it’s possible that things could go sideways very quickly. The Wall St Journal reported this over the weekend: One lesson from an unprecedented year of elections around the world is that voters in industrialized countries are particularly unhappy, ready to boot unpopular leaders out of office and making it more difficult for politicians in power to enact bold programs of change. Rarely have the rich world’s political leaders been so widely disliked. No leader of an industrialized country other than tiny Switzerland has a positive rating, according to a survey of some 25 democracies by pollster Morning Consult.
Here’s the poll: A majority of Americans oppose Donald Trump’s plans to use the U.S. military to deport millions of undocumented immigrants, to instruct the U.S. Justice Department to investigate his political rivals and to pardon rioters charged with breaking into the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, according to a nationwide Washington Post-University of Maryland poll. Even larger majorities of Americans oppose Trump’s plans to jail reporters for writing stories he doesn’t like and having police use force against anti-Trump protests. The survey of 1,251 Americans was conducted weeks after Trump’s victory and sought to examine public sentiment about positions espoused by the president-elect that challenge democratic principles and strain constitutional norms, as well as views on the legitimacy of American elections after Trump’s win. Trump has claimed a broad mandate for his proposals and has selected cabinet secretaries and other executive branch officials who have expressed eagerness to carry them out.
I’m a HUGE fan of A Closer Look on the Seth Meyers show. It’s written by Sal Gentile and the supervising producer is Emily Erotas. They have a limited series podcast called A Closer Look Back, talking about what they learned during Trump first term & what they can do to prepare for Trump 2.0. It’s insightful & funny and I highly recommend it. I was on the Nicole Sandler Show on 12-2-2024 singing the praises of Sal and A Closer Look. I mentioned my idea on the show, here it is cued up. Listening to their podcast and Rachel Maddow’s recent show on preparing for Trump’s next term got me thinking. Who has a media and social media strategy to mess with Trump this time around? And, because nothing seems to hurt Trump, who is focusing on busting his nominees & minions? I ask because I don’t see the Dems doing it. I wondered what I can do. Who can I help that I think is doing good work to counter the RW narrative? I looked at what was breaking thru the RW narrative IN MULTIPLE SPACES. One was comedy.
Welcome Chaos Games With so much chaos this morning in Washington, D.C., I don’t know where to focus. Government shutdown looms, blares CNN unless that’s changed since I last hit Refresh. Kate Riga at TPM wonders just where “on the spectrum of incompetence to malice” the incoming Trump II administration will land. It appears Donald Trump has ceded the presidency to, in NewsHoundEllen’s view, a “likely illegal immigrant.“ David Rothkopf wonders how a great nation functions with three presidents at once. The official president is “currently MIA. Our president-elect has been acting since the first week of November like he has already taken office, meanwhile, but has also effectively appointed a shadow president in Elon Musk, who appears to be the one of the three with the most clout right now.” The rule of law is going on holiday except for punishing them what’s done Trump wrong: U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan says she has often reassured police officers traumatized by the violence of Jan.
For Republicans, for Democrats, for the republic In yesterday’s Starting The Steal, we discussed the Republican legal challenge to losing the North Carolina state Supreme Court race in November. But today consider the national implications. Even a Republican gets it (sort of). Andrew Dunn of Longleaf Politics believes it a bad idea for Court of Appeals Judge Jefferson Griffin to fight his loss all the way to the GOP-controlled state Supreme Court he’s desperate to join. Republicans want to throw out 60,000 votes “on technicalities in voter registration.” Read more about that here and here. “I’m not sure who’s leading the push here — but it needs to end now,” writes Dunn: If the Supreme Court sides with Griffin, the fallout will be immediate and brutal. This isn’t just bad optics; it’s potentially a credibility-shattering disaster for the court, the party, and conservatism in North Carolina. Overnight, this becomes a national story about Republicans “stealing” a Supreme Court seat. The allegation would be impossible to defend against. And it wouldn’t end there.
Our new president is a different kind of MAGAmaniac Back in 2016, the whole country was left in shock when celebrity businessman Donald Trump managed to take over the Republican Party and win the presidential election. At the time there was quite a bit of resistance within the GOP establishment due to the fact that Trump had not run as an ordinary conservative but rather as a populist demagogue and they had no idea that their voters were so hungry for his message. Gone were all the usual paeans to small government and family values and even his strong advocacy for expanding the military was coupled with a discordant isolationist stance that harkened back to the pre-WWII America First movement. (Trump had no idea about that history — he thought he came up with it himself.) However he was all for tax cuts for the wealthy, which is the lifeblood of the Republican party. And he was reflexively hostile to anything his predecessor Barack Obama ever did which meant that he was willing to reverse much of the progress that had been made in the previous eight years, pleasing Republicans to no end.
And yet he’ll probably die being hated because he was old Those numbers are the envy of the world. The US under Joe Biden and the Democrats engineered a soft landing from a global economic catastrophe. I wonder if anyone will ever take the chance again. Doing the right thing turned out to be politically suicidal. Just as he did last time and he’ll seize credit for it. If you ever thought life was fair, think again. By the way, Democrats are gloomy about the economy, and Republicans are optimistic. I don’t think it’s just pure partisanship on the Dems part. They’re worried about the tariffs, tax cuts and deportation which isn’t irrational. If Trump carries out his plan the risk of killing this economy is very, very high. Of course, he’ll just blame the Democrats so… Here’s his latest: Biden is a ghost and the Democrats are nowhere to be found. Everyone knows it’s a GOP shitshow show. Let’s hope most people see the truth.