Month: November 2024

It’s that time of year again. For those of you who remember this classic scene from WKRP in Cincinnati.

This will function as a new cafe/lounge for a few days. I hope you all have a wonderful holiday. Drop by and say hello if you get a moment.

Cheers!

Howdy!

Here’s an outake from the Bitches Brew sessions:

Cheers!

In May 2010, I was already anticipating a major drubbing for the Democrats in the upcoming midterms. But even without knowing the results of the elections to come, I knew that due to retirements there would be at least a 15 percent change in the makeup of the U.S. Senate. This infusion of Tea Party energy made me dubious that Sen. Chris Dodd of Connecticut, who in one of his last acts in the Senate was successfully pushing through the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform bill, was justified in his optimism about the body’s bipartisan functionality. In particular, I was dreading the expected arrival of Rand Paul in 2011.

We can be quite scornful of the constant call for bipartisanship from the Washington press and centrist politicians, but there is a certain logic to it considering the restrictive rules of the Senate. [Yet] I can’t see how it’s going to be easier to pass legislation through the Senate with Rand Paul objecting to every effort to spend a dime of money or some Jim DeMint acolyte from Utah trying to out-teabag the teabaggers. I think the next Congress will be completely dysfunctional, particularly in the Senate. It’s a real problem.

The DeMint acolyte I was referencing was Mike Lee, who has turned out to be a far worse as a senator than I imagined. But Rand Paul’s record has been a little different. I expected him to emulate his libertarian-minded father, then a representative from Texas and perennial presidential candidate with a cult-following. Father Ron was known for voting against virtually all government programs and appropriations, but to little effect. However, the same behavior from his son in the Senate, where unanimous consent is needed to proceed, could grind things to a halt. I expected Rand to be at least as disruptive as then-Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma whose reflexive obstruction had earned him the nickname “Dr. No.”

Sen. Paul probably votes against more legislation (from either party) than any other senator, although Lee is similarly obstreperous. But he turned out to be far more tamable than his old man. And there was another thing that made Paul stand out less than I had anticipated. His fellow Kentucky senator, Mitch McConnell, as leader of the Senate Republicans, had adopted the practice of routinely denying unanimous consent for anything the Democrats wanted to do. This dilatory tactic forced the Democrats to constantly have cloture votes to overcome “quiet” filibusters. Eventually, it compelled them to eliminate the filibuster for executive appointments and lower-level federal judges. Because the GOP filibustered everything, it prevented Paul from getting attention for filibustering on his own initiative.

Paul has now been in the Senate long enough, and gained enough seniority, that he is set to chair the Homeland Security Committee in the next Congress. This puts him in a prime position to have some say over Donald Trump’s plans for mass deportations. And, in keeping with his father’s libertarian proclivities, Paul is having some serious reservations.

GOP Sen. Rand Paul denounced President-elect Donald Trump’s plan to deploy the military to carry out mass deportations of undocumented immigrants upon his return to office, saying it would be a “huge mistake” and a misuse of military personnel.

“I’m not in favor of sending the Army in uniforms into our cities to collect people,” Paul (R-Ky.) told Newsmax host Rob Schmitt on Tuesday. “I think it’s a terrible image and that’s not what we use our military for, we never have and it’s actually been illegal for over 100 years to bring the Army into our cities.”

…“I will not support an emergency [declaration] to put the Army into our cities — I think that’s a huge mistake,” he said, later adding, “I really think us as conservatives who are supportive of Trump need to caution him about sending the Army into our cities.”

…The senator also expressed concern for how it would look like for “the housekeeper who’s been here 30 years” to get arrested by a uniformed service member.

“I don’t see the military putting her in handcuffs and marching her down the street to an encampment. I don’t really want to see that,” Paul said, proposing “an in-between solution” that would expand work permits for those who have been in the U.S. for a long time.

If Paul were saying this as just one of a hundred senators, I wouldn’t put much stock in it, but as chair of the Homeland Security Committee, he has some actual power to shape things. Many of the keys players who will be needed to carry out mass deportations will have to first pass though Paul’s committee for confirmation to their positions. After that, he’ll have an oversight role.

So, if you’re looking for any prospect for bipartisan cooperation in the next Congress, and I anticipate almost none, this is one area where there might be some hope.

Paul is a bit lock a stopped clock that is right twice a day. In this case, he’s right about objecting to the use of the military to carry out domestic policing. He could be an important if unexpected ally in putting the brakes on one of the most dangerous impulses of the incoming fascist regime.

 

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In this New York Times piece on the radicalism of Donald Trump’s early cabinet nominations, I am going to give credit to Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan for trying, but the choices are so bad that even their best efforts can’t keep up.

Take the example of Pete Hegseth, Trump’s selection to run the Pentagon. Haberman and Swan initially only fault him for being “a former Fox News host whose leadership experience has been questioned.” Many paragraphs later, they get around to a bigger problem:

The president-elect’s choice to lead the Defense Department, Pete Hegseth, is facing an allegation that he sexually assaulted a woman, which he has denied…

…The Trump team, people briefed on its activities say, did engage in vetting for some of his choices, such as Mr. Hegseth. But the sexual assault allegation did not show up because it involved a private settlement agreement with the woman in question, the people briefed on it said.

And if the only or even the most serious problems with Hegseth were that he’s ill-equipped to run the Defense Department and is quite possibly a rapist, then Haberman and Swan would have adequately done their jobs.

But there’s this, as reported by the Associated Press:

Pete Hegseth, the Army National Guard veteran and Fox News host nominated by Donald Trump to lead the Department of Defense, was flagged as a possible “Insider Threat” by a fellow service member due to a tattoo on his bicep that’s associated with white supremacist groups.

Hegseth, who has downplayed the role of military members and veterans in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack and railed against the Pentagon’s subsequent efforts to address extremism in the ranks, has said he was pulled by his District of Columbia National Guard unit from guarding Joe Biden’s January 2021 inauguration. He’s said he was unfairly identified as an extremist due to a cross tattoo on his chest.

This week, however, a fellow Guard member who was the unit’s security manager and on an anti-terrorism team at the time, shared with The Associated Press an email he sent to the unit’s leadership flagging a different tattoo reading “Deus Vult” that’s been used by white supremacists, concerned it was an indication of an “Insider Threat.”

He was considered too radical and extreme by the Pentagon to be trusted with guarding the president of the United States. And now Trump is asking us to put him in charge of the Pentagon. That might have been mentioned by Haberman and Swan as a possible impediment to his confirmation. It certainly means he won’t be picking up any Democratic votes.

And here’s another reason he can only be confirmed, if at all, on a strict party line vote. In 2019, Hegseth was instrumental in convincing President Trump to do this:

President Donald Trump has intervened in three high-profile murder cases involving U.S. service members, dismissing charges against a Green Beret accused of killing an Afghan man, pardoning a former Army officer serving 19 years for ordering soldiers to fire on unarmed Afghan men, and promoting a Navy SEAL who was convicted of posing with a dead body but acquitted of more serious charges.

This was one of the darkest days of the first Trump presidency, and Hegseth’s lobbying was responsible for making it happen:

“This is so dangerous, nothing pisses me off more than these pardons,” a retired general officer fumed to ABC News after they were announced. “This undermines everything we have stood for — all my years of service goes up in smoke because we have a dictator who has no respect for the rule of law nor what we stand for.”

Hegseth is a dangerous white nationalist, a possible rapist, and a supporter of the active military murdering Muslims with not only impunity but the stamp of approval of the president. He’s written that Islam “is not a religion of peace, and it never has been” and accuses them of plotting to “conquer” Europe and America by making common cause with secularists to crush “our nation’s Judeo-Christian institutions.”

Now, maybe there will be enough Republican senators willing to overlook all of this, or even acutely sympathetic to it, that Hegseth can be narrowly confirmed. But he comes with a lot more baggage than Haberman and Swan managed to describe.

Then there is Robert Kennedy Jr. who has been nominated to head the Department of Health & Human Services. The concerns with Kennedy’s moral character, judgment and mental health are almost too numerous to document. Haberman and Swan don’t even try, limiting themselves to saying that Kennedy “has made baseless claims about vaccines” and “is not only a vaccine skeptic but also a supporter of abortion rights who has all but declared war on the pharmaceutical and food industries that have long funded the Republican Party.”

There’s nothing in there about Kennedy saying several dozen frankly insane things. There’s nothing in there about his Wilt Chamberlain-level of promiscuity and extramarital relationships. Nothing about dumping a dead bear in Central Park or using a chainsaw to decapitate a whale and then strapping it to “the roof of his minivan for a five-hour drive home.”

Amazingly, there’s not even a mention that RFK Jr. once testified in a deposition that “a worm…got into my brain and ate a portion of it and then died” which caused him “memory loss and mental fogginess so severe that a friend grew concerned he might have a brain tumor.”

His loss of brain matter might help explain why his brain doesn’t function properly, and this actually matters. Just ask American Samoa, where RFK’s influence helped produce a measles outbreak that killed 83 children.

Health officials around the world are alarmed over the likely impact of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — a longtime vaccine skeptic who was tapped for the health secretary role this week — on global health. Experts from Samoa have been particularly vocal in sounding the alarm, citing the destructive impact of Kennedy’s rhetoric on the tiny Polynesian island nation…

…Warning that Kennedy will empower the global anti-vaccine movement and may advocate for reduced funding for international agencies, Aiono Prof Alec Ekeroma, the director general of health for Samoa’s Health Ministry told The Washington Post that Kennedy “will be directly responsible for killing thousands of children around the world by allowing preventable infectious diseases to run rampant.”

“I don’t think it’s a legacy that should be associated with the Kennedy name,” Ekeroma said in an email Friday.

Yeah, the problem with RFK Jr.’s confirmation prospects is hardly just that he’s a vaccine skeptic who supports abortion rights and is an enemy of the pharmaceutical and food industries. He’s a lunatic of low character whose idiotic theories have already caused an epidemic that caused dozens of children their lives. I think even some Republican senators will have reason to pause before confirming this man.

Of course, the bulk of the Haberman/Swan piece relates to the nomination of Florida congressman Matt Gaetz to be attorney general. And it looks like Trump may have to go around the normal Senate confirmation process to get him confirmed, mainly because he’s the most hated man in Congress, with Republicans actually more hostile than Democrats. But in focusing so much on Gaetz, they have precious little space for Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s nominee to head the nation’s intelligence agencies. All Haberman and Swan have to say about her is that she is “a favorite of Russian state media” who “has blamed the United States and NATO for provoking Vladimir V. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.”

There’s nothing about her upbringing in a weird cult led by a surfer Hare Krishna guru who she still considers her spiritual adviser. There’s nothing about her secret visit to Syria to meet with the butcher Bashar al-Assad or her demand that the United States join Russia in helping to prop up his regime. There’s no mention that she is widely suspected of being a Russian asset at best and a useful idiot at worst. Gabbard is easily the most dangerous nominee in the history of the country, since she is auditioning for a role that would give her access to the identities of every spy and agent we have working in Putin’s inner circle, or in Russia in general. This would argue strongly for not taking the risk. I doubt there are Democratic senators who will support her confirmation, and many Republican senators will at least privately have the same misgivings.

The problem here is both on the prospects and merits of these nominees, which simply are not adequately described by Haberman and Swan. Admittedly, their piece aims mainly to describe their prospects rather than their merits, but the two things are too intertwined to be separately treated. Their chances of confirmation are bound up with their lack of merit and the political costs of saying all these shortcomings and scandals are not disqualifying.

But it’s probably true, as they report, that Trump is employing a “flood-the-zone” strategy where even if one or two of his picks don’t make it through the regular confirmation process, the others will.

And, as David Nir capably describes, Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson have a plan for confirming any “appalling MAGA nihilists” the Senate rejects.

Again, I give Haberman and Swan credit for describing the situation in some detail, but they’d need another 3,000 words to really provide an adequate picture for their readers. And this is going to be a challenge for the media for the duration of Trump’s second term.

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One of the more provocative takes I’ve seen since the election is from The Editors at The Drift. I think it’s unfortunate that they decided to open their piece with a prolonged savaging of Joe Biden, going all the way back to his 1988 campaign. It’s not that I think some of their critique isn’t valid, nor that it doesn’t fit with the overall construction of the article. Rather, it probably causes too many people to just stop reading, including the people who would most benefit. I know I almost did, mainly because I’m just in no mood to see Biden taken to the woodshed. He’s done what he could, and if it turned out tragically for him and for us, I can’t fault the man for giving it his best shot.

What I liked most about their take was that it comes from a pretty far left point of view, but every time I thought they were slipping into the same old boring and tired left-wing critiques of the Democratic Party, they seemed to pull the argument out of the fire. The regular chestnuts are all there, Ukraine and Gaza and the suppression of student protests, elite condescension and sanctimony, overplaying the threat of Trump, over-reliance on abortion as an issue, emphasizing Harris’s record as an incarcerator, campaigning with ex-Republicans like Liz Cheney, shying away from the defense of the Trans community, cozying up to crypto.

But these arguments are not made in the typical lazy way, nor presented as the sole or even primary reasons for defeat. Instead, they’re layered brick by brick to explain why the sum total wasn’t persuasive to lots of traditional or gettable Democratic voters who turned up their nose at Harris not simply because of the “price of eggs,” but because the there wasn’t enough contrast and there wasn’t enough flavor.

Trump has also worked hard to build an edge among loosely or nonpartisan Americans, embracing his identity as the candidate of Joe Rogan, Tulsi Gabbard, RFK, Jr., and the artist formerly known as Kanye West. The “weird” demographic — youngish, heavily male, surprisingly multiracial, hyper-online, alienated and distrustful — has clearly found a home in the Trump movement. He is, after all, weird in his own way: a post-decorum politician, swaying to Ave Maria and extolling Arnold Palmer’s penis. For wide swaths of the population, Trumpism has become the default political ideology, where those without a strong reason to arrive at some rival set of principles inevitably wind up. Why wouldn’t it be? The Democrats have nothing to offer as an alternative but a simulacrum of MAGA politics stripped of the libidinal pleasures of rage and transgression, like the caffeine-free version of Trump’s favorite beverage, Diet Coke.

In fact, The Editors have a message for far-left critics who think this problem is easily solvable with some Bernie Sanderseque messaging:

It might be pleasant to imagine that disgust at Harris’s rightward turn was at the root of her underwhelming performance — that voters stayed home or flocked to Trump because they saw him as offering an alternative. That is the diagnosis many left-wing commentators have arrived at in the aftermath of the election, just as they did four years ago, to explain why Biden squeaked past Trump by a much smaller margin than expected, even amid the perfect storm of Covid shutdowns. It implies a relatively optimistic short-term prognosis, all things considered: the American people voted against the failed Democratic establishment more than they voted for Trump; if next time we can finally succeed in nominating a true left-wing critic of the establishment, in the vein of Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, those voters will happily abandon Trumpism for authentic populism. There were, to be sure, plenty of votes cast against the Democrats in this fashion, like in the Arab American community of Dearborn, MI, which turned out overwhelmingly for Rashida Tlaib and by a thin margin for Trump. And we certainly wouldn’t mind if a reconstructed Democratic Party elevated a socialist firebrand as its next leader, though we aren’t holding our breath.

But there’s a clear element of delusion in the belief that despite strong showings in three presidential elections over nearly a decade, including two victories, “real” support for Trump remains confined to a small coterie of lunatics. Trump is the center of gravity of American politics.

And Trump is the center of gravity for reasons the Democratic Establishment has misdiagnosed:

The Biden-Harris administration made the fatal mistake of assuming that in vowing to “Make America Great Again,” the Trumpist movement channeled a widespread nationalistic mood, a longing to re-center American identity in our politics. This was the moderate complement to the wishful thinking of the Sanders left. It saw authentic Trumpism as a shallow reservoir, joining streams of discontent that could be rechanneled by Democratic politicians — except the discontent it imagined was not rage at economic elites but frustration with the “divisiveness” of liberal identity politics and the culture warring of the 2010s. Democrats could vanquish Trumpism, then, by expelling “wokeness” and replacing particularist rhetoric about race and gender with pieties about American unity. “Freedom” became the campaign’s catchphrase.

Here we see their strongest analysis, as it gets to the heart of the weakness in the Democratic coalition:

The Democrats bet the farm on the idea that a desire to defend the shared traditions and symbols of American democracy could transcend profound divides of class and ideology. America, as an ideal, was supposed to smooth over all the contradictions in the coalition. It was how they’d hold the Blue Wall in the Rust Belt while making inroads into Romney-voting Sun Belt exurbs; fundraise in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street while walking picket lines and strengthening labor law; keep the former neocons on their side while reassuring anti-war activists and Arab Americans that they were committed to peace in the Middle East. Everyone would put aside their differences for the sake of America. But “America” in this sense is, indeed, over.

And here we see the argument come to its conclusion, albeit not without raising some serious questions:

…the Biden and Harris campaigns clung stubbornly to the conviction that Trumpian anti-Americanism was pushed by an aberrant fringe, and for that reason would repel good, normal, healthy voters (even registered Republicans, even people who voted for Trump the first two times). This judgment was wrong. The core claim of the Trump campaign — that America is something that existed in the past and may exist again in the future, but that doesn’t have much integrity or coherence in the present — captures something essential about many people’s experience of social reality today. The political theorist Benedict Anderson famously argued that nations are “imagined communities,” and it is hard to sustain an imagined community of America’s diversity and scale in the face of extreme economic inequality; the fracturing of the media monoculture into a bewildering patchwork of social media platforms, podcasts, streams, and cable news networks; and the decimation, exacerbated by the Covid pandemic, of offline social relationships and community institutions. Under such conditions, it is easy to suspect that anyone who insists we’re all in this together is just trying to rip you off — a suspicion that Trump is especially adept at vocalizing.

My first reaction to this is that they’ve captured something essential to understand about how Trump’s success is directly related to the fragmentation of our culture and decline of real world civic engagement. But, while I can agree that misdiagnosis goes a long way toward explaining why Harris lost, I can’t agree that the effort to overcome this fragmentation was wrong.

If an America rooted in common purpose, strong institutions, the rule of law and basic decency is “in this sense, indeed, over,” that doesn’t mean it wasn’t worth fighting for. It also seems like a perfectly sensible and defensible strategy for smoothing “over all the contradictions in the coalition.” It came close to working, and whatever happens with our government, and whomever runs it, we’ll always be better off with strong institutions and respect for the rule of law.

But re-litigating the past is of less interest than planning for the future. As you might expect, The Editors see opportunity:

Working-class discontent, to the extent it got a political hearing, expended itself in a vain struggle for position in the Democratic Party of Clinton and Obama. Now those days are over — for worse and, with any luck, for better. While working-class “realignment” (or, more accurately, de-alignment, since exit polls indicate a fairly split working-class vote) raises the disturbing possibility of MAGA victories for years to come, it was also a necessary development if any radical alternative to the two capitalist parties was ever going to acquire a mass basis. Perhaps that is not much reason for hope, in the end. But it is reason to contest the Democrats’ outrageous sense of entitlement to their base’s loyalty; to construct an alternative that can block the Republicans’ attempt to reinvent themselves as the party of the multiracial working class; to cultivate leaders who don’t brag about their IQs and insult voters’ intelligence; to replace resentment in our politics with solidarity; and to insist on a radical reinvention of our corporatized, consultant-infested political life. Reason, in short, to try.

Working class discontent is unlikely to go away under a Trump administration. The same can be said more broadly about rural and small-town discontent. Breaking and weakening our institutions won’t repair the elite’s reputations, but it may lead many to value what they’ve lost. The Democrats might not have to make any adjustments at all to reap the benefits of buyer’s remorse in the next midterm elections. But they can’t win back the genuine trust and loyalty of the working class until they get serious about what has really been driving discontent.

To me, this has been primarily a result not of immigration, globalization and trade deals, but of the lack of antitrust enforcement that began under Jimmy Carter in the 1970’s. It has hollowed out America, destroyed entrepreneurial opportunity, led to vast regional inequality, and killed the American Dream for much of the country. The Biden administration was actually excellent on these issues, but progress takes time and their messaging was terrible, in part because the media is owned by monopolists and in part because the party still wanted to court Silicon Valley and Wall Street. In truth, making implacable enemies of those forces in this election probably would have led to an even worse outcome. They print ink by the barrel and control our airwaves.

There aren’t neat and pat answers, but I have been saying for years that when left-wing populism withers, right-wing populism fills the void. And right-wing populism always takes the form of fascism. At a time when belief in our institutions is at all time low, this was fatal.

And that gets to my last question. Is this fatal?

Is there a comeback from this? Or does it all fall now? There’s a real possibility that the door has been kicked in and all that remains is for the walls to collapse.

But one thing I’m sure about is that there’s a yawning void of left-wing populism in our rural areas, small-towns and even in our cities. It’s showing up now in how education level is among the best predictors of voting preference. The Democrats tried being the upholders of the system, the adults in the room. It almost worked. But since it failed, we have the very fascist takeover I predicted for all these years. Even David Brooks sees this now.

I don’t agree with everything the Editors wrote in this piece, but I still see it as essential reading for anyone who wants to understand where we are and how we might get out.

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be continuing with the Grand Canyon scene. The photo that I’m using (My own from a recent visit.) is seen directly below.

I’ll be using my usual acrylic paints on a 6×6 inch canvas panel.

When last seen, the painting appeared as it does in the photo directly below. Since that time, I have continued to work on the painting.

For this week’s cycle I’ve revised the lower right bushes and the central shadow.

The current state of the painting is seen in the photo directly below.

I’ll have more progress to show you next week. See you then.

This is just one example of crap reporting on Congress. Axios is currently running two articles on House Foreign Affairs Chairman Michael McCaul (R-Texas). In the first, it reports that McCaul was “‘briefly detained’ by police at Dulles International Airport earlier this month after mixing alcohol and Ambien.” In other words, he acted like a complete jackass at the airport, locked himself out of his phone and missed his flight because he’s a drunk. Axios tells us this matters because he is “a powerful U.S. policymaker on foreign affairs..”

In the second piece, Axios reports that “House Foreign Affairs Chairman Michael McCaul (R-Texas) won’t seek a waiver to retain his committee gavel, ending his six-year tenure as the panel’s top Republican.” But in this article, they make no reference to the first piece even though they’re both running on the front page. Instead, by way of explanation, Axios just cuts and pastes a statement from McCaul’s office:

• “Out of respect for [conference] rules and a desire to see future leaders rise from our conference, I have decided not to pursue another term as chairman,” McCaul told Axios in a statement.
• “It has been a tremendous honor to serve as the chairman… I am beyond proud of everything we accomplished over the past six years,” he added.

Here’s the deal. Unlike the Democrats, the Congressional Republicans have term-limits for committee chairs. In the House, this is three two-year terms, and if a chairman wants to remain in place beyond that they have to apply for a waiver. These are often granted but it’s certainly not automatic. So, McCaul may or may not have been able to retain his gavel on the Foreign Affairs Committee. As a reporter, you want to understand what is really behind his decision to give up without a fight.

Was his waiver likely to be denied? And, if so, for what reason? Was someone else on the panel likely to win any fight for McCaul’s gavel? Axios reports that Rep. Brian Mast (R-Fla.), Rep. Joe “You Lie!” Wilson (R-S.C.), Rep. Darrell “Car Thief” Issa (R-Calif.), and Rep. Ann Wagner (R-Mo.) are all in the running to replace McCaul. Did one of them scare McCaul off?

Of, could it be that McCaul’s drunken episode at the airport delivered a fatal wound to his hopes for getting a waiver? Two days ago, Semafor seemed to anticipate this in their reporting, noting at the end of their description of McCaul’s episode at Dulles that “he is term-limited at the helm of the powerful Foreign Affairs Committee and would require a waiver from Republican leaders to continue in that role next year.”

“Two weekends ago, I made a mistake — one for which I take full responsibility,” McCaul said in a statement to Semafor. “I missed a flight to Texas and found myself disoriented in the airport. This was the result of a poor decision I made to mix an Ambien — which I took in order to sleep on the upcoming flight — with some alcohol. Law enforcement officers briefly detained me while I waited for a family member to pick me up.”

There was no mention that he wasn’t seeking a waiver, the inference being that he might find it more difficult to get one now that the world knew he was found staggering around the local airport in an inebriated stupor.

But Axios rewarded McCaul for giving them a response by making no mention of the airport incident in their piece on him stepping down from the top of the committee. And they did this even though their article on the airport incident was published on the same day! Like hours earlier. Instead, they reported McCaul’s preposterous explanation that he committed a self-defenestration out of a desire to enable “future leaders.”

I mean, what the fuck? That is criminally bad reporting.

Donald Trump has made some very provocative cabinet nominations in the last couple of days, including Pete Hegseth for Secretary of Defense and Matt Gaetz for Attorney General. But the most dangerous is former Democratic congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard for Director of National Intelligence. Here’s why.

Back in January 2023, I wrote a piece called “If It Walks Like A Russian Stooge….” It was about Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald and Tulsi Gabbard, and it took a close look at how they had discussed the civil war in Syria and Russia’s aggression toward Ukraine. Almost a year earlier, Nancy LeTourneau wrote a similar (subscription) piece for this site called “Who’s Spreading Putin’s Talking Points These Days?.” Her article didn’t mention Taibbi, but it also noted Greenwald and Gabbard’s disturbing use of Kremlin propaganda.

I don’t want to reinvent the wheel here. I recommend looking at those pieces to see why Nancy and I both independently concluded that something extremely fishy was going on. I wrote that they “show all the signs of being either compromised or compensated (or both) by the Russians” and “When you peel away the onion, their consistency over time is not in being on the left or the right, but in criticizing anything America does that Russia doesn’t like and in defending Russia at every turn, often with Russia’s own talking points.” Nancy wrote:

How did they all latch onto the same talking points? Was it a coincidence? Did they simply follow Greenwald’s lead? Or is there someone behind the scenes feeding them these lines?

These folks become enraged when accused of promoting Putin’s talking points. But, as much as I’d like to avoid being a conspiracy theorist, it’s hard to ignore that they’re all singing from the same page with this obscure, preposterous theory.

With respect to Gabbard, this wasn’t a novel observation. When she ran for the Democratic nomination for president in 2019-2020, Hillary Clinton speculated that the Kremlin was “grooming her to be the third-party candidate” and said “they have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her so far.” David Plouffe straight up called her “a Russian asset.”

And, as Naveed Jamali of Newsweek observed at the time, they had good reason to make these bold claims:

When Gabbard announced her candidacy, Russian state media quickly picked up the news, and the coverage by the likes of RT and Sputnik was on their English-language sites, indicating that it was not aimed at Russians. An NBC investigative piece found that there were at least 20 such pieces about Gabbard’s candidacy, such as those on RT that proclaimed “Tulsi Gabbard is ready for America.”

I noted in my original piece that there were people on the left who had genuine concerns about American support for Ukraine’s inclusion in NATO and the European Union, seeing it as provocative and disrespectful of Russia’s legitimate national security interests. There were people on the left, including me, who were opposed to U.S. involvement in the Syrian civil war, in which Russia was aggressively taking the side of the butcher, Bashar al-Assad. These positions aligned with the Kremlin’s view, but that didn’t mean anyone holding them was a Russian asset. What stood out with Gabbard was her use of Russian talking points, as well as the clear reciprocal support she received in return.

If you really think about it, it’s remarkable that Hillary Clinton made those comments about Gabbard precisely because they sounded so out of character. Clinton had been in the public eye for over a quarter century by 2019, and she’d never been known to espouse conspiracy theories. But she felt the case was obvious enough to make without fear of sounding crazy.

Trump has nominated Gabbard to the top job in the American Intelligence Community. It’s a position that gives her access to the identity of every employee, including those serving overseas with either official or non-official cover. She’ll have insight into exactly who in the Russian government is feeding information to America, and it has been clear for a while that America has some well-placed agents working in high positions in the Kremlin. This is one of the reasons the U.S. was so confident Russia would launch a full-bore invasion of Ukraine even as our European allies (and even Ukraine) remained skeptical.

I don’t think there is any way Gabbard could pass a normal background check to authorize her to see highly classified information, but Trump doesn’t care. Maybe he’s just stupid, or reckless, or it could be that he too is a Russian asset, as has long been speculated. It doesn’t really matter because there’s simply no way that we can risk having Gabbard in a position to compromise all our intelligence officers and their foreign agents.

Matt Gaetz would be an extremely dangerous Attorney General and Pete Hegseth could do irreparable damage to the U.S. military. I don’t want to downplay the seriousness of their nominations. But Gabbard is far more frightening, and preventing her nomination should be the first priority.

Howdy! It’s another midweek. I am opening with Gil Scott-Heron’s classic Winter in America:

Hang in there, everyone.

If you were looking to cash in on Donald Trump’s election, you may have already missed out on one opportunity. Private prison giants GEO Group and CoreCivic and have seen their stocks soar astronomically since Election Day. As of this writing, GEO Group is up 82 percent over the last month, and CoreCivic is up 68 percent. Those prices might be too expensive at this point to win you a windfall.

Still, investors are betting heavily that the Trump administration will sign major contracts with these companies to erect concentration camps for the millions of people they’ve promised to deport.

In an earnings call Thursday, GEO Group Executive Chairman George Zoleysaid the company “was built for this unique moment in our company’s — country’s history and the opportunity that it will bring.”

Brian Evans, GEO Group’s chief executive officer, said on the call, “We’re looking at a theoretical potential doubling of all of our services.”

Now, maybe you’re not the type of person to seek personal profit from a mass deportation program, or maybe you would never invest in an industry of for-profit incarceration even if it wasn’t giddily gearing up to enable a white nationalist wet dream. If so, I get it. You’re not going to cry about being too late to the party.

But there’s a lot of money being made suddenly since bets on Trump paid off. Dogecoin cryptocurrency is up 14 percent over the last month, in part because the DOGE stock symbol is shared with the new Department of Government Efficiency that Trump just announced, which will be headed by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. If Elon Musk now virtually owns the presidency, J.D. Vance super-patron Peter Thiel owns the vice-presidency. He recently sold over  $1 billion worth of his Palantir stock, but that was premature. It has risen a further 44 percent since his sale and is up 264 percent year-to-date.

The stock market is booming in general, which was the case even before Trump’s victory, so a correction is surely coming. I think the irrational exuberance may last a while longer, however, at least until Trump is inaugurated and reality begins to set in. His tariff ideas have a real potential to send stocks plummeting. Beyond that, once his deportation program gets up and running, it will create some real turbulence in the economy that could easily spook investors into a big sell-off.

I think a lot of people are getting rich and more will get rich in this narrow window between the excitement over promises of tax breaks and lax regulation and the reality that the stock market is already too high and Trump is going to fuck things up.

So, get in now while the going is good, and then get out quick!