Kill the filibuster or say the rulebook won

Eric Schmeltzer, a Daily Kos contributor, has suggestions for Democrats on how to keep their majority once they get it this fall. My view is they need to sever relationships with billionaires and cut the billionaires’ hold over the rest of us. But let’s listen to Schmeltzer:

Pop quiz: It’s 2028, and Democrats have held both chambers for almost two years. Which of these realities would you prefer? A) We tried to pass an anti-corruption bill, but it got filibustered. B) We passed an anti-corruption bill, but President Donald Trump stood in the way of it becoming law. Here’s one more: A) We passed a bill that put healthcare back where it was before Trump’s disastrous “One Big, Beautiful Bill.” B) We passed a package that redefines healthcare in America, but Trump vetoed it. You probably didn’t need long, and neither will other voters. B is bold, which is exactly what turns one win into a series of wins. But for Democratic leadership, the time to figure out how you get to B is now. The good news is that the planning is happening.

Part of that good news is it seems possible next Speaker Hakeem Jeffries is on board with these ideas. Even so, this will require bold work. That healthcare package can be described as “Medicare for Anyone Who Wants It,” something you get through your taxes, not a monthly bill, is priced without a profit margin, and stays with you no matter where you live or work. So pass it, get it to the Oval Office. The nasty guy vetoes it. And in 2028 the message is easily: Remember how close we got with that bill. We must keep Democrats in the majority and keep Republicans out of the White House. A Brennan Center poll found 92% of voters say corruption is a big problem. An effort to end Citizens United shows 46% of voters don’t trust either party to fix it. That’s an opening for Democrats. Other needs to end corruption: Ban members of Congress from trading stocks. Ban the president from profiting off the office (we didn’t use to need a law for that). Ban anonymous money in elections (I’d like to go much further, but this Supreme Court...). Create an ethics office that doesn’t answer to the president (yeah, there is that effort by the nasty guy to allow him to meddle in everything not under Congress or the Federal Reserve). I would add: Ban all gifts to Supreme Court justices and create a Supreme Court ethics office they don’t control. Commenters added: Ban gerrymandering and pass voting rights. These ideas will cost Democrats something – and that is important. Yeah, he’ll veto all that. And Democrats run on that in 2028. These bills can be readied now so that within 100 hours of the new Congress being sworn in they hit the Oval Office desk. Democrats may control the Senate, but not a filibuster proof Senate. The common wisdom about the filibuster is if it is killed Republicans can pass horrible stuff and Democrats can’t stop them. But (1) people need to see the true impact of their vote – now they can vote for vile candidates knowing the worst won’t get through. And (2):

Let’s go back to the quiz and say the filibuster line to that guy in Saginaw, Michigan. Democrats have 51 votes and a rulebook they control, and they’re telling him that the rulebook won. Now say the veto line. He already knows whose fault it is, because only one guy in this country can veto a bill and everybody knows his name. People forgive a wall you can’t move. But a rule you could have changed and didn’t, well, that’s on you.

Restoring what the nasty guy broke is good. But passing something that gets vetoed and people are still talking about in 2028 requires boldness. And if they’re still talking about the bills in 2028 they can be signed in 2029. And a majority might hold for decades. So get moving. Emily Singer of Kos reported that Republicans are into the stages of grief over losing Congress. So far they’re into bargaining. I mention that because of an exchange that Singer relates, between former Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida and Robbie Smither, a Florida Republican voter who plans to vote Democratic for the first time in his life because of the nasty guy: Gaetz: “Bro we need your vote. ... I hate the war too. But the Democrats want to trans your kids.” Singer had Smither’s response:

“With all due respect, stop pissing on people and telling them it’s raining,” he shot back. There is absolutely no logical evidence that [Democrats] want to ‘trans’ my two sons. None.” Smither went on to say, “What we worry about is feeding him and his brother. Paying the mortgage and homeowners insurance on the house we’re raising them in.”

Which is why culture war issues are not working this year. Singer also reported that Republicans and their billionaire funders are (finally) dumping piles of cash into the campaign. But it won’t matter. Singer lists reasons: Campaign finance law says candidates get better ad rates that PACs. Democratic candidates in swing states are far out-raising their opponents. So the differences are smaller than they appear. Most importantly, no amount of money will change an election if the ads aren’t addressing the issues most important to voters. People want candidates to address high cost of living and high gas prices. What they are getting fearmongering on transgender issues. Republicans think transgender issues got them in power in 2024. Actually, voters were reacting to the economic mess recovering too slowly from the pandemic and thought Republicans would handle the economy better. Instead, Republicans screwed it up. Also, in states where those vile anti-trans ads ran and are running, the states already passed laws restricting transgender rights. Fearmongering now is less effective. An email from March For Our Lives reported that libraries across the country, including in Baltimore, six branches of the Los Angeles County Libraries, and all 20 branches at St. Louis County Libraries are giving out gun safe storage devices and gun locks, often for free. No paperwork, no ID, no questions. The Central Library of Baltimore gave out 100 locks in 24 hours.

One administrator put it plainly: "One homicide costs taxpayers a million dollars. One non-fatal shooting costs taxpayers $1.5 million. A safe costs $20. Gun locks are $15." That math is undeniable. And the fact that communities are finding ways to make it happen — through libraries, hospitals, health departments, and local officials working together — is proof that the movement for gun safety doesn't wait for Congress.

In today’s pundit roundup for Kos Chitown Kev quoted Justin Wolfers of Platypus Economics looking at the importance of a free press. This is at a time when the nasty guy banned three networks from the White House. The ban was blocked this morning.

Starting in 2003, Brazil’s federal government randomly picked municipalities for audits of federal money. Some audit results came out before an election, and some came out after. That’s the foundation for a great natural experiment. Claudio Ferraz and Frederico Finan compared the two groups. Corrupt mayors who were exposed before the election were far less likely to be reelected, and the effect was much bigger where there was local radio, because radio was how the story reached voters. Mexico shows something similar. When local radio and TV reported that politicians had misused public money, voters punished those politicians’ parties much more heavily.

In the comments Rambler797 reported diesel truck buyers (and I’m sure he is referring to pickups) are 90% men and 84% white. And 87% of their party affiliation is Republican. That’s why they are raging at the nasty guy on social media. Rambler797 then included a tweet by Curtis Namba:

Hey Truckers! Remember when diesel was so cheap under Biden you would caravan to DC waving your stupid Trump banners?

Nerd heaven? Mandalit del Barco of NPR reported on the opening of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles. Yeah, that’s George Lucas, creator of Star Wars. Of course, there is a great deal about Star Wars inside, but there is also a great deal that isn’t. There are reproductions of the Sistine Chapel ceiling and other world heritage sites. One gallery has a large collection of Normal Rockwell paintings.

But most of the collection is original work that Lucas says is often overlooked in the art world, including comics, Japanese manga, children's book illustrations, and pulp magazine covers.

He’s making a branch of the government obsolete

Lisa Needham of Daily Kos reported the nasty guy has come up with a method to keep paying members of the military, Border Patrol, Customs and Border Protection, and ICE during the shutdown. He didn’t like the look of soldiers going to foodbanks or, as Needham describes them, he wants to keep his favorite fascists happy. So he came up with a way to do that. All other federal workers don’t get paid during the shutdown and the nasty guy has been talking about refusing to give them back pay. Needham also wrote:

The New York Times headline writers are not meeting the moment at all, reporting this as Trump “expanding his authority” to spend federal money without Congress. This is not a thing. The president doesn’t have this authority. There’s nothing for him to expand. This is just sheer lawlessness where Trump is singlehandedly deciding how all tax dollars are spent. It’s from the same playbook as his idea of taking the revenue he got from singlehandedly imposing illegal tariffs, and illegally shuffling it over to farmers, who are being hurt by … his illegal tariffs. Gotta keep them voting Republican!

The NYT also fails by implying his expanding authority is a good thing. News stories I’ve heard are about farmers who are glad for a possible bailout but that won’t cover the loss of markets because of the tariffs. They’d rather have the markets. John Stoehr of the Editorial Board says this way of paying the troops is bad. The nasty guy is doing two bad things with the government’s money. The first he’s been doing since the start of this term, which is called impoundment. That means not spending the money Congress appropriated and is against the law. The Republicans who control Congress essentially said that’s fine with us. The big rescission package approved last summer merely confirmed what the nasty guy was already doing. That impoundment got worse after the shutdown started because the nasty guy used “ideological targeting” – withholding $27 billion from Democratic districts. This move to pay the troops after the start of the shutdown is the second money thing the nasty guy is doing. The money Congress designated for one purpose he is now using for another purpose. This is “a violation of the Article 1, Section 9, Clause 7 of the US Constitution, which was written to make sure the people don’t lose control of their money.” The Antideficiency Act reinforced that Constitutional clause by saying, as Stoehr summarized, “it’s a felony for anyone in government to spend any money on anything that’s not approved by the Congress.” This adds to the understanding the nasty guy views the Constitution and law as a suggestion he may ignore. It also means he views blue states and cities as sources of income to be extracted as he controls their population. If he can refuse to spend money on things Congress tells him to spend it on and spends money on things Congress didn’t designate, then he doesn’t need Congress. He’s made a branch of the government obsolete. Any court that says no to the nasty guy will see its decision appealed to the Supremes. Because they are corrupt they will not stop this crime. Republicans in Congress, meaning Congress through official action, will not stop this crime and will not try to reclaim their power of the purse. Which means the remedy can only come from Democrats. The nasty guy has also put them in the position that if they make a deal with him to end the shutdown they become complicit in these crimes. I hope they recognize that because of these crimes any deal they make he will override. How can Democrats wield the power to force the nasty guy to face the consequences of these crimes? Alas, Stoehr doesn’t know exactly. Though the part he does know involves the people understanding this crime which seems obscure and right now leads to the good thing of troops being paid. And it involves the people continuing to protest. Max Burns of Kos wrote about other aspects of the crime. Things like, “unpaid troops will quickly lose their patience with [Trump’s] destructive shutdown antics.” And Republican senators griped because the reasons he gives for being able to pay the troops during the shutdown keep changing. Another aspect of the crime is the nasty guy saying he can divert the money the government collected through his illegal tariffs to pay the farmers hurt by those tariffs. Or maybe he’ll divert to maintain food assistance for pregnant women, mothers, and young children. Again, doing that without Congressional authorization is illegal.

It’s easy to imagine Trump ramping up tariffs simply to swell a war chest he alone oversees, free of congressional oversight and used solely to advance his personal goals. $10 billion to ICE for the purchase of military weaponry? Done. No purpose is too self-interested or shady in a system where Trump controls the purse strings of a parallel government treasury. ... Trump’s latest federal shutdown has offered him yet another testing ground for the unconstitutional power grabs that define his second term. His administration has made clear it intends to press forward unless Congress or the courts stop them.

In the pundit roundup for Kos from Monday, ten days ago Greg Dworkin included a pair of tweets. First from NewsWire, a headline:

U.S. BEEF PRICES SOAR TO ALL-TIME HIGH

Response from scary lawyerguy

If you doubt the media bias *in Trump's favor* consider that this general topic (food prices) was covered obsessively under Biden and used by the media to take down his presidency and is now barely mentioned and when it is, no blame is put on Trump for what's happening.

In response to a tweet quoting Mike Johnson saying Republicans the ones fixing healthcare, see the Big Brutal Bill, Jesse Ferguson tweeted:

This bill was... - The largest cut to Medicaid in American history - seniors in nursing homes, kids health care - Over 500 rural hospitals are in jeopardy of closing - 1-in-4 nursing homes say they may have to close The GOP calls that "fixing health care"

Anat Shenker-Osorio of Weekend Reading discussed pollingism, the belief that a political race can be mapped because voters make decisions based on conscious preferences, those preferences are discernible by polls, and winning in polls can translate to winning in the real world. An alternative view sees voters with opinions that change with relationships and societal discourse. Repeated comments of family, trusted messengers, and persistent media narratives change opinion. The author calls this magnetism. That means the politician must establish the right conversation, to be attractive. One must have a cause to draw people and do so from a place from broadly shared values, not prejudices.

In short, the first step to winning an election is making it about what you can win on. Strategic campaigns begin with the question: How do I force the issues and conversations that most benefit my side to the fore?

In the comments a tweet by Will Saletan quoted and provided a link to an article in The Bulwark:

To bring a democracy under authoritarian control, you need more than a strongman. You need politicians who will assure the public, as we slide toward one-man rule, that nothing odd is happening. That’s the role Johnson is playing in Trump’s takeover.

Meidas Touch tweeted a quote from a source he didn’t identify:

JD Vance lied repeatedly on Sunday shows with his trademark smug insufferability. Trump lies like a huckster televangelist – like he knows he’s trying to con you with obvious bs so he keeps checking to see if you are buying it and can’t believe his luck that so many are. Mike Johnson lies with a monotone smooth sliminess that reminds me of the character Kevin Spacey played in The Usual Suspects. But Vance tells preposterous lies with a tone of indignancy if you dare suggest that he might be full of s---.

Yesterday I heard Johnson complain that Democrats want to prosecute the nasty guy for everything he does. I wanted to shout through my radio to say that’s because everything he does is a crime. In last Saturday’s roundup Dworkin included a tweet by Ronald Brownstein.

The #NoKingsOct18 website lists ~65 (!) separate events across Southern California alone. @SpeakerJohnson has stamped all of those people as anti-American. It's his "deplorables" moment, tho it hasn't sparked anything like the media attn HRC faced. Why's that any less of a slur?

No broken laws? Prosecute anyway.

Back in April I complained about emergency alerts being sent to my phone. I was alerted to: Thunderstorms that died out before reaching me. An explosion that happened ten miles away and the alert sent two hours later, which reached me at 6 am. I was not alerted to thunderstorms that hit and were quite strong, one setting off the city’s emergency sirens. I rated the service 0-4. I haven’t gotten any alerts since then. Jennifer Berry Hawes, in an article for ProPublica posted on Daily Kos discussed the federal Integrated Public Alert and Warning System that isn’t getting much use by local officials.

ProPublica identified at least 15 federally declared major disasters since 2016 in which officials in the most-harmed communities failed to send alerts over IPAWS — or sent them only after people were already in the throes of deadly flooding, wildfires or mudslides.

Hawes describes several of those incidents. Reasons why IPAWS isn’t used include insufficient training, insufficient money to connect to the IPAWS system, a variety of other alert systems – none of which get used effectively, fear that the alert would be broadcast too widely and cause traffic jams, fear of sending out alerts to something that might be of no consequence prompting residents to ignore future alerts, or the authorized user for a community is home in bed. So I guess my phone is a part of the IPAWS system (perhaps all phones are) and the Detroit authorities are struggling to figure out how to use it effectively. Back when I worked in IT for the auto industry several colleagues in the department were from India and on work visas. At the time I heard a lot about the H-1B visas used by many tech employers. These were visas held by the employer, which meant the worker was tied to that employer. That meant if the employer was displeased the worker would be sent to their country of origin. That also meant the employer could pay well below what they would have to pay an American worker. H-1B visas are still around and are back in the news. The nasty guy wants to limit the use of these visas as part of his efforts to limit immigration. So he added a $100K fee (followed by confusion on when the fee would apply). Tech companies are bitching and moaning, but most can afford to pay, or hire Americans. Or use code written by AI (a quarter of code already is). Kos of Kos reports the places that can’t afford the fees are rural hospitals. Many doctors there are immigrants on H-1B visas. Its also an area the federal government designates as short on primary care doctors and an area likely to be hit when the Big Brutal Bill’s Medicaid cuts happen. Many rural areas may lose their only doctor. Kos also discussed the nasty guy’s shift away from Russia and towards Ukraine. He tweeted that Ukraine could, with help from NATO, push Russia completely out. Kos works through all the details of this change in position. The question is: Why? Kos answered:

The irony is that Russian dictator Vladimir Putin once had Trump in the palm of his hand. Flattery and promises of a Nobel Peace Prize could have helped him starve Ukraine into submission. But Putin, too arrogant to debase himself and suck up to Trump the way other world leaders did, may have overplayed his hand. And that arrogance might ultimately help doom him. What a crazy twist.

In Thursday’s pundit roundup for Kos Chitown Kev quoted Paul Krugman comparing the nasty guy to Putin and Hungary’s Victor Orban and their grabs for autocratic rule.

Trump has a significant problem that neither Putin nor Orban faced. When Putin and Orban were consolidating their autocratics (sic), they were genuinely popular. They were perceived by the public as effective and competent leaders. Just nine months into his presidency, Trump, by contrast, is deeply unpopular. He is increasingly seen as chaotic and inept. As David Frum says, this means that he is in a race against time. Can he consolidate power before he loses his aura of inevitability? Will those who run major institutions – particularly corporate CEOs – understand that we are at a crucial juncture, and that by accommodating Trump they have more to lose than by standing up to him? To put it bluntly, is the Jimmy Kimmel affair the harbinger of a failed Trumpian putsch?

Oh, I wish! Yes, Kimmel is back on the air with a lot more people watching his returning monologue than watched the show before it was suspended. Thank you, nasty guy. In the news this week is the nasty guy demanding James Comey and Letitia James be prosecuted by the Department of Justice though there is no evidence of actual crimes. In the comments of the roundup are a pair of tweets. The first by Spencer Hakimian quoting an exchange with the White House Press Secretary:

Reporter: Why won't Trump accept the conclusions of his Justice Department to not bring charges against Letitia James? Leavitt: These people literally tried to ruin his life. He wants to see accountability.

Sarah Longwell responded:

This isn’t just weaponizing the DOJ. It’s inventing crimes. His already weaponized DOJ is saying there’s nothing they can do to prosecute because Letitia James didn’t break any laws. And Trump is saying prosecute anyway, I have a score to settle.

A meme posted by DefendOurConstitution shows a boy with a skeptical expression.

So me, wearing a bulletproof backpack to school with metal detectors, armed guards and routine mass-shooter drills is “the price of freedom”... But you, wearing a mask on Walmart for 10 minutes is “tyranny”?

In Friday’s roundup Greg Dworkin included a tweet by Abbie Richards talking about measles misinformation. She includes a link to more on Media Matters.

If you sow enough doubt and fear and confusion, you can sell more supplements to "bulletproof" your followers immune systems against measles.

Will Bunch tweeted an intro to an article he wrote for the Philadelphia Inquirer about TV stations that are not locally owned.

Folks had no idea who owns their local TV stations - until large, faceless corporations, Sinclair and Nexstar, said they can't watch Jimmy Kimmel because of politics. This is why they've been warning us: media consolidation is a threat to democracy.

Greg Sargent at The New Republic:

Now that Disney and ABC have bucked President Trump’s authoritarian censorship regime and reinstated comedian Jimmy Kimmel’s show, MAGA personalities are in a seething fury. They’re claiming the move insults Charlie Kirk’s memory—Kimmel’s original sin concerned a poorly timed quote about Kirk’s murder—and that this shows Disney hates MAGA’s rank and file. As one influential MAGA figure put it to her followers: “DISNEY LOATHES YOU.”

From Bloomberg:

Epstein was drawn to what he saw as the finest things in life. The substantial wealth he acquired after leaving Bear Stearns in 1981 to advise the ultrarich afforded him a Boeing 727, one of Manhattan’s largest townhouses and his own Caribbean island. And when his own hour of terror dawned in 2005, following a tip to police in Palm Beach County from the family of a teenage girl, he didn’t rely on just one champion or defender, his inbox shows, but a collection of elite professionals. Though lawyers, academics and media advisers helped him in different ways and to different extents, his network included past and future White House officials, a top Hollywood publicist, a former child-exploitation prosecutor and renowned researchers, including one on his way to winning a Nobel Prize. That support for Epstein—who harmed more than 1,000 people, according to the US Justice Department—came when he needed it most. The professionals who surrounded Epstein defended and deflected, coached and countermessaged, burnished and polished. Together, they helped extend Epstein’s influence and freedom, even lending an air of invincibility. His reckoning was postponed until 2019, when federal prosecutors charged him with trafficking minors. Weeks later, he was found dead in jail in New York City awaiting trial.

From NBC News:

Whether she intended it or not, the 39-year-old [MI state senator Mallory] McMorrow started a trend of Democratic outsiders end-running party leaders to launch their campaigns, sometimes in explicit opposition to them. The movement is fueled by a crisis of confidence among Democratic voters in their own party, which is giving encouragement to the types of nontraditional candidates who have been walloped by leadership-aligned rivals in the past. Altogether, ahead of the 2026 midterm elections, the moves have created a number of crowded and competitive-looking Democratic Senate primaries — contests that have often seen party leaders leap in to anoint favorites in recent years. Democratic angst following the loss to President Donald Trump last year has contributed to the trend in at least five races that could determine the majority, from core battlegrounds like Michigan and Maine to long-shot targets like Iowa and Texas.

A pair of tweets, first from Ken Klippenstein:

Chuck Schumer says "even though Democrats' numbers are low," that's fine because they're still higher than that of Republicans. "In a couple of the races where we have the two candidates, we win!"

Lis Smith responded:

With all due respect, this is simply not it. GOP numbers declining doesn't mean Dems will necessarily benefit- polls show that loud & clear. Democrats MUST improve their standing w/the American people & can only do that by putting forth a compelling vision of their own.

I’ve been hearing about the nasty guy threatening to fire, not furlough, federal employees if there is no budget deal and the government has to shut down. I’ve also been hearing about the response from Democrats. This is what Politico wrote about that:

Among the Democrats still standing firm against a Republican-led seven-week funding punt include those representing many of thousands public employees who would be most at risk if President Donald Trump and OMB director Russ Vought follow through on their threats. “Whether there’s a shutdown or not, they just keep firing government employees,” said Rep. Glenn Ivey, who represents part of Washington’s Maryland suburbs. “I don’t know that capitulating on this front slows that down. In fact, it might actually encourage them to think that they can stay on the track that they’re currently on.” Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland called the threats “mafia-style blackmail” in a statement, adding that the potential layoffs are “likely illegal.” Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia said, “For Trump, people’s lives and livelihoods are just bargaining chips.”

In the comments is a tweet from David Frum with a link to his article in The Atlantic. Alas, the full article is restricted to subscribers.

Trump hates Comey because Comey's FBI investigated Trump's Russia connections. But Trump *indicted* Comey not just for payback. Trump is testing whether he can misuse prosecutions to pervert the 2026 elections.

Oliver Willis of Kos discussed why conservatives hate free speech as part of his series on explaining the right. And I think he got it right. After citing several instances of attempts at limiting speech Willis wrote:

Conservatism has a serious problem when it comes to competing in an open war of ideas. Many conservative priorities, like racism and economic policies bent around the desires of the ultra-wealthy, are not popular with the public at large. To allow an open exchange of ideas is to allow for the chance that liberalism and the Democratic Party might succeed. Instead, conservatives have sought to rig the system. In an electoral sense, that has led to policies like gerrymandering congressional districts, redrawing borders to ensure Republicans win seats even in areas where Democrats would have a plurality or majority in a fair system. The same practice is being borne out by the right’s crusade against the First Amendment. If ideas they don’t like are banned from public discourse, the right “wins” arguments by default. Not only does attacking speech change the rules to favor the right, but it undermines the foundation of the United States. The Revolutionary War and the subsequent drafting of the Constitution and the ratification of the Bill of Rights were meant to protect America. Battles like World War II were fought to defend the continued existence of those rights against the threat of fascism. Hundreds of thousands of people died defending those rights.

America has grown too comfortable with violence and cruelty

The national handbell seminar begins tomorrow. I’m not attending in person. Even so, it will be livestreaming three concerts a day starting with one tomorrow evening. The concerts will feature a selection of the best handbell performers. I don’t know how much this will affect my blogging time. I may post regularly or I may not post again until Sunday or Monday. Lisa Needham of Daily Kos reported that 144 employees of the Environmental Protection Agency sent a letter to administrator Lee Zeldin objecting to new agency policies. Another letter in March complained of the illegal dismantling of core agency functions. In response to the latest letter Zeldin put all who signed (some were anonymous) on leave. This is a violation of First Amendment rights of free speech. Needham spent much of the rest of the article explaining in what cases employees do and don’t have free speech rights. In this case they clearly do. What caught my attention in this article is the last few paragraphs:

Trump treats the presidency like an extension of his person, and his Cabinet has adopted that same framing: People voted for Trump, which means they preapproved anything he chooses to do. Any disagreement, therefore, means you are not respecting the will of the voters. It isn’t surprising, with that mindset, that the administration is coming for the free speech rights of public employees. After all, how dare they speak out against Dear Leader? Just because the GOP has signed on to Trump’s cult of personality doesn’t mean that federal workers have to do so as well.

Brett Kelman, in an article for KFF Health News posted on Kos a month ago, reported many American doctors are moving to Canada. One big reason is because, as Kelman paraphrased one of the doctors, “Too much of America has simply grown too comfortable with violence and cruelty.” There are a lot of reasons inside the big one. The nasty guy becoming more authoritarian. The deep cuts to Medicaid. Appointing Robert Kennedy Jr. to lead and dismantle federal health agencies. On the other side of the border, applications to be licensed in Canada has increased more than 750% in the last seven months compared to a year ago. Some are saying they are moving specifically because of the nasty guy. Also, Canadian provinces have relaxed some licensing regulations in recent years to allow easier migration. A Canadian physician recruiting company said they saw a 65% increase in inquiries from January to April and is now contacted by up to 15 American doctors a day. Another company helps doctors to get licensed in other foreign nations. They had previously worked with doctors with wanderlust, seeking adventure. Now it is more intentional about getting out of the US. Doctors who have made the move feel less stress, do less paperwork, and have no fear of burying patients in medical debt. And in the US we already don’t have enough doctors. When Musk slashed his way through federal agency personnel some of the talk was we’ll just replace all those workers with AI. Some of the most vocal people, like Musk, have shown they are anti-human and would rather deal with technology. So a month ago Needham reported that two AI tools have been installed at the Food and Drug Administration. And both of them suck. FDA Commissioner Martin Makary gushed over the new tools, as did Jin Liu, deputy director for Drug Evaluation Sciences. One of the tools isn’t connected to anything – like medical journals or even other computers – so it can’t manage basic tasks. The other was asked questions about publicly available information and answered incorrectly. We may get half-baked AI anyway. Also from a month ago Needham discussed another way the nasty guy is threatening universities. It is telling the organizations that do the accrediting that universities are in violation of federal anti-discrimination laws. In Needhan’s example the nasty guy claims Columbia doesn’t meet the standards for accreditation because of the way it treated Jewish students. The threat – the Notice of Violation – includes no information on what Columbia needs to do to comply. There are only the threats if it doesn’t. Columbia is finding out that although it bent the knee to the nasty guy it will still be attacked. It can’t do enough to stop the attacks (except maybe cease operations).

The government doesn’t accredit any school and therefore can’t yank any accreditation. The federal government does certify accreditors, but while it's likely that the leftover remains of the Department of Education could approve new accreditors, getting rid of the existing ones isn’t that easy. These are vague, meaningless attacks that don’t have a lot to do with the actual requirements for certification of accreditors. As the Council of Regional Accrediting Commissions explained in a statement about Trump’s executive order, the Higher Education Act establishes due process requirements for recognition of accreditors, including reviews from multiple offices within the Department of Education. And it included a pointed reminder that “concerns about accreditor recognition can be escalated to federal court.”

There’s another reason why the nasty guy is attacking the accreditors. They were a big part of the demise of Trump University. In the comments of a pundit roundup on Kos Paul Fell posted a cartoon shows a waiter has delivered a dead bird, type unknown but definitely not appetizing. The customer says, “Waiter! This isn’t what I ordered!” The waiter holds up a sign saying “2024 election” and says, “Wanna bet?” Fell added:

As Americans keep finding out all the disastrous, cruel, & frankly anti-American things Trump & Republicans are doing, even MAGAts are saying this isn't what they voted for. Don't believe them. This is *exactly* what they voted for.

A meme related to the devastating Texas flood posted by exlrrp shows a photo of the president of Mexico. Below it is the text:

Mexico’s president just sent rescue teams to Texas. After all the hate. After all the anti-immigrant policies. After all the racism towards brown people. She still helped. She still showed up. She still did the right thing. To a red state that wouldn’t do the same for her. That’s leadership. That’s power. That’s a woman.

I’ve written about Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene claiming that Democrats can control the weather and that it must stop. Fiona Webster posted a cartoon by Lalo Alcaraz titled “Weather Control Machine” and showing a truck labeled “Big Oil” that is spewing a lot of pollution.

They built the wrecking ball now swinging at them

Myriam-Fernanda Alcala Delgado, in an article for Capital & Main posted on Daily Kos, discussed the Los Angeles volunteer organization Unión del Barrio. The group got their start in 1992 after the beating of Rodney King. They are a community patrol network to monitor law enforcement activity that might be dangerous to residents in vulnerable neighborhoods. These days they monitor ICE. Volunteers look for cars with tinted windows and masked license plates. They patrol neighborhoods looking for ICE. They also respond to tips about current ICE activity. They do some verification before issuing public alerts. They are very careful to keep to the speed limit and obey all traffic signs. They don’t want ICE or law enforcement a reason to stop and engage with them. Sometimes ICE leaves an area because they have lost the element of surprise. But ICE is changing tactics in response to volunteer patrols. Instead of morning operations ICE shifted to later in the day when volunteers are at work. They have also started using decoys – one ICE vehicle leads patrols one way while ICE operations go another. The group got a letter from Sen. Josh Hawley saying they are supporting civil unrest and aiding criminal conduct. The letter demands they “cease and desist.” Unión del Barrio says the letter is simple intimidation and won’t stop them. Carrie Levine, in an article for Votebeat posted on Kos, talked about an executive order involving new rules for voting machines. From this article I didn’t figure out whether the new rules promoted the nasty guy, promoted democracy, or were impartial. The article is more about the problems implementing the new rules. From what I can figure out, one problem is that federal accredited laboratories have not yet certified voting machines to the new standards, which can take years. In the meantime, the current standards are quite good and lead to accurate results. But devious actors can say the current machines don’t meet the new standards, spreading doubt on the election results. Another problem is the move to the new standard does not come with money to make that happen. Replacing voting equipment can cost millions. A while back I talked about ways authoritarians stay in power. One way is to hold elections that the opposition party is well represented on the ballot but just can’t seem to ever win. Thom Hartmann of the Kos community and an independent pundit wrote an essay in response to words by James Carville. Carville warned that as the nasty guy sees a decisive Republican loss in the coming 2026 midterms he may try something extreme to hold onto power. Hartmann is equally concerned, but doesn’t think the extreme action will be martial law or a national emergency. Instead, according to journalist Greg Palast, a Great Purge will be enough. The purge has been authorized by five corrupt conservatives on the Supreme Court. It involves scrubbing names from voter rolls. One part is removing names and Hartmann lists several ways that is happening. Another part is the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act introduced by Republicans (who else?). One provision is if the name on the birth certificate is different from the passport or driver’s license a person can’t register (or reregister). The biggest group this affects is married women who take their husband’s last name. Others affected are transgender. The other half of the problem is that most Americans don’t have a birth certificate readily available or know where it is. The reason for the law is a racist myth. There are claims that millions of undocumented immigrants vote. When dedicated sleuths work to uncover evidence of that claim they can produce in court they come up empty, while defendants can show similar state laws prevent thousands of legal voters from voting. These tactics go back to before the 2000 election. In that one George Bush II was able to claim victory in Florida, and thus the White House, because his brother Jeb, governor of Florida at the time, had purged tens of thousands of black voters from the rolls. Republicans continue to use purging because it works. “That’s not election security. That’s systemic suppression.” And it happens before a vote is cast. If it doesn’t work? There is always ICE, answerable only to the nasty guy and with a growing number of concentration camps to use. Kos of Kos wrote that two Alaskan lawmakers, one a Republican, wrote a hand-wringing op-ed in the New York Times about the Big Brutal Bill with the headline, “Alaska cannot survive this bill.” Kos lists the horrors of the bill – lost health coverage, food assistance, school funding, and more. The nasty guy campaigned on all that carnage. And 54% of Alaskans voted for him anyway. Strange that the small-government crowd is the most dependent on assistance from the government. The state’s politicians, Sen. Lisa Murkowski in this case, scramble to shield their constituents from the cuts the citizens voted for. The pattern is getting old.

So, yes, Alaska is right to be scared. The bill will devastate them. But they aren’t innocent. They helped build the wrecking ball—and now they’re shocked to find it swinging in their direction. Actions have consequences.

In Saturday’s pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin had several quotes worth mentioning. Norm Ornstein of The Contrarian talked about how Democrats were tripped up when the nasty guy’s campaign was able to cast several issues in terms of fairness. There was a female swimmer who tied for fifth place with a transgender swimmer, but got the sixth place trophy. Another case was student loan forgiveness that was portrayed as unfair to those who had worked hard to pay off their student loans.

Democrats who did not want to sacrifice anyone for temporary political advantage supported trans athletes as a matter of fairness and decency were easy to portray as being too woke to recognize the perceived unfairness.

Matt Fuller tweeted a link to a story on Notus and wrote:

That letter from 16 vulnerable House Republicans — about how they won't vote for the Senate's Medicaid cuts — is a pretty crazy read today. Everyone on this letter voted for the bill.

Paul Waldman of The Cross Section also talked about Republicans and the Big Brutal Bill:

So why are they doing this? One can certainly imagine a less radical version of this bill, one that moved in the same direction but not so far and fast, much as the legislation they passed in Trump’s first term did. That kind of bill might not be a political winner, but it wouldn’t be such a huge loser either. Why not go that route? They’re not giving away their shot [not quite the Hamilton lyric] The answer is that this isn’t about the politics, it’s about the substance. You don’t like weather-vane politicians, always checking the polls to see how they should vote? Well here you go. They are willing to take the political risk, even the certainty of future defeat, because they believe so strongly in what this bill does. They despise Medicaid and have contempt for everyone who uses it. The same goes for SNAP, aka food stamps. They desperately want to cut taxes for the wealthy, and always have. They don’t just want to roll back Biden-era climate policies, they want to destroy the entire green energy and manufacturing sectors of the economy. ... That’s just part of what’s in the bill, but the point is that this is the fulfillment of their fondest policy wishes. If it costs them their House majority and maybe even their Senate majority as well (a long shot, but not impossible), they’re willing to do it. Because they believe in it.

I’m on the email lists for Demand Progress and Move On. Both are very good at sending me frequent emails about the latest outrage from the nasty guy (and there are lots). All of them ask for money. Some ask me to sign a petition first, though I’ve gotten no feedback on whether any of the petitions have been effective – from what the nasty guy and Republicans are doing they probably aren’t. I also get letters from various prominent Democrats as well as the national committees, all asking for money. I get texts on my phones from Democratic candidates around the country hoping I would be a part of their team (as in donating money). So this tweet from Dan Pfeiffer resonated:

I understand the short term incentives involved, but the fact that every bad thing that Trump does is immediately followed by 1000 fundraising texts from every person in the Democratic Party has some long term consequences for the party’s relationship with its base.

In the comments ResJudicata22 posted a cartoon by Drew Sheneman. A MAGA man says, “Gender-Affirming care is unnatural!” Around him words point to various parts of his body, words such as, “Hair plugs, Beard coloring, Viagra,” and for his shoes, “Lifts.” Tracy posted another cartoon by Sheneman. This one shows the nasty guy telling young kids, “I’m cutting your school lunch program to pay for tax cuts and bombs. If you’re hungry, join the Army.” Another commenter noted that lowest level Army pay is below a living wage. In the comments of Sunday’s roundup Rented Mule posted a meme:

I didn’t grow up reciting “with liberty and justice for all” every morning at 7 am just to be called radical for actually wanting liberty and justice for ALL.

A cartoon posted by thendis-nye, creator unknown, shows a man on the phone as out the window is a formal garden with a fountain. The man says:

They’re all gone!? My pool’s dirty! Who’s going to cook for me and clean my house? Who will trim the hedges and take care of the estate grounds!? No one told me this would affect me!

And a cartoon by Garth German show a man with elephants:

Man: Why should we spend $60 billion to help Ukraine?! Elephants: Yeah! Damn Straight! Man: Think of all we could to if we spent that $60 billion helping Americans instead! Elephants: (uproarious laughter) Elephant1: This guy thinks we’ll spend money to help Americans... Elephant12: Hee Hee Elephant3: Here’s the plan to cut Medicaid, Social Security, and SNAP.

In today’s roundup Dworkin included a tweet by Melanie D’Arrigo that quoted a tweet by Aaron Rupar. First Rupar, referring to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, billionaire.

Bessent on Medicaid cuts: "The able-bodied Americans are not vulnerable Americans ... people can get off Medicaid and get a job that has good healthcare benefits ... I don't think poor people are stupid. I think they have agency."

D’Arrigo adds:

30% of American jobs do not offer health benefits, and 49% of employed workers can't afford healthcare without going into debt. Every American is a vulnerable American when healthcare is restricted, tied to employment, and for-profit.

Republicans can con voters, but not the bond market

The big beautiful (actually quite ugly) federal budget bill passed the House. It’s got a great deal of the nasty guy’s agenda rolled into it. The nasty guy was on Capitol Hill on Tuesday to twist arms (and I hear the holdouts voted “present” instead of yes). Emily Singer of Daily Kos reported the big, well known items in the bill are cuts to Medicaid (expected to cause 13.7 million people to lose health insurance) and SNAP (cutting 11 million from food assistance). There is a lot more to the bill, much of it opposed by the American people. To keep many of those details from the public – and members of Congress – the bill this big was pushed way too fast and the last few sessions were done overnight. At the end of the visit Capitol Hill the nasty guy said:

We're not doing any cutting of anything meaningful. The only thing we're cutting is waste, fraud, and abuse. With Medicaid—waste, fraud, and abuse. There's tremendous waste, fraud, and abuse. ... We have illegal aliens that are multiple killers, with multiple murder records, getting Medicaid.

A couple things about that statement: If you don’t like bad people getting Medicaid you can change the eligibility requirements without taking Medicaid away from those who desperately need it. You certainly know how to change requirements because you just changed them – by adding work requirements, which results in people losing coverage, not because they aren’t working but because the reporting requirements are so difficult and time consuming they may miss work and lose the job they’re required to have. “Anything meaningful... waste, fraud, and abuse” – depends on your definition of “meaningful” and “waste.” Republicans have shown over and over that poor people are not meaningful to them – they have shown how much they hate poor people. And from the perspective of a rich person giving anything to the poor is “waste.” In Monday’s pundit roundup on Kos Greg Dworkin had a couple quotes about this bill. From Jonathan Cohn of The Bulwark

But the focus on the delays can be a bit of a distraction. Because right now the real question is not why the Republicans are moving so slowly but why they are moving so quickly—and what they don’t want you to see… But, then, there’s reason to believe GOP leaders are trying their best not to make the legislation’s true nature clear to members—or the public, for that matter. The polling on Medicaid cuts is clear: Voters oppose them strongly. GOP officials know this, which is why they have spent so much time denying they are making cuts to Medicaid—or, at least, framing them as a way to root out “waste, fraud, and abuse” and to strengthen the program for the “truly vulnerable.” But the longer the debate goes on, the more indefensible those claims look. Every passing day gives analysts more time to publish damning information, like these analyses showing coverage losses by state and congressional district. And the more this information gets out, the easier it is for organizations and activists to press their case.

What Dworkin included and I didn’t are links to analysis reports. Some of those are behind paywalls. Dworkin also included a tweet from Rolling Stone that links to an article that has this tagline: “Hospitals go out of business when Medicare and Medicaid are cut. Period.” LJ Slater posted a cartoon from Kevin Kallaugher. The left side has has the caption, “Robin Hood. Stole from the rich. Gave to the Poor.” The right side shows a masked elephant holding a family at gunpoint as the child puts the bag marked “Medicaid” into a much larger bag labeled “Tax cuts.” The caption says, “Robbing Hoodlum. Steals from the poor. Gives to the rich.” Bonds are been in the news lately and AmericanIdeal of the Kos community wrote a couple posts on why that is. I’ll try for a simple explanation. If bonds and economics are your thing, go ahead and enjoy the full articles. The first article was written on Monday. The author says the big ugly bill just passed by the House is a con. The nature of the con is that the tax cuts in the bill, expected to increase the national debt by $3.8 trillion will not have significant damage to the economy and government securities. Republicans can con voters, but they can’t con the bond market. Last Friday Moody’s became the last of the three major agencies that evaluate credit risk to downgrade US treasury bonds rating from AAA (the best) to AA-1. The last time all three had not rated treasuries the safest was 100 years ago. The author translates Moody’s announcement from economic speak into English:

In other words, no amount of phony DOGE cuts or “work requirements and revised eligibility standards” (e.g.: massive cuts to Medicaid) will offset the estimated $4 trillion of deficit growth caused by the Republicans’ A #1 goal of extending the tax cuts of 2017. Simply put, the bond markets aren’t having it.

They’re showing they’re not having it by selling US bonds in favor of safer and more predictable markets and by requiring higher interest rates when they do buy. Higher interest rates mean the government must pay more to pay back the bonds. The amount the government must spend each year to pay for the bonds has risen significantly over the last few years and will soon be unsustainable. Rising bond rates mean corporations must pay higher rates for the bonds they issue. And Americans also pay higher rates on mortgages. The second article on bonds was posted Wednesday. In that day’s bond market prices rose again.

Why does it matter? Mostly because bond market turmoil, especially as a result of international selling, would make it more difficult for the US to reliably repay the interest on its outstanding debt, an issue forming the basis of GOP hardliner opposition to passing another deficit increasing budget bill. It also lifts the pressure on corporations who need to borrow to refinance their own debt and/or make planned investments in infrastructure, technology, etc. While the equities market “bulls” and buy-and hold trading strategy stalwarts will continue to point to the fact that “extreme events come and go”, it has been over 100 years since the US Treasury wasn’t blessed with a pristine AAA rating from any of the major credit rating agencies. Should the “sell America” trade gripping the treasury markets take widespread hold after the big beautiful Bill passes, the US economy will likely be subject to a permanent existential restructuring forced by global monetary decisions. This isn’t small, or inconsequential, nor is it just another political debate.

Last Sunday Barbara Rodriguez of The 19th, in an article posted on Kos, explained how the work requirements added to Medicaid will force people to lose health insurance. I’ll let you read the details. I’ll mentioned something I noticed. Sometimes Republicans describe their reasons for work requirements with the words “capable adults who choose not to work.” That’s not an accurate description because most already work. Others replace the first two words with “young” and “able-bodied” and “men.” That’s a big misdirection because most of the people who will lose health insurance are women. In today’s pundit roundup Chitown Kev had a couple quotes worth mentioning. Jamelle Bouie of the New York Times wrote about the war for the soul of America and its four theaters of conflict. I’ll summarize the list: One: The nasty guy is waging war on constitutional government, replacing it with himself. Two: The MAGA movement is waging war on the nation’s economic future by effectively closing borders and becoming an inpenetrable fortress. But that means Americans will have to leave service industries for manufacturing. Three: A pitched battle against a sustainable climate future. Four: The MAGA movement’s assault on the nation’s ability to produce scientific, technological and medical breakthroughs. Kev added:

Remember that an “impenetrable fortress” might be designed to keep others outside of the walls but it also functions to keep inhabitants within the fortress walls. Trump will grift for the drawbridge tolls.

Kev quoted Timothy Snyder, writing for his own Substack and talking about Ed Martin. His nomination was recently withdrawn (I don’t remember why or for what) and he is now given the title of “weaponization czar” – weaponizing the legal system to bring people into line. Snyder wrote:

He has done more visible work for the Russian state television than for any other institution. Martin, in other words, has already been part of one weaponized legal system for some time. His American career as "weaponization czar" is a natural second step of his Russian career as apologist for both Russian and American weaponizers and authoritarians. Between 2016 and 2024, Martin was a star of both RT and Sputnik, which are propaganda arms of the Russian state. Putin himself has made this completely clear. One of the central missions of RT and Sputnik is to weaken the standing and power of the United States. Anyone who goes on RT or Sputnik, as Martin did more than a hundred times, knows what he is doing. For eight years, on any issue of the day, Martin was there to spread mendacious propaganda about Americans and to defend Putin and Trump. His Russian work surpassed any media exposure in the United States.

“Weaken the standing and power of the United States...” Republicans and the nasty guy seem to be doing a pretty good job of that. And who benefits is Putin. In a third pundit roundup Dworkin quoted Philip Bump of the Washington Post:

The Trump administration is aware that Americans broadly support the deportation of undocumented immigrants who have committed violent crimes. Rather than using it as the basis for deporting violent immigrants, though, the administration often works backward: Knowing that Americans want to see violent criminals sent out of the country, it sends people out of the country, while arguing that they were violent criminals. There is a dangerous catch-22 at play. The government reserves the right to scoop people up and send them to foreign prisons, but, by ignoring due process, reserves for itself the ability to determine whether that treatment is warranted.

Elsewhere in the article Bump explains the rights immigrants and citizens have when facing ICE. Earlier this week Michigan Public had reports about the Environmental Protection Agency giving an all-clear on the Flint, Michigan water crisis. This removed the Safe Drinking Water Act emergency order. The crisis began eleven years ago when Flint water was shifted from the Detroit water system to the Flint River and insufficient water treatment and safeguards were not put in place. Lead and other contaminants leeched into the water. That’s about all Michigan Public said. Alix Breeden of Kos reported more. Benjamin Pauli is a Flint resident and chair of the city’s Water System Advisory Council. He’s not pleased with the EPA’s withdrawal. The council worked to create “institutional arrangements that allow residents to raise concerns effectively and receive meaningful follow up.” That’s needed because residents’ trust in government is still shaky and the water system still has issues that need to be addressed. But the EPA’s all-clear also removed major funding for the council. Now Pauli is afraid that citizens will be portrayed as anti-science or just determined to be victims. Pauli had also been on “the EPA’s National Environmental Justice Advisory Council, which provided recommendations to the EPA for the nation’s underserved communities.” But NEJAC got axed because it was seen as DEI. Alex Samuels of Kos wrote about the nasty guy fuming over celebrity endorsements, as in Beyoncé, Bono, Oprah, and Bruce Springsteen supporting Harris over himself. The recent tantrums and demands for investigations appear to be because public filings show the Harris campaign paid the celebrity production companies, a normal expense of campaigning, and not a bribe given to the stars.

That Trump’s still throwing tantrums about celebrity endorsements nearly six months after winning the election is absurd. Stars backed Harris because they saw what Trump was offering and wanted no part of it. His demand for a federal investigation into a defeated opponent because Beyoncé endorsed her is far from oversight—it’s full-blown grievance politics. ... And with everything else on his plate, from court cases to crises, it’s anyone’s guess why Trump keeps picking fights with celebrities instead of focusing on, you know, governing. But one thing’s clear: Nothing triggers Trump more than being left out by the cool kids.

Instead impose fines later if anything goes awry

Lisa Needham of Daily Kos wrote about the Becerra v. Braidwood case to come before the Supreme Court. It challenges the constitutionality of preventive care requirements in the Affordable Care Act. These are things like testing for sexually transmitted diseases and coverage for PrEP, the drug that can prevent transmission of HIV, used by a lot of gay men. The case is brought by a company owned by Christian conservatives who don’t like STD testing and PrEP because they are “complicit in facilitating homosexual behavior.” Conservatives are attacking the ACA in court (they failed in Congress) with a two part plan. First, try to overturn people getting basic health care. Second, overturn mandating coverage for things evangelicals object to. This case does both. The case has already been through the court of Judge Reed O’Connor of the Northern District of Texas. He was appointed by Bush II. He gave the plaintiffs everything they wanted and more. Here’s where it’s really a problem. O’Connor blocked all preventive care requirements for insurance plans.

So, no more zero-cost coverage of heart statins (drugs that lower cholesterol), lung cancer screenings, and drugs that reduce the risk of breast cancer. Physical therapy for older people to decrease falls? Gone. Prenatal nutritional supplements? Gone. Screening for depression? Gone.

The 5th Circuit Court, reliably conservative, agreed, though they said O’Connor’s ruling applies only to the conservative company that brought the suit, not to the nation as a whole. However, that’s an invitation for more companies to sue for the same ruling. So both parties requested the Supremes take the case.

Perhaps worst of all, the conservatives on the Supreme Court lack compassion. Justice Samuel Alito will not be swayed by the fact that preventive-care requirements help increase health equity, ensuring better outcomes for women of color. Justice Clarence Thomas will not be bothered by the fact that upholding O’Connor’s decision could eliminate nearly three-quarters of the ACA’s preventive care for women, infants, and children. Justice Amy Coney Barrett will not care if getting rid of PrEP coverage causes HIV rates to skyrocket. This case gives the conservative justices a chance to make life harder for people they hate while also making the work of government much more difficult. It’s hard to imagine they’ll pass up the opportunity to do just that.

Alex Samuels of Kos worked from a report from the Associated Press discussing career civil servants who work in the National Security Council, the people who do the work to make sure the nation is secure. These people are being scrutinized for their fealty to the nasty guy. As one might expect, many are quitting. That might be what the nasty guy wants. But that means the NSC will be understaffed, maybe for quite a while. And that leaves our national security exposed. Andrew Mangan of Kos wrote that the nasty guy’s desire to make Canada a US state would backfire. The reason is simple. While Canada has five parties represented in their Parliament, even the most conservative party would correspond to centrist Republicans with the rest further to the left. That means if they were a part of the US in the last election they would have added three times more votes for Harris than for the nasty guy. Canada has 41.5 million people, about two million more than California. That means it would get 48 House seats. Democrats would get 31 seats and Republicans 17, which would flip the chamber. Yeah, gerrymandering would balance that out a bit. As for the Senate, would all of Canada be one state? If so, Democrats would not flip the Senate. But if each province became a state that would be twenty more Democratic senators. Alix Breeden of Kos discussed the real reason why the nasty guy wants Greenland. He has said the US needs Greenland for national and economic security. That’s because...

Greenland is a treasure trove of minerals the U.S. needs to compete with China, and the island hasn’t been quick (enough) to fork them over. More specifically, Greenland has neodymium and dysprosium. These extremely rare elements—used for electric motors, wind turbines, and other electronics—are found in healthy amounts and lay widely untouched across Greenland. Thanks to climate change, the once iced-over minerals are now up for grabs. ... With Greenland’s minerals—not to mention their untapped oil resources—the U.S. would be able to rely less, or not at all, on China’s supply.

The nasty guy isn’t the only one trying to grab, though the locals are pretty good at giving the boot. China has tried, as have the UK, Canada, and US billionaires. Musk’s companies SpaceX and Tesla are well known. He has others, including The Boring Company, as in boring holes in the ground. Daniel Rothberg of ProPublica and Dayvid Figler of City Cast Las Vegas, in an article posted on Kos, did some research into that company. Musk proposed an idea, a way to reduce traffic. He would bore tunnels under a city and supply electric cars to whisk people through those tunnels. Sounds pretty sweet! But California said no. So did Illinois. And Baltimore/Washington. The reasons for the rejection is that Musk’s environmental impact studies were woefully inadequate. Finally, Las Vegas said yes. Well, the Convention and Visitors Authority did. They started with a loop under the Convention Center, a 0.8 mile route that opened in 2021. It’s a private project and receives no federal funding. There are plans for more later, perhaps 104 stations across 68 miles of tunnels under the city and to the airport.

The project is also realizing Musk’s notion of how government officials should deal with entrepreneurs: avoid lengthy reviews before building and instead impose fines later if anything goes awry. Musk’s views on regulatory power have taken on new significance in light of his close ties to President-elect Donald Trump and his role in a new effort to slash rules in the name of improving efficiency. The Las Vegas project, now well under way, is a case study of the regulatory climate Musk favors.

Impose fines later if anything goes awry? I hope you’re enough of an environmentalist to understand the gigantic flaw in that statement. Tunneling underground encounters groundwater. It may contain contaminates or the boring process may introduce them. Improper disposal of that water pollutes the disposal area. And cleaning up that contamination is much harder than preventing it. The consequences of “gone awry” can be quite severe. Its victims may be permanently harmed. Paying fines may not repair or compensate for the harm. That’s especially true if the company pays top lawyers to litigate the case to avoid paying the fine. I don’t intend to declare that all construction should be banned because someone or something might be harmed, perhaps severely. But we have environmental and workplace safety rules so that companies know the ways to reduce the harm, to learn from and understand the situations that have happened in the past and have a chance of happening now. Musk wants to avoid all those “regulations,” better understood as worker and environmental protections. Yeah, the boring encountered groundwater. And Musk is accused of handling it in ways that increase the damage. Boring workers have also filed complaints about other workplace hazards. Yet, Musk still has been working to circumvent oversight. Tunneling to the airport means complying with Federal Aviation Administration regulations and federal environmental reviews. So the company plans to end its tunnels perhaps a mile away. And that does nothing for congestion at the terminal – which better traditional mass transit could relieve. Even with the abysmal environmental record the Las Vegas City Council is still in favor of extending the tunnels. That’s because hotels are pleading for better ways to move the crowds around. Musk has the nasty guy’s ear. Musk wants to operate without consumer, worker, and environmental protections. Consumers, workers, and the environment will be harmed. He’ll work to block the fines. In the comments of a pundit roundup on Kos are several cartoons about how close Musk and other billionaires are to the nasty guy. And exlrrp posted a meme:

Musk’s Wealth 2012: $2 billion 2024: $447 billion Bezos’s Wealth 2012: $18 billion 2024: $249 billion Zuckerberg’s Wealth 2012: $44 billion 2024: $224 billion USA Minimum Wage 2009: $7.25 an hour 2024: $7.25 an hour

In the comments of a pundit roundup that has been hiding in my browser tabs since early August is a meme posted by user Proginoskes.

Bubba: I vote Republican to keep Foreigners, Minorities, Women, Socialists, Gays, and Liberals from ruining my life. Billionaire: I vote Republican to keep this moron from realizing I’m the only one ruining his life.

Invest in belonging rather than belongings

Ari Shapiro of NPR spoke to Robin Wall Kimmerer, a botanist and the author of the books Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge And The Teachings of Plants and The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World. They talked about the economy of abundance. The central idea is whether an economy can be based on reciprocity rather than extraction. Capitalism is based on extraction, but that is not how natural landscapes are organized. Can human economy be circular and regenerative similar to how nature does it? Indigenous cultures widely use gift economies to distribute goods without a market. Other examples are little free libraries (I know of several within a few miles of me) on up to public libraries. Wall Kimmerer said:

So the notion is we don't all have to own everything. Abundance comes from sharing what we have.

Another example of a gift economy is ... NPR. Corporate America pushes the message that the more we consume the more successful and happier we will be. We’re even called consumers. Yet, hyper-consumption is one driver of climate change and environmental damage.

And so if we can start to put the brakes on consumption through practices like gratitude and reciprocity, we say, you know, I already have everything that I need. I really don't need to buy that next thing. Instead, I'm going to invest in relationship. I'm going to invest in belonging rather than belongings. And, you know, I think it's good for - I know it's good for the planet, but it's also good for us.

Wall Kimmerer is pleased that ecological economists are already thinking in this direction. Walter Einenkel of Daily Kos noted that the nasty guy, the supposed champion of the working class, has named several billionaires to his cabinet and administration. The list: + Linda McMahon for Education. + Howard Lutnick for Commerce. + Scott Bessent for Treasury. + Steven Witkoff for Middle East Envoy, who has conflicts of interest there. + Jered Isaacman for NASA administrator – yeah, he did pay to fly twice on SpaceX, but that’s not NASA. + Warren Stephens for Ambassador to United Kingdom. + Charles Kushner for Ambassador to France, yeah, the father of the pandemic prince. + And Musk and Ramaswamy for DOGE.

Many of Trump’s rich-as-hell picks have embraced austerity policies that have already failed western democracies. Their disdain for government projects to help the non-rich is likely to lead to more boom for billionaires and more bust for the American people.

Morgan Stephens of Kos reported that Biden signed the defense funding bill. This is the one that has lots of good things in it, such as increased pay for militarily personnel. But it is also the one that bans military medical insurance from providing gender affirming care for transgender minors.

Biden "strongly opposes" the part of the bill that limits transgender health care and said it will negatively affect the military’s recruiting abilities.

Biden could have vetoed the entire bill, sending it back to Congress for revision. But there were many important things in the bill, including keeping troops paid and maintaining national security, and not any time before the end of this Congress to demand revisions. As for recruiting abilities, anyone with a transgender child won’t want to enlist and those who learn their child is transgender may get out at the first chance. Alix Breeden of Kos reported Biden withdrew a proposed regulation that ...

would have prohibited schools from enacting bans on transgender student-athletes trying to participate on the teams that align with their gender identity while allowing schools to enforce some restrictions on competitive sports.

Yet Biden’s move is being praised by “ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio, the first openly transgender lawyer to argue before the Supreme Court.” What’s going on? Strangio says the nasty guy would have withdrawn the proposal anyway and with the notice of the proposed rule in place the nasty guy could have redirected it into something worse. While Strangio praised Biden on this action, he called Biden’s signing the defense bill a “disaster.” Three weeks ago Breeden reported on the case United States v. Skrmetti before the Supreme Court challenges the Tennessee law that bans transgender minors from getting gender-affirming care. The lawyer arguing for transgender care was Strangio. The ruling may come as late as June. Gillian Branstetter, spokesperson for the ACLU’s LGBTQ Project explained why protecting the ban would be bad. She also explains Tennessee lawmakers are relying on the same logic as the Dobbs decision that took away the right to an abortion. I just saw that I have about two dozen pundit roundups in my browser tabs. I’ll try to get through some of those now. Others will have to wait for another day. And some of those tabs will just get deleted. In the comments of a roundup for December 16 Dennis Goris drew a cartoon of a mother and child talking to a doctor. The doc says, “We’re not doing polio shots anymore. But you do have iron lung coverage.” Also a cartoon by Barbara Smaller for New Yorker Humor shows a young man in a coffee shop saying, “It’s only a conspiracy theory now, but with the right marketing it could be a widely held belief.” I’m finding that some of the memes posted by exlrrp have a limited life. When I revisit some of these roundups I see a lot of broken links. From a roundup for December 13 is a cartoon posted by Dark Warlord. It shows the Muppet Grover dressed as a doctor standing in a surgery suite with the title, “I’m Sorry You Can’t Afford to Be Alive, and Other Stories From America.” In a roundup from December 17 Michelle Goldberg of the New York Times wrote about the Great Capitulation.

Displays of submission aren’t limited to tech and media. Christopher Wray, the head of the F.B.I., agreed to step aside before the end of his 10-year term rather than make Trump fire him. Several Democrats have signaled their willingness to work with Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, whose so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, seems poised to hack away at our already threadbare safety net. [...] Different people have different reasons for falling in line. Some may simply lack the stomach for a fight or feel, not unreasonably, that it’s futile. Our tech overlords, however liberal they once appeared, seem to welcome the new order. Many hated wokeness, resented the demands of newly uppity employees and chafed at attempts by Joe Biden’s administration to regulate crypto and A.I., two industries with the potential to cause deep and lasting social harm. There are C.E.O.s who got where they are by riding the zeitgeist; they can pivot easily from mouthing platitudes about racial equity to slapping on a red MAGA hat.

Malcom Ferguson of The New Republic wrote about the postal service.

USPS privatization has been in the works for some time now. Trump-appointed Postmaster General Louis DeJoy has been doing his best to corrode one of the oldest, constitutionally ensured institutions in this country. On-time delivery rates fell when DeJoy was appointed in 2020, particularly in communities of color. He facilitated the removal and destruction of mail sorting machines that were crucial to allowing USPS to function smoothly. And he has multiple questionable investments. Last week, he even covered his ears while being grilled by congressional Republicans for dismantling USPS from the inside out. “Louis DeJoy is the perfect example of a Trump nominee. After Trump appointed him, he ran USPS into the ground. Now, he claims it doesn’t work & will propose privatizing it,” one X commentator wrote. “Then, he, Trump & their cronies will steal the business, charge exorbitant amounts & rape the public.”

In a roundup from December 18 Greg Dworkin quoted The Bulwark discussing the real scandal of our media tycoons, which is the rich owners are increasingly antagonistic to their own journalism.

It’s no surprise media owners are rushing to make good with Donald Trump; they know he’s eager to hit them where it hurts. Trump hasn’t just vowed to punish media orgs that displease him, he’s also made it clear that owning such institutions is enough to earn a mogul his economic and political enmity. If you’re a newspaper owner or a corporation with a cable channel in your portfolio, the cost of subsidizing media that tells the truth about Trump has been jacked up tremendously. Say goodbye to that tariff waiver; good luck with that attempted merger.

Parker Molloy of Nieman Lab wrote on the same topic, first mentioning how Bush II treated the press after 9/11 and leading up to the Iraq War.

But this time could be worse. Media billionaires aren’t just staying quiet — they’re actively courting Trump’s favor. The coming wave of media consolidation means these owners have a vested interest in keeping Trump happy. After all, they’ll need his administration’s approval for mergers, favorable regulatory decisions, and continued tax breaks. The signs of this pre-emptive surrender are already visible in how outlets frame stories about Trump. Headlines have gotten softer. Coverage of his most extreme statements gets buried. Stories about his plans for retribution against political enemies are treated as horserace politics rather than threats to democracy.

A tweet from Shannon Watts:

I'm confused. Are Democrats fighting fascism or are we engaging in bipartisanship? Would be nice if leadership settled on a cohesive strategy and message. Either A) democracy is in danger, B) it's actually not, or C) it’s in danger but we still need to cooperate. Please advise.

And a tweet from Edward-Isaac Dovere

many things happened in the election, including an overall shift more toward Trump across a lot of demographic groups, but the difference in the election going to Trump over Harris in the Electoral College comes down to about 0.148% of the votes cast

In the comments Geo Is Pissed reproduced a child’s letter to Santa that sounds like a pretty good idea:

Dear Santa, I have a grate ideea. On Christmas when you are in every ones house you could take all of the guns and put them in your sack and hide them at the North pole and then no one could kill anyone in the world. Thank you.

And a meme that I remember but has a broken link: A family is throwing rocks. The caption says, “It’s not prejudice if you call it religion.” And the roundup for today. Dworkin quoted several pundits praising Carter. In the comments were several cartoons in honor of Jimmy Carter. I like the one showing Carter building a stairway to heaven. A meme posted by exlrrp:, “Notice how Jimmy Carter never gets condemned for mixing politics with his Christianity. That’s because he focused on living it out rather than making grand declarations about it our using it as a legislative weapon against others. Jimmy Carter just focused on loving other well!” – Rev. Benjamin Cremer, pastor and author.

A world where everyone is walking around with tracking devices

Mark Sumner of Daily Kos takes another look at the claim that the more the nasty guy gets bad legal news the stronger he becomes. And Sumner calls BS.

The idea that [CEO of the Harris Poll, Mark] Penn and [Los Angeles Times writer Scott] Jennings are selling is that narrative that Republicans, and Trump, want everyone to believe: It’s the “every time he gets knocked down again, he gets up stronger” thesis. And it is, what’s that word again? Bulls---. Every time Trump is held accountable, every MAGA account on X seems to spew “Democrats just elected Trump!” Because, somehow, they seem to be convinced that everyone else is just as angry about a slight to Trump as the folks in their Let’s Go Brandon support group. We’re not.

Fans of the nasty guy said the same thing before the 2020 election. And, after impeachment, he lost. Sumner also had a look at what the nasty guy wants in a VP candidate. + Surrogacy: How quick are they to defend the nasty guy, praise him, and attribute every bit of good news to him? + Subservience: How well can they be a blank, extremely white screen onto which any nasty guy thought can be projected – without a thought for legality or morality. + Sacrifice: Someone who will take the bullet and slow down the chase. Sumner then rates who appear to be the top four candidates according to those criteria. These candidates are: Doug Burgum, Marco Rubio, Tim Scott, and JD Vance. Beyond that I really don’t care how well each fits the criteria. Kos of Kos wrote about the conservative movement being one long grift. He shows a list of products one can buy to avoid buying a similar product that is too “woke.” One can get anti-woke water, razor blades, beer, sneakers (the gold ones that give the nasty guy a cut), pets, coffee, and even a bank. That they cost more than the corresponding “woke” product is an easy guess – a case of Ultra Right Beer goes for $57.84 ($18.65 of that for shipping) while a case of Bud Light is $21. But it keeps you from getting woke cooties. I’ve collected a bunch of pundit roundups. I’ll just go through them (with a diversion or two) even with the jumble of topics. A pundit roundup for Kos from two weeks ago by Chitown Kev quoted Thor Benson of Wired on how the nasty guy’s return to the Oval Office could create a surveillance state and do it quickly.

If he so desired, Trump could create his own version of this [Nixon era] program, but he’d be working with much more advanced technology—and it’d be in a time when there are countless data points available on every American. Hoover could have only dreamed of a world where everyone was walking around with tracking devices. ... The administration may not even need to come up with a justification for surveilling Americans without a warrant, because it could simply purchase scores of people's personal data. The federal government has been known to purchase data from private brokers in the past, and doing so doesn’t require a warrant. “We are just awash in data, and data brokers can just collect and sell these data,” Vagle says. “Law enforcement or quasi-law enforcement can collect that information.”

A momentary break from roundups to visit a Book Post by Admiral Naismith on Kos that includes a look at the book Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, by Jaron Lanier. The book, of course, goes into these in a whole lot more detail to explain what is happening to your brain, politics, and more. Reader reviews of the book are here. Naismith just lists the reasons and I’ll mentioned some of them:

1. You are losing your free will. 2. Quitting social media is the most finely targeted way to resist the inanity of our times. 3. Social media is making you into an asshole. 4. Social media is undermining truth. ... 9. Social media is making politics impossible.

Naismith boils the ten down to two:

(1) social media is run by fascists like Zuckerberg, who use insidious propaganda techniques to make Republicans into dangerously unhinged terrorist fanatics and Democrats discouraged from voting out of sheer despair. (2) the "influencers"--not the kids on reddit with a million followers, but the REAL behind-the-scenes godzillionaires--pay billions to mine your data and f--- you over with targeted propaganda. And yet---I have a friend network via social media. I have in fact PRACTICED, not lost, empathy by interacting with them. I get to have friends in Colorado and Ohio and Florida and England, who I would never interact with at all, but for social media.

A roundup from ten days ago, Kev quoted Greg Sargent of The New Republic talking about the nasty guy saying he’ll get revenge.

In the media, this story tends to be framed as follows: Will Trump seek “revenge” for his legal travails, or won’t he? But that framing unwittingly lets Trump set the terms of this debate. It implies that he is vowing to do to Democrats what was done to him. But that’s not what Trump is actually threatening. Whereas Trump is being prosecuted on the basis of evidence that law enforcement gathered before asking grand juries to indict him, he is expressly declaring that he will prosecute President Biden and Democrats solely because this is what he endured, meaning explicitly that evidence will not be the initiating impulse.

Joan Walsh of The Nation looked at the health care plans in Project 2025. First, align care with the demands of conservative Christianity – no abortion, no transgender care, and more. Then...

Severino would also leave Americans far more vulnerable to crass capitalism when they are seeking healthcare. He wants HHS to promote private-sector Medicare Advantage plans, which—take it from me, I did my homework—may give healthy “young” seniors decent benefits at lower costs, but which get more expensive, and more restrictive, as seniors age and need more care. He recommends making Medicare Advantage the “default option” once a person qualifies for the senior-citizen health program at age 65, which would be a boon to private insurance companies, since it essentially privatizes the wildly popular public program. Severino would also repeal recent legislation allowing Medicare to negotiate better prices for commonly used drugs. And he doesn’t like Medicaid any better: He would weaken the ACA provisions that rely on Medicaid expansion and would impose work requirements on recipients.

In a roundup from eleven days ago, Greg Dworkin quoted a tweet by Steve Benen (which includes a link):

Trump to Mike Johnson: Put unqualified, scandal-plagued loyalists on the Intelligence Committee, giving them access to many of the nation's most sensitive secrets. Johnson to Trump: Sure thing. Everyone else: You've got to be kidding me.

Dworkin quoted an article in The Guardian:

The chair of Colorado’s Republican party is facing calls to resign from members of his own group after the state organization sent out an email criticizing Pride month – and later calling for rainbow-colored Pride flags to be burned. Dave Williams, who is also a representative in Colorado’s legislature, has faced swift backlash from his fellow Republicans in the wake of the controversial email sent. Much of the criticism aimed at Williams by other Republicans focused on the potential for his remarks to hurt the chances for members of their party to be elected.

I notice the criticism is not about the harm to LGBTQ people. It is good to see Republicans admit that oppressing LGBTQ people can turn voters against them. In the comments are a few good cartoons. Rob Rogers posted one of the nasty guy in a landing craft with other troops approaching the coast on D-Day (now 80 years ago). He says, “But Hitler did some good things... Right suckers?” exlrrp posted a meme of the Statue of Liberty taking a golf swing at the head of the nasty guy. And a panel posted by National Now shows Lucy and Charlie Brown and she says, “I think a lot of my anger can be traced to Patriarchy!” In a roundup from nine days ago, Dworkin quoted Dean Baker on X and Threadreader:

I was listening to a focus group sponsored by NPR of people who don't like Biden or Trump. They asked one person who was leaning towards Trump about what she saw happening in a second Trump term. She answered, he would create jobs. Given that we have created jobs at an incredible pace under Biden, this would be like saying that they want to see Trump in because he would nail Osama Bin Laden. What an incredible indictment of the media that people literally have no idea of the basic facts on the economy. And don't tell me this is based on their lived experience. They don't know lots of people who are unemployed. They get this from what they hear, not from what they see.

And in the comments... A cartoon by David Wilson shows the nasty guy speaking at a rally. A guy in a red hat says, “I wonder what his sentence is going to be.” A woman in a blue jacket says, “Me too! I haven’t heard a complete one yet.” A cartoon by Joel Pett shows a car driving past the “Church of our Malignant Christian Nationalism.” The man in the car asks, “Are we obliged to forgive them for knowing not what they do?” In a roundup from a couple days ago by Dworkin he quoted Peter Wehner of The Atlantic talking about political supporters:

But something has changed for me in the Trump era. I struggle more than I once did to wall off a person’s character from their politics when their politics is binding them to an unusually—and I would say undeniably—destructive person. The lies that MAGA world parrots are so manifestly untrue, and the Trump ethic is so manifestly cruel, that they are difficult to set aside. If a person insists, despite the overwhelming evidence, that Trump was the target of an assassination plot hatched by Biden and carried out by the FBI, this is more than an intellectual failure; it is a moral failure, and a serious one at that. It’s only reasonable to conclude that such Trump supporters have not made a good-faith effort to understand what is really and truly happening. They are choosing to live within the lie, to invoke the words of the former Czech dissident and playwright Vaclav Havel. One of the criteria that need to be taken into account in assessing the moral culpability of people is how absurd the lies are that they are espousing; a second is how intentionally they are avoiding evidence that exposes the lies because they are deeply invested in the lie; and a third is is how consequential the lie is.

Lea Page of the New York Times spent six months knocking on the doors of over 8,000 voters from across the political spectrum:

There’s an immediate intimacy in having a conversation on someone’s doorstep. It is, after all, a threshold between public and private, but who would have thought that political canvassing would be so conducive to such unvarnished honesty? Perhaps because of the fracturing of our communities, we encountered an almost universal need to be witnessed and validated, to trust. … It never felt like a loss. We had stood together on porches and broken steps, among pots of petunias and cans of sodden cigarette butts, and we listened. People told stories full of pride and full of pain. Do you see me? they seemed to ask in a hundred different ways. Do you see my beauty? Do you see my struggle? They were asking so little of us. It was easy to say yes.

Last weekend the nasty guy went to a black church in Detroit to convince people he wold be better for black people than Biden. In the comments Rambler797 included a tweet by John Rock:

“Photo shared by Detroit reporter Russ McNamara of the crowd during Trump’s visit to a Black church in the city yesterday. McNamara reported, ‘Of the 8 Black Trump voters I talked to, just one was from Detroit and zero were congregants.’” In no way surprised by this.

That photo is of the people sitting the pews. All the faces that can be seen are white. A cartoon by Barry Deutsch posted on Kos shows a man and a woman saying, “Why can’t trans people just accept their bodies as they are? ‘Gender Affirmation’ is woke crap! Normal people don’t do that!” Around them are words to show what body modifications each has had done. Some for her: shaved legs, liposuction, boob job, makeup, nose job, botox, hair dye, and pierced ears. Some for him: tattoos, chin job, hair transplant, shaved face, and tummy tuck.