Showtime

 

This may be more obvious than I think, but this week's votes on a continuing resolution to keep the government going past Friday's debt ceiling deadline until September are a kind of confession of failure on the part of House Republicans, and Speaker Mike Johnson in particular, retreating from the effort to use reconciliation rules to put through the huge package of tax cuts and spending cuts they passed on February 25 for fiscal year 2025. Never mind, said Johnson: Elon and Donald can do it, or something like it.

But Johnson said those cuts would be reserved for legislation to fund the government in fiscal year 2026, which begins on October 1.

"We will actually be able to change the way this is done and incorporate all the extraordinary savings that DOGE is uncovering through fraud, waste and abuse, the other revenues that President Trump is bringing about because of his policies," Johnson told the Fox News program "Sunday Morning Futures."

Although as you know DOGE hasn't uncovered any fraud, waste, or abuse at all that they're able to publicly identify, and their own estimate of how much money they've managed to save so far—$105 billion—would be pretty pathetic as an attack on a $2 trillion deficit, if it were accurate, which it clearly isn't anywhere near. While the revenue that President Trump is "bringing about because of his policies" means tariffs, and it's pretty hard to estimate, what with Trump changing his mind up to three or four times in a given day (just announced he's doubling the tariffs on steel and aluminum he's landing on Canada on Wednesday, from 25% to 50%), but the best guesses seem to make it around $120 billion a year, which also isn't much, though the rise in consumer prices it will bring on, focused on the areas of electronics and clothing, motor vehicles and food, will cost us around $1600-$2000 a year per household. Not only a tax on Americans, whatever Trump may imagine, but a very regressive tax, mostly felt by those with lower incomes (the lower your income, the higher the proportion of it that you end up spending on stuff like food and clothing, or really anything).

Git Along, Little Doges

Watching King Abdullah and Marco Rubio squirm in their seats while Trump continues on about his Gaza plan is quite something.

“We’ll take Gaza, we’ll own it and cherish it” - boy oh boy pic.twitter.com/SLKBWnap5B

— Lani Refiti (@LaniRefiti) February 11, 2025

Wish there'd been more Rubio (or just more cowbell) in the video of that meeting a week ago, which Trump decided contrary to custom not  to hold in private before the photo op and public statements but did all three at once, presumably to prevent King Abdullah from screaming at him; but Rubio's face in this photo reminds me of that lady in the Hermès scarfs who used to watch Trump explaining virology to the nation from the standpoint of his transcendent ignorance—deeply panicked but trying not to show it. I didn't realize until that moment that Trump actually has no idea what the Gaza ceasefire deal (which he has endorsed) entails: the sequence of phase 1, releasing some hostages and prisoners to set the stage for phase 2, negotiating a final disposition of the territory and releasing all the remaining hostages, followed by phase 3, implementing the deal and permanent ceasefire (the Biden deal I've been telling you about for a year), as revealed by Trump's comment,

“As far as I’m concerned, if all of the hostages aren’t returned by Saturday at 12 o’clock, I think it’s an appropriate time. I would say, cancel it and all bets are off and let hell break out. I’d say they ought to be returned by 12 o’clock on Saturday,” Trump said.

No, it's not an appropriate time. Phase 2 hasn't even started yet. It would be nice for the hostages and their families, who I support, and no doubt also nice for Netanyahu, who I don't support, but it has no relation to the agreement painfully worked out over the past year. It's demanding that all the parties trash that agreement and start all over again, which clearly meant it couldn't be wrapped up on Saturday. It's just a completely new idea nobody else has ever heard of, because Trump just made it up on the spot and doesn't know enough about the situation to realize that it can't possibly happen, and there's a reason it can't possibly happen.

It's nothing but a big smelly turd deposited in the Oval Office that is of no relevance to anything, except to Trump's equally irrelevant fantasy of taking control of the Gaza Strip as his own, or Jared Kushner's, development project, with all the irritating Gazans cleared out of the way in Egypt or Jordan (I don't know who he thinks are going to be the housekeepers and waitstaff and caddies, perhaps they'll be imported from the Philippines), in spite of endless attempts by Jordanians and Egyptians and Saudis to explain to His Imperial Stupidity that it can't be done. A turd the existence of which nobody present dares to acknowledge, because Big Donald might get upset (Abdullah did have something to say about it once he got out of there, though he did lower himself to suggesting that the meeting might be described as "constructive"—he's far from the worst king in his neighborhood, not that I support kings, but diplomacy requires some dishonesty).

Things may have marched in a different direction since I started drafting these remarks with the development of a Trump policy on Ukraine, but I think Trump's stupidity remains the main factor. I'm sure I'll get back to that later.

The Emperor's New Immigration Policy

Image from The New York Times of the US Navy Base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The "Migrant Tent Camp" at lower left is an area that was used to house boat people on their way to Florida, in the days when America used to welcome refugees from godless socialism, and still did during the Biden administration, from around 37 at the beginning of the term to 4 last February; it's theoretically capable of holding 13,000, but for the current exercise they've just assembled a camp of 150 tents. However, the actual 10 Venezuelan migrants sent to Guantánamo this week from America, in one of the first big moves of the Trump administration's mass deportation program, are being held seven miles to the east in the prison complex, not with but not too far from the 15 9/11 terrorism suspects still languishing there since 2002 or 2003. 

This from The Guardian is hilarious on first look:

US immigration is gaming Google to create a mirage of mass deportations

It seems in the first week of the Trump presidency when you Googled ICE operations or raids you got the impression of a great big wave of arrests across the country of unauthorized foreigners in the form of ICE press releases, but when you looked at the stories there was something wrong:

That four-day operation in Colorado? It happened in November 2010. The 123 people targeted in New Orleans? That was February of last year. Wisconsin? September 2018. There are thousands of examples of this throughout all 50 states – Ice press releases that have reached the first page of Google search results, making it seem like enforcement actions just happened, when in actuality they occurred months or years ago. Some, such as the arrest of “44 absconders” in Nebraska, go back as far as 2008. 

They were old stories, some 13,000 of them, all timestamped "updated 1/24/2025", which shot them to the top of the Google and Bing rankings. Some Merry Pranksters (at the White House?) had spoofed us all into thinking Trump was keeping his violent Day One promises.

Court Drama

The civil war has started, apparently, but it's all on their side. I mean, they're fighting over who owns Trump, at least initially, between Laura Loomer, the self-described embodiment of MAGA, and Elon Musk, the embodiment of billionaires; who's going to be Trump's "sidepiece" as Loomer startlingly puts it, though I'm not sure she means us to understand the word the way I understand it, or whether she's aware how three months ago some of us thought she was advertising herself as the emperor's sidepiece in the traditional sense, speaking of stage 5 clingers:

No one can keep former President Donald Trump away from Laura Loomer.

Throughout his third presidential campaign, aides and advisers have done their best to shield him from Loomer, a far-right social media influencer, and similar figures who stroke his ego and stoke his basest political instincts. (NBC News, September 13)

Now it turns out there's an ideological component to the conflict, over the question of immigration. This goes back to last Sunday (as I learn from Heather Cox Richardson), when Trump named a member of the Musk-Andreesen-Ackman circle, Sriram Krishnan, as a senior White House adviser on artificial intelligence, and Loomer issued an angry protest the next day. Krishnan was born in India himself, and has advocated making it easier for US companies (thinking especially of the tech industry) to hire foreign workers on H-1B visas. This caused an explosion of rage in the nativist caucus of the Republican party—the part where Loomer and Stephen Bannon live—who wanted to know why foreigners were being preferred over the American-born:

Chaos Monkeys

One thing I think people are missing is the significance of the scene in the president-elect's box at the Army-Navy football game on December 14, where so many symbolic meetings seemed to be occurring, from Vice President–Elect Vance bringing killer Daniel Penny as his plus-one to the rival secretary of defense candidates Hegseth and DeSantis, but business appeared to be getting done in the deep conversations of Trump, House Speaker Mike Johnson, and Senate Majority Leader–Designate John Thune. The world's richest man, Elon Musk, brought a small boy, one of his numerous progeny, but in many of the pictures he looked like a stranger trying to photobomb the event, lonely and wistful, with an oddly large head.

AP photo by Stephanie Scarbrough.

We know what Trump and the congressional leaders were talking about, and it wasn't Musk's many interesting plans for cutting government spending. It was the urgent continuing budget resolution they were planning to vote on in the House on Wednesday the 18th, to prevent a government shutdown on Friday, in fact, and Trump was pushing some new demands in the opposite direction; instead of the resolution they planned, to carry them just to March, forcing them to go through the same thing in a matter of a few months, he wanted them to extend spending out for a full year, until next December, which I think would have been impossible to manage before the deadline, and in addition he wanted them to include a provision suspending the debt ceiling, the thing Democrats usually have to beg Republicans to help them with, because the Republicans are so famously conservative about the national debt.

(The debt ceiling is currently suspended, under the terms of an earlier deal; that's not what would have shut the government down when the deal expired on January 1, but it will shut it down fairly soon, maybe mid-June, at current spending levels, so they most likely will need to re-suspend the debt ceiling, or eliminate it permanently as Trump apparently suggested in his conversation with Johnson and Thune.)

So my theory is Musk didn't enjoy this. His plan to cut two and a half trillion dollars from the national debt was not being taken seriously (he didn't actually have a plan, but everyone should have understood that he was so smart it would happen before you knew it). Trump was going ahead on the assumption that he'd be adding $7.7 trillion over the next ten years. Musk was being slighted.

The Last Postmortem

 

Screen Capture from Save Daddy Trump on Steam.

A popular postmortem sentiment is the idea that what happened in the US in this month's election is what has happened all over the place in developed democracies, in the wake of the inflation that accompanied the recovery from the Covid pandemic all over the world, when angered voters punished the ruling parties in a frustration with the way democracy is seen to be failing: 

“There’s an overall sense of frustration with political elites, viewing them as out of touch, that cuts across ideological lines,” said Richard Wike, director of global attitudes research at the Pew Research Center.

He noted that a Pew poll of 24 countries found that the appeal of democracy itself was slipping as voters reported increasing economic distress and a sense that no political faction truly represents them.

and even though inflation in the US wasn't nearly as bad as in some of those other countries, our voters just did the same thing.

I wanted to check that hypothesis out for the flood of big elections between 2021 and 2024, and found evidence for a much more nuanced picture: a bad time for a few ruling parties, but not so great either for Trumpies and like-minded individuals on the nationalist, anti-immigrant, authoritarian side of the right (loosely characterized as "fascist" below, sue me if you don't like it):

Literary Corner: The Weave

 

Socially distanced Biden campaign rally at UAW Region 1 headquarters, Warren, Michigan, September 9 2020. Photo by Patrick Semansky, AP, via USA Today.

Eight Circles and He Couldn't Fill Tbem Up

by Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States

I mean you can do whatever you want. I said
I don't like that. Lo and behold I see
they went and then built a plant and now
they do their business with India. They probably
do it outside India, too. They built
a very big plant. Many countries do that.
All of a sudden you hear they're leaving Milwaukee
or leaving wherever they may be located.
It's very sad to see. And it's so simple,
This isn’t like Elon with his rocket ships
that land within 12 inches on the moon
where they want it to land or he gets the engines back.
That was the first I really saw. I said, ‘Who the hell did that?’
I saw engines about three or four years ago.
These things were coming. Cylinders, no wings,
no nothing, and they’re coming down very slowly,
landing on a raft in the middle of the ocean,
someplace with a circle. Boom. Reminded me
of the Biden circles that he used to have, right?
He’d have eight circles and he couldn’t fill them up.
But then I heard he beat us with the popular vote.
I don’t know, I don’t know, couldn’t fill up the circles.
I always loved those circles. They were so beautiful.
That was so beautiful to look at. In fact, the person
that did them, that was the best thing about his —
the level of that circle was great. But they couldn’t
get people, so they used to have the press
stand in those circles because they couldn’t get
the people. Then I heard we lost. ‘Oh, we lost.’
No, we’re never going to let that happen again.
But we’ve been abused by other countries. We’ve been
abused by our own politicians, really, more than
other countries. I can’t blame them. We’ve been
abused by people that represent us in this country,
some of them stupid, some of them naive,
and some of them crooked, frankly.

From Trump's remarks at the Detroit Economic Club, October 10 2024. The opening bit is from a story Trump has been telling for years, about the injustice of India having a 100% tariff on motorcycles, which was meant, I think he believed, to harm the US motorcycle industry, as Washington Post's Annie Gowen wrote in 2018:

Elon Musk's Great Replacement

I'll try to post a real post here very soon. Meanwhile this.

Trouble With a Capital T

 

Spooky things are happening in the world of social or semi-social media, not just at Twitter. I saw this note about Facebook's Instagram platform today

Instagram "removed" one of my stories from 2 years ago that showed one of those old timey KKK warnings for Africans to not go to communist meetings because it "violates guidelines" and barred me from using paid branding tools lol is there a purge on the horizon?

— Flying Chaucer (@lelianadelrey) April 8, 2023

and in fact last week I went through something similar myself at Blogger, the Google subsidiary that generously provides this space for free to me and Steve and Roy (Alicublog) and huge numbers of people like us to expose our thinking to public notice; I had three old posts "unpublished" on grounds that it had been flagged by some anonymous user and found on review to violate Blogger's "Malware and Virus Policy", which is weird, because I'm not aware of passing on any malware or viruses at all, though I can imagine being found offensive from time to time to some sensitive soul and getting in trouble with the community guidelines that way.

For the Record: The Twitter Files

There's just so much news flooding in before I can absorb it, I'm thinking maybe I just have to resign myself to being a week or so behind on everything. I don't want to let go of the efforts of Mr. Musk's Kancelculture Kids to expose the woke leftist FBI's brutal censorship efforts at Twitter, where they succeeded in silencing the entire NewsCorp organization for [checks notes] a full day before Twitter changed its mind and its policy, in October 2020, nearly spoiling Rupert's special October Surprise revelations of Shirtless Hunter. 

Installment #7 of "The Twitter Files", by noted plastic straw advocate Michael Shellenberger, showed up on Tuesday to defend the story he, Weiss, and Taibbi have been developing: 

It's not at all clear that it's "wholly accurate" https://t.co/6uLpGTzSMv https://t.co/qEEXqxJzrM

— Yas is at post.news/yastreblyansky but still here (@Yastreblyansky) December 20, 2022

I mean, for one thing, the story of the blind computer repairman John Paul Mac Isaac turning the laptop over to the FBI was dodgy enough, the way Mac Isaac told it:

No Foul, No Harm

 

Vintage Space Jam T-shirt via.

I've been thinking about sports lately, partly no doubt because it's that one time in a quadrennium when I start following a sport myself with some assiduity (maybe should be twice in a quadrennium now that I've found out about the women's game), and wanting to say something about how Republican politics relates to sports, but it wasn't coming together until this remarkable series on Mark Meadows texts from the effort to overturn the 2020 election began coming out at Talking Points Memo, and then something Hilzoy said (Hilzoy is the philosopher Hilary Bok, one of the great bloggers until she quit blogging in 2009, and still a really valuable presence on Twitter) crystallized it for me:

... and the point is not to reflect people's actual will but to see whether, if you torture the rules badly enough, you can see, or pretend to see, a way that YOU can win.

— hilzoy (@hilzoy) December 14, 2022

Narratology: From the #TwitterFiles

 The Republican noise machine, including this putz, a former reporter who got fired from BuzzFeed in 2014 after 41 of his stories were busted for plagiarism, now reinvented aa a podcaster for "God, Family, America", with gigs on NewsMax, Parler, and Charlie Kirk's Turning Point USA (coincidentally I just removed him from my Twitter yesterday in my #ProjectMute program, which is why I know all this at the moment), is shocked! shocked! to learn that Twitter's Trust and Safety officers were meeting regularly with the FBI during the 2020 election campaign. 

This from the #TwitterFiles "investigation" being carried out by famous independent journalists Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss ("investigation" in scare quotes because the investigating seems to consist basically of reading the stuff Mr. Musk gives them and trying to squeeze it into some kind of narrative arc).

Pretty sinister, huh? And Twitter's deputy general counsel at the time, Jim Baker, used to be

Literary Corner: Meat Mountain

 

Revelation

by Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States of America

So, with the revelation
of MASSIVE & WIDESPREAD FRAUD
& DECEPTION in working closely
with Big Tech Companies, the DNC, 
& the Democrat Party, do you throw
the Presidential Election Results of 2020
OUT and declare the RIGHTFUL WINNER, or
do you have a NEW ELECTION? A Massive Fraud
of this type and magnitude allows for the
termination of all rules, regulations, and articles,
even those found in the Constitution. Our great
"Founders" did not want, and would not condone,
False & Fraudulent Elections!

Sir, this is an Arby's, and today's Meat Mountain is penis.

Namely, the prodigal penis of presidents' progeny (sing it in rolling hexameters, Muse, and lubriciously!), of which somebody (I assume connected with Rudy Giuliani) posted a photo on Twitter during the 2020 presidential campaign. Intrepid journalist Matt Taibbi has discovered (actually no, he didn't discover anything; the assignment editor, Mr. Musk, gave him the relevant documents) that the Biden campaign asked Twitter to pull the picture, and Twitter obliged, after some earnest in-house debate, on the grounds that Twitter rules forbid the publication of hacked material, which seems like as good a reason as any.

Apparently Retired Emperor Trump believes this was the decisive moment of the whole campaign—deprived of a chance to look at that cockshot, America's voters, or at least the Twitter users, lost their ability to make a decision and stumbled blindly into voting for Biden instead, with the deplorable results we all know (I see he's slipped back into admitting he didn't get as many votes as Biden, that's nice). That's the massive and widespread fraud and deception we're talking about, the collusion between Democrats and Big Tech, violating Giuliani's freedom of speech, invalidating the whole election, and abrogating the Constitution. 

And apparently Taibbi and his assignment editor, Mr. Musk, believe it too, though they don't seem to offer any clear ideas on who would throw out the 2020 election and reinstall Trump in the White House—former Vice President Pence? General Mike Flynn? Maybe the House can elect Trump Speaker in January and then Biden and Harris can resign so Trump becomes president automatically. I'm sure everybody will agree with that, and Biden owes it to us, since it's all his fault. It's what the "Founders" would want, scare quotes and all. Biden's always talking about unifying the country, why doesn't he do something?

Twitter Is People

lost all your money due to gambling on cryptocurrencies?

should have spent your money with us instead

eat ghareeb nawaz

— ghareeb nawaz (@ghareebnawazCHI) September 19, 2022

Chicago.

buy you out and make it a co-op

— Yas We Can (@Yastreblyansky) November 18, 2022

Note the presupposition, now that he's the proprietor, that it's some kind of extension of his self, like a puppet in his hands, or a pet. "What trick should I teach it?"

But it really isn't his; I mean, I guess the proprietary software is, but the community isn't. That's something that's assembled itself over the years, and can't be owned.

Checkmark

 

If you haven't got a sawbuck for an
Impoverished billionaire,
Then you really don't belong at all
In Elmo's "public square".

Freedom Isn't Cheap

 

The funniest part, said Checkmark @shannonrwatts, "is that Elon Musk thinks the issue is that Stephen King is balking at the $20 per month fee." Indeed.

Hi, I'm Elon Musk, Twit-in-Chief here at National Public Cheerio, and with me in the studio is some anonymous tool who will cheerfully nod assent to everything I say and let me do all the talking, the Silk to my Diamond or Diamond to my Silk as the case may be, and we're interrupting your doomscrolling, as we do two or three times a week, to ask you all for your support.

Because Twitter isn't like all the other platforms selling your eyeballs at a profit, though we do sell quite a lot of them of course, but just not enough to make a profit, and indeed not enough to pay expenses, which have gone up a bit since I took on $13 billion in debt to acquire the site and those interest payments won't pay themselves! Will they?

Instead, Twitter has a unique membership model, where I may own it but you are all members, taking advantage of all the freedom of speech I generously offer you, freedom you can rely on to let you say whatever you want without intrusive monitoring, or at least not very much monitoring, or at least as long as our very few advertisers don't mind, and all I ask is that you think about sending me a little money from time to time, not that you have to do it, Twitter is a public square open to all who wish to speak their minds and will always remain so, but it would still be nice if you'd send me some money, is all I'm saying.

By which I mean you're much more of a member if you pay in a little more than the treasure of your unique and freely expressed opinions and exotic beliefs. Whatever you can afford, but let's say $60, which would make you a Basic Twit, that's just $5 a month for a year of Twitter membership, and all the rage and misinformation you can communicate, without any need to interact with the people you went to high school with, unlike that other platform. Isn't that alone worth the price? 

And to show my appreciation I'll send you a high-quality canvas Twitbag you can take along when you're shopping, to the beach, or any of the other activities you might perform when you're not sitting at the screen.

Or for $240, only $20 a month, I'll make you a Checkmark, my guarantee that you're an at least moderately famous person, a key to thousands of Follows, Likes and Retweets, Quote Tweets and Responses, that will in fact demonstrate how famous and influential you are to anybody who needs to know. With discounts of up to 60% (just $8 a month!) if you're really really famous.

Or any amount at all. And now is the best possible time, because I'm in a matching period where every dollar you pledge will be matched by an anonymous donor who is definitely not from Saudi Arabia, so your $1,000 pledge will be worth $2,000, your $,5000 pledge worth $10,000, and so on. You'll be doing so much more for the public square and for freedom of speech this way!

Act now during this special matching period, and as an extra-special gift the algorithm will let you cut into lines, allow you to post long videos, and show you 50% fewer ads. Membership has its privileges!

Call me today, at 1-866-CHEERIO, or visit me at twitter.com and press that "DONATE" button! Operators are standing by! 

Actual Twitbag, by Tabitha Maud, $21 (on sale!) from Society6.