Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

“woke” is the new caravan.

They want us to be overwhelmed and exhausted. Focus. Resist. Oppose.

We are builders in a constant struggle with destroyers. keep building.

When we show up, we win.

Fundamental belief of white supremacy: white people are presumed innocent, minorities are presumed guilty.

Oppose, oppose, oppose. do not congratulate. this is not business as usual.

People are weird.

There are more Russians standing up to Putin than Republicans.

Democracy cannot function without a free press.

Stamping your little feets and demanding that they see how important you are? Not working anymore.

Hey hey, RFK, how many kids did you kill today?

Dear media: perhaps we ought to let Donald Trump speak for himself!

… riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact

Motto for the House: Flip 5 and lose none.

Never entrust democracy to any process that requires Republicans to act in good faith.

T R E 4 5 O N

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn.

Those who are easily outraged are easily manipulated.

You don’t get to peddle hatred on saturday and offer condolences on sunday.

The low info voters probably won’t even notice or remember by their next lap around the goldfish bowl.

Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to.

The worst democrat is better than the best republican.

Putting aside our relentless self-interest because the moral imperative is crystal clear.

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War for Ukraine Day 1,048: A Brief Monday Night Update

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A quick housekeeping note: I’m running about an hour behind tonight, so I’m just going to run down the basics.

Russia committed another war crime in Kherson today. They droned a passenger bus. I’m going to post that after the jump because there’s blood in the video and this way it won’t be on the front page even if I put a warning in.

Here’s last night’s/this morning’s air defense tally:

It was quite a large drone attack, but no bomber activity: 79 out of 128 drones reported shot down, with the “location lost” of a further 49 (these may have been decoys). Two Kh-59 cruise missiles also shot down.

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— Euan MacDonald (@euanmacdonald.bsky.social) January 6, 2025 at 5:24 AM

Here is President Zelenskyy’s address from earlier today. Video below, English transcript after the jump.

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Important Read: The Case for A Shadow Cabinet

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The case for a Shadow Cabinet – a positive form of opposition.
snyder.substack.com/p/shadow-cab…

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— Timothy Snyder (@timothysnyder.bsky.social) January 6, 2025 at 9:11 AM

Timothy Snyder, who famously warned us Do Not Comply in Advance, has a very interesting proposal in his latest SubStack post:

When I moved to Great Britain to study, I found the politics very exciting. The parliamentary system was different, so that new elections immediately led to new governments. The press was excellent but political, so that one could read the newspapers and be informed both of the facts and the sentiments. And, when reporting government policy, journalists always had an opposition voice to quote: members of the “shadow cabinet.”

Like so much else in British public life, the institution of the shadow cabinet was unfamiliar to me, but I soon grew to appreciate and admire it. The “cabinet,” of course, was the assembly of government ministers, led in Britain by the prime minister. The party in opposition (the Labour Party when I arrived in Britain in 1991) appointed its own leading members to “shadow” each government minister, including the prime minister.

Shadow meant follow. The shadow ministers “shadowed” the actual ministers, in the sense of following their every move, criticizing policy and offering alternatives. Importantly, the shadow minister was always available to offer commentary to the press on his or her area of expertise. This greatly enriched public life. At any point a journalist, and thus the public, had access to an alternative point of view, one which was both pertinently expert and politically relevant. Shadow ministers did not always become real ministers after the next elections, but often they did.

Four years ago today, Donald Trump led an attempt to overthrow a democratic election and thereby undo our constitutional system. In two weeks, the same man will be inaugurated president of the United States, this time with a centibillionaire as the unelected de facto head of government and with anti-qualified anti-patriots as his cabinet nominees. What to do? People talk about resistance, and about opposition. What forms should these take? I have written elsewhere about what citizens can do. Leading politicians of the opposition party, the Democratic Party in the United States, have a special responsibility, and also special opportunities. One of these is to form a shadow cabinet. I want to join the voices of those advocating for this. (Here I am speaking for the idea on television a few weeks ago.)

In Great Britain, the shadow cabinet represents “the loyal opposition.” The loyalty in question is to the state and to its head, the monarch. In the United States, a “loyal opposition” would be loyal to our Constitution — and, indeed, that could be the basis of its activity. We face the unusual situation of a government — a president and his cabinet — who seem indifferent to the rule of law itself. By beginning from the principle that we have a government of laws, not men, a shadow cabinet would reinforce the American way of politics. It would be a very good thing to have a constitutional lawyer or two on the shadow cabinet.

And a shadow cabinet would remind us of how much better things can be. The regular reactions of its members to Musk-Trump would flow from different sense of politics and policy. That is material that the press needs, and that we all need. As Trump and his cabinet undertake their unpredictable whorl of destructive policy, journalists and others will be at a loss as to what to say. The worse things get, the harder it is to think of an alternative. As time goes by, the chaos of Musk-Trump might seem like the only possible reality. That, of course, will be the goal of the new regime: to persuade us that government just means dysfunctionality, spectacle, and repression. At every moment, members of the shadow government can remind us what government could instead be doing, positively, for the people. They are there to remind us that a better America is always possible…

Yes, there is a problem in that we Democrats are infamously ‘not an organized political party’. But that can be its own strength — we’re not an intellectual monoculture, uniformly susceptible to every passing blight! In any case: Go read the whole thing, and let’s discuss.

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Trump Won

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I’m slammed (short term) at work, but I’ve also been in a funk all day thinking about how poorly we (the country, our politicians, our party) responded to January 6.  The conclusion I’ve come to is a simple one:  Trump won the January 6 confrontation.  I’ll outsource this post to John Ganz:

Today is January 6th and I feel a certain tedium and impatience about marking the anniversary of the Capitol Hill attack four years later. There seems to be a growing consensus that it, along with all of Trump’s other menaces to constitutional rule, is not worth taking seriously. The line on January 6th is that even if it was a coup or insurrection attempt, it was a farce and a failure. But this is wrong. In retrospect, it was a great political success for Trump. Not only because he got away with it, but because of how he could fracture and polarize the response. Attention paid to it is now considered sour grapes: part of a discredited political strategy and a remnant of liberal sentimentalism that is fast going out of style. He came back from it and rallied even those who initially condemned it or were frightened by it to his side. And he made the defense of the constitutional order a partisan issue.

We are accustomed to repeating now that Trump’s coalition is fragile or that there are intrinsic weaknesses in his governing style. True so far as it goes, but how fragile is a coalition that reformed and expanded after he attempted to overthrow the U.S. government? And how weak is someone who managed to suffuse the atmosphere with a sense of total credulity about himself and total cynicism about his opponents? This is an attitude now shared even among those who do not consider themselves his supporters. There is now a process of retrospective legitimation, as if the vote somehow wipes the slate clean, and makes lies the truth. There is a kind of spiritual Gleichsaltung going on: Trump is now the man and to continue one’s criticism forcefully makes you a sad deadender. Resistance liberalism is turning into Vichy liberalism and the NeverTrumpers suddenly discover they were AlwaysTrumpers. Some of that can be blamed on the failure of the media or the opposition party, but some credit has to be given to Trump himself. The great insult comic has landed his jibes: he has embarrassed the opposition, he has humiliated them. They are forced to laugh along now or look like spoilsports. Looking back in the 1960s, the Italian socialist Pietro Nenni remarked, “Everyone in Italy agreed in not taking Fascism seriously.” Not being taken seriously is probably the thing that helps Trump the most, on the one hand, it drives him, it torments him and everything he does can be read as a demand to be taken seriously, but it is also his greatest political gift and strength, it allows him to glide.

On January 6th Trump successfully broke the system: there is no neutral, recognized arbiter of the law and the constitutional order, there is just raw politics. That does not mean he will necessarily prevail in every political contest, but he should never be seen as the underdog. His political skills should not be underestimated. His appetite for risk has been rewarded. Why would he not be emboldened to try other desperate stratagems since he’s faced no repercussions thus far?

I don’t agree with everything he says here, but that last paragraph is about right, I think.

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Adieu Justin

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Justin Trudeau is out:

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says he plans to step down once the Liberal Party has chosen a successor, bringing his time leading the country to a tumultuous end.

Trudeau, who became Liberal leader in 2013 and prime minister in the fall of 2015, announced his long-awaited decision outside his official residence, Rideau Cottage, on Monday morning.

Trudeau also said he asked Gov. Gen. Mary Simon to prorogue Parliament until March 24, and she granted the request.

The Tories plan a vote of no confidence, and there must be an election by October, 2025.  So the Liberals have only a short time to pick a new leader and get ready for an election.  Hopefully it will go better for them than it did for us.

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Foreign Office Briefing: Double-No-Seven vs. Brofeld

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You guys all know about Nigel Farage, right? He’s the multi-millionaire pub bore who self-sacrificingly turned down the role of non-woke James Bond to lead Britain’s far-right Reform party. Reform is not technically a “party” in the classic sense, but an “entrepreneurial political start-up” registered as a limited liability company (LLC) with Companies House. Innovative!

Farage owns 53% of Reform LLC, though he promised to change that sometime “soon”—anyone who pays to join that party, meantime, is putting cash into Nigel’s pocket. He was also one of the key frontmen hustling in favour of the Brexit fiasco, and even if you’re not au courant with UK politics you have probably seen him in the news, bellowing away or grinning his ghastly grin:

Double-No-Seven

Whoops, sorry. That’s the Mouth of Sauron. Easy to mix them up, not just because of the physical resemblance, but because both are members of an ancient, degraded ruling class who now speak for a far more powerful lord. Here is Farage at Mar-a-Lago sometime recently, standing beside the man who was, until very very recently, his actual master:

Just this past Friday, at the Reform shareholder meeting party conference, Farage hailed Musk as a “hero,” calling Musk’s plans for DOGE in the US a blueprint for the UK to follow, and also confirming that Musk was thinking of making a major donation to Reform—though possibly not the $100 million that’s been kicked around the press for the last several weeks.

As of today, he’s singing a very different tune.

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Monday Morning Open Thread: Life Goes On

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Joe Biden awards Denzel Washington the Presidential Medal of Freedom

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— Phil Lewis (@phillewis.bsky.social) January 4, 2025 at 4:11 PM


 

After my last post, I feel like I should warn Betty Cracker not to read this, from the Washington Post:

Vice President Kamala Harris has called President-elect Donald Trump a threat to American democracy. She has said he is a fascist. She has predicted he would abuse the powers of the presidency. She has warned that he should “never again stand behind the seal of the president of the United States.”

But on Monday, in her constitutional role as president of the Senate, Harris will preside over a joint session of Congress that oversees the counting and certification of the electoral college votes affirming that Trump — despite the alarms she sounded during her 107-day sprint to the November election — will again assume the powers and trappings of the presidency…

The certification carries additional historical importance because it comes just four years — and one presidential election — after a violent mob, infuriated by Trump’s false claims that the election had been stolen by Joe Biden, stormed the U.S. Capitol as then-Vice President Mike Pence presided over the 2020 electoral count. This time, Trump is welcoming the result and Democrats are showing no signs of claiming fraud. Even so, law enforcement officials are planning extensive security arrangements to ensure nothing disrupts the proceeding.

Harris intends to make sure the certification goes smoothly, aides say, partly as a pointed contrast to Trump’s unwillingness to do so four years ago.

Presidential historian Tim Naftali noted that from the first days after Harris’s loss, she and Biden made it clear they would provide “the kind of transition for Donald Trump that Donald Trump refused to provide for them four years ago.” Harris promised in her concession speech to ease the new administration’s transition to power, while Biden hosted Trump — whom he had called an “existential threat” — in a White House meeting that was so cordial it annoyed some of Biden’s fellow Democrats.

“This is, in a sense, a way to meet one of their campaign promises,” said Naftali, a senior research scholar at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. “Their administration came to power to restore dignity and to restore American institutions. And even though they are leaving the Oval Office to the person they replaced, whose chaos they were elected to eliminate, they have one last opportunity to send a message about the importance of traditional norms.”…

The Democratic mantra, for better or worse: We choose to do these things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.

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Another Dawn Open Thread: A Note From Our Current (Excellent) President

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A new opinion piece in the Washington Post, “What Americans should remember about Jan. 6” [gift link]:

On this Jan. 6, order will be called. Clerks, staff and members of Congress will gather to certify the results of a free and fair presidential election and ensure a peaceful transfer of power. Capitol Police will stand guard over the citadel of our democracy.

The vice president of the United States, faithful to her duty under our Constitution, will preside over the certification of her opponent’s victory in the November election.

It is a ceremony that for more than two centuries has made America a beacon to the world, a ceremony that ratifies the will of the voters.

For much of our history, this proceeding was treated as pro forma, a routine act. But after what we all witnessed on Jan. 6, 2021, we know we can never again take it for granted.

Violent insurrectionists attacked the Capitol, threatened the lives of elected officials and assaulted brave law enforcement officers.

We should be proud that our democracy withstood this assault. And we should be glad we will not see such a shameful attack again this year.

But we should not forget. We must remember the wisdom of the adage that any nation that forgets its past is doomed to repeat it. We cannot accept a repeat of what occurred four years ago…

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