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digby
"what digby sez..."
Digby's Hullabaloo Posts
You know it’s a problem because they can’t figure out how to excuse it. Here’s Vance yesterday just completely denying the reality, even in context:
He certainly did say that and it’s going over like a lead balloon.
It doesn’t just apply to Iran. He doesn’t care about Americans’ financial situation in any context and it’s obvious because he keeps talking about the stock market and saying the economy is the greatest the world has ever seen and we’re in a golden age.
That’s his Dukakis in a helmet moment.
They can’t stop going after the vulnerable:
Vice President JD Vance announced Wednesday that the Trump administration is withholding $1.3 billion in Medicaid payments to California and is threatening to suspend federal funding to all states if they don’t aggressively prosecute fraud in their Medicaid programs.
As part of his role as the fraud czar, Vance said that the administration is targeting California because the state isn’t taking fraud seriously.
“There are California taxpayers and American taxpayers who are being defrauded because California isn’t taking its program seriously, but also you have people who have been prescribed medications that they don’t even need. They’ve had drugs put into their bodies that they don’t need because fraudsters have actually encouraged false prescriptions and false administration of medications,” Vance said at the White House.
The move is similar to the one the administration took in February suspending Medicaid payments to Minnesota.
[…]
“Now, we have red states and blue states that go after fraud aggressively. But we also unfortunately have some states — mostly blue states, unfortunately — that do not take Medicaid fraud very seriously,” the vice president said.
They are targeting long term care and hospice. In other words, old people and people who are dying, many of whom are alone and poor.
I guess we should be surprised because they did cut off funding to USAID which will kill millions of vulnerable children around the world so it’s not as if these monster give a shit about anything.
And I don’t think I have to point out the fact that the Trump administration going after fraud is hilariously duplicitous considering the massive fraud they are openly perpetrating on the country and raking in billions doing it.
How about those pardons:
On the evening of Thursday, June 12, a small group of internet gamblers made a highly specific prediction on Polymarket, the betting website that offers odds on virtually everything.
Thirteen users wagered a total of $140,000 that Israel would strike Iran by the end of that week, even as the odds suggested that an attack was unlikely. Seven of the accounts had been opened just days earlier. Another had a history of bets related to military action against Iran — and had won money on all of them.
Israel attacked Iran later that day, netting the accounts more than $600,000 in profits.
[…]
Those bets represent only a slice of the suspicious activity on Polymarket. A New York Times examination found that more than 80 Polymarket users have placed bets with suspicious characteristics, including 38 whose well-timed wagers have drawn little or no public attention. They won money across nearly 30 topics dating back to at least 2024, from Israel’s strike on Iran last year to the regulatory debate over cryptocurrency trading.
The Times’s examination also revealed previously unreported red flags in some of the high-profile bets that have drawn scrutiny. The findings were based on a series of warning signs that hint at insider trading without proving it definitively. Those signals include long-shot bets that pay off, well-timed wagers by recently opened accounts and bets by users who gamble on only a few related topics without ever losing, among other considerations.
On 23 March, traders placed $580m in bets on the oil futures market just 15 minutes before Trump said on social media that the US was having “productive” talks with Iran, according to the Financial Times. The traders made a windfall after Trump’s comments triggered a sell-off in the oil markets that made oil prices plummet.
The same thing happened again on 7 April, this time when traders spent $950m on oil futures, betting that the price of oil would fall just hours before the ceasefire with Iran was announced.
“We can’t say from the outset whether any of these trades were illegal. Any one of them could be lucky, and any one of them could be based on lawful information,” said Andrew Verstein, a law professor at the University of California at Los Angeles. “But many of them bear the hallmarks of suspicious trades that would naturally warrant investigation.”
Not to mention all the Trump no-bid contracts, kickbacks and scams.
So naturally, they’re going to take away nursing home and hospice attendants in retaliation for any state that doesn’t worship Dear Leader.
It’s hard to believe there are so many millions of our fellow Americans who are either stupid enough or cruel enough to keep supporting these monsters but the evidence is clear. They live among us. And it’s the most frightening thing about all of it.
In 1972, as he was preparing for what would turn out to be his landslide reelection that November, President Richard Nixon made an historic trip to the People’s Republic of China. As the old saying goes, he was the only one who could have done it because he’s the only one who wouldn’t have been red-baited by Richard Nixon. His visit was a highly-staged affair, featuring carefully curated images avidly watched by people worldwide, as they hadn’t had a window into China for over two decades. And it was a smashing success, not only politically, but substantively as well.
As historian Rick Perlstein related in “Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America,” Nixon’s anti-communist agit-prop, honed over many decades, was sincere — but it was only part of the story. The man’s duality was evident by the fact that he truly was the ugly, divisive character that spawned the nickname “Tricky Dick.” At the same time, he possessed a sophisticated worldview and a deep grasp of foreign affairs. Nixon used the opening with China as leverage against the Soviet Union and began the process that led to the end of the Cold War 19 years later. That trip, and the strategy behind it, remain one of his most positive legacies.
Now, 54 years later, Donald Trump is carrying out his own visit to China, and it’s highly unlikely that any such memorable achievement will emerge from it. While the president shares Nixon’s most heinous character flaws, he has no understanding of foreign affairs, and his only claim to a sophisticated worldview is an understanding of the burning question of Italian granite versus Greek marble. Unlike with Nixon, all America can hope for is that Trump doesn’t make such a fool of himself that we find ourselves in even worse economic and national security situations than we’re already in.
In October, when Trump first announced his visit to China, he was high on his tariff regime — and likely imagining he could jet into Beijing and bend Premier Xi Jinping to his will on trade. But seven months later, the tide has turned. Trump is meeting his Chinese counterpart as a weakened leader, hobbled by the Supreme Court’s ruling that found most of his tariffs unconstitutional, as well as the ongoing war in Iran, which a new Washington Post report revealed has shifted the balance of power between the two nations. (China, according to a confidential assessment, has “gained a major edge” on the U.S. during the conflict.) Trump is reportedly seeking China’s help in negotiations with the Islamic Republic to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and draw down the conflict. But any assistance from Xi will almost certainly require concessions from the U.S. that Trump will doubtless attempt to spin as inconsequential, or even nonexistent.
Trump’s war against Iran has led to an interruption of oil supplies and a rapidly cascading disruption of the world economy. China, which has several methods of alternative energy to lean on, has not been as affected by the war as other Asian countries. But Xi must be concerned about the very real possibility of a global recession stemming from Iran’s continued strangling of shipping through the Strait. As the emergency wears on, the Islamic Republic and China are moving closer, leaving the U.S. in an uncomfortable position.
Despite Trump’s apparent belief that Xi loves him like a brother and would give him the shirt off his back, there’s no doubt that China will be looking for reciprocation for any help it provides. That would likely include assurances that the president’s tariff business will be gone for good and that the U.S. will take a much more hands-off policy toward Taiwan. As the Guardian reported, “Trump has relaxed restrictions on the sale of advanced semiconductors to China, shown little support for Taiwan [and] reportedly ordered the Pentagon to cut references to China being a threat from U.S. defence strategy.”
The Financial Times’ Gideon Rachman has pointed out that China still has a monopoly on rare earth minerals, which they used to great advantage during the recent tariff war. And while the U.S. still dominates in technology, China is rapidly catching up with artificial intelligence and surpassing the country in electronic vehicles. There may be some showy “agreements” that Trump can use to pretend he’s doing something for America, but it’s clear that China holds the cards.
Meanwhile, Trump is already bathing in the flattery inherent in such foreign visits. During his first term, China feted him like a favorite prince with various ceremonies: a private tour of the Forbidden City, followed by a performance by the Peking Opera and a huge state dinner. (They need to be careful this time; there’s no way Trump could stay awake during a Chinese opera these days.)
As is usual with any such Trump event, they all pretended they had made massive deals for billions of dollars, which turned out to be non-binding and mostly never came to fruition. The visit mainly served to convince Trump that all the pomp and circumstance meant that he and Xi are such good friends to this day — and that Xi will do whatever Trump wants him to do. This time around, the president is already praising Xi as his “friend” and predicting a “fantastic future together.”
The truth, of course, is much more complicated. Xi and China’s leaders, according to “private conversations and public writings,” view America as “‘declining but dangerous’ — a late-stage power prone to bursts of aggression in the hopes of arresting its slide,” Ryan Hass wrote in the Atlantic. The director of the China Center and Koo Chair in Taiwan Studies at the Brookings Institution, Hass argued that Xi is content to stand back and let the U.S. flame out, leaving China as the leader in “a world in which their dominance emerges not as a climactic victory over Western interests but as a fact on the ground.”
Richard Nixon would not be happy about that assessment. But while the Chinese may be right in their analysis, they shouldn’t be too smug about it. The U.S. deserves the world’s loss of respect for having returned Trump to office after sending him into exile four years before. The country’s reputation is damaged, probably permanently.
But assuming a wealthy, nuclear superpower that’s “declining but dangerous” will simply flame out is equally dangerous. America may be going down — but it could very well take the rest of the world with it.
Salon
Not the red he’s looking for
The most out of control reactions from MAGAs I’ve seen on the street are over references to the economy: gas, food, the war, the ballroom. They’re hurting. They know they’ve been betrayed. They know their lord and savior Trump is to blame but they refuse to go there. Basic economic facts they see as a thumb in the eye.
This is bad for Trump. Work the eye. He won’t see it coming.
Sign Guy now wears a body cam when dancing on the overpass.
Millennials, GenZ? Make it so.
From The Root:
A Louisiana resident who identified himself as Marshawn delivered a fiery, emotional speech to lawmakers during a state Senate hearing over redistricting Monday, accusing Republicans of trying to “cheat” Black voters out of political power.
Preach!
But the beautiful thing is, the children that y’all have made, and the people that’s younger than y’all, don’t support none of this racism that y’all want. The MAGA party is the last breath of the Confederacy, and I’ll be happy to see Millennials and GenZ bury y’all. There will be no more of your party. The midterms gonna come. Y’all are going to get wiped out.
Funny thing about that: Sign Guy already has September messages in the queue asking Millennials and Gen Z to do just that. The power sits in the palm of their hands, waiting, if they’ll just close their fingers around it. The graphic couldn’t be clearer.
Your state similar.
For those of you who don’t watch cable or may have missed this Anderson Cooper interview with Brian Driscoll, the former acting FBI Director who was fired for failing to be the brown-noser Trump requires. It’s yet another data point that the FBI is becoming so tainted that America is actually in danger — not only from criminal and national security threats they aren’t bothering to investigate but from the FBI itself.
Brian Driscoll revealed in an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper that he underwent a vetting process last year when he got offered the deputy director job at the FBI. But things quickly took a turn when he started getting pressed about his personal politics, including who he voted for in 2024 and when he became a supporter of President Donald Trump.
At one point, Driscoll recalled, Patel told him that the vetting process would go smoothly as long as he wasn’t active on social media, made no donations to the Democratic Party, and didn’t vote for Kamala Harris as president. “It made the hair on the back of my neck stand up,” Driscoll told CNN. He served as acting FBI director for just a month, stepping down from the helm of the agency when Patel was confirmed by the Senate in February 2025.
After Patel’s confirmation, he told Driscoll that “the FBI tried to put the president in jail and he hasn’t forgotten it.” “It was the first time he articulated it that bluntly to me,” Driscoll said.
Around that same period, tensions between Driscoll and the Trump administration escalated when he refused to heed an order to hand over the names of every employee involved in investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 rioters and fire eight senior officials. Driscoll said that order came from Emil Bove, Trump’s former personal defense lawyer, who at the time was the acting deputy attorney general at the Department of Justice. Bove is now a federal judge at the U.S. Court of Appeals. When he asked Bove why he needed to submit the list of employees involved in probing the Capitol rioters, Driscoll was told simply that there was “cultural rot in the FBI,” he told CNN.
“I was telling them this is wrong,” he said.
Driscoll was fired without explanation last August. A month later, he and two other ousted FBI officials filed a lawsuit against Patel, then-Attorney General Pam Bondi, the FBI, the DOJ, and the Executive Office of the President. They alleged that they were terminated over insufficient loyalty to Trump.
In the lawsuit, Driscoll alleged that Patel admitted “his ability to keep his own job depended on the removal of the agents who worked on cases involving the president. “You take all of these highly experienced people with the perspective gained through that experience, through success and failure alike, and remove them,” Driscoll told CNN. “It’s devastating to the workforce, not just for the morale, but also the stability of the organization and the faith in it from the people inside of it and the people outside of it.”
Patel is a disaster even by Trump’s standards. Not that Trump really cares but he’s lost control of the agency with is now leaking like a sieve every day.
FBI Director Kash Patel sidestepped months of unflattering insider accounts of his leadership in a hearing on Tuesday. Instead, he boasted of the bureau almost doubling its number of arrests under his tenure, and of capturing the world’s “Ten Most Wanted” villains at a record clip.
He sounded a familiar refrain as he seeks to protect his job, dismissing senators’ concerns over media reports about his behavior, and waving a large placard that he said carried statistical proof that his leadership of the world’s premier law enforcement agency has been stellar. But Patel’s FBI has imposed new policies that inflate these numbers and overstate the bureau’s progress in stemming crime, according to a half dozen law enforcement sources with knowledge of the changes.
For example, the FBI began counting thousands of arrests of immigrants that occurred when bureau agents accompanied the federal immigration officers who made the arrests as part of surges targeting the Minneapolis area, Memphis and other cities. Such cases are not ones the bureau had previously recorded as a bureau arrest, the people said.
An MS NOW review of changes in the FBI’s Most Wanted list during Patel’s tenure also found that the FBI manipulated that iconic bureau program to falsely suggest rapid progress; in that time, the bureau quickly added the names of some fugitives just hours or days before agents capture them.
Again, Trump doesn’t care about this. In fact, he no doubt sees it as “smart.” And Patel has no fear of the law himself because he knows Trump will pardon him for anything he does (unless it’s to betray Trump.) But there could be pressure coming from certain members of congress. Maybe. At this point I’m not sure they care about anything either.
This one is secret but it’s very, very close to home:
Earlier this spring, a mysterious explosion blew up a car carrying an alleged cartel operative in broad daylight on one of Mexico’s busiest highways just outside of its capital city.
Francisco Beltran was killed instantly along with his driver, their bodies found slumped over in their seats after the concentrated blast. Video and pictures of the attack on March 28 show a quick burst of flames with the car continuing to roll forward, drifting off the highway.
Known as “El Payin,” Beltran was accused of being a mid-level member of the Sinaloa Cartel, one of Mexico’s most notorious drug trafficking syndicates, Mexican security analysts and sources familiar with his activities said.
Mexican authorities have maintained extreme secrecy around the explosion, but multiple sources tell CNN that the attack was a targeted assassination, facilitated by CIA operations officers. An explosive device had been hidden inside the vehicle, the State of Mexico’s Attorney General told CNN.
The Beltran operation was part of an expanded, and previously unreported, CIA campaign inside Mexico — spearheaded by the agency’s elite and secretive Ground Branch — to dismantle the entrenched cartel networks, those sources as well as two additional people familiar with the campaign told CNN. President Donald Trump has designated several of those groups foreign terrorist organizations and deemed them to be at war with the United States.
Since last year, CIA operatives inside Mexico have directly participated in deadly attacks on several, mostly mid-level cartel members, the sources said. “The lethality of their operations has been seriously ramped up,” said one of the people briefed on the operations. “It’s a significant expansion of the kind of thing the CIA has been willing to do inside Mexico.
I’m shocked he hasn’t been bragging about this on Truth Social but give it time. He certainly doesn’t care about CIA secrecy or international law or anything like that. I suspect he hasn’t said anything because it just hasn’t been top of mind over Venezuela, Cuba and Iran. when you’re waging wars of various intensity all over the world it’s hard to keep track.
The CIA is back in the covert war business apparently. What could go wrong?
Spencer Ackerman has this about the new Cointelpro:
Any Rage Against The Machine fan reading the Trump administration’s new national security strategy immediately recognized the parallel to COINTELPRO, the FBI’s infamous Cold War campaign to surveil, infiltrate, and disrupt the American left.
After elevating “violent left-wing extremists, including Anarchists and Anti-Fascists” to a central focus of U.S. counterterrorism, the strategy document, released last week, declared: “The mission of the counterterrorism structures of the U.S. Government is to identify those groups that have the intent and capability to plot attacks against Americans and then neutralize them.”
[…]
In it, right-wing political violence, such as the January 6 insurrection, exists only as a calumny of politicized government persecution to justify aiming counterterrorism authorities and resources at the left. Drug cartels and traffickers are defined as terrorists, not because of any campaign of political violence, but simply, as the strategy boasts, “to make available additional intelligence authorities.” Against a new grouping of “top five” jihadist entities, which, beyond al-Qaeda and ISIS, are not defined, it vows “high-intensity but short campaigns,” a standard promise of post-9/11 forever wars. Christians in Africa are “the most persecuted people on Earth.” (It was the justification for Trump’s Christmas bombing of Nigeria.)
Along those lines, the strategy warns of “New and deepening alliances between the far-left and Islamists, i.e., the ‘Red-Green’ alliance.” Such “alliances,” which the strategy naturally does not expand upon, are another creation of the far-right imagination. To the degree that there’s a material reality buried under there somewhere, it’s inevitably going to be the growing, vocal sympathies on the left – and expanding beyond it – for Palestine, which reads to Zionists and their allies in the White House as simply an affinity for Hamas. It will also likely come to mean those who reject Trump’s disastrous war of aggression against Iran.
Already this year, the Justice Department has charged anti-ICE protesters in Texas as terrorists and indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center. “Speech will be criminalized,” warned former FBI special agent Terry Albury on a livestream we both participated in on Monday.
Trump’s counterterrorism strategy builds upon a crucial document the White House issued last year, known as National Security Presidential Memorandum-7, and reported on most assiduously by Ken Klippenstein. NSPM-7 instructed the federal Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTFs) – which unite state and local police with the FBI and Department of Homeland Security – to investigate the “common threads” of domestic political violence resident in “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.” The vagueness of such categories – what counts as “extremism on migration, race and gender”? – is simultaneously laughable and deadly serious. JTTFs, supercharged after 9/11, do not need a factual predicate linking a person or group to an act of violence to open an “assessment,” a low-level form of FBI investigation permits physical surveillance and infiltration.
This has been on the agenda for quite some time, they’ve just codified it and are openly announcing their intentions. The jury is still out on whether anyone cares about this stuff anymore. (I wrote about that JTTF when it was first reported but there’s been very little discussion of it.)
Get ready. This is Nixon on steroids and I have little doubt they’ll move on it. After all, they’ve indicted the former FBI director for posting a picture of some seashells. I don’t think they have any limits.
Let’s celebrate HIM this summer
RNS tells us that Thomas Paine is in the doghouse with the wingnuts again:
Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., was revving up a crowd of tens of thousands gathered in Philadelphia for the first major No Kings protest last June. His speech, like the demonstration itself, was focused primarily on pushback against President Donald Trump, whom critics such as Raskin likened to a would-be monarch.
But after railing against the president, Raskin paused to focus on one of his favorite Founding Fathers: Thomas Paine, an English-born political writer who supercharged the American Revolution with his wildly popular pamphlet “Common Sense” 250 years ago.
Noting that he named his own late son after Paine, Raskin recalled the corset-maker-turned-revolutionary’s dream of an America that would operate as “an asylum to humanity.” Paine, he told the crowd, envisioned “a place of refuge for people seeking freedom from religious and political and intellectual and economic repression from around the world” — and then helped spur a revolution to make it a reality.
Less than a month later, at the inaugural service of Christ Church DC — a congregation organized by self-described Christian nationalist Doug Wilson and attended by influential conservatives, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth — Pastor Jared Longshore delivered a sermon that held up Paine not as a hero, but a cautionary tale. Longshore dismissed Paine as someone who “exalted human reason to the place of a golden calf,” an apparent reference to Paine’s deism and his criticism of organized religion’s entanglements with political power.
“Thomas Paine actually lost all of his old friends,” Longshore said, standing at a pulpit underneath an American flag. He then implied Paine’s fall from grace could be the ultimate fate of modern progressives, saying: “Only a few mourners came to his funeral, and even the Quakers wouldn’t let him be buried in their cemetery. That’s tough. Shows you how people used to think and how people are thinking now.”
The contrast captures not only Paine’s contested place in American memory, but the larger political and religious debate in the US over whose founding vision should govern.
Scholars say Paine’s historical importance is undeniable. A seminal and celebrated voice in the American Revolution, Paine was so influential that John Adams once referred to the late 1700s as “the age of Paine.” What’s more, in addition to his role in America’s founding, Paine, an Englishman, championed democratic values so fervently that he later became a leader in the French Revolution despite not speaking French.
But Paine ultimately proved polarizing in his own lifetime, largely because of his blistering critique of organized religion, historians say. Among other things, he helped initiate debates over the separation of church and state that continue to this day, resulting in a bifurcated legacy: Paine as a champion of freedom or Paine as the “Forgotten Founding Father” — embraced or dismissed, depending on who is doing the remembering.
Plus ça change, mon frères.
But Paine comes back when he is needed:
He’s needed now.