Here it is.

Here’s some big news — Jennifer Rubin is leaving the Washington Post. She’s joining a new substack site called The Contrarian that says it is dedicated to fighting authoritarianism. Other writers who are said to have joined include George Conway, Barbara McQuade, and Andrew Weissmann. So we’ll see how that goes.

WaPo under Bezos is getting more and more useless. Rubin used to be an apologist for George W. Bush, but she never bought into Trumpism and has been one of the most intelligent and prolific critics of Trump for a decade now. Now WaPo is losing her. Several months ago WaPo somehow lost two of their other best, and progressive, opinion writers, Greg Sargent and Paul Waldman. There aren’t many WaPo opinion writers left who are worth reading. WaPo still has Eugene Robinson, Dana Milbank, Alexandra Petri, and Colbert King, but the rest of them I can think of run the gamut from mushy to deranged, IMO. They still have Philip Bump and Aaron Blake doing politics reporting, but I’ve noticed a lot of their news reporting is getting mushier, too. Jeff Bezos is killing a once-great newspaper.

The fires in southern California continue and threaten to get worse, I understand. The Biden Administration is sending aid. Once Trump takes over, that’s likely to change. Eric Lutz, Vanity Fair:

As Politico reported, Trump on Sunday held a dinner at Mar-a-Lago with several House Republicans, during which he discussed tying wildfire relief funding to a debt limit increase—something he’s been agitating for since the end of last year, when he called for the debt ceiling to be abolished during a government funding fight. House Speaker Mike Johnson was not present, according to Politico, but several top Republicans were, including some with authority over the appropriations process.

Earlier Sunday, Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso predicted to CBS News’ Margaret Brennan that he believes “there will be strings attached to money that is ultimately approved” for fire relief. “It has to do with being ready the next time,” Barasso said Sunday on Meet the Press, “because this was a gross failure this time.” Last week, Ohio Congressman Warren Davidsonsuggested outright to Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo that aid could be withheld to “put pressure on the California government to change course” in its forest management policy. “If they want the money, then there should be consequences where they have to change their policies,” the Republican said Friday.

As I wrote last week, righties refuge to acknowledge the role of climate change in fires of unprecedented intensity in bleeping January and blame the disaster on Democratic party mismanagement and DEI hiring. See the Guardian, US right wing fans misinformation fires as firefighters battle Los Angeles blazes. Gov. Newsom has set up a web page to counter the lies, but of course no rightie is going to believe Gavin Newsom.

More Stuff to Read:

Trump’s thuggish response to the California fires is a bad omen by Noah Berlatsky at Public Notice catalogs a lot of the lies being spread.

Of course Trump himself rushed to join the outflow of gaseous garbage. On Truth Social, he ranted that California did not have enough water to fight the fires because Gov. Gavin Newsom had chosen “to protect an essentially worthless fish called a smelt” and “refused to sign the water restoration declaration.” Trump continued to heap abuse on Newsom throughout the week and weekend, even as the governor worked to respond to an unprecedented disaster.

I’m surprised he didn’t mention the giant faucet. Turns out there is no such document as the “water restoration declaration” and no one seems to know how it got into Trump’s head that there was. No, there’s no shortage of water.

See also Paul Krugman, In Praise of California.

Here’s a headline at Politico that caught my attention:

Here’s the article.

The U.S. government under incoming President Donald Trump should intervene to stop the EU from fining American tech companies for breaching antitrust rules and committing other violations, Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said late Friday.

Exactly how is Trump going to “intervene” with the EU’s business? Will he invade Brussels once he’s conquered Greenland, or what? Trump can always ask the EU nicely to lay off the tech bros, of course; and the EU can and probably will tell Trump to go pound sand.

Zuckerberg complained that the EU had forced U.S. tech companies operating in Europe to pay “more than $30 billion” in penalties for legal violations over the past two decades. Last November, the tech chief’s Meta conglomerate, which operates Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and other social media and communications platforms, was fined €797 million for breaching EU antitrust rules by imposing unfair trading conditions on ads service providers.

Last year the EU fined Meta 1.2 billion euros for sending users’ personal data to the U.S., I assume without the permission of the users. “The decision applies to user data like names, email and IP addresses, messages, viewing history, geolocation data and other information that Meta — and other tech giants like Google — use for targeted online ads.” Stuff they get away with here.

Meanwhile, Elon Musk — having bought the U.S., apparently — is now moving on Europe. And the Europeans don’t care for it much. Newsweek reports that “Musk is being investigated in Europe amid concerns the billionaire’s influence, for instance through his posts on X, constitutes an ‘interference’ in upcoming elections.” Well, yes, it probably is. Go for it, Europe. See also EU politicians warn against Elon Musk’s incursions into European politics at ABC News.

Last month — before the current fire disaster, note — the Senate Budget Committee put out a report titled Next to Fall: The Climate-Driven Insurance Crisis Is Here — and Getting Worse. Here’s just a bit —

In communities across the United States, homeowners are already facing a climate-driven insurance affordability crisis. As climate-related risks have increased, so, too, have climate losses. Some estimates suggest that “[i]nsured losses from natural disasters in the U.S. now routinely approach $100 billion a year, compared to $4.6 billion in 2000.” This has, in turn, translated to an accompanying increase in insurance premiums. Between 2020 and 2023, insurance premiums in the top 20 percent of counties for climate risk increased by 22 percent, and studies have found that insurance premiums have increased 40 percent faster than inflation. Homeowners have, on average, “seen their premiums spike 21 percent since 2015. . . . That
means ever more people are forgoing coverage, leaving them vulnerable and driving prices even higher as the number of people paying premiums and sharing risk shrinks.” Staggeringly, around 67 percent of homes in the United States are now underinsured.

In other words, this isn’t just a Florida or California problem. It’s a national problem, and it needs a national solution, which isn’t going to happen in the next four years.

I believe this is the Bloomberg article that was linked in Senator Whitehouse’s “x.” I can’t read it behind the subscriber paywall. Here’s one I could read, Climate change tests the insurance industry and could lead to the ‘next big economic shock’ for the U.S. at Yahoo News. The MAGAts are still pretending climate change is a joke, but you can’t fool bean-counters.

Meanwhile, House GOP puts Medicaid, ACA, climate measures on chopping block, says Politico. House Republicans are the new flying monkeys, I tell you.

See also As a Climate Scientist, I Knew It Was Time to Leave Los Angeles at the New York Times.

[Update: SCOTUS didn’t stop the sentencing. Trump will be sentenced tomorrow for the convictions in the “hush money” case.]

[Another update: MSNBC is reporting that the 11th Circuit court says the Jack Smith report can be released, but after a three-day delay to allow for appeals. It’s not clear to me if this ruling applies equally to the J6 and documents reports.]

This is one of those days I wonder if our species will last another century. Predictably, the Right is turning the California fires into partisan talking points based on lies.

Philip Bump at WaPo writes that falsehoods around the L.A. fires are proliferating on the right. The subhead is, “Anything to keep the realities of climate change from spreading.” Please do read this; no paywall. Led by Donald Trump, it’s already a hardwired narrative on the Right that flames are consuming neighborhoods because of Democrats and DEI hires. If only White Republican men were running California, I take it, none of this would have happened.

Here’s just a sample:

So when actor James Woods, a prominent voice on right-wing social media, declares that the fires are because of “liberal idiots like Gavin Newsom and Karen Bass,” saying one of them “doesn’t understand the first thing about fire management and the other can’t fill the water reservoirs,” he is incorrect. For example — and in contrast to Trump’s claim about diverting water from Northern California that was aimed at agriculture, not firefighting — reservoirs in Southern California are at or above historic levels. That’s good news for firefighting aircraft that need the water to douse flames, except that those high winds prevented them from flying for several hours.

And, of course, all the screeching about DEI is based on the assumption “that non-White hires are necessarily less competent,” and this is accepted on the Right as gospel.

I took a look at one Right-wing site. At Hot Air, a person named Duane Patterson writes under a painfully ironic headline, “Lessons, Painful At Times, Are Only Lessons If They’re Eventually Learned.” And, of course, there is no clear “lesson” presented in the article, just the usual grievances. This disaster is entirely the fault of “Democratic leadership,” who somehow should have been able to slow down the wind and make the rain fall. More water should have been available, Patterson writes, except as Philip Bump told us, a lack of water in reservoirs wasn’t the problem. And it’s also the fault of homeless people — arson is suggested — and DEI hires. The usual blah blah blah.

What isn’t the problem is climate change. Climate change is mentioned twice, in both cases to dismiss it as just a stupid excuse. Here’s one mention:

Insurance companies pulled out of the L.A. basin years ago because state regulators would not allow them to adjust their rates to cover the increased exposure risk that was growing along with all the undergrowth and brush in the hills that the state refused to cut back. Insurance companies knew trouble was coming. Everyone honestly knew this day would eventually come, but Gavin Newsom would love for you to believe it’s climate change’s fault and just one of those things that’s unavoidable. 

Climate change is not “unavoidable” if we can accept that it’s happening and take steps to slow it down, but let’s go on … The part about insurance is mostly true; the state would not let insurance companies raise their rates to cover their increased exposure to wildfire risk.

But how many homeowners would have found the rates too high? And remember that the Republican-run state of Florida has a similar problem; insurance companies are packing up and leaving because the increased risk of hurricanes makes insuring Florida homes too risky. All those White Republican manly men who run Florida don’t seem to have an answer for that, either. California at least offers a home insurance plan of last resort for people who can’t get other coverage, which I’m pretty sure is more than Florida has done. Do correct me if I’m wrong.

As far as forest management is concerned, I’m going to assume California could do better than it has. But I found this article about a 2023 UCLA study that says, in brief, it’s complicated.

While some political leaders have argued that governmental overprotection of forests has been the primary cause of worsening fires, the reality is more nuanced. Increased logging and clearing trees may help in some locations. But in other places, evidence suggests it can lead to worse fires. For instance, opening the tree canopy allows sunlight to dry vegetation, MacDonald said, increasing the amount of dry plant matter that feeds wildfires.

And you’re going to need a huge number of people to do all the brush clearing and leaf raking the Right suggests. Who you gonna hire (if not migrants)?

The paper also calls for more regulation (watch the Righties get the vapors) regarding where and how housing developments can be built. But in the end, hotter weather, a dryer climate, and stronger winds will still be with us.

Oh, and here’s the other mention of climate change in the Hot Air article:

If there is one thing Newsom is competent at, it’s playing the blame game. There’s truly no one finer. It’s always someone else’s fault, or it’s climate change’s fault – any number of outlets for passing the buck when disaster strikes.

Like I said, climate change is just dismissed as a stupid excuse. No lessons learned here.

This goes back at least to Ronald Reagan’s taking Jimmy Carter’s solar panels off the White House roof. The implication was that alternative energy is for wimps. Manly men and their supportive women must drill baby drill. Loyalty to fossil fuels is now deeply embedded in hard-Right tribal identity, to the point that no right-thinking Rightie would ever even momentarily entertain the notion that climate change is happening and fossil fuels might be a problem. Their minds are closed and locked up tight. They have been well trained to react to any mention of climate change with derision and denial, and I don’t see that changing.

So, no lessons will be learned, as long as Donald Trump and his cult have anything to say about it.

See also Philip Bump’s column from yesterday, No windmills, more rakes: Trump’s archaic climate politics return. Trump, who no doubt has never so much as raked a leaf or mowed a lawn in his life, is certain that we just need more leaf-raking a brush clearing. For that matter, I wonder if Trump has ever walked in a real, natural forest? He’s a New York City boy, you know.

Bump begins,

The mechanism for climate change is by now well established. Gases like carbon dioxide and methane sit in Earth’s atmosphere and absorb heat rising from the planet instead of allowing the heat to escape into space. Some of that absorbed heat is, instead, redirected back down to the Earth’s surface. Because we’ve dumped so much of those gases into the atmosphere — largely by burning oil, coal and gas — more heat is retained.

The planet gets hotter. The oceans get hotter and expand. The air gets hotter and holds more moisture. The land gets hotter and dries out. We get rising sea levels and bigger storms and worse droughts. 2024 will almost certainly be Earth’s hottest year on record, seizing the title from the previous hottest year … 2023.

But no, that can’t be true, says the Right. We just need to put manly Republican White men in charge, and rake more leaves, or something.

I hope all you readers are safe from the wildfires in California. It sounds terrible.

The latest — at the present time, AG Merrick Garland plans to release the Jack Smith J6 report, probably on Friday, but hold back on the documents report. There are still two defendants in the documents case, Trump employees Waltine Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira, who are asking the report not be released. I assume any report not released before Trump takes office will be buried, and all traces of it in the Department of Justice likely destroyed. One assumes Jack Smith is keeping copies. Just for posterity, of course.

In other Trump crime news, today Trump asked the Supreme Court to stop Judge Juan Merchan from issuing a sentence in the hush money case. As reported in Business Insider,

Lawyers for Donald Trump have asked the US Supreme Court to block the president-elect’s Manhattan hush-money sentencing, currently set for Friday.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor is assigned to handle emergency applications from New York for the court, and she will get first pass at the application.

Sotomayor, nominated by President Barack Obama in 2009, issued a scathing dissent of the high court’s July 1 opinion granting presidents broad immunity from prosecution. The 525-page application filed by Trump on Wednesday morning refers to presidential immunity more than 300 times, and argues that it voids his conviction and indictment.

Sotomayor, nominated by President Barack Obama in 2009, issued a scathing dissent of the high court’s July 1 opinion granting presidents broad immunity from prosecution. The 525-page application filed by Trump on Wednesday morning refers to presidential immunity more than 300 times, and argues that it voids his conviction and indictment.

If she is unpersuaded by Trump’s application, she will refer it to the full panel of justices, where he would need a majority 5/9 vote to prevail.

The Court asked for a response by 10 a.m. Thursday from Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, so if they have a full panel vote I assume it will be after that. I like David Kurtz’s headline on this — Does The Roberts Court Have Any Dignity Left To Surrender?

In more other news: President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico suggested today that the United States be renamed “Mexican America.” 

This is embarrassing. The Associated Press reports,

President-elect Donald Trump told residents of Greenland that “we’re going to treat you well” as his oldest son visited the mineral-rich Danish territory that’s home to a large U.S. military base, heightening speculation that the incoming U.S. administration could seek to acquire it.

The president-elect later told a news conference he wouldn’t rule out using military force or economic coercion to take control of Greenland, saying that “we need it for national security.”

Earlier, the president-elect posted a video showing a TRUMP-emblazoned plane landing in Nuuk, the Arctic territory’s capital, in a landscape of snow-capped peaks and fjords.

“Don Jr. and my Reps landing in Greenland,” Trump wrote. “The reception has been great. They, and the Free World, need safety, security, strength, and PEACE! This is a deal that must happen. MAGA. MAKE GREENLAND GREAT AGAIN!” Supporters later posted video of Trump speaking by phone to locals.

Just look at the headline on this mess:

The 56,000 inhabitants of Greenland must be getting alarmed. But was there some groundswell of demand for annexing Greenland I never noticed? Who other than Trump wants this? And what makes me suspect Putin put the idea in Trump’s thick head?

And, of course, he’s still talking about invading Panama and making Canada a state.

Anyway — in other news, Jack Smith was preparing to release his final report on Donald Trump by this Friday. This is a two-part report, one volume on J6 and one on stolen documents. Yesterday Judge Aileen Cannon ruled that the Justice Department may not release the report. (Some news stories have her blocking the documents part, but other says she’s trying to block the whole thing.) I take it there is question whether Loose has the authority to block either part of the document. So we’ll see what happens.

It’s January 6 again. Back in the day January 6 was the Feast of the Epiphany and the official end of the Christmas season. Now we remember The Insurrection. There are a number of Insurrection retrospectives online today. Joyce Vance reposted something she wrote on 1/7/2021. Don Moynihan has a good commentary headlined Jan. 6 and the Path Not Taken. President Biden has an op ed at WaPo headlined What Americans Should Remember About Jan. 6. But then see David Kurtz at TPM, who says Biden was mistaken when he wrote that we’re “beyond” the Insurrection.

The Insurrection isn’t over. It continues even now. Ever since the 2020 election we’ve been locked in a struggle against a faction of socially alienated and angry neo-fascists who have been whipped up into believing that Trump was robbed of an election — or, at least, are willing to say they believe it to justify their burn-it-all-down agenda. Standing against this faction are those who support the Constitution, democracy the rule of law, and the institutions of government, flawed though they may be. Plus there’s a big third faction of low-information voters who don’t know what the bleep is going on but voted for Trump because they think he’ll bring down the price of groceries. Which he won’t.

And I understand The Weather is dumping a ton of snow on Washington, DC. Seems poetic.

Meanwhile, MAGA freakazoid Kash Patel, Trump’s nominee to head the FBI, has been pushing the claim that the FBI planned the January 6 insurrection. Yeah, he’s just the guy to head the bureau. Trump is putting his people into critical positions so that the work of January 6 — to destroy the guard rails that keep us safe from tyranny — can continue. He may yet succeed. And I fear the Republican majority in the Senate will meekly let him get away with it.

Related: I recommend The Internet Is Worse than a Brainwashing Machine at The Atlantic. No paywall.

In other news: The White House announced that “Today President Biden will take action to protect the entire U.S. East coast, the eastern Gulf of Mexico, the Pacific off the coasts of Washington, Oregon, and California, and additional portions of the Northern Bering Sea in Alaska from future oil and natural gas leasing.” Great, but won’t Trump just reverse that as soon as he’s sworn in? Maybe not. According to The Daily Beast,

Biden is invoking the 1953 Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act (OCSLA) to prevent new fossil fuel developments off the East and West coasts of the U.S. as well as in the Eastern Gulf of Mexico and Alaska’s North Bering Sea.

The law gives presidents the power to permanently withdraw parts of the Outer Continental Shelf from future oil and gas leasing—but doesn’t include a provision for how another president could revoke such an order. Trump would therefore likely have to get Congress to change the law before he could undo Biden’s action.

Trump’s pack of flying monkey supporters are screeching bloody murder about this, of course. None of the news stories I’ve seen are mentioning that there was a record oil production boom during the Biden Administration.

That’s an awkward milestone for President Joe Biden, who has arguably done more than any modern president to facilitate America’s transition away from fossil fuels to greener alternatives.

It turns out the Las Vegas Tesla cybertruck guy had a political motive after all. This is from Josh Marshall, who is a pro who is careful with facts:

…there is a pretty striking lack of attention to the political motives he expressed in at least two documents or what I guess we might call minifestos that investigators found on his iPhone.

Those documents denounce Democrats and demand they be “culled” from Washington, by violence if necessary, and express the hope that his own death will serve as a kind of bell clap for a national rebirth of masculinity under the leadership of Donald Trump, Elon Musk and Bobby Kennedy Jr.

Did you miss that stuff?

Yeah, me too!

It’s also still true that the Livelsberger possibly was suffering from PTSD and traumatic brain injury, and his second marriage was falling apart. But it seems peculiar (cough) that news outlets aren’t reporting this part of the story. Some news outlets have reported that these notes were found on his phone, but I haven’t found the parts where he said some of this:

Military and vets move on DC starting now. Militias facilitate and augment this activity.
Occupy every major road along fed buildings and the campus of fed buildings by the hundreds of thousands.
Lock the highways around down with semis right after everybody gets in. Hold until the purge is complete.
Try peaceful means first, but be prepared to fight to get the Dems out of the fed government and military by any means necessary. They all must go and a hard reset must occur for our country to avoid collapse.

Or this:

Consider this last sunset of ‘24 and my actions the end of our sickness and a new chapter of health for our people. Rally around the Trump, Musk, Kennedy, and ride this wave to the highest hegemony for all Americans! We are second to no one.

All the news stories I’ve found about the notes just say he wanted his death to be a “wake-up call.” And that’s it. You can find the texts from Livelsberger’s phone here, courtesy of the Nevada Current.

It may be that news outlets didn’t want to inspire more armed insurrection, but I think the public needs to know that this guy was a Trump-loving terrorist. There will be more.

Here’s another outrage: I didn’t mention this earlier, but last month a guy in Virginia was found to have a huge stockpile of explosives in his home. FBI agents who searched the home found more than 150 homemade bombs. This was the largest seizure of homemade weapons in FBI history, the agency said. He also had an unregistered short-barrel rifle and has been stockpiling ammunition for that. Further,

[Detective] Cardwell testified that Spafford, in conversations with the informant, allegedly expressed a desire to “bring back political assassination” and had been using a photograph of President Joe Biden for target practice at a shooting range where he was pursuing a 300- to 400-yard sniper qualification. 

Brad Spafford, the bomb maker, has been connected to a far right movement called No Lives Matter that apparently just wants to burn everything down. If convicted of everything he appears to be guilty of, he could face decades in prison. But here’s the kicker — a federal judge released him on a $25,000 bond. Um, what? I understand he’s supposed to stay with his mother and not possess any firearms. Let’s hope he doesn’t kill anybody before the trial.

In other news: Ann Telnaes, the Washington Post cartoonist, has left WaPo after it killed one of her cartoons. This is it:

I guess Jeff Bezos was offended.

President Biden has awarded Presidential Medals of Freedom to Hillary Clinton and George Soros, which should make the MAGAts happy. It’ll give them something to be mad about. He also honored Robert F. Kennedy, Sr. — so not the Lesser — and the late George Romney, Mitt’s father, who was governor of Michigan.

We’ll keep Mike Johnson as Speaker for a while longer. He appeared to be two votes short on the first vote, but then a couple of holdouts changed their minds. I understand some of the Freedom Caucus creatures only voted for Johnson to avoid electing Hakeem Jeffries. Trump had endorsed Johnson, possibly to avoid there not being a Speaker to certify Trump’s election on January 6. And that was barely enough.

There has been whining from the creatures that Johnson isn’t the leader the House Republicans need. But as David Kurtz points out at TPM, House Republicans have been ungovernable for a while now.

If you trace the current era of Republicanism to the tea party era that started in 2010, then we’re 14 years into the kind of chaos being demonstrated again today on the Hill, where the GOP is unable to govern itself let alone a country.

I suppose that if Speaker Mike Johnson pulls out a re-election win, you could argue no harm/no foul. But the structural incentives that create this kind of recurring chaos will remain. It’s a mix of things we’ve talked about for years: a close margin in the House that gives the hard-right members more clout; performative destruction as a form of politics that eventually eats its own; extremism both collectively and individually that is rewarded with high media profiles and adoration from the right-wing base.

Consider the last few Republican speakers, going back to the 1990s. Newt Gingrich, Dennis Hastert, John Boehner, Paul Ryan, Kevin McCarthy, and now Johnson. There’s a pack of mutts for you. During the same period the Democratic speakers have been, um, Nancy Pelosi and then Nancy Pelosi again.

We’re learning a bit more about the Las Vegas Tesla cybertruck guy. Now it’s being said he shot himself in the head shortly before the Tesla combusted. The  deceased was Matthew Livelsberger, an active-duty soldier who is said to have sustained a head injury in the military and who also apparently had a history of spousal abuse. His second wife had just left him. He also was a big Trump supporter, his family said. The motive here may have been that he wanted to go out in a way that would be noticed. As of now there is no apparent connection between Livelsberger and the New Orleans truck killer, Shamsud-Din Jabbar. That probably was terrorism.