It’s five days before Christmas, and Elon Musk — the unelected billionaire who seems to lack even a Schoolhouse Rock! level of civics attainment — is trying to tank another government spending bill.
Continue reading “The Musk Who Stole Christmas”As of Friday evening it appears that the Trump/Musk GOP has managed to put out, or at least move to “controlled” status, the wildfire they lit for no particular reason earlier in the week. We will soon see that this three or four day drama is a microcosm for most of what is going to unfold over the next two and likely four years: an always chaotic and often destructive jostling between different versions of far-right state transformation. Here on the one hand is Trump’s autarkic and transactional MAGA, seeking to channel power, adulation and beak-wetting all toward the person of Donald Trump. There you have Elon Musk with his more chaotic and futurist/Randian version of Silicon Valley’s “move fast and break things” culture. What unites them is their personalist character, something Donald Trump and his politics brought to the national dance. We shouldn’t doll either of these variants up too much as ideologies. They’re just different versions of post-civic democracy America from the world of billionairedom, each guy’s particular wants and needs, etc., and also with some broader constituency beyond them personally.
Continue reading “Springtime for Billionaires”I admit I’ve been saying mostly the same thing in my last few posts on events on Capitol Hill. I must think that if I keep writing it it will finally be clear. Oh well. I just noticed someone say they were surprised that almost 40 House Republicans defied not only Trump but Elon Musk as well.
I don’t think that’s what happened. Was Musk for this Trump/Johnson clean up effort that went down to defeat last night? That doesn’t seem clear at all. It’s way over-literal, over-determined. He wasn’t really for it or against it. He blew the deal up and then just moved on to something else.
Here’s the chain of events I see.
Continue reading “State of Play on Capitol Hill”January 6 defendants and attorneys have caught on to a shift in Donald Trump’s statements about a pardon in recent weeks: he’s teased the idea that he may issue a blanket pardon to non-violent offenders, while leaving the fate of the rest unclear.
Continue reading “Violent or Nonviolent? January 6ers Try to Parse Trump Pardon Remarks”A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
The GOP chaos on the Hill isn’t about policy disputes or even strictly ideological differences. That makes covering which version of which bill contains which provisions a bit of a fool’s errand. This isn’t about spending or budget priorities or the debt limit or any of the other ostensible negotiating points that Republicans themselves can’t agree on or resolve amongst themselves in any meaningful way.
This week’s debacle is not your grandpappy’s horse-trading in a smoke-filled room or LBJ dishing out the Johnson Treatment. The only arm-twisting going on is the kind you see in pro wrestling, which is probably the best parallel for what the GOP’s performative politics amounts to. Spending bills, speakership elections, and other real and pressing matters of government put the GOP’s kayfabe under extreme duress. When that happens, we get eruptions like this one that periodically pull the curtain back on what is really up.
We’re more than a decade now into the GOP’s performative politics of destruction. It gains power by touting its aim to break stuff and then runs into a brick wall when it’s forced to make the hard choices that come with holding power. Any GOP effort to govern at least temporarily is susceptible to being undermined by its many bombthrowers, who can exert leverage by striking a purer “blow it all up” posture.
It’s why the details of the negotiations, such as they are, barely matter. It’s why what’s on or off the table isn’t very illuminating about the underlying politics. I’d call it a disaster for Republicans, but they’ve done this over and over for more than decade and not paid nearly the political price you’d expect.
I police word choice with some trepidation because rather than forcing hard thinking about precision it often gets turned into a new bright-line rule that is just as lazy as the bad practice it replaced. With that caveat, observe some of the headlines over the last day or two about the GOP chaos on the Hill. Do these really accurately describe what is happening, especially in a world in which the GOP has spent decades invested in making the broader public think government is inept, unreliable, and incompetent?
Those are literally true, but they fail to capture the true dynamic. Not all headlines were this opaque, and other stories from the same outlets had sharper headlines that reflected what is actually happening. The worst of all though was this laugher: “Biden is AWOL as Washington spirals into shutdown chaos”
Elon Musk’s outsized role in bullying the House GOP into abandoning the bipartisan deal on CR had Trump scrambling Thursday to assert that he’s still in charge. Trump himself did hastily scheduled phone interviews with reporters at ABC, CBS and NBC. The pushback was not subtle, as exemplified by this cheesy spin given to Politico:
It Musk is a “pawn in Trump’s chessboard, like everybody else,” said a person close to Trump who, like others in this story, was granted anonymity to speak frankly. The media “really wants to paint Elon as this independent character. If it were a chessboard, [Musk would] be a bishop.”
Trump’s own spokesperson issued a clunky statement that belied Trump’s strength: “As soon as President Trump released his official stance on the CR, Republicans on Capitol Hill echoed his point of view. President Trump is the leader of the Republican Party. Full stop.”
“President-elect Donald Trump had dinner Wednesday with Amazon founder Jeff Bezos (who owns The Washington Post) at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, and the two were joined by billionaire Elon Musk, a Trump transition team spokesperson confirmed.”–WaPo
More than 30 House Republicans have sent a letter to President-elect Trump urging him to have his new attorney general call for the resignations of all 94 U.S. attorneys and handpick their acting successors rather than allowing the existing first assistant U.S. attorneys to ascend to the acting roles, Semafor was the first to report.
The sweeping resignations of all the U.S. attorneys would not be unusual or uncommon with a change in administrations, but handpicking each of the acting U.S. attorneys to make sure they are not an “ideological protégé” of their predecessor is out of the ordinary.
Here’s what caught my eye from the letter:
We believe your interim appointments ought to be current federal prosecutors. Your transition team, incoming Attorney General, and like-minded allies in the U.S. Senate and U.S. House should identify individuals within each office to elevate to Interim U.S. Attorney until your nominations for U.S. Attorneys are confirmed by the Senate.
That sounds an awful lot like a mechanism to identify loyalists – and by implication everyone who isn’t a loyalist – throughout the Justice Department. Stay tuned.
This is very inside baseball but it gives you a taste of the loyalty dynamic operating within the Republican Party right now: A MAGA power play roils Senate GOP campaign groups. I know it’s tempting to write this off as something the GOP brought on itself, but this is your occasional reminder that everything Trump does to America he first does to the Republican Party.
“When the media decides to start hedging, or not telling the full story, combined with people being reluctant to engage in political opposition because they fear they will land in jail, that’s just not a democracy any longer. And it’s not like we’re six months away from that. It feels like we might be a month away from a world in which people start to retreat from politics for fear of criminal prosecution, and the media just uses kid gloves in dealing with the regime. I don’t think this is hypothetical two years from now; we may be living in a very restricted democratic space in January.”–Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT), speaking on Greg Sargent’s podcast The Daily Blast
A major setback in the RICO case in Georgia as an intermediate appeals court found the trial judge erred in not disqualifying District Attorney Fani Willis once he found that her conduct had created a “significant appearance of impropriety.” That means Willis is off the case unless she succeeds in her appeal to the state Supreme Court.
Politico: Judges increasingly alarmed as Trump’s Jan. 6 clemency decision nears
Sherrilyn Ifill, on the Roberts Court: “More and more, the conservative majority’s approach has put the rules and norms that govern our system of litigation in the crosshairs as much as the substantive rights of marginalized groups.”
The Pentagon has maintained for months that there are 900 U.S. troops deployed in Syria, but yesterday revealed that the actual number is 2,000.
The Josh Marshall Podcast featuring Kate Riga will be recorded in front of a live audience for the first time on Jan. 15 in Washington, D.C.
Want to join us? Tickets are on sale here. If you are a TPM Prime member, you should have already received an invitation with a discount code. If not, reach out to us and we’ll get you one.
We’ll do a brief Q&A and a cocktail hour after the podcast. I’ll be there. I hope to see you there, too.
Tickets are limited and they’re going fast, so don’t wait. Buy now.
Morning Memo will be on hiatus next week. It will resume on Dec. 30.
Do you like Morning Memo? Let us know!
If you haven’t seen the details, the meltdown on Capitol Hill went from bad to worse this evening. Or awesome to awesomer, depending on your perspective. Let’s review. Donald Trump wanted a smooth ride to January 20th. He allowed the leaders of the congressional GOP to negotiate a government funding extension to smooth that ride. That was about to pass before Elon Musk stepped in with a tweet storm and blew up the whole thing. That sent Speaker Johnson and Trump back to the drawing board to come up with a new GOP-only plan to meet Musk’s objections. To get it through today it needed a 2/3rds vote in the House. It didn’t come close to 50%. For the next ten days or so the Senate is controlled by the Democrats. So the House isn’t even the only problem. Trump told House Republicans today they had to vote for this new plan. Then 38 House Republicans voted against. Now they’re barreling toward a government shutdown.
Continue reading “Musk Shows Trump That He’s the New Chaos in Town”The biggest question to me about Trump II is where the administration will land on the spectrum of incompetence to malice. Based on this current preview, the New York Times needle is currently quivering over the red-hot incompetence zone.
This is a live question because Republicans under Donald Trump’s unified government will have more incentive to set aside their obstructionist instincts and cooperate than ever before; the party is much more MAGAfied than in 2017, with many of the reluctants and resisters forced out. If there’s one thing the conference’s rightward flank loves more than gunking up the gears of legislating, it’s performing fealty to Trump.
But Trump has to be actively engaged in governing to snap the foot soldiers into line. And as we’ve seen this past week, he continues to refuse to do that. Georgetown’s Matt Glassman put this well in his newsletter: “If he had just laid out his position at Thanksgiving — maybe ‘clean-ish CR, with disaster relief, with farm bill extension, etc.’ — the House GOP would have absolutely passed that bill and then Johnson and company could have negotiated a decent deal with the Senate and moved on.”
Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) also put it simply: “What does President Trump want Republicans to do: vote for the CR or shut down government? Absent direction, confusion reigns.”
This time, rather than his typical swooping in at the 11th hour to blow up the carefully crafted compromise of his own accord, “President-Elect Musk” forced Trump’s hand. Democrats’ gleeful goading of Trump as Musk’s puppet is the most energized I’ve seen them since the election.
Add to this stew that Trump, in a baffling turn of events, now wants the debt ceiling lifted — or even repealed altogether. It’s a bizarre request to tack on for a number of reasons. First, the only people who actually weaponize the debt ceiling are Republicans, and most only care about it when Democrats are in office. If Trump hadn’t called attention to it, Republicans would have lifted or suspended it as usual, with Democratic votes offsetting the Republican fiscal hawks. It’s Democrats who occasionally mutter about taking this weapon out of the GOP arsenal, only to drop the subject until the next clash.
This has caused bickering between Trump and aforementioned fiscal hawks, as the President-elect is now urging a primary against the “unpopular,” “weak” and “ineffective” Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX), who in the past has been a particularly loud voice against raising the debt limit (and who also, unforgivably, initially endorsed Ron DeSantis in the primary).
Many involved, including Trump, are also now venting their spleen at Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA).
“We’ll see. What they had yesterday was unacceptable,” Trump told NBC, referring to the original continuing resolution, when asked if he still had confidence in Johnson. “In many ways it was unacceptable. It’s a Democrat trap.”
Of course, it has to be at least a little friendly to Democrats by design; if some Republicans will never vote for anything but their dream hard-right spending bill, it paradoxically moves the bill to the left, as Johnson needs Democratic support to make up for it and get the bill through. This is a tale as old as time.
A handful of House Republicans are openly telling reporters that Johnson is losing their support, and Sens. Mike Lee (R-UT) and Rand Paul (R-KY) are sycophantically calling for Musk (who we’re watching discover how the government operates in real time) to be installed as speaker instead.
If Johnson manages to keep the government funded — his team is leaking news of a plan for a three-month extension, reportedly cutting measures like lowering prescription drug costs that had been included to keep Democrats on board — some of this furor might die down before the speaker elections on Jan. 3. Trump immediately endorsed the bill, though there’s still a Democratic Senate to contend with, even if it does pass through the House. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) called the “Trump-Musk-Johnson proposal” “laughable.”
Johnson may ultimately survive, not least, because, given the above, who the hell else would want this job?
One thing to keep in mind: If Johnson does win the election to retain his title for the incoming Congress, he’ll enjoy a degree of security neither he nor Kevin McCarthy before him ever had. The new rules package requires nine votes to trigger the motion to vacate, up significantly from the current one.
Republicans Turn Eating Their Own Into A Spectator Sport
Georgia Appeals Court Disqualifies Fani Willis From Trump RICO Case
Trump Casts The Worst And Dimmest For Season 2
OpenAI Pleads That It Can’t Make Money Without Using Copyrighted Materials for Free — Noor Al-Sibai, Futurism
LA Times owner asks editorial board to ‘take a break’ from writing about Trump – report — Dani Anguiano, The Guardian
Majority of Americans oppose Trump’s proposals to test democracy’s limits — Colby Itkowitz, Emily Guskin and Scott Clement, The Washington Post
This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at The Conversation.
Coastal populations are expanding quickly around the world. The rise is evident in burgeoning waterfront cities and in the increasing damage from powerful storms and rising sea levels. Yet, reliable, detailed data on the scale of that population change has been hard to pin down, until now.
We study human geography as a sociologist at Mississippi State University and a computer scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Using newly available data from Oak Ridge that combines census results, satellite images and data science techniques, we were able to track growth patterns of coastal populations around the world.
The results show a striking pattern: The largest number of people by far — about 10% of the global population — live within 5 kilometers (3.1 miles) of the coast, and another 5% of the world’s people live between 5 and 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) from the coast. In the rings beyond 10 kilometers, the population declines swiftly.
The United Nations estimates that Earth’s population passed 8 billion people in 2022, an increase of 1 billion in just over a decade.
We found that over 2 billion of those people — 29% of the total global population — lived within 50 kilometers (31 miles) of shore in 2018, based on Oak Ridge Laboratory’s publicly available dataset. About half of those inhabitants — over 1 billion people, or about 15% of the global population — lived within 10 kilometers of the water.
If you picture a globe, that means 15% of the world’s population was living on 4% of the Earth’s entire inhabitable landmass.
People are drawn to coastal areas for many reasons. Coastal cities are often economic hubs, meaning job opportunities, access to trade and exposure to bustling communities. These areas also offer access to nature, including fisheries and recreation.
We found that between 2000 and 2018, the global population living within 10 kilometers of the water increased by about 233 million inhabitants — about 28%. That’s equivalent to adding 23 new megacities with 10 million inhabitants each — about twice the size of the Miami metro area — right near the water’s edge.
Human settlement patterns have profound consequences for people’s exposure to risk, particularly near the coasts.
Rising sea levels contribute to high-tide flooding, more extreme storm surge during hurricanes and erosion in regions around the world. In some areas, particularly Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands, rising saltwater has infiltrated farm fields and freshwater sources. Hurricanes and typhoons, which gain strength over warm water, have intensified as temperatures have risen.
Coastal ecosystems, including fragile mangroves, wetlands and coral reefs, are also sensitive to the expanding coastal populations and to the infrastructure and pollution accompanying human settlement.
Despite the importance of understanding these population patterns in coastal regions, trying to get a global picture of the growth has been hazy at best. The LandScan Global project at Oak Ridge National Laboratory is changing that by starting to allow public access to annual high-resolution population data. We can used that data to estimate the magnitude and growth patterns of coastal populations on an annual basis.
Coastal growth is happening across the globe, but we found the strongest growth patterns on two continents: Asia and Africa.
Currently, Asia has four of the five most populated countries: China, India, Indonesia and Pakistan. It also has 60% of the Earth’s coastal population. In comparison, Africa has about 12%, Europe has 11%, North America has 9% and South America has 7%.
But Africa has the fastest-growing population. Between 2000 and 2018, Africa’s coastal population grew 61%, with 58 million more people living within 10 kilometers of the oceans. Asia added 125 million more inhabitants within 10 kilometers of the coast – a more modest 25% increase.
Collectively, about 78% of the coastal growth was on those two continents.
On all of these continents, human population growth along the coast followed a similar pattern: The highest concentrations of inhabitants are in the bands closest to shore, decreasing rapidly as they move inland. Given the great differences among the cultures, economies and histories of the continents, it is remarkable to find consistent human population patterns.
Coastal regions are hubs of economic activity and infrastructure development, often playing critical roles in national and global economies. However, the rapid population growth is accelerating human and environmental risks.
Understanding these coastal population growth patterns is fundamental to addressing this global challenge.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
If you’re thinking about joining us for our first live-audience version of the podcast on January 15th down in DC, definitely get your tickets now. We’ve got 200 seats/tickets and we’ve already sold half of them in the first 36 hours. As noted, it’s a live-audience version of the podcast followed by a Q&A and then drinks, with your first drink included in the price of admission. Join us. It’ll be fun. Tickets are $75 if you’re not a member and $50 for Prime and Prime AF members. For Inside members, the ticket is included in the price of your membership. If you’re a member you’ll already have gotten the discounted link sent directly to your inbox. Seriously, we can’t wait to see all of you.
A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Kate and Josh discuss Democrats’ vote against elevating AOC to a prominent role, the great capitulation of the CEOs and Biden’s acts of mercy.
You can listen to the new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast here.
Continue reading “Listen To This: AOC Snubbed”