The Justice Department is a tad irked by the Matt Gaetz nomination.

Donald Trump’s decision to nominate Rep. Matt Gaetz for attorney general has Justice Department veterans petrified and warning of a crisis in the department marked by chaos and revenge.

…

“There’s no conceivable justification for nominating somebody this smarmy and this offensive for a position of such significance in this democracy other than to have a puppet and somebody who, as Gaetz has demonstrated, will do anything Trump asks,” said Ty Cobb, a former Trump White House lawyer.

[Aside: I do wish Americans would stop using the word “smarmy” without bothering to know what it means.]

In the weeks leading up to the election and days since, Gaetz had not been seen as a contender for attorney general. The choice suggests that Trump may have passed over some of the conventional-wisdom candidates, like Utah Sen. Mike Lee (a former federal prosecutor and a Supreme Court clerk) and business-friendly former regulator Jay Clayton.

Well obviously he passed over everyone who isn’t Matt Gaetz.

“If there were any people left who were sort of holding on to the idea that it’ll basically be like Trump’s first term, where the people who are really in charge of the department are more or less these sort of old guard Republican stalwarts … they’ve now been disabused of that notion,” former federal prosecutor Jonathan Kravis said. “Because even if it’s not Matt Gaetz, even if he doesn’t get confirmed, it’s going to be someone else like him.”

One former Trump DOJ official, granted anonymity to speak candidly, called the Gaetz nomination “fucking appalling.”

“The attorney general should not be a provocateur,” the former official added. “The problem with a person like that is he derives too much enjoyment from chaos and burning the place down, and those just would be the last traits you’d want in someone in charge of federal law enforcement.”

It’s going to be all burning the place down all the time.

Um…

What I wonder is what reason Dawkins has to think Musk has the welfare of the world at heart.

The enemy of my enemy is my friend. That’s an old saying, i.e. there’s no one author. Anyway is it true?

I don’t know. The most obvious answer is that it depends. Is the enemy of your enemy otherwise a fine upstanding person? Then by all means make friends with her. Is the enemy of your enemy a bad person who has never done a kind or generous thing in his life and is intent on destroying as much of the world as he can before he stops having a pulse? Then no, he’s not your friend, no matter how profoundly he hates your enemy.

There are some gc feminists who should be paying more attention to that distinction.

The AP reports:

Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz [has] resigned from Congress, ending an ethics probe into allegations of sex trafficking, sexual misconduct and drug use, after President-elect Donald Trump nominated him for attorney general.

…

Gaetz submitted his resignation from Congress, effective immediately, launching an eight-week clock to fill his seat, Johnson said, possibly in time for the start of the new Congress on Jan. 3. It also ends a long-running ethics investigation into the Florida congressman.

Johnson framed the stunning move by Gaetz to resign early and before confirmation as a way to help the majority fill his vacancy much [faster] than if he were to wait until his Senate confirmation as attorney general.

Nothing like an Attorney General who was under investigation for perving on a child among other vomitous activities.

How bizarre.

Of what now?

Human sexual dimorphism.

It’s a thing.

Men can’t get pregnant. Women can’t swim faster than “Lia” Thomas.

Public Notice on Trump’s swift move to demand the powers of a dictator:

But the process of staffing up every new administration has slowed to a crawl because Republicans spent the last 25 years weaponizing Senate procedure to obstruct Democrats. Democrats have certainly returned fire, but no one has done more to ratchet up the temperature — and the gridlock — than Republican Leader Mitch McConnell.

“The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president,” he crowed back in 2010. And one of the ways McConnell ensured that Obama couldn’t enact his agenda, despite having a majority in the House for his first two years and in the Senate for six, was to filibuster literally everything, including Obama’s executive branch nominations.

…

It’s not difficult to see why Trump would like to avoid putting his preferred appointees through the wringer of confirmation, even after McConnell did him a solid and changed the rules in 2019 to cut debate time for lower-level nominees from 30 hours down to just two.

The last time around, Trump’s appointees took quite a beating from congressional Democrats, most notably Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who stammered through an interrogation by his former colleague, then-Sen. Kamala Harris. And Sessions was, on paper at least, a rational choice for the office. This time Trump is threatening to make shitposter Kash Patel head of the FBI. Even assuming Patel could get confirmed, Democrats would surely take advantage of confirmation hearings to draw attention to his promise to weaponize law enforcement to attack the media and embark on a revenge tour against everyone who ever tried to bring Trump to justice.

…

In short, Trump is demanding, as the price of his support, that the incoming Senate majority leader promise to let him skip checks and balances and stack his administration with every unconfirmable ghoul he can find.

Naturally he’s got a whole cadre of Republican spinmeisters willing to dress up this naked extortion and gross assault on the separation of powers as a measured response to Democratic obstruction. Former White House Counsel Don McGahn took to the Wall Street Journal’s opinion page on Monday to tut-tut that “recess appointments are a tradition worth restoring, and Mr. Trump deserves to have the power that all his predecessors had.” This ignores the reality that Biden’s confirmations also took forever, and no president has ever had the power to simply staff his entire administration without the bother of confirmation hearings.

…

So now Trump is currently naming a cadre of offensively unqualified sycophants to staff every government agency, safe in the knowledge that his congressional allies will roll over and cede their constitutional authority to him and three Supreme Court justices will execute an about face and discover that recess appointments are very cool and very legal after all.

In short: no checks, no balances.

Suzanne Moore is not enormously impressed by Alastair Campbell.

Post-Blair, Campbell has made a career as some sort of management consultant, banging on about leadership. His thuggishness has never been toned down. Not even in his diaries. Him physically fighting Peter Mandelson during an argument over what the leader should wear while canvassing has always stuck in my head. He has no time for women except the “totty” him and his Westminster cronies rated. On Clare Short, for instance, he wrote “God she does turn my stomach”.

…

He was disastrous and bullying as a leader of the Remainers trying to get a second referendum, again shouting over distinguished female journalists.

Now he is reincarnated alongside Rory Stewart in a podcast for centrist dads: The Rest is Politics. They are meant to be opposites: it’s just that Rory also once ran a bit of Iraq as a gap year hobby or something and his arrogance is more patrician.

Both of them belong to the (adopts caveman voice) “Funny chaps… Women” brigade, who regard women as a lesser species. In the most recent podcast, Campbell explains that the fact that trans issues played a part in the Democrat loss was relayed to him by his US pal, the former diplomat and journalist James Rubin. A man told him something, so Campbell listened.

Rubin apparently told Campbell: “You guys don’t get just how big this woke thing is but you haven’t got it nearly as big…” Campbell then muses: “The $25 million spent on ads about trans, Trump talking about kids going in as boys in the morning and coming back as girls in the afternoon, the dressing room stuff and all that. I think we underestimated how much that was getting through to people.”

The fact that for 10 years women have been campaigning, losing their jobs and have been vilified for refusing an extreme trans agenda has passed him by. All of this was presumably, in his eyes, a Right-wing plot, or a silly culture issue – until it caught his attention this week.

It caught his attention so he chatted with another man about it.

Oh how exciting, another first.

Delaware state Sen. Sarah McBride won the state’s only House seat Tuesday, NBC News projects, making her the first openly transgender person elected to Congress. 

But so very much not the first man elected to Congress.

There are a lot of available firsts in this kind of thing. The first person from an obscure small town in Iowa; the first person who failed algebra in 9th grade; the first person who has a cat named Ronald Krump – one could go on in this vein forever.

Meanwhile, McBride is a guy elected to Congress and women continue to be both ignored and mocked.

And here we go: Even Worse Than Last Time in action. The Beast appoints a Fox News jock Secretary of Defense.

President-elect Donald Trump stunned the Pentagon and the broader defense world by nominating Fox News host Pete Hegseth to serve as his defense secretary, tapping someone largely inexperienced and untested on the global stage to take over the world’s largest and most powerful military.

The news was met with bewilderment and worry among many in Washington as Trump passed on a number of established national security heavy-hitters and chose an Army National Guard captain well known in conservative circles as a co-host of Fox News Channel’s “Fox & Friends Weekend.”

Of course he did. He considers himself qualified to be president, so why wouldn’t another tv personality be qualified to take over the world’s largest and most powerful military?

Hegseth’s choice could bring sweeping changes to the military. He has made it clear on his show and in interviews that, like Trump, he is opposed to “woke” programs that promote equity and inclusion. He also has questioned the role of women in combat and advocated pardoning service members charged with war crimes.

Because war crimes are a good thing and we’re proud of them.

Originally a comment by Mike Haubrich on Often struggling.

This reminds me of the Arch Bishop of MPLS-St. Paul, John Nienstedt, who vigorously defended the Church against charges of priestly abuse (including moving notorious priests around without warning the new parishes.) He had sent a sermon around the state for priests to read on the Sunday before the vote on a state amendment banning same-sex marriage that reminded Catholic voters about the canonical position on the issue (gays must remain celibate to avoid sinning.) I heard him defend the position on a radio call-in on Minnesota Public Radio, about how the law can be painful to follow sometimes but there you go.

Shortly after, there were photos showing him in compromising positions with young men, and he was forced to resign. The church declared bankruptcy in order to avoid paying claims.

There’s something about granting heavenly authority over humans that encourages them to commit heinous acts, isn’t there?

I’ve been thinking about this 10 Stupid Goddy Rules in the Classroom thing, and what would be better in classrooms. I don’t necessarily think any homilies or bits of moral advice should be on the walls of classrooms, but I’m not adamant about it. Maybe it’s useful to have them. So what kind of thing should they be?

My hunch is some form of “don’t be shitty.” Maybe a bulletin board that could have posters that change every few days, with small manageable iterations of “don’t be shitty.” Help each other; don’t make fun of anyone; share; remember what it feels like to be teased or bullied. Blah blah; that kind of thing. Tiny chapters from the large book of Remember Everyone Has Feelings Just As You Do. Basically trying to coax children to be decent to each other – trying to nudge children into being not like a trump.

It annoys the bejeezus out of me that legislators think it’s a good idea to plaster walls with God shouting “ME ME ME ME OBEY ME” rather than mild advice on how not to be one of the mean kids.

Last June we were talking about Louisiana’s plan to force “the 10 commandments” on school children.

The AP version:

Louisiana has become the first state to require that the Ten Commandments be displayed in every public school classroom under a bill Republican Gov. Jeff Landry signed into law Wednesday.

The GOP-drafted legislation mandates that a poster-size display of the Ten Commandments in a “large, easily readable font” be in all public classrooms, from kindergarten to state-funded universities.

Opponents question the law’s constitutionality, warning that lawsuits would be likely to follow. Proponents say that the purpose of the measure is not solely religious but that it has historical significance. In the law’s language, the Ten Commandments are described as “foundational documents of our state and national government.”

Nonsense. Let’s not forget: the first four – 40% of the total – are purely goddy. Of course the measure is religious; it can’t not be.

The first four: no gods other than me, no idols, no blasphemy, remember the sabbath. Nearly half the vital foundation of morality is about pampering the bossy prickly vain jealous put me first goddy figure. Nearly half is not morality at all but the terms the new dictator imposes.

Of course that dreck has no business in schools, let alone being mandated in schools.

Today the bill hit a speed bump.

A coalition of parents attempting to block a state law that would require that the Ten Commandments be displayed in public school classrooms by next year have won a legal battle in federal court.

U.S. District Judge John deGravelles issued an order Tuesday granting the plaintiffs’ request for a preliminary injunction, which means the state can’t begin its plan to promote and create rules surrounding the law as soon as Friday while the litigation plays out.

The judge wrote that the law is “facially unconstitutional” and “in all applications,” barring Louisiana from enforcing it and adopting rules around it that obligate all public K-12 schools and colleges to exhibit posters of the Ten Commandments.

It’s hard to see how the libertarian wing of the Republicans could stomach such a law.

Gov. Jeff Landry signed the GOP-backed legislation in June, part of his conservative agenda that has reshaped Louisiana’s cultural landscape, from abortion rights to criminal justice to education.

The move prompted a coalition of parents — Jewish, Christian, Unitarian Universalist and nonreligious — to sue the state in federal court. They argued that the law “substantially interferes with and burdens” their First Amendment right to raise their children with whatever religious doctrine they want.

Including zero.

Receive HOW much in grant money for writing fatuous speculative anti-woman blather????

Nearly two million pounds, that’s how much.

Welby has resigned.

Justin Welby spent his 11 years as Archbishop of Canterbury trying to prevent the global Anglican communion from fracturing, often struggling to please liberals or conservatives as they fought over homosexual rights and women clergy.

But in the end he was brought down by an issue from the church’s past rather than its future: the failure to investigate an abuse scandal that dated back decades…Welby said he had had “no idea or suspicion” of the allegations before 2013, the year he became archbishop. But the independent Makin Report, published on Nov. 7, concluded it was unlikely he would have had no knowledge of the concerns regarding Smyth’s behaviour in the 1980s.

That’s unclear. Is it unlikely that Welby, in the 1980s, had no knowledge? Or is it unlikely that Welby now had no knowledge of Smyth’s “behaviour” aka violent child abuse in the 1980s?

Educated at Britain’s most prestigious private school, Eton, Welby worked in the oil industry for more than a decade before being ordained in 1992. He was made the senior prelate of the Church of England in 2013, becoming the spiritual head of 85 million Anglicans in 165 countries.

Interesting career-life move – oil industry to priesthood. Each somewhat demonic, but in different ways.

His time at the head of the Anglican communion was turbulent as he was forced to navigate a schism that erupted as he enabled women to become bishops and allowed churches to bless same-sex couples. He said he had decided not to carry out such blessings himself, out of responsibility for the wider church, adding: “This is where you have to be a politician.”

But the move angered the conservative branch of the global communion, most notably African churches where homosexuality is taboo, and a conservative group of Anglican church leaders said last year it had no confidence in him.

Too liberal one minute, not liberal enough the next.

“Liberal” may not be the right word for opposing and exposing child abuse, but it is a conservative impulse to side with the institution rather than its victims, and to conceal the harms perpetrated by the institution on its vastly less powerful victims.

Archbish urged to get out.

The archbishop of Canterbury has been urged to stand in solidarity with abuse victims by resigning after a report into a cover-up in the Church of England. A petition started by three members of the General Synod – the church’s parliament – calling for Justin Welby to quit has reached more than 10,000 signatures.

An independent review published last week concluded John Smyth [might] have been brought to justice had Welby formally reported the abuse to police a decade ago.

But he didn’t, so Smyth went elsewhere to torture more boys. It seems Welby’s god hates children and loves their torturers. Beware of people who think they have a pipeline to Mister God.

Over five decades between the 1970s until his death, Smyth is said to have subjected as many as 130 boys and young men in the UK and Africa to traumatic physical, sexual, psychological and spiritual attacks, permanently marking their lives.

But improving their souls?

No, of course not.

More on Smyth from the Guardian last week:

John Smyth, a powerful and charismatic barrister, sadistically abused private schoolboys who attended evangelical Christian holiday camps in the late 1970s and early 80s. When the abuse was discovered, Smyth was allowed to move abroad with the full knowledge of church officials, where he continued to act with impunity.

And “abroad” as we just saw meant Africa. “Tut tut John, you can’t do that sort of thing here; off you go to Africa, where children need to be tortured.”

Smyth, who died in 2018, was chair of the Iwerne Trust, which funded the Christian camps in Dorset. A secret review carried out by the trust in 1982 described “horrific” beatings of teenage boys, mostly carried out in Smyth’s shed at his Winchester home.

So that’s more than 36 years (more because the abuse has to have started well before the secret review) that Smyth was allowed to torture children. Isn’t religion wonderful?

Winchester college, one of the UK’s leading private schools, whose pupils were among the alleged victims, was informed of the allegations but neither the college nor the trust reported Smyth to the police. Instead, the headteacher asked Smyth never again to enter the college or contact its pupils.

Smyth moved to Zimbabwe, where in 1992 he faced charges of killing a 16-year-old boy who was found dead in a swimming pool at a holiday camp in 1992. The case was dismissed and he later moved to Cape Town.

Nice for him, not so nice for the children of Cape Town.

From July 2013, “the Church of England knew at the highest level about the abuse that took place in the late 1970s and early 1980s. John Smyth should have been properly and effectively reported to the police in the UK and to relevant authorities in South Africa,” the report said.

It identified several “thematic concerns”, including abuse of positions of trust and power, excessive deference to senior clergy, failures of leadership and a cover-up over an extended period.

Because that’s how religion works. It’s hierarchical, with an imaginary god at the top and the fictional god’s putative representatives at the next level, above other humans. Of course they abuse such trust and power; who wouldn’t?

In a statement, Joanne Grenfell, the C of E’s lead safeguarding bishop, and Alexander Kubeyinje, its national director of safeguarding, said: “We are deeply sorry for the horrific abuse inflicted by the late John Smyth and its lifelong effects, already spanning more than 40 years.

Now that it’s been exposed. What were you doing before that?

Disruption.

There’s already a judiciary subcommittee on the “weaponisation of the federal government” in Congress to investigate the “censorship industrial complex” – the idea that big tech is “censoring” Republican voices. For the past 18 months, it’s been subpoena-ing academics. Last week, Elon Musk tweeted that the next stage would be “prosecutions”. A friend of mine, an Ivy League professor on the list, texts to say the day will shortly come “where I will have to decide whether to stay or go”.

Trump’s list of enemies is not theoretical. It already exists. My friend is on it. In 2022, Trump announced a “day one” executive order instructing “the Department of Justice to investigate all parties involved in the new online censorship regime … and to aggressively prosecute any and all crimes identified”. And my friends in other countries know exactly where this leads.

Another message arrives from Maria Ressa, the Nobel prize-winning Filipino journalist. In the Philippines, the government is modelled on the US one and she writes about what happened when President Duterte controlled all three branches of it. “It took six months after he took office for our institutions to crumble.” And then she was arrested.

What we did during the first wave of disruption, 2016-24, won’t work now. Can you “weaponise” social media when social media is the weapon? Remember the philosopher Marshall McLuhan – “the medium is the message”? Well the medium now is Musk. The world’s richest man bought a global communication platform and is now the shadow head of state of what was the world’s greatest superpower. That’s the message. Have you got it yet?

I’ve got something.

Brianna Wu speaking up for women…but of course he considers himself a woman, which he isn’t, so his speaking up for us is speaking over us, so no, not requested, not wanted, not needed, absolutely not appreciated.

Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on The spirit of vengeful reprisal is the totality of his beliefs.

The part about learning Russian was not entirely a joke btw. Earlier today I filled up two 15 liter water jugs. The Norwegian Directorate for Civil Protection recently sent out a leaflet asking all citizen to stock up on water, durable food items, hygiene products, matches, candles, firewood etc. to be prepared to survive for up to a week without electricity, tap water, open stores etc. in case of a “crisis or war”, so if it’s just my paranoid delusion, at least It’s not just me.

To my country, and Europe in general, one obvious implication of Trump’s return to power is that our NATO membership no longer offers us any strong protection against Russia. All I can do is hope that the nuclear arsenals of France and Great Britain will make Putin think twice about attacking, but honestly, if I were Putin, even I wouldn’t put much stock in their willingness to use them. As others have pointed out, outsourcing our security concerns to America will go down in history as one of the greatest blunders ever, almost as bad as outsourcing our manufacturing sector to China.

Trump’s promised trade-war with Europe, tariffs on European goods etc. is also likely to trigger a recession that will almost certainly lead to increased support for the already powerful, pro-Putin, right-wing populist movements of Europe like Rassemblement National and Alternative für Deutschland. A tiny country like my own, which cannot fight a war on our own for very long no matter how much we spend on national defense (far too little, admittedly), may soon find itself out of allies, and, of course the threat from our own far right is only too real.

Love it or hate it, one of the most memorable movie experiences of my life was the battle of Helm’s Deep from the Lord of the Rings movie Two Towers. The main battle itself was, of course, entertaining enough, but to me the most memorable part was the tense, claustrophobic feeling inside the fortress while Saruman’s vast army was approaching, the lights of thousands of burning torches were appearing on the horizon, and the sound of thousands of marching feet kept getting louder every minute. It’s one of those scenes you really have to see in a good cinema to get the full effect: Seeing it on a computer screen or even a large TV doesn’t do it justice. That’s kind of how this feels, except that this time it’s for real, and there is no Gandalf, or Éomer, or Treebeard coming to the rescue. The enemy is not yet inside the fortress, or even at the gates, but the torches are on the horizon and the sound of marching feet is getting louder by the minute…

Dang, for imperturbably immovable male confidence this really takes the biscuit.

Punch line:

“I don’t know as much about it as you do, and I will tell you what to do anyway.”

Biscuit taken as no other biscuit has ever been taken.

Adam Gopnik wrote this in the New Yorker before the election:

Think hard about the probable consequences of a second Trump Administration—about the things he has promised to do and can do, the things that the hard-core group of rancidly discontented figures (as usual with authoritarians, more committed than he is to an ideology) who surround him wants him to do and can do. Having lost the popular vote, as he surely will*, he will not speak up to reconcile “all Americans.” He will insist that he won the popular vote, and by a landslide. He will pardon and then celebrate the January 6th insurrectionists, and thereby guarantee the existence of a paramilitary organization that’s capable of committing violence on his behalf without fear of consequences. He will, with an obedient Attorney General, begin prosecuting his political opponents; he was largely unsuccessful in his previous attempt only because the heads of two U.S. Attorneys’ offices, who are no longer there, refused to coöperate. When he begins to pressure CNN and ABC, and they, with all the vulnerabilities of large corporations, bend to his will, telling themselves that his is now the will of the people, what will we do to fend off the slow degradation of open debate?

Trump will certainly abandon Ukraine to Vladimir Putin and realign this country with dictatorships and against NATO and the democratic alliance of Europe. Above all, the spirit of vengeful reprisal is the totality of his beliefs—very much like the fascists of the twentieth century in being a man and a movement without any positive doctrine except revenge against his imagined enemies. And against this: What? Who? The spirit of resistance may prove too frail, and too exhausted, to rise again to the contest. Who can have confidence that a democracy could endure such a figure in absolute control and survive? An oncologist who, in the face of this much evidence, shrugged and proposed watchful waiting as the best therapy would not be an optimist. He would be guilty of gross malpractice. One of those personal-injury lawyers on the billboards would sue him, and win.

What any plausible explanation must confront is the fact that Trump is a distinctively vile human being and a spectacularly malignant political actor. In fables and fiction, in every Disney cartoon and Batman movie, we have no trouble recognizing and understanding the villains. They are embittered, canny, ludicrous in some ways and shrewd in others, their lives governed by envy and resentment, often rooted in the acts of people who’ve slighted them. (“They’ll never laugh at me again!”) They nonetheless have considerable charm and the ability to attract a cult following. This is Ursula, Hades, Scar—to go no further than the Disney canon. Extend it, if that seems too childlike, to the realms of Edmund in “King Lear” and Richard III: smart people, all, almost lovable in their self-recognition of their deviousness, but not people we ever want to see in power, for in power their imaginations become unimaginably deadly. Villains in fables are rarely grounded in any cause larger than their own grievances—they hate Snow White for being beautiful, resent Hercules for being strong and virtuous. Bane is blowing up Gotham because he feels misused, not because he truly has a better city in mind.

Trump is a villain. He would be a cartoon villain, if only this were a cartoon. Every time you try to give him a break—to grasp his charisma, historicize his ascent, sympathize with his admirers—the sinister truth asserts itself and can’t be squashed down. He will tell another lie so preposterous, or malign another shared decency so absolutely, or threaten violence so plausibly, or just engage in behavior so unhinged and hate-filled that you’ll recoil and rebound to your original terror at his return to power. 

And that’s where we live now.

Villainy inheres in individuals. There is certainly a far-right political space alive in the developed world, but none of its inhabitants—not Marine Le Pen or Giorgia Meloni or even Viktor Orbán—are remotely as reckless or as crazy as Trump. Our self-soothing habit of imagining that what has not yet happened cannot happen is the space in which Trump lives, just as comically deranged as he seems and still more dangerous than we know.

Comforting.

And we chose this. That’s what the US is – the country that chose this. In 2008 it chose Obama and in 2024 it chose this.