DL Open Thread: Monday, February 3, 2025

Oh, OK.  Some Democratic senators demanded answers.  But the so-called opposition party is not making the Rethugs own this, and countless other brazen illegal activities they’re engaging in. 

It’s all part of a plan:  This plan:

If you want to understand the first few weeks of the second Trump administration, you should listen to what Steve Bannon told PBS’s “Frontline” in 2019:

Steve Bannon: The opposition party is the media. And the media can only, because they’re dumb and they’re lazy, they can only focus on one thing at a time. …

All we have to do is flood the zone. Every day we hit them with three things. They’ll bite on one, and we’ll get all of our stuff done. Bang, bang, bang. These guys will never — will never be able to recover. But we’ve got to start with muzzle velocity. So it’s got to start, and it’s got to hammer, and it’s got to —

Michael Kirk: What was the word?

Bannon: Muzzle velocity.

Muzzle velocity. Bannon’s insight here is real. Focus is the fundamental substance of democracy. It is particularly the substance of opposition. People largely learn of what the government is doing through the media — be it mainstream media or social media. If you overwhelm the media — if you give it too many places it needs to look, all at once, if you keep it moving from one thing to the next — no coherent opposition can emerge. It is hard to even think coherently.

Donald Trump’s first two weeks in the White House have followed Bannon’s strategy like a script. The flood is the point. The overwhelm is the point. The message wasn’t in any one executive order or announcement. It was in the cumulative effect of all of them.

Ezra Klein argues we shouldn’t believe Trump, and he’s correct, to a point.  But only if the other side engages constantly and sells the message to the American people.  Two words: Ken Martin.  What passes for the Democratic Party has muzzled its best communicators, at least the ones that AIPAC didn’t defeat: AOC, Bernie, Elizabeth Warren, Jasmine Crockett.  Too progressive, not corporate enough.  That must change.  One more thing:  LBR and Chris Coons must vote against EVERY SINGLE ONE OF TRUMP’S NOMINEES MOVING FORWARD.  They simply can’t normalize the destruction of America.  We’ll be watching.  Oh, and perhaps you can have someone on your staffs read this column on Democratic spinelessness.  Try to stay away from a mirror after reading it, you might not like who/what you see.

Musk’s Mindless Minions.  Must-reading:

Elon Musk’s takeover of federal government infrastructure is ongoing, and at the center of things is a coterie of engineers who are barely out of—and in at least one case, purportedly still in—college. Most have connections to Musk, and at least two have connections to Musk’s longtime associate Peter Thiel, a cofounder and chair of the analytics firm and government contractor Palantir who has long expressed opposition to democracy.

WIRED has identified six young men—all apparently between the ages of 19 and 24, according to public databases, their online presences, and other records—who have little to no government experience and are now playing critical roles in Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) project, tasked by executive order with “modernizing Federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.” The engineers all hold nebulous job titles within DOGE, and at least one appears to be working as a volunteer.

“What we’re seeing is unprecedented in that you have these actors who are not really public officials gaining access to the most sensitive data in government,” says Don Moynihan, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan. “We really have very little eyes on what’s going on. Congress has no ability to really intervene and monitor what’s happening because these aren’t really accountable public officials. So this feels like a hostile takeover of the machinery of governments by the richest man in the world.”

The New Orleans Saints Came To The Rescue Of The Archdiocese That Enabled Sex Abuse:

The Archdiocese of New Orleans was facing a crisis. A sex-abuse scandal was bursting into public view, sending shock waves through the heavily Catholic city.

Leaders of one of New Orleans’ other major institutions, the N.F.L.’s New Orleans Saints, were concerned. Gayle Benson, the team’s owner, is a devout Catholic, major church benefactor and close friend of Archbishop Gregory Aymond.

So in July 2018, when Greg Bensel, the Saints’ head of communications, saw a local news story revealing that a former deacon who had been removed from the ministry after abuse accusations was serving in a public role at a local church, he sent an email to Ms. Benson.

In reply, Ms. Benson said that the archbishop was “very upset.” Then, Mr. Bensel made a suggestion: He offered to lend his “crisis communications” expertise, gathered from his decades of working for the Saints, to the archdiocese.

That exchange was the first of more than 300 emails, obtained by The New York Times, that show the Saints and the archdiocese working together to temper the fallout from a flood of sexual abuse accusations made against priests and church employees. The abuse accusations, which span decades, have led to dozens of civil lawsuits and out-of-court settlements, more than 600 claims of abuse in the archdiocese’s ongoing bankruptcy case and a handful of criminal convictions, and are part of an international reckoning for the church.

BTW, this N’Awlins Archbishop is an anti-Man Of God.  Fired food bank officials for refusing to bankroll sex abuse claims against the Diocese:

The way that the archbishop of New Orleans’ Roman Catholic archdiocese fired leaders at a church-affiliated food bank Thursday has angered many congregants of the bankrupt organization.

Aymond summarily removed Natalie Jayroe – the longtime president and CEO of Second Harvest of Greater New Orleans and Acadiana – on Thursday, as well as three members of the Second Harvest board of directors: Kristen Albertson, Nick Karl and Bert Wilson.

A statement released on behalf of some of the ousted leaders said they had been removed for refusing to send the archdiocese up to $16m to pay settlements for child molestation committed by Catholic clergy.

Like so many others in the community, retired political strategist Sidney Arroyo said he was livid when he heard the news. He said he had worked closely with Jayroe and others at Second Harvest to help raise $15m for the food bank over the years.

“It’s one of the most successful food banks in the nation,” Arroyo said. “And they’ve done it all without a hint of scandal, without a hint of any kind of impropriety or misuse of funds. And this is what the archbishop wants to dip into as a money pot for the pedophile priests? I think that’s not only unacceptable, I think it’s disgusting.”

You never know what’s gonna show up in the Open Thread because I never know what story is gonna resonate with me.  That one did.

Gonna stop there because I’m almost 1400 words in.  I haven’t even scoured the local news outlets yet, but I will.

What do you want to talk about?