On the clear, cold morning of December 29, 1890, on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, three U.S. soldiers tried to wrench a valuable Winchester away from a young Lakota man. He refused to give up his hunting weapon. It was the only thing standing between his family and starvation, and he had no faith it would be returned to him as the officer promised: he had watched as soldiers had marked other confiscated valuable weapons for themselves.
As the men struggled, the gun fired into the sky.
Before the echoes died, troops fired a volley that brought down half of the Lakota men and boys the soldiers had captured the night before, as well as a number of soldiers surrounding the Lakotas. The uninjured Lakota men attacked the soldiers with knives, guns they snatched from wounded soldiers, and their fists.
As the men fought hand to hand, the Lakota women who had been hitching their horses to wagons for the day’s travel tried to flee along the nearby road or up a dry ravine behind the camp. Stationed on a slight rise above the camp, soldiers turned rapid-fire mountain guns on them. Then, over the next two hours, troops on horseback hunted down and slaughtered all the Lakotas they could find: about 250 men, women, and children.
Fifteen years ago, I wrote a book about the Wounded Knee Massacre, and what I learned still keeps me up at night. But it is not December 29 that haunts me.
What haunts me is the night of December 28.
On December 28 there was still time to avert the massacre. In the early afternoon, the Lakota leader Sitanka had urged his people to surrender to the soldiers looking for them. Sitanka was desperately ill with pneumonia, and the people in his band were hungry, underdressed, and exhausted. They were making their way south across South Dakota from their own reservation in the northern part of the state to the Pine Ridge Reservation. There they planned to take shelter with another famous Lakota chief, Red Cloud. His people had done as Sitanka asked, and the soldiers escorted the Lakotas to a camp on South Dakota's Wounded Knee Creek, inside the boundaries of the Pine Ridge Reservation.
For the soldiers, the surrender of Sitanka's band marked the end of what they called the Ghost Dance Uprising. It had been a tense month. Troops had pushed into the South Dakota reservations in November, prompting a band of terrified men who had embraced the Ghost Dance religion to gather their wives and children and ride out to the Badlands. But at long last, army officers and negotiators had convinced those Ghost Dancers to go back to Pine Ridge and turn themselves in to authorities before winter hit in earnest.
Sitanka’s people were not part of the Badlands group and, for the most part, were not Ghost Dancers. They had fled from their own northern reservation two weeks before when they learned that officers had murdered the great leader Sitting Bull in his own home. Army officers were anxious to find and corral Sitanka’s missing Lakotas before they carried the news that Sitting Bull had been killed to those who had taken refuge in the Badlands. Army leaders were certain the information would spook the Ghost Dancers and send them flying back to the Badlands. They were determined to make sure the two bands did not meet.
But South Dakota is a big state, and it was not until late in the afternoon of December 28 that the soldiers finally made contact with Sitanka's band. The encounter didn’t go quite as the officers planned: a group of soldiers were watering their horses in a stream when some of the traveling Lakotas surprised them. The Lakotas let the soldiers go, and the men promptly reported to their officers, who marched on the Lakotas as if they were going to war. Sitanka, who had always gotten along well with army officers, assured the commander that the band was on its way to Pine Ridge and asked his men to surrender unconditionally. They did.
By this time, Sitanka was so ill he couldn't sit up and his nose was dripping blood. Soldiers lifted him into an army ambulance—an old wagon—for the trip to the Wounded Knee camp. His ragtag band followed behind. Once there, the soldiers gave the Lakotas an evening ration and lent army tents to those who wanted them. Then the soldiers settled into guarding the camp.
And the soldiers celebrated, for they saw themselves as heroes of a great war, and it had been bloodless, and now, with the Lakotas’ surrender, they would be demobilized back to their home bases before the South Dakota winter closed in. As they celebrated, more and more troops poured in. It had been a long hunt across South Dakota for Sitanka and his band, and officers were determined the group would not escape them again.
In came the Seventh Cavalry, whose men had not forgotten that their former leader George Armstrong Custer had been killed by a band of Lakota in 1876. In came three mountain guns, which the soldiers trained on the Indian encampment from a slight rise above the camp.
For their part, the Lakotas were frightened. If their surrender was welcome and they were going to go with the soldiers to Red Cloud at Pine Ridge, as they had planned all along, why were there so many soldiers, with so many guns?
On this day and hour in 1890, in the cold and dark of a South Dakota December night, there were soldiers drinking, singing, and visiting with each other, and anxious Lakotas either talking to each other in low voices or trying to sleep. No one knew what the next day would bring, but no one expected what was going to happen.
One of the curses of history is that we cannot go back and change the course leading to disasters, no matter how much we might wish to. The past has its own terrible inevitability.
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Former President Jimmy Carter died today, December 29, 2024, at age 100 after a life characterized by a dedication to human rights. His wife of 77 years, Rosalynn Carter, died on November 19, 2023; she was 96 years old.
James Earl Carter Jr. was born on October 1, 1924, in Plains, in southwestern Georgia, about half an hour from the site of the infamous Andersonville Prison, where nearly 13,000 United States soldiers died of disease and hunger during the Civil War only sixty years earlier. He was the first U.S. president to be born in a hospital.
Carter’s South was impoverished. He grew up on a dirt road about three miles from Plains, in the tiny, majority-Black village of Archery, where his father owned a farm and the family grew corn, cotton, peanuts, and sugar cane. The young Carters and the children of the village’s Black sharecroppers grew up together as the Depression that crashed down in 1929 drained away what little prosperity there was in Archery.
After undergraduate coursework at Georgia Southwestern College and at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Carter completed his undergraduate degree at the U.S. Naval Academy. In the Navy he rose to the rank of lieutenant, serving on submarines—including early nuclear submarines—in both the Atlantic and Pacific fleets.
In 1946, Carter married Rosalynn Smith, a friend of his sister’s, who grew up in Plains. When his father died in 1953, Carter resigned his naval commission and took his family back to the Carters’ Georgia farm, where he and Rosalynn operated both the farm and a seed and supply company.
Arriving back in Georgia just a year before the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision declared racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional, Carter quickly became involved in local politics. In 1962 he challenged a fraudulent election for a Georgia state senate seat, and in the runoff, voters elected him. The Carters became supporters of Democratic president John F. Kennedy in a state whose dominant Democratic Party was in turmoil as white supremacists clashed with Georgians eager to leave their past behind. Kennedy had sent troops to desegregate the University of Mississippi.
Carter ran for governor in 1966, the year after Congress passed the Voting Rights Act. He lost the primary, coming in third behind another liberal Democrat and a staunch segregationist Democrat, Lester Maddox, who won it and went on to win the governorship. When Carter ran again in 1970, he emphasized his populism rather than Black rights, appealing to racist whites. He won the Democratic primary with 60% of the vote and, in a state that was still Democrat-dominated, easily won the governorship.
But when Carter took office in 1971, he abandoned his concessions to white racists and took a stand for new race relations in the United States. “I say to you quite frankly that the time for racial discrimination is over,” he told Georgians in his inaugural speech. “No poor, rural, weak, or Black person should ever have to bear the additional burden of being deprived of the opportunity of an education, a job, or simple justice.”
His predecessor, Maddox, had refused to let state workers take the day off to attend services for the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s funeral; Carter pointedly hung a portrait of King—as well as portraits of educator Lucy Craft Laney and Georgia politician and minister Henry McNeal Turner—in the State Capitol.
Carter brought to office a focus not only on civil rights but also on cleaning up and streamlining the state’s government. He consolidated more than 200 government offices into 20 and backed austerity measures to save money while also supporting new social programs, including equalizing aid to poor and wealthy schools, prison reform and early childhood development programs, and community centers for mentally disabled children.
At the time, the state constitution prohibited Carter from reelection, so he built recognition in the national Democratic Party and turned his sights on the presidency. In the wake of the scandals that brought down both President Richard Nixon and Vice President Spiro Agnew, as well as many of their staff, when it seemed to many Americans that all of Washington was corrupt, voters welcomed the newcomer Carter as an outsider who would work for the people.
He seemed a new kind of Democrat, one who could usher in a new, multicultural democracy now that the 1965 Voting Rights Act had brought Black and Brown voters into the American polity. Like many of the other civil rights coalitions in the twentieth century, Carter’s supporters shared music reinforced their politics, and Carter’s deep knowledge of blues, R&B, folk, and especially the gospel music of his youth helped him appeal to that era’s crucially important youth vote. Bob Dylan; Crosby, Stills & Nash, Nile Rodgers, Willie Nelson, and Johnny Cash, as well as the Allman Brothers, all backed Carter, who later said: “I was practically a non-entity, but everyone knew the Allman Brothers. When they endorsed me, all the young people said, ‘Well, if the Allman Brothers like him, we can vote for him.’”
Elected by just over 50% of American voters over Republican candidate Gerald R. Ford’s count of about 48%, Carter’s outsider status and determination to govern based on the will of the people sparked opposition from within Washington—including in the Democratic Party—and stories that he was buffeted about by the breezes of polls. But Carter's domestic policy advisor Stuart Eizenstat once said that Carter believed an elected president should “park politics at the Oval Office door” and try to win election by doing the right thing. He took pride in ignoring political interests—a stance that would hurt his ability to get things done in Washington, D.C.
Carter began by trying to make the government more representative of the American people: Eizenstat recalled that Carter appointed more women, Black Americans, and Jewish Americans to official positions and judgeships “than all 38 of his predecessors combined.”
Carter instituted ethics reforms to reclaim the honor of the presidency after Nixon’s behavior had tarnished it. He put independent inspectors in every department and established that corporations could not bribe foreign officials to get contracts. He expanded education programs, establishing the Department of Education, and tried to relieve the country from reliance on foreign oil by establishing the Department of Energy.
Concerned that the new regulatory agencies that Congress had created since the mid-1960s might be captured by industries and that they were causing prices to rise, Carter began the deregulation movement to increase competition. He began with the airlines and moved to the trucking industry, railroad lines, and long-distance phone service. He also deregulated beer production—his legalization of homebrewing sparked today’s craft brewing industry.
But Carter inherited slow economic growth and the inflation that had plagued presidents since Nixon, and the 1979 drop in oil production after the Iranian revolution exacerbated both. While more than ten million jobs were added to the U.S. economy during his term—almost twice the number Reagan added in his first term, and more than five times the number George H.W. Bush added in his—inflation hit 14% in 1980. To combat that inflation, Carter appointed Paul Volcker to chair the Federal Reserve, knowing he would combat inflation with high interest rates, a policy that brought down inflation during the first term of his successor, Ronald Reagan.
Carter also focused on protecting the environment. He was the first president to undertake the federal cleanup of a hazardous waste site, declaring a federal emergency in the New York neighborhood of Love Canal and using federal disaster money to remediate the chemicals that had been stored underground there.
Carter placed 56 million acres of land in Alaska under federal protection as a national monument, saying: “These areas contain resources of unequaled scientific, historic and cultural value, and include some of the most spectacular scenery and wildlife in the world,” he said. In 1979 he had 32 solar panels installed at the White House to help heat the water for the building and demonstrate that it was possible to curb U.S. dependence on fossil fuels. Just before he left office, Carter signed into law the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, protecting more than 100 million acres in Alaska, including additional protections for the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
Coming after Nixon’s secret bombing of Cambodia and support for Chile’s right-wing dictator Augusto Pinochet, whose government had systematically tortured and executed his political opponents, Carter’s foreign policy emphasized human rights. Carter echoed the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights established by the United Nations, promising he would promote “human freedom” while protecting “the individual from the arbitrary power of the state.” He was best known for the Camp David Accords that achieved peace between Israel and Egypt after they had fought a series of wars. Those accords, negotiated with Anwar Sadat of Egypt and Menachem Begin of Israel paved the way for others. Carter credited the religious faith of the three men for making the agreement possible.
Carter also built on his predecessor Nixon’s outreach to China, normalizing relations and affording diplomatic recognition of China, enabling the two countries to develop a bilateral relationship. While commenters often credit President Reagan with pressuring the Soviet Union enough to bring about its dissolution, in fact it was Carter who negotiated the nuclear arms treaty that Reagan honored and who, along with his national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, saw the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 as a major breach in international relations. He cut off grain sales to the USSR, ordered a massive defense buildup, and persuaded European leaders to accept nuclear missiles stationed in their countries, which Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev said was a significant factor in the dissolution of the USSR.
To Carter also fell the Iran hostage crisis in which Muslim fundamentalists overran the American embassy in the Iranian capital Tehran, seizing 66 Americans and holding them hostage for 444 days, in return for a promise that the American-backed Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, whom Carter had admitted to the U.S. for cancer treatment, be returned to Iran for trial. Carter immediately froze Iranian assets and began secret negotiations, while Americans watched on TV as Iranian mobs chanted “Death to America.” A secret mission to rescue the hostages failed when one of the eight helicopters dispatched to rescue the hostages crashed, killing eight soldiers. Before he left office, Carter successfully negotiated for the hostages’ return; they were released the day of Reagan’s inauguration.
Carter left office in January 1981, and the following year, in partnership with Emory University, he and Rosalynn established the Carter Center, an Atlanta-based nongovernmental, not-for-profit organization to advance peace, health, and human rights around the world.
The Carter Center has supervised elections in more than 100 countries, has helped farmers in 15 African countries to double or triple grain production, and has worked to prevent disease in Latin America and Africa. In 1986, when the Carter Center began a program to eradicate infections of the meter-long Guinea worm that emerges painfully from sufferers’ skin and incapacitates them for long periods, 3.5 million people a year in Africa and Asia were infected; in 2022 there were only 13 known infections, in 2023 there were 14. So far in 2024, there have been 7, but those will not be officially confirmed until spring 2025. In a 2015 interview, Carter said he hoped to outlive the last case.
President Carter said, “When I was in the White House, I thought of human rights primarily in terms of political rights, such as rights to free speech and freedom from torture or unjust imprisonment. As I traveled around the world since I was president, I learned there was no way to separate the crucial rights to live in peace, to have adequate food and health care, and to have a voice in choosing one’s political leaders. These human needs and rights are inextricably linked.”
In 2002, Carter received the Nobel Peace Prize “for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development.” When journalist Katie Couric of The Today Show asked him if the Nobel Peace Prize or being elected president was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to him, Carter answered: “When Rosalynn said she’d marry me, I think that’s the most exciting thing.”
In his Farewell Address on January 14, 1981, President Jimmy Carter worried about the direction of the country. He noted that the American people had begun to lose faith in the government’s ability to deal with problems and were turning to “single-issue groups and special interest organizations to ensure that whatever else happens, our own personal views and our own private interests are protected.” This focus on individualism, he warned, distorts the nation’s purpose because “the national interest is not always the sum of all our single or special interests. We are all Americans together, and we must not forget that the common good is our common interest and our individual responsibility.”
Carter urged Americans to protect our “most precious possessions: the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the land which sustains us,” and to advance the basic human rights that had, after all, “invented America.” “Our common vision of a free and just society,” he said, “is our greatest source of cohesion at home and strength abroad, greater even than the bounty of our material blessings.”
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The fight between MAGA and DOGE continues. Original MAGAs who want the government to expel immigrants and elevate white evangelical Christian men are facing off against the new DOGE MAGAs who disdain original MAGA culture and want the government to turn the tech billionaires loose from regulations and taxes to create their own global oligarchy.
The fight has taken shape over H-1B visas that allow companies to hire foreign workers for skilled positions. MAGA opposes all immigration and relied on Trump’s promise to deport 11 to 20 million immigrants; DOGE wants more H-1B visas, arguing that America is not producing enough skilled engineers because of the misguided culture that Americans like MAGAs embrace. On Friday, billionaire Elon Musk, who has been very close to Trump since bankrolling his election, agreed with MAGA influencer Ian Miles Cheong, who has more than a million followers on X, when Cheong posted: “Much of the anger being driven toward Elon Musk today is simply disappointment being projected by the ‘ret*rded right’ that’s on the fringes of the conservative movement, against Musk, whom they wish was an unrepentant racist like they are.”
Late on Friday night, Musk defended H-1B visas again, posting on X: “The reason I’m in America along with so many critical people who built SpaceX, Tesla and hundreds of other companies that made America strong is because of H1B.” He continued: “Take a big step back and F*CK YOURSELF in the face. I will go to war on this issue the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend.” According to Forbes, Musk’s Tesla was among the leading employers of those holding H-1B visas in 2024.
Meanwhile, original MAGA influencer Steve Bannon used Musk’s apparent throwing MAGA critics off X as a route to attack the entire DOGE faction. “They're trying to dump people off the platforms like that's going to matter?” he said to influencer Jack Posobiec. “You can't stop us, we’re relentless…. We’re never going to quit…. We're a thousand times tougher than you guys are…. Keep coming after American citizens like you're coming and you're going to find out exactly how tough we are. We’re not going to tolerate this. Your trashing of the MAGA movement…. How dare you…. I don't care how big a check you wrote.”
Today, Bannon doubled down: “We’re gonna get H-1B visas out, root and stem, and all the workers you brought in. Just like we’re deporting 15 million here, we want them deported, out…. And give those jobs to American citizens today…we demand they get reparations. You stole from them.”
Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo pointed out on Saturday that what many of us have been calling a civil war in the MAGA movement is not the best way to look at the MAGA fight. Marshall points out that the 2024–2025 MAGA was mostly just an electoral machine built around Trump. In the past, he notes, MAGA never really had policies. Mostly, it was a vehicle for Trump’s grievance about the investigation into the ties between his 2016 campaign and Russian operatives, and after his first impeachment, it became about retribution. But now, as Marshall notes, Trump is “tired and on the way out,” and he never really cared about policy anyway: he ran for president for the purpose of staying out of jail and “lording it over his foes.”
What is going on now, Marshall says, is less a civil war than “a battle over the steering wheel.” Trump absorbed groups into his coalition with the promise he would work for them, but their policies have always been contradictory. Now that it’s time for their payoff, not everyone can be appeased. So, will the Trump machine work for the MAGAs or the DOGEs…or even the Robert F. Kennedy “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) faction—which, as Marshall says, was “grafted on to the movement in the last months of the final stretch of the campaign for narrowly electoral reasons.” Today, Nathaniel Weixel of The Hill outlined how the MAHA faction is itself bitterly divided over issues like drugs to treat obesity.
Marshall concludes that, in any case, “[t]here’s little sign Trump cares. He’s already gotten what he wants.”
On Saturday, in an interview with the New York Post, President-elect Donald Trump threw his MAGA supporters under the bus and sided with Musk and pharmaceutical entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy on H-1B visas. “I’ve always liked the visas, I have always been in favor of the visas. That’s why we have them,” Trump said, referring to the H-1B visas that permit companies to hire foreign workers in skilled occupations. “I have many H-1B visas on my properties. I’ve been a believer in H-1B. I have used it many times. It’s a great program.”
Trump appeared to be confusing H-1B visas with H-2A and H-2B visas, which cover temporary agricultural workers and seasonal workers in tourism, hospitality, and landscaping. In fact, as Leah McElrath pointed out, Trump said in 2016 that the H-1B program shouldn’t exist. And as Judd Legum pointed out, on June 22, 2020, Trump issued an executive order suspending H-1B visas because he said they were taking jobs from Americans.
The fight within MAGA is only part of the larger fight within the Republican Party, whose leadership needs to organize the newly elected members of the House of Representatives as soon as they get back to Washington, D.C., and come into session on Friday, January 3. The House should have a speaker in place before Congress counts electoral votes on January 6.
Even if Trump no longer needs MAGA voters, extremist MAGAs in the House do, and they are angry at current House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) for his willingness to work with less extreme Republicans and Democrats to keep the government operating. Members of the far right want to shut it down until it stops spending more money than it takes in and stops supporting policies they oppose.
This is turning into a fight over the House speaker. Extreme MAGA Republicans say they will not support Johnson for speaker this time around, putting his election in jeopardy because the party’s majority is so thin Johnson cannot lose more than two votes. Trump was angry at Johnson for passing a continuing resolution to fund the government without getting rid of the debt ceiling but, perhaps looking at the tight congressional schedule, endorsed him today with a social media post.
The Republican factions made the Congress that is just ending one of the least productive in history, and that chaos seems likely to get worse. With the 2023 Fiscal Responsibility Act, Congress suspended the U.S. debt ceiling until January 1, 2025, this Wednesday. The debt ceiling establishes a limit to how much the treasury can borrow to fulfill the country’s financial obligations, “including Social Security and Medicare benefits, military salaries, interest on the national debt, tax refunds, and other payments,” Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen explained.
Last Friday, December 27, Yellen warned Congress that the country will likely hit the debt ceiling between January 14 and January 23. The Treasury can resort to extraordinary measures to pay obligations, but if it is to keep the country functioning, the incoming Congress must raise the debt ceiling. That will not be easy.
Trump wants to cut taxes for billionaires and corporations, a plan that the Congressional Budget Office estimates will add $4.6 trillion to the national debt over the next ten years. After years of complaining about Democratic spending on social welfare programs, he is now demanding that Congress get rid of the debt ceiling altogether. Republican lawmakers have said they will raise the debt ceiling by $1.5 trillion, but only in exchange for $2.5 trillion in cuts to mandatory spending over ten years.
This would require cuts to popular programs, putting the Republicans in the position of cutting benefits to poor and middle-class Americans in order to give tax cuts to the rich. The party has gone a long way from the 1860s, when party members invented the income tax to guarantee both that the nation’s bills got paid and that the burden would fall “not upon each man an equal amount,” as Senator Justin Smith Morrill (R-VT) put it then, “but a tax proportionate to his ability to pay.”
There is also an international dimension of the fight for control of the U.S. government. Musk followed up on last week’s X post supporting the far-right German political party Alternative for Germany (AfD), criticized as a neo-Nazi group. On Saturday in Welt am Sonntag, Musk wrote that AfD is the “last spark of hope” for Germany. He claimed the right to speak out about Europe’s largest economy because of his “significant investments” in the country. The editor of the newspaper’s opinion section resigned in protest.
Conservative lawyer George Conway posted: “So the world’s richest man, who grew up under apartheid in South Africa and now pulls the mentally deteriorating incoming U.S. president’s strings, has written an op-ed urging Germans to elect a new-Nazi government. Got that?” He added: “Concerning.”
Jens Spahn, the State Secretary of the German Ministry of Finance and a Member of the German Bundestag, Germany’s top federal legislative body, saw an even bigger picture. He pointed out that AdF wants Germany to leave the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and is anti-U.S. and pro-Putin and pro-Russia. “Is that what the USA wants?” Spahn asked. “A Germany that turns towards Russia and away from the USA?” German president Frank-Walter Steinmeier called Musk’s interference with the German elections—whether it's hidden or open, as on X—a threat to democracy.
Over the weekend, Trump’s team appeared to be backing Trump’s threats against Greenland, which is a self-governing territory of Denmark. Those threats seem deliberately designed to destroy NATO. Denmark is a U.S. ally and a member of NATO. The U.S. already has a military base there, the Pituffik Space Base, as part of a mutual defense agreement between the U.S. and Denmark.
If the U.S. is concerned about foreign threats to Greenland, it does not have to take over the island. It could simply work with Denmark to increase the U.S. presence there. But Trump’s former national security adviser Robert C. O’Brien posted yesterday on X that Trump is “100% right” to demand the U.S. take possession of Greenland.
“We love the Danes but a couple of additional drones, dogsled teams & inspection ships are not enough to defend Greenland against the Russians & Chinese Communists. [Greenland] needs anti-aircraft, counter UAV (drone) & anti-ship missile systems. It also requires at least one frigate on full time patrol & a squadron of fighters. If our great ally Denmark can't commit to defending the Island, the US will have to step in, as POTUS 47 said.”
CNN anchor and chief national security analyst Jim Sciutto answered: “To be clear, are you saying the Trump administration will deploy US forces on the territory of a NATO [ally] without that ally’s consent?” Former representative Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) was more direct in his response to O’Brien. He posted: “When did you become insane?”
When viewed next to the statements of Russian pundits that a few powerful leaders should divide the world according to spheres of influence, there is perhaps logic to Trump’s demands. Trump is not threatening our rivals, but rather is threatening our own allies in the area around the U.S. And now Musk is supporting an anti-NATO, pro-Russia party in Germany. It could be that what we are seeing is an attempt to throw away NATO and America’s influence across the globe in order to carve up the world into spheres, with Trump offering to abandon Europe to Russia while the U.S., run by the DOGE faction of the Republican Party, officially takes control of a U.S.-centric sphere.
Meanwhile, the Biden administration today stood firm on maintaining the position the United States has held since World War II. President Biden announced nearly $2.5 billion in military aid to Ukraine, “as the Ukrainian people continue to defend their independence and freedom from Russian aggression.” In addition, Treasury Secretary Yellen announced $3.4 billion in economic assistance to enable Ukraine to pay its healthcare workers, teachers, and first responders. “At my direction, the United States will continue to work relentlessly to strengthen Ukraine’s position in this war over the remainder of my time in office,” Biden said.
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The best part of the year, for me, was getting the chance to travel across the country and meet so many of you in person. We have created something extraordinary over the past several years, and I am honored to be a part of it.
I thank you all, most profoundly, for your questions and arguments and ideas and humor and patience—and above all, your support and concern for this project and for me. I couldn't do it without you.
As for the future, old-time sailors would call the red skies of the last several sunsets a good omen.
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
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Twenty-five years ago today, Americans—along with the rest of the world—woke up to a new century date…and to the discovery that the years of work computer programmers had put in to stop what was known as the Y2K bug from crashing airplanes, shutting down hospitals, and making payments systems inoperable had worked.
When programmers began their work with the first wave of commercial computers in the 1960s, computer memory was expensive, so they used a two-digit format for dates, using just the years in the century, rather than using the four digits that would be necessary otherwise—78, for example, rather than 1978. This worked fine until the century changed.
As the turn of the twenty-first century approached, computer engineers realized that computers might interpret 00 as 1900 rather than 2000 or fail to recognize it at all, causing programs that, by then, handled routine maintenance, safety checks, transportation, finance, and so on, to fail. According to scholar Olivia Bosch, governments recognized that government services, as well as security and the law, could be disrupted by the glitch. They knew that the public must have confidence that world systems would survive, and the United States and the United Kingdom, where at the time computers were more widespread than they were elsewhere, emphasized transparency about how governments, companies, and programmers were handling the problem. They backed the World Bank and the United Nations in their work to help developing countries fix their own Y2K issues.
Meanwhile, people who were already worried about the coming of a new century began to fear that the end of the world was coming. In late 1996, evangelical Christian believers saw the Virgin Mary in the windows of an office building near Clearwater, Florida, and some thought the image was a sign of the end times. Leaders fed that fear, some appearing to hope that the secular government they hated would fall, some appreciating the profit to be made from their warnings. Popular televangelist Pat Robertson ran headlines like “The Year 2000—A Date with Disaster.”
Fears reached far beyond the evangelical community. Newspaper tabloids ran headlines that convinced some worried people to start stockpiling food and preparing for societal collapse: “JANUARY 1, 2000: THE DAY THE EARTH WILL STAND STILL!” one tabloid read. “ALL BANKS WILL FAIL. FOOD SUPPLIES WILL BE DEPLETED! ELECTRICITY WILL BE CUT OFF! THE STOCK MARKET WILL CRASH! VEHICLES USING COMPUTER CHIPS WILL STOP DEAD! TELEPHONES WILL CEASE TO FUNCTION! DOMINO EFFECT WILL CAUSE A WORLDWIDE DEPRESSION!”
In fact, the fix turned out to be simple—programmers developed updated systems that recognized a four-digit date—but implementing it meant that hardware and software had to be adjusted to become Y2K compliant, and they had to be ready by midnight on December 31, 1999. Technology teams worked for years, racing to meet the deadline at a cost that researchers estimate to have been $300–$600 billion. The head of the Federal Aviation Administration at the time, Jane Garvey, told NPR in 1998 that the air traffic control system had twenty-three million lines of code that had to be fixed.
President Bill Clinton’s 1999 budget had described fixing the Y2K bug as “the single largest technology management challenge in history,” but on December 14 of that year, President Bill Clinton announced that according to the Office of Management and Budget, 99.9% of the government's mission-critical computer systems were ready for 2000. In May 1997, only 21% had been ready. “[W]e have done our job, we have met the deadline, and we have done it well below cost projections,” Clinton said.
Indeed, the fix worked. Despite the dark warnings, the programmers had done their job, and the clocks changed with little disruption. “2000,” the Wilmington, Delaware, News Journal’s headline read. “World rejoices; Y2K bug is quiet.”
Crises get a lot of attention, but the quiet work of fixing them gets less. And if that work ends the crisis that got all the attention, the success itself makes people think there was never a crisis to begin with. In the aftermath of the Y2K problem, people began to treat it as a joke, but as technology forecaster Paul Saffo emphasized, “The Y2K crisis didn’t happen precisely because people started preparing for it over a decade in advance. And the general public who was busy stocking up on supplies and stuff just didn’t have a sense that the programmers were on the job.”
As of midnight last night, a five-year contract ended that had allowed Russia to export natural gas to Europe by way of a pipeline running through Ukraine. Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky warned that he would not renew the contract, which permitted more than $6 billion a year to flow to cash-strapped Russia. European governments said they had plenty of time to prepare and that they have found alternative sources to meet the needs of their people.
Today, President Joe Biden issued a statement marking the day that the new, lower cap on seniors’ out-of-pocket spending on prescription drugs goes into effect. The Inflation Reduction Act, negotiated over two years and passed with Democratic votes alone, enabled the government to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies over drug prices and phased in out-of-pocket spending caps for seniors. In 2024 the cap was $3,400; it’s now $2,000.
As we launch ourselves into 2025, one of the key issues of the new year will be whether Americans care that the U.S. government does the hard, slow work of governing and, if it does, who benefits.
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On the clear, cold morning of December 29, 1890, on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, three U.S. soldiers tried to wrench a valuable Winchester away from a young Lakota man. He refused to give up his hunting weapon. It was the only thing standing between his family and starvation, and he had no faith it would be returned to him as the officer promised: he had watched as soldiers had marked other confiscated valuable weapons for themselves.
As the men struggled, the gun fired into the sky.
Before the echoes died, troops fired a volley that brought down half of the Lakota men and boys the soldiers had captured the night before, as well as a number of soldiers surrounding the Lakotas. The uninjured Lakota men attacked the soldiers with knives, guns they snatched from wounded soldiers, and their fists.
As the men fought hand to hand, the Lakota women who had been hitching their horses to wagons for the day’s travel tried to flee along the nearby road or up a dry ravine behind the camp. Stationed on a slight rise above the camp, soldiers turned rapid-fire mountain guns on them. Then, over the next two hours, troops on horseback hunted down and slaughtered all the Lakotas they could find: about 250 men, women, and children.
Fifteen years ago, I wrote a book about the Wounded Knee Massacre, and what I learned still keeps me up at night. But it is not December 29 that haunts me.
What haunts me is the night of December 28.
On December 28 there was still time to avert the massacre.
In the early afternoon, the Lakota leader Sitanka had urged his people to surrender to the soldiers looking for them. Sitanka was desperately ill with pneumonia, and the people in his band were hungry, underdressed, and exhausted. They were making their way south across South Dakota from their own reservation in the northern part of the state to the Pine Ridge Reservation. There they planned to take shelter with another famous Lakota chief, Red Cloud. His people had done as Sitanka asked, and the soldiers escorted the Lakotas to a camp on South Dakota's Wounded Knee Creek, inside the boundaries of the Pine Ridge Reservation.
For the soldiers, the surrender of Sitanka's band marked the end of what they called the Ghost Dance Uprising. It had been a tense month. Troops had pushed into the South Dakota reservations in November, prompting a band of terrified men who had embraced the Ghost Dance religion to gather their wives and children and ride out to the Badlands. But at long last, army officers and negotiators had convinced those Ghost Dancers to go back to Pine Ridge and turn themselves in to authorities before winter hit in earnest.
Sitanka’s people were not part of the Badlands group and, for the most part, were not Ghost Dancers. They had fled from their own northern reservation two weeks before when they learned that officers had murdered the great leader Sitting Bull in his own home. Army officers were anxious to find and corral Sitanka’s missing Lakotas before they carried the news that Sitting Bull had been killed to those who had taken refuge in the Badlands. Army leaders were certain the information would spook the Ghost Dancers and send them flying back to the Badlands. They were determined to make sure the two bands did not meet.
But South Dakota is a big state, and it was not until late in the afternoon of December 28 that the soldiers finally made contact with Sitanka's band. The encounter didn’t go quite as the officers planned: a group of soldiers were watering their horses in a stream when some of the traveling Lakotas surprised them. The Lakotas let the soldiers go, and the men promptly reported to their officers, who marched on the Lakotas as if they were going to war. Sitanka, who had always gotten along well with army officers, assured the commander that the band was on its way to Pine Ridge and asked his men to surrender unconditionally. They did.
By this time, Sitanka was so ill he couldn't sit up and his nose was dripping blood. Soldiers lifted him into an army ambulance—an old wagon—for the trip to the Wounded Knee camp. His ragtag band followed behind. Once there, the soldiers gave the Lakotas an evening ration and lent army tents to those who wanted them. Then the soldiers settled into guarding the camp.
And the soldiers celebrated, for they saw themselves as heroes of a great war, and it had been bloodless, and now, with the Lakotas’ surrender, they would be demobilized back to their home bases before the South Dakota winter closed in. As they celebrated, more and more troops poured in. It had been a long hunt across South Dakota for Sitanka and his band, and officers were determined the group would not escape them again.
In came the Seventh Cavalry, whose men had not forgotten that their former leader George Armstrong Custer had been killed by a band of Lakota in 1876. In came three mountain guns, which the soldiers trained on the Indian encampment from a slight rise above the camp.
For their part, the Lakotas were frightened. If their surrender was welcome and they were going to go with the soldiers to Red Cloud at Pine Ridge, as they had planned all along, why were there so many soldiers, with so many guns?
On this day and hour in 1890, in the cold and dark of a South Dakota December night, there were soldiers drinking, singing, and visiting with each other, and anxious Lakotas either talking to each other in low voices or trying to sleep. No one knew what the next day would bring, but no one expected what was going to happen.
One of the curses of history is that we cannot go back and change the course leading to disasters, no matter how much we might wish to. The past has its own terrible inevitability.
But it is never too late to change the future.
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Former President Jimmy Carter died today, December 29, 2024, at age 100 after a life characterized by a dedication to human rights. His wife of 77 years, Rosalynn Carter, died on November 19, 2023; she was 96 years old.
James Earl Carter Jr. was born on October 1, 1924, in Plains, in southwestern Georgia, about half an hour from the site of the infamous Andersonville Prison, where nearly 13,000 United States soldiers died of disease and hunger during the Civil War only sixty years earlier. He was the first U.S. president to be born in a hospital.
Carter’s South was impoverished. He grew up on a dirt road about three miles from Plains, in the tiny, majority-Black village of Archery, where his father owned a farm and the family grew corn, cotton, peanuts, and sugar cane. The young Carters and the children of the village’s Black sharecroppers grew up together as the Depression that crashed down in 1929 drained away what little prosperity there was in Archery.
After undergraduate coursework at Georgia Southwestern College and at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Carter completed his undergraduate degree at the U.S. Naval Academy. In the Navy he rose to the rank of lieutenant, serving on submarines—including early nuclear submarines—in both the Atlantic and Pacific fleets.
In 1946, Carter married Rosalynn Smith, a friend of his sister’s, who grew up in Plains. When his father died in 1953, Carter resigned his naval commission and took his family back to the Carters’ Georgia farm, where he and Rosalynn operated both the farm and a seed and supply company.
Arriving back in Georgia just a year before the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision declared racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional, Carter quickly became involved in local politics. In 1962 he challenged a fraudulent election for a Georgia state senate seat, and in the runoff, voters elected him. The Carters became supporters of Democratic president John F. Kennedy in a state whose dominant Democratic Party was in turmoil as white supremacists clashed with Georgians eager to leave their past behind. Kennedy had sent troops to desegregate the University of Mississippi.
Carter ran for governor in 1966, the year after Congress passed the Voting Rights Act. He lost the primary, coming in third behind another liberal Democrat and a staunch segregationist Democrat, Lester Maddox, who won it and went on to win the governorship. When Carter ran again in 1970, he emphasized his populism rather than Black rights, appealing to racist whites. He won the Democratic primary with 60% of the vote and, in a state that was still Democrat-dominated, easily won the governorship.
But when Carter took office in 1971, he abandoned his concessions to white racists and took a stand for new race relations in the United States. “I say to you quite frankly that the time for racial discrimination is over,” he told Georgians in his inaugural speech. “No poor, rural, weak, or Black person should ever have to bear the additional burden of being deprived of the opportunity of an education, a job, or simple justice.”
His predecessor, Maddox, had refused to let state workers take the day off to attend services for the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s funeral; Carter pointedly hung a portrait of King—as well as portraits of educator Lucy Craft Laney and Georgia politician and minister Henry McNeal Turner—in the State Capitol.
Carter brought to office a focus not only on civil rights but also on cleaning up and streamlining the state’s government. He consolidated more than 200 government offices into 20 and backed austerity measures to save money while also supporting new social programs, including equalizing aid to poor and wealthy schools, prison reform and early childhood development programs, and community centers for mentally disabled children.
At the time, the state constitution prohibited Carter from reelection, so he built recognition in the national Democratic Party and turned his sights on the presidency. In the wake of the scandals that brought down both President Richard Nixon and Vice President Spiro Agnew, as well as many of their staff, when it seemed to many Americans that all of Washington was corrupt, voters welcomed the newcomer Carter as an outsider who would work for the people.
He seemed a new kind of Democrat, one who could usher in a new, multicultural democracy now that the 1965 Voting Rights Act had brought Black and Brown voters into the American polity. Like many of the other civil rights coalitions in the twentieth century, Carter’s supporters shared music reinforced their politics, and Carter’s deep knowledge of blues, R&B, folk, and especially the gospel music of his youth helped him appeal to that era’s crucially important youth vote. Bob Dylan; Crosby, Stills & Nash, Nile Rodgers, Willie Nelson, and Johnny Cash, as well as the Allman Brothers, all backed Carter, who later said: “I was practically a non-entity, but everyone knew the Allman Brothers. When they endorsed me, all the young people said, ‘Well, if the Allman Brothers like him, we can vote for him.’”
Elected by just over 50% of American voters over Republican candidate Gerald R. Ford’s count of about 48%, Carter’s outsider status and determination to govern based on the will of the people sparked opposition from within Washington—including in the Democratic Party—and stories that he was buffeted about by the breezes of polls. But Carter's domestic policy advisor Stuart Eizenstat once said that Carter believed an elected president should “park politics at the Oval Office door” and try to win election by doing the right thing. He took pride in ignoring political interests—a stance that would hurt his ability to get things done in Washington, D.C.
Carter began by trying to make the government more representative of the American people: Eizenstat recalled that Carter appointed more women, Black Americans, and Jewish Americans to official positions and judgeships “than all 38 of his predecessors combined.”
Carter instituted ethics reforms to reclaim the honor of the presidency after Nixon’s behavior had tarnished it. He put independent inspectors in every department and established that corporations could not bribe foreign officials to get contracts. He expanded education programs, establishing the Department of Education, and tried to relieve the country from reliance on foreign oil by establishing the Department of Energy.
Concerned that the new regulatory agencies that Congress had created since the mid-1960s might be captured by industries and that they were causing prices to rise, Carter began the deregulation movement to increase competition. He began with the airlines and moved to the trucking industry, railroad lines, and long-distance phone service. He also deregulated beer production—his legalization of homebrewing sparked today’s craft brewing industry.
But Carter inherited slow economic growth and the inflation that had plagued presidents since Nixon, and the 1979 drop in oil production after the Iranian revolution exacerbated both. While more than ten million jobs were added to the U.S. economy during his term—almost twice the number Reagan added in his first term, and more than five times the number George H.W. Bush added in his—inflation hit 14% in 1980. To combat that inflation, Carter appointed Paul Volcker to chair the Federal Reserve, knowing he would combat inflation with high interest rates, a policy that brought down inflation during the first term of his successor, Ronald Reagan.
Carter also focused on protecting the environment. He was the first president to undertake the federal cleanup of a hazardous waste site, declaring a federal emergency in the New York neighborhood of Love Canal and using federal disaster money to remediate the chemicals that had been stored underground there.
Carter placed 56 million acres of land in Alaska under federal protection as a national monument, saying: “These areas contain resources of unequaled scientific, historic and cultural value, and include some of the most spectacular scenery and wildlife in the world,” he said. In 1979 he had 32 solar panels installed at the White House to help heat the water for the building and demonstrate that it was possible to curb U.S. dependence on fossil fuels. Just before he left office, Carter signed into law the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, protecting more than 100 million acres in Alaska, including additional protections for the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
Coming after Nixon’s secret bombing of Cambodia and support for Chile’s right-wing dictator Augusto Pinochet, whose government had systematically tortured and executed his political opponents, Carter’s foreign policy emphasized human rights. Carter echoed the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights established by the United Nations, promising he would promote “human freedom” while protecting “the individual from the arbitrary power of the state.” He was best known for the Camp David Accords that achieved peace between Israel and Egypt after they had fought a series of wars. Those accords, negotiated with Anwar Sadat of Egypt and Menachem Begin of Israel paved the way for others. Carter credited the religious faith of the three men for making the agreement possible.
Carter also built on his predecessor Nixon’s outreach to China, normalizing relations and affording diplomatic recognition of China, enabling the two countries to develop a bilateral relationship. While commenters often credit President Reagan with pressuring the Soviet Union enough to bring about its dissolution, in fact it was Carter who negotiated the nuclear arms treaty that Reagan honored and who, along with his national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, saw the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 as a major breach in international relations. He cut off grain sales to the USSR, ordered a massive defense buildup, and persuaded European leaders to accept nuclear missiles stationed in their countries, which Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev said was a significant factor in the dissolution of the USSR.
To Carter also fell the Iran hostage crisis in which Muslim fundamentalists overran the American embassy in the Iranian capital Tehran, seizing 66 Americans and holding them hostage for 444 days, in return for a promise that the American-backed Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, whom Carter had admitted to the U.S. for cancer treatment, be returned to Iran for trial. Carter immediately froze Iranian assets and began secret negotiations, while Americans watched on TV as Iranian mobs chanted “Death to America.” A secret mission to rescue the hostages failed when one of the eight helicopters dispatched to rescue the hostages crashed, killing eight soldiers. Before he left office, Carter successfully negotiated for the hostages’ return; they were released the day of Reagan’s inauguration.
Carter left office in January 1981, and the following year, in partnership with Emory University, he and Rosalynn established the Carter Center, an Atlanta-based nongovernmental, not-for-profit organization to advance peace, health, and human rights around the world.
The Carter Center has supervised elections in more than 100 countries, has helped farmers in 15 African countries to double or triple grain production, and has worked to prevent disease in Latin America and Africa. In 1986, when the Carter Center began a program to eradicate infections of the meter-long Guinea worm that emerges painfully from sufferers’ skin and incapacitates them for long periods, 3.5 million people a year in Africa and Asia were infected; in 2022 there were only 13 known infections, in 2023 there were 14. So far in 2024, there have been 7, but those will not be officially confirmed until spring 2025. In a 2015 interview, Carter said he hoped to outlive the last case.
President Carter said, “When I was in the White House, I thought of human rights primarily in terms of political rights, such as rights to free speech and freedom from torture or unjust imprisonment. As I traveled around the world since I was president, I learned there was no way to separate the crucial rights to live in peace, to have adequate food and health care, and to have a voice in choosing one’s political leaders. These human needs and rights are inextricably linked.”
In 2002, Carter received the Nobel Peace Prize “for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development.” When journalist Katie Couric of The Today Show asked him if the Nobel Peace Prize or being elected president was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to him, Carter answered: “When Rosalynn said she’d marry me, I think that’s the most exciting thing.”
In his Farewell Address on January 14, 1981, President Jimmy Carter worried about the direction of the country. He noted that the American people had begun to lose faith in the government’s ability to deal with problems and were turning to “single-issue groups and special interest organizations to ensure that whatever else happens, our own personal views and our own private interests are protected.” This focus on individualism, he warned, distorts the nation’s purpose because “the national interest is not always the sum of all our single or special interests. We are all Americans together, and we must not forget that the common good is our common interest and our individual responsibility.”
Carter urged Americans to protect our “most precious possessions: the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the land which sustains us,” and to advance the basic human rights that had, after all, “invented America.” “Our common vision of a free and just society,” he said, “is our greatest source of cohesion at home and strength abroad, greater even than the bounty of our material blessings.”
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The fight between MAGA and DOGE continues. Original MAGAs who want the government to expel immigrants and elevate white evangelical Christian men are facing off against the new DOGE MAGAs who disdain original MAGA culture and want the government to turn the tech billionaires loose from regulations and taxes to create their own global oligarchy.
The fight has taken shape over H-1B visas that allow companies to hire foreign workers for skilled positions. MAGA opposes all immigration and relied on Trump’s promise to deport 11 to 20 million immigrants; DOGE wants more H-1B visas, arguing that America is not producing enough skilled engineers because of the misguided culture that Americans like MAGAs embrace. On Friday, billionaire Elon Musk, who has been very close to Trump since bankrolling his election, agreed with MAGA influencer Ian Miles Cheong, who has more than a million followers on X, when Cheong posted: “Much of the anger being driven toward Elon Musk today is simply disappointment being projected by the ‘ret*rded right’ that’s on the fringes of the conservative movement, against Musk, whom they wish was an unrepentant racist like they are.”
Late on Friday night, Musk defended H-1B visas again, posting on X: “The reason I’m in America along with so many critical people who built SpaceX, Tesla and hundreds of other companies that made America strong is because of H1B.” He continued: “Take a big step back and F*CK YOURSELF in the face. I will go to war on this issue the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend.” According to Forbes, Musk’s Tesla was among the leading employers of those holding H-1B visas in 2024.
Meanwhile, original MAGA influencer Steve Bannon used Musk’s apparent throwing MAGA critics off X as a route to attack the entire DOGE faction. “They're trying to dump people off the platforms like that's going to matter?” he said to influencer Jack Posobiec. “You can't stop us, we’re relentless…. We’re never going to quit…. We're a thousand times tougher than you guys are…. Keep coming after American citizens like you're coming and you're going to find out exactly how tough we are. We’re not going to tolerate this. Your trashing of the MAGA movement…. How dare you…. I don't care how big a check you wrote.”
Today, Bannon doubled down: “We’re gonna get H-1B visas out, root and stem, and all the workers you brought in. Just like we’re deporting 15 million here, we want them deported, out…. And give those jobs to American citizens today…we demand they get reparations. You stole from them.”
Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo pointed out on Saturday that what many of us have been calling a civil war in the MAGA movement is not the best way to look at the MAGA fight. Marshall points out that the 2024–2025 MAGA was mostly just an electoral machine built around Trump. In the past, he notes, MAGA never really had policies. Mostly, it was a vehicle for Trump’s grievance about the investigation into the ties between his 2016 campaign and Russian operatives, and after his first impeachment, it became about retribution. But now, as Marshall notes, Trump is “tired and on the way out,” and he never really cared about policy anyway: he ran for president for the purpose of staying out of jail and “lording it over his foes.”
What is going on now, Marshall says, is less a civil war than “a battle over the steering wheel.” Trump absorbed groups into his coalition with the promise he would work for them, but their policies have always been contradictory. Now that it’s time for their payoff, not everyone can be appeased. So, will the Trump machine work for the MAGAs or the DOGEs…or even the Robert F. Kennedy “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) faction—which, as Marshall says, was “grafted on to the movement in the last months of the final stretch of the campaign for narrowly electoral reasons.” Today, Nathaniel Weixel of The Hill outlined how the MAHA faction is itself bitterly divided over issues like drugs to treat obesity.
Marshall concludes that, in any case, “[t]here’s little sign Trump cares. He’s already gotten what he wants.”
On Saturday, in an interview with the New York Post, President-elect Donald Trump threw his MAGA supporters under the bus and sided with Musk and pharmaceutical entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy on H-1B visas. “I’ve always liked the visas, I have always been in favor of the visas. That’s why we have them,” Trump said, referring to the H-1B visas that permit companies to hire foreign workers in skilled occupations. “I have many H-1B visas on my properties. I’ve been a believer in H-1B. I have used it many times. It’s a great program.”
Trump appeared to be confusing H-1B visas with H-2A and H-2B visas, which cover temporary agricultural workers and seasonal workers in tourism, hospitality, and landscaping. In fact, as Leah McElrath pointed out, Trump said in 2016 that the H-1B program shouldn’t exist. And as Judd Legum pointed out, on June 22, 2020, Trump issued an executive order suspending H-1B visas because he said they were taking jobs from Americans.
The fight within MAGA is only part of the larger fight within the Republican Party, whose leadership needs to organize the newly elected members of the House of Representatives as soon as they get back to Washington, D.C., and come into session on Friday, January 3. The House should have a speaker in place before Congress counts electoral votes on January 6.
Even if Trump no longer needs MAGA voters, extremist MAGAs in the House do, and they are angry at current House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) for his willingness to work with less extreme Republicans and Democrats to keep the government operating. Members of the far right want to shut it down until it stops spending more money than it takes in and stops supporting policies they oppose.
This is turning into a fight over the House speaker. Extreme MAGA Republicans say they will not support Johnson for speaker this time around, putting his election in jeopardy because the party’s majority is so thin Johnson cannot lose more than two votes. Trump was angry at Johnson for passing a continuing resolution to fund the government without getting rid of the debt ceiling but, perhaps looking at the tight congressional schedule, endorsed him today with a social media post.
The Republican factions made the Congress that is just ending one of the least productive in history, and that chaos seems likely to get worse. With the 2023 Fiscal Responsibility Act, Congress suspended the U.S. debt ceiling until January 1, 2025, this Wednesday. The debt ceiling establishes a limit to how much the treasury can borrow to fulfill the country’s financial obligations, “including Social Security and Medicare benefits, military salaries, interest on the national debt, tax refunds, and other payments,” Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen explained.
Last Friday, December 27, Yellen warned Congress that the country will likely hit the debt ceiling between January 14 and January 23. The Treasury can resort to extraordinary measures to pay obligations, but if it is to keep the country functioning, the incoming Congress must raise the debt ceiling. That will not be easy.
Trump wants to cut taxes for billionaires and corporations, a plan that the Congressional Budget Office estimates will add $4.6 trillion to the national debt over the next ten years. After years of complaining about Democratic spending on social welfare programs, he is now demanding that Congress get rid of the debt ceiling altogether. Republican lawmakers have said they will raise the debt ceiling by $1.5 trillion, but only in exchange for $2.5 trillion in cuts to mandatory spending over ten years.
This would require cuts to popular programs, putting the Republicans in the position of cutting benefits to poor and middle-class Americans in order to give tax cuts to the rich. The party has gone a long way from the 1860s, when party members invented the income tax to guarantee both that the nation’s bills got paid and that the burden would fall “not upon each man an equal amount,” as Senator Justin Smith Morrill (R-VT) put it then, “but a tax proportionate to his ability to pay.”
There is also an international dimension of the fight for control of the U.S. government. Musk followed up on last week’s X post supporting the far-right German political party Alternative for Germany (AfD), criticized as a neo-Nazi group. On Saturday in Welt am Sonntag, Musk wrote that AfD is the “last spark of hope” for Germany. He claimed the right to speak out about Europe’s largest economy because of his “significant investments” in the country. The editor of the newspaper’s opinion section resigned in protest.
Conservative lawyer George Conway posted: “So the world’s richest man, who grew up under apartheid in South Africa and now pulls the mentally deteriorating incoming U.S. president’s strings, has written an op-ed urging Germans to elect a new-Nazi government. Got that?” He added: “Concerning.”
Jens Spahn, the State Secretary of the German Ministry of Finance and a Member of the German Bundestag, Germany’s top federal legislative body, saw an even bigger picture. He pointed out that AdF wants Germany to leave the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and is anti-U.S. and pro-Putin and pro-Russia. “Is that what the USA wants?” Spahn asked. “A Germany that turns towards Russia and away from the USA?” German president Frank-Walter Steinmeier called Musk’s interference with the German elections—whether it's hidden or open, as on X—a threat to democracy.
Over the weekend, Trump’s team appeared to be backing Trump’s threats against Greenland, which is a self-governing territory of Denmark. Those threats seem deliberately designed to destroy NATO. Denmark is a U.S. ally and a member of NATO. The U.S. already has a military base there, the Pituffik Space Base, as part of a mutual defense agreement between the U.S. and Denmark.
If the U.S. is concerned about foreign threats to Greenland, it does not have to take over the island. It could simply work with Denmark to increase the U.S. presence there. But Trump’s former national security adviser Robert C. O’Brien posted yesterday on X that Trump is “100% right” to demand the U.S. take possession of Greenland.
“We love the Danes but a couple of additional drones, dogsled teams & inspection ships are not enough to defend Greenland against the Russians & Chinese Communists. [Greenland] needs anti-aircraft, counter UAV (drone) & anti-ship missile systems. It also requires at least one frigate on full time patrol & a squadron of fighters. If our great ally Denmark can't commit to defending the Island, the US will have to step in, as POTUS 47 said.”
CNN anchor and chief national security analyst Jim Sciutto answered: “To be clear, are you saying the Trump administration will deploy US forces on the territory of a NATO [ally] without that ally’s consent?” Former representative Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) was more direct in his response to O’Brien. He posted: “When did you become insane?”
When viewed next to the statements of Russian pundits that a few powerful leaders should divide the world according to spheres of influence, there is perhaps logic to Trump’s demands. Trump is not threatening our rivals, but rather is threatening our own allies in the area around the U.S. And now Musk is supporting an anti-NATO, pro-Russia party in Germany. It could be that what we are seeing is an attempt to throw away NATO and America’s influence across the globe in order to carve up the world into spheres, with Trump offering to abandon Europe to Russia while the U.S., run by the DOGE faction of the Republican Party, officially takes control of a U.S.-centric sphere.
Meanwhile, the Biden administration today stood firm on maintaining the position the United States has held since World War II. President Biden announced nearly $2.5 billion in military aid to Ukraine, “as the Ukrainian people continue to defend their independence and freedom from Russian aggression.” In addition, Treasury Secretary Yellen announced $3.4 billion in economic assistance to enable Ukraine to pay its healthcare workers, teachers, and first responders. “At my direction, the United States will continue to work relentlessly to strengthen Ukraine’s position in this war over the remainder of my time in office,” Biden said.
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And so, the sun sets on 2024.
The best part of the year, for me, was getting the chance to travel across the country and meet so many of you in person. We have created something extraordinary over the past several years, and I am honored to be a part of it.
I thank you all, most profoundly, for your questions and arguments and ideas and humor and patience—and above all, your support and concern for this project and for me. I couldn't do it without you.
As for the future, old-time sailors would call the red skies of the last several sunsets a good omen.
Let's hope that they're right.
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
Twenty-five years ago today, Americans—along with the rest of the world—woke up to a new century date…and to the discovery that the years of work computer programmers had put in to stop what was known as the Y2K bug from crashing airplanes, shutting down hospitals, and making payments systems inoperable had worked.
When programmers began their work with the first wave of commercial computers in the 1960s, computer memory was expensive, so they used a two-digit format for dates, using just the years in the century, rather than using the four digits that would be necessary otherwise—78, for example, rather than 1978. This worked fine until the century changed.
As the turn of the twenty-first century approached, computer engineers realized that computers might interpret 00 as 1900 rather than 2000 or fail to recognize it at all, causing programs that, by then, handled routine maintenance, safety checks, transportation, finance, and so on, to fail. According to scholar Olivia Bosch, governments recognized that government services, as well as security and the law, could be disrupted by the glitch. They knew that the public must have confidence that world systems would survive, and the United States and the United Kingdom, where at the time computers were more widespread than they were elsewhere, emphasized transparency about how governments, companies, and programmers were handling the problem. They backed the World Bank and the United Nations in their work to help developing countries fix their own Y2K issues.
Meanwhile, people who were already worried about the coming of a new century began to fear that the end of the world was coming. In late 1996, evangelical Christian believers saw the Virgin Mary in the windows of an office building near Clearwater, Florida, and some thought the image was a sign of the end times. Leaders fed that fear, some appearing to hope that the secular government they hated would fall, some appreciating the profit to be made from their warnings. Popular televangelist Pat Robertson ran headlines like “The Year 2000—A Date with Disaster.”
Fears reached far beyond the evangelical community. Newspaper tabloids ran headlines that convinced some worried people to start stockpiling food and preparing for societal collapse: “JANUARY 1, 2000: THE DAY THE EARTH WILL STAND STILL!” one tabloid read. “ALL BANKS WILL FAIL. FOOD SUPPLIES WILL BE DEPLETED! ELECTRICITY WILL BE CUT OFF! THE STOCK MARKET WILL CRASH! VEHICLES USING COMPUTER CHIPS WILL STOP DEAD! TELEPHONES WILL CEASE TO FUNCTION! DOMINO EFFECT WILL CAUSE A WORLDWIDE DEPRESSION!”
In fact, the fix turned out to be simple—programmers developed updated systems that recognized a four-digit date—but implementing it meant that hardware and software had to be adjusted to become Y2K compliant, and they had to be ready by midnight on December 31, 1999. Technology teams worked for years, racing to meet the deadline at a cost that researchers estimate to have been $300–$600 billion. The head of the Federal Aviation Administration at the time, Jane Garvey, told NPR in 1998 that the air traffic control system had twenty-three million lines of code that had to be fixed.
President Bill Clinton’s 1999 budget had described fixing the Y2K bug as “the single largest technology management challenge in history,” but on December 14 of that year, President Bill Clinton announced that according to the Office of Management and Budget, 99.9% of the government's mission-critical computer systems were ready for 2000. In May 1997, only 21% had been ready. “[W]e have done our job, we have met the deadline, and we have done it well below cost projections,” Clinton said.
Indeed, the fix worked. Despite the dark warnings, the programmers had done their job, and the clocks changed with little disruption. “2000,” the Wilmington, Delaware, News Journal’s headline read. “World rejoices; Y2K bug is quiet.”
Crises get a lot of attention, but the quiet work of fixing them gets less. And if that work ends the crisis that got all the attention, the success itself makes people think there was never a crisis to begin with. In the aftermath of the Y2K problem, people began to treat it as a joke, but as technology forecaster Paul Saffo emphasized, “The Y2K crisis didn’t happen precisely because people started preparing for it over a decade in advance. And the general public who was busy stocking up on supplies and stuff just didn’t have a sense that the programmers were on the job.”
As of midnight last night, a five-year contract ended that had allowed Russia to export natural gas to Europe by way of a pipeline running through Ukraine. Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky warned that he would not renew the contract, which permitted more than $6 billion a year to flow to cash-strapped Russia. European governments said they had plenty of time to prepare and that they have found alternative sources to meet the needs of their people.
Today, President Joe Biden issued a statement marking the day that the new, lower cap on seniors’ out-of-pocket spending on prescription drugs goes into effect. The Inflation Reduction Act, negotiated over two years and passed with Democratic votes alone, enabled the government to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies over drug prices and phased in out-of-pocket spending caps for seniors. In 2024 the cap was $3,400; it’s now $2,000.
As we launch ourselves into 2025, one of the key issues of the new year will be whether Americans care that the U.S. government does the hard, slow work of governing and, if it does, who benefits.
Happy New Year, everyone.
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14