The Usual Suspects 🤡 🤮 ✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️ 🤮 🦃 🦃

Happy Turkeys: Biden pardoned 🦃 🦃 Peach and Blossom and, in all likelihood, is working up a long list of humans to pardon before he steps down in January because Trump seems hell bent on seeking the retribution he promised against a flock of people including just about anyone who worked on the federal cases against him, media outlets who dissed him, and probably son Hunter too.  Those legal cases were the ones that we naively thought would result in Trump being held accountable for his January 6 coup and all those purloined documents but that have now been dropped albeit without prejudice by Special Counsel Jack Smith because Trump, warts and all, is now our king.  Smith is planning to step down shortly, hopefully not before issuing a report detailing all of what he learned about Trump’s crimes.  Keeping with another one of his promises, Trump who is acting as if he’s already president, announced that he intends to impose a 25% tariff on goods from major trading partners Mexico and Canada on day one of his administration “to stem the flow of fentanyl.”  He also announced plans to raise tariffs on China but didn’t specify an amount.  It’s unlikely that his tariffs will do much about fentanyl, but they will raise the price of many products including lots of grocery items if they are actually imposed.  So far market reaction to Trump’s tariff announcement has been muted mostly because investors are counting on his promise being no more than a negotiating tactic.  Maybe they’re right, but if they’re wrong, expect market indices to go south and inflation to start heading north in January.  As to those inflation fears Treasury Secretary nominee Bessent says nothing to worry about because “tariffs can’t be inflationary because if the price of one thing goes up, then they (i.e. not rich people ) have less money to spend ….. so there is no inflation." Apparently, billionaires consider dishwashers and refrigerators discretionary items that don’t need to be replaced when broken because doesn’t everyone have maids and multiple sub- zeroes? If your appliances are on their last legs, now would be a good time to replace them because those items will get way more expensive if Trump’s tariffs go through.     

The 🤡 🤡 🤡:  A whole swath of characters from Trump Hell One, supplemented by some who he acquired during his days in the wilderness, are back and doing their thing.  Various outlets report that lawyer/advisor Boris Epshteyn who among other actions pushed the now failed Matt Gaetz nomination, has been soliciting large payments from those seeking help obtaining Trump cabinet appointments.  We know that because someone in Trump’s orbit leaked that an internal investigation into Epshteyn’s actions had been conducted and that the report recommended that he be banished.  Epshteyn hasn’t been banished either because the purpose of the investigation was to make him behave or maybe because he’s now giving Trump a share of his ill-gotten gains? Kash Patel, one of the more nefarious, extreme MAGA anti-deep state members of the Trump squad, is hoping to get a senior position at the CIA or FBI where Director Wray who was appointed by Trump during Hell One expects to be fired. Though he’d like to snag one of the director spots he’s so unconfirmable that even Trump knows it can’t be done, so he’ll likely end up with something almost as damaging like a second in command/chief of staff role. Steve Bannon’s buddy Sebastian Gorka, a disreputable character who former Chief of Staff John Kelly forced out of the last Trump administration, is Trump’s pick for counter-terrorism advisor.  His selection is so questionable that a candidate to serve as National Security Advisor pulled himself out of the running because he didn’t want to be anywhere near Gorka. Ric Grennell who previously served as Trump’s Ambassador to Germany and temporary Director of National Intelligence is very bummed that he hasn’t been tapped to be Secretary of State.  He has rejected a few “lesser” positions but that hasn’t stopped him from weighing in on President Biden. He wants “feeble” Joe Biden to step down now so that Trump can jump past everyone in the line of succession, including VP Kamala Harris, to immediately become president. In case there is any doubt that we’re going to be in big trouble when the next pandemic hits, yesterday Trump announced that his pick to head the NIH is Stanford doctor Jay Bhattacharya, a masking opponent who advocated herd immunity rather than vaccines for COVID. He’ll fit in well with RFK Jr who’s surrounding himself with people from the anti-vaccine Children’s Health Defense group and who is all in on raw milk, which in addition to being a potential source of E coli bacteria is also turning out to being a vector for bird flu which is starting to spread to humans and has one former FDA Head, Dr David Kessler, fearing that it’s the next pandemic. By the way, Dr. Oz who also hasn’t met a quack cure that he doesn’t like, assuming that he make money from it, has been shilling for a scuzzy Medicare Advantage plan, a bit of a problem since he’ll soon be in charge of Medicare and Medicaid services.  Trump also keeps appointing more and more of those responsible for the Project 25 plan that he pretended to disavow during his campaign including former and soon to be current OMB head Russ Vought. As to confirmations, though it didn’t work for child trafficker Gaetz, JD Vance has been telling vulnerable Senators up for reelection in 2026 that if they don’t vote yes for Trump’s nominees 💰 💰 man Musk will fund their primary opponents.   On a somewhat humorous note, remember Trump’s “human printer” Natalie Harp?  She was by his side during his NY trial, providing him with mood lifting flattering articles. Apparently, she’s on her way to the Oval Office where she’ll continue to have unfettered access to Trump, maybe all those notes she’s been sending him like the ones where she’s written “you’re all that matters to me” and  “I want to bring you joy” are really working or maybe it’s something else even more icky. Ickiness aside, Harp facilitates Trump’s worst instincts by bringing him conspiracy ridden articles and reposting inappropriate sexist and racist memes and even communications from world leaders like Ukraine’s Zelenskyy that are meant to be private.      

Abortion Morass:  We keep on learning more, on a delayed basis, about the deaths in states with abortion bans.  The most recent story concerns an eleven-week pregnant Texas woman who instead of receiving a D & C during a spontaneous miscarriage was provided a drug that didn’t help and then allowed to bleed out.  She died because doctors feared that providing her with the necessary procedure would have landed them in jail. Texas’ solution is to stop reporting on deaths that took place during the first two years of the state’s ban.  That’s similar to the strategy now being implemented in Georgia, where officials, upset that their dire statistics have “leaked” out have fired the statistics team because leaks are so much worse than actual deaths?  

Fog:  The conflict between Lebanon and Israel or really between Iran’s Hezbollah backed surrogates and Israel, is over, at least for now.  A ceasefire went into effect early this morning. Unfortunately, the war in Gaza between Israel and Iran’s other surrogates, Hamas, continues.  The hostages, to the extent any remain alive, are still hostages and Gazan civilians remain in the crosshairs.

#BringThemAllHomeNow

Happy 🦃 to All

 
Cyberbullying 🤡 🤮 ✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️ 🤮

Apprentice Casting:  With a flurry of pre-weekend appointments, Trump selected his cabinet nominees including Scott Bessent, his much-awaited Treasury pick. Bessent was always in the running but fell out of favor for a bit after he loudly butted heads with transition co-chair Howard Lutnick who ended up with the consolation prize of Commerce. Earlier this year Bessent who, ironically given how much the MAGA community demonizes George Soros, used to work at his investment fund, advocated using tariffs only as a negotiating tool but now he’s talking about applying them more broadly but at lower levels than those trumpeted by the Orange guy. Get used to inflation and rising debt because he, like Trump is also all in on extending Trump’s first term tax cuts and though the party line is that those cuts will be paid for by tariffs and budget slashing, tariffs don’t pay for themselves but do raise consumer prices and, despite the Musk/Ramaswamy Doge slash the budget plan, the budget is mostly made up of hard to cut entitlements and defense spending.  Slashing won’t be easy because even MAGA voters will get upset when they lose or see cuts in their Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and ACA benefits, neither will they be happy when their parks are closed and their federal highways become full of potholes. As to the other cabinet announcements, as expected, most of them are Trump loyalists with little relevant experience for their new positions.  We know that some of them have either committed or overlooked sex crimes, that at least one of them is a Putin/Assad apologist and that another is poised to throw us back to disease ridden pre-vaccine times, but since none of them have been vetted by the FBI, we don’t know about everything lurking in their closets, yet. Naturally, the Republicans party line is that they’re all great, with the exception of Trump’s labor pick Representative Lori Chavez-DeRemer the Oregon Congresswoman who recently lost her reelection bid.  She has a number of MAGAs including the NY Post which called her a “toxic anti-conservative RINO” up in arms because of her pro-union positions. So much fun to watch these guys fight each other. Not only has Trump and his transition team failed to have the FBI do routine background checks, but they’ve also failed to sign required transition documents so at least so far, they’re being barred from gaining access to the departments that they’ll be running, assuming they’re confirmed, and it does appear that there will be confirmation hearings in January. That also means that Trump hasn’t gained access to government transition funds, but that’s an intentional decision on his part because it also means that he doesn’t have to disclose the names of all those generous “civic-minded” supporters who are funding his transition activities, the crowd who is paying to have friends put into high places and we know he’s all about doing favors for people with big checking accounts. By now we know that one of those who has bought his way in is Elon Musk who spent his weekend cyberbullying government employees by name on X (Twitter).  By the way, Panhandle Putz Matt Gaetz whose seat won’t be filled until a very fitting April Fools’ Day special election is now available on Cameo in case you are looking for a holiday present for that hard to please friend.  He’s also teasing a run for the Florida Governor spot that DeSantis will term out of at the end of 2026.

 

Don’t Give Up:  Gaetz is out, but his replacement Pam Bondi is hardly someone to look forward to as she is likely to implement some of Trump’s wish list, a list that prosecuting opponents, releasing violent January 6 “tourists,” and firing anyone who worked on any of the Trump prosecutions.  While we are likely stuck with Bondi, none of us should give up on protesting against the confirmation of accused rapist Pete Hegseth, Bashar Assad apologist Tulsi Gabbard, and RFK Jr.  Those allegations against Hegseth are both believable and concerning as is his disdain for women in the military.  Gabbard who has spent the last few years repeating Putin talking points appeared with and has expressed support for Syria’s Assad despite his chemical attacks on his own people.  Then there’s RFK, though he keeps trying to obfuscate his anti-vaccine stance, hiding behind his promise to get America eating healthy again, don’t be fooled.  He’s already begun staffing his team with anti-vaxx activists.  If confirmed RFK will oversee the NIH, the CDC, the FDA and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.  He has indicated that he wants to “reexamine safety data for approved vaccines” and we all know or should know what he really means by that.  Ask the Samoan parents whose kids died from measles after he told them not to get vaccinated.  He’s all in on taking fluoride out of the water, which is good for dentists who want to fill more cavities not so good for those who don’t want them in the first place.  He also wants to halt infectious-disease research at the NIH and fire 600 of its employees while reversing the FDA’s “suppression” of discredited COVID cures such as ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine. The New Yorker reports that he wants to prosecute medical journals if they don’t “start publishing real science,” his response to Lancet publishing a study showing that vaccines have saved more than 150 million lives over the past half century. Then there’s raw milk, he wants us to have more opportunities to drink it because what’s a little E. coli and more exposure to bird flu among friends?  By now we should all realize that one of the consequences of climate change is more pandemics and one way to deal with those is research and vaccine development and while it would be nice to think that eating fewer bowls of Fruit Loops would help combat the next COVID like killer, that’s not the way it works.  Ironically, the agricultural industry and the anti-abortion crowd might oppose RFK’s confirmation too though the anti-abortion crowd might be mollified if he promises to “reexamine” the FDA’s approval of mifepristone, and you’d be naïve to think that he won’t make that promise.           

Disease Edition:  Earlier I address the “R” in the MMR vaccine.  Today, I’ll address one of the M’s, measles, a highly contagious viral disease that spreads through the air when an infected person breathes, coughs, or sneezes.  It can cause severe illness, complications, and even death though death is rare for those of us with access to health care and with healthy immune systems.  Symptoms include rash, very high fever, runny nose, and red eyes but can also include complications such as diarrhea, ear infections, and pneumonia, less frequently seizures, blindness, and brain inflammation.  When not vaccinated or otherwise immune, nine out of ten people exposed to measles get measles and are sick for more than a week.  That’s a lot of sick children, complications, and lost days of school and work for caregivers and even if complication rates are low, that’s also a lot of hospitalizations from pneumonia and worse.  Some of those complications can result in death because even in developed countries like the US some of the infected die. Measles can cause serious complications for pregnant women including pneumonia, miscarriage, stillbirth, low birth weight babies, premature birth, and less frequently subacute sclerosing panencephalitis (SSPE), a rare but fatal neurodegenerative complication. The currently used measles vaccine which can be given alone but is usually combined with the vaccine for rubella and mumps has been around since 1968 and is safe and effective.  And again, healthy eating and the avoidance of Fruit Loops is neither a way to avoid measles nor a cure.  Some of those advocating mass deportations of undocumented migrants have been blaming increased rates of childhood diseases like measles on the migrants being unvaccinated, kind of ironic given that many of them support RFK’s nomination and he wants all of our children to be unvaccinated but then again even if logic died a long time ago, we should work really hard to protect our kids and our immune compromised friends.     

#BringThemAllHomeNow

Pre Weekend Funnies  🤡 🤮 ✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️ 🤮

Gone Gaetz:  Panhandle Putz Matt Gaetz will not be the next Attorney General.  He withdrew from consideration yesterday after CNN told him they were about to reveal that his sexcapade with the seventeen-year-old wasn’t a one-off experience and after he received a call from Trump telling him that it was time for him to throw in the towel which isn’t to say that Trump won’t appoint him to another position, just not one that requires confirmation.  Trump’s decision was because he’d been told that at least five Republican Senators including former Republican leader Mitch McConnell, Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski, Maine’s Susan Collins, Oklahoma’s Markwayne Mullin and Utah’s incoming newbie Senator John Curtis, were likely to vote against the Gaetz confirmation.  Murkowski and Collins’ no votes were expected.  The question had been who else would be willing to cross Trump.  McConnell may have reached the no more fxcks stage of his career, if so, things could get interesting going forward. Before becoming Senator, Oklahoma’s Mullin served with Gaetz in the House and had heard him brag and about his drug fueled sexcapades, so he had every reason to believe the accusations against Gaetz were true.  Like McConnell, Utah’s Curtis is another one to watch, maybe he’ll be more like his predecessor, retiring Senator Mitt Romney rather than Utah’s other Senator Mike Lee who is one of Trump’s most avid supporters, only time will tell.  Shortly after dumping Gaetz, Trump announced that his nominee for Attorney General is now Pam Bondi who served as Florida’s Attorney General from 2011 to 2019.  She’s currently a partner at the lobbying firm that was run by Trump’s incoming Chief of Staff Susie Wiles.  She’s was an early proponent of the election lie who has long been one of Trump’s most avid supporters, she served as a senior advisor to the team that defended him during his first impeachment and, when she was serving as Florida Attorney General, she nixed the state’s Trump University fraud case, a decision that “coincidentally” occurred after Trump contributed $25,000 to her AG campaign. Expectations are that she’ll be easily confirmed because all that makes her a normal Trump appointee.     

Cabinetry: Attention now turns to Defense Secretary nominee, accused rapist Pete Hegseth.  It’s highly likely that the allegation that Hegseth raped his accuser is true, however, it’s also possible that having just rejected Gaetz, Senate Republicans will give him a pass, in order to avoid incurring the wrath of Trump. For his part, Hegseth is sticking by his “consensual sex” claim and his supporters, including some in the Senate like the always complicit Lindsey Graham, are asserting that if there had been a crime, local police wouldn’t have dropped the case and anyway it’s just rape and the victim was of age so who cares?  For the record, police didn’t drop the case, they recommended that it be handed to local prosecutors for their review, but before that happened Hegseth paid off and entered into a non-disclosure agreement with his accuser.  Turning to Trump’s other nominees, RFK Jr’s nomination is still out there.  Despite all his flaws, and there are many, as well as the tape of him previously equating Trump with Hitler, something that he blames on believing biased media reports, he may benefit from all the attention currently being placed elsewhere, that would be a shame, but this is a shameless crowd.  The same is true of Tulsi Gabbard, suspected by many of being Putin’s tool, no one should forget how ill-suited she is to serve as Director of National Intelligence.  As to some of Trump’s other picks, earlier this week when Trump announced that transition team co-chair Howard Lutnick was his pick for Commerce Secretary he disappointed both Lutnick who really wants to be Treasury Secretary and his other co-chair, Linda McMahon who had hoped to be selected for the Commerce spot but who instead got “stuck” with Education, a great place for someone being sued for looking away while an employee sexually abused kids and also a department that Trump ran on eliminating.  As to that coveted Treasury Secretary role, Trump still hasn’t announced his pick because finding a credible candidate who is both a tariff supporter and acceptable to the “markets” ain’t easy. Contenders continue to include Kevin Warsh, a former investment banker and former Federal Reserve governor who Trump has often consulted for economic advice and Marc Rowan, the billionaire co-founder of private equity firm Apollo Global Management who has the support of son-in-law Jared Kusher who won’t be joining the administration but will still advise on the Middle East because of course.  Tennessee’s current Senator Bill Hagerty and hedge fund manager Scott Bessent, an early favorite who lost points for knocking heads with Lutnick, also remain in the mix.

State of Play:  Republicans have won 219 seats including three safe seats that will remain vacant until filled by special elections.  Democrats have won 213 seats.  Three House races have not been called yet.  Last night Pennsylvania’s incumbent Democrat Bob Casey conceded to Republican Dave McCormick, as a result the Senate split is officially 53 Republicans to 47 Democrats.   

Fog:  Everything is awful.  No peace in the Middle East and scarier than usual missiles are flying back and forth between Ukraine and Russia.

#BringThemAllHomeNow

 

 

A Feature Not a Bug 🤡 🤮 ✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️ 🤮

Cabinet Sex Crimes:   Yesterday, all five Republican members of the House Ethics Committee voted against releasing the ethics report concerning former Congressman/Attorney General nominee Matt Gaetz’s sex trafficking and drug escapades.  It remains possible that they will vote to release the report when they meet again in early December and/or that it will be shared with the Senate before Gaetz’s confirmation hearing, assuming Trump’s recess appointment scheme fails. Despite the Ethics Committee’s failure, or more likely because of it, parts of the documentary evidence related to Gaetz’s sexcapades have begun leaking out, including a “follow the money” flow chart that shows the payments made by Gaetz to two women who testified under oath that he had paid them for sex.  That flow chart hit the presses around the same time that JD Vance who we thankfully haven’t seen much of lately was ushering Gaetz in and out of meetings with the Republican Senators whose votes Gaetz will need to be confirmed.  While alleged sex trafficker Gaetz was roaming the halls of the Senate, Mediaite published the full police report concerning the attack that “alleged” rapist/Defense Secretary nominee Pete Hegseth paid to conceal.  To say the least, the details are not pretty.  The Trump team apparently isn’t all that pleased with Hegseth. They can deal with rape accusations, but apparently, they’re upset that Hegseth didn’t come clean about his before his appointment was announced.  As the WSJ noted, “there’s a lesson about picking unvetted cabinet secretaries on a whim,” as if Trump ever really learns lessons. On the subject of sex problems, it turns out that Linda McMahon, who headed the Small Business Administration the last time Trump was president, may have one of her own. McMahon who Trump just announced as his selection to head the Department of Education has no real education experience but since Education is one of the departments that Trump plans to eliminate who needs experience?  Keeping with the sex crime theme, McMahon is currently being sued by five former “ring boys” who claim that they were groomed and sexually assaulted by an announcer who worked for her and her husband Vince’s WWE company.  Though that announcer was fired, he was rehired once he promised to “steer clear of the kids,” a strategy that works so very well with pedophiles, right?  Worth noting, husband Vince is the subject of a federal investigation concerning millions of dollars of payments he made to settle sexual misconduct and assault claims. To date there have been no suggestions that Mehmet Oz, better known as Dr. Oz, has been involved in any sex scandals, however he is an advocate and marketer of faux herbal cures, some for diseases like ovarian cancer, and has pushed sham diet pills and ineffective COVID treatments.  Apparently, that, together with his TV skills and multiple Emmy awards, makes him the perfect choice to run the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services which would put him in “control over a more than $1 trillion budget and influence over drug price negotiations, medication coverage decisions, the Affordable Care Act and more.” Kind of cool, but only in the most terrifying of ways, that he and RFK Jr will be making health choices for all of us if Trump gets his way.  With all the attention directed at Gaetz and Hegseth, the RFK problem has been mostly moved off the front pages for the moment though some on the right like Mike Pence are upset about his appointment, not because of his cockamamie opinions on vaccines but because he’s got a history of supporting abortion rights. Nepo RFK is another one with some lurking sex accusations, not his many consensual encounters, but one that involved a then 23-year-old nanny who he allegedly groped and harassed multiple times while she was caring for his children.  Lastly, for today, there’s Matt Whitaker.  Whitaker served for a short time as acting Attorney General after Jeff Sessions but before Bill Barr during Trump’s first presidency. He has no relevant international experience but has made a name for himself marketing toilet bowls for well-endowed men which apparently makes him the perfect choice to serve as the US Ambassador to NATO. One more important thing, well important if you are a hypocritical right wing faux religious bible thumper who wants the Ten Commandments posted in in every classroom, yesterday Speaker Johnson announced that members of Congress will only be allowed to use the bathroom that corresponds with their birth sex.  That’s to prevent Sarah McBride, the newly elected Congresswoman from Delaware who is transgender from using the Ladies Room.  Apparently, the same members of Congress who can deal with the rapists and sex traffickers among them are freaked out about a transgender woman using a closed stall or fixing her hair in a bathroom.  Have they ever flown, used a bathroom at a friend’s house, or eaten in a restaurant with only one facility.  Apparently not.  We’re not talking grade school, we are talking about people who hold themselves out to be adults, a few of whom may be wearing Hanky Panky thongs under their Brooks Brothers suits, but that’s another subject.  Sad.  

Not Going Back Polio Edition: Count me among those who find MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough and Mika Brezinski’s trip to Mar a Lago to kiss Trump’s ring beyond disturbing.  That said, when I was channel surfing this morning, I tripped upon a segment where Steve Rattner who usually reports on the economy was detailing in some of his easy-to-understand charts the number of lives that have been saved by childhood vaccines.  We need more of that, all over, not just on MSNBC whose viewership, never all that high, has been tanking of late, likely one of the reasons that Comcast is spinning off most of its cable stations.  One of the diseases that Rattner highlighted is his charts is polio. Polio is caused by the poliomyelitis virus, the last really major outbreak of polio in the US took place in 1952, the first vaccine became available in 1955.  As a result of the polio vaccine, we rarely see cases of polio in the US or in most of the world though it’s still out there, is endemic in parts of Pakistan and Afghanistan and was a case was diagnosed in New York State earlier this year and a few more were detected in Gaza where, as a result of the war, vaccination rates dropped from 99% into the high 80s.  Polio is extremely contagious, asymptomatic in most people but life altering and even deadly in others as depending on the strain 1 in 200 to 1 in 2000 ended up with some form of paralysis or dead. That paralysis sometimes impacts the lungs, leaving its victims on respirators. Back before the vaccine became available some, mostly young people, ended up relying on iron lungs to live with many others needing leg braces or wheelchairs.  Most of us over a certain age, remember pictures of faces poking out from those iron lung machines and/or knew people who had polio.  FDR wore leg braces and mostly relied on a wheelchair after he contracted polio at the age of 39.  Republican Senator Mitch McConnell still suffers balance issues caused by the polio he contracted at the age of two and has been known to fall down in public, something that usually isn’t broadcasted. Something to think about the next time RFK Jr talks about how vaccines should be eliminated or revisited and also a reason that the usually awful McConnell is a vaccine advocate.   

#BringThemAllHomeNow            

 

A Pox on Both Your Houses 🤡 🤮 ✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️ 🤮

Ethics Are So Yesterday: The House Ethics Committee is scheduled to meet tomorrow.  The make-up of the ten-member committee is evenly split with five Republicans and five Democrats. As of yesterday, all the members of the committee and likely lots of their staff members have seen a copy of Attorney General nominee Matt Gaetz ethics report.  According to a lawyer representing two of the young women who testified under oath in response to subpoenas, Gaetz was observed having sex with a minor something that’s counts as statutory rape in Florida.  He also “allegedly” paid women for sex.  Speaker Mike Johnson, who holds himself out as holier than thou said that it would be inappropriate to release the Gaetz ethics report but apparently there’s more than one precedent for similar reports being released even after the subject of those reports steps out of Congress. Trump has been calling around pressing members of the Senate to commit to voting for Gaetz’s confirmation in January, assuming he can’t put the kibosh on those hearings ever taking place.  No doubt Trump is threatening to ruin the lives of vulnerable Senators, it’s worked before and as outgoing Senator Mitt Romney noted, hiring protection for one’s family is very expensive and most Senators don’t have the financial resources that he has. More dirt has come out about Trump’s Department of Defense nominee the multiply cheating, thrice married Fox guy Pete Hegseth.  Apparently, the woman who he “allegedly” raped was working for a conservative group and was responsible for making sure that Hegseth turned up when and where he was scheduled to turn up. He was harassing two women in a bar; to defuse the situation she walked him back to his room, after that her memories grew murky, likely because she was drugged.  After realizing that she’d been raped,  she went to the emergency room where her bruises were noted, and a sperm sample turned up positive. He paid her off, she signed a non-disclosure agreement.  In the before times when candidates like Zoe Baird who President Clinton nominated to serve as his Attorney General were disqualified for mundane things like failing to pay social security taxes for a nanny and a driver, he’d have been kicked to the curb but now rape accusations are just one of those okay things, because, well we all know why.  Last night Trump announced the nomination of another Fox guy/former Wisconsin Republican Congressman Sean Duffy to serve as Transportation Secretary.  As far as we know, Duffy isn’t guilty of any sex crimes but it’s not like the Trump transition team, which has outsourced the minimal amount of vetting they’re doing to an outside source, as in not the FBI, is looking all that hard for any.      

Not Going Back, Pox Edition:  Starting with the good news, the World Health Organization declared Variola more commonly known as smallpox eradicated in 1980, US residents stopped being inoculated for the disease in 1972.  Varicella Zoster more commonly known as chickenpox has not been eradicated but in the US, there’s been an effective vaccine for it since 1995.  Before the vaccine, just about everyone contracted chickenpox.  For most the symptoms included a fever with a rash and blisters, however some ended up with pneumonia or another serious infection which is why before the introduction of the vaccine in the US 10,500 to 13,000 of the infected ended up in the hospital during outbreaks and 100 to 150, mostly children, died.  Also, babies born to women who contract chickenpox during the first 20 weeks of pregnancy can be born with Congenital Varicella Syndrome, which includes brain, eye, muscle, limb, and bone defects and blindness and intellectual disabilities.  Though for most the symptoms of chickenpox typically go away in under a week, the Varicella Zoster virus is sneaky, it hangs around in the body forever, reappearing as shingles in one of three adults who had chickenpox, even in those whose initial cases of chickenpox were so mild that they didn’t know they were infected.  Shingles attacks, and they can feel like brutal, sometimes endless attacks, generally occur after the age of 50 but can happen earlier to those with suppressed immune systems, a group that includes those taking medication for autoimmune diseases. You can’t catch shingles from someone with shingles but anyone who hasn’t had chickenpox or the vaccine, including young not yet vaccinated children, can catch chickenpox from a shingles sufferer with blisters.  The first shingles vaccine was released in the US in 2006, in 2016, Shingrix a more effective vaccine became available replacing the earlier one. Then there’s monkeypox, now known as Mpox, it’s caused by the Orthopox virus, a member of the Variola family.  It first appeared in humans sometime in the 1970s. There was an outbreak in 2022, and it appears to be out and about again. To date Mpox is not as widespread or contagious as the other pox viruses.  There’s an effective vaccine for it but the current Mpox strain appears to have developed one of those gain of function mutations that may be making the available vaccine less effective, just another reason that vaccine research and development, another one of those things that RFK Jr opposes, because he’d rather we all be able to drink raw milk, is very important.                   

#BringThemAllHomeNow             

 

 
Rubella Umbrella 🤡 🤮 ✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️ 🤮

Cabinet of Curiosities:  Trump continued to announce his cabinet picks this weekend.  They’re mostly awful, some predictably so, like Chris Wright the energy/fracking executive, climate change skeptic that he picked to serve as the head of the Department of Energy.  When Trump said “drill baby drill” he meant it, environment be damned.  Also, remember how Trump tried to distance himself from Project 25?  Well forget about that, yesterday he picked Brendan Carr to be the Chairman of the FCC.  Carr who has vowed to take on the “censorship cartel,” by which he means Facebook, Google, Apple, and Microsoft, basically anyone who ever made any efforts to combat vaccine misinformation or campaign lies or anything else that conflicts with right wing thinking.  That’s part of the “aggressive agenda” that Carr laid out in the text of Project 25. In addition to being a big donor to Trump’s campaign, he’s a big supporter of Elon Musk who this weekend retweeted a promise to create an “extinction level event,” that tweet refers to the destruction of several government departments including Education, the EPA, and Agriculture.  Some reporters predict that Trump will tire of Musk soon, but Elon paid well over $100 million to be co-president so he may not be so easy to banish and anyway, Trump is probably still picking his pockets.  Trump hasn’t picked his Treasury Secretary yet, reports are that though he doesn’t want to roil the markets by picking a totally complicit loon, he wants someone who will support his cockamamie tariff plans.  Transition co-chair Howard Lutnick may still be in the running, he’s apparently been rubbing Trump the wrong way and since he’s not as rich as Musk, that’s a problem for him.  We’ll find out if it’s possible to balance sane policies with extreme tariffs soon enough because the markets which initially rallied after the election, in part because Trump’s win meant that there wouldn’t be a violent transition, are waking up to the realization that there’s danger ahead.  Some of that danger appears to be spilling over to the military. Trump’s team is making lists of those to blame for the messy Afghanistan withdrawal which he actually initiated by cozying up to the Taliban.  His plans might even involve recalling retired generals and other officers so that they can be court martialed alongside some still in the service.  That fear factor is one way of making sure those that remain comply with his orders no matter how illegal they maybe.       

The Appalling Four:  Trump is an adjudicated rapist who has been accused of more than a dozen sexual assaults so why should anyone be surprised that he’s trying to load his cabinet, with those similarly accused. It’s not just Panhandle Putz Matt Gaetz, who according to some of the testimony before the House ethics committee that House Speaker Johnson is trying to squelch, was observed having sex with an underage teen who allegedly was then trafficked to some of his friends, it’s also Pete Hegseth.  Hegseth the inadequately experienced Fox fiend selected by Trump to serve as Secretary of Defense once, or once that we know of, paid off a woman to silence her after she accused him of rape.  He admits they had sex probably because the police have some of his sperm but insists that their encounter was consensual and that he only paid her off over concerns that her accusation that asserts he drugged her before the sexual assault might cost him his job at Fox. The Department of Defense has a sexual assault problem so who better to head it than an accused rapist?  Hegseth, together with Gaetz, RFK Jr, and Gabbard are the worst of the worst assuming sexual assault, vaccine denial and the eerie repetition of Kremlin talking points concern you. As to RFK Jr It’s not just vaccines, his advice to the 18,000 staffers, a group that includes career scientists, researchers, and inspectors responsible for the safety and effectiveness of prescription drugs and medical products, is that they should pack up their bags and be prepared to leave. He’s not very fond of the FDA’s food and nutrition center either, particularly ironic since this weekend pictures of him dining on fried fast food with Trump were all over social media. According to the Trump whisperers Trump knows that some, if not all of these four will have trouble being confirmed by the Senate but he’s determined to have them which is why he is working really hard to convince House and Senate leadership to go into recess immediately after they are seated in January.  Mitch McConnell who is no longer the Senate’s Republican leader but whose word still matters says that whether Trump likes it or not there will be hearings.  That’s encouraging, but he once teased that he’d vote to convict Trump and then didn’t.  He could have ended the Trump nightmare in 2020 but maybe he has reached his tipping point.  He’s 83 and his term ends in 2026 so this time he’s got nothing to lose by standing up.  Or not.       

Not Going Back Disease Edition:   My plan over the next few weeks is to provide information about the diseases that await us if RFK is seated because even if he fails to eliminate vaccines, his anti-vax rhetoric is already impacting vaccine uptake and putting lots of people at risk. Today’s disease is Rubella, also known German Measles.  The Rubella vaccine was introduced in the US in 1969.  In 1971 it was combined with the vaccine for Measles and Mumps into the MMR shot.  If you are over a certain age, you probably had Rubella and if you contracted it as a child in all likelihood you didn’t suffer much more than a rash and a fever. The bad news is that 20 to 25% of infants born to mothers who contract Rubella during the first trimester of pregnancy, with decreasing frequency for those who contract it later in their pregnancies, develop Congenital Rubella Syndrome which includes, microphthalmia (eye malformations), cataracts, microcephaly (unnaturally small heads), “mental retardation,” deafness, patent ductus arteriosus (heart defects), distinctive bone defects and a few other horrible things.  My source for this is my copy of Control of Communicable Diseases in Man, a mandatory purchase back when I studied Public Health.  A whole bunch of people, including those in your orbit who voted for Trump did not vote for Rubella, and probably don’t even know how dangerous it can be but here we are, Trump has nominated the anti-vax guy to be Health Secretary and to make matters worse reproductive choice is a vanishing option in lots of states and maybe even all states.  Please, please share this with them because they need to know and they need to speak up, loudly before Trump forces nepo Kennedy into his cabinet.

The State of Play: As of this morning Republicans have won 218 seats including the three that will be open as a result of Gaetz’ resignation and his other two cabinet nominations.  Democrats have won 212.  Five seats have not been called yet.  The Senate still stands at Republicans 52, Democrats 47.  Pennsylvania’s incumbent Senate Democrat Bob Casey is now only 17, 430 votes behind Republican challenger, likely winner Dave McCormick, so there will be a mandatory recount and lots of fighting about what constitutes a legal ballot, but the difference is probably insurmountable.   

#BringThemAllHomeNow

 

 
Time to Do Some Shots 🤡 🤮 ✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️ 🤮

Shots 💉 💉 💉?: Hug your kids, stock up on masks, make sure you are up to date on your tetanus, shingles, and pneumonia shots and maybe do a few shots too because Trump has nominated RFK Jr to be the Secretary of Health and Human Services.  To call RFK, who’s all in on ivermectin and steroids,  a vaccine skeptic, doesn’t do justice to his deadly views about vaccines.  He’s far more than skeptical, he thinks vaccines are dangerous, e coli laden raw milk however is fine.  And please, whatever you do, don’t buy his word salad assertions that he’s been misunderstood and just wants to see vaccines more “rigorously tested,” because they are rigorously tested and that’s just code for saying he wants them canceled.  Get familiar with the symptoms and dangers of polio, whooping cough, chicken pox, measles, German measles (rubella), and mumps.  Those childhood diseases will be back in a big way because even if those vaccines remain available, herd immunity which relies on mandates and is key to preventing disease outbreaks will become a thing of the past.  If you think this is an exaggeration, consider Samoa which suffered a deadly measles outbreak not long after RFK’s 2019 visit when he convinced local government officials that the MMR (measles, mumps rubella) vaccine was dangerous. The result of that ill-advised warning was that 83 unvaccinated children died needlessly following a major measles outbreak.  RFK’s response to that was to blame their deaths on inadequate nutrition because admitting he’d had a hand in killing kids, that wasn’t going to happen.  The population of Samoa is 200,000, the population of the US is 330 million. The consequences of eliminating or even just reducing vaccine uptake in the US will be dire.  We’re not talking about running over and stashing a bear cub in Central Park, we’re talking about the lives of children and a whole lot of immune suppressed people of all ages.     

Hearings?:   The question is whether under the leadership of new Republican leader John Thune the Republican dominated Senate will hold the confirmation hearings that Trump insists they shouldn’t hold because he wants to put his “misfits” in place through recess appointments.  As of now Thune is mostly saying there will be hearings.  If so, the question will be whether enough Republicans take their “advice and consent” role seriously.  If they do, they’ll drill into RFK’s lack of credentials and his conspiracy nonsense and reject him.  If not, they’ll rubberstamp Trump’s appointment and we’ll suffer the consequences, not just those who voted for him but all of us and it’s not just vaccines, RFK is poised to do damage throughout all of HHS’s divisions, including the FDA and the CDC.  It’s not just RFK, others like Panhandle Putz Matt Gaetz, Tulsi Gabbard, and Pete Hegseth are woefully inadequate and in the case of Gabbard a risk to national security.  Again, if the hearings take place and Republican Senators do their job their failings will become obvious.  The question is how many, if any of Trump’s 🤡 🤡 they’ll be willing to ding because crossing Trump, which will incur not just his wrath but all kinds of attacks and threats from his MAGA acolytes, takes balls.  As of yesterday, the consensus is that Gaetz, especially once the results of the House ethics investigation into his alleged sex trafficking and drug use come to light, won’t be confirmed but we’ve been fooled before.  As to Fox’s Hegseth, in addition to being a misogynist and, judging by his tattoos and some of his appearances, an anti-Semitic white supremacist, he’s likely just not up for the task because it’s one thing to go on Fox and pander to Trump, it’s quite another to serve as the head of the huge DOD.  Then there’s Gabbard, in addition to all the suggestions that she’s a wee bit too friendly with Vladimir Putin, she’s previously shown an affinity for Syria’s Assad and she’s a member of an “abusive” religious cult. Additionally, there’s concern in the intelligence community that our allies will stop sharing key intelligence with us if she’s at the top of information loop, not that many of them are comfortable with Trump.  As to Trump’s other nominees, most of them are scary too, but predictably scary in that they are all in on pushing the Republican agenda.  That’s depressing, but par for the course because that what happens when the party in charge changes.  Last night Trump announced that he’s nominating North Dakota Governor/failed presidential candidate Doug Burgum to serve as the Secretary of the Interior.  Burgum, a captive of the oil industry, is all in on fulfilling Trump’s “drill baby drill” promise, environmental concerns be damned.  On the legal front, Trump has nominated many of the members of his legal defense team to senior positions, including Todd Blanche who he’s tapped to serve as Deputy Attorney General. Like him or not, unlike Matt Gaetz, Blanche has real credentials.  He previously worked as a prosecutor at the Southern District of New York and worked for the WilmerHale law firm before becoming a partner at Cadwalader. He stepped down from Cadwalader to defend Trump.  Trump also nominated former Georgia Congressman/veteran Doug Collins, one of those who defended him at the time of the Mueller hearings, to run the VA.  Collins had hoped to be appointed to the Senate seat vacated by Georgia’s former Senator Johnny Isakson but lost out to Kelly Loeffler who then lost an election to current Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock. He was expected to challenge Georgia’s current Democratic Senator Jon Ossoff in 2026 but assuming he’s confirmed as VA Secretary and he probably will be, that’s likely off the table.  On the Elon front, the co-president, who’s been having side conversations with Iran, is hiring for his DOGE team, criteria include a genius level IQ and a willingness to work endlessly for no pay because that’s what brilliant people do? Has anyone seen or heard from JD Vance?

State of Play: According to NBC Republicans have won 218 House seats, Democrats 209 with the rest of the races still not called.  The exact numbers vary depending on the source since some races have been called by some news outlets but not by others.  Three of those Republican seats will remain empty for a while since those winners are Trump appointees; one of them is Matt Gaetz who has already resigned from Congress.  Though the gap between Pennsylvania’s incumbent Democratic Senator Bob Casey and likely winner Republican challenger Dave McCormick has shrunk to 24,000+/-, votes with only 49,000 ballots still uncounted it’s likely that Casey is toast.  Still that race will go to a recount.

#BringThemAllHomeNow                    

 

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot 🤡 ✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️ 🤮 🤢 

💩 Show Chronicles:  All things considered, yesterday began smoothly.  Biden held his nose and did what few of us could or would have, he politely welcomed Trump to the White House.  Senate Republicans held a closed door, secret ballot vote to select their new leader.  The candidates were South Dakota’s John Thune, Texas’ John Cornyn, and Florida’s Rick Scott who last year sent retiring leader Mitch McConnell into panic and denial mode with his bullet point plan to sunset Medicare, Medicaid and anything else voters care about.  Despite being Trump and co-president Elon Musk’s choice and having the vocal support of MAGA Senators Bill Hagerty, Rand Paul, Ron Johson, Tommy Tuberville and Marco Rubio, Scott failed to get enough votes to even make it past the first of what turned out to be two rounds of voting. After the second round John Thune, Mitch McConnell’s designated heir apparent, emerged the winner. In the before times, Democrats being happy about McConnell notching a strategic victory would have been unheard of, but given the choices, seeing Thune win the leadership role is a relief.  He’s a traditionalist and during a brief post vote meet-up with the press, he said that his plans include holding confirmation hearings for Trump’s appointees with the caveat that he’d reconsider if Democrats behaved unreasonably or if he finds a horse’s head in his bed.  Okay, he didn’t say that last 🐴 part, but you know that he was thinking it.

Devil’s Gaetz:  Smooth lasted only a fraction of a Scaramucci, because as the day wore on, Trump announced a few more of his appointees,  First, he announced that his choice for Director of National Intelligence is former Democratic Congresswoman. turned MAGA Trumper Tulsi Gabbard.  Gabbard. a veteran, who Hillary Clinton has repeatedly called the “favorite of the Russians,” has no intelligence creds but probably is Putin’s choice for the position. Her appointment is terrifying, but it turned out to be only the tip of the day’s horrors as Trump’s next major announcement was the nomination of Florida’s Matt Gaetz to serve as Attorney General. While Senators, on both sides of the aisle, were digesting Gabbard’s selection, Trump dropped the Gaetz megaton bomb.  The choice of Gaetz is horrible on so many levels.  First of all, he’s the subject, or was until yesterday, of a House ethics investigation for his drug use and for having sex with at least one minor.  Second, though he has a legal degree, he has relatively little experience practicing law and is woefully unqualified for the job which includes managing 115,000 people though that probably is the point, because as the recently released from jail Steve Bannon put it, Gaetz is being hired to be Trump’s blowtorch, his mission is to destroy the DOJ as we know it, firing and/or chasing away as many career attorneys as possible.  Remember how William Barr surrounded himself with experienced real attorneys and actually pretended to do his job a lot of the time, Gaetz, the disrupter who threw the House into disarray when he ousted Speaker Kevin McCarthy won’t even pretend, he’ll proudly brag about setting DOJ on fire because Trump promised retribution and that would be retribution.  Unlike the other House members who Trump has nominated for cabinet positions, Gaetz, has already resigned from the House likely because a scathing ethics report detailing his sex and drug offenses was due to be released this Friday. Since the House Ethics Committee can only investigate and report on current members of Congress, Gaetz’s early resignation means that the report won’t be released. That said there’s a nonzero chance that someone will leak it, or at least that’s the hope of a lot of Republican Senators who’d rather not be put in the position of voting on the Gaetz nomination because to the extent that Trump can’t figure out a way to circumvent the “regular” hearing process with a recess appointment, they’re going to be put in the position of having to vote for or against a woefully unqualified, sex offender appointed by another sex offender. No doubt most of them are so scared of Trump because 🐴 🐴 and his MAGA enforcers that they will vote for Gaetz, the hope is that there will be enough outliers with guts willing to do otherwise.  Feel like 🤮, go ahead, you are not alone. And while you are praying at the porcelain throne 🚽, don’t forget about Trump’s other truly awful pick, Defense Secretary nominee, Fox news bro Pete Hegseth who just last week said that it was okay for Putin to want Ukraine back because after all it was his to begin with.  So far, we haven’t heard anything about Trump’s health care picks, but at least one possibility, RFK Jr, is frothing at the mouth, increasingly frustrated that his name hasn’t been called, at least so far. Mike Bloomberg isn’t frothing but he has emailed and posted a series of missives about RFK’s dire inadequacies.  Those missives, complement Trump for project Warp Speed COVID vaccine delivery because nothing works better with Trump than effusive compliments.    

The State of Play:  As expected the Republicans have won the House.  Their exact majority remains uncertain.  According to CBS, Republicans have won 218 seats, Democrats 211, nine remain up in the air. Three of the Republican seats, the Gaetz seat plus the ones currently held by Elise Stefanik and Michael Waltz, will remain vacant until they are filled following as yet unscheduled special elections.  While all three seats will probably remain in Republican hands, at least for the immediate future Mike Johnson, who is expected to hold on to his Speakership, will have a hard time getting anything done. That may be by design, because it’s also being reported that Elon Musk, the shadow president who may or may not be wearing out his welcome at Mar a Lago, is looking for ways to usurp the House’s budgeting powers so that his as yet unwritten DOGE/Fire Everyone Plan can be implemented by fiat. On the Senate front, as expected, the Pennsylvania race between incumbent Democrat Bob Casey and Republican Dave McCormick is headed to a recount.  McCormick remains in the lead, but his lead has fallen a smidge below the recount threshold.  Moreover, somewhere around 80,000 ballots have yet to be counted.

#BringThemAllHomeNow       

   

To the Winner Goes the Spoils 🤡 ✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️ 🤡 

It’s Not Over til It’s Over:  In 2008, it took eight months for Minnesota’s former Democratic Senator Al Franken to be seated in the Senate. Initial election results showed him trailing incumbent Republican Norm Coleman by 215 votes.  However, after all the ballots were counted, including some that had been wrongly disqualified, a recount, and some litigation, it was determined that Franken had beaten Coleman by 225 votes.  Franken was finally seated in July.  Franken’s path to the Senate is relevant today because though incumbent Democratic Senator Bob Casey currently trails Republican challenger Dave McCormick by just over 29,000, somewhere around 92,000 ballots, enough to swing the results of the election. have not yet been counted.  In addition, Pennsylvania law requires a recount when the difference between the candidates is .5% or less and currently the difference sits at .5%.  Though McCormick insists that he won, and at the end of the day he might have, the race isn’t over and is likely to head to a recount no matter who comes out on top after all the ballots have been counted. Of course, Republicans and right leaning media outlets like the National Review insist that Casey should concede now but we all know that if the shoe was on the other foot they’d be screaming bloody murder.  The House race isn’t over either, though at this point it’s just about a given that Republicans will maintain control, the issue is by how many seats.  Per CBS as of this morning Republicans lead Democrats 216 to 210 (other media outlets have slightly different counts).  With nine races still unresolved, Republicans need only two more seats to stay in control, or to stay barely in control.  That barely thing is even more of a problem now, because as of yesterday, Trump’s appointee list includes two Republican members of the House.  Though both are from safe districts, their seats will remain unfilled for months until special elections can be held for their replacement making passage of any bills that much more difficult.

🤡 Car:  Yesterday, Trump announced a slew of appointments.  The not so bad news is that a few of them aren’t awful, the bad news is that a whole bunch of them are truly awful, comical too but only in the most depressing of ways. First, the “normal” ones.  Trump announced New York Congresswoman Elise Stefanik as his choice for UN Ambassador.  In the before times, Harvard graduate Stefanik was considered a “normie” Republican but since then she’s pivoted hard right to become one of Trump’s staunchest defenders. Many on the right don’t trust her because they believe that she’s just opportunistic rather than truly right wing. Whatever her true politics, she is articulate and bombastic, and since I am one of those who believe that the UN is a corrupt, biased institution that needs to be repeatedly called out, all things considered, she’s probably the right person for the job.  Like Stefanik, Florida Senator Marco Rubio was also once considered a “normie” who called out Trump for the dangerous man he is, however over time, Rubio who rivals Stefanik in his ambitions, saw the writing on the wall, tossed his soul aside and joined the Trump train. Yesterday, Trump announced Rubio as his choice for Secretary of State, again, all things considered, not the worst choice given the alternatives. From Trump’s perspective, appointing Rubio is a win-win,  if Rubio crosses him, he’ll dump him with a Truth Social post, in the meantime he gets someone with some competence and also gets a say in who replaces him, assuming Florida Governor DeSantis plays ball.  As to that replacement, the names include the usual Florida scoundrels plus Ron’s wife Casey and maybe even Eric’s wife Lara. Now to some of the bad and comical. The Department of Homeland Security has 240,000 employees, it’s the third largest after the VA and the Department of Defense.  In addition to border security and immigration, Homeland is responsible for cybersecurity and the Secret Service so naturally Trump has chosen South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, best known for shooting her dog, alienating her Native American population so much that they won’t let her on their lands, for getting her teeth remodeled gratis in exchange for providing free advertising to an out of state dental practice, for her “alleged” affair with Trump acolyte Corey Lewandowski, and for dancing aside Trump during his dance a thon campaign appearance. No management skills, but she looks good in front of a camera, that and her undying loyalty are key qualifiers for Trump. On the subject of on camera appearance, Trump has chosen Fox weekend host Pete Hegseth to run the Department of Defense.  Hegseth is a veteran and is telegenic, but his capabilities stop there. He’s in the middle of his second divorce, the result of fathering a child with one of his Fox coworkers which makes sense since that’s about all he thinks women are good for as he’s also on record saying that while it’s “okay” for minorities to serve in the military, women should not be allowed in combat, a wee problem not just for women in the service but for the military which is having recruitment troubles.  He also doesn’t believe that germs exist because if he can’t see them, they’re not there, his excuse for not washing his hands for ten years. The Defense Department employs millions of people, including 1.3 million in active service,  810,000 in the National Guard, and 750,000 civilians.  He is so not up for the task of managing them or of defending the country but again, he looks good on camera so there’s that.  Trump has also selected former NY Congressman Lee Zeldin for the Environmental Protection Agency, his chief qualification being that he doesn’t think the environment needs much protecting; Florida Congressman Mike Waltz, a China Hawk, NATO skeptic, and election denier who had his endorsement withdrawn by the Orlando Sentinel because of that denial as his National Security advisor; former Congressman John Ratcliffe who was the Director of National Security during the last year of Trump’s last administration as CIA director; and he’s appointed Nazi wannabee Stephen Miller who has never met an immigrant he likes except maybe Elon Musk as his Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy, not surprising but very frightening.  He’s chosen Former Governor Mike Huckabee, father of Sarah, as his ambassador to Israel.  Huckabee is a long-time supporter of Israel which is nice for Israelis, not so good for Palestinians, but that support is rooted in his evangelistic belief that in the coming “end times” when the Messiah comes again, assuming of course that he’s been here once, Christians will rise up in the Holy Land.  At that point, Jews as non-believers will cease to exist. Just in case some Israelis find that philosophy hard to overlook, Trump has teamed him with one of his golf buddies, real estate guy Steve Witkoff who will be his special envoy to the Middle East. Today, Senate Republicans will be holding a vote to determine their next leader.  If Trump gets his way, that leader will be Florida’s Rick Scott unless one of the other candidates, John Thune or John Cornyn, agrees to put the Senate into recess immediately after it convenes in January. Doing that would allow Trump to get most, if not all of his appointees into their positions without subjecting them to confirmation hearings where their obvious incompetence and conflicts will come out.  Appointees like Stefanik and Rubio will sail through confirmation but a lot of the others, not so much.             

WTF: To cap off the evening, the Wall Street Journal posted an article detailing Trump’s plans to exert retribution on everyone in the military particularly the generals who have criticized him and who we are all relying on to refuse his worst orders. He plans a commission to “revamp” the military, by revamp think fire anyone with a conscience who takes the Constitution seriously.  That’s truly frightening, as in five alarm, holy crappola frightening.  Also not so good, Trump announced that Elon Musk, the guy who eviscerated Twitter for fun, and Vivek Ramaswamy who we’ve all been trying to forget, will be in charge of the currently non-existent, not yet funded Department of Government Efficiency to be known as DOGE, an acronym meant to signify Trump’s support for all things crypto because after all a whole bunch of crypto bros supported his candidacy bigly.  The mandate of DOGE is to come up with a plan to downsize government, one that includes the elimination of boatloads of civil service employees, and a few departments like Education because someone has to fund Trump’s planned tax cuts and who needs anyone to send out those Social Security checks, to manage Medicare, safety check food, water, and drugs anyway?  Elon and Vivek have 18 months to produce their recommendations which means that unless they act fast and they might, they’ll be recommending kicking constituents to the curb and cutting Social Security and all that other nice stuff just in time for all the members of the House and one third of the Senate to be running for reelection.  We better pray that the yutzes who missed Musk’s statement about his plans causing lots of hard times for many realize that he has them in his crosshairs before it’s too late, The wealthy can live without Social Security checks and maybe even health care and public schools and so on, others not so much.  I am not convinced that they get it or will get it only when it’s too late as one Trumper told me yesterday that they’re totally convinced that Trump will eliminate the taxes that they currently pay on their Social Security and after all that’s all that matters.  Of course, they also think Pete Hegseth will be a great DOD Secretary because he’s been fun to watch on Fox.  

Now would be a good time for President Biden to focus on his pardon list and if he hasn’t already, he should add Jack Smith and maybe his whole Biden family, all the Generals, Liz Cheney, Nancy Pelosi, Adam Schiff, and so on.   

#BringThemAllHomeNow

Here We Go Again  💩 ✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️ 💩 

Déjà vu All Over Again:  Usually a news junkie, I started 2017, binging Law & Order episodes, a way of avoiding what was going on in Washington. This weekend I began watching the fourth season of Slow Horses, the British show based on Mick Herron’s terrific John Le Carre like books. I’d been saving this season’s episodes for a blizzard, but who doesn’t feel like we’re in the midst of a category ten storm? By the way, if you like Slow Horses and, like me, were a Le Carre reader, try Karla’s Choice, a new book by Le Carre’s son.  It takes place in the aftermath of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold and these days we’re all George Smiley, facing enemies everywhere.  Now back to 2016 on steroids, the election isn’t entirely over but it’s getting close.  Right now, Republicans appear poised to hold on to the House, so far, they’ve won 213 seats, the Democrats 203, nineteen remain undecided.  Odds are that the Republicans will secure a majority, albeit another difficult to manage small one, we just don’t know how small it will be. Depending on who you ask the make-up of the Senate isn’t set in place either. Republicans have definitely won control; the question is by how much.  Over the weekend Arizona’s Senate race was called for Democrat Ruben Gallego and Nevada’s was called for Democrat Jackie Rosen, impressive given that Trump won both states. That leaves only Pennsylvania’s race between Democratic incumbent Bob Casey and Republican hedge fund tycoon/Connecticut resident Dave McCormick undecided, or maybe undecided depending on who you ask.  The AP has called the race for McCormick, but a number of decision desks still rate it as “too close to call.”  McCormick, who is married to former Trump appointee Dina Powell, spent the weekend taking victory laps. However, 100,000 or so votes, enough to sway the outcome, remain uncounted and though McCormick would prefer they stay that way, Casey is waiting for them to be counted.  Right now, McCormick leads by .6% (39,650 votes). According to Pennsylvania law a recount must be held for any statewide race in which a candidate was defeated by one-half of one percent or less of the votes.  If Casey gains any ground once the outstanding “provisional” votes are counted, the race will go to a mandatory recount. Republicans hold the Senate regardless of who ultimately wins Pennsylvania, but if Casey manages to eke out a victory, their margin will be smaller, giving more power to the Senate’s two most rational and pro-choice Republicans, Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski and Maine’s Susan Collins.

Incoming:  Since he’s only a naturalized citizen, Elon Musk can’t run for president, so he did the next best thing, he spent $120 million to buy himself one. Melania and erstwhile Don Jr fiancée Kimberly weren’t in the family photo taken after the election results came in, but Elon Musk was.  Of more concern, he was also on at least part of Trump’s post-election call with Ukraine President Zelenskyy.  Should we be concerned, absolutely.  Musk has decamped to Mar a Lago where he is weighing in on political appointments and has even thrown his weight behind Florida’s Rick Scott, the senator who in addition to wanting to sunset Medicare, Medicaid, and the ACA, is vying to take over the Senate leadership role left open by Mitch McConnell’s decision to step aside.  Scott is a dark horse in that race which until now has been thought to be between Texas’ John Cornyn and South Dakota’s John Thune.  Scott upped his chances this weekend by saying that he’d happily allow Trump to circumvent the usual process of Senate confirmation for cabinet and presumably other appointees, allowing Trump to instead fill those positions through edicts. No doubt Cornyn and Thune will now agree to do the same because, of course. Trump’s team has not yet signed the usual documents required to smooth the transition, in part because of all those sticky ethics requirements.  Also, his team wants to do away with FBI background checks.  Remember that promise to be dictator for a day, it’s starting.  On the subject of appointments, Campaign Manager Susie Wiles has been tapped to be Trump’s Chief of Staff, or his first Chief of Staff, and Tom Horman, the former ICE director who on 60 Minutes recently defended caging kids and said that it would be okay to deport US citizen children of undocumented migrants was just appointed Trump’s Border Czar.  RFK Jr is hanging in the wings and appears to believe that he’s up for a key health care position. We should be very concerned about that.  His anti-vaccine positions are based on conspiracy theories and false science. Over the weekend one of his claims, that the HPV vaccine which is coming close to wiping out cervical cancer in Australia, actually causes HPV cancers has been all over social media.  He’s a quack who belongs nowhere near health care. He’s also not a nutrition scientist though he’s now playing one on TV.  I am less concerned about his rants against Froot Loops, but even there he shouldn’t get a toe hold on policy because he’s relentless and dangerous.  For what it’s worth there are some Republican doctors in the Senate who might stand in his way, not quacky eye doctor Rand Paul but maybe John Barrasso, Roger Marshall, and Bill Cassidy who all should know better, particularly if bolstered by Senators Murkowski and Collins, however, if Trump is allowed to circumvent the usual confirmation process, that won’t matter.  One more thing to mention about the Senate, of the seven Republicans who voted to impeach Trump only three, Senators Cassidy, Collins and Murkowski remain. Two of them, Cassidy and Collins are up for reelection in 2026 and are likely to be threatened with an avalanche of opposition if they don’t adhere to the Trump/Musk line.

Fog:  It turns out that last week’s attack/pogrom targeting Israeli soccer fans in Amsterdam was planned on Telegram and similar communication apps.  Somehow those plans were missed by Dutch intelligence which might explain why the very chastened Dutch Prime Minister Dick Schoof has cancelled his travel plans to deal with the fallout. Over the weekend, pressured by the US, Qatar agreed to kick out its “nice” Hamas house guests, something about them failing to agree to any ceasefire or prisoner release. It’s not clear when they’ll actually leave or where they’ll be going though Turkey has been mentioned as one possible destination. It’s also not clear what Trump will actually do with the Middle East once he takes over, though Netanyahu says they see “eye to eye,” whatever that means.  This weekend the NY Times reported that his Middle East positions are now being influenced by daughter Tiffany’s Lebanese father- in-law, a sometime Hezbollah supporter, who helped him get votes from Arab Americans in key swingy places like Michigan. Who could have possibly guessed that Trump has few positions that can’t be influenced by the last guy into the room, particularly if that guy delivers some combination of votes and money? Has anyone checked on mega pro-Israel donor Miriam Adelson lately?  

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Broken Glass 💩 ✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️ 💩 

It’s the Economy Stupid:   Everyone is pointing fingers, assigning blame:  it’s Biden’s fault, it’s Kamala’s fault, the campaign was too short, it wasn’t focused on the right things and so on.  All of those points have merit and will be debated and micro analyzed for weeks if not years to come, but it may be that what most impacted the outcome of the election were the COVID shutdowns and the inflation that followed because while so many of us were focused on fascism and the clown’s obvious flaws including his affinity for Nazism and his obvious racism and misogyny a lot of swing voters were focused on the more mundane, the size of their grocery bills.  Inflation is back down to normal levels and the US economy is the envy of the world, but the wage earners who suffered the most during the COVID shutdowns and then suffered even more when they went shopping for groceries and other essential items don’t get that success is slowing inflation, not returning prices to pre-pandemic levels.  Economics is complicated, for the most part not taught in school, and most people don’t read the Wall Street Journal or any business paper on a regular basis, but they do shop and pay bills.  It’s easy to say that all of Trump’s voters are fascists or racists because some of them are and some of them also hate the idea of a woman becoming president, but it’s not all of them.  Unfortunately, a lot of them either don’t think it matters if Trump is a horrible person because they don’t think his obvious flaws and dangerous policies will affect their lives as much as paying more for cereal and milk. That’s not to say that racism and misogyny and a host of other things didn’t play a role in the outcome of the election, but at the end of the day, it may have been mostly the shutdowns and inflation and no campaign strategy or Democratic candidate, man or woman, black or white, was going to be able to undo that.  So here we are, and it’s not going to be pretty.

The House and Senate: Yesterday there was some good news, Michigan’s Elissa Slotkin, Wisconsin’s Tammy Baldwin, and Nevada’s Jackie Rosen were all declared winners of their very hard-fought Senate races. Though we know the Senate will be controlled by Republicans we still don’t know the size of their majority.  Late yesterday, The AP called Republican Dave McCormick the winner of the Pennsylvania Senate race, but incumbent Democrat Bob Casey hasn’t conceded, he’s waiting for the remaining absentee ballots to be counted because there remains a very small chance that he could still eke out a win.  In Arizona, with 74% of the votes in, Democrat Ruben Gallego remains narrowly ahead of election denier Kari Lake but with 900,000 votes still to be counted, his lead has been shrinking so it’s too early to know how whether his lead will hold.  We also still don’t know who will be controlling the House because a number of races mostly in California won’t be called for a while.  According to The Hill, as of last night, 214 seats have been called for Republicans, 200 for Democrats.  Of the 21 remaining to be decided, Democrats lead in 13, Republicans in 8.  Do the math, it doesn’t look good for Democrats.

Abortion rights:  All but three of the proposed measures aimed at preserving or expanding abortion access passed on Tuesday.  The three failures were Florida, Nebraska, and South Dakota.  In Florida 57.1% of voters voted for the abortion amendment but the hurdle for passage was 60% and Governor DeSantis had used all his powers and a few he probably didn’t have to campaign against the amendment’s passage and unfortunately for the women in his state, despite the popularity of the abortion rights amendment, his efforts paid off.  In Nebraska, 55% of voters voted to incorporate a 12 week ban into the state constitution and in South Dakota 58% opposed including a right to abortion into the state constitution, leaving SD’s near total abortion ban intact.  Even in the states that have expanded guaranteed abortion rights, the fight isn’t over because Republican held state legislatures and Governors are likely to throw impediments in the way of those services being provided because that’s what they do.  Moreover, despite the fact that more people than not want abortion rights, House and Senate Republicans are still talking about passing legislation to impose a nationwide ban and it’s highly likely that the fight to ban the abortion drug Mifepristone nationwide isn’t over.  I guess this is as good a place as any to mention that Trump is still saying that he’ll put RFK Jr in charge of health things and no, the nepo guy, isn’t changing his view on vaccines, he’s just trying to sound a wee bit more reasonable to make his appointment to something that might need Senate confirmation possible, there are after all a few real doctors in the Senate. For the record, RFK saying that he won’t act to ban vaccines, that he’ll just subject them to more scrutiny, is bull 💩 because those vaccines he’s talking about have already been heavily scrutinized by real medical professionals.     

Hate: On the night of November 9 in 1939, Nazi leaders unleashed a series of pogroms against the Jewish population of Germany, and we all know what happened next.  Last night while I was at a presentation commemorating what has become known as Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass,  hundreds of Israeli soccer fans in Amsterdam to attend a Maccabi soccer (football) match were attacked in what Dutch, European leaders and even the NY Times referred to as an anti-Semitic attack. A significant number of Israelis have been injured, some have still not checked in with families or friends, and the Israeli government is sending planes to bring the Israelis affected by what Dutch authorities are now calling a pogrom home. History repeating itself in so many places sucks.

#BringThemAllHomeNow