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