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