Vengeance Well, President-elect Donald Trump certainly is off to a roaring start, isn’t he? Ensconced at his Mar-a-lago beach club with the richest man in the world glued to his side every moment, he’s getting a whole new band together for his second term. Aside from his choice of Florida Sen. Marco Rubio for Secretary of State, this time there’s nary an establishment figure anywhere to be seen as he chooses his new cabinet and White House staff. He’s going directly to the life-blood of MAGA and picking the most controversial, lib-triggering extremists he can find. I mentioned his first group of nominees earlier this week none of whom have anything to particularly recommend them for these jobs but they at least have some government experience behind them. The choice of FOX News celebrity Pete Hegseth for Secretary of Defense was the first inkling that this was about to go seriously off the rails. Hegseth has no experience running anything and has no government experience beyond serving as a National Guard officer in Iraq and Afghanistan and a prison guard at Guantanamo prison.
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Calling all incels The richest man in the world seeks “high IQ revolutionaries” to work for him for free: Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are asking Americans who are “high-IQ small-government revolutionaries” and willing to work over 80 hours a week to join their new Department of Government Efficiency – at zero pay. In a new X post on Thursday that doubled as a job announcement and another one of Musk’s trolling attempts, the account for the newly formed Doge wrote: “We don’t need more part-time idea generators. We need super high-IQ small-government revolutionaries willing to work 80+ hours per week on unglamorous cost-cutting.” The name of the department, which is not part of the federal government, harkens back to a meme of an expressive shiba inu dog. “If that’s you, DM this account with your CV. Elon & Vivek will review the top 1% of applicants,” the statement added.
John Oliver on Trump’s cabinet short list: Talk of who will fill President-elect Donald J. Trump’s new Cabinet has already inspired rampant speculation, and a chart of potential picks from CNN revealed “a deep bench of idiots, freaks and wannabe tough guys,” according to John Oliver. “That chart f—ing sucks,” The Last Week Tonight host said Sunday. “It looks like a ‘choose your fighter’ screen where the only thing they’re fighting is the arc of the moral universe. It looks like an advent calendar where every circle opens up to a tiny piece of literal shit. It looks like a game board for Guess Who? Oops! All a–holes.” No doubt about it. I totally identify with this rant by Oliver. No it is not easier. It’s horrible:
We were Trumpified before Trump Self-flagellation over the 2024 presidential race loss continues among Democrats. It is fueled by simplistic press narratives that I hear as: Millions face violent deportation, Ukrainians face losing their country, Gazans face continued slaughter, and the world faces the collapse of NATO and the rise of fascism American-style because Democrats have a messaging problem. The 75 million whose votes empower those outcomes? Their hands are clean. Brian Beutler is not buying it either: For all the unfolding recrimination, a fairly strong consensus has already formed across the left that last week’s election results are part of a global, post-Covid, post-inflation backlash against incumbents. And for what it’s worth, I agree with this consensus; Occam’s razor applies too neatly to start the analysis elsewhere. Operative word: start. The information environment itself is a place to continue: “Working the refs” was once an art. Under Democrats’ noses, the right has made it a science. (They won’t call it that, of course.) The right attacks.
It’s been a week since the election of Donald Trump and the shock is just now beginning to wear off. The ritual Democratic self-flagellation is calming a bit as most people finally take a breath and recognize that while the result was a terrible disappointment it was anything but a landslide for Donald Trump, nor was it a crushing rebuke of the Democratic party. As Philip Bump of The Washington Post points out in this preliminary analysis: “Trump’s popular-vote victory will likely end up as the smallest since 2000. It is due, in part, to fewer people voting. Exit polls are imperfect, but they suggest where each party gained and lost votes since 2020…What we can say, though, is that this was not an electoral landslide, but a narrowly contested race in which Trump is likely to have benefited as much from who didn’t turn out to vote for his candidacy than who did turn out to vote for him. Right now, the first order of business is to shake off the defeat and confront the challenge of Donald Trump’s ghastly agenda. As we have seen in the last few days it’s shaping up to be both more chaotic and more extreme than even in 2016.
They’re going to go after all of them: One of Trump’s Day One executive actions is expected to be an order on so-called interior enforcement, arresting and detaining immigrants in the U.S. illegally, the sources said. Trump intends to scrap Biden administration guidance that prioritized people with serious criminal records for deportation and limited enforcement against non-criminals, they said. The Trump order would call for deportations to prioritize people charged with felonies and people who have exhausted their legal avenues to remain, but would not restrict officers from picking up other potentially deportable immigrants. An estimated 1.4 million immigrants in the U.S. have final deportation orders, according to ICE, a group that will be a focus for the incoming Trump administration. “A federal judge said, ‘You must go home,’ and they didn’t,” Homan told Fox News on Monday. Certain groups – such as international students who support Palestinian militant group Hamas and have violated the terms of their student visas – could also be listed as a priority, two of the sources said.
What an ungracious piece of … garbage: Melania Trump declined an offer to head to the White House Wednesday and meet with Jill Biden, citing the Biden administration’s raid on Mar-a-Lago as part of the federal government’s investigation into classified documents. “She ain’t going,” a source familiar with Melania’s decision told The Post. “Jill Biden’s husband authorized the FBI snooping through her underwear drawer. The Bidens are disgusting,” the source said. “Jill Biden isn’t someone Melania needs to meet,” the source added. BY the way, Trump’s anything but gracious, but we knew that. That fucker wouldn’t give Biden a transition, wouldn’t meet with him and wouldn’t come to his inauguration. I feel like throwing up. I cannot see how this is useful for anything. I can only assume that this is some kind of Christian ethic that I don’t understand.
I don’t think people realize that exit polls are just polls. They’re good, as polls go, because they ask a lot of people what they think and what they voted for on the day of the election. But it takes several months for the numbers crunchers to adjust and analyse the data alongside the actual results and it is often substantially different than what we thought on the morning after the election. Anyway, Ryan Cooper at the American Prospect suggests that we put our hair shirts in the closet for the time being and deal with the fact that half of the American public has no idea what they’re in for: Now that Donald Trump has won, again, a furious debate on the left side of the political spectrum has erupted, as Democratic Party factions jostle for position by casting blame on everyone but themselves. For my part, while I can’t help but have some suspicions, it will be six months before we have detailed data on where demographics actually landed, and at time of writing California is not even done counting. Any serious conclusions are premature at this point.
Mr. Insecurity picks a Fox News host for SecDef Donald Trump proved critics right again on Tuesday. All this time I thought one of strongest motivators for Donald (Mr. Insecurity) Trump’s was to get the world to stop “laughing at us” (him). It’s considered one of the reasons he ran for president after sitting through some skillful mocking at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner. “Saturday Night Live” comedian Seth Meyers and President Obama (Did you know he’s Black?) both roasted Trump as unserious. “Donald Trump has been saying he will run for president as a Republican — which is surprising, since I just assumed he was running as a joke,” Meyers jabbed as Trump sat stone-faced. “That evening of public abasement, rather than sending Mr. Trump away, accelerated his ferocious efforts to gain stature within the political world,” wrote Maggie Haberman and Alexander Burns after the 2016 Super Tuesday primaries. “And it captured the degree to which Mr.
I don’t know about you but this strikes me as very bad. Remember this is the guy who pardoned war criminals in his first administration and overruled the military chain of command to do it. He has expressly said that he wants to use the military to shoot protesters and round up immigrants. If we are depending on the military to resist illegal orders I’m not sure there will be any left to do it: The Trump transition team is considering a draft executive order that establishes a “warrior board” of retired senior military personnel with the power to review three- and four-star officers and to recommend removals of any deemed unfit for leadership. If Donald Trump approves the order, it could fast-track the removal of generals and admirals found to be “lacking in requisite leadership qualities,” according to a draft of the order reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. But it could also create a chilling effect on top military officers, given the president-elect’s past vow to fire “woke generals,” referring to officers seen as promoting diversity in the ranks at the expense of military readiness.