It looks like Kash Patel isn’t the only one implementing the vengeance agenda and Russ Vought won’t be the only ones demanding total loyalty in the executive branch. Others are helping with the dirty work: Staffers working for the DOGE duo, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, have contacted some of Trump’s first-term cabinet secretaries and asked them to prepare two lists of people they served with: one for political appointees and the other for career officials. The listmakers are then to write an “A” by the names of those they believe Trump should bring back or keep, and a “B” by the names of those they think should be blacklisted or fired. Of course, civil servants (the career officials) are typically protected from political raids at agencies, but Trump has vowed to use Schedule F, an executive order that would make them fireable—and these plans for mass layoffs will almost certainly wind up before the courts. I would have thought those two would be huddled over spreadsheets and policy papers deciding the BIG QUESTION of how to slash a third of the government in the first year.
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Thank you, thank you, thank you to everyone who’s supported this site this year. It’s a validation of the work we put into it and I appreciate it so much. It appears that indy media, however small, is going to be more important than ever in these next few years. Thanks to you, we’ll be here doing our best to make sense of it all. I don’t honestly know what most people care about anymore but I do know that some of us still find Trump’s attempted coup one of the most shocking events we’ve ever witnessed. A president inciting a mob to storm the Capitol during a joint session of Congress to overturn the presidential election is the most destabilizing event in recent memory. That we’ve put that president back in the White House is a very disturbing sign that this country has lost its moorings. Trump discussed his plans to pardon the insurrectionists in his recent TIME Magazine interview: Well, we’re going to look at each individual case, and we’re going to do it very quickly, and it’s going to start in the first hour that I get into office. And a vast majority of them should not be in jail.
As Tom mentioned this morning in this excellent piece, it sure feels as if whatever resistance there was to Trump during the past 8 years is evaporating. Most of those who haven’t decided to jump on the MAGA bandwagon just don’t want to hear about it. CNN reported yesterday that its latest poll shows that 72% of those polled say they’re paying little to no attention to Trump-related news. I wrote about one early bright spot in all this a while back: the Blue State Governors. At the moment they seem to be the only ones showing a willingness to fight. Rolling Stone took a deep dive into their plans: Among governors, [Illinois Governor] Pritzker has been out in front — positioning himself as the blue-state anti-Trump. The Hyatt hotel heir is a billionaire himself, worth nearly $4 billion, which counts as fuck-you money in an age when opposing Trump can carry significant costs, from increased security to the risk of retaliatory litigation, or “lawfare.” In November, Pritzker launched a new organization, called Governors Safeguarding Democracy, that seeks to unify state-based opposition to Trump’s agenda. Unveiled with co-chair Gov.
If you’re like me, this whole crypto craze is somewhat mystifying. And I really don’t understand the necessity for it. Paul Krugman at his Substack has the answer: crime. The tech bros who helped put Trump back in power expect many favors in return; one of the more interesting is their demand that the government intervene to guarantee crypto players the right to a checking account, stopping the “debanking” they claim has hit many of their friends. He goes on to point out that this is actually the opposite of what the whole Bitcoin revolution was supposed to do which was eliminate the need for banks: What’s going on here? Elon Musk, Marc Andreesen and others claim that there’s a deep state conspiracy to undermine crypto, because of course they do. But the real reason banks don’t want to be financially connected to crypto is that they believe, with good reason, that to the extent that cryptocurrencies are used for anything besides speculation, much of that activity is criminal — and they don’t want to be accused of acting as accessories.
Splitting sculpted hairs Don’t use the R-word. The extremely litigous future former president actually won one in court this week. ABC News agreed to pay Donald J. Trump $15 million dollars in a defamation lawsuit brought against network anchor George Stephanopoulos and his employer, plus $1 million in legal fees. That’s a lot of Eau de Trump. The network agreed to make a $15 million contribution to a “Presidential foundation and museum to be established by or for Plaintiff.” [Read on once you’ve stopped laughing about where that money will actually wind up.] The network will also issue a statement of “regret” over comments made by Stephanopoulos in a March 10 interview with Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.). As NBC News tells the tale: In the initial complaint, Trump’s lawyers alleged that Stephanopoulos “knowingly or recklessly made multiple false and disparaging statements regarding Plaintiff during ABC broadcasts.” Mace, who has publicly discussed being [R-worded] as a teenager, was asked during the March interview with Stephanopoulos about Trump’s treatment of women and the E. Jean Carroll case.
Descent into madness Two of my friends (barely a couple of years older) had polio as children. One still walks with a limp. The other told me just yesterday that she spent time in an iron lung as a kid. I was shocked. Remember when medical ventilators were in super-high demand during the COVID-19 pandemic? Before ventilators there were iron lungs. Obsolete now (save for extremely rare cases), iron lungs fell out of use in the 1950s when positive pressure ventilators came along. Coincidentally, vaccines that ended the polio outbreaks of the 1940s and 1950s arrived about the same time. My parents put me in line at a Chicago park one night to get the Salk vaccine by injection gun. Getting vaccinated against polio back then was a community event. You can imagine what my friends think of RFK Jr.’s proposal for having the FDA decertify the polio vaccine. The one with iron lung experience used spicier language yesterday than used by Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, 82, himself a polio survivor (CBS News): Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell issued an apparent warning Friday to Robert F.
That’s just the most high profile. They bought themselves cabinet sets. The Big CEOs are all donating at least a million to the inauguration and ABC settled a totally bogus lawsuit for 15 million to be donated to Trump’s “presidential library and foundation” which doesn’t exist. They threw in George Stephanopoulos being forced to apologize as a sweetener. (That was probably worth more to Trump than the money.) I expected Republicans to bend the knee. That’s not unusual. Even a few Democrats following suit doesn’t surprise me. But the media and the business community totally capitulating, bringing gifts to the baby Trump like they’re the three wise men wasn’t something I expected. Those guys have so much money I assumed they’d never have to curry that kind of favor. It appears to me they want to. Maybe it’s just a matter of not wanting to be left out of the Mar-a-Lago party. But this is definitely happening and it’s very, very worrying.
This drone story taking the country by storm is almost certainly nothing nefarious. People are all over the internet with videos of what are obviously airplanes shrieking about drones the size of SUVs. It’s possible that there’s something going on with drones in New Jersey but with Fox News screeching about an “Iranian mothership” launching them off the Jersey shore we really have reached full Idiocracy. ABC News broadcast about a mysterious orb in the sky. Well, actually this is full Idiocracy: That should be all you need to know but just in case you’re curious: 1. Project Blue Beam is a conspiracy theory that alleges a secret plan by entities like NASA and the United Nations to establish a new world order through advanced technological manipulation. Here’s a detailed breakdown of what the theory claims: 2. Objective:The primary goal is to implement a new global religion that would serve as the ideological foundation for a totalitarian world government.
Yum. I hope he doesn’t want to ban antibiotics too or we’ll be in worse trouble than we already are. By the way: Recall this? Nov. 10, 2010 — An effort by Pennsylvania schools to get students to eat healthier is coming under fire from Sarah Palin. The proposed new guidelines would limit the amount of sweets in classroom parties and reduce the number of holiday and birthday celebrations. On the proposed regulations, Palin called Pennsylvania a “nanny state run amok.” In protest, she brought 200 sugar cookies to a Bucks County school fundraiser Tuesday. “I had to shake it up a little bit because I heard there is a debate going on in Pennsylvania over whether most schools condemn sweets, cakes, cookies, that type of thing,” Palin said. “I brought dozens and dozens of cookies to these students.” Instead, parents would be encouraged to serve healthy snacks, such as fruits or vegetables. But hey, the two Sarahs never said you shouldn’t serve raw meat, raw egg yolks and raw milk to kids, amirite? Perfectly legit.
Once again, many, many thanks to those of you who’ve contributed this year. I am so grateful, There are so many options out there for people to subscribe to good writing and great analysis so it really warms my heart to see that some of you are choosing to support the work we do here. I’ll never have a paywall — I want people who have limited ability to pay to be able to read us too — and I don’t want to go back to featuring ads, so I really appreciate those of you who have the means and the desire to donate. I don’t know how many of us have the stomach to be dissidents. I certainly don’t know what I will do if I’m forced to ask myself that question. But it’s probably something we should all think about at least a little bit ahead of time. With people like Tom Hohman saying they plan to arrest people who “harbor” undocumented workers and Trump and his henchmen threatening to jail everyone in sight, it’s not completely out of the question that we might be confronted with some unpleasant choices before too long.