Paul Krugman’s quit his NY Times column and although he hasn’t said it in so many words, it’s most likely because he felt constrained from saying what he wants to say the way he wants to say it. He does have a newsletter and he’s already bringing the fire: Once upon a time a Republican president, sure that large parts of federal spending were worthless, appointed a commission led by a wealthy businessman to bring a business sensibility to the budget, going through it line by line to identify inefficiency and waste. The commission initially made a big splash, and there were desperate attempts to spin its work as a success. But in the end few people were fooled. Ronald Reagan’s venture, the President’s Private Sector Survey on Cost Control — the so-called “Grace commission,” headed by J. Peter Grace — was a flop, making no visible dent in spending. Why was it a flop? There is, of course, inefficiency and waste in the federal government, as there is in any large organization.
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Instead of making Trump fire him, Christopher Wray let Trump off the hook and has politely bowed out and resigned today. This is not how this is supposed to work. The whole idea of the year term was to keep the FBI director out of partisan politics while not allowing him to create a J. Edgar Hoover-style fiefdom of its own. As with so much else, Trump cares nothing about intentions, traditions or norms and the fact is that he has the power to fire him so there was never any doubt that he would do it. Everyone in America exists to serve him. Here’s the usual classy response from Trump:
As it turns out most Americans don’t care all thatm uch about abortion rights after all. And that means they don’t care all that much aboutwhether some women lose their health or their lives for lack of ability to obtain one. I wish I could say that shocks me, but it doesn’t. When the price of eggs is higher than it was four years ago nothing else really matters. Here’s how it’s going in the courts: The case now before the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, centers on whether federal emergency room mandates — enshrined in EMTALA, the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act — preempt state abortion bans when they conflict. EMTALA requires that emergency rooms stabilize patients in crisis. Idaho maintains that they don’t overlap, that the ban’s exception for preventing the woman’s death covers all emergencies.
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On Democrats freshening up the brand Thank goodness Syria’s autocratic regime collapsed before Bashar al-Assad “suck-up,” Tulsi Gabbard, had a chance to prop him up as Donald Trump’s director of national intelligence, quips Michael Tomasky. Our unstable world is about to become more so. Here at home, Democrats still smart at losing the presidency to a criminal imbecile and walking advertisement for the Dunning-Kruger effect. How they pull the country and the world back from the brink of Idiocracy will occupy them until the next general election, if that long. Perhaps Democrats’ biggest obstacle to freshening up their brand, aside from institutional lethargy, is a media ecosystem owned and operated by reactionary billionaires. Democrats’ post-mortem spitballs over how to regain market share with the American electorate are so many trees falling in the forest if no one hears the sound. Perhaps more star power could break through? Vanity Fair‘s Chris Smith suggested last week that perhaps “Democrats need their own demagogue,” to break through the right-wing noise. The good kind, of course.
Time to wake up people. After a month recuperating from the grueling campaign Donald Trump is back in our faces. The presidential election last month was a disappointment to say the least. And ever since then it’s felt as if the air has just been slowly leaking out of the opposition. Much of the mainstream media seems to be attempting to change course and curry favor with the new administration while Democratic officials appear to be in shock. In some ways it’s reminiscent of the days in the lead up to the Iraq war, with a quiet resignation taking the place of the febrile excitement that characterized the push to rally around the flag. People just seem enervated and spiritless. Sometimes it’s hard to remember why we fight when it all seems so futile. Well, I think the opposition is about to get its mojo back. And that’s because for the last month all we saw (to the extent we were even paying attention which many of us couldn’t bring ourselves to do) was the news telling us about what Trump is doing, who he’s nominating and what he’s planning. And that’s all bad! In fact, it’s worse than many of us thought it would be.
Wait, what????
I guess I’m feeling cynical about just about everything right now, so perhaps my point of view isn’t realistic.
This is one of the craziest things I’ve heard him say: What is he talking about? He must have been drunk when he said that. It’s been the right that’s pushed the flag and a pledge for the last 60 years! “These colors don’t run!”, “Love it or leave it!” After 9/11 anyone who wasn’t worshiping the stars and stripes was at risk if they didn’t keep their mouths shut. As for the pledge: Francis Bellamy was a minister who was thrown out of his Baptist post because of sermons describing Jesus as a socialist. He and novelist cousin Edward Bellamy both saw a future for the United States as a country in which the government controlled virtually every aspect of a person’s life. Francis Bellamy (who also wrote for a magazine underwritten by flag sales and therefore stood to gain by having schools require a flag salute each day) and his friends got President Benjamin Harrison to incorporate Bellamy’s pledge into the 400th anniversary celebration of Columbus’ arrival in the New World. It has been recited in public schools ever since… [T]he pledge has remained a recurring political hot button.
I think everyone knows that the HBO masterpiece “Succession” was based upon the Murdoch family. Well, it turns out that the family has actually based some of its actions on “Succession.” The NY Times (link below) reports that a court in Nevada has ruled today that Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch can’t change the irrevocable trust to block the rest of the kids from having any influence on Fox News. He came down hard on them apparently but this isn’t the end of the story. I guess there are appeals and also some end runs to get the job done. But this is just fascinating: The legal maneuvering came to a head during several days of sealed, in-person testimony in Reno in September by Mr. Murdoch, Lachlan, James, Elisabeth, Prudence and a number of their representatives on the trust. The proceedings revealed that Mr. Murdoch’s children had started secretly discussing the public-relations strategy for their father’s death in April 2023.