Trumps Indictment: Historical and Future Implications V
Politics is like a board game and before Trump it was all about how to win it. Trump threw out the old board and began an entirely new game. Those seeking to defeat him by playing on the old board never will.
He has ushered in an age of political theater, bringing into power people who would be considered “unqualified” by the old guard. But they are very much qualified to do what it is that Trump is seeking to do.
From what I can tell, the old guard among Republicans have pretty much accepted defeat.
The old guard among Democrats are still thinking that the right old guard Democrat will be able to take on this new phenomenon called Trumpism. But it won’t work because Trump changed the game.
Old guard Democrats feel uncomfortable with the kind of political theater that will be necessary to create a real counterforce to Trumpism. They’re just another form of theater, however, and it’s a theater to which they are all boxed in. They preferred losing to Trump than winning with anything outside their box.
All of this seems to me like the dramatic turbulence inherent in any historic phase transition. The old isn’t all good or all bad, and the new isn’t all good or all bad. Even people I disagree with are saying some important things. It feels to me like a time to keenly observe and deeply listen. Whichever way you look at it, holding on to the old is fruitless. Something new is emerging now, and it’s up to each of us to make it the good, true, and the holy.. There’s a lot of darkness out there but there is also a lot of light….particularly in our hearts.
~ Marianne Williamson
The only thing I would disagree with in the above statement is this:
From what I can tell, the old guard among Republicans have pretty much accepted defeat.
Republicans rejecting Trump's push for Rick Scott by electing John Thune as senate majority leader revealed a pushback among the old guard who still holds constitutional values in their hearts.
Here's to a new chess board!
He has ushered in an age of political theater, bringing into power people who would be considered “unqualified” by the old guard. But they are very much qualified to do what it is that Trump is seeking to do.
From what I can tell, the old guard among Republicans have pretty much accepted defeat.
The old guard among Democrats are still thinking that the right old guard Democrat will be able to take on this new phenomenon called Trumpism. But it won’t work because Trump changed the game.
Old guard Democrats feel uncomfortable with the kind of political theater that will be necessary to create a real counterforce to Trumpism. They’re just another form of theater, however, and it’s a theater to which they are all boxed in. They preferred losing to Trump than winning with anything outside their box.
All of this seems to me like the dramatic turbulence inherent in any historic phase transition. The old isn’t all good or all bad, and the new isn’t all good or all bad. Even people I disagree with are saying some important things. It feels to me like a time to keenly observe and deeply listen. Whichever way you look at it, holding on to the old is fruitless. Something new is emerging now, and it’s up to each of us to make it the good, true, and the holy.. There’s a lot of darkness out there but there is also a lot of light….particularly in our hearts.
~ Marianne Williamson
The only thing I would disagree with in the above statement is this:
From what I can tell, the old guard among Republicans have pretty much accepted defeat.
Republicans rejecting Trump's push for Rick Scott by electing John Thune as senate majority leader revealed a pushback among the old guard who still holds constitutional values in their hearts.
Here's to a new chess board!
https://youtube.com/shorts/lJsNdALMpG4?si=qMiieEd82LAKEpES
Racist Bidenista punches and assaults black Trump supporter. Claims she wants to flag black conservatives...
https://www.instagram.com/p/DCVELcXOURv/?igsh=NzBocnV2MXA5bm10
Bidenistas murders her father over election.
https://nypost.com/2024/11/10/us-news/minn-dad-anthony-nephew-ranted-against-trump-killed-family-in-murder-suicide/
Bidenista triple murder/suicide over Trump election.
No violence huh???!!!!
Racist Bidenista punches and assaults black Trump supporter. Claims she wants to flag black conservatives...
https://www.instagram.com/p/DCVELcXOURv/?igsh=NzBocnV2MXA5bm10
Bidenistas murders her father over election.
https://nypost.com/2024/11/10/us-news/minn-dad-anthony-nephew-ranted-against-trump-killed-family-in-murder-suicide/
Bidenista triple murder/suicide over Trump election.
No violence huh???!!!!
It was shocking ( to a degree ) this man was even nominated. But, being Trump himself trumped around with Jeffrey Epstein, it wasn't completely out of left field.
Gaetz resigns from Congress — possibly skirting long-awaited Ethics report
His resignation came the same day Donald Trump nominated him to be attorney general, but some Republicans think he had other motivations.
[ . . . ] GOP House colleagues believe his decision is actually tied to an Ethics Committee report investigating several allegations including that Gaetz engaged in sex with a minor, which they believe was poised to be released in a matter of days. Gaetz has repeatedly denied wrongdoing and has sought to attack the panel probing various allegations against him. If Gaetz is no longer a member of the House, the report likely won’t be formally released, though it could leak.
One House Republican, granted anonymity to speak candidly, tied Gaetz’s resignation to trying to “stymie the ethics investigation that is coming out in one week.”
Gaetz, his spokesperson and a senior aide did not respond to requests for comment about the decision.
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/11/13/matt-gaetz-resigns-congress-00189488
Gaetz resigns from Congress — possibly skirting long-awaited Ethics report
His resignation came the same day Donald Trump nominated him to be attorney general, but some Republicans think he had other motivations.
[ . . . ] GOP House colleagues believe his decision is actually tied to an Ethics Committee report investigating several allegations including that Gaetz engaged in sex with a minor, which they believe was poised to be released in a matter of days. Gaetz has repeatedly denied wrongdoing and has sought to attack the panel probing various allegations against him. If Gaetz is no longer a member of the House, the report likely won’t be formally released, though it could leak.
One House Republican, granted anonymity to speak candidly, tied Gaetz’s resignation to trying to “stymie the ethics investigation that is coming out in one week.”
Gaetz, his spokesperson and a senior aide did not respond to requests for comment about the decision.
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/11/13/matt-gaetz-resigns-congress-00189488
"Constitutional values in their heart." You see, you Jim Crows always show your establishment NPC narrow vision, historically ìlliterate view. The new Senate leader, voted upon in secret like commies by the Rino fake Republicans, are the very NWO establishment GOP trash like Graham and McConnell. They are war hawks and NATO sycophantic traitors. You love them because they put Biden in power from the right. As far as qualified, I suspect your version of qualified is someone that works for Lockheed Martin or Silcone valley or the council on Foreign relations globalist minions.
Trump has picked and nominated very qualified OUTSIDERS, for the most part, to allow them to assess the Washington cesspool of INSIDERS...
These people have hurt Republican and Democrats for years..
Do wake up from the "old guard" delusion...
But you have to publish something negative, right?
New ideas and plans to help people, never elects the bought and paid for representatives...
Trump has picked and nominated very qualified OUTSIDERS, for the most part, to allow them to assess the Washington cesspool of INSIDERS...
These people have hurt Republican and Democrats for years..
Do wake up from the "old guard" delusion...
But you have to publish something negative, right?
New ideas and plans to help people, never elects the bought and paid for representatives...
Matt Gaetz is half Rino traitor like Graham and McConnell and will probably not get confirmed by congress.
We are trying to kick out the establishment Republicans because they are infiltrators like the Bush family put in place to run secret ops for the Democrats...
We are trying to kick out the establishment Republicans because they are infiltrators like the Bush family put in place to run secret ops for the Democrats...
BREAKING: Republican Senator John Cornyn just announced that he would like the House Ethics Committee to release the findings of the Matt Gaetz investigation. It sure looks like Republicans are going to sink one of Trump’s first nominees.
https://x.com/DemocraticWins/status/1857102454216638882
lolol!
Jimmy Kimmel on Matt Gaetz’s Attorney General Nomination: In Trump Administration, ‘Being Investigated for Sex Trafficking Underage Girls’ Can Be Listed Under ‘Special Skills’
https://variety.com/2024/tv/news/jimmy-kimmel-trump-matt-gaetz-attorney-general-sex-trafficking-special-skills-1236209948/
https://x.com/DemocraticWins/status/1857102454216638882
lolol!
Jimmy Kimmel on Matt Gaetz’s Attorney General Nomination: In Trump Administration, ‘Being Investigated for Sex Trafficking Underage Girls’ Can Be Listed Under ‘Special Skills’
https://variety.com/2024/tv/news/jimmy-kimmel-trump-matt-gaetz-attorney-general-sex-trafficking-special-skills-1236209948/
Ahavati said:Cont from above
The gulf between Trump’s promises to slash the government and voters’ actual support for government programs is not going to make the Republicans’ job easier. Conservative pundit George Will wrote today that “the world’s richest person is about to receive a free public education,” suggesting Elon Musk, who has emerged as the shadow president, will find his plans to cut the government difficult to enact as elected officials reject cuts to programs their constituents like.
Musk’s vow to cut “at least” $2 trillion from federal spending, Will notes, will run up against reality in a hurry. Of the $6.75 trillion fiscal 2024 spending, debt service makes up 13.1%; defense—which Trump wants to increase—is 12.9%. Entitlements, primarily Social Security and Medicare, account for 34.6%, and while the Republican Study Group has called for cuts to them, Trump said during the campaign, at least, that they would not be cut.
So Musk has said he would cut about 30% of the total budget from about 40% of it. Will points out that Trump is hardly the first president to vow dramatic cuts. Notably, Ronald Reagan appointed J. Peter Grace, an entrepreneur, to make government “more responsive to the wishes of the people” after voters had elected Reagan on a platform of cutting government. Grace’s commission made 2,478 recommendations but quickly found that every lawmaker liked cuts to someone else’s district but not their own.
Will notes that a possible outcome of the Trump chaos might be to check the modern movement toward executive power, inducing Congress to recapture some of the power it has ceded to the president in order to restore the stability businessmen prefer.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt was himself a wealthy man, and in the 1930s he tried to explain to angry critics on the right that his efforts to address the nation’s inequalities were not an attack on American capitalism, but rather an attempt to save it from the communism or fascism that would destroy the rule of law.
“I want to save our system, the capitalistic system,” FDR wrote to a friend in 1935. “[T]o save it is to give some heed to world thought of today.”
The protections of the system FDR ushered in—the banking and equities regulation that killed crony finance, for example—are now under attack by the very sort of movement he warned against. Whether today’s lawmakers are as willing as their predecessors were to stand against that movement remains unclear, especially as Trump tries to bring lawmakers to heel, but Thune’s victory in the Senate today and the widespread Republican outrage over Trump’s appointment of Gaetz and Hegseth are hopeful signs.
Notes: https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/november-13-2024
Intentionally marginalized by neo-Confederate MAGA, George Will's literary work ought to be considered required reading for anybody who still wants to establish their credentials as a genuinely Constitution oriented citizen...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Will
The gulf between Trump’s promises to slash the government and voters’ actual support for government programs is not going to make the Republicans’ job easier. Conservative pundit George Will wrote today that “the world’s richest person is about to receive a free public education,” suggesting Elon Musk, who has emerged as the shadow president, will find his plans to cut the government difficult to enact as elected officials reject cuts to programs their constituents like.
Musk’s vow to cut “at least” $2 trillion from federal spending, Will notes, will run up against reality in a hurry. Of the $6.75 trillion fiscal 2024 spending, debt service makes up 13.1%; defense—which Trump wants to increase—is 12.9%. Entitlements, primarily Social Security and Medicare, account for 34.6%, and while the Republican Study Group has called for cuts to them, Trump said during the campaign, at least, that they would not be cut.
So Musk has said he would cut about 30% of the total budget from about 40% of it. Will points out that Trump is hardly the first president to vow dramatic cuts. Notably, Ronald Reagan appointed J. Peter Grace, an entrepreneur, to make government “more responsive to the wishes of the people” after voters had elected Reagan on a platform of cutting government. Grace’s commission made 2,478 recommendations but quickly found that every lawmaker liked cuts to someone else’s district but not their own.
Will notes that a possible outcome of the Trump chaos might be to check the modern movement toward executive power, inducing Congress to recapture some of the power it has ceded to the president in order to restore the stability businessmen prefer.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt was himself a wealthy man, and in the 1930s he tried to explain to angry critics on the right that his efforts to address the nation’s inequalities were not an attack on American capitalism, but rather an attempt to save it from the communism or fascism that would destroy the rule of law.
“I want to save our system, the capitalistic system,” FDR wrote to a friend in 1935. “[T]o save it is to give some heed to world thought of today.”
The protections of the system FDR ushered in—the banking and equities regulation that killed crony finance, for example—are now under attack by the very sort of movement he warned against. Whether today’s lawmakers are as willing as their predecessors were to stand against that movement remains unclear, especially as Trump tries to bring lawmakers to heel, but Thune’s victory in the Senate today and the widespread Republican outrage over Trump’s appointment of Gaetz and Hegseth are hopeful signs.
Notes: https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/november-13-2024
Intentionally marginalized by neo-Confederate MAGA, George Will's literary work ought to be considered required reading for anybody who still wants to establish their credentials as a genuinely Constitution oriented citizen...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Will
MidnightSonneteer said:
Intentionally marginalized by neo-Confederate MAGA, George Will's literary work ought to be considered required reading for anybody who still wants to establish their credentials as a genuinely Constitution oriented citizen...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Will
Agreed!
Also, how far would you go to say that there definitely needs to be change to the current system, albeit not toward an authoritarian direction.
Intentionally marginalized by neo-Confederate MAGA, George Will's literary work ought to be considered required reading for anybody who still wants to establish their credentials as a genuinely Constitution oriented citizen...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Will
Agreed!
Also, how far would you go to say that there definitely needs to be change to the current system, albeit not toward an authoritarian direction.
If the rumors are true that Lauren Boebert is being made Secretary of Education, let George Carlin explain why Trump and Musk are appointing her.
https://x.com/AdamInCT82/status/1856814397668430117
lolol @ Trump AND Musk!
But, yep, the billionaires/millionaires control it all.
https://x.com/AdamInCT82/status/1856814397668430117
lolol @ Trump AND Musk!
But, yep, the billionaires/millionaires control it all.
More violent murder from the left trending on tictok
https://youtube.com/shorts/w-q27Zj5B14?si=5Hgnw2bRfluURf3n
MATGA make aqua tofana great again
First the AUTHORITARIANS AND THEIR POLICE STATE LAWFARE tells wife's to lie to their husbands, then to divorce then and now to poison them like the wife's in the Roman empire did...
But you said your CONFEDERATE slave party were peaceful and moral.....
https://youtube.com/shorts/w-q27Zj5B14?si=5Hgnw2bRfluURf3n
MATGA make aqua tofana great again
First the AUTHORITARIANS AND THEIR POLICE STATE LAWFARE tells wife's to lie to their husbands, then to divorce then and now to poison them like the wife's in the Roman empire did...
But you said your CONFEDERATE slave party were peaceful and moral.....
Here's Seth for the SOBER interpretation of MAGA insanity...
https://youtu.be/NkO17vnBMWQ?si=aSLhVJ6huDNmkLWS
https://youtu.be/NkO17vnBMWQ?si=aSLhVJ6huDNmkLWS
November 14, 2024
Heather Cox Richardson
Nov 14, 2024
Two snapshots today illustrate the difference between the economic—and therefore the societal—visions of the Biden-Harris administration and of the incoming Trump administration.
The Biden-Harris administration today released numbers revealing that over the past four years, their policies have kick-started a boom in the creation of small businesses across the country. Since the administration took office, entrepreneurs have filed more than 20 million applications for new businesses, the most of any presidential term in history. This averages to more than 440,000 applications a month, a rate more than 90% faster than averages before the pandemic. Black business ownership has doubled, and Hispanic business ownership is up by 40% since before the pandemic.
The administration encouraged that growth with targeted loans, tax credits, federal contracts, and support services. Small businesses are major job creators and employ about 47% of all private sector employees.
President Joe Biden rejected the “neoliberalism” of the previous 40 years that had moved about $50 trillion dollars from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%. Those embracing that theory maintain that the government should let markets operate without regulation, concentrating wealth among a few people who will invest it more efficiently than they can if the government intervenes with regulations or taxes that hamper the ability of investors to amass wealth.
Biden and Harris returned the U.S. to the model that both parties had embraced until 1981: the idea that the government should regulate business, provide a basic social safety net, promote infrastructure, and protect civil rights. That system had reduced extremes of wealth in the U.S. after the Great Depression and given most Americans a path to prosperity.
Biden’s policies worked, enabling the U.S. to recover from the pandemic more quickly than any other country with a modern economy, sending unemployment to historic lows, and raising wages faster than inflation for the bottom 80% of Americans.
It has also had social effects, most notably today with the announcement from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that the U.S. is seeing a historic drop in deaths from the street drug fentanyl. From June 2023 to June 2024, deaths dropped by roughly 14.5%, translating into more than 16,000 lives saved. Experts say the drop is due to better addiction healthcare, the widespread availability of the opioid reversal drug naloxone, and lower potency of street fentanyl.
If the record of the extraordinary growth of small businesses in the past four years is one snapshot, the other is a social media post from yesterday, in which former pharmaceutical executive Vivek Ramaswamy noted that the government spends $516 billion a year on “programs which Congress has allowed to expire.” “We can & should save hundreds of billions each year by defunding government programs that Congress no longer authorizes,” he wrote.
Bobby Kogan, who worked in President Joe Biden’s Office of Management and Budget and on the Senate Budget Committee, explained that Congress often authorizes spending as “temporary” in order “to encourage Congress to revisit it to update various parts of the bill, such as eligibility, benefits, etc.” But Congress can still fund the programs in appropriations bills.
Kogan noted that the largest program currently operating under expired authorization is veterans’ medical care.
Trump and his advisors embrace the neoliberalism Biden rejected. Rather than invest in the economy to create opportunities for middle-class Americans and those just starting out, they want to slash the existing government to free up more capital for investors.
Trump has tapped the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, who invested at least $132 million in cash in Trump’s campaign as well as the in-kind gift of the support of X, and former pharmaceutical executive Vivek Ramaswamy to run a “Department of Government Efficiency,” or DOGE, named for Musk’s favorite cryptocurrency.
According to the Washington Post’s Jeff Stein, Elizabeth Dwoskin, Cat Zakrzewski, and Jacob Bogage, people around Musk say the group is intended to “apply slash-and-burn business ideologies to the U.S. government.” Musk has vowed to slash “at least” $2 trillion from the federal budget and has warned it will create “hardship.”
That the people embracing this plan see a world in which a few elites run things showed in today’s social media post by the “DOGE.” The post called for “super high-IQ small-government revolutionaries willing to work 80+ hours per week on unglamorous cost-cutting. If that’s you, DM this account…. Elon & Vivek will review the top 1% of applicants.”
Such cuts would be enormously unpopular, and in the Washington Post yesterday, Stein, Dwoskin, Zakrzewski, and Bogage reported that Trump’s aides are exploring ways to enact dramatic cuts to the government without congressional approval. Key among those is simply refusing to release the money Congress appropriates for programs Musk and Trump want to cut. This is known as “impoundment,” and Congress made it illegal in 1974 after President Richard Nixon tried to shape the government to his wishes by refusing to fund congressional programs he opposed.
Trump tried to do this quietly in 2019 by refusing to release the money Congress had appropriated for Ukraine to fund its fight against Russian incursions until Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky smeared Biden. When the threat came to light, the House of Representatives impeached Trump. Although the Senate ultimately acquitted Trump, according to Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) all the Republican senators agreed he had done as the House charged.
Now Trump’s team apparently hopes that a pliant Supreme Court will declare the 1974 Impoundment Control Act unconstitutional, permitting Trump—or Vice President J.D. Vance, should Trump not be able to fulfill his term—to shape the government without consulting Congress.
Because of the 2024 presidential election, Trump will soon be able to return the country to the neoliberal vision of the 40 years before Biden, supercharging it with the help of unelected billionaire Elon Musk, who recently claimed the title of being the “George Soros of the right,” a reference to the liberal philanthropist who has been the bogeyman of right-wing pundits.
But it’s not at all clear that Americans actually want that supercharged neoliberalism. As vote counts are continuing, it has become clear that Trump’s victory was slim indeed. New numbers from Nate Silver suggest he will not clear 50% of voters.
At the same time, a new study out today from Data for Progress showed that people who paid “a great deal” of attention to political news voted for Vice President Kamala Harris +6, while those who paid “none at all” went +19 for Trump.
Cont below
Heather Cox Richardson
Nov 14, 2024
Two snapshots today illustrate the difference between the economic—and therefore the societal—visions of the Biden-Harris administration and of the incoming Trump administration.
The Biden-Harris administration today released numbers revealing that over the past four years, their policies have kick-started a boom in the creation of small businesses across the country. Since the administration took office, entrepreneurs have filed more than 20 million applications for new businesses, the most of any presidential term in history. This averages to more than 440,000 applications a month, a rate more than 90% faster than averages before the pandemic. Black business ownership has doubled, and Hispanic business ownership is up by 40% since before the pandemic.
The administration encouraged that growth with targeted loans, tax credits, federal contracts, and support services. Small businesses are major job creators and employ about 47% of all private sector employees.
President Joe Biden rejected the “neoliberalism” of the previous 40 years that had moved about $50 trillion dollars from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%. Those embracing that theory maintain that the government should let markets operate without regulation, concentrating wealth among a few people who will invest it more efficiently than they can if the government intervenes with regulations or taxes that hamper the ability of investors to amass wealth.
Biden and Harris returned the U.S. to the model that both parties had embraced until 1981: the idea that the government should regulate business, provide a basic social safety net, promote infrastructure, and protect civil rights. That system had reduced extremes of wealth in the U.S. after the Great Depression and given most Americans a path to prosperity.
Biden’s policies worked, enabling the U.S. to recover from the pandemic more quickly than any other country with a modern economy, sending unemployment to historic lows, and raising wages faster than inflation for the bottom 80% of Americans.
It has also had social effects, most notably today with the announcement from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that the U.S. is seeing a historic drop in deaths from the street drug fentanyl. From June 2023 to June 2024, deaths dropped by roughly 14.5%, translating into more than 16,000 lives saved. Experts say the drop is due to better addiction healthcare, the widespread availability of the opioid reversal drug naloxone, and lower potency of street fentanyl.
If the record of the extraordinary growth of small businesses in the past four years is one snapshot, the other is a social media post from yesterday, in which former pharmaceutical executive Vivek Ramaswamy noted that the government spends $516 billion a year on “programs which Congress has allowed to expire.” “We can & should save hundreds of billions each year by defunding government programs that Congress no longer authorizes,” he wrote.
Bobby Kogan, who worked in President Joe Biden’s Office of Management and Budget and on the Senate Budget Committee, explained that Congress often authorizes spending as “temporary” in order “to encourage Congress to revisit it to update various parts of the bill, such as eligibility, benefits, etc.” But Congress can still fund the programs in appropriations bills.
Kogan noted that the largest program currently operating under expired authorization is veterans’ medical care.
Trump and his advisors embrace the neoliberalism Biden rejected. Rather than invest in the economy to create opportunities for middle-class Americans and those just starting out, they want to slash the existing government to free up more capital for investors.
Trump has tapped the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, who invested at least $132 million in cash in Trump’s campaign as well as the in-kind gift of the support of X, and former pharmaceutical executive Vivek Ramaswamy to run a “Department of Government Efficiency,” or DOGE, named for Musk’s favorite cryptocurrency.
According to the Washington Post’s Jeff Stein, Elizabeth Dwoskin, Cat Zakrzewski, and Jacob Bogage, people around Musk say the group is intended to “apply slash-and-burn business ideologies to the U.S. government.” Musk has vowed to slash “at least” $2 trillion from the federal budget and has warned it will create “hardship.”
That the people embracing this plan see a world in which a few elites run things showed in today’s social media post by the “DOGE.” The post called for “super high-IQ small-government revolutionaries willing to work 80+ hours per week on unglamorous cost-cutting. If that’s you, DM this account…. Elon & Vivek will review the top 1% of applicants.”
Such cuts would be enormously unpopular, and in the Washington Post yesterday, Stein, Dwoskin, Zakrzewski, and Bogage reported that Trump’s aides are exploring ways to enact dramatic cuts to the government without congressional approval. Key among those is simply refusing to release the money Congress appropriates for programs Musk and Trump want to cut. This is known as “impoundment,” and Congress made it illegal in 1974 after President Richard Nixon tried to shape the government to his wishes by refusing to fund congressional programs he opposed.
Trump tried to do this quietly in 2019 by refusing to release the money Congress had appropriated for Ukraine to fund its fight against Russian incursions until Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky smeared Biden. When the threat came to light, the House of Representatives impeached Trump. Although the Senate ultimately acquitted Trump, according to Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) all the Republican senators agreed he had done as the House charged.
Now Trump’s team apparently hopes that a pliant Supreme Court will declare the 1974 Impoundment Control Act unconstitutional, permitting Trump—or Vice President J.D. Vance, should Trump not be able to fulfill his term—to shape the government without consulting Congress.
Because of the 2024 presidential election, Trump will soon be able to return the country to the neoliberal vision of the 40 years before Biden, supercharging it with the help of unelected billionaire Elon Musk, who recently claimed the title of being the “George Soros of the right,” a reference to the liberal philanthropist who has been the bogeyman of right-wing pundits.
But it’s not at all clear that Americans actually want that supercharged neoliberalism. As vote counts are continuing, it has become clear that Trump’s victory was slim indeed. New numbers from Nate Silver suggest he will not clear 50% of voters.
At the same time, a new study out today from Data for Progress showed that people who paid “a great deal” of attention to political news voted for Vice President Kamala Harris +6, while those who paid “none at all” went +19 for Trump.
Cont below
Cont from above
Many of those voters got their information from social media or right-wing websites, but one of those today underwent a historic change. The satirical news outlet The Onion bought right-wing radio host and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’s InfoWars at auction. Jones’s property was up for sale because juries found him guilty of defamation and awarded his victims about $1.5 billion in damages. After the 2012 shooting at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut that killed 26 students and teachers, Jones insisted the event was a hoax designed to provide an excuse for gun safety regulations. He and his supporters harassed the victims’ families for years.
Jones appeared to be trying to keep control of InfoWars by having a company associated with him buy it up under the terms of the bankruptcy and restore it to him. But Sandy Hook families worked with The Onion to keep it from returning to Jones’s hands. Jones is screaming that the sale that took it away from him was a conspiracy. The company associated with him, First United American Companies, is already protesting the sale in court.
Jones rose to prominence in 1993, when he dropped out of community college to start a talk radio show that warned the government was making war on Americans. His shtick echoed the anti-communist grifters of the post–World War II years that promised small donors that their contributions could stop the creeping communism in the United States. Jones became popular enough that he went on to found InfoWars, which made him rich from the sale of nutritional supplements. The theme of InfoWars was that “There’s a war on for your mind!” and that only people like him could deliver the truth.
But his lies cost him a billion dollars, and now, noting that “InfoWars has shown an unswerving commitment to manufacturing anger and radicalizing the most vulnerable members of society,” The Onion has bought his website, which it plans to relaunch in January as a parody of Jones and a site that promotes gun safety legislation. But the chief executive officer of The Onion, Ben Collins, told Kim Bellware of the Washington Post: “It’s not just [Jones], it’s the people on Instagram trying to get you to drink raw milk; it’s the [multilevel marketing] people trying to get you to join a scam…. Those people have outsize impact in our completely bifurcated and balkanized media environment.”
—
Notes: https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/november-14-2024
Many of those voters got their information from social media or right-wing websites, but one of those today underwent a historic change. The satirical news outlet The Onion bought right-wing radio host and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’s InfoWars at auction. Jones’s property was up for sale because juries found him guilty of defamation and awarded his victims about $1.5 billion in damages. After the 2012 shooting at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut that killed 26 students and teachers, Jones insisted the event was a hoax designed to provide an excuse for gun safety regulations. He and his supporters harassed the victims’ families for years.
Jones appeared to be trying to keep control of InfoWars by having a company associated with him buy it up under the terms of the bankruptcy and restore it to him. But Sandy Hook families worked with The Onion to keep it from returning to Jones’s hands. Jones is screaming that the sale that took it away from him was a conspiracy. The company associated with him, First United American Companies, is already protesting the sale in court.
Jones rose to prominence in 1993, when he dropped out of community college to start a talk radio show that warned the government was making war on Americans. His shtick echoed the anti-communist grifters of the post–World War II years that promised small donors that their contributions could stop the creeping communism in the United States. Jones became popular enough that he went on to found InfoWars, which made him rich from the sale of nutritional supplements. The theme of InfoWars was that “There’s a war on for your mind!” and that only people like him could deliver the truth.
But his lies cost him a billion dollars, and now, noting that “InfoWars has shown an unswerving commitment to manufacturing anger and radicalizing the most vulnerable members of society,” The Onion has bought his website, which it plans to relaunch in January as a parody of Jones and a site that promotes gun safety legislation. But the chief executive officer of The Onion, Ben Collins, told Kim Bellware of the Washington Post: “It’s not just [Jones], it’s the people on Instagram trying to get you to drink raw milk; it’s the [multilevel marketing] people trying to get you to join a scam…. Those people have outsize impact in our completely bifurcated and balkanized media environment.”
—
Notes: https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/november-14-2024
I have mixed feelings about RFK Jr.'s appointment as head of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). I am proactive about removing additives and dangerous ingredients that corporations sell to Americans but remove for other countries such as England and Australia. I am not a fan of the FDA for that very reason.
However, I keep having flashbacks to when his anti-vaccine activism led to a measles outbreak in Samoa that resulted in the death of 83 people, mostly children.
I find it ironic that many who are anti-vaxxers as adults actually had vaccines against polio, measles, etc. as children.
I get the hype about the COVID-19 vaccinations because it was pushed through so quickly or wasn't an option in certain work environments; however, for the majority of us it was a choice. I had the vaccine, as I am immunocompromised. I also had the boosters, the last being in the spring of 2023.
I've also had the Pneumonia, Shingles, Hepatitis B ( I lost an aunt to that ), and it seems like one other, maybe RSV. I'd have to check my records.
So far, I'm healthy. As are my children. Brothers. Grandson. Friends. As a matter of fact. I've never lost anyone to an immunization. I have, however, lost people who weren't vaccinated.
I'd be very careful about preaching anti-vaccines in regard to children, especially if you've had them as a child yourself. Your life could've been saved by one, especially back in the 50-60's when polio was rampant.
https://www.npr.org/2024/11/14/nx-s1-5188411/robert-kennedy-trump-administration-health
Keep up with emerging diseases that we once thought were eradicated.
However, I keep having flashbacks to when his anti-vaccine activism led to a measles outbreak in Samoa that resulted in the death of 83 people, mostly children.
I find it ironic that many who are anti-vaxxers as adults actually had vaccines against polio, measles, etc. as children.
I get the hype about the COVID-19 vaccinations because it was pushed through so quickly or wasn't an option in certain work environments; however, for the majority of us it was a choice. I had the vaccine, as I am immunocompromised. I also had the boosters, the last being in the spring of 2023.
I've also had the Pneumonia, Shingles, Hepatitis B ( I lost an aunt to that ), and it seems like one other, maybe RSV. I'd have to check my records.
So far, I'm healthy. As are my children. Brothers. Grandson. Friends. As a matter of fact. I've never lost anyone to an immunization. I have, however, lost people who weren't vaccinated.
I'd be very careful about preaching anti-vaccines in regard to children, especially if you've had them as a child yourself. Your life could've been saved by one, especially back in the 50-60's when polio was rampant.
https://www.npr.org/2024/11/14/nx-s1-5188411/robert-kennedy-trump-administration-health
Keep up with emerging diseases that we once thought were eradicated.
November 15, 2024
Heather Cox Richardson
Nov 16, 2024
Three years ago today, President Joe Biden signed into law the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, more popularly known as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act. That law called for approximately $1.2 trillion in spending, about $550 billion newly authorized spending on top of regular expenditures. As Biden noted today, it was “the largest investment in our nation’s infrastructure in a generation.”
In the past three years, the Biden administration launched more than 66,000 projects across the country, repairing 196,000 miles of roads and 11,400 bridges, as well as replacing 367,000 lead pipes and modernizing ports and airports. Today the administration announced an additional $1.5 billion in funding for railroads along the Northeast Corridor, which carries five times more passengers a day than all the flights between Washington, D.C., and New York City.
In his first term, Trump had promised a bill to address the country’s long-neglected infrastructure, but his inability to get that done made “infrastructure week” a joke. Biden got a major bill passed, but while the administration nicknamed the law the “Big Deal,” Biden got very little credit for it politically. Republicans who had voted against the measure took credit for the projects it funded, and voters seemed not to factor in the jobs and improvements it brought when they went to the polls last week.
This lack of credit has implications beyond the Biden administration. As economist Mark Zandi told Joel Rose of NPR, “We need better infrastructure. We should continue to invest. But that's going to be hard to do politically because lawmakers are seeing what's happening here and they’re not getting credit for it.”
Meanwhile, President-elect Trump has been rapidly naming people he intends to nominate for his cabinet, and it is not going well. As Brian Tyler Cohen wrote on Bluesky: “The same people who’ve spent the last several years decrying ‘unqualified DEI hires’ are now shoehorning through Cabinet nominations who can’t even pass a basic background test.”
Cohen was not joking; Evan Perez, Zachary Cohen, Holmes Lybrand, and Kristen Holmes of CNN reported today that Trump’s transition team is skipping background checks by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, claiming that they are slow and intrusive.
But that lack of background checks has already mired Trump’s picks in controversy.
Trump has said he would nominate Pete Hegseth, an Army National Guard veteran and co-host on the weekend edition of Fox & Friends, to become the secretary of defense. Since that announcement, news has broken that a fellow service member who was the unit’s security guard and on an anti-terrorism team flagged Hegseth to their unit’s leadership because one of his tattoos is used by white supremacists. Extremist tattoos are prohibited by army regulations.
News broke today that a woman accused Hegseth of sexually assaulting her after a Republican conference in Monterey, California, in 2017. According to Michael Kranish, Josh Dawsey, Jonathan O’Connell, Dan Lamothe, and John Hudson of the Washington Post, the woman who made the allegation said the alleged victim had signed a nondisclosure agreement with Hegseth.
Now the transition team fears more revelations. “There’s a lot of frustration around this,” a member of the transition team told the Washington Post reporters. “He hadn’t been properly vetted.”
Causing even more headaches today for the transition team was Trump’s appointment of former Florida representative Matt Gaetz to become the United States attorney general. Immediately after Trump said he would nominate Gaetz, the representative resigned his congressional seat, forestalling the release of a House Ethics Committee report concerning allegations of drug use and that Gaetz had taken a minor across state lines for sex.
It is reported that the victim, who was a seventeen-year-old high-schooler at the time, testified before the committee.
After spending an evening with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) said that publishing the report would be “terrible” and that he would “strongly request that the Ethics Committee not issue the report because that’s not the way we do things in the House.”
This, despite the fact that, as historian Kevin Kruse noted, “[f]or years now, the right has been accusing Democrats of running a shadowy conspiracy to protect politicians who are sex predators.” And, in fact, the House Ethics Committee did release a report on Representative William Boner (D-TN) in 1987 for allegations of corruption after he had already resigned the office to become mayor of Nashville.
And then there is Trump’s tapping of former Hawaii representative Tulsi Gabbard to be director of national intelligence (DNI). Gabbard’s ties to America’s adversaries, including Russia’s president Vladimir Putin and Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, have raised serious questions about her loyalty. Making her the country’s DNI would almost certainly collapse ongoing U.S. participation in the Five Eyes intelligence alliance in which the U.S., the U.K., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand have shared intelligence since World War II.
As former Illinois representative Joe Walsh wrote: “Donald Trump just picked someone to oversee our intelligence who, herself, couldn’t pass a security clearance check. She couldn’t get security clearance. She couldn’t get a job in our intelligence community. Because she’s too compromised by Russia. Yet Trump picked her to run the whole thing.”
Trump appears eager to demonstrate his control of Republicans in the Senate by ramming through appointments that will collapse the rule of law at home (Gaetz) and the international rules-based order globally (Hegseth and Gabbard). When Texas senator John Cornyn said he would like to see the Gaetz report, Trump loyalist Steve Bannon said: “You either get with the program, brother, or you're going to finish third in your primary.” A member of Trump’s transition team said that Trump wants to bend Republican senators to his will “until they snap in half.”
Cont below
Heather Cox Richardson
Nov 16, 2024
Three years ago today, President Joe Biden signed into law the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, more popularly known as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act. That law called for approximately $1.2 trillion in spending, about $550 billion newly authorized spending on top of regular expenditures. As Biden noted today, it was “the largest investment in our nation’s infrastructure in a generation.”
In the past three years, the Biden administration launched more than 66,000 projects across the country, repairing 196,000 miles of roads and 11,400 bridges, as well as replacing 367,000 lead pipes and modernizing ports and airports. Today the administration announced an additional $1.5 billion in funding for railroads along the Northeast Corridor, which carries five times more passengers a day than all the flights between Washington, D.C., and New York City.
In his first term, Trump had promised a bill to address the country’s long-neglected infrastructure, but his inability to get that done made “infrastructure week” a joke. Biden got a major bill passed, but while the administration nicknamed the law the “Big Deal,” Biden got very little credit for it politically. Republicans who had voted against the measure took credit for the projects it funded, and voters seemed not to factor in the jobs and improvements it brought when they went to the polls last week.
This lack of credit has implications beyond the Biden administration. As economist Mark Zandi told Joel Rose of NPR, “We need better infrastructure. We should continue to invest. But that's going to be hard to do politically because lawmakers are seeing what's happening here and they’re not getting credit for it.”
Meanwhile, President-elect Trump has been rapidly naming people he intends to nominate for his cabinet, and it is not going well. As Brian Tyler Cohen wrote on Bluesky: “The same people who’ve spent the last several years decrying ‘unqualified DEI hires’ are now shoehorning through Cabinet nominations who can’t even pass a basic background test.”
Cohen was not joking; Evan Perez, Zachary Cohen, Holmes Lybrand, and Kristen Holmes of CNN reported today that Trump’s transition team is skipping background checks by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, claiming that they are slow and intrusive.
But that lack of background checks has already mired Trump’s picks in controversy.
Trump has said he would nominate Pete Hegseth, an Army National Guard veteran and co-host on the weekend edition of Fox & Friends, to become the secretary of defense. Since that announcement, news has broken that a fellow service member who was the unit’s security guard and on an anti-terrorism team flagged Hegseth to their unit’s leadership because one of his tattoos is used by white supremacists. Extremist tattoos are prohibited by army regulations.
News broke today that a woman accused Hegseth of sexually assaulting her after a Republican conference in Monterey, California, in 2017. According to Michael Kranish, Josh Dawsey, Jonathan O’Connell, Dan Lamothe, and John Hudson of the Washington Post, the woman who made the allegation said the alleged victim had signed a nondisclosure agreement with Hegseth.
Now the transition team fears more revelations. “There’s a lot of frustration around this,” a member of the transition team told the Washington Post reporters. “He hadn’t been properly vetted.”
Causing even more headaches today for the transition team was Trump’s appointment of former Florida representative Matt Gaetz to become the United States attorney general. Immediately after Trump said he would nominate Gaetz, the representative resigned his congressional seat, forestalling the release of a House Ethics Committee report concerning allegations of drug use and that Gaetz had taken a minor across state lines for sex.
It is reported that the victim, who was a seventeen-year-old high-schooler at the time, testified before the committee.
After spending an evening with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) said that publishing the report would be “terrible” and that he would “strongly request that the Ethics Committee not issue the report because that’s not the way we do things in the House.”
This, despite the fact that, as historian Kevin Kruse noted, “[f]or years now, the right has been accusing Democrats of running a shadowy conspiracy to protect politicians who are sex predators.” And, in fact, the House Ethics Committee did release a report on Representative William Boner (D-TN) in 1987 for allegations of corruption after he had already resigned the office to become mayor of Nashville.
And then there is Trump’s tapping of former Hawaii representative Tulsi Gabbard to be director of national intelligence (DNI). Gabbard’s ties to America’s adversaries, including Russia’s president Vladimir Putin and Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, have raised serious questions about her loyalty. Making her the country’s DNI would almost certainly collapse ongoing U.S. participation in the Five Eyes intelligence alliance in which the U.S., the U.K., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand have shared intelligence since World War II.
As former Illinois representative Joe Walsh wrote: “Donald Trump just picked someone to oversee our intelligence who, herself, couldn’t pass a security clearance check. She couldn’t get security clearance. She couldn’t get a job in our intelligence community. Because she’s too compromised by Russia. Yet Trump picked her to run the whole thing.”
Trump appears eager to demonstrate his control of Republicans in the Senate by ramming through appointments that will collapse the rule of law at home (Gaetz) and the international rules-based order globally (Hegseth and Gabbard). When Texas senator John Cornyn said he would like to see the Gaetz report, Trump loyalist Steve Bannon said: “You either get with the program, brother, or you're going to finish third in your primary.” A member of Trump’s transition team said that Trump wants to bend Republican senators to his will “until they snap in half.”
Cont below
