58% say he isn’t honest and 54% say he doesn’t care about people like them. 65% don’t think he’s a good role model. And yet he is the president. I guess Biden being seen as senile and Trump calling Kamala Harris an idiot a couple of thousand times made him seem mentally sharp and that was the deciding factor?
Oy.
A few years back on Thanksgiving eve I ran this recipe for Pumpkin Cake and received a very nice note from journalist Karen Tumulty saying that she’d been tooling around the web for something to bake and tried it and liked it very much. Ever since then I’ve called it Karen Tumulty Cake. It’s easy even for non bakers and it really is very good. And while that pan is lovely, you could easily bake it in a regular bundt pan or regular cake pans.
Karen Tumulty Pumpkin Cake
For cake
* (3/4 cup) softened unsalted butter.
* 2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour plus additional for dusting pan
* 2 teaspoons baking powder
* 1 teaspoon baking soda
* 1 teaspoon cinnamon
* 3/4 teaspoon ground allspice
* 2 tablespoons crystalized ginger, finely chopped
* 1/2 teaspoon salt
* 1 1/4 cups canned pumpkin
* 3/4 cup well-shaken buttermilk
* 1 teaspoon vanilla
* 1 1/4 cups granulated sugar
* 3 large eggs
Icing
* 2 tablespoons plus 2 teaspoons well-shaken buttermilk
* 1 1/2 cups confectioners sugar,
* 1/4 cup chopped walnuts
* a 10-inch nonstick bundt pan
Preheat oven to 350°F. Butter bundt pan generously.
Sift flour (2 1/4 cups), baking powder, baking soda, cinnamon, allspice, and salt in a bowl. Whisk together pumpkin, 3/4 cup buttermilk, ginger and vanilla in another bowl.
Beat butter and granulated sugar in a large bowl with an electric mixer at medium-high speed until pale and fluffy, add eggs and beat 1 minute. Reduce speed to low and add flour and pumpkin mixtures alternately in batches, beginning and ending with flour mixture, just until smooth.
Spoon batter into pan, then bake until a wooden pick inserted in center of cake comes out clean, 45 to 50 minutes. Cool cake in pan 15 minutes, then invert rack over cake and reinvert cake onto rack. Cool 10 minutes more.
Icing:
Whisk together buttermilk and confectioners sugar until smooth. Drizzle over warm cake, sprinkle with chopped walnuts (keep a little icing in reserve to drizzle lightly over walnuts) then cool cake completely. Icing will harden slightly.
Easy as pie (easier, actually.)
Many Americans were sorely disappointed this week when Special Prosecutor Jack Smith decided to drag up and withdraw the January 6th indictment and the appeal of the classified documents case dismissal against Donald Trump. Smith said in his filings that the government stood by the charges but because of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel’s rule that a sitting president cannot be prosecuted, he had no choice but to drop the charges.The judges in the cases acceded to his requests and dismissed them both without prejudice although the idea that anyone will bring these cases in 2029 when Trump is 82 years old is fanciful. It’s over. He got away with it once again.
It’s not that we didn’t know it was coming one way or the other. In fact, from the moment the Supreme Court issued their shocking opinion about presidential immunity, the writing was on the wall that Trump would face no accountability even if he didn’t win the election. It went without saying that if he won, he would order the cases dismissed and that would be that. So, this wasn’t a surprise but like so much else we’ve experienced with Trump ,not the least of which was this last election, it was just one more depressing, ennervating event seemingly designed to drain the fight out of anyone who sees this man’s lawlessness and corruption as a blight on our nation.
That’s because one of the disturbing consequences of the repeated failures to hold him to account is the fact that he seems invincible, impervious to negative ramifications for his actions and is therefore seen by his followers as a kind of superhero with magical powers. It’s not true, of course. He’s no hero, super or otherwise. He’s just a shameless, corrupt con artist who has lied his way out of trouble his whole life. And now that he knows he has immunity from any criminal acts he might commit as president, he is willing to use his power to punish his enemies. He’s made it clear that Jack Smith and his team are among them.
On a radio show before the election he said that he would fire Smith in “2 seconds” because he now has immunity. He also declared, “we should throw Jack Smith out with them, the mentally deranged people. Jack Smith should be considered mentally deranged, and he should be thrown out of the country.” Do you think he bears a grudge at all?
When former Congressman Matt Gaetz withdrew after Trump’s daft nomination of him for Attorney General there was a great sigh of relief that someone so unfit would not be made the top law enforcement officer in the land. It was obvious that Trump had nominated him with the express purpose of going after his enemies in the DOJ and using the power of federal law enforcement to prove his accusations against the department’s alleged “weaponization.” He has scores to settle and Gaetz was champing at the bit to help him do it.
Unfortunately for Gaetz he’d made so many enemies on Capitol Hill that Trump was forced to tell him he had to go. (It almost certainly wasn’t because of any concerns about the sordid accusation of underage sex and drug use. Those were more likely considered qualifications since Trump related to his legal travails having a similar history himself.) There was hope after he dropped out that Trump might appoint someone more respectable to this important post and one who would be less likely to become his hatchet man. Fat chance.
He didn’t name a hatchet man, that’s true. He named a hatchet woman, one of his impeachment defense lawyers and the former Attorney General of Florida, Pam Bondi.
As David Dayen at the American Prospect has reported, her tenure at Florida AG was notorious for her ruthless treatment of Floridians whose homes had been unlawfully foreclosed upon. But America first became acquainted with Bondi during Trump’s first campaign when it was reported that at Florida AG she had dropped out of the class action suit againt the now defunct Trump University after having received a $25,000 check from the (also now defunct) Trump Foundation.
Bondi was an early Trump supporter when he ran for president, eagerly joining him on the campaign trail as one of his most energetic endorsers and making frequent appearances on Fox News. From that moment on she was always hanging around the periphery of Trump World in one way or another.
She gave a singularly unimpressive performance during Trump’s first impeachment trial but turned up later with Rudy Giuliani and his motley crew contesting the election results in 2020. She was in Pennsylvania insisting that “cheating” was going on and was among those who gathered at that historically bizarre press conference at the Four Seasons Landscaping office, which they had evidently mistaken for the Four Seasons Hotel.
Bondi has also made it clear where she stands on the idea of seeking retribution for the indictments against Trump. As far back as 2023 she has said that the prosecutors should be prosecuted:
Coming from a former prosecutor and state Attorney General that’s quite a statement. It’s clear that this sentiment is one of the main reasons Trump has chosen her for the job.
One of her most important tasks will be overseeing the mass deportation program. Trump’s chosen “immigration czar” Tom Homan, who has been tapped to run it, calls her “one hell of an AG” declaring that they plan to prosecute anyone who stands in the way of their plans:
The Washington Post reports that Trump wants to fire all of the DOJ attorneys who worked with the Special Prosecutors office, including the career civil servants which would require some extraordinary actions on the part of the new AG. She seems up for the task.
And that’s not all. According to the Post:
Trump is also planning to assemble investigative teams within the Justice Department to hunt for evidence in battleground states that fraud tainted the 2020 election, one of the people said.
You can bet that Trump’s new Attorney General will not make the mistake that former Attorney General Jeff Sessions made when he recused himself from the Russia investigation even though she clearly should having been involved in his attempt to overturn the election. She’s no doubt as eager to prove the Big Lie as he is. (If she isn’t Trump will not be happy.)
Bondi is the perfect Trump choice for this particular gig and I’m surprised he didn’t choose her in the first place. She has all the credentials Matt Gaetz didn’t have and will likely be much more competent in her pursuit of Trump’s vengeance agenda. It would be nice to think that she’ll be stopped in the Senate but there’s virtually no chance of that. It will be smooth sailing for her. She’s right out of Central Casting.
Salon
Trumpflation is coming. Better buy your knee pads before Donald Trump’s tariffs kick in after Jan. 20. He’ll expect us all to kowtow, dontcha know.
Greg Sargent’s Daily Blast features Margaret Sullivan, former public editor for The New York Times, regarding Trump’s recent demand that the paper apologize for unspecified bad coverage. “He actually thinks [the Times] should grovel and show submission to him now that he won,” says Sargent. Bad coverage being any story that doesn’t fluff his stuff:
Sargent: I want to read a key part of Trump’s rant about the times. He said, I don’t believe I’ve had a legitimately good story in The New York Times for years, and yet I won in record fashion, the most consequential presidential election in decades. Where is the apology? Now, it wasn’t in record fashion, but either way, Margaret, this neatly captures how Trump understands the media. He actually thinks it should grovel and show submission to him now that he won. I don’t think he accepts on the most basic level that the press’s role is to challenge power. At least he doesn’t accept it when he’s in power. What do you think we can take from that?
Sullivan: In some ways, it’s nothing new. He’s always been very manipulative about the press and he does not understand that the press is there to help citizens hold him accountable. This never entered his mind, or if it has, he’s quickly dismissed it. But yes, he does seem to think that because he won the election and again, of course it has to be put in these superlative and false terms, that therefore, the Times should apologize to him for anything that isn’t what he terms “a good story.” And a good story, of course, is a story that flatters him and makes him look great. We know and your sophisticated listenership here knows that that is not what The New York Times should be doing in any way. He has this thing about, I have a huge mandate here, and everybody needs to get in line and bow. That is worrisome for sure.
What Trump could do to punish journalists is to use the Espionage Act to throw journalists in jail for publishing leaked classified information. He could look to make an example of someone to put the fear of the Orange God into reporters. Sullivan cites the Morning Joe hosts traveling to Mar-a-Lago to make nice with Trump as an example of preemptive submission.
This is what we have to watch for in the Trump 2.0 era as the press tries to cover it:
Sullivan: There’s a strong sense that we don’t want to alienate this huge number of 75 million people in the country who voted for him because we want a big tent. We want all the customers and all the readers and everybody we can get. And we don’t want those people to be alienated by us. That’s the push and pull. And I don’t know how it’s going to play out. The Times made a very strong endorsement of Kamala Harris to their credit. At the same time, some of the coverage of Trump has been very white glove careful. So I guess we’ll see.
I guess we’ll see, indeed.
It’s infuriating. The media narratives post-Nov. 5 focus on what Kamala Harris did wrong in her upbeat, mere three-and-a-half month presidential campaign. What did Democrats do wrong? How did they lose this group, that group, etc. How must they reinvent themeslves after a sufficient period of sackcloth and ashes?
“Democrats Lost Their Base and Their Message,” declares the New York Times’ Nate Cohn. Trump’s reelection means “the end of the Democratic Party as we knew it.”
Really? 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? And the 77 million Americans who chose those outcomes (by a “landslide” of 1.6 points)? Their hands are clean?
Mehdi Hasan is not buying it either. He issued this rant against media narratives that Democrats veered too far left:
The ‘moderates’ got *their* candidate in every single election in which the Republicans nominated Trump: 2016 Clinton, 2020 Biden, 2024 Harris… and they lost to Trump two out of three times. And now they’re going to blame *the left* for that? No f*cking way.
“There was nothing left-wing about Harris,” Hasan reminds YouTube.
Clearly, Democrats need to make more inroads in rural America where Republicans eat their lunch.
Democrats need to advertise their accomplishments more. MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell Tuesday night mentioned how Alaska’s state ferry system will get replacement ferries and on-ship wifi that no one will know arrived because of Joe Biden’s economic policies. Some RW commenter will complain that Joe Biden didn’t give Alaska new ferries, the American taxpayer did. Then he’ll credit Donald Trump with the stimulus checks Congress appropriated to which Trump added his signature.
Democrats’ victories in North Carolina this year came not simply because the GOP slate was so extreme, but because voters are more inclined to trust the Democratic brand with local and state matters than with national ones. That, despite national Democrats’ polices being overwhelmingly popular. Just more popular than federal-level Democrats are.
I hear the regular complaints that the left sat on its collective hands as conservative billionaires consolidated control over the media in the last few decades. Why don’t “our” billionaires fight back? Has anyone asked them?
Vox asks Democrats like Washington Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez where Democrats went wrong (by 1.6 points). She insists, “I think there’s a lot of work to be done on conveying cultural respect and regard for the people that are building our country, that are growing our food, that are keeping the wheels on the bus and conveying that respect sincerely and thinking and listening with curiosity.”
No argument there. Yes, there is a toxic and widening class divide in the country, but given the structure of the Electoral College, bridging the rural-urban divide is perhaps more proximate to Democrats winning back the White House and the Supreme Court.
Blame the notion that Democrats have veered too far left on right-leaning media narratives. But also on Democrats’ failure to recognize that marketing is more effective than messaging.
Americans who chose Trump are not off the hook for what comes next. They need to take a long look into the mirror.
Amazing how prices have suddenly turned around ever since the election and everything is more affordable now, isn’t it?
I guess the whole thing happened in just the last three weeks. We sure didn’t hear about it before November 5th.
Imagine that. I heard on Tv that the TSA says that this Thanksgiving will be the biggest travel day in history. Also, that the top ten travel days in history all took place in 2024.
Dr. David Kessler ran Operation Warp Speed and is a very well known public health expert going all the way back to the George H.W. Bush administration. He is concerned:
I was the Biden administration’s chief science officer during Covid-19. I was co-leader of Operation Warp Speed, which began in Mr. Trump’s first term to accelerate the development of Covid-19 vaccines. I worked on the purchase and rollout of hundreds of millions of vaccines and on developing antiviral treatments. One of my jobs was to assess the trajectory of the virus.
Now I am back at my job teaching at the medical school at the University of California, San Francisco. I have been monitoring the spread of bird flu, also known as H5N1, and discussing the situation with colleagues around the country. My concern is growing.
So far, there have been no reports of person-to-person spread of H5N1, though there have been at least 55 confirmed cases of bird flu in humans in the United States, almost entirely among poultry and dairy workers. Those infections are presumed to be primarily the result of contact with animals. In addition, a child in Alameda County in California with minor respiratory symptoms tested positive for H5N1 recently; it is unclear how the child became infected. There are likely other cases out there that are not being diagnosed.
[…]
Here is where matters stand: The most recent risk assessment from the Johns Hopkins Center for Outbreak Response Innovation, issued on Nov. 19, listed the risk of infection to farm workers as high, and the risk of infection to people in contact with affected farm workers and animals as moderate. The Hopkins report said that “while the immediate risk to the general public and health care workers is still currently low, the long-term consequences of continued, uncontrolled transmissions presents a high risk to all populations.”
California has recently seen a significant rise in detections of H5N1 in dairy herds. Experts believe that animals at as many as half the dairy farms in California are infected. That is why it is important to pasteurize milk, which kills the virus. (All milk sold across state lines is pasteurized; 30 states allow the in-state sale of nonpasteurized milk, which is labeled “raw.”) Two states, Colorado and Pennsylvania, have agreed to test pooled milk from all farms before pasteurization to monitor spread. Bulk milk testing should be mandatory in all states with dairy farms to determine the full extent of the infection on these farms and also allow us to contain the virus. As if to underline the importance of such a mandate, bird flu was detected in raw milk bought retail last Thursday from a dairy producer based in Fresno, Calif.
Without mandatory testing, bird flu will continue circulating at farms across the country, which substantially increases the risk that the virus mutates and evolves to allow a human-to-human transmission that will be hard to stop.
There will be no mandatory testing of anything under the Trump administration. Even saying it is like waving a red flag. The word “mandatory” is a curse word, particularly when it comes to pubic health. California will probably do it, if they aren’t already. But this is a big country and this sort of thing can’t be confined to any one state.
No one knows how many mutations will be required to set off human-to- human respiratory spread. That could require many mutations and may never happen. But we could also be just two or three mutations away. If the virus begins to transmit efficiently among humans, it will be very difficult to contain, according to the Johns Hopkins assessment, and “the likelihood of a pandemic is very high.”
The incoming Trump administration needs to be prepared.
That’s not happening. They weren’t prepared the last time and they won’t be this time either, particularly with the new travelling freak show at HHS.
Maybe it won’t happen. But if David Kessler is concerned we should be too.
Will this happen? Doubtful. But you never know. It’s entirely possible that some kind of civil disobedience is going to be necessary if they follow through on these plans:
Democratic Denver Mayor Mike Johnston recently said he was prepared to go to jail over his opposition to the Trump administration’s border policies. The president-elect’s pick to be the next border czar responded that he’s willing to put him there.
“You are absolutely breaking the law,” Tom Homan, Trump’s “border czar” designate, told Fox News’ Sean Hannity. “All he has to do is look at Arizona v. U.S. and he would see he’s breaking the law. But, look, me and the Denver mayor, we agree on one thing. He’s willing to go to jail, I’m willing to put him in jail.”
Stephen Miller is in charge of this project with Tom Homan as his spokesperson. Do you want to place your hopes in Stephen Miller being unwilling to push the boundaries? I’m not.
The logistics of deporting tens of millions of people are daunting. The logistics of deporting a few million, are doable. There are going to be round-ups and confrontations. And since there is a ton of grift to be made, they’re going to build out the infrastructure to make that happen. Something’s going to happen, we just don’t know how bad it will be.
The new weight loss drugs are incredibly popular and incredibly expensive. Most insurance companies won’t cover them so they end up being available only to people who can afford to pay cash which is often well over a thousand dollars a month.
The medical consensus is becoming very clear that these drugs help prevent and treat serious disease by helping people control their weight. It’s not really debatable at this point. And most people believe that if Medicare and Medicaid cover them the price will come down and insurance companies will follow. The scale will make up for whatever profits the pharmaceutical companies are making at the higher price points.
The Biden administration is taking this up and in doing so is going to put the incoming Trump administration on a collison course with a public that is clamoring for these drugs:
The Biden administration, in one of its last major policy directives, proposed on Tuesday that Medicare and Medicaid cover obesity medications, a costly and probably popular move that the Trump administration would need to endorse to become official.
The proposal would extend access of the drugs to millions of Americans who aren’t covered now.
The new obesity drugs, including Wegovy from Novo Nordisk and Zepbound from Eli Lilly, have been shown to improve health in numerous ways, but legislation passed 20 years ago prevents Medicare from covering drugs for “weight loss.”
The new proposal sidesteps that restriction, specifying that the drugs would be covered to treat the disease of obesity and prevent its related conditions.
“We don’t want to see people having to wait until they have these additional diseases before they get treatment,” said Chiquita Brooks-LaSure, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, or C.M.S., noting the growing medical consensus that obesity is a chronic health condition.
RFK, the former heroin dealer and obvious steroid abuser doesn’t believe in them:
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., his choice to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, has suggested that obesity should be tackled through healthy eating, not drugs.
“If we just gave good food, three meals a day, to every man, woman and child in our country, we could solve the obesity and diabetes epidemic overnight,” Mr. Kennedy said on Fox News before the election.
He’s an idiot. But there’s another Dr. in the mix who’s been a big proponent:
Dr. Mehmet Oz, Mr. Trump’s choice to lead C.M.S., has been more enthusiastic; he featured patients who took the drugs on his old television talk show. Dr. Oz’s portfolio would include Medicare and Medicaid policy, but he would report to Mr. Kennedy.
Oz isn’t going to do anything RFK and Trump don’t want him to do, obviously. So I would expect the incoming adminstration to nix this idea immediately over costs and because it’s a Biden initiative. (Trump makes most of his decisions based upon whether the previous administration was for it or against it.)
I would hope that Democrats or patient advocates or someone will make sure that the public knows about this because if he nixes it it’s not going to be a popular decision. People desperately want these drugs and have been waiting now for a few years for them to be covered by Medicare and then private insurance. Best case, Trump goes ahead and approves it and if he doesn’t people should know that Biden wanted to provide it and Trump denied them.
What’s this all about? Well, yesterday the Times published this story in which people in Trump’s orbit are obviously trying to get rid of Boris Epshteyn:
President-elect Donald J. Trump’s legal team found evidence that a top adviser asked for retainer fees from potential appointees in order to promote them for jobs in the new administration, five people briefed on the matter said on Monday.
Mr. Trump directed his team to carry out the review of the adviser, Boris Epshteyn, who coordinated the legal defenses in Mr. Trump’s criminal cases and is a powerful figure in the transition. Several people whom Mr. Trump trusts had alerted him that Mr. Epshteyn was seeking money from people looking for appointments, three of the people briefed on the matter said.
David Warrington, who was effectively the Trump campaign’s general counsel, conducted the review in recent days, the results of which were described to The New York Times. The review claimed that Mr. Epshteyn had sought payment from two people, including Scott Bessent, whom Mr. Trump recently picked as his nominee for Treasury secretary.
Boris was a top adviser throughout the Trump exile at Mar-a-lago. Somebody’s not happy about it.
Then today, there was more palace intrigue, with a whole lot of innuendo:
President-elect Donald J. Trump has always demanded loyalty from his aides, but few have answered the call quite like Natalie Harp.
A 33-year-old former far-right cable host, Ms. Harp is nearly always at Mr. Trump’s side. She has written him a series of devotional letters, including one that said, “You are all that matters to me.” Once, when Mr. Trump was playing golf in Scotland, she ran behind his cart to keep him up to date with positive stories and social media posts.
Little known beyond Mr. Trump’s immediate orbit, Ms. Harp is now poised to play a potentially influential role in his White House, sitting right outside the Oval Office and acting as the conduit for a largely unsupervised flow of information to and from the president and helping him with his social media feed.
She has no official title, but during the campaign, colleagues referred to her as the “human printer” because she followed Mr. Trump around with a portable printer and a battery pack to charge it, so she could hand him information in hard copy, as he prefers.
But Ms. Harp also established herself at the center of a fast-moving carousel of text messages, articles and tidbits directed at Mr. Trump. This has generated concern among other aides who feel she has been far too willing to serve as a funnel for conspiratorial information at a moment when Mr. Trump appears more contemptuous than ever of attempts to manage or control him. One of her go-to news sources, people who have observed her say, is the website Gateway Pundit, which frequently disseminates conspiracy theories embraced by the far right.
In recent weeks, people with knowledge of her performance say, she has been more willing to operate within the transition team’s chain of command. Still, her role over most of the past three years speaks to Mr. Trump’s desire to maintain open channels to a wide assortment of people and unvetted sources of information. And it underscores his tendency to surround himself with people who tell him what he wants to hear. A top adviser to Mr. Trump used to say he would ask 49 people what they thought of something, stopping only at 50 if the last person told him what he wanted to hear.
Ms. Harp fits well inside those patterns, people who work with Mr. Trump have said. They have described her as a conduit, rather than a filter, and an instant enabler of his impulses. She types up his thoughts as he dictates them and she quickly dispatches them onto social media. She has sometimes arranged media interviews for him without the knowledge of Mr. Trump’s press team.
He calls her “sweetie” and treats her like his own daughter (which we know is a little weird as well…) She goes with him everywhere and does everything he wants. If anyone’s looking for a guardrail she isn’t it. She has no discretion and often enables his worst instincts on social media.
She’s a “devout Christian,” whatever that means these days, and Trump first spotted her on Fox news where she said he saved her life by signing legislation allowing experimental treatments. She was an anchor at OAN when he scooped her up to work for him in 2022. He believes that she’s the only staffer who really cares about him.
In 2023, Ms. Harp sent a series of letters to Mr. Trump that unnerved people around him, according to a half-dozen people with knowledge of them.
“You are all that matters to me,” she wrote in one of the letters, which were seen by The New York Times. The letters’ authenticity was confirmed by two people with direct knowledge of them. “I don’t ever want to let you down,” Ms. Harp wrote, thanking Mr. Trump for being her “Guardian and Protector in this Life.”
In another letter, she told Mr. Trump that she wanted to get back to “that synergy” she used to have with him, where “we’d talk about everything and nothing.”
“I want to bring you joy,” she wrote, “to feel like we can get through a day without ever having to talk ‘work.’”
Oookay. That sounds perfectly innocent…
Apparently nobody on the staff can stop her and considering Trump’s angry tweet (probably dictated to Harp) this morning.
This stuf is part and parcel of a Trump administration and it’s mostly just a distraction. On the other hand,it does show that Trump is still the ridiculous fool he’s always been and in some ways it’s our best hope that we’ll get out of this horrific four years alive. His shallowness and ineptitude are the only guardrails left. (Of course, they can be lethal as well…)