Josh Marshall wrote this on Bluesky and I think it explains what’s going on with HHS as well as I’ve seen it anywhere:
It’s getting a lot of attn today. But even before today most of the country had very little idea of what has happened at NIH or through it the entire ecosystem of biomedical research in the US. Simply put, Musk, Kennedy & Trump exploded a bomb right in the middle of cancer cure research in the US.
On purpose. For many cancers, research has been put back years or decades. Alzheimers treatment and cure research similar story. If you know people who are survivors of these diseases and fear recurrence or have genetic dispositions or are just like everyone else and know they are liable to these and other diseases potential cures are now less likely to be there when you need them. You have to ask: what is the goal when you pull the plug on the whole ecosystem of cancer cure research? What’s the agenda? The answers are so dark and twisted most people struggle to believe it could be real.
But it is real. And it’s happened so quickly, most of the country doesn’t know it yet. Indeed, I got some key indications over the weekend that even people in the biomedical research world outside of NIH don’t get yet what’s happened. So the bomb has gone off but most people don’t realize it yet. It’s like Bobby Kennedy and Elon and Trump just drove a big semi full of fertilizer Tim McVeigh-style up in front of the national labs and detonated it.
The prospect of more life saving cures and treatments already got much bleaker. If you think you or a loved one might one day get one of these cancers, or Alzheimers, or various other dread diseases 10, 20, 30 years from now your chances have already dimmed because of what’s happened just in the last two months.
And now they’ve decided to up the pace and make it far worse because of a mix of difficult to fully comprehend pathological motives tied to political extremism, belief that AI will supplant medical research & that destroying the current research world will add to their wealth and political power and cement their hold over what was the American republic.
It will take a determined, smart, relentless and implacable counterattack to begin to undo the damage.
There are so many atrocities coming from this administration that it’s hard to decide the worst of it. But when it comes to the most harm to the most people in short, medium and long term, I think this might be it. The U.S. has been one of the most prolific leaders in medical research for a very long time and we’re giving it up because Trump wanted to cover up his support for vaccines during the pandemic — and stick it to the people who made him feel stupid about it. No one can tell him anything so he’s letting Bobby Jr play. Many people will die needlessly.
Let’s hope that we can put this Humpty Dumpty together again but the damage is already severe and it will take a massive effort. It’s heartbreaking.
The 25% tariff on all foreign made cars goes into effect at midnight. Aaaand:
Trump's pulling out a giant board to list the tariffs he's charging today. Looks like 34% China, 20% EU, 46% Vietnam, 32% Taiwan, 24% Japan, 26% India, 25% South Korea, 36% Thailand, 31% Switzerland, 49% Cambodia. Most other countries hid by podium, he's counting them off 1 by 1.
He almost certainly just made those numbers up in his head. There’s no rationale for any of it. He simply doesn’t understand what tariffs are, what trade is and why nations use them. He thinks it’s unfair that any foreign country would charge a higher aggregate tariff on U.S. goods than the U.S. charges them. That’s not how this works. It’s not how any of this works.
It would have been really great if he’d read a history book at some point:
“From 1789 to 1913, we were a tariff-backed nation and the US was proportionately the wealthiest it has ever been … then in 1913, for reason unknown to mankind, they established the income tax.”
He really believes that “America” was wealthier before the 20th century. Can he honestly be that fucking dumb? Can anyone?
Willard: They told me that you had gone totally insane, and that your methods were unsound.
Kurtz: Are my methods unsound?
Willard: I don’t see any method at all, sir.
[…]
I’m not saying that the Trump team’s thinking is unsound. I don’t see any thinking at all.
I don’t know how many people realize that the administration’s case for tariffs is completely incoherent, that it has not one but two major internal contradictions.
Here’s the story: Trumpers are claiming that tariffs
1. Won’t increase prices, because foreign producers will absorb the cost
2. Will cause a large shift in U.S. demand away from imports to domestic production
3. Will raise huge amounts of revenue
If you think about it for a minute, you realize that (1) is inconsistent with (2): If prices of imports don’t rise, why would consumers switch to domestically produced goods? At the same time, (2) is inconsistent with (3): If imports drop a lot, tariffs won’t raise a lot of money, because there won’t be much to tax.
So the public story about tariffs doesn’t make any sense. And Trump’s rants about tariffs go beyond nonsense. Here’s one of the latest:
Does he really believe that Canada is a major source of fentanyl? Worse, does he believe that fentanyl smugglers pay tariffs?
But is it all a cover for the real, probably sinister agenda of Trump’s tariff push?
No. There isn’t any secret agenda, devised by people who know that the public story is nonsense. How do I know that? Because who, exactly, do you think is devising this secret agenda?
As he goes on to point out, Trump’s advisers are all hacks and yes-men. There are no grown-ups.
This is all Trump’s whim, ungoverned by any expertise or any sense of responsibility. He believes his hype and all the rest of his sycophants and henchmen are just going along for the ride — and that’s assuming they know this is lunacy in the first place.
As Krugman puts it:
This is all about Trump’s gut feelings. A White House official told Politico that he likes the “shock and awe,” and that
Each country needs to panic and call. … Trump wants to hear you grovel and say you’ll cut a deal.
Since most of our trading partners aren’t in a groveling mood, trade war seems inevitable.
I’ll update this once the “big announcement” happens.
Here is a gift link to Masha Gessen’s new piece in the New York Times. But gird yourself. It’s as chilling as anything I’ve read in recent days:
“It’s the unmarked cars,” a friend who grew up under an Argentine dictatorship said. He had watched the video of the Columbia graduate student Mahmoud Khalil’s abduction. In the video, which Khalil’s wife recorded, she asks for the names of the men in plainclothes who handcuffed her husband.
“We don’t give our name,” one responds. “Can you please specify what agency is taking him?” she pleads. No response. We know now that Khalil was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, an agency of the Department of Homeland Security.
Those of us who have lived in countries terrorized by a secret police force can’t shake a feeling of dreadful familiarity. “I never realized until this moment how much fear I carried with me from my childhood in Communist Romania,” another friend, the literary scholar Marianne Hirsch, told me. “Arrests were arbitrary and every time the doorbell rang, I started to shiver.”
It’s the catastrophic interruption of daily life, as when a Tufts University graduate student, Rumeysa Ozturk, was grabbed on a suburban street by half a dozen plainclothes agents, most of them masked. The security camera video of that arrest shows Ozturk walking, looking at her phone, perhaps to check the address where she was supposed to meet her friends for dinner that night, when an agent appears in front of her. She says something — asks something — struggling to control her voice, and within seconds she is handcuffed and placed in an unmarked car.
Yikes. Read it all. This is where we are and all the people who say that if it can happen to these people it can happen to you are right. Trump and his henchmen are drunk with power and the one thing that people seem to like so far about Trump’s reign of terror is the authoritarianism. So far it’s limited to foreigners and that’s disgusting, especially considering what’s written on the Statue of Liberty. But it won’t be long before they use these powers against American citizens. Trump and his cronies are determined to exact revenge against his enemies and shut down dissent.
There is so much bad news happening in politics on a daily basis that sometimes you feel as if you’ve been physically pummeled by it. The Trump administration’s “shock and awe” campaign to overwhelm the country with one extreme policy after another, dismantling most of the government institutions that make America a first world country, is extraordinarily punishing. You can’t blame people for opting to tune out a bit and care for their emotional well-being.
I obviously can’t do that because it’s my job to pay attention but I have to admit that I find myself fighting pessimism if not total despair. It’s not my nature to feel that way but after last November and everything that’s happened since it’s been hard for me to find my usual resilience. This has been especially difficult as I’ve watched the leaders of the Democratic Party appear to be paralyzed in the face of their defeat and read what seems like hundreds of election postmortems that indicate that the Party is facing years in the wilderness despite the fact that Trump only won by 1.5% and didn’t even reach a majority.( I haven’t seen such energetic self-flagellation since 1984 when Walter Mondale lost to Ronald Reagan by 18 points and only won 13 electoral votes — his own state.)
It’s just so hard to accept that after January 6th and all his criminal behavior that people would actually restore him to the White House and even worse that he and his henchmen would call that puny win a mandate. But that’s what they’ve done and it’s felt as if we’re all just bystanders watching as they take Elon Musk’s metaphorical chainsaw to everything that’s good about America and celebrate our society’s darkest predilections.
I made a promise to myself that I was not going to get my hopes up about elections after all that. No more hopium for me. I said that I would certainly root for Democrats to win wherever possible and would do what I could to make that happen. But I just couldn’t let myself pore over polling and racehorse analysis anymore or allow myself to put too much stock in any individual victories.
I also pledged that I would not put my faith in Democratic leaders to show any creativity or inspiration. Whatever will get the party and the out of its funk is going to have to come from the ground up not the top down
During the Trump years the off-year elections have been the exciting bellwethers of the Resistance. In the past I would have been gleefully reading everything I could about the Pennsylvania state house races and following what was going on down in Florida in the two deep red GOP seats that might just be upsets. Not this year. I made a mental note, crossed my fingers that it would go well and just decided to wait and see what happened. The big Wisconsin Supreme Court race piqued my interest but I didn’t look too closely, having spent one too many late nights waiting for the Waukesha returns and I just couldn’t face it.
Well, I’m here to tell you that yesterday changed everything, for me at least. As I said, I have not put much faith in the leaders in DC, especially since they caved on the Continuing Resolution a couple of weeks ago. Unlike some people I didn’t disparage them for holding little rallies in front of the agencies where Elon Musk’s DOGE boys were swinging their wrecking balls. They were trying things, and that’s important. But for the most part they’ve just seemed ineffectual. Until now.
On Monday evening New Jersey Senator Cory Booker began a marathon floor speech to break the record that the odious Dixiecrat Strom Thurman set when he filibustered the Civil Rights Act on 1957 for 24 hours and 17 minutes. The symbolism of Booker, a Black Senator, doing that was obvious and excellent under our current circumstances where the Trump administration is doing everything it can to erase the story of racial minorities in American life. But I had no idea how thrilling it would be to see him stand there for what turned out to be 25 hours and 4 minutes and lay out the case against what Trump and the Republicans are doing. He opened his speech by saying:
“These are not normal times in our nation. And they should not be treated as such in the United States Senate. The threats to the American people and American democracy are grave and urgent, and we all must do more to stand against them.”
Apparently, it thrilled a lot of people. According to The Hill, “more than 350 million people liked the speech on TikTok live, as the senator approached 25 hours of holding the floor in the Senate chamber.” Hundreds of thousands of people watched it on C-SPAN. CNN and MSNBC all carried portions of it live throughout the afternoon. And what he said was great. No reading from the phone book or “Green Eggs and Ham.” No matter when you tuned in he was telling it like it is, for 25 straight hours with passion, insight, inspiration and empathy, like something out of a Frank Capra movie.
25 hours and 5 minutes. Cory Booker just gave the longest Senate speech of all time to protest Trump.
Dozens of letters, plenty of tears — here’s just a small snapshot of the NJ senator’s marathon floor speech: pic.twitter.com/6Z6xpvibhm
And then came the election returns. The two Florida races were won by Republicans as expected and by about 15 points, half the margin Trump received last November. But the big one in Wisconsin was a banger. I’d certainly paid attention in recent days to Elon Musk’s antics there where he poured more than $20 million into the right wing candidate’s campaign and handed out million dollar checks along with other cash goodies. He made the race a referendum on himself even turning up in person on Sunday telling people that it would be the end of America if the liberal won.
That didn’t work out for him. The liberal candidate, Susan Crawford, won by 10 points.
The upshot is that Musk’s threats to spend millions to punish rogue Republicans in primaries and Democrats in the general may not be quite as ominous as previously thought. The more people get to know him, the less they like what they see.
And even Trump’s clout may be more diminished than he realizes:
Jeffries: "One point that should have my Republican colleagues quaking in their boots. In the Florida 6th race, which was Trump +30 district, the margin was cut in half. There are 60 Republicans in the House who currently represent districts where Trump did worse than 15 or 16 points."
I couldn’t help but remember that the Democrats lost 63 seats in 2010, the Tea Party year when all those people were showing up at town halls to protest. It happens.
I still haven’t completely let out that big breath I took in last November but I’m starting to feel like the country is waking up to the reality of what’s going on and the Democrats are offering some leadership and the grassroots energy that’s going to be needed to fight this fight. I don’t think I’ll be smoking any hopium any time soon, but I can feel some optimism and energy rising. I’ll take it.
Popular Information reports on a Trump administration document outlining how its immigration enforcers decide who to deport to a Salvadoran hellhole:
The document, titled “ALIEN ENEMY VALIDATION GUIDE,” creates a point system to determine whether a Venezuelan over 14 years of age is a TDA member. Anyone scoring eight points or higher “are validated as members of TDA.” Those scoring six or seven can be deemed members of TDA depending on the “totality of the facts.”
Or someone can tell police you are TdA to get back at you. Or police can tell just by spotting your “Michael Jordan “Jumpman” tattoo or “high-end urban street wear” like a Jordan 23 jersey or high-tops.
Some of the scoring system is based on court records. For example, being found by a court to have violated “federal or state law…for activity related to TDA” is worth 10 points. Any court document “identifying the subject as a member of TDA” is worth five points.
But people can also be assigned points based on “Symbolism.” Someone with “tattoos denoting membership/loyalty to TDA” is assigned four points.
The "Jump Man" Tattoo in the HSI document? First posted online by a Michael Jordan fan account in 2015.
Got inked images of crowns, trains, stars, and clocks? Off to the gulag with you!
Under this criteria, LeBron James, who has a crown tattoo and, like many NBA players, dresses in high-end street wear before games, would be “validated” as a member of TDA. (James would be spared deportation to El Salvador because of his American citizenship.)
Other “symbols” that seem more specific fall apart under scrutiny. For example, the DHS document claims the tattoo “Real Hasta La Muerte,” which means “Till Death,” indicates allegiance to TDA. But “Real Hasta La Muerte” is the title of a popular album by Anuel, a Puerto Rican reggaeton artist.
That is why other federal government documents obtained by USA Today warn that tattoos are an unreliable way of determining gang allegiances. A 2023 document from U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s El Paso Sector Intelligence Unit notes that “Chicago Bulls attire, clocks, and rose tattoos are typically related to the Venezuelan culture and not a definite (indicator) of being a member or associate of [TDA].” No tattoo establishes membership in TDA because TDA “doesn’t require its members to get tattoos.”
Popular Information details cases with which readers may already be familiar.
If this approach seems comical, it is because Trump 2.0 hires only the best authoritarian know-nothings to do its bidding. Like DHS Secretary Kristi Noem:
A former spokesperson for DHS under the Biden administration responded to Noem’s video on X: “No American—Republican or Democrat—should accept DHS using [a Salvadoran prison] to sidestep the Constitution. Stripping due process is un-American, full stop. We don’t protect our country by abandoning the principles that define it. We’re better than this.”
Twenty-five-plus hours of video of Sen. Cory Booker condemning Trump policies says otherwise.
“There are things that go bump in the night…. And we are the ones who bump back.”
Wisconsin flipped a middle finger at Elon Musk last night. Sen. Cory Booker (D) of New Jersey filibustered in the Senate for a record-breaking 25-plus hours and stole the news cycle from Donald Trump even as Wisconsin voters elected Judge Susan Crawford, a Democrat, to the state Supreme Court by 10 points, maintaining the Democrats’ 4-3 advantage. Take the win. Kudos to Crawford and state Democrats led by chair Ben Wikler. Musk can take his oligarch money and shove it. The price of eggs was MIA.
Now what?
Today Donald Trump, the mad king, means to announce more tariffs, further destabilizing world trade. Liberation Day, he calls it. Staffers have said they don’t know what items Trump will go after from what countries and in what amounts, but whatever. In the background, Timothy Noah believes, is some Trumpish notion that he can eliminate the progressive income tax with tariff revenue. It makes no sense. The numbers don’t add up. But this is Donald Trump we’re talking about.
Trump is “testing the waters,” immigration advocate Douglas Rivlin tells Greg Sargent’s Daily Blast. Trump’s immigration enforcers don’t care about the rule of law. If they can arrest and deport any “usual suspects” at any time for any reason without due process. It won’t stop there. This was always about scaring immigrants into leaving the country and about looking tough on black and brown people for the MAGA base. They are pushing the envelope for how cruelly they can treat people random people without having to answer for it. The law is what Trump 2.0 says it is. Immigrants are criminals if it says they are. Or I am. Or you are.
Trump is simultaneously cracking down on free speech while Republicans claim to defend it on media platforms they closely control.
Masha Gessen, born in Moscow to Jewish parents, has seen it before: masked men in unmarked cars snatching people off the streets and whisking them off to jails unknown for seemingly random charges. “Shifting goalposts,” neighbors informing on neighbors. And secret lists (gift link):
It’s the lists. More than anything else, in fact, it’s the lists. A private company has launched an app called ICERAID, billed as a “protocol that delegates intelligence-gathering tasks to citizens that would otherwise be undertaken by law enforcement agencies.” The app promises rewards for “capturing and uploading images of criminal illegal alien activity” and possibly even bigger rewards for self-reporting — for adding oneself to the ICERAID registry if one is “an honest, hard-working undocumented immigrant with no criminal history.” The app, in other words, combines two time-tested secret-police techniques: incentivizing some people to denounce their neighbors and inducing others to add themselves to registries.
Trump 2.0 seems to have outsourced surveillance to groups like Mothers Against College Antisemitism. And “Betar U.S., a Zionist organization so extreme-right that the Anti-Defamation League has denounced it; and several other groups that, since the beginning of Donald Trump’s second term, have been reporting people to government authorities and cheering when they are detained, deported or fired.”
Last Friday, mere minutes after Columbia announced the name of its new interim president, Claire Shipman, an entity that calls itself Documenting Jew Hatred on Campus addressed Shipman on X: “We have identified faculty members” who, the group believes, should be purged. The self-appointed enforcers are vigilant. This, too, is a hallmark of a secret-police state.
The citizens of such a state live with a feeling of being constantly watched. They live with a sense of random danger. Anyone — a passer-by, the man behind you in line at the deli, the woman who lives down the hall, your building’s super, your own student, your child’s teacher — can be a plainclothes agent or a self-appointed enforcer.
We’ve seen that with Texas offering rewards for reporting doctors providing abortion or women seeking them or friends aiding them. Gessen demonstrates that informing on neighbors already is not limited to abortion care.
So savor the win in Wisconsin. Celebrate Booker’s rallying congressional Democrats to get off their butts. This isn’t over. Things that go bump in the night will not win if we bump back.
Cory Booker broke the filibuster record set by Dixiecrat racist Strom Thurman when he filibustered the Civil Rights Act of 1957. It’s only fitting. And he didn’t just read “Green Eggs and Ham”, he talked about what’s actually happening, right now, with passion and commitment.
Senator Booker: What kind of man is in the white house that makes fun of the disabled, who lies so much that the fact checkers lose count, that minimizes the pain and the suffering pic.twitter.com/yENAcc7sTm
"I don't want a Disney vacation of our history! I don't a whitewashed history, I don't want a homogenized history. Tell me the wretched truth about America, because that speaks to our greatness" — 20 hours into his speech, Cory Booker is spitting absolute 🔥 pic.twitter.com/IXxRaT5vKE
There are a lot of lefty types on social media pooh-poohing this as “performative” and I think that’s unfair. They’ve had to postpone votes because of it, it’s getting lots of attention and it’s driving the MAGA people crazy. It’s also energizing the Democrats in Congress which is a really important thing.
Ruben Gallego has put a hold on all VA nominees and Republicans in the House had to cancel votes for the rest of the week because the Democrats took down the rule (with the help of a few Republicans) and have ground legislation to a halt. Democratic Senators announced a “Social Security War Room” and while I don’t know what it adds up to, I do know that it’s vitally important to highlight that issue if they have any hope of defeating Republicans. I’m sure they can do more but at least they are doing something.
As Tim Miller has been saying for the last two months, Democrats should just stop worrying about what “strategy” they should use and go out and try things! They have no idea what’s going to work or what might be the inspiration that gets the party and the voters to realize that we are in a crisis.
A massive wave of job cuts got underway at US health agencies Tuesday, with some employees receiving early-morning emails saying their jobs were eliminated and some unable to access the building when they arrived at work.
It was not immediately clear how many employees had received notice Tuesday morning. The US Department of Health and Human Services has not responded to CNN’s request for comment.
HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said last week that 10,000 full-time employees would be cut on top of thousands who had already left and probationary employees currently on leave. He said the changes would make fighting chronic disease the priority and reduce “bureaucratic sprawl.” Kennedy promised that the department would do more with less.
After weeks of worry from agency staffers, job cuts — known as a reduction in force, or RIF — were sweeping across offices at multiple agencies, hitting leadership, longtime staffers, scientists, administrators and communications staff.
“It’s a bloodbath,” one US Food and Drug Administration employee said.
The have given some people living in the DC area the opportunity to take jobs at the bureau of Indian Affairs in Alaska, so that’s nice.
Bobby Jr is as bad as Musk at this point and the ramifications may be even more serious.He is a brainworm addled weirdo who truly believes that modern medicine must be destroyed and we should all “b build immunity” by getting deadly illnesses. If our immune systems aren’t up to the task, well, that’s just how it goes.
I don’t think you can overestimate the damage this monster is doing to our country and the world. It is monumental.
