Here are the preliminary spending cut proposals from the GOP. Pay no attention to the Orwellian headings. The proposals are often the opposite of what they say. (For instance “strengthening Medicare for seniors” by cutting it by $479 billion makes no sense.)
STRENGTHEN MEDICARE FOR SENIORS ($479B) o Site Neutral – $146B o Uncompensated Care – $229B o Bad Debt – $42B o BCA Mandatory Sequester Extension – $62B
MAKING MEDICAID WORK FOR THE MOST VULNERABLE ($2.3T) o Per Capita Caps – up to $918B o Equalize Medicaid Payments for Able Bodied Adults – up to $690Bo Limit Medicaid Provider Taxes – $175B o Lower FMAP Floor – $387B o Special FMAP Treatment for DC – $8B o Repeal American Rescue Plan FMAP Incentive – $18B o Medicaid Work Requirements – $120B
REIMAGINING THE AFFORDABLE CARE ACT (ACA) ($151B) o Recapture Excess Premium Tax Credit – $46B o Limit Health Program Eligibility Based on Citizenship Status – $35Bo Repeal the Prevention Public Health Fund – $15B o Appropriate Cost Sharing Reductions – $55B
ENDING CRADLE-TO-GRAVE DEPENDENCE ($347B) o Reinstate the Trump-era Public Charge Rule — $15B o Reduce TANF by 10 Percent – $15B o Eliminate the TANF Contingency Fund — $6B o Reform the Thrifty Food Plan — up to $274B o Eliminate the Social Services Block Grant – $15B o SNAP Reforms – $22B
REVERSING BIDEN CLIMATE POLICIES ($468B) o Discontinue the Green New Deal Provisions in the 2021 Infrastructure Bill – $300Bo Repeal EV Mandate – $112B o Repeal IRA green energy grant s– $56B
OTHER: ($917B-$1T) o End the Student Loan Bailout – $200-330B o Rescind all Unspent COVID Money – $11B o Auction Spectrum – $60 billion o Repeal Orderly Liquidation Authority – $22 billion o Increase FERS Contributions – $45 billion o Other federal employee benefit reforms – $32 billion o Restrict emergency spending to recent average—$500B o Eliminate the TSP G Fund Subsidy – $47B
POTENTIAL TAX OFFSETS: ($227-$527B) o Green energy tax credits – $200 – $500B, depending on political viability o SSN CTC Requirement – $27B
It’s all very bad. But sitting here in Santa Monica where the smoke hasn’t yet cleared and the fires still rage, it’s stunning that they are prepared to slash all climate change mitigation policies, even Green new Deal programs that bring jobs to their own constituents.
They’re trying to kill us. That’s all there is to it.
Putin is very eager to meet Trump face to face, the Kremlin is making no prerequisite demands for the meeting to take place. There has presumably been a lot of back channel diplomacy before this official meeting. The Russian side aims to exclude Ukraine from the process completely and present itself to Trump as the side willing to compromise, while blaming Kyiv (and Biden’s administration) for the continuation of the war.
Sounds totally believable. I wonder if Trump will let anyone take notes.
The historic New York criminal case against Donald Trump — the first of its kind against a former president — closed with a whimper Friday morning, with the president-elect facing no consequences for faking business documents to cover up a sexual affair from American voters in 2016.
“Never before has this court been presented with such a unique and remarkable set of circumstances,” Justice Juan Merchan said from the bench. “This has been a truly extraordinary case.”
However, the judge pointed out that the soft landing to such a weighty case was directly due to Trump’s impending return to office — and he reminded Trump that the legal protections sparing him what could have been a more serious sentence, which could have included years in jail, belonged not to a man but to the person who temporarily sits at the White House’s Resolute Desk.
“Ordinary citizens do not receive those legal protections,” Merchan said as he delivered his sentence.
“To be sure, it is the legal protections afforded to the office of the president of the United States that are extraordinary — not the occupant of the office,” he said.
Yeah, whatever.
Merchan: "It's the office of the president that bestows those far reaching protections to the office holder and it was the citizenry that recently decided you should once again receive the benefits of those protections which include the supremacy clause and presidential immunity" pic.twitter.com/uH8Tf7iXAy
“It’s been a political witch hunt. It was done to damage my reputation so I would lose the election, and obviously, that didn’t work.”
Every day I am reminded that tens of millions of my fellow Americans endorsed not just Trump but the idea that a president should be immune from all accountability for everything he does. It’s nihilistic and shallow to just throw up your hands and say “nothing matters.” But damn, some days it’s really hard not to think that.
1.10.25 11 am ET – Washington, D.C.- CNN Newsroom Anchor, Jim Acosta @acosta Audio of Trump's Sentencing hearing ( 27 minutes) pic.twitter.com/XPb6dV8BMH
Over at The American Prospect, Micah Sifry has assembled a list of DNC members ahead of the election of new party officers on Feb. 1. The New York Times reported on the two front runners in November. (I have a favorite for chair.) Your state’s members might want to hear from you about yours. March for our Lives co-founder and Parkland school shooting survivor, David Hogg, is running for 1st vice chair. I haven’t followed who else is running.
So, while some joke that the race for DNC chair is the ultimate high school class president election, whoever holds the office will have a significant role in how Democrats respond to Trump, how they rebuild, what changes they make to their media, technology, and fundraising practices, and how the 2028 presidential selection process plays out.
The problem is that the DNC member list is not publically available. Some state parties publish the list of their members (mine does), but others do not. Some you can figure out. Kinda.
Michael Kapp, a DNC member from California who was first elected to that position by his state party’s executive committee in 2016, told me the list isn’t public “because it’s the DNC—it’s a black box.” He told me that leadership holds tightly to the list to prevent any organizing beyond their control.
Kapp adds later:
“There are incentives for the DNC to keep us [members] apart,” Kapp added. “So we can’t organize, so we can’t talk to one another, so we can’t grow and learn.” Most crucially, “so we can’t organize against, or, if we wanted, in favor of whatever leadership wanted. By keeping us apart, they’re really able to organize and control these meetings from the top down.”
That sounds familiar. When years ago I assembled county chair contact lists by state for distributing For the Win, there appeared to be no public listing of county chairs on the New York state party’s website (which seemed to exist primarily for soliciting donations; that has since changed). A former member of New York’s City Council at the time told me the reason was that the old boys in Albany didn’t want any independent organizing among their members either. (Albany County, BTW, seemed to have two live websites, one an obvious draft, misspellings and all.)
Sifry and TAP are providing the list so people outside the party’s inner circle might weigh in with their state’s members on who leads the Democratic Party after Feb. 1.
The list we are publishing was leaked to me by a trusted source with long experience with the national party. Like Kapp, this person thinks it’s absurd that the party’s roster of voting members is secret. Indeed, since there is no official public list, each of the candidates running for chair and other positions has undoubtedly had to create their own tallies from scratch—making it very likely our list comes from a candidate’s whip operation.
To protect individuals’ privacy, we’ve removed everyone’s phone numbers and email addresses—though in some cases people do make that information public on their own. By drawing on that data along with publicly available information from state party websites, news reports, and other biographical information online, we’ve been able to confirm the accuracy of most of the names provided. (One note: There are 449 names on the list, but chair Jaime Harrison is technically not a voting member, leaving 448 who will select the next chair.)
It’s Friday. Allow me to geek out a bit. I worked for decades as a mechanical engineer, a P.E., specifically in piping departments of major consulting firms, even more specifically, in pipe stress analysis. (Here’s the Generative AI explanation.) The nonsense being spewed by Trump 2.0 and other RW hacks about the fires in Los Angeles and hydrants with no water gets under my skin. Especially Trump’s “little fish” idiocy.
Thursday night’s late-night shows were focused on the devastation of the Los Angeles fires, as well as incoming President Trump’s bizarre response to them.
“Daily Show” host Desi Lydic played a clip of Trump rambling on about smelt, continuing to spread a debunked conspiracy theory about the state’s water supply.
“I tried to get Gavin Newsom to allow water to come — you’d have tremendous water out there — they send it out to the Pacific, because they’re trying to protect a tiny little fish — which is in other areas, by the way — called the smelt. For the sake of the smelt, they have no water,” Trump said.
Lydic offered a rebuttal, saying “And for the record, no, the L.A. fires have nothing to do with smelt. But in Trump’s defense, words are hard. And smelt only has one syllable, while climate change has three.”
In fact, “not in their own minds” experts tell the Washington Post that California’s reservoirs stand at historically high levels. Supply is not the problem. Demand is. Getting the water to where you need it is.
To provide reliable water pressure in hilly areas, cities install holding tanks like those at the top, positioned strategically at the top of local mountains, the way cities in flat areas pump water, slowly, to fill water towers standing high above the local terrain. In both cases, gravity does the rest. Keeping these tanks filled in a system under severe stress is a problem (emphasis mine):
Janisse Quiñones, head of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, said the ferocity of the fire made the water demand four times greater than “we’ve ever seen in the system.”
Ms Quiñones said hydrants are designed for fighting fires at one or two houses at a time, not hundreds, and refilling the tanks also requires asking fire departments to pause firefighting efforts.
Refilling those tanks while the water system down below is under historic demand too is even tougher. In the case of the Pacific Palisades fire, like I said (Washington Post):
In order for water to be piped uphill to hydrants in Pacific Palisades, it is collected in a reservoir, pumped into three million-gallon, high-elevation storage tanks, then propelled by gravity into homes and fire hydrants.
DWP spokesman Bowen Xie said the agency had filled its 114 water storage tanks before the blaze, but after the Palisades Fire erupted on Tuesday, water demand quadrupled in the area, lowering the pressure required to refill the three local storage tanks.
By 4:45 p.m., the first of the three tanks ran out of water, said Janisse Quiñones, DWP’s chief executive and chief engineer. The second tank ran empty about 8:30 p.m., and the third at 3 a.m. Wednesday.
“We had a tremendous demand on our system in the Palisades,” she said at a Wednesday briefing. “We pushed the system to the extreme.”
Supply is not the problem.
Marty Adams, former general manager and chief engineer at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, echoed those concerns. He said the agency’s water pump-and-storage system, like others nationwide, was designed to meet fire protection standards based on the water needed to battle fires at several homes or businesses, not wildfires that consume whole neighborhoods.
“None of that’s ever been based on the entire neighborhood going up. If that’s the new norm, that’s something that’s got to be figured in,” he said. “Nobody designs a domestic water system for that. It would be so overbuilt and so expensive.”
My morning man on Hullabaloo, Tom Sullivan lives in Asheville North Carolina and just went through an epic flood a couple of months ago. Now I'm going through a literal firestorm on the opposite coast in LA. This is all climate change, weird weather systems all over the planet.
Nobody would pay for that. Let’s get real. We heard similar complaints (from RW critics looking to score points) after Hurricane/Tropical Storm Helene hit my town.
Helene’s apocalyptic flooding at the end of September ripped out the major water mains supplying Asheville, leaving us without water pressure for weeks and without water certified drinkable until mid-November. Oh, but those lefties running Asheville who replaced the water mains that washed out in 2004 flooding were responsible/irresponsible because they buried the replacement lines ONLY 25 ft deep!
Donald Trump is not the only walking advertisement out there for the Dunning-Kruger effect.
A Nazi Poster from 1941: The Polish-language words translate roughly to “Jews are lice; they cause typhus.”
I have been told that we’re not supposed to talk about Hitler and the Nazis because it evokes unpleasant comparisons to the modern authoritarian movement that’s getting ready to assume power in the United States. Indeed, we’re supposed to try to “make deals” with them so it wouldn’t be prudent to say anything that might make them mad. At least that’s what I hear…
Nonetheless, I don’t see how we can talk about this without mentioning the Nazis so I will:
President-elect Donald J. Trump is likely to justify his plans to seal off the border with Mexico by citing a public health emergency from immigrants bringing disease into the United States.
Now he just has to find one.
Mr. Trump last invoked public health restrictions, known as Title 42, in the early days of the pandemic in 2020, when the coronavirus was tearing across the globe. As he prepares to enter office again, Mr. Trump has no such public health disaster to point to.
Still, his advisers have spent recent months trying to find the right disease to build their case, according to four people familiar with the discussions. They have looked at tuberculosis and other respiratory diseases as options and have asked allies inside the Border Patrol for examples of illnesses that are being detected among migrants.
They also have considered trying to rationalize Title 42 by arguing broadly that migrants at the border come from various countries and may carry unfamiliar disease — an assertion that echoes a racist notion with a long history in the United States that minorities transmit infections. Mr. Trump’s team did not respond to a request for comment.
They seem to be serious. As I posted earlier, Stephen Miller told the GOP Senators that they are going to use Title 42.
Nazi propaganda often portrayed people persecuted by the regime as vermin, parasites, or diseases. Nazi ideology focused on the idea that Germany’s “racial purity” was under attack from the “blood of weaker peoples,” and Nazi propaganda often depicted Jews, political opponents, and others as parasites that threatened the overall health of the so-called “national community” (“Volksgemeinschaft“).1 During the years of the Nazi regime, German doctors argued that Jews spread disease. Reflecting common themes in Nazi propaganda, these medical professionals repeatedly pushed the false claim that Jews were responsible for outbreaks of typhus—a deadly contagious disease spread by lice.2
The Nazi propaganda poster featured here was created in 1941 for public display in German-occupied Poland. The Polish-language words translate roughly to “Jews are lice; they cause typhus.” Designed to link Jews and typhus closely together in the minds of non-Jewish Poles, the poster shows one of the feared typhus-ridden lice drawn on top of the face of a Jewish man that has been made to look like a skull. Several other examples of antisemitic Nazi propaganda depict Jews covered in lice, but this image seems designed to suggest that Jews and lice are similar creatures equally responsible for spreading the disease.
German doctors and public health officials in the Nazi regime helped advance these antisemitic ideas. They did not acknowledge that the German invasion of Poland and the creation of ghettos were actually responsible for creating typhus epidemics in occupied Poland by imposing hunger, poverty, overcrowding, and unsanitary conditions.3 Instead, German medical professionals published essays claiming that Jewish people’s supposedly “low cultural level” and “uncleanliness” were to blame.
The respected status of German physicians helped spread the lie that Jews were responsible for spreading typhus. Concerned only with preserving the health of German personnel, German public health officials in Poland repeatedly urged occupation authorities to isolate Jews further from the rest of the population and deny them access to medicine.4 Their professional medical advice was used to rationalize the creation of ghettos throughout occupied Poland.5 German occupation authorities used posters like this one to spread these unfounded justifications for the isolation of Jews from Polish society.
It’s just a good thing that only doctors and scientists of the highest integrity will be manning the government health agencies under Trump.
Trump and his henchmen met with Republican Senators yesterday to preview his immediate plans.
Senators were given previews of some of what they were told would be 100 executive orders, two sources who were in the room told Axios.
Stephen Miller, Trump’s longtime immigration adviser, dove into how they intend to use executive power to address the border and immigration starting Day 1.
It’s unclear if all will be technical executive orders, or more broadly executive actions taken by Trump or federal agencies.
One big border plan: Reinstating Title 42, according to multiple sources.
The pandemic-era public health policy cites concerns about spreading illness to allow for the rapid expulsion of migrants at the border — preventing them from even a shot at asylum.
There were millions of Title 42 expulsions from early in the COVID pandemic until President Biden ended the policy in 2023.
Other executive actions and plans that Miller outlined included:
More aggressively using a part of the Immigration and Nationality Act — 287(g) — which allows some state and local law enforcement to assist in some of the duties of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Building the border wall, constructing soft-sided facilities to hold migrants and implementing other asylum restrictions.
The incoming Trump administration is considering conducting a high-profile raid targeting undocumented immigrants in its initial days, according to three people familiar with the discussions. The raid could target immigrants allegedly living in the United States illegally at a workplace in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area, the people said.
In meetings between the Trump transition team and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials, the Trump team has repeatedly asked about resources and logistics immediately available to carry out workplace raids, the three people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they’re not authorized to speak to the media about transition discussions, said.
Maybe they could come out here to LA to do it. They could find some immigrants who’ve been left homeless from the fires and really give their rabid base a thrill.
It sounds like they are going to get the show on the road the minute they get back in the White House. I guess this is what America voted for.
By all indications, at least nine Senate Democrats will vote to advance the Laken Riley Act, a sweeping measure that mandates the detention of undocumented immigrants who have committed nonviolent crimes, all but ensuring that it will move forward. This is a classic GOP “message bill”: It forces Democrats to either oppose the package, creating instant ad fodder against them, or swallow the whole thing, even though it contains some awful policies that most Democrats would surely oppose in isolation.
Unfortunately, some Senate Democrats are making this mess worse than it has to be—and in so doing, are flirting with an early surrender to Donald Trump. It suggests that some Democrats, spooked by Trump’s comeback, have already decided there’s no percentage in even attempting to challenge anything carrying the aura of “toughness” on immigration. That doesn’t bode well for their capacity to resist the terrible crackdown that’s coming, but fortunately, it’s not too late to find a better path.
Of particular note here: Senators John Fetterman of Pennsylvania and Ruben Gallego of Arizona. When they endorsed the bill this week, it appeared inevitable that more Democratic senators would follow, given that each seems to know how to politically survive in challenging swing states. And indeed, the nine that have now backed the bill ensures that it will get 60 votes needed to break cloture and move forward.
Apparently, Gallego and Fetterman raced to gratuitously endorse the bill upsetting the rest of the Democrats. Even worse, they did it in ways that reportedly help Trump!
Senator Alex Padilla of California has been telling colleagues that rushing to endorse the bill in full is not necessary and potentially harmful. “Democrats should use the leverage we have in the Senate to demand practical and necessary improvements,” Padilla told me in a statement.
It looks like Manchin and Sinema passed the torch.
You can read more about this despicable bill here.
Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) plans to meet with President-elect Trump, a source familiar with the matter confirmed to Axios.
Fetterman has become a voice of bipartisanship and is among the few Democratic senators to have met with Trump’s Cabinet nominees, showing a rare willingness to engage with parts of the MAGA camp.
“President Trump invited me to meet, and I accepted,” Fetterman said in a statement.
“I’m the Senator for all Pennsylvanians — not just Democrats in Pennsylvania,” he continued. “I’ve been clear that no one is my gatekeeper. I will meet with and have a conversation with anyone if it helps me deliver for Pennsylvania and the nation.”
The meeting will take place at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago, CBS reports.
Sen. Markwayne Mullin says Obama is "kissing the ring" with Trump at Carter's funeral because "Trump is the most popular man in the world, and probably the most popular man in our lifetime around the world. And everybody recognizes that now." pic.twitter.com/x5rrVbJGpz
