Is this a funciton of people turning off the news? If so, maybe we should turn it back on…
Mandate? Looks like it …
46% not motivated? That’s a bad sign:
Maybe people are just tired. I’ll refrain from freaking out for a while on that one. But I’m worried that he’s so fully normalized that most people won’t react at all to what he does:
Will this matter or will everyone ust move on to the next thing?
Pay no attention to the partisanship when you analyze whether or not “economic anxiety” is the explanation for election outcomes, especially GOP partisanship. Obviously, that’s completely meaningless.
The Cabinet:
Note that more than half the people think they should be loyal to Trump. Slowly but surely it’s happening…
Only a little over 50% approve of Trump’s tariffs. But this is just depressing although earlier polls showed this so we shouldn’t be surprised:
I guess we should be happy that more don’t support using the military — for now.
Trump will have a honeymoon it appears. And if Project 2025 is any gyude, and it should be, they are planning to take full advantage of it.
Can we stop parroting that we can’t normalize Donald Trump? Or autocracy, kleptocracy, oligarchy, etc.? Look around.
Anyone who says, “Well, that’s never going to happen,” to warnings that some batshit insane event might happen under the coming Trump administration has not been paying attention over the last decade. “Well, that’s never going to happen” keeps happening.
A brief review (in no particular order):
Americans elected Donald Trump, a reality TV star with no political experience, a man with a reputation in his hometown as a con man, a repeat adulterer and sexual predator, to be president of the United States. Backed by Bible-believing, evangelical Christians.
After Trump’s dark, “American carnage” inauguration speech, former president George W. Bush remarked, “That was some weird shit.”
The world watched Trump reject the consensus view of the U.S. intelligence community and take Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin’s word that Russia had not interfered with the 2016 election. In front of the world’s press. After meeting the former KGB officer in private with no advisers or note-takers.
An American president ordered immigrations officials to separate migrant parents and children, losing track of the children and/or locking them in cages.
The same president attempted to withhold appropriated weapons from an American ally fighting off a Russian invasion unless Ukraine launched (or at least announced) an investigation into a political rival, former Vice President Joe Biden, and his son, Hunter. He was impeached (but not convicted) for it.
The world watched the United Nations General Assembly laugh at the president of the United States.
At a NATO summit, Trump was caught on camera “shoving aside Montenegro’s Prime Minister Dusko Markovic in what appeared to be an attempt to get to the front of the photo line.”
Trump dismissed the COVID-19 plague that had already killed hundreds of Americans as going away on its own by Easter 2020, then promoted quack remedies as tens of thousands more died.
The America president told so many blatant lies that a major newspaper kept count, discontinuing its tally at somewhere over 30,000.
Trump wanted to buy Greenland and talked about nuking hurricanes.
Trump and Republican allies around the country attempted to overturn the results of the 2020 election after Trump lost to Joe Biden.
On Jan. 6, 2021, Trump “summoned the mob, assembled the mob and lit the flame of this attack” on the U.S. Capitol. The mob battled the police for hours, breached and sacked the building, threatening to lynch lawmakers, as Trump sat for hours watching on TV, doing nothing. Several people died. Trump told rioters he loved them. He was impeached but not convicted a second time.
Trump left the White House after stealing hundreds of classified documents. It was just one of the many acts for which he’s been federally indicted, including the Jan. 6 insurrection.
New York juries convicted Trump on 34 felony counts for business fraud and found him guilty of rape in a civil lawsuit.
Trump held a xenophobic, misogynistic rally in Madison Square Garden that echoed the German American Bund rally held there in 1939.
After all of the above and much, muchmore — and yet still more — Americans elected Donald John Trump as president for a second time on Nov. 5, 2024.
Let’s contemplate some of what may come next.
Trump means to staff his administration with anti-democracy, extremist cranks and weirdos.
He will direct the Department of Justice to prosecute and jail his political enemies, and demand military tribunals for generals who crossed him.
He will ethnically cleanse the country of millions of (face it) nonwhite, undocumented residents using perhaps active-duty troops.
Trump hopes to denaturalize others and strip birthright citizenship from U.S.-born children of the undocumented, and the Roberts Supreme Court will let him.
He plans to abandon Ukraine to Russian annexation and precipitate the collapse of NATO.
He plans to wholesale fire dedicated, career civil servants, and staff what’s left of the government with inexperienced, fawning sycophants led by anti-democracy, extremist cranks and weirdos.
Women’s rights will be under more threat than in the past half-century.
Trump’s administration will, in effect, declare open season on the LGBTQ+ community and allow Christian nationalists to impose their beliefs on the nation, including on Christians who find their beliefs abhorrent.
Look, fighting back against what’s coming is not just righteous, but patriotic. I’m tired. You’re tired. We’re all tired. But for all its flaws, the ideal of America that MAGA Republicans want to unmake with extreme prejudice is worth fighting for. I’m sorry I’m not more upbeat about it like James Fallows or Rebecca Solnit. That doesn’t lessen the imperative, especially since there is no guarantee how low the foes of freedom won’t stoop once they get rolling.
Tell me again, “Well, that’s never going to happen.”
Now that campaign season is almost over (our N.C. state Supreme Court recounts, lawsuits, etc., could drag into December), I’ve scheduled my Covid booster and flu shots for later this morning. With quacks and cranks poised to take over the health system on January 20, hoarding your necessary meds is a good idea. As is getting your shots, advises Joyce Vance at Civil Discourse. She got hers on Friday:
Increasingly, I’m contemplating the issues we are going to face at the intersection of public health and the rule of law. Dr. Vin Gupta posted on BlueSky today, “We need as many healthcare professionals to be courageous and speak to truth, for our patient’s sake and for the sanctity and credibility of our profession. That starts now. We cannot allow the highly abnormal to be normalized.” He said it in the context of the qualifications, or lack thereof, of Trump’s nominees for key positions in the health sector, including Marty Makary as FDA commissioner, Dr. Janette Nesheiwat for surgeon general, and Dr. Dave Weldon for CDC director, all of whom would work for Kennedy. Each of them is controversial. And, of course, there’s Mehmet Oz for CMS, which oversees agencies including Medicare and Medicaid.
Gupta is naive. Normalizing the abnormal was pretty much complete after the vote count on Nov. 5. Horse, barn, etc. Not to mention that if you don’t get those immunizations at federal expense now, you may be paying for them out of pocket (if still available) once Dr. Brainworm & Co. move into their new offices.
That is, if they can find their new offices (Raw Story):
Appearing on CNN early Saturday morning, Professor Heath Brown of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice raised alarms that the Trump transition team has yet to submit much-needed documentation to the General Services Administration (GSA) which would allow senior members of the president-elect’s team to have access to information they will need on day one.
Speaking with host Victor Blackwell, Brown was asked, “So this agreement with the General Services Administration allows them to get some office space, get some money but also there are documents related to ethics agreements and anti-conflict of interest commitments. Is this abnormal, disruptive or is it more than that?”
“I think it’s very worrisome for two primary reasons,” Brown replied. “If the agreements aren’t signed that means the key information that the incoming administration needs about the major threats, challenges facing our country are not going to be shared in the same way as if the agreements were signed.”
I-O-K-I-Y-A-R will be S-O-P for M-A-G-A more then ever this time around, starting even before Dictator on Day 1 takes and violates his oath of office in the same breath. Rules established to ensure government transparency and accounatbility are out the window. Not quite half the country voted for abnormal.
Without those signed agreements, Brown worries, we won’t know who is funding this transition.
“Those agreements establish caps on the amount of money that can be donated to the transition team as well as requiring public disclosure of who those donors are,” Brown continued. “If we don’t see those agreements signed, we’ll never know that information and I think many people would worry about that.”
But that’s the point. Donations to the transition become another lucrative grift for Trump. Again, not quite half of “many people” couldn’t care less about that.
Will they when the next Covid variant or the flu strikes down a family member? Doubtful.
“Strength takes many forms, and the most obvious forms are not always the most significant. The men who create power make an indispensable contribution to the Nation’s greatness, but the men who question power make a contribution just as indispensable, especially when that questioning is disinterested, for they determine whether we use power or power uses us. […]
If sometimes our great artists have been the most critical of our society, it is because their sensitivity and their concern for justice, which must motivate any true artist, makes him aware that our Nation falls short of its highest potential. […]
We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth […] But democratic society — in it, the highest duty of the writer, the composer, the artist is to remain true to himself and to let the chips fall where they may. In serving his vision of the truth, the artist best serves his nation.”
– President John F. Kennedy, from his Robert Frost tribute address (October 23, 1963)
61 years ago this past Friday, President John F. Kennedy and First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy landed in Dallas, Texas at 11:38am. They were accompanied by Texas Governor John Connally and his wife. The two couples were greeted by Vice-President Lyndon B. Johnson and Lady Bird Johnson. After about 15 minutes of schmoozing with the friendly crowd of admirers gathered on the tarmac, the Kennedys, Johnsons, and Connallys were whisked to their waiting motorcade, which would take them through downtown Dallas. Thousands of locals already lined the route, eager for a glimpse of the charismatic President and First Lady.
As we are all now painfully aware, President Kennedy had only 35 minutes left to live.
Every time I see that footage of JFK and Jackie getting off the the plane at Love Field, I say to myself "No, no…don't go…get back on the plane…please." Hard to watch any film clip or photograph of that day.
— Dennis Hartley denofcinema.bsky.social (@denofcinema5) November 22, 2024
“Where were you when Kennedy got shot?” has been a meme for anyone old enough to remember what happened that day in Dallas on November 22, 1963.
I was but a wee military brat, attending my second-grade class at a public school in Columbus, Ohio (my dad was stationed at nearby Fort Hayes). Our class was herded into the gym for an all-school assembly. Someone (probably the principal) gave a brief address. It gets fuzzy from there; we either sang “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” or recited the Pledge of Allegiance (or we possibly did both), and were sent home early.
My 7-year-old mind could not grasp the profound sociopolitical impact of this tragedy; naturally I have come to understand it in the fullness of time. From my 2016 review of Jackie:
Understandably, the question of “why now?” could arise, to which I would reply (paraphrasing JFK) …why not? To be sure, Jacqueline Kennedy’s story has been well-covered in a myriad of documentaries and feature films; like The Beatles, there are very few (if any) mysteries about her life and legacy to uncover at this point. And not to mention that horrible, horrible day in Dallas…do we really need to pay $15 just to see the nightmare reenacted for the umpteenth time? (Spoiler alert: the President dies at the end).
I think that “we” do need to see this film, even if we know going in that there was no “happy ever-aftering” in this Camelot. It reminds us of a “brief, shining moment” when all seemed possible, opportunities were limitless, and everything was going to be all right, because Jack was our king and Jackie was our queen. So what if it was all kabuki, as the film implies; merely a dream, invented by “a great, tragic actress” to unite us in our sadness. Then it was a good dream, and I think we’ll find our Camelot again…someday.
They will run you dizzy. They will pile falsehood on top of falsehood, until you can’t tell a lie from the truth – and you won’t even want to. That’s how the powerful keep their power. Don’t you read the papers?
– From Winter Kills (screenplay by William Richert)
The Kennedy assassination precipitated a cottage industry of independent investigations, papers, articles, non-fiction books, novels, documentaries and feature films that riff on myriad conspiracy theories.
Then of course there was that Warren Commission report released in 1964; an 888-page summation concluding JFK’s alleged murderer Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. This “conclusive” statement, of course only fueled more speculation that our government was not being completely …forthcoming.
2024 marks the 45th anniversary of one of the more oddball conspiracy thrillers based on the JFK assassination…Winter Kills. Director William Richert adapted his screenplay from Richard Condon’s book (Condon also wrote The Manchurian Candidate, which was adapted for the screen twice).
Jeff Bridges stars as the (apolitical) half-brother of an assassinated president. After witnessing the deathbed confession of a man claiming to be a “second gunman”, he reluctantly gets drawn into a new investigation of his brother’s murder nearly 20 years after the matter was allegedly put to rest by the findings of the “Pickering Commission”.
John Huston chews the scenery as Bridges’ father (a larger-than-life character said to be loosely based on Joseph Kennedy Sr.). The cast includes Anthony Perkins, Eli Wallach, Sterling Hayden, Ralph Meeker, Toshiro Mifune, Richard Boone, and Elizabeth Taylor.
The film vacillates between byzantine conspiracy thriller and a broad satire of other byzantine conspiracy thrillers–but is eminently watchable, thanks to an interesting cast and a screenplay that, despite ominous undercurrents, delivers a great deal of dark comedy.
Is Winter Kills essential viewing? It depends. If you like quirky 60s and 70s cinema, it’s one of the last hurrahs in a film cycle of arch, lightly political and broadly satirical all-star psychedelic train wrecks like The Loved One, The President’s Analyst,Skidoo,Candyand The Magic Christian. For “conspiracy-a-go-go” completists, it is a must-see.
Here are 9 more films that either deal directly with or have a notable link with the JFK conspiracy cult. And while you’re watching, keep President Kennedy’s observation in the back of your mind: “In serving his vision of the truth, the artist best serves his nation.”
Suddenly – Lewis Allen’s taut 1954 hostage drama/film noir stars a surprisingly effective Frank Sinatra as John Baron, the cold-blooded leader of a three-man hit team who are hired to assassinate the (unnamed) President during a scheduled whistle-stop at a sleepy California town (interestingly, the role of John Baron was originally offered to Montgomery Clift).
The film is essentially a chamber piece; the assassins commandeer a family’s home that affords them a clear shot at their intended target. In this case, the shooter’s motives are financial, not political (“Don’t give me that politics jazz-it’s not my racket!” Sinatra snarls after he’s accused of being “an enemy agent” by one of his hostages). Richard Sale’s script also drops in a perfunctory nod or two to the then-contemporaneous McCarthy era (one hostage speculates that the hit men are “commies”).
Also in the cast: Sterling Hayden, James Gleason, Nancy Gates, Christopher Dark, and Paul Frees (Frees would later become known as “the man of a thousand voices” for his voice-over work with Disney, Jay Ward Productions, Rankin/Bass and other animation studios).
Some aspects of the film are eerily prescient of President Kennedy’s assassination 9 years later; Sinatra’s character is an ex-military sharpshooter, zeroes down on his target from a high window, and utilizes a rifle of a European make. Most significantly, there have been more than a few claims over the years in JFK conspiracy circles suggesting that Lee Harvey Oswald had watched this film with a keen interest.
There have been conflicting stories over the years whether Sinatra had Suddenly pulled from circulation following Kennedy’s death; the definitive answer may lie in remarks made by Frank Sinatra, Jr., in a commentary track he did for a 2012 Blu-ray reissue of the film:
[Approximately 2 weeks] after the assassination of President Kennedy, a minor network official at ABC television decided he was going to run Suddenly on network television. This, while the people were still grieving and numbed from the horror of the death of President Kennedy. When word of this reached Sinatra, he was absolutely incensed…one of the very few times had I ever seen him that angry. He got off a letter to the head of broadcasting at ABC, telling them that they should be jailed; it was in such bad taste to do that after the death of President Kennedy.
Sinatra, Jr. does not elaborate any further, so I interpret that to mean that Frank, Sr. fired off an angry letter, and the fact that the film remains in circulation to this day would indicate that it was never actually “pulled” (of course, you are free to concoct your own conspiracy theory).
The Manchurian Candidate – There’s certainly more than just a perfunctory nod to Red hysteria in John Frankenheimer’s 1962 cold war paranoia fest, which was the last assassination thriller of note released prior to the zeitgeist-shattering horror of President Kennedy’s murder. Oddly enough, Frank Sinatra was involved in this project as well.
Sinatra plays a Korean War vet who reaches out to help a buddy he served with (Laurence Harvey). Harvey is on the verge of a meltdown, triggered by recurring war nightmares. Sinatra has been suffering the same malady (both men had been held as POWs by the North Koreans). Once it dawns on Sinatra that they both may have been brainwashed during their captivity for very sinister purposes, all hell breaks loose.
In this narrative (based on Richard Condon’s novel) the assassin is posited as an unwitting dupe of a decidedly “un-American” political ideology; a domestic terrorist programmed by his Communist puppet masters to kill on command. Some of the Cold War references have dated; others (as it turns out) are evergreen.
Seven Days in May – This 1964 “conspiracy a-go go” thriller was director John Frankenheimer’s follow-up to The Manchurian Candidate. Picture if you will: a screenplay by Rod Serling, adapted from a novel by Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey II.
Kirk Douglas plays a Marine colonel who is the adjutant to a hawkish, hard right-leaning general (Burt Lancaster) who heads the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The general is at loggerheads with the dovish President (Fredric March), who is perceived by the general and some of the other joint chiefs as a “weak sister” for his strident support of nuclear disarmament.
When Douglas begins to suspect that an imminent, unusually secretive military “exercise” may in fact portend more sinister intentions, he is torn between his loyalty to the general and his loyalty to the country as to whether he should raise the alarm. Or is he just being paranoid?
An intelligently scripted and well-acted nail-biter, right to the end. Also with Ava Gardner, Edmund O’Brien, and Martin Balsam.
Executive Action – After the events of November 22, 1963, Hollywood took a decade-long hiatus from the genre; it seemed nobody wanted to “go there”. But after Americans had mulled a few years in the sociopolitical turbulence of the mid-to-late 1960s (including the double whammy of losing Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King to bullets in 1968), a new cycle of more cynical and byzantine conspiracy thrillers began to crop up (surely exacerbated by Watergate).
The most significant shift in the meme was to move away from the concept of the assassin as a dupe or an operative of a “foreign” (i.e., “anti-American”) ideology; some films postulated that shadowy cabals of businessmen and/or members of the government were capable of such machinations. The rise of the JFK conspiracy cult (and the cottage industry it created) was probably a factor as well.
One of the earliest examples was this 1973 film, directed by David Miller, and starring Burt Lancaster and Robert Ryan. Dalton Trumbo (famously blacklisted back in the 50s) adapted the screenplay from a story by Donald Freed and Mark Lane.
A speculative thriller about the JFK assassination, it offers a scenario that a consortium comprised of hard right pols, powerful businessmen and disgruntled members of the clandestine community were responsible.
Frankly, the premise is more intriguing than the film (which is flat and talky), but the filmmakers deserve credit for being the first ones to “go there”. The film was a flop at the time, but has become a cult item; as such, it is more of a curio than a classic. Still, it’s worth a watch.
The Parallax View – Alan J. Pakula’s 1974 thriller takes the concept of the dark corporate cabal one step further, positing political assassination as a sustainable capitalist venture, if you can perfect a discreet and reliable algorithm for screening and recruiting the right “employees”.
Warren Beatty delivers an excellent performance as a maverick print journalist investigating a suspicious string of untimely demises that befall witnesses to a U.S. senator’s assassination in a restaurant atop the Space Needle. This puts him on a trail that leads to an enigmatic agency called the Parallax Corporation.
The supporting cast includes Hume Cronyn, William Daniels and Paula Prentiss. Nice work by cinematographer Gordon Willis (aka “the prince of darkness”), who sustains the foreboding, claustrophobic mood of the piece with his masterful use of light and shadow.
The screenplay is by David Giler and Lorenzo Semple Jr. (based on the 1970 novel by Loren Singer, with a non-credited rewrite by Robert Towne). The narrative contains obvious allusions to the JFK assassination, and (in retrospect) reflects the political paranoia of the Nixon era (perhaps this was serendipity, as the full implications of the Watergate scandal were not yet in the rear view mirror while the film was in production).
The Conversation – Written and directed by Francis Ford Coppola, this 1974 thriller does not involve a “political” assassination, but does share crucial themes with other films here. It was also an obvious influence on Brian De Palma’s 1981 thriller, Blow Out (see my review below).
Gene Hackman leads a fine cast as a free-lance surveillance expert who begins to obsess that a conversation he captured between a man and a woman in San Francisco’s Union Square for one of his clients is going to directly lead to the untimely deaths of his subjects.
Although the story is essentially an intimate character study, set against a backdrop of corporate intrigue, the dark atmosphere of paranoia, mistrust and betrayal that permeates the film mirrors the political climate of the era (particularly in regards to its timely proximity to the breaking of the Watergate scandal).
24 years later, Hackman played a similar character in Tony Scott’s 1998 political thriller Enemy of the State. Some have postulated “he” is the same character (you’ve gotta love the fact that there’s a conspiracy theory about a fictional character). I don’t see that myself; although there is obvious homage with a brief shot of a photograph of Hackman’s character in his younger days that is actually a production still from …The Conversation!
Blowout -This 1981 thriller is one of Brian De Palma’s finest efforts. John Travolta stars as a sound man who works on schlocky horror films. While making a field recording of ambient nature sounds, he unexpectedly captures audio of a fatal car crash involving a political candidate, which may not have been an “accident”. The proof lies buried somewhere in his recording-which naturally becomes a coveted item by some dubious characters. His life begins to unravel synchronously with the secrets on his tape.
The director employs an arsenal of influences (from Antonioni to Hitchcock), but succeeds in making this one of his most “De Palma-esque” with some of the deftest set-pieces he’s ever done (particularly in the climax).
Three Days of the Condor – One of seven collaborations between star Robert Redford and director Sydney Pollack, and one of the seminal “conspiracy-a-go-go” films. With a screenplay adapted by Lorenzo Semple, Jr. and David Rayfiel from James Grady’s novel “Six Days of the Condor”, this 1975 film offers a twist on the idea of a government-sanctioned assassination.
Here, you have members of the U.S. clandestine community burning up your tax dollars to scheme against other members of the U.S. clandestine community (no honor among conspirators, apparently). Also with Faye Dunaway, Cliff Robertson and Max von Sydow.
Pollack’s film conveys the same atmosphere of dread and paranoia that infuses The Conversation and The Parallax View. The final scene plays like an eerily prescient prologue for All the President’s Men, which wasn’t released until the following year. An absolutely first-rate political thriller with more twists and turns than you can shake a dossier at.
JFK – The obvious bookend to this cycle is Oliver Stone’s controversial 1991 film, in which Gary Oldman gives a suitably twitchy performance as Lee Harvey Oswald. However, within the context of Stone’s film, to say that we have a definitive portrait of JFK’s assassin (or “assassins”, plural) is difficult, because, not unlike Agatha Christie’s fictional detective Hercule Poirot, Stone suspects no one…and everyone.
The most misunderstood aspect of the film, I think, is that Stone is not favoring any prevalent narrative; and that it is by the director’s definition a “speculative” political thriller. Those who have criticized the approach seem to have missed that Stone himself has stated from the get-go that his goal was to provide a “counter myth” to the “official” conclusion of the Warren Commission (usually referred to as the “lone gunman theory”).
Stone’s narrative is so seamless and dynamic, many viewers didn’t get that he was mashing up at least a dozen *possible* scenarios. The message is right there in the script, when “Mr. X” (Donald Sutherland) advises New Orleans D.A. Jim Garrison (Kevin Costner), “Don’t believe me. Do your own work…your own thinking.”
JICYMI-This 2023 episode of “The Commonwealth Club” features Mark Shaw, best-selling author of 6 books related to the Kennedy assassination, reflecting on the 60th anniversaryof the tragedy:
The sweeping tariffs that President-elect Donald J. Trump imposed in his first term on foreign metals, machinery, clothing and other products were intended to have maximum impact around the world. They sought to shutter foreign factories, rework international supply chains and force companies to make big investments in the United States.
But for many businesses, the most important consequences of the tariffs, enacted in 2018 and 2019, unfolded just a few blocks from the White House.
In the face of pushback from companies reliant on foreign products, the Trump administration set up a process that allowed them to apply for special exemptions. The stakes were high: An exemption could relieve a company of tariffs as high as 25 percent, potentially giving it a big advantage over competitors.
That ignited a swift and often successful lobbying effort, especially from Washington’s high-priced K Street law firms, which ended up applying for hundreds of thousands of tariff exemptions. The Office of the United States Trade Representative, which handled exclusions for the China tariffs, fielded more than 50,000 requests, while the Commerce Department received nearly 500,000 exclusion requests for the tariffs on steel and aluminum.
As Mr. Trump dangles new and potentially more expensive tariffs, many companies are already angling to obtain relief. Lawyers and lobbyists in Washington say they are receiving an influx of requests from companies that want to hire their services, even before the full extent of the president-elect’s tariff plans becomes clear.
He will use taxpayer money to make whole the companies that play ball with him just as he did with the farmers in his first term.
While Mr. Trump has often promised to “drain the swamp” in Washington, some have argued that these trade rules did the opposite. Tracking by OpenSecrets, a nonprofit organization, showed that the number of clients lobbying Congress on trade issues ticked up noticeably once Mr. Trump took office, growing more than 50 percent from 2016 to hit a record high in 2019.
First of all, when he says “drain the swamp” he means anyone who is hostile to him. It has nothing to do with corruption. He believes in corruption and frankly makes no bones about it. There’s no reason to pretend otherwise. In fact, this scheme is largely just another grift opportunity. Trump will have leverage over many companies and he will use it.
One recent economic study also found evidence that Trump officials had used the exemption process to reward their supporters and punish opponents.
The study, which looked at nearly 7,000 company applications, found that an increase in past contributions to Republicans raised the likelihood of a company’s receiving an exemption. A history of past contributions to Democrats, meanwhile, decreased a company’s chances of winning a lucrative exemption.
“I would not be surprised at all if this happened again,” he said.
It’s guaranteed. The only losers in this scheme will be the people who are buying goods, but at least half the ocuntry will be convinced that they’re actually paying less because Dear Leader tells them so.
Jamelle Bouie sent this along in his newsletter today and I thought is was perfect for the moment:
Most Americans who know of Frederick Douglass know that he lived to see the destruction of chattel slavery and the liberation of Black Americans from the despotism of human bondage. Less well known is the fact that Douglass would also live long enough to see the slave stand free, stand a brief moment in the sun, and move back again toward slavery, to paraphrase W.E.B. Du Bois in his book “Black Reconstruction.”
Douglass died in 1895 as the counterrevolution to Reconstruction and the agrarian rebellions of the 1880s and 1890s took final shape. In 1890, Mississippi imposed its Jim Crow Constitution. Other states in the South soon followed suit. In 1896, the Supreme Court would affirm “separate but equal” in Plessy v. Ferguson, a landmark ruling that would stand until 1954, when it was overturned by Brown v. Board of Education.
In 1894, at Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church in Washington D.C., Douglass delivered the last great speech of his career. Titled “The Lessons of the Hour,” it was his attempt to make sense of the rise of Jim Crow and the violent retrenchment of the era. I want to share a little of the speech with you because I think it is worthwhile to read the perspective of someone who continues to fight for their ideals even in the midst of profound reversal and defeat.
Here’s Douglass, moving toward his conclusion.
I have sometimes thought that the American people are too great to be small, too just and magnanimous to oppress the weak, too brave to yield up the right to the strong, and too grateful for public services ever to forget them or fail to reward them. I have fondly hoped that this estimate of American character would soon cease to be contradicted or put in doubt. But the favor with which this cowardly proposition of disfranchisement has been received by public men, white and black, by Republicans as well as Democrats, has shaken my faith in the nobility of the nation. I hope and trust all will come out right in the end, but the immediate future looks dark and troubled. I cannot shut my eyes to the ugly facts before me.
He continues:
Strange things have happened of late and are still happening. Some of these tend to dim the lustre of the American name, and chill the hopes once entertained for the cause of American liberty. He is a wiser man than I am, who can tell how low the moral sentiment of this republic may yet fall. When the moral sense of a nation begins to decline and the wheel of progress to roll backward, there is no telling how low the one will fall or where the other may stop.
As much as Douglass intends to stand in the way of those would destroy the victory of an earlier age, he knows that, for him, “Time and strength are not equal to the task before me.” And yet:
But could I be heard by this great nation, I would call to mind the sublime and glorious truths with which, at its birth, it saluted a listening world. Its voice then, was as the trumpet of an archangel, summoning hoary forms of oppression and time honored tyranny, to judgement. Crowned heads heard it and shrieked. Toiling millions heard it and clapped their hands for joy. It announced the advent of a nation, based upon human brotherhood and the self-evident truths of liberty and equality. Its mission was the redemption of the world from the bondage of ages.
Douglass concludes:
Apply these sublime and glorious truths to the situation now before you. Put away your race prejudice. Banish the idea that one class must rule over another. Recognize the fact that the rights of the humblest citizen are as worthy of protection as are those of the highest, and your problem will be solved; and, whatever may be in store for it in the future, whether prosperity, or adversity; whether it shall have foes without, or foes within, whether there shall be peace, or war; based upon the eternal principles of truth, justice and humanity, and with no class having any cause of complaint or grievance, your Republic will stand and flourish forever.
I hope you find this as useful as I do.
Or we could keep coddling insecure white people who feel their privilege is threatened whenever those who don’t look like them get a share of the American dream. And sure, let’s let the oligarchs openly pull the strings of our supposedly democratic system for their own benefit. What could go wrong?
I’m just going to leave this here. If you have a few minutes, listen to Project 2025 author Russell Vought, Trump’s budget chief, talk about what he plans to do in the new administration. He’s not just a faceless bureaucrat. He’s got a vision. A Christian Nationalist vision.
Remember this guy? Trump just made him director of the Office of Management and Budget.
Shout-out to everyone who tried to convince us he knew nothing about Project 2025. pic.twitter.com/t6RdA7xccq
President-elect Donald Trump plans to fire the entire team that worked with special counsel Jack Smith to pursue two federal prosecutions against the former president, including career attorneys typically protected from political retribution, according to two individuals close to Trump’s transition.
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.
The proposals offer new evidence that Trump’s intention to dramatically shake up the status quo in Washington is likely to focus heavily on the Justice Department, the nation’s premier law enforcement agency, and that at least some of his agenda is fueled not by ideology or policy goals but personal grievance.
Asked about Trump’s plans to fire prosecutors on Smith’s team and investigate the 2020 election, a Trump spokeswoman echoed the president-elect’s frequent claim that the Justice Department cases against him were politically motivated.
[…]
As he again becomes president, Trump “wants to clean out the bad guys, the people who went after me,’” said one of the individuals familiar with the plans, who like the other person spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private deliberations about the incoming Trump administration.
I guess we knew he was going to go after the prosecutors who were involved in his federal cases. And that won’t be all. There are political enemies and others that will need to be paid back for opposing him. But I didn’t anticipate investigations into the 2020 election, although I should have.
He knows he lost and his psyche is so fragile that he can’t deal with it even though he won this time. Maybe he can find some flunkies to put together a phony report validating his claims and he and his cult can pretend that proves it. But we’ll always know that he lost that election and lied about it and he’ll know we know it. It will torture him until the day he dies.
President-elect Donald J. Trump announced on Friday that he would nominate Dr. Martin A. Makary, a Johns Hopkins University surgeon with a contrarian streak, to be commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration.
Mr. Trump announced two other top health picks on Friday evening as well. He chose Dr. Dave Weldon, a physician and former congressman from Florida, to lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
For years, Dr. Weldon championed the notion that thimerosal, a preservative once used widely in vaccines, caused an explosion of autism cases around the world. In 2007, he backed a bill proposing to take vaccine safety research out of the hands of the C.D.C. Health officials reject the idea that research shows any link between thimerosal and autism.
Mr. Trump also put forward Dr. Janette Nesheiwat, a physician and Fox News contributor, to be surgeon general. She worked caring for patients after Hurricane Katrina, an announcement from Mr. Trump said, and on the front lines of the Covid pandemic in New York City. She also markets vitamin B and vitamin C dietary supplements.
Dr. Makary, 54, rose to prominence more than a decade ago as a critic of the medical establishment, speaking out about patient safety and working with hospitals to improve practices. He also gained attention during the pandemic, weighing in on herd immunity, vaccines and masks in 2021, roiling some doctors who were still contending with packed I.C.U.s and hundreds of deaths a week.
[…]
Dr. Makary would oversee an agency that regulates a vast swath of the economy, including prescription and over-the-counter drugs, revolutionary cell and gene therapies as well as food, medical devices, tobacco and cosmetics.
Every last one is a Fox news crank, a quack or a snake oil salesman. Good luck to all of us.
Update —
In recently unearther video, RFK Jr calims that his organization financed “Plandemic” the conspiracy theory documentary that killed a bunch of people during COVID:
We also have a film platform. We have a film division at Children’s Health Defense. We’ve produced two films. One of them is VAX 2, which was, you know, a huge success. And then Plandemic, which we financed, which is now by some metrics the most successful documentary in history. I think it’s had 25 million views. Even though they threw us off all the social media, we were able to still get a lot of people to see that film.
North Carolina officials meet in Oval Office with President Biden about increasing Helene disaster relief funding. Clockwise from left front: Lake Lure Mayor Pro Tem Dave DiOrio, Chimney Rock Mayor Peter O’Leary, Buncombe County Commissioner Parker Sloan, Gov. Roy Cooper, President Joe Biden, Asheville Esther Manheimer, Buncombe County Commission Chair-elect Amanda Edwards, Canton Mayor Zeb Smathers.
A friend last night asked how recovery was coming along here in Asheville. The truth is we are out of the news but a long way from out of the woods.
Some friends were in the Oval Office on Thursday to ask President Joe Biden to add a zero to the end of federal recovery aid already approved for Western North Carolina. Or at least for another $25.5 billion. The group also met with congressional budget staff on Capitol Hill to promote a larger aid package.
Locals are hoping the supplemental aid passes quickly because the next occupant won’t be as friendly to ye olde Cesspool of Sin™. The GOP-dominated legislature in Raleigh is already cutting us off. More on that in a moment.
This week, I sat down with @NC_Governor and elected officials from western North Carolina to thank them in person for their partnership as we continue our focus on hurricane recovery.
We're doing everything we can to get your communities what they need in these difficult times. pic.twitter.com/ad8Ti8s2h8
Recovery will take years. Downtown Asheville normally would be bustling with shoppers this time of year. For a local economy overdependent on tourism (don’t get me started), empty hotels and shops are dead weight on the city’s economy and on out-of-workers’ lives. Some storefronts are empty and for rent. Residents who left the area during the seven-week water outage may have found work where they relocated already, and may not return.
Recovery depots are still in operation for people (fewer now) from more remote areas of the county still without power or with contaminated wells needing testing, or with homes too damaged to be habitable.
It’s not in the news but it is still the reality on the ground. The town may look normal but normal will not return soon.
Disaster victims still need showers, laundry facilities, supplies, etc. A Board of Elections members told me on Friday relations are still camping out in her house eight weeks after Tropical Storm Helene dropped off a disaster.
A FEMA map I obtained on Friday (dated 11/19) displays the numbers of privately owned and rental residences impacted across Western North Carolina. The largest concentrations are in Buncombe County (Asheville metro).
542 homes destroyed
1,600 homes with major damage
18,102 homes requiring habitability repairs
There are another 6,000+ rental residences destroyed, damaged, or requiring habitability repairs, meaning structural repairs and/or replacement of appliances and heating/cooling/plumbing/electrical systems.
Thanks to the New York Times for covering what I said on the floor: this is not a recovery bill — this is a purely partisan bill that takes aim at some of the foundational pillars of our democracy.https://t.co/2NzlFfXUJf
We mentioned this week North Carolina Republicans’ scramble in the lame-duck session to snatch power from Democrats who defeated their candidates under the guise of a disaster recovery measure. The GOP-dominated body remains “dead-set on refusing to provide meaningful relief for mountain communities hit hard by Hurricane Helene,” reports Smoky Mountain News.
“I’m deeply concerned that instead of help for Western North Carolina, that they used this storm as a front to engage in yet another power grab that I think hurts North Carolina,” Cooper told The Smoky Mountain News Nov. 22.
Three WNC Republicans voted against the bill but are likely to vote to sustain an expected Cooper veto. Canton Mayor Zeb Smathers, whose town flooded just three years ago, had stern words for Raleigh:
Canton Mayor Zeb Smathers praised the three western reps for sticking up for a region that consistently feels overlooked by Raleigh — perhaps for good reason.
“What you saw was fundamental, principled leadership and doing right by the people of Western North Carolina. That was not a hurricane relief bill; it was a bill that was trying to be marketed as one. Even when talking about the money, it just shifts money. It doesn’t allocate where it goes,” said Smathers. “It was a bill that was done behind closed doors, very quickly and not involving even the Republicans, even our own legislators. This is a bill that should not have been passed and should not exist and should be vetoed. And if it was Democrats doing it, I would say the same thing.”
Plenty of videos and podcasts (some of them sensationalized) show destroyed homes, crushed cars and piles of debris and downed trees along roadsides in residential neighborhoods and in more outlying areas. The destruction is not just along the rivers but on hillsides hit by slides and flattened by tornadoes or microbursts. Sometimes only a few yards and a few feet of elevation separate devastation and “normal.” No one really knows how long the cleanup will take.
Officials report 103 deaths across WNC, with 43 in my county, Buncombe. Our house painter reports he lost one of his best crew members to the storm.
A friend just returned from Hawaii reports that a year later the burned city of Lahaina is still a wasteland. They feel us, he said. We feel them.
