Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Good news, bad news this morning

First, good news courtesy of E.J. Dionne. Conservatives (with the most clout) have abandoned their opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage. Why? They won’t admit it, but they caught that car and lost that fight:

After gyrating from one position to another, Donald Trump simply gave up on being a pro-life candidate. The states, he said, would settle the issue, and he didn’t give a damn how they did it. The Republican Party followed along, drastically weakening the antiabortion provisions in its platform because it recognized that opposing reproductive rights after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision was an electoral loser.

And it is. Abortion rights prevailed in 7 out of 10 states where voters had a choice this year — in three carried by Vice President Kamala Harris (New York, Maryland and Colorado) but also in four won by Trump (Missouri, Arizona, Montana and Nevada). Reproductive rights won 57 percent of the vote in pro-Trump Florida, but the state had a 60 percent threshold for the referendum to pass. Opponents of abortion rights fully prevailed only in Nebraska and South Dakota.

So the right ginned up other bogeymen with which to frighten and activate their base and drive them to the polls: immigrants and transgender people. Even so, Trump’s narrow popular-vote margin wasn’t enough to justify “apocalyptic electoral analysis,” Dionne argues.

The right will, of course. And a left still licking its wounds over the election outcome doesn’t exactly feel celebratory. The economy and immigration worked better for Trump than the defense of democracy and women’s rights worked for Kamala Harris. Immigration and trans issues simply lit a hotter, brighter fire under Trump voters even if, as my post below explains, trans people are but 1% of the population. People perceive them as scary Others constituting a threatening 20-plus percent of the population.

The bad news comes from Jason Statler (LOLGOP):

“We can have democracy, or we can have billionaires. Not both. At least with these campaign finance laws,” he writes. The problem is that the billionaires are winning. They are drowning democracy in a flood of dollars:

Just 400 mega-donors outspent every other contributor to the Republican Party based on what we know about the spending in the 2024 campaign. Elon Musk alone appears to have outspent every small donor to the Trump campaign. And that’s if you don’t count the multiple billions of dollars he put into the $44 billion he wrangled to purchase Twitter and turn it into a Trump campaign website. In return, Tesla has skyrocketed 40% since Trump’s election, making Elon about $70 billion he can blow on future elections.

And the way that Elon spent degraded democracy itself. His PAC drowned targeted voters with disinformation of the sort tens of millions are now fleeing from on Twitter.

It’s not a fair fight. But then, the right doesn’t believe in fair:

It’s the billionaires versus the people, and the billionaires are kicking our ass with Elon—and his grudge against his daughter and the culture that accepts her in a way he never can—leading the way. His Phishing Scam Approach to politics has helped him, officially the richest human being ever to live, to become significantly richer.

Many factors have made America the most unequal country in the OECD and now threaten our ability to govern ourselves.

He continues:

There is an obvious solution. We need to take our own side against the billionaires. We must stop behaving like “temporarily embarrassed billionaires” who are just one video or startup from getting high and playing Halo II with Elon.

There are more of us than there will ever be of them. But that only matters if we have a democracy where it’s even possible for us to fight for our interests.

A massive barrier in this fight is that Democrats feel they need their billionaires to fight the other billionaires. This “choose your fighter” strategy has proven to be a failed one. We will never be able to offer these moguls what they want—minimal taxes on the rich, no consumer protections, and an end to our votes mattering.

So, we need a progressive movement that can take the people’s side. The billionaires are activated. We no longer need to fear them turning on us and our Constitution. It’s happened. They sided with an insurrectionist who has made it clear he intends to rule as a dictator and will refuse ever to leave office peacefully. That’s done.

Now, we need to have the debate that matters most: do we want a democracy or billionaires? Because we can’t have both. Not like this.

I’d quibble some with taking our own side against billionaires being an obvious solution. Poorer people believing themselves “temporarily embarrassed billionaires” is a cultural myth dating from before Horatio Alger. It’s sustained by the monied class to keep the poors supporting nonsense like trickle-down economics and buying state lottery tickets in lieu of their organizing unions to rebalance the power dynamics in this country.

It’s not a viewpoint one can just turn off by telling the poors there are more of us than there are of them. Why do you think the less-well-off adopted as their champion a billionaire who would never admit them to his country club?

They don’t hate him. They want to be him. Immune from prosecution, unbound by any rule, truly free to be the biggest asshole in any room and to kick away the ladder behind you. Kicking the downtrodden and making money from it? That’s real freedom, baby.

They learned more from a four-hour Trump rally than they ever learned in Sunday school.

Are they out to get you? Who they?

During the runup to Nov. 5, there was a lot of talk about “vibes.” This was a vibes election more about what people felt than about what they think (or think they know). Jonathan V. Last has a Bulwark post about how out of synch people perceptions are with reality. It’s rather instructive. First:

1. Perceptions

Yesterday Jemele Hill recirculated a study YouGov did in 2022 about the gaps between people’s perceptions and reality.

YouGov asked a series of questions on “What percentage of Americans do you think are [fill in the blank]?” with the [blank] being all sorts of qualities: black, gay, Christian, left-handed, own a passport, etc.

The results were hilarious. Here are some of the percentages that Americans (on average) think their fellow citizens are:

• Transgender: 21 percent
• Muslim: 27 percent
• Jewish: 30 percent
• Black: 41 percent
• Live in New York City: 30 percent
• Gay or lesbian: 30 percent

We’ll get to the actual, in vivo percentages in a moment. First I want to point out the absurdity: 1-in-3 are gay/lesbian? Muslims and Jews make up 57 percent of the country? Blacks are 40 percent of the population?

Not to be crass, but if a third of the population is gay/lesbian then where are all the kids coming from?

If a quarter of the country is Muslim and a third is Jewish, then mosques plus synagogues would outnumber churches. Does anyone see more mosques and synagogues than churches as they drive around?

If 40 percent of the country is black then wouldn’t there be a lot more black people in Congress? I mean, there have only been 12 African-American senators ever.

You see what I mean: These perceptions do not square with any version of observable reality. Here the numbers as they actually exist in the real world:

• Transgender: 1 percent
• Muslim: 1 percent
• Jewish: 2 percent
• Black: 12 percent
• Live in New York City: 2 percent1
• Gay or lesbian: 3 percent

We are talking about errors of perception measured by orders of magnitude. On the trans population, the average American’s estimation is off by 2,000 percent.

People make a consistent mistake in the same direction, Last observes. They wildly overestimate the number of people from recognized minority/interest groups of every kind and underestimate how numerically common their own group is. He dubs it “a particularly American cognitive bias.”

I wonder how much it has to do with the evangelical perception that there’s a secret war going on just below the surface of observable reality that Christians wage daily against spiritual principalities and powers, “against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.” They learn that the Devil and his demons lurk around every corner waitin’ to git ya.

Last continues:

You might think that a normal bias would be to look around, see what is common in your experience, and extrapolate to believe that this is also for true of the rest of the world. Instead, we have the opposite.

People see very few of these characteristics in their everyday lives—and then decide that the rest of the world must be full of these minority groups they rarely encounter.

For someone living in a middle-class suburb of Cleveland, how many trans people, or Muslims, or millionaires do they meet on a daily basis? I’m guessing, just based on statistics, that the answer approaches zero.

But this average person takes the absence of those minority groups in their life and assumes that the rest of the country is chockablock with them.

Like imaginary Satanic pedophile cults that way. It’s this learned paranoia that perhaps says something fundamental about Americans’ psyche.

2. Paranoia

American politics has long been driven by concerns about The Other.

Often The Other is based on race or ethnicity. Sometimes on wealth. Sometimes it’s about class.

These perception gaps suggest that Americans in the majority are deeply paranoid about their own position relative to The Other. They believe that people who are nothing like them make up some massive but invisible bloc, while the people who are very much like them—whom they see every day at the store and in school—are more rare than they wish.

This distorted perception leads people in majorities to a combative, oppositional politics. They worry about being displaced by minorities they rarely encounter but fear are lurking somewhere, out there, in great masses.

Richard Hofstadter wrote about the paranoid style in American politics in 1964 and he was looking at both the contemporary and the historical. Developments since then have mostly confirmed his thesis. I think we can take it as read that paranoia is an important component of American social and political life.

And if this is the case, then I would say that our bizarre perception bias is both symptom and cause. People are paranoid about The Other, which is why they believe that hordes of The Other must exist. And the belief that their own majority group is small while The Other is large feeds the underlying paranoia.

“I’m not sure how democracy is supposed to work with a population that is this paranoid, confused, and oblivious to reality,” Last concludes.

I’m not sure either. But this misperception of threats that the poll reveals is nothing new. I noticed that decades ago after the Three Mile Island accident when nuclear power was more on people’s threat radar:

I have a 1982 Scientific American article here (Xeroxed. Remember kids?) in which study subjects were asked to rank a sampling of 30 sources of risk. Nuclear power topped the list for the League of Women Voters and college students, although it ranked 20 in terms of attributable deaths. Business professionals ranked nuclear power No. 8. Pesticides also made the top ten for the League and college students. It showed up at 28 on the researchers’ list. At the bottom of list of risks for all three groups? Vaccinations. Where would they rank today? We’re not very good at this.

The dangers from vaccinations may leapfrog ionizing radiation as a perceived risk after Jan. 20. Getting them or not getting them.

James Fallows has written a fascinating piece for Wired (temporarily out from under the paywall)about California and the future that I hope you will read with an open mind. An excerpt:

California has at many points been held up as an American paradise. Now it’s widely seen as closer to hell. Runaway housing prices, tax burdens, homelessness, congestion, fire, drought, flood. The best sides of tech innovation, and the worst of tech-bro greed and narcissism. These are the state’s hallmarks. This perception is particularly rampant among Republicans: Polls show that two-thirds of Republicans say this one US state has done more damage than good for the country, and that almost half of them don’t consider it “American” at all. Beyond political party, fully half of adult Americans say in polls that California is in decline. As a recent headline put it shortly before Harris became the Democratic nominee, “California’s image will be a weapon” against her as a candidate.

Never mind that one in every eight Americans still lives in California—a population larger than 21 other US states combined—and that its economic output is bigger than any entire non-US country except China, Japan, or Germany, and that it’s the birthplace of an disproportionate share of the world’s most familiar and valuable brand names. The overwhelming sense is that the California miracle is over, its reservoirs of dynamism as tapped out as the Central Valley’s aquifers during recent years of drought.

As a Californian who has spent most of his life in other parts of the United States, and as an American who has lived for more than a dozen years in other parts of the world, I’ve often been struck by the ways declinist alarmism about my home state can feel like a displaced version of declinist alarmism about my home country as a whole.

“California is America, but sooner,” the USC sociologist Manual Pastor has said. That goes for huge cultural and demographic shifts (California was the first mainland US state whose diverse population became “majority-minority,” back in the 1990s, a full generation ago) and for era-defining crises, self-inflicted and not. And most importantly, it also goes for solutions—the kind that can redirect the momentum of American life, and life around the world, with a leverage no other state possesses.

Just take the area of gasoline-powered transportation. After World War II, when American car culture was famously getting minted in Southern California, the state used a gas tax hike to build out one of the first modern freeway networks. In the ’50s, the US federal government borrowed that same model to construct the interstate highway system. Then, starting in the 1980s, California led the fight against leaded gasoline, eventually banning its sale in 1992, four years before the US as a whole did the same. In 2019, after Donald Trump’s administration rolled back emissions standards for cars, California struck a deal with the world’s leading carmakers, from Ford to Honda to VW and BMW—to make existing standards even tougher in the face of climate change. The size of the California market made this a de facto national standard (which the Biden administration later ratified).

It would be one thing if this were just a history lesson. But the same kind of dynamic is playing out right now in a few crucial arenas that virtually no one beyond California is talking about. And I’m happy to report that the America taking shape on its Pacific coast is again inventing solutions far more rapidly than conventional wisdom has accounted for.

[…]

California deserves new attention as the “reinvention state” rather than a “resistance state.” Even under Trump, there’s still a good chance that as California goes, so eventually goes the country, and eventually much of the world. Here are a few illustrations of where it’s headed. None of these is “the” solution to California’s many problems. But each of them illustrates the creative spirit from which solutions have always come.

I urge you to read the whole thing while it’s still beyond the paywall. It’s really good and should provide at least a modicum of hope that despite the destruction Trump is about to unleash there is another vision.

It’s not that California doesn’t have problems. It has all the problems everyone else has and often shows the new problems before the rest of the country. It’s spawned the era of the tech bro libertarians that has become a blight on all of us. But because of its massive population, resources, wealth and talent, it also often shows the path out of it.

I live here and I didn’t know the half of it. It’s reassuring. If we can get through this perilous period without an unrecov erable catastrophe, there is hope.

Fallows concludes:

The story of America involves continued rediscovery of its potential. That is the story of the most American state as well. “I’d give anything to trade for America’s problems,” a senior Chinese bureaucrat told me in 2008, when I was living in Beijing and the United States seemed to be in free fall. America had emergencies; China, he explained, had more threatening long-term weaknesses—as has become clear in the years since then. As I write, America’s immediate political prospects are uncertain. But however this year’s election turns out—with a president who was born in California, or with a California girding itself to show that it still represents the future—the state demands attention for its many innovations, and not just its travails.

In case you were wondering why all these people involved in sexual assault are being chosen for the Trump administration. This is why. And it is why those fucked up, incel bros voted for him:

He “tells it like it is” — that they were asking for it. He’s right that for millenia some men have told themselves that.

Now read the Pete Hegseth police report. Listen to Matt Gaetz defend himself. It’s all a version of the same thing. When you’re a star you can get away with it. And Trump and his miserable, garbage cabinet and staff are proving it.

Timothy Snyder lays out the case against Pete Hegseth. It’s worse than you think:

1.  Pete Hegseth, Trump’s nominee for secretary of defense, has no qualifications for the job.  He has never run a large organization and has no national security expertise.

2.  Hegseth has zero notion of which other countries might threaten America or how.  In his books this is simply not a subject, beyond a few clichés.

3.  Hegseth does not believe in alliances.  For him, “NATO is a great example of dumb globalism.”

4. Hegseth wants a political army that bans women from combat roles, is purged of “cowardly generals,” and is anti-woke. 

5.  Hegseth never notes that the politicized Russian army meets all of his standards perfectly, but is is ineffective and commits war crimes. 

6.  Hegseth never notes that the Ukrainian army, which does have women in combat, and is not politicized in the way he would like, has overperformed. 

7.  Hegseth has almost nothing to say about the most significant armed conflict of our time and has not visited Ukraine or learned anything about it.

8.  Hegseth’s misogynist gender politics are consistent with his polygamy and the accusations of rape. 

9.  Hegseth’s enemies are all internal: the Left, Muslims, and immigrants.  He repeatedly claims that the Left wishes to annihilate everyone else, which is a call to violence. 

10.  Hegseth, a Christian Reconstructionist, believes that Americans should be governed not by law or by the Constitution but by God — as interpreted of course by Hegseth and his friends.

11.  Hegseth calls for a “holy war” and a “crusade” against Americans who think differently than he does because “God wills it.”  Trump is the pretext: Hegseth wants “to make crusade great again.”

12.  Hegseth, according to his books, could be counted upon to ignore threats to America from abroad, and to use a purged and politicized military against “enemies within.”  This is consistent with Trump’s avowed intention to build a kind of dictatorship on the ruins of a dysfunctional government.

13.  Hegseth thus represents a policy of regime change.  Trump’s nomination of Hegseth is best understood as part of a decapitation strike against the republic. A Christian Reconstructionist war on Americans led from the Department of Defense is likely to break the United States.

People like Hegseth who have half-baked ideas based upon superficial reading of history are all over the place. Sometimes I am one of them. But people like that should not be put in charge of anything as important as the US Military. The danger lies in the egomania that compels him to accept such a position despite his totally unqualified background and experience. Hegseth is someone who does not believe that war crimes should be crimes. He is a violent sexual assaulter. He is, in other words, a violent man, possibly a sociopath.

I can easily see him and the enablers around him doing some truly terrible things because they are too ignorant of the consequences and have no restraint. People like that often do something destructive simply because they don’t have the imagination or the know-how to do anything different.

This one worries me greatly.

This Seb Gorka video is not a parody. Really.
Seriously. pic.twitter.com/oFn2vi06l7

— Charlie Sykes (@SykesCharlie) May 24, 2019

Via Mediaite:

Gorka opened the video saying “I knew this day would come, but I didn’t expect it so soon,” crowing about Trump’s order allowing Attorney General Bill Barr to declassify information about the 2016 election.

“The Kraken has been unleashed,” Gorka declared in his signature affected bellow. “Watch, in the next two days, the rats, the hyenas, start to eat each other.”

A large light source appears to be placed behind the camera for Gorka’s monologue, overexposing the video which seems to be inspired by villainous monologues from Arnold Schwarzenegger movies.

If you’re unfamiliar with this fruitcake:

Sebastian Gorka, the pugilistic commentator who leveraged fears about Islam as a threat to Western civilization into a short-lived role in the first Trump administration, is poised for a second run inside the White House.

Gorka was tapped to serve as deputy assistant to the president and senior director for counterterrorism, president-elect Donald Trump said Friday night. Previously, Gorka was an adviser on national security matters for Trump for seven months until his abrupt exit.

The role, which doesn’t require Senate confirmation, will position Gorka to provide counsel and input on issues he has focused on for years, including hard-line approaches on militant groups and immigration. But if his previous role at the Trump administration is any indication, he is poised to ruffle feathers even among reverent Trump loyalists and other Republicans, who have described him as fringe and underqualified, more suited to riff in cable news green rooms than guide policy in the Oval Office.

Ya think??? Here’s another primer on his background. (Spoiler alert: He’s just as nutty as RFK Jr and a great deal more openly bloodthirsty.) Not that anyone with a brain would need to see anything other than that insane video to know he shouldn’t be allowed within a hundred miles of the White House.

He was pushed out in the first term and couldn’t get a security clearance. Trump is bypassing all security clearances in this term so he’s back, largely, I would assume, because of that video not in spite of it. That kind of loyalty will not go unrewarded. I’m just surprised Sidney Powell and Michael Flynn haven’t been tapped. Yet.

That one time I tuned into Bannon's War Room and heard America's next counterterrorism chief Sebastian Gorka articulate outright Christian fascism.

— Rick Perlstein (@rickperlstein.bsky.social) 2024-11-24T21:10:38.511Z

The NY Times reports:

This is a good first clue that Trump has no intention of even pretending to follow the law this time. And why should he? He knows he has immunity:

President-elect Donald J. Trump is keeping secret the names of the donors who are funding his transition effort, a break from tradition that could make it impossible to see what interest groups, businesses or wealthy people are helping launch his second term.

Mr. Trump has so far declined to sign an agreement with the Biden administration that imposes strict limits on that fund-raising in exchange for up to $7.2 million in federal funds earmarked for the transition. By dodging the agreement, Mr. Trump can raise unlimited amounts of money from unknown donors to pay for the staff, travel and office space involved in preparing to take over the government.

Mr. Trump is the first president-elect to sidestep the restrictions, provoking alarm among ethics experts.

Those seeking to curry favor with the incoming administration now have the opportunity to donate directly to the winning candidate without their names or potential conflicts ever entering the public sphere. And unlike with campaign contributions, foreign nationals are allowed to donate to the transition.

Trump can also keep any unspent money that’s collected. Sweet.

This is way beyond the “appearance of conflict of interest” it’s the blatant appearance of corruption and considering Trump’s history, it’s almost certainly exactly that. Between the Truth Social and Bitcoin scams where people can “invest” in his money losing schemes for the purpose of currying favor, the second Trump administration is going to be a free-for-all. He will literally be running his cons right out of the oval office and no one will say a word because they are terrified he’s going to exercise his immunity and pardon power to destroy them.

That sounds hyperbolic I know. But ask yourself, “who’s going to stop him,?”

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.

Uh-huh

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, much more — 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.”

S-O-P for M-A-G-A

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):

According to an expert on public policy, members of Donald Trump’s incoming administration may already find themselves behind on their jobs the moment that they take over for the outgoing President Joe Biden administration.

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.