Lazy Caturday Reads

Good Afternoon!!

‘Louisa Cat Sleeps Late (1929) from the’ The Fairy Caravan, Beatrix Potter

We have just 37 days until Trump takes over the presidency. How bad will it get? Probably much worse than we can begin to imagine right now.

Lots of rich and powerful people are obviously scared to death, because they are obeying in advance. Chris Wray is quitting as FBI director, paving the way for Trump sycophant Kash Patel, who wants to completely shut down the FBI’s intelligence division. Tech bros are donating to the Inauguration fund.

Even some Democrats are indicating openness to some of Trump’s insane appointments. Are any Democrats planning to fight back? I hope so, but it’s not clear right now.

Here’s the latest:

The New York Times: In Display of Fealty, Tech Industry Curries Favor With Trump.

The $1 million donations came gradually — and then all at once.

Meta. Amazon. OpenAI’s Sam Altman. Each of these Silicon Valley companies or their leaders promised to support President-elect Donald J. Trump’s inaugural committee with seven-figure checks over the past week, often accompanied by a pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago to bend the knee.

The procession of tech leaders who traveled to hobnob with Mr. Trump face-to-face included Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive, and Sergey Brin, a Google founder, who together dined with Mr. Trump on Thursday. Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, shared a meal with Mr. Trump on Friday. And Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, planned to meet with Mr. Trump in the next few days.

This was the week when many tech companies and their top executives, as reluctant as they may have been, acknowledged the reality of getting business done in Mr. Trump’s Washington. With their donations, visits and comments, they joined a party that has already raged for a month, as a cohort of influential Silicon Valley billionaires, led by Elon Musk, began running parts of Mr. Trump’s transition after endorsing him in the campaign.

While businesses frequently try to get on an incoming president’s good side, the frenzy of tech activity stood out from other industries. Until President Obama’s administration, the tech industry had largely stayed aloof from politics. Some wrote just small checks for Mr. Trump’s first inauguration.

Now the bread-breaking with Mr. Trump has become highly public. Meta and Amazon, whose founders had previously been criticized by Mr. Trump, said they would donate $1 million to Mr. Trump’s inaugural fund this week. Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, the high-profile artificial intelligence start-up, said on Friday that a $1 million donation to Mr. Trump’s inaugural fund would come from him personally.

“President Trump will lead our country into the age of A.I., and I am eager to support his efforts to ensure America stays ahead,” Mr. Altman said in a statement.

Nonprofit contributions to inaugural committees, which host patriotic-themed events around Jan. 20, are low-stakes, timeworn ways for companies to seek favor under the guise of patriotism without being pegged as overly partisan actors.

Other tech leaders have also praised Mr. Trump. Marc Benioff, the chief executive of Salesforce and the owner of Time Magazine, posted on X on Thursday that it was “a time of great promise for our nation,” after Time awarded Mr. Trump its coveted “Person of the Year” designation.

Now Apple has joined the crowd of suck-ups. Only Microsoft is holding out.

The Hill: Apple CEO visits Mar-a-Lago, joining list of tech execs seemingly courting Trump.

Apple CEO Tim Cook visited Mar-a-Lago on Friday, joining a growing list of tech executives that are seemingly courting President-elect Trump ahead of his return to the White House.

The president-elect and Cook had dinner at Trump’s Florida resort in West Palm Beach, multiple outlets reported. The meeting marked their first interaction since their call two months ago….

Mother Cat and Kittens, Beatrix Potter

The president-elect said in mid-October during his appearance on Patrick Bet-David’s podcast that the Apple executive talked to him about fines the European Union imposed on the company.

“Then two hours ago, three hours ago, he called me,” Trump said. “He said, ‘I’d like to talk to you about something.’ ‘What?’ He said, ‘The European Union has just fined us $15 billion.’ That’s a lot.” [….]

Cook was one of the many tech leaders to congratulate Trump on his win over Vice President Harris in last month’s contest.

“We look forward to engaging with you and your administration to help make sure the United States continues to lead with and be fueled by ingenuity, innovation, and creativity,” he wrote in a post on social platform X. 

I imagine a hefty donation will be forthcoming.

Media owners are also caving to Trump in advance. Jeff Bezos ordered the Washington Post not to publish a planned endorsement of Kamala Harris. L.A. Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong did the same thing. Now Soon-Shiong has gone further. 

The Independent: LA Times billionaire owner killed op-ed that was critical of Trump’s cabinet picks, report says.

Los Angeles Times owner Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong killed an opinion column that was critical of President-elect Donald Trump’s recent Cabinet picks, telling his paper’s editorial board that it could only publish the piece if it also ran an editorial with an opposing view, according to The New York Times.

The spiked column was set to be published in the outlet’s Sunday newspaper and website on November 24. Soon-Shiong intervened just hours before the op-ed was scheduled to be sent to the printer, prompting the editors to pull the piece as the deadline approached.

According to the NY Times, the column was headlined: “Donald Trump’s cabinet choices are not normal. The Senate’s confirmation process should be.” The editorial board decided that after the incoming president had announced a slew of controversial picks, many of which the board members were concerned about, it would have one of its writers pen a piece calling on the Senate to take its job of confirming nominees seriously.

“In addition to saying that the Senate should follow its traditional process, the editorial criticized several of Mr. Trump’s picks as being unfit for their proposed roles, including former Fox News host Pete Hegseth and former presidential contender Robert F. Kennedy Jr.,” The New York Times noted.

After Soon-Shiong’s intervention led to the editorial being pulled, the paper’s editors scrambled to find another column to fill the suddenly open slot. Ultimately, they decided on an already written piece by outgoing editorial board member Karin Klein that took a more sympathetic stance on Trump. That column was headlined, “Trump has a chance to be a true education president.”

CNN’s Reliable Sources reported on Friday morning that besides Soon-Shiong spiking the editorial, several recent opinion section headlines were also “softened” or “made more bland” by editors concerned that “anything too harsh would get rejected” by the billionaire owner. “For the most part, we’re now just writing about state and local issues,” a source told CNN.

What about the Democrats? I could find only one story about Democrats pushing back slightly. Axios: Inside Democrats’ emerging Trump inauguration boycott.

More than a dozen congressional Democrats plan to sit out President-elect Trump’s inauguration, and many more are anxiously grappling with whether to attend, Axios has learned.

Why it matters: Not every Democrat skipping the ceremony will do so to protest Trump — but a formal boycott is materializing as a first act of resistance against the incoming president.

Tabitha Twichit, Beatrix Potter

For many Democrats, the scars of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol remain fresh in the mind, marking Trump as a threat to democracy.
“For somebody who he said he’s going to lock me up, I don’t see the excitement in going to see his inauguration,” former Jan. 6 committee chair Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) told Axios.

State of play: Martin Luther King Jr. Day coinciding with the Jan. 20 inaugural ceremony gives many Democrats an easy out, though others planning to stay away cited a distaste for inaugurations, a loathing of Trump — and even fears for their safety.

• Rep. Delia Ramirez (D-Ill.) said that as a Latina, she doesn’t “feel safe coming” with Trump’s supporters pouring in for the ceremony. “I’m not going to physically be in D.C. on that day,” she told Axios.
• Similarly, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) said that attending MLK Day events instead “makes sense, because why risk any chaos that might be up here?”
• For other members, the reasoning is more mundane: Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.) “almost never attends inaugurations” and has only been to two during his 28 years in office, his spokesperson told Axios.

The latest on Trump appointments:

Last week, Robert Kennedy, Jr. and Kash Patel began visiting Senators to push for their nominations to be approved. 

On Kennedy, after yesterday, Senators will need to think carefully about how they feel about vaccines to prevent childhood diseases. Yesterday, Dakinikat posted about a top adviser to Kennedy who wants to get reverse approval for the polio vaccine.

Philip Bump at The Washington Post: When depicting the government as bad is more important than stopping polio.

When debates over the efficacy of vaccines emerge, as they increasingly do, there is a go-to example offered: the response to polio in the mid-20th century.

From 1910 to 1950, more than 376,000 Americans were afflicted with polio, with nearly 49,000 dying from the paralyzing disease. Then, in 1955, the polio vaccine was announced and approved. From 1956 to 1970, there were about 41,200 infections and about 2,000 deaths. From 1971 to 2000, 287 cases and 102 deaths. Since then? Essentially nothing at all.

This is why polio is such a good example. There was a lot of polio, with 1 out of every 2,700 Americans infected in 1952. Then there was a vaccine, and now there’s hardly any polio at all. So little, in fact, that one case that was identified in New York in 2022 earned national news headlines.

Despite the data, even the polio vaccine has not escaped the ire of the anti-vaccine movement. In 2022, a lawyer named Aaron Siri filed a citizen petition with the U.S. government seeking to block distribution of the polio vaccine for children until “a properly controlled and properly powered double-blind trial of sufficient duration is conducted to assess the safety of this product,” the New York Times reported Friday. It was one of more than a dozen vaccines Siri sought to block.

Siri, as you probably guessed, is also a longtime adviser to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President-elect Donald Trump’s selection to run the Department of Health and Human Services. In fact, the Times reports, Siri has been aiding Kennedy as he vets potential administration staffers.

Kennedy himself has been similarly critical of vaccines, making debunked claims about vaccine safety and pushing for restrictions on their use. He has been a prominent member of the anti-vaccine community for years but generally offered his views from the political sidelines.

Kennedy’s views are a mishmash of they’re-wrong-and-I’m-right assertions that span the gamut of credibility offered under the appealing banner of “making America healthy.” But the mishmash means that a lot of obviously dubious stuff gets mixed in with the valid stuff. The valid stuff includes Americans’ eating habits, which are obviously not great. The dubious stuff includes his embrace of the idea that airplane condensation trails are something worthy of concern. And vaccines, thanks to the pandemic and thanks to the long-standing anti-vaccine movement, are a valid element of public health that he presents as dubious.

Samuel Whiskers, Betrix Potter

In the early 1950’s, I was in elementary school in Lawrence, Kansas. My school was included in the pilot program for the Salk (polio) vaccine. One of my friends in the first grade had gotten polio and had to wear leg braces. This disease in no joke. I’m very grateful to have gotten that vaccine in early childhood. I had other childhood diseases–mumps, measles, German measles–before vaccines were available. I never had chicken pox. I think it’s possible that my hearing problem–which was first diagnosed in my early 30s–developed because of mumps or measles.

Apoorva Mandavilli at The New York Times: Are Childhood Vaccines ‘Overloading’ the Immune System? No.

It’s an idea as popular as it is incorrect: American babies now receive too many vaccines, which overwhelm their immune systems and lead to conditions like autism.

This theory has been repeated so often that it has permeated the mainstream, echoed by President-elect Donald J. Trump and his pick to be the nation’s top health official, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

“When you feed a baby, Bobby, a vaccination that is, like, 38 different vaccines and it looks like it’s been for a horse, not a, you know, 10-pound or 20-pound baby,” Mr. Trump told Mr. Kennedy on a call in July. “And then you see the baby all of a sudden starting to change radically — I’ve seen it too many times.”

On Sunday, Mr. Trump returned to the theme, saying Mr. Kennedy would investigate whether childhood vaccines caused autism, even though dozens of rigorous studies have already explored and dismissed that theory.

“I think somebody has to find out,” Mr. Trump said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

But the idea that today’s vaccines are overtaxing children’s immune systems is fundamentally flawed, experts said. Vaccines today are cleaner and more efficient, and they contain far fewer stimulants to the immune system — by orders of magnitude — than they did decades ago.

What’s more, the immune reactions produced by vaccines are “minuscule” compared with those that children experience on a daily basis, said Dr. Yvonne Maldonado, a pediatrician at Stanford University who advises the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on vaccines.

Sorry to be judgmental, but Trump is a complete idiot, and so are the people who elected him.

Children harbor trillions of bacteria, more than the number of their own cells, and encounter pathogens everywhere — from caregivers and playmates; in kitchens, bathrooms and playgrounds; on toys, towels and sponges.

“That’s just the normal course of growing up, is to have fevers and develop immunity to all of the organisms that are in the environment around you,” Dr. Maldonado said. “We are built to withstand that.”

By Beatrix Potter

A vaccine’s power comes from the so-called antigens it contains — bits of a pathogen, often proteins, that elicit an immune reaction in the body.

Children harbor trillions of bacteria, more than the number of their own cells, and encounter pathogens everywhere — from caregivers and playmates; in kitchens, bathrooms and playgrounds; on toys, towels and sponges.

“That’s just the normal course of growing up, is to have fevers and develop immunity to all of the organisms that are in the environment around you,” Dr. Maldonado said. “We are built to withstand that.”

A vaccine’s power comes from the so-called antigens it contains — bits of a pathogen, often proteins, that elicit an immune reaction in the body.

For once, Mitch McConnell is the good guy in this fight, because he is a polio survivor. The New York Times: McConnell Defends Polio Vaccine, an Apparent Warning to Kennedy.

Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader and a survivor of polio, issued a pointed statement in support of the polio vaccine on Friday, hours after The New York Times reported that the lawyer for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has petitioned federal regulators to withdraw the vaccine from the market.

Without naming Mr. Kennedy, Mr. McConnell suggested that the petition could jeopardize his confirmation to be health secretary in the incoming Trump administration.

“Efforts to undermine public confidence in proven cures are not just uninformed — they’re dangerous,” said Mr. McConnell, who is stepping down as his party’s Senate leader next month but could remain a pivotal vote in Mr. Kennedy’s confirmation. “Anyone seeking the Senate’s consent to serve in the incoming administration would do well to steer clear of even the appearance of association with such efforts.”

Mr. Kennedy has said he does not want to take away anyone’s vaccines. His lawyer, Aaron Siri, filed the petition in 2022 on behalf of the Informed Consent Action Network, a nonprofit run by Mr. Kennedy’s former communications director. Mr. Siri is advising Mr. Kennedy as he vets candidates for the Department of Health and Human Services.

Mr. McConnell, 82, of Kentucky, contracted polio as a child, more than a decade before the vaccine became widely available. When his left leg was paralyzed, his mother took him for treatment in Warm Springs, Ga., at the same treatment center frequented by another famous polio survivor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

On Kash Patel’s nomination for FBI director:

The New York Times: Patel Distorts Justice Dept. Benghazi Inquiry, Inflating His Role.

Kash Patel, President-elect Donald J. Trump’s pick to be F.B.I. director, often burnishes his credentials as a former prosecutor even as he portrays law enforcement agencies as an inept and politicized “deep state.” A critical piece of that narrative is the investigation into the 2012 attack on a diplomatic compound and a C.I.A. annex in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans.

Mr. Patel, who worked at the Justice Department from early 2014 to 2017, was involved in that inquiry. He described it in his 2023 memoir, “Government Gangsters: The Deep State, the Truth, and the Battle for Our Democracy,” and in a conversation on a September podcast of “The Shawn Ryan Show.”

Three Little Kittens, Beatrix Potter

But he has both exaggerated his own importance and misleadingly distorted the department’s broader effort, according to public documents and interviews with several current and former law enforcement officials familiar with the matter. Most spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.

“By the time the D.O.J. was moving in full force to compile evidence and bring prosecutions against the Benghazi terrorists, I was leading the prosecution’s efforts at Main Justice in Washington, D.C.”
— “Government Gangsters”

“I was the main Justice lead prosecutor for Benghazi for awhile.”
— “The Shawn Ryan Show”

Mr. Patel has repeatedly made it sound as if he led the government’s overall effort to investigate and prosecute militants involved in the 2012 attack.

As Mr. Patel himself acknowledges, he worked at the department’s Washington headquarters, or “Main Justice,” and he did not remain for the duration of the investigation.

In fact, Mr. Patel, a former public defender, was a prosecutor in the department’s counterterrorism section, where his assignments included work on the Benghazi investigation. But the section only supported the investigation, which was run by a team of prosecutors at the office of the U.S. attorney in the District of Columbia, along with agents and analysts at the F.B.I.

Mr. Patel took a junior position in the counterterrorism section in late January 2014 — well after the Benghazi investigation started. He left the department in April 2017, about six months before the first Benghazi case went to trial.

A spokesman for the Trump transition did not say for how much of that period he was working on the Benghazi investigation. But Mr. Patel was responsible for handling the section’s contribution to the interagency effort for only part of his time there, the officials familiar with the matter said.

Haley Fuchs at Politico: Assessing Patel’s confirmation chances.

Trump loyalist Kash Patel’s chances to become the head of the FBI are looking better and better.

This week, Patel held meetings with 17 Republican senators, including Utah Sen.-elect John Curtis, around Capitol Hill, many of whom publicly indicated their support for his nomination. The resignation of his would-be predecessor Christopher Wray also smoothed the path for the president-elect’s pick to helm the agency after his confirmation, and Trump world is confident in the road forward.

Asked in the Capitol Hill hallways about Wray’s decision, Patel promised he would “be ready to go on Day One.”

But the Trump transition was prepared for more pushback, as the initial outlook on the nomination was murky. Patel has been known to spout conspiracies about the 2020 election, pushed supplements that he claimed could reverse the Covid-19 vaccine, and suggested he may prosecute journalists. Trump’s former Attorney General Bill Barr reportedly once said Patel would become deputy FBI director “over my dead body.” Patel has suggested he would shut down the FBI headquarters to create a “museum of the deep state” and promised to target political opponents.

The incoming Trump team was “braced for impact,” said one transition official granted anonymity to speak candidly, adding, “We were ready for this to be more of a fight. … It hasn’t turned out that way.”

Reacting to the news of Wray’s resignation, Republican senators said that Patel would have been confirmed regardless of whether Wray left on his own volition. And if he had stayed, Wray was inevitably going to be fired on Day 1, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) added.

Greg Sargent at The New Republic: How GOP Senators Are Secretly Getting Ready to Surrender to Trump.

It’s largely passing unnoticed, but Republicans are quietly laying the groundwork to give their full blessing to one of Donald Trump’s more corrupt schemes: Unleashing law enforcement on his political enemies without cause once he’s sworn in again next year. That capitulation is already underway, with an argument they’re beginning to put forward to smooth the path for Trump’s nominee to head the FBI, Kash Patel.

The New York Times has a big piece reporting that Senate Republicans are growing “warm” to Patel, who has explicitly declared that in Trump’s second term, a range of enemies of Trump should be prosecuted for no discernible legal reason whatsoever.

Why are they warming to Patel despite the obvious threat he poses? The Times reports that Republicans now harbor a “deep distrust” of the FBI, that they see it as “rotted by corruption and partisanship,” and that all this has become a new “Republican orthodoxy”:

It is the culmination of a remarkable turnabout that has been years in the making for a party that traditionally had given unyielding support for the nation’s law enforcement agencies.

Senator Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma claims that Patel will “clean out the FBI.” And Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina insists he’lll restore the bureau’s “integrity.” In short, we’re meant to believe GOP senators back Patel because he will reform a badly corrupted agency in a way that will better serve our country.

Here’s the thing: All of that is nonsense. Most Republicans don’t actually think those things about the FBI, and they don’t actually believe Trump picked Patel to reform the bureau to address those alleged problems. Nor is there any reason to treat this as any kind of sincere, momentous ideological shift.

We should treat that very idea—that Republicans have in some principled sense begun to deeply question the FBI’s institutional role—as itself being spin. If anything, the GOP embrace of Patel carries echoes of the corrupted, secretive, intrusive FBI of the pre-Watergate days, and the new reformist pose is being hatched as fake cover to support Patel later despite what Republicans all know to be true—that Trump has selected him to transform the agency into a weapon against his enemies.

Read more at the link.

Other politics news:

Nancy Pelosi is recovering from hip surgery. 

The Independent: Former House speaker Nancy Pelosi undergoes hip replacement surgery after fall during Europe trip.

Former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has undergone a hip replacement procedure after being hospitalized in Luxembourg on Friday following a fall.

Pelosi, 84, was traveling with the congressional delegation for the 80th anniversary of the Battle of the Bulge – the last major German offensive during the Second World War – when she fell.

Her spokesperson, Ian Krager, said in a statement:“ Earlier this morning, Speaker Emerita Pelosi underwent a successful hip replacement and is well on the mend.

“Speaker Pelosi is grateful to U.S. military staff at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center at Landstuhl Army Base and medical staff at Hospital Kirchberg in Luxembourg for their excellent care and kindness.

“Speaker Pelosi is enjoying the overwhelming outpouring of prayers and well wishes and is ever determined to ensure access to quality health care for all Americans.”

Earlier her office had said she was “receiving excellent treatment from doctors and medical professionals.”

That’s all I have today. Have a great weekend, everyone!