Mostly Monday Reads: Only the Very Psycho

“Coming soon, FAFO,” John Buss, @johnbuss.bsky.social

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

I’ve been trying to focus on how bad the Trump Regime’s economic policies will be for the economy since I am a Financial Economist.  Today, we must face the horrific white christofascist appointments that will kill more women and endanger the lives of the GLBTQ+, as well as threaten the lives of young children, the elderly, and those with preexisting conditions.  We will have a combination of VooDoo Economics, VooDo medicine, and VooDoo exorcism.  People will die. People will be incarcerated. People will righteously fear for their lives.  When the words “Liberty and Justice for all” were enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, they signed on to “all,” and “all” stood until this regime. The Supreme Court, Congress, the President, and the People firmly moved the path of American history to ensure that “all” meant “all.”  Many of my family members nobly signed on to the Declaration and the wars, even though it meant they sacrificed their lives and liberty. They did so because they wanted to hand a legacy of freedom down to us. Shame on us if we let this band of psychopaths steal our past and our future.

The list of “undesirables” and those that must be controlled by specific kinds of white men is long and threatening.  Just living, just doing your job, just attending school, just trying to start a family, just being you and not bothering anyone else will be illegal in this country if Donald and his cronies have their way.

The Independent reported today that “Trump reportedly plans to kick trans troops out of the military within days of inauguration. Trump’s actions could eject thousands of current trans service members.”  This comes on the heels of the nominee for the Defense Department’s desire to remove women from all kinds of duties in the military.  These actions will hurt military readiness and create stress within the ranks of the military.

Donald Trump is expected to sign an executive order that would remove transgender service members from the military as soon as his first day in office.

The president-elect is reportedly preparing to issue an order following his inauguration on January 20 that would effectively ban trans people serving in the military — and then medically discharge the thousands of currently serving trans service members in the armed forces.

In his first term in office, Trump declared that the US would no longer “accept or allow” trans people in the military, citing “tremendous medical costs and disruption,” he tweeted in 2017. The ban took effect in 2019.

President Joe Biden reversed that policy, which was the subject of several lawsuits. Now, Trump is expected to immediately rescind Biden’s order and go further by ejecting currently-serving trans troops, according to The Times, citing sources familiar with the president-elect’s plans.

The executive action is among a stack of orders the president-elect is planning to issue as soon as he re-enters the White House, including sweeping actions on immigration, all of which are expected to draw significant legal battles.

Senator and military veteran Tammy Duckworth continues to push back on the notion that women can’t do the jobs they’ve passed all kinds of tests to perform. From CBS News’ Face the Nation, “Sen. Duckworth says Trump defense secretary pick is “flat-out wrong” about women in combat roles.”

“Our military could not go to war without the 220,000-plus women who serve in uniform,” Duckworth said. She added that having women in the military “does make us more effective, does make us more lethal.”

Lisa Needham of Public Notice writes, “Trump hoodwinked voters about his worst policy commitments. They signed up for Project 2025 whether they knew it or not.”  It’s easy to hoodwink idiots.  What amazes me is the number of people who seem to want us to be mean and petty.

Before digging into the steps Trump is taking to force the worst of Project 2025’s personnel and policies on the country, let’s tackle that whole mandate question first.

Besides the fact that the Trump campaign deliberately obscured some of its most consequential policy goals to win votes, there’s the fact that his victory is proving far less decisive than it initially appeared. As votes have continued to be counted, Trump’s popular vote margin is going to be less than two percent, smaller than Hillary Clinton’s popular vote win in 2016 and in fact the smallest popular vote margin since 2000. Declaring you have a mandate doesn’t make it so, but it is The Republican Way going back to George W. Bush.

Back to Project 2025. Despite lying about it throughout the campaign, Trump wasted no time appointing several of the project’s authors to key positions in his new administration. Because they’ve been steeped in hypocrisy for so long, Republicans see nothing odd about Trump embracing Project 2025 after feigning a complete lack of familiarity and having called it “ridiculous and abysmal.”

Project 2025 co-author Russ Vought, who led the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) during Trump’s first term, got caught on tape saying the quiet part out loud during the campaign when he told undercover reporters to trust that Trump would implement a national abortion ban if he returned to power, despite his public statements to the contrary. But far from being rapped on the knuckles for linking Trump to a stance he ostensibly opposed, Vought has been rewarded by getting his old OMB job back.

Besides being one of Trump’s abortion-whisperers, Vought is going to be instrumental in executing Trump’s plan to strip federal workers of job protections and replace them with hard-right partisans who see their only job as executing Trump’s wishes. Vought won’t stop there, though. He’s said we’re living in a “post-constitutional” time, which for Vought apparently means that Trump gets to turn the military on protestors and to cut spending whether Congress agrees or not.

If this sounds to you a lot like an imperial presidency, of deforming the whole of the federal government to make it solely a weapon to implement Trump’s desires, you’re not wrong. And Vought is by no means alone in being one of the Project 2025 denizens who Trump is ushering into high-level government positions.

Trump’s pick for the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Brendan Carr, wrote the Project 2025 chapter on the FCC. In it, Carr proposes that the FCC regulate big technology companies like Apple, Meta, and Google so that what Carr called the “censorship cartel” can be dismantled. Carr also backs Trump’s plan to penalize broadcast networks for “bias,” having already raised the specter of killing a Paramount-Skydance merger over Trump’s nonsense conspiracy theory about 60 Minutes deceptively editing an interview with Kamala Harris.

You can expect Carr’s vision of free speech to look a lot like what X/Twitter looks like under Trump pal Elon Musk: protection of hate speech and suppression of viewpoints critical of Trump.

Trump’s Surgeon General and FDA chair appointments are as appalling as the rest.  They also stand to endanger the lives of many Americans. The health of women, children, and the elderly is in danger. It gets worse.  The over million lives lost to Trump’s mismanagement of COVID-19 will look like a joy ride if either of the next two incoming diseases turns into a pandemic.  They may be because the people most equipped to deter them will be supervised by idiots. The CDC pick is a nightmare waiting to happen, too.  This is from NPR.  “What to know about Trump’s picks for CDC, FDA and surgeon general.”  It’s reported by Will Stone. 

In a series of high-profile announcements Friday evening, President-elect Trump made his picks for three top health positions in the new administration.

Johns Hopkins surgeon Marty Makary is his choice for Food and Drug Administration commissioner. He wants former Rep. Dave Weldon, a Republican from Florida, to serve as director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Dr. Janette Nesheiwat, a Fox News contributor, is in line to be the next surgeon general.

Trump made all three announcements on Truth Social and in press releases. Together the picks would help the incoming president shift the priorities of agencies that are linchpins in public health. But the choices also come with controversy.

Here are some snips on all three cabinet candidates.

A frequent guest on Fox News, Makary has authored several books on health care, is a member of the National Academy of Medicine and holds a master’s in public health from Harvard. He gained visibility for his writing and research on the high cost of health care, medical errors and the need for more transparency in medicine, among other topics.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, he also emerged as a vocal critic of various aspects of the public health response, particularly vaccine mandates and what he called the “complete dismissal of natural immunity.”

He voiced support for lockdowns early in the pandemic and encouraged universal masking. But in the subsequent years, he became increasingly outspoken against certain COVID-related decisions made by federal health agencies. He called the CDC under the Biden administration, “the most political CDC in history.”

<snip>

“He’s a well-trained internist. He’s practiced medicine,” says Dr. Georges Benjamin, head of the American Public Health Association. “He doesn’t [seem to] have traditional public health training, but we’ll learn more when he goes through Senate confirmation.”

As a congressman from Florida, Weldon “worked with the CDC to enact a ban on patents for human embryos,” Trump said in his Truth Social post. Weldon also introduced protections for health care workers and organizations that do not provide or aid in abortions. Known as the Weldon Amendment, the clause has been attached to the annual HHS spending bill in Congress since 2005.

The Weldon Amendment and related policies apply to public funds. But according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research group that supports abortion rights, it also “emboldens health insurance plans, health care institutions and medical providers to deny abortion services and coverage … often under the rubric of protecting ‘conscience’ or ‘religious freedom.’ “

<snip>

As with several of his picks for his Cabinet, Trump’s new surgeon general comes with experience at Fox News.

Nesheiwat is a medical contributor for the network and author of Beyond the Stethoscope: Miracles in Medicine, a book described on her website as “a vivid Christian memoir” that recounts her experiences during the pandemic and after. She’s also medical director at CityMD, a network of urgent care centers in New York and New Jersey — experience she has drawn on in selling her own line of vitamin supplements.

Along with Dr. Oz and RFK, jr., we should see a healthy business, perhaps called Trump Pharmaceuticals, in quack medicine.  We also see the footprints to ensure children get polio again and that women die from pregnancy again.  This comes after ProPublica has found yet another black woman who died unnecessarily from the Trump Abortion Ban law put into place in Texas.  “Are Avoiding D&Cs and Reaching for Riskier Miscarriage Treatments. Thirty-five-year-old Porsha Ngumezi’s case raises questions about how abortion bans are pressuring doctors to avoid standard care even in straightforward miscarriages.”

Wrapping his wife in a blanket as she mourned the loss of her pregnancy at 11 weeks, Hope Ngumezi wondered why no obstetrician was coming to see her.

Over the course of six hours on June 11, 2023, Porsha Ngumezi had bled so much in the emergency department at Houston Methodist Sugar Land that she’d needed two transfusions. She was anxious to get home to her young sons, but, according to a nurse’s notes, she was still “passing large clots the size of grapefruit.”

Hope dialed his mother, a former physician, who was unequivocal. “You need a D&C,” she told them, referring to dilation and curettage, a common procedure for first-trimester miscarriages and abortions. If a doctor could remove the remaining tissue from her uterus, the bleeding would end.

But when Dr. Andrew Ryan Davis, the obstetrician on duty, finally arrived, he said it was the hospital’s “routine” to give a drug called misoprostol to help the body pass the tissue, Hope recalled. Hope trusted the doctor. Porsha took the pills, according to records, and the bleeding continued.

Three hours later, her heart stopped.

The 35-year-old’s death was preventable, according to more than a dozen doctors who reviewed a detailed summary of her case for ProPublica. Some said it raises serious questions about how abortion bans are pressuring doctors to diverge from the standard of care and reach for less-effective options that could expose their patients to more risks. Doctors and patients described similar decisions they’ve witnessed across the state.

Leonard Leo continues to be a religious crusader against human rights and still has the billions to do so.  This article from NPR is probably one of the reasons why MTG wants to defund it NPR and NPTV. Haven’t we been through all this before?  Don’t we learn anything?  “The man who helped roll back abortion rights now wants to ‘crush liberal dominance’.” It’s not liberal dominance.  It should be a dominance of facts, law, and sanity.   Here’s some of an interview that shows where he wants to stick his tentacles next.

Inskeep: Mr. Leo, I want people to know about something called the Teneo Network, if I’m pronouncing it correctly. There’s been some reporting on this, an effort that you’re involved with to bring conservative influence to businesses Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Hollywood, in the same way that you brought more conservative influences to the judiciary, will you help me understand what you’re doing there? With judges, you identified young law clerks, young lawyers to try to promote them into the judiciary. What are you doing with, say, Hollywood?

Leo: It’s very important, in my view, to create pipelines of talent and networks of very driven, strategic people in all sectors of American life. If you want to introduce, you know, the Western cultural tradition and traditional values. So in the case of Hollywood, for example, the idea is to recruit and identify talented young professionals who have a knack for content creation and other aspects of the production of entertainment. People who believe in a sort of family-centered entertainment, where there’s a high demand. And Hollywood recognizes that. And then really helping them find opportunities to use their skills to create that kind of entertainment in the Hollywood space and beyond. And there are a lot of young professionals in entertainment and in journalism and in business and finance who are looking for opportunities to inject their traditional values and the Western cultural tradition into other aspects of American social and cultural life.

Inskeep: ProPublica obtained a video of you promoting this project and saying you wanted to “crush liberal dominance.” Is that what you want to do?

Leo: Yes! And the reason Steve – and I would really call your attention to the words I used: I want to crush liberal dominance. In other words, I want to make sure that there’s a level playing field for the American people to make choices about the lives that they want to have in their country. I’m perfectly happy having a world where people can make choices between various kinds of things. But what I don’t want is a system where our entertainment system or our world of news media or our business and finance worlds are heavily dominated by left ideology that either chokes out other ways of thinking about things, or that just creates a system where sort of inappropriate political and policy decisions are being made in places where politics and policy don’t really have a proper place.

Politico asks this question. “Could Trump sideline government watchdogs? Some are already quitting. The president-elect’s allies have called for a wholesale replacement of the more than 70 inspectors general across the federal government.”

Two in-house investigators at U.S. intelligence agencies recently quit their jobs. There’s growing fear in Washington that they could be the start of an exodus — or a purge — of government watchdogs.

A wave of departures by inspectors general would give President-elect Donald Trump the opportunity to nominate or appoint people of his choice to the watchdog posts — leaving dozens of federal departments, agencies and offices subject to oversight by people who would owe their positions to Trump.

In the wake of Trump’s election, CIA Inspector General Robin Ashton and Intelligence Community Inspector General Thomas Monheim revealed they plan to leave government in the coming weeks. Neither cited Trump’s victory as a basis for the decision, but the timing of the announcements troubled some longtime advocates for IGs.

“I’m very disappointed that the two IGs have resigned,” said former Justice Department Inspector General Michael Bromwich. “My view is that when things get tough, IGs should not resign, but instead redouble their efforts to do their jobs. Doing a tough job in difficult circumstances is what they bargained for. I think preemptively resigning makes things too easy for the incoming administration to avoid oversight. To prematurely run for the exits, in my view, that is not the way to handle the responsibility.”

Trump frequently clashed in his first term with some IGs, who are responsible for investigating alleged misconduct by the government, and his team briefly floated a plan to call on all of them to resign, though Trump never did. This time around, Trump allies have urged the president-elect to clean house and remove from their positions all watchdogs appointed by other presidents, though it’s unclear if Trump will do so.

This kind of chaos is just what Trump thrives on.  It gets him all junked up so he can lie and get media attention.  It will be incumbent on all of us to protect the vulnerable people that this Regime of Chaos will go after.   There are fewer safeguards against his desire to join the Putin circle.  We must also steel the nerves of the public servants and representatives in this battle of law and order against Thievery and chaos.

This news is a stab in the heart of Lady Justice. “Special counsel Jack Smith asks judge to dismiss Trump’s election interference charges.”  No Justice. No Peace.

Vive la résistance

I’m updating this to include something I just read on @threads tonight.  Look what he’s announced and he’s not even in office yet.  Be prepared.   https://www.threads.net/@dakinikat/post/DC0U99Rt7Ts

Canada and Mexico?  It’s like we’re just blowing ourselves and all of North America up!

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?