All Things Trump: the story continues...

[Tero]

Trump DOJ, however they are with Gaetz, will reopen investigation of Hunter and joe Biden and their dealings in Ukraine.

[Tero]

....But leave aside for the moment that she is manifestly unprepared to run any kind of agency. Americans usually accept that presidents reward loyalists with jobs, and Trump has the right to stash Gabbard at some make-work office in the bureaucracy if he feels he owes her. It’s not a pretty tradition, but it’s not unprecedented, either.

To make Tulsi Gabbard the DNI, however, is not merely handing a bouquet to a political gadfly. Her appointment would be a threat to the security of the United States.
(Atlantic)
... Fox News host named Pete Hegseth, is so blatantly unqualified—a caricature of MAGA fidelity—that some insiders say even the Senate sworn in this January, with its 53 Republicans, may vote not to confirm him as leader of the Defense Department.

The same might be true (one can always hope) of Trump’s pick for director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, the far-right Democrat turned MAGA Republican, who has no relevant experience except, perhaps, that she has avidly parroted Russian propaganda lines to explain a wide variety of international developments.

As for Gabbard, picked to oversee and coordinate the 18 U.S. intelligence agencies, not much need be said beyond “Holy shit!” If confirmed, she will replace Avril Haines, who had been—in contrast to Gabbard’s slim résumé—deputy director of the CIA and deputy national security adviser before President Joe Biden nominated her for the job.
If the Senate doesn’t dismiss Gabbard’s nomination as an insult to the enterprise of intelligence gathering and analysis, then we are in serious trouble as a nation. At the very least, one can expect hundreds of intelligence professionals to resign—which may be Trump’s intention. He wants to destroy “the administrative state,” as his erstwhile strategist Steve Bannon once put it. Putting Gabbard in charge of the intelligence apparatus is one way of doing that.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/202 ... gence.html

[Brian Peacock]

Elon's first task will be to create a bureaucracy to reduce the amount of government bureaucracy.

Something like the Efficiency Department of Government Efficiency: EDGE. And as its head he'll obviously be the EDGE Lord.

You can have that one for the blog Tero

[Tero]

But but...Bill Barr was smarmy too!

“There’s no conceivable justification for nominating somebody this smarmy and this offensive for a position of such significance in this democracy other than to have a puppet and somebody who, as Gaetz has demonstrated, will do anything Trump asks,” said Ty Cobb, a former Trump White House lawyer.

Many rank-and-file Justice Department staffers — who were already dreading what Trump might do at DOJ — were flabbergasted by the Gaetz announcement. “This is completely wild. It’s so out of bounds, it’s just shocking,” said one career DOJ lawyer, who was granted anonymity out of concerns about retaliation. “He’s there for one purpose: to enact retribution.

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/11/1 ... t-00189496

[Tero]

Trump, the modern Don Quixote, fighting wind mills, will cost us.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... e-policies

Under Biden, the US legislated the Chips Act, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act, all aimed in varying degrees to deal with the climate crisis while also bolstering American manufacturing.

The IRA alone, with its major incentives for clean energy, is credited with helping create around 300,000 new jobs, with the vast majority of $150bn in new manufacturing investment flowing to Republican-held districts.

Trump, however, has called this spending wasteful and vowed to erase it. “I will immediately terminate the green new scam,” the president-elect said shortly before his election win. “That will be such an honor.

[Tero]

sargonas
11h11 hours ago
By the way… It’s straight up impossible to grow coffee beans in the United States, so enjoy that 20% markup on your coffee thanks to tariffs!

midnightandreggie
12h12 hours ago
I hope the people who didn't vote for Kamala Harris because of Biden's Gaza policies are happy with Trump's appointment of Mike Huckabee as ambassador to Israel, a man who says there is no such thing as a Palestinian & all of Israel was giving by God to the Jews.

yeah, Pontius Pilate is ambassador

[Tero]

Rep. Jeff Van Drew on Newsmax: "Daddy's home. And things are gonna change."
https://bsky.app/profile/atrupar.bsky.s ... wayt7ooc2b
new forum

[Tero]

Now: McCarthy says Gaetz won’t get confirmed: ‘Everyone knows that’
Jan: Gaetz gets a recess appointment.

That will be the end. Trump will be dictator. At least 2 years.

[Tero]

Trump will take on evil drug companies. Which....do not force you to take vaccines. But but....they sell drugs that people dying are forced to take and pay a lot. And you die anyway!

In his announcement, Trump promised that, with Kennedy leading the HHS, the agency would be restored as the "Gold Standard Scientific Research."

"For too long, Americans have been crushed by the industrial food complex and drug companies who have engaged in deception, misinformation, and disinformation when it comes to Public Health," Trump wrote. "Mr. Kennedy will restore these Agencies to the traditions of Gold Standard Scientific Research, and beacons of Transparency, to end the Chronic Disease epidemic, and to Make America Great and Healthy Again!"

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/democr ... -secretary

[Tero]

Michael Lewis already gave us a preview of term 2. Not quite the RFK Junior and Gaetz scenario but a good summary of our risks.
https://esapolitics.blogspot.com/2024/1 ... nment.html

Pretty much the same as in 2016, but much worse. Michael Lewis went through the important cabinet postitions in this book in 2018. The guy that owns AccuWeather got to run the Weather Bureau. The dpartment of energy is not just about drilling. It covers nuclear reactors and nuclear waste and so on. I'm re-reading it now.

[Tero]

Some screen shots of Trump tax plan at my post.
https://www.threads.net/@esa55jarvi/pos ... DR0WLC5_KQ

[Tero]

McConnel:“A very large portion of my party,” he told me one day, “really doesn’t believe in the Constitution.” He’d realized this only recently, he said. We were a few months removed from an attempted coup instigated by Republican leaders, and he was wrestling with some difficult questions. Was the authoritarian element of the GOP a product of President Trump, or had it always been there, just waiting to be activated by a sufficiently shameless demagogue? And what role had the members of the mainstream establishment—people like him, the reasonable Republicans—played in allowing the rot on the right to fester?
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/202 ... trump.html

[Joe]

Michael Lewis already gave us a preview of term 2. Not quite the RFK Junior and Gaetz scenario but a good summary of our risks.
https://esapolitics.blogspot.com/2024/1 ... nment.html

Pretty much the same as in 2016, but much worse. Michael Lewis went through the important cabinet postitions in this book in 2018. The guy that owns AccuWeather got to run the Weather Bureau. The dpartment of energy is not just about drilling. It covers nuclear reactors and nuclear waste and so on. I'm re-reading it now.

I was thinking of doing the same. I still remember the part about the Hanford Nuclear site in Oregon. Here's a taste from Vanity Fair

Four hours out of Portland I arrive at what is maybe the single finest case study of the problem. In December 1938, German scientists discovered uranium fission. Physicist Enrico Fermi’s report on the Germans’ work made its way to Albert Einstein, and in 1939 Einstein wrote a letter to Franklin Roosevelt. That letter is the founding document of the Department of Energy. By the early 1940s the United States government understood that for democracy to survive it needed to beat Hitler to the atom bomb, and that the race had two paths—one required enriched uranium, the other plutonium. In early 1943, the United States Army was evicting everyone from an area in Eastern Washington nearly half the size of Rhode Island and setting out to create plutonium in order to build a nuclear bomb. The site of Hanford was chosen for its proximity to the Columbia River, which could supply the cooling water while its dams provided the electricity needed to make plutonium. Hanford was also chosen for its remoteness: the army was worried about both enemy attacks and an accidental nuclear explosion. Hanford was, finally, chosen for its poverty. It was convenient that what would become the world’s largest public-works project arose in a place from which people had to be paid so little to leave.

From 1943 until 1987, as the Cold War was ending and Hanford closed its reactors, the place created two-thirds of the plutonium in the United States’ arsenal—a total of 70,000 nuclear weapons since 1945. You’d like to think that if anyone had known the environmental consequences of plutonium, or if anyone could have been certain that the uranium bomb would work, they’d never have done here what they did. “Plutonium is hard to produce,” said MacWilliams. “And hard to get rid of.” By the late 1980s the state of Washington had gained some clarity on just how hard and began to negotiate with the U.S. government. In the ensuing agreement the United States promised to return Hanford to a condition where, as MacWilliams put it, “kids can eat the dirt.” When I asked him to guess what it would cost to return Hanford to the standards now legally required, he said, “A century and a hundred billion dollars.” And that was a conservative estimate.

More or less overnight Hanford went from the business of making plutonium to the even more lucrative business of cleaning it up. In its last years of production the plutonium plant employed around 9,000 people. It still employs 9,000 people and pays them even more than it used to. “It’s a good thing that we live in a country that cares enough to take the time it will take, and spend the money it will spend, to clean up the legacy of the Cold War,” said MacWilliams. “In Russia they just drop concrete on the stuff and move on.”

The Department of Energy wires 10 percent of its annual budget, or $3 billion a year, into this tiny place and intends to do so until the radioactive mess is cleaned up. And even though what is now called the Tri-Cities area is well populated and amazingly prosperous—yachts on the river, $300 bottles of wine in the bistros—the absolute worst thing that could happen to it is probably not a nuclear accident. The worst thing that could happen is that the federal government loses interest in it and slashes the D.O.E.’s budget—as President Trump has proposed to do. And yet Trump won the county in which Hanford resides by 25 points.

[Tero]

RFK will put people into wellness farms. To get off prescription CNS drugs.

[Tero]

Trump will appoint ALL of his henchemen.

His pressure campaign is already underway, with Trump posting on social media ahead of the Senate Republican leader election earlier this week that a majority leader "must agree" to allow for recess appointments if his nominees otherwise stall out during the confirmation process. The three candidates in the leader race quickly agreed it would be an option, and the winner, Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., reiterated publicly on Thursday that "all options are on the table."

The onlu slight hitch is this recess. Both the house and senate have to be in recess.
https://www.npr.org/2024/11/16/g-s1-344 ... -confirmed