Donald Trump Archives - Page 3 of 49

Hey, what a difference a month makes

Harris/Walz

What a difference a month makes. Like a lot of people, by the time the Republican National Convention was over, I was thoroughly depressed. When Joe Biden was running, he rightly pointed out the risk to democracy if his opponent were elected. Unfortunately, the Republicans said the same thing if the Democrats won.

Even as I heard the calls for Joe Biden to step aside, I couldn’t imagine how that would work out. Kamala Harris’ polling numbers weren’t much better than Joe’s. The pundits also noted that she never got any footing in the 2020 Democratic campaign season, which was true.

Do you know who else ran not one but two dismal Presidential campaigns? Joe Biden, who dropped out of the 2008 campaign after faring poorly in Iowa. Of course, Barack Obama then picked him as his running mate.

So, I am cautiously optimistic. In retrospect, I should have KNOWN that Kamala Harris and Tim Walz would be the Presidential/Veep candidates for the Democrats. I jest. But it feels so right.

The Republicans are currently on the defensive. A disoriented djt insists that the attendance at his “rally” on Jan. 6, 2021, before the storming of the Capitol, was larger than the quarter million on August 28, 1963, when MLK Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech. He has fantasized that Joe Biden might somehow snatch back the nomination. People around him say he’s been knocked off his bearings.

Uh-uh

Harris/Walz has pivoted to We’re Not Going Back. Some have criticized it as unduly negative, but I think it’s wonderful. It’s oblique. Go back to what? The time before Roe v. Wade? Before Jan. 6? It’s a counterweight to Make America Great Again, Again.

Now, the GOP candidate is considered ‘Too Old’ by a majority. “Mental Fitness Increasingly Worry Voters.” Like Biden, he can’t pivot to become younger, and touting his alleged prowess in basic cognitive tests isn’t helping. I only wish the press had been harsher on djt earlier, because he’s been saying crazy stuff for quite a while.

Also, several pundits have noted that the “weird” labeling is particularly effective. If one attacks djt on policy, he’ll say his position was misrepresented. But if one points out his mixing up California politician Willie Brown with another black man, and you say, “That’s weird,” you don’t have to ask if he’s losing it. After Hillary Clinton used “deplorable” to describe MAGA fans, they embraced it, but weird is a different thing.

I should write about tech bro JD Vance and how Silicon Valley owns him, but nah.

DEI

When Harris got down to her Veep candidates, you knew there would be a white man. That DEI! If you’re gonna have a black South Asian woman, you gotta have a white guy. Walz seems to be the least likely candidate. Gov. Roy Cooper (NC) looks like how a president would have been portrayed in many 1980s disaster films. Josh Shapiro, governor of Pennsylvania, looks like a policy wonk. US Senator Mark Kelly (AZ) looks like, well, an astronaut. Then there were the forty-somethings, Gov. Andy Beshear (KY) and US DOT Secretary Pete Buttigieg.

MN governor Tim Walz is the least telegenic, but he has a Midwestern genuineness and a great biography, which people are attracted to. “He tossed off multiple zingers about how ‘creepy and weird as hell’ the Republican ticket. Coach Walz’s sudden rise in the Democratic Party was no accident. And according to the satirical Borowitz Report, “in an extraordinary show of support from the furry mammals, America’s cats gave a full-throated endorsement to…Walz.”

Interestingly, according to an article published in the National Library of Medicine in 2023, “We vote for the person, not the policies: a systematic review on how personality traits influence voting behaviour.” The GOP candidates and most of their proxies are not very nice people. Their “stolen valor” attack on Walz is overblown, e.g., and is funny coming from the campaign of Captain Bone Spurs.

RFK, Jr.

When Biden was still poised to be the Democratic candidate, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. seemed to have the chance to be at least a spoiler. His stock is down now, and John Oliver’s skewering on Last Week Tonight didn’t help.

Worse, from Behan Communications: “Since ‘weird’ seems to be the word of the moment, we thought we’d hop right in with some news about… [the] presidential candidate of the Comic Relief Party.

“Where to begin? With his admission that he dumped a dead bear cub in Central Park 10 years ago? Or that he once had a freezer full of roadkill meat? Or that doctors told him he has a dead worm in his brain? Or that he somehow believes, according to testimony he gave this week in an Albany, N.Y., courtroom, that an intent to move somewhere is ‘the only requirement for residency?'” He has been “disqualified from the New York ballot over his false residence claim.” It’s likely to affect other states where he used that bogus address.

Project 2025: Reproductive rights

DOJ run amok

From the Center for Reproductive Rights – https://reproductiverights.org/roe-v-wade/

The Project 2025 agenda has drawn a bullseye on reproductive rights. It aims for “the next conservative administration to attack reproductive rights from several angles, including by removing the term ‘abortion’ from all federal laws and regulations, reversing abortion pill approval, punishing providers by withdrawing federal health funding and restricting clinics that provide contraception and STD testing. “

It is not comforting that Paul Dans left his director role at the Heritage Foundation, which oversees Project 2025. Sure, djt’s campaign “welcomed” the news because it has been trying to distance the candidate from the plan for months now that folks are paying attention.

The Republican nominee for President has a position on the issue that has been described as “pure jibberish” as he tries and fails to BS his way through questions about Mifepristone.

After the Dobbs decision was leaked in the spring of 2022, I posited that the country could be worse off post-Roe than it was pre-Roe. Sometimes, I HATE being correct.

The SCOTUS leak

(SCOTUS never discovered the source of the leak. Based on Chief Justice Roberts’ public comments, I assumed that he was seeking a “middle ground,” perhaps a ban after 15 weeks. There could have been a 3-3-3 or 3-4-2 outcome, with the CJ getting one or more of the newbies on the court on his side. But when someone – one of Alito’s or Thomas’ clerks? – spilled the beans early, voila! Roe gets overturned.)

The heartbreaking stories of women who have to practically, or actually, have to be on death’s door before receiving treatment when a pregnancy goes wrong. State legislators insist incorrectly that their draconian laws don’t handcuff doctors from providing necessary care.

As The Atlantic reported in 1969(!), and it’s true again in 2024: “As a matter of fact, no one knows what the laws which permit abortion to save the life of the mother mean.”

ABC News put out a special – here’s just a small portion– about the “dire impact of new healthcare restrictions on pregnant women.” I was alternatingly sad and infuriated. Dobbs has brought out the stupid, such as bans against in vitro fertilization.

Defund

What else is Project 2025 calling for? “The policy book instructs the Department of Health and Human Services to ‘issue guidance reemphasizing that states are free to defund Planned Parenthood in their state Medicaid plans’ and ‘propose rulemaking to interpret the Medicaid statute to disqualify providers of elective abortion.'”

It “also proposes requiring education on ‘fertility awareness-based’ methods of contraception and family planning and suggests eliminating condoms from Health Resources & Service Administration guidelines because they are not a ‘women’s’ preventative service.” The stupidity of this provision is amazing.

“Heritage recommends the next conservative administration direct the CDC to ‘eliminate programs and projects that do not respect human life and conscience rights and that undermine family formation.'” I read A Handmaid’s Tale in 1995 but thought it was fiction.

“The book recommends reversing policies that allow ‘the use of public monies … to facilitate abortion for servicemembers.'” Ah, supporting our troops!

The Anti-Abortion Movement Is Perverting the 14th Amendment. So says Jamelle Bouie in the New York Times in response to the 2024 Republican National Committee’s party platform. “In the same way it is perverse for conservative legal activists and Supreme Court justices to use the Reconstruction amendments… to dismantle this nation’s halting efforts at substantive racial equality, it is also perverse for the anti-abortion movement to use the 14th Amendment as a cudgel against bodily autonomy in the name of so-called fetal rights.”

Department of Justice and federal law enforcement

“The policy book states that ‘litigation decisions must be made consistent with the President’s agenda.'” That’s terrifying.

Do you remember Jeff Sessions? He was the first Attorney General under djt, and he was terrible. Yet he did one correct thing. He recused himself from participating in any DOJ investigation regarding allegations that Russia had interfered in the 2016 presidential election, infuriating 45.

There’s no reason to believe that a Republican AG in 2025 would have even that much integrity, based on djt’s attempt to strongarm DOJ, as acting AG Jeffrey Rosen noted in his testimony before the January 6 hearings.

“The policy book [for Project 25] euphemistically calls for the next conservative Administration’ to do everything possible to obtain finality for the 44 prisoners currently on federal death row.’ During the final months of his administration, Trump rushed 13 federal executions in 2020 — ‘an unprecedented clip’ compared to the combined total of three federal executions in the preceding 60 years.

“Project 2025 claims that the Biden administration ‘has enshrined affirmative discrimination in all aspects of its operations under the guise of ‘equity’ and vows to ‘reverse this trend’ by attacking ‘so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) offices that have become the vehicles for this unlawful discrimination.'” Ah, the old “reverse racism” trope.

“Project 2025 calls to reassign election-related offenses to the Criminal Division of the DOJ rather than the Civil Rights Division… This change would allow a second Trump administration to provide more resources for investigations into bogus claims of voter fraud and bolster efforts to overturn future election results.”

Will we have ever-challenged votes when the results don’t turn out how the White House wishes? It may sound overly dramatic, but this provision alone makes me worry that democracy itself would be in jeopardy.

Politics: Don’t forget about 1974

RMN

Understandably, many people’s jaws have dropped over the changes in the political landscape during July 2024. Many of them compared it to 1968, and rightly so.

But don’t forget about 1974. That was the year that Richard Nixon resigned after the Watergate debacle. I was reminded of this when my Wordle buddy used PENCE on the way to PENNE. He said he was thinking about the money, not the VEEP. I replied: “Of course, but it reminds me to try the word occasionally.”

His response: “AGNEW has 5 letters, but nobody ever thinks of him.” Au contraire! “I think of Ted all of the time. He’s why Jerry Ford became president 50 years ago.”

Ted

Vice-President Spiro T. Agnew was newly re-elected in 1972 with Richard Nixon. Initially, he was not the target of an investigation in Maryland, where he had been governor. However, by June 1973, [Lester ] “Matz’s attorney disclosed to Beall that his client could show that Agnew had not only been corrupt but that payments to him [from Matz’s engineering firm] had continued into his vice presidency. The statute of limitations would not prevent Agnew from being prosecuted for these later payments.”

Ultimately, “on October 10, 1973, Agnew appeared before the federal court in Baltimore and pleaded nolo contendere (no contest) to one felony charge, tax evasion, for the year 1967. [U.S. Attorney General Elliot] Richardson agreed that there would be no further prosecution of Agnew and released a 40-page summary of the evidence. Agnew was fined $10,000 and placed on three years’ unsupervised probation. Immediately prior to entering court, Agnew had an aide submit his formal letter of resignation to the Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, and sent a letter to Nixon stating he was resigning in the best interest of the nation. Nixon responded with a letter concurring that the resignation was necessary to avoid a lengthy period of division and uncertainty, and applauding Agnew for his patriotism and dedication to the welfare of the United States.”

25A

This kicked in Section 2 of the 25th Amendment, which reads: “Whenever there is a vacancy in the office of the Vice President, the President shall nominate a Vice President who shall take office upon confirmation by a majority vote of both Houses of Congress.”

Some Vice-Presidents ascended to the Presidency and had no Veep: John Tyler (after William Henry Harrison, 1841-1845); Millard Fillmore (after Zachary Taylor, 1850-1853); Andrew Johnson (after Abraham Lincoln, 1865-1869); Chester A. Arthur (after James Garfield, 1881-1885). Others – Teddy Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge, Harry Truman, and Lyndon Johnson – had no Veep until the following election.

So this was a new thing. Gerald Ford, the House Minority Leader, “was nominated to take Agnew’s position on October 12, the first time the vice-presidential vacancy provision of the 25th Amendment had been implemented. The United States Senate voted 92 to 3 to confirm Ford on November 27. On December 6, the House confirmed Ford by a vote of 387 to 35. After the confirmation vote in the House, Ford took the oath of office as vice president.”

Then, after Watergate became untenable for Nixon, he addressed the nation on television on August 8, 1974, and resigned from the presidency the next day.

When Gerald Ford became President, the 25th Amendment was used again to elevate Nelson A. Rockefeller to vice president in December 1974. Those were weird times.

1968

Not that 1968 wasn’t strange. Doris Kearns Goodwin, who has a recent book about how she and her late husband interacted with the times, appeared on The Weekly Show in late July. She schooled Eugene Daniels and host Jon Stewart on the situation’s complexity.

Not only did Lyndon Johnson, the Democratic President, decide he would not run for re-election, but he would also engage in some diplomacy to end the Vietnam War. He realized that if he couldn’t do the latter without doing the former, so he went on TV at 9:00 PM on March 31st.

But only four days later, Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated. This put the kibosh on the peace plan, as he had to deal with massive disruptions on the streets. Robert Kennedy started actively running for president after Eugene McCarthy had gotten 42% of the vote in the New Hampshire Democratic primary against the incumbent. He was very likely to become the party nominee when, in early June, just after the California primary, RFK was assassinated.

This caused chaos at the Democratic convention in Chicago in August 1968. Hubert Humphrey, Johnson’s vice president, became the nominee, but so many people were slow to get behind HHH that Richard Nixon – remember him? – barely won the Electoral College, with George Wallace, the third-party candidate, taking five states.

2024

So, it is not shocking that the Democrats have coalesced behind Kamala Harris. Her campaign could keep the money raised by the Biden/Harris campaign.

I find it hysterically funny that the Republicans are suggesting that those 14 million people who voted for Joe Biden in the very non-contested Democratic primaries were losing their franchise because Harris is now the nominee. They have supported a candidate on the Republican side who wanted to disenfranchise 81 million people who voted for Joe Biden in 2020 and, more than that, continue the lie that the election was stolen.

It’s almost humorous to listen to djt being surprised that Kamala Harris identifies as part black, given the fact that she attended an HBCU, Howard University, and was a member of a black sorority, AKA. Her mother has been on record that she raised Kamala as black because she knew that she would be perceived as black by most people. Yes, race in America is complicated, but the misogynoir in djt has often been very strong.

I’ve been aware of Rachel Scott, the ABC reporter who questioned him at the black journalists’ event, for a while. She, along with Diane Sawyer, presented a Peabody-nominated report about how pregnant women who wanted to have kids were experiencing severe outcomes but, because of anti-abortion laws, could not receive medical treatment. She’s not a new kid on the block but is the senior congressional reporter for ABC News.

July rambling: Dr. SCOTUS

Gleichschaltung

Dr. SCOTUS Will Now See Your Next Patient – Ron Harman King fears our healthcare lies with those in black robes, not white coats.

Cory Doctorow: Unpersoned about romance writer K Renee and others locked out of their Google docs

CrowdStrike blames test software for taking down 8.5 million Windows machines.

Teaching the Bible in Public Schools

Disputing Errors on Your Tenant Background Check Report

Succeeding in the Post-Wayfair Landscape: Top 3 Trends in Sales Tax Six Years On (yes, this is interesting to a geeky business librarian)

The Nation’s Data at Risk: Meeting America’s Information Needs for the 21st Century

Why Paper Checks Refuse To Die

A neurological disorder stole her voice. Jennifer Wexton takes it back on the House floor.

Quieting Your Inner Critic – Self-Compassion and Other Methods

Navy exonerates Black sailors unjustly punished in 1944 after a deadly California port explosion.

Bob Newhart Was an Everyman With a Comic Voice Like No Other. The 25 best TV series finales ever. Newhart is #22 and should be much higher. I watched him on Ed Sullivan and his three CBS shows

Whitney Rybeck, ‘Friday the 13th’ Actor and Crash Test Dummy in Seat Belt Ads, Dies at 79

The Worm Charmers: A Florida family coaxes earthworms from the forest floor

Homicide: Life on the Street Finally Gets Streaming Home at Peacock. This was one of my favorite programs.

Oscars: What To Do When You Lose

Now I Know: The Dirty Lyric Snuck Onto The Radio and The Pencil That Told Kids To Do Something They Shouldn’t and A Mountainous Problem With Instant Noodles

Kelly and Sunday Stealing

SSA

“Soon, you will no longer be able to sign in to your online Social Security account using your Social Security username and password. To access Social Security online services, including my Social Security, you will need to create a Login.gov or ID.me account.”

This is a real thing, reported on AARP and CBS Mornings.

“The change affects about 46 million of the roughly 86 million people who have My Social Security accounts, according to an SSA spokesperson.”

POLLYTICKS

How Joe Biden launched his career by beating two unbeatable Republicans

Thank You, President Biden

Weekly Sift: Resolutions and The Two Kinds of Unity, in which I was introduced to the word Gleichschaltung. “It’s an old German engineering term for when you wire a bunch of electrical circuits together under a common master switch. It got applied to German politics in 1933, for reasons that you may recall from history books.” Also, the Kamala surge and Couches, Cat Ladies, and J. D. Vance.

djt Returns to Bad Form — and Gives the Democrats Hope

Immigration, Crime, Politics, and lies and Fact-checking djt’s lies during his RNC acceptance speech

RNC & “Migrant Crime”: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

Demagoguery repeats itself

djt Sells Sneakers, Coins, and Trading Cards Imprinted with his Bloody Face

How Kamala’s name is pronounced; even a child can do it

From way back on July 15: ‘Terrified’ – Americans in NZ react to Trump shooting, Biden uncertainty

Borowitz Reports repeats: New Conspiracy Theory Links Wide Availability of Guns to People Getting Shot

MUSIC

Anything Goes – Peter Sprague featuring Rebecca Jade

Look At Me, I’m MTG!– A Randy Rainbow Song Parody

John Mayall, British Blues-Rock Legend and 2024 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Inductee, Dies at 90. Room To Move

Flivver Ten Million by Frederick Converse, performance is by the Buffalo Philharmonic,

Coverville 1495: Cover Stories for Marc Cohn and Simple Minds and 1496: The Trevor Horn Cover Story II

The Great Curve – Talking Heads

K-Chuck Radio: Gaze into the crystal ball …

Coast -Kim Deal

You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away– Peter Sprague, featuring Allison Adams Tucker.

Patterns – Laura Marling

Several versions of Sit Down, You’re Rocking The Boat here and here and here and here (1992 Tonys – Nicely-Nicely (Walter Bobbie) plus Nathan Lane and J.K. Simmons) and here and here (current London revival) and probably more here

Knee Deep Blues – Caleb Caudle:

Breath Out – Dawn Richard and Spencer Zahn –

This LOST 1986 Song Went Viral…But for Years-NOBODY Knew WHO Sang it—UNTIL Today!–Professor of Rock

Project 2025: Personnel and staffing

Christian nationalism

I have looked at Google Trends. Since the week of June 3, there has been a definite upward trend in the number of searches for the term Project 2025, “the extreme right-wing agenda for the next Republican administration.” That’s good. Maybe djt is one of them since he claimed he doesn’t know about it but is opposed to many of its aspects. How are both possible?

Leading up to the election, I’ve decided to reiterate its tenets. Regarding Personnel and staffing, “Project 2025’s goals for staffing the next GOP presidency reflect Trump’s idea to gut civil service staff and replace them with potentially tens of thousands of MAGA loyalists. The New York Times describes this plot for a second Trump administration as an ‘expansion of presidential power over the machinery of government’ that would reshape “the structure of the executive branch to concentrate far greater authority directly in his hands.”

When I first searched for Schedule F, I discovered the IRS Form 1040 to report farm income and expenses. That’s not what we’re looking for.

Here’s an article from The Brookings Institute, a hardly liberal think tank, titled The Risks of Schedule F for Administrative Capacity and Government Accountability.

“Weeks before the 2020 election, President Trump unveiled an executive order that would have created a new class of political appointee, Schedule F. The order would have allowed a president to turn any career official with a policy advisory role into a political appointee, removing job protection and opening the door to vastly politicize the federal workforce.

“President Biden rescinded the order, but Trump has made it a central feature of his re-election campaign as part of his effort to take control of “the deep state…”

“Deep state”

“First, let’s understand the scale of what is being proposed. Among developed countries, the U.S. is an outlier in terms of its existing level of politicization. We use about 4,000 political appointees to run the executive branch, an increase from about 3,000 in the early 1990s…

“Supporters of Schedule F have proposed converting 50,000 career civil servants into political appointee status. That is a massive degree of additional politicization and the most fundamental change to the civil service system since its inception in 1883. Increasing the number of political appointees would create a new venue where political polarization would undermine the quality of governance by replacing moderates with extremists.”

Or, put another way, the cabal would replace people who know how to do their jobs with political hacks. Naturally, the National Federation of Federal Employees (NFFE) supports legislation to stop it. Unsurprisingly, it was introduced in the House in February 2023, where it languishes.

Pushback

However, back in April 2024, the “Office of Personnel Management issued the final version of its regulation meant to safeguard the civil service from the return of a Trump-era policy that sought to convert most federal employees to at-will workers.”

In a statement, Joe Biden said, “‘My administration is announcing protections for 2.2 million career civil servants from political interference, to guarantee that they can carry out their responsibilities in the best interest of the American people’… Day in and day out, career civil servants provide the expertise and continuity necessary for our democracy to function.”

“The final rule states that an employee’s civil service protections cannot be taken away by an involuntary move from the competitive service to the excepted service; clarifies that the ’employees in confidential, policy-determining, policy-making or policy-advocating positions’ terminology used to define Schedule F employees means noncareer, political appointments and won’t be applied to career civil servants; and sets up an appeals process with the Merit Systems Protection Board for any employees involuntarily transferred from the competitive service to the excepted service and within the excepted service.”

So djt and his people could reinstate Schedule F, but implementing it would be more difficult.

Christian nationalism

Another tenet of Project 2025 is Christian nationalism. It claims that “centralized government ‘subverts’ families by working to ‘replace people’s natural loves and loyalties with unnatural ones,’ utilizing the biblical language of natural versus the unnatural.”

More specifically, “Former Trump official Jonathan Berry’s chapter on the Department of Labor states that ‘the Judeo-Christian tradition, stretching back to Genesis, has always recognized fruitful work as integral to human dignity, as service to God, neighbor, and family’ and claims that Biden’s administration is ‘hostile to people of faith.'”

As a person of faith, I trust my antipathy for Christian nationalism and Christofascism is abundantly clear.