#cabinet appointment

[thethirdbear]

[trendynewsnow]

Trump Appoints Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services

Trump’s Cabinet Decision: A Strategic Move with Symbolic Significance Donald J. Trump’s choice to appoint Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to a cabinet position appears to fulfill his earlier commitment to Mr. Kennedy, promising him a role within his administration. This move, however, raises questions about the value of the arrangement for both parties involved. Pre-election polling regarding the impact of…

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Send in the clowns :: David Rowe

* * * *

TAKE A DEEP BREATH

Robert B. Hubbell

Nov 14, 2024

Trump's proposed nominations over the last 48 hours are so bad they are disturbing and unsettling—not only for Americans but for citizens of the world. Let’s review where we are. But before we do, let’s catch our breath.

One challenge of writing a daily newsletter during difficult times is to avoid a format that sounds like, “This bad thing happened, then another bad thing happened, and then another bad thing happened.” However, on some days, that is how the news comes at us.

Even on such days, we must remember that the consequences of events will unfold over time—giving us the opportunity to absorb, adjust, and resist. That is where we find ourselves on a day when Trump's cabinet and senior officer nominations seem like a sick joke being played on the American people by Vladimir Putin.

The nominations are so bad that they are likely to have two short term consequences that offer a smidgen of a glimmer of hope.

First, they decrease the likelihood that the Senate will allow Trump to make “recess appointments” that would result in unreviewed confirmations of a Putin ally running our intelligence agencies and a congressman currently under investigation for having sex with underage girls running the Department of Justice.

Second, there is a real possibility that Trump may withdraw some of the nominations. They are so bad that confirming them may be too humiliating for a handful of Republican Senators. We will see.

But there is no soft-pedaling the import of the nominations announced on Tuesday and Wednesday. The nominations suggest that the top priorities of the second Trump tenure will be mass deportations and political vengeance—just as Trump promised on the campaign trail.

Before turning to the nominations, two stories regarding Congress deserve our attention.

Senate Republicans elect John Thune as Majority Leader

Trump lobbied for Senator Rick Scott (FL) to be elected as Majority Leader in the Senate. Scott had promised to put the Senate into recess so that Trump's cabinet nominations could evade the Senate confirmation process.

On Wednesday, Senate Republicans elected South Dakota Senator John Thune as Majority Leader, ignoring Trump's wishes. See Politico, GOP senators brush off concerns about Thune’s relationship with Trump. Thune is an institutionalist who will not allow Trump to evade Senate confirmation hearings and opposes abolishing the filibuster.

Thune will have a narrow two or three seat majority—with Senators Collins, Murkowski, and Bill Cassidy (who voted to convict Trump on the second impeachment)—offsetting against the hardline MAGA faction in the Senate. Of course, Susan Collins has demonstrated an astounding lack of conviction previously and can be counted on for nothing.

In short, “It could have been worse” in the Senate race for Majority Leader. That may be small consolation, but we should accept it for what it is worth.

Hakeem Jeffries concedes that Republicans will control House

Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries released a statement  that said, in part, that “we will not regain control of the Congress in January.” In a Democratic caucus meeting, Jeffries took responsibility for the loss. See Axios, Hakeem Jeffries tells House Democrats he owns 2024 election loss.

I do not understand the concession while there is still a mathematical path to control for Democrats, especially after the resignation of Matt Gaetz and the nominations of GOP House members Pete Hegseth (Defense) and Elise Stefanik (UN), Mike Waltz (NSA), which will result in at least four vacancies—all in Republican held districts. But perhaps Hakeem Jeffries has insights into the state of those races that are not available to us.

If you are still working on ballot curing for House members, cure away! Reducing the GOP margin of control will help Democrats remain relevant in the 119th Congress, which begins on January 3, 2025.

Trump cabinet and senior officer nominations.

Trump's nominations for cabinet and senior officers have confirmed that he is prioritizing deporting tens million immigrants and exacting political vengeance. Still, no one was ready for the outrageously unqualified hacks he has nominated.

Before turning to the shocking nominations made on Wednesday, we must revisit two aspects of nominations made earlier in the week.

Mike Huckabee’s nomination as Ambassador to Israel.

Two days after Trump indicated he would nominate Mike Huckabee as Ambassador to Israel, Huckabee said during a radio interview that he would support Israel annexing the West Bank and resettling Gaza with Israeli citizens. (Israel withdrew from Gaza in 1994.)  See The Times of Israel, Trump ambassador pick Huckabee says administration could back West Bank annexation.

In a separate interview, Huckabee said that there “isn’t such a thing” as a Palestinian.

Of course, ambassadors do not set US foreign policy. But Trump's selection of Mike Huckabee sends a strong signal that Trump will support Netanyahu’s vow to “finish the job”—as Trump said during his debate with Joe Biden in July.

Solutions relating to Israel’s security and the territories of Gaza and the West Bank have eluded every world leader from 1948 to the present. But Mike Huckabee’s views are likely to inflame a situation that is already dire.

Pete Hegseth’s nomination as Secretary of Department of Defense

As I wrote yesterday, Fox entertainer and former national guard officer Pete Hegseth is manifestly unqualified to assume the leadership role at the Department of Defense. One day after Washington asked in unison, “Pete Hegseth who?”, reports emerged that Hegseth was barred from serving as part of a national guard security detail in Washington, D.C. for Joe Biden’s inauguration.

Per those reports, Hegseth was removed from the inauguration security detail because he has tattoos that are popular with white nationalist anti-Muslim groups in the US. See HuffPo, Pete Hegseth Was Removed From Biden Inauguration For Tattoo | HuffPost Latest News.

Hegseth claims that the tattoos are “religious symbols.” Those symbols date back to the Crusades—an effort by the Christian west to liberate Jerusalem from Muslim control. One of the tattoos says, “Deus Vult.” Hegseth explained in 2020, “I’ve got Deus Vult – God Wills It – which was the cry of the Crusaders, on my bicep.”  

A 2020 book by Hegseth says, “Just like the Christian crusaders who pushed back the Muslim hordes in the twelfth century, American Crusaders will need to muster the same courage against Islamists today.”

Hegseth thus confirms that the tattoos are “anti-Islamist” in nature. Whether those sentiments also include white supremacy beliefs should be an active area of investigation during his Senate confirmation hearing.

Trump nominates Matt Gaetz as Attorney General

Trump's nomination of Matt Gaetz for Attorney General felt like a gut punch. Gaetz’s only qualification for running the Department of Justice is that he was under investigation by the DOJ for having sex with underage girls (involving travel across state lines). The DOJ dropped that investigation two years ago, but a House ethics committee was scheduled to release a report on Friday of this week on those charges and allegations of illicit drug use. Gaetz resigned from the House on Wednesday in an attempt to forestall the release of the report. See NYTimes, House Ethics Panel Was Set to Vote to Release Report Critical of Matt Gaetz, (Article accessible to all.)

Matt Gaetz is a conspiracy theorist who believes that the January 6 insurrection was incited by the US government. He was involved in the attempted coup to prevent the count of electoral ballots by the Joint Session of Congress. He has called for the FBI to be abolished. He invited a Holocaust denier as his guest to the 2018 State of the Union. Gaetz supports the pardoning of January 6 defendants

Trump's nomination of Gaetz stunned members of Congress. See Axios, Republicans "stunned and disgusted" as Trump taps Matt Gaetz for AG.

It is difficult to capture the depravity of Trump's nomination of Gaetz. It demonstrates that Trump is hell-bent on vengeance above all else. Gaetz views the DOJ as his enemy and persecutor. Gaetz will take a wrecking ball to the DOJ and the FBI as he seeks to destroy evidence of Trump's past crimes (and his own)—even as he uses the DOJ to target Trump's political enemies.

Trump nominates Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence

The Director of National Intelligence (DNI) is the “head of the US intelligence community.” The DNI prepares the president’s daily intelligence briefing (which Trump famously did not read during his first term).

Vladimir Putin could hope for nothing better than to have a sympathetic ally as the leader of the DNI. On Wednesday, Trump nominated Tulsi Gabbard to lead the DNI. Gabbard has a long and suspect affinity for Putin (and Syrian dictator Assad). See Tom Nichols in The Atlantic, Tulsi Gabbard’s Nomination Is a National-Security Risk.

As Nichols notes, Gabbard is spectacularly unqualified to serve as DNI. Worse, when her political positions are not incoherent, she has been a cheerleader for Russia’s interests against the US and its allies. Per Nichols,

She has blamed NATO and the U.S. for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (again, to the celebration of both Russian and Chinese state media), has repeated Russian propaganda claims that the U.S. has set up secret bioweapons labs in that country, and has argued that the U.S. not Russia is wholly responsible for Putin’s nuclear brinkmanship.

When she appeared on Sean Hannity’s show in 2022, even Hannity blanched at Gabbard floating off in a haze of Kremlin talking points and cheerleading for Russia.

It seems doubtful that Gabbard can obtain the security clearances necessary to serve as DNI. As recently as this summer, she claimed to be on the TSA “domestic terror watch list.”

Like Pete Hegseth, Gabbard blames the US for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Vladimir Putin could not be happier with Hegseth and Gabbard if he picked them himself.

Concluding Thoughts  

Well, that was a dollop of bad news. Take a deep breath. Recognize that they aren’t going to achieve everything they want merely by declaring their intentions. Watch this space for collective actions in the future to defeat the confirmations of Pete Hegsmith, Tulsi Gabbard, and Matt Gaetz (at least).

The silver lining in Trump's nominations is that they are so outrageous they highlight his bad faith and ill intentions. His nominees for Defense, DNI, and DOJ reveal that he has no interest in governing, only in exacting revenge and deporting ten million immigrants. Even a craven GOP caucus in the Senate must be brought up short by the audacity of nominating anti-government provocateurs to run the most important agencies in the US government.

So, take a breath. Let’s see how this all works out—especially after the American people have the opportunity to make their voices heard.

[Robert B. Hubbell Newsletter]

[iguessyouregonnamissthepantyraid]

i think this time around (orange hitler 2: electric bugaloo) i'm just gonna have to disconnect from the news a bit. last time i tried so so hard to stay informed and up-to-date on the latest bullshit and it got me nothing but chronic heartburn. not to mention when covid hit, i learned that it didn't matter how well-informed i was about anything actually, because my conservative relatives weren't gonna listen to a thing i said about covid (me, a biochemist, literally doing research on the molecular biology of viruses for a living) so they sure as hell weren't gonna listen to me about anything else, and that just made the whole thing so much more disheartening

anyway. i think the move is: much less national news, a bit of local news instead so i know what actually impacts my town/county, and maybe a few nonfiction polisci books here and there. just enough to help me understand the state of things without driving my blood pressure through the fucking roof. because i truly can't help anything if the stress gives me a stroke at the ripe old age of 32

[deadpresidents]

Trump is saying he wants to skirt the senate confirmation process for recess appointments and he won't support a Senate majority leader that doesn't agree. Do you think the senate will actually give up their power so willingly?

I think there are still enough legislators (at least in the Senate) who believe in separation of powers and aren't willing to give away their branch's role as something close to an equal partner in governing that they will not give that away so easily. I think that's why the Senate Republicans probably ended up choosing John Thune as Majority Leader today. However, they are so beholden to the cult of personality that the MAGA movement has built around Trump that the only reason Thune ended up winning is because the Senate leader was chosen in a secret ballot. If those votes were public, I guarantee Rick Scott would have been elected Majority Leader today.

[fuckyeahmarxismleninism]

Trump’s fascist cabinet picks and what will stop them

By Stephen Millies

Donald Trump’s cabinet picks are a declaration of war against the entire working class. These choices are a domestic version of the Pentagon’s “shock and awe” invasion tactics and are meant to smash any opposition.

Here’s a preliminary list of these bigots.

[hana-bobo-finch]

woah it’s another pdbc post. could not get the whole running into a china cabinet thing out of my head

rest in peace my girl Bellona u were a real one 😔✊

+ another one since she was on my mind

[thepoliticalvulcan]

As a Floridian of 20 years, I rolled my eyes when I got the news that Matt Gaetz was nominated for attorney general. Pam Bondi? I am livid and deeply worried. Gaetz is a bad person and I suspect we are about to find out he’s done much worse than have sex with teenagers.

Bondi, while not having (allegedly) committed statutory rape, is on a whole other level. She’s actively participated in trying to steal the 2020 election, taken bribes, and fought gay marriage until she literally had no more options for obstruction. She’s a vicious mercenary and at the very least a small c small n Christian Nationalist but possibly an out and out theocrat.

Do not fall into the trap of assuming conventionally qualified for a position means a person is at all professionally ethical.

[critical-skeptic]

Dancing Through Dystopia: Smug Smiles and Dollar Fields

The normalization of mediocrity in high office, epitomized by Trump 2.0’s cabinet appointments, is a symptom of a society lulled into apathy. It’s almost as if the electorate has been trolled into a collective shrug, watching the nation’s leadership devolve into a reality show. What’s worse is the deliberate design of this decay, exemplified by Donald Trump’s partnership with his new significant other, aptly dubbed as Elania Trump, a power couple built to mock democracy with its every move.

Take the appointment of WWE mogul Linda McMahon as Secretary of Education—or worse, Elon Musk as the potential czar of the Department of Governmental Efficiency (yes, really). This isn’t just absurd; it’s strategic absurdity. Trump and his administration are crafting a system so laughably dysfunctional that it deadens the public’s ability to react. Musk’s reputation as a “disruptor” may have earned him a cult following, but his qualifications to handle government bureaucracy are as solid as a wet paper bag. His penchant for trolling, whether online or in the boardroom, aligns perfectly with Trump’s modus operandi: turn governance into a spectacle and watch as outrage cycles burn themselves out.

This is trolling on a national scale. Trump 2.0, backed by his new cohort of yes-men and internet darlings, understands that the best way to paralyze opposition is through an endless stream of outrageous appointments. By the time you’re done wrapping your head around the first wave of them, someone else equally laughable is shoved into a position of power. This tactic ensures that outrage fatigue sets in before anyone can effectively organize against this systemic collapse of competence.

The sheer irony here is that the same people who fume over the use of words like “retarded” are silent—or worse, complicit—when actual governmental retardation happens before their eyes. Trump and his allies are fully aware that performative outrage is easy to spark but even easier to manipulate. By engineering one ludicrous appointment after another, they exploit society’s focus on language and superficial moral victories, ensuring the real damage—like the dismantling of public education and governance—occurs in plain sight.

The public’s acceptance of these appointments is a chilling indicator of how far the bar has fallen. When someone like Musk, who has spent more time managing former Twitter—now X tantrums than engaging in public service, is heralded as a “visionary,” you know the con is working. The appointment of such figures isn't just a joke; it’s an erosion of the very idea of expertise, replacing it with meme culture as policy.

This normalization isn’t just apathy; it’s complicity. It’s the willful acceptance of trolling as governance and chaos as the new normal. The more absurd the appointee, the more power Trump and “Elania” wield by turning governance into a nihilistic farce. The endgame is clear: to render the public so jaded, so disillusioned, that the most unqualified, incompetent, and unhinged individuals can slip into power with little more than a collective shrug.

In the face of this, silence isn’t neutrality—it’s surrender. The question is whether society will continue to feeding the trolls by allowing them to get under their collective skin, distracted by little petulant moves of social manipulation, control the corporate media cycles by buying into their outrage bait or finally wake up to the joke being played on them and fight for whatever is left of sanity and democracy?

[aunti-christ-ine]

But the DonOld will try, he will.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Guy Venables

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

November 16, 2024

Heather Cox Richardson

Nov 16, 2024

One of President-elect Trump’s campaign pledges was to eliminate the Department of Education. He claimed that the department pushes “woke” ideology on America’s schoolchildren and that its employees “hate our children.” He promised to “return” education to the states. 

In fact, the Department of Education does not set curriculum; states and local governments do. The Department of Education collects statistics about schools to monitor student performance and promote practices based in evidence. It provides about 10% of funding for K–12 schools through federal grants of about $19.1 billion to high-poverty schools and of $15.5 billion to help cover the cost of educating students with disabilities.

It also oversees the $1.6 trillion federal student loan program, including setting the rules under which colleges and universities can participate. But what really upsets the radical right is that the Department of Education is in charge of prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race and sex in schools that get federal funding, a policy Congress set in 1975 with an act now known as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). This was before Congress created the department.

The Department of Education became a stand-alone department in May 1980 under Democratic president Jimmy Carter, when Congress split the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare into two departments: the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Education. 

A Republican-dominated Congress established the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare in 1953 under Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower as part of a broad attempt to improve the nation’s schools and Americans’ well-being in the flourishing post–World War II economy. When the Soviet Union beat the United States into space by sending up the first  Sputnik satellite in 1957, lawmakers concerned that American children were falling behind put more money and effort into educating the country’s youth, especially in math and science. 

But support for federal oversight of education took a devastating hit after the Supreme Court, headed by Eisenhower appointee Chief Justice Earl Warren, declared racially segregated schools unconstitutional in the May 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. 

Immediately, white southern lawmakers launched a campaign of what they called “massive resistance” to integration. Some Virginia counties closed their public schools. Other school districts took funds from integrated public schools and used a grant system to redistribute those funds to segregated private schools. Then, Supreme Court decisions in 1962 and 1963 that declared prayer in schools unconstitutional cemented the decision of white evangelicals to leave the public schools, convinced that public schools were leading their children to perdition. 

In 1980, Republican Ronald Reagan ran on a promise to eliminate the new Department of Education.

After Reagan’s election, his secretary of education commissioned a study of the nation’s public schools, starting with the conviction that there was a “widespread public perception that something is seriously remiss in our educational system.” The resulting report, titled “A Nation at Risk,” announced that “the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people.”

Although a later study commissioned in 1990 by the Secretary of Energy found the data in the original report did not support the report’s conclusions, Reagan nonetheless used the report in his day to justify school privatization. He vowed after the report’s release that he would “continue to work in the months ahead for passage of tuition tax credits, vouchers, educational savings accounts, voluntary school prayer, and abolishing the Department of Education. Our agenda is to restore quality to education by increasing competition and by strengthening parental choice and local control.”

The rise of white evangelism and its marriage to Republican politics fed the right-wing conviction that public education no longer served “family values” and that parents had been cut out of their children’s education. Christians began to educate their children at home, believing that public schools were indoctrinating their children with secular values. 

When he took office in 2017, Trump rewarded those evangelicals who had supported his candidacy by putting right-wing evangelical activist Betsy DeVos in charge of the Education Department. She called for eliminating the department—until she used its funding power to try to keep schools open during the covid pandemic—and asked for massive cuts in education spending.

Rather than funding public schools, DeVos called instead for tax money to be spent on education vouchers, which distribute tax money to parents to spend for education as they see fit. This system starves the public schools and subsidizes wealthy families whose children are already in private schools. DeVos also rolled back civil rights protections for students of color and LGBTQ+ students but increased protections for students accused of sexual assault. 

In 2019, the 1619 Project, published by the New York Times Magazine on the 400th anniversary of the arrival of enslaved Africans at Jamestown in Virginia Colony, argued that the true history of the United States began in 1619, establishing the roots of the country in the enslavement of Black Americans. That, combined with the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, prompted Trump to commission the 1776 Project, which rooted the country in its original patriotic ideals and insisted that any moments in which it had fallen away from those ideals were quickly corrected. He also moved to ban diversity training in federal agencies. 

When Trump lost the 2020 election, his loyalists turned to undermining the public schools to destroy what they considered an illegitimate focus on race and gender that was corrupting children. In January 2021, Republican activists formed Moms for Liberty, which called itself a parental rights organization and began to demand the banning of LGBTQ+ books from school libraries. Right-wing activist Christopher Rufo engineered a national panic over the false idea that public school educators were teaching their students critical race theory, a theory taught as an elective in law school to explain why desegregation laws had not ended racial discrimination. 

After January 2021, 44 legislatures began to consider laws to ban the teaching of critical race theory or to limit how teachers could talk about racism and sexism, saying that existing curricula caused white children to feel guilty.

When the Biden administration expanded the protections enforced by the Department of Education to include LGBTQ+ students, Trump turned to focusing on the idea that transgender students were playing high-school sports despite the restrictions on that practice in the interest of “ensuring fairness in competition or preventing sports-related injury.” 

During the 2024 political campaign, Trump brought the longstanding theme of public schools as dangerous sites of indoctrination to a ridiculous conclusion, repeatedly insisting that public schools were performing gender-transition surgery on students. But that cartoonish exaggeration spoke to voters who had come to see the equal rights protected by the Department of Education as an assault on their own identity. That position leads directly to the idea of eliminating the Department of Education.

But that might not work out as right-wing Americans imagine. As Morning Joe economic analyst Steven Rattner notes, for all that Republicans embrace the attacks on public education, Republican-dominated states receive significantly more federal money for education than Democratic-dominated states do, although the Democratic states contribute significantly more tax dollars. 

There is a bigger game afoot, though, than the current attack on the Department of Education. As Thomas Jefferson recognized, education is fundamental to democracy, because only educated people can accurately evaluate the governmental policies that will truly benefit them.

In 1786, Jefferson wrote to a colleague about public education: “No other sure foundation can be devised for the preservation of freedom, and happiness…. Preach, my dear Sir, a crusade against ignorance; establish and improve the law for educating the common people. Let our countrymen know that the people alone can protect us against [the evils of “kings, nobles and priests”], and that the tax which will be paid for this purpose is not more than the thousandth part of what will be paid to kings, priests and nobles who will rise up among us if we leave the people in ignorance.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[davidaugust]

It sounds like Thune is open to recess appointments but not set on them yet. https://www.argusleader.com/story/news/politics/elections/2024/11/13/south-dakota-senator-john-thune-says-recess-appointments-still-an-option-for-trump-cabinet/76265376007/

We can, by contacting our Senators and Representatives demand the full advising and consenting of appointments (and yes, Representatives can add pressure to the Senate to not do recess appointments).

Find yours: https://www.congress.gov/members/find-your-member

[pixlmonkeys]

I’m overwhelmed to the point where the only way I can function is to lock myself in the bathroom and cry but I got to see the phrase “ran head first into a china cabinet” for an appointment on one of the technician’s computer so I consider that a win

[yutadori]

having immature parents sucks so bad

[that-ineffable-devil]

I know I haven't Dead Boy Posted today, but don't worry, I'm going to start a rewatch again tonight and probably post unhinged shit throughout so I'll be that annoying Dead Boy Poster on your dash again soon enough, I promise.