Category: News & Comment

Christopher Wray Sticks It to Donald Trump

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By resigning as FBI director prior to the end of his 10-year tenure, Christopher Wray has thwarted Donald Trump’s plans to install the odious Kash Patel as FBI chief.

New York Times: “By stepping down now, as the conservative writer Erick Erickson observed, Wray has created a ‘legal obstacle to Trump trying to bypass the Senate confirmation process.’”

“Here’s why. According to the Vacancies Reform Act, if a vacancy occurs in a Senate-confirmed position, the president can temporarily replace that appointee (such as the F.B.I. director) only with a person who has already received Senate confirmation or with a person who’s served in a senior capacity in the agency (at the GS-15 pay scale) for at least 90 days in the year before the resignation.”

“Kash Patel, Donald Trump’s chosen successor at the F.B.I., meets neither of these criteria. He’s not in a Senate-confirmed position, and he’s not been a senior federal employee in the Department of Justice in the last year. That means he can’t walk into the job on Day 1.”

Mass Deportations Threaten U.S. Economy

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From CNBC:

“A labor market boosted by immigration after the Covid pandemic faces a threat from President-elect Donald Trump’s plan for mass deportation of undocumented immigrants.”

“Foreign-born workers have been taking open positions in sectors from construction and agriculture to technology and health care, fields where hiring companies have struggled to find domestic labor. Immigrant workers made up 18.6% of the workforce last year, a new record, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data.”

“The timing and scope of Trump’s plan remains to be seen, but companies and economists are trying to figure out how much the deportations could hurt the U.S. economy.”

Graph Shows When the U.S. Healthcare System Went off the Rails

Nixon's Healthcare Maintenance Organization Act of 1973 played an early role in enabling corporations to profit off sick and dying Americans

Jon Ponder
Chart source: Our World in Data

This graph shows the point at which the efficacy of healthcare in the United States diverged from the systems of its peer and competitor countries like the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, France and Japan. It shows that at the point when healthcare spending skyrocketed in the United States, the results of the enormous spending began to falter as measured by life expectancy.

Obviously, there were many factors that led to this divergence. But one factor in particular stands out. In 1973, President Nixon pushed through Congress and then signed into law the Health Maintenance Organization Act of 1973, which changed the operating parameters of HMOs and other pre-paid medical plans. Its advocate was Edgar Kaiser, a wealthy California donor and president of Kaiser Permanente.

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Oxford’s Word of the Year Is ‘Brain Rot’

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Who are we to quibble with something with “Oxford” in its name that “brain rot” is two words, not one?

From TIME:

If you’ve been scrolling too long on social media, you might be suffering from “brain rot,” the word of 2024, per the publisher of the Oxford English Dictionary.

After public consultation, Oxford University Press announced its choice—defined as the “supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as the result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging” as well as “something characterized as likely to lead to such deterioration”—on Monday. “Brain rot” beat out five other finalists, including “dynamic pricing,” “lore,” “romantasy,” “slop,” and Dictionary.com’s Word of the Year “demure.”

“‘Brain rot’ speaks to one of the perceived dangers of virtual life, and how we are using our free time,” Casper Grathwohl, president of Oxford Languages, said in the announcement. “It feels like a rightful next chapter in the cultural conversation about humanity and technology. It’s not surprising that so many voters embraced the term, endorsing it as our choice this year.”

The first recorded use of “brain rot,” according to Oxford University Press, was in Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, published in 1854. “While England endeavours to cure the potato-rot, will not any endeavour to cure the brain-rot, which prevails so much more widely and fatally?” wrote Thoreau in his treatise on transcendentalism.

It would seem the results of the 2024 presidential election are symptomatic of a virtual pandemic of brain rot across the electorate. Just pour some bleach on it.

MAGA Christians Set Their Sights on the Revoking 19th Amendment, Women’s Right to Vote

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Women demanding the right to vote in 1920

Ms. Magazine:“If we had a Christian nation tomorrow, and women did have the right to vote, we would not have a Christian nation within 50 years because the husband has been appointed by God as the head of his home.” – MAGA Pastor Joel Webbon, president of the Right Response Ministries, in 2023

In a 2024 episode of his own podcast Theology Applied, [MAGA theologist Joel] Webbon argued that the repeal of the 19th Amendment is actually “not [about] trying to take away the female vote, but it’s trying to say, no, there’s a family vote,” and that he believes this because “that is the Christian position.”

In fact, more than a hundred years earlier, a member of the Christian Reformed Church used the same argument that the Bible opposes suffrage, and taught that society consists of families, not individuals.

On the same episode of The Standard, Webbon uses the same argument that late 19th- and 20th-century anti-suffragists used: that women’s right to vote is a moral issue in that it impinges on men’s rights and interferes with women’s predestined roles as wife and mother.

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Defense Secretary Nominee’s Mother Criticized Him As a Serial Abuser of Women

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Hegseth showing off his radical Christian nationalist tattoos

Daily Beast: “On behalf of all the women (and I know it’s many) you have abused in some way, I say… get some help and take an honest look at yourself,” [Penelope Hegseth, the Trump nominee’s mother] wrote on April 30, 2018.

“I have no respect for any man that belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around and uses women for his own power and ego.

“You are that man (and have been for years) and as your mother, it pains me and embarrasses me to say that, but it is the sad, sad truth.”

Federal Debt Could Spike Trump’s Big Economic Promises

Buck Banks

Trumponomics Watch

The Associated Press: Donald Trump has big plans for the economy — and a big debt problem that will be a hurdle to delivering on them.

Trump has bold ideas on tax cuts, tariffs and other programs, but high interest rates and the price of repaying the federal government’s existing debt could limit what he’s able to do.

Not only is the federal debt at roughly $36 trillion, but the spike in inflation after the coronavirus pandemic has pushed up the government’s borrowing costs such that debt service next year will easily exceed spending on national security.

The higher cost of servicing the debt gives Trump less room to maneuver with the federal budget as he seeks income tax cuts. It’s also a political challenge because higher interest rates have made it costlier for many Americans to buy a home or new automobile. And the issue of high costs helped Trump reclaim the presidency in November’s election.

“It’s clear the current amount of debt is putting upward pressure on interest rates, including mortgage rates for instance,” said Shai Akabas, executive director of the economic policy program at the Bipartisan Policy Center. “The cost of housing and groceries is going to be increasingly felt by households in a way that are going to adversely affect our economic prospects in the future.”

After Running against High Prices, Trump Warns Americans That He’ll Raise Prices Across the Board

The chaos is the point

Jon Ponder

In Shock Doctrine, her seminal work on the rise of authoritarnism in the contemporary world, Naomi Klein shows how fascists undermine democracies in order to replace them with authoritarian states by creating and exploiting economic chaos. In the disruptions that ensue, they seize power.

In advance of his inauguration next month, Trump is saying plainly that he is very intentionally bringing economic chaos on day one. As Maya Angelou said, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time. People know themselves much better than you do.”

Salon.com: Donald Trump, who won in part due to inflation that peaked two years ago, campaigned on a policy of making everything from vegetables to televisions more expensive, suggesting a plurality of voters either did not understand tariffs — and the rippling economic impact of raising taxes on imported goods — or simply did not believe the Republican candidate would follow through.

In a Monday evening post on Truth Social, the president-elect reaffirmed that yeah, he’s serious.

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