Not-a-Surprises

Posted on Tuesday 11 February 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

I see TV commercials about health insurance that complain about “bills” and “not-a-bills”. I get plenty of both too.

  • Not-a-surprise: Trump and Musk are really after tax cuts for the wealthy.
  • Trump doesn’t grasp the point of foreign aid;
  • Conservatives upset by the Super Bowl half-time show are apparently for diversity after all;
  • How the Trump administration thinks America is full of the wrong kind of people;
  • A Thomas B. Edsall round-up on this attack against modern American liberalism;
  • Links about Musk and taxpayer-funded research, how Trump is emulating Hungary’s Orbán, and how maybe Trump’s zone-flooding can’t go on forever;
  • Not-a-surprise: A Trump admin puts election security staffers, whose job is to ensure the security of US elections, on leave.
– – –

This is the least surprising thing yet.

Slate, Alexander Sammon, 1 Feb 2025: This Is Not About Cost Cutting, subtitled “What Trump and Musk really want out of their government rampage is hiding in plain sight.”
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The Roots of All This is an Unchanging Human Nature in a Changing World

Posted on Monday 10 February 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Heather Cox Richardson explains why the right to vote, not the Second Amendment, is the key to maintaining our rights;
  • Robert Reich wonders where the lawlessness of the Trump regime will end;
  • Paul Krugman sees the end of Pax Americana;
  • Connie Willis on the best cartoon of the day, and the funniest thing of the day (from the Borowitz Report);
  • Short items;
  • Katherine Stewart at NYT asks, Now Will You Believe What Is Happening Right in Front of Us?
  • MSN’s Lindsay Beyerstein explores delusion as the key mental state of Trump’s supporters;
  • And my thoughts about how all of this is about human nature, in the ancient world and in the modern world.

What are the pundits saying?

Heather Cox Richardson, February 9, 2025

On Friday, President Donald Trump issued an executive order “protecting Second Amendment rights.” The order calls for Attorney General Pam Bondi to examine all gun regulations in the U.S. to make sure they don’t infringe on any citizen’s right to bear arms. The executive order says that the Second Amendment “is foundational to maintaining all other rights held by Americans.”

In fact, it is the right to vote for the lawmakers who make up our government that is foundational to maintaining all other rights held by Americans.

The claim in the executive order implies that it is only at gunpoint that any other rights are maintained. A very primitive, frontier-justice notion; a concern for force, not principle. Heather counters at length.

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Nothing mattered, in the end

Posted on Sunday 9 February 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • NY Times’ timeline of Trump 2.0;
  • NRA graphic from Facebook;
  • A Canadian perspective on Trump;
  • DEI graphic from Facebook;
  • How Trump (and Musk) target agencies investigating *them*;
  • The cost of scrapping the social cost of carbon;
  • David French on the populist cure, how Steve Bannon doesn’t think populists are understood, and how populism is rooted in grievance and expressed in simplistic terms of good and evil.

First of all for today, this handy timeline.

NY Times, updated 9 Feb 2025: All of the Trump Administration’s Major Moves in the First 20 Days

I assume this will continue to be updated daily. The top of the page has buttons to filter by category, and by type of action or announcement.

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Here’s a fun imagine floating around on Facebook.

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Flooding the Zone with Shock and Awe

Posted on Saturday 8 February 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • How to deal with it; I’m trying to put things into a broader perspective of their deep motivations, which are always about basic, tribalist, human nature;
  • Trump is taking over Kennedy Center because he objects to drag;
  • Plastic straws, racist speech, inmates in charge of the asylum;
  • WaPo shows you some government webpages deleted by the Trump administration;
  • Perhaps Musk’s motivation for attacking USAID;
  • NY Times Editorial Board: Now is not the time to tune out.

A couple phrases have been deployed to describe Trump’s deliberate (or not) strategy upon taking office of moving quickly with lots of executive orders. One is “shock and awe” after Bush’s strategy for invading Iraq; another is Steven Bannon’s “flooding the zone with sh*t” by which he meant spewing so much garbage so quickly that no one could tell what was real and what wasn’t. Another strategy that I saw today on Facebook (I didn’t capture a link) was that Trump treats each day like a media contest. He gets up in the morning and thinks of something outrageous to say on Truth Social, then depends on the news media (who Bannon and his acolytes think can only focus on one topic at a time) to be distracted by that while Trump goes about his real work relatively unnoticed; yet his goal is to ‘win’ the news cycle each day.

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Elizabeth Kolbert, H IS FOR HOPE

Posted on Saturday 8 February 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Subtitled “Climate Change from A to Z”
Illustrations by Wesley Allsbrook
(Ten Speed Press, 159pp, c2023, published March 2024) <Amazon>

This is a book I bought on the basis of the author’s name (I quite admired her book of a decade ago, THE SIXTH EXTINCTION, reviewed here) without quite realizing that it isn’t a book of essays so much as a book of illustrations with short essay accompaniments; a book for casual readers, or perhaps for young adults. As the subtitle says, the book outlines issues concerning climate change in 26 topics, from A to Z.

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DEI and NASA

Posted on Friday 7 February 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • David Wallace-Wells on the sabotage of the American government;
  • Paul Krugman on “autogolpe” and the Musk/Trump chaos;
  • Heather Cox Richardson on how Republicans have, ever since Reagan, convinced voters that there’s an enemy “deep state” out to destroy their country;
  • Nicholas Kristoff on his experience with USAID and how now “the world’s richest men take on the world’s poorest children”;
  • Brief items about MAGA’s Politico scandal, and supposed “anti-Christian bias”;
  • And a NASA reporter reflects on DEI and how inclusion is the point of the work NASA does.

Breaking News: Trump Takes Over Kennedy Center. Presumably he’ll tell them to play only pretty music. By white men.

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This piece is by the author of a book about the consequences of climate change, which I reviewed here, whose first sentence was “It is worse, much worse, than you think.”

NY Times, David Wallace-Wells, 5 Feb 2025 (in today’s print paper): This Isn’t Reform. It’s Sabotage. [gift link]

It is, so far, worse than I feared.

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A Nation vs. a Collection of States

Posted on Thursday 6 February 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Quite a number of interesting items stacked up. Let’s just start working them.

  • How sending education “back to the states” is problematical for the same reason you don’t run a nation like a business;
  • How Trump creates problems he then claims to fix;
  • How the assault on DEI is about resegregation;
  • How California farmers, who supported Trump, don’t want to talk about what he did to their water;
  • Timothy Snyder about what makes a country, and what we can do now to fight back against tyranny.

Slate, Derek W. Black, 6 Feb 2025: “Back to the States”, subtitled “Trump’s Department of Education plans go against our country’s long history of federal support for schools”
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Shades of Morality

Posted on Wednesday 5 February 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Trump’s crazy Gaza redevelopment plan;
  • How conservatives use “corruption” (without evidence) as an excuse to undermine institutions they don’t like;
  • And they would go after Wikipedia, if they could;
  • Then a long sequence about JD Vance on Christian love, various responses, and my take;
  • With a relevant quote by Bertrand Russell.

First, items about the Current Craziness.

Slate, Fred Kaplan, 4 Feb 2025: This Trump Plan for Gaza Is One of the Craziest Things I’ve Ever Heard

He proposed not only that the roughly 2 million Palestinians in Gaza leave their homeland—because, he said, it’s “a hellhole” and always will be—but that the United States take it over, “own it” (he dropped that phrase a few times), and develop it into “the Riviera of the Middle East.”

Yes, he really said that.

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Living in History

Posted on Tuesday 4 February 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Still rainy, still with cold, sleeping half the day it seems, reading a bit. I roused myself about two hours ago and here’s what I came up with.

  • Heather Cox Richardson on the obvious: that Republicans are letting an un-elected billionaire run the government;
  • Why Trump is shutting down USAID;
  • And withdrawing from the United Nations Human Rights Council;
  • And wants to “clean out” Gaza;
  • How the coup is deleting data it doesn’t like;
  • And how if what’s happening here happened in any other country, we’d be calling it a coup.

Here’s what I think is a key point. There are always people like Trump, in every society, and their followers. They are driven by base human nature tribal values. Disregard for anyone outside their tribe, in this case white men, who say out loud that people of other races, and women, cannot be trusted. The question now is whether our American society, built on Constitutional principles designed to overcome those prejudices and claim equality, can survive someone like Trump. And it seems increasingly uncertain that that can happen.

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Let’s start with a summary from Heather for today.

Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson: February 3, 2025

I’m going to start tonight by stating the obvious: the Republicans control both chambers of Congress: the House of Representatives and the Senate. They also control the White House and the Supreme Court. If they wanted to get rid of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), for example, they could introduce a bill, debate it, pass it, and send it on to President Trump for his signature. And there would be very little the Democrats could do to stop that change.

But they are not doing that.

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Easier to Destroy than to Build

Posted on Monday 3 February 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Or: The Anti-America Americans.

Latest about the coup:

  • Today Trump has suspended the tariffs he’d said would go into effect *today* on Mexico and Canada. Familiar pattern? He’s flailing.
  • Musk and his gang of college kids have compromised the financial records of everyone in America, as Musk is unilaterally deciding which government programs no longer need funding.
  • And probably something else I missed.

Today’s items.

  • Some of them say it out loud: white men should be in charge;
  • Conservative Wall Street Journal calls the tariffs (now postponed!) “the dumbest trade war in history”;
  • How Trump and his current acolytes only learn how things work by breaking them; aligned with Elon Musk’s misconceptions about government spending;
  • How Trump’s Gitmo detention center would be bigger than history’s worst concentration camps;
  • And Franklin Foer on how Trump is enacting the long-standing conservative goal of dismantling the federal government.

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They really say it out loud. (Realize that Boing Boing can be a bit sarcastic.)

Boing Boing, Ellsworth Toohey, 3 Feb 2025: New pick for high-level State Department job: “Competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work.”
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