CELEBRATE YOUR UNIQUE TALENT DAY UPDATES
Mine Is Being Able To Figure Out A 20% Tip In My Head In Five Seconds - What's Yours?
-It is likely cold comfort, but with what will likely be an onslaught of misinformation on multiple fronts that must be prepared for, the facts should be known - and in fact, the 2024 Presidential election will be the third-closest election in American history, with Kamala Harris falling short despite winning the third-highest number of votes for President in American history (74,327,659). Trump continues to be a shade under 50% (he will be number two on the list behind the man who beat him in 2020, Joe Biden - because Trump may go after THAT, too), but while Harris' results are being reported by the Associated Press at 48.6%, they have decided to round up Trump's 49.8% to a full 50%. Thanks, AP.
-Most of Trump's appointments to his cabinet and staff have more or less been made, and as most if not all of you who read this will be utterly unsurprised about (though the mainstream media seem to be shocked ... yeesh), they are uniformly unqualified and/or unserious and/or utterly corrupt already and/or with at least eight of them, billionaires who will get to the price of those eggs just as soon as they get to it, you betcha MAGA voters!
-That said, some are more corrupt than others, particularly in what we are likely going to call with irony "national security." Exempting Secretary of State nominee Marco Rubio (who can at least put some sentences together coherently), the collection of freaks are uniformly dangerous enough that there may be at least pushback on them by whatever non-MAGA GOP Senators are there.
-The issues surrounding Defense nominee Pete Hegseth are known and rising, whether they involve his Christian nationalist links or his long ALLEGED (eyeroll) record of sexual abuses. There is also National Intelligence nominee Tulsi Gabbard, who besides being praised on Russian television hours after the election as "Putin's Girlfriend," was found over the weekend to be on a Transportation Safety Administration watch list because of her connections to despots and foreign terrorist sympathizers like Syrian strongman Assad.
-Then there's Newsmax commentator Sebastian Gorka, a live cartoon of a bad guy with a questionable doctorate (his advisor simply said "I do not consider him an expert on terrorism") that has been pictured wearing a Hungarian uniform known to be worn by neo-Nazis entities in that country, as well as a medal given by that organization in a photo taken in 2017 when he was first in the White House.
-Will there be pushback? It is not known, though talk of attempting an end-around of Senate conformation hearings to simply appoint the Trump picks have quieted after Matt Gaetz removed his name from consideration for Attorney General. Reportedly, Trump was aware enough to say he was not interested in such a maneuver, though that likely depended on who last spoke to him before making said comment.
-Speaking of pushback, numerous news outlets are getting gossip from the inner circle of Mar-a-Lago - or possibly just walking into the joint and looking around considering how lax security is in the area (Trump is already making most of his phone calls to foreign leaders on non-secure phone lines - YOLO, baby!) - and already reporting on furious and unhinged screaming matches and occasional shoves in an effort to get close enough to Trump (and his butt barnacle Elon Musk) and curry his favor. Both Yahoo News and the London Telegraph refer to "knife fights" with Musk and failson Donald Trump, Jr. (last seen sticking his finger in his pants and rubbing the tip of his finger on his gums right after while watching a SpaceX launch last week) at the center of many of them.
-This is a sign that (a) this is how Trump has always run his bid-ness-es, (b) at 78 and in seemingly failing health is not likely to change, and (c) his love of chaos and lack of discipline will more than likely impede progress in the implementation of the Trump agenda, Project 2025 (which, again, is being implemented to the SHOCK! of the Kristin Welker Todds and Jake Tappers but not to those of us who voted for the lady with the loud laugh who don't get their news from dudebros).
-To get a sense of the "implementation plan," observe what the aforementioned Musk, along with fellow billionaire ego Vivek Ramaswamy, have presented as the "plan" to cut government waste. They first started with the cutesy name: the Department of Government Efficiency, which was immediately abbreviated "DOGE" and accompanied by AI-generated images (likely by Musk) of Musk as Iron Man and Musk as a hip-hop artist to show how serious he was about this new task.
-NEVER MIND the fact that he does NOT run a federal Department. Creating Departments is done by Congress. What Musk is running is a commission to cut government waste - and if that sounds like something pretty much every administration since at least Nixon has created as a sop to cut Gub-mint, well, it means you don't get your news from dudebros.
-Anyway, once Musk moved from the cartoons, he then promised he was creating an army of volunteers to "examine" federal policies to find those that could be cut easily. That he was choosing to do this by calling for volunteers willing to work 80 hours a week with apparent little or no pay was not exactly mentioned prominently. BUT, the goal was to find these pockets of waste, where he and Vivek would fight for a microphone to inform the world of what they found with an innovative communications tool called ... wait for it! ... a PODCAST! Hosted by two of the most insufferable men on the face of the planet at the moment!
-NEVER MIND the fact that while some Government agencies are commissions that can be funded and defunded without acts of Congress, most will require acts of Congress - and that when Musk and (especially) Ramaswamy talk about "25 million government workers," that figure (as Paul Krugman has noted) is actually ALL national government workers for ALL governments - national, yes, but also state and county and local governments.
-Anyway, it is true that Elon and Vivek are aware that Congress will be necessary for a lot of these recommendations to be made and implemented (and it is not likely a list of such agencies will be generated on January 20, 2025, as Trump promised) (in case someone wants to start keeping track of promises made and not kept), so they have begun work on working with the going-to-be razor-thin MAGA GOP House majority (the number of special elections that may need to be conducted is now up to at least four) with a special House Subcommittee on DOGE Efficiency to be created in the new Congress. And who is going to be the Chair of said Subcommittee? Who? WHO? WHO?!?!? Why, that would be the one and (thank the Lord God Almighty in Heaven or wherever She resides) only ... MARJORIE! TAYLOR! GREENE!!!!!!!
-NEVER MIND all sanity, at least we will have THAT to entertain us - and to know that the likelihood of the ultimate success of DOGE just became that ... ahm ... 'enhanced' with Marge in charge. As Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-Squad) put it, "Absolutely dying at those two now getting assigned the 'privilege' of 'working' with MTG. That is actually hilarious. ... (Marge) barely shows up and doesn't do the reading ... it's like giving someone an unplugged controller. ... Enjoy, fellas! Very prestigious post you have there (signing off with a skull emoji)."
-All of that said, one strategy Musk is apparently starting to roll out is not funny and quite disturbing: 'outing' random federal workers on his now-dying social media site X, which in turn allows MAGAts and robots to abuse and attack the workers to the point where they would leave rather than stay to fight for their jobs or at least get a severance package (which apparently is part of the DOGE stuff).
-That tactic was being echoed by Trump's Office of Management and Budget nominee, Project 2025 co-author Russell Vought, who in at least one private speech wanting to "inflict trauma" on workers he labeled "the enemy within" to drive them out of their offices and appoint Trump loyalists in their place. Vought is an out Christian nationalist and one of the most vocal embodiments of the worst fears people have of how he would like Trump to roll into office, and one of the very few people who worked in the previous administration who will be back for a second go-around. More than Musk, Vought will need to be watched.
-(Stands on Soapbox.) That intimidation will clearly be one of Trump's (and Trump allies') biggest weapons, if not their primary weapon, to do what they claim they have a massive mandate for (see first paragraph above) - but it is being done, as we have seen, by giving Trump pretty much every bit of decision-making agency despite what we know Trump has done historically without the cognitive and physical issues on display in the waning days of the campaign. Those issues and that history will not go away, nor will the decades and even centuries of past practice, protections, size, and (ironically) inertia of bureaucracies. It will be a nasty fight with harm to be inflicted, but it is a fight that can be had and will need to be had. (Stands off Soapbox.)
-While things did what they did here, in Dubai last week one of the most important climate change conferences in several years was taking place (because contrary to what likely will be everything Trump and his sewer clowns will say, climate change is real and getting worse). In a series of meetings that featured numerous near-collapses of negotiations, the United Nations-sponsored COP29 (it is the 29th such conference) agreed that industrialized countries will create a $300 billion fund for developing countries to help cope with said climate changes. The fund is being called "an insult" by many countries who need the funding, and it is far from clear whether countries that would need to pony up the cash will do so (staring at the United States), but it is another agreement out there, for what that may be worth.
-We'll wrap with movie news of two sorts ... first, the box office for the weekend, where theatres are celebrating the biggest one-two release since BARBIE and OPPENHEIMER last summer, as WICKED exploded with a $114 million box office take this weekend for the theatre nerds, while the dudebros flocked to GLADIATOR II opened to $55.5 million in the U.S. and another $50M in foreign sales in its second week of release. Second, whether WICKED and GLADIATOR II will be Oscar-bound is yet to be determined, but after a slightly frustrating search, a host for the March 2 ceremonies - and on paper it's a good one: Conan O'Brien, who has the advantage of not having to stop production of a talk show to do it anymore, will be this year' shost. So, could be kind of fun, y'all!
-On this date in 1947, ten Hollywood stars, producers, and writers were found in contempt of Congress after testifying before the House Un-American Activities Committee. On this date in 1966, sessions began for what would become SGT. PEPPERS' LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND. On this date in 1971, D.B. Cooper parachuted out of the plane he hijacked with ransom money he received for the crime - and was never seen again, alive or dead. And on this date in 1974, the bones of the oldest prehistoric human ever were found in Ethiopia - the skeleton was named "Lucy."
-Debuts on this date: ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES (1859), barbed wire (1874), BLACK BEAUTY (1877), the first women-only federal prison (1928), the FBI Crime Lab (1932), GUYS AND DOLLS (1950), THE PAJAMA GAME (1954).
-Happy Birthday to Zachary Taylor, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Scott Joplin, Dale Carnegie, Garson Kanin, Howard Duff, Rene Enriquez, Martin Charnin, Ken Kragen, David newell, Oscar Robertson, Paul Tagliabue, Donald "Duck" Dunn, Pete Best, Billy Connolly, Dave Bing, Jimmy Collins, Dwight Schultz, Damon Evans, Stanley Livingston, Clem Burke, Denise Crosby, Alejandro Mayorkas, Arundhati Roy, Dawn Robinson, Colin Hanks, and Katherine Heigl.
-Rest in Peace/Rest in Power to Diego Rivera, George Raft, Big Joe Turner, Dodie Smith, Freddie Mercury, Albert Collins, Warren Spahn, Arthur Hailey, Noriyuki 'Pat' Morita, Hector Camacho, Florence Henderson, and Ricky Jay.
-Feed the Worms: Gangster Lucky Luciano, ultra-conservative William F. Buckley Jr., spree killer Charles Starkweather, Reagan/Bush spokesman Marlin Fitzwater, and serial killer Ted Bundy entered Earth on this date. Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald dead on this date in 1963. (Jesus, what a day.)
-The Number One Novel in America on this date ... in 2024, TO DIE FOR by David Baldacci ... in 2014, THE BURNING ROOM by Michael Connelly ... in 2004, LONDON BRIDGES by James Patterson ... in 1994, THE CELESTINE PROPHECY by James Redfield ... in 1984, THE TALISMAN by Stephen King and Peter Straub ... and in 1974, CENTENNIAL by James Michener.