So naturally I came back from that conference and now I have a cold. I don’t have anyone to whine to so I’ll whine to y’all. Hope everyone is doing well.
Oh this is real
Trump picks Dr. Oz to lead Medicare and Medicaid
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2024/11/19/nation/trump-dr-oz-lead-medicare-medicaid/?utm_campaign=Globe_Twitter&s_campaign=bostonglobe%3Asocialflow%3Atwitter
This seems fine everything is fine
Moscow says first Ukrainian attack on Russia with US-made missiles signals west wants to escalate conflict – Russia-Ukraine war live
https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2024/nov/19/russia-ukraine-war-live-moscow-kyiv-volodymyr-zelenskyy-latest-news-updates
Typical
US Republican politician must resign after pleading guilty to sexual assault
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/nov/19/indiana-john-jessup-sexual-assault
Sprots!
Fifth athlete disqualified from one of dirtiest races in Olympic history
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2024/nov/19/fifth-athlete-stripped-olympic-medal-dirtiest-races-athletics-history-tatyana-tomashova-london-2012-1500m
Stonks!
Nasdaq turns positive as Nvidia gains, S&P 500 cuts losses tied to geopolitical tensions: Live updates
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/11/18/stock-market-today-live-updates.html
This is a neat article [gift article]
A century later, a taped message solves the mystery of a WWI doughboy’s death
https://wapo.st/4fQ6TOI
Have a good one!
Dr Oz?
OMG. You gotta be fucking with me, but you’re not.
Buckle up, this is going to be fucking crazy.
Yep. And we get to see if the Senate is just going to rubber-stamp this gaggle of clowns and grifters (spoiler alert: they will).
This whole cabinet is a 21st-century version of “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.”
…something about that coming from the silent era made the ending land with more of a shock than any modern horror movie has ever pulled off for me?
I was thinking more Caligula.
…it’s they rather than you…& us rather than me…but…yup…that’s precisely what they’re doing
…oz is clearly out there with gaetz as statements of intent go…I made a crack about kayfabe yesterday & today I read about the WWE exec getting tipped for heading up a department of education some of his base think they want to demolish…with a folding chair…off the top rope…& by the time the dust settles & we see who he puts where…& how…in “acting” capacities or via coerced recess appointment or whatever mechanism of fiat he can bulldoze…or…in the cases that go the other way…some compromise that in an ordinary world would be beyond the pale…but looks “relatively” moderate
…anyone who agrees to hold these sorts of posts for him needs to be keeping their eye on a disaster recovery plan for when he throws them under a convenient bus…the attrition rate for his starting line-ups is atrocious…less so for his objectives…& for all the uncertainty the objective as always seemed to be to run the US as an extension of generations-deep grift that’s played out like a public record RICO case for the ages…if the motherfucker doesn’t think he’s michael corleone making the family business legit, I will eat my hat…well…not my hat…I need that…but I’ll buy one of those ones made of tortilla or some shit?
You say that and yet Dr. Oz may be the most qualified person he’s put forward thus far.
He’s the guy you appoint when you want to jam through massive cuts and blow up the civil service that runs the place. Maybe the theory is privatization or some idiocy, but there is no way private insurers can reorg that fast.
You’re going to have hospitals and health care systems locking up trying to sort out what’s going on.
Things are looking good for Matt Gaetz.
Hacker Steals File With Testimony From Accusers of Matt Gaetz: Report
Aside to Cousin Matty: Gaetz apparently used Nestor’s PayPal account to pay for prostitutes. Criminal genius, this guy. But Nestor is still around … somewhere.
Carolyn Ryan and the NY Times went into above the fold headline mode for Eliot Spitzer, which was fine.
But for the new US AG? Of course not. They’re blanketing coverage about Google’s efforts over 15 years to limit lawsuits. Sure that’s a business section story, but not a priority.
But just like a president’s age dominated coverage until now it doesn’t matter, they’re making up the rules as they go along.
…forcing google to split chrome as a browser out from android as an OS and with it to decouple the connection between using android/chrome & using google as a search engine is broadly in line with how it went with windows & IE…& bing, I suppose…though that rather stretches the analogy…& most android users either already use an alternative browser/search engine or would pick google’s for both anyway…so it seems like that’s another one that’s gearing up but hasn’t yet settled on what the field looks like at the line of engagement?
…yesterday @bryanlsplinter mentioned not really getting why now on the part where biden greenlit the long-range missiles…& I’ve sorta accidentally been pondering that part for a bunch of the meantime one way or another…not because I particularly think I can figure it out but because aside from the predictable rhetorical spike in the temperature of the whole pot it’s not altogether clear to me what it changes?
…I’ve seen some stuff that offers various reads on it…including a few that would be guilty of what this sees as leaving out the important context
…though I can think of a few more contextual angles that perspective is arguably light on…so…for example…in an apples to oranges comparison…announcing the US withdrawl from afghanistan in his lame duck window was the foreign policy hot potato joe had to juggle in january…& to some extent this requires the incoming adminsitration to make some indicative calls early on in a similar “you’re stuck with it now” sense…but there seems even to be a fairly huge range of differing niceties to let it be massaged in a number of ways in which some radically different narratives at the retail end of the reporting could all be managed such that the actual difference “on the ground” was broadly netted out to a wash?
…on one extreme he rescinds the permissions & the money & the supply & drops the whole burden on the EU unless ukraine agrees to whatever vlad’s convinced him is a deal he makes bank on…that seems like the sort of thing that you need to render vlad rolling over on day one a viable prospect, anyway…so, lest I tip into the doom-spiral of could-be-worse ones if we call that both the worst case scenario & saggyassicus orangetiticus’ preferred one…then arguably attempting to drag one end of its overton window far enough fast enough to hoick the other end away from its happy place at the other extreme might make some sense
…the bar for what passes for full-blooded support of ukraine just got higher…in a sense there’s an incremental scale of skin-in-the-game & now if there’s pull-back from the US either europe fills it or the parts that don’t can’t still claim to be entirely on-side…but mostly all these players have either been heavily invested in at least one out of…worrying about being next…trying to sit on the fence while showing which way they think they’d be better off jumping…not being able to so much as match ukraine without most of the other players on their side if they do wind up directly on deck…& in a relatively small minority of cases with a big overlap on things like NATO & the UN security council…possessing the capacity to single-handedly make the jump from regional to global conflict…& in a cynical sort of way…you could argue the facts fit the compromise being to maintain a floating line that falls short of that last one…& that biden’s parting shot is almost the inverse of the withdrawl that tied his hands in that it gives a lot of wiggle room short of jumping straight to a course of action that would suddenly induce more slack than europe can pick up in time to keep that state of affairs ticking over
…& the carrot…since the stick hasn’t ever been known to work on the other guy…is to demonstrate that a minor (in at least some senses) step towards letting ukraine make fuller use of assistance already made available to it provokes a major tantrum…which is suggestive that vlad’s bargaining position is considerably weaker than he tries to telegraph it being…& that might get through to a transactional mind as a reason to re-visit the relative values of quids & pro quos enough to see some value in there still being two sides to play off against one another rather than forcing one to bend the knee to the other so that other will agree not to make you look bad
…not saying joe’s tactic is to make russia & the EU contestants in a twisted version of the apprentice where turning ukraine into a profit engine is the task…but…I guess maybe I’m also not not saying that…as it turns out…& arguably more of it has to do with the big guns that aren’t guns…they can still fire these missiles without the enhanced navigation the US doesn’t necessarily have to share…or they can stop re-supplying the missiles but keep letting them have the surveillance information…or they can threaten to share that kind of thing less with other allies in europe (the UK system possibly utilises the same stuff – I don’t really know enough about that level of how shit works to say it’s true but it’s that way with at least some of this sort of shit)…or…if none of us are in fact paranoid enough…he can blow up the massive advantage that disparity confers…which is currently making the west israel to russia’s iran in intelligence capabilities…by farming out classified shit through a gabbard-shaped hole in the cone of silence…or a live-streamed fucking dinner party…while we all sigh with relief when the AG isn’t gaetz…& he can claim to be taking an array of positions like a pick & mix of permutations to suit…in the terminology of a dude named hutchinson from the 1700s it’s an indian gift…but it still seems like a generous one on joe’s part?
Politically speaking, it’s almost always harder to stop something that’s already started than it is to start something new. Just ask the GOP about the ACA versus their shiny new health care plan (a piece of paper with dusty post-it note from 2017 on top that just says “details coming soon!”)
But also, to some of your point: You have to make them own every stupid decision that goes sideways — which is gonna be basically all of them — and the last thing you should do is either be timid or, worse, meet them anywhere approaching halfway. Foreign policy is trickier because even America has limits of control and there are other interested parties both for and against every bit of every plan, but when Trump hands Ukraine to Russia he should have to 100% own it and not get to fall back on the half-assing of what came before.
The problem is Democrats can’t help themselves. They always have to be “reasonable” and “working with their friends across the aisle” while Republicans strip the country for parts. They don’t have a solid history of standing back and saying “we’re not even going to dignify this with a discussion that you’re going to ignore anyway.”
…& there it is…a headline that embraces the metaphor you kinda assume the ass being worn like a hat on the top of this jenga tower of stacked up blocks of compressed shite designed to fall over dramatically has been using in his own head all along
Trump ignores transition rules. It’s a ‘hostile takeover,’ ally says. [archive.ph of WaPo]
…it’d be nice if we lived in a timeline where the outcome didn’t have as a load-bearing element the SOP of a quasi-legitimate grifter-in-chief functionally extorting the land of the free & the home of the brave through the exercise of a permanent stay-outta-jail-&-get-paid card in conjunction with the unitary executive privilege they’ve lined up to be waiting on his desk…that a tactic that pays dividends is to swamp your opposition with so many unthinkable things that while they’re busy trying to trim down the final tally of fuck-no-s you can pad your side of the deal with a lot of pounds of flesh…pork optional…that wouldn’t have been parted with under other circumstances
…@clevernamehere made a good point about needing to not let shit slide just because it can’t be stopped…which carole cadwalladr echoed in that list of things to help contend with the broligarchy I threw in a link to in yesterday’s comments…think it was yesterday’s anyway…who can really tell?
…but when it comes to stuff like ukraine & the table has players including europe & china as well as the US & russia using it like a boardgame that’s “diplomacy by other means”…the triumvirate of hegseth, gabbard & gaetz in concert with the SC(r)OTUS is obviously taking a sledgehammer to the thing…& it is undoubtedly important to try to keep things as intact as possible while making a full accounting of what gets chipped away…just generally…but the useful idiot making use of the idiots that gave him another go is fundamental security risk with or without a gabbard to be the first to serve as ablative shielding from any fallout that might land on him from pulling that kind of shit the way he clearly did before
…that pat hand he’s holding domestically makes it broadly impossible for the rest of “the west” to re-secure that level of shared intelligence short of doing vlad’s work for him by carving a cut out that splits the US from the rest of the post WWII “allies AKA victors” & fundamentally alters what passes for geopolitical equilibrium…so you’re left with a game where he confers with vlad about what ball to roll & when…& the rest of europe tries to engineer ways to make the nation state pins that stay standing into the most awkward split possible
…which isn’t the sort of level playing field I think people generally mean when they use that as a substitute for fair play?
[ETA]
…I don’t mean this unkindly…but whether the weapon is the US…or its voters…& whether the dying dealer is the democrats…or all of us…or whether harry is vlad…or dipshitticus disasterous…or…us…the truth is this keeps coming to mind about relying on things in the clutch that you never put in the time to maintain when you didn’t need them
…much as it’s easy to malign the UK system for the ways the leader gets picked without recourse to the general population’s preferences…it does allow for them being deposed repeatedly in the course of a single term…& that alone feels like it confers more plot-armor on the villain of this piece than is safe for any of the rest of us still hoping to survive until the credits roll & the lights come back on?
I’m sure this pick will help make schools great again…
https://apnews.com/article/linda-mcmahon-trump-education-secretary-wwe-613016d0c164b89765af761404cbb123
It’s another distraction pick to cover up who will really be crashing things.
People who don’t understand the first thing about Trump and the goons will say the Education Department doesn’t provide that much funding for K-12, so it’s not that big a deal, blah blah.
But when you have a bunch of authoritarians, they’re not going to care about regular order. They’re simply going to assert they have the right to tell public schools how to spend their money and educate their kids, and find courts that back them up. And they’re hoping parents won’t push back.