Saturday, February 08, 2025

Is Hegseth going to develop a huffing addiction?

Pete Hegseth never should have been confirmed as Secretary of Defense.  Antonio Pequeño IV (FORBES) reports:


Democrats on the House Appropriations Committee sent a letter to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth on Friday, scrutinizing him over costly maintenance and “emergency” painting of his government-owned home.

The letter, written by Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., and Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., said the Army told the Appropriations Committee about plans to “exceed the $35,000 threshold for operation, maintenance and repair” of a government home that will be occupied by Hegseth, who also owns a house in Tennessee.

The Democrats said the total requirement for the housing work was $137,297, with $49,900 of the figure needed for an “emergency” paint job.

The letter to Hegseth asks the secretary why the emergency paint job was necessary, what rent he will pay for the house and asks him to provide a list of former secretaries of defense who needed government-furnished housing with the same costs needed to maintain his own home before occupancy and annual rent was paid.


Oh, just give him a rag and a can of paint thinner.  That's all he wants.  He's promised not to drink but he needs to huff to take the edge off.  When you confirm an alcoholic who is active in his disease, you have to expect thigs like this.  He should never have been confirmed.  But if the unethical Republican senators were bound and determined to confirm such a weak nominee, the very least they should have done is require that, while serving as Secretary of Defense, he attend weekly Alcoholic Anonymous meetings. 


I'll take my laughs where I can get them.  


Tragic times for our nation.  Emil Guillermo (INQUIRER) notes the transition taking place from a democracy to Chump Land:


It’s the kind of America that can’t afford the generosity and humanity of aid to the poor.

A judge on Friday has stopped the complete dismantling of USAID for now.

But Musk calls it a criminal operation and Trump nods in agreement. So is it criminal to stop malaria? Disease outbreaks from dysentery? The reversal of HIV in children?

Ending USAID means people will go hungry, get sick and even die.

And America doesn’t care?

One former state department rep put the cuts in perspective. USAID is less than one percent of the federal budget. If the budget were $1,000 dollars, that’s like cutting six cents.

That’s how small America is being. And while USAID is seen currently as more critical in developing areas like Africa, our Asian ancestral lands like the Philippines have also received relatively smaller amounts, estimated at $5 billion since 1961, much of it recently to fight the effects of climate change.


At TAP, Robert Kuttner has a great overview of Chump and Elon Musk sovereign wealth fund scam. In other news, Texas has a measles outbreak and yet Chump still has the anti-vax lunatic Robert Kennedy Jr. as his Secretary of Health and Human Services.   Pavan Acharya (TEXAS TRIBUNE) reports, "At least 10 cases of measles -- eight of which are among school-aged children -- have been reported in Gaines County in West Texas over the past two weeks, driving worries of an escalating outbreak." Deidre McPhillips (CNN) adds, "A record share of US kindergartners had an exemption for required vaccinations last school year, leaving more than 125,000 new schoolchildren without coverage for at least one state-mandated vaccine, according to data published by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in October."   Four days ago, the Texas Department of Health and Human Services provided this overview:


In January 2025, the Houston Health Department confirmed two cases of measles associated with international travel in unvaccinated Harris County residents. Those were the first Texas measles cases since 2023 and prompted a DSHS health alert on January 23.

On January 29, the South Plains Public Health District notified the public of a measles case in a Gaines County child. As of now, a total of six cases have been identified, all among unvaccinated school-aged children who are residents of Gaines County. There is no suspected link between the Gaines County outbreak and the Harris County cases.

So as of now there are twelve confirmed cases in Texas since January 29th.  The University of Minnesota's CIDRAP notes cases developing in Georgia:


Elsewhere, the Georgia Department of Public Health today reported two more measles cases in unvaccinated Atlanta residents. In a statement, the group said the patients are family members of a case confirmed in January.

In a monthly measles update today, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said it has received reports of 14 cases this year from five jurisdictions: Alaska, Georgia, New York City, Rhode Island, and Texas. Nine of the cases were part of two outbreaks. All patients were unvaccinated or had an unknown vaccination status. Six were hospitalized for isolation or treatment of complications. 


At CNN, back in December, Arthur Allen wrote:

             

The availability of safe, effective covid vaccines less than a year into the pandemic marked a high point in the 300-year history of vaccination, seemingly heralding an age of protection against infectious diseases.

Now, after backlash against public health interventions culminated in President-elect Donald Trump’s nominating Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the country’s best-known anti-vaccine activist, as its top health official, infectious disease and public health experts and vaccine advocates say a confluence of factors could cause renewed, deadly epidemics of measles, whooping cough, and meningitis, or even polio.     

          

“The litany of things that will start to topple is profound,” said James Hodge, a public health law expert at Arizona State University’s Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law. “We’re going to experience a seminal change in vaccine law and policy.”

“He’ll make America sick again,” said Lawrence Gostin, a professor of public health law at Georgetown University.     


Earlier this week, Paul Krugman observed:


Now Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a crank who rejects vaccines in particular and medical science in general, is on track to become the Secretary of Health and Human Services. The National Institutes of Health have effectively been shut down. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have stopped releasing crucial data. If you go to CDC’s website, there’s a banner across the top reading “CDC’s website is being modified to comply with President Trump’s Executive Orders,” which mainly means purging anything that hints at concern over social inequality.

I don’t know this for sure, but my prediction is that the current purge of language will eventually turn into a purge of people, with the administration firing anyone suspected of being more loyal to science than they are to Donald Trump.

And all of this is highly likely to lead to many preventable deaths — hundreds of thousands, maybe millions.

How did this happen? Gradually, then suddenly.

What many people don’t understand about science is that it isn’t a set of Truths handed down from above. It is, instead, an attitude and a method. The attitude is that the world should be understood through observation and evidence, interpreted via hard thinking. The method involves formulating hypotheses and testing them against the facts.

Since someone will ask: Does economics qualify as a science? Well, sometimes. Much of the field involves deductive reasoning from a priori assumptions, hence the old joke that ends with the economist saying “Assume a can opener.” I’d say that such exercises can be useful, but then I would say that, given that it describes a lot of my own work. Beyond that, however, there has been a “credibility revolution” in economics in recent decades, with much greater efforts to ground the field in solid evidence.

But back to science in general: Because it’s a method rather than a set of declarations from on high, you can’t consume it a la carte, rejecting scientific results you dislike for political, cultural or religious reasons. Reject evolution, and you undermine the basis for much of biology, and hence medical science. Reject the case for climate change, and you undermine the physics and chemistry that underly that case.

And Republican politicians have been rejecting science they don’t like for a long time.


Chump will kill us all if given the chance.  


In other news, James Politi (FINANCIAL TIMES OF LONDON) notes, "A federal judge in New York has temporarily blocked Elon Musk and his team from accessing the US Treasury department’s payments data, warning that it risked leading to the disclosure of sensitive information."  Ray Sanchez (CNN) adds:


The judge’s order, issued early Saturday, temporarily halts access to a sensitive payment system that distributes Americans’ tax returns, Social Security benefits, disability payments and federal employees’ salaries.

US District Judge Paul Engelmayer ordered the destruction of any downloaded information from the payment system by anyone given access to it since January 20, citing “the risk that the new policy presents of the disclosure of sensitive and confidential information and the heightened risk that the systems in question will be more vulnerable than before to hacking.”     


Oh, look, hagged out has-been Justine Bateman was wrong yet again.  Someone let her know that The William Howard Taft Charter High School in the armpit of California is not a recognized law school.  If you've missed it, the washed up celebrity came out for Chump as the election approached and she's now taken to telling everyone -- in Tweet after Tweet -- just how stupid and uninformed she is. 

 Stan's "The great Yvette Nicole Brown, the piece of human crap Justine Bateman" noted her transformation to MAGA and he also delivered very astute critique of her so-called acting:


If you ever doubt how awful she is, watch the episode of MODERN FAMILY that she guested on.  Claire's got a health issue and Phil goes with her to the hospital.  The man in the next bed -- confused about that by the way.  Claire had to share a bed in the same room as a man?  


At any rate, the man's kids come in.  Three of them and they appear to compare with Phil and Claire's kids -- Luke, Hayley and Alex.  Justine's playing the Hayley character so she should be a laugh riot.  But, all these years later, Justine still hasn't learned how to deliver a line.  There are times when she swallows what was supposed to be the punch line.

She has no talent and she never did.


You can also refer to Marcia's "Have you seen how ugly Justine Bateman's gotten?:"


Having failed as an actress and a director and a writer and a diet-er, she's now failing as a human being.  She's a Chumper.  She's fallen for Donald Chump.  Why?

She's too ugly to get someone her own age.  So she's trying to get some old man interested in her.  Someone in his eighties that won't require much from her and will hopefully die soon.

She can't make money.

She never could act.  Never.  And she's gotten so ugly now that she'd break the camera.  

So I guess it's either find a sugar daddy or find a pimp.  And a pimp would make her work. 


In other Elon news, Hafiz Rashid (THE NEW REPUBLIC) notes:

The Department of Energy on Friday tried to clarify why one of Elon Musk’s DOGE underlings was granted access to the department’s I.T. systems despite opposition from its general counsel and cybersecurity offices. 

CNN reports that Luke Farritor, 23, whose previous work experience consists of an internship at Musk’s company SpaceX was granted access by Energy Secretary Chris Wright Wednesday. The department’s legal counsel and chief information offices, which govern I.T. and cybersecurity, “said this is a bad idea,” according to a source who spoke with CNN, given that Farritor hadn’t received a standard background check. 


Let's go to BLUESKY.


How can someone be this gullible?

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— Post-Left Watch (@postleftwatch.bsky.social) February 8, 2025 at 1:54 AM

Racist Socialist Susan (stage name Medea) Benjamin should have been kicked out of the left when she cozied up to the Proud Boys.  For that to happen we'd have to have a real left.  Instead, we've got a left that's praising a hideous book.  Socialists praising Socialists.  Please understand that.  And if're confused, Ava and I spent five hours writing our take on the book today and it will go up on Sunday at THIRD -- even if nothing else does because we worked way too hard on it and I'm not the mood for THIRD dragging into Monday and/or Tuesday.  It's 3901 words right now -- not counting our end notes.  It's a really bad book with some really big problems. 

I just realized I didn't write about Trina's "A pig boy named Colin King" -- I'll grab it tomorrow night or in Monday's snapshot but let me steer you to it now and also to Harold Meyerson's column at TAP on resistance -- that one I anted to excerpt here but I've been staring at it for five minutes and am just too tired to do an excerpt of the column that makes sense. 

The following sites updated:



 

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