Philadelphia PA 17Feb2025
All content by Rich Gardner unless otherwise noted.
What are MAGA people after? Well, what they most appear to enjoy is “owning the libs.”
Right now, what MAGA people really want to do is to be culturally dominant. To have liberals, and especially liberal women, look up to them. A favorite myth they enjoy telling themselves is that a particular, highly questionable study that concluded that liberal, single women are actually quite miserable. Liberals are really not as happy as they seem! MAGA people just want to “make the prodigal liberal daughter give up her career to marry the pickup-driving lunkhead next door.” Their idea is that the “woke” left is dead. The author concludes:
Denying Republican voters what they want — liberals giving in and conforming to the soulless MAGA milieu — isn’t just satisfying, but strategically wise. This is simple behavioral psychology. You don’t give toddlers cookies because they tantrum, or they will tantrum more. It’s also crucial in helping illustrate how Trump is not their savior and cannot give them what they want.
Gathering at the office of Senator McCormick.
Senator Mitch McConnell gives his farewell speech after having served seven 6-year terms. He leaves the institution of the Senate “a weaker, more broken institution than it was when he arrived.” He did have a principle. He wanted to increase the power, wealth and influence of the Republican Party. But the problem always was that such a goal wasn’t necessarily compatible with preserving the power of the Senate. So the power of the Senate suffered enormous degradation, thanks to the actions of McConnell.
As President Biden charged in 2021, the filibuster was “being abused in a gigantic way.” The 60-vote threshold imposed by the filibuster ever since McConnell, in the minority of the Senate at the time, decided that absolutely everything President Obama tried to do had to be filibustered. The “60-vote threshold” to pass anything became seen as simply a normal thing. “[The filibuster is] not a tool of compromise, it’s a tool of obstruction,” [Representative, now Senator] Gallego told O’Donnell, mentioning notable bills that have died in the Senate due to the filibuster, including the John Lewis Voting Rights Act.” Democratic Senators Manchin and Sinema became infamous as obstructionists due to the outsized power that the filibuster gave them.
So how are some of Trump’s wildly unqualified nominees to Cabinet positions doing? In no particular order, let’s take a look first at Robert Kennedy Jr.
It’s been around 30 years since a large measles outbreak occurred anywhere in the US. Texas has a small rural population in Gaines County that has “families who attend small private religious schools or are homeschooled.“ This small group is largely unvaccinated. So with cases in West Texas rising and even spreading to New Mexico, what’s out new Secretary of Health & Human Serices doing about it? Well, Bobby Kennedy visited Samoa in 2019 and the former Samoan Prime Minister has shown that Kennedy spread vaccine hesitancy. Kennedy has vigorously denied any responsibility for the measles outbreak in Samoa.
Calley Means went on CNN to defend Bobby and his anti-vax outlook. Instead of defending Kennedy’s views, Means tried to change the subject, played the “whataboutism” game and sneered that “It’s breathless coverage of five measles cases.” Clearly, if Kennedy had any serious intention of doing anything about the outbreak in Texas, Means would have responded with a calm reciting of facts.
On the Ben Franklin Parkway.
Don’t know if I quite agree with the piece in People’s World that purports to explain Trump’s abrupt move from supporting Ukraine against Russia to making a 180-degree turn to being Putin’s good buddy and complaining that Ukrainian President Zelenskyy is a dictator (Zelenskyy won the 2019 election by a landslide of over 70%, there have been no further elections since, because it is simply impossible to truly reflect the will of the people unless elections are held under peacetime conditions) because I think People’s World just sees the situation with the US, Ukraine and Russia to be far more orderly and planned and organized than it really is (gullibility of Trump & Musk). I just don’t see any grand strategic vision on the part of either President Trump, the Heritage Foundation (that authored Project 2025) or DOGE, the group of young tech guys led by Elon Musk.
That being said, Russia appears to be very pleased and excited about Tulsi Gabbard becoming the Director of National Intelligence! “the shampanskoye corks were popping like machine guns.“
As the US-Russia talks started in Riyadh on February 18, the morning broadcast of the state TV program 60 Minutes, hosted by Olga Skabeeva, excitedly noted: “This is the beginning of negotiations about Ukraine without Ukraine. Kyiv was officially dropped overboard.”
Meanwhile on Russian state TV: Another translated clip of Tucker Carlson and Tulsi Gabbard, introduced by state TV host Vladimir Soloviev as “Our girlfriend Tulsi.”
The same piece talks about Gabbard and Ukrainian biolabs. Her explanation in defense of her statement sounds pretty reasonable to me, but it shows that she, at best, used sloppy language that was easily misconstrued.
The above photo contributed by Gayle Morrow from Oakland CA.
List of the mass firings so far. We’ve seen a few potentially disastrous mass firings. The mass firings of people at the NNSA,
Some of the initially fired employees included NNSA staff who work at facilities where nuclear weapons are built, oversee contractors who build nuclear weapons and who are responsible for inspecting those weapons.
And an agency that is working on bird flu.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture said Tuesday that, over the weekend, it accidentally fired “several” agency employees who are working on the federal government’s response to the H5N1 avian flu outbreak.
The agency said it is now trying to quickly reverse the firings.
At the 0:50 mark in the attached video, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller demands to know why CNN’s Brianna Keilar isn’t celebrating all of the cuts that Elon Musk’s DOGE is making.
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