Comments

  1. says

    For the convenience of readers, here are some links back to the previous set of 500 comments on The Infinite Thread.

    https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2025/01/03/infinite-thread-xxxiv/comment-page-1/#comment-2249787
    The news has covered the multi-million-dollar homes burned in the California fires, and has given air time to some of their famous owners. Adam Mahoney of Capital B News has a different take:

    https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2025/01/03/infinite-thread-xxxiv/comment-page-1/#comment-2249778
    Tuberculosis rates plunge when families living in poverty get a monthly cash payout

    https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2025/01/03/infinite-thread-xxxiv/comment-page-1/#comment-2249774
    Republican congressman calls for halting of disaster relief to California

    https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2025/01/03/infinite-thread-xxxiv/comment-page-1/#comment-2249762
    Connected cars are a “privacy nightmare,”

  2. says

    Rick Wilson describes the convicted criminal’s no good, very bad week

    […] Rick Wilson, at the Lincoln Project, highlights the ways in which tRump’s last week was bad. Now, I know some people don’t trust former members of the GOP. But these days, we need allies where we find them. Besides, I admire Wilson’s pull-no-punches style. [video at the link]

    In case you don’t like clicking on videos (although this one is only about 6 minutes), here are the highlights, with some editorial content.

    tRump was sentenced in court. Yeah, he’s not getting fines or jail time, but the convicted criminal label will not be going away anytime soon. Not going to be pardoned by a New York governor. The stench will last forever.

    tRump’s own hand-picked Supreme Court did not save him. Emphasizes that John Roberts and Amy Coney Barrett did the right thing. […]

    tRump went to President Carter’s funeral, where most other presidents, vice-presidents and their spouses ignored him. Wilson waxed on about how Karen Pence totally ignored tRump (but Mike Pence did not).

    Also talks about how Jack Smith’s report will come out (note I am not sure of the status of this as it keeps changing). Points out that the very corrupt Aileen Cannon could be impeached at some point. (Note we have not done that well with impeachments, but heck, why not work on it)

    Maga base starting to get upset as they realize tRump not planning to keep his promises (one reason he’s talking so much about Greenland). Bringing down inflation is hard!

    The groups who support tRump are not getting along with each other, fighting over positions, jobs and policies. […] [PZ pointed this out as well in his post: It’s all Kilkenny Cats out there ]

    It’s easy to promise great things, but much harder to get them done, especially in a DC this divided. […]

    Wilson said something interesting. He thinks tRump’s second term, even though he will not be inaugurated for another 8 days, has already peaked.

    We need to savor the Schadenfreude, and talk about his weaknesses. Because the more talk there is about his weaknesses, the weaker he will become. These are opportunities.

    Now, for those who did not watch Karen Pence ignoring tRump, you can see it here (and this is a time where, I must warn you, tRump appears — because he has to). Skip over it if you don’t want to see the convicted criminal. At least the still only shows the criminal’s back! [video at the link]

  3. says

    https://www.wonkette.com/p/you-dont-have-justin-trudeau-to-kick

    […] There’s a last-minute scramble to find a replacement [for Justin Trudeau] to turn the sinking ship around but whoever gets the gig is more likely to end up like Kim Campbell, Canada’s first and only female female prime minister. Campbell, a Conservative who took office after Brian Mulroney skedaddled ahead of schedule, was also the country’s first female justice minister but only lasted roughly a dozen Scaramuccis at the new job before leading the party into such a resounding clobbering in the 1993 election, the surviving Cons could’ve carpooled in a convertible to commute to the House of Commons.

    But at least probable PM Pierre Poilievre seems unlikely to start sabre-rattling about seizing the wee specks of technically France off the coast of Newfoundland or turning Turks and Caicos into our own private Hawaii. Or to rage-tweet at Santa Claus for not pulling his economic weight on Arctic sovereignty despite his long history of giving better Christmas presents to the one percent.

    You’ve probably heard by now Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced last week he’s stepping down. On January 6 no less, which is becoming a bit of a portentous date for significant North American political developments.

    “My friends, as you all know, I’m a fighter,” said a sad-looking Trudeau while announcing he was hanging up his gloves. “Every bone in my body has told me to fight because I care deeply about Canadians. I care deeply about this country, and I will always be motivated by what is in the best interest of Canadians. And the fact is, despite best efforts to work through it, Parliament has been paralyzed for months after what has been the longest session of a minority Parliament in Canadian history. […] This country deserves a real choice in the next election, and it has become clear to me that if I’m having to fight internal battles, I cannot be the best option in that election.” [Photo of Trudeau in a boxing ring.]

    […] Not that he’s going away right away. Governor-General Mary Simon agreed to prorogue Parliament until March 24 to give the Grits time to get their shit together and pick a new boss, meaning the federal government will essentially be AWOL when the world collectively steps into the Twilight Zone on January 20 thanks to America’s stupidest citizens.

    […] Pierre Elliott Trudeau famously made his own decision to step down after taking “a walk in the snow.” […] His son made the same call after taking a walk in the snow of his own after going on a ski vacation with his family (including his estranged wife), which made international headlines after he was ambushed by an anti-LGBTQ dumb-dumb named Emily Duggan who urged him to “please get the fuck out of B.C.”

    Canadians are so stereotypically polite we say “please” even when cussing people out in front of their children. Trudeau usually hits the slopes at flashier Whistler, a two-hour drive from Vancouver, but opted instead to reflect on his situation at remote Red Mountain in the Tory-held southern Kootenays, where his younger brother Michel worked as a liftie when he was killed in an avalanche while backcountry skiing 27 years ago. His body was never recovered, and this is the closest thing the family has to visiting his grave. Not that the haters would care about that sort of thing.

    […] I’ve always wished Trudeau the best as the alternatives have invariably been worse. It was a bummer when he reneged on the promise to abolish the first-past-the-post electoral system in favor of proportional representation, but at least we got slightly cheaper daycare out of him. […] The SNC-Lavalin affair was a doozy, where he shitcanned the country’s first Indigenous justice minister because she wouldn’t give Liberal corporate donors a break with corruption charges and he lied after the Globe & Mail reported on it, but we still got legalized weed. Even if it’s much cheaper, stronger and without all the stoner-proof packaging when bought off the street. […]

    Plus he got us through the plague in reasonably decent shape and did as well as could be hoped when dealing with That Awful Man [Trump] the first time around.

    […] he was smart enough to surround himself with much smarter people. […]

    (Fun fact: Trudeau began his career in Vancouver’s public education system as a substitute high school teacher […]

  4. says

    Washington Post link

    “Supreme Court to hear case challenging Obamacare’s preventive coverage”

    “At issue is a provision requiring health-care plans to cover no-cost preventive care, including cancer screenings, immunizations and contraception.”

    The Supreme Court said Friday it will review the constitutionality of a provision of the Affordable Care Act that requires health plans to provide no-cost preventive care, including cancer screenings, immunizations and contraception, to millions of Americans.

    The case puts the law, commonly known as Obamacare, in the crosshairs once again and follows several challenges in recent years by conservatives hoping to overturn it, as well as a landmark 2012 ruling by the justices upholding its legality.

    In Becerra v. Braidwood Management Inc., a Christian-owned business and six individuals challenged the preventive-care provision because it requires health-care plans to cover pre-exposure medications intended to prevent the spread of HIV among certain at-risk populations. The plaintiffs argue that the medications “encourage and facilitate homosexual behavior,” which conflicts with their religious beliefs.

    The plaintiffs also contend that an expert committee that mandates the preventive care health-care plans must offer is unconstitutional because its members are not appointed by the president with Senate approval, in violation of the appointments clause.

    A Texas district court [Texas courts … sheesh] sided with the plaintiffs, ruling that the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force — which set the coverage requirements — was unconstitutional because its members had not been confirmed by the Senate and that all mandates it had imposed since 2010 were invalid. […]

    The Supreme Court is likely to hear oral arguments in the case later this year.

  5. says

    NBC News:

    What to know about the California wildfires

    The Santa Ana winds are expected to strengthen today, after a brief reprieve yesterday, with gusts of 30 to 50 mph in coastal areas, and up to 70 mph in the mountains of Los Angeles and Ventura Counties.

    The wind-fed wildfires have killed at least 16 people and swept through 40,000 acres in the greater Los Angeles area, destroying entire communities and more than 12,300 structures.

    Evacuation orders for the largest blaze, the Palisades Fire, have expanded as it sweeps east and threatens Brentwood, Encino and Westwood. It is 11% contained.

    At least 153,000 L.A. residents were under evacuation orders overnight. […]

    Los Angeles County declared a public health emergency, warning that smoke and particulate matter could pose immediate and long-term threats. […]

    Though residents are eager to return to their homes, officials warn that the wreckage remains dangerous for civilians and requests for police escorts are overwhelming Los Angeles’ already strained resources.

    Los Angeles Sheriff Robert Luna spoke about the frustrations of those who are at barricades trying to go back to their neighborhoods, warning that the debris left behind resemble “war zones.” Officials said they are working on a solution that would allow residents to view their homes online to assess damage instead of returning in person.

    “There are downed power poles, electric wires,” Luna said. “There are still some smoldering fires. It is not safe.”

    The city’s officers initially worked with citizens to provide police escorts for people to go back to recover medications and pets, Los Angeles Police Chief Jim McDonnell said. That came to an end as “the numbers became overwhelming” for the department.

    “Today, we need to suspend that practice effective immediately — we have search operations now beginning,” McDonnell said. “We will have cadaver dog deployment, and that will result in crime scene preservation efforts and then the recovery of remains, working closely with the L.A. County Coroner.”

    […] 14,000 people are working the fire line, and Governor Newsom has doubled the National Guard to help with logistics. Support is coming from Mexico and other states. […]

    Link

  9. says

    What an unregulated school voucher program looks like

    Arizona’s acclaimed voucher program provides zero transparency into private schools’ history, academic performance or financial sustainability to help parents make informed school choices.

    by Eli Hager, for ProPublica

    One afternoon in September, parents started arriving for pickup at Title of Liberty Academy, a private Mormon K-8 school in Mesa, Arizona, on the eastern outskirts of Phoenix.

    Individually, the moms and dads were called in to speak to the principal. That’s when they were told that the school, still just a few months old, was closing due to financial problems.

    There would be no more school at Title of Liberty.

    Over the course of that week, more parents were given the news, as well as their options for the remainder of the school year: They could transfer their children to another private or charter school, or they could put them in a microschool that the principal said she’d soon be setting up in her living room. Or there was always homeschooling. Or even public school.

    […] Many of them had been disappointed by their local public schools, which some felt were indoctrinating kids in subjects like race and sex and, of course, were lacking in religious instruction. […]

    An LDS member herself, [one mother] was soon ready to start paying tuition to the school from her son’s Empowerment Scholarship Account — a type of school voucher pioneered in Arizona and now spreading in various forms to more than a dozen other states. ESAs give parents an average of over $7,000 a year in taxpayer funds, per child, to spend on any private school, tutoring service or other educational expense of their choice.

    Yet Arizona’s ESA program provides zero transparency as to private schools’ financial sustainability or academic performance to help parents make informed school choices.

    [Snipped details of the school’s past financial trouble, and of the Arizona State Board for Charter Schools recommendation that it should be shut down. The school changed its name and reopened. Sounds like a scam.]

    […] found a way to keep existing and being funded by the public anyway, just without the standards and accountability that would normally come with taxpayer money.

    Arizona does no vetting of new voucher schools. Not even if the school or the online school “provider” has already failed, or was founded yesterday, or is operating out of a strip mall or a living room or a garage, or offers just a half hour of instruction per morning. (If you’re an individual tutor in Arizona, all you need in order to register to start accepting voucher cash is a high school diploma.)

    […] President-elect Donald Trump has prioritized the issue, most recently by nominating for secretary of education someone whose top priority appears to be expanding school choice efforts nationwide. […]

    These programs are where the U.S. education system is headed.

    In our stories, we’ve reported that Arizona making vouchers available even to the wealthiest parents — many of whom were already paying tuition for their kids to go to private school and didn’t need the government assistance — helped contribute to a state budget meltdown. We’ve also reported that low-income families in the Phoenix area, by contrast, are largely not being helped by vouchers, in part because high-quality private schools don’t exist in their neighborhoods.

    […] Private school parents can speak at public school board meetings, and they vote in school board elections. But public school parents can’t freely attend, let alone request the minutes of, a private school governing body’s meetings, even if that school is now being funded with taxpayer dollars.

    […] The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank associated with Trump, has maintained that in such a system, schools would have “a strong incentive to meet the needs of their students since unsatisfied parents can take their children and education dollars elsewhere,” which the group says would create “direct accountability to parents.”

    Yet in a truly free market, opponents say, consumers would have information, including about vendors’ past performance, to make purchasing decisions in their own best interests.

    […] Several ESA parents across the Phoenix area said in interviews that they absolutely want educational choice and flexibility, but that they also want the sort of quality assurance that only government can provide. […] many local private schools and other educational vendors have started advertising on Facebook and elsewhere that they are “ESA certified,” even though there’s no state “certification” beyond simply signing up to receive the voucher payments. […]

    Doug Nick, spokesperson for the Arizona Department of Education, responded that state law “makes it clear that we have no authority to oversee private schools,” even ones receiving public dollars.

    […] [snipped history of Edwards, the woman that had founded ARCHES, which was subsequently changed to Title of Liberty.]

    […] we had to have teachers in order to be able to get students.” She ended up hiring mostly her own family members, both for teaching positions and to do much of the school’s financial paperwork.

    […] Calls for school transparency and accountability used to be a feature of the center-right education reform movement. No Child Left Behind, one of President George W. Bush’s signature legislative achievements, mandated that public school students in certain grades undergo standardized testing in core subjects, on the grounds that schools should have to prove that they’re educating kids up to state standards and, if they’re not, to improve or else risk losing funding.

    That testing was often rote, providing incomplete information as to the varied lives of students and pressuring many teachers to “teach to the test,” critics alleged. But it did offer a window into school performance — which, in turn, gave the voucher movement ammunition to criticize failing public schools.

    Still, early voucher efforts too included basic transparency and accountability measures. When vouchers were first proposed in Arizona, for instance, a state task force said that “private schools must also participate in the same accountability process as public schools in order to qualify for state funding.” Louisiana’s voucher program, similarly, required participating private schools to administer state student achievement tests just like public schools did.

    But voucher advocates changed course between 2017 and 2020. By that time, several academic studies had found that larger voucher programs had produced severe declines in student performance, especially in math.

    Asked about a set of particularly negative findings out of Louisiana, DeVos, Trump’s secretary of education, blamed the state’s voucher program for being “not very well conceived.” Part of the problem was that it was overregulated, she and other advocates said. [LOL, what bullshit.]

    In the years since, fully unregulated universal ESA programs have become the favored program design of many school choice supporters.

    […] Arizona private schools receiving public funding have to do no public reporting at all. If they want, they can self-report their enrollment and performance numbers to be published on websites like Niche.com, but they are free to exaggerate. [Ideal environment for scams.]

    […] even minimal efforts at transparency and accountability have been opposed by big-money voucher supporters.

    Walmart heir Jim Walton, for instance, gave $500,000 this year to defeat a proposed Arkansas state constitutional amendment that would have required private schools receiving state funds to meet the same educational standards that public schools do. At the Ohio Legislature, provisions of a proposed bill that would’ve made voucher schools submit an annual report showing how they’re using state funding were recently removed under pressure from voucher advocates.

    And in Arizona, Republicans in the Legislature have opposed every effort by Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs to increase oversight of private schools that receive ESA money — except for one reform: They decided that such schools must fingerprint their teachers.

    But the new law doesn’t require the ESA schools to run those fingerprints through any database or to use them in any way.
    […]

    Wanting to make triple-sure that I wasn’t missing something, I drove over to the strip mall a few weeks ago to see if anything was still going on there.

    What I found inside was a scene of school choice in its endstage. A sort of zombie voucher school, with dozens or possibly hundreds of books and papers scattered across the floor. Student records, containing confidential information, had been left out. There was food in the cafeteria area, molding.

    Under quotes from the Book of Mormon painted on the walls and a banner proclaiming that Title of Liberty would strive to be a “celestial stronghold of learing [sic],” a document was sitting on a table. It offered guidance for parents on how to select the right school for their little ones, including this line: “You might be surprised how many schools are just flying by the seat of their pants.”

    And on top of a file cabinet next to that was a stack of postcard-sized flyers that had been printed off at Walmart, reading, “Sign up your student for ESA.”

  10. says

    https://www.wonkette.com/p/ron-desantis-turning-another-florida

    “Ron DeSantis Turning Another Florida College Into Wingnut Diploma Mill”
    “New College was a warm-up”

    Remember New College of Florida, the tiny school that Gov. Ron DeSantis and his merry band of grotesqueries took over in 2023, turning what had been a well-regarded, left-leaning liberal arts college into a right-wing cesspool, the kind of place that puts an emphasis on the study of “western civilization” and dumps books its conservative masters deem double-plus-ungood into giant dumpsters […]

    Well, get ready for “New College of Florida II: The Newening.”

    The unlucky school that has landed in Florida Republicans’ crosshairs is the University of West Florida, located in the bustling Pensacola metro area. UWF is a medium-sized state school with a little over 14,000 students, both graduate and undergrad. It is your average American university, as best we can tell. The school offers majors in the arts, engineering, education, business. Its athletic programs play Division II sports and there is an active Greek system.

    DeSantis recently named five new people to the school’s Board of Trustees, including a couple of dips with ties to right-wing think tanks. This was on top of the state’s GOP-controlled Board of Governors getting rid of three trustees and replacing them with what the local NPR station called “Tallahassee insiders.”

    The governor’s office provided National Review with a statement about the change:

    Under the leadership of Ron DeSantis, Florida made a commitment to refocus the state’s universities on their classical mission: promoting academic excellence and preparing students to be citizens of this republic. Bringing in these new board members will break the status quo and help refocus the university on the core mission of education. We look forward to seeing the new board members hit the ground running.

    Mm-hm. This is anodyne babble. The bit about refocusing “the university on the core mission of education” is wingnut code for “the university is too woke,” which itself is code for “the university teaches stuff that conservatives disagree with and must be crushed under our fascist bootheels.”

    [snipped details, including past inclusion of a Women and Gender Studies program.]

    The DeSantis appointees are a hodgepodge of winger loons. One of them is Scott Yenor, a Boise State professor who has served as a fellow at the Claremont Institute and the Heritage Foundation. That’s the double espresso shot of reactionary conservatives […]

    Yenor appeared in our pages once before, back in 2021, when he gave a stemwinder of a speech full of not-at-all-retrograde ideas such as “independent women are more medicated, meddlesome, and quarrelsome than women need to be,” [!!!] feminism is “a fundamental threat to strong, fruitful families,” [!!!] and that old chestnut about how men need to step up so that women will “be secure with feminine goals of homemaking and having children.” [!!!] [He seems nice and reasonable.]

    […] How are any women engineering students supposed to think about a lunkhead with views that could best be described as “Neanderthal-adjacent” being on their school’s Board of Trustees? […]

    The rest of the new trustees are a grab bag of conservative indoctrination. One dude has a law degree from Regent University and also served as a Claremont fellow. Another was also a fellow at Heritage. One is an instructor with the National Rifle Association. […]

    Sure, this is part of DeSantis’s assault on higher education in Florida. But it is also emblematic of the Right’s assault on higher education in general, which is only going to get worse in the next four years. […]

    Additionally, Scott Yenor himself has referred to colleges as “indoctrination camps,” which he won’t mind when it is right-wing indoctrination, but for the moment means more attacks on funding […]

    Remember that New College had a little under 700 undergrads in the last semester before DeSantis and his cronies began their takeover. So clearly that whole experiment was, as many suspected, always intended to scale up. Watch your asses, large-sized schools in the State of Florida University System, the legislature has already outlawed DEI programs and you’re probably next for a makeover.

  11. says

    Washington Post link

    “Xavier Becerra, who has led the Department of Health and Human Services, says federal agencies are outmatched in a world of ‘instantaneous information and disinformation.’ ”

    As they entered office at the height of the coronavirus pandemic in early 2021, Xavier Becerra and his allies had a plan to restore Americans’ faith in the nation’s beleaguered public health agencies.
    Becerra, tapped by President Joe Biden to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, empowered career government scientists and experts muzzled under the Trump administration. Biden officials took on social media posts they said spread disinformation about coronavirus vaccines, urging Facebook and other companies to remove them. The White House mounted a nationwide vaccination campaign, convinced the results would win over skeptics.

    Four years later, the pandemic has receded. But trust in America’s health agencies has not recovered. The percentage of adults who regarded the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as “excellent” or “good” fell from 64 percent in April 2019 to 40 percent in October 2021 — a rating that has stubbornly refused to budge in the subsequent three years, according to Gallup polls, despite the Biden administration’s efforts to rebuild confidence. Other surveys found similar declines in trust and approval for federal health agencies, and the people who lead them, driven by GOP skepticism. [graph at the link]

    “I can’t go toe to toe with social media,” Becerra said in a wide-ranging interview Wednesday, arguing that even a Cabinet secretary can be hemmed in. As examples, Becerra cited the lawsuits the Biden administration faced after urging social media companies to take down posts the White House considered disinformation. And he noted that officials can’t formally disclose many details about negotiations to lower prescription drug prices. “I don’t get to write whatever I want,” he said.

    The health secretary never mentioned Robert F. Kennedy Jr., but the longtime anti-vaccine activist’s shadow hung over Becerra’s answers. President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to run HHS has relentlessly criticized the agencies he soon may lead, amplified false claims about vaccines and offered alternatives to what he called government misinformation. […]

    If Kennedy is confirmed by the Senate, he will be the first HHS secretary whose personal celebrity arguably eclipses the agencies he oversees. The scion of the Democratic political dynasty has 4.5 million Instagram followers — more than HHS (about 200,000 followers) and its subagencies combined. His bid for the presidency won him millions of supporters […]

    The health secretary contended that the government is outmatched, suggesting that Congress should set aside more resources for his nearly $2 trillion agency.

    “I don’t have a budget that Pfizer has to do marketing and advertising,” Becerra said, invoking the pharma giant that spends billions of dollars to promote its drugs. “Will [Congress] give me some money to compete out there with all the disinformation?” […]

    More at the link.

  13. Reginald Selkirk says

    Burglary suspects dressed as firefighters arrested in L.A. fire zone, officials say

    Los Angeles authorities said they arrested 29 more people overnight in the fire zones, including one burglary suspect who was allegedly dressed as a firefighter.

    Of the arrests, 25 people were apprehended in the Eaton fire zone, four in the Palisades fire zone, authorities said.

    “We have people who will go to all ends to do what they do,” Los Angeles Police Department Chief Jim McDonnell said of a man dressed in a fire jacket and helmet burglarizing homes.

    One man, who was driving a truck, was arrested in the Palisades area, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and LAPD said. Other suspects were found inside the vehicle. The men pretended to be associated with a fire station but a quick check with the L.A. Fire Department proved that not to be the case, officials said.

    Sheriff Robert Luna said those arrested were not from the area and that some had firearms and drugs.

    About 20 similar arrests were made earlier last week…

  14. says

    New Yorker link

    “The Inauguration of Trump’s Oligarchy”

    “Certain business titans have made Mar-a-Lago a scene of such flagrant self-abnegation, ring-kissing, and genuflection that it would embarrass a medieval Pope.”

    Excerpts from a longer article by David Remnick.

    In modern terms, a Presidential Inauguration is an open-air branding opportunity. John F. Kennedy, a hatless Cold Warrior, placed his Administration at the vanguard of a new generation “born in this century,” and delivered an internationalist vow to “pay any price, bear any burden.”

    On January 20, 2017, Donald Trump set a distinctly different inaugural tone, delivering a sunless stem-winder of populist fury in which he vowed to heal the hellscape of “American carnage.” No longer would the country bow to self-serving élites and rapacious foreigners: “America will start winning again, winning like never before.” Upon leaving the reviewing stand, George W. Bush was heard to say, “That was some weird shit.” [Accurate.]

    […] Joe Biden, whose Presidency is now grinding to its conclusion, had hoped to render Trump’s Administration a historical fluke—a fleeting, if ugly, interregnum. […] Once more, the music of apocalypse is in the air: “Our Country is a disaster, a laughing stock all over the World!” Trump declared recently.

    He will return to the Oval Office with a résumé enhanced by two impeachments, one judgment of liability for sexual abuse, and a plump cluster of felony convictions. […] Trump soldiers on, as if all the legal accusations against him are badges of merit, further proof of his anti-establishment street cred.

    Since the election, he has proposed so many advisers of low character and dubious qualification that he has overwhelmed the circuitry of the confirmation process and the public sphere. […]

    Across the land, a willing suspension of disbelief has taken hold. […] Certain titans of Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and (God forgive us) the media have hustled off to Mar-a-Lago, a scene of such flagrant self-abnegation, ring-kissing, and genuflection that it would embarrass a medieval Pope. […]

    One of Trump’s most effective political maneuvers might be called “whacking the beehive,” a propensity to unleash so much buzzing menace into the air that it’s impossible to maintain calm, much less focus. Will he set up detention camps for undocumented immigrants? Will he split with nato and cut off Ukraine? Are we about to send the 82nd Airborne to descend on the good people of Nuuk?

    […] Perhaps what is most striking about the ascendant Trump Administration, which takes pains to cast itself as the champion of a forgotten working class, is its own oligarchic features. […] the 2010 Supreme Court decision that equates money with speech, resulting in an ever more corrupt system of campaign finance.

    […] Musk’s influence, unlike that of his Gilded Age predecessors, is amplified by his gargantuan following on a social-media engine in his possession. When Trump steps up to the lectern next week to recite the oath of office, he will stand beside his wife. But he will have a great deal of other company—multibillionaires who have shamelessly dispensed with principle to seek an indulgent new President’s favor and enhance their fortunes.

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