It has seemed to me that the replacements at the Department of Defense look like an old group coming together for one last set. Asha Rangappa thinks so too.
I’ve got a yarn board up. Not sure when I’ll be able to share…
Open thread!
Cheryl Rofer wrote at Balloon Juice from 2017-21.
Cheryl is a retired chemist who has has been particularly active with nuclear policy. Cheryl has her own blog, Nuclear Diner, and she also posts at Lawyers, Guns & Money.
Twitter: @CherylRofer
This post is in: 2020 Elections, Open Threads, Trumpery
It has seemed to me that the replacements at the Department of Defense look like an old group coming together for one last set. Asha Rangappa thinks so too.
I’ve got a yarn board up. Not sure when I’ll be able to share…
Open thread!
This post is in: 2020 Elections, Dolt 45, Open Threads
We had a whole weekend of national attention on President-Elect Joseph R. Biden and Vice-President-Elect Kamala D. Harris. He went golfing to try to ignore it, but today the neglect is setting in with full force.
So still-President Donald J. Trump fired his Secretary of Defense. That’ll show them! And you can call him Yesper, but Mark T. Esper defied The Master one too many times.
It seems pointless to fire anyone when you have only ten more weeks in the job, but as our very own Cole quoted Mary Trump,
Esper gave an interview on November 4 that he evidently asked to be held until he resigned or was fired. It’s been published. I think I would have wanted to have calmed down a bit before giving an interview and tried to avoid the whining, but you get the Secretary of Defense we just had, not the one we might want.
There’s a lot of speculation about why Esper was fired, and who’s next. The FBI’s Christopher Wray is the favorite. Also, too, someone in the White House has given instructions to agency heads to fire anyone who’s got a resume circulating.
I think Cole’s got it right. The positive side, I guess, is that as Trump eliminates people from the government, he becomes less able to do real damage, like start a war. It’s going to make the transition more difficult, but we knew that was coming.
And where are the other front-pagers? Open thread.
This post is in: Cat Blogging, Nature & Respite, Open Threads
I have a trail cam set up in my front yard. These pics are from this morning, a half hour before the kitties went out. I need to change the time on the camera back to standard. Ric didn’t want to go out this morning. He knew something.
Open thread!
Respite Thread – This Morning’s VisitorPost + Comments (235)
This post is in: Biden-Harris 2020, COVID-19 Coronavirus
This is Job One, and Joe Biden is on it.
The numbers of sick and dead are shooting up the steep part of the exponential curve, where they become hard to control. Most of the country is seeing uncontrolled spread of the virus – that means that people don’t know how they contracted it. The numbers set records every day now.
One of the first things Biden has done since he became President-Elect is to announce that he will name, on Monday, a 12-member COVID task force.
The task force will be led by three co-chairs: former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner David Kessler and Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith from Yale University.
I have no doubt that the three will be available to the press immediately, and that they will have strong messages about how to deal with the pandemic. The first message will be that we are not talking politics, we are talking about a barely living organism that has no respect for status or ideology. Its mathematics are stark, but not inexorable if we meet it with our intelligence. To begin, mask up, distance from other people, and wash your hands.
“There are some things he’s going to do right off the bat,” said Nicole Lurie, a Biden campaign adviser who served as the Obama administration’s top pandemic-preparedness official. “He will reach out to Tony Fauci. He will declare his intent to be an active participant in the WHO and in the world. And I believe that in very short order, he’ll be in touch with governors and mayors around the country, listening to what it is that they’ll need to pivot this response.”
There’s a tradition for the President-Elect to avoid competing with the President, but there is no competition here, because, even as more White House staff are infected with the virus, Trump continues to do nothing. And the virus continues its mindless multiplication.
The response must be immediate. The incubation period of the virus means that people infected today will show symptoms a week or two later; the path of the disease to death is another week or two. Some people will not die but will be disabled, perhaps permanently.
What Biden and the task force can do is less than will be possible after he is inaugurated on January 20; for example, only then can he invoke the Defense Production Act to make protective equipment and medications more available. Congressional action will be needed, too, so that schools can be made more safe and people will not have to risk their livelihood to keep safe.
But we must start now. Mask up, distance from other people, and wash your hands.
Cross-posted to Nuclear Diner
This post is in: 2020 Elections, Open Threads
I’ve felt like I was vamping on the piano since before the election, and never more than this week. Vamping is what you do when you’re waiting for the next thing to start. It has other uses too.
Speculation on the lack of “calling” the election ranges from network fear of Trump, through the desire of coastal elites not to allow flyover states like Arizona and Nevada to decide the election, to wanting not to make a mistake on this one.
But I’ve been clear since before the election: It’s Biden and Harris. I just wish the noise would be over.
Open Thread!
This post is in: 2020 Elections, Open Threads, Trumpery
My Twitter feed right now is about evenly divided between people saying that Trump’s speech is a terrible thing for democracy in America and all future elections and others making fun of him.
As Daniel Dale said, it contained more lies than any Trump speech he has seen. And it was written down, presumably by Stephen Miller and other apparatchiks. Trump took no questions.
He was low-energy throughout, and his voice got husky toward the end.
The networks all cut away early on and provided some facts. A few Republicans are repudiating it.
It is true that 70 million plus or minus Americans voted for him, and some of them are rabid. But very few are turning out to “watch” the polls or generally threaten people. The low energy of the speech seems unlikely to inspire them to do any more than they’ve done. I could barely keep track of the accusations and doubt that his devotees will get any more out of it than “We got robbed.”
I’m with the people who are making fun of him. It’s a great way to discredit a would-be dictator. American values have taken a beating throughout his presidency, and we will need to mend them. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are already starting on that.
We do have to kick this guy to the curb, and it looks like many of his former allies will help with that. Maybe we can just let them do it.
Open thread.
This post is in: 2020 Elections, Open Threads