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My simple blog of pictures of travel, friends, activities and the Universe we live in as we go slowly around the Sun.



January 31, 2025

Do you like living in the 3rd world?

Pentagon to swap traditional media with pro-Trump outlets under new rotational program for Defense Department workspace

By Brian Stelter

One America News Network would soon replace NBC News and Breitbart would swap with National Public Radio in coveted Pentagon press corps workspace under a plan shared with journalists Friday night.

In what the Pentagon is calling a new “annual media rotation program,” The New York Post will also be invited to move into The New York Times’ workspace. And a fourth outlet affected by the rotation program, Politico, would be replaced by HuffPost.

Three of the changes, set to take effect on February 14, elevate relatively small and ardently pro-Trump media outlets while sidelining more popular, more mainstream news organizations.

The fourth is the exception: HuffPost, which has a progressive brand, is openly critical of President Donald Trump. Curiously, though, the site does not currently have a Pentagon correspondent.

“If the Trump Administration and Secretary Hegseth are interested in more hard-hitting coverage of their stewardship of the Defense Department from HuffPost, we are ready to deliver,” a HuffPost spokesperson said Friday night.

NBC News said in a statement, “We’re disappointed by the decision to deny us access to a broadcasting booth at the Pentagon that we’ve used for many decades. Despite the significant obstacles this presents to our ability to gather and report news in the national public interest, we will continue to report with the same integrity and rigor NBC News always has.”

CNN has reached out to representatives for The New York Times, NPR and Politico for comment.

The Friday night announcement is bound to provoke challenges from members of the Pentagon press corps. But it is in line with the Trump administration’s stated goals to challenge long-held norms and create space for new, opinionated online media outlets.

Pentagon spokesman Jonathan Ullyot said in the internal memo to the Pentagon Press Association that the changes apply to individual office spaces in the “Correspondents’ Corridor” at the Defense Department — both a practical and symbolic move.

The year-by-year rotation program will “broaden access to the limited space of the Correspondents’ Corridor to outlets that have not previously enjoyed the privilege and journalistic value of working from physical office space in the Pentagon,” Ullyot wrote.

Officials apparently chose one outlet “from each press medium” — print, online, radio and TV — to forfeit their existing space for one years’ time.

The news outlets that are being replaced were effectively given two weeks’ notice.

Members of the Pentagon press corps were left wondering why The Times, NBC, NPR and Politico were told to vacate the office space, and whether the decisions were related to their rigorous coverage of new Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, the former Fox News host who took charge at the Pentagon earlier this week.

“To be clear, the outlets that vacate the spaces loaned to them” by the defense secretary “will remain as full members of the Pentagon Press Corps,” Ullyot wrote. “They will continue to enjoy the same media access to the Pentagon and will be able to attend and cover briefings and be considered for travel with civilian and military leaders in the Department as they have previously. The only change will be giving up their physical workspaces in the building to allow new outlets to have their turn to become resident members of the Pentagon Press Corps.”

Ullyot’s memo billed the rotation system as a fair way to welcome more media outlets into US military headquarters, but the announcement came under immediate scrutiny.

Breitbart, for example, was selected as a radio outlet, replacing NPR this year. But Breitbart – a well-known web site for pro-Trump coverage and commentary – barely has a radio operation of its own. The word “radio” doesn’t appear on its home page at all. The media outlet has a distribution deal with SiriusXM and one big podcast, Breitbart News Daily. Its footprint pales in comparison to NPR, which provides news coverage for local stations all across the country.

One America News was selected as TV outlet, replacing NBC this year. While NBC produces some of the most-watched news programs in the country, like “NBC Nightly News” and “Today,” One America is so small that it eschewed the Nielsen ratings measurement service. The far-right channel, headquartered in San Diego, faced multiple lawsuits stemming from the outlet’s lies about the 2020 election.

Kevin Baron, a former vice president of the Pentagon Press Association, called the development “the erasure of journalism at the Pentagon.”

“Kicking out reporters HURTS coverage. If you can’t file your stories from inside the building you are disadvantaged. If you don’t have a work space you are disadvantaged,” Baron said in a series of posts on X.

Purge of career law enforcement officials

Trump DOJ demands list of thousands of FBI agents, others who worked on Jan. 6 and Trump investigations for possible firing

By Evan Perez, Josh Campbell and Hannah Rabinowitz, CNN

The Trump administration is set to expand a purge of career law enforcement officials, demanding the names of those who worked on January 6, 2021, US Capitol attack and Trump-related investigations for potential removal – a move that could affect thousands.

Leaders of the FBI were instructed Friday to provide the Justice Department by Tuesday information about all current and former bureau employees who “at any time” worked on January 6 investigations, according to an email from acting FBI director Brian Driscoll and obtained by CNN.

The Justice Department, according to the email, will review those employees to “determine whether any additional personnel actions are necessary.”

“This request,” Driscoll wrote to all bureau personnel, “encompasses thousands of employees across the country who have supported these investigative efforts.” The acting director noted in the email that such a list would also include him, as well as the acting deputy director.

The requested list, which interim DOJ leaders had spent the past week drawing up, highlights how the new administration has moved quickly to deliver on President Donald Trump’s vow to strike back at the Justice Department and FBI that he claims have been weaponized against him. Trump has falsely accused agents of abuse in their court-ordered search of his Mar-a-Lago home and of their treatment of Capitol rioters.

The FBI and Justice Department declined to comment.

Driscoll attached to the email a memo from acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove with the subject line “Termination.”

“For each employee included in the lists, provide the current title, office to which the person is assigned, role in the investigation or prosecution, and date of last activity relating to the investigation or prosecution,” Bove wrote. “Upon timely receipt of the requested information, the Office of the Deputy Attorney General will commence a review process to determine whether any additional personnel actions are necessary.”

The Bove memo also referenced the removal of senior FBI officials, which CNN previously reported.

“The FBI — including the Bureau’s prior leadership — actively participated in what President Trump appropriately described as ‘a grave national injustice that has been perpetrated on the American people over the last four years’ with respect to events that occurred at or near the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021,” Bove said.

The Justice Department also requested information on FBI personnel who worked on a criminal case brought in September by the previous administration against several high-level members of Hamas over the October 7, 2023, attack.

Driscoll said in his email that “we are going to follow the law, follow FBI policy, and do what’s in the best interest of the workforce and the American people.”

Friday’s notices of expected termination sent shockwaves throughout the FBI, line-level agents and analysts told CNN.

“This is a massacre meant to chill our efforts to fight crime without fear or favor,” said one agent. “Even for those not fired, it sends the message that the bureau is no longer independent.”

One employee noted the January 6 case, which involved over a thousand defendants located across the country, was the largest investigation ever worked by the FBI.

“Everyone touched this case,” the employee said.

January 6 prosecutors fired

Also on Friday, more than a dozen prosecutors who worked on January 6 cases were fired by the Justice Department, according to communications obtained by CNN,

The prosecutors had worked in the US attorney’s office in Washington, DC, on a temporary basis on Capitol riot cases. But at the end of the Biden administration, their jobs were being converted to permanent status, according to a separate DOJ memo obtained by CNN and circulated across the DC US attorney’s office headed by Ed Martin.

“The manner in which these conversions were executed resulted in the mass, purportedly permanent hiring of a group of AUSAs in the weeks leading up to President Trump’s second inauguration, which has improperly hindered the ability of acting U.S. Attorney Martin to staff his Office in furtherance of his obligation to faithfully implement the agenda that the American people elected President Trump to execute,” Bove wrote in that memo.

“I will not tolerate subversive personnel actions by the previous Administration at any U.S. Attorney’s Office. Too much is at stake,” he added.

The Trump purge at DOJ’s main headquarters began last week – within minutes of the new interim leaders being sworn in – as some senior career lawyers were notified that they were being reassigned to a task force focused to immigration-related issues and so-called sanctuary cities, jurisdictions that generally decline to assist federal deportation efforts. The reassignment is widely viewed as an effort to force out senior career officials, some of whom have since resigned.

Emails sent by James McHenry, the acting attorney general, to those being ousted from their jobs have included language that reads: “Given your significant role in prosecuting the President, I do not believe that the leadership of the Department can trust you to assist in implementing the President’s agenda faithfully.”

Some agents say Trump and other critics misunderstand that FBI agents and supervisors can’t choose which assignments they are given as part of their job. The FBI workforce is broadly conservative and until recently were led for years by lifelong Republican Christopher Wray. The nomination of Kash Patel, Trump’s pick to lead the FBI, is pending in the Senate.

Many agents initially had qualms about being assigned to the Capitol attack and Trump cases, viewing the prosecutions as heavy-handed, people familiar with the matter said. Some Justice Department lawyers leading January 6 cases complained that they believed agents sometimes slow-walked some of their work.

Firings would ‘severely weaken’ bureau, agents association says

Shortly after Trump took office, Tom Ferguson, a former agent and aide to Republican Rep. Jim Jordan, arrived at the FBI headquarters as a policy adviser. Jordan has been a staunch FBI critic and led a subcommittee on purported weaponization of government agencies, including the FBI.

The FBI Agents Association officials met with Patel in recent weeks to raise concerns about possible firings of agents, urging him to protect agents who did their work investigating violent crimes with oversight from judges, FBI supervisors and Justice Department lawyers, according to people briefed on the meeting.

“During our meeting, he said that agents would be afforded appropriate process and review and not face retribution based solely on the cases to which they were assigned,” the agents association said in a statement.

The statement also warned that “dismissing potentially hundreds of Agents would severely weaken the Bureau’s ability to protect the country from national security and criminal threats and will ultimately risk setting up the Bureau and its new leadership for failure.”

During the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Thursday on his nomination, Patel said he didn’t know of any upcoming personnel plans.

“Are you aware of any plans or discussions to punish in any way, including termination, FBI agents or personnel associated with Trump investigations?” asked Democratic Sen. Cory Booker.

“I am not aware of that, senator,” Patel replied.

January 30, 2025

Weird Climate Fixations

Tiny Fish, Windmills, Low-Flow Toilets: Trump Has Some Weird Climate Fixations

“It was striking that the White House memo included toilets and shower heads as a presidential priority.”

Oliver Milman

From crusading against showers he feels don’t sufficiently wash his hair to reversing protections for a small fish he calls “worthless,” Donald Trump’s personal fixations have helped shape his first environmental priorities as president.

While withdrawing the US from the Paris climate accords and declaring an “energy emergency” were among Trump’s most noteworthy executive orders on his first day in office, both were further down a list of priorities put out by the White House than measures to improve “consumer choice in vehicles, shower heads, toilets, washing machines, lightbulbs, and dishwashers.”

Meanwhile, a separate Trump executive order titled “Putting People Over Fish” instructs federal agencies to divert more water from Northern California to the southern part of the state, which has been ravaged by drought and wildfire. The order blames the “catastrophic halt” of water due to protections for the delta smelt, a small endangered creature that Trump recently called an “essentially worthless fish.”

While Trump has long complained about poor water pressure in home appliances and has repeatedly attacked California for its water policies, experts said that trying to further these grievances through the presidency will hit inconvenient roadblocks.

“It was very striking that the White House memo included toilets and shower heads as a presidential priority. It really was something,” said Andrew deLaski, executive director at the Appliance Standards Awareness Project. “But I think Donald Trump’s concerns are somewhat out of date, to tell you the truth, and backsliding on federal standards for appliances would be illegal.”

When he last was president, Trump scrapped stricter energy efficiency standards for lightbulbs and created loopholes for less efficient appliances such as dishwashers and showers. These moves, which were later reversed by President Joe Biden, followed years of complaints by Trump over water pressure.

“You know, I have this gorgeous head of hair. When I take a shower, I want water to pour down on me,” Trump said in 2023. “When you go into these new homes with showers, the water drips down slowly, slowly.” He separately claimed in 2019 that “people are flushing toilets 10 times, 15 times, as opposed to once” because of a lack of water pressure.

Under federal law, the Department of Energy has to review appliance standards every six years to improve or maintain—but not degrade—efficiency benchmarks. Proponents of the rules say they have helped save Americans money through less wasted energy and water, as well as help lower planet-heating pollution. Polling shows the standards are broadly popular with the public.

But Trump, some Republicans, and gas and homebuilding lobbyists have cast the rules as overreach, and unified Republican control of Congress and the White House could see rollback of the standards, or at least eliminate the tougher rules put in place by Biden.

“No doubt some people don’t like their shower heads and there is a nostalgia for old things, but testing shows there is a broad array of product choices that work very well while saving energy and water,” said deLaski.

“There were some performance problems with some products but that was back in the 1990s. Consumers generally like their efficient products now. The president may be operating on some out-of-date information and I’m sure there are very good showers in the White House.”

The disastrous wildfires in Los Angeles, meanwhile, have resurfaced Trump’s animus towards the delta smelt, which he said is being lavished with water that should be rerouted to southern California to fight the blazes. “Los Angeles has massive amounts of water available to it,” Trump said on Tuesday. “All they have to do is turn the valve.”

Racist, Ableist Diatribe......

Trump Responds to Washington Plane Crash With Racist, Ableist Diatribe

The president used the tragedy, which killed 67, to deliver a bigoted and self-promoting tirade about DEI.

Julia Métraux

On Wednesday, an Army Black Hawk helicopter crashed into a commercial American Airlines flight as it was in the process of landing at Ronald Reagan International Airport in Washington, DC. Officials believe that there were no survivors among the 67 people on both craft.

After tragedies like these, it’s typical for American presidents to address the grieving public. What’s not typical of presidents is to blame issues with, for example, the Federal Aviation Administration on disabled people and people of color. Prior to diving into a bigoted speech at a next-day press conference on the crash, Trump claimed to have “pretty good ideas of what happened,” suggesting disabled people, people of color, Barack Obama, and ex-Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg were to blame for the tragedy.

In his speech, Trump rattled off a long list of the disabilities he said the Biden FAA had allowed air traffic controllers to have—citing, among others, dwarfism—poising hiring them as a negative move. There is nothing to confirm the air traffic controllers, who attempted to intervene at least twice prior to the crash, were even disabled. In addition, disabled people are not hired if they cannot perform the duties of their job.

And he gave himself a pat on the back for his executive order ending equitable hiring processes, issued last week, which claimed that the FAA “specifically recruited and hired individuals with ‘severe intellectual’ disabilities, psychiatric issues, and complete paralysis.” Trump has a history of attacking disabled people and of insulting his political opponents by asserting that they are “mentally disabled.”

Trump then segued to blasting former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, claiming that Buttigieg had run the FAA “right into the ground with his diversity” during his time at the helm. It is unclear whether Trump is referring to Buttigieg’s own sexuality, the FAA pushing for more equitable hiring processes, or the ex-secretary’s groundbreaking rulemaking and actions—which included taking steps to make airlines more accountable for breaking disabled people’s wheelchairs.

It is also impossible to separate Trump’s attacks on intellect—he centered his speech on a fixation with air traffic controllers as “naturally talented geniuses”—from his previously expressed racist views, or from his fixation on hiring processes in the FAA that tried to recruit more workers of color.

This is allegedly the person, after all, who told his ex-fixer Michael Cohen that “Black people are too stupid to vote for me.” He cast blame on the FAA’s “diversity and inclusion hiring plan, which says diversity is integral to achieving FAA’s mission of ensuring safe and efficient travel—I don’t think so. I don’t think so. I think it’s just the opposite.”

And even though Barack Obama has been out of office for more than eight years, Trump—who boosted his political prominence by pushing racist birther conspiracy theories against the former president—found time to attack him for FAA hiring changes. “I changed the Obama standards from very mediocre at best,” he said. “I put safety first. Obama, Biden, and the Democrats put policy first.”

“African-Americans, Hispanic Americans, we took care of everybody at levels that nobody’s ever seen before,” Trump said in another bizarre segue. But the FAA “determined that the workforce was too white,” he claimed. “Too white—and, uh, we want the people that are competent. But now we mourn.”

Obfuscating

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is Trying to Hide Who He Is

How Trump’s HHS nominee spent two days of hearings obfuscating decades of scientific falsehoods.

Anna Merlan and Kiera Butler

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s confirmation hearings to become Secretary of Health and Human Services could have been a window into Kennedy’s beliefs and how he’d run one of the largest departments in the U.S. government. Instead, Kennedy spent much of the two days he was questioned before two different Senate committees denying his past comments, obfuscating his long record as an anti-vaccine activist, and, in some cases, flatly denying things he’s previously said publicly. Here’s a non-exhaustive list of places where Kennedy reversed his previous positions, denied something he’s previously said, or presented a misleading picture of past actions.

Characterized himself as not anti-vaccine but pro “strong science”

Kennedy’s clear record is that of a man who stokes suspicion and distrust towards vaccines at every turn, and has done so for almost 20 years. Nonetheless, throughout the hearing, Kennedy insisted that he’s not a vaccine opponent, saying that he and his children are vaccinated against some illnesses, and that he simply wants good science and data. 

But the fact is that since 2005, with the publication of “Deadly Immunity,” his now-retracted Rolling Stone article, a cornerstone of Kennedy’s public career has been casting doubt on the safety and efficacy of vaccines. Kennedy chaired Children’s Health Defense from 2015 to 2023, through which he spent countless hours making misleading claims about vaccines. The original name of the organization, the World Mercury Project, stemmed from the false claim that vaccines contain a harmful form of mercury. In 2016, Kennedy accused Congress of allowing “mercury-contaminated vaccines that other countries have long outlawed.” This statement misrepresented thimerosal, a preservative that’s been demonized by the anti-vaccine movement for decades, and which has, in any case, been removed from most vaccines since 2001. 

Kennedy has also expressed unqualified support for Andrew Wakefield, who authored the retracted study suggesting a link between vaccines and autism, an association that has been disproven and debunked many times over. (During his confirmation hearings, Kennedy also suggested that the Institute of Medicine—a non-profit advisory organization now known as the National Academy of Medicine—needed to look into the purported vaccines-autism connection. But the IOM already did in 2011, and issued a report, hundreds of pages long, conclusively finding that vaccines do not cause autism.

“If the science says I’m wrong about what I’ve said in the past,” Kennedy proclaimed at one in the hearing, “as I said, I will apologize.”

This is a common talking point for Kennedy—that he’s not anti-vaccine, but merely pro-science—but that doesn’t make it true.

Offered a misleading picture of why he traveled to Samoa

Kennedy repeatedly distorted his infamous trip to Samoa in the run up to a measles outbreak that killed 83 people, most of them unvaccinated children.

During his visit, he spoke to the prime minister about vaccines and met with two anti-vaccine activists. Kennedy has acknowledged in the past that he went to Samoa at the invitation of one of them, “medical freedom” campaigner Edwin Tamasese; as NBC recently reported, an explicit goal of the trip was for the two men to discuss vaccines.

Kennedy, however, insisted at the hearing that he was there to attend an independence celebration and introduce a “medical informatics” system, adding, “I never thought gave any public statement about vaccines. You cannot find a single Samoan who will say ‘I didn’t get a vaccine because of Bobby Kennedy.’” 

Claimed an apology he gave to a woman who accused him of sexually harassment was for “something else”

In July, Vanity Fair reported allegations from Eliza Conney that Kennedy had groped her during her time working as a caregiver for his children. Cooney told Reuters that Kennedy apologized to her over text after the story came out. According to Reuters, the text read, “I read your description of an episode in which I touched you in an unwanted manner. I have no memory of this incident, but I apologize sincerely for anything I ever did that made you feel uncomfortable or anything I did or said that offended you or hurt your feelings. If I hurt you, it was inadvertent. I feel badly for doing so.”

When questioned about the alleged incident during the hearing by Senator Patty Murray of Washington, Kennedy denied sexually harassing or assaulting Cooney. When asked if he’d apologized to her, he said he had not, adding, without elaboration, “I apologized to her for something else.” 

Denied claiming Lyme disease is a bioweapon

When Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) suggested on Wednesday that Kennedy had claimed Lyme disease was a “miltary-engineered bioweapon,” Kennedy responded, “I probably did say that.”

Yet on Thursday, when Sen. Susan Collins of (R-Maine) asked him about his statements on Lyme disease as a bioweapon, he changed his story. “I’ve never believed that, Senator,” he said. “What I said is, we should always follow the evidence.” 

The idea that Lyme disease is a bioweapon has been thoroughly debunked. 

Denied saying Covid-19 was an “ethnically targeted” bioweapon

Kennedy claimed in the summer of 2023 that Covid was a bioweapon, telling an Upper East Side audience, “Covid-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.” 

But in what represented a bit of an emerging pattern, when questioned about these remarks during the hearing, Kennedy claimed he “didn’t say it was deliberately targeted.” 

There is also no proof that Covid is an ethnic bioweapon, a theory so fringe that few people besides Kennedy have even promoted it. 

Flip-flopped on Ozempic

During Thursday’s hearings, Kennedy told Sen. Andy Kim (D-N.J.), “The GLP-1 drugs—class of drugs—are miracle drugs.” That’s a departure from his previous comments on Ozempic and other weight-loss drugs of its class. In October, he said on a Fox News appearance, “They’re counting on selling [Ozempic] to Americans because we’re so stupid and so addicted to drugs.” He also claimed at the time that the European Union “is right now investigating Ozempic for suicidal ideation”—even though the EU’s report, published in April, had already found no relationship.

Cast himself as a staunch opponent of abortion

During the hearings, Kennedy said repeatedly that he agrees with President Trump that “every abortion is a tragedy,” as he put it, and that the state “should control abortion,” presenting this as a long-held position. But it isn’t: Kennedy previously said on his own 2024 presidential campaign’s website he would have, as president, restored Roe vs. Wade, adding, “Body sovereignty must be protected.” 

Denied calling antidepressant users “addicts”  

“You described Americans who take mental health medications as addicts who need to be sent to wellness farms to recover,” Sen. Tina Smith (D-MN) said during Wednesday’s hearings. “Is that what you believe?” Kennedy then denied ever having said “that antidepressants are like addicts.”

Yet as Mother Jones reported in July, when he made a podcast appearance to unveil a plan to overhaul addiction treatment programs during his 2024 campaign, Kennedy described a vision of opioid, antidepressant, and ADHD “addicts” receiving treatment on tech-free “wellness farms,” where they would spend as much as three or four years growing organic produce.

Denied suggesting pesticides could cause children to become transgender 

On Wednesday, Bennetasked Kennedy, “Did you say exposure to pesticides causes children to be transgender?” Kennedy replied, “No, I never said that.” But in July, a report by CNN found dozens of instances of Kennedy spreading the notion. In a 2022 episode of his podcast, for example, Kennedy said, “If you expose frogs to atrazine, male frogs, it changes their sex and they can actually bear young…and so the capacity for these chemicals that we are just raining down on our children right now to induce these very profound sexual changes in them is something we need to be thinking about as a society.”

Although the hearings questioning Kennedy have concluded, it’s unclear when the Senate will schedule a vote on his confirmation. Several senators indicated they’d follow up with further questions over the weekend. Clearly, they’ll have a lot to ask about. 

January 29, 2025

Massively reshaping

Project 2025 is already massively reshaping America

The OMB memo is the boldest, and clearest example of how the administration is employing Project 2025’s strategies.

By Megan Messerly

President Donald Trump says he’s never read Project 2025. But his advisers sure have.

Monday’s memo from Trump’s Office of Management and Budget ordering a sweeping freeze of federal financial assistance is the boldest, and clearest example of the administration not only leaning on the people who wrote Project 2025 but employing its strategies.

The memo, which throws into jeopardy billions of federal assistance for programs like providing school meals and supporting homeless veterans, hews closely to the strategy Trump’s pick for OMB director Russell Vought sketched out for bringing the federal bureaucracy to heel in Project 2025’s second chapter. That includes ensuring that the executive branch’s spending aligns with the president’s priorities — regardless of what Congress decides. And it tees up a constitutional fight over the separation of powers, with Vought long arguing that a federal law that prohibits the executive branch from withholding dollars appropriated by Congress is unconstitutional.

While Vought has yet to be confirmed by the Senate, multiple people close to the administration told POLITICO that both he and Trump policy chief Stephen Miller have played key roles in the funding freeze. Press secretary Karoline Leavitt, during her first briefing Tuesday, said she spoke with Vought Tuesday morning about the memo and that “the line to his office is open for other federal government agencies.”

It’s not the only example of how Project 2025 promises are coming to fruition. The president has moved to end diversity, equity and inclusion programs, re-up his previous “Schedule F” initiative that allows him to more easily fire career employees and reinstate service members who had been dismissed for failing to receive the Covid-19 vaccine at the height of the pandemic.

These quick moves, many of which have been enacted by executive action and have had immediate and drastic impacts on day-to-day governing in Washington, demonstrate a key difference between the early chaotic days of Trump’s first term, when directives were often hastily written, and his second. His moves this time are more coordinated and better executed, in more than one case with memos released late in the day that have caught career employees, Democrats and the media off guard.

A federal judge on Tuesday temporarily halted the spending freeze from taking effect, saying the courts needed more time to consider the impact. But Trump and his team say they’re prepared for the inevitable legal fight.

But Trump allies, still sensitive about the way Project 2025, the 922-page policy roadmap, was used as a cudgel by Democrats on the campaign trail — including by toting around a larger-than-life version of the book at the Democratic National Convention — argue that the moves reflect his campaign trail promises and should surprise no one.

“The ideas that are being implemented are the ones that the president has been talking about throughout his campaign,” said Roger Severino, director of domestic policy at the Heritage Foundation and one of Project 2025’s many authors.

He pointed to video statements Trump released pledging to rein in bureaucracy, attack the so-called deep state and upend the Justice Department, which Trump and his allies accused of abusing its power by prosecuting him for his handling of classified documents and his efforts to overturn his loss in the 2020 election.

“That’s what he was elected on,” Severino said. A president following through on his promises “has never happened before, and that’s why some people are surprised. But they shouldn’t be surprised if they paid attention.”

Polls consistently showed Project 2025 was a political loser that risked dragging Trump down before he disavowed it.

But for Democrats, the message Tuesday was clear: We told you so. It’s a point Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and others hammered home on Tuesday in response to the chaos caused by the OMB memo, as Senate Democrats also called on their Republican colleagues to hold Vought’s nomination in committee over the freeze.

“Plain and simple, this is Project 2025 — Project 2025 by another name. They knew how unpopular Project 2025 was. The right-wing idealogues are still in control so they had to do it in a different way but it has the same consequences and will have the same horrible, negative, overwhelming reaction from the American people,” Schumer told reporters. “And who is going to be the implementer of this? None other than the chief cook and bottle washer of Project 2025, Russell Vought.”

The White House did not respond to a request for comment about the Project 2025 connection. But Leavitt, during the Tuesday briefing, defended the spending freeze.

“The reason for this is to ensure that every penny going out the door is not conflicting with the executive orders and action that this pr

“People tend to freak out,” said Scott Jennings, a GOP strategist who has been a vocal Trump defender on CNN and who was at one point considered for Trump’s press secretary post. “The alternative is we allow the machinery to keep turning, no matter whoever the president is, and that doesn’t seem right either.”

Vought previously said that OMB is the most important tool the president has to “tame the bureaucracy and the administrative state” and sees the office as being able to “turn on and off any spending” going on at the agencies.

“We can do that in foreign aid. We can do that in all sorts of places,” Vought previewed to Tucker Carlson in November.

For all the prior planning, an energy executive familiar with discussions around the OMB memo, granted anonymity to discuss private conversations, told POLITICO that the freeze appeared to also have caught the administration off guard.

“The White House is scrambling to figure out how to explain this,” the person said.

In an attempt to clarify some of the confusion surrounding the memo, the OMB released a second memo underscoring that agencies are only required to pause funding for any activities that may conflict with a handful of executive orders the president has signed, including those relating to foreign aid, diversity, equity and inclusion efforts and the environmental spending approved by Congress during the Biden administration.

The second memo also said the freeze would not impact any direct assistance to individuals, including SNAP and Medicaid, though access to Medicaid’s payment system appeared to have been turned off Tuesday afternoon in what the White House said was an unrelated issue.

Other social safety net programs that get indirect money from the federal government, including some housing assistance and drug treatment programs, were not addressed in the memo.

Trump has yet to embrace some of Project 2025’s more controversial elements, including its expansive strategy for restricting abortion access in the country, which Democrats notably seized on. It gives credence to the argument from Trump allies that it is the president, not Project 2025, that is driving policy.

“It’s the president who announced what he was going to do,” Severino said. “We finally have a president who’s fulfilling his promises.”

Dick

RFK Jr. says government-run health care is failing Americans

Kennedy suggested that most people on federal insurance are unhappy with their government plans.

Chelsea Cirruzzo

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., nominated by President Donald Trump to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, derided government-run health care programs during a Senate Finance Committee confirmation hearing and said more Americans would like to be on private insurance.

Kennedy, 71, said he’s on a Medicare Advantage plan, the privately run alternative to traditional Medicare. He said more people would prefer to be on those plans, but can’t afford it.

“We need to listen to what people prefer to be on,” he said.

A September 2024 report from the Better Medicare Alliance, a group of insurers and business groups that support the privately run alternative to traditional Medicare, found that 52 percent of MA enrollees make less than $24,500 a year. Medicare Advantage plans can offer lower premiums but implement cost-cutting tools like prior authorization, in which doctors have to seek insurers’ approval before providing care, and narrow doctor networks to cut costs.

Kennedy’s comments came after Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), who has a seat on Finance and also chairs the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee that will hold a hearing with Kennedy on Thursday, asked how Kennedy would improve Medicare, the insurer of older Americans, and Medicaid, which provides care to low-income ones — and how he might better integrate people who qualify for both programs.

Kennedy responded by suggesting that most people on federal insurance are unhappy with their government plans as well as the private ones offered under former President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act, prompting laughter from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).

“I would ask any of the Democrats who are chuckling just now: Do you think all that money, the $900 billion that we're sending to Medicaid every year, has made Americans healthy? Do we think it’s working for anybody? Are the premiums low enough?” Kennedy shot back.

Polling updated on Jan. 17 by the health policy research group KFF found that 64 percent of American adults favorably viewed the 2010 health care law.

Launches hours-long X rant

Jack Schlossberg launches hours-long X rant during RFK Jr.’s confirmation hearing

Trump’s Health and Human Services nominee is his cousin.

Ali Bianco

We’re hours into Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s hearing now, and there’s one person who is ALL over it online: Jack Schlossberg.

Schlossberg, the chronically online sensation and the only grandson of former president John F. Kennedy, has some choice words on his cousin’s Senate hearing, sharing MSNBC videos and adding his own commentary.

Schlossberg and Kennedy have butted heads on politics before. (Schlossberg is notably more liberal-leaning than the would-be secretary of Health and Human Services.)

In all caps, Schlossberg is responding in real time to Kennedy's views on abortion and chronic diseases, and is calling out Kennedy for being a “liar” and a “guru shaman figure” who runs a cult.

“LIFE AND DEATH DECISIONS by someone who cannot tell the truth,” Schlossberg wrote on X.

Caroline Kennedy, Schlossberg’s mother, also came out against Kennedy Jr. Tuesday in a letter to senators, calling Kennedy Jr. a “predator.”

Aims to Rescind

Trump Aims to Rescind a Half-Century of Environmental Rules

The result could be, well, mind-numbingly complicated.

Dylan Matthews

If you pick through Donald Trump’s parade of executive orders upon taking office on January 20, you’ll discover many that revoke orders made by Joe Biden. But in one, Trump dug even further back: He revoked an executive order issued by Jimmy Carter in 1977, nearly half a century ago.

Carter’s order gave the Council on Environmental Quality, a branch of the White House, the authority to issue binding regulations governing how federal agencies comply with the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). Trump, by revoking it, takes away that power from the CEQ.

This may seem rather technical, but Trump in effect set off a process that could lead to very meaningful changes in the way the federal government handles environmental reviews for everything from oil pipelines to solar farms to highways to light rail systems to national parks.

NEPA is a law that governs federal agencies, telling them how and when to review the environmental impacts of federal projects. It is enforced, however, through private action: Individuals, companies, environmental groups, and so on can sue federal agencies for failing to conduct sufficient NEPA review, and courts can and do demand more review in response, delaying or killing the underlying project under review.

To the law’s advocates, this provides a powerful method for conservationists and average citizens to fight back against polluting projects near them. The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) calls NEPA the “environmental Magna Carta,” citing cases where it’s protected communities from water-contaminating drilling projects or blocked oil pipelines that enable greenhouse emissions.

To critics, including business groups generally skeptical of regulation but also many renewable energy developers whose projects are often subject to NEPA, the law causes pointless delays to beneficial projects, including ones necessary to building the clean energy needed for rapid decarbonization, and must be reformed if the US is to tackle climate change seriously.

Trump, of course, does not care about climate change. He made that much clear when he paired his NEPA order with an executive order blocking all offshore wind turbines and any onshore turbines built with public funds or on public lands, and his Department of Interior followed it up a few days later with an order suspending permits for all renewable energy projects, including solar in addition to wind. Trump’s skepticism toward NEPA reflects the much older skepticism that business and extractive industries have always had toward the law. But given the new anti-NEPA turn among some climate advocates, it’s worth asking what exactly his changes will mean for the buildout of solar and other renewables.

It’s too early to say for sure, but some people in the pro-renewables, anti-NEPA camp are hopeful. “I think it’s probably the right move if you want to move really fast and deploy clean energy resources or any kind of energy resources,” Eli Dourado, chief economist at the Abundance Institute and a leading NEPA critic, told me.

A more skeptical read is that Trump’s order raises more questions than answers. One thing energy developers crave is certainty, especially from the government, and if nothing else, the order creates a huge amount of uncertainty as to the future of NEPA and environmental review.

NEPA is one of the first federal environmental laws, passed in 1969, before the Clean Air or Clean Water Acts and before the Environmental Protection Agency was even created. As initially drafted, it had little teeth, beyond stating the opinion of Congress that there should be “productive and enjoyable harmony between man and his environment.”

But Lynton Caldwell, an adviser to Sen. Scoop Jackson (D-WA), added what would become the law’s most important provision: a requirement that federal agencies consider the environmental impacts of any “major action” they undertake and produce a “detailed statement” laying out those impacts.

Under the Administrative Procedure Act of 1946, which governs how federal agencies make and revise rules and adjudicate administrative decisions, people with standing (usually those who might be harmed by a rule or federal action) have the right to challenge executive agencies in court. Environmental groups soon realized that they and their supporters could use this ability to challenge federal agencies for failing to follow NEPA.

NRDC, in its list of “NEPA Success Stories,” gives the example of a proposed land exchange between the US Forest Service and a lumber company in Washington state. “Citizen groups” and the Muckleshoot Indian Tribe challenged the idea, and a court ruled that the Forest Service “violated NEPA by failing to consider an adequate range of alternatives and by neglecting to analyze the cumulative impacts of the proposed exchange.” This forced the Forest Service to redo the analysis; the swap went forward, but in NRDC’s view, “with a better design that protected old-growth forest and culturally and recreationally important public lands.”

Federal agencies are just like you or me: They hate getting sued. So setting clear standards for what NEPA review of projects should look like became necessary soon after it was passed. In 1977, Carter’s executive order gave the job of setting these standards to the Council for Environmental Quality, a section of the White House that had actually been created by NEPA in 1969. CEQ would be tasked with developing regulations that other agencies—the EPA, the Department of Transportation, etc.—have to follow in doing their NEPA reviews.

And that, indeed, is how the process has proceeded for decades now. Agencies can and do approach NEPA differently, with some being more lenient than others. But their review processes were governed by regulations that had to be consistent with CEQ’s regulations, and ultimately by courts that could determine that the processes were insufficient, forcing the agencies to do years more of analysis and sometimes delaying projects considerably. Those court determinations were always ultimately based on the text of NEPA itself, but informed by prior court rulings, as well as CEQ’s rules.

Trump’s EO revokes the 1977 order giving CEQ authority to issue these regulations, and instructs the chair of CEQ to, within 30 days, “propose rescinding” all regulations the Council has issued to date. In lieu of these binding regulations, the Council is supposed to (also within 30 days) provide “guidance” as to how agencies should conduct NEPA reviews going forward.

This creates something of a paradox, notes John Ruple, a law professor at the University of Utah and until last year senior counsel to CEQ under Biden. “President Trump ordered CEQ to ‘propose rescinding CEQ’s NEPA regulations,‘ but there does not appear to be a way for CEQ to do that, since rescinding a regulation requires an agency to go through the rulemaking process—and Trump just told CEQ that it no longer has rulemaking authority,” Ruple explained. “I don’t know how CEQ can do what he directs.”

This focus on CEQ’s regulations is probably in part due to a recent court case, Marin Audubon Society v. Federal Aviation Administration (2024). The case involves a conservation group in California challenging the FAA’s environmental review of proposals to conduct aerial tours of national parks. In November, two of three judges on a panel of the DC Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in the case that CEQ lacked the legal authority to issue NEPA regulations, because NEPA itself did not explicitly give it that power. That sowed no small amount of uncertainty about the status of CEQ and NEPA, and the Trump EO seems clearly meant to back up the judges’ determination that CEQ not promulgate these kinds of regulations.

There are some immediate concerns that come to mind with Trump’s EO. One is that there isn’t a chair of CEQ: It’s a Senate-confirmable position and Trump has not even nominated someone to it yet. It seems doubtful that the role will be permanently filled anytime soon; it took until April 2021 for Biden’s chair to be confirmed by the Senate, and Trump didn’t have one until two years into his term. In lieu of a formal chair, there’s an acting chair, but having a temporary official propose a comprehensive overhaul of a half-century’s worth of rules in less than a month is a tall order.

To some NEPA skeptics, rescinding CEQ’s regulations opens up a world of possibility where the council and the agencies it advises can embrace a different approach to environmental review, in which fewer projects rise to the level of needing a concise environment assessment or a long, involved environmental impact statement.

Thomas Hochman of the Foundation for American Innovation laid out a few ways this could work in a blog post. “Without those binding regulations in place, agencies are free to adopt much narrower definitions of terms like ‘significance’ and ‘major federal action,’ trim back their alternatives analyses, and treat factors like environmental justice or greenhouse gas emissions as optional rather than mandatory considerations,” Hochman writes.

For instance, if NEPA review is required in cases where “major Federal actions significantly affecting the quality of human environment” are involved, then agencies could decide that, for instance, projects that the federal government provides only limited funding for are not “major Federal Actions,” or that certain small activities do not “significantly” affect the quality of the human environment. “Repealing the EO creates a lot of opportunity but also a bunch of uncertainty and ultimately it’ll come down to implementation and some court fights,” Aidan Mackenzie of the Institute for Progress agreed.

Other experts I spoke to were not so sure. The NEPA law itself lays out how environmental review must proceed, and if an agency decided to adopt different interpretations of words like “major” and “significant” than it had used previously, it could be opening itself up to a lot of litigation risk. Suppose the FAA decides it doesn’t think, say, the aerial tours of a national park in the Marin County case are likely to have a “significant” impact on the quality of the environment. All it takes is one judge to agree with a litigant that the impact is significant for that decision to send the FAA into years of legal struggle, delaying the underlying project in the process. CEQ’s regulations were meant, at least in part, to create a uniform set of standards that agencies could avoid those kinds of lawsuits by following. If they break with those standards, agencies could put themselves at risk.

“NEPA lays out the things that agencies have to consider in fairly exacting fashion,” said Alex Mechanick, who until January 20 was senior counselor to the administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs at the Office on Management and Budget, and thus a top White House official dealing with regulatory issues. “It’s not clear to me how much juice they can get out of efforts to reduce burden via just weakening regulations, because those regulations could be held to be inconsistent with the statute.”

One big question here is how exactly courts will respond to the fact that CEQ regulations are no longer binding. One plausible answer is that they don’t respond at all: They’re still required to hold agencies accountable to the text of NEPA, and the last half-century of regulations provides them with a known method of determining what’s compatible with NEPA and what isn’t. “Courts could…look at CEQ’s current regulations and say, ‘All right, regardless of what Trump’s EO does, we find this direction persuasive to us in interpreting and understanding requirements under the statute,’” Ruple told me.

Dourado at the Abundance Institute was more optimistic that the change would have meaningful effects: “It’s a clean way to undo a lot of built-up procedure all at once—to say that ‘we don’t even have the authority to make these rules, and therefore we can just rescind them.’” But he of course agrees that ultimately, the agencies are bound by the NEPA statute, which has actually gotten somewhat more detailed in recent years.

The Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023, the spending deal that Biden and House Republicans struck that year, included changes to the law that set page limits for environmental reviews and time limits for their authoring, but also laid out in more detail than NEPA had before exactly how reviews should proceed and what factors they should include. By getting more specific, the law gave regulators less wiggle room to change course than they might have previously had.

Ultimately, any serious changes to the law will have to come as part of another legislative package. That isn’t unthinkable—in addition to the 2023 changes, Biden signed a bill in October limiting NEPA reviews of chip manufacturing plants, so Congress is capable of passing bipartisan NEPA reform—but it’s probably not doable on party lines. Budget reconciliation, which lets Senate Republicans pass some legislation with 50 votes, probably isn’t usable for permitting reform. That means any package will need Democratic support, and while a comprehensive bipartisan package on permitting reform came close to passing in December, it died over disagreement about the NEPA reform portion.

If Trump’s NEPA order has an ambiguous effect, at best, on the speed of renewable build-out, the wind executive order has a clearly negative one. Ironically, the order itself relies on NEPA: It calls for increased federal review of offshore and onshore wind projects for environmental impacts, and because most wind projects need federal permits and/or subsidies, most projects are subject to these new requirements. The rule also uses federal authority over coasts to block offshore wind projects entirely. Industry groups are declaring that it could block more than half of existing wind projects in the US.

Onshore wind is roughly tied with solar as the cheapest per-megawatt source of electricity in the US, cheaper even than natural gas (if not as reliable—the wind doesn’t always blow). Offshore wind, which took a harder hit in the order, is significantly more expensive, and faces other challenges, like the Jones Act, which bans foreign-built ships from traveling between US ports. Because the US does not build ships capable of installing offshore wind itself, in practice projects have to sail from Canada or other neighboring countries all the way to, say, New Jersey, to install turbines.

On the plus side, projections suggest that solar is getting cheaper faster than wind is, meaning that wind buildout might be comparatively less important for decarbonization going forward, and the Trump EO is less destructive than it looks at first glance. But these forecasts can be badly wrong, and it’s hard to sugarcoat Trump’s decision to block buildout of one of the cheapest clean energy sources there is, whatever the ultimate effects of his NEPA EO are. Moreover, the Department of Interior action this past week targeted solar just as much as wind.

Put it all together, and it’s hard to avoid the boring but important conclusion here: Trump is not doing much of anything that will make clean energy easier to build in the near term, and is doing several things that will make it harder.

The Madness

The Madness of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

The depth of his extremism has not been fully conveyed to the public.

David Corn

The media has failed the public on a crucial matter: the derangement of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Often he is described in news reports as a vaccine skeptic, when he is far more than that. He is an extreme vaccine opponent. And he has lied about this, saying he has “never been anti-vaxx,” though he recently declared, “There’s no vaccine that is safe and effective.” He still promotes the debunked notion that vaccines cause autism. In May 2021, he petitioned the Food and Drug Administration to stop the use of all Covid vaccines. He proclaimed it “the deadliest vaccine ever made”—though these vaccines were estimated to have saved 20 million lives globally in the first year of their use. His anti-vaccine advocacy also played a role in a deadly measles outbreak in Samoa in 2019 that killed scores of children, and this, too, he has lied about.

But Kennedy’s false claims about vaccines and his own stance on the issue are merely just one slice of his craziness that has not been fully conveyed to the public. For years, he has pushed a host of conspiracy theories and false propositions in such an aggressive and unhinged manner as to raise profound questions about his judgment and analytical abilities. Placing a fellow this cracked, disingenuous, and paranoid in charge of the American public health system—which Donald Trump has proposed to do by nominating him to be secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services—threatens national and global security. This could be the most dangerous act of Trump’s presidency. Yet Republican senators and much of the public are ho-humming this perilous appointment.

Like Trump, Kennedy for years has wielded a firehose of falsehoods across multiple fronts and has engaged in assorted misconduct and odd behavior, so much so that the individual lies and misdeeds zip by and blur into a mess that becomes tough for the media to thoroughly depict and hard for the public to absorb.

During the pandemic, he not only recklessly opposed the vaccines; he also made the baseless and seemingly antisemitic comment that Covid was engineered to spare Jews and Chinese people. He compared anti-Covid public health measures to the Holocaust and claimed Dr. Anthony Fauci was orchestrating “fascism.” (Kennedy published an entire book in 2021 outlandishly attacking Fauci, asserting this public health official, over his decades-long career, had mounted “a historic coup d’état against Western democracy.” In this book, he claimed that Fauci once funded testing of an AIDS treatment on a group of foster children and many of them died because of the experiment—a scurrilous allegation that has been debunked.) Kennedy, who has no training in science or medicine, also hyped unproven treatments for Covid, including hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin.

In 2022, Kennedy pushed a wild-eyed theory about the pandemic that showed how bonkers he can be. He claimed that a global elite led by the CIA had been planning for years to use a pandemic to end democracy and impose totalitarian control on the entire world. This was Alex Jones-level crazy. But Kennedy fervently insisted he had proof: the ominous-sounding Event 201. That was the name of a pandemic simulation held at a New York City hotel in October 2019, months before Covid struck. In one podcast, he said that no one had to take his word on this claim of a diabolical scheme and that you could look up Event 201 and even watch its recorded proceedings on YouTube. I did and discovered the simulation, conducted publicly by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, was a rather anodyne gathering of corporate execs, former government officials, and policy experts that did not come close to matching Kennedy’s description of it. Yet Kennedy maintained this exercise was proof of a worldwide plot to exploit a pandemic to “execute a coup d’etat against democracy.” Only an observer far removed from reality could sit through the three-and-a-half-hour-long Event 201 and reach such a loony conclusion.

While excitedly propagating this conspiracy theory, Kennedy demonstrated a methodology he has employed in other instances. He misrepresents facts. He fabricates. He sounds authoritative and offers what appears to be oodles of evidence. But he blends dollops of reality with fevered fantasies and concocts a goulash of irrational conspiracy. If he’s not a self-aware con man, he must be delusional. Whatever the case may be, he has pocketed millions of dollars—including $10 million last year—as an anti-vax champion.

On other health policy matters, he has peddled canards and shams. He falsely suggested that HIV did not cause AIDS and that this disease was attributable, in part, to the use of recreational drugs—notably, poppers—by gay men. He has frequently said that human-made chemicals in the environment could be making children gay and causing “gender confusion.” (There is no scientific evidence to back this up.) He has bolstered the baseless claim that the usage of antidepressants has led to school shootings. He has promoted the drinking of raw milk, which presents the risk of foodborne disease and the spread of avian flu, given the recent outbreak in dairy cows. He has pushed the unfounded view that fluoride in drinking water causes arthritis, bone fractures, bone cancer, IQ loss, neurodevelopmental disorders, and thyroid disease. (Major public health groups say fluoridation prevents cavities and is safe.)

Outside the public health realm, Kennedy has hawked other unfounded conspiracy theories. He once asserted, “They’re putting in 5G [high-speed broadband service] to harvest our data and control our behavior. Digital currency that will allow them to punish us from a distance and cut off our food supply.” (He also told podcaster Joe Rogan that wifi “radiation” causes cancer, “cellphone tumors,” and “opens your blood brain barrier” to toxins—of which there is no scientific proof.) Not surprisingly, he has long insisted that the CIA was part of the plot to assassinate his uncle, President John Kennedy. (He also believes Sirhan Sirhan, who was convicted of murdering his father, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, did not fire the shot that killed the senator and that a second gunman was involved.)

And then there’s just a wide range of RFK Jr. weirdness and questionable (if not scandalous) behavior. This includes dumping a dead bear cub in Central Park; decapitating a dead whale and taking its head home; allegedly sexually assaulting a babysitter; keeping a sex diary of his many extramarital affairs during his second marriage; hailing his past use of heroin; reportedly sexting with a reporter (while married to his third wife); and causing concern at an environmental group he led over his puzzling distribution of tens of millions of dollars.

Kennedy, once widely praised for his work as an environmental lawyer, has compiled a long history of personal misconduct, conspiracy-mongering, and unrelenting lying. It may be too much for senators to vet and consider during his confirmation hearings. But all this and his lack of experience managing a large government department warrants extensive scrutiny, as he is slated to take over the world’s biggest public health agency. Moreover, his recent policy pronouncements ought to spark worry. He has called for pausing all drug development for four years, as well as research into infectious diseases. So no work on pharmaceuticals that might help Americans stricken with cancer, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and other illnesses? And no research or vaccine development for a bird flu strain that might mutate into a virus transmitted between humans?

A forceful and articulate public speaker who has mastered the art of appearing to be well-informed, Kennedy has repeatedly showed that he is unfettered by reality and facts and that he is an erratic and stubborn pitchman for unfounded conspiracy theories and dangerously false propositions. Putting him at the helm of the nation’s public health system creates a risk of great magnitude. Had he succeeded in blocking the Covid vaccines, millions more Americans might have died.

A clear-eyed look at his positions, actions, and assertions leads to a frightening conclusion: He is an untrustworthy and unstable person. To put it simply, he is batty. And it is absolutely nuts for him to be in charge of an agency that must rely on sound science, solid research, and prudent policy to safeguard the health and well-being of the American people. If the Senate Republicans confirm his nomination, it will be an act of abysmal recklessness and irresponsibility. Out of mindless loyalty to Trump or fear of him, they will inject a potentially deadly virus into a system meant to protect us.

Just Six Minutes

It Took RFK Jr. Just Six Minutes to Lie to Congress

Trump’s HHS nominee is indeed anti-vaccine.

David Corn and Dan Friedman

Six minutes into his opening statement at his confirmation hearing Wednesday, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. lied. President Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the Department of Health and Human Services brazenly repeated a statement that has been cited as false multiple times.

“News reports claim I am anti-vaccine…I am not,” he said in his opening statement to the Senate Finance Committee.

At that, a protester in the audience, shouted, “You lie.” She was removed from the hearing room by Capitol Hill police.

The protester was right. In July 2023, Kennedy told a podcaster, “There’s no vaccine that is safe and effective.” That same month, during an interview on Fox News with Jesse Watters, Kennedy said, “I do believe that autism comes from vaccines.” That notion has long been scientifically debunked. In 2021, he told a podcaster that people should “resist” guidelines from the Centers for Disease and Control on vaccines. He added, “I see somebody on a hiking trail carrying a little baby and I say to him, better not get them vaccinated.” And the non-profit that he led promoted an anti-vaccine campaign with the slogan, “IF YOU’RE NOT AN ANTI-VAXXER YOU AREN’T PAYING ATTENTION.”

And then there are all the anti-vax books he has written that certainly convey the impression that vaccines are dangerous.

Yet at the hearing, Kennedy tried to run from his past. He claimed that when it comes to vaccines he was merely “pro-safety” and only has asked “uncomfortable questions.” He said that vaccines play a “critical role in health care” and noted that “all my kids are vaccinated.”

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), the ranking Democrat on the committee, was determined not to let Kennedy slip by with his Big Lie about vaccines. He cited several of Kennedy’s past remarks. Referring to Kennedy’s comment that his kids were vaccinated, Wyden noted that during a 2020 podcast interview, Kennedy said he “would do anything, pay anything, to go back in time and not vaccinate” his kids.

Kennedy tried to weasel his way out, claiming that no vaccine is safe and effective “for everyone.” But that’s obvious, given that all vaccines can have adverse reactions. He did not bother to counter the other comments that Wyden referenced. He also dodged questions about the assertion in a 2021 book he wrote that parents have been misled to believe measles is a deadly disease and that the measles vaccine is safe and necessary. When Wyden asked whether measles is deadly, Kennedy refused to provide a yes or no answer. But he told the committee that he supports the measles and polio vaccines. Wyden scoffed at this remark.

Kennedy had to call on his powers of slipperiness to duck tough questions. Asked about the petition he filed in May 2021 with the Food and Drug Administration to rescind the authorization for the Covid vaccine and to block future access to it, he said he had only been focused on the use of vaccines for six-year-old children. That was highly misleading. Kennedy’s request to the FDA claimed the vaccine’s costs outweighed the benefits for everyone, not just children.

Kennedy’s penchant for sidestepping was on continuous display through the morning. Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.), asked him about a bonkers comment pertaining to Covid he uttered in 2023: “Covid-19. There is an argument that it is ethnically targeted. Covid-19 attacks certain races disproportionately. Covid-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.” This remark had been widely interpreted as antisemitic and suggestive that the Covid was designed as bioweapon that would spare certain people.

Kennedy responded that he had not said “deliberately targeted”—and this silly dodge provoked laughter from the crowd. He said he had been merely referring to an NIH study. Bennet did not have the time during his five-minute allotment to look this up. But that NIH study—which Kennedy did not mention when he made those remarks in 2023—did not say this virus was designed to target certain demographic groups. It only noted that “genetic factors” might play a role in how the disease affects people.

This was classic Kennedy: Cite an informative-sounding source that does not actually say what he claims it says. In this instance, he had implied that Covid was a bioweapon, as he has said about other diseases, including Lyme disease. He had no proof for this—as with many of his conspiratorial claims—but when called out at this hearing he pointed to a study that does not confirm his outlandish allegation. Kennedy’s mastery of this methodology, when applied to issues of life-and-death, makes him a potentially dangerous appointment.

When Kennedy was asked by Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho), the committee chair, if anything in his background “might present a conflict of interest,” he said no. That was misleading. In his financial disclosure filing, Kennedy revealed that he has earned millions of dollars by referring clients to personal injury law firms suing Merck in various courts on behalf of people who received HPV vaccines—which studies show help prevent cervical cancer. Despite his nomination, he indicated he plans to keep receiving fees from those lawsuits. That means he could receive a large sum if Merck loses the cases or settles them, a prospect that Kennedy, if confirmed, could potentially influence.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) pressed Kennedy on his financial stake in these lawsuits. Would Kennedy agree, she asked, not to pocket any money from these cases when he is secretary and for four years afterward? “There is a lot of ways that you could influence those future lawsuits and pending lawsuits,” Warren said, noting that Kennedy as HHS secretary could impact cases by publishing anti-vaccine claims in official government reports or by sharing FDA data with lawyers bringing the suits. Kennedy did not agree to eschew money from these lawsuits. Instead, he repeatedly misconstrued Warren’s request. “You are asking me not to sue vaccine companies,” Kennedy said. That was not what she was asking.

It was clear throughout the first hours of the hearing that none of Kennedy’s falsehoods and misrepresentations mattered to the Republican members of the committee. He was not meaningfully challenged by any of them. That was not surprising, for, as Kennedy displayed thoroughly, when it comes to adhering to the truth, his record on this front is similar to that of the fellow looking to hire him.

January 28, 2025

There is so many lies and just stupid shit in this. Revolution coming.

Trump bashed California’s water system. Then DOGE paid a visit.

Department of Government Efficiency officials toured a California water-pumping station.

By Debra Kahn

The Department of Government Efficiency paid California’s water-delivery infrastructure a visit on Monday following President Donald Trump’s withering criticism of the system.

DOGE officials visited the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s water pumps in Northern California and said they’d worked with the agency to increase water deliveries south, as Trump has been pushing California to do.

“Congratulations to the Administration and DOI’s Bureau of Reclamation for more than doubling the Federally pumped water flowing toward Southern California in < 72 hours,” the agency posted on X on Tuesday morning. Was an honor for the DOGE team to work with you. Great job!”

The pumps, which move water south from California’s wetter northern region, are federally owned and operated. California officials said late Monday that they had been down for maintenance. They also said Trump did not send the military into the state to “turn on the water,” as Trump claimed in a social media post.

“The military did not enter California,” California’s state Department of Water Resources posted on X after 10 p.m. Pacific time. “The federal government restarted federal water pumps after they were offline for maintenance for three days. State water supplies in Southern California remain plentiful.”

The agency was responding to a post Trump wrote on Truth Social that said the military entered California and used emergency authority to restore water supplies after hydrants ran dry during the Los Angeles wildfires. (But that was an infrastructure problem, not a supply-side issue.)

“The United States Military just entered the Great State of California and, under Emergency Powers, TURNED ON THE WATER flowing abundantly from the Pacific Northwest, and beyond,” he wrote. “The days of putting a Fake Environmental argument, over the PEOPLE, are OVER. Enjoy the water, California!!!”

The post came a day after Trump issued an executive order instructing a half-dozen federal agencies, including the Defense Department and Homeland Security Department, to figure out how to deliver more water to Southern California and the Central Valley. The order referenced the fires in Los Angeles that Trump toured on Friday.

Trump has been trying to pressure Gov. Gavin Newsom and leaders to increase water deliveries and on Friday said he wanted to condition disaster aid for Los Angeles on tightening voter requirements and increasing water deliveries from Northern California to drier areas further south.

The Bureau of Reclamation, which operates the federal side of California’s water-pumping infrastructure, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Conservative commentator Steve Hilton posted on X Monday night that he had toured Reclamation’s Jones Pumping Station in California’s Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, which moves water through the federally managed side of California’s vast water-delivery system. California and the federal government own and operate different parts of the system that jointly serve 28 million people and irrigate nearly 4 million acres of farmland.

One of the people who accompanied Trump on his Los Angeles visit, conservative water policy advocate Edward Ring, was lead author of a paper Hilton released on water policy.

The destruction.... Do like living in a toilet?

Legal battle looms as Trump orders a funding freeze during a review of federal loans and grants

By CHRIS MEGERIAN

The White House is pausing federal grants and loans starting Tuesday as President Donald Trump's administration begins an across-the-board ideological review of its spending, causing confusion and panic among organizations that rely on Washington for their financial lifeline.

Administration officials said the decision was necessary to ensure that all funding complies with Trump's executive orders, which are intended to undo progressive steps on transgender rights, environmental justice and diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, efforts.

They also said that federal assistance to individuals would not be affected, including Social Security, Medicare, food stamps, student loans and scholarships.

However, the funding freeze could affect trillions of dollars, at least temporarily, and cause widespread disruption in health care research, education programs and other initiatives. Even grants that have been awarded but not spent are supposed to be halted. State agencies and early education centers appeared to be struggling to access money from Medicaid and Head Start, stirring anxiety with answers hard to come by in Washington.

Court battles are imminent, and Democratic New York Attorney General Letitia James plans to ask a Manhattan federal court to block the Republican president's moves.

“My office will be taking imminent legal action against this administration’s unconstitutional pause on federal funding,” she said on social media.

The pause was scheduled to take effect at 5 p.m. ET, just one day after agencies were informed of the decision.

“The use of Federal resources to advance Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies is a waste of taxpayer dollars that does not improve the day-to-day lives of those we serve,” wrote Matthew Vaeth, the acting director of the Office of Management and Budget.

Democrats and independent organizations described the pause as capricious and illegal because Congress had already authorized the money.

“The scope of this illegal action is unprecedented and could have devastating consequences across the country," said Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee. "For real people, we could see a screeching halt to resources for child care, cancer research, housing, police officers, opioid addiction treatment, rebuilding roads and bridges, and even disaster relief efforts.”

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, a Democrat from New York, called it “more lawlessness and chaos in America.”

It's unclear from the White house memo how sweeping the pause will be. Vaeth said all spending must comply with Trump's executive orders,

Vaeth wrote that “each agency must complete a comprehensive analysis of all of their Federal financial assistance programs to identify programs, projects, and activities that may be implicated by any of the President’s executive orders." He also wrote that the pause should be implemented “to the extent permissible under applicable law.”

The Environmental Protection Agency, which distributes billions of dollars, confirmed that it would implement the pause to “align federal spending and action with the will of the American people as expressed through President Trump’s priorities.”

Washington is a hub of spending that flows to various departments, local governments, nonprofits and contractors, and the memo has left countless people who are dependent on that money wondering how they will be affected.

The pause is the latest example of how Trump is harnessing his power over the federal system to advance his conservative goals. Unlike during his first term, when Trump and many members of his inner circle were unfamiliar with Washington, this time he's reaching deep into the bureaucracy.

“They are pushing the president’s agenda from the bottom up," said Paul Light, an expert on the federal government and professor emeritus of public service at New York University.

He also said there are risks in Trump's approach, especially with so many voters reliant on Washington.

“You can’t just hassle, hassle, hassle. You’ve got to deliver.”

A briefing with White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, her first, is scheduled for 1 p.m. ET. ____ Associated Press writers Moriah Balingit, Collin Binkley, Matthew Daly, Lisa Mascaro, Amanda Seitz and Michael Sisak contributed to this report.

Bullet to the head... Bullet to the head...

Trump Tax Cuts Not Just Good For Billionaires, Say Billionaires

A memo obtained by the Guardian shows Charles Koch’s dark-money network spending big on—sorry, against—class warfare.

Julianne McShane

A group founded by the billionaire Koch brothers is on a mission: to extend the massive tax cuts Trump instituted in his first term, and to convince working-class Americans that those cuts benefit them, too—despite ample evidence to the contrary.

According to an eight-page memo obtained by the Guardian, Americans for Prosperity (AFP)—a dark-money group founded in 2004 by Charles Koch and his brother David, who died in 2019—is trying to preserve and expand the $1.5 trillion Republican tax cuts from 2017, many of which are supposed to expire at the end of this year. “We will be seeking a further reduction in corporate taxes,” the AFP memo to donors states, noting that domestic corporate revenue increased 41 percent, to $420 billion, from 2017 to 2023.

The group is also trying to pressure members of Congress to use the Congressional Review Act—which gives Congress 60 days to overturn agencies’ proposed new rules—to undo regulations implemented at the end of Biden’s term focused on the technology and energy sectors (the memo does not offer further details on the specific regulations they’re targeting).

The memo does not state the total estimated cost of AFP’s lobbying efforts, but the Guardian reports a figure of $20 million.

Its aims are audacious, considering that there is already evidence that the 2017 tax cuts did not benefit working-class Americans, but the ultra-wealthy. As my colleague Hannah Levintova wrote in 2018:

In the year since the GOP Congress helped Trump push through his $1.5 trillion in cuts in less than two months, businesses have not, as promised, overwhelmingly given their extra profits back to the people. Instead, they’ve saved billions in taxes, using the money for stock buybacks aimed at further enriching the company’s executives and shareholders, driven the federal debt to a level unseen since the years immediately after the Great Recession, and overwhelmingly kept any plans for spending their massive tax savings a secret.

And as my colleague Michael Mechanic noted back in October, the nonpartisan Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy released an analysis of whom Trump’s most recent tax proposals would benefit. Their findings? The proposals would lead to tax increases for all but the richest 5 percent of Americans, with the poorest Americans seeing the largest increase. Another analysis conducted in May 2023 by the same group found that making the provisions permanent (through a bill proposed by Republicans that year) would cost $288.5 billion next year alone—two-thirds of which would go to the richest Americans, with the poorest fifth receiving only 1 percent of the spoils.

But AFP seems undeterred by existing evidence—and, instead, is committed to producing its own.

The memo reported by the Guardian says the group will rely on a three-pronged strategy to achieve its goals: Spending at least $10 million to build a “national narrative” focused on “telling the success story of tax cuts” and countering what it calls “inevitable class-warfare arguments” against them; carrying out a lobbying campaign in Washington; and “lighting a grassroots fire back home” to persuade lawmakers in the House and Senate to act.

Some of these efforts will specifically target Latino voters, given the gains Trump made with them in the November election, according to the memo—which adds that a self-described center-right New Mexico nonprofit called the LIBRE Initiative, part of the wider Koch network, is launching a “national grassroots program to rally Latino Americans to support the extension of the tax cuts along with the repeal of recent costly Biden Administration.” That effort already appears to be underway: The group has shared infographics praising the 2017 legislation to its tens of thousands of social media followers and launched a website directing people to send letters to their members of Congress demanding that they expand the tax cuts.

Another key player in the strategy will apparently be Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which the memo describes as “as a real opportunity to cut over-regulation and waste.” (As Michael Mechanic outlined last month, while the DOGE proposals include eliminating the National Institutes of Health, veterans’ health benefits, and Pell Grants, there are a variety of tax breaks the government could roll back if it were actually concerned with cutting wasteful spending.)

The AFP group points to its success getting the 2017 bill passed, and their “door-to-door, phone, and digital lobbying efforts” to get Trump’s three Supreme Court nominees—Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett—confirmed to the bench as proof of their ability to rally support. “At a time when many Senators were under intense pressure from progressives to cave,” they write, “AFP activists were the critical counterweights to outside progressive influences.”

One person who definitely will benefit if the tax cuts are extended? Charles Koch. In 2018, the liberal group Americans for Tax Fairness estimated that the tax cuts would save the Koch brothers an estimated $1 billion a year in income taxes.

Prices

Hey! Loving the high prices?

You stupid dumb fucks bitched about Biden, now you fucking love paying out your ass...

Hey stupid dumb fucks, you pay for my eggs...

January 27, 2025

Makeup clashes.....

JD Vance clashes with Catholic bishops as GOP line on religion evolves

As last week began, Republicans targeted an Episcopal bishop. As last week ended, the vice president clashed with Roman Catholic bishops.

By Steve Benen

On the first full day of his second term as president, Donald Trump attended a national prayer service in Washington, where he sat and listened to the bishop of the local Episcopal Diocese. It quickly became quite memorable: The Right Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde spoke truth to power, urging the newly inaugurated president to reconsider his attacks on marginalized communities.

Trump reacted furiously, and among Republicans, he was hardly alone. House Speaker Mike Johnson and the new White House press secretary condemned the bishop’s sermon, and Fox News personalities repeatedly lashed out at Budde on the air. One GOP lawmaker went so far as to introduce a congressional resolution to formally condemn her remarks — and it quickly picked up 20 Republican co-sponsors.

It served as a timely reminder that too often in GOP circles, religion is treated as something that must be celebrated, protected and respected — just so long as the faith community is telling the party what it wants to hear.

In fact, the first week of the Trump era ended on a similar note to the way in which it began.

JD Vance sat down with CBS’s Margaret Brennan for his first on-air interview as vice president, and the “Face the Nation” host reminded her guest that the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops last week condemned some of Trump’s executive orders, most notably the administration’s new policy on allowing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials to enter houses of worship.

“Do you personally support the idea of conducting a raid or enforcement action in a church service, at a school?” the host asked. The Ohio Republican, who is himself a Roman Catholic, replied:

Of course, if you have a person who is convicted of a violent crime, whether they’re an illegal immigrant or a non-illegal immigrant, you have to go and get that person to protect the public safety. That’s not unique to immigration. But let me just address this particular issue, Margaret. Because as a practicing Catholic, I was actually heartbroken by that statement. And I think that the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops needs to actually look in the mirror a little bit and recognize that when they receive over $100 million to help resettle illegal immigrants, are they worried about humanitarian concerns? Or are they actually worried about their bottom line?

So, a few things.

Right off the bat, it was curious to hear Vance say that officials have a responsibility to “get” those convicted of violent crimes “to protect the public safety.” Trump’s pardons for violent Jan. 6 felons suggest the Republican White House has already rejected the vice president’s assertion.

What's more, it’s unusual, to put it mildly, to see a prominent American political leader use such pointed language in reference to Catholic leaders. “Are they actually worried about their bottom line?” is the kind of question that, I suspect, will not be well received by the USCCB.

But let’s also not brush past the larger context. In recent years, in instances in which the Biden administration disagreed with the Roman Catholic Church, Trump and other Republicans were quick to accuse the former Democratic president of being “against God,” “against the Bible” and “essentially against religion.” At the Republican National Convention, one speaker condemned Biden — by all accounts, a devout Catholic — as a “Catholic in name only.”

What are the chances Republicans will hear similar talk after a week in which party leaders launched a hysterical offensive against Budde and publicly questioned whether Catholic bishops are principally concerned with “their bottom line”?

Boost religion in schools

Supreme Court could further boost religion in schools with new cases

The justices recently agreed to review appeals that cite First Amendment religious rights. The high court’s decisions could affect operations of the nation’s schools.

By Jordan Rubin

Religion could take on a more prominent role in publicly funded education after this Supreme Court term.

On Friday, the justices said that they would consider a bid for the country’s first publicly funded religious charter school, in Oklahoma. A week earlier, the court had said that it would hear an appeal from Maryland parents seeking the right to keep their children from reading LGBTQ-themed books.

In both cases, religious groups successfully petitioned the justices despite warnings that crediting their legal claims would break new ground.

To be sure, the court has already favored First Amendment religious arguments in recent years. Doing so in these new cases wouldn’t be a new phenomenon. The question is how much further the court might go in this area.

In the Oklahoma case, the petition from lawyers with the Alliance Defending Freedom cited recent high court rulings bolstering First Amendment claims of free exercise of religion. Opposing their petition, the state’s Republican attorney general distinguished those rulings by writing that they were about “state subsidization of tuition at existing private religious schools, not state establishment of new public religious schools.”

Responding to the Supreme Court’s taking of the Oklahoma case, the American Civil Liberties Union and others said in a statement: “Converting public schools into Sunday schools would be a dangerous sea change for our democracy.”

Notably, Justice Amy Coney Barrett recused herself from the case. The order granting review didn’t explain why the court will be without the Trump appointee, who has been in the majority in divided religion rulings. But if the case is headed for another partisan split on the court with six Republican appointees and three Democratic appointees, the rest of the majority may have figured it can afford to lose one vote. It takes four justices to grant review.

The court has a full set of justices for the Maryland case, Mahmoud v. Taylor. Citing similar First Amendment precedents, parents of elementary school students say their rights are burdened through their children’s forced participation in certain instruction on gender and sexuality without parental notice or the chance to opt out.

School officials, meanwhile, say that the parents are trying to “unsettle a decades-old consensus that parents who choose to send their children to public school are not deprived of their right to freely exercise their religion simply because their children are exposed to curricular materials the parents find offensive.”

Of course, the Dobbs case and other recent appeals have shown that a majority of the court can change how the law is interpreted if it chooses to. Once again, we wait to see what the court will do.

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