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In addition to being denied his debt ceiling extension, Trump was also repudiated when his daughter-in-law “withdrew” from consideration as Senator from Florida. Trump was pushing Lara Trump to fill the seat that will be vacated when Marco Rubio is approved as Secretary of State. Lara Trump’s appointment was intended as Trump domination: domination of “little Marco” by showing that an utterly unqualified person could fill his Senate role and domination of his primary opponent Gov. DeSantis by forcing him to appoint an unqualified Trump family member. It was a fail. This is after Matt Gaetz was forced to withdraw as Trump’s nominee for Attorney General.  We’re still a month out, and already Trump is showing the same skills that made him such a failure in business. “The Apprentice” TV show was meant to use media to create a faux image of Trump as a business success. It worked. People fell for it. But here we are, a month out from inauguration and Trump’s incompetence is already start...

This is just absurd. “ As first reported by  NPR , the state health department informed its employees that they were not allowed to promote COVID, influenza, or mpox vaccines. The directive, which department officials said they would not put into writing, related to all aspects of public health employees' jobs: employees could not send out press releases, give interviews, hold vaccine events, give presentations or create social media posts encouraging the public to get the vaccines, according to the story. They also could not put up signs at the department's clinics that COVID, flu, or mpox vaccines were available on site.” The given reason is apparently that the Louisiana state health department believes that telling people about the availability and benefits of vaccines constitutes coercion. When pressed on the issue: “In response to an email from  MedPage Today , a Louisiana Health Department spokesperson did not respond to specific questions but instead sent a st...

If current trends and policy continue, the Social Security Trust fund will be exhausted in the early 2030s and payments will drop by about 22%. If Trump has his way and income taxes are lifted on SS payments, payments are projected to drop by about 30%. And if Trump’s dream of deporting 10 million undocumented immigrants comes true, it will be even worse, since undocumented workers subsidize the SS system with fake SS numbers.   One way to delay the end of the Trust Fund and mitigate some of the reduction in benefits is to grow the population of workers in the US. The US population grew nearly 1% between 2023 and 2024.  “As the nation’s population surpasses 340 million, this is the fastest annual population growth the nation has seen since 2001 — a notable increase from the record low growth rate of 0.2% in 2021. The growth was primarily driven by rising net international migration. “Net international migration, which refers to any change of residence across U.S. borders (the ...

There's been loads of navel-gazing and brow-furrowing over the Democratic Party losses in 2024. Setting aside the fact that the election was actually very close, what do Democrats do to regain power in the midterms and in 2028? Josh Marshall over at TPM has suggestions: "If you were a party coming off a stinging defeat and looking for ways to burnish your brand as the party focused on the needs of average Americans on a budget you could scarcely ask for a better environment in which to do it. Even beyond what I described above, with these two rough beasts slouching their way into 2025, you have probably never had a time in American history where you have all the billionaires lining up and saying pretty much openly and loudly that we’re here as Team Billionaire and here to support the billionaire President and excited to usher in a new era of government   of   the billionaires, quite literally   by   the billionaires and really obviously   for   the billiona...

I have a reflexive skepticism about fads. While AI isn’t exactly a fad, the relentless promotion by the media of an AI future certainly looks faddish to me.   That said, there’s no question that AI is making inroads into data analysis. Watson can already read radiological images more accurately than trained radiologists. AI is transforming warehouse management. Over at her blog “Eating Policy,” Jennifer Pahlka has a post on the role AI is likely to play in the execution of the Musk/Ramaswami DOGE project to cut $2 trillion from the federal budget.  “The reality is that in many domains, the regulatory and spending complexity is such that it’s very hard for  anyone  to know what’s going on. You might think it’s Congress’s job to understand how the laws they’ve written have been operationalized, but that’s one of their chief complaints — that they don’t really understand what happens within the agency and they don’t always think it's consistent with their intentions. An...

The US is one of a small handful of countries that has a statutory limit on the federal debt. It used to be routine for Congress to raise the debt ceiling, but recently, House Republicans have been using the debt ceiling to extract political concessions from Democratic Administrations. While raising the debt ceiling wasn’t in the recent continuing resolution that Speaker Johnson was negotiating and co-president Elon Musk just torpedoed, it will be an issue shortly after Trump’s inauguration. That would interfere with his plans for tax cuts for the wealthy and for corporations. So according to the Guardian: “Now, the president-elect has modified his demands, by telling NBC News in an interview that he wants the debt ceiling eliminated outright. “The Democrats have said they want to get rid of it. If they want to get rid of it, I would lead the charge,” Trump told the broadcaster.” I say do it. Get rid of the debt ceiling once and for all and end the fiscal hostage taking. https://x....