Donald Trump is creating a dangerous regime by eliminating institutional guardrails in place to prevent his incompetent leadership

Echo opinion published by The New York Times Editorial Board:

Donald Trump has demonstrated his lack of fitness for the presidency in countless ways, but one of the clearest is in the company he keeps, surrounding himself with fringe figures, conspiracy theorists and sycophants who put fealty to him above all else. This week, a series of cabinet nominations by Trump showed the potential dangers posed by his reliance on his inner circle in the starkest way possible.

For three of the nation’s highest-ranking and most vital positions, Trump said he would appoint loyalists, with no discernible qualifications for their jobs (❗), people manifestly inappropriate for crucial positions of leadership in law enforcement and national security.

The most irresponsible was his choice for attorney general. To fill the post of the nation’s chief law enforcement officer, the president-elect said he would nominate Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida.

Yes, that Matt Gaetz.

The one who called for the abolishment of the F.B.I. and the entire Justice Department if they didn’t stop investigating Trump. The one who was among the loudest congressional voices in denying the results of the 2020, election, who said he was “proud of the work” that he and other deniers did on January 6, 2021, and who praised the Capitol rioters as “patriotic Americans” who had no intention of committing violence. The one whose move to oust Speaker Kevin McCarthy in 2023, paralyzed his own party’s leadership of the House for nearly a month.

Gaetz, who submitted his letter of resignation from Congress after his nomination was announced, was the target of a years long federal sex-trafficking investigation that led to an 11-year prison term for one of his associates, though he denied any involvement. 

The Justice Department closed that investigation (❓-why), but the House Ethics Committee is still looking into allegations of sexual misconduct, illicit drug use, improper acceptance of gifts and obstruction of government investigations of his conduct. 

Kevin McCarthy, the former House speaker, blamed Gaetz for his ouster, on the grounds that Gaetz “wanted me to stop an ethics complaint because he slept with a 17-year-old.”

Gaetz is the man Trump has selected to lead the 115,000-person agency that he has called the most important in the federal government, a position whose enforcement role could cause the most trouble for any president with corrupt intent. 

Even for Trump, it was a stunning demonstration of his disregard for basic competence and government experience and of his duty to lead the executive branch in a sober and patriotic way. It will now be up to the Senate to say he has gone too far and reject his unqualified nominations.

Trump’s list of appointments is just getting started, but already includes two other unqualified nominations that he announced this week: former Representative Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence and Pete Hegseth to be secretary of defense.

Gabbard, who previously represented Hawaii in the House and regularly appears on Fox (Fake ❗) News, is not only devoid of intelligence experience but has repeatedly taken positions in direct opposition to American foreign policy and national security interests. She has appeared on several occasions to side with strongmen like President Vladimir Putin of Russia and President Bashar al-Assad in Syria.

Hegseth, a co-host of “Fox & Friends,” is perhaps even more unqualified, given the gravity — not to mention the budget — of the post he would assume. He enjoys some support from enlisted service members and veterans, but outside of serving two tours as an Army infantryman in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as time at Guantánamo Bay, Hegseth has no experience in government or national defense.




“He’s never run a big institution, much less one of the largest and most hidebound on the planet,” the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal wrote Wednesday. “He has no experience in government outside the military, and no small risk is that the bureaucracy will eat him alive.” The board went on to call Mr. Hegseth a “culture warrior” at a time when there are much bigger security issues for the Pentagon to be focused on.

It’s far from certain if Hegseth could even obtain the security clearances required for the job. He has said he was one of a dozen National Guard members removed from service at President Biden’s inauguration in 2021, because of concerns that he was an extremist — possibly because of a tattoo he wears that is popular among white supremacists.

These are some of the most consequential roles in government, protecting the country from military and terrorist threats, investigating domestic criminal conspiracies and prosecuting thousands of federal crimes every year. Yet to fill them, Mr. Trump has resorted to people whose only eligibility for office is an apparent willingness to say yes to his every demand.

Gaetz in particular has joined Trump in expressing a commitment to exacting vengeance against anyone they believe has done them wrong. Trump began his campaign by saying “I am your retribution,” and Gaetz broadcasts nothing so much as that. He has no business leading an agency with the role of combating crime, fraud, violations of civil rights and threats to national security, among many other things.

In Trump’s first term, the department was protected by career prosecutors and other civil servants who understood that their primary obligation was to the dictates of the Constitution, not to the whims of the president. But, Trump has promised to purge people like that from his second administration.

The possibility of extreme appointments like these was the reason the Constitution gives the Senate the right to refuse its consent to a president’s wishes. Last week, Republicans won control of the chamber. Now they will be confronted with an immediate test: Will they stand up for the legislative branch and for the American system of checks and balances? Two Republican senators, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine, have already expressed strong skepticism about the Gaetz’s nomination - of course, he has since withdrawn- and others have declined to express their support.

Trump clearly expects the Senate to simply roll over and ignore its responsibilities. He wants to turn the leaders of major important agencies into his deputies, remaking the federal government into a Trump Inc. organization chart entirely subordinate to him. He recently demanded that the Senate give him the ability to make recess appointments, a way of bypassing the Senate’s consent process when the chamber is adjourned for 10 days or more.

Even Republican senators refused to consent to that demand during his first term, to preserve their constitutional role, and Senate Republicans on Wednesday voted to reject as their leader Rick Scott of Florida, who said he would have no problem allowing recess appointments. Instead, they chose John Thune of South Dakota, who is far more likely to uphold his chamber’s right to refuse consent of president nominations.

In Trump’s second term, senators will immediately be confronted with an extreme set of appointments, even worse than those of the first term. That makes it all the more important that they preserve the ability to say no. 💥

Donald Trump and his political marriage a trois!

Whatever you think of the nature of his win, Donald Trump is still 😩😱😬😡Donald Trump👺💥 An echo opinion by Jamelle Bouie published in The New York Times.

Trump is overbearing in many areas and ruinously deficient in others. 

Most disturbing is how Trump holds so much sway over his supporters that, as he famously put it nearly 10 years ago, he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose “any voters.”

In fact, Trump is hardly capable of managing himself or the people around him. His White House was notoriously chaotic and he remains as impulsive, dysfunctional and undisciplined as he was during his first term.

There was, in the first weeks after the election, some notion that this had changed, that we were  somehow looking at a new Trump (❓), ready to lead a united Republican Party. 

But, as we’ve seen over the past few days, this notion was premature. First, the Republican Party is far from unified, as their struggle to pass a bill to continue to fund the government showed. It took days. What’s more, Trump is not alone as a figure of influence among congressional Republicans; the unelected Elon Musk has imposed himself onto the president-elect as a consigliere of sorts and is trying to build a political empire for himself via X, the social media platform he essentially bought for this purpose.

It was from X, in fact, that Musk urged Republicans to kill the continuing resolution, throwing the House into chaos and prompting Trump to escalate the confrontation to save face, demanding a new resolution that suspended or raised the debt limit. 

Then, on Thursday evening before the Christmas recess, the Speaker Mike Johnson tried to pass that bill. But a number of Republicans broke ranks, and unified Democratic opposition meant it was dead on arrival.

Together, Trump and Musk (marriage a trois) have not only walked the Republican Party into an otherwise needless defeat; they also have given Democrats the jump start they apparently needed to behave like a real opposition. According to Axios, House Democrats even broke into chants of “Hell no” when confronted with proposed Republican spending cuts.

That’s more like it.

The absurd battle over the continuing resolution (the CR) should stand as a vivid reminder that Trump is in a much more precarious position than he may have appeared to be in immediately after the election. With a 41 percent favorability rating, he remains unpopular. He cannot count on a functional majority in the House. He has no plan to deliver the main thing, lower prices, that voters want. And one of his most important allies, Musk, is an agent of chaos he can’t seem to control.

There have been enough presidents that there are a few models for what a well-run administration might look like. This is not one of them.

Suggestion for Rudy Giuliani- Set up your own auction webite or give Trump a commission to sell your stuff

 

Gift (or regifting❓) Ideas from the Rudy Giuliani Collection❗

How about a Rolex Datejust*, owned by the former mayor and put up for auction after he was found liable for defaming two poll workers?

Echo essay by Dan Greene published in The New Yorker

t was not easy, after a federal jury determined that Rudy Giuliani owed nearly a hundred and fifty million dollars to two Georgia poll workers he had defamed, for America’s Mayor’s victims to recoup. At first, orders for Giuliani to hand over assets were ignored. The plaintiffs’ attorney was given access to his apartment, only to report that it had been cleared of valuables. There was talk of a storage unit in Ronkonkoma which Giuliani didn’t control. His lawyers dropped him. At one point, he claimed that he couldn’t afford food. 

Luckily for anyone still Christmas shopping (or perhaps looking for a "return upgrade"❓), however, the court continued pressing Giuliani for his assets, which are expected to be sold at auction to pay for a portion of the damages owed to the plaintiffs, whom Giuliani libelled with false claims of election malfeasance. Thus, luxury items that belonged to the former mayor can soon be under your Christmas tree.

Perhaps someone in your life, taking cues from “Santa Baby,” has been dropping hints about a convertible. How about Giuliani’s navy 1980, Mercedes-Benz 500 SL, formerly owned by Lauren Bacall? “This is a good car for a second home—summer fancy,” Lindsay Schey, who runs the Gift Insider, a gift-advice service, said the other day. “You’re not gifting this to your son who just got his license.”

Nor is your teen-ager likely pining for the framed Joe DiMaggio replica jersey that hung above Giuliani’s library fireplace, or for an autographed photograph of Reggie Jackson. (Several of the latter can be found on eBay for less than a hundred dollars.) 

But, for Yankees fans of a certain age, consider making these part of a memorabilia array, augmented by baseball cards or other related collectibles. “That way, you’re not just regifting something from someone’s old home,” Schey said. If you have your eye on authentic Yankees World Series rings, however, look elsewhere: Giuliani has thus far skirted forfeiting three such rings, for championships the team won while he was mayor, by claiming that he already gifted them to his son. (A trial on these and other assets is set for January 16th. Giuliani’s request that it be moved so he can attend Donald Trump’s Inauguration was denied.)

A court order also mandates turning over “various items of furniture.” Real-estate photos of Giuliani’s New York residence, possibly staged virtually, show currant-colored leather lounge seats, an upholstered swivel chair with matching ottoman, and stained-glass lampshades. When, in recent years, Giuliani filmed videos for his Web show from his library, he sat in a high-backed chair of shiny brown leather. “Very traditional vibes,” Schey said. “You want someone who will appreciate that.”

Additionally subject to seizure: an unspecified television set, “costume jewelry.” The bulk of Giuliani’s offerings is an inventory of twenty-six watches.  ⌚ (During a hearing related to his disbarment in Washington, D.C., he displayed a wrist bearing two of them.) But temper expectations. A video of eighteen of the timepieces, posted from a FedEx facility by an indignant Giuliani representative (“an absolute bastardization of our justice system!”), suggested a collection that Benjamin Clymer, the founder of the luxury-watch site Hodinkee, deemed mediocre. “They’re mostly kind of inconsequential,” Clymer said. “It’s very clear he’s more of an accumulator, not a connoisseur.”

Schey recommended embellishing any Giuliani watch with a cheeky engraving referencing its provenance. “It adds an element of ‘You’ve never received anything like this before,’ ” she said. Clymer’s lone endorsement was for a Rolex Datejust with a white Roman-numeral dial, which typically sells for around five thousand dollars and is likely to retain its value. Another option, for the right giftee: a Franck Muller Cintrée Curvex that retails in the low five figures. “If I had a lot of money and I wanted to, like, fuck with somebody, that would be the watch that I would get,” Clymer said. The watchmaker’s reputation sounded familiar. “To a watch guy, it’s, like, ‘Wow, Franck Muller was everything twenty-five years ago,’ ” Clymer said. “Now the brand is still around, but a shell of what it used to be.”

If you’re feeling lavishly generous, request a viewing of Giuliani’s ten-room penthouse, at Sixty-sixth and Madison, which is being handed over to the poll workers, too. (There’s no mortgage on it.) It’s a tenth-floor corner unit with a glassed-in conservatory and a primary suite made by combining two bedrooms and two baths, and it’s just a short walk from Café Boulud and the Central Park Zoo. Last year, Giuliani listed the apartment, unsuccessfully, for $6.5 million; before the verdict, StreetEasy had it posted for closer to $5 million. (The listed broker also sold Bernie Madoff’s penthouse.) It’s a co-op, which could create two problems, should the poll workers want to flip it: buyers are subject to board approval and to monthly maintenance fees, which in this case are nearly eleven thousand dollars. Also, in 2021, the place was raided by the F.B.I. Check for bugs.

That’s likely too steep for most peoples’ Santa budgets, even in this town. Who might give such a present, and to whom? “I don’t know many people who gift apartments,” Schey said. “I wish I did.” 

Published in the print edition of the December 16,  2024, issue, with the headline “Rudy’s Stocking Stuffers.”

Helpful hint:  Seems to me like Donald Trump could earn a commission by promoting the Guiliani collection😳 Just sayin'❗

*Launched in 1945, the Datejust was the first self-winding waterproof chronometer wristwatch with a window displaying the date at 3 o’clock on the dial.

Donald Trump is the worst president ever rated last by a 2024 survey of American historians

Shame and disgrace: Echo opinion letter published in the Longview News-Journal, a Texas newspaper:

Dear Editor:  It’s a matter of public record that former President Donald Trump was the most corrupt and the most incompetent U.S. president in history. A survey of American historians in the 2024 Presidential Greatness Project rated Abraham Lincoln at No. 1, the best president in our 235-year history, and they rated Trump at No. 45, the worst.

Trump’s bungled handling of the worst global pandemic in 100 years caused the unnecessary deaths of over 200,000 Americans. Now we have learned that Trump sent scarce COVID testing equipment to Russian war criminal Vladimir Putin, while good Americans died in hospitals without their loved ones by their sides, as refrigerator trucks waited on American streets to carry off the dead.

Trump watched on White House TV as common criminals and traitors ransacked the U.S. Capitol and criminally assaulted Capitol police on January 6, 2021, a date that will tragically live in infamy.

Trump’s undermining of NATO, the greatest strategic partnership in U.S. history, puts American military personnel at great risk and threatens our national security.

Trump’s dereliction of duty in these instances brings shame😳😡😒  and disgrace to the once-proud political party that for so long marketed itself as the “party of Lincoln.”

— From John Simmons, in Longview, Texas

American Trump voters are victims of groupthink. George Owell prophesized what we thought was fiction

The Darkroom of Propaganda by Andrew O’Hagan

Echo opinion essay published in the New York Review of Books:

“It now shows in the lower depths of the Internet as well as on talk radio shows and a hundred perfidious podcasts, where the sleep of reason becomes a populist mania, and hostility a kind of sport.”

It is a sad feature of the ego that it will always seek pleasure in the wrong places. Now and again, voters will crave the approval and the leniency of the thing which despises them, and that is how a felonious bigot gets to be president. 

To millions of decent people who might judge better when it comes to their children, Trump’s menace is not a bar to his attraction but is rather a part of it, and so, for reasons too deep for tears, his manifold hatreds have proved more inviting than repugnant to a proportion of the electorate. It is an aspect of Trump’s cruel magic that he so readily invites the communion of people who find they can express in company what they might otherwise resist. As George Orwell showed, groupthink may be developed in a darkroom of propaganda. For us, it now shows in the lower depths of the Internet as well as on talk radio shows and a hundred perfidious podcasts, where the sleep of reason becomes a populist mania, and hostility a kind of sport.

This has been his achievement, to bring such loathing to the open spaces of America, where certain voters can feel remote, can feel worthless, looking for someone to blame and someone to save them. That is how a sociopath gets to be president. He rises like a Leviathan out of people’s worst feelings. And that is how true oppression works, by harnessing the unconscious disgust and prejudice of the vulnerable, marrying it to the ambitions of the mighty, who are ready to say, “Come and be part of our solution.”

The antiapartheid activist Steve Biko once said that “the most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.” That is how a sexual predator gets to be president. He gets there by being a wizard of paranoia and brutality, while the voters, so many of them shunted away from their brains, their hearts, and their courage, follow the road that leads to his phony eminence, begging for inclusion. He has the fame. He has the money. He has the answers, right?

What the election shows is that more than enough Americans feel sufficiently disappointed with their circumstances to join their voices to a fascist band. It will end horribly. A man who should be in jail is positioned again as the most powerful person on earth, accompanied by a vice-president who once compared his boss to Hitler. When I witnessed Trump mount the convention platform in July, reeking of malice and manifestly disturbed, I hoped that a population of free voters couldn’t possibly reelect him. But that’s the point. A very great number of them are not in the best sense free. They are imprisoned in his mirage. That is how a racist gets to be president. Not by being liked by those he hates, but by being the source of a power they feel desperate to share in. They want ownership. And Donald Trump is president because he temporarily owns their minds.

Mass Deportations- in a big picture sense it is possible that any American can be at risk

Echo opinion - written by Judge Nancy Gertner, published in The Boston Globe:

The premise of President-elect Donald Trump’s mass deportation plan is that the government will be able to accurately identify who is or who is not lawfully here. That may be true of certain people — those with a pending order of deportation, even DACA recipients, to name a few.

Ironically, however, American citizens are not so easily identified.

If you were born here, your proof is your birth certificate. (Racial segregation of hospitals left many Black Americans without a government-issued birth certificate. Likewise, many Native American citizens born on reservations were not issued a birth certificate.) 

If you are a naturalized citizen, you would have your naturalization certificate. If you were born abroad to American citizens, you would use your passport or your parents’. But few citizens carry their documents around with them — democracies typically do not mandate identity cards. And getting copies of official documents takes time and money. The government usually relies on its notoriously inaccurate database.

There is no central index for naturalization records. Indeed, there is not even a national database of all citizens or noncitizens. The ICE databases that exist are riddled with “significant errors” and have “incomplete data” as one district court found in a challenge to immigration detainers in the Central District of California. Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse reports consistent errors in the ICE databases and worse, ICE’s lack of cooperation in improving them. The result: “A small but not insignificant number of detainers are issued each year to what was recorded by ICE as U.S. citizens.”

Mass deportation based on error-filled databases risks rounding up, detaining, and even deporting people just because they don’t speak English, or their last name suggests that they came from somewhere else, or from certain neighborhoods, a grotesque and dehumanizing prospect in this nation of immigrants.

Nancy Gertner is a retired federal judge in Boston and a law professor at Harvard Law School.

More information is reported at Investigate Midwest, a free news source this site here:

Elon Musk is an unregistered agent of several foriegn governments and an illegal lobbyist

Elon Musk’s undu influence as an unregistered lobbyist, as an unelected and nationalized citizen who has no allegience to the U.S.,  shows why we desperately need campaign spending reform.

(Missing person alert❗ J.D. Vance must be hiding out someplace❓❓) 

Where is the real J.D. Vance? Is he masquarading as Waldo?

To the editor of the Los Angeles Times: Elon Musk’s latest foray into international politics is his endorsement of the Alternative for Germany, a far-right party with leaders who have opposed further commemorations of the Holocaust. As a child survivor of the Holocaust, I find this endorsement utterly reprehensible.

His recent attempt to intimidate members of Congress over the debt limit was rightly criticized.

Musk’s (unelected❗)rise to political prominence and power is the result of the U.S. Supreme Court’s mindless decision in the 2010 Citizens United case, which enabled him to spend at least $250 million in support of President-elect Donald Trump. His ownership of X allows him to influence millions of Americans with unchecked and often hideous propaganda.

Maine Writer - Although we know how Trump is teller of endless lies, the statements he echoed about "draining the swamp" should have named Elon Musk as the top name on his swamp scum- but, of course, Trump has zero intention of trashing his oligarch conspirators.  

There is much talk about reforming our institutions. Campaign finance reform should be at the top of the agenda.

Thomas P. Bernstein, in Irvine, California

Woman must wake up to the risk of losing access to contraception

 We need laws guaranteeing access to birth control.

Echo opinion by Stephanie Gorton published in the Boston Globe  

The judiciary has betrayed American women on abortion — contraception could be next.

Margaret Sanger born September 14, 1879, Corning, New York, U.S.—died September 6, 1966, Tucson, Arizona was the founder of the birth control movement in the United States

Amid the ongoing debates about abortion, birth control has appeared to be a reassuring constant.

Since it moved into the mainstream nearly a century ago, birth control has become a pillar of public health: In the United States, public expenditures on family planning exceed $2 billion annually. From condoms to Plan B to Opill, a birth control pill that became available over the counter just last year, easy access to birth control has long felt like a settled matter.

Except that certainty is illusory. There’s every indication that Trump’s second term will embolden abortion opponents to go after a variety of birth control methods. In fact, birth control is already under attack by elected officials across the country who’ve deluged the public with misinformation.

In 2022, House Representative Lauren Boebert repeatedly introduced amendments during the federal-funding appropriations process that aimed to prevent “abortifacient contraceptive drugs,” namely emergency contraception and IUDs, from receiving federal funding. Another member of Congress, Matt Rosendale, introduced a bill with a similar goal. Neither was successful, but Boebert was reelected last month to a House now under Republican control and her position is unchanged.

Separately, Student Health Services at the University of Idaho ceased providing birth control in September 2022, citing legal concerns raised by the state’s near-total abortion ban.

Representative Debbie Lasko, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, and House Speaker Mike Johnson have falsely described the “morning-after” pill as a “chemical abortion pill.” 

In the 2023, Kentucky gubernatorial race, candidate Daniel Cameron went even further, asserting he would refuse to use public funds not just for abortion but also for contraception, including Norplant, Depo Provera, and daily birth control pills. 

This cluster of anti-contraception efforts reflects how broad the ant

i-reproductive rights movement has become — and how little science matters to the discourse.

The abortion rights movement fears the next administration will resurrect the Comstock Act, an 1873 law that criminalized mailing information relating to birth control, sex education, and abortion. The law has been amended over the years, and if enforced today, it would only apply to drugs used in abortions, not to birth control. However, abortion opponents are attempting to miscast emergency contraception and IUDs as abortion methods, which they hope will result in a chilling effect both on physicians prescribing those contraceptive methods and on patients seeking them.

Misinformation is rife, especially when it comes to how birth control works. According to the 2023 KFF Health Tracking Poll, up to 73 percent of Americans believe Plan B works by ending an existing pregnancy and IUDs work by preventing fertilized eggs from implanting. 

Neither statement is accurate: Plan B prevents or delays ovulation, and IUDs prevent fertilization.

If birth control’s legal standing were rock solid, perhaps the misinformation would be less alarming. But it is, in fact, legally vulnerable: Justice Clarence Thomas pointed out the inevitability of attacks on contraception in his concurring opinion on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, the 2022 ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade. He cited “a duty to ‘correct the error’ established in those precedents,” the precedents being Griswold v. Connecticut, the 1965 decision that established a federal right to birth control, and Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 decision that legalized gay marriage. There is currently no case scheduled to go before the Supreme Court that could reverse Griswold, but Thomas’s remarks made his opinion on the matter clear — and they highlight birth control’s uncomfortably fragile legal status.

The decisions legalizing birth control and gay marriage, like Roe, centered on privacy. That is, the government may not interfere with personal decisions individuals make about their bodies. But in 2022, Dobbs effectively recategorized pregnancy: In the eyes of the court, it is no longer a private physiological event.

If the rationale behind Roe is invalid, Justice Thomas argued, the court has a duty to apply the same reversal to birth control and gay marriage, too.

Almost all other countries in Europe and North America guarantee access to contraception. The British and French governments passed laws legalizing birth control in 1967. (They also affirmed the right to legal abortion in 1967 and 1975 respectively.) Canada and Mexico have done the same. But in the United States, Congress has never affirmed the right to birth control. 

There have been efforts to make it happen, but the issue has become a partisan flashpoint: This past year, the Right to Contraception Act was twice rejected in the Senate, with arguments either calling the measure “completely unnecessary” or “a Trojan horse for more abortions.” Somehow it was both too unimportant and too threatening.

Why has the United States relied solely on the judiciary to guarantee rights like access to abortion, gay marriage, and contraception? 

The answer can be traced back to the 1920s and a little-known activist named Mary Ware Dennett.

Dennett first brought the issue of birth control to Washington in 1919 when she drafted a bill that would have legalized contraception. She envisioned a new law that would modify the Comstock Act, deleting its prohibition on birth control. Dennett spent five years doggedly trawling Congress for a sympathetic sponsor.

For the most part, she met with hostility. While she occasionally had a good meeting, she also endured mockery and rage. The response of Senator Thaddeus Caraway of Arkansas was typical: “If you want to make everybody prostitutes, then go ahead.” Dennett’s bill was introduced several times but never made it to a vote.

Dennett bowed out in 1924, broke and discouraged, and Margaret Sanger launched her own lobbying effort. Sanger’s bill was narrower. In order to win physicians’ support, Sanger restricted the birth control market to physicians only, giving doctors gatekeeping authority over their patients’ fertility. It was a pragmatic move, and Sanger’s bill actually passed in 1934 — before being recalled 15 minutes later. The campaign only found success once Sanger abandoned Congress and started working through the courts.

That fateful decision succeeded in the short term. A case orchestrated by Sanger, US v. One Package of Japanese Pessaries, gave physicians the right to prescribe birth control starting in 1936. In the immediate aftermath of the decision, Sanger wasn’t sure she had won. A court victory felt flimsy compared with a new federal law, and others, including Dennett, were skeptical it represented lasting change. Yet once she was confident the government wouldn’t appeal the case to the Supreme Court, Sanger proclaimed the legal decision “an emancipation proclamation to the motherhood of America.”
That shift from Congress to the courts also set reproductive rights on the course to the vulnerable legal status they occupy today. A federal law is far less likely to be rewritten than a judge’s decision is to be reinterpreted.

Stephanie Gorton lives in Providence, R.I., and is the author of “The Icon and the Idealist: Margaret Sanger, Mary Ware Dennett, and the Rivalry That Brought Birth Control to America.”

Consistent nationwide access to a range of options is vitally important. Long-term methods like the IUD provide protection from forced pregnancies for those trapped in coercive or abusive relationships, while the contraceptive pill can be transformative in regulating hormones and easing chronic pain.

Today, the opportunity for change is undoubtedly local. Only 14 states and Washington, D.C., have legal protections for birth control. Just 21 states require public-school sex education to include instruction on birth control.

Americans deserve laws that safeguard access to every kind of contraception. Anyone whose life has been shaped by access to contraception — or lack of access to it — has a stake in bolstering our right to birth control in the years ahead.

Stephanie Gorton lives in Providence, R.I., and is the author of “The Icon and the Idealist: Margaret Sanger, Mary Ware Dennett, and the Rivalry That Brought Birth Control to America.”

Donald Trump's outrageous pre-transition decisions are already dangerous: There is nothing "peaceful" in his rhetoric

Donald Trump's sequel will be a bigger failure than his first trial run!

Maine Writer: Thanks to the Houston Chronicle for peeling back the veneer on the fake Trump participation in a smooth administrative transition.  Frankly, Trump was prepared for another January 6th insurrection if Vice-President Kamala Harris and Governor Tim Walz had been elected.  All of which is to say, Donald Trump gets zero credit for supporting a smooth transition. Nevertheless, while the Biden administration delivers toward the peaceful transition, Donald Trump has exposed his incompeence in a series of chaotic decisions about cabinet nominees, creating explosive policies about mass exportations, tariffs, and making outrageous claims about how the United States can create Canada as a 51st state, purchase the Island of Greenland from Denmark and reclaim the Panama Canal.  Preposterous! Echo opinion published at this site here:

Jackie Calmes opinion: It’s great that the transfer of power following the November 2024, election is proceeding peacefully, as it always has except at the onset of the Civil War, and, yes, in 2021. 

Yet, you can thank President Joe Biden, Vice President Harris and their fellow Democratic good losers for that, not Trump. 

No one can credibly doubt that, had he lost again, he’d be raising another ruckus. Or worse, that there’d be violence. Trump suggested as much, telling Time in April, “If we don’t win, you know, it depends.”

States and the federal government prepared for mayhem that never came. Gabriel Sterling, the top Georgia election officer who four years ago publicly and presciently warned Trump that “someone’s going to get killed” because of his provocations, and who endured death threats himself, said of the electors' meeting this week, “To be honest, I forgot about it.”

As Trump declared in last month’s victory speech, “It’s time to unite.”

But as Biden said afterward in congratulating him: “You can’t love your country only when you win.”

Biden — who still hasn’t received acknowledgment of Biden’s 2020, victory, let alone congratulations, and who, thanks to Trump, is considered illegitimate by seven of 10 Republicans — expressed hope that “we can lay to rest the question about the integrity of the American electoral system. … It can be trusted, win or lose.”

Indeed. And that’s why, in this week of the uneventful electoral college vote, (Did you miss it❓ On Tuesday, the electoral college made official what we’ve known for six weeks: Donald Trump defeated Kamala Harris for the presidency) - Americans should take the occasion to note the damage that Trump has wrought to the citizenry’s faith in elections by his years of demagogically disparaging them — instead of joining him and his MAGA minions in memory-holing their falsehoods about election fraud.

Trump has gone silent about “rigged” elections since he won in November. And yet, up to the final hours of voting, he was crying foul. “A lot of talk about massive CHEATING in Philadelphia. Law Enforcement coming!!!” he posted on election day.

City and state officials, including Seth Bluestein, a Republican member of Philadelphia’s board of elections, reposted Trump’s lie to insist there was “absolutely no truth” to it. For that, Bluestein suffered antisemitic attacks and threats online. Countless election workers have known the feeling. Thanks, Trump.

Days earlier, Trump claimed, “Pennsylvania is cheating, and getting caught, at large scale levels rarely seen before.” He spread a false conspiracy theory of vote stealing in one county, adding, “We caught them cold.” No, he hadn’t; there were no vote thieves to catch.

After Trump won Pennsylvania — surprise! — he clammed up about Democrats' alleged heists there and in all six other battleground states that he carried, including four states governed by Democrats. I guess as vote riggers go, Democrats are just inept?

Even before the election, Trump stifled his talk that early and mail voting are rife with fraud, but only after advisors, apoplectic that Republican candidates were being shortchanged, appealed to his “yuge” ego: “Sir, your people are so excited to vote for you that they want to as soon as they can,” one said during an April meeting at Mar-a-Lago. “You gotta tell them it’s OK.”

Trump has not, however, changed his tune about the 2020, election. The president-elect continues to lie that he won it, so routinely that reporters let it go unchecked ❗😧 What’s worse, looking ahead, is that Trump reportedly is making fealty to his election lies a job requirement for appointees to high-level administration posts.

So it is that he’s tapped former Florida Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi to be U.S. attorney general. She was part of “the first wave of the Big Lie,” as former Trump White House aide Alyssa Farah Griffin put it to the House Jan. 6 investigation committee. Bondi rushed to Pennsylvania after the 2020 election to spread disinformation about dead voters and ballot dumps. She was with lead election denier Rudy Giuliani for Team Trump’s ludicrous news conference at Four Seasons Total Landscaping in a Philadelphia industrial park. And she was fulminating on Fox News: “We are not going anywhere until they declare Trump won Pennsylvania.”

In 2022, former Trump aide Cassidy Hutchinson told the January 6, committee that Bondi contacted her before she testified to press Hutchinson to remain loyal to Trump, according to the Washington Post. (Yet, it’s former Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, the committee’s vice chair, that House Republicans now want prosecuted for witness tampering for her talks with Hutchinson.) This year, Bondi echoed Trump’s falsehoods about noncitizens voting from her platform as a leader of a pro-Trump policy institute. And she promised retribution for Trump’s indictments: “The Department of Justice, the prosecutors will be prosecuted.”

No doubt Bondi as the next attorney general would carry out Trump’s calls for the Justice Department to investigate the 2020 election, to prosecute Biden and to get House Jan. 6 committee members behind bars.

“Is she going to continue … pushing out the Big Lie?” California’s new Democratic senator and January 6 committee veteran Adam Schiff recently asked on MSNBC.

That was a rhetorical question, of course.

Jackie Calmes is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times.

Dec 20, 2024

Jackie Calmes:  Trump’s acknowledgment of Biden’s 2020 victory, let alone congratulations, and who, thanks to Trump, is considered illegitimate by seven of 10 Republicans — expressed hope that “we can lay to rest the question about the integrity of the American electoral system. … It can be trusted, win or lose.”

Democrats must strategically educate voters about how Donald Trump will fail. Chaos will damage average people

Voters will witness the metaphoric impact of political Narcan when Donald Trump signs his draconian executive orders and pushes unqualified nominees into public hearings for Senate confirmation.

Democrats may be in the (very slim) minority, but they are not yet an opposition. What’s the difference?

Echo opinion published in The New York Times by Jamelle Bouie.

An opposition would use every opportunity it had to demonstrate its resolute stance against the incoming administration. 

Opposition would do everything in its power to try to seize the public’s attention and make hay of the president-elect’s efforts to put lawlessness at the center of American government. 

An opposition would highlight the extent to which Donald Trump has no intention of fulfilling his pledge of lower prices and greater economic prosperity for ordinary people and is openly scheming with the billionaire oligarchs who paid for and ran his campaign to gut the social safety net and bring something like Hooverism back from the ash heap of history.

An opposition would treat the proposed nomination of figures like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Kash Patel and Pete Hegseth as an early chance to define a second Trump administration as dangerous to the lives and livelihoods of ordinary Americans. It would prioritize nimble, aggressive leadership over an unbending commitment to seniority and the elevation of whoever is next in line. Above all, an opposition would see that politics is about conflict — or, as Henry Adams famously put it, “the systematic organization of hatreds” — and reject the risk-averse strategies of the past in favor of new blood and new ideas.

The Democratic Party lacks the energy of a determined opposition — it is adrift, listless in the wake of defeat. Too many elected Democrats seem ready to concede that Trump is some kind of avatar for the national spirit — a living embodiment of the American people. They’ve accepted his proposed nominees as legitimate and entertained surrender under the guise of political reconciliation. Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, for example, praised Elon Musk, a key Trump lieutenant, as “the champion among big tech executives of First Amendment values and principles.” Senator Chris Coons of Delaware similarly praised Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, a glorified blue-ribbon commission, as a potentially worthwhile enterprise — “a constructive undertaking that ought to be embraced.” And a fair number of Democrats have had friendly words for the prospect of Kennedy going to the Department of Health and Human Services, with credulous praise for his interest in “healthy food.”

Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey said last month. “I have concerns, obviously, about people leading in our country who aren’t based in science and fact.” 

And at least two Democrats want President Joe Biden to consider a pardon for incoming President Trump. “The Trump hush money and Hunter Biden cases were both bullshit, and pardons are appropriate,” Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania wrote in his first post on Trump’s social networking website.

Representative Jim Clyburn of South Carolina also said that Biden should consider a pardon for Trump as a way of “cleaning the slate” for the country. “If we keep digging at things in the past, I’m not too sure the country will not lose its way,” he said in a conversation on MSNBC with Jonathan Capehart. 

But, unmentioned was Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon, which did not clean the slate of American politics as much as it made legal and political impunity the lodestar of Republican presidential politics.

Other Democrats have decided, in the wake of Trump’s popular vote victory, that aggressive, full-spectrum opposition to his priorities is a mistake. “Here is what I am not going to do for the next two years and the next four years,” Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader, said in a news conference after the election. “I’m not going to deal with ‘It’s Tulsi Gabbard one day, then an hour later it’s Matt Gaetz, then the next day it’s Robert F. Kennedy Jr., then he says something on Truth Social, and then the people connected to him are doing something outrageous.’ No, that I’m not doing, because that’s all a distraction.”

It seems strange to think that it is not the job of an opposition to oppose — especially when the people in question have little business in government — but Jeffries isn’t alone in thinking that it is to the advantage of Democrats to hold their powder and avoid direct confrontations. He is in line with high-level Democratic strategists who also think that it is a mistake for Democrats to make noise, draw attention and seize the initiative.

“A pollster to Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign told top Democratic Party officials recently that they must confront President-elect Donald Trump far differently than they did during his first term,” Holly Otterbein reported in Politico, “urgently pressing them not to focus on every outrage but instead argue that he is hurting voters’ pocketbooks.” According to the pollster, voters don’t care about who he’s putting in cabinet positions and will “give him a pass on the outrageous” if costs come down. (❓- but Trumpzi  already admitted that his fake promise to bring down costs will be difficult❗ to accomplish - ya'think❓. IOW, he lied to voters and they bought the "pig in a poke" message. OMG❗)

At the heart of all of this — whether it comes from congressional leaders, ordinary lawmakers or top pollsters — is the idea that Democrats can float above the fray and reap the political rewards of any chaos and dysfunction. Besides, voters say they want compromise — and what else can Democrats do but follow the polls?

It’s as if Democrats see politics as a stable landscape — a static field with clear rules. They can respond to voters, but they cannot shape the basic orientation of the electorate. 

By this view, most Americans are fixed in place and Democrats must meet them where they are. If voters don’t seem to care about corruption, impropriety and incompetence, then there’s nothing Democrats can do to make them care.

But this is not true. We know as much because Trump just won an election demonstrating that it’s not true. Trump rehabilitated himself through relentless self-promotion. He built a constituency for tariffs and mass deportation through endless repetition connected to some basic concerns. His “stop the steal” obsession put him at the center of Republican Party politics. He captured space in American cultural life and refused to let go, winning political power in the process.

Democrats can’t replicate this behavior, but there are lessons to learn from it — the first and foremost being that the public will not make connections and draw conclusions unless you do it for them. And that takes a willingness, again, to seize attention, to throw everything at the wall with the hope that something will stick. 

If Democrats, following the pocketbook strategy, want voters to blame Trump for any price hikes during his administration, they need to do everything they can now, in as dramatic a fashion as they can manage, to make Trump the culprit — to give voters a language with which they can express their anger at the status quo.

If Democrats want voters to blame Trump for any potential foreign policy failures, they must work now to highlight and emphasize the extent to which the president-elect - Trumpzi- wants a more or less inexperienced set of hacks and dilettantes to lead the nation’s national security establishment. 

Even something as obvious as the connection between Trump’s billionaire allies and his support for large, upper-income tax cuts has to be dramatized and made apparent to the voting electorate.

At this stage, there’s little evidence that Democrats are willing to do any of this. Given the opportunity, for example, to effect a changing of the guard — to promote younger and more aggressive voices like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to leadership, even if it upsets the usual rules of seniority, as I mentioned earlier — Democrats said, in effect, No thanks.

This is a grave mistake. Trump’s hand is not as strong as it looks. He has a narrow, and potentially unstable, Republican majority in the House of Representatives and a small, but far from filibuster-proof, majority in the Senate. He’ll start his term a lame duck, with less than 18 months to make progress before the start of the next election cycle. And his great ambition — to impose a form of autarky on the United States — is poised to spark a thermostatic reaction from a public that elevated him to deal with high prices and restore a kind of normalcy. But Democrats won’t reap the full rewards of a backlash if they do nothing to prime the country for their message.

There are other reasons for Democrats to try to take the initiative. There are still many Americans rightfully concerned with an authoritarian turn in the United States. Again, just over half the electorate did not vote for Trump. They deserve leadership, too. Indeed, the party’s refusal to fight sends ripples through civic life. If Democratic leaders won’t fight, then it’s hard to expect civil society, or just ordinary people, to pick up the slack. Either democracy was on the ballot in November or it wasn’t, and if it was, it makes no political, ethical or strategic sense to act as if we live in normal times.

It is not a distraction to vocally oppose Trump’s would-be nominees or highlight his extreme intentions. Democrats should look at every aspect of the next Trump administration as an opportunity to do, well, politics — to demonstrate their values and show the extent to which this president has no plan to pursue the public good. The quiet and supposedly responsible approach of the past four years is a dead end. Attention is the only currency that matters, and Democrats need some to spend.

Abraham Lincoln was assisted in his first campaign for president by a cadre of young, costumed men who campaigned, marched in the streets and showed militant enthusiasm for the Republican Party. These “Wide Awakes” were as flamboyant and provocative as any movement that has ever emerged in the history of American politics, and they soon held the attention of the entire nation, friend and foe alike. The 1860 election was not, the historian Jon Grinspan wrote, “a dry government process but a public confrontation, and the Wide Awakes had formed to help Republicans fight back.”

So it was and so it is. American politics has always been a game of performance and spectacle, from the whiskey-fueled street debates of the early Republic to the raucous conventions of the first Gilded Age. To be sterile and sober-minded in this arena is to be, for the most part, a loser.

Donald Trump obviously learned nothing during his first chaotic term, evidenced by his unqualified cabinet nominees

"No amount of blame-shifting, false equivalence or reality-distorting can cover up the insanity, chaos, incompetence and callousness that is Trump."

Opinion letter below my comment, published in the Beaver County Times, a Pennsylvania newspaper:  

Makes no sense for Donald Trump to nominate incompetent loyalists to the positions where they can do the most harm to averge people regardless of age, race, immigrant status or political opinions. When he nominates the unqualified Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (RFKjr) to be the Secretary for Health and Human Services, Trump is falling victim to the proven cliche about insanity- "doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result", a phrase often attributed to Albert Einstein, meaning that repeatedly performing the same action while hoping for a different outcome is considered illogical or foolish. In other words, "Wash, Rinse, Repeat".

As a refresher to provide proof of the above, this opinion letter (below) is a reminder about just how bad the "repeat" cycle can be, unless Trump nominates qualified people to crucial health care leadership positions.  

Trump’s response to the pandemic has been indefensibly disastrous❗ That does not prevent disciples of his political cult from defending him, for example, in a letter sent to this paper from April 26. No amount of blame-shifting, false equivalence or reality-distorting can cover up the insanity, chaos, incompetence and callousness that is Trump. More than anything, it's his own words that prove that.

Remember when he praised the tests we still don’t have and compared them to his Ukraine call? “The tests are all perfect, like the letter was perfect. The transcription was perfect. Right?”

Last month at the CDC, Trump bragged from beneath his red hat, “Every one of these doctors said, ‘How do you know so much about this?’ Maybe I have a natural ability.”

Then on April 24: “I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute. One minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning?”

"I'd rate it a 10," Trump has said of his response.

“The numbers” are now more than 76,000 American lives lost.

"I don't take responsibility at all," said 😒😠Trump.  (Politico)

From David Ninehouser, in Ambridge, Pennsylvania

When asked in March about bringing coronavirus-stricken Americans ashore from a cruise ship, Trump said, “I don’t need the numbers to double because of one ship that wasn’t our fault.”

School shootings in America are a horrible public health epidemic: Must be treated with prevention strategies!

MADISON, WI- Yet another school shooting occurred at Abundant Life Christian School on December 16, 2024, in Madison Wisconsin. 

Where is the will to end the school shooting tragedies?

Echo opinion letter published in The Boston Globe:

Official says Wisconsin shooter was new student at the Christian school where her victims had deep ties.

Aside from finger-pointing and litigation, where is the active prevention of this kind of violence and the follow through to act❓

The normalization of school shootings in America must serve as a wake-up call. We must no longer merely react to these tragedies — we must ask ourselves, “What is happening here? Why is this happening?” We cannot accept such violence as normal — we must act.

While media coverage often focuses on the immediate tragedy, the critical question of why — as in, what motivates these acts — often goes unexplored. Understanding these motives is crucial for both public awareness and effective prevention. Mental health professionals need this insight to intervene early, before issues escalate into violence, whether in schools or the broader community.

I propose establishing a commission of behavioral health experts dedicated to investigating the motives, triggers, and warning signs of these violent events. This commission could offer vital guidance on how to identify and address dangers before they reach a breaking point.

If we continue facing these tragedies without meaningful prevention steps, we will have missed the chance to create lasting change. The time for reflection, understanding, and action is now.

Chuck Weinstein in Arlington Massachusetts.

Is Elon Musk in charge of America's government? OMG!

Echo opinion publised in the New York Times:

Elon Musk "not elected and never faced any kind of vetting or confirmation by appointed or elected officials"

Dear Editor: It is beyond maddening that Elon Musk (❓) is able to exert such influence over the actions of the United States government, which exists, let us remember, to serve the interests of all Americans.  (Opinion letter published at this site here.)

Musk is NOT ❗elected and never faced any kind of vetting or confirmation by appointed or elected officials.

Perhaps, worst of all, his wealth completely insulates him from any negative effects of his meddling. If things go wrong and he loses a few hundred million dollars, he won’t suffer.

Musk reminds me of a child who is playing a game. Hey❗ I’m at Mar-a-Lago! When I speak, markets and legislators react❗

Isn’t this fun❓ 

From Geoffrey S. Poor in Shoreline, Washington