Robert Hubbell is one of my favorite bloggers. I could not resist reposting his Thanksgiving commentary. It’s so beautiful!
He wrote:
We are living through challenging times. It isn’t easy to feel gratitude in the midst of trying circumstances. The answer to regaining a sense of gratitude is to expand our perspective—which allows us to look beyond today’s troubles to the greater blessings that will endure for generations to come.
To help regain perspective, I suggest reading an excerpt from Carl Sagan’s book Pale Blue Dot, which references our home planet. The Planetary Society website explains the background for Sagan’s reflection and quotes the most famous passage from his book. It is a fitting reflection for Thanksgiving.
Many readers have used Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot as their reflection for Thanksgiving dinner.
First, this introduction from The Planetary Society:
The following excerpt from Carl Sagan’s book Pale Blue Dot was inspired by an image taken, at Sagan’s suggestion, by Voyager 1 on 14 February 1990. As the spacecraft was departing our planetary neighborhood for the fringes of the solar system, it turned around for one last look at its home planet.
Voyager 1 was about 6.4 billion kilometers (4 billion miles) away, and approximately 32 degrees above the ecliptic plane, when it captured this portrait of our world. Caught in the center of scattered light rays (a result of taking the picture so close to the Sun), Earth appears as a tiny point of light, a crescent only 0.12 pixel in size.
Here is Carl Sagan’s reflection on the photo and our place in the cosmos:
Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there–on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.
Happy Thanksgivjng to you and your family and your friends!
For many of us who had hoped to elect Kamala Harris as President, this is not the best of Thanksgivings.
But we must be thankful for our blessings, count them, and rededicate ourselves to improving our society and the lives of others.
Never forget: We are not going back!
We want a better world, not the fictional world of the past. We want progress, not regress.
I am thankful for all those who dedicate their lives to progress, opportunity, kindness, compassion, justice, education, enlightenment, and equity.
I am thankful for our nation’s teachers. They have devoted themselves to building a better world, one student at a time. They have not been thanked enough.
I am thankful for my family.
I am thankful for health.
Be thankful. Be kind. Be strong. Be good to yourself.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is one of the premiere government agencies responsible for research in medicine and public health. NIH is the largest biomedical research institution in the world. Maintaining its scientific integrity is important for the U.S. and the world.
Trump appointed a leading opponent of vaccines to lead the NIH. Others in the medical profession have considered his views to be “fringe,” “extreme,” “out of the mainstream.” Of course, Trump’s choice of Robert Kennedy Jr. to be Secretary of Health and Human Services, which oversees NIH, has garnered many critics, who refer to him as an unqualified and dangerous quack. And then there is Dr. Oz, the hawker of vitamins on TV, as director of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. He is said to be a proponent of privatizing Medicare by pushing Medicare Advantage plans owned by private companies.
Why is Trump unleashing his fury on the nation’s public health services? If you know, please share.
Our esteemed reader, who posts under the name, “New York City Public School Parent,” has researched Trump’s nominee to lead the NIH.
She wrote:
Bhattacharya, like Bondi, like William Barr, gets a pass by a liberal media that ignores the worst of their political hackery and their history of dishonesty. Instead of characterizing their actions as corrupt, or demonstrating the utter lack of integrity these folks have, the so-called liberal media instead normalizes their worst actions and mischaracterizes those worst actions as simply “something that rabid partisans on the other side don’t like.”
When the so-called liberal media was helping the right wing media amplify Bhattacharya’s hyped “evidence-based findings” – that covid was no more deadly than the flu, in spring of 2020, a real journalist, Stephanie M. Lee at Buzzfeed, was reporting on this “evidence” – the very problematic Santa Clara antibody study – financially supported by an airline owner who wanted the public flying again – where Bhattacharya’s doctor wife was caught lying to recruit affluent parents at her kids’ school to participate in a “random” study. Unlike the rest of the journalistic establishment, Lee did more than act as a stenographer, and in 2022 won the Victor Cohn Prize for Excellence in Medical Science Reporting. From their press release:
“She investigated a study by John Ioannidis and his colleagues [Bhattacharya and another hack] at Stanford that made a splash early in the coronavirus pandemic when it claimed to show COVID-19 was no more dangerous than the flu. Lee uncovered serious flaws in the study; her stories also showed that Ioannidis had organized an effort to lobby the White House against pandemic lockdowns before collecting any data and that the study had been secretly funded by David Neeleman, the founder of JetBlue and a vocal lockdown opponent.”
Bhattacharya is so lacking in integrity that he made Lee’s life hell for daring to report the truth — he accused her of going after his family (directly causing her to be threatened) because she told the truth – that his doctor wife had improperly solicited parents at her kids’ affluent school to be part of her husband’s “random” antibody study to help prove that covid was no more dangerous than the flu.
He also has a lot in common with Emily Oster – two economists guilty of unprofessionally hyping their very flawed data and getting lots of publicity because they were willing to use that flawed data to make claims that just coincidentally happened to support a dishonest Republican narrative. In both cases, far more credible researchers were correctly pointing out how problematic their “evidence” was – but the media ignored critics and amplified these two folks who were more than happy to hype the lie that indisputable evidence and data supported the Republican narrative about covid being no big danger.
Later, quietly, these political hacks would make revisions to their data, because their critics were correct that they had hyped flawed data that supported right wing narratives.
Despite the fact that no credible researcher would have ever made the claims of certainty (their “data” proves it!), these two never lost an ounce of credibility despite their errors.
Typical double standard – if you are helping the Republican narrative, your improper actions are barely mentioned and always spun as irrelevant, thus your reputation as a widely respected truth-teller remains intact in the liberal media. If you are telling the truth and the truth doesn’t support the right wing narrative, the so-called liberal media (in the interest of “balance”) will scrutinize your actions to find some misstep they amplify into a major scandal that suggests you should never be trusted.
Lee now writes for the Chronicle of Higher Education. Bhattacharya is still disparaging her for not acting like the more prominent reporters in the so-called liberal media who specialize in uncritically rewriting press releases amplifying the undisputed “data” and “evidence” supporting right wing narratives.
The media also hyped the Great Barrington Declaration, which had very few credible researchers in epidemology, medicine or science among their signees, but included fake doctors and doctors who were also dead serial killers.
Yeah, yeah, I know it’s a strange headline, but it’s true.
Here is the story: Politico reporter goes to Arizona to cover the voucher story. Discovers that the chief advocate for vouchers is a beautiful, charming mom who uses state money to home-school her five children.
Writer is wowed by this mom. Writer notes that mom is funded by DeVos and Koch machine. It doesn’t matter. She’s so charming and pretty, who cares that vouchers are busting the state budget?
Writer pays more attention to the adorable mom than to those fighting to stop the damage she is doing to kids, public schools, and communities. Somehow she becomes the hero of the story.
Who cares that vouchers are used mostly by families whose kids never went to public schools? Who cares that vouchers are harming the state’s public schools?
Who cares that Arizona voters overwhelmingly rejected voucher expansion? Who cares that the legislature ignored their vote?
Who cares that less than 5% of the state’s students are undermining the state budget and the schools that educate the other students?
Families, mostly from high-income zip codes, have applied the taxpayer funds for everything from ski lift passes to visits to trampoline parks, a $4,000 grand piano, more than a million dollars in Legos, online ballet lessons, horse therapy and cookie-baking kits. Proponents justify expenditures like these in the name of parents’ prerogative to shape their children’s education or by pointing to wasteful spending by public schools. As a result, ESA costs have ballooned from the legislature’s original estimated price tag of $100 million over two years, to more than $400 million a year — a figure, critics have noted, that would explain more than half of Arizona’s projected budget deficit in 2024 and 2025.
Ain’t it grand?
Love is love, even when it is underwritten by billionaires!
Trump has vowed retribution and revenge against everyone who dared to question his motives and integrity. Let’s see how that goes. The felonious President-elect has former Special Counsel Jack Smith in his crosshairs, according to The Washington Post.
Smith, as you know, indicted Trump for hiding top-secret and confidential documents at his Mar-a-Lago home, stashed away in closets, storerooms, and a bathroom. When asked politely by the National Archives to return the documents, Trump said he didn’t have them. Then, he said he had them, but they belonged to him, citing the Presidential Records Act (which said no such thing). Then his case landed in the court of a judge appointed by Trump, who appointed a Special Master to review the documents. After her decision was overturned by an Appeals Court, Judge Aileen Cannon sat on the case and eventually threw it out, on grounds that the Special Counsel was illegally appointed.
Smith tried Trump in the DC federal courts for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, but Trump’s lawyers managed to stall the case (with the help of the U.S. Supreme Court, which sat on the appeal for months without a decision). The case was successfully killed by these delaying tactics. Trump never faced the accountability he deserved.
Now he will punish Jack Smith for daring to prosecute him.
And he will use the Justice Department to investigate the 2020 election. Will the investigators dare to tell Trump that it was not stolen?
President-elect Donald Trump plans to fire the entire team that worked with special counsel Jack Smith to pursue two federal prosecutions against the former president, including career attorneys typically protected from political retribution, according to two individuals close to Trump’s transition.
Trump is also planning to assemble investigative teams within the Justice Department to hunt for evidence in battleground states that fraud tainted the 2020 election, one of the people said. The proposals offer new evidence that Trump’s intention to dramatically shake up the status quo in Washington is likely to focus heavily on the Justice Department, the nation’s premier law enforcement agency, and that at least some of his agenda is fueled not by ideology or policy goals but personal grievance.
Trump still believes, it appears, that he won in 2020 , that he was right to send a mob to lay waste to the U.S. Capitol, and to hide top-secret documents in his home.
He was convicted of tax evasion and registering for a gun without admitting he was using illegal drugs. He pled guilty to all charges in Delaware and California. He will be sentenced in those states in mid-December and faces the possibility of many years in prison.
After going through a long period of addiction and extravagant spending, he seems to have finally got his life together. He is no longer using drugs. He has paid back his tax debts.
His life was destroyed both by his own actions and by the vendetta of Republicans. They wanted to humiliate him as a way of getting at his father. If his name was Hunter Jones, instead of Biden, he would not be facing serious jail time.
He should be sentenced to community service, not prison.
Joe Biden should pardon his son, and ignore the howls of MAGA. The MAGA crowd wants blood, public flogging, and the scourging of anyone named Biden.
President-Elect Trump made another off-the-wall nomination, which is sure to demoralize the scientists and doctors who work in public health for the federal government.
President-elect Donald Trump has chosen health economist Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a critic of pandemic lockdowns and vaccine mandates, to lead the National Institutes of Health, the nation’s leading medical research agency.
Trump, in a statement Tuesday evening, said Bhattacharya, a 56-year-old physician and professor at Stanford University School of Medicine, will work in cooperation with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., his pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, “to direct the Nation’s Medical Research, and to make important discoveries that will improve Health, and save lives.”
“Together, Jay and RFK Jr. will restore the NIH to a Gold Standard of Medical Research as they examine the underlying causes of, and solutions to, America’s biggest Health challenges, including our Crisis of Chronic Illness and Disease,” he wrote.
The decision to choose Bhattacharya for the post is yet another reminder of the ongoing impact of the COVID pandemic on the politics on public health.
Bhattacharya was one of three authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, an October 2020 open letter maintaining that lockdowns were causing irreparable harm.
The document — which came before the availability of COVID-19 vaccines and during the first Trump administration — promoted “herd immunity,” the idea that people at low risk should live normally while building up immunity to COVID-19 through infection. Protection should focus instead on people at higher risk, the document said.
“I think the lockdowns were the single biggest public health mistake,” Bhattacharya said in March 2021 during a panel discussion convened by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
The Great Barrington Declaration was embraced by some in the first Trump administration, even as it was widely denounced by disease experts. Then- NIH director Dr. Francis Collins called it dangerous and “not mainstream science.”
One of the best blogs is written by Simon Rosenberg, a Democratic political strategist. He has a determined sense of optimism and calls his blog “The Hopium Chronicles.” Even his free columns are chock full of information. He identifies and fund raises for significant candidates. His is the voice we need to see us through the midterm elections, when we can take back the House or the Senate or both.
Here is his latest, which was free. I finally gave in and subscribed after I finished reading it. I won’t copy in full so please open and read the rest.
It begins:
Good morning all. We start today with some very good news – Derek Tran declared victory in CA-45 last night. I know folks here have worked very hard on that race, and while it hasn’t been officially called yet we should be optimistic about where it’s headed. If you want to keep working to cure ballots in CA-45 and CA-13 (Adam Gray) sign up with our friends at Grassroots Democrats HQ. Here’s the current count in both races:
If we win both these races the House will be 220R-215D, and we will have picked up two seats net from the last Congress. With three vacancies due to House members leaving to join (or attempting to join – Gaetz) the Trump cabinet, House Rs will begin Congress next year at 217-215, a one vote majority in what has been a very factious and fragile Republican “Majority.”
Here’s where our 15 endorsed House candidates stand today:
Too Close To Call/Still Counting (2) – Gray CA-13, Tran CA-45 (optimistic!)
Losses (9) – Shah AZ-01, Engel AZ-06, Salas CA-22, Rollins CA-41, Bohannan IA-1, Vargas NE-02, Jones NY-17, Altman NJ-07, Stelson PA-10
I remain very proud of the good we’ve done this past cycle. We made deeply strategic investments and got important wins in a tough year in AZ, NC, NE, WI and in these critical House seats. Of the 6 House seats Dems flipped this cycle, our community aggressively backed 5 of them – George Whitesides CA-27, Tom Suozzi NY-3, Laura Gillen NY-4, Josh Riley NY-19 and Janelle Bynum OR-5.
If both Gray and Tran do win, the Hopium community will have played meaningful roles in electing 7 of the 8 House candidate who turned red seats blue this year. Great work everyone!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
While We Are Tired, And Down, We Have To Fight – I’ve thought a lot about how this place is going to work in this second Trump era. As we’ve discussed it is going to be hard. Bad things are going to happen. And we are going to have to keep fighting through it all, not disengage or get too down, and forge ourselves into a ferocious and effective opposition. Some are going to need to take time off to rest, recover, regroup. That’s fine. Do what you need to do. But friends, if we’ve learned anything in the past few days, we are going to have to fight, and we are going to need everyone on board when they are rested up and ready to go.
While I’ve maintained a very upbeat and optimistic outlook here at Hopium since we launched in March of 2023 I also have been very clear-eyed about who Trump was, and the threat he represented. Rapist, fraudster, traitor, 34 times felon. Or this passage, which I shared again and again:
They want Putin to win, the West to lose. The border to be in chaos, and migrants to keep flowing into the country. Americans to lose even more rights and freedoms. The planet to warm faster. 10 year olds to carry their rapist’s baby to term, and for more women to die on operating room tables. Tens of millions to lose their health insurance. More dead kids in schools. Verified rapists in positions of authority. A restoration of pre-Civil Rights era white supremacy. Huge new tariffs which will raise prices on everything and wreck the global economy which has made us prosperous. Big new tax cuts for their wealthiest donors and tax increases for every day people. Books banned across the US. Seniors to pay more for insulin and prescription drugs. Foreign governments free to pollute our daily discourse and harass our citizens. Teenagers to work night shifts in meat packing plants and not go to school. The minimum wage to stay at $7.25. Mass arrests and mass deportations of immigrants long settled in the US. Insurrectionists to be pardoned. To end American democracy for all time.
Or this one that I also repeated again and again:
Trump is a Russian-backed wrecking ball who wants to end the American-led global economic system that has made us prosperous, end the Western alliance that has made us safe, and end American democracy that has made us free.
A central cause of my optimism that we would win this year came from my belief that our campaigns would have more to work with to disqualify and degrade Trump than any campaigns have ever had, as Trump/MAGA 2024 was far more dangerous, criminal, extreme than any previous iteration of Trump/MAGA. We had beaten the extremists in 2018, 2020, 2022 and 2023; the fascists had underperformed and been beaten in Europe and France this past summer; and I felt the conditions were such that we could once again prevail against this dangerous politics in the November election.
We know what happened next. Despite his historic ugliness and threat to the country, we didn’t win. And it is clear now, within just a few weeks of Trump’s election, that he is not going to be just one of the guys, a country club Republican CEO, that nutty dude with a red hat doing bro-pods; and that he wasn’t just engaging in “locker room talk” about all those crazy things he rambled on about. Voters were fooled into believing Trump was just a wacky but successful business guy – again. What they – and we – got instead was a Russian backed monster seemingly intent on destroying the American economy and the country from his very first day in office.
Consider the news from the past few days:
“Trump plans tariffs on Mexico, Canada, and China that could cripple trade” (NYT)
“Walmart says Trump tariffs could raise prices” (CNBC)
“Trump’s deportation vow alarms Texas construction industry” (NPR)
“US farm groups want Trump to spare their workers from deportation” (Reuters)
“Trump officials to receive immediate clearances and easier FBI vetting: president-elect’s team planning for background checks to occur only after administration takes over bureau” – The Guardian
“Kennedy’s antivax views and friends can cause real damage” (NYT)
“Trump Pentagon pick (Hegseth) had been flagged by fellow service member as ‘Insider Threat’” (AP)
“Tulsi Gabbard’s sympathetic views towards Russia cause alarm as Trump’s pick to lead intelligence services” (AP)
“Sexual misconduct allegations sank one Trump nominee and loom over Kennedy” (WSJ)
“Gaetz exit puts spotlight on other Trump nominees accused of sexual misconduct” (Reuters)
President-elect Donald Trump said Monday he will issue executive orders imposing new tariffs on all imported goods from China, Mexico and Canada, the nation’s three largest trading partners, as one of his first acts upon reentering the White House. He said 25 percent tariffs would be imposed on Mexican and Canadian merchandise and 10 percent on Chinese goods as part of a plan aimed at stopping an “invasion” of drugs and migrants into the country. Economists have warned that American consumers would face higher prices on goods because of the proposed tariffs.
As we’ve been discussing here, we are not going to win every battle, and we have to be really smart about where we engage. But fight we must. Here are two things you can do right now, before Thanksgiving:
Call your Senators and Representative to let them know your dissatisfaction with the rapist, fraudster, traitor and 34 times felon’s pick of Tulsi Gabbard, Pete Hegseth and Robert Kennedy; and to inform them of your expectation that they will leave it all out there on the playing field to block these profoundly dangerous nominations whether they have a vote on them or not.
Trump could have let us have a quiet Thanksgiving holiday. Instead, because he is mad, impulsive and a serial betrayer of the country, we get these wild threats of crippling, autocratic tariffs. Here is Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell on CNN last night talking about how these tariffs are going to drive up costs of so many of our every day goods:
Rest up this long weekend my friends. Enjoy your time with family. Take long walks. Binge watch your favorite show. Read that book that has been sitting by your bedside table for months. Cure a few more ballots for Gray and Tran. Rest up, recharge and for those of you ready to jump back in next week get ready. We have a lot of work to do.
Remember, Hopium is hope with a plan. We just don’t hope that things will turn out as we want. We do the work to make it so. And man do we have a lot of work ahead of us.
Our reader “Democracy” always posts wise, deeply researched comments. In this comment, Democracy makes us wonder whether Trump’s nomination of Matt Gaetz was a deep fake that would make anyone else look better. Such as Pam Bondi.
Pam Bondi will be loyal to Trump. Loyalty is the trait that matters more to Trump than competence or experience.
“Bondi said the Justice Department’s special counsel investigation into whether Trump associates coordinated with Russian interference in the 2016 election needed to be dissolved. She declared that the 45th president’s first impeachment in 2019 was a “sham.” And when Trump was indicted four times after leaving office, Bondi was blunt about who deserved legal scrutiny — and it wasn’t the former president.
“The prosecutors will be prosecuted, the bad ones,” Bondi declared on Fox News in 2023, soon after Trump’s fourth set of criminal charges. “The investigators will be investigated.”
Democracy writes:
Pam Bondi as Attorney General.
What could go wrong? Let’s see.
Bondi was never a supporter of the Affordable Care Act and tried to extinguish it. As of February of this year, Florida had more than 4 million people receiving health care through the Affordable Care Act, the highest ACA enrollment in the country.
Bondi has been a long-time opponent of LGBTQ rights and same-ex marriage. After the Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision, Bondi said she had OPPOSED same-sex marriage NOT for any personal beliefs or political partisanship but because of “the rule of law.”
Bondi took that $25,000 political donation from a Trump CHARITY and then dropped any participation by Florida in a lawsuit against the Trump University flim-flam scheme. She denied that she did anything wrong or that there was any connection between the moola and her decision not to participate in the suit against Trump’s crooked tactics. Indeed, as one Trump University official said in court testimony, enrollees in the courses were directed to
“call their credit card companies and raise their credit limits two, three, or four times so that they would be able to invest in real estate,” to “charge the course to multiple credit cards” or “to open up as many credit cards as they could.”
Bondi is a 2020 election denier, parroting Trump’s false claims that the election was “stolen” by “fake ballots” — she could never provide any evidence of this — and that any investigation into Trump’s incitement of the violent January 6 insurrection was a weaponization of the Justice Department for political purposes. Just last year she said on Fox ‘news” that,
“When Republicans take back the White House, you know what’s going to happen? The Department of Justice, the prosecutors will be prosecuted — the bad ones — the investigators will be investigated.”
Kinda sounds like “weaponization” doesn’t it?
The mission of the Department of Justice is “to uphold the rule of law, to keep our country safe, and to protect civil rights.” According to its website, DOJ core values are
• Independence and Impartiality.
• Honesty and Integrity.
• Respect.
• Excellence.
Obviously, the nomination of Matt Gaetz was laughably terrible. Pam Bondi may be a bit more palatable, but not by much. She is a liar, and a bigot, and a right-wing hack, and a seditious traitor…but with a “pretty” face. She’s the lipstick on the pig.
Diane Ravitch's blog 