Was RFK Jr. Responsible for 83 Deaths in Samoa?

By dianeravitch
November 21, 2024 //
9

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. visited in Samoa in 2019. While there, he proselytized on the dangers of vaccines. After he left, the number of people getting vaccines declined. 83 people died of measles, many of them children. They were not vaccinated. RFK is not merely a “vaccine skeptic,” he’s an opponent of vaccines.

The Washington Post reported:

Health officials around the world are alarmed over the likely impact of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — a longtime vaccine skeptic who was tapped for the health secretary role this week — on global health. Experts from Samoa have been particularly vocal in sounding the alarm, citing the destructive impact of Kennedy’s rhetoric on the tiny Polynesian island nation.


Warning that Kennedy will empower the global anti-vaccine movement and may advocate for reduced funding for international agencies, Aiono Prof Alec Ekeroma, the director general of health for Samoa’s Health Ministry told The Washington Post that Kennedy “will be directly responsible for killing thousands of children around the world by allowing preventable infectious diseases to run rampant.”


“I don’t think it’s a legacy that should be associated with the Kennedy name,” Ekeroma said in an email Friday.


Ekeroma recalled a disastrous epidemic in 2019, when measles spread rapidly across the small Pacific Ocean country. Of Samoa’s population of 200,000, more than 5,700 were infected and 83 died, many of them young children. Hospitals were overrun, and the nation declared a state of emergency. To stop the outbreak, Samoa launched a massive vaccination campaign, and unvaccinated families were asked to hang red flags outside their homes.

The island nation already had a lagging measles vaccination rate of only about a third of infants, plummeting from 90 percent in 2013. Health experts attributed that drop in part to a public health scandal in which two nurses improperly mixed the measles vaccine with the wrong liquid, resulting in the deaths of two infants. Both nurses were sentenced to five years in prison, and the vaccination program was temporarily suspended — but the accident also opened the door to a wave of vaccine misinformation, including from Kennedy and his anti-vaccine nonprofit.


Kennedy had visited Samoa only four months before the outbreak and met with anti-vaccine advocates. He later characterized the outbreak in Samoa as “mild.”

Categories Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Health, Science

The Trans Bathroom Issue Explodes in Congress

By dianeravitch
November 20, 2024 //
117

Delaware elected Sarah McBride to Congress. Representative McBride is transgender. Republican women are going nuts for fear that Rep. McBride might use the women’s bathroom. Or the women’s gym.

Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina has introduced a resolution to bar Rep. McBride from using the women’s facilities. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene is aghast and insists on calling Rep. McBride “he” and “him.”

The New York Times reported:

“Sarah McBride doesn’t get a say,” [Nancy Mace] told reporters on Monday night. “I mean, this is a biological man.” She said that Ms. McBride “does not belong in women’s spaces, women’s bathrooms, locker rooms, changing rooms — period, full stop.”

The move by Ms. Mace, one of the more attention-seeking members of the House, was straight out of the political playbook Republicans have long employed on transgender issues, which they see as an effective wedge to divide Democrats….

…with Ms. McBride’s arrival in Washington, House Republicans for the first time have a transgender colleague to target in their own workplace…

House Majority Leader Mike Johnson was flummoxed. He said:

“A man is a man, and a woman is a woman. And a man cannot become a woman,” Mr. Johnson said. “That said, I also believe that we treat everyone with dignity. We can do and believe all of those things at the same time.”

McBride posted a comment on social media:

“Every day Americans go to work with people who have life journeys different than their own and engage with them respectfully, I hope members of Congress can muster that same kindness,” she wrote. “This is a blatant attempt from far right-wing extremists to distract from the fact that they have no real solutions to what Americans are facing…”

Marjory Taylor Greene was outraged:

“He’s a man,” Ms. Greene told reporters bluntly on Monday night. “He’s a biological male. So he is not allowed to use our women’s restrooms, our women’s gym, our locker rooms. He’s a biological male. He has plenty of places he can go.”

Ms. Greene said she was “fed up with the left shoving their sick trans ideology down our throats and invading our spaces and women’s sports.”

The Democrats defended their new colleague.

Who will stop her from using the women’s bathroom?

Having used many women’s bathrooms myself, I would like to point out that there are no open stalls. No one is naked. Privacy is certain.

What’s the deal?

Categories Bigotry, Cruelty, Elections, Gender, Republicans

Andy Borowitz: What Do We Do Now? Thoughts for Voters

By dianeravitch
November 20, 2024 //
18

Andy Borowitz has words of wisdom for Democrats and Never Trumpers. Do not despair. Prepare. Big electoral wins breed hubris, overconfidence, overreach. Or, pride goeth before a fall.

He writes:

Maybe you’ve been asking yourself:

1. “How could Donald Trump have won 51 percent of the popular vote?”

2. “How hard is it to immigrate to New Zealand?” 

3. “What the actual f..k?”

Fair questions.

Let’s try a thought experiment. Could Tuesday’s election results have been any worse?

Well, what if, instead of 51 percent, the Republican nominee had won 59 percent? Or 61 percent? And what if he had won 49 states?

Those aren’t hypotheticals. Those were the results of the 1972 and 1984 landslides that reelected Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. 

With thumping victories like those, what could possibly go wrong for the winners?

If history’s any guide, some nasty surprises await Donald Trump.

In 1972, the Democratic presidential nominee, George McGovern, won just 37.5 percent of the vote, carrying only Massachusetts and the District of Columbia for a total of 17 Electoral College votes. He didn’t even win his home state, South Dakota. 

In 1984, Democrat Walter Mondale did carry his native Minnesota, but that was as good as it got for him. In the Electoral College, he fared even worse than McGovern, with a whopping 13 votes. 

In the aftermath of these thrashings, the Democratic Party lay in smoldering ruins, and Republicans looked like indestructible conquerors.

Now, some might argue that those GOP victories, though statistically more resounding than Trump’s, weren’t nearly as alarming, because he’s a criminal and wannabe autocrat. 

But Trump’s heinousness shouldn’t make us nostalgic for Nixon and Reagan. They were also criminals—albeit unindicted ones. And they were up to all manner of autocratic shit—until they got caught. 

The Watergate scandal was only one small part of the sprawling criminal enterprise that Nixon directed from the Oval Office in order to subvert democracy. For his part, Reagan’s contribution to the annals of presidential crime, Iran-Contra, broke myriad laws and violated Constitutional norms. 

The hubris engendered by both men’s landslides propelled them to reckless behavior in their second terms—behavior that came back to haunt them. Nixon was forced to resign the presidency; Reagan was lucky to escape impeachment. 

After the Watergate scandal forced Richard Nixon from office, this bumper sticker helped Massachusetts voters brag that they handed him his only Electoral College loss in 1972.

Of course, Trump would be justified in believing that no matter how reckless he becomes, he’ll never pay a price. He’s already been impeached—twice—only to be acquitted by his Republican toadies in the Senate. And now that the right-wing supermajority of the Supreme Court has adorned him with an immunity idol, he’ll likely feel free to commit crimes that Nixon and Reagan could only dream of. Who’ll stop him from using his vast power to persecute his voluminous list of enemies?

Well, the enemy most likely to thwart Trump in his second term might be one who isn’t on his list: himself. The seeds of Trump’s downfall may reside in two promises he made to win this election: the mass deportation of immigrants and the elimination of inflation. 

Trump’s concept of a plan to deport 20 million immigrants is as destined for success as were two of his other brainchildren, Trump University and Trump Steaks. The US doesn’t have anything approaching the law-enforcement capacity to realize this xenophobic fever dream. 

And as for Trump’s war on inflation, the skyrocketing prices caused by his proposed tariffs will make Americans nostalgic for pandemic-era price-gouging on Charmin.

It’s possible that Trump’s 24/7 disinformation machine, led by Batman villains Rupert Murdoch, Tucker Carlson, and Elon Musk, will prevent his MAGA followers from ever discovering that 20 million immigrants didn’t go anywhere. And it’s possible that if inflation spikes, he’ll find a scapegoat for that. (Nancy Pelosi? Dr. Fauci? Taylor Swift?) 

And, yes, it’s possible that Trump will somehow accomplish his goal of becoming America’s Kim Jong Un, and our democracy will go belly-up like the Trump Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City. 

But I wouldn’t bet on it. I tend to agree with the British politician Enoch Powell (1912-1998), who observed that all political careers end in failure. I doubt that Trump, with his signature blend of inattention, impulsiveness, and incompetence, will avoid that fate.

And when the ketchup hits the fan, the MAGA movement may suddenly appear far more fragmented and fractious than it does this week. You can already see the cracks. Two towering ignoramuses like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert should be BFFs, but they despise each other—the only policy of theirs I agree with. 

If things really go south, expect MAGA Republicans to devour each other as hungrily as the worm who feasted on RFK Jr.’s brain—and that, my friends, will be worth binge-watching. I’m stocking up on popcorn now before Trumpflation makes it unaffordable. 

Marjorie Taylor Greene (L), wishing a space laser would strike Lauren Boebert (R). (Win McNamee/Getty Images)

One parting thought. Post-election, the mainstream media’s hyperbolic reassessment of Trump—apparently, he’s now a political genius in a league with Talleyrand and Metternich—has been nauseating. It’s also insanely short-sighted. Again, a look at the not-so-distant past is instructive.

In 1984, after Reagan romped to victory with 59 percent of the popular vote and 525 electoral votes, Reaganism was universally declared an unstoppable juggernaut. But only two years later, in the 1986 midterms, Democrats proved the pundits wrong: they regained control of both the House and Senate for the first time since 1980. Those majorities enabled them to slam the brakes on Ronnie’s right-wing agenda, block the Supreme Court nomination of Robert Bork, and investigate Iran-Contra.

The lesson of the 1986 midterms is clear: the game’s far from over and there’s everything to play for. If we want to stem the tide of autocracy and kleptocracy, restore women’s rights and protect the most vulnerable, we don’t have the luxury of despair. The work starts now.

Categories Accountability, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, History, Humor, Trump

Peter Greene: A Tribute to 6-Year-Old Ruby Bridges

By dianeravitch
November 20, 2024 //
10

Peter Greene reminds us of an important anniversary that we should have commemorated: the arrival of 6-year-old Ruby Bridges at the William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans, where she was the first Black child. She had to walk through crowds of screaming whites, mostly women, who didn’t want her to integrate the school. She integrated the school, but the white children were gone. She was the only child in her class, and she developed a close relationship with her kind teacher.

He writes:

Things got busy here at the Institute this week, so I missed posting about this anniversary on Thursday. But I don’t want to overlook it for another year.

On November 14, Ruby Bridges was six years old, three months younger than the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education. Six years old.

She had attended a segregated kindergarten in New Orleans. The district gave Black children a test to see if they would be allowed to attend the all-white William Frantz Elementary School. Six passed. Two decided not to go through with it. The three other girls were sent to a different all-white school; Ruby Bridges would be the only Black student desegregating William Frantz.

Her father was not sure he wanted to put her through that. Her mother argued it had to be done for her daughter and “for all African-American children.”

This was three years after the Little Rock Nine were escorted into school by the National Guard. Conditions in the South had not improved. A crowd came out to hurl insults and threaten a six year old child. 

“What really protected me is the innocence of a child,” Bridges said at an event last Thursday.“Because even though you all saw that and I saw what you saw, my 6-year-old mind didn’t tell me that I needed to be afraid. Like why would I be afraid of a crowd? I see that all the time.”

But it is still shocking to see pictures of the protests. They made a picture of a coffin, with a Black baby in it, and paraded it around the school. Along with a cross. Bridges was the only child in her class– white parents pulled their children out, and many teachers refused to teach. The boycott was eventually broken by a Methodist minister, but Bridges still was shunned, her father fired, her family barred from some local businesses. 

It’s Ruby Bridges portrayed in the Norman Rockwell painting “The Problem We All Live With.” one of his first works after he left The Saturday Evening Post. It earned him sackfulls of angry mail, calling him, among other things, a “race traitor.”

This week, many schools celebrated a Ruby Bridges Walk To School Day in schools all around the country.  

There is a common narrative, that in the sixties we pretty much settled all the racial issues in this country and that demands for equity ever since have just been a political ploy to grab undeserved goodies. “We fixed that stuff,” the argument goes, “so we shouldn’t need to be talking about it now. You sure you don’t have some other reason for bringing it up?” It’s the narrative that brings us to a President-elect who claims that since we fixed racism in the sixties, it’s white folks who have been the victims, and who need reparations.

But here’s what I want to underline– Ruby Bridges is alive. Not even old lady alive, but just 70. Presumably most of the children gathered around that coffin and cross are also alive, probably a few of those adults as well (Bridges’s mother died in 2020). 

This is not some episode from the distant past. It’s not about some form of schooling that belongs to some dead-and-gone generation. The anniversary is a reminder to do better, to be better, a reminder that it really wasn’t very long ago that a whole lot of people thought it was okay to threaten a six year old child with abuse and violence. White folks don’t need to hang their heads in shame and embarrassment, but neither should they say, “That was people from another time, long ago and far away,” as a way to feel better about the whole business. It can happen here. It just happened here. Pay attention and do the work to make sure it isn’t happening tomorrow.

Categories Bigotry, Cruelty, Democracy, Extremism, Louisiana, New Orleans, Racism, Segregation, Segregation , Racial Isolation and Integration, Shame

What Peter Greene Thinks About the Nominee for Secretary of Education

By dianeravitch
November 20, 2024 //
8

Think how much worse it could be. It could have been a Mom for Liberty. Or Chris Rufo.

Open the link.

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Elections, U.S. Department of Education

Trump Picks Linda McMahon, Wrestling Exec and Friend, as Secretary of Education

By dianeravitch
November 19, 2024 //
21

President-Elect Trump announced that he has chosen Linda McMahon as his Secretary of Education. McMahon, 76, was co-chair of Trump’s transition and served as head of the Small Business Administration in Trump’s previous term. She made a lot of money as a partner in World Wrestling Entertainment and helped turn it into a multi-billion company.

McMahon briefly served on the Connecticut State Board of Education before she quit to run for the Senate and lost. She is a graduate of East Carolina University with a degree in French.

She is board chair of the America First Policy Institute, a Trump-aligned “think tank.”

Her selection continues Trump’s pattern of selecting totally unqualified people for his cabinet. McMahon’s job is to destroy the U.S. Department of Education.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., vaccine opponent: appointed to run the Department of Health and Human Services. FOX commentator, Pete Hegseth, who has zero managerial experience, to run the massive Department of Defense; Tulsi Gabbard, Putin sycophant, as Director of National Intelligence. Matt Gaetz, allegations of drug use and sex with underage girls, as U.S. Attorney General. On and on with people who seem to be not only unqualified but at odds with the organization they are supposed to lead.

Trump’s choices are intended to destabilize the government.

Steve Bannon says the Trump team wants to destroy “the administrative state.” That’s our government. Trump is choosing people to destroy our government.

Categories Disruption, Elections, Trump, U.S. Department of Education

What’s on the Musk-Ramaswamy Chopping Block?

By dianeravitch
November 19, 2024 //
13

Trump put Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy in charge of a “Department of Government Efficiency” and told them to have fun cutting the federal budget. A billionaire and a millionaire who know nothing about government programs will start hacking away.

The Washington Post helpfully assembled a list of programs that are prime targets.

Jacob Bogage wrote:

Trump government efficiency advisers Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy have pledged not to bring a chisel to government spending, but rather “a chainsaw.” The particular approach Ramaswamy has in mind could threaten dozens of programs that tens of millions of Americans rely on each day.


Ramaswamy floated on social media a proposal to eliminate programs that Congress funds but where specific spending authorization has lapsed. That may sound like an easy source of savings, but it would ax veterans’ health-care programs, drug research and development, opioid addiction treatment — even the State Department.


“We can & should save hundreds of billions each year by defunding government programs that Congress no longer authorizes,” Ramaswamy wrote.


The approach from President-elect Donald Trump, Musk and Ramaswamy’s out-of-government “Department of Government Efficiency,” or DOGE, demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of Congress and federal spending, experts say.


Though Ramaswamy suggested that programs Congress no longer authorizes are prime targets for cuts, in reality, many programs where Congress has let authorization lapse are covered by funding bills that policy wonks call “self-authorizing.”

In other words, instead of needing two laws — one to approve funding for an agency and another to actually allocate the money — Congress only passes one: the allocation, which intrinsically gives a department authority to spend its funding. It is Congress’s way of making legislative work more efficient, and its legality has been confirmed by numerous government studies.


There is plenty of room for policymakers to uncover and eliminate excess federal spending, experts say, an issue made even more serious by the country’s deteriorating financial health. The national debt is expected to eclipse $36 trillion in the coming days; Trump’s first-term policies accounted for $8.4 trillion of that amount, according to the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.


It just might be more difficult than DOGE’s backers suggest.


“It is obviously important for the government to be good stewards of taxpayer dollars. There’s real bipartisan areas where people agree there’s stuff to be done. But what Elon and Vivek and Trump are going for is not that,” said Bobby Kogan, an analyst at the center-left think tank Center for American Progress. “They don’t even get the basics right. They get the size of the budget wrong. They named it after a meme. In no way are they actually taking this seriously.”

Musk and Ramaswamy beg to differ, and have called the DOGE commission the United States’ next Manhattan Project.


“There’s a new sheriff in town. Donald Trump’s the president. He has mandated us for radical, drastic reform of this federal bureaucracy with the learnings of that first term,” Ramaswamy said on Fox News. “And look, Elon and I — Elon is solving major problems of physics. I came from the world of biology. What we’re solving here now is not a natural problem. This is a man-made problem, and when you have a man-made problem, you better darn well have a man-made solution. That’s what we’re bringing to the table.”
Trump transition officials did not immediately return a request for comment.


The programs without separate spending authorization that Ramaswamy would do away with represent more than $516 billion, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The 10 largest make up $380 billion. Here’s a look at what some of those programs do.

Veterans’ health care


A 1996 law set eligibility requirements for military veterans to receive hospital, medical and nursing home care and authorized spending for those services and patient enrollment. That law has not been renewed, but Congress regularly allocates additional Department of Veterans Affairs funding and allows benefits to increase automatically based on inflation. VA provides medical care to more than 9.1 million enrolled veterans, according to the agency.
Drug development and opioid addiction treatment.


Most of this spending relates to the bipartisan 21st Century Cures Act of 2016. That law provided money to the National Institutes of Health and Food and Drug Administration to modernize pharmaceutical research and medical trials. It funded research for cancer cures and state-level grants for opioid addiction and other substance abuse treatment.


State Department


In 2003, Congress passed the Foreign Relations Authorization Act, which set policy priorities and created spending authority for the State Department. That law has not been renewed, but Congress every year since has passed annual funding bills for the department, which Trump has announced he’ll nominate Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Florida) to run.


Housing assistance


President Bill Clinton in 1998 signed the Quality Housing and Work Responsibility Act, which overhauled federal housing assistance policies, including voucher programs and other antipoverty assistance. The Department of Housing and Urban Development and other agencies continue using this law to implement federal housing programs.


Justice Department


In 1994, Congress passed the landmark Violence Against Women Act and has renewed it multiple times since. In 2006, lawmakers packaged a VAWA renewal with authorizing legislation for the Justice Department. As with the State Department, Congress has not approved new authorizing legislation for the Justice Department since, but it has funded the agency — and even authorized hundreds of millions of dollars more for a new FBI headquarters — every year.


Education spending


The 2015 Every Student Succeeds Act delegated power to state and local education officials to set primary and secondary education achievement standards. It gives billions of dollars in federal grant money to state and local education officials to fund schools and school districts. Those standards are still used by the Education Department, even though the legislation has not been reauthorized. Trump has suggested he’d like to eliminate the entire department.


NASA


Stripping funding for NASA, which was last reauthorized in 2017, could spell doom for Musk’s commercial spaceflight firm, SpaceX. The company has contracts worth more than $4 billion — including for return trips to the moon and retiring the International Space Station — linked to programs approved in the 2017 law.
Health-care and student loan programs
What’s known as the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, was actually passed in two separate bills in 2010. The Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act represents the second bill, which included some tax revisions and technical changes to the ACA. The law has not been reauthorized since, but the Department of Health and Human Services reported in March that more than 45 million people have health insurance coverage backed by the Affordable Care Act.

The law that made those final tweaks to the ACA also overhauled the Education Department’s student loan program. Where some schools relied on private lenders to issue federally backed loans, with this law, the government itself became the lender. That change has since enabled President Joe Biden to offer student loan debt relief, though many of his most ambitious policies have been blocked by the courts. Student loans are generally funded through mandatory spending — similar to social safety net programs such as Medicare and Social Security — and not subject to annual spending laws.


International security programs


The 1985 International Security and Development Cooperation Act bundled together authorizations for a number of international security programs, including funding and regulations for arms sales to allies, economic aid for developing countries, airport security, anti-narcotics-trafficking policies, the Peace Corps and more. This Reagan-era law continues to be foundational to congressional funding and federal policy.


Head Start


Head Start provides preschool education for children from low-income families. In the 2023 fiscal year, more than 800,000 children enrolled in Head Start programs, according to the National Head Start Association. The program also helped place more than 530,000 parents in jobs, school or job-training programs. It was last authorized in 2007.

The article contains a graphic of programs that are on the chopping block, along with their appropriations. I can’t copy it. If you subscribe to the Washington Post, please open the link and post the graphic in your comment.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Budget Cuts, Cruelty, Disruption, Elections, Extremism, Funding, Health, Ignorance, Trump

Jared Polis, Democratic Governor of Colorado, Praises RFK Jr.

By dianeravitch
November 19, 2024 //
18

https://www.denverpost.com/2024/11/14/jared-polis-rfk-jr-trump-hhs-endorsement-tweet/

Colorado Gov. Jared Polis holds up a copy of Project 2025 as he speaks during the Democratic National Convention Wednesday, Aug. 21, 2024, in Chicago. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
Colorado Gov. Jared Polis holds up a copy of Project 2025 as he speaks during the Democratic National Convention Wednesday, Aug. 21, 2024, in Chicago. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

Colorado Gov. Jared Polis on Thursday cheered anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s nomination to lead the nation’s top public health agency, highlighting the controversial nominee’s stances on “big pharma” and “corporate ag.”

Polis, a Democrat, faced quick pushback on social media after he said he was “excited” by President-elect Donald Trump’s selection, and he posted againan hour later to clarify his thoughts. A spokesman for the governor then further walked back Polis’ support for Kennedy in a statement to The Denver Post.

Trump, a Republican, nominated Kennedy to lead the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. In the presidential race, Kennedy initially had sought the Democratic nomination, then ran as an independent. A member of the dynastic Kennedy family, he later abandoned his presidential campaign and backed Trump.

Kennedy has pushed a number of public health conspiracies, most prominently around vaccines, and has advocated for other positions that are generally out of the mainstream, such as more availability of unpasteurized milk. He has said he wants to remove fluoride from the American water supply, and when he ran for president, he said he wanted to pause research into pharmaceuticals and infectious diseases for at least eight years.

He has falsely suggested that COVID-19 was “ethnically targeted” to “attack” certain groups and that mass shootings have been caused by prescription drugs, among other debunked conspiracy theories.

Kennedy has adopted some mainstream health positions, such as limiting ultra-processed foods and the use of pesticides in growing crops. Polis, citing specific quotes by Kennedy, focused on those latter views in his first post Thursday afternoon on the social platform X.

“‘In some categories, there are entire departments, like the nutrition department at the (Food and Drug Administration) that are — that have to go, that are not doing their job, they’re not protecting our kids,” Polis quoted Kennedy as saying, then added himself: “YES! The entire nutrition regime is dominated by big corporate ag rather than human health and they do more harm than good.”

Polis — who’d previously criticized Kennedy’s anti-vaccine stances this summer — acknowledged those positions in his posts Thursday but urged his 136,000 X followers to hold off on mocking or disagreeing with Kennedy.

He said Kennedy had “helped us defeat vaccine mandates in Colorado in 2019.” He was referring to a defeated legislative measure that would have made it harder for parents to opt out of vaccine mandates for public schools.

Polis wrote that he hoped Kennedy would make vaccines a matter of choice, not about bans or requirements.

Polis’ comments drew swift backlash. Outgoing state Rep. David Ortiz, a Littleton Democrat, called the governor’s endorsement “pathetic pandering.” Rep. Javier Mabrey, a Denver Democrat, quipped on X: “Yikes.” Shad Murib, the chair of the Colorado Democratic Party, tweeted “Welp” shortly after Polis’ comments, and he subsequently criticized Kennedy’s conspiratorial history in a Thursday evening statement from the party.

Sen. Kyle Mullica, a Thornton Democrat and emergency room nurse, was blunter.

“This is just complete bullshit,” he said in an interview, and then repeated that point for emphasis. 

Mullica rejected Polis’ suggestion that state officials had sought vaccine mandates in the past. He said legislators worked to improve immunization rates through medical exemption reform and through education. Polis previously supported parents’ ability to opt out of vaccinations — drawing support from anti-vaccine advocates — despite the state’s poor rankings for pediatric immunization.

“The biggest thing is — look, science matters, man,” Mullica continued. “And with all the disinformation and misinformation that’s being put out by people like RFK Jr. and the internet, we need leaders who can stand up, follow the science, understand it and (make) sure we are making decisions based on evidence and science.”

Asked why Polis endorsed Kennedy in light of his often-conspiratorial stances, a spokesman for the governor responded by referring to a subsequent Polis social media post. The spokesman, Eric Maruyama, then issued a statement distancing the governor from the controversial figure he had just backed.

Maruyama wrote that Polis “does not endorse actions that would lead to measles outbreaks and opposes unscientific propaganda.”

“Governor Polis has not changed his view as a whole on RFK Jr. or on the Governor’s previously stated concerns regarding some of  RFK Jr’s positions,” Maruyama wrote. “While opposed to RFK’s positions on a host of issues, including vaccines and banning fluoridation, (Polis) would appreciate seeing action on pesticides and efforts to lower prescription drug costs and if Trump is going to nominate someone like him then let them also take on soda, processed food, pesticides and heavy metals contamination.”

Categories Colorado, Elections, Extremism, Health, Science

Heather Cox Richardson: Trump Attacks the Foundations of Our Government

By dianeravitch
November 19, 2024 //
19

In this post, Heather Cox Richardson demonstrates why she has over one million paid subscribers. She brilliantly weaves together events of the day to show the pattern on the rug. The economy is humming along with new jobs created by Biden. Meanwhile Trump plans massive cuts to Medicaid to pay for tax cuts for billionaires. Trump’s goal: to destroy the foundations of the American government. We were warned.

She writes:

On Friday, Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo locked in a $6.6 billion deal with the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company for it to invest $65 billion in three state-of-the-art fabrication plants in Arizona. This will bring thousands of jobs to the state. The money comes from the CHIPS and Science Act, about which Trump told podcaster Joe Rogan on October 25: “That CHIPS deal is so bad.” House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) said he would work to repeal the law, although he backed off that statement when Republicans noted the jobs the law has brought to their states. 

Also on Friday, a Trump-appointed federal judge struck down a Biden administration rule that would have made 4 million workers eligible for overtime pay. The rule raised the salary level below which an employer has to pay overtime from $35,568 to $43,888 this year and up to $58,656 in 2025. The decision by Texas judge Sean D. Jordan kills the measure nationally.

On Sunday, speaking from the Amazon rainforest in Brazil, President Joe Biden said that it would not be possible to reverse America’s “clean energy revolution,” which has now provided jobs across the country, primarily in Republican-dominated states. Biden noted that the U.S. would spend $11 billion on financing international responses to climate change in 2024, an increase of six times from when he began his term. 

But President-elect Trump has called climate change a hoax and has vowed to claw back money from the Inflation Reduction Act appropriated to mitigate it, and to turn the U.S. back to fossil fuels. What Trump will have a harder time disrupting, according to Nicolás Rivero of the Washington Post, is the new efficiency standards the Biden administration put in place for appliances. He can, though, refuse to advance those standards.

Meanwhile Trump and his team are announcing a complete reworking of the American government. They claim a mandate, although as final vote tallies are coming in, it turns out that Trump did not win 50% of the vote, and CNN statistician Harry Enten notes that his margin comes in at 44th out of the 51 elections that have been held since 1824. He also had very short coattails—four Democrats won in states Trump carried—and the Republicans have the smallest House majority since there have been 50 states, despite the help their numbers have had from the extreme gerrymandering in states like North Carolina. 

More Americans voted for someone other than Trump than voted for him.

Although Trump ran on lowering the cost of consumer goods, Trump and his sidekick Elon Musk, along with pharmaceutical entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, have vowed to slash the U.S. government, apparently taking their cue from Argentina’s self-described anarcho-capitalist president Javier Milei, who was the first foreign leader to visit Trump after the election. Milei’s “shock therapy” to his country threw the nation into a deep recession, just as Musk says his plans will create “hardship” for Americans before enabling the country to rebuild with security. 

Ramaswamy today posted on social media, “A reasonable formula to fix the U.S. government: Milei-style cuts, on steroids.” He has suggested that cuts are easier than people think. The Washington Post’s Philip Bump noted that on a podcast in September, Ramaswamy said as an example: “If your Social Security number ends in an odd number, you’re out. If it ends in an even number, you’re in. There’s a 50 percent cut right there. Of those who remain, if your Social Security number starts in an even number, you’re in, and if it starts with an odd number, you’re out. Boom. That’s a 75 percent reduction done.”

But, as Bump notes, this reveals Ramaswamy’s lack of understanding of how the government actually works. Social Security numbers aren’t random; the first digit refers to where the number was obtained. So this seemingly random system would target certain areas of the country. 

Today, both Jacob Bogage, Jeff Stein, and Dan Diamond of the Washington Post and Robert Tait of The Guardian reported that Trump’s economic advisors are talking with Republicans in Congress about cuts to Medicaid, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) formerly known as food stamps, and other welfare programs, in order to cover the enormous costs of extending tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. Medicaid is the nation’s health insurance for low-income Americans and long-term care. It covers more than 90 million Americans, one in five of us. Rural populations, which tend to vote Republican, use supplemental nutrition programs more than urban dwellers do. 

The Washington Post reporters note that Republicans deny that they are trying to reduce benefits for the poor. They are, they say, trying to reduce wasteful and unnecessary spending. “We know there’s tremendous waste,” said House Budget Committee chairman Jodey Arrington (R-TX). “What we don’t seem to have in the hour of action, like when we have the trifecta and unified Republican leadership, is the political courage to do it for the love of country. [Trump] does.”

Those cuts will likely not sit well with the Republicans whose constituents think Trump promised there would be no cuts to the programs on which they depend.

Trump’s planned nominations of unqualified extremists have also run into trouble. Senate Republicans are so far refusing to abandon their constitutional powers in order to act as a rubber stamp to enable Trump’s worst instincts. Former representative Matt Gaetz (R-FL), a Trump bomb thrower, was unqualified to be the nation’s attorney general in any case, but as more information comes out about his alleged participation in drug fueled orgies, including the news that a woman allegedly told the House Ethics Committee that she saw him engage in sex with a minor, those problems have gotten worse. 

Legal analyst Marcy Wheeler notes that the lawyers representing the witnesses for the committee are pushing for the release of the ethics committee’s report at least in part out of concern that if he becomes attorney general, Gaetz will retaliate against them. 

According to Vanity Fair’s Gabriel Sherman, fear of the MAGA Republican colleagues who are already trying to bully them into becoming Trump loyalists is infecting congress members, too. When asked if Gaetz was qualified for the attorney general post, Representative Mike Simpson (R-ID) answered: “Are you sh*tting me, that you just asked that question? No. But hell, you’ll print that and now I’m going to be investigated.”

The many fringe medical ideas of Trump’s pick for secretary of health and human services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., earned him the right-wing New York Post editorial board’s denigration as “nuts on a lot of fronts.” The board called his views “a head-scratching spaghetti of what we can only call warped conspiracy theories, and not just on vaccines.” Kennedy is a well-known opponent of vaccines—he called Covid-19 vaccines a “crime against humanity”—and has called for the National Institutes of Health to “take a break” of about eight years from studying infectious diseases, insisting that they should focus on chronic diseases instead.

Writing in the New York Times yesterday, Peter Baker noted that Trump “has rolled a giant grenade into the middle of the nation’s capital and watched with mischievous glee to see who runs away and who throws themselves on it.” Mischievous glee is one way to put it; another is that he is trying to destroy the foundations of the American government.

Baker notes that none of Trump’s selections would have been anything but laughable in the pre-Trump era when, for example, Democratic cabinet nominations were sunk for a failure to pay employment taxes for a nanny, or for a donor-provided car. Nor would a president-elect in the past have presumed to tap three of his own defense lawyers for top positions in the Department of Justice, effectively guaranteeing that he will be protected from scrutiny. 

A former deputy White House press secretary during Trump’s first term, Sarah Matthews, said Trump is “drunk on power right now because he feels like he was given a mandate by winning the popular vote.”

Today Trump confirmed that he intends to bypass normal legal constraints on his actions by declaring a national emergency on his first day in office in order to launch his mass deportation of undocumented migrants. While the Congressional Budget Office estimates this mass deportation will cost at least $88 billion a year, another cost that is rarely mentioned is that according to Bloomberg, undocumented immigrants currently pay about $100 billion a year in taxes. Losing that income, too, will likely have to be made up with cuts from elsewhere. 

Finally, today, CNBC’s economic analyst Carl Quintanilla noted today that average gasoline prices are expected to fall below $3.00 a gallon before the Thanksgiving holiday. 

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Cruelty, Democracy, Deregulation, Disruption, Economy, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Funding, Republicans, Trump

John Horgan, Science Writer, Laments the Loss of a Bold Editor

By dianeravitch
November 18, 2024 //
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John Horgan is a widely published science writer. In this article, he expresses his sorrow that Scientific American bowed to pressure to oust its outstanding Chief Editor Laura Helmuth. Right wingers love to attack Democrats for “censorship,” but it is Republicans who forced Helmuth’s ouster and Republicans who ban books.

He wrote:

Well before Scientific American’s editor vented her despair over the election, social injustice warriors were bashing the magazine for its political views. Critics include anti-woke bros Jordan Peterson, Charles “The Bell Curve” Murray, Pinker wannabe Michael Shermer, Dawkins wannabe Jerry Coyne and the right-leaning Wall Street Journal and City Journal.

On election night, Sci Am editor Laura Helmuth called Trump voters “racist and sexist” and “fucking fascists” on the social media platform BlueSky, a haven for Twitter/X refugees. Yeah, she lost her cool, but Helmuth’s labels apply to Trump if not to all who voted for him. 

Although Helmuth apologized for her remarks, Elon Musk (perhaps miffed that Scientific American recently knocked him) and others called for her head. Yesterday Helmuth announced she was stepping down.

Trump spews insults and wins the election. Helmuth loses her job. Critics of cancel culture cheered Helmuth’s cancellation. I’m guessing we’ll see more of this sickening double standard in coming months and years.

I’m writing this column, first, to express my admiration for Helmuth. She is not only a fearless, intrepid editor, who is passionate about science (she has a Ph.D. in cognitive neuroscience). She is also—and I’ve heard this from her colleagues and experienced it first-hand–a kind, considerate person. That’s a heroic feat in this mean-spirited age.

I’d also like to address the complaint that Helmuth’s approach to science was too political and partisan. Yes, under Helmuth, Scientific American has had a clear progressive outlook, ordinarily associated with the Democratic party. The magazine endorsed Joe Biden four years ago, shortly after Helmuth took over, and Kamala Harris this year.

Sci Am presented scientific analyses of and took stands on racism, reproductive rights, trans rights, climate change, gun violence and covid vaccines. Critics deplored the magazine’s “transformation into another progressive mouthpiece,” as The Wall Street Journal put it. Biologist Jerry Coyne says a science magazine should remain “neutral on issues of politics, morals, and ideology.”

What??!! As Coyne knows, science, historically, has never been “neutral.” Powerful groups on the right and left have employed science to promote their interests and propagate lethal ideologies, from eugenics to Marxism. Science journalists can either challenge abuses of science or look the other way.

I became a staff writer at Scientific American in 1986, when Jonathan Piel was editor. The magazine bashed the Reagan administration’s plan to build a space-based shield against nuclear weapons. I wrote articles linking behavioral genetics to eugenics and evolutionary psychology to social Darwinism. I got letters that began: “Dear Unscientific Unamerican.” My point: the magazine has never been “neutral,” it has always had a political edge.

Under Piel, as well as successors John Rennie, Mariette DiChristina and Helmuth, the magazine published plenty of articles with no political ramifications. But if you just stick to uncontroversial science, and you decline to take a position on topics like climate change or reproductive rights, you aren’t “neutral.” You are just looking the other way. 

Robert Kennedy, Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Health, has linked vaccines to autism, and he has conjectured that the covid virus was engineered to attack Caucasians and African Americans and spare “Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.” Trump says some Mexican immigrants have “bad genes” that make them killers, and as recently as 2022 he called climate change a “hoax.”

Meanwhile, Trump is vowing to cut federal aid to schools “pushing critical race theory, transgender insanity, and other inappropriate racial, sexual or political content.” And The Guardian reports that Trump is filing lawsuits against The New York Times and other media “that have been critical of him.”

Using your power to silence your opposition sounds pretty fascist to me. Will the next editor of Scientific American have the guts to challenge Trump and his minions? Will anyone?

Categories Courage, Elections, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, Science
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