Thursday, February 27, 2025

Junior can't grasp what an epidemic is


We all knew science idiot Robert Kennedy Junior was not qualified to serve as Health and Human Services Secretary.  We all know that.  Even his trashy wife Cheryl Hines knew that.  And now we're seeing what happens when a scientific fool is put in charge of a health agency.  A measles outbreak has been taking place.  C.I. noted it awhile back:

In other news, Texas has a measles outbreak and yet Chump still has the anti-vax lunatic Robert Kennedy Jr. as his Secretary of Health and Human Services.   Pavan Acharya (TEXAS TRIBUNE) reports, "At least 10 cases of measles -- eight of which are among school-aged children -- have been reported in Gaines County in West Texas over the past two weeks, driving worries of an escalating outbreak." CNN) adds, "A record share of US kindergartners had an exemption for required vaccinations last school year, leaving more than 125,000 new schoolchildren without coverage for at least one state-mandated vaccine, according to data published by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in October."   Four days ago, the Texas Department of Health and Human Services provided this overview:


In January 2025, the Houston Health Department confirmed two cases of measles associated with international travel in unvaccinated Harris County residents. Those were the first Texas measles cases since 2023 and prompted a DSHS health alert on January 23.

On January 29, the South Plains Public Health District notified the public of a measles case in a Gaines County child. As of now, a total of six cases have been identified, all among unvaccinated school-aged children who are residents of Gaines County. There is no suspected link between the Gaines County outbreak and the Harris County cases.

So as of now there are twelve confirmed cases in Texas since January 29th.  The University of Minnesota's CIDRAP notes cases developing in Georgia:


Elsewhere, the Georgia Department of Public Health today reported two more measles cases in unvaccinated Atlanta residents. In a statement, the group said the patients are family members of a case confirmed in January.

In a monthly measles update today, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said it has received reports of 14 cases this year from five jurisdictions: Alaska, Georgia, New York City, Rhode Island, and Texas. Nine of the cases were part of two outbreaks. All patients were unvaccinated or had an unknown vaccination status. Six were hospitalized for isolation or treatment of complications. 


At CNN, back in December, Arthur Allen wrote:

             

The availability of safe, effective covid vaccines less than a year into the pandemic marked a high point in the 300-year history of vaccination, seemingly heralding an age of protection against infectious diseases.

Now, after backlash against public health interventions culminated in President-elect Donald Trump’s nominating Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the country’s best-known anti-vaccine activist, as its top health official, infectious disease and public health experts and vaccine advocates say a confluence of factors could cause renewed, deadly epidemics of measles, whooping cough, and meningitis, or even polio.     

          

“The litany of things that will start to topple is profound,” said James Hodge, a public health law expert at Arizona State University’s Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law. “We’re going to experience a seminal change in vaccine law and policy.”

“He’ll make America sick again,” said Lawrence Gostin, a professor of public health law at Georgetown University.     


Earlier this week, Paul Krugman observed:


Now Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a crank who rejects vaccines in particular and medical science in general, is on track to become the Secretary of Health and Human Services. The National Institutes of Health have effectively been shut down. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have stopped releasing crucial data. If you go to CDC’s website, there’s a banner across the top reading “CDC’s website is being modified to comply with President Trump’s Executive Orders,” which mainly means purging anything that hints at concern over social inequality.

I don’t know this for sure, but my prediction is that the current purge of language will eventually turn into a purge of people, with the administration firing anyone suspected of being more loyal to science than they are to Donald Trump.

And all of this is highly likely to lead to many preventable deaths — hundreds of thousands, maybe millions.

How did this happen? Gradually, then suddenly.

What many people don’t understand about science is that it isn’t a set of Truths handed down from above. It is, instead, an attitude and a method. The attitude is that the world should be understood through observation and evidence, interpreted via hard thinking. The method involves formulating hypotheses and testing them against the facts.

Since someone will ask: Does economics qualify as a science? Well, sometimes. Much of the field involves deductive reasoning from a priori assumptions, hence the old joke that ends with the economist saying “Assume a can opener.” I’d say that such exercises can be useful, but then I would say that, given that it describes a lot of my own work. Beyond that, however, there has been a “credibility revolution” in economics in recent decades, with much greater efforts to ground the field in solid evidence.

But back to science in general: Because it’s a method rather than a set of declarations from on high, you can’t consume it a la carte, rejecting scientific results you dislike for political, cultural or religious reasons. Reject evolution, and you undermine the basis for much of biology, and hence medical science. Reject the case for climate change, and you undermine the physics and chemistry that underly that case.

And Republican politicians have been rejecting science they don’t like for a long time.


Chump will kill us all if given the chance.  


That was February 9th, today Steven Bennen (RACHEL MADDOW SHOW, MSNBC) explains Junior bombed in yesterday's cabinet meeting:






[. . .]


Can he learn?  Cassidy.  Can he learn?  Because I know Junior can't. 

"The Snapshot: (THE COMMON ILLS):

 Thursday, February 27, 2025.  Tabitha reminds "We did not have to be here It did not have to be this way,"  MAGA creeps in Congress don't want truth to come out in hearings, Alien Musk continues to lie, and much more.


Lets start with TABITHASPEAKS.


There were two choices in the fall of 2024: Kamala Harris or Convicted Felon Donald Chump.  There was no excuse then and there's no excuse now.  DSA launched their plan to attack Kamala and depress turnout and they got away with it because they control so much of the media.  If you're new to the topic, you can refer to these two pieces: "2024: The Year of Betrayal From Inside The Left." and "Media: How Amy Goodman harmed immigrants and helped elect Chump."


In 2028, if they try to start this same rat f**kery, we need to shut it down immediately.  Dropping back to 2023, Alex Seitz-Wald (NBC NEWS) reported:


At the DSA’s national convention in Chicago earlier this month, questions about whether the group should form an independent political party and how vigorously it should discipline members in elective office were front-and-center, with strong opinions on both sides.

But a resolution for a full “clean break” with the Democratic Party fell short and a Rhode Island DSA member who ran for the national political committee on an anti-Democratic Party platform did not succeed.

Renée Paradis, a member of the party's National Political Committee said opinion inside the DSA ranges widely, including those who want the group to be more active inside the Democratic Party.

But the consensus coming out of the convention, she said, remains that DSA should keep running candidates in Democratic primaries while building its own outside campaign infrastructure.

They have to pose as Democrats to win.  Socialism isn't going to carry them  into office in most districts.  So they have to lie.  And they lie about who they are in their books they write about each other -- their bad books that are nothing but a circle jerk --  and they have this whole deception that they pull.  If you're a Democrat and they start doing this in 2028, you need to be vocal and you need to call them out.  You need to point out that they aren't Democrats.  


One of the funniest things in watching 'brave' voices call out Ana of THE YOUNG TURKS is watching the people shy from noting that she was DSA.  


That's typical DSA.  I have friends in DSA but I am not DSA because that crap has always happened -- even with their predecessor.  They're more radical than thou and they want to tear down the system and then they get frustrated and they do their move to the right. 


As a DSA member, Ana got to host JACOBIN's podcast.  Why are we saying, 'She went from left over to MAGA"?  She went from Socialist over to MAGA.


They both want to tear down the system.  It's not that big of a leap and far too many DSAers have made that leap over the years.  


Kyle Kulinski is DSA.  He and Cenk came up with Justice "Democrats" because they knew Justice Socialists wouldn't work.  


Kyle seems like a caring person.  He can sometimes make a highly astute call.  


But we don't highlight him anymore.  


If you're a Socialist trying to pass yourself off as a Democrat, after 2024, we can't afford you.


Silly and Billy -- as Cenk calls THE VANGUARD's Zac and Gavin -- look more and more hypocritical with each day.  And more stupid.


What's the latest from the world of domestic Socialism?  Ask Zac and Cody!  Don't ask Zac and Gavin because they're incapable of honesty.  

Doubt it?


"Bernie's back!"


From where?  


He's yacking again.  He's good with words from time to time, he just can't deliver.  The kids don't grasp that.  They don't realize that he was called out for his fake assery for years and years but his excuse was "I can't do this or that because I'm in the House and have to run every two years for re-election."  And a number of us bought that excuse -- I donated to his first Senate run.  He never did anything.  In the Senate now for decades and he has nothing to show for it.


But Zac and Gavin are on board!  They are going to vote for him in 2028 for president!!!!!


Do they realize that this is why they look like freaks to the rest of us?


In 2028, Bernie will be 87 years old.  


It's a four year term.  


87 years old.  Older than Joe Biden was when he was president, older than Donald Chump will be when he finishes his four year term.


87 years old.


They are whining constantly like two little bitches about this age or that age.  Gerry Connolly  shouldn't have been picked to chair that committee, it should have been AOC.  I argued that here.


I remember THE VANGUARD making an argument on that as well: Gerry was too old.

Gerry is 74 years old.  They said he was too old.  But now they're wasting our time on Bernie needs to run in 2028 for president --- when he will be 87?


I can disagree with you and still have some respect for your opinion -- unless you're a hypocrite.


That's why we called out Jimmy Dore to begin with.  And this is also true of Zac and Gavin.


They feel that a primary was stolen.  2016.  Now they are too stupid and too ignorant to go into the 2008 primary and the world only began for them in 2016 as they nursed on Bernie's tits.  But Bernie was done wrong and blah blah blah.  Yet these same people were trashing the Green Party for not making Jesse Ventura their 2016 presidential nominee.


They insisted the DNC rigged 2016 (and they have a point) but then they want to argue that the Greens should have rigged the primary.  Because that's what they're advocating for.  Jesse wouldn't run for the nomination, other people were declared candidates for the nomination.  But they're supposed to ignore that and give him the nomination?


Their hypocrisy is only surpassed by their sheer stupidity.


Last week or the week before, they were attacking Jon Stewart and I didn't pay attention, don't really care.  I like Jon as a person, I've known him for years.  I did not like what THE DAILY SHOW did in the lead up to the election -- which included "that's so gay" as a 'joke' and I thought we had all surpassed that nonsense by the '00s.  They also did a number of 'jokes' that weren't funny and were just Jon both siding it.  Because Jon wants to be seen as fair by both sides.


Guess what, Jon? MAGA isn't fair.  They lie and they lie again.  And if you're not being threatened by them, you're not telling the truth.


I like Jon, I've known him for years.  But as the election approached and he pulled his usual nonsense, we backed away.  I have no intention of ever highlighting THE DAILY SHOW here again.  It does more harm than good.


A week or two ago, the YOUTUBERs were attacking Jon. Fine, I don't really care.  Except . . .


When real issues could have been addressed we got the Zac and Codys doing their YOUTUBE segments about how we needed to run Jon Stewart for president.


I'm tired of the stupidity.  I'm so tired of the stupidity.  


I think Senator Patty Murry is one of our best US senators.  I've thought that for some time.  I had a heated argument with an editor as MS.MAGAZINE when they were intentionally overlooking her while covering other Dem 'sheroes.'  Patty's a workhorse who will work on an issue and work on an issue and even if she hits a wall she'll continue working. 


If she runs in 2029 (that would be her next election), I'm not going to be trying to turn out the vote.  She's 74 right now.  And I love Patty.  I think she's done amazing work and think her work as Chair of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee was outstanding.  


But I'm not Zac and Cody.  "BERNIE! BERNIE!  RUN BERNIE!"  


Just grow the hell up.  There's no way in the world that an 87 year old Bernie Sanders can walk -- he can't run -- for president.


While they're jerking off to their fantasies and wasting everyone's time, Senator Roger Wicker won't let Senator Elizabeth Warren finish a statement in a hearing.   That 'mean'  Elizabeth Warren wanted a corporation to explain how they ran a hospital into the ground.  Wicker, of course, was present to protect the corporation and to punish the people.  And then you had US House Rep James Comer refusing to let US House Rep Max Frost speak.  What's going on?


MAGA is sinking as is their leader. 

 EJ Montini (ARIZONA REPUBLIC) reports:


Where is co-president Elon Musk and his snotnosed band of pubescent hackers when Donald Trump needs them?

You’d have thought that with all the whiz-bang computer skills Musk claims his nerd bros possess, they’d have been able to weasel their way into the data collection systems of some big-time pollsters and jack up the numbers for the co-commander in chief.

 But I guess not.

Because it ain’t good news.

According to the most recent Gallup poll, Trump is the least popular president in more than 70 years.

Or, as the company put it on its website: “Trump’s job approval rating is 15 points below the historical average for all other elected presidents in mid-February since 1953.”


Here's some reality that Silly & Billy can't make time for.  This is the high water mark.  The first 100 days are the high water mark in terms of popularity for presidents.  And once the rot sets in, public opinion only hardens against them.  

MAGAs can't handle the truth so they shut it down.  Comer was insisting that calling Chump "the grifter in chief" was disrespectful to Chump.  I think Chump's use of porn actress and prostitutes and roll dogging around with the late Jeffrey Epstein and the accusations of assault from all the women pretty much exempt Chump from respect -- as does the 34 felony convictions he received.






Tom Boggioni (RAW STORY) notes of the video segment above:


"I honestly have never in my life seen anything so outrageous as that," she began. "Now, I know there's a lot of things that are outrageous that impact American's lives every day so don't yell at me online. But this is really, really bad. "

"What they're saying is, if you criticize the president of the United States as an elected member of Congress, we will silence you," she continued. "I mean, that's a really good way to lose the midterms."

Addressing the video clip, she added, "I hope that that goes viral, because the truth is, the only thing we know about what Musk and Trump are doing in all these federal agencies is what he puts on his privately owned social media. He owns it privately, I mean, it is something that he bought for billions of dollars, and now he is lifting it up."


Senator Elizabeth Warren's office issued the following regarding yesterday's hearing:

Trump Nominee Seeks A Top Pentagon Leadership Role

Video of Exchange (YouTube)

Washington, D.C. – At a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee, U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) questioned Mr. Stephen A. Feinberg, President of Cerberus Capital Management and nominee for Deputy Secretary of Defense, about his troubled private equity history and his qualifications for the job of second-in-command at the Pentagon. 

Senator Warren called out Mr. Feinberg’s involvement in Steward Health Care, a now-bankrupt hospital system, which once owned 31 hospitals nationwide. In Massachusetts specifically, Mr. Feinberg enriched himself and his investors at the expense of the hospitals, sucking out over $700 million while leaving the hospitals understaffed, underresourced, and severely indebted. In part due to his corporate extraction, the system went bankrupt and, two Massachusetts hospitals shut down for good, leaving Massachusetts communities without access to the care they need. 

Mr. Feinberg claimed Steward hospitals were doing “well” at the time Cerberus sold the company. However, “[m]any Steward hospitals were financially struggling as Cerberus began to make its exit in 2020,” according to the Private Equity Stakeholder Project. More importantly, before he left, Mr. Feinberg sold the hospitals’ real estate, cashing out the profits but leaving the hospitals with massive liabilities in the form of years of increasing lease payments for the land they used - a key factor in the hospitals’ 2024 bankruptcy.

Mr. Feinberg claimed he “turned [Steward] around, fixed them, grew them, [and] had a tremendous amount of success.” However, he slashed a full medical center, a primary and specialty care unit, a surgery department, an urgent care department, and a VA Clinic at a Quincy Medical Center, leaving nothing but an emergency room. Additionally, just two years after Cerberus took over Steward, nurses in Massachusetts filed more than 1,000 “unsafe staffing” complaints, a significant increase from previous years.

Transcript: Hearing to Consider the Nomination of Mr. Stephen A. Feinberg to be Deputy Secretary of Defense
U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee 
February 25, 2025 

Senator Elizabeth Warren: So, Mr. Feinberg, you’ve been nominated to be Deputy Secretary of Defense, in charge of DOD’s $850 billion budget. Your main qualification is that you have built one of the world’s largest private equity companies. You’ve spent your entire career honing the private equity tools used to hollow out businesses, from department stores to veterinary practices. And, presumably, those are the skills that you would bring to the Department of Defense. So, I just want to look at how that’s worked.

Let’s start with how you treat people. In Massachusetts, in 2010, your private equity firm bought six non-profit hospitals, turned them into for-profit hospitals called Steward. Ten years later you cashed out, having made a profit a little shy of a billion dollars, and leaving behind a hospital system that was staggered under a load of debt and, four years later, collapsed into bankruptcy.

Now, Mr. Feinberg, when we met in my office, you told me that your private equity outfit made an average 23% annual return each year that you owned our hospitals. If Steward nurses had gotten the same 23% salary increases that your investors effectively got every year, do you know how much they would be paid at the time you sold off your hospitals?  

Mr. Stephen A. Feinberg, nominee for Deputy Secretary of Defense: Well, I do know that in 2010, the hospitals were going under, and we were asked – 

Senator Warren: I’m sorry, Mr. Feinberg, we’re going to have very limited time here and I actually want to spend it on your qualifications to do this job. And it’s about how you treat people. The average nurse in the Steward hospitals at the time you bought them made $85,120. 

At a 23% annual raise, how much money would they be making right now? 

Mr. Feinberg: I’m not going to do the math, but what I could tell you – 

Senator Warren: Okay, I’ll do the math for you. $829,828. Now, of course, the nurses didn’t do that well. During that same period of time, Carney Hospital, one of the hospitals you bought in Massachusetts, raised nurse salaries about 1.5% a year - and that was the best increase across the Steward hospitals that you were running. 

Mr. Feinberg: That’s incorrect. 

Senator Warren: In other words, you seem to think that when it is time to reorganize a business, that equity should get about fifteen times as much return on their investment as the people who actually do the work.

So, let’s take a look at the second issue, and that is maintaining critical functions – 

Mr. Feinberg: Senator, would you like me to respond to Steward? Because a lot of inaccurate statements. 

Senator Warren: We need to make cuts at the Department of Defense, but we also need to maintain our national security.  

Chair Wicker: Mr. Feinberg, she’s entitled to make a speech. 

Mr. Feinberg: I apologize. 

Chair Wicker: She’s entitled to go on and on. 

Senator Warren: So let’s go back to Steward Hospitals. Did you cut fat or cut vital functions?  

Now, Mr. Feinberg, the town of Quincy used to have a full medical center, with primary and specialty care, a surgery department, an urgent care department, and a VA Clinic. That was its basic function. After your private equity company finished with it, what was left?

Mr. Feinberg: Well, when we exited the investment in 2020, the company was doing well –

Senator Warren: I’m asking what was left of the Quincy hospital. When you took it over – 

Chair Wicker: Now, Senator, he’s trying to answer a question. You finally stopped for a breath. 

Senator Warren: Well, that’s what I’m asking – 

Chair Wicker: Do you intend to let him at least have maybe 20, 30 seconds to answer a question? 

Senator Warren: Well, can I have my time back? 

Chair Wicker: Yes, I said you’re entitled to make a speech, but you stopped for – you stopped with a question mark and he started to try to answer the question. 

Senator Warren: All right, what’s the answer to the question? What was left of the Quincy hospital? That was my question. 

Mr. Feinberg: Lots happened after we exited. And there has been mismanagement. We did save – 

Senator Warren: My clarifying question: what was left when you exited? 

Mr. Feinberg: I’m not certain about that – 

Senator Warren: It was an emergency room, and nothing more.  

Mr. Feinberg: But, but, we took those hospitals from collapse in 2010 – we were going to shut it down as the tenth largest employer in Massachusetts, turned them around, fixed them, grew them, had a tremendous amount of success, worked closely with the governor, and the problems with Steward happened after we exited the investment. 

Senator Warren: I am asking about questions as you exited and during the period of time you ran it. Now, of course, a hospital is supposed to provide good quality care—and that takes qualified nurses and other staffers. Mr. Feinberg, for the hospitals that didn’t close down, during the time you ran it, do you know how many “unsafe staffing” complaints were filed?

Mr. Feinberg: I do know the vast majority of problems happened after we left. And by the way, our nurses were among the highest paid in the country.

Senator Warren: Is that a no, that you don't know how much? How many “unsafe staffing” complaints were filed? 

Mr. Feinberg: I don’t know. 

Senator Warren: Well, let me tell you. There were over a thousand filed, that is five times the normal rate in Massachusetts. 

Mr. Feinberg: What year was that? 

Senator Warren: These are the years that you were in control. For the two hospitals – 

Chair Wicker: Senator Warren, perhaps you would like to take another round?

Senator Warren: No, I’d like to just finish. I just have a quote. 

Chair Wicker: Your time is expired, Senator. Your time is expired. 

Senator Warren: I spent a great deal of that time listening to the Chairman telling me how I have to conduct my questions. 

Chair Wicker: The senator's time is expired. 

Senator Warren: Could I just close? 

Chair Wicker: Senator Sullivan. 

Senator Warren: Could I just close, Mr. Chairman? I’d just like to say why I care about this issue. 

Chair Wicker: The senator's time has expired. She can have another round.

###




So what's really going?  MAGA members of Congress are finding it difficult to go home. People are too upset with the lousy job MAGA is doing.  So what they're trying to do in the halls of Congress now is to shut down all truth.  So James Comer, for example, just screams and hisses and thinks back to those teenage years and that cow that really touched him -- in a way no human female ever could.  Mooooo, Comer, moooooo.



Despite doubling the number of listed contracts, the updated itemized savings now total $9.6 billion, a sharp drop from the original $16.6 billion in savings DOGE itemized last week. At the same time, DOGE is now claiming total savings of $65 billion — far higher than the amount itemized, and an increase from its earlier claim of $55 billion, much of which has previously been called into question. 

$65 billion is approximately 0.9% of the entire 2024 federal budget of $6.75 trillion. 

DOGE's website claims this higher figure includes savings from contract and lease terminations, renegotiations, grant cancellations, layoffs and other miscellaneous reductions, but DOGE has not supplied documentation for the vast majority of the savings it claims.

In addition, $144.6 million is attributed to real estate savings, but DOGE has provided no supporting details beyond the dollar figure, agency and city, making independent verification difficult.

You get it, right?  DOGE is the most visible of Chump's programs.  And it's a complete and utter failure.  MAGA members of Congress don't want to talk about that. 



Elon Musk, billionaire presidential vizier and de facto head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), has long feuded with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), an agency that has fined his aerospace company SpaceX while conducting unwelcome oversight. Now, amid an alarming spate of air travel accidents - including a deadly mid-air collision of a passenger jet and a U.S. Army helicopter over Washington, D.C. last month, which President Donald Trump and allies callously tried to blame on cultural diversity - the tech oligarch has said DOGE will lead reforms at the FAA.

That might reassure some people impressed by videos of SpaceX's rockets, but on Tuesday afternoon, Musk, who did qualify for a private pilot certificate in 2002, seemed baffled by some of the basics of air travel. In a post on X - the misinformation-heavy social media site Musk shaped from the remains of Twitter, after buying the platform for $44 billion in 2022 - supply chain company CEO Ryan Petersen shared a screenshot of the projected flight path of a United Airlines flight from San Francisco to Houston, which hewed close to the southern U.S. border with Mexico. "Why is this plane not flying in a straight line?" Petersen wondered. Musk replied, "It should be."

While both men appeared to suggest there was something irregular or suspicious about the flight plan, this was not the case. Planes may take certain less direct routes due to weather, air traffic, or any number of factors. Indeed, Musk's own private jet has flown on curved trajectories, as captured in screenshots of flight records shared on X by Jack Sweeney, a software engineer who has worked for American Airlines and the aviation consultant UberJets, and famously aroused Musk's ire by tracking the movements of his private jet with ElonJet, a network of social accounts. (Sweeney has also monitored the flight activity of Taylor Swift, Russian oligarchs, and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, and his company Ground Control aims to provide "unrestricted air traffic data" to all.) Sweeney posted the flight path that Trump's plane took from Southern Florida to Texas in November ahead of a SpaceX launch, which for a while hugged the coastline of the Gulf of Mexico instead of tracing a straight line over the body of water.

"There are countless reasons why a flight might not follow a straight path - weather, [Extended-range Twin-engine Operations Performance Standards] regulations, or optimizing fuel efficiency by following favorable winds," Sweeney stated on X. 

Sweeney tells Rolling Stone that Petersen and Musk appeared to be "jumping to conclusions" to "push a point that our system is outdated, which, there's definitely things that can be updated." But, he adds, it's a complex system currently in place, and "there are reasons things were designed the way they were," including with established routes in the sky that function as aerial highways. "It takes time for things to get updated properly," he adds, which it seems that Musk's DOGE has not taken into account as it seeks to slash away at vital federal agencies, including the FAA.

It's because Alien Musk doesn't know anything.  He's never worked in these agencies, he's unfamiliar with them since he grew up in South Africa.  He knows nothing.  








Musk's ignorance is harming the American people.  Carl Gibson reports:



"In the time that i was at VA, what I saw was a bunch of dedicated employees trying to do their best to maintain VA.gov and keep it online and secure. But they were overworked. There just weren't enough people to do all the work," Kamens said. "And now with me being gone and other people being gone because DOGE has fired them or fired them by proxy through VA, there's even fewer people to do the work. And it's inevitable when you don't have enough people to maintain the cybersecurity of VA.gov or any other website, it's going to deteriorate and eventually there's going to be an incident."




For decades, the anti-abortion movement has aggressively promoted women into visible leadership roles. It's for cynical reasons, namely, to bat off entirely accurate accusations that the movement is misogynist. Never mind that there have always been women who are eager to police the bodies and behavior of other women. Enough people are credulous or at least disingenuous enough to think that "I'm a woman, which means I can't hate other women" is an actual argument. For ambitious women who wanted to climb the ranks of Republican politics, anti-feminism has long been the steadiest of ladders. The propaganda value of their gender outweighed their party's larger hostility to women in leadership. 

But now that Roe v. Wade has been overturned and Donald Trump is back in the White House, many on the right feel they no longer need to hide the naked sexism fueling their movement or put up with the annoyance of women in even token leadership positions. As Kiera Butler at Mother Jones reports, the anti-abortion movement is embroiled in an escalating civil war right now over these issues. Male leaders of the Christian right have been swarming Kristan Hawkins, the 39-year-old head of a "student" anti-abortion group, demanding her ejection from the movement. It started after she objected to Republican legislators introducing bills to charge women who get abortions with murder, an extreme move she fears will backfire on the movement. But mostly it was about growing male anger on the Christian right that women are allowed leadership positions at all. 

"Removed [sic] this woman from public service," declared influential Christian nationalist pastor Joel Webbon, part of the "TheoBros" movement that includes the leadership of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's church. Soon other TheoBros jumped in, declaring "We need Christian men leading the fight against abortion," arguing that women's suffrage was a mistake, and accusing Hawkins of emasculating her husband by being "busy jet-setting."
Forty-five percent of female voters backed Trump in 2024, despite his overt misogyny. Most, no doubt, believed that complicity would protect them and that the attacks would be centered on other women. But while the GOP certainly wants to strip liberal and feminist women of their rights, male MAGA leaders are showing increasing interest in bringing Republican women to heel, both culturally and through the force of law. After all, they are more likely to live and work with Republican women. If they want to feel the full flowering of male domination, it's Republican women they need to see submitting. 

Webbon and the TheoBros have been clamoring more loudly in recent months about their wish to strip women, especially their own wives, of the right to vote. "You won't let women vote? Well, our society doesn't let five-year-olds vote," Webbon explained in a May podcast. He added that "a woman is like a child" and that "God has appointed men to protect them." As Sarah Stankorb at the New Republic documented, there has been growing support in Christian nationalist circles "for the repeal of the 19th Amendment and support a 'household vote' system in which men vote on behalf of their families." Hegseth's former sister-in-law reports she heard him echo similar sentiments. 


The following sites updated: