Have your passports up to date. You may be able to travel to another country to get your flu shot (as well as any other vaccines you may need).
And get any other vaccines you're not up to date on (such as the new RSV vaccine, and Shingrex) NOW, while they are still available! You can get them at a pharmacy, and you don't need a prescription!
And a wonderful cherry to top of this health care massacre sundae: Measles cases have now been reported in New Jersey and Kentucky, in addition to the ongoing spread in Texas and New Mexico.
This would be a very good time to get up to date on your vaccines (including boosters for MMR, TDaP, and polio if it's been a few decades since your immune system last saw those those). Get those vaccines while you still can!
The guillotines of 18th-century France did not drop in a vacuum. They were not an arbitrary burst of bloodlust, nor were they the spontaneous rage of a misguided mob. They were the culmination of decades of unchecked wealth hoarding, exploitation, and an elite class that believed itself untouchable-until it wasn’t.
Exactly! Remember that "Bugs Life" movie? At some point the ants DO realize that they don't have to take the grasshopper's abuse.
Fun fact, the New Deal actually saved the rich capitalists. Communism was spreading world-wide. The plutocrats literally kept their heads because of the New Deal. The current crop of wealth hoarders aren't smart enough to understand!
There's a moment in Ken Burns' documentary The Roosevelts that I find haunting. Someone tells FDR at the start of his first term that if he fails, he'll go down in history as the worst US president. FDR's response was "No. I won't be the worst President. I will be the LAST President."
He knew what was at stake if the Great Depression continued on the same course.
That's what I still don't understand. Politically, we're at the exact same point. However, we're not in the midst of the Great Depression. We're coming off 4 years of a strong economy. The two high school trans athletes in MI really upset folks.
Apparently half the country doesn't believe our economy is strong. They live in an alternate reality, but they are going to get one HELL of a wakeup when Trump crashes the economy for real. This has the potential to make 2008 look like a garden party.
SO MUCH INSANITY IN TODAY’S NEWSLETTER. I’d love to hear what possible good there is in decimating our defenses against infectious disease! Are billionaires and MAGAts immune to the flu and whatever other horrors could come our way? This is just beyond senseless in a world full of senseless-ness!
Also,Hatch Act dork here. 34 year civil servant. Absolutely wearing that stupid hat is a violation. I never even wore a small political button on my purse to work. One employee was obsessed with the Bush/Gore fiasco and talked about it too much— was fired. There were all kinds of hatch act violations in shit show 1.0, nothing ever enforced so why would it be now.
"I'm hearing from experts around the world about what the destruction of USAID is meaning: "a global health massacre," in the words of a doctor who has devoted her life to humanitarian work on the front lines. Millions of malnourished children left to starve. Pregnant women not getting micronutrients to prevent neural tube defects. Programs against schistosomiasis abandoned. HIV positive patients left without ARV's. Water no longer purified. Surveillance against Ebola and bird flu set back. TB patients unable to get medicine. I've long argued that USAID should be reformed, but this Trump/Musk demolition is cruel and incompetent and benefits China, while killing children just as wonderful as our own.
This is the question everyone should have been asking before they made the MAD man/child King wannabe; president for a second time? Everything happening today, is going exactly as planned; for Musk and the rest of Trump’s Oligarch class. The rest of us; not so much!
I just went to the website for the secretary of state. There is a link at the bottom to "contact". Sent an email to little marco challenging him to find a spine and resign in protest.
If there's ANY attempt to be "efficient" here, it's clear that they're doing an extremely bad job. Truly efficient audits (1) are done by experts, because "efficient" means "reaches its goal in the cheapest, fastest, and most "high-quality" way possible, and you cannot know that without profound experience on the ground, and (2) do not pause the programs that are being audited since you HAVE to SEE them at work to be able to have the material needed to do an audit in the first place.
Musk is doing the exact opposite with his chainsaw approach combined with an "audit" team with no real auditor and only tweens who are supposedly good at writing computer code and planting AI in the entire government's computer system.
So although I strongly appreciate all the details and facts mentioned here (we absolutely HAVE to know them and spread the info), I feel as if we urgently need a deeper level of investigation and analysis, because if not, they'll always be one step ahead of us.
First observation when we analyze the facts rather than merely reporting them: this is clearly NOT about government "efficiency" at all.
Second important observation, or rather, question to investigate: if it's not about government efficiency, then what it IS it about?
As we started to see in Bill's recent interview with Anne Applebaum: it's all about installing TYRANNY in the US, so it's about "revolutionary change", as one Trump official called it yesterday that ends three centuries of democracy in the US and replaces the thousands of mechanism guaranteeing it in daily life, to replace it with a dictatorship or fascism, characterized by the end of checks and balances and the bundles ("fasces" = "bundle" in Latin) of the powers of Congress and the courts into the power of the executive.
Since that is SO very clearly what they're doing, I continue to hope that The Bulwark will shift to not just reporting the news (even though that remains more important than ever before, with the WH taking over the WHCA), but also launching the debate about what is truly going on beyond a moment by moment description of who does what. We HAVE to get to the WHY level asap.
Applied to today's events: WHY DO THEY WANT TO CUT USAID?
At face value, it doesn't make any sense: who would want the wealthiest country on Earth to stop spending less than 1% of its budget on life-saving foreign aid which, on top of its clear impact in terms of "charity" (a key Christian value, and this government wants to spread Christian nationalism), is also an important tool in spreading democratic values all over the world and countering the influence of China and Russia in the developing world?
The answer is clear: the only reason why anyone would want to stop spreading pro-democracy values and would want to actively let fascist regimes fill in the void is because you WANT to spread fascist values instead.
Paul Manafort, who did so for years in Ukraine, is back and taking up his former role again. Steve Bannon and Sebastian Gorka are both back in the WH, after they helped Orban install fascism in Hungary. And the tech billionaires, as historian Quinn Slobodian explains in "Crack-up Capitalism - A World Without Democracy", have dreamt of installing fascism everywhere for years already.
THAT is why they end USAID even though only Congress can legally make this decision. Only fascists do NOT want to invest in spreading democratic values, and only fascists want to take over controlling the purse strings from Congress - and only fascists would ignore court orders mandating them to immediately pay the $2 billion of life-saving aid that Rubio promised he wouldn't block any longer.
So let's finally have the debate, in that case: why is it that today, in the 21st century, democracy is still the best possible form of governance? What are the main arguments of America's neofascists against it, and why do we believe those arguments are all false?
I'm afraid that if we won't go there, and just stick with noticing how immoral it is to end USAID programs, we'll never get to the bottom of it and won't be able to fight back... "efficiently".
I challenge every single person who remotely purports to call themselves a journalist in Elon's vicinity to continually ask him why he doesn't just give up his company's govt contracts and his tax cuts to cut down the deficit.
I'm starting to think that all these cuts are aimed, consciously, at reducing the population by culling out the marginalized populations in society, both in the US and abroad.
A common thread in fascist movements is a deep disdain (bordering on homicidal) for the homeless, marginalized, and disabled, who are viewed as "creating an unnecessary burden on society." The Nazis went as far as wanting them culled and put their beliefs into action after taking power. Examples in MAGA include the lionization of Daniel Penny, an ex-Marine who put a lethal chokehold on a homeless man in a NY subway. Remember Trump openly complaining about the presence of disabled veterans in his ceremonies and wanting them removed. No surprise that the desire to remove all safety nets for the vulnerable is a feature, not a bug, of MAGA.
When we were in the thick of the covid pandemic, that was pretty much suggested in lieu of vaccine mandates. Let's just cull the weak ones to get to herd immunity.
Oh absolutely, I absolutely believe this.......I told a friend the other day that once Medicaid is gone we'll have barracks with cots lined wall to wall and people dying there while being tended to by volunteers who through donations have acquired morphine and Ativan to just give people comfortable deaths since there will be no money to treat them.......
I’m not sure anyone would suggest that there aren’t places where the federal government could be cut, but it’s a scalpel situation, not a meat axe. I worked in the corporate world for 40 years and went through my share of RIFs. They were never fun or easy, but they were done with thoughtful consideration of what could be done without damaging the underlying business operations. That’s what sets this DOGE BS apart. Musk and his coterie of flying monkeys either don’t know the damage they’re doing or they don’t care. Musk is the antithesis of a great leader and manager. Being a good investor and making a lot of money covers a host of sins.
They WANT this kind of damage to be done. This is EXACTLY what Project 2025 planned to do, and in "Dawn's Early Light" Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts explains why, in the mind of the new elites in DC, the only "way forward" is to "burn down all US institutions" first. This isn't a matter of incompetence, it's deliberately and based on a strong belief in neofascist ideology. We urgently have to come to terms with this fact, if not it will take us an eternity to develop effective strategies for fighting back.
They believe that every U.S. institution was taken over by "the left," and therefore the only way to "save America" is by "counterrevolution." They are not "conservative" by any reasonable definition.
An aside: Remind me of the name of the Harvard professor of Civil Procedure who said res judicata is a meat ax, collateral estoppel is a scalpel. Loved that guy!
This NYT headline is what I lost sleep over last night:
Unknown Deadly Illness Strikes Western Congo
The outbreak has been traced, tentatively, to three children who ate a bat, the W.H.O. said, and known threats like Ebola and Marburg have been ruled out.
This is not a pitch for a new Michael Crichton novel . . .
I think that expected scene where Trump will go around the table and get fawning tributes to himself from his cabinet is going to be one for the ages this time. 🙄
It was a tiny margin so NO the real great and good Americans did not vote for this. We didn't fall for the con.
I am worried about the flu vaccine. We are elderly and flu could kill us.
Have your passports up to date. You may be able to travel to another country to get your flu shot (as well as any other vaccines you may need).
And get any other vaccines you're not up to date on (such as the new RSV vaccine, and Shingrex) NOW, while they are still available! You can get them at a pharmacy, and you don't need a prescription!
And a wonderful cherry to top of this health care massacre sundae: Measles cases have now been reported in New Jersey and Kentucky, in addition to the ongoing spread in Texas and New Mexico.
This would be a very good time to get up to date on your vaccines (including boosters for MMR, TDaP, and polio if it's been a few decades since your immune system last saw those those). Get those vaccines while you still can!
These people are hideous. Ghouls, even.
The guillotines of 18th-century France did not drop in a vacuum. They were not an arbitrary burst of bloodlust, nor were they the spontaneous rage of a misguided mob. They were the culmination of decades of unchecked wealth hoarding, exploitation, and an elite class that believed itself untouchable-until it wasn’t.
Exactly! Remember that "Bugs Life" movie? At some point the ants DO realize that they don't have to take the grasshopper's abuse.
Fun fact, the New Deal actually saved the rich capitalists. Communism was spreading world-wide. The plutocrats literally kept their heads because of the New Deal. The current crop of wealth hoarders aren't smart enough to understand!
There's a moment in Ken Burns' documentary The Roosevelts that I find haunting. Someone tells FDR at the start of his first term that if he fails, he'll go down in history as the worst US president. FDR's response was "No. I won't be the worst President. I will be the LAST President."
He knew what was at stake if the Great Depression continued on the same course.
That's what I still don't understand. Politically, we're at the exact same point. However, we're not in the midst of the Great Depression. We're coming off 4 years of a strong economy. The two high school trans athletes in MI really upset folks.
Apparently half the country doesn't believe our economy is strong. They live in an alternate reality, but they are going to get one HELL of a wakeup when Trump crashes the economy for real. This has the potential to make 2008 look like a garden party.
SO MUCH INSANITY IN TODAY’S NEWSLETTER. I’d love to hear what possible good there is in decimating our defenses against infectious disease! Are billionaires and MAGAts immune to the flu and whatever other horrors could come our way? This is just beyond senseless in a world full of senseless-ness!
Also,Hatch Act dork here. 34 year civil servant. Absolutely wearing that stupid hat is a violation. I never even wore a small political button on my purse to work. One employee was obsessed with the Bush/Gore fiasco and talked about it too much— was fired. There were all kinds of hatch act violations in shit show 1.0, nothing ever enforced so why would it be now.
https://x.com/NickKristof/status/1895189825466311070.
"I'm hearing from experts around the world about what the destruction of USAID is meaning: "a global health massacre," in the words of a doctor who has devoted her life to humanitarian work on the front lines. Millions of malnourished children left to starve. Pregnant women not getting micronutrients to prevent neural tube defects. Programs against schistosomiasis abandoned. HIV positive patients left without ARV's. Water no longer purified. Surveillance against Ebola and bird flu set back. TB patients unable to get medicine. I've long argued that USAID should be reformed, but this Trump/Musk demolition is cruel and incompetent and benefits China, while killing children just as wonderful as our own.
2:10 PM · Feb 27, 2025"
It's not cruel and incompetent. It is EVIL. Let's start consistently using the right words, people!
“WHAT COULD GO WRONG:”
This is the question everyone should have been asking before they made the MAD man/child King wannabe; president for a second time? Everything happening today, is going exactly as planned; for Musk and the rest of Trump’s Oligarch class. The rest of us; not so much!
I just went to the website for the secretary of state. There is a link at the bottom to "contact". Sent an email to little marco challenging him to find a spine and resign in protest.
If there's ANY attempt to be "efficient" here, it's clear that they're doing an extremely bad job. Truly efficient audits (1) are done by experts, because "efficient" means "reaches its goal in the cheapest, fastest, and most "high-quality" way possible, and you cannot know that without profound experience on the ground, and (2) do not pause the programs that are being audited since you HAVE to SEE them at work to be able to have the material needed to do an audit in the first place.
Musk is doing the exact opposite with his chainsaw approach combined with an "audit" team with no real auditor and only tweens who are supposedly good at writing computer code and planting AI in the entire government's computer system.
So although I strongly appreciate all the details and facts mentioned here (we absolutely HAVE to know them and spread the info), I feel as if we urgently need a deeper level of investigation and analysis, because if not, they'll always be one step ahead of us.
First observation when we analyze the facts rather than merely reporting them: this is clearly NOT about government "efficiency" at all.
Second important observation, or rather, question to investigate: if it's not about government efficiency, then what it IS it about?
As we started to see in Bill's recent interview with Anne Applebaum: it's all about installing TYRANNY in the US, so it's about "revolutionary change", as one Trump official called it yesterday that ends three centuries of democracy in the US and replaces the thousands of mechanism guaranteeing it in daily life, to replace it with a dictatorship or fascism, characterized by the end of checks and balances and the bundles ("fasces" = "bundle" in Latin) of the powers of Congress and the courts into the power of the executive.
Since that is SO very clearly what they're doing, I continue to hope that The Bulwark will shift to not just reporting the news (even though that remains more important than ever before, with the WH taking over the WHCA), but also launching the debate about what is truly going on beyond a moment by moment description of who does what. We HAVE to get to the WHY level asap.
Applied to today's events: WHY DO THEY WANT TO CUT USAID?
At face value, it doesn't make any sense: who would want the wealthiest country on Earth to stop spending less than 1% of its budget on life-saving foreign aid which, on top of its clear impact in terms of "charity" (a key Christian value, and this government wants to spread Christian nationalism), is also an important tool in spreading democratic values all over the world and countering the influence of China and Russia in the developing world?
The answer is clear: the only reason why anyone would want to stop spreading pro-democracy values and would want to actively let fascist regimes fill in the void is because you WANT to spread fascist values instead.
Paul Manafort, who did so for years in Ukraine, is back and taking up his former role again. Steve Bannon and Sebastian Gorka are both back in the WH, after they helped Orban install fascism in Hungary. And the tech billionaires, as historian Quinn Slobodian explains in "Crack-up Capitalism - A World Without Democracy", have dreamt of installing fascism everywhere for years already.
THAT is why they end USAID even though only Congress can legally make this decision. Only fascists do NOT want to invest in spreading democratic values, and only fascists want to take over controlling the purse strings from Congress - and only fascists would ignore court orders mandating them to immediately pay the $2 billion of life-saving aid that Rubio promised he wouldn't block any longer.
So let's finally have the debate, in that case: why is it that today, in the 21st century, democracy is still the best possible form of governance? What are the main arguments of America's neofascists against it, and why do we believe those arguments are all false?
I'm afraid that if we won't go there, and just stick with noticing how immoral it is to end USAID programs, we'll never get to the bottom of it and won't be able to fight back... "efficiently".
I challenge every single person who remotely purports to call themselves a journalist in Elon's vicinity to continually ask him why he doesn't just give up his company's govt contracts and his tax cuts to cut down the deficit.
And then ask Musk if maybe Tesla is going to pay any 2024 income tax!
I'm starting to think that all these cuts are aimed, consciously, at reducing the population by culling out the marginalized populations in society, both in the US and abroad.
A common thread in fascist movements is a deep disdain (bordering on homicidal) for the homeless, marginalized, and disabled, who are viewed as "creating an unnecessary burden on society." The Nazis went as far as wanting them culled and put their beliefs into action after taking power. Examples in MAGA include the lionization of Daniel Penny, an ex-Marine who put a lethal chokehold on a homeless man in a NY subway. Remember Trump openly complaining about the presence of disabled veterans in his ceremonies and wanting them removed. No surprise that the desire to remove all safety nets for the vulnerable is a feature, not a bug, of MAGA.
When we were in the thick of the covid pandemic, that was pretty much suggested in lieu of vaccine mandates. Let's just cull the weak ones to get to herd immunity.
Oh absolutely, I absolutely believe this.......I told a friend the other day that once Medicaid is gone we'll have barracks with cots lined wall to wall and people dying there while being tended to by volunteers who through donations have acquired morphine and Ativan to just give people comfortable deaths since there will be no money to treat them.......
That sounds so much greater than paying taxes for real medical care. /s
I’m not sure anyone would suggest that there aren’t places where the federal government could be cut, but it’s a scalpel situation, not a meat axe. I worked in the corporate world for 40 years and went through my share of RIFs. They were never fun or easy, but they were done with thoughtful consideration of what could be done without damaging the underlying business operations. That’s what sets this DOGE BS apart. Musk and his coterie of flying monkeys either don’t know the damage they’re doing or they don’t care. Musk is the antithesis of a great leader and manager. Being a good investor and making a lot of money covers a host of sins.
They WANT this kind of damage to be done. This is EXACTLY what Project 2025 planned to do, and in "Dawn's Early Light" Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts explains why, in the mind of the new elites in DC, the only "way forward" is to "burn down all US institutions" first. This isn't a matter of incompetence, it's deliberately and based on a strong belief in neofascist ideology. We urgently have to come to terms with this fact, if not it will take us an eternity to develop effective strategies for fighting back.
They believe that every U.S. institution was taken over by "the left," and therefore the only way to "save America" is by "counterrevolution." They are not "conservative" by any reasonable definition.
An aside: Remind me of the name of the Harvard professor of Civil Procedure who said res judicata is a meat ax, collateral estoppel is a scalpel. Loved that guy!
This NYT headline is what I lost sleep over last night:
Unknown Deadly Illness Strikes Western Congo
The outbreak has been traced, tentatively, to three children who ate a bat, the W.H.O. said, and known threats like Ebola and Marburg have been ruled out.
This is not a pitch for a new Michael Crichton novel . . .
The CDC is on top of this, right?
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/25/world/africa/unknown-deadly-illness-congo.html?searchResultPosition=1
Send road kill eater RFK over there to personally check it out.
Apparently not. 😷
I think that expected scene where Trump will go around the table and get fawning tributes to himself from his cabinet is going to be one for the ages this time. 🙄
No new flu vaccine next year?! To everyone with asthma, COPD or other respiratory issues - stock up on N95 masks.