Cryptocurrency, Investing, Money, Economy, Business, and Debt:
Boss of car making giant Stellantis abruptly quits
Bitcoin Miner Marathon Buys $618 Million Worth of BTC
‘Italian’ purees likely to contain Chinese forced-labour tomatoes, BBC finds
Coronavirus News, Analysis, and Opinion:
Zoo Experiment Finds 1 in 5 Animals Test Positive For COVID-19 Virus
It’s a small sample from one zoo in Brazil. I wonder if other zoos might try the testing themselves to see if it’s more than a one-off result.
Politics:
News Media Missing the Story on Trump Appointees
The news media cannot get itself to plainly describe the extremist nature of Donald Trump’s administration picks to the public.
The latest example came this weekend, by way of Kash Patel.
When Trump announced that he intends to nominate Patel to serve as the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigations, the vast majority of news organizations declined to directly convey to readers in headlines and story ledes that the pick is a right-wing conspiracy theorist who has openly vowed to disfigure the law enforcement agency.
Instead, most newsrooms opted to use the far more muted adjective ‘loyalist’ to describe the appointment of Patel, as if there were any doubt that any of Trump’s picks would be anything but loyalists.
Charles Kushner and Kash Patel join Donny’s Confederacy of Sewer Clowns
a kakistocracy the likes of which no one has ever seen
Mike Davis Gets Around:
Trump’s Chief Legal Defender Vows a ‘Reign of Terror’ — Or Is It All an Act?
A whistle-blower report and other documents suggest that Trump’s nominee to run the Pentagon was forced out of previous leadership positions for financial mismanagement, sexist behavior, and being repeatedly intoxicated on the job.
The author of an email critical of Fox News host-turned-Trump Defense Secretary pick Pete Hegseth threatened New Yorkerwriter Jane Mayer that “if you print that, I will deny I wrote it,” and when Mayer reminded him “that it had been sent from the same personal e-mail account that he still uses,” the author wrote, “I don’t care. I’ll just say it never happened.”
Trump Vowed to Kill Biden’s Climate Law. Republicans Say Not So Fast.
Donald Trump’s campaign-trail vow to end President Biden’s signature climate law is running into a cold reality: Too many Republican lawmakers want to keep it.
The Inflation Reduction Act has channeled billions of dollars to renewable-energy projects across the country, with Republican-led states getting the lion’s share of the funding. Even though not a single Republican in the House or Senate backed the Democratic package, today there likely isn’t enough support in Congress to pass a repeal, according to Capitol Hill watchers and former Trump administration officials who worked on energy policy.
Kash Patel Pick Speaks Volumes About Trump’s Agenda
For Trump, naming Patel to the post serves several purposes. First, Trump is taking his razor-thin election win as a mandate to rule as he pleases, and Patel is the perfect nominee to prove that he doesn’t care what anyone else thinks. Even knowing what they know, Americans chose to return Trump to office, and he has taken their decision as a license to do whatever he wants—including giving immense power to someone like Patel.
Second, Trump wants to show that the objections of senior elected Republicans are of no consequence to him, and that he can politically flatten them at will. Some of his nominations seem like a trollish flex, a way to display his power by naming people to posts and daring others to stop him. Trump has always thought of the GOP as his fiefdom and GOP leaders as his vassals—and if the Senate folds on Patel and others, he may be proved right on both counts.
Trump insists on nominating clowns and buffoons and is himself inevitably a chaotic presence. But he also brings people like Vought with him into power. Many people tend to think that the extremists, the nutty MAGA people, are inherently incompetent; and that conversely, when you go up on the competence scale, you are likely to encounter fewer ideological extremists.
Vought, however, is a fully competent, utterly committed radical ideologue.
Serendipity:
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