I’ve suggested that the time has come to bring the Clusterfuck thread to its natural conclusion, and that we should now have a thread devoted specifically to all actions by the Biden Administration and Congress (and any other parties) to repair the damage. This effort will be a project enough, apart from all the other forward-looking activities we look forward to in the next few years. Unfucking the Clusterfuck will be a backward-looking project, looking back on all the mayhem and wreckage of the Trump years, and trying to fix as much as we can as fast as we can.
I think it is worthy to have a thread devoted specifically to that project.
What will the Biden Administration do? How many Trump appointees, policies, and regulations can be un-done, and how quickly? Can people like DeJoy be promptly shown the door? Can we get all those kids out of the cages?
Let’s discuss it here. Let the Un-Clusterfucking begin!
ETA: Note that I am specifically putting this thread here in Politics and Elections, not in the Pit. It may be a backward-looking thread, but unfucking the Clusterfuck is a positive thing we can all think highly of. Pit-worthy language should be perfectly acceptable here, as appropriate, but the overall attitude of the thread should be positive!
What I look forward to seeing most of all, and as quickly as possible, is a massive purging and detrumpification of the Executive branch.
EVERY Trump appointee (directly or indirectly) should be reviewed and MOST of them should be kicked out. Not much we can do about all the judges.
I am concerned about people who have fixed terms (I mentioned DeJoy above). AIUI, these people can be fired for good cause, but cannot be arbitrarily fired just at the President’s whim. Who are these people, and what can be done to axe them?
I likewise look forward to a massive review of EVERY Executive Order that Trump signed, with a view to repeal or amend as many as need to be repealed or amended (which I would expect would be a very great many of them).
The Biden administration has taken down the “1776 Commission Report” webpage. It was up for only about a day. I downloaded the report, which is an unbelievable right-wing wishlist version of history. Sort of “A Patriot’s History of the United States” Lite.
(A Patriot’s History of the United States is supposed to be a counterblast to Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, even down to copying the form of the title and even its typeface. I started reading it because I was curious to see how they answered Zinn’s stories about the atrocities of Columbus. They did it by basically ignoring them. A Patriot's History of the United States - Wikipedia )
Well, actually it wasn’t my idea or preference, but there was quickly an objection by someone to having the F-word in the thread title. So I reported that to the mods for their consideration. For the record, the original thread title was
Just having Trump out of office is a start. Not having a conspiracy theorist as president is going to help immensely.
@DrDeth mentioned rolling up his sleeves and getting to work, which is the tone that his inaugural address struck. He didn’t waste a lot of time speaking in platitudes; it was pretty much low-key, as if to say “Thanks for this little party and all, but let’s not waste time here; let’s get to work.”
The Biden-Harris transition team issued a press release this morning or last night outlining his day-one plans. It seems to have gotten munged in a transition of the website to whitehouse.gov, but you can read it here, courtesy of the Internet Archive.
Chase down, purge, and rebuild anything that has that ghoul Stephen Miller’s fingerprints on that. 1776, census hit job…those are all his trademarks. I’m convinced that guy was the real power behind Trump.
Here’s a clear example of the detrumpification I want to see done by Biden and reported/discussed in this thread: From the thread about Trump appointing Michael Ellis as NSA General Counsel:
Here’s Biden firing a Trump appointee who was appointed for a fixed term, before that term is up.
Here’s another example of detrumpification, copied from the Biden First 1500 Days thread: Biden isn’t fucking around!
Biden has canned three Trump appointees already:
Michael Pack, the Voice of America guy who’s been trashing that and several related organizations;
Kathleen Kraninger (this is a name I haven’t even seen before), Trump’s head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (remember, the agency that Elizabeth Warren was supposed to head);
Peter Robb, Trump’s head of the National Labor Relations Board (this is the same guy mentioned in the above post).
Don’t want to create a major hijack, but this strikes me as extremely selfish and entitled. Where do people get off telling people to change something like this and why do we censor ourselves to appease them? Clutch your pearls elsewhere. /hijack
Someone on MSNBC and an interesting observation tonight. One of the things Trump learned to do was to do so many stupid things at once that it was hard to push back on all of them. Biden might be doing the same, but with good things. The moment you want to protest rejoining the Paris Accords he freezes deportations. What’s a reactionary to do?
