Until they caught him at it one day.
TL fans unite!
We used to joke that Bush was an Aggie. He wasn’t, so that was kinda unfair. Perry, however…
Time to update the fantastic (or possibly, fantastical) list of Trump appointments!
We’ll start with the EPA. For comparison, for folks not familiar with the present Obama appointee, it’s Gina McCarthy, an impressively intelligent and eloquent woman (I’ve seen several interviews with her) who has a 25-year career as an environmental administrator, an adviser to five Massachusetts governors, a former head of the Connecticut state environmental agency, and an M.Sc. in in Environmental Health Engineering and Planning and Policy from Tufts.
Trump’s pick? Myron Ebell, a blithering imbecile who ekes out a mendacious living as a climate change denier for the libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute* with the principal function of spreading lies about climate science. “Ebell repeatedly referred to climate scientists as ‘global warming alarmists’ and suggested that climate research is in fact an arm of a coordinated political movement … ‘He doesn’t really know anything about science,’ said Gavin Schmidt, director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies and a top Earth scientist at NASA who has faced off with Ebell in the past … Ebell’s technique, Schmidt said, is to point toward “some little fact” and use it to extrapolate some larger irrelevant and scientifically incorrect point.”
- CEI is the outfit that once put out a couple of TV ads about how terrific CO2 is because it makes plants grow, with the tag line “They call it pollution. We call it life.” The ads became a laughingstock of the media and didn’t last long.
The pick for Education Secretary is, if such a thing were possible, even more of a black comedy. Betsy DeVos comes from a billionaire family that is the very inner circle of the most powerful Republican-aligned wealth in the country with long-time links to the Koch brothers, and is one of their principal donors and staunch advocates of their far-right libertarian ideals. DeVos and family have donated hundreds of millions to far-right causes and lobbyists. Her father-in-law was RNC finance chair during the Reagan years before being removed for unpalatable comments like saying that “anyone who was unemployed simply didn’t want to work” and later being charged with criminal tax fraud; her brother is the founder of the Blackwater private paramilitary company that became so infamously disreputable in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Betsy herself has been the principal in some of the most extreme of this Republican lobbying, pushing for school vouchers versus public education, and lobbying intensively against SSM in multiple states. She has been quoted thusly:
“My family is the biggest contributor of soft money to the Republican National Committee,” she wrote in the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call. “I have decided to stop taking offense,” she wrote, “at the suggestion that we are buying influence. Now I simply concede the point. They are right. We do expect something in return. We expect to foster a conservative governing philosophy consisting of limited government and respect for traditional American virtues. We expect a return on our investment.”
“People like us,” she added archly, “must surely be stopped.”
A rather curious choice for a president-elect who promised that he was going to “drain the swamp” of Washington insiders, and who some endorsed as being not really a Republican.
Draining the swamp…and replacing it with a toxic waste dump.
It is worth noting that the DeVos family fortune primarily comes from co-ownership of Amway, the multi-level marketing (MLM) scheme that has bilked its “distributors” for billions of dollars by encourging them to buy inventories of cheap products that are difficult to sell and then encourage their friends and family members to join and do the same. Oddly enough, Last Week Tonight did a show on MLM companies just prior to the election.
“Draining the swamp” indeed. We need somewhere to build more soon-to-be bankrupt Trump casinos and hotels.
Stranger
Trump is reportedly considering David Petraeus for Secretary of State or possibly Defense. (Trump picks loyalists for economic posts, Obamacare critic for cabinet | Reuters). Finally! A Secretary of State who can be trusted with classified emails!
They never wanted Petreus charged in the first place. Just one more vivid example of the Republicans accusing others of doing things they give themselves a pass on. And then there’s Trump’s many conflicts of interest that are getting glossed over
I think I might actually tune in to some of the Senate confirmation hearings on C-Span this time around.
Tom Price at Health and Human Services.
We may end up wishing it had been Ben Carson!
Obviously I am not the target audience Trump has in mind with most/all of these appointments. Okay, fine.
I’m not especially conversant with the menagerie of what looks to me like far (far!)-right political figures + some amateurs being proposed to fill all these positions.
I’d appreciate a little help here. Can anyone draw some straight lines between the most ardent positions of Trump’s various picks and the benefits that will accrue because of these positions to the angry white people in their rural ghettos who voted him into office in the first place? One straight line per post would be just fine.
Thanks and God Bless!! 
Swamp drained.
Area now certified for nuclear waste.
Trump hasn’t announced very many Cabinet-level nominees yet, and none have been confirmed. Those that have been announced so far have mostly been political strategists and national security-related positions. For example, I don’t think anyone Trump (or Clinton) picked for CIA Director would have had many direct and tangible benefits for “the angry white people in their rural ghettos”.
I’ll give you two for one in this post though:
Betsy DeVos, as Education Secretary, seems likely to direct funding towards school choice, hopefully allowing poor people, even the angry white kind in rural ghettos, to escape failing public schools.
HHS Secretary Tom Price may take a leading role in dismantling some or all of ObamaCare and figuring out what to replace it yet. It’s all a bit speculative right now because we don’t know the details, but if you’re an angry white rural ghetto-dweller, odds are good you’d like to see ObamaCare repealed, and your chances of that happening are probably better with HHS Secretary Tom Price than with some of the others that were considered for the position.
:smack:
You don’t get to complain about us playing “chicken little”, then completely dismiss global warming as something people don’t care about. Yeah, a lot of people don’t give a shit. That’s a serious problem.
Also DeVos wants to basically end public schools. Great choice for education secretary.
There is nobody so corrupt and or incompetent that TinyHands could nominate that wouldn’t breeze through a Republican Senate
Betsy DeVos, who did not attend public schools and sent no children to public schools, is not interested in giving parents a choice. She wants to destroy the public school system. Public schools struggle because they are inadequately funded. Draining them of cash only makes it worse.
If you’re an angry white rural type, you want to see Obamacare repealed, not because it hurts you (it probably helps you), but because you are one dumb motherfucker. Price has no more intention of replacing the ACA than any other Republican. The idea is to repeal and make millions of people uninsured so that they can die the horrible deaths that they think poor people deserve.
I’d have to do my homework before I could have an opinion on DeVos. Bad schools are one thing the inner city and poor rural areas have in common, and that leaves people unprepared to succeed in today’s world. What’s the answer? Dunno. Thanks for yours.
As for Price, yeah, he definitely wants to get rid of the ACA. Hope it doesn’t come across as trolling by my pressing the point but, how does that help poor angry white people again? Right now they can get subsidized insurance. Post-Price they get… nothing? Yay? 
I see the word “replace” there, but NO GOP bigwig has ever elaborated on that AFAIK. They just won’t talk about it. In this context, I really think it is an empty box.
There is something in the box, but its rather small, like a dessicated peanut…
Riiiiight… seeing as how many of those poor folks are Republicans :rolleyes:
As long as they can keep directing their hate at Muslims and gays and minorities and make them afraid of losing their guns, the poor rural whites will happily give up their medical care and Social Security and die earlier deaths rather than help any member of “the other”, so they will keep punching that GOP ticket.
I think there’s precious little correlation between school funding and performance, but I’d like to see your cite.
I don’t think that the Trump voters would put it quite that way, but essentially I think it boils down to the following (not that they would acknowledge it)
The Trump voter feels that they have lost out over the past 20 years, and have moved down the economic ladder rather than up. This may or may not be actually true, but they have been conditioned by their right-wing sources to ignore actual facts, and focus on their “feelings”.
Their “feelings” tell them that they used to be on top of the pile, but now they are near the bottom. Their solution is to find someone to crap on - Gays, muslims, and “liberals” fit the bill. As part of this crapping, they want to punish someone. If that means removing health care from others (strangers) so that they are moved to the bottom of the pile, so be it. If it means that poor people die… well that just makes them feel a bit more important and better than someone. So that’s essentially what they want - others to be hated, marginalized and even denied healthcare, as long as that means that they FEEL better about themselves.