Tag: President Trash the Place

  • Wham wham wham

    Trump and his gang are going to take an axe to federal programs.

    The departments of Commerce and Energy would see major reductions in funding, with programs under their jurisdiction either being eliminated or transferred to other agencies. The departments of Transportation, Justice and State would see significant cuts and program eliminations.

    The Corporation for Public Broadcasting would be privatized, while the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities would be eliminated entirely.

    Also…

    At the Department of Justice, the blueprint calls for eliminating the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, Violence Against Women Grants and the Legal Services Corporation and for reducing funding for its Civil Rights and its Environment and Natural Resources divisions.

    Burn it all down, says the invading barbarian.

  • Guerilla archiving

    Trump is what he is, therefore scientists are racing to copy government data onto servers where Trump can’t delete everything.

    Alarmed that decades of crucial climate measurements could vanish under a hostile Trump administration, scientists have begun a feverish attempt to copy reams of government data onto independent servers in hopes of safeguarding it from any political interference.

    The efforts include a “guerrilla archiving” event in Toronto, where experts will copy irreplaceable public data, meetings at the University of Pennsylvania focused on how to download as much federal data as possible in the coming weeks, and a collaboration of scientists and database experts who are compiling an online site to harbor scientific information.

    It will be publicly available, but it won’t be destroyable by the gilded monster who is about to become president.

    In recent weeks, President-elect Donald Trump has nominated a growing list of Cabinet members who have questioned the overwhelming scientific consensus around global warming. His transition team at the Department of Energy has asked agency officials for names of employees and contractors who have participated in international climate talks and worked on the scientific basis for Obama administration-era regulations of carbon emissions. One Trump adviser suggested that NASA no longer should conduct climate research and instead should focus on space exploration.

    It’s always a good idea when there’s a possible or likely danger looming to do everything you can to ignore and conceal it. That way you’re happy right up to the end.

  • A disaster for humanity

    Phil Plait tells us Trump is apparently going to cut off the funding for NASA’s climate research.

    In an interview with the Guardian, Bob Walker, a senior Trump adviser, said that Trump will eliminate NASA’s Earth science research. This is the mission directorate of NASA that, among other important issues, studies climate change.

    In other words, Trump and his team want to stop NASA from studying climate change. From the article:

    Nasa’s Earth science division is set to be stripped of funding in favor of exploration of deep space, with the president-elect having set a goal during the campaign to explore the entire solar system by the end of the century.

    This confirms essentially the same comments made by Walker in late October at a Federal Aviation Administration committee meeting.

    So that’s horrifying.

    If this slashing of NASA Earth science comes to pass, it will be a disaster for humanity. This is no exaggeration: NASA is the leading agency in studying the effects of global warming on the planet, in measuring the changes in our atmosphere, our oceans, the weather, and yes, the climate as temperatures increase. They have a fleet of spacecraft observing the Earth, and plans for more to better understand our environment. That’s all on the chopping block now.

    Especially irritating are the details of what Walker said. Calling climate change research  “politicized science” is so ironic you could build a battle fleet out of it, because it was the GOP who politicized it. They are the ones who attacked it as a party plank, they are the ones who have been taking millions in fossil fuel money to fund an organized disinformation campaign about it, they are the ones who harass climate scientists.

    “Politicized” – honest to christ. It’s not politicizing to think it’s probably not ok to continue destroying the climate for the sake of our short-term gain while leaving the catastrophe for future generations to deal with.

    Walker said the research should be done by NOAA, which Plait points out is outrageous since the Republicans have been relentlessly attacking NOAA for the past two years.

    There’s one other exasperating thing Walker said, and it’s a pants-on-fire doozy:

    Walker, however, claimed that doubt over the role of human activity in climate change “is a view shared by half the climatologists in the world. We need good science to tell us what the reality is and science could do that if politicians didn’t interfere with it.”

    That is complete garbage. “Half the climatologists”? In reality, at least 97 percent of climatologists agree that humans cause global warming, and the data show you can’t explain the current rising temperatures without human influence.

    climate consensus

    And need I remind you, this is all happening while the planet has seen a string of record breaking heat, month after month, where the Arctic sea ice is melting in unprecedented ways, where President Obama has said climate change and its denial is a threat to national security, and a top military advisory board has said the same thing.

    I find it outrageous that Trump won this presidency in large part by stoking fear in people, yet he denies the single biggest thing we actually should be scared of.

    We’re screwed.

  • Not Trump’s to fill

    Dahlia Lithwick says we should all throw a huge tantrum about the Supreme Court, and scream and scream and scream until we’re sick, because the Republicans stole that god damn vacancy.

    The current Supreme Court vacancy is not Trump’s to fill. This was President Obama’s vacancy and President Obama’s nomination. Please don’t tacitly give up on it because it was stolen by unprecedented obstruction and contempt. Instead, do to them what they have done to us. Sometimes, when they go low, we need to go lower, to protect a thing of great value.

    The seat that became vacant when Antonin Scalia died earlier this year was blocked by the Republican party for 9 months for reasons that were transparently false from the outset. At first the senators obstructed the president’s pick of moderate Merrick Garland because they claimed Obama was a “lame-duck president” with only a year remaining in his term, and the “people” should be allowed, for the first time in history, to decide for themselves. Later, the reasons for obstruction changed when Senate Republicans began to run on the promise to block any nominees put forward by a Democratic president. Virtually all of those senators won their seats back on the strength of that pledge. Smart guys.

    For Republicans, keeping the Supreme Court conservative was more urgent than governance or leadership or an independent judiciary. To reward that by meeting President Trump halfway on his nominees is not sober statesmanship. It’s surrender. Senate Republicans are already crowing that they can have a Justice Ted Cruz named in the coming days and seated by February. They can. But it is not his seat.

    They stole it.

    Realistically, what is left to do, aside from sending fresh fruit and a Vitamix to Justices Ginsburg and Breyer, is to figure out a way to make this a front-page story until January. Our choices now are to make a huge national fuss or to quietly and maturely accede to a Trump nominee, who will assuredly be on board for rolling back Roe v. Wade, protecting religious objectors from general laws, and expanding gun rights. We can hold out hope that Trump’s general lunacy and opportunism will lead him to seat someone wholly unpredictable, a kind of sweeps-week stunt nominee like Michelle Obama or Justice Omarosa or his son Barron. But for all that I have railed against destructive partisanship directed at fragile courts, I am persuaded now that the only way to answer nihilism is with nihilism of our own.

    I doubt the Dems can ever match the Republicans in nihilism.

  • Nearby with some matches

    Bloomberg on Steve Bannon a year ago:

    Bannon is the executive chairman of Breitbart News, the crusading right-wing populist website that’s a lineal descendant of the Drudge Report (its late founder, Andrew Breitbart, spent years apprenticing with Matt Drudge) and a haven for people who think Fox News is too polite and restrained. He’d spent the day at CPAC among the conservative faithful, zipping back and forth between his SiriusXM booth and an unlikely pair of guests he was squiring around: Nigel Farage, the leader of Britain’s right-wing UKIP party, and Phil Robertson, the bandanna’d, ayatollah-bearded Duck Dynasty patriarch who was accepting a free-speech award. CPAC is a beauty contest for Republican presidential hopefuls. But Robertson, a novelty adornment invited after A&E suspended him for denouncing gays, delivered a wild rant about “beatniks” and sexually transmitted diseases that upstaged them all, to Bannon’s evident delight. “If there’s an explosion or a fire somewhere,” says Matthew Boyle, Breitbart’s Washington political editor, “Steve’s probably nearby with some matches.”

    …

    Along with his CPAC triumph, a secret project he’d conceived was nearing fruition: His lawyers were almost finished vetting a book about Bill and Hillary Clinton’s murky financial dealings that he’s certain will upend the presidential race. “Dude, it’s going to be epic,” he tells me. I sip my “moonshine”—his wink at the Dynasty guests—and wonder, as people often do, whether Bannon is nuts. On my way out, the doorman hands me a gift: a silver hip flask with “Breitbart” printed above an image of a honey badger, the insouciant African predator of YouTube fame whose catchphrase, “Honey badger don’t give a shit,” is the Breitbart motto.

    Bannon’s life is a succession of Gatsbyish reinventions that made him rich and landed him squarely in the middle of the 2016 presidential race: He’s been a naval officer, investment banker, minor Hollywood player, and political impresario. When former Disney chief Michael Ovitz’s empire was falling to pieces, Bannon sat Ovitz down in his living room and delivered the news that he was finished. When Sarah Palin was at the height of her fame, Bannon was whispering in her ear. When Donald Trump decided to blow up the Republican presidential field, Bannon encouraged his circus-like visit to the U.S.-Mexico border. John Boehner just quit as House speaker because of the mutinous frenzy Bannon and his confederates whipped up among conservatives. Today, backed by mysterious investors and a stream of Seinfeld royalties, he sits at the nexus of what Hillary Clinton once dubbed “the vast right-wing conspiracy,” where he and his network have done more than anyone else to complicate her presidential ambitions—and they plan to do more. But this “conspiracy,” at least under Bannon, has mutated into something different from what Clinton described: It’s as eager to go after establishment Republicans such as Boehner or Jeb Bush as Democrats like Clinton.

    Because they’d rather have fascism! It’s hipper! Plus honey badger don’t give a shit.

    Operating from the basement of his townhouse—known to all as the Breitbart Embassy—Breitbart’s pirate crew became tribunes of the rising Tea Party movement after Barack Obama’s election, bedeviling GOP leaders and helping to foment the 2013 government shutdown. The site has also made life hell for Democrats by, for example, orchestrating the career-ending genital tweeting misfortune that cost New York Representative Anthony Weiner his seat in Congress in 2011. Tipped to Weiner’s proclivity for sexting with female admirers, Bannon says, the site paid trackers to follow his Twitter account 24 hours a day and eventually intercepted a crotch shot Weiner inadvertently made public. The ensuing scandal culminated in the surreal scene, carried live on television, of Andrew Breitbart hijacking Weiner’s press conference and fielding questions from astonished reporters.

    And now he’ll be in the White House. There’s more, but I’ve had enough for today.