Trump wants Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to be Health Secretary. OMG. Really?

RFK JR has caused untold damage with his ignorance....
Those who supported his candidacy defined the poor quality of public education in science & the lack of critical thinking abilities....

It was a national embarrassment to watch crowds cheer at Trump rallies when he spoke of punishing public schools that mandate vaccinations.

The US has outbreaks of common illnesses that were long ago eliminated due to ignorance perpetuated by RFK JR.

Measles is debilitating and deadly, and cases are surging, WHO and CDC warn

November 14, 2024

excerpt: 

CDC Director Dr. Mandy Cohen told CNN’s Meg Tirrell on Wednesday that she doesn’t want to see the world go backwards just to remind people that vaccines work.

“I think we have a very short memory of what it is like to hold a child who has been paralyzed with polio or to comfort a mom who’s lost her kid from measles,” Cohen said at the Milken Institute’s Future of Health Summit. “We need to remember that the reason we have these childhood vaccines is to make sure that we are the strongest, the healthiest that we can be as a community.”

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Trump wants Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to be Health Secretary. OMG. Really?

Robert Reich Nov 14

Friends,

Trump is giving his middle finger to America.

Nominating the alleged sexual trafficker Matt Gaetz to be Attorney General, Fox News host Pete Hegseth to be Secretary of Defense, and bizarro Tulsi Gabbard to be Director of National Intelligence, are acts of nihilistic disruption.

Now, nominating conspiracist and fabulist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to the nation’s leading health job — overseeing the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control, and the National Institutes of Health, among other sensitive positions — is an act of utter hubris.

At a time when the truth is a precious common good, and the public’s health is already precarious, RFK Junior has made a name for himself spreading dangerous health lies.

He claimed that COVID-19 was “targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people” and that “the people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.” And that “the Chinese are spending hundreds of millions of dollars developing ethnic bioweapons and we are developing ethnic bioweapons. They’re collecting Russian DNA. They’re collecting Chinese DNA so we can target people by race.”

He has promoted the baseless claim linking vaccines to autism. He’s been a leading proponent of COVID-19 vaccine misinformation, erroneously suggesting the vaccine has killed more people than it has saved.

In his 2021 book, The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health, he alleged, without plausible evidence, that Dr. Fauci performed “genocidal experiments, sabotaged treatments for AIDS, and conspired with Bill Gates to suppress information about COVID-19.”

All nonsense.

Friends, I knew Robert F. Kennedy, and Robert F. Kennedy Junior is no Robert F. Kennedy. If not for his lustrous name, RFK Junior would be just another crackpot in the ever-growing pool of bottom-feeding fringe characters encircling Trump like ravenous slugs.

So why nominate this collection of bozo’s?

If Trump wants to smoke out the Senate Republicans who aren’t fully behind him, he has easier ways of doing so than putting up an entire Star Wars cantina of idiots up for senate confirmation.

I can see why Trump might want total loyalists in key positions that would enable him to turn America into a police state — more on this tomorrow — but why nominate a nut job to run America’s health system?

What possible point is there to subjecting Americans to poisonous food or drugs? Why undermine the Center for Disease Control when Americans and their children need the protections vaccines provide?

Or is all this just another manifestation of Trump becoming deranged?

If Americans suffer buyer’s remorse for electing him, the next time we’ll have a chance to do anything about it will be the midterm elections of November, 2026. But how much damage can Trump and his cantina do between next January and then?

Republicans target undated ballots in Pennsylvania

 

Thursday, November 14 Republicans are trying to block counting of undated mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania As Pennsylvania's U.S. Senate race heads toward a recount, the RNC and GOP candidate David McCormick filed two legal actions to block the counting of timely received mail-in ballots missing a correct handwritten date on the envelope. The Pennsylvania Department of State announced Wednesday that a recount will be conducted in the race. Under state law, any race within a 0.5% margin can qualify for an automatic recount, so long as the losing candidate doesn’t waive it. According to the latest vote count, incumbent Sen. Bob Casey (D) is trailing behind McCormick by just 0.4%. Conservative group seeks to put voter ID requirement on Maine’s ballot  A conservative group in Maine said they gathered enough signatures to move forward with a proposed ballot measure to require voter ID in the state. The petition signatures now head to the secretary of state to be verified. The PAC — Voter ID for ME — said in a Facebook post that the group collected over 165,000 signatures. The petition only needed 67,682 signatures, which was the number of votes cast for governor in the 2022 election.

POLITICO Nightly: The many factions battling for Trump’s attention

 

By Ian Ward President-elect Donald Trump joins House Republicans for a meeting at the Hyatt Regency hotel in Washington, DC on Wednesday. | Pool photo by Allison Robbert.   LOYAL, LOYAL-ER, LOYALIST — The verdict on Donald Trump’s early staffing choices is in: Trump is stocking his new administration with “loyal defenders,” as a recent headline from The New York Times put it, and leaning on “loyalists” to fill key positions, as Vox put it. It’s true that almost all of Trump’s selections for top administration jobs have pledged their fidelity to him in one way, shape or form. But loyalty to Trump is not the only — or even the most important — basis upon which to evaluate his early personnel choices. A more fundamental question is whether Trump’s selections see eye-to-eye with him (and each other) on basic questions of policy and ideology. And with every new pick that Trump announces, the answer becomes clearer: No. Despite the carefully staged performances of fealty from Trump’s selections, his administration is shaping up to be a hodge-podge of ideological rivals and competing policy factions. In the long run, the inevitable conflict that will arise between these factions may chip away at whatever sense of loyalty his new picks bring to the early administration. In this respect, at least, Trump’s nascent administration reflects the Republican Party as a whole. Trump’s conquest of the GOP in 2016 famously blew up the traditional Republican coalition, opening the door to more explicitly populist and nationalist factions and diminishing the influence of more conventional conservatives like Mitch McConnell and Mitt Romney. These conflicts have raged on below the surface of the GOP even as Trump has consolidated his political control over the party, fueled by the fact that Trump himself is driven more by instinct than by explicitly-articulated ideology. The intra-party conflict remains particularly fierce on two key issues: foreign policy and trade. On foreign policy, the party remains divided between two major camps. On the one side are the more hawkish Republicans — often labeled derisively (but not always accurately) as “neoconservatives” — who want to see the U.S. retain its standing as the global military and economic hegemon. On the other side are the “restrainers” or non-interventionists , who would like to see the U.S. play a more limited role in a “multipolar” world defined by competition between multiple global powers. In selecting his top foreign policy picks, Trump has drawn from both sides of this divide. Marco Rubio, Trump’s choice to run the State Department, hails from the more hawkish side of the GOP, despite paying some lip service to the non-interventionists’ position. By contrast, Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s selection for director of national intelligence, has aligned herself with the restrainers since joining the Republican Party earlier this year, joining Trump’s vice president JD Vance, who is inarguably the most prominent voice of restraint within the mainstream GOP. Meanwhile, Trump’s incoming national security advisor, Florida Rep. Michael Waltz, has been critical of the decision to withdraw troops from Afghanistan — a decision that restrainers cheered during the first Trump administration. At this point, these disagreements may seem largely academic, but they could have significant downstream policy ramifications when it comes to, say, setting a timeline for ending U.S. support for the war in Ukraine or responding to a potential Chinese invasion of Taiwan. Trump seems to lean instinctually toward the restrainers’ position, but the lesson of his first stint in office is that he’s easily persuaded by his advisors. Which faction will have his ear the second time around remains an open question. Similar disagreements can be found within the GOP on the issue of trade, where the party is divided over the question of how far to take Trump’s protectionist impulses. As of today, Trump has not yet named his most important economic advisors, but there are already signs that his administration will encompass conflicting positions on trade. Vance represents one pole of the debate over protectionism, based around the argument that the administration should implement fairly sweeping tariffs as a way to boost domestic manufacturing and raise wages for U.S. manufacturing workers. Meanwhile, Vivek Ramaswamy, who Trump recently appointed with Elon Musk to run the newly created Department of Government Efficiency, has staked out a more libertarian position on trade , arguing that the U.S. should use tariffs for the more narrow purpose of lessening its industrial dependence on China, even if that means increasing trade with friendly nations like South Korea and India. Others, like former Trump economic advisor Larry Kudlow, have framed tariffs even more narrowly as a tool for rebalancing the global trading system with the ultimate goal of returning to a more or less free trade paradigm. Where the Trump administration lands on the tariff question will likely depend on who Trump selects for top positions at Treasury, Commerce, and Office of the U.S. Trade Representative. But regardless of whom he picks, these underlying disagreements within the party are unlikely to evaporate entirely. All that said, it’s fair to ask: Will any of these disagreements really matter, given the Trump appointees’ overriding loyalty to Trump himself? At the end of the day, won’t his senior officials simply defer to whatever Trump tells them to do? There’s some truth in that analysis, but it also misinterprets the underlying dynamics of Trump world. As his first term in office showed, Trump makes policy decisions based on a mix of political and aesthetic considerations — what makes his preferred constituencies happy, weighed against what makes him and his administration look strong. Because Trump doesn’t operate on an explicitly ideological basis, the ideological orientation of his advisors takes on an outsized role. Whomever can articulate their preferred policies in terms that appeal to Trump’s gut instincts generally win out. In that context, the ideological distinctions between Trump’s senior administration officials matter more than they would in a typical presidential administration. Loyalty gets you so far, but beyond a certain point, it can only paper over deeper disagreements, not resolve them. Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at nightly@politico.com. Or contact tonight’s author at iward@politico.com or on X (formerly known as Twitter) at @ianwardreports.     What'd I Miss? — Biden’s off to his final global summits. Other leaders are already moving on: As international leaders gather for summits this week in Lima, Peru, and Rio de Janeiro for what might have been President Joe Biden’s proud valedictory, capping a decades long foreign policy career, the supposed leader of the free world is an afterthought . Domestically, his voters just rejected his and his party’s support for strengthening NATO, building international alliances and backing Ukraine as it battles Russia. Other leaders this week will likely focus far more on adjusting to the rapidly changing global order Biden leaves in his wake. — Judges postpone Jan. 6 trials on verge of Trump presidency: Two federal judges agreed today to postpone criminal trials for defendants accused of breaching the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, agreeing that President-elect Donald Trump’s imminent inauguration could make the proceedings unnecessary. Over the objection of the Justice Department, U.S. District Judges Carl Nichols and Rudolph Contreras — Trump and Obama appointees, respectively — said they wanted to conserve court resources and avoid hauling in dozens of potential jurors for cases that might be called off in a few weeks. — Hochul pushes ahead with Manhattan toll plan before Trump takes office: Gov. Kathy Hochul resurrected a politically risky toll plan today to start charging drivers entering parts of Manhattan $9 during peak hours — an idea that drew derision from President-elect Donald Trump. Known as congestion pricing, the program is expected to be leveraged by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to access $15 billion in bonds and pay for infrastructure projects for the region’s decrepit bus and subway system. POLITICO first reported last week that Hochul was moving to revive the program.   The lame duck session could reshape major policies before year's end. Get Inside Congress delivered daily to follow the final sprint of dealmaking on defense funding, AI regulation and disaster aid. Subscribe now.     THE NEXT ADMINISTRATION MANHATTAN USAT — President-elect Donald Trump has picked Jay Clayton, a longtime corporate lawyer and former Wall Street regulator, to be the U.S. attorney overseeing Manhattan . Clayton served as the chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission during Trump’s first term but has no experience as a criminal prosecutor. If confirmed by the Senate, Clayton would head the nation’s most prestigious federal prosecutor’s office: the Southern District of New York, which has jurisdiction over the largest financial institutions and brings many high-profile white-collar and public-corruption cases. FIREBRANDS — Michael Anton and Sebastian Gorka are in the running to be President-elect Donald Trump’s deputy national security adviser, according to three people familiar with the competition who were granted anonymity to speak candidly. With either selection Trump would elevate a firebrand loyalist who served in the incoming commander-in-chief’s first administration to one of the White House’s top roles. LOOKING FOR VOLUNTEERS — Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency is calling for volunteers to send in their résumés — via X direct message. DOGE, which uses the same acronym as its X handle, wants to recruit “super high-IQ small-government revolutionaries willing to work 80+ hours per week on unglamorous cost-cutting,” according to its post on X. Musk then added, with a post from his personal X account, that this work will be unpaid. RFK JR. TO HHS — President-elect Donald Trump is expected to nominate former presidential candidate and anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services , according to a person with direct knowledge of the selection. The expected pick, which will roil many public health experts, comes after Trump promised to let Kennedy “go wild” with health and food policy in his administration after Kennedy dropped his own presidential bid to endorse the now-president-elect. It’s also a sign of the opening Trump sees after he scored a decisive electoral victory and Republicans won a comfortable majority in the Senate. THE SURVIVOR — Many in Washington are telling themselves that Matt Gaetz has no chance of being confirmed as attorney general. One House Republican, after hearing about the pick, was laughing so hard that he had to wipe away tears. But Gaetz’s latest moment in the spotlight is in many ways emblematic of his entire career. He is often dismissed as a clown or a self-promoter or a bomb thrower who couldn’t possibly continue his ascent. Then he keeps winning. That’s why Kevin McCarthy is the former, not current, House speaker. And that’s why it’s far too soon to say Gaetz won’t ultimately become the top law enforcement officer of the United States.     AROUND THE WORLD An aerial view of a mine shaft where an estimated 4,000 illegal miners are trapped in a disused mine in Stilfontein, South Africa. | AP YOU’RE ON YOUR OWN — South Africa’s government says it won’t help a group of illegal miners inside a closed mine in the country’s North West province who have been denied access to basic supplies as part of an official strategy against illegal mining, The Associated Press reports. The miners in the mineshaft in Stilfontein are believed to be suffering from a lack of food, water and other basic necessities after police closed off the entrances used to transport their supplies underground. It is part of the police’s Vala Umgodi, or Close the Hole, operation, which includes cutting off miners’ supplies to force them to return to the surface and be arrested. Police had earlier indicated that information received from those who recently helped bring three miners to the surface indicated that up to 4,000 miners may be underground. However, this afternoon police spokesperson Athlenda Mathe said that they believed the number was exaggerated and may be far less than that, estimating a figure of between 350 and 400 miners. BAD HOST — A COP host’s main job is to smooth things over. Ilham Aliyev has other ideas. The Azerbaijani autocrat opened this year’s global climate conference, known as COP29, with a rant against Western “hypocrisy.” Two days later, he tore into France and the Netherlands for what he described as “repression” and ongoing colonial rule. Within hours, France’s top climate official canceled her trip to Baku. The direct attacks — highly unusual in the three-decade history of United Nations climate talks — have left senior foreign affairs officials questioning whether the petrostate president is actually committed to the delicate dance of getting 200 countries to find consensus.   Policy change is coming—be the pro who saw it first. Access POLITICO Pro’s Issue Analysis series on what the transition means for agriculture, defense, health care, tech, and more. Strengthen your strategy.     Nightly Number €800 million The amount of money ($841 million) that European Union regulators have fined Facebook parent company Meta for antitrust violations. Brussels has already slapped Big Tech rivals Google and Apple with billions in antitrust penalties. RADAR SWEEP CONFISCATE THIS — As the school year began, multiple Canadian provinces had a new mandate in place: No cell phones in the classroom. The program was designed to combat rising fears of consistently distracted students, on their phones rather than paying attention to class or even developing social skills by talking face to face with their classmates. But the program launch is not going well. Without a real enforcement mechanism from the government, it has fallen on teachers to confiscate phones. And in some cases, they’ve been found liable for phones they subsequently lost or damaged. Read Luc Rinaldi in MacLean’s about how a good idea can go wrong so fast — and what these school districts can do to fix it. Parting Image On this date in 1943: Leonard Bernstein (second from right) is congratulated by members of the New York Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra after the 25-year-old musician made his debut conducting the orchestra at Carnegie Hall in New York. Bernstein substituted for Bruno Walter, who had become ill, to lead the organization in a 90-minute national radio broadcast. | AP Did someone forward this email to you? Sign up here.   A message from PhRMA: Seniors are feeling the true cost of drug price “negotiations.” Instead of saving money, some Medicare patients will pay more for medicines. Others may not be able to get their medicines – 89% of insurers and PBMs say they plan to reduce access to medicines in Medicare Part D because of the Inflation Reduction Act. Higher costs and less access. That’s not what seniors were promised. Learn more.     Follow us on Twitter Charlie Mahtesian @PoliticoCharlie Calder McHugh @calder_mchugh   Follow us

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