https://www.statnews.com/2025/03/13/trump-administration-withdraws-dave-weldon-cdc-nomination/

Whoa. Everybody who called or emailed their Senators: good work, y’all!!

https://donmoynihan.substack.com/p/trump-and-musk-are-building-a-new

Waivers and favors.

Long term, the market always goes up, so the current trend will (probably) resume, but it won’t be due to Trump.

«“It would be a capitulation to the Trump style of democracy, which is the movement of democracy to dictatorship,” said Rep. Hank Johnson, a typically mild-mannered Democrat from Georgia, when asked what happened if Senate Democrats allowed the spending bill to become law.»

https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/11/politics/democrats-gop-government-funding-bill/index.html

«And Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff, who faces a potentially tough reelection next year, told CNN a shutdown is “not in our nation’s interests” and “we will see what comes out of the House.”»

…

«“If Chuck Schumer can’t get us a better vote, he should resign,” one centrist House Democrat told CNN, who lamented the party was being too cautious even as Trump trampled over Congress’ powers. “What’s the plan? What’s the strategy? There isn’t one.”»

…

«Even moderate Blue Dog members do not plan to bail out Johnson on the vote if he can’t reach the 217 votes needed on his own, according to a person familiar with the members’ thinking.»

Good.

«Asked what happens if eight Democrats back the plan in the Senate, Jayapal retorted: “That’s not going to happen.”»

I hope she’s right.

«“If you are healthy, it’s almost impossible for you to be killed by an infectious disease in modern times,” Kennedy falsely told Fox News’s Marc Siegel in an interview last week. He’d had “a very, very emotional and long conversation” with the family of the child who had died, he said; and later added that “malnutrition may have been an issue in her death.”»

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2025/03/texas-measles-outbreak-death-family/681985/?gift=ly-h2TZGdDJyaoFv6n-KaVja-o65EJUbDu2g1HRm3o0&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share (gift)

What a shit. Sorry for my bad language, but it fits.

«The death of his daughter, Peter told me, was God’s will. God created measles. God allowed the disease to take his daughter’s life. “Everybody has to die,” he said. Peter’s eyes closed, and he struggled to continue talking. “It’s very hard, very hard,” he said at last. “It’s a big hole.” His voice quavered and trailed off.»

Ok. I’m really sorry for their loss, but God gave us brains and free will.

«After lunch, I made the six-hour drive back to Austin, where I live, past the pumpjacks slowly bobbing for oil and the towering wind farms. There’s nothing I heard in Seminole that I haven’t also heard from crunchy liberal friends at home who choose not to vaccinate their kids because they believe that vaccines contain toxins that cause autism or that childhood diseases bolster the immune system. [Emphasis mine. – John.] (For the record, the 1998 paper that purported to show a link between vaccines and autism has been retracted, and research indicates that contracting measles can degrade your body’s ability to fight other infections.) Nor are Peter’s views that unusual in conservative corners of the country. A recent poll found that nearly one-third of all Republican and Republican-leaning voters, for instance, think that routine inoculations are “more dangerous than the diseases they are designed to prevent.” That’s the gist of what I heard from multiple Mennonites I interviewed. They are far from alone.»

…

«At one point in the parking lot, Peter had asked me why his daughter matters to the rest of the country. I’d struggled in the moment to come up with an answer.»

https://www.ft.com/content/ea5b09e7-1b05-4b62-9aad-64705170d6a9

«After he took his four-year-old son, X, to the White House last month, insiders say Trump asked for the HMS Resolute desk to be disinfected. The boy felt just as at home as his father.»

I had forgotten Trump is a germophobe.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-47477354

Trying an experiment. Everything’s excerpted below, but if you want to see the excerpts in context, try this hypothes.is link (you may need to collapse the right-side pane). It’s annotated, but each annotation is just “.”:

https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bbc.com%2Fnews%2Fworld-us-canada-47477354&group=__world__

«”There’s the danger of presenting a white saviour figure,” says Mr Ownby, adding how Finch, while fictional, is probably the best-known representation of white resistance to racism.

“Of creating hero worship for people whose heroism came through doing their jobs within the system as it existed. After all, the civil rights movement was about changing the system.”»

…

«Mr Doggett says that he understands people holding a stereotypical view of the White South as racist, because such a view is “justified.” He agrees with Mr Gorton that the problem of the region’s racism was compounded by the machinations of the White South’s wealthy elite.

“There’s a long history of wealthy whites manipulating poor whites to put the blame on blacks,” Mr Doggett says. “People became so full of racial hatred that they couldn’t see that blacks were actually their allies.”»

…

«”While there certainly were white Southerners who advocated for civil rights for black Americans, many more didn’t,” says Ansley Quiros, a historian and author of “God With Us: Lived Theology and the Black Freedom Struggle in Americus, Georgia, 1942-1976.”

“In some ways it’s easier – at least for Americans – to tell those few, heroic stories than to grapple with the majority position.”»

…

«”There has been progress,” Mr Doggett says. “Sometimes now younger people seem hopeless about the situation, but people have no idea about how bad it used to be – the police would dredge the river for a black person who had been lynched and come across other bodies no one knew about.

“We’ve come a long way – yes, there is still forever to go, but it is better.”»

…

«But, at the same time, he notes how a visitor to the museum – especially a white one – can leave having been given the impression that all whites were bad all the time, which has a “a depressing effect.”

This in turn, he explains, doesn’t encourage white Southerners – or any Americans – to think more expansively about racial tensions that the South, and the country, still wrestles with.

“I do wish there was more info about those whites who have done progressive things in the South,” he says. “And are still doing them.”»