Robert Reich - Trump will continue to say tariffs are paid by other countries. They're not. A tariff is basically a sales tax passed onto consumers by importers. It's also regressive — taking a higher % out of the paychecks of working people than the wealthy. Hope that clears things up
Mike Huckabee
Axios - President-elect Donald Trump announced he will nominate former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee as U.S. ambassador to Israel. Huckabee has a close relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He has also repeatedly expressed support for Jewish settlers and has backed the idea of Israel annexing parts of the occupied West Bank.
- In 2015, Huckabee said Israel has a stronger historical connection to the West Bank than the U.S. has to Manhattan.
- In 2019, Huckabee said that he personally believed Israel had the right to annex parts of the West Bank.
- During his 2008 presidential run, Huckabee said
"there's really no such thing as a Palestinian" and argued that land
for a future Palestinian state should be taken from other Arab states,
not Israel.
Pete Hegseth
New Republic - The awful views of Hegseth
Time - Hegseth’s
vocal defense of these men as victims of overzealous prosecution raised
eyebrows in the military community, where such interventions by
civilians are seen by some as a threat to the integrity of the justice
system. “These are men who went into the most dangerous places on earth
with a job to defend us and made tough calls on a moment’s notice,” Hegseth said on Fox & Friends in May 2019. “They’re not war criminals, they’re warriors.”
Lorance had been convicted by a military court in 2013 for the murder of two Afghan men during a military operation in 2012 in which he ordered his soldiers to open fire on a group of unarmed Afghan civilians he suspected of being insurgents. Lorance served six years of a 19-year sentence before Trump, after lobbying from Hegseth and others, granted him a pardon in Nov. 2019, arguing that he was unfairly targeted by military prosecutors and that his actions were justified in a combat environment where split-second decisions were often necessary for survival.
Matt Gaetz
National Memo - Former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) may be the next Attorney General of the United States if President-elect Donald Trump has his way. But even with a Republican-controlled Senate, Gaetz's future is uncertain. On the social media platform Bluesky, journalist Joshua Friedman quoted Punchbowl News co-founder John Bresnahan who said that Republicans were "stunned — and not in a good way" by the prospect of Gaetz being in charge of the DOJ and its roughly 115,000 employees. He added that Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) was "so exasperated by reporters asking him about Gaetz that he stopped talking and stood there stone-faced for 30 seconds."
Senate Republicans' immediate reaction to the news of Gaetz being selected to head the Department of Justice were not positive. The Washington Post's Liz Goodwin tweeted a thread of various responses she got from Republicans after the news broke of the president-elect's pick for the nation's top law enforcement official. Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) is one of the more moderate members of the Senate Republican Conference. She told Goodwin that there will likely be "many many questions" for the Florida Republican at his confirmation hearing in the Senate Judiciary Committee, and that she was personally "shocked" after hearing that Trump picked him.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), who is another GOP Senate moderate, gave nonverbal disapproval of Gaetz's nomination. Goodwin tweeted that she asked Murkowski: "Do you think he's a serious candidate?" The Alaska senator reportedly shook her head "no" before walking onto the Senate floor.
Alternet - In a recent interview with the New Republic's Greg Sargent, New Yorker reporter Susan Glasser described how what she saw while covering the Putin regime in Russia could also happen in the U.S. as Trump prepares to be inaugurated for his final term. She warned that the president-elect is "very likely to move very, very rapidly to create new facts on the ground while his opponents are just busy fighting with each other over their ideological priors." She also cautioned that based on her personal experience as a former journalist reporting from Russia, Americans should expect many similarities between the second Trump administration and Putin's government.
"My husband and I
were correspondents [in Russia] in the first few years of Putin’s term,
and Putin moved with extraordinary speed and focus to dismantle the
fledgling institutions of Russian democracy," she said. "That has been
the template and the playbook for other would-be authoritarians who are
working within a democratic system."
Guardian - The United States’s blossoming emergence as a clean energy superpower could be stopped in its tracks by Donald Trump, further empowering Chinese leadership and forfeiting tens of billions of dollars of investment to other countries, according to a new report.Trump’s promise to repeal major climate policies passed during Joe Biden’s presidency threatens to push $80bn of investment to other countries and cost the US up to $50bn in lost exports, the analysis found, surrendering ground to China and other emerging powers in the race to build electric cars, batteries, solar and wind energy for the world.
NPR - One of Trump’s clearest campaign promises is his plan to close the Department of Education. Since 1979, the federal department has overseen everything from college student loans to aid for public school special education. It doesn’t operate public schools and universities — that’s left to state and local governments. Jon Valant, an education policy expert at the Brookings Institution, says many Republicans have been calling for the Department of Education's elimination for some time. Valant explores the reasons behind this push and the potential consequences if it were to be accomplished.
Chalkbeat - Abolishing a federal department would require an act of Congress, just as creating one does. It likely would also require broad bipartisan support, which the idea doesn’t have. U.S. Rep. Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican, has regularly introduced legislation to abolish the department — but the bill has failed to gain traction.
No comments:
Post a Comment