Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
Not one damn thing. #ThingsImGonnaMissAboutTrump pic.twitter.com/tXnMUxN3MZ
— Jen (@JenTusch) January 20, 2021
Of course he’ll never entirely go away — even if he weren’t catnip to the Media Village Idiots, we’d still have the impeachment trial to deal with. But isn’t it lovely not to have to approach every news break (and there are so many fewer such) as potentially life-threatening?
Late Night Open Thread: Missed Like An Aching ToothPost + Comments (42)
A visual representation of how I feel after four years of Trump and a year of pandemic:
I got the very welcome news that my parents will be getting their covid vaccinations in a few weeks. Just a couple more weeks, and they will be safe and able to resume their lives. It’s such a relief. I’m so glad they listened to me in the early days and took it seriously, and stayed at home and let me do things for them rather than have them go out and expose themselves to danger.
As I noted elsewhere, I know they aren’t going to live forever, but I will be god damned if this virus or by the callous disregard, incompetence, and malignant negligence from the tumor in the White House.
I hope he is in court every day of the remainder of his life before he finally chokes on a double cheeseburger and oozes his way off this planet.
Here’s a bit of contextually good news:
President Trump’s last-ditch effort to remove civil service protections from tens of thousands of career federal employees appears to have lost steam, facing time constraints and legal hurdles as the administration prepares to leave office, officials said.
This was to have been the finishing blow in Trump’s and the GOP’s long attempted murder of the independent Federal civil service.
Instead, it collapsed in a broad spectrum display of gaffers.
The order gave agencies until Tuesday to review potentially affected jobs. But as of Monday night, no…federal agencies had delivered a list of affected employees to White House officials for review, with the exception of the Office of Personnel Management, which also rushed to reshuffle much of its staff of roughly 3,500 people into the new category.
My guess as to why? An administration whose baseline level of competence was never that high found itself embroiled in weeks of election denialism. Eyes flew off the ball. If Trump had won, this would have all sailed through sometime over the next month or so. Without that luxury of time, and with a fair amount of WH staff distracted or disengaged, and confronting a bureaucracy that had less than zero interest in complying with Trump’s command? Not a chance.
This is a big Biden deal. If the White House had managed to drive this through, and especially if they had then managed to salt the executive branch with the same kind of folks who peopled the Iraq occupation, the damage they’ve already done to functional governance would have been made damn near permanent.
Trump and his cabal have still managed to do plenty of damage in the last two and a half months, of course. But thank Dog for the small mercy that they just aren’t good enough to swing the wrecking ball as far and hard as they want.
Now that this error is almost over, I think it is time to revisit predictions from November 2016.
TLDR: We’re fucked hard and good
Yep!
I expect the Supreme Court to be a 5-4 reactionary majority on voter rights. I would not be shocked if there is a bill filed to expand the court to 11 or 13 Justices filed and floating around as a sword of Damocles to threaten Kennedy to vote for anything coming off of the Susan B. Anthony fund’s wishlist. I expect the filibuster to be gone by lunchtime on the first day of the new Congress.
Yes, there is a reactionary majority on voting rights and it looks to be durable. Susan B. Anthony List wishlist will be fulfilled but through a different mechanism than I thought. The filibuster is still limping along.
I would give myself a 1.5 out of 3
I expect the Republican Party to use their position of concentrated minorities against a dispersed majority to do as much as they can to lock in as much of a partisan tilt as possible. Packing the courts is the big one as the Democrats have majorities on most of the Appeals circuits right now. Getting to Republican majorities via packing in 40 something Federalist society drones is extraordinarily efficient as that can only be altered quickly if the Democrats can get a trifecta and they re-pack. It’s nasty but efficient.
Yep! 1 for 1
We’re going to see massive mistakes of basic execution (and many executions that should not occur even if one supports the death penalty) as competence does not matter. We will be governed by the Brietbart comments section. Any policy (even if it is a good one) that is more complex than allowing contributors to use the commons as a waste dump or passing out large checks to the already comfortable or beating up on liberals/Democrats/Other will get fucked up. Deep Water Horizon in the Trump Administration would still be leaking.
Yep, significantly more federal executions. Significantly more use of the commons as a dumping ground and upward redistribution of wealth. I under-estimated the clusterfuckedness of incompetency and inattention when it came to COVID.
3 for 3
We are going to be in caveat emptor low trust/high verification cost world as fidicuary duty obligations disappear, as the CFPB disappears and Dodd-Frank unwinds.
I was wrong on Dodd Frank —its sails got trimmed by regulation but not much by law.
1 for 2
We’re going to see any larger opioid outbreaks in rural counties as Medicaid funded drug treatment will be harder.
We’re going to see a lot of counties that voted for Trump continue to get kicked in the balls economically.
We’re going to lose a lot of people that have options to go elsewhere in the world. Immigrants with an education will find other places to go.
3 for 3
A lot of what has happened was predictable as it was predicted.
51 more hours of this error.
There’s a high-souled, pure-minded joy in considering the installation of a working (Democratic, of course) government. There’s also much schadenfreude!
LOL I love that as a last gesture of fealty to Trump the bitter-enders will have to get up at five in the morning to be ready to see him off. https://t.co/TpdpvxDA5l
— Daniel W. Drezner (@dandrezner) January 18, 2021
… Because, rumor has it, if he leaves early enough, he’ll still be ‘President’ when the helicopter lands at Marred-A-Largo. Also, he refuses to be in DC when Biden is inaugurated, for reasons. Sad, cranky alte kaker reasons.
Late Night Open Thread: <em>What Is Best in Life?… </em> (Redux)Post + Comments (63)
I’m also giving Trump a major send-off, I’m just not sure I can build the catapult fast enough. https://t.co/7jiTTcHs9a
— Mig Greengard (@chessninja) January 15, 2021
After this week, we’ve all earned some easy targets…
Late Night Schadenfreude Open Thread: Final DazePost + Comments (177)