Back in June I asked you to tell me about your favorite TPM posts. I read through your responses at the time. But the project I was investigating was soon overtaken by the rush of campaign events, particularly the aftermath of the Trump-Biden presidential debate at the end of the month. I was finally able to go through them more systematically this weekend. First, thank you for the attention and thought so many of you put into those contributions. They were gratifying and illuminating to read. My aim with this exercise was to pull together a list of posts for something kind of but not precisely like an anthology.
I’ve mentioned a few times that Donald Trump is giving Democrats a big, big opening by so conspicuously surrounding himself and seeking the counsel of almost all of the country’s super-billionaires. If you’re a bruised party looking to get a footing in a populist moment, having the billionaire (at least branded as such) head of the opposite party surround himself with the country’s top billionaires and basically say, “We’re Team Billinoaire” is a pretty good opening. And the American people seem to agree.
AP has a new poll out which asked whether people think it’s a good or bad thing that the President “relies on billionaires for advice about government policy.” When I first saw the results of this poll as “good” coming in at “+12” I thought they meant “net” 12% and I thought, “eeeesh, the honeymoon phase is more intense than I thought!” But no, 12%: as in, 12% of the public think it’s a good thing. 60% think it’s not. That’s U.S. adults. The only outliers are Republicans, 20% of whom think this is a good thing. But even that is pretty feeble. To put it simply, these are terrible numbers.
Another detail out of FDA. The agency has removed pages which provide guidance to medical researchers on conducting medical trials with representative numbers of men and women and ethnic and/or racial minority groups. I think most people know this: but this isn’t a matter of symbolic diversity. Many medications and/or diseases or conditions present differently in men and woman and in people with different genetic backgrounds.
Wanted to share some information on the RFK Jr. nomination before the Senate.
It probably won’t surprise you that RFK Jr., along with Tulsi Gabbard, are among the few Trump nominees who might actually not get confirmed. But I’m told that one senator who Democratic senators and health care advocates have real concerns about is none other than Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI). To be clear, Whitehouse isn’t confirmed as voting for Kennedy. But he appears to be actively considering it. (Ed Note: WTF?)
In order to combat the scourge of “DEI,” the DOJ yesterday indefinitely suspended observance of events like Black History Month, Women’s History Month and other long observed (and one would imagine fairly innocuous) commemorations.
The details are as follows.
Yesterday as part of the implementation of Trump’s anti-DEI executive order and the related anti-DEI guidance memorandum from the Office of Personal Management, the Executive Office of United States Attorneys immediately “suspend[ed] observance programs until further notice” and advised regional U.S. Attorneys Offices that “we believe it would also be prudent for the USAOs to suspend all observance events at this time.”
For what it’s worth, Black History Month isn’t something that BLM activists came up with. President Gerald Ford recognized February in 1976 and Congress passed a law designating February as National Black History Month in 1986.
The news was contained in a circular email sent to all U.S. Attorney’s Offices and shared with TPM.
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This week, DeSantis’ own onetime deeply loyal Republican state legislature is doing Trump’s DeSantis humiliation gambit for him.
In a stunning turn of events in the state legislature Monday, Republican leadership not only defied DeSantis by shutting down the special session he’d called for and scrapping a DeSantis-backed immigration bill he’d asked them to pass, they also introduced their own version of the legislation, which they named after the President: coined the TRUMP Act.
