Don't Look Now But.......

It’s really tiring listing all the bad and malicious actions that the Trump administration has subjected our citizens to.  It is numbing in the worst way.  We begin to accept as ‘normal’ the egregious changes that are occurring all around us as piece by piece, quietly in most cases, as decades of progress against all manner of challenges met are being dismantled.

And all the while we are distracted by scandalous episodes that seem to pop up like mushrooms in a fertile swamp.  This week it is the Rob Porter mess.  Every news outlet and media platform is stressing over this as if it is the final straw that will break the camel’s back.  Meanwhile the deconstruction continues relentlessly as our attention is absorbed by the most lurid of details. 

Sure he’s a wife beater….and sure he has not passed security screening to have access to the country’s most sensitive secrets…but hey---it turns out that literally dozens of White House employees have the same status.  This is just another example of the complete incompetence of the people who are ‘running’ our government.  This incompetence is present at every level of this administration.  Making matters worse is the fact that most important agencies and departments have not even been staffed with leadership, and it is over 1 year since the Trumpists took over.

Here is a shortlist of just the proposed bad actions that I can recall off the top of my head:

--Trump’s budget reveals that he wants to cut funding for the CDC’s Prevention and Public Health Fund, implementing an 80 percent reduction in the global reach to detect infectious-disease outbreaks abroad.  His budget would cut another $1 billion from the CDC, which by the way is leaderless because he has failed to appoint a new Director.  God help us if we have a real pandemic to deal with.

--And speaking of health, he is consciously destroying the current health care system and not replacing it with anything of value,  eventually resulting in millions of newly covered citizens losing their coverage.

--Trump and the Republicans have passed a huge tax cut, reducing our tax revenues, which will increase our deficit which will be the reason that we have no choice but to institute savage cuts to social programs.

--We learned yesterday from the Senate Intelligence Committee hearings that—guess what?—Russia is going full bore to influence our midterm elections.  Trump’s intelligence people unanimously concur that it is happening again.  When asked what the President and the administration is directing them to do to counter these active measures their answer was….nothing!

Think about that!  Virtually everyone agrees that we need to take defensive action and plan to counter this attack on our sovereignty---except our President who has done nothing and given no support to our counter-intelligence professionals!  Talk about Treason, Mr. President!

--Trump is trying to stem legal immigration by legislating away what Trump calls ‘chain migration’ or the ability of new immigrants to bring in immediate family, that has always been at the heart of US immigration.

--The Trump administration is advocating support for voter suppression, gerrymandering and various other schemes to disenfranchise minority voters.  Trump nominated, and the Senate Judiciary Committee approved Thomas Farr to be a US District judge for the Eastern District of North Carolina.  Farr helped draft and defend the most egregious voter-suppression and gerrymandering laws in the country.

  

--The administration had nominated a person to run the Census Bureau for the 2020 census who wrote a book about how to create legislative districts to influence voter patterns.  Fortunately he withdrew after scathing criticism, but the Census Bureau now has no permanent director, its funding has been cut, field tests have been canceled, and it is unveiling a controversial new IT system for 2020.

---The administration wants to radically overhaul the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program which offers about 46 million low-income Americans both sustenance and economic choice by providing an allowance to buy the fruit, meat, fresh vegetables, soda, ice cream and kind of bread they want to eat.  They want half the benefits to be provided in the form of a “Harvest Box” full of food preselected by the federal government, cutting the budget for SNAP by 1/3 and reducing $21 Billion from the federal deficit.  The problem with this is big food retailers will stand to lose billions of dollars in lost SNAP business, and it takes choice out of the hands of those who actually eat the food.

--The Presidential budget plan singles out abortion providers and Planned Parenthood by prohibiting Health and Human Services funding, including money used for family planning.

That is just a sampling folks.  The list goes on and on.  While we are slack-jawed and consumed by lurid distractions, all this other ‘stuff’ is quietly unfolding.

The midterm elections can’t come soon enough.  Let’s hope they are not 'rigged' by the Russians and the Trumpist Republicans.