Tag: Elon Musk

The 2024 Year’s End Quiz continued

tax the rich!

Last year, which is to say yesterday, I  started to do the 2024 Year’s End Quiz that Kelly always does. But my answers became Too Damn Long, so I split it up. 

Whose behavior merited celebration?

Oh, there’s a bunch of people trying to fight the good fight; I suppose there are a lot of local heroes. And there’s a person who has taken a great deal of interest in my genealogical process, which I greatly appreciate. 

Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed?

There are SO many.

A wide swath of the American public seems to think that taxing rich people is a bad thing, even though they’re not rich themselves. I remember the discussion over the so-called death tax a few years ago, and people balked at it even though they’re extremely unlikely to be in that situation. The Ultra Millionaire Tax Act of 2024 (H.R. 7749) is far less likely to impact them. They won’t be making $50 million, which might be taxable. Income inequality has been rampant since Ronald Reagan’s time, and it has only worsened.

And then, there are the politicians.

Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) “authored a resolution that would ban trans women from women’s bathrooms at the U.S. Capitol” after saying how much of an ally she is to LGBTQ people.

Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL), possibly the most incompetent Senator, said it’s ‘Not Our Job’ to vet djt’s Cabinet picks (psst: yes, it is)

Rep. Marjorie Taylor-Greene (R-GA) blames Democrats for weaponizing the weather.

Most of the Cabinet picks (Hegseth, RFK Jr, Gabbard, and especially Kash Patel)

Orange

Elon Musk and his tech bro buddies (rump jr, Vance)

Where did most of your money go?

The house, specifically a new back porch; the daughter’s education.

What did you get really excited about?

The mystery project

Compared to this time last year, are you happier or sadder?

Sharply sadder, though better now than in the summer.

Thinner or fatter?

Definitely fatter. There is a distinct correlation between my emotional state and my food consumption.

Richer or poorer?

Poorer.

Science!

What do you wish you’d done more of?

I’d be in good shape if I could only get that cloning thing going.

What do you wish you’d done less of?

Brooding.

How did you spend Christmas?

With my wife, daughter, and MIL.

Did you fall in love in 2024?

Absolutely.

How many one-night stands?

Lessee: (two cubed) minus (the square root of 64).

What was your favorite TV program?

CBS Sunday Morning, CBS Saturday Morning, Abbott Elementary, Elsbeth. 

I’ve discovered that I like watching NFL football in the last year or two that I hadn’t felt for decades. It’s always recorded. Every week, I learn something new. In a game between the Cincinnati Bengals and the hated Dallas Cowboys, the score was tied near the end of the game. Cincinnati punted the ball, but Dallas blocked the kick. All the Cowboys needed to do was to let the ball go. They would have possession, and they were already in field goal territory. Instead, one of the Cowboys touched the ball but could not control it.  The Bengals regained possession and soon scored a touchdown to win the game. I loved it.

There’s a thin line…

Do you hate anyone now that you didn’t hate this time last year?

Hate is such a terrible word. If I did, and I’m not saying I do, it’d be Elon, who helped buy an election by spending over a quarter of a billion dollars on djt and his cronies. Then he dances around, threatening to slash Social Security. As a friend likes to say, “Chuck YOU, Farley!” (Sidebar: one minor reason I don’t prefer the term African-American is that recently, someone referred to Elon Musk as an African-American, and it hurt my head.)

What was the best book you read?

Prequel and The Undertow are in the same vein.

What was your greatest musical discovery?

Cage the Elephant, who Anthony Mason interviewed on CBS Mornings.

What did you want and get?

To get to sing, listen to music, go to plays.

What did you want and not get?

Democracy

What were your favorite films of this year?

Conclave, The Wild Robot, Sing Sing, Ghostlight, Thelma, Inside Out 2, Poor Things, and Anatomy of a Fall. But my favorite was American Fiction.

What did you do on your birthday?

It was a Thursday, so I went to choir and took out the trash. Beyond that, I have no idea.

How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2024?

Comfortable.

Facts not in evidence

What kept you sane?

I think I went a little insane this year.

Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?

Bill McKibben

What political issue stirred you the most?

Global warming, abortion rights, book banning, racism, sexism, homophobia. Oh, and the possibility that good chunks of Project 2025, which I only mentioned a half dozen times, will be enacted, threatening democracy.

Who did you miss?

In the throes of my despair, it was my friend Norm, who died in 2016.

Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2024:

This is part of what Kelly wrote last year. I think it works.

The United States of America desperately needs to re-embrace rational and collective thinking, and ditch its mythologies about rugged individualism and the eternal wisdom of “the Founders”.

If you take selfies, post your six favorite ones:

I don’t take many selfies. The one above, taken at the Museum of Broadway in Manhattan (and I don’t mean Kansas) in January 2024, is the only one I can find. 

The musical portion of the post 

 

Quote a song lyric that sums up your year:

I was leaning into the third segment of the Monster / Suicide / America medley on the Monster album. The first part is relevant but slightly clunky, but there’s something very basic about the end of Suicide. The third part is anthemic. Lyrics and the track.

‘Cause there’s a monster on the looseIt’s got our heads into the nooseAnd it just sits there watchin’
America, where are you nowDon’t you care about your sons and daughtersDon’t you know we need you nowWe can’t fight alone against the monster
Also

The other song that came to mind was American Idiot by Green Day. This is the 20th anniversary of that album. I’m fairly sure that ADD gave it to me at some point. It’s a great collection, and the title song seems very appropriate. Lyrics. “Starting off the album with a bang, ‘American Idiot’ is a scathing takedown of American culture in the years following 9/11.” The track.

Don’t wanna be an American idiot
One nation controlled by the media
Information age of hysteria
It’s calling out to idiot America

Welcome to a new kind of tension
All across the alienation
Where everything isn’t meant to be okay
Television dreams of tomorrow
We’re not the ones who’re meant to follow
For that’s enough to argue

American Kakistocracy on steroids

stunningly unqualified

Back in 2017, Norm Ornstein wrote about the American Kakistocracy for The Atlantic. “There’s a case to be made that the United States is governed by the least scrupulous of its citizens.” And now we are an American Kakistocracy on steroids.
2017: “Kakistocracy is a term that was first used in the 17th century; derived from a Greek word, it means, literally, government by the worst and most unscrupulous people among us. More broadly, it can mean the most inept and cringeworthy kind of government. The term fell into disuse over the past century or more, and most highly informed people have never heard it before (but to kids familiar with the word “kaka” it might resonate).”

“As I wrote my new book with E.J. Dionne and Tom Mann, One Nation Under Trump, I kept returning to the term. Kakistocracy is back, and we are experiencing it firsthand in America. The unscrupulous element has come into sharp focus in recent weeks as a string of Trump Cabinet members and White House staffers have been caught spending staggering sums of taxpayer dollars to charter jets, at times to go small distances where cheap commercial transportation was readily available, at times to conveniently visit home areas or have lunch with family members.”

I use the term “on steroids” intentionally. This is a term that djt used to describe the embarrassing failed North Carolina Republican gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson. He was “like Martin Luther King on steroids.” This is an insult to both Martin Luther King and steroids.

What’s happening now, and it’s changing so rapidly that it’s difficult to encapsulate, is that any sense of guardrails or normalcy is out the window. As I used to say too often, though it’s still accurate, The trouble with normal is it always gets worse.

Another appropriate word for right now is ‘recrudescence’ (17th century): “the return of something terrible after a time of reprieve.”

Elon

Undoubtedly, you’ve heard how the Dems ran too far to the left or too far to the center or were too “woke,” or whatever. What I think is mostly true is that the Republicans were better able to define the Democrats than the Dems.

“Muslims in Michigan began seeing pro-Israel ads this fall praising Vice President Kamala Harris for marrying a Jewish man and backing the Jewish state. Jews in Pennsylvania, meanwhile, saw ads from the same group with the opposite message: Harris wanted to stop U.S. arms shipments to Israel.

“Another group promoted ‘Kamala’s bold progressive agenda’ to conservative-leaning Donald Trump voters, while a third filled the phones of young liberals with videos about how Harris had abandoned the progressive dream. Black voters in North Carolina were told Democrats wanted to take away their menthol cigarettes, while working-class White men in the Midwest were warned that Harris would support quotas for minorities and deny them Zyn nicotine pouches.

“What voters had no way of knowing at the time was that all of the ads were part of a single $45 million effort created by political advisers to Tesla founder Elon Musk.”

It doesn’t feel like just another election. The Hollywood Reporter, of all things, notes: “The results came as a shock to large swaths of the nation who had hoped that the election of… Harris would protect the United States from the kind of fascism sweeping across the world. But for some — communities of color and queer and trans people, for example— Trump’s re-election only reaffirmed nightmares about a country whose major civil rights gains are young when compared to its oppressive history.”

Cabinet

It appears there are two types of his Cabinet appointments: the totally unqualified and the merely unfortunate.

47 selected, for his Attorney General, a person who Ben Domenech, a “big noise in conservative circles [who is] a co-founder of The RedState group blog and The Federalist,” despises. The headline of his article, posted to Substack, left no doubt as to the tenor of the piece: “Matt Gaetz is a Vile Sex Pest, and Any Senator Who Votes For Him Owns That.” His selection triggers audible gasps from some Republicans.

Tom Homan

Pete Hegseth is a Fox News TV host who is way out of his league to run an operation as vast as the Defense Department. He had a role in djt’s controversial pardons of men accused of war crimes. He also is waging a war on “woke.”

Rep. Elise Stefanik, a Republican from New York, was picked as an ambassador to the United Nations but not because of her international expertise.

As governor of South Dakota, Kristi Noem has no background in Homeland Security.
The Atlantic called Tulsi Gabbard, a former Democratic member of Congress from Hawaii, “stunningly unqualified for almost any Cabinet post (as are some of Trump’s other picks), but especially for ODNI. She has no qualifications as an intelligence professional—literally none….  She has no significant experience directing or managing much of anything.”
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s message on vaccines is a medical crisis waiting to happen. And then he says stuff even nuttier.
(Off-topic, but LinkedIn wanted to know if I wanted to follow Vivek Ramaswamy, the “efficiency guy with Musk. “STAND for truth.” No, thank you. )
Here are observations by Common Dreams.
Day 1
Worse than that, Orange is Plotting To Skip The Senate Confirmation Process. He was serious when he said he’d be dictator only on Day 1. This involves the Senate allowing “him to make recess appointments that would skip the otherwise Constitutionally mandated Senate confirmation process.” Reportedly, he “is coordinating with House Speaker Johnson to allow [djt] to force Congress to adjourn under Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution so that he can freely make the recess appointments he wants.” 
The Senate could block this if it takes its role of ‘advise and consent’ seriously—otherwise, the extremely tenuous Senate integrity is shot altogether.

Meanwhile, per Red State: “Several conservative groups are currently in a campaign to identify federal employees who are partisan or possibly resistant to enacting Trump’s agenda, according to a CNN report. These groups include the Heritage Foundation Oversight Project and the American Accountability Foundation.

“The organizations have flooded federal agencies with tens of thousands of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests demanding access to emails, personnel records, and other communications between government employees. The effort is part of a comprehensive strategy to lay the groundwork for mass firings of civil servants under Trump’s Schedule F executive order issued in 2020, which was later revoked under President Joe Biden.” I wrote about Schedule F here. 

So, am I optimistic? Not really. But one needs to fight the fight anyway. I’m just not sure what that looks like yet.

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