Bits n’ pieces from east, west and beyond
East, west or beyond, sooner or later events elsewhere may have a local impact. A recent sampling:
The Federal Trade Commission has a new rule banning phony on-line reviews. Penalties can be up to $50,000 per infraction. Lina Khan, FTC’s chair, and a Republican target, says false product evaluations can harm legitimate competitors. An estimated 30 to 40% of online reviews are dishonest.
Sen. Bernie Sanders’ bill to block $20 billion in U.S. weapons to Israel failed, the Guardian reported. At the same time the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Israel’s prime minister and for the military commander of Hamas. Charges included crimes against humanity.
Postponed: Trump’s sentencing for 34 felony convictions. The judge said lawyers need to file dismissal arguments by Dec. 2; prosecutors will have a week to respond. The Guardian said Trump’s lawyers want the case tossed “in order to facilitate the orderly transition of executive power.”
Russia’s new intermediate-range ballistic missile, recently fired at a Ukrainian military-industrial facility, can travel 10 times faster than the speed of sound and can’t be intercepted by American or European anti-defense missiles, according to Russia’s President Vladimir Putin.
Oceanographic reported that 44 leading ocean and climate scientists signed a letter warning that the network of Atlantic ocean currents responsible for climate stability are on the edge of collapse - sooner than anticipated, and with a greater impact than previous estimates.
Consequences are expected to include extreme and abrupt weather shifts, with “large impacts on ecosystems and human activities.” The COP29’s recent climate deal authorized $300 billion to help poorer countries fight climate change, BBC wrote. India and others characterized the amount as “a paltry sum” in contrast to the need, which experts say is over $1 trillion every year.
Donald Trump disavowed Project 2025 while campaigning, but he’s wasted no time appointing P-2025 affiliates to his Cabinet and White House staff, The Guardian wrote. That began with choosing JD Vance for his vice president.
Vance has close ties to P-2025’s chief architect and promoter, Kevin Roberts, the Heritage Foundation’s president. Other P-2025 affiliates Trump’s tapped for his administration include: Ben Carr, who wrote P-2025’s chapter on the Federal Communications Commission, now Trump’s nominee for that agency. Tom Homan, listed as a P-2025 contributor, is Trump’s nominee for “border czar.”
Mike Huckabee, Trump’s choice for ambassador to Israel, has interviewed P-2025’s architect on his show, trying to reduce negative opinions about P-2025. Karoline Leavitt, appointed Trump’s press secretary, appeared in P-2025 training and promotional videos. Stephen Miller returns to the Trump Administration as deputy chief of staff for policy; he appeared in a P-2025 promotional video. John Ratcliffe, Trump’s CIA preference, helped build P-2025 policy recommendations.
In a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy described plans to reshape the federal government, including dismantling federal agencies, via Trump’s newly formed Dept. of Government Efficiency (DOGE). The New Republic pointed out both have “a wide range of conflicts of interest and opportunities for corrupt self-enrichment.”
David Sirota, in an application to serve on the DOGE team, outlined his previous Capitol Hill history and his investigative reporting on government inefficiency. His application included a proposal to create a separate Dept. of Pentagon Efficiency (DOPE) to address the Pentagon’s seventh failure to pass an audit.
But Sirota’s application focused on non-military efficiency initiatives.
A sampling: Fix the Tax Payment System, including expanding the free direct tax file system and enacting President Ronald Reagan’s proposal for a voluntary return-free tax system.
Eliminate the Health Insurance Bureaucracy and adopt what Trump favored in the past: Medicare for All. A Republican-run Congressional Budget Office report said Medicare for All would save Americans an estimated $650 billion annually. Stop Expensive Health Care Privatization. Sirota says new studies show Medicare Advantage Plans cost the government more than using traditional Medicare, and Advantage plans too often wrongly deny coverage owed.
This will mean taking on Dr. Mehmet Oz, Trump’s Medicare nominee, who has pledged to try to force more seniors onto Advantage Plans and has been paid to promote those plans on TV. Combat Profiteering Off Government-Developed Medicines: government funding contributed to the development of all new approved medicines between 2010 and 2019, but, under the Clinton Administration, a rule was dropped requiring companies benefitting from government help with pharmaceutical research to offer those products at a fair and reasonable price.
Trump’s self-proclaimed “unprecedented and powerful [voter] mandate” is the fifth smallest victory margin since 1900, according to James M. Lindsay, writing for the Council for Foreign Relations. This year Trump had four million fewer votes than Joe Biden in 2020.
Blast from the past: “You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.” Attributed to Abraham Lincoln, 16th president.