I just found out from an e-mail list related to passenger rail that Amtrak will be rolling back its DEI initiatives.

I couldn’t find Amtrak mentioned in Project 2025.  There’s hardly anything about rail at all.  This smells like “obeying in advance”.

Ken Martin has been elected as the chair of the Democratic National Committee.  In his acceptance speech, he used “billionaires” several times, always in a perjorative sense.  Can we hope that the Democrats will no longer be content with enjoying the view out of the Overton window, but rather try to get the working-class vote back?  We’ll see…

I heard “out of the corner of my ear” on today’s Today show that Trump had fired several departments’ inspector generals.  I Googled for it; and it turns out to be true:  he did indeed fire 17 IGs overnight, presumably to replace them with the usual yes-men.  I won’t bother including any links since several stories from outlets like Reuters all the way to Bezos’ Washington Post showed up right at the top.

It turns out that there’s a 2020 law that says that the president must give Congress 30 days notice before such a firing; and several congresscritters (including Republicans like Grassley) have already opposed the move.  We’ll see whether there are enough principled Republicans for the Congress to say, “no, you can’t do that”.

One down, 1460 to go.

I’m not sure that the pardons and sentence commutations are the big story, although that’s what the media are covering, including some mild comments by a handful of Republicans.  Getting less media attention is the executive order putting all federal DEI workers on paid leave and effectively shutting down all government DEI activity.  I have every expectation that we’ll soon see many more departures from basic human decency.

If the numbers I’ve seen on the WWW are true (I haven’t verified them myself), Trump squeeked by with a margin of just 1.5% of the popular vote; and it seems obvious to me that he couldn’t have achieved anywhere near that without the roughly 80% of Christian fundies voting for their god’s chosen one.  All the other guesses, e.g., refusing to vote for a woman, white working class men being abandoned by the Democrats, although probably true, strike me as small potatoes by comparison.

I’m coming to the conclusion that the real problem we have is a faux religion that’s just an excuse to be prideful, hateful, self-satisfied DIEhards.  I wish I could be more understanding; but I’m finding myself simply disgusted.

He didn’t spend all his time bragging on himself as Trump would have done.  He mentioned some of the good things that have happened during his administration, but that wasn’t the main part of the speech.

About ten minutes in, he started to go after the wannabe oligarchs and even briefly likened them to the late 19^th century robber barons.  He warned about the rising influence of social media and its spreading of misinformation; and he warned about what he called the “tech-industrial complex” as an analogy to Eisenhower’s “military-industrial complex’.  This part was encouraging.

The next important election in the U.S., one in which you and I don’t get to vote, will happen on Saturday, Feb. 1, when the Democratic National Committee will elect their next chair.  We’ll find out then whether the Democrats will want to be a real opposition party and go after the 21^st century robber barons, or if it’ll just be more of the same.  (I’m rooting for Ben Wikler who made the Wisconsin Democratic Party actually effective and who has Chuck Schumer’s endorsement at least.)

I don’t usually follow the This Modern World cartoons, but I probably should.

Robert Reich passed along a good one on his Substack.

Mike the Mad Biologist reminds us of Section 3 of the 14^th Amendment.

If I were a member of the House or the Senate, I’d introduce a bill to remove the disability and see whether it gets a two-thirds majority in both houses.  That probably wouldn’t stop Trump because, even if the bill failed, we’d still need a finding that Trump engaged in insurrection or gave aid or comfort to those who did.  It would likely make the news, however; and that would be fun. 😎