Joe Biden’s pick to head the Office of Management and Budget has withdrawn her name in the face of stiff opposition. In all the coverage that I have been reading about her nomination in the mainstream media, attention has focused entirely on her supposedly ‘toxic’ tweets. For Republicans to be upset over mean tweets is of course rich, given that their hero Donald Trump was an utterly vicious tweeter.

But what is noticeable is that nowhere in the coverage did I see any mention of what should have been the real obstacle to her nomination, which is her awful record as head of the Center of American Progress and that silence says a lot about the corrupt bipartisan politics in the US.

Tanden will likely end up in some other Biden administration post because she is a strong Democratic partisan and prolific fundraiser even from unsavory sources and money talks.

Louis DeJoy, the Postmaster General of the US Postal Service, was a businessperson and Republican fundraiser with no experience in the area of the agency he was picked to lead by Trump. He seems intent on ruining the postal service in the name of cost savings and efficiency. Like many Trump and Republican free market enthusiasts, they do not seem to realize that some vital government services are just that, services whose goal should be to serve the public well, not to generate profits.

What is even more puzzling is that in providing uniform pricing for mail, the USPS is using the heavier volume of mail sent to and from urban areas (which makes it cheaper to handle per item) to subsidize the mail sent to and from rural and remote areas. For some rural areas, the postal service is their lifeline to the rest of the country and the way they get essential items like medicines. Since urban areas tend be more Democratic and rural areas more Republican, cutting postal services or raising prices would hurt Republicans more. And yet, Republicans, so indoctrinated against the government, seem to be on board with both those measures that are promoted in the name of ‘efficiency’ and ‘cost cutting’.
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March Madness is the name given to the college basketball championships in the US but it may acquire an additional significance this year. One of the features of apocalyptic cults is that when the predicted day of reckoning fails to materialize, they simply shift the day. This is happening with the QAnon and other dead-enders who believe that Trump should still be president. After the overthrow of the election did not occur on January 6th despite their riot, they thought that Trump would seize power on inauguration day. When that did not happen and he slunk off to Florida, they needed a new day and it appears that Thursday, March 4th is the one.
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As expected, Trump received a rapturous welcome at the CPAC conference that ended yesterday and went through his usual spiel for ninety minutes, again claiming that he won. He clearly seeks to remain as the leader of the Republican party and thus has frozen the race to be the party’s next nominee in 2024, similar to the way that Hillary Clinton froze the Democratic race in 2016 until she finally did announce her candidacy.
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Donald Trump makes a return to the public eye with a speech today to the annual right-wing Conservative Political Action Conference in Florida, providing the finale to this right-wing nut fest. While CPAC is independent of the Republican party, CPAC drives much of the party’s agenda. So far, the event has been doubling down on the Big Lie that the election was stolen from him and the reasons for doing is obvious, because it gets the party faithful to open their wallets.

“Donald Trump convinced his base – a majority of Republicans, if polls are to be believed – that the election was stolen. Though the CPAC organizers likely know it’s false, they’re using this as a wedge issue to excite the base and sell more tickets,” said Nick Pasternak, who recently left the Republican party after working on several GOP campaigns.

He added: “CPAC’s willingness to make the election lie such a big issue this year is a concerning symbol of what many in the party think – and what they’ll do.”
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Jay Williams, a Republican strategist in Georgia, said the focus on elections was a way to gin up support among the party’s faithful base, which remains largely loyal to Trump and his allies.

“I would not equate ‘the party’ with CPAC so I wouldn’t put much stock in it from that perspective,” he said. “CPAC exists to make money and so it’s no surprise to me the organizers have jumped on to this issue as a way to drive engagement of their target market.”

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Joe Biden has launchd his first airstrike, against targets in Syria, killing 22 people.

The Pentagon’s chief spokesperson, John Kirby, said the location of the strikes was used by Kataeb Hezbollah and Kata’ib Sayyid al-Shuhada, two Iraqi pro-Iran groups operating under the Hashd umbrella. “This proportionate military response was conducted together with diplomatic measures, including consultation with coalition partners,” Kirby said. “The operation sends an unambiguous message: President Biden will act to protect American and coalition personnel. At the same time, we have acted in a deliberate manner that aims to de-escalate the overall situation in eastern Syria and Iraq.”
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Mary Ellen O’Connell, a professor at Notre Dame Law School, criticised the US attack as a violation of international law. “The United Nations charter makes absolutely clear that the use of military force on the territory of a foreign sovereign state is lawful only in response to an armed attack on the defending state for which the target state is responsible,” she said. “None of those elements is met in the Syria strike.”

Once again, the US sends its troops into other countries and when they are attacked, claims it must retaliate in self-defense. It is part of the persistent mindset that pretty much the whole world is American territory so they are never invaders, only other countries are.
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I have already discussed the awful record of Neera Tanden who has been nominated by Joe Biden to the powerful position of the head of the Office of Management and Budget. There are signs that her nomination is in trouble. But instead of focusing on that record, criticisms of her have centered on her late-night rage tweeting, resulting in her now trying to walk away from them saying, “My language and my expressions on social media caused hurt to people, and I feel badly about that. And I really regret it and I recognize that it’s really important for me to demonstrate that I can work with others… I would say social media does lead to too many personal comments and my approach will be radically different.”

Really? She only now realized the toxic effects of social media? Tanden did not say these things as an impulsive adolescent who has since matured and learned better. She made those vicious attacks on people as part of advancing her reactionary agenda and fully conscious of what she was doing, and is only sorry for them because they might jeopardize her nomination to an important post. Her apology is utterly disingenuous. Norman Solomon writes how the media and some left-leaning Democratic-supporting groups such as MoveOn are turning a blind eye to her faults and urging support for her.
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