I don’t know what you do in public bathrooms, but apparently Rep. Nancy Mace (Magat-SC) needs more privacy when it comes to her activities. Of course we need rules about this, and we need them NOW. Newly elected Rep. Sarah McBride (D-DE), Congress’s first openly transgender representative, hasn’t even been seated yet and they are already preparing to make her life miserable. Note to Nancy, lose the middle school attitude, we have enough drama as it is, and bigger problems to solve. And really, the giant cross earrings? WWJD?

Never mind that transgendered people have been using Capitol Hill bathrooms for years  without incident. Yes, even during 45’s administration. Many bars/restaurants have unisex bathrooms nowadays. It’s no big deal. Really. The toilets are enclosed. The sinks are not, but if someone is doing something that requires privacy at a sink, well, save it for at home. None of us wants to see it.

Ya know, I am sick of hearing pundits blaming Dem focus on trans issues as a reason Trump won. All the ads I saw that had anything to do with trans folk were negative ads by Republican backers. So the media pushed questions of Dems towards comments on trans rights. What else can they respond but that trans people are fellow human beings who deserve to be able to do human things, like go to the bathroom without getting beat up, physically or emotionally. The GOP is the only gang who cares about who is using which bathroom or locker room. I’m sure Speaker Johnson will listen to all sides and find a solution to this non problem.

Conflicts of Interest, Security Clearance Issues, Lack of Protocol … Meh

Who elected Elon Musk?

What is an outspoken billionaire with a million conflicts of interest with the rules of government doing as Donald Trump’s shadow? Did he replace JD Vance or Melania to be at Trump’s side through job interviews with potential Cabinet members and on the phone with foreign heads of state?

Does Musk even have a White House security clearance – or are we just brushing away such legal niceties in a time of personal loyalties to Trump? Does “best buddy,” as Musk has now taken to calling himself, now mean that he is set to speak the policy words that come out of Trump’s mouth?

Maybe Musk, who is seen both as a brilliant engineer and a wild card as an outspoken social scientist, is popping up well beyond this celebrated leading role — along with former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, a pharmaceutical businessman — in looking at federal spending and organization, in places and roles that feel well beyond the role of even a close advisor. The so-called Department of Government Efficiency is meant to be an out-of-government, private counsel on cutting upwards of two trillion dollars from the federal budget. The Washington Post added reporting that aides are considering how to outrun normal congressional procedures on how money is appropriated.

As The New York Times notes of Musk, “The world’s richest person has ascended to a position of extraordinary, unofficial influence in Trump’s transition process, playing a role that makes him indisputably America’s most powerful private citizen.” The Times reaps incidents in which Musk in effect has substituted for a missing Melania in Trump family photos and is being greeted at Mar-a-Lago, where he stayed this week, with standing ovations.

Musk has taken an active role in deciding Senate leadership, Cabinet picks — including vetoing some candidates — and setting foreign policy priorities. He has joined Trump on calls with leaders of Turkey, Ukraine and plans to meet with the Argentine president.

On Monday, The New York Times reported, Musk met with Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations in New York in a session that two Iranian officials described as a discussion of how to defuse tensions between Iran and the United States. With what authority is this private citizen having these talks; the Logan Act says it is illegal to do so.

It’s all happening without formal portfolio.

Conflicts Galore

Musk has conflicts with government regulation as a result his ownership of social media company X, his space program and Tesla businesses, his cryptocurrency investments and lots of other areas. As a private citizen, of course, he need not meet any requirements to divest or distance himself from those financial and regulatory interests before advising Trump. Musk has a big entry foot into artificial intelligence development, another area where regulation is pending during the Trump years.

In turn, Musk’s network of friends and business partners includes Silicon Valley executives and international investors who all have direct interests in decisions made by an incoming administration. Musk’s million-dollar giveaways to individual voters for supporting candidate Trump and his political objectives flirted with violation of criminal laws.

There’s a through-line that the world’s richest man and his friends are unaccountable for any out-and-out influence they are exerting on an incoming president-elect — himself a character who is resistant to following established norms.

Some television news reports were hinting that other Trump insiders are offput by Musk, who they see as overstaying his early Trump welcome. Frankly, I don’t care about their bruised feelings, I care about whether we have a shadow president — someone himself ineligible to run for president.

Apart from all else, Musk has a mixed business record that reflect brilliance in applied science and a tin ear when it comes to supporting even his own people. He rejects collective bargaining, and his style reflected in the acquisition of Twitter was to overpay, then fire anyone who knew how to run the operation, turn up the political noise in the name of free speech, and then complain about the subsequent drop-off in business and profit. Shall we apply the same to Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid or meat inspections or the defense department? Shall we cancel fixing roads and bridges?

U.S. spending at-a-glance says we spend $6 trillion a year. All but $1.7 trillion are required by law, including debt payments and the social entitlements programs. Trump plans to deepen debt with tax cuts and basically bring in fewer tax dollars, regardless of who benefits, and huge costs for his immigration and deportation programs and new defense spending. Squaring this uneven circle seems harder work than justified by sloganeering.

Trump can have whatever friends he chooses to keep around him, I suppose. He can get ideas from whomever he chooses. But somewhere in that mix of formal and informal sources of government re-shaping, there is a requirement to come clean with the American public.

The democracy is not supposed to operate as a family parlor game.

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The post President Elon Musk? appeared first on DCReport.org.

Back in 1939, Winston Churchill famously said in a radio broadcast: “I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma …” One might say something similar today about the state of Russia’s economy. Since Russia’s renewed invasion of Ukraine in 2022, international economic sanctions have increased. However, Russia’s economic growth appears robust, according to IMF figures, because of enormous wartime stimulus. Meanwhile, Russia’s central bank has hiked its policy interest rate above 20%, partly to choke off inflation and partly to avoid a depreciation of the ruble (which would make it more expensive for Russia to import goods from China, in particular). Add unreliable and unavailable Russian economic statistics to the mix, and it’s hard to see into the riddle, though the mystery, past the enigma. But some evidence does bubble to the surface now and then.

A report from the Wall Street Journal describes “The ‘Deathonomics’ Powering Russia’s War Machine; Payments for soldiers killed on the front lines are transforming local economies in some of Russia’s poorest regions” (by Georgi Kantchev and Matthew Luxmoore November 13, 2024).

Facing heavy losses in Ukraine, Russia is offering high salaries and bonuses to entice new recruits. In some of the country’s poorest regions, a military wage is as much as five times the average. The families of those who die on the front lines receive large compensation payments from the government.

These are life-changing sums for those left behind. Russian economist Vladislav Inozemtsev calculates that the family of a 35-year-old man who fights for a year and is then killed on the battlefield would receive around 14.5 million rubles, equivalent to $150,000, from his soldier’s salary and death compensation. That is more than he would have earned cumulatively working as a civilian until the age of 60 in some regions. Families are eligible for other bonuses and insurance payouts, too. “Going to the front and being killed a year later is economically more profitable than a man’s further life,” Inozemtsev said, a phenomenon he calls “deathonomics.”

The subsidies are large enough to reduce poverty rates in some of Russia’s poorest areas, and also to balloon budget deficits:

The money flowing to military families can also carry economic risks. The payouts cost around 8% of state expenditures in the year to June 2024, expanding the budget deficit, according to an analysis by Re: Russia, a research group. The payouts have contributed to a high inflation rate plaguing Russia, leading the central bank to raise interest rates to near-record 21%. And more men going to the front is stoking a labor crunch, leaving employers short of welders, drivers and builders.

In Russia’s hinterland, though, the war payouts make a big difference. In Tuva, a remote region where the poverty rate is three times the national average, bank deposits have jumped by 151% since January 2022, the month before the invasion, central-bank data shows. That is the highest increase in Russia, a sign that people are able to squirrel away substantial amounts of money. The region is also in the midst of a record construction boom with new multistory residential complexes arising in the regional capital of Kyzyl. It is almost as if an entire generation has found work overseas and is now sending back remittances.

The Stockholm Institute of Transition Economics (SITE) at the Stockholm School of Economics has tried to see through the smoke in its report “The Russian Economy in the Fog of War” (September 2024). The report starts by putting the size of Russia’s economy in international perspective.

In a global context, Russia is sometimes labeled a “great power”. There are good historical reasons for this. It was one of two opposing poles in the cold war; it remains a major nuclear state; it is a permanent member of the UN security council with veto powers; between 1998 and 2014 it was part of the G7 which with the inclusion of Russia became the G8; and in terms of land size Russia is by far the largest country in the world. In terms of economic size, however, Russia is not a “great power” with a GDP of around 2000 billion US dollars. That is about 1/10th of the combined GDP of the EU-27 (about 20 000 billion US dollars), or approximately the same size as the Nordic countries combined. The size of the US economy is about 27 000 billion US dollars or more than 13 times the Russian economy. Compared to other BRIC countries, Russia is behind Brazil (2200 billion US dollars), distanced with some margin by India (3600 billion US dollars), and only around 10 percent of the Chinese economy (17 800 billion US dollars). … In other words, there is no reasonable scenario where Russia could afford to outspend the West on military equipment and personnel if the West decided to enter a full-blown arms race with Russia in the longer run, when short-run production constraints are not the deciding factor.

For Russia, oil and gas exports alone are about 14% of total GDP. Thus, Russia’s economy fluctuates with energy prices. The report cites one estimate that “between 60 and 95 percent of Russia’s GDP growth can be explained by changes in one exogeneous variable alone: the change in international oil prices.”

Another way of illustrating how natural resources dominate the Russian economy is to look at trade flows. A break-down of what Russia exports, and to whom, shows that more than half consists of sub-soil assets, and more than 40 percent of the total is oil and oil products. When instead looking at imports, it is clear that Russia depends on the rest of the world for machinery, electronics, vehicles, pharmaceuticals, and other goods that require innovation and competitive manufacturing. In short, the Russian economy in terms of trade relations can be described as exporting mainly natural resources, while importing manufactured items and being highly dependent on importing advanced products.

Since 2022, Russia has stopped and then re-started the publication of various economic series. The official GDP numbers are probably not trustworthy, and even to the extent that they can be trusted, they involve heavy production for a wartime rather than a civilian economy. The report uses the price of oil to estimate the size of Russia’s GDP, and then applies a range of possible estimates of inflation, withe the result that “all the alternative measures of growth are negative, ranging from around minus 2 to minus 11 percent.”

The unemployment rate in Russia appears to be quite low, at an official rate of 2.4%. But the grim reason is a combination of killed and wounded in the Ukraine war and people of military age fleeing the country. As the report notes:

Beyond the aggregate numbers, there are also important details when it comes to what happens with the composition of the workforce. The war requires soldiers in great numbers at the front lines, mostly young males, with many of them ending up killed or injured. The war has also triggered an outmigration of citizens due to sanctions and the threat of conscription. Notably, those emigrating are predominantly middle-class business owners and educated workers in conscription age. Furthermore, migrants also move their capital to their new home countries, as for instance shown by the significant financial flows being directed from Russia to the United Arab Emirates since the invasion began in February 2022 (Alexander and Malit, 2024). This suggests that the brain drain not only results in a reduction of skilled labor but also in a loss of capital and investment.

In snowy mountain regions, the situation is sometime ripe for an avalanche, but at the same time, exactly what might cause the avalanche to happen can be unclear. Russia’s economy is currently spending about 8% of GDP on defense and intelligence, while running large budget deficits, double-digit inflation, interest rates north of 20%, and suffering under international sanctions. I do not know if the result will be an economic avalanche, or just a stagnant and declining standard of life for civilians.

The post Russia’s Economy and Deathonomics first appeared on Conversable Economist.

Since dumping Xitter earlier this year, I don’t hear much about parody users there anymore unless their posts show up on platforms other than Elon’s. I used to howl at “sitsnexttokimdavis,” who used to troll former county clerk Kim Davis, who famously refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples.

But this parody user had me going for a few minutes until I decided to find out who the H-E-Double-Hockey-Sticks was behind the “@realdogenews” handle.

It wasn’t Elon, that’s for sure.

The personna or “voice” of the “X” poster behind Department of Government Efficiency Parody (yes, “parody” is in the title) sounds like a scheming middle schooler, or you could say and not be wrong, exactly what Elon Musk must be thinking.

The post that caught my attention was this one:

I shall explain.

At a meeting this weekend in DC, McConnell was heard to remark, “There will be no recess appointments,” in reference to Trumpelstiltskin’s requirement that his outrageous cabinet appointments be given a pass in what is termed “recess appointments,” a process of nonconfirmation confirmations.

The remark was immediately xeeted by a staffer on The New Yorker magazine, only to be quickly taken down. Too late. MAGAs saw the tweet and went ballistic with comments that may be summarized by this remark from the chair of the GOP Youth Advisory Council: “Nobody gives a damn about what Mitch McConnell has to say anymore.”

But @realdogenews captured their reactions perfectly by channeling what any given 13-year-old bully would say.

No one said that the demise of the American democracy couldn’t be fun.

Fox News Host and Army National Guard Veteran Pete Hegseth Said Women Should Not Serve in Combat Roles and That Men Are More Capable.

Originally published by The 19th

Women veterans, national security organizations and military historians are pushing back against recent disparaging comments made by Pete Hegseth, President-elect Donald Trump’s choice to lead the Department of Defense.

“I’m straight up just saying we shouldn’t have women in combat roles,” Hegseth, a Fox News host who served in the Army National Guard, said on a podcast last week while promoting his new book, “The War on Warriors.” “It hasn’t made us more effective. It hasn’t made us more lethal. It has made fighting more complicated.”

Allison Jaslow, the chief executive of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, said she was deployed to Iraq in 2004 as a platoon leader. Within two months, her entire platoon’s mission shifted to a more combat-focused directive and many of the “women could run circles around some of the men” — both in physical fitness and courage, Jaslow said.

“During my time in the military, I’ve had some male colleagues really freaking disappoint me,” Jaslow said. “I’ve seen women who’ve displayed more courage, better physical fitness and better character over some of the men that I’ve served with. I reject the notion [that men are categorically better] altogether, and I think some people with strongly held beliefs will look at one example and label all the rest of us. … It’s just one of those things where I’m like, ‘Tell me to my face.’”

Hegseth, who according to his personal website served in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, also said that institutions shouldn’t incentivize women to take these roles because “over human history, men in those positions are more capable.”

He argued in his book that standards have been changed to accommodate women, which ultimately detracts from the capability of military units. He also claims that “America’s white sons and daughters” are walking away from the military because of “woke” ideology that is too “effeminate” and promotes diversity, equity and inclusion to the country’s detriment.

“Everybody knows between bone density and lung capacity and muscle strength, men and women are just different,” Hegseth added in the interview.

Women — who currently make up more than 21 percent of the active-duty force — have held combat roles in the military for decades, though it’s been a gradual progression. Congress repealed the law banning women from combat aviation and on ships in 1991 and 1993, respectively. The Navy reversed the policy barring women from submarines in 2010. And then in 2013, Congress announced the repeal of the combat exclusion policy, which was implemented in 2015. Over a quarter of a million women served in Iraq from 2003 to 2011, the largest-scale and most visible deployment of women in U.S. history. More than 1,000 women were injured in combat and 166 killed as of 2017, according to the Service Women’s Action Network (SWAN).

Lory Manning, a Navy veteran who served as the director of government operations with SWAN, said Hegseth’s comments are “ill-informed” and there’s no substantial evidence that the presence of women in combat roles harms the U.S. military’s effectiveness.

“He keeps saying they’ve lowered standards for women [in combat roles], and that is just not true,” said Manning, who also led Women in the Military Project at the Women’s Research and Education Institute for 15 years. “Number one: it’s against the law to lower standards for women.”

Manning said he is likely confusing or conflating two different kinds of military standards: basic physical fitness and occupational. The basic physical fitness tests differ across military services and are typically adjusted by age and gender.

“These are basically just to see if this person is fit to be in the military, whether they’re a heart surgeon or a Catholic chaplain or a combat person,” Manning said. “But for every single job in the military, there’s also a set of occupational standards that have to be met. And the law says that they must be gender and age neutral.”

Women service members are required to meet the exact same standards as the men serving alongside them in the same roles. In some recent instances, Manning said women were even asked to participate in specialty combat squads called Lioness Teams. In Iraq, it became clear that only American women soldiers were able to communicate with Iraqi women due to cultural customs and were able to gain important intel on the ground.

“I think [Hegseth] is dead wrong when he says that women are the problem,” Manning said. “Leadership is and has historically been about how to blend the diversity in the armed forces.”

Jaslow emphasized that women should not be considered as weaker based on their gender, pointing to how many have competed and succeeded on the same playing field as their male counterparts.

“Look at the women who’ve graduated from Ranger School, which is so grueling that around half of the men who enter it fail out,” Jaslow said, referring to one of the toughest Army training courses. “These women deserve a Secretary of Defense who is aware of that reality and also ensures that the culture in the military embraces that reality.”

Jaslow said Hegseth’s remarks were especially disappointing because he also fought during the post-911 conflicts alongside an increasing number of women service members.

“It’s tough to swallow that he is somebody who is a contemporary of mine, who lived through our most recent wars and also understands that we are fighting our wars with an all-volunteer military right now,” Jaslow said. “We don’t need to be standing in the way of any able-bodied American who wants to serve or telling them that there are restrictions on the way that they have to serve their country. Just set the standards, and if they can rise to the challenge, they should be able to serve.”

If confirmed, Hegseth would lead the largest government agency, which employs nearly 3 million military and civilian employees all charged with protecting the security of the country.

Kara Dixon Vuic, who studies gender and the U.S. military at Texas Christian University, said that if Hegseth were to bar women from serving in combat roles — it would be a rare reversal in a centuries-long history of the military expanding toward greater inclusivity. A major exception was when Trump placed a ban on transgender people serving in the military, which went into effect in 2019 and was ended by the Biden administration in 2021.

“Nothing Hegseth’s saying is new,” Vuic said. “People said those same things about the racial integration of the military. They said similar things about gay men and women being allowed to serve openly. He’s putting the blame for anything negative that could happen on a group of people without providing evidence to support that claim.”

Yet, women have found themselves on the frontlines of war for centuries, even before they were given technical combat role titles. When the chaos of conflict ensues, roles are often not cleanly delineated into combat and non-combat. Even cooks, medics and radio operators can find themselves in the battlefield. As far back as the Revolutionary War, there were reports of women serving in combat alongside their husbands or disguised as men or as spies for the cause.

“I think top military leaders will push back because they know the realities on the ground,” Vuic said. “They see that women in combat is a matter of efficiency and effectiveness. And they have understood for a long time that to be the most lethal military, you have to draw on the widest pool of talent in this country. To cut off more than half of the population simply because of their sex is not going to give you an optimal military force.”

Lauren Buitta, who founded Girl Security, a nonprofit dedicated to increasing gender equity in the national security sector, said the U.S. military is currently struggling with high suicide rates, rampant sexual misconduct and assault and a recruitment crisis.

“In my mind, the short of it is that this issue is decided: Women have served selflessly,” Buitta said. “There are other tremendous challenges that the U.S. military confronts that I imagine a Secretary of Defense would be focused on.”

Buitta, who works on dismantling gender stereotypes to create career pathways for young girls and women in the national security sector, said that her organization will continue to help girls achieve their dreams, even if that is to serve in a combat role in the military.

“If Hegseth’s words did turn into action that impacted women’s contributions and combat occupations, I think it will hurt America’s position on the global stage,” Buitta said. “We lead by example.”

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The post ‘Tell Me to My Face’: Women Veterans React to Trump Defense Pick’s Disparaging Comments appeared first on DCReport.org.

We’ve all been watching with a mixture of horror and amusement (the latter of which was intended), while presidential appointments have been handed out as cavalierly as razor blade-bearing Halloween candy can be. But many important appointments have yet to be made by Don the Con (or whoever is actually making them), so I thought I’d try and help with a few suggestions of my own. They are not particularly well thought out, so they should match the appointments already made rather well, if I say so myself.

Labor. Doug McMillon. McMillon is CEO of Walmart and makes 1000 times the median income of a Walmart associate. McMillon was the driving force to replace the unionized butchers with prepackaged frozen meat at all of his stores.

Commerce: Peter Thiel. VP JD Vance once regarded him as his Sugar Daddy. Mutton gourmets will rejoice because Thiel will ensure that tarrifs on products imported from New Zealand, his recently adopted second country, remain the lowest in the world.

Treasury: Paul Cassano aka Paulie Roast Beef. A well-known associate of the Lucchese family of New York and New Jersey, Paulie knows where the bodies are buried, having dug a few of the interment sites himself.

Agriculture: William Anderson. CEO of Bayer AG, Bayer acquired Monsanto, which developed GMO technology. GMO seed production is akin to putting all of one’s eggs in one basket, so that when only one biological agent kills the world’s corn crop, it will make it ever so much easier to identify which one it is.

Transportation: Mark R. George. President and CEO of Norfolk Southern RailwIay, here is a CEO who knows about train derailment. Not about how to prevent them, which is defeatism writ large, but in cleaning up devastated derailment sites and burying bodies which is more hands-on.

Education: Herschel Walker. As a former NFL running back, Walker knows the value of a good education, having received a lesson in humility from Senator Raphael Warnock in 2022. He is noted for his work in Lycanthropy, having been the first to identify werewolves as the principle predator of vampires.

Housing: Vince McMahon. Formerly the CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), McMahon knows absolutely nothing about housing or urban development. But neither did prenatal brain surgeon Dr. Ben Carson, who Donnie D Cups previously chose for the job.

CDC: Aaron Rogers. As yet another professional football player/appointee, Rogers is well-aware that one’s performance is related to his overall health and will work well with RFK, Jr’s mandate to nullify all vaccination mandates in the nation’s school systems.

Surgeon General: Dr. Jack Kevorkian. Yes, he’s still dead, so that should keep him from identifying any further life-threatening habits that Americans love and American businesses enjoy providing for.

Taken as a package with those already nominated, this rogue’s gallery of appointees should ensure that the 47th president’s next (and God willing, his last) term lives up to all of our expectations.