President Biden fires Social Security Administration Commissioner Andrew Saul -- who has done a lot of harm to our Social Security program -- and accepts the resignation of Commissioner David Black after asking for it. Just like his Personal Lord and Savior Donald Trump, Mr. Saul called his firing "a bolt of lightning no one expected," which insults our efforts to oust him for the last six months! Now the very same Republicans who argued throughout the Trump years that "the President should be able to hire and fire whomever he likes" are arguing that Mr. Saul should get his job back. If he thinks he's just going to log in this morning, though, he's a fool.
President Biden has also issued a sweeping Executive Order mandating that our government regulate corporate monopolies a lot harder. Matt Stoller is about as good a writer as exists on this topic, and though he says "(i)t feels a bit like I wrote this order," he also points out the potential roadblocks ahead: not just corporate whining like that of the reactionary U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and not just all the folks who have yet to be appointed to those positions within the Executive branch which would carry out the order, but the "deep state" (yes, it's an actual thing, that writers described long before Trump) which resists change of any kind. (All of which Mr. Biden, possibly more experienced in our federal government than any previous President, surely knows, and that may not bode well for the order's effectiveness.)
When I read that the Surfside condo that collapsed in Florida late last month might never have collapsed if a 2008 state law governing condo repairs hadn't been repealed in 2010, I'm reminded of then-Gov. Rick Scott citing President Trump's waiving of certain regulations as a help in getting buildings rebuilt faster after Hurricane Irma, and former actual moderate Republican Rep. Carlos Curbelo saying around the same time that better building standards save money because you don't have to build things again and again if you do them right the first time. Florida, of course, is the state that doesn't care about anything but money, and you know what our Bible says about the love of money.
Speaking of the Sunshine State, south Florida law enforcement have been using facial recognition on peaceful protestors. Warrants, probable cause? Nah, that stuff's for losers! Although all that was good enough for our Founders. A lot of those protestors were black, of course, and I'd lay money that a lot of them (and folks who looked like them, remember how bad facial recognition is at that) got pulled over later for "broken tail-lights" and "suspected car theft," and some of them even died. But hey, this is Florida, the State That Doesn't Give a Shit.
Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC) says a Biden-proposed door-to-door vaccine campaign could become a pretext for a door-to-door gun- or Bible-confiscation campaign. Never mind how easy it would be to conduct any kind of door-to-door campaign just based on public records -- they always tell you government actually doing something for its owners, the people, is a "slippery slope" toward totalitarianism, but never do they apply such logic to say "you let corporations police themselves and soon they'll be dumping filth into your drinking water," since that's the more likely thing to happen. As I would think his own constituents have been telling him!
Finally, in a peripherally-related note, Tucker Carlson, who has lately accused the NSA of spying on him, now thinks we should spy on teachers to make sure they're not teaching Critical Race Theory. Saying it's just like putting body cameras on cops won't save him from his own hypocrisy! Never mind that no one gets taught critical race theory until college -- we need the reminder that right-wingers don't oppose government spying, but only government spying on them, and they approve of government spying on you.
Comments