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Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: Which timeline is this, exactly? [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-05-13
We begin today with Paul Krugman’s bullet points on the U.S./China deal to slash the tariffs that both countries imposed.
1. A 30 percent tariff is still really, really high, especially combined with the 10 percent tariff we’re imposing on everyone else. The back of my envelope says that the average U.S. tariff rate will now be around 13 percent, up from around 3 percent when Trump began his trade war. Before all this drama that would have been seen as wildly protectionist. 2. This wasn’t a case of both sides backing down. China only imposed its tariffs as a response to Trump’s gambit, and has reduced them only because he retreated. And retreat he did. This was basically Trump running away from the killer rabbit.
Michelle Goldberg of The New York Times informs us that in this timeline, any influential “influencer” can also be nominated for a prestigious government post. Take, for example, Casey Means, the shoe salesman’s nominee to become Surgeon General.
Means believes that the medical industry wants to make people sick to profit from their treatment, so she shows little interest in expanding access to traditional health care. In her best-selling book “Good Energy: The Surprising Connection Between Metabolism and Limitless Health,” she argues that metabolic disorders caused by unhealthy lifestyles are at the root of virtually every illness, including cancer, infertility, heart disease and depression. Failure to address the fundamental causes of these maladies means that “the more access to health care and medications we provide to patients, the worse the outcomes get.” Means is obviously correct that the American diet is a disaster, and most people would benefit from better sleep, more exercise and stress-control techniques like meditation. What’s insidious in her philosophy is the notion that good choices and a positive attitude can obviate the need for modern pharmaceuticals. (Health is, alas, never limitless, even with the ENERGYbits algae tablets Means hawks on her website.) She is a vaccine skeptic, suggesting in her newsletter that “the current extreme and growing vaccine schedule is causing health declines in vulnerable children.” She’s also a critic of birth control pills; as she told Tucker Carlson last year, “The things that give life in this world, which are women and soil, we have tried to dominate and shut down the cycles.” These views, however, are not the reason that some of Donald Trump’s supporters erupted into virtual civil war after he nominated Means to be surgeon general last week. (Trump tapped her after withdrawing his first choice, the former Fox News contributor Janette Nesheiwat, who was found to have exaggerated her credentials.) Means is a close ally of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., now the secretary of health and human services. Yet much of Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again, or MAHA, movement has revolted against her nomination. It’s a rift that underscores the instability of a political coalition built on paranoia, distrust and the dogged pursuit of social media clout.
And as much as I like Michelle Goldberg’s columns…at the very top of the NYT web page as of 5:50 am this morning:
The Qatari jet, shameful and probably even illegal as it is, is only the highlight of corruption “concerns” if you limit it to the past 36-48 hours.
Next thing you know, the NYT will state that Trump has learned his lesson.
Or...take Trump’s former personal attorney, Todd Blanche, now the acting head of the Library of Congress replacing Dr. Carla Hayden.
Justin Papp/Roll Call
Uncertainty gripped the Library of Congress on Monday as the White House moved to assert more control over the legislative branch agency, naming Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche as its acting head. [...] Blanche is a former personal attorney of Trump’s who has defended him in multiple instances, including the 2024 hush money case in which Trump was convicted on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. He was confirmed by the Senate in March to serve as second-in-command in the Trump Justice Department under Attorney General Pam Bondi. Two others from Justice were dispatched to the library. Brian Nieves, deputy chief of staff in the office of the Deputy Attorney General, has been tapped as acting deputy librarian, while Paul Perkins, associate deputy attorney general, may serve as acting register of copyrights, according to a Justice Department spokesperson. Trump’s actions amount to an attempt to “take over a legislative branch agency,” according to two top Democrats on committees with library oversight.
Eric Morgan and Ralph Keeling with for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Trump’s proposed funding cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration with threaten the agency’s ability to monitor the earth’s atmospheric carbon dioxide.
The Trump administration has made clear it wishes to gut NOAA’s research enterprise, which is at the center of climate research globally. Already, we’ve seen large-scale firings and rejections of research proposals. Recent guidance from the Office of Management and Budget shows the administration intends to assiduously follow the blueprint of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 and shutter the Ocean and Atmospheric Research Line Office. This is not just a little haircut for a large federal agency—it’s grabbing the scissors and stabbing the agency through the heart. If successful, this loss will be a nightmare scenario for climate science, not just in the United States, but the world. It will also likely spell the end of our ability to continuously update the Keeling Curve. Against this ominous backdrop, a small group of scientists is scrambling to preserve the ability to know how much carbon dioxide is in the atmosphere. NOAA maintains a global backbone of measurements of carbon dioxide and other gases, not just at Mauna Loa, but at more than 50 stations around the world. In parallel, our program at Scripps maintains records at a dozen stations. Other countries also contribute, but their efforts are almost all focused regionally, leaving the big picture to just a few programs that are global in scope. Climate change, however, is a global problem, and global networks address the really important questions. Such networks provide critical information on how fast carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are building up in the air from fossil-fuel burning and other processes. They provide information on how much carbon dioxide is being removed from the atmosphere by the oceans and by land plants. They provide information critical to independently verify emissions, to negotiate international treaties, to make decisions now about how much carbon dioxide the world can emit. These observational networks are the factual basis upon which all efforts to mitigate and adapt to climate change are based.
President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, mostly about foreign policy and trade issues. Jon Lee Anderson of The New Yorker interviewed Brazil's
Lula knows that his coalition is thin. In a recent speech, he said, “The Presidents of South American countries should understand that we are very weak if we are isolated.” When I saw him in Brasília, he made a plea for greater international coöperation. “We have to convince the world that it’s not possible to end multilateralism,” he said. “Multilateralism was a form of civility found among states to coexist peacefully, with rules that everyone must follow,” he went on. “It’s already proven that, if we don’t control the air, everyone will be a victim of air pollution. If the sea rises, everyone will be a victim. It hasn’t yet reached the world’s most important leaders that we need global governance to make some decisions globally.” [...] Lula advocated a world in which the major powers could compete without resorting to warfare, and in which they coöperated more closely on such priorities as hunger and climate change. It was not lost on him that Brazil, as a developing economy, depends on maintaining friendly relations, even when it means partnering with countries with wildly divergent value systems. “We need to say: thank goodness we have China that, from a technological perspective, is very advanced and can compete in the technological world of A.I., giving us an alternative for this debate,” he said. In his telling, Western powers’ animosity toward China was spurred by trade, not by its human-rights abuses or its threats to invade Taiwan. “I am from a generation that learned in the nineteen-eighties, through Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, that the best thing for the world was globalization and free trade. Products should flow freely across the world. Money should flow freely across the world.” China, he said, had merely adopted this theory along with everyone else. “China started producing everything that was produced in the U.S. and Europe. You couldn’t buy a single pair of pants, shoes, or a shirt that didn’t say ‘Made in China.’ They very skillfully copied everything and learned how to produce things as well or better. Now that the Chinese have become competitive, they have become the world’s enemies,” he added testily. “And we don’t accept that. We don’t accept the idea of a second Cold War. We accept the idea that the more similar countries are—technologically and militarily advanced—the more they must talk to each other, because I’m not sure the planet can handle a Third World War.”
Finally today, Joel Guinto of BBC News reports that in the midterm Philippine elections, voters decided to party like it was 1998 (or something like that), with Philippine President Ferdinand "Bongbong" Marcos Jr'’s allies losing seats in the Senate that will decide the fate of Philippine vice-president Sara Duterte, daughter of the former president Rodrigo Duterte (now detained in The Hague) while the former president also won the mayor’s race in the Duterte family stronghold of Davao.
According to the latest count of 80% of the votes, Marcos allies appear to have captured fewer senate seats than expected. Meanwhile his rival, former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte who is detained in The Hague over his drug war that killed thousands, has been elected mayor of his family's stronghold. The fate of his daughter Vice President Sara Duterte, who is facing an impeachment trial, remains in the balance. [...] The popular vice-president, who is widely expected to run for president in 2028, is facing the prospect of a ban from politics, should a jury made up of senators vote to impeach her. Many people had expected Marcos Jr's picks to win most of the 12 seats. But according to the latest count of 80% of the votes, only six from his camp appear to have won seats, and one of them has also been endorsed by the Dutertes.
Oh, you think that the U.S. timeline is weird?
The Duterte camp appears to have won at least four seats. They include Marcos Jr's older sister Imee, who recently bolted from her brother's alliance to side with the Dutertes.
OK, granted...a Kennedy (and not just any Kennedy) is in a far-right administration...but still...
Ours is not the only weird TL.
Everyone try to have the best possible day, no matter what TL you may be in.
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