Hurry up and wait
Curmudgeon here, checking in.
My hamstring pull is slowly improving, but because it was almost healed about ten days ago when I re-injured it, I decided to ask for some physical therapy to see if it could be helped along to heal completely without another setback.
First, although technically self-referral to a physical therapist is possible, I couldn’t find one who didn’t require a referral from a doctor. Fine – except that meant a delay while I waited for a doctor appointment. And it also meant more expense for insurance.
Then I was fortunate enough to get a quick PT appointment, but only because of a cancellation. I saw the physical therapist today. She was friendly and generally knowledgeable, although a bit stumped. My orthopedic history is byzantine, and although I first went to that office in the early 1990s and have gone quite a few times since, they no longer have my old records and so they haven’t a clue about that history except the summary version I tell them.
And then for followup appointments she could see me in six weeks, which is absurd for an injury. That’s the way it is these days, and it’s by no means the longest wait. They said there are always cancellations and so I guess it will all work out.
But just try to get an appointment with a neurologist these days – six months is considered a short wait. And good luck if you have to cancel an appointment with your regular PCP and reschedule in a timely fashion – long waits there, too.
It’s ordinarily much easier to see a nurse practitioner or physician’s assistant. Even then the waits can be long, and sometimes – not always by any means – the care is substandard.
What’s this all about? Is there just a higher ratio of patients to medical people? What’s going on? Why is it so much worse than it used to be? It’s not my imagination, is it?
Caroline Glick explains the current lawfare against Netanyahu, and it will sound familiar to you
The lawfare against Netanyahu has been revved up, and it resembles what happened to Trump. But it actually seems even worse than what happened to Trump, because it’s going on during a war in which Israel is fighting for its continued existence. I’ve cued up the relevant segment, which lasts about nine minutes:
Roundup
(1) RFK Jr. is having his Congressional hearing, and apparently the Democrats are extremely angry with him: see this. They didn’t even like him very much when he was a Democrat, but once he supported Trump he because truly hated.
Also, this attack on RFK Jr. from his cousin Caroline Kennedy is just terribly sad. There is no question that both of them have known intense tragedy – having a father assassinated when they were young, growing up in the Kennedy spotlight, having siblings die as well – and that the family as a whole has known tremendous problems. Whatever complaints Caroline had about RFK Jr., she kept them quiet as far as I know until he left the Democrat reservation, and now it’s time to try to destroy him.
(2) The DOJ ends its case against Trump’s co-defendants in the documents matter. Good.
(3) The administration has rescinded the Office of Management and Budget memo that initiated the freeze that has been temporarily halted by a DC federal judge. The rescinding of the OMB memo seems to be merely a procedural thing that doesn’t represent a change in the administration’s intent regarding a funding freeze.
(4) New press secretary Karoline Leavitt did very well in her debut in the role. She’s the youngest presidential press secretary ever. Here’s an excerpt:
Zeke Miller of the Associated Press … asked whether Leavitt saw her role as purely an advocate for the president or whether she would provide “the unvarnished truth.” Replied the new press secretary, “I commit to telling the truth from this podium every single day.”
“But,” Leavitt continued, striking a tone that was less confrontational than business-like, “we ask that all of you hold yourselves to that same standard.”
“We know for a fact there have been lies that have been pushed by many legacy media outlets in this country about this president, about his family. And we will not accept that. We will call you out when we feel that your reporting is wrong or there is misinformation about this White House,” she continued. “So, yes, I will hold myself to the truth, and I expect everyone in this room to do the same.”
(5) In another test for the courts, Kristi Noem has attempted to take away the Temporary Protected Status of 600K Venezuelans who entered illegally and were given that protection by the outgoing Biden administration in its very last days, on January 17.
Open thread 1/29/2025
Update on the funding freeze
As could be predicted, a federal judge in DC freezes the freeze (or is it unfreezes the freeze?):
A federal judge temporarily blocked President Trump’s plan to freeze federal aid minutes before it was set to go into effect late Tuesday afternoon.
U.S. District Judge Loren AliKhan said she was granting a “brief administrative stay” that preserves federal disbursements at least until Monday at 5 p.m. EST after a group of nonprofit and public health organizations filed a lawsuit.
The judge will hold another hearing Monday on whether to grant a longer pause.
AliKhan, an appointee of former President Biden who was randomly assigned to the case, issued the order at the conclusion of a hastily scheduled video conference Tuesday that began just an hour before the freeze.
It’s no surprise that this was a judge in DC appointed by Biden and company. However, I don’t object to a temporary freeze on the freeze in order to assess what’s what. I doubt the assessment will be objective, however. But we’ll see.
This will almost certainly be the pattern for a great many of Trump’s moves: a big hue and cry from Democrats, and then immediate lawsuits leading to decisions from left-leaning judges imposing a temporary halt on whatever he’s ordered. Some of these cases will be going to SCOTUS. Some of the cases will ultimately be decided in his favor and some won’t, and for some issues Congress will try to pass statutes on the subject.
And about the military
It is the policy of my Administration that the Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security with regard to the United States Coast Guard (USCG), and every element of the Armed Forces should operate free from any preference based on race or sex.
There’s a ton more at the link, but the goal is to rid the military of the policy of DEI Uber Alles. It started to be implemented during the Obama administration, to the best of my recollection, and picked up enormous steam during the Biden administration. It is deeply entrenched now. Good luck getting rid of it.
The funding freeze: the press pounces
Here’s the sort of thing I’m talking about:
An abrupt halt on federal grants and loans announced Monday night by the Trump administration has created widespread confusion across the government, Congress, state programs and nonprofit organizations that rely on that funding.
The Office of Management and Budget sent a vaguely worded two-page memo to all federal agencies Monday night directing them to “temporarily pause all activities related to obligation or disbursement of all Federal financial assistance” that could conflict with President Donald Trump’s agenda.
The following morning, nonprofit organizations said they were unable to get into a system used to access federal funds to pay for expenses, like salaries and rent.
It’s not clear exactly which programs will be halted, but OMB also sent a document to agencies asking for details on more than 2,600 programs, including school meals for low-income students, USAID foreign assistance, mine inspections, the WIC nutrition program for pregnant women and infants, and a reintegration program for homeless veterans.
However, here’s what press secretary Leavitt had to say when asked at a press conference. Unfortunately, I can’t embed that video, so please click on the link to listen to it. Among other things, Leavitt says:
I think there’s only uncertainty in this room amongst the media; there’s no uncertainty in this building. So let me provide the clarity that all of you need. This is not a blanket pause in federal assistance in grant programs from the Trump administration. Individual assistance, that includes … to give you a few examples, Social Security benefits, Medicare benefits, food stamps, welfare benefits, assistance that is going directly to individuals will not be impacted by this pause. And I want to make that very clear to any Americans who are watching at home who may be a little bit confused about some of the media reporting. This administration, if you are receiving individual assistance from the federal government, you will still continue to receive that. However, it is the responsibility of this president and this administration to be good stewards of taxpayer dollars. That is something that president Trump campaigned on, that’s why he has launched DOGE … and that’s why OMB sent out this memo last night.
There was more, but I think the original memo gave the media a golden opportunity to raise the alarm, which of course they did. I know plenty of people who believe that Trump is going to take away their Social Security and their Medicare, and this stirs them up further. Perhaps there’s no way to calm them own, of course. But the situation with this pause should have been announced in a way that was crystal completely clear from the start.
Open thread 1/28/2025
More on the hostages
It would be nice to have a translation for this. But some things are easy to understand even without one:
On the other hand, Hamas has finally given Israel a list of who is alive and who is dead in the group of 33 to be released in this “deal.” The answer is that 26 are purported to be alive, which is similar to Israel’s previous tally of 25.
The question on many people’s minds, including mine, is whether any members of the Bibas family are on the “alive” list. Israeli authorities are busy letting families know, so my guess is that the general public won’t know till the exchanges all occur.
Meanwhile, Trump has released some bombs that Biden and company had withheld from Israel:
US President Donald Trump said on Saturday night that he had lifted a hold put in place by former president Joe Biden on a shipment of 2,000-pound bombs for Israel.
“A lot of things that were ordered and paid for by Israel, but have not been sent by Biden, are on their way!” Trump wrote on his social media app Truth Social, without providing further details.
On the Hegseth confirmation, and especially Murkowski
As noted in this post, Pete Hegseth was confirmed by the Senate in a vote of 51/50 with Vice President Vance casting the tie-breaking vote. The GOP Senate members who voted “Nay” were Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, and Mitch McConnell the former Majority Leader.
Murkowski is the quintessential RINO and yet she’s from a red state, Alaska. You may wonder why she’s still Alaska’s senator. She was first elected in 2002 and has held the seat since then, having won her most recent election in 2022. That means she is up for re-election in 2028, if she decides to run. She’ll be 71 years old then, not especially geriatric by current standards in politics.
But if you look at Murkowski’s election history it’s a bit easier to understand, although strange. She’s the daughter of a well-known and once-popular Alaskan governor who had also been a senator. Her father appointed her to the Senate when he resigned his own seat to become governor in 2002. She was already in politics, however, as a member of Alaska’s House of Representatives starting in 1999. When I say that her father was a “once-popular” governor, I’m referring to the fact that he won the governorship by a wide margin, but by the time he tried to run for a second term he was primaried out and left with the dismal approval rating of 19%.
Lisa Murkowski has held on more or less by the skin of her teeth. (By the way, I don’t usually put anyone down for having failed the bar exam because I’m well aware of how difficult it is, but Murkowski has the distinction of having failed four times and passed only on the fifth try.) For example, when she ran for re-election to the Alaska House in 2000, she won by 56 votes.
When her father appointed her to the US Senate in 2002, many Alaskans were unhappy:
The appointment caused controversy in Alaska. Many voters disapproved of the nepotism. Her appointment eventually resulted in a referendum that stripped the governor of the power to directly appoint replacement senators.
As far as her elections to the Senate go:
Murkowski has had several close challenges but has never lost a general election. She has won four full terms to the Senate; she won 48.6% of the vote in 2004, 39.5% in 2010, 44.4% in 2016 and 53.7% in 2022.
That 2010 race was a three-candidate event in which she was successfully primaried and was not the GOP nominee, but decided to run anyway in a write-in campaign and beat the official Republican nominee, a Tea Party candidate, by a narrow margin. My guess is that the reason for her victory included crossover Democrat votes, people who realized one of the Republicans would win and wanted it to be the RINO. In 2016 it was a four-way race:
[In 2016] Murkowski was re-elected with 44.4% of the vote, becoming the first person in history to win three elections to the U.S. Senate with pluralities but not majorities, having taken 48.6% in 2004 and 39.5% in 2010.[4] Miller’s 29.2% finish was then the best ever for a Libertarian candidate in a U.S. Senate election in terms of vote percentage.
Her 2022 victory was extremely strange as well [emphasis mine]:
This was the first U.S. Senate election in Alaska to be held under a new election process provided for in Ballot Measure 2. All candidates ran in a nonpartisan blanket top-four primary on August 16, 2022, and the top four candidates advanced to the general election, where voters utilized ranked-choice voting.
Murkowski had been a vocal critic of Donald Trump during his presidency and opposed several of his initiatives. Murkowski was one of seven Republican senators who voted to convict Trump in his second impeachment trial in 2021, and was the only one up for re-election in 2022. On March 16, 2021, the Alaska Republican Party voted to censure Murkowski and announced that it would recruit a Republican challenger in the 2022 election cycle. Kelly Tshibaka, a former commissioner of the Alaska Department of Administration, was endorsed by Trump and the Alaska Republican Party. Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell and the National Republican Senatorial Committee supported Murkowski.
In addition to Murkowski and Tshibaka, Democrat Pat Chesbro and Republican Buzz Kelley also advanced to the general election. On September 13, Kelley suspended his campaign and endorsed Tshibaka but remained on the ballot. Murkowski received a plurality of first-place votes; however, because no candidate received a majority of the votes in the first round, an instant runoff was triggered. Murkowski won reelection in the third and final round, winning most of the second-choice votes from Chesbro’s voters.
So she won because of Democrat votes, this time without a doubt. She also had the support in that election of none other than Mitch McConnell.
I think that history explains, at least in part, how it is that Alaska came to have Lisa Murkowski as its long-time senator.
For McConnell, I don’t think his vote is any mystery: he hates Trump, and perhaps it has something to do with his financial interests as well.
Susan Collins is much easier to explain. I wrote:
I don’t fault Collins. She’s from Maine. She helps even if she sometimes votes with Democrats, because when she retires she’ll be replaced by a real Democrat.
She has to choose the times she will vote more conservatively, and when it doesn’t matter as much is free to vote with Democrats. She almost certainly was aware of the breakdown of votes, and knew that Vance was available to break the tie.
Commenter “Old Flyer” wrote:
I am not so charitable toward Collins. There are ample opportunities to assuage the Left leaning voters in her relatively tiny constituency; but Hegseth’s confirmation was hanging in the balance. I believe that she is a committed anti-Trumper and will oppose him as long as she feeds at the Senate trough–regardless of the stakes.
I think the answer is as I said above: that she knew it actually didn’t hang in the balance. It’s possible to forget that votes are often known in advance and that members of Congress sometimes vote to make a point when they know it doesn’t matter in the end.
Today is the second anniversary of Gerard Vanderleun’s death
[NOTE: This is a repost of an essay I wrote a few days after Gerard died. Also, he left instructions to close his blog two years after his death. I plan to do that in a few weeks. Meanwhile, I’m still compiling the poetry book, and I need his blog for that.]
It’s a daily voice, like a friend you talk to on the phone every day. The closest thing to this kind of writing prior to blogging was the daily columnist (when did those go out? or did they ever exist?).
You get to thinking a blogger is someone you know, and although the conversations are a mite one-sided, they’re not totally one-sided because many bloggers interact in the comments as well. And then there’s always email contact, which makes the blogger much more easily accessible than the olden-day columnist.
The writing voices of bloggers are highly idiosyncratic as well. It’s not newspaper reporting, after all, with its pretense of objectivity and impersonality. Also, there’s no middleman or editor. The blogger is all of that rolled into one.
Some bloggers are far more personal in their writing and disclosure than others. Gerard Vanderleun was that way, for example. I’m much more circumspect (remember that apple I hide behind). Then again, even what appears like openness is hardly full disclosure, and bloggers intentionally shape the personae they project. That’s why meeting a blogger in the real world usually causes some feeling of surprise, because the writer is not the person although the person is the writer.
So when a writer dies and that writing voice is stilled, it’s extra-noticeable for the readers. There’s often a pang very much like losing a good friend in real life, a friend with a major daily presence. The blogger has been churning out copy like a machine, usually every day and probably several times a day, often for years or decades. And then suddenly: silence. Utter utter silence.
It’s a very dramatic reminder that death is an abrupt and reluctant parting as far as our lives on earth go, and how powerless all of us are in its face.
[NOTE: For those of you who don’t know the story of why I’m writing about Gerard Vanderleun, please see this.]