Also important this week: A trustworthy guide to childhood vaccine schedules, from actual pediatricians (many of whom saw these diseases before they could be vaccinated against).

* pin it & share it *

Ps: no, pediatricians are not pharma shills, don’t @ me
www.healthychildren.org/English/safe...

Another clown with a flamethrower.

3. He said: "Instead, they assume an imaginary version of him, a Trump they can support — more strategic, less impulsive, someone who thinks like them."

Republicans, this is a chance to take an off ramp from Trump. His people are indefensible and he is out to lunch. Take it. Neither (nor now prob Vance) are going to be on the ballot.

the weird thing about the descent into fascism is how normal everything else seems.

kids have birthday parties. folks go on vacation. neighbors say good morning. people walk their dogs. joggers wind their way through their early-morning exercise.

yet the power grab slowly grows.

In future generations, when your children and grandchildren look back on this moment, they are not going to ask about the price of eggs. They are going to ask you what you did. Not what you felt. Not what you paid. But what you did. And I want to be able to say I did everything I possibly could.

I will use every tool at my disposal to protect this country from Trump. I will litigate to defend voting rights until there are no cases left to bring. I will speak out against authoritarianism until my last breath.

I will not back down. I will not bow or scrape. I will never obey.

He's never worked a day in government.

Yet he gets to decide what is wasteful and what is fraud?

Is a program that provides lifesaving medications to our impoverished allies "wasteful"?

Is one that feeds starving kids "fraud"?

He decides. An unelected oligarch decides our values.

...

Elon Musk’s DOGE is hacking through the federal government and claiming unprecedented access. But Musk’s shadow presidency is also a bailout for X, Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI

“Elon Musk is the president now” was underselling it

Elon now has significantly more power over this country and everyone in it than any president ever has

What this long and detailed NYT piece calmly calls an “extraordinary flexing of power by a private individual” is in fact a blatantly unconstitutional usurpation of Congress’s Article I powers and delegation of the President’s Article II duties.

www.nytimes.com/2025/02/03/u...

"Despite his desire for essentially unilateral authority, he is a spectator to his own presidency the second something goes wrong," says @chrislhayes.bsky.social on Trump's response to the deadly plane crash on the Potomac River.

Never seen such a load of unqualified white dudes

@jimacosta.bsky.social, signing off, with calm and dignity:

"Don’t give in to the lies. Don’t give in to the fear. Hold on to the truth and to hope"

Wow. Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde fearlessly calls out Trump and Vance to their faces. This is heroic.

(posting in 3 parts due to Bluesky's 1 minute limit)