But Trump totally isn’t racist.
Yup, totally not racist.
Just to put things in context, Pierson has a black father and a white mother, she voted for Obama in 2008, and her hero is Malcolm X.
I’m not sure I’m ready to describe her as racist, but she definitely doesn’t understand the difference between edgy and stupid.
Look, Trump is just fulfilling his promise to drain the swamp. Once somebody has been in DC more than like, 3 months, they’re obviously corrupt with Washington influence.
That’s why he takes so many vacations and is never at the White House. Keeping himself pure.
She’s also a convicted thief.
Not that I know anything about the DoE, but here’s a different take…
I had always thought the D.O.E. busied itself with supplies of oil and gas, and the regulation of prices. Actually (and crucially) it’s staffed with thousands of scientists and is responsible for maintaining our nuclear-arsenal inventory of 6,800 warheads, each vastly more deadly than the bombs dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It also monitors the nuclear weapons of other nations and helps their governments keep them out of the hands of terrorists by enabling authorities to detect the unauthorized movement of nuclear material across borders.
In addition, the D.O.E. is in charge of protecting the nation’s electrical grid, which has already been probed by as yet unidentified groups intent on crippling it. If they succeed, they could cause, say, the entire Pacific Northwest to go dark for months. The D.O.E. is in charge of cleaning up the nuclear dumps filled with the lethal by-products of 70 years of making nuclear weapons. The Hanford site, in southeastern Washington State, is the source of a plume of radioactive sludge that has contaminated the ground water and is creeping toward the Columbia River. Containing it is a priority, and cleaning the site, according to a former senior D.O.E. official cited by Lewis, will take 100 years and $100 billion. The department also funds research for the development of alternative energy sources that are initially too expensive and risky for the private sector to take an interest in. Electric cars, like the Tesla, for instance, owe their existence to the D.O.E.
The work of the department is so important that President Obama instructed 50 people inside the agency to prepare briefs to deliver to his successor. Bush had done likewise for him. For the morning after the election, the department set aside 30 parking spaces for the people the new president would send over, and it scheduled 75 days to brief them. On the appointed day, according to former D.O.E. officials, no one showed up. No one showed up the next day or in the days following.
@Malathor
It’s just amazing coincidence donald dump has done eveything putin could have ever asked of a traitor… to anyone with the intelligence of a 4 year old (or those who don’t actually care about America). Remember when he gave state secrets to the Russians and put American sympathisizers at risk? Or when he revealed the secret location of 2 of our submaraines to the psychotic Duterte? Seems like decades ago…
Sure, the DOE has many responsibilities, but in this administration the Energy secretary has none. Trump’s cabinet is mostly sinecures with the possible exceptions of Nielsen, Mnuchin, Pompeo, Sessions, and Mattis, ie homeland security, treasury, state, justice, and defense.The others do some damage with their various idiot policy directives, but if they were all assassinated at once their departments would feel no pain.
I find it perhaps this administration perhaps the most depressing thing I’ve every experienced in watching politics. Trump is in effect trying to dismantle the entire apparatus of government in all spheres, and a vast swath of the country doesn’t care or actively supports it. Apparently a lot of people actually believe that all of the stuff that makes their lives reasonable just sort of happens, and the government has nothing to do with it.
I can definitely see the point of the “let it all burn” people in some ways. The only way some folks are ever going to understand is when they have that last, futile epiphany as the flames of anarchy consume them.
Trump will set US back 20 years but it’s okay China and Russia will be happy to fill the leadership vacuum.
And somehow it will be the fault of the Democrats.
Thanks Obama!
“China and Russia are happily filling the leadership vacuum.” is more correct.
That description of the DOE makes me more skeptical of it. Some of those service should be in other govt agencies and are duplicative.
Some of those projects are straight up waste and crony capitalism. Some are crucial but not sure throwing in crucial projects indicates why having Short staff appointees is a bad thing.
DOE only dates to 1977 or so, growing out of the old Atomic Energy Commission which itself grew out of the Manhattan Project in WWII. This predated the Department of Defense, which dates to 1947 and the Truman administration, so that helps account for the weirdness of nuclear weapons being in a department that itself was created due to the energy crises of the seventies. Once a bureaucracy gets its hands on a portfolio, it never gives it up…
Not sure what you’re getting at here, wahoo. The Vanity Fair piece linked in the post isn’t trying to be a comprehensive listing of DOE’s responsibilities - it’s about the (well documented in many places) bizzaro, reprehensible treatment of DOE by Trumpian political thought police during the transition and early days of the administration.
As for crony capitalism - it’s not like DOE developed cars for Tesla, but it did develop a lot of battery technology. I can certainly see different administrations having different views about the government’s proper role in technology development. One might see investment in clean energy research as a national priority, while another might view the government’s role to be to tilt the playing field toward more fossil fuels. Elections, consequences, etc. Someday the substantial federal investment in fusion research might pay off, and private companies will make money off of that. Would you view that as crony capitalism, too?
The weirdness regarding the DoD starting up in 1947 is that it was a rebranding of the Department of War, which had been its name since the Founding (it was one of the original Cabinet departments, along with State, Treasury and ?). The “War” moniker was in a bad odor after the Nuremberg trials which accused the Nazis not just of war crimes but also of waging an unjustified war, right?
I hear they even had their own room back in the day, with a rule that no fighting was allowed inside it.