Secretary of Oil

Hopefully you missed some really contentious confirmation hearings. Just three Republican senators could blow this thing all to heck for Trump if they wanted to, and looks like we already have quite a few more than that opposing Tillerson for SoS.

Of course the GOP has been doing nothing but caving like the dang Croods since this whole thing started, so I'm trying not to get too optimistic.

 

<Did I miss anything?>

Well, a head of Housing and Urban Development who has no experience in either housing or urban development comes to mind.

<An anti-vaxxer heading up health.>

I'm glad you brought that up. I DID miss that one. Most of the coverage of Price has focused on his hostility to Obamacare, which was concerning but at least predictable. I had no idea he was a member of the AAPS, which is hostile to Medicare and Medicaid and features some real quackery in other areas too:

Tom Price Belongs to a Really Scary Medical Organization

"The AAPS statement of principles declares that it is “evil” and “immoral” for physicians to participate in Medicare and Medicaid, and its journal is a repository for quackery. Its website features claims that tobacco taxes harm public health and electronic medical records are a form of “data control” like that employed by the East German secret police. An article on the AAPS website speculated that Barack Obama may have won the presidency by hypnotizing voters, especially cohorts known to be susceptible to “neurolinguistic programming”—that is, according to the writer, young people, educated people, and possibly Jews."

(snip)

"Perhaps [Price] was so attracted to the AAPS vision of doctors as special and “outside of the herd” to the point that he ignored its simultaneous promotion of dangerous medical quackery, such as antivaccine pseudoscience blaming vaccines for autism, including a view that is extreme even among antivaccine activists, namely that the “shaken baby syndrome” is a “misdiagnosis” for vaccine injury; its HIV/AIDS denialism; its blaming immigrants for crime and disease; its promotion of the pseudoscience claiming that abortion causes breast cancer using some of the most execrable “science” ever; its rejection of evidence-based guidelines as an unacceptable affront on the godlike autonomy of physicians; or the way the AAPS rejects even the concept of a scientific consensus about anything. Let’s just put it this way. The AAPS has featured publications by antivaccine mercury militia “scientists” Mark and David Geier. Even so, the very fact that Price was attracted enough to this organization and liked it enough to actually join it should raise a number of red flags. It certainly did with me, because I know the AAPS all too well.

How much of this stuff does Price himself belief? It’ll be a worthy topic of inquiry during his confirmation hearing. But either way, the AAPS isn’t the sort of group you join if you have any faith in government or belief that it can meaningfully help people; rather, it’s the sort of organization you join if you want to drag the world back to a time when individual patients were on their own, batted to and fro by indifferent markets, with effectively no recourse to fight against quackery, fraud, and other forms of medical malfeasance. If and when Price is handed the keys to HHS, things could get scary, fast."

Holy moly!

 

Oh, and he just tapped Rick Perry, supergenius, to head an agency he said he wanted to abolish. And who denies climate change, so no reason to move our energy policy away from fossil fuels. So now there's that.