Americans may have recently elected Donald Trump to a second term, but that doesn’t mean they have high confidence in his ability to choose well-qualified people for his Cabinet — or effectively manage government spending, the military and the White House, according to a new poll from the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

As Trump names his appointees for key posts in his administration — some of whom could face difficult confirmation fights in the Senate even with Republicans in control — about half of U.S. adults are “not at all confident” in Trump’s ability to appoint well-qualified people for his Cabinet and other high-level government positions.

The appointment process and its breakneck speed have represented a manifestation of Trump’s pledge to voters to be a disruptive force in the country and a return to the chaotic era of governance that defined his first four years in the Oval Office. But only around 3 in 10 Americans are “extremely” or “very” confident that Trump will pick qualified people to serve in his administration. A majority of Republicans say they do have high confidence.

Trump has promised to shake up Washington with an aggressive approach that includes the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, a nongovernmental task force assigned to find ways to fire federal workers, cut programs and slash federal regulations, to be helmed by billionaire Elon Musk and fellow entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy.

Beyond his appointments, though, the survey finds a similar level of confidence in Trump’s ability to manage government spending and perform other key presidential tasks, including overseeing the military and the White House — which, in Trump’s first term, experienced significant high-level staff turnover, particularly in its early days.

That’s not quite the same challenge faced four years ago by President Joe Biden, who came into office with higher levels of confidence in some areas than others.

Democrats and independents are most likely to doubt Trump’s leadership​

That low confidence is generally driven by Democrats and independents. A large share of Democrats are suspicious of Trump’s abilities on all of these fronts — about three-quarters say they are “not at all confident” that he will be able to effectively manage the White House, government spending or the military, or choose well-qualified people for his Cabinet.

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About 4 in 10 independents, meanwhile, say they are “slightly” or “not at all” confident in Trump’s capacity to execute each of these responsibilities, while about 2 in 10 are “extremely” or “very” confident.

Republican confidence is higher, but it isn’t overwhelming​

Confidence among Republicans is higher, but not as overwhelming as Democrats’ doubts. About 6 in 10 Republicans are “extremely” or “very” confident in Trump’s ability to choose well-qualified people to serve in his Cabinet and manage the White House, the military and government spending. About 2 in 10 Republicans are “moderately confident,” and another 2 in 10 are “slightly” or “not at all” confident in each case.

Biden had similar hurdles at the start of his term​

When Biden took office in 2021, people also harbored some doubts about how he’d carry out some major responsibilities — but unlike with Trump, where concern is fairly even across different tasks, they were more confident in Biden’s ability to do some things than others. When he entered the White House, Biden had served eight years as President Barack Obama’s vice president, as well as decades in the U.S. Senate, and he ran the 2020 campaign largely on those years of experience.

A separate AP-NORC poll conducted shortly after Biden took office — which asked the question slightly differently — found a higher level of confidence in Biden’s ability to appoint well-qualified people for his Cabinet and manage the White House than his ability to manage the military and government spending.

Just Hyundai for now.

I like the way they display info on the car and the financing. Pick a specific car and you can see what I'm talking about. They even show you how your interest rate changes based on your credit rating.

I can see people printing off those pages when negotiating with other car dealers.

One of the biggest and most pressing questions in the aftermath of the 2024 election is just how much President-elect Donald Trump follows through on some of his more authoritarian-leaning proposals.
This is a man, after all, who talked about suspending parts of the Constitution, being a dictator for a day, criminalizing dissent and targeting his political enemies for retribution. Trump’s defenders often dismiss these comments as mere provocations, but only one man knows what’s in the president-elect’s heart. And there will surely be fewer obstacles in his second term if he does go down some undemocratic paths.


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One of those diminished obstacles will be Trump’s own base.

For months, we’ve seen some remarkable findings when it comes to just how much the GOP base is willing to countenance or entertain authoritarianism. And we can now add another poll to the mix.

Monmouth University on Thursday released new data on a question it’s been asking for a while. The question notes that Trump has talked about suspending laws and constitutional provisions, and asked whether people would be bothered if he targeted his political enemies after doing so.
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Trump’s allies are increasingly unbothered.
Just 23 percent of Republicans in the poll said they would be “bothered a lot” if Trump did this. That’s down from 41 percent in July and 25 percent in October. And it’s now less than the percentage who say they would not be bothered at all (36 percent).

(The remainder — about one-third of Republicans — say they would be “bothered a little.”)
The data also suggest that Trump-leaning independents have shifted significantly. Overall, the percentage of independents who say they would be bothered a lot if Trump targeted his enemies has dropped from 68 percent in July, to 60 percent in October, to 55 percent today.

Overall, nearly two-thirds of Americans said in July that they would be “bothered a lot” (65 percent) by such behavior. Now it’s just a slight majority (52 percent).
It’s merely the latest in a long line of data suggesting Republicans aren’t terribly concerned with democratic guardrails, at least when Trump is involved:

• 57 percent of Republicans earlier this year said it would be a good thing if Trump were able to act “without having to worry about Congress and the courts.”
• 52 percent agreed that we need “a strong president who should be allowed to rule without too much interference from courts and Congress.”
• 56 percent of Republicans in April agreed that “we need a leader who is willing to break some rules to set things right.”
• 30 percent of Trump supporters last year agreed that we need a leader who doesn’t just break rules but also laws.
• A pre-election poll showed one-quarter of Republicans said Trump should try to seize power if he loses.
• A February poll showed 74 percent of Republicans favored Trump being dictator for a day.

It’s possible to overinterpret this data. Perhaps Trump allies don’t really think Trump would do these things and/or view them as unfair questions. Indeed, the new Monmouth poll showed Republicans say, 71 percent to 21 percent, that they don’t actually expect Trump to try to suspend laws and constitutional provisions to target his enemies. (Democrats are far less convinced; they say, 77 percent to 21 percent, that Trump will.)
But we’ve also seen over and over how the Republican Party tends to talk itself into the things Trump wants to do.

He’ll plant a seed of a seemingly shocking idea and then fertilize it gradually over time, all the while bringing his party along for the ride. The most pronounced case is the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection, which Republicans gradually came to believe wasn’t that bad and even that those responsible have been persecuted.

We don’t know what Trump’s true intentions are when it comes to targeting his enemies. Trump said over the weekend that members of the House Jan. 6 committee should be jailed, the latest in a long line of foes he’s said things like that about.
But in a new Time magazine interview published Thursday, Trump said that he hasn’t discussed prosecutions of rivals with his choice for attorney general, former Florida attorney general Pam Bondi (R), and that it would be up to her on whether to proceed. (Bondi last year talked about how “prosecutors will be prosecuted — the bad ones” and “the investigators will be investigated.” Trump has also announced a pick for FBI director, Kash Patel, who has talked about targeting Trump’s enemies.)
Still, if Trump and/or his Justice Department do press forward with such a drastic plan, much of his base will apparently back him up — or at least not object too strenuously.

Question for those HROT'ers out there who are well-versed in long-term investment and the different forms of IRA's:

What type of retirement investment account would you recommend to someone who already has a decent 401k built up and is considering opening a supplementary retirement account? In this case the target would be to invest around 5-7k per year for the next 30 years in hopes of building a solid foundation for a meager but comfortable retirement. Appreciate any and all input!

She wrote on X, "Woodrow Wilson pardoned his brother-in-law, Hunter deButts. Bill Clinton pardoned his brother, Roger. Donald Trump pardoned his daughter’s father-in-law, Charlie Kushner. And just appointed him Ambassador to France. But tell me again how Joe Biden ‘is setting precedent’?"

Navarro's bizarre claim about Woodrow Wilson's pardon of a fictional brother-in-law named "Hunter deButts" instantly raised eyebrows. Social media users and news outlets quickly fact-checked Navarro before she owned up to her mistake the next day.

Javier Milei, the wild-haired Argentine president known by his supporters as “the madman,” has lately edged out Hungary’s Viktor Orban as the MAGA movement’s chief international inspiration.
Donald Trump has called Milei his “favorite president,” and Milei was the first foreign leader to visit him at Mar-a-Lago after his victory. Last week, the Conservative Political Action Conference, which has increasingly sought to build a global network of right-wing activists and politicians, held its first-ever conference in Buenos Aires. Lara Trump, the president-elect’s daughter-in-law, gave a speech lauding Milei’s relentless budget-slashing, and vowed that, with help from Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy’s Department of Government Efficiency, “we’re going to do the same thing in the United States.”
The ascendence of Milei in Trumpworld is a sign of an important ideological shift on the right. Trump first ran for office railing against corporate America and rejecting the sort of entitlement cuts long dreamed of by Republican wonks like Paul Ryan, the former House speaker. “I’m not going to cut Social Security like every other Republican, and I’m not going to cut Medicare or Medicaid,” Trump said in 2015. After Trump won, Orban became an icon to a group of rising right-wing intellectuals less interested in fiscal discipline than in using the power of the state to remake culture, reward friends and punish enemies. Conservatives like JD Vance often speak admiringly of the subsidies Orban’s government gives families to encourage them to have more children; such spending is more than 5 percent of Hungary’s G.D.P.
Milei is a very different kind of right-winger. He’s an arch-libertarian — except when it comes to abortion — who has four cloned mastiffs named after conservative economists. He believes that drugs should be legal, as should the sale of organs, and sees marriage as a contract that should exist outside of state regulation.
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Since taking office a year ago amid devastating hyperinflation, he’s undertaken a campaign of economic shock therapy, slashing government spending by around 30 percent. In doing so, as Jon Lee Anderson wrote in a recent New Yorker profile, he’s changed “the compact between the Argentinian state and its citizens — cutting cost-of-living increases to pensioners, funding for education, and supplies for soup kitchens in poor neighborhoods.” In some ways, Milei is succeeding; inflation has plummeted. But the poverty rate rose by around 11 points during his first six months in office, to almost 53 percent, and the country has fallen into a recession.
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In the American right’s admiration for Milei, you can see the rebirth of old-fashioned small-government conservatism in feral tech-bro form. Campaigning for Trump in October, Musk argued that Americans need to accept “temporary hardship” to reduce spending, and Ramaswamy recently called for “Milei-style cuts on steroids.” It’s far from clear how much policy influence Musk and Ramaswamy will actually have; the Department of Government Efficiency is just an advisory board, not a real department. But while Paul Ryan may be banished from Trump’s Republican Party, some of the most unattractive elements of his politics have come roaring back.
Mike Lee, a Republican senator from Utah, has long dreamed of pulling up Social Security “by the roots.” In social media posts last week, he compared it to a “Ponzi scheme” and called for “real reform.” “Interesting thread,” wrote Musk, boosting it. On Fox Business Network, Representative Rich McCormick, a Republican from Georgia, said legislators need to have the “stomach” to make “hard decisions” about entitlements, while his fellow congressional Republican, Mark Alford, called for raising the Social Security retirement age.
At least in the immediate term, both Social Security and Medicare are probably safe, given the minuscule size of the House Republican majority. Plenty of other programs could, however, be on the chopping block.
A Republican Congress may cut federal matching funds that helped states expand access to Medicaid, which covers low-income people and people with disabilities. Republicans are talking about imposing national Medicaid work requirements and checking recipient eligibility more than once a year, potentially burdening people with more paperwork than they can keep up with. The G.O.P. is also looking at ways to cut food stamps and to make it harder to qualify for them. Affordable housing programs could be gutted, and Trump will probably roll back what he can of Biden’s student debt relief programs. New hardships, for many, may well be on the way. It remains to be seen how temporary they will be.

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For years, observers, including me, have attributed at least part of Trump’s success to his rhetorical break with the unpopular elements of conservative economic orthodoxy. His choice of Vance as vice president suggested he might be open to an expansion of the social safety net aimed at shoring up blue-collar families. But the American right’s lionization of Milei indicates a different Republican path, one more congenial to the party’s biggest donors.
Milei, with his defiantly vulgar, anarchically anti-establishment style, has managed to build a working-class constituency for economic austerity, and to maintain it even as his policies start to bite. (His approval rating is currently a relatively robust 55 percent.) He’s figured out a way to harness the insurrectionary energy of populism to the most elite economic program imaginable. This feat, such as it is, may not be replicable outside of Argentina, but it’s understandable that our plutocrats would want to try.

Sounds like he will tell the Vikings his plans tonight.


I say move on. Sign Sam Darnold as a bridge guy and trade up for Drake Maye.

Skol!

No thread?
3 of the top 6 picks have been French players. The NBA is truly a worldwide sport.
I"m only watching until the Bulls select a bag full of magic beans.

Beyond parody.
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Okay, only watched one episode. But I was giggling quite a bit. I'm guessing it gets worse as it wasn't on TV very long.

Not silent chuckles, but actual laughs. I realized today that I don't laugh as much as I used to, or should.

Leslie Jones first up for three nights. I always liked her on SNL. Last night...


Leslie Jones Tackles The Erotic MLK Jr. Statue & Classified Docs in Biden's Home | The Daily Show

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WILTON, Iowa (AP) — Every year the U.S. egg industry kills about 350 million male chicks because, while the fuzzy little animals are incredibly cute, they will never lay eggs, so have little monetary value.

That longtime practice is changing, thanks to new technology that enables hatcheries to quickly peer into millions of fertilized eggs and spot male embryos, then grind them up for other uses before they mature into chicks. The system began operating this month in Iowa at the nation’s largest chick hatchery, which handles about 387,000 eggs each day.

“We now have ethically produced eggs we can really feel good about,” said Jörg Hurlin, managing director of Agri Advanced Technologies, the German company that spent more than a decade developing the SUV-sized machine that can separate eggs by sex.

Even Americans who are careful to buy cage free or free range eggs typically aren’t aware that hundreds of millions of male chicks are killed each year, usually when they are only a day old. Most of the animals are culled through a process called maceration that uses whirling blades to nearly instantly kill the baby birds — something that seems horrifying but that the industry has long claimed is the most humane alternative.


“Does the animal suffer? No because it’s instantaneous death. But it’s not pretty because it’s a series of rotating blades,” said Suzanne Millman, a professor at Iowa State University who focuses on animal welfare.

Chick culling is an outgrowth of a poultry industry that for decades has raised one kind of chicken for eggs and another for meat. Egg-laying chickens are too scrawny to profitably be sold for meat, so the male chicks are ground up and used as additives for other products.

It wasn’t until European governments began passing laws that outlawed maceration that companies started puzzling out how to determine chicken sex before the chicks can hatch. Several companies can now do that, but unlike most competitors, AAT’s machine doesn’t need to pierce the shell and instead uses a bright light and sensitive cameras to detect an embryo’s sex by noting feather shading. Males are white, and females are dark.

The machine, called Cheggy, can process up to 25,000 eggs an hour, a pace that can accommodate the massive volume seen at hatcheries in the U.S. Besides the Cheggy machine in the small eastern Iowa city of Wilton, an identical system has been installed in Texas, both at hatcheries owned by Hy-Line North America.


The process has one key limitation: It works only on brown eggs because male and female chicks in white eggs have similar-colored feathers.

That’s not a huge hindrance in Europe, where most eggs sold at groceries are brown. But in the U.S., white shell eggs make up about 81% of sales, according to the American Egg Board. Brown shell eggs are especially sought by people who buy cage-free, free-range and organic varieties.

Hurlin said he thinks his company will develop a system to tell the sex of embryos in white eggs within five years, and other companies also are working to meet what’s expected to be a growing demand.

Eggs from hens that were screened through the new system will supply NestFresh Eggs, a Southern California-based business that distributes organic eggs produced by small operations across the country. The eggs will begin showing up on store shelves in mid-July and NestFresh executive vice president Jasen Urena said his company will begin touting the new chick-friendly process on cartons and with a larger marketing effort.


“It’s a huge jump in animal welfare,” Urena said. “We’ve done so much work over the years on the farms. How do we make the lives of these chickens better? Now we’re able to step back and go into the hatching phase.”

Urena said the new system was more expensive but any price increase on store shelves would be minimal.

The animal welfare group Mercy for Animals has tried to draw attention to chick culling for more than a decade in hopes of ending the practice.

Walter Sanchez-Suarez, the group’s animal behavior and welfare scientist, said laws in Europe outlawing chick culling and new efforts to change the practice in the U.S. are wonderful developments. However, Sanchez-Suarez sees them as a small step toward a larger goal of ending large-scale animal agriculture and offering alternatives to meat, eggs and dairy.

“Mercy for Animals thinks this is an important step, but poultry producers shouldn’t stop there and should try to see all the additional problems that are associated to this type of practice in egg production,” he said. “Look for alternatives that are better for animals themselves and human consumers.”