Measure The Drapes, Pick The Cabinet

Let’s play Biden Cabinet picks.

Here are the jobs to fill:

15 executive departments – the Secretaries of Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, Education, Energy, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, Housing and Urban Development, Interior, Labor, State, Transportation, Treasury, and Veterans Affairs, and the Attorney General.

The Cabinet also includes the White House Chief of Staff and heads of the Environmental Protection Agency, Office of Management and Budget, United States Trade Representative, Central Intelligence Agency, Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and Small Business Administration.

I’ll kick off my fave: Sally Yates for Attorney General.

Sally Yates

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Author: craigcrawford

Trail Mix Host. Lapsed journalist, author & retired pundit happily promoting nothing but the truth for Social Security checks.

114 thoughts on “Measure The Drapes, Pick The Cabinet”

  3. Jessica Denson lead the Trump campaign’s Hispanic engagement effort. Now she’s speaking out against his “vile, self-serving” candidacy. “Donald Trump does not care about the welfare of the people. Everything that the Trump campaign champions is a complete lie, and it is to the detriment of the American people.”

  7. Andrew Yang – A new position to bring tech up to snuff
    Beto O’Rourke – HUD
    Mike Bloomberg – Health and Human Services
    Mayor Pete – Veterans Affairs
     
    Agreed, we need to keep Dem Senators in place.  

  8. Dem senators in states with Dem governors are safe but we would not want to take senators sitting as ranking member out of powerful committees unless their successors are also very strong. 

  12. Warren for Treasury except that her Governor is a Republican 

    Susan Rice – Secretary of State

    Michelle Grisham – health & Human Services or Agriculture

     

  14. the guardian notes this morning:

    The Economist has this morning published its presidential endorsement for the Democratic nominee in a leader titled: Why it has to be Biden

    Tribal politics predated Mr Trump. The host of “The Apprentice” exploited it to take himself from the green room to the White House. Yet, whereas most recent presidents have seen toxic partisanship as bad for America, Mr Trump made it central to his office. He has never sought to represent the majority of Americans who did not vote for him.
    All politicians prevaricate, but his administration has given America “alternative facts”. Nothing Mr Trump says can be believed—including his claims that Mr Biden is corrupt. Partisanship and lying undermine norms and institutions. This president calls for his opponents to be locked up; he uses the Department of Justice to conduct vendettas; he commutes the sentences of supporters convicted of serious crimes; he gives his family plum jobs in the White House. When a president casts doubt on the integrity of an election just because it might help him win, he undermines the democracy he has sworn to defend.

    Look at Covid. Mr Trump had a chance to unite his country around a well organised response—and win re-election on the back of it, as other leaders have. Instead he saw Democratic governors as rivals or scapegoats. He muzzled and belittled America’s world-class institutions. He sneered at science. And, unable to see beyond his own re-election, he has continued to misrepresent the evident truth about the epidemic and its consequences.

    They are under no illusions, though, about a Democratic victory being a quick fix.

    Joe Biden is not a miracle cure for what ails America. But he is a good man who would restore steadiness and civility to the White House. He is equipped to begin the long, difficult task of putting a fractured country back together again. That is why, if we had a vote, it would go to Joe.

    Read more here: The Economist – Why it has to be Biden

  16. Democrats Dream of Flipping Texas With Early Vote Exploding
    By 
    Rachel Adams-Heard

    October 29, 2020, 3:00 AM CDT

     
    Cook Report moves state from ‘leans Republican’ to ‘toss up’

     
    More than 8 million have cast ballots — 90% of 2016 total

    Uncertainty aside, the early voting and closer-than-usual polls are a wake-up call for Republicans who thought they had time before the party’s grip on the state was in real jeopardy, said Brendan Steinhauser, a GOP strategist who’s worked on campaigns for Republicans including Cornyn and Representative Dan Crenshaw.
    “We’re almost in crisis mode,” he said. “The party’s base is very white, it’s very old, it’s rural in a state that’s getting younger, more diverse and more urban. Everything is working against Republicans right now.”

    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-10-29/democrats-dream-of-flipping-texas-with-early-vote-exploding

  17. NYTimes:

    Turkish Bank Case Showed Erdogan’s Influence With Trump
    New details of the Justice Department’s handling of the accusations against Halkbank reveal how Turkey’s leader pressured the president, prompting concern from top White House aides.
    […]
    This account is based on interviews with more than two dozen current and former Turkish and U.S. government officials, lobbyists and lawyers with direct knowledge of the interactions. Representatives for the Turkish government, Halkbank, the Justice Department and the White House declined to comment.
    Turkey had mounted an elaborate influence campaign in Washington to deal with Halkbank. It predated Mr. Trump’s election but came to encompass a broad cast of players, including Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former New York mayor; Michael T. Flynn, Mr. Trump’s first national security adviser; and Brian D. Ballard, a lobbyist and fund-raiser for the president.
    After senior Turkish government officials lobbied Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Mr. Trump, Mr. Mnuchin pressed the Justice Department not to impose too large a fine on Halkbank because Turkey could not afford it, two federal officials said. Mr. Mnuchin’s office declined to comment on Halkbank but added that the Treasury and Justice Departments “routinely consult and coordinate” on sanctions cases and fines.
    Mr. Bolton and others said they could not fully explain why Mr. Trump seemed so determined to please Mr. Erdogan.
    “This was a relationship that was really important for the United States to handle,” said Fiona Hill, who oversaw policy on Turkey and Europe for the National Security Council under Mr. Trump. “And at every turn, the president kept leaping in, and he wasn’t following the strategic threads of the relationship.”
    [long article with detail continues]

  18. Never before in modern presidential politics has a candidate been so reliant on wide-scale efforts to depress the vote as Trump.
    “What we have seen this year which is completely unprecedented … is a concerted national Republican effort across the country in every one of the states that has had a legal battle to make it harder for citizens to vote,” said Trevor Potter, a former chair of the Federal Election Commission who served as general counsel to Republican John McCain’s two presidential campaigns. “There just has been this unrelenting Republican attack on making it easier to vote.”

    https://www.politico.com/news/2020/10/29/trump-suppress-vote-win-433460

  24. Lost in the mail – or UPS or Fedex or DHL?  Electronic documents?  WTF is he talking about?

    They used pictures of what we had sent so that searchers would know what to look for. 

    So he didn’t feel like he could print those pictures (pictures?) and show them on the air?  Even in court photocopies of original documents are admissible as if they were originals.   Tucker is full of more shit than a Christmas goose.

  25. I don’t care where he serves or what position….  but I want Al Fraken in there somewhere.

  29. You have to give Bette Midler points for this one:

    There’s gonna be a full moon on Saturday, All Hallow’s Eve, while Mercury is in retrograde. AND that’s the night we turn back our clocks. I’m not saying I believe in any of that stuff, but let’s all put a circle of salt around our beds & climb in with a bowl of Snickers at 5PM.

     

  34. Got out after the ice  melted,  to get  the car inspected /registered .   Last week we were still setting heat records , so we still had all the leaves on our trees here.  They hadn’t even turned colors.  Needless to say a lot of limbs down.  About 3/8’s  of an inch of ice  isn’t nearly as bad on bare trees , but ones with a full leave load.  Man do I hate ice storms. 

  35. One would have to be stupid or just plain evil to be as irresponsible as DeSantis, and that fucker went to Yale and Harvard, so draw your own conclusion.

  37. Every American ghost we’ve ever had  is coming to this Halloween . 
    John Brown , Judy Garland  (in red shoes), “Typhoid Mary”,  General Custard,  Frank Zappa,  Malcolm X ,  Nathan Bedford Forrest,  Ichabod Crane,  Eleanor Roosevelt, you name it .
    They are all coming to the party this year. 
     
    The longest year of our lives, has been  a week in 2020. 
     
    It’s a good year for gobbins. 

  38. And if  we  don’t have enough on our plate –
    The Russians  have been running  a  study  on the largest continental shelf on planet Earth.
    Looking for  “Methane Flares”  on the seafloor.   Well they found one , …………  running along the  edge of the slope  300 meters down. 
     
    It’s 150 km long. 
    This is the biggest one yet found. 
    Many of the stories on this say it is the first example of this , it is not . 
    What it is ………………………………    Is  best expedition to date  to study this .  Done by Russians. 
    Putin thinks he can pump gas out of the ground , and ship it in an Ice Free Arctic Ocean .  A real Big Win. Right? 
    That ocean will be boiling  as those gas ships leave port.  And his gas feeder pipelines  buckle and collapse into  slumps ,  blowouts,  and  a rapidly  changing landscape. 
    That ocean where they were sailing is where the first freeze-up used to start .  Except for this year.  We are still waiting for those waters to freeze. 
    Which brings up that old phrase  ……………..
    “We’ve Never Seen This Before” 

     Climate crisis: Plumes of methane stretching ‘hundreds of kilometres’ rising from Arctic seabed

    https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/methane-arctic-seabed-greenhouse-gas-emissions-climate-siberian-shelf-study-expedition-b1396150.html

    When methane is released into the atmosphere, it is 86 to 105 times as powerful as carbon dioxide at disrupting the climate over a 20-year period.

    Then it oxidizes into Co2 .

  39. Old man, I split my time 70/30 for 6 years between NH & Maine back in the 80s.  Whitest places I’ve ever been.  In 2020, here’s Maine’s racial breakdown:
     

    White alone, percent 94.4%

    Black or African American alone, percent 1.7%

    American Indian and Alaska Native alone, percent 0.7%

    Asian alone, percent 1.3%

    Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander alone, percent (??)

     Two or More Races, percent 1.8%

    Hispanic or Latino, percent 1.8%

    Sounds like the typical D’ump rally to me.

    Really it’s a case of untested racism. Hard to see systemic racism when there really aren’t identifiable racial minorities in anything other than tiny numbers. Easy to be racist (or not) if you see “the others” on TV and don’t get the chance to test it in the real world.
     

  41. Looking over the national polls reported by RCP and the only two that do not show an increase in Biden’s margin over D’ump is a JTN/RMG Research poll – which is down 1% from their prior poll, which was 10/15-17.  (The CNN poll shows a 4 point drop from the 16 point margin in its last poll, but that poll was 8 points higher than the one before and was considered to be a wild outlier (or more appropriately, outliar) so I’m not counting that.  After a bump around 10/10, the race has tightened by 2.5 points, or rather you could say it’s returned to the margin seen 6 weeks ago, and 10 weeks ago, and 7 months ago…. The more things change the more they stay the same.

  43. Pogo –
    So glad someone got my point, and expanded the thought. 
    It’s a great deal like all those blind men  feeling up the elephant .  At this point , Senator Susan  has felt up  Trump with her mask over her eyes. 
    I am so sick of hearing that woman talk. 
    While I’m at it. 
     I’m really worn-out watching Judy Woodruff  trying to form a question on the NewsHour. 
    Some nights it  is real fingernails on slate, …………  watching her trying to form a question. 
    You can see both of their heads grinding gears  trying not to step  into doo-doo. 

  45. Pogo –
    Exactly !
    He dug out his vein of voters  4 years ago.  And it petered out then . 
    And he never looked  to find another drift. 
     
    There is No Ghost vote this year  for him .  The real ghost vote  is the young , I gotta think Greta , and guns is driving those folks. 
    And their numbers ain’t in anyone’s plan. 

  50. Old man,  the part of Maine I lived in  – well, really, sailed out of – was the Rockland area.  Before I moved up there from Tuscaloosa Al, out of curiosity I looked up the demo for the area.  Rockland had about 7000 folks total, 4 of whom were black.  I never saw a black person in Rockland who didn’t appear to be  a tourist.  It was a bit of a shock after living in Tuscaloosa County – which had roughly 1/3 black population.  The area in NH I lived in  – Campton/Waterville Valley, was more of the same.  I used to listen to the ski area guys in the bars at night talk racist shit about blacks, and one of them who I knew from the ski area was engaged in one of those conversations and I asked him if he had ever even met a black person – although the census claimed the county was 2% black, as far as I could tell there sure as hell weren’t any blacks in the area that didn’t either go to college in Plymouth or come up to Waterville to go skiing, and that was rare at best. He indignantly said he had.  I was skeptical.

  51. I for one, feel pretty good .
    In the end , the Americans do the right thing.  After trying everything else.  All those young voters   this year will vote for dog catchers until they die. 
    These are not  22 year-old males  thinking that Monster Truck Rallies are over regulated,  they are kids that had to run down hallways as their gunman stalked their school with AR-15’s.
    And then there is Greta , those  folks are doing the same thing. 
     
    That is what I see in the “youth vote”.  18 to 35. 

  53. Pogo –
    About the age  of 9 or 10 , I spent  about 2 or 3 weeks with my Uncle Monk and my Aunt Lorea.  that went on for 5 years.  They lived outside of Dangerfield, Texas. 
    They had butane business and he did plumbing. 
    There were no “Backhoe’s” . I was the backhoe. 
    Some of  his customers were  so poor . I have never  recovered looking over that fence into another world. 

  54. My Uncle Monk sat up with  my father the night before he left Texas to go to war.  My dad was 19  and had an 8th grade education. 

  55. Monk loved baseball  watching it on  TV 60 years ago ,
    Dizzy Dean and Pee Wee Reese.  Calling the game . 
    He had his TV antenna  on a 50ft tower  so he got a clear signal  out of Shreveport.

  56. Monk was killed by his own Ford tractor  with the mower  on it. 
    It nearly ate me one morning as well. 
    Those few short summers there  are one reason I’m still typing today. 

  62. Of the likely Pennsylvania voters polled, 51 percent preferred the former vice president compared with 44 percent who said they backed Trump. Just 4 percent of the 1,324 Pennsylvanians surveyed were undecided, and the poll had a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.
     
    a Quinnipiac poll released Thursday.
     

  64. Funny how reality  is crushing Trump  in front of the entire world. 
     
    The wave is approaching the shore 
     

  66. The only way he wins , Putin turns off our power grid for 2 weeks. 
    And they both are turning shovels  at the New Turnip Tower in Moscow! When the juice comes back. 
     
    Buy solar  stocks, buy wind stocks. 

  67. On Tuesday, we take our country back.
     
    The one thing America  says every 4 years. 
     
    Who? 
    Who took it ?
    Other Americans ? 
     
    You mean Belgium  didn’t take  our  country  ?
     
     

  68. Note to the reader –
    I peppered this place  once with only problems.  I saw no solutions.  When asked for them , I saw none. 
    The world has over run my  despair,  everything we need is at our finger tips. 

  69. I’m not going shut down  the economy . I’m going to to shut down the virus.
    Biden’s last pitch

  70. Poobah, I ain’t buying what Quinnipiac is selling regarding Ohio.  I think that’s a bridge just a skosh too far for Joe. My sense is that he’ll win PA, MI and WI, but IOWA being too close to call I’m not buying that either.  

  71. The Turnip Turn-out  on Nov. 3rd.  is not as big as they think it will be.
    You can’t vote in the ICU.

  72. Pogo –
    Iowa has been gutted by climate change.  And the farmers  are waking up to it. 

  73. tRUMPsky paid no attention to the farmers in Iowa when the derecho blew through a few months ago.   They won’t reward him for that.   

  74. CC
     
    Your page has begun  to never load here.  It just never loads.  But I can still type, and post . 

  75. OK –
    Everyone take a deep breath.  The attacks are here .  Hospitals first.
    This will be a real  shit storm. 

  81. Corn and beans combine to make complete human protein. 
    All those sites in Mexico  were  built by  plant eaters. 

  82. Old man & BiD I sincerely hope you are right and I am not. We’ll know in a week or so. 
    btw, listen to Bob. Crude now is below $35 per barrel. Its trajectory is DOWN. 

  83. That’s 2/3 rd’s  of the Sisters.
    Squash ! 
     
    She was the last one to join the group 

  85. KGC
    Yes, that POS must go! Rubbing salt in the wounds. If Dems win the Senate we must end the filibuster, pronto!

  86. Decency matters. Character matters. Countless Republicans are putting country over party and supporting Joe Biden for President – thank you to all who’ve spoken out.

  87. If  we win ,
    I want a dead mall bill  with a prize at the end,  in several  categories.
     
    A prize  fires the human heart , and then the mind follows. 

  88. This idea of  re-making  these buildings,  covers  our entire country. 
    And it puts so many people to work.

  90. I like all the cabinet suggestions. And, yes, to Al Franken!
    If you watch the WaPo videos,  you’ll see that we really need good scientists, doctors, & leadership to work on Covid.

  91. TX is now at 51% of registered voters having cast their ballots.  Tomorrow is the last day to vote early.  Weather for Election Day will be nice in these parts.
    What would tRMPsky do with a hostile Senate?  Plenty of reasons to impeach and remove.   I will be glad to toss Yertle, Collins, Lindsey, etc., into the dustbin if history.  

    https://abc13.com/voting-in-texas-is-harder-than-other-states-2020-presidential-election-vote-why-hard-to/7160993/

    We’re number one!

    But, there is voter suppression.  100,000 curbside went poof?!?

  92. This keg could be  uncorked   really very cheaply. 
    The government sets the prize, 
     
    A horse race. forms . 
    This is how Lindberg  flew the Atlantic. 

  94. I’m hoping that the tremendous number of early voters across the country is an indication that Americans won’t let anyone keep us from the vote!! And, of course that it’s a blue tsunami. 

  96. I am the only living hippie that never slept  with Grace Slick. 
     
    I love every hair on her head, 

  101. Pogo-
    Every  group is crawling across glass to vote.  In numbers we’ve never seen . 
    This is not more of the same. 

  103. Think of this –
    No one that voted for Ralph Nader in 2,000 has  moved to Trump. 
    Everyone in the GOP with a brain  has endorsed Biden. 
     
    That is a very big move, 

  104. Oh, so because trump made a fool of himself with that Sharpie, he is now punishing apolitical scientists and installing sycophants at NOAA

  106. Bink –
    Take a breath  Swarms  of these rats are jumping ship.  in every root and branch. 
    Being in the Trump Administration.  means getting a job in Washington.  Well not so much . 

  111.  The entire Solar PV world  is in flux,  The  entire world that plugs into it  is going crazy.

  112. When Col. Drake brought in the first well,  things  picked up speed. 
     
    That is us , for better or worse.  It also saved the last whales. 

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