Pete Hegseth as Defense Secretary?

The title of this is supposed to be just a perverse joke - we hope.

The last member of an informal alliance of top Trump officials with enough swat or stature to stand up to President Trump — the Committee to Save America, as we called these officials 16 months ago — resigned in epic fashion.

The bottom line: Unlike most others, who pretended to leave on fine terms, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis bailed with a sharp, specific, stinging rebuke of Trump and his America-first worldview...

It was a historic letter and a historic moment capping a historic day, one you could easily see filling a full chapter of future books on the Trump presidency. The wheels felt like they were coming off the White House before Mattis quit. - Axios 

The thing is, Traitor Trump has already made a practice of appointing people just because he pretty much mindlessly likes what they’ve had to say on TV. Like Larry Kudlow and Heather Nauert. So there is precedent.

Hegseth's Minnesota connection is that he’s from here, and ran for the GOP Senate nomination here in 2012. He’s since become a major Fox idiot - Trump's kind of idiot. Birds of a feather.

(BTW: "Mattis was no Shining Knight," from Informed Comment, here.)

VA privatization trial run hasn't worked well

ProPublica has been consistently breaking the most important news about what the a-hole kleptocrats are trying to do to Veterans Administration healthcare.

Here’s what has actually happened in the four years since the government began sending more veterans to private care: longer waits for appointments and, a new analysis of VA claims data by ProPublica and PolitiFact shows, higher costs for taxpayers...

The winners have been two private companies hired to run the program, which began under the Obama administration and is poised to grow significantly under Trump. ProPublica and PolitiFact obtained VA data showing how much the agency has paid in medical claims and administrative fees for the Choice program. Since 2014, the two companies have been paid nearly $2 billion for overhead, including profit. That’s about 24 percent of the companies’ total program expenses — a rate that would exceed the federal cap that governs how much most insurance plans can spend on administration in the private sector. - ProPublica

MN-06: Emmer stumbles badly out of the gate

Someone seems to be in over his head. And, no, he won’t learn. Not his style.

Minnesota Rep. Tom Emmer’s first few weeks leading the GOP’s House campaign arm are sure off to a great start. Last week, New York Rep. Elise Stefanik, pointing out that she would be just one of 13 Republican women serving in the House, announced that she was leaving her leadership post at the NRCC and building her own operation to recruit Republican women to run. Emmer responded to this by telling a reporter that Stefanik’s plan to help women in primaries was “a mistake,” a comment that Politico reports immediately caused a firestorm in the GOP caucus.

Emmer quickly tried to clarify that he only meant that it was a “mistake” for the committee to get involved in primaries in the first place, but that didn’t stop several Republican House members from publicly rebuking him. Stefanik herself tweeted out Emmer’s “mistake” comments with her own caption: “NEWSFLASH I wasn’t asking for permission.” - Daily Kos

More malicious crap at the VA - Update

Traitor Trump is skilled at having others do his dirty work, though not at keeping his own grubby mitts clean.

Newly released emails about the three Trump associates who secretly steered the Department of Veterans Affairs show how deeply the trio was involved in some of the agency’s most consequential matters, most notably a multibillion-dollar effort to overhaul electronic health records for millions of veterans.

Marvel Entertainment chairman Ike Perlmutter, West Palm Beach physician Bruce Moskowitz and lawyer Marc Sherman — part of the president’s circle at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida — reviewed a confidential draft of a $10 billion government contract for the electronic-records project, even though they lack any relevant expertise...

But none of the three men has served in the U.S. military or elsewhere in government, and none of them has expertise in health information technology or federal contracting.

The list is one of hundreds of newly released documents about the so-called Mar-a-Lago Crowd’s sway over VA policy and personnel decisions. The records show them editing the budget for a government program, weighing in on job candidates and being treated as having decision-making authority on policy initiatives. - ProPublica

The roots of this next one are pre-Trump. But better leadership now could have resulted in getting this fixed.

 A few weeks ago NBC News reported that U.S. veterans attending school under the GI Bill weren't getting the benefits promised to them because a small change to how student housing claims were calculated had the side effect of breaking the entire system. The ancient technology relied upon by the Veterans Benefits Association could not handle the required change in zip code processing, creating a backlog of more than 100,000 unprocessed claims. Some veterans have ended up getting incorrect amounts, but others haven't gotten their benefits at all, leading to dire financial stress as students struggled to suddenly come up with money that the Veterans Administration suddenly wasn't sending them.

Now we're learning that veterans who didn't get their full payments cannot expect the VA to make good on the rest of the money. They're out of luck. NBC reports that congressional staffers have been told by the department that the veterans who were underpaid can expect to be stiffed for the rest of their claims because the department can't audit those past underpayments without even worse delays to current payments, due to the same system frailties. - Daily Kos

Update: "After pressure from Congress, VA reverses course and promises full benefits to veterans." Note that it's pressure from Congress, not from Trump.

The economy won't crash tomorrow, but, red flags

- "Household debt hit a record high of $13.5 trillion last quarter"

The total debt shouldered by Americans has hit another record high, rising to $13.5 trillion in the last quarter, while an unusual jump in student-loan delinquencies could provide another signal that the nation's economic expansion is growing old.

Flows of student debt into serious delinquency — of 90 or more days — rose to 9.1 percent in the third quarter from 8.6 percent in the previous quarter, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. - NBC News

Crappy NAFTA 2.0 got signed, but it ain't over

Traitor Trump recently signed the US Mexico Canada Agreement (USMCA), frequently referred to as NAFTA 2.0. It still has to be approved, next year, by both houses of Congress. There is opposition from both the left and the right, and it will be interesting to follow. For now, useful analysis:

- This is an overview, with a lot of links:

The new NAFTA might hit some feel-good political notes. But, as always, the real-life impact of its protections for labor, the environment, and human rights comes down to the political will to wield the law to support those communities—a political will that is rooted in the rights that free-trade deals inevitably leave out: the people’s power to defy a rigged system. - The Nation

- This is more specific to farmers and food:

IATP has done a thorough analysis of what the new agreement means for farming and food. The upshot: While minor improvements have been made, major new detrimental provisions have also been added, and none of the structural issues that farmers in all three countries have been calling for have been adequately addressed. - IATP