As He Goes Out the Door

For the moment, I'm going to assume that Mafia Mulligan is leaving office on January 20 relatively normally and Joe Biden will become president. On his way out, he and his cronies are laying booby traps and burning as many things they can. 

Here are three examples I saw today:

First, they've been executing people. Tonight, the federal government executed its ninth prisoner of 2020 as Trump races to kill as many people as possible before he leaves office. This was the first execution during the lame-duck period in 130 years, and Trump's nine executions so far were the first federal executions at all in 17 years. 

Tonight's death was Brandon Bernard, a Black man who was convicted of murder when he was 18, even though he was an accomplice rather than the killer. He was convicted by a jury made up of 11 white jurors out of 12. Five of those jurors had recently called for him to be taken off death row because of new evidence.

Second, in Minnesota, where the rural parts of our state still don't have broadband internet service, the FCC just awarded a huge, competitively bid contract to a tiny, non-local company that promises to deliver service with an unproven technology. This lack of broadband is a major economic barrier to rural success, of course, and may even be one of the most important sources of resentment rural Minnesotans feel for "the cities." So the Trump administration screwing this up on its way out the door is one final insult to us all, which Democrats will end up being blamed for, I imagine. And none of us will be surprised to find out at some point that the unqualified company's owner has some connection to the Trump Organization, the Trump Campaign, or some other important part of the administration.

Third, and finally, Mulligan is gutting our clean air rules. "Trump move would steer agency away from protecting public health," says the deck in this story. "The EPA announced final rule changes Wednesday that would make it harder for the incoming Biden administration to make new rules to protect the environment and public health by limiting the consideration of their costs and benefits."

Oh, you know, whatever. Public health, who cares about that? Obviously not this administration. The agency's name may include the words "Environmental Protection," but that doesn't mean there should be any weighing of the costs and benefits of poisoning the air in any way. 

And that's not mentioning whatever it is he's doing at the Pentagon by appointing multiple unqualified people to be in charge of everything, defunding and dismantling airplanes that are used to monitor Russian militarism, and other crazy stuff.