Scott Adams is the creator of Dilbert, and he also happens to be a Trump apologist to end all Trump apologists. He thinks Trump is the greatest persuader of people that has maybe ever lived, and he thinks half the country is in a mass hysteria and cognitive dissonance for not realizing that fact. You might have heard him on Sam Harris’s podcast a while back and you might also have slammed your head into your desk a few times. In a couple recent blog posts, Scott references a list of Trump’s incredible achievements. He alleges that lefties like me won’t be able to fit this list into their worldviews and will have to pretend it doesn’t exist. Let’s see how this list holds up!
Scott Adams blog 1, 2, pipelines, 100 ways Trump is hurting women, the women’s council that is MIA, Trump’s 2 for 1 regulation thing sucks, Trump hasn’t followed through on HBCUs.
I was on the Mythicist Milwaukee Podcast discussing the conference which I’ll be appearing at this month. Check them out here.
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Just an elaboration, but one of those things Trump did regarding ending regulations also involved keeping several regulations from being enacted. Some of these are things that fall under your “incompetent because it’s not a good idea” category.
Just a few highlights of rules made automatically inactive by the act:
0584-AE00: Temporary emergency eligibility for SNAP for disaster victims.
0910-AC59: requires members of the Dept. of Health and Human Services (you know, the guys handling welfare and healthcare) to report if they discover any falsification of the research they use.
1105-AB25: Rule laying out the definition of research misconduct for the Department of Justice, as well as procedures for investigation, adjudication, and appealing of misconduct.
1105-AA65 : Designation of which federal agencies are forwarded cyber tipline information related to an act meant to combat child predators.
1601-AA12: A DHS rule establishing procedures to impose restrictions on lobbying.
There are way too many for me to list here. Luckily, they’re listed here: https://www.reginfo.gov/public/jsp/eAgenda/InactiveRINs_2017_Agenda_Update.pdf
Though for a more in-depth explanation, you’ll need to go to https://www.reginfo.gov/
There are numerous ones I haven’t even looked into, including stuff about juveline immigrants, custody procedures for immigrants, procedures for conditional residents who are being abused by their spouse, and so on.
There are even a slew of now-inactive rules regarding the exemption of certain types of files from the Privacy Act of 1974 for the IRS. Those are a little harder to make sense of, but I suspect there could be something there given that Trump has refused to release his tax returns. You know, just a guy whose finances are under investigation for a whole host of reasons getting rid of rules exempting IRS records from being private. Nothing to see here.
It’s astounding how many of these rules were aimed at improving the lives of the people we generally associate as the Republican base. There are all kinds of regulations and rules meant to help farmers and agricultural employees, with insurance and grants and all sorts of things. And yes, the federal government is a major player in crop insurance. And now a lot of those are just inactive.
I’ve been trying to tell people the GOP is ripe to have a wedge forced between them and rural whites who actually do rely on agriculture. The opportunity’s there for the taking for anyone who wants to do the un-sexy work of investigatin’ the regulatin’.