Little Marco Goes Global
Trump administration taking shape: Florida Sen. Marco Rubio will most likely be picked as secretary of state; former New York Rep. Lee Zeldin, a Republican who ran for governor against Kathy Hochul and lost, will helm the Environmental Protection Agency; Florida Rep. Mike Waltz will serve as national security adviser; and Rep. Elise Stefanik, who represents New York in the House, has been picked by President-elect Donald Trump to serve as ambassador to the United Nations.
Rubio is, unfortunately for libertarians, quite hawkish. He seems most interested in China affairs, taking a hard-line stance on curbing human rights abuses via government pressure, and he advocates shifting manufacturing back to America as a means of reducing reliance on Chinese imports. He has long supported Venezuelan sanctions, and he is a staunch supporter of Israel, calling Hamas “100 percent to blame” in response to a question about civilian deaths in Gaza.
Trump often deviated from the views of his top advisers.
And I know @DonaldJTrumpJr and others are doing what he said below.
But Trump’s last 3 appointees – Elise Stefanik, Mike Weltz, and Rubio – are war hawks fully aligned with the worst prongs of bipartisan DC consensus. pic.twitter.com/LLW0YuDu85
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) November 12, 2024
“Despite speaking in hard-line terms about Russia in the past, Mr. Rubio would likely go along with Mr. Trump’s expected plans to press Ukraine to find a way to come to a settlement with Russia and remain outside of NATO,” reports The New York Times. “It is unclear whether the leaders of Ukraine or Russia would be prepared to enter into talks at Mr. Trump’s urging.”
Zeldin is probably a better pick for his post, at least in terms of libertarian priorities, than Rubio. “As president, Biden paused export permits for liquified natural gas, scrapped or stalled new oil and gas pipelines and attempted to bar new permits for drilling on federal land,” reports the New York Post. Zeldin is expected to roll back most of those policies and be broadly focused on deregulation.
Zeldin “will ensure fair and swift deregulatory decisions that will be enacted in a way to unleash the power of American businesses, while at the same time maintaining the highest environmental standards, including the cleanest air and water on the planet,” said President-elect Donald Trump in a statement.
La Leche League founder resigns: The nonprofit organization devoted to breastfeeding training and support, which has been around since the 1950s, is being dealt a sharp rebuke from one of its original founders (and current board members). Marian Tompson, now 94, writes that the “organization that has become a travesty of my original intent” and that its “focus has subtly shifted to include men who, for whatever reason, want to have the experience of breastfeeding despite no careful long-term research on male lactation and how that may affect the baby.”
Tompson is probably referring to a series of changes the organization has made over the last decade that let transgender people and other so-called “chestfeeders” in, detailed here by Bethany Mandel for The Free Press. The issue first cropped up in 2012, when trans-identifying Trevor McDonald—who was born a woman but identified as a man following giving birth, and had an elective mastectomy as a result—was successful in getting the organization to bend its rules for the sake of inclusion.
To some, the erosion of La Leche League’s boundaries may seem like no big deal, or even like progress. But to women who care about maintaining some access to
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