Kevin Drum

The truth is that I'm not sure how I'm doing. But there's this:

• • My oxygenation level is consistently high. That's good, but my breathing is still pretty shallow if I move around even a little bit.
  • My colon virus seems to be gone. This is based on a lack of bowel movements lately.
  • But I'm peeing a lot, which is good.
  • My enterovirus (cold virus) is probably gone, though there's no telling for sure.
  • CT scan thorax: "Overall slight increased extensive bilateral consolidative and groundglass infiltrates. 4.2 cm dilatation of the ascending aorta. Tiny nonobstructing left nephrolithiasis." Got that?
  • Chest X-ray: "Interval mild increase in left lung diffuse airspace opacification. Mild to moderate right lung airspace opacification remains without change. There is a small left pleural effusion and adjacent compressive atelectasis or pneumonia, new. Stable cardiomediastinal silhouette. Low lung volumes."

I gather from this that the flu and pneumonia are roughly the same as before. This is bad. These are the key things that need to get better, and I don't know why they aren't. I'm extremely fatigued and it's very frustrating.

Donald Trump fired a few thousand Park Service workers, but apparently Doug Burgham has decided to hire them back. Efficiency! However, the one maintenance guy at Yosemite who has the keys to unlock people from the bathrooms remains fired.

Elon Musk got mad at Danish astronaut Andreas Morgensen and called him "fully retarded." The contretemps turns out to be related to the return of two astronauts stuck on the ISS. Apparently Musk has grown very fond of the slur "retarded," using it over a dozen times since November.

You already know this, but Trump has decided that Ukraine started the war with Russia. Quite so. Remember how Poland started WW II with Germany?

President Donald Trump and billionaire adviser Elon Musk have said on social media and in press briefings that people who are 100, 200 and even 300 years old are improperly getting Social Security benefits — a “HUGE problem,” Musk wrote. 300 years old! That would be a problem. Now, it so happens that Social Security was created in 1936 and the first beneficiaries go back to the 1880 census. So that's an absolute max of 145 years old as of this year. "Fully retarded" barely begins to describe this.

Donald Trump says he's going to expand IVF. Not quite, it turns out:

Within 90 days of the date of this order, the Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy shall submit to the President a list of policy recommendations on protecting IVF access and aggressively reducing out-of-pocket and health plan costs for IVF treatment.

A list of policy recommendations falls a little short, no? What's more, Congress would have to pass these recommendations, something they've shown no inclination of doing in the past. It's just more smoke and mirrors.

"The DOGE subcommittee just discovered $2.7 trillion in improper payments in Medicare and Medicaid overseas, to people who should not have gotten it.” That seems unlikely, doesn't it? In fact, this is since 2003, so it comes to about $120 billion per year. That's not peanuts, but here are the real numbers:

• Medicare: 5.3%
• Medicaid: 3.5%
• Social Security: 0.8%

Entitlement fraud is a real thing, but it's only a few percent of total spending, not $2.7 trillion. These guys are lunatics.

Before Trump was elected, I figured there were a a range of possibilities if he won.

1. On one end: he's a blowhard. He says lots of stuff he never follows up on.
2. On the other end: He's dead serious this time. He's going to deport millions; put tariffs on everyone; take a sledgehammer to DEI; and nominate lunatics to his cabinet. It would be a bloodbath, but the courts and Republicans in the Senate would rein in the worst of it.

But it's been so much worse—though not on stuff he ran on. Deportations have been low and he's backed off on a bunch of tariffs. But DEI has turned into a jihad against anything that so much as mentions Black accomplishment—or women or Hispanics or anything else. USAID has been demolished for no reason and the medical research community is being torn to pieces. The entire federal workforce is being given a haircut with a blowtorch, with no apparent rhyme or reason. Elon Musk is tearing through federal agencies doing God knows what—he won't tell anyone. The righteous prosecution of a corrupt mayor has been pulled over protest as long as the mayor cooperates on deportations.

Foreign affairs is no better. Ukraine has refused Trump's demand for half its mineral wealth. Meanwhile Trump is busy punishing the AP for refusing to call the Gulf of Mexico the absurd Gulf of America. Trump is pursuing random tariffs that make no sense, primarily on our allies. And he continues to make periodic threats against Greenland, Panama, and, Canada.

It's governance gone mad, with no explanation or apparent reason. And we have 205 more weeks of it.

Not a good day. Nothing is improving and my breathing is very shallow. Still waiting for the immunoglobulin stimulant to kick in. That might start a recovery. If not, we're running out of options.

Pneumonia appears slightly better today. Maybe. Hard to tell for sure.

My oncologist finally showed up this afternoon and finally agreed my immune system was shot. A multiple myeloma specialist tells me this is a common side effect of bispecific therapies like Talvey. Oh. So we've agreed on a treatment that spurs regrowth of immunoglobulins. It will take a week or three to have an effect. It's too bad we didn't start this three weeks ago when we first knew.

I generally feel slightly better today than yesterday. Maybe tomorrow will be even better.

Oh, and it turns I have a colon infection. That's at least four so far.

Fading fast. Pneumonia worse. Ventilator next. Not looking good. Take care of Donald Trump for me.

Too tired to blog.

It's been a while since we've checked in on the Trump meme coin scam, but today the New York Times checked in for us:

As of the middle of this week, more than 810,000 wallets had lost money on [$Trump].... The total losses are almost certainly much larger: The data does not include transactions that took place on a series of popular crypto marketplaces that started offering the coin only after its price had already surged.

....Whether people made or lost money, it was stellar business for the Trumps. Nearly $100 million in trading fees have flowed to the family and its partners, although most of that has not yet been cashed out, the Chainalysis data shows.

Here's the price of $Trump over the past three weeks:

The coin opened at 9:01 pm on January 17th and skyrocketed from 18 cents to $32 before Trump even announced it. After Trump did announce it, it surged further to $75, making a ton of money for a few early flippers who mysteriously knew about it so early.¹

But not for anyone else. Within four hours of opening, $Trump was already above $18, and anyone who bought it after that is now underwater.

Except, as the Times notes, for Trump and his buddies. They don't really need to care all that much about the price of the coin. Sure, a long-term bonanza would be nice, but they'll presumably continue making $100 million in fees every month as long as there's plenty of churn among the chumps. Or maybe less. But who cares? It's a lot and it's risk free. Just sit back and let the Oval Office make you rich.

¹Who? No one knows because the blockchain is private and encrypted. Which just confirms the old saw that the only actual use case for crypto is criminal transactions.

I forgot to mention this, but as threatened, I'm back in the hospital. So far we've duplicated every single test from seven days ago and gotten the same results as before. The only thing new is that my pneumonia is either a little better or a little worse depending on whether you believe the X-ray or the CAT scan; and I apparently have a brand new enterovirus (like a cold virus). That's damn mysterious since I haven't left the house for the past week except to come to the hospital.

It's also disturbing since the most likely explanation is that my immune system has been so weakened by the Tecvayli that I need to start living in a bubble. And that actually seems like it might be the case. Here are my immunoglobulin levels:

The problem with multiple myeloma chemotherapies is that they don't distinguish between immunoglobulins. In my case, only my IGG immunoglobulins are cancerous, but the others all get taken along for the ride. In this case they've really gone along for the ride. My A and M immunoglobulins have been wiped out to undetectable levels, and the G immunoglobulins are so low that it's probably only cancerous cells that are left.

I haven't talked to my oncologist about this because I keep ending up in the hospital instead of keeping my appointments with him. I suppose it's a good sign that he hasn't called me in a panic about this, but that assumes he's seen the test results—which he might not have, since he doesn't seem to bother looking at test results until I'm actually in the office with him.

In any case, no one really seems to know what ails me. They say my pneumonia is moderate; my lungs are otherwise clear; and my heart is fine. That really shouldn't be causing the extreme symptoms I'm having: I can barely breathe, and even the slightest exertion gives me chills and gasping.

Bottom line, this all sucks, and I don't seem to be getting any better. Blecch.

When history is written, the first few months of Trump 2.0 will go down as the most craven and prostrate in the history of the Republican Party. We are living in a country ruled by fantastic conspiracy theories and personal revenge, and not a single Republican is willing to stand against it. Not one.