Trump's Transition Poll #s Dropping Fast | Trump Says Repeal ACA At Once

Trump's Poll Numbers Diving

1. Only 37% of voters approve of Donald Trump's transition to the presidency, writes a new Quinnipiac University poll. Women lead the way with 59% of female voters disapproving of how Trump is doing his job. 

The measures of Trump's personal qualities all are more negative than they were in a November 22 Quinnipiac University poll:

53 - 39 percent that he is not honest, compared to 52 - 42 percent November 22;
49 - 44 percent that he has good leadership skills, compared to 56 - 38 percent;
52 - 44 percent that he does not care about average Americans, compared to 51 - 45 percent who said he did care;
62 - 33 percent that he is not level-headed, compared to 57 - 38 percent;
71 - 25 percent that he is a strong person, compared to 74 - 23 percent;
68 - 27 percent that he is intelligent, compared to 74 - 21 percent.

Trump Takes on Vaccine Safety

2. Long a skeptic of vaccines, president-elect Donald Trump met with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to chair a new commission on vaccine safety and scientific integrity, Kennedy told reporters in Manhatan's Trump Tower lobby on Tuesday. 

The unprecedented move would contradict established science, medicine and the US government's position on links between medical conditions like autism and vaccines. Kennedy is a proponent of a widely discredited theory that links vaccines and autism. 

In 1998, a well-respected journal published the work of researcher Andrew Wakefield and 12 of his colleagues that linked standard measles, mumps and rubella vaccines to autism. Based on a tiny sample size of 12 and speculative conclusions, the research was embraced by celebrities like Jenny McCarthy, Jim Carrey and Trump who actually called upon parents to stop vaccinating their children. 

The problem: The study was an elaborate fraud.

Editors of the Lancet, which published the original piece, discovered that Wakefield had been funded by attorneys for parents who were pursuing lawsuits against vaccine companies and that a number of elements of the paper were misreported.

In February 2010, the journal retracted the piece, and in an investigative piece in 2011, in The BMJ found even more shenanigans in the way the study was conducted. Some parents of children in the study reported by Wakefield to have autism said they did not, and others who were listed in the study as having no problems before the vaccine actually had had developmental issues. via The Washington Post

Trump Tells GOP To Quickly Replace Health Care Law

3. President-elect Trump told Republicans to "get to business" and quickly repeal President Obama's Affordable Care Act, saying "Obamacare has been a catastrophic event." Trump indicated that he expected a repeal "probably some time next week", then saying "the replace will be very quickly or simultaneously very shortly thereafter."

Several Republicans are very nervous about repealing the ACA without a clear alternative plan in place. via The New York Times

Watching 'The Crown' With the QE2 Falling Apart In Dubai & John Boehner's Tears Long Gone From Trumpworld

Watching 'The Crown' With the QE2 Falling Apart In Dubai & John Boehner's Tears Long Gone From Trumpworld

Could we agree that any woman trying to lead the free world, who cried in prime time, would be run out of Dodge? I finally tuned into the Netflix series 'The Crown', and I assure you that the young queen Elizabeth will be steely and duty-driven -- keeping it together when her father dies. And that is exactly how the second episode ends, with Elizabeth burying her adoring love and grief for her dead father deep in her heart, now masked by royal obligations to her public and the entire British Empire.

Watching 'The Crown' knowing that the electoral college voted on Monday for Donald Trump as America's next president, I can't help thinking about Republican John Boehner's arrival as Speaker of the House.  He wept through his 2010 60 Minutes interview, a reality that did not amuse me in the least, given the Republican agenda for America. In fact, those tears are typically called a charade when a damsel in distress turns on the floodgates.

Indeed when I wrote about Boehner's intentions to lead the charge against abortion and contraception rights in America, it was after after watching a chilling meeting with his chief of staff Mick Krieger accepting one of those tiny plastic babies in perfect form meant to represent a six-week old embryo. In reality, those cells and molecules are a blob about the size of a pomegranate seed, and I don't mean to be disrespectful in any way. But it's another example of post-factual information suggesting that these perfectly formed cereal box creatures (I am not making this up. Republicans put them in cereal and candy boxes at state fairs) are in any way representative of the actual pregnancy process.  To me the meeting signalled the hell that poor women in America would go through as Republicans ripped away not only abortion rights but also access to contraception and general health care for women living all over America in impoverished communities. There is no satisfaction in saying that my instincts were correct.

Melinda Gates Takes The Lead Worldwide In Delivering Birth Control To Poor Women

Melinda and Bill Gates on first trip to Africa in 1993.

The commitment of the Gates Foundation to gender equity globally will surely take another uptick with the upcoming probability that the Trump administration will shut down all funding for Planned Parenthood internationally and in the US. The first order of the incoming Obama administration was to reverse the Bush administration's commitment that no taxpayer dollars fund contraception projects around the world. And Hillary Clinton as Secy of State created a new position, the Office of Global Women's Issues, to prioritize the drive for gender equality worldwide.

The strategic thinking, fact-based female half of the world's largest foundation knows: "“You empower a woman and you change the world. We know that if a woman is economically empowered inside her family, all kinds of magical things happen.”

In 2012, when the Gates Foundation announced its support of a $4.3 billion public-private partnership designed to give 120 million women in the world’s poorest countries voluntary access to contraceptives by 2020, Melinda chose multiple international public stages, ranging from a TED talk to the London Summit on Family Planning, with the goal of underlining her unyielding commitment to the issue of birth control. Her decision put the devoted Catholic at odds with her church, and she has never looked back.  “We have 220 million women asking us for contraceptives, and we’re not delivering them,” Gates says. “Because of the political controversy, we backed away from the issue as a world. And yet women are dying in childbirth because they have child after child after child, and their children are dying because they’re coming too quickly.”