Rumors and Reports of Rumors

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


RUMORS AND REPORTS OF RUMORS….I’m a little torn about whether I should blog more about transition scuttlebutt. On the one hand, this stuff matters a lot for the future course of the administration. If Robert Gates is Secretary of Defense or Tom Vilsack is Secretary of Agriculture, that says a lot about the tone and direction of Obama administration policy.

On the other hand, I’d guess that about 99% of these rumors are completely bogus, just random guesses from people with only a tenuous connection to the transition team. In that sense, reacting to the rumors is just dumb. It’s the kind of thing that makes us all stupider, not better informed.

Still, chatting about who might go where, and what it all means, isn’t such a bad conversation to have, even if the spark is sort of random and poorly sourced. So I dunno. What do you all think of the possibility of Gates staying on as SecDef or Vilsack being appointed Secretary of Agriculture?

Fact:

Mother Jones was founded as a nonprofit in 1976 because we knew corporations and billionaires wouldn't fund the type of hard-hitting journalism we set out to do.

Today, reader support makes up about two-thirds of our budget, allows us to dig deep on stories that matter, and lets us keep our reporting free for everyone. If you value what you get from Mother Jones, please join us with a tax-deductible donation today so we can keep on doing the type of journalism 2024 demands.

payment methods

Fact:

Today, reader support makes up about two-thirds of our budget, allows us to dig deep on stories that matter, and lets us keep our reporting free for everyone. If you value what you get from Mother Jones, please join us with a tax-deductible donation today so we can keep on doing the type of journalism 2024 demands.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate