unraveling

28.Feb.2025

Family values

Idaho's supermajority Republican political agenda is generally far out, not in a good way. Far out for control over women, for example. Women's health is between a woman, her husband, her fetus, her doctors, nurses, and the Idaho legislature. Women's first amendment rights are limited to agreeing with the menfolk who tell us what's what. Cheering is good, booing, not so much. A "constitutional" Sheriff will signal the black-shirted goons to carry you right out of there. (The Kootenai County GOP's slogan is "Freedom & Justice. For All." Apparently they ran out of room for "Who Agree With Us.")

Have a read of Bailey O'Neil's guest opinion in the Coeur d'Alene Press: A sheriff's betrayal of public trust: When power enables violence. There's a lot more of that coming.

"Sheriff Norris's conduct represents more than a dereliction of duty — it constitutes a betrayal of his oath of office. A law enforcement officer who gleefully records the assault of a citizen rather than preventing it has forgotten the fundamental purpose of his badge. His actions demonstrate not strength but weakness, not authority but authoritarianism, not leadership but the petty abuse of power."

The Republican party has been steadfast in refusing to even consider a statute to add the words "sexual orientation" and "gender identity" to our anti-discrimination civil rights statute. (Currently, "race, color, religion, sex, national origin, [and] disability" are enumerated.)

Following the christian nationalist lead in demonizing diversity, equity, and inclusion for political aggrandizement of its opponents, they've managed to get so-called "DEI centers" on our university campuses shut down. Nothing but meritocracy now, baby!

No more Office of Equity and Diversity, Office of Multicultural Affairs, Diversity Center, Black/African American Cultural Center, LGBTQA Office or Women's Center—with its half-century+ history. We are all one, big, merit-based family now.

Well... former director of UI's Office of Multicultural Affairs and BSU's Student Diversity Inclusion, Francisco Salinas reminds us of what the attempted erasure is about, as the state dismantles student resources:

"Intentional work to diversify higher education in the academy is part of the work of overcoming the legacy of racism that's built into the systems in higher education. What you're basically doing is denying that reality exists at all."

They're prepared to deny science in favor of religious beliefs too, taking the time last year to declare that—contrary to well-established fact—that "there are two, and only two, sexes: male and female" and "every individual is either male or female." And to define "boy," "father," "female," "gender" ("shall be considered a synonym for 'sex'"), "girl," "male," "mother," and "sex."

This year, the legislature has a big, big, crazy agenda, and what is too crazy for bills, they're putting in memorials and resolutions, "coming next season" bills. They're jealous of their power, and indefatigable in trying to make initiatives and referenda more difficult to get on the ballot for the people to decide. Having had one attempt slapped down was unconstitutional by our state supreme court, they're trying to amend the constitution to have it their way.

They want to reserve an official time of prayer each day during their session. ("Please god, let this end soon.")

They did their damndest to force a poison pill down the throat of voter initiative-based Medicaid expansion this session, or, failing that, to "reform" it. Idaho's Medicaid enrollment rate (20.4%) is close to the national average of 21.2%. In the richest nation in human history, more than one in five Americans have too little income to afford healthcare insurance. The proposed "fix" is to make it harder to get a subsidy.

But we've got revenue to spare for private and religious schools? $50 million (on a "first come, first served" basis) is just the camel's nose under the tent. The Idaho State Tax Commission is to create a waiting list “demonstrating who would be eligible on a first-come, first-served basis if the annual maximum limit [is] increased.” The governor signed the bill in spite of it failing to meet the "accountability" leg of his four-legged stool that a bill should be "fair, responsible, transparent and accountable."

“But I don’t think there’s enough accountability in the money we give public schools either,” he added, noting the deficiency and his own shortcomings, too-clever by half with a false equivalence. He's also begin a bit slow (at least) to provide accountability and transparency from his own office, stalling the report of input the public provided, after Idaho Ed News had reported that constituent emails were running more than 15 to 1 opposed to the bill. (Headline says 10-to-1; data say 94-to-6%.)

Last but not least, on Tuesday, Feb. 25, the Senate declared they shall recognize TRADITIONAL FAMILY VALUES MONTH, from Mother’s Day through Father’s Day "to raise awareness about the challenges facing traditional families and the alarming rate at which the traditional American family is declining."

That'll give us more than a month (five weeks and a day) to extol natural (?!) female mothers, and male fathers, children, aunts, uncles, grandparents, and ok, the catch-all of "other extended family." Just be aware that if you're not making the grade as a "traditional American family," your development of character, morality, virtue, and spirituality are suspect.

God bless Sen. Jim Guthrie, R-McCammon, the only Republican to debate against the resolution, who wondered “Why do we have to kick somebody in the shin to prop up somebody else? Why does it have to be like that?"

Why, indeed.

27.Feb.2025

Chip to flip

Fundraising is hard, especially after the beat-down of the 2024 election, and the Supreme Court's all-power-to-billionaires decision in Citizens United. (Orwell is smiling sardonically at the naming rights.) The DCCC is after me to "chip in $15," and get my name and credit card information. Subject line is "Re: the oligarchy," with this colorful reminder for the lede:

Tom, just over a month ago, Trump was sworn in alongside his closest donors: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg -- the three richest men in the country.

Felon bought his full premium executive access for $290 million (and ok, flushing $tens of billions down the Xitter tube). If half the people in the country chipped in just $2, they could match that! (But then he could double his spending without raising a sweat, and so on.)

And speaking of "the parasite class," "Musk and his businesses have received at least $38 billion in government contracts, loans, subsidies, and tax credits, often at critical moments, helping seed the growth that has made him the richest person in the world."

Degraded opinions

Caught a newsy snippet of The First Cabinet Meeting, which included Felon Musk in his dorky black MAGA hat gushing about the Best Cabinet Ever, which might have been as cringeworthy as Mike Pence's obeisance if I'd watched long enough. Beyond that, I feel like I can barely keep up with headlines. Gene Hackman died (aww), at 95 (well, then). And oh, foul play is not suspected, even though his (64 yo) wife and dog were found dead, too.

The bookselling, omniwarehouse billionaire Jeff Bezos decreed that henceforth only two kinds of opinions shall matter to the Washington Post:

“We will be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets… Viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.”

First of all, "we will"? Good god. Also, the political coup that is reducing us to a petrostate, betraying our allies, and joining forces with Russia, Belarus, North Korea and the like, No Comment?! It's "an unsurprising surprise, [after] Bezos shamefully pulled the paper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris last fall."

I went to cancel our subscription, and they offered me half price for a year, and then 50% more after that. Tricky. Let's see if they can keep me from cancelling for all of a year. "Thanks for your continued support," the last screen says.

H/t to Marc Elias' Democracy Docket for highlighting Bezos' plan, and his organization that's interested in fighting for democracy, rather than choking it to death in the darkness. You can subscribe to his free newsletter, or for a premium membership at $10/month. Compare his mission statement to Bezos':

"We are in an existential fight for the future of our democracy. While legacy media and its billionaire owners bend the knee, Democracy Docket stands tall. We will never compromise. We will never bow. We will never obey."

Some of DD's positive headlines just now:

• Arizona Court Dismisses Right-Wing Group’s Election Administration Lawsuit
• Judge Extends Halt on Trump’s Firing of Head of Watchdog Agency For Federal Workers
• Voter Suppression Laws Remain Blocked in Arizona

And this disturbing explainer: What Happens When an Executive Ignores the Law? Ask Constitutional Sheriffs. "So-called “constitutional sheriffs” descend from a lineage of federal, state and local politicians who, in the name of white supremacy, openly flouted judicial decisions." Lit up by the undefeated racism of the South, resisting school desegregation in the 1950s, through to Arizona's contemptible Joe Arpaio, and to the January 6th rioters attempting to overthrow the 2020 presidential election, at Donold's command.

Idaho is advancing the pillars of personal liberties and free markets too... oh wait no, it isn't. Our governor just signed a misbegotten law to provide a $300 minimum fine for possession of less than three ounces of marijuana. (ICYMI, the War on Drugs was an abysmal failure, and 39 of our great state laboratories of democracy have legalized cannabis for medical use, and 24 for recreational use. The blue/gray/green/black dot divide is a little different than the old red/blue two-party system that's been dragging us down.) Idaho and Wyoming are surrounded by (mostly far) less draconian different opinions on the matter.

On the plus side, one effort to kill Medicaid expansion has been laid to rest. A compromise bill, in response to debate and testimony (something the Idaho legislature so rarely responds to) is up next. And a bill to restrict absentee voting died in the House State Affairs committee, with tie votes for "return to sender" and sending it to the full House.

And Utah's Senator Mike Lee, @BasedMikeLee on the Xitter hell-site, tweeted that "Corrupt judges should be impeached. And removed. Pass it on if you agree." We can't impeach corrupt Senators, but they should certainly be removed. We can (and did!) impeach corrupt presidents, but Mike Lee and his cohort failed at the all-important step 2. Joyce Vance, When They Come for the Judges:

"Senator Lee, the son of Rex Lee, Solicitor General of the United States during the Reagan administration, was both an Assistant United States Attorney and a law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sam Alito after graduating from law school. He most decidedly understands that his tweet, which implies that judges who rule against the administration are corrupt, is false.

"This has been a persistent beat with Lee of late. Earlier this month he tweeted, “This has the feel of a coup—not a military coup, but a judicial one,” after a judge in New York issued a temporary halt to DOGE’s access to Treasury Department systems.... That sort of temporary pause, designed to prevent anything that cannot be undone down the road from happening is hardly a coup. But there you have it, the distinguished senator from Utah, spreading misinformation. It is a dangerous campaign to undermine the rule of law, as Democratic Rep. Zoe Lofgren said Tuesday:

"Calling for judges to be impeached just because you don’t like their decisions is nothing short of anti-constitutional. Judicial review, the power of the courts to declare laws passed by Congress or actions taken by the president unconstitutional, is a deep-seated part of our rule of law system."

26.Feb.2025

On the precipice

Robert Reich: What Trump is really trying to do:

"In every part of the government that involves the use of force — the military, the investigation and prosecution of crimes, the authority to arrest, the capacity to hold individuals in jail — Trump is putting into power people who are more loyal to him than they are to the United States.

"Trump is rapidly gaining a personal monopoly on the use of force. This is his most fundamental goal. This is the essence of tyranny."

The new, sub-qualified, de-retired general who will be Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff put himself on the record expressing his fealty to Donold at last year's CPAC:

“I love you, sir. I think you’re great, sir. I’ll kill for you, sir.”

All the gaslighting about the Democrats' supposed "weaponization of the federal government" is coming to fruition. Accountability failed.

Dan Bongino, soon to be deputy director of the FBI, "former cop, Secret Service agent, conspiracy theorist, and Fox News commentator" is "the 20th ex-Fox News host, journalist, or commentator to bag a senior job in the new Trump administration)."

"Every tyrant throughout history has gained a personal monopoly on the use of force so he can impose his will on anyone, for any purpose. Tyrants achieve this by delegating power only to people personally loyal to them."

My friend Jon Norstog forwarded a copy of Reich's post and added this:

"This is classic political science. The state has a monopoly on the use of force. Poli Sci 101, they even taught this at U of Idaho. Our constitution, laws and customs have mostly prevented the nation's police and armed forces) from being used for political purposes, personal gain or to terrorize our own citizens. Robert Reich is calling attention to what is going on, but not why. Trump is an old, befuddled, man, who will probably not live out his term in office. The people Trump has brought into the government are putting together the machinery for a takeover, the Constitution be damned. There is nothing to stop them but the courts."

And we, the people. Reich's call to action:

"[W]e must protect the institutions in our society still able to oppose Trump’s tyranny — independent centers of power that can stop or at least slow him. Not this Congress, tragically, but federal courts and judges. Many of our state governors and attorneys general, state legislatures, and state courts. Perhaps even our state and local police. Hopefully, our communities.

"Ultimately this will come down to our own courage and resolve: To engage in peaceful civil disobedience. To organize and mobilize others. To fight against hate and bigotry. To fight for justice and democracy.

"Remember this: Tyranny cannot prevail over people who refuse to succumb to it."

25.Feb.25

And now, a word from state media

In keeping with today's Kremlin theme, breaking news that the White House announces that it's going to handpick which "media outlets" (and presumably, which reporters) that will be allowed to ask Lord Emperor Donold questions.

"America has turned on its friends"

That's the headline of a Financial Times editorial, safely behind their paywall, but outlined well enough by Heather Cox Richardson in her Feb. 24 Letter from an American, marking three years since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. There have been more than a million killed or wounded, most of them Russians.

"In the past week, President Donald Trump has embraced Russian propaganda about its invasion," and yesterday, the US delegation to the United Nations "voted against a resolution condemning Russia for its aggression in Ukraine and calling for it to end its occupation," voting with Russia, Israel, North Korea, Belarus, Sudan, Hungary, and 11 other countries. 65 abstentions, what the hell? So it passed, "overwhelmingly," 93-18. For what that's worth. The BBC provides more detail of the multiple General Assembly and Security Council votes. HCR provides the punchline:

"[T]he U.S. voted against a resolution that reiterated that one nation must not invade another, one of the founding principles of the United Nations itself, an organization whose headquarters are actually in the United States....

"On Google Maps, users changed the name of Trump’s Florida club Mar-a-Lago to “Kremlin Headquarters.”

The editorial board of London’s Financial Times noted today that “[i]n the past ten days, [Trump] has all but incinerated 80 years of postwar American leadership.” Instead, it has become an “unabashed predator,” allied with Russia and other countries the U.S. formerly saw as adversaries. The board recalled important moments in which “the US displayed its character as global leader,” and those moments “defined the world’s idea of America.” But a new era has begun. Trump’s assertion that Ukraine “should have never started” the war with Russia, and J.D. Vance’s statement that the real danger in Europe is liberal democracy, are “the dark version of those” moments coming, as they did, “straight from Putin’s talking points.”

"Each, the board said, “will live in infamy.” It added that “there should be no doubt that Trump’s contempt for allies and admiration for strongmen is real and will endure.” He is “instinctively committed to the idea that the world is a jungle in which the big players take what they want…. He divides the world into spheres of interest.”

“America,” the board concluded, “has turned.”

The European nations are forging ahead on their own. The EU imposed more sanctions on Russia. The UK "announced a sweeping package of sanctions rivaling those of the war’s early days." And French President Emmanuel Macron, visiting Washington D.C., "maintained a façade of camaraderie with Trump, but as Trump slumped in his chair and recited the inaccuracies that in the U.S. often go uncorrected, Macron seemed comfortable and in command. He interrupted Trump to contradict him in front of reporters and called out Russia for being the aggressor in the war."

PBS News has video of that event. Go forward 6 minutes to the start of the speaking. "France is America's oldest ally," +rump got right, following someone else's script for him. That 75th anniversary of D-Day mentioned, when the American president wouldn't go out in the rain.

He doesn't get 2 minutes into his prepared remarks before injecting something risible and stupid, speaking in an affectless montone, marking "this third anniversary of the invasion of Ukraine which would" [there's a pause, as he goes off-script] "never have happened if I was president. That was not going to happen." He can lie in the subjunctive just as effortlessly in reality. He drones on, about

"the horrors— of this gruesome and bloody war can scarcely be overestimated hundreds of thousands of people, Russians and Ukrainians in particular have" [and he looks up, finally] "needlessly" [and back down to the script] "died. An entire generation of Ukrainians [sic] and Russian men [weirdly emphasized] has been decimated [sic]. One– thousand– year-old cities have been– turned into rubble– [he looks up] those beautiful spires– that you used to see– there, they were most beautiful in the world, they say– [back to the script] are lying in heaps of rubble [he seems to contemplate "rubble"] blasted to smithereens, it's time to end this bloodletting and restore peace and I think we're going to do it..."

With "great conversations. Including with Russia." Nonsense about the "great progress" that's been made "in one month" of his magical reign. Some people are saying it was the greatest first month ever. "A lot of good things toward peace are happening, moving at, I think pretty quickly." Those talks with (just) Russia in Saudi Arabia were "successful," he says, gives a shout out to "the King and Mohammed, great people."

"It should have never started," he said, riffing, lying with the passive voice giving cover for Russia, then goes on to whine about "the costs," meaning money. Segue to innumerate lying:

"The United States has put up far more aid to Ukraine than any other nation. Hundreds of billions of dollars, and we've spent more than 300 billion, Europe has spent about a hundred, a hundred billion, that's a big difference. And at some point we should equalize."

Statista's current tally of total aid puts the US at €114 billion, and the EU and member countries more than €130 billion from January 24, 2022 to December 31, 2024. He goes off script again, to criticize "the previous administration," that "didn't think of a lot of things, like why did they let it start in the first place?"

And then the non sequitur plan for looting Ukraine. "That is why we must have an agreement with Ukraine on critical minerals, rare earths, and various other things."

And then, wistfully, off-script, those halcyon days when he left office and there were "no wars" (Hello Afghanistan!) "no problems, we didn't have October 7th with Israel, we didn't have Russia and Ukraine going at it... we didn't have inflation!" Then blah blah blah IMMIGRATION dog whistling "murderers, drug dealers, gangs, we didn't have any of that."

Now "we'll fix it all up."

Macron starts in English, then switches to French; the video has translation audio over the top, going into Donold's ear, nods along sagely. Lots of thanks, and commending, including on "working with President Zelenksy," and the minerals deal. Mentions the Crimea, and the Donbas; the 8 years before the 2022 invastion (half of which was on Don's watch, including "that perfect phone call" attempting to extort Zelenksy for dirt on Hunter Biden that got him impeached, the first time).

"I wanna do something, it's what I do, I do deals, my whole life is deals, that's all I know is deals, and I know when– somebody wants to make it, and somebody doesn't..."

Hup to

In case you were wondering (which you probably weren't, given how many more serious things there are to wonder about), "what is Vivek Ramaswamy up to, after he was all-in on team +rump and supposed to be half in charge of the Department of Efficient Sabotage?"

Jim Wright picked up a V.R. tweet, exhorting us to start physical education in kindergarten" and "bring back the presidential fitness test." Just like the good old days.

"You know, it's funny but back 2010, when First Lady Michelle Obama announced the "Let's Move" campaign to fight childhood obesity, a program that involved physical education starting in kindergarten, healthy eating, improved access to healthy affordable foods including growing your own, and exercise, people like Vivek Ramaswamy and Republicans went absolutely batshit bonkers in outrage over "government overreach," "Soviet style communism," "Chinese exercise," and telling parents their kids were too fat (how DARE she?!?!)."

I'm old enough to remember Jane Fonda's workout video being a thing, 40-some years ago. When she was in her 40s. 17 million sold from 1982 to 1995. She's still kicking, just received the Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award on Sunday. For her acceptance speech, she didn't mention working out, but at age 87 (!), her lively presence is its own testimonial.

The Today show website filed it under "popculture," which is a bit breezy, considering what she had to say in her remarkable speech. Props for them providing the video, and the transcript. In part:

"Make no mistake, empathy is not weak or woke. And by the way, woke just means you give a damn about other people. Back to empathy. A whole lot of people are going to be really hurt by what is happening, what is coming our way. And even if they're of a different political persuasion, we need to call upon our empathy and not judge, but listen from our hearts and welcome them into our tent, because we are going to need a big tent to resist successfully what's coming at us.

"I made my first movie in 1958. It was the tail end of McCarthyism, when so many careers were destroyed. Today it's helpful to remember, though, that Hollywood resisted. We did. Overseas, brave American producers like Hannah Weinstein hired blacklisted writers. Myrna Loy, John Huston and Billy Wilder founded the Committee for the First Amendment. ...

"Have any of you ever watched a documentary of one of the great social movements, like apartheid or our civil rights movement or Stonewall, and asked yourself, would you have been brave enough to walk the bridge? Would you have been able to take the hoses and the batons and the dogs?

"We don't have to wonder anymore because we are in our documentary moment. This is it. And it's not a rehearsal."

24.Feb.2025

Five things

The Muskrat decreed that “Consistent with [Trump’s] instructions, all federal employees will shortly receive an email requesting to understand what they got done last week. Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.” The AP reported that

Shortly afterward, federal employees — including some judges, court staff and federal prison officials — received a three-line email with this instruction: “Please reply to this email with approx. 5 bullets of what you accomplished last week and cc your manager.”

Of course it's a load of horse puckey, but the Supreme Court-empowered smash and grab is still full tilt, even if it's starting to show weakness as decent people and a institutions begin to resist. HCR notes that "the White House has told a court that Musk has no authority and is only a presidential advisor."

Which is to say the truth comes out, every once in a while. The Sunday NYT's top story was PRESIDENT OUSTS TOP U.S. GENERAL AS PART OF PURGE, said purge including the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Charles Q. Brown Jr., Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Lisa Franchetti, General James Slife, the vice chief of the Air Force, and the top Judge Advocates General for the Army, Navy and Air Force. It seems our new SecDef is going in a new, lawless direction, and they all would be in his way. As Adam Parkhomenko put it, Hegseth "sure seems to be planning some criminal shit. Thank goodness he's a respectable gentleman with an impeccable record," ha ha.

Another above-the-fold item anticipating Sunday's election in Germnay, and A Key to Trump's Success: His Genius for Lying. A headline with a little kick, even if it seems most of a decade too late. What made it to the web rendition was masticated to the more usual pabulum: In Trump’s Alternate Reality, Lies and Distortions Drive Change.

So to be clear, no employees were genuinely required to tell F/Elon or his harpies what they did last week, in a reply to hr@opm.gov. But you could send an email, of course. A gal on Facebook made a nice list, including

"4. I had to delete this one because my husband said I shouldn't use the "F" word in these emails, and he's right, I should be a nicer person, so just assume that I was very unhappy watching everything you are doing to our government while watching the news on TV."

Other pushback included federal court officials who "instructed recipients not to respond."

“We understand that some judges and judiciary staff have received an email ... directing the recipient to reply with 5 accomplishments from the prior week. Please be advised that this email did not originate from the Judiciary or the Administrative Office and we suggest that no action be taken.”

More from the AP, as "Key U.S. agencies, including the FBI, State Department and the Pentagon, have instructed their employees not to comply." Leah McElrath observed that the email "is a loyalty test."

The point of the email demand isn’t the product resulting from the demand. The point is the compliance with the demand itself.

Even if the demand is ultimately revised, Musk and Trump have gathered a lot of information about the system as a whole.

They’ll likely reward and punish accordingly.

Still, lists are fun, aren't they? I'm not an employee of the federal government (haven't been anyone's employee for more than 20 years), but here are five of my "bullets":

1. On Monday, I had an epic powder day snowboarding at Bogus Basin, best of the season (so far). Kind of fogged out on Tuesday, but then Thursday was still cold, but BLUEBIRD clear and sunny. Very nice.
2. Three bike rides for the week too, 45 miles is a bit below my average, but it's winter, you know?
3. I pruned our apple and peach trees on Friday, just (barely!) ahead of a freaky February heat wave. Forecast high near 60 today, and in the 50s and sunny through Friday.
4. Choir rehearsal on Wednesday evening, for yesterday, when Jeanette and I sang in our church choir, a setting of Langston Hughes' "Dreams"; "City Called Heaven"; and "Climbin' Up the Mountain," in a worship service honoring Black History month.
5. Kept the blog going here, with posts on your lawless attacks on the federal government, the disasters from the first month of the new administration in progress, our spinless Senators, and the vile capitulation to Russia and our betrayal of Ukraine (and our allies in Europe).

As compared to your and Donold's record, which included

"24 hours tweeting more than 220 times and engaged in public fights with two of the mothers of [your] children while allegedly running companies and overhauling the government, while Trump spent at least 12 nights at Mar-a-Lago in his first 29 days in office. S.V. Date of HuffPost noted on February 18 that Trump has played golf at one of his own properties on 9 of his first 30 days in office and that Trump’s golf outings had already cost the American taxpayer $10.7 million."

That, and this, from Heather Cox Richardson's Feb. 23 letter from an American:

Historian Johann Neem, a specialist in the American Revolution, turned to political theorist John Locke to explore the larger meaning of Trump’s destructive course. The founders who threw off monarchy and constructed our constitutional government looked to Locke for their guiding principles. In his 1690 Second Treatise on Government, Locke noted that when a leader disregards constitutional order, he gives up legitimacy and the people are justified in treating him as a “thief and a robber.”

22.Feb.2025

Happy George Washington's birthday

A not-too-subtle subtweet in this week's NYT Flashback Quiz, item #5:

"The British public is relieved by the Munich agreement, which gives part of Czechoslovakia to Germany to avert war. (No one consults the Czechoslovakians.)"

ICYMI, and #spoileralert, that was in run-up to the last big fight we had with organized Nazis. Are some of our public relieved by what our fatuous felon is cooking up in eastern Europe just now, with our underqualified SecDef's warm-up act signaling how fully we're prepared

"Left out of peace talks, Ukrainians fear they can no longer trust America."

It was eleven years ago this month that Russia occupied and annexed Crimea from Ukraine, and three since it launched a full-scale invasion. The Russian dictator, Vladimir Putin, has committed myriad war crimes along the way. (The International Criminal Court's arrest warrant for Putin will turn two next month.) Mark Hertling boils it down, in The Bulwark: We’re Negotiating with War Criminals. My emphasis added:

"Vladimir Putin started this war in Ukraine by launching an unprovoked invasion. Throughout the three years of this conflict, Russian forces have purposely committed documented war crimes. Yet the Kremlin—now aided by some in the United States—continues to spread propaganda to mask the truth. From the deliberate bombing of civilian infrastructure to mass executions in places like Bucha to the kidnapping of Ukrainian children, the evidence of war crimes is overwhelming. And we are negotiating with them."

Historian Heather Cox Richardson's February 19, 2025 Letter from an American provides a capsule history of the Russo-Ukrainian context, the war, and the shape of the Trump administration's betrayal and capitulation. It runs from Crimea to Comey to Paul Manafort's criminal dealings with oligarchs, the first time Trump was impeached, the Big Lie about the 2020 election Trump lost, right up to our hillbilly vice president's embarrassing lecture to the 61st Munich Security Conference.

"After Vance told Europe to “change course and take our shared civilization in a new direction,” he refused to meet with Germany’s chancellor Olaf Scholz and instead met with the leader of the far-right German political party that has been associated with neo-Nazis."

We're not just palling around with terrorists, we're joining forces with them, in a nutshell. Our leaders are modeling their "new direction" on Nazism.

"[F]rom his Florida residence [Tuesday evening], Trump parroted Russian propaganda when he blamed Ukraine for the war that began when Russia invaded Ukraine’s sovereign territory. When reporters asked about the exclusion of Ukraine from the talks, Trump answered: “Today I heard, ‘Oh, well, we weren’t invited.’ Well, you've been there for three years. You should have ended it three years ago. You should have never started it. You could have made a deal.” He also said that Zelensky holds only a 4% approval rating, when in fact it is about 57%."

Ukraine should never have started having Russia invade them. Speaking of public opinion,

"A Quinnipiac poll released today shows that only 9% of Americans think we should trust Putin; 81% say we shouldn’t. For his part, Putin complained today that Trump was not moving fast enough against Europe and Ukraine."

20.Feb.2025

Red state blues

There'll be blue state blues too, but T2's hatchet man and all-purpose bludgeon is not parceling out any favors to the states where MAGA live. More than 60% of Idaho's land is "our land," owned by the federal government, and managed by the Department of Agriculture (the US Forest Service), and the Department of Interior (National Park Service, BLM, US Fish and Wildlife Service). Alexandra Duggan, for the Spokesman-Review: "‘Public lands will suffer’: Idaho, home to seven national forests, loses integral forest service employees across the state to Trump terminations."

Undermaintained trails, closed recreation areas, insufficient staffing to deal with fire season, and another roadside attraction: full toilets. F/Elon Musk and his team of DOGEs wholesale sabotage will have the Idaho zone literally flooded with shit.

Any word from "Idaho Republicans, previously vocal in their support of President Donald Trump before and after the election"? They're "largely silent," so far. "The Idaho GOP declined to comment," the governor's office did not respond, and a spokesperson for US Senator Mike Crapo "said via email that his office has not received any further information on the firings, other than what has been reported in the media." He's out of the loop, in other words. Apparently not prepared to make so much as squeak against the knights (and weekends!) of long knives.

Crapo's website currently features a "bill to protect [the] western way of life," as if we still had laws and stuff. He's also in favor of keeping "traditional" lead in ammunition and tackle. But not a bloody thing about the co-president felons and their coup in process.

Our other senator, Jim Risch, likes to emphasize how much "in lockstep" he is with Trump. He's fully committed to rubber-stamping whatever, as long as it's Republican-branded. (He used to be outspoken in his support for Ukraine. With Trump-Vance shifted to Putin's talking points, accusing Ukraine of starting the war of Russia invading their country, of Ukraine's leader being a "dictator," crickets.) So much for that powerful seat in the center of the Foreign Relations committee.)

RFK Jr. for HHS? Tulsi Gabbard in charge of National Intelligence? Kash Patel running the FBI? All totally, 100% fine with him. Lockstep. His front-page slider with his big issues, starting with "MOAR FREEDOM," all feature the same cozy shot of him talking to somebody (or himself?), gesticulating from an armchair by an unlit fire. Perfect.

19.Feb.2025

A sickness upon the land

You've probably seen the news of the measles outbreak in Texas (and now into New Mexico) by now? It started in Gaines County, population 22,000-some, which "has one of the highest rates in Texas of school-aged children who opt out of at least one required vaccine, with nearly 14% of K-12 children in the 2023-24 school year." Plus however many homeschooled kids without data reporting opted out.

The AP reports that Kennedy says panel will examine childhood vaccine schedule after promising not to change it. Lying to Congress in your confirmation hearing isn't a crime, is it? It's been de rigeur lately. In his "welcome" message to the U.S. Health and Human Services agency ("after a weekend of mass firings of thousands of HHS employees"), RFK Jr. "vowed to investigate the childhood vaccine schedule that prevents measles, polio and other dangerous diseases."

“Nothing is going to be off limits,” Kennedy said, adding that pesticides, food additives, microplastics, antidepressants and the electromagnetic waves emitted by cellphones and microwaves also would be studied.

So much for "his commitment to Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy, a Louisiana physician who harbored deep misgivings over the health secretary’s anti-vaccine advocacy. Cassidy ultimately voted to send Kennedy’s nomination to the Senate floor after he said Kennedy gave him assurances that he would not alter the federal vaccine schedule."

As Jess Calarco noted in a Bluesky post, "the most shocking thing about this is that anyone took him at his word." Max Kennerly boils it down:

"71 years old and finally achieving his dream of killing children.

"Not just some children here or there, like he's been doing, but thousands of children annually, systematically, by destroying one of the pillars of public health, one of the greatest achievements of humanity."

For his part, RFKJ worked the crowd left at HHS by saying “Let’s start a relationship by letting go of any preconceived perceptions you may have of me.” We could Just go by the demonstrated facts that he's a liar, can't be trusted, has a history of drug use, cruel violence, and mental illness.

Frumpy, trumpy, and felons galore

Mob boss aspirant and needs-grooming felon Stephen Bannon, the enabling bogeyman of the 2016 Trump campaign after Paul Manafort's felonies caught up with him, is in the news (so to speak; from +rump-whisperer Maggie Haberman), coming after the new guy:

“Musk is a parasitic illegal immigrant. He wants to impose his freak experiments and play-act as God without any respect for the country’s history, values or traditions."

Yes, we've been noticing. (Nice touch there, using the activist Surpreme Court extremists' catch-phrase.) Also in the pot and kettle calling genre, this:

Mr. Bannon has repeatedly criticized Mr. Musk, calling him a “truly evil person” before the inauguration last month and vowing to prevent him from having full access to the White House.

So that didn't work. f/Elon Musk "has made himself invaluable to Mr. Trump as an internal enforcer of executive orders and efforts to aggressively cut spending and reduce the size of the federal work force." The broligarchy "move fast and break things" plan is being rolled out on an unprecedented scale, and in high gear.

It's a competition of greater evils. Bannon's complained about Musk not being pure enough. Haberman says B has condemned M "as not pure to the movement." Always one with a clapback, Musk replied: “Bannon is a great talker, but not a great doer. What did he get done this week? Nothing.” Elon and his Furies are working weekends!

Ah, for those halcyon days of senior advisors doing nothing in a week. The bozos on our bus to perdition even put a rosy tint on Jared Kushner's time lurking in office and grifting $billions while screwing up the government response to Covid-19.

In a remarkable coincidence of effort and benefit, headlined with the NYT's "this is slightly abnormal" style guide, Elon Musk’s Business Empire Scores Benefits Under Trump Shake-Up. "Shakeup," as in the systematic attack on agencies that might provide any oversight (let alone accountability) of Musk's business enterprises, many of which have enjoyed generous federal subsidies. "His companies were promised $3 billion across nearly 100 different contracts last year with 17 federal agencies," the Times reported back in October, "$13 billion in contracts over the past five years" in the Feb. 11 piece.

Donold chipped in by firing three executives, and effectively paralyzing the National Labor Relations Board (and so its 24 investigations into X, SpaceX, and Tesla). The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau won't be investigating hundreds of complaints about Tesla's debt collection and loans anytime soon. Daintily,

"Traditional federal conflict of interest rules seem almost antiquated, if Mr. Musk is determined to be involved in specific decisions about agencies his companies do business with."

How precious is this?

Mr. Trump, speaking with reporters before he attended the Super Bowl on Sunday, said Mr. Musk is “not gaining anything” in the role. White House officials last week added that it is up to Mr. Musk to police his own actions."

Today's edition of The Cause with LOLGOP got me started, Why Elon Musk is not Steve Bannon. Sattler quashed hopes for a bro-breakup anytime soon, and sorts the Zeitgeist into two bleak scenarios: either Elon is Donald's puppetmaster or Trump is happy to be king, while Elon is his CEO.

"Musk is the master puppeteer Republicans always pretend George Soros to be, leaving us to believe that these conspiracy theories were not just fueled by antisemitism but also burning jealousy,"

or, h/t to "a pseudo-philosopher named Curtis Yarvin, who is at least friendly with JD Vance and has inspired the increasingly apocalyptic worldview of Vance’s primary corporate sponsor, Peter Thiel":

“The CEO he picks will run the executive branch without any interference from the Congress or courts, probably also taking over state and local governments,” Yarvin wrote. “Most existing important institutions, public and private, will be shut down and replaced with new and efficient systems.”

The latest Letter from American, Heather Cox Richardson, starts with a court filing that "clarified the government position" that Musk is supposedly holding. This for the lawsuit brought by 14 states' attorneys general.

In a sworn declaration to the court, [Director of the Office of Administration Joshua] Fisher identified Musk as “a Senior Advisor to the President.” He explained: “In his role as a Senior Advisor to the President, Mr. Musk has no greater authority than other senior White House advisors. Like other senior White House advisors, Mr. Musk has no actual or formal authority to make government decisions himself. Mr. Musk can only advise the President and communicate the President’s directives.”

Plausible deniability then? The big guy can just say he told Musk to do whatever (with no documentation, of course), and if there was any criming, it's ok, the president is immune. Or what the hell, if Musk needs to be pardoned, that too. Anything else? After the Blitzkrieg attacks on USAID, the Treasury Department, Veterans Affairs, Education, Energy, HHS (including the CDC, NIH, FDA, and Medicare/Medicaid), Homeland Security, the National Park Service, the CFPB, Agriculture, the Department of Justice, the State Department, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration,

"Over the weekend, Fatima Hussein of the Associated Press reported that DOGE was trying to get access to taxpayer data from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), specifically the Integrated Data Retrieval System that enables examinations of tax returns, deep troves of information about hundreds of millions of American citizens and businesses. Access to individuals’ bank account numbers and private information has, in the past, been tightly guarded. Indeed, compromising access to that information is a felony."

Not to put too fine a point on the lawlessness, Liz Dye, for Public Notice:

"In reality, most of what Musk is doing is flatly illegal.

"Canceling contracts without notice violates the law. Mass firing federal employees without cause violates the law. Cutting federal funds for all scientific and medical research violates the law. But most egregiously, Musk’s deletion of entire government departments and Trump’s refusal to spend money as directed by the budget bills violates the Constitution. That’s why multiple courts have enjoined the Trump administration from blanket spending cuts."

16.Feb.2025

Into the whirlwind

We saw it all coming, sparked by the absurdity of "reality TV" and the gold-plated psychopath gliding down an escalator, then the comedy turned to tragedy by January 6, 2021. For just a moment, there was shock and outrage from some of the Republican hostages, brief talk about accountability, and then Kevin McCarthy went to Mar-a-Lago and called it all off. There was still power to be had, and money to be made, after all. (What's McCarthy up to these days? I wonder, idly.)

The 2016 election was swung with a lot of help from Russia, and the fruition of a decades-long, calculated attack on Hillary Clinton. Remember when her private email server was the scandal du jour?!

Fast forward to Melon Usk's l'il doggies running wild through the entire federal bureaucracy, running rm -rf / on whole agencies. (There must be fraud and waste, right? Just remove everybody, see what's broken, and fix it with AI.) And there's not a bloody peep out of the Republican quislings.

We now have Affirmative Action for Dictators. Timothy Snyder:

"As a television show, American foreign policy is about strength. In reality, it is about draining power from the United States and its allies, thereby creating atmospherics in which Donald Trump feels good and Elon Musk converts lost state capacity into personal profit. The weakness, in other words, is the point.

"In the alliances that held through January 2025, the United States was an unrivaled power. By whatever measure one chose, no other country was of the same status. Without the alliances, however, the equation is different. It is not just that the United States loses the economic, military, and political strength of its allies. It is that the U.S. must now compete with them and try to subordinate them.

"At the Munich Security Conference, which is just coming to an end, the American vice president instructed Europeans to open themselves as colonial vessels. They should remove any constraints on social media platforms, allowing Musk and other oligarchs to shape their elections. And those elections should then lead to the victory of far right parties that would remove any other barriers to Musk’s power. In this scenario, no conceivable American interest is served. Only Musk’s. It is unlikely to play out as JD Vance expects. What is certain, though, is the palpable alienation of the Europeans."

It gets worse. Read the rest. We're in for a hell of a ride. (Nothing compared to the hell Ukraine has already experienced.) All because there wasn't enough collective backbone in the Republican Party to say You're fired! when it needed saying like never before.

12.Feb.2025

Fighting diversity, equity, and inclusion in Idaho

At yesterday's City Club of Boise gathering, the panel's moderator started by inviting us to put our minds back in space and time to living in South Carolina, in 1704. Without elaborating on any details, leaving those to our imagination. I thought of something made out of wood, dark, nothing electrical, of course, no plumbing. Wood smoky. Maybe far enough south it wasn't cold? No National Weather Service to tell me today's highs will be in the mid-50s to mid-60s on the coast, and cooler inland, only in the low 40s up in the northwest. No "national."

It was a provocative moment, not explored as much as it could have been, on the way to putting "exclusion" in context, and thinking about the myths and narratives upon which the colonial immigrants built a state, and then a nation.

There were three interesting panelists, and my notes can't do justice to what all they had to say, and it'll be a little while (Sunday, at least) before the recording is available on Boise State Public Radio. But my first takeaway from DEI: Dying, Evolving, Illegal? was that fight over "DEI" is for the stakes of the American Dream, of equal opportunity. Our country—our culture—is an experiment, in process for four centuries now, give or take.

Promoting Diversity was intended to be a way of calling people in, rather than calling them out; turned into a code word for race, and gender. But it's about the Americans with Disabilities Act, about veterans, and a lot more. IT'S NOT A NEW THING. But it (along with equity, that principle going back centuries more, and inclusion) has been made new, and weaponized into one of our fighting words by a political faction itching for a fight.

That faction includes the three Republican Senators who served on the 2024 DEI interim working group, the author and co-sponsors of Senate bill 1048, Ben Toews, Todd Lakey, and Julie VanOrden. It is currently awaiting its turn in the Senate State Affairs committee, with the stated purpose of

"[W]ork[ing] to protect freedom of inquiry and the pursuit of knowledge in Idaho’s institutions of higher education by freeing students and faculty from compulsory ideological training. It prohibits DEI-based discrimination in admission and hiring, DEI-related employee incentives, DEI offices and officer positions, diversity training, and bias reporting systems. Students also may not be forced to enroll in a course designed and implemented with DEI principles unless their chosen course of study is based on these concepts."

The fiscal impact statement declares a "may be" pot of gold at the end of the anti-rainbow: "It could save up to $3.8 Million based on the 51 associated positions previously identified in Idaho’s Higher Education institutions," as in, hey look, we could fire 51 people! and save $millions.

The cost of "annual reporting to the Attorney General and legislature," or having our AG and any aggrieved students contemplating "private cause of action for injunctive relief and/or penalties" "for failure to comply" are not tabulated.

There is a closing homage to our founding genocide, recognition that you know there is something to DEI, but we don't want it to get out of hand: "This will not affect centers and scholarships for American Indian students."

Our Republican supermajority-controlled legislature wants to provide for academic freedom by writing law to

"PROHIBIT DIVERSITY, EQUITY, AND INCLUSION OFFICES AND OFFICERS AT INSTITUTIONS OF HIGHER EDUCATION, TO PROVIDE AN ALTERNATIVE USE FOR CERTAIN FUNDS, TO PROHIBIT DIVERSITY TRAININGS, TO PROHIBIT BIAS REPORTING SYSTEMS, TO PROHIBIT CERTAIN REQUIRED COURSES, TO PROVIDE FOR EXEMPTIONS FROM CERTAIN REQUIREMENTS, TO REQUIRE CERTAIN REPORTS, TO PROVIDE THE ATTORNEY GENERAL WITH CERTAIN ENFORCEMENT AUTHORITY, TO PROVIDE FOR A PRIVATE CAUSE OF ACTION, AND TO PROVIDE LIMITATIONS; PROVIDING SEVERABILITY; AND DECLARING AN EMERGENCY AND PROVIDING AN EFFECTIVE DATE."

It's an emergency! We need more liberal toleration! And a lot of prohibitions to guarantee tolerance and freedom. In spite of the bill author insisting that "nothing is being banned," (he said that at the 4th working group meeting in late January) the all-encompassing and demonization of anything "DEI" has already led to the shutdown of affinity centers, including the Black/African American Cultural Center, the Office of Multicultural Affairs, the LGBTQA Office and the 52-year-old Women’s Center at the University of Idaho.

Now that UI's "Student Success Pages Are Being Rebuilt," you'll have to refer to the Wayback Machine to read the answer to Why a Women's Center? (archived in 2016)

"Women’s Centers exist because gender equity has still not been reached in any country around the world. Women still earn less than their male peers, and women of color face an even larger pay gap. Women hold fewer tenured faculty positions, and continue to be underrepresented in certain fields. Women of color are absent in many areas of higher education. Violence against women is rampant in America with more than a half-million women reporting assaults by intimate partners and four women dying each day as a result of domestic violence."

Meanwhile, in S1048:

"The Legislature finds that this state was founded upon the fundamental truth that all men [sic] are created equal and endowed with inalienable rights. Among these rights is the freedom of inquiry, which along with the principle of liberal toleration is essential to the advancement and diffusion of knowledge. The constitution of this state also declares that the stability of a republican form of government depends mainly upon the intelligence of the people. In contravention of these principles, a subversive ideology derived from the tenets of critical theory has infected the administration of this state's system of higher education, promoting a culture of division, ignorance, bigotry, and intolerance. Therefore, it is the intent of the Legislature to eliminate all programs and initiatives within all public institutions of higher education predicated on the tenets of critical theory, or more commonly known under the title of "diversity, equity, and inclusion."

It makes me wonder, how much of the reactionary flapdoodle hinges on deliberate (it seems) misunderstanding of what critical theory means? What critical thinking means. On white male fragility and its defense of unearned privilege. The irony is deep in the statements of fear, and the prohibitions, said to root out any and all "differential treatment," and especially any "preferential treatment" in systems that have bestowed differential, preferential favors to the in-group for countless generations.

It also is worth noting that the bill's section 1 elides the stated constitutional purpose of bringing up "the intelligence of the people," which is about the duty of the legislature:

"The stability of a republican form of government depending mainly upon the intelligence of the people, it shall be the duty of the legislature of Idaho, to establish and maintain a general, uniform and thorough system of public, free common schools."

This at the time when the supermajority is doing its damndest to figure out how to get taxpayer money flowing to unaccountable private schools, and to proliferate attacks on the system of public, free common schools that are at the heart of our "republican form of government."

11.Feb.2025

Profiles in psychopathy

Kara Swisher, talking to Ezra Klein: NYT gift link to the interview.

"I think it started off with: I have some good ideas, and I’d like to put them into place. And now it’s: I have all the ideas on every topic, and therefore what I say goes."

"[T]here’s always a massive amount of drama centered on him....

"I think he’s greatly informed by video games. Someone described him to me as Ready Player One, and everybody else is an NPC — a nonplayer character....

"He always has to be the hero or the person who matters the most... Also the stakes have to be very high, and if it doesn’t work, we’re doomed.... Everything sucks, and everybody previously is criminal or evil or “pedophiles.” A word he likes to use a lot."

ETTD

ICYMI last go 'round, that "Everything Trump Touches Dies." In Heather Cox Richardson's Feb. 10 Letter from an American, after a round-up of warnings from history and current events, this:

"Trump indicates that he is willing to undermine the credit of the United States. Yesterday, on Air Force One, he told reporters that the members of the administration trying to find wasteful spending have suggested that they have found fraud in Treasury bonds and that the United States might “have less debt than we thought.” The suggestion that the U.S. might not honor its debt is a direct attack on the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which says that “[t]he validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.” That amendment was written under similar circumstances, when former Confederates sought to avoid debt payments and undermine the power of the federal government."

What Forbes says "are considered to be about the safest investments on earth," "because they are backed by the full faith and credit of the U.S. government," about to be turned into a conman's plaything? It's like the old saying goes, "elect a criminal, expect a crime-spree."

Five former Secretaries of the Treasury have weighed in Our Democracy, Under Siege. Robert E. Rubin, Lawrence H. Summers, Timothy F. Geithner, Jacob J. Lew, and Janet L. Yellen, in the New York Times:

"We were fortunate that during our tenures in office no effort was made to unlawfully undermine the nation’s financial commitments. Regrettably, recent reporting gives substantial cause for concern that such efforts are underway today....

"[W]e are alarmed about the risks of arbitrary and capricious political control of federal payments, which would be unlawful and corrosive to our democracy....

"During our collective 18 years at the helm of the Treasury, we never were asked to stop congressionally appropriated funds from being paid out in full. Not since the Nixon administration has this type of executive action been contemplated. At that time, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the president did not have the power to withhold federal funds that Congress had authorized.

The judiciary strikes back

Democracy Docket's stack of Court Cases has 99 pages going. Marc Elias' subscriber Tip Sheet notes they're "currently following 30 Trump accountability lawsuits."

"Though there are different ways to count, by any measure there have been a flood of lawsuits against Donald Trump’s illegal actions as president. This week, and in the weeks to come, we will undoubtedly see many more. Don’t get distracted by Trump’s lies, JD Vance’s insinuations or Musk’s crazy tweets. Pay attention to wins and losses. By that metric Trump is losing and I expect that will continue."

He also notes that "Big Law" has yet to join the party the way it did in 2017, when "many large law firms boasted about what they were doing to protect democracy from Donald Trump."

"Not this time. Nearly every one of the lawsuits against Trump, Musk and Co. has been filed by legal nonprofit organizations like Democracy Forward, Public Citizen, etc. Like legacy media, Big Law spent a lot of time convincing everyone that they were pillars of civil society. Now that Trump is back, they are mostly just cowering in the corner and hoping not to be noticed. Perhaps they are reflecting their corporate clients — bent knees and all — but the lack of engagement is noticed."

And of course, there is more.

DOJ - Political retribution is here
It did not take long for Donald Trump’s retribution to begin. We have already seen the targeting of government employees, DOJ prosecutors and FBI agents. Over the weekend, the New York Times profiled the District of Columbia’s acting U.S. attorney, describing him as “willing to amplify calls for retribution.” We also saw more targeted removals of people’s security clearances based on political animus. Don’t let this become normalized. Each one of these dismissals or threats should be the subject of outrage. It will become worse in the days and weeks to come. Please, pay attention.

CONGRESS - Voter suppression is on the docket
With Republicans in Congress itching to enact new voter suppression laws and MAGA-controlled state legislatures coming back into session, expect to see more lies and demagoguing about noncitizen voting in federal elections. Here are the facts: (1) there are virtually no instances of it happening; (2) Republicans want to do this because it targets the young, the transient and women. When these and other voter suppression laws are enacted, they will be challenged in court. And Democracy Docket will keep you informed.

10.Feb.2025

Other than that, how's it going?

Charlie Warzel and Ian Bogost reporting in The Atlantic: The Government’s Computing Experts Say They Are Terrified

"Elon Musk’s unceasing attempts to access the data and information systems of the federal government range so widely, and are so unprecedented and unpredictable, that government computing experts believe the effort has spun out of control. This week, we spoke with four federal-government IT professionals—all experienced contractors and civil servants who have built, modified, or maintained the kind of technological infrastructure that Musk’s inexperienced employees at his newly created Department of Government Efficiency are attempting to access. In our conversations, each expert was unequivocal: They are terrified and struggling to articulate the scale of the crisis....

“This is the largest data breach and the largest IT security breach in our country’s history—at least that’s publicly known,” one contractor who has worked on classified information-security systems at numerous government agencies told us this week. “You can’t un-ring this bell. Once these DOGE guys have access to these data systems, they can ostensibly do with it what they want.”

Among the nominal "leader of the free world's" blandishments is that he's in control (as if that would reassure any sane person). “Elon can’t do and won’t do anything without our approval,” he said to reporters recently. “And we will give him the approval where appropriate. Where it’s not appropriate, we won’t.”

We all know what a meticulous student of the bounds of what's appropriate Trump is, eh. And eighty fathoms below his sketchy stub-fingered awareness, the team of weevils continues vacuuming up data with a firehose, after which "whatever data [Musk] siphons now could be his forever."

There's an unsigned, 23 page memorandum out in the wild, dated February 5, titled Capture of U.S. Critical Infrastructure by Neoreactionaries, detailing the new regime's "alarming developments that transcend partisanship." Shorter:

"Musk has not limited government or dismantled the deep state; he has replaced it with himself. Under his radical restructuring of federal power, the White House is at risk of becoming captive to Musk’s demands."

Looking down on the US

It took me two weeks past the dateline to get to A view from north of the border, from Andrew Coyne, columnist for The Globe and Mail, "Canada’s most widely read newspaper" according to Robert Reich, who shared it on his substack blog.

The last two weeks (which felt like months) have not invalidated any of Coyne's bleak assessment of "a Crisis like No Other, Not Only for the U.S. But For the World."

"The candidate out on bail in four jurisdictions, the convicted fraud artist, the adjudicated rapist and serial sexual predator, the habitual bankrupt, the stooge of Vladimir Putin, the man who tried to overturn the last election and all of his creepy retinue of crooks, ideologues and lunatics: Americans took a long look at all this and said, yes please."

Or at least a plurality of Americans who could be bothered to cast a vote said yes please. It's like horseshoes and hand grenades, close enough to a "landslide" delivering a "mandate" squeals the big man and his squadron of toadies.

"There is no sense in understating the depth of the disaster. This is a crisis like no other in our lifetimes. The government of the United States has been delivered into the hands of a gangster, whose sole purpose in running, besides staying out of jail, is to seek revenge on his enemies. The damage Donald Trump and his nihilist cronies can do – to America, but also to its democratic allies, and to the peace and security of the world – is incalculable. We are living in the time of Nero."

And so begins our six months of maximum peril.

8.Feb.2025

Another weekend in the wood chipper

We don't have a King, but we do have Angus King, independent US Senator from Maine, and Heather Cox Richardson quotes him at some length, when he was delaying (but not, ultimately, stopping) confirmation of the nomination of Russell Vought as director of the Office of Management and Budget.

King reminded his colleagues that they had taken an oath to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic” and noted that the Framers recognized there could be domestic enemies to the Constitution. “Our oath was not to the Republican Party, not to the Democratic Party, not to Joe Biden, not to Donald Trump,” King said, “but…to defend the Constitution....”

Vought, King said, is “one of the ringleaders of the assault on our Constitution. He believes in a presidency of virtually unlimited powers.” He “espouses the discredited and illegal theory that the president has the power to selectively impound funds appropriated by Congress, thereby rendering the famous power of the purse a nullity.” King said he was “really worried about…the structural implications for our freedom and government of what's happening here…. Project 2025 is nothing less than a blueprint for the shredding of the Constitution and the transition of our country to authoritarian rule. He's the last person who should be put in the job at the heart of the operation of our government.”

And yet, there he is. Confirmed by 53 mute and compliant Republican ducklings, "firmly invested in looking the other way" as Joyce Vance put it in Coup, Continued. In the AP story of Vought's confirmation, we're reminded that Vought declared in Project 2025, chilling in a new light, that the OMB “is a President’s air-traffic control system.”

As of early this morning, U.S. District Judge Paul A. Engelmayer issued an emergency order to rein in the DOGE boys' infiltration of the Treasury payment systems, responding to a lawsuit from 19 states' attorneys general.

"Judge Engelmayer ordered any such official who had been granted access to the systems since Jan. 20 to “destroy any and all copies of material downloaded from the Treasury Department’s records and systems.” He also restricted the Trump administration from granting access to [political appointees, and 'special government employees']...."

Although the court order mandates an immediate halt to the Musk employees’ access to the Treasury Department’s payment system, it was not immediately clear when or if they would fully comply. ...

If the administration fails to comply with court orders, it is unclear how they might be enforced. The Constitution says that a president “shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.”

A quaint notion that the Republican caucus of the US Senate, and the radical extremists on the Supreme Court have currently rendered moot. The Onion hits a little too close to the mark. Trump Claims He Can Overrule Constitution With Executive Order Because Of Little-Known ‘No One Will Stop Me’ Loophole. Or is Musk who's running the show? It really looks like Musk. Jim Wright hits the nail on the head:

Democrats can't fire Elon Musk.
Republicans won't.
The only guy who can is Donald Trump and Elon Musk now has all of Trump's financial, business, and personal information. Everything the IRS, FBI, CIA, et al, knows about him. Musk has it all.

Musk's and Trump’s National Security Sabotage — And Why Putin and Xi Are Laughing: "Donald Trump and Elon Musk have created a national security nightmare. On purpose." "America’s adversaries couldn’t have scripted a better betrayal than what Musk and Trump are doing…"

"Most recently they gave a 23 year-old working for Musk access to our Department of Energy, which manages America’s nuclear weapons arsenal. One of his teenage colleagues who is also rummaging through our nation’s secrets reportedly runs websites in Russia."

Yes, I do "remember when."

"Remember back in 2016 when Republicans — and the Director of the FBI and editors at The New York Times — were so flipped out that Hillary Clinton used a private server in her home for her personal email and, as a result, a few dozen government emails ended up on it?

"Just a few months after Trump won that “national security election,” he secretly met with the Russian ambassador and the foreign minister in the Oval Office and handed them the name of a spy working for us and Israel in Syria.

"He then stole thousands of Top Secret classified documents — including our nuclear information — and left them in a publicly-available bathroom for over a year as multiple alleged spies wandered through Mar-a-Lago.

"This week the CIA, responding to an executive order from Trump, sent an unclassified email to the White House with the names of all the new employees the agency has hired in the past two years."

Last but not least, Timothy Snyder: Of course it's a coup.

"The ongoing actions by Musk and his followers are a coup because the individuals seizing power have no right to it. Elon Musk was elected to no office and there is no office that would give him the authority to do what he is doing. It is all illegal. It is also a coup in its intended effects: to undo democratic practice and violate human rights."

5.Feb.2025

Scam likely

The caller ID on my new (just over 4 months old) phone labels some numbers not in my contacts list as Scam likely. I'm not sure who's setting that category, or based on what, but there haven't been any false positives that I know of. (Most scammers don't bother to leave a message after "no answer," of course.) They haven't filtered out every scammer, but it's nice to see some getting the hook.

You've probably heard about the "offer" that the stinking new administration has made to millions of federal employees to induce them to resign voluntarily? Something something Fork in the road, reviving one of Usk's memes from when he bought Twitter and started running it into the ground, sacking most of the staff.

Last week, Popular Information reported that despite media reports, the offer to federal employees wasn't a "buyout". This week, the follow-up about the "deferred resignation" scam. You can jump to the chase at the prècis in the first subhead: Federal employees agree to resign; the federal government agrees to do whatever it wants.

No, you're probably not going to keep getting paid through September 30 without having to work. You might not get paid. You might have to keep working. And all you have to do is

"forever waive[], and [never] pursue through any judicial, administrative, or other process, any action against [AGENCY] that is based on, arising from, or related to Employee’s employment at [AGENCY] or the deferred resignation offer, including any and all claims that were or could have been brought concerning said matters."

Sounds like the one certainty is that you'll loose your job, sooner or later.

I've added one more (free) subscription to my alt media list, one that Popular Information started on January 20: Musk Watch.

All our base are belong to Musk

Couldn't let go of the meme riff title once it came to mind, but our current status is anti-funny, and well beyond dire. Our angry billionaire psychopathic Nazi oligarch and acting president has unleashed a reign of terror on the federal government with our dotard executive's blessing, and—so far—not a whiff of effective resistance from the quisling, Republican-led Congress.

All those dystopian movie plots involving computer systems being taken over were a warning, but even those of us who were familiar with (and used) the comprehensive "admin privileges" to do whatever did not imagine the destruction being done on the full scale of the US federal government that is in process right now, let alone within the space of a couple of weeks. Trump II is two weeks and two days old, and not long after the "Broadway in Boise" run of Hamilton went dark Sunday night, this: A 25-year-old "engineer" on Elon Musk's DOGE team has admin privileges over the code that controls Social Security payments, tax returns, and more. From Wired:

"[S]ources say that [Marko] Elez’s privileges include the ability not just to read but to write code on two of the most sensitive systems in the US government: the Payment Automation Manager and Secure Payment System at the Bureau of the Fiscal Service (BFS). Housed on a secure mainframe, these systems control, on a granular level, government payments that in their totality amount to more than a fifth of the US economy....

"[A]dmin privileges could give someone the power to log in to servers through secure shell access, navigate the entire file system, change user permissions, and delete or modify critical files. That could allow someone to bypass the security measures of, and potentially cause irreversible changes to, the very systems they have access to."

Irreversible damage. In addition to the direct control of the government's purse, there is what Jim Wright's Facebook post yesterday spells out as the greatest Identity Theft in history.

"Even if we throw Musk out, HE STILL HAS OUR INFORMATION.

"He still has our personal information. All of it. All of your private information. Everything the government knows about you. Your identity, your bank accounts, your credit cards, your tax information, the property you own, all of it. Every detail. There's a reason why that information was protected. Musk's companies now have it and whoever they decide to sell it to has it. If one of those unvetted, uncleared, unknown 18-year-olds made a copy, they have it. If any of them are compromised, if Musk's corporate data systems are penetrated by our adversaries, then they have it too. China. Nigeria. Hackers. Thieves. Enemy intelligence agencies. Marketing executives.

"There's nothing to stop Musk. He doesn't work for us. He's not accountable to the people or their representatives in any fashion. And he has repeatedly demonstrated that his loyalty to American is tenuous at best. His only allegiance is to profit...

"Addendum: Musk now has all the personal and financial information of his rivals. Bezos. Zuckerberg. Trump even. Give that some thought."

Yesterday afternoon, Rebecca Solnit, over a link to an AP story with headline Trump and Musk demand termination of federal office leases through General Services Administration, as in all of the roughly 7,500 federal offices nationwide.

"Why would you shut down all the federal offices unless you're nihilists who've decided we don't need a government?"

Boring stuff like courthouses, post offices and data processing centers.

"GSA regional managers were told the goal is to terminate as many as 300 leases per day, according to the employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.

"According to the employee who spoke to the AP, the initiative is being led by Nicole Hollander, who has been embedded in the GSA’s headquarters in recent days.

"On her LinkedIn profile, Hollander describes herself as an X employee with a background in real estate, in the Washington area. Hollander’s X account — which shows that she joined in March 2015 but where posts date only to September 2023 — is full of posts related to X’s real estate acquisitions, as well as information about auctions of items from Twitter’s former offices after Musk purchased the platform."

Is there more? Yeah, there's more. Trump says he sees "a long-term ownership position" in the Gaza strip. From Jim Wright:

Reporter: “How many people need to leave Gaza?”

Trump: “ALL of them.”

All of them.

That's what Trump said, verbatim, as Netanyahu looked on grinning. Literally grinning. And THEN the US President said he would send American troops to "take over" Gaza.

"The U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip. We'll own it. We have an opportunity to do something that could be phenomenal. The Riviera of the Middle East."

Meanwhile...

"Trump also withdrew the United States from the UN Human Rights Council, sent the first planeload of brown people to a concentration camp in Cuba, and announced that he's worked out a deal to incarcerate AMERICANs in some for-profit mega prison in El Salvador. At the same time, a team of barely-out-of-high-school-kids led by Elon Musk is right now dismantling your government and downloading your personal information to his corporate servers -- reportedly also including all veterans' personal information."

After infiltrating the Treasury Department, and "feeding USAID into the wood chipper" over the weekend, now Axios reports that "multiple sources told Axios on condition of anonymity that DOGE representatives were at NOAA's facilities in Silver Spring, Md., on Tuesday. In The Guardian's report:

“They apparently just sort of walked past security and said: ‘Get out of my way,’ and they’re looking for access for the IT systems, as they have in other agencies,” said Andrew Rosenberg, a former NOAA official who is now a fellow at the University of New Hampshire. “They will have access to the entire computer system, a lot of which is confidential information.”

Project 2025, written by several former Trump staffers, has called for the agency to be “broken up and downsized”, claiming the agency is “harmful to US prosperity” for its role in climate science.

Yeah, once we just get rid of the scientists monitoring what's happening to the planet's climate, happy days will be here again.

3.Feb.2025

The coup: Psychopathic Smash & Grab

It was not so long ago that newspapers were important. "Print" media. We used to go to a bookstore and buy the gigantic Sunday New York Times and be informed and entertained for a week. The web came along and all of a sudden it was free for all, any day of the week. Then not-so-free; they "experimented" with charging for their opinion columnists. As an avid reader, and sometime writer of opinions myself, I was willing to pay for what seemed the crème de la crème. I added the "World News" list, dozens of sites around the region and world, along with a "blogroll" of links to interesting individuals' sites to my blog. (Both lists have gone out of date, maybe by a decade?)

Now there are paywalls, mostly, a few of which we're subscribing through. And there are "independent" media, some of which we're paying for, and the best of which seem more essential to me than the "bigs," right now when the criminal who hijacked one of our two major parties has been "restored" to power, this time unfettered by "traditional" Republicans, or a judicial system capable of holding its criminals accountable.

Dan Gillmor was a capable, respected reporter for the San Jose Mercury News; now he's running his own show, aggregating independent and other journalism with his Cornerstone of Democracy blog, the name inspired by Thomas Jefferson's observation that "The cornerstone of democracy rests on the foundation of an educated electorate."

Barely two weeks into Trump II, our foundations are riddled with vermin. The Essentials, for Feb. 3, start with Timothy Snyder's post from yesterday, The Logic of Destruction, with Gillmor's caption wondering Is an economic meltdown the goal? Snyder:

"The gap between the oligarchs’ wealth and everyone else’s will grow. Knowing what they themselves will do and when, they will have bet against the stock market in advance of Trump’s deliberately destructive tariffs, and will be ready to tell everyone to buy the crypto they already own. But that is just tomorrow and the day after.In general, the economic collapse they plan is more like a reverse flood from the Book of Genesis, in which the righteous will all be submerged while the very worst ride Satan’s ark. The self-chosen few will ride out the forty days and forty night. When the waters subside, they will be alone to dominate."

Gillmor (my emphasis added):

"A coup d'etat is effectively if not formally, under way in Washington. It's being engineered by American billionaire oligarchs who make their Russian counterparts look like minor league nobodies."

Outside the "mainstream media" that are struggling to keep up with the flooded zone (and earning Gillmor's contempt), he highlights Wired as one pocket of quality, "for example": The Young, Inexperienced Engineers Aiding Elon Musk’s Government Takeover. "Engineers between 19 and 24, most linked to Musk’s companies, are playing a key role as he seizes control of federal infrastructure." With links from the Wired original (to some of that MSM):

"The six men are one part of the broader project of Musk allies assuming key government positions. Already, Musk’s lackeys—including more senior staff from xAI, Tesla, and the Boring Company—have taken control of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and General Services Administration (GSA), and have gained access to the Treasury Department’s payment system, potentially allowing him access to a vast range of sensitive information about tens of millions of citizens, businesses, and more. On Sunday, CNN reported that DOGE personnel attempted to improperly access classified information and security systems at the US Agency for International Development and that top USAID security officials who thwarted the attempt were subsequently put on leave. The Associated Press reported that DOGE personnel had indeed accessed classified material."

Next item, detailed reporting from Reuters, More USAID staff ousted after Trump administration dismantles aid agency.

"WASHINGTON, Feb 2 (Reuters) - The Trump administration removed two top security officials at USAID during the weekend after they tried to stop representatives from billionaire Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) from gaining access to restricted parts of the building, three sources said on Sunday....

"Nearly 30 career staff in the agency's Legislative and Public Affairs bureau lost access overnight to their emails, at least five sources said, bringing the total number of senior USAID career staff who have been put on leave over the past week close to 100.

"DOGE did access the building yesterday," a senior Senate Democratic aide said, requesting anonymity to discuss the incident. USAID security officers tried to turn away DOGE personnel without security clearances.

"They (security personnel) were threatened with action by the federal Marshals Service," the aide said. Following the incident, the director of USAID security, John Voorhees, and his deputy were removed from their positions and put on leave, sources said.

"Trump on Sunday said the agency has 'been run by a bunch of radical lunatics, and we're getting them out.' 'We're getting them out, and then we'll make a decision,' he told reporters."

Our Oligarch in Chief, unelected, unconfirmed, put in charge of the made-up DOGE, and now apparently with "official" uniformed goons when he needs them to insert his teem of weevils into the machinery of government declared on X-state media that the Congressionally-established Agency for International Development, is "a criminal organization" without providing any evidence and added "Time for it to die."

The mob of MAGA that imagine they're either in on the misdeal, or outside the blast zone are probably fine with that. Why should they care about field hospitals in Thai refugee camps, landmine clearance in war zones, or drugs to treat millions suffering from diseases? Have you seen the price of eggs lately?

Groundhog Day, 2025

Oligarchy, authoritarianism, and kleptocracy

Revised headline; was "The reign of Donold the Merciless," but this is a fast developing story. Two weeks into the new regime.

Someone put up a little yard sign at the edge of the bench in our neighborhood. "MERCY," it says, above a small cross, and "MT 5.7" in black Sharpie on a white field. I'd seen it a couple times in recent days, meant to look up the verse, then went to take a picture of it yesterday. Weather or contrary opinion had left it flat, wet, a little spattered with mud. I restored it to what visibility it had, probably not much for drivers whizzing around a curve at 35 or 40 mph.

Matthew 5 is the introduction to the Sermon on the Mount, beginning with The Beatitudes, Jesus calling out the "Blessed" in characteristics that have been denigrated by the powerful throughout the ages. The poor in spirit, those who mourn, the meek, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, those prosecuted for their righteousness. Matthew 5:7 says "Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy."

The chosen verse, and sign, a quiet homage to Bishop Mariann E. Budde of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington D.C., speaking truth to power for an awkward moment, before power set about its campaign of rapine and pillage such as our nation has never seen before.

Joyce Vance's metaphor is "the middle of a five-alarm fire." After the attempt "to cancel birthright citizenship with an executive order," after "illegally fir[ing] 18 inspectors general, the people who ferret out corruption, waste, and fraud in federal agencies," no longer wanted by the big man.

Cue the history lesson, less than one year into Richard M. Nixon's second term, when the "Saturday Night Massacre" was followed in ten days by the beginning of impeachment hearings. This time... not so much. Trump has already been "practice" impeached twice, and each time the quislings of the Republican caucus of the Senate chose to ignore the clear and undisputed evidence to save—and now ultimately, to restore—their criminal leader. The Supreme Court, now packed with "unitary executive" quislings as well, has declared all bets are off, from what Richard Nixon said (after he'd resigned in disgrace to avoid a less quisling House and Senate from removing him), that "when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal" to an even more outrageous dictum: the president can't be prosecuted for doing illegal things, now and forever. It's impeachment and conviction, or nothing, and the now fully hijacked Republican Party declares "THIS IS FINE."

You want to see weaponization of government? Here you go: Trump DOJ demands list of thousands of FBI agents, others who worked on Jan. 6 and Trump investigations for possible firing. Vance:

"These FBI employees are career. They have civil service protections, and although they can be demoted, they cannot be fired without cause. Lawsuits might expose that, but so far, a number of the impacted FBI executives seem to be taking the option of retiring ahead of their firing date, which preserves their pensions and other retirement benefits.

"DOJ’s acting leadership also instructed the FBI on Friday to turn over information about “all current and former bureau employees who ‘at any time’ worked on January 6 investigations”...

"During Kash Patel’s confirmation hearing to head the FBI this week, he testified under oath that he wasn’t aware of any plans to punish agents involved in the Trump cases. He said, “no one will be terminated for case assignments.” He also said that “All FBI employees will be protected against political retribution.” Donald Trump made a liar out of him. But it’s the American people who will end up paying for it."

Heather Cox Richardson's Feb. 1, 2025 Letter from an American leads with a succinct, stark summary (my emphasis added):

"Throughout now-president Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign, it was clear that his support was coming from three very different factions whose only shared ideology was a determination to destroy the federal government. Now we are watching them do it.

"The group that serves President Donald Trump is gutting the government both to get revenge against those who tried to hold him accountable before the law and to make sure he and his cronies will never again have to worry about legality."

The third faction is the Musk-led "tech bros." His chippy $290 million supporting Trump/ublicans in 2024 is already paying dividends.

"Today, Musk’s X social media company became a form of state media when the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) said it would no longer email updates about this week’s two plane crashes—one in Washington, D.C., and one in Philadelphia—and that reporters would have to get their information through X."

The chaos of illegal "pausing" all federal funding and grants set the stage for Musk to force the resignation of the highest-ranking career official at the Treasury Department, in order to worm his way into "the U.S. government payment system that disburses about $6 trillion a year through Social Security benefits, Medicare, Medicaid, contracts, grants, salaries for federal government workers, tax refunds," etc.

"[W]ith Musk’s people at the computers that control the nation’s payment system, they can simply stop whatever payments they want to....

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo posted: “This is more or less like taking the gold from Fort Knox and putting it in Elons basement. Anyone who gets a check from soc sec or anything else[,] he can cut it off or see all y[ou]r personal and financial data.” Pundit Stuart Stevens called it “the most significant data leak in cyber history.”

Holger Hestermeyer posted on Bluesky that Spiegel reports that "Musk now also has access to sensitive data of competitors with regard to their financial dealings with the government." Asha Rangappa, The X Factor: "We have a dictator. It just isn't the one we expected."

There are 124 items in Amy Siskind's latest weekly list. "Experts in authoritarianism advise to keep a list of things subtly changing around you, so you’ll remember." The changes are not subtle right now, but the chaos beggars efforts to keep track.

17. Former Proud Boy leader Henry “Enrique” Tarrio said in an interview, “Now it’s our turn,” and called for imprisoning Biden attorney general Merrick Garland for “corruption” to “give him a taste of his own medicine.”

18. Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes met with three Republican lawmakers at the Capitol, asking for a full pardon for himself and 13 others. He also outlined a plan to investigate police witnesses and prosecutors “up the chain.”...

123. CNBC reported that Google maps also reclassified the U.S. as a “sensitive country,” a designation it reserves for states with strict governments and border disputes, like China, Russia, Israel, Saudi Arabia and Iraq.

raveling

Tom von Alten