The dismantling of the U.S. Government by Elon Musk and Donald Trump is beyond breathtaking. I put Musk’s name first because he appears to be the one who is issuing orders while Trump golfs or rants on social media. I couldn’t possibly discuss the damage in a blog post–there is just too much happening at once. We are watching a fascist takeover in real time. Meanwhile, the Democrats are doing nothing to stop it.
From what I can tell, Trump/Musk have already destroyed the Justice Department and the FBI. Musk has taken control of the Treasury’s computer system that controls all government’s payments, including Social Security. They are working to get rid of as many federal employees as they can, either by firing them or convincing them to quit. They are purging websites of important public information. Soon, Trump plans to install tariffs that will cause serious inflation and damage relationships with our closest allies Canada and Mexico.
One thing I know for sure: this country will never be the same. I only hope we can stop it from becoming a dictatorship. If the Democrats remain supine, it may not be possible.
I’ve long believed that the American media would be more clear-eyed about the rise and return of Donald Trump if it was happening overseas in a foreign country, where we’re used to foreign correspondents writing with more incisive authority. Having watched with growing alarm the developments of the last 24 and 36 hours in Washington, I thought I’d take a stab at just such a dispatch. Here’s a story that should be written this weekend:
February 1, 2025 By William Boot
WASHINGTON, D.C. — What started Thursday as a political purge of the internal security services accelerated Friday into a full-blown coup, as elite technical units aligned with media oligarch Elon Musk moved to seize key systems at the national treasury, block outside access to federal personnel records, and take offline governmental communication networks.
With rapidity that has stunned even longtime political observers, forces loyal to Musk’s junta have established him as the all-but undisputed unelected head of government in just a matter of days, unwinding the longtime democracy’s constitutional system and its proud nearly 250-year-old tradition of the rule of law. Having secured themselves in key ministries and in a building adjacent to the presidential office complex, Musk’s forces have begun issuing directives to civil service workers and forcing the resignation of officials deemed insufficiently loyal, like the head of the country’s aviation authority.
The G-7 country’s newly installed president, a mid-level oligarch named Donald Trump, appeared amid Musk’s moves to be increasingly merely a figurehead head of state. Trump is a convicted felon with a long record of family corruption and returned in power in late January after a four-year interlude promising retribution and retaliation against foreign opponents and a domestic “Deep State.” He had been charged with attempting to overthrow the peaceful transition of power that had previously removed him from office in 2021, but loyalist elements in the judiciary successfully blocked his prosecution and incarceration, easing his return to power.
Over the last two weeks, loyalist presidential factions and Musk-backed teams have launched sweeping, illegal Stalin-esque purges of the national police forces and prosecutors, as well as offices known as inspectors-general, who are typically responsible for investigating government corruption. While official numbers of the unprecedented ousters were kept secret, rumors swirled in the capital that the scores of career officials affected by the initial purges could rise into the thousands as political commissars continued to assess the backgrounds of members of the police forces.
The mentally declining and aging head of state, who has long embraced conspiracist thinking, spent much of the week railing in bizarre public remarks against the country’s oppressed racial and ethnic minorities, whom he blamed without evidence for causing a deadly plane crash across the river from the presidential mansion. Unfounded racist attacks on those minorities have been a key foundation of Trump’s unpredicted rise to political power from a career as a real estate magnate and reality TV host and date back to his first announcement that he would seek the presidency in 2015, when he railed against “rapists” being sent into the country from its southern neighbor.
In one of his first moves upon returning to the presidency, he mobilized far-right paramilitary security forces to begin raids at churches, schools, and workplaces to identify and remove racial minorities, including those who had long lived in harmony with the country’s white Christian majority. He also immediately moved to release from prison some 1,500 supporters who had participated in his unsuccessful 2021 insurrection, including members of violent far-right militias who promptly upon release swore fealty to him in any future civil unrest.
Underscoring his apparent disconnection from reality, reports surfaced that the president had ordered military forces to unleash an environmental catastrophe and flood regions of a separatist province known as California that is led by a high-profile political opponent. The order underscored how the military, which had resisted Trump’s unconstitutional power grabs in his first administration, was now led by a subservient defense minister, a favored TV personality with no experience in management who faced an embarrassing series of allegations about his drunken behavior in the workplace.
The conclusion:
Throughout the week’s fast-moving seizure of power—one that seems increasingly irreversible by the hour—neither loyalist nor opposition parliamentary leaders raised meaningful objection to the new regime or the unraveling of the country’s constitutional system of checks and balances. A few members of the geriatric legislature body offered scattered social media posts condemning the move, but parliament — where both houses are controlled by so-called “MAGA” members handpicked for their loyalty to the president — went home early for the weekend even as Musk’s forces spread through the capital streets.
It was unclear what role, if any, Musk’s forces would allow parliament to have in the new governmental structure by the time it returned to the national assembly known as Capitol Hill.
I hope you’ll read the whole piece at the Substack link.
This story (which Dakinikat posted yesterday) is huge. Now there are new and even more dangerous developments (see additional stories on this below.)
The highest-ranking career official at the Treasury Department left the agency after a clash with allies of billionaire Elon Musk over access to sensitive payment systems, according to three people with knowledge of the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private talks.
David A. Lebryk, who served in nonpolitical roles at Treasury for several decades, announced his retirement Friday in an email to colleagues that was obtained by The Washington Post. President Donald Trump named Lebryk acting secretary upon taking office last week. Lebryk had a dispute with Musk’s surrogates over access to the payment system the U.S. government uses to disburse trillions of dollars every year, the people said. The exact nature of the disagreement was not immediately clear, they said.
By Bettina Baldassari
Officials affiliated with Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” have been asking since after the election for access to the system, the people said — requests that were reiterated more recently, including after Trump’s inauguration. Tom Krause, a Silicon Valley executive who has now been detailed to Treasury, is among those involved, the people said. Krause did not respond to requests for comment….
When Scott Bessent was confirmed as treasury secretary on Monday, Lebryk ceased to be the acting agency head. Trump administration officials placed Lebryk on administrative leave before he announced he would step down, two of the people said.
Typically only a small number of career officials control Treasury’s payment systems. Run by the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, the sensitive systems control the flow of more than $6 trillion annually to households, businesses and more nationwide. Tens, if not hundreds, of millions of people across the country rely on the systems, which are responsible for distributing Social Security and Medicare benefits, salaries for federal personnel, payments to government contractors and grant recipients, and tax refunds, among tens of thousands of other functions.
The clash reflects an intensifying battle between Musk and the federal bureaucracy as the Trump administration nears the conclusion of its second week. Musk has sought to exert sweeping control over the inner workings of the U.S. government, installing longtime surrogates at several agencies, including the Office of Personnel Management, which essentially handles federal human resources, and the General Services Administration, which manages real estate. (Musk was seen on Thursday visiting the GSA, according to two other people familiar with his whereabouts, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal matters. That visit was first reported by the New York Times.) His Department of Government Efficiency, originally conceived as a nongovernmental panel, has since replaced the U.S. Digital Service.
Aides to Elon Musk charged with running the U.S. government human resources agency have locked career civil servants out of computer systems that contain the personal data of millions of federal employees, according to two agency officials.
Musk, the billionaire Tesla CEO and X owner tasked by Trump to slash the size of the 2.2 million-strong civilian government workforce, has moved swiftly to install allies at the agency known as the Office of Personnel Management.
The two officials, who spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation, said some senior career employees at OPM have had their access revoked to some of the department’s data systems.
The systems include a vast database called Enterprise Human Resources Integration, which contains dates of birth, Social Security numbers, appraisals, home addresses, pay grades and length of service of government workers, the officials said.
“We have no visibility into what they are doing with the computer and data systems,” one of the officials said. “That is creating great concern. There is no oversight. It creates real cybersecurity and hacking implications.”
Officials affected by the move can still log on and access functions such as email but can no longer see the massive datasets that cover every facet of the federal workforce.
President Donald Trump has granted Elon Musk unprecedented power to carry out his war on the “deep state.” The justification for this is supposed to be that the government is corrupted to its core precisely because it is stocked with unelected bureaucrats who are unaccountable to the people.
Musk, goes this story, will employ his fearsome tech wizardry to root them out, restoring not just efficiency to government but also the democratic accountability that “deep state” denizens have snuffed out—supposedly a major cause of many of our social ills.
The startling news that a top Treasury Department official is departing after a dispute with Musk shows how deeply wrong that story truly is—and why it’s actively dangerous. The Washington Postreports that David Lebryk, who has carried out senior nonpolitical roles at the department for decades, is leaving after officials on Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, sought access to Treasury’s payment system:
Lebryk had a dispute with Musk’s surrogates over access to the payment system the U.S. government uses to disburse trillions of dollars every year, the people said. The exact nature of the disagreement was not immediately clear, they said.
The news raises a complicated question: WTF??? Why is Musk’s DOGE trying to access payment systems inside the Treasury Department? It’s not clear what relevance this would have to his ostensible role, which is to search for savings and inefficiencies in government, not to directly influence whether previously authorized government obligations are honored.
Cliffhanger, by Stefanie Roberti
Another question: Did Trump directly authorize Musk to do this, or did he not? Either answer is bad. If Trump did, he may be authorizing an unelected billionaire to exert unprecedented control over the internal workings of government payment systems. If he did not, then Musk may be going rogue to an even greater extent than we thought….
Former officials I spoke with were at a loss to explain why Musk would want such access. They noted that while we don’t yet know Musk’s motive, the move could potentially give DOGE the power to turn off all kinds of government payments in a targeted way. They said we now must establish if Musk is seeking to carry out what Trump tried via his federal funding freeze: Turn off government payments previously authorized by Congress. The White House rescinded the freeze after a national outcry, but Trump’s spokesperson vowed the hunt for spending to halt will continue. The former officials are asking: Is this Treasury power grab a way to execute that?
“Anybody who would have access to these systems is in a position to turn off funding selectively,” said Michael Linden, a former OMB official who is now director of Families Over Billionaires, a group fighting Trump’s tax cuts for the rich. “The only reason Musk wants to get himself in there must be because he wants to turn some things off.”
Read more at TNR. I got my Social Security check this month. Will I get one in March?
Remember how Elon Musk destroyed Twitter by ripping apart its infrastructure without understanding it? Now imagine that same playbook applied to the federal government. It’s happening, and the stakes are exponentially higher. When reviewing Kate Conger and Ryan Mac’s book “Character Limit” last fall, I highlighted two devastating patterns in Musk’s management: his authoritarian impulse to (sometimes literally) demolish systems without understanding them, and his tendency to replace existing, nuanced solutions with far worse alternatives (even when those older systems probably did require some level of reform). Those same patterns are now threatening the federal government’s basic functions.
Let’s be crystal clear about what’s happening: A private citizen with zero Constitutional authority is effectively seizing control of critical government functions. The Constitution explicitly requires Senate confirmation for anyone wielding significant federal power — a requirement Musk has simply ignored as he installs his loyalists throughout the government while demanding access to basically all of the levers of power, and pushing out anyone who stands in his way.
The parallel to Twitter is striking and terrifying. At Twitter, Musk’s “reform” strategy transformed a platform used by hundreds of millions for vital communication into his personal megaphone, hemorrhaging somewhere between 60-85% of its revenue in the process. But Twitter was just a private company. Now he’s applying the same destructive playbook to the federal government, where the stakes involve not just user experience or advertising dollars, but the basic functioning of American democracy.
The constitutional violations here dwarf the Twitter debacle. Where Musk merely broke a social media platform through incompetence last time, he’s now breaking the actual mechanisms of governance — and doing it with the same reckless playbook that turned Twitter into a ghost town. As Conger and Mac, who documented the Twitter disaster, point out, even the specific tactics are being recycled:
The email landed in employees’ inboxes with the subject line: “Fork in the Road.” The message in the email was stark: Accept a sweeping set of workplace changes or resign.
That was the note that millions of federal employees received around 5 p.m. on Tuesday. It echoed a similar message that thousands of workers at Twitter got from Elon Musk in late 2022 after he bought the company.
[….]
Mr. Musk, who also leads Tesla and SpaceX, has enlisted the help of a team of loyalists to assess agencies and make cuts, the same thing he did during the Twitter takeover.
Steve Davis, the head of Mr. Musk’s tunneling startup, The Boring Company, helped oversee cost-cutting at Twitter and now leads DOGE. Brian Bjelde, a longtime human resources executive at SpaceX who also helped during the Twitter takeover, is now an adviser to the Office of Personnel Management.
Michael Grimes, a top banker at Morgan Stanley who helped lead Mr. Musk’s Twitter acquisition, is expected to take a senior job at the Commerce Department.
One of Mr. Musk’s software engineers at Tesla, Thomas Shedd, was named the head of “Technology Transformation Services” at the General Services Administration, which helps manage federal agencies. Mr. Shedd promptly employed a Musk tactic: asking for proof of engineers’ technical chops.
Mr. Shedd asked for engineers to sign up for sessions in which they could share “a recent individual technical win,” according to an email sent to more than 700 employees on Tuesday night and viewed by The Times.
Elon Musk’s minions—from trusted sidekicks to random college students and former Musk company interns—have taken over the General Services Administration, a critical government agency that manages federal offices and technology. Already, the team is attempting to use White House security credentials to gain unusual access to GSA tech, deploying a suite of new AI software, and recreating the office in X’s image, according to leaked documents obtained by WIRED.
By Otar Imerlishvili
Some of the same people who helped Musk take over Twitter more than two years ago are now registered as official GSA employees. Nicole Hollander, who slept in Twitter HQ as an unofficial member of Musk’s transition team, has high-level agency access and an official government email address, according to documents viewed by WIRED. Hollander’s husband, Steve Davis, also slept in the office. He has now taken on a leading role in Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Thomas Shedd, the recently installed director of the Technology Transformation Services within GSA, worked as a software engineer at Tesla for eight years. Edward Coristine, who previously interned at Neuralink, has been onboarded along with Ethan Shaotran, a Harvard senior who is developing his own OpenAI-backed scheduling assistant and participated in an xAI hackathon.
“I believe these people do not want to help the federal government provide services to the American people,” says a current GSA employee who asked not to be named, citing fears of retaliation. “They are acting like this is a takeover of a tech company.”
The team appears to be carrying out Musk’s agenda: slashing the federal government as quickly as possible. They’re currently targeting a 50 percent reduction in spending for every office managed by the GSA, according to documents obtained by WIRED.
There also appears to be an effort to use IT credentials from the Executive Office of the President to access GSA laptops and internal GSA infrastructure. Typically, access to agency systems requires workers to be employed at such agencies, sources say. While Musk’s team could be trying to obtain better laptops and equipment from GSA, sources fear that the mandate laid out in the DOGE executive order would grant the body broad access to GSA systems and data. That includes sensitive procurement data, data internal to all the systems and services GSA offers, and internal monitoring software to surveil GSA employees as part of normal auditing and security processes.
The access could give Musk’s proxies the ability to remote into laptops, listen in on meetings, read emails, among many other things, a former Biden official told WIRED on Friday.
At the direction of the Trump administration, the federal Department of Health and Human Services and its agencies are purging its websites of information and data on a broad array of topics — from adolescent health to LGBTQ+ rights to HIV.
Several webpages from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention with references to LGBTQ+ health were no longer available. A page from the HHS Office for Civil Rights outlining the rights of LGBTQ+ people in health care settings was also gone as of Friday. The website of the National Institutes of Health’s Office for Sexual & Gender Minority Research Office disappeared. (Most of these pages could still be viewed through the Internet Archive.)
Another order, signed by Trump, takes aim at “diversity, equity, and inclusion” across the federal government.
On Friday, however, many pages that did not seem related to “gender” or “diversity” had also been taken down, such as AtlasPlus, an interactive tool from CDC with surveillance data on HIV, viral hepatitis, STDs and TB. Also gone missing: a page with basic information about HIV testing. The CDC’s Social Vulnerability Index, a tool that assesses community resilience in the event of natural disaster was also taken down.
“The removal of HIV- and LGBTQ-related resources from the websites of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other health agencies is deeply concerning and creates a dangerous gap in scientific information and data to monitor and respond to disease outbreaks,” the Infectious Disease Society of America said in a statement. “Access to this information is crucial for infectious diseases and HIV health care professionals who care for people with HIV and members of the LGBTQ community and is critical to efforts to end the HIV epidemic.”
One striking example of the vanishing information: The CDC pulled down the website that houses data collected by the nation’s largest monitoring program on health-related behaviors among high schoolers.
Pages related to the CDC’s Division of Adolescent and School Health, which administers the program, were also unavailable.
The Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System tracks key metrics on nutrition, physical activity, tobacco and drug use, sexual behavior and other areas. The program was created 35 years ago and includes a national survey that researchers rely on to measure how behaviors influence health and design prevention measures.
“It’s the way the nation understands adolescent health,” says Stephen Russell, a sociologist at the University of Texas at Austin who studies adolescent health. “The disappearance of that data is stunning.”
This afternoon, FBI personnel braced for a retaliatory purge of the nation’s premiere law-enforcement agency, as President Donald Trump appeared ready to fire potentially hundreds of agents and officials who’d participated in investigations that led to criminal charges against him.
A team that investigated Trump’s mishandling of classified documents was expected to be fired, four people familiar with the matter said. Trump has long fumed about that investigation, which involved a raid on his Mar-a-Lago estate that turned up hundreds of classified documents he had taken after he left the White House four years ago.
David Sundberg, the head of the FBI’s Washington Field Office, is also being fired, these people added. Sundberg is a career FBI agent with more than two decades of experience, and he oversees some of the bureau’s most sensitive cases related to national security and counterintelligence. Current and former officials told me they are worried that those investigations could stall, at least temporarily, if a large number of agents are suddenly removed. A spokesperson at the Washington Field Office declined to comment.
By Marcella Cooper
Trump’s retribution is not limited to those who investigated him personally. Administration officials are reviewing records to identify FBI personnel who participated in investigations of the January 6 assault on the Capitol by his supporters, people familiar with the matter told me. That could potentially involve hundreds if not thousands of agents, including those who interviewed and investigated rioters who were later prosecuted. Shortly after taking office, Trump pardoned about 1,500 of the rioters and commuted others’ sentences.
There is no precedent for the mass termination of FBI personnel in this fashion. Current and former officials I spoke with had expected Trump to exact retribution for what he sees as unjust and even illegal efforts by the FBI and the Justice Department to investigate his conduct. But they were stunned by the scale of Trump’s anticipated purge, which is taking aim at senior leaders as well as working-level agents who do not set policy but follow the orders of their superiors.
This afternoon, some FBI personnel frantically traded messages and rumors about others believed to be on Trump’s list, including special agents who run field offices across the country and were also involved in investigations of the former president.
Trump’s efforts to root out his supposed enemies might not withstand a legal challenge. FBI agents do not choose the cases assigned to them, and they are protected by civil-service rules. The FBI Agents Association, a nonprofit organization that is not part of the U.S. government, said in a statement that the reports of Trump’s planned purge are “outrageous” and “fundamentally at odds with the law enforcement objectives outlined by President Trump and his support for FBI Agents.”
The mass firings could imperil the nomination of Kash Patel, whom Trump wants to run the FBI in his administration. Just yesterday, Patel had assured senators during his confirmation hearing that the very kinds of politically motivated firings that appear to be in motion would not happen.
This is a genuine emergency. Remember it only took Hitler about a year and a half to establish a dictatorship in Germany. Is anyone working to oppose Trump and Musk? It sure doesn’t seem like it.
Federal government workers have been left “shell-shocked” by the upheaval wreaked by Donald Trump’s return to the presidency amid signs that he is bent on exacting revenge on a bureaucracy he considers to be a “deep state” that previously thwarted and persecuted him.
Since being restored to the White House on 20 January, the president has gone on a revenge spree against high-profile figures who previously served him but earned his enmity by slighting or criticising him in public.
He has cancelled Secret Service protection for three senior national security officials in his first presidency – John Bolton, the former national security adviser; Mike Pompeo, who was CIA director and secretary of state; and Brian Hook, a former assistant secretary of state – even though all are assassination targets on an Iranian government hit list.
The same treatment has been meted out to Anthony Fauci, the infectious diseases expert who angered Trump after joining the White House taskforce tackling Covid-19 and who has also faced death threats.
Trump has also fired high-profile figures from government roles on his social media site and stripped 51 former intelligence officials of their security clearances for doubting reports about Hunter Biden’s laptop as possible Russian disinformation….
“The most common refrain I’m hearing from people who have left but are still talking to people on the inside is: ‘I knew it was going to be bad but I didn’t think it was going to be this bad,’” said Mark Bergman, a veteran Democratic lawyer who has been in contact with some of those who fear being targets of the retribution Trump repeatedly vowed on the campaign trail….
A bit more:
There are ominous signs that the spirit of retribution will continue – or get worse.
Last week, in tactics more redolent of totalitarian regimes the United States has historically been at odds with, federal workers were warned of “adverse consequences” if they failed to report their colleagues who refused to comply with the administration’s purge of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs, or tried to sustain the programs with coded language.
The Democrats are angry. Well, at least some of them.
For months, party activists have felt bitter about Kamala Harris’s election loss, and incensed at the leaders who first went along with Joe Biden’s decision to run again. They feel fresh outrage each time a new detail is revealed about the then-81-year-old’s enfeeblement and its concealment by the advisers in charge. But right now, what’s making these Democrats angriest is that many of their elected leaders don’t seem angry at all.
By Monika Seidenbusch
“I assumed that we would be prepared to meet the moment, and I was wrong,” Shannon Watts, the founder of the gun-control group Moms Demand Action, told me. “It’s like they’ve shown up to a knife fight with a cheese stick.”
For all the people in Watts’s camp, the party’s response to Donald Trump’s first 12 days in office has been maddening at best and demoralizing at worst. After Trump issued pardons or commutations for the January 6 rioters last week, including the ones who attacked police officers, no immediate chorus of anger came from what is supposed to be the next generation of Democratic talent, including Maryland Governor Wes Moore, California Governor Gavin Newsom, and former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, another 2028 hopeful, who is on tour selling a young-adult version of her autobiography, has told interviewers, “I am not out looking for fights. I am always looking to collaborate.”
After Trump threatened Colombia with tariffs, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries attempted to reassure the confused and fearful rank and file with the reminder that “God is still on the throne,” which seemed a little like saying, “Jesus, take the wheel.” And people were baffled after the Democratic National Committee responded on X to Trump’s first week in office by channeling a quainter time in American politics and dusting off an Obama-era slogan to accuse him of being “focused on Wall Street—not Main Street.” “Get new material!” one person suggested in the replies, a succinct summary of the other 1,700 comments.
The limp messaging continued this week, after Trump’s administration on Monday issued a federal-funding freeze, including for cancer research and programs such as Meals on Wheels. The next day, Jeffries called for an emergency caucus meeting to hammer out a forceful “three-pronged counter-offensive.” But that emergency meeting would not actually take place until the following afternoon. (By the time lawmakers were dialing in, the White House had already rescinded the order.) Jeffries’s Senate counterpart, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, scowling over his glasses, offered his own sleepy—and slightly unsettling—assessment of the moment: “I haven’t seen people so aroused in a very, very long time.”
Some Democrats say they are hopeful that a new chair of the DNC, who will be elected today, will give the now-rudderless party a bit of direction—a way to harness all that arousal. The committee leads the party’s fundraising apparatus and coordinates with its sister organizations on Senate and House campaigns. But a chair can’t do much if the party’s own lawmakers aren’t willing to swap out the mozzarella for something a little sharper.
Things are getting really bad and are likely to get worse. Where are the Democrats? Where are the protests in the streets? Is it too late to save democracy?
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Alexandr Klemens The White Cat’s Slumber in the Library
Everything is going to hell in a handbasket, as everyone here knows. Trump is issuing shock executive orders at an unbelievable pace. His goal is to overwhelm us and force us to give up in despair. Of course many of his orders are illegal and/or unconstitutional and many others are simply idiotic. We’re in for four years of this–if we still have elections in the future.
I was born right after World War II, in 1947. In the aftermath of the war, there were dramatic changes in U.S. culture. The culture continued to change in many positive ways during my lifetime–until recently.
Trump managed to put the Supreme Court under right wing control, and they proceeded to overturn Roe v. Wade, making women once again second-class citizens.
The court had already weakened many of the advances in Civil Rights that took place in of 1960s and 1970s, such as voting rights. Now they are poised to continue overturning more of the rights we have gained in recent years, including the right to same sex marriage. This was happening before Trump, but he has greatly speeded up the process.
I’ve been thinking about all this, because of a wonderful essay I read this morning by historian Heather Cox Richardson at “Letter from an American.”
She begins by describing events that took place after D-Day. U.S. troops were exhausted and were told to rest in the Ardennes region of Belgium. Then the Germans organized a massive offensive on the Ardennes that led to the Battle of the Bulge. The Germans told allied soldiers they had no choice but to surrender, but they refused.
“NUTS!”
That was the official answer Brigadier General Anthony C. McAuliffe delivered to the four German soldiers sent on December 22, 1944, to urge him to surrender the town of Bastogne in the Belgian Ardennes….
Members of his staff were more colorful when they had to explain to their German counterparts what McAuliffe’s slang meant. “Tell them to take a flying sh*t,” one said. Another explained: “You can go to hell.”
By the time of this exchange, British forces had already swung around to stop the Germans, Eisenhower had rushed reinforcements to the region, and the Allies were counterattacking. On December 26, General George S. Patton’s Third Army relieved Bastogne. The Allied counter offensive forced back the bulge the Germans had pushed into the Allied lines. By January 25, 1945, the Allies had restored the front to where it had been before the attack and the battle was over.
The Battle of the Bulge was the deadliest battle for U.S. forces in World War II. More than 700,000 soldiers fought for the Allies during the 41-day battle. The U.S. alone suffered some 75,000 casualties that took the lives of 19,000 men. The Germans lost 80,000 to 100,000 soldiers, too many for them ever to recover.
The Allied soldiers fighting in that bitter cold winter were fighting against fascism, a system of government that rejected the equality that defined democracy, instead maintaining that some men were better than others. German fascists under leader Adolf Hitler had taken that ideology to its logical end, insisting that an elite few must lead, taking a nation forward by directing the actions of the rest. They organized the people as if they were at war, ruthlessly suppressing all opposition and directing the economy so that business and politicians worked together to consolidate their power. Logically, that select group of leaders would elevate a single man, who would become an all-powerful dictator. To weld their followers into an efficient machine, fascists demonized opponents into an “other” that their followers could hate, dividing their population so they could control it.
In contrast to that system was democracy, based on the idea that all people should be treated equally before the law and should have a say in their government. That philosophy maintained that the government should work for ordinary people, rather than an elite few. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt inspired the American people to defend their democracy—however imperfectly they had constructed it in the years before the war—and when World War II was over, Americans and their allies tried to create a world that would forever secure democracy over fascism.
Winter Slumber, Shawn Braley
After we defeated the fascists, many dramatic changes took place:
The 47 allied nations who had joined together to fight fascism came together in 1945, along with other nations, to create the United Nations to enable countries to solve their differences without war. In 1949 the United States, along with Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, and the U.K., created the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a peacetime military alliance to stand firm against aggression, deterring it by declaring that an attack on one would be considered an attack on all.
At home, the government invested in ordinary Americans. In 1944, Congress passed the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act, more commonly known as the G.I. Bill, to fund higher education for some 7.8 million former military personnel. The law added to the American workforce some 450,000 engineers, 180,000 medical professionals, 360,000 teachers, 150,000 scientists, 243,000 accountants, 107,000 lawyers, and 36,000 clergymen.
In 1946 the Communicable Disease Center opened its doors as part of an initiative to stop the spread of malaria across the American South. Three years later, it had accomplished that goal and turned to others, combatting rabies and polio and, by 1960, influenza and tuberculosis, as well as smallpox, measles, and rubella. In the 1970s it was renamed the Center for Disease Control and took on the dangers of smoking and lead poisoning, and in the 1980s it became the Centers for Disease Control and took on AIDS and Lyme disease. In 1992, Congress added the words “and Prevention” to the organization’s title to show its inclusion of chronic diseases, workplace hazards, and so on.
More changes: investments in infrastructure such as the interstate highway system, efforts to end racial discrimination.
After the war, President Harry Truman desegregated the armed forces in 1948, and as Black and Brown Americans claimed their right to be treated equally, Congress expanded recognition of those rights with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Shortly after Congress passed the Voting Rights Act, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed Executive Order 11246, translating FDR’s 1941 measure into the needs of the peacetime country. “It is the policy of the Government of the United States to provide equal opportunity in Federal employment for all qualified persons, to prohibit discrimination in employment because of race, creed, color, or national origin, and to promote the full realization of equal employment opportunity through a positive, continuing program in each executive department and agency.”
This democratic government was popular, but as the memory of the dangers of fascism faded, opponents began to insist that such a government was leading the United States to communism. Tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, along with the deregulation of business and cuts to the social safety net, began to concentrate wealth at the top of society. As wealth moved upward, lawmakers chipped away at the postwar government that defended democracy.
And now, since the inauguration of President Donald Trump on Monday, the dismantling of that system is happening all at once…
Richardon lists the horrors we’ve seen from Trump in recent days: read about them at the link above. But she is suggesting that we don’t have to give up; we can still fight fascism when things look the darkest, as they did in the Ardennes when they faced being overwhelmed by the Nazis.
January 25, 2025, marks eighty years since the end of the Battle of the Bulge.
The Germans never did take Bastogne.
I’ve quoted a great deal, but I still hope you’ll go read the whole essay.
The Republican-controlled Senate on Friday night confirmed Pete Hegseth as defense secretary by the narrowest of margins, with Vice President JD Vance casting a tie-breaking vote and delivering a victory for President Donald Trump.
The initial vote was 50-50, with three Republicans — Sens. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine — joining all 47 Democrats in voting no.
Vance then cast the 51st vote, putting Hegseth over the top and ending weeks of uncertainty over the fate of Trump’s controversial pick to lead the Pentagon.
It marked only the second time in history a vice president was needed to break a tie for a Cabinet level nominee. In 2017, then-Vice President Mike Pence broke a 50-50 tie to confirm Betsy DeVos as Education secretary in Trump’s first term….
McConnell’s vote was a stunning rebuke of Hegseth and Trump, whom the former Senate Republican leader has clashed with repeatedly over the years.
“Effective management of nearly 3 million military and civilian personnel, an annual budget of nearly $1 trillion, and alliances and partnerships around the world is a daily test with staggering consequences for the security of the American people and our global interests,” McConnell said in a scathing statement that suggested Hegseth had not shown he is up for the job.
“Mr. Hegseth has failed, as yet, to demonstrate that he will pass this test,” McConnell’s statement continued. “But as he assumes office, the consequences of failure are as high as they have ever been.”
Shortly after the vote began, Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., who in recent days was still seeking answers from Hegseth, announced on X that he would vote in favor of him.
President Donald Trump fired multiple independent federal watchdogs, known as inspectors general, in a Friday night purge, removing a significant layer of accountability as he asserts his control over the federal government in his second term, according to two people with knowledge of the dismissals, granted anonymity to share details they were not authorized to speak about publicly.
One of the two people briefed on the dismissals said the number is at least a dozen and includes inspectors general at the departments of State, Agriculture, Interior, Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, Education, Labor and Defense, as well as the Small Business Administration, the U.S. Energy Corp., and the Environmental Protection Agency.
By Tatiana Rodionova
Together, those agencies make up large swaths of the federal government, with control over billions of dollars in taxpayer money and broad global reach.
The inspectors general at the Department of Justice, Office of Personnel Management, the Federal Communications Commission, the Export-Import Bank and the Department of Homeland Security remain in place, according to the person.
The inspectors general were dismissed via emails from the White House Presidential Personnel Office, with no notice sent to lawmakers on Capitol Hill, who have pledged bipartisan support for the watchdogs, in advance of the firings, the person said. The emails gave no substantive explanation for the dismissals, with at least one citing “changing priorities” for the move, the person added….
Hannibal Ware, the inspector general of the Small Business Administration and leader of a council that represents inspectors general across government, suggested that the removals may be invalid because they appear to violate federal law requiring a 30-day notification to Congress before any watchdogs can be removed.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio halted spending Friday on most existing foreign aid grants for 90 days. The order, which shocked State Department officials, appears to apply to funding for military assistance to Ukraine.
Rubio’s guidance, issued to all diplomatic and consular posts, requires department staffers to issue “stop-work orders” on nearly all “existing foreign assistance awards,” according to the document, which was obtained by POLITICO. It is effective immediately.
It appears to go further than President Donald Trump’s recent executive order, which instructed the department to pause foreign aid grants for 90 days pending review by the secretary. It had not been clear from the president’s order if it would affect already appropriated funds or Ukraine aid.
The new guidance means no further actions will be taken to disperse aid funding to programs already approved by the U.S. government, according to three current and two former officials familiar with the new guidance.
The order shocked some department officials for its sweeping mandate. “State just totally went nuclear on foreign assistance,” said another State Department official.
Still, the document leaves room for interpretation and does provide some exceptions. It specifies that foreign military financing for Egypt and Israel will continue and allows emergency food assistance and “legitimate expenses incurred prior to the date of this” guidance “under existing awards.” At points, it also says the decisions need to be “consistent with the terms of the relevant award.”
Scientists at the National Institutes of Health have been told the communications pause announced by the Trump Administration earlier this week includes a pause on all purchasing, including supplies for their ongoing studies, according to four sources inside the agency with knowledge of the purchasing hold.
The supply crunch follows a directive first issued on Tuesday by the acting director of the Department of Health and Human Services, which placed a moratorium on the release of any public communication until it had been reviewed by officials appointed or designated by the Trump Administration, according to an internal memo obtained by CNN. Part of this pause on public communication has been widely interpreted to include purchasing orders to outside suppliers. One source noted they had been told that essential requests can proceed and will be reviewed daily.
Researchers who have clinical trial participants staying at the NIH’s on-campus hospital, the Clinical Trial Center, said they weren’t able to order test tubes to draw blood as well as other key study components. If something doesn’t change, one researcher who was affected said his study will run out of key supplies by next week. If that happens, the research results would be compromised, and he would have to recruit new patients, he said.
CNN is not naming the scientists because they were not authorized to speak with the media.
While it’s unclear if the communications moratorium was intended to affect purchasing supplies for NIH research, outside experts said the motivation wasn’t all that important.
“It’s difficult to tell if what’s going on is rank incompetence or a willful attempt to throw sand in the gears, but it really could be either, neither reflects well on them,” said Dr. Peter Lurie, who is president and executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest. Dr. Lurie was previously an official at the US Food and Drug Administration.
The clinical center only has a few weeks of medication on hand, according to a source who had knowledge of the pharmaceutical supply but was not authorized to speak with reporters.
President Donald Trump made headlines today with a threat to do something he can’t accomplish on his own: attaching conditions to disaster aid for California. We’ll see if Congress goes along. Instead, I want to focus on an area where he does have power: deportations.
So why am I hearing about this now? A hallmark of the first Trump administration was the president taking something that was already happening and claiming it was the result of his revolutionary leadership. That seems to be what’s happening here.
So were mass deportations an empty threat? No — they just aren’t happening instantly. Throughout the campaign, experts cautioned that deportations on the scale Trump was promising — and his team wants to deliver — would require massive spending on ICE agents and detention facilities. Republicans in Congress are promising to deliver those resources. But none of that means they can do it right away.
Biden didn’t film his ICE raids and deportation flights for the media. That’s what Trump is doing. But so far, he isn’t deporting any more immigrants than Biden did.
Bearing Social Security numbers and employment authorization, workers who recently arrived from places like Haiti and Venezuela have been packing and sorting orders at Amazon; making car parts for Toyota and Honda; and working in hotels, restaurants and assisted-living facilities.
On Friday, they woke up to the news from the Trump administration that many of them could be abruptly detained and swiftly deported.
Many of them have a protected status that stretches for another year or two. Tens of thousands, who arrived more recently, likely do not.
This is going to be a big problem here in Massachusetts, where we have many of these immigrants with protected status.
Experts said that immigrants had every reason to worry because the memo turned hundreds of thousands of people who have been in the country lawfully into unauthorized immigrants.
“After they came in doing everything the government told them to do, they are in the same boat as someone who came here unlawfully,” said Lynden Melmed, former chief counsel at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
“Right now, even though you are holding valid documents that allow you to work and be in the U.S., this guidance makes you vulnerable to being picked up by immigration agents and arrested at any time,” said Mr. Melmed, a partner at the firm Berry Appleman & Leiden.
Former President Biden used executive authority to admit people with temporary statuses that do not automatically offer a path to permanent residence. But, crucially, the initiatives shielded beneficiaries from deportation for at least two years and allowed them to work legally
The memo issued late on Thursday by Benjamine C. Huffman, the acting homeland security secretary, directs immigration agents to identify for expedited removal the population of migrants who benefited from two specific Biden-era initiatives related to border management.
This policy will also affect Ukrainians and Afghans who have been allowed into the U.S. temporarily. Read more details at the NYT.
The blitzkrieg of executive actions that President Donald Trump signed on day one was fully intended to be disorienting in its scope of horrors, and it is delivering. They would end birthright citizenship in the United States, pull us out of the Paris climate agreement, facilitate the wholesale purging of insufficiently loyal government workers, and pardon hundreds of rioters who attacked the Capitol, including those who violently savaged cops. That’s only a very partial list.
But one executive order in particular is quietly drawing attention from immigration lawyers because of its unusually radical implications. It appears to declare that Trump’s authority to seal the Southern border and entirely nullify the right to seek asylum exists wholly independent of any statute and is rooted in his constitutional powers, all because we are allegedly coping with a migrant “invasion.” What determines whether we’re subject to an “invasion,” you ask? Trump declaring it to be so, that’s what.
This suggests that Trump and his team may be laying the groundwork to argue, to an unprecedented degree, that he is largely unbounded by Congress in executing key aspects of his immigration agenda. The justification of this on “invasion” grounds also suggests something else: The government will be corrupted deeply to produce outright propaganda designed to sustain the impression of that “invasion.”
Cats in the Snow, by Benben-Cai
The relevant provision is buried in this new executive order, which declares that Trump is closing the country to migrants on grounds that they constitute an “invasion across the southern border.” Critically, the order also says that migrants who are “engaged” in this invasion no longer can seek asylum protections—ones authorized under the Immigration and Nationality Act, or INA—until Trump issues “a finding that the invasion at the southern border has ceased.”
The sloppily written order doesn’t define precisely who constitutes a migrant engaged in this invasion. In other words, Trump appears essentially to be declaring an open-ended power to say that any and all migrants who enter unlawfully do constitute invaders. Trump can suspend the INA’s provisions mandating certain treatment of these migrants for as long as he says the “invasion” is underway.
The order gives several rationales for this. One is that migrants could be “potentially carrying communicable diseases.” That’s more radical than the Title 42 Covid-19 restrictions on entry—which Trump originally instituted and Joe Biden kept in place—as those relied on a governmentally declared public health emergency. This new order merely rests on the possibility of migrants carrying diseases. Putting aside history’s dark lessons about the consequences of casting migrants as bearers of disease, there’s no documented link between migrants and such diseases to begin with, as the Cato Institute’s Alex Nowrasteh details.
The order’s other rationale may be even more dangerous. It says that the Constitution gives Trump the authority—pursuant to conducting foreign affairs and protecting states from invasion—to take any actions he deems necessary to “achieve the objectives of this proclamation,” i.e., halt or reverse the “invasion” by migrants. That seems to apply to anyone who enters the country illegally after the signing of the order. Under it, Trump would not be bound by congressional statute in determining what to do with them, immigration lawyers tell me.
Read the rest at the link.
That’s about all I can stomach for today. I need to go back to taking care of myself as best I can. I hope you all are pacing yourselves and being kind to yourselves. I love you all.
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We are getting some snow here in Greater Boston. It doesn’t look like it will amount to much, but it’s pretty to look at. I miss having big snowstorms. It seems as if climate change has destroyed us New Englanders’ identity as tough people who handle deep snow and frigid cold with aplomb.
In the winter of 2014-2015, Boston got an unbelievable snow total of 110 inches, with 64.8 inches coming in February. On January 26-27, a blizzard dropped more than 34 inches of snow. Now we’ve gone through several mild winters with very little snow. Personally, I miss the old days of giant snowstorms. And I know I’m not alone.
Ben Popp, executive director of the American Birkebeiner Ski Foundation….
MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: This is On Point. I’m Meghna Chakrabarti, and sure snow can be a pain in the butt, I know. But for folks who grew up with long winters, snow also carries memory with it of ethereal beauty, hard slogs, and hard times overcome of crystalline joy. I grew up in a place with a pretty temperate, very rainy winter.
So when I moved to New England and experienced my first big blanket of snow, I was left with only one feeling: pure magic. Now though, for listeners who shared those stories with us that you just heard, they were from upstate New York, Utah, Colorado, Wisconsin, New Hampshire, Washington State, Maine, Iowa, Ohio, the Dakotas and more.
For all of them, winter is very different. Because the magic feels like it’s fading away….
(LISTENER MONTAGE)
I’m standing in my front yard and there is a tiny bit of ice that used to be snow that’s melted in the shade, and we’ve had almost no snow.
It’s February 2nd and I live in Western New York and there is no snow today. The ground is bare. I can see grass. This is completely different from what I experienced when I was growing up.
I have a four-year-old golden, who’s only ever played in a few inches of snow. Has no idea what it’s like to run and fly and bound through endless puffy snow.
This year’s snow amount is quite depressing.
I think our snow drought is contributing to our overall drought that we’ve been experiencing in eastern Iowa over the last five years or so.
This year for the very first time, when I go outside, sometimes I occasionally find flies or mosquitoes or bees, and so to me, seeing insects that are typically not around during the winter months. It tells me there’s clear change happening.
I miss the snow. I miss watching it fall. I miss how it muffles the noise and just makes things so peaceful and quiet.
I really miss having snow for Christmas and for the kids to play sled and built snow forts.
When my kids were growing up, they were outside all the time. Now our young grandchildren can’t really go outside so much and all the time. Because it’s a mud pit instead of a snow mound. So it’s hard.
The roads in town are as oddly bare as the trails here and one local businesses’ electronics door front sign captures our community’s collective sentiment. It keeps flashing “Pray for snow.”
CHAKRABARTI: It is true. Snowfall is becoming less reliable and snowpacks are shrinking. Winter snowpack in many parts of the continental U.S. have shrunk by 10% to 20% per decade over the last 40 years. That’s according to a study published last month in Nature. There is some annual variation, but overall winter and its signature precipitation are changing.
Snow has a way of creating a shared identity, a sense of wonder, a sense of fun for people who live in those cold places. It binds communities together. So what do we lose when that snow melts away?
Climate change is not only changing the way we live; it is change how we see ourselves. Read the discussion at the WBUR link. If you live in a place that used to get lots of snow, I think you’ll find it interesting.
It was the hottest year ever recorded for the world’s lands and oceans in 2024, US government scientists have confirmed, providing yet another measure of how the climate crisis is pushing humanity into temperatures we have previously never experienced.
Last year was the hottest in global temperature records stretching back to 1850, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa announced, with the worldwide average 1.46C (2.6F) warmer than the era prior to humans burning huge volumes of planet-heating fossil fuels.
This new record, 0.1C (0.18F) hotter than the previous high mark set in 2023, means that all of the 10 hottest years since 1850 have occurred in the past decade. The data supports separate figures released by European Union scientists this week that also show a record 2024, albeit those figures showed 2024 was 1.6C (2.8F) hotter than pre-industrial times, the first measure beyond the internationally-agreed threshold of keeping long-term temperatures below a 1.5C (2.7F) rise.
Nasa, which also released its temperature data on Friday, concurs that 2024 was a record year, being 1.47C (2.6F) hotter than the pre-industrial era. “All the groups agree, regardless of how they put the data together, there’s no question,” said Gavin Schmidt, a senior climate scientist at Nasa. “The long-term trends are very clear.”
Schmidt said the levels of global heating are pushing humanity beyond its historical experience of the Earth’s climate. “To put that in perspective, temperatures during the warm periods on Earth three million years ago – when sea levels were dozens of feet higher than today – were only around 3C warmer than pre-industrial levels,” he said. “We are halfway to Pliocene-level warmth in just 150 years.”
Last year saw a record hot year for the United States, Europe and Africa, as well as another record year for the Arctic, which is warming up at three times the rate of the global average.
The year was marked by severe events worsened by the climate crisis, with temperatures so hot in Mexico that howler monkeys fell from trees, a double-whammy of hurricanes that flattened swathes of the US south-east, devastating floods in Spain and record low water levels in the Amazon river. Southern Africa got just half of its normal rain levels.
Now in 2025 we are seeing an unbelievable climate disaster in Los Angeles. I heard this morning that the burned area in LA is now larger than the city of Boston.
California’s Palisades Fire, the largest of the deadly wildfires that ignited this week in the Los Angeles area, has devastated communities and upended thousands of lives, forcing people to flee homes that were lost to the blaze. The inferno has scorched dozens of square miles, and maps from CBS News show how its size compares to those of major U.S. cities.
Here’s a look at how the Palisades Fire compares to the size of 13 cities across the U.S.
The maps show comparisons to Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Miami, Minneapolis, New York City, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Sacramento, and San Francisco.
Check out the comparisons to cities you are familiar with.
An exceptional mix of environmental conditions has created an ongoing firestorm without known historical precedent across southern California this week.
The ingredients for these infernos in the Los Angeles area, near-hurricane strength winds and drought, foretell an emerging era of compound events – simultaneous types of historic weather conditions, happening at unusual times of the year, resulting in situations that overwhelm our ability to respond.
On Wednesday, Joe Biden pledged the assistance of the Department of Defense to reinforce state and local firefighting capabilities, a rare step that highlighted the extent to which the fast-moving fires have taxed response efforts.
As of Wednesday evening, the Palisades and Eaton fires have each burned more than 10,000 acres and remain completely uncontained. About one in three homes and businesses across the vast southern California megacity were deliberately without power in a coordinated effort by the region’s major utilities to contain the risk of new fire starts due to downed power lines.
The Palisades fire now ranks as the most destructive in Los Angeles history with hundredsof homes and other structures destroyed and damage so extensive that it exhausted municipal water supplies. In Pacific Palisades, wealthy homeowners fled by foot after abandoning their cars in gridlocked neighborhoods. In Pasadena, quickly advancing fire prompted evacuations as far into the urban grid as the famous Rose Parade route.
Early estimates of the wildfires’ combined economic impact are in the tens of billions of dollars and could place the fires as the most damaging in US history – exceeding the 2018 Camp fire in Paradise, California.
Fire crews have been facing a second night of fierce winds in rugged terrain amid drought and atmospheric conditions that are exceedingly rare for southern California at any time of the year, let alone January, in what is typically the middle of the rainy season – weeks later (or earlier) in the calendar year than other historical major wildfires have occurred.
Analysis:
The next few days will be a harrowing test. Lingering bursts of strong, dry winds into early next week will maintain the potential for additional fires of similar magnitude to form. In a worst-case scenario, the uncontained Palisades and Eaton fires will continue to spread further into the urban Los Angeles metro, while new fires simultaneously and rapidly grow out of control – overtaking additional neighborhoods and limiting evacuation routes more quickly than firefighters can react. In conditions like these, containing a wind-driven blaze is nearly impossible.
These fires are a watershed moment, not just for residents of LA, but emblematic of a new era of complex, compound climate disaster. Conditions for a January firestorm in Los Angeles have never existed in all of known history, until they now do.
The short answer is that the greenhouse gases humans continue to emit are fueling the climate crisis and making big fires more common in California.
As the atmosphere warms, hotter air evaporates water and can intensify drought more quickly.
Melting Arctic ice creates changes in the jet stream’s behavior that make wind-driven large wildfires in California more likely. Recent studies have found that Santa Ana wind events could get less frequent but perhaps more intense in the winter months due to the climate crisis.
The more complicated answer is that these fires are an especially acute example of something climate scientists have been warning about for decades: compound climate disasters that, when they occur simultaneously, produce much more damage than they would individually. As the climate crisis escalates, the interdependent atmospheric, oceanic and ecological systems that constrain human civilization will lead to compounding and regime-shifting changes that are difficult to predict in advance. That idea formed a guiding theme of the Biden administration’s 2023 national climate assessment.
Apocalyptic flames and smoke are raging through southern California in the worst fire in Los Angeles county’s history. At least seven people have died. Thousands of structures have been destroyed. Hundreds of thousands of people have fled their homes. The private forecaster AccuWeather estimates initial damage and economic loss at more than $50bn and has the potential to be the costliest wildfire disaster in American history. The impacts of the disruption and loss faced by community members is incalculable.
These powerful interests are ignoring what is fanning wildfire flames – fossil fuel-driven climate change – and trying to deflect attention elsewhere. This is not surprising. Denying science and promoting false narratives squarely falls within the playbook of the fossil fuel industry and its proponents. Take for example, Trump calling the climate crisis a hoax and once again threatening to withdraw the US from the Paris agreement.
Oil, gas and coal companies have been lying to us for decades. A 2015 investigation by Inside Climate News revealed that ExxonMobil’s own scientists knew as early as the 1970s that burning fossil fuels would cause global warming and increase the likelihood of extreme weather events. Instead of pivoting toward cleaner energy solutions, Exxon and other major players funded misinformation campaigns to sow doubt about climate science, delaying action and worsening the crisis.
California is part of a growing number of states and local governments challenging these lies through litigation. The legal suits against six oil companies and the American Petroleum Institute accuse them of deceiving the public regarding the connection between fossil fuels and climate crisis and profiting from that deception. The aim of the litigation is to redirect those profits into funds to address the damage of climate crisis on California. The litigation is still underway.
The science is clear. Wildfires are getting worse due to climate crisis as a result of increased temperatures and drier conditions in southern California. While more work needs to be done to determine the specific role fossil fuels played in the Los Angeles fires, we do know that emissions from the world’s 88 largest fossil fuel companies are responsible for 37% of the cumulative area burned by forest fires in the western US and south-western Canada between 1986 and 2021.
Ethically, the responsibility is undeniable. By continuing to expand production, fossil fuel companies are prioritizing shortterm profits over longterm planetary survival. As academic Naomi Oreskes points out in her book Merchants of Doubt, this is not mere negligence – it is a calculated decision to disregard human and environmental well-being.
As Los Angeles burned for days on end, horrifying the nation, scientists made an announcement on Friday that could help explain the deadly conflagration: 2024 was the hottest year in recorded history.
With temperatures rising around the globe and the oceans unusually warm, scientists are warning that the world has entered a dangerous new era of chaotic floods, storms and fires made worse by human-caused climate change.
The firestorms ravaging the country’s second-largest city are just the latest spasm of extreme weather that is growing more furious as well as more unpredictable. Wildfires are highly unusual in Southern California in January, which is supposed to be the rainy season. The same is true for cyclones in Appalachia, where Hurricanes Helene and Milton shocked the country when they tore through mountain communities in October.
Wildfires are burning hotter and moving faster. Storms are getting bigger and carrying more moisture. And soaring temperatures worldwide are leading to heat waves and drought, which can be devastating on their own and leave communities vulnerable to dangers like mudslides when heavy rains return.
“We’re in a new era now,” said former Vice President Al Gore, who has warned of the threats of global warming for decades. “These climate related extreme events are increasing, both in frequency and intensity, quite rapidly.”
The fires currently raging in greater Los Angeles are already among the most destructive in U.S. history. By Friday, the blazes had consumed more than 36,000 acres and destroyed thousands of buildings. As of Saturday, at least 11 people were dead, and losses could top $100 billion, according to AccuWeather.
It’s a slow news day, as expected during the dead zone between Christmas and New Year’s Day. Most of the mainstream outlets are covering the ongoing battle between MAGAs and Tech bros over H1B visas, which Dakinikat in detail in yesterday’s post. Here’s one update to the story by Hafiz Rashid at The New Republic: Steve Bannon Joins War Against Elon Musk as MAGA Implodes.
Steve Bannon has joined the MAGA war between hard-line immigration opponents and tech executives like Elon Musk, taking the side of xenophobia on his War Room show Friday.
“H-1B visas? That’s not what it’s about. It’s about taking American jobs and bringing over essentially what have become indentured servants at lower wages,” the former Trump adviser turned pundit said, referring to the visa program that allows immigrants in specialized fields to work in the United States temporarily.
“This thing’s a scam by the oligarchs in Silicon Valley to basically take jobs from American citizens, give them to what become indentured servants from foreign countries, and then pay ‘em less. Simple. To let them in through the golden door,” Bannon added.
Musk set off the MAGA faithful on social media on Wednesday morning, posting on X about how more foreign tech workers need to be allowed to work in the United States because “there is a permanent shortage of excellent engineering talent.” Vivek Ramaswamy, Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency sidekick, generated his own backlash from the right Thursday by suggesting American culture was to blame for why employers seek tech employees from overseas.
Many on the right disagreed vehemently, particularly racists like Laura Loomer, who spent most of Thursday on her X account attacking Musk and tech executives who share his views. Musk then retaliated against Loomer and his other MAGA friends turned critics that evening, allegedly censoring them on the platform by removing their verification badges and hurting their engagement.
Neither side is right on the issue, though. Bannon, Loomer, and other anti-immigration conservatives are motivated by nativism and racism in their opposition to foreign tech workers, and tech CEOs like Musk seek low-wage immigrants to work for long hours in their companies instead of American workers who don’t have a fragile visa status hanging over their heads.
Steve Bannon has labeled Elon Musk a “toddler” after the tech billionaire urged opponents of H-1B skilled migrant worker visas to “F*** YOURSELF in the face.”
Bannon, who served as Donald Trump‘s White House chief strategist for seven months in 2017, made the comment on social media platform Gettr, which is primarily used by conservatives….
Bannon’s comments are just the latest salvo in an increasingly bitter row within Trump’s MAGA [Make America Great Again] coalition over H-1B visas, and legal immigration more generally, which has pitted some of his key supporters in big business and Silicon Valley against more nativist elements.
Once in office Trump could struggle to placate both those in business who believe skilled legal migration boosts the U.S. economy, and those of his supporters who think it takes place at the expense of American workers….
In a post on his X social media platform, formerly Twitter, South African-born Musk commented: “The reason I’m in America along with so many critical people who built SpaceX, Tesla and hundreds of other companies that made America strong is because of H1B.
“Take a big step back and F*** YOURSELF in the face. I will go to war on this issue the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend.”
A screenshot of the post was shared by Bannon on Gettr, with Trump’s former strategist and 2016 campaign manager adding: “Someone please notify ‘Child Protective Services’— need to do a ‘wellness check’ on this toddler.” [….]
The H-1B visa allows American companies to employ foreign workers in specialty occupations. These typically require theoretical or technical expertise in fields such as information technology (IT), engineering, mathematics, finance, medicine, science, or other professional disciplines.
The number is currently capped at 65,000 per year, though an additional 20,000 visas are made available annually for foreigners who graduate in the U.S. with a master’s degree or doctorate.
Luna from Sailor Moon
On a more serious note, as Trump prepares to take office, the U.S. faces the strong possibility of another pandemic. That is frightening, considering how badly Trump handled the COVID-19 pandemic and the fact that Trump has nominated anti-vaxxer and conspiracy theorist Robert Kennedy Junior as head of the Department of Human Services (DHS).
A new report from PBS highlights the potential danger of bird flu turning into a full-blown pandemic in the United States.
In particular, PBS spoke with several experts who said the United States has been behind the ball when it comes to keeping a handle on the pandemic and they point to the fact that the United States Department of Agriculture has only recently started testing milk nationwide for bird flu contamination.
“It’s disheartening to see so many of the same failures that emerged during the COVID-19 crisis reemerge,” explained Tom Bollyky, the director of the Council on Foreign Relations’ Global Health Program….
Tom Peacock, a bird flu researcher at the Pirbright Institute in the United Kingdom, said that the real danger could come if the bird flu virus mutates in a way that makes it easily transmissible between humans.
“Even if there’s only a 5 percent chance of a bird flu pandemic happening, we’re talking about a pandemic that probably looks like 2020 or worse,” he told PBS. “The U.S. knows the risk but hasn’t done anything to slow this down.”
Keith Poulsen’s jaw dropped when farmers showed him images on their cellphones at the World Dairy Expo in Wisconsin in October. A livestock veterinarian at the University of Wisconsin, Poulsen had seen sick cows before, with their noses dripping and udders slack.
But the scale of the farmers’ efforts to treat the sick cows stunned him. They showed videos of systems they built to hydrate hundreds of cattle at once. In 14-hour shifts, dairy workers pumped gallons of electrolyte-rich fluids into ailing cows through metal tubes inserted into the esophagus.
“It was like watching a field hospital on an active battlefront treating hundreds of wounded soldiers,” he said.
Nearly a year into the first outbreak of the bird flu among cattle, the virus shows no sign of slowing. The U.S. government failed to eliminate the virus on dairy farms when it was confined to a handful of states, by quickly identifying infected cows and taking measures to keep their infections from spreading. Now at least 875 herds across 16 states have tested positive.
Experts say they have lost faith in the government’s ability to contain the outbreak.
“We are in a terrible situation and going into a worse situation,” said Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada. “I don’t know if the bird flu will become a pandemic, but if it does, we are screwed.”
To understand how the bird flu got out of hand, KFF Health News interviewed nearly 70 government officials, farmers and farmworkers, and researchers with expertise in virology, pandemics, veterinary medicine, and more.
Together with emails obtained from local health departments through public records requests, this investigation revealed key problems, including deference to the farm industry, eroded public health budgets, neglect for the safety of agriculture workers, and the sluggish pace of federal interventions.
Case in point: The U.S. Department of Agriculture this month announced a federal order to test milk nationwide. Researchers welcomed the news but said it should have happened months ago — before the virus was so entrenched….
Far more bird flu damage is inevitable, but the extent of it will be left to the Trump administration and Mother Nature. Already, the USDA has funneled more than $1.7 billion into tamping down the bird flu on poultry farms since 2022, which includes reimbursing farmers who’ve had to cull their flocks, and more than $430 million into combating the bird flu on dairy farms. In coming years, the bird flu may cost billions of dollars more in expenses and losses. Dairy industry experts say the virus kills roughly 2 percent to 5 percent of infected dairy cows and reduces a herd’s milk production by about 20 percent.
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said her agency will need to start taking “extraordinary measures,” or special accounting maneuvers intended to prevent the nation from hitting the debt ceiling, as early as January 14, in a letter sent to congressional leaders Friday afternoon.
“Treasury expects to hit the statutory debt ceiling between January 14 and January 23,” Yellen wrote in a letter addressed to House and Senate leadership, at which point extraordinary measures would be used to prevent the government from breaching the nation’s debt ceiling — which has been suspended until Jan. 1, 2025.
The department has in the past deployed what are known as “extraordinary measures” or accounting maneuvers to keep the government operating. But once those measures run out the government risks defaulting on its debt unless lawmakers and the president agree to lift the limit on the U.S. government’s ability to borrow.
“I respectfully urge Congress to act to protect the full faith and credit of the United States,” she said.
The news comes after President Joe Biden signed a bill into law last week that averted a government shutdown but did not include President-elect Donald Trump’s core debt demand to raise or suspend the nation’s debt limit. The bill was approved by Congress only after fierce internal debate among Republicans over how to handle Trump’s demand. “Anything else is a betrayal of our country,” Trump said in a statement.
After a protracted debate in the summer of 2023 over how to fund the government, policymakers crafted the Fiscal Responsibility Act, which included suspending the nation’s $31.4 trillion borrowing authority until Jan. 1, 2025.
Notably however, Yellen said, on Jan. 2 the debt is projected to temporarily decrease due to a scheduled redemption of nonmarketable securities held by a federal trust fund associated with Medicare payments. As a result, “Treasury does not expect that it will be necessary to start taking extraordinary measures on January 2 to prevent the United States from defaulting on its obligations,” she said.
Muta from Whisper of the Heart
Will the Republicans have a Speaker of the House by mid-January? They not only have to deal with the debt ceiling, but also they will need a Speaker in order to count and certify the electoral votes on January 6, 2025.
Trump has promised to take a number of steps on “day 1” of his administration, including pardoning people who were convicted of crimes on January 6 2021 and beginning plans for mass deportation of undocumented immigrants. A couple of related stories:
With Donald Trump winning back the White House, his Big Lie that Jan. 6 was just an enthusiastic rally that got out of hand, rather than an insurrectionist mob he unleashed to disrupt the count of the 2020 electoral college, has new currency.
A new congressional Republican report, spearheaded by MAGA lapdog Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-Ga.) has recommended a criminal probe of former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) for co-chairing the House Jan. 6 investigation. Loudermilk’s report reached a through-the-looking-glass conclusion that Cheney & co. had promoted “a false, pre-determined narrative that President Trump was personally responsible for the breach of the Capitol on Jan. 6 and should therefore be held accountable.”
Trump is returning to the Oval Office with an explicit agenda to rewrite history — and upend convictions. He has vowed to issue “Day One” pardons to Jan. 6 criminals and defendants, whom he has called “great patriots,” “hostages,” and “warriors.” During the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump referred to Jan. 6 itself as “a day of love.” And when he recently summoned tech billionaire Mark Zuckerberg to Mar-a-Lago, Trump reportedly prompted his guests to rise and place their hands over their hearts, while listening to a rendition of the national anthem sung by jailed Jan. 6 defendants.
It is not precisely clear whom Trump wants to pardon. But the list of Jan. 6 convicts includes many serving long sentences for serious felonies — ranging from injuring police officers to sedition. In mid-December, a federal judge in Washington, D.C., who has handled many Jan. 6 criminal cases, spoke out from the bench. District Court Judge Amit Mehta said the idea that Trump could pardon the former head of the Oath Keepers militia haunts him: “The notion that Stewart Rhodes could be absolved is frightening — and ought to be frightening to anyone who cares about democracy,” Mehta said, per a courtroom report in Politico. In 2023, Mehta handed down an 18-year sentence to Rhodes for “seditious conspiracy.” (The prison term included a terrorism enhancement.)
Asked by Rolling Stone if Trump planned to pardon Rhodes — or others imprisoned on seditious conspiracy charges, like Enrique Tarrio, the ex-honcho of the Proud Boys — the presidential transition team didn’t rule it out. “President Trump will make pardon decisions on a case-by-case basis for those who were denied due process and unfairly targeted by the justice system,” says Trump transition spokesperson Karoline Leavitt.
In the buildup to Jan. 6 and in its aftermath, Rhodes spearheaded militia activity that that saw Oath Keepers lieutenants stockpile weapons across the border in Virginia, creating “Quick Reaction Forces” or QFCs, that could be activated in the hoped-for scenario that Trump would invoke the Insurrection Act and summon militia groups to battle his enemies to help him cling to power.
Rhodes was outside the Capitol during the rioting, but communicated with members in the building. When Rhodes received a report that members of Congress were in danger and looking to flee, he replied, per court documents, “Fuck ‘em.” At sentencing, Rhodes compared himself to the Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Mehta told Rhodes to his face that he was no “political prisoner” — but rather an “ongoing threat and peril to this country.”
Daren Humbert Vaughn:, Gikkingen from The Cat Returns
Mexico is developing a cellphone app that will allow migrants to warn relatives and local consulates if they think they are about to be detained by the U.S. immigration department, a senior official said Friday.
The move is in response to President-elect Donald Trump’s threats to carry out mass deportations after he takes office on Jan. 20.
The app has been rolled out for small-scale testing and “appears to be working very well,” said Juan Ramón de la Fuente, Mexico’s secretary of foreign affairs.
He said the app would allow users to press a tab that would send an alert notification to previously chosen relatives and the nearest Mexican consulate. De la Fuente described it as a sort of panic button.
“In case you find yourself in a situation where detention is imminent, you push the alert button, and that sends a signal to the nearest consulate,” he said.
U.S. authorities are obliged to give notice to home-country consulates when a foreign citizen is detained. Mexico says it has beefed up consular staff and legal aid to help migrants in the legal process related to deportation.
DENVER (AP) — A Colorado man is facing possible bias-motivated charges for allegedly attacking a television news reporter after demanding to know whether he was a citizen, saying “This is Trump’s America now,” according to court documents.
Patrick Thomas Egan, 39, was arrested Dec. 18 in Grand Junction, Colorado, after police say he followed KKCO/KJCT reporter Ja’Ronn Alex’s vehicle for around 40 miles (64 kilometers) from the Delta area. Alex told police that he believed he had been followed and attacked because he is Pacific Islander.
After arriving in Grand Junction, Egan, who was driving a taxi, pulled up next to Alex at a stoplight and, according to an arrest affidavit, said something to the effect of: “Are you even a U.S. citizen? This is Trump’s America now! I’m a Marine and I took an oath to protect this country from people like you!”
Alex, who had been out reporting, then drove back to his news station in the city. After he got out of his vehicle, Egan chased Alex as he ran toward the station’s door and demanded to see his identification, according to the document laying out police’s evidence in the case. Egan then tackled Alex, put him in a headlock and “began to strangle him,” the affidavit said. Coworkers who ran out to help and witnesses told police that Alex appeared to be losing his ability to breathe during the attack, which was partially captured on surveillance video, according to the document.
According to the station’s website, Alex is a native of Detroit. KKCO/KJCT reported that he was driving a news vehicle at the time.
The office of New York’s attorney general released body camera footage Friday showing the fatal beating of a state prisoner this month by correctional officers who punched and kicked him repeatedly while he was handcuffed on an infirmary bed.
The incident, which has drawn outrage from political leaders and was condemned by the officers’ union as “incomprehensible,” is being investigated by state Attorney General Letitia James. The inmate, Robert Brooks, 43, died in the hospital a day after the Dec. 9 attack.
“I do not take lightly the release of this video, especially in the middle of the holiday season,” James said at a virtual news conference.
“These videos are shocking and disturbing,” she added.
Brooks can be seen in the videos with his hands cuffed behind his back. In one video, he is sitting up as an officer presses his foot down on him. He is then punched by two officers.
At another point, he is forcefully yanked from the bed by his shirt collar and held up above the ground, his face visibly bloodied.
Last week, Gov. Kathy Hochul ordered the state Department of Corrections and Community Supervision to begin the process of firing 14 workers at the Marcy Correctional Facility in Oneida County, where the incident occurred. They include correctional officers, sergeants and a prison nurse. In the interim, all have been suspended without pay, except for one officer, who already resigned.
In a statement following the release of the videos, Daniel Martuscello, the commissioner of the state corrections department, said his office has launched its own investigation in an effort to bring “institutional change.”
Read much more at the NBC News link.
Those are my recommended reads for today. Take care, everyone.
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Lesley Ivory, Dandelion, Snowdrop and the Devon Christmas Market
The House and Senate passed the bill to fund the government for 3 more months, thanks to Democratic votes. After unelected President Musk sabotaged the original bipartisan bill, it was touch and go, but the House and Senate both passed a compromise spending bill at the very last minute last night. The Hill: House passes bill to avert government shutdown after whirlwind funding fight.
The House approved legislation to avert a government shutdown hours before the deadline Friday, sending the bill to the Senate for consideration after a whirlwind week on Capitol Hill.
The chamber voted 366-34-1 in support of the legislation, clearing the two-thirds threshold needed for passage since GOP leadership brought the bill to the floor under the fast-track suspension of the rules process. All Democrats except one — Rep. Jasmine Crockett (Texas), who voted present — joined 170 Republicans in voting yes….
Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), after the vote, lauded the legislation as “‘America First’ legislation because it allows us to be set up to deliver for the American people.”
“In January, we will make a sea change in Washington. President Trump will return to D.C. and to the White House, and we will have Republican control of the Senate and the House. Things are going to be very different around here. This was a necessary step to bridge the gap, to put us into that, that moment where we can put our fingerprints on the final decisions on spending for 2025,” he said.
The package — which Johnson rolled out shortly before the vote — would fund the government at current levels through March 14, extend the farm bill for one year and appropriate billions of dollars in disaster relief and assistance for farmers.
The legislation does not, however, include language to increase the debt limit, an eleventh-hour demand from President-elect Trump that hurled a curveball into the sensitive government funding negotiations.
The Senate approved legislation to avert a federal government shutdown just after a midnight deadline, capping a chaotic week in which President-elect Donald J. Trump blew up a bipartisan spending deal, only to see his own preferred plan collapse as Republicans defied him.
President Biden is expected to sign the measure, which would extend funding into mid-March and approve disaster relief for parts of the nation still recovering from storms. The White House said early Saturday that it was not instituting a government shutdown, even though funding to run the government technically ran out at midnight.
The Senate passed legislation late Friday that would reauthorize pared-back funding for childhood cancer research after the bipartisan program briefly became a political flash point.
The Senate’s version of the Gabriella Miller Kids First Research Act 2.0 was originally tacked on to a 1,547-page short-term stopgap government funding bill congressional leaders unveiled Tuesday. The program was dropped from the compromise measure after billionaire Elon Musk and President-elect Donald Trump claimed the deal contained unnecessary spending.
Democrats specifically highlighted the cut in cancer research to suggest the GOP favored tax cuts and the bottom line over sick children.
Legislation to expand Social Security benefits to millions of Americans passed the U.S. Senate early Saturday and is now headed to the desk of President Biden, who is expected to sign the measure into law.
Senators voted 76-20 for the Social Security Fairness Act, which would eliminate two federal policies that prevent nearly 3 million people, including police officers, firefighters, postal workers, teachers and others with a public pension, from collecting their full Social Security benefits. The legislation has been decades in the making, as the Senate held its first hearings into the policies in 2003.
“The Senate finally corrects a 50-year mistake,” proclaimed Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, a Democrat from New York, after senators approved the legislation at 12:15 a.m. Saturday.
The bill’s passage is “a monumental victory for millions of public service workers who have been denied the full benefits they’ve rightfully earned,” said Shannon Benton, executive director for the Senior Citizens League, which advocates for retirees and which has long pushed for the expansion of Social Security benefits. “This legislation finally restores fairness to the system and ensures the hard work of teachers, first responders and countless public employees is truly recognized.”
The vote came down to the wire, as the Senate looked to wrap up its current session. Senators rejected four amendments and a budgetary point of order late Friday night that would have derailed the measure, given the small window of time left to pass it.
Explanation of the Social Security Fairness Act:
The Social Security Fairness Act would repeal two federal policies — the Windfall Elimination Provision (WEP) and the Government Pension Offset (GPO) — that reduce Social Security payments to nearly 3 million retirees.
That includes those who also collect pensions from state and federal jobs that aren’t covered by Social Security, including teachers, police officers and U.S. postal workers. The bill would also end a second provision that reduces Social Security benefits for those workers’ surviving spouses and family members. The WEP impacts about 2 million Social Security beneficiaries and the GPO nearly 800,000 retirees.
The measure, which passed the House in November, had 62 cosponsors when it was introduced in the Senate last year. Yet the bill’s bipartisan support eroded in recent days, with some Republican lawmakers voicing doubts due to its cost. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the proposed legislation would add a projected $195 billion to federal deficits over a decade.
This week’s installment of the long-running saga, “House Republicans cannot govern,” will soon be forgotten. Elon Musk’s decision to blow up a bipartisan agreement to keep the government funded through the sheer power of posting (and the latent threat posed by his immense wealth), Donald Trump suddenly calling for the abolition of the debt limit, House Republican Chip Roy telling his colleagues that they lack “an ounce of self-respect” — all these dramas will surely give way to even more ridiculous ones in the new year.
But this week’s government funding fight also revealed something that could have profound implications for the next four years of governance: Trump’s power over the congressional GOP is quite limited.
This did not appear to be the case just days ago. On Wednesday, Trump joined Elon Musk in calling on House Republicans to scrap a bipartisan spending deal that would have kept the government funded through March, increased disaster relief, and funded pediatric cancer research, among many other things. Despite the fact that the GOP needs buy-in from the Senate’s Democratic majority in order to pass any legislation — and failure to pass a spending bill by Saturday would mean a government shutdown — House Republicans heeded Trump’s call to nix the carefully negotiated compromise.
If Trump had little difficulty persuading his co-partisans to block one spending bill, however, he proved less adept at getting them to support a different one.
On Thursday, in coordination with Trump, the House GOP unveiled a new funding bill, one shorn of all Democratic priorities. Over social media, the president-elect instructed his party to “vote ‘YES’ for this Bill, TONIGHT!” Then, 38 House Republicans voted against the legislation, which was more than enough to sink it amid nearly unified Democratic opposition.
House conservatives’ defiance of Trump is partly attributable to ideological differences. The president-elect’s objections to Wednesday’s bipartisan agreement were distinct from those of his donor Elon Musk or the House GOP’s hardliners. The latter disdained the spending bill’s page count and fiscal cost. Trump, by contrast, appeared more preoccupied with the legislation’s failure to increase — or eliminate — the debt limit.
Trump wanted the debt limit raised for his first two years so he could give more tax cuts to billionaires, but Republicans refused to go along with that. Read the rest at Vox.
The latest shock posting from President Musk was a tweet supporting a neo-Nazi party in Germany. Then last night a man who is a fan of both AfD and Musk perpetrated a deadly terror attack. Dakinikat wrote about this yesterday.
At least five people were killed and more than 200 wounded after a man plowed a car into a Christmas market in the central German city of Magdeburg, German leaders said Saturday, hours after authorities identified the suspect as Taleb al-Abdulmohsen, a 50-year-old Saudi doctor who officials said had expressed anti-Islamic views.
Reiner Haseloff, the premier of the state of Saxony-Anhalt, confirmed the new toll during a visit to the scene of Friday’s incident. A child is among the dead.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who appeared alongside Haseloff, said almost 40 of the casualties “are so seriously injured that we must be very worried about them.”
Getting Together, by Pat Scott
Scholz noted that the attack took place just days before Christmas, and that normally “there is no place more peaceful or cheerful than a Christmas market.”
“What a terrible act it is, to kill and injure so many people with such brutality,” Scholz said, adding that it is important that the country “stays together” and did “not allow those who wish to sow hate” to do so.
The suspect, Abdulmohsen, who arrived in Germany in 2006, had expressed anti-Islam views and described himself as a Saudi dissident, according to a German official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an open investigation.
Interior Minister Nancy Faeser told reporters Saturday the investigation was ongoing, and “we can only say with certainty that the perpetrator was obviously Islamophobic,” according to Zeit newspaper and Reuters news agency.
The jealousy bone might appeared to have bitten Elon Musk Wednesday, as he reportedly crashed the widely publicized dinner between President-elect Donald Trump and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos.
Trump’s Mar-a-Lago hosted the dinner dinner for the politician and billionaire, but the two didn’t have privacy for long before Musk appeared. According to the New York Times, the X CEO “was not initially expected to be part of the dinner but joined as it was underway.”
Reactions online to the apparent power move were swift and cutting, with late night hosts and social media commentators mocking Musk as “deranged” and “creepy,” among other unflattering conclusions. The tech mogul was dragged up and down, with many saying it seemed like he was worried about his ongoing “bromance” with the president-elect.
“This two-week bromance is going to fall apart more spectacularly than any in history,” journalist and author Seth Abramson wrote on Bluesky. “Elon Musk is so deranged and creepy — and such a clueless stalker — that he actually crashed a private dinner between Donald Trump and Musk rival Jeff Bezos. I can’t imagine how livid that made both Trump and Bezos.”
He continued his post: “What it also confirms is that Musk not only has no boundaries and believes himself Trump’s superior but has no intention of permitting any other plutocrat to squeeze more juice out of Trump than him. Showing up at that dinner uninvited is a power play intended to cow both other oligarchs and Trump.”
Musk’s choice to crash Trump and Bezos’ meal was a dinner bell to the various late night hosts out there, as well. Just about every single one of them had a joke or two to crack at Musk’s expense this week, with Seth Meyer’s warning Trump he got “‘Cable Guy’-ed” – a reference to the 1996 Jim Carrey stalker comedy.
“Oh my god, you let him do you a favor, and now you can’t get rid of him — you got ‘Cable Guy’-ed by Elon Musk,” Meyers said. “Every time you look out that little keyhole, he gonna be there.”
Jimmy Fallon pondered how these two rival billionaires could claim custody of the president-elect. The answer came from another ’90s classic: “Air Bud.”
“To settle who he loves more, Elon and Bezos are going to put Trump down in the middle of the room and see who he goes to first: ‘All right, here boy!’” Fallon joked.
A nearly two-year investigation by Democratic senators of supreme court ethics details more luxury travel by Justice Clarence Thomas and urges Congress to establish a way to enforce a new code of conduct.
Any movement on the issue appears unlikely as Republicans prepare to take control of the Senate in January, underscoring the hurdles in imposing restrictions on a separate branch of government even as public confidence in the court has fallen to record lows.
The 93-page report released on Saturday by the Democratic majority of the Senate judiciary committee found additional travel taken in 2021 by Thomas but not reported on his annual financial disclosure form: a private jet flight to New York’s Adirondacks in July and a jet and yacht trip to New York City sponsored by billionaire Harlan Crow in October, one of more than two dozen times detailed in the report that Thomas took luxury travel and gifts from wealthy benefactors.
The court adopted its first code of ethics in 2023, but it leaves compliance to each of the nine justices.
“The highest court in the land can’t have the lowest ethical standards,” the committee’s chair, Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois, said in a statement. He has long called for an enforceable code of ethics.
Republicans have said the investigation is a way to undermine the conservative majority court, and all the Republicans on the committee protested against the subpoenas authorized for Crow and others as part of the investigation. No Republicans signed on to the final report, and no formal report from them was expected.
Thomas has said that he was not required to disclose the trips that he and his wife, Ginni, took with Crow because the big donor is a close friend of the family and disclosure of that type of travel was not previously required. The new ethics code does explicitly require it, and Thomas has since gone back and reported some travel. Crow has maintained that he has never spoken with his friend about pending matters before the court….
The investigation found that Thomas has accepted gifts and travel from wealthy benefactors worth more than $4.75m by some estimates since his 1991 confirmation and failed to disclose much of it. “The number, value and extravagance of the gifts accepted by Justice Thomas have no comparison in modern American history,” according to the report.
Justice Clarence Thomas failed to disclose two additional trips from a billionaire patron than have previously come to light, Senate Democrats revealed on Saturday after conducting a 20-month investigation into ethics practices at the Supreme Court.
The findings were part of a 93-page report released by Democratic staff members of the Judiciary Committee along with about 800 pages of documents. It said the two trips, both of which had been previously unknown to the public, took place in 2021 and were provided by Harlan Crow, a real estate magnate in Texas and a frequent patron of Justice Thomas’s.
One trip took place that July by private jet from Nebraska to Saranac, N.Y., where Justice Thomas stayed at Mr. Crow’s upstate retreat for five days. The other came in October, when Mr. Crow hosted Justice Thomas overnight in New York on his yacht after flying him from the District of Columbia to New Jersey for the dedication of a statue.
The disclosures were one of the few new revelations in a report that otherwise largely summarized information about largess accepted by justices — and failures to disclose it — that had already become public. Justice Thomas had not disclosed the trips, even after refiling some of his past financial forms, and the committee learned about them through a subpoena to Mr. Crow, the report said.
Read more details about the investigation at the NYT link.
That’s all I have for you today; I’ll be back here on Wednesday, December 25, Christmas Day. Best wishes to all of you.
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The Sky Dancing banner headline uses a snippet from a work by artist Tashi Mannox called 'Rainbow Study'. The work is described as a" study of typical Tibetan rainbow clouds, that feature in Thanka painting, temple decoration and silk brocades". dakinikat was immediately drawn to the image when trying to find stylized Tibetan Clouds to represent Sky Dancing. It is probably because Tashi's practice is similar to her own. His updated take on the clouds that fill the collection of traditional thankas is quite special.
You can find his work at his website by clicking on his logo below. He is also a calligraphy artist that uses important vajrayana syllables. We encourage you to visit his on line studio.
“The Senate finally corrects a 50-year mistake,” proclaimed Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, a Democrat from New York, after senators approved the legislation at 12:15 a.m. Saturday.
This did not appear to be the case just days ago. On Wednesday, Trump joined Elon Musk in 
Republicans have said the investigation is a way to undermine the conservative majority court, and all the Republicans on the committee protested against the subpoenas authorized for Crow and others as part of the investigation. No Republicans signed on to the final report, and no formal report from them was expected.
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