We are being ruled by evil idiots. Unfortunately, they are in full control of our government, supported by other idiots–along with people who know better, but live in fear of the evil idiots. I wonder if there is any way to get through this nightmare without ending up in a dictatorship controlled by these incredibly stupid, evil people? If only we could wake up and find out that this was all a very bad dream.
Trump administration officials fired more than 300 staffers Thursday night at the National Nuclear Security Administration — the agency tasked with managing the nation’s nuclear stockpile — as part of broader Energy Department layoffs, according to four people with knowledge of the matter.
Sources told CNN the officials did not seem to know this agency oversees America’s nuclear weapons….
The agency began rescinding the terminations Friday morning.
Some of the fired employees included NNSA staff who are on the ground at facilities where nuclear weapons are built. These staff oversee the contractors who build nuclear weapons, and they inspect these weapons.
It also included employees at NNSA headquarters who write requirements and guidelines for contractors who build nuclear weapons. A source told CNN they believe these individuals were fired because “no one has taken anytime to understand what we do and the importance of our work to the nation’s national security.”
Members of Congress made their concerns about the NNSA firings known to the Energy Department, a Hill staffer told CNN. A person with knowledge of the matter told CNN that senators visited Energy Sec. Chris Wright to express concern about the NNSA cuts.
“Congress is freaking out because it appears DOE didn’t really realize NNSA oversees the nuclear stockpile,” one source said. “The nuclear deterrent is the backbone of American security and stability – period. For there to be any even very small holes poked even in the maintenance of that deterrent should be extremely frightening to people.”
NNSA has a total of 1800 staff at facilities around the country. The only probationary staffers exempt from the Thursday-night firings were those who work at its Office of Secure Transportation, the office in charge of driving or otherwise transporting nuclear weapons around the country securely, one person familiar told CNN….
The agency made the about face Friday morning; during a meeting, acting NNSA administrator Teresa Robbins said the agency had received direction to rescind the termination of probationary employees. Probationary workers have typically been employed for less than a year, or two years in some cases, and have fewer job protections and rights to appeal.
Robbins added on Friday that if probationary NNSA employees had not yet been fired, their jobs were now safe and all NNSA employees whose access to the agency’s network and internal IT systems was shut off would be turned back on, one source told CNN.
See what I mean? The Trump administration ordered the firing of all probationary government employees without even check to see if any of these people were in essential jobs. Government by stupid people.
National Nuclear Security Administration officials on Friday attempted to notify some employees who had been let go the day before that they are now due to be reinstated — but they struggled to find them because they didn’t have their new contact information.
In an email sent to employees at NNSA and obtained by NBC News, officials wrote, “The termination letters for some NNSA probationary employees are being rescinded, but we do not have a good way to get in touch with those personnel.”
The individuals the letter refers to had been fired on Thursday and lost access to their federal government email accounts. NNSA, which is within the Department of Energy and oversees the nation’s nuclear stockpile, cannot reach these employees directly and is now asking recipients of the email, “Please work with your supervisors to send this information (once you get it) to people’s personal contact emails.” [….]
President Donald Trump’s administration has acted with unprecedented speed — and in some cases, questionable legality — in seeking to cut large portions of the federal government, laying off staff and ending contracts. But that speed has resulted in complications, including firing people agencies actually want to keep.
The emails come after multiple staff — all civil servants — at the NNSA received termination notices late Thursday, according to a source with direct knowledge of the notifications. NBC News reviewed the termination notification, which included the subject line: “Notification of Termination During Probationary/Trial Period.”
The NNSA is tasked with designing, building and overseeing the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile….
The termination notices, which read “effective today,” came within hours of a Russian drone striking the Chernobyl power plant in Ukraine. NNSA tracks nuclear risks in Ukraine, including through sensor systems.
So these firings weren’t even limited to probationary staff. Everyone was fired.
Americans could soon start to feel the repercussions of the Trump administration’s decision to fire thousands of government workers — from public safety to health benefits and basic services that they have come to rely on.
Trump’s directive to slash thousands of jobs across agencies is leaving gaping holes in the government, with thousands of workers being laid off from the Education Department, the Office of Personnel Management, the Department of Veterans Affairs and multiple others.
At the U.S. Forest Service, where some 3,400 workers are slated to be cut, wildfire prevention will be curtailed as the West grapples with a destructive fire season that has destroyed millions of acres in California.
And the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention wasn’t spared: Almost half of the agency’s 2,800 probationary employees were cut while about 400 employees appeared to have taken the “buy-out” offer, meaning the agency responsible for protecting Americans from disease outbreaks and other health hazards will lose about a tenth of its workforce. That’s on top of more than 2,000 probationary employees fired from the Department of Health and Human Services, the CDC’s parent agency.
“Morale is tanked,” said a forest service official close to the situation — who, like many current and former government employees who spoke to POLITICO, was granted anonymity out of fear of retribution. “The public will see it this summer when campgrounds are shut down, trails aren’t maintained and bathrooms aren’t cleaned.”
Should the gutting of the federal government result in immediate negative consequences for the American people, the Trump administration could face political backlash from voters in Republican and Democratic states who suddenly find a host of services — including access to government websites or even benefits — vanish.
Illustration by Cassie Dominicis
The stupid and evil person behind all this chaos is Elon Musk, who appears to taken over the role of POTUS.
The Office of Personnel Management, which serves as the federal government’s human resources department, has been operated by associates of Elon Musk for weeks. The agency, which also laid off staff, sent out the so-called “Fork in the Road” deferred resignation notice to federal employees allowing those who opted in to resign their posts but be paid to not work through September.
A lawsuit filed by union officials representing federal workers temporarily halted the program, but a federal judge ruled the program could move forward, because the union officials didn’t have standing. The Trump administration then said no more federal employees could opt into the program — and the next day, the terminations of federal workers on probation resumed.
“We definitely cut more than probationary employees,” a person familiar with Office of Personnel Management firings said Friday. “We cut the entire communications department” and career employees too, the person added. In total, the person said as many as 200,000 civil service workers across the federal government that were in their probationary period as of this week could receive termination notices….
The firings came so swiftly this week that some Forest Service employees were told they would lose their job before there was any paperwork to sign.
Read more about the consequences of government by stupid people at the Politico link.
The Trump administration is full of incredibly stupid people, many of whom–including de facto President Musk and his puppet Trump–are also cruel people who enjoy inflicting pain and suffering on weaker people. Just look what they have done to USAID.
Shockingly, it turns out that empowering the richest human being on the planet to maliciously and gratuitously heap additional misery on that planet’s most poor, hungry, and desperate people might—just might—pose a niggling political problem to President Donald Trump.
There seems to be a split in Trumpworld these days. Some seem to think Trump can get away with anything, no matter how devastating it is to the most vulnerable or how corrupt an abuse of power it represents. Others seem aware that there are limits—that at some point, Trumpworld might push things too far and suffer a public backlash, and that this might actually matter.
A new internal memo circulating inside the U.S. Agency for International Development neatly captures this split. The Washington Postreports that the memo warns USAID employees not to communicate with the press about the shocking disruptions in humanitarian assistance that are being caused by the Trump-Musk attack on the agency, which are already producing horrific consequences. The memo said this transgression might be met with “dismissal.”
The memo claims to be correcting a “false narrative in the press” about the disruptions to that assistance. It notes that Secretary of State Marco Rubio last month issued a waiver to “lifesaving humanitarian assistance,” allowing it to continue despite the Trump-Musk freeze in agency spending. This has meant that this assistance has “continued uninterrupted and has never paused,” the memo claims, while warning recipients against any “unauthorized external engagement with the press.”
Miss Mink, the cat countess, by Janet Hill
This is highly disingenuous at best and mostly nonsense at worst. As The New York Timesreports, some senior USAID officials recently received an email explicitly directing them to hold off on approving some of this assistance, pending more directives from on high. What’s more, according to the Times, while some of this assistance did continue due to Rubio’s waiver, much of it has encountered serious obstacles.
This assistance—which includes aid for lifesaving food, shelter, and medicine—has gotten bogged down as USAID employees and groups that partner with the agency to distribute these things have struggled to access government funding streams halted by Trump. (A judge has ordered the funds to continue.) In one case, Musk claimed that the administration had restarted some disease-prevention funding, but it remains frozen, the Times reported.
The directive ordering USAID employees to refrain from discussing this with the press represents an unnerving turn in this saga, given how ugly and blatant it is. “This is basically telling USAID personnel not to tell the truth about what they have seen,” Jeremy Konyndyk, a former senior USAID official, told me, adding that this functionally commands USAID staff to “get in line with the propaganda narrative.”
Read more at TNR.
The stupid people who are now running the government are also working to make Americans less healthy.
The “department of government efficiency”, the Donald Trump-created program known as Doge and headed by the billionaire Elon Musk, has accessed or requested access to sensitive systems at multiple health agencies as the US president attempts to grant the committee sweeping powers within the federal government.
The bid for access comes amid an unprecedented effort to halt government spending, despite multiple court orders to unfreeze funds and reverse staff suspensions.
Thousands of people were laid off from health agencies on Friday after the Trump administration announced a plan to fire nearly all probationary employees, potentially numbering in the hundreds of thousands across the federal service.
“The potential for doing harm is significant,” said Scott Cory, former chief information officer for an agency within the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
Health agencies maintain tightly controlled databases with sensitive information, and upheaval at these agencies threatens the US healthcare systemeven as the threat of infectious diseases like bird flu continues to ramp up.
“The possibility of new outbreaks or public health events is certain given the recent concerning spread of bird flu, which is still hampered by a slow response,” said an employee at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the record.
“With external communications cut off, extensive work-stop orders and dramatic changes in the federal workforce, the ability of any health agency is severely limited and ultimately will serve no one but those who choose to profit off the suffering,” the employee said….
Some 5,200 people across health agencies reportedly received layoffs notices on Friday.
About 1,250 of them worked at the CDC, according to a source who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
This included senior officials and the entire first-year class of the CDC’s Epidemic Intelligence Services officers, known as “disease detectives”.
Other senior health officials are also being targeted for layoffs, and employees are bracing for more mass layoffs in coming days, sources say. Several contractors also report being laid off this week.
And then there’s the new Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Hours after being confirmed as Secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. issued a statement that laid out sweeping plans for his first 100 days in office. Chief among his goals, he wrote, was to combat what he called a “growing health crisis” of chronic disease. The document called for the federal government to investigate the “root causes” of a broad range of conditions, including autism, ADHD, asthma, obesity, multiple sclerosis, and psoriasis. Conspicuously absent was any explicit mention of childhood vaccines, which Kennedy has long railed against as the head of the anti-vaccine advocacy group Children’s Health Defense.
From Journal of a Cat in Rome, by Takako Kessoku
But the document did zero in on another one of his fixations: a class of widely prescribed drugs that treat depression, anxiety, and mood disorders. The government, he said, would “assess the prevalence of and threat posed by the prescription of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, antipsychotics, [and] mood stabilizers.”
Kennedy has repeatedly railed against what he sees as rampant overprescription of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, commonly known as SSRIs, which treat depression and anxiety and include medications like Prozac and Zoloft. As with his previous assertions about vaccines, many of his statements about these drugs are not backed by science. In a 2023 livestream on X with Elon Musk, he claimed that “tremendous circumstantial evidence” suggested that people taking antidepressants were more likely to commit school shootings. (Actually, most school shooters were not taking those drugs, evidence shows.) Kennedy has also called people who take SSRIs addicts—and then tried to claim he didn’t during his confirmation hearings.
So despite this evidence, what options does Kennedy offer in response to the supposed overprescription of and addiction to SSRIs? In a podcast appearance last July, Kennedy said he planned to dedicate money generated from a sales tax on cannabis products to “creating wellness farms—drug rehabilitation farms, in rural areas all over this country.” He added, “I’m going to create these wellness farms where they can go to get off of illegal drugs, off of opiates, but also illegal drugs, other psychiatric drugs, if they want to, to get off of SSRIs, to get off of benzos, to get off of Adderall, and to spend time as much time as they need—three or four years if they need it—to learn to get reparented, to reconnect with communities.” The farm residents would grow their own organic food because, he suggested, many of their underlying problems could be “food-related.”
Will participation in these “wellness farms” be voluntary? This sounds kind of like involuntary servitude.
The Internal Revenue Service has now joined the list of federal agencies and offices experiencing life on the “DOGE” side. Two sources told TPM that a staffer affiliated with President Trump and Elon Musk’s controversial “efficiency” initiative left some bewildered and concerned on Thursday as they held their first meeting at the Washington headquarters of the tax agency.
Reuters and other news outlets havereported on the IRS meeting and identified the DOGE staffer involved as Gavin Kliger. A Capitol Hill source who was briefed on the meeting confirmed to TPM that Kliger represented DOGE at the agency. According to the Hill source, who requested anonymity to discuss the meeting, Kliger explained that DOGE wants to get a deep look inside the IRS.
By Jackson Ng
“Their interest was … really across the board, so it included the operation of enforcements, it included taxpayer service in terms of function and the personnel footprint, and they wanted extensive system access,” the Hill source said.
That last point, the source said, brings up unique concerns and uncertainty since the IRS has deep knowledge of Americans’ personal financial information.
“What exactly that would look like, I’m not sure,” the source said of the DOGE demand for access, adding, “Levels of data protection at IRS are higher than at other agencies. … Not only is improper disclosure illegal, but improper inspection of data internally is illegal. So, it’s a really high bar of data security here. It’s hard to think about what extensive system access would look like for these guys that wouldn’t violate the law.” [….]
A Treasury Department source with knowledge of Kliger’s meeting at the IRS said the DOGE staffer had a handful of phones, which struck the agency’s employees as “bizarre.”
“He basically had the vibe of a McKinsey consultant and came in and asked about headcount and how many people are in each department,” the Treasury source said, adding, “He had a black Mac, which didn’t seem to be government issue, and five iPhones.”
On LinkedIn, Kliger, who graduated from UC Berkeley in 2020, indicated he was working at the software company Databricks up until last month when he became a “special advisor” at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management. On a Substack that has beenidentified as belonging to Kliger, he describes himself as a “Silicon Valley engineer” who had a “political awakening.” Kliger also, according to a Reuters report, amplified content from neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes on a Twitter page that he later partially deleted and locked down.
The Treasury source said the DOGE staffers who have made contact at the department have been focused on “ROI,” or return on investment. In the context of the IRS, that would mean a focus on maximizing collections while keeping other costs down, the source said.
“I think they’re focused on collection now because they need every dollar they can for those tax cuts,” the source said of DOGE and the Trump administration. “You want to make it as streamlined as possible but also collect money.”
Read the rest at TPM.
I think that’s all the tolerance I have for reading about Trump and Musk’s government of the stupid for today.
Take care everyone. I hope you are all having a peaceful weekend.
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“Resist!” John (repeat1968) Buss @johnbuss.bsky.social
It’s another Sad Day, Sky Dancers!
This may be the only hope we have left. Three GOP seats are heading to Special Elections. A Democratic Party Trifecta would be enough for Dems to regain control! The rest of the news has the indicators of a Constitutional Crisis and, as BB and JJ have said, a Coup. Former US Attorneys Barbara McQuade and Harry Littman have inside information on something that makes Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre look like a picnic. JJ and BB are flooding my sms with some of the worst headlines I have ever seen.
The last three weeks have been unending and brutal. The roll-out of Project 2025 is the most consequential threat to our Republic since the Civil War. And it’s coming from the White House. This headline fromThe Salt Lake Tribuneshows how horrifying it’s getting in the states that are Republican Red have gone down the War Path against everything decent, just, and fair. “Nazi flags can fly in Utah schools, but not pride flags, GOP lawmaker says. A new bill would allow for Nazi and Confederate flags to be displayed in some instances in Utah schools and government buildings, but pride flags would be banned.”
Here are the Litman and McQuade conversations about the DOJ’s Thursday night Slaughter.
Strong rumor with credible sourcing: DOJ has put all of public integrity line attorneys in a room and told them they have an hour for someone to choose who will sign motion to dismiss and if nobody does, they will all be fired. The nastiest strong-arming in DOJ history by a long shot.
This is Saturday night massacre in free fall. A day that will live in infamy in DOJ. 22 people in room. it's savage. hard to imagine greater disrespect for DOJ professionals.
In less than a month in power, President Trump’s political appointees have embarked on an unapologetic, strong-arm effort to impose their will on the Justice Department, seeking to justify their actions as the simple reversal of the “politicization” of federal law enforcement under their Biden-era predecessors.
The ferocious campaign, executed by Emil Bove III — Mr. Trump’s former criminal defense lawyer who is now the department’s acting No. 2 official — is playing out in public, in real time, through a series of moves that underscore Mr. Trump’s intention to bend the traditionally nonpartisan career staff in federal law enforcement to suit his ends.
That strategy has quickly precipitated a crisis that is an early test of how resilient the norms of the criminal justice system will prove to be against the pressures brought by a retribution-minded president and his appointees.
On Thursday, the interim U.S. attorney in Manhattan, Danielle R. Sassoon, resigned rather than sign off on Mr. Bove’s command to dismiss the corruption charges against Mayor Eric Adams of New York. Ms. Sassoon is no member of the liberal resistance: She clerked for the conservative Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia, and had been appointed to her post by Mr. Trump’s team.
Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of the Department of Defense Pete Hegseth headed to Europe to evidently blow up the relationships with all of our major allies. The two surly men’s visit was not appreciated. This happened while Trump announced that he and Putin would be visiting each other’s country to tie up Ukraine’s surrender. Vance has been sent to chat with Ukriane’s President Zelensky at the Munich Conference, which they are both attending. Analysis of his speech can be found at this link. ‘Threat I worry most is threat from within,’ Vance criticises European leaders – summary.”
US vice-president JD Vance has urged Europe to put forward a positive case for freedom and act against “the threat that I worry most, the threat from within” which he put as “the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values” through restrictions on free speech, content moderation rules online, and political firewalls against radical parties.
A Russian drone carrying a high-explosive warhead struck the protective containment shell of the Chornobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine overnight, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said.
He described the move, coming amid speculation about potential peace talks with Russian president Vladimir Putin, as “a very clear greeting from Putin and Russian Federation to the security conference.”
Ukrainian security services said the drone was a Geran-2, the Russian name for the Iranian-designed Shahed-136, and had been intended to hit the reactor enclosure, Reuters noted.
Zelenskyy said the damage to the shelter was “significant” and had started a fire, but he added that radiation levels at the plant had not increased.
The Kremlin spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, denied Moscow was responsible for the attack. Without presenting evidence, he said Ukrainian officials wanted to thwart efforts to end the war through negotiations between Trump and Putin.
In a wide-ranging and fiery speech peppered with European references, he accused European leaders of abandoning their roots as “defenders of democracy” during the cold war by what he believes is the process of shutting down dissenting voices (14:51).
He said they were increasingly looking “like old entrenched interests hiding behind ugly Soviet era words like misinformation … who simply don’t like that idea that somebody with an alternative viewpoint might express a different opinion” (14:55).
He criticised “cavalier” statements from European officials “sounding delighted” about the cancelled presidential elections in Romania or expansive content moderation powers or other free speech restrictions in theUS, Germany and Sweden, saying there were “shocking to American ears” (14:46).
He also criticised European leaders for “running in fear of your own voters,” including on migration, saying that risks destroying democracy from within by disenchanting the population from taking part in democratic processes (15:01).
He dismissed any criticism of Elon Musk’s alleged interference in European elections, saying “if American democracy can survive 10 years of Greta Thunberg’s scolding, you guys can survive a few months of Elon Musk.”
He called for an end of political “firewalls,” a pointed reference to the German arrangement keeping out the far-right parties such as the Alternative für Deutschland, just nine days before the federal election next Sunday (15:01).
But notably, he doesn’t say much about Ukraine, other than a brief comment that the US administration “believes we can come to a reasonable settlement between Russia and Ukraine” (14:44).
The New Republic’s Hafiz Rashid has this take. “JD Vance Escalates Conflict With Europe in Alarming Speech at Munich.”
The vice president criticized European leaders for being afraid of their own voters, in a nod to European far-right parties, such as the AfD in Germany, seeming to threaten a chilling of relations with governments whose ideologies differ from his and Trump’s.
“If you’re running in fear of your own voters, there is nothing America can do for you, nor, for that matter, is there anything that you can do for the American people who elected me and elected President Trump,” Vance said.
Hanging over the conference was Thursday’s attack in the German city, where a car driven by an Afghan immigrant ran into a crowd of people, injuring at least 28. Vance used the incident to bolster a nativist argument for restricting immigration.
“How many times must we suffer these appalling setbacks before we change course and take our shared civilization in a new direction?” Vance asked.
“If American democracy can survive 10 years of Greta Thunberg’s scolding, you guys can survive a few months of Elon Musk,” Vance said, downplaying a man currently threatening America’s democracy, as well as that of Germany, and drawing a false equivalence between a climate activist and the world’s richest man.
The vice president may think he struck a blow for the Trump administration’s worldview in Munich Friday, but he’s missing the hypocrisy of his own words. The Trump administration has so far rammed through executive orders instead of passing laws, gutted the federal workforce, undermined the right to a free press, and ignored the outcry from all Americans outside of the MAGA bubble.
Politico has the hot take on Pete Hegseth’s visit to the Munich Security Conference. An actual Republic Congress critter may have a criticism! Amazing! Well, he did try to soften the blow with some obvious ass kissing too. Read for yourself. “Senior Republican senator ‘puzzled’ and ‘disturbed’ by Hegseth’s Ukraine remarks. Senate Armed Services Chair Roger Wicker is breaking with the line from the Trump White House.”
U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth made a “rookie mistake” when he said a return to Ukraine’s pre-war borders was “unrealistic,” Senate Armed Services Chair Roger Wicker said Friday.
Hegseth on Thursday pulled back some of the comments he made about Ukraine a day earlier, where he said that NATO membership for Kyiv was off the table and that the country could not return to its internationally recognized borders.
“Hegseth is going to be a great defense secretary, although he wasn’t my choice for the job,” the Mississippi Republican told POLITICO on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference. “But he made a rookie mistake in Brussels and he’s walked back some of what he said but not that line.”
“I don’t know who wrote the speech — it is the kind of thing Tucker Carlson could have written, and Carlson is a fool,” Wicker said, referring to the pro-Putin broadcaster.
Speaking to Jonathan Martin at the POLITICO Pub in the Munich conference, Wicker — a staunch Ukraine supporter — said he was “surprised” by Hegseth’s original comments and “heartened” that the new defense secretary had reversed course. Wicker said he favors a firm posture with Moscow.
“Everybody knows … and people in the administration know you don’t say before your first meeting what you will agree to and what you won’t agree to,” Wicker said, adding that he was “puzzled” and “disturbed” by Hegseth’s comments.
While I just criticized the governor of Utah, let me not forget to kick the governor of Lousyana in the balls a few times. He’s trying to kill us. This is also from Politico. “Louisiana to end mass vaccine promotion, state’s top health official says. The department will still “stock and provide vaccines,” according to a department memo.”
The Louisiana Department of Health “will no longer promote mass vaccination” according to a Thursday memo written by the state’s top health official and obtained by The Associated Press.
A department spokesperson confirmed Louisiana Surgeon General Ralph Abraham had ordered his staff to stop engaging in media campaigns and community health fairs to encourage vaccinations, even as the state has experienced a surge in influenza.
Abraham’s announcement occurred the same day vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was sworn in by the U.S. Senate to serve as President Donald Trump’s health secretary.
In a separate letter posted on the department’s website, Louisiana’s surgeon general decried “blanket government mandates” for vaccines and criticized the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s COVID-19 vaccination push. Individuals should make their own decisions about vaccinations, Abraham said.
“Government should admit the limitations of its role in people’s lives and pull back its tentacles from the practice of medicine,” said Abraham, a Republican.
I gagged on that last statement because that certainly doesn’t apply to women and girls with functioning ovaries and uteruses. Meanwhile, Trump is planning mass firings at the CDC. Bird Flu, anyone? This is from STAT. “Trump administration to fire thousands at health agencies. Employees across agencies who were hired in the past one to two years are being targeted.” Considering he also wants to end Medicaid, I would say we are about to have a serious amount of deaths on our hands.
The Trump administration is set to eliminate thousands of federal health care jobs Friday, targeting employees across public health and science agencies who were hired in the past one to two years.
Senior officials were informed in meetings Friday morning that roughly 5,200 people on probationary employment — recent hires — across agencies including the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will be fired that afternoon, according to sources briefed on the meetings. CDC leadership was told the Atlanta-based agency would lose about 1,300 workers. The numbers at the NIH are not clear, but exceptions are being made for certain probationary employees, according to a memo viewed by STAT.
The workers will be given a month’s paid leave but lose access to work systems by the end of Friday, according to sources.
In addition to the probationary workers, an unspecified number of contract workers at the CDC and other Health and Human Services agencies have been informed over the course of the past week that their jobs had been terminated, including dozens at the Vaccine Research Center housed at NIH. Many jobs at these agencies are done by contract workers.
Other changes are expected, particularly at the leadership levels of organizations. When Susan Monarez, a former ARPA-H official, was named acting director of the CDC, she informed staff she would transition into the role of acting principal deputy director once Dave Weldon, the nominee to lead the agency, is confirmed. That move signaled that the current acting principal deputy director, Nirav Shah, who joined the CDC in March 2023, was likely out of a job. Earlier this week, Shah told CDC staff that his last day at the agency would be Feb. 28, a source told STAT.
Head of ARPA-H and Biden appointee Renee Wegrzyn told staff Friday morning that she was fired, a source told STAT. The agency, established in 2022 by Biden to work with the private sector on breakthrough medical technology, employs less than 200 workers. Because of the agency’s newness, most employees are considered probationary and could be targeted for layoffs.
Once again, I feel the need to share Tim Miller’s latest at The Bulwark. Trying to preserve American democracy makes for strange bedfellows. Also, they have a Valentine’s poem for everyone!
Roses are red, The Bulwark is rad—
As we’ve always said:
Orange Man Bad.
Here’s Miller’s lede. “Kash’s Honesty Problem.” Ya think?
For all the many, many, MANY faults of Trump’s other nominees, none of them impulse-lied to senators’ faces while under oath in a confirmation hearing, as if they were a troublemaking toddler telling their parents they didn’t drop the cake, hoping no one noticed their face was covered in chocolate icing.
But that seems to be what Kash Patel did—and not on a matter of negligible import. Patel told the Senate Judiciary Committee that “I don’t know what’s going on right now over there” in the FBI, and that he was “not aware” of plans to fire FBI agents and officials who had investigated Donald Trump and January 6th. But according to several whistleblowers and contemporaneous notes, this was not true. From the Washington Post:
“KP wants movement at FBI,” one attendee purportedly wrote in the notes Durbin reviewed.
This was just the latest in a string of ostentatious lies that Patel told the senators set to confirm him—and basically anyone else who has had the displeasure of recently encountering him. Here’s just a modest sampling:
Patel had previously said “we went to the studio and recorded [the J6 Prison Choir], mastered it, digitized it, and put it out as a song” but during his confirmation hearing he told Sen. Adam Schiff that the “we” repeatedly invoked in that sentence did not actually include him because he was not involved. He claimed he was using “the proverbial we”—I guess he means the royal “We”—you know, the editorial. It is the type of semantic lie that would make even Slick Willy blush.
A state court judge overseeing one of the January 6th cases said Patel was “not a credible witness” because his testimony was “not only illogical . . . but completely devoid of any evidence in the record.”
Patel has vastly exaggerated his résumé, claiming, among other things, that he was the “the Main Justice lead prosecutor for Benghazi” when in fact he had a junior supportive role—one he began after the investigation had started and left before the first case went to trial.
A Trump adviser told the Atlantic that Patel had more than once claimed he was the person who “‘gave the order’ for U.S. forces to move in and kill the ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in 2019”—even though he was not even in the Situation Room.
Former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper wrote in his book that Patel’s lies about a Seal Team Six hostage rescue in Africa led to an international incident that put their lives at risk.
Then there were his claims that he was present when Trump magically declassified the documents he was keeping at Mar-a-Lago, and then pleaded the Fifth when asked about it in front of a grand jury.
I could keep going, but really, the story of Kash is best summed up in this anecdote from Elaina Plott Calabro’s Atlantic profile. Calabro wrote that Patel often says he and Trump are “just a ‘couple of guys from Queens,’” when Patel isn’t even from Queens. He’s from Garden City! That’s not the 313.
We’re still not living in the United States of America, are we? The abhorrent actions of Trump, Musk, and underlings puts the word Banana in the Republic.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
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Trump: "Like on tractors that can handle anything from hurricanes to lightning to anything. They use magnets. It's a new theory — magnets. They're gonna lift the planes up. And it doesn't work."
Conflict of interest? The State Department’s procurement forecast lists Tesla as the recipient of the largest expected contract, with Marco Rubio’s department planning to purchase $400 million worth of “Armored Tesla” vehicles.
Interesting: the State Department’s procurement forecast detailing a $400 million order for "armored Tesla" has now been edited to "armored electric vehicles." The document shows the edit was made tonight at 9:12 p.m. — after it was highlighted in reports
About 75,000 US federal workers accepted the deferred buyout program of President Donald Trump's administration, a spokesperson for the US Office of Personnel Management said reut.rs/3Ez0avr
"Details of the agreement were not made public in court filings, but X and Mr. Trump notified the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday that they had agreed to dismiss the lawsuit. Both parties agreed to pay their own costs…www.nytimes.com/2025/02/12/t…
📌I was the managing editor at Stars and Stripes and can tell you that Pete Hegseth is the first SecDef I am aware of to be openly booed by military families on a military base.📌This is the most significant pushback I have seen to this administration's racist, hostile initiatives.
Not this next few items are about a horror bill called SAFE Act HR 22
The Save Act has already passed the House and is intended to suppress the vote among women. This is the 1st step in the GOP's effort to take away women's right to vote.
As many as 69 million women who have changed their last name to match their spouse’s do not have a birth certificate matching their legal name.msmagazine.com/2025/02/11/s…
the SAVE Act, a bill that would require all Americans to provide a birth certificate, passport, or one of a few other citizenship documents every time they register or re-register to vote would disenfranchise tens of millions of eligible American citizens. http://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/ana…
The GOP-controlled Senate early Wednesday morning voted to confirm Tulsi Gabbard to be President Donald Trump’s director of national intelligence, putting the former congresswoman in charge of the sprawling U.S. intelligence community.
The 52-48 vote was largely along party lines, with nearly all Republicans present voting in favor of Gabbard. Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., the former longtime GOP leader who has clashed with Trump, was the only Republican who joined all Democrats in voting against her.
Tulsi Gabbard
Gabbard’s confirmation is a win for Trump and represents yet another example of his dominance over the GOP, where few have shown a willingness to step out of line.
After Trump announced Gabbard as his DNI pick in November, Democrats — and a handful of Republicans — voiced serious concerns about her 2017 secret meeting with then-President Bashar Assad of Syria; her sympathetic comments about Russia; her past efforts to repeal a powerful government surveillance tool, known as Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act’s Section 702; and her previous support for Edward Snowden, a former government contractor who leaked classified information to the press about those spying programs.
In the end, McConnell was the sole Republican to buck Trump and vote no on Gabbard. In a scathing, lengthy statement after the vote, McConnell said it was apparent Gabbard was not prepared for the job and demonstrated a “history of alarming lapses in judgment.”
“The Senate’s power of advice and consent is not an option; it is an obligation, and one we cannot pretend to misunderstand. When a nominee’s record proves them unworthy of the highest public trust, and when their command of relevant policy falls short of the requirements of their office, the Senate should withhold its consent,” McConnell said.
“The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) is a key participant in the process that informs every major national security decision the President makes. The ODNI wields significant authority over how the intelligence community allocates its resources, conducts its collection and analysis, and manages the classification and declassification of our nation’s most sensitive secrets. In my assessment, Tulsi Gabbard failed to demonstrate that she is prepared to assume this tremendous national trust.
Susan Collins was *concerned,* but not enough to go against Trump. If only Mitch McConnell had acted on his true beliefs and voted to impeach Trump, U.S. national security would not be in so much jeopardy today.
It’s a good thing Trump has something to celebrate today, because yesterday was a humiliating disaster for him. We now know for sure that Elon Musk is the real POTUS. Trump is just letting Musk run the country while poor Donald plays golf and posts rage-filled messages on Truth Social. Does Musk have something on Trump besides money? Is Trump afraid of Musk?
William Kristol at The Bulwark: When President Musk Speaks, Donald Trump Listens. DOGE is in charge now.
It was an unusual scene yesterday in the Oval Office. Elon Musk stood and held forth for a half hour to the assembled press corps, while Donald Trump sat at his desk, occasionally chiming in, but mostly looking up at Elon with what seemed to me to be increasing irritation.
With the president looking on, Musk was asked to justify his minions’ wanton rampage through the ranks of our civil servants. He said:
“We do find it sort of rather odd that there are quite a few people in the bureaucracy who have ostensibly a salary of a few hundred thousand dollars, but somehow manage to accrue tens of millions of dollars in net worth. . . . The reality is they’re getting wealthy at the taxpayer’s expense. That’s the honest truth of it.”
Here’s a tip based on many years of watching politicians and, for that matter, of watching my fellow human beings: When someone says “that’s the honest truth of it,” that person is probably not telling the honest truth. Especially if that person is someone like Musk.
The truth is that Musk has no idea what the net wealth is of various government employees. Unless, that is, he’s had his apparatchiks take a look at those employees’ SF-86 security clearance questionnaires or their IRS records. Which would be illegal—an illegality for which we don’t, so far at least, have any evidence.
So Musk is just making this up. But why should the world’s wealthiest man let the truth stand in the way of a casual slander of government employees if that can help his assault on our government?
More and more, the president appears to be a puppet of the world’s richest man.
During an Oval Office press conference on Monday, Donald Trump remained hunched over the Resolute Desk while Elon Musk took the reins, spending more time answering reporters’ questions than the president himself.
Trump had called journalists into his office to observe the signing of a new executive order, which effectively green-lighted Musk’s work to cull large swaths of the federal workforce through DOGE. But the jarring visual of a multibillionaire hovering over a U.S. president and answering questions for him stayed with and rattled political commentators.
MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell called Trump’s “presidential subservience” to Musk the “most powerless image of a president of the United States ever created by a camera.”
Musk—who was not elected by anyone to systematically dismantle the federal government—did “everything he possibly can to tell the world, without saying a word, that ‘Donald Trump is not the boss of me,’” according to O’Donnell.
The Tesla CEO also violated Oval Office norms by appearing at the press conference in casual garb and with his son. By O’Donnell’s measure, Musk spoke 3,666 words at the executive order signing, whereas Trump spoke 2,487 words.
Compare that to the role that Trump’s vice presidents play in his political realm: Former Vice President Mike Pence never spoke more than Trump did at a Trump-centric event during his first term, and Vice President JD Vance likely never will, either.
Elon Musk humiliated President Donald Trump during Tuesday’s joint press conference in the Oval Office, which left Trump looking like the “most powerless” U.S. president ever caught on camera, MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell said on The Last Word.
During a press conference in the Oval Office in which they claimed—without providing a single piece of evidence—to have uncovered billions of dollars of government waste and fraud, Musk spoke 3,666 words to Trump’s 2,487, O’Donnell said.
Musk brought his 4-year-old son X to the press conference, wore a T-shirt and baseball cap, and even interrupted Trump.
He stood over Trump while the president sat behind the Resolute Desk, “delivering a picture of presidential subservience the likes of which we have never seen—the most powerless image of a president of the United States ever created by a camera,” O’Donnell said….
Trump, he continued, has always craved the attention of the “truly rich, virtually all of whom ignored Donald Trump as phony rich and vulgar rich.”
Now he has the attention of the world’s richest man, who can literally bail him out of the $82.5 million he currently owes writer E. Jean Carroll, who successfully sued Trump for defamation, and the $500 million judgment levied against him in a civil fraud case in New York.
O’Donnell also opined on the way Trump responded to the Musk child–turning away suddenly when the kid approached him and said something. Trump hates kids, but he let this one into his inner sanctum. He actually picked his nose and wiped it on the Resolute Desk.
And why is Musk always dragging that poor kid with him everywhere he goes? Does the boy have any friends his own age? Why isn’t he in Pre-K?
The boy’s mother is not happy.
The Independent: ‘He should not be in public like this’: Grimes reacts after Elon Musk parades their son around Oval Office.
Grimes has spoken out after Elon Musk paraded their four-year-old son, X Æ A-Xii, or Lil X, around the Oval Office as Donald Trump signed an executive order to bolster the Department of Government Efficiency’s powers in government.
The Canadian musician, 36, who shares three children with the Tesla CEO, a father of 12 offspring, took to X (Twitter) in response to her son’s surprise appearance saying: “He should not be in public like this. I did not see this, thank u for alerting me. But I’m glad he was polite. Sigh.”
Her comment came in response to another user who chimed that “Lil X was very polite today! You raised him well. He was so cute when he told DJT ‘please forgive me, I need to pee’.”
During the controversial press event, Lil X was seen picking his nose, mimicking his father, and whispering to Trump as he lingered by the Resolute desk.
Making light of more grave matters, the child looked on as Trump bolstered Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency’s (Doge) power to reshape the federal government by signing an executive order requiring agencies to cooperate with the Musk-led department and the effort to slash costs…..
Grimes, singer of “Genesis”, has remained outspoken on X, responding to fans and spouting her political views, as well as denouncing her ex’s alleged ties to the alt-right and Nazism.
One more comment from me. What was with that outfit Musk was wearing? It looked like an overcoat and a T-shirt and sweatpants–and a baseball cap. WTF? Trump is always so fussy about how the people under him dress–another sign that Musk is in charge.
Two serious posts on this madness:
Robert Reich at his Substack: Fraud and Musk.
The Trump-Musk regime is accusing federal civil servants of fraud, based on no evidence, while at the same time allowing corporations to pay off foreign officials, dropping bribery charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams, pardoning a former governor of Illinois who tried to sell his Senate seat, and stopping investigations into foreign influence-peddling in the United States.
In other words, Trump-Musk have declared open season on real fraud and bribery.
On Monday evening, Trump signed an executive order halting investigations and prosecutions of corporate corruption in foreign countries under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of 1977.
Today, Musk held forth in the Oval Office, claiming that drastic reductions in the federal workforce were justified because it was rife with fraud.
I’ve spent more than a dozen years in the federal government, and I can tell you that the vast majority of civil servants I’ve had the honor of working with are dedicated and hardworking. They are delivering critical services to Americans and protecting them from corporate malfeasance.
For the richest person in the world to be given a bully pulpit in the Oval Office to impugn their integrity is beyond shameful.
Musk has the integrity of a slug. Since Trump was elected president, Musk’s fortune has increased $270 billion. If you think that’s an accident, you haven’t been paying attention.
When Trump was sworn into office, Musk’s six corporations were under more than 32 continuing investigations conducted by at least 11 federal agencies, according to a review by The New York Times.
Most of these cases are now closed or likely to be closed soon, and the agencies that initiated them are being defanged by Musk and Trump.
Reich lists multiple examples of Musk’s fraud against the U.S. Read about it at the link.
Joyce Vance at Civil Discourse: Call it what it is.
A week ago, I wrote a piece here called “Is It Really a Coup?” My answer, based on the evidence in front of us, was yes. Since then, life has gone on and DOGE has mostly gone on (despite what they seem to view as the inconvenience of a few temporary restraining orders), committed to nothing less than the radical transformation of government by a small band of unelected, quasi-official people, who are operating outside of government transparency rules. It has all the characteristics of a non-military transformation of a democratic government into something entirely different.
In a statement that made me proud to be a lawyer yet again, the American Bar Association (ABA) all but called it a coup, but without actually using that word: “No American can be proud of a govt that carries out change in this way. Neither can these actions be rationalized by discussion of past grievances or appeals to efficiency. Everything can be more efficient, but adherence to the rule of law is paramount.”
This morning in the Washington Post, Alan Charles Raul wrote an excellent piece on DOGE. Mr. Raul served as the associate White House Counsel under President Ronald Reagan and went on to serve as general counsel of the Office of Management and Budget under Reagan and President George H.W. Bush. He is a lecturer at Harvard Law School. Not exactly a liberal.
In his piece, titled, Why DOGE is unconstitutional, he writes, “What is not debatable, however, is that Congress has not authorized this radical overhaul, and the protocols of the Constitution do not permit statutorily mandated agencies and programs to be transformed — or reorganized out of existence — without congressional authorization.”
It’s such a polite way of saying it’s a coup without saying it.
Maybe now that the Reagan Republican guys have shown up, we can all agree we are living through the quietest of coups. If we don’t start calling it what it is and putting a stop to it, it stands a fair chance of succeeding. The lawyers are hard at work, but that will not be enough alone. They are holding the ground until the public catches up. It would be nice if Congress and the Supreme Court did their jobs too. But for starters, let’s call the coup a coup—while we still can.
Lest you think that’s hyperbolic, yesterday, the Associated Press reported that they “were informed by the White House that if AP did not align its editorial standards with President Donald Trump’s executive order renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America, AP would be barred from accessing an event in the Oval Office.“ Later in the day, they were refused access. It’s a clear and also an extremely petty, violation of the First Amendment, which prevents the government from imposing prior restraints on anyone’s speech, let alone the press.
Apparently, it’s easy to ignore such a ridiculous moment, and most people seem to have. But this is a form of Newspeak, the Orwellian construct of language that a government insists people use in order to narrow people’s range of thought. Sure, it was only over what we call the Gulf of Mexico, but this was not trivial buffoonery; it was a significant moment, a testing of the waters to see if this new White House could get away with stepping on the First Amendment without causing a furor.
“While we still can.” How much longer do we have to save our democracy? Is it too late?
I know this isn’t much of a post; but I’m not feeling well today so that’s all I have. Take care everyone.
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I’m having a colonoscopy this morning. So I will be awol today. This will be a quick post.
I’m watching a coup in progress…while people are having Superbowl parties. It feels like I’m in my own personal Twilight Zone episode. If only I could send Trump, Musk and all the MAGA idiots to the cornfield… but in reality, we are the ones that are being held hostage…in The MAGA Zone.
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.
Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of the Department of Defense Pete Hegseth headed to Europe to evidently blow up the relationships with all of our major allies. The two surly men’s visit was not appreciated. This happened while Trump announced that he and Putin would be visiting each other’s country to tie up Ukraine’s surrender. Vance has been sent to chat with Ukriane’s President Zelensky at the Munich Conference, which they are both attending. 
Meanwhile, The Guardian also reports a drone attack on Chornobyl. 
The New Republic’
Politico
While I just criticized the governor of Utah, let me not forget to kick the governor of Lousyana in the balls a few times. He’s trying to kill us. This is also from
I gagged on that last statement because that certainly doesn’t apply to women and girls with functioning ovaries and uteruses. Meanwhile, Trump is planning mass firings at the CDC. Bird Flu, anyone? 
Once again, I feel the need to share Tim Miller’s latest at 
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