Posted: March 8, 2025 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: cat art, caturday, Donald Trump, Elon Musk | Tags: Betsy Arakawa, Doge, Gene Hackman, hantavirus, Oval Office Swedish ivy, Trump Cabinet meeting |
By Paul Kulsha
Good Afternoon!!
As usual, there is so much bad news out there that I don’t know where to begin. Everything is awful, but we have to go on with our lives amid the madness. Honestly, I think Trump is insane. His dementia is progressing. He is obsessed with punishing anyone in or out of the government who ever criticized him or offended him in any way. It’s really hard to believe this is happening in America. I have no idea what will happen next, but it does seem that his erratic behavior is beginning to get to some powerful people. It also looks like there is some trouble in paradise for Elon Musk. That will be the focus of most of this post.
Anyway, I’m just going to share some stories that hit home with me today, and then try to have a normal weekend while I still can.
Yesterday, we learned what led to the deaths of Gene Hackman and his wife Betsy Arakawa.
CNN: Gene Hackman’s wife was protective of his health for years. She died of hantavirus and days later, he was gone.
For years, actor Gene Hackman’s doting wife Betsy Arakawa would do whatever she could to help keep him healthy, whether it meant wearing a mask everywhere she went or encouraging him to stay fit by riding his bike or doing yoga on Zoom.
In late February, the couple was found dead in their New Mexico home, a heartrending end to the life they shared. Arakawa, 65, died of hantavirus and days later, Hackman, 95, died of heart disease, the New Mexico medical investigator’s office revealed Friday.
Authorities, working to lay out a timeline of what happened, said Hackman had Alzheimer’s disease and may have not realized he was alone in the days before he died.
Clues as to what the couple’s life looked like before their tragic deaths could be gleaned from their last interactions with loved ones. Close and longtime friends of the couple say they seemed to be in good health at their most recent encounter.
“Last time we saw them, they were alive and well,” Daniel Lenihan told CNN’s Erin Burnett last week. Barbara, Lenihan’s wife, said she had last seen Arakawa a few weeks ago at a home decor shop the two had opened together in Santa Fe….
Using evidence gathered from their home, authorities pieced together what they now believe happened, answering many of the questions behind what began as a mystery.
What probably happened:
Arakawa’s last known interactions were on February 11. She had a short email exchange with her massage therapist that morning and later visited a Sprouts Farmers Market, CVS pharmacy and a dog food store before returning to her gated community at around 5:15 p.m., Santa Fe Sheriff Adan Mendoza said Friday. After that, there was no other known activity or outgoing communication from her, the sheriff said.
“Numerous emails were unopened on her computer on February 11,” Mendoza said.
Arakawa died from hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, a rare disease that results from infection through contact with rodents, according to Dr. Heather Jarrell, chief medical examiner for the New Mexico Office of the Medical Investigator. Pills found scattered on the bathroom floor near Arakawa’s body were prescription thyroid medication and not related to her death, Jarrell said. Zinna, one of the animal-loving couple’s dogs, was found dead in a crate in the bathroom near her body.
“Based on the circumstances, it is reasonable to conclude that Ms. Arakawa passed away first,” Jarrell said.
What Hackman’s days looked like after his wife of more than 30 years left his side has yet to be fully pieced together, but the end came in a matter of days.
Hypertensive and atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease took the acting legend’s life, likely on February 18 when his pacemaker last recorded his heartbeat, according to Jarrell. The device recorded Hackman was experiencing atrial fibrillation, an irregular heart rhythm.
His body was discovered on the ground near the kitchen, with a walking cane and sunglasses next to him, on February 26.
Authorities said he was “in a very poor state of health.” Hackman had “advanced” Alzheimer’s disease, which was “a significant contributory factor” in his death, and it was possible the actor was “not aware” his wife had died several days earlier, Jarrell said.
Was Arakawa really his only caregiver? That must have been really difficult. Did these two have close family members? If that was my Dad, I would have been checking in every day. I don’t understand how it took so long for the bodies to be discovered.
Daydreams, by Laura Seeley
The Washington Post: Hantavirus killed Gene Hackman’s wife, Betsy Arakawa. What is it?
Betsy Arakawa, pianist and wife of actor Gene Hackman, died of hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, New Mexico chief medical examiner Heather Jarrell said Friday at a news conference.
Arakawa, 65, and Hackman, 95, were found dead in their Santa Fe home last month.
Hantavirus pulmonary syndrome is a rare illness spread by rodents that was first detected in humans in the United States about three decades ago. Here’s what to know….
Hantaviruses can develop into hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, a lung disease that kills about 38 percent of people who develop respiratory symptoms, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Symptoms typically start to show between one and eight weeks after first contact with the virus.
The disease presents with flu-like symptoms, such as fever, muscle aches and a cough, Jarrell said. About half of patients experience headaches, dizziness, chills and abdominal problems such as nausea, vomiting, diarrhea and stomach pain, according to the CDC.
As the disease progresses, it attacks capillaries in the lungs and can cause them to leak, damaging lung tissue, causing fluid buildup and severely affecting heart and lung function, according to the Mayo Clinic. Symptoms of this stage of the illness can include difficulty breathing and an irregular heart rate.
There is no specific treatment. Breathing support, including intubation, may help some patients….
Hantavirus disease is rare. There were 864 reported cases in the United States between 1993, when the CDC began tracking the illness, and 2022, the last available CDC data.
The states with the highest number of cases during that time were New Mexico (122), Colorado (119), Arizona (86) and California (78). The vast majority of cases originate west of the Mississippi River, according to the American Lung Association. In New Mexico, authorities have documented between one and seven cases in humans annually in recent years, state public health veterinarian Erin Phipps said Friday.
The disease is transmitted through rodent droppings, urine, or saliva. This whole episode is so sad. It kind of reminded me of what happened to William Holden–not that the deaths are similar, but Holden was a famous person who died alone in his home and wasn’t found for some time. He was very drunk and fell and hit his head on a table. His body was found by his building superintendent several days after his death. He was only 63.
Where is the famous Swedish Ivy?
Dakinikat shared this crazy Trump story from Mother Jones: The Country’s Most Famous Houseplant Is Missing. What Did Trump Do With It?
After the Washington Post ran a front-page photo of President Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu sitting in front of the Oval Office fireplace on February 4, careful reader Thomas M. Sneeringer fired off a letter to the editor. “It appears the fireplace mantel in the Oval Office has been subjected to President Donald Trump’s Midas touch,” he wrote. Sneeringer observed that the spray of Swedish ivy that has adorned the mantle for more than half a century had vanished, replaced by what he speculated might be… golf trophies?
By Ellen Haasen
“I was instantly offended and instantly understood how it happened,” Sneeringer told me in an interview. “It was just so consistent about what we know about Trump’s taste.”
He knew that the missing ivy was no ordinary plant. Irish ambassador Thomas J. Kiernan had given it to President John F. Kennedy as a gift in 1961, and ever sinceit has been a consistent backdrop to some of the most famous White House meetings. Back in 1984, during the Reagan administration, Kurt Anderson wrote a tribute to “The Plant” in Time magazine:
“The Oval Office may be the headiest place in America. When the President, sitting in his desk chair at the southern tip of the Oval, stares dead ahead to the far wall, he sees The Plant. Anywhere else it would be a robust but unremarkable Swedish ivy. But there on the marble mantelpiece, day after consequential day, it basks in the power and the glory. No matter who has been inaugurated since 1961, The Plant has always stayed…The Swedish ivy, given its potential for leaks, is an Administration team player first and last.”
The hardy plant’s scalloped green leaves are center stage in photos of Ronald Reagan meeting Gorbachev, George H.W. Bush schmoozing with Bruce Willis and Nelson Mandela, and Jimmy Carter conferring with Yitzhak Rabin or having lunch with his wife Rosalynn. Nelson Shanks painted Bill Clinton leaning next to the ivy in his official presidential portrait.
The plant survived Trump’s first term, and it was even there to bear witness to that awkward meeting between Trump and Joe Biden after the 2024 election.
But no more.
So where is it now? The White House did not respond to several inquiries about the plant’s whereabouts or the gold statues that replaced it.
Like so many things that Trump and his DOGE team are heedlessly destroying, the Oval Office ivy has a constituency that may not be immediately obvious to those wielding the chainsaws. With its own Instagram account and generations of progeny that even Elon Musk can’t rival, the humble houseplant enjoys a cult following.
I hope he didn’t just throw the plant in the trash. Trump really does destroy everything he touches.
Could Trump be tiring of Elon Musk pretending to be president?
Yesterday The New York Times published one of those White House insider stories by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan: Inside the Explosive Meeting Where Trump Officials Clashed With Elon Musk.
Marco Rubio was incensed. Here he was in the Cabinet Room of the White House, the secretary of state, seated beside the president and listening to a litany of attacks from the richest man in the world.
Seated diagonally opposite, across the elliptical mahogany table, Elon Musk was letting Mr. Rubio have it, accusing him of failing to slash his staff.
You have fired “nobody,” Mr. Musk told Mr. Rubio, then scornfully added that perhaps the only person he had fired was a staff member from Mr. Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.
Mr. Rubio had been privately furious with Mr. Musk for weeks, ever since his team effectively shuttered an entire agency that was supposedly under Mr. Rubio’s control: the United States Agency for International Development. But, in the extraordinary cabinet meeting on Thursday in front of President Trump and around 20 others — details of which have not been reported before — Mr. Rubio got his grievances off his chest.
Mr. Musk was not being truthful, Mr. Rubio said. What about the more than 1,500 State Department officials who took early retirement in buyouts? Didn’t they count as layoffs? He asked, sarcastically, whether Mr. Musk wanted him to rehire all those people just so he could make a show of firing them again. Then he laid out his detailed plans for reorganizing the State Department.
Mr. Musk was unimpressed. He told Mr. Rubio he was “good on TV,” with the clear subtext being that he was not good for much else. Throughout all of this, the president sat back in his chair, arms folded, as if he were watching a tennis match.
After the argument dragged on for an uncomfortable time, Mr. Trump finally intervened to defend Mr. Rubio as doing a “great job.” Mr. Rubio has a lot to deal with, the president said. He is very busy, he is always traveling and on TV, and he has an agency to run. So everyone just needs to work together.
The meeting was a potential turning point after the frenetic first weeks of Mr. Trump’s second term. It yielded the first significant indication that Mr. Trump was willing to put some limits on Mr. Musk, whose efforts have become the subject of several lawsuits and prompted concerns from Republican lawmakers, some of whom have complained directly to the president.
A bit more:
In a post on social media after the meeting, Mr. Trump said the next phase of his plan to cut the federal work force would be conducted with a “scalpel” rather than a “hatchet” — a clear reference to Mr. Musk’s scorched-earth approach.
Mr. Musk, who wore a suit and tie to Thursday’s meeting instead of his usual T-shirt after Mr. Trump publicly ribbed him about his sloppy appearance, defended himself by saying that he had three companies with a market cap of tens of billions of dollars, and that his results spoke for themselves
But he was soon clashing with members of the cabinet.
Just moments before the blowup with Mr. Rubio, Mr. Musk and the transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, went back and forth about the state of the Federal Aviation Administration’s equipment for tracking airplanes and what kind of fix was needed. Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, jumped in to support Mr. Musk.
Mr. Duffy said the young staff of Mr. Musk’s team was trying to lay off air traffic controllers. What am I supposed to do? Mr. Duffy said. I have multiple plane crashes to deal with now, and your people want me to fire air traffic controllers?
Jess Bidgood wrote a follow-up to the Haberman/Swan story, also at The New York Times:
Yesterday, President Trump did something he’s seemingly been loath to do in the first seven weeks of his new administration: He reined in Elon Musk.
My colleagues Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman have the details of the extraordinary cabinet meeting where everything unfolded, and you’re going to want to read every word….
What was clear was that some of the nation’s cabinet secretaries had hit their breaking point with Musk’s efforts to steamroll the federal government. And while Trump said he still supported Musk’s mission, he gave his secretaries something they wanted. As Jonathan and Maggie wrote:
“From now on, he said, the secretaries would be in charge; the Musk team would only advise.”
The encounter stood as the first indication that Trump is willing to put some limits on the billionaire, even if those limits would do little more than bring the realities of Musk’s wide-ranging role more in line with how the administration’s lawyers have described it in court.
John Cielukowski, Fat Cat Electric
But the limits, if they hold, could raise bigger questions about the role Musk will play in the government going forward — especially if his history in the business world is any guide.
Ryan Mac, a colleague of mine who covers big tech, has reported on Musk for a long time. Today, I asked him if Musk had ever been content with an adviser-style role, one in which he doesn’t run the show.
Ryan’s answer was simple: No.
Musk has never liked being one voice among many, Ryan explained. Vivek Ramaswamy, who was initially going to be Musk’s partner in leading the Department of Government Efficiency, is long gone. Musk doesn’t sit on a lot of boards. And throughout his corporate history, whenever he hasn’t initially had control over a company, he’s tended to seek it.
At Tesla, where he was an early investor, he became the chief executive. Before he bought Twitter and renamed it X, he almost joined the company’s board. Then he decided to acquire the company outright, fire its board of directors and executives and become the chief executive. (He later named a new C.E.O. but retains considerable control over the company.)
Not all of Musk’s bids for control have worked. Decades ago, for example, he was forced out as the chief executive of PayPal. His effort to get control of OpenAI — a nonprofit he co-founded in 2015 — failed, as did his more recent bid to buy it.
Musk, it seems, prefers to be the bride, not the bridesmaid. The question now is whether he’ll stick to Trump’s directive that he simply advise — and whether he’ll be content if he does.
Read more at the NYT.
Jonathan Lemire at The Atlantic: Is DOGE Losing Steam? The Department of Government Efficiency lives. But Donald Trump is reining in Elon Musk.
President Donald Trump’s shift on the Department of Government Efficiency began with a warning from an unlikely source.
Jesse Watters, a co-host of the Fox News hit show The Five, is usually a slick deliverer of MAGA talking points. But on February 19, Watters told a surprisingly emotional story about a friend working at the Pentagon who was poised to lose his job as part of the Trump administration’s sweeping cuts to the federal workforce. “I finally found one person I knew who got DOGE’d, and it hit me in the heart,” said Watters, who urged his Fox colleagues to “be a little bit less callous.”
Although Watters soon resumed championing DOGE, the moment went viral. Trump watched the clip and asked advisers if it was resonating with his base of supporters, according to one of three White House officials I spoke with for this story (they requested anonymity so they could discuss private conversations).
Over the ensuing weeks, the president grew unhappy with the television coverage of cuts affecting his voters, according to two of those officials, while the White House fielded calls from Cabinet members and Republican lawmakers frustrated by Elon Musk, the billionaire tech mogul empowered to slash the federal government. Some of Trump’s top advisers became worried about the political fallout from DOGE’s sweeping cuts, especially after seeing scenes of angry constituents yelling at GOP members of Congress in town halls.
All of this culminated in Trump taking his first steps to rein in Musk’s powers yesterday. The president called a closed-door meeting with Cabinet members and Musk, one that devolved into sharp exchanges between the DOGE head and several agency leaders. Afterward, Trump declared that his Cabinet would now “go first” in deciding whom in their departments to keep or fire.
DOGE lives. Trump has made clear that Musk still wields significant authority. And those close to Trump say that the president is still enamored with the idea of employing the world’s richest man, and still largely approves of the work that DOGE is doing to gut the federal bureaucracy. Some in the White House also believe that clarifying Musk’s purview might help the administration in a series of lawsuits alleging that Musk is illegally empowered.
But Trump’s first public effort to put a leash on Musk appears to mark the end of DOGE’s opening chapter, and a potential early turning point in Trump’s new administration.
Did you like this post? Please share it with your friends:
Posted: February 26, 2025 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: Donald Trump, Elon Musk | Tags: abuse of government employees, Aviation as canary in a coal mine, Cabinet meeting, Department of Veterans Affairs, Doge |
Good Afternoon!!
I woke up this morning to the stunning news that Elon Musk will be in attendance at Trump’s first cabinet meeting this morning. That is completely insane, but it’s the reality we are living in right now. I wonder if this will be similar to the first cabinet meeting in 2017? Remember how most of the attendees took turns praising Trump? This time, perhaps they’ll be forced to suck up to Musk.
CBS News: Trump to hold first Cabinet meeting at the White House, with Musk in attendance.
President Trump is holding his first Cabinet meeting at the White House on Wednesday, convening his top advisers who are now largely in place across the executive branch.
Billionaire and senior Trump adviser Elon Musk, who is not a member of the Cabinet, will also be present, the White House said. Mr. Trump posted on Truth Social Wednesday that “ALL CABINET MEMBERS ARE EXTREMELY HAPPY WITH ELON. The Media will see that at the Cabinet Meeting this morning!!!” Musk is a special government employee who has been tasked with informally overseeing the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.
The Cabinet meeting comes as Musk has started to run into opposition from other top officials in his push to slash federal spending and the government’s workforce. In recent days, he has said federal employees must respond to an email by describing five things they accomplished last week or face termination, sparking confusion among federal workers. Multiple Senate-confirmed heads of departments told their employees that they could ignore the demand, which was issued by the Office of Personnel Management.
Most, but not all, of Mr. Trump’s top nominees have now been confirmed by the Senate. A full Senate vote has yet to be scheduled for Rep. Elise Stefanik, his pick to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, as House Republicans cannot afford to lose a vote given their razor-thin majority. Linda McMahon, Mr. Trump’s pick to run the Department of Education, also has yet to be confirmed by the Senate. Mr. Trump has pledged to overhaul that department.
The president’s nomination of Lori Chavez-DeRemer for secretary of labor is still in limbo, with no vote scheduled yet. And the Senate has yet to confirm Jamieson Greer as U.S. trade representative, although the Senate advanced his nomination this week, as the president imposes hefty new tariffs on allies and adversaries alike.
Meanwhile, the White House claims that Musk actually has no control over DOGE; yesterday we learned that the mysterious person who is actually in charge of destroying our government is someone named Amy Gleason.
AP: Who is Amy Gleason, the person named DOGE’s acting administrator by the White House?
The acting administrator of the Department of Government Efficiency is a low-profile executive who has expertise in health care technology and worked in the first Trump administration.
The White House on Tuesday afternoon identified Amy Gleason as the acting leader of DOGE, which has been pushing agencies to fire employees, cancel contracts and make other budget cuts.
Although DOGE’s cuts have been championed by billionaire Elon Musk and his associates, the White House has insisted that Musk is overseeing the effort as a senior adviser to President Donald Trump, not a DOGE employee.
The identity of who was technically running DOGE had been a mystery, even though an executive order signed by Trump last month called for the appointment of an administrator to report to the White House. A government lawyer on Monday told a judge that he didn’t know who that person was, and White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt had declined to identify the person earlier Tuesday in a press briefing….
Gleason, 53, worked from 2018 through 2021 in the United States Digital Service, an agency that has been renamed the US DOGE Service, according to her LinkedIn profile. In that role, she worked with the White House on the federal response to the coronavirus pandemic.
She returned to the agency in January after Trump took office. DOGE and Gleason did not respond to an email seeking comment on Tuesday….
In the interim, she had been working as “chief product officer” at two small Nashville-based health care startups, Russell Street Ventures and Main Street Health, according to her LinkedIn profile.
Okay. But everyone knows that Musk is in charge.
The latest news and commentary on Musk’s activities:
The Washington Post: DOGE to cancel government contracts that help veterans, records show.
Veterans Affairs Secretary Douglas A. Collins took to social media on Tuesday to tout sweeping cuts to contracts that he said would save the department nearly $2 billion without touching core services.
But the 875 contracts on the chopping block help cover medical services, fund cancer programs, recruit doctors and provide burial services to veterans, according to internal VA documents.
“Make no mistake,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal (Connecticut), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee, said in a statement Tuesday responding to Collins’s announcement. “This is just another reckless cost-cutting decision that will harm veterans and tax payers for years to come.”
The cancellations mark the administration’s latest effort, led by Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service, to streamline a federal bureaucracy President Donald Trump has cast as bloated, corrupt and lazy — a campaign that has left no part of the 2.3 million civilian workforce untouched, not even the department tasked with supporting the nation’s veterans and their families. On Monday, following a first round of layoffs affecting 1,000 workers, VA announced another 1,400 dismissals of “non-mission critical positions.”
Collins announced the moves to cut contracts from a wood-paneled office in a video posted to X on Tuesday, looking into the camera with papers in hand to declare: “I got some big news for you.”
“I’ve been given this report. Says we were taking millions … in dollars in contracts to create things like PowerPoint slides and meeting minutes,” he said, telling employees they could learn to make their own presentations.
Collins also pledged an end to contracts that provide executive support, and coaching and training, but did not further detail terminations. He said the savings would be funneled back into veterans’ care: “Don’t let nameless sources, even senators and House members who want to scare you, and media, who want to perpetuate the line. We are taking care of the veterans,” he said.
Obviously, anything involving helping human beings is considered non-“mission critical” in Trump/Musk world.
The Washington Post: Elon Musk’s business empire is built on $38 billion in government funding.
Elon Musk and his cost-cutting U.S. DOGE Service team have been on a mission to trim government largesse. Yet Musk is one of the greatest beneficiaries of the taxpayers’ coffers.
Over the years, Musk and his businesses have received at least $38 billion in government contracts, loans, subsidies and tax credits, often at critical moments, a Washington Post analysis has found, helping seed the growth that has made him the world’s richest person.
The payments stretch back more than 20 years. Shortly after becoming CEO of a cash-strapped Tesla in 2008, Musk fought hard to secure a low-interest loan from the Energy Department, according to two people directly involved with the process,holding daily briefings with company executives about the paperwork and spending hours with a government loan officer.
When Tesla soon after realized it was missing a crucial Environmental Protection Agency certification it needed to qualify for the loan days before Christmas, Musk went straight to the top, urging then-EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson to intervene, according to one of thepeople. Both people spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.
Nearly two-thirds of the $38 billion in funds have been promised to Musk’s businesses in the past five years.
In 2024 alone, federal and local governments committed at least $6.3 billion to Musk’s companies, the highest total to date.
The total amount is probably larger: This analysis includes only publicly available contracts, omitting classified defense and intelligence work for the federal government.SpaceX has been developing spy satellites for the National Reconnaissance Office, the Pentagon’s spy satellite division, according to the Reuters news agency. The Wall Street Journal reported that contract was worth $1.8 billion, citing company documents.
The Post found nearly a dozen other local grants, reimbursements and tax credits where the specific amount of money is not public.
An additional 52 ongoing contracts with seven government agencies — including NASA, the Defense Department and the General Services Administration — are on track to potentially pay Musk’s companies an additional $11.8 billion over the next few years, according to The Post’s analysis.
Of course the fact that Musk has multiple government contracts demonstrates conflicts of interest that make it illegal for him to be any kind of government employee and be involved cutting government programs and firing government employees. But so what? We live in Trump/Musk world now.
Isaac Stanley-Becker and Jonathan Lemire at The Atlantic on Musk’s demands the federal workers account for their work activities or be terminated: ‘It’s a Psyop’: Inside Elon Musk’s Empty Ultimatum.
Shortly before 11 a.m. on Sunday, the 80,000 physicians, health scientists, disease detectives, and others tasked with safeguarding the nation’s health received instructions to respond to an email sent the day before asking them, “What did you do last week?”
The email arose from a Saturday dispatch issued by President Donald Trump on the social-media platform he owns, Truth Social. “ELON IS DOING A GREAT JOB, BUT I WOULD LIKE TO SEE HIM GET MORE AGGRESSIVE,” he wrote.
The response from Elon Musk arrived seven hours later on the social-media platform he owns, X. The billionaire Trump confidant leading the effort to slash the federal workforce wrote that afternoon that he was acting on Trump’s “instructions” and ensuring that “all federal employees will shortly receive an email requesting to understand what they got done last week.”
The result was a government-wide email directing federal workers to detail their accomplishments over the previous week, in five bullet points. Musk wrote on X: “Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.”
Government agencies responded in different ways to this e-mail, giving employees confusing messages. A number of bosses advised their employees not to respond at all.
By late afternoon on Monday, many federal health workers had left their offices with no new guidance, uncertain about whether to respond to the email and whether ignoring it would jeopardize their jobs.
They didn’t know that the federal government’s main personnel agency, which had sent Saturday’s government-wide email, had quietly instructed agencies midday Monday that a response was voluntary. Those instructions effectively rescinded Musk’s threats.
For Musk, the episode was a setback. For federal workers struggling to get their bearings, they told us, it was just one more reason to feel both fury and fear.
“This whole administration is a fucking train wreck,” a federal health official said….
Most of the early guidance not to reply to the Musk directive came from the country’s national-security agencies, including the CIA, the FBI, and the Department of Homeland Security. A senior official at NASA, which advised employees not to respond, called the request an “unprecedented ask and unprompted attack on our workforce” in a weekend email to employees that was described to us. A deputy commander at the Navy told people in his chain of command, “Please do NOT respond at this time,” accenting his order using bold red text.
The cascading series of contradictory guidance reflected the unusual balance of power between Trump and Musk, and the unpredictable consequences for millions of federal workers. “It’s a psyop,” said a senior official at the Department of Veterans Affairs, referring to a psychological operation, in this case intended to intimidate federal workers. “It’s a form of harassment. But there’s no one to complain to, because no one knows exactly where it’s coming from or who’s behind it.”
The entire episode was a clusterfuck, but supposedly Musk/DOGE are still trying to make it happen.
Meanwhile, there were signs that OPM was working to make parts of the Musk directive permanent, at least within the agency. In an email to employees Monday evening, OPM’s acting director wrote that he had asked the chief human capital officer to “operationalize this exercise” so that employees continue to “submit weekly accomplishment bullets.”
WTF?! In many cases we are talking about highly accomplished scientists, doctors, and other professionals–and they are supposed to justify their jobs with lists of 5 accomplishments every fucking week?
Pamela Herd and Don Moynihan at “Can We Still Govern?”: Musk’s Fraudulent Fraud Squad.
Fraud, waste, and abuse has become the rallying cry for Elon Musk’s dismantling of the federal government. During a recent Oval Office briefing about DOGE, Trump and Musk used the terms “fraud” and “fraudsters” a dozen times, claiming that their elimination of fraud could save up to $1 trillion dollars.
Musk’s social media is similarly laden with tales of fraud and abuse that his DOGE team has supposedly uncovered. Millions of dead people receiving fraudulent Social Security! “Illegals” living in high end hotel rooms paid for by FEMA! Corrupt USAID bureaucrats ripping off the government and enriching themselves! None of it is true.
Musk and Trump’s focus on fraud is nothing new. Fraud has always served as a powerful political trope, one that provides a rationale for cutting government. Accusations of fraud were used to discredit Black elected officials during Reconstruction. Ronald Reagan’s Welfare Queen was an especially effective trope directed against poverty-based policies. A recent poll suggests that 70% of Americans believe government expenditures are filled with waste, fraud, and inefficiency….
First, Musk’s fake fraud claims are different from the past because he has built, and now is able to leverage, a propaganda machine to feed the fraud narrative. Ronald Reagan was an extraordinarily effective communicator, but Musk makes him look like an amateur. Musk can use DOGE to generate false claims about fraud, and how much money DOGE can save by tackling it. He then pushes those claims on his social media platform. The President and right-wing media obligingly repeat the claims. It is an integrated production function that converts conspiracy theories into government policy, and then conventional wisdom in MAGAland.
Second, as we describe below, the scale and scope of the programs they’re targeting are fundamentally different from the past. It’s not just to gut programs that benefit marginalized populations. They’re targeting a broad swath of government programs, including popular policies that benefit most Americans, and using the fraud trope to justify extreme and illegal actions, like shutting down entire agencies. This fits with a worldview that government is fundamentally corrupt, and must be captured and radically refashioned.
Third, the motivation is not really about shrinking government, rather it’s about state capture. The strategy is simple. Claim there’s fraud, dismantle the institutions that prevent fraud, and then capture public dollars for yourself. As Musk himself recently noted: “it’s like, really easy to take advantage of the federal government. Very easy.” He should know. His companies have received at least $38 billion from government subsidies, loans and contracts. Their value, and his personal net worth, have ballooned since the election.
And here is the key point: Musk is the one committing an unprecedented fraud on the American people, conning it out of a functional government. He is systematically lying, claiming that there is widespread fraud and abuse, then leveraging those lies to remake government in ways that benefit the broligarchy.
Please read the rest at the Substack link.
James Fallows at his Breaking the News: ‘They Were Careless People’: Taking Moments to Tear Down What Has Taken Lifetimes to Create.
Fallows begins with a photo of Queens College, Oxford and the caption:
The plush lawn of The Queen’s College, Oxford. As the corny joke goes, a visiting American asks, “How do you get your lawn to look like that?” The British groundskeeper replies, “It’s easy. Just sow it, roll it, mow it—and do that for 400 years.” But what has taken centuries to perfect could be torn up in minutes with a backhoe. That’s essentially what’s happening to America’s carefully built ‘soft infrastructure’ now. Here’s another example from the aviation world.
Last week the eminent China scholar Orville Schell likened this moment’s all-fronts Trump-Musk disruption of American institutions to the early years of the catastrophic Cultural Revolution under Chairman Mao. “Trump may lack Mao’s skills as a writer and theorist,” Schell wrote, “but he possesses the same animal instinct to confound opponents and maintain authority by being unpredictable to the point of madness”:
“Mao, who would have welcomed the catastrophe now unfolding in America, must be looking down from his Marxist-Leninist heaven with a smile, as the East wind may finally be prevailing over the West wind – a dream for which he had long hoped.”
It is impossible to keep up with the barrage of daily shocks and dislocations. Of course this is by design. The nonstop flow of outrages also makes it easier for members of the quisling Congress to avoid commenting on any of them in particular—for instance, the US siding with Russia and North Korea in a major UN vote this week, and siding against all its traditional allies. By tomorrow, reporters will have something else to ask about.
So let me focus on one dull-sounding development that sooner or later will be killing people. Yes, I could be talking about changes in Medicaid or in vaccine coverage or in cancer research, or about the USAID shutdowns that have already left many people dead overseas. Or lots more.
But instead I’m talking about the sudden attack on part of the invisible infrastructure that has kept air travelers so safe in the skies. Reminder: before last month’s helicopter-airliner collision over the Potomac, the US had gone nearly 16 years without a major airline crash. Through those years, US airlines conducted well over 10 billion passenger-journeys. A total of two people died in US airline accidents through that time. [UPDATE: Just now, as I put up this post, I see news of a potentially catastrophic close-call this morning at Chicago’s Midway airport. More on that as extra info comes in.]
Certain animals—frequently amphibians—are seen as indicators of the larger health of an ecosystem. If they’re doing OK, probably so is the system as a whole.
Certain industrial and social structures can have a marker-species function. If a society can sustain them, it means that many other institutions and arrangements must be functioning too. Any country can operate crude steel smelters or grow plantation crops. But to have an advanced biotech industry, or a globally successful university system, or advanced info-tech, a country needs a lot of other physical and social infrastructure.
Aviation, especially aircraft-making, is another of these industrial marker-species. There are only a handful of viable aircraft producers in the world. That’s not a coincidence: Success in this realm is so difficult, and the cost of the smallest error can be so high. To have an Airbus company—or a Boeing in its heyday, or a smaller Embraer or Bombardier—you have to have a lot of other things in working order. After living in China, I wrote a book called China Airborne. Its premise was that China’s decades-long quest—still unsuccessful—to join Airbus and Boeing as a global aerospace power was a microcosm of its strengths and limitations in many other realms.
Why would this be? It is again because of aviation’s marker-species role. To have a successful aircraft industry you need so many other things:
Read the rest at the Substack link. I’ve already quoted too much.
More stories of interest:
The Bulwark: It IS Happening Here. Trump’s autocratic project isn’t some threat on the horizon. It’s our current moment.
The Guardian: Bezos directs Washington Post opinion pages to promote ‘personal liberties and free markets.’
The Guardian: Rachel Maddow staff to be let go as part of MSNBC overhaul.
CBS Boston: American Airlines flight from Boston aborts landing at D.C. airport to avoid departing plane.
The New York Times: Two Planes, in Washington and Chicago, Abort Landings to Avoid Collisions.
Alexander J. Motyl at The Hill: Was 40-year-old Trump recruited by the KGB?
Peter Baker at The New York Times: Under Trump, America’s New Friends: Russia, North Korea and Belarus.
Jill Filopovic at The Atlantic: The Adolescent Style in American Politics.
Amanda Marcotte at Salon: “A woman is like a child”: MAGA quickly turns its sights on stripping Republican women of power.
Devan Cole at CNN: For Trump, 3 court losses in 90 minutes.
That’s all I have for today. Take care everyone!
Did you like this post? Please share it with your friends:
Posted: February 19, 2025 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: Donald Trump, Elon Musk | Tags: Canada, Democrats, Doge, Fall of empires, Richard Nixon, Russia, Sadism, State Department, Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyy |
Good Afternoon!!
My natural optimism is beginning to wear thin. Our country is on a fast track to autocracy, and our Congressional “leaders” don’t seem to be doing much to slow it down. I’m afraid that Trump and Musk will actually try to steal the money from Social Security and Medicare that Americans have contributed through our payroll taxes. I know if it happens, there will be a massive pushback from the American people, but will Democrats actually begin to fight back then? I’m not sure.
I know some elected Democrats are working hard to slow down what’s happening, but so far their actions aren’t visible enough. They don’t seem to be working as a group to educate the public about what is happening to our country. Meanwhile, Trump and Musk are blundering their way through the government, shutting down vital programs and firing employees indiscriminately. The courts are our only hope, and they move very slowly.
There is so much awful stuff happening, and there are endless stories I could share about it; so I’ll just share the ones that hit me hardest this morning.
Yesterday, Trump had the nerve to claim that Ukraine started the war with Russia.
CNN: Zelensky says Trump lives in ‘disinformation space’
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky accused Donald Trump of repeating disinformation, a day after the US president
falsely accused Ukraine of starting the war with Russia.
Zelensky’s outspoken comments were part of what is shaping up to be far the most public exchange of accusations between Kyiv and Washington since the full-scale war started nearly three years ago.
Speaking to reporters in Kyiv, Zelensky pushed back on several unfounded claims the US president made on Tuesday, while reinforcing Ukraine’s position that a deal to end the war needed its involvement.
“Unfortunately, President Trump – I have great respect for him as a leader of a nation that we have great respect for, the American people who always support us – unfortunately lives in this disinformation space,” Zelensky said.
Trump has made it clear he wants the war to end as soon as possible – even if it means further territorial losses for Ukraine. And much to the horror of Kyiv and its allies, Trump has at times adopted Kremlin’s narrative and blamed Ukraine and NATO for the conflict, even saying that Ukraine “may be Russian some day.”
But Trump’s boosting of Russia goes well beyond rhetoric. The president raised many eyebrows last week when opting to hold a 90-minute phone call with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin before speaking to Zelensky.
Then on Tuesday, US and Russian officials held high-level talks on ending the war in Ukraine in the Saudi capital of Riyadh, excluding Kyiv from the meeting.
Putin praised this new US attitude towards his country. Speaking about the talks in Riyadh, Putin said he was told the atmosphere was “friendly.”
“There were completely different people on the American side, who were open to the negotiation process without any bias, without any condemnation of what had been done in the past,” Putin added.
The US and Russia agreed in Riyadh to appoint high-level teams to negotiate the end of the war and said
they were working to reestablish diplomatic channels.
Trump wants to further dumb down the State Department.
The Washington Post: State Dept. orders cancellation of news subscriptions around the world.
The State Department has ordered the cancellation of all news subscriptions deemed “non-mission critical,” according to internal email guidance viewed by The Washington Post. The move aligns with the Trump administration’s crackdown on media companies that count the U.S. government as paying customers.
A Feb. 11 memo sent to embassies and consulates in Europe described the mandate as part of an effort to reduce spending. The email read, in part, “Considering this priority, posts are asked to immediately place Stop Work Orders on all non-mission critical contracts/purchase orders for media subscriptions (publications, periodicals, and newspaper subscriptions) that are not academic or professional journals.”
The mandate applies globally,to hundreds of U.S. embassies and consulates, according to a State Department official who spoke with The Post on Tuesday on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters. Embassy security teams rely on news coverage to prepare for diplomatic travel in conflict zones. Cancellation of subscriptions — including to local news outlets — could hinder their assessment of threats, the official said….
A Feb. 14 memo directed procurement teams at embassies and consulates to prioritize the termination of contracts with six news organizations in particular: the Economist, the New York Times, Politico, Bloomberg News, the Associated Press and Reuters.
State Department personnel were told that they could submit a request to maintain a news subscription but that it “must be done within 1 sentence.” The guidance laid out possible justifications — if the subscription affects the safety of U.S. personnel or facilities, or if it is required by treaty or law, or if it yields an affirmative answer to one of the following questions: “Does it make America safer? Does it make America stronger? Does it make America more prosperous?”
A State Department employee who received the memos, and shared them with The Post, expressed concern that terminating news subscriptions — particularly to local outlets —would deprive embassies and consulates of information necessary to complete their mission. “This will endanger American lives overseas because we are being cut off from news sources that are needed on a daily basis,” said the employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to comment to the press.
Opinion pieces on Trump-Musk-DOGE’s destruction of our government.
Ryan Cooper at The American Prospect: Musk and Trump Are Causing the Dumbest Imperial Collapse in History. Empires have fallen before. But it’s never been this purely idiotic.
A month into the second Trump administration, I think it is fair to conclude that the American empire in its current form is collapsing. The post-1945 global order, with the United States at its apex, is no more. America itself is not going anywhere—at least not yet—but the foundation of the empire, namely its structure of alliances and partnerships, has been dealt irreparable damage. Western Europe, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, and especially Canada now view America with suspicion if not outright hostility, and they are right to do so.
Now, the history of empires is the story of their rise and inevitable fall. As Herodotus wrote about Greek city-states, “most of those which were great once are small today; and those which used to be small were great in my own time.” But nobody has matched this current downfall for sheer egregious stupidity.
Indeed, it’s hard to think of even a single competitor for that title. There have been, to be sure, many idiotic imperial leaders throughout history who helped blow up their empires through bungling and mistakes. Tsar Nicholas II was an incompetent boob whose closest adviser was a charlatan mystic, and he personally led the failed military effort during the First World War that eventually destroyed his regime. Yet Russia bore only a small share of the blame for starting the war in the first place, and other much better-governed empires like Germany and Austria-Hungary, which shared much of that blame, also collapsed because of the war’s strains.
The eventual collapse of the Western Roman Empire began when a large Roman army was heavily defeated by Goths, who had adopted many Roman military tactics. The Eastern European Empire persisted for another thousand years, but it too eventually collapsed following military defeat at the hands of the Ottomans.
That is how empires tend to fall. Either they are defeated in battle, and are conquered or collapse, or they suffer a succession crisis and fall apart (both often enabled by corruption and mismanagement). Or they are simply eclipsed by another power, as happened when the British Empire fell short and the U.S. succeeded it.
What Trump inherited and what he has done so far:
President Trump, by contrast, was handed an empire in splendid condition. The core alliance of NATO was stronger than it had been in decades, as Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine pushed Sweden and Finland to join. Thanks to President Biden’s policies, the American economy was the envy of the world, with a post-pandemic recovery that outstripped any peer nation. The dollar was still by far the most important reserve currency, and the U.S. still had control over global financial pipelines.
No serious threats were on the horizon, either. In its war with Ukraine, Russia has burned through most of its gigantic stockpile of Soviet-era military hardware, taken perhaps 800,000 casualties, and put its economy under terrific pressure. China, while the only peer competitor the U.S. has faced since 1991, is saddled with deep economic difficulties and looking down the barrel of population collapse.
But Trump and Musk are blowing America’s imperial foundations to kingdom come. Take USAID, which as the largest distributor of humanitarian aid in the world, has both done a tremendous amount of good work and also served as a carrot for America’s global predominance—until now. The agency has been all but dismantled, unleashing havoc all over the globe. HIV and drug-resistant tuberculosis are now spreading unchecked in many countries reliant on USAID medication, both proving America cannot be trusted and threatening outbreaks of those diseases in the U.S. itself.
Both Trump and Musk have attacked NATO; Trump has reportedly said he wants to withdraw from the alliance, while Musk has said it “needs an overhaul” and he wonders why it “continued to exist.” More importantly, Trump has repeatedly suggested annexing Canada, a NATO member. The enormous implications of this threat are clearly not getting through to many American elites. At The New York Times, Peter Baker has a column blithely speculating about which way Canadians might vote should they be annexed, concluding that Democrats would likely benefit.
But this is not a political parlor game for Canadians. They are incandescently furious, and they are right to be. Canada stood shoulder to shoulder by America through the great bloodbaths of the 20th century. Since then, it has been a quietly loyal neighbor, making not a peep of trouble along the world’s longest land border, and providing a vast supply of energy, mineral, timber, and other exports to fuel the American economy. And this is the thanks they get: A senile fascist American president who suggests a war of conquest—and make no mistake, that is what it would take—because he wants to make America look big but doesn’t understand how the Mercator projection exaggerates the size of northern land masses—which, it’s been reported, is one reason for his coveting Greenland, too.
Read the rest at the link above.
Liz Dye at Public Notice: Unelected billionaire breaks laws to “restore” democracy.
“He who saves his Country does not violate any Law,” President Trump posted last week on his social media platform.
The quote was widely attributed to French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, and Trump, who fancies himself one of history’s great leaders, leaned into the monarchical fantasy. And lest there was any confusion, he explicitly linked it to a story about his administration defying a court order with respect to the federal budget.
The quote is an unmistakable echo of Richard Nixon, who insisted in 1977 that “when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.”
That wasn’t true for Nixon, of course, who by then had been out of office for three years. But last year the Supreme Court gutted the rulings that reined in Nixon, and now Trump and Elon Musk are running the government as if they are the only law in the land. They insist they are “saving” the country by burning down its institutions, and they claim a mandate of the people to do it….
When it comes to Twitter, Elon Musk is the “voice of god.” (And not for nothing, but he literally sued “the people” when they exercised their right to criticize him or not speak on his platform.)
But Musk and Trump make a similar false equivalency when it comes to governing, insisting that the results in November empower them to do whatever they like, law be damned.
“The beauty is that we won by so much. The mandate was massive,” Trump told Time Magazine in December, adding that “America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate.”
In reality, Trump won by less than 1.5 percent and took less than 50 percent of all votes cast. His popular vote margin was one-third as large as Biden’s and the second-narrowest in 60 years. There was no “mandate,” let alone a “massive” one.
And yet Trump and Musk govern as if they won an overwhelming majority, and this gives them the right to ignore the law….
At the recent Oval Office press conference where Musk played with his toddler son, the saucer-eyed vizier delivered a manic defense of the DOGE committee’s “hostile takeover of the government.” (Video after the transcript.)
Well, first of all, you couldn’t ask for a stronger mandate from the public. The public voted. We have a majority of the public vote voting for President Trump. We won the House, we won the Senate. The people voted for major government reform. There should be no doubt about that. That was on the campaign. The President spoke about that at every rally. The people voted for major government reform, and that’s what people are going to get. They’re going to get what they voted for. And a lot of times people that don’t get what they voted for, but in this presidency, they are going to get what they voted for. And that’s what democracy is all about.
In reality, Trump announced the DOGE committee after he won in November, promising that Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy (remember him?) would “provide advice and guidance from outside of Government, and will partner with the White House and Office of Management & Budget to drive large scale structural reform, and create an entrepreneurial approach to Government never seen before.” He only brought DOGE inside the government by executive order on January 20.
Trump did not run on a promise to unleash an unelected billionaire to slash-and-burn through the government, firing tens of thousands of employees and arbitrarily canceling contracts and federal programs. And even if he had, that still wouldn’t make it legal….
The United States is a constitutional democracy. We must all abide by the Constitution, and we don’t get to override its provisions by popular referendum.
At least we were a constitutional democracy. Read the rest at Public Notice.
Andrew Egger at The Bulwark: Sadism for Its Own Sake.
The Trump White House is itching to ramp up its cartoonishly cruel immigration policy to industrial scale. But they’re finding the sledding frustratingly slow.
The Economist noted this week that “so far, mass deportation has been more rhetoric than reality.” Daily ICE arrests are just a tick up from the Biden years—from a few hundred a day to just over a thousand. “ICE stopped releasing a daily arrests number in early February,” the Economist notes, “which may be because the agency would rather nobody kept count.”
If you’re Trump, this is no good. He’d promised instant gratification: “the largest deportation operation in history,” beginning on Day One of his presidency. His fans, longing to see footage of migrants getting hustled into ICE vans by the thousands across the country, might be getting a little twitchy.
So the administration is taking a new tack: emphasizing quality over quantity. The White House is spotlighting the leering cruelty with which they carry out the deportations that are happening. Deporting former designees of temporary protected status back to countries where they face prosecution: check. Deporting migrants to countries they’ve never even visited: check. Holding detainees at Guantanamo Bay: check.
And yesterday, releasing the single most viscerally disturbing piece of deportation propaganda to date: A short video, posted to the official White House X account, titled “ASMR: Illegal Alien Deportation Flight.”
ASMR videos, which became popular on YouTube in the 2010s, use specific audio cues to stimulate feelings of relaxation and euphoria in the viewer. The White House video perversely mimics the style: lovingly lingering on the revving engine of an airplane waiting to take off; the jingling of chains as they are laid out in rows on the ground, then used to shackle deportees’ arms behind their backs; the shuffling of chained feet up into the plane. No faces are ever seen. The idea is not just that viewers should approve of the footage. It invites them to take sensual pleasure from it.
Plenty of Trump’s people were happy to oblige. The tweet quickly induced hooting replies—memes of American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman blissfully vibing on his headphones in a MAGA hat, exhortations to “let the clanging bar sounds of Guantanamo Bay whisk you away to your happy place,” speculation about when “some of our corrupt politicians” would be going the same way.
Sam Stein at The Bulwark: The DOGE Brain Drain Has Begun. It’s not just jobs cut and agencies gutted. It’s the talent that will be lost for generations to come.
THREE DAYS AFTER the National Institutes of Health abruptly announced it would place a strict, low cap on the money it sends to universities and research institutions for the administrative costs of scientific research, the University of Iowa made an abrupt announcement of its own.
The school’s Office of the Vice President for Research declared that going forward, it would pause “the hiring of new Graduate Research Assistants unless they are already budgeted as a direct cost on a funded project.”
The announcement sent shockwaves through parts of academia, providing an alarming demonstration of the impact the NIH cap would have on aspiring scientists. “We were pretty stunned,” the chair of the biochemistry and molecular biology department at a top university told The Bulwark.
NIH’s so-called “indirect cost” cap has since been paused by the courts. And a University of Iowa spokesperson confirmed they’ve put a pause on their policy too. But the spokesman also noted that they were “actively monitoring the developments happening at the federal government level.”
And on that front, they are hardly alone. The prospect that the cap will return, combined with the dramatic cuts that the Trump administration is making at every scientific agency, has generated chaos and uncertainty in the scientific community. The aforementioned department chair noted that his own school had decided to stop bringing on any new faculty. A cellular biology professor at a separate, prominent state university said that they’d reduced the number of graduate school offers by 75 percent and were weighing whether to continue a program to provide summer research opportunities for undergraduate students from smaller colleges, including HBCUs.
“One might ask, ‘Why are they trying to destroy the science training pipeline?’” that professor said. “To what end?”
In the first month of the second Trump administration, the world’s richest man—underinformed, chronically online, and staffed by a coterie of teenaged and twentysomething former engineering interns—has been moving at warp speed to reshape, reduce, and even dismantle the United States government. But while Musk’s rampage has been feverishly covered, the scope of its impact remains largely underappreciated. Experts say it can’t be measured in weeks or months or even in government services affected. Rather, it will be felt over the span of decades and defined in metrics like intellectual talent lost.
Read the rest at The Bulwark.
Why aren’t the Democrats screaming bloody murder? Dave Zirin at the Nation: Why Democrats Won’t Throw a Real Punch?
A relative of mine—an older gent with a penchant for salty language—yelled over the phone at me in frustration, “Where are the damn cojones in the Democratic Party?”
His use of language aside, this argument—that the Democrats are not raising nearly enough hell as Apartheid’s Chestburster, Elon Musk, vivisects the government from the inside—is all over the liberal left. The phrase going around is, “The Democrats have brought a lectern to a social media war.” Masses of enraged, terrified people are looking at the analog, slow-motion leadership of Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer and the zero-calorie rhetoric of House leader Hakeem Jeffries and want them replaced by people who know how to fight. As The Nation has reported, when Democratic politicians have shown up to protests, people aren’t cheering their presence. They are howling at them to do more.
To be clear, people aren’t criticizing the efforts of individual Democrats trying to expose this deadly grand theft taking place in plain sight. The cry is, “Why aren’t the Democrats as unified and ruthless toward their enemies as Republicans?”
Why aren’t they taking the fired federal workers who are sharing their heartbreaking stories—the ones that Musk says were being paid to do nothing—and making them famous? The cancer researcher on the verge of a breakthrough? The park ranger in Yosemite who won’t be there to conduct rescues and save lives? The air traffic controller who can speak to the connection between understaffing and recent plane crashes? Is it even safe to fly in Trump’s America?
The Democrats should be amplifying these folks—writing op-eds about them, refusing to go on camera without sharing their spotlight, pressuring their IG influencers to raise them up—but instead, we learn their stories from Reddit. As Moira Donegan wrote in The Guardian, “Why are the Democrats so spineless?” The conventional wisdom is that they simply “don’t know how” to wage a social media and public-relations attack that can, to use one blaring example, define people like JD Vance as a Nazi-curious Manchurian Candidate.
Read what Zirin thinks about it at The Nation.
News on the ongoing destruction:
SV Date at HuffPost: Donald Trump Has Already Spent $10.7 Million Of Taxpayer Money Playing Golf.
NBC News: USDA says it accidentally fired officials working on bird flu and is now trying to rehire them.
The New York Times: DOGE Claimed It Saved $8 Billion in One Contract. It Was Actually $8 Million.
Politico: Elon Musk looks beyond Washington toward Wisconsin.
Zeteo: Musk and DOGE Might Soon Have Access to the Most Lucrative Defense-Contract Database of All.
Washingtonian: Trump’s Kennedy Center Cancels Pride Concert That Would Have Featured Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington.
The New York Times: Struggle Over Americans’ Personal Data Plays Out Across the Government.
Politico: Trump signs order to claim power over independent agencies.
Amanda Marcotte: RFK ‘s plan to make America healthy again? Round up people with mental health conditions in camps.
Wired: The 50-Year-Old Law That Could Stop DOGE in Its Tracks—Maybe.
Did you like this post? Please share it with your friends:
Posted: February 15, 2025 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: cat art, caturday, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, just because | Tags: Antidepressants, Department of Energy, Doge, Government by the Stupid, Health, IRS, National Nuclear Security Administration, Robert Kennedy Jr |
Good Afternoon!!
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.
Here’s the latest idiocy from our stupid rulers.
Rene Marsh and Ella Nilsen at CNN: Trump officials fired nuclear staff not realizing they oversee the country’s weapons stockpile, sources say.
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.
NBC News: Trump administration wants to un-fire some nuclear safety workers but can’t figure out how to reach them.
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.
Politico: Stunned federal workers brace for the real-world repercussions of Trump’s purges.
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.
Greg Sargent at The New Republic: Trump-Musk Scandal at USAID Takes Unnerving Turn With Vile Leaked Memo.
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 Post reports 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 Times reports, 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 Guardian: Musk’s takeover of US health agencies raises pandemic threat, experts warn.
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.
Kiera Butler at Mother Jones: RFK Jr. Is Already Taking Aim at Antidepressants.
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.
Musk and his Doge bros hit the IRS this week.
Hunter Walker at Talking Points Memo: Inside The ‘Bizarre’ Meeting Where DOGE Requested ‘Extensive System Access’ At IRS.
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 have reported 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 been identified 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.
Did you like this post? Please share it with your friends:
peej
Carissa
bostonboomer
dakinikat
ecocatwoman
mablue2
Mama Lopez
peggysue22
quixote
skydancingguestblogger
Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)
Sky Dancing 
Recent Comments