The Conversation -- February 18, 2025
Apparently, Donald Trump is bored with the Big Lie, and is now going with a Bigger One: ~~~
~~~ Zoe Richards of NBC News: “... Donald Trump suggested Tuesday that Ukraine was responsible for Russia's invasion of the country three years ago, arguing Kyiv could have made a deal to avoid the conflict. 'You should have never started it,' Trump said of Ukraine while criticizing President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who had expressed concern that his country was not included in talks between the U.S. and Russia in Saudi Arabia. 'I think I have the power to end this war, and I think it's going very well. But today I heard, “Oh, well, we weren't invited.” Well, you've been there for three years," Trump told reporters at his Mar-a-Lago resort. 'You should have never started it. You could have made a deal.'” ~~~
~~~ Eli Stokols of Politico: “...Donald Trump mocked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as a poor negotiator and “grossly incompetent” Tuesday, as tensions continued to rise over the administration’s direct talks with Russia about ending the war it launched nearly three years ago. The comments come amid criticism from European allies and many American intelligence experts that Ukraine and European nations invested in Ukraine’s defense had been excluded from negotiations that began early Tuesday between U.S. and Russian officials in Saudi Arabia.”
Lindsay Whitehurst of the AP: “A federal judge refused Tuesday to immediately block billionaire Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency from accessing government data systems or participating in worker layoffs. U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan found that there are legitimate questions about Musk’s authority, but said there isn’t evidence of the kind of grave legal harm that would justify a temporary restraining order. The decision came in a lawsuit filed by 14 Democratic states challenging DOGE’s authority to access sensitive government data. The attorneys general argued that Musk is wielding the kind of power that the Constitution says can only be held by those who are elected or confirmed by the Senate. The Trump administration, for its part, has maintained that layoffs are coming from agency heads, and asserted that despite his public cheering of the effort Musk isn’t directly running DOGE’s day-to-day operations himself.... [Chutkan wrote that the states'] questions about Musk’s apparent 'unchecked authority' and lack of Congressional oversight for DOGE are legitimate and they may be able to successfully argue them later.”
Carol Leonnig & Spencer Hsu of the Washington Post: “The head of the criminal division in the U.S. attorney’s office in D.C. resigned Tuesday morning after declining to comply with an urgent Trump administration demand to freeze the assets of a multibillion-dollar Biden administration environmental grant initiative and launch a criminal investigation, according to two sources familiar with the matter and the official’s resignation letter. Veteran prosecutor Denise Cheung’s resignation came in response to a Justice Department effort to assist ... Donald Trump’s new head of the Environmental Protection Agency, who said last week that he would try to rescind $20 billion in grants awarded by the Biden administration for climate and clean energy projects, according to two people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to discuss it publicly. Cheung wrote in her resignation letter that while she and the FBI were ready to ask a bank to freeze the assets immediately, she refused a last-minute order from interim U.S. Attorney Edward R. Martin Jr. to open what she called an unfounded investigation sought by the office of acting Deputy Attorney General Emil S. Bove, according to a resignation letter obtained by The Washington Post.” Politico's report is here.
Marie: Is our children learning? I just called an American company which is named Bank of America, and I got an American person living in Houston, Texas, which is still an American state, and he spoke standard English with a standard American accent. When I told him I lived in New Hampshire, this American person asked if that was anywhere near Kentucky. And I was wondering how this country could be so screwed. (After he settled my business issue, I told him that he was an American citizen and it was his duty to know his county, and he needed to go home and in his spare time learn where every state in his country was located.) Yeesh!
Marie: It almost defies the laws of probability that so few White House reporters play Stump Trump, even though that is, in theory, their job. But wouldn't it be fun to see a reporter ask Trump a question framed around Calvin's assumption here? And then the reporter would follow up if Trump blows her off with "What a stupid question!" And then we could watch Trump's head explode. So then the staff, in deference to squeamish sensibilities, would have to replace Trump's missing head with whatever cover-up they might find nearby: like a pointy white hood. Thanks to RAS for the link.
Marie: I guess it isn't bad enough that in fear of diversity initiatives, the Muskrats are firing federal employees whose jobs it is to protect civil rights (see Natanson/Dehghanpoor story linked below). Now a Trump official is suggesting it is illegal for members of Congress to even inform constituents of their civil rights: ~~~
~~~ Ailia Zehra of the Hill: Donald “Trump’s 'border czar' Tom Homan said Monday he asked the Department of Justice (DOJ) whether Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (D-N.Y.) efforts to educate people about their rights while facing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is impeding the agency’s operations. Speaking on Fox News, Homan said he finds it disturbing that 'any member of Congress wants to educate people how they evade law enforcement.'... When the Fox News host asked him if he thought Ocasio-Cortez was breaking the law, Homan said he would leave that question to the DOJ.” Thanks to RAS for the link. ~~~
~~~ Marie: I'm no lawyer. But it seems to me that what Ocasio-Cortez is doing is similar to what a cop does when s/he -- as is required by U.S. law (and the Constitution) -- reads an arrestee his or her Miranda rights. Both AOC and the cop may prevent a person who in fact is guilty of a crime from incriminating himself. It's an integral part of the American system of justice. Read yer Bill o' Rights, Tom.
Well, you silly old folks. Too bad you're about to be scammed. We of the FBI were going to warn you so maybe you could keep your life savings, but no can do. Meeting cancelled. The president* sez faggedaboudit. Thanks to RAS for the link. MB: When you think about it, the fewer of these types of community outreach presentations there are, the better, as far as Trump is concerned. I mean, how is going to scam people if the FBI keeps warning people off his grifts?
Annals of "Journalism," Ctd. Evan Hurst, in a morning round-up at Wonkette seems a tad unimpressed with Peter Baker's thesis about how "Making [Canada] a state ... would almost surely cost Republicans control of the House, trim their majority in the Senate and make it harder for them to win the White House in future elections." Hurst writes, "Much of the internet is currently about how the New York Times’s Peter Baker is a bad journalist and doesn’t understand journalism and thinks this is all a fucking game and is no better than a Nazi collaborator the way he normalizes Donald Trump. But sure, Peter, WHAT IF WE JUST SEIZED CANADA? Is there a BOTH SIDES to consider here? Fuck you." MB: In fairness to Baker, he does preface his "analysis" with a disclaimer: "Few in Washington take the prospect all that seriously, of course." As for me, I would not mind being part of Canada. In fact, had I been living in Canada all my life, I would be able to speak French, albeit with a bad Canadian accent (or as some French would argue, Canadian dialect).
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Minho Kim, et al., of the New York Times: “Thousands of protesters opposing broad swaths of ... [Donald] Trump’s agenda took to the streets across the United States on Monday, calling Mr. Trump a 'king' on Presidents’ Day for his efforts to terminate thousands of federal workers and to fire prosecutors and independent watchdogs within the federal government. On Saturday, Mr. Trump suggested on social media that he would not heed concerns that his sweeping actions could be breaking laws, posting a riff on a phrase often attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte: 'He who saves his country does not violate any law.' 'No king, no crown, we will not back down,' chanted those who gathered a few hundred feet from the U.S. Capitol on the National Mall in Washington.... The major group organizing the protest identified itself as the 50501 movement, a grass-roots effort to push back against what it views as Mr. Trump’s second-term 'overreach' in reshaping the government.” MB: And you-all put “overreach” in quotation marks because???
Marie: After reading the following report, I'm beginning to think I've midjudged the Musk/Trump presidency*. Rather than being anything nearly approximating a joint administration, what Trump has pioneered is the Rent-a-Presidency. In the first-ever instance of a U.S. Rent-a-Presidency deal, Trump has sold the right to run a huge government into the ground for the low, low price of $250 million. ~~~
~~~ Don't Blame Elon! He's a Nobody! Kyle Cheney of Politico: “Elon Musk is not the leader of DOGE — the mysterious Trump administration operation overseeing an effort to break and remake the federal bureaucracy. In fact, he’s not even technically part of it at all, the White House said in court papers Monday night. In a three-page declaration, a top White House personnel official revealed that Musk’s title is 'senior adviser to the president,' a role in which he has 'no actual or formal authority to make government decisions himself.' That explanation, provided to a federal court by Joshua Fisher, the director of the White House’s Office of Administration, seems to directly contradict the way ... Donald Trump and Musk have spoken publicly about the so-called Department of Government Efficiency.... The sworn statement instead deepens the questions surrounding DOGE.... Fisher’s filing was delivered to U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is weighing a legal effort by Democratic attorneys general to bar Musk and his DOGE allies from continuing to exert influence on the federal government.... She ... asked the Trump administration for more details about the mass firings it appears DOGE has been directing across the government. A Justice Department attorney, Joshua Gardner, declined to detail the job cuts DOGE has been involved in so far, despite Chutkan’s request for specifics.” ~~~
~~~ Kyle Cheney & Josh Gerstein of Politico: “U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan on Monday appeared poised to reject an effort to immediately bar Elon Musk and his allies from accessing data or causing firings across a broad swath of the federal government. The judge said an effort by Democrat-led states lacked enough concrete evidence to justify that extraordinary restriction.” MB: See also my related comment beneath Zach Montague's report about Musk's Raiders gaining access to Education Department systems. ~~~
~~~ Here's a brief AP report on the hearing. ~~~
~~~ Marcy Wheeler: "Yesterday, Judge Tanya Chutkan had a Presidents Day hearing on a lawsuit challenging DOGE’s actions. While she reportedly seemed inclined not to grant an emergency restraining order, she did order the government to provide her with two pieces of information: how many people had and were going to be fired, and what Elon Musk’s status is. In a response and declaration, the government blew off the first question, but on the second, denied that Musk has the power of DOGE. He’s just a senior Trump advisor, one solidly within the White House Office, and so firewalled from the work of DOGE, yet still protected from any kind of nasty disclosure requirements.... [The plaintiffs in the case argue that Musk's role requires the advice and consent of the Senate under the Constitution's Appointments Clause.] The statement is quite obviously an attempt to retcon the structure of DOGE [sic], one that Ryan Goodman has already found several pieces of evidence to debunk.... The retconning of his role is all the more obvious when you understand that the right wing judges on SCOTUS feel very strongly about the Appointments Clause. And Trump is on the record relying on it, most spectacularly in convincing Aileen Cannon that Jack Smith had to be confirmed by the Senate before he could indict Trump."
There is no way to overstate how serious a breach this is.... S.S.A. has comprehensive medical records of people who have applied for disability benefits.... It has our bank information, our earnings records, the names and ages of our children, and much more. -- Nancy Altman, president of Social Security Works, a group that promotes the expansion of Social Security ~~~
~~~ Alan Rappeport, et al., of the New York Times: “The top official at the Social Security Administration stepped down this weekend after members of Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency sought access to sensitive personal data about millions of Americans held by the agency, according to people familiar with the matter. The resignation of Michelle King, the acting commissioner, is the latest abrupt departure of a senior federal official who refused to provide Mr. Musk’s lieutenants with access to closely held data.... Mr. Musk’s team at the Social Security Administration was seeking access to an internal data repository that contains extensive personal information about Americans.... Mr. Musk’s team has been embedding with agencies across the federal government and seeking access to private data as part of what it has said is an effort to root out fraud and waste. Social Security payments account for about $1.5 trillion, or a fifth, of annual federal spending in the United States.... It is not clear how many members of Mr. Musk’s staff sought access to it, whether they ultimately succeeded or whether they had been granted full employment status at the Social Security Administration....
“Ms. King was replaced by Leland Dudek, a career official who has been overseeing the agency’s anti-fraud office, according to people familiar with the matter. He did not respond to a request for comment. Before he was named, Mr. Dudek posted comments on LinkedIn praising Mr. Musk’s team and saying he had been assisting its efforts, according to people who saw his posts. Mr. Dudek has deleted his account.” The Washington Post broke the story. An NBC News story is here. ~~~
~~~ digby points to a crazy conspiracy Elon likes to tell. Here here is on X (undated): "The REAL reason so many Democrats are upsets about entitlements (social security, medical, etc) fraud investigations is that they are using your taxpayer money as handouts to attract and retain ILLEGAL immigrants. Their future voters. That's what it's all about. Truth." No, it's bullshit. This is the Great Replacement Theory which Musk signed on to some time ago.... Illegal immigrants do not get social security, Medicare or Medicaid. If they become citizens, they will be entitled to them but there is no guarantee that they will vote Democratic.... It’s not surprising that Musk would be a promoter of this racist fringe conspiracy theory. But now that he has the keys to the government, he’s in a great position to destroy social security in ways that will impact all of us.... Trump has promised not to cut Social Security and Medicare but he’s a liar. And even if he’s sincere in that desire he’s so easily manipulated by Musk et al that they can easily convince him that the cuts are merely curbing fraud and that real people will not be hurt by it.” ~~~
~~~ Marie: And if we must use that term and if we're going to point at "ILLEGAL immigrants," let us remember that Elon himself was once an ILLEGAL immigrant to the U.S.
“St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.” Hannah Natanson, et al., of the Washington Post: “Many federal government employees were dismissed over the holiday weekend as managers confronted a Trump administration demand to fire workers by Tuesday. In group texts and in online forums, they dubbed the error-ridden run of firings the 'St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.' The firings targeted new hires on probation, who have fewer protections than permanent employees, and swept up people with years of service who had recently transferred between agencies, as well as military veterans and people with disabilities employed through a program that sped their hiring but put them on two years’ probation....
“The firings have extended to touch employees at almost every agency, including map makers, archaeologists and cancer researchers..., in choices that some workers said contradicted a U.S. Office of Personnel Management directive to retain 'mission-critical' workers.... The termination letters hitting inboxes all struck the same note: Probationary workers were getting the ax for poor job performance. But many of those fired had just received positive reviews, or had not worked in the government long enough to receive even a single rating.... Firing employees en masse with the same claim of poor performance is illegal, said Jim Eisenmann, [whose law firm specializes] in litigation by federal employees.” ~~~
~~~ Marie: To add gross insult to significant injury, the richest man in the world is gloating over firing and lying about the performance of modestly-paid employees who have dedicated themselves careers designed to help Americans. According to the Post report, Elon “Musk, whose U.S. DOGE Service is leading the drive to downsize government, over the weekend shared triumphant messages on X.... Close to 2 a.m. Monday, he reposted a picture of himself in a gladiator outfit and declared he was destroying 'the woke mind virus.'”
Julia Ainsley of NBC News: “The Trump administration is preparing to fire hundreds of high-level Department of Homeland Security employees this week as part of a move to rid the country’s third-largest agency of people deemed to be misaligned with the administration’s goals, according to three sources familiar with the matter. The sources said the Trump administration has a 'centralized plan' and a list of people in high-level positions across every component of DHS who are to be targeted this week. The firings will come on top of hundreds of more general cuts that began across DHS on Friday night, which targeted the Federal Emergency Management Agency, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. Those firings were the latest in a governmentwide effort to reduce the federal workforce.”
Revenge of the White Supremacist Boys. Hannah Natanson & Chris Dehghanpoor of the Washington Post (Feb. 15): “A team of workers from the U.S. DOGE Service developed step-by-step plans for carrying out ... Donald Trump’s order to purge diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives from the federal government — and over the next six months intends to expand that campaign dramatically, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post. DOGE aims to target staffers who are not in DEI roles and employees who work in offices established by law to ensure equal rights, internal DOGE documents show. In the coming weeks, the documents show, DOGE has planned for the Trump administration to trim staff from dozens of offices..., including those that protect employees’ civil rights and others that investigate complaints of employment discrimination in the federal workplace. Among the groups targeted are a Veterans Affairs office that works to ensure all veterans receive equal access to care and an office within Health and Human Services that provides information about the health of minority populations.... In the weeks leading up to the inauguration, DOGE positioned and envisioned itself as the executor and enforcer of Trump’s executive order against diversity.”
Life-Threatening News. Ian Duncan of the Washington Post: “A team from billionaire Elon Musk’s SpaceX rocket company will help envision ways to overhaul the nation’s aging air traffic control systems, beginning with a visit to the Federal Aviation Administration’s command center Monday, Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy said.... It was not clear Monday what expertise [SpaceX] engineers have in how the air traffic control system works.... The move was announced as union leaders said the FAA laid off roughly 400 probationary employees as part of sweeping job cuts the Trump administration has imposed across the federal government in recent days. The cuts represent only a small fraction of the agency’s workforce of almost 47,000, and front-line workers such as air traffic controllers and radar technicians appear to have been spared.... The full scope of the job cuts was not clear.... But union officials and Democrats said the cuts could nonetheless imperil air safety as employees have to carry out their duties with less backup.... SpaceX’s rocket launches are regulated by the FAA, and the agency has alleged that the company violated safety rules in the past.” The Verge has a story here. ~~~
~~~ Marie: All things being equal, if SpaceX engineers were to be part of a larger team that would examine, analyze and make recommendations on how to safely overhaul the air traffic control system while at the same time maintaining air safety -- I'd be find with that. But remember that the idea of DOGE which Trump presented during the campaign was that Musk would assemble a group of experts to conduct an audit and recommend efficiencies that would save taxpayers "trillions" of dollars. That, of course, is not what has happened. So if all things being Musk prevails, then everyone who boards an airplane either landing or taking off at a U.S. airport is in danger. ~~~
~~~ Update. Marie: It looks as if Sean Duffy, the new Secretary of Transportation, is getting his bearings and learning how to better describe (or mask!) what Musk's team is doing. According to the Verge report linked above, “In a post on X, Duffy said the team from SpaceX went to Virginia to 'get a firsthand look at the current system, learn what air traffic controllers like and dislike about their current tools, and envision how we can make a new, better, modern and safer system.' Previously, Duffy said that Musk’s DOGE team would 'plug in' to the FAA to help 'upgrade our aviation system.'” If Duffy's latest post is accurate, the workers he is describing would not be wet-behind-the-ears raw programmers but systems managers/designers, typically more experienced personnel (though not necessarily coders) who determine general goals and specifications for computerized systems. I have no idea, of course, if Duffy is telling the truth, but that's what he's saying.
Zach Montague of the New York Times: “A Federal District Court judge in Washington declined to bar associates of Elon Musk from gaining access to the Education Department’s data systems, finding that the University of California Student Association, which sued to block the incursion, had not shown that students were irreparably harmed in the process. In a late order on Monday, Judge Randolph D. Moss wrote that lawyers representing the students had failed to show that sensitive student data from the department’s databases had been illegally disseminated in a way that would justify an emergency restraining order barring Mr. Musk’s team from the agency’s systems. Judge Moss described potential harms to the students as 'entirely conjectural.'” ~~~
~~~ Marie: Most actions the U.S. government takes require transparency, at least to the Congress, but also to the public as prescribed by the Freedom of Information Act. Why? Because ours is supposed to be a government of, for and by the people. We're the bosses of them; we are, in theory, the government. President Musk stood up in his black-hatted villain costume during his recent Oval Office press conference, and claimed, “So all of our actions are maximally transparent. In fact, I don’t think there’s been, I don’t know of a case where an organization has been more transparent than the Doge organization.” He directed press and people alike to the sources of all knowledge: "... we post our actions to the DOGE Handle on X and to the Doge website.” This is patently false. BUT Matt Novak of Gizmodo wrote, “The X account for DOGE does indeed post things, though they’re often misleading or outright lies. But the website Musk identifies is empty. The domain is DOGE.gov, the kind of site where Musk could hypothetically be posting all kinds of information about the work he and his goons are doing right now. But there’s nothing except three lines of text.” One purpose of this lie is that litigants seeking temporary restraining orders against the Musk teens' excesses and incursion are forced to go before the court with information that is often, as the judge determined, “entirely conjectural.” ~~~
~~~ As many a philosopher, historian and political scientist will tell you, the first tool of the authoritarian is language, which he bends and breaks through lies, distortion, and the alteration or inversion of the meaning of words. I don't know that Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post gets that, but he does provide some raw data for academics can use to bolster their research: “... the White House has adopted a unique lexicon to describe its agenda — in some cases, using words that in ordinary contexts mean the opposite. Here’s a guide to the verbiage, drawn from remarks made by ... Donald Trump and White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt.” The words & phrases Kessler covers are “transparency,” “free speech,” “fraud and abuse,” and “trade deficit.”
News from the Kleptocracy. Eric Lipton & Maggie Haberman of the New York Times: When Donald Trump held a phone conference earlier this month among Jay Monahan, the top executive at the PGA Tour, and Yasir Al-Rumayyan, the chairman of the Saudi Arabia-backed LIV Golf association, and himself, he was “using the power of his office to forge an agreement... and ... pushing a merger that relates to his own family’s financial interest. In other words..., Mr. Trump’s participation in this discussion was a brazen conflict of interest — one of a series that have played out over the past few weeks, with a frequency unlike any presidency in modern times, even in the first Trump term.... Hui Chen, a ... Justice Department adviser on fraud cases[, said,] 'The entire force and power of the United States government is now part of the business support structure for the Trump family.'... ” It isn't just Trump, of course. Most notably, there's Elon Musk, overseeing departments that regulate his multi-billion-dollar businesses, or Edward Martin, whom Trump appointed as the U.S. attorney for D.C., who “resigned from representing a criminal defendant before moving in his capacity as a federal prosecutor to dismiss the charges filed against his client.” ~~~
~~~ Glenn Thrush of the New York Times: Donald “Trump said on Monday that he had nominated the interim U.S. attorney for Washington, [D.C.,] Ed Martin, a far-right election denier who sat on a board that raised cash for the Capitol rioters and pushed for their mass reprieve, to run the office on a permanent basis. Mr. Martin, who has minimal prosecutorial experience but a hyperpartisan social media presence, must first be confirmed by the Senate, whose members were forced into hiding by the mob of Trump loyalists who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Mr. Martin’s nomination marks a complete reversal for an office that formed the core of one of the Justice Department’s most complex investigations, swapping leaders committed to holding rioters accountable for a man who stood in the crowd outside the Capitol and defied a congressional subpoena to describe his role in the day’s events.... Mr. Martin has already started an internal review of Capitol riot cases in his office and was tapped by Attorney General Pam Bondi to help scrutinize the so-called weaponization of the department during the Biden administration.” ~~~
~~~ Then there's this little tidbit about some of the people Elon fired: ~~~
~~~ Matthew Chapman of the Raw Story: "Some of the latest employees on the chopping block at tech billionaire Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency task force are Food and Drug Administration staff who oversee regulation of one of Musk's companies, [Neuralink,] Reuters reported Monday evening. Layoffs at the FDA, according to Rachael Levy and Marisa Taylor, include 'about 20 people in the FDA’s office of neurological and physical medicine devices, several of whom worked on Neuralink, according to the two sources.... That division includes reviewers overseeing clinical-trial applications by Neuralink and other companies making so-called brain-computer interface devices, the sources said.... The development of this technology, however, has been controversial, with early trials in monkeys reportedly leading to horrific deaths — something Musk denied." ~~~
~~~ Marie: I like to watch murder mysteries, and one of the "techniques" murderers use is to pretend to be classic serial murderers; that is, the murderer's target is one individual with whom s/he has a beef. But to throw the cops of their game, the murderer kills a number of people in similar ways in order to make it appear that s/he is a random killer, so the "real" target -- and the killer's motives -- disappear in the "crowd." I think that's what Elon is doing here. By firing thousands of workers, he hopes no one will notice when a few of the people he fires are the very people who can cause his businesses problem. ~~~
~~~ Here's Rachel Maddow on some of these dicey firing, including the very questionable firings of FDA personnel overseeing a deadly Musk-brand brain chip. Thanks to NiskyGuy for the link: ~~~
~~~ At about 1:45 min. in., Maddow lists a series of lies Musk has told to try to justify DOGE's program cuts and employee terminations. Maddow sees a pattern here and notes that if you have a good reason to do something, you don't have to make up a lie to explain why you did it. ~~~
~~~ Here's the segment Maddow led with last night, which led her to wonder why the people who fired the Nuclear Security staff did fall on their swords and resign. Thanks again to NiskyGuy for the link.
Marie: BTW, if you have a half-hour, especially if you've been having trouble facing what the Musk/Trump administration has been up to for the past month, John Oliver will catch you right up-to-date, in a manner less painful, if no less alarming, than you could gather yourself from reading the New York Times. See the video at the top of yesterday's page.
Ellen Nakashima of the Washington Post: “Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Monday alleged that the Biden administration 'rushed' an IRS audit of him after he was nominated, suggesting that the former administration ordered a politically motivated income tax review. On the social media platform X..., [Hegseth] posted an image of what appears to be a notice from the IRS to Hegseth and his wife, notifying them that their federal tax return was being audited and they owed a balance of $33,558. 'Total sham,' he wrote. “The party of “norms” and “decency” strikes again. We will never back down.'... Hegseth did not offer any evidence that the alleged IRS scrutiny of his taxes was politically motivated.... Tax experts who have served in Republican and Democratic administrations said audit decisions are made not by political appointees at the IRS but by career employees.... The tax code makes it a crime for White House officials to request an audit of a particular taxpayer or interfere with an ongoing audit, experts noted.” Politico's story is here.
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New York. William Rashbaum, et al., of the New York Times: “Four top New York City officials are expected to resign in the coming days, after the outgoing U.S. attorney for Manhattan accused the mayor of trading cooperation with President Trump’s mass deportation agenda for a dismissal of his criminal indictment, according to three people with knowledge of their plans. The four officials — Maria Torres-Springer, the first deputy mayor, and Meera Joshi, Anne Williams-Isom and Chauncey Parker, all also deputy mayors — oversee much of New York City government, and their departure is poised to blow a devastating hole in the already wounded administration of Mayor Eric Adams. Mr. Adams, a Democrat, is resisting growing calls to resign. Gov. Kathy Hochul is also under increasing pressure to remove him from office.” (Also linked yesterday.) ~~~
~~~ The story has been updated to include a new development: “Hours later, Gov. Kathy Hochul, who has the authority to remove Mayor Adams from office, said she had called a meeting for Tuesday to discuss 'the path forward.' In a statement, she acknowledged that the four officials’ resignations raised “serious questions about the long-term future of this mayoral administration. 'In the 235 years of New York State history, these powers have never been utilized to remove a duly-elected mayor; overturning the will of the voters is a serious step that should not be taken lightly,' she said. 'That said, the alleged conduct at City Hall that has been reported over the past two weeks is troubling and cannot be ignored.'” An AP story is here.
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Mexico. Rachel Pannett of the Washington Post: “Mexico is threatening to take Google to court over its 'Gulf of America' name change on maps for users in the United States, pointing out that much of the body of water lies outside U.S. maritime borders in regions controlled by Mexico and Cuba. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said Monday at a news conference that ... Donald Trump’s executive order to rename the Gulf of Mexico applied only to the U.S. continental shelf — the area of seabed to which the U.S. lays claim under the law of the sea and maritime agreements with other coastal states. It has asked Google to fully restore the name 'Gulf of Mexico' to its Maps service for areas outside U.S. territory.” ~~~
~~~ Marie: Oh, gosh, I'm in trouble. After Akhilleus showed us how to change the name of the Gulf of Mexico on Mapquest, I changed it to Gulf of Marie. Honest, I thought it was legal. How was I to know?
Russia. Niha Misah of the Washington Post: “Russia has freed an American citizen who was arrested this month on drug smuggling charges. The move came ahead of talks Tuesday between U.S. and Russian officials in Saudi Arabia aimed at ending the war in Ukraine. Kalob Byers, a 28-year-old from West Virginia, was released to U.S. authorities.... Byers was detained along with his Russian fiancée, Naida Mambetova, at Moscow’s Vnukovo International Airport on Feb. 7, after customs officials said they found cannabis gummies in his luggage. Byers was accused of attempting to smuggle drugs into the country, an offense punishable by up to 10 years in prison.... Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov sought Monday to link the Byers release to the talks in Saudi Arabia. In response to a question about Byers, Peskov told reporters that Moscow expects to discuss 'restoring the entire complex of Russian-American relations' during the talks, adding that 'certain events can be viewed in this context,' according to the Associated Press.”
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Attempt #2:
Two segments from Rachel last night:
https://youtu.be/ujsQ3bp9-4I?si=e8NSNlqtQwu3qtEx
https://youtu.be/1CCoZ0Zlz9k?si=nAfASdBSpaafXt0N
At the end of the first link, she says "If you voted for *****, this is what you voted for."
But that's only part of it. If you voted for an R in the House or the Senate, they aren't doing diddly squat to protect you either.
The Rs are doing what they have said they wanted to do, drown the government in the bathtub, but like the overturning of Roe, it is going to have huge consequences.
Every R voter was a 1-marshmallow kid.
So who’s in charge?
The Bleak House announced that Adolf Musk is not in charge of Doggie and has no authority to do anything.
If so, how and why are he and his Hitler Youth being allowed to fire thousands of federal employees and rifle through the tax returns of anyone they choose?
If Adolf isn’t the boss, who is?
During that bizarre Opioid Office presentation, (the one where the kis noted who the real president is), Fat Hitler said he had nothing to do with Doggie and it was all up to Adolf Musk.
Now they’re saying something completely different. They’re saying now that he doesn’t even work for Doggie.
This isn’t the Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight, this is the Gang That Shoots at Everything, even themselves.
Get out the carving knife!
Fat Hitler and his boyfriend, Putin the Terrible are getting set to decide the fate of Ukraine. Without the Ukrainians.
History has no end of examples of this kind of bulldozing and carving up of territories and people without their input or consent. The results? Not good.
Here’s a sampling:
“The Sykes-Picot Agreement
As the first world war was well under way, British and French representatives sat down to agree how they’d divide up the Ottoman Empire after it was over. As an enemy power, the Ottomans were not invited to the talks.
Together, England’s Mark Sykes and France’s François Georges-Picot redrew the Middle East’s borders in line with their nations’ interests…The agreement became the wellspring of decades of conflict and colonial misrule in the Middle East, the consequences of which continue to be felt today.”
So, big fail there. What else?
“The Évian Conference
In 1938, 32 countries met in Évian-les-Bains, France, to decide how to deal with Jewish refugees fleeing persecution in Nazi Germany.
Before the conference started, Britain and the US had agreed not to put pressure on one another to lift the quota of Jews they would accept in either the US or British Palestine.
While Golda Meir (the future Israeli leader) attended the conference as an observer, neither she nor any other representatives of the Jewish people were permitted to take part in the negotiations.
The attendees largely failed to come to an agreement on accepting Jewish refugees, with the exception of the Dominican Republic. And most Jews in Germany were unable to leave before Nazism reached its genocidal nadir in the Holocaust.”
Wow. Really big fail there…
One more?
“The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact
As Hitler planned his invasion of Eastern Europe, it became clear his major stumbling block was the Soviet Union. His answer was to sign a disingenuous non-aggression
The treaty, named after Vyacheslav Molotov and Joachim von Ribbentrop (the Soviet and German foreign ministers), ensured the Soviet Union would not respond when Hitler invaded Poland. It also carved up Europe into Nazi and Soviet spheres. This allowed the Soviets to expand into Romania and the Baltic states, attack Finland and take its own share of Polish territory.
Unsurprisingly, some in Eastern Europe view the current US-Russia talks over Ukraine’s future as a revival of this kind of secret diplomacy that divided the smaller nations of Europe between large powers in the second world war.”
There’s more. None of them good.
But I’m sure Fatty will make a perfect deal. He always does.
Right?
Testy
@Akhilleus: One of the ways authoritarians distort language is to say two contradictory things, and we are supposed to believe both of them. Here's Hannah Arendt, for instance, in The Origins of Totalitarianism:
"The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness."
In my latest entry in the game of Who's President Now?, I'm arguing that the only thing rational people can tell for sure is that Musk is president now. However, his control of the presidency* is temporary; it's only a rental, and under the terms of the lease, use of the presidency may be terminated and revert to the lessor at any time and at the sole discretion of the lessor.
Marie,
Hannah is always a good resource for interpreting the twaddle of authoritarian punks.
I’m thinking this latest stinky pile of crap is designed to protect the MuskRat from lawsuits. States sue him personally, Fat Hitler says “Who? That guy? Don’t even know him. He don’t do nothing. He got no authority. Go ‘way.”
@Akhilleus: That may be, but it's also to protect Trump and his administration. An independent citizen is not subject to government transparency laws like those under the FOIA. So Musk, and therefore Trump and everybody else in his administration, can keep diddling with sensitive systems, copying data that would be of interest and benefit to them, fire people, close departments, whatever, and then just
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I've always liked words and generally considered them my friends, but I understand that as closely as good writing can make them come to the object or idea they are signifying, the words are never the thing itself. Words are no more than stand-ins for reality...or in the case of those who use them to hide rather than reveal, an alternative to it.
Have to say that as much as I have liked words for most of my life, the Right Wing's use of them over the last decade is beginning to spoil my taste for them. Instead of using them to get closer to the truth of things, they build barriers that obscure or hide it
Must be like the feeling some have when an old and trustworthy friend unaccountably turns against them. Betrayal might describe it.
And I really hate the despoilers of the language I love.
Calvin figures out DEI
Dan Froomkin
"What you can do to fight the Trump agenda
A list of lists of how to resist"
"Homan says he’s asked DOJ whether Ocasio-Cortez is impeding ICE
President Trump’s “border czar” Tom Homan said Monday he asked the Department of Justice (DOJ) whether Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (D-N.Y.) efforts to educate people about their rights while facing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is impeding the agency’s operations.
Speaking on Fox News, Homan said he finds it disturbing that “any member of Congress wants to educate people how they evade law enforcement.”"
Sorry, Priorities
The Atlantic
"How COVID Pushed a Generation of Young People to the Right
Research suggests that pandemics are more likely to reduce rather than build trust in scientific and political authorities."
By Derek Thompson
By the People, For the PeopleRe: That Homan douchebag demanding AOC be arrested.
Because in the Fat Hitler Reich, informing people of their constitutional rights is now a crime. Besides, they don’t recognize the Constitution anymore.
NiskyGuy,
By the way, I got the Wordle answer in two the other night thanks to your hint. Haha. That was a good one: “crook”. And to top it off, the pangram in the Spelling Bee that night was “jailbird”. Too bad the former no longer engenders the latter, at least for some people.
Wendy Edelberg and Ben Harris, in The New York Times, on Blundering Our Way Into a Financial Crisis
"The true risk is our political leaders doing something wildly irresponsible that unnerves financial markets.
President Trump has brought budgetary chaos with extraordinary speed. In just his first week in office, his administration threatened to withhold payments of trillions of dollars of congressionally enacted spending. Days later, he appeared to reverse course. Then he allowed staff members of the newly formed Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, to gain access to critical Treasury payment systems, prompting the resignation of a senior official with decades of public service. New threats to withhold federal payments now come daily. "
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/18/world/europe/us-russia-saudi-ukraine.html
Gee. Guess that Russia thing back in 2016 wasn't a hoax after all...
Homan's gripe with AOC seems to be over the equivalent to the Miranda Act, which every cop is supposed to read to a detained person when arresting him.
Of course this is "educating" a possible criminal and I seem to recall the Orange Ape saying something like "I love the uneducated" a decade or so ago.
Bobby Lee,
Fat Hitler says that whenever he looks in the mirror.
The chaos, some purposeful, most a function of a simpleton in the Opioid Office, along with the flood of illegal and unconstitutional actions perpetrated by Fat Hitler and his drug addled, former illegal alien PM, will eventually make it to Little Johnny and the Dwarfs. Fatty is a doltish doucheclamp on many things but on jack hammering courts to protect his flabby ass from legal jeopardy, he’s a master.
The goal of all this criminality is to get sued so’s his right to piss on the constitution and thumb his nose at laws, regulations, ethics, morality, and history gets the imprimatur of the Nazis on the Supine Court.
Once he has that, we are all well and truly fucked. And the America we all grew up with is over, never to be seen again. We will just be another backward, thuggish totalitarian state.
I would say that Homan's "gripe with AOC" is the typical gripe of a fat, unattractive, thug-like piece of rejected man-meat/bully who could not get a date on a dare, should he desire one, and AOC is pretty, attractive all the way around, well-dressed and educated, smart, savvy, slender, slick, good with words, and someone who would not date him if he asked. In fact, she is probably laughing at him now...
Gerben-jan Gerbrandy
New Amsterdam
A Job
WellDone"DeJoy announces plans to step down as USPS postmaster general
DeJoy told the USPS Board of Governors to begin the process of searching for a new postmaster general. DeJoy took office in June 2020."
Rest of the Universe, and most of Earth, and half of US
Again, Waldman nails it.
https://paulwaldman.substack.com/p/you-are-the-inefficiency?
In short, Ryan's "makers" make it by taking from taxpayers.
From One Farmer to Another