Turning On The Giant Faucet Of Bullshit - US Politics February 2025

A former employer of mine is in the news for losing 390ish people to the USAID dogepurge.

I worked with dozens of those people (not closely, it was two weeks two years ago). These were global health experts like specialists in cholera, AIDS, typhoid and other minor inconveniences to the regime.

Interestingly they were almost all former feds who were moved over as a group to the private sector explicitly to keep doing their old jobs, but on contract. The reason was unclear, but I gather the company was hired as a way to onboard and employ these specific experts. Now one wonders if the result of that contract was that they were easier to fire.

Amy Siskind on Bluesky: “As of this afternoon, after the initial deadlines for Musk's buyout offer, just 65,000 have taken the offer, roughly 3% of employees, far lower than Musk's estimate of five to 10%. In a typical year, roughly 150,000 federal employees retire.”

NIH funding cut to the bone; med schools and universities are fucked.

Court blocked the USAID cuts though, curious to see if they simply ignore the court.

Bleak as fuck, to be sure. Though, aiui, like many other things, that requires congressional approval so it will most likely get blocked for now. Still, depressing and scary.

'Condoms For Hamas' should be a song in the new Team America musical

If you don’t want more Hamas isn’t keeping them from reproducing good?

I guess I must be dumb cause you had packages for Hamas/ Trojans and some of them used

Not to derail, but why the hell did she have used trojans in her pocket? Seems kind of icky, throw that shit out.

Hoarder probably

I’ve got one hand in my pocket and the other is full of Hamas condoms

big balls was part of an international cybercrime gang: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2025/02/teen-on-musks-doge-team-graduated-from-the-com/

The NIH cuts are devastating to research universities.

xpost i broke my tiny brain trying to read that article

i shut down emotionally right around the first mention of “Tesla.Sexy” and it was downhill from there

The Krebs story is nuts not the least because it involves him getting swatted.

Anyone who starts an LLC before the age of 18 should probably be put on a watchlist.

Good lord can you imagine the chaos if there was a 9/11 scale event

^^Biden's fault, obviously.

JD Vance sticking up for the “normalize Indian hate” guy is pretty depraved

ain't that America

Judge blocked DOGE access to the treasury, let's see what happens now

I'm currently reading Milton Mayer's They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-1945, which I found in my local library last week. Mayer spent a long time postwar hanging out and making friends with 10 ordinary small-town German citizens (he did not tell his new friends he was Jewish; they simply thought of him as an American), and gradually they told him about what life was really like there during Hitler's rise, and you know what? If you weren't a Jew, things were pretty good! Better than they'd been in the 1920s, that was for sure!

The reason the Trump regime is ultimately going to fail is that they're making people's lives materially worse. The OG Nazis made many people's lives better, at least until the war.

Trains won’t be running on time under this administration that’s for sure

It actually reminds me more of what happened in the Soviet Union around the time World War II started up, they were flung back on their heels because Stalin had purged so many competent people from the government, and it was being run by a bunch of amateurs or incompetents at crucial positions.

While some are just making jokes about the Kennedy Center Honors, music folks who know more are worrying about the future at Kennedy Center of the free multiple nights per week Millennium stage gigs w/ roots, global music & more; the hiphop gigs; the jazz ones; the collaborations w/ local Washington DC organizations.

One of the sponsors of the Republican bill to repeal home rule for Washington DC, Congressman Andy Ogles (TN-05) was being investigated by Biden Justice Department for campaign violations and had his phones seized and such. But Trump Justice Department dropped the charges

The difference in bravery between Korean opposition politicians (facing down armed military, scaling walls) and US Democrats (going away when rentacops tell them to) is, as people on social media are pointing out, striking.

Do some googles

I know this will be a disappointing answer but:

The resistance here wants a return to normalcy. To civil rule by grownups.

We're - surprised? Angry? - that they're not acting up in ways that they are not temperamentally suited to. We want people who last months were filling out the equivalent of TPS reports to suddenly become barricade-storming radicals, and that may not be quite fair or realistic.

It's worth noting that Korea has had fratricidal barbarism in living memory. Different cultures and different circumstances.

Like, "stop the steal" and "hang Mike Pence" worked as rallying cries, at least partly because the audience was already bonkers.

It's hard to storm the gates with goals like "a return to regular order in the legislative calendar" and "respect the statutory 30-day notice period for removing inspectors general."

I mean, I am definitely temperamentally suited to fuck some shit up but I also have young kids and don’t want to end up in an el Salvadoran prison.

It just seems as though even some minor passive resistance is beyond them. They just leave when they're told to, acting as though "the rules" will somehow save everything.

the horrific guantanamo situation was finally starting to wind down, so of course trump has started making the problem worse

Their names have not been released. Their exact crimes are unknown. The more than three dozen immigrants being held at Guantánamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba have entered what lawyers are calling a “legal black hole.”

Four days ago the Trump administration flew the first migrants from Fort Bliss, Texas, to Guantánamo Bay. The officials said the detainees were “dangerous criminals,” “the worst of the worst” and alleged members of a violent Venezuelan gang, holding them in a prison on the U.S. naval base created for suspected terrorists after Sept. 11, 2001. But administration officials have released almost no other information.

...The unusual and hasty movement of detainees to the military prison with a history of accusations of human rights violations comes as President Donald Trump attempts to fulfill a campaign promise to aggressively increase the number of immigration arrests and deportations. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facilities in the United States have quickly filled, officials say, and Trump has ordered the construction of detention space for as many as 30,000 migrants at Guantánamo.

Most of those migrants are expected to live in tents pitched on a different part of the base. But the early arrivals are more than three dozen “high-threat criminal illegal aliens” who are in ICE custody and are being housed in a vacant military facility, a Defense Department spokesperson said on Saturday.

“Any new arrivals of illegal aliens will be temporarily housed in designated migration holding areas at Naval Station Guantánamo and will be treated safely and humanely in accordance with international humanitarian standards,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “This will be a temporary solution until the illegal immigrants are return[ed] to their countries of origin.”

For the migrants who recently arrived at Guantánamo, four lawyers who are familiar with the military prison say the Trump administration is breaking the law by denying them access to legal counsel — something the suspected terrorists detained in Guantánamo have obtained. Even if the migrants are confirmed as members of the Venezuelan-based Tren de Aragua gang, as the Trump administration contends, the lawyers say the migrants do not qualify to be held in the high-security area of the base that some prisoners have described as a “tomb above ground.”

"What do we want?" "Due process in lieu of contractual terminations for convenience!"

"When do we want it?" "Ideally as part of the next round of appropriations, or, failing that, as part of budget reconciliation!"

"Hey hey, ho ho, circumventing a duly certified 1102-series funding obligation procedure has got to go!"

Xp

No I agree. I didn’t watch the whole encounter because one person kept repeating “so I have to be on a guest list? Is that what you’re saying?!?” over and over so I turned it off.

That was xp to james

xp
many federal employees are like that, and of course many of the contractors are. but not all. i wasn't like that. i'm surprised that some more people haven't stood up and spoken more forcefully, even those mired in the courage sinkhole morass that is middle to upper class income

Oh yeah I forgot you lived here back in the day

Anyway, it’s been two weeks.

The longest two weeks.

Enjoying the Golden Age?

The Pee Tape is here and we're in it.

Feeling like Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ right now

Shh not so loud, I’m sure there’s some arts funding he hasn’t stopped yet.

Sen. Mike Lee, R-Youfucknkiddn, called yesterday's ruling by Judge Engelmayer a "judicial coup," which Musk tweeted "Yes" too. These guys are about 3 days from saying Trump should override the judiciary.

I know Alfred doesn’t like podcaster/ writer Adam Johnson but I agree with this take of his from x :

Musk comes on here everyday spreading lurid, baseless rightwing conspiracy theories & our media is still reporting on his purging of ideological enemies and govt programs he—arbitrarily and ideologically—dislikes as “cost cutting” and “finding waste”. A totally alternate universe

I don't dislike him, not especially the last couple years.

Candidates for top national security positions in the Trump administration have faced questions that appear designed to determine whether they have embraced the president’s false claims about the outcome of the 2020 election and its aftermath, according to people familiar with cases of such screening.

The questions asked of several current and former officials up for top intelligence agency and law enforcement posts revolved around two events that have become President Donald Trump’s litmus test to distinguish friend from foe: the result of the 2020 election and the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol, according to the people, who, like other interviewed for this report, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the matter’s sensitivity.

These people said that two individuals, both former officials who were being considered for positions within the intelligence community, were asked to give “yes” or “no” responses to the questions: Was Jan. 6 “an inside job?” And was the 2020 presidential election “stolen?”

These individuals, who did not give the desired straight “yes” answer, were not selected. It is not clear whether other factors contributed to the decision.

The best books, Winston perceived, are those that tell you what you know already.

Sen. Mike Lee, R-Youfucknkiddn, called yesterday's ruling by Judge Engelmayer a "judicial coup," which Musk tweeted "Yes" too. These guys are about 3 days from saying Trump should override the judiciary.