Open Mic for the week of 2/17/2025
In Prince Edward Island, the second Monday of February is known as “Islander Day”.
There’s a phenomenon where someone writes an essay about this or that but someone else wants to discuss something that has not yet made it to the front page.
This is unfair to everybody involved. It’s unfair to the guy who wrote the original essay because, presumably, he wants to talk about his original essay. It’s unfair to the guy who wants to talk about his link because it looks like he’s trying to change the subject. It’s unfair to the people who go to the comments to read up on the thoughts of the commentariat for the original essay and now we’re talking about some other guy’s links.
So!
The intention is to have a new one of these every week. If you want to talk about a link, post it here! Or, heck, use it as an open thread.
And, if it rolls off, we’ll make a new one. With a preamble just like this one.
Today in it is totally not a cult:
1. Representative Claudia Tenney (NY-24) proposes turning Trump’s birthday into a Federal Holiday.
2. Rep. Luna introduces legislation to carve Trump into Mt. Rushmore
3. House Republicans want to impeach judges that ruled against Trump
https://www.axios.com/2025/02/16/impeachment-judges-republicans-trumpReport
Four NYC deputy mayors are expected to resign rather than collaborate with Trump and Adams: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/17/nyregion/adams-deputy-mayors-resign-trump-immigration.html?smtyp=cur&smid=bsky-nytimesReport
The GOP wants to ban mRNA vaccines: https://www.yahoo.com/news/bill-ban-mrna-vaccines-passes-140200324.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAACYLVIW00ldqm6UCPi6x0bA7pJPelrx6iePXdC-ZN30G7gQ7wC3svob-8w2UsUyI-nptiG0JHe0W3wykEBUILSX-kxQXPN20PcwNtHOVK2lm32jlGka_UEH8VBrlwrqwSiYyrQgdH4JkZoZ-kmHO5FGuQkOls6wli1DPTQUqEsQH
ETA: Never mind this is Montana only but still dumbReport
Most state legislatures have some really dumb bills introduced every session. This one is more interesting than many because it actually passed a committee vote. Also too, it banned mRNA for vaccines against infectious diseases, but allowed the tech for use against cancer or to correct gene-based problems.Report
Homan wants the DOJ about making a video advising undocumented residents about their rights: https://www.newsweek.com/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-investigation-illegal-migrant-video-tom-homan-2031045Report
“These health burdens have continued to increase alongside the increased prescription of medication. For example, in the case of Attention Deficit Disorder/Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, over 3.4 million children are now on medication for the disorder — up from 3.2 million children in 2019-2020 — and the number of children being diagnosed with the condition continues to rise.
This poses a dire threat to the American people and our way of life.”
The language of Eugenics right out in the open.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/02/establishing-the-presidents-make-america-healthy-again-commission/?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR1SErud5Tu3NGb7PN1P1SH1bMWrNaqo2aoPvvnNc5WiS2IrAhpLXHlp9bw_aem_jn2B0kbC060F0yDuQBLLfAReport
The opioid addiction scandal was mostly doctors prescribing badly.
Presumably that’s a thing in other situations.Report
Elon replied to DJT’s Napoleon-quoting tweet today with 14 flag emojis, at 14:14 ET.
What a weirdly specific flag count and timestamp. I’m sure it’s just because he’s allegedly on the spectrum and feels a special affinity for the number 14. In a strange coincidence, the gear in the DOGE logo also has that many teeth. My heart goes out to him.Report
Oh, I forgot to mention that like his Sieg Heil, he did it twice.
He does it twice, so that while the ignorant don’t catch it or make excuses for it, the white nationalists, sometimes colloquially known as “nahtzees”, that he’s dogwhistling can be sure that the first signal was no accident.
Ha ha! What a crazy overexcited big “theater kid” he is!
https://x.com/kendallybrown/status/1891541628394824059Report
1) Yes, it’s pretty obvious at this point.
But more importantly,
2) Dude, are you on Twitter?Report
In reverse order,
2) Nope. Weirdly at times now I kinda wish I was only because stuff like this is hard for me to double-check to make sure it’s not misinformation/disinformation/taken out of context; but still, I was never on Twitter to start with and no WAY am I getting on that sinking dumpster-fire now.
and 1) It was obvious before, but someone here who shall remain nameless kept making odd excuses for the Sieg Heils; and as I love that person like a brother, I intend to keep hammering relentlessly upon this particular nail until they also say, “yes, it’s pretty obvious at this point”, because I don’t want my brother to keep on looking like a dang fool.Report
Re: Twitter, I plan to go down with the ship. I’ve tried a couple of the replacements, and find them either to be either very boring (Mastadon) or almost entirely populated by the sorts of people I went out of my way to avoid on Twitter (BlueSky). Since I see almost none of the far right stuff on Twitter, at least for now, it remains mostly bearable, though I did block literally hundreds of people talking about a certain conflict in a certain part of the world (including some people here).
Speaking of the far right stuff, Musk’s attraction to it was apparent pretty much as soon as he bought Twitter, when he started interacting with those people openly over there. For example, he has repeatedly agreed with and amplified “Great Replacement” views.
I assume the use of dog whistles is really just trolling, because he’s already shown us who he is, and everyone acting as though his flirting with the far right on Twitter, or hanging out with AfD in Germany, etc., doesn’t mean he’s like them is either kidding themselves or doesn’t really care if he’s like them.
Or such people are at this point just so reflexively contrarian about anything said by anyone to the left of the median House Republican that they’ve lost all sense of perspective and gravity.Report
As dog-whistles go, that’s one that is outside even my range of hearing.
The screenshot that I saw had it at 1:14, though… which I understand is 13:14.
Different time zones, I guess.Report
Yeah, it’s timezone stuff. His initial reply was at 14:14 ET (he’s in DC), but of course that would display in the local timezone of the screenshotter.
I think if I were posting multiple flags, I would post eleven, one flag louder than ten.Report
Was Twitter originally made to allow for fifteen flags on a line? I saw a screenshot showing that fifteen flags had a new line created so you had one row of 14 and then one row of 1.
This may go all the way back to Jack.Report
What could possibly go wrong?
https://x.com/RepTimBurchett/status/1889719640923762971Report
If only the Democrats had a spine – or a brain.
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-party-that-refuses-to-take-shots-loses/?Report
OH SO YOU’RE SAYING THAT DEMOCRATS ARE THE ONLY PARTY WITH AGENCYReport
If anything, what the Democrats have shown in this moment is that agency is something they lack completely. They are not agents, they are large blobs of jelly in expensive clothing.Report
I wonder if Mitch McConnell is for hire.Report
Turtles at least have some agency.Report
Cowabunga.Report
Ironically, I feel that McConnells’ strategy for Obama would be way more useful if used by us against Trump.Report
Management all over the world is requiring a return to the office.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/us-russia-talks-ukraine-europe-invasion-rcna192544Report
https://united24media.com/latest-news/us-russia-peace-plan-allegedly-suggests-three-stages-ceasefire-elections-and-final-agreement-5992
Speaking of “peace” “deals”, the stabbing in the back from Trump to Ukraine continues. The three stage “process” includes snap elections which will presumably be used to try and get a Kremlin and Putin friendly Puppet government in charge of things.Report
The only way we can protect Democracy is to make sure that we don’t have elections.Report
Or we let countries decide when to have elections and make when a war is ongoing is not the best time?Report
What does “letting countries decide when to have elections” look like?
Asking the people in power whether they want one?Report
As opposed to whom? Trump and Putin?Report
As opposed to “letting them happen as scheduled”.
But I understand that that train has left the station.Report
So that’s not an alternative.Report
Maybe the people who took it off the table shouldn’t be in charge of deciding whether it’s time to have elections yet.
I mean… if you’ve already cancelled an election, is there ever going to be a good time to have one after that? Ever?Report
If I recall correctly, Ukraine’s constitution calls for the suspension of elections in a time of emergency, which is clearly the case there. Nothing untoward has happened.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/11/17/ukraine-elections-war-russia-zelensky/Report
Also, how exactly do you hold elections when a chunk of the country is occupied by a foreign army? I fthey hold and election and Zelensky wins again, Putin (and his proxies) will either A) Claim it doesn’t count because not everyone got to vote or B) Claim that this amounts to Ukraine disclaiming the occupied territory since they weren’t counted in the vote totals.Report
So whom?Report
Who/Whom.Report
You tell us.Report
It means that Russia and the US don’t get to ram snap elections down Ukraine’s throat in a “peace accord” that is being negotiated without Ukraine’s being present.Report
Speaking of more local corruption.
The Adams’ situation has gotten to the point where Gov. Hochul is holding an emergency meeting today. The proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back appears to be the sudden resignation of 4 Deputy Mayors and the head of the NYC council calling for him to resign. These are Adams’ own allies and staffers, not his opposition.
Josh Marshall correctly pointed out that the corrupt plea bargain deal gives Trump dominion over NYC effectively.’
We shall see if Hochul is willing to use a never enacted power which lets her remove the mayor from office.
FWIW, I think it is generally good to be cautious about using this power but this is an emergency/break glass situationReport
I think that Hochul needs to break this glass and get Adams out of power immediately.
It’s okay to set a precedent if it’s important enough.
Will she be the one to appoint a new mayor?Report
No. The NYC Charter lays out the line of succession. First in line is the Public Advocate, then the City Comptroller.Report
Jumaane Williams… oooh! He’s a Democratic Socialist!
Yeah, Hochul needs to get rid of Adams *YESTERDAY*.Report
The DOJ is now arguing that Elon Musk does not run DOGE or work for them at all, and is merely a special advisor to the President: https://abcnews.go.com/US/white-house-claims-elon-musk-doesnt-run-doge/story?id=118913206
The lawyers did not bother to specify who _does_ run it, which one would assume that government lawyers would do almost automatically when presented with ‘lawsuit that targets targets a governmental agency and names the head of the agency but names the wrong person as the head’. It is utterly surreal not to say ‘X is not in charge, Y is, here is the documentation’ as a response to that. It is blatant deliberate stalling to try to force the opposing side to file a motion demanding to know who is is in charge, a thing that they should not have to do and the judge isn’t going to put up with them having to do…who runs governmental agencies is not secret and doesn’t need to be requested in court. If I was the judge this filing was given to, I’d say ‘Well, you have ten minutes to tell me who is in charge or I’m issuing an temporary restraining for the entire agency to stop what they are doing until someone is officially in charge.’
Anyway, lawyers doing things that will make judges very angry aside: Not only is this obvious nonsense, as both Trump and Elon have presented themselves in charge of DOGE many time, but it really feels like this means the entire DOGE scam is unraveling and Elon is trying to get out from under it.
Sadly, because Elon is a complete and total moron (Seriously, this cannot be stressed enough) and has admitted repeatedly he has access to restricted information that DOGE has accessed, making him not part of DOGE actually makes the situation for him worse, not better.
The lawyers trying to stop DOGE just claimed he wasn’t in charge because the specific lawsuit pointed out that Elon had not been confirmed by the Senate, so decided to retcon him into a mere Presidential advisor, which might, in theory, make that lawsuit a little weaker, while making everything else so much stupider because this claim can be used in _other_ court filings about how DOGE should not be accessing things it is accessing, because now they can prove people outside DOGE have access to it!
Hell, it doesn’t even actually help this lawsuit! This lawsuit is about how DOGE is out of control and operating outside Federal Regulations without Congressional Authorization or Senate Confirmation, and lawyers saying ‘The person who has been claiming to run it is not actually running it, and we’re not going to say who is, and in fact might not be sure’ does not, uh, disprove that premise.Report
This is a blatant lie.Report
New polls! We got 538 and we got RCP.Report
And what do you take away from these polls?Report
Oh, the usual. “This just goes to prove that you can’t trust polls.”Report
Can JB troll Democrats/Liberals with selectively presented information? Not only can he, he is compelled to do so.
There is a bunch of stuff going on: Musk is currently taking a lot of fire for Trump, the proverbial sh@t has not hit the fan for most Americans, and there is a weird split in favorability and approval.
But this os still low by first 100 days status historicallyReport
Selectively presented information? I posted links to the two biggest polling aggregators out there without adding additional commentary hoping to spin what you, the reader, would see with your own eyes when you went to these sites to look at the numbers for yourself.
“But this os still low by first 100 days status historically”
Would you have preferred if I, instead, had said “Here are the new polls but this os still low by first 100 days status historically”?
Would that have made it feel less selectively presented for you?Report
You present the polls without context in a cheery matter. It sure has hell looks like it is coming from an amoral vacuum to me. I report, you decide.
Do you have any opinions on your own for what is happening and whether the actions are good or bad?Report
coming from an amoral vacuum
How is this not the opposite of selectively presented?
Do you have any opinions on your own for what is happening and whether the actions are good or bad?
Oh, yeah. I’ve got plenty.Report
saul you’re literally doing the thing where you make up a guy in your head and get mad at himReport
Also, counter evidence: https://www.nj.com/politics/2025/02/major-trouble-for-donald-trump-in-new-polling-is-chaos-catching-up-to-him.htmlReport
This just goes to prove that you can’t trust polls.Report
One thing is for certain: if this country is well and truly cooked, then it’s us who put it in the oven and left it there.Report
There’s a quotation attributed to Genghis Khan: “I am the punishment of God…If you had not committed great sins, God would not have sent a punishment like me upon you.”
The legendary Emperor Yu successfully controlled a massive flood and, by doing so, demonstrated that he held the mandate of heaven.
One of the odd things about the whole “mandate of heaven” thing is that stuff like “flood control” was, mostly, somewhat manageable. Like, you could spend money and effort on dams and maintenance and floodwalls and so on and so forth. And, for the most part, if you weren’t in a particularly floody year, it didn’t matter if your local managers skimmed a little off the top and didn’t do all of the maintenance required. Why bother having managers whose job it was to manage the managers in dryish years? Or manager manager managers?
But when the deluge came, that little “skimming off of the top” became a flood and an indicator that the job of overseeing things had been neglected and it went all the way to the top. And neglect meant that you had lost the mandate of heaven.
We have lost the mandate of heaven.
Our sins have been very great indeed.Report
“The people all said to Samuel, ‘Pray to the Lord your God for your servants so that we will not die, for we have added to all our other sins the evil of asking for a king.'”
1 Samuel 12:19 (NIV)Report
Sometimes you get a Solomon. Sometimes you get an Ahab.Report
Or Herod.Report
Leaving the realm of myth and religion, it strikes me as very much a case of the political struggles of Cold War and post-Cold War America “creat[ing] circumstances and relationships that made it possible for a grotesque mediocrity to play a hero’s part.” Specifically, I think this is a path we’ve been headed down since the end of WWII, with all the contradictions, both domestic and international, of the economic and political order that came out of that.Report
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.Report
Considering the animus to FDR that conservative business people held back in the day so are on to something.Report
In fairness, it’s not a particularly original idea. See, e.g., this book, which was written in ’94, when Trump was just a hotel owner, serial bankruptcy filer, and frequent tabloid fodder, who was the primary cause of the death of the USFL.Report
From Josh Marshall:
Was getting a read out a short time ago about firings at CMS (the agency that runs Medicare and Medicaid). The cuts run deep. And giving how much of the health care economy runs through these programs that’s of course worrisome. But the most telling detail is one I’ve heard from numerous other agencies. The people actually running the agency don’t actually know how many people have been fired or who they are. If you’re in charge of and responsible for running the place you really need to know that. But as in other agencies they’re having to piece that together by doing things like seeing whose emails have been turned off or just asking them. Did you get fired? You? Can someone ask Lori if she got fired? Imagine running an agency and finding out that there had been widespread terminations but not being given any details about who they are or how many there are. That’s pretty straightforward sabotage.Report
I can’t think of anything Putin or Xi would do differently if they were in charge of the U.S. instead of TruskReport
They probably would be more pro-Palestinian, for one obvious thing.Report
This might be one of the strangest things I’ve seen someone say on this site. I can see a comparison to, say, Orbán, in that it looks like Trump is trying to remake the government and to some extent universities in his ideological image, but even that comparison, which unlike comparing him to Putin or Xi (two very different rulers from each other, even) makes some sense, is pretty limited. He hasn’t yet gone after the press, or protestors in really, and even his attacks on universities (through withholding grant money) are nothing like Orbán’s yet.Report
Orabnification is happening to.
I wonder if this a difference between liberal v. leftist. I think USAID did a lot more good than bad and its destruction will lead to a lot of pain and suffering around the world.
They are basically doing a wholesale dismantling of the Federal Government which will cause a lot of pain down the road or worse.
And I don’t think this is good even if the agencies were not perfect.
Putin and Xi wanted a weakened and discredited and untrusted U.S. and Trusk’s actions are going to produce that. I don’t believe in Evil Spock American Exceptionalism where the United States is only a source of evil and malice in the world. I don’t believe in American Exceptionalism where we are only a force of unalloyed good.
But I am an internationalist and believe in soft power and America being active in world affairs.Report
I think USAID does real good, and it’s a shame that’s stuff is going away. It’s very good that its black money and propaganda functions will be gone, though I assume agencies like the CIA will pick them right up.
I have mixed feelings about the administrative state, but the way it’s being dismantled, and the speed with which it’s being dismantled, are undeniably reckless and will cause a great deal of suffering while doing damage to a myriad of institutions that are, at least for the most part, good (like universities).
I don’t think Xi sees the U.S. the way the U.S. sees China. Putin may see the U.S. the way the U.S. sees Russia, though, but if he were running things, I have no doubt that the military would be his first target, not cancer research grants or the Department of Education.Report
You can’t have a welfare state without an administrative stateReport
You can’t have mature capitalism without a welfare state.Report
Also true.
You are responding to a guy who would ban private equity and then give anyone but support staff lifetime totality bans from working in finance/banking/consulting, even if they are just right out of college and in the first hour of orientation.
I’m not a neoliberal.Report
Hungary is a unitary parliament system which makes it a lot easier to totally take over. I think Trump is going to leave a mess of smoking craters and ruins, kind of like a half-as*ed renovation job that never got passed or even completed the demolition stage.
Unlike you I wouldn’t call myself an internationalist but I am a kind of realist that sees the upside to self interested noblesse oblige and non-zero sum thinking where the opportunities present themselves.
It seems to me that the core failure is that of America’s outward looking organizations, from the aid agencies, to the spooks, to even the military itself to exercise some basic judgment and self auditing. It’s clear to me that DOGE (to say nothing of Trump himself) is completely Twitter brained. The reason this stuff is on the radar is because it’s become so easy to meme-ify the various idiotic-to-disastrous things these organizations do. Bottom line is if we want PEPFAR (and to be clear, I want PEPFAR) we need to be able to say no to DEI in Serbia or promoting gay or trans or whatever comic book characters for Peru’s department of education, and wherever else.Report
Our Federalized system might also prevent some but all damage.
As my State Senator pointed out this morning, most forests in California (and most of the United States) are federal land. Slashing jobs at Interior and National Parks is going to be very bad during the summer travel and wildfire seasons.
What is happening at the DOJ and FBI is not good.
What is happening at HHS/NIH is not good.
But I still find it strange that DEI gets such strong reactions. Yes, there is some silliness in the language used at corporate training workshops but it is clear that Trump’s crusade against DEIA is more about reasserting white supremacy. Hence he found one group that deserves political asylum, white South Africans.* They are going at this with manic energy. They are defending alliances with far right fascist parties and going to the mats when someone is revealed as a Holocaust denier or having attended actual white supremacist rallies.
Or as I saw it, Musk’s code warriors are like meth addicts ripping through the walls and copper wiring looking for the WOKE machine so they can figure out why women won’t f**k them,
But if someone’s response to all the chaos and damage being caused now is still to go “but DEI.” I have to think it will be 2024’s but her emails…Report
I don’t think any of is likely to turn out well. I’ve never voted for Trump or any Republican for president. If I have to cop to anything it’s voting for Larry Hogan twice for governor in a context where Democrats would hold legislative super majorities.
Here is what I’d offer as food for thought from someone who still votes D but probably has some big disagreements on a handful of cultural issues.
1. I think the ability to do the kinds of really good things the government can do rests in large part on the government being, on balance, effective and responsible. Not perfect mind you, because nothing is perfect. But it does need to operate from an understanding that it’s going to have to work really hard, and be really good, to get credit, and that a relatively small amount of idiocy is going to be weighed (at times grossly) disproportionately against it.
2. I think the Democratic party and the progressive permanent bureaucracy, and its auxillaries in education, corporate HR, and influential NGO spaces, desperately want to be able to discriminate against my sons based on race and sex. Your own comments here at times suggest you’d be comfortable with that too. I don’t think any progeny of mine ought to be given unfair advantage (as if my glorious genes aren’t enough- kidding) but I’m never going to be on board with a system like that. Neither are a lot of people, including, increasingly, the people who are nominally supposed to benefit from it.
Now at the end of the day I vote based on the fact that I think the greater evil is, for example, to (pretend to but not actually) balance the federal budget on the backs of health insurance that mainly helps poor women and children. And thats to say nothing of putting ignorant yahoos in charge. It’s like trying to solve a problem by giving a monkey a hand grenade. However as long as the Democrats and progressive bureaucracies are steeped in this stuff it will be asking for many, many people ro swallow a bitter and bordering on poisonous pill.Report
Your sons – and mine – still live in a world where they are statistically more likely to gain advantage then my white daughters or my black nieces and nephews. It’s like the tech bro rage about feminizing corporations which are 90% Helen’s by men. Frankly until the situation for my daughters and nieces and nephew gets to the place our sons enjoy you can take you sanctimonious rage and go sit in the corner.Report
Heh, sanctimonious rage? The tone was intended as constructive and friendly.
Anyway accusing anyone of sanctimony is pretty rich coming from a guy who down below is speaking approvingly about the Pope just because of a single point you agree with, as if you actually care what the Holy See says about anything generally.
Also not sure what you mean by ‘gain advantage.’ Maybe you’ll be more specific. But the reality is that women now outnumber men in college by about 10%, and are outpacing them on virtually every educational achievement metric. Plenty of high earning, high prestige professions like medicine and law (my profession) are close to female dominated and based on pipeline will be even moreso over the next generation or two. I don’t have any problem with this in principle. So rest assured, all the opportunity is there for them, and there’s no need for these official anf quasi official discrimination games.Report
I was actually being sarcastic about the bishops since a good many of them have made gay out of telling g the pope quite publicly why he is wrong.Report
Typo or Freudian slip?Report
TypoReport
I heard that they’re so autistic that they’re practically ace.Report
Anyone for whom DEI is a top 25 issue is either not a serious person, or very serious indeed, and pushing an agenda that they dare not openly advocate in polite company.Report
Pope Francis has pneumonia in both of his lungs, the Vatican reports.
They say “you always follow a fat pope with a thin one.”
We’ll see what thin looks like, I guess.Report
and he’s only got one lung…
My gut says he’ll recover … not getting the ‘there’s nothing to worry about here…. oops he died’ vibe we usually get. But, he is 88 with only one lung… so you never know.Report
I’m following the hearing about the EOs barring trans people from the military live on Blue Sky, they are going _exceptionally_ poorly for the government.
Things like the judge asking ‘Can you explain how pronoun usage harms military preparedness’, and she tore into them when they could not answer. And asking if the EO saying that an entire group of people are ‘dishonest, undisciplined, and lack integrity’ is ‘expressing animus’, a thing that is pretty important to the suit, and that the government lawyer was unwilling to confirm (Because it would be disastrous for the case) or deny (Because, you know, pesky legal ethics.) that.Report
New app just dropped. Personal security professionals. The dev calls it “Uber with guns“.
Minimum booking time is five hours but, sometimes, you need security very very badly.
Now you can just book it from your phone! Currently limited to NYC and LA but I can easily imagine other cities having a handful of potential clients that have a need for temporary private security.Report
Oh, boy, this won’t end up with someone in prison. /sReport
All paths lead to someone in prison, just a question of how much excitement we have along the way.Report
If I hadn’t read all those William Gibson and Neal Stephenson books, this would be a shocking development.Report
It’s the kind of obvious evolution of “Defund the Police”, when you think about it.Report
“Defund the Police,” Libertarian Edition.Report
Vibes? Papers? Essays?Report
More of the Seasteading, but instead its fortified neighborhoods, type.Report
*shrug* I’ve been pointing out all along that “okay I’ll hire my OWN cops” is a valid response to “if you didn’t pay taxes there wouldn’t be any cops”.
And “there’s more poor people than rich people, so the rich people better watch out” yeah but there’s more bullets than poor people, and bullets are cheaper than welfare.Report
U(zi)berReport
Maybe Luigi is an investor and was just drumming up business.Report
NYT has more details.
https://nypost.com/2025/02/15/us-news/new-app-offers-personal-bodyguards-and-private-motorcades-on-demand-in-nyc/
Apparently you can specify your security details style of attire. Options include ‘business tactical.’Report
Autocorrect fail. Obviously I meant NYP but know better than go edit a comment with a link.Report
Would like to request a whimsical renaissance guard. Swiss if possible. Blue, gold with an accent of orange.Report
I was going to make a joke about trying to fit a halberd in an SUV but according to Wikipedia sig sauer firearms would be a fully authentic representation.Report
You know what all the Mercs say: Halberds for show, Sig Sauer for dough.Report
I’m pretty sure hiring Swiss mercenaries is against international law, except for The Pope.Report
I think it’s time we stop outlawing the Pike Square… we have countermeasures.Report
It is all about Halibut AvenueReport
Some guy on social media priced it out and the cheapest ride he could get was a grand.Report
Yea, it is definitely not for everyone. Which is maybe good or maybe just also consistent with the dystopian implications of such a business.Report
Given the level of fearmongering that goes on in this country these days, I’ll bet a lot more people think they need it than people who actually need it.
I’ll likely never sign up and I’m writing this as a resident of Chicago, where I’m shot and killed at least once or twice daily. 😉Report
Something to ponder – by firing all the probationary Feds using lies about performance one creates the veneer of “cause” to the terminations. And guess what type of firing prevents you from getting unemployment benefits?Report
Whatever this means: Trump signed more executive orders including one that “reestablishes the long-standing norm that only the president or the attorney general can speak for the United States when stating an opinion as to what the law is,” Scharf said.
https://abc7.com/post/trump-will-sign-new-executive-orders/15927230/Report
WTF does that even mean? It goes without saying that, in legal proceedings, the position of the United States on what the law is or should be is presented by DOJ, under the direction of the AG and, ultimately, the President. Outside of legal proceedings, nobody speaks for the United States in any way that matters. If a rogue AUSA does something stupid in court, he or she can be fired. If the United States Attorney for the Western District of East Bumf**k mouths off at a bar association dinner, he or she can be slapped down. Is this EO a solution in search of a problem?Report
From out here in the cheap seats it looks like an attempt to codify ignoring the courts.Report
That was my thought. For example, the President can say that Massachusetts v. EPA was wrongly decided, that carbon dioxide isn’t a pollutant under the Clean Air Act, so the EPA can’t regulate carbon dioxide.Report
It wouldn’t surprise me if that was what’s behind this, but a President has always been able to say what he damn pleases and can make what he says the “position of the United States.” The “position of the United States,” however, is merely that, a “position.”* It isn’t law, and isn’t a license to disregard what is law.
*Just the other day, I was talking with a lawyer who kept saying “our position is…” I told him that may be his “position,” but if push came to shove he’d have to come up with a reason that a court would buy it, and he hadn’t given me one.Report
I think it is about further gutting agencies that are independent from the executive by statute. It could be about gutting the Federal Courts ability to decide on the Constitutionality of Executive Orders and starting the pretext for ignoring them if/when the Supreme Court rules against Trump.
Trump and Co are still very high on their own supply and today they “ended” congestion pricing in NYC while sending out a faux Time cover with Long Live the King and Trump wearing a crown.
Hochul is responding well but theatre criticism demands that people criticize Hochul’s responseReport
Pope Francis is dying and he is using his last moments to tell the U.S. Bishops than Trump and Co. are up to no good and especially calling out J.D. Vance.
LETTER OF THE HOLY FATHER FRANCIS
TO THE BISHOPS OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
_________________
Dear Brothers in the Episcopate,
I am writing today to address a few words to you in these delicate moments that you are living as Pastors of the People of God who walk together in the United States of America.
1. The journey from slavery to freedom that the People of Israel traveled, as narrated in the Book of Exodus, invites us to look at the reality of our time, so clearly marked by the phenomenon of migration, as a decisive moment in history to reaffirm not only our faith in a God who is always close, incarnate, migrant and refugee, but also the infinite and transcendent dignity of every human person. [1]
2. These words with which I begin are not an artificial construct. Even a cursory examination of the Church’s social doctrine emphatically shows that Jesus Christ is the true Emmanuel (cf. Mt 1:23); he did not live apart from the difficult experience of being expelled from his own land because of an imminent risk to his life, and from the experience of having to take refuge in a society and a culture foreign to his own. The Son of God, in becoming man, also chose to live the drama of immigration. I like to recall, among other things, the words with which Pope Pius XII began his Apostolic Constitution on the Care of Migrants, which is considered the “Magna Carta” of the Church’s thinking on migration:
“The family of Nazareth in exile, Jesus, Mary and Joseph, emigrants in Egypt and refugees there to escape the wrath of an ungodly king, are the model, the example and the consolation of emigrants and pilgrims of every age and country, of all refugees of every condition who, beset by persecution or necessity, are forced to leave their homeland, beloved family and dear friends for foreign lands.” [2]
3. Likewise, Jesus Christ, loving everyone with a universal love, educates us in the permanent recognition of the dignity of every human being, without exception. In fact, when we speak of “infinite and transcendent dignity,” we wish to emphasize that the most decisive value possessed by the human person surpasses and sustains every other juridical consideration that can be made to regulate life in society. Thus, all the Christian faithful and people of good will are called upon to consider the legitimacy of norms and public policies in the light of the dignity of the person and his or her fundamental rights, not vice versa.
4. I have followed closely the major crisis that is taking place in the United States with the initiation of a program of mass deportations. The rightly formed conscience cannot fail to make a critical judgment and express its disagreement with any measure that tacitly or explicitly identifies the illegal status of some migrants with criminality. At the same time, one must recognize the right of a nation to defend itself and keep communities safe from those who have committed violent or serious crimes while in the country or prior to arrival. That said, the act of deporting people who in many cases have left their own land for reasons of extreme poverty, insecurity, exploitation, persecution or serious deterioration of the environment, damages the dignity of many men and women, and of entire families, and places them in a state of particular vulnerability and defenselessness.
5. This is not a minor issue: an authentic rule of law is verified precisely in the dignified treatment that all people deserve, especially the poorest and most marginalized. The true common good is promoted when society and government, with creativity and strict respect for the rights of all — as I have affirmed on numerous occasions — welcomes, protects, promotes and integrates the most fragile, unprotected and vulnerable. This does not impede the development of a policy that regulates orderly and legal migration. However, this development cannot come about through the privilege of some and the sacrifice of others. What is built on the basis of force, and not on the truth about the equal dignity of every human being, begins badly and will end badly.
6. Christians know very well that it is only by affirming the infinite dignity of all that our own identity as persons and as communities reaches its maturity. Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups. In other words: the human person is not a mere individual, relatively expansive, with some philanthropic feelings! The human person is a subject with dignity who, through the constitutive relationship with all, especially with the poorest, can gradually mature in his identity and vocation. The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the “Good Samaritan” (cf. Lk 10:25-37), that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception. [3]
7. But worrying about personal, community or national identity, apart from these considerations, easily introduces an ideological criterion that distorts social life and imposes the will of the strongest as the criterion of truth.
8. I recognize your valuable efforts, dear brother bishops of the United States, as you work closely with migrants and refugees, proclaiming Jesus Christ and promoting fundamental human rights. God will richly reward all that you do for the protection and defense of those who are considered less valuable, less important or less human!
9. I exhort all the faithful of the Catholic Church, and all men and women of good will, not to give in to narratives that discriminate against and cause unnecessary suffering to our migrant and refugee brothers and sisters. With charity and clarity we are all called to live in solidarity and fraternity, to build bridges that bring us ever closer together, to avoid walls of ignominy and to learn to give our lives as Jesus Christ gave his for the salvation of all.
10. Let us ask Our Lady of Guadalupe to protect individuals and families who live in fear or pain due to migration and/or deportation. May the “Virgen morena”, who knew how to reconcile peoples when they were at enmity, grant us all to meet again as brothers and sisters, within her embrace, and thus take a step forward in the construction of a society that is more fraternal, inclusive and respectful of the dignity of all.
Fraternally,
Francis
From the Vatican, 10 February 2025Report
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8IPNda2HSC4Report
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Too bad they mostly won’t listen.Report
And shouldn’t. There are lots of reasons to oppose what he’s doing. However invoking God just makes it harder to compromise and be reasonable and we should expect the other side to do the same thing.
Further the Church is hardly an expert in ethics.Report
“Invoking God” is pretty much the job description of a religious leader. Maybe that sounds silly to those of us who don’t believe that there is a God or that the religious leader in question has some pipeline to the God being invoked, so we don’t have to take the invocation seriously. But we can’t really ask them to play by our rules.Report
It’s one thing for the Holy Father to invoke God.
It’s quite another for me to invoke the Holy Father and say “hey, look at this guy! You people agree with him, right?”Report
It’s certainly “another thing,” but what kind of thing is it? You’re pointing out that a religious leader, purporting to rely on the word of some God, has said something you agree with and hoping that what the religious leader is saying will get some traction. People who care what the religious leader has to say may find it compelling; people who don’t, won’t. And the problem is?Report
Ain’t no problem!
Do you agree with the Holy Father about whether women are eligible to become priests?Report
I don’t have an opinion about the rules of a club of which I am not a member. Orthodox Jews don’t eat pork? No skin off my nose and more bacon for me.Report
Oh, I understand that particular position! “This is what those folks think. Okay. Life’s like that sometimes.”
It’s the whole “The Holy Father thinks this… you’re Italian. You agree with the Holy Father, right?” thing.Report
Is there some sort of connection between your first and second paragraphs?
Are you under the impression that anyone whose name ends in a vowel is a member of the Catholic “club”? Or that, to the extent that you’re asking a non-member whether he happens to agree with what the club boss says on something other than club rules, some non-club-related identity is relevant? If the Pope says “X,” and X is a matter of club rules (e.g. who can be priests, what age you have to be to receive communion, whether you can eat pork), non-members are well-advised not to bother themselves about it. If X is a matter of general moral argument (abortion, capital punishment, treatment of migrants, whether you can eat meat at all), non-members can agree or disagree with the Pope just the same as they can agree or disagree with some random social media pundit.Report
non-members can agree or disagree with the Pope just the same as they can agree or disagree with some random social media pundit.
Yes! The Holy Father is just some random social media pundit.
I mean, he is a particularly prominent one and who is, occasionally, insightful and eloquent…
But, let’s face it, he’s got a *LOT* of bad advisors and sometimes he also gives less insightful and less eloquent commentary.Report
Well, that certainly clears things up.Report
“I don’t have an opinion about the rules of a club of which I am not a member.”
It must be nice to have the privilege of not caring about politics.Report
Maybe you can explain why you think your comment makes sense. Like most of us here, I am a “member” of the body politic, and care very much about the rules of that club. I am not a member of a variety of other clubs, like the Roman Catholic Church, the Rotary Club, or the Grosse Pointe Garden Club, which have rules that I might think silly, and might even oppose, if I had to adhere to them. But since their silly rules have nothing to do with me or my interests, or those of people I care about, I don’t bother myself about them. If that’s “privilege,” it’s not a definition I know anything about. Unless minding one’s own business is “privilege.”Report
Unless minding one’s own business is “privilege.”
Yeah, I was asleep for a lot of 2017-2022 as well. About a third of it.Report
Well, that certainly clears things up.Report
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/18/world/americas/trump-migrant-deportation-panama.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
This administration that is very concerned with Christians has deported an Iranian convert to Christianity to Panama where she is trapped in a hotel room. If she has to go back to Iran, she will be killed most likely.Report
https://bsky.app/profile/ryanjreilly.com/post/3lik4sbvu4c2n
U.S. Attorney Ed Martin to launch investigation into Schumer.
Horman has asked the DOJ to investigate AOC for using her free speech rights to advise people pulled over by ICE on their rights.Report
https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2025/02/all-hail-the-king
1. Trump states he is ending congestion pricing in NYC;
2. Hochul says FU, we will see you in court.
3. Trump declares himself king on social mediaReport
https://bsky.app/profile/joshuajfriedman.com/post/3likp45oxkk2n
A master class in how you respond to TrumpReport
What the heck happened? Did Hochul get abducted and replaced with a pod person? Is there some way to make sure the real one doesn’t come back?Report
I’m not sure it’s going to work. For one thing, who is the target audience? It wasn’t the people who couldn’t afford to drive! The target audience is the people that could.
Here’s the problem that I see. This isn’t a left vs. right thing. This is a populist vs. elite thing and Hochul is speaking to the elite.
I suppose that that’s better than treating it as left vs. right… I mean, it actually understands the frame. But the target audience is smaller than the people who had to make the tradeoff to take mass transit.Report
The legality of this strikes me as black and white and unambiguously outside Don’s authority. Your political analysis strikes me as debatable- yes maybe some people who made the tradeoffs and took transit instead will be delighted by this. It’s also possible that an equal number of people who enjoyed the noticeably reduced congestion will be less pleased. Could be that this’ll please more people than it displeases but, to be blunt, Don isn’t winning New Jersey or New York state even if he makes some of their upstaters happy two years away from the next election. Whereas the Dems saying “fish you, that’s illegal” strikes me as useful for their sides moral in a way that could snowball forward towards the election. I don’t think pre-emptive obedience is going to be helpful.
And that’s without touching on Trump declaring himself King. Maybe a few libertarians and righties actually would care about that. Lol I know, sorry, couldn’t help but try the joke. Snerk.Report
Oh, yes. “Eff you, that’s illegal!” is a great play.
And pulling the whole “they used federal funds for transportation, that makes it under the auspices of FedGov” should be familiar to anybody who used to argue with Libertarians.Report
Sure, and that’s an argument for the courts which, most likely, Trump will viscously lose because whatever argument one might make about federal funds being used for transportation giving them a say it’s unlikely that Trump writing ‘repeal it” on a napkin and tweeting it out is the acceptable method to throw that weight around. When it’s an unambiguously good program and a strong legal case I think the preponderance of the advantage is in fighting for it.Report
I think it has something to do with Federal Highways. You’re not allowed to charge tolls on Federal Highways.
This means that NYC can charge tolls on everything but I-95 and US Route 1.
I think.Report
Tolls are charged on federal highways all the time.Report
I’m digging into this and seeing the following:
Section 129 General Tolling Program doesn’t cover this.
Section 166 HOV/HOT Lanes doesn’t cover this.
Interstate System Reconstruction and Rehabilitation Pilot Program (ISRRPP) doesn’t seem to cover this.
Value Pricing Pilot Program (VPPP) seems to be what is covering this.
State, regional, and local government agencies may apply for tolling authority if they are allocated one of 15 slots available in the program. Each slot may include multiple projects.
Here’s what the government is saying:
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I mean, they’re not wrong to say that this is going to very quickly stop being about “congestion reduction” and start being a source of revenue that the government depends on staying at a consistent level, and whoops that level’s gone down…
(Pigouvian taxes work great until you realize that you’ve eaten all the pigs but you’re still hungry for bacon.)
That said, I think this is the kind of thing the country needs. Fuck You, Make Me in response to Trump or his butt-boy making some crazy decision. Not a Strongly-Worded Letter Of Resignation in response to some perfidy but “hell no, I ain’t doing that, and if you want to fire me you bastards are gonna need the riot squad with power tools to get me out of this office!”Report
You know what? I think I agree with that. We need to establish that each of our states is somewhat sovereign as well and should be able to tell the Fedgov “up yours”.
We can call it “Federalism-for-real-this-time”.Report
The Supremes have been hard at work on this for about 50 years.Report
Don’t project how everyone else in the county thinks about mass transit to NYC…only _25%_ of the people who live in NYC have driver’s licenses. A good chunk of the ones that do, keep their car outside the city, so even less of that 25% drive in the city. The amount of people who had to ‘make the tradeoff’ is nearly negligible, because the amount of New Yorkers who drive in and out of the city is negligible. (It’s just that the city is so populated that ‘negligible’ still results in pretty bad traffic.)
I’ve heard from plenty of people who talk about how New York is literally now driveable, you can actually operate a motor vehicle in it and get places.
Several of them are people who do deliveries in Manhattan.
Even New Jersey, when attacking the program, attacked it on the grounds that NYC keeps all the money, not their population disliked it.
Like, everyone I hear talks about this doesn’t quite understand the very unique situation of NYC WRT to cars. They absolutely do not think about mass transit in the way other people think about mass transit.Report
The stuff that I think about mass transit in NYC involves “undocumented visitors setting women on fire”.
This is one of the reasons that I think that Hochul realizes that she can’t replace Adams with a DSA goon. The second the DSA goon becomes mayor, we’ll go back to “defund” and then every single idiot with a camera becomes a citizen journalist documenting non-representative assaults on the newly depoliced subway.Report
I’m starting a new Jaybird Bingo Card. This is a contender for a square.Report
Which one? Referring to illegal immigrants as “undocumented visitors”? Bringing up “Defund the Police”? Referring to crimes caught on video as “non-representative”?Report
Wait and see.Report
It really is sorta gibberish, isn’t it?
Jaybird really does assume that Democratic governors are all extremely far left, all occupying positions that almost no elected Democrats occupy at all.Report
I thought that saying that Hochul knowing that she can’t replace Adams with a DSA goon was acknowledging that Hochul was *NOT*, in fact, extremely far left.Report
I think she’ll just let time take care of Adams. There’s an election in November and he’s wildly unpopular.
https://apnews.com/article/eric-adams-popularity-trump-corruption-charges-nyc-a367838a7a438c159d6d0bfb10339680Report
I think she’s waiting long enough to remove him that it doesn’t create some special election that Cuomo is going to win…at least, people keep saying that, I have not actually gone and looked at the law and deadlines to understand exactly what they’re talking about.
The absolute best case scenario is that Adams’ prosecution is delayed, he toadies up to Trump, and then Hochul removes him for the very obvious cause of ‘actual literal criminal everyone has been yelling at her to remove’, and he gets prosecuted anyway. We’re already halfway there.
Just making it blatantly obvious how corrupt Adams and the Trump DOJ is.Report
Like many Democratic women (or Democrats in general), I think she sees Trump as a person without any redeeming qualities.
1. In the call between Democratic Governors and Schumer/Jefferies, she apparently gave a variant of people need to FAFO in order to ensure they never vote for Trump again;
2. She takes abortion rights seriously as demonstrated by her stance in fighting against LA and TX.
3. She seems like she might be willing to do something about Adams because having Trump in control of NYC with Adams as his puppet-prefect it bad.Report
I sure as heck hope she does something about Adams.Report
Hey, remember Mayor Bass? She’s investigating why she was allowed to go on a trip. I am not making this up.
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On the one hand,
Trump is announcing himself a king and one of his foot soldiers is trying to find ways to bring charges against Democrats who criticize him or any other Republican: https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/trump-appointed-prosecutor-kicks-operation-whirlwind-eyes-schumer-rcna192878
On the other hand, JB has an opportunity to troll Democrats and his neurons can’t resist despite more pressing issues.Report
If you could give me a list of stuff I’m allowed to talk about in the open thread, I’d appreciate it!
Lord knows, without a topics approver, I might talk about any silly thing that happens.Report
Seems she hasn’t learned the lesson of recent years that you Never Apologize For Anything.
Someone described modern existence with the media/social-media/Online power as like having a conversation with the Fae. Never apologize, because that means you agree that you did something wrong, and the people you’re dealing with have a bottomless hunger for appeasement when wronged.Report
“We are going to fire the heck out of the person who didn’t prevent me from going to Ghana” is kind of apologizing, kind of? But it’s still pretty far away.Report
Even reacting to the critics is admitting that, in some small way, they had a point.Report
And it looks like Kash Patel gets confirmed today.
If even half of the horrible predictions of what happens if he gets confirmed are in the ballpark of accurate, we’re going to learn a *LOT* about the last couple of decades.Report
Aaaaaand he just got approved.Report
And he has just been sworn in.
Like, at almost 6PM on a Friday.Report
Hochul is not going to remove Adams but will install guardrails. The actual removal procedure is actually much more complicated than the internet has let on of course: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDapa0YSnVs&t=457s
Start watching the explainer at the 6:30 markReport
Why are you talking about the governor of New York instead of the horrific display of the Bibas children?Report
That stupid region is never going to know peace.Report
Hamas returned the bodies of the three deceased members of the Bibas family. The murder of the Bibas family, although Hamas claims they died in an Israeli air strike but Hamas lies a lot, has generally angered or served as a symbol of anger of Jews world wide. Many Jews, and these include people I know in real life, who never posted on politics or Israel have posted in outrage at the fate of the Bibas family.
When I have pointed this out to people, the response has generally been that Jews are bad for caring more about some lives than others. I find this response perplexing. Nobody thinks it is bad or unusual for Muslims to care more about the lives of their fellow Palestinian Muslims than Israeli Jews killed by Hamas even if they live in distant Indonesia but Jews are supposed to universally care rather than be concerned more about our fellow Jews. There aren’t that many of us and 45% of all Jews live in Israel but the people who defend Pan-whatever solidarity in other groups as part of revolutionary praxis think that Pan-Jewish solidarity is dual loyalty and international conspiracy. They just don’t get this when you point it out.Report
If you thought that I was going to make a “why are you talking about this instead of talking about the governor of New York” joke, you’ve got good instincts but I think that there’s more gold to be mined in discussing how even the UN (EVEN THE UN!!!) came out and issued a disapproving statement.
Hamas seems to be going out of its way to alienate freakin’ everybody right in the middle of needing a lot of allies.
If I were Egypt/Jordan, I wouldn’t want these people to show up on my doorstep either.
Maybe we can send them to Europe.Report
If Angela Merkel were still chancellor the whole thing would solve itself.Report
Check this out. Here’s what Amnesty International said:
Yes. *THAT* is what it is a reminder of.
It’s like they’re actively trying to set themselves on fire.Report
The thinking is that there were alternatives other than killing 48k people.
The problem with that line of thinking is it amounts to the idea that Israel should suck up terrorism and/or that it doesn’t have the right to defend itself. More importantly, in the context of WW2, the allies weren’t obligated to kill one of their own civilians killed every time an axis civilian was killed… and even this is ignoring we don’t know how many of those 48k were civilians.
And we’re starting to wake up to the problem I pointed out a year plus ago. Hamas wasn’t destroyed, but Israel is still more or less in charge. So Israel isn’t going to allow military bases (i.e. hospitals) to be rebuilt or allow other “dual use” materials/facilities to be sent in. Further very few want to rebuild “civilian” structures that Hamas will occupy and Israel will then destroy.
At this point Israel will focus on keeping Hamas weak, which probably means not rebuilding Gaza.Report
The dumb decisions of Palestinian leadership managed to basically kill any Israel appetite for working with the Palestinians but basically yes, people expect Israel to accept a certain amount of terrorism and Jews to accept a certain amount of anti-Semitism. They don’t say this part out loud because it sounds bad and unconvincing.Report
Hamas has released a statement!
Report
The Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia has released a statement:
“What we saw today in Gaza is a disgrace to Islam, an act of blasphemy against Allah.”Report
An interesting analysis from Josh Barro about the real costs of DEI thought among the Dems. I think he is being a bit overwrought on it but I don’t know that I strongly disagree either.
https://www.joshbarro.com/p/democrats-need-their-own-dei-purge/commentsReport
There really isn’t any sort of DEI faction to purge from the party in any sort of official manner. The real danger is that there are large numbers of activists of different sorts and different levels of affiliation with the Democratic Party, some passionate Democratic voter and some not, whose antics can be imputed to the institutional Democratic Party by the Republicans. Telling these activists to cool it and engage in some self-censorship. They think that being ridiculous is part of the point of activism.Report
Yes I think you and he are sortof saying the same thing. It’s kind of moved into being basically just a common language and reflex for almost the whole fashionable activist set.Report
Complete with self-congratulatory conferences. The difference is that he thinks there are practical steps that can be taken to distance from the DEI apparatchiks. I am not really certain this is possible. They really don’t seem to understand when you explain why they aren’t helping and look at you like you have two heads.Report
It actually doesn’t matter if ‘distance’ is possible, mostly because the Republicans will just overtly lie about things and the media will not bother to mention that while repeating their lies.
In fact, they already are massively lying about pretty much every aspect of this topic and built up a giant glob of nonsensical resentment about stuff that isn’t actually true.
You actually can look at Jaybird, who has internalized all of this, and see how completely incoherent and angry he is about companies doing PR stuff and stuff like that.
I mean, this article itself is a good example. It claims to be about DEI, but here is the conclusion:
There is exactly one part of that that could be DEI, and that’s affirmative action. And it’s worth pointing out that that policy is _literally 50 years old_, created by executive order by JFK. Except not even that, the current system is basically just something education _invented_, it’s not something directed from above. And it is now illegal.
Was there a big pushback by elected Dems when the court struck it down in 2023? I don’t remember one. There were plenty of people going ‘This will not have the effect that a lot of Asians have apparently been convinced it will’ (and those people were right) and a lot of people, myself included, pointing out all the _other_ stuff that tilted the admissions process towards both white people and wealthy people, like legacy admissions and considering extracurriculars and other activities, things that often are completely inaccessible to the poor. (And the rich can literally just buy certificates saying their kids participated in those, as we’ve seen.)
But I don’t remember anyone, and certainly no elected Dem, saying ‘This is horrible! I approve of some sort of scoring system that explicitly includes race in it! We demand the courts allow this!’ Maybe they did, maybe I missed it.
But I seem to recall a lot of people pointing out that colleges had mostly transitioned _away_ from doing that in favor of things that attempted to equalize things better, even if a few of them did include race as a pretty minor factor. And it wouldn’t really matter if they couldn’t do that anymore.
And, again…this isn’t legal anymore. Are Democrats supposed to be running around yelling ‘I am satisfied with how the courts ruled!’ Do we think that would make the news? The news is barely covering Democrats at all.Report
You actually can look at Jaybird, who has internalized all of this, and see how completely incoherent and angry he is about companies doing PR stuff and stuff like that.
I’m not the guy theorizing that this stuff was an op done on behalf of corporations trying to get people to hate the idea of unions, Dave.
The folks alternating between “nobody is saying that’ and “but that’s good though” are the ones who you should direct your ire at. They’re the ones who are costing your side votes, after all.
Was there a big pushback by elected Dems when the court struck it down in 2023?
The DNC released a statement following Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard. Would this count?
If not, I can try to find something else.Report
DavidTC: …affirmative action.
…But I don’t remember anyone, and certainly no elected Dem, saying ‘This is horrible! I approve of some sort of scoring system that explicitly includes race in it! We demand the courts allow this!’ Maybe they did, maybe I missed it.
19 years ago Michigan outlawed Affirmative Action.
And the law was ignored. The colleges came up with a more complicated “holistic” system that produced exactly the same results. Which means the same people (i.e Team Blue) were using the same quotas (i.e. percentage of population) and we’ve spent the last 19 years with Team Blue defending that in lockstep.
The only thing that changed was the language. So no, Team Blue won’t say “we insist on a scoring system”, they will say “we insist on a complex holistic system that makes race one factor of many and oops, it just coincidently results in the same outcome”.
The lesson learned should be that removing this is going to be like outlawing someone’s religion. Trump is correct to assume that there will be massive pushback, because that’s what we’ve seen before.Report
He that judges the booty is directionally correct and, I want to say, about as extreme in his position as his side will allow. He’s calling out the excesses while still focusing on the good intentions of the people who committed them.
He’s basically saying that there’s a withdrawal but it’s not a retreat, it’s a recalibration, so on and so forth. Josh Barro, bless him, is going further and is closer to being actually correct rather than merely directionally, but Pete is preaching to the choir and Josh is preaching to the formerly undecideds and being them to become undecided again. Laying groundwork for when Trump gets to be too much again.
As for “BIPOC”, the point of BIPOC is that, along with AAPI and LatinX, you can pretty much say “everybody but white people and Jews”. Get all of your bases covered.Report
I still have a warm spot for Pete but I’m not certain how he goes forward. There’s talk about him carpetbagging into a Michigan Senate seat and that’d be something, I suppose, and that’s better than nothing. Still his mayoral backgrounds and his acceptable but not remarkable stint in the administration is a narrow base to build a national career on. I certainly wish him well.Report
He’s one of the best talkers the Dems have. He’s a McKinsey Consultant to the bone. That appeals to a great many of the elite within the Democratic party and his ability to talk to them on their level and gently explain that stuff didn’t work.
There’s no way that I could say it in a way that would get them to listen but Pete can.
The problem is that they picked up a *LOT* of bad habits over the last four years and unlearning them and learning new ones will be more painful and take more time than just waiting for Trump to implode.Report
Well yes, between Trump ineptitude and thermostatic reaction the Dems could realistically swing back quite easily without changing a lot. Personally I’d prefer that they take somewhat more agency in the matter and go for more than a mere thermostatic win.
As for Pete- I agree with your analysis, the problem is I’m not sure where in his laudable characteristics we find a mass voting constituency and he’d very badly need one if the tack he takes is one that, even gently, questions the mores and ticks of the activist/elitist left set.Report
“He’s one of the best talkers the Dems have. He’s a McKinsey Consultant to the bone. That appeals to a great many of the elite within the Democratic party and his ability to talk to them on their level and gently explain that stuff didn’t work.”
Also he’s queer, and that really matters to a lot of them, that someone with the right personal-life credentials have this opinion, instead of Just Another Cishet White Dudebro.Report
We are in the boat we are in today partly because cis-het white dudes don’t know how to share well.Report
I’ve seen the criticism that he may be gay but he is not queer.
Perhaps that criticism is something that only a crazy person would make and I don’t want to argue that particular point. I am merely pointing out that that criticism is out there.Report
I am sure everyone is tired of my opinion on the subject but whatever.
To me a lot of this circles back to the mission of the Democratic party. Does anyone know what it is anymore? Historically I always thought of it as stuff like protecting the commons, standing up for the rights of the little guy against larger social and economic forces, and ensuring the state acts as a check against poverty and inequality through various social democratic lite programs and entitlements.* Oh and usually an overall more sensible foreign and fiscal policy, at least over the lasf 25-30 years.
The question moving forward is whether that stuff (maybe modified for the 21st century) still matters or if it’s endlessly indulging and implementing the sensibilities of people deeply ensconsed in academic and NGO culture. I’d like to recover something like the former, but I suppose time will tell.
*Obviously there have always been tensions, inconsistencies, and hypocrisy, that just makes them a normal American political party.Report
Well I certainly am not tired of you talking about your opinion on the matter.Report
The fact that no one seems to have a sense of perspective in worrisome.
Does everyone else see what is going on in the United States right now? And we are saying “Well, Democrats have a DEI problem.”
F###ing Flying Spaghetti MonsterReport
What is the mission, or the vision or what have you?
Stop Trump for sure. But what else?Report
Stopping Trump from destroying everything built up over decades or centuries, making the United States into a baddie and international laughing stock that nobody trists, and turning America into a kleptocracy but without the colorful dictator clothing should be a good enough as mission or vision.Report
I wish it was that easy.Report
Like you stated in the other blog, going against Trump is going to require a lot of people who voted for Trump to be allowed into the resistance gracefully because we need the numbers. The problem is that there are certain things that are imputed to the Democratic Party by nutpicking that a lot of these people don’t like. DEI is one of those things. I get that hatred of DEI is overblown, although I’m less of a fan of it than you are and think that a lot left anti-Semitism and anti-Asian prejudice is present in the movement, but they aren’t exactly being helpful by keep doing the ridiculous things that drives everybody up the wall as their part in the resistance.Report
As Lee is obliquely pointing out, Saul, there’s a corollary to your “Defeating Trump is Important!” exclamation. A LOT of the DEI gestures and habits are -not- substantive positions but rather symbolic ticks and a lot of the constituencies DEI helps are not vulnerable, marginalized people who DEI helps or protects. A lot of the DEI beneficiaries (I dare to say most of them even) are wealthy academics, over credentialed consultants and fashionable wealthy capitalists using DEI’s precepts for cover, profit or prestige.
If defeating Trump is important (and I agree it emphatically is) then is not discarding the superfluous, useless or posturing fashions of DEI not a very small price to pay to advance the goal of defeating Trump?
I emphasize, before some DEI advocate rushes to hide behind the disadvantaged and marginal, that everyone agrees that a lot of DEI can be discarded without hurting the powerless, marginal or disadvantaged. Wouldn’t discarding the DEI faff not be a small price to pay to defeat Trump? It’s not like Barro is being vague here- he points to very definite material policies DEI ushered in and how they’re HATED by minorities that DEI claims to be protecting.Report
There is a cynical argument that a lot of corporate HR types got all in on DEI because it was a way to piss people off about liberalism. My brother noted in the past that DEI is the closest thing that the Left has to grift or is grift. I do believe he is correct that going on against it is missing the forest for the trees at the moment.Report
Wait.
So the HR types got in as part of a long con to discredit HR types?
This strikes me as one hell of a conspiracy.
I’m on board.Report
Not to discredit HR types but to ensure that employees hate liberalism enough to vote for the anti-union party.Report
The hair dye was a nice touch.Report
Based upon my experience, most “HR types” aren’t that smart enough to come up with that scheme. In one example, my old company subcontract out 99% of reporting requirements that HR typically does. The only thing the HR rep did was 1) was there “in case” and 2) sent out a monthly email talking about what the dept did. It was a short email. Six figures for that? This is me rolling my eyes.Report
A good HR department can have useful compliance and administrative functions (think benefit management). I think what happens in a lot of places is they assume a ‘create the culture’ kind of function and do a bunch of stuff antithetical to their actual mission, which is protect the business.Report
Yeah, “I think what happens in a lot of places is they assume a ‘create the culture’ kind of function and do a bunch of stuff antithetical to their actual mission, which is protect the business.” This.
I remember folks in my family in HR telling me “HR DOES NOT work for you. It works for the company, and protecting the company is their main job.
I was always reminded of that when HR had the annual explanation of benefits and how “we’re trying to keep costs down, but employees are going to have to take a higher percentage of the burden this year” BS….Report
There could be an element of it but it’s unlikely. The majority of the damage is done at the non-profit, government agency and academic level along with social media. Corporate HR types are down with it for very simple incentive matters: You spend a few bucks on kayfabe DEI stuff and that makes it very easy to cheaply deflect any litigation about discriminatory hiring/firing practices. It’s pretty good business.Report
Interestingly the modern DEI kayfabe has IMO actually increased risk, especially in an environment with a conservative federal judiciary that one assumes is very ready and willing to hold against companies for discrimination and/or hostile work environment for white people.
I’ve been in-house long enough to watch the evolution. Back in the day instead of “DEI” it was typical to have something that might be called ‘Compliance’ or ‘Code of Conduct’ training. This would include insights like ‘don’t sing rap lyrics with profanity or racial slurs in the break room’ and ‘do not offer members of your staff a promotion in exchange for sexual favors’ kind of stuff. People would often groan about this too for various reasons but it was all generally consistent with what the law is. While stuff like this was never going to be determinative in a lawsuit the consensus was its better to have it than not for CYA purposes. At a certain point a lot of the risk conversation ends up being about not wanting to be seen as an outlier when the inevitable claim occurs.
That’s all very different though from the idea that companies are going to establish highly race conscious hiring practices, set up a bunch of identity based affinity groups, or worst of all bring in some Robin DiAngelo (or whoever) acolyte to confront your work force in live sessions and/or create really aggressive training materials.
From a risk perspective it’s gone from mild CYA to just begging to be sued.Report
Yeah, it is different from that, which is why almost no companies do that. In fact, the thing you’re thinking of, the reason you picked the name Robin DiAngelo, is not an example of that.
Coca-Cola signed up for for something called LinkedIn Learning, a platform that has thousands of courses. They required a few of those courses to be taken by employees. They also, sorta randomly, selected some courses and put them in ‘learning plans’. Robin DiAngelo’s LinkedIn Learning webinar was one of those.
Was this a poor choice? Probably. Was it a deliberate attempt to create aggressive training materials? No.
In fact, _is_ that material aggressive? Not really. I really don’t like the way it’s using ‘white’, but the things she says are generally true and presented in a neutral manner, and it’s somewhat ironic that she has consistent talked about how white men _constantly_ seem to take bald facts and very minor suggestions as direct attacks on them. She’s written a book about it, in fact.
I mean, to quote her: “The number one most effective adaptation of racism over time, is the good/bad binary, this idea that a racist is a bad person and a good person is not racist. And so it’s about individuals who are either good or bad or who either do or don’t engage.”
And because that quote is slightly confusing, she is saying that racism has basically adapted by making racism UTTERLY EVIL instead of normally a bunch of subconscious tendencies and assumptions that anyone can get (Which what 95% of racism actually is), so that anyone who gets any of their behavior pointed out, even the slightest hint of ‘maybe don’t say that’ or ‘we use this new term now’ has to defend it to the death, or they are BAD PEOPLE.Report
I appreciate your efforts to try to convince people that the last 10 or 12 years of escalating craziness around identity issues was all a figment of their imagination. When it comes to me I’d say save the pixels.Report
I’ll be blunt.
1. I think 70-80 percent of the reason Harris did not win was the general inflation/throw the bums out trend that swept elections all over the world. Occam’s razor and all that.
1a. The rest was death by a thousand cuts and I think Israel/Palestine was more of a reason than DEI and I think Israel/Palestine was barely one of the cuts.
2. Even given that, she lost very narrowly given only months to campaign and received more votes than Biden in four swing states: NC, GA, NV, and one more than I am forgetting.
2a. Trump won those states but his super-power is always getting low-propensity Herrenvolkists out who vote for him and often only him. Hence, the fact that he was only able to flip one swing state Senate race (PA). OH, MT, and WV are red states.
3. To the extent, people are saying DEI caused them to vote for Trump, they are still doing the innuendo version of “No snowball chance in hell you are getting me to vote for the Black-Indian Lady….”
4. I think very online people talking about DEI being bad are a select group of cranky middle-aged white guys who hate that a black woman made them feel uncomfortable and potentially contemplate things that they preferred not to contemplate. Or some guys seem to act like DEI means that one day their daughter is going to stop being Daddy’s Little Girl suddenly and come home with a girlfriend with a shaved head and combat fatigues and say “Sorry Daddy but DEI taught me that the revolution is here and you have to be put up against the wall. Suzy here is going to pull the trigger.”
Basically, it is a bunch of people with an ax to grind and using this as an opportunity, also why did Biden have to appoint all those non-white people like Julie Su and Lina Khan, can’t we just go back to the Clinton 90s when all these pesky social issues were kept on the table please? Instead of American citizens, we should think of ourselves as employees for America, Inc, completely dedicated to increasing the GDP/Quarterly profits. I, Very Serious Pundit Man, will act as HR cheerleader. Everything else is just a distraction against the goal of America, Inc.”
Yes, some DEI stuff is the closest thing liberals have to the right-wing wingnut circuit but people have a moral responsibility to think with straight heads and if Musk is out there talking about how we need pain/great depression to bring about his third-rate Shadowrun/Curtis Yarvin fantasy and Trump is talking about mass deportations, a person has a responsibility to take this seriously and literally. I’m not going to let people off the hook if there response to this is “Yeah,but I had to go listen to a lecture on implicit bias and structural racism…”
Well, I don’t know what to say to these people but it sure as hell looks like Musk wants a deep, deep recession or worse.Report
Saul, let me give you a comprehensive list of all of the counties that Harris won in 2024 that Biden did not:
Any questions?Report
I have one: Are we talking about acres, or people?
Because a lot of empty acres voted for Trump, and a couple of cities where a lot of people live voted for Harris.
I live in Texas, in the most populous county. More people live here than in the combined 219 less populated counties. My county voted for Harries. Those 219 counties almost sure voted for Trump.
If you give me a list that says Harris lost Texas 219 to 1, that would be kind of useless, don’t you agree?Report
I’m not talking about whether the counties were populated or not.
I’m talking about the counties that voted for Trump in 2020 and voted for Harris in 2024.
If you wanted me to give you a list of the counties that voted for Trump in 2016 but voted for Biden in 2020, I could give you a list of those counties.
Heck, if you wanted a list of counties that voted for Clinton in 2016 but voted for Trump in 2020, I could give you that list too.
But it’s easiest for me to give you a list of all of the counties that voted for Trump in 2020 and then went on to vote for Harris in 2024:
Wanna see it again?Report
No. I don’t care how acres voted. I care about how people voted.Report
I still think the most useful discussion is about where and why people didn’t vote. That being said g the largest block of voters in the electionReport
Harris lost most of her votes in blue states.
She lost nearly 1.9 million votes in California and about 700K in New York, another 400K in NJ.
She still won all these states pretty easily. NJ was the closest and it was still nearly 52 percent for her.
In CA, Democrats managed to flip three House seats R to D despite shedding 1.9 million votes from Biden to Harris.
It seems to be more parochial-municipal issues being turned into ire at national Democrats and not DEI.Report
New York was closer to flipping Red than Florida was to flipping Blue.Report
Well, would it make a difference to you if you knew that “not flipping a single county” is something that hasn’t happened since 1932?
Like, in 1984, even Walter Mondale flipped Apache County (Arizona) from voting for Reagan in 1980 to voting for a Democrat.Report
Saul, many of the people claiming there is a problem voted for Harris. I know I did.
I agree with a lot of your big picture analysis of why Harris lost. What I don’t get is why your reaction to other Democrats saying we have a major branding problem is to call them all secret racists and sad pathetic little men.
At a certain point the goal of the party isn’t just to narrowly win the presidency it’s to get a sizeable enough senate and house majorities to actually do things. Yes Trump is a really big threat right now but the best thing that can be done to check him outside of using the courts is to thump the GOP in the midterms. Are you sure your approach to this subject helps?Report
Saul, question, did you read the original article we’re discussing? Because Barro is not expressing general, unmoored from reality, DEI sentiment. He’s talking about specific, concrete instances of DEI based political (and policy) malpractice.
And I agree with a lot of your analysis about how the election last year went down. The problem is #1, #2, and to a degree #3 (seriously, are you saying that political reality forbids nominating minorities or women? Seriously???) are not actionable assertions.
1.a and DEI in general are things Dems could act on and could in theory control. I agree that, in the Trump era in 2026 and 2028 the Dems probably will have some advantage simply in thermostatic and Trumpian terms. But we don’t want to be eking out 50%+1 wins against this flaming dumpster fire/psychotic incoherent clown show of a right wing party; we need to thump them in order to make them change. Not just scrabble out a win, route them. If ditching the performative, stupid and grifty elements of DEI; not (I emphasize -NOT-) the genuine substantive areas where DEI overlaps with our many other principles about helping and protecting minorities and other disadvantaged groups; why the fish should we not do that? Because it’d give some white bros on the internet who’d never vote for the Dems anyhow a happy? Who fishing cares. If they’re momentarily tickled because we axed a bunch of stupid DEI stuff they’ll be utterly miserable when their entire ring wing project gets consigned to the political wilderness.
For fish’s sake, it’s like we’re sweeping down a river towards a waterfall and some of us are saying “hey let’s row to the shore” but all you want to talk about is how the current is evil, physics is unrelenting and going over the waterfall would be a calamity. Yes, fine, sure, but physics won’t change, we do not have the power to change the current, let’s row to shore!Report
He’s actually not. He’s talking about literally one example of DEI, a thing that Democrats did 50+ years ago and was just struck down by the courts.
And then a bunch of completely unrelated stuff. Defunding the police has nothing to do with DEI, regardless of how popular or not you think the policy is. (It also, notable, is not actually a Democratic position.)
Along with absolute nonsense like ‘He noted how just about the only people he encountered in his DNC politicking who hadn’t gone to college were…’ Um…yeah, _all_ elected politicians went to college, statistically speaking.
Along with completely insane complaints like how David Hogg tweeted something about…who started gun control? It is a completely insane thing to say, not just because who started ‘gun control’ is pretty undefined, but also the American gun control movement certainly wasn’t started ‘centuries again’, it was started after a number of high-profile assassinations in the 60s. So it is an extremely dumb thing to tweet, David Hogg is sorta a moron, but in what possible way is that tweak supposed to be causing people not to vote for Democrats? Also, how is that DEI?
What is actually happening in this discussion is summarized in the paragraph that starts with ‘What worldview am I complaining about?’, and then he proceeds to summarize a worldview that the Democrats absolutely _do not have_, but instead has been ascribed to them by Republicans and the media has happily gone along with.
The very next paragraph, for example, is ‘Democrats see Asian Americans disproportionately getting ahead in school as an “inequitable” outcome, and so they try to stack the deck against them.’, a thing that did not happen. Again, I will point out that Affirmative Action is _almost sixty years old_ and the idea of using race in the way that is something that high education just…decided to do back then, and is not some recent thing that Democrats have done.Report
If ditching the performative, stupid and grifty elements of DEI; not (I emphasize -NOT-) the genuine substantive areas where DEI overlaps with our many other principles about helping and protecting minorities and other disadvantaged groups; why the fish should we not do that?
How many votes would it swing?Report
The theory is it’d swing a heck of a lot more than continuing on our current course would.Report
Wisconsin is currently going through a tempest in a teapot where the governor introduced a bill that included, among other things, language changes.
“Mother” was switched to “Inseminated Person”.
As a big conspiracy theory fan, I think it’s because the governor knew that his bill would never, ever pass, not in a million years, so he put that stuff in there as a poison pill and could argue against the people in the state house/senate as being bigots.
Though I suppose someone may point out that changing “mother” to “inseminated person” isn’t DEI and ask why I would even care, given that I don’t live in Wisconsin.Report
That’s certainly a theory.Report
CJ, I’m trying to figure out your thought process on this. Let’s put the presidency aside, and take it as a given that we’re in a moment where those elections are going to be relatively narrow.
How would you go about trying to compete for the Senate, and for state houses and governorships? Is there any sort of change in strategy or branding you’d consider or is this in your estimation the best they can possibly do? Because that hasn’t been going well either.Report
My thought process is that the Pundit’s Fallacy isn’t a thought process. Throwing out a pet peeve on a small- bore issue may be fun, but you do things that will win you net votes, preferably significant net votes. Not non- zero votes, not there must be some votes out there somewhere that might possibly turn if the party accommodates my pet peeve on this marginal issue.Report
I think that’s a fair rejoinder to the narrow idea that Democrats could do one weird trick to comprehensively change their electoral fortunes. However what’s being suggested (by me at least) is the need for a bigger reinvention. It involves jettisoning a lot of bad cultural baggage but that by itself won’t be enough.
Bill Clinton and the New Democrats did something like this in the 90s, kicking the party out of the sclerosis and outdated thinking. Trump has partially done it with the GOP, casting off a lot of the zombie Reganism and neoconservatism. His success is limited by the fact that it rests on a cult of personality and is born of the self interest of the Trump family and hangers on rather than a well thought through political project, but there is a willingness in there to go outside the box.
What I don’t get, and what boggles my mind, is that suggesting that the Democrats should also be thinking this way gets you called a racist or told that change is not really effective with the implication that no one should ever try it. That all sounds to me less like wisdom and more like a cope for continued failure.Report
Not non- zero votes, not there must be some votes out there somewhere that might possibly turn if the party accommodates my pet peeve on this marginal issue.
Is “JEEZ LOUISE QUIT ACCOMMODATING THAT OTHER GUY’S PET PEEVE ON THAT MARGINAL ISSUE!” a reasonable complaint?Report
The complaint is don’t waste my time on this s**t unless you bring the receipts.Report
Does the election count as a receipt?
National polling?Report
Not for the kind of fine- grained, small- bore issues being obsessed about. If the data existed showing non-trivial constituencies who would swing on this stuff, we’d have seen it by now.Report
When you set the terms for both sides of the argument, you’re bound to win.Report
You asked, I answered. A thing is true or it isn’t. Someone who says something exists can back it up or he can’t. Do you play by different rules?Report
To me the even more important piece than Barro on DEI is this one from Texiera.
https://www.liberalpatriot.com/p/one-simple-question-for-democrats
The maps thrown around are devastating not just for the presidency but for the senate, govnernorships, and state legislatures. If the GOP is able to continue to tone down its own ambient politics of racial grievance, which like it or not it’s getting better at, the Democrats are in for some real pain. College grads are both too few and too concentrated to make up a broad, national base. Conversely, the GOP doesn’t have to win racial minorities outright, it just has to get a big enough chunk of their middle and working class to prevent the Democrats from running up the score like they used to be able to.Report
The main thing that the democrats have going for them is that Trump is a mule without coattails and only outperforms against truly horrible candidates.
The main thing that the republicans have going for them is that they have no freakin’ idea how to tell whether a candidate is truly horrible or not and, in their attempts to avoid self-reflection for even a freakin’ second, are making their own problems even worse.
Huh! Colorado is one of the *GOOD* states! I feel better about my choices.Report
Heh my outsider’s perspective is that CO has an interesting, maybe somewhat unique combination of lifestyle appeal and proximity to the left coast that it will remain a magnet for the voters Democrats do really well with.
My question (concern) is what happens if PA starts to follow something like the trajectory of OH. The only bulwark against that is Philadelphia and it’s suburbs but I don’t see Philly as the same kind of outwardly emanating blue pillar that BOS, NYC or DC are.Report
I mean Georgia and the south eastern (north of Florida) coastal states do look to be improving for Dems and have potential to become a new battleground. It’s not hopeless.Report
Report
As, I presume, you’re well aware that is utterly and completely meaningless this far out from the next primary contest. More than anything it simply indicates how many of the interviewees recognize a given name.Report
Your beloved contrarian is addicted to trolling as Musk is addicted to Ketamine.Report
Hopeless is as hopeless does.
Of course, maybe the Republicans will implode.
Then we won’t have to interrogate whether suggesting that the best candidate that the Democrats had available in 2024, the one that did everything perfectly, the one who made no significant mistakes, run for president after losing a startlingly close election… whether suggesting that she run again counts as “trolling”.Report
Musk is apparently high as a kite at CPAC while waving around a chainsaw and Grimes is begging online for his attention because one of their three kids is in medical crisis.Report
The completely self-destruction of the richest man in the world and his insane need for attention and for people to like him would be funny if he wasn’t determined to do so much harm along the way.Report
IDF has apparently stated that the body released as Shiri Bibas is not Shiri Bibas’ body:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2025/feb/21/middle-east-crisis-live-updates-israel-idf-hostages-hamasReport
Assuming that the IDF is telling the truth, Hamas probably realized that the costs of giving a fake one (and the attendant circuses) are higher than the costs of giving the real one.Report
I mean, nobody was going to accept a coffin with five pounds of sand and a “DO NOT OPEN” note…Report
Trump is trying to end the independence of the United States Post Office for looting and election interference purposes.Report
Totally not a cult:
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/c1710e830726641b6d7d4c2fd0f87b6b42a2b8f8cd78f14921970320416eaace.pngReport
In today’s why Jews don’t consider the we are merely anti-Zionist rhetoric convincing, Pro-Palestinian protestors descended on a Jewish neighborhood in NYC and said things like “settlers go back home” and “we don’t want any Zionists here.”
https://www.timesofisrael.com/clashes-break-out-at-anti-israel-protest-in-brooklyn-jewish-neighborhood/Report
You can’t judge whether or not you’re a racist oppressor based on whether some of your critics calling you that are dumb.Report
Those black hats will never cease to crack me up.Report
I have no idea what is funny here. The activist did not need to descend on Boro Park and make a ruckus. These were American Jews in the United States. They were not settlers in any sense unless you simply believe that Jews don’t belong anywhere. They routinely state that they are merely anti-Zionist but here we are.Report
The incident itself is not amusing. People living in 21st century NYC as though it’s 19th century Russia is.Report
They are no more different than other minority groups maintaining their way of life. People respect the Amish to an extent or very much but the Amish are rural while the Hasidim are urban and that causes the disconnect.Report
Okay. We’ve got a wild ride here. People who enjoy crazy will be delighted.
William Banks is a guy in New York who protested injustice and genocide and all that crap by stealing pro-Israel signs from peoples’ yards. He got caught, got arrested, got tried, and got shipped off to the hoosegow for 8 months.
These things happen.
While in prison, he got the nickname “White Moses“.
Anyway, he escaped from prison and posted a video of escaping from prison to twitter.
Four months before his prison stay was scheduled to end.Report
We keep going round and round about what censorship is and whether the private sector can do it or not. This often gets subsumed into a free speech absolutes debate. Well right here right now in Mississippi we have a GLARING example of government censorship. I look forward to the “well you have to understands”
https://mississippitoday.org/2025/02/20/hinds-county-judge-orders-clarksdale-newspaper-to-remove-editorial-alarming-press-advocates/?utm_source=Mississippi+Today+Supporters&utm_campaign=09e556524b-The_Today_2_7_2025_15_26_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_2ac1d8600e-09e556524b-169036478&mc_cid=09e556524b&mc_eid=dac5637214Report
If I wanted to undermine free speech, I’d argue about it as if it were something that only the government were responsible for protecting. Like, if a private company censored someone, my response would center on “private companies can do whatever they want”.
If I wanted to foster a culture of free speech, I’d argue that it’s better for these views to be out there. It’s better for them to be argued against. It’s better for everybody if we all knew where we all stood because, if we engage in speech suppression on a societal (but not to the level of governmental) level, we may find ourselves setting up for a preference cascade that we have no idea how to deal with and using social control tools that crumble to dust in our hands.
As it stands, this silly and stupid act in Mississippi is a natural outgrowth of a society that holds Free Speech in contempt.
Now let’s read the article itself…
Oh, well. You have to understand.
Freedom of the Press doesn’t mean Freedom from Consequences. It’s not like hate speech is legal. Libel isn’t legal either. We all have a responsibility for *RESPONSIBLE* speech.Report
An editorial calling you out as a politician for acting in bad faith isn’t hate speech.
But that’s for proving my point.Report
…do you actually think someone here would be in support of this?Report
Of this specific incident – probably not. Of using the courts to silence critics of a governing regime – absolutely .Report
My criticism is against the whole “we don’t have a society that upholds the Enlightenment ideals behind the concept of Free Speech” thing.
If you have a society that upholds those ideals, it won’t matter if the government doesn’t.
If you have a society that doesn’t uphold those ideals, it won’t matter if the government does.Report
There are probably a dozen people alive in the US now who can address that criticism because we don’t t teach enlightenment ideals and their relationship to the bill of rights. Is that a sad thing? For us uber-intellectuals sure but it’s not a criticism that will resonate with normies or even much of the very online. Your government will punish you for saying or writing things that criticize them is a thing normies will get. Seems to me that is thus way more important.Report
we don’t teach enlightenment ideals and their relationship to the bill of rights
Well, then. I would suggest getting ready for more and more of this sort of thing.
Even among the side that you consider your own. “Wait wait, guys!!! The reason we have those is not to protect them from us!”, you can try to explain.Report
I don’t know if you’ve noticed but I regularly criticize my own side.Report
There was a Supreme Court case — I’m too busy to look up which one — in which the Court said there was a significant difference between “First Amendment values” (I believe the term came from one of the parties’ briefs) and the First Amendment. The unsuccessful plaintiffs were trying to sell the idea that some nice, speech-enhancing idea they wanted the government to adopt was actually required by the First Amendment. They failed.
Lots of things that would enhance a “culture” of free speech are not required by the First Amendment and many such things are not only not required by the First Amendment, they are forbidden by it. Free speech, whether legal or cultural, is a complicated notion not resolved by slogans. It is also, as a matter of historical and social fact, not an especially popular one.
Let’s take the idea that “private companies can do whatever they want,” whether you’re for or against it. First, it isn’t quite true. The government can, and does, forbid private companies to put up Help Wanted signs that say “No Irish need apply” and First Amendment challenges have lost. But it largely is true. And would you have it any other way? If so, what happens to the free speech rights of the private companies themselves? Must they say things, or platform others to say things, that they don’t wish to say or be associated with? Maybe there would be more speech in such a world, but not more free speech.
And much social pressure that inhibits free speech is, itself, free speech. Many years ago, when I was working on a major free speech case, someone sent me a memo pad with the printed heading: “Free speech means you can say what you like — and everyone else can laugh at you.” There is no “first speaker” privilege. Anyone who says anything must be prepared for others to disagree. Perhaps they are wrong, unenlightened, and censorious, but wrong, unenlightened, censorious speech is, itself, free speech. Freedom of speech is not freedom from all its consequences. It has always taken guts to say unpopular things, and moving out of small-town America to the sinful big city where you can say what you like and be what you are — or at least more freely than you could in East Bumf**k — is a well-documented historical phenomenon and, by now, a literary cliche. As Dr. Gottlieb told Dr. Arrowsmith in Sinclair Lewis’s novel, you can’t have both freedom and the rewards of popular slavery.
The law can let people talk and prevent interference, and in America it largely does; but nothing can make people listen.Report
Well, then. I would suggest getting ready for more and more of this sort of thing.
Even among the side that you consider your own. “Wait wait, guys!!! The reason we have those is not to protect them from us!”, you can try to explain.
(Oh, and the court case seems to be Minnesota Board for Community Colleges v. Knight.)Report
More of what “sort of thing”? And whatever that sort of thing is, why more than we’re already used to? After all, free speech has never been popular and censorious assholes of every persuasion have always been with us. I doubt it’s any worse than it has ever been, and, indeed, it’s probably better now than before. Our current notions of free speech are barely 100 years old, to the embarrassment of self-styled originalists, and long after the Enlightenment was over.
And that wasn’t the case. I read the case I’m vaguely remembering in law school, which was well before 1984.Report
More of what “sort of thing”?
To follow the thread back, “using the courts to silence critics of a governing regime”.
And whatever that sort of thing is, why more than we’re already used to?
More than you are used to. Probably not more than others are used to.
I doubt it’s any worse than it has ever been
Oh, is that our goalpost now? Comparing today to when you had to buy Ulysses in a plain brown wrapper?Report
It has been tried, and people will continue to try. And when they succeed, it will be news, as this one has been. And they will almost always be reversed.
As far as goalposts go, if you want to argue with the voices in your head, that’s your right. My original comment said a lot of things, none of which I have heard you dispute.Report
As did mine.
Here’s my takeaway, which I will repeat if you wish to dispute it instead of arguing against the position you wish I held:
If you have a society that upholds Enlightenment ideals, it won’t matter if the government doesn’t.
If you have a society that doesn’t uphold Enlightenment ideals, it won’t matter if the government does.
I do hope that Chuck Espy is reprimanded if not recalled and someone sits him down and explains the concept of “Incorporation” to him.
But I also know that to the extent that the mayor is representative of the people, his stupidity is also an indictment of his supporters. Perhaps even his anti-antis.Report
OK, you want me to dispute something?
If you have a society that upholds Enlightenment ideals, it won’t matter if the government doesn’t.
If you have a society that doesn’t uphold Enlightenment ideals, it won’t matter if the government does.
I dispute that. We have long had a society where what you insist on calling Enlightenment values are widely unpopular and generally invoked opportunistically. Despite that, there are all sorts of protections against the government punishing people for their speech, indeed, more than we used to have. And they largely work. So the two notions aren’t linked the way you suppose.Report
More than we used to have because we need them more than we used to need them.
I’m pretty sure that Espy will get slapped down (though not, sadly, recalled) but we’ll see more and more politicians pushing for this sort of stuff under the umbrella of protecting the children and whatnot.
And the backlash will look like…
(looks around)
Well, it’ll be familiar.Report
“Of this specific incident – probably not. ”
ahahahaha you didn’t read the article before you posted it, did youReport
Indeed I did. It’s close to local politics for me. My conclusion stands.Report
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/20/us/politics/federal-worker-firings-trump-ruling.html
Lawyer brain will be the death of us all:
“Still, he said, “federal district judges are duty-bound to decide legal issues based on even-handed application of law and precedent — no matter the identity of the litigants or, regrettably at times, the consequences of their rulings for average people.”
Judge Cooper said that he was denying the unions’ request that he block the Trump administration from continuing its downsizing efforts because the matter should be first addressed with the agency that adjudicates labor disputes between federal employee unions and management, known as the Federal Labor Relations Authority.
Judge Cooper noted that if the unions lose in that venue, they could resume their court battle through the federal court of appeals.”
So Trump’s neat trick here is to illegally destroy the ability of the admin bodies to hold hearings on his mass firings and then get goo goo dumb dumb judges who express sympathy and concern but state it is very important for procedure to be followed, rule of law and all that.Report
Mayor Bass has just fired fire chief Kristin Crowley.
Also, Donald Trump is bad.Report
Rick Caruso (the guy who ran against Bass last time) strikes back:
Report
Alright folks, we got Steve Bannon doing the Na.zi salute at CPAC. Any comments? Critiques on style? Any discussion about how we’ve openly moved into just straight up Na.zi symbolism with the current administration?
Don’t worry, they’re only doing it because the libs are _mistakening_ it for the Na.zi salute, it’s not actually the real thing. [insert joke about having to be from Germany or it’s just sparkling fascism] And, of course, pissing of the libs is more important not being mistaken for Na.zis…in fact, they don’t really seem to mind being mistaken for Na.zis.
Europe, as always, does mind, and the French Na.zis-that-claim-they-are-not-Na.zis, who had a speaker named Jordan Bardella scheduled today to speak today, withdrew from his speech faster than [insert joke about France military here]
He said, I quote, “Yesterday, while I was not present in the room, one of the speakers out of provocation allowed himself a gesture alluding to Na.zi ideology. I therefore took the immediate decision to cancel my speech that had been scheduled this afternoon”, which is the sort of thing that normal people, or even far-right politicians like Jordan Bardella, do, after realizing they are about to stand on the same stage that a person who threw a Na.zi salute was standing on.
Edit: Ah, found the article: I don’t know why he was startled, overt Na.zis were allowed last year, too: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/nazis-mingle-openly-cpac-spreading-antisemitic-conspiracy-theories-fin-rcna140335
Just no salutes from the stageReport
This is going to keep happening, folks. We’ve had decades of the American far-right inject the alt-right memes directly into their brain and merging into some sort of terminal online brain where Na.zi stuff is funny because it triggers the libs, but in Europe, far-right people have to distance themselves from the slightest hint of Na.zi _literally as fast as possible_.
Some of that is because, yes, there are legal implications for supporting Na.zis in a lot of European countries, but also, they have a functioning media and a population that, even at its far-righty-est, doesn’t think _open_ Na.zis are funny or should be allowed in polite company.
As the US far-right goes completely masks off, Europe’s far-right is going to keep backing away and crafting more and more elaborate masks and insisting they have nothing to do with that.
Which will actually be helpful in the recovery of this country.Report
(using a clever euphemism so you don’t Say The Naughty Word gives further emphasis and attention to the Naughty Word)Report
Bug or feature?Report
You know how there was a temporary injunction against firing USAID workers?
“Temporary” has just expired.Report
Forensics shows that Hamas murdered the Bibas kids:
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cjry3jzedl1oReport
Trump is predictably backing down from his Gaza inanity:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/21/us/politics/trump-gaza-egypt-jordan.htmlReport
Transfer of Palestinians is one of the nicer outcomes, given the last couple of days.Report
A billboard of Luigi went up for a bit today. A digital billboard.
Think he’ll get the Daniel Penny treatment?
Do you think someone who says “we can’t rule it out” is being crazy?Report
Trump fires the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The United States is effectively a dictatorship at this point. Anybody who could oppose Trusk from within the federal government is being systematically purged. The Courts are toothless and are adhering to proceduralism to avoid doing anything because as the Straight A honors kids that they are would rather fall to tyranny that get a B, I mean overruled, by a higher court. Either that or they are going to follow Trump anyway or Trump will ignore them. Republican voters in Republican districts are begging their Representatives and Senators to do something but they are twiddling their thumbs. People are entertainment to death and are ignoring their civilc duties in favor of the ultimate food experience. The entire prosperous economy is heading towards a massive crash.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/21/us/politics/trump-fires-cq-brown-pentagon.htmlReport
From Wikipedia:
If you scroll down the page, you’ll see that we get a new one every 4 years like clockwork. (With occasional new ones in the middle, but they’re always gone by the end of the term.)Report
He also fired the woman who ran the navy, the black man who was number two at the air force and the woman who ran the coast guard. He intends pull a retired three star out and promote him to chair the chiefs.Report
We seem to get a new Chief of Naval Operations every four years, a new Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force every four years, and and a new Commandant of the Coast Guard every four years.
Oh my gosh… how deep does this rabbit hole go?!?Report
Looking at the lists on Wiki, people who didn’t serve out their terms are very few and far between. Generally, they seem to be very non-tumultuous positions.Report
Jaybird, why are you pretending that these people were not fired mid-term?
Why are you pretending it is common for them to fired mid-term, or in fact _ever_?
I went to the Commandant of the Coast Guard, to cite how long it has been since one of them was fired, and it turns out…literally never, apparently. Or at least, not before 1946, when they started serving out four year terms. All of them after served exactly four years, within two or three days. (Except for the second one, who served four years and five month and appears to have done that to move the schedule to June 1 instead of Jan 1) And looking at the ones before that, before four years became a standard, I don’t think _any_ of them have been fired. Many of them left due to death or age-mandated requirement from the Coast Guard.
As for the Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force: That also is a four year term, although there has been one that retired early due to what could be considered political reasons, General Fogleman, and of course General Dugan was fired for continuing to flap his lips at reporters after being told to stop by the president. So let’s check _why_ General Charles Q. Brown Jr. was fired, according to the the person who fired him:
As has been pointed out by active-duty military, the only actual litmus test for top military leadership is following lawful orders given by the civilian chain of command. Asserting that military officials should be removed for not rejecting the _lawful orders_ of the previous civilian administration is flatly bonkers.
And note that ‘lawful’ means ‘under the military code of justice and international law’, not random civilian court decisions. None of which, incidentally, have involved the military _at all_, the military is generally not subject to that sort of constitutional scrutiny at all. There is absolutely no way to argue that ‘what the military was doing’ under Biden was unlawful in any sense.
So basically Hegseth’s just arguing ‘The military should have the right to disobey the civilian leadership, mostly because I am stupid enough to think it will only disobey the _liberals_ and it will love us conservatives.’
This is because Hegseth is, and this cannot be stressed enough, an extremely bad person who does not understand the military and how it exists within the government, and shouldn’t be in charge of a tank, much less an entire armed force.Report
I’m mostly responding to the breathless assertions that something completely untoward is being done here. It looks like there is quite regular turnover quite regularly for *ALL* of these positions. Naval Operations seems to have a handful of two year terms (hey, people die, it happens), Air Force has a handful of three years, and the Coast Guard is the only one that seems to be breaking a mold of four year terms here.
If this sets a precedent for future Democratic Presidents being able to better direct the military to be a better place for people of color to live and work, I think that that will only be a benefit in the long term.Report
Jaybird, I literally explaing some of the three years-term before, but let me explain every single one of them in detail, since I guess you cannot even be bothered to check a single one:
First, Naval. Going down the list:
Admiral Mullen left his position to become Joint Chief.
Admiral Boorda died while holding the position.
Admiral Moore left his position to become Joint Chief.
Admiral Anderson took early retirement because he conflicted with Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara during the Cuban Missile crisis due to his stupidly aggressive stance of using depth charges on Soviet submarines, a thing that _objectively_ almost started a nuclear war. Two out of three people required people on that submarine voted to use nuclear weapons and the lowest-ranked, the executive officer, Vasily Arkhipov, voted no. So…yeah, Admiral Anderson guy got fired.
Admiral Carney seems to be before they decided on the four year thing. That doesn’t seem like he was forced to retire, he was appointed for two years.
So, no, literally one person has ever been removed from their position as Chief of Naval Operations while the Joint Chiefs have existed. Obviously, that position has existed well before that, but huge amount of military policy and how it interacted with the civilian administration changed during and after WWII, and trying to compare before and after is very silly. Same with Spatz in the Air Force.
Now Air Force:
General Moseley was asked to resigned because, under his watch, the Air Force mishandled nuclear weapons, which caused huge amounts of outrage. That’s it. That’s the reason. It’s very simple. You can ask if it was fair to blame him for that, it probably wasn’t, but that was what it was for.
General Fogleman resign willingly, he was not asked to do so. That is a fairly complicated situation about military ethics and perceived influencing of judicial decisions that I don’t really want to get into, but the relevant part is he literally was not asked to resign, he did it himself because he though this ethics required it. It sorta is political, but in the sense of ‘I think I have accidentally become political so I will recuse myself entirely out of my position’.
General Dugan, and I cannot make this more clear, repeatedly disobeyed very direct orders to SHUT UP about the US trying to kill Saddam Hussein. Straight up insubordination, literally would not stop talking to journalists about this topic. And, as far as I can tell, him and Adminal Anderson are the only people in all of this who have actually been _fired_ instead of being asked to retire.
General Brown got prostate cancer and retired.
General LeMay was also asked to retire early (Barely early, like a few months) due to public disagreements with Defense Secretary McNamara.
If you actually want to know what happened between McNamara/Kennedy/Johnson and the Joint Chiefs, there are entire books written on it. The Vietnam war, the Cuban Missile Crisis, all sorts of actual real conflict between the two groups, the civilians and the military, with the military repeatedly chaffing under the civilian control.
That was not a good situation to be in, and is actually one of the reasons the Joint Chiefs were restructured to no longer be in the chain of command.
And that is not the situation we have here, literally none of the fired people have ever argued at all with the civilians, as far as we are aware. Also, they are not in the chain of command, and cannot give orders to the rest of the military, so it doesn’t really matter what they think.
THAT ISN’T WHAT THE JOINT CHIEFS DO.Report
Also, they are not in the chain of command, and cannot give orders to the rest of the military, so it doesn’t really matter what they think.
OH GOOD!
All the more reason to worry about other, more pressing, concerns.Report
To quote myself:
Hey, Jaybird. What would convince you that the Trump administration is planning to do something very illegal with the military?
What if next week they fired all the heads of the every service’s JAG?Report
“What if next week they fired all the heads of the every service’s JAG?”
Quite honestly, my first thought would be that I’d probably wonder if every service’s JAG helped give Article 92s to soldiers who refused the Moderna shot.Report
Now, that’s a nice pithy joke, but try addressing the actual hypothetical:
Let’s say we wake up, Tuesday, and all the heads of JAG have been fired.
These would be the lawyers in charge of prosecuting military personal for war crimes and issuing illegal orders, fired. Cause they’re the _other_ people you would need to remove if you wanted to do something unlawful with the military.
Would it be serious if Hegseth did that?
It sure is weird how you will never state anything you think would be serious indications of something wrong.Report
The serious indications of something wrong were all the way back when Biden refused to drop out, when Harris was named his replacement, and then when the Democrats looked at the 2024 election and said “Yeah, Harris was great, the problem was the voters.”
We’re in aftereffects of screwing up badly.
Now, you say “These would be the lawyers in charge of prosecuting military personal for war crimes and issuing illegal orders, fired.”
I would ask to see whether the official reason given was something like “they screwed up by doing X” and then whether X actually happened.
Because, at that point, we get to argue over whether X was sufficient and whether they also prosecuted people for war crimes is less significant.
Lemme know if things ever get so bad that you’re willing to say that maybe the Democrats should change somewhat.Report
I thought you would have figured this out by now, but they _were_ all fired.
And here’s the quote as to why he fired them.
There was no actual individual justification given. Not a single error on their part cited.
And I feel it’s important to point out he said _constitutional_ advice. Not ‘laws of war’ advice. War crimes do not have anything to do with the constitution. Rules of Engagement in other countries do not have anything to do with the constitution. Almost no part of a war has anything to do with the constitution.
There’s pretty much just two things to do with the military that might raise constitutional question and one of them is about the use of the military in invading other countries without any sort of Congressional authorization…which JAG would not weigh in on, that’s a political question that needs to solved in the civilian process.
No, the only real actual place you’d run into a constitutional question is…using the military against US citizens. You know, the thing Trump has repeatedly mused about doing. The thing he had to be stopped from doing his first term: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/mark-esper-trump-shoot-black-lives-matter-protesters-1346079/
But, hey, while you’re _still_ refusing to draw any sort of fascism line, I guess you refuse to say you’d have a problem with that.Report
The “using the military against US citizens” rubicon has already been crossed, sadly.
I would most certainly hope that they not be used on US soil.
I mean, unless in defense of the country.Report
If you look up pictures of the heads of the other 2 branches of the service, you might notice a difference from the 3 who were relieved.Report
It’s worth pointing out that while it is nearly unprecedented to for _anyone_ at that level to be removed or asked to resign, it is pretty unprecedented to have two people missing at once from the Joint Chiefs. There’s a reason we carefully stagger that.
We have _three Joint Chiefs_ missing. Although I guess the Commandant of the Coast Guard of technically just an attendee, not actually a Joint Chief.
Incidentally, this also means we have the Navy _and_ the Coast Guard without a Senate-confirmed head right now. If someone wants to try a naval invasion, I guess now is the time.Report
Oh no! We may have open borders until the Senate does something!Report
Also, and this a somewhat minor detail, but the Joint Chiefs do not have operational control. They are literally not in the chain of command, the US military does not have a unified high command at all.
The chain of command is president -> secretary of defense -> secretary of various service branches -> service or joint commanders
The first three people in that chain are civilians. The Joint Chiefs also serve under the Secretary of their service branch, and report to those Secretaries. Trump already has the power to change out the Secretaries, and in fact did the moment he got elected, and no one has a problem with that. That’s the civilian side, that’s political, the president gets to control it.
That’s the people who made any decisions about DEI, not the Joint Chiefs. The Joint Chiefs don’t have anything to do with policy. They are, explicitly, not there for that sort of policy, just military readiness policy. And any policy they’re supposed to doing is just done via advising the President or Secretary of Defense to do it, they don’t have any ability to do it themselves.
The Joint Chiefs are supposed to be politically-neutral advisory body. They advise about tactics to accomplish goals, and they not only knows what the military is currently doing, but what it can do, including what is lawful and what isn’t.
And that, right there, is the real problem, because they not only are allowed to advise leadership, but they are allowed to contact and advise _the service commanders_, or in fact anyone in the branch. They are the person that can call up a service commander and say ‘As far as I understand the situation, your orders to detain that Congressman do not sound lawful’. It’s not _binding_, they have no authority to actually make anything happen, but it is a hell of a defense at your court martial for disobeying orders, to say ‘The highest ranking person in this service agreed with my decision’.
The only reason you care about replacing them is if you want people who have a very different understanding of what orders are lawful and what the military is allowed to do under US and international law.Report
Some good news: Remember back in 2020 the stories going around that doctors were performing “mass hysterectomies” on undocumented visitors in the detention camps?
As it turns out, those stories were false.
False to the point where MSNBC has settled the lawsuit rather than letting it go through the snake.
Just gaming this out in my head, I’m guessing that discovery was likely to indicate that this would *NOT* be covered by the Sullivan decision.Report
Okay, 28th Amendment Enthusiasts, we finally have ourselves a lawsuit.
Report
The courts will punt on deciding the 28th’s status unless it somehow hits the very narrow window of mattering, and probably even then.Report
My assumption is that the 28th Amendment is a null set, containing nothing.
But, you may point out, you’re just an amateur! You’re not an expert!
That’s true.
You may go on to point out that the ABA has said that they recognize the 28th Amendment.
That’s true as well.
Might be nice to have someone figure out whether Biden was right or whether the Archivist was right. I mean, *OFFICIALLY*.Report
The court won’t, and shouldn’t, get into 28th Amendment issues because it will be able to decide this case without reaching out to give a purely advisory opinion on whether the 28th Amendment has been ratified or not. That’s how it’s done.Report
Holy crap:
Report
And the jockeying for position has begun:
Report
OPM doesn’t have the legal authority to make that request.
That aside the FBI isn’t the only stand down ordered – DoD, State, and Treasury all told their folks not to answer.
Why you might ask? It’s just five bullet points. The private sector does it all the time. The answer lies in the who you should cc. Because if every fed answers it and ccs their supervisor, then you have a nice neat map of who works where for whom. Which something the Russians and Chinese have tried to phish out of the federal gov relent for years.Report
OPM doesn’t have the legal authority to make that request.
I just don’t think this matters anymore.Report
I agree it doesn’t matter to Musk & Co.
That it doesn’t is bad.Report
The Left needs to do a much better job of explaining that answering the email would put the country in danger because the whole “yowling like a scalded cat in response to asking what you did last week” thing doesn’t play well to normies.Report
Forcing Feds to do a bad thing just because normies are forced to do a bad thing doesn’t make it a good thing. Either your management trusts you to do the thing you were hired to do or they don’t.Report
That one would be a good argument to throw in there. Talk about the importance of being able to WFH as well.Report
I’ve always found this kind of thing to be a strong sign of bad management in the private sector. Everyone knows who works and who doesn’t and paranoid micromanagement rarely works out as a long term leadership strategy.
However I will say I guffawed at the insinuation that the feds listing what they did last week would be a threat to national security. I mean it’s absolutely a great line but, man, the chutzpah!Report
Micromanagement takes many forms. I find the kind that devours 15 minutes during your morning coffee to be less onerous than the kind that devours seven minutes every two hours.
My career since working at the restaurant has been variants of “what *KIND* of micromanagement do you want?”
Though, once in a while, I do get blessed with a period of benign neglect for a half-year or so.Report
It’s possible my line of work is such that it’s pretty trivial to meet the ‘what would you say you do here’ minimal level of accountability. If the contracts aren’t moving along, or the analysis around whatever question wasn’t provided, it would be noticed and noticed fast.
The harder to measure is the long term value of good legal advice and scrivening. What’s the worth of ‘nothing bad happened’? Of course I will certainly assure you, for the sake of myself and my various creditors, that the services are both real and invaluable!Report
There are people out there, essential people!, who cannot answer the question “what do you do here?”
Michael Cain notes that there are the engineering types who spend a week thinking about how to answer a question.
I’ve met these people. They’re uncanny and I don’t know that I’ve ever met one who was paid what they were worth.
It’s when someone shifts to “therefore, the people who work for the Federal Government are like this”, I’d say “whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa, hold up there, Tex.”
I believe someone at Bell Labs is like that. I’m not sure that someone at USAID is like that. I’d enjoy hearing why 95% of those who work at Treasury might be like that. I would *REALLY* enjoy hearing why 95% of those who work at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau would be like that.
If you want to tell me that each Federal Department has 5% of people whose job it is to deal with intangible imponderables that have zero deliverables, I suppose I’d shrug and say “okay, yeah… life’s like that”.
Hell, make it 20%. 25%!!!
What about the other 75%?Report
In todays why they aren’t credible when they say that they are merely anti-Zionist and not anti-Semitic, a now former employee of a pottery studio in Cambridge, MA was caught on film tearing down a poster of the Bibas children yesterday. My theory is that basically large parts of the Left have a mental block when it comes to Jews. They do not see us as a real people with a culture of our own who experienced persecution but as a cosplaying white people associated with money and power. They do not want to learn and can not learn. This is also how they can denounce the concept of a Jewish state as racist while praise the concept of an entire Muslim world or speak about Western imperialism in Muslim land without irony.
https://x.com/ADL_NewEngland/status/1892988694963069097Report
Zionism is a political movement which says the Jews should have a state.
Are they trying to define anti-Zionism as something other than calling for Israel’s destruction?Report
They are trying to pretend that the Palestinians are using ANC style rhetoric and want a secular multicultural democracy. Either that or the more honest ones see Israel as basically French Algeria and Israeli Jews as Pied-Noirs and destruction of Israel is the only thing they will settle for.
There is a weird arrogance in these cases. I’ve had people, all non-Muslim leftists, say to me things like “we will allow the Jews to stay if the Jews will dismantle their supremacist state. Besides ignoring the dozens of state that call themselves Muslim and place Islam front and center in national identity complete with blasphemy laws, they seem to ignore the fact that Israel basically won every military encounter before there was an Israel and other Muslim countries don’t have any appetite for a global jihad against Israel. Israel is both simultaneously worse than WWII era Germany and Stalin’s USSR and also a weak state and society about to collapse at any minute.Report
AfD comes in second in German elections with nearly 20% of the vote and 143 seats in the Parliament.Report
The latest MUSK/DOGE emails seems to he going sideways. Some judges received it and maybe some politicians (I can’t confirm the last part but Tina Smith wrote something about Musk not being the boss of her while calling it a Dick Boss Move)
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/new-doge-musk-email-goes-seriously-sideways
“We’ve got a fascinating story unfolding with the new Musk email I reported on below. And yes, something can be fascinating while also being grave, dangerous and in its own way terrifying. Over the course of the evening top leadership at the FBI, the State Department, the VA, the Department of the Navy (to its civilian employees) and other parts of the government have explicitly instructed employees in their departments and agencies to ignore the email. Meanwhile the DOJ seems to be instructing its employees to follow it. (And yes, FBI is sort of under DOJ and that’s kind of weird but that’s where we are.)
It’s important to note that these emails are authorized or allowed if not directed by the President of the United States. And yet whole wings of the government are saying to ignore it. I mentioned to someone this evening that they’re treating a presidentially authorized email as some kind of insider threat. And this person says, we’re surprised that Trump is an insider threat? To which I said, yes, I’m surprised that his own appointees are doing so.
This is all a bit comical and also manages to be a certain degree of state disintegration we’re watching in real time. But it also seems clear that Musk has gotten a bit over his skis finally. We’ve been in this world of upside where a lone wolf is on a wilding spree through the federal government, clearly not operating at anyone’s direction but his own. And yet the President is at least okaying it all after the fact. And thus our system can’t really make sense of what’s happening. Yes, it’s almost all illegal even or in a sense especially if the President is authorizing it. But it’s also pretty clear that the elected President is in the backseat of this car if he’s in the car at all.
But here you have seemingly the first time where his own appointees are pushing back and in a fairly public way.
This will get weirder.”Report
I work for a corporation as part of a team that has a scrum four days a week. On the good days, when stuff happens like it should, each member of the team gives a brief (45 second) rundown of yesterday’s doings (or last Thurs/Fri if it’s a Monday) and says “No Blockers”. This meeting may take 10 minutes if we devote some time to discussions of the weather. (On the bad days, somebody is blocked or starts a ramble and we’re 10 minutes into the thought processes behind changing the order of operations of this or that process or, worse, management asks a weird question and we’re stuck taking about QA/Test metrics for 20 minutes.)
Anyway, that’s the context for this next part:
There might be one week a year where I don’t get anything done. This week is almost always the last week prior to Christmas break in December.
If it is any other week in the year, I will have no problem coming up with a list of stuff I accomplished, tested, or blew up in my face the week prior.
So when I heard that government employees would have to send an email where they listed off the accomplishments of the last week, I will remember how *I* felt when we moved from “not having scrums” to “having scrums”.
“WHAT A PAIN IN THE BUTT!!!!”, I thought. The worst part was that since this transition happened right around the time we transitioned to “Safer At Home” for a year or two, we kept the old weekly meetings that daily scrums were designed to replace. (Now that we’re back in the office, the weekly meetings have morphed into a slightly larger monthly meeting.)
So if the complaint is something like “how dare management expect me to list off what I did yesterday as if they pretended to understand what it is that I do?!?”, then I am 100% on board. Freakin’ management, man. Just leave me alone and let me do my job. Here are some tricks that *I* use to deal with the indignity…
If the complaint is “I have no responsibility to be accountable to the people who employ me”, I’ve gotta say that “no, you pretty much have to show up and list what you did. It sucks.”
And responding to *THAT* with resistance? That has me wonder “Gott damm, what *DID* you do last week?”Report
I have some grave concerns about what’s happening in DC, but there are good and bad criticisms, and the bad ones only help Musk & Trump. Public sector workers getting noisy about things that private sector workers are very familiar with (whether those things are bad or silly or reasonable) strikes me as falling in the “bad criticism” category.Report
Remember “Learn to Code”? When Clinton was talking about all of the coal miners she was going to put out of work, one of the clarion calls put out by journalists and opinion journalists everywhere was “Learn to Code”.
A guy who spent 22 years in the mines could retool their skillset and get a job writing HTML for the local Coca-Cola bottling plant, maybe.
Here’s the wikipedia:
Well, in January 2019, a bunch of Journalists started losing their jobs and posting about it and, of course, Right-Wing Trolls everywhere started posting, as the link above puts it, “a torrent of mockery and hate speech mixed with suggestions to learn to code”.
All that to say: There are a bunch of public sector workers who are going on the news and telling awful stories about how awful it is to lose their jobs.
These news stories are not being met with sympathy about how awful it is to lose one’s job but suggestions on how to train for new careers in different sectors of the economy.
Remember the dialog about Free Trade in the “Talking Points” episode of The West Wing?
Parsons ended up being wrong in that episode, of course.
The Republicans were thrilled to send the jobs overseas. It’d be like sending buggy whip jobs to India. They can do the old jobs, we’ll create the new ones.
Anyway, that’s the setting that we’ll be hearing Federal Workers talk about losing their jobs. They’ll be talking about it to people who learned to code after changing careers. They’ll be talking about it to people who saw their jobs outsourced and sent to Singapore or India for a few years before the jobs slowly started wandering back.
I imagine that the responses they’ll get will feel like hate speech. A torrent of it, even.Report
Learn to Code is excellent advice. I’ve given it to all my daughters and to various interns I’ve talked to over the years.Report
It was excellent advice right around until I met Claude.
Now I don’t know if it is, anymore.
I mean, it’s the equivalent of telling someone to learn Latin. It will help their thinking. It will help their English. It will give them small amounts of pleasure as they wander about their day…
But we’re at the cusp of something and I don’t know that learning to code remains good advice for the same reason it was good advice in 2005.Report
JB: I don’t know that learning to code remains good advice for the same reason it was good advice in 2005.
It’s still great advice.
Spreadsheets didn’t doom Accountants. Inhumanly good Robotic Surgical Arms haven’t replaced Surgeons.
AI will be a tool the software engineers use, it will not replace us. My 1st daughter using AI on a regular basis and I use it on an irregular basis.
Tools increase the productivity of the person using them. Ergo there is more demand for that kind of work and the people who can do it.
The level of technology in society is going up, not down. The need for software to run that technology is going to go up, not down.Report
I don’t think it will be doomed as a profession but I do think it will become a job fewer and fewer people need to do, with the entry level jobs becoming much more scarce. The efficiency I’ve seen reported from enabling something like copilot is huge, and have been told that the real learning curve for existing coders is to start thinking of themselves as editors rather than writers.
I foresee a lot of legal work going this way over time. It won’t hurt the senior folks like me (we will just become even more editors than we often enough already are) but it’s will mean less work at the entry level, and fewer people growing into that senior role.Report
What’s going to happen is that HELLO WORLD will become a 37-Megabyte file filled with boilerplate and exception-handling, but nobody will care because an injectable personal-fitness tracker the size of a zit will have a 32-bit processor and a terabyte of storage memory.Report
This sounds like something I said many years ago, when I was asked what I would do with a billion-ops-per-second processor.
Never, ever write in a compiled language again. Everything I write will run on an interpreter that many smart people have worked on so I don’t have memory leaks, or buffer overflows, or naked error messages like “Seg fault, core dumped”.
The funnier thing is that back in the mid-1970s I did a bunch of work in APL, where the interpreter avoided memory leaks, and buffer overflows, and any sort of run-time fault put me in a full symbolic debugger.Report
“I mean, it’s the equivalent of telling someone to learn Latin.”
Or telling them to learn to drive a stick-shift car. It’s certainly a skill, but things have gone from “maybe someday” to “you need to actively search for a situation where you’ll need it”.Report
There might be one week a year where I don’t get anything done.
During the course of my technical career, there were numerous weeks where an accurate answer to that question would be along the lines of, “I thought about ways to transform your question into something that might be solvable. None of them look at all promising.” That did, in a couple of the worst cases, go on for months.
I don’t know if Musk ever bothered learning about the math that makes the Falcon 9 booster “make it to the landing zone” possible. My understanding is that there was a long period where the handful of people involved got nowhere. Then someone put together a new dissertation by someone at Stanford, restructured the guidance problem, and came up with a solution.
Clearly his script kiddies don’t think along those lines, or they never would have fired a bunch of critical people from NNSA.Report
My heights are not quite so lofty.
Even if “Deliver the Product” isn’t something that I do in a given week, I can do stuff like “sit with QA and discuss artifact capture/verification” because they care about that sort of thing for the previous iteration.
“I documented one of our procedures.”
“I went through and made edits to Bob’s documentation of his own procedures.”
“I created a power point slide for management that has a picture of one of our artifacts and a link to where it’s staged and a screenshot of the document that tells any given new guy how to do the same.”
While it’s true that I work with a handful of engineers who do work that involve letting the universe flow through them for weeks at a time before they become a perfect manifestation of God’s Will, the majority of the folks I work with would be able to answer Elon’s email with “I worked on the Hickory project. I squashed two bugs and only created one.”Report
I have an electronic journal, it’s a simple text file. I keep it for my own benefit so I can remember what I’ve worked on and put down notes on how I fixed stuff.
It’s a gift to my future self.Report
We can answer that questions too Jaybird. I do every week for my manager.
Elon doesn’t have standing to ask.Report
So don’t answer!Report