Open Mic for the week of 2/3/2025
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.
Jonathan Chait has an article in the Atlantic talking about the spectacle of the DNC electing various chairs and vice-chairs over the weekend.
Those who vigorously disagree with Chait will enjoy this Freddie DeBoer 2024 article in which he explains that Jonathan Chait is actually a Trump supporter.Report
But for the Republican party, this would seem like a less than optimal choice.Report
Which Republican Party? The Mitt Romney one? Oh, yeah.
What strikes me about the David Hogg as vice-chair thing is that there are a handful of things that I think that the Democratic Party has the opportunity to put on the back burner and pretend that is an important thing, sure, but less important than The Resistance and among them are:
1. Gun Control
2. Defunding the Police
3. Abolishing ICE
Now I’m not saying that the Democrats should drop these wishlist items!!! Oh no!!! I am, however, saying that they are of secondary, if not tertiary, importance during the current moment and can be deprioritized while the Democratic Party makes other issues their primary action items.
And nominating David Hogg in an effort to reach out to young disaffected males who, in the past, would have preferred the Democrats strikes me as a failure to effectively model the mind of the modal Zoomer.
But I’m wrong about stuff like this all the time.Report
The current Republican party is not managing it’s ‘success’ very well… and that’s before it has generated any actual success.
I don’t think Hogg was nominated to reach disaffected Males from what I’ve read… the challenge for TeamR is to actually execute on delivering policy wins that disaffected males will feel… and delivering policy wins that are better for more than *just* disaffected males.
And, after executing successful policies, TeamR has to message around those policies.
None of the above are a given for TeamR… if TeamR screws up… it doesn’t matter who the Assistant Vice Chair at the DNC might be.Report
The current Republican party is not managing it’s ‘success’ very well… and that’s before it has generated any actual success.
We’re back in the old news cycle system.
We went over to my Buddy’s for game night on Saturday and I found myself thinking “I wonder what I missed” on the drive home.
Say what you will about Biden’s tenure, you knew that not much happened after 5PM on a Saturday.
All that to say: if and when they do get an actual success, it won’t matter much because, after about two hours, it’ll be about two hours later.
And we’ll have new stuff to scream about.Report
Yes, I’m just pointing out that the process iterates.
But I’m not sure I agree that ‘nothing happens’ is a valid interpretive framework. If a political party can achieve successful policy objectives and can’t make sure that they get ‘credit’ for them… then either a) the successful policies aren’t popular b) they weren’t actually successful policies, or c) the political party is underperforming on a key metric… capitalizing on popular successful policies.
I’d agree that it’s too early to definitively say how it will shake out, but as I note above, it’s my opinion that *right now* TeamR is trending towards overplaying their hand.Report
Oh, yeah, TeamR is overplaying its hand like you wouldn’t believe.
But then I look at, for example, the DNC chair elections and see plays I can’t even comprehend.
Remember the tagline to Cool Hand Luke? “Sometimes nothing can be a real cool hand”?
That “sometimes” is a really important part of the sentence because it implies that sometimes it’s not.
Everybody thinks that two pair is a pretty good hand until they remember that the only thing that two pair beats is one pair.
But overplaying two pair against a guy who is bluffing is…
Remember Casey Stengel? “Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game?”Report
Something you, and a lot of idealistic leftists and Berniacs don’t really internalize is how little power the DNC has. I mean, and first let’s acknowledge that they’ve been a clown show lately, they have very little influence on who gets the presidential nod, what goes into the platform or who gets nominations for lower levels. The quip “I’m not a member of an organized party- I’m a Democrat.” has a lot of truth to it. The next time someone says “The DNC rigged the game against Bernie.” or “The DNC should be steering the party a lot more competently.” try and think back to this moment. This is the DNC; kindof always had been I gather. This institution didn’t rig things against Bernie- it couldn’t even if it desperately wanted to. This organization didn’t force out Biden nor did it get him the nomination in the first place in 2020. This -is- the DNC. This -isn’t- new.Report
They may not *HAVE* actual power, but they *ARE* an actual symbol.
To the extent that more and more of the actual democrats say “DNC? Never heard of them”, is to the benefit of the Democrats as a whole (I think). But to get there will require a handful of Hoggs.Report
A lot of Americans don’t understand the difference between weak political parties and strong political parties.
In the US, both political parties are weak and it is probably more accurate to state that there are 50 if not 100s of Democratic and Republican Parties joining together for one. All that it takes to register as a Democrat and Republican in the U.S. is checking a box when you register to vote.
A lot of Parliamentary countries have strong political parties especially ones where the upper house is more ceremonial than not have strong and centrally organized political parties. You have to be a dues paying member to join and participate in the conferences. There are no primaries, the parties state “Riding X, Ms. Jones is your candidate for the Labour Party.” And the parties have a lot more power to punish wayward members who don’t tow the line.
Instead we get half-baked conspiracies theories on the evil DNC controlling everything and preventing the true voice of the people from being heard.
BS, if the DNC was strong, AOC would not be in Congress or her path to Congress would have involved a lot more laddersReport
Entirely true and well put Saul from where I sit, well done.Report
Whoops. I’m on mobile and accidentally Reported Jaybird’s comment when I meant to Reply with:
This Admin media strategy of crippling the ability of media (traditional or social) to report on or analyze any given item of Total Bullshit because before they can, the next item of Complete Bullshit is upon us, has been called “flooding the zone” by Bannon et al, or a “shock and awe” media approach, but I’d like to suggest an older term, “blitzkrieg”.
That is, calling the phenomenon a “news cycle system” kind of places the responsibility for the situation on news media, rather than the entity that is purposefully deploying aggressive wartime-like media-signal-jamming against its own citizens.Report
I’m remembering Ben Rhodes back in 2016 when he bragged:
The manipulation of the news media has been going on for a while and the news media has been, more or less, complicit.
This doesn’t let the government off the hook. The government is the entity manipulating the press.
We can, and should, blame Jacob for ripping Esau off. That said, Esau also sold his birthright for a mess of pottage.
Mmmmm. Pottage.Report
I don’t disagree with you in theory about some of this, defunding the police and abolishing ICE are probably things to not talk about for now. (And ICE is just going to go full-fascist when let lose, so there will be more ammo later anyway.)
But I think you seriously underestimate just how much young people, even the sort of disaffected young people who have run over to the right, are completely fed up with gun control and the lack of progress there.
We’re about to hit 30 years since Columbine, since the reality of school shootings have dominated the life of everyone who passed through school after that, which are *checks note* everyone under 40 at this point.
And the feeling of helplessness, as politicians have been completely unwilling to address the issue, has only gotten worse.
This, honestly, is one of the issues that Democrats should be putting right up there next to abortion. And I think the only reason they have not is the Democratic party, and in fact the entire political establishment, is run by people who are older than dead.
Now, like the Republicans on fighting abortion, you could argue that doing this would activate the other side, like the anti-abortion wins have activated pro-life Dems…except the anti-gun control side has _long_ been activated. Decades ago. There is not really any harm in the Democrats just going full-bore on gun control…the Republican party already lies about their position on that anyway. Might as well actually hold the position they are being condemned for and get the ‘youth’ vote.Report
But I think you seriously underestimate just how much young people, even the sort of disaffected young people who have run over to the right, are completely fed up with gun control and the lack of progress there.
I don’t know how I could underestimate it more than I am underestimating it now.Report
I don’t actually understand what you mean by that.Report
I think that the disaffected young people who have run over to the right could not possibly give so much as a tinker’s cuss about gun control and the lack of progress there.Report
I read an article on this the other day. Democrats were still very competitive with young women, it’s young men where they got killed. Someone can correct me if I’m wrong but on the whole I believe young men are less gung ho on gun control.Report
See also: Defunding the Police
See also: Abolishing ICEReport
Those are harder issues to deal with.
The gun thing I think is easier to just go back to pre-Sandy Hook Obama era. Treat it as a state and local issue. Hogg is of course the opposite of the type of person you want for that pivot but I think you can get pretty far on let New York be New York and let Texas be Texas.Report
Ah, but at that point, you’re…
You know what? I’m going to write an essay today.Report
Trump is busily defunding the police now.Report
I think you misunderstood. I am not saying they are pro-gun control.
I am saying they are not anti-gun control. That there are basically no anti-gun control absolutists under…well, not immediately after Columbine, so let’s say under 30 years of age. You grow up in a school where you can be murdered at any moment, you watch that happen over and over and no one can stop it, you’re not ‘cold dead hands’. You actually think that’s a little insane.
Indeed, if these disaffected youth have a preference, it is for _some_ gun control, even if it’s not a huge issue for them and won’t decide how they vote. The Democrats talking about it will not fire them up to oppose it.Report
Kinda thought we’d have a main page Tariff Talk… but absent that:
https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/02/fact-sheet-president-donald-j-trump-imposes-tariffs-on-imports-from-canada-mexico-and-china/
Quick hits:
1. Process… ’emergency’ tariffs seem like a silly thing to delegate, but delegated they’ve been. I suppose a future president can simply not veto Congress pulling that ‘imperial’ power back.
2. Goals… Whelp, I suppose officially it’s drug interdiction and border control.
3. Outcome(s)… drug interdictions and border control? Some increased prices? Recession? Sky fallls?
4. Prudence… seems low.
Recommended path: Offer better solutions for ostensible goals; suggest poor outcomes to watch for; judge actual outcomes; make political gains off of bad outcomes; or acknowledge political outcomes did not match priors and adjust political rhetoric and future solutions for new or similar goals accordingly.
Personally I’d avoid adopting Free Market Fundamentalism on the Left in a reactionary(!) response to Trumpian stuff.Report
We may need you to write the Tariff post. I know that I don’t know enough about Tariffs to say how bad they’ll be beyond just writing about Smoot-Hawley and repeating the Libertarian talking points that I had memorized back in the 90’s.
Which would all be well and good, I suppose. “Free Trade is good! NAFTA was good! It was good for the country as a whole! Offshoring our manufacturing to China was good! Look at the GDP! It’s going up!”
But I’m pretty sure that the weeds I’d be able to dive into wouldn’t tackle the real problems and talking about Comparative vs. Competitive vs. Absolute Advantage wouldn’t touch on what the fight is actually about.Report
Heh, well I’m not a Market Fundamentalist ™ and see tariffs (properly) as a tool to manage foreign affairs including trade.
Tariffs can and do affect trade, they can and do raise prices, those prices are (mostly) paid by the consumers, they will alter consumer choices, and reveal new consumer preferences… all of those things are more or less accurate, but simply become part of the cost/benefit calculation of what you get by enacting the tariff. That is, it literally doesn’t matter what the theoretical economic impact might be to a ‘perfectly functioning free market’.
What’s the point of the tariff? Do the benefits outweigh the costs… that’s the only useful conversation. Have you properly calculated the risks? The gains? The counter-moves? Future iterations?
And, if you *threaten* a tariff and get what you wanted without any cost? Well, possibly we’re undervaluing the trade benefits we’re providing to our partners.Report
In Brazil, the combination of monetary policy and tariffs under the ISI seems to have accomplished exactly what it set out to, even if it took a while.Report
Possibly; it’s not something I’ve studied much, but I think there’s long-term concerns that ISI’s success becomes itself a kind of drag on productivity one the protections outlive their initial objectives.
Which is just to say that using different policy tools always carry the risk of creating constituencies that rely on the status quo even when the status quo should be trimmed to account for success.Report
As for an article looking at Tariffs without making the mistake of Market Fundamentalism? Oren Cass has a decent one.
https://www.understandingamerica.co/p/o-canada-time-to-talk-tariffsReport
If the 10% de minimis exception would bring a handful of manufacturers back to the states? That might be a price worth paying.
One thing that someone pointed out to me what that Market Fundamentalism has both a lot of unaddressed criticisms on top of the fact that it has never been tried.
At the end of the day, I guess the question is “how much are you willing to deal with unintended consequences?”
The unintended consequences of NAFTA and the Most Favored Nation Trade status are pretty well established by now.
I mean… one of them includes “Trump”.Report
The thing about tariffs and protectionism is that even the people who _like_ them(1) admit they can only be used to protect existing industries, and you shouldn’t be using them when you don’t have the industries to start with, because all you’ve done is idiotically raised your prices in the vague hope that, years later, that industry will finally exist.
Like, this is obvious when you think about it.
What is less obvious that the world is so interconnected that the amount of ‘things that go into making other things’ is so large that you often _think_ you have an industry somewhere, but it turns out to be 95% dependent on a thing you import from somewhere else, at which point see the first paragraph I said.
Which is why broad tariffs on entire countries are idiotic to start without any research.
1) I will admit I am not entirely against tariffs, but not for protectionism per se, but labor rights. Slap a _very small_ tariff on China, starting at 0.5% (I have no idea if that’s a reasonably starting point.), and let companies that can demonstrate they treat their workers fairly opt out. Slowly ramp that small tariff up, to incentives companies. Point out that China itself could opt out of the entire thing by actually changing their laws and no longer allowing what is functionally slave labor.
But that’s not really an attempt at protectionism, at least not in general, although I guess it could be argued it’s an attempt at protecting American companies from having to compete with companies that can abuse their workers.
And a key point is you need to do this extremely slowly and at a very low level. You know, like non-dumb people.Report
Looks like Mexico caved.Report
Or Trump caved because of a 500 point drop in the market.
It basically looks like a kick the can down the road kind of agreement where both sides say they are doing something but it is really the status quo which will remain. Border migration from Mexico was down before Trump was elected again.Report
Right… will have to see what the actual outcome is; BUT, better to manage the response to the outcomes than hyperventilate about theoretical outcomes.
Plus, see also Panama ‘caving’ and stepping back from China Belt-and-Road agreement from 2017.Report
Yea the real measure is whether 10,000 Mexican national guard troops on the other side actually changes anything in terms of illegal immigration and drug smuggling. If ‘no’ or ‘not by much/not with an ROI that makes sense’ then it was a stunt.
If ‘yes’ the honest reaction would have to be ‘wait it was that easy all along?’Report
Agreed, curious to see what the actual negotiations will yield.
Could be symbolic nonsense
Could be symbolic but successful interdiction
Could be significant collaborative interdiction
Could be General Pershing crossing the border chasing Pancho Villa…
…hard to say, really.Report
There is a *HUGE* narrative fight on the twitters right now between the “Mexico Caved” and “Trump Caved” people.
“Folded” is trending and it’s about 50% “TRUMP FOLDED LIKE A CHEAP SUIT!” and about 50% “TRUMP GOT EVERYTHING HE WANTED!”
What happened? Who knows what happened. The only thing that matters is that Trump did/did not win. You can communicate whether you are on Team Good/Evil by how you describe what appears to have happened.
I admit to having forgotten this dynamic, though I shouldn’t have.Report
Heh, now this is funny… it’s like watching toddlers play soccer, everyone just chasing the ball with no idea what the game is.Report
How can you have “forgotten” it since last week?Report
I got a lot going on.Report
It’s slightly complicated by the fact that Trump also promised to “take steps” to reduce arms smuggling into Mexico. So it’s mostly just a lot of symbolic hand waving in both directions. This sort of plays into my general expectation that Trump was mostly looking for symbolic exchanges and a lot of smoke so he can peddle that to his supporters as triumphs while blowing confusion around to try and distract from the nonsense that Musk is up to on the homestead.
Of course he’s juggling lit matches in an ammunition dump and if he fishes it up he’ll get one heck of a market crash. It’ll be interesting to see what the exchanges with the Canadians results in. So far he seems to be almost single handedly destroying the prospects for the Canadian right wing in the next election which is ironic.Report
So far he seems to be almost single handedly destroying the prospects for the Canadian right wing in the next election which is ironic.
Expand on this. From what I’ve seen Pierre Pulverizer is tweeting stuff like “CANADA FIRST”.
Which is, like, as patriotic a sentiment as I’ve seen since Molson Canadian’s “I AM CANADIAN” ad campaign.
The polling shows the Conservatives down a tick from 44.4% to 43.4% (and Trudeau up that much) in the last week but I don’t know how to tell the difference between that and regression to the mean/deat cat bounce.
Hey, the Bloc is up to 8.3%!Report
It’s too soon to tell but the Canadian vibe has moved strongly against Trump and by association strongly against the right in Canada which is exactly why you see Poilievre, who is no idiot, tweeting that kind of stuff. This could, entirely, be just vibes based so who knows but, pre-Trump, the question in Canada was “how huge will the Liberal wipeout be?” and now it’s “Everyone hates Trump, maybe Justin shouldn’t resign?”
But, again, it’s far too soon to tell and if this is the Trump bumpkum that I presume it is, everything could easily revert to the mean if the massive uncertainty gets resolved.Report
Most of the polls agree there’s been somewhere between 5-10 point shift in the LPC’s favour in recent weeks.
In messaging terms, Poilievre has consistently been a day late and a dollar short, pretty stuck on saying the same thing as the government did a day or week later. His decision making has gotten slow and cautious as the Trump issue splits his voters almost straight down the middle so he has to carefully coalition manage. Meanwhile anti-Trumpism unites the Liberals and they’ve gotten a lot of traction. PP is gone from the guy dictating political events to a back seat commentator in half a month, and a fairly bland and uninteresting one at that.
Magic number for the Liberals right now is getting to about 30 percentage of the vote and about tied in Ontario. With those numbers CPC will win the most seats but face a hung parliament.Report
So it’s probably in Trudeau’s best interest to hold out until October and not have snap elections ASAP.
Who knows how much Canadians will hate Trump by Thanksgiving?Report
Trudeau is stepping down in March. The next Liberal leader (right now looking like Carney) will be making those decisions, and what options they will have depends on the opposition parties being willing to play ball.
Possible the NDP caves and is willing to vote for confidence again, Singh has been all over the map on the issue after issuing his supposed final ultimatum and neither his caucus nor his base is keen on running right now, but he also is looking at how he’s lost his rural vote to the CPC for being too Liberal friendly.
A new Liberal leader might also want the momentum of going from leadership campaign right to election campaign and not have to make governing compromises, so its really all up in the air.
As for the other players, the CPC obviously wants an election as soon as possible. The Bloq have stated quite firmly that they want the Liberal leadership race to go on unopposed and then have an election. Their dream outcome is a Conservative minority government with them with the bulk of the Quebec seats and will try to engineer it if they can.Report
He could get one anyway. The markets are not even slightly happy with this level of uncertainty.
Yes, at some point, it might be clear that Trump is not going to do these tariffs, and the marker will stop worrying, but then other countries will stop even pretending to care, and countries that _did_ apparently care previously will, without much fanfare, stop doing whatever they announced they did. (It’s worth reminding people that all of this is being done without any actual agreements being signed, as far as I know.)
And there’s not any way to square that circle. Either people believe he might do it, in which case the market doesn’t like it, or they don’t, and people ignore his threats.
This is on top of the situation that is NVidia crash, which for some reason is happening in extreme slow motion and is only like 20% done. Hell, if it’s slow enough, it might not actually harm anything else, but honestly this is a little insane…I know stock trader are delusional gambling lunatics, but they usually aren’t _this_ bad. Apparently, we’re seeing if we can keep a company in the air by techbros just wishing really, really hard. Sounds stupid, but it works for Tesla.Report
Yes, the uncertainty that has come in where once there was certainty is going to be absolutely awful. Businesses are going to need to hedge their bets for long term planning and these are deeply integrated and huge markets we’re talking about Trump fishing with.Report
Other way around.Report
I was thinking about “emergency” tariffs this morning. I’ve been keeping books for 25 years and I’m struggling to come up with any sort of accounting emergency. Hell’s bells, Congress passed the declaration of war on Japan on Dec. 8, about 24 hours after the Pearl Harbor attack. They can act when they want to.
Perhaps Congress could pass a law forbidding itself from delegating its powers to anyone.Report
Heh, right… I mean, I could conjure a situation around ‘dumping’ that could possibly constitute a tariff emergency where you’d need to act immediately to prevent businesses from going bankrupt. But yes, most tariff policy works around long-term geo-political/economic goals.
Now, I could see Congress deciding that a country (or region) was not negotiating in good faith and delegating the Executive who also has delegated Trade Negotiation powers the ability to threaten and level Tariffs as part of that objective… but a little like declaring war, I’d rather Congress delegate for a specific purpose for a specific time.Report
It occurs to me that the Democratic Party could have tried to remove the President’s tariff powers at any time in the last 4 years, but then I doubt action that reduces presidential power would even have occurred to them.Report
Murc’s Law in Aisle 4!!! Murc’s Law in Aisle 4!!!
They could have removed in 2021 and 2022. This is when they controlled all three branches of the government.
At the time, they were dealing with the COVID vaccine roll out and getting life back to normal (COVID restrictions did not fully end until mid or end 2022), Inflation, and the Afghan withdrawal.
Pardon political capital and resource allocation for being real things.Report
Yeah.
I can totally understand preferring a Party with agency to one that has none (and its most ardent defender get upset when you say that it ought to have some!).Report
Saul, while you’re in aisle 4, grab a few small brown paper bags – I’m concerned you’re not going to make it all 4-yrs.
It’s not Murc’s Law — it’s the perennial problem of the Imperial Presidency.
I mean, kudos to Congress for fixing the Electoral Count act early in Biden’s presidency… which just shows that there’s at least some awareness that Congress should act; it seems though that there was only political capital for that limited scope — but I also didn’t hear of any additional items that were on the table.Report
Yes, but it’s simply an observed fact in all US Politics classes that neither party *ever* gives up a Presidential Power collected by the other party.
Why would you? The power is only dangerous when other people exercise it.Report
Those who have been keeping up on the Joe Rogan vs. Kamala Harris fight know about the bombshell revelations that Harris actually wanted to go on Rogan’s show but Rogan made it impossible for her to do so. Becket Adams has an article in The Hill disagreeing with the take of Parnes and Allen.
Something from the beginning of the end:
Report
Rogan has on average 11M views per podcast. His podcast with Musk went to 68M.
The guy doesn’t NEED anyone to come onto his show. He likely has folks clamoring to go on, ergo, he sets the rules. The fault lies with the Harris staff in total.Report
Trump caved to the Mexican lady.Report
“Mexico’s government deploying troops and spending money to enforce border security in a way they were originally not going to do” doesn’t sound like “caving”…Report
The headline at WaPo is:
U.S. tariffs on Mexico delayed as country agrees to rush 10,000 troops to border
The subline is:
The order to send Mexican national guard troops to the border is meant to strengthen efforts to block the flow of drugs, especially fentanyl, coming into the United States.
I am open to the possibility that when drilling down on the details it is more stunt than substance. However as it is being reported from non-Fox News type outlets it not immediately obvious that such is the case.Report
Considering that 88% of fentanyl seized at the southern border comes in via legal ports of entry this won’t stop much in the way of illegal drug trade. And Mexico already agreed with Biden to ramp up efforts on its southern border so what’s the win here for Trump?Report
Like I said above to March, depends on what happens. If nothing then I think we can feel pretty confident in the stunt hypothesis.Report
This was stuff Mexico was doing already.
Same with the Canadian offer, it was already in the works in December, none of which was a big deal on Ottawa’s end. in February Trump gets a couple minor changes to it and agrees.Report
If anyone was worried about Democrats not rising to the occasion, don’t worry, Chuck Schumer has you covered:
https://bsky.app/profile/schumer.senate.gov/post/3lh5nrrtgqc2vReport
You know how I prefer my New York pizza slices?
Folded.Report
Good Lord.Report
Chuck Schumer is the antithesis of inspiring leaders. I’ve seen potted plants do better.Report
Chris Murphy, Jamie Raskin, Andy Kim, Jasmine Crockett, and some others are aware of where we are atReport
I wish Democrats cared about free trade and economic literacy even when Donald Trump isn’t in office.Report
Says the guy who’d sell the Chinese the ropes they use to hang us.Report
Mark Rubio has announced himself as acting head of USAIDReport
Much discussion among leftists these days about whether we can celebrate the end of USAID or if the circumstances of its demise are just too dire. See also, the FBI.Report
(To be clear, the US will keep doing the bad things they were doing with USAID, without doing any of the good things, should USAID actually cease to exist, but still, the reasons for the left to celebrate don’t come along often.)Report
My understanding of USAID has always been that it is strongly suspected to be at least to some degree a front for espionage or other clandestine activities.
However I would say the way to eliminate something like that is through lawful means (i.e. probably Congress), not sending an unelected bazillionare consigliere of the president and his bufoonish henchman to bust it up.Report
Right, the circumstances make it less enjoyable to watch.Report
Do you prefer that with end of PEPFAR thousands of babies will be born with HIV infections every week — in 2023, PEPFAR provided almost half a million mothers with retroviral medication?Report
It’s been 23 years. At what point should we expect people to care for themselves? Would they without our “help”? And why do we have multiple us gov agencies dealing with this?Report
Tell me you haven’t heard of softpower without telling me you haven’t heard of softpower.
PEPFAR is an unalloyed good and one of the few (maybe the only) good thing to come from Bush II’s admin. The cost of doing it is cheap for a country our size.Report
PEPFAR was created as a “emergency” program to deal with a crisis. That’s right there in the name. It’s been trying to “ensure long-term sustainability and country leadership” since 2008.
So it suffers from the problem that it’s mission is to destroy itself.
The life cycle of this kind of program is it’s created with great intentions, does good things, and then the iron rule of bureaucracy takes hold and it becomes a vehicle to support the jobs of the program itself.
It’s the same issue with charities which claim to “help X” (how can you oppose helping X?) and they spend more money on administration than on X.
I can’t tell whether we’ve hit the point where PEPFAR should be eliminated, but there are multiple red flags here.
It’s existed so long that it’s original staff presumably has mostly been replaced. It’s made no progress on destroying itself over the last 17 years. One of the big problems back in 2003 was the serious AIDS drugs were on patent, but that’s no longer true.
Elements of the GOP (who might or might not know more than I do) have problems with it.
Again, at what point is the “emergency” over?Report
Dark, I’d suggest this is an area where 0 sum thinking is the wrong approach. Should the program be run well, and not as a boondoggle? Of course. But absent evidence that such is the case (and my understanding is that it’s pretty successful), this is the kind of pittance out of the federal budget that is pretty easy to justify. It is a globalized world and the last thing we need is more people contracting or dying from AIDs and if we can prevent that by distributing cheap antiretroviral drugs to developing countries we should.Report
There are very few areas where zero sum thinking is a good idea.Report
It’s a mistake to have the soft bigotry of low expectations. It’s especially a mistake to write it into law.
At some point it will create problems and enable behavior that shouldn’t be.
It is certainly possible that it’s still a successful program… but at this point it shouldn’t be. Ergo the question should be, why is it still needed, i.e. what has gone wrong to the point where it’s still needed.Report
That’s not the right way of analyzing something like PEPFAR. The beneficiaries are people in impoverished countries that left to their own devices will become hot beds of a deadly disease that doesn’t recognize borders. PEPFAR is self-interested noblesse oblige, not a question of enablement or moral hazard.Report
PEPFAR is self-interested noblesse oblige, not a question of enablement or moral hazard.
When I look at the list of countries it’s supposed to focus on, some (Haiti) are just as much a failed state as they were then. I can easily believe we’re in noblesse oblige territory there.
Others have had massive economic growth. Vietnam’s GDP is 10x what it was.
Is PEPFAR still “helping” Vietnam even if it’s no longer impoverished? Is PEPFAR taking credit there? Is Vietnam engaging in moral hazard by not dealing with this?Report
I honestly think a lot of this discussion is completely ignoring how soft power works. Do you know what the $100 billion over 20 years spent on PEPFAR bought the US? An incredibly amount of goodwill.
And almost all that money goes _back_ to the US. We pay Americans to do it, we buy drugs from American countries to distribute, and, yes, we also use all that to spy on everyone. For $5 billion a year.
And this is on top of the actual good it does. Because diseases running rampant elsewhere in the world is actually bad for Americans. Cause, um, diseases do not understand borders. But even pretending the good doesn’t exist, $5 billion a year (Which, again, goes back to us) just for this level of good will and access is not actually bad.
Arguing ‘There are some places it should cut back in’ is reasonable…and is a thing it already does. This is why we have an _agency_ to manage this crap. It doesn’t just keep funding things in places that don’t need it.
And isn’t actually what’s being argued anyway. Maybe we should stop iron-manning the arguments that Trump’s government _could_ be making against _small parts_ of PEPFAR, (we guess, we don’t know and have no facts, we just sorta _feel_ parts of it must be ineffiecence), but he didn’t make those arguments! He is trying to dismantle literally the entire USAID.
We aren’t living in a hypothetical universe where someone is making reasoned and logical cuts to services. We’re living in a universe where a bunch of techbros just cut outgoing payments to people and try to dismantle everything. We don’t need to talk about what cuts we sorta guess that it might be possible to be made without causing much damage.Report
500,000 women were getting treatment for HIV through PEPFAR in 2023. Get rid of PEPFAR and the HIV/AIDS rate in Africa is going to sky rocket.Report
So without this program the wheels come off? The people of Africa have no interest in staying HIV free? Their governments have no interest or ability to have this happen?
There is a failed state or two in that list, but there are also a lot of countries that have gone a long way upwards. The treatment of AIDS has gotten a lot cheaper. This program has had as part of it’s mission turning over this treatment to the locals for the last 18 years or so.
It’s very fair to ask “what’s going on”.Report
You’re asking policy questions, Dark, when the pertinent questions are procedural ones. For decades libertarians have asserted that the executive can’t unilaterally make decisions on spending, either spending more or spending less, without cooperation from congress (while on the side inveigling that neither should be allowed to spend at all since the constitution requires Gilded Age degrees of government size). Now it sounds like you’re saying that since Trump is proposing to spend less then screw the procedural questions- it’s all good. If you can’t see how that incredible reversal can’t come back to bite the right, especially the libertarian right, something fierce in the near predictable future, well I dunno what to tell you.Report
If you can’t see how that incredible reversal can’t come back to bite the right, especially the libertarian right, something fierce in the near predictable future, well I dunno what to tell you.
From over here, it looks like the stuff that is happening right now is the reversal that is coming back to bite.Report
How do you figure? Have I missed some wave of unilateral and dubiously legal Executive based expansions of government recently?Report
You mean since 1984 or so or are you asking me to limit it to Joe Biden (and maybe Obama) or what?Report
If you want to make a case that the electorate that elected Trump did so on some form of libertarian backlash grounds you can feel free to try. I have my doubts.Report
Oh, no. If I were to argue that the electorate elected Trump for a list of reasons, I’d say that the most important reasons were:
1. Immigration
2. Economy/Inflation
3. Crime
And only somewhere around #4 would we find ourselves beginning to talk about non-crime “culture war” stuff that the electorate wanted Trump to turn around. (And, quite honestly, it’d probably be focused a lot more on high school sports than foreign aid (or culture war stuff masquerading as foreign aid).)
That said, I think that Trump is part of a reversal that is coming back to bite.
We went nuts there for a while, after all.Report
Right, so basically the demented republitarian billionaire running around the apparatus’ of the Federal Government trying to close various elements down with just the fig leaf of an executive order at most has nothing at all to do with a backlash to some kind of similar or equivalent actions on the other side. Just that the woke indulgences of the late Obama on era are fourth order drivers of voter discontent with the Dems. I’d say, then, that my objection to Dark stands.Report
Ding ding ding ding.Report
Wait, so now we’re back to asking for EOs that overstepped instead of asking about it being a libertarian (?) backlash?
Because I think that there is some stuff in there (involving a phone and/or a pen) that I could point to if I knew that you weren’t going to bring up libertarians again.Report
“Went”Report
Procedurally, I fully expect Trump to be overruled left, right, and center for these reasons.
However that’s a different issue than “this program claims to do holy things (and did so in the past) so any effort to examine it, question it, or otherwise hold it accountable is unthinkable”.
I also think it’s a mistake to examine every dollar spent as though no one will change their actions if that dollar is withdrawn. For example my kid got free lunches for several years here, but subtracting that doesn’t leave her hungry because I won’t allow that.Report
Sure and if we were arguing about a proposal in Congress or in spending bill negotiations where this was a provision I’d say you’re on solid ground but we’re talking about an extralegal act of, I don’t know, baseless vandalism?
I hear you saying you expect it will be overruled but don’t you think it should be overruled?Report
North: don’t you think it should be overruled?
For procedural reasons? Yes.
I also think this program, like all programs, should be forced to justify it’s existence against a reasonably high bar. (There’s a reasonably good chance it can do that too.)
Big picture we need a good way to prevent the gov from trying to do everything for everyone, and to prevent dead wood from building up. All programs should have sunset provisions.
Again, this program has multiple red flags showing. It’s job is to destroy itself and it’s thus far failed.
When we have multiple red flags the default isn’t to look at what it claims to do and feel good about ourselves. The default is to assume it is off mission and should be destroyed without strong justification otherwise.Report
Fair enough.
I’ll note that the private market has failed to eliminate HIV so I fail to see why we could expect this program to do so.Report
I don’t expect it to “eliminate HIV”.
Part of their mandate is supposedly trying to stand up locals so they can deal with this issue without international help.
OK, so we have that as a mandate, a ten fold increase in GDP, a massive reduction in the cost of the drugs because they’re off patent, and 23 years of effort.
I think it’s fair to measure them by teaching how to fish rather than by giving out fish, which long term is their job… but not in their personal best interests.Report
I believe PEPFAR was granted a waiver a couple days ago.Report
*I* read this comment, Marchmaine.
It was, for the record.
I, personally, think that it’s important for us to continue with PEPFAR. It primarily protects American citizens going abroad for sex tourism, after all.Report
USAID: Some of our best CIA assets are sex tourists.Report
FWIW, I think Musk is angry at USAID because they took stances against Apartheid. They were not perfect but they did a lot of good stuff too and there very well be a huge crisis in Africa because USAID was supplying food and medical supplies in places like Sudan.Report
For those who don’t know, the very very quick history: Congress passed sanctions for Apartheid South Africa in 1986 over President Reagan’s veto.
Now, the thing is: Almost all foreign policy aperture is the administration’s policy, right? The State Department is doing the president’s bidding in a general sense. And the Reagan Administration had no problem with Apartheid.
So the Black South Africans and the anti-Apartheid forces did not trust American diplomatic outreach in general, considering it was coming from a very suspect source. (And they were probably right to not trust it, some of that was CIA.)
However, USAID isn’t really a diplomatic mission. It is an executive agency, but it’s one that exists entirely to implement foreign aid as laid out in law.
At least, that’s the theory. The CIA probably also uses it, who knows. But whatever the actual fact is, the anti-Apartheid forces in South Africa trusted it in ways they didn’t trust other parts of the US government, and it…helped them. A lot. It helped pay to educate the population after decades of oppression, it helped build civil structures that they were lacking (Which took legal exceptions to get around the sanctions laws), it put pressure on the Apartheid regime, and it was right there as Nelson Mandela took power.
If you are against Apartheid, what USAID did in South Africa is 100% a success story of the US government foreign policy, using soft power, not force, to pressure a mostly peaceful transition out of a oppressive and racist government.
I will make absolutely no comment if Elon Musk, a man whose grandparents moved with his mother to Apartheid South Africa the second it existed because Canada was becoming uncomfortable for overt Na.zis, and whose family with him left the second it _stopped_ being Apartheid, considers that a success story or not.Report
I saw someone assert that USAID was created by Executive Order back in the 60’s. So I googled.
Executive Order 10973—Administration of Foreign Assistance and Related Functions
Apparently, JFK created it.
From my cursory reading of it (and I am not a lawyer), it seems like the congress gives it money and then it reallocates the money according to Section 502:
Huh. 1961.Report
This is true, but Congress later made it, er, official.Report
Wikipedia is saying that it happened the other way around.
God only knows what Wikipedia will say in 20 minutes, of course.
But that’s what it says now.Report
Specifically, I believe the Foreign Assistance Act was later amended to include USAID.Report
The New Directions Act part of the page talks about stuff like the budget reforms and the Percy amendment and whatnot… but it still seems to be under the umbrella of the Executive.
You just know that John Kerry is beating himself up right now.Report
I think Kerry was part of amending the FAA to include USAID language in ’04, so I’m sure he used it exactly as he wanted.Report
For those claiming Democrats are not doing anything,
Schatz announced a blanket hold on all of Trump’s state department nominees until USAID is restored.
Murphy announced a similar blanket hold on other officials I believe.
This gums up the Senate and it is stuff the Democrats can doReport
Cory Booker is doing his part to stand up to Trumpler as well:
There are a bunch of people asking stuff like “wait, it’s a national security agency?” in responses but that is just because they’re on the other side, probably.Report
(he’s referring to the part about the CIA)Report
About time.Report
Good, glad to see some actual push-back from the legislature.Report
I don’t speak French but it looks like Trump caved to Trudeau too. Folded like a cheap suit! And he calls himself a dealmaker!!!
(Translation services provided by Twitter.)
Report
“I just had a good call with President Trump,” Trudeau said in a social media post. He said Canada would push ahead with its 1 billion Canadian dollar, or about $6.89 billion, border reinforcement plan and deploy additional technology and staff, all of which had been announced previously.
Trudeau said Canada would also appoint a “fentanyl czar” and would: “list cartels as terrorists, ensure 24/7 eyes on the border, launch a Canada-U.S. Joint Strike Force to combat organized crime, fentanyl and money laundering.”
So it looks like Trump got nothingReport
Oh! He also has an English version so that Americans are able to read it too:
Yeah. Trump got pantsed.
I wonder how long it’ll be before Trump caves to China, now that he’s caved to Panama, Mexico, and Canada.Report
One hypothesis is that Trump got pantsed.
Another is that he got to put on a show for his base, who aren’t going to believe the mainstream media when they say he got pantsed. Placating his base with no real damage done is arguably a pretty good outcome, all things considered.
As a one-off, Occam’s razor favors the first, but stuff like this just keeps happening, so…I dunno. Maybe he actually is smarter than he lets on.
I mean, he’d have to be, right? He manages to dress himself.Report
Both things can be true. And in Trump’s case probably are.Report
I think he made a big show of force both as a performance and to see what it would get him. He encountered real resistance both home and abroad and retreated after taking the table stakes he was offered.
The threats are both real and bluster, because he’d have gone farther if he sensed weakness, but he hasn’t built the apparatus to follow through with threats against real resistance.Report
Mhm, so this looks like what the markets (and I) were expecting. A bunch of already existing moves and realities being repackaged as concessions to Trump; basically kayfabe. What’d probably be good “in principle” would be for a leader to refuse to do this kind of kabuki and insist that Trumps tarrifs were a violation of existing agreements, would hurt Americans etc… but what is good for the foreign countries in each of these specific situations, though, is to simply give Trump his fig leaf and then get on with business without the disruption of an actual fight.Report
Now if only the press would call this out as Trump huffing and puffing and getting nothing but that would go against the Team America vibe so they won’tReport
Yeah, the fact that they aren’t is kind of suspicious. Do you think that there is an editorial slant behind how they’re covering these stories?Report
Yes I do. The same news outlets who had endorsements of Kamala Harris quashed by their owners are not going to go out and call him the biggest loser. This is obvious to most of us.Report
Golly!
If that’s obvious, is it obvious that there was an editorial slant prior to the new censorious regime?Report
I’m old enough to remember when Trump’s actions were going to destroy America’s relevance as a world power and he wasn’t paying attention to anyone. But I guess now Trump is a wimp who backs down at the first sign of resistance.Report
Yes he is. Because like most bullies he’s all bluff and bluster. They bought him off with things they are already doing or had agree with Biden to do. Sure he gets to white knight it but in actuality he’s more Don Quixote then King Arthur.Report
Well, both Dons have a problem with windmills.Report
That’s the thing, there’s no incentive for foreign governments to risk their own agendas to dig the US out of a hole that their own institutions and voters couldn’t be bothered digging themselves out of.Report
I agree entirely which is the devilishly obnoxious thing about Trump. He’s an utter idiot but he has this instinct that sends him squirming into the crevice of any given situation where crushing him requires actors to behave profoundly contrary to their immediate interests.Report
BTW, I did actually learn what happened with Colombia: Colombia is, in fact, flying their people home, on their own airplanes. (1) I read it in AP story earlier, I don’t have access to the link right now.
Or to put it another way: Colombia got the entirety of their demands. Which were, again, ‘do not transport our citizens back to us corralled and handcuffed as prisoners in military vehicles’. (2)
Anyway, we can call that caving or not. It isn’t a return to the status quo, but it is something that the Trump Administration probably could have just asked for.
And there still seems to be no point for this change in policy, at all. No, it’s not going to save money. Like most things with people who have been detained by the government, the actual cost is almost entirely the cost of the detention itself, and even things like commercial plane tickets are pretty cheap compared to that. (Also, we could have just demanded Columbia pay for those tickets, which again are really trivial in any sort of government budget, but might have been some sort of symbolic victory?)
Also, now we have Colombian planes landing at our airports to pick these people up, wasting time and space in our system. Luckily, no part of air transit is overloaded and near a breaking point, like our air traffic control system.
1) Ironically, they appear to mostly be using their own military planes, but one supposes that their citizens will be treated better on those planes, and not prisoners at all, than they were chained up on American military planes.
2) Which, interesting fact, the second those planes gots out of US airspace, holding them handcuffed as prisoners turns into a dubious legal situation. They have been charged with no crime and have been removed from the country, you probably can’t keep them as prisoners anymore. And I only say probably because this is an issue that’s never really happened under international law, because no one has done this before. It’s possible you can get away with this in international airspace, with the plane operating under the us flag, but remember that plane entered Colombian airspace and attempted to land on Colombian soil with them handcuffed, it really seems like the Colombia authorities would have been within their rights to arrest the people operating that thing for kidnapping. And yes, someone’s about to hypothesize how the US would have reacted to that, but that isn’t the point, the point is it is very obviously illegal.Report
” Colombia got the entirety of their demands. Which were, again, ‘do not transport our citizens back to us corralled and handcuffed as prisoners in military vehicles’.”
it is very amusing that you’ve dropped “refugees being deported” in favor of “transport [their] citizens back to [them]”.Report
What are you talking about? The people under discussion are not refugees, as far as I know. I guess they _could_ be, there are not a huge amount of refugees from Colombia but there is some. But that is pretty much completely irrelevant to how Colombian feels about them.
And, yes, they are Colombian citizens, that’s the reason they are being deported to Colombian. You generally deport people back to their own country.
Colombia does not have a problem with its citizens being deported back to it because those citizens entered another country illegal. Pretty much no country does, not even the US. If you get into Canada illegally, and get caught there, and they bring you back over the border, that’s fine. Indeed, that’s the _ideal_ punishment, sending you back, because the punishment can be much worse. You sneak into Singapore illegal, you probably get locked in prison for ten years and beaten with sticks every Monday. Having the foreign government merely _hand their citizens back_ is quite a relief. Colombia had no problem with that.
Colombia, again, had a problem with those citizens _being chained to seats in military planes_ instead of how countries normally deport people to non-connected countries, which is purchase flights on commercial flights or charter planes to send a group.Report
Where do I apply to be Canada’s fentanyl czar? According to the BBC, 32 whole pounds were seized at the Canadian border last year.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvg93nn1e6goReport
You probably have to become a citizen first.
Do you speak French? They have language laws up there…Report
Eh, English is good enough for ’em. In between stopping the 12 ounces of fentanyl a week I can study up on citizenship.Report
Ok… about the whole DOGE thing. I don’t know where to begin. As a process guy, I absolutely abhor this complete end-around the entire process. Seriously, it’s bad and I condemn it thrice.
BUT, as a tech guy who has (on and off) worked with the Feds on their Data Management projects, the prospect of Musk and a few techies with cots deploying COTS (Commercial off-the-shelf) software to solve simple data management issues that have plagued (and plague here is too soft of a disease metaphor) the entire Federal Government? Well, I’m laughing like the Joker. I’ll laugh harder with the upcoming data-breach, but that’s a different sort of laugh.
No, I’m not concerned about the PII stuff people are hyperventilating about…
But still, you have no idea how funny it is to see the data silos integrated — there are right now thousands, nay, tens of thousands of consultants watching this with mouths ajar… the fact that the GSA is one of the institutions being ‘integrated’ — off the charts irony.
https://archive.is/2025.02.01-235221/https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-lackeys-general-services-administration/Report
I just wonder when China will get their hands on the information in the OPM database.Report
Heh, yeah, hope the social security numbers don’t leak.
On the serious side, there’s definitely data I don’t want leaked through an accidentally unsecured S3 bucket… but from an accountability/auditability side of things, we cannot underestimate how much the Feds couldn’t do. And, honestly, projects to ‘share’ data across systems and depts … tens of $B in consulting contracts without any real prospect of being able to do it.Report
As soon as one of the broccoli heads within Elon’s ambit starts to look up the deets of his OnlyFans crushes.Report
I want to say something about how the Dems can use this precedent the next time they get in the executive but my expectation is this is eventually going to run into a brick wall of court judgements against it and then that wreckage will explode into a massive fireball as data leaks and other fish ups absolutely explode in ineptness and disaster so the only precedent will be “if you do this it’ll blow up in your faces like you’ll never believe”.Report
Yeah, very high potential for blowing up.Report
My experience with stuff like this is that very often, there’s a very simple solution “K” that is used by virtually the entire industry but nowhere in the government, and it turns out that the government has requirement “J” that “K” is unable to achieve without, e.g., Literally Making A Private Copy Of Google, which is why the government wasn’t already using “K”.Report
Yes, it’s very much like this. The weird part is that “J” is often irrelevant or incoherent… like, we need Google, but it can’t be an internet version of Google… but it has to have all the stuff that is on the internet, otherwise it would just be internal search — we want the stuff that Google has, but only as long as it’s not on the internet — for security reasons.
I mean, that’s a joke, but “J” is usually such a confounder that instead of achieving success that 99% of the commercial world has, you’ve just invented a category that doesn’t exist, requires custom $B, and will break within 2-years. But I guaranty at least 3 Bidders will give you a number for it.Report
“J” is usually an operating bureaucracy’s interpretation of a legislated requirement. And government bureaucracies care very much about meeting their customers’ requriements. (And, as is usual in the modern economy, “users” and “customers” are not the same people.)Report
Much of the federal government contracts with google to use its Google Suite products. My agency does. Has for years.
The rest use Microsoft Office Suite. Which is hilarious when we try to do cross-agency video conferences and our resident security forces is to default to the meat functional browser version.Report
Mexico apparently has 14,591 troops at the border and the deal with Trump is that they would have 10K troops at the border. Not 10K more but 10K so Trump agreed to let Mexico reduce its border guardsReport
On the one hand, here is a charming story about a woman able to raise her daughter in an apartment that she was raised in: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/27/realestate/renters-childhood-apartment.html
On the other hand, this story is an epic policy failure because it is about a not poor woman (she went to boarding school and is at least shabby chic upper-middle class) who can live a quirky, subsidized bohemian life because of a rent stabilization law.Report
Short of high altitude bombing nothing will ruin a city more effectively than rent control. As I read the story all I felt was mild disgust.Report
Finding the baseball card signed by Jackie Robinson was a chef’s kiss. The wine store is still active though I don’t know if it is in the control of her family.Report
I have absolutely no doubt that she and her fam are in some way profiting from that wine store. Ugh.Report
There are more people like this in NYC and possibly other major cities with rent control/stabilization than you would think. For some reason, NIMBYs think these make for great stories to champion rent control/stabilization.Report
Times like this make me wish I had a NYT subscription so I could see the comments on this article.Report
This one does not have commentsReport
Somehow I find myself unsurprised by this yet also disappointed.Report
https://archive.is/wdSPN
Can’t see any comments, but here’s the article.Report
Thank youReport
And the JFK files drop on *FRIDAY*!!!
I know we all have a little countdown to the weekend in our heads anyway, but there’s an extra special prize for making it to the end of this particular week!Report
The secrets have been known for years and are all summarized in the video below:
https://youtu.be/K7y2xPucnAo?si=Jot7nTUvvtwqKjkKReport
I know, deep in my heart, that there are only but so many revelations that are actually possible.
1. The files are merely overclassified. Like, monumentally overclassified. There’s some stuff in there that is politically sensitive and potentially embarrassing for this or that agency (including the stuff that was done after the fact for a few years there) but the big question will be “why in the hell was there such a big deal made out of the need to keep *THIS* secret?”… which will feed conspiracy theories about #2.
2. Anything really juicy that might have been in there in 1968 sure as hell has been redacted by now. The only question is whether “what really happened” is still written down somewhere (in a top secret file with a name like “PRNT-ADZ 63-8677” (and no one will ever open this file until the AIs take over and get access) *OR* it’s not written down anywhere and the handful of people who know what happened will have the information die with them.
3. I suppose that there is always the option of “yeah, we had a working relationship with the mob and so we had Jack Ruby kill Oswald but, seriously, it was for the good of the country” or similar coming out but, honestly, I wouldn’t bet on this one.
My money is on #1.
As such, I am looking forward to find out what, exactly, is going to have been overclassified to hell and back.Report
Heh fair enough.Report
It was to protect Italian Americans from blowback of Mob killing JFK for schtupping the wrong lady.
So… way over-classified.Report
JFK was assassinated because he was schtupping a secretary who was working for the guy who was in charge of Area 51.
It wasn’t a magic bullet. It was an extraterrestrial one.Report
We can only hope.Report
Apprently he intends to close yet another executive branch agency by executive order. This time Education. That’s gonna hurt a lot of public school districts in red states.Report
At the end of the day elections have consequences for public policy.
What I’m still not seeing explained is where the authority to do this stuff comes from unilaterally and without an act of Congress.
Of course this has always been the most dangerous part of Trump. Not that he gets policy wrong, the whole point of a democratic and republican form of government is that policy changes and can be changed again. It’s the continuous haphazard playing chicken with the system that we can’t have.Report
The Department of Education itself is not constitutionally authorized, so there’s kind of perverse symmetry there.Report
No but it and USAID are stupidity authorized. And Congress allegedly reserved the right to themselves to approve and disprove creation of federal agencies.Report
Apparently, the Department of Education does a *LOT* of stuff. Some of the stuff is covered by legislation but nowhere near all of it.
The stuff that got established by EO? He’s tackling that. The stuff that grew organically the way that stuff grows organically? He’s saying that it’s under his authority to prune that away.Report
This is the circular meta-problem of the ‘fourth-branch’ of Government. It occupies the space between Congress and the Executive with both having legitimate claims of oversight and control.
It is exacerbated by the fourth-branch participating in its own definitions of scope, oversight and control.
I hate to say there’s no easy way to manage this phenomenon, but… there’s no easy way to manage this.
If I wanted to write a controversial essay, I’d suggest that the trigger for all of this is that the balance between the Right owning some part of the spoils system* and the Left owning another part broke…
*there’s totally not a spoils system like originally… it’s a ‘soft-spoils-system’ in a way Tocqueville would have understood.Report
I still vividly recall the day in my admin law class that we discussed Chevron and suddenly having a realization of how profound the questions raised by the administrative state really are. Even as a generally liberal person I see the case for trimming it back. The idea that there are things that got put in place in the 60s or 70s or whenever (to say nothing of what has grown around them) are totally sacrosanct and never up for discussion or debate is IMO itself a kind of reactionary stance, no matter how progressive the people who hold that position claim to be.
And yet you’d still ideally have a thoughtful gradualism, hopefully led by Congress or at least carefully negotiated between the branches. Even failing that, and if irresponsibility is necessary I’d be more comfortable with it coming out of a really reckless majority in the legislative branch. Ultimately I think the unfortunate answer to your question about how to manage it is something like ‘elect responsible leaders’ which is something we seem to be failing at. No one said democracy was easy and it we fail it will be our own fault.Report
When I took administrative law, Chevron was still working its way through the administrative process, so there was no Chevron Doctrine. There was, instead, a general sense floating around the courts that some kind of deference was due to administrative interpretations, but it was rather ad hoc, depending in large part on the respect in which the particular agency was held and in larger part on how persnickety the particular judge was. When Chevron came down, it wasn’t originally regarded as a Big F*****g Deal; it was more of an attempt to articulate existing practice with a few nips and tucks here and there., changing how judges talked more than what they did. I expect rather modest effects from the overruling of Chevron.Report
I’m certainly not in hysterics over it. I’m not even totally sure I disagree with overturning it.
I do think that where to draw the line on what administrative agencies can do is a very fraught area of law in light of the lack of clear constitutional guidance. In theory Congress can eliminate statutory mandates for the agencies or force modifications or elominate an agency entirely any time it wants but the reality of Congress’ general laziness about doing so creates (in my mind at least) questions of legitimacy of agency decisions. Maybe not necessarily legally but popularly.Report
the balance between the Right owning some part of the spoils system* and the Left owning another part broke
One thing I just remembered was the whole Amazon HQ2 thing.
Remember when Bezos was going to put a new HQ in AOC’s district? She rattled off a bunch of demands and Bezos shrugged and said “fine, we won’t build it there, then” and just up and left.
Team Good spun this as AOC demonstrating that she was right to demand what she did… they gave away the store, after all, why shouldn’t she insist on a bunch of concessions in return?
Team Evil spun this as AOC getting greedy and gave a bunch of rules about how to be a good parasite versus a parasite that gets itself ejected.
Anyway. Thinking about that today.Report
Heh… one of the things that provides a little cognitive dissonance for those of us old enough to remember is the Left white-knighting the CIA, NSA, Homeland Security, FBI, DoD, Treasury, etc.
I mean, does no one respect the old ways?Report
new hotness: USAID is Good Actually
old and busted: “sexual preference”Report
Legally? There is no authority to do this.
But the GOP is seemingly under the complete control of Trump and Musk and the ideologues behind them and GOP members in Congress seem fine with not asserting any authority to get back their perogative.Report
He.
Does.
Not.
Care.
About.
“Legal” or law or authority.
Because SCOTUS told him he didn’t need to.Report
That isn’t the check on the Executive. DA’s aren’t the check on the Executive exercising (questionable) authority over the Executive branch.
If he’s overstepping power reserved to Congress… SCOTUS can and will rule such. That’s still not an indictable offence. Think about it… we don’t put in jail every administration that had an Executive order or action stopped by the Courts.
If SCOTUS rules against his Executive Actions *and* he ignores SCOTUS *and* isn’t impeached… that’s an actual Constitutional crisis.
…but still not resolvable by a DA or an indictment.Report
It will take years for this to get to SCOTUS and I have zero faith they will rule against him. And even if they do then what? They have no independent arm to enforce.
He is actively usurping the congressional power of the purse (largely because they are too cowardly to actually legislate) and their answer seems to be “thank you sir may I have another.”Report
The authority comes from nowhere. Trump and Musk are running the United States as dictatorship. Republicans in Congress are weak willed and will give Trump anything he wants rather than team up with the Democratic Party to maintain their power. Even if the Republicans in Congress were willing to team up with the Democratic Party, Trump or really Musk’s answer will be “how many divisions to Congress have?” We can file lawsuits but Trump-Musk will ignore any verdict against them for the same reasons. Yesterday, Congressional Democrats were kept out of the USAID office despite a law saying that all members of Congress have access to federal office. Get this through your head, we are in a dictatorship.Report
I don’t know about you, but my social media posts are full of metaphors and memes including the theme of touching hot stoves. Grabbing those stoves with both hands. Pulling off their underwear and then sitting on said hot stoves. Intentionally face-planting on the burners.
It’s a change of pace from the FAFO and leopards-eating-faces memes, I guess.
As always, the people who realize that their own economic interests are being sacrificed to their own pain, and that they actually voted for this to happen to them, is quite small. There’s a lot of silence where the “Wait, I didn’t vote for this!” seems like it ought to be. We got some of it with people who had been promised different kinds of jobs and medical care and found those promises retracted.
Maybe we’ll get more of it when red-hat-wearing parents find their special needs kids’ IDEA plans disrupted. (Which I hope you all will join me in deploring should that actually happen. That’s not a good place for schadenfreude to land.)
I credit it to the power of cognitive dissonance, the extend of the human mind’s ability to rationalize the beneficence of one’s own actions and statements.Report
https://www.npr.org/2025/02/04/nx-s1-5285470/venezuelans-florida-tps-immigration-trump
I see plenty of Leopards eat my face stuffReport
One of Trump’s 2016 promises was “drain the swamp”, and this looks a lot like a swamp being drained.
“Maybe we’ll get more of it when red-hat-wearing parents find their special needs kids’ IDEA plans disrupted.”
Will you let those parents keep their kids at home instead of being forced to send them to school (and keep their taxes instead of paying for schools their kids don’t attend)? Because if so, I feel like more parents than you think would take that deal!Report
Lets look at today:
1. USAID officials stationed abroad have been told abruptly that they are returning stateside on Friday and if they refuse to comply, the military might forcibly return them;
2. Democratic Congress members and their supporters have been blocked access to Treasury;
3. Trump reiterated that he wants 1.7-1.8 million Palestinians to leave Gaza and never come back.
4. Head Start programs in Washington, Oregon, and Wisconsin indicated that they have been cut off from funds which indicates that Musk’s crew is playing with the turn off funding to blue states program.Report
#2 “and their supporters”
The government can do that? Keep congressional supporters out of their buildings?!?Report
It probably never occurred to the Congress critters that they should pass laws that made Congressional ID badges good for access to any executive branch building. And that there needed to be a large armed force that answered to Congress rather than to the executive to enforce such access. And that such a force should answer to a minority set of members of Congress.Report
“It probably never occurred to the Congress critters that they should pass laws that made Congressional ID badges good for access to any executive branch building. ”
Can members of Congress enter the Supreme Court’s private chambers during deliberations and take notes?Report
Congress did not authorize the existence of the Supreme Court.
They did authorize the existence of the Treasury Department. It was founded September 11, 1789, by an Act of Congress:
Every part of its structure is under Congressional control, everything it does is by the authorization of Congress, even if large chunks of their authority was delegated by Congress to the president. Congress has a right to do any sort of oversight it wishes as to how the Department is functioning, including personal inspection.
The equivalent of your question would be if Congress could get inside the _White House’s_ deliberations, and the answer, as already answered by the court, is no.
(This is on top of the obvious fact that court deliberations are generally secret as part of the concept of due process, itself a part of the constitution. Whereas the behavior of the _Treasury_ is not impacted in that way.)Report
Sorry, it was founded September 2nd 1789. September 11th was the date the first Secretary of the Treasury was appointed.Report
Congressional oversight committees have long claimed the right to access federal property as part of their work. Would that they would tell us under what statutes.Report
There actually is an armed force that answers to Congress instead of the executive. It’s called the Capitol Police: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Capitol_Police
While it answers to Congress, and has a specific assignment of certain areas, not only is Treasure Building _within_ that area, but it actually can do arrests anywhere in the US if it spots a crime. Like, oh, trespassing. (Like they tried to do Jan 6ths, in fact.)
Of course, how could Democrats send them anywhere, if they answer to Congress?
Well, according to Roll Call magazine, at least the top nine members of the House and Senate have a Capitol Police escort at all times, just like the executive and the secret service. I don’t know the entire list, but I assume that is at least the minority leaderships, probably also the minority whips. (And with the majority, would be eight people. Who is the last person? Whatever, doesn’t matter.)
Which means…when they walk somewhere, they have a police office with them…who do not take orders from the Executive. Not even indirectly, like DC police. And they can arrest people who are blatantly committed crimes, even crimes unrelated to their security job.
Now, if we had leadership that wanted to _do_ something, Democratic leadership could walk into, say, the Treasure, be denied entry by some Musk hack, have one of the _actual people who work there_ say ‘I don’t know who this person is and they appear to be trespassing’, and, the police could, you know…arrest the Musk hack.
Would that arrest stick? No. The AG would not prosecute.
But it would remove the people long enough for Congress to, you know, get in there.Report
How many divisions does the Congressional Minority have?Report
Today everyone worries about the Musk minions cutting off federal payments. When does the continuing resolution run out? That’s the point where we can worry about the Musk minions keeping checks flowing for military, law enforcement, and select other federal organizations. And lord have mercy on anyone who doesn’t accept those checks as valid.Report
The CR was until March 14, 2025*
*The writers are hacks.Report
The scene at Treasury: https://bsky.app/profile/alvarezreports.bsky.social/post/3lhf4ykzuuc2mReport
https://bsky.app/profile/ronfilipkowski.bsky.social/post/3lhfda6bj3k2i
Trump’s new plan for Gaza is a lot worse than imagined and by a lot worse, I mean it is a moral disaster of epic proportions.
“I’m sure Americans at home and abroad all feel safer tonight now that Trump announced with Bibi that the US is going to take over Gaza, level all the buildings, and forcibly remove the population.
Might want to cancel any vacation plans you may have had to Europe.”-Ron FilipkowskiReport
Ethnic cleansing it is!
To be quite honest, there is a *LOT* of real estate right on the water that is wasted on Philistines.Report
So much for America first.Report
At least we’ve finally hammered out whether Jews are white.Report
RUBIO: OK, uhh well what we’ll do, I’ll run in first, uh gather up all the eggs, we can kinda just, ya know blast them all down with AOE. Um, I will use Intimidating Shout, to kinda scatter’em, so we don’t have to fight a whole bunch of them at once. Uhh, when my Shouts are done, uhh, I’ll need Anfrony to come in and drop his Shout too, uh so we can keep them scattered and not have to fight too many. Um, when his is done, Bass of course will need to run in and do the same thing. Uhh, we’re gonna need Divine Intervention on our mages, uhh so they can, uhh, AE, uh so we can of course get them down fast, cause we’re bringing all these guys, I mean, we’ll be in trouble if we don’t take them down quick. Uhh I think this is a pretty good plan, we should be able to pull it off this time. Uhh, what do you think Ratcliffe? Can you give me a number crunch real quick?
RATCLIFFE: Uhhh.. yeah gimme a sec… I’m coming up with thirty-two point three three, repeating of course, percentage, of survival.
NOEM: That’s a lot better than we usually do, uhh, alright, you think we’re ready guys? [interrupted]
TRUMP: All right chums, I’m (back)! Let’s do this! LEEROOOOOOOY JEEENKIIIIIINSSS!!! [runs into Gaza]
-Short pause-
HEGSETH: [incredulous] … Oh my God he just ran in. [runs in]Report
On the one hand: This will be like the Canada/Mexico Tariffs. Trump will make a lot of bluster and then cave, cave, cave, fold like a cheap suit, when Saudi Arabia says “let *US* police it instead”.
On the other hand: He means it and it’ll be like Afghanistan times Iraq on whatever the hell they use over there instead of steroids.
On the gripping hand: Greenland has started sounding like a swell compromise.Report
Boy is Puerto Rico gonna be pissed when we make Gaza a state.Report
Lindsey Graham: “erm”Report
“You were upset when we said that money was wasted for condos in Gaza but we were talking about Mozambique. We have listened to you and we will be putting condos in Gaza!”Report
At least we won’t have to pretend like Iran isn’t inciting things (the way we did during the Iraq occupation.)Report
Um, so I’m a little confused here. Is Trump planning on giving Gaza to Israel, or _keeping_ it?
It sounds like he’s going to keep it.
Is that…is that an acceptable plan to Israel? Has anyone asked how they would feel about that?
The people in Israeli politics who want to wipe Gaza off the map are _very_ clear that they think all of the Southern Levant west of the Jordan River belongs to Israel.Report
He’s already said “wait, wait, wait, wait, no US boots on the ground, no US dollars going into this sort of thing”.
So if he’s going to keep it, he’s going to keep it without US boots/dollars.
Which tells me that he’s *NOT* going to keep it.
So the question is whether it will end up going to Israel *OR* if it’ll be handed over to Team UAE/Qatar/Oman to turn it into a great site for tourism and future world cups.Report
The new reports are that the Gizmocrats have forced their way into NOAA and the next target is the DOL. All the wheels are f**king off.Report
Can confirm.
The pattern seems to be run and fun into agencies with no confirmed political leadership.Report
https://www.axios.com/2025/02/05/doge-noaa-dei-information-searchReport
“Buyouts” are coming for the CIA:
https://bsky.app/profile/joshtpm.bsky.social/post/3lhfj5wkavk2aReport
Certain foreign leaders are laughing up their sleeves.Report
Just a subset of those who are shaking their heads.
Is there a legal explanation for how Trump amassed his fortune?Report
Maybe I’m just out of the loop here, but the cited reason is Mexican drug cartels. Are they really that big a problem for this country?Report
King Soopers/Kroger’s goes on strike tomorrow.
They’re the only grocery store in town that has those little stuffed peppers in the olive bar. Maribou can’t stand them but I think that they’re positively ambrosial.
They’re also the store that sells mini-boules from La Baguette and those things make the *BEST* bread bowls.
Anyway, stock up tonight and remember to go to Safeway for the next two weeks.Report
And they are striking why exactly?Report
Why does it freakin’ matter? Don’t cross the picket line.Report
The action is happening for a reason. That’s the story here if you actually care about your fellow citizens who work there.Report
…this has nothing to do with feeling things. It’s about doing things or, in this case, *NOT* doing them.
Don’t cross the picket line.
And certainly don’t cross it but tell yourself that you’re better at “caring about your fellow citizens who work there” than the people who refuse to cross it but aren’t sufficiently feeling things.Report
I’m not talking about feeling either. Nor would I cross a picket line. I just happen to think that being snarky about stocking up now on stuff in advance of a strike is less important then talking about why the strike is happening.
As always however you do you Jay.Report
The big ask seems to be staffing levels.Report
Andreessen Horowitz has hired Daniel Penny. They hired him as an investor?
Huh.Report
Birthright citizenship EO stayed by a federal judge.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/2025/02/05/birthright-citizenship-injunction-trump-immigration/
I assume we will be seeing this about 1000 more times in the coming weeks.Report
Seems hard to believe, I’m pretty sure the President declared it the law of the land.Report
I fully expect Trump to lost the overwhelming majority of these cases even in conservative Courts of Appeals and at the Supreme Court. I don’t think there is much appetite for allowing the President the unilateral ability to interpret the Constitution as he/she sees fit because then you might as well pack up and go home.
I also fully expect Trump and Co. to ask how many divisions does Congress and the Courts have?Report
And there’s the rub. One might hope some of the state attorneys general would step up and pursue concomitant state level action from which he is not immune. And maybe consider a differing approach to custody this time.Report
The Libertarian National Party is having its own “what the hell?” level scandal.
Libertarian Party Gets New National Chair After Angela McArdle’s Surprise Resignation
Don’t let the boring headline fool you! There’s embezzling, there’s demonic possession, and you’ll be left asking “Wait, any relation?” and NOBODY WILL TELL YOU. You can google and there’s nothing. There are wikipedia entries for both people and they don’t even mention it. It’s crazy. (I’m guessing “cousins”.)Report
I don’t believe she’s any relation to Andrea McArdle, of Annie fame.Report
Let me go find my tiny out of tune violin.Report
Speaking of the FCC scandal, Tracing Woodgrains has a full article on it.
There’s a *LOT* of stuff in there that would get you to say “that’s an exaggeration, that’s not real” but… apparently, it is. It’s *NUTS*.Report
FAAReport
DANG IT.
Let’s compromise. FBB.Report
Defense Intelligence Agency personnel sent memo to suspend observations for MLK Day, Juneteenth, Holocaust Rememberance Day among other woke observationsReport
Speaking of Travel, the California Inspector General put out a report about the Merced to Bakersfield Segment of California’s HSR (warning: PDF).
Long story short, they had hoped to finish the Merced to Bakersfield segment by 2030 and the new estimate is that they won’t be able to get it done by 2033.
They also mention problems with the first 119 miles of the segment between Merced and Bakersfield (164 miles, according to Google).Report
Huh. Florida has had HSR since 2023.
Report
I found the whole thing a bit too Marxist but this is a good summation on the ironies of Crypto: https://www.unpopularfront.news/p/what-happened-here-c9f
“Musk’s total idiocy is structural: it goes back to the very origin of the Greek term idiotes, a person who cannot understand the shared political life of the city. These people cannot understand that their wealth and power are not their sovereign creations but the shared product of the wider state and society that supports and sustains them. Cryptocurrency is the perfect embodiment of this structural misrecognition: its advocates say it represents wealth outside of the state and society, but its notional value is wholly determined by its price in fiat money, created and sustained by the state. (It also functions a lot like “race” and “IQ:” as a repository of social value that provides a haven from degradation, but I’ll address that another time.) Here’s the thing: They can only see corruption around them because they are wholly corrupt.”Report
I dunno about the deep philosophical stuff but I still have yet to have someone explain crypto to me in a way that does not sound like an obvious scam.Report
It is an obvious scam and an imaginary asset!!!Report
Here’s my best attempt:
It is really tough to make a digital thing that cannot be copied. If you make a document, for example, I can copy to a disk. Well, maybe you’ll make it unreadable so I can’t see it. So I give myself root. Now I can see it. Now I can copy it. So you air gap your system. Well, if I have physical access, I have everything and, more importantly, you can’t use it unless you’re right freakin there.
And you can play whatabout whatabout whatabout and I can come up with a couple dozen ways that I can copy your file.
What’s interesting about Bitcoin is that I can’t copy your bitcoin. I can only steal it. “Well, what if I break into your computer and change your database entry?” “It doesn’t work like that. The database is distributed. You would have to break into approximately 70,000 computers and change *ALL* of the entries and change *ALL* of the entries at the same time. Easier to steal it.”
If it’s like anything, it’s like those stuffed animals that let you name a star. For $14.99, get a little plushie and go to the QR code and name the star after your kiddo and, tah-dah, now HD 228398 is called “InMD Jr.”
And the database is distributed so nobody can bust into the db and change HD 228398’s assigned name.
But it also sort of requires a consensus reality.
Is Gobbles the Beanie Baby worth $7k? It strikes me as obviously not the case that Gobbles the Beanie Baby is worth $7k. At a glance, I might say somewhere between $10 and $20.
But if you can get a nutter to shell that out? Guess what? It’s worth $7k.
“That sounds like an obvious scam.”
“Yeah. Well.”Report
Crypto, or more specifically blockchain as a concept, is a vaguely useful concept to make sure that records are not changed. It is a programming tool…not a particularly _useful_ programming tool because there are plenty of ways to do it, but blockchain does fill in some unique edge cases where you need to be distributed.
And people decided to use it for money, which it _sorta_ works as. In fact, it works a lot of actual currency instead of electronic money. Actually, arguably more like gold, because there’s a finite amount of it, and while it does technically have ‘serial numbers’, those numbers are easy enough to ‘melt off’ and print new ones.
And let’s ignore the fact that this (along with gold) is just fiat money, because all currency is fiat money, it’s something we’ve randomly assigned value to, to trade in units of, and the question is just if we use the government’s fiat or invent their own.
Unfortunately, there are reasons we don’t carry around bars of gold everywhere we go and don’t keep our savings in gold in giant saves in our house. Does anyone know this?
One, it’s wildly deflationary because the amount of gold, and bitcoin, cannot possibly keep up with the amount of money that needs to exist. Ergo, the value keeps going up, which sounds great for an investment, but is incredibly stupid for a currency, because not only does it make things hard to value, but people tend to save it. (Which means, when they buy things, they use some other currency.)
Two, it means the government cannot track it at all, which sounds good until you remember ‘The government tracking currency’ is how you, uh, stop it from being stolen and recover it afterwards. And stop it from being used to pay off kidnappers. And drug cartels.
We do not actually want our currency to be ‘indistinguishable ounces of gold poured into a pot’. Especially not a pot guarded by computer security that not only is easy to hack access to, but easy enough to social engineer access to. It doesn’t matter if all the math in the world says you cannot copy and replicate the gold, we believe the math there, but people can just _take it_. They can physically, or electronically, walk off with it, and now they have it, and you can’t get it back. (And humans are _completely crap_ at computer security compared to physical security. Actually, we’re complete crap at unattended physical security too, which is why we put _humans_ in it to physically stop people from spending hours cutting through walls.)
This is all on top of the issue we skipped past, that this is basically just people printing a lot of something, and then trying to get others to use it as fiat currency. It’s like if I have a bunch of stale breadcrusts and start hyping up how breadcrusts are going to be the best currency ever and everyone will take them, and even set up a fake economy where I trade breadcrusts for other things to show how well it works. I’m not even sure that qualifies as a pyramid scheme. It’s just a conman trying to sell you crap by lying about what you can do with it.Report
Oh, and the really funny joke is that, if we actually started using crypto as currency…at some point someone is going to come up with functioning quantum computers. Could happen in a decade, could happen in three. And from what I understand, those can just…literally instantly manufacture a ton of crypto, causing massive devaluation and inflation. (Or, if they’re smart, do it slower and less obvious.)
Crypto is designed to be slow to make more of, with it getting slower and slower and more and more work as it’s made, but a big enough quantum computer will just…do it. Instantly. Even a smaller quantum computer can do it a hell of a lot faster. On normal decryption, the the math is that every single qubit that the computer has halves the computational time (Because that’s one less bit you have to check in combination with every other bit. I.e., 8 bits have 256 possibilities, 7 bits have 128, 6 bits have 64, etc. Standard encryption obviously uses a lot more bits.), I have no idea if that’s the same for making cyptocurrency, but it’s something like that.Report
Trump’s trade war tirade seems to have turned things around for the Liberals in Canada: https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/3c55718eb5e339cf81070172531d58fea7d0a6657f84efe83ae15a648ce96490.pngReport
Not surprising at all.Report
We have a new textbook definition of chutzpah:
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/c9a5c2ef66f806abbb9562e211258d1014a231ed01cd79ce52b9e3dab1531c00.pngReport
The thing that really angers me about this is the utterly hypocrisy of Muslims towards Jewish self-determination. They can speak at great length and passionate eloquence on Israel is a blot upon all of Islam and it is an utter colonial humiliation for any Muslim to live in country where the symbols are Jewish symbols, the public holidays Jewish holidays, and the culture, history, and literature are Jewish.
At the same time they and their Western allies really can’t seem to comprehend that Jews don’t want to be secondary subsidiary subjects of an official Muslim state that is part of an official Muslim world complete with heresy laws, apostasy laws, and crescent moons and Qu’ran quotes everywhere. Where Muslims can insult Jews and Judaism but Jews are in for a world of hurt if we say anything slightly critical about Islam. They want to be able to look us in the eye point to a map of Indonesia or some other distant place and say that they feel more of a connection to the people there than they are Muslim and we are not. At the same time, if we say we feel a closer connection to other Jews it is called dual loyalty and international conspiracy.Report
Sweet agnostic jebus! The stupid is so strong it burns!Report
It is kind of astounding, isn’t it? DJT was kissing up to Bibi on the campaign trail, for God’s sake.Report
American Jews got the message and voted for Harris. We need to fight against Trump because otherwise the United States looks like it will become a dictatorship and Musk’s apostles are going to do a lot of damage and possibly collapse the American and global economies. There is a still a lot of having to save idiots from themselves though. What’s worse, is that too many people aren’t going to call people like her out on this because they don’t want to appear Islamophobic. This person and everybody like her needs to be told how fishing dumb and hypocritical they are.Report
Wait, after Trump’s support for Israel after October 7th, you don’t feel so much as a newton of pull to support him?Report
No.Report
Are you still confused about why Leftists and Progressives aren’t more supportive of Israel even though Jews have been part of the backbone of Leftist/Progressive support for the last couple of centuries?Report
I mean, yes, if you phrase it like that.
More Jewish voters (79%) did vote for Harris than Muslim voters (20%) did.
Of course, roughly the same amount of Jewish voters (20%) voted for Trump as Muslim voters (21%) did. If you’re wondering where rest of the Muslim vote went, it went third party, almost entirely to Jill Stein, who had a Muslim running mate. Or to no one.
One might ask what is going on there with the Jewish vote, and also one might point out that 20% of Jewish voters is roughly five times as much voters as 21% of Muslim voters, and in fact is even more total votes than 21% Muslim voters + 59% half-voters for neither.
But anyway, you can blame Muslims for choosing to vote third party when that might have, hypothetically, altered the outcome in Michigan, but the simply fact it is did not. If every Jill Stein voter had voted for Harris, she would not have won a single additional state.Report
Oh yeah, another frustrating thing is that despite many Arab or Muslim Americans deciding they can’t vote for Harris because of the Israel-Hamas War, many are going to be inclined to treat them as more of a part of the resistance than American Jews that got the message because they are “too true people of color” and Jews are “wypipo.” A blog mate from LGM reported that at an anti-Trump rally in Denver the Pro-Israel and Pro-Palestine people got into a heated argument.Report
A Judge has blocked Musk’s script kiddies from access to Government Computers: https://www.rawstory.com/elon-musk-doge-2671109322/
We will see if this sticks or not.Report
The ruling barred “any person who is an employee (but not a Special Government Employee) of the Department of the Treasury and who has a need for the record or system of records in the performance of their duties.”
“This Order shall remain in effect until such time as the Court rules on the Plaintiffs’ forthcoming Preliminary Injunction Motion,” the ruling said.
How difficult is it to become a Special Government Employee?Report
Musk is one actually. Just take a memo.Report
Guardian article on ICE gaming google to create an illusion of mass deportation:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/06/ice-us-immigration-deportations-google?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other&fbclid=IwY2xjawIRvUBleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHRXvvnQcz9DwGDQl1yd53CROlUbtO0Wc6qDH1GRliKGN5x_Xl1MHQr4IGw_aem_vnv3OT0tDrau0QdUVEIGNAReport
Huh. Trying to nudge self-deportation, do you think?Report
Everything is a show this time around.Report
Benny Morris responds to Coates very harshly:
https://bennymorris.substack.com/p/response-to-coatesReport
“Take the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and annexed East Jerusalem. Long pages in “The Message” are devoted to the (unfortunately very real) horrors of the occupation – the humiliating roadblocks, where Palestinians traveling to visit relatives, go to work, or see a doctor, are forced to spend hours by the wayside, imploring indifferent or sadistic soldiers to be allowed to pass; home searches in the middle of the night; home destruction (even of poor cave-dwellers, as in Susiya); mass arrests and the occasional killing, usually unintended, of innocents; no-go areas for Palestinian vehicles.
I, too, lament these often draconian, always oppressive measures. But…”
There’s always one of those.Report
The problem with a lot of liberal-left critique of Israel is that it always takes an assume a can opener approach. If only Israel/Jews did X, Y, and Z than the Palestinians/Arabs/Muslims will magically and mystically become secular multicultural liberals because reasons. There is no evidence of this and Western critics just over look the popularity of Islamic theocratic politics from Morocco to Indonesia and the treatment of non-Muslims in every Muslim majority state because that is really inconvenient for them. They have no response to what Jews should do if the Palestinians really are serious about the “No Jews” and “we want Muslim Palestine” or basically know and approve of Jews getting screwed but don’t want to say it out loud.Report
Everyone is a reasonable person who thinks like I do. The only way I’d act like they do is if I were repressed.
Problem is when I listen to what the Palestinians are actually saying it sounds a lot like they’re serious about “No Jews”. Unfortunately that means Hamas isn’t the actual problem because while they’re brutal and repressive, they represent the Palestinians political desires.Report
Yeah, this is so fun to read:
*Sigh*
“The acceptance of partition does not commit us to renounce Transjordan: one does not demand from anybody to give up his vision. We shall accept a state in the boundaries fixed today, but the boundaries of Zionist aspirations are the concern of the Jewish people and no external factor will be able to limit them.” -David Ben-Gurion, literally said in 1937 about the partition.
That’s Ben-Gurion not only claiming that the ‘whole land of Israel’ should be Jewish, but that _Jordan_ also should be.
“Why weren’t the Arabs dumb enough to believe the Jews who were openly saying to their own people that they would eventually take all the land and the partition was just a step along the way?’
Chaim Weizmann, of course, did _not_ believe this, and was much more tempered. He actually had proposed a Jewish homeland elsewhere previously, as he seemed to understand how just…taking a country could be problematic, and said plenty of things about how Israel should be a joint nation of Jews and Arabs and the world will judge the Jews by how they treat Arabs. He had also was one of those people that everyone claimed to respect but completely ignored what he actually asked them to do, and he was elected to the entirely symbolic position of President of Israel, then died in 1952 so no one had to pretend to care what he thought anymore.Report
he seemed to understand how just…taking a country could be problematic
That part of the world hasn’t been a country for thousands of years, it’s always been the outback of some empire.Report
Yeah, the only time Israel/Palestine might have been what you call a country from the Romans until 1918 or 1948 is under the Crusades. I just really don’t get the ahistorical logic at work here.Report
From what I recall from actual history is that Israel/Palestine was a province of various empires from the Romans to the Ottomans or British depending on how you count things. The only time it was what you can call a country rather than a province would be under the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem and even that is questionable.
Like I really don’t understand the logic at work here. There was never a country. called Palestine but a geographic region called Palestine. The Pro-Palestinian logic is that out of the mixed population of Ottoman Palestine, it was the Muslim and Christians who were the true political nation and the Jews just lived there and were to have no say in the future of the place. That just doesn’t make sense by the logic used by the Left for every other group in the entire world but for Jews three special rules seem to apply:
1. Jews do not have the right of self-determination as Jews because that is settler-colonialism.
2. At the same time, the various host nations are under no obligation to form a national identity that incorporates their local Jews. They only have to give us citizen results and then they can ignore us and treat us with benign or malign neglect but still demand absolute loyalty from us.
3. Jews must under no circumstances be treated as a true minority in the way that African-Americans in the United States are minority because reasons, that’s why.Report
1) Jews are a successful minority and thus disprove many of the Left’s core beliefs.
2) Much of the discrimination against Jews comes from other minorities and thus disproves many of the Left’s core beliefs.
3) Jews are religious and openly have a different culture in a way that goes well beyond foods, and thus disproves many of the Left’s core beliefs.
4) Many Jews are white, which disproves many of the Left’s core beliefs.
Questioning core beliefs is hard, pretending there aren’t questions is much easier.Report
4) White supremacists certainly don’t think Jews are white even if a Jew has blonde hair and blue eyes and very fair skin.
It’s a bit of what you write and also a belief that Jews might be screwed at times but will generally turn out fine after some temporary disruptions.Report
Dude, you’ve said that you don’t think that Jews are white either. Are you a white supremacist?Report
Yeah, I did. How does this contradict my observation to Dark Matter? The white supremacists don’t think we are white and the further left in it’s various forms thinks we are wypipo. I think Jews are stuck between two or three idiot armies.Report
Would you be happier if white people thought you were white and Black people thought that you weren’t?Report
I also suspect a lot of going after Israel as a bad ethnostate but ignoring the other explicit ethnostates is not necessarily because other ethnostates might be seen as more legitimate but people think they can do something about Israel because of the numbers involved but going after say Japan, South Korea, the Arab states, or all the self-declared Muslim states is effectively impossible also because of the numbers involved.
Saying this out loud though sounds really bad and unconvincing, so people find a way to Israel and Jews are different because reasons rather than numbers and practicality.Report
It’s holding Israel to different standards than normal.
It’s an effort to support the idea that “Israel shouldn’t exist”.Report
Israel and Jews both, yes.Report
Also, what should have the Jews done? Stayed in Europe and get killed in the Holocaust? Should the Mizrahi Jews just have accepted their secondary subsidiary status as non-Muslims in a Muslim state that is part of a bigger collection of Muslim countries?Report
Those were options although just spelling them out goes a long way to explain why the Jews wanted a country so bad.
Big picture that region had two sets of indigenous natives who had opposite ideas on who would be setting up a state and what peoples will be welcomed.
As normal, there were population exchanges and the process of setting up state(s) and winding down empire was messy. See also Britain’s pull out of India and the creation of India/Pakistan and so on.
The truly abnormal part was Israel not being forgiven the crimes of it’s creation. That’s the root of all other problems here.
There shouldn’t be “refugees” decades, much less generations, after a state creation conflict. There especially shouldn’t be UN support for that.Report
I will admit that Israel/Palestine was a lot smaller in area than the other countries that got partitioned after WWII. This made everything more intense for both sides. I also agree that even if there wasn’t a formal partition vote in the United Nations, something like a partition would have happened because the Jews and Arabs would have both declared independence unilaterally. It would have just been messier.
The anti-Israel side argues that the Jews weren’t indigenous to the area because they came from elsewhere. This ignores the fact that the Jews were fleeing for their lives and this was one of the few places they could go to. The arguments made by the Arabs of Palestine were not different than arguments made by other people trying to kick out fleeing Jews or other refugees, “we didn’t create this problem, it isn’t our fault, and the Jews will alter the fundamental culture of our country.”Report
Our new AG announces that the DOJ is Trump’s personal law firm:
https://www.lawdork.com/p/ag-pam-bondi-says-trump-sets-dojReport
Did we expect anything less from Kneepads Bondi?Report
Yeah, you’d think that Trump would have been a bigger fan of Harris, looking back.Report
From what I’ve seen of his taste in women, I doubt that.Report
Politico has released a statement:
(emphasis in original)
So we should be able to put all this to bed now.Report
One would hope. Status quo ante goes back 235 years. There’s a right way and a wrong way to do things that’s spelled out quite clearly for all to see, especially those that take an oath to the damn thing.Report
One of the script kiddies had to leave because of racist posts: https://www.wsj.com/tech/doge-staffer-resigns-over-racist-posts-d9f11a93Report
Oh good! I thought that if something like this would happen that there’d be some sort of fight over whether or not the kid should be able to stay.
He got fired, he’s out.
Easy peasy.Report
He didn’t get fired, he resigned. It doesn’t seem like he was asked to resign.
I think he just finally figured what _exactly_ he had gotten himself into.
Man, if only the government had some sort of confirmation process for employees. Well, probably not that level, but some sort of confirmation process for higher up. This guy’s boss appears to be *checks notes* someone named Elon Musk (Fake sounding name) who is in charge of some sort of efficiency office, and seems to have some sort of scandal about *check notes* Well, that can’t be right, no one would let someone who just did that into the government.
Maybe we should set up a process where people like this ‘Musk’ have to get confirmed by someone else, maybe some part of Congress, and then some sort of political neutral system for hiring people to do things like IT and whatnot, which could be based on education and skill and things?
Also the Treasury Department should probably have _their own_ IT instead of some efficiency office coming in to do it…honestly, it feels like the people trying to ‘cut fat’ should be working over on the budget, which decides this in advance, instead of where _payments_ go out.
Has anyone looked into any of this?Report
Wait, so the racist guy resigned because he saw something that made him say “I’d better get out of here” but only coincidentally after his social media history was made public?Report
I think he realized he was in over his head a little bit back, and used the social media stuff as an excuse to exit.
But my point was not his actual exact motives, which are pretty unknowable, my point was that that the reason there was not a ‘fight over whether the kid should be able to stay’, because the kid did not, in fact, want to stay. Before anyone could leap to his defense, he noped out.
The next time something extremely racists comes out, like if it comes out that someone near all this twice secretly did a Na.zi salute at the inauguration in front of millions of people, there will almost certainly be a fight.Report
Apparently he’s on his way back.
So we do get to have a fight over the kid.
JD Vance has already tweeted in support of not letting the kid go.Report
The NCAA bends the knee: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/06/us/politics/ncaa-transgender-athletes-ban.htmlReport
İyad el-Baghdadi has an interesting realpolitik thread on the whole Gaza thing.
He’s not really looking at it from an “ought” position until he gets to the very end. It’s a cynical “is” essay.Report
This seems troublingly plausible.Report
People are stranded in the middle of clinical trials including with devices implanted in them because of the cuts to USAID. Rubio announces USAID’s staff will go from 14K to 249 with only 12 in Africa: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/06/health/usaid-clinical-trials-funding-trump.html?unlocked_article_code=1.u04.uwUS.LsuSP-cSzcLO&smid=url-shareReport
Do we have any money guys?
The whole “Donor-Advised-Fund” thing seems shady but I am being assured that it is not, in fact, shady.
But it sure as hell seems shady.Report
Musk’s sanctum santorum: https://projects.propublica.org/elon-musk-doge-tracker/Report
This is great! We should do this for all parts of government.Report
We did – right in all our websites. Which are no getting shut down.Report
DOGE is not government. It is the shocktroops of Musk’s coupReport
Well, once the president signed the order renaming the US Digital Service DOGE it got a bit murky.Report
I’m pretty sure that it *IS* the government.
Or are you just using hyperbole in service to establishing how moral your position is?Report
So here’s a thing to ponder – in 2023 Mississippi spent. $7.9 billion of state and local tax money through state agencies for services to citizens. That same year they spent $11.6 Billion in additional federal grants – almost all of which were swept up in the grants pause that wasn’t but might still be. On this if salaries paid to the 21k federal civil servants in the state. The GOP seems to want to do away with most of that if not all of that. Which will have economic impacts.
https://mississippitoday.org/2025/02/06/trump-grant-freeze-mississippi/?utm_source=Mississippi+Today+Supporters&utm_campaign=c0fb19dbec-The_Today_2_7_2025_15_26&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_2ac1d8600e-c0fb19dbec-169036478&mc_cid=c0fb19dbecReport
Yesterday, one of the gizmocrats was forced to resign because of unearthed racists posts including ones calling for normalizing Indian hate. Today a man married to an Indian woman and with three half-Indian kids calls for his reinstatement: https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/02/07/us/trump-administration-updates#vance-doge-staffer-racist-postsReport
Yeah, JD. Vance, carefully trying to calculate exactly what order the government is Coming For people.
“Alright, so, we’re still coming for the trans, and the next is the Mexicans, we weren’t _supposed_ to come for the Indians yet…I know some people here want to but Elon has assured me that he’s going to stall that as long as possible because he needs his workers…can we maybe go after the gays in there after the Mexicans, delay things a bit…”
His wife: “What are you doing, dear?”
“Oh, just calculating when I’ll need to throw you and the kids to the fascists.”Report
Honestly, I’m surprised that Democrats aren’t more on board with normalizing hatred of market-dominant minorities. I guess we really are past peak woke.Report
Who wants a spoiler for tomorrow’s Big Game Bud Light commercial?
Report
Trump just legalized plastic straws.Report
They weren’t universally illegal.Report
We got about 10 minutes left for the JFK files.Report
sighReport
So… is the plan classified too?Report
Hahahahahahahahaha
You got played Jay.Report
I’m hoping that the plan is unclassified.Report
You aren’t going to get what you think you are going to get.Report
According to Wikipedia
I am interested in seeing what information might have caused “serious damage” to national security in, oh, the 1970s or 1980s or 1990s if it were publicly available.
The argument that “there is obviously *NOTHING* in those files that would case ‘serious damage’ to national security!” is one that makes sense to me. It strikes me as most likely that the information that has been classified for decades is not information that would cause “serious damage” as much as it would cause “serious embarrassment”.
And that’s what I think I’m going to get.
But I am also open to the possibility that I will, instead, get confirmation that we merely have an overclassification crisis in government.Report
Next up in Bend the Knee:
1. “Effective Monday 2/10/25, NIH indirect rate capped at 15%. Applies to existing & future grants.
—> Deep budget cuts & program closures coming to a university near you.
Is this the break the glass moment for university administrators who have been silent so far about the attack on science?”
2. Trump issues an EO on South Africa which sure as hell makes it look like Musk is the real President and deeply upset about Apartheid endingReport
So the grant thing is a long simmering issue most R1s charge 50% overhead on campus and 26ish percent off campus. Federal agencies including NSF and NIH have been trying to get that reduced for years.Report
Marshall thinks it will destroy academic medical research in the United States. Trump tried this in his first term but was blocked by CongressReport
We are going to be offering asylum to white Afrikanners: https://bsky.app/profile/gmbutts.bsky.social/post/3lhmvuytvwk24Report
Archivist Colleen Shogan has been let go.
She should have put the 28th Amendment in there out of spite but it’s too late now.Report
Trump, in what weirdly seems like an obvious violation of the government’s position that the US government should no longer accept refugees, has decided to accept South African refugees that have been discrimination on racial grounds and now there’s a law saying some of their property, in very rare cases, can be seized without compensation.
Weird. I wonder if there’s anything different about these refugees, or exactly why they would have their property seized?
Hint: They’re white, and they generally had their property seized because the apartheid government that white people set up stole the almost all the land from literally all the Black people and gave it to the whites.
The government has recently passed a law allowing the seizure of some of land without compensation, mostly because 72% of the land was still white owned (And note 100% wasn’t even white owned to start with!), and some of it was _extremely obviously_ stolen(1) and the government feels people should not be paid for it. White people, for the record, are under 9% of the population.
It actually is fairly amazing and informative at just how long it is taking South Africa to get out from under a form of government that ended in early 90s. It turns out that if the government gives white people official ownership of almost everything in the land, elections becoming fair and open and Black people running the government doesn’t really matter, as white people still, uh, own everything.
Perhaps people in the US could realize that if this is the setup in South Africa _with a majority Black government_ that is actually _trying to fix things_ and get ownership of the country even vaguely fairly distributed, maybe there’s an obvious explanation why it has been so hard for Black people here in the US to build wealth with a government that was actively hostile to them for a very long period of time and still has open white supremacists being listened to and courted by one of the political parties.
1) I mean, I feel, from a practical matter, that the entire place was stolen, but I mean that there is some land that transferred in a hypothetical legal manner, even if every economic system favored whites and Blacks had no choice but to sell…and there was some land that was transferred by, like, murdering the owner and saying it was yours and the government saying ‘Yup. Sounds good, here’s the deed.’Report
A little more historical context. In the current county of south africa, there is an area called the Bivianns (sp) that was “settled” mostly by Scotts. Them emigrated to SA because the British empire needed a “buffer between the English and the “rampaging african tribes”. Since the brits were currently oppressing the scots too, they told them if they moved to SA and established homes in a certain area they’d get help and land. The land’s only good for ranching, so the settlers, told they could be farmers, demanded add’l land to graze animals and got it. The point? The english were exploiting everyone, not just the black africans. I’m not going to even mention the Indians in India.Report
Yeah, the issue is pretty complicated. And of course, when it’s pointed out that white people own 72% of the land, and are only 9% of the population are white does that mean…is that land mostly distributed across the 9%, or is there a 1% in there that owns almost all of it?
Likewise, the example you gave: Did the Scots _actually_ have ownership of that land? Or was it some sort of arrangement. I don’t know, but I wouldn’t trust the English for one second to not ‘buy’ (aka, conquer) a bunch of land in a foreign country and then just lease it to whoever seems the most controllable.
And of course, there’s always this: Thirty years of ANC government has created a class of super-rich Black businessmen, but done little for the poor majority.
That’s from this: https://www.reuters.com/world/stark-divide-that-south-africas-land-act-seeks-bridge-2025-02-09/
So, yeah. There’s all sorts of stuff as they try to fix things.
But what isn’t actually happening is…real refugees. Like, no. This is a democratically-elected government trying to untangle decades of legal segregation and extremely tilted ownership, which has _reserved the right_, but has never actually done, to take land without compensation in some extreme cases. (But honestly seems to mostly be unable to take land even with compensation, a thing everyone agrees governments can do.) No one is being forced out or discriminated against due to their race, and the fact that this economic correction is going to impact white people disproportionately is only because _they’re the people hording land_.
Anyone asserting that they are a ‘refugee’ from South Africa because South Africa said ‘Uh, look, this situation is untenable and you got here in unacceptable way, and you can’t just keep all that land’ is insane, and the fact the US government has pretended such a thing is real is somewhat amazing.Report
White Afrikaners move to distance themselves from Trump and Musk: https://bsky.app/profile/maxkennerly.bsky.social/post/3lhomzxafys27Report
Today in Trump announcements:
1. 25 percent tariffs on steel and aluminum on Monday so the price of beer is going up;
2. He might be playing with not paying some debt/treasuries: https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/trump-says-some-treasury-notes-may-not-be-realReport
In the middle of the Superbowl, Trump cancelled the penny.
While many are celebrating, I can’t help but see it as an indictment of inflation.
When I was a kid, pennies were worth something.Report
Wait, this requires an act of congress. Numismatists hardest hit.Report
Not entirely sure what granularity below $1 provides anymore. Other than maybe trying to fool us that something that is effectively $2 appears to be $1 plus a tiny fraction less than $1.Report
Dropping the Adams case is going very poorly for the Trump admin: https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/02/14/nyregion/eric-adams-charges-doj
It is like these people don’t understand the concept of integrity at all and think everything is transactional.
Former Roberts Clerk Hagan Scotten sent Bove a scathing resignation letter.
https://bsky.app/profile/nycsouthpaw.bsky.social/post/3li5k6sh2l22vReport
Adams also appeared on Fox and Friends with Hooman and announced “I’m collaborating.”Report