My theory on all this is that Elon is legitimately so stupid, and Trump legitimately just believes everything he's told, that they believed that they were going to be some huge examples of actual fraud they could point at, like government employees just writing checks to themselves or their spouses or things like that.
They assume that they'd find this almost instantly, because this is how they would operate. And this is the sort of stuff that does happen at local government levels.
But it's not really the sort of stuff that happens at the higher levels, in fact they can't happen like that. And they haven't found the stuff they thought they were going to immediately find.
This is why they have to keep inventing things like Politico and I assume everyone has heard about the Reuters 'social deception' story by now and what it actually was about? (I kept waiting for that to hit this site, but I guess people were smart enough not to buy it? To spend 10 seconds googling it before posting about it? I admit I am surprised.)
Which, should be pointed out, are not examples of fraud or corruption, even if they had been as presented. So at best we're quibbling over microscopic amounts of government spending that were properly authorized. Which does not sound important enough to upend the entire government.
And I also think they actually believed that a huge amount of government employees would take the buyout because a huge amount of them were functionally criminals, grifting the system, and would want out before being caught.
Again, projection. I cannot emphasize enough how much this is how they literally think and operate.
That's why this isn't going particularly well for them, and they're being forced to lie about what they find and just start firing people. But it's not how they expected things to go.
As someone who has read that fanfic, I thought at the time that the fanfic wasn't half bad, if way too long and with a lot of weird philosophical stuff that the writer was obviously trying to push.
But the reason it was semi enjoyable was mostly that it was deconstructing all the nonsense in Rowlings' story, making everyone in all sides in the war act in a much more intelligent manner, and trying to figure out how magic should actually work, and looking back, that doesn't really make it a good story as much as it makes the original a bad story.
And again, can I emphasize how insanely long it was, like 10 times as long as it needed to be.
References to trans people have been removed from the National Parks Service web page abut Stonewall. It was done fairly ineptly and in real time, as Blue Sky noticed, with 'gay and trans people' ending up saying things like 'gay and people' and stuff like that, and LGBTQ being edited to LGBQ, before whoever realizing how dumb that was and editing that down to 'LGB', which is not a thing, and then making another pass to get rid of the word 'queer' in general.
It's unclear if this was the National Parks Service or some intern with write access to the website.
What makes this worse is, for the record: The riot at Stonewall was not technically over homosexuality laws, but gender policing. While homosexual _sex_ was illegal, that, uh, was pretty hard to police at a bar where people were not having sex, so the police were actually looking for people violating 'crossdresser' laws (1) and wearing clothing that did not match their sex...which the police sometimes found hard to determine so would forcibly check genitalia.
So now the government is officially leaving trans people out...when the arrests were literally about gender and the riot was started by Stormé DeLarverie(2), who was being arrested for not conforming to gender norms.
1) Which often were themselves incredibly vague interpretation of 'masquerade' or 'impersonation' laws. There is a myth among the queer community that you had to be wearing three items of the correct gender's clothing to be legal, but that never appears to have been the law, and in fact police were often harassing crossdressers with literally no laws backing them up at all, just a vague feeling of 'You are not allowed to dress like that'. And often arrest anyone near those people just because they wanted to.
2) She was a butch lesbian who probably was being arrested for dressing like a man, aka, _wearing pants_. Although considering she could pass for a man, and had once been arrested on the assumption she was a man dressed as a woman, who even know what was going through the police's head. Translated from caveman, probably something like 'This not normal girl or normal boy, arrest weird person!'. Law do not matter to the police.
I was planning on mentioning earlier today, but got busy, that it was weird was that the Manhattan US attorney's office had not dropped charges against Eric Adams, despite being told to do so Monday and that is fairy trivial paperwork , and the media had not noticed and acted like it had been done. Someone pointed this out on Blue Sky, that the only real reason it would take so long it there was pushback.
Well, there was: https://apnews.com/article/new-york-city-us-attorney-0395055315864924a3a5cc9a808f76fd
It's worth pointing out the reason the Justice Department gave in their memo was:
Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove said in a memo Monday that the case should be dismissed so Adams could aid Trump’s immigration crackdown and campaign for reelection free from facing criminal charges. The primary is four months away and Adams has multiple challengers.
To start with, 'so he can campaign for months for reelection without criminal charges' is nonsense. We're four months out from the primary, not the election, and the charges were filed September 26, 2024, so eight months from the primary. And the actual election is November 4, 2025. So they were filed slightly over a year out.
Soon we will reach the point where you can literally never be charged with a crime if you plan to run for office, ever.
Secondly...yeah, um, 'helping on an immigration crackdown' is not a valid reason for people to get away with corruption. That reason is, itself, blatantly corrupt. Whether or not someone is 'helpful' to the administration should have no bearing on whether or not they are criminally prosecuted for crimes they did.
I mean, we all know they're doing that, but the Justice Department just out and _said_ it in the memo.
So the US Attorney just...refused to do it. And has now resigned.
Meanwhile, I've had people point out the courts probably will not approve dropping the case without prejudice anyway. They will not be happy with the explicit statement that Adams' trial is delayed _only as long as he is helping the administration_. If they do allow it to be dropped (Which they do not), they will certainly require it to be dropped with prejudice so it cannot be filed again if he stops helping them. Because courts are often against *checks notes* literal criminal extortion.
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It's going to be interesting to watch how the court system and professional lawyers react to the current administration's ineptness. Like just blatantly saying the illegal stuff in a memo.
For another example, the Justice Department has filed an idiotic lawsuit against New York that is going to be laughed out of court, asserting that somehow New York is endangering Federal immigration officials by not turning over driver's license data to the Federal government. The lawsuit, hilariously, claims that Federal law trumps state law, a thing that is true and might be more relevant if there _was_ a law requiring that data be turned over. There is not.
The last time Trump was in office, his idiotic lawsuit gibberish hadn't really started, and didn't infect the Justice Department. This time, it has, with cases that are just as grounded as his election cases, with legal theories that are completely insane. And he's brought in lawyers willing to do them.
Did you all know there's not legally a reason the courts couldn't declare the DoJ a vexatious litigant and thus requires the court's approval before DoJ file lawsuits in Federal court? You'd think logically that shouldn't be possible, but there ain't no exception for 'You cannot do this to actual Federal Department of Justice' in the vexatious litigant rules.
This conversation started with the following situation:
a) The Trump administration told the military to remove all DEI programs
b) The Tuskegee Airmen videos that were part of Air Force Basic Training were part of a DEI initiative
c) thus is extremely obvious that the decision to remove those videos was an entirely correct interpretation of the EO
I was making the assumption you actually knew the first, and have enough basic logic to understand the last point, and your point of misunderstanding was the second point.
Which means you (And Jaybird), objectively, did not know at least one thing a DEI program did at the start of this thread. Not just didn't know it, but dismissed the idea that such a video _could_ be part of a DEI program without even bothering to check.
I guess, alternately, you could have no idea what the EO said, or might be Patrick Star levels of dumb and not be able to put together 'If they say to remove all of a thing, and something is part of that thing, they have told you to remove that something'.
In any case, I think that a policy of removing too much and then putting back some of the stuff that shouldn’t have been removed is an acceptable price to pay.
Price to pay for what, is the goal to not having other DEI videos that do the same thing for women and Muslims and whoever the military has actively tried to recruit by showcasing _their_ accomplishments in the military? Is that the thing we were trying to do? And we accidentally included this one video in that we wanted to not include?
Jaybird, could you explain what you think DEI in the military _did_? And what now is no longer doing, or will eventually not be doing under the new policies?
Hardly. The way the local program works is we get worthless meetings on fighting microaggressions and there is pressure to hire non-white non-males.
Hey, Dark Matter, how about a compromise on that. There will officially be no pressure to hire 'non-white non-males' if we can implement exactly one law and a Federal agency to do it. The law is simple: The government will send out identical resumes, one with the name of someone that sounds like a white man, and one with the name of someone who sounds like a woman or minority. If a business follows up with the first one, and not the second, repeatedly, to a statistical level, we fine the company a large amount.
Maybe we already have information about that: https://www.npr.org/2024/04/11/1243713272/resume-bias-study-white-names-black-names
And realize how much worse that is when you realize how _automated_ that system is. That at that first passs, resumes are being sent through a computer and scanned and spit out. Which means people are inserting themselves into the process at some point to discriminate, probably at the actual hiring manager's location. The hiring manager gets handed something by a computer telling them to call someone, glance at the name, and think 'Nah, not hiring a Jamal', even if they do not _think_ that's what they are thinking. The discrimination that happens at the interview level is likely much worse, just much harder to pin down objectively.
The entire conservative bugaboo of 'Unqualified non-white non-men hired instead of white men' literally isn't happening. First, because that isn't the goal of that form of DEI, it's to hire equally qualified non-white non-men, but even that does not actually work, they make, statistically, almost no difference. DEI programs like that do not actually accomplish their goals.
What they end up doing is pulling noise makers and throwing themselves a party because the company, entirely normally, did hire someone who wasn't a white man.
If those such programs vanished, no one would care. The problem is that isn't all DEI does.
That’s somewhere between worthless, unethical, and illegal.
Yes, a huge chunk of DEI are worthless and accomplish nothing. Welcome to the business world, where huge chunks of middle management do nothing useful.
But I'm lying there, because there actually is evidence that doing things like talking about microagressions may have people dismiss the idea mentally, but they actually do start understanding the concept of 'don't make assumptions about people and force them to interact with those assumptions'. And it makes it clear that more overt bigotry is completely off the table. So it's not entirely worthless.
Other chunks of DEI do things like 'Talk about the accomplishments of Black people in the military in an attempt to recruit and keep more Black people in the military', as some people at this site have been startled to learn.
Other parts of DEI are making sure buildings are wheelchair accessible, and in fact DEI has started to be called DEIA, with 'accessibility' at the end.
Other parts of DEI are basically 'This brochure we are putting out is entirely full of white people, and as we do not have any actual minorities, let's hire some models to pose for some photo', which is obviously not useful to _anyone_. But hardly needs to be barred by law.
It's almost as if 'a vague term to refer to a program that reduces biases and increase understanding of differences in this specific place' is a term that can, in fact, be used to refer to many different things. Some of which are worthless, some of which actually do useful short-term things, some of which might meaningfully change things long term, and some of which, I guess, can be evil.
But railing against it is like railing against marketing.
And I still don’t know whether you’ve seen the phrase “malicious compliance” before.
I have. My question is, do you understand what _normal_ compliance is?
The Air Force, and in fact the entire government, was ordered to removed DEI programs. Agree or disagree?
The Air Force removed a DEI program. Agree or disagree?
That DEI program included a video about the Tuskegee Airmen. Agree or disagree?
That is because that is the sort of video that you find in DEI programs. Agree or disagree?
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A bunch of people have decided to pretend this is something other a direct result of what was ordered, because it Looks Bad.
Yeah, it looks bad, because the executive order was, in fact, bad, because DEI programs are generally good things that people mostly agree with.
The people at this site have spent years getting lathered up and foaming at the mouth about thing that are extreme outliers of DEI, done by almost no one, some of them even completely hallucinated by the far right. Along with the fact that some scammers operate DEI consulting. (Like they do all business process consulting, which is like 80% scammers as an industry)
When the military does DEI stuff, it is emphasizing the achievements of minorities and women and minority religions and subcultures, mostly to try to _get them to serve_. It is operating on historically Black campuses in a way that causes people on those campuses to sign up. It is putting up pictures of female service members to try to pull in women.
Along with the barest bones training 'Do not harass or assault other service members, and don't make fun of their religion or accent or whatever'. Maybe some stuff about operating in other cultures that is not so much 'diversity' as 'do not get everyone incredibly angry by ordering women to remove their hijab in front of men'.
That's what military DEI is. It is, literally, videos talking about the Tuskegee Airmen. That isn't some unrelated thing, that sort of stuff is a huge chunk of what the military is doing under the banner of DEI.
What I love about the opening paragraph is that it exists in a perfect vacuum. No memory of Biden. No memory of Obama.
Would you like to state an example of what you're talking about?
I think that Obama and Biden both did make it very clear the ideological positions that they were asking the government to follow.
I can't recall a single instance of someone following that and them going 'Not that'.
Is this the bogus IRS story _again_?
Anyway, have you ever heard the term “malicious compliance”? Like, ever? Is my comment right here the first time you’ve ever seen those two strings of letters next to each other?
The executive order:
(b) Each agency, department, or commission head, in consultation with the Attorney General, the Director of OMB, and the Director of OPM, as appropriate, shall take the following actions within sixty days of this order:
(i) terminate, to the maximum extent allowed by law, all DEI, DEIA, and “environmental justice” offices and positions (including but not limited to “Chief Diversity Officer” positions); all “equity action plans,” “equity” actions, initiatives, or programs, “equity-related” grants or contracts; and all DEI or DEIA performance requirements for employees, contractors, or grantees.
That video was part of a DEI program, specifically, training. That program was terminated, hence, the video stopped being shown. Do you think the program shouldn't have been terminated under this EO?
Or is the argument that the video should have been shown elsewhere? Because the EO is also pretty clear about doing that in the very next section:
(ii) provide the Director of the OMB with a list of all:
(A) agency or department DEI, DEIA, or “environmental justice” positions, committees, programs, services, activities, budgets, and expenditures in existence on November 4, 2024, and an assessment of whether these positions, committees, programs, services, activities, budgets, and expenditures have been misleadingly relabeled in an attempt to preserve their pre-November 4, 2024 function;
Seems pretty clear they don't want DEI material sneaking out and going elsewhere. This was, presumably, an 'expenditure' at some point, an expenditure of a DEI program, so...it seems clear it isn't supposed to be moved elsewhere under something else.
The problem here is that you have hallucinated the DEI programs are something other than what they actually are, so you think showing this video is not really part of them.
I’m more than willing to accept that finding that millions of dollars were being funneled to Politico and then, when the contracts were cancelled, that Politico had a payroll problem was 100% a coincidence.
Jaybird, you are still repeating lying insinuations and proposing that something is a 'coincidence' where the non-coincidence version _literally cannot be true_.
Politico had a problem with payroll _before_ the US government decided to cancel all subscriptions to it. If you are confused about the order of events, here: https://www.yahoo.com/news/doge-cancels-politico-government-funding-200829761.html
You will notice the cancellation is happening on _Wednesday_, whereas as the payroll problem happened on _Tuesday_, and the government is required, constitutionally, to obey the linear passage of time.
What was (possibly) canceled, or least frozen, a few days _before_ the problem was USAID's subscriptions, which totaled $42,000. We don't actually know this happened, incidentally. USAID had doors locked and stuff and supposedly money was frozen, but it is unclear exactly what was frozen and what sort of automated payments continued.
I don't know if I need to explain the odds that a subscription payment was going to happen in that particular time, especially considering they are yearly subscriptions. Nor should I have to point out that the payroll was made a hours later, which is not not good, but does indicates there was, indeed, a technical problem.
And I really shouldn't need to explain that billion dollar companies do not balance on razor-thin cash-flow that require $42,000 hitting their bank account in a specific week.
Pretending that it is possible that 'things that are happening in the government' and the technical glitch that Politico had with payment are even _slightly_ related is insane gibberish, conspiratorial nonsense of the highest level.
And you not only fell for it, but are unwilling to stop trying to find a connection. Still wink wink nudge nudging straight into addled nonsense.
What you are doing is fascism apologism, where the government issues vague directives that make it extremely clear the ideological direction they are coming from and what people are meant to do, but when people try to follow them and there's any public backlash, it's always 'oh they didn't really mean to do that, that was people just doing that on their own'.
But this actually wasn't a vague directive, because the Trump Administration is fundamentally too stupid to be good at fascism.
The directive was to get rid of any diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, of which this video was literally part of. And the Administration has made it extremely clear that they _mean_ this, to the point of talking about criminal charges for people who 'hide' such programs. This is not some wishy-washy, 'use your own judgment as to what you want to keep but tone it down' thing, this has been very emphasized.
The idea that this video was unreasonable to remove, that it was not removed in a normal attempt to comply with presidential directives, is absurd. Because this sort of video is what 50% of DEI is! (And another 40% is stuff like 'don't ask to touch Black people's hair no matter how interesting it is')
The only people that sounds absurd to is this site, that has spent _years_ inventing gibberish about what diversity, equity, and inclusion programs are, so have worked themselves into such a state of ignorance that they don't understand it includes things like talking about historic Black figures.
What the Tuskegee Airmen did is fundamentally not different from what anyone else did in World War II, except in the fact that they did it for a country that did not respect their race, that forbid them to marry who they wanted, that had legalized segregation in parts of it, and overt discrimination in all of it, and yet they fought for their country.
You cannot talk about them except in that context. And talking about that, in that context, is what f*cking DEI programs DO.
No Jaybird, the argument is that you were blatantly, deliberately lied to about the amount of money.
And you fell for it.
Moreover this lie accompanied a conspiracy theory about what USAID was paying for, and a conspiracy theory about why political couldn't make payroll, which I promise you would have literally nothing to do with that small amount of money, which incidentally would not have been due that day anyway.
In other words, everything you were told about this and every implication from that, was a flat-out lie. Conspiracy theories on top of conspiracy theories.
And now you are attempting to retreat to a more reasonable sounding position, which basically comes down to 'but they were spending money on it! I'm not a complete and total fool, money was going towards them!'
Entities within the US government do pay private companies in order to purchase goods and services from them. This includes subscribing to news publications. This has traditionally been something that conservatives approval of, in fact want more of under the term 'privatizing government'
That is not the same thing as lies about the amount being paid and a conspiracy theory formed around that lie that they were being paid to slant the news.
But this is more of your ridiculous nilism, where you pretend that there is no such thing as a qualitative differences, only quantitative, rendering literally everything meaningless, where openly purchasing newspaper subscriptions just like any member of the public is the same as bribery.
Oh, and why don't you list some of that stuff that's coming to light? As I pointed out with the last thing that you came forward with, it was just a straight up lie, attributing the entire cost of Politico subscriptions across the government to USAID, and building a conspiracy theory from that that frankly didn't even make sense.
So instead of vague posting about what you're talking about, try actually saying them.
Or are you talking about 'overhead on federal contracts is sometimes pretty high', which hardly seems 'novel', and was _extremely public_, it's part of the grant bidding process and posted on websites, it has not recently 'come to light'.
Really? Would you like to list times that the executive has violated contracts in the past?
I mean, I can think of a few, but it's things like violating treaties with Native Americans, things that we agree were actually theft and should not have been done.
I would ask for the violating constitutional authority, but I know your examples are going to be lunatic interpretation of what the Federal government as a whole is allowed to do. As opposed to things that are explicitly granted to one branch of the government versus another, which is the problem here. So I'm not going to bother.
I like how you're pretending the issue is 'this stuff being exposed' instead of 'executive overstepping actual constitutional authority and also violating contracts'.
Republicans are in charge of Congress. They can certainly set whatever rules they want here. They can even run on this issue if they want. In fact, there.are very few things that be Trump Administration has done that could not be done by legislation.
But the executive can't do this unilaterally, and it certainly can't do it retroactively, breaking contracts.
And, to be clear, grants are contracts. I have only been on the barest peripheral of dealing with grants, and then only private ones, but even I know you aren't just handed the money. You spend the money (often borrowed) under the agreement that you have, aka, you do something for them that they have promised to pay you for, and they reimburse it. And you have to be very careful to spend the money in ways that they approve of, or you did not, in fact, follow the grant and you won't get reimbursed.
It doesn't matter if new leadership of grant issuer decides they don't like it, it is a contract that both parties have agreed to.
Or are we at the point where conservatives think contracts don't mean anything anymore if they don't like them?
The main thing that Trump has going for him at this moment in time is the 100% legal, 100% done-by-the-book stuff that comes to light that is absolutely scandalous.
Jaybird, you fell for an extremely obvious lie about the amount of money that USAID gives Politico, maybe you need to re-calibrate what stuff is actually 'coming to light' vs. the stuff you're just believing the lies about.
In fact, why don't you tell us some _more_ of that stuff so we can point out it's wrong?
It really is amazing how many people have to be 'Well, it looks like the Democrats were literally correct about everything they said about Republicans and Trump, and meanwhile we've never been correct about anything that we've imagined they would do, but somehow I am going to caveat this in some way that doesn't make me completely wrong'.
We have dealt with decades of the Republican _projection_, where they take things they want to do and project them on the Democrats.
Remember FEMA camps? Buddy, exactly one of us is building camps and spiriting people away to them. Oh, you don't know that there are currently 50 people whose identities are completely unknown at Guantánamo Bay?
Ah, well, maybe that's because the media is completely in the tank for Republicans, and has been for decades, also another exact opposite thing of what Republicans claim.
Remember the 'Obama is using the IRS to go after his political enemies', aka, 'The IRS is making some dumb decisions that actually are sorta politically neutral'. Meanwhile, Trump.
Hey, remember that time that Bill Clinton spoke to the AG? Remember that? Anyone remember that?
Remember back when we cared about national security?
Remember when we cared about UNELECTED CZARS?
It really is amazing to have watched all the masks fall the f*ck off, to watch Republicans wholeheartedly do things they have _hallucinated_ Democrats were doing to trying to do. Just over and over and over again. Things the Democrats have never actually tried, but it's extremely clear the Republicans have wanted to do this whole time.
And even the anti-Trumpers can't seem to admit how just hallucinatory they have been about this.
Congress has itself only notionally funded a lot of what happens… and clearly has lost oversight control in all sorts of areas.
Congres hasn't 'lost' oversight control. Congress has just completely failed to do it, like they have completely failed to do anything, for several decades.
Those videos were literally shown as part of the military's Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Training. So of course they were removed, the government asserted that the Air Force should not have Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Training anymore.
Actually, my question is...where do you think those video _should_ be shown? In what way _are_ the Tuskegee Airmen relevant to Air Force history that is _not_ talking about diversity and inclusion? Please explain why you think people should learn about the Tuskegee Airmen. And what should said about them?
'A group of airmen named the Tuskegee Airmen existed. They did some stuff in WWII, like a lot of other groups. They flew fighters to escort bombers, were pretty successful at it, and had one of the lowest loss rates of bombers they were escorting in WWII, but not _the_ lowest rate, so it raises the question of why we've decide to talk about them specifically. Oh well, we can't say more about this.'
Seriously, explain why you think they are important _besides_ them being Black, which is, repeat after me: Showcasing diversity.
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.
The first is that we have have literally two additional laws after both Nixon and the first time Trump did this. It is possible to argue what Nixon did was legal. Which is why, tada, it was outlawed.
The second is you seem to think that USAID is some sort of slush fund that extra money ends up, and USAID decides where it goes. That...is not accurate. There are specific programs it has to do, with specific funding.
Also, the problem is not that 'the person in charge of USAID has different priorities', it is that USAID was shutdown and almost all the employees let go. Any policy prioritization of USAID money would be _inside_ the programs, it would be 'We are going to spend this money for doing this things over in this country instead of this one'.
I.e. a government agency is handed $X to do one goal with five different ways to accomplish it in ten different locations, and $Y to do another thing with two different ways in five different locations. It has some discretion. It can alter which method it chooses to do stuff, emphasizing some and demphasizing others. It can decide that one of those ten locations does not really need the help, and focus on the other nine. It can shift some percentage of the money for the first to the second, someone up there said 10%, I don't know if that's correct but sounds right.
What it can't do is stop doing the first thing for policy reasons, and the government certainly can't shut the entire thing down, which is _explictly_ what Trump has said he is doing. That was the legal argument Nixon had.
It really is weird how Trump's defender to like to iron-man how he _could_ have done something in a way that might hypothetically be legal, and meanwhile he's just...doing things in a way that is blatantly illegal.
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I had to keep reminding people: The president runs executive branch agencies (OR, rather, the cabinet does), but Congress _created_ them, it funds them, it controls literally everything about what they are or are not allowed to do, including _forcing_ them to do things. They are not some magical thing the president magically can do things in. Everything that happens with them is within the constrains that Congress set out.
Or to put it another way, for all the 'run the government like a business': The president may be be the CEO, but Congress is the board of directors and _owns_ the company. They have just delegated the functioning of the company to the president, but he has to follow every single rule they made. (Barring a few places where the constitution intersects, but that is not really relevant to anything he's done.) In fact, any discretion that he has was literally granted by Congress, or at least not forbidden by Congress but they could. Constitutionally he has _zero_ discretion over spending.
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.'
Incidentally, before you try to act outraged: Biden did, indeed, skit the ICA to not build the border wall by claiming the delays were programmatic.. It was a pretext, he had a political reason to not do that spending, and he figured out how to do it in such a way that it _looked_ legal.
In fact, Donald Trump might have gotten away with the Ukraine thing if we _didn't_ have a bunch of evidence he was extorting Ukraine over it. Trump had something he could point at that was legitimately causing a delay. It's just, we also had evidence that he was doing it for personal reasons...not even political policy, but to help with reelection.
Biden was wisely like 'Sure, I will build the wall as required by Congress. I will spend the money as soon as I am able. But I don't approve of this waiver granted by Trump for skipping environmental studies, and I will remove that waiver as the law _also_ allows, and sadly that is going to delay thing. Oh no.'
This is because, say it with me: Biden understand how the law actually works, unlike both President Trump and unelected President Musk does. Also, President Trump literally cannot stop talking about how he's doing a bunch of illegal things because he's incredibly needy, and Musk has absolutely no self-control either. They have no ability to subtly manipulate the system in such a way that it _looks_ like they are operating within the law.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Open Mic for the week of 2/10/2025”
Last I checked, corporations have free speech and can have whatever the hell political goals they want.
Was that only supposed to apply to corporations with conservative political goals?
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My theory on all this is that Elon is legitimately so stupid, and Trump legitimately just believes everything he's told, that they believed that they were going to be some huge examples of actual fraud they could point at, like government employees just writing checks to themselves or their spouses or things like that.
They assume that they'd find this almost instantly, because this is how they would operate. And this is the sort of stuff that does happen at local government levels.
But it's not really the sort of stuff that happens at the higher levels, in fact they can't happen like that. And they haven't found the stuff they thought they were going to immediately find.
This is why they have to keep inventing things like Politico and I assume everyone has heard about the Reuters 'social deception' story by now and what it actually was about? (I kept waiting for that to hit this site, but I guess people were smart enough not to buy it? To spend 10 seconds googling it before posting about it? I admit I am surprised.)
Which, should be pointed out, are not examples of fraud or corruption, even if they had been as presented. So at best we're quibbling over microscopic amounts of government spending that were properly authorized. Which does not sound important enough to upend the entire government.
And I also think they actually believed that a huge amount of government employees would take the buyout because a huge amount of them were functionally criminals, grifting the system, and would want out before being caught.
Again, projection. I cannot emphasize enough how much this is how they literally think and operate.
That's why this isn't going particularly well for them, and they're being forced to lie about what they find and just start firing people. But it's not how they expected things to go.
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As someone who has read that fanfic, I thought at the time that the fanfic wasn't half bad, if way too long and with a lot of weird philosophical stuff that the writer was obviously trying to push.
But the reason it was semi enjoyable was mostly that it was deconstructing all the nonsense in Rowlings' story, making everyone in all sides in the war act in a much more intelligent manner, and trying to figure out how magic should actually work, and looking back, that doesn't really make it a good story as much as it makes the original a bad story.
And again, can I emphasize how insanely long it was, like 10 times as long as it needed to be.
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References to trans people have been removed from the National Parks Service web page abut Stonewall. It was done fairly ineptly and in real time, as Blue Sky noticed, with 'gay and trans people' ending up saying things like 'gay and people' and stuff like that, and LGBTQ being edited to LGBQ, before whoever realizing how dumb that was and editing that down to 'LGB', which is not a thing, and then making another pass to get rid of the word 'queer' in general.
It's unclear if this was the National Parks Service or some intern with write access to the website.
What makes this worse is, for the record: The riot at Stonewall was not technically over homosexuality laws, but gender policing. While homosexual _sex_ was illegal, that, uh, was pretty hard to police at a bar where people were not having sex, so the police were actually looking for people violating 'crossdresser' laws (1) and wearing clothing that did not match their sex...which the police sometimes found hard to determine so would forcibly check genitalia.
So now the government is officially leaving trans people out...when the arrests were literally about gender and the riot was started by Stormé DeLarverie(2), who was being arrested for not conforming to gender norms.
1) Which often were themselves incredibly vague interpretation of 'masquerade' or 'impersonation' laws. There is a myth among the queer community that you had to be wearing three items of the correct gender's clothing to be legal, but that never appears to have been the law, and in fact police were often harassing crossdressers with literally no laws backing them up at all, just a vague feeling of 'You are not allowed to dress like that'. And often arrest anyone near those people just because they wanted to.
2) She was a butch lesbian who probably was being arrested for dressing like a man, aka, _wearing pants_. Although considering she could pass for a man, and had once been arrested on the assumption she was a man dressed as a woman, who even know what was going through the police's head. Translated from caveman, probably something like 'This not normal girl or normal boy, arrest weird person!'. Law do not matter to the police.
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I was planning on mentioning earlier today, but got busy, that it was weird was that the Manhattan US attorney's office had not dropped charges against Eric Adams, despite being told to do so Monday and that is fairy trivial paperwork , and the media had not noticed and acted like it had been done. Someone pointed this out on Blue Sky, that the only real reason it would take so long it there was pushback.
Well, there was: https://apnews.com/article/new-york-city-us-attorney-0395055315864924a3a5cc9a808f76fd
It's worth pointing out the reason the Justice Department gave in their memo was:
To start with, 'so he can campaign for months for reelection without criminal charges' is nonsense. We're four months out from the primary, not the election, and the charges were filed September 26, 2024, so eight months from the primary. And the actual election is November 4, 2025. So they were filed slightly over a year out.
Soon we will reach the point where you can literally never be charged with a crime if you plan to run for office, ever.
Secondly...yeah, um, 'helping on an immigration crackdown' is not a valid reason for people to get away with corruption. That reason is, itself, blatantly corrupt. Whether or not someone is 'helpful' to the administration should have no bearing on whether or not they are criminally prosecuted for crimes they did.
I mean, we all know they're doing that, but the Justice Department just out and _said_ it in the memo.
So the US Attorney just...refused to do it. And has now resigned.
Meanwhile, I've had people point out the courts probably will not approve dropping the case without prejudice anyway. They will not be happy with the explicit statement that Adams' trial is delayed _only as long as he is helping the administration_. If they do allow it to be dropped (Which they do not), they will certainly require it to be dropped with prejudice so it cannot be filed again if he stops helping them. Because courts are often against *checks notes* literal criminal extortion.
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It's going to be interesting to watch how the court system and professional lawyers react to the current administration's ineptness. Like just blatantly saying the illegal stuff in a memo.
For another example, the Justice Department has filed an idiotic lawsuit against New York that is going to be laughed out of court, asserting that somehow New York is endangering Federal immigration officials by not turning over driver's license data to the Federal government. The lawsuit, hilariously, claims that Federal law trumps state law, a thing that is true and might be more relevant if there _was_ a law requiring that data be turned over. There is not.
The last time Trump was in office, his idiotic lawsuit gibberish hadn't really started, and didn't infect the Justice Department. This time, it has, with cases that are just as grounded as his election cases, with legal theories that are completely insane. And he's brought in lawyers willing to do them.
Did you all know there's not legally a reason the courts couldn't declare the DoJ a vexatious litigant and thus requires the court's approval before DoJ file lawsuits in Federal court? You'd think logically that shouldn't be possible, but there ain't no exception for 'You cannot do this to actual Federal Department of Justice' in the vexatious litigant rules.
On “The USAID Fight Is About Power, Not Spending”
This conversation started with the following situation:
a) The Trump administration told the military to remove all DEI programs
b) The Tuskegee Airmen videos that were part of Air Force Basic Training were part of a DEI initiative
c) thus is extremely obvious that the decision to remove those videos was an entirely correct interpretation of the EO
I was making the assumption you actually knew the first, and have enough basic logic to understand the last point, and your point of misunderstanding was the second point.
Which means you (And Jaybird), objectively, did not know at least one thing a DEI program did at the start of this thread. Not just didn't know it, but dismissed the idea that such a video _could_ be part of a DEI program without even bothering to check.
I guess, alternately, you could have no idea what the EO said, or might be Patrick Star levels of dumb and not be able to put together 'If they say to remove all of a thing, and something is part of that thing, they have told you to remove that something'.
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Price to pay for what, is the goal to not having other DEI videos that do the same thing for women and Muslims and whoever the military has actively tried to recruit by showcasing _their_ accomplishments in the military? Is that the thing we were trying to do? And we accidentally included this one video in that we wanted to not include?
Jaybird, could you explain what you think DEI in the military _did_? And what now is no longer doing, or will eventually not be doing under the new policies?
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Hey, Dark Matter, how about a compromise on that. There will officially be no pressure to hire 'non-white non-males' if we can implement exactly one law and a Federal agency to do it. The law is simple: The government will send out identical resumes, one with the name of someone that sounds like a white man, and one with the name of someone who sounds like a woman or minority. If a business follows up with the first one, and not the second, repeatedly, to a statistical level, we fine the company a large amount.
Maybe we already have information about that: https://www.npr.org/2024/04/11/1243713272/resume-bias-study-white-names-black-names
And realize how much worse that is when you realize how _automated_ that system is. That at that first passs, resumes are being sent through a computer and scanned and spit out. Which means people are inserting themselves into the process at some point to discriminate, probably at the actual hiring manager's location. The hiring manager gets handed something by a computer telling them to call someone, glance at the name, and think 'Nah, not hiring a Jamal', even if they do not _think_ that's what they are thinking. The discrimination that happens at the interview level is likely much worse, just much harder to pin down objectively.
The entire conservative bugaboo of 'Unqualified non-white non-men hired instead of white men' literally isn't happening. First, because that isn't the goal of that form of DEI, it's to hire equally qualified non-white non-men, but even that does not actually work, they make, statistically, almost no difference. DEI programs like that do not actually accomplish their goals.
What they end up doing is pulling noise makers and throwing themselves a party because the company, entirely normally, did hire someone who wasn't a white man.
If those such programs vanished, no one would care. The problem is that isn't all DEI does.
Yes, a huge chunk of DEI are worthless and accomplish nothing. Welcome to the business world, where huge chunks of middle management do nothing useful.
But I'm lying there, because there actually is evidence that doing things like talking about microagressions may have people dismiss the idea mentally, but they actually do start understanding the concept of 'don't make assumptions about people and force them to interact with those assumptions'. And it makes it clear that more overt bigotry is completely off the table. So it's not entirely worthless.
Other chunks of DEI do things like 'Talk about the accomplishments of Black people in the military in an attempt to recruit and keep more Black people in the military', as some people at this site have been startled to learn.
Other parts of DEI are making sure buildings are wheelchair accessible, and in fact DEI has started to be called DEIA, with 'accessibility' at the end.
Other parts of DEI are basically 'This brochure we are putting out is entirely full of white people, and as we do not have any actual minorities, let's hire some models to pose for some photo', which is obviously not useful to _anyone_. But hardly needs to be barred by law.
It's almost as if 'a vague term to refer to a program that reduces biases and increase understanding of differences in this specific place' is a term that can, in fact, be used to refer to many different things. Some of which are worthless, some of which actually do useful short-term things, some of which might meaningfully change things long term, and some of which, I guess, can be evil.
But railing against it is like railing against marketing.
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DD, it is not my fault that the conservatives have flatly hallucinated what DEI programs actually do for years at this point.
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I have. My question is, do you understand what _normal_ compliance is?
The Air Force, and in fact the entire government, was ordered to removed DEI programs. Agree or disagree?
The Air Force removed a DEI program. Agree or disagree?
That DEI program included a video about the Tuskegee Airmen. Agree or disagree?
That is because that is the sort of video that you find in DEI programs. Agree or disagree?
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A bunch of people have decided to pretend this is something other a direct result of what was ordered, because it Looks Bad.
Yeah, it looks bad, because the executive order was, in fact, bad, because DEI programs are generally good things that people mostly agree with.
The people at this site have spent years getting lathered up and foaming at the mouth about thing that are extreme outliers of DEI, done by almost no one, some of them even completely hallucinated by the far right. Along with the fact that some scammers operate DEI consulting. (Like they do all business process consulting, which is like 80% scammers as an industry)
When the military does DEI stuff, it is emphasizing the achievements of minorities and women and minority religions and subcultures, mostly to try to _get them to serve_. It is operating on historically Black campuses in a way that causes people on those campuses to sign up. It is putting up pictures of female service members to try to pull in women.
Along with the barest bones training 'Do not harass or assault other service members, and don't make fun of their religion or accent or whatever'. Maybe some stuff about operating in other cultures that is not so much 'diversity' as 'do not get everyone incredibly angry by ordering women to remove their hijab in front of men'.
That's what military DEI is. It is, literally, videos talking about the Tuskegee Airmen. That isn't some unrelated thing, that sort of stuff is a huge chunk of what the military is doing under the banner of DEI.
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Would you like to state an example of what you're talking about?
I think that Obama and Biden both did make it very clear the ideological positions that they were asking the government to follow.
I can't recall a single instance of someone following that and them going 'Not that'.
Is this the bogus IRS story _again_?
The executive order:
That video was part of a DEI program, specifically, training. That program was terminated, hence, the video stopped being shown. Do you think the program shouldn't have been terminated under this EO?
Or is the argument that the video should have been shown elsewhere? Because the EO is also pretty clear about doing that in the very next section:
Seems pretty clear they don't want DEI material sneaking out and going elsewhere. This was, presumably, an 'expenditure' at some point, an expenditure of a DEI program, so...it seems clear it isn't supposed to be moved elsewhere under something else.
The problem here is that you have hallucinated the DEI programs are something other than what they actually are, so you think showing this video is not really part of them.
Yes, it is.
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Jaybird, you are still repeating lying insinuations and proposing that something is a 'coincidence' where the non-coincidence version _literally cannot be true_.
Politico had a problem with payroll _before_ the US government decided to cancel all subscriptions to it. If you are confused about the order of events, here: https://www.yahoo.com/news/doge-cancels-politico-government-funding-200829761.html
You will notice the cancellation is happening on _Wednesday_, whereas as the payroll problem happened on _Tuesday_, and the government is required, constitutionally, to obey the linear passage of time.
What was (possibly) canceled, or least frozen, a few days _before_ the problem was USAID's subscriptions, which totaled $42,000. We don't actually know this happened, incidentally. USAID had doors locked and stuff and supposedly money was frozen, but it is unclear exactly what was frozen and what sort of automated payments continued.
I don't know if I need to explain the odds that a subscription payment was going to happen in that particular time, especially considering they are yearly subscriptions. Nor should I have to point out that the payroll was made a hours later, which is not not good, but does indicates there was, indeed, a technical problem.
And I really shouldn't need to explain that billion dollar companies do not balance on razor-thin cash-flow that require $42,000 hitting their bank account in a specific week.
Pretending that it is possible that 'things that are happening in the government' and the technical glitch that Politico had with payment are even _slightly_ related is insane gibberish, conspiratorial nonsense of the highest level.
And you not only fell for it, but are unwilling to stop trying to find a connection. Still wink wink nudge nudging straight into addled nonsense.
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What you are doing is fascism apologism, where the government issues vague directives that make it extremely clear the ideological direction they are coming from and what people are meant to do, but when people try to follow them and there's any public backlash, it's always 'oh they didn't really mean to do that, that was people just doing that on their own'.
But this actually wasn't a vague directive, because the Trump Administration is fundamentally too stupid to be good at fascism.
The directive was to get rid of any diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, of which this video was literally part of. And the Administration has made it extremely clear that they _mean_ this, to the point of talking about criminal charges for people who 'hide' such programs. This is not some wishy-washy, 'use your own judgment as to what you want to keep but tone it down' thing, this has been very emphasized.
The idea that this video was unreasonable to remove, that it was not removed in a normal attempt to comply with presidential directives, is absurd. Because this sort of video is what 50% of DEI is! (And another 40% is stuff like 'don't ask to touch Black people's hair no matter how interesting it is')
The only people that sounds absurd to is this site, that has spent _years_ inventing gibberish about what diversity, equity, and inclusion programs are, so have worked themselves into such a state of ignorance that they don't understand it includes things like talking about historic Black figures.
What the Tuskegee Airmen did is fundamentally not different from what anyone else did in World War II, except in the fact that they did it for a country that did not respect their race, that forbid them to marry who they wanted, that had legalized segregation in parts of it, and overt discrimination in all of it, and yet they fought for their country.
You cannot talk about them except in that context. And talking about that, in that context, is what f*cking DEI programs DO.
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No Jaybird, the argument is that you were blatantly, deliberately lied to about the amount of money.
And you fell for it.
Moreover this lie accompanied a conspiracy theory about what USAID was paying for, and a conspiracy theory about why political couldn't make payroll, which I promise you would have literally nothing to do with that small amount of money, which incidentally would not have been due that day anyway.
In other words, everything you were told about this and every implication from that, was a flat-out lie. Conspiracy theories on top of conspiracy theories.
And now you are attempting to retreat to a more reasonable sounding position, which basically comes down to 'but they were spending money on it! I'm not a complete and total fool, money was going towards them!'
Entities within the US government do pay private companies in order to purchase goods and services from them. This includes subscribing to news publications. This has traditionally been something that conservatives approval of, in fact want more of under the term 'privatizing government'
That is not the same thing as lies about the amount being paid and a conspiracy theory formed around that lie that they were being paid to slant the news.
But this is more of your ridiculous nilism, where you pretend that there is no such thing as a qualitative differences, only quantitative, rendering literally everything meaningless, where openly purchasing newspaper subscriptions just like any member of the public is the same as bribery.
On “Off With Their (Over)heads: Trump Administration at War with Public Health”
Oh, and why don't you list some of that stuff that's coming to light? As I pointed out with the last thing that you came forward with, it was just a straight up lie, attributing the entire cost of Politico subscriptions across the government to USAID, and building a conspiracy theory from that that frankly didn't even make sense.
So instead of vague posting about what you're talking about, try actually saying them.
Or are you talking about 'overhead on federal contracts is sometimes pretty high', which hardly seems 'novel', and was _extremely public_, it's part of the grant bidding process and posted on websites, it has not recently 'come to light'.
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Really? Would you like to list times that the executive has violated contracts in the past?
I mean, I can think of a few, but it's things like violating treaties with Native Americans, things that we agree were actually theft and should not have been done.
I would ask for the violating constitutional authority, but I know your examples are going to be lunatic interpretation of what the Federal government as a whole is allowed to do. As opposed to things that are explicitly granted to one branch of the government versus another, which is the problem here. So I'm not going to bother.
But I would like to know the contract thing.
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I like how you're pretending the issue is 'this stuff being exposed' instead of 'executive overstepping actual constitutional authority and also violating contracts'.
Republicans are in charge of Congress. They can certainly set whatever rules they want here. They can even run on this issue if they want. In fact, there.are very few things that be Trump Administration has done that could not be done by legislation.
But the executive can't do this unilaterally, and it certainly can't do it retroactively, breaking contracts.
And, to be clear, grants are contracts. I have only been on the barest peripheral of dealing with grants, and then only private ones, but even I know you aren't just handed the money. You spend the money (often borrowed) under the agreement that you have, aka, you do something for them that they have promised to pay you for, and they reimburse it. And you have to be very careful to spend the money in ways that they approve of, or you did not, in fact, follow the grant and you won't get reimbursed.
It doesn't matter if new leadership of grant issuer decides they don't like it, it is a contract that both parties have agreed to.
Or are we at the point where conservatives think contracts don't mean anything anymore if they don't like them?
On “The USAID Fight Is About Power, Not Spending”
Jaybird, you fell for an extremely obvious lie about the amount of money that USAID gives Politico, maybe you need to re-calibrate what stuff is actually 'coming to light' vs. the stuff you're just believing the lies about.
In fact, why don't you tell us some _more_ of that stuff so we can point out it's wrong?
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It really is amazing how many people have to be 'Well, it looks like the Democrats were literally correct about everything they said about Republicans and Trump, and meanwhile we've never been correct about anything that we've imagined they would do, but somehow I am going to caveat this in some way that doesn't make me completely wrong'.
We have dealt with decades of the Republican _projection_, where they take things they want to do and project them on the Democrats.
Remember FEMA camps? Buddy, exactly one of us is building camps and spiriting people away to them. Oh, you don't know that there are currently 50 people whose identities are completely unknown at Guantánamo Bay?
Ah, well, maybe that's because the media is completely in the tank for Republicans, and has been for decades, also another exact opposite thing of what Republicans claim.
Remember the 'Obama is using the IRS to go after his political enemies', aka, 'The IRS is making some dumb decisions that actually are sorta politically neutral'. Meanwhile, Trump.
Hey, remember that time that Bill Clinton spoke to the AG? Remember that? Anyone remember that?
Remember back when we cared about national security?
Remember when we cared about UNELECTED CZARS?
It really is amazing to have watched all the masks fall the f*ck off, to watch Republicans wholeheartedly do things they have _hallucinated_ Democrats were doing to trying to do. Just over and over and over again. Things the Democrats have never actually tried, but it's extremely clear the Republicans have wanted to do this whole time.
And even the anti-Trumpers can't seem to admit how just hallucinatory they have been about this.
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Congres hasn't 'lost' oversight control. Congress has just completely failed to do it, like they have completely failed to do anything, for several decades.
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Those videos were literally shown as part of the military's Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Training. So of course they were removed, the government asserted that the Air Force should not have Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Training anymore.
Actually, my question is...where do you think those video _should_ be shown? In what way _are_ the Tuskegee Airmen relevant to Air Force history that is _not_ talking about diversity and inclusion? Please explain why you think people should learn about the Tuskegee Airmen. And what should said about them?
'A group of airmen named the Tuskegee Airmen existed. They did some stuff in WWII, like a lot of other groups. They flew fighters to escort bombers, were pretty successful at it, and had one of the lowest loss rates of bombers they were escorting in WWII, but not _the_ lowest rate, so it raises the question of why we've decide to talk about them specifically. Oh well, we can't say more about this.'
Seriously, explain why you think they are important _besides_ them being Black, which is, repeat after me: Showcasing diversity.
A thing which is no longer allowed.
On “Open Mic for the week of 2/3/2025”
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.
On “Keynesian Beauty Contests, Schelling Points, and the Omnicause”
No, there's less. For multiple reasons.
The first is that we have have literally two additional laws after both Nixon and the first time Trump did this. It is possible to argue what Nixon did was legal. Which is why, tada, it was outlawed.
The second is you seem to think that USAID is some sort of slush fund that extra money ends up, and USAID decides where it goes. That...is not accurate. There are specific programs it has to do, with specific funding.
Also, the problem is not that 'the person in charge of USAID has different priorities', it is that USAID was shutdown and almost all the employees let go. Any policy prioritization of USAID money would be _inside_ the programs, it would be 'We are going to spend this money for doing this things over in this country instead of this one'.
I.e. a government agency is handed $X to do one goal with five different ways to accomplish it in ten different locations, and $Y to do another thing with two different ways in five different locations. It has some discretion. It can alter which method it chooses to do stuff, emphasizing some and demphasizing others. It can decide that one of those ten locations does not really need the help, and focus on the other nine. It can shift some percentage of the money for the first to the second, someone up there said 10%, I don't know if that's correct but sounds right.
What it can't do is stop doing the first thing for policy reasons, and the government certainly can't shut the entire thing down, which is _explictly_ what Trump has said he is doing. That was the legal argument Nixon had.
It really is weird how Trump's defender to like to iron-man how he _could_ have done something in a way that might hypothetically be legal, and meanwhile he's just...doing things in a way that is blatantly illegal.
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I had to keep reminding people: The president runs executive branch agencies (OR, rather, the cabinet does), but Congress _created_ them, it funds them, it controls literally everything about what they are or are not allowed to do, including _forcing_ them to do things. They are not some magical thing the president magically can do things in. Everything that happens with them is within the constrains that Congress set out.
Or to put it another way, for all the 'run the government like a business': The president may be be the CEO, but Congress is the board of directors and _owns_ the company. They have just delegated the functioning of the company to the president, but he has to follow every single rule they made. (Barring a few places where the constitution intersects, but that is not really relevant to anything he's done.) In fact, any discretion that he has was literally granted by Congress, or at least not forbidden by Congress but they could. Constitutionally he has _zero_ discretion over spending.
On “Open Mic for the week of 2/3/2025”
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.'
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Incidentally, before you try to act outraged: Biden did, indeed, skit the ICA to not build the border wall by claiming the delays were programmatic.. It was a pretext, he had a political reason to not do that spending, and he figured out how to do it in such a way that it _looked_ legal.
In fact, Donald Trump might have gotten away with the Ukraine thing if we _didn't_ have a bunch of evidence he was extorting Ukraine over it. Trump had something he could point at that was legitimately causing a delay. It's just, we also had evidence that he was doing it for personal reasons...not even political policy, but to help with reelection.
Biden was wisely like 'Sure, I will build the wall as required by Congress. I will spend the money as soon as I am able. But I don't approve of this waiver granted by Trump for skipping environmental studies, and I will remove that waiver as the law _also_ allows, and sadly that is going to delay thing. Oh no.'
This is because, say it with me: Biden understand how the law actually works, unlike both President Trump and unelected President Musk does. Also, President Trump literally cannot stop talking about how he's doing a bunch of illegal things because he's incredibly needy, and Musk has absolutely no self-control either. They have no ability to subtly manipulate the system in such a way that it _looks_ like they are operating within the law.
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