The Weekly Sift

Monday, February 24, 2025

Winged Victory

NO SIFT NEXT WEEK. THE NEXT NEW ARTICLES WILL APPEAR ON MARCH 10.

Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.

- George Orwell
"Second Thoughts on James Burnham" (1946)

In order to understand the title of this post and its relationship to the quote, you need to know why ancient Greek statues of Nike, the goddess of victory, had wings: During a battle, birdlike Victory might flit back and forth from one side to the other before landing.

This week's featured post is "How Things Stand", my evaluation of the current state of Trump's attempt to overturn American democracy.

This week everybody was talking about Musk's chaotic attack on the federal workforce

Elon may have reached the limit of his power this weekend, as other players within the Trump administration began to resist his usurpations of their domains. Saturday, Musk tweeted on X that all federal workers would soon receive an email "requesting to understand what they got done last week. Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation."

That was followed by an all-government-employee email from hr@opm.gov, an account Musk created specifically to broadcast to the whole federal workforce.

[Subject Line] What did you do last week?

Please reply to this email with approx. 5 bullets of what you accomplished last week and cc your manager.

Please do not send any classified information, links, or attachments.

Deadline is this Monday at 11:59pmEST.

A number of Trump-administration cabinet secretaries did not take this well. Picture it: You're supposed to be in charge of a department, but somebody from outside your chain-of-command contacts your employees asking for progress reports and threatening their jobs. Presumably he thinks that he (and not you) is going to evaluate their performance. And what if you had something more urgent for your people to be doing on Monday?

So several people who are not Trump-administration dissidents (in any way) pushed back.

Newly confirmed FBI Director Kash Patel told his staff in a separate email later on Saturday that they should "pause any responses". "FBI personnel may have received an email from OPM requesting information," Patel wrote in a message obtained by CBS News."The FBI, through the Office of the Director, is in charge of all of our review processes, and will conduct reviews in accordance with the FBI procedures."

The state department sent a similar message, saying leadership would respond on behalf of the agency. "No employee is obligated to report their activities outside of their Department chain of command," an email from Tibor Nagy, acting undersecretary [of State] for management, said.

The Pentagon told its staff: "When and if required, the Department will coordinate responses to the email you have received from OPM."

From Wired today:

Federal employees at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) were greeted this morning by television sets at the agency’s Washington, DC headquarters playing what appears to be an AI-generated video of President Donald Trump kissing the feet of Elon Musk, accompanied by the words: “LONG LIVE THE REAL KING.”

A person at HUD headquarters on Monday morning shared a video with WIRED showing the scene playing out on a loop on a TV screen inside the Robert C. Weaver Federal Building. The source, who was granted anonymity over fears of repercussions, says that workers at the building had to manually turn off each TV in order to stop the video playing.

Just for a moment, and for the sake of argument, Paul Krugman takes seriously the notion that government should run like a business. And then he looks at the list of alleged costs DOGE claims to have saved the taxpayers. It doesn't add up to anywhere near the "$55 billion" Elon claims, but that's not the worst of it. At one point it mistakes an $8 million contract for an $8 billion contract.

Now, imagine that a publicly held company were to release a statement about its earnings that was riddled with major errors — with all the errors going in the same direction, making the company’s earnings look better than they are. What would you conclude? The answer, surely, would be to suspect that the company’s business is going very badly, but that top executives are trying desperately to hide the bad news while they sell off their own shares and possibly loot the company through sweetheart deals and so on.

and Ukraine

In case you didn't think it could get any worse, just this morning the US voted with Russia and against our NATO allies against a UN resolution marking the three-year anniversary of the Ukraine War by condemning Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

Back in 2016, Hillary Clinton said Trump would be Putin's puppet. And so he is.

Tuesday night, Trump firmly came down on Vladimir Putin's side in the Ukraine War. He made a number of false claims that echo Russian propaganda, including implying that Ukraine started the war

“I’m very disappointed, I hear that they’re upset about not having a seat [at the talks],” Trump told reporters at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida when asked about the Ukrainian reaction. The US president said a “half baked” negotiator could have secured a settlement years ago “without the loss of much land”.

“Today I heard, ‘oh, well, we weren’t invited.’ Well, you’ve been there for three years ... You should have never started it. You could have made a deal,” he said.

and that Zelenskyy (but not Putin) is a dictator. The Kyiv Independent explains the electoral situation: Zelenskyy was elected to a five-year term as president in 2019 with 73% of the vote. After the Russian invasion in 2022, martial law was declared. The elections previously scheduled for 2024 were not held due to the government's inability to establish safe voting conditions in the whole country. (The UK's Prime Minister Keir Starmer has pointed out that Britain also suspended elections during World War II.)

Trump's claim that Zelenskyy has a 4% approval rating was a typical Trump statistic: based on nothing. Kyiv International Institute of Sociology estimates Zelenskyy's approval rating at 57%, far higher than Trump's.

The Trump administration has been negotiating with Russia about the Ukraine War, but without Ukraine or Europe at the table. Statements by various people in the administration -- J. D. Vance, Pete Hegseth -- imply that Trump has already given in to many of Putin's demands: Russia gains Ukrainian territory, the US commits no peacekeeping troops to Ukraine, Ukraine does not join NATO, etc. Meanwhile, Trump has been demanding Ukraine sign over half its mineral wealth to the US in exchange for past support, with no future American guarantees or responsibilities.

Trump's embrace of a foreign dictator and previous enemy of the United States has not been sitting well with many congressional Republicans, who have pushed back against Trump's false claims without directly criticizing Trump.

“Putin started this war. Putin committed war crimes. Putin is the dictator who murdered his opponents. The EU nations have contributed more to Ukraine. Zelensky polls over 50%,” Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.), a GOP Ukraine supporter, posted on social media, tackling several arguments made by Trump over the past day without naming the president. “Ukraine wants to be part of the West, Putin hates the West. I don’t accept George Orwell’s doublethink.”

and the military firings

Friday, Trump fired two members of the Joint Chiefs -- the Black guy and the woman. The JCS will return to being a White men's club, as God intended. He also fired the top lawyers of all three military services. (These are the people who are supposed to tell military leadership: "You can't do that, it's illegal.")

JCS Chair and four-star General C.Q. Brown (a.k.a. the Black guy) is going to be replaced by a three-star general Trump is bringing out of retirement. Heather Cox Richardson writes:

In place of Brown, Trump has said he will nominate Air Force Lieutenant General John Dan Caine, who goes by the nickname “Razin”—as in “Razin Caine”—to be the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. ... Caine has held none of the assignments that are required for elevation to this position. His military biography says he was a career F-16 pilot who served on active duty and in the National Guard. Before he retired, he was the associate director for military affairs at the CIA. The law prohibits the elevation of someone at his level to chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff unless the president waives the law because “such action is necessary in the national interest.”

But of course it is Brown who is denigrated as a "DEI hire", not the White man replacing him whose only qualification is his absolute loyalty to Trump.

and the tax/budget negotiations

The Senate has passed a budget plan different from the one the House hopes to vote on tomorrow. A budget outline has no direct effect -- no money is appropriated -- but it's necessary to pass one before the reconciliation procedure can become available to circumvent Senate filibusters.

The fact that Republicans haven't formed a common plan yet -- and that the Senate went ahead and voted on its version even though Trump prefers the House plan -- indicates that this might be a difficult negotiation.

Republicans got no Democratic votes for their plan, but Rand Paul crossed over to vote against it.

The Republican margin in the House is so narrow that if just two Republicans cross over and Democrats stay united, no bill can pass.

I know basically nothing about the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, which claims to be non-partisan and has a board of directors full of academic types. So hold the following analysis lightly.

ITEP looked at the Trump proposals as we know them so far, including his stated (but not yet fully implemented) proposals about tariffs. ITEP models tariffs as taxes eventually paid by consumers, which is what most economists expect to happen.

If you do that, you get these conclusions about how Trump's proposals will affect taxpayers at various income levels.

but I want to back up and take a larger view

The featured post takes a broad look at how the autocracy vs. democracy struggle is going.

and you also might be interested in ...

LawDork points out that even cases that look like wins for the Trump administration are actually worth fighting, because the administration is forced to put its position on the record, and may even make commitments to the judge about how it will interpret certain parts of the policy in question. Even if a lawsuit fails, it shows the administration that someone is watching what they do.

Germany's governing party, the Social Democrats, suffered a crushing defeat Sunday in Germany's parliamentary elections, winning only 16% of the vote. Its allies, the Green Party, added 12%.

The leading party was the conservative Christian Democrats with 29%, so the next chancellor will likely be the CDU's Friedrich Merz. This is not a big deal in itself, since the CDU isn't all that conservative by American standards. Long-time chancellor Angela Merkel was a Christian Democrat, and the party hasn't changed all that much in the meantime.

The big news, though was the performance of the neo-Nazi Alliance for Germany (AfD), which got 21%, about double its performance in the previous elections in 2021. AfD was endorsed by American fascists J. D. Vance and Elon Musk.

Trump hailed the election’s outcome. “Much like the USA, the people of Germany got tired of the no-common-sense agenda, especially on energy and immigration,” he wrote in a post on Truth Social. “This is a great day for Germany.”

In addition to local German issues, the new government will play a central role in charting a course forward for Europe in the face of a rising Russian threat and an unreliable ally in America.

Merz struck a blunt tone, saying Trump had made it “clear that [his] government is fairly indifferent to Europe’s fate” and that Germany would have to wait to see “whether we will still be able to speak about Nato in its current form” when the alliance meets for its next summit in June.

“For me, the absolute priority will be to strengthen Europe as quickly as possible so that, step by step, we can really achieve independence from the USA” in defense matters.

and let's close with something that belongs in your vocabulary

Megan Herbert is a cartoonist with a Substack blog. In a recent piece, a wife calls her husband over to the window because he urgently needs to see something whose nature isn't revealed until the last panel: It's a beauty emergency.

Monday, February 17, 2025

Unwelcome Advice

I can even understand how a Chief Executive whose background is in business and politics might see the contemplated dismissal-with-leverage as a good, if distasteful, deal. But any assistant U.S. attorney would know that our laws and traditions do not allow using the prosecutorial power to influence other citizens, much less elected officials, in this way. If no lawyer within earshot of the President is willing to give him that advice, then I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion. But it was never going to be me.

- SDNY Assistant US Attorney Hagan Scotten
writing to resign after a DoJ order
to dismiss charges against NY Mayor Eric Adams

This week's featured post is "Can Ethical People Work in the Trump Administration?"

This week everybody was talking about the DoJ resignations

The resignation of seven federal prosecutors is covered in the featured post.

and Elon Musk's growing power

The Guardian summed up the state of things on Sunday:

Musk and his allies in the “department of government efficiency” (Doge), the unofficial committee acting as the operations arm of his cost-cutting efforts, have targeted a range of major government departments. They have moved to close the United States Agency for International Development, slashed the Department of Education and taken over the General Services Administration that controls federal IT structures. Doge staffers have also gained access to the treasury department, as well as set their sights on the Department of Defense, energy department, Environmental Protection Agency and at least a dozen others.

It's worth pointing out that Musk's authority is entirely delegated from President Trump, and the Constitution does not give Trump the power to do many of these things without Congress. But Congress has played no role in any of DOGE's actions. It never established DOGE as a government department, and Musk's appointment has never been confirmed by the Senate. Agencies like USAID and the Department of Education were set up and funded by Congress, so the President (and hence Musk) has no legal authority to close them or block the money Congress has appropriated to fund them.

The Guardian goes on to point out how Musk is benefiting personally from much of what he does.

As companies seek to benefit from Doge’s reshaping of the government, Musk also has extensive contracts worth billions of dollars through his own companies like SpaceX that are potentially set to expand under the new administration. ... Musk’s influence in the White House also puts in peril the numerous federal investigations against his companies for a range of alleged wrongdoings that includes violating federal labor and securities laws. Trump has already dissolved one watchdog agency investigating Tesla. Government accountability groups have warned that Musk’s myriad of potential ethical conflicts and a lack of transparency around his actions in government carry the risk that he will use his power for political corruption.

“You don’t need to be any kind of ethics expert to to appreciate the massive problem there is with a billionaire who helped fund the president’s campaign and has government contracts of his own being given the power to root around in agency systems that impact how and when government contractors are paid,” said Donald Sherman, executive director of the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (Crew), a watchdog organization.

To justify himself, Trump has quoted the Emperor Napoleon: “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.” ("Saving the country" is in the eye of the beholder. So had he succeeded, would-be assassin Thomas Matthew Crooks might have used the same justification.)

The slipshod nature of DOGE's actions was underlined this week when it came out that DOGE had fired more than 300 employees of the Nuclear National Security Administration, the people who watch over our nuclear weapons stockpile.

Some of the fired employees included NNSA staff who are on the ground at facilities where nuclear weapons are built. These staff oversee the contractors who build nuclear weapons, and they inspect these weapons. It also included employees at NNSA headquarters who write requirements and guidelines for contractors who build nuclear weapons. A source told CNN they believe these individuals were fired because “no one has taken anytime to understand what we do and the importance of our work to the nation’s national security.”

When people who do understand what NNSA does got involved, the government tried to rescind the firings. However, the fired employees had lost access to their work email accounts, so no one immediately knew how to contact them.

Keep this in mind when you hear pronouncements about "waste" from Musk or other DOGE people: Everything looks like waste when you don't understand it.

Another blow to the "genius" image of Musk and his minions came when it turned out that the Doge.gov web site had security problems.

Did you hear about the $50 million in condoms USAID sent to Hamas? Or the 150-year-olds collecting Social Security? Or that USAID is a criminal organization, in league with money-laundering Lutheran charities?

Complete bullshit, to use a technical term coined by philosopher Harry Frankfurt. Nothing Musk says should be believed until he provides evidence.

and the law

Proclamations of Napoleon have no legal weight in the United States, so many of Musk's actions are being challenged in court. So far the Trump administration is losing most of those cases.

However, last year Trump also lost on his presidential-immunity argument all the way up the line until the partisan Republican Supreme Court got the case. Lower courts are obliged to follow previous precedents (though occasionally a judge goes rogue). But the Supreme Court is free to make up law as it sees fit, as it did in the immunity case.

Same thing here. A simple reading of the Constitution (in the birthright citizenship cases) or the law (in the freezing-federal-funding cases) forces a judge to rule against Trump. But the basic argument Trump is making across the board is that any law limiting his power is unconstitutional. (For example: The Impoundment Control Act of 1974 says that a president has to spend money as Congress has appropriated it. Previous Supreme Courts have upheld the Act's constitutionality, and those precedents tie the hands of lower-court judges.)

That is an absurd argument ungrounded in the history of American law. But so was sweeping presidential immunity. During the Biden administration, the Court's six conservative justices frequently limited the executive branch's ability to act without authorization by Congress. But Biden was a Democrat, and in the Roberts Era the law changes depending on which party has power.

But will it change this far? We may be about to find out. Here's the background: The US Office of the Special Counsel is an independent agency established by Congress.

OSC's primary mission is to safeguard the merit system by protecting federal employees and applicants from prohibited personnel practices (PPPs), especially reprisal for whistleblowing.

LawDork elaborates:

The limits state that the Special Counsel is nominated by the president, subject to Senate confirmation, for a five-year term and can only be removed by the president “for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.”

This set-up makes perfect sense, because OSC can't do its job if the same authority that wants to go after whistleblowers, i.e., the President, can also fire the Special Counsel if he gets in the way. However, Trump did fire Special Counsel Hampton Dellinger without cause. Dellinger went to court, and was granted a temporary restraining order preventing Trump from firing him. An appeals court refused the administration's appeal 2-1, but the dissenting judge (a Trump appointee) objected that "Congress cannot constitutionally restrict the President’s power to remove the Special Counsel."

Yesterday, the administration took its appeal to the Supreme Court, hoping that its Trump-cannot-be-bound (even though Biden could) argument prevails there. If it does, I suspect that few of the current lower-court rulings against Trump will stand.

and Ukraine

Tomorrow, a US delegation headed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio will meet with Russian counterparts to discuss ending the war in Ukraine. Notice who will not be there: a Ukrainian delegation or anyone representing our European allies.

Prior to these talks, the Trump administration already seems to have conceded much of what Russia wants. At a NATO meeting in Brussels last week, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Ukraine will not restore its pre-invasion borders, and he distanced the US from any guarantees for Ukraine's future. He called Ukraine's desire for NATO membership "unrealistic".

In sweeping remarks to NATO allies eager to hear how much support Washington intends to provide to the Ukrainian government, Hegseth indicated that Trump is determined to get Europe to assume most of the financial and military responsibilities for Ukraine’s defense, including a possible peacekeeping force that would not include U.S. troops.

Worse, any European troops deployed to Ukraine would not be covered by the NATO mutual-defense agreement. If Putin would decide to attack them, they would be on their own.

Afterwards, Hegseth was asked a fairly obvious question:

You have focused on what Ukraine is giving up. What concessions will Putin be asked to make?

The true answer here would be "none", but instead Hegseth went off on a tangent about how Putin responds to "strength", so he invaded Crimea during the Obama administration and attacked the rest of Ukraine during the Biden administration, but did not launch any new invasions during Trump's first term.

On the one hand it's interesting that Hegseth didn't answer the question asked. But it's also worth trying to figure out what question he answered instead. I postulate this one: "Should we be worried that Trump is in Putin's pocket?"

BTW, I think his answer to that question is misleading as well. During the first Trump administration, Putin knew that time was on his side, because Trump was dismantling NATO from within. After Biden started putting NATO back together, Putin attacked because he saw his window for action shrinking.

Plus, it is absurd to characterize an American president willing to concede virtually everything Putin wants before negotiations even begin as "strong".

and Gaza

I don't take seriously the part of Trump's plan for Gaza where the US claims ownership of the land and turns it into a Mediterranean resort. I think he announced that just to troll us.

However, the part of the plan where Israel ethnically cleanses Gaza, while the US pressures Arab nations to take in Gazan refugees -- that seems completely serious. Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates will meet in Riyadh Thursday to formulate an alternative, which they will hope to take to the larger Arab League meeting in Cairo next week.

I want to make two points about this. First, unlike the West Bank, Israel does not have any historical claim on Gaza. Even in Biblical times, Gaza was a Philistine city.

Second, I want to address the comparison being made to the population transfers that happened in 1946-48 when the former British Raj was partitioned into India and Pakistan. This argument has been put forward by WSJ columnist Sadanand Dhume, and echoes a claim often made by opponents of a Palestinian state: There are already nearly two dozen Arab countries, so why does there need to be another one?

Dhume glosses over what a disaster the partition of India was.

By 1948, as the great migration drew to a close, more than fifteen million people had been uprooted, and between one and two million were dead.

Also, proponents of the Palestinians-are-just-Arabs vision are projecting a Jewish notion of identity onto Arabs. Arabs have never had a unified ethnic identity. While it's true that many Palestinians did not identify as Palestinians until comparatively recently, prior to that they identified primarily with their local communities, not with some larger Arab nation. Palestinian identity comes up from below, not down from above.

Dhume paints the international refusal to support an ethnic cleansing in Gaza as "the world's double standard towards Israel". Actually, it is a single-standard reaction to the horror of the post-World-War-II population transfers.

I have not yet read Peter Beinart's new book "Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza". However, this interview with The New Yorker is worth a look.

and you also might be interested in ...

Politics is all fun and games until you have to write a budget. House Republicans took their first step in that direction by passing a budget resolution out of committee and sending it to the full house. It cuts rich people's taxes, lines up cuts in Medicaid and food stamps, and allows $3.3 trillion more debt to accumulate in the next ten years. It's already in trouble as Republican congresspeople reckon with the number of Medicaid recipients in their districts.

The WaPo:

[D]espite the rapid infusion of resources, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is struggling to arrest higher numbers of immigrants and falling far short of the administration’s goals.

Simple reason: The invasion of criminals that Trump talked so much about during his campaign was never real. He talked a lot about unleashing local law enforcement to deport the criminal migrants because "they already know who they are". And maybe that was true for a handful of people, but there were never "millions" of migrant criminals to deport.

The WaPo's Catherine Rampell:

What Trump has done for US farmers so far:
-frozen their foreign aid program (and left their food to rot)
-encouraged EU to ban their products
-frozen legally-owed reimbursements for their energy efficiency upgrades etc.
-threatened to deport half their workforce
-suppressed research on bird flu

Paul Krugman explains why everything Trump is proposing -- tariffs, deporting low-wage workers ... -- will make inflation worse. But he warns against buying inflation-protected Treasury bonds (TIPS), because they'll only protect you against "future inflation that the U.S. government admits is happening". Once Trump appointees start reporting the numbers Trump wants to hear, officially recognized inflation will plummet, no matter what is happening to your groceries.

The Daily Show explains how to Un-DEI your office.

Illinois Governor J. B. Pritzker has made a series of announcements: (1) Lake Michigan has been renamed Lake Illinois, (2) Illinois is annexing Green Bay for security purposes, and (3) stay tuned for an announcement regarding the Mississippi River next week.

and let's close with something musical

Back in 2020, the pandemic forced choirs to figure out how to synchronize without being in the same room. The Unitarian Universalist General Assembly went virtual that year, and this choral performance was created for it. I find "Let the wave wash over me" to be a particularly comforting thought these days.

Monday, February 10, 2025

Insurgency

Insurgent movements are not the product of hard times. They are the product of insurgent cultures.

- Lawrence Goodwyn, The Populist Moment

This week's featured post is "How Do Things Change?"

This week everybody was talking about the pushback against Trump and Musk

This week, a number of federal judges stepped in with orders to halt some of the administration's illegal actions. Just Security keeps a continuously-updated litigation tracker to help the rest of us stay current. Here are some highlights:

Wednesday, a federal judge in Maryland granted a preliminary nationwide injunction blocking the Trump administration from enforcing its executive order ending birthright citizenship.

The Executive Order interprets the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment in a manner that the Supreme Court has resoundingly rejected and no court in the country has ever endorsed

The next day a judge in Washington granted a similar injunction.

Ultimately, the government's position is unavailing and untenable. It does not have the text or precedent to support its interpretation of the Citizenship Clause. And it rehashes losing arguments from over a century ago. ... The President cannot change, limit, or qualify this Constitution right via an executive order.

Yesterday, a federal judge in New Mexico blocked the administration from sending to Guantanamo three Venezuelan men currently in ICE custody. The order applies only to those three.

Thursday, a D. C. federal judge approved an order limiting DOGE access to the Treasury payments system to read-only access for two "special employees", one of who is Marko Elez, the Musk staffer dismissed and then rehired after his racist social media posts became public. This order is at least partially superseded by the order of a New York federal judge who temporarily banned "special government employees" such as DOGE has from accessing "any Treasury Department payment record, payment systems, or any other data systems maintained by the Treasury Department containing personally identifiable information and/or confidential financial information of payees".

Thursday, a Massachusetts federal judge paused the administration's deferred-resignation plan until a hearing can be held today.

Last Monday, a D. C. federal judge blocked the Office of Management and Budget from enforcing its proposed funding freeze.

Friday, a D.C. federal judge blocked USAID from putting employees on administrative leave or removing them from the countries where they are stationed.

Judges in D. C. and Massachusetts blocked the transfer of transwomen inmates to federal men's prisons.

Thursday, a D. C. judge approved an order preventing the government from releasing a list of FBI agents involved in investigating President Trump.

Many other lawsuits are pending, but have not been ruled on. It remains to be seen whether temporary orders will become permanent, or whether Trump will decide to defy some of them, a possibility J. D. Vance floated yesterday.

and leopards unexpectedly eating the wrong faces

I take for granted that Trump doesn't care that he is upsetting people like me. "Owning the libs" is one of the goals of MAGA, not something to be avoided. But this week a number of MAGA-sympathetic groups noticed that Trump's actions were hurting them, in a leopards-are-eating-my-face way.

The first were Christian charities that receive USAID grants.

The controversy began late Saturday evening, when Michael Flynn, a Catholic and retired Army general who previously served as an adviser to President Donald Trump, published a post on X alongside screenshots of a spreadsheet detailing federal funding disbursed to Lutheran groups in the last two years. The spreadsheet — which also included organizations that were not Lutheran — listed groups such as Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service (now Global Refuge), one of several organizations that partner with the federal government to resettle refugees; Lutheran colleges such as Pacific Lutheran University; and various local chapters of Lutheran Social Services.

Without citing evidence, Flynn accused the groups — who have longstanding funding agreements with the government — of “money laundering,” a federal crime. He also insisted the numbers amounted to “billions” of American taxpayer dollars, a claim not supported by the attached spreadsheet.

Musk, who describes himself as a “cultural Christian,” quote-posted Flynn’s claims, saying, “the (Department of Government Efficiency) team is rapidly shutting down these illegal payments.”

Christianity Today reports:

Most of USAID’s budget goes to grants for specific development projects, including at Samaritan’s Purse, World Vision, World Relief, Catholic Relief Services, and many other faith-based groups. It supports local Christian health clinics in Malawi and groups providing orphan care.

In Kenya, PCEA Chogoria Hospital, a historic mission hospital now run by Kenyan churches, provides comprehensive health care to HIV patients through support from USAID. On January 24 the hospital received a stop-work order for that care and has had no indication of a return of funding despite Rubio’s promises that life-saving HIV care could continue.

The hospital has 3,162 HIV patients in that USAID-funded program, and 42 staff members caring for those patients.

I have to wonder whether hearing the administration lie about their own programs will cause Christians around the country to wonder about Trump's and Musk's truthfulness in general. In many communities, the ax is falling on local charities doing things like refugee resettlement, not distant organizations with projects in Africa.

Another group suffering from Musk's actions are American farmers.

Farmers report missing millions of dollars of funding they were promised by the U.S. Agriculture Department, despite promises from the Trump administration that a federal funding freeze would not apply to projects directly benefiting individuals. ... Farmers who signed contracts with the Agriculture Department under those programs paid up front to build fencing, plant new crops and install renewable energy systems with guarantees that the federal government would issue grants and loan guarantees to cover at least part of their costs. Now, with that money frozen, they’re on the hook.

Kansas Senator Jerry Moran, a Republican, has noticed that USAID food programs benefit Kansas farmers.

The World Food Programme estimated $340 million in U.S. food aid was idled at domestic ports by order of the Trump administration. In total, $566 million in U.S.-grown commodities designated for humanitarian purposes was locked down in warehouses throughout the world.

“Time is running out before this lifesaving aid perishes,” Moran said. “Food stability is essential to political stability, and our food aid programs help feed the hungry, bolster our national security and provide an important market for our farmers, especially when commodity prices are low.”

And another Republican Senator, Katie Britt of Alabama, is concerned about the medical research done in her home state.

While the administration works to achieve this goal at NIH, a smart, targeted approach is needed in order to not hinder life-saving, groundbreaking research at high-achieving institutions like those in Alabama.

Again, if Musk is targeting "ground-breaking research" in Alabama, maybe medical research programs in other states are being hit unfairly.

Trust McSweeney's to find humor in the grimmest situations. Tom Ellison writes the column Elon Musk would write if he were honest: "Here at DOGE, we've streamlined every aspect of America's collapse".

did you know that before DOGE came along, government spending was influenced by an ad hoc network of billionaires behind campaign contributions, dark money groups, and shadowy think tanks? It’s far more efficient to reduce redundancy by placing the entire US Treasury under the centralized control of just one billionaire private citizen (me).

and you also might be interested in ...

For a moment, it seemed like this administration might still be -- just a little -- vulnerable to shame. One of Musk's young DOGE acolytes, Marko Elez, was outed for posting racist statements to social media within the last year. Elez then resigned.

Sadly, though, that wasn't the end of the story. Elon posted a poll on X asking

Bring back @DOGE staffer who made inappropriate statements via a now deleted pseudonym?

J. D. Vance endorsed a Yes vote, arguing against the idea that "stupid social media activity should ruin a kid’s life". The X community being what it is these days -- non-racists have largely decamped to BlueSky -- 78% voted for reinstatement, which apparently has now happened.

Vox points out what a sham the Musk/Trump administration's "free speech" idealism is: Free speech is for people who agree with them about things like, say, racism; or for people who offer Nazi salutes in public. But if you are a foreign student who participated in protests of Israel's genocide in Gaza, Trump promises to deport you.

This is not merely a case of the typical hypocrisy we expect from politicians. It is a coherent worldview coming into form: The Trump administration has been making clear that while it has plenty of tolerance for not just radical ideas but outright racist words and gestures, it has no room whatsoever for dissent or disagreement.

While we're talking about racism and Gaza, Tuesday Trump openly endorsed ethnically cleansing Gaza so that it could become “the Riviera of the Middle East”. I mean, why should annoying Arabs get to occupy prime waterfront property just because their ancestors have lived there for centuries? They should want to leave.

I don’t think people should be going back to Gaza. I heard that Gaza has been very unlucky for them. They live like hell. They live like they’re living in hell. Gaza is not a place for people to be living, and the only reason they want to go back, and I believe this strongly, is because they have no alternative.

In Trump's telling, the suffering of Gazans is just "unlucky", and not the predictable result of decisions made by the US and its Israeli allies. The place just happened to turn to rubble, and it's nobody's fault that support from agencies like USAID is drying up.

OK, that's the ranting of an evil man. But I'm not giving this story its own headline for a simple reason: You need to recognize when you're being trolled. Trump is not going to occupy Gaza with US troops any more than he's going to invade Greenland, make Canada a US state, or do a bunch of the other crazy stuff he talks about. The whole point of envisioning a US "ownership position" in Gaza was to change the news cycle, which was starting to focus too much on Musk's illegal seizures of power.

Keep your eye on the ball.

New DNC Vice Chair David Hogg has begun posting daily updates "What Democrats Did Today".

Global surface temperature is a combination of a long-term global warming trend and year-by-year circumstances like an El Nino. (That's why each year isn't always hotter than its predecessor.) But the month-by-month records for the hottest months on record have all happened since July of 2023. January 2025 set a record for reasons climate scientists haven't completely puzzled out yet.

Trump is about to issue an executive order bringing back plastic straws. Because: priorities. Human convenience trumps animal suffering.

Somewhat to my surprise, the Gaza truce has still not collapsed.

and let's close with an excuse to buy more books

I have a personal rule about local bookshops: If the reason I know I want a book is because I saw it in a bookstore, I have to buy it at that bookstore, even if I could get it cheaper from Amazon.

But while that works for physical books, what about e-books, which is how I read most things these days? If you're rebelling against Amazon's dominance of e-books, getting your books from Apple or even Kobo isn't that much of a protest.

A new option is Bookshop.org, where profits on e-books can be directed to a local bookstore near you.

Monday, February 3, 2025

Dark Matryoshka

Like a Russian nesting doll of fuck-ups

- Jeremy Konyndyk, former USAID official
on Trump's foreign-aid freeze

This week's featured post is "Campaign or Movement?"

This week everybody was talking about tariffs

After long threatening tariffs against Canada, Mexico, and China, Trump ordered tariffs on Saturday: 10% tariffs on China and energy imports from Canada, 25% tariffs on Mexico and non-energy imports from Canada. The tariffs take effect tomorrow.

It's always hard to know what Trump's true intentions are, so it's possible some deal to avoid the tariffs might be worked out before they take effect. Ostensibly, the reason for the tariffs is that the three countries aren't doing enough to prevent fentanyl from being smuggled into the US. So if there's even a fig leaf's worth of progress on that issue, Trump could cancel the order and declare victory. [Sure enough: The Mexican tariffs have already been paused for a month.]

If not, Canada has already announced its reprisals. Mexico has pledged to retaliate, but so far I haven't seen specifics.

and Musk's takeover of government systems

Much of Trump's first two weeks has consisted of the new administration puffing up to look bigger and more powerful than it actually is under the law. For example, Trump confidently cancelled the 14th Amendment's guarantee of birthright citizenship without having any authority to do so. His government spending "freeze" was promptly unfrozen by two federal judges -- again, because it is not based on any legal authority. (Once Congress has appropriated money, the executive branch has a responsibility to spend it as directed.)

But simultaneously, important things are happening in the shadows, with even members of Congress puzzled about what is going on. It's hard to get clear information, but it seems that private-sector employees of Elon Musk's companies have been inducted into his DOGE department, and have been taking over major government computer systems. Wired reported Wednesday on Musk's takeover of the computer systems at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), the federal government's HR department. Other Musk loyalists have taken control of the payment system at the Treasury's Bureau of Fiscal Service. BFS writes $6 trillion of checks each year. Still others have captured the General Services Administration.

It's not clear what kinds of abuse Musk intends, but using the BFS payments system he could do his own version of impoundment: simply kill the checks paying for any program he disapproves of. Conversely, Matt Yglesias suggests a different use:

— Appropriations lapse in March, government shutdown
— But DOGE just illegally keeps paying the bills Trump believes should be paid

A fourth agency Musk has taken over is USAID, which oversees foreign aid grants. Musk has declared USAID "beyond repair" and says he intends to shut it down. His legal authority to do this is, well, zero.

DOGE was established by executive order two weeks ago, and given the mission to modernize "Federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity". I don't see how you get from there to shutting down an agency established by Congress. USAID's security officers tried to prevent DOGE employees from getting access to systems with sensitive and perhaps classified information, but those officials were then put on administrative leave.

On his blog Doomsday Scenario, Garrett Graf imagines how our press would cover this if it were happening in a Third World country "Musk's Junta Establishes Him as Head of Government".

What started Thursday as a political purge of the internal security services accelerated Friday into a full-blown coup, as elite technical units aligned with media oligarch Elon Musk moved to seize key systems at the national treasury, block outside access to federal personnel records, and take offline governmental communication networks.

With rapidity that has stunned even longtime political observers, forces loyal to Musk’s junta have established him as the all-but undisputed unelected head of government in just a matter of days, unwinding the longtime democracy’s constitutional system and its proud nearly 250-year-old tradition of the rule of law. ... The G-7 country’s newly installed president, a mid-level oligarch named Donald Trump, appeared amid Musk’s moves to be increasingly merely a figurehead head of state.

The freeze on money for states was set aside by two judges, but the freeze on foreign aid grants apparently stands, with potentially deadly results.

Some of these grants fund NGOs in third-world countries where a little money can mean the difference between life and death.

Among the programs that remain grounded as of Friday: emergency medical care for displaced Palestinians and Yemenis fleeing war, heat and electricity for Ukrainian refugees and HIV treatment and mpox surveillance in Africa.

Meanwhile, The Guardian reports on two other programs on hold. One is working on malaria vaccines, and the other studies drugs for HIV prevention.

Some products, such as injectable HIV prevention drugs, are not yet available outside research settings, he said, leaving participants with no alternative source to continue treatment.

If the level of drugs in a participant’s body falls to nonprotective levels, it not only puts them at risk of infection, but means their infection is more likely to develop drug resistance. That makes their treatment more complicated, and if they then infect someone else, the resistance will spread.

Ostensibly, the freeze is just 90 days, so that the programs can be reviewed by Trump appointees. But there appears to be no mechanism for a review to take place.

One example of abuse is in the all-government emails that have been coming from OPM. One (I know somebody who got it, and then saw it reported) announced a "mandate" that all federal employees return to the office five days a week. It offered a "deferred resignation" option for people who didn't want to come in: Simply by replying to the email with "resign", an employee could continue to be paid until September, when the resignation would take effect. Major media falsely characterized this as a "buyout" offer.

From top to bottom, this email had no legal authority behind it. Work-from-home options are written into several ongoing union contracts, which nameless minions inside the Trump administration -- or even Trump himself -- have no power to cancel. So there is no legal across-the-board return-to-the-office mandate.

There also is no "buyout" offer. The OPM email doesn't say the resigning workers get to stop working, only that they won't have to come into the office. It doesn't say they can't be fired before September. And the money to pay them has not been authorized. (The whole government is only funded through March 14.)

So the memo basically has no legal content. It makes an unauthorized threat and offers an unauthorized escape from that threat.

and plane crashes

Wednesday, an Army helicopter and an American Eagle jetliner collided over the Potomac River near Reagan National Airport in D.C. Trump promptly repeated the pattern I pointed out three weeks ago: Despite the fact that he knew nothing about the actual causes of the crash, he blamed it on his political enemies. Rather than turn tragedy into a unifying national experience of sorrow and grief, he turned it into a divisive experience of finger-pointing and misinformation.

This time the culprit was DEI: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. His implication was that somebody somewhere in this tragedy wasn't a White man, and that it all could have been prevented if that particular position had been filled by a White man.

All the Trump acolytes -- J. D. Vance, Pete Hegseth, etc. -- echoed his sentiments, with Trump Jr. bragging that the new administration puts "merit ahead of skin color". What's really laughable about this is that no merit-based system would produce a Vice President Vance or Defense Secretary Hegseth. Both of these men are completely unqualified for the jobs they hold, and it's impossible to imagine a woman or a person of color being chosen with so little relevant experience.

and you also might be interested in ...

Another Trump order that is being challenged in court relates to his order insisting there are only two sexes. One consequence of this order is that transwomen in federal prison have to be reclassified as men and moved to a men's facility. The danger of rape and other brutalization should be obvious.

One such prisoner has succeeded in getting a court to block her transfer, and rights organizations have filed a second case covering three women.

and let's close with some getaways

Can't manage a vacation right now? Check out "The 20 Most Beautiful Places on Planet Earth" in this video.

Monday, January 27, 2025

Four Lights

There are four lights.

- Captain Jean-Luc Picard,
refusing to let his Cardassian torturer define reality

This week's featured post is Week One.

This week everybody was talking about Trump

If you're sick of hearing about him, forgive me, because it's Week One of his new administration. The featured post is all Trump, and so is most of this weekly summary.

I continue not to take seriously his threats against Greenland and Denmark (or Canada). But Trump himself does seem to take his threats seriously. Saturday, the Financial Times reported on a pre-inauguration call between Trump and Danish Prime Minister Marie Frederiksen. The Guardian (not behind a paywall) summarizes:

Trump, then still president-elect, spoke with Frederiksen for 45 minutes last week, during which he was described to be aggressive and confrontational about Frederiksen’s refusal to sell Greenland to the US.

The Financial Times reports that according to five current and former senior European officials who were briefed on the call, the conversation “was horrendous”. One person said: “He was very firm. It was a cold shower. Before, it was hard to take it seriously. But I do think it is serious and potentially very dangerous.”

He threatened tariffs targeted against Danish imports, which likely would result in reprisals from the entire European Union. The EU undoubtedly wants to avoid a trade war with the US, but a territorial threat against a member nation is bound to galvanize the whole union.

Also from The Guardian:

Speaking onboard Air Force One on Saturday, Trump said: “I think we’re going to have it,” and claimed that the Arctic island’s 57,000 residents “want to be with us”.

But Greenland's Prime Minister Múte Egede says:

We are Greenlanders. We don’t want to be Americans. We don’t want to be Danish either. Greenland’s future will be decided by Greenland.

And why would they want to be Americans? Unlike the US, Denmark at least offers the full services of a prosperous socialist nation, like free health care. The whole Greenland situation raises an important question: Does the second Trump administration include anyone willing to tell the boss that he's out of his mind?

and the bishop's rebuke

The MAGA movement depends on a couple of head-scratching beliefs:

The richest man in the world (and a bunch of other multi-billionaires) is on the side of ordinary working people.
Christianity requires political positions that are incompatible with the teachings of Jesus.

The second problem got exposed Tuesday when Episcopal Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde, whose home church is the National Cathedral, led the traditional post-inaugural church service. Her sermon, which was grounded across-the-board in the teachings of Jesus, called for honoring the dignity of all people, being honest, and practicing humility. Speaking directly to Trump, she asked for mercy on those who are frightened, including LGBTQ people and refugees. She reminded him that

[T]he vast majority of immigrants are not criminals. They pay taxes, and are good neighbors. They are faithful members of our churches, mosques and synagogues, gurdwara, and temples.

Trump was furious, and repeated a bunch of easily debunked lies. (My links in the quote below.)

The so-called Bishop who spoke at the National Prayer Service on Tuesday morning was a Radical Left hard line Trump hater. She brought her church into the World of politics in a very ungracious way. She was nasty in tone, and not compelling or smart. She failed to mention the large number of illegal migrants that came into our Country and killed people. Many were deposited from jails and mental institutions. It is a giant crime wave that is taking place in the USA. Apart from her inappropriate statements, the service was a very boring and uninspiring one. She is not very good at her job! She and her church owe the public an apology! t

Of course Trump's yes-men had to join in.

Rep. Mike Collins (R-Ga.) said Budde, born in New Jersey, “should be added to the deportation list.”

Others’ attacks were more personal.

Fox News’s Sean Hannity said Budde, whom he described as a “so-called bishop,” “made the service about her very own deranged political beliefs with a disgraceful prayer full of fearmongering and division.” Matt Walsh of The Daily Wire, a conservative media company, said Budde is a “fake bishop” and mocked her appearance.

“Who knew Satan wore granny glasses and stole his haircut from John Denver?” Fox News personality Greg Gutfeld said.

This is what happens when MAGA World is confronted with actual Christianity, rather than the corrupted version Trump's followers preach.

and Musk's Nazi salute

In the post-inauguration rally at the Capitol One Arena in DC, Elon Musk gave a speech, during which he offered the crowd a Nazi salute, pictured above. (It's not any better in the context of the full video.)

Of course, Musk and his fellow Trumpers deny that he did any such thing. The idea that Musk's gesture is a Nazi salute is "legacy media propaganda" and a "dirty tricks campaign" by liberals. (Because who among us hasn't accidentally done a Sieg Heil in a moment of exuberance? Happens all the time.)

Frankly, they need better dirty tricks. The ‘everyone is Hitler’ attack is sooo tired.

A lot has been made of the fact that Trump's people have learned from his first administration and will be more focused and effective this time around. But Trump's opponents have learned too. Here's Josh Marshall's response:

Back in the first Trump presidency, Trump’s critics spent an inordinate amount of time trying to get Trumpers to admit they’d done this or that, to apologize, whatever. This was always a mistake. I don’t need anyone to validate what I saw. I saw it. I don’t care what the explanation is.

This is the right reaction. Don't be trolled. Don't be gaslit. Of course Elon, Trump, and his various minions are going to send increasingly blatant signals of support to their fascist allies. Of course they're going to deny doing so. They will acknowledge no shame and make no apologies.

The point of asking for an acknowledgment and/or apology is to support a notion of shared reality: This is what we require before we're willing to admit someone back into the consensus. But as we saw in Trump's first term, that ship has sailed. The Trumpers have no interest in sharing our reality. They want to overwhelm us with their claims until we don't know what is true any more. Asking them to acknowledge truth simply puts the ball in their court; it gives them the power to say "no".

Given that consensus is no longer a possibility, the important thing is to hold onto our own sense of reality. We saw what we saw, and we're not going to let an authoritarian political movement push us into a mindset where maybe we didn't see what we saw.

and you also might be interested in ...

Remember when egg prices were too high and Biden was to blame? Well, they're even higher now, and the problem is a public health issue: Bird flu is killing chickens, and entire flocks are being sacrificed to stop the spread of the disease. The lesson here is that presidents, even a chosen-by-God president like Trump, don't have magic wands to wave over such problems. There's a real world out there, with real cause-and-effect mechanisms.

The accusations against author Neil Gaiman have gotten very detailed and compelling.

Friday night, Trump fired inspectors general from more than a dozen federal agencies. Inspectors general are supposed to provide oversight, and to be Congress' eyes and ears in the executive branch, so if you wanted your underlings to break the law, getting rid of the IGs is a good first move. However, firing them without warning or justification is illegal.

The WaPo covered this in a typically Trump-normalizing way, saying only that the firing "appeared" to be illegal. The sun appears bright this morning and the sky appears to be blue, but who can really say?

Trump's attempt to eliminate all Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs from the government added a McCarthyite touch. A memo went out to all government employees -- I have a friend who got one -- instructing them to report any DEI programs that might have changed their names lately or otherwise attempted to fly under the radar. Failure to rat out your colleagues could result in "adverse consequences".

and let's close with a rationalization

I can stop buying books any time I want. Cartoonist Tom Gauld understands me.