Sunday, February 09, 2025
Oh No Not My Precious Money
These fucking people.
“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,” Britt told AL.com.
On Friday night, the NIH announced it was cutting payments toward overhead costs for research institutions that receive its grants, a policy that could leave universities with major budget gaps, The Associated Press reported.
Supervillains
Saturday, February 08, 2025
Be Prepared To Lock Them Up
A federal judge has restricted the Elon Musk-led government efficiency team from accessing a critical Treasury Department payment system.
The order, issued early Saturday, stops the access temporarily and demands the destruction of any downloaded information saying there is risk of “irreparable harm.”
Friday, February 07, 2025
Someone Complained
Feb 7 (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump on Friday made public an order delaying tariffs on de minimis, or low-cost, packages from China until the Commerce Department can confirm that procedures and systems are in place to process packages and collect tariff revenue.I doubt it will return. There's no easy way to add in seamless tariff collection.
Seems Bad
Edward Coristine, a 19-year-old member of Elon Musk’s squad that’s criss-crossing US government agencies, was fired from an internship after he was accused of sharing information with a competitor.
“Edward has been terminated for leaking internal information to the competitors,” said a June 2022 message from an executive of the firm, Path Network, which was seen by Bloomberg News. “This is unacceptable and there is zero tolerance for this."
Online Chats
Two US law enforcement officials who investigate cybercrimes told Bloomberg they’ve been tracking online chat rooms that Coristine and others participated in for at least a year. The officials, who requested anonymity because they are not authorized to publicly discuss their work, said they first became aware of him, under the usernames “Rivage” and “JoeyCrafter,” while investigating an alleged hacker who Coristine was communicating with in an online forum. The officials wouldn’t identify the hacker or the case they were investigating.
Seems Bad
Krause’s position will give him control over the Treasury Department system responsible for disbursing more than $5 trillion in annual payments, including for Social Security, Medicare, tax refunds and thousands of other measures. Musk has demanded on social media that Treasury unilaterally stop sending these payments, accusing the department’s career staff of breaking the law.
Who Is This For
Is that "the only problem"? What the fuck is wrong with you, man.Trump will finance the purchase of Greenland by selling time-share condos in Gaza.
— Congressman Brad Sherman (@BradSherman) February 5, 2025
The only problem: if a displaced Palestinian woman gives birth in Greenland, her infant will be eligible for birthright citizenship.
Seems Bad
Cats that became infected with bird flu might have spread the virus to humans in the same household and vice versa, according to data that briefly appeared online in a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention but then abruptly vanished. The data appear to have been mistakenly posted but includes crucial information about the risks of bird flu to people and pets.One thing he reacts to is the line going down, so the plunging Dow will often be our one big hope. Doesn't save us from everything, of course.
Thursday, February 06, 2025
Who Knew There Were Lines
A staffer for Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency whose access to U.S. Treasury payment systems was approved by a federal judge on Thursday has links to a deleted social-media account that advocated for racism and eugenics.
The 25-year-old employee, Marko Elez, resigned Thursday after The Wall Street Journal asked the White House about his connection to the account.
The deleted profile associated with Elez, who was embedded in the Treasury Department to carry out efficiency measures, advocated repealing the Civil Rights Act and backed a "eugenics immigration policy" in the weeks before President Trump was inaugurated.
"You could not pay me to marry outside my ethnicity," the account wrote on X in September, according to a Wall Street Journal review of archived posts. "Normalize Indian hate," the account wrote the same month, in reference to a post noting the prevalence of people from India in Silicon Valley.
Probably the last one that got him fired.
Keep Them Busy With Petty Shit
On Wednesday, some employees at the General Services Administration found a creative way to express displeasure with the “Fork in the Road” offer to resign: a spoon emoji. During one video meeting in which members of the agency’s technology-focused branch were encouraged to take the offer, some rained down spoon emojis in an associated chat room. On Thursday, G.S.A. workers noticed that the spoon had been removed from the list of emojis permitted in their videoconferencing platform.
Team Pritzker
The finest representative of the big oaf community.
“Unlike Donald Trump, Illinois follows the law. The bipartisan Illinois TRUST Act, signed into law by a Republican governor, has always been compliant with federal law and still is today. Illinois will defend our laws that prioritize police resources for fighting crime while enabling state law enforcement to assist with arresting violent criminals. Instead of working with us to support law enforcement, the Trump Administration is making it more difficult to protect the public, just like they did when Trump pardoned the convicted January 6 violent criminals. We look forward to seeing them in court.”
Speaking Of Liars
The standard form of journalism is to privilege the statements of the people in power, then perhaps give voice to "critics argue" a few paragraphs later. What if you recognize you can't do that if your job is to inform readers?
News of mass immigration arrests has swept across the US over the past couple of weeks. Reports from Massachusetts to Idaho have described agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) spreading through communities and rounding people up. Quick Google searches for Ice operations, raids and arrests return a deluge of government press releases. Headlines include “ICE arrests 85 during 4-day Colorado operation”, “New Orleans focuses targeted operations on 123 criminal noncitizens”, and in Wisconsin, “ICE arrests 83 criminal aliens”.
But a closer look at these Ice reports tells a different story.
That four-day operation in Colorado? It happened in November 2010. The 123 people targeted in New Orleans? That was February of last year. Wisconsin? September 2018. There are thousands of examples of this throughout all 50 states – Ice press releases that have reached the first page of Google search results, making it seem like enforcement actions just happened, when in actuality they occurred months or years ago. Some, such as the arrest of “44 absconders” in Nebraska, go back as far as 2008.
All the archived Ice press releases soaring to the top of Google search results were marked with the same timestamp and read: “Updated: 01/24/2025”.
The distribution of Pinocchios from a glorified opinion columnist does not fix the problem.
I know we have this conversation every time Republicans are in power.
Yelling Is Good
Sounds Bad
This is the kind of piece which people (understandably) use to defend the New York Times, but the real test is whether the political reporters remember they're dealing with people who lie about everything. Peter Baker probably thinks reading the news makes him biased, or something.
In the days after President Trump took office, as Elon Musk’s team began pressing for access to the Treasury Department’s payments system, officials repeatedly said that their goal was to undertake a general review of the system. They said they would observe, but not stop money from going out the door.
But emails reviewed by The New York Times show that the Treasury’s chief of staff originally pushed for Tom Krause, a software executive affiliated with Mr. Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, to receive access to the closely held payment system so that the Treasury could freeze U.S. Agency for International Development payments.
In a Jan. 24 email to a small group of Treasury officials, the chief of staff, Dan Katz, wrote that Mr. Krause and his team needed access to the system so they could pause U.S.A.I.D. payments and comply with Mr. Trump’s Jan. 20 executive order to halt foreign aid.
Wednesday, February 05, 2025
Seems Bad
Half of Virginia’s community health centers have been cut off from federal grant money, forcing some to stop providing certain services and others to close branches.
The commonwealth has 31 Federally Qualified Health Centers with over 200 locations — a majority of which serve rural areas with limited access to medical care. Annually, about 400,000 Virginians rely on the care provided by these nonprofit, community-based centers, according to the Virginia Community Healthcare Association.
Positive Steps
A second federal judge on Wednesday blocked President Donald Trump’s executive order that seeks to end birthright citizenship, saying it’s likely unconstitutional and “runs counter to our nation’s 250-year history of citizenship by birth.”
The nationwide preliminary injunction from US District Judge Deborah Boardman is a significant ruling against Trump’s Day 1 order, which was swiftly met with legal challenges and put on hold days later by a separate judge.
The order “conflicts with the plain language of the 14th Amendment, contradicts 125-year old binding Supreme Court precedent and runs counter to our nation’s 250-year history of citizenship by birth,” Boardman said during a hearing on Wednesday.
Woopsie Doodle
The C.I.A. sent the White House an unclassified email listing all employees hired by the spy agency over the last two years to comply with an executive order to shrink the federal work force, in a move that former officials say risked the list leaking to adversaries.The CIA is also getting Musk's bogus retirement offer, which is not legal and contains the fine print that if you don't get the promised money:
The list included first names and the first initial of the last name of the new hires, who are still on probation — and thus easy to dismiss. It included a large crop of young analysts and operatives who were hired specifically to focus on China, and whose identities are usually closely guarded because Chinese hackers are constantly seeking them to identify them.
You Could've Listened
Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), who previously said there are certain aspects of DOGE he could get behind, told us he’s “appalled by the unconstitutional efforts to block funding appropriated and authorized by Congress.” Khanna said he’s made those concerns known to Musk.Yes I bet Elon is very concerned about your concerns!
Dipshit.
Maybe If His Byline Was "Matt" or "Nate" More Democrats Would Listen
And so the president’s opponents, whoever they are, cannot expect a return to the Constitution as it was. Whatever comes next, should the country weather this attempted hijacking, will need to be a fundamental rethinking of what this system is and what we want out of it.
The Price of Stuff
HONG KONG/SEOUL/SHANGHAI, Feb 5 (Reuters) - The U.S. Postal Service said it would temporarily suspend parcels from China and Hong Kong, after President Donald Trump ended a trade provision this week used by retailers including Temu and Shein to ship low-value packages duty-free to the U.S.Figuring out how to prevent shippers from exploiting the de minimis exemption is probably not a bad idea, but doing it in this hamhanded "don't worry about the consequences" fashion would be low hanging fruit for Dems if they weren't, also, on this anti-China kick.
The Trump administration imposed an additional 10% tariff on Chinese goods that came into effect on Tuesday and moved to close the "de minimis" exemption that allows U.S. shoppers to avoid paying tariffs for shipments below $800.
People love their dropshipping crap and people fucking hate getting surprise tax bills from their delivery companies.
Tuesday, February 04, 2025
Sounds Bad
We know that the vast majority of federal aid has been halted, particularly that which comes from the U.S. Agency for International Development. This includes medical care and food for malnourished children, refugee hospitals, supplies for war-torn regions, and much more. Claims that humanitarian aid was exempted from the pause are simply not true. We know that clean-energy businesses aren’t receiving grants passed by Congress under the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. We know that Energy Department grants intended for historically disadvantaged cities or projects with community benefit plans (including the restarting of a nuclear facility in Michigan) have been stopped. We know that electric-vehicle charging station grants have been stopped.
This is all completely illegal. Elon has boasted of shutting down certain payments through his takeover of the payment system, though that’s probably just bloviating. (It’s also terrifying, as it carries the threat of mucking up the payment system in ways that could destroy the country.) But we’re not in a theoretical place when it comes to payments to disfavored causes and organizations. They are doing this now, in the open, in plain view of everyone, and in so doing usurping the power of a coequal branch of the government.
Sounds Bad
Ryan said things at one point got better for Head Start following last week's chaotic funding/grant freeze.
— Lisa Desjardins (@LisaDNews) February 4, 2025
But now it has again gotten worse.
"A lot of programs are getting error messages or sorry messages," when trying to access their funding/accounts, he said.
For What You're Worth, Jake
Chris Murphy: They don't seem super different than Elon Musk, who has amplified vicious antisemitic information on Twitter and who gave the Heil Hitler salute on Inauguration Day -- it seems to be standard! Jake Tapper: For whatever it's worth, the Trump Team says that wasn't a Heil Hitler salute.
— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona.bsky.social) February 3, 2025 at 10:05 PM
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Seems Bad
A 25-year-old engineer named Marko Elez, who previously worked for two Elon Musk companies, has direct access to Treasury Department systems responsible for nearly all payments made by the US government, three sources tell WIRED.
Two of those sources say that Elez’s privileges include the ability not just to read but to write code on two of the most sensitive systems in the US government: The Payment Automation Manager (PAM) and Secure Payment System (SPS) at the Bureau of the Fiscal Service (BFS). Housed on a top-secret mainframe, these systems control, on a granular level, government payments that in their totality amount to more than a fifth of the US economy.
Monday, February 03, 2025
Happy Hour
"Nazi children are destroying the government"
— Just Kidding (@internethippo.bsky.social) February 3, 2025 at 7:44 PM
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The Answer Is No
The New York attorney general, Letitia James, has warned New York hospitals that complying with the White House’s executive order to end gender-affirming medical care for transgender youth could well violate state law.
The letter, which the attorney general’s office sent Monday morning to health care providers and other organizations, puts hospitals at the center of a conflict between the federal government and state authorities.
Progress
WASHINGTON—Sen. Brian Schatz (D., Hawaii) said he would place a “blanket hold” on all of President Trump’s State Department nominees until the administration’s attack on the leading U.S. foreign-assistance agency ends, a move that threatens to stall Trump’s ability to get his foreign-policy team in place.Some members also went to the USAID building today. We'll see if they get any coverage!
I do know that when Dems are in power, news outlets love to rush the cameras to the minority party, and when Republicans are in power, news outlets love to rush the cameras to the majority party, but that's more reason to create spectacle, not less.
"Trades"
Robinhood Markets is getting in on the sports event contracts craze, offering retail investors the opportunity to place trades on the outcome of Sunday’s Super Bowl https://t.co/NAIvVckzjM
— Bloomberg (@business) February 3, 2025
Doug Ford, Leader Of The Resistance
Progressive Conservative Leader Doug Ford is "ripping up" Ontario's $100 million contract with Elon Musk's Starlink in the wake of U.S. tariffs on virtually all Canadian goods, he said in a statement Monday.
Marks
It’s been fairly frequently remarked that markets seemed to believe that Donald Trump would do all the stuff that markets liked, and none of the things that markets don’t like. Well, we now know how that turned out.Imagine what else "markets" get tricked by!
Occasionally people complain when I link to paywalled things, but almost everything is paywalled now and I don't really know what to do about that.
But Mah Beat Sweeteners
Sunday, February 02, 2025
Would Probably Help To Know Some Lawmakers Have Their Backs
But I suppose planning tea time with genocidaires is more important.
The top agent at the F.B.I.’s New York field office vowed in a defiant email to his staff to “dig in” after the Trump administration targeted officials involved in the investigations into the Jan. 6 attack — and praised the bureau’s interim leaders for defending its independence.
“Today, we find ourselves in the middle of a battle of our own, as good people are being walked out of the F.B.I. and others are being targeted because they did their jobs in accordance with the law and F.B.I. policy,” wrote James E. Dennehy, a veteran and highly respected agent who has run the largest and arguably the most important field office in the bureau since September.
Tariffs And Trade Wars
Elon's Been Working Hard
WASHINGTON, Feb 2 (Reuters) - A key U.S. pilot messaging system was experiencing a temporary outage, which could lead to flight delays on Sunday, U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said late on Saturday.It's one thing to play Jenga with your microblogging site...