Safety regulations by AI

Yes, I’ve been watching team, dance, and men’s figure skating all this past week. Tonight starts pairs, followed by women’s this week. I’ve been enjoying it very much. I’m thinking about how to portray the stats from the men’s long program results in which the fifth place guy (Mikail Shaidrov of Kazakhstan) ended up in first place (yes, his long program was flawless and beautiful), the second place guy (Yuma Kagiyama of Japan) bobbled a bit to keep second place, the ninth place guy (Shun Sato of Japan) ended up in third, and the first place guy (Ilia Malinin of the US, known as the Quad God) took eighth, well off the medals. I watched Malinin’s performance and his many stumbles and quad jumps that weren’t four rotations. Perhaps calling him the Quad God (he even wore a t-shirt with that on it) was too much stress. When watching these performances I wonder would they be more or less beautiful if the skaters did it because they loved what they do and the joy they give viewers and didn’t get scored or ranked? Back towards the end of January Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Daily Kos included a five minute video of Rachel Maddow discussing the protests of the ICE operations in Minneapolis. This was shortly after Alex Pretti was murdered. Her main idea is this: The people who are against democracy and in favor of the nasty guy as dictator believe they will win with intimidation, with guns, and through war. The people who believe in saving democracy, who declare “No Kings,” will win through flexing democracy, through speech, protest, and political power. A week ago Alexander Shur and the staff of Votebeat in an article posted on Kos discussed the nasty guy’s call to Republicans to “nationalize the voting” and “take over the voting in at least 15 places.” Thankfully, there are some Republicans who are pushing back, including from Senate Majority Leader John Thune.

Election officials say the lesson of 2020 was not that the system is invulnerable, but that it can be strained in ways that cause lasting damage long before courts step in. While it’s unclear whether Trump’s latest demands — and possible future actions— would lead to the same level of disruption, legal experts say some of the backstops that ultimately stopped him last time are now weaker, leaving election officials to absorb even more pressure.

Some election officials are stressing transparency, showing in real time the rules are being followed exactly. But that doesn’t help with the skeptic that say, “I don’t believe you.” Also, they recognize the assault is coming to more than the local jurisdiction. Another danger this year is the “charlatans” who created a business model of spreading conspiracy theories for profit. Election officials are also dealing with death threats. They’ve had to enhance security, yet turnover has increased dramatically. Members of the administration that pushed back against the claims of fraud in 2020 are not there this time. Courts are a great line of defense and have already halted many of the nasty guy’s election policies. But court challenges take time and “untold damage” can happen to public trust and public officials before their ruling. That gap is the current risk.

“It’s up to us to choose to believe him or not,” [said Justin Levitt, an election law professor at Loyola Marymount University]. Obedience in advance isn’t required, and treating Trump’s claims as commands would grant him authority he does not have, Levitt said, adding, “We have agency in this.”

Also towards the end of January (yeah, this is a chance to get browser tabs that have sat for a while) Lisa Needham of Kos reported that the Department of Transportation updated safety regulations by letting an AI write them. That should be good enough.

While [DOT’s top lawyer Gregory] Zerzan might just want “good enough,” most people actually do want the perfect rule when it comes to transportation safety. Regrettably, as ProPublica described, Zerzan “appeared interested mainly in the quantity of regulations that AI could produce, not their quality.” ... This is, to be blunt, terrifying. It’s not just the blind faith that somehow Google’s glorified chatbot is more knowledgeable than an entire agency of specialized experts, but also that complex safety regulations can just be generated in seconds.

This isn’t just DOT and Zerzan. The nasty guy, after firing a lot of employees, has talked about AI replacing everything. Nothing will go wrong! Especially if it is Musk’s Grok AI. A month ago Oliver Willis of Kos wrote that the nasty guy has been talking about America First. But the country that benefits the most from his policies is not the US, but China. China may have started surging ahead before the nasty guy took office, but he has made America’s competitive advantage worse and has paid more attention to is ballroom than doing anything about China. Also from a month ago is a cartoon from Clay Jones. About that time the nasty guy had commented that the only this that would constrain him is his own morality. So Jones reviews his morality: He was pals with Epstein (details still TBD), stole from a fake charity, grifted students through his fake university, weaponized the DoJ against his enemies, and monetized the Oval Office. Yeah, we understand his morality and how little that would deter him from anything. In today’s pundit roundup for Kos Chitown Kev quoted Carron J. Phillips of The Contrarian on Substack discussing the nasty guy’s racist posts about the Obamas.

Too often, the oppressed are asked to address their oppression, instead of the oppressed hearing from those who have the privilege of being unscathed. We see this a lot when it comes to activism in sports, which is why it was so refreshing to see a bevy of white American athletes being asked about the state of America during the Winter Olympics.

Those white American athletes declaring their opposition to the nasty guy’s policies are really annoying conservatives. Which is good. In the comments paulpro posted a meme:

Two things Republicans hate: 1. Being called racist. 2. Black people.

No recordings, no paperwork, no oversight

Eli Hager, in an article for ProPublica posted on Daily Kos, reported the full story of what happened when the Department of Government Efficiency (remember DOGE?) came to the Social Security Administration. Much of that story comes from Leland Dudek, who was the SSA administrator for about four months last winter and spring. The story opens with Dudek posting a scroll 4 feet by 20 feet on the wall. In tiny print and diagrams it describes what SSA does. But that’s not yet entirely reflected in the agency’s computer systems. The SSA is 90 years old. It’s software dates back to the 1980s and has more than 60 million lines of code. Many things are still done on paper. It has been talking of upgrades for two decades without it happening. So when DOGE called for efficiency and the elimination of waste and promised IT whiz kids to make it happen Dudek thought great, bring it on. Except the other part DOGE called for was the elimination of fraud. And that was much louder than all other goals. Every little discrepancy these green kids found was taken as fraud and blown into a scandal – see the stories of 120 year old people turned into dead people still collecting SS.

They could have worked to modernize Social Security’s legacy software, the current and former staffers say. They could have tried to streamline the stupefying volume of documentation that many Social Security beneficiaries have to provide. They could have built search tools to help staff navigate the agency’s 60,000 pages of policies. (New hires often need at least three years to master the nuances of even one type of case.) They could have done something about wait times for disability claims and appeals, which often take over a year. They did none of these things.

Every time Dudek tried to work around his bosses, which were people at the White House, he would get a call reminding him what he was really supposed to be doing, which was not to make the SSA better. He realized the problem wasn’t the DOGE kids, it was the senior leaders. One example was the SSA Office of Transformation, which had been starting the work of modernizing the SSA systems. He was told the office was wasteful and to cut it. So he started acting the part that the White House wanted, while trying to push what would actually help the SSA. About all that did was make him unemployable after he was forced out. And the turmoil frightened many of the people who depend on their SS checks. It also made their experience working SSA agents on the phone and in person worse. The only good thing is that SS benefits are still being paid. So far. Maria Godoy of NPR discussed the release of Robert Kennedy Jr.’s Make Our Children Healthy Again Strategy. It has 100 recommendations for improving children’s health. Some of the points are good, things like promoting exercise and fitness and teaching good nutrition. But there are also not good things, such as studying the root causes of autism (which aren’t the things he wants to prove) and producing a new vaccine framework (when there is nothing wrong with the old one). There are also loopholes, such as calling on the reduction of unsafe food additives while letting food companies determine the safety and while specifying no penalties for using additives known to be harmful. And there are contradictions, such as calling for fresh local produce in schools after the administration canceled the program that did just that. Leila Fadel of NPR continued the conversation with Barry Popkin, professor of nutrition at the University of North Carolina. Popkin said yes, children’s health is bad. An example is the type of diabetes usually only seen in older adults is now seen in children and teens. But this list does nothing to fix that bad health. “It’s all promises but no teeth.” It’s all about “research, exploration, consideration, but nothing about any regulation or law to mandate change.” Nothing will happen, or at least nothing after Kennedy leaves office.

And you can see that, really, that the food and agriculture sectors that really profit highly from the ultra-processed food they're selling to our children and killing them at the same time, really have gotten to the government so that they had nothing in this document that will lead to any meaningful regulation, law or guideline that will improve America's health.

One thing that would help the health of children is money ffor school food programs that pay for eliminating ultra-processed foods and regulation to require it. But that won’t happen. Alix Breeden of Kos adds a bit more:

According to Marion Nestle, New York University professor emerita of nutrition, food studies, and public health, the report doesn’t have much substance. “The report seems to twist itself into knots to make it clear that it will not be infringing upon food companies,” Nestle said in an email to NBC News. “MAHA has so much bipartisan support. This was the time to regulate food marketing to kids — not ‘explore.’” She went on to say that the report is “short of specifics and weak on regulatory actions,” echoing a similar sentiment from professionals when the preliminary report leaked.

At the bottom of the article is a quote from Kennedy:

We had lots of guns when we were kids. Kids brought guns to school and were encouraged to do so. And nobody was walking into schools and shooting people. There are many things that could explain this. One is the dependence on psychiatric drugs.

I’m pretty sure my student handbook for high school said that a student caught with a gun at school would be expelled. I never saw a gun at school (or anywhere else, though I didn’t go into the town gun shop because my family didn’t hunt). I never heard of a bring your gun to school day. So I rate his first two sentences as false. That bit about nobody shooting people in schools is true. We didn’t practice lockdowns and didn’t need to. But at the time the rate of gun ownership was quite low. At the ending of this quote is Kennedy trying to link psychiatric drugs given to students with school gun deaths? The kids aren’t doing the killing. Fadel spoke to reporter Adrian Florido about the recent Supreme Court order that lifted the temporary order that banned ICE from doing aggressive immigration sweeps in Los Angeles. The order was brief, unsigned, and included no reasoning, meaning it was from the shadow docket. The order means ICE can resume targeting people based solely on skin color, accent, and occupation; what the ACLU called blatant racial profiling. Florido said:

In a concurrence, Justice Brett Kavanaugh cited an estimate that 10% of LA's population is undocumented and said race can be relevant when agents are determining whether they suspect someone is in the country illegally. Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a dissent. And she wrote, quote, “we should not have to live in a country where the government can seize anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish and appears to work a low-wage job.”

A reminder that Sotomayor is Latina. There is an underlying court case. The lower court said these sweeps cannot happen while the case proceeds. The Supremes said the sweeps can. And the order will probably affect what ICE does in Chicago and other cities. Fadel and Steve Inskeep then spoke to Sarah Isgur, editor of SCOTUSblog, who recently interviewed Justice Amy Coney Barrett about the shadow docket. A Supreme Court case takes time to read through the briefings, hold oral arguments, and write the opinions. That takes several months to a year or two. The purpose of the emergency (shadow) docket is what should the law be between now and when the case is officially decided. Even so this can have permanent effects that can not reversed even if the eventual decision goes the other way. An example is a person deported now. Other examples are everything the nasty guy does through executive order, such as whether he can fire the head of the Federal Trade Commission. A problem is the orders are not explained and they usually (almost always?) favor the nasty guy. These orders leave lower courts caught between previous Supreme precedents and what these order say. This post includes a bit of that Barrett interview. She admits the emergency docket does not allow the justices to think about the issue, there is less information, and no time for reasoned opinions. Isgur says these nine people don’t really know how to handle the emergency docket and with the start of their term next month they’re going to be hit with a lot of cases coming from all those executive orders, cases like can the president invoke tariffs or fire a Federal Reserve governor. Another issue is what should be the status quo. The emergency docket is supposed to protect the status quo while the case is being decided. Is the status quo what was in effect before the president took office? Or, as the nasty guy’s team claims (and has Biden’s team claimed before them), since he is voted in by the people and is there only four years should his orders be status quo? Lisa Needham of Kos added her take on the Supreme Court orders.

The now familiar 6-3 lineup at the United States Supreme Court just threw out decades of settled law so that President Donald Trump’s roving bands of masked federal agents in Los Angeles can engage in a little light racial profiling, as a treat, and can continue scooping up people based on nothing more than looking Latino, speaking Spanish, and working at a low-wage job like a car wash. You know the drill. A lower-court judge wrote a detailed, thoughtful, lengthy opinion about how this practice was 100% racial profiling and ordered the government to stop doing it. The Trump administration ran to the Supreme Court to say that the world would crumble if they couldn’t racially profile brown people in Los Angeles right away, and the Supreme Court obliged by staying the lower court’s order. That stay prevents the lower court’s order from going into effect, so federal agents can continue this straight-up racist, unconstitutional behavior. ... Does arresting or detaining people for no reason at all violate the Fourth Amendment’s requirement that probable cause is required to search or seize someone? It sure does! If a police officer wants to stop someone on the street and search them, they have to have a level of reasonable suspicion about that particular person, such as believing they are armed and about to commit a crime. Law enforcement officers have to be able to justify stopping specific people based on specific concerns rather than being able to stop whole groups of people based on shared characteristics. ... Justice Sonia Sotomayor pulled no punches, even refusing to engage in the faux-civility of the tradition of saying “I respectfully dissent.” Nope, here it is just “I dissent.” While that may seem like a nerdy, legalistic, tiny thing to focus on, in the context of how the justices communicate with one another through their opinions, it’s Sotomayor saying the actions and reasoning—or lack thereof—of her colleagues are not worthy of respect.

Needham also reported some of the ICE ways of doing business have changed for the worse. DHS Secretary Kristi Noem says ICE agents are facing assaults (what the rest of us would consider freedom of speech). Filming of ICE agents isn’t allowed. No Supreme Court ruling has said one way or the other, though numerous state courts have rules that is a protected right. ICE agents used to be required to document the specific person they want to arrest, giving lots of details, and getting supervisor approval. Now they just arrest who they please. DHS is blocking members of Congress from doing their ICE facility oversight duties without prior approval, while the law says approval can’t be required. And DHS has shut down the oversight office, freezing 500 civil rights cases.

No recordings, no paperwork, no oversight. DHS is systematically eliminating every way we have to keep tabs on law enforcement to ensure that Trump’s immigration crackdown, no matter how illegal or violent, can’t be stopped.

In Tuesday’s pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin quoted Politico:

The justices, who apparently divided 6-3 along ideological lines, put on hold a federal district judge’s order that reined in what critics called “roving” raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. That judge had found the tactics were likely unconstitutional because agents were detaining people without probable cause at car washes, bus stops and Home Depot parking lots based on stereotypes. The high court’s majority offered no explanation for its decision to grant the Trump administration’s emergency appeal to block the district judge’s order. However, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote separately in support of the decision, saying it was reasonable to briefly question people who meet multiple “common sense” criteria for possible illegal presence — including employment in day labor or construction, and limited English proficiency.

That little bit about “common sense” is partly why Sotomayor lost respect for the decision. In the comments Matt Davies posted a cartoon titled “Supreme Court guide to use of race in admission:” Over the entrance to a university is “Not OK.” Over the doors of an ICE detention van is “OK.” David Wolfe tweeted, “Children are born perfect without the need for toxic injections. Once vaccinated, the brain and body are harmed forever.” Dr. Neil Stone, infectious diseases doctor, responded, “Before vaccines, 1 in 5 kids never made it to their first birthday.” I add: What’s the evidence that the brain and body of an infant are harmed? Every vaccine must document they aren’t harmful to the vast number of people who take them. Acyn tweeted a quote from the vice nasty, “The bad news is...one of the pollsters once told me, anger usually wins midterm elections and because we done so much of what we said we are going to do, people are angry.” Gavin Newsom responded: “JD Vance admits he policies are wildly unpopular on national television.” In the comments of Wednesday’s roundup is a meme by Dan Pfeiffer,

There are only two possibilities – John Roberts is so afraid of a constitutional crisis that he will give Trump everything he wants, or Roberts is 100% in on the MAGA project to destroy our democracy.

Or both? Way down in the comments is a cartoon by the Naked Pastor. Under a banner saying these are the “Lost sayings of Jesus” Jesus is talking to a group of women. “Beware when men write something and claim it is inspired by God, for then you can’t dispute it.”

When they can’t win a fair fight, they rig the system

I finished the book The Gravity of Us by Phil Stamper. It’s a gay teen romance that is science fiction adjacent. The narrator is Cal. He lives in Brooklyn and finished his junior year in high school. He’s a budding journalist and has a social media following for his video posts of what is going on around NYC. He occasionally creates news, such as asking city candidates awkward questions they didn’t expect from a teen. Then his father announces he’s the final hire in NASA’s class of 20 astronauts for their program to go to Mars. The move to Houston happens Monday. Cal is upset at leaving his life in Brooklyn. Once in Houston Cal sees most of the astronauts are parents of young children, with one exception. Kat and Leon are his age and Cal is immediately attracted to Leon. We know where this is going. NASA’s funding to go to Mars is in a large part because of StarWatch, a celebrity gossip network. Their program Shooting Stars is about the astronauts and their families, the modern version of Life magazine which presented the 1960s astronauts to the public. The show host and producers thrive on presenting the families with as much drama and not-quite scandal as possible. Some of the astronauts have gotten good at deflecting or redirecting those attacks. StarWatch does not like Cal offering an alternate portrayal, one of information and truth. NASA does. That is the driving conflict of the story. I enjoyed the book. I call it science fiction adjacent because the focus isn’t on getting to Mars, it’s on StarWatch and Cal, who is helped by NASA’s public relations office. I was amused and baffled by one small point. The cover illustration shows two young men sitting on the ground with their backs to us watching a rocket launch. Their fingers are intertwined. I got the impression that one was white, the other black. But because of the light of the launch I could not be sure. I was about a third of the way through the book before skin color was mentioned in passing, then it was never mentioned again. Race was never a factor in their growing relationship. Yeah, that’s a good thing. However, without those brief mentions of skin color Cal and Leon would be seen as two white lads. Alex Samuels of Daily Kos reported that the law firms that caved to the nasty guy’s demands are facing serious backlash from their clients. The nasty guy targeted these law firms because at some point they helped his opponents. He pulled security clearances to make business difficult for them. Then he offered a deal – give him millions of dollars in free legal help for his unconstitutional agenda and he would return them to his good graces. Several firms sued. At least nine major firms submitted and took the deal. In response, many of their clients are walking. Their reasoning is simple. If the law firm can’t stand up for itself it’s not going to stand up for its clients. The firms look like the legal arm of the White House. They lost credibility. Submitting has a steep price. That’s in addition to many of their lawyers leaving for other, more ethical, law firms or starting new ones. Carter Walker, in an article for Votebeat posted on Kos, discussed voter fraud in the 2021 mayoral election in tiny Millbourne, Pennsylvania, suburb of Philadelphia. It’s tiny as in 50 acres, less than a tenth of a square mile, and about 1,200 residents. It is now majority Asian and many are Bangladesh immigrants. The fraud was done by Muhammad Nurul Hasan with help from Muhammad Munsur Ali. They illegally registered dozens of nonresidents as Millbourne voters, then cast ballots for them. Hasan’s opponent was Mahabubul Tayub. He reviewed the voter rolls before the election because adding 29 names to the rolls in a short time in a town with 600 voters didn’t make sense. Tayub recognized the names of several people who did not live in Millbourne. Last month Hasan pleaded guilty. Walker noted that these small cases of election fraud are used to claim fraud is rampant and laws to protect against it (while actually suppressing voters) are necessary. But cases of fraud look like what happened in Millbourne – a small number of people affecting a small number of votes that could make a difference in a local race. Scaling up the effort to make a difference in a state or national race is much more difficult. It would involve a lot of people, and they would leave markers that officials would see. The perpetrators would be caught. Alas, the difficulty in scaling up is not a persuasive argument. And that can undermine trust. The Millbourne town council is only five members. Two resigned for reasons unrelated to fraud. The three remaining members, barely a quorum, include Hasan and Ali. Though they are convicted (sentencing pending) they are still on the council. Nothing says they must resign. And if they did the council could do nothing until new members could be voted in. That is making for difficult moments in the tiny council meeting room. The Congressional Budget Office rated the Big Brutal Bill, about to be taken up by the Senate, and said the bill will raise the national debt by trillions. Some Republicans by saying the CBO has been taken over by partisan hacks and its numbers can’t be trusted. They claim big tax cuts for billionaires will actually pay for themselves – a line Republicans have been using consistently since Reagan with plenty of evidence the opposite is true. In yesterday’s pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin included a tweet by Jessica Reidl:

Elected Republicans are coalescing around the talking point that CBO's tax cut estimates are complete fiction and that tax cuts pay for themselves. Well, CBO's 2018 and 2019 revenue estimates - which included the previous year's TCJA - were ... 99.5% accurate.

The TCJA is the 2017 tax cut bill. Way down in the comments exlrrp posted a couple memes about Elon Musk:

Elon Musk, who was once worth over $400 billion in December 2024, has seen his fortune plunge by $200 billion, setting a new world record for the largest personal wealth loss in history.

Contrast that with this:

Elon Must is officially out of DOGE. It might look like he failed since he didn’t save us any money, find waste, or uncover fraud, but his true goal was in data mining and on that front, he made out like a bandit.

In today’s roundup Chitown Kev quoted Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo about Musk’s departure from the White House along with Musk calling the Big Brutal Bill and abomination.

Musk isn’t shifting sides here. He’s complaining that the cuts to social programs in the GOP budget aren’t deep enough. He claims this is about growing deficits. But he’s not said anything about the centerpiece high income tax cuts which are the drivers of those deficits. So while it’s probably obvious to most of you reading this, it’s important to note that Musk isn’t in any way switching sides...I’m skeptical.

Down in the comments are several cartoons and meme in response to what Sen. Joni Ernst said in a town hall meeting. Ernst talked about how wonderful the Big Brutal Bill was. A constituent said that because of the cuts to Medicaid people would die. Ernst cold-heartedly replied, “We’re all going to die.” My favorite cartoon shows a man on the ground reaching towards Jesus, who says, “Why bother healing you? We’re all going to die.” Three weeks ago Lisa Needham of Kos discussed the nasty guy’s efforts to keep us in the dark. He closed the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Weather and Climate Disasters program so we can’t learn the cost of extreme weather events. Also, agencies are barred from considering the economic effects of climate change. Don’t believe in climate change? Don’t track the costs of climate change which allows pretending it doesn’t exist. Also gone are over a dozen health-tracking programs. Who needs to know about pregnancy risks, cancer clusters, childhood lead poisoning, domestic violence, or police misconduct? If risks can’t be shown there is no downside to eliminating regulations.

If Republicans refuse to track the bad effects of their bad policies, they can obscure the harms their policies create. Genius move for them, but bad news for everyone else.

Yeah, this is a chance to clean out my browser tabs. Nearly four weeks ago Oliver Willis of Kos tackled the question of why the right hates colleges. He gives several examples. Yeah, the attack on Harvard and other top schools. There is the harsh restart of payments of student loans and the work to eliminate the Department of Education and its programs who help the financially disadvantaged to get to college. So why? One answer is that conservatives have long seen college as a source of liberal indoctrination – their children come home as liberal radicals. But millions of college graduates voted for Republicans.

What is really going on isn’t indoctrination, but a failure of conservatism to win the war of ideas. And as is so often the case with the right, when they can’t win a fair fight, they try to rig the system from the inside. Republicans fail to enlist those who go through a college education to their side of the aisle, so they undermine student loan programs, try to bully colleges, and even attempt to turn college sports into another casualty of the bigoted “culture war.”

Men want meat and not chick food

I’m again (or still) behind in reading the news (which mostly means reading Daily Kos) by a few days. So this is a chance to write about some of the stuff that has accumulated in browser tabs. And a chance to decide to close some of those tabs because I’m not going to get around to writing about them. On Wednesday I wrote about the nasty guy sending a couple planes of deportees to a notorious prison in El Salvador. Judge James Boasberg ordered the planes to be turned around. The planes continued and once they landed in El Salvador the deportees were beyond the reach of US courts. The nasty guy said the deportees were members of criminal Venezuelan gangs. Tim Miller quoted a tweet from Aaron Reichlin-Melnick:

NEW! Sworn declarations filed last night confirm the Trump admin sent INNOCENT people to rot in prison El Salvador, including a professional soccer player tortured by the Maduro regime who entered this country LEGALLY to seek asylum and has NO CRIMINAL RECORD in either country.

Miller added:

In a just world, Tom Homan and Stephen Miller would be indicted for this.

Last Saturday Lisa Hagen of NPR discussed the Nazi salute that Musk gave during an inauguration event. It is news these several weeks later because people are taking Musk’s move as permission they can also give the salute. Elites can usually get away with it. Everyone else may face consequences, including losing their job. Not long after Musk gave the salute he said it was a joke. Many people are not laughing. Jokes like this change for the worse what is socially acceptable to discuss. It allows the jokester to accuse those offended of being oversensitive – jokes being “harmless.” And it beckons people to join far right groups because, hey, they’re the fun ones. The right has been successful in claiming it is the home of comedy and free expression. They also target the free expression of those who want reproductive rights, who are LGBTQ, and who want to protest what Republicans are doing. Emily Feng of NPR talked to various people about new parallels between American and Chinese politics. Feng spent a decade covering China. One of the people Feng talked to was David Lampton, a political science professor at Johns Hopkins University, who noted parallels specifically to the Chinese Cultural Revolution of the 1970s. Things like attempts to control the media and building a cult of personality. As in the nasty guy banning the Associated Press from certain media events. Feng also spoke to Orville Schell, director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society. Schell noted that the nasty guy and Mao Zedong are “deeply in love with the idea that you can't be creative unless you first destroy.” Mao purged bureaucrats by accusing them of disloyalty and dissent. The nasty guy is attempting the same. In a post from two weeks ago Lisa Needham of Kos wrote about the Supreme Court decision that upholds Congress has the power to determine how government funds are to be spent and Musk and the nasty guy don’t. In particular Needham wrote about Alito’s whiny dissent, supported by Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Thomas. Here’s why that dissent is described as whiny. Alito is angry that a single district judge is allowed to compel the US government to honor its financial commitments. But conservative litigants routinely run to particular district judges in Texas to ensure a nationwide ruling. Alito is annoyed that a judge ordered the government to pay $2 billion. He sounds like the judge made up the requirement when that $2 billion was in a law adopted by Congress. The money is for contractors who already did the work. Alito’s solution for these contractors is each one individually file in the Court of Federal Claims. That’s a huge barrier for small contractors, especially those based overseas. Also Alito pretends not to know how contracts work. Each contractor would have to argue that the government entered into a contract and reneged. Alito is saying the nasty guy can cancel contracts on a whim. Alito isn’t the only problem – three other justices signed his dissent. In a tweet from six weeks ago Kevin Kruse wrote:

I can’t believe the Supreme Court said the president was above the law and now the president is acting like he’s above the law.

In the replies is a meme showing Founding Fathers and the words “Pardon us while we turn over in our graves.” In another post from two weeks ago Needham reported the nasty guy is pulling security clearances from law firms who have worked against him. This is a problem for more than the law firm.

For a covert CIA officer, even the fact they work for the CIA is secret, and it would be a crime for them to tell someone who doesn’t have proper clearance. If that CIA officer needs an attorney, the attorney needs a security clearance too. This isn’t just an issue for spies. Any federal employee who works with classified material can encounter this if an employment dispute requires discussing that material. Without an attorney who has clearance, that person is out of luck.

An “employment dispute” is now likely to be protesting an illegal firing by DOGE. Targeting law firms is a way to make sure some fired employees can’t protest. A law firm can get its security clearance pulled for doing such things as providing services for special counsel Jack Smith and his cases against the nasty guy for election fraud and mishandling classified documents. An Associated Press article posted on Kos two weeks ago reports that some fired federal workers are facing relatives cheering their firing. These relatives believe the stories of government bloat, or that the government needs to be trimmed to “make the government great again,” or that public servants are “parasites” and part of the waste the DOGE team has yet to document. This vanishing family support can hit hard. At the end of January Juana Summers and Brittany Luse of NPR discussed that Luse has been noticing more and more food products are advertising on their packaging how much protein they contain. Why this new emphasis? Yes, protein can help with weight loss and gaining muscle mass. It is also a food component that has not been villainized, as carbs and fat have been. Here’s another reason for the current emphasis on protein:

It's the nutrient for men. People of all genders need protein. It's just that protein, because of its relationship to muscle growth, has been masculinized. And thus, certain high-protein foods like meat also become masculinized.

And culture, especially commercials play on that, saying men want meat and not “chick food.” Fiona Webster posted a cartoon by Garth German. It shows elephants in suits carrying signs saying “Match your clothes to your crotch” and “Lemme see what’s in your pants.” Off to the side is a man saying, “It’s starting to concern me how much you guys are focused on other people’s genitals.”

Weaponized empathy is the issue

I’ve written about the advice being given to Republican members of Congress: Voters (or “paid agitators”) have been showing up at member town hall meetings and telling the member they are quite angry at the destruction of the federal government. The advice is: Don’t hold town hall meetings. Emily Singer of Daily Kos said that Rep. Chuck Edwards of North Carolina ignored that advice and held an event in Asheville. Three hundred people packed the auditorium. Another thousand had to remain outside. Edwards defended his vote for the budget plan that “would cause massive and unpopular cuts to Medicaid and food stamps in order to only partly pay for tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans.” He also defended DOGE. Several statements prompting loud booing. Responses like that show there could be a Republican wipeout in 2026. Since Republicans are not holding such meetings several Democrats are now planning to hold town halls in Republican districts. I’ve heard Gov. Tim Walz is a part of that effort. Alex Samuels of Kos looked at the first comprehensive polling done in swing states since the November. The important bit says a Republican wipeout in 2026 is not a sure thing.

Essentially, pollsters discovered that most voters in competitive House districts believe that congressional Democrats “are more focused on helping other people than people like me.” Just 1 in 4 independents (27%) believe that Democrats are focused on helping them, while a majority (55%) feels the party aims to assist others. “The Democratic brand is still not where it needs to be in terms of core trust and understanding people’s challenges,” said Molly Murphy, one of the pollsters, in a conversation with Politico. “Even though voters are critical about Trump and some of the things he’s doing, that criticism of Trump doesn’t translate into trust in Democrats. The trust has to be earned.”

Other findings: Over half do not believe Democrats prioritize working people. About half say the term “elitist” describes the Democratic Party. And 40% believe Democrats don’t have a strategy for responding to the nasty guy. In a pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin had a couple quotes critical of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer for his support for the Republican spending bill that averted a government shutdown but gave the nasty guy more protections. One quote is from Dan Pfeiffer of The Message Box:

This is a failure of leadership. No plan, no strategy, and no attempt to communicate honestly and forthrightly with the base. At no point did we know what Dems were fighting for or what victory would look like. Schumer and some Senate Democrats wanted to be seen as “fighting” up until the moment the fight was set to start. Everyone hoped that Johnson would fail to get the votes in the House, which would force them into negotiations with Democrats. But that didn't happen; and there was seemingly no plan for what Senate Democrats would do if Johnson did get the votes. This is a pattern with Senate Democratic leadership. There is a reticence to have tough conversations with the base, to tell them that this is a fight we can’t win or shouldn’t pick for the reasons Schumer laid out in his op ed. You have to set expectations. Senate Dems should have signaled their worries about the shutdown weeks ago. But because they raised expectations for a fight and pulled the rug out at the last minute, people are enraged — and for good reason. Democrats need to treat our voters like adults and be willing to have tough conversations.

David Remnick of the New Yorker interviewed Atun Gawande, a former USAID senior official discussing the closing of USAID. I think this quote is from one of Gawande’s answers:

This damage has created effects that will be forever. Let’s say they turned everything back on again, and said, “Whoops, I’m sorry.” I had a discussion with a minister of health just today, and he said, “I’ve never been treated so much like a second-class human being.” He was so grateful for what America did. “And for decades, America was there. I never imagined America could be indifferent, could simply abandon people in the midst of treatments, in the midst of clinical trials, in the midst of partnership—and not even talk to me, not even have a discussion so that we could plan together: O.K., you are going to have big cuts to make. We will work together and figure out how to solve it.” That’s not what happened. He will never trust the U.S. again. We are entering a different state of relations. We are seeing lots of other countries stand up around the world—our friends, Canada, Mexico. But African countries, too, Europe. Everybody’s taking on the lesson that America cannot be trusted. That has enormous costs.

And a tweet from Politico with a link to one of their stories:

The architect of Project 2025 says the plan is working perfectly: “It’s actually way beyond my wildest dreams.” Paul Dans, the project’s ousted former director, on how Trump is implementing his agenda after all.

That last bit is because during the campaign the nasty guy pretended he knew nothing about Project 2025. In a second roundup Chitown Kev quoted Edward Isaac-Dovere and Annie Grayer of CNN talking about Schumer and Democrats”

They say Schumer flubbed weeks of strategy, essentially negotiating with himself for less to make the final bill worse than they could have gotten it to be with better pushback. They say he mismanaged dynamics internally with colleagues and publicly so that he ended up delivering a fresh round of dejection to a party already slumping on the ropes. Any Democrat paying attention knew this week of negotiations was going to be terrible for them. But, many say, it was Schumer’s leadership that left them looking and feeling even worse—and with much less leverage for future fight, now that Senate Republicans saw how easy it was to write what Trump wants into the bills, make no effort to reach out to Democrats, and watch them be the ones to attack each other. “Republicans saw Democrats were weak, and thought, ‘We’re going to call your bluff’—and they were right,” said a top aide to one Senate Democrat. “This was always going to be no-win. But it didn’t have to be this much of an ‘L’.”

Political science professor Philip D. Bunn writing for his “Everything Was Beautiful” Substack about the DOGE claim of improving government efficiency:

If “government efficiency” alone is your goal, Nazi Germany is exemplary. This is not to make a lazy accusation of DOGE supporters or affiliates being Nazis, only to highlight that “efficiency” itself is contentless. It describes means, not ends, unless we make the mistake of mistaking our means for ends in themselves. [...] ...consider the “inefficiency” afforded to us by our Constitutional rights. The fourth, fifth, and sixth amendments provide citizens, suspects, and criminal defendants strong protections in the course of criminal investigations and trials. These protections are surely opposed to bare efficiency. It would be more efficient for police officers to be able to search whomever they want, for trials to proceed without regard for protection against self-incrimination, for convicts to have no right to an appeal, and so on. Efficiency in the criminal justice system, pursued single-mindedly, would require removing the pesky rights that slow the process and drag out cases for many months and years. [...] All of this to say, I find the narrow focus on “government efficiency” troubling, both in principle and in practice. I recognize that “efficiency” in most people’s minds is opposed directly to “waste, fraud, and abuse” and I certainly am not defending waste and fraud. But finding and resolving issues of waste, fraud, and abuse is more properly speaking an issue of government accountability, not bare efficiency. In attempting or purporting to increase the efficiency of government, we risk eliminating things that are, despite their inefficiency, quite essential to healthy, stable government….

I’ve written that many Republicans and their rich backers want to privatize the Postal Service so they can make money off it. This appears to be a step in that direction. Samuels reported that Postmaster General Louis DeStroy has reached an agreement with Musk to make “further efficiencies” at USPS. This includes cutting 10,000 workers out of a total workforce of 635,000. That’s on top of 30,000 job cuts since 2021. Ten days ago Kos of Kos discussed Musk and what’s going on with his companies. The value of Tesla stock has dropped 45% since a high in December. That has cut $121 billion from Musk’s net worth. But that leaves him with about $340 billion. The weekend before Musk threatened to cut Ukraine’s access to Starlink, the internet service provided through a constellation of satellites. Ukraine has used Starlink to coordinate combat activities in the front lines of the war. Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski reminded the world that Ukraine’s Starlink access is paid for by Poland at a rate of $50 million a year. Ukraine pays for every terminal that connects to Starlink. Musk’s threat is prompting Europe to come up with an alternative to Starlink, though a European competitor isn’t scheduled to come online until 2030. Italy appears to have killed a $1.6 billion deal for its own Starlink network. Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim is head of América Móvil canceled a Starlink contract worth $7.5 billion and announced a $22 billion investment with both European and Chinese providers for a Starlink replacement. Musk’s evil deeds are affecting his net worth. I had previously written that when Biden and Congress authorized more funding for the IRS the agency would be able to audit rich people and pull in much more in taxes than was spent on the new auditors. Of course, Republicans and their rich backers didn’t like having to be honest on their tax forms. Andy Kroll, in an article for ProPublica posted on Kos, wrote that the probationary employees of the IRS are being fired. Since Biden was able to hire most of these specialists only in the last year, most are still on probation.

John Koskinen, who led the IRS from 2013 to 2017, said in an interview that the widespread cuts to the IRS make no sense if Trump and Musk genuinely care about fiscal responsibility and rooting out waste, fraud and abuse. “What I’ve never understood is if you’re interested in the deficit and curbing it, why would you cut back on the revenue side?” Koskinen said.

I referred to these employees as specialists. Kroll explained why. To properly audit a tax return from an oil company the IRS needs petroleum engineers. These are the people who would be able to tell if a big research tax credit is legitimate. Specialists from other industries were hired to audit returns from those industries. They are paid more than other IRS employees, but their work brought in orders of magnitude more than their salaries. In 2024 the IRS made a big push to bring in these specialists and get them trained. Now most are gone.

“Large businesses and higher-wealth individuals are where you have the most sophisticated taxpayers and the most sophisticated tax preparers and lawyers who are attuned to pushing the envelope as much as they can,” said Koskinen, the former IRS commissioner. “When those audits stop because there isn't anybody to do them, people will say, ‘Hey, I did that last year, I'll do it again this year.’” “When you hamstring the IRS,” Koskinen added. “it’s just a tax cut for tax cheats.”

About ten days ago I came across an interesting quote within a meme in the comments of another pundit roundup. The link to that meme is now broken. So I went elsewhere to find that quote. And I found it in an article by Caroline Wazer of Snopes posted on Yahoo! News. Yes, the quote is legit and this article goes to the source and provides a bit more context. The quote is by Musk and was said when Musk was on Joe Rogan’s show. Here’s the exchange with the first sentence the quoted one:

Musk: The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy. The empathy exploit. They're exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response. So, I think, you know, empathy is good, but you need to think it through and not just be programmed like a robot. Rogan: Right, understand when empathy has been actually used as a tool. Musk: Yes, like, it's weaponized empathy is the issue.

In the comments of a third pundit roundup is a cartoon by Toonerman. The first speaker is a dog, which seems to be this cartoonist’s voice of sanity.

Dog: You have $420,000,000,000. You can do anything you want, buy anything you want, go all over the world! It’s incredible. Elon, ... so what do you want to do? Musk: Take money away from old people, take food away from children, take health care away from the poor and keep homeless vets on the streets. ... yeah that’s fun ... You know, killin’ poor people is a blast!

I’ve come to understand that some people, and Musk is a prime example, measure their self-worth by the gap between their lives and the lives of those at the bottom of the social hierarchy. Having $420 billion isn’t enough of a gap. He works so that those at the bottom have even less, making his gap bigger. Not quite so far down in the comments exlrrp posted a meme (with a link still intact):

Fox News’ Laura Ingraham asked Putin’s Puppet last night why he’s so much “tougher with Canada than you are with some of our biggest adversaries?” His answer: “Only because it’s meant to be our 51st state. One of the nastiest countries to deal with is Canada.” Do you get it yet? This is exactly the same reasoning Putin uses to annex and invade Ukraine. This gives Putin cover to continue his land grab of former Soviet Union countries.

Once we take power, we are going to go absolutely berserk

Alisa Chang of NPR talked to Matt Slaughter, dean and economist at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, about the nasty guy describing the big stock market drop as a period of transition or a detox before a much better economy will come. This will be short term pain. Slaughter says the tariffs being imposed mean there will also be long-term pain. This economic pain will not be temporary.

I think a fundamental reason that President Trump was elected and then reelected was his astute understanding that globalization has not benefited every single worker and company and community. But what is being missed is that for decades, all those connections to the global economy through trade and investment and immigration have really spurred gains for scores of millions of Americans.

The nasty guy has said that tariffs will rebuild US manufacturing. Slaughter doubts tariffs will accomplish that. The strongest companies tend to be globally connected, more productive, and more innovative. They pay higher wages for better jobs. Yes, some companies and their workers will benefit from higher tariffs that limit competition. But tariffs cause greater harm to the economy than the few companies they help. A recession is looking more likely. Tariffs mean American companies will have lower profits. They’ll be less productive. Jobs will be lost. Consumers see the likelihood that prices will go up. I heard elsewhere this week in response to the claim of a temporary transition, a detox, that the stock market doesn’t believe him. The stock market tends to look out a long way. They don’t see the current situation improving in just a couple quarters or just a couple years. In a pundit roundup for Daily Kos Chitown Kev quoted Paul Krugman writing in his own Stubstack:

So the Trumpers are responding in their usual fashion: blaming other people. Yesterday I wrote about the proliferation of conspiracy theories, with a special focus on “globalists,” which, let’s face it, usually ends up meaning Jews. The Trump economic team seems, however, to be pushing a different kind of excuse: The claim that Biden left behind a terrible economy, and that we’ll need to go through a painful period of “detox.” Now, you may wonder how anyone could characterize the economy when Trump took office, with 2.5 percent growth, low unemployment and inflation only slightly above the Fed’s 2 percent target, as terrible. But the Trumpist position, coming from multiple officials, seems to be that the prosperity was fake, that the numbers were exaggerated by bloated government spending and employment. Hence the need for a costly transition to an economy where workers are doing useful things. As usual, one has to ask: Are they ignorant or are they lying? And as usual, the answer is: Why not both?

Sam Gustin of The Nation discussed how the nasty guy wants to manipulate economic data. The Gross Domestic Product, or GDP, is a main calculation of US economic output. Changes in the GDP mark economic growth or decline. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick announced plans to strip out all government spending from the GDP.

By excluding government spending from the official GDP estimates issued by the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the Trump administration could downplay the economic damage of firing hundreds of thousands of federal workers and slashing billions from the federal budget. In other words, they could gaslight the public into believing that the economy is doing better than it actually is, which could come in handy if economic conditions continue to deteriorate.

In a second roundup Greg Dworkin quoted the Wall Street Journal which voiced fears the nasty guy will wreck the soft landing:

“On Friday, I would have said I thought the administration was worried about their policies really slowing down the economy, and they were trying to lay the groundwork for the narrative that they inherited a weakening economy,” said Michael Strain, head of economic-policy studies at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute. More recent comments seem to have gone beyond that. “Now, there’s almost a sense that if something goes wrong in the economy, then that’s fine,” said Perkins. “That’s making people quite nervous because if you get to the point where you are pushing the economy into a recession, there is no guarantee that that’s just going to pass quickly.”

Brian Beutler from Off Message wrote that public opinion won’t necessary follow a sabotaged economy.

We’re going to test the power of MAGA propaganda techniques. Can concerted lying convince enough people to deny the existence of economic hardship, or celebrate it, or blame it on Democrats, such that it doesn’t become a political drag on Trump? For all the brain poison MAGA propagandists pump into our information environment, these early signs of discomfort suggest they know the truth of the matter. Which means they’re conscious of the coming deception: they’ll blame Biden and foreigners and liberals and Jews for causing economic pain, and circle their wagons around Trump, fully aware of their own lies.

Down in the comments is a cartoon by Joe Heller showing a wife watching the nasty guy on TV. She says, “He wants us to stop talking about egg prices.” Her husband looking at their retirement account says, “Chicken eggs or nest eggs?” In a third roundup Dworkin quoted Paul Waldman of The Cross Section who wrote that Democrats need to start Project 2029 now. He noted Project 2025 didn’t hurt Republicans much.

Project 2025 is doing exactly what it was intended to do. The process of creating it helped conservatives clarify their goals, and as important as its specific recommendations was the tone it set. The implicit but unmistakable theme of the document was this: Once we take power, we are going to go absolutely berserk. No right-wing fantasy will be off the table. There is no limit to the glorious destruction we will inflict upon the federal government and everything it does.

A tweet from Ken Dilanian:

The president just rattled off a series of grossly inaccurate statistics suggesting violent crime, including murder, went up over the last four years. No serious criminologist believes that and the data doesn’t support it. And every murder is counted.

In the comments exlrrp posted a meme by DarrigoMelanie showing:

Trump fired... 80K VA workers 50K IRS workers 10K USAID workers 7K Social Security workers 2K Dept. of Education workers 1100 CFPB workers 1K NOAA workers 17 Inspectors general 1 ethics watchdog lead Trump isn’t dismantling the “deep state.” He’s crippling the country.

The list is not (or no longer) complete. I easily noticed something about these cuts: + If they help people who are not rich, they’re cut. + If they prevent rich people from criming, they’re cut. + If the rich want to make money from what the agencies do for free, they’re cut. The agencies that help the rich get richer haven’t been touched. Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos quoted late night commentary. A sample:

“Over the past few weeks, the billionaires who attended Trump’s inauguration have lost a combined 209 billion dollars. Yeah—it’s been a wild time. Elon Musk lost $150 billion. Jeff Bezos lost $29 billion. And Mark Zuckerberg lost his mind.” —Jimmy Fallon

“Oh, gosh, what a shame!” said the 99% of Americans that don’t even have $1 billion.

But I thought we was owning the libs

Oliver Willis of Daily Kos wrote from a New York Times report that Musk and his DOGE boys have entered the Integrated Data Retrieval System of the IRS. This “would allow DOGE to manipulate transaction data as well as harvest sensitive information for millions.”

Both Trump and Musk have repeatedly shown interest in pursuing a vendetta against their adversaries, now they have access to some of the most private and sensitive data held by the U.S. government to pursue this agenda.

Willis reported:

The mainstream media is offering a tepid response to President Donald Trump’s decision to ban the Associated Press from covering official White House events. AP has been barred from reporting on at least two White House events because the wire service has said they will be using the term “Gulf of Mexico” in reference to the Gulf of Mexico.

The AP is still using “Gulf of Mexico” as only the US recognizes the name change and the AP is read around the world and must use easily recognizable place names for all audiences. The response is called “tepid” because while few have released statements in support of the AP they won’t “take any action beyond their statements, like boycotting White House events in solidarity with AP.”

Bending to Trump’s will while voicing support for the Associated Press would seem to be in complete contradiction.

Morgan Stephens of Kos reported on protests titled “No King in Presidents Day” or “No Kings Day.” The protests are led by 50501 a grassroots activist group that started on Reddit. The name means “50 protest, 50 states, one movement.” A website listed 80 events. The group demands “justice,” “transparency,” and “accountability” to “uphold the Constitution” and end Trump and Musk’s “executive overreach.” Stephens posted images from protests in Boston, Philadelphia, the National Mall, St. Augustine, and Austin. Another group of protesters are outside Tesla dealerships, where sales have been in decline.

Presidents Day was created in the 1880s to celebrate the birthday of President George Washington, but in Trump’s second term, it’s shaping up to be a day of resistance.

In a pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin included a tweet by Dan Cluchey that was posted in response to the firing of several hundred Federal Aviation Administration employees, the people who staff air traffic control. Cluchey wrote:

Whole lot of folks, drenched by misinformation, are about to figure out that the 'deep state' they've been taught to despise are actually civil servants who keep our planes in the air, stop diseases from ravaging our communities, prevent banks from preying on us, et al.

Down in the comments is a meme posted by exlrrp and written by Ron Filipkowski:

It seems to me that if Musk has proof that millions of Social Security checks have gone out illegally to dead people, he should be presenting that evidence in front of a Grand Jury under oath tomorrow instead of s---posting it on social media. When can we do this under oath?

paulpro posted a cartoon by Slyngstad showing a guy in a red hat and a “I (heart) Elon” shirt. In the first panel he says:

Why are these libruls so mad that Elon Musk has their Social Security number! Oh, ‘cuz he’s ‘unelected’? Is that why? He’s fixin’ the system and he needs all that stuff. Grow up libs. Every one of them burecrats has your info and is unelected!”

In a second panel the man has a bill and a “You’re Fired” notice on his desk.

Whatdya mean I lost by job and lost all my Medicaid benefits? But I thought we was owning the libs. My grandma’s Social Security check too? But she needed that. All my bills are higher now ‘cuz no one can tell companies not to do that?

That makes me think of the saying: The best way to fleece someone is to get them to believe they are helping you fleece someone else. Paul Fell posted a cartoon of two children in “DOGE” shirts carrying a bucket of money. One is blowing a raspberry the other has a hand up to stop a skeptical Uncle Sam. The second child says:

Yes, we’re the experts President Musk has tasked with cleaning up govt waste, fraud, and abuse, and no, you can’t see what’s in the bucket.”

Below that exlrrp posted memes and screen shots showing the DOGE team is finally posting examples of their spending cuts. And the amounts and the claims around them are lies. Denise Oliver Velez posted a substitute roundup because the regular host could not. There is little in the body, though the comments have the usual bunch of cartoons. One of those was posted by Fiona Webster and is by Christopher Weyant. It shows a DOGE guillotine and being led to it is a person labeled “Government.” Beside him is Musk saying, “Don’t worry – I won’t feel a thing!” Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos wrote about the movie Mickey 17 to be released in a couple weeks. I watched the trailer and it’s way too violent for me. Bill mentions it because the bad guy, a despot, is Mark Ruffalo, playing against type. Bill quoted a report on CNN:

[A]s he drew upon a range of real world despots to form the character, Ruffalo found himself considering how: “They all end the same way.” “I mean, it might be brutal on the way to getting there, but all of these guys end the same way. It’s not sustainable,” Ruffalo told CNN on the red carpet, in London’s Leicester Square. “And I think that’s kind of one of the nicer things about the movie, is that, in the end, the people always win. It just takes some time and some suffering—horrible, you know, terrible things. But we gotta remember that we always win and they always lose. They’re too selfish, they’re too self centered, they’re too arrogant, they’re too stupid, they’re too insane for them to triumph,” added Ruffalo.

I like that sentiment, but it isn’t always true. A despot has been in control of China for 75 years. A family of tyrants has been in control of North Korea for nearly 80 years. However, in the case of America our current tyrant is indeed too selfish, too self centered, too arrogant, too stupid, and too insane. In another Cheers and Jeers column Bill wrote about the winners in this year’s contest by the Minnesota Department of Transportation’s name a snowplow contest Some of the winners:

We’re Off to See the Blizzard Plowabunga! Don’tcha Show I Came, I Thaw, I Conquered

White people’s beliefs have value

Before the election the nasty guy frequently said he knew nothing about Project 2025. Emily Singer of Daily Kos reported he has “nominated at least seven people who either directly contributed to the document or who promoted it” with more people on the short list for other positions. Howard Lutnick, the nasty guy’s co-chair of his transition, had said Project 2025 is too “radioactive” for any of its people to be nominated for the cabinet. Lutnick is now the nominee for the Department of Commerce. The nominees from Project 2025: + Russ Vought wrote the chapter on how the president can amass more power by purging federal employees who are insufficiently loyal. His also a Christian nationalist. He is nominated for the director of the Office of Management and Budget. + Brendan Carr, currently an FCC commissioner, wrote the chapter on the FCC. He is nominated to be the FCC chair. + Tom Homan is listed as a contributor to Project 2025. He was a part of the inhumane family separation policy in the nasty guy’s first term. He’s nominated to be the border czar. I don’t think that’s currently a job title. + John Ratcliffe was director of national intelligence in the first term. He is a Project 2025 contributor. He’s nominated to head the CIA. The nasty guy praised him for “telling the truth” about Hunter Biden’s laptop. + Pete Hoekstra is currently the chair of the Republican Party in Michigan. He took over after the previous chair, a MAGA person who made a mess of things. So he’s seen as the calm establishment guy. Yet, he is listed as a Project 2025 contributor. He’s nominated to be ambassador to Canada. + Karoline Leavitt was a campaign spokesperson and is nominated for White House press secretary. She appeared in a Project 2025 training video to discuss how a loyalist should navigate working for the federal government. + James Braid worked as deputy chief of staff for JD Vance’s Senate office. He starred in Project 2025 videos on how to get its agenda through Congress. He’ll be the liaison to Congress to get the agenda passed. Not counted in the nominees and new hires is Vance, who is only one step away from Project 2025. The head of the project wrote a book and Vance wrote the foreword. So what’s this about the nasty guy knowing nothing about Project 2025? A week ago an Associated Press article posted on Kos reported that the nasty guy named several nominees for financial, health, and national security positions. I’m interested in only one of them, the guy nominated for Treasury Secretary. He’s Scott Bessent. He’s of interest because he’s gay, with a husband and children. The AP article also says he is closely aligned with Wall Street. Because of that he’s seen as a “safe” pick. He is also an advocate for deficit reduction and he has said that means slashing government programs while in favor of extending tax cuts for the rich. This guy has made a big change. He had donated to Al Gore’s presidential run and worked for George Soros, a big supporter of Democrats. At some point he switched to supporting and advising the nasty guy. In a pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin included a quote I found worth mentioning. It is by Mark Hertling of The Bulwark:

The inculcation of personal values, or the understanding of organizational values and values-based decision making, are not as prevalent as they may need to be. I’ve taught values-based leadership and decision-making to healthcare professionals and MBA students. When I begin teaching each class, I ask, “What are your personal values, and do they align with your organization’s stated values?” Every time, I’m met with mostly blank stares. The same seems to be true in government. A few years ago, I was discussing some issue or another with a member of Congress. I asked him why he held a particular position on the issue, and he responded, “Because I support American values.” When I asked which specific value that policy was connected to, he couldn’t name one.

In the comments exlrrp posted a meme:

Nasty guy: Elon you can’t sit there! Elon: It’s my presidency. I bought it!

Much further down is a Twonks cartoon with the caption “Freak out your new neighbors” and shows packing boxes labeled with such things as bowling balls, bagpipes, tap shoes, fireworks, crossbows, and crocodile food. Back in the middle of October Michael Harriot wrote a thread about “Race as an Economic Construct.” We’ve heard that race is a social construct and he wrote most social constructs are economic constructs. Most non-white school districts are underfunded. Some say it’s partly due to schools being funded by property taxes and a home in a black neighborhood is worth $48K less than the same home in a white neighborhood. So those schools there get less money. The big question: Why haven’t we fixed this? We as a society have agreed that black children are less valuable. It’s the only explanation. Through our history if there’s a problem we wanted to solve we did it. We’re not even trying to fix this one. Now think in terms of effort and return on effort. One would work a bit extra for a big boost in pay. But what if that increase went to your child and not you? What if it went to a child you didn’t know? Would you still work extra if the increase went to a black child? Harriot turned to belief economics. White people’s beliefs have value. The nasty guy made white people believe immigration was a big problem, when unauthorized immigration is down. Same with the economy, same with crime. White people think crime is getting worse when it is dropping. But white fixes to crime harm black people. Politicians and media focus on white people’s beliefs and not black people’s reality.

People had cultivated the habit of apathy

A couple days ago my friend and debate partner sent an email saying he had received emails that say computer hacking experts think the presidential election was cooked in the swing states. The fraud was done through votes that were entered electronically without a matching paper ballot. They were “bullet ballots” with a vote for the nasty guy but no votes for any other races. He asked if I had heard anything about it. I replied that I hadn’t. Shortly after replying to my friend I saw an email that mentioned bullet ballots. That email is from Gaslit Nation. As part of an episode’s description are notes for the show. That includes a link to an article posted on Free Speech for People. It describes a letter from computer hacking experts warning Harris of the ways the vote tally could be hacked and that she should ask for recounts. The article summarizes the letter saying that after the 2020 election nasty guy operatives accessed voting equipment to get copies of its software. In the years since they could have studied it for vulnerabilities, ways to introduce malware. While this sounds dire, the letter does not allege specific misdeeds or say whether or how the vote count was affected. It only says election fraud is possible and that a recount is highly recommended. I then got a link to an article on Snopes, the site dedicated to affirming or debunking internet stories. I’ve referenced Snopes in the past, though not for several years (is it now owned by msn?). This article is by Jordan Liles and is in response to allegations by Stephen Spoonamore made in a letter to Harris and posted on Spoutible that made much more specific descriptions of bullet ballot counts, which are high enough to overturn the election. The lengthy analysis by Liles, which I scanned, but did not entirely read, essentially says Spoonamore’s numbers don’t add up and he doesn’t back up his statements. Spoonamore made a claim of a particular count of ballots that voted for only president, but reported state statistics are well under the claimed number. Irontortoise of the Daily Kos community (not verified by DK staff) that (in two parts, here and here) linked to the Snopes report. They also ran the numbers and concluded the number of bullet ballots this year is not far from historical rates, which means there weren’t many extra bullet ballots and they weren’t enough of thems to change the election. Emily Singer of Kos wrote about Matt Gaetz’ withdrawal from the nomination for Attorney General. Singer said that withdrawal was actually pushed by the nasty guy, who recognized there are enough senators to block confirmation and they weren’t going to change their vote. Singer said Gaetz’ departure a mere eight days from nomination is out of character for a wannabe strongman who made “fight” his motto. It is also surprising the nasty guy didn’t use his threat of recess appointments, though Republicans have been telling him they won’t let him shred their advice and consent power. All this is typical for a man known for chaotic decisions. That prompted Jessica Sutherland of Kos to wonder which of the nasty guy’s other hasty and problematic picks will fall next. Sutherland lists plenty of reasons to reject Pete Hegseth for Defense, Robert Kennedy for Health and Human Services, Kristi Noem for Homeland Security, Linda McMahon for Education, Mehmet Oz for Medicare and Medicaid, Sean Duffy for Transportation, Tulsi Gabbard for national intelligence, and Elon Musk for that made up department. Maybe Republicans will assert themselves and reject them all. This morning Tamara Keith of NPR talked about the speed of the announcements for various cabinet positions. She also talked of the things the nasty guy has not done. There are three documents the transition team has not yet signed. The documents are not named. They were instituted after the disputed 2000 election shortened the transition time and also after the issuing of a report on the Sept. 11 terror attack which emphasized the need to have a fully functioning government as quickly as possible. They were designed to make the transition go smoothly. The FBI (still controlled by Biden) isn’t doing background checks on the nominees, something the Senate has required. There seems to be no effort to get the nominees properly vetted before confirmation hearings in January. In addition to the FBI check each nominee is supposed sign an ethics agreement that says they have resolved conflicts of interest, such as divesting stock or ending a business relationship. Since this takes weeks it is usually done before the nominee is announced. In 2017 many nominees were delayed because of the process. Did the nasty guy learn the wrong lesson and instead of starting earlier is trying to circumvent the process? Does he know some of them will not meet ethics rules, which his Department of Justice will not prosecute? So will the Senate demand these background checks and ethics declarations? We’ll see. In a pundit roundup for Kos Chitown Kev quoted several people with interesting views. Heather Digby Parton of Salon wrote:

But for all the nuts and kooks Trump is appointing to some of the top jobs to accomplish his revenge agenda, there are some areas where he's stocking the administration with people who are determined to fulfill their own. Many of them are Project 2025 veterans.

So much for the nasty guy claiming he had nothing to do with Project 2025. Makena Kelly of Wired looked at one of those nominations. This one is Brendan Carr to head the Federal Communications Commission. Carr wrote the Project 2025 chapter on the FCC. And it looks like Carr, in addition to giving communication companies all the goodies they’ve been asking for, wants to transform these companies into speech police. Sam Wolfson of the Guardian discusses how destructive the “manosphere” might be because of its ability to corrupt youth. This couples with many people getting their news from influencers, rather than actual news sources, which I mentioned yesterday.

It’s not on one channel on a DirectTV box, but its audience is far bigger, potentially reaching 10 times as many people [as Fox News]. It’s an amorphous network of podcasts, YouTubers, Twitch streamers and meme accounts from Kill Tony to Joe Rogan to Dilley Meme Team. They encompass entertainment, comedy, sport, health, relationships – but a distrust of the Democrats and the mainstream media permeates them all. Like Fox News and conservative AM radio, the audiences of these podcasts are scared about a changing world, but their fears are very different from those of older viewers and listeners. They’re less susceptible to bogeymen stories of violent migrants, socialism or kids watching pornography (they are the kids watching pornography). They’re more worried about money in politics, ongoing wars, the #MeToo movement, and liberals who can’t take a joke. They’re also curious about heterodox thinking, history and the environment.

Kev objects to the word “heterodox.” These people are saying the same old stuff supremacists have always said. They simply have the luxury of being able to blast it out. Kristen Ghodsee of The New Republic discussed the people who lived behind the Iron Curtain and the dangers of withdrawing from public life.

Yes, escapism through art, culture, and nature helped East Europeans persevere despite the many hardships of life in a command economy. But it also left them uniquely unprepared to deal with the sudden changes that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall. Because people had cultivated the habit of apathy, they stood helpless as the lofty promises of free markets and democracy descended into kleptocratic chaos.

If you must retreat into a private sphere, do it with cherished others. Binge watch with a friend. Play board games. Stay active in your faith community. “Practice ‘scruffy hospitality’ by inviting friends and neighbors over even when your house is a mess and you can only serve a frozen pizza.” Joe Stanley-Smith of Politico Europe discussed a memoir by former German Chancellor Angela Merkel and what she had to say about the nasty guy. A bit of it:

“He judged everything from the perspective of the property entrepreneur he had been before politics,” she wrote of Trump. “Each property could only be allocated once. If he didn’t get it, someone else did. That was also how he looked at the world.” “For him, all countries were in competition with each other, in which the success of one was the failure of the other; he did not believe that the prosperity of all could be increased through co-operation.”

In the comments exlrrp posted a meme: “Let me get this straight, you want to know what is on Hunter’s laptop but not what is in the ethics investigation on Matt Gaetz.” Dennis Goris posted a cartoon of two men in a bar. One says, “After I posted the cartoon I realized my mistake was assuming disdain for Nazis was universal.” Another meme posted by exlrrp: “It’s really something to watch the party whose supporters poop on the floor in the Capitol and wipe their feces on the wall tell us which bathrooms to use.” A cartoon by Drew Sheneman shows a whale talking to a dolphin, “The oil companies want you to worry about theoretical wind turbines when our stomachs are full of actual plastic.”

He knows that his picks are too extreme for confirmation

The voters chose the nasty guy a second time less than ten days ago. Already I see I won’t be able to keep up with the news. I won’t keep up with what I see as the bits of news worth writing about. For example, in contrast to eight years ago the nasty guy is being quick about announcing his picks for various administration positions and for his cabinet. Alarming, but not surprising, that all the names mentioned so far are horrible people. I don’t have the time to list them all. I will mention a few – which means they’re the most alarming. Lisa Needham of Daily Kos reported the nasty guy will probably have no difficulty getting his choices for the 1,200 positions that need Senate confirmation. The Senate is in Republican hands and it appears the filibuster for confirmations has already been eliminated (or was never there). And if the Senate balks, there is the Federal Vacancy Reform Act that allows for “acting” cabinet members. These are supposedly limited to 210 days, But last time the nasty guy switched people around and the Department of Homeland Security had three acting secretaries, so no official head for 440 days. An advantage of the “acting” secretary is they’re more easily fired if they aren’t sufficiently loyal. Or, like last time, he could leave positions vacant, grinding agencies to a halt.

But that’s exactly what conservatives want. They hate agencies because agencies have a nasty habit of creating regulations on things like limiting pollution or trying to make things better for trans kids. Gutting the administrative state means Trump will never have to deal with pesky experts again. Instead, we could experience conspiracy theorist and all-around weirdo Robert F. Kennedy Jr. running the FDA. If Trump wants it that way, it’s likely impossible to stop him, even if Republican senators came together to block someone who thinks wi-fi causes cancer, Trump can just go around them. It’s definitely time to expect the absolute worst.

Emily Singer of Kos reported, prior to the Senate voting a new Majority Leader...

“Any Republican Senator seeking the coveted LEADERSHIP position in the United States Senate must agree to Recess Appointments (in the Senate!), without which we will not be able to get people confirmed in a timely manner,” Trump wrote in a post on X. “Sometimes the votes can take two years, or more. This is what they did four years ago, and we cannot let it happen again. We need positions filled IMMEDIATELY!” ... So the fact that Trump is demanding the Senate allow recess appointments is a likely sign that he knows that his picks are so extreme that even a GOP Senate wouldn't confirm them. ... The three Senate Republicans running to replace Mitch McConnell as leader all quickly came out to say they support Trump’s demand to make recess appointments—a bad sign for anyone hoping that the Senate would serve as a backstop to Trump’s dictatorial impulses.

With Congress becoming nearly a year-round body there may not be a recess to allow making a recess appointment. Needham reported that various government institutions are trying to protect themselves from the nasty guy’s efforts. The military is one she focused on. How will they be called on to deport millions of immigrants? Will they be housing deportees at military bases? Will they be called on to stop domestic protests? How are the generals and grunts to figure out which orders are legal and which are illegal – they are required to disobey illegal orders but face harsh consequences of they disobey a legal one. But, how to tell? Walter Einenkel of Kos reported:

A disturbing report from The Wall Street Journal says that Donald Trump’s transition team is drafting an executive order to create a military review body that could allow his administration to remove three- and four-star officers more easily. Purportedly, this “warrior board” would consist of retired senior military personnel. The Journal, whose reporters have seen a draft of this order, says it allows the removal of officers “lacking in requisite leadership qualities” as quickly as 30 days from their review and could force them to retire. The speculation that this board would be a way for Trump to create a military that is loyal to him above all else is not far-fetched.

He has talked about his admiration for Hitler’s generals. On Tuesday Oliver Willis of Kos reported there are signs Elon Musk is trying to assert control over the Republican Party. He reportedly spent $200 million to support the nasty guy in the election. Part of that was through his use of X to support his guy through lies, conspiracy theories, and attacks. Then Musk announced his pick for Senate Majority Leader before the nasty guy did, who chose the same candidate. Thankfully, that candidate lost (which is not a way of saying the guy who got the job will be any good for the country). There are also stories of Musk exerting influence, though the stories may have originated from Musk. Also on Tuesday an Associated Press article posted on Kos reported:

President-elect Donald Trump on Tuesday said Elon Musk and former GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy will lead a new “Department of Government Efficiency" — which is not, despite the name, a government agency. The acronym “DOGE” is a nod to Musk's favorite cryptocurrency, dogecoin. Trump said in a statement that Musk and Ramaswamy will work from outside the government to offer the White House “advice and guidance” and will partner with the Office of Management and Budget to “drive large scale structural reform, and create an entrepreneurial approach to Government never seen before.” He added that the move would shock government systems.

The Department of Government Efficiency doesn’t exist, at least not yet. So how does Musk and the rest fit in with the Administration? Likely they’ll be an outside think tank issuing pronouncements on how government departments should be funded and which are terminated. Or... Willis suggests that Musk has been put in charge of a blue-ribbon commission, a long Washington tradition of creating a panel to address a problem and that issues a report months or years later when it can be ignored.

There are already signs from within Trump world that Trump wants to get rid of his growing Musk problem. Politico is now reporting that insiders close to Trump believe Musk has “become almost a comical distraction,” citing his habit of “hanging around Mar-a-Lago” and sitting in on high level meetings and giving feedback nobody asked him for.

The nasty guy has traditionally given his big donors access to power. So Musk is only the latest to step up to the trough. This announcement of Musk’s new fake department fits in the nasty guy’s love of a good show to make a grand proclamation that turns out to be nonsense. This one appears to put Musk in his place. But did he get the message? Einenkel reported Musk is changing the terms of service for X. The new terms say if users want to sue the company they must do so in one of two Texas courts stocked with nasty guy appointees. In response to that and to the general awful quality of the site journalists and news organizations are pulling out. The Guardian has said it will no longer post on X, though users may share articles there. Journalist Don Lemon, who is in the midst of a lawsuit against Musk for alleged breach of contract, is also leaving. Singer reported:

On Wednesday, Donald Trump appointed Rep. Matt Gaetz as attorney general. The Florida Republican, accused of child sex trafficking, is a Trump loyalist who has made it his mission to protect Trump at all costs. He would be the country’s top law enforcement official. ... Gaetz’s nomination is completely out of left field.

Gaetz had been under the investigation by the FBI for years of alleged child sex trafficking. They declined to file charges. He’s also being investigated by the House Ethics Commission – more on this in a moment. Gaetz was instrumental in getting Kevin McCarthy removed as House Speaker. He is well known for stirring up big trouble for the House, apparently for the sake of stirring up trouble.

Hill newspaper reporter Emily Brooks reported that there was an “audible gasp” in the room where House Republicans are meeting to nominate their leadership slate for 2025 when Gaetz’s nomination was announced. It’s despicable nominations like Gaetz’s that make it clear why Trump wants to shred the rules and bypass the Senate to simply install his picks in key administration roles.

Yeah, a smarmy guy under investigation nominated to be the top law enforcement official. Einenkel had more to say about Congress’ views on the nomination of Gaetz. Some members say they will absolutely not vote for him. Other say he’s the nasty guy’s pick and we must support the nasty guy, showing how completely they’ve sold themselves. And Sen. Susan Collins is “shocked.” One hopes that is higher than “concerned.” She was “concerned” about the nomination of accused sexual predator Brett Kavanaugh’s to the Supreme Court and voted for him anyway – and got a sizable campaign donation haul. Singer reported that just hours after Gaetz was nominated for AG he resigned from Congress. He didn’t wait to be confirmed for the new job. There wouldn’t be a reason for the hasty exit, would there? Yeah, there is. The House Ethics Committee was set to release its report on Gaetz in two days. It is described as “highly critical.” But with Gaetz no longer a member of the House the Ethics Committee no longer has jurisdiction over him and the investigation is closed. Democrats are saying there’s a difference between losing jurisdiction and thus no longer able to issue punishment and being able to issue the report. Democrats want that report issued anyway. I’ve since heard that Republicans in the Senate also want to see that report before they take up Gaetz’ nomination.

Ultimately, Trump wants Gaetz as his attorney general to carry out his agenda of punishing his perceived enemies, and releasing the ethics report into Gaetz’s conduct would jeopardize that nomination. However, one glimmer of hope for the decent people who want to see Gaetz fail is that Gaetz's fellow Republican lawmakers absolutely hate him. Ohio GOP Rep. Max Miller said on Wednesday that Gaetz is "literally worse than gum on the bottom of my shoe," adding that Gaetz is "a complete weirdo."

John VandeHei and Mike Allen of Axios explain more about the nasty guy and Gaetz. Here’s a bit of their article.

Get used to this. It's your future foretold: On some topics, Trump wants to seem reasonable. On others — like anything related to his suspicion of a hostile "deep state" — he demands his own personal, controllable wrecking ball. Gaetz, 42, is a wrecking ball, head to toe. Oh, and arguably the most despised one among elected Republicans. But Trump doesn't care, advisers say. ... Republicans hope Gaetz is simply a sacrificial sucker, put up to be rejected so Trump can smuggle through a controversial but more acceptable alternative. Perhaps. But Gaetz is a Trump favorite and Mar-a-Lago regular. Trump has assurances from Senate Republican leaders that he can use a controversial workaround, recess appointments, to smuggle in unpopular picks, at least for a few years.

In the comments of a pundit roundup on Kos exlrrp posted a meme and a cartoon. The meme shows a scene from the end of the movie The Planet of the Apes (it came out in the early 1970s) in which the main character encounters the Statue of Liberty half-buried on a beach. The added words say, “Well, at least now we have the backstory...” The cartoon by Sipress shows a woman talking to a man, saying, “My desire to be well-informed is currently at odds with my desire to remain sane.” Further down Marlene Robertson posted the word for the day:

kakistocracy, noun, a state or country run by the worst, least qualified, or most unscrupulous citizens.

I suggested getting a passport now in case you need to flee later. Madisonian of the Kos community included a link for details, though added five important reminders. 1. Apply now. Don’t wait. The process can take months and applications from nervous fellow citizens will produce a processing logjam. 2. Take a money order for the exact amount. 3. You will need a valid ID and a certified copy of your birth certificate. Take the required photos in the required format or take extra cash for a photo service fee. 4. Check whether you need an appointment or can just walk in. 5. Verify all your documents are in order and all the forms are filled out correctly. I’ll add one more. When I last renewed the place that handled it (I’m pretty sure it was a post office) was allowed to collect a processing fee. Take cash for that too.