What I'm reading today... February 18, 2025
Only 1,432 days to go...
“Dear Trump voter,
I know many, if not most, of you are reveling in the complete disruption of the first three weeks of Trump 2.0. I get it. He sold you on a campaign of retribution and abolition of anything having been supported by the previous administration. He is delivering on that promise. But I cannot help but ask myself how long the euphoria will last. Sure, it is easy to be giddy about executive orders that identify any non-white male’s success as simply the product of a diversity hire or college admission. It is deserved justice to have those pesky prosecutions of police beaters of Jan. 6 wiped clean and the unfortunate victims of legal weaponization set free. It is even a secret pleasure to watch those conspiratorial bureaucrats in the federal government get their comeuppance as they are summarily fired for no cause except doing their jobs. One question: how exactly is this making America great again?
Maybe I am biased because my wife and I both suffer from an incurable form of Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma, but I do not see the future benefit for this country of cutting billions of dollars from the vital cancer research at the National Institutes of Health all because a researcher’s report contains the word “diversity.” I hope you never need the services of this organization or the services of any number of other health care institutes like the Shriner’s Hospitals or St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital that receive funding and research support from NIH.
Trump’s agenda has nothing to do with making the lives of average Americans better. Ask the thousands of auto workers who may lose their jobs in electric vehicle battery plants or electric vehicle charging station manufacturing facilities how they are doing these days now that Trump has stopped their funding by freezing all disbursements of monies from Biden’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and Inflation Reduction Act. Ask the Midwest farmers who are losing $2 billion to $2.5 billion in markets for their grains due to Trump’s shuttering of the U.S. Agency for International Development. If past is prologue, he will try to make this up by using tax dollars to pay the farmers off through an emergency subsidy.
Where I really get confused and need some help understanding the motivations for your vote for Trump is in the area of government services more broadly. The decades-long mantra of political conservatives is that government isn’t the answer, but rather the problem. So, if that is the case and smaller, less capable government is the utopia of the future, can you please explain why there is a rush to Washington with hat in hand demanding the federal government do something to fix it every time there is a natural disaster or economic setback like massive banking system failures?
The wolves have been baying at the doors of FEMA because the recovery from Helene is not complete yet. Trump’s answer is to shut FEMA down. Let the states handle emergency response and recovery. While you are pondering the future under this system let me remind you that your Republican state legislature refused to pass recovery money for Western North Carolina unless it included a series of political reorganizational tricks to completely hamstring the incoming Democratic Administration. Do you seriously believe that the good ole boys in Raleigh give one hoot about what happens out here in the wilderness of Western North Carolina?
I understand the frustration many of you feel regarding the sense of being left behind in the past 40 years of supposed economic boon times. I would submit that your beef is not with the policies that provide aid in times of trouble, fund life-saving research, or pay for bureaucrats to make sure you get your Social Security checks and that the national security apparatus of this country is capable of responding to the threats against us. Your beef is with Republican politicians who have not learned the easy lesson that making their wealthy friends rich doesn’t make the rest of us better off. You voted for this mess. Enjoy the show before the waiter brings the check. It’s going to be a doozy.”
Source: Opinion: A letter to Trump voters: how are Trump's actions making America great again? by Brad Gutierrez- Guest opinion in the Citizen Times
Thought for the day in honor of his birthday…
“To suppress minority thinking and minority expression would tend to freeze society and prevent progress. Now more than ever we must keep in the forefront of our minds the fact that whenever we take away the liberties of those we hate, we are opening the way to loss of liberty for those we love.” ~Wendell Willkie
What I read every day…
Quote of the day:
“I don’t know who wrote the speech. It is the kind of thing Tucker Carlson could have written, and Carlson is a fool.”
~Roger Wicker, the Republican chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee
What I’m reading today…
Revealed: Trump’s confidential plan to put Ukraine in a stranglehold: Panic in Kyiv as US president demands higher share of GDP than Germany’s First World War reparations
Donald Trump’s demand for a $500bn (£400bn) “payback” from Ukraine goes far beyond US control over the country’s critical minerals. It covers everything from ports and infrastructure to oil and gas, and the larger resource base of the country. The terms of the contract that landed at Volodymyr Zelensky’s office a week ago amount to the US economic colonisation of Ukraine, in legal perpetuity. It implies a burden of reparations that cannot possibly be achieved. The document has caused consternation and panic in Kyiv.
The Disrupter in Chief Can’t End a War Like This
The administration’s messaging was inconsistent and chaotic, but one thing was clear: Both Trump and Hegseth had floated significant concessions even before formal negotiations were underway. Europeans can see what’s happening. They are realizing that they’re going to have to bulk up their defenses and are now planning to perhaps fight alone, without the United States, in a potential future conflict with Russia.
Top Social Security Official Leaves After Musk Team Seeks Data Access
The resignation of Michelle King, the acting commissioner, is the latest abrupt departure of a senior federal official who refused to provide Mr. Musk’s lieutenants with access to closely held data. Mr. Musk’s team has been embedding with agencies across the federal government and seeking access to private data as part of what it has said is an effort to root out fraud and waste.
Trump Media says it lost more than $400 million last year
The parent company of President Donald Trump’s social networking site Truth Social says it lost $400.9 million last year and its annual revenue declined 12% to $3.6 million.
All the President’s Sock Puppets
Perhaps Mr. Bove and others wouldn’t mind filling federal prosecutors’ offices with sock puppets and ideologues. In the long run, the plan is probably self-defeating. All federal prosecutors operate within a legal ecosystem that demands they act with integrity and exercise independent legal judgments. Diktats from Washington can override these constraints. The responses of judges, juries and witnesses may be harder to control.
Trump to Fire Hundreds From FAA Despite Four Deadly Crashes on His Watch
“Staffing decisions should be based on an individual agency’s mission-critical needs. To do otherwise is dangerous when it comes to public safety. And it is especially unconscionable in the aftermath of three deadly aircraft accidents in the past month.”
Trump "has signed an executive order to rename the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. The body of water has shared borders between the U.S. and Mexico. Trump's order only carries authority within the United States. Mexico, as well as other countries and international bodies, do not have to recognize the name change. The Gulf of Mexico has carried that name for more than 400 years. The Associated Press will refer to it by its original name while acknowledging the new name Trump has chosen. As a global news agency that disseminates news around the world, the AP must ensure that place names and geography are easily recognizable to all audiences."
Dismantling of federal efforts to monitor election interference creates opening for foreign meddling
The Trump administration’s downsizing and disbanding of federal agencies has hit efforts that improve election security and monitor foreign influence. That could create gaps for America’s enemies to exploit the next time the country holds a major election.
How Trump’s One-for-One Tariff Plan Threatens the Global Economy
The order that Mr. Trump signed on Thursday directed his agencies to study how to proceed with reciprocal tariffs. That raised the risk of increasing costs for American consumers at a time of deepening concern over inflation, challenging the president’s own vows to bring down prices on groceries and other everyday items. And that heightened the possibility of greater delay from the Federal Reserve in lowering borrowing costs.
Elon Musk’s DOGE team may need a crash course in COBOL
DOGE has also said it aims to “modernize” government systems, which implies altering the code within those government systems. That could bring members of the organization face-to-face with something they’ve potentially never seen before: COBOL, or common business-oriented language.
Ha! I learned COBOL in 1976 and programmed in it. As I thought, the government systems are really old! I wrote about this a while back in my post called, Bugged
Pushing Back Against Abuses of Power
The fear is palpable in neighborhoods like Little Village, a vibrant community near downtown Chicago known as the “Mexico of the Midwest.” A local city council member, Byron Sigcho-Lopez, explained that ICE raids have created a climate of terror, causing residents to skip medical appointments, stay away from school and limit visits to local businesses. Sigcho-Lopez described a father with no criminal record who was arrested by ICE after dropping off his child at school.
Donald Trump's executive orders threaten containment of deadly viruses
“Local health officials and doctors depend on the CDC to get disease updates, timely prevention, testing and treatment guidelines and information about outbreaks. Shutting down public health communication stops a basic function of public health. Imagine if the government turned off fire sirens or other warning systems.”
Decency in the time of monsters
We can maintain our ideals by demonstrating them whenever and wherever we can — showing courage in the face of fear, protecting the vulnerable in the face of brutality, practicing kindness in the face of cruelty, and preserving what is left of our democracy in the face of tyranny. We can maintain decency in the time of monsters. We must. It is the first step in resisting the monsters, and the prerequisite for overpowering them.
Trump Fired, Then Unfired, National Nuclear Security Administration Employees. What Were Their Jobs?
The National Nuclear Security Administration maintains, refurbishes and keeps safe the United States’ more than 3,000 nuclear warheads. It also supervises the production of new nuclear warheads. On Thursday, about 300 probationary employees at the nuclear security agency were fired, according to people familiar with the matter…On Friday night, at least some of the laid-off staff members at the agency were told to come back to their jobs…NBC News reported that the agency struggled to reach out to some employees that it wanted to reinstate, unable to find contact information for those workers after they were shut off from their federal government email accounts. The Trump administration tries to bring back fired nuclear weapons workers
What I am watching…
“I’d be foolish if I wasn’t afraid…”
“Living in Donald Trump’s head, you discover there is not very many things in there… a putter, a cheeseburger, a porn video and somebody else’s credit card…he’s always focused on the most basic and visceral things… his various appetites, his various needs. You can understand him through two lenses: self-aggrandizement or self-preservation and very little else.”