Friday, January 31, 2025

I used to think more of Adam Schiff


Oh, really?  

In the meantime, Musk is attempting a coup.



...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE 02/06/2025:  Finally, Adam wakes up.



Kudos once again to JBP



Trump 2.0 - Insanity beyond measure

Friday, January 31, is the worst day yet.  YET.








But none of that is the worst of what happened today.

This is...








Missing the point


I keep seeing this type of article and posting on social media:  Hahahaha, DeepSeek results in less than democratic responses.

Are they missing the point on purpose?

The fucking point is DeepSeek showed that working AI can be achieved for a fraction of a fraction of what the US techbros have been spending.

 ...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE 01:07 pm:


How about that?  We CAN do it for less money.  Whaddya know.

A bad policy looking for a reason to exist


Why is China getting off cheap? 


Oh.

Anyway, sorry, MAGA, your buying power is not going to get better. 


Killed more than a million of them through mishandling the Covid pandemic and cut taxes for millionaires?

And what are the Dems doing in Trump 2.0?



Is Trump abandoning his previous #1 talking point (look how much the stock markets like me!) and corporate money bags because he now has his phony crypto riches?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

MSM continue to bleed



Trump 2.0 - destroying air safety

The San Francisco Chronicle reported Thursday that beginning this weekend, the San Carlos Airport, which lies along the final approach to San Francisco International Airport (SFO), will no longer have anyone manning its control tower. The resignations came after the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) reassigned controllers' contracts to a firm that pays less.

Airport manager Gretchen Kelly said "understandably, all current controllers have declined [the firm's new] offers."

[...]

San Carlos Flight Center owner Alessandro Franco said air traffic control at the airport is "hugely important" due to its proximity to SFO and its typically busy airspace. Aircraft approaching the San Carlos Airport alternates between communicating with air traffic controllers at San Carlos and those at SFO. Now, he's worried the resignation of controllers will mean there is "another layer of safety that’s not going to be present."

  MSN
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Trump 2.0 - capture the justice and investigative arms of government

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
Several top FBI executives promoted by former Director Christopher Wray were told Thursday to resign or retire and that they will be demoted or reassigned if they don’t leave.

The purge of senior officials includes about a half-dozen “executive assistant directors,” who are some of the bureau’s top managers overseeing criminal, national security and cyber investigations. They are career civil servants, meaning they can't be fired without cause.

  NBC
Apparently they can.
A current FBI official told NBC News that the move would be “hugely disruptive,” while a former official who is talking to people at the FBI said there’s a lot of anger because the affected employees aren’t considered political figures in any way.
That's why they're being removed.
Trump fired 18 inspectors general last week, including watchdogs for the State, Defense and Labor departments and the Department of Health and Human Services.

[...]

The Trump administration has also fired career attorneys at the Justice Department who were involved in prosecuting him, raising alarms over his making good on threats of retribution against those who have challenged his conduct.
UPDATE 08:42 pm:


So I assume he got shitcanned.  Also, that's not a look I would have expected to see on a Feeb.  He looks like someone named General Beauregard.


Trump 2.0 - Destabilize the entire globe


Let's also be clear: This is illegal impoundment of money appropriated by Congress and Constitutionally required to be used according to the appropriation.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Trump 2.0 - Science is the enemy





Ready to have the national treasury depleted?

And by depleted, I mean robbed.
The highest-ranking career official at the Treasury Department is departing after a clash with allies of billionaire Elon Musk over access to sensitive payment systems.

[...]

President Donald Trump named [David] Lebryk as acting secretary upon taking office last week. Lebryk had a dispute with Musk’s surrogates over access to the payment system the U.S. government uses to disburse trillions of dollars every year.

[...]

When Scott Bessent was confirmed as treasury secretary on Monday, Lebryk ceased to be the acting agency head.

[...]

Officials affiliated with Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” have been asking since after the election for access to the system [...] — requests that were reiterated more recently, including after Trump’s inauguration.

[...]

Run by the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, the sensitive systems control the flow of more than $6 trillion annually to households, businesses and more nationwide. Tens, if not hundreds, of millions of people across the country rely on the systems, which are responsible for distributing Social Security and Medicare benefits, salaries for federal personnel, payments to government contractors and grant recipients and tax refunds, among tens of thousands of other functions.

[...]

Musk has sought to exert sweeping control over the inner workings of the U.S. government, installing longtime surrogates at several agencies, including the Office of Personnel Management, which essentially handles federal human resources, and the General Services Administration, which manages real estate.

  WaPo


...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE 10:39 am:



I have zero faith in Dems.

UPDATE 08:06 pm:  I was not making a joke about robbing the Treasury.  I just didn't realize it would be this quick and in this way.


The air crash over the Potomac

Greg Sargent spoke to Juliette Kayyem, former DHS official who looks at conditions that might have led to the crash that had trump "[seething] with anger at reporters who dared to ask tough questions about his claims." (Greg Sargent)
Sargent: This jet had 64 people on board and crashed into the Potomac River after colliding with a military helicopter at around 9 p.m. on Wednesday night. The helicopter appeared to be on a training flight.

[...]

Kayyem: The why is still being reviewed; obviously it’s just been a few hours. On the basic facts, American Airlines regional plane collided with an Army helicopter. Conditions were clear, as we know. The passenger jet from Wichita, Kansas, was just about to arrive at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, one in a succession of airliners landing about two minutes apart, and that’s not abnormal for national airport. The Black Hawk was on a very typical training mission from Virginia’s Fort Belvoir. And we had been told, and I think the basic census, both of them were on standard flight patterns, well known for the D.C. area. [...] That’s why the investigation has to determine what, in fact, happened.

[...]

There’s only three places where the error could have occurred, especially since we know that the circumstances were pretty normal: the pilot of the airplane, the pilot of the helicopter where there’s a lot of focus on what was going on, or something happened in the air traffic control room.

We have audio of the air traffic control room. It does not appear that someone wasn’t.... The helicopter pilot was notified of a visual concern. In other words, he needed visual on an airplane. He says he has it. We don’t know if he’s looking at the right plane. So in terms of miscommunication, the air traffic controller could have been more specific about which plane, or the helicopter pilot misunderstood it. Now that has nothing to do with any of the hirings that the FAA was looking at because in particular, all three of those positions—only three people who were in charge of that time—have to go through a training and standards process that are not diversity based.

[...]

The unsophisticated nature of how [Trump] deals with complexity is while most of us in the field are looking at this saying, We have a normal thing. Lots of traffic, that’s normal. Weather was normal. No suspicion of anything weird. And then a tragedy. What’s the why?, Donald Trump thinks he can answer that with his right-wing infused media consumption. He tries to fill the airwaves at a press conference that, while nothing should shock me now, I think I had forgotten how bad he is in this particular role of crisis management. [...] If you just go back to the Covid press conferences, this felt very similar to that: just a bunch of BS and then anger when those lies are confronted.

Sargent: So Trump immediately goes out there at a time when we really just don’t know a whole lot and blames Democrats and DEI for the crash.

[...]

He lumps himself in with a superior species of some amorphous type that who the hell knows exactly what he means, but I do think that there’s a deep racial component to it on some level. He’s also asked at one point what evidence he has that DEI hires were to blame, and he said, “Just could have been.” Really sloppy shit.

[...]

What actually happened over the last few administrations with the FAA?
Continue reading.  Or listen to it on Sargent's Daily Blast podcast episode.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.


UPDATE 08:32 am:



Hmmm.  Give me a second.


Trump is insane.  What else is new, Chris?   Also, surely  Biden and DEI are still somehow responsible for the helicopter flying too high.  


Yes.



UPDATE 08:48 pm:



UPDATE 02/09/2025:
[I]t turns out that the program to offer FAA careers to people with disabilities—the program Trump specifically decried yesterday—was a Trump administration initiative from 2019.

  Bulwark


Thursday, January 30, 2025

Not good, Dan


Right in the middle of a bird flu epidemic that is seeing markets with no eggs on the shelves and new cases of human infection.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Trump 2.0 (and all dictatorships) - Control the airwaves



Trump 2.0 in one picture


...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Universities once again for whites only


(click the graphic to enlarge)


...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE 01/31/2025:



They know what's coming


That should ensure the Republicans all vote in favor of her.  And, frankly, Trump is not going to come up with anyone who should be in that role even if it's not her.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

John R Lewis Voting Rights Act


Next up: SCOTUS.  Which is where they were headed when they brought the suit.  Bring a suit you know will fail in appeals court so that you can go to the Supreme Court of Donald J Trump with it, where you have a good chance of destroying democracy.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Kash Patel

Seeing clips of Kash Patel's confirmation hearing as FBI director, I have only one comment:  He is even more ridiculous than I was led to believe.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Trump 2.0 - Same as 1.0, Facts don't matter





Geography doesn't matter, either.


Dammit.  I was looking forward to somebody explaining to me how they make bombs from condoms.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Trump 2.0 - Tear it all down


...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.