Project 2025 Tracker

 

Tracker (with detailed objectives listed).

Texas tragedy

 

Looks like it might have been simply a natural disaster, and blame isn't helpful.  But, things aren't going to improve under the Trump regime.

Water rose fast along the Guadalupe River, causing more than two dozen deaths. Local officials said they couldn’t have seen it coming.

[...]

A flood watch was issued by the National Weather Service at 1:18 p.m. that predicted up to 7 inches of isolated rainfall early Friday morning in South Central Texas, including Kerr County.

[...]

The Guadalupe River gauge at the unincorporated community of Hunt, where the river forks, recorded a 22-foot rise in just two hours, said Bob Fogarty, meteorologist with the NWS Austin/San Antonio office.

[...]

At least 32 people were killed by the flooding. Dozens more remained missing as of Saturday morning, including 27 young girls from a Christian summer camp, according to the Kerr County sheriff’s office.

The scale of the disaster — and the fact that major flooding is common in this part of Texas — has raised questions over whether more could have been done to warn people in the path of the flood waters.

Local and state officials were quick to point to weather forecasts that did not accurately predict the intensity of the rainfall.

[...]

“The heartbreaking catastrophe that occurred in Central Texas is a tragedy of the worst sort because it appears evacuations and other proactive measures could have been undertaken to reduce the risk of fatalities had the organizers of impacted camps and local officials heeded the warnings of the government and private weather sources, including AccuWeather,” AccuWeather Chief Meteorologist Jonathan Porter wrote in a statement Saturday morning.

Nim Kidd, chief of the Texas Division of Emergency Management, on Friday pointed to NWS forecasts from earlier in the week that projected up to 6 inches of rain.

[...]

The most serious warning came at 4:03 a.m. when the NWS issued a flash flood emergency, warning of an “extremely dangerous and life-threatening situation” and urging immediate evacuations to higher ground.

[...]

The flooding came amid concerns about staffing levels at the NWS, after the Trump administration fired hundreds of meteorologists this year as part of Elon Musk’s DOGE cuts. The NWS Austin/San Antonio office’s warning coordination meteorologist announced in April that he was retiring early due to the funding cuts, leading to speculation that vacancies could have impacted forecasters’ response.

The NWS forecasting offices were operating normally at the time of the disaster, said Greg Waller, service coordination hydrologist with the NWS West Gulf River Forecast Center in Fort Worth.

“We had adequate staffing. We had adequate technology,” Waller said. “This was us doing our job to the best of our abilities.”

Staffing data provided by the NWS’s labor union showed the San Angelo forecasting office currently has four vacancies out of 23 positions and San Antonio has six vacancies out of 26.

Legislative Director Tom Fahy said that was adequate to issue timely forecasts and warnings before and during the emergency.

At least one independent meteorologist working in Texas echoed that statement, writing on his website that “we have seen absolutely nothing to suggest that current staffing or budget issues within NOAA and the NWS played any role at all in this event.”

[...]

Between 2 and 7 a.m., the Guadalupe River in Kerrville rose from 1 to more than 34 feet in height, according to a flood gauge in the area.

  Texas Tribune

UPDATE 06:07 pm:

 

UPDATE 07/06/2025:

Before taking any questions, Texas’s governor Greg Abbott, the homeland security secretary Kristi Noem, the Texas senator John Cornyn and the representative Chip Roy opened today’s press conference with long statements of self-congratulation and praise for the response from local, state and federal officials. They also repeatedly thanked Donald Trump in effusive terms.

[...]

Much of the statements from Abbott, Noem, Cornyn and Roy focused on praising their own efforts, thanking Trump and the White House and encouraging people to pray.

“Prayer matters,” Abbott said. Prayers “could have been the reason why water stopped rising”.

[...]

There are still 27 people missing from the flooding event. Of the bodies recovered so far, five adults and three children are still unidentified.

  Guardian

Then maybe more than 27 are still missing?

Dalton Rice, the Kerrville city manager, said that 27 girls from Camp Mystic, a Christian summer camp along the Guadalupe River, are still missing. Other people who were in the area but not at the camp could also be missing, Rice added.

[...]

Following two long statements from the Texas governor and US homeland security secretary praising their own response efforts, the senator John Cornyn took the mic at the press briefing and began: “My thanks to President Trump.”

Next to speak is representative Chip Roy, who opened with a joke, saying: “Before I was crazy enough to run for Congress” he spent a lot of time in this area. He goes on to praise the governor and the homeland security secretary.

[...]

Officials have said the floods were not predicted by forecasts and that the river rose by 26ft (8 meters) in just 45 minutes. A local weather forecaster disputed that and said that warnings were issued hours before the disaster.

UPDATE 07/06/2025:

Huh, what?

UPDATE 07/07/2025:

UPDATE 07/08/2025:

UPDATE 07/11/2025:

UPDATE 07/12/2025:

Coincidence?

 

Vought is a dipshit.

Project 2025: Mission Accomplished

[Russell] Vought, a self-described Christian nationalist who served as the director of the Office of Management and Budget in Trump’s first term, was known for his provocative public pronouncements. But he went even further in private, envisaging a Trump presidency in which regulatory agencies would be shut down and career civil servants would be too depressed to get out of bed.

“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” Vought said in one recording. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can't do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so.

“We want to put them in trauma.”

  ProPublica

Mission accomplished. And a reminder that Christian Nationalists are not Christian.

“We have detailed agency plans,” he said. “We are writing the actual executive orders. We are writing the actual regulations now, and we are sorting out the legal authorities for all of what President Trump is running on.”

Who claimed, while running, that he didn't know anything about Project 2025.

“The stark reality in America is that we are in the late stages of a complete Marxist takeover of the country,” he said in one speech. “Our adversaries already hold the weapons of the government apparatus, and they have aimed it at us. And they are going to continue to aim it until they no longer have to win elections.”

Every accusation is a confession.

A lot of what we do as reporters is akin to squinting through opaque windows at events unfolding in a very dimly lit room. We can see who is inside and how they’re moving, but our lack of context often prevents us from understanding what’s really happening. We default to assuming that the future will be roughly like the past, guessing that, say, Trump 47 will be roughly like Trump 45 with fewer guardrails.

[...]

Vought has returned to his post as the budget office’s director, and his plans for eviscerating entire agencies and decimating the morale of federal workers have turned into reality. Trump 47 looks very different from Trump 45, just as Vought told his audiences that it would.

[...]

It seems appropriate to give Vought the last word since the worldview he described has proven so accurate. What sounded grandiose in the preelection days seems today like a reasonable summary of the path Trump and his allies have chosen.

“We are here in the year of 2024, a year that very well [could] — and I believe it will — rival 1776 and 1860 for the complexity and the uncertainty of the forces arrayed against us,” Vought said, citing the years when the colonies declared independence from Britain and the first state seceded over President Abraham Lincoln’s election.

“God put us here for such a time as this.”

New world order

 

The Project for a New American Century didn't get off the ground, and its spawn - Projecte 2025 - is practically a 180 turn.

Project 2025

year ago, Paul Dans was chief architect of what was shaping up to be the blueprint for Donald Trump’s second term. Eight months ago, he was sent into MAGA exile.

Dans was the director of Project 2025 at the Heritage Foundation when, midway through the 2024 presidential campaign, he and his program started to become a huge political liability for Trump. Democrats warned of Project 2025’s “radical” agenda, saying it would mean a ban on abortion, elimination of LGBTQ+ rights, and complete presidential power over federal agencies along with the elimination of some of them, including the Department of Education. At the Democratic National Convention, Saturday Night Live’s Kenan Thompson held up a giant-size replica of the 900-page Project 2025 book and quipped, “You ever see a document that could kill a small animal and democracy at the same time? Here it is.”

  Politico

And, apparently, Americans didn't give a shit. Or didn't believe it.

Dans became a sacrificial lamb. Pressured to resign from Heritage, Dans left in a fit of pique at the end of July, and he later criticized LaCivita and campaign co-head Susie Wiles for campaign “malpractice.”

Now Dans, who lives in Charleston, South Carolina, and works as a lawyer and government relations consultant, is letting bygones be bygones and says he’s delighted with the extent to which Project 2025 has, in fact, become the Trump administration’s playbook.

This week, in his first in-depth interview since Trump returned to the presidency, Dans effectively confirmed what Democrats were saying all along and Trump himself denied: There really is almost no difference between Project 2025 and what Trump was planning all along and is now implementing.

[...]

“It’s actually way beyond my wildest dreams,” Dans said. “It’s not going to be the easiest road to hoe going forward. The deep state is going to get its breath back. But the way that they’ve been able to move and upset the orthodoxy, and at the same time really capture the imagination of the people, I think portends a great four years.”

Minor point: Did he really say "road to hoe" or is that the author's (and proof reader's) ignorance showing? You don't hoe roads. You hoe rows.

We are going on our 250th birthday here in a little over a year from now. And the last 100 years have been a great diversion from the enduring constitutional structure of this great American experiment in democracy. That is, we needed to undertake a restoration of democracy by slamming the door shut on the Progressive Era. What happened dating back to FDR, but even before that with Wilson, was a way of thinking that an expert class would superintend life for the rest of us, that the common man didn’t have the sense to rule his own destiny. The entire artifice of the federal government had been built over the last 100 years in essentially a very anti-democratic manner.

So...switching parties in charge of doing that very thing to ultra-conservatives is the answer?

Our Constitution vests the executive power squarely and solely in the president of the United States. And over the last 100 years, these encroachments on that power were not only unconstitutional, they were anti-democratic and lacking in moral legitimacy in the sense that the people vote every four years for a president to put forward new policy, and if his policies are being impeded by an unelected, unaccountable bureaucracy, that is a problem that needs reformation.

Rule by one man is democratic? AND constitutional? It's my understanding - correct me if I'm wrong - that the people elect representatives to check and balance any new policy put forward by the president they elect. And, the unelected, unaccountable bureaucracy - have you heard of Elon Musk and DOGE?

Dans is not only a dick, he doesn't even have the capability of reasoning.

The interview transcript is here.

School House Rock 2025

 

They never learn

 No matter how many times Trump punks people, there are still people lining up to be punked.

We, the people are speaking

If Congress critters are cowards, the people are not.

In Trump 2.0, it's permitted to run down people protesting in the streets.  These are brave citizens.  

UPDATE 12:20 pm:

Project 2025 underway

Why do so many of President Trump’s multitudinous executive orders fly in the face of extant legal principles? Are they the result of incompetence? Is the administration laying the groundwork for test cases in an effort to expand executive power in the Supreme Court?

Below we assess a third possibility: the administration doesn’t care about compliance with current law, might not care about what the Supreme Court thinks either, and is seeking to effectuate radical constitutional change.

  Executive Functions

I'd go with that. Continue reading.

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

UPDATE 12:03 pm:

America for sale

Ask yourself why it's so important for them to have Hegseth at Defense.

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

UPDATE 11:46 am:

It's Sunday

The [Supreme Court] has not yet finished slating all of its cases for the term, but its docket is already filled with cases that cover a range of important areas, and this bodes ill for millions of people.

[...]

Even if Kamala Harris does manage to clear every hurdle to the presidency—if she manages to win both the popular vote and the Electoral College, and those votes are honored—it is important to understand that the Supreme Court’s dread work of dismantling democracy and setting back the rights of women, people of color, and the LGBTQ community to the prevailing standards of 1859 will continue apace. The deck has been stacked, and the court’s six conservative justices are not going to let this opportunity go to waste. They have an agenda—a mandate, you could say—and it looks a lot like the one that’s gotten a lot of attention in recent months: Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership, the conservative plan to take over the federal government and remake the executive branch in a Christofacist image should Trump win.

[...]

For over 50 years, [Project 2025's author - the Heritage Foundation] has worked to pack the judiciary with extremist Republican judges in an attempt to wipe out the civil and social progress of the 20th and early 21st centuries. And it has largely succeeded.

This success may help to explain one of the few gaps in the 900-page Project 2025 document: the absence of a detailed section dedicated to the Supreme Court. I believe this is because the fascist blueprint assumes that the court has already been captured. Project 2025 is in motion in the courts, and it will continue to move forward there, with or without Trump in office, because its core tenets are supported by a majority of the Supreme Court’s justices.

[...]

Over the coming term and the many that follow, we will see Project 2025’s agenda play out in three key areas: the administrative state, environmental regulations, and civil rights.

[...]

At the beginning of the summer, the Supreme Court overturned Chevron deference—the legal doctrine that courts should defer to executive agencies on matters concerning the interpretation of congressional statutes [...] and the lower courts are already weighing a number of cases that seek to punch holes in the regulatory authority of agencies like the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF).

[...]

[W]hen it comes to the environment, there are already two cases on the court’s docket that will let the conservative justices fulfill their role as unofficial members of the fossil fuel and chemical industries. In City and County of San Francisco v. Environmental Protection Agency, the Supreme Court will likely decide that its members, not environmental experts, should determine just how much pollution and human filth can be dumped into the ocean. And in Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County, Colorado, the conservatives will likely choose to weaken the role of environmental-impact studies.

[...]

Nor will the court stop at deregulation and environmental abuse. One of Project 2025’s main goals is to reassert and safeguard white supremacy by overturning any law or policy meant to even the playing field.

  Elie Mystal

Continue reading. 

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

Climate change is a hoax

Tennessee and North Carolina are also experiencing immense devastation from Hurricane Helene.  And Project 2025 will devastate FEMA.

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

Get it while you can

Red states are going to hurt if Trump takes office.

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

Project 2025 would cut Head Start

And not just that, but do away with the Department of Education.

No.  It's easily explainable: polling shows educated people are anathema to Republicans.

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

Labor Day 2024

Bullets

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

Project 2025 leader

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

Project 2025 puts the final nail in the middle class coffin

While Kamala Harris wants to build the middle class again.

Texas isn't waiting for Project 2025 to be formalized

The New York Times reported that [87-year-old] Lidia Martinez, a retired educator who lives in San Antonio, was shocked last week when officers came to her house at 6 a.m. and informed her that they were searching her residence because she had filed a complaint about residents in her area getting their mail-in ballots.

Martinez says she's spent decades volunteering with the League of United Latin American Citizens to help seniors in the Latino community register themselves to vote.

"“I go to a lot of senior events; I explain to them what they have to do,” she told the Times. “I’ve been involved in politics all of my life.”

The officers at her house asked to see the voter registration cards that she had collected. After informing them that she didn't have them at her house, they proceeded to search the property and left with her laptop, her phone and some documents.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton defended the raid as part of an election integrity investigation.

  Raw Story

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

UPDATE 09:58 am: