…I mentioned a bill hicks bit the other day…& I have another running on a loop in the back of my head this morning…can’t find the part I want as a clip…but…it comes a bit after this, I think

…&…roughly…it goes like this…”people tell me, ‘quit talking about kennedy, bill…it was a long time ago’…& I say, ‘fine…but then don’t talk to me about jesus'”

Responding to news that the special counsel Jack Smith had dropped all charges against Donald Trump for his attempt to overturn the 2020 election and retention of classified information, Dan Goldman, a prosecutor turned New York Democrat and member of the House oversight committee, lamented “a shame for justice in this country”.

“It establishes that Donald Trump is above the law,” Goldman told CNN. “The supreme court put him above the law [by ruling that he had “absolute immunity” for official acts] but now he appears to escape full accountability for what were crimes charged by a grand jury.”

Goldman rejected the argument that by re-electing Trump, the American people had acquitted him of all charges.

“I think what was very clear is that people voted for Donald Trump because they thought that he was going to improve the lives of the middle class, and perhaps in addition that he would secure the border,” Goldman said. “They did not vote for him to dismantle our democracy, to attack the constitution, to politicize all of our agencies, and certainly not as a referendum on his criminal cases.

“Those cases should have been played out in a court of law … and Donald Trump should not have been able to run out the clock.”

…shoulda…woulda…coulda…uhhh…oughta?

To many Americans on Monday, “no one is above the law”, however, no longer seemed like a legal reality. Three weeks after Trump defeated Kamala Harris, Smith dropped 44 charges against him: four for election subversion and 40 for retention of classified records.

Smith said he was following Department of Justice policy, which says a sitting president cannot be charged. He also said he was acting “without prejudice”, which meant the cases could be refiled after Trump leaves power.

…do I think it matters because I have faith that once he’s out they’ll break that out again?

…not so much…but…does it matter that it isn’t “with prejudice”?

…kinda…yeah…in a bunch of the same ways I’m not gonna let it go…even if eventually I learn to go on about it less…kinda like how the reporting is on what smith had to say but…the way it works is it isn’t his call…that’d be the judge…& if any judge on any of these cases dismisses “with prejudice”…well…I generally hope for bad things to happen to terrible people…it’s a failing of mine

Steven Cheung, Trump’s spokesperson, celebrated “a major victory for the rule of law”, adding: “The American people and President Trump want an immediate end to the political weaponization of our justice system and we look forward to uniting our country.”

…sure…I don’t get to not share my world with people who think that isn’t a steaming pile of counter-factuals posing as a dopamine-spiking statement of tribal supremacy for all manner of addicts living in denial…but to suggest that me & stevie there live in the same world is like saying steve lives in the world I have to share with him…&…all signs point to not-so-much?

Nonetheless, among Trump’s opponents, the mood was one of despond. The writer Tom Nichols, a conservative Trump critic, summed up: “Mission accomplished. He ran for [president] to stay out of jail, and here we are.”

…ok…so it at least overlaps with tom’s…& I don’t claim I see it any clearer than either of them…seems more likely on a statistical basis that none of us do…it’s not like one person could wrap their head around the whole thing, anyway…so that’s not really a controversial claim…

Vance said: “If Donald J Trump had lost an election, he may very well have spent the rest of his life in prison. These prosecutions were always political. Now it’s time to ensure what happened to President Trump never happens in this country again.”

…still…in the land of the willingly-ignorant…the tunnel-eyed man is…telling it how it is

In a post to his own social media platform, Trump said all cases against him, including civil suits in New York resulting in multimillion-dollar penalties, were “empty and lawless”, orchestrated by his Democratic foes.

…if “is” means “a chain of fallacious reasoning can be translated into the ways it’s not true being reduced to the status of meaningless by an outcome that would be consistent with this otherwise hellaciously backwards statement“…it’s…sorta true…but adjusting for that shit…for four fucking years…when they’re gonna be…these four fucking years…is gonna be fucking exhausting, y’all…& maybe my brain is trying to get me to create a “don’t talk to me about jesus” macro just to be able to hive that part off to sub-routines & free up the higher cognitive functions just to stop me winding up in a persistent vegetative state on account of my memory buffers being in a constant state of overflow that’s crashing the system

“It was a political hijacking,” Trump said, “and a low point in the history of our country that such a thing could have happened, and yet, I persevered, against all odds, and WON.”

Democrats decry ‘sham for justice’ after prosecutors drop Trump charges [Guardian]

…&…maybe this approach is more constructive than anything I can currently get traction with

Democrats’ much-touted ‘ground game’ was a disaster. Here’s how to fix it [Guardian]

…the smoke coming out of my ears is presumably on account of I’m mentally smoking the tyres but I haven’t shot the brake because I’m trying not to jump the gun & give the race away before it even starts

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has used chemical weapons and waged a bloody campaign of ethnic cleansing in his brutal suppression of an uprising that has killed half a million people, many of them civilians. In Myanmar, military dictator Gen. Min Aung Hlaing and his army have been responsible for bombing civilian villages in its war against the long-persecuted Rohingya minority. And in Sudan, a new potential genocide threatens the Darfur region’s Black Masalit people at the hands of Gen. Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, who is known as Hemedti, and his Rapid Support Forces.

…you see

So who does the International Criminal Court wish to arrest for war crimes? Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense chief Yoav Gallant.

…I hear you WaPo…much the way I keep hearing about flavors of “derangement syndrome”

Israel is not a member of the ICC, and the warrants will have limited practical effect, except possibly preventing Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Gallant from traveling to countries which have pledged to enforce it. We say possibly because countries in the past have promised to uphold ICC arrest orders only to ignore them when convenient. Several European countries and Canada have suggested they would uphold the latest arrest orders; others have balked.

But the arrest orders undermine the ICC’s credibility and give credence to accusations of hypocrisy and selective prosecution. The ICC is putting the elected leaders of a democratic country with its own independent judiciary in the same category as dictators and authoritarians who kill with impunity. Israel went to war in response to the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023, which left 1,200 Israelis dead and another 250 taken hostage, around 100 of whom still remain captive. The ICC’s arrest warrant for one of the authors of that massacre, Hamas leader Mohammed Deif, who was probably killed in an Israeli airstrike months ago, looks more like false equivalence than genuine balance.

…lotta small-print when invoking “the rule of law”, these days…eh, WaPo…maybe it’s not really true that the american edition of the meaning of “rule” looks like taking the most piss out of the idea of the “law” part…but…that’s what you get for being the class clown, I guess

Israel needs to be held accountable for its military conduct in Gaza. After the conflict’s end — which is long overdue — there will no doubt be Israeli judicial, parliamentary and military commissions of inquiry. Israel’s vibrant, independent media will do its own investigations. Some Israeli reserve soldiers have already been arrested over accusations of abuse against Palestinian detainees. More investigations will follow. The ICC is supposed to become involved when countries have no means or mechanisms to investigate themselves. That is not the case in Israel.

The United States has long had an ambivalent relationship with the ICC. It refuses to be a party to the court for fear of politically motivated prosecutions against U.S. service members overseas. But at times it has encouraged the ICC and lent support, as in the case of war crimes against Russian President Vladimir Putin for his invasion of Ukraine.

…so…don’t take this the wrong way, WaPo

Four ways Trump will undermine the authority of Congress [WaPo]

…we can still be friends

The lessons in progressives’ hidden 2024 victories [WaPo]

…but

“Welcome to thought-police Britain” […uh, huh…sure, WaPo…dude, I could make your fucking head spin about how that shit works with that much history accreted on the working parts…but you’re the one trying to break my mind…I ain’t like you, ‘cus…you fucking your own head up & I’m just trying not to get caught in the wreck…only…if I may?]

…at the same time

Texas woman dies after receiving inadequate treatment for a miscarriage [Guardian]

…WaPo?

President-elect Donald Trump, in his first term, took a hostile stance toward the ICC. Mr. Trump imposed travel sanctions against ICC prosecutors and staff, which President Joe Biden lifted. The ill-considered arrest warrants against Israel only give Mr. Trump a new reason to halt American cooperation with the court, at a time when it’s needed for Russia, Sudan, Myanmar and conflicts elsewhere that atrocities are being committed with impunity and the victims have no other recourse.

The International Criminal Court is not the venue to hold Israel to account [WaPo]

…go fuck yourself with that shite…america lost its opinion-counting rights about the appropriate venue to decide the matters of judgement you might invoke an international court to determine according to a rule of law when it squarely strove to turn the whole thing into an exercise in displacement activity by pretending it’s just the conversation at the kids’ table while the grown-ups are in the room where it happens…into which it just lobbed a super-annuated toddler whose only setting is “meltdown”…for the second fucking time…while expecting people to treat it like it’s where to look for the sort of leadership that breaks ground in the directions we need to drag this sinking fucking boat we’re all on…& not the poster-child for chumming the fucking waters…& now…with round two of the guy fixing by all indications to make that we-forget-so-soon era of the US look like the poster child for responsible global stewardship steaming down the pike?

One reason why Trump managed to win the election in spite of his four felony prosecutions is because self-imagined journalists never fact-checked him when he falsely claimed his prosecutions – all of them – were partisan witch hunts.

This article, from WaPo, is a remarkable example.

It confirms what was already clear – that Trump will attempt to fire everyone who worked on his own criminal prosecutions – and adds that Trump also intends to use DOJ to investigate his claims of voter fraud that his own DOJ already debunked in late 2020. It describes this fascist project to politicize DOJ as evidence of his “intention to dramatically shake up the status quo in Washington.”

The post notes that Trump, “lost to Joe Biden but continues to insist [the election] was stolen from him in key battlegrounds,” and describes that, “neither the president-elect nor his allies have ever provided evidence to prove their claims of voter fraud.”

But it doesn’t mention that Bill Barr’s DOJ already did investigate Trump’s claims of election fraud. And although Josh Dawsey is bylined, the story mentions none of Dawsey’s several stories on contractors whom Trump hired in 2020, who looked for – but could not find – any evidence to back these claims (one two three).

More tellingly, WaPo’s four journalists don’t bother to correct Karoline Leavitt’s objectively false claim that, “President Trump won the election in a landslide,” a claim that could be easily debunked by pointing out that Trump won’t break 50% of the popular vote and won by less than 2%.
[…]
Worse still, they repeated Trump’s claims of grievance over and over, saying only that it is a frequent claim, not a false one.

…I imagine I’ll go back to getting used to feeling like I’m being gaslit by reality

There are plenty of ways people who chose to engage in journalism could debunk these false claims: to point out that Joe Biden was also investigated for retaining classified documents, to describe that a former Trump US Attorney, Robert Hur, found characteristics that distinguished Trump’s case from Biden’s, to explain what those distinctions were — Trump’s year-long effort to hide documents from DOJ. Regarding January 6, a journalist might explain that hundreds of other people were charged with the same main crime — obstructing the vote certification — as Trump was, but in his case the fraudulent certificates made the evidence even stronger.

…all due respect to dr wheeler…& that’s a lot of that…but…the lady’s even done a whole ball of thread podcast & even that doesn’t really have a realistic chance of unpacking how false a comparison the exercise involves on the one hand?

…just take special counsels…as “a thing”…cannon argued they aren’t canon…& with the case dismissed she faces…zero repercussions…maybe even negative repercussions in the sense that it probably qualifies as an asset if you think the positive outcome is her elevation to a more powerful sinecure with a lifetime guarantee against getting fired…that she’s definitionally less qualified for than the one she already demostrated she literally can’t do

…but…durham…whose appointment nobody has tried to argue was improper in that sort of headline-torquing way…he pulled shit like cracking privilege for shit congress wouldn’t normally surrender & even with those sorts of advantages in the big finale where he alleged & inferred & implied all manner of huge game-changing conspiratorial shit…what he charged…& appealed aquittals for even when backed up by verdicts in cases that made his asked & answered…was less than what poor ol’ bob lamented in the chapters of his report where he mentioned in passing that lots of the declination decisions would look different if they had information they knew for a fact they’d been obstructed & obfuscated into not being able to obtain in ways that themselves looked totally chargeable if it weren’t for the pesky detail that policy dictates not mortally wounding the authority of the office by suffering to have a sitting president sitting to answer a case against them…& the corollary where to get to make available…even in the near-certain knowledge that not enough people will care to give it even a once-over while it gets mis-represented into the sort of hand-grenade that doesn’t go off…any of that shit…you can’t drop that sub-set of charges & sally forth to try to prosecute every other motherfucker involved…under the auspices of a DoJ in thrall to the lowest bar(r) the AG has thus far managed to provide…so the best you can do is drop all of them & present your heavily-redacted homework to an uncaring universe

…he just charged a couple or three folks with not being able to make him unable to call them liars even once…no matter how tortuous the contortions required to frame that that way…& that privileged material he got that jack & bob didn’t get a sniff of anything like?

…that shit made him look wronger than shit six ways from sunday

…while…on the other…little-fingered…hand

But it’s all buried under dumb repetition of Trump’s attack on rule of law, as if the attack were true. WaPo just couldn’t be bothered to conduct the least little act of journalism on that point, and so simply repeated Trump’s false claims of grievance with no correction.

And as such, the article itself becomes part of precisely the outrageous abuse it describes: the creation of a false myth of grievance by burying (literally in Trump’s case and figuratively in the case of four people calling themselves journalists) the reality about rule of law.

https://www.emptywheel.net/2024/11/23/wapo-enthusiastically-joins-trumps-attack-on-rule-of-law/

…you know what…I promise I won’t go all anyone-who-says-they-get-quantum-physics-doesn’t again…but…this is due…& it’s not impossible I’m still warming up

…it’s also possible I don’t have enough coffee in the house this morning

…so…I’ll loft this as it stands & then see if I can get my thinking to stand up long enough to see if it’s got legs?

…ok…let’s see now…don’t look now…but WaPo might be about to achieve critical mass & implode its critical faculties into a faculty that has a lot in common with a singularity at the event horizon

Our democracy needs a different model for journalism [WaPo]

…sure…that’d be keen…would do approximately jack shit about any of the stuff about any of this that guarantees we don’t fix it because that’s not possible while it remains securely unaddressed…but…if the view is all we get to adjust…sure…let’s fiddle with the bits that make it fuzzy until the edges get crispy…that’s right in front of our deep-fried face so it shouldn’t require much effort & that’s a bonus when you’re feeling listless & unmoored

Let’s begin by defining the term: Civic friendship denotes the friendship of citizens. Any hope of soothing the bitterness of our current politics hinges on it, on our ability to see one another as citizens and friends. Civic friendship is not the same thing as civil dialogue. There are many laudable efforts to encourage civil dialogue on university campuses and in other settings. But these are about how we interact, not about why we do or what we hope to achieve in our interaction. Without cultivating true friendship among citizens, the best we can hope for from civil dialogue is to be more polite about unbridged divides. Civic friendship requires civil dialogue but places it in a context of common purpose that can make civic engagement – especially our disagreements – not only polite but also productive.

…have fun with that WaPo…but I’m well past the end of my beginnings & into concerns about the beginnings of some pretty serious ends…so…if you wonder where the rest of us are at that left your audience looking thinner than a presidental coiffure

Civic friendship also differs from personal friendship. The philosophers of personal friendship, Aristotle and Cicero foremost among them, describe true friendship as a common pursuit of virtue or justice. Yet there is no polity of any size, at least in modern times, in which there is universal agreement on the nature of virtue – and the word “justice” is even more fraught. Moreover, there is no polity in which it is reasonable for all people to know one another in a manner that would enable any kind of personal friendship, least of all the highest form.

…let me put it this way, WaPo…I see your augustine of hippo

In his magnum opus, “The City of God,” Augustine describes two cities: the heavenly city and the earthly one. Citizens of the heavenly city, who are united in the love of God, are simply pilgrims in the earthly city, which concerns the mundane affairs of this world. Augustine is sometimes regarded as an antipolitical thinker in that the City of God is, ultimately, the only city that matters. But this pilgrimage through the earthly city occurs for a reason. Augustine is indifferent neither to its affairs nor to the obligations of its citizens.

Instead, he offers a laudable yet grounded means of understanding the friendship of citizens. Cicero had defined the commonwealth as a community of people united by justice. If so, Augustine replies, there is no such thing as a commonwealth, for there is no such thing as complete justice in the earthly city. What there can be, he argues, is civic peace. This civic peace limits politics to “a kind of compromise between human wills about the things relevant to mortal life.” Civic peace must occur among citizens, and Augustine’s definition of a political community helps us understand what citizens are: “If one should say, ‘A people is the association of a multitude of rational beings united by a common agreement on the objects of their love’, then it follows that to observe the character of a particular people we must examine the objects of its love.” In other words, if citizens love the same things, there can be peace and friendship — and because the mortal concerns of the earthly city are amenable to compromise, that can suffice.

…but…if we’re going there?

Civic friendship, then, is a condition in which citizens share basic commitments — the same “object of their love” — and the resulting harmony provides a basis for political conversation and even sharp political dispute. The more I trust that others share my desire to assess the prospects for civic friendship, for example, the more comfortable I am debating the topic, the more committed I am to civility and the less I feel inclined to perceive offense gratuitously.

The real antidote to political bitterness [WaPo]

…a contemporary of cicero was…catullus…he wasn’t a rapper or anything…but he fucked with a verse form or two in his day…& there’s one of his about a politician cicero would have known…& how no matter how inappropriate it might be in context…he was forever grinning a pearly rictus at all & sundry…for which the part that they never ask you to translate in the exam question provides the following explanation

still I wish you wouldn’t grin forever everywhere;
for nothing is more senseless than senseless giggling.
Now you’re a Celtiberian:
and in the Celtiberian land early in the morning they piss and scrub their teeth and pinky gums with it,
so that the higher the polish on your teeth,
the more it proclaims that you have drunk your piss.

catullus, carmina, canto 39

…the grin & bear it school has a lot in common with the fabled stiffness of the upper lip…but…quit huffing that piss-breath in my direction or I’m liable to do something inadvisable

President-elect Donald Trump is coming for the executive branch. Eight years ago, he thought he could shake up federal agencies and left after four years with little to show for it. This time, with Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy leading the charge, he is talking about even more radical changes. Will he do any better the second time around?

…narratively…sure…but in fuck-your-dumbass-meme-acronym-donkey-&-shiba-inu-show terms…that’s all fucking window dressing unless the entire enterprise is predicated on the sort of abuse of power that is objectively terrifying in a contemperaneous geopolitical context vis à vis the whole continued survival of the species thing…so…also…fuck you, no…& fuck you some more for making me have to be the one to point it out in a footnote next to no fucker will bother to follow through by so much as a click’s breadth

…so…while I’m wasting my breath on this hiding to nothing…here’s something else the hounds bay at like there’s something up there out on a limb even if you can’t see what the critter looks like

…remember alpha bank?

…it was a lot of informational tsunamis ago…but…it was in the news for a hot minute back in the day

John Durham and Newly-Sanctioned Alfa Bank’s Filings: “Almost like they were written by the same people”

…&…people talked a lot of shit about it

Trump Server Mystery Produces Fresh Conflict (Published 2021) [NYT]

…but

The Misleading Claim That Durham’s Reference to Trump White House Records Was Misleading [National Review, Jul ’22]

…well…it made a difference who you asked, let’s say

The Dishonest and Incompetent FBI Work John Durham Learned to Love

…but in among the details…durham argued that the evil deep state did a watergate on his boy while he was in the oval office…it might have been during the part where a judge was bench-slapping him about how him taking it upon himself to say that another ruling by a judge that already happened that said the investigation that provided the underlying discovery materials which he tenuously & tangentially miscontrued in what by rights is a laughable effort to pretend that claim about hacking his administration being a thing either hillary or obama or some cat-stroking bond villain did…was duly & properly predicated & not the witch hunt it needed to be for the premise of his whole argument not to fall apart under its own unsupported weight

…it might not…it’s truly hard to ping the right coordinates in the morass of confected bullshit looking for this small an example of purchase[*]

…but…this much is fact that as I understand it all parties in the court in question were prepared to stipulate…& it has to do with a thing called a “yota phone“

…you probably never heard of them

What happens when you splice a smartphone with a Kindle? [The Verge May ’15]

…but the guy who came forward to the FBI who also worked for the democrats in a capacity with which the FBI were entirely familiar before that…who durham was trying to parlay into his whole conspiracy angle…the part where him & the alpha bank servers getting pinged from secure locations like the executive office of the white house overlap…those yota phones pop up in that…it gets a mite technical but imagine a scenario in which…say…there are some in-laws in a loose mob-cosplay network of mutually beneficial familial grifting operations…& one of the ones that married into MAGA is a graft from the alpha bank tree…if you feel like it you can sift through all the dross & find the names & where that part lines up with the truth

…& say one of those has such a device…which were more popular in the russian “sphere of influence” & would have worked fine as a phone there…but in the US couldn’t get an OTA network to give it the 4G time of day…but could still make calls if it had wifi

…well, then it would be innocuous in the sense of not necessarily part of a cyberattack for that to wind up on a wifi network phoning home for a handshake with the alpha bank servers…that’s an innocent involuntary ping…& social engineering isn’t a relevant factor in state capture game theoretics so nobody fucking cares about that or how or why it happened…least of all durham…the part he wants to use as a fulcrum despite having no place to stand while trying to shift the world on its axis…is that the people who logged that traffic…over a timeframe that included instances of said device (possibly devices – this was a while ago & I’m no funes the memorious) showing up in some sensitive networks before, during & after his transition into office as being evidence of culpability on the part of democrat-affiliated targets on charges that by his own reasoning would be more readily & solidly applicable to the guy he says they hacked post jan ’16 by cunningly beginning a process to look into stuff the judges judged to need looking into after they knew they’d lose in…well, they got a go-ahead in ’15 & that took some lead-time…where’s that flowchart that explains the movie primer got to…I need to see a simplified version of how this is all supposed to work the way the national review & the federalist said it did…since enough people think that’s the reality of the thing to be an IRL “reality”…to at the very least make me sound like the one that’s either distorted or dysfunctional depending on your preference…& how annoying I am to you

…that part isn’t actually disputed…might seem like if so much turned on it that you’d need a different composition to your fulcrum…but maybe it’s all about how long you can persuade how many people to believe your lever is?

…maybe a lever you can lean on clear from st petersberg to the resolute desk like a red phone in a will-it-be-nuclear-winter movie…or one that glows in the dark all the way from the west end to the top of the eastern bloc…or…rots away invisibly in the ether like a lost data packet…or a dead link…but…hey, maybe not so let’s not upset ourselves thinking about it too hard when we can keep playing the game we know the rules to & everyone knows which bits to join in yelling…otherwise what’s the point in claiming to be civilized?

…besides…russia hoax^®…amirite?

Trump isn’t the first president to try to shrink or reorganize the executive branch, or the first to claim to be leading an assault on waste, fraud and abuse that would deliver significant cost savings and more efficient government. Richard M. Nixon had his Ash Commission. Ronald Reagan had the Grace Commission. Bill Clinton had his National Performance Review, known as “reinventing government,” or “REGO,” led by then-Vice President Al Gore.

Trump, Musk and Ramaswamy have huge ambitions and no humility about what they are undertaking. What they have talked about amounts to a wholesale attack on federal agencies designed to eliminate thousands of regulations, reduce the federal workforce by an order of magnitude that could cripple the delivery of vital services, and effect cost savings that would amount to nearly one-third of the federal budget, or the entire discretionary part of the budget and then some.

…how does the song go?

…everything still remains the same

Previous attempts to make the government smaller or more efficient have fallen far short of what was promised. Of those earlier efforts, Gore’s reinventing government initiative might have been the most successful. The Grace Commission, named for businessman J. Peter Grace, by contrast, came up with recommendations that promised $424 billion in savings over three years. Closer scrutiny by the Congressional Budget Office and the General Accounting Office (now renamed the Government Accountability Office) pegged the savings at about $98 billion. Most of what the Grace Commission recommended went nowhere.

Could that be the outcome for Trump in his second term in the White House, roughshod attacks with little to show for it? Experts say what Trump, Musk and Ramaswamy are talking about — both in terms of money saved and workforce reductions — is unrealistic and that they will soon bump into political and economic realities that will leave them far short of what they claim. That doesn’t mean, however, that at the outset the president-elect should not be taken seriously about how disruptive he will try to be in his efforts. Musk has claimed he can cut the budget by roughly $2 trillion, but analysts say that would require drastic (and unpopular) cuts in entitlements programs, defense or other vital services.

Trump has created what he calls the “Department of Government Efficiency,” or DOGE, which is not an official agency of government but simply a unit designed to empower Musk, the world’s richest person, and Ramaswamy, the entrepreneur and former presidential candidate, to begin their work. The two wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday that outlined their plan. It is worth a read for anyone wondering about their intentions.

Rhetorically, it is a call to arms “to cut the federal government down to size” and attack “the entrenched and ever-growing bureaucracy [that] represents an existential threat to our republic.” The plan is premised, in part, on recent Supreme Court rulings that limit the power of the agencies to write and impose regulations and that Musk and Ramaswamy say give the president considerable latitude to make big changes.

…so I guess I “remain the same”

Musk and Ramaswamy said they will serve as outside volunteers. They will oversee the hiring of “a lean team of small-government crusaders” who will work with “legal experts embedded in government agencies, aided by advanced technology, to apply these [Supreme Court] rulings to federal regulations enacted by such agencies.” They expect that work to identify vast numbers of regulations that can be eliminated — and that with that will come a reduction in the federal workforce.

The DOGE duo dispute what they say is conventional wisdom that says presidents can’t fire federal workers, that those protections are there to protect workers only “from political retaliation,” but not from broader reductions that don’t target individuals. Further, they say, the president has the power to make other administrative changes, such as the relocation of agencies outside of Washington, which likely would result in many workers choosing to leave government service rather than uprooting. Congress might want a word on anything like that.

…sitting here resting my bones [of contention]

Musk and Ramaswamy also said that their initiative would identify “pinpoint executive actions that would result in immediate savings for taxpayers.” Whether this is a scaling back of ambitions or an oversight in failing to cite the full scope of the cuts previously described isn’t clear.

…that I just can’t seem to stop going at like a dog

Musk has a reputation for cutting budgets or workers at companies he owns, including Tesla, X and Space X. A recent New York Times article said he was often willing “to cut too much rather than too little” and also described him as having spent six hours going line by line through Twitter’s budget with the company’s executives, ordering cuts along the way and brooking no resistance.

…like the difference in the way that the sort of overwrite-society’s-firmware-straight-to-prod fuck-knuckle-dragging fly-by-wire retooling mid-flight bluesky-moonshot mars-or-bust thinking from people who think if it doesn’t work you can just roll back to the snapshot of the system labelled “last known good” & start fucking it up again like it never happened…which is true for lots of stuff they regularly re-affirm in their lived experience…works with a thing we not only can’t do that with but where the equivalent of wiping it back down to the level of getting to pick & choose at the OS level like you’re *really* into linux & the world is your conky live desktop wallpaper…is going back to the fucking stone age…which…not entirely coincidentally…we have as the end-state of a piece of verbal shorthand about a thing we do enough of…to paraphrase a line from broken arrow…that it’s not clear if the thing that’s really scary is that it happens…or that it’s the sort of thing we have a name for that way

…I imagine I’ll probably end up trying to crack some marrow out of that for some self-indulgent delayed gratification at some point before my lights go out

…sometimes it seems like there’s four of those…& sometimes IYKYK…your guess is probably better than mine…but I know what it looks like I’m looking at to me…& I’m prepared to admit that that’s all I can claim to see better than anyone else…so I know I’m in no danger of looking fashion-forward any time soon?

Kamarck also cautioned the Trump team about its notion that the best approach is to rely primarily on people outside of government to lead the effort, if that is their plan. The Grace Commission did that, using people in the private sector to bring a business sensibility to the federal government. Gore’s operation worked closely with people in the agencies, which Kamarck argued produced better results. “The fat in the government is like the fat in good piece of steak,” she said. “It’s marbled through it.”

Musk and Ramaswamy claimed that with his electoral college majority and a 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court, Trump is poised for “a historic opportunity for structural reductions in the federal government.” In the face of expected opposition, they said, “We expect to prevail.”

Those words no doubt reflect the aggressive approach the president-elect and his advisers hope to take once he is sworn in. Meanwhile, executive branch employees are bracing for what could be coming and opponents are preparing to resist through legal and other channels. Whether Trump’s shock troops, led by Musk and Ramaswamy, are truly ready will be known soon.

Trump is coming for the executive branch. Does he know what he’s doing? [WaPo]

…gonna need you to define some bigger terms on the knowing & the doing there, WaPo…ol’ buddy, ol’ pal

Biden should pardon Trump [WaPo]

…&…you should have declared against him on the grounds that’s his only route to crossing the line without a guilty verdict & you know as well as I do how long the list is of how many things he’d need that to cover…but…keeping wishing in one hand, WaPo…& shitting in the other

Why the resistance went quiet after Trump’s victory [archive.ph of WaPo]

…& I guess we’ll all get to see what fills up with what & how breathing goes as that gets extrapolated

…but doubtless the new boss will be along to whip that through some crunchtime like nobody’s business & we’ll be first to market at the all you can eat buffet of…uhhh

World will be ‘unable to cope’ with volume of plastic waste in 10 years, warns expert [Guardian]

…loving it when a plan comes together?

Risk algorithm used widely in US courts is harsher than human judges [New Scientist]

…maybe not…everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth [like richard spencer]?

The delusions behind a bitcoin strategic reserve [FT]

…don’t push me, WaPo

…what do obscure fact patterns have to do with anything worth taking time out of your day for, anyway?

Huawei to launch phone with own software in sign of China-US splintering [FT]

…fucked if I know…eh, WaPo?

Trump keeps names of donors funding transition secret in break with practice [Guardian]

…how’s that different model for journalism working out for you, there?

Greg Sargent had a column proposing ways for Democrats to really challenge Pam Bondi at her confirmation hearing. He describes it as an opportunity to expose how badly she’ll be willing to politicize rule of law.
[…]
While I agree with Sargent’s premise — Democrats should treat Bondi’s confirmation hearing as an opportunity — I disagree with his proposed approach (and that espoused by Jamie Raskin, whom he quotes at length).

Sargent’s focus is on how Bondi would act under predictable eventualities.
[…]
But this is precisely the approach that failed with Bill Barr, who months after a contentious confirmation hearing, kicked off the process of politicizing DOJ.

Most tellingly, Barr was asked questions about the kind of foreseeable eventualities that Sargent describes (such as, pardons for January 6ers), and it did no good. Patrick Leahy, Amy Klobuchar, and Lindsey Graham all asked Barr whether pardoning someone for false testimony would amount to obstruction. Every time, Barr at least conceded the potential applicability of obstruction in that case. And then, just months after that hearing, when Barr wrote a declination memo for Robert Mueller’s obstruction charge, he simply ignored the pardons. He didn’t mention them at all. While it took years for us to learn how he had reneged on his own stated views (by simply ignoring them), those setting these expectations never found a way to hold him accountable for the dodge.

That said, January 6 Committee staffer Thomas Joscelyn, whom Sargent also quotes, gets a bit closer to the approach I’d recommend. Don’t ask Bondi whether she would do something; make sure you lay out her responsibility for inevitable consequences when things she’s likely to do have untoward effects.
[…]
Rather than asking Bondi about something we know will happen going forward (political violence from freed militia members), ask her how she’ll avoid the negative consequences Trump’s past actions already had. Rather than asking Bondi whether she’ll be responsible for Proud Boy violence when Trump pardons them, instead note that Bill Barr treated threats the Proud Boys and Roger Stone made against Amy Berman Jackson as a technicality, only to have them plan an insurrection 18 months later. “Bill Barr’s coddling of Trump’s far right extremists led to a predictable increased threat, an attack on the Capitol. How will you avoid the same mistake?” It uses the confirmation hearing to lay out the consequences of past corruption.

You can use this approach with pardons more generally. “Because Trump didn’t properly vet his pardons the first time around, at least seven of them quickly returned to crime, with many of them beating their spouses. How will you ensure that Trump’s bypassing of normal pardon protocol don’t put violent men back on the streets?” You can pick some of the January 6ers — like hardened criminal Shane Jenkins, who almost had a fundraiser at Bedminster, or NeoNazi Timothy Hale-Cusanelli, who did — to ask Bondi how coddling such criminals is consistent with the law-and-order promises she makes.

The difference, so far, is subtle: Using the hearing to show past consequences for Barr or Trump’s own failures, rather than generically predicting future woes.

But that difference becomes more important when adopting a more important focus for the hearing.

Like the legitimization of far right extremists that Joscelyn predicts, we can predict a number of other inevitable outcomes from Trump’s second term. The most important is that as billionaires like Elon Musk loot the government, government service will decline precipitously, only exacerbating the alienation of many of the people who voted for Trump. And when those same billionaires get impunity from Trump’s DOJ, consumers will have their lives ruined. But Trump will work hard to blame scapegoats: liberals, trans people, and unions, rather than the billionaires Trump chose to given direct control over the looting process.

Democrats need to build in accountability for the corruption from the beginning. They need to explain that a crash in life quality is the inevitable consequence of Trump’s corruption and — just as important because committed MAGAts are more likely to turn on others before they turn on Trump — his billionaire appointees and protected buddies.

And Pam Bondi offers a spectacular way to lay that out, because she has been involved in protecting the villains who harmed Trump supporters in the past.

https://www.emptywheel.net/2024/11/24/pam-bondi-offers-a-platform-to-expose-the-consequences-of-trumps-past-corruption/

…who doesn’t put long odds on any of the specimen questions marcy lays out from there showing up in more than a willing spirit when the weak flesh gets its moment in the spotlight?

…so…yeah…if “without prejudice” is going to be a hill & there’s dying going on…color me iwo jima & I’ll send you postcards…because my radio’s broke & I don’t know about no ceasefire but the jungle is trynna murder my ass…& needs must when the devil drives?

[*] …if you’re wondering what’s low-key been bugging you since at least this point…yes…if you use the co-ordinates & navigational techniques this explicitly implies…then it would indeed follow as a matter of implacable logic…that the russians watergated hillary for the daiper-don…ispo facto…can anybody say “collusion”?

…but…saying so is “treason®”…according to popular mandate…so…I’m the sucker…if that makes you feel better?