BlueSky February 2025, Part 1

February 2025: our first full month of Trump 2.0 (and Musk 1.0). Once again, I'm splitting the BlueSky round-up into the first half of the month today, and the second half tomorrow. It's in reverse chronological order, starting from February 14. Tomorrow will cover February 15–28.

The month began with Elon Musk's takeover of the federal government and information coming out about his DOGE boys. They moved through various agencies: USAID was first. Trump declared tariffs on Canada and Mexico, and then backed off on them. He decided the Gulf of Mexico was newly renamed the Gulf of America. Near the middle of the month, the Department of "Justice" coerced New York City Mayor Eric Adams into a deal to get his federal charges dropped, and a bunch of U.S. attorneys resigned in protest. Oh, and Russel Vought was confirmed by spineless Republican senators as head of the Office of Management and Budget. And Tulsi Gabbard as DNI! There was criticism of Democratic leadership throughout for not doing enough to fight back, and particularly of electeds who continue to say they want to "work across the aisle."

As usual, I have moved some of the less timely images up or down in the order for better visual balance. Though there were many fewer images in these two weeks... everyone was feeling pretty grim.

Everything below the line is quoted from the attributed account.

___

The right keeps making clear how all our fights are connected. We need to make that clear in how we fight our fights.
David Kaib

The United States of America is coercing the mayor of a major city to follow policies by threat of criminal prosecution for unrelated corruption.
Domestic Enemy Hat @kenwhite.bsky.social

It’s very interesting how media outlets like 404 and Wired who do tech and not DC cocktail party circuit slop have covered the Musk angle best because their guiding light isn’t getting a ticket to next weeks book release party in Georgetown
Oliver Willis

Scientists think there's a decent chance that, if global temps rise 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels, it could trigger a cascade of tipping points that further accelerate warming, up to 5 or 6 degrees. AKA: "A cluster of abrupt shifts occur in ESMs [Earth system models] at 1.5 to 2ºC."
David Roberts @volts.wtf

The goal of organizing is not to convince your opponent. The goal of organizing is to defeat your opponent.
Angus Johnston

Biden:
- let's end cancer
Trump
- let's double cancer
Greg Greene

Guy On Doomed Planet Mostly Concerned With Skin Color Of People In Movies:


The Onion

More than 60 actions taken by President Trump during his first month in office bear the fingerprints of Project 2025, the right-wing blueprint for overhauling the federal government. [link to a NYT story]
Karen Yourish

"They wouldn't do that, that would be stupid, therefore you must be lying about what they want to do" is a load-bearing pillar of the Republican Party, and it's why we must touch the stove.
Leonid Baezhnev @rev-avocado.bsky.social

As I've said for decades now: Republican ideas, policy, and goals are so cartoonishly vile that merely describing them in plain language makes you sound like you must be lying to make them sound that awful
Brian Clevinger

No one likes to hear this but a politician’s job in 2025 is to be a media personality and to shape the perceptions of their audience.
Moira Donegan

As a software engineer I can tell you: Musk's coders are not improving systems at various government agencies. Any such claims are lies to hide the real intent. The best engineers take weeks even to understand complex systems; months to plan how to upgrade them; and years to do so without disruption.
Bob G. @bobg.whizbang.me

Not that anyone cares but a bunch of senior DOJ officials resigning over a corrupt instruction to drop a case was what triggered the Nixon impeachment, and in the Trump era it's just the 2pm scandal of a random Thursday and every day now has ~3 such scandals that would have ended any prior admin
Pwnallthethings

How will EVs shape airborne tire pollution in the US over the next 20 years? We estimated that by 2044, EVs could contribute up to 40% of Tire Wear Particle emissions, with total EV-related TWP emissions rising 17-fold.
Hosein Foroutan @hforout.bsky.social

One thing Democratic leadership could do right now is to name an alternate HHS secretary—someone to provide ongoing public updates and health information. And do it for other departments too. Start showing voters what a Democratic government would look like—press conferences, speeches, all of it.
Mark Harris

As a woman and a virtue ethicist, I cannot believe I’m here in the 21st century waxing nostalgic for my grandfather’s ideals of masculinity
Shannon Vallor

I... do not understand this new construction of masculinity? it's not athletic. it's not stoic. it's not handsome. it's not accomplished. it's never been intellectual. it's just rich white loud dudes on the TV who look like they don't wash their genitals? is that it?
Carlos Yu @carloshasanax.bsky.social

we are getting stories crazier than watergate every single day and no one bats an eye at them anymore. society has hypernormalized intense corruption that it feels like NOT being openly corrupt hinders you
onion person @junlper.beer 

I'm old enough to remember when the courts ruled that the president didn't even have the authority to cancel student debt. What was that, fifty, maybe sixty years ago? My how time flies.
Jessica Kant

You cannot cancel student debt, but you can cancel the Department of Education. Make it make sense…?
Ghost Goat

The United States has become the North Korea of North America. Put that on your Google Maps.
Peter Gleick

My experience with my family is that moderate means ‘make the chaos stop’. They don’t like change. They don’t like big bumps in their path. They don’t like to cause a scene. Of course, they don’t realize how violent that opinion is. Any attempt to explain this is met with blank stares.
mask fairy

The $400m contract for cybertrucks is more than the entire Department of Energy spends on solar power.
Costa Samaras

Apparently, spending $400 million on battery-operated trash cans was not seen as government waste or fraud.
Just Jack @jack-e-smith.bsky.social

THEY ARE DEFUNDING MEDICAID AND BUYING CYBERTRUCKS WITH THE MONEY. Dems stop saying "uh he promised he would lower the cost of living" and take the layup
mtsw

the idea that these tech guys are opposed to "government waste" is so completely fucking ridiculous. they feast on government waste. DOD budgets are a bloated mess. the pentagon has failed 7 straight audits. the big beneficiaries are tech companies providing defense services.
Peter @notalawyer.bsky.social

Pretty funny that McConnell is the most consistent GOP vote against the slate of Cabinet officials when he, more than any other Senator, is responsible for a second Trump administration.
Don Moynihan

A Swedish company has developed technology to produce a material from old textiles that can be used to manufacture brand new clothing and can help reduce the huge amounts of water and other resources used by the fashion industry.
Ada Palmer

we are absolutely deluged with media about the world of faculty meetings and student protests at elite universities but know essentially nothing about the country's largest megachurches. e.g., Gateway Church is the ninth-largest megachurch in America, with a weekly attendance about 10% larger than Harvard's student body. its founding pastor was outed as a pedophile last year. you didn't know its name or that that was a scandal before i mentioned it.
rev. howard arson @theophite.bsky.social

A reminder: Vladimir Putin could end the war in Ukraine right now, just by ordering his soldiers to go home. No need for treaties or negotiations.
Anne Applebaum

we really need a better name for the “wealth gap” to more accurately reflect that these motherfuckers stole our shit
asiniiwiikwe aka ashley fairbanks @ziibiing.com

Peer-reviewed studies show US liquefied natural gas is 33% worse than coal. Exporting US LNG = producing massive local pollution + fueling the global climate crisis + locking-in buyers into expensive, dirty fossil fuels
Assaad Razzouk

well it has certainly been an amusing prank to let the worst people alive take over the american government for a few weeks, but I think it's probably gone on long enough
Tom Tomorrow

Margarita Teresa of Spain, painted by Juan Bautista Martinez del Mazo. She would die at age 21 during her 7th pregnancy. One child survived her. Life of a Habsburg woman!


Dr. Peter Paul Rubens

third reconstruction probably has to involve making America more parliamentary
Sharon @sharonk.bsky.social

Safer Roads are not a punishment. Slower posted speeds often mean more throughput, not less. And transportation planning orgs and elected need to stop listening to backwards angry social media comments when making transportation decisions.
Erik Noonan

[Tulsi Gabbard, t]he woman who arrived in American politics from nowhere. Has no accomplishments to speak of in government, and has expressed sympathy for some of America’s geopolitical enemies, has been handed supervision of U.S. intelligence infrastructure.
Sherrilyn Ifill

Since they’re falsely calling everything “fraud” and since every accusation is a confession and since they’re dismantling financial oversight entities, guess what they’re planning to do a lot of in the future?
Leah McElrath

Dear Germany (and every other country). If Viktor Orbán likes a political party, you’re 100% guaranteed that it will be awful for you. If Elon Musk likes the same party, you’re 200% guaranteed.
Brent Toderian

sometimes being a journalist feels like trying to point something out to a cat but it just keep staring at your finger like that’s the important thing
Hayes Brown

Russell Vought wants to slash the government down to a mass deportation force. No more medical research, no more education department, no more civil rights enforcement, no more Social Security, no more Medicaid—think of all the things he wants to cut while "begging" for more of your $ to deport people
Sarah Posner

Seems futile to point this stuff out anymore, but Musk and Trump holding a photo op to tout all the “corruption” DOGE has found on the same day Trump’s DOJ announced it would no longer investigate foreign governments who try to bribe U.S. officials was some real Orwell-level messaging.
Radley Balko

you show me someone who thinks they are a top specimen of humanity because they happen to lack pigmentation and i'll show you someone who, at best, looks like a dweeb and at worst looks like you wouldn't leave them alone with a child
jamelle @jamellebouie.net

In the past five years, higher ed has demonstrated that it's a soft target for right-wing culture war attacks. Too many are willing to sacrifice part of the sector to protect the rest, as parochial interests dictate. That shows weakness and guarantees a loss for the whole sector.
Jeremy C. Young

Have we forgotten all of those stories on how AI, bots or algorithms "accidentally" become racist?


The Alternate Historian

This new executive order signed today appears to create DOGE as a shadow government across the entire federal government. Each agency/department will be assigned a DOGE minder who will work with the Secretary or Director and essentially be in charge of all new hiring and/or firing.
Josh Marshall @joshtpm.bsky.social

In the Soviet Bloc, the Communist Party assigned political minders/ commissars to every school, factory, army unit, etc to ensure ideological compliance and loyalty to the regime. Hiring was based on class background and demonstrated loyalty. Obviously, this is very different.
Anna Grzymala-Busse @annagbusse.bsky.social

"Comparing chimp and human brains shows that the regions that grew most during human evolution are the most prone to aging. The fastest-shrinking regions in humans were the orbitofrontal cortex and other parts that expanded most over the past few million years."
Shawn McClure

So if you’re keeping score…
- The acting chair of FEMA said his agency isn’t bound by laws from Congress.
- The Speaker of the House said it’s totally cool with him if the President usurps Congress’ spending authority.
Jeff Lazarus

Incredible: Russ Vought’s daughter has cystic fibrosis and benefits from a “miracle drug” made possible by the National Institutes of Health—an agency Vought now aims to gut as part of the Project 2025 attack
Mark Follman

I admire Elon's parenting style, which is basically like a cartoon pirate having a parrot with him all the time
Ian Boudreau

Putin is a Bond villain and this guy is a National Lampoon villain
John Q Public @conjurial.bsky.social

There are over 440,000 illegal immigrants from Europe currently in the US, according to the MPI. That's more than the population of Minneapolis or New Orleans. Why aren't we seeing these individuals inhumanely deported? Because they're white. And ICE takes orders from its Racist-In-Chief.
Jon Davidson @jondavidsondotcom.bsky.social

Tech has stopped being about helping YOU do things - it's now a means for management consultants to use software to penetrate/monetize every aspect of our lives, all while expressing growth to the markets. This is the growth-at-all-costs Rot Economy.
Ed Zitron

The dogs have spoken. Good boy! Good girl!


Robert Moffitt @justplainbob.bsky.social

It is so obvious Musk is harping on Social Security fraud as an excuse to cut back the program that keeps half of America's seniors out of poverty. Don't say you weren't warned.
Helaine Olen

So the Trump regime can rename a massive body of water, but I can’t vote using my married name? #SaveAct
Jess Piper @piperformissouri.bsky.social

America isn’t just becoming a parody — it’s becoming a parody written by a Nazi AI program on crack having a stroke.
Brent Toderian

There's an entire enormous industry of establishment voices who spent years, and enormous effort, convincing us that the left, in the form of undergrads and corporate HR departments, was a threat to American freedom equal to that posed by the fascist right. None will ever face any accountability. None will lose jobs or prestige. None will apologize. But at the very least, I will hate them until the day I die.
David Roberts @volts.wtf

Putin's favorite music is playing Trump like a fiddle
TheGrayMattersReport

Can JD Vance be a Catholic while lacking every Christian virtue?  Ross Douthat drops by to explain.
New York Times Pitchbot

I guess when one side wins by a slight plurality, they get to dismantle the foundational structures of democracy. That is just how things work!
Tom Tomorrow

A military that isn’t resilient to climate impacts is a military with degraded capabilities that is weaker. Can’t complete a mission if the runway is underwater, if the power is out, if the coastal installation is damaged, if the staff in the area can’t get to work, if systems are damaged.
Costa Samaras

the constitutional crisis is actually 25 years going, but most people shrugged their shoulders and kept moving because it was happening very slowly. we are now in the final constitutional collapse phase, which is moving orders of magnitude faster.
Michael @fleerultra.bsky.social

I’m not sure I can recall a time when we’ve seen such cowardice and capitulation by leadership across the political spectrum. The run up to the Iraq War was bad, but this is even more extensive. Musk performs the dishonesty equivalent of a Powell UN Security Council briefing every single day.
Leah McElrath

All ethanol plants in Minnesota are required to disclose their annual water use (although our petroleum refineries have no such requirement), it seems reasonable that data centers should have to do the same.
Robert Moffitt @justplainbob.bsky.social

When two private jets both owned by guys named Vince crash into each other I think there are enough private jets.
spleenly

Congratulations America, Trump spent $15 million of YOUR money to take a nap at the Super Bowl and leave before halftime… All, on your dime.
Jeras Ikehorn

Seriously, journalists do not have to validate a demonstrably false claim. The KKK is not a public safety organization. The 2020 election was not stolen. DOGE is not about efficiency. Do not repeat the lies.
Rebecca Solnit

BP cutting their ‘green targets’ as profits fall to JUST $8.9 BILLION. They own our politics, they’re writing the anti-protest laws, so fossil fuel psychopaths are free to give up the greenwash and drill right up to collapse. They’re going to kill us all.
Climate Dad

Q: What is your plan to heal the divide and bring the American people?
A: I would start by finishing Reconstruction, ending the systematic voter suppression that artificially keeps many "Red" states Red and I will bring the full force of the government against any Confederates who stand in our way.
Chad Loder

Vermeule teaches at Harvard Law. Tom Cotton is a Harvard Law grad. JD Vance is a Yale Law grad.  John Yoo is a Yale Law grad. Samuel Alito, Yale Law. Brett Kavanaugh, Yale Law. Clarence Thomas, Yale Law. "Elite" law schools ought to be having a reckoning. But they won't.


Kevin Gannon @thetattooedprof.bsky.social

Two lawyers, one Yale educated, one Harvard educated; one the VP, one a senator, suggesting that decisions made by courts aren’t legitimate if they don’t like the outcome. This is dangerous territory.
Joyce White Vance

The only way I can interpret the GOP's actions is that they are 100% certain they will never face another democratic election again. They hit the shore and burned their ships.
Chad Loder

For those keeping score, so far this week Microsoft has found that regularly using generative AI reduces a person's critical thinking skills, and the BBC has found that AI news summaries contain "significant issues" 51% of the time.
Dan Whitehead

The problem is not that scientists are not communicating well. It’s that they are under attack by interests who do not care about truth or the messy reality of the scientific enterprise. The truth is complicated and nuanced. The lies are bold and simple. This is not a fair fight.
Christie Aschwanden @cragcrest.bsky.social

Completely agree, wrote about this: The country has failed to defend scientists against propaganda attacks, for decades. Scientific leaders have blamed victims. Going back, at least, to climate science
Dan Vergano

Trump has been president for 21 days as of noon. He has spent all or part of 10 of those days at properties he owns, businesses where he often interacts with his private customers. He has played golf on at least five of those days.
Philip Bump

Imagine how many crimes Eric Adams will commit now that he knows that as long as he lets Trump do what he wants with the city he'll never face any consequences. This is not a recipe for effective governance. Eric Adams has to go and every person with power in this city should call on him to resign.
Doug Gordon @brooklynspoke.bsky.social

I have seen people get thrown face-down onto a hard floor for failing to follow a judge's orders. I have seen people sent to Rikers Island for refusing to follow a judge's order. Courts have plenty of hard power. But they only have practice using it against poor people.
Emily Galvin-Almanza

Predicting that "Gulf of America" will age as well as "freedom fries" did.
Ebony Elizabeth Thomas @ebonyteach.bsky.social

Kathy Hochul could still remove Eric Adams from office right now. 'Let the process play out'? He just corruptly traded the powers of his office, and the people of the city, to subvert that process. Leaving him place is allowing him to deliver his end of the quid pro quo and makes her complicit.
Andy Craig

Again, at this point, we should just abolish the Senate's current advice and consent process. It's worse than useless in its current form, because it doesn't screen out dangerously unqualified people, and the shabby veneer of legislative oversight is much worse than no oversight at all:
Mark Copelovitch

Memo to journalists: There's a high likelihood the thing you are writing about does not "raise concerns" about something bad happening — it is in fact the bad thing happening. Reevaluate your language and maybe your entire approach to the story. Tell the whole truth.
Sammy Roth

What the actual *?! The White House has designated Mr. Musk’s office, the United States DOGE Service, as an entity protected from public records requests and most judicial intervention until at least 2034, by classifying its documents as presidential records.
Alt National Park Service @altnps.bsky.social

From the Civil Rights division of the DOJ to the CFPB, the administrative state is designed to make material the abstract rights expressed in law. In its absence, what remains is the old enslaver state governed by the unrestrained whims of the rich and powerful.
Dr. William Horne @wihorne.bsky.social


Senator Sheldon Whitehouse

Thou shalt not spend millions on Super Bowl ads about Jesus when you could’ve used it to feed the hungry.
God @godpod.bsky.social

Here's one thing I can tell you for certain: no matter how bad Trump's pogrom against trans Americans gets, none of the reactionary centrists who shepherded this thing into the mainstream will ever acknowledge their role in it or apologize.
David Roberts @volts.wtf

Just a friendly reminder: Vance changed his name multiple times to be identified how he wants to be identified. Trump's family changed their name to be identified how he wants to be identified
PL Thomas EdD

The fact that a criminal, once elected to office, will continue to be a criminal, is not news.
Richard Ettelson

Very disorienting time for me, a traditional American. I thought most of us still believed in the stories we tell about ourselves. That it's good to be smart, courageous, kind. I thought we'd mostly bought into the narrative that cruelty, stupidity, scamming are for the bad guys.
Wedge LIVE!™

It makes as much sense to have a public debate about trans healthcare as it does to have a public debate about hip replacements. You almost certainly know nothing about it and so you should shut up. The government knows nothing about it and should leave it to the experts
Katy Montgomerie

Donald Trump is imposing a 25% tariff on aluminum; 2/3 of its primary aluminum comes from Canada and is made with hydroelectricity. US aluminum is mostly made with coal. Expect higher CO2 and perfluorocarbon emissions, not to mention more expensive cars and beer.
Lloyd Alter

Everyone should be pointing out what is happening at CFPB. There is zero argument to be made here that this is being done to provide taxpayer value. The agency's budget is minuscule, averaging like $600 million/year, yet it has obtained $20 billion in payments from corporations to Americans
Robert Maguire

I think we can all agree at this point that most of the updates and improvements introduced to our technological devices and social media platforms are not welcome and are not actually improvements that make the services better.
Robert Simonson

I appreciate that he just distilled all conspiracies into one single sentiment:


Tim Henke

Whatever your politics are, calling Clarence Thomas “our nation’s all-time greatest Supreme Court justice” is just embarrassing.
Kevin M. Kruse

I’ve been offline, but MAGA is very upset that Black people exist — so I’m gathering Philadelphia won?
Leah McElrath

"Training is preparation for the known; education is preparation for the unknown." Just remember that we train AI, but we educate humans.
Dr. Crystal A. Kolden @pyrogeog.bsky.social

If a government is pushing for AI and sincerely believes in its potential, without proposing any economic solutions for the inevitable catastrophic levels of unemployment, then that’s the giveaway that they’ve stopped governing for the people of the country, and have been bought by speculators.
Joel Morris @gralefrit.bsky.social

“In response to an executive order titled "Defending Women From Gender Ideology Radicalism," the U.S. military has halted sexual assault prevention programs.”
Kia DH @drkiadh.bsky.social

NIH had two tracks for the same fellowship: those from underrepresented backgrounds and those not. Both usually get funds. Rather than merge back to one track to comply with their understanding of executive orders, they essentially rejected without review all the ones on the underrepresented track.
Brian O'Meara

If religious organizations can pay for Super Bowl ads, they can pay taxes.
The Real Brutalist @jmings.bsky.social


Jon Cooper @joncooper-us.bsky.social

Representation without taxation for a handful of billionaires, taxation without representation for the rest of us.
Timothy Snyder

lol these tech blowhards who are defending putting twenty something Elon suckups in charge of the entire federal government which is way more complex than any private company. Okay, bro, then why aren’t you hiring your best and brightest 24 year olds to run your large public companies? That’s a much easier assignment comparatively but you wouldn’t dare. Would JPMorgan hire a college sophomore who called himself Big Balls to reshape its entire transactional system with no oversight? Of course not. And Republican Congressmen were justifying Big Balls running the entire U.S. system
Elizabeth Spiers

It takes 240 trees to absorb the CO₂ produced from one car in a single year. Building dense, walkable cities where more people can live a car-free lifestyle saves trees in the exurbs and makes a bigger difference than the most heavily forested backyard.
Qagggy!

Every urban freeway that was planned but not built is so obviously a tragedy avoided. That fact should inform our opinions about the urban freeways that *were* built, and how much better off we might be without them.
Warren Wells, AICP

Dems spent years avoiding having any kind of convo about adding seats to the Supreme Court because 'what kind of precedent would that set for Republicans? Meanwhile, the GOP take office & within weeks are openly talking about ignoring court verdicts and impeaching judges. Sigh.
Mehdi Hasan

I'll probably say this 5 million times in coming years, but: A political strategy that relies on the public "waking up" and realizing that Trump & Co. are awful -- on their own -- is destined to fail. No matter how bad it gets. None of this is self-executing. People must be told and shown.
David Roberts @volts.wtf


Trombenik @bobukraine-1.bsky.social

It is truly astonishing, a sports league had to stop saying "end racism" to placate the feefees of absurd white people in this country. Like "stop drowning cats" is not controversial unless you are a sociopath.
D.A. Bullock @bullycreative.bsky.social

Remember: The fundamental issue isn’t the size of the government or how to make government more “efficient.” It’s who our government is for. Should it work mainly for big corporations and billionaires, including the richest person in the world — or for the rest of us?
Robert Reich

we gotta bring back "broken windows theory" but for billionaires
O.K. Computermeyer @niedermeyer.online

Had Cy Vance chosen to prosecute Ivanka and Don Jr. in 2012 we might not be in this mess. Instead, Vance got a $25,000 campaign donation from Trump's attorney, dropped the charges and, well, here we are.
Doug Gordon @brooklynspoke.bsky.social

I personally think "trans people exist, are good, and have rights" can, if you try, be more popular than "let's release insurrectionists to pursue their passions of child porn and crime" or "what if high school interns spent 17 hours a day destroying everything you depend on"
jesse @jesseltaylor.bsky.social

Good job we gave all those fascists platforms, allowing them to be comprehensively defeated in the marketplace of ideas. That sunlight really does function as excellent disinfectant!
Dr Matt Lodder

You can tell how great these AI products are by how much they have to keep sneaking them into our devices without our knowledge
Kevin M. Kruse

I realized today that Trump, Musk, DOGE, Vance, Miller, Vought and their many collaborators have broken so many laws already that they know they have to destroy our government and entire way of life to stay out of jail. This is all or nothing. We should respond accordingly.
Fred Wellman

The people who are engaged in a series of illegal abuses of government power — some might even call it a coup! — are labeling even the slightest judicial pushback to be a coup. I don't know where this ends, but its clear where they want it to end.
Don Moynihan

“Why do I need NOAA? I’ve got a weather app” is equivalent to asking “Why do I need farms? I can go to the supermarket.”
Dr. Robin Tanamachi @tornatrix.bsky.social

re-reading this tweet every few years with a new perspective on who "we" refers to:


Rob DenBleyker

Today, the New York Post referred to Elon Musk, a 53-year-old man, as a “wunderkind.”
Yashar Ali

"The United States is in a constitutional crisis":
Agree: 54%
Disagree: 27%
Unsure: 19%
YouGov / Feb 6, 2025 / n=1106
Polling USA

the deep state doesn't exist — but the deep theft now certainly does
Mike Eliason @holz-bau.bsky.social

It’s clear Donald Trump is an unparalleled agent of chaos. What I still don’t know is if it’s due to his essential dna (massive narcissism, greed, incompetence, corruption…) Or if he really is an agent of a foreign enemy as many assume, and is acting on orders. Or both. We really should find out.
Brent Toderian

I keep seeing people say “nobody’s doing anything but posting.” False. People are doing a lot; you have to spend the time to go find them. If all you see is posting, it’s because all you’re doing is scrolling.
Courtney Milan

Being correct about all of this for years doesn't actually feel good.
Prisonculture

Speaking of pennies, I’ve found that the best use of one cent coins is to drill holes in them and use them as a washers. Washers typically cost 10 cents each:


David Ho

“A new analysis by independent automotive blog FuelArc suggests that fire fatalities are 17 times more likely in a Cybertruck than in the infamous Ford Pinto — the posterchild deadly cars if ever there was one.”
Tyler King

Let's say there's "waste" and "fraud" in the government. Well that’s why every department had an inspector general to find and stop it. But guess what? Trump fired most of these independent auditors who should be insulated from politics. None of this is about waste and fraud.
Robert Reich

“The federal government is too big” is everywhere and always an objection to it doing things that benefit someone the speaker doesn’t like. Stop assuming good faith.
Adam Miller @ajm6792.bsky.social

this stuff makes perfect sense when you understand that these people have a slaveholder’s ideology and believe that liberty means the freedom to dominate others:


jamelle @jamellebouie.net

Notable that Elon's crew of incels and edgelords are full-fledged men for the purposes of being given the keys to car to run the government. But for the purposes of being accountable for their actions they’re just kids from good families with youthful indiscretions.
Josh Marshall @joshtpm.bsky.social

The more I think about it, the more I understand DOGE as a way for the GOP to implement all of their least popular policies in an extralegal way because nobody, both in Congress or the executive branch, wants to be tied to the policies or the consequences of the polices. This is, of course, why we have to treat it explicitly as a GOP project so they can’t wash their hands of it later. These cuts have been the dream of the party since before Watergate, they have to wear it.
Cooper Lund

Gotta say, the mainstream media is simply not doing the minimum amount of work to communicate that a bunch of Nazis implicated in child pornography have all of our banking information and can turn off social security whenever they want.
Nick @slothropsmap.bsky.social

Ethel Rosenberg got the chair for doing a lot less damage to U.S. national security than Elon Musk has done this week
Brandon Friedman

When we said “another world is possible,” maybe we should have been more specific.
Leah McElrath


Billy Bragg

It is impossible to overstate how big of a deal it is that one of Musk’s underlings, who is operating without oversight, is connected to a child sexual exploitation and extortion criminal network.
COM is the worst thing you can imagine, and then worse than that.
fashfreenw.bsky.social

Executive wants to frame the NIH indirects cut as $4B in savings. But given that NIH returns $2.5 on every $1 investment, this would actually cost US economy a net $6 BILLION (per year!). Not to mention the human costs of wrecking education and research sectors and the communities they serve.
Matt Barber @biobarber.bsky.social

If Trump and Musk were trying to weaken the United States and sell it to its foreign enemies, how would they act any differently from the way they're acting now? Not at all, you say? Maybe you should wonder why that is.
Harry Turtledove @hntdove.bsky.social

I'd like to see more writing on how the Musk/Trump junta feels like a frontal attack on the entire concept of virtue, in even the most traditional senses. They are actively demonizing and punishing everyone who doesn't worship Mammon.
Faine Greenwood

Growing up everyone told us that the Soviet Union was the enemy. Who knew it would be South Africa that finally do us in.
David Ho

I wonder if any of the rating agencies is considering downgrading U.S. debt. Not having a secure payment system would be a very good reason.
Dean Baker

For a lot of white people, the COVID lockdowns are the first time in their lives they've ever experienced meaningful restrictions, particularly meaningful government restrictions. So it's really not surprising, in retrospect, that their reaction was to overthrow the government and destroy science.
Anna Phylaxis @quatoria.bsky.social

jd vance and elon musk installing nazis in the us government is more dire than joe biden's dog biting a secret service agent but only one gets the msm 24-7 machine activated. spoiler: its the dog.
Oliver Willis

What DOGE is doing doesn’t meaningfully reduce government spending and it in no way improves efficiency. What it does is weaken America and strengthen our enemies. It is time to focus on why that is the goal of Musk and Trump. Why is damaging the US their primary goal?
David Rothkopf

It feels like no one should have to say this, and yet we are in a situation where it needs to be said, very loudly and clearly, before it’s too late to do anything about it: The United States is not a startup. If you run it like one, it will break.
WIRED

Everyone should know that when the 2021 enhanced child tax credit expired, parental employment went down because parents were less able to afford child care. It expired because of Manchin who said parents buy drugs, but the CTC also lowered parental drug abuse.
Scott Santens

#ActNow:


Extinction Rebellion Berlin

this is the "merit" two-step. first, you strongly imply or state outright that the presence of anyone who isn't a straight, able-bodied white man is unfair "DEI," then you argue that just because an institution is all-male and lily-white doesn't mean there is discrimination. that's just merit!
jamelle @jamellebouie.net

i'm sorry, the nominee for FBI director owns up to $5m in a shell company tied to a shady-PRC fast fashion house that is known to use slave labor??? am i losing my fucking mind? what is happening
Sky Marchini

And there it is: Russell Vought is confirmed. I wrote a long profile of him, his worldview, his political project: He’s one of the architects of Project 2025, an avowed Christian nationalist, and a radical ideologue of the “post-constitutional” Right. He is at war with pluralistic democracy.
Thomas Zimmer

alt headline [to Washington Post story about Russell Vought being confirmed as head of OMB]: enemy of constitutional government installed in white house
jamelle @jamellebouie.net

Implicit in Susan Collins' "reasoning" re: her Vought vote (if you can even call it that) is the idea that presidents have a right to pick their own teams. But Collins voted against 85 Biden nominees, all of them highly credentialed. (Google them!) So that rationale doesn't hold water.
Collins Watch

This really is beyond belief. Susan Collins votes for a nominee who she says she believes is violating the Constitution. What would be disqualifying in her view, a murder conviction?
Dean Baker

I'm not saying Gilded Age inequality was a good thing, but at least those Robber Barons made a token effort to give back by building cultural institutions and libraries. Today's billionaires are more concerned with building penis rockets, tax evasion, and seem to believe laws are for poor people.
Sarah Darer Littman

Mike Luckovich is one of the greatest political cartoonists of all time. Thank you for 3 decades of scathing satire, remarkable insight and helping us all laugh to avoid weeping openly. Your longtime fan, Mark Hamill:


Mark Hamill

it is fucking insane to see people act like "DEI" just means tepid corporate trainings when trump says it when he wants to deny visas for trans athletes entering the united states and builds a concentration camp for immigrants in gitmo and removes all mention of women and minorities from everything
Ashcan

The impact of the annihilation of US AID on countless millions worldwide and on US strength and standing in the world is incalculably high. It’s a humanitarian and national security disaster and a huge boon to our enemies. But the savings it produces relative to the whole budget are inconsequential.
David Rothkopf

The most bizarre tic of American media is its ability to acknowledge reality but refusal to draw any conclusions from it. If Republicans are constantly lying about their agenda, that should be the core of your political coverage! Both-sides stories are useless when one side isn't trustworthy. They have been publishing articles like this for two decades: "Gee willikers, what Republicans do with power doesn't match their rhetoric at all!"
Michael Hobbes

I want people to understand this. For many of them, democracy ended when Obama was elected twice and Black Lives Matter rose to prominence. This is them “fixing” a system that felt broken and newly unsafe to them.
Karen Attiah

I suppose the task force created by the "Eradicating Anti-Christian Bias" executive order will start by investigating the Vice President’s statements attacking Catholic bishops, the leader of DOGE accusing Lutheran Family Services of money laundering, ICE raids on churches … so much work already on anti-Christian bias from this administration.
Micah Schwartzman

"Former NOAA officials told CBS News that current employees have been told to expect a 50% reduction in staff and budget cuts of 30%." These cuts amount to an existential threat to the National Weather Service — and put the safety of all Americans in jeopardy.
Eric Holthaus

An old favourite for Friday. The Portuguese Fish Tin Museum is an amazing source of typography:


Present & Correct

The phrase "the Edison of our times" keeps repeating in my head and I feel like a little piece of my soul dies with each echo.
Tara Goddard

ironic how Elon Musk is doing more to destroy global capitalism than any leftist of the last 50 years
Catbus @hayao.lol

We are in the midst of an administrative coup the like of which we have never seen - or even imagined - in our lifetimes. Every day brings new abuses, new scandals, which can’t just be undone or fixed. We are in a very dark place as a country and as a constitutional republic right now.
Mehdi Hasan

Sometimes, I think about Ida B. Wells-Barnett, W.E.B. DuBois, Frederick Douglass, Mary McLeod Bethune, etc., dealing with those who clearly were not smart at all, treating them as if they were not fully human.... while they could read, write and THINK circles around them...their entire lives.
Ebony Elizabeth Thomas @ebonyteach.bsky.social

The more I learn about data centers the more I am convinced this is the 21st century equivalent of the Interstate system in the last century. Just a colossal mistake that will have enormous costs compared to the benefits. The claims that we need them are no better than GM's in favor of freeways.
David King @cityplanning.bsky.social

Just saw a guy in a white range rover call a lady a bitch ass motherfucker in traffic and i hope it temporarily allayed his unconscious fear that it is he who is actually the bitch ass motherfucker
eve6

We all know the president's brain is a rancid pile of pudding but it's still a bit jarring to see him open his piehole and have utter nonsense come tumbling out.
Kevin M. Kruse

Universities — including the schools that most aggressively shut down student activism — are now fully panicking because the Trump administration is about to shut down all kinds of funding for research and more. Too bad they made it clear that their students shouldn’t speak up and speak out.
Saeed Jones @theferocity.bsky.social

do i roll my eyes at a lot of DEI stuff? yeah, i wrote a whole essay about why i thought it was bullshit back in 2020. but trump et al aren’t saying, “corporate DEI policies mainly exist to protect corporate interests from discrimination lawsuits.” they’re saying “get the blacks out”
jamelle @jamellebouie.net

Trayvon Martin would have been 30 years old today had he not been hunted down and killed by George Zimmerman in 2012.
talia jane

in retrospect, tech billionaires totally ravaging the US free press and then doing a coup feels of a piece
Talia Lavin @swordsjew.bsky.social

FACT: The entire federal civilian workforce accounts for 4 PERCENT of the federal budget
Judd Legum

It's classic Trump to try and distract from a domestic Constitutional crisis by threatening an international humanitarian crisis, but eventually he is going to run out of room to escalate his rhetoric and we'll see what happens then. I don't imagine it will be pretty.
Gwen Snyder

If you judge by the number of stories, the number of authors involved, the tone, the duration of coverage ... you can't help but conclude that the NYT found the fact that Biden is old much more alarming than the fact that an unelected tech nazi is illegally taking over key government systems.
David Roberts @volts.wtf

billionaires shouldn't exist. 100% tax on every cent over 999,999,999.99
Mike Eliason @holz-bau.bsky.social

Kind of ironic: Instead of Trump making his tax returns public, he gave everyone else's tax returns to Musk.
Bill Lindeke

FBI Uncovers Al-Qaeda Plot To Just Sit Back And Enjoy Collapse Of United States:


The Onion

"The most abundant nanoplastic was tyre particles (41%), then polystyrene (28%) and polyethylene (12%). Each tyre on the world’s 1.6bn vehicles can lose 4kg during its lifetimes and may be the largest source of tiny plastic pollution."
The War on Cars

Route 4 in Paramus, NJ, yesterday. Posted on Facebook by John Weir:


Ann Getty

Tired: NYT: Young Musk Fans Learn American Civics, Hands-On
Wired: Wired: Those Little Rat Fucks Are Still In The Walls
Erin Fogg @criminalerin.bsky.social

Imagine willingly giving the most powerful military in the history of the world to a well-known corrupt and crooked real estate developer, and then acting surprised when he’s obsessed with stealing land around the world. When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a shitty golf course.
Brent Toderian

This is something I’m still working on, but I am of the belief that Democrats need *more* culture war, not less. I want Dems to take out a switchblade and ask “y’all have a problem with the Civil Rights Act you squeamish little bitches?”
Kaitlin Is Just Getting Started @gothamgirlblue.com

James Hansen’s new paper suggests that climate sensitivity is underestimated, and that the record-breaking heat in 2023-24 was due to accelerating warming rather than temporary El Niño. I deeply hope it’s wrong, because it suggests we have locked in far more heating than currently understood.
Hannah Daly

it was impossible to know what was coming unless you paid even a little bit of attention
Paul Fairie @paulisci.bsky.social

Any journalist characterizing Trump's desire to occupy and ethnically cleanse Gaza as "thinking like a real estate developer" needs to take a good hard look in the mirror and then resign from their profession. They are not fit for the purpose.
Dr. Genevieve Guenther @doctorvive.bsky.social

Medicare fraud is a big deal. Just ask SENATOR RICK SCOTT WHERE HIS FORTUNE COMES FROM. But these clowns aren't going to stop the Rick Scotts of the world. They're gonna fuck over my parents and yours (and our collective future)
Evan Sutton

The word people are looking for to describe what Musk and Trump are doing is "treason." These acts are treasonous. They are traitors.
Brad Johnson @climatebrad.hillheat.com

Even adorable anthropomorphic woodland creatures fight back when necessary:


Leah McElrath

Elon says 90% of US aid never reaches communities. He confuses USAID's 90% reliance on intermediaries -- US companies delivering HIV drugs, WFP delivering food aid -- with waste. Comical if not so dangerous.
Justin Sandefur @justsand.bsky.social

TRUMP: *machine-guns crowd of pedestrians at Fifth Ave*
NYT: President's most daring argument for population control brings new scrutiny.
Comfortably Numb @numb.comfortab.ly

Any four Republican Senators could stop this at any time simply by threatening to block all action (or even caucus with the Democrats) if Trump doesn't make certain concessions. They won't, but that should be a much bigger story than whether the Democrats are doing everything that *they* can.
Steve Vladeck

The idea of making the site of a recent US-funded genocide into a US-owned seaside resort for the wealthy is, in fact, audacious, but that is probably not the first descriptor I'd choose, or among the top 100.
David Roberts @volts.wtf

Losing NOAA would be devastating. Project 2025 authors want to get rid of it because it monitors climate change, and privatize the information it currently provides for free, so you'll have to buy information about the weather and the winds (imperative for mariners).
Heather Cox Richardson

how is it that a bunch of children can walk undeterred into every government building and start ripping out wires while Congress is refused entry
Shiv Ramdas Rice Lord @nameshiv.bsky.social

Feeling really naive in my prior belief that there were laws preventing unelected and non-government employees from immediately seizing government buildings and property and unilaterally ending funding and programs approved by Congress and signed by a US president
acieb.bsky.social

Career Federal Civil Workers are heroes. Thank you for your public service.
Costa Samaras

Now Musk has sent Booger, Broccoli Rob and Big Balls to the NOAA, in order to be sure us freeloaders stop getting all those free warnings about hurricanes and stuff.
Kevin M. Kruse

Copy desks are good! Having people argue over headlines and adjectives before publication is a good thing! Getting it right and being 30 seconds slower is better than off-kilter and being 30 seconds faster.
City Nolan @ndhapple.bsky.social

“You were ONLY supposed to be RACIST”:


Jeff Yang @originalsp.in

If GSA sold 7,500 buildings at once, the question is who would buy them. Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union gives us the answer to that: a handful of oligarchs. They'd get billions of dollars in real state for a song, which they could lease back to government for a handsome profit.
Waldo Jaquith @waldo.net

After this weekend, the US doesn't have any real allies left. Most western/asian countries will not trust the US in the future. Its willingness to renege on agreements with its closest allies, while threatening the sovereignty of others, will reverberate for generations.
colinscott13.bsky.social

This is an economic coup d'etat. Don't be afraid to say that in your communities and to your family members etc... This is what's unfolding. Some people who think they aren't going to be impacted are imo going to quickly find out how intertwined their lives are with the State and its governments.
Prisonculture

“Elon Musk is the president now” was underselling it. Elon now has significantly more power over this country and everyone in it than any president ever has
Micah @rincewind.run

I can't tell you how many people told me it was impossible for Joe Biden to remove one guy running the post office
Brandon Friedman


Freethinkers United

It's really appalling that things are happening — like firing career Department of Education officials because they attended a diversity conference — that remind me of what I've read about Mao's mid-1960s Cultural Revolution in China, a humanitarian disaster we don't talk about nearly enough
Will Bunch

The entire Treasury code system may have to be thrown out and rewritten. Once hackers have physical access to the systems they can make invisible changes that may never be found.  The system can never be trusted again. This is a multi-billion dollar act of terrorism.
MGoCoder

I said after the election result that one of the big issues with the messaging was that, for a lot of people who aren't engaged with politics, both sides sound equally hysterical. What makes "my opponents are fascists" more believable than "my opponents are commies" to a low-info voter?
Small Robots @smolrobots.bsky.social

Lots of people have experienced this before, but a lot of supposedly smart folks who think they’ll be protected for whatever reason (race, class, citizenship, etc.) need to come to the realization quickly that the federal government is now explicitly hostile to your existence and way of life.
Norm Charlatan

it’s hard not to feel disillusioned when reporting all the flagrantly illegal and terrifying things this government is doing somehow doesn’t fully break through to the mainstream. it feels like cable news and corporate media made a deal to convince people to keep calm and carry on.
Marisa Kabas

The US spends a small amount of its GDP on foreign aid compared to other major economies. Dismantling USAID won’t help Americans  — it’s just cruel and reckless political theatrics:


Steve Rattner

A reminder about the BS, now repeated by Rubio, on Chinese "control" in Panama.
—The second-most-significant increase in China's influence in Panama came 8 years ago. That was when Panama switched diplomatic recognition from Taiwan to the PRC. US president at the time was Donald Trump. Who DID NOT SAY A WORD.
— First-most-significant increase in PRC sway in Panama is starting right now. That is because of Trump's insane ranting about "taking back" the Canal. And having that parroted by likes of Rubio. Has unified Panama, as tariffs unified Canada.
James Fallows

Remember when Elon was JUST ruining Twitter?
Brent Toderian

Weird how not a single one of the newspapers and magazines that have been breathlessly churning out "cancel culture" think pieces for the past four years have managed to use the word "censorship" at all to describe the most rapid and comprehensive campaign of mass-censorship in recent US history.
Jessica Kant @jessdkant.bsky.social

Indian Railways will be fully electrified next year (it’s at ~99% currently)
UK is at 38% with tentatively another 12-13% new electrification committed
Indian Railways is building a 7000km high speed rail network by 2047
We can’t even get ours all the way from central London to central Birmingham
Leo Murray @crisortunity.bsky.social

What's funny is, none of this probably would be happening if Congress had kept the minimum wage indexed to the inflation rate.
Bob Alberti @a1batross.bsky.social

TRUMP TRADE WAR UPDATE:
Colombia: Lasted 4 hours - Trump accepts what was already offered.
Mexico: Lasted one weekend - Trump accepts worse than before.
Canada: Lasted one weekend - Trump accepts what was already agreed.
Two-step process established:
1. Try to look tough
2. Just fold
News Eye

World's richest man wants to get rid of food safety, clean water protections, worker, protections, auto safety standards, clean air protections, financial regulations, and any rules that might prevent corporate interest from harming people and the environment. That’s all. This is war.
David Corn

You say: they shutdown USAID.
You mean: they illegally broke in to a secure facility over a weekend, hijacked sensitive data on vulnerable people and US businesses, destroyed property Americans paid for, cut off resources for sick and hungry families, and fired Americans across the country.
Loren DeJonge Schulman @lorenraeds.bsky.social

Why target USAID when it’s <1% of budget? “USAID funds democracy-promotion programs around the world, including in European countries where right-wing populist movements are thriving. Musk has become an ally of those movements, some of whose leaders have specifically targeted the agency…”
Omar Wasow

MAGA: No, Biden can't wipe away student loans. That's hella illegal unless Congress acts.
Also MAGA: If Trump declares an entire federal agency  "lunatics" he can do away with it and all the funding it distributes without bothering to inform Congress, let alone requiring any action.
Mike Masnick

Reminder: protests are SUPPOSED to be disruptive. Otherwise they are just rallies or parades. Nobody's life or livelihood truly depends on a single stretch of freeway being open. Shout out again to @derringerpax.bsky.social for this art inspired by a @bettybarcode.bsky.social quote:


Tara Goddard

In case it’s not totally clear, deleting websites and databases is the modern equivalent of burning books.
Michael, from the Internet™ @champl.in

I always thought Elon Musk was the most dangerous man in America but I viewed him as a danger primarily in terms of his wealth and his disinformation power. I didn't realize he would pose an actual threat to our form of government, our national security, and our most sensitive personal data. Sheesh.
Mehdi Hasan

I oversaw global health programs at USAID. They reached 100s of millions of people, added 6 extra years to the lifespan of children in partner countries, and were eradicating health threats worldwide. What insanity and cruelty to break that.
Atul Gawande

There are literally not enough journalists employed in the US to cover the bad shit that is happening right now. We are now going to experience the social consequences of a weakened news industry--which are the same as the benefits of a weakened news industry, to those who weakened it.
Hamilton Nolan

The richest man in the world has taken over the US government and his first order of business is taking revenge for the fall of apartheid in South Africa
Julia Carrie Wong @joolia.bsky.social

in five years when we look back on today it will baffle people that the two biggest stories at the time weren't the fact that elon musk was a hopeless drug addict and donald trump was dangerously senile
mtsw

Has congress passed a law superseding or eliminating the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961? Has the Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional? Then why are journalists reporting that Trump and Musk are "shutting down" USAID. They are not authorized to do so.
A.J. Bauer

Bela Lugosi (left) with his dog, at the front gate:


Sardonicus

I'm glad that America is doing real classic end of empire stuff. A king who is visibly losing his mind declaring a war based on a dream he had. Greedy courtiers feuding over access to the treasury. Some looks are timeless.
Joseph Fink @planetoffinks.bsky.social

I really don’t think it’s happenstance that pretty much every remaining institutional safeguard broke down within 15 years of Citizens United
Talkin B. Practice

When I think of Elon Musk hacking into hundreds of millions of tax files and Social Security records I am reminded of the case of Aaron Swartz. He face five years in prison because he hacked into M.I.T's computer system.
Dean Baker

If you take down a Confederate memorial that was literally dedicated to promote white supremacy, that’s “erasing history.” But if you hide pictures of accomplished women, that’s just fighting wokeness.
Kevin M. Kruse

I was one of those warning how bad it would be and how Trump 2 would be much worse than anyone complacently assumed. But even I didn’t have ‘cancel all foreign aid, including to kids with HIV and malaria’ and also ‘let the world’s richest man get access to our private data’ on my 2025 bingo card.
Mehdi Hasan

This isn’t going to go well. #TrumpsTariffs:


Brent Toderian

Just a reminder that Musk couldn’t get a top-level security clearance. And he was under investigation for violating the terms of the clearance he did have. Now he has your Social Security number, your tax returns, and is unilaterally deciding who the government does and does not pay.
Radley Balko

This sounds like a bad movie it's so hard to believe but does seem to actually, possibly be happening that that core US government private information on US citizens and businesses and confidential government operations is being carted off by unvetted malevolent possibly foreign actors
David Burbach

When I visited a friend who worked in the White House years ago, I had to submit a ton of info weeks earlier to get approved just to walk into the building. And now, apparently, anyone who says "I work for Musk" can just wander around and access anything.
Mike Masnick

Hillary Clinton did not follow federal rules on her email as Secretary of State and it was a huge media scandal. Donald Trump is violating a foundational aspect of the Constitution as part of an unprecedented assault on US democracy and the media can't be bothered to cover it with the same intensity
Brendan Nyhan

I think burning the country down is also a local news story. What do MN Republican leaders have to say about an inexplicable trade war with neighboring Canada? Shutting down federal agencies and cutting off money appropriated by Congress? Pardoning cop beaters and purging the FBI? I'd like to get back to our normal routine of random GOP legislators relentlessly punching Minneapolis for being lawless wacko police haters. But I don't think I'll be able to take those complaints seriously anymore.
Wedge LIVE!™

Funniest part is that Twitter cost him $44 billion but the United States didn't even cost $300 million. We're the Tumblr of countries.
Razor @sugarazor.bsky.social

is it good or bad that a billionaire oligarch with close ties to foreign dictators is currently downloading the most sensitive information the us federal government has about its citizens to his own private servers?
jamelle @jamellebouie.net

no notes:


Steve Marmel

Elon Musk keeps talking about saving taxpayers a few billion and government efficiency but the simplest and most efficient way for the government to recoup hundreds of billions all at once is to just take it from Elon Musk.
@jphillll.bsky.social

When the people with guns — the FBI, DHS, military realize Trump handed all their financial info and control over their paychecks to one guy who has no position in government and is accountable to no one, I’m not 100 percent sure it plays out the way Trump and Musk seem to think it will.
Radley Balko

An underrated reason why our checks and balances are failing against everything that’s going on is that nobody thought an elected official would do things that were this self-defeating and stupid. They all assumed reasonable people at the wheel and we gotta remember that when we rewrite them later.
Cooper Lund

Musk should go to federal prison for years for this. Just like any other non-government employee without any sort of clearance would be if they took control of this information.
Craig Calcaterra

Book burning? If everything was digital in Hitler's 1930s Germany, this is what his book burning would have looked like: deletion of data, removal of websites, retraction of scientific studies, censorship of words like "equity," "diversity," "climate change."
Peter Gleick

Here are some nice mushrooms:


lukelukeluke

Anyone emphasizing the need to "reach across the aisle" or "find common ground" right now is really saying "my privilege protects me from the danger you are facing," whether they know that or not. The inability to be self-aware by most people in power right now is so demoralizing to so many of us.
Tara Goddard

Years and maybe decades after the fact, we'll still be uncovering shady shit Musk's people are doing right now
Adam Gurri

Talked with a friend in DOD (former military, civilian) who says the past week was crazy. The emails they got from OPM looked like Nigerian scams, people actually reported them to IT as suspicious.
Patrick Chovanec @prchovanec.bsky.social

History will remember, while Trump was purging the government of anyone who didn't place him above the Constitution, Amy Klobuchar was able to find common ground in the renaming a post office in St. Paul
Pat Jennings @veryrecent1.bsky.social

“We must end gender ideology,” say the people who believe that heterosexuality should be enforced with state violence and that women should have the legal status of permanent children.
Moira Donegan

Black history is American history. Not acknowledging Black history *should* be unAmerican.
PL Thomas EdD

There appear to be at least three separately operating heel factions breaking things within the government in wholly different ways right now. There's the Miller-headed immigration one, the DOGE/Elon one, and a Project 2025 OMB one. This dynamic hasn't showed up in mainstream reporting at all. Smaller pubs are doing great work on individual bands of looters right now — Wired is all over the Musk stuff, and Rolling Stone has been great with the shit that most closely aligns with formal WH/Miller — but a less subservient press would be mapping out the connections of the heists in real time.
Tim Onion @bencollins.bsky.social

headline: Elon Musk has constructed the Howling Engine, which converts the anguished cries of children into cancer
democrats: in these dark times, the american people need us to reach across the aisle
merritt k

They say “we want to end DEI” and they mean “we want to make sure that no white man in America ever has a black woman for a boss.”
Moira Donegan

It is Black History Month. Whether the administration outlaws it or not:


The Heathen Historian

the definition of a “competent government” is “one you don’t have to think about all the time”
shauna @goldengateblond.bsky.social

"DEI" is "CRT" is "gender ideology" is "cultural Marxism"--never a static, definable thing whose merits can be defended or debated or reasoned about. It is a specter, a phantasm, a nebulous evil, a RHETORICAL DEVICE, first and foremost. It is a cudgel to instrumentalize against the marginalized.
Talia "Odinslayer" Bhatt

Gender and sexual minorities have always been early targets of fascist movements. We deserve life and love and the fullness of human experience without violence. The rhetoric of MAGA fascists has been genocidal for years. Now, our government is putting this rhetoric into policy. We are not canaries for the coal mine, dying as a symbol of what is to come. We deserve your outrage for our own inherent value. Trans liberation is freedom for all. A freedom fascism cannot tolerate. They have tried before; we will not be erased. But Trump can do a lot of damage in the trying.
Rep. Leigh Finke

I know “all empires fall” and all that nonsense but I’ll be wrestling, for the rest of my life, with the reality that the world’s mightiest superpower is being toppled the the absolute biggest fuckin’ losers imaginable. Just… junior prom rejects, all the way down.
James B. Jones

I'm struck by the near-total failure of leadership across civil society, in a country that fetishizes the concept. Whole sections of leadership books at every bookstore. Named, endowed "leadership" institutes and curricula across higher ed. Awards and special recognition for "leaders." AND YET
Kevin Gannon @thetattooedprof.bsky.social

It's actually theft of taxpayers money when websites go dark. We paid for that data
Kendra Pierre-Louis @kendrawrites.com

If you cannot call it what it is when all in a week: a government removes every mention of a group of people, destroys information about them en masse, bans their discussion in schools, restricts their ability to travel and starts seizing and refusing their official identification, when will you?
Jessica Kant

Ah damn it turns out this whole political system relies on false assumptions about how big of an asshole someone could be
pixelatedboat

I am reminded of when Dr. Shirley Malcom told us at a Fellows meeting two decades ago that when folks started the BS re: why do we need diversity, she always responded "without diversity, a species dies."
Nicki Washington, Ph.D. @drnickiw.bsky.social

I realize this is probably too simple for the great minds that work at major news outlets, but we do not impose tariffs on countries. We impose tariffs on the goods we import from countries.
Dean Baker

I just want to say for the record that when the history books are written centuries from now, I believe the election of Donald Trump in a free and fair election in 2024 will go down as one of the most senseless and self-destructive own goals in human history
Aaron Rupar

Ask yourself what you’d think about another country if a new regime quickly prohibited all government agencies from communicating with the public, then began deleting data from government websites that it deemed unacceptable.
Radley Balko

Elon Musk is now attempting to rob *checks news* the elderly, disabled people and their children, widows, and *checks news again* yep orphans
Erin Fogg @criminalerin.bsky.social

Going full court press on Musk would be a pretty obvious play for an opposition party right now, if we had one.
Tom Tomorrow

I don't think Elon should get access to a list of the names, social security numbers, home addresses and bank account information of millions of the most vulnerable people in all of America, personally, I don't approve of where this could and may well be intended to be heading to next
Erin Fogg @criminalerin.bsky.social

Today, Trump has:
-indicated he'll purge the FBI of everyone who isn't a fanatical loyalist
-allowed his crony to seize all government funding in an effective coup
-ripped the entire federal government off the internet

Today, Democrats have:
-done nothing
-said nothing
-tweeted about egg prices
Will Stancil

hey you know what would be cool, if anyone, at any level, in any branch of the government did even one (1) thing to try to put the brakes on any of the terrible shit being carried out right now
Jack Mirkinson

<whispers> DEI is just another word for democracy.
Democracy is diverse.
Democracy is equality.
Democracy is inclusive.
Every attack on “DEI” is actually an attack on democracy.
Jen Mercieca

the conservative movement has been tightening the noose around the neck of the US constitution for 40 years and it's about to finally snap shut. what comes next?
mtsw

Like not to be glib here, but the answer to all of the "wait can he do this???" stuff is "no," with the remedy of impeachment. We're living through a constitutional failure not because the constitution permits this, but because it doesn't and congress will not do the thing it demands in response.
Pwnallthethings

An unelected, erratic, ketamine-addled billionaire with far right/white nationalist views has taken control of the personnel and payment systems of the United States government. Not an exaggeration, not hyperbole.
Brendan Nyhan

Trump administration just ordered the General Services Administration to develop a plan to cut 50% of its current budget, multiple officials tell me. "Our SES [senior executives] looked shell shocked," one official told me. "I expect this was a result of Musk's visit to HQ yesterday."
Ken Klippenstein

the richest man in the world has been installed in the government and he is very clearly trying to subvert it for his own ends.
jamelle @jamellebouie.net