Author: Ophelia Benson

  • Scrambling to salvage

    They have better manners across the pond.

    Rattled European leaders gathered in London on Sunday, scrambling to salvage any U.S. backing for Ukraine — and to map a way through disintegrating transatlantic security relations — after the televised Oval Office blowup between President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

    European heads of state continued to rally around Zelensky, who was greeted with cheers outside 10 Downing Street and a warm hug from British Prime Minister Keir Starmer when he arrived Saturday. European Union and NATO leaders met later Sunday in London, where Ukraine was at the forefront of discussions, and Zelensky attended. Starmer, in brief remarks before the leaders walked in for talks, said recent events had brought Europe to “a once in a generation” moment.

    It’s a bit as if they’re gathering to figure out what to do about Grendel.

    European leaders continued their chorus of support for Ukraine that began after Friday’s fireworks, praising the country’s efforts to resist the Russian invasion even as they took care not to directly criticize Trump.

    Because he’s Grendel. If you criticize him he might eat you or step on your house or burn your city to the ground.

    Starmer and Macron made clear they would continue their campaign to rescue something of American backing for Ukraine, even as they confronted the growing evidence that Trump’s pivot toward Russian President Vladimir Putin could be genuine and lasting. And that Europe would be forced to take on more of Ukraine’s — and possibly its own — defense if Trump shrinks the U.S. role.

    Or if Trump just plain invades Europe. It wouldn’t surprise me.

    Starmer had called the London summit as a follow-up to two gatherings of European heads of state, which struggled to respond to Trump’s upending of long-entrenched security and trade norms.

    The British leader has tried to place London at the forefront of Europe’s response to the Trump upheavals. Starmer fast-tracked a surge in U.K. defense spending Saturday and pledged British troops as a main part of a potential future European security force in Ukraine. On Sunday, he called on other European governments to grow their militaries and to join a “coalition of the willing” in taking up the slack in Ukraine.

    In defiance of the coalition of the assholes.

  • Soz

    Police admit they probably maybe should not have terrorized a woman for saying men are not women.

    Police have apologised over an investigation they mounted into a Newcastle United fan banned by the football club after expressing gender-critical views on social media.

    Northumbria Police have told Linzi Smith that crucial elements of their investigation into claims she had committed a hate crime were not acceptable.

    Yeah, “crucial elements” like the fact that what she said is simple obvious truth that everyone over the age of 3 is well aware of.

    Ms Smith, 34, was accused of being transphobic by a complainant who told Newcastle United that trans people would not feel safe sitting near her.

    Because what, she would pull a machete out of her pocket and carve them up? No – a machete is too big to fit in a pocket. So what then? How would “trans people” not feel safe sitting near her? For that matter how would they know they were sitting near her? How would they have the faintest idea they were sitting near her? Or who she was or what she had said?

    Ms Smith added that she felt “embarrassed and humiliated” at having to explain and justify her biological sex and sexual orientation to officers during the investigation.

    What else do we have to explain and justify to the cops? That water is wet? That cats are not dogs? That peaches are not lobsters? Is there a list somewhere? Couldn’t someone just give the cops a handbook?

    Lord Young, general secretary of the Free Speech Union, which has been helping Ms Smith, said: “Linzi should never have been investigated for a hate crime for saying trans women aren’t women, any more than she should have been banned from Newcastle games.

    “I’m delighted that Northumbria Police have now admitted their error and apologised and I look forward to Newcastle now lifting its ban.

    “No one should be punished by a football club for expressing a point of view that is perfectly legitimate, not remotely hateful and which 99 per cent of the club’s fans agree with.”

    What the hell is wrong with the 1%?

  • Guest post: Being a woman is not a performative activity

    Originally a comment by maddog1129 on Differences.

    What’s this “cis women” business? There’s no reason for “cis” to describe what we used to call “women” until very recently. Your forced labeling of women as “cis” women doesn’t even apply to many women you are trying to shove into that category. To the extent gender ideologists have provided a definition, “cis” as a descriptor of women is a “gender identity,” not a sex. Some women (sex) “identify with” or, more incoherently, “identify as,” or are comfortable with the bundle of gender stereotypes arbitrarily ascribed to women in some culture. News flash: since at least the 1970s, many feminist women have been pointing out that the social constructs of gender roles and stereotypes imposed on women are trappings and shackles of subordination, with no necessary application to any individual woman. Many feminists reject the notion of “gender” out of hand, and specifically do not “identify” with or as the bonds of oppression created for them. There is therefore a large swath of women (sex) who don’t have a gender identity at all. We are not “cis.” It’s not for you gender ideologists to impose a label onto others against their will.

    The word “women” refers to adult humans who are female. It’s a word for the sex of the people spoken of.

    BY DEFINITION, only a man (sex) can be a trans woman. That’s what the term “trans” signifies: he is a man and not a member of the sex class of women.

    You WISH that the words “women” and “men” had “evolved” to slough off any connection to sex, but they haven’t, despite your fervent and desperate efforts to force such a change.

    Sex is real. Sex matters. There are distinct differences between women and men, and these differences have profound effects on women (the sex), including SEXual assault, male pattern violence against women and girls, the SEXual risk of pregnancy, as well as needs peculiar to women, for women’s privacy, dignity, and safety. That’s why many facilities, spaces, services, etc., are segregated by sex, not by “gender identity.”

    As much as you WISH there weren’t significant differences between women, and trans-identified men, where segregation is by sex, the differences are profound.

    Men may conduct themselves so as to appear feminine. They are free to do so to their hearts’ content. They might be able in time to establish that adopting the trappings of femininity is a “valid” way for a man to live. In that sense, they might be “valid,” but it’s got nothing to do with women, or with what it is to be a member of the sex class called women. No matter what the man does to himself, he cannot change his sex. He will never be a woman. Being a woman is not a performative activity. It is a biological fact. A trans woman might “deserve” some recognition for creating a different way for men to be men, but no amount of effort, performance, wishing, sacrifice, or hardship will ever mean that a man “deserves” to be “recognized” as the sex he is not. To this, women say “No.”

    “Trans women are men.”

    That’s the truth. Your mantra is a lie. Trans women are NOT women. Not ever. Repeating a lie a million times doesn’t make it true. It’s still a lie.

  • Upside down

    Interesting. A Guardian writer, Edward Helmore, thinks Trump’s disgusting bullying yesterday is Zelenskyy’s fault.

    One television star turned president visits another far more powerful one on a stage set and attempts to introduce a plot twist of sorts. What could go wrong?

    The high-stakes White House showdown that unfolded on Friday after the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, demanded US security guarantees was deemed a damaging setback to Donald Trump’s goal of forging a peace deal – and a win for Russian dictator Vladimir Putin – by some US political commentators.

    Zelenskyy didn’t “demand” security guarantees out of the blue; he sought them in exchange for the highly valuable mineral rights Trump was demanding.

    The US treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, revealed after the showdown that his meeting with Zelenskyy in Kviv days earlier resulted in a similar outburst. After Friday’s meltdown, Bessent called Zelenskyy’s approach “one of the great diplomatic own goals in history”.

    “Outburst”?? It was Zelenskyy doing the outbursting?!

    “Clearly it very difficult to do an economic deal with a leader that doesn’t want to do a peace deal,” Bessent told Bloomberg.

    “I’m not sure what he was thinking,” Bessent said of Zelenskyy, who was ultimately asked to leave the White House by the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, after Ukrainian diplomatic aides texted that they were prepared to sign the agreed economic rare earth minerals deal.

    Et tu Guardian?

  • Hanna Miller focused on protecting whales

    One of the NOAA people Trump abruptly fired yesterday:

    Until Thursday afternoon, Hanna Miller focused on protecting whales from oil spills, ship strikes, and fishing gear.

    Miller was a natural resource specialist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the science-heavy federal agency that forecasts weather, tsunamis, and hurricanes, regulates fisheries, studies the climate, and protects salmon, orcas, and other endangered species that swim.

    In 2022, she helped a multiagency team make sure endangered orcas didn’t swim into the diesel fuel belching out of the sunken Aleutian Isle fishing boat off Washington’s San Juan Island. “I was on call for 42 days, tracking them every second that I was awake to make sure that they didn’t go through [the oil spill],” Miller said.

    In 2023, Miller was awarded employee of the year for NOAA Fisheries in the western United States, and in March 2024, she was promoted. On Thursday afternoon, while on vacation in Hawaii, the federal biologist opened her work email on her personal phone to find she no longer had a job.

    “The Agency finds that you are not fit for continued employment because your ability, knowledge and/or skills do not fit the Agency’s current needs,” the email from Vice Admiral Nancy Hann, Deputy Under Secretary for Operations, reads.

    “[I] just read it and had enough time to read it and share it with my personal email before I got locked out of my work account,” Miller said. “I was just really devastated,” she added.

    Hundreds of scientists and policy specialists received similar emails on Thursday as the Trump administration began downsizing the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

    Purely to “save” money, regardless of how useful or necessary or vital the work being canceled is. It’s about as sensible as terminating the fire department just as your house bursts into flames.

  • Differences

    Deep thoughts.

    Actually some two women or men are the same: identical twins.

    Other than that, of course they’re not “the same”; what they are however is the same sex. The word “sex” doesn’t mean your temperament or personality or likes and dislikes; it just means your sex. No two humans are the same, either, but they’re still both humans. The word “human” doesn’t mean your temperament or education or history or location, it just means your species. Words have meaning.

    “Concepts” of which people are women and which are men don’t “evolve across times, place and culture” – if they did, there wouldn’t be so many of us. Of course concepts of how women and men should behave evolve across all the things, but that’s a different matter. It’s useful to have a grasp on differences of that kind.

  • Formerly eliminated

    You can’t fix stupid, and the result is that stupid can kill you.

    In her hometown of Lubbock, Texas, Leah, a pregnant mother, has been avoiding stores and other public spaces for the last two weeks.

    On Wednesday, the city saw a six-year-old child who was not vaccinated against the virus die – the first US death from the measles in nearly a decade.

    With a baby on the way, Leah could be putting her foetus at risk of health complications if she contracted the virus, despite her own vaccination. Her paediatrician also advised her to move up her older son’s second shot of the vaccine – the full course for the immunisation – as the risk to his health grows.

    Measles ffs. We thought measles was a thing of the past, thanks to the miracle of vaccination.

    The US declared measles “eliminated” from the country in 2000, but in recent years, as anti-vaccine sentiments rose, the country has seen several outbreaks of the virus.

    Because it’s so much fun to be all quirky and original and interesting by promoting anti-vaccine “sentiments” instead of vaccinating your kids.

    On Wednesday, Robert F Kennedy Jr, the nation’s newly confirmed top health official, called the Texas outbreak “not unusual”, a claim disputed by doctors and local residents.

    Public health experts and Lubbock residents said the health secretary’s past remarks about childhood vaccines – as well as actions he’s taken related to them since entering office – could fuel an outbreak that is worrying parents across Texas and nearby states.

    The “health secretary” is actively promoting disease and death.

  • Where it started

    Dude we can see where your makeup ends. We can always see where your makeup ends. You have a shoepolish-brown face and pink ears: we can see that: we do see that every day. You look ridiculous.

  • It was a setup

    Tom Nichols on the horror of today:

    The president of the United States ambushed a loyal ally, presumably so that he can soon make a deal with the dictator of Russia to sell out a European nation fighting for its very existence.

    Trump’s advisers have already declared the meeting a win for “putting America first,” and his apologists will likely spin and rationalize this shameful moment as just a heated conversation—the kind of thing that in Washington-speak used to be called a “frank and candid exchange.” But this meeting reeked of a planned attack, with Trump unloading Russian talking points on Zelensky (such as blaming Ukraine for risking global war), all of it designed to humiliate the Ukrainian leader on national television and give Trump the pretext to do what he has indicated repeatedly he wants to do: side with Russian President Vladimir Putin and bring the war to an end on Russia’s terms. Trump is now reportedly considering the immediate end of all military aid to Ukraine because of Zelensky’s supposed intransigence during the meeting.

    Vance’s presence at the White House also suggests that the meeting was a setup. Vance is usually an invisible backbencher in this administration, with few duties other than some occasional trolling of Trump’s critics. (The actual business of furthering Trump’s policies is apparently now Elon Musk’s job.) This time, however, he was brought in to troll not other Americans, but a foreign leader. Marco Rubio—in theory, America’s top diplomat—was also there, but he sat glumly and silently while Vance pontificated like an obnoxious graduate student.

    Vance was there to be a shithead, and he fulfilled the task very thoroughly.

    After the meeting, Trump dismissed the Ukrainian leader and then issued a statement that could only have pleased Moscow:

    I have determined that President Zelensky is not ready for Peace if America is involved, because he feels our involvement gives him a big advantage in negotiations. I don’t want advantage, I want PEACE. He disrespected the United States of America in its cherished Oval Office. He can come back when he is ready for Peace.

    Yes if only Roosevelt had told Churchill he didn’t want advantage, he wanted PEACE, so let’s all do a deal with Herr Hitler.

    Vance, for his part, fully inhabited the role of a smarmy talk-show sidekick, jumping in to make sure the star got the support he needed while slamming one of the guests. The vice president is an unserious man who tries to insert himself into serious moments, but this time the stakes were much higher than the usual dustups with the media or congressional Democrats. He chuckled as Brian Glenn, a journalist from the right-wing channel Real America’s Voice who is reportedly dating Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, asked Zelensky the tough and incisive question of why he had not worn a suit in the Oval Office. (Perhaps he’ll ask Musk why he wore a hat [baseball cap] and T-shirt to a Cabinet meeting, but I doubt it.)

    The sheer rudeness shown to a foreign guest and friend of the United States was (to use a word) deplorable as a matter of manners and grace, but worse, Trump and Vance acted like a couple of online Kremlin sock puppets instead of American leaders.

    Sock puppets is what they are, really. Wally Smiths on the global stage.

    But no matter how disgusted anyone might be at Trump and Vance’s behavior, the strategic reality is that this meeting is a catastrophe for the United States and the free world. America’s alliances are now in danger, and should be: Trump is openly, and gleefully, betraying everything America has tried to defend since the defeat of the Axis 80 years ago. The entire international order of peace and security is now in danger, as Russian autocrats, after slaughtering innocent people for three years, look forward to enjoying the spoils of their invasion instead of standing trial for their crimes. (Shortly after Trump dismissed Zelensky from the White House, Putin’s homunculus, former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, posted on X: “The insolent pig finally got a proper slap down in the Oval Office.”)

    Ah yes the insolent pig who doesn’t like being invaded by a neighbor.

    Solidarity with the insolent pigs.

  • Squalor

    The reviews roll in.

    Updating to add

  • Why don’t you wear a clown suit?

    And even more bullying and insulting of Zelenskyy for having the nerve to resist invasion by a dictator.

    47 more months of this.

  • No weather service for you

    Also very bad:

    The Trump administration has begun firing employees at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, one of the world’s premier centers for climate science.

    The firings are expected to cost more than 800 people their jobs, out of a total of about 13,000 staff members, according to two people familiar with the situation who declined to be identified for fear of retribution. The notifications went out on Thursday afternoon.

    Because weather isn’t important. Nobody needs to know about the weather.

    “This loss of talent at NOAA is going to set the agency back years and compromise the integrity of missions that directly support human health and safety, economic prosperity and national security,” the analyst said, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. “This is not a move toward efficiency; it’s a move toward putting Americans in danger every day.”

    …

    The firings on Thursday are expected to be just the first wave of departures. Several hundred more staff members are expected to leave on Friday as part of the so-called deferred resignation program, according to a person familiar with the matter. On top of that, the Trump administration is expected to cancel contracts of workers affiliated with NOAA, which could cost the agency as many as 2,500 personnel.

    Good good good. Remember: weather doesn’t matter.

    Those who remain will see their jobs get more difficult. The General Services Administration, which manages government facilities, has begun canceling some of the contracts for buildings that NOAA uses, according to a person familiar with the matter. The agency has frozen credit cards used to pay for travel and sharply restricted the amount of money employees are able to put on those cards for other purchases.

    …

    “Gutting NOAA will hamstring essential lifesaving programs that forecast storms, ensure ocean safety and prevent the extinction of whales and sea otters,” said Miyoko Sakashita, the director of oceans projects at the Center for Biological Diversity. “I think most Americans want these kinds of vital government services protected, and we’ll do everything we can to defend them.”

    NOAA has been singled out for especially deep cuts by members of the Trump administration. Project 2025, the policy blueprint published by the Heritage Foundation that is reflected in many of the actions taken by the Trump administration so far, calls the agency “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry.” The document urges that NOAA be dismantled and some of its programs be terminated.

    Ahhh yes, good thinking. If NOAA is no longer there to inform us about climate change, there won’t be any climate change. It’s a good idea to close your eyes while driving, too: if you can’t see it it can’t smash into you.

  • Bully and Vice-bully

    Shame of a nation.

  • Geopolitics by tantrum

    Now Trump, like any furious teenager, has gone to his social media to whine and yell and threaten.

    In a Truth Social post following a heated exchange between Trump, Vance and Zelenskyy in the Oval Office, Trump called the meeting “meaningful,” but added, “I have determined that President Zelenskyy is not ready for Peace if America is involved.”

    “We had a very meaningful meeting in the White House today. Much was learned that could never be understood without conversation under such fire and pressure,” the president wrote in the post. “It’s amazing what comes out through emotion, and I have determined that President Zelenskyy is not ready for Peace if America is involved, because he feels our involvement gives him a big advantage in negotiations.”

    “I don’t want advantage, I want PEACE,” Trump added in the post. “He disrespected the United States of America in its cherished Oval Office. He can come back when he is ready for Peace.”

    So Trump’s going to let Putin swallow Ukraine because Vance manipulated him (Trump) into a tantrum. And those are the people running the show.

  • 10 minutes of sheer horror

    Oh my god oh my god oh my god

  • Oh those refugees

    As you may recall, Trump issued an executive order on February 7 that said

    Washington “shall promote the resettlement of Afrikaner refugees escaping government-sponsored race-based discrimination, including racially discriminatory property confiscation.”

    He ordered the Departments of State and Homeland Security “to prioritize humanitarian relief, including admission and resettlement through the United States Refugee Admissions Program, for Afrikaners in South Africa who are victims of unjust racial discrimination.”

    …

    On X this month, South African native Elon Musk, Trump’s top adviser, accused his home country of pushing “openly racist ownership laws.” South Africa rejected a license for his Starlink internet company because it did not meet BEE requirements.

    Ebrahim Rasool, the South African ambassador to Washington, said Trump’s order is based on false premises, including that “Afrikaners would fit the bill of refugees because refugees have a sense of being poor, dispossessed and oppressed.” None of that, he added during an interview, applies to Afrikaners, “the highest income earners in South Africa.”

    South Africa’s 2017 land audit showed that White people own 72 percent of individual farm and agricultural holdings, compared with 4 percent for “Africans,” which refers to the Black population. Compare that with the overall population, which is 81 percent Black and 7 percent White, almost the opposite of the landownership demographics.

    With that context, the South African government recently approved an Expropriation Act that allows it to acquire land for “nil compensation” under narrow circumstances. Those limited situations include “where the land is not being used and the owner’s main purpose is … to benefit from appreciation of its market value,” and “where an owner has abandoned the land by failing to exercise control over it.”

    No land has been confiscated under the law. There are no plans to force landowners away from their properties.

    “The people of this country know the pain of forced removals,” South African President Cyril Ramaphosa told parliament, as happened to Black people under apartheid. “That is why we will never allow forced removals again.”

    But Musk and Trump (in that order) are making a point.

    H/t What a Maroon

  • Separation of mosque and city

    I thought being a mayor, especially of one of the world’s biggest cities, was a secular kind of job.

    Silly me.

    Also, he makes it sound like a party, like the secularized commercialized Xmas we’re so used to, but Ramadan is a month of fasting. The fasting is dawn to dusk, and it’s not just eating it’s also drinking, so it’s unhealthy at best and risky at worst.

    It’s not something to pretty up with party lights, and it’s not something mayors or councilors or MPs should be promoting and cheering.

  • After

    But it’s a blanket problem.

    The president of the International Paralympic Committee says he is opposed to “blanket solutions” for transgender participation policies.

    Andrew Parsons was speaking after United States President Donald Trump signed an executive order that prevents transgender women from competing in female categories of sports.

    Sigh. I hate that journalistic caution that obscures the journalist’s meaning. The word “after” renders the rest of the sentence empty. Was Parsons disputing Trump’s executive order, or no? Mere chronology is not helpful.

    Last week, International Olympic Committee (IOC) presidential candidate Seb Coe backed the move, and has also suggested he would consider introducing a blanket ban if elected next month.

    “One thing that is important to us of course is to protect the female category, this is the number one priority,” Parsons told BBC Sport. “But we also have to acknowledge that there is a growing population of transgender athletes, [and] that they would like to compete at the highest possible level.”

    Either Parsons or the BBC is muddying the waters here. There is no “But” if he means women should shut up because lots of men want to compete in their sports. Yes indeed there is a growing population of men who would like to compete in women’s sports at the highest level but they should not be allowed to do that, ever. Protecting the female category isn’t just “one thing” that’s important to “us”; it’s the only fair thing to do.

  • 4% like the plan

    Heather Cox Richardson yesterday:

    This morning, Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought and Office of Personnel Management acting director Charles Ezell sent a memo to the heads of departments and agencies. The memo began: “The federal government is costly, inefficient, and deeply in debt. At the same time, it is not producing results for the American public. Instead, tax dollars are being siphoned off to fund unproductive and unnecessary programs that benefit radical interest groups while hurting hardworking American citizens. The American people registered their verdict on the bloated, corrupt federal bureaucracy on November 5, 2024 by voting for President Trump and his promises to sweepingly reform the federal government.”

    Vought was a key author of Project 2025, the blueprint for a second Trump administration, and in July 2024, investigative reporters caught him on video saying that he and his group, the Center for Renewing America, were hard at work writing the executive orders and memos that Trump would use to put their vision into place. But his claim that voters backed his plan is false. An NBC News poll in September 2024 showed that only 4% of voters liked what was in Project 2025. It was so unpopular that Trump called parts of it “ridiculous and abysmal” and denied all knowledge of it.

    But the policies coming out of the Trump White House are closely aligned with Project 2025 and, if anything, appear to be less popular now than they were last September. Under claims of ending diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has been slashing through government programs that are popular with Republican voters like farmers, as well as with Democratic voters.

    Yesterday, Secretary of Veterans Affairs Douglas A. Collins celebrated cuts to 875 contracts that he claimed would save nearly $2 billion. But, as Emily Davies and Hannah Natanson of the Washington Post reported, those contracts covered medical services, recruited doctors, and funded cancer programs, as well as providing burial services for veterans. The outcry was such that the VA rescinded the order today. Still on the chopping block, though, are another 1,400 jobs at the VA. Those cuts were announced Monday, on top of the 1,000 previous layoffs.

    Despite the anger at the major cuts across the government, Vought announced that agency heads should prepare for large-scale reductions in force, or layoffs, and that by March 13 they should produce plans for the reorganization of their agencies to make them cost less and produce more with fewer people. Before Trump took office, the number of people employed by the U.S. government was at about the same level it was 50 years ago, although the U.S. population has increased by about two thirds. What has increased dramatically is spending on private contractors, who take profits from their taxpayer-funded contracts.

    In his memo today, Vought instructed agency heads to “collaborate” with the DOGE team leads assigned to the agency, who presumably report to Elon Musk.

    Also today, Trump signed an executive order putting the DOGE team in charge of creating new technological systems to review all payments from the U.S. government and then giving the head of DOGE the power to review all those payments. “This order commences a transformation in Federal spending on contracts, grants, and loans to ensure Government spending is transparent and Government employees are accountable to the American public,” the executive order says.

    Make no mistake: This order transforms federal spending by taking it away from Congress, where the Constitution placed it, and moves it to the individual who sits atop the Department of Government Efficiency.

    Yesterday the White House announced that the acting head of DOGE is Amy Gleason, who was hired on December 30, 2024, at the technology unit that Trump tried to transform into the Department of Government Efficiency. Nevertheless, members of the White House, including President Donald Trump, have repeatedly referred to Musk as “the head of [DOGE].”

    Musk appeared to be in charge of the first Cabinet meeting of the Trump administration today. As Kevin Liptak and Jeff Zeleny of CNN reported: “If anyone was still in doubt where the power lies in President Donald Trump’s new administration, Wednesday’s first Cabinet meeting made clear it wasn’t in the actual Cabinet.” Katherine Doyle of NBC News described “Senate-confirmed department heads spending an hour as audience members.”

    A photograph of the meeting in which Musk, wearing a Make America Great Again ball cap and a T-shirt that said “Tech Support,” appears to be holding court while Trump appears to be sleeping reinforced the idea that it is Musk rather than Trump who is running the government. When Trump did speak, CNN fact checker Daniel Dale noted, his remarks were full of false claims.

    Cabinet officers, who had brought notes for the statements they expected to make, sat silent, while Musk, the unelected billionaire from South Africa who put more than a quarter of a billion dollars into electing Trump, spoke more than anyone except Trump himself.

    Only one month in. 47 months to go.

  • Under any statute in the history of the universe

    Huh. It turns out Musk and Trump can’t just fire probationary employees just by saying yer fiyered.

    A federal judge on Thursday ordered the Office of Personnel Management to rescind earlier instructions telling federal agencies to “promptly determine whether these employees should be retained at the agency.”

    The directions, communicated in a Jan. 20 memo and Feb. 14 internal email, are “illegal” and “should be stopped, rescinded,” Judge William Alsup of the Northern District of California said from the bench.

    The ruling does not reinstate dismissed employees.

    “The Office of Personnel Management does not have any authority whatsoever under any statute in the history of the universe, to hire and fire employees within another agency,” Alsup said Thursday night. “It can hire its own employees, yes. Can fire them. But it cannot order or direct some other agency to do so.”

    Huh. I wonder why no one bothered to look into that first. Seems kind of sloppy.

    Alsup called probationary employees “the lifeblood of our government.”

    “They come in at the low level and they work their way up, and that’s how we renew ourselves and reinvent ourselves,” he said.

    But there are too many. Trump says so.