Another winner…

Not, oddly enough, a press release in which he admits he’s a cheating asshole.

Dude has the nerve to complain of “spreading hate.”

Tom Nichols at The Atlantic:

I watched Sean Hannity’s Fox News interview tonight with President Donald Trump and Elon Musk.

But I am still not sure who’s in charge. If there is a headline from the interview, it is that the president of the United States feels that he requires the services of a multibillionaire to enforce his executive orders. Trump complained that he would write these “beautiful” executive orders, which would then languish in administrative limbo. Musk, for his part, explained that the president is the embodiment of the nation and that resisting his orders is the same as thwarting the will of the people. Hannity, of course, enthusiastically supported all of this whining about how hard it is to govern a superpower.

Of course the president is not “the embodiment of the nation.” That kind of thinking is used to justify royalty, but presidents are definitely not supposed to be royalty. Trump’s galactic vanity does not contradict that.

The interview was arduous both for the viewer and for Hannity, because everyone who interviews Trump must always contend with the president’s apparent inability to hold a single thought for very long. Hannity, as usual, tried to throw softballs; Trump, as usual, missed every pitch. Hannity at one point noted that Trump has “become a student of history” and then asked how the Framers of the Constitution would view his efforts to rein in the bureaucracy. Trump verbally wandered about before returning to his talking points about Musk, who he said is “amazing” and “cares.” So say James Madison and the other Founders, apparently.

Seriously? Did Hannity really think Trump could respond intelligently to that question? Surely not. Surely it’s obvious to everyone that Trump’s brain is melting away, and he can’t respond intelligently to anything. You’d think Fox people would be careful to throw him softballs.

It turns out that actions based on moving fast and breaking things can be…well…destructive. Who knew?

The movers and breakers are trying to unfire some of the crucial people they fired so swiftly and breakingly, but they’re having trouble because they did so much breaking.

The US government is trying to rehire nuclear safety employees it had fired on Thursday, after concerns grew that their dismissal could jeopardise national security, US media reported.

The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) workers were among hundreds of employees in the energy department who received termination letters.

…

The Trump administration has since tried to reverse their terminations, according to media outlets, but has reportedly struggled to reach the people that were fired after they were locked out of their federal email accounts.

A memo sent to NNSA employees on Friday and obtained by NBC News read: “The termination letters for some NNSA probationary employees are being rescinded, but we do not have a good way to get in touch with those personnel.”

“Please work with your supervisors to send this information (once you get it) to people’s personal contact emails,” the memo added.

Amateurish much?

That’s the problem, see. Breaking things is breaking things. If it occurs to you five minutes later that you need the things you just broke, well, maybe you shouldn’t have broken them.

Musk and Trump’s moronic method here is just to throw out all the people who are easy to fire because they don’t yet have protections. Their method is not to investigate what people do and try to figure out which jobs are least essential. Their method is what a child having a tantrum would do, but it’s not what anyone with an adult brain and a lick of sense would do. It’s fast, but then so is a missile launch; that doesn’t mean you want to launch missiles at the very people who are there to warn us of approaching missiles.

The sheer infantile stupidity of it is hard to believe.

Oops wait a second come back

Trump’s administration is attempting to rehire officials with the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) who worked on the government response to bird flu before being fired over the weekend, US media report.

The layoffs were a part of a cost-cutting mission across the US government by Trump and his Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) leader Elon Musk.

The terminations came as the latest outbreak of the bird flu has wreaked havoc on poultry and cattle farms, causing egg prices to skyrocket and raising concerns among public health experts.

A USDA spokesperson told the BBC that although “several” officials working on bird flu were “notified of their terminations” over the weekend, “we are working to swiftly rectify the situation and rescind those letters”.

So you’re saying maybe it’s not a good idea to fire whole agencies without pausing for one single second to look into what they do and why it’s needed? Wow, radical.

“USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service frontline positions are considered public safety positions, and we are continuing to hire the workforce necessary to ensure the safety and adequate supply of food to fulfil our statutory mission,” the spokesperson added.

Along with firing lots of them fast and at random.

Trump and Musk appeared on Fox News on Tuesday night to defend the mass cuts they are making across the government, with Musk claiming Doge is just trying to “restore the will of the people through the president”.

Ya unh huh that’s how it’s done, move fast and break things and call that “the will of the people.”

The transfer to dictatorship proceeds apace.

Trump has signed an executive order making independent regulatory agencies established by Congress now accountable to the White House – a move that some experts said clashes with mainstream interpretations of the constitution.

The order forces major regulators such as the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to report new policy priorities to the executive branch for approval, which will also have a say over their budgets.

Everybody and everything has to get Trump’s permission to do anything, and if he doesn’t give his permission, that’s the end of it.

In a fact sheet, the White House described the move as, “ensuring that all federal agencies are accountable to the American people, as required by the Constitution”.

Trump is not the American people.

The latest apparent power grab from the Trump administration would give the office of management and budget head, Russell Vought, oversight over a suite of major agencies – including regulators of Wall Street, campaign finance, telecommunications companies, labor and even the Postal Service.

The Trump order aligns with campaign promises to make independent agencies accountable to the president and a pledge Vought made in 2023: “What we’re trying to do is identify the pockets of independence and seize them.”

Aka make the US a dictatorship.

“The [order] directs that all independent agencies shall subordinate themselves to the office of management and budget (OMB) and Trump’s OMB hatchet man, Russ Vought,” said Robert Weissman, co-president of the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen.

“Under the [executive order], independent agencies’ rules would be approved by OMB and Vought, their funding would be determined by OMB and Vought, and they would be required to follow White House policy dictates,” said Weissman.

Weissman argued the move was an effort to shield major corporations from the scrutiny of such independent agencies. The SEC, for instance, often investigates major corporations on behalf of shareholders.

“Not incidentally, both the FTC and SEC have ongoing investigations or enforcement actions against companies owned by Elon Musk,” said Weissman.

Of course they do.

Zelensky points out that Trump tells a lot of lies.

“I would like to have more truth with the Trump team,” Mr. Zelensky told reporters in Kyiv during a broader discussion about the administration, which this week opened peace talks with Russia that excluded Ukraine. Mr. Zelensky said that the U.S. president was “living in a disinformation space” and in a “circle of disinformation.”

Which is a lightly veiled way of saying he lies non-stop.

Later Tuesday, Mr. Trump said of Ukraine’s leadership and the war, “You should have never started it”…

Note: he didn’t start it.

“Yesterday, there were signals of speaking with them as victims,” he said of the Trump officials’ tone in discussing the Russian officials, whose government sparked the largest war in Europe since World War II, which has killed or wounded about a million people on both sides over three years. “That is something new.”

It’s what they do. It’s what trans ideologues do and it’s what Trumpists do. Blatantly reverse victim and victimizer and ignore all corrections.

Jo Bartosch at UnHerd:

The United Nations has been dragged into the global conflict between the defenders of biological reality and the demands of transgender activists. UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women and Girls, Reem Alsalem, has dared to acknowledge the existence of two sexes in her reports — at once a fact so mundane and an act so rare — that over 200 NGOs have signed a letter denouncing her.

According to this outraged coalition, co-led by Planned Parenthood International (PPI) and Women Deliver (WD), Alsalem’s “sex-based” approach is nothing less than a “Western colonial patriarchal worldview” that “undermines decades of progress.” Apparently, recognising that men commit violence against women “further marginalizes vulnerable groups, including trans and gender-diverse persons, increasing the risk of violence and hatred.” Because nothing threatens safety quite like correctly identifying the sex of rapists, wife beaters or extremist religious leaders who stone rape victims. The furious missive is the latest attack on Alsalem, an expert who has faced calls for her dismissal from her UN role for over two years, alongside constant accusations that she is transphobic.

“Colonial” ffs – as if colonized people think men are women. That’s colonial if you like.

Bizarrely, to the NGO set who enjoy expense-account lunches in Geneva while churning out unreadable reports, Alsalem’s insistence on biological sex is supposedly rooted in white supremacy. As the letter states: “The category of ‘woman’ has always been racialized, with white women expected to enforce binary gender norms violently upon anyone deemed non-conforming.” 

They’ve been reading Judith Butler, haven’t they.

Alsalem’s work, which exposes the brutal reality of male violence — child marriage, sex trafficking, femicide — triggers the #BeKind conformists because it refuses to kowtow to their luxury beliefs. Anyone with a functioning moral compass should be horrified by these crimes, not by the language used to describe them. Yet WD and PPI seem more exercised by words like “biological sex” than by the actual atrocities committed against women and girls worldwide.

It’s all in the language, you see. There is no reality, there is only chat.

Michael Tomasky puts it starkly:

I’d be hard-pressed to argue that JD Vance’s meeting with the leader of the German fascist party on Friday was weakly covered by the press. Yet somehow, it hasn’t registered quite the degree of shock and revulsion here in the United States that it deserves to. That visit, along with Vance’s shocking speech at the Munich Security Conference, confirms every worst suspicion about this morally rudderless mountebank. The argot of diplomats and newspaper editorials, which express “concern” or even “grave concern,” doesn’t begin to describe how we Americans should feel about what Vance did last week in our name.

The Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD) has been declared a “suspected extremist” organization by the German domestic intelligence agency. It has been shunned by all other parties; with a Bundestag election coming up February 23, the leading candidate, Christian Democrat Friedrich Merz, has vowed that he won’t form a government with the fascists. AfD’s leaders have constantly downplayed the country’s Nazi past. And the vice president of the United States just met with its leader. While shunning a meeting with the sitting chancellor.

…

Vance and Musk, and by extension their boss, President Donald Trump, like what AfD stands for, and they want the world to know they like it.

They want to rub our noses in it.

Well how do you think they get there?!

It’s not about being “bothered” ffs. It’s also not personal. It’s about the whole set of demands and changes and rules and lies that impose this terrible religion on all of us. How is it not blindingly obvious that if you call a man “she” you are accepting the ideology? And when you’re Piers Morgan doing it on social media you are promoting and validating the ideology. Cut it out.

A Congressional press release:

House Appropriations Committee and Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education Subcommittee Ranking Member Rosa DeLauro is warning of the fatal consequences of unelected billionaire and self-appointed president Elon Musk’s crippling of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). By slashing CDC’s workforce, President Trump and unchecked billionaires are leaving Americans more exposed to disease, illness, and death.

“Elon Musk – an unchecked billionaire – President Donald Trump, and Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. are continuing their assault on Americans’ health,” said Ranking Member Rosa DeLauro. “In the midst of a severe flu season, and as a potentially deadly avian flu outbreak threatens to raise the stakes for public health even further, firing thousands of highly skilled employees – including doctors – will make Americans sicker, weaker, and more vulnerable to avoidable death. These cuts reverse progress in the fight against deadly diseases like cancer and diseases that had been previously eradicated in America like polio. This does not lower costs for families as Trump promised he would. Instead, it tells them they are on their own.”

In this move, Trump and Musk have reportedly fired 135 members of the CDC Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS). This is nearly half of the staff.

“EIS officers are at the frontline of public health emergencies. They are on the ground when outbreaks occur so that we can contain diseases before they reach the United States. We will not know the outcome of decimating this program until it’s too late – until Americans are dying from a disease we could have contained before it spread. This is nothing short of terrifying,” DeLauro continued.

Yes but it’s fun for Musk, and that’s what matters.

We take for granted the various safety measures and health protections the collective intelligence of humans has come up with over the years, so we take an axe to those measures to “save money.”

At least, some of us do, and unfortunately the some of us who do are busy with those axes.

Over a thousand (1300) probationary workers at the Center for Disease Control are being let go by the Trump administration, representing about 45% of all probationary workers at the CDC.

Being fired. I dislike that “being let go” euphemism, especially in cases like this where the firings are wholly arbitrary and reckless. There’s no room for euphemisms here.

Among those laid off include all 50 first-year officers of the CDC’s Epidemic Intelligence Service, and perhaps some second-year officers. The EIS, established in 1951, recruits some of the brightest public health leaders into a two-year program to train healthcare professionals to identify and respond to disease outbreaks.

And that’s a good thing. We need healthcare professionals who can identify and respond to disease outbreaks. Does Idiot Musk really want more disease outbreaks? Probably not; probably he’s just too reckless and power-drunk to pay attention to the details.

EIS officers have historically identified and controlled important health threats like COVID-19 and Zika. Their expertise allows for rapid response to emerging infectious diseases, which ultimately prevents widespread transmission. Firing frontline workers will have devastating consequences for public and global health, and will hinder the CDC’s ability to respond to outbreaks in a timely fashion.

In other words EIS officers make things not happen, and because the things don’t happen, we don’t realize the EIS officers stopped them, so we feel very clever when we fire them all to save $$$.

This comes at a time where there is no shortage of public health threats. Currently, the flu is surging in America, with up to 23 million hospital visits for the flu and at least 370,000 hospitalizations, according to the CDC. In addition, the bird flu is spreading uncontrollably in animals and has killed one man in Louisiana. An Ebola outbreak has also been reported in Africa. America and the world are in desperate need of qualified public health practitioners who can manage all of these public health threats.

Naaaah. Just drink an extra glass of orange juice and you’ll be fine.

Maybe the CDC isn’t the right branch of government to slash? Maybe disease control is not actually a bad thing?

The Trump administration slashed hundreds of employees at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — including dozens of workers crucial to public health safety — as the country grapples with a potential “quad-demic,” according to reports.

As part of an effort led by the Department of Government Efficiency, which billionaire Elon Musk heads, thousands of probationary workers within the Department of Health and Human Services were told they were being terminated over the weekend, including 1,300 at the CDC.

According to NBC News, those departures included around two dozen workers at the Laboratory Leadership Service, a two-year fellowship program that trains scientists to address public health threats.

So Musk and Trump want disease to spread unchecked?

Other axed workers include half of the Epidemic Intelligence Service program, CBS News reported. EIS is another two-year fellowship program that trains health care professionals to become “disease detectives,” investigating public health threats, identifying their cause, and implementing control measures.

Trump and Musk want to stop investigating public health threats, identifying their cause, and implementing control measures? They want public health threats to go unnoticed, unidentified, uncontrolled?

As of Friday, the Trump administration planned to gut the CDC by 10 percent, slashing 1,300 probationary employees, the Associated Press reported. The Department of Health and Human Services is expected to see more than 5,200 cuts to its 80,000-person workforce, the outlet reported.

Also: don’t you dare get vaccinated, and don’t even think about wearing a mask. Peasants.

Sometimes the bafflegab is so extensive that the reader literally cannot tell what the reporter is saying.

Scots councillor claims he faces disciplinary hearing for calling non-binary child a boy

Well which kind of “non-binary child”?

Astoundingly, the Scottish Express doesn’t say. The result is a dense fog where a news item should be.

A Scots councillor claims he is facing potential disciplinary action for allegedly calling a non-binary child a “boy.” Controversial independent representative Alastair Redman will be hauled in front of Standards Commission chiefs next week to face accusations that he has breached the code of conduct.

The Argyll and Bute councillor was embroiled in a row in 2023 about parents complaining to a secondary school about a non-binary child allegedly gaining access to the girls’ changing rooms. The school investigated and concluded that this didn’t happen, and police probed a second allegation that the kid had placed a recording device in the same facilities.

That seems to imply that the “non-binary child” is a boy, but news stories shouldn’t be implying crucial facts about what they’re reporting on, they should report them. It’s so stupid, as well as so amateurish and hostile to the reader and generally not what they’re supposed to be doing.

And then there’s also the total submission to woo. There’s no such thing as a “non-binary child” ffs.

Maybe don’t take any plane trips for the next four years or so.

The Trump administration has begun firing several hundred Federal Aviation Administration employees, upending staff on a busy air travel weekend and just weeks after a January fatal midair collision at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.

Probationary workers were targeted in late-night emails Friday notifying them they had been fired, David Spero, president of the Professional Aviation Safety Specialists union, said in a statement.

The impacted [fired] workers include personnel hired for FAA radar, landing and navigational aid maintenance, one air traffic controller told The Associated Press. The air traffic controller was not authorized to talk to the media and spoke on condition of anonymity.

A Transportation Department official told the AP late Monday that no air traffic controllers were affected by the cuts, and that the agency has “retained employees who perform critical safety functions.” In a follow-up query the agency said they would have to look into whether the radar, landing and navigational aid workers affected were considered to handle critical safety functions.

Oh we’ll look into that for you, would you like some tea or coffee?

Other FAA employees who were fired were working on an urgent and classified early warning radar system the Air Force had announced in 2023 for Hawaii to detect incoming cruise missiles, through a program that was in part funded by the Defense Department. It’s one of several programs that the FAA’s National Defense Program manages that involve radars providing longer-range detection around the country’s borders.

Due to the nature of their work, staff in that office typically provide an extensive knowledge transfer before retiring to make sure no institutional knowledge is lost, said Charles Spitzer-Stadtlander, one of the employees in that branch who was terminated.

The Hawaii radar and the FAA National Defense Program office working on it are “about protecting national security,” Spitzer-Stadtlander said. “I don’t think they even knew what NDP does, they just thought, oh no big deal, he just works for the FAA.”

“This is about protecting national security, and I’m scared to death,” Spitzer-Stadtlander said. “And the American public should be scared too.”

Musk is just sending his underlings in to fire as many people as possible, without any attention to what the people do and why and what kind of hell will result from firing them all.

The employees were fired “without cause nor based on performance or conduct,” Spero said, and the emails were “from an ‘exec order’ Microsoft email address” — not a government email address. A copy of the termination email that was provided to the AP shows the sending address “ASK_AHR_EXEC_Orders@usfaa.mail.outlook.com.”

The firings hit the FAA as it is facing a shortfall in controllers. Federal officials have been raising concerns about an overtaxed and understaffed air traffic control system for years, especially after a series of close calls between planes at U.S. airports. Among the reasons they have cited for staffing shortages are uncompetitive pay, long shifts, intensive training and mandatory retirements.

See, you don’t want that. You don’t want to get rid of the people who keep planes from crashing into each other. They serve a purpose.

Man who pretends to be a woman and abuses any woman who points out he is a man tells JK Rowling to stop doing something she isn’t doing.

The three pleases are a nice touch though. One would have been cold, two would have been pushy, but three are just right.

Guy whines about not enough attention being paid to him our trans family especially the male part.

His name under the story is Jenny Maguire. He’s a man.

We must examine why a group that represents less than 1pc of the population now takes up such a large slice of the political and media landscape – and more importantly, what is being ignored as a result.

Well one major reason the group takes up so much space is the fact that it takes it up. It demands it, it grabs it, it camps out in it. The trans movement loves attention and can never ever get enough of it. If it had wanted to take up little space it would have gone about things very differently.

Mr Maguire goes on to explain that politicians should “protect women” rather than “bash” the sainted trans communniny. By calling them “terfs” perhaps?

Bottom row, left side – that’s our hero protecting women.

Seeking a way through:

Employers have handled disputes involving transgender issues “really badly”, the general secretary of the UK’s largest trade union has said.

Unison’s Christina McAnea said unions have a responsibility “to try and make sure that we find a way through this” and she would be happy to work with organisations on the issue. Speaking exclusively to The Scotsman, she referenced the need to ensure trans people are not discriminated against while also ensuring women with concerns are “listened to and heard”.

But what does “the need to ensure trans people are not discriminated against” mean? What does “discrimination against trans people” consist of?

That’s the problem. It doesn’t mean what it means in the case of subordinated groups such as women or workers or people of color or LGB. They’re not confined to ghettos or systematically paid less or confined to menial jobs. It generally appears to mean they should be instantly and unconditionally believed when they say they are the opposite sex. But there are many compelling reasons that is not a right. It’s not invidious discrimination to need to know which people are male; that’s especially true in the case of women.

It comes amid an ongoing employment tribunal involving NHS Fife that centres on a trans doctor’s use of a female changing room.

Always the same sneaky refusal to state the facts. Upton is not a “trans doctor”; he’s a trans woman, aka a man. The tribunal centers on a male doctor’s use of a female changing room. The relevant adjective is not “trans” but “male.”

Unison’s women’s conference, which was held in Edinburgh from Thursday until Saturday, backed a motion stating “trans women are women and trans men are men” and supporting the controversial policy of self identification.

Which is both an insult and a threat to women.

The Scotsman asked Ms McAnea whether a woman should have a right to a single-sex space, such as a changing room, which excludes trans women or those born male.

She said: “I think it’s hard to come down hard and fast on some of this.

Well think again, then. Of course it’s not hard. Men should not invade women’s spaces. End of story.

“I just cannot believe it’s not within the grasp of managers in a big organisation to find a way through this that both satisfies the need to ensure that trans women aren’t discriminated against, and ensures that the voices of women who have got concerns about some of these things are listened to and heard.”

Well that depends on how you define “discriminated against.” If men who claim to be trans women would stop invading women’s spaces then yes, there could be a way through, but there is no sign that that’s happening, and union bosses like this one are zero help.

Ms McAnea said the women’s conference had carried the motion “because they take the view that giving trans women rights doesn’t take away rights from women”. She said: “That’s not to say it’s not legitimate to have a discussion when women raise issues about safety and single-sex spaces.

In other words she’s just spouting easy platitudes that contradict each other. The view that giving trans women rights doesn’t take away rights from women is flatly contradicted by those issues about safety and single-sex spaces – and there are also the issues about sports and prizes and hiring and promotion and all the rest of it. “Giving trans women rights” in the sense of ordering everyone to agree that they’re actual women obviously takes away myriad rights from women. That’s why we object to it!

“But there’s all these definitions about what does that mean that I think need to be discussed. And what is the actual problem we’re trying to address?”

Hello? We’ve been doing that. For years. We get called names for doing that. Pay attention.

Tom Nichols points out that we’re all the prisoners of Musk’s resentment and egomania.

One of the greatest tricks that Donald Trump and Elon Musk ever pulled is to convince millions of people that DOGE, the self-styled Department of Government Efficiency, is about government efficiency.

DOGE isn’t really a department; it’s not an agency; it has no statutory authority; and it has little to do with saving money, streamlining the bureaucracy, or eliminating waste. It is a name that Trump is allowing a favored donor and ally to use in a reckless campaign against various targets in the federal government. The whole enterprise is an attack against civil servants and the very notion of apolitical expertise.

But it must be a department – it says so itself! The D in DOGE stands for “department.” What more do you want?

Populists are generally wary of experts, especially those who work for the government, but Musk is no man of the people: He is the richest human being in the world, and he runs major companies that rely both on government-provided expertise and significant government subsidies. As my colleague Anne Applebaum wrote, “Musk has made no attempt to professionally audit or even understand many of the programs being cut”—a willful indifference that gives away the game.

Well he’s that kind of man of the people – the kind who doesn’t care how ignorant he is, because he’s a man of the people. You may say that’s circular but I say it’s just good common sense.

Musk’s assault on expertise is coming from the same wellspring that has been driving much of the public’s irrational hostility toward experts for years. I have been studying “the death of expertise” for more than a decade, and I have written extensively about the phenomenon in which uninformed laypeople come to believe that they are smarter and more capable in almost any subject than experts. The death of expertise is really about the rise of two social ills: narcissism and resentment.

Hey you know what else fits that description? Trans “activism.” Makes ya think.

Eventually, such attacks run out of steam when the costs begin to accumulate. No matter how many times Stalin told his scientists to plant wheat in the snow so that it could evolve to grow in the winter, the wheat (which had no political allegiances) died. Today, vaccine refusal might seem like a brave stand against white-jacketed overlords—until your children are stricken with measles or whooping cough.

Modern societies, as Americans are soon to learn, cannot function without experts in every field, especially the many thousands who work in public service. The first step in containing the damage is to see Trump’s and Musk’s goals for DOGE clearly: It is a project rooted in resentful arrogance, and its true objective is not better government, but destruction.

And there’s not a damn thing we can do to stop it.

One to watch:

Trump’s administration has asked the supreme court to approve the firing of the head of a federal agency dedicated to protecting whistleblowers in the first appeal of Trump’s new term and a key test of his battle with the judicial branch.

It’s pretty tricky – aka impossible – to have a federal agency dedicated to protecting whistleblowers if the Big Boss is free to meddle with said agency. Trump wants to get rid of anyone who did or does or could blow a whistle on him, and that’s unfortunate, because he’s breaking rules and laws and constitutional norms all over the shop. Trump is the last person on the planet who should be able to fire all the whistleblowers.

Hampton Dellinger, the head of the office of the special counsel (OSC), is among the fired government watchdogs who have sued the Trump administration, arguing that their dismissals were illegal and that they should be reinstated.

That’s one reason right there. They think they can fire anyone they want to. That would be a dictatorship, not a presidency.

The OSC is an independent federal agency that serves as “a secure channel for federal employees to blow the whistle by disclosing wrongdoing”.

It is also intended to enforce the Hatch Act, a 1939 law designed to ensure that government programs are carried out in a nonpartisan way, and to enforce a merit system by investigating and prosecuting racial discrimination, partisan political discrimination, nepotism and coerced political activity. [I guess sex discrimination is allowed?]

Dellinger has said his office’s work was “needed now more than ever”, noting the “unprecedented” number of firings, in many cases without any specified cause, of federal employees with civil service protections in recent weeks by the Trump administration.

On Wednesday, the federal judge Amy Berman Jackson reinstated Dellinger to his position pending a 26 February court hearing, writing that the language of the 1978 law that created Dellinger’s position “expresses Congress’s clear intent to ensure the independence of the special counsel and insulate his work from being buffeted by the winds of political change”.

How about the tornados of political change?

According to that law, the special counsel “may be removed by the president only for inefficiency, neglect of duty or malfeasance in office”.

As the Trump administration implements sweeping firings throughout the federal government, Dellinger has argued that his dismissal, via a one-sentence email that did not specify the cause, was unlawful.

Also damn rude.

Wait who’s the joke?

That’s so dumb it’s hard to believe. Maya doesn’t say “he’s tall therefore not a woman.” Her point is that a lot of newspapers apparently took great care to hide the fact that Upton towers over Peggie, presumably because that fact hints at the malicious absurdity of Upton’s claim that Peggie bullied and harassed him.

Magic Gender Ideology is so stuffed with lies and manipulations like this it’s a wonder anyone takes it seriously.