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.
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.
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.
Manoshpere bigot Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan—who still face rape and human trafficking charges in Romania, among others—are on their way to the United States after the Trump administration strong-armed Romania into lifting travel restrictions.
The Tate brothers have been ardent Trump supporters for years, and it seems to have paid off. A Trump official mentioned the Tates in a call with Romania earlier this month, according to the Financial Times. Trump’s special envoy Ric Grenell brought up the brothers again to Romania’s foreign minister on his trip to Munich.
And “brought up” is apparently cravenspeak for “demanded the immediate release of.”
“I have never heard of a foreign government asking Romania to lift preventive measures to allow some suspects to leave the country,” foreign Romanian Judge Cristi Danilet told the Associated Press. “If I had been a judge, this would not have happened. If it is true, it means that there is no more rule of law and sovereign countries.”
It’s true; they’re back in the US now, while Trump claims to know nothing about it.
In interviews with Mother Jones,queer and trans workers who hold wide-ranging roles in the federal government, some with more than a decade of public service, say they have been living and working in fear since Trump regained office—afraid of being targeted or even fired for their gender identity, sexual orientation, or past efforts to support other LGBTQ employees. All eight federal workers interviewed for this story requested anonymity to protect themselves or their colleagues from workplace retaliation.
Transgender workers, in particular, tell Mother Jones they’re afraid of being fired every day simply for being who they are.
Hang on. Hang on. It’s not for “being who they are.” It’s the very opposite of that. It’s for claiming to be who they are not. Unless of course you translate “who they are” as “people who claim to be who they are not.” Endless spiral. That’s the core of trans ideology, and there’s no escaping it, because that’s all there is.
Oops! She thought she was writing in her private secret diary…how embarrassing.
Huh, I wonder why some knobhead in The Times gave me a bad review for a book where I criticise their paper's coverage of working class people, their obsession with demonising trans women, the dominance of privately educated people in journalism, the stranglehold rightwing…
Huh, I wonder why some knobhead in The Times gave me a bad review for a book where I criticise their paper’s coverage of working class people, their obsession with demonising trans women, the dominance of privately educated people in journalism, the stranglehold rightwing billionaires have on the media, and the cosy relationship between lobby journos and politicians?
It’s a mystery!
And then she does it again. Must be Thursday.
Politics is war by other means. And media is politics by other means. I could have written War & Peace and the Rupert Murdoch newspapers would give it a 0/10.
She could have written War and Peace except for the fact that no she couldn’t.
So anyway, after all that, of course I had to read the review.
Ash Sarkar, a two-legged viral outrage generator beloved by television producers, came to prominence during the late 2010s. Whether in TV studios self-identifying as a communist or at street demos screaming the word “Nazi” at people, Sarkar was an inescapable presence of those high-pitched times.
What did Sarkar, a senior editor at the left-wing news site Novara Media, want back then, other than being internet famous for owning, burning, calling out and clapping back at room-temperature IQ pundits on breakfast television, or seeing her absolute boy Jeremy Corbyn in 10 Downing Street? “It’s about the desire to see the coercive structures of state dismantled,” she told one interviewer in 2018, “while also having fun.”
Be careful what you wish for. It turns out to be Trump and Musk who are doing the dismantling.
Her prose is leaden. The pages swarm with “emboldening effects”, “culture wars being stoked”, “vulnerable minorities”, “anti-migrant crackdowns”, “strong bulwarks”, “custodians of the status quo”, “individual subjectivities” and “pervasive feelings”. Sometimes she doesn’t make any sense at all: “Social media has partially, but dramatically, democratised the public sphere.” Good luck figuring out what a partial dramatic democratisation is.
…
As the book loses steam she goes back to calling people Nazis. Gender critical feminists, Sarkar reckons, are “not a million miles away” from Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy.
Really? Women who say that men are not women are comparable to Rudolf Hess?
Well no wonder the BBC included her in that documentary about the Nazis.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was slammed Wednesday for downplaying a measles outbreak that has led to the country’s first child death from the disease in decades.
Donald Trump’s health secretary waved off the active Texas outbreak—where pediatricians on the ground have reported children being accepted into care unable to properly breathe—as a normal thing that happens every year.
Scores of physicians have rung alarm bells that the latest outbreak, impacting over 100 people in West Texas and neighboring New Mexico, is a “crisis” that is far from normal—especially for a disease that was declared eliminated in the U.S. in 2000.
The Texas Department of State Health Services said Wednesday the child who died from measles was “school-aged” and unvaccinated. They were hospitalized last week and had died by Wednesday morning.
But that’s normal. No biggy. I’m sure the kid’s parents are just getting on with their day.
The death is the first since 2015, when measles was blamed as the cause of death for an immunocompromised Washington woman who physicians did not know had the disease until after her death. Before that case, the country had gone 12 years since it had last recorded a measles death of any kind.
Kennedy told reporters there have now been two deaths this year from the disease, which is largely preventable with a widely-available vaccine, but he did not elaborate on the second case.
Kennedy of course didn’t say the “largely preventable” part. That should be in parentheses rather than between commas. Kennedy doesn’t want to admit that measles is largely preventable.
There were 18 people hospitalized as of Wednesday morning, Texas health officials said. Those in Lubbock, which is ground zero for the outbreak, say that number is steadily growing.
Dr. Lara Johnson, the chief medical officer of a children’s hospital in the city, told NBC News her team has cared for “around 20” kids with measles. [All] of those patients were admitted because they were struggling to breathe. None had been vaccinated.
None. had. been. vaccinated.
Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy, a former physician who was slammed by his medical colleagues earlier this month for voting to confirm Kennedy, told parents Wednesday to protect their children from measles by getting the “safe and effective” vaccine.
After voting for Kennedy. Rethink your life, Senator.
But don’t worry. They’re not breaking anything that actually matters. They say so themselves.
“We’re cutting down the size of government. We have to,” Trump said earlier on Wednesday during the first cabinet meeting of his second term. “We’re bloated. We’re sloppy. We have a lot of people that aren’t doing their job.”
The administration already moved to fire thousands of probationary employees who were not yet entitled to civil service protections. The president on Wednesday said that the Environmental Protection Agency plans to cut up to 65% of its employees. Employees at the labor department and the Social Security Administration are also reportedly bracing for dramatic downsizings.
See? Stupid shit. Frivolous. Unnecessary. Who needs an environment? What good is labor? Social security is a libbrul plot to weaken us.
Addressing the cabinet meeting on Wednesday, Musk conceded that Doge had made some mistakes in its rapid-fire approach to shrinking and in some cases attempting to entirely eliminate agencies. He conceded that Doge “won’t be perfect”, including when it “accidentally” cancelled an Ebola-prevention effort that the tech billionaire insisted had been restored “immediately” and with “no interruption”.
An official with the US Agency for International Development (USAid), one of Doge’s first targets, disputed Musk’s claim, telling the AP that agency funds for Ebola response had not been released since Trump froze foreign aid last month.
Listen up: white people don’t get Ebola. That’s all you need to know.
Trump’s top aides are struggling to contain disputes at the White House and across the administration following billionaire Elon Musk’s ultimatum to federal workers to list their accomplishments or lose their jobs, said three government officials familiar with the tensions.
Before the weekend, the White House felt confident that coordination had been improving between senior staffers and Musk, two of those people said. In the first weeks of Trump’s new administration , some White House officials had expressed concerns over the tactics of Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, as Reuters previously reported.
Chief of staff Susie Wiles had pulled Musk aside to ask him to loop her in on his plans instead of surprising her team with major decisions, according to two separate sources with knowledge of the conversation who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the discussions.
After that conversation, Musk had begun keeping Wiles informed of DOGE’s activities on a daily basis, said one of the officials with direct knowledge of the matter. The White House believed it had Musk’s agreement that he would seek approval from cabinet secretaries before he used the government’s human resources agency, the Office of Personnel Management, to send emails directly to federal workers, two of the officials said.
But the plan appears to have quickly fallen apart. After Trump urged Musk to “get more aggressive” with DOGE in a post on his Truth Social site on Saturday, OPM ordered the nation’s 2.3 million civil-service workers in an email to detail their accomplishments at work. The email landed shortly after Musk posted on his social media site X that not responding to the request would be viewed as a resignation, an ultimatum that sent shockwaves through Washington.
You have to wonder why Trump gives Musk his orders via “his Truth Social site“ rather than the more usual way, i.e. directly. You also have to wonder why Musk issues his threats to civil-service workers via his social media site.
Trump and Wiles did not sign off on the email, those three people said, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the media. Musk, however, told a cabinet meeting on Wednesday that he had asked Trump if his team could “send out an email to everyone, just saying: ‘What did you get done last week?’ The president said yes. So, I did that.”
He did that and he also said – on his soshul meeja site – that not replying=resignation. So in effect the email was not “just saying” wudja do lassweek.
In response to questions from Reuters, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement the sources are “wrong” and that the “White House was not caught off guard.” Trump signed off on Musk’s email idea, and DOGE and the OPM gave the White House a heads up, she said.
Uh huh, but what about the non-reply=resignation part?
She called the media’s “obsession” with Trump, Musk and DOGE “pathetic” and said it proves the media is still out of touch with American voters.
I beg your pardon? It’s pathetic for the media to report what Trump, Musk and DOGE are doing? They should just ignore it and cover sports instead?
A new map and data from The Wilderness Society illustrate the potential reach of executive and secretarial orders issued to fulfill President Trump’s fossil fuel-centric “energy dominance” vision.
Places at risk include Bears Ears National Monument, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the watershed of Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness.
Trump’s day-one executive orders and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum’s secretarial orders from two weeks later positioned drilling and mining interests as the favored users of America’s public lands and threatened to scrap existing land protections and conservation measures. Following those orders, assistant secretaries were supposed to have submitted action plans to Secretary Burgum on Feb. 18 with steps to review, revise and rescind protections for potentially hundreds of special places nationwide. The department has not yet commented on the content of these plans or committed to any public input or transparency around the process.
In the absence of that transparency, the new Wilderness Society map gives a sense of some of the places that could fall under the Trump administration’s punitive microscope, including natural and cultural treasures like Bears Ears National Monument, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the watershed of Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness.
“As we speak, the Trump administration’s Department of the Interior is deciding which of our treasured places to sell out for drilling and mining. Our analysis shows that their plans could end up removing or reducing protections for tens of millions of acres’ worth of wildlife habitat, ancient cultural sites and outdoor recreation areas,” said Dan Hartinger, senior director of agency policy at The Wilderness Society.
Federal agencies must develop plans to eliminate employee positions, according to a memo distributed Wednesday by President Donald Trump ‘s administration that sets in motion what could become a sweeping realignment of American government.
The memo expands the Republican president’s effort to downsize the federal workforce, which he has described as an impediment to his agenda. Thousands of probationary employees have already been fired, and now his administration is turning its attention to career officials with civil service protection.
…
“The federal government is costly, inefficient, and deeply in debt. At the same time, it is not producing results for the American public,” said the memo from Russell Vought, director of the White House’s Office of Management and Budget, and Charles Ezell, acting director of the Office of Personnel Management, which functions as a human resources agency. “Instead, tax dollars are being siphoned off to fund unproductive and unnecessary programs that benefit radical interest groups while hurting hard-working American citizens.”
…
Specific targets for reductions were not included in the memo, but Trump said the Environmental Protection Agency could cut its workforce by 65%.
Of course. Who the hell needs an environment? Environments are just a politically correct invention by weirdo left-wing weirdos. Get rid of it!
Scotland’s First Minister has backed the right of trans people who self-identify as women to use female toilets and changing rooms.
Do note the carefully confusing and euphemistic wording. Asshole has backed “the right” of MEN to use female toilets and changing rooms. Men. Not people, not trans people, not trans people who self-identify; MEN. The word is “men.” MEN.
John Swinney, the leader of the SNP, said he supported Scottish Government guidance for its trans employees, which states they “should choose to use the facilities they feel most comfortable with”.
Except women of course. Women should just shut the fuck up. Women don’t get to “choose to use the facilities they feel most comfortable with” because men like Swinney make it impossible for them to do so. The facilities women “feel most comfortable with” are the ones with NO MEN IN THEM. Swinney’s moronic (or vicious) generosity to men rules that out, so there you go, women: sucks to be you.
Rachael Hamilton, the Scottish Tory deputy leader, said: “Women and girls will be dismayed that John Swinney continues to ignore their rights and safety by remaining wedded to Nicola Sturgeon’s reckless self-ID policy.
“His insistence that trans women are women totally undermines his follow-up claim that this shouldn’t come at the disadvantage of other groups. Gender self-ID, by its very definition, comes at the expense of the right of biological females to access single-sex spaces – and the First Minister knows it.”
Sorry to agree with the Tory, but when the non-Tories lose their damn minds we don’t have a choice.
After a prayer led by former NFL player and US housing secretary Scott Turner, Donald Trump starts addressing the cabinet once more.
Hahaha that’s funny – former football player turned housing secretary – and he “leads a prayer” at a secular meeting of a secular government.
Here, let me lead a prayer. Dear Easter Bunny: please make Musk and Trump disappear, amen.
In another part of the forest:
The Doge congressional subcommittee in the Republican-led House of Representatives is meeting today to discuss the sweeping cuts to the federal government, and to defend them as necessary in order to stop wasting taxpayer money. The hearing is titled “America Last: How Foreign Aid Undermined US Interests Around the World”.
Chairwoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Georgia Republican closely aligned with Trump, said in a statement released ahead of the hearing that it will address the “shocking” amount of money that has been spent overseas to “to push left-wing ideology, fund radical extremist groups, and usurp the will of the people abroad and here at home”.
Witnesses at the hearing include a former employee of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) who now works for the conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation, another conservative think tank expert from the Middle East Forum, and a right-wing journalist from The Daily Signal.
Over the years, Musk and his businesses have received at least $38 billion in government contracts, loans, subsidies and tax credits, often at critical moments, a Washington Post analysis has found, helping seed the growth that has made him the world’s richest person.
The payments stretch back more than 20 years. Shortly after becoming CEO of a cash-strapped Tesla in 2008, Musk fought hard to secure a low-interest loan from the Energy Department, according to two people directly involved with the process,holding daily briefings with company executives about the paperwork and spending hours with a government loan officer.
…
DOGE, which stands for Department of Government Efficiency, has sought to cut staff, slash budgets or cut contracts at all seven of the agencies where Musk’s companies have ongoing contracts. That includes the General Services Administration, Defense Department and Transportation Department.
Ungrateful fella, isn’t he.
“Not every entrepreneur at this scale has been this dependent on federal money — certainly not Nvidia, not Microsoft, nor Amazon, nor Meta,” said Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, professor at the Yale School of Management, who noted that much of the funding has come during Democratic administrations. “With DOGE, there does seem to be a paradox there. He has been a big beneficiary of national industrial policy, especially Democrat industrial policy, through government funding.”
Paradox is one word for it. I can think of others.
John Helveston, a professor at George Washington University who studies electric vehicles, said Tesla is a prime example of the success that can come from government investment in nascent industries, though government assistance alone is not a guarantee for success.
By pushing to cut subsidies across all industries, Helveston said Musk is strangling a potential lifeline for smaller companies — and his competitors.
“Pretty much every aspect [of Tesla] has benefited from direct government subsidy or financing,” he said. “It’s not a weird phenomenon for Tesla to benefit from this, but it is certainly hypocritical.”
He looks as if the tits are anchors pulling him forward, so that he can’t for the life of him stand up straight. He’s tilted awkwardly forward, and struggling not to topple. His shoulders are hunched, his arms look as if they don’t belong to him, it’s obvious his bum is sticking out, the skirt is wrinkled, his legs and feet look even more as if they don’t belong to him. The bangs are ridiculous. The jacket is too tight, and wrinkled like the skirt. The nail polish looks stupid and ugly. The lipstick is ok I guess.
What’s the point of any of this other than mocking women?
An American who wanted to be formally recognised as non-binary in the UK has been told by the Court of Appeal their gender identity does not legally exist in this country.
So much drivel in that one sentence. What is it to be “formally recognized”? What is “non-binary”? What is genner idenniny? What kind of damn fool goes to court to demand to be “recognized” as something nonsensical?
The Beeb includes a winsome photo of him. Wannabe winsome anyway. Pronounced head tilt, so that we’ll perceive his Special Idenniny instantly. He has head-tilt genner, aka broken neck genner.
Ryan Castellucci previously lost a High Court challenge to have their gender recorded as non-binary on a gender recognition certificate – a document which changes someone’s legal sex – after moving to the UK in 2019.
They had obtained legal recognition as non-binary in California in 2021, and were issued an American passport in 2022 listing their sex as ‘X’.
He had. He was. He’s just one guy, not a they.
At an earlier hearing, the court heard how Castellucci, a cyber security expert from California, uses the title “Mx” and refers to themselves using they/them pronouns.
Really? Instead of “I” and “me”? That must be massively confusing.
Non-binary is an umbrella term for those those who do not identify as exclusively male or female.
Talk gibberish, end up repeating your words words. It doesn’t matter what people “identify as” when it comes to brute facts. “Identify as” is for fictions and abstractions, not for humdrum bio realities like what sex you are.
More than 20 civil service employees resigned Tuesday from billionaire Trump adviser Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, saying they were refusing to use their technical expertise to “dismantle critical public services.”
“We swore to serve the American people and uphold our oath to the Constitution across presidential administrations,” the 21 staffers wrote in a joint resignation letter, a copy of which was obtained by The Associated Press. “However, it has become clear that we can no longer honor those commitments.”
The employees also warned that many of those enlisted by Musk to help him slash the size of the federal government under President Donald Trump’s administration were political ideologues who did not have the necessary skills or experience for the task ahead of them.
The mass resignation of engineers, data scientists and product managers is a temporary setback for Musk and the Republican president’s tech-driven purge of the federal workforce. It comes amid a flurry of court challenges that have sought to stall, stop or unwind their efforts to fire or coerce thousands of government workers out of jobs.
It’s tricky doing a tech-driven purge without engineers and data scientists.
The staffers who resigned worked for what was once known as the United States Digital Service, an office established during President Barack Obama’s administration after the botched rollout of Healthcare.gov, the web portal that millions of Americans use to sign up for insurance plans through the Democrat’s signature health care law.
All had previously held senior roles at such tech companies as Google and Amazon and wrote in their resignation letter that they joined the government out of a sense of duty to public service.
I think we can be pretty confident it doesn’t pay more. Or as much.
Trump’s empowerment of Musk upended that. The day after Trump’s inauguration, the staffers wrote, they were called into a series of interviews that foreshadowed the secretive and disruptive work of Musk’s’ Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.
According to the staffers, people wearing White House visitors’ badges, some of whom would not give their names, grilled the nonpartisan employees about their qualifications and politics. Some made statements that indicated they had a limited technical understanding. Many were young and seemed guided by ideology and fandom of Musk — not improving government technology.
And the ideology in question is the rather crude Spending Taxpayer Money Bad. We can’t all build our own roads or power plants or airports.
“Several of these interviewers refused to identify themselves, asked questions about political loyalty, attempted to pit colleagues against each other, and demonstrated limited technical ability,” the staffers wrote in their letter. “This process created significant security risks.”
All sent by Musk who doesn’t even have a government job and is not even from here. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.
Donald Trump has stepped in to defend Elon Musk from a mounting backlash in his own administration after some cabinet members told US federal workers to ignore the billionaire entrepreneur’s demand that they write an email justifying their work.
…
Newly confirmed cabinet officials, including the FBI director, Kash Patel, and Tulsi Gabbard, the national intelligence director, told underlings not to comply with a weekend order from Musk for all staff to send an email detailing their past week’s work by midnight on Monday or face termination.
Uh oh uh oh – if underlings can just disobey Musk then what’s next?
With his wealthiest and most high-profile lieutenant threatened with loss of face and authority, Trump used a meeting with the French president, Emmanuel Macron at the White House on Monday to deliver a vote of confidence.
Of course he did, because that’s totally the point of meetings with foreign heads of state.
A more audacious sign of dissent was on display at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (Hud), where television monitors played what appeared to be AI-generated false images of Trump sucking Musk’s toes in a loop, with “long live the real king” written over the footage, according to the Washington Post, citing people working at the department.
Musk doesn’t take hints though.
Despite the backlash, Musk took Trump’s comments as a signal to again threaten workers with the sack.
“Subject to the discretion of the President, they will be given another chance. Failure to respond a second time will result in termination,” he posted on his own social media platform, Twitter/X, on Monday.
A later post mocked the resistance to his original email. “Absurd that a 5 min email generates this level of concern!” he wrote. “Something is deeply wrong.”
Wut? You can send a 5 min email that orders the military to install Trump as dictator and kill anyone who resists. What difference does the brevity of the email make?
The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), a union representing about 800,000 of the 2.3 million-strong federal workforce, said Musk’s original email was a cynical ploy aimed at intimidating workers into resigning.
“If we took the time to comment on each and every ridiculous thing that Elon Musk tweets out, we’d never get any work done,” Brittany Holder, a union spokesperson said.
Russia’s UN ambassador, Vassily Nebenzia, acknowledged what he said were “constructive changes” in the US position on the conflict. US allies in Europe on the 15-member council – France, Britain, Denmark, Greece and Slovenia – abstained from the vote.
Ya “constructive changes” to side with Russia instead of Ukraine and most of Europe.
The UK’s ambassador to the UN, Barbara Woodward, said after the vote that while London shared the “ambition to find a lasting end to this war”, there should be “no equivalence between Russia and Ukraine in how this council refers to this war”.
She added the UK regretted “our proposals making these points clear were not taken onboard, and as such we could not support this resolution”.
In other words the US is now the enemy of the liberal democracies.
It was the first security council resolution to pass during the war. The council had been unable to take any action because Russia holds a veto.
Russia did not veto the Trump administration’s resolution.
While security council resolutions are considered binding, general assembly resolutions are not. However, general assembly resolutions carry diplomatic and political gravity as they illuminate the global consensus on issues.
The US, Russia, Israel, Belarus and North Korea all voted against the EU-Ukrainian resolution, underlining an extraordinary shift since the election of Donald Trump, who has largely absolved Vladimir Putin of responsibility for the invasion.
Or to put it more honestly, Kremlin welcomes pro-Kremlin stance on Ukraine after UN vote. What the invaders call “balance” is in fact pro-invasion. No doubt the Nazis would have welcomed a more “balanced” stance on genocide; no doubt slaveowners in Georgia and Alabama would have welcome a more “balanced” stance on enslavement.
Moscow praises Washington for siding with it at UN, as European countries abstain in sign of deepening rift with US.
Good Washington [pat pat pat] Good boy [pat pat pat]
The Kremlin has welcomed what it said was a “much more balanced” US stance on Ukraine after the Trump administration pushed through a UN security council resolution on the war that included no criticism of Russia.
The Kremlin spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, said the move was evidence of Washington’s willingness to try to find a peaceful settlement. Moscow backed the resolution, which was passed late on Monday, although European countries abstained, in a sign of a deepening rift with Washington.
In a simple three-paragraph motion on the third anniversary of Russia’s invasion, the US took a neutral position on the war and called for a “swift end” to the conflict and “lasting peace”. It presented a sharply different tone to that of the Biden administration, which had supported Ukraine throughout.
