Week of March 2, 2025

My post content

Each week that goes by there are more disastrous things to document, not less. I am trying (trying) to keep each item short. When I have time, I’ll add more analysis in essays.

Here goes…

1. Trump ordered the same boxes of classified documents he illegally took from the White House last time to be loaded up on Airforce One and taken back to Mara Lago (ABC, CNN, etc). Now, why do you suppose might he do that?

2. An NPR review of new data added to DOGE's "wall of receipts" finds the group quietly changed previous errors, added new ones, and still has little verified savings to show for its work. Ruining people’s lives while dancing around on stage with a chainsaw and laughing about it, to the cheers of CPAC is apparently not achieving the cost savings some had hoped. But Musk does seem to be enjoying it, nonetheless.

The purge of federal employees continues to be utter chaos. Because Musk is being so reckless they keep firing people and only after – realizing they actually need those employees (duh). Some Federal workers were ordered to return to offices without desks, Wi-Fi and lights. Meanwhile Musk's little band of miscreant hackers are drawing 6-figure salaries for making colossal messes while Musk claims they are not getting paid (Fortune).

(Cartoon from New Yorker Magazine)

3. The Trump administration is trying to get at Ukraine’s rare minerals, in exchange for – well – nothing. Trump says the US won’t provide security in exchange. He says, “well we’ll be in the area mining the minerals so…”. The most important mineral that is located in Ukraine is Lithium. Who needs Lithium? Tesla. (NPR, BBC).

There is some talk of an “investment fund to help Ukraine rebuild”, but the US would have the controlling share. Trump is not promising future support but trying to retroactively require Ukraine to pay the US for previous support.

4. EPA is now denying AMERICAN climate science data (The New Yorker). “It’s in this country that scientists, funded by or working for the government, came to understand the role of carbon in our atmosphere”.

5. Pete Hegseth just stopped all cyber security defenses against Russia (AP, CBS News). Funny because he also just stopped intelligence sharing with Ukraine.

6. While planes seem to be falling from the sky or having near misses on the daily, this week someone was bitten by a scorpion in an airport in Logan Airport in Boston. Apparently, God has run out of locusts.

7. The richest man on the planet said, “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy” (Daily Kos, CNN, AOL). Wut? He also called Social Security a Ponzi scheme (it is not). His lack of empathy is on display daily as evidenced by how gleeful he is about firing people. Add to this the fact that some Evangelical leaders are now calling empathy a sin (MSN) and one starts to feel the creeping presence of something very dark. It can’t be just me.

"The death of human empathy is one of the earliest and most telling signs of a culture about to fall into barbarism."

—Hannah Arendt, German American Historian and Philosopher, 1906 to 1975

8. Trump proclaims (as is his way) that we can’t protest on college campuses (Reuters, CBS). Whatever dude.

9. RIP U.S. Department of Education. Education Secretary Linda McMahon introduced herself to department employees with an email calling on them to join her in a “historic final mission” to downsize the agency and shift control to the states (CBS, Yahoo). Interestingly, she and Trump tout returning control to states, while also saying the federal government will police what is taught. They have zero understanding of how important the Dept of Education is. It’s elimination will (in part) hurt students who are poor or are in need of special education services.

10. Good news: On Thursday, a federal judge ordered the reinstatement of Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB) Chair Cathy Harris (Democracy Docket). The MSPB hears appeals from federal employees, and studies federal merit systems in an effort to protect the rights of federal employees.

11. More good news - someone on Fox News said something truthful: Fox News contributor Andy McCarthy. “In any event, when the President of the United States doesn’t recognize America’s enemies, when he hallucinates them into America’s friends because he thinks he personally has an amicable, potentially fruitful relationship with the odious tyrants who run them, then America is courting disaster.” Strike up the band.

12. In this week’s edition of MY BLOOD IS F#$CKING BOILING!!!: Elon Musk shared a call from conservative political commentator Ben Shapiro urging Trump to pardon Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer convicted in the 2020 killing of George Floyd. (Alt National Park, Seattle Times, MSNBC). So far Trump is saying he is not considering it.

13. The Consumer Finance Protection Bureau (CFPB) – the bureau which is supposed to protect consumers from predatory lending practices and economy crashing malfeasance from big banks has dropped numerous (serious) cases since Trump took office (AP, Bloomberg, Yahoo Finance). But I’m told that Trump cares about regular folks. (UPDATE: The CFPB has in fact been completely shut down (thanks Uncle Rod). The big banks must be popping champagne.)

14. DOGE is firing so many Social Security employees and closing so many SS offices that Former Social Security Commissioner Martin O'Malley is predicting payment interruptions in the next few months (AP, NPR). PAYMENT INTERUPTIONS FOR SENIORS. IS THAT WHEN WE GET OUT THE PITCHFORKS AND TORCHES?! I keep hearing from Trump and his supporters that cutting SS is off limits. You cannot fire 7000 employees and shut 49 offices and expect things to run smoothly. As I noted last week, it already takes over a year for a SS disability application to be processed. There are huge backlogs.

Look, I know people hate this, but these things need to be studied in order to find the inefficiencies. Randomly hacking away at an agency like SS, which is so vitally important to so many people will simply cause panic, and real damage. And big mistakes will be made (needlessly hurting people) which Musk has already shown a proclivity for (making big mistakes and hurting people).

I must once again remind you that the number of federal employees has remained about the same since the seventies while our population has grown dramatically. The backlogs at SS (and other agencies) are because of a lack of resources.

But again, the point is to make government not work, so they can say, see, government does not work. Then they can privatize everything to make money (for the already rich) from it. Essential services are usually ruined when a profit motive is in play – see our current healthcare system for an example.

15. The Joint Address to Congress. Good God it went on for 2 freaking hours! It was a firehose of lies. I can’t go into all of that in this list, but you can read more about here.

(If nothing else please go look up the difference between transgender mice and transgenic mice. Look, I’m not claiming there is no waste in government. There is. But there is no need to make crap up.)

As an aside, I agree with republicans that dems should have stood for the little boy with cancer. That was disgraceful. However, it’s galling to have Trump trot out (exploit) this poor child with cancer during his speech when he just made massive cuts to cancer research! We pay Elon Musk a ton of money to blow stuff up in space (excuse me – I mean unplanned rapid disassembly), but we're canceling cancer research. And again, I ask, are we great yet?

As another aside: To the Dems in leadership, WE DON’T GIVE A SHIT ABOUT YOUR PINK OUTFITS OR STUPID LITTLE AUCTION PADDLES. YOU SHOULD BE OUT THERE ON THE STREETS LIKE JOHN LEWIS GETTING YOUR DAMN SELVES ARRESTED. At the very minimum, get your lame butts thrown out of The Joint Address with Al Green. But for the love of God do not join Rs in censuring him. You’re killing me right now.

16. Good news alert: The Supreme Court rejected Trump’s request to keep billions in foreign aid frozen (CNN) despite another hissy fit from Alito. There is some question as to how it will be enforced and when the actual payments will resume.

17. Trump just announced he is cutting 80,000 VA employees (CNN, AP, etc.). 80,000. More than 25% of the VA workforce are veterans.

18. Tariffs. Bloody hell it is so ridiculous. Unnecessarily fighting with and provoking our friends and allies is just stoopid. But it is also OBVIOUS market manipulation. Say something to tank the market, Trump’s rich friends buy up stocks, the next day take it back, the market goes back up, the rich friends get richer. Cause chaos in world economies. But no one will do a damn thing about.

19. Trump continues to say (lie) that the U.S. has spent $350 billion on Ukraine. Real number is $128 billion (Council on Foreign Relations). It varies depending on what you count but it is nowhere near $350 billion.

20. It really looks like DOGE fired everyone at the SEC because Elon was being investigated for insider trading. I realize calling out someone’s conflicts of interest has just become a quaint relic from another era, but it actually is kind of a big deal.

21. The AP has obtained a database of the file names and descriptions of more than 26,000 military images flagged for removal --because the pictures highlight contributions by women or minorities, or celebrate heritage. Pictures of the WWII war plane Enola Gay were flagged, because…I guess the plane was gay.

And it’s because they really really do not understand DEI, or worse they get that warm and fuzzy feeling by erasing the accomplishments of women and people of color.

22. Tucker Carlson said “If I have a Black female surgeon, my first assumption will be this person had to meet lower standards.”

23. DOGE cancels the lease of the NOAA Radar Operations Center in Norman, Oklahoma. Here is a real life example of why that is bad.

24. You know how I keep telling you over and over that they are coming for our National Parks. Well, I keep being right about that. Apparently, Musk/Trump have 34 NP buildings whose leases they are cancelling (Fromers). "Parks are being dismantled before our very eyes,". "Steps are being taken to remove barriers to drilling and mining on public lands, with even national monuments on the table,".

25. Trump plans to deport 240,000 Ukrainians who are here legally (Forbes).

26. Trump has reportedly told Canada’s Trudeau that "he did not believe that the treaty that demarcates the border between the two countries was valid and that he wants to revise the boundary," (NYT). That would be the treaties of Paris in 1783, the Oregon Treaty in 1846, and the Webster-Ashburton Treaty in 1842. I’m sure they all got it wrong.

Oh and he said in The Joint Address that we are taking Greenland “one way or another”.

27. Lastly, while we are on the subject of Trump’s world domination fever dream, here is a great post from my Uncle Rod with a list efforts by the Trump administration to move the US from a Constitutional Democracy to some autocratic regime like Russia or North Korea.

Pay attention to the current SCOTUS case regarding Unitary Executive Theory. Depending on how SCOTUS rules, this is something that could give extraordinary power to the Executive branch and pretty much completely destroy checks and balances, and the independence of various agencies – something that keeps us from being, well, Russia.

Jeesh. I’m thinking a glass of whiskey and a rubber mallet to the head might make sleeping a possibility. Cheers!

And as always, in the words of Thomas Jefferson in Hamilton, “So what did I miss?”