What has 2 thumbs and was so distracted by the snow this morning it forgot to do an open thread? This guy!
Ooooh, look at Jonny 2 thumbs.
Anyway I have been been encouraging people to contact your legislator or member of Congress. I suspect that you can find something to ask your member of Congress, but I will suggest asking them to stop Elon Musk from bull in a China shopping the whole country. For the legislature, I like HB 1343 to make sure that student aid isn’t in jeopardy if you protest.
HB 1343 (read it here) repeals RCW 28B.10.281, which says,
This law doesn’t target students’ financial aid merely for protesting; only if the protest disrupts classes or other educational activities.
Also, I would argue “at such institution” means the law doesn’t apply to off-campus protests, even if they disrupt university functions, because it’s not “at” such institution; but a college administrator might interpret it to mean any protest that disrupts college activities, whether on campus or on public streets adjacent to the campus.
A literal reading of the law sanctions students merely for participating in a disruptive protest, regardless of whether their personal actions were disruptive. It also penalizes protest organizers if the crowd gets out of control through no fault of theirs. So even if you support the principle behind this law, it paints with too broad a brush and should be repealed.
@2
We’re still trying to get the Hippies behind the Vietnam war which was a right and honorable thing for us to be involved in and if you don’t love America leave it.
Sometime tomorrow Bluesky will hit 31M registered users.
They’re still hitting another million new users about every nine days.
A million unique posters every day since Jan 19th.
Vice President Trump begs OPEC to increase production which they did the last time putting more US extractors out of business than any administration ever (yes, you can google that). The only thing he wants is lower pump prices, US jobs can get fucked.
It’s why he thought he could get away with putting a Tariff on Canadian oil.
OPEC says, ‘Naw. We’re good at low $70s/bbl” *
Gas prices are rising in winter. Summer is coming.
*Ironically, Arabic slang for ‘No Way Jose’ is pronounced ‘HellNaw’
@2 All three of you are dead so STFU. We don’t need any loud mouth ghosts around here. We already have Doctor Dumbfuck.
Only very little people are this small and petty:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/national-cryptologic-museum-covers-nsa-displays-dei_n_67a36924e4b0eeea940d825f
It’s also another backdown by a small and petty dictator. Back downs so far: Tariffs, firing J6 FBI agents, giving Musk access to federal payments. The tally keeps, and will continue, rising because this is the ALL HAT NO CATTLE administration.
Between Corporation for Public Broadcasting, National Endowment for the Arts and Public Service Announcement production and broadcasting from HHS, NPR gets about $60M a year from Federal Funding. This is not a lump sum to a huge org called NPR, much of it is granted individually to local stations. The more rural the area, the more likely NPR is the only media to inform of emergencies such as Tornado warnings.
To match the ‘stand alone’ company Space X in federal funds delivered would take NPR 333 years.
It would take 40 years to match what taxpayers shelled out (repaid loan not included) to get Tesla up and running.
Elon’s style seems to be “fire everybody” and then rehire and rebuild from the ground up.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/05/tech/musk-x-twitter-takeover-us-government-employee-advice/index.html
But you can’t do that with the federal bureaucracy. Unlike Twitter employees, who are at-will, firing career civil servants and then replacing them with partisan loyalists violates civil service laws and union contracts.
Federal workers can only be fired for cause, and can appeal their dismissals through the personnel system and courts. They can be laid off if their agency is downsized or closed, but if they’re let go and then replaced, those workers will be entitled to reinstatement with back pay and benefits. And the replacements will be illegal hires.
This CNN article says Musk views laws and regulations as “speed bumps.” But as a private citizen, he can be sued in tort, and those claims won’t be barred by sovereign immunity. If every federal worker he causes to be illegally fired or laid off brings a tortious interference with their employment claim against Musk, it could cost him billions.
I hope they go for it. Musk deserves to be on food stamps. Oh, I forgot, he’s doing away with food stamps. He’ll have to eat cat food if he wants to eat. And live under a bridge. Now there’s a scene I’d like to see.
It begins.
https://www.newsweek.com/texas-democrat-bring-first-articles-impeachment-trump-second-term-2026701
Trump already holds the record as the most-impeached president. Why not pile on for the history books?
Musk’s $270 million campaign donation to Trump is starting to look like a bribe in exchange for temporary government employment giving him access to millions of government records that can be exploited for personal gain.
8)There is a reason we have a Civil Service, the patronage system had its abuses, but must admit, worked for Lincoln getting the 13th Amendment over the line in Congress.
Taiwan’s bureaucracy puts our Deep State to shame. They have two branches of government just dedicated to hiring staffers for the 3 usual branches(Legislative, Executive, and Judicial) and investigating the bad apples. The Control and Investigation Yuans have their roots in Imperial China’s Civil Service Examination System.
So LITERALLY ethnic cleansing.
Nancy – are cis gender women showing each other their vaginas in the restrooms?
What makes you think you’ll get the pleasure of seeing a penis? And Christ knows you haven’t seen one in a long time.
@12 why sure! We can build up the Middle East but can’t build up back via FEMA, here in this shithole.
Elon’s Shitler youth are running into a huge problem.
COBOL was created in the 50s and is rarely studied by current CS types who prefer the lucrative world of C++, JavaScript and Python.
But COBOL is still dominant in mainframe and massive database environments.
In the 90s it was fading at top schools but it was the difference of knowing you could get a job with IBM or the government with a pension and benefits or rolling the dice on getting big checks now and being laid off in a couple years when Activision gets swallowed up by Microsoft or spending the rest of your career as a code monkey in an E-commerce company.
They’re breaking a lot of shit trying to learn what they’ve never had to know.
And why are most Government mainframes still on COBOL? Because neither while in control of Congress has ever seen value, because there is little, in spending Trillions to overhaul every server within Federal and state government.
@12 Why would we spend taxpayer money to house Palestinian terrorists in comfort while millions of Americans can’t afford starter homes?
IIRC, Trump promised during the campaign to develop federal lands for Americans needing housing, not develop Gaza into seaside resorts for European and Chinese tourists.
It’s always a confession
Daily Wire, Federalist, and Imaginative Conservative contributor who wrote and tweeted about trans groomers and Pride Parades as gay recruiting drives….
Is now a 39 year is now a self describes CIS male humble servant of Christ charged with Molestation and sexual contact with a child under the age of 12.
In the least shocking news of the week,
Isreali Jews polled overwhelmingly support a forced march of all current citizens of Gaza to somewhere as yet undetermined so they can grab the land.
Unintended consequences for the grain belt farmers who said, “Trump is looking out for us.”
USAID buys $2B a year of rice, wheat and Lentils from American agribusiness to distribute around the world to chronically malnourished populations and areas stricken by drought or other natural disruptions.
Elon is currently, illegally, shutting down USAID completely because they helped topple Apartheid and because some of their funding ends up in Ukraine where the government is currently looking at legal remedy for Elon shutting off Starlink during the early days of the Russian invasion.
@19 I’m sure Israel would be happy to relocate Gazans to some landlocked piece of desert and pipe in water for them. The shutoff valve, of course, will be in Israel’s possession.
Cutting 2 trillion of spending for “efficiency”.. Oh yeah it’s attainable:
He proposes eliminating 16 federal agencies, including the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. (Yes, eliminating, as in not existing anymore.) He would cut 50 percent of the funding for nine other agencies, including the FAA and NASA, and about a third of the budget from all the others. He also proposes eliminating farm subsidies and virtually all pro-business tax breaks…
eliminating 535,000 federal jobs and shuttering dozens of buildings in the process, you would save approximately … wait for it … $400 billion.
That’s 20 percent of Musk’s stated goal, and less than half of what he considers an acceptable fallback.
No worries, though..
bringing home all the troops from Europe and Asia, in favor of a “Fortress America” approach that focuses on protecting the homeland. After junking all the aircraft carriers and overseas bases, Stockman projects an additional $500 billion in savings. That’s still not even halfway to Musk’s goal.
to the $2 trillion target, Stockman takes means testing to an extreme: Social Security cuts would start for individuals at incomes above $75,000, with benefits phasing out entirely once you earn six figures.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/02/05/doge-musk-budget-cuts-stockman/
Stockman? Yep, that David Stockman, now 78 years old.
Does Stockman think his plan is realistic? Of course not — he’s not crazy. His real point is to illustrate the challenge
You can buy his “plan” if you like:
https://www.amazon.com/How-Cut-Trillion-Blueprint-Ramaswamy/dp/1630692948
Now here’s a Palestinian resettlement plan I can support:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMwvGnsnkEU
Rightwing blacklists are back.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/06/black-health-federal-workers-watchlist
It is possible to sue these bastards for (a) invasion of privacy and (b) tortious interference with employment. It might be possible to prosecute them under anti-doxxing statutes, too.
The Census Bureau is going dark:
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/02/06/some-census-bureau-data-now-appears-to-be-unavailable-to-the-public.html
It’s hard to hide an economic depression, though, if he drives us into one.
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/02/06/the-big-january-jobs-report-comes-out-friday-heres-what-to-expect.html
This may be the last “normal” jobs report we see for a while. If
TrumpMusk starts firing federal employees en masse, the economy could begin losing instead of gaining jobs. Halving the federal workforce would wipe out many months of job gains and increase the unemployment rate. What about unemployment benefits for fired federal workers? I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if they froze them or found excuses to deny them, because we live under a lawless government now.Trump’s very first jobs report is well below estimates, 143,000 vs. 169,000, with almost no job growth outside of healthcare (66,000), retail (34,300), and government (32,000, which includes teachers).
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/02/07/heres-where-the-jobs-are-for-january-2025-in-one-chart.html
Consumer confidence is tanking, too.
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/02/07/consumer-inflation-fears-spike-in-february-as-tariff-worries-hit-sentiment.html
Buyer remorse sets in:
https://www.rawstory.com/trump-voters-unhappy/
YES, IT IS WHAT YOU VOTED FOR, NUMBNUTS.
Tariffs were a Trump campaign promise. His first term should have taught you he’s chaotic. You knew exactly what you were getting but voted for it anyway. Shame on you for complaining about what you helped make happen. It’s time to be a man, pull in your gut and throw your chest out, and suck it up, Ace.