1975. Smack in the middle of the Me Decade. President Gerald R. Ford was stumbling around the White House after taking the reins from Richard M. Nixon, who had made his Watergate-weary exit the previous year to slink back to his castle by the sea (not unlike mad King Lear). Former Nixon advisors John Mitchell, Haldeman, and John Ehrlichman were convicted and sentenced for their involvement in the Watergate coverup. The country was in a recession, and people were lining up for hours at the gas pumps due to an OPEC-imposed oil embargo. And yet…were we not entertained? The top 5 highest-grossing films of the year (domestically) were Jaws, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Shampoo, and Dog Day Afternoon. Saturday Night Live premiered in October (as NBC’s Saturday Night), hosted by a coked-out George Carlin. The top 5 TV shows were All in the Family, Laverne & Shirley, Maude, The Bionic Woman, and Rich Man, Poor Man. People were spending their hard-earned bucks on Pet Rocks (don’t ask). Those were heady days. Yeah, I know. “OK, Boomer”. I was all of 19 years old in 1975. That was the year I visited L.A.
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We now know that Trump’s order to the military to “turn on the valve” and give southern California all the water it could ever need resulted in the Army Corps of Engineers releasing a bunch of water into a flood plain without notice almost causing a catastrophe. Oh, and the water would not have flowed to Southern California in any case. The whole thing is insane but apparently we have the military carrying out insane orders that they must know make no sense which is extremely troubling. And now we have Musk lying like Trump to his millions of followers about this ridiculous stunt. The LA Times article is a bullshit snowjob by the way. But even with that the truth can gleaned if you read the whole thing. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has dramatically increased the amount of water flowing from two dams in Tulare County, sending massive flows down river channels toward farmlands in the San Joaquin Valley. Federal records show that water releases from Terminus Dam at Lake Kaweah and Schafer Dam at Lake Success jumped early Friday morning. The sudden increase occurred four days after President Trump said on social media that the U.S.
The vandals took the handles For an ironic laugh as Musk-Trump lackeys burn the Constitution, steal government data (yours included), and take an axe to everything they can’t burn, check out the Musk burble above about restoring “power to the PEOPLE.” If you believe that, Donald Trump has some crypto coin to sell you. Heather Coxe Richardson writes: Throughout now-president Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign, it was clear that his support was coming from three very different factions whose only shared ideology was a determination to destroy the federal government. Now we are watching them do it. The group that serves President Donald Trump is gutting the government both to get revenge against those who tried to hold him accountable before the law and to make sure he and his cronies will never again have to worry about legality. Those three allied groups are Trump’s fanatical loyalists, “the MAGA crew that embraces Project 2025,” and finally techbros led by Elon Musk.
Turning the White House into a chop shop Anand Giridharadas’s The Ink this morning announces: Musk’s hostile takeover It’s hard to know just how destructive this will be in the long run, but for now, this is arguably the most troubling development in a day of extremely troubling developments. Elon Musk appears to be trying to do to the federal government what he did at Twitter/X: massively disrupt its functioning and drive out experienced employees not on board with his transformations and his personality cult. [Tusk] Musk bought his way into the White House complex and now means to, as they say, “have his way” with the federal government. If you haven’t heard, Musk locked Office of Personnel and Management (OPM) civil servants “out of computer systems that contain the personal data of millions of federal employees” (Reuters): The two officials, who spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation, said some senior career employees at OPM have had their access revoked to some of the department’s data systems.
Not happy and for good reason: Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader in the Senate, has reportedly been criticised by some of the party’s state governors for not resisting Donald Trump’s agenda and cabinet nominees strongly enough. The exchange took place in a conference between Schumer and six Democratic governors that laid bare differences within the party over how to counteract a seemingly rampant Trump as he wreaks upheaval across the political landscape with an avalanche of executive orders, the New York Times reported. The governors, led by JB Pritzker of Illinois and Maura Healey of Massachusetts, pleaded with Schumer to slow down the confirmation of Trump’s cabinet by persuading fellow senators to vote against his nominees wherever possible. They said the party needed to generate more public opposition than senators had managed in the chamber so far. The appeal came in the week the Senate is meeting to confirm two of Trump’s most contentious cabinet picks, Robert F Kennedy Jr, as health and human services secretary, and Tulsi Gabbard, for the role of national intelligence director.
Two can play at that As Digby reported yesterday, Sen. Chuck Schumer, one of several Beltway Democrats past their expiration dates, is catching shit from a half dozen Democratic governors. They are mad as hell at Donald Trump’s newest reality show, the Project 2025 Demolition Derby, and they’re not going to take it anymore. They insist somnolent Democrats on Capitol Hill — how did Trump put it? — fight, fight, fight. Paul Krugman concurs in his newsletter, offering similar political advice he normally eschews: Today, however, I’m going to make an exception, and offer three words of advice to Democratic politicians and MAGA opponents in general: oppose, oppose, oppose. And make noise. A lot of noise. Don’t make conciliatory gestures in the belief that Trump has a mandate to do what he’s doing; don’t stay quiet on the outrages being committed every day while waiting for grocery prices to rise. I can’t promise that taking a tough line will succeed, but going easy on Trump is guaranteed to fail. Trump and his MAGA minions deserve no quarter and certainly no deference.
They’re not even trying to hide it: When Donald J. Trump sued CBS for $10 billion days before the 2024 election, accusing the company of deceptively editing a “60 Minutes” interview with Vice President Kamala Harris, many legal experts dismissed the litigation as a far-fetched attempt to punish an out-of-favor news outlet. Now Mr. Trump is back in the White House, and many executives at CBS’s parent company, Paramount, believe that settling the lawsuit would increase the odds that the Trump administration does not block or delay their planned multibillion-dollar merger with another company, according to several people with knowledge of the matter. I will not be surprised to hear of corporate executives down at Mar-a-Lago whispering that if Trump were to sue them over… whatever … they would have to talk to their board about “settling it”, if you know what I mean.
Nobody did. But he’s is our new overlord anyway This is incredibly concerning: The highest-ranking career official at the Treasury Department is departing after a clash with allies of billionaire Elon Musk over access to sensitive payment systems, according to three people with knowledge of the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private talks. David A. Lebryk, who served in nonpolitical roles at Treasury for several decades, announced his retirement Friday in an email to colleagues obtained by The Washington Post. President Donald Trump named Lebryk as acting secretary upon taking office last week. Lebryk had a dispute with Musk’s surrogates over access to the payment system the U.S. government uses to disburse trillions of dollars every year, the people said. The exact nature of the disagreement was not immediately clear, they said. Officials affiliated with Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” have been asking since after the election for access to the system, the people said — requests that were reiterated more recently, including after Trump’s inauguration.