This is probably what Trump was babbling about the other night when he said he’s sent in the military to “turn on the valve” to bring water to southern California. Good Lord: Water managers were relieved Thursday evening after the Army Corps of Engineers agreed to back off of a sudden decision earlier in the day to dump massive amounts of water from Kaweah and Success lakes. Water managers said they got about an hour’s warning from the Army Corp’s Sacramento office to expect the Tule and Kaweah rivers to be at “channel capacity” by Thursday night. Channel capacity means the maximum amount of water a river can handle. For the Kaweah, that’s 5,500 cubic feet per second and for the Tule, it’s 3,500 cfs. Those levels were last seen, and surpassed, during the 2023 floods, which destroyed dozens of homes and businesses and caused significant damage to infrastructure.“We were able to get them to back off that,” said Eric Limas, General Manager of the Lower Tule River and Pixley irrigation districts, of the Army Corps.
Uncategorized
“… meaning the lumber” Bloomberg is reporting that he’s going with the 25% tariffs. I haven’t seen that confirmed anywhere else. But it’s certainly causing trouble already: Trump’s 25% Tariff Vows Send Canada, Mexico FX Tumbling President Donald Trump’s renewed pledges to slap 25% tariffs on imports from Canada and Mexico on Feb. 1 jolted foreign exchange markets late in the New York trading session, sending currencies from both countries plunging against the US dollar. The Mexican peso slid 1.1% and Canada’s dollar fell as much as 1.2% after Trump told reporters at the White House he would follow through on trade restrictions, which he’d vowed during his inauguration, on Saturday. The Bloomberg Dollar Spot Index erased an early loss to gain as much as 0.2%. All because he’s mad that they haven’t properly licked his boots. Enjoy your guacamole today because it’s going to be unaffordable before long.
Is there any point to keeping count? Remember when politicizing a tragedy was gauche? Not just among Republicans inside the Beltway but among Fox News hosts and right-wing talkers? Well, those tragedies typically involved mass shootings, often at schools. But a mass casualty event in D.C. involving an airliner and an Army helicopter in the first month of Donald Trump’s watch? It’s a perfect opportunity for the president to make political statements and display his skill at stopping the buck anywhere but his desk. Glenn Kessler at the Washington Post documents that the president’s rants attributing blame for the midair collision on his doorstep this week to DEI policies were four Pinocchios-worthy (gift link): In the aftermath of the deadly collision between a jetliner and a Black Hawk helicopter at Reagan National Airport, Trump held an extraordinary news conference during which he speculated on the cause of the accident. At length, he attacked former presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden for imposing what he called “a big push to put diversity” that he said weakened the Federal Aviation Administration.
But they can still do a lot of damage The Trump “Rolling Thunder” operation, as former presidential adviser Steve Bannon calls it, hasbeen in full effect in the week and a half since Donald Trump was restored to the presidency. Day after day, one atrocity after another has been perpetrated on the American people as Trump and his henchmen take a wrecking ball to the federal government. Do they know what they’re doing or are they just throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks? Over the course of these 10 tumultuous days Trump has pardoned or commuted the sentences of all the January 6th rioters and his Justice Department has closed any pending cases. Various agencies have fired and demoted personnel, some of which can only be seen as acts of retribution such as the firing of career prosecutors who worked on the Jack Smith Special Counsel cases and the dismissal of almost all the Inspectors General.
This Bluesky thread was written by former Obama and Biden administrator, Zealan Hoover: I ran $100 billion in Infrastructure and IRA programs at EPA. We obligated over $70 billion onto signed awards and contracts to protect public health and the environment. All that funding is currently frozen. Here are the facts… On January 20, Trump signed Executive Order 14154 (“Unleashing American Energy”) that directed agencies to “immediately pause the disbursement of funds” from the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and the Infrastructure Law (IIJA/BIL). NOTE: EOs do not give agencies special power to break the law. Not paying grantees with signed grant agreements is illegal. While there are certain activities EPA has discretion to pause, such as designing new competitions and making new awards, once a grant award is signed with a grantee the government is legally obligated to pay them. This obligation to pay is clearly enshrined in 2 CFR § 200.305.
On Sunday, @CaliforniaDFW brought 3 orphaned mountain lion cubs to Oakland Zoo’s vet hospital. The trio, estimated to be about 3 months old, were found in Portola Valley. CDFW believes the mother of these cubs is the same female mountain lion that was killed by a car in the same… pic.twitter.com/D7QWzUjoDY — Oakland Zoo (@oakzoo) January 29, 2025 This past Sunday, January 26th, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) and brought three orphaned mountain lion cubs to Oakland Zoo for rehabilitation and care. These rescues mark the 30th mountain lion rescue for the Zoo, with close collaboration with CDFW. Oakland Zoo’s advanced Veterinary Hospital has enabled the Zoo to assist in numerous mountain lion rescue cases for those who were sick, injured, burned, or orphaned. The three mountain lion cubs, now named Fern (female), Thistle (male), and Spruce (male), are currently recovering at the Zoo’s Veterinary Hospital Mountain lions in California face many threats, including car strikes and wildfires. These factors contribute to human-wildlife conflict, increasing encounters as mountain lions encroach on urban areas and developments.
Oopsie. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt just tweeted this: This is NOT a rescission of the federal funding freeze. It is simply a rescission of the OMB memo. Why? To end any confusion created by the court’s injunction. The President’s EO’s on federal funding remain in full force and effect, and will be rigorously implemented. I assume this is them trying to be clever and moot the court injunction? Probably not a good idea to say this out loud. Meanwhile here’s Potus and his Majordomo entertaining the MAGA faithful with fantasies: Except… note the date They think they’re in a movie. They’re just lucky that the only people paying attention are MAGA cult members and a few die-hards like us.
So it begins. (That is not what happened. Colombia said they didn’t like Trump landing military aircraft in their country and treating their citizens like shit. Trump agreed to allow Colombia to send their own airplanes to pick them up and treat them humanely.) The total amount US sends to all underdeveloped countries is $60 million. We sent $30 million to Gaza for medicine. The idea that Hamas is using $30 million dollars worth of condoms is insane but it’s the kind of thing the wingnuts love (“dirty, dirty”) so it will join the rest of the lunatic fringe lies that Trump is spewing. Like this one: Total lie. This did not happen. Republicans in DC know this because they aren’t this stupid but they either think it’s clever and funny or they just don’t care that the president is apparently suffering from dementia.
Last week: Tonight: Aviation expert James Fallows wrote last night: There appears to have been a disastrous collision between a regional jet, a CRJ made by Bombardier and flown by American Eagle Airlines, with more than 60 people aboard en route from Wichita, and a military helicopter, reportedly a Blackhawk flown as “VIP Transport” by the US Army. News footage from local TV stations captured the collision, for instance this from local NBC news. The news is tragic and still unfolding. As in all aviation disasters, early reports can be misleading; I’ll follow up with more details tomorrow, as more become known. The most recent mass-fatality crash had been almost 16 years ago. That was in February, 2009, when the crew of a Colgan regional jet, a feeder for United Airlines, apparently mis-managed an icing emergency, and crashed on approach to Buffalo, New York. Since then, the relentlessly safety-minded collaborative culture of the US air travel system has made commercial airline travel in the United States the safest mode of travel ever invented.
Subtlety is not their agenda I’ve long described the right-wing policy ratchet this way: Find the line. Step over it. Dare anyone to push them back. No pushback, or if it fails? New line. Lather. Rinse. Repeat. That was timorous, beta pre-Trumpism. The authoritarian goal today is no line at all. David Graham describes Trump 2.0’s stumble over pausing funding already allocated by Congress as more than ineptitude. “It’s part of a carefully thought-out program of grabbing power for the executive branch,” and not simply chaos, but “a battle over priorities within the Republican Party.” They may mismanage business, but they still mean business: “The great challenge confronting a conservative President is the existential need for aggressive use of the vast powers of the executive branch to return power—including power currently held by the executive branch—to the American people,” Trump’s nominee to head the OMB, Russell Vought, wrote in Project 2025, the blueprint for a conservative administration created by the Heritage Foundation, a Trump-aligned right-wing think tank.