Happy Hour

Get happy.

Seems Bad

Hope the white house press corps are having an exciting time.

Half of Virginia’s community health centers have been cut off from federal grant money, forcing some to stop providing certain services and others to close branches.

The commonwealth has 31 Federally Qualified Health Centers with over 200 locations — a majority of which serve rural areas with limited access to medical care. Annually, about 400,000 Virginians rely on the care provided by these nonprofit, community-based centers, according to the Virginia Community Healthcare Association.

Positive Steps

We're not in "lol nothing matters" territory quite yet.

A second federal judge on Wednesday blocked President Donald Trump’s executive order that seeks to end birthright citizenship, saying it’s likely unconstitutional and “runs counter to our nation’s 250-year history of citizenship by birth.”

The nationwide preliminary injunction from US District Judge Deborah Boardman is a significant ruling against Trump’s Day 1 order, which was swiftly met with legal challenges and put on hold days later by a separate judge.

The order “conflicts with the plain language of the 14th Amendment, contradicts 125-year old binding Supreme Court precedent and runs counter to our nation’s 250-year history of citizenship by birth,” Boardman said during a hearing on Wednesday.

Woopsie Doodle

Gonna be like this every day.

The C.I.A. sent the White House an unclassified email listing all employees hired by the spy agency over the last two years to comply with an executive order to shrink the federal work force, in a move that former officials say risked the list leaking to adversaries.

The list included first names and the first initial of the last name of the new hires, who are still on probation — and thus easy to dismiss. It included a large crop of young analysts and operatives who were hired specifically to focus on China, and whose identities are usually closely guarded because Chinese hackers are constantly seeking them to identify them.

The CIA is also getting Musk's bogus retirement offer, which is not legal and contains the fine print that if you don't get the promised money:

Lunch

Still sick. Might need a nap.

You Could've Listened

I don't claim that The Left is always correct (The Left often doesn't agree with itself, so this would be impossible), but a tremendous problem is that anything coded left - such as criticism of Elon Fucking Musk - is dismissed out of hand by Very Serious Centrist Dipshits. If The Left hates him, he must be doing something right!

Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), who previously said there are certain aspects of DOGE he could get behind, told us he’s “appalled by the unconstitutional efforts to block funding appropriated and authorized by Congress.” Khanna said he’s made those concerns known to Musk.

Yes I bet Elon is very concerned about your concerns!

Dipshit.

Maybe If His Byline Was "Matt" or "Nate" More Democrats Would Listen

Snark, but definitely not directed at Bouie.

And so the president’s opponents, whoever they are, cannot expect a return to the Constitution as it was. Whatever comes next, should the country weather this attempted hijacking, will need to be a fundamental rethinking of what this system is and what we want out of it.

The Price of Stuff

A lot of people are suddenly getting "must pay duty" notices from other shippers.

HONG KONG/SEOUL/SHANGHAI, Feb 5 (Reuters) - The U.S. Postal Service said it would temporarily suspend parcels from China and Hong Kong, after President Donald Trump ended a trade provision this week used by retailers including Temu and Shein to ship low-value packages duty-free to the U.S.

The Trump administration imposed an additional 10% tariff on Chinese goods that came into effect on Tuesday and moved to close the "de minimis" exemption that allows U.S. shoppers to avoid paying tariffs for shipments below $800.

Figuring out how to prevent shippers from exploiting the de minimis exemption is probably not a bad idea, but doing it in this hamhanded "don't worry about the consequences" fashion would be low hanging fruit for Dems if they weren't, also, on this anti-China kick.

People love their dropshipping crap and people fucking hate getting surprise tax bills from their delivery companies.

...the USPS has resumed service but the duty issue remains! 

Anyway, this highlights a big issue with this kind of thing. The actual $ cost isn't necessarily a huge burden, but the paperwork and processing across several entities is.

Morning

Wacky Wednesday

Tuesday Night

Rock on.

Happy Hour

Get happy

Sounds Bad

Maybe somebody should do something.

We know that the vast majority of federal aid has been halted, particularly that which comes from the U.S. Agency for International Development. This includes medical care and food for malnourished children, refugee hospitals, supplies for war-torn regions, and much more. Claims that humanitarian aid was exempted from the pause are simply not true. We know that clean-energy businesses aren’t receiving grants passed by Congress under the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. We know that Energy Department grants intended for historically disadvantaged cities or projects with community benefit plans (including the restarting of a nuclear facility in Michigan) have been stopped. We know that electric-vehicle charging station grants have been stopped.

This is all completely illegal. Elon has boasted of shutting down certain payments through his takeover of the payment system, though that’s probably just bloviating. (It’s also terrifying, as it carries the threat of mucking up the payment system in ways that could destroy the country.) But we’re not in a theoretical place when it comes to payments to disfavored causes and organizations. They are doing this now, in the open, in plain view of everyone, and in so doing usurping the power of a coequal branch of the government.

Afternoon

Have a little bit of that norovirus or similar. Talk amongst yourselves!

Sounds Bad

Ryan said things at one point got better for Head Start following last week's chaotic funding/grant freeze.

But now it has again gotten worse.

"A lot of programs are getting error messages or sorry messages," when trying to access their funding/accounts, he said.

— Lisa Desjardins (@LisaDNews) February 4, 2025

For What You're Worth, Jake

Chris Murphy: They don't seem super different than Elon Musk, who has amplified vicious antisemitic information on Twitter and who gave the Heil Hitler salute on Inauguration Day -- it seems to be standard! Jake Tapper: For whatever it's worth, the Trump Team says that wasn't a Heil Hitler salute.

[image or embed]

— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona.bsky.social) February 3, 2025 at 10:05 PM

WHO ALLOWS HIM? WHO ALLOWS HIM, MOTHERFUCKERS???

 Journalists love pretending "the narrative" isn't something they are mostly responsible for.

Seems Bad

Hopefully Dems figure out a way to make crime illegal.

A 25-year-old engineer named Marko Elez, who previously worked for two Elon Musk companies, has direct access to Treasury Department systems responsible for nearly all payments made by the US government, three sources tell WIRED.

Two of those sources say that Elez’s privileges include the ability not just to read but to write code on two of the most sensitive systems in the US government: The Payment Automation Manager (PAM) and Secure Payment System (SPS) at the Bureau of the Fiscal Service (BFS). Housed on a top-secret mainframe, these systems control, on a granular level, government payments that in their totality amount to more than a fifth of the US economy.

Monday Night

Rock on.

Philadelphia's Worst Humans

Aiden Steigelmann.

Happy Hour

Dems need to hire some shitposters for their messaging.

"Nazi children are destroying the government"

[image or embed]

— Just Kidding (@internethippo.bsky.social) February 3, 2025 at 7:44 PM

Come Back Next Month

I guess we'll be doing this regularly.

The Answer Is No

Pretty easy, really.

The New York attorney general, Letitia James, has warned New York hospitals that complying with the White House’s executive order to end gender-affirming medical care for transgender youth could well violate state law.

The letter, which the attorney general’s office sent Monday morning to health care providers and other organizations, puts hospitals at the center of a conflict between the federal government and state authorities.

Progress

More like this.

WASHINGTON—Sen. Brian Schatz (D., Hawaii) said he would place a “blanket hold” on all of President Trump’s State Department nominees until the administration’s attack on the leading U.S. foreign-assistance agency ends, a move that threatens to stall Trump’s ability to get his foreign-policy team in place.

Some members also went to the USAID building today. We'll see if they get any coverage!

I do know that when Dems are in power, news outlets love to rush the cameras to the minority party, and when Republicans are in power, news outlets love to rush the cameras to the majority party, but that's more reason to create spectacle, not less.

"Trades"

Robinhood Markets is getting in on the sports event contracts craze, offering retail investors the opportunity to place trades on the outcome of Sunday’s Super Bowl https://t.co/NAIvVckzjM

— Bloomberg (@business) February 3, 2025

Lunch

Eat

Doug Ford, Leader Of The Resistance

At least we have some unexpected plot twists.

Progressive Conservative Leader Doug Ford is "ripping up" Ontario's $100 million contract with Elon Musk's Starlink in the wake of U.S. tariffs on virtually all Canadian goods, he said in a statement Monday.

Marks

The easiest people to con are the ones who believe they are geniuses, and therefore untrickable. And so the savviest people of The Discourse - journalists, business guys - always think they are perfectly correct in believing that other people are the marks, that they themselves are in on the con. It's okay to lie to the great unwashed, the pig people, as I, a very smart person, am convinced I understand what is really happening.

It’s been fairly frequently remarked that markets seemed to believe that Donald Trump would do all the stuff that markets liked, and none of the things that markets don’t like. Well, we now know how that turned out.

Imagine what else "markets" get tricked by!

Occasionally people complain when I link to paywalled things, but almost everything is paywalled now and I don't really know what to do about that. 

(If it is paywalled for you, it is a long rundown of pronouncements from investor guidance newsletters and similar. As for getting around paywalls, disabling javascript after loading the site often does the trick!)

...That was fast:

I assume that means she agreed to pretend to do some bullshit.

But Mah Beat Sweeteners

Most journalist names - the ones who go on tv - are competing over who can ingratiate themselves the most with the incoming administration. If Dems want coverage they are going to have to work at it.

Oldheads remember how much derision the press corps directed at Democrats in in the minority who tried to do any oversight in the early Bush era.  These people are truffle pigs to power.

Related: if you were a low level gov't staffer, would you trust one of the political reporters of the New York Times  (or Dash Sulzberger generally) to not bury your whistleblowing under an avalanche of bothsidesing?

To not do worse than that?

Morning

If Elon Musk does it, then it isn't illegal.

Sunday Night

Rock on.

Would Probably Help To Know Some Lawmakers Have Their Backs

 But I suppose planning tea time with genocidaires is more important.

The top agent at the F.B.I.’s New York field office vowed in a defiant email to his staff to “dig in” after the Trump administration targeted officials involved in the investigations into the Jan. 6 attack — and praised the bureau’s interim leaders for defending its independence.

“Today, we find ourselves in the middle of a battle of our own, as good people are being walked out of the F.B.I. and others are being targeted because they did their jobs in accordance with the law and F.B.I. policy,” wrote James E. Dennehy, a veteran and highly respected agent who has run the largest and arguably the most important field office in the bureau since September.

Hey, Hakeem, You Busy?

 

Well What Are You Going To Do About It

 Sounds bad.

Tariffs And Trade Wars

I do think economists have muddled the issues for years, pretending that tariffs are in and of themselves some great evil borne out of ignorance, instead of one tool of taxation and policy among many.

It is the trade wars that are a problem, especially as tariffs become a tool for noneconomic goals (we call those sanctions now, usually).

Canadians know how to concentrate the pain onto various American brands in Republican states and congressional districts.

In 2018, for example, they targeted the vital playing cards industry. United States Playing Card Company is located in 

Erlanger, Kentucky (Mitch's state).

The US rules the interdependent world om a lot of ways,  but it is best not to surrender to bullies.

Elon's Been Working Hard

Amazing.

WASHINGTON, Feb 2 (Reuters) - A key U.S. pilot messaging system was experiencing a temporary outage, which could lead to flight delays on Sunday, U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said late on Saturday.

It's one thing to play Jenga with your microblogging site...

I have no idea if this is really their fault, but purging all the people who know anything other than how to own the libs with Nazi shitposts...

Morning

 Sunday funday

Saturday Evening

Enjoy

Afternoon

Enjoy

Answer Never Coming

Actually Busy

Taking a little break from watching the world burn.  Talk amongst yourselves!

Morning

 Slacker Saturday.