Trump / Musk (other than DOGE)

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Very clear-eyed analysis of the reality of the end of the post-WWII world order and the need for Europe to recognize that Trump is aligned with Xi and Putin to see the world as being carved up into spheres of influence based on hard power (military might). He urges Europe to understand they have no seat at the table based on soft power or reliance on rules-based international organizations — the ticket to a seat at this table is hard power.
 
nycfan said:


Very clear-eyed analysis of the reality of the end of the post-WWII world order and the need for Europe to recognize that Trump is aligned with Xi and Putin to see the world as being carved up into spheres of influence based on hard power (military might). He urges Europe to understand they have no seat at the table based on soft power or reliance on rules-based international organizations — the ticket to a seat at this table is hard power.
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On Trump — Russia believes that Trump is buying what they are telling him, which diminishes his leverage. “… and I saw this happen in Afghanistan where he gave away the biggest concession before we even started. It’s a strange ‘Art of the Deal’ honestly …”
 
altmin said:
gizmodo.com

DOGE Staffer Known as 'Big Balls' Reportedly the Grandkid of a KGB Spy

Sure, why not?
gizmodo.com gizmodo.com
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From the link:

“… So, you know that DOGE staffer who goes by “Big Balls,” otherwise known as 19-year-old Edward Coristine—an alleged former member of online cybercriminal organization The Com and a cybersecurity worker who reportedly got fired from his job for leaking company secrets? Well, turns out there’s another layer to his dubious background. According to independent journalist Jacob Silverman, Coristine is the grandson of Valery Martynov, a former KGB spy.

Per Silverman’s research, Martynov was an officer in the technical espionage division of the Russian intelligence agency back in 1980, when he was sent to the United States to serve as an undercover agent at the Soviet Embassy in Washington, D.C. About two years into his stay, Martynov got flipped by the FBI and started to feed the US government Soviet secrets.

Martynov was eventually identified as compromised by KGB counterintelligence officer Victor Cherkashin, who had himself successfully developed sources within the US intelligence agencies. In order to get Martynov back to Russia without him suspecting that he was found out, Cherkashin was asked to escort another Soviet spy back home (it’s a long story that Silverman explains in detail). As soon as the plane touched down, Martynov was arrested and ultimately executed.

His widow eventually moved to the United States permanently, where she and her children would settle, marry, and have kids—including Edward. …”
 
nycfan said:
They are already claiming it is because Trump is so respected and feared that immigrants quit coming and many here self-deported rather than face his wrath.

I do thing a lot of immigrants without legal status have become much more cautious about movements in public — gone to ground to the extent possible so as not to be an easy target and hoping that they won’t be nabbed at work. Not sure how long that will last.

I heard a story on CNN this morning about a permanent legal resident and military veteran who was nabbed by ICE on January 22 and remains in detention today even though he and his wife have documented his legal resident status.
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That could impact border encounters. I don’t think it would have any impact on deportations. At least not yet.
 

GSA says workers who took ‘fork’ won’t get a full payout — then reverses itself​

The inconsistency marks the latest twist in an error-plagued rollout of the Trump administration’s sweeping effort to incentivize federal workers to quit.

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www.washingtonpost.com

“Officials with the General Services Administration told staff in emails sent last weekend that probationary workers who took the Trump administration’s deferred resignation offer would not necessarily be paid through Sept. 30, going back on a guarantee made to all federal workers.

Instead, GSA leaders wrote in messages obtained by The Washington Post, probationary staff would see their payments stop when their probationary period expired, if that date came before the end date of the resignation program.

Hours after The Post contacted the U.S. Office of Personnel Management about the issue, GSA reversed itself, communicating the decision in a note from the agency’s chief of staff that said, “Things change.”

Probationary employees will receive their pay through Sept. 30 “regardless of their probation end date,” he wrote in an email obtained by The Post.

The inconsistency marks the latest twist in an error-plagued rollout of the Trump administration’s sweeping effort to incentivize federal workers to quit — a deal the government promised repeatedly would permit all approved employees to get paid for not working through September. Dozens of probationary workers in recent interviews have detailed challenges with taking the deal, as agencies raced to implement a Trump administration directive to shed those jobs.

In particular, some probationary employees who accepted the resignation offer reported they were fired anyway, spurring confusion and chaos. When The Post contacted OPM to ask about the firings, agencies began reinstating terminated workers to the resignation program. The mistaken firings and corrections transpired at several agencies including the Education Department and the Agriculture Department, The Post found. …”
 


Hard power is the only power and the only necessary justification for any action to this Administration…
 

Trump ends deportation protection for 500,000 Haitians​


www.bbc.com

Trump ends deportation protection for 500,000 Haitians - BBC News

The move comes amid deteriorating conditions in the Caribbean country.
www.bbc.com www.bbc.com

“The US government will end the temporary protected status (TPS) for 500,000 Haitians living in the country in August, the Department of Homeland Security said on Thursday.

This comes despite deteriorating conditions in the Caribbean country, with gangs controlling about 85% of the capital and sexual violence against children increasing by 1,000% last year, according to the United Nations.

TPS is granted to nationals of designated countries facing unsafe conditions, such as armed conflict or environmental disasters. …”



 


The New Meaning of ‘Munich’​

After J.D. Vance’s bizarre speech, a word synonymous with appeasement may now signal the voluntary surrender of global hegemony.​


“…the U.S.-orchestrated global order—which, for most of the past 80 years since World War II, U.S. officials of both political parties fully supported—was starting to fall apart even before Trump began suggesting that he was no longer interested in being leader of the free world.

But by brazenly treating some of Washington’s key allies as adversaries—and its autocratic adversaries as partners—Trump may be administering the death blow to a once-stable world system in which Washington served as overseer of a powerful alliance of democracies.

As another Munich attendee, Georgetown University scholar Charles Kupchan, put it to me: “The atmosphere in Munich was that of a funeral.”

…
Indeed, Vance’s bizarre speech on Feb. 14—which had nothing to do with security and everything to do with culture and politics—should probably be seen mainly as an appeal to his MAGA home audience and perhaps the effective start to his 2028 presidential campaign.

“There are folks inside the administration who are simply thrilled to be bringing tears to the eyes of the Europeans,” said one Republican international relations expert familiar with the Trump officials’ thinking, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

“There is a lingering anger from Trump’s first term toward the bien-pensant crowd in Brussels who openly criticized Trump’s domestic politics and came out against the Dobbs decision.” …”
 
Continued

“… The problem, however, is that Trump often behaves in ways that suggest that he thinks the United States is still the global hegemon.

“He thinks America’s bargaining position is incredibly strong, that we can get massively better deals at better cost,” said William Wohlforth, an international relations scholar at Dartmouth College. “So that’s not really consistent with this idea of multipolarity,” he added.

It’s fashionable to write that Trump just makes policies up as he goes along, such as his seemingly immoral—and monumentally ahistorical—idea of ridding Gaza of Palestinians and turning it into the “Riviera” of the Middle East. But in fact, Trump has been remarkably consistent in his view that Washington has no business being caretaker to the world—going back to the late 1980s, when as a real-estate magnate, he took out a full-page New York Times ad that said, “The world is laughing at American politicians as we protect ships we don’t own, carrying oil we don’t need, destined for allies who won’t help.”

In some ways, Trump is a reversion to the pre-World War II norm of Republican geopolitics. In recent weeks, much has been made of the 47th president’s 19th-century approach to power—stemming from his bid for greater hemispheric primacy over Greenland and the Panama Canal, as well as his embrace of the tariff policies similar to those of former President William McKinley.

But he also represents a return to the early-to-mid 20th century Taft Republicanism, named for Sen. Robert Taft. Once known as “Mr. Republican,” Taft fought the New Deal and backed the America First Committee, the pre-World War II version of Trump’s movement. Former President Dwight Eisenhower silenced that isolationist wing of the GOP 70 years ago as the Cold War got underway. Now it seems to be back, redefinedas “national conservatism.”

… Former President Joe Biden worked hard to restore the U.S. role as the supposed overseer of the global order and portray Trump, and his disruptive first term, as an outlier. But the main message of the 2024 election was that it was Biden, not Trump, who was the interlude from history.

The advent of Trump II—and the way that he’s upended Washington and the world order in just a month—shows that history is returning with a vengeance. …”
 
We must be just hours away now from someone — anyone — starting to recognize Trump has made us stronger on the world stage. Right, house Pubs? Because so far, it looks like our enemies are LOVING our capitulation and our friends are pissed at us for abandoning them to our mutual enemies.
 


Trump notoriously doesn’t like being touched (by other men especially)… people used to attribute that to being a germaphobe but some of his other behaviors call that into question.
 
nycfan said:

DOGE’s Only Public Ledger Is Riddled With Mistakes​

The figures from Elon Musk’s team of outsiders represent billions in government cuts. They are also full of accounting errors, outdated data and other miscalculations.

GIFT LINK 🎁 —> DOGE’s Only Public Ledger Is Riddled With Mistakes
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“… The mistakes touched a wide range of contracts — some worth hundreds of millions of dollars and others worth just a few thousand.

David Reid, an environmental scientist in Michigan, was surprised to learn his contract studying invasive species in the St. Lawrence Seaway was included on the list.

“That contract wasn’t canceled by DOGE or anyone else,” he said. The contract expired on Dec. 31 and he decided to retire and not renew it, he said.

“If they took credit for canceling the contract, they’re lying.”

The group claimed $25,000 in savings from his project. …”

——
IMG_5137.jpeg
DOGE is making up fake savings and firing people so fast they have to try to rehire a number of them across various departments because they fired mission critical workers, but sure, sure, be MORE aggressive.

I know Trump is most likely just posturing here to pretend he has some oversight over Musk and the alleged boy genius Musketeers in this mess, but please don’t urge them to get more reckless than they already have been.
 
“… In another case, DOGE claimed $232 million in savings on a contract providing information technology support to the Social Security Administration. But The Intercept reported that only a sliver of the contract was canceled — a program to let users mark their gender as “X” — bringing the actual savings closer to $560,000.

… The “wall of receipts” also lists hundreds of cases in which — even by the website’s own accounting — the changes saved taxpayers nothing. In one contract, the Securities and Exchange Commission had agreed to spend $10 million for a five-year subscription to the legal-research site Westlaw. But the savings are listed as $0. The S.E.C.’s contract expired in March 2024.

… So far, the site has not been fully transparent about the data it includes or about the changes it makes.

Around the same time news organizations published articles on major inaccuracies, the “wall of receipts” website was updated to correct the errors without changing the “last updated” date. …”

Phil Murphy Transparency GIF by GIPHY News
 
“… The website says the effort has saved $55 billion in total, but has provided no details on its “wall of receipts” for the bulk of that money. The top-line number also did not change this week, even after the site fixed errors that inflated the savings of individual grants.

One place where the office has more regularly communicated with the public is on the social media platform X, owned by Mr. Musk. But it has repeated some of the same kinds of errors there.

In one post about the $8 billion mistake, the group claimed it had “always used the correct $8M in its calculations,” despite its updates to its site.

On Wednesday, the DOGE account reposted a message on X from the Treasury Department, saying that the I.R.S. had “rescinded a previously planned $1.9B contract” and done so “in connection” to the group’s work — describing a canceled contract that wasn’t yet on the DOGE.gov “wall of receipts.”

The account added a screenshot showing a $1.9 billion purchasing agreement — another one of those umbrella contracts — with an unnamed vendor, now marked “terminate for convenience.”

A code in the screenshot identified the vendor as Centennial Technologies, a company in Northern Virginia. But that company said its agreement had actually been canceled in the fall, during the Biden administration.

“Nothing changed now,” Mani Allu, the company’s chief executive, said in an email. He said that the slow-moving contracts database had not been updated to show the cancellation until this month, making the change appear new. …”
 
SmilingJack said:
I don't see how we ever come back from this idiotic bullying policy against everyone of our allies? America is now the narcissistic personality of the President and like Trump we'll soon have no friends.
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I don’t think the Pubs will ever realize the people in the world they most resemble are the impotent stooges of authoritarian dictators like Putin, Orban and Erdogan. In other words, the pathetic enablers of freedom-haters they claim to detest.
 
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