Thanks to everyone who sent protest pics from yesterday. I’m going to post your reports and pics soon. But, sheesh, seems like everybody’s quitting, and it isn’t quiet quitting, so I wanted to cover that first.
Let’s start in New York City. Yesterday, four deputy mayors resigned their posts. There are eight in total. The city comptroller, Brian Lander, sent a letter to Adams asking him to provide a contingency plan by the end of the week, otherwise Lander might convene an “Inability Committee” meeting, which is the way under the Section 10 of the City Charter to remove the mayor if the governor doesn’t act. Kathy Hochul, who needs a lot of weathermen to see which way the wind is blowing, issued a statement that seemed like she’s actually considering using her power to remove Adams. She’s going to meet with key members of the downstate machine as well as Lander today:
CBS News New York’s Marcia Kramer has learned the meetings Hochul will have will be one on one with New York political leaders, including City Comptroller Brad Lander, City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, and Queens Congressman Gregory Meeks.
Kramer has also learned everything is on the table, including the mayor deciding to resign or deciding not to run for reelection, and even the governor using her powers to remove the mayor from the power, something that has never happened in New York state history.
While it’s true that the mayor has never been removed, FDR started the process and had court rulings saying he could do so back when he was governor (the mayor resigned instead), and Pataki removed the Bronx DA from a case and won court rulings on that.
The state of play on the dismissal of Adams’ charges is that Young Voldemort Bove apparently put all the remaining public integrity prosecutors in a room and said nobody’s leaving until someone files a dismissal on Adam’s charges. The dismissal was filed by two attorneys, Antoinette Bacon and Edward Sullivan. I’m not an expert, but reading that filing, it’s all “The Acting Attorney General determined…” — that’s Bove. So, I think they filed the dismissal but basically hope to keep their careers and bar cards by simply reporting what Bove told them to do. The federal judge handling the case, Dale E. Ho, has scheduled a hearing for tomorrow.
The top official at the Social Security Administration stepped down after a clash with DOGE employees over access to sensitive personal records, two sources told ABC News.
Michelle King, a career official who served at the agency for more than 30 years, was serving as acting commissioner of the Social Security Administration but left the agency after she was replaced with Leland Dudek this weekend.
Sources said that DOGE employees were seeking access to an internal data system which includes sensitive, personal information of Americans.
Presumably King’s replacement will be more open to letting Elon have every American’s data so he can enroll us all in his new payment system on X.
Edit: Sorry, missed another one:
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The top federal prosecutor who supervised criminal cases at the Washington, D.C. U.S. Attorney’s office resigned on Tuesday, citing what she described as an improper demand by officials appointed by President Donald Trump’s administration to launch a criminal probe and pursue an asset freeze.
In a letter to the interim U.S. Attorney Ed Martin reviewed by Reuters, the office’s criminal chief Denise Cheung wrote that the Trump administration had ordered her to investigate a government contract awarded during Joe Biden’s administration and pursue a freeze of the recipient’s assets.
She said that neither request was supported by the evidence, which she said she was provided with by the Deputy Attorney General’s office.
Cheung is a 24-year career prosecutor at DoJ. I’m sure her replacement, someone who graduated from Liberty University and just passed the bar on their third try, will be up to the task.
hells littlest angel
One frog to another: “Does this water seem warm to you?”
Avalune
Italy was largely a cash only place when we lived there some time ago. It was a bit of a shock, and annoyance if I’m honest, coming from the land of debt card, but we adapted. If I am enrolled in his bullshit for Leto’s retirement, assuming he gets any after they are finished deleting and slashing everything, I think we will need to pull everything out and just go back to cash only. Honestly, we probably should anyway but I’m going to whine about the inconvenience for a while yet.
FDRLincoln
Trump is the False Prophet, Musk is the Anti-Christ, and X is the Mark of the Beast.
Maybe if the Rapture happens, all the good and kind people of every religion, denomination, and no religion will go to heaven, while the fundies and evil people of all religions stay behind and worship the Orange Pig and Edolph Shitler.
John S.
The replacement is former Fiserv CEO Frank Bisignano. He is worse than you can possibly imagine.
Geminid
@FDRLincoln: I’d rather see the Crapture. That’s when all the assholes get transported to Hell and the rest of us are left in peace..
Steve LaBonne
Having nobody but incompetent loons working for them might at least slow things down somewhat. That’s all I’ve got by way of optimism today.
brendancalling
@hells littlest angel: That frog is still more aware than folks like Charles Schumer and Dick Durbin.
I am extremely disappointed in leadership. They should quit too, and let some Democrats with fire in their bellies lead things.
Ruckus
@FDRLincoln:
Maybe the rapture happens and all the shitheads that want to fuck over everyone else will be sent to hell. Seems more fitting…. And less likely.
I’m not a religious person but it seems to me that the entire concept of religion was that all the shitty humans will get their due and everyone else will finally have decency. The reason I’m not a religious person is that is the basic teaching of most religions and it seems to have worked out so well… NOT
comrade scotts agenda of rage
Yesterday, the big downgrade from Sec Pete at DOT posted on Twitter:
Edolph replied:
Soooo, let’s parse this out:
Step 1: Fire all the government employees who make air travel safe.
Step 2: Let America see the consequences of those actions.
Step 3: Outsource the safety jobs he eliminated to his own company.
Step 4: Profit.
This is my shocked face.
MM: You should follow Duffy’s twitter account. He basically trashes Sec Pete for these accidents.
Every Dem Senator that voted to confirm this clown needs a sharp kick in the ass.
bbleh
“Well at least we’re GETTING BACK at the Biden people for their WEAPONIZATION of the Justice Department! We wouldn’t be doing this if the Democrats hadn’t MADE us do it.” Etc etc.
I wonder whether anyone has considered setting up / funding some kind of consortium of reduced-fee / pro-bono lawyers to defend former officials from this kind of legal harassment. It’s one thing to assume judges will eventually toss this kind of trash, but just getting to court with a lawyer and a case takes money. And I’d guess a lot of the initial defenses might be kinda pro-forma, so there might be some economies of scale. They could also coordinate PR work.
@mistermix.bsky.social
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: It’s a work day today for me, but I’m planning on a follow up on the Toronto crash and possible other unintended consequences of the absolute decimation of the FAA and the nonsensical idea that SpaceX can do anything to “help”.
Glory b
NY law (something the “Do Something” crowd never seems to consult) says that before removal, the mayor is to be afforded an opportunity to present a defense, which NY courts, as far back as the 1930s, have interpreted as requiring a hearing.
I’m pretty sure the meetings, etc, include making sure that black clergy and local elected officials have buy in. Otherwise, Adam’s and his supporters will likely characterize him as a victim of a white official’s machinations.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
Also too, remember how prior to 911, ‘Murka’s airport security was outsourced?
One of the first things that the Bushies did was pull that role into a governmental one. All the while trying to outsource damn near everything else they could manage.
The DOT mode I worked for for 27+ years was *hated* by the (R) Congresses of the Clinton years and well into the Dubya reign of error. They did everything they could to minimize our oversight roles by threatening funding and even agency extinction.
Then the Big Dig Clusterfuck happened. Suddenly everybody was asking “where was the oversight?” Very quietly over the next couple of years, we were no longer threatened with extinction.
If all this plays out, it’s gonna take a lot of deaths and tragedies to wake-the-fuck-up enough low-info/low-enthusiasm voters to think about what their vote (or non-vote) means.
Hungry Joe
All these principled resignations, in normal times, would generate righteous and widespread outrage. In the New Age of Trump our (largely underreported) outrage might inspire a collective shrug, even as malevolent toadies take their places and scores of systems — comprising the entire edifice of a modern, functional society — begin, one by one by two by three by four, to collapse.
Not feeling overly optimistic today, even after the inspiring rally Ms. Joe and I attended yesterday. The eviscerated center cannot hold. Which of course doesn’t mean we shouldn’t keep trying. But some days …
lowtechcyclist
@FDRLincoln:
And all the fundies would be denying that anything Rapture-like had happened, and would still be waiting for it to come take them.
It would be especially interesting when things started to get rather Tribulation-like, to watch them come up with bullshit to pretend nothing was out of the ordinary.
Quicksand
@@mistermix.bsky.social:
SpaceX is going to help by building a submarine…
bbleh
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: @mistermix.bsky.social: I would not be at all surprised if Elmo sees himself as at once a Savvy Businessman and the Hero Who Saves The Day. (Which comic character was it who used to sing that operatically? Mighty Mouse?) Sort of a childish John Galt fantasy.
Walz had it right. These people are just WEIRD.
Ruckus
@Steve LaBonne:
Hate to be the bearer of bad news but they won’t slow down. They will go full speed to get as much as they can steal as soon as they can, because while they think they are the smartest, bestest humans by being greedy fucks and getting their (and everyone else’s shares), really all they are is complete and utter assholes. As humanity has been since day one. But now it’s far more organized and far more complex so even if they lose, recovery will take time and a lot of actual humans will suffer greatly in the meantime.
None of this bullshit is new to humanity, it’s just other than a life well lived, greed is the overwhelming trait of humanity. And a life well lived is NOT a greedy life. And what happens as life gets better is that the greedy fucks don’t often get their desired end of having it all. Especially as all is a far bigger concept than it was in the lifetime of humans alive today. But the downside is that trying to get it all destroys a hell of a lot more than it used to.
Because there is a hell of a lot more to destroy.
danielx
No doubt. But will they be up on that new requirement about using Preparation H for lip gloss?
Tumbrel futures gonna be reaching escape velocity soon.
lowtechcyclist
@bbleh:
Yep, it was Mighty Mouse.
danielx
@Quicksand:
Which will have screen doors to reduce weight!
Jeffg166
If nothing else the Democratic leadership is getting the message it’s OK with their base to be anti coup.
Baud
I hope the judge doesn’t let them dismiss without prejudice. That would make courts accessories to extortion. He should make them pursue the case or dismiss with prejudice so they can’t hold it over Adams’s head.
A Ghost to Most
@FDRLincoln: So many enablers and apologists.
bbleh
@lowtechcyclist: in Elmo’s case it would be in a squeaky Muppet voice.
japa21
They will be stopped. The question is if they can be stopped before everything is destroyed and millions lose their lives. It may take asteroid 2024 YR4 to do the job.
ArchTeryx
We already have the perfect example of what privatized air traffic control gets you. It’s called Überlingen.
Context: The Swiss privatized their ATC to a company called SkyGuide. And one fine night, they decided, to save money, to pull all but one of their controllers, disconnect the outside phone line, and take down half their radar capacity all at once. Because it “wasn’t a busy time,” and they wanted to do all their maintenance at once.
The result was one of the worst midair collisions of all time at Überlingen, Germany. A FedEx plane smashed into a Bashkirian Airlines Tu-154. One full of children and their chaperones on their school trip. The vertical stabilizer on the FedEx plane cut the Tu-154 in half.
There were no survivors. And half the bodies were found well outside the crash site, showing they were pulled out of the plane and free-fell to the ground.
That poor SkyGuide ATC controller, left with no way to contact the outside world, without half the tools he depended on, and without backup, was assigned a good part of the blame. (The Tu-154 pilot disregarding the TCAS anti-collision system was the other part of it. The FedEx plane followed TCAS instructions. The Tu-154 pilot did not, instead choosing to follow the frantic instructions of the controller – which were dead wrong. Because he lacked the data he needed to make the correct call thanks to the degraded systems).
And the tragedy didn’t end there. A Russian national that had lost his entire family in the crash stalked and murdered that controller, Peter Nielsen, in cold blood. The murderer was subsequently hailed as a national hero in Russia. SkyGuide? Got a slap on the wrist and kept right on truckin’.
We aren’t the only one that practices corporate non-accountability. The Swiss are just as good at it as we are. And we’re about to find out what happens when you put unaccountable corporations in charge of air safety.
Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg
“Here at X payments, we’ve taken the step of creating crypto accounts for your benefit using SS and tax data, and will be the one stop shop for the issuance of social security benefits and tax refunds…..”
sab
@Hungry Joe: My office has birthday parties every month there is a birthday. Mine is in February so it is tomorrow. I hate this tradition. I don’t do birthdays. I was quiet in December when our resident MGAt started on about Biden’s pardons. If she does anything like that at my company birtday party tomorrow I will go ballistic. I am 71. I do not care if they kick me out. They won’t, because I am popular ( because I am nice) and she isn’t ( because she is abrasive.)
ETA tomorrow is my Social Security day. Most months I just wrote it in my checkbook. Tomorrow I will check first.
dmsilev
So, I’m reading that NASA is today’s agency-hit-by-DOGE-meataxe. Ten percent cut, so far, with the same due consideration for details and so forth that we’ve all come to expect from Elon Musk and his band of sociopathic 20-somethings.
They’re going to fuck up Social Security and Medicare, almost certainly. Whether on purpose or by accident, who knows, but it’s going to hurt a lot of people and kill some of them.
Hildebrand
@FDRLincoln: If you read the Bible correctly – which evangelicals just don’t – and if there is a rapture (and that is highly debatable), then the people ‘taken’ are the ones that always get ‘taken’ by the authorities (in this case, the ultimate authority), and it ain’t to be taken to paradise, but to the place where punishment happens.
TBone
Speaking of quitting, our protest organizer yesterday urged us all to join the upcoming National DEI Boycott Day! I’m all in:
https://www.newsweek.com/nationwide-economic-blackout-february-28-list-stores-being-targeted-2030269
Pls forgive source, it gives good description.
February 28
Amazon
Walmart
Best Buy
Another Scott
Meanwhile, … GovExec – DeJoy is stepping down:
Hmm…
Meanwhile, my package of popcorn still seems to be stuck in Indianapolis…
Best wishes,
Scott.
JML
have to say, finding a way to accelerate into retirement and flee to Portugal or Malta or something is sounding better all the time. But I’m not really old enough or financially secure enough to get there for a while.
hells bells what a bunch of evil, lying, idiots. As pleased as I am about the show of integrity from people in the DoJ, I’m equally frightened of the know-nothing junior nazis that will come in and take their places.
Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg
@dmsilev:
Sadly, it looks like a Starlink widget is going to land on our iPhones shortly, for people running iOS 18 or greater.
I think you have to opt in, which I won’t be doing.
TBone
@Another Scott: is the Board majority Dem now?
Baud
@dmsilev:
Bet Buzz Aldren feels like an idiot endorsing Trump.
ArchTeryx
@Another Scott: He did his job fixing elections and degrading the USPS. So now he gets to retire to a wingnut welfare sinecure.
Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg
@JML:
Malta’s buy-in routine doesn’t seem bad, and the place is awesome (went there last February – it was amazing, and I got to go into the Hypogeum).
Another Scott
@TBone: Nope.
I don’t have time to review the board process, but I think Biden did all he could do with his nominations there.
Grr…
Best wishes,
Scott.
Phylllis
@Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg: My husband scoffed the other day when I said I hoped people would wake up when they eliminate treasury notes and tell everybody to turn in their fiat dollars for bitcoin @ .20 cents on the dollar.
ArchTeryx
@Baud: They never do. If Aldrin’s a Trumpanzee, he won’t admit wrong even the day he goes to his grave. Fuck him.
dmsilev
@Baud: Doubt it. I don’t pretend to understand the hold that he has on his fan base, but it’s real and very strong.
Ocotillo
@sab: Mine was a day later than usual and it was in “pending” status in my bank account. It cleared from pending the following day.
sab
@JML: My youngest grandaughter is 10. What language should she be learning? She is mxed race. I am thinking Spanish and French.
Citizen Alan
@FDRLincoln: I maintain that Trump is the Antichrist.
In Left Behind, there was a shifty billionaire who helped facilitate Carpathia’s rise to power only to be personally executed by Antichrist immediately upon his ascension to becoming ruler of the world (by becoming Secretary General of the UN, who is the ruler of the world if you’re a deranged Bircher religious fanatic). Carpathia then immediately mind controls the entire body of the UN to simply ignore the fact that the Secretary General has just shot and killed a man in front of the whole General Assembly, which seems overcomplicated given Carpathia could have had him quietly executed in private a few hours later.
In this twisted parody of Left Behind we are all trapped in, it seems more logical for Trump to be the Antichrist, the MAGA hats to be the Mark of the Beast, and Musk the Antichrist’s High Priest who gets installed as Pope only for the Antichrist to assassinate him later for inscrutable reasons.
And now, I can visualize Edolph dressed as the Pope.
sab
@Ocotillo: Yikes.
sentient ai from the future
TAKE THE DEAL.
https://mastodon.online/@davidaugust/114025631613752532
direct video here:
https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/cache/media_attachments/files/114/025/631/747/923/777/original/4db9bdec244cccfa.mp4
pajaro
@brendancalling:
Dick Durban has been working his butt off trying to stop the Kash Patel nomination. That’s his job.
You guys are amazing. These are legislators that you are expecting to be Martin Luther King Jr.’s. In 2017 we didn’t behave this way toward Pelosi, even though Dems got their butts kicked in the House in the two years before we took back power.
sab
@Hildebrand: I am 71. In my misspent youth (age 12) I believed in the Rapture, even before all those books about it. Now I realize hundreds of generations before me also believed and were wrong.
God probably thinks way beyond millenia and also outside our galaxy and species.
Baud
@sab:
Pretty sure you’re mathing wrong.
JML
@sab: Spanish and Portuguese? (I mean, my family is very French on one side, so i’ll never discourage that)
But Portugal and Costa Rica both have golden medallion programs to attract retirees with guaranteed income…
pajaro
@brendancalling:
So call a Senator you think should be leading. Before you settle on that person, ask if he or she has been opposing unanimous consent or has been placing holds to stop Senate business. When they say they haven’t, ask why they haven’t.
There literally has never been a mass popular movement led by legislators from a couple of different states. We don’t need Shumer to get arrested. We need a women’s march.
HinTN
@comrade scotts agenda of rage:
In a former life my company was hiring a Safety Professional. A SpaceX employee applied and interviewed. Let’s be kind and say that the safety culture there, as revealed in the interview, was abysmal. But they’re “here to help” by golly.
JML
@Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg: Malta is pretty amazing. went there as a family when I was a kid and it was wonderful and memorable. Their buy-in is exceptionally reasonable for Europe and most of the population speaks better English than Americans. But even as old as I feel, I still wouldn’t be able to make it actually happen.
Baud
Apparently, on Reddit, people are into criticizing resigning rather than being fired. Or they don’t realize that people can be fired. Or they’re trolls looking to distract people from the real issue.
sentient ai from the future
@JML: i am less old than a lot of you and i am considering moldova and to some extent latvia, because if putin advances to either of those territories the EU is toast anyway, as a last hope of refuge from authoritarianism.
but i wouldnt be able to reside there until my kid is an adult (coparent will absolutely not support leaving the country, way to look out for your trans child, asshole) so i’ve got a few years to stick it out yet.
pajaro
@Ruckus:
They will go as fast as they can, because they know that there’s going to be pushback, and they are trying to steal as much as they can as quickly as they can. But it’s not a strategy that seems to be thinking long-term. There’s an election in 21 months, and things may look different if there’s a Democratic Congress two years from now.
There’s evidence that Trump’s job approval is already falling, and things are very likely to get worse if he does a fraction of what he threatens to do.
sab
@JML: Thank you. Now need to figure out the logistics of learning Portugese in Ohio.
Ohio Mom
@ArchTeryx: It’s always the low guy on the totem pole who ends up getting blamed. Or in this case, killed.
That’s my current guess as to where all this is going, everything is privatized. We have a foretaste in Medicare. The privatized version, Medicaid Advantage, gives worse service and costs the government much more (not energetic enough at the moment to google the numbers).
It will make everything more expensive, both in terms of the goods and services we purchase, and the taxes we little people pay.
Baud
@sab:
Good luck getting around the ban.
Betty Cracker
@Geminid: “Crapture” — love that!
sab
@Baud: Of course. That is arithmetic not math, but you are a lawyer not an engineer.
Jesus Dod 33 AD. How many generations to 1965?
TBone
@Another Scott:
Peale
@Glory b: Yep. Having lived in DC through the latter part of the Barry administration, you can’t just remove a corrupt mayor who is African American, because a big group of his supporters need to be convinced that he hasn’t been targeted and isn’t any more corrupt than most other mayors who were allowed to get away with it.
bbleh
@Ruckus: @pajaro: concur entirely: they’re in smash-and-grab mode. And this is just the latest — and likely largest and nearly last — manifestation of it. The Senate Republicans — McConnell et al. — and the SC — Roberts et al. — have been doing their own versions for a while now.
These guys are gonna smash a lot more than the others did. They’re bigger and a LOT more stupid.
Professor Bigfoot
@Hungry Joe: From what I said downstairs— I’m starting to think the 1798 Constitution, with its “checks and balances” is now a dead letter; and that scares the shit out of me.
Hildebrand
@sab: 19th century reactionaries (freaking out about modernity) really did a number on the US and Europe. We are still dealing with their panic over, well, everything.
Why can’t all these anti-modernity zealots go live with the Amish – at least they are consistent in their knavery, and they leave the rest of us alone
edit: The rapture wasn’t a thing until the 19th century. It, too, was a reaction to modernity, and folks not going to church (really low participation rates in the majority of the population in the middle of the 19th c), and the burgeoning suffrage movement, and of course, freeing the enslaved populations of the US
edit to the edit: …and scientific progress, and the historical-critical method of reading scripture, and, oh good lord, just about everything.
sab
@Baud: Home schooling has its limited advantages. Plus she is very computer literate.
Too tight immigration bans will destroy US sports, and even MAGAts care about that, if only for the gambling.
bbleh
@sab: figure 20-30 years per generation. So I’d say “scores.”
TBone
@sentient ai from the future: 🔥💀 HAHAHAHAHAHA!
I’M DEAD
sab
@Hildebrand: Amish don’t want them?
sab
@bbleh: I accept your figures. Math is weird. Arithmetic makes sense.
Hildebrand
@sab: Who would? lol
We certainly don’t. Musk needs to hurry up and head to Mars, I’ll help him pack – I’m sure we can stuff any number of the religious freaks into a suitcase for him.
Anyway
I am worried about so many prosecutors, heads of Census, Soc Sec Admin etc quitting. Seems to me that the good people that we might have expected to hold the line are leaving allowing RWNJs to be appointed in their place.
Librettist
“The world’s richest man” is incessantly sending out spam using the Trump email lists.
That bum couldn’t afford lunch if they took away his company credit card.
Gretchen
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: All the SpaceX engineers who designed the rockets that keep blowing up are going to work on air traffic control now? Me looking at Amtrak schedules…
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Baud:
I mean, I think that people should refuse to resign. Make them fire you.
Baud
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
Why? Resigning in protest used to be considered noble. Now we criticize it as weakness. It would be one thing if the person couldn’t be fired and just accommodated Trump, but that’s not this situation.
We’re killing ourselves with made up performative litmus tests that we impose on people.
Juju
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: This from his company that has all those rapid unscheduled disassemblings. I know I’m impressed. 🙄
gvg
@Baud: It’s not exactly made up. When the Nixon resignations happened it caused a huge scandal and investigations and Congress was in the habbit of standing up for itself. People expected more truth and honor too.
Now we know Congress will roll over and allow Trump to replace them with worse, AND we know he can find worse, because they and he have already shown us…so in a panic, we are looking for other ways that will work for awhile. Now sure this will work. I think it might depend on the specific provisions of each jobs appointment process and rules, plus boards and things willing to stand up which is going to vary by specific positions.
Miss Bianca
@sab: About 60 or 65 generations, according to what I remember from my Confirmation class teacher.
Betty
@Baud: It just makes me sad to know we are losing so many good people.
Chris
@FDRLincoln:
My favorite theory about the Rapture, in the popularly understood meaning of the term, is that the Rapture has already happened and all the good Christians were taken up to heaven.
It’s just that there were so few of them, and all of them were in such lowly positions, that nobody noticed.
Baud
@Chris:
You just made a bunch of Christian jackals sad.
Citizen Alan
Yeah, by a lot. If you’re 71, I think it’s at most 4 or 5 generations since Darby chopped up a Bible and rearranged various random passages to come up with the Rapture bullshit.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Another Scott:
I don’t think he (or the Senate Dems) did, honestly. I think Biden forgave DeJoy in exchange for electrifying the postal truck fleet and for his role in getting Republicans to help eliminate the prefunding requirement postal workers’ pensions. I think it was foolish for him to do this.
From the Wiki:
Biden had 5 of his appointees on the board at one time. Anton Hajjar was the vice chairman from June 2021 until December 2024. I assume it would take a simple majority of the board to remove Dejoy, who is also apart the board, as well as the deputy postmaster general.
There were 3 vacancies that the Senate Dems could have filled in time to kick DeJoy out, but they didn’t for whatever reason I can’t fathom. And the ones Biden did nominate/got confirmed, a few Republicans, I don’t get either:
Zollars was under investigation by the DOJ under Trump back in 2020:
Why would Biden renominate someone so sketchy as Zollars, a Trump appointee? Find another Republican who isn’t corrupt or just appoint an independent to get around the Political Party limitation for board membership!
He wasn’t the only Republican nominee that was confirmed to the board. There was Derek Kan, who while he had previously worked for the Obama administration at the Amtrak board, also worked in Trump 1’s OMB, with prior experience at OMB under Bush, as the deputy director.
From Wiki:
Somebody who willing worked at the Trump admin at the very end and had worked with Mitch McConnell as policy advisor is disqualified from such a position. There was no excuse in my mind to not get good people in place to remove DeJoy ASAP.
Biden should have nominated people who would follow through with his removal and the Senate Dems should have confirmed those people before the last Congress ended at the very least.
sab
@Citizen Alan: I was thinking back to St Paul or thereabouts.
sab
@Miss Bianca: Thank you. Finally some religious arithmetic. So scores of generations it is.
Citizen Alan
@sab: I’m not a huge fan of Saul of Tarsus, but I think even he would have been flabbergasted at the heresies that Evangelical Christians have embraced in the name of (Supply Side) Jesus Christ.
MomSense
Deputy Dir. of CDC announced his departure. Dr. Shah is coming back to Maine. This is a really sad development for public health. He’s a person of integrity and it doesn’t say good things about what is happening at CDC.
sab
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): Some people want to keep their professional licenses. Those licensing agencies suggest you quit in protest.
No need to hang on to be fired “for cause, ” because any firing looks bad on your resume. No employer wants to hire someone who hung on in the last job to be sand in the wheels of their last job.
If you morally or professionally cannot follow orders you should quit.
sab
@sab: bbleh already pointed this out just using arithmetic.
sab
@Citizen Alan: I agree with all your points on Paul formerly Saul. That guy had issues. He was a big fan of end of times thinking.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@sab:
I’d like to think any future employers/licensing agencies would understand considering the circumstances, that their being fired by President Musk is a mark of integrity rather than shame. It’s not like Project 2025 is a big secret
JML
Supply Side Jesus. Yeah, think I’ll be using that one. nicely stated.
Another Scott
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): Thanks for this.
It looks like Biden couldn’t have stacked the Board if he wanted to. FederalTimes.com (from August 2022):
(Emphasis added. [eta] – I see your excerpt makes the same point.)
For whatever reason, the Board (including at least a few people appointed by Biden) thinks that DeJoy has been doing a good job. If we don’t want the President reaching down and overriding agency leadership, and I think in general we don’t want that, then he was correct to keep his hands off. (The question remains, though, how those people were picked to be on the board and why they see good things about DeJoy that we don’t.)
Now, of course, we get to see whether 47 tries to take a wrecking ball to the place, overriding whatever sensible things the current Board wanted to do (whether DeJoy was actually able to do those things or not).
Thanks again.
Best wishes,
Scott.
Quinerly
I’ll leave this here. Don’t think mentioned.
A worker at the GSA has resigned in protest after Elon Musk ally Thomas Shedd requested “admin/root access to all components of the Notify.gov system,” which is a government system used to send mass text messages to the public. The worker said access is highly sensitive and would give Shedd unilateral, private access to the personal data of members of the public.
Shedd is a former Tesla engineer who now runs Technology Transformation Services (TTS), a group of coders and software engineers within the GSA. Notify.gov contains not just the phone numbers of everyday people but also information about whether they participate in government programs such as Medicaid, which is based on a person’s financial situation.
404 Media reporting
Quinerly
In FDA news
The Food and Drug Administration’s head of medical device safety, was terminated by the Trump Administration this past weekend.
And the FDA Food Safety Chief resigned today.
Stat News and NYT reporting
Kayla Rudbek
@sab: Mandarin Chinese, in my opinion (and I should probably start on it myself because Pallas Athene knows that the language of science and engineering is going to switch in the next century).
Kayla Rudbek
Kayla Rudbek
@Citizen Alan: I still like Spider Robinson’s take on him in the Callahan stories (that Paul was a alien twisting the message of Christ in order to make humanity prey for the aliens)