Saturday Report 2/1/25 - Another "hair on fire" moment?

The Best of the Rest of the News

Feb 01, 2025

— Let’s just call these mass firings at Justice and the FBI what they are. Donald Trump is a lawless man who is ripping apart the FBI to turn it into a banana republic-style group of enforcing thugs who will only do his will. They will spare his friends and persecute his enemies. We’ve seen this over and over during the past century in countries all over the world; it’s nothing new. It’s just that we never expected to see it here in America. Putin dreamed for most of his life of destroying America; he now has a friend who is doing it for him. This attack on the Justice Department and particularly on the FBI is the beginning of America’s first true era of dictatorship. The only question now is how long and how far Democratic and Republican politicians and career government employees will tolerate this, and, when their resistance comes, whether it will be too late. The phone number for Congress is 202-224-3121.

— This plane crash shows Trump can’t handle a crisis; we’re going to have to hold our breath for the next 4 years... We already knew this from Covid, when at least 400,000 Americans died unnecessarily because of Trump’s utter incompetence and his attempts to use the pandemic for political gain. Now, with the plane and helicopter crash into the Potomac he let his racist and misogynist freak flag fly high, coming out before any investigations to say that the crash was caused by Black people, women, and/or handicapped people having been hired by the FAA. This is sick, twisted, unAmerican, inhumane, and highlights his complete and utter lack of character or humanity. It now appears that the fault for the crash lies with the helicopter pilot, who was both too high and off-course — and was apparently a woman. One of his people must’ve told Trump, who immediately saw it as an opportunity to go off on women, arguing, like Pete Hegseth, that women shouldn’t be in any kind of significant role in the military. The FAA itself did a quick investigation and found that there was only one controller in the tower handing both plane and helicopter traffic (normally there are 2) in part because the DCA airport only has 19 certified controllers altogether, even though the FAA says they should have 30. This is the result of years of Republican cuts to the FAA’s budget to finance tax breaks for billionaires. The GOP’s 2025 proposed budget includes another 26% cut in FAA funding to pay for tax cuts for Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, just like their unsuccessful 2023 budget effort. When will Americans wake up to the fact that Republicans only care about billionaires and big corporations that kick back campaign contributions to them in exchange for subsidies, deregulation, and tax loopholes? You’d think, after all these years of the Reaganomics trickle-down scam (among others) that they’d have figured it out…

— We have another “hair on fire” moment with Musk sticking his nose (and people) into our Government. After the head of the FAA opened an investigation into Musk’s SpaceX program, it appears that Musk himself intervened to get the guy to quit or be fired; now another federal officer, the highest-ranking career official at the Treasury Department, has also resigned rather than do battle with Musk. Nobody elected this billionaire — arguably the richest man in the world — but this past week he apparently walked into (or sent emissaries) the part of the Treasury Department that writes trillions of dollars in checks to demand information about who’s getting paid, how much, and why. This could include highly confidential information that may well include government payments to Musk’s Tesla, SpaceX, and Neuralink competitors, among others. Will Trump reign him in? It appears that our president is as afraid of Musk as many of his employees say they are. Oligarchy is a form of government where morbidly rich people or their agents take over the reins of government and turn its resources and efforts away from helping average people and toward protecting and subsidizing the oligarchs themselves. We’re officially there.

— People are trying to simplify the message. One of the latest viral internet memes is a graphic with the following words on it:
*January 20: Trump FIRES the FAA director
*January 21: Trump FREEZES all Air Traffic Controller hiring
*January 22: Trump DISBANDS the Aviation Safety Advisory Committee
*January 28: Trump sends a buyout/retirement ransom letter to existing FAA employees
*January 29: First American mid-air collision in 16 years, 67 fatalities. WE ARE ONCE AGAIN RULED BY AN INCOMPETENT FOOL WHO IS GONNA GET US ALL KILLED!

— “They’re both dangerous”: Senators are worried after both Patel and Gabbard refused a constitutional pledge. Delaware’s Democratic Senator Chris Coons is warning Americans that when he asked both Kash Patel and Tulsi Gabbard if they’d refuse an illegal or unconstitutional order from Trump, both refused to say they’d stand up to the Mango Mussolini. “It gives me real pause,” Coons told Raw Story, adding, “Bill Barr answered easily [that he’d refuse an illegal order]. Pam Bondi answered easily. Merrick Garland answered easily. I do that with every nominee.” The sad and simple reality is that Trump has so badly intimidated his nominees that most are afraid to even say out loud that they’d challenge him, much less actually do it when the chips are down. This should alarm every American, particularly given Trump’s long history of criminal behavior and his past requests to the military to shoot protestors “in the legs” and other bizarre, illegal, and fundamentally unAmerican steps. We’re in for a hell of a ride over the next four years…

— “Mass Murderer in Waiting”: Reporter accuses LA Times’ billionaire owner of editing his anti-RFK op-ed to support Kennedy. Eric Reinhart wrote an article for the LA Times about Bob Kennedy’s appearance before the Senate, but is now saying that the paper’s editors — presumably at the behest of the paper’s rightwing billionaire owner — rewrote his article and changed the headline to make it seem like he was endorsing Kennedy when in fact it was the opposite. “I am the author of this OpEd,” Reinhart wrote on X, “which was given a misleading title and from which key lines were cut—lines that made very clear that RFK Jr is dangerously ignorant, has absolutely no business near HHS, and is effectively a mass murderer in waiting.” What’s the old joke about the Golden Rule? “He who has the gold makes the rules,” as I recall. Certainly seems to be the case here, truth be damned…

— ICE horror story hits the news… A grandmother, mother, and toddler were all hauled off to an ICE immigration detention center (euphemism for “jail”) by Trump’s officers when they were caught speaking Spanish to each other. Turns out they were visiting from Puerto Rico — where everybody’s a US citizen — but that didn’t deter the enthusiastic cops. Thank the gods they didn’t end up in Gitmo. ICE had been prioritizing undocumented immigrants who’d committed crimes while in the US, but since Trump gave each ICE office a daily quota for arrests they’re starting to do more general sweeps, looking for people who’ve been good residents, quietly doing their work and paying their taxes. The latest report is that Trump wants to open the notorious Guantanamo Bay prison for black- and brown-skinned people here without documentation; as the old saying goes, the cruelty is the point.

— Hunter in a Farmer’s World: