(Permanent Musical Accompaniment to the Last Post of the Week from the Blog’s Favourite Living Canadian)
It appears at the moment that the reign of error brought to the government by Elon Musk and the Cargo Shorts Crew may be coming to an end. First of all, the White House is showing signs that it’s run out of patience with Musk’s independent rampage through the executive branch. From The New York Times:
You have fired “nobody,” Mr. Musk told Mr. Rubio, then scornfully added that perhaps the only person he had fired was a staff member from Mr. Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. Mr. Rubio had been privately furious with Mr. Musk for weeks, ever since his team effectively shuttered an entire agency that was supposedly under Mr. Rubio’s control: the United States Agency for International Development. But, in the extraordinary cabinet meeting in front of President Trump and around 20 others—details of which have not been reported before—Mr. Rubio got his grievances off his chest.
Mr. Musk was not being truthful, Mr. Rubio said. What about the more than 1,500 State Department officials who took early retirement in buyouts? Didn’t they count as layoffs? He asked, sarcastically, whether Mr. Musk wanted him to rehire all those people just so he could make a show of firing them again. Then he laid out his detailed plans for reorganizing the State Department.
Little Marco Unchained!
Cabinet officials almost uniformly like the concept of what Mr. Musk set out to do—reducing waste, fraud, and abuse in government—but have been frustrated by the chain saw approach to upending the government and the lack of consistent coordination. Thursday’s meeting, which was abruptly scheduled on Wednesday evening, was a sign that Mr. Trump was mindful of the growing complaints. He tried to offer each side something by praising both Mr. Musk and his cabinet secretaries. (At least one, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who has had tense encounters related to Mr. Musk’s team, was not present.) The president made clear he still supported the mission of the Musk initiative. But now was the time, he said, to be a bit more refined in its approach.
When this president resorts to How Things Are Supposed to Work, you know he’s cornered. He and his people have to be aware that Musk and what he’s done, while popular in theory, is incredibly unpopular in specific cases. Republicans in Congress, particularly in the Senate, are beginning to find themselves heated up back home. I mean, some of them even pleaded their case directly to the Porcelain Man himself. From The Washington Post:
Though many Republican lawmakers support Musk’s mission, some have in recent weeks complained about a lack of communication about DOGE plans. Musk told a group of Republican senators in a closed-door lunch that he wanted to set up a direct line for them when they have questions, allowing them to get a near-instant response to their concerns, senators said. Some senators were given Musk’s phone number during Wednesday’s meeting, and the entrepreneur said he would “create a system where members of Congress can call some central group” to get problematic cuts reversed quickly, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) said.
The meeting was the first sign that, after weeks of burrowing into federal agencies and attempting to lay off hundreds of thousands of federal workers, Musk recognizes he needs Congress’s cooperation to make a lasting impact on U.S. spending. On Wednesday, the Supreme Court rejected the Trump administration’s ongoing freeze of nearly $2 billion in foreign aid—a decision Musk told the senators he had read.
Nice of him to realize we still have a Constitution and all that. Somebody strike his Medal of Freedom. It also seems to matter that his chain-saw routine has begun to result in a noticeable losing streak in the federal courts. In his newsletter, Josh Marshall blows the whistle on the whole DOGE and Pony Show.
But it remains unclear if Republicans are willing to vote to support Musk. Some lawmakers are worried about the political price they could pay for DOGE, as constituents deluge their offices with angry phone calls and show up in droves to town halls that leaders have urged lawmakers to avoid. Some members have resented that lack of communication.
But the key is that the budget is being changed without anyone actually knowing what’s happening. Even members of Congress. It’s important to note that literally nothing DOGE is doing is public. Everything we think we know is from press reporting based on leaks. So no one knows what’s happening and no one who is accountable to anyone at an election is actually doing it. Some Republican senators are coming in now, as the article explains, and saying ‘hey we get the final word here. Nothing is official until we vote.’ But that’s BS. USAID and CFPB and huge swaths of the federal government have already been shut down. So for calendar 2025 the decision has already been made. And to a great extent DOGE is creating faits accompli into the future. Once you fire everyone and cancel all the contracts you can’t just flip a switch and it comes back into existence. That’s all by design.
Essentially, the Republican legislators are asking Musk to bail them out so they don’t have to vote in public on his foolishness. The fundamental cowardice of Republican officeholders is really something to see.
Over at the DOD, Secretary Pete Hegseth has been beavering away at wringing the DEI out of Defense Department materials. This is being done with the careful processes that are a hallmark of this administration. From the AP:
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had given the military until Wednesday to remove content that highlights diversity efforts in its ranks following President Donald Trump’s executive order ending those programs across the federal government. The vast majority of the Pentagon purge targets women and minorities, including notable milestones made in the military. And it also removes a large number of posts that mention various commemorative months—such as those for Black and Hispanic people and women. In some cases, photos seemed to be flagged for removal simply because their file included the word “gay,” including service members with that last name and an image of the B-29 aircraft Enola Gay, which dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, during World War II.
Several photos of an Army Corps of Engineers dredging project in California were marked for deletion, apparently because a local engineer in the photo had the last name Gay. And a photo of Army Corps biologists was on the list, seemingly because it mentioned they were recording data about fish—including their weight, size, hatchery and gender.
Clowns to the left of me, clowns to the right of me, volleyed and thundered...
Weekly WWOZ Pick to Click: “Ghost of the Blues” (Sidney Bechet): Yeah, I still pretty much love New Orleans.
Weekly Visit to the Pathé Archives: It being Women’s History Month and all, here, from 1916, is the first woman zookeeper in the UK. Granted, her duties were limited to working with chickens in an exhibit demonstrating how keeping your own poultry was a good hedge against wartime shortages, but small steps, right? And don’t get too arrogant about the whole thing. This week, in 20freaking25, the Secretary of Agriculture recommended that we keep our own chickens if egg prices continue to rise. History is so cool, especially when it repeats itself.
The very worst story to come out of the Grand Sellout is probably this one served up by Politico Europe. It seems that the administration has been in touch with Ukrainian opposition politicians in an effort to submarine the Zelenskyy government. If you interpret this news as the administration’s possible willingness to countenance a coup that would install a government that would agree to the kind of draconian deal favored by both the Trump and Putin governments, well, shame on you, anyway.
The official line from the U.S. administration is that Trump is not interfering in Ukraine’s domestic politics. This week, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick denied his boss was “weighing into Ukrainian politics,” adding all that Trump wants is a partner for peace. But the behavior of Trump and his officials suggests quite the opposite. Trump has accused Zelenskyy of being a “dictator without elections,” and hinted he would not be “around very long” if he didn’t do a deal with Russia. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has falsely accused Kyiv of canceling the election. (In response to the news in this article, Elon Musk tweeted: “Ukraine needs to hold an election. Zelensky would lose by a landslide.”)
Polls suggest otherwise, of course. Musk doesn’t know fck-all about Ukrainian politics. But history tells us that, when the U.S. arranges a coup, they usually work. Zelenskyy needs to watch his back.
Discovery Corner: Hey, look at what we found! From Smithsonian:
Beginning some 3,000 years ago, Southeast Asian peoples began voyaging out into the Pacific and settling the islands of Polynesia. These ancient sailors navigated by the stars, traversing the ocean in large canoes carved from trees. Now, one of those boats, known as a waka, has been found in hundreds of pieces in New Zealand’s Chatham Islands. Experts say the artifact could be one of the most significant discoveries of its kind. “No matter how old it is, we can’t overstate how incredible it is,” Justin Maxwell, the archaeologist leading the investigation, tells the Guardian’s Veronika Meduna. “It will go down as one of the most important finds of all time in Polynesia.”
As regular visitors to the shebeen know, we have a preference for accidental finds that change history, and this one is a doozy.
“My son and I were just loading the boat up and taking the dogs for a run up the beach … just after a big rain,” Vincent, a local fisherman, tells Radio New Zealand. Then, Nikau saw pieces of timber in the river. The wood sported strange holes, and it appeared to be well preserved. “We were like, ‘Sweet, some new timber for us to use,’ ” Nikau tells Myjanne Jensen and Hikurangi Jackson of the TV series “Te Ao with Moana.” “We took it all home [and] started putting it together, just trying to find out what it was about. … And we were like, ‘Hey, this is starting to form the shape of a boat.’ ”
A fisherman. His son. Their dog, and a find that thrills the experts. Get me the Netflix people, stat!
Hey, Popular Science, is it a good day for dinosaur news? It’s always a good day for dinosaur news!
From its well-preserved bones, the paleontologists believe that Chadititan was a small and slender dinosaur, with elongated vertebrae and delicate limbs that set it apart from other titanosaurs. It was an herbivore and belonged to the Rinconsaurian group.
At 22 feet, this new find is one of the less titanic of the titanosauria, but it was found in the middle of a treasure trove of other fossils, including hundreds of turtles.
The bones were uncovered near a salt flat in the Anacleto Formation in northern Patagonia, Argentina, and found among fossils of ancient snails, garfishes, crocodile relatives, clams, freshwater turtles, and other organisms. Among this prehistoric treasure trove, the team uncovered the first fossil record of a family of tropical land snails—Neocyclotidae—and the first example of a small, tropical air-breathing land snail in the genus Leptinaria. This area was once a small pond surrounded by sand dunes and palm trees in what was a more arid and dry environment.
Nice to know it had company. And “air-breathing land snail” is odds-on to be useful in our coverage of the current administration. Just another way that they lived then to make us happy now.
I’ll be back on Monday, for whatever fresh hell awaits... Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake-line and wear the damn masks, and take the damn shots, especially the boosters and the New One. In your spare time, spare a thought for everyone touched by the floods in Kentucky and in West Virginia, and by the crash in Washington, and by the measles outbreak in the Southwest, and in the fire zones in Los Angeles, and for all the folks in Ukraine, who stubbornly fight on, and all the folks in Gaza, and all the people in New Orleans, Las Vegas, Nashville, and Queens, who were visited by the Crazy before the year had hardly begun. And the folks in L.A., now fighting floods and mudslides exacerbated by the recent wildfires. And the folks in Lahaina, who are still rebuilding. And all the folks we regularly cited here in the year gone by, and especially for our fellow citizens in the LGBTQ+ community, who deserve so much better from their country than they’ve been getting. And for all of us, who will be getting exactly what we deserve.
