THE PERSON who MAKES the FIRST COMMENT WILL GET TWO CRITTERS
EVERY PERSON WHO COMMENTS WILL GET A CRITTER
RULES IN THE DIARY
WHEN YOU FIND SOMETHING in the DIARY that you LIKE
YOU CAN REPOST IT AS COMMENT in the DIARY
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Sorry, it's a xit, but it is so purrfect!
From Tom Colicchio:
If the Money has already been appropriated then yes they do. There is a budget process. You may want to check out Schoolhouse rock.
Responding to:
Quote
Career bureaucrats don’t get to violate lawful orders from the President of the United States. They answer to the president, and he answers to the people. Really not that complicated.
If you don't know the name, here's a bit of who Tom Colicchio is. In a world of Just DiVANS, be a Tom.
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Oh Sweet Jeebus.
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I'm not tech savvy enough to get a lot of this, but it seems like it could be a big deal. Can this tech billionaire save the media from an AI apocalypse? fortune.com/…
Matthew Prince has a vision of Internet utopia.
In it, anyone can read anything online for free, just like how it was in the early dotcom days. Content creators would be flush with cash thanks to strong business models, like in the pre-dotcom days, and audiences would be satisfied with the quality of content they consumed.
But the cash keeping this system running wouldn’t come from readers’ pockets, or even entirely from advertisers. In Prince’s utopia, there are no paywalls or intrusive belly fat ads required to keep media companies afloat.
Instead, the money would come from charging an army of bots to access content on their websites —something the bots, dispatched by AI companies, currently do for free as they crawl the web and “scrape” data to train their insatiable large language models (LLMs).
Prince has a unique vantage point. As the cofounder of Cloudflare, a cybersecurity company that he says more than 20% of the entire internet sits behind, he’s seen the number of crawls on sites drastically increase.
Click the link to read the whole thing. And if you understand it and can explain it better, I'm all ears.
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Excuse the golf joke, but "par for the course." Trump FBI pick Kash Patel’s Vegas home belongs to timeshare tycoon accused of shady practices. thenevadaindependent.com/…
If Patel is confirmed, GOP megadonor accused of “bait-and-switch” vacation rental schemes could have a close associate at the highest levels of law enforcement.
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In the cache of paperwork that Clark provided, a single name recurs: Michael J. Muldoon, the GOP megadonor who has lured countless vacationers into his convoluted web of timeshare companies: Starpoint, Sapphire Resorts, GeoHoliday Club, Resortstay International, BQ Resorts, Getaways Resort Management.
Unlike the Clarks and Starpoint’s other irate customers, Muldoon actually holds property in Las Vegas. County records and Google Maps disclose his stuccoed abode in the guard-gated community of Spanish Trail — a brilliant emerald patch in the desert metropolis’ sand-colored sprawl. Billing itself as “the area’s premier upscale private residential community,” Spanish Trail is attached to an exclusive country club of the same name, with tennis courts, a fitness center and a 27-hole golf course that comes right up to Muldoon’s backyard.
It was from this address that Muldoon donated $50,000 to the Ted Cruz Victory Fund in May 2024, $15,000 into committees affiliated with West Virginia Gov.-elect Patrick Morrissey that February, and $50,000 to the Republican National Committee in August 2023, according to Federal Election Commission filings.
But public records reveal something more: Muldoon doesn’t live there alone. Voter files show that Kash Patel, the conspiracy-theorizing Donald Trump loyalist that the president has nominated to lead the FBI, has been registered at the address since January 2022. Just weeks after Muldoon cut his check to Cruz’s leadership PAC, the North Carolina and Nevada state Republican parties transferred funds to Patel at the timeshare tycoon’s Spanish Trail address, marking the fifth such disbursement he received at Muldoon’s home in as many months.
What’s more, Clark County Election Department records show that Patel cast mail ballots from Muldoon’s luxury residence in the presidential primary in February 2024, the state and federal primaries that June, and then in the November general election.
“I am proud to call Las Vegas my home,” Patel boasted at a Trump campaign event in the city last September, where Trump foreign policy envoy Ric Grenell even suggested Patel might someday serve as one of Nevada’s U.S. senators. “I moved out here after our administration ended. You all have welcomed me with open arms, and I cannot thank you enough.”
There’s no record of Patel residing anyplace in Las Vegas except with Muldoon.
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Oops. I sure hope FIDJT responds accordingly. Miller would look better without a face anyways. Stephen Miller Claimed Elon Musk Was the One Elected in November. www.emptywheel.net/…
Yesterday, Stephen Miller RTed a propagandist’s attack on Jamie Raskin, in which he reframed Raskin’s legal points — that Congress has the power of the purse, that Elon Musk cannot eliminate agencies created by Congress — by suggesting they were an attack on DOGE’s [sic] efforts to “eliminat[e] waste and fraud.”
Element removed [it was a Xit of Miller smearing Jamie Raskin. You can click if you want to see it]
Miller suggested Democrats — defending the Constitution — hate democracy, because (Miller said) “voters have the right to elect a president to drain the permanent unelected DC swamp.”
With his RT, the Deputy Chief of Staff of Donald Trump’s White House suggested Elon had been elected.
Elon. Not Trump.
According to Politico, propagandists were posting this argument on Xitter, with Elon RTing them to assert his own legitimacy.
Meanwhile, this NYT article suggests that the White House isn’t in control of what Elon is doing.
Senior White House staff members have at times also found themselves in the dark, according to two officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive discussions. One Trump official, who was not authorized to speak publicly, said Mr. Musk was widely seen as operating with a level of autonomy that almost no one can control.
[snip]
This time, however, he carries the authority of the president, who has bristled at some of Mr. Musk’s ready-fire-aim impulses but has praised him publicly.
“He’s a big cost-cutter,” Mr. Trump told reporters on Sunday. “Sometimes we won’t agree with it and we’ll not go where he wants to go. But I think he’s doing a great job. He’s a smart guy.”
[snip]
Several former and current senior government officials — even those who like what he is doing — expressed a sense of helplessness about how to handle Mr. Musk’s level of unaccountability. At one point after another, Trump officials have generally relented rather than try to slow him down. Some hoped Congress would choose to reassert itself.
Mr. Trump himself sounded a notably cautionary note on Monday, telling reporters: “Elon can’t do and won’t do anything without our approval. And we’ll give him the approval where appropriate, where not appropriate, we won’t.”
“If there’s a conflict,” he added, “then we won’t let him get near it.”
Please, i want to watch them eating each others faces for a bit.
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Well, Fuck, Part I
Well, Fuck, Part II
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From Timothy Snyder (it's a gift link, I hope it works for you). The Logic of Destruction And how to resist it. snyder.substack.com/…
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Theirs is a logic of destruction. It is very hard to create a large, legitimate, functioning government. The oligarchs have no plan to govern. They will take what they can, and disable the rest. The destruction is the point. They don’t want to control the existing order. They want disorder in which their relative power will grow.
Think of the federal government as a car. You might have thought that the election was like getting the car serviced. Instead, when you come into the shop, the mechanics, who somehow don’t look like mechanics, tell you that they have taken the parts of your car that work and sold them and kept the money. And that this was the most efficient thing to do. And that you should thank them.
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A lot of paragraphs about what politicians, federal workers and business leaders can, should and are doing.
Then this, for the rest of us.
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As for the rest of us: Make sure you are talking to people and doing something. The logic of “move fast and break things,” like the logic of all coups, is to gain quick dramatic successes that deter and demoralize and create the impression of inevitability. Nothing is inevitable. Do not be alone and do not be dismayed. Find someone who is doing something you admire and join them.
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This is a long story, but definitely worth a read. Is Somebody Doing Something?! Yes. Let me break it down for you. statuskuo.substack.com/…
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The most common question I saw across social media and in the comments was understandable: Is somebody doing something about this?
The short and important answer is yes. And we need to understand a few things to help bring things into focus.
First, the timing of all of this was intentional. It all went down on a Friday night, when there would be less ability among affected employees to communicate and resist; decreased national press attention; and closed congressional offices, courthouses and law offices. They wanted us to panic for several days and make us feel like we were rudderless and without clear options.
But today is the first business day after last Friday’s bombshells, and I can report confidently that the anti-Trump/Musk response is well underway.
It’s helpful to think of the response as falling into four distinct yet sometimes overlapping categories, each with increasing urgency. These responses include the personal, the political, the legal and the popular.
Once we place a response into one of these categories, it’s far easier to assess whether it is serving its intended purpose. This level of disciplined reasoning will also help us all prevent the common error of expecting, for example, personal responses to create legal results, or political responses to generate popular ones. These are all very different beasts, each important in its own right, but usually led by very different actors.
Mr. Kuo then goes through a series of specific examples. Particularly on the political front, he names names and what they're focused on. It's a hopeful (in a sense) article of what can be done and who's doing it. And what we can do as well. It's worth a full read.
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Some examples of the above:
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Better than a strongly worded letter. Not as good as articles of impeachment.
(Yes, I know they don't have the votes to impeach. Doesn't mean they shouldn't be drafting articles every day over & over again. They don't have the votes to pass this legislation either, but the ACTION is what matters."
[image or embed]
— Mueller, She Wrote (@muellershewrote.bsky.social) February 4, 2025 at 12:35 PM
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Thank you federal workers! May you stay anonymous and safe. Federal Workers Sue to Disconnect DOGE Server. Two federal workers, citing reports that Elon Musk’s associates are operating an illegally connected email server at OPM, seek a restraining order. www.wired.com/…
Federal employees are seeking a temporary restraining order as part of a class action lawsuit accusing a group of Elon Musk’s associates of allegedly operating an illegally connected server from the fifth floor of the US Office of Personnel Management’s (OPM) headquarters in Washington, DC.
An attorney representing two federal workers—Jane Does 1 and 2—filed a motion this morning arguing that the server’s continued operation not only violates federal law but is potentially exposing vast quantities of government staffers’ personal information to hostile foreign adversaries through unencrypted email.
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If the motion is granted, OPM would be forced to disconnect the server until the assessment is done. As a consequence, the Trump administration’s plans to drastically reduce the size of the federal workforce would likely face delays. The email account linked to the server—HR@opm.gov—is currently being used to gather information from federal workers accepting buyouts under the admin’s “deferred resignation program,” which is set to expire on February 6.
“Under the law, a temporary restraining order is an extraordinary remedy,” notes National Security Counselors’ executive director, Kel McClanahan. “But this is an extraordinary situation.”
Before issuing a restraining order, courts apply what’s known as the “balance of equities” doctrine, weighing the burdens and costs on both parties. In this case, however, McClanahan argues that the injunction would inflict “no hardship” on the government whatsoever. February 6 is an “arbitrary deadline,” he says, and the administration could simply continue to implement the resignation program “through preexisting channels.”
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Sonia Dridi is an award winning (French) journalist, assigned to cover the White House for French media. Empty G (get it? Say it out loud) has a problem with her accent and posted (on xit, I'm not gonna bother finding/Reposting it) that foreign journalists should be tossed from the WH press corps.
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WP, a great addition for your bumper sticker collection!
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Evening Shade Seekers! Happy Thank A Mail Carrier Day!
Happy World Cancer Day. Not the cancer, but to finding a cure.
Happy National Hemp Day!
AND, Happy National Homemade Soup Day!
Tomorrow is National Chocolate Fondue Day and World Nutella Day. Hope your sweet tooth is ready!