(C) Daily Kos
This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .
Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: The executive branch's demolition of the U.S. government continues [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-02-20
We begin today with the ongoing dismantlement of the American government beginning with Brian Faler of POLITICO’s report that beginning today, thousands of employees will be laid off from the Internal Revenue Service.
Though it comes in the thick of tax-filing season, managers across the tax agency have been alerted to cuts targeting newer hires. That means people who have been in their jobs for less than one year or, in some cases, two years, depending on their position. The reductions are expected to disproportionately hit those working in enforcement, partly because they represent a large share of those recently brought on board, which could hurt tax collections. The agency is also wary of reducing taxpayer-service personnel as millions of Americans started filing their taxes last month, and will continue to do so through April 15. It’s unclear whether there will be additional waves of layoffs, a person familiar with the agency’s plans said. [...] Getting rid of newer employees could hit the agency especially hard because it has long been plagued by high attrition rates and has a disproportionately older workforce. Nearly two-thirds of IRS employees are eligible to retire in the next six years.
Kim Zetter of WIRED reports that Elon Musk’s DOGE minions have now moved on to access data at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA)
Coristine—briefly an intern for Musk’s brain-computer interface company, Neuralink, as WIRED has reported—has been working his way through numerous federal agencies and departments as a DOGE operative since January. He has been tracked at the General Services Administration (GSA), the Office of Personnel Management, the State Department, and FEMA. At State’s Bureau of Diplomatic Technology, he potentially had access to systems containing sensitive information about diplomats and many sources and spies around the world who provide the U.S. government with intelligence and expertise. As the journalist Marisa Kabas was first to report, he has now moved to CISA, a division of DHS. He is listed in the staff directory as a senior advisor. A second DOGE worker, Schutt, has also joined Coristine at CISA. Schutt has reportedly also been at the GSA. Prior to his work with DOGE, he worked on the launch of WinRed, a fundraising platform for Republicans that helped the party raise $1.8 billion during the 2024 election campaigns. It’s not clear yet what level of access Coristine might have to data and networks at CISA, but the agency, which is responsible for the defense of civilian federal government networks and works closely with critical infrastructure owners around the country, stores a lot of sensitive and critical security information on its networks. This includes information about software vulnerabilities, breaches, and network risk assessments conducted for local and state election offices. Since 2018, CISA has helped state and local election offices around the country assess vulnerabilities in their networks and help secure them. CISA also works with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National Security Agency to notify victims of breaches and process information about software vulnerabilities before the information becomes public.
Kate Christobeck, Wesley Parnell, and Nicholas Fandos of The New York Times review the events of yesterday’s Eric Adams hearing.
For a hearing on a request that has roiled New York’s political and legal communities, the proceedings on Wednesday were surprisingly tame. For 90 minutes, the judge, Dale E. Ho, methodically examined the rationale of the Justice Department official, Acting Attorney General Emil Bove III, for requesting to dismiss the charges without prejudice (which means they could be brought again in the future). He also sought to establish that Mr. Adams had knowingly consented to the government’s motion. Mr. Adams was indicted in September on charges of bribery, fraud, soliciting illegal foreign campaign contributions and conspiracy as part of a scheme involving the Turkish government. On Wednesday, Mr. Bove argued that dismissing the case was “a standard exercise of prosecutorial discretion,” and that Mr. Adams’s indictment had negatively affected the “national security and immigration objectives” of President Trump. [...] Although Judge Ho acknowledged that it was “not in anyone’s interest here for this to drag on,” he told the parties that he did not want to “shoot from the hip” and issue a decision during the hearing. He did not give a specific timeline and asked for “patience as I consider these issues carefully.”
Derek Thompson of The Atlantic looks at the COVID-19 pandemic as a possible reason that young generation moved tot the right of the political spectrum.
What’s driving this global Rechtsruck? It’s hard to say for sure. Maybe the entire world is casting a protest vote after several years of inflation. Last year was the largest wipeout for political incumbents in the developed world since the end of the Second World War. One level deeper, it wasn’t inflation on its own, but rather the combination of weak real economic growth and record immigration that tilled the soil for far-right upstarts, who can criticize progressive governments on both sides of the Atlantic for their failure to look out for their own citizens first. There is another potential driver of the global right turn: the pandemic. Pandemics might not initially seem to cash out in any particular political direction. After all, in the spring of 2020, one possible implication of the pandemic seemed to be that it would unite people behind a vision of collective sacrifice—or, at least, collective appreciation for health professionals, or for the effect of vaccines to reduce severe illness among adults. But political science suggests that pandemics are more likely to reduce rather than build trust in scientific authorities. One cross-country analysis published by the Systemic Risk Center at the London School of Economics found that people who experience epidemics between the ages of 18 and 25 have less confidence in their scientific and political leadership. This loss of trust persists for years, even decades, in part because political ideology tends to solidify in a person’s 20s.
Carter Sherman of the Guardian looks at the tacky shoe salesman’s executive order about in vitro fertilization (IVF) and finds that it’s basically a document with much sound and fury that signals no keeping of his campaign pledges.
The order, on its own, does not fulfill any campaign pledges. It does not change policy, much less make IVF free to people who want to grow their families. Instead, it is soliciting “policy recommendations to protect IVF access and aggressively reduce out-of-pocket and health plan costs for such treatments”. It is, in many respects, a PR move – one that may alienate the anti-abortion movement, which largely opposes IVF, but further cements the Trump administration’s reputation for pronatalism. “The order recognizes the importance of family formation and that our nation’s public policy must make it easier for loving and longing mothers and fathers to have children,” the order reads. Although Americans widely support access to IVF, the anti-abortion movement tends to oppose it on the grounds that it creates unused or discarded embryos (which they consider to be children). Predictably, anti-abortion activists revolted at news of Trump’s Tuesday order. “IVF turns children into a product to be created, sold, and discarded – violating their basic human rights,” Lila Rose, the leader of the anti-abortion group Live Action, posted on X. In another post, she added: “IVF is NOT pro-life.” [...] The Trump administration’s pronatalist devotion to “family formation”, however, seems to extend only so far – or, perhaps, only to specific kinds of parents. Stressing that IVF should be used by “longing mothers and fathers” leaves out LGBTQ+ families, who regularly rely on IVF. His administration’s plan to cut the funding of the National Institutes of Health and Science, the planet’s leading public funder of biomedical and behavioral research, threatens the future of efforts to curb maternal mortality, which is disproportionately high among Black and Indigenous women. (Those planned cuts are reportedly Doge’s work.) And the lack of direct action on IVF in Trump’s Tuesday order is striking, especially in the context of Trump’s other executive orders, which have issued sweeping – and potentially illegal – mandates to eliminate birthright citizenship and roll back the rights of transgender people. The order does not, for example, mandate private employers cover IVF in the way that they are required to covercontraception.
Tom Wheeler of the Brookings Institution shares some of the background of Trump’s complaint against CBS News over about former Vice President Kamala Harris’ 60 Minutes interview.
Presidents have the right to express themselves—and frequently do—on matters before the FCC. Unlike a cabinet secretary, however, the chairman of the agency does not report to the president. The FCC is chartered by Congress as an independent agency, separate from the executive. The president’s input that “CBS should lose its license” (an FCC decision) and its relationship to a lawsuit from which he could personally benefit is unusual. The New York Times headlined, “Paramount in Settlement Talks With Trump Over ‘60 Minutes’ Lawsuit.” The Times reported, “A settlement would be an extraordinary concession by a major U.S. media company to a sitting president, especially in a case in which there is no evidence that the network got the facts wrong or damaged the plaintiff’s reputation.” [...] All of this occurs against the background of the sale of Paramount Global (and its CBS subsidiary) for $8 billion that was announced in July. Because CBS owns 28 television stations, the FCC must approve the transfer of their federal licenses to use the airwaves. As a result, the agency has tremendous leverage over the company. Chairman Brendan Carr has linked the reinstated complaint with the FCC review of the license transfers: “I’m pretty confident that that news distortion complaint over the ’60 Minutes’ transcript is something that is likely to arise in the context of the FCC review of that transaction.”
Denis Mukwege of The New York Times comments of the world’s continuing silence about the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Last month Goma, the largest city in the east of Congo, fell to the M23 rebel group, backed by neighboring Rwanda, as part of the group’s decade-long campaign to control the region’s mineral-rich territory. The assault on Goma resulted in nearly 3,000 deaths in the first week alone and thousands of injuries. Today hospitals in Goma are overwhelmed, with many patients being treated in makeshift tents to handle the overflow. The blood supply is strained, the cost of food is skyrocketing, and access to water, electricity and the internet is severely limited. The U.N. uncovered that in the chaos, more than 100 female inmates at a prison were raped and then burned alive when the facility caught fire. Congo has been plagued by war for nearly three decades. Millions of people have been displaced, and rape has consistently been used as a weapon of war. Most estimates state that over six millionpeople have died, making it the deadliest conflict since World War II. But many of us who live in Congo believe that the real number is much higher. And the world remains largely silent.
Finally today, Jacob Silverman of The Nation is reporting that Argentinian President Javier Milei may face impeachment charges over the promotion of a crypto memecoin.
During his latest manic Nazi posting spree earlier this month, Kanye West shared a screenshot of what he claimed was an offer of $2 million to promote a crypto pump-and-dump operation. The proposed deal said that Kanye would write a post promoting “a fake ye currency”—a memecoin, also known as a shitcoin—and after eight hours, he would be allowed to post that his account was hacked and that the promotion was fake. [...] Whether the offer was real or not, it reflects a standard deal of a kind that’s executed sub rosa every day in the scamming-as-a-service crypto economy. A variation on this grim script played out last week when Argentinian President Javier Milei promoted a crypto token—an essentially worthless shitcoin—as a get-rich-quick opportunity for his countrymen, only to delete his post and attempt to distance himself from the project. [...] This kind of vulgar grifterism might be tolerated in a figure like the current president of the United States—responsible for promoting both the $TRUMP and $MELANIA shitcoins that rocketed up in investor value before plummeting rudely back to earth a few days later, after Trump and his allies had potentially realized hundreds of millions of dollars in profit. But the people and opposition politicians of Argentina are less forgiving. Milei now faces potential fraud charges and calls for his impeachment. On Monday, markets saw a sell-off in Argentina’s government bonds. Former Argentinian president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner wrote on X that Milei was a “CRYPTO SCAMMER.” Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum described the situation as “extremely serious if confirmed.” A muscled young crypto influencer named “Ape” posted shirtless videos of himself screaming about his $LIBRA losses, smashing objects in his home, and vowing to hunt down Milei and the project developers. He then, in classic crypto-grift fashion, asked fans to join his Telegram channel and support other tokens he partnered with.
Everyone have the best possible day!
[END]
---
[1] Url:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/2/20/2304929/-Abbreviated-Pundit-Roundup-The-executive-branch-s-demolition-of-the-U-S-government-continues?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=trending&pm_medium=web
Published and (C) by Daily Kos
Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified.
via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/
