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Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: Virginia may be the resentment canary in the coal mine [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-02-26
Andrew Egger/The Bulwark:
Glenn Youngkin to Fired Federal Workers: Time to Be Productive For a Change DOGE’s haphazard blitzkrieg of federal firings is falling harder on some places than others.; Virginia, with its 144,000 federal employees, has been among the most deeply disrupted. But fear not, DOGE’d-off workers of the Commonwealth! Gov. Glenn Youngkin has a message for you: Your days of leeching off the public may have come to an end, but with a little elbow grease and pluck, you just might successfully transition to actual productive work in the private sector. That was the gist of Youngkin’s strikingly tone-deaf press conference yesterday, focused on the cheerful theme VIRGINIA HAS JOBS. “Listen,” Youngkin said, “we have a federal government that is inefficient, and we have an administration that is taking on that challenge of rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse and driving efficiency in our federal government. It needed to happen.” But that doesn’t mean, Youngkin suggested, that you can’t root out the wasters, fraudsters, and abusers with a little empathy. “We have a lot of federal workers in the Commonwealth,” he went on, “and I want to make sure that they know we care about them and we value them and we want them to find that next chapter.”
x Lots of undecideds in this new Roanoke College poll of Virginia
But Trump is at 59% disapproval vs. 37% approval in Virginia
Many voters not tuned into Governor’s race yet
But those are pretty rough numbers for GOP to run with an incumbent President
https://t.co/wX2vln4I7m https://t.co/RkAqYNrFh1 — Sam Shirazi (@samshirazim) February 25, 2025
Kevin D Williamson/The Dispatch:
Immortal Stupidity, Revisited The so-called Department of Government Efficiency is neither a department nor efficient. We free-market types have spent many years arguing that the government does a poor job of trying to run businesses that bureaucrats do not know much about, especially considering the abundance of perverse incentives and lack of good ones influencing the regulatory endeavor. As I wrote above: This is not an argument against all regulation, but an argument for modest expectations. Elon Musk and DOGE now oblige us to examine the other side of that coin, which has rarely been looked at because it is rarely relevant: Business tycoons are apt to do as bad a job when it comes to managing and reforming regulatory agencies and other bureaucracies as those regulators and bureaucrats do when trying to steer complex business endeavors by remote control. It is obvious that Musk and his disreputable little gaggle of pudwhacking throne-sniffers simply do not know what they are doing: For example, they ordered the dismissal of a bunch of federal employees who were “on probation” because they seem to have thought that this probationary condition was disciplinary rather than a formality related to those employees being new hires. Employees with stellar evaluations were fired in emails that cited their supposed performance problems. In one case a reader passed along, an administrator promoted to a manager position because of his excellent work in a subordinate role was dismissed because he was “on probation” in his new role. Many similar situations have been reported. Ignorance is the natural state of mankind, and most of us will forever be ignorant about most subjects—economists call this “rational ignorance,” which reflects the fact that there is not much reason to learn a great deal about things that do not matter much to you in the near term or foreseeable future and about which you do not have, and never will have, much control or influence. Ignorance can be rational—arrogance rarely is.
x "Ruh roh", to quote Scooby Doo, on how Americans view the economy.
-Just 20% view it as excellent or good. Worse than at any pt during Trump's 1st term.
-"Yikes": 59% say the economy is getting worse... Worse than at any pre-covid pt during Trump's 1st term.
Danger territory. pic.twitter.com/MF38TDpAm8 — (((Harry Enten))) (@ForecasterEnten) February 24, 2025
NPR:
Medical research labs brace for possible funding cuts that could disrupt their work This is the Gesundheit II, a research tool that collects and measures particles in people's exhalations (or sneezes). "We have people come in who have flu or other respiratory infections. The person sits with their face in the cone and the air around them is drawn into the cone," says Milton, a professor of environmental health at the university's School of Public Health in College Park, Md. The device is one way that Milton and his colleagues study how respiratory viruses like the flu and COVID-19 spread from one person to another. "That's a big important question because how you stop transmission depends on how that's happening," he says. But Milton says his work is threatened by the Trump administration proposal to cap indirect costs associated with medical research like his at 15%. His university has been getting about 56%. "It would be really bad for our work," Milton says. "It would slow us down. It may prevent us from continuing the work in the longer run."
x Americans voted for Trump, but don't support his agenda
Our look at 300 polls asking support for Trump's policies:
https://t.co/p2HZH6CJwJ pic.twitter.com/rG9aNnuuHT — G Elliott Morris (@gelliottmorris) February 25, 2025
Steve Vladeck/The Contrarian:
Let’s fire all the lawyers The ominous removal of the judge advocates general by the Trump administration. Not only has there long been a norm that JAG lawyers are independent of political control, but, unlike with respect to any other military officers, Congress in 2004 codified that independence. Thus, for each service branch, there is a statute today providing that (emphasis mine): No officer or employee of the Department of Defense may interfere with—(1) the ability of the Judge Advocate General to give independent legal advice to the [Secretary or senior uniformed officer of the service branch]; or (2) the ability of judge advocates of the [service branch] assigned or attached to, or performing duty with, military units to give independent legal advice to commanders. To be sure, the president is still entitled to choose the TJAG (a nomination that is subject to the Senate’s advice and consent). But these statutes exist entirely to ensure that, once they are in office, each TJAG (and all of his or her subordinates) is free to speak his or her mind. Firing TJAGs for no stated reason, as Hegseth purported to do on Friday, might not violate the letter of the statute (so long as President Donald Trump is the one who actually fires them). But it sure violates its spirit. And it sends the worst possible message to more junior officers in the JAG Corps about what kind of support they can expect from senior leadership if they feel the need to push back against actions the military is taking with the approval of Hegseth and Trump.
x Awful news --> Delivery of therapeutic food assistance to nearly 400,000 severely malnourished kids is suddenly in doubt due to Trump-Musk firings at USAID, two manufacturers of the product tell me.
"Starving children are waiting," one says.
New from me:
https://t.co/IJgzarf8FT — Greg Sargent (@GregTSargent) February 25, 2025
Noah Smith/Noahpinion:
How the Democrats can fight back against MAGA Return to the liberalism of 1992. Today let’s talk about partisan politics. Not the most fun topic, but an important one. This is not a nonpartisan blog. I focus mostly on analyzing the world to figure out what’s going on, because that’s what I enjoy the most, and that’s where I think I add the most value. But I don’t hesitate to share opinions or take political sides. And I don’t make any secret of the fact that I want the Democrats to win. This is not because I view the Democrats as “my team” — I view America, the country, as my team. Nor do I want the Republican party to die; I want it to be a sane and reasonable conservative party that does sane and reasonable things when it wins elections. The problem is that right now, the Republicans are neither sane nor reasonable, because they’ve been hijacked by ideologues and isolationists with autocratic impulses. That’s bad for the country. So I want Democrats to mount a credible, effective opposition to Musk and Trump. The problem with that is that over the past 12 years or so, the Democrats have also become less sane and reasonable than they were before. They’ve become obsessed with divisive identitarianism, unpopular culture wars, and paralyzing proceduralism. They’ve let an out-of-touch extremely-online educated class dictate their attitudes and language, and they’ve let some of the big cities they run fall into disorder and decay. Their drubbing at the hands of Trump in 2024 was no accident.
Seth Masket/tusk:
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