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Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: Hurricane season is here [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-06-01
We begin today with Makena Kelly, Leah Feiger, and Zoë Schiffer of Wired reporting that, of course, Elon Musk is not leaving DOGE at all and that, in fact, the“agency’s” work is accelerating.
Elon Musk will not be fully exiting the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)—and its activities are only intensifying. On Friday, President Donald Trump threw cold water on the idea that Musk would fully disappear from DOGE and the White House forever. "Elon's really not leaving,” Trump said in a joint press conference with Musk in the Oval Office. “He's gonna be back and forth. It's his baby, he's going to be doing a lot of things." [...] Both new and familiar DOGE faces have also been recently detailed to new agencies, according to sources. Members of Musk’s early DOGE team, including Luke Farritor, Gavin Kliger, Edward Coristine, and Sam Corcos, have met with a number of departments and agencies—including the Treasury, the Office of Management and Budget, and the FBI—in recent days, seemingly continuing business as usual, WIRED has learned. The team also appears to be actively recruiting, according to documents viewed by WIRED. Over the last week, federal workers have also been asked to urgently review and potentially cancel contracts across the government. Trump appeared to confirm that contracts were under review at Friday’s press conference: "Many contracts, Elon, right now are being looked at,” he said.
Here’s a reminder that today is the beginning of hurricane season with specialist Michael Lowry writing for The New York Times that DOGE has dangerously affected the National Weather Service and hurricane forecasting.
The National Weather Service costs the average American $4 per year in today’s inflated dollars — about the same as a gallon of milk — and offers an 8,000 percent annual return on investment, according to 2024 estimates. It’s a farce for the administration to pretend that gutting an agency that protects our coastlines from a rising tide of disasters is in the best interests of our economy or national security. If the private sector could have done it better and cheaper, it would have, and it hasn’t. Losing the hurricane hunters would be catastrophic, but that would be only the forerunner wave in a brutal, DOGE-directed tsunami to weather forecasting. In just three months DOGE has dealt the National Weather Service, which operates 122 local forecast offices around the country, the equivalent of over a decade of loss to its work force. Some offices have hemorrhaged 60 percent of their staff members, including entire management teams. [...] With dozens of local forecast offices struggling to maintain 24/7 operations, NOAA put out a mayday on May 13 asking remaining staff members to temporarily vacate their posts to salvage what was left of the nation’s critical warning network. Nearly half of local forecast offices are critically understaffed, with a vacancy rate of 20 percent or higher, and several are going dark for part of the day, increasing the risk of weather going undetected and people going unprotected and unwarned.
Paul Krugman wrote up his response to the U.S. Court of International Trade’s ruling that many of Trump’s tariffs are unconstitutional.
Until he announced the massive “Liberation Day” tariffs on April 2, Trump mainly relied on Section 232 of the 1962 Trade Expansion Act, which empowers the president to impose tariffs when imports “threaten to impair national security.” Such tariffs are supposed to follow a quasi-judicial process in which the Commerce Department investigates the claim, reaches a decision, and the president then chooses whether to act… [...] But hey, this is the Trump administration, so if the president wants his flunkies’ officials’ opinion, he’ll tell them what it is. The result has been a series of absurd claims — Canadian aluminum is a national security threat? — but no real pushback. But Trump wanted to do much more… [...] Section 232 and a grab-bag of other measures weren’t going to be enough to get there. So Trump invoked the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977, which gives the president very broad powers under emergency conditions. And so he went ahead tariffing everyone, penguins included. It turns out, however, that really major tariff changes are subject not to a quasi-judicial process involving MAGA loyalists, but to an actual judicial process involving the Court of International Trade, which is a real court populated by real judges appointed for life.
Paul N. McDaniel and Darlene Xiomara Rodriguez write for The Conversation looking at some of the reasons why the population of Detroit, Michigan has increased for the second year in a row.
Dr. David C. Hayes writes for Michigan Advance about language and dehumanization.
..the relative ease of dehumanization (the act of relegating a group of people socially as ‘less than human’ by a majority of society) is something that isn’t solely in the world of extreme examples. Every day we dehumanize groups of people for any number of reasons. When we do that, it is easy to disregard them. It is also easy to harm them because, in a social appraisal, they aren’t really people, right? The phenomenon is not limited to the world of crime and investigation. We can simply look to the Michigan House GOP’s attempt to legislate trans athlete participation as a way of providing safety for (italics are my emphasis) real girl athletes. This means that the existence of real girls is threatened by the existence of unreal girls in an obvious act of dehumanization. It is like using the term ‘illegal alien’ as opposed to undocumented person. In both of these instances, the danger to the ‘non-human’ subjects of this type of rhetoric is apparent. State Rep. Matt Koleszar (D-Plymouth), in opposition to the bill, noted “Make no mistake, this legislation and the rhetoric that surrounds it could get somebody killed.” The words of the bill matter. It is immaterial that the Governor is unlikely to sign such a bill if it even made it to her desk, the damage is done in the nomenclature. [...] We don’t escape this in our faith systems, either. The dangers of using dehumanizing language in terms of antisemitic, anti-Muslim, anti-Christian, or any other faith of choice does nothing more than put either metaphorical, or in the case of most world conflicts at this point, literal crosshairs on the subject of the dehumanizing language. The innocent human beings being killed in both Palestine and Israel at this point in history, depending on which side your political rhetoric lands on, are either victims or ‘deserved it.’
What Rachel Hall and Rachel Keenan of the Guardian write about mental health misinformation of social media (and specifically TikTok) is limited to the UK but is quite applicable for an American audience.
People are increasingly turning to social media for mental health support, yet research has revealed that many influencers are peddling misinformation, including misused therapeutic language, “quick fix” solutions and false claims. Those seeking help are confronted with dubious advice, such as eating an orange in the shower to reduce anxiety; the promotion of supplements with a limited evidence base for alleviating anxiety, such as saffron, magnesium glycinate and holy basil; methods to heal trauma within an hour; and guidance presenting normal emotional experiences as a sign of borderline personality disorder or abuse. [...] The Guardian took the top 100 videos posted under the #mentalhealthtips hashtag on TikTok and shared them with psychologists, psychiatrists and academic experts, who took a view on whether the posts contained misinformation. The experts established that 52 out of 100 videos offering advice on dealing with trauma, neurodivergence, anxiety, depression and severe mental illness contained some misinformation, and that many others were vague or unhelpful.
Matthias Gebauer, Konstantin von Hammerstein, Paul-Anton Krüger, and Christoph Schult of Der Spiegel look at what the new German Chancellor, Friedrich Merz, can really do about Russia’s war with Ukraine.
Merz, the chairman of Germany’s center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU), has kicked off his term as German chancellor with a diplomatic charm offensive of a kind that many of Germany’s partners had been hoping for following the rather tepid tenure of Olaf Scholz. Emmanuel Macron in Paris, Donald Tusk in Warsaw, Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Kyiv – hardly any previous German head of government has made so many visits in such a short time after being sworn into office. In the first weeks of his tenure, Merz has clearly shown more interest in foreign policy than in domestic issues, and he has made Ukraine a top priority. Already, Merz has succeeded in ensuring that the most important European countries are on the same page when it comes to Russia and are at least taken seriously enough by U.S. President Donald Trump that they speak regularly on the phone. But by focusing so intently on foreign policy and Ukraine, Merz has also raised expectations, including hopes that the three-year-long war may soon be coming to an end. That is the flip side of his burst of activity. What, though, can he actually achieve?
Finally today, Marc Español of El País in English looks at the continuing threat of climate change to one of the great cities of antiquity.
Alexandria is among Africa’s densest cities, and one of the world’s most exposed to the effects of climate change, including rising sea levels and increasing storms and cyclones. This combination is especially worrisome, given that more than half of its residential areas are informal neighborhoods located near the water, where dozens of buildings are already beginning to crumble. [...] Alexandria sits on a privileged position along the Nile, nestled between a lake to the south and the Mediterranean Sea to the north. Over the centuries, however, its location has become a dangerous trap. There’s nowhere for the city to retreat, despite the fact that it is sinking due to tectonic forces, and its coastline is receding due to the Nile’s sediments, as sea levels gradually rise and seawater increasingly penetrates the city’s foundations. Currently, the level of the Mediterranean in the Alexandria area rises by a yearly average of 1.5 millimeters, according to Essam Fouad, a researcher at Egypt’s Coastal Research Institute. Meanwhile, the land on which Alexandria is located sinks each year between one and 1.5 millimeters. And though it varies by neighborhood, latest studies calculate that the Alexandrian coast experienced an average erosion of nearly 12 feet every year between 2001 and 2021.
Everyone have the best possible day that you can!
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