Wednesday Open Thread

4 thoughts on “Wednesday Open Thread”

1. Probably perfectly fine to put a bunch of employees from Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency on administrative leave. What good were these woke weaponizers anyway?

   The employees, according to the Associated Press, worked specifically within CISA’s election efforts, helping state and local election officials secure their elections from cyber attacks and handle foreign and domestic-based disinformation and influence campaigns.

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2. "Commissar-in-Chief." David Kurtz at TPM.

   In a bizarre and surreal Oval Office circus, Elon Musk and Donald Trump ratcheted up DOGE’s infiltration of the federal government.

   The occasion was Trump signing of a new executive order furthering seeding DOGE across government (except the military) and laying the groundwork for a new round of purges of the federal workforce.

   The executive order lays out draconian and absurdist methods for extending the hiring freeze Trump previously ordered by, for example, limiting hiring to one employee for every four who depart.
   But the true significance of the executive order was empowering DOGE, overseen by the world’s richest man, to have a key role in every department and agency. The result is a arrangement where Musk and his team operates as layer superimposed between the White House and the rest of the federal government, positioning them as political enforcers in the style of the old Soviet commissars, as TPM’s Josh Marshall noted.

   It still seems wildly improbably that the Musk-Trump pact survives for long with these two volatile and unstable personalities, but the damage they may do before they self-combust is almost unimaginable.

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3. Kyri Baker Interview

   The grid's distribution component – the ignored part

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4. Rough start for the BroSecDef:

   Defense Secretary Hegseth booed and heckled by military families protesting DEI push

   Military families protesting the Defense Department's anti-DEI push heckled Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on his arrival at U.S. European Command headquarters in Germany on Tuesday.

   On a visit to the U.S. military’s key European military hub in Stuttgart, Hegseth was booed by around two dozen people who live at the base in an apparent demonstration against the policies being implemented by the Trump administration.

   The demonstrators at the short protest repeatedly chanted “DEI,” apparently in a reference to Hegseth’s recent ban on some books in Defense Department schools. Hegseth last week ordered the restriction of learning materials covering subjects that included psychology and immigration in Defense Department schools.

   https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/hegseth-protest-dei-transgender-germany-military-rcna191636

   Im sure of the Orange Clown Stasi got photos and names of the family members in order to start some Early Return of Dependents orders…. 

    

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