11 thoughts on “Tuesday Open Thread”

1. Sometimes things are so stunning, words are inadquate to describe the shock. Such, to me, is the naming of Kash Patels’ second in command. I guess I will just leave it at….OMFG!  ..what the actual fuck?

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2. I've come to the conclusion that Trump can NOT be a Stealth Russian Asset. 

   Why? Because a REAL Stealth Russian Asset would be much sneakier. They wouldn't scream "I'm a Stealth Russian Asset".

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3. Trump and his minion at the United Nations General Assembly blow up the image of the United States.  Sky News

   US joins Russia, North Korea and Belarus to vote against UN resolution on Ukraine war

   Two motions were passed by the UN today as the world marks the third anniversary of Russia's invasion – with the US voting against one and abstaining on another.

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   1. It's due to the love triangle of Putin, Trump and Kim Jong Un — Besties for Life!

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4. Peak Power on the Grid

   TL:DR; For intermittent (wind) and unexpected – it's SCGTs

    

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5. The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
   The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
   The best lack all conviction, while the worst
   Are full of passionate intensity.

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6. I really want to know how the NaziTechBro's Teenie Coder Army is gonna deal with THIS… 

   Elon Musk's DOGE Flooded With Spam After Email Threat to Workers

   Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has been flooded with spam after he asked federal workers to send an email listing what they got done in a week.

   A FedNews (Reddit) user posted what they said was the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) email, and the address it was sent from.

   Users posted about their spam emails on the subreddit FedNews—an unofficial platform for federal employees to discuss work. Newsweek has contacted DOGE, via direct message on X, for comment.

   In several different threads on the topic, people have said they took part in spamming Musk, with one explaining: "Not a fed but my significant other is … and let me tell you there is an astronomical amount of us following all of this, rooting for all of you, and yessss being petty and flooding doge with ridiculous 5 bullet emails.

   "As mentioned above, anywhere from lyrics, recipes, to how we feel about these a**holes, to what we did last week to resist this bulls**t. I know you all can only do so much but we're rooting for you to stand strong and hold the line!"

   Another said: "One of my homies replied to it. 1. EAT 2. A 3. BAG 4. OF 5. D***S."

   One said: 1. Supported and defended the Constitution of the United States against foreign enemies. 2. Supported and defended the Constitution of the United States against domestic enemies. 3. Bore true faith in, and allegiance to, the Constitution of the United States. 4. Discharged the duties of my office well and faithfully. 5. Responded to random email from an anonymous kid."

   Someone else wrote: "Didn't do ketamine, didn't ignore my children's mother, didn't golf, didn't wield a chain saw."

   https://www.newsweek.com/elon-musk-doge-spam-threat-workers-2035702

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7. Elon Musk Steps in Doge Shit. Josh Marshall at TPM.

   Regarding Elon Musk's "requirement" that government employees list their achievements or be automatically fired. He had to walk it the whole thing back because otherwise certain lawyers would be screwed for making false representations in Court.

   Well, here’s the story.

   On January 27th a lawyer named Kel McClanahan filed a lawsuit on behalf of anonymous (“Jane Doe”) civil servants pursuant to several federal laws over GWES.  McClanahan argued that under these various federal laws, if DOGE/OPM wanted to set up this new email system they had to jump through a bunch of different hoops. But the DOGE folks don’t care for hoops. We know this, right? So to get out of that they had to make various promises and representations about how GWES would be used.

   One of those was that PIA that among others things represented that anything to do with the GWES emails would be voluntary. You can look, not look, respond, not respond, etc. There’s also something called the E-Government Act. That requires an agency to produce a privacy impact report. And once you do that the PIA is binding. So people can rely on it. So there’s a few different legal requirements and court representations flowing together here. But once OPM produced that PIA document I mentioned over the weekend it became binding. And critically, the DOJ lawyers who were representing OPM (and in effect DOGE) on the case made those representations themselves. Basically, they vouched for those representations being true. And that, along with other promises, is why GWES got the green light.

   That second part is important. There’s what the PIA does on its own and there’s the repercussions of those DOJ lawyers using it as part of their arguments in court and vouching for it being true. If it’s not, those lawyers can be sanctioned by the judge.

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8. A word of advice to all those T***phumping Pfruits and coots out there: Maybe don’t go spending that MAGAtastic $5,000 Elon DOGE refund check just yet?  Maybe not all in one place, anyway?

   DOGE Quietly Deletes the 5 Biggest Spending Cuts It Celebrated Last Week

   These were the original five largest savings on its list:

   • An $8 billion cut at Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The actual contract in question was worth $8 million. The mistake seemed to stem from an earlier, erroneous entry in a federal contracting database. But contracting experts said that the service should have known better: ICE’s entire budget is about $8 billion, making it implausible that one contract could be so large. The U.S. DOGE Service adjusted the figure on the site after The Times wrote about it, and said in a post on Mr. Musk’s X platform that it had “always used the correct $8M in its calculations.”

   • Three $655 million cuts at the U.S. Agency for International Development. This was actually a single cut that was erroneously counted three times, as first reported by CBS News. That mistake also seemed to reflect a misunderstanding of the way government contracts work; they sometimes have “ceiling values” far in excess of what will be spent. Experts said this cancellation was unlikely to produce anything close to $655 million in savings even once. Now, the site lists a much smaller savings for these three cancellations: $18 million in total.

   • A $232 million cut at the Social Security Administration. Here, Mr. Musk’s organization appeared to have mistakenly believed that the agency had canceled a huge information technology contract with the defense contracting giant Leidos. Instead, as reported by The Intercept, it had canceled only a tiny piece of it: a $560,000 project to let users mark their gender as “X.” The DOGE site now shows that small cut instead.

   Some of the new canceled contracts added this week appear to make some of the same types of errors.

   The largest savings on the latest version of its list is a $1.9 billion cut at the Treasury Department. But The Times reported last week that this contract was canceled last fall, when Joseph R. Biden Jr. was president — and when DOGE did not yet exist.

   https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/25/upshot/doge-spending-cuts-changed.html?

   Sounds as though the only thing Elon’s DOGE kiddies are really efficiency expert at is blowing smoke up Elon’s ass? These DOGE “savings” reports appear to contain only slightly more actual fact than can be found in any 34-felony convictions T***p financial statement or tax return. No telling how much all this genius efficiency and lying math-is-hard bullshittery is going to finally wind up costing!

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9. I hear DOGE just had a "rapid unscheduled disassembly". Staff resigning, en masse.

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   1. Gosh, I hope that's true, Duke. What's the source?

      I did find this, from The Economic Times. A third of DOGE staff resigned – mostly veteran civil servants who are refusing to go along with Musk’s chaos agenda:
      https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/us/elon-musk-doge-mass-resignations-government-crisis/articleshow/118565630.cms?from=mdr

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