- Heather Cox Richardson – Letters from an American – February 21, 2025
…
Meanwhile, Jessica Piper of Politico noted that 62% of Americans in the CNN poll said that Trump has not done enough to try to reduce prices, and today’s economic news bears out that concern: not only are egg prices at an all-time high, but also consumer sentiment dropped to a 15-month low as people worry that Trump’s tariffs will raise prices. White House deputy press secretary Harrison Fields said in a statement: “[T]he American people actually feel great about the direction of the country…. What’s to hate? We are undoing the widely unpopular agenda of the previous office holder, uprooting waste, fraud, and abuse, and chugging along on the great American Comeback.”Phone calls swamping the congressional switchboards and constituents turning out for town halls with House members disprove Fields’s statement. In packed rooms with overflow spaces, constituents have shown up this week both to demand that their representatives take a stand against Musk’s slashing of the federal government and access to personal data, and to protest Trump’s claim to be a king. In an eastern Oregon district that Trump won by 68%, constituents shouted at Representative Cliff Bentz: “tax Elon,” “tax the wealthy,” “tax the rich,” and “tax the billionaires.” In a solid-red Atlanta suburb, the crowd was so angry at Representative Richard McCormick that he has apparently gone to ground, bailing on a CNN interview about the disastrous town hall at the last minute.
- RFK Jr. Makes His First Anti-Vaccine Move
The HHS secretary targets members of a CDC committee that plays a key role in vaccine approvals. - Trump fires top US general in unprecedented Pentagon shakeup
(REUTERS) — President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of U.S. military leadership.
…
While the Pentagon’s civilian leadership changes from one administration to the next, the uniformed members of U.S. armed forces are meant to be apolitical, carrying out the policies of Democratic and Republican administrations.Brown, the second Black officer to become the president’s top uniformed military adviser, had been expected to complete his entire four-year term in September 2027.
A U.S. official said Brown was relieved with immediate effect, even before the Senate confirms his successor.
Trump administration fires top US general and Navy chief in unprecedented purge of military leadership
…
The removal of the second Black man to serve as America’s most senior general and the first woman to serve on the Joint Chiefs of Staff appears to send a strong signal from an administration that has outlawed diversity and inclusion efforts across the military and wider government.Who is Trump’s pick for chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff, Dan Caine?
…
Caine has not served in any of the roles — Joint Chiefs vice chairman, chief of staff for one of the branches of the armed service, or head of a combatant command — that nominees are legally required to have performed in order to be nominated. The president, however, may waive those requirements if he “determines such action is necessary in the national interest.”This is the most dangerous move yet
The canary is gasping for air
…
They fired the top lawyers of all three service branches.In Pursuit of a ‘Warrior Ethos,’ Hegseth Targets Military’s Top Lawyers
The defense secretary has repeatedly derided the military lawyers for war crime prosecutions and battlefield rules of engagement. - Author of Upcoming Elon Musk Biography Says ‘There Is No Evidence’ Billionaire Has Any ‘Intellectual Achievements’
- Pam Bondi Covers Up Foreign Influence Peddling and Lying to the FBI
- DOGE’s USDS Purge Included the Guy Who Keeps Veterans’ Data Safe Online
The cybersecurity lead for VA.gov was fired last week. He tells WIRED that the Veterans Affairs digital hub will be more vulnerable without someone in his role. - Eighty two years ago today, Sophie Scholl was executed by guillotine for leading a student resistance against Hitler. She was 21.
- How Uncovering Bias Took A Black Man Off Death Row In NC
- 17 red states are suing to end federal disability protections. Here’s how you can support Section 504
…
If 504 is rolled back, it would be up to individual states to decide how much they want to protect people with disabilities from discrimination, as well as which services—if any—they want to provide.
[Note that Texas is one of the participating states. Texas Gov. Abbott uses a wheelchair.] - Ten reasons for modest optimism
- DOGE got going with the idea of cutting fraud and waste. I’m sure there is both in the federal government. But DOGE isn’t doing that. They’re just cutting to cut.
At the Forest Service, we lost 3,400 people, mostly recent hires but also some more established workers. The vast majority of these folks aren’t Washington bureaucrats, but people working in rural America. Almost all of them having nothing to do with any ‘agenda’ the new administration is gunning for.
Here’s who we lost:
Trail crews. Biologists. Foresters. Front desk help at ranger stations. Engineers. Surveyors. GIS specialists. Hydrologists. Researchers who study anything from plant and animal species to wildfire behavior. Rec specialists.
Losing these people means forest roads don’t get maintained. Trails will be closed. So will campgrounds. Wildfire prevention projects will be delayed or shelved. Timber stands will be unavailable for logging. - The Online Right Is Building a Monster
Their increasingly extreme rhetoric is eventually going to freak the hell out of ordinary people.
…
So one of the reasons we were so critical of the far-left mob was that we knew eventually it would empower a far-right one. That moment has now come, and as our reporter River Page argues in the important essay below, it’s most obvious on the internet. Twitter used to be a place where the far-left would viciously attack someone for saying sex is real; it has become a platform where far-right trolls can say someone is “not an Anglo Saxon and therefore should be ignored.”Or, as Bari put it in her speech at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship on Monday, “just as the left defaced and desecrated statues of Churchill, the vandals on the right desecrate his name and his memory.”
- ‘Arbitrary and discriminatory’: Judge blocks Trump’s effort to deter DEI programs
- Why banks are flying gold bars on commercial flights from London to NYC
- Is my tax and Social Security data safe from DOGE? Safeguard these sensitive records.
- Project 2025 Tracker
- Trump will pander to Xi just as he has to Putin
Republicans who think the US president will fight for Taiwan are deluded - Putin’s secret weapon: Russia’s hybrid submarine war against the UK and the rest of Europe
…
Ultimately, the potential sabotage of the cables should be seen “not as an isolated phenomenon” but as part of “a much more comprehensive Russian programme of threatening communications infrastructure and infrastructure in general,” says Keir Giles, a Russia expert at Chatham House and author of the book Who Will Defend Europe? - Former Intelligence Officer Claims KGB Recruited Trump
[original page says “This page is so lost, even our intrepid reporters can’t find it…” – see, also ] - Foxtrot Farm’s Post
- Musk Tells Government Workers to Detail Their Workweek or Face Termination
Elon Musk has drawn inspiration from his 2022 takeover of X, then known as Twitter, as he works to overhaul the federal government. - George Floyd Killing Separated Trump From His Generals
A four-minute video appears to have been a turning point for the president and Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., the ousted Joint Chiefs chairman. - Trump Admin. Firings Outpace Deportations in First Month
The first month of the second Trump administration has seen federal firings far outpace deportations of illegal immigrants, Newsweek reported on Saturday.In the first 30 days, the administration has deported 37,600 people, or well below the 57,600 monthly average during the Biden administration, according to previously unpublished figures from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security reviewed by Reuters. During the same time period close to 200,000 federal workers have either been fired or informed of a pending dismissal, although some have already been called back, according to information the outlet has compiled.
- Harmeet Dhillon: The Department of Justice Nominee Coming for Our Civil Rights
…
Trump nominated Harmeet Dhillon, an attorney fixated on weaponizing the law to encourage discrimination, to lead DOJ’s Civil Rights Division as the Assistant Attorney General. She made her career out of purposefully being the lawyer for people accused of racial and gender discrimination in a bid to undermine civil rights laws. Dhillon has meticulously built her brand as an anti-woke cultural warrior who takes pleasure in disparaging racial and gender equity in the courts and on social media.How can someone who has tried to eliminate civil rights and anti-discrimination protections lead a powerful federal department that’s supposed to uphold our civil rights laws? It could be that Trump is more interested in using our civil rights laws to attack diversity programs than to enforce them.
- Turning back the clock to white boy DEI
- What’s Really Behind Republicans’ Push for Proof of Citizenship?
…
Republicans are tying election integrity to the southern border and playing on fears of demographic outnumbering — a dog whistle for white supremacy if ever there was one — to push for proof of citizenship. - Matthew 12:25
