Dodgy Days In DC

 

Whole lotta dodgy going on.  Surprise, surprise!

Dodgy MF Saudi Golf Deal

The Oval Office meeting [in early February] convened by President Trump brought together the most important leaders in the world of professional golf: Jay Monahan, the top executive at the PGA Tour, and, via telephone, Yasir Al-Rumayyan, the chairman of the Saudi Arabia-backed league known as LIV Golf. The stated goal was to figure out a way to eliminate roadblocks preventing the planned merger between the rival two groups.

But the gathering earlier this month said something even more important about the Trump administration itself. Mr. Trump was not simply using the power of his office to forge an agreement — something that presidents have done for centuries. In this case, Mr. Trump was pushing a merger that relates to his own family’s financial interests.

The Trump family is a LIV Golf business partner. The family has repeatedly hosted LIV tournaments at its golf venues, including one planned in April at the Trump National Doral in Miami for the fourth year in a row.

In other words, according to half a dozen former Justice Department prosecutors and government ethics lawyers, Mr. Trump’s participation in this discussion was a brazen conflict of interest — one of a series that have played out over the past few weeks, with a frequency unlike any presidency in modern times, even in the first Trump term...

Dodgy DOGE firings -- FDA

Food and Drug Administration employees reviewing Elon Musk’s brain implant company Neuralink were fired over the weekend as part of a broader purge of the federal workforce, according to two sources with knowledge of the matter.

The cuts included about 20 people in the FDA’s office of neurological and physical medicine devices, several of whom worked on Neuralink, according to the two sources, who asked not to be identified because of fear of professional repercussions. That division includes reviewers overseeing clinical-trial applications by Neuralink and other companies making so-called brain-computer interface devices, the sources said...

Dodgy DOGE firings -- Homeland Security

The Trump administration is preparing to fire hundreds of high-level Department of Homeland Security employees this week as part of a move to rid the country’s third-largest agency of people deemed to be misaligned with the administration’s goals, according to three sources familiar with the matter.

The sources said the Trump administration has a “centralized plan” and a list of people in high-level positions across every component of DHS who are to be targeted this week. 

The firings will come on top of hundreds of more general cuts that began across DHS on Friday night, which targeted the Federal Emergency Management Agency, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. Those firings were the latest in a governmentwide effort to reduce the federal workforce...

Dodgy DOGE firings -- Park Rangers 

The sweeping layoffs of thousands of federal employees ordered by the Trump administration have made their way to Pennsylvania.

On Friday, some employees at one of the nation's most historic sites found out they're losing their jobs.

It leaves some to wonder what the impact will be as unions speaking out against the firings say they're being done without just cause.

Unions representing National Park employees also say the layoffs will make things even worse at parks that are already understaffed...

"Reduce the federal workforce" is a euphemism for "making arbitrary cuts in personnel and programs to help pay for tax cuts for the billionaire oligarchs running the show."  In some cases, the value added is that you're eliminating threats to your business interests, or actively engaging in promoting those interests.  Or, that you're simply a soulless sadist who craves the approval of other soulless sadists. 

The MF's regime is now a full- fledged a klepto- kakistocracy.

QOTD -- The "Unqualified Authenticity" Of Pete Hegseth

 

"...You can see in it so many of the central tenets of Trump’s approach to governance: the contempt for expertise and traditional qualifications; the insistence that the only real qualification is authenticity—and that authenticity is somehow wrapped up in performative masculinity; the belief that sounding tough and being tough are the same thing; and the conviction that complexity necessarily reduces to weakness.

It’s all right there in the nomination of a proudly unqualified individual who frames his lack of qualifications as qualification of a different, more authentic, variety that reflects what he calls a 'warrior ethos' America has somehow lost in its infatuation with equity. And this idea has the apparently silent assent of all of the Republican members of the committee and a few, at least, enthusiastic takers.  [snip]

This is the philosophical core of the Trump era. And it is interesting to watch it migrating from Trump himself down to his cabinet. In the first term, after all, Trump’s defense secretaries and cabinet officers were, generally speaking, well qualified in the traditional sense of qualifications. The cult of unqualified authenticity was then mostly confined to Trump himself. But in the Hegseth hearing, you can see it trickling downward.

And with it trickles its accoutrements. Because like Trump, Hegseth completed the package by buffaloing his way through some substantial allegations of misconduct. Merely unqualified is apparently insufficiently manly to constitute true authenticity—in fact, Hegseth, who is not an ignorant man, may know a little too much defense policy to fully embody the cult of authentic unqualification—he rounds out the picture with disdainful and implausible dismissals of allegations of sexual assault, financial mismanagement, and alcoholism...." -- Benjamin Wittes, writing in Lawfare on "The Cult of Unqualified Authenticity" seen in the person of Fox tv personality and white Christian nationalist Pete Hegseth's nomination to be Secretary of Defense.  Let that sink in again.  

Hegseth, after some performative display of "concerns" by some Republican Senators (hi, Joni Ernst!), will be confirmed -- absent, as some would put it, finding a dead boy in his bed (and then he would still be odds- on to be confirmed by these amoral, corrupt Republicans).  It's likely to be the same with most if not all of the Malignant Fascist's other authentically unqualified nominees like Tulsi Gabbard, Kash Patel, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and his mindboggling list of unqualified Ambassadorial nominees.  As has been noted, where there was some level of government expertise in the MF's first term, the only qualification needed this time around in this kakistocracy is blind loyalty to the cult leader as he proceeds, with broad immunity granted by his illegitimate Republican Supreme Court, to dismantle what's left of American prosperity, freedoms and democracy.  As someone somewhere once said, elections have consequences.

BONUS:  Paul Campos brings the receipts on "The Party of Evil."