Month: February 2025

Somebody asked Donald Trump today why Elon Musk's crew of techbros needs access to private information about Americans:

Trump suggested that he has given the tech billionaire free rein and appeared blase about the details. Asked why Doge needs access to treasury payment systems including Americans’ social security numbers, home addresses and bank accounts, he replied: “Well, it doesn’t, but they get it very easily. We don’t have very good security in our country.”

Treasury's security is fine. But if the president orders them to give DOGE unlimited access, then of course that's what they get.

Musk won't tell anyone what he's up to, and it's obvious that Trump doesn't know either. If DOGE is dicking around with stuff they don't need, and Trump doesn't care, then who does?

I can barely walk to the kitchen without prompting a lengthy attack of uncontrollable shakes and gasping for breath. This is worse than it was a week ago, and if it doesn't resolve soon I'm heading back to the hospital.

For now, though, it means I can't wander around to take pictures of the cats. I can only sit in my chair and wait for them to come to me. Which they do. This is Charlie popping his head up and trying to decide if he wants to jump in my lap. He didn't, which I suppose is all just as well.

What's going on here?

Several U.S. military branches are pausing training related to the prevention of sexual assault in order to comply with one of President Trump’s executive orders related to diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.

A directive issued by Marine Corps headquarters on Tuesday “asked the fleet to PAUSE on all [Sexual Assault Prevention and Reporting] training due to recent changes within the White House to remove diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) from all federal policies,” according to an email obtained by The Times.

There's been a lot of stuff like this that's been getting deep-sixed even though it has nothing to do with DEI programs. There are two possible explanations:

• Everyone is living in fear of Elon and Donald, so they're taking no chances. Anything even remotely related to non-white-males is getting axed.
• Lots of people have been wanting to get rid of this stuff for a long time and they're using DEI as an excuse to do it.

I don't know which it is, but an awful lot of programs that merely mention gay people or Black people are being halted. If that's really what Donald Trump wants, OK. But it sure isn't what he wrote in his anti-DEI executive order.

The first jobs numbers of 2025 are out. The American economy gained 143,000 jobs last month. We need 90,000 new jobs just to keep up with population growth, which means that net job growth clocked in at 53,000 jobs. The headline unemployment rate dropped slightly to 4.0%.

This is obviously a fairly weak jobs report, but at the same time the participation rate is up; the employment-population ratio is up; and the unemployment rate is down. So it's not all bad.

Hum de hum:

A key DOGE staff member who gained access to the Treasury Department’s central-payments system resigned Thursday after he was linked to a deleted social-media account that advocated racism and eugenics.

....“Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool,” the account posted in July, according to the Journal’s review of archived posts. “You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity,” the account wrote on X in September.

Well, mistakes happen, amirite? But this dude is gone now because obviously Donald Trump doesn't put up with—

President Trump has nominated Anthony J. Tata, a retired brigadier general with a history of Islamophobic and other inflammatory comments, to a senior Pentagon post in charge of jobs and deployments.

This is the second time Mr. Trump has nominated Mr. Tata, who once called former President Barack Obama a “terrorist leader,” to a senior job in the Defense Department that requires Senate approval.

Maybe Trump just really likes white people after all. Still, a guy who's exterminating DEI, trying to ethnically cleanse Gaza, and cutting off funds to South Africa for being mean to whites, should take a wee bit more care about who he pals around with.

It's time for another episode of "What Republicans Believe":

Give or take a bit, about 10% of Democrats believe each of these things.

A pair of painted terrapins at the LA Zoo.

The latest:

1. Panama says Trump is full of shit and it hasn't agreed to let US warships transit the canal for free.
2. A judge has paused Trump's offer to federal workers to resign their jobs and still be paid through September.
3. Another judge has issued a nationwide injunction against Trump's attempt to do away with birthright citizenship.
4. Trump's effort to freeze federal spending was shot down last week.
5. A judge has ordered the Treasury Department not to share sensitive data with Elon Musk's DOGE operatives.
6. Greenland remains a part of Denmark.
7. Trump has backed down over his tariff threats against Canada and Mexico.
8. He's made himself a laughingstock over his proposal for US ownership of Gaza.
9. ICE arrests of illegal immigrants are barely higher than in the past. As of February 1, ICE appears to have stopped releasing daily arrest counts.

None of this is to say that Trump hasn't done plenty of damage. USAID is in shambles. Perceived enemies have been fired all over the place. Gender-affirming care has been torched. Millions of acre feet of water in California have been dumped into the ground. J6 rioters were all pardoned.

Nonetheless, there's more bark than bite in Trump's actions, many of which have been halted or pared back now that court actions are being ramped up. Also, Trump has already run through most of the low-hanging fruit that he can accomplish via executive orders. It starts getting harder now.

We're nearly done with 2024 economic statistics. There are just a few stragglers left. Here is labor productivity for Q4:

The trendline allows you to see periods when productivity lagged or grew more than average. The past couple of years have been slightly above trend, though you have to squint a bit to see it. We'll see if Donald Trump can keep it up.

Donald Trump tweeted this on August 22, 2018:

What's this all about? Trump's 2018 tweet was prompted by President Cyril Ramaphosa announcing his support for a constitutional amendment that, in some cases, would allow the government to expropriate unused land without compensation. Trump took up the cudgel again a couple of days ago, prompted by an expropriation act finally being passed last month.

The whole thing is super complicated and goes back decades. Land reform was a bedrock tenet of the ANC, but over the years voluntary transfers haven't worked. White people still own more than 70% of the land. So President Ramaphosa has been under a lot of pressure to do something.

In addition, South Africa has a very high crime rate and white farmers in rural areas are murdered all the time. As it happens, this murder rate has declined quite a bit, but it still amounts to about 70 per year—which seems like a lot but is lower than the daily murder rate throughout the whole country. Most of the farm killings are the result of robberies gone bad, and the overall murder rate in South Africa is about four times higher for blacks than whites. Still, this has been a hot button issue for a very long time, so when Trump says South Africa is “treating certain classes of people VERY BADLY," he's explicitly talking about white people.

Is white South African immigrant Elon Musk whispering in Trump's ear about this? I wouldn't be surprised, but he hardly needs to. Trump has been concerned for a long time about whether South Africa's white people are getting a fair shake.