Nuked 😱✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️ 😱

All Hail the King? It’s Presidents Day, the day that was initially meant to celebrate the life of founding father and first US president George Washington who wasn’t a king and, unlike the current one who posted this weekend on Truth Social and X that “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law,” didn’t want to be one. Don’t be surprised if next year, the president part is changed because we know that’s something that Trump would like to do, after all he moves hurricanes by Sharpie, has altered the names of the Gulf of Mexico and Denali and aspires to be carved into Mount Rushmore. Sadly, that’s the least of what he’s been up to. With his blessing, his largest contributor and designated wrecking ball, Elon Musk, continues to do irreparable harm to the government.  Examples of that damage include Musk’s mucking around in crucial and until now secret data bases, a list of which is about to include the one belonging to the IRS, and the across-the-board firing of a large number of government employees, probationary or otherwise. Worth noting that the probationary employee category doesn’t just include new hires, it also includes those recently promoted into new positions, like experienced air traffic controllers.  Musk and by extension Trump’s position is that if you work for the government, you are by definition expendable so what if your job involves securing or upgrading nuclear weaponry or making sure planes don’t fly into each other or monitoring the spread of killer viruses. Over the weekend, it was reported that one result of their willy nilly firing activities included the dismissal of hundreds of essential employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration which resides in the Department of Energy. In his book The Fifth Risk, author Michael Lewis wrote that officials in Trump’s first administration were clueless about the functions of many of the departments of government they were appointed to oversee. Apparently, they still are because neither Musk, his rat squad nor even Trump realized that an across-the-board firing of Department of Energy employees would leave the nukes exposed. Reports are that they’re now trying to hire back many of those nuked nuke employees but are having a hard time locating them because when they were fired, their email accounts were also nuked.  No one, least of all nepo-RFK is all that interested in rehiring any of the virus guys.  We know that because over the weekend information about the benefits of flu shots were taken down from the CDC website.  We’re currently experiencing a particularly bad flu season, if you haven’t gotten a shot, its not too late, not that the brain worm guy would tell you that.  We’re also experiencing an uptick in measles cases, not just in Texas but also in New Jersey.  Funny thing about measles, banning Froot Loops or halting infectious disease research, two of RFK’s top priorities, won’t stop the highly contagious measles virus from spreading nor will it cure any of those already infected, but you know what does, the MMR vaccine. And, in case you are wondering, the bird flu is out and about too, spreading among cats, cattle, and even people.  If we’re lucky it won’t be lethal, if not there’s always ivermectin. 

Diplomatic Disaster: Trump’s international wrecking team, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Veep JD Vance spent the last few days spreading Vladimir Putin’s message across Europe.  After Hegseth told an audience at the Ukraine Defense Contact Group in Brussels that a return to Ukraine’s pre-war borders and NATO membership would be “unrealistic,” Senate Armed Services Chair Roger Wicker said that he’d made a “rookie mistake.”  Wicker who voted for Hegseth’s confirmation because of course he did, went on to question who had written Hegseth’s speech, adding that it was the kind of thing that Tucker Carlson, who he then called a fool, would have written.  Hegseth and Carlson are former Fox colleagues so it’s not a stretch to believe that Carlson, maybe with the help of a Putin scribe, actually worked on that speech. Hegseth later pulled back some of his comments but then Trump who plans to go to Saudi Arabia for a meet up with Putin to “end” the Ukraine-Russia war, without Ukraine’s Zelensky or anyone from Europe, said that he was cool with everything Hegseth had said, so the comments stand.  He was also cool with the effort to extort mineral rights from Ukraine, an outrageous effort that wasn’t received well by Zelensky.  As to Veep JD, in his speech to the Munich Security Conference he attacked our European allies, or maybe now our former allies, for squelching free speech and by squelching he means not being more hospitable to neo-Nazis and white supremacists. He told them that the greatest threat facing the European continent wasn’t Russia or China but from within.  His speech was met with disdain by Europe’s leaders but was gleefully received by Putin and his allies including former Russian President Dmitri Medvedev who complimented him for delivering such a “bold critique of Europe.” As to free speech, the AP is still banned from the White House briefing room and from Air Force One because it still calls the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of Mexico.  There’s been some protest from other media companies, just words, no actions. Even worse, over the weekend Axios announced that they’ll go with Trump’s Gulf of America order, so much for press solidarity.

Legal or Not?  Eric Adams remains the nominal Mayor of New York.  The fraud charges against him will likely go away this week, at least go away for as long as he complies with Trump’s orders to cooperate with the INS even when those orders violate local law. On Friday, after Hagen Scotten, a highly respected, decorated military veteran and conservative Republican Attorney at the Southern District of New York resigned writing that only a “fool or a coward” would obey Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove’s direction to drop the charges against Adams, twenty one attorneys from the Department of Justice’s Washington DC based Criminal Division were shepherded into a room and told that they’d all be toast if two of them didn’t agree to sign the Adams dismissal paperwork.  Ultimately Edward Sullivan, a senior litigator who is close to retirement agreed, saying that he did to protect the jobs of the other members of the unit.  He was joined by Antoinette Bacon, a supervisor who the NY Times described as someone who was always going to carry Trump’s water. The charges haven’t been dropped yet but the paperwork has been delivered to the judge overseeing the case. The lawsuits against all Trump and Musk’s freezing, firing and infiltration of crucial data bases continue to percolate through the courts.  One of those cases related to Trump’s firing of Hampton Dellinger, the federal official responsible for overseeing the enforcement of workplace protections for federal employees is expected to make it to the Supreme Court shortly.  As to the information that Musk’s rats have accessed, some classified information about the size and staff of the National Reconnaissance Office, the federal intelligence agency that designs, builds, and maintains US intelligence satellites, has been posted for all to see on the DOGE website. Alarm bells are ringing in US intelligence offices while champagne and vodka flow at the Kremlin.

Fog:  Three more Israeli hostages were released on Saturday morning. Somewhere around seventy remain in captivity although some of those are no longer alive. Secretary of State Rubio visited Israel over the weekend, where he shared platitudes with Bibi Netanyahu. Rubio has moved on to Saudi Arabia presumably to discuss what’s next for the region but also maybe to get a thrashing from the Saudis who aren’t pleased with Trump’s plans to turn Gaza into a Palestinian-free beach resort.     

#BringThemAllHomeNow