Losing My Perspicacity February 7, 2025

We have our first DOGE resignation for racism; Trump evicts the former head of the Coast Guard from her home; Pam Bondi’s first day as AG was cray-cray; Yet another homophobe is arrested for child molestation; and I throw in the towel on The High Note

Author

Julie DiCaro
February 07, 2025

Good morning and Happy Friday. Thanks for hanging out with me for a bit this morning. I hope everyone is hanging in there, drinking plenty of water, and, above all, getting off social media and away from the doomscroll.

As with every day for the past three weeks, so much garbage happened today that it’s difficult to stay on top of it all. On one hand, we need to stay as informed and engaged with our elected officials as possible right now. On the other, I just want to curl into a ball and watch Lord of the Rings and Parks and Rec repeatedly. It’s a real pickle.

Out of the hundreds of things that are happening in Washington each day that make my blood boil, the one that really stands out today is the constant LYING by the Trump administration and their avatars. Not that this is anything new, but this lie is so obviously made up that it enrages me that anyone believes it. And yet, I see people parroting it all over the place.

As you no doubt recall, during her first press conference, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt claimed that USAID had spent $50 million on condoms for Gaza. That claim was quickly debunked, but that didn’t stop Trump from repeating the lie again the very next day.

Trump: "We identified and stopped $50 million being sent to Gaza to buy condoms for Hamas." (This is a lie.)

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com)2025-01-29T19:23:01.890Z

I’ve seen this lie repeated ad nauseam on Facebook (I know, it’s my own fault for still being on there), and, like every game of telephone ever, the story keeps getting weirder and the facts keep changing. Today, Rep. Buddy Carter (R-GA) changed the relevant facts a bit, making the amount $15 million and the condoms going to the Taliban.

Given that the US does not recognize the Taliban and has no diplomatic relationship with them, it seems odd that we’d send them $15 million worth of condoms. You and I know that, but a lot of foolish people are willing to believe anything that confirms their worldview that Democrats are stealing money from America and Elon Musk is getting it back. Maddening.

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Today, We have our first DOGE outing; Trump evicts the former head of the Coast Guard from her home; Pam Bondi’s first day as AG was cray-cray; Yet another transphobe is arrested for child molestation; and I throw in the towel on The High Note.

Let’s do this.

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DOGE employee resigns for being a public racist

The only good thing I can say about the federal government in its current state is that it’s leaking like a sieve. I’m here for it.

Earlier this week, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent claimed in an interview that he had vetted at least one member of the DOGE crew, the under-25-year-olds currently pulling through Americans’ private data without the requisite security clearance. There has been speculation online that the person Bessent vetted was Marko Elez, a former SpaceX employee, who reportedly had access to rewrite code inside the US Treasury’s system.

If true, that’s a massive problem for Bessent, because Marko Elez just had to resign when a bunch of his old tweets resurfaced.

Marko Elez, a 25-year-old who is part of a cadre of Elon Musk lieutenants deployed by the Department of Government Efficiency to scrutinize federal spending, resigned after The Wall Street Journal asked the White House about his connection to the account.

“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. “Normalize Indian hate,” the account wrote the same month, in reference to a post noting the prevalence of people from India in Silicon Valley.

After the Journal inquired about the account, White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said that Elez had resigned from his role.

So, to be clear, one of the leaders of this band of barely-legal computer geniuses couldn’t figure out that the internet is forever? Nothing is ever truly deleted, kid.

Meanwhile, Bessent has been claiming all over the place that DOGE has “read-only” access to the data in the Treasury system. It turns out that was very much not true.

Wired (who is doing some of the best work around on this story):

US Treasury Department and White House officials have repeatedly denied that technologists associated with Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) had the ability to rewrite the code of the payment system through which the vast majority of federal spending flows. WIRED reporting shows, however, that at the time these statements were made, a DOGE operative did in fact have write access. Not only that, but sources tell WIRED that at least one note was added to Treasury records indicating that he no longer had write access before senior IT staff stated it was actually rescinded.

In good news, however, a federal judge approved an agreed order prohibiting the Treasury Department from sharing sensitive financial data with DOGE employees yesterday morning.

The agreement allows two individuals associated with Musk but employed by the Treasury Department – called special government employees – to have “read only” access to the sensitive data.

Once approved by U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, who is overseeing the case, the agreement will stay in place until Feb. 24 when both sides return to court to argue about a long-term preliminary injunction.

The two special government employees allowed to continue seeing Treasury Department data are Tom Krause and Marko Elez, according to the filing. Krause is the former chief executive of Cloud Software Group, a Silicon Valley tech company. Marko Elez is a 25-year-old engineer who used to work for Musk’s X and SpaceX.

(strikeout added)

This is the case where three unions representing federal employees sued to get DOGE out of the computer system. And you can already tell how well that “merit and intelligence” thing is working in the DOJ now that we’ve gotten all the “DEI” people out of there.

During the hearing, lawyers for the Department of Justice struggled to articulate how DOGE plans to use sensitive taxpayer data to reduce the size of the federal government, though they acknowledged that Musk's group of cost-cutters are driving the direction of the entire effort.

The agreement between the parties will be in place until February 24, when U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly will hear arguments on whether she should implement a long-term preliminary injunction (prohibition). But, it’s worth nothing that Judge Kollar-Kotelly was assured by the DOJ lawyers that no one at DOGE had anything other than read-only access to the system. Given WIRED’s reporting, I would be surprised if the judge hauls the lawyers back into court today for an explanation.

Trump evicts former head of US Coast Guard

Former US Coast Guard Commandant Linda Fagan is a four-star admiral and, until Trump demoted her on his second day in office because she’s a woman (and we all know being a woman = incompetency), she was the first woman to head up a branch of the US Military. The official reason she was fired, per the White House, was “border security issues” and “excessive focus on diversity.”

As quickly as the news cycle is churning, Fagan’s demotion barely registered among the American populace, but I can’t help but feel that we should all be making a lot more noise about this.

Yesterday, Trump evicted Fagan from her home at Joint Base Anacostia Bolling with less than three hours of notice.

Fagan, who was named commandant in 2022, made a convenient target for a new president who wanted to flex his muscle. The process for firing her was less complex than for dismissing chiefs of the four main branches of the military. More than that, the move allowed him to send signals about his anti-DEI agenda and desire to stem the flow of illegal immigrants and goods into the United States.

Throwing her out of her house on short notice went a step further.

"It's petty and it's personal," one Fagan ally said.

Of course it’s personal. Trump has big personal issues with every woman who doesn’t look or behave the way he would like them to (we’ve all seen Mar-A-Lago Face, no?), and he really has problems with women who stand up to him. Think of the women he hates the most: Hilary Clinton, Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Nancy Pelosi — he reserves far more vitriol for them than he does their male colleagues.

According to the report, Fagan didn’t even have the chance to remove her personal effects from the home.

Pam Bondi is runnin’ wild

A few weeks ago, I saw a former colleague of Pam Bondi on MSNBC. While whoever he was talking to (Maddow? Joy Reid? I can’t remember) was reeling over Trump’s nominees for HHS (RFK) and the Pentagon (Pete Hegseth), the former colleague insisted that Bondi was not like those other guys. That she might be a conservative, but she wouldn’t just do Trump’s bidding.

Today, on Bondi’s first day as US Attorney General, here’s what she did:

(BTW, I have no idea why some links are showing up blue and some are showing up black, but I’m working on it!)

So much for the idea that Bondi wouldn’t be a rubber stamp for Trump’s worst impulses.

I don’t know how long it’s going to take Democrats to realize that all these nominees sit before them and lie to their faces during their confirmation hearings. It was obvious with Brett Kavanaugh, it was obvious with Amy Coney-Barrett, and it’s obvious now. They have simply got to come up with better questions, and should be reminding nominees that they are under oath every time they say something untrue.

Of course, John Fetterman joined the Republicans in voting for Bondi, the only Democrat to do so.

In news we absolutely saw coming from miles away

Yet another right-wing “Christian” who accused drag queens of being pedophiles has been arrested for child molestation.

Aaron Craig Gleason, an anti-LGBTQ+ writer who has accused queer people of “grooming” children for sexual abuse, has been arrested and charged for molesting a child under the age of 12.

Gleason, a 39-year-old middle school teacher and soccer coach who has written for the anti-LGBTQ+ media outlets The Daily Wire, The Federalist, and The Imaginative Conservative, was arrested on January 28 by police officers in Okaloosa, Florida. He has been charged with the “lewd and lascivious molestation of a child under the age of 12 by a person over the age of 18” and was held in jail on a $75,000 bond.

Wooooow. I’m so surprised.

In other news

Here’s a quick list of other stories I don’t have the time/emotional energy to get into right now:

The High Note

Given the chaos around us, I try to leave you each day with a smile on your face and a song in your heart. But kids, it is bleak out there.

So, after hours of looking, I gave up. Here’s three minutes of a porcupine making cute noises.

Survive and advance today. Don’t let the bastards get you down.

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