Losing My Perspicacity January 31, 2025

Drowning the federal government in a bathtub — or the Potomac; Justin Tucker had a really bad day online; Kids are reportedly running OPM; the NWSL lands in Denver; RFK Jr's confirmation hearing was a mess; and The High Note.

Author

Julie DiCaro
January 31, 2025

Good morning, Happy Friday, and welcome to the last day of January 2025, thank God. January always seems to drag on towards the end of the month, but it feels like we’ve lived 10 lifetimes in the last two weeks, and we’ve all probably aged 20 years. I’m glad you’re here today.

If you’re a Gen Xer like me, you likely grew up trusting three men in the world above all others outside your immediate circle of family and friends: Peter Jennings, Dan Rather, and Tom Brokaw. (That is, if you were a weird little kid who watched the nightly news when you were seven, like I did.) Those guys were the news, and we had no idea what their individual politics were. So while I’ve been aware for a while that Dan Rather is far more left-leaning than I ever would have guessed (or perhaps it’s just that the entire country has lurched so far to the right), I was surprised to learn that he’d shared this on Facebook.

There’s no doubt that the legacy media outlets have wholly abdicated their responsibility to the general public to 1) not alienate right-wing viewers, 2) curry favor with the new regime, and 3) maintain access to the Trump administration. This was never clearer to me than when watching White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt’s first press briefing. I know I wasn’t alone in screaming follow-up questions at my television while the White House Press Corps sat silently on their hands. And while the old-school media icons were far from perfect, I can’t imagine Helen Thomas abiding such a display.

Some of you may know that Marisa Kabas broke the story of the federal funding freeze over on her newsletter, The Handbasket, which is excellent. Other independent journalists have also started getting their hands on federal documents, as the Trump administration seems to be leakier than a sieve. In the wee hours of the morning, a source emailed me a memo laying out how OPM wants agencies to implement its radical anti-trans policies. I promise that I’ll share with you whatever information comes my way, and I always protect my sources. If you or someone you know has information they’d like to share, my secure proton mail address is [email protected]. I’m also on Signal.

To that end, I’ll make my weekly pitch for you to become a premium subscriber to Losing My Perspicacity. While there are certainly some cons to journalists working alone (we are always better with people checking our work and shaping our stories), I truly believe that independent journalists, who are not beholden to the concerns of media lawyers or scoring “clicks” for private equity, are the best chance we have to turn this ship around. Even if you don’t subscribe to LMP, I hope you’ll help another independent journalist somewhere.

And hey, if you can’t subscribe, please take a few seconds to click on the ad below — it helps keep the lights on.

Today: Drowning the federal government in a bathtub — or the Potomac; Justin Tucker had a really bad day online; Kids are reportedly running OPM; the NWSL lands in Denver; RFK Jr's confirmation hearing was a mess; and The High Note.

Here we go.

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Drowning the federal government in the bathtub

Wednesday night, not long before an American Airlines regional jet and an Army Blackhawk helicopter collided over the Potomac River in Washington D.C., America’s secretary of Defense was on Jesse Watters’ show ranting about DEI hires and immigrants ($.25 per person hazard pay for having to retrieve that video on FOX News — so pay up!). Watters is on from 8 - 9 pm ET, according to my Guide, and the collision occurred at around 9 pm, so you do the math. Our new Secretary of Transportation, who you may remember as “Boston Sean” from The Real World, was reportedly busy working on the memo below, which sounds like something Margaret Atwood would have rejected from The Handmaid’s Tale for being too over-the-top.

NEW: Yesterday, the Department of Transportation issued a memo that says DOT and DOT-supported programs should "give preference to communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average." www.transportation.gov/sites/dot.go...

— Garnet Henderson (@garnethenderson.com)2025-01-30T19:40:38.055Z

Under his eye! Blessed be the fruit!

We already knew, of course, that Donald Trump and Elon Musk were trying to prune the federal workforce back by thousands, offering what is actually a deferred resignation as a “buyout,” which it is not. We also knew that Trump and Musk pushed out the head of the Federal Aviation Administration, typically a non-partisan position, because he gave Musk fits over SpaceX:

The head of the FAA, Mike Whitaker, resigned on January 20 — one year into his 5 year term — after facing relentless criticism from Musk for not approving SpaceX missions quickly enough. The Senate confirmed him unanimously in 2023. No acting FAA head has been appointed.

— Judd Legum (@juddlegum.bsky.social)2025-01-30T11:46:57.349Z

Yesterday, reports began making the rounds that the control tower staffing at Reagan International Airport was “not normal” at the time of the collision, as the controller on duty that night was reportedly handling a job usually done by two people. As you may know, air traffic control towers were understaffed even before Trump took office, but he further gutted them last week, according to Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY).

So why am I re-telling you all of this? Well, back in the George W. Bush days (and even before), right-wing political activist and architect of our continuing shitshow, Grover Norquist, was fond of saying that the goal was to make the federal government so small, the right could “drown it in the bathtub.” In fact, I remember seeing images of homes submerged in murky water after Katrina with that quote emblazoned on them in the early days of social media.

Here’s what the brilliant journalist William Greider wrote at The Nation back in 2003.

Norquist’s ambition is that building on its current strength, the right can cut government by half over the next twenty-five years to “get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub” [see Robert Dreyfuss, “Grover Norquist: ‘Field Marshal’ of the Bush Tax Plan,” May 14, 2001]. The federal government would shrink from 20 percent of GDP to 10 percent, state and local government from 12 to 6 percent. When vouchers become universally available, he expects public schools to shrink from 6 to 3 percent of GDP. “And we’ll have better schools,” he assures. People like Norquist play the role of constantly pushing the boundaries of the possible. “I’m lining up support to abolish the alternative minimum tax,” he says. “Has Bush spoken to this? No. I want to run ahead, put our guys on the record for it. So I will be out in front of the Bush Administration, not attacking the Bush Administration. Will he do everything we want? No, but you know what? I don’t care.”

Greider was always way ahead of the curve when it came to figuring out the game the right was playing. My ethics professor had us read his groundbreaking book “Who Will Tell The People?” in j-school, and I think about how prescient Greider was regularly. We sure could use a journalist like him right now.

The Democrats could use Greider as a consultant on messaging, too.

Constructing an effective response requires a politics that goes right at the ideology, translates the meaning of Bush’s governing agenda, lays out the implications for society and argues unabashedly for a more positive, inclusive, forward-looking vision. No need for scaremongering attacks; stick to the well-known facts. Pose some big questions: Do Americans want to get rid of the income tax altogether and its longstanding premise that the affluent should pay higher rates than the humble? For that matter, do Americans think capital incomes should be excused completely from taxation while labor incomes are taxed more heavily, perhaps through a stiff national sales tax? Do people want to give up on the concept of the “common school”—one of America’s distinctive achievements? Should property rights be given precedence over human rights or society’s need to protect nature? The recent battles over Social Security privatization are instructive: When the labor-left mounted a serious ideological rebuttal, well documented in fact and reason, Republicans scurried away from the issue (though they will doubtless try again).

The right loves to throw around the word “deregulation,” which is just a fancy word for “fewer rules.” Already, the meat industry is asking Trump to roll back regulations that keep our food supply safe. I don’t know about you, but I’m all for strict rules re: how America’s food is handled, especially as so much of it is shipped cross-country and at a time when the avian flu is being found in dairy products. Allowing companies to make more money with less environmental regulation also sounds great (to some), until you remember what America was like in the 1970s, when our waterways were so polluted that some caught fire multiple times.

Having a small federal government that leaves Americans alone, for the most part, sounds great —  until you realize how many people depend on the federal government to fill in the gaps the states refuse to, particularly in protecting individual rights. No matter how desperately the GOP wants to cut billions from the budget and redirect it to private companies (which they no doubt will have a financial stake in), the federal government is the size it is for a reason.

When people with no philosophy beyond “move fast, break everything, and hoard all the wealth you can” start pulling people from important jobs, things like a plane winding up in the Potomac happen. The adults in the room, the career civil servants who do their jobs no matter who is in the Oval Office, have always known this. Sadly, it appears all the adults have vacated the premises.

Also, blaming things that happen on your watch on women, people of color, and the disabled is bullshit, and everyone knows it.

(“Trump refuses to accept responsibility for cutting FAA staff; blames desegregation and women in the workplace” would have been a far better headline.)

So Justin Tucker seems gross

Baltimore Ravens kicker Justin Tucker has been accused of sexual misconduct between 2012 and 2016 by half a dozen Baltimore-area massage therapists, according to the Baltimore Baner:

Ravens kicker Justin Tucker engaged in inappropriate behavior at four high-end spas and wellness centers in the Baltimore region, according to six massage therapists, including exposing his genitals, brushing two of them with his exposed penis, and leaving what they believed to be ejaculate on the massage table after three of his treatments.

Several therapists said Tucker’s behavior was so egregious that they ended his sessions early or refused to work on him again. And, at two spas, management said they banned him from returning.

The allegations get far more graphic from there. Tucker, of course, has denied all wrongdoing in a statement posted to X. The denial is pretty much what you’d expect from a guy who wears his religion and “family man” title on his sleeve and then gets accused of skeeving out masseuses all over Baltimore. The Banner is laying, all the women are lying, I’m such an upstanding guy, blah blah blah.

Significantly, however, Tucker says that he has “never received complaints from a massage therapist,” has never been “dismissed from a massage therapy or bodywork session,” and has “never been told I was not welcome at any spa or any other place of business.”

First, NFL teams have massage therapists on staff, so I’m not sure why he’d need to go to a spa other than for the obvious. But that aside, the internet did its thing and scrounged up these 2021 tweets:

Justin Tucker is probably the best kicker in the league, so you can rest assured that absolutely nothing will happen to him as a result of this information. Yay sports.

Elon Musk reportedly has children running the Office of Personnel Management

What I’m about to tell you begs the question of whether anyone in Trump’s administration checked into what happened at Twitter after Elon Musk took over before putting him in charge of the federal government.

From Wired, via Yahoo:

The top brass of the OPM has been hollowed out to make room for Musk's former henchmen, according to federal sources tapped by Wired, where they're poised to "monitor and enforce" loyalty to Trump across the federal government, University of Michigan's Don Moynihan told the magazine.

***

"One, a senior adviser to the director, is a 21-year-old whose online resume touts his work for Palantir," per Wired, while another "who reports directly to Scales, graduated from high school in 2024." A copy of the latter's resume include his summer internship with Musk's Neuralink, alongside jobs as — we assure you that we are not joking — a camp counselor and bike mechanic.

Although both these tykes are ostensibly poised to rip and tear through America's federal agencies, Wired declined to name them "because of their ages" — a somewhat baffling choice given that both appear to be of legal age. (And if they're not, well, that's a much bigger problem.)

Tell me some more about how women and racial minorities are unqualified for every position they hold.

NWSL lands in Denver

Denver was awarded its first women’s major pro sports team and the NWSL’s 16th team today.

Denver got the nod after Boston picked up the league’s 15th team last year, and their team will begin play in the 2026 season.

RFK Jr.’s confirmation hearing was a disaster

Watching the clips from RFK Jr’s confirmation hearings today was pretty comical, if you didn't think too hard about what was at stake. One Senator after another went right at Kennedy, using his own words against him over and over.

There are a lot of great moments floating around on social media for you to watch, but I desperately need someone to take this video, so a slow zoom on Cheryl Hines in the gallery, and set it to the theme from “Curb Your Enthusiasm.”

ALSOBROOKS: You said 'we should not be giving Black people the same vaccine schedule that is given to whites.' Can you please explain what you meant? RFK Jr: There's a series of studies ... ALSOBROOKS: What different schedule would you say I should've recevied?

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com)2025-01-30T19:40:09.392Z

She looks like she’s pondering every decision that led her here. That’s a shame.

The High Note

Each day, I try to leave you on a somewhat hopeful note, or at least refresh our memories of the times America was great.

It is with great pleasure that I remind you that this week is the 100th anniversary of the Alaska Serum run, where a sled dog named Balto and his team rushed across the frozen tundra to get the anti-toxin for diphtheria to the town of Nome where there was an outbreak. (Yes, I know Alaska was only a US territory in 1925, but I’m claiming this one for America anyway. God knows we need the positivity.)

How cool is this?

The run was a 750-mile relay by mushers in -50 degree temperatures through heavy and drifting snow, part of the route was across the ice over the Bering Sea, and there were several lead dogs involved, including Blackie, Togo, and Balto. Three dogs died after the first leg alone.

Here’s a very cool video about the whole thing and the reenactment happening this week.

A good reminder of what life was like before we all had easy access to life-saving medication at the corner drug store.

Survive and advance out there today, kids. Don’t let the bastards get you down.

Defy. Disobey. Disrupt.

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