Republicans: continued

[Tero]

Hegseth gets job
-Welcome to the Trump team
- I will need a makeup studio
- Fine
(True)

[L'Emmerdeur]

About time the US government stopped supporting little leaches. It'll force women to birth them but once that's accomplished it should be 'job done.'

'The Trump Administration’s War on Children'

The clear-cutting across the federal government under President Donald Trump has been dramatic, with mass terminations, the suspension of decades-old programs and the neutering of entire agencies. But this spectacle has obscured a series of moves by the administration that could profoundly harm some of the most vulnerable people in the U.S.: children.

Consider: The staff of a program that helps millions of poor families keep the electricity on, in part so that babies don’t die from extreme heat or cold, have all been fired. The federal office that oversees the enforcement of child support payments has been hollowed out. Head Start preschools, which teach toddlers their ABCs and feed them healthy meals, will likely be forced to shut down en masse, some as soon as May 1. And funding for investigating child sexual abuse and internet crimes against children; responding to reports of missing children; and preventing youth violence has been withdrawn indefinitely.

The administration has laid off thousands of workers from coast to coast who had supervised education, child care, child support and child protective services systems, and it has blocked or delayed billions of dollars in funding for things like school meals and school safety.

These stark reductions have been centered in little-known children’s services offices housed within behemoth agencies such as the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Justice, offices with names like the Children’s Bureau, the Office of Family Assistance and the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. In part because of their obscurity, the slashing has gone relatively overlooked.

“Everyone’s been talking about what the Trump administration and DOGE have been doing, but no one seems to be talking about how, in a lot of ways, it’s been an assault on kids,” said Bruce Lesley, president of advocacy group First Focus on Children. He added that “the one cabinet agency that they’re fully decimating is the kid one,” referring to Trump’s goal of shuttering the Department of Education. Already, some 2,000 staffers there have lost or left their jobs.

The impact of these cuts will be felt far beyond Washington, rippling out to thousands of state and local agencies serving children nationwide.

The Department of Education, for instance, has rescinded as much as $3 billion in pandemic-recovery funding for schools, which would have been used for everything from tutoring services for Maryland students who’ve fallen behind to making the air safer to breathe and the water safer to drink for students in Flint, Michigan. The Department of Agriculture, meanwhile, has canceled $660 million in promised grants to farm-to-school programs, which had been providing fresh meat and produce to school cafeterias while supporting small farmers.

At the Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the agency’s secretary, has dismissed all of the staff that had distributed $1.7 billion annually in Social Services Block Grant money, which many states have long depended on to be able to run their child welfare, foster care and adoption systems, including birth family visitation, caseworker training and more. The grants also fund day care, counseling and disability services for kids. (It is unclear whether anyone remains at HHS who would know how to get all of that funding out the door or whether it will now be administered by White House appointees.)

Head Start will be especially affected in the wake of Kennedy’s mass firings of Office of Head Start regional staff and news that the president’s draft budget proposes eliminating funding for the program altogether. That would leave one million working-class parents who rely on Head Start not only for pre-K education but also for child care, particularly in rural areas, with nowhere to send their kids during the day.

[And so on...]

[L'Emmerdeur]

With the laser-like intellect of Ron Johnson focussing on the important questions, maybe the truth about 9-11 will finally come to light.

'Senate Republican wants to hold hearings on a 9/11 conspiracy theory'

Sen. Ron Johnson is actively investigating 9/11.

A day after the Wisconsin Republican went on a far-right podcast promoting conspiracy theories about the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people, a spokesperson for Johnson said the lawmaker is currently seeking information and documentation in order to hold hearings on the event nearly 25 years later.

He would do so in his capacity as chair of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, one of Congress’s most storied and powerful panels with far-reaching jurisdiction that gives its chair wide latitude to probe a diverse array of matters. It has in the past probed war profiteering, organized crime and the 2008 global financial crisis.

In a podcast interview Tuesday with MAGA personality Benny Johnson, Ron Johnson asserted that one of the buildings around the World Trade Center complex in New York was brought down via “a controlled demolition” in the aftermath of the collapse of the twin towers.

Building 7 at the World Trade Center complex collapsed hours after the initial attack when al Qaeda terrorists hijacked commercial airliners and crashed them into both towers of the World Trade Center. The smaller office building could not withstand hours of uncontrolled fire after flaming debris rained down on the building.

However, its collapse has long been subject to rampant conspiracy theories from so-called 9/11 truthers, suggesting that Building 7 was demolished via planted explosives alone, or that it was, along with the twin towers, deliberately destroyed by the federal government or other entities in an attempt to place the blame on al Qaeda.

The building’s tenants, which included an outpost of the Central Intelligence Agency, have made it a locus for conspiracists, with the phrase “jet fuel can’t melt steel beams” becoming an enduring internet meme.

Citing a documentary that promoted these conspiracy theories about the attack, Ron Johnson went on to say the investigation into the collapse conducted by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, which is part of the Department of Commerce, was “corrupted.”

“What actually happened on 9/11? What do we know? What is being covered up?” he asked. “My guess is there’s an awful lot being covered up in terms of what the American government knows about 9/11.”

[Joe]

With the laser-like intellect of Ron Johnson

Trigger Warning!!!1! :

focussing on the important questions, maybe the truth about 9-11 will finally come to light.

'Senate Republican wants to hold hearings on a 9/11 conspiracy theory'

Sen. Ron Johnson is actively investigating 9/11.

A day after the Wisconsin Republican went on a far-right podcast promoting conspiracy theories about the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people, a spokesperson for Johnson said the lawmaker is currently seeking information and documentation in order to hold hearings on the event nearly 25 years later.

He would do so in his capacity as chair of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, one of Congress’s most storied and powerful panels with far-reaching jurisdiction that gives its chair wide latitude to probe a diverse array of matters. It has in the past probed war profiteering, organized crime and the 2008 global financial crisis.

In a podcast interview Tuesday with MAGA personality Benny Johnson, Ron Johnson asserted that one of the buildings around the World Trade Center complex in New York was brought down via “a controlled demolition” in the aftermath of the collapse of the twin towers.

Building 7 at the World Trade Center complex collapsed hours after the initial attack when al Qaeda terrorists hijacked commercial airliners and crashed them into both towers of the World Trade Center. The smaller office building could not withstand hours of uncontrolled fire after flaming debris rained down on the building.

However, its collapse has long been subject to rampant conspiracy theories from so-called 9/11 truthers, suggesting that Building 7 was demolished via planted explosives alone, or that it was, along with the twin towers, deliberately destroyed by the federal government or other entities in an attempt to place the blame on al Qaeda.

The building’s tenants, which included an outpost of the Central Intelligence Agency, have made it a locus for conspiracists, with the phrase “jet fuel can’t melt steel beams” becoming an enduring internet meme.

Citing a documentary that promoted these conspiracy theories about the attack, Ron Johnson went on to say the investigation into the collapse conducted by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, which is part of the Department of Commerce, was “corrupted.”

“What actually happened on 9/11? What do we know? What is being covered up?” he asked. “My guess is there’s an awful lot being covered up in terms of what the American government knows about 9/11.”

That's a string of words I never expected to see together.

As for 7 World Trade Center, never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity

Consolidated Edison and five of its insurers have filed a $314.5 million lawsuit against the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, asserting that huge diesel tanks in 7 World Trade Center, an office building that collapsed late in the day last Sept. 11, were improperly designed and maintained. The suit charges that fires fed by the fuel in those tanks played a major role in the collapse.

A major Con Edison electrical substation that sat beneath 7 World Trade Center -- a 47-story high-rise just north of the twin towers -- was destroyed when the building collapsed.

''The insurers are trying to recover what they paid to us and we're trying to recover some of our uninsured losses,'' said Chris Olert, a Con Edison spokesman. ''There was negligent design, inspection, maintenance and operation of the diesel fuel tanks there. The diesel tanks caused the building to collapse.''

The tanks contained more than 40,000 gallons of fuel to provide backup power for the city's emergency command center, a Secret Service office and other tenants. A 6,000-gallon tank for the command center, which was on the 23rd floor, was mounted 15 feet off the ground near an elevator bank. It was cited as unsafe by Fire Department officials in 1998 and 1999, but the Port Authority has asserted that the tank and the structure met the city's fire code and posed no special danger.

[Brian Peacock]

Seems pretty clear cut. The CIA blew the diesel tanks. Discuss.

[Tero]

https://www.alternet.org/trump-johnson- ... ciliation/

"The House budget resolution — nonbinding legislation but a necessary step in the reconciliation process — instructed the committee with jurisdiction over Medicaid to come up with $880 billion in spending cuts. But the Senate version did not follow suit, and several House Republicans signaled they wouldn't vote for Medicaid cuts that large in the final bill."

Scher continues, "This is why a budget reconciliation bill isn't quickly and neatly falling into place. In the worst-case scenario, Republicans’ reconciliation bill effort will collapse, and in the ugly aftermath, their intra-party rifts will harden into existential schisms."

[Tero]

Thevtypucal blame game against Democrats and boomers. Sean does some of this.

[pErvinalia]

Covfefe!

[Sean Hayden]

I do not! —maybe. Mostly I just point out democrats don’t actually like people, which makes their message sound funny.

[Tero]

That's true. People for the most part are like wolves in the animal world. Not terribly interesting and only looking for the next meal. Aside from
Mammals, I like all birds. Even crows. Smart generalists.

[Sean Hayden]

[Joe]

Seems pretty clear cut. The CIA blew the diesel tanks. Discuss.

No need. They caught the building on fire with flaming debris from one of the big buildings they demolished across the street. That blew the deisel.

[pErvinalia]

[Brian Peacock]

That's true. People for the most part are like wolves in the animal world. Not terribly interesting and only looking for the next meal. Aside from
Mammals, I like all birds. Even crows. Smart generalists.

Wolves are a vital component of a healthy wilderness ecology.

[Tero]

"After Donald Trump won in November, I sat down to read all 922 pages of Project 2025. As I write in my new book, what I discovered was more radical and more interesting than I’d expected. It predicted much of what we’ve seen in the first three months of the second Trump administration—and much of what’s to come, including the dismantling of federal climate research that’s started to take shape in recent weeks."

"The authors of the Project 2025 plan "believed that the Christian, right-wing nation they desired could come about only if Republicans stopped doing politics the way they always had and refused to accept the structure of the executive branch as it existed. They also understood that the faster a new president moved, the more he’d be able to achieve as the courts, Congress, and civil society struggled to keep up."

"The most important tactic laid out in the plan was to transform the federal bureaucracy by firing as many civil servants as possible, changing others into political appointees, and terrifying the rest into obeisance."

"As for what comes next, the text suggests two major things to watch. One is an end to any policies that acknowledge climate change, and to any federal climate research. Already, the Defense Department has canceled climate work, NASA has fired its chief scientist, NOAA has laid off hundreds of workers, and the EPA has plans to fire hundreds more, but even these steep cuts are likely only the start. Earlier this month, Politico reported on an Office of Management and Budget memo proposing an evisceration of NOAA that closely mirrors Project 2025’s proposals. Unlike some on the right, Project 2025 doesn’t treat climate change as a hoax, but it does view these programs as an impediment to the unfettered exploitation of fossil fuels, especially on federal land, that they want.

"The second is a more organized campaign to promote conservative gender norms, traditional families, and Christian morality. Trump has already moved to limit transgender rights, but the Project 2025 agenda is much wider, aiming to return the United States to a country of married families with male breadwinners and female caregivers. The authors also want to ban abortion nationally, though Trump has shown little enthusiasm for the idea. Though he’s content to let states strictly limit abortion, he’s attuned to how unpopular overturning Roe v. Wade was outside of his base."

"Thinking about Project 2025 as simply a laundry list of management tweaks and policy proposals is a mistake. The authors set out to turbocharge the Trump administration and reshape the executive branch, but their ambitions are much bigger. Their goal is to transform American society in their image. So far, everything is going according to plan."

David A. Graham