#Don Moynihan

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Don Moynihan at The UnPopulist (10.06.2024):

A standard step in the authoritarian playbook is to secure power by taking control of the bureaucracy, especially the national security components of the state. Former President Donald Trump tried to do this at the end of his administration and has made this plan absolutely central to his second-term vision. When Trump left office, the threats to democracy posed by Schedule F—his plan to reclassify hundreds of thousands of federal employees into political appointees he could fire at will—seemed remote. That is no longer true now that he has a viable chance of being reelected. A chief lesson that Trump and his supporters learned was that they failed because they were unable to treat federal employees like contestants on The Apprentice, to be fired at Trump’s whims. In a second term, they have a plan to fix this problem that even if implemented haphazardly could generate extraordinary damage to the quality of American government and the stability of our democracy. As Robert Shea, a public management expert who served in the George W. Bush administration, noted, Schedule F would create “an army of suck-ups.”

What is Schedule F?

Schedule F is an executive order that was signed by Trump, rescinded by President Joe Biden at the start of his administration, and which Trump has promised to resurrect (The “F” part is a reference to different classes of political appointees; there is already a Schedule A-E). Schedule F gives the president the power to reclassify career civil servants who have some sort of policy advisory aspect to their job into political appointees.

What does this mean? There are basically two classes of workers in government: career civil servants who work in government for the long-haul and are selected based on a non-political process, and political appointees. The first can only be fired for cause, i.e., poor performance or violating rules. The second are selected by the president and serve at his or her pleasure. In other words, political appointees can be pushed out for any reason the president deems worthy. From the perspective of career officials, under Schedule F they could be involuntarily reassigned from career status to at-will, providing them with much less job security. These leading advocates for Schedule F during Trump’s term—who proposed that at least 50,000 officials could be reclassified just as a first step—include James Sherk, who joined the administration from the Heritage Foundation and now works for the America First Policy Institute; Russ Vought, the former Heritage Foundation official who ran the Office of Management and Budget for Trump and now leads the Center for Renewing America; and Paul Dans, the Trump official who led Project 2025. With support from the Heritage Foundation and the Conservative Partnership Institute, all have been involved in planning for a second Trump term in which Schedule F would feature prominently.

The vague nature of the policy means that the upper limit of the order would be to convert hundreds of thousands of officials. There are about 2.1 million civil servants, and about 4,000 political appointee slots. So, converting tens of thousands, or maybe a few hundred thousand officials, into appointee slots might not seem like a big deal. But the U.S. is already an outlier when it comes to the number of political appointees relative to other countries, and the power those appointees hold, which tend to be the top leadership roles in government. Other countries do not embrace the degree of politicization the U.S. already has because research shows that more politicized systems are less effective in governing: they are associated with less stability, lower performance, and lower responsiveness to the public.

There is not a pressing need for more appointees; Trump never came close to filling his 4,000 slots, and had an extraordinary degree of turnover among those he did appoint. Instead, the function of Schedule F is to politicize more and more of the government and to force federal officials to worry that they will lose their job if they uphold their oath to the Constitution in the face of Trump’s demands.

[...]

Undermining Democratic Accountability

For Trump and his advisors, the purpose of Schedule F is to avoid accountability, not to embrace it. If he wins, Trump would be ineligible to run for office again, and so there is no electoral incentive to temper his actions in his second term. (He may ignore such constitutional constraints, of course, at which point Schedule F would be even more explicitly serving authoritarian ends.) His complaints during his presidency about the operation of the administrative state were usually not about responsiveness to specific policy goals, but frequently that they would not facilitate illegal behavior. In The New Yorker, Jonathan Blitzer reported that a former senior official in the Trump administration told him, “Inside the White House ... Trump was constantly enraged that his Cabinet wouldn’t break the law for him.”

Trump’s first impeachment offers a Rosetta Stone for the democratic risks that Schedule F would bring. That proceeding featured Trump seeking to use his public office of the president, and taxpayer dollars, for partisan and corrupt political purposes. The means of doing so—withholding aid to Ukraine in the hope of gaining dirt about his political opponent—was both illegal (violating the Impoundment Act) and unconstitutional. Trump political appointees were informed of this by career officials at the Department of Defense and the Office of Management and Budget. But they were ignored as the former covered up the illegal action and invented a secret legal rationale to justify it. When the scandal was exposed, Trump forbade his appointees from testifying before Congress. Most of what was learned about the illegal actions and cover-up came from career officials. After the impeachment, Trump punished those officials to the greatest degree, removing them from their positions, blocking promotions, or demoting them. With Schedule F, he simply would have fired them, as he did at an unprecedented rate with inspectors general, the officials who are explicitly tasked with providing accountability within agencies. Few if any would have had the courage to testify and expose Trump’s illegal behaviors. Remarkably, the Project 2025 training videos are actually instructing future Republican political appointees about how to evade accountability by excluding career staff from meetings and avoiding paper trails. Take Tom Jones, a Republican opposition researcher who runs the American Accountability Foundation, an ironically named organization given that its head is seeking to subvert formal mechanisms of accountability. “You’re probably better off going down to the canteen, getting a cup of coffee, talking it through and making the decision, as opposed to sending him an email and creating a thread that Accountable.US or one of those other groups is going to come back and seek.” Jones has already been scouring the social media posts of career officials, creating an enemies list of those who have expressed views hostile to Trump and should be fired via Schedule F if he returns to office.

Don Moynihan wrote in The UnPopulist that Donald Trump (and Project 2025)’s deranged Schedule F policy will wreck the civil services and turn it into a political spoils system.

[thatstormygeek]

First, these are examples of backlash, of a post George Floyd politics. After the outrage associated with the death of Floyd, it seemed for a passing moment that American institutions in government, business and academia were paying real attention to historical problems. The most meaningful policy result, however, has been to mobilize the right wing to both mischaracterize such efforts and go after institutional nods to fairness they previously saw as unattainable, such as DEI offices. Contrary to what you have been told about wokeness run amok on campus, it is now much more professionally risky for scholars to study topics related to race, or to be public facing scholars if they do so, than it was before 2020. Second, the goal is to feed a culture of fear within research institutions. Knowing that you are going to be placed in the crosshairs by a bad faith antagonist is intimidating. Rufo published his accusations against Gay, and then Cross, in City Journal, a media outlet of the right wing Manhattan Institute. This tactic reflects an ongoing pattern of a new right wing media seeking to intimidate and cancel scholars that do not share their views, and especially those who study race. If you do not study this topic, or are not a scholar of color, or are not critical of right wing ideas, you can stay safe in the academic cocoon. Which is what they want.

Third, the message is that the topic of race, and the Black scholars that disproportionately pursue the topic, simply do not belong in elite institutions. The mode and nature of the targeting feeds into prejudices, clearly felt by those doing the targeting. On BlueSky, Jamelle Bouie wrote “the key thing here is that "plagiarism" here means "being a black person in a prestigious position"" The mere presence of scholars of color is taken as clear evidence of a sign a decline of institutional merit (compared to the good old days, when you could get a job based on the strength of a letter of recommendation from a mentor at an elite institution).

[mourning-again-in-america]

Nixon's cabinet was absolutely wack. Elliot Richardson, known as the Richardson of Ruckelshaus and Richardson of the Saturday Night Massacre, was Secretary of Health Education and Welfare, til he got moved to SecDef for five months before becoming Attorney General before the Massacre. Oh, and he was Secretary of Commerce for Ford.

Meanwhile Caspar Weinberger, who you know from Reagan's years, was FTC chair, head of Office of Management and Budget, and Sec of HEW.

The man also had George Romney in Housing and Urban Development and HW Bush as Ambassador to the UN!

[sarkos]

As Musk brings his staff to the Office of Personnel Management, senior officials' access to data systems is being revoked. "We have no visibility into what they are doing with the computer and data systems," one of the officials said. "That is creating great concern. There is no oversight. It creates real cybersecurity and hacking implications." One key database, the officials cited, is Enterprise Human Resources Integration, which has "all of the birthdates, Social Security numbers, appraisals, home addresses, pay grades and lengths of service of government workers." Reuters spoke with University of Michigan Professor Don Moynihan, at the Ford School of Public Policy, who warned th at there doesn't seem to be any congressional oversight over Trump and Musk. "This makes it much harder for anyone outside Musk's inner circle at OPM to know what's going on," Moynihan said. The officials said they still have the power to log on and access their emails but there's no access to the massive datasets they managed. Musk demands that his team work overnight and 80-hour weeks to find all of the necessary cuts, violating federal labor laws unless a worker is paid overtime. However, it's unclear whether Musk or American taxpayers are paying those workers. Musk had sofa beds brought into the OPM office on Jan. 20, the day Trump took office, to ensure his personal team could work non-stop. The area can only be accessed with a special security badge or a security escort, an OPM employee said.

'Great concern': Musk aides reportedly lock career civil servants out of computer systems - Raw Story

[mariacallous]

Centibillionaire Elon Musk’s takeover of the former US Digital Service—now the United States DOGE Service—has been widely publicized and sanctioned by one of President Donald Trump’s many executive orders. But WIRED reporting shows that Musk’s influence extends even further, and into an even more consequential government agency.

Sources within the federal government tell WIRED that the highest ranks of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM)—essentially the human resources function for the entire federal government—are now controlled by people with connections to Musk and to the tech industry. Among them is a person who, according to an online résumé, was set to start college last fall.

Scott Kupor, a managing partner at the powerful investment firm Andreessen Horowitz, stands as Trump’s nominee to run the OPM. But already in place, according to sources, are a variety of people who seem ready to carry out Musk’s mission of cutting staff and disrupting the government.

Amanda Scales is, as has been reported, the new chief of staff at the OPM. She formerly worked in talent for xAI, Musk’s artificial intelligence company, according to her LinkedIn. Before that, she was part of the talent and operations team at Human Capital, a venture firm with investments in the defense tech startup Anduril and the political betting platform Kalshi; before that, she worked for years at Uber. Her placement in this key role, experts believe, seems part of a broader pattern of the traditionally apolitical OPM being converted to use as a political tool.

“I don't think it's alarmist to say there's a much more sophisticated plan to monitor and enforce loyalty than there was in the first term,” says Don Moynihan, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan.

Got a Tip?

Are you a current or former employee with the Office of Personnel Management or another government agency impacted by Elon Musk? We’d like to hear from you. Using a nonwork phone or computer, contact Vittoria Elliott at vittoria_elliott@wired.com or securely at velliott88.18 on Signal.

Sources say that Riccardo Biasini, formerly an engineer at Tesla and most recently director of operations for the Las Vegas Loop at the Boring Company, Musk’s tunnel-building operation, is also at the OPM as a senior adviser to the director. (Steve Davis, the CEO of the Boring Company, is rumored to be advising Musk on cuts to be made via DOGE and was integral in Musk’s gutting of Twitter, now X, after his takeover of the company in 2022.)

According to the same sources, other people at the top of the new OPM food chain include two people with apparent software engineering backgrounds, whom WIRED is not naming because of their ages. One, a senior adviser to the director, is a 21-year-old whose online résumé touts his work for Palantir, the government contractor and analytics firm cofounded by billionaire Peter Thiel, who is its chair. (The former CEO of PayPal and a longtime Musk associate, Thiel is a Trump supporter who helped bankroll the 2022 Senate campaign of his protégé, Vice President JD Vance.) The other, who reports directly to Scales, graduated from high school in 2024, according to a mirrored copy of an online résumé and his high school’s student magazine; he lists jobs as a camp counselor and a bicycle mechanic among his professional experiences, as well as a summer role at Neuralink, Musk’s brain-computer interface company.

Among the new highers-up at the OPM is Noah Peters, an attorney whose LinkedIn boasts of his work in litigation representing the National Rifle Association and who has written for right-wing outlets like the Daily Caller and the Federalist; he is also now a senior adviser to the director. According to metadata associated with a file on the OPM website, Peters authored a January 27 memo that went out under acting OPM director Charles Ezell’s name describing how the department would be implementing one of Trump’s executive orders, “Restoring Accountability to Policy-Influencing Positions Within the Federal Workforce.” This has to do with what’s sometimes known as Schedule F—a plan to recategorize many civil service jobs as political appointees, meaning they would be tied to the specific agenda of an administration rather than viewed as career government workers. The order would essentially allow for certain career civil servants to be removed in favor of Trump loyalists by classifying them as political appointees, a key part of the Project 2025 plan for remaking the government.

“I think on the tech side, the concern is potentially the use of AI to try and engage in large-scale searches of people's job descriptions to try and identify who would be identified for Schedule F reclassification,” says Moynihan.

Other top political appointees include McLaurine Pinover, a former communications director for Republican congressman Joe Wilson and deputy communications director for Republican congressman Michael McCaul, and Joanna Wischer, a Trump campaign speechwriter.

“OPM is not a very politicized organization,” says Steven Kelman, a professor emeritus at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. “My guess is that typically, in the past, there have been only one or maybe two political appointees in all of OPM. All the rest are career. So this seems like a very political heavy presence in an organization that is not very political.”

Another OPM memo, concerning the government’s new return-to-office mandate, appears, according to metadata, also to have been authored by someone other than Ezell: James Sherk, previously at the America First Policy Institute and author of an op-ed advocating for the president to be able to fire bureaucrats. Formerly a special assistant to the president during Trump’s first term, he is now a part of the White House Domestic Policy Council.

The return-to-office policy, according to the November Wall Street Journal op-ed authored by Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, is explicitly geared toward forcing the attrition of federal employees.

Last week, many federal workers received test emails from the email address HR@opm.gov. In a lawsuit filed last night, plaintiffs allege that a new email list started by the Trump administration may be compromising the data of federal employees.

“At a broadest level, the concern is that technologists are playing a role to monitor employees and to target those who will be downsized,” says Moynihan. “It is difficult in the federal government to actually evaluate who is performing well or performing poorly. So doing it on some sort of mass automated scale where you think using some sort of data analysis or AI would automate that process, I think, is an invitation to make errors.”

Last week, federal employees across the government received emails encouraging them to turn in colleagues who they believed to be working on diversity, equity, inclusion, and access initiatives (DEIA) to the OPM via the email address DEIAtruth@opm.gov.

“This reminded me,” says Kelman, “of the Soviet Stalinism of turning in your friends to the government.”

The OPM did not immediately respond to a request for comment, nor did the people whom sources say now sit atop the bureaucracy.

“I am not an alarmist person,” says Kelman. “I do think that some of the things being described here are very troubling.”

[marvelsmostwanted]

Since Elon Musk apparently really does not want their names out there, here are the names of the 19 to 25 year olds working with him to illegally access public information and dismantle federal agencies. They are actively aiding what has been called “a hostile takeover of the machinery of governments by the richest man in the world.”

This is not “doxxing” or exposing them, btw. We deserve to know who is working for and with our own federal government. Government should be as transparent as possible, and we absolutely deserve to know exactly who is accessing our information without our permission.

From Wired:

The [DOGE] engineers are Akash Bobba, Edward Coristine, Luke Farritor, Gautier Cole Killian, Gavin Kliger, and Ethan Shaotran. None have responded to requests for comment from WIRED. Representatives from OPM, GSA, and DOGE did not respond to requests for comment.

The six men are one part of the broader project of Musk allies assuming key government positions. Already, Musk’s lackeys—including more senior staff from xAI, Tesla, and the Boring Company—have taken control of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and General Services Administration (GSA), and have gained access to the Treasury Department’s payment system, potentially allowing him access to a vast range of sensitive information about tens of millions of citizens, businesses, and more. On Sunday, CNN reported that DOGE personnel attempted to improperly access classified information and security systems at the US Agency for International Development and that top USAID security officials who thwarted the attempt were subsequently put on leave. The Associated Press reported that DOGE personnel had indeed accessed classified material.

“What we're seeing is unprecedented in that you have these actors who are not really public officials gaining access to the most sensitive data in government,” says Don Moynihan, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan. “We really have very little eyes on what's going on. Congress has no ability to really intervene and monitor what's happening because these aren't really accountable public officials. So this feels like a hostile takeover of the machinery of governments by the richest man in the world.”

Additional engineers mentioned by Wired include:

- “An engineer named Nikhil Rajpal is representing Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) task force at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), according to multiple sources.” (source)

- “A 25-year-old engineer named Marko Elez, who previously worked for two Elon Musk companies, has direct access to Treasury Department systems responsible for nearly all payments made by the US government” (source)

*Update: Marko Elez resigned due to racist posts he made resurfacing in the Wall Street Journal. To give you an idea of what the people are like that Elon is hiring for DOGE (tw: super racist!)

"You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity," [Marko Elez’s] account wrote in September. "Normalize Indian hate," a separate post from that month read.

In July of last year, the account posted: "Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool."

In other posts, from December, the account pushed for repealing the Civil Rights Act and shared: "I just want a eugenic immigration policy, is that too much to ask.” - NPR

That guy had direct access to Americans’ information. Cool cool cool cool

[whatwhiteswillneverknow]

Elon Musk has taken over two government agendas: USAID, the main U.S. humanitarian aid agency, and OPM, which oversees 2.2M government employees. He's locked employees out of their computer systems and, with help from young engineers, has accessed the Treasury Department's payment systems. Professor Don Moynihan at the Ford School of Public Policy, University of Michigan, said Americans are witnessing 'an extraordinary centralization of power in someone who lacks a top-level security clearance and has not been subject to any Senate confirmation process.

Original link:

[juanabaloo]

There's a Treasury coup going on, led by Musk. The Nazi Republicans are fine with this and the legacy (traditional) media doesn't seem to care. (It start Friday sometime. Friday Jan 31st, 2025) I'll link to the source, but I wanna include the full article from Wired in text here.

They have identified the 6 engineers (supposedly they are engineers) who are part of this coup. These people have names, they are not nameless shadows. May they never know a moment of peace in their godforsaken lives.

[Personally I have zero issue with them being young. The real problem is their lack of experience and training with confidential data, lack of security clearance, and them participating in a fucking coup.]

Vittoria Elliott Additional reporting by Zoë Schiffer and Tim Marchman Wired.com Feb 2, 2025 2:02 PM

The Young, Inexperienced Engineers Aiding Elon Musk’s Government Takeover

Engineers between 19 and 24, most linked to Musk’s companies, are playing a key role as he seizes control of federal infrastructure.

The engineers are Akash Bobba, Edward Coristine, Luke Farritor, Gautier Cole Killian (also known as Cole Killian), Gavin Kliger, and Ethan Shaotran. None have responded to requests for comment from WIRED. Representatives from OPM, GSA, and DOGE did not respond to requests for comment.

(Source: Wired.com)

Full article under the cut, including some initial details like university and internship jobs for some of the six.

Elon Musk’s takeover of federal government infrastructure is ongoing, and at the center of things is a coterie of engineers who are barely out of—and in at least one case, purportedly still in—college. Most have connections to Musk, and at least two have connections to Musk’s longtime associate Peter Thiel, a cofounder and chair of the analytics firm and government contractor Palantir who has long expressed opposition to democracy.

WIRED has identified six young men—all apparently between the ages of 19 and 24, according to public databases, their online presences, and other records—who have little to no government experience and are now playing critical roles in Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) project, tasked by executive order with “modernizing Federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.” The engineers all hold nebulous job titles within DOGE, and at least one appears to be working as a volunteer.

The engineers are Akash Bobba, Edward Coristine, Luke Farritor, Gautier Cole Killian, Gavin Kliger, and Ethan Shaotran. None have responded to requests for comment from WIRED. Representatives from OPM, GSA, and DOGE did not respond to requests for comment.

Already, Musk’s lackeys have taken control of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and General Services Administration (GSA), and have gained access to the Treasury Department’s payment system, potentially allowing him access to a vast range of sensitive information about tens of millions of citizens, businesses, and more. On Sunday, CNN reported that DOGE personnel attempted to improperly access classified information and security systems at the US Agency for International Development and that top USAID security officials who thwarted the attempt were subsequently put on leave. The Associated Press reported that DOGE personnel had indeed accessed classified material.

“What we're seeing is unprecedented in that you have these actors who are not really public officials gaining access to the most sensitive data in government,” says Don Moynihan, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan. “We really have very little eyes on what's going on. Congress has no ability to really intervene and monitor what's happening because these aren't really accountable public officials. So this feels like a hostile takeover of the machinery of governments by the richest man in the world.”

Bobba has attended UC Berkeley, where he was in the prestigious Management, Entrepreneurship, and Technology program. According to a copy of his now-deleted LinkedIn obtained by WIRED, Bobba was an investment engineering intern at the Bridgewater Associates hedge fund as of last spring and was previously an intern at both Meta and Palantir. He was a featured guest on a since-deleted podcast with Aman Manazir, an engineer who interviews engineers about how they landed their dream jobs, where he talked about those experiences last June.

Coristine, as WIRED previously reported, appears to have recently graduated from high school and to have been enrolled at Northeastern University. According to a copy of his résumé obtained by WIRED, he spent three months at Neuralink, Musk’s brain-computer interface company, last summer.e [e seems to be a typo]

Both Bobba and Coristine are listed in internal OPM records reviewed by WIRED as “experts” at OPM, reporting directly to Amanda Scales, its new chief of staff. Scales previously worked on talent for xAI, Musk’s artificial intelligence company, and as part of Uber’s talent acquisition team, per LinkedIn. Employees at GSA tell WIRED that Coristine has appeared on calls where workers were made to go over code they had written and justify their jobs. WIRED previously reported that Coristine was added to a call with GSA staff members using a nongovernment Gmail address. Employees were not given an explanation as to who he was or why he was on the calls.

Farritor, who per sources has a working GSA email address, is a former intern at SpaceX, Musk’s space company, and currently a Thiel Fellow after, according to his LinkedIn, dropping out of the University of Nebraska—Lincoln. While in school, he was part of an award-winning team that deciphered portions of an ancient Greek scroll.

Kliger, whose LinkedIn lists him as a special adviser to the director of OPM and who is listed in internal records reviewed by WIRED as a special adviser to the director for information technology, attended UC Berkeley until 2020; most recently, according to his LinkedIn, he worked for the AI company Databricks. His Substack includes a post titled “The Curious Case of Matt Gaetz: How the Deep State Destroys Its Enemies,” as well as another titled “Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense: The Warrior Washington Fears.”

Killian, also known as Cole Killian, has a working email associated with DOGE, where he is currently listed as a volunteer, according to internal records reviewed by WIRED. According to a copy of his now-deleted résumé obtained by WIRED, he attended McGill University through at least 2021 and graduated high school in 2019. An archived copy of his now-deleted personal website indicates that he worked as an engineer at Jump Trading, which specializes in algorithmic and high-frequency financial trades.

Shaotran told Business Insider in September that he was a senior at Harvard studying computer science and also the founder of an OpenAI-backed startup, Energize AI. Shaotran was the runner-up in a hackathon held by xAI, Musk’s AI company. In the Business Insider article, Shaotran says he received a $100,000 grant from OpenAI to build his scheduling assistant, Spark.

“To the extent these individuals are exercising what would otherwise be relatively significant managerial control over two very large agencies that deal with very complex topics,” says Nick Bednar, a professor at University of Minnesota’s school of law, “it is very unlikely they have the expertise to understand either the law or the administrative needs that surround these agencies.”

Sources tell WIRED that Bobba, Coristine, Farritor, and Shaotran all currently have working GSA emails and A-suite level clearance at the GSA, which means that they work out of the agency’s top floor and have access to all physical spaces and IT systems, according a source with knowledge of the GSA’s clearance protocols. The source, who spoke to WIRED on the condition of anonymity because they fear retaliation, says they worry that the new teams could bypass the regular security clearance protocols to access the agency’s sensitive compartmented information facility, as the Trump administration has already granted temporary security clearances to unvetted people.

This is in addition to Coristine and Bobba being listed as “experts” working at OPM. Bednar says that while staff can be loaned out between agencies for special projects or to work on issues that might cross agency lines, it’s not exactly common practice.

“This is consistent with the pattern of a lot of tech executives who have taken certain roles of the administration,” says Bednar. “This raises concerns about regulatory capture and whether these individuals may have preferences that don’t serve the American public or the federal government.”

Additional reporting by Zoë Schiffer and Tim Marchman.

[sobreiromecanico]

Leituras da Semana (#41 / 18 Nov 2024)

People don't trust authority, and yes, it is ironic that this often leads them towards authoritarian figures.

Ainda no seguimento das eleições americanas - apesar de o ponto não ser esse -, Ed Zitron escreve no seu blogue pessoal um artigo muito interessante sobre o estado da comunicação social tradicional no contexto da rot economy que afligue o sector tecnológico (que se tornou omnipresente nas nossas vidas). Tendo sido jornalista, e em particular jornalista na área das tecnologias de informação, é um tema que me diz imenso apesar de essa vida me estar hoje demasiado distante.

The truth is that the media is more afraid of bias than they are of misleading their readers.

Isto transporta-me para os primeiros dias do meu curso há quase 22 anos; mais especificamente, para a aula introdutória de Teorias do Jornalismo com o professor Mário Mesquita, que perguntou aos caloiros quais eram os valores pelos quais se devia reger a profissão de Jornalista. Praticamente todos nós mencionámos "objectividade", e foi com surpresa que o ouvimos dizer que esquecêssemos a objectividade: é uma quimera, um algo inalcançável, pois a nossa visão do mundo irá sempre reflectir-se nas nossas descrições desse mundo; que enquanto jornalistas devíamos ser rigorosos, mas não necessariamente objectivos. Lembro-me disso com alguma frequência: sim, todas as histórias têm dois lados, mas raramente esses lados são equivalentes; cobri-los como tal é uma péssima prática.

Não muito longe do mesmo tema, e até porque me irritou ouvir o Ricardo Araújo Pereira no Governo Sombra a repetir pela segunda semana a diatribe da expressão latinx ou a citar o artigo da Maureen-fucking-Dowd no NYT. É impressionante como mesmo as pessas mais inteligentes podem ficar presas às suas embirrações e aos seus preconceitos: um amigo que muito estimo anda numa cruzada contra a "linguagem inclusiva" e a "cultura de cancelamento", alheio a tudo o mais que se passa. Caminhamos a passos largos para um novo fascismo, que de novo pouco ou nada tem, e estarão preocupados, o RAP e o meu amigo, por algumas pessoas anunciarem os seus pronomes. Enfim, resmungo terminado, voltemos ao artigo: no seu Substack, Don Moynihan desmonta a ideia propagada por muita gente na imprensa dita de referência de que Kamala Harris terá perdido as eleições por causa do foco nas ditas políticas identitárias, quando na verdade esse foco esteve... na campanha rival, mas não como habitualmente pensamos nelas (ou não como a imprensa as comunica). É uma perspectiva muito interessante e que merece ser considerada.

[azspot]

Walz faces attack from Republicans for his support for LGBTQ policies, but that support reflects his experience as a teacher. Schools, and their teachers, communicate which students are welcome and valued, and which are not. He extended that sense of inclusion to gay and lesbian students as a teacher. He was the faculty sponsor of his school’s first gay-straight alliance in 1999. To give a sense of how much of a stretch this was, this was three years after President Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act, enshrining marriage as between women and men. Because he had seen instances of bullying of gay kids, Walz later said that it was important that the sponsor to be “the football coach, who was the soldier and was straight and was married.” (Walz also served for decades in the National Guard, and in 2006, was the highest ranking enlisted soldier to serve in Congress).

Don Moynihan

[disneybuddy]

I HAVE THIS GREAT NEW IDEA FOR A CARTOON SHOW!

I have this great new idea for a cartoon show! It's called Cereal Town! It's about a town where cereal mascots live and do CRAAAAAAAAAAZY stuff! They say out of character things! The main joke is that these iconic characters are acting like deranged out of character lunatics! But it's a total love letter to cereal mascots, trust me, it totally is!

The show will be animated in Adobe Flash, and all the characters have been redesigned. Here's some concept art I whipped up!

EVERYONE's gonna be there! Even the really obscure ones, 'cause this is a love letter to cereal mascots! Here's all the characters that'll show up:

Tony the Tiger (voiced by Paul F. Thompkins) - He's a million times dumber now! Your typical sitcom dimwitted dad, like Homer Simpson or Peter Griffin!

Mrs. Tony (voiced by some random YouTube/TikTok celebrity) - Tony's wife who's a total nag and considered way out of his league (not that you can tell with the art style)!

Tony Jr. and Antoinette (voiced by Ben Schwartz and Jenny Slate) - Tony's kids! They're basically Dipper and Mabel from Gravity Falls but they're tigers!

Trix the Rabbit (voiced by Johnny Galecki) - He's addicted to Trix! Get it? Trix = drugs! And drug addiction is HILARIOUS, right?!

Sonny the Cuckoo Bird (voiced by Will Forte) - Since we gave the "addicted to their cereal" shtick to Trix the Rabbit, he's now a neuronic Woody Allen parody who collects decorative plates!

Lucky the Leprechaun (voiced by Flula Borg) - He's not really a leprechaun now! He's just a weirdo who THINKS he's a leprechaun! He's not even Irish anymore, he's German!

Toucan Sam (voiced by Jillian Bell) - He's a girl now, because otherwise there won't be enough female characters in the show! And she's also a stereotypical valley girl obsessed with her hair and clothes and self-conscious about her big nose!

Count Chocula (voiced by Fred Armisen) - He's now a stereotypical scatterbrained geezer who complains about those dang kids and their newly-fangled contraptions or whatever!

Frankenberry (voiced by Thomas Lennon) - He's a loser who lives in his creator's basement and goes on the internet a lot! He's also obsessed with science fiction movies!

Boo Berry (voiced by Mindy Kaling) - He's a girl now, too! She's Sonny's girlfriend (or rather, GHOULfriend, aren't I so clever?) who is really smart until she suddenly isn't because the joke demands for her to not be smart!

Dig 'Em the Frog (voiced by another random YouTube/TikTok celebrity) - He's a musician! He was once part of a band, but decided to go solo! And he's obsessed with pumpkin spice lattes and drinks them even when it's not autumn!

Sugar Bear (voiced by Bobby Moynihan) - He's Dig 'Em's husband!

Snap, Crackle and Pop (voiced by Jason Mantzoukas, Kimiko Glenn, and Daveed Diggs) - They're classmates of Tony Jr. and Antoinette who are always up to some zany scheme to get out of class!

Chip the Wolf (voiced by Beck Bennett) - He's the teacher at Tony Jr. and Antoinette's school, but he's also secretly a secret agent! Because shut up, that's why!

Cap'n Crunch (voiced by David Tennant) - He's the Mayor of Cereal Town, but he's incompetent! LOL!

Wendell the Baker from Cinnamon Toast Crunch (voiced by Harvey Guillen) - He's a baker! So... basically, he's exactly the same, except he's voiced by Harvey Guillen now!

Fruity Yummy Mummy (voiced by Lizzo) - She's Frankenberry's ex-girlfriend! She's ALSO considered way out of his league!

Fruit Brute (voiced by Don Cheadle) - He's Count Chocula's pet dog! Personality-wise, he's basically Brian Griffin!

Sunny the Raisin Bran Sun (voiced by Stephanie Beatriz) - He's a girl now too! She's the sun, but she's also a citizen of Cereal Town! How WACKY!

Buzz Bee only has dialogue in one episode, where it's revealed that he's voiced by Dennis Haybert! That's funny, right?! RIGHT?!

Did I mention that this is a love letter to cereal mascots?! Because it IS!

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Don Moynihan at Can We Still Govern?

The Tocquevillian view that civil society, including it’s associations, are essential bulwarks to protect democracy is such well-worn truism as to be incontestable.

Or so you would have thought. But we live in an age where serious people, serious advocates of free speech mind you, are very anxious to shut down such speech they disagree with. They are not just happy to lobby government to use its power to shut down such speech, but are entirely indifferent to grotesque hypocrisies as they use their own speech rights to silence others. Trump and his supporters are already threatening civil society with investigations, lawsuits and intimidation. In the aftermath of student protests, leaders of higher education are increasingly retreating to a position of “institutional neutrality.” Studied indifference to the issues of the day makes a great deal of sense for those seeking to manage organizational reputation and avoid blame, but it is a less than inspiring vision as higher education as a set of institutions willing to speak truth to power.

The right wing wants to go further, and is now targeting professional academic associations from making public statements. The American Enterprise Institute is leading the charge. A recent report presents it as a scandalous that many academic associations have made some sort of statements about race, affirmative action, climate change, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Israel-Hamas, or immigration. To be more precise, AEI views such actions as problematic because “these statements almost uniformly reflect progressive orthodoxy” and it calls on government to not allow public funds to allow people to join professional associations.

This idea might seem outlandish, but it was featured in some of the standard right wing locations, such as The College Fix, The Washington Examiner, and The Wall Street Journal. And we are in a moment when Republican officials are looking for ideas to undermine academic freedom. So, if you are an academic, or just a citizen uncomfortable with the idea of silencing some very specific associations because of the content of their speech, you should be worried about this.

I want to address this attack on professional associations on three levels. First, the basic logic that AEI is proposing is simply false. Second, it is not based on any true defensible principle beyond “free speech for me, but not for thee.” It is a call for government to target speech by associations that AEI disagrees with. And third, it is massively hypocritical. AEI, and other organizations trying to silence professional associations are doing precisely what they say should be forbidden: taking taxpayer dollars to engage in issue advocacy.

[...] First, academic associations have professional expertise on certain topics. And because those associations are centered on scholarly values, that expertise is usually anchored in legitimate scientific values. You can find exceptions, of course, but when the American Political Science Association talks about democracy, or when environmental associations weigh in on climate change issues, you should probably listen to them. On their domains of expertise, they are more likely to be credible relative to AEI or other associations that present themselves as engaging in research, but whose activities are heavily tilted by an ideological lens. [...]

Second, academic associations are representative organizations. They are typically run by elected officers who seek to represent the views and interests of their membership. The structures of our institutions is inherently more democratic than, say, the structure of the AEI or other think tanks, which are necessarily more responsive to donors and partisans. We hear from individual members who express concerns on certain issues. It is incredibly rare for an association to engage in a public statement without prior pressure from their membership, or at least without the knowledge that the vast majority of their members share the expressed views. Again, this is perfectly Tocquevillian.

In some cases, the concerns members raise are not about abstract political values but about how public policies directly affect them. For example, members of an association might raise a concern about hosting events in states they can be prosecuted for going to the bathroom, or where they cannot count on reliable health care if their pregnancy runs into trouble. Academic associations are increasingly global, and US immigration policies can directly affect their ability to participate in their profession. For example, AEI singled out the American Statistical Association for raising concerns about President Trump’s travel bans from majority Muslim countries. Is this unreasonable? Not really if you consider that “one out of nine ASA members resides outside the U.S.” This is a straightforward case where associations are drawing attention to how a policy decision directly and negatively affects its membership. After all, what is the point of being a member of a professional association that refuses to represent you?

Don Moynihan with a banger of a piece on academic freedom.

[caffeineandviolins]

FOR THOSE WHO CANNOT READ THE ARTICLE: PART ONE

Elon Musk’s takeover of federal government infrastructure is ongoing, and at the center of things is a coterie of engineers who are barely out of—and in at least one case, purportedly still in—college. Most have connections to Musk, and at least two have connections to Musk’s longtime associate Peter Thiel, a cofounder and chair of the analytics firm and government contractor Palantir who has long expressed opposition to democracy.WIRED has identified six young men—all apparently between the ages of 19 and 24, according to public databases, their online presences, and other records—who have little to no government experience and are now playing critical roles in Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) project, tasked by executive order with “modernizing Federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.” The engineers all hold nebulous job titles within DOGE, and at least one appears to be working as a volunteer.

The engineers are Akash Bobba, Edward Coristine, Luke Farritor, Gautier Cole Killian, Gavin Kliger, and Ethan Shaotran. None have responded to requests for comment from WIRED. Representatives from OPM, GSA, and DOGE did not respond to requests for comment.The six men are one part of the broader project of Musk allies assuming key government positions. Already, Musk’s lackeys—including more senior staff from xAI, Tesla, and the Boring Company—have taken control of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and General Services Administration (GSA), and have gained access to the Treasury Department’s payment system, potentially allowing him access to a vast range of sensitive information about tens of millions of citizens, businesses, and more. On Sunday, CNN reported that DOGE personnel attempted to improperly access classified information and security systems at the US Agency for International Development and that top USAID security officials who thwarted the attempt were subsequently put on leave. The Associated Press reported that DOGE personnel had indeed accessed classified material.

What we're seeing is unprecedented in that you have these actors who are not really public officials gaining access to the most sensitive data in government,” says Don Moynihan, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan. “We really have very little eyes on what's going on. Congress has no ability to really intervene and monitor what's happening because these aren't really accountable public officials. So this feels like a hostile takeover of the machinery of governments by the richest man in the world.”Bobba has attended UC Berkeley, where he was in the prestigious Management, Entrepreneurship, and Technology program. According to a copy of his now-deleted LinkedIn obtained by WIRED, Bobba was an investment engineering intern at the Bridgewater Associates hedge fund as of last spring and was previously an intern at both Meta and Palantir. He was a featured guest on a since-deleted podcast with Aman Manazir, an engineer who interviews engineers about how they landed their dream jobs, where he talked about those experiences last June.

Coristine, as WIRED previously reported, appears to have recently graduated from high school and to have been enrolled at Northeastern University. According to a copy of his résumé obtained by WIRED, he spent three months at Neuralink, Musk’s brain-computer interface company, last summer.Both Bobba and Coristine are listed in internal OPM records reviewed by WIRED as “experts” at OPM, reporting directly to Amanda Scales, its new chief of staff. Scales previously worked on talent for xAI, Musk’s artificial intelligence company, and as part of Uber’s talent acquisition team, per LinkedIn. Employees at GSA tell WIRED that Coristine has appeared on calls where workers were made to go over code they had written and justify their jobs. WIRED previously reported that Coristine was added to a call with GSA staff members using a nongovernment Gmail address. Employees were not given an explanation as to who he was or why he was on the calls.

Farritor, who per sources has a working GSA email address, is a former intern at SpaceX, Musk’s space company, and currently a Thiel Fellow after, according to his LinkedIn, dropping out of the University of Nebraska—Lincoln. While in school, he was part of an award-winning team that deciphered portions of an ancient Greek scroll.

Elon Musk’s takeover of federal government infrastructure is ongoing, and at the center of things is a coterie of engineers who are barely out of—and in at least one case, purportedly still in—college. Most have connections to Musk, and at least two have connections to Musk’s longtime associate Peter Thiel, a cofounder and chair of the analytics firm and government contractor Palantir who has long expressed opposition to democracy.WIRED has identified six young men—all apparently between the ages of 19 and 24, according to public databases, their online presences, and other records—who have little to no government experience and are now playing critical roles in Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) project, tasked by executive order with “modernizing Federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.” The engineers all hold nebulous job titles within DOGE, and at least one appears to be working as a volunteer.

Additional reporting by Zoë Schiffer and Tim Marchman.

It should be accurate, but if possible, please compare with the original as I used my last free article to copy-paste! Spread the word!

These men just stole the personal information of everyone in America AND control the Treasury. Link to article.

Akash Bobba

Edward Coristine

Luke Farritor

Gautier Cole Killian

Gavin Kliger

Ethan Shaotran

Spread their names!

[pscottm]

Exclusive: Musk aides lock government workers out of computer systems at US agency, sources say

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/musk-aides-lock-government-workers-out-computer-systems-us-agency-sources-say-2025-01-31/

WASHINGTON, Jan 31 (Reuters) - Aides to Elon Musk charged with running the U.S. government human resources agency have locked career civil servants out of computer systems that contain the personal data of millions of federal employees, according to two agency officials.

Since taking office 11 days ago, President Donald Trump has embarked on a massive government makeover, firing and sidelining hundreds of civil servants in his first steps toward downsizing the bureaucracy and installing more loyalists.

CEO and X owner tasked by Trump to slash the size of the 2.2 million-strong civilian government workforce, has moved swiftly to install allies at the agency known as the Office of Personnel Management.

The two officials, who spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation, said some senior career employees at OPM have had their access revoked to some of the department's data systems.

The systems include a vast database called Enterprise Human Resources Integration, which contains dates of birth, Social Security numbers, appraisals, home addresses, pay grades and length of service of government workers, the officials said.

"We have no visibility into what they are doing with the computer and data systems," one of the officials said. "That is creating great concern. There is no oversight. It creates real cybersecurity and hacking implications."

Officials affected by the move can still log on and access functions such as email but can no longer see the massive datasets that cover every facet of the federal workforce.

Musk, OPM, representatives of the new team, and the White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

OPM has sent out memos that eschew the normal dry wording of government missives as it encourages civil servants to consider buyout offers to quit and take a vacation to a "dream destination."

Don Moynihan, a professor at the Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan, said the actions inside OPM raised concerns about congressional oversight at the agency and how Trump and Musk view the federal bureaucracy.

"This makes it much harder for anyone outside Musk's inner circle at OPM to know what's going on," Moynihan said.

A team including current and former employees of Musk assumed command of OPM on Jan. 20, the day Trump took office. They have moved sofa beds onto the fifth floor of the agency's headquarters, which contains the director's office and can only be accessed with a security badge or a security escort, one of the OPM employees said.

The sofa beds have been installed so the team can work around the clock, the employee said.

Musk, a major donor to a famously demanding boss, installed beds at X for employees to enable them to work longer when in 2022 he took over the social media platform, formerly known as Twitter.

"It feels like a hostile takeover," the employee said.

The new appointees in charge of OPM have moved the agency's chief management officer, Katie Malague, out of her office and to a new office on a different floor, the officials said.

Malague did not respond to a request for comment.

David Lebryk, the top-ranking career U.S. Treasury Department official, is set to leave his post following a clash with allies of Musk after they asked for access to payment systems, the Washington Post reported on Friday.

The new team at OPM includes software engineers and Brian Bjelde, who joined Musk's SpaceX venture in 2003 as an avionics engineer before rising to become the company's vice president of human resources. Bjelde's role at OPM is that of a senior adviser.

The acting head of OPM, Charles Ezell, has been sending memos to the entire government workforce since Trump took office, including Tuesday's offering federal employees the chance to quit with eight months pay.

"No-one here knew that the memos were coming out. We are finding out about these memos the same time as the rest of the world," one of the officials said.

Among the group that now runs OPM is Amanda Scales, a former Musk employee, who is now OPM's chief of staff. In some memos sent out on Jan. 20 and Jan. 21 by Ezell, including one directing agencies to identify federal workers on probationary periods, agency heads were asked to email Scales at her OPM email address.

Another senior adviser is Riccardo Biasini, a former engineer at Tesla and most recently a director at The Boring Company, Musk's tunnel-building operation in Las Vegas.

[trumpnewsinternational]

Chuck Todd Brutally Turns on Biden, While Don Lemon Offers Bizarre Legal Advice, w/ The Fifth Column

Megyn Kelly is joined by Kmele Foster, Michael Moynihan, and Matt Welch, hosts of The Fifth Column podcast, to discuss Chuck Todd brutally turning on Biden, Don Lemon’s bizarre legal advice and attacks on Trump supporters, and more. LIKE & SUBSCRIBE for new videos everyday: https://bit.ly/3Aw93yw Watch full clips of The Megyn Kelly Show here: https://bit.ly/3xFXNxI Sign up for my 'American News Minute' weekly email: https://www.megynkelly.com Tune in live on SiriusXM at 12-2pmET: SiriusXM.us/TheMegynKellyShow Find the full audio show wherever you get your podcasts: Apple — https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast... Spotify — https://open.spotify.com/show/0awxEJH... Follow The Megyn Kelly Show on all social platforms: Twitter —   / megynkellyshow   Instagram —   / megynkellyshow   Facebook —   / megynkellyshow   Connect with me on social media: Twitter —   / megynkelly   Instagram —   / megynkelly   Facebook —   / megynkelly  

[ramrodd]

Lawrence: Why Trump's lawyer called him the 'orange turd' during Stormy ...

COMMENTARY:

This case is about the fraud Trump presented to America to become POTUS. The point is that January 6 is a criminal conspiracy  with the objective of overthrowing the US Constitution and installing a  dictator, going back to Joe McCarthy and the John Birch Society.

  The thing is, Trump was not an agent of the Nazification Oligarchs of  Russia until he was compromised by them in the old Soviet style of honey  Trap with Clinton's analytics. Whoever those people are they are the same people who torched the 30th floor of Trump Tower to remind Trump whoever these people are. who have him by the balls. I don' know who it is, but Steve Bannon is in the mix with Merrill Lynch,

  When it comes to putting Steve Bannon in jail for 4 months, jail was Hitler's  launching pad. Trump is in great danger from the Russian Nazification Oligarch who opposes the Kremlin Oligarchs aligned with Putin, Mueller proved that Putin and Trump had no business together, And this actually goes back to  Gorbachev and the Soviets. Trump went looking for cash in Russia after Bob Dole's 1986 Tax Reform that pulled the plug on all all the equity from his properties. He was collateral damage to the Resolution Trust Corporation and the failure of the Savings and Loan industry, Supply Side econoics in action, Trump's Art of the Deal  business model was organic to the Nixon-Moynihan Affirmative Action DEI economics. It doesn't work in the white supremacist economics of Supply Side economics.

  The question is with Trump, when did the honest hyperbole of Trump Tower under Carter become the demonstrable routine fraud of the Trump Organization of 2016. A fraud against the American Experiments.