MAGA bits: DOGE employee sees reality, and gets fired for it; Pardoned criminals' payoffs

Government Executive reports that contrary to MAGA's expectations, one of Musk's DOGE employees discovered that government worked pretty well and wasn't corrupt, so he got fired for saying that in public: 

VA-based DOGE associate gets ‘the boot’ after publicly discussing his work

Sahil Lavingia detailed in a personal blog how the reality of hunting inefficiencies at the Department of Veterans Affairs was not what he had expected. 

Sahil Lavingia — an engineer, tech startup founder and CEO of Gumroad, an e-commerce platform for content creators — wrote in a recent personal blog that he “got the boot” from DOGE without warning the day after Fast Company published an interview in which he spoke about finding less inefficiencies than he expected in the government during his DOGE assignment as senior advisor to the chief of staff at the Department of Veterans Affairs.

“I would say the culture shock is mostly a lot of meetings, not a lot of decisions,” Lavingia told Fast Company in the piece, which also noted that he noticed the number of mission-driven people working in government. “But honestly, it’s kind of fine—because the government works. It’s not as inefficient as I was expecting, to be honest. I was hoping for more easy wins.”

This is more evidence that the point of DOGE is not waste, fraud and abuse, but instead it is about building a kleptocratic dictatorship and accumulating power and wealth at the expense of democracy and the public interest. Poor Mr. Lavingia -- he was banboozled. He didn't understand what his real job was. Quaint naïvety, or childish gullibility?

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A reddit post, The consequences of Trump selling pardons, by a former pardons attorney in the DoJ is keeping track of how much money djt has saved the criminals being pardoned. So far, djt has saved the criminals $1.34 billion in fines and restitution payments they had been on the hook for. One can reasonably wonder what djt's cut of the payback was.

One of the Peanuts commented: This money was owed the victims of those crimes. Trump is therefore stealing money from the victims of crime and fraud through the power of pardon. How nice.

Another responded: I wonder whether one of the victims will try to assert a 5th Amendment taking claim. It would be unprecedented, as far as I know, but the logic seems sound to me. Those victims had a right to compensation from the criminal and that right was enforceable at least by the federal judge who imposed the sentence. Now, due to Trump's pardon, there is no more right to compensation.

Pxy analyzed the legal question: While victims who lose access to restitution payments due to presidential pardons may intuitively feel their property has been "taken" by government action, the legal reality is significantly more nuanced and generally unfavorable to such claims. The Fifth Amendment's Takings Clause provides that private property shall not "be taken for public use, without just compensation." The critical legal barrier facing victims seeking takings claims lies in the requirement that property rights must be "vested" to receive constitutional protection. Legal analysis is clear that victims deprived of court-ordered restitution due to presidential pardons face significant barriers to successful Fifth Amendment takings claims. The established legal doctrine treats restitution orders as penal sanctions rather than vested property rights, eliminating the foundation necessary for takings claims.

Bottom line: djt has (1) screwed innocent people and businesses out of $1.34 billion, and (2) rewarded criminals with $1.34 billion minus djt's cut, maybe 20%? How nice. /s 

Context: A president can condition pardons on the payment of court-ordered restitution, provided the clemency grant explicitly includes this term. The legal foundation for this exists in centuries of precedent and DOJ guidance. Thus, djt intentionally chooses not to make the crooks pay.

Do you feel it?

 Link to article here.

Since the birth of modern cosmology in the 1920s, we’ve been bombarded with discoveries so staggering they border on the surreal. There are more than 2 trillion galaxies in the observable Universe. The gold in our jewelry was forged in the cataclysmic collision of neutron stars. We can now detect the faint afterglow of light emitted when the Universe was just 380,000 years old. Ninety-five percent of the cosmos — dark matter and dark energy — remains an open riddle. And the atoms in our bodies were once inside stars that died in spectacular explosions.

These aren’t just astronomical facts — they are fragments of our own story. And yet, the cosmos stays strangely “over there,” like a brilliant mural we’re not sure how to enter. These revelations strike us with intellectual awe, but remain oddly weightless, precisely because they are too inconceivable to hold. What, after all, can a single human mind do in the face of such scales?

Q: Do you ever feel a sense of being “One with the universe?”  If yes, talk about it.

Only the poets among us will get that.  Otherwise, no harm, no foul.  Carry on. 😊

(by PrimalSoup)

2024 election analysis: A current assessment

One can reasonably wonder why and how djt got elected in 2024. By then, his mendacity, corruption, explicit authoritarian intentions, e.g., his 1/6 coup attempt, and poor track record of governance were clear. There was no empirical basis to trust him. Nonetheless, tens of millions of people trusted, believed and voted for him. Tens of millions of others did not vote for Harris. 

Election analyses constantly point to three factors as the main reasons. Near or at the top was economic discontent, resentment and pain associated with (i) wage stagnation, (ii) inflation, which was effectively blamed on Biden, and (iii) globalization, which was blamed on Biden and Democrats generally. Also among the top factors were (1) fear, anger and resentments grounded in perceptions that immigration was very bad, with the borders being uncontrolled, (2) cultural fear, anger and resentments related to relentless cultural and anti-woke narratives of oppression and discrimination, e.g., DEI and woke extremism, and (3) demographic political shifts of expanded support for djt and Republicans generally among Black men, Hispanics, and young white men not college-educated.

Truth made tribal

Although not usually included as an important factor in 2024 election analyses, was decades of radical right authoritarian demagoguery and divisive propaganda. djt’s ascendancy was not an aberration. Instead, it was the culmination of a intentional decades-long propaganda effort designed to displace empirical (evidence- and reason-based) governance with emotion- and loyalty-driven authoritarianism. Along the way, major changes in the media landscape played a role. For example, Clear Channel (now iHeartMedia) owned 800+ AM radio stations by 2011. That constituted a homogenized authoritarian messaging Leviathan. We are all aware of the authoritarianism and demagoguery that dominated major radical right sources like Faux News for decades. The Moral Majority’s opposition to civil rights and LGBTQ+ protections established a template in the 1980s for conflating natural social change with moral decay.

Although authoritarianism was inherent all along among elites, popular right-wing rhetoric aimed at the rank and file evolved over time from more or less principled, institutional democratic conservatism to populism to mostly unprincipled authoritarianism and demagoguery. The Overton window was gradually pushed from the right, to the hard right to the extreme authoritarian right. Rush Limbaugh was an example. His rhetoric started out as a Reagan-style small government conservatism with belief in constitutional separation of powers (not belief in a unitary executive), federalism, and respect for democratic institutions like the courts, free press, and academia. Over time his rhetoric evolved (2009-2016) (Obama won via “illegal immigrant voters”). Later his rhetoric became harsher (2107-2021) and degenerated into a more reality- and reason-detached authoritarian demagoguery (the 1/6 Capitol rioters were “hundreds of thousands of people — Americans who have gotten fed up with having elections stolen from them by the Democrats, including the White House.”). 

Also, there was the rise of toxic media, which became a much bigger factor starting about 2008-2010. The collective legacy of Limbaugh, Faux News and other sources of radical right authoritarian demagoguery was that they made truth tribal for a significant minority of Americans. Politics went from more or less evidence- and reason-based to more or less emotion and tribe loyalty-based. Collectively, that paved the way for the rise of djt as an openly authoritarian demagogue despite what his public track record showed him to be.

Crypto corruption

Rolling Stone reports about djt's corrupt crypto bribery scheme:

Foreign Interests Appear to Be Pouring Millions Into Trump’s Meme Coin 

President Donald Trump’s meme coin is already a thing that shouldn’t exist, much less as a vehicle for foreign entities to funnel money to the sitting president, yet here we are. 

According to a Wednesday report from Bloomberg, over half of the top holders of $TRUMP — a personal cryptocurrency token established days before his inauguration — are likely foreign buyers, who have dumped millions into the project.

And likely not without motive. Last month, the token announced that Trump would be hosting an exclusive May 22 dinner for about 200 of $TRUMP’s largest investors at his Washington, D.C., golf club, leading to a flurry of purchases. According to Bloomberg, “76 percent of the token value held among the top 220 wallets likely belongs to foreign owners because the wallets used exchanges that are not available to U.S. residents.” According to a separate analysis by The Washington Post, roughly $100 million worth of tokens were purchased after the dinner was announced.

The lack of transparency, easy access for foreign influence, and ethical vacuum surrounding this constitutes a bribery scheme. Foreign power and entities can buy influence by secret financial contributions. Although a large portion of the top holders are reportedly foreign, Americans and American businesses can also bribe him.

Congressional Democrats have proposed legislation to ban elected officials and their families from profiting off meme coins or similar ventures, but chances of that passing in congress is low, maybe ~1%. Chances of djt ever signing an anti-crypto corruption law are lower.