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 chairman 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.
Wired has now reported the names and backgrounds of all these young fellows. One has recently graduated from high school, three more were interns at X and SpaceX and another worked for an AI firm and wrote a Substack extolling the virtues of Matt Gaetz and Pete Hegseth. One of them was a senior at Harvard as of last September and has his own AI startup.
These are the people who’ve been given access to classified materials, social security numbers, health records and banking information of American citizens, businesses and charities with an apparent mandate to decide which ones are waste and fraud.
They have no security clearances or any other kind of vetting. If you think they’re not a risk, I would just remind everyone of this young man:
An Air National Guard member has pleaded guilty to posting dozens of classified documents online in one of highest-profile intelligence leaks in recent years.
Prosecutors recommend that Jack Teixeira, 22, be sentenced to up to 16 years and eight months in prison.
While working at an Air National Guard base, he posted documents to Discord, a platform popular with gamers.
The material included maps, satellite images and intelligence on US allies.
Do Musk’s young acolytes have better judgement? I hope so. But let’s just say that giving them keys to the US Treasury and all that information is very poor judgement on Musk’s part. But then again, he has a major case of arrested development himself. Look at this insane comment:
Did you know that USAID, using YOUR tax dollars, funded bioweapon research, including COVID-19, that killed millions of people? https://t.co/YVwyKA7ifs
This is an excerpt of a piece by legal expert Sam Bagenstos laying out a few of the illegal acts committed by Trump and Musk in the past two weeks. I thought it might be helpful if you’re trying to wrap your mind around all of it or trying to convey to someone who hasn’t been paying attention just how monumental this assault actually is:
There’s an incredible brazenness to the speed and scope at which Trump–and Elon Musk, who in many ways looks like his de facto head of government–is breaking law after law in the interest of bending the bureaucracy to their will. Here are just a few of the more salient examples:
Mass suspensions and projected firings of career civil servants whose work touched diversity or equity initiatives;
Mass suspensions and projected firings of career civil servants whose work involves foreign aid.
Retaliatory firings of career civil servants involved in investigations or prosecutions of Trump and the January Sixth insurrectionists, with the threat of mass firings to come.
Mass firings of Inspectors General without following the statutory process of providing Congress 30 days’ notice and specific reasons for the firings.
Impoundments of federal funds–that is, refusing to carry out the law that requires the President to spend money Congress appropriates–on a scale orders of magnitude greater than we’ve ever seen.
Trump’s OMB tried to accomplish this impoundment with an incredibly broad and poorly drafted memo, which led to chaos across the government as payments were suspended for Medicaid and other programs on which people, community organizations, and businesses across the country rely. The Administration withdrew the memo the next day, but it made clear that the underlying “spending freeze” remained in place. And now two courts have enjoined the Administration from carrying it out.
But various of Trump’s Executive Orders themselves seem to require agencies to stop spending appropriated funds. And agencies seem to be continuing to carry out those impoundments.
And perhaps the biggest legal and administrative issue of all: Musk’s successful efforts for his team to take control of the federal government’s system for issuing payments–for writing checks to individual persons and entities. This action threatens cybersecurity and privacy in a variety of very significant ways. And it also creates the prospect of yet more illegal impoundments of federal funds. Indeed, Musk’s statements over the weekend (that he’s optimistic he’s found $4 billion a day in savings, that his team is “rapidly shutting down” payments to Lutheran Family Services to provide services to migrant children, and freezing money to refugee-aid organizations generally, etc.) suggest that he’s going to use his control over the system simply to turn off payments to those organizations and programs that he (and perhaps Trump) believes shouldn’t be funded. That’s as much of a violation of Congress’s power of the purse as was OMB’s ham-handed memo, but it’s more insidious because it may fly below the radar.
If you’re wondering what the plan behind all this is, he has the right analysis:
It seems obvious that Trump and Musk are running the basic play we’ve seen before from Musk and other Silicon Valley billionaires–move fast, break things (with “things” very much including the law), and then dare folks to try and do something about it. Their expectation is that people will be too overwhelmed, and the law will move too slowly, to stop them from doing what they’re doing. Maybe at some later point some lawsuit will provide somebody some relief. But Trump and Musk will fight those challenges at every step through whatever means necessary, many challenges will fail for odd legal reasons, and other challengers will get exhausted by the process. To the extent they ultimately lose some lawsuit, I expect that Trump and Musk think it won’t reverse what they’re doing; it will just represent a reasonable cost of doing business.
Yes, this is the “break things” ethos of silicon valley where neurotic nerds believe they are geniuses with the capability of running the world and the best way to do that is to destroy it and start from scratch. And they believe no one can stop them. Maybe they’re right.
Bagenstos doesn’t have any answers about how this will end up. He pretty much acknowledges that the illegality of all this may be beside the point but thinks it’s important to point out for its own sake.
I guess we can hope that Musk and Trump have a falling out and Musk is forced to pull all of his flunkies out of the agencies once it becomes clear that it’s causing massive upheaval but I don’t honestly think Trump cares about any of it anymore. He’s just bent on revenge and making money and the more people hurt the better he feels. The law is so slow and cumbersome, Musk will have the country wrecked before they even get to the hearings. And the Congress is well … fuggedaboudit. They can’t even protect their own prerogatives much less the health and livelihoods of Americans.
Hopefully, the Democrats will start blocking unanimous consent. It’s literally the least they can do. But I hope they have something else up their sleeves because otherwise the already demoralized Democratic base which can barely pay attention are going to drop out altogether. Leadership is required.
Are they in the tank with Musk too? If so, we are in even bigger trouble than we knew.
I wonder if all federal agencies will be required to communicate with the public through Elon Musk’s private company from now on? Sounds pretty illegal but what do I know? Someone should find out.
Musk is doing something so outrageous that we seem to be unable to wrap our minds around the enormity of it. Josh Marshall took a crack at it and it’s hard to believe but from what I’ve been reading all day, I think he’s got it right:
… they already have over key computer systems, payment systems, etc. and with the press picture it’s not that things aren’t getting out. The stuff abt the Treasury payments systems and control over certain computer networks has been reported. It’s more putting together the big picture abt how different pieces fit together.
There also seems to be a significant amount of downloading government data onto private servers, etc, totally outside any cybersecurity regime. Additionally it’s unclear to the people inside whether the people doing these things actually work for the US govt…
who they are, whether they’re even American citizens. They all seem to be Thiel and Musk protégés. And I’ve had multiple references to their refusing to identify themselves by anything but first name. The rationale given is that they could be doxed. One additional point and to be clear this latter stuff isn’t from my reporting just pieced together other reports and what musk is saying himself. They’re into th ex treasury payment system and claiming they’ve already found like $4B in “savings” a day.
It’s important to know what this means. This is simple his DOGE team reviewing the US federal budget, law of the land and deciding which parts aren’t necessary. It sounds like they’re saying they will unilaterally cut these funds with control over the check writing at Treasury.
They’re not saying that last part explicitly but that’s certainly the logic of what they’re saying. (Go look at his tweets over thd last two days). So a group of Musk protégés seem to be overruling the US federal budget. Impoundment by the president is illegal. It’s hard to think through the levels of illegality having a group of people who don’t even seem to be US government employees doing it.
For all federal employees:Before you are locked out of your systems, ensure you have copies of unclassified performance appraisals, awards & other relevant personnel docs. If you have access to your office, grab your more important personal items sooner rather than later.
NEW: @wired.com built a tool to monitor 1,300+ federal .gov websites, revealing that entire sites are going dark as we speak. @telliotter.bsky.social, @dmehro.bsky.social (who built the tool), and @dell.bsky.social report: www.wired.com/story/us-gov…
“Will there be some pain? It will all be worth the price that must be paid.”
SEZ WHO???
The man truly is suffering from a mental breakdown. He’s come to believe that he’s going to take over Canada (with Mexico as a slave colony?) This is delusional. Tom is right, below. While he’s out here following his delusional quest for manifest destiny, Elon Musk is stealing every Americans’ data and randomly cutting off money to whomever his cyber-freaks and MAGA weirdos decide to cut off. And apparently nobody is going to stop them.
I can’t think of a reason punishing Canada with tariffs, let alone treating our neighbor far more harshly than Trump is treating China, is in the national interest. Trump’s spokesperson says that it’s because of the fentanyl pouring across our northern border, which wouldn’t justify tariffs even if it were happening — which it isn’t.
But who says that these tariffs have anything to do with the national interest — as opposed to the personal interests of the people calling the shots?
My guess is that Trump is imposing steep tariffs on Canada and Mexico just to show that he can — that it’s essentially a dominance display. And the many people pointing out that it’s a terrible idea probably only reinforced his determination to show that he’s in charge and smarter than anyone else.
I think this is right. It’s personal and it’s delusional. He’s not really asking for anything that Canada and Mexico can deliver. He’s just saying that he plans to break them and make every company move to America if they want to sell here. What are they supposed to do about that? Come crawling on their bellies to Mar-a-Lago and commit ritual suicide? What’s the ask?
And again, I don’t see how anyone can stop it. His delusions of grandeur are so overwhelming now, and his sycophantic courtiers are so bloodthirsty, that I’m pretty sure the courts will have no sway. I’m stumped.
Elon Musk is far richer than you. You don’t like being reminded, and on some level it must gnaw at you. As insecure as you are, hanging out with men far richer than yourself must make you feel as lucky as a poor person who wins the lottery. But have you noticed that this guy who didn’t win a single state is taking advantage of you?
What’s happening behind your back is already described as the Musk junta.
“Americans don’t know the full extent of what Elon Musk is doing as he embeds alongside President Donald Trump at the top of the federal government,” says CNN. Do you?
You won the presidency, and now Musk is the shadow president. He’s taken control of the U.S. Treasury, your U.S. Treasury. He’s firing officials. You made your name as the “You’re fired!” guy. Elon is stealing your moves.
Lutheran Social Services is one of the largest employers in South Dakota, operating senior living facilities across the state. Republicans are shutting it down Perhaps more concerning is Mike Flynn, known foreign asset, having access to this data?
Radley Balko comments, “What the hell is happening? How is Elon Musk unilaterally deciding what are and are not ‘illegal’ payments? Why the [hell?] is Mike Flynn getting access to this information? How many laws were broken in this exchange?”
Sure, breaking laws gives you a thrill in your nether regions. But Donny, the unitary executive theory is yours. And you’re letting Elon make decisions unilaterally?
Remember how pissed you got at Chris Christie and Steve Bannon in 2016 when you found out they were hiring staff for your transition? As reported, you said, “You’re stealing my money! You’re stealing my fucking money! What the fuck is this?” You demanded they shut it down.
Well, sir, Elon Musk is stealing your presidency. What are you going to do about it, big guy?
For an ironic laugh as Musk-Trump lackeys burn the Constitution, steal government data (yours included), and take an axe to everything they can’t burn, check out the Musk burble above about restoring “power to the PEOPLE.” If you believe that, Donald Trump has some crypto coin to sell you.
Throughout now-president Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign, it was clear that his support was coming from three very different factions whose only shared ideology was a determination to destroy the federal government. Now we are watching them do it.
The group that serves President Donald Trump is gutting the government both to get revenge against those who tried to hold him accountable before the law and to make sure he and his cronies will never again have to worry about legality.
Those three allied groups are Trump’s fanatical loyalists, “the MAGA crew that embraces Project 2025,” and finally techbros led by Elon Musk. The flying monkeys of Musk’s DOGE have set about firing large numbers of departmental officials and civil servants, the people who not only operate governmental machinery but know how to. Their actions are likely illegal, but then they don’t know what the law is, nor do they care.
“Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, fucked up Medicaid for everyone in the country.”
Now that they have they keys, they are promptly driving the United States into a ditch, making sure there’s no one left to stop them. The arsonists fired the fire department, then set about breaking into Fort Knox:
But then, yesterday, Elon Musk forced the resignation of David A. Lebryk, the highest-ranking career official at the Treasury Department. Lebryk had been at Treasury since 1989 and had risen to become the person in charge of the U.S. government payment system that disburses about $6 trillion a year through Social Security benefits, Medicare, Medicaid, contracts, grants, salaries for federal government workers, tax refunds, and so on, essentially managing the nation’s checkbook.
According to Jeff Stein, Isaac Arnsdorf, and Jacqueline Alemany of the Washington Post, Musk’s team wanted access to the payment system. Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) demanded answers from Trump’s new Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, warning that “these payment systems simply cannot fail, and any politically-motivated meddling in them risks severe damage to our country and the economy. I am deeply concerned that following the federal grant and loan freeze earlier this week, these officials associated with Musk may have intended to access these payment systems to illegally withhold payments to any number of programs. I can think of no good reason why political operators who have demonstrated a blatant disregard for the law would need access to these sensitive, mission-critical systems.”
Now, though, with Musk’s people at the computers that control the nation’s payment system, they can simply stop whatever payments they want to.
For those who’ve watched the “Silo” series, the low-caste, low-influence workers in Mechanical understand their only political leverage lies in their controlling the machinery that keeps 10,000 people alive underground. Shut off the power and everything stops. For Musk, shutting off the little-noticed money-dispersal machinery is the equivalent, and the unelected megalomaniac means to use it.
I hope Spocko won’t mind me borrowing one of his Mastodon posts on the matter (Marcy Wheeler commenting on her recent post documenting the Musk-Trump atrocities):
“Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, fucked up Medicaid for everyone in the country.” @emptywheel just now talking to @nicolesandler https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KK-yyLJr4V0 Listen at nicolesandler.com about how Trump’s Immigrant Invader, #elonmusk damaged America in just 2 weeks
Reporter: You promised Americans you would to try to reduce costs..
Trump: Tariffs don’t cause inflation. Tariffs cause success. There could some temporary short term disruption. And people understand that pic.twitter.com/3LNipd0hm8
JUST IN: B.C. Premier David Eby says he directed B.C. Liquor sales to immediately stop buying American liquor from red states and remove the highest-selling brands from those states from the shelves of the province’s liquor stores. pic.twitter.com/fNAEFOjDlG
I really like that they’re targeting red states. That’s the smart way to do it.
The consequences are going to be painful. All those Trump voting auto workers who didn’t care about Biden walking the picket line or what he did for the unions are going to wish they had made a different decision.
Canadians booing the U.S. national anthem isn’t something I ever thought I’d see, but this is what happens when you let a psychopath criminal with isolationist and protectionist policies back into the White House.pic.twitter.com/n0695YAPXk
1975. Smack in the middle of the Me Decade. President Gerald R. Ford was stumbling around the White House after taking the reins from Richard M. Nixon, who had made his Watergate-weary exit the previous year to slink back to his castle by the sea (not unlike mad King Lear). Former Nixon advisors John Mitchell, Haldeman, and John Ehrlichman were convicted and sentenced for their involvement in the Watergate coverup. The country was in a recession, and people were lining up for hours at the gas pumps due to an OPEC-imposed oil embargo.
And yet…were we not entertained? The top 5 highest-grossing films of the year (domestically) were Jaws, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Shampoo, and Dog Day Afternoon. Saturday Night Live premiered in October (as NBC’s Saturday Night), hosted by a coked-out George Carlin. The top 5 TV shows were All in the Family, Laverne & Shirley, Maude, The Bionic Woman, and Rich Man, Poor Man. People were spending their hard-earned bucks on Pet Rocks (don’t ask). Those were heady days.
Yeah, I know. “OK, Boomer”.
I was all of 19 years old in 1975. That was the year I visited L.A. for the first time, while still living in Alaska. I went with a friend, a fellow music geek who had grown up there. He introduced me to his “holy trinity” of record stores: Tower Records on the Strip, Aron’s on Melrose (their sidewalk sales were legend), and of course, the original Rhino Records store on Westwood Boulevard. I went absolutely nuts with the vinyl hunting (I remember flying back north with about 150 LPs in tow). We didn’t have record stores like that in Fairbanks.
50 years later, I’m still listening to a lot of that music haul (as I write this, in fact). Does that point to the quality of the music, or simply an adherence to nostalgia? As I wrote last year:
“They” say that your taste in music is imprinted in your high school years. Why do you suppose this is? Is it biological? Is it hormonal? Or Is it purely nostalgia? According to a 2021 study, it may have something to do with “arousal, valence, and depth”. Say what?
Have you wondered why you love a particular song or genre of music? The answer may lie in your personality, although other factors also play a role, researchers say.
Many people tend to form their musical identity in adolescence, around the same time that they explore their social identity. Preferences may change over time, but research shows that people tend to be especially fond of music from their adolescent years and recall music from a specific age period — 10 to 30 years with a peak at 14 — more easily.
Musical taste is often identified by preferred genres, but a more accurate way of understanding preferences is by musical attributes, researchers say. One model outlines three dimensions of musical attributes: arousal, valence and depth.
“Arousal is linked to the amount of energy and intensity in the music,” says David M. Greenberg, a researcher at Bar-Ilan University and the University of Cambridge. Punk and heavy metal songs such as “White Knuckles” by Five Finger Death Punch were high on arousal, a study conducted by Greenberg and other researchers found.
“Valence is a spectrum,” from negative to positive emotions, he says. Lively rock and pop songs such as “Razzle Dazzle” by Bill Haley & His Comets were high on valence. Depth indicates “both a level of emotional and intellectual complexity,” Greenberg says. “We found that rapper Pitbull’s music would be low on depth, [and] classical and jazz music could be high on depth.”
Also, musical attributes have interesting relationships with one another. “High depth is often correlated with lower valence, so sadness in music is also evoking a depth in it,” he says.
“They” may be right…I graduated in 1974, and the lion’s share of my CD collection/media player library is comprised of (wait for it) albums and/or songs originally released between 1967-1982.
OK, enough with the science already. I just wanna dance. Here are my top 10 album picks of 1975, with an additional 10 appended (to temper the hate mail that I’m going to get anyway).
And just remember kids…it’s only rock ‘n’ roll.
T.N.T.– AC/DC
AC/DC is one of those bands that came roaring out of the gate with a such a perfect formula that it required no additional tweaking for the life of the product. Consequently, you only really need one of their albums in your collection to adequately represent the entire catalog. For me, it’s this 1975 Australian release (their second studio effort). It may be simple, balls-out four chord hard rock…but it’s the right four chords that fans (apparently) never tire of. There’s something elemental about their sound that compels you to crank it to “11” and scream along with no inhibitions (my neighbors hate me). R.I.P. Bon Scott and Malcolm Young.
Choicecuts: “It’s A Long Way to the Top”, “Rock and Roll Singer”, “Live Wire”, “T.N.T.”.
Ambrosia-Ambrosia
I imagine this choice may raise a few eyebrows, as most casual listeners likely (and understandably) primarily associate Ambrosia with well-worn Adult Contemporary radio staples like “How Much I Feel”, “You’re the Only Woman”, and “You’re the Biggest Part of Me”. However, their eponymous 1975 debut, while definitely sporting a slick L.A. studio veneer, could easily be cross-filed in the “prog rock” section. Led by gifted singer-songwriter-guitarist David Pack, the quartet delivers a strong set with chops musicianship and lovely harmonies
Choice cuts: “Nice, Nice, Very Nice”, “Time Waits for No One”, “Holdin’ on to Yesterday”, “Drink of Water”.
Futurama – Be-Bop Deluxe
Formed in the UK in the early 70s by eclectic (and prolific) guitarist-singer-songwriter Bill Nelson, Be-Bop Deluxe defied categorization, flitting between art-rock, electronica, glam and prog. This 1975 release (their sophomore effort) is no exception, and chock full of great tunes. Nelson’s solo career (under various monikers) began in the 70s and is still going strong (dozens and dozens of albums in his catalog…this guy is like Picasso, he never slows down!).
Choice cuts: “Maid in Heaven”, “Sister Seagull”, “Music in Dreamland”, “Jean Cocteau”.
Blow By Blow – Jeff Beck
Like all great artists, guitar maestro Jeff Beck (who left us in 2023) was loathe to dawdle too long in a comfort zone; he never stopped exploring, pushing the boundaries of his instrument ever-further with each performance (whether on stage or in the studio). While he was generally relegated to the “rock” section, he could slide effortlessly from blues, boogie, and metal to funk, R & B, soul, jazz and fusion (more often than not, all within the same number). A perfect case in point is this outstanding instrumental album (which went platinum). Inspired by Billy Cobham’s influential 1973 album Spectrum, Beck set out to explore new textures and soundscapes within the realm of jazz-rock fusion. He enlisted legendary producer-arranger George Martin to helm the sessions (to great effect). Stevie Wonder contributed two songs.
Choice cuts: “She’s a Woman”, “Cause We’ve Ended as Lovers”, “Thelonius”, “Freeway Jam”.
Marcus Garvey – Burning Spear
A highlight of the 1978 cult film Rockers is a scene featuring Winston Rodney warbling his haunting and hypnotic Rasta spiritual “Jah No Dead” a cappella, backed only by the gentle lapping of the nighttime tide. A true Rastafarian to the core, Rodney (aka Burning Spear) is on a par with Jimmy Cliff and Bob Marley as one of the seminal artists of roots reggae music. This 1975 release is one of his best.
Idiosyncratic English folk-rocker Roy Harper has always marched to his own drum, but has nonetheless garnered a rep as a “musician’s musician”, noted as an inspiration by the likes of Ian Anderson, Pete Townshend, Kate Bush, and Led Zeppelin (the latter band gave him a musical nod with their song “Hats Off to Roy Harper”, which appeared on Led Zeppelin III). This 1975 effort is my favorite Harper album, which features guitarists Chris Spedding and David Gilmour. Gilmour was working on Pink Floyd’s Wishing You Were Here album in an adjoining studio, and (as the story goes) was returning a favor to Harper for contributing the lead vocal to “Have a Cigar”. Roger Waters apparently had developed a throat malady during the sessions, and Harper offered to step in (Waters reportedly still carries a grudge for allegedly not having been consulted-but then again he has a rep for being a cranky fellow).
Choice cuts: “The Game (Parts 1-5)”, “The Spirit Lives”, “When an Old Cricketer Leaves the Crease”.
Dreamboat Annie – Heart
After paying their dues playing the bar band circuit in Seattle and Vancouver B.C. for several years, gifted siblings Ann and Nancy Wilson and band mates built up a loyal following, becoming known for their searing Led Zeppelin covers. Dreamboat Annie is an astonishing debut, a perfect set of dynamic rockers that run the gamut from the whisper to the thunder. While the album was released in 1975, it was on a small label that didn’t have wide distribution, so it wasn’t until the chart success of the album’s first single release “Magic Man” in 1976 that the band really broke big nationally. And the rest, as they say, is history.
With this sprawling two-record set, Led Zeppelin continued to draw from the well of Delta blues, English folk, heavy metal riffing and Eastern scales that had come to define their sound. This time out, however, they really pulled out all the stops…tossing in everything from country honk to pop and hard funk. And it worked; this is Zeppelin at their creative zenith (subsequent albums had their moments, but it was kind of a slow downhill slide from here).
Choice cuts: “Houses of the Holy”, “The Rover”, “Bron-Y-Aur”, “In My Time of Dying”, “Kashmir”, “Ten Years Gone”, “Night Flight”, “Black Country Woman”.
Mind Transplant – Alphonse Mouzon
Alphonse Mouzon made his bones playing drums in Larry Coryell’s Eleventh House, one of the pioneering jazz-rock fusion bands of the early-to-mid 70s (powering through impossible time signatures with dazzling speed and accuracy on a par with Billy Cobham’s work with The Mahavishnu Orchestra). For this (mostly instrumental) solo project, he recruited top flight players, including guitarists Lee Rittenour and Tommy Bolin. One of the best genre entries.
Choice cuts: “Mind Transplant”, “Some of the Things People Do”, “Nitroglycerin”, “Golden Rainbows”,
Horses – Patti Smith
Being a bit ahead of its time in many ways, Patti Smith’s debut album has aged like a fine wine. Backed by minimalist musical arrangements, Smith’s poetry (sometimes recited, sometimes sung) is by turns raw, confessional, and enigmatic, but compelling at every turn. Some of the cuts border on invocations (the first time I heard “Birdland” I was mesmerized, but as soon as it ended I vowed to never again listen to it alone, in the dark). This is not background music.
Choice cuts: All of them. Bring a friend.
Bonus Tracks!
Here are 10 more gems from 1975 worth a spin:
Artful Dodger – Artful Dodger
Born to Run – Bruce Springsteen
Evening Star – Fripp & Eno
Flat as a Pancake – Head East
Free Hand – Gentle Giant
Katy Lied – Steely Dan
Metropolitan Man – Alan Price
Teaser – Tommy Bolin
Tomorrow Belongs to Me – The Sensational Alex Harvey Band
I suspect they wanted to get this done before Kash Patel came in so his blatant lie about not seeking revenge wouldn’t be so clearly exposed in his first days. But it looks like it isn’t going to be so easy:
Acting FBI Director Brian Driscoll on Friday refused a Justice Department order that he assist in the firing of agents involved in Jan. 6 riot cases, pushing back so forcefully that some FBI officials feared he would be dismissed, multiple current and former FBI officials told NBC News.
The Justice Department ultimately did not dismiss Driscoll. He sent out a memo to the workforce Friday night explaining that he had been ordered to remove eight senior FBI executives and turn over the names of every FBI employee involved in Capitol riot cases.
The eight executives have been forced out but Driscoll did not say in the memo whether he would turn over the broader list of Jan. 6-related names — a list that he noted encompasses thousands of FBI employees, including him. “As we’ve said since the moment we agreed to take on these roles, we are going to follow the law, follow FBI policy, and do what’s in the best interest of the workforce and the American people — always,” Driscoll, a former member of the FBI’s elite hostage rescue team, wrote.
In a message that circulated widely among bureau personnel, an FBI agent summarized what happened as: “Bottom line — DOJ came over and wanted to fire a bunch of J6 agents. Driscoll is an absolute stud. Held his ground and told WH proxy, DOJ, to F— Off.”
It looks like Patel is going to have to do Trump’s dirty work after all.
This is good. We need to see more resistance to what Trump is doing. The purging of vast numbers of federal personnel is bad in itself. Purging Trump’s enemies list which, in this case, includes people who were assigned to the January 6th cases and did their job, is authoritarianism 101.
Sadly, I just had yet another conversation with an acquaintance who told me that things really aren’t that bad. I asked if he was watching the news and he said he’s turned it off ever since the election and I wondered how he knows that nothing bad is happening. He said he hasn’t noticed any difference in his own life. I told him it is only a matter of time before it does and he should start paying attention because it’s very, very bad.
I freaked him out. But I think we need to start freaking out our neighbors and friends. Too many people are still tuning out politics, an impulse I understand, but they need to tune back in.
