Some things never change:
"what digby sez..."
Digby's Hullabaloo Posts
For no apparent reason
The pro-war crimes Sec. Def. is apparently preparing for war on the Southern border:
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered about 3,000 active-duty troops to the southern U.S. border, including soldiers from a motorized brigade equipped with 20-ton armored Stryker combat vehicles, defense officials familiar with the effort said.
The defense secretary approved the orders Friday, said two officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal Defense Department planning. The soldiers are primarily from the 4th Infantry Division’s 2nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team at Fort Carson, Colorado, and will be joined by soldiers specializing in engineering, intelligence and public affairs, the officials said.
The Pentagon announced the deployment in a statement Saturday afternoon after the news was first reported by The Washington Post. Hegseth has ordered the deployment of the Stryker unit and a helicopter battalion to “reinforce and expand current border security operations to seal the border and protect the territorial integrity of the United States,” the statement said.
The troops will arrive in coming weeks, underscoring the Defense Department’s “unwavering dedication to working alongside the Department of Homeland Security to secure our southern border and maintain the sovereignty, territory integrity, and security of the United States under President Trump’s leadership,” the statement added.
About 2,400 soldiers will deploy with the Stryker brigade combat team and an additional 550 will go with the aviation unit, said another defense official, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue. A handful of others will join them.
After news of the deployment, Hegseth said in a post on X that the administration is “dead serious about 100% OPERATIONAL CONTROL of the southern border.”
And then there’s this:
The mission had been in planning since January and comes despite a sharp drop in border crossings since the Trump administration took office. Hegseth said during a trip to the border in February that all options are on the table to support President Donald Trump’s efforts to stop illegal migration.
I’m sure it will make great television. So is war. Super great.
Musk has his eyes on Social Security
Trump says that he won’t touch benefits. But he’s all for Elon eliminating waste. fraud and abuse in the program, all of which is defined by Elon.
Here’s what he thinks of the program:
The billionaire argued Friday on “The Joe Rogan Experience” podcast that the United States government is “one big pyramid scheme” before blasting Social Security as “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time.”
When asked to clarify, Musk said, “Well, people pay into Social Security and the money goes out of Social Security immediately, but the obligation for Social Security is your entire retirement career. If you look at the future obligations of Social Security, it far exceeds the tax revenue.”
Musk, who oversees Trump’s cost-cutting initiative for federal spending, the Department of Government Efficiency, added that “people are living way longer than expected” and thus the government’s obligation to pay the debt “will be much worse in the future.”
After seeing the Republicans all cozy up to Putin and allow Musk to eviscerate the federal workforce I’m sure they’ll let him do whatever he wants with Social Security too. They are completely gone. So I’m not sure what can stop him if he decides it’s got to be severely slashed. Trump? Because he “promised?” Lol.
By the way, there’s already trouble on the way:
Social Security has never missed a benefit payment since the program first began sending individuals monthly benefits more than eight decades ago. But the recent actions at the U.S. Social Security Administration by Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency are putting monthly benefit checks for more than 72.5 million Americans at risk, former commissioner and former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley told CNBC.com.
“Ultimately, you’re going to see the system collapse and an interruption of benefits,” O’Malley said. “I believe you will see that within the next 30 to 90 days.”
Ahead of any interruption in benefits, “people should start saving now,” O’Malley said.
The Social Security Administration uses multiple systems and technologies that Elon Musk has criticized for leading to errors. As commissioner, O’Malley told Congress the agency needed more funding for IT modernization.
O’Malley said DOGE leaders are now making changes at the agency, and significant staff cuts have already led to system outages. Those intermittent IT outages may happen more frequently and for more extended periods of time until there is a “system collapse and an interruption of benefits,” he said.
Feature not bug I’m afraid.
That will just be from Elon and Big Balls and the boys messing around with the technology. The problem will be exacerbated by laying off the 50% of the workforce Social Security as they’ve already announced. If you don’t get your check, good luck getting anyone on the phone to report it.
Once they start finding “fraud” the fun really starts.
Update– oops, looks like he’s already on it. We’re fucked.
Speak up, speak out. Loudly.
Kevin Kruse offers perhaps the best summary of the Trump-Vance ambush of Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office last week:
It’s nice how they’ve replicated the middle school dynamic of the insecure bully and his sniveling sidekick picking on someone surrounded by a circle of scared little boys who also try to talk shit so the bully doesn’t come after them.
Or as the right calls it, “masculinity.”
And on Brian Glenn, the Real America’s Voice reporter(?) and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s (R-Ga.) boyfriend, Kruse adds:
And I mean that literally — he’s [Zelensky] there pleading for funds to save lives and this sniggling manchild mocks his fucking outfit
“It’s time to say it plainly. America’s leadership has switched sides in the war,” as the Kyiv Independent opinion page sees it. But, “The American people have not, and they should speak up.”
Please do.
Let this sink in. The president of a battered Ukraine, an ally of the U.S., became the first world leader in history to be kicked out of the White House. Not a dictator, not a disgraced politician — the president of Ukraine, a country suffering from the worst invasion in the 21st century. The country that the U.S. administration swore to bring peace to.
In an ugly exchange, the president and vice president joined forces to admonish Zelensky for “not being grateful” enough for the help Ukraine was getting.
To that, Zelensky reminded them that he had thanked the American people multiple times, including earlier that day. But it appears that gratitude to the American people isn’t what Trump and Vance were looking for — they wanted him to grovel and prostrate himself in front of Trump. Kiss the ring.
For sure, Zelensky could have done a better job composing himself and restraining his reactions, but it’s fair to say that he was put in a situation he couldn’t win. If he let Trump and Vance — and apparently, it takes two of them to win a verbal argument against one non-native English speaker — continue their line of attack on Ukraine, unchecked, he would be seen as weak both at home and abroad. Weakness is something a country at war can’t afford to project
Trump did not get into a pissing match with French President Emmanuel Macron or U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer, the editorial notes, when they publicly corrected both Trump and Vance “on their provocative and false statements about Europe.” Macron and Starmer may be shorter than Trump but they, like North Korea’s even-shorter Kim Jong Un, possess nuclear weapons. Zelensky does not. Every interaction is a dick-measuring contest for Trump, so Zelensky is the smaller kid Trump and Vance would have picked in the schoolyard to bully.
Except underlying Trump’s and Vance’s bullying performances is this: they are the scared little boys talking shit so a bigger bully, Vladimir Putin, doesn’t come after them.
The Independent continues:
Trump and his government are now making sure Ukraine will lose this war. They are also choking their other allies in the process. But most importantly, they are betraying the interests of America, and making it weaker.
The tragedy is that Trump is doing it all in the name of millions of Americans who completely disagree with that and are disgusted with Trump’s line.
[…]
Americans should stand up and send their political leadership a clear message: We don’t support what you’re doing, so stop doing it in our name. We don’t want an alliance with Russia, and we don’t want a betrayal of Ukraine. And frankly, we are embarrassed.
I’ve said as much in messages to my congressman and senators (all G.O.P.). My hand is raised in protest. My flag is out.
* * * * *
Have you fought the coup today?
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Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink
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Musk is a dangerous phony
White House tech veteran, Waldo Jaquith, posted a Bluesky thread about what Elon Musk’s DOGE saboteurs did on Friday to a federal technology group where Jaquith once worked. We know by now (and as you read on Saturday) that Musk’s “waste, fraud, and abuse” pitch for the cameras and is as phony as Trump University.
Musk possesses “scant interest in constitutional law” and considers oversight of his operations the “dictatorship of the bureaucracy.” His goal is not to improve government or even to shrink it (the Goldilocks question) but to hobble it. So under the pretext of cutting “waste,” he is in fact destroying the government’s ability prevent his becoming … emperor, or something more like Eldon Tyrell or Peter Weyland. Musk would enjoy the comparison.
Pay attention:
18F, the federal government’s technology shop, was demolished by Musk’s team shortly after midnight. It was a cost-recoverable org, charging agencies for their expertise, using a consulting model. Its cost to government was negligible, its benefits huge. My team there once saved DoD $500 billion.
18F is *precisely* what Musk and team claim should exist within government. But when his team found it, they destroyed it, because it is evidence that government works well (can’t have that!), and because like Zelensky, 18F didn’t bend the knee.
Trump and Musk are eliminating any part of government that works well, because that undermines their thesis that government doesn’t work. GSA (which houses 18F) turns a profit as an agency. Naturally it has to be destroyed. 18F’s healthy revenue stream also means it must go.
To anybody in leadership at the state or municipal level: 18F’s destruction makes this *the perfect time* to hire experienced technologists, which you all need very badly. Most 18Fers would love to stay in public service. They are spread throughout the country. Go go go!
For any devs wondering what 18F does (did), here’s its GitHub org page, with 1,210 repos. A few were mine! All the work they did for all their agency partners was open source. Public money should produce public software, for public inspection. Those days are over, starting today.
18F did two things, both for agencies that hired them to help with projects: it built software and it taught agencies how to hire & oversee vendors to build software. The former raised the bar by showing agencies what “good” looks like, the latter allowed those practices to expand sustainably.
The work that I led at 18F I naturally feel was really important (I hope all 18Fers felt the same way about their work): codifying the procurement principals that we’d all identified there over the years. I thought this would have a tiny audience. Instead it became a foundational text.
Introduction | 18F De-risking Guide
The work I do today at @usdigitalresponse.org is simply what I did at 18F (software procurement, budgeting, and oversight), except I’m a team of one, dependent on grant funding. I have sent many an agency to 18F when they need large-scale support. But no more—I have nowhere to send them now.
Republican myth-making
I wish we could hire a bunch of 18Fers at U.S. Digital Response, but we’re a small organization, reliant on grants for funding. Heck, my position is only 3/4-time. Instead we’ll work with our state and local partners to create positions appropriation for these folks, and help to make those matches.
18F faced a lot of threats over the years. In the beginning it was mostly from within, frankly. It’s the way of digital services that they break a bunch of rules to get started. Then the threats were external. But I never thought a threat was being too effective for Republican myth-making.
I see folks asking about forking all the 18F GitHub repos so there are copies. Don’t worry, that was done at scale by multiple organizations, weeks ago, anticipating this.
“It’s chaotic, and it feels like it’s chaotic on purpose,” says a former 18F worker describing the demolition of 18F to The Atlantic (gift link). “Move fast and break things” comes to Washington like January 6 without the riot.
Matteo Wong writes:
DOGE’s actions have been widely compared to the playbook that Musk used to decimate and remake Twitter into X: The inefficiency is the point. Asking workers to resign and justify their work through scrambled, aggressive messages almost inevitably prompts exodus and collapse, voluntary or not. But another useful comparison might be to the playbook Musk follows from space programs for his company, SpaceX. Government teams, their staff, and the citizens they serve are like test launches of rocket prototypes: try a new ship design uncrewed, knowing it could well explode, and repeat. But in this case, there are people aboard.
And like everything in Trump’s career, there is a lot of myth-making involved. The gaming community seems ahead of the press in spotting the bullshit behind Musk, suggests one Bluesky poster.
So far the gaming community is really the first to comprehensively debunk the central musk myth that “what’s incredibly difficult and time-consuming for normal people is trivially easy for me” and I assume that’s partly because the consequences for that imploding elsewhere are too high
Btw even when musk talks about working around the clock it’s part of this myth, he’s just saying “oh it’s hard for you to do, but for me it’s second nature.” But like, he doesn’t work. He never learns any new skills or has breakthroughs, he just stays up all night dming rw influencers & doing drugs
Like oh you’re such a “hardcore” worker and singular genius that every tech problem is trivial? And these legacy govt computer systems are giving you fits? Why not simply become a COBOL expert faster than anyone ever has? Oh what’s that, you can’t, because you’re a charlatan & a moron
Musk had been paying someone else to play Path of Exile for him to achieve the alleged high scores he bragged about. It was a lie.
“The man has more money and power than you could ever want,” says Karl Jobst in the video above, “yet he still felt compelled to lie about something so trivial.”
No wonder he gets along so well with Donald Trump. He’s an uber-rich super villain out of a Bond film.
Where’s 007 when you really need him?
* * * * *
Have you fought the coup today?
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Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink
You Have Power
I felt it apropos on this Oscar Eve to honor Hollywood’s annual declaration of its deep and abiding love for itself with my picks for the top 10 movies about…the movies. Action!
Cinema Paradiso– Writer-director Giuseppe Tornatore’s 1988 love letter to the cinema may be too sappy for some, but for those of us who (to quote Pauline Kael) “lost it at the movies” it’s chicken soup for the soul. A film director (Jacques Perrin) returns to his home town in Sicily for a funeral, triggering flashbacks from his youth. He reassesses the relationships with two key people in his life: his first love, and the person who instilled his life-long love of the movies. Beautifully acted and directed; keep the Kleenex handy.
Day for Night– French film scholar and director Francois Truffaut was, first and foremost, a movie fan. And while one could argue that many of his own movies are rife with homage to the filmmakers who inspired him, this 1973 entry is his most heartfelt declaration of love for the medium (as well as his most-imitated work). Truffaut casts himself as (wait for it) a director in the midst of a production called Meet Pamela.
“Pamela” is a beautiful but unstable British actress (Jacqueline Bisset) who is gingerly stepping back into the spotlight after a highly publicized breakdown. The petulant, emotionally immature leading man (Jean-Pierre Leaud) is a fool for love, which constantly distracts him from his work. Truffaut also has to coddle an aging Italian movie queen (Valentia Cortese) who is showing up on set three sheets to the wind and flubbing scenes.
Truffaut cleverly mirrors the backstage travails of his cast and crew with those of the characters in the “film-within-the-film”. Somehow, it all manages to fall together…but getting there is half the fun. Truffaut parlays a sense of what a director “does” (in case you were wondering) and how a good one can coax magic from seemingly inextricable chaos.
Ed Wood– Director Tim Burton and leading man Johnny Depp have worked together on so many films over the last 30 years that they must be joined at the hip. For my money, this affectionate 1994 biopic about the man who directed “the worst film of all time” remains their best collaboration. It’s also unique in Burton’s canon in that it is somewhat grounded in reality (while I wish his legion of loyal fans all the best, Burton’s predilection for overly-precious phantasmagorical and macabre fare is an acquired taste that I’ve yet to acquire).
Depp gives a brilliant performance as Edward D. Wood, Jr., who unleashed the infamously inept yet 100% certified camp classic, Plan 9 from Outer Space on an unsuspecting movie-going public back in the late 1950s. While there are lots of belly laughs, none of them are at the expense of the off-beat characters. There’s no mean-spiritedness here; that’s what makes the film so endearing. Martin Landau delivers a droll Oscar-winning turn as Bela Lugosi. Bill Murray, Sarah Jessica Parker, Patricia Arquette and Jeffrey Jones also shine.
8 1/2– Where does creative inspiration come from? A simple question, difficult to answer. Federico Fellini’s semi-autobiographical 1963 classic probably comes closest to “showing” us…in his inimitable fashion. Marcello Mastroianni is fabulous as a successful director who wrestles with a creative block and existential crisis whilst being hounded by the press and various hangers-on. Like many Fellini films (all Fellini films?), the deeper you go, the less you comprehend. Yet (almost perversely), you can’t take your eyes off the screen; with Fellini, there is an implied contract between the director and the viewer that, no matter what ensues, if you’ve bought the ticket, you have to take the ride.
Hearts of the West– In Howard Zeiff’s 1975 dramedy, Jeff Bridges stars as a Depression-era wannabe pulp western writer (a scene where he asks the barber to cut his hair to make him look “just like Zane Grey” is priceless.) He gets fleeced by a mail-order scam promising enrollment in what turns out to be a bogus university “out West”. Serendipity lands him a job as a Hollywood stuntman. Bridges gets able support from Blythe Danner, Andy Griffith (one of his best performances), Donald Pleasence, Richard B. Shull, and veteran scene-stealer Alan Arkin (he’s a riot as a perpetually apoplectic director). Rob Thompson’s witty script gives the wonderful cast plenty to chew on.
The Kid Stays in the Picture– Look up “raconteur” in the dictionary and you might see a picture of the subject of this winning 2002 documentary, directed by Nanette Burstein and Brett Morgen. While essentially a 90-minute monologue by legendary producer Robert Evans (The Godfather, Rosemary’s Baby, Love Story, Chinatown, etc.) recounting his life and career, it’s an intimate and fascinating “insider” purview of the Hollywood machine. Evans spins quite the tale of a mogul’s rise and fall; by turns heartbreaking and hilarious. He’s so charming and entertaining that you won’t stop to ponder whether he’s making half this shit up. Inventive, engaging, and required viewing for movie buffs.
Living in Oblivion– This under-appreciated 1995 sleeper from writer-director Tom DiCillo is the Day for Night of indie cinema. A NYC-based filmmaker (Steve Buscemi) is directing a no-budget feature. Much to his chagrin, the harried director seems to be stuck in a hellish loop as he chases an ever-elusive “perfect take” for a couple of crucial scenes.
DiCillo’s cleverly constructed screenplay is quite funny. Fabulous performances abound from a “Who’s Who” of indie film: Catherine Keener, Dermot Mulroney, Kevin Corrigan, James Le Gros and Peter Dinklage (in his first billed film role). Dinklage delivers a hilarious rant about the stereotypical casting of dwarves in dream sequences. It has been rumored that Le Gros’ character (an arrogant Hollywood hotshot who has deigned to grace the production with his presence) was based on the director’s experience working with Brad Pitt (who starred in DeCillo’s 1991 debut , Johnny Suede). If true, all I can say is…ouch!
The Story of Film: An Odyssey is one long-ass movie. Consider the title. It literally is the story of film, from the 1890s through last Tuesday. At 15 hours, it is nearly as epic an undertaking for the viewer as it must have been for director-writer-narrator Mark Cousins. Originally aired as a TV series in the UK, it played on the festival circuit as a five-part presentation. While the usual suspects are well-represented, Cousins’ choices for in-depth analysis are atypical (e.g. African and Middle-Eastern cinema).
That quirkiness is what I found most appealing about this idiosyncratic opus; world cinema (rightfully) gets equal time with Hollywood. The film is not without tics. Cousins’ oddly cadenced Irish brogue takes acclimation, and he tends to over-use the word “masterpiece”. Of course, he “left out” many directors and films I would have included. Nits aside, this is obviously a labor of love by someone who is sincerely passionate about film.
The Stunt Man– “How tall was King Kong?” That’s the question posed by Eli Cross (Peter O’Toole), the larger-than-life director of the film-within-the-film in Richard Rush’s 1980 drama. Once you discover King Kong was but “3 foot, six inches tall”, it becomes clear that the fictional director’s query is actually code for a much bigger question: “What is reality?”
Ponder that as you take this wild ride through the Dream Factory. Because from the moment the protagonist, a fugitive on the run from the cops (Steve Railsback) tumbles ass over teakettle onto Mr. Cross’s set, where he is filming an arty WW I drama, his (and the audience’s) concept of what is real and what isn’t becomes hazy, to say the least.
O’Toole chews major scenery, ably supported by a cast that includes Barbara Hershey and Allen Garfield. Despite lukewarm reviews from critics upon original release, it has since gained status as a cult classic. This is a movie for people who love the movies.
Sunset Boulevard– Leave it to that great ironist Billy Wilder to direct a film that garnered a Best Picture nomination from the very Hollywood studio system it so mercilessly skewers (however, you’ll note that they didn’t let him win…did they?). Gloria Swanson’s turn as a fading, high-maintenance movie queen mesmerizes, William Holden embodies the quintessential noir sap, and veteran scene-stealer Erich von Stroheim redefines the meaning of “droll” in this tragicomic journey down the Boulevard of Broken Dreams.
Previous posts with related themes:
Pre-Oscar marathon: Top 10 “Best Picture” winners
Beautiful losers: The Top 10 Oscar snubs
Fassbinder: Love Without Demands
Douglas Sirk: Hope as in Despair
Guild 45th: The Last Picture Show (essay)
More reviews at Den of Cinema
— Dennis Hartley
Here is a gift link to a major new NY Times article about how Elon Musk took over the federal government. It is a doozy and I highly urge that you read it.
An excerpt:
On the last Friday of September 2023, Elon Musk dropped in about an hour late to a dinner party at the Silicon Valley mansion of the technology investor Chamath Palihapitiya.
[…]
As the night wore on, Mr. Musk held forth on the patio on a variety of topics, according to four people with knowledge of the conversation: his visit that week to the U.S.-Mexico border; the war in Ukraine; his frustrations with government regulations hindering his rocket company, SpaceX; and Mr. Ramaswamy’s highest priority, the dismantling of the federal bureaucracy.
Mr. Musk made clear that he saw the gutting of that bureaucracy as primarily a technology challenge. He told the party of around 20 that when he overhauled Twitter, the social media company that he bought in 2022 and later renamed X, the key was gaining access to the company’s servers.
Wouldn’t it be great, Mr. Musk offered, if he could have access to the computers of the federal government?
Just give him the passwords, he said jocularly, and he would make the government fit and trim.
Think about that. It was September of 2023.
Read the whole thing. I’ll have more to say about this later. Let’s just say that I’m not sure that making the government fit and trim was Elon’s real motive.
The rage @JVLast shows here is real, raw and how lots of us feel. Yesterday was goddamn shameful. pic.twitter.com/39ECKReqFh
— Colin Jones (@colinjones) March 1, 2025
He didn’t clip the best moment which starts at 4:05:
Just off the very top, nobody seems to remember this but at the the close of the Cold War, Ukraine was in possession of 1,900 nuclear warheads. They had one of the largest stockpiles of nuclear arms in the entire in the entire world. They did not directly control them because they were Soviet controlled warheads that were stationed there during the the last days of the Soviet Union.
But the Ukrainian people are pretty resourceful and holding on to 1,900 nuclear warheads is a pretty fucking valuable card to have if we’re talking about cards. They chose to give them up.
Why did Ukraine choose to give up these Warheads? Because in 1994 the United States of America signed a guarantee of Ukrainian sovereignty and security against aggression.
We had a deal, we had a fucking deal with these people already!
And we we convinced them to give up their nuclear warheads and they did and and now all of a sudden that’s just gone !
It was called the Budapest Memorandum:
The memoranda, signed in Patria Hall at the Budapest Convention Center with U.S. Ambassador Donald M. Blinken amongst others in attendance prohibited Russia, the United States, the United Kingdom and France from threatening or using military force or economic coercion against Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan, “except in self-defence or otherwise in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations.” As a result of other agreements and the memorandum, between 1993 and 1996, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine gave up their nuclear weapons.
At the time Ukraine had the third largest nuclear arsenal in the world. They were the only country with such an arsenal to ever give them up. And they will be the last. Trump has made sure of that. Certainly no one will ever believe that the United States will have their backs again.
Update —
That time @marcorubio explained how USA, Russia & the UK promised Ukraine to provide for their defense forever if they gave up the huge stockpile of nuclear weapons left in the country after the Soviet Union fell.
— Resolute Square (@ResoluteSquare) March 2, 2025
Good times. pic.twitter.com/DVkatnU4gd
From Jason Kottke at a local Vermont website:
JD Vance, fresh off of helping his boss ambush & insult a foreign leader in the White House yesterday afternoon, is on vacation in Vermont with his family this weekend and will be skiing at Sugarbush Resort in Warren, VT, a 15-minute drive from where I live.
This morning, Sugarbush snow reporter Lucy Welch took the opportunity to make some good trouble by sending out a message of resistance against Vance and the administration he represents. The message went out via email to all Sugarbush daily report subscribers and appeared on the website for a brief time before it was removed. Here is the text of her message:
Mar 1st, 2025, 6:49 AM: Today of all days, I would like to reflect on what Sugarbush means to me. This mountain has brought me endless days of joy, adventure, challenges, new experiences, beauty, community, and peace. I’ve found that nothing cures a racing mind quite like skiing through the trees and stopping to take a deep breath of that fresh forest air. The world around us might be a scary place, but these little moments of tranquility, moments I’ve been fortunate enough to enjoy as a direct result of my employment here, give me, and I’d guess you, too, a sense of strength and stability.
This fresh forest air, is, more specifically fresh National Forest air. Sugarbush operates on 1745 acres of the Green Mountain National Forest. Right now, National Forest lands and National Parks are under direct attack by the current Administration, who is swiftly terminating the positions of dedicated employees who devote their lives to protecting the land we love, and to protecting us while we are enjoying that land.
This Administration also neglects to address the danger, or even the existence of, climate change, the biggest threat to the future of our industry, and the skiing we all so much enjoy here. Burlington, VT is one of the fastest-warming cities in the country, and Vermont is the 9th fastest-warming state. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA), a resource I use every day for snow reporting, is crucial in monitoring extreme weather events and informing public safety measures, and is also experiencing widespread layoffs and defunding at the hands of the Administration.
Sugarbush would not be Sugarbush without our wonderful community. Employees and patrons alike, we are made up of some of the most kind hearted, hardworking people I have ever met. Our community is rich with folks of all different orientations, ethnicities, and walks of life, who all contribute to make this place what it is. They all love Sugarbush because it is a place where they can come to move their bodies, to connect with the land, to challenge themselves, to build character, to nourish their souls with the gift of skiing.
Many of these people are part of the LGBTQI+ community. Many (well, that’s a stretch, we all know this is an incredibly white-washed industry) are people of color. Half are women. Many are veterans or adaptive skiers who, through Vermont Adaptive, are able to access snow sports in part thanks to federal grants through the Department of Veterans Affairs, which is also facing devastating cuts. Many of our beloved employees moved across the world through an exchange program on the J1 visa to help this resort run, and they are not US citizens. ALL of these groups are being targeted, undervalued, and disrespected by the current Administration.
The beauty of National Forest land, is that anyone and everyone is welcome to enjoy it. Anyone and everyone can buy a lift ticket. I also imagine it is incredibly difficult, and likely impossible, to say “No” to the Secret Service. I hope that, instead of faulting Sugarbush management or employees for “allowing this to happen”, you can direct your anger to the source — the Administration that, in my oh-so-humble opinion, is threatening our democracy, our livelihoods, our land.
I want to reiterate how much I admire and respect my fellow employees and managers — they work so hard to make this place operate, to keep you coming back and enjoying it and making lifelong memories. Many of them may feel the same way that I do, but their hands are tied, and for good reason. They have families to support, they have benefits and health insurance to receive, they face far greater and more binding pressure from Corporate. I am in a privileged position here, in that I work only seasonally, I do not rely on this job for health insurance or benefits, and hey, waking up at 4:30 AM isn’t exactly sustainable. Therefore, I am using my relative “platform” as snow reporter, to be disruptive — I don’t have a whole lot to lose. We are living in a really scary and really serious time. What we do or don’t do, matters. This whole shpiel probably won’t change a whole lot, and I can only assume that I will be fired, but at least this will do even just a smidge more than just shutting up and being a sheep.
I am really scared for our future. Acting like nothing is happening here feels way scarier than losing my job. I want to have kids one day, and I want to teach them to ski. The policies and ideals of the current Administration, however, are not conducive to either of these things, because, at least how things look now, I’d never be able to afford a good life for a child anyway, and snow will be a thing of Vermont history. So please, for the sake of our future shredders: Be Better Here. It has truly been a pleasure writing your morning snow reports — I hope this one sticks with you. With love, peace, and hope, Lucy Welch …
I guess she’s not allowed to have opinions on the job. But that doesn’t mean she and her neighbors don’t have them:
Route 100 in Waitsfield is lined with protestors with signs about the current administration’s policies. @madrivervalley #vanceinvermont pic.twitter.com/soac5Gw3xT
— The Valley Reporter (@ValleyReporter) March 1, 2025
This kind of thing needs to happen whenever these assholes go out in public. They need to be reminded that they did NOT win a landslide and that the only people who are backing them right now are hardcore conspiracy theorists, hacks and morons. I think they forget that inside their DC MAGA bubble.
Update — this stuff is happening all over the country.
The crowd is growing and has lots of support from people driving by. Spaceship X protest now.
— Kelly Stuart (@skyspider.bsky.social) March 1, 2025 at 1:02 PM
[image or embed]
Since Trump took office he has:
- told Ukraine that it cannot expect to regain any territory or ever join NATO
- he ends the isolation that western leadership have had Putin in since the invasion saying he’s going to meet him and invites him back in the G7
- Trump had the US vote against a resolution in the UN calling for a just and lasting peace in Ukraine because it contained the true statement that Russia had invaded Ukraine. He voted with North Korea, Russia, Iran and Belarus.
- He called Zelensky a dictator
- has ordered the cyber command to stop any planning toward Russia
Putin is just sitting back letting Trump make concession after concession without giving anything in return. It’s a huge win.
Trump’s very upset that Zelensky isn’t on board with the sell-out, particularly because he’s refusing to kiss Putin’s ass the way Republicans kiss his. On the tarmac yesterday he said:
“He’s gotta say, ‘I want to make peace.’ He doesn’t have to stand there and say ‘Putin this, Putin that.’ All negative things. His people are dying.”
Putin invaded his country and has lost tens of thousands of soldiers. One might expect that Trump would be saying instead:
Putin’s gotta say “I want to make peace.” He doesn’t have to keep bombarding Ukrainian cities, even Chernobyl, all negative things if he wants to make a peace deal. Tens of thousands of Russians have died in this war.
Why is he not doing that? I think we know, don’t we?
Jonathan Chait writes today about Trump’s affinity for Putin. When asked if he thought Putin would keep his word:
Reporter: "What if Russia breaks the cease-fire?"
— The Bulwark (@BulwarkOnline) February 28, 2025
Trump: "What if a bomb drops on your head right now?" pic.twitter.com/J0c3J3Qrwq
“They respect me. Let me tell you, Putin went through a hell of a lot with me. He went through a phony witch hunt, where they used him and Russia. Russia, Russia, Russia, you ever hear of that deal? … It was a phony Democrat scam. He had to go through it. And he did go through it.”
Trump seems to genuinely feel that he and Vladimir Putin forged a personal bond through the shared trauma of being persecuted by the Democratic Party. Trump is known for his cold-eyed, transactional approach, and yet here he was, displaying affection and loyalty. (At another point, Trump complained that Zelensky has “tremendous hatred” toward Putin and insisted, “It’s very tough for me to make a deal with that kind of hate.”) He was not explaining why a deal with Russia would advance America’s interests, or why honoring it would advance Russia’s. He was defending Russia’s integrity by vouching for Putin’s character.
In recent years, the kinship between Trump and Putin has become somewhat unfashionable to point out. After Robert Mueller disappointed liberals by failing to prove a criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia, conventional wisdom on much of the center and left of the political spectrum came to treat the scandal as overblown. But even the facts Mueller was able to produce, despite noncooperation from Trump’s top lieutenants, were astonishing. Putin dangled a Moscow building deal in front of the Trump Organization worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and Trump lied about it, giving Putin leverage over him. Trump’s campaign chair, Paul Manafort, was in business with a Russian intelligence officer. Russia published hacked Democratic emails at a time when they were maximally useful to Trump’s campaign, and made another hacking attempt after he asked it on television to find missing emails from Hillary Clinton. The pattern of cooperation between Trump and Putin may not have been provably criminal, but it was extraordinarily damning.
[…]
Trump does admire dictators. He does instinctively side with bullies over victims. He does lack any values-based framework for American foreign policy. But … in addition to his generalized amorality, Trump exhibits a particular affection for Putin and Russia.
[…]
Trump has been regurgitating Russian propaganda, not only regarding Ukraine, since before Zelensky even assumed office. In 2018, the year preceding Zelensky’s election, he defended Russia’s seizure of Crimea; he has repeatedly refused to acknowledge Russian guilt for various murders; and he has even stuck to Russian talking points on such idiosyncratic topics as the Soviets’ supposedly defensive rationale for invading Afghanistan in 1979 and their fear that an “aggressive” Montenegro would attack Russia, dragging NATO into war.
I could add another little nugget: when Trump and Kim Jong Un were making love, Trump was on the horn with Putin who told him it would be smart to pull American troops out of South Korea and Trump canceled the annual military maneuvers on his advice. I’d imagine there are plenty of other examples. We know what we saw in Helsinki.
Chait doesn’t have an explanation as to why Trump loves Putin so much. It’s obviously not that they were both persecuted by the Democrats since he held these ideas long before the Russia investigation. Maybe he’s literally a Russian asset as has long been suspected. Maybe he just particularly likes the thoroughly unlikeable cold fish for some reason. It would be weird since he usually only likes people who suck his toes and Putin certainly does not do that. In fact, Putin treats him like one of his lackeys and he seems to eat it up.
I obviously don’t know if there’s more than meets the eye about this. But one thought that has entered my mind is that because he is stuck in the 1950s, he still sees Russia as a great power and saw Putin is some kind of strongman like Kruschev and wanted to be like him. (Recall that he used to lie and say he knew him when he’d never met him — “we were stablemates.”) But once he started getting blowback for the sloppy campaign engagement with Russia in 2016 his oppositional defiant disorder kicked in and he doubled down.
Since Trump is the leader of the most powerful nation on earth and not a child, I don’t know if any of those responses will work with him. But I do know that whenever someone says he shouldn’t do something he decides that’s exactly what he’s going to do. And in this case, that means siding with the dictator. (I’m sorry to say that it might also mean that he’s double down on Musk as well.)
If he thinks siding with Putin makes him strong,he’s wrong. Putin thinks he’s a fool and a dupe and is laughing at his idiocy. But if he and that psychopath JD Vance did what they did yesterday just to make the rest of the world recoil in horror, he got what he wanted. He enjoyed himself very much.