Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:It doesn't matter if you hate USAID. It doesn't matter if you think the money they spend is a waste of taxpayer dollars. It doesn't matter if you think Musk is a genius and a renegade and superhero all wrapped up into one. None of it matters. What matters are the laws of the United States of America say there is a right way to do things, and Musk is operating outside of those laws right now. He has no legal authority to do what he is doing. So he needs to be stopped and held accountable.
+10109192827483
It is NOT about USAID. It's about letting a rogue agent take over the government and do whatever he wants.
Trump and the GOP can shutdown USAI, it's within their right. But there are rules,. procedures and laws for how to do it. Elon cannot fire employees who are civil servants and command government police forces. GTFO.
Elon does not run our entire government outside of the law.
+ another 10000000000
I'll keep posting this on threads all over the place until I'm blue in the face. It's the process everyone should be paying attention to, not just the outcome. Our democracy is built on a constitution and rule of law, and when you eliminate those, despite being happy with the outcome, you're an ignorant fool.
Come on. This just rings so hollow. Our country has an extremely long history of individual and collective action that breaks or bends then prevailing law—all the way back to the country’s founding fathers who knew they were risking their lives in declaring independence.
This goes all the way from the trivial (Harry Reid intentionally misleadingly insinuating that Mitt Romney was a tax cheat from the Senate floor—and laughing about it no less) to the most important issues (John Lewis and his good trouble).
Indeed, we’re less than 8 years removed from an FBI director leaking stories to the press, an FBI agent altering evidence in a warrant application and, as we speak, purported FBI agents are sharing details with each other on social media on how to anonymously leak information they are not authorized to disclose. My guess is that you are mostly supportive of these ethical and legal lapses (hopefully not on the warrant business), but we are to believe that all of a sudden you really care about the rule of law and process?
The left can’t spend the first Trump presidency declaring that he is such a unique threat to democracy that institutional guardrails should be ignored and then come back and assert institutional guardrails. It just has no credibility.
I’m not happy about violation of the law and institutional guardrails being ignored. But this has been happening for the better part of my adult life dating back to the second Bush administration. Why should we care now? Because this time it is different? Maybe you are right and this is the time to care. But after decades of this garbage, across both political parties, I just can’t…
Come on nothing. You don't burn the entire place down and then claim you give a crap about the rule of law and institutional guardrails. Except for Elon Musk, every single person you mentioned swore to uphold the constitution when they took an oath of office. That's not just for show. It means something. You seem to want to want equate civil rights protest (good trouble) with the utter crap show we have now so you lack all credibility. If the FBI is corrupt (and yes, I believe many of them are) root them out - do the job that you have been elected to do, not hand over the reins to someone who has absolutely no care in the world what our constitution says as long as his checkbook is open for business. This is absurd, and you know it. And yes, I've tended to care about the rule of law for decades now, because I'm not an idiot.
I daresay you're missing the point of the post you responded to. There were people who swore to uphold the rule of the law and then broke it. Like the FBI agents who leaked, or faked stuff for a warrant. Were they punished? I don't know, or did it happen and was it enabled because senior bureaucrats were "terrified" of Trump "destroying democracy." A lot of that stuff happened under Trump 01. So it's hard to have sympathy for your response.
It's pretty clear what the Trump administration goals are for this second term. I cam outline a few of them so far:
1. Musk is serious about reforming the Federal IT system. It was a nightmare for decade and people complained about it for decades and forever tried to "fix it" but nothing ever got done because the bureaucracy cared more about privacy and protection despite not being particularly good at both. It's easy to kill reform through a thousand meetings. If Musk accomplishes in one year what people have tried to do for 30 years, that will be a massive improvement to the overall efficiency of the bureaucracy and government functioning.
2). The administration does not care about classified secrets. You may not like Trump but at least so far everything they've done has been in the name of transparency. We will finally (apparently) really see where all the money is going and what projects and programs are being funded instead of all that information shielded behind a bureaucratic maze of secrecy and opaqueness and "classified secret requiring top clearance" etc cetera. I've a feeling we're going to learn a lot more about what the institutional bureaucracy, whether USAID or CIA or FBI were doing and it's not going to be pleasant. It doesn't mean most people were up to no good. I believe that the vast majority of the bureaucracy in all agencies were law abiding decent people doing their jobs decently, but at a certain level stuff was definitely happening behind closed doors. We saw this with the Mueller investigation into the so called Russian collusion, we saw this with some USAID activity. We saw this with funding at Wuhan. Most people in Congress have no idea what is really going on either. Marco Rubio made that clear in a speech earlier that agencies routinely stonewalled congressional request for information.
All the laws people accuse Musk or Trump of breaking are laws that the agencies used to protect themselves from audits and demands for transparency and it was clearly not healthy. These were not laws for the benefit of the American people. And probably allowed some people to do things they otherwise wouldn't have done.
Yes, Trump and Musk are taking a wrecking ball to the institutional bureaucracy, aka the deep state. But I'm not upset by it. Yet. They may go too far. We will see. The funny thing is that as someone in my mid 40s, I remember all the left wing progressive liberal Democratic college professors ranting against the deep state. It was the Republicans who defended a lot of these activities and demand for secrecy, so it's interesting to see how the tables have flipped. But be careful before assuming you're on the morally higher ground, especially if it's confirmed that Federal agencies were using taxpayer dollars to do genuinely disturbing stuff whether political interference or funding questionable research into bat viruses and then hiding it behind a cloak of secrecy and refusing accountability.
![[Post New]](/jforum/templates/default/images/icon_minipost_new.gif){kind=icon}