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Pure insanity.
Wasting water that could otherwise be used for irrigation is probably going to piss off some conservative central valley farmers that tend to vote Republican. Won’t make any difference in Senate or Presidential elections but it could potentially cost them seats in the House.
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2 years or so from now? That seems like a lifetime or so at this point.
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A bit on the nose.
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Hedge funds bet billions on market crash in Trump’s America
Goldman Sachs reports a surge in short bets against US stocks
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/01/31/hedge-funds-bet-billions-against-trumps-america/
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Repeating myself, but what’s happening right now is a classic, full-on, 1980ies style corporate raid - only not on a corporation but on the whole country.
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The threat was loud and clear: Report your so-called “DEI” employees or else. What exactly “DEIA or similar ideologies” means is up in the air, but the message was out there. And so was the email address of the DEIA snitching hotline.
Fake emails quickly started to roll in. ‘I don’t care, fuck these McCarthyite bastards,” one BlueSky user said, with an screenshot attached of an email to the hotline where he ironically reported Donald Trump and JD Vance for being “put in their positions solely because of their race and/or gender despite the fact that they are wholly unqualified for their jobs and, in some cases, have criminal records.”
“Anyone have a script to fire off a billion e-mails an hour??” another user asked in the replies.
“Anyone can email anything of any size even if it crashes the site,” one X user noted.
The scope and effectiveness of this latest phase of Trump’s anti-DEI crusade remains to be seen.
thefingerfuckingfemalefury
FLOOD THIS 
MAKE IT UTTERLY UNUSABLE
awfulhorrid [ @awfulhorrid Hey, buddy! 
]
As an IT professional I have to advise you all to not waste government resources like this, especially if you do so without using a disposable anonymous email address service like the one below.
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I’m having trouble holding it together lately. Everything feels like it’s already over, like it’s too late, like there’s no way out. Not to pick on AOC in particular, whom I’ve been very much in favor of, but when trans people are being outlawed, concentration camps are being planned, Musk is illegally taking over entire government departments’ computer systems and planes are falling out of the sky and I see this:
Idgaf I’m still fighting for guaranteed healthcare.
Aspiration is the answer. Not just “we’re not the bad guys.”
We need something more meaningful than that. I want a future worth fighting for. They have no vision. We do. Lean into our strengths and knock them out.
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@aoc.bsky.social) January 31, 2025 at 12:20 PM
it really makes me lose hope. Universal healthcare and having a campaign strategy beyond “we’re not the Republicans” are important, sure, but… right now? Really? Right now I’m worried that there won’t BE future elections at the rate Trump’s destroying our country. I’m scared that Nazis will be kicking down our doors within a few months and shipping us off to be murdered. The time to talk about universal healthcare was either before the fucker was elected, or after we’re sure that democracy will still exist a year in the future. If even AOC, one of the only Democrats actually speaking out about anything, doesn’t realize this, then we’re well and truly fucked- and it really feels like we indeed are.
Is it just me? Am I overreacting as a result of too much doomscrolling?
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It’s bust out for the entire country.
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Lutheran Family Services is a huge player locally. I wonder if they are going after them in general or singling out SD for some reason? Guess we’ll find out.
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I’m with you in that same boat. Life raft?
The following line of thinking makes me feel a little better (I’ve long admired Robin’s analyses).
The rest
I wonder how people are going to make sense of what seems to be a very new line coming from three different kinds of voices of opposition to Trump in the last several weeks, voices that are fairly influential and will shape, I’m sure, how the rest of us talk and think about the next four years.
Here’s JAMELLE BOUIE, whom I’d describe as a strong left liberal, with the sharpest historical analysis of the intersections between racism and capitalism, and a deep awareness of how institutions affect politics:
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“It is very telling of these guys’ [Trump and his followers] conception of how power works that they see issuing a flurry of executive orders as evidence of presidential strength and vigor and not a sign that the president is too weak to pursue a serious legislative agenda.”
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“We have a president with a tenuous grip on small legislative majorities who is out of the gate with a flurry of dramatically unpopular orders and who has just demonstrated his weakness on the international stage. if i were an elected member of his domestic opposition, i might try to draw real blood.”
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“i think this should be factored into how states, counties, localities and hospitals respond to these executive orders. ‘we will investigate you if you teach DEl.’ okay, with what agents, specifically? with what state capacity?”
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“not to downplay the seriousness of any of this but i think a lot of you are imagining the united states as a country of 30 million people and not a country of 330 million people. ‘he’ll enforce this with proud boys!’ okay, there are > 13,000 public school districts in the US. there are roughly 100,000 primary and secondary schools. trump pardoned 1500 people.”
Here’s EZRA KLEIN, whom I’d describe as a mainstream liberal, bordering on the centrist, who often sets the pace of more respectable commentary:
"Donald Trump’s first two weeks in the White House have followed Bannon’s strategy like a script. The flood is the point. The overwhelm is the point. The message wasn’t in any one executive order or announcement. It was in the cumulative effect of all of them. The sense that this is Trump’s country now. This is his government now. It follows his will. It does what he wants. If Trump tells the state to stop spending money, the money stops. If he says that birthright citizenship is over, it’s over.
“Or so he wants you to think. In Trump’s first term, we were told: Don’t normalize him. In his second, the task is different: Don’t believe him.”
…
"There is a reason Trump is doing all of this through executive orders rather than submitting these same directives as legislation to pass through Congress. A more powerful executive could persuade Congress to eliminate the spending he opposes or reform the civil service to give himself the powers of hiring and firing that he seeks. To write these changes into legislation would make them more durable and allow him to argue their merits in a more strategic way…But Republicans have a three-seat edge in the House and a 53-seat majority in the Senate. Trump has done nothing to reach out to Democrats. If Trump tried to pass this agenda as legislation, it would most likely fail in the House, and it would certainly die before the filibuster in the Senate. And that would make Trump look weak.
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"That is the tension at the heart of Trump’s whole strategy: Trump is acting like a king because he is too weak to govern like a president. He is trying to substitute perception for reality. He is hoping that perception then becomes reality. That can only happen if we believe him.
“The flurry of activity is meant to suggest the existence of a plan. The Trump team wants it known that they’re ready this time. They will control events rather than be controlled by them. The closer you look, the less true that seems. They are scrambling and flailing already. They are leaking against one another already. We’ve learned, already, that the O.M.B. directive was drafted, reportedly, without the input or oversight of key Trump officials — ‘it didn’t go through the proper approval process,’ an administration official told The Washington Post. For this to be the process and product of a signature initiative in the second week of a president’s second term is embarrassing.”
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“What Trump wants you to see in all this activity is command. What is really in all this activity is chaos. They do not have some secret reservoir of focus and attention the rest of us do not. They have convinced themselves that speed and force is a strategy unto itself — that it is, in a sense, a replacement for a real strategy. Don’t believe them.”
And here’s REBECCA SOLNIT, one of the preeminent voices of The Resistance, whose politics I can’t always figure out but whom no one would accuse of downplaying threat of Trump:
“I found this really insightful and encouraging analysis,” she writes, referring to the following statements from Timothy Noah, a solid liberal journalist who keeps a close eye on things related to workers and unions, and Greg Sargent, another solid liberal journalist, statements that she posts on her page.
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Noah: “Trump is, I have argued, not a strong president. He is a weak president. He has authoritarian tendencies, but he’s weak. He’s mentally weak. He is subject vulnerable to all sorts of manipulation by his aides. He tries to do all sorts of contradictory things. He is not competent. And on the evidence of this particular example, neither are his enablers…These are all signs of a weak presidency.”
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Sargent: “I want to get at your point about weakness and failure here. An interesting thing is how this contrasts with Trump/MAGA propaganda right now. That propaganda is relentlessly pushing the idea that Trump and his allies are ruthlessly forging ahead with his agenda. You see it all over Twitter. All of MAGA’s tweeting immense congratulations to Trump, he’s crushing the libs, he’s doing this, he’s doing that. … The real story here is that they’re actually screwing up already…I don’t want to be too optimistic here. They’re going to do a lot of damage—already are doing a lot of damage. But clearly what we’re seeing now is that they’re not going to be able to roll over the bureaucracy and our institutions, as easily as they thought, as easily as John Harris thinks, as easily as that credulous New York Times piece portrayed, right?”
Back to me: I’m less interested in crowing or scoring points with my critics (though I’d be less than honest if I didn’t say it hurt to be called these things publicly by people who’ve known me personally and worked with me for a long time, sometimes as far back as graduate school) than in pointing out something I noticed about a month or so ago. During Trump 1.0, people found it useful, for reasons I remain unclear about, to say that we were living under a fascist regime, even though the very fact that they could say that publicly suggested otherwise, and to warn of fascism as a way, I guess, of mobilizing people to vote or act.
Now that it’s become clear that yelling fascism won’t make it— whatever “it” is—go away, now that people realize that a constant state of alarm imposes genuine political costs, people are looking for different kinds of analysis that show all the ways in which the familiar tools of politics are the tools we have to fight with, that a lot of the Trump power performance is just that, performance, that a lot of what we consider democracy still exists, and that we’re all going to have to look harder at institutions and actions and cracks and crevices—and less to the courts or revelations about Russia and pee (remember that one?) or to the passing street demonstration.
I’ll be interested to see how this commentary develops further.
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