Update on the funding freeze
As could be predicted, a federal judge in DC freezes the freeze (or is it unfreezes the freeze?):
A federal judge temporarily blocked President Trump’s plan to freeze federal aid minutes before it was set to go into effect late Tuesday afternoon.
U.S. District Judge Loren AliKhan said she was granting a “brief administrative stay” that preserves federal disbursements at least until Monday at 5 p.m. EST after a group of nonprofit and public health organizations filed a lawsuit.
The judge will hold another hearing Monday on whether to grant a longer pause.
AliKhan, an appointee of former President Biden who was randomly assigned to the case, issued the order at the conclusion of a hastily scheduled video conference Tuesday that began just an hour before the freeze.
It’s no surprise that this was a judge in DC appointed by Biden and company. However, I don’t object to a temporary freeze on the freeze in order to assess what’s what. I doubt the assessment will be objective, however. But we’ll see.
This will almost certainly be the pattern for a great many of Trump’s moves: a big hue and cry from Democrats, and then immediate lawsuits leading to decisions from left-leaning judges imposing a temporary halt on whatever he’s ordered. Some of these cases will be going to SCOTUS. Some of the cases will ultimately be decided in his favor and some won’t, and for some issues Congress will try to pass statutes on the subject.
And about the military
It is the policy of my Administration that the Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security with regard to the United States Coast Guard (USCG), and every element of the Armed Forces should operate free from any preference based on race or sex.
There’s a ton more at the link, but the goal is to rid the military of the policy of DEI Uber Alles. It started to be implemented during the Obama administration, to the best of my recollection, and picked up enormous steam during the Biden administration. It is deeply entrenched now. Good luck getting rid of it.
The funding freeze: the press pounces
Here’s the sort of thing I’m talking about:
An abrupt halt on federal grants and loans announced Monday night by the Trump administration has created widespread confusion across the government, Congress, state programs and nonprofit organizations that rely on that funding.
The Office of Management and Budget sent a vaguely worded two-page memo to all federal agencies Monday night directing them to “temporarily pause all activities related to obligation or disbursement of all Federal financial assistance” that could conflict with President Donald Trump’s agenda.
The following morning, nonprofit organizations said they were unable to get into a system used to access federal funds to pay for expenses, like salaries and rent.
It’s not clear exactly which programs will be halted, but OMB also sent a document to agencies asking for details on more than 2,600 programs, including school meals for low-income students, USAID foreign assistance, mine inspections, the WIC nutrition program for pregnant women and infants, and a reintegration program for homeless veterans.
However, here’s what press secretary Leavitt had to say when asked at a press conference. Unfortunately, I can’t embed that video, so please click on the link to listen to it. Among other things, Leavitt says:
I think there’s only uncertainty in this room amongst the media; there’s no uncertainty in this building. So let me provide the clarity that all of you need. This is not a blanket pause in federal assistance in grant programs from the Trump administration. Individual assistance, that includes … to give you a few examples, Social Security benefits, Medicare benefits, food stamps, welfare benefits, assistance that is going directly to individuals will not be impacted by this pause. And I want to make that very clear to any Americans who are watching at home who may be a little bit confused about some of the media reporting. This administration, if you are receiving individual assistance from the federal government, you will still continue to receive that. However, it is the responsibility of this president and this administration to be good stewards of taxpayer dollars. That is something that president Trump campaigned on, that’s why he has launched DOGE … and that’s why OMB sent out this memo last night.
There was more, but I think the original memo gave the media a golden opportunity to raise the alarm, which of course they did. I know plenty of people who believe that Trump is going to take away their Social Security and their Medicare, and this stirs them up further. Perhaps there’s no way to calm them own, of course. But the situation with this pause should have been announced in a way that was crystal completely clear from the start.
Open thread 1/28/2025
More on the hostages
It would be nice to have a translation for this. But some things are easy to understand even without one:
On the other hand, Hamas has finally given Israel a list of who is alive and who is dead in the group of 33 to be released in this “deal.” The answer is that 26 are purported to be alive, which is similar to Israel’s previous tally of 25.
The question on many people’s minds, including mine, is whether any members of the Bibas family are on the “alive” list. Israeli authorities are busy letting families know, so my guess is that the general public won’t know till the exchanges all occur.
Meanwhile, Trump has released some bombs that Biden and company had withheld from Israel:
US President Donald Trump said on Saturday night that he had lifted a hold put in place by former president Joe Biden on a shipment of 2,000-pound bombs for Israel.
“A lot of things that were ordered and paid for by Israel, but have not been sent by Biden, are on their way!” Trump wrote on his social media app Truth Social, without providing further details.
On the Hegseth confirmation, and especially Murkowski
As noted in this post, Pete Hegseth was confirmed by the Senate in a vote of 51/50 with Vice President Vance casting the tie-breaking vote. The GOP Senate members who voted “Nay” were Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, and Mitch McConnell the former Majority Leader.
Murkowski is the quintessential RINO and yet she’s from a red state, Alaska. You may wonder why she’s still Alaska’s senator. She was first elected in 2002 and has held the seat since then, having won her most recent election in 2022. That means she is up for re-election in 2028, if she decides to run. She’ll be 71 years old then, not especially geriatric by current standards in politics.
But if you look at Murkowski’s election history it’s a bit easier to understand, although strange. She’s the daughter of a well-known and once-popular Alaskan governor who had also been a senator. Her father appointed her to the Senate when he resigned his own seat to become governor in 2002. She was already in politics, however, as a member of Alaska’s House of Representatives starting in 1999. When I say that her father was a “once-popular” governor, I’m referring to the fact that he won the governorship by a wide margin, but by the time he tried to run for a second term he was primaried out and left with the dismal approval rating of 19%.
Lisa Murkowski has held on more or less by the skin of her teeth. (By the way, I don’t usually put anyone down for having failed the bar exam because I’m well aware of how difficult it is, but Murkowski has the distinction of having failed four times and passed only on the fifth try.) For example, when she ran for re-election to the Alaska House in 2000, she won by 56 votes.
When her father appointed her to the US Senate in 2002, many Alaskans were unhappy:
The appointment caused controversy in Alaska. Many voters disapproved of the nepotism. Her appointment eventually resulted in a referendum that stripped the governor of the power to directly appoint replacement senators.
As far as her elections to the Senate go:
Murkowski has had several close challenges but has never lost a general election. She has won four full terms to the Senate; she won 48.6% of the vote in 2004, 39.5% in 2010, 44.4% in 2016 and 53.7% in 2022.
That 2010 race was a three-candidate event in which she was successfully primaried and was not the GOP nominee, but decided to run anyway in a write-in campaign and beat the official Republican nominee, a Tea Party candidate, by a narrow margin. My guess is that the reason for her victory included crossover Democrat votes, people who realized one of the Republicans would win and wanted it to be the RINO. In 2016 it was a four-way race:
[In 2016] Murkowski was re-elected with 44.4% of the vote, becoming the first person in history to win three elections to the U.S. Senate with pluralities but not majorities, having taken 48.6% in 2004 and 39.5% in 2010.[4] Miller’s 29.2% finish was then the best ever for a Libertarian candidate in a U.S. Senate election in terms of vote percentage.
Her 2022 victory was extremely strange as well [emphasis mine]:
This was the first U.S. Senate election in Alaska to be held under a new election process provided for in Ballot Measure 2. All candidates ran in a nonpartisan blanket top-four primary on August 16, 2022, and the top four candidates advanced to the general election, where voters utilized ranked-choice voting.
Murkowski had been a vocal critic of Donald Trump during his presidency and opposed several of his initiatives. Murkowski was one of seven Republican senators who voted to convict Trump in his second impeachment trial in 2021, and was the only one up for re-election in 2022. On March 16, 2021, the Alaska Republican Party voted to censure Murkowski and announced that it would recruit a Republican challenger in the 2022 election cycle. Kelly Tshibaka, a former commissioner of the Alaska Department of Administration, was endorsed by Trump and the Alaska Republican Party. Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell and the National Republican Senatorial Committee supported Murkowski.
In addition to Murkowski and Tshibaka, Democrat Pat Chesbro and Republican Buzz Kelley also advanced to the general election. On September 13, Kelley suspended his campaign and endorsed Tshibaka but remained on the ballot. Murkowski received a plurality of first-place votes; however, because no candidate received a majority of the votes in the first round, an instant runoff was triggered. Murkowski won reelection in the third and final round, winning most of the second-choice votes from Chesbro’s voters.
So she won because of Democrat votes, this time without a doubt. She also had the support in that election of none other than Mitch McConnell.
I think that history explains, at least in part, how it is that Alaska came to have Lisa Murkowski as its long-time senator.
For McConnell, I don’t think his vote is any mystery: he hates Trump, and perhaps it has something to do with his financial interests as well.
Susan Collins is much easier to explain. I wrote:
I don’t fault Collins. She’s from Maine. She helps even if she sometimes votes with Democrats, because when she retires she’ll be replaced by a real Democrat.
She has to choose the times she will vote more conservatively, and when it doesn’t matter as much is free to vote with Democrats. She almost certainly was aware of the breakdown of votes, and knew that Vance was available to break the tie.
Commenter “Old Flyer” wrote:
I am not so charitable toward Collins. There are ample opportunities to assuage the Left leaning voters in her relatively tiny constituency; but Hegseth’s confirmation was hanging in the balance. I believe that she is a committed anti-Trumper and will oppose him as long as she feeds at the Senate trough–regardless of the stakes.
I think the answer is as I said above: that she knew it actually didn’t hang in the balance. It’s possible to forget that votes are often known in advance and that members of Congress sometimes vote to make a point when they know it doesn’t matter in the end.
Today is the second anniversary of Gerard Vanderleun’s death
[NOTE: This is a repost of an essay I wrote a few days after Gerard died. Also, he left instructions to close his blog two years after his death. I plan to do that in a few weeks. Meanwhile, I’m still compiling the poetry book, and I need his blog for that.]
It’s a daily voice, like a friend you talk to on the phone every day. The closest thing to this kind of writing prior to blogging was the daily columnist (when did those go out? or did they ever exist?).
You get to thinking a blogger is someone you know, and although the conversations are a mite one-sided, they’re not totally one-sided because many bloggers interact in the comments as well. And then there’s always email contact, which makes the blogger much more easily accessible than the olden-day columnist.
The writing voices of bloggers are highly idiosyncratic as well. It’s not newspaper reporting, after all, with its pretense of objectivity and impersonality. Also, there’s no middleman or editor. The blogger is all of that rolled into one.
Some bloggers are far more personal in their writing and disclosure than others. Gerard Vanderleun was that way, for example. I’m much more circumspect (remember that apple I hide behind). Then again, even what appears like openness is hardly full disclosure, and bloggers intentionally shape the personae they project. That’s why meeting a blogger in the real world usually causes some feeling of surprise, because the writer is not the person although the person is the writer.
So when a writer dies and that writing voice is stilled, it’s extra-noticeable for the readers. There’s often a pang very much like losing a good friend in real life, a friend with a major daily presence. The blogger has been churning out copy like a machine, usually every day and probably several times a day, often for years or decades. And then suddenly: silence. Utter utter silence.
It’s a very dramatic reminder that death is an abrupt and reluctant parting as far as our lives on earth go, and how powerless all of us are in its face.
[NOTE: For those of you who don’t know the story of why I’m writing about Gerard Vanderleun, please see this.]
Northern New England had an earthquake today
A real one, not a metaphoric one.
Fortunately, as with most New England earthquakes, it was small: in this case, 3.8. I didn’t feel it, although I should have, as it was felt from Portland, Maine to Boston:
The quake occurred about 6.5 miles southeast of York, Maine, just before 10:30 a.m., according to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), which initially reported the magnitude as 4.1 before adjusting the temblor to 3.8.
“Today’s M3.8 near Bar Harbor, Maine, reminds us that earthquakes are unusual but not unheard of along the Atlantic Seaboard,” USGS wrote on X.
The National Weather Service (NWS) in Caribou, Maine, said there was no threat of a tsunami.
That’s a bit strange, since York is quite far from Bar Harbor.
I’ve felt many earthquakes of that magnitude in New England. It’s usually just a gentle shaking which you can miss if you’re in a car or doing something other than just quietly sitting.
Open thread 1/27/2025
Spambot of the day
Questions you never thought to ask:
So what is a tree hugger with an extra mattress to do?
Politico seems to be trying out a new stance on Trump
This column sort-of lauding Trump appeared in Politico on the 21st. It was written by Politico’s media editor in chief John F. Harris, and is entitled, “Time to Admit It: Trump Is a Great President. He’s Still Trying To Be a Good One.” Straddling the fence, but it’s an improvement. The idea is similar to the idea of Time’s “Man of the Year” award, which is that “greatness” is measured by impact, whether bad or good.
An excerpt:
But the second occasion of Trump taking the oath of office also put him in an entirely new light. For the first time, he is holding power under circumstances in which reasonable people cannot deny a basic fact: He is the greatest American figure of his era.
Let’s quickly exhale: Great in this context is not about a subjective debate over whether he is a singularly righteous leader or a singularly menacing one. It is now simply an objective description about the dimensions of his record.
So that establishes the somewhat neutral tone.
There’s also this:
Opponents have no choice but to acknowledge he and his movement represent a large historical argument — and then rally similarly large arguments to defeat it. Trump in 2020 showed himself ready to undermine democracy for his own purposes. Trump in 2024 showed that he is also a potent expression of democracy.
That second sentence reveals Harris’ bias. Did Trump “undermine democracy” in 2020, and did he try to defend it? And what of things like the Hunter laptop coverup; didn’t that “undermine democracy” tremendously, whether or not there was any meaningful fraud in the actual voting? In other words – what is democracy and how does one defend it? If a person truly believes for a host of reasons that an election is rigged, how does one “defend democracy”? That vital issue is ignored by Harris and so many others.
I like this part, though:
Have you ever known someone who was facing legal hurdles? In many cases, even if people ultimately win the case, they end up being consumed and shrunken by the searing nature of the experience. Imagine running for president amid huge civil suits, criminal prosecutions, and even felony convictions — then emerging from this morass as a larger figure than before. No one needs to admire the achievement to recognize that Trump is possessed by some rare traits of denial, combativeness and resilience.
But was it really “denial”? Or was it righteous anger at the kangaroo court proceedings, and faith that truth would ultimately prevail? Is it denial if Trump wins as he seems to have thought he would? Or was it the left that was in denial?