For the next three weeks or so, the news is likely to be all about one dead guy who, as Kristjan Wager put it, “represented a bigoted organization, covering up for child molesters”.  I now add to my current depression the worry about what the Trump/Musk regime and its gaggle of grifters will get away with while nobody is paying attention.

With any luck, I’m overreacting.

Update:  I haven’t been following Francis because I don’t really care; but I guess he was one of the good guys after all.  Robert Reich posted a eulogy on his substack; so I defer to Reich’s better knowledge of Francis himself; but I keep the same opinion of the Roman Catholic Church and the same worry about what more important news might be missed.

I heard on the news this morning that Trump has halted all military aid to Ukraine.  The “official” reason is that it’s a temporary halt to evaluate the effectiveness of the aid.  Bullshit.  The two purposes are to feel macho by punching down like bullies do and to give Putin time to take more territory before the Europeans get their aid packages ready.

Trump is giving his state of the union speech tonight.  What I fear is that Democrats will remain totally spineless; and I note that they’ve already selected a “moderate” to give the Democratic response.  (The Republicans will be utterly shameless, but that will come as no surprise.)

I’m beginning to lose all hope that America can avoid becoming a failed state.

I retired from the USPS about three years ago, but I still like to hear how my former colleagues are doing.  From a recent private e-mail [my own comments in italics in square brackets]:

… I fear the following:

1) A unilateral override of our remote work MOU [Memo of Understanding—a kind of addendum to the union contract].  Trump has recently declared that ONLY HE has the right to interpret the law for the executive branch, and this includes all labor laws.  The department of labor won’t matter, and he can just order the post office to ignore arbitration.  He’s made a power play to eliminate the independence of any agency.  This still has to be challenged in court, and I expect it will.  But he’s challenging the system in ways it has not been challenged before, and anything is possible.

2) A unilateral decision to ARBITRARILY FIRE all Probationary Employees.  This could involve those across all crafts, as well as those who recently promoted into management (and are going through their EAS [first level of management] probation).

3) A unilateral action by management to start using extreme productivity tracking to try and terminate us.  In the federal agencies, all computers are being ordered to be installed with key loggers to track productivity, as if the only method of tracking productivity is how many characters per minute you type, or how many mouse clicks you make.  These are not productivity trackers, but metrics designed to terminate people.

4) And if all 3 of these things are on the table, then everything else is as well – such as replacing postal IT with GSA IT.  He could try to replace our internal HR with OPM.  Anything is possible.  After all, he’s the sole arbitrator of the law in his estimation.

The USPS is required by law to deliver, at a uniform price and service level, to all locations in the United States and its territories.  How long will that continue if the Muskrats fire all the probationary rural carriers¹?  And what about delivering mail in Alaska where there are no roads²?  Does anybody seriously think that a private for-profit company will do that?

Trump can claim correctly, and probably will, that the Postal Service loses billions annually; but IIUC, that’s almost all due to a legal requirement to fully fund the retirement system for decades, something that no other company does.  My understanding is that they at least break even, on average, on actual services rendered; and IIRC, priority mail³ is actually quite profitable.

This is blantantly illegal; but Trump doesn’t care about the law.  Republican congresscritters won’t do anything to stop it (they’re all scared of getting primaried, and I’ve read that some of them have even gotten death threats); and SCOTUS’ Gang of Six have shown themselves to be utterly shameless; so we don’t have an effective separation of powers anymore.  I’m beginning to lose all hope.

---

¹”Letter carrier” is the official term for the person who delivers mail to your home or P.O. box.

²Mail moves to and from small town post offices in Alaska in small aircraft.  Yes, really.  I was a programmer on a system that connects desired movements of the mail with available transportation, and “Alaska Contract” is one of the air transportation types.

³The marketeers’ term for what was called “parcel post” when I was growing up. 😎

Putin and Trump negotiating a Ukrainian peace deal with both Ukraine and Europe excluded, and not even pretending otherwise, gave me a possibly not so bright idea:  the next round of negotiations could be something like semi-finals.

Europe
--------|
        |________________
Ukraine |                |
--------|                |
                         |________________
 Putin                   |
--------|                |
        |________________|
 Trump  |
--------|

I just found out from an e-mail list related to passenger rail that Amtrak will be rolling back its DEI initiatives.

I couldn’t find Amtrak mentioned in Project 2025.  There’s hardly anything about rail at all.  This smells like “obeying in advance”.

Ken Martin has been elected as the chair of the Democratic National Committee.  In his acceptance speech, he used “billionaires” several times, always in a perjorative sense.  Can we hope that the Democrats will no longer be content with enjoying the view out of the Overton window, but rather try to get the working-class vote back?  We’ll see…

I heard “out of the corner of my ear” on today’s Today show that Trump had fired several departments’ inspector generals.  I Googled for it; and it turns out to be true:  he did indeed fire 17 IGs overnight, presumably to replace them with the usual yes-men.  I won’t bother including any links since several stories from outlets like Reuters all the way to Bezos’ Washington Post showed up right at the top.

It turns out that there’s a 2020 law that says that the president must give Congress 30 days notice before such a firing; and several congresscritters (including Republicans like Grassley) have already opposed the move.  We’ll see whether there are enough principled Republicans for the Congress to say, “no, you can’t do that”.

One down, 1460 to go.

I’m not sure that the pardons and sentence commutations are the big story, although that’s what the media are covering, including some mild comments by a handful of Republicans.  Getting less media attention is the executive order putting all federal DEI workers on paid leave and effectively shutting down all government DEI activity.  I have every expectation that we’ll soon see many more departures from basic human decency.

If the numbers I’ve seen on the WWW are true (I haven’t verified them myself), Trump squeeked by with a margin of just 1.5% of the popular vote; and it seems obvious to me that he couldn’t have achieved anywhere near that without the roughly 80% of Christian fundies voting for their god’s chosen one.  All the other guesses, e.g., refusing to vote for a woman, white working class men being abandoned by the Democrats, although probably true, strike me as small potatoes by comparison.

I’m coming to the conclusion that the real problem we have is a faux religion that’s just an excuse to be prideful, hateful, self-satisfied DIEhards.  I wish I could be more understanding; but I’m finding myself simply disgusted.

He didn’t spend all his time bragging on himself as Trump would have done.  He mentioned some of the good things that have happened during his administration, but that wasn’t the main part of the speech.

About ten minutes in, he started to go after the wannabe oligarchs and even briefly likened them to the late 19^th century robber barons.  He warned about the rising influence of social media and its spreading of misinformation; and he warned about what he called the “tech-industrial complex” as an analogy to Eisenhower’s “military-industrial complex’.  This part was encouraging.

The next important election in the U.S., one in which you and I don’t get to vote, will happen on Saturday, Feb. 1, when the Democratic National Committee will elect their next chair.  We’ll find out then whether the Democrats will want to be a real opposition party and go after the 21^st century robber barons, or if it’ll just be more of the same.  (I’m rooting for Ben Wikler who made the Wisconsin Democratic Party actually effective and who has Chuck Schumer’s endorsement at least.)