Again, But With Poetry! Tabs, Fri., Feb. 7, 2025

Morning news roundup! Things to read!

Tabs gif by your friend Martini Glambassador!

Good morning, Wonkette friends. First some sadness.

Your comrades Walter Wellstone and Villago Delenda Est both died this week, Walter after proactively choosing to end his life with dementia, and Villago after a fall. Both notices from their beloveds are pinned at the top of the comments here. They are very loved.

Before we transition to ugly things that our beloved friends’ names should not be near, we’ll put a buffer of “Maxwell Frost talks to Teen Vogue and is great and we love both of them.” (Teen Vogue)

And sort of almost exactly the same thing but with poetry! (Margaret Killjoy)

Now, on same again, here’s Sen. Brian Schatz talking to Isaac Chotiner, which people say you should never do, but like, I figure he would just want to chat with me because I’m so smart and interesting! (New Yorker)

Now on to stupid and ugly.

Grampa and the $2 rides on the aeroplane. (Jeff Teidrich)

His sick game is lighting fires so he (alone) can “fix” them. Goddamn his voters are the stupidest people on the fucking planet. (Jay Kuo)

“Stunning and irresponsible.” All USAID staff — the Americans helping people throughout the world dig wells, build schools, what the fuck ever (Dok has a good rundown here) have to shut down their missions by midnight tonight. (NPR)

But that win at Treasury wasn’t that much of a win. Bessent can now just order Treasury to make all the doggie boys employees. (Burning Bird)

The story’s really about the national security implications of giving the doggie boys all the access, but this in particular is just good managing:

Meanwhile, morale has plummeted, said three OPM officials, as DOGE agents have clashed with senior career personnel. One official recalled a recent meeting in which a young DOGE team member began screaming at senior developers and calling them “idiots.”

(Washington Post)

I wonder if that was the one who already had to resign for “too racist for the racists at DOGE” or if that was a different one? (Gift link Wall Street Journal)

The AP points out no, Musk controlling all this shit and accusing people of committing crimes on Twitter is weird, actually. (AP) Plus news you can use: If you’re in one of the lucky 25 states, you can still use the IRS’s new Direct File tool — something progressives have been demanding for DECADES and which Joe Biden did and nobody cared — even though Musk said he “deleted” it. (AP / Direct File)

Techdirt is having an actual cow over Trump making the CIA auto-blow its own cover, forcing it to send the names of all the newest China-focused recruits in an unclassified email. (Techdirt)

This from a couple of years ago is once again relevant. Just how crazy was our COVID response under Trump? Fucking insane. (Doomsday Scenario)

Tipped workers gonna get boned by “no tax on tips”? Well, that sounds correct actually. (EPI Blog)

Delta says fuck you, it’s not going to re-segregate, which is of course the rationale behind ending “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.” (HuffPost) Meanwhile, I got a stupid spam from “Red Pill Women” (bullshit, fuck them) about how if Rep. Jasmine Crockett is advocating for Black women to be taken seriously, that must mean she hates Black men, right? What a bunch of disgusting pieces of shit. Anyway, guessing her rant about “banning DEI being a move to coddle mediocre white men” (she means white men who are mediocre, not all of you, Jesus) hit a nerve. (HuffPost)

OK, so I’ve been watching the shit out of “Little House on the Prairie” because Megyn Kelly is mad the new reboot might be “woke” LOLLLLLLL, and I am still only on season one because it is TWENTY FIVE HOURS LONG, that is like eight Lord of the Ringses, and I had no idea Michael Landon blew up the whole fucking town at the end of nine seasons and so many movies so it couldn’t be bought by a “greedy developer” and go fuck, Megyn Kelly. (EW) Meanwhile, the actress who played the meanest girl in the whole wide world, Nellie Oleson, was sexually abused from a terrible age, and wrote a book a few years ago about how playing such a bitch hated by everyone saved her sanity through getting to raaaaaage, and now I love her forever and need to read her book. (CBS News) Also, gross, Michael Landon. Ugh. (New York Post)

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