THE TICKER – Pentagon can no longer hide coffins :: Israel lobbyists charged with spying on U.S. :: Military scours online personals to route out gay servicemembers
THE TICKER – Pentagon can no longer hide coffins :: Israel lobbyists charged with spying on U.S. :: Military scours online personals to route out gay servicemembers
Pentagon can no longer hide coffins: In response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, the Pentagon will now release photos of flag-draped coffins containing the remains of U.S. servicemembers killed in the Iraqi war. The Bush Administration has censored such photos in order to keep public approval of the war from slipping. Too late for all that, anyway.
Israel lobbyists charged with spying on U.S.: Two former employees of the lobbying group American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) were indicted yesterday on charges that they illegally received and passed on classified information to foreign officials and reporters over a period of five years. A Pentagon security analyst has been charged with feeding the two men secret U.S. information about Iran.
Military scours online personals to route out gay servicemembers: The U.S. military apparently has nothing better to do than surf Gay.com and other websites looking for service personnel who may have profiles online so they can kick out the homos under the “Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell” rules. Hey, it’s not like there’s a war going on or anything.
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Not hiding the coffins will make it a little harder for the Pentagon to fudge the numbers. Puerto Rico said that their are more like 6 or 7 thousand dead and the extra deaths are not reported as combat deaths because the soldiers died in the hospital in Germany. As ;long as they leave Iraq soil breathing, they are supposedly not reported as killed in combat. Now we can verify if this is the case.
Trump and Musk think federal employees are shirking,
But we think their approach is disconcerting.
Don’t you think it’s funny
That they think we’re saving money
By paying 40,000 people for eight months of not working?
“We can send them, and he [El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele] will put them in his jails. And he’s also offered to do the same for dangerous criminals currently in custody and serving their sentences in the United States, even though they’re U.S. citizens or legal residents,” reported The New Republic.
— On Tuesday, Secretary of State Rubio and El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele announced they’d reached an agreement to “outsource” U.S. prisoners to El Salvador’s mega-prison. The agreement was initially supposed to cover alleged gang members, but was expanded.
Elon Musk may have pleasured himself with his ability to slash Twitter’s workforce and turn it into a janky site for fascist fanboys. But America is not a software company. And letting a thin-skinned, Ketamine-fueled, video-game cheating, Nazi apologist billionaire take over the machinery of the United States is not something that anyone voted for. Finally Democrats in Congress are beginning to make this point. But citizens, too, must be full-throated. Because none of us, not a single one of us, voted for Elon Musk.
“Elon can’t do—and won’t do—anything without our approval and we’ll give him the approval where appropriate. Where not appropriate, we won’t.”
— “President Trump on Monday said there were curbs in place to prevent Elon Musk from doing anything in the government without the White House’s blessing, responding to growing confusion about who was overseeing Musk’s push to dismantle multiple agencies,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
“The good news about the DNC, for those who prefer that the country have a politically viable alternative to the authoritarian personality cult currently running it, is that the official Democratic Party has little power. The DNC does not set the party’s message, nor will it determine its next presidential candidate.”
At least 20,000 federal employees have heeded the Trump administration’s call to leave their jobs and get paid through September, officials told news outlets yesterday, reported the Morning Brew newsletter. That means ~1% of the 2+ million-strong federal workforce is taking the deal first introduced in an email announcing a “Fork in the Road” (the same language Elon Musk used to offer buyouts to non-“hardcore” Twitter employees). This falls short of the White House’s goal of having 5% to 10% of federal staffers turn in their notice to cut down on government spending, but officials say the number continues to climb as the Feb. 6 deadline for accepting the offer nears.
A study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that women between the ages of 25 and 65—the life stages of early and middle adulthood—spoke on average about 3,000 more words per day than their male counterparts, reported Phys.org. Significant gender differences did not appear in the study’s other age groups: adolescence (ages 10 to 17), emerging adulthood (ages 18 to 24) and older adulthood (65 and up).
“More than 90 percent of the country’s 313 air traffic control facilities operate below the Federal Aviation Administration’s recommended staffing levels, according to an analysis of staffing data from the union representing controllers obtained by The New York Times. As of earlier this month, 285 facilities — which include traffic control towers and other locations — were below staffing thresholds set by the F.A.A. and the union. At 73 of those facilities, staffing is so low that at least a quarter of the work force is missing.”
Bloomberg: The duties would immediately hit almost one-quarter of the 16 million vehicles that are sold in the US each year, as well as the parts and components that go into them — an import market that totaled $225 billion in 2024, according to research from consultant AlixPartners. Tariffs will add $60 billion in costs to the industry, the research shows, much of which is likely to be passed on to consumers.
“The Pentagon expects to send two flights of migrants to Guantanamo Bay this weekend, the first step in President Donald Trump’s plans to use the the base for detaining people swept up in his crackdown on illegal immigration,” Politico reports.
Not hiding the coffins will make it a little harder for the Pentagon to fudge the numbers. Puerto Rico said that their are more like 6 or 7 thousand dead and the extra deaths are not reported as combat deaths because the soldiers died in the hospital in Germany. As ;long as they leave Iraq soil breathing, they are supposedly not reported as killed in combat. Now we can verify if this is the case.