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Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Terrible Political Memes
« on: Today at 03:32:12 AM »
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Of course it wasn't really the Department of Energy that suddenly, independently decided to fire a large number of employees at the exact same time that Musk and Trump have begun their promised purge of the federal workforce. That's obviously just how they're dressing it up. They gave the orders, and everyone fired is told "(insert agency/department name here) has determined that your position is now redundant," blah blah blah. That's obvious. And of course career officials at the Department of Energy would know that nuclear weapons would fall under their own purview. They wouldn't make that mistake. The two famously arrogant and not particularly bright businessmen now running this country, both of whom have spent their whole lives thinking they know better than everyone else? They would.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/14/climate/nuclear-nnsa-firings-trump/index.html
Even if we take it for granted that the federal budget is in urgent need of cutting, and even if we take it for granted that this cutting needs to take the form of mass firings (despite the salaries of federal employees making up only a tiny part of the federal budget), this is ample evidence that Elon Musk and his team of broccoli-headed kids aren't the ones who should be doing it. They're morons.
Sure, I'm willing to sacrifice hypothetical lives who are saved from a hypothetical working future drug to get fraud out of government. Some of them may die, but it is a sacrifice I am willing to make.
right, but my question was -- why? even if there truly is a forced choice between the two, why is it better to sacrifice people's lives than it is to sacrifice some fraction of a public grant to waste/fraud/abuse?
Sure, I'm willing to sacrifice hypothetical lives who are saved from a hypothetical working future drug to get fraud out of government. Some of them may die, but it is a sacrifice I am willing to make.It's interesting how much you lot care about embryos.
And how little you care about humans when they've actually been born.
So the reason it didn't give out grants is because it's not suppose to. It wasn't made to give out grants.
The Biden Cancer Initiative was founded in 2017 by the former vice president and his wife, Jill Biden, to “develop and drive implementation of solutions to accelerate progress in cancer prevention, detection, diagnosis, research and care and to reduce disparities in cancer outcomes,” according to its IRS mission statement. But it gave out no grants in its first two years, and spent millions on the salaries of former Washington, DC, aides it hired.
The Vermont-based institute said it would stop accepting donations and suspend all operations by the end of May “so there could not even be an appearance of impropriety,” Jane Sanders said.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cj3eg3n11gvo
This clown has been getting a lot of coverage in the press over here.
There's zero chance that he will ever find the hard drive. If he ever did it would pretty likely be broken anyway.
https://twitter.com/KanekoaTheGreat/status/1888021014585688435
But I think the sports agencies and such should determine that, not the president.
But does that insulate the president from impeachment? There is the notion that you can't (or, at least, shouldn't) enforce the law by breaking the law.
The courts don't make laws at all. They interpret laws to determine if they are valid and if they apply to individual cases. Congress makes the laws and the executive branch enforces those laws.
That's a dubious piece of hyperbole, but even if we assume it to be true, there's an easy answer - because the Supreme Court, the body representing the judicial branch of government, chose to allow him to. They didn't have to. They could have - and, needless to say, absolutely should have - ruled against him, and if they had, Trump couldn't have done anything about it, just as Biden couldn't do anything about them ruling in Trump's favor. Like Congress, the Supreme Court has a number of ways to check Trump's power, and also like Congress, they're refusing to use them.
And yet he wasn't able to freeze funds. The courts stopped him.
Okay, there's a lot of wildly incorrect stuff being posted here. No, the president is not a king
I would have thought that it's pretty self evident that laws which affect the citizens of an entire country should be made by a group rather than an individual.