Icebox Hash

Let's check the freezer

In the classic Americana in which my dad grew up - Mom and Pop and the five boys in Dunbar, WV - they had what I think is a fabulous weekly ritual. Since Mom made dinner every weeknight, Pop would step in to cook on Saturday. Since they also needed room in the fridge for the Sunday shopping - I still don’t quite understand how they had so many leftovers with five growing boys in the house - Pop would make what was, ah, lovingly know as Icebox Hash. The recipe was simplicity itself: put everything that hadn’t been eaten in the previous week into a casserole dish and bake. When you realize that Mom was probably doing fairly conventional meal planning - think limited variations on meat, potato and veg as opposed to taco Tuesday or stir-fry, that is not as gut-churning as you might fear, but the the ensuing meal was still unpredictable, uneven and potentially inedible. Family lore maintains that the boys learned to keep an eye on Pop during this process after they discovered one memorable Saturday that he had included peaches - in syrup - found in the fridge. Yum. I share this because I may or may not be adopting a similar approach with my weekend output: revisit the food I didn’t get to during the week, reduce the portion size and bake it into a hopefully readable casserole. Or at least half-bake it. Sorry. It is at least what I am doing today.

Another brilliant firing. The Bureau of Consumer Protection is probably not on your top five favorite federal agencies list, but maybe it should be. A division of the FTC, its mandate is to protect us, the consumer, (a name that makes sense?!) from the more blatant abuses of capitalism. It does stuff like try to limit coercive fees, curb usurious loan practices, chase down fraud, etc. These are the folks who fight robocallers and sue credit card companies, hooray for BCP! Rohit Chopra, its erstwhile director, was fired today - despite a five year appointment to avoid partisan namings. This guy rocked. You only need know that credit card companies despised Mr. Chopra to know he was fighting the good fight. As firings go, this one certainly is not surprising and even kind of minor, but I bring it up because one of the Grifter-in-Chief’s campaign promises was to cap credit card interest rates at 10%. Uh-huh. Since a bad-ass like Chopra couldn’t even get capping late fees at $8 past the banking lobbies, I doubt Duping Don’s next lackey, guaranteed to pare down oversight and enforcement, will be getting that promise fulfilled.

Fighting federal waste? Earlier this week, two million - 2,000,000!- federal employees received an offer to resign and get paid through September. To accept this offer they needed only reply to the email with ‘resign” in the subject line. We know that Republicans are committed to shrinking the federal government (Grover Norquist used the grim metaphor of making it small enough to drown in the bathtub, isn’t that lovely?) and run on it every election cycle. They aren’t totally wrong and I am decidedly not making the argument that our system isn’t bloated, inefficient and very much feel that there needs better scrutiny, oversight and ongoing adjustments made to minimize these problems. Are there agencies that have 10 people doing the work of 5 due to outdated or stupid methods? Or those people being given a week to do something that realistically should only take a day? Undoubtedly, and it would be great to fix those. We’ll call them the 10-5 agencies.

**I have fun personal anecdote related to this phenomenon that if you would like to skip just scroll down to the next asterisks. My buddy Haze and I worked at a private beach club in Santa Monica back in the day where we were the crew designated to prep the beach for opening each day. We would race to the time clock - an actual analog clock that printed the time on your physical card when you stuffed it in to the slot - to punch in by 8:05 since despite being scheduled to work at 8:00 the clock could only deal with 1/10 of an hour increments so 8:05 was actually 8 as far as the clock was concerned. This led to slapstick sprinting and lunging at the clock that could have so easily been avoided had we just been willing to show up five minutes earlier, but where is the fun in that? Having been in a dead panic to save five minutes of being at work, we would then shift gears to a slow crawl to head to the beach where we would then nap someplace inconspicuous for an hour or so. Yes, we were being paid to sleep at the beach, because the club had calculated that it should take two hard working beach boys (our actual job title. I know.) two hours to prepare the beach for the 10 AM opening. Haze and I could leisurely accomplish this in about 45 minutes, so our morning naps became a central, and paid, part of our sleep schedule. Federal workers got nothing on those dedicated teenage slackers. Good times.**

But we also KNOW that are a great number of agencies that have 5 people doing the work of 10 - the 5-10s. The FAA is an unfortunately too tragic an example of this problem as we found out today something like 85% of the traffic control centers nationwide are classified as understaffed. The feds are notoriously bad at getting things done, or doing them at a glacial pace, but it should intuitively obvious to the casual observer that arbitrarily shrinking the work force is clearly not the answer to that problem. To wit:

- paring down the 5-10s will only exacerbate the problem as it doesn’t shrink the work, just the staff.

- who do think will take them up on that buy out offer? The 5-10s who are getting slammed or the 10-5s who are coasting and will have to dynamited out of their civil service easy chairs? The agencies that are already struggling will get worse and the actually wasteful ones will perpetuate their inefficiency.

- this buyout will waste insane amounts of money since when the 5-10s flee in droves, but continue to get paid for the next eight months, their agencies will grind to a halt they will have to replaced. This money-saving plan will now be paying two people for one job. It should be called anti-DOGE. Dumb, dumb, dumb.

The oligarchy brigade has finally started to file their ethics agreements. The combined wealth of Felonious Don’s cabinet nominees - somewhere north of a billion and a half bucks - isn’t in a any jeopardy. The idea is that people in high positions of government shouldn’t be able to use those positions to line their pockets OR be influenced by the people doing the lining. “Conflict of interest” undersells this a bit as either of these things happening violates federal law. At recent count the agreements submitted so far count up over 450 potential problems, with the soon-to-be-confirmed Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick alone listing 106 companies he has to stay away from. But the iceberg revealed by his financial disclosures includes holdings in over 800 corporate entities worth over a billion dollars. Our budding Energy Secretary is getting a million dollar bonus in March from the $3.1B oil and gas fracking company he has been running for the last decade, but I’m sure he will be impartial when it comes to granting leases. Justice Thomas getting an RV and nice vacations from rich buddies? Ha! Chump change. And the real kicker? These are just letters, negotiated by the ethics commission, that have no actual legal bindings. They might as well give the Boy Scout salute with their fingers crossed behind their backs. These were roundly ignored by the hucksters in the first Orange administration with no repercussions.

California’s water problems have not been magically solved. Have you seen the original Ghostbusters? Remember when the EPA guy comes in and forces the guys to shut down their containment grid even though he knows nothing about it won’t listen to the people who do? Pause for excellent and appropriate movie quote:

Egon - “Everything was fine until dickless here forced us to power down the grid.”

Mayor - “Is this true?”

Venckman - “Yes, it’s true. This man has no dick.”

The US Army Corps of Engineers - a group deserving of admiration and respect - was forced to “turn on the water” the tap that allows water to flow from northern California to southern, which according to Dipshit Don, if done earlier, would have prevented the wildfires. Very helpful, except: 1)There is no such tap, literally no way for the water he is talking about to travel to where he thinks it would have been so useful. 2)The water that did flow will end up in the central valley, where right now it is of no use and will eventually be wasted at best and could very easily cause flooding and damage. 3) The intended use that water, and for which it was being saved, was to provide relief to farmers and residents when everything dries out and crops are actually in the ground. So. The huge “victory” proclaimed by Ass47Hat wasn’t possible, didn’t not have the stated effect, caused problems for people who had nothing do with it and will in a few months actively fuck over a bunch of people who overwhelmingly voted for the guy who did it so he could back up his lies. So much winning.

Finish with two things that you can actually laugh about.

A Danish official gets real. If only Democrats would be so blunt.

Remember Trumpsterfire’s inaugural pledge to plant the stars and stripes on Mars or his more specific campaign promise that we would go to Mars during his term. Science has other ideas. Launch windows for Mars only open every 26 months and the next one in is late 2026. Co-President Mush says SpaceX is launching then, and he might in fact crash land a probe in mid-2027 (the fastest trip takes at least six months and is stupid hard), but the prudent assumption is that we should get at least one successful landing before sending astronauts. Since the next window wouldn’t open until 2028 and the fastest you can make a mission with people is 34 months unless you want spam-in-a-can (the wonderfully vivid phrase coined my the Mercury astronauts) Manifest Destiny is going to have to wait. Classic.

I hope I didn’t throw any peaches in the hash. Thanks for reading.

A parting note too scary to ignore but too huge and evolving to yet fully explore:

The firing of US Attorney’s office prosecutors is as egregious as it was inevitable. He said he was going to do it an he did it despite the whistling past the graveyard of his followers: “Oh, it won’t be so bad, he won’t do all those things.” Oops. The firing (illegal firing) of inspectors general was a little more oblique but still of a pattern. But when you add compiling of a list of any FBI agents who investigated Jan. 6 (the assumption is the list will be used to to fire said agents) we get a truly terrifying picture of clear intent to utterly reshape the rule of law into a tool of the president. Try to remember that these were cases filed, built and prosecuted through all the processes designed to prevent abuse - grand juries, issuance of warrants by judges, rules of evidence, and jury verdicts. Not to mention they were pursuing people who were literally seen beating on police on camera for fuck’s sake. Not content just to pardon said rightly convicted lawbreakers, the Trump Dump now wants to punish the people who had the gall to enforce those laws. All just to prove that J6 was the “day of love” he wants it remembered as. We know he is a vindictive but what do think he’ll do with his newly sycophant-staffed “Justice” department when he is attacked directly? Keep your eye on this one, friends, this is the actual, non-hyperbolic “attack on democracy” we’ve heard so much about and an existential threat. Selah.