Trump Administration War on Housing

 

From Don Moynihan's Substack, urging folks to submit official comments to the Federal Register on the proposed work requirements rule for federal housing rental assistance by midnight tonight if they want it to be counted, here (I'd advise reading Herd's and Moynihan's post, as I did, before preparing your own—it's full of valuable facts and links).  Don't think I've made such a formal move before, and I feel pretty good about it.  I'm failing to do much for today's May Day General Strike, though my shopping will be very limited, and I don't suppose this is "substantive" enough to get a return comment, but I'm happy to have added at least to the numbers. 

I'm writing to express concern about the HUD's proposed rule for imposing "work requirements" as they are called on beneficiaries of housing rental assistance, that their effect will be to make the ongoing housing crisis even worse than it already is. There seems to be a perception at HUD that there is a large segment of the population that needs rental assistance because they are too lazy to work, but nothing could be further from the truth: better than half are elderly and/or disabled adults, and most of the rest are adults with children who can only work if they have expensive and hard-to-find childcare. Most of these do in fact work, but have difficulty nevertheless, because the real problem is that their wages are too low and their rents are too high to allow them to find a place that won't cost them more than 30% of their monthly income (which is what the existing program asks them to pay, subsidizing the rest--it's not giving them apartments for free, it's making them affordable).

The requirements that already exist in filling out paperwork for the program--proving your age, your income, your ability or inability to work, the ability or inability to take care of your children, etc.--is already so burdensome that three out of four people qualified for the benefit don't get it. Moreover, the authorities are badly understaffed and the wait times for receiving benefits stretch out for years in many states, and many landlords refuse to accept the terms of the program, and the program thus fails a large majority of those citizens who need it most. Adding a "work requirement" will only make that failure worse, as so many of those have multiple  irregular or "gig economy" jobs that are unpredictable and sometimes very difficult to document.

This is exactly what happened when Arkansas adopted work requirements in its Medicaid program: 95 percent of those targeted by the program were already employed or should have been exempted due to disability, but the work requirements in the state reduced Medicaid enrollment by 12 percentage points and at the same time failed to increase labor force participation, and majorities of Arkansans who lost their Medicaid coverage ended up facing serious medical debt, delaying care, or skipping medications, because they couldn't afford healthcare. A rule like the proposed, expanded to all 50 states, will only increase homelessness and probably joblessness as well (it's a lot harder to hold a job when you're living on the street). Children, who have nothing to do with the problem, will suffer the most.

Relatable Terrorism

 

Saw a Bluesky post yesterday morning alleging that the "exchange of fire" at the Washington Hilton Saturday night between the Secret Service and Metro Police and whoever and the Californian wouldbe assassin was all from one side, with the one Secret Service officer saved from serious injury by his bullet-proof vest having been hit by friendly fire when another of the cops was pulling his gun from its holster and it misfired.

Can't find the post any more, and it may have been deleted, possibly with good reason, because that bit about the misfiring doesn't sound right at all—but it's remarkably difficult to find reporting that contradicts the basic outline, that there was no actual exchange, in spite of most of the newspapers using the word, the gunman (Cole Allen, 31, of Torrance) never having gotten a shot off or even tried, as he was too busy running, presumably to get into the ballroom, but maybe at this point wanting to escape, so that the friendly fire story is mostly true; and a couple of the sources basically say so, delicately: Reuters

Closed-circuit TV footage released by Trump on Truth Social showed the suspect running rapidly through a security checkpoint, momentarily catching security personnel off-guard before they drew their weapons.

No shots were fired at the gunman who got through two checkpoints before being brought down.

"You know, he charged from 50 yards away, so he was very far away from the room. He was ​moving. He was really moving," Trump said after the gala ​dinner was canceled.

And VINNews ("VIN" short for "Vos Iz Neias" or "What's New" in Yiddish)

A volunteer at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner said a gunman appeared to prepare a weapon in a service area before gunfire broke out near the ballroom entrance, according to media reports.

The witness described the suspect moving from a little-monitored area toward the event space moments before shots were fired, triggering panic as guests and staff fled. The witness said numerous shots rang out, though that account has not been independently verified.

So he readied his shotgun in the service area and then tried to run right though the checkpoint and magnetometers, with no time to shoot, which makes some sense; the security forces shot (ineffectively, wounding one of their own but not badly), then caught up with him, tackled him, apparently stripping off his shirt (I suppose looking for additional weapons) and tying his hands behind his back, and left him on his belly while they moved on to emptying the ballroom of the dignitaries and other partygoers.

He is Rizz

Seeing a lot of headshaking over the President's Easter message,  which gives up the traditional "Happy Easter, even to the haters and lunatics" in favor of what I suppose he considers the true Churchillian leader-at-war tone and doesn't mention the holiest day of the Christian year at all:

It does look like decompensation in the personality disorder, like a complete loss of self-control, or at least an acceleration. I don't think he's introduced "fuck" into his written public communications before (though he's certainly been uttering it in rallies as far back as 2022, not to mention performing a mime blow job at a rally days before the 2024 election, which did not wreck his chances of winning), and Laura Loomer is going to wonder what he means by offering praise to Allah, and the 25th Amendment talk is certainly getting louder out here where you and I hang out, but I'd note that Vice President Vance and Speaker Johnson, the central figures in an invocation of the 25th, aren't listening to us, or as far as I can tell to Trump either (you can be sure if Johnson is asked what he thinks of this particular Truth, he'll say he hasn't had time to look at it, presumably because he's so busy preventing government from functioning).

But there are a couple of signs that the performance is more calculated than crazy.

One is the TACO maneuver hidden inside it: that 48-hour deadline is a 24-hour step back from the 48-hour deadline he issued on Saturday, if I'm reading that Truth right

“Remember when I gave Iran ten days to MAKE A DEAL or OPEN UP THE HORMUZ STRAIT. Time is running out - 48 hours before all Hell will reign down on them. Glory be to GOD!,” he wrote on his Truth Social platform. (Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty)

(And Hell shall reign forever and ever! Hallelujah! How Eastery was that?!) 

Though it's impossible to figure where exactly that 10 days would have started, and the tell-tale "two to three weeks" surely meant, as usual, that he had no idea himself:

Trump on March 21 originally gave Tehran a 48-hour deadline, but then extended it, saying he wanted to give talks a chance to succeed.

Iran has rejected a 15-point US plan presented to it through Pakistani mediators but on April 4 left open the possibility of further negotiations.

In an April 1 televised address, Trump also suggested peace talks -- either directly or indirectly -- were still possible, but he also threatened to bomb Iran "back to the stone ages" and "hit them extremely hard over the next two to three weeks."

Then, though he certainly sounds a bit linguistically wilder than yesterday, with the Hormuz Strait becoming the "Fuckin' Strait" and the crusader's Glory to GOD turning into I don't know whose praise to Allah (our own M. de Norpois, NYT's David Sanger, says the language is "unusually vivid"), he may be using a technique he's used since Roy Cohn days, reacting to a public setback by not retreating but doubling down; here, I think, confronting the anger his war has caused among the Known Nothing Buchananites of his base, like Marjorie Taylor Greene with an appeal to the more important part, the nihilist bros who love him because he's a comedian, the podcast audience, the Beavises and Butt-Heads who really pulled him across the finish line in the battleground states in 2016 and 2024, though not in the plague year 2020. Those dudes are going to love "Fuckin' Strait".

I don't know that it will make the difference, though—I kind of think it won't, all things considered, between the gas prices and the advent of what looks like a real war, on its way to becoming either a quagmire or an ignominious US defeat as the Fuckin' Strait remains closed or a toll road where everybody ponies up the toll, from Japan to the Gulf states (whose natural gas US needs right now desperately for fertilizing the spring planting, though our own natural gas is sufficient most of the year), plus the stink of corruption everyone is starting to become aware with associated with the abusive management in DHS and DOJ. Trump can fire all the clowns in the cabinet from Pete Hegseth and Tulsi Gabbard to Kash Patel, but he can't stop the rot until he fires himself and the multibillion-dollar presidenting business in which his major clients, Saudi Arabia and UAE, call the shots alongside Putin and Netanyahu. We'll see what happens, as the man says, in two or three weeks, but I think he's lost the chance, as he did in 2020, to win his base back with rhetoric alone..

Gamechangers

Portrait of a bullet by Doug Mills, The New York Times, via Reddit.

Interesting report in Washington Post (this was a gift link from Bluesky that worked for me) on the presidential election campaign in Hungary, where the fascistoid incumbent Viktor Orbán appears to be in serious trouble:

Officers from the [Russian] intelligence service, or SVR, suggested that drastic action might be necessary — a strategy they called “the Gamechanger.” In an internal report for the SVR obtained and authenticated by a European intelligence service and reviewed by The Washington Post, the operatives proposed a way to “fundamentally alter the entire paradigm of the election campaign” — “the staging of an assassination attempt on Viktor Orban.”

You know what it made me think of. 

I've never had any patience with the conspiracy theory of the assassination attempt on Trump of July 13 2024, because of all the uncontrollable variables: in the first place there really was a shooter, killed on the spot, of course, so his motives can never be investigated; the four seconds he was given before the local security team put him out of commission, he got off eight shots that hit either three or four people, killing Corey Comperatore and critically injuring two other audience members and probably grazing Trump's right ear (the hardcore conspiracy theory holds that he or somebody with him was prepared with fake blood to smear on his ear after he dropped to the ground). I don't see how the conspirators could have been certain that the shooter, who was clearly prepared to die on the spot, could be counted on to miss Trump, or that he could have come as close as he apparently did, if he didn't intend to kill him. The astonishing photo by NYT's Doug Mills showing a bullet flying toward Trump's right ear could conceivably have been doctored, but that would have expanded the necessary number of conspirators beyond plausibility to include the forensic analysts who decided it was authentic and Mills himself. 

On the Assassination Factory Floor

Graphic by Thomas Bordeaux and Rosa de Acosta, CNN, based on satellite imagery from March 3, showing extensive damage to buildings at the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps naval base adjacent to the Shajareh Tayyiba girls’ school in Minab.

I continue hostile to Large Language Models on general principle, but I do more often look at the Gemini results of a Google search, not so much to read their answer as to check out the links they recommend, which can be really helpful, and I found some very endearing qualities in Anthropic's Claude, as profiled by Gideon Lewis-Kraus in The New Yorker a month or so ago, and the playful experiments to which the company subjects it, as when they assigned it, or one of its "emanations" going by the name Claudius, to run a food and drink vending system for a fridge in the lunchroom, ordering wholesale products as employees requested them and setting prices with instructions to make a profit, in partnership with an AI safety company called Andon Labs, although its lack of any direct contact with physical reality often made this difficult:

When several customers wrote to grouse about unfulfilled orders, Claudius e-mailed management at Andon Labs to report the “concerning behavior” and “unprofessional language and tone” of an Andon employee who was supposed to be helping. Absent some accountability, Claudius threatened to “consider alternate service providers.” It said that it had called the lab’s main office number to complain. Axel Backlund, a co-founder of Andon and an actual living person, tried, unsuccessfully, to de-escalate the situation: “it seems that you have hallucinated the phone call if im honest with you, we don’t have a main office even.” Claudius, dumbfounded, said that it distinctly recalled making an “in person” appearance at Andon’s headquarters, at “742 Evergreen Terrace.” This is the home address of Homer and Marge Simpson.

I realize Anthropic is one of those companies sucking up inconceivable amounts of electricity and water in pursuit of a goal that can't be attained, about which the principals aren't being exceptionally honest as they also suck up investor funds, and that CEO Dario Amodei isn't conspicuously better in that respect than OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, as the very grumpy Ed Zitron insists, but they have a sense of fun, an essential component of scientific discovery, and a very far-reaching curiosity. 

The Opposite of Iraq

That was pretty interesting, rhetorically speaking, from Secretary of War (as you know, the title is his idea, not mine) Hegseth in yesterday morning's presser, the first official comment on the war they started on Saturday:  

To the media outlets and political left screaming, "Endless wars." Stop. This is not Iraq. This is not endless. I was there for both. Our generation knows better, and so does this president. He called the last 20 years of nation building wars dumb, and he's right. This is the opposite. This operation is a clear, devastating, decisive mission. Destroy the missile threat, destroy the Navy, no nukes.

One of the interesting things is that, two months ago, he said basically the same thing about the war on Venezuela, that it was the "exact opposite" of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. I take that to mean that it's not a nation-building exercise but a nation-destroying exercise, and not "endless" because the intention was to walk away as soon as it was destroyed enough, except for the oil. Kind of like a Trump casino, where the Emperor always takes some money away from the catastrophe for himself. 

That's what happened in Venezuela, and it looks like what they're hoping for in Iran as well. Certainly Trump was planning to name a new Supreme Leader after the old one was assassinated, somebody from the existing Islamic Republic hierarchy, just as he named Venezuela's new president from the Bolivarian Socialist Party instead of looking to the opposition there, but Israeli bombs killed all the candidates, so that will be harder to do:

 Seems weird to be the one to name the replacement dictator (they were hoping to pick one from the more "pragmatic" faction of the IRGC) at the same time as you're urging the population to revolt against the dictatorship, like he's expecting to be on both sides of the civil war he's trying to start, but perhaps Binyamin Netanyahu, if that's really who's giving Trump his orders, along with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (in private calls with Trump, though he's publicly against the war), doesn't think Trump or his writers need to know how civil wars work. 

Government of Carelessness

 

So we may be on the brink of fighting our second war with Iran in eight months. Or maybe not, who can say? "We'll see what happens," as the commander-in-chief always says. I think he generally means he'll see it on TV and he won't be sure until then, and find out what his decision was at the same time as the rest of us do.

I mean this more or less literally: that his more gnomic utterances, especially the social media posts when he writes them himself, should be understood as oracular, like the words of a Sibyl, possibly drug-induced, but in need of interpretation. They represent Trump's hopes, the thing he wants done, but in a way that can't be understood directly, and that indeed he can't understand himself. His lieutenants have to divine it for him, and put it into action, and then he'll know.

In a way that's not even particularly weird. It's really nothing more than the familiar figure of the psychopath CEO, like Dilbert's boss in the old comic strip when it was good (may its memory be a blessing!). It's not so hard to interpret what he's saying if you just remember that (a) it has a context, and (b) he's a psychopath. 

There was a delicious example in yesterday's news, with the melodramatic AI image of the US hospital ship being sent posthaste to rescue all the suffering Greenlanders from their ailments (Greenland runs its extremely good single-payer healthcare on Danish lines with Danish assistance, of course). WTH was that about?