The Goat Pen

At the DNC.

Okay you MAGAs in your RVs and camping trailers. Good News!

As Trump cuts federal jobs, even national parks are on the chopping block

As the Trump administration rushes to cut spending and eliminate federal jobs, even the people who work at the national parks — among the country’s most beloved and least politicized institutions — find themselves directly in the crosshairs.

Last week, the seasonal workers who staff 433 national parks and historical sites, including Yosemite, Death Valley and Joshua Tree, began receiving emails saying their job offers for the 2025 season had been “rescinded,” with little further explanation.

The move set off panic in the ranks of park employees, and threw into limbo the vacation plans of hundreds of millions of people who visit the parks each year. On the chopping block are hundreds — and potentially thousands — of park rangers who respond to medical emergencies, as well as visitor center employees and the crews that clean bathrooms and empty garbage cans.

In many of the larger and most popular parks, seasonal workers outnumber year-round permanent employees, making it hard to imagine how the parks will function without them, according to one supervising ranger who asked that her name not be used for fear of retaliation.

https://www.latimes.com/california/stor ... deral-jobs

hedge wrote: ↑Sun Feb 02, 2025 11:25 am

the best part of this is the LBGTQ+ websites that were talking about all the things the government has to do for these people including priority hiring and promotions now giving a 404 error.

love that

Watch Trudeau's body language change, the exhale of air before answering is a plus

Not surprising...

https://www.msn.com/en-us/politics/gove ... r-AA1yhWvS

Just think how that could have rebuilt North Carolina

also USAID is getting accused of some bad things. also not surprising

and that's how it is

All the little neoliberal shills coming out of the woodwork to run these establishment talking points. Hilarious. Let’s see Trump do more harm than NAFTA did. Not a peep from Hedge about the insidious Bill Clinton tho. Too busy rimming that DNC butthole (and what a smelly one it is). Can’t say I’m surprised.

Im generally pro-free trade, but lets not act like our sudden interest in it after WW2 was totally altruistic.

In 1945 the industrial capacity of the rest of the world was almost totally destroyed leaving “free trade” as what was best for America by default. World markets open for American factories, the only place they were untouched and ensuring cheap raw materials and resources would also flow the other way for the lowest cost. It was certainly propagandized as “helping rebuild the world economy” (the Allies who remained aligned with us anyway) or whatever, but it also happened because it was entirely to our benefit as our industrial concerns became the world’s industrial concerns.

Sounds like a win/win situation to me. All I see now is lose/lose...

A 25-Year-Old With Elon Musk Ties Has Direct Access to the Federal Payment System

The Bureau of the Fiscal Service is a sleepy part of the Treasury Department. It’s also where, sources say, a 25-year-old engineer tied to Elon Musk has admin privileges over the code that controls Social Security payments, tax returns, and more.

A 25-year-old engineer named Marko Elez, who previously worked for two Elon Musk companies, has direct access to Treasury Department systems responsible for nearly all payments made by the US government, three sources tell WIRED.

Two of those sources say that Elez’s privileges include the ability not just to read but to write code on two of the most sensitive systems in the US government: The Payment Automation Manager (PAM) and Secure Payment System (SPS) at the Bureau of the Fiscal Service (BFS). Housed on a top-secret mainframe, these systems control, on a granular level, government payments that in their totality amount to more than a fifth of the US economy.

Despite reporting that suggests DOGE has access to these Treasury systems on a “read-only” level, sources say Elez, who has visited a Kansas City office housing BFS systems, has many administrator-level privileges. Typically, those admin privileges could give someone the power to log into servers through secure shell access, navigate the entire file system, change user permissions, and delete or modify critical files.

That could allow someone to bypass the security measures of, and potentially cause irreversible changes to, the very systems they have access to.

“You could do anything with these privileges,” says one source with knowledge of the system, who adds that they cannot conceive of a reason that anyone would need them for purposes of simply hunting down fraudulent payments or analyzing disbursement flow.

"Technically I don't see why this couldn't happen," a federal IT worker tells WIRED in a phone call late on Monday night, referring to the possibility of a DOGE employee being granted elevated access to a government server.

"If you would have asked me a week ago, I'd have told you that this kind of thing would never in a million years happen. But now, who the fuck knows."

A source says they are concerned that data could be passed from secure systems to DOGE operatives within the General Services Administration (GSA).

WIRED reporting has shown that Elon Musk’s associates—including Nicole Hollander, who slept in Twitter’s offices as Musk acquired the company, and Thomas Shedd, a former Tesla engineer who now runs a GSA agency, along with a host of extremely young and inexperienced engineers—have infiltrated the GSA, and have attempted to use White House security credentials to gain access to GSA tech, something experts have said is highly unusual and poses a huge security risk.

https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-a ... nt-system/

hedge wrote: ↑Tue Feb 04, 2025 11:15 am Sounds like a win/win situation to me. All I see now is lose/lose...

Don’t buy any imports. Fuck everyone else. Let the rich pay the 25% VAT on their shit. I will just keep my old cars my old cell phone and old tvs

hedge wrote: ↑Sat Feb 01, 2025 5:54 pm "Fruit. Northern Utah has a shit load of fruit"

You're a fruit...

Actually the Utah export to Hong Kong is dehydrated brine shrimp from Salt Lake City

Had it not been for Trump there would be no DOGE. Had it not been for DOGE we would not have known about all that corruption at the treasury department. Had we not have known about that corruption the checks would have continued to be issued to terrorist organizations unabated. There is not one democrat that is thankful for what Elon Musk has accomplished. Pride and team is more important than doing what is right.