Overbooked yet again.

It's how I roll...

 

This book has jumped the queue as I've been pressing to finish Christopher's riveting new work on LLM AI technology, These Strange New Minds. Mary Anne Franks rocks. I'd hoped to finish her and Chris's books today...

Then I opened my inbox this morning when I got up.

I'd forgetten that Who Is Government was on pre-order (I am a long-time insatiable Michael Lewis FanBoy).

After Donald Trump won his first presidential election, I had one of the strangest experiences I’ve ever had as a writer. The federal government had set aside a big pot of money for the candidates of both parties to staff their presidential transition teams. Trump and Hillary Clinton had both built massive teams of people ready to enter the 15 big federal departments and hundreds of smaller federal agencies to learn whatever was happening inside. A thousand or so Obama officials were waiting for them, along with briefings that had taken them six months to prepare. But then, days after the election, Trump simply fired the 500 or so people on his transition team. “Chris, you and I are so smart that we can leave the victory party two hours early and do the transition ourselves,” he told a perplexed Chris Christie, who’d assembled the team.

Then he appointed Rick Perry as his secretary of energy. In his own presidential campaign, Perry had called for the Energy Department’s elimination—and was forced, at his Senate confirmation hearings, to acknowledge that he’d had no real idea of what went on inside the Energy Department, but now that he’d spent a few days looking into it, he really did not want to eliminate it. At that moment, it became clear that none of these people, newly in charge of the United States government, had the faintest idea what it did. (The Energy Department, among its other critical functions, manages our nuclear weapons.) And they weren’t alone! I didn’t really have any clue what went on inside the department, either. People capable of ruining panel discussions and dinner parties with their steady stream of opinions about American politics were totally flummoxed by the simplest questions about American government…

Our government—as opposed to our elected officials—has no talent for telling its own story. On top of every federal agency sit political operatives whose job is not to reveal and explain the good work happening beneath them but to prevent any of their employees from embarrassing the president. The PR wing of the federal government isn’t really allowed to play offense, just a grinding prevent defense. And the sort of people who become civil servants—the characters profiled in this book—tend not to want or seek attention.

And, finally, there is the stereotype of “the government worker.” We all have in our heads this intractable picture: The nine-to-fiver living off the taxpayer who adds no value and has no energy and somehow still subverts the public will.

You never know what effect any piece of writing will have. Writers write the words, but readers decide their meaning. My vague sense is that most readers of these stories have come away with feelings both of hope (these civic-minded people are still among us) and dread (we’re letting something precious slip away). My own ambition for The Post series and this book was that they would subvert the stereotype of the civil servant. The typecasting has always been lazy and stupid, but increasingly, it’s deadly. Even as writers grow rich proving it wrong.

Given our current Trump/MAGA/DOGE shitstorm, this stuff is all acutely timely.

 

 

OUR FABULIST-IN-CHIEF THIS MORNING, WHINING ONCE AGAIN ON HIS "TRUTH SOCIAL" ABOUT OUR JUDICIAL BRANCH.

"This Radical Left Lunatic of a Judge, a troublemaker and agitator who was sadly appointed by Barack Hussein Obama, was not elected President - He didn’t WIN the popular VOTE (by a lot!), he didn’t WIN ALL SEVEN SWING STATES, he didn’t WIN 2,750 to 525 Counties, HE DIDN’T WIN ANYTHING!" Trump wrote. "I WON FOR MANY REASONS, IN AN OVERWHELMING MANDATE, BUT FIGHTING ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION MAY HAVE BEEN THE NUMBER ONE REASON FOR THIS HISTORIC VICTORY. I’m just doing what the VOTERS wanted me to do. This judge, like many of the Crooked Judges’ I am forced to appear before, should be IMPEACHED!!! WE DON’T WANT VICIOUS, VIOLENT, AND DEMENTED CRIMINALS, MANY OF THEM DERANGED MURDERERS, IN OUR COUNTRY. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!"

BUT WAIT! THERE'S MORE!
 

Saw this author interviewed on PBS Newshour last night.

 

This book is the story of a largely under-the-radar legal movement that is weaponizing the obscure field of libel law—a campaign whose growing momentum has closely tracked the country’s increasing flirtations with authoritarianism.

At first glance, libel law might seem an unlikely venue for a battle with high stakes for American democracy…

Yeah. At first blush, his book coheres nicely with Mary Anne Franks'.

 

ERRATUM
 

Been watching daily equities markets fluctuations lately (like a lot of folks). Found this a bit interesting.

 

Trump's "Truth Social" (DJT) and Musk's TESLA. I overlaid the dark grey negativeely sloping approximate "trendline" starting on Inauguration Day. Had I the raw data, I'm guessing I could compute a linear Pearson-R of perhaps ~ 0.9. These two DOGE BFFs fully deserve each other.

____

 

UPDATE

Her book is killer.

_____

 

UPDATE: THE DAY IN STUPID

 

 

Okeee Dokeee, then.

 

Stay tuned...

_________