02/03/25
Good morning! It’s Tuesday, February 4th.
African American Coaches Day
So naturally… let’s look at some numbers!
In the NFL – 53% of the players are Black, while 9.4% of head coaches are Black, but 36.6% of assistant coaches are Black.
In MLB, 9.9% of coaches are Black.
In US soccer, 8.9% of coaches are Black.
The NBA is the only one that has made a genuine effort to diversify their coaching staff and the 2022-2023 season marked the first time in the league’s history that there were more Black than white coaches. now half of the franchise coaches are Black.
Diversifying is a choice… so is not working to diversify.
And now, the news.
Tariff Time
Let’s start with the Tariff-Off – a whimsical nickname for a truly dumb move that is taking over the world. Everywhere I go, people are like “Kim, Kim! We hate the tariffs but we love that you say Tariff-Off”
On Monday, President Trump announced that the proposed tariffs between Canada and Mexico will be delayed for 30 days after, per Trump, both agreed to boost their border security.
As I record this on Monday night, tariffs against China are still expected to start tomorrow, which will be today when you’re hearing this.
Good news, since Monday morning started with a stock market stumble as markets reacted to the weekend tariff signing. They did recover once the 30 days pause was announced but it was a pretty scary headline to wake up to.
Though not the scariest we’ve woken up to so far.
No will it be, presumably, the scariest we’ll see in the future.
And I, for one, think that element of mystery and surprise is what makes life so great.
Anyway, the Tariff-Off is off for now in two out three countries.
1,100 EPA Employees Could Be Fired
-via NBC News
Last week about 1,100 employees from the Environmental Protection Agency were informed that: “As a probationary/ trial period employee, the agency has the right to immediately terminate you. The process for probationary removal is that you receive a notice of termination, and your employment is ended immediately.”
So they are not fired, but the Trump administration just thought it might be cool to let these people know they could be.
They are union members, so Marie Owens Powell, president of the union for many of those workers, has said the union will “ensure there was a valid cause and the process was followed.”
There are about 8,500 EPA staffers in Powell’s union alone, and it’s unclear why these 1,100 workers were chosen, but don’t you worry, the people working on DEI issues were already placed on administrative leave.
Because when it comes to the environment and environmental protections, let’s for sure not think about diversity, equity, and inclusion. Let’s for sure not study the way the environment affects different communities, based on resources sent or kept from them.
That would be… wild.
Too far, ya know?
New State Department Hire
-via NBC News
And while we’re on the subject of hiring and firing… the State Department has hired a real gem of a guy. His name is Darren Beattie and he is the acting undersecretary of state for public diplomacy. In order to make this hiring permanent, he will need to be Senate confirmed.
Beattie worked in the first Trump administration, but was fired after people found out that he’d appeared at a conference with white nationalists.
But that was Trump 1.0. Now we’re in the new reich. I mean term. New term.
He runs a website with the word news in it, which may lead you to believe he does the news. But much in the way Fox News includes the word news, it’s just a bunch of racist garbage. Just to paint a picture of this site, they celebrated Beattie’s job by calling his appointment “a real blow to the same smug hacks who love slapping the ‘conspiracy theorist’ label on anyone who challenges their narrative.”
But why would we call him a conspiracy theorist?
Well, he calls January 6th a “fedsurrection,” saying the deadly day where people were literally trying to kill police officers with Trump flag poles… the work of the FBI.
And just as recently as October, he posted this on Twitter: "Competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work. Unfortunately, our entire national ideology is predicated on coddling the feelings of women and minorities, and demoralizing competent white men."
What a loser.
Anyway, his job will be to oversee the bureaus of Educational and Cultural Affairs and Global Public Affairs, and participate in foreign policy development.
I’m sure that’ll be good.
Constitutional Crisis
-via NPR, NY Times, ABC News, and CNN
On Monday the White House announced that Elon Musk, the unelected billionaire who’s got his little grub hands in everything, is allowed to do so because he’s a special government employee. This is a real designation given to people who are not volunteers but not full-time employees.
He is not getting a salary, they say, but he has top-secret security clearance and an office on the White House campus.
So everyone calm down, he’s very special.
Lord.
If someone had just said that to him when he was a kid, would we be here now? Isn’t it so great that we get to watch our democracy fall under the weight of two men that just weren’t loved enough as a kid?
So let’s see what this most special employee is up to…
Oh, it looks like he’s trying to shut down the US Agency for International Aid, aka USAID.
Literally, on Monday, workers were locked out of the agency and little Marco Rubio, somehow our Secretary of State, said he was the acting head of the agency.
USAID was established by President Kennedy in 1961 and, with around 10,000 employees, the agency does little things like… war relief in Ukraine, peace-building in Somalia, disease surveillance in Cambodia, vaccination efforts in Nigeria, H.I.V. prevention in Uganda and maternal health assistance in Zambia. In the last few years, thanks to this group, the US has helped contain outbreaks of Ebola and hemorrhagic fevers.
Their budget takes up less than 1% of the federal budget.
Frankly, a steal at twice the price.
Meanwhile, Marco Rubio, best known for the time he drank water weird at the state of union response (do you remember that? It was weird! I guess it’s not what he’s best known for, but I’ll never forget), calls it a “completely unresponsive agency.”
On Monday, workers were told to stay home. They were locked out of the building and locked out of their emails.
It’s unclear where we go from here. It’s Monday night, and it’s unclear if it will be reopened by the time you hear this. Though that’s doubtful.
In response, about a dozen congressional Democrats came out and finally, finally, didn’t mince words. Outside of the USAID building, they called the closing of the agency illegal with House Rep Jamie Raskin calling it a Constitutional crisis.
I take that term pretty seriously. We all should. I think we overuse it, but it is a political science term for when there is a problem in the function of the government that the constitution, or governing law, is not able to fix.
It’s very serious.
Think states seceding ahead of the Civil War. President Harrison dying and the country having no idea who would take over for him because we hadn’t had a serving president die yet. Nixon doing Watergate.
Things that hadn’t happened before, and therefore our constitution hadn’t figured out a plan for this. We didn’t know how to react, until suddenly we had to figure what we’d do.
Everything is new until it isn’t.
We have seen this before. We have seen oligarchs and tyrants take over governments before.
We just haven’t seen it here yet.
I do believe we are in a Constitutional Crisis.
And so we should turn to one of the founders of the Constitution. The man who so believed in it, that he wrote 51 of the 85 Federalist Papers, which were essentially just PR papers for the Constitution.
And in one of those Federalist Papers, Federalist 33, he said this: “If the federal government should overpass the just bounds of its authority and make a tyrannical use of its powers, the people, whose creature it is, must appeal to the standard they have formed, and take such measures to redress the injury done to the Constitution as the exigency may suggest and prudence justify.”
In other words, in the words of our other founding father, Lin Manuel Miranda… "Do you support this Constitution?
Then defend it."
Pushback works.
Call Congress.
(202) 224-3121
And that’s it. That’s the news.
Hey, listen… I know.
I know. But we’re here. We’re in it together.
And because of that… I’m proud of you.