Monday, February 13, 2017

Caution: Wrecking Crew at Work

The science guys in government agencies are quietly sending their data to private computers so that it won’t be lost forever when — not “if” — their government hard drives are wiped clean by the Trumpengestapo.

They’re using the Internet, although some of them are telling friends they’ll smuggle out thumb drives in their anuses if need be.

Such is life in Trumpistan.

Department of Agriculture computers have already put electronic locks on data that used to be free to the public about puppy mills, animal cruelty and other violations.  Now you can no longer check out conditions at the puppy farm that’s selling the French bulldog your little girl is crazy about.

Cute bulldogs are one thing.  Decades of critical climate science data are quite another: the future of life on this planet is at stake.

Last week the EPA rushed out a video for employees in which its acting administrator, Catherine R. McCabe, appeared to reassure everyone about the climate science data.  “I would like to allay fears and rumors that scientific data and information are being deleted,” she said.  “That is not the case."

The lady doth protest too much, methinks.  She knows perfectly well that the regime has already ordered the agency to delete the climate science page from its website; that orders went  our to provide the White House with names of scientists doing climate research, and the nature of their projects; that EPA scientists, like National Park environmental scientists, have been ordered not to say anything in public about their work.

The National Park directive has birthed a plethora of rogue National Park sites online, which broadcast all manner of vetted, peer-reviewed science that the regime doesn’t want citizens to know.

Not just the scientists, but most of the civil servants in Washington and environs are running scared these days.There are some 2 million of them and their oath is to the Constitution and the public, not to any particular president or administration.

The New York Times reported:

At the Treasury Department, civil servants are quietly gathering information about whistle-blower protections as they polish their résumés.

At the United States Digital Service — the youthful cadre of employees who left jobs at Google, Facebook or Microsoft to join the Obama administration — workers are debating how to stop Mr. Trump should he want to use the databases they made more efficient to target specific immigrant groups.“It’s almost a sense of dread, as in, what will happen to us,” said Gabrielle Martin, a trial lawyer and 30-year veteran at the Denver office of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, where colleagues now share daily, grim predictions about the fate of their jobs under Mr. Trump’s leadership.

“It’s like the movie music when the shark is coming,” Ms. Martin said, referring to “Jaws,” the 1975 thriller. “People are just wary — is the shark going to come up out of the water?”“What do you do,” asked Representative Gerald E. Connolly, Democrat of Virginia, if you work at a place where the leader “avowedly renounces the work of that agency?”

Now it turns out that there’s an added dark element to the firing of Sally Q. Yates, the acting attorney general who was first asked to stay on during the transition to Trumpistan, then was axed when she refused to endorse the regime’s Muslim travel ban.  James Clapper, Obama’s spy chief, was given transcripts of intercepted conversations between retired Gen. Michael Flynn, then a top adviser to the president-elect, and a Russian diplomat.  Compromising discussions of U.S.foreign policy, including sanctions against Russia were on the recordings, which were given to Yates who told the Trump gang about them even before Flynn was officially named national security adviser. Flynn could be blackmailed, she warned.

Rather than acting then, they had Vice President Mike Pence reel off one more Big Lie to the American People, denying that there was anything untoward about Flynn’s conversations.

The excrement hit the fan and while all of Washington twittered and tweeted late last night, Flynn resigned. He was the first on Trumpistan's Team of Reptiles to fall victim to truth.  
Surely others must follow, for this is a government of serial liars, incompetents and bullies who think they’re above the law.