I apologize for being absent for a few days. I’m fine, but I’ve had a busy few days. Along with a couple of doctor appointsments I broke down and got a new phone. I’ve been postponing getting a phone for quite a while. I’d had my old phone, an LG model, for somewhere between six and seven years, and for about a year I haven’t been able to update the operating system. So things were starting to not work. But up until recently I was fine with it. It did everything I wanted it to do, so what the bleep?

So I got the new phone, a Motorola model, on Friday. I had ordered it online, so it was shipped to me. And finally today I think I’ve got it pretty much set up, with all the apps working and data transferred and everything. And I’ve received my first Spam Likely call on it, even. I don’t like the ringtone, but I’ll deal with that eventually. Also it will sometimes ping me and I can’t figure out why. But it’s working. At one point I went to a T-Mobile store for help, but what they could do was limited because I didn’t know my google password off the top of my head. It never occurred to me I would need a google password with me. Then I ended up spending about half a day on the phone with T-Mobile technical help to make the data transfer happen. And this is why I hate to buy a new phone.

Israelis are voting today, and I’m reading turnout is very high. Netanyahu’s opposition is led by former Israeli military chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot. And I don’t know enough about Eisenkot to know if he’d be more than an inch or two of improvement over Netanyahu.  Al Jazeera says the polls are very close. And the Associated Press is saying that it could be weeks or months before the outcome is determined. So don’t wait up.

In the last post I mentioned that Jared Kushner allegedly was managng funds for Saudis and Emiratis while employed in the White House during Trump’s first term. Now there’s a story from the same source saying that the Emiratis paid Kushner $50 million to get Rex Tillerson fired as Secretary of State. Tillerson was indeed fired, in March 2008. I thought it was because Tillerson called Trump a bleeping moron. Maybe that, too.

Also, too, see A 28-Year-Old DOGE Operative Gutted USAID. HR Had No Record of Him Working There at WIRED. Somehow the kid — er, young man — was put into the position of head of USAID by Marco Rubio without becoming an official employee of the State Department.

Internal USAID emails reviewed by WIRED reveal that during the three-week period of March 18 to April 4, during which Lewin began canceling lifesaving aid programs and personally signed off on the termination of thousands of USAID employees, he did not sign the paperwork typically required by law to begin work at the agency, despite repeated requests. In fact, his appointment was so mysterious that USAID security was unable to issue him an ID card because they had no records of his employment.

Someday when we have a normal administration again there’s going to have to be a reckoning about the whole DOGE thing. And speaking of Elcon Musk, Robert Reich has a must-read piece up at The Guardian headlined Defund Elon Musk. Just read it.

I don’t want to write about Trump. I don’t want to write about the midterms. This time next week we’ll be waiting for the polls to close. I can’t wait.