Tag: Deep State

Fear and Pain.  Good.

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So, I was an hour late for work clearing the stupid snow this morning.  Well, because of the snow and because I’m overly optimistic when it comes to estimating snow removal time.  Or maybe I’m too lazy to get up that early.  But it all got done and the world didn’t end and so I can move along with my day and week.

Yesterday Trump ordered sanctions against Canada, Mexico and China.  Today Canada and Mexico came to terms by agreeing to Trump’s border security requirements and got a reprieve of a month on the tariffs to prove their good faith.  And Panama has agreed not to extend China’s management of the canal.

And today I listened to Marco Rubio declaring USAID a rogue agency that will now be brought to heel for ignoring orders to account for who it has been giving money to.

Could this be “Little Marco” sounding more like Donald Trump, or at least an ally of Donald Trump and America?  Has the world gone topsy-turvy?  Or is it just that no one has ever stood his ground against the bureaucrats, influence peddlers and sycophants that infest Washington and waste our money by the imperial ton.  Seeing the progress of Trump’s seemingly endless initiatives I can’t help but think that this is the first man to stand up to the bureaucracy.  Ever!  And it occurs to me that all those impossible things we heard about; defying the FBI and the CIA, and finding out what actually gets done with the defense budget, and reining in the EPA; all of these unattainable goals can be had for the cost of doing the hard work to find out what the bureaucrats actually do all day, and using presidential power to hold them accountable.

I was reading the ZMan’s post today comparing Trump to Isaac Asimov’s character the Mule in his classic science fiction series Foundation.  The Mule was an outlier because his mutant psychic talent was not predicted by Hari Seldon’s “psychohistory.”  And so, he blew up all of the best laid plans of the Foundation.  ZMan thinks that Trump is the destructor laying waste to the managerial state (aka the Deep State).  Well, I don’t disagree with that analogy.  But maybe he’ll be more than that.  Maybe he’ll be like the child who wasn’t afraid to say that the emperor has no clothes.  And imagine if that lesson gets learned by not only JD Vance but even Marco Rubio.  Now, of course, most of these Republican Senators and Congressmen are crooks and they want the payoffs from the defense and pharma lobbyists.  But even if it’s only a handful of honest men, Trump has let the American people in on the secret and anyone who wants to inherit his mantle will have to call out the corruption, waste and inefficiency of the bureaucracy and get us our money back from the crooks that infest Washington.

I’m starting to get hopeful that Trump is going to take a chainsaw to the budget.  And he has several incentives.  Reducing government excesses will lower the debt, rein in inflation and lower taxes.  But it will also starve his enemies of funds with which to attack him.  They won’t be able to hand out millions of dollars to left-wing crazies.  And the NGOs are where most of Trump’s enemies work when the Democrats are out of the White House.  Losing their cozy perches and lucrative salaries will frighten them out of their wits.  And that is exactly when they’ll be least likely to cause trouble.  They’ll be forced to scramble to find a new source of income and they’ll lose the microphones they typically have to organize trouble for conservatives.

I don’t want to sound like a Pollyana.  It’s not as if the Left no longer controls most of the institutions; the schools, the universities, the Media, Hollywood, the book publishers and most of Silicon Valley.  But Trump has show us that controlling the White House can be incredibly helpful in throwing a monkey wrench into the gears of the Deep State.  And since the Deep State at this point is the Left, it’s causing our enemies fear and pain.

Good.

Let’s Pray for Their Success

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What to write about tonight?  Well, how about thinking about, “How did we get here?”

I know all about the deep dives where everything traces back to the Enlightenment and the loss of faith.  Or there’s the Abolitionists and the Civil War enshrining social justice in our government.  But I don’t want to go back that far.  I’ll settle for Woodrow Wilson and FDR as the source of the runaway bureaucracy that Washington DC has become.  Sure, in between, there were others but I think Wilson set the stage with the WW I expansion and FDR metastasized the problem with the New Deal and the WW II expansions.

Now, I’m not denying that by creating the Leviathan FDR assured the defeat of Hitler and Japan.  He did.  And by funding the Manhattan Project he created the American Empire and eventually destroyed the Soviet Union.  But at what cost?  As one of his successors (Eisenhower) warned, the melding of the US war machine with corporate interests fueled by almost limitless investment from the Federal Reserve has swallowed up our democracy.  And with it, has enveloped us in a police state that dictates to us in a way that is in line with what the Stasi did in East Germany and what China does with its people today.

The final nail in the coffin was 9/11/2001.  The reaction to that attack assured that the Patriot Act and the FISA Courts could treat American citizens like Stalin’s victims that we read about in the Gulag Archipelago.  You can be arrested, convicted, sentenced and buried in the gulag for annoying the bureaucrats or just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.  Freedom of speech, unreasonable search and seizure and the right to an open and fair trial are all stripped away with the wave of a magic wand when the FISA Court and the Patriot Act declare that national security is threatened.  And all kinds of other atrocities are possible when the intelligence agencies can convince banks, airlines and social media companies that you are a dangerous person because you don’t agree with the bureaucracy’s priorities.

And all of this is because a bunch of rag tag Islamic extremists hijacked four airliners.  Well, as I’ve confessed innumerable times, I was one of the fools who agreed to this nonsense back in 2001.  I allowed myself to be swayed by anger to allow George W Bush and his geniuses to put in place the very laws that would plague Americans ever since.  All of us who agreed with these measures put on our chains voluntarily.  More the fool me.

Well now it’s time to start undoing all of this.  And I mean all of it.  First to go must be the FISA Courts and the Patriot Act.  Ending the ability of the CIA and FBI to target American citizens and sweep away their constitutional rights is the primary goal.  That must go.

But after that, the military industrial complex must be examined and the practices that allow it to bribe elected officials and collude with contractors to bleed the American taxpayers must be changed.  Sure, we need up to date weapons to assure the security of this country.  But we’re not even getting that anymore.  We have bloated weapons programs that produce expensive but unimpressive results.  Our state-of-the-art Abrams tanks are being decimated on the battlefields of Ukraine by $500 drones.  Our next-up super-fighter jet is a vaporware project that is so poorly defined that despite a price tag rumored to be close to a trillion dollars we don’t know why we should build it, other than it will enrich the contractors beyond their wildest dreams.

Getting this done will be a battle royale.  Both Democrats and Republicans will defend the military industrial complex with every fiber of their beings.  People like Lindsey Graham and Mitch McConnell have amassed huge fortunes and incredible influence by serving the interests of the defense contractors in everything they do in the Congress.  It’s not too much to say that Donald Trump and his cabinet appointees in the Department of Defense will be risking their lives when they defy the vested interests there.  There is probably no limit to what they might do to prevent reform of the present situation.

Let’s pray for their success.  Nothing less than the freedom and prosperity of our children hangs in the balance over the next few years.

Tom’s World – 14DEC2024 – Capital vs Labor vs Deep State

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TomD

Stalin (I think) made the statement that capitalists would sell him the rope that he would use to hang them.

Before manufacturing can return en masse to the US, somebody(s) is going to have to go through the 1.75 x 10^9th onerous regulations and delete most. It’s too expensive to manufacture here and because of the lawyers and bureaucrats, too risky too.
How many landmines are there in the mass of employment laws? Family leave, wrongful termination lawsuits, handicap regs, discrimination lawsuits, DEI, Unions, dockworkers perfectly willing and happy to paralyze the nation or to destroy their employer.

There’s a radio station that I listen to down here that has ads for HR services providers. The ad starts with a (supposed) business owner moaning, “I’ve got an employee who never shows up when he is supposed to, What can I do” I almost jump into the radio yelling, “Fire the SOB, you idiot!” But apparently these days, things are so warped by the lawyers and legal environment that the obvious answer isn’t the correct answer any more. And, in that environment, US employment will be restricted.

A Million Miles Away

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In the last week or so there have been a number of reports about large drones flying over New Jersey and New York City.  When reporters have asked the Department of Defense and the FBI about this they were that the drones are unidentified.  But at the same time there was no sense of urgency by these agencies to calm the civilian population by assuring them that an investigation is in effect.  It was more or less a shrug of the shoulders and the comment that local law enforcement would handle these mysterious craft.

A congressman from New Jersey posited that there was a rumor that the drones were Iranian and that they were associated with a “mothership” based off the east coast in the Atlantic.  The Pentagon spokesman denied this and said there was no indication that the drones were foreign or controlled by adversaries of the United States.  But at the same time there was no indication how this could be known if the drones were unidentified.

So, then what is going on?

Well, of course I can’t prove anything.  But it occurs to me that Iran makes a lot of military drones and Russia uses an enormous number of military drones in the Ukraine war.  And both those countries are looking to make trouble for the United States because of military actions we have currently going on in their neighborhoods, in other words Syria and Ukraine.

Maybe they’re sending a message that they can retaliate for the attacks going on in their world.  Or maybe they’re scouting around to find the easiest or the most valuable targets to hit.  Well, isn’t that something!

And, of course, all of this is in response to US initiatives that were activated after the Democrats lost the November election.  After November 5th the United States gave Ukraine permission to use long range missiles in the Russian homeland.  And of course the toppling of the Assad regime by American proxies just occurred in the last week.  So, the State Department and the Department of Defense unleash chaos around the world and the blowback from it will hit home about the time President Trump is inaugurated.  Isn’t that something!

For me this just reinforces what kind of psychopaths we have running our foreign policy.  Antony Blinken and Victoria Nuland play their color revolution games with foreign countries and the blowback will be felt by innocent Americans and especially by our military that shouldn’t be put in harm’s way for egregious adventures that only alienate the rest of the world and benefit no one except the military contractors that feed off of the arms buildup that follows after these obscene plans are put in action.

Well, there’s basically nothing that can be done until that undead creature is finally packed into his mummy case and carted away from the White House.  Maybe we’ll get lucky and the other shoe doesn’t drop before January 20th and Donald Trump can inform our adversaries that sanity has reasserted itself over US foreign policy and that all ticking time bombs will be deactivated and we can start from a simple position of mutual hatred but without the added factor of sociopaths with delusions of grandeur running foreign policy for the world’s deadliest weapons stockpile.

Well, anyway, I’ve got my fingers crossed and I’m usually a pretty lucky guy.  It’s less than 40 days but why does it seem like a million miles away?

Release the Disruptor

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I was listening to some talking heads talk.  And it was a lot of blah, blah, blah.  But toward the end one of them said “America is hungering for renewal.”  And that resonated with my feelings.  Maybe I mean that I long for good people or for good actions to start happening in this country.

I think that Obama and Biden have shown us what letting terrible people run this country looks like.  And in the blue states it’s been going on for decades.  The result is what we see in California and what we saw in Minneapolis in 2020.

I don’t expect Trump to turn on the sunshine machine and all of a sudden, it’s “Morning in America” again.  That’s not his job.  His job is to break the stuff that needs breaking.  He needs to fire thousands and thousands of bad people.  He needs to prevent the government from attacking its own people.  He needs to hold the blue states accountable for subverting immigration laws and victimizing American citizens by squandering their tax dollars by giving them to illegal aliens.  He needs to live up to his hype as the great disruptor.  He needs to disrupt all of the things that are crushing the American people.

Sure, he needs to fix energy policy and force American corporations to hire Americans.  He can do many things that will benefit us economically.  But the only way to free us from our captors is to wrest the reins of government away from the Deep State and restore our freedom from all the petty and not so petty tyrants that afflict us.  And at the top of the list is the intelligence agencies and the Justice Department.

Trump must clean house.  There is no other way to fix this thing except remove all of those FBI agents whose job it has been to spy on Trump and his lieutenants since 2016.  These are the same people who have declared people who protest at PTA meetings as domestic terrorists if they disagree with their children being propagandized about sex and race.

Donald Trump must mandate the elimination of DEI and affirmative action and use his Justice Department to petition the Supreme Court to eliminate all laws that mandate racial, ethnic, sexual and other entitlements.  We need to get government out of the business of quotas and back in the business of performing its rightful functions, like running the military and protecting the borders.

So, I agree that this country needs renewal.  But for the most part I don’t expect government programs to spark renewal, either economic or cultural.  What I do expect is that pruning away the parts of the government that actively damage America will lead to a kind of renewal.  It will allow healthy, normal activities to proceed without the warping and stunting effects of those laws and programs that currently afflict us.  All we need is for these people to get off our backs and we’ll be able to flourish like we did before all this nonsense began.

Patriot Games

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Lately, I find reality beginning to resemble 1980’s action movie plots.  We have CIA and FBI undercover operations freely mixing into our politics.  Whether it’s Russia-gate or Hunter’s laptop or any of the color revolution activities inside and outside of the United States, it just seems like there’s no longer any brakes on what intelligence agencies will do if they decide it’s in their interest.

It’s as if they’ve been reading too many Tom Clancy novels or something.  And now with Donald Trump taking the initiative by selecting nominees for Attorney General and other cabinet officers who could curtail these activities it almost seems like we’re approaching some kind of showdown between the elected government and the Deep State.

It doesn’t take much imagination to see where this could go.  Now the thing is, the intelligence agencies have a long-standing relationship with many of the senators who run the place.  With Senator Thune selected for Senate Majority Leader I wouldn’t be surprised if they are given marching orders to veto Trump’s nominees like Matt Gaetz.  What might happen might be that the Senate could veto Gaetz but Trump might make him an interim appointee.  I’m guessing that a year in office might be plenty enough to fire and prosecute plenty of Trump’s enemies.  And after the year I’m sure Trump will find plenty of other work for Gaetz.  And likewise for Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense.  You can fire a lot of generals and rescind a lot of DEI and LGBTQ policies in a year.

But it’s easy to see that the GOP establishment is still alive and well in the Senate.  Donald Trump has his work cut out for him and he’ll have to use every bit of the powers that the presidency possesses to bust up the Deep State.  I suspect he may have to declare a national emergency just to shut the border and deport the millions of illegal aliens.  And I don’t think the enemies of this country, foreign (the aliens) or domestic (governors like Gavin Newsom) will just roll over and play dead.  Trump is going to have to play hardball with them.  I don’t doubt that it will lead to violence.  And that’s one of the biggest reasons why he has to purge the military and the Justice Department of his enemies.  Otherwise, they will fight him tooth and nail every step of the way.

I think it will be fascinating to see who wins.  I’m sure the FBI and the CIA will “discover” another Russia-gate to investigate.  And various senators who work for Raytheon and the other defense contractors will accuse Trump of being soft on Russia for not wanting to keep the Ukraine war going for another ten years.  I hope that Donald Trump has learned his lesson and will fire all of the FBI, NSA, CIA and other intelligence agency enemies he has as soon as he gets into office.  And he should similarly fire as many woke generals as he can, as soon as he can.  I think his presidency depends on it.  And with no hint of exaggeration, his very life probably does too.

Roasting the Nuts

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We have so many crazy people in this country.  And I don’t mean the psychopaths living in homeless encampments.  I’m talking about people like Nancy Pelosi and David Frum.  Here are “leaders.”  Pelosi used to be the Speaker of the House.  Frum writes for the premiere media outlets.  And after witnessing the undeniable exposure of Joe Biden’s massive cognitive failure, both of them spew lies and projection about how the real story is Donald Trump’s cognitive condition.

Pelosi danced and weaved to avoid saying that Joe Biden is incapable of running the country the way a president has to.  Finally, when all else failed she claimed that there were medical doctors who thought that Trump was suffering from dementia based on his debate performance.  Alternatively, I have to say Pelosi was getting so agitated over being asked to answer the question about Biden’s cognitive problems that she was starting to sound a little demented herself.

And these crazy people running our country don’t intend to let go, regardless of whether Biden or Trump “wins” the election.  They just expect to keep calling the shots and running things the way they want. And maybe they will.  I haven’t seen any real proof that Trump will take down the Deep State.  I mean, I’d love to see it happen but what makes him think it will end up any differently from 2017-2021?  I’m guessing that even if he wins, the FBI and the other intelligence agencies will begin undermining his administration from day one.  Will he be firing trainloads of these guys right from the git-go?

I have heard that the Heritage Foundation has a project running that identified talent that Trump can start hiring from the start to fill all the leadership openings in the critical agencies.  But are all these guys just warmed over George W Bush cronies?  Will they be Bill Barr times ten thousand?  Because if so, then it could be even worse than last time.

What he probably should do is hire all the military officers that Barack Obama fired.  A cadre of discipline military men that have old scores to settle might be just the force needed to clean house at the FBI, the Justice Department, the CIA and the rest of these renegade agencies.

And speaking of the military, Trump’s first official executive order should be to fire any biological male in the military wearing a wig and a skirt.  Especially the “Rear Admiral,” “Rachel” Levine.  What this freak show has done to military morale and preparedness cannot be overstated.

So, for me the desperate nature of our situation lies in how entrenched the craziest people are in our society.  Rooting these people out will take all of the time and attention away from trying to accomplish anything positive.  The only ameliorating circumstance is that so many of these nuts are geriatric age.  Nancy Pelosi is eighty-four years old and looks every second of that.  Watching her argue with the reporter about Biden’s dementia I kept thinking she might keel over from the strain.  But no luck.

Much good could be done with the aid of Father Time.  But without a doubt if anything is going to be accomplished to undo some of the harm, we see around us it’s going to take grunt work and spite.  Gosh I wish I were younger.  All I have left at this point is the spite.

Guest Contributor – Milo Mindbender – 29JUN2024 – Chevron Considered

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The overruling of Chevron could also apply to the BATFE, as it also is an executive branch not a legislative branch function. This is a refreshing pushback against the unelected beurocrats who make up new ways to advance personal or ideological policies without the power of legislation.
I am happy to see a beginning of unraveling the fiat state that has been created by BATFE, EOA, NOAA, and other over reaching government functionairies believing themselves to be the originator of power, and authority not truly granted them or their offices.
It is a small start, but truly appears to be headed in the right direction when viewed with the pushback against geotabbing cattle by the EPA, while disregarding illegal and unvetted, or unvaccinated invaders over our borders. Hopefully it results in less overreach, but that will be seen in the future.

Coping with Biden and Overruling Chevron

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The post-debate euphoria has finally worn off.  I’ve watched the various media and political operatives screech and croak in horror at the spectacle of Joe Biden’s cognitive flat lining.  And it was immensely gratifying.  I haven’t had this much fun since Election Night 2016.  Wonderful.  But now it’s time to put down the toys and look out into the cold, hard light of Saturday and move on.

It doesn’t appear that the Democrat elite has decided to pull the plug on Dementia Joe.  At least not yet.  Obama and Clinton have texted that Biden’s performance is just one of those things and everything will be status quo on the way toward glorious victory in November.  Well, good.  Leaving Joe in is the best thing that could happen for Trump.  There will be a small subset of voters who don’t care for Trump but are horrified by the prospect of a man as obviously cognitively damaged as Biden, in charge of the US military and other critical agencies of the government.  It’s got to give them pause wondering who is actually running the government instead of Biden right now.  So, this revelation has to boost Trump somewhat.  How much is the big question.  We should have some polls in a week or two.

I saw that the Supreme Court came out with a couple of rulings.  One is relevant to President Trump and other January 6th defendants.  It overrules charging them with obstruction of a government proceeding.  This will help a number of the defendants because this serious charge was the only felony for a number of the defendants.

The other decision is much more important for the country at large.  It overturned the so-called “Chevron deference.”  According to this 1984 ruling courts were forced to show deference to federal agencies when interpreting ambiguities in the law within their area of expertise.

“”Chevron is overruled. Courts must exercise their independent judgment in deciding whether an agency has acted within its statutory authority,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the decision.

The court’s conservative justices were in the majority, with the liberal justices dissenting. The ruling will make it easier for judges to second-guess actions by regulators, empowering challengers to regulations across federal agencies.

Business, conservative and libertarian groups cheered the decision, saying it eliminates a rule that requires courts to favor the government in all manner of challenges to regulation. The litigation was part of what has been termed the “war on the administrative state,” an effort to weaken the federal agency bureaucracy that interprets laws, crafts federal rules and implements executive action.”

Now this is brilliant.  With the right courts and executive branch oversight many overreaches by agencies like EPA and the IRS can be challenged in court and reversed.  This is a wonderful result.

So that is the world today.  A mixture of progress and regress.  In one direction we see the Supreme Court correcting past mistakes.  In another rogue judges and prosecutors serve up lawfare against the enemies of a demented president of the United States.

Well, it’s not as if we’re all not used to the spectacle.  The encouraging sign is that more of it is happening out in the open and more and more normies are getting an eyeful.

Has the Deep State Overplayed Its Hand?

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So, yesterday’s post was probably as pessimistic as I’ve ever felt.  The Supreme Court’s siding with the Biden border policy is so maddening that I could feel nothing but anger and hopelessness.  But there is a flip-side to such blatant harm being perpetrated against our sovereignty.  It could trigger an enormous groundswell of anger and support for Trump completely out of all proportion to his popularity with the other half of the country.  If the cities continue to fill up with illegal aliens who use up all the resources of these poor urban areas and contribute to crime and increase the misery of the inhabitants then maybe beyond all possibility of fraud the country could reject Biden and the Democrats so convincingly that even the oligarchs will be forced to relinquish the keys to the government.

Now granted this is a hard premise to sell.  When Trump won in 2016 the Left began a systematic campaign of sabotage against his administration that is still ongoing.  It seems unlikely that a bottom-up movement would have the organization to challenge the veritable tidal wave of voter fraud that the Left will unleash next November.  Poll watchers and lawyers will be needed to witness and accuse the cheaters while it is actually going down.  I don’t think that program is being built up.  I don’t think Trump knows how to organize an effective defense of his election.  And yet.

And yet, there is such an anger and frustration growing in this country that maybe January 6th was just a very early rumble in advance of an earthquake of unprecedented size.  Let’s say an 11.0 on the ten-point Richter scale.  If angry reactions sweep over a country that sees another fabricated Biden “victory” it might be enough to scare the Deep State into backing down.  And if it doesn’t it just might trigger the real insurrection that they stage-managed on January 6th.

Honestly, I have no certainty at all about what is most likely to happen.  We’re in completely uncharted territory.  But they’ve been goading the majority of people in this country going all the way back to when that creepy weirdo Obama got elected.  And every new incitement has been a magnitude larger than the last one.  It feels like they are intentionally pushing this thing toward an explosion of anger.  It’s entirely possible that they have a plan that depends on this explosion to allow them to sweep away the vestiges of popular government.  But as I’ve been intimating who’s to say they haven’t underestimated just how large the reaction will be to their goading.  If they do underestimate the reaction, what follows could be something like the reception that Louis XVI faced after the fall of the Bastille.  There might be a reckoning for the people who have set themselves over us and made our lives a chaotic misery.

So that’s “the other hand.”  If it turns out the master minds of the Deep State have underestimated the depth of anger and hatred, they’ve generated we may see the upending of their whole regime.  Just something to think about.  No guarantees given.