https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GkZ5l5gXAAEC2Q-?format=jpg&name=large
I think this makes the point very well. Kudos to the Trump and Musk show.
Tag: Trump’s second term
Tom’s World – 22FEB2025 – DOGE, Blessed Be Their Name
I think it amusing/horrifying that the DIMs have finally identified their base principle, their hill to die on that MUST NOT be breached. DOGE has revealed the nature of that principle. And it is not DIE, open borders, green energy, climate change, transgender, etc., etc.
The hill that that they have chosen as the location for their apoplectic battle is the continuation of graft and corruption on the $trillion dollar scale.
Example from yesterdays news- Though it’s difficult, I’ll try not to get too pejorative here but that FAT ***** Black Georgia “woman”,Stacey Abrams, was in the news. DOGE (blessed be their name) uncovered that a PAC formed by Stacey a couple of months ago for environmental justice received a $2 billion (read $2 thousand million) grant from the nightmare Biden admin.
Understand that this PAC was 2 months old and had no employees and had a capitalization of $100 before the grant. Also understand that the grant had no conditions, no oversite, no monitoring, no auditing.
That precisely is the base principle of what the Dims have become and will “die” to protect.
How Miserable They’ll Be
How much damage can Donald Trump do to the Left in four years’ time? Well, a normal Republican president spends his four years basically trying to hold his own against the Deep State while all the Democrat cabinet officers take a four-year hiatus working in well-funded NGOs and cushy media jobs. And when the Democrats get back into the White House, they’ve had four years to map out the next wave of progressive boondoggles.
But Donald Trump is not your father’s Republican. He’s taking a wrecking ball to the US federal budget and firing everyone in sight. And as for those well-funded NGOs, well he’s defunding them. USAID was the first place Elon Musk went with DOGE. All those government funded think tanks and color revolution incubators are going to dry up without the millions and billions of dollars of federal slush money to fund their depravity. And even a bunch of left-wing “media” sites are going to be feeling the pinch without federal dollars.
And this time around even the mainstream media is hurting badly. CNN, MSNBC, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Politico and many others are laying off journalists and reporters by the hundred. There probably won’t be any spots opening up for unemployed CIA, FBI, NSA and other directors on their staffs and even less place for all the generals and colonels about to find themselves pounding the pavement.
And the same goes for lobbying jobs for defense contractors, banks, green energy scammers and pharma companies. The SEC and the FDA are going to crack down on the shenanigans, the green energy gravy train will be shut down and the DOD is going to be cancelling multi-billion-dollar weapons system contracts instead of starting new ones.
Put all that together and it spells disaster for the Left’s recession-proof game plan. In fact, it also spells disaster for Washington DC in general. Guess what happens to the national capitol if hundreds of thousands of jobs are cut and a trillion dollars is pulled out of the budget?
RECESSION!
Now, what would that look like? It would mean the laid-off bureaucrats would disperse across the country like cockroaches looking for jobs they were qualified for. But that’s the problem. They’re really not qualified for anything useful. They’re federal bureaucrats. They have no skills and they’re used to being unaccountable to management. No one would or could hire them. Their resumes are radioactive and they have the mark of Cain on their foreheads. Chances are they’ll end up in fast food or prostitution.
At the same time a reduction in the number of workers in DC will take its toll on the local businesses that support them; restaurants, clothes stores and gay bathhouses. Just as the rest of the country will be benefiting from an economic upturn, the Greater Washington area will be plunged into economic stagnation. Property values will plummet and crime will spiral out of control. Knowing President Trump’s penchant for quick decisive action, I predict he will move his team to a new capitol at Mar-a-Lago and let the old capitol sink back into the swamp where it came from.
But seriously, we’re about to get a four-year vacation from IRS audits, antifa and BLM rioting, foreign wars, LGBTQ innovations (pronouns, rainbow paraphernalia, etc.), mask-wearing bureaucrats and runaway energy prices. Four years of peace and quiet without the Left stirring up trouble will be like heaven itself. Sure, I’m exaggerating how perfect the relief will be but still it’s going to be plenty good. And one of the best things about it will be how miserable they’ll be.
How can you beat that?
This Might Work
Congratulations to Kash Patel on his approval as FBI Director. The following is my recommendation for a training video for managers looking for best practices in how to re-orient and select from existing personnel in the Federal Bureau of Investigation going forward. It’s a master class in my opinion.
That Would Be Great
In the Hollywood film, “The Bad and the Beautiful” there is a discussion between an actor named Gaucho and a bit-part actress on the make named Lila. Gaucho tells her that his producer friend Jonathan (Kirk Douglas’s character) is a great man. But world-weary Lila laughs and replies “There are no great men, buster, there’s only men.”
So, are there any great men? Were there ever any? Is a Caesar or a Napoleon great? Or were they just great generals. Was Einstein great or was he merely a genius? Was Socrates a great man or merely annoying? How about St Paul?
It seems to me that the definition of a great man is one who is both intelligent and moral. So, it’s not enough to be brilliant if the use of your intelligence is to do evil. And it’s not enough to be a saint if you cannot somehow use this moral sense to benefit humanity as a whole or at least a significant chunk of it.
Framed the way I have here it’s not that easy to pick out these exceptional beings. I guess religious leaders like Jesus, Buddha, Moses stand out. They’ve had an outsized impact on the world. They understood the problem of living in the world of men. It’s so very hard to know what is the right thing to do in the multitude of decisions we make as we negotiate the confusing and frightening human world. How often we choose the easier thing instead of the “right” choice. We compromise our morals and standards to avoid pain or discomfort or even embarrassment. How much more will a leader compromise because the stakes are just so incredibly high.
I guess the only leader that comes to mind is Marcus Aurelius; the philosopher king. Not that he was perfect or that none of his philosophy was misguided. But without a doubt he was intelligent and he used his powerful office to provide the best government he could to the millions who lived within the Roman empire in the second century AD. Maybe this is an example of a great man.
So which Americans were great? Washington, Jefferson? Maybe. In the last one hundred and fifty years I don’t think there’s been much greatness. FDR had a large impact on the country but I don’t think he was wise. And so many of our recent presidents are neither moral nor wise. Some were truly awful, like Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and especially Joe Biden.
So where does that leave Donald Trump? Well, morality is not his forte. His private life is a mess. You need look no further than the “Stormy Daniels” episode to see that he does not restrain his baser nature at all. Then again do any of the wealthy ever do better? As for intelligence, he’s not a stupid man. He is an ambitious businessman who knows how to market himself. Is he wise? Well, he’s no philosopher king. But I think he does feel affection for his countrymen. I think he does want to make America a better place and make life better for Americans.
So, let’s just say that if he succeeds, Donald Trump will perform a truly great service for the United States of America. He will save it from the forces that are currently destroying it. He can vanquish the managerial bureaucracy that rules over us and is leeching away our strength and vitality. He will succeed where a century of American presidents has failed to save their country. That would be great.
Just a Regular Old Thursday in the Age of Trump
The increasingly shrill and desperate shrieks coming from bureaucrats and Democrats is truly music to the ears of hard-pressed taxpayers everywhere. DOGE has found the mother lode and shutting off the spigots that siphon off billions of dollars of taxpayer money into the coffers of cronies and crooks at NGOs around the world is the greatest act of American patriotism since the Revolutionary War was fought by an army of ragtag lunatics two hundred and fifty odd years ago. If Trump follows up on all of the executive orders he’s written and defends them against the fake judges attacking from all sides he has the potential of getting his face (and hair) on Mt. Rushmore.
And now he’s beginning to address Ukraine. He’s begun discussions with Putin and Zelensky. That’s going to be a long story but he’s begun well. Those negotiations will be long and difficult. A war that’s killed over a million men isn’t ended by turning a switch. The Russians and the Ukrainians are fighting a grudge war and even though it’s going against the Ukrainians they haven’t given up yet. In their desperation they might try some pretty awful things and that would make the Russians even angrier. Probably the smartest course for us is to convince Ukraine that the longer this thing goes, the worse will be the eventual outcome for them. Of course, most of this is the fault of American neo-cons who were responsible for the color revolution that installed the crazies in Kiev. If we hadn’t provided them with hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of arms and assurances that they would win, they never would have taken on the Russian bear and they would still have all of their land and all of their men. Crazy.
So, what’s next? We’ve become so jaded that we expect every day will include another Trumpian miracle. Another attack on the Left and its stooges. Well, they keep coming. Gabbard and Kennedy are in office and Patel was just advanced to the full Senate for a vote. All of that is going well. I read that the Justice Department has halted the prosecution of New York Mayor Adams and because of that the lead federal prosecutor for the Southern District of New York resigned in protest. Well, if she can’t have her politically motivated prosecution, she’s gonna take her ball and go home. Boo Hoo!
As Chemist mentioned in the comments yesterday, DOGE thinks they can shave trillion dollars off the price tag for social security and the other entitlements. That’s not all the way to where we have to get but it’s about 40% of the way there. That’s definitely nothing to sneeze at. So initial indications are that the Trump administration and the Congressional Republicans are moving in the right direction to start fixing some of the biggest problems that plague us. It’s hard to be critical of what’s going on so far.
In other news tomorrow is Valentine’s Day and I’ve agreed to spring for some Thai food and treat Camera Girl to a drive in my luxury sedan (well sort of) around the beautiful Dunwich environs. We can make this trip because I spent the morning shoveling slush and water off of the driveway in anticipation of tonight’s deep freeze. I reminded her of my prudence and diligence in attending to this situation and how her frail womanliness would never have been capable of the exertion and the sheer strengthliness of my manly effort. She feigned indifference but I could sense her awe.
I’ve added a revolt within the ranks of the good guys in my story. It sort of came out of nowhere but I now think it’s a good way to add tension and give the main character a chance to prove his leadership and shift the action away from the King of the Mole Men who is really more of a sage and businessman than a man of action. I’m imagining a sort of St Crispin’s Day speech to rally the troops and head into the final crisis (whatever it turns out to be!).
Next week will be extra busy. I have three separate extra commitments that will keep me hopping and neglecting my site work. Such is life. And so, it goes.
Guest Contributor – Chemist – 13FEB2025 – $1T
Talcove from LexisNexis Special Services testifying before the DOGE committee yesterday:
“What amount of fraud can be prevented in the entitlements programs and how?”
“By putting identity confirmation requirements in at the front end of payment systems, eliminating self-certification, and monitoring the back end – $1T.”
A trillion dollars sounds like a good start on cutting the budget.
Update:
Comment by TomD
Yeah, 1 $trillion as in 10^12th power, is a start. You want to see the logical conclusion of this process?
This is the largest real bill printed in the history of man. When I got the bill, the value was approx. 1/10th the value of the paper that it is printed on. Ironically, due to now scarcity, the bills are selling for well over $100 on ebay. I’m pissed, I bought 20 of them for $1 each and was giving them away as jokes/object lessons.
TANSTAAFL!
I was looking at the latest available numbers for the federal budget (fiscal 2023).
| Mandatory | ||||
| Social Security | $1.3 trillion | 1,300,000,000,000 | ||
| Medicare | $839 billion | 839,000,000,000 | ||
| Medicaid | $616 billion | 616,000,000,000 | ||
| Welfare | $448 billion | 448,000,000,000 | ||
| Other | $502 billion | 502,000,000,000 | ||
| subtotal | 3,705,000,000,000 | |||
| Discretionary | ||||
| Defense | $805 billion | 805,000,000,000 | ||
| Non-Defense | $917 billion | 917,000,000,000 | ||
| subtotal | 1,722,000,000,000 | |||
| Interest on the Debt | $659 billion | 659,000,000,000 | ||
| Grand Total | 6,086,000,000,000 | |||
And we only brought in about 4.4 trillion in revenue that year so we ran a deficit of about $1.7 trillion dollars. And that is equal to all of the “discretionary” spending which by the way includes all of defense spending. Now that is a grim picture. But as the kids say, “It is what it is.” What we should be shooting for is a budget that doesn’t exceed our revenues minus our debt payment. So, our budget should be around $3.74 trillion dollars. Or roughly speaking we have to trim the budget by 40%.
That’s a lot. But you know, I’ll bet it’s about in line with the amount of waste we could delete from the budget if honest people were looking at it. Even line items like Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare are riddled with inefficiency and featherbedding employment practices that a determined auditor could ferret out and eliminate. If Elon Musk could fire 70% of the staff at Twitter without any noticeable diminution in the capability of the business surely the federal bureaucracy can be pared back by 40% without too much trouble. Let’s face it automation probably already does most of the work that these people get credit for.
It may not be possible to reduce all that spending within a year or even four years but what is needed is a detailed plan to do just that. The plan needs to be a continuous improvement process that allows managers to apply metrics that tell them how many people to remove from the system on a monthly basis and how the remaining human resources are allocated and rated to determine who stays and who goes. It will be as murderous and cutthroat as the private sector is. Basically, it will be hell for bureaucrats and many of them will run away screaming just to avoid the stress. But it is exactly what’s needed. We can’t afford to make the federal government a jobs program for the dim-witted and lazy people who can’t make it in the private sector. At the very least the first thing we should do is lower all salaries by 40%. And I understand there may be some lower paid employees for which this is an unreasonable cut. But that can be worked out on a case-by-case basis. But it’s a good estimate for what we’re trying to do. And as far as boondoggles, we know there are plenty of those. Probably not two and half trillion dollars’ worth but still plenty to trim.
And let’s be honest. We all probably benefit from many programs that will have to be cut. So be it. Everybody will have to suck it up to some extent. Who knows, it may turn out that we can’t have free Chat GPT because it’s really paid for by our tax dollars. Fine. We’ll have to pay for that and probably a whole bunch of other things ourselves. Well, in the words of RAH, “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.”
How Many Generals Has Pete Fired?
February has been keeping me busy with snow and ice removal. Three snowfalls in one week are predicted. And the day job has been hectic. But I’ve managed to write several thousand words on my story this week which is pretty good. I follow as best I can in the news how Trump is doing in his epic assault on the “managerial state.” We’ve reached the point in the dance where various Obama-appointed federal judges will veto everything he does. It’ll be interesting to see if he honors the decisions or just ignores them. I rather hope he just goes full speed ahead and deals with the consequences later. It would be so much quicker to just make the changes and let the Deep State deal with a fait accompli.
I didn’t see the game but I watched a few minutes of post-Super Bowl celebrations going on in Philadelphia. A mob of inebriated cretinous goons combined their strength to yank a traffic light pole out of the ground, smash it with their hands and feet and then throw into the back of an enormous dump truck that they somehow got their hands on. Unfortunately, it fell out of the truck and onto several of their fellow rioters. But obviously a good time was had by all. Ah, the transformative energy of sports. I’m sure the City of Brotherly Love will rise to new heights on the spiritual boost this championship will provide. Well, anyway, the rioting, looting and arson probably won’t continue much past Monday.
The world situation grows more chaotic by the week. The Gaza ceasefire and prisoner exchange seems to be wobbling and the Ukraine war grinds brutally on. Trump’s latest tariff project seems to involve imports of aluminum and steel. I believe we get a lot of aluminum from Canada. The hydroelectricity in Quebec makes Canadian aluminum competitive with any other world producers. I’m not sure if Trump is taking another slap at Trudeau. I think a lot of the steel comes out of China. I wonder if Trump is serious about that. It would be a real shot across the bow of Xi Jinping’s economy. We’ll see.
I’m curious to see if Trump will give a speech where he lays out his big plan for the changes he’s making to government spending. I mean, it’s great that he’s shutting down the patronage and pork at USAID and other left-wing fronts. And reducing the federal payroll by as much as possible is also admirable. But I tend to think that he has some bigger, more comprehensive program in the works. Now maybe he wants to wait until he’s put out some of these fires like the judges blocking his executive orders. And maybe he’s working with the Congressional Republicans to push forward some large bill that contains a lot of the items he intends to use to transform the economy. But right now, it’s very hard to tell what’s going forward and what’s been halted.
I guess I’ll have to be patient for a few more weeks. After all he hasn’t been in office even a month yet. It just seems longer because of all the activity he’s produced. I’m impatiently waiting for Patel, Kennedy and Gabbard to get their votes in the Senate. I feel like that’s dragging. But that’s not Trump’s fault. The Senate Republicans are a sorry looking lot and can barely keep from tripping over their own feet. But one thing I’d like to hear about is how many generals Pete Hegseth has fired this week. I think maybe that’s the metric I would use to gauge the effectiveness of the Trump administration. Yep that’s the one.
The Time for Speeches
We got the promised four inches of snow last night so I had to clear it this morning. I didn’t get out there until ten-thirty so I was busy when Trump was sworn in. After a shower and lunch, I put on the video and listened.
Well, Donald Trump did his thing. He gave a half hour address and he surely went to town. I think he touched almost all the bases. He left out the J6 pardons which did surprise me. But other than that (and I guess Greenland) he went through the litany of actions and policies that he promised during the campaign. And I gotta tell ya, it was pretty great.
Now I have to be honest, I do get tired of all the pauses for applause. They’re not really necessary. But some of them were justified. When he said he was going to end government racial and sexual interference in people’s lives I’m pretty sure I gave off a whoop. And when he said that he was going to restore freedom of speech by putting a stop to all government interference with speech I smiled. And when he said that there are officially two genders (he meant sexes) recognized by the United States government I think I may have clapped.
He said the government would put an end to the sexual struggle sessions in the military. And he said he would be declaring a national emergency at the southern border. He said he will be reinstating the stay in Mexico policy for people seeking asylum. He said he’s taking the Panama Canal back and he said he’s declaring the cartels terrorist organizations. He said he’s ending the Green New Deal and the Electric Car subsidies. He said he’s going to “drill baby drill.” He said he’s going to restore impartial justice and end lawfare. And he said that God saved his life to give him the chance to restore America to greatness.
He said everything. He didn’t take a swing at Joe Biden but nobody’s perfect.
Alright, good. He got his say and all those applause lines and he criticized his opponents and their awful policies. Splendid.
But Inauguration Day is one day. Tomorrow, I want to hear what you’ve done for me lately. We all went to a lot of trouble to drag our butts down to the Middle School cafeteria to vote for you. We did that even though we believed there was a better than even chance that the Democrats would steal this election too. So, we’ve gone out on a limb to look like saps for you Mr. President, so it’s time for you to have your minions sweep up the confetti and busted balloons and roll up their sleeves and actually check off one or two items off of that list of promises you made today.
And how about starting with the J6 pardons? That’s the one that is most urgent. These people have been shut away for years for misdemeanors or for nothing in some cases. Setting them free is the right thing to do and it’s the smart thing to do too. He shouldn’t wait. He owes them that.
After that, shut down the FBI. That’s a no-brainer. After that just start putting the wheels in motion for all of the stuff that takes time to get moving. Call up the yahoos in the Senate and get your appointees confirmed and let’s get this show on the road. The time for speeches is over.
Update:
I saw last night that he did sign pardons for about 1,500 J6 prisoners. Good.