Author Topic: Trump Administration 2.0  (Read 15379 times)

Body-by-Guinness

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Federal Government Inc. has a New CEO
« Reply #150 on: January 25, 2025, 10:54:22 PM »
An accurate perspective:

From Daniel Jupp:

The 2nd term has been conducted so far even more gloriously than I thought it would be.

I don’t think people realise fully what is happening here. Trump is using the mandate and his personality to simply go straight through all the usual barriers, obstacles and crooks like they aren’t there.

And he’s taking action. It’s not just words.

Signing executive orders is one thing. But he’s learned the lesson from the obstruction that took place in the first term. He has his people, MAGA people, empowered and where obstruction is happening, they are going in and removing it.
You want to delay releasing J6ers? Ok, I’ll send US Marshalls in to pull them out.

You want to give someone a different job title and think you can still keep doing that DEI shit under a different name? Ok, we will spot it, get the legal team on it, and the person above has got 10 days to stop or you’re losing your job as well.

You are still doing nothing and fucking around leaving people freezing and homeless in Carolina? Ok, I’m ordering the Army back and they are building bridges and roads and fixing things. Enough of that shit.

You have a scheme with insurance companies and mortgage providers to steal all the land in California and ‘build back better’? No. I’m going in, I’m letting the victims speak live on every channel, I’m shaming the insurance companies. Federal permissions are going to delay rebuilding? No they aren’t, I’m waiving them. Karen Bass says it takes months to start rebuilding? No it doesn’t, I’m publicly shaming that and I’m looking at every means to bypass her and just let people get back to their properties and start cleaning up.

Ukraine grift? No, I’ve turned off the money tap. I’ve phoned Putin and Zelenskky. Get working on a peace deal, now.

You used security clearances and intel expert status to try to impose a Democrat permanent tyranny? Those security clearances are gone. Immediately. Oh, and you can forget your security detail too. I know people are going to bleat about it. I don’t care.

Basically Trump is treating the whole federal system as a company he owns where the employees have been lazy thieving bastards…and it is. But more, he’s treating it as a company YOU own where the employees have been lazy cheating bastards….and it is. And by sheer energy, force of personality and some obvious planning awareness that obstruction would be attempted again, he is, as Chuck Schumer whines, bulldozing.

Before, he reached over the heads of the Matrix to address the people directly. Ok, I’ll go round the media because the media is crooked. I’ll address the people directly through tweets and rallies and just constant presence always, every day, going somewhere and meeting ordinary people. I’ll walk into a restaurant and shake a hundred hands. I’ll visit a fire station. Every single day. Combine the rallies and the public appearances and Trump campaigns at a level and with an energy like nobody else….but he does it when in office too. He doesn’t stop. It’s perpetual campaigning.

Now, he’s added to that. Ok, the obstacle is this whole edifice of the Deep State, the administrative State, the obstructionists who want decline and disaster because that’s what they have schemes to profit from. Fuck that. FEMA are no good, I’ll use the Army. Do I have an honest piece I can place on the table? I’ll use that instead. The people are furious and being ignored? I’ll bring them right into the heart of this. I’ll reach over the heads of the Matrix again. But this time to do the tasks. Real action.

The most heartening thing for me was hearing that people were sacked and cleared out of their desks and escorted from buildings in some instances. Yes, the best news is these people being sacked. Because that signals it’s not just words. That signals action and consequence. You can’t try and block this. You have no legitimate ability to block this. And if you are sitting in a non job doing nothing but propaganda and obstruction, you’re being removed from the building.

Apply that to the Republican Senators who try to block appointments, and all is good.

My one cause of concern is the AI deal, but the rest has been golden. No western nation has seen an assault on the corruption of the system like this in centuries. Trump is dealing with the administrative State the way Thatcher dealt with the unions in Britain in the 1980s. In Britain, that led to the sole period of pride and success my nation has had since World War Two. Trump’s assault on the administrative State if continued will be bigger than what has already been achieved by a similar attitude in Argentina. It will be the greatest blow against the Matrix and for the people and the greatest impediment to the slave society that was being built ever seen.

The AI infrastructure deal is the only route he has left them for that dystopia, but I’m hoping he and Musk will be able to turn it to genuine good serving the people rather than to the control system of the elite. I don’t think as the truther crowd do that it means him and Musk want the same slave society that a Gates wants. Everything else they are doing contradicts that.

Crafty_Dog

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Re: Trump Administration 2.0
« Reply #151 on: January 26, 2025, 05:46:08 AM »
AMEN.

PS:  I'm glad to see the article note AI policy as problematic.

DougMacG

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Trump 2.0, Denali, McKinley
« Reply #152 on: January 26, 2025, 07:43:14 AM »
https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-myth-of-mt-denali/

National Park Service notes that, “no fewer than nine Native groups… used unique names for the mountain. There are five Athabascan languages surrounding the park, each with its own oral place name.”

And Mt. Denali is not even the right tribal name.

Crafty_Dog

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Trump pulls Bolton's security detail
« Reply #153 on: January 26, 2025, 03:21:12 PM »
I am more than a little uneasy with this.  Pompeo was an outstanding Sec State and even though Bolton turned asshole, both men's lives are legitimately in danger from the Iranians. 

There is a whiff of pettiness here , , , Furthermore, if either is taken out, it will be very bad politically for Trump.

https://x.com/DefiyantlyFree/status/1881850242930491675

Body-by-Guinness

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Compare & Contrast
« Reply #154 on: January 26, 2025, 06:13:22 PM »
@CynicalPublius
To fully understand just how remarkable today’s exchange with Colombia was, you need to understand how Washington DC has traditionally worked through these sorts of issues, and the different way it works now under Trump.
I’ll illustrate.

Traditional Approach:

1. Colombia announces it will not take our repatriation flights.
2. On Monday, the State Department convenes an interagency task force with DoD, NSC, DEA, INS, ICE, Commerce, Treasury and Homeland Security.
3. The task force meets for four days and develops a position paper.
4. The position paper is rejected by the Secretary of State, who is unhappy that insufficient equity considerations are built into the process.
5. The task force reconvenes a week later to redevelop three new, equity-centric courses of action and create a new position paper. 
6. The process is delayed a week because Washington DC gets three inches of snow.
7. SecState approves the new position paper for interagency circulation, and considerable input is received from the heads of other departments so the task force must reconvene.
8. The original three proposed responsive courses of action are scrapped in favor of a new, fourth course of action that achieves the worst aspects of the three prior courses of action but satisfies the interagency.
9. Someone in State who disagrees leaks to the Washington Post, who writes a story about how ineffective the Presidential administration is.
10. The White House Chief of Staff sets up a session three days later to brief the President, who approves the new fourth course of action.
11. Over a month after the issue is first raised, the State Department Public Affairs Officer holds a press conference announcing that Colombia has agreed to try to send fewer criminals into the US and everyone declares victory.

Trump Approach:

1. Colombia announces it will not take our repatriation flights.
2. After a par-5 third hole where he goes one under par, Trump uses his iPhone to post on social media as to how the USA will destroy Colombia’s economy if they do not do what the USA demands.
3. By the time Trump gets to the par-4 sixth hole, Colombia’s President has agreed to repatriate all the illegal Colombians in his own plane, which he will pay for.
4. Trump finishes three under par and goes to the clubhouse for a Diet Coke where he posts a gangsta AI image of himself and the new FAFO Doctrine.
5. Winning.

See the difference?  It’s called LEADERSHIP.

Crafty_Dog

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Cotton urges Trump to revisit decision to pull protective details
« Reply #155 on: January 27, 2025, 09:09:06 AM »
I heartily concur!

https://www.dailywire.com/news/cotton-urges-trump-to-revisit-his-decision-to-pull-protective-details-off-people-targeted-by-iran

Not only is Trump in the wrong here, the whiff of personal pettiness is already in the air on this one (e.g. weathervane Lindsay Graham https://www.bizpacreview.com/2025/01/27/lindsey-graham-wants-senate-to-probe-why-trump-yanked-security-for-john-bolton-1518734/
 https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1883554438889025792 ), and any attempt or god forbid, success would be devastating to Trump's image.

« Last Edit: January 27, 2025, 09:30:30 AM by Crafty_Dog »

DougMacG

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Re: Trump Administration 2.0
« Reply #156 on: January 27, 2025, 10:16:27 PM »
'The GOP needs to act as though they have 18 months to fix everything because that could be the case.'

Body-by-Guinness

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Trump Fires Unfireable Chair of NLRB
« Reply #157 on: January 28, 2025, 11:46:36 AM »
The NLRB is capable of all manner of hijinks, and worse. This will be worth tracking; on the face of it Trump has a strong hand to play here, albeit one the next Democrat president will also be able to exercise:

@BehizyTweets

BREAKING: President Trump just fired Gwynne Wilcox, the National Labor Relations Board Chair.

Wilcox says she will fight to overturn his decision, "As the first Black woman Board Member, I brought a unique perspective that I believe will be lost upon my unprecedented and illegal removal... I will be pursuing all legal avenues to challenge my removal, which violates long-standing Supreme Court precedent."

President Trump's decision shocked the system because apparently, NLRB members are shielded from presidential removal, a rule that clearly violates the Constitution.

There is no such thing as an "independent agency" of the federal government. ALL agencies that wield executive authority are under the president's jurisdiction. Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution: “The executive power shall be vested in a President of the United States.”

Body-by-Guinness

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Big Meanies Think Trump is a Big Meanie
« Reply #158 on: January 28, 2025, 01:47:10 PM »
2nd post.

This could go a lot of places, but given Trump’s election is the root cause of much of what is discussed, I’ll drop it here. Note, a lot of rabbit holes linked in the original and subsequent pieces I’ll also link below.

Amusingly and annoyingly, a theme that emerges throughout these pieces involve impact Trump’s EOs et all have on federal employees (FE). FEs don’t know if they’ll have jobs/predictable income, you know like many Americans that endured Bidenomics. FEs fret that they are or will be singled out for the choices they made while doing their jobs, you know like those that questioned woke dogmas, or had the wrong affiliations, or indeed had some characteristic that did not provide them membership in a “protected class.” Poor FEs, in short, feel persecuted for doing the bidding for their political masters and persecuting their fellow Americans.

Cry me a freaking river, mofos:

https://thetransom.com/p/trump-to-bureaucrats-freeze

Politico’s take on the destruction of political structures Dems used to maintain political power, calling it a “power grab:”

https://www.politico.com/newsletters/playbook/2025/01/28/trumps-massive-power-grab-00200908

Yo Politico, make that some realpolitik jits.

And Politicos tale of the poor, beleaguered DOJ employees coming to terms with what it feels like to lose hunter status and contend with the powerlessness they imposed on their former prey:

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/01/27/trump-justice-department-week-one-00200860




Crafty_Dog

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WSJ against Tulsi nomination
« Reply #159 on: January 29, 2025, 09:57:45 AM »
Tulsi Gabbard, Edward Snowden and Intelligence
Does the U.S. want a director of national intelligence who excuses mass leaking of secrets?
By The Editorial Board
Updated Jan. 28, 2025 6:24 pm ET

Voters want disruption in Washington, but it’d be something else entirely for the Senate to confirm a director of national intelligence who has a record of defending those who subvert U.S. interests. When former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard testifies Thursday, will Republicans pose questions that serve the public interest, or go along to get along with President Trump?


Sen. Tom Cotton, the head of the Intelligence Committee, recently said he hopes nobody questions Ms. Gabbard’s patriotism. We aren’t. The issue is what she believes and what she does, especially on U.S. intelligence. Her history isn’t encouraging. In 2020 she introduced a House resolution, alongside then Rep. Matt Gaetz, calling for the feds to drop charges against Edward Snowden.

“The National Security Agency’s bulk collection telephone records program was illegal and unconstitutional,” the resolution argued. “Edward Snowden’s disclosure of this program to journalists was in the public interest.” Oh, his disclosure of one NSA program to some trusted journalists? Is that all Ms. Gabbard believes Mr. Snowden did?

The reality is that Mr. Snowden betrayed his oath by pilfering a massive cache of U.S. secrets, fleeing to Russia, and subsequently taking citizenship there.

“The vast majority of the documents he stole have nothing to do with programs impacting individual privacy interests,” a House Intelligence Committee review said in 2016. “They instead pertain to military, defense and intelligence programs of great interest to America’s adversaries.” Many of the details are classified, though, and the report was heavily redacted.

Yet the damage was real. “Russia and China have cracked the top-secret cache of files stolen by the fugitive US whistleblower Edward Snowden, forcing MI6 to pull agents out of live operations in hostile countries,” the U.K.’s Sunday Times reported in 2015. The U.K. is part of the Five Eyes alliance of nations that share intelligence with the U.S. It’s hard to square that report with the euphemistic description in Ms. Gabbard’s House resolution.

Or take it from Mr. Cotton, who didn’t mince words in 2016. “Edward Snowden was an egotistical serial liar and traitor whose unauthorized disclosures of classified information have jeopardized the safety of Americans and allies around the world,” he said. “Snowden’s close and continual contact with Russian intelligence services speak volumes. He deserves to rot in jail for the rest of his life.”

We agree with the late New York Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who led a commission on government secrets in the 1990s, that overclassification is a problem. “The best way to ensure that secrecy is respected, and that the most important secrets remain secret, is for secrecy to be returned to its limited but necessary role,” that report said. “Secrets can be protected more effectively if secrecy is reduced overall.”

What Mr. Snowden stole wasn’t needlessly kept secrets, and the solution to overclassification isn’t for random government contractors to go rogue and download whatever they see fit. Ms. Gabbard might try to parry by saying today’s whistleblower protections offer better channels for dissent. But the House report said that “laws and regulations in effect at the time of Snowden’s actions afforded him protection.” He made a different choice.

No, the question isn’t Ms. Gabbard’s patriotism. It’s judgment, and what message it would send friends and foes to confirm a director of national intelligence who doesn’t really seem to believe in protecting national intelligence.

Crafty_Dog

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VDH with a personal analysis of Trump
« Reply #160 on: January 29, 2025, 03:19:03 PM »

Body-by-Guinness

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A MAGA Potpourri
« Reply #161 on: February 01, 2025, 12:49:06 PM »
A wide ranging piece covering all sorts of ground and containing many insights. Given that Trump is the common denominator herein, I’ll drop it here:

https://www.coffeeandcovid.com/p/the-occupation-saturday-february

Body-by-Guinness

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How Biden Supercharged Putin’s Economy & Other Bon Mots
« Reply #162 on: February 03, 2025, 09:08:50 PM »
Some very apt speculations and bon mots here:

https://www.coffeeandcovid.com/p/none-shall-sleep-monday-february

Crafty_Dog

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UNRWA
« Reply #163 on: February 04, 2025, 03:27:41 PM »

Crafty_Dog

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FO
« Reply #164 on: February 04, 2025, 03:44:12 PM »
(2) TRUMP TAKING CONTROL OF FINANCIAL REGULATORS: Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent ordered the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) to stop all rulemaking, communications, and lawsuits yesterday.
President Donald Trump is expected to appoint new directors of the Federal Deposit Insurance Company (FDIC) and Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), according to a person familiar with the plans.
Why It Matters: Reforming the CFPB has been a longstanding priority for Congressional Republicans and key Trump donors. This is likely an effort to finally put the CFPB under the appropriations process, deregulate digital fund transfers, and prevent regulators from “nudging” banks to debank Trump administration officials and political appointees as “politically exposed persons.” - R.C.
Beltway Rollup:
(3) RUBIO SAYS STATE NOW CONTROLS USAID: Secretary of State Marco Rubio said he is now in charge of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and USAID may be dismantled after a review of the agency’s operations.
(4) TRUMP CREATES U.S. SOVEREIGN WEALTH FUND: President Donald Trump issued an executive action directing federal agencies to create a U.S. sovereign wealth fund. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the sovereign fund will be created in the next twelve months, and creating a sovereign fund is of great strategic importance.
(5) TRUMP TO ISSUE EO ENDING EDUCATION DEPARTMENT: President Trump is preparing an executive order that aims to dismantle the Department of Education, according to people briefed on the draft order. Twenty Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) employees have already started working in the Education Department to cut spending and eliminate employees.

Crafty_Dog

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WSJ: Sovereign Wealth Fund is a terrible idea
« Reply #165 on: February 07, 2025, 08:43:06 AM »
I concur!!!

And without it, what happens to Trump's pretenses of buying half of TikTok?
====================

‘Sovereign Wealth’ for Politicians
All the reasons Trump’s government investment fund is a very bad idea.
By The Editorial Board
Feb. 6, 2025 5:54 pm ET

Now here’s an idea: Leverage federal assets to create a new investment fund for the political class to invest in whatever it pleases, including private companies. What could possibly go wrong?

The answer is plenty, which is why President Trump’s proposal Monday to create a new sovereign wealth fund deserves to die in Congress. His executive order included scant details. But it said the fund would “promote fiscal sustainability,” “establish economic security for future generations, and promote United States economic and strategic leadership internationally.” More likely, it would take resources from the private economy, fund political boondoggles, and mess with the business decisions of private companies.

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Mr. Trump’s order directs Treasury and Commerce to develop a plan within 90 days for “funding mechanisms, investment strategies, fund structure, and a governance model” as well as legislation that could be required to set it up. Congress would have to authorize its creation and funding mechanism.

Why has no President done this before? One reason is the U.S. perennially runs budget deficits, projected at $1.9 trillion for this fiscal year. Countries with sovereign wealth funds typically invest surplus revenue from commodity sales or excess foreign exchange reserves from trade surpluses, e.g., China.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent says the U.S. can “monetize” federal assets, which the White House puts at $5.7 trillion. Treasury, theoretically, could sell or securitize future revenue streams from such assets to raise money for the fund. The money would then be invested to earn returns, also in theory.

In practice, federal assets aren’t what they seem. Washington’s biggest asset is its $1.6 trillion in student debt, about a quarter of which is already set to be written off. Other phantom assets include hundreds of billions of dollars in loans for disaster relief, low-income housing and green energy. The U.S. also owns some $2.6 trillion in property, software, plants and equipment, which are subject to depreciation.

Other countries that have wealth funds, such as Norway, finance them with revenue from oil or resource sales. The U.S. earns revenue from spectrum sales and royalties from leases. But the politicians spend it.

Such funds typically enrich a country’s rulers and their friends far more than citizens. Foreign leaders use the funds to finance businesses and projects of political allies. Corruption is a constant temptation. Malaysia’s version, 1MDB, channeled billions of dollars to support the lifestyles of a Prime Minister and his cronies.

There’s also no need for such a U.S. fund since Congress already spends on roads and bridges, technology, research and development and the other uses that Mr. Trump has cited as justification.

The biggest danger is that such a fund will be used to invest in private companies. Politicians would love a separate vehicle to direct capital without having to go through Congress. Mr. Trump gave the game away on Monday when he suggested such a fund could buy TikTok.

Howard Lutnick, nominated to be Commerce secretary, suggested that “if we are going to buy two billion COVID vaccines, maybe we should have some warrants and some equities in these companies and have that grow for the health of the American people.”

But with ownership comes political control. A sovereign wealth fund would give Mr. Trump and future Presidents more leverage to bully businesses. Witness how public pension funds use their investments to coerce companies to adopt their climate and cultural agenda. The French government’s stake in Renault has made it harder to cut jobs and close factories so the auto marker could become more competitive. If the feds own 10% of Pfizer, do you think Mr. Lutnick wouldn’t soon be telling the company what it can charge on drugs?

It’s no coincidence that after Mr. Trump floated the sovereign wealth idea last year, the Biden White House let it be known that it was working on such a fund to invest in strategic companies to compete with China. But then what was the $280 billion Chips Act all about?

***
In talking up his fund idea, Mr. Trump confuses “sovereign wealth” with the real wealth of nations. National wealth is created by the ingenuity and risk-taking of its citizens. They build new companies and make new discoveries. That’s how America became rich and built an economy worth trillions.

Government doesn’t create wealth, and a sovereign wealth fund would merely be one more way for the government to commandeer private wealth for political purposes. It will destroy more wealth than it creates.

Body-by-Guinness

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A Vought that Counts & Other Bon Mots
« Reply #166 on: February 07, 2025, 03:10:39 PM »
And another Coffee & Covid well worth perusing:

https://www.coffeeandcovid.com/p/gremlins-friday-february-7-2025-c

The section about OMB director Vought is well worth perusing.

Body-by-Guinness

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ACLU Seeks to Block Trump’s Potential Release of Probationary Employees
« Reply #167 on: February 07, 2025, 04:11:41 PM »
Standard gnashing of teeth from an expected quarter. You would think lawyers would understand the meaning of the term “probationary….”

Exclusive: ACLU asks Congress to investigate plans to fire 'probationary' federal employees
ACLU urges Congress to investigate layoffs
•The Hill News / by Rebecca Beitsch / Feb 7, 2025 at 2:34 PM

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is asking Congress to investigate the Trump administration's plans for “imminent mass layoffs” of as many as 200,000 employees hired within the last two years ago.

The letter comes as departments across government have been asked to assemble a list of employees still on probation after being hired. The probationary period lasts one or two years, depending on the agency.

The ACLU said Trump administration officials have “repeatedly made clear that they intend to reshape the federal workforce for their own partisan political purposes.”

“We respectfully urge that you investigate the Administration’s rationale and legal basis for these planned layoffs. … Mass layoffs of federal employees of the sort that have been reported to be under consideration are presumptively and inherently illegal,” the ACLU wrote to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

The ACLU argues the law requires reviewing each employee’s performance on a case-by-case basis, while any large-scale firings would have to follow existing law for shrinking the workforce.

Despite their probationary status, the employees are still afforded much of the same protections as the broader federal workforce, meaning they must be informed of “inadequacies” in their performance before being fired.

“While the law allows for the termination of probationary employees for performance or conduct reasons, a mass firing on this scale without any sort of individualized assessment or following of Reduction in Force (RIF) procedures raises serious legal concerns,” the ACLU wrote to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

“RIF decisions similarly cannot be motivated by partisan political reasons. Any effort to sidestep RIF procedures or apply political litmus tests to their employment status would violate federal law,” they added, noting reductions in force laws require a 60-day advance notice to employees.

The plan to remove probationary employees is just one of a number of sweeping actions to reshape the workforce.

The Office of Personnel Management has also offered nearly all government employees the option to take a buyout. Though the offer promises eight months of pay and benefits for those wishing to leave federal service, the proposed contract contains numerous conflicting statements and would leave employees with little recourse to challenge any fallout from the deal — including if it is not funded.

And President Trump also signed an order reigniting his Schedule F mandate, now dubbed Schedule P/C, that creates a new class of federal employees — directing agencies to reassign career policy staff to new positions where they could be hired and fired like political appointees.

The move has sparked fear the Trump administration will use the new employee class to remove career civil servants and replace them with political appointees, who would then have greater control over what have traditionally been nonpartisan roles.

The letter from the ACLU defended the current merit-based hiring system.

“Everyone in America relies on the professional and skilled federal employees who serve our communities,” it wrote.

“We need the people in these and so many other critical roles selected for their professionalism not for loyalty or cronyism. At this perilous moment, we urge that you make clear that the Trump Administration cannot violate existing laws and purge probationary employees government-wide based on partisan political objectives, rather than merit.”

https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/5133248-acolu-letter-congress-trump-administration/

Body-by-Guinness

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Trump Seeking to Exercise “Radical Constitutionalism?”
« Reply #168 on: February 07, 2025, 04:53:51 PM »
My first encounter with this Substack, though I’ve certainly encountered the author’s names before as they are both known in federal legal circles. Here they posit that Trump’s strategy can be found amid OMB’s new leader, Vought’s, speeches, writings, and methods. Though much of this is beyond my legal ken, I suspect they are on to something.

Marc, I suspect you’d derive value from clicking around this substack:

The Trump Executive Orders as “Radical Constitutionalism”
Much more than “test cases” may be at stake in Trump's aggressive claims of presidential authority
BOB BAUER AND JACK GOLDSMITH
FEB 03, 2025

President Trump looks at Russell Vought, who delivers remarks at the White House in 2019. (Official White House photo by Shealah Craighead)
Why do so many of President Trump’s multitudinous executive orders fly in the face of extant legal principles? Are they the result of incompetence? Is the administration laying the groundwork for test cases in an effort to expand executive power in the Supreme Court?

Below we assess a third possibility: the administration doesn’t care about compliance with current law, might not care about what the Supreme Court thinks either, and is seeking to effectuate radical constitutional change.

The third possibility sounds histrionic, which is not our usual posture. But it appears to be the view of Trump’s nominee to head the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, who is one of Trump’s “most influential advisers,” who will be voted on for confirmation in the Senate soon, and who will play a central role in Trump’s executive orders, if he hasn’t already.

This post assesses Vought’s views on executive branch law compliance, examines how his views fit with the Trump approach to executive orders to date, and asks what administration lawyers might be doing in all of this.

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Vought’s Views

In May 2023, Vought complained at a talk at the pro-Trump think tank, the Center for Renewing America, that Trump’s policies in the first administration were thwarted because “the lawyers come in and say it’s not legal, you can’t do that, that would overturn this precedent, there’s a state law against that.”

Vought added that legal objections to presidential policies are where “so much of things break down in our country.” He provided a specific example: “a future president says, ‘What legal authorities do I need to shut down the riots,’ we want to be able to shut down the riots and not have the legal community . . . to come in and say ‘that’s an inappropriate use of what you’re trying to do.’” Vought added: “I don’t want President Trump having to lose a moment of time having fights in the Oval Office about whether something is legal . . . .”

We cannot know if, or the degree to which, Vought’s theory of governmental legal advice is guiding the Trump administration’s executive orders. Yet Vought’s theory fits many of the known facts. And the OMB, as we will explain below, has a vital role in executive orders.

Executive Orders and Legal Process

President John F. Kennedy’s Executive Order 11030, today embodied in a regulation, governs the process for executive orders inside the executive branch. For our purposes, two components of the process are important. First, the executive branch entity that proposes an executive branch order must submit it to the Director of the OMB (i.e. Vought, if confirmed), together with a letter from the originator of the EO “explaining the nature, purpose, background, and effect of the proposed Executive order or proclamation and its relationship, if any, to pertinent laws and other Executive orders or proclamations.”

If the Director of OMB approves the order, “he shall transmit it to the Attorney General for his consideration as to both form and legality.” The Attorney General has assigned this function, like many legal interpretation functions, to the Office of Legal Counsel. Career OLC attorneys expert in executive orders review the orders. These lawyers do not typically do full-blown legal analyses of the orders, as they would with a legal question for which OLC writes formal legal opinions. But they typically do a serious legal chop on the EO to ensure its legality, and with any EO of substance there is normally a great deal of back and forth to ensure that the facts in the EO are accurate and that the order is lawful. If the proposed order passes OLC muster, the Attorney General approves and transmits it “to the Director of the Office of the Federal Register, National Archives and Records Administration.”

The bottom line: By Executive Order and regulation, both still in force, the Justice Department must review the legality of the EO, and the Attorney General must approve it.

What’s Going On Inside the Trump Administration?

We do not know what legal process the New Trump administration is using to vet the legality of executive orders. But it does not appear that the executive order or regulation are being followed, or that DOJ or OLC is fully in the loop. Four pieces of evidence support this view.

First, many executive branch orders have serious legal problems that OLC typically would have raised legal doubts about. Jack listed just a few last week:

The TikTok ban delay reflects a controversial and not-obviously-lawful conception of presidential enforcement discretion. The withdrawal from the Paris agreement is contrary to prior executive branch views of presidential agreement-termination authority. Yesterday’s freeze of nearly all grants and federal loans, though nominally limited “to the extent permissible under applicable law,” foreshadows the much-telegraphed and almost-certainly-unconstitutional Trumpian Article II impoundment theory. Trump’s gambit to fire career civil servants rests on a conception of Article II that goes beyond the Supreme Court’s already-generous removal precedents. There are other examples of Article II overreach. And relatedly, several of Trump’s actions violate other provisions of the Constitution, such as the birthright citizenship order.

These examples are notable because one (birthright citizenship) defies an OLC opinion, another (constitutional impoundment) is contrary to another OLC opinion, a third (the Paris agreement withdrawal) reflects a view that OLC has found problematic (see pp. 8-9), and the others are in tension with or contrary to extant Supreme Court jurisprudence. And there are many other examples of EOs contrary to or in tension with governing law. It doesn’t appear as if these orders received OLC approval for form and legality. And if they did, the pattern raises questions about how OLC will function in this administration. OLC normally adheres to Supreme Court precedent, and though it sometimes reverses itself, it typically explains reversals in published opinions.

Second, Vought stated last May that his think tank, the Center for Renewing America, was “trying to build a shadow Office of Legal Counsel” to enable the president to avoid legal objections to his policies.

Third, the Trump 2.0 transition, unlike the Trump 1.0 transition, did not vet EOs with the Justice Department, but rather relied on “a team of lawyers from outside the Justice Department” in a “sign of Trump aides’ general distrust of the Justice Department,” according to the New York Times.

Fourth, at a January 29 White House press briefing, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt was asked “who advised the president on the legality of telling government agencies that they don’t have to spend money that was already appropriated by Congress?” Leavitt’s answer was revealing: “The White House Counsel’s Office believes that this is within the president’s power to do it, and therefore, he’s doing it.”

This question was nominally directed at the OMB spending freeze memo. But the question of the president’s constitutional power to order spending freezes lurks behind other executive orders as well and is a theory we know the Trump administration is interested in pushing. This is an issue that OLC normally would have opined on, especially since the issue is of such momentous constitutional significance and because OLC (in a William Rehnquist opinion) has previously ruled on the matter. Leavitt, however, made no mention of DOJ or OLC. Her disclosure that the White House Counsel, David Warrington, delivered the decisive advice suggests that his office may have supplanted the Justice Department’s legal advisory function, at least on some major presidential initiatives in the EOs.

In sum, the plethora of legal problems in the EOs, the Vought shadow OLC idea, the reliance on outside lawyers instead of DOJ during the transition, and the Leavitt statement are four pieces of evidence that OLC, and the Justice Department more generally, are being sidelined in the legal review process for at least some executive orders, and for presidential actions more generally. It is evidence that would make sense of the apparent indifference to legal compliance in so many of the Executive orders.

We should note that if OLC and DOJ are being cut out or overruled in favor of a president-centered or White House-centered legal interpretation and review process, that is the president’s prerogative under Article II, though the process would defy EO 11030 and the regulation. Such an arrangement would be an extreme change of process from past administrations and would demand explanation beyond non-compliance with EO 11030.

Radical Constitutionalism

One way to look at the administration’s assault on legal barriers is that it is seeking to establish “test cases” to litigate and win favorable Supreme Court decisions.

But the typical test case is a carefully developed, discrete challenge to statutory or judge-made law with some good faith basis. The challenge may be based on changes that have occurred over time in the law, in the background facts, or in large changes in politics, which support a claim that the law should now be modified or reversed. And it is often an incremental program—one of test cases building on test cases.

The Trump executive orders might have some of these features, but in the aggregate they seem more like pieces of a program, in the form of law defiance, for a mini-constitutional convention to “amend” Article II across a broad front.

This pattern echoes a philosophy—“radical constitutionalis[m]”—that Vought laid out in a 2022 essay. The essence of radical constitutionalism is that “[t]he Right needs to throw off the precedents and legal paradigms that have wrongly developed over the last two hundred years and to study carefully the words of the Constitution and how the Founders would have responded in modern situations to the encroachments of other branches.”

Vought strongly implied that an element of radical constitutionalism is to instill fear in the Supreme Court that the presidency is prepared to resort to outright defiance of its decisions.

Vought interpreted Madison’s famous “ambition must be made to counteract ambition” idea to mean that the branches would have “a healthy fear of each other” that would “cause[] them to pause before encroaching” on another branch. He gave as an example John Marshall’s refusal in Marbury v. Madison to order Secretary of State James Madison to deliver William Marbury’s commission “{b}ecause he was afraid Jefferson would order [Madison] not to and show the Supreme Court to be toothless.” Vought then noted that “Jefferson . . . gave us a glimpse of the posture that prevents encroaching powers.”

If this is the theory behind the executive orders—and again, we are speculating here based on the views of one hugely influential Trump advisor—then the orders are not merely setting up Supreme Court test cases. They are, rather, bombarding the Court with a wave of legal challenges about the proper scope of Article II (among many legal issues) with the aim of provoking a confrontation over the legitimacy of the existing legal order, at least with regard to Article II, and perhaps more broadly. And the administration might be planning to dare the Court to say “no” with threats of noncompliance.

The administration’s TikTok executive order can be seen as an early gambit in this direction. The Supreme Court unanimously upheld Congress’s ban on TikTok, and the ban came into effect before Trump became president. A day after the law came into effect, Trump became president and issued an Executive Order in which he instructed his Attorney General to not enforce the act for 75 days based on the flimsiest of justifications that the already-in-effect law denied him an opportunity to review it for national security concerns or negotiate a deal. More remarkably, the president ordered the Attorney General to inform the relevant private firms that “there has been no violation of the statute and that there is no liability for any conduct” in violation of the statute during the 75-day period (or after the effective date of the act and before the EO).

The TikTok EO is not a direct defiance of a Supreme Court judgment, but it is close. And it could be signaling things to come. Whether the administration would threaten defiance because it actually intended to ignore a Supreme Court judgment, or because it simply wanted to pressure the Court into favorable decisions, no one can know.

Where are Administration Lawyers?

All of which raises the question: Is Trump getting legal advice, and, if so, from whom?

It is noteworthy that while the administration has announced nominees for most top spots at the Justice Department, it has not yet nominated anyone for OLC. Former Florida Solicitor General Henry Whitaker was the acting head of OLC for at least the first few days of the administration. But it is not clear if he is still at OLC (his name was briefly on the OLC website but no longer is), or who is in charge there. Is OLC in the loop on the Trump executive orders? Is it signing off on the ones with obvious legal problems? Under what legal theories?

Similar questions arise about the role of the White House Counsel. Did Leavitt’s disclosure of the White House Counsel’s advice about the OMB freeze memorandum foreshadow a commanding role for this office and a marginalized OLC? We (and others) have written about the risks that the White House Counsel, even more than the Justice Department, may be expected to wear the “team jersey” and conform his or her legal advice to meet the president’s preferences or demands. Will this administration more directly and openly empower the White House Counsel’s Office to assume the role traditionally performed by OLC? Will the White House find a pliant OLC head to dissipate this potential conflict?

In the days, weeks, and months ahead, the White House Counsel and his staff, the Attorney General, the head of OLC and his or her team, and many other lawyers in this administration will have choices to make in meeting the president’s expectations and demands. They all understand that they have professional ethical obligations independent of whatever loyalty they owe to the president and the administration. They have also pledged a constitutional oath as well as an oath to conduct themselves “uprightly and according to the law” if they are members of the Supreme Court bar. And they have duties of loyalty to the institutions they are serving.

We have been in the legal hot seat in the White House and Justice Department, respectively. We understand the hard and often intractable choices that high-stakes governmental legal advice entails, and we do not envy the difficulties that lawyers advising this president face. It is also true that administrations sometimes legitimately test the validity of accepted legal principles in court to seek a new legal understanding. And the White House Counsel inevitably has an elevated role in the legal advisory process, often in tension with OLC, on issues the president cares about. All of this is “normal science” in the executive branch legal process.

But the theory and process of “radical constitutionalism” that Vought has floated go very far beyond these typical tensions and conundrums in the roles contemplated for senior government lawyers. If something approaching the Vought theory defines the new Trump administration’s legal process—and there are clues that it does—then no senior government lawyer with integrity should countenance or participate in it.

https://executivefunctions.substack.com/p/the-trump-executive-orders-as-radical
« Last Edit: February 08, 2025, 05:53:16 PM by Body-by-Guinness »

Crafty_Dog

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Constitutional issues regarding the extent and limits of executive branch power
« Reply #169 on: February 08, 2025, 05:06:31 AM »
BBG's post is a serious and important piece-- and one deserving of a thread where a future Search is more likley to find it.

https://firehydrantoffreedom.com/index.php?topic=2917.msg178669#msg178669
« Last Edit: February 10, 2025, 06:46:44 AM by Crafty_Dog »

Body-by-Guinness

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Why Force ‘em to Buy US Steel when They can Invest in it Instead?
« Reply #170 on: February 09, 2025, 03:33:32 PM »
Trump solve US steel production issue not by forcing Japan to purchase steel from us, but by getting them to invest in the business itself:

https://x.com/CitizenFreePres/status/1888149541792203161


Crafty_Dog

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Tulsi 52-48
« Reply #172 on: February 12, 2025, 03:58:18 PM »
Done.

Crafty_Dog

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Trump on McConnell
« Reply #173 on: February 14, 2025, 07:06:34 AM »
Tell us what you really think haha!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yyqKT35Q1Es

ccp

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Re: Trump Administration 2.0
« Reply #174 on: February 14, 2025, 07:17:57 AM »
McConnell import is kicked to the curb.

Interesting Scott Jennings on CNN last night used to be an advisor for Mitch saying how he hates when two people he likes disagree.   He says Mitch will vote with Trump 90% of the time.

And what the heck is Kaitlen Collins doing at press meetings asking hit and run and gotcha questions AND putting the clips on her hourly MAGA sabotague CNN fake news report later the same night.

Honestly I don't recall any other anchor doing both . 

BlueLight

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Re: Trump Administration 2.0
« Reply #175 on: February 14, 2025, 08:23:39 AM »
-Happy about his economic policy. I like the deregulation of crypto. Additionally, bitcoin will have significant, potentially vital national security implications in the future.

-We'll see about his international policy, depends mostly on Syria for me. If he pulls out, I want it to be done in a way that ensures that a genocide and massacre of our allies that bled for us does not take place and Hamas or ISIS are not allowed to resurface. This part is a question of honor for me. I do not want to see what occured after Afgh withdrawal with Biden happen again under trump.

-I would like very much to see the Afghan commandos we promised to bring home, brought to the US. Currently they are being hunted and killed by Taliban and are still in hiding. This is another major issue for me, as I see it as a fundamental question of honor. Biden administration dragged their legs on this and many died as result. I'd like to see Trump set an example.

-Not happy about the divisive politics and insulting other polititions on the other end of aisle. I'm a big fan of tribalism in nationalism and social groups (Marc's included). Promotes coehesion.
But in the context of politics, not a fan. Taken too far promotes social breakdown and breakdown of national identity

-Happy about government reformation. I'm not sure if it's being done right, we'll see, but overspending is certainly an issue.

Something needs to change, and regardless, it will due to current global circumstances. Whether the change will be net positive or negative is yet to be seen, but I'm open to giving him a chance.

Body-by-Guinness

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A Reagan Eyed View of Trump 2.0
« Reply #176 on: February 14, 2025, 05:51:56 PM »

Body-by-Guinness

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More on DC Housing Market
« Reply #177 on: February 16, 2025, 08:54:25 AM »

Body-by-Guinness

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FAFO Heavy Metal AI Video
« Reply #178 on: February 17, 2025, 05:33:10 AM »
It's got a great beat I can bang my head to and is sure to trigger "Progressives" and perhaps cause them to wet the bed. I give it a 17 out of 10:

https://x.com/JimFergusonUK/status/1890709294456156232

Body-by-Guinness

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Of Long Leashes and Auditions
« Reply #179 on: February 17, 2025, 06:19:17 AM »
2nd post.

Another talking point that rears its head has to do with Trump’s ego and ability to share the limelight, with narcissism being the tacit criticism. Alas, he’s not marching to the called tune, witness the splashes Bondi, Vance, Hegseth, Musk, etc. are making.

An interesting point made below: is part of his method of giving a lot of lease part of an audition process to replace him in four years?

Trump shares the spotlight
He can trust Vance, Rubio and Hegseth to speak for MAGA
FEB 17, 2025

At the annual Munich Security Conference last week, Trump wanted to blast Eurocrats with the sobering truth that the USA is no longer interested in being their unpaid security staff. So he sent Vice President JD Vance to deliver the message.

Vance shocked the Europeans to the core:

The threat that I worry the most about vis a vis Europe is not Russia, it’s not China, it’s not any other external actor. What I worry about is the threat from within. The retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values, values shared with the United States of America.

I was struck that a former European commissioner went on television recently and sounded delighted that the Romanian government had just annulled an entire election. He warned that if things don’t go to plan, the very same thing could happen in Germany too.

Now, these cavalier statements are shocking to American ears. For years we’ve been told that everything we fund and support is in the name of our shared democratic values. Everything from our Ukraine policy to digital censorship is billed as a defense of democracy. But when we see European courts cancelling elections and senior officials threatening to cancel others, we ought to ask whether we’re holding ourselves to an appropriately high standard.

Vance told it like it is as if he were Vice President Howard Cosell:

Speaking up and expressing opinions isn’t election interference. Even when people express views outside your own country, and even when those people are very influential—and trust me, I say this with all humor—if American democracy can survive ten years of Greta Thunberg’s scolding, you guys can survive a few months of Elon Musk.

Vance was not the only Trump official to enjoy a moment in the spotlight.

Pete Hegseth also laid down the law in Brussels:

A durable peace for Ukraine must include robust security guarantees to ensure that the war will not begin again. This must not be Minsk 3.0. That said, the United States does not believe that NATO membership for Ukraine is a realistic outcome of a negotiated settlement.

Instead any security guarantee must be backed by capable European and non-European troops.

If these troops are deployed as peacekeepers to Ukraine at any point, they should be deployed as part of a non-NATO mission. And they should not covered under Article 5. There also must be robust international oversight of the line of contact.

To be clear, as part of any security guarantee, there will not be U.S. troops deployed to Ukraine.

To further enable effective diplomacy and drive down energy prices that fund the Russian war machine, President Trump is unleashing American energy production and encouraging other nations to do the same. Lower energy prices coupled with more effective enforcement of energy sanctions will help bring Russia to the table.

Safeguarding European security must be an imperative for European members of NATO. As part of this Europe must provide the overwhelming share of future lethal and nonlethal aid to Ukraine.

This met with NATO feathers ruffled and neocon tut-tutting.



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The subject came up in one of Trump’s Oval Office chit chats with the press.

Reporter: Senator Roger Wicker said it was a rookie mistake for Hegseth to outline what would or would not happen as far as Ukraine’s membership in NATO.

Trump: I haven’t heard that. Roger is a very good friend of mine. Pete has been doing a great job.

Reporter: Were you aware of what Hegseth was going to say in his speech at NATO?

Trump: Generally speaking yeah. I’ll speak to Roger. I’ll speak to Pete. I’ll find out.

Hegseth is Trump’s man. Trump gave him the long leash. I like that.

I also like that former rival Rubio is getting his moment in the sun. He went to Latin America and laid down the law to Panama and others while Bukele feted Rubio in El Salvador.

LeMonde reported:

During a tour of five Central American countries, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio made sure it was known that the region was a priority to the United States. Ending his tour on Wednesday, February 5, Rubio's trip first trip abroad drew attention to Central America, presented by the Trump administration as a source of immigration and a region where China's presence harms American interests.

The first stop on this tour, in Panama on Sunday, February 2, was the most closely followed, following Trump's threats to take back the canal, claiming the neutrality treaty governing it had been violated by the presence of Chinese companies. As soon as Rubio got back on the plane, Panama announced its exit from the Chinese Belt and Road initiative, even though it had been the first Latin American country to join in 2017.

I have noticed a pattern. Trump is sharing the spotlight this time. The self-promotion is still there as after 50 years of media spotlight, this is engrained in Trump. But he also is sitting back and letting a new generation garner attention.

Sharing is caring, but Sharon isn’t Karen

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Certainly Elon Musk has enjoyed even greater celebrity than ever under President Trump. Musk is taking the heat for the mass layoffs but as you read the sob sister stories just remember anyone fired was offered an eight-month paid vacation and rejected the buyout.

The rise of these new MAGA faces is intentional.

My guess is Trump at 78 knows the sand is running out of his hourglass. He wants not only to complete the task but also a generation of warriors to carry on the MAGA Movement. Nixon was saddled with Ford. Reagan with Bush. Heck, Coolidge with Hoover. Each successor undid the master’s work.

Trump likely does not wish to repeat that so he has surrounded himself with like minded men and women who basically are auditioning for his job.

The public likes what he is doing. Axios reported to its dismay, “Every Arizona swing voter in our latest Engagious/Sago focus groups said they approve of President Trump's actions since taking office—and most also support Elon Musk's efforts to slash government.”

The story also said:

Some would like to see him do more, sooner, to rein in consumer costs. But several said they don't mind that Trump's early actions haven't primarily focused on inflation—even when that was their top issue in the election—and said they can be patient if prices don't come down for a while.
Several doubt the warnings that tariffs may translate to long-term price increases for American consumers.
Several expressed views that "waste, fraud and abuse" are so prevalent that government agencies can be slashed or eliminated without hurting services on which they depend.
As Frank Sinatra sang, “Love is lovelier the second time around/ Just as wonderful with both feet on the ground.”

Bondi, Noem and even Lee Zeldin are getting their media time. Tom Homan is a more familiar face on cable now than the Kardashians. He couldn’t get more time if he sold pillows with OxyClean.

Leave a comment

This Cabinet and Musk and Homan are better than Trump’s first Cabinet because they are in tune with the president and loyal to the MAGA movement. Well, maybe not RFK Jr. but he is coming around.

Don’t worry about Trump’s ego. He still garners attention. He became the first president to attend a Super Bowl and on Sunday, he was at the Daytona 500.

Trump will make America great again. But to keep it great will require young leadership (Vance is all of 40) to preserve it. I think that is behind Trump’s use of surrogates to spread the word.

Plus he doesn’t have to travel as much.

https://donsurber.substack.com/p/trump-shares-the-spotlight?r=1qo1e&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email&triedRedirect=true

DougMacG

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Re: FAFO Heavy Metal AI Video
« Reply #180 on: February 17, 2025, 10:10:48 AM »
It's got a great beat I can bang my head to and is sure to trigger "Progressives" and perhaps cause them to wet the bed. I give it a 17 out of 10:

https://x.com/JimFergusonUK/status/1890709294456156232

Wow. I'm not a heavy metal guy, but that is powerful.

We've wondered for years how to reach others. Not everyone wants to read Heritage or Cato or the Forum. Data and logic go so far but our opponents know how to reach out with emotion. This does that, understatement!

"I give it a 17 out of 10."  - This got me to watch.

Body-by-Guinness

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Waterloo 2.0, this Time w/ Genuine Digital Zombies!
« Reply #181 on: February 17, 2025, 01:13:12 PM »
Elements of this could go more than one place, but given it all backtracks to Trump, I’ll park it here:

☕️ WATERLOO ☙ Monday, February 17, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Deep State's Waterloo moment as DOGE dishes biggest scandal in human history; media's Napoleonic meltdown over Trump tweet; NYT op-ed signals massive win; funemployment in the Swamp; more.

JEFF CHILDERS

FEB 17, 2025

Good morning, C&C, it’s Monday! The weekend’s news did not disappoint. Prepare for more exposed history in the making. In today’s roundup: in a month of history-making news, the story that rules them all, a genie of disclosure that can’t be stuffed back in the Social Security bottle; Trump’s ninja-level troll and the media’s Napoleonic meltdown over movie quote; Democrat dreams of rescue from dictatorship by the courts ebbs away in brutal NYT birthright op-ed; and funemployment strikes the Swamp amidst enthusiastic draining.

🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍

I confess to feeling lately like I’m starting to overuse words like “historic,” “unprecedented,” “revolutionary,” and “never seen before.” I need more words. But what can I do? We live in a time when centuries of history are being minted in minutes. Regardless, and unapologetically, this next story will blow your socks off.

🔥🔥🔥

We’ve discovered the Great Democrat Zombie Army.


A full decade ago in 2015, the Social Security Administration’s Inspector General reported that 6.5 million active Social Security numbers were assigned to people aged 112 or older, despite there being only 35 such individuals known to be living worldwide. (Robert Kennedy should be happy to hear about this.) That was alarming enough, but in 2023, an expanded audit looked at SSNs aged 100 and up. This time, 18.9 million active SSNs with birthdates of 1920 or earlier lacked a date of death, meaning they are still active.

But last year (2024), PEW Research reported there are only 80,000 living Americans aged 100+, leaving a shocking discrepancy of 18.8 million mysterious perennial people still receiving social security and possibly disability as well, not to mention generous credits from phantom tax returns, and of course, blue state and local benefits.

And of course, these immortal individuals are probably also voting. Voting Democrat.

The IG’s 2023 follow-up report detailed all the Agency’s terrific progress in resolving the problems identified since the earlier 2015 report. In short, the Social Security Administration’s diligent, alert, and apolitical permanent career civil servants grabbed hold of the IG’s 2015 report with both hands and shoved it into the basement furnace.

I, for one, thank the gods of bureaucrats for all the hardworking, non-biased, non-partisan federal workers in the Social Security Administration who concluded, probably right after their 3-mimosa-lunch (held by Zoom), that it was just too hard and too expensive to stop 18.9 million fraudulent social security records by putting a presumed date of death into the date field. It’s no use.

It’s not like it might have made any difference in the 2020 election or anything.

🔥 I’m sure this will (not) shock you. Both times, 2015 and 2023, the media ignored or downplayed the story. A sane person living in pre-Millennial America might assume that the tireless watchdog media, upon learning about the vast numbers of impossibly fake Social Security accounts and the trillions of dollars of attendant waste and fraud would never give the government a moment’s peace until it was fixed.

But no.

We are not surprised. We are scarred veterans of the post-Millennial period, and we understand the media’s main job is not to expose, but to cover up government incompetence — and especially bury any news at all that might fuel legitimate concerns about election integrity.

Not to mention upholding corporate media’s timeless narrative chestnut that entitlement fraud is rare and overhyped and only a right-wing conspiracy theory. That narrative, after all, is as timeless as the millions of zombified centenarian recipients.

In 2015, apart from one-offs in some conservative media (Breitbart, Washington Times, Fox), I could only find a single AP story about the 6.5 million fraudulent Social Security records aged 112+. In 2023, after the SSA’s OIG published its report finding 19 million digitally breathing people over 100 still “alive” in the system, once again, there was mostly media silence. It should have been a five-alarm fire, but only a handful of “far-right” sites mentioned the news (Federalist, Washington Examiner). The usually reliable New York Post only briefly mentioned the OIG report, but even that was buried in a bigger article about government waste generally.

But CNN, The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the other major outlets? Crickets. My searches came up empty. It just wasn’t important enough to report.

In the latest electrifying development that will also probably not shock you, DOGE —for the last week slogging through the SSA’s septic systems of archaic paper and antique Cobol software — is beginning to report that the OIG canaries in the SSA mineshaft were, if anything, woefully underreporting the problem.

🔥 Yesterday, apparent DOGE mouthpiece Elon Musk posted a simple database count of active Social Security Numbers by age range. The dumbfounding chart was a political hydrogen bomb, and it speaks for itself:

Apparently, we’ve been operating on the honor system this whole time. We normal, non-civil-service Americans were the only ones who didn’t know. It’s just the latest reason they sneer at us and think we’re stupid and gullible. Those neanderthal conservatives will believe anything. They’re right. We’re the biggest suckers in human history.

I added up the numbers for our cherished, specially abled readers in Portland. Based on Elon’s chart, the total count of active SSNs is 398 million. That means there are +64 million more active SSNs than the entire population of the United States (334 million).

Let me say it again: sixty-four million zombies. Needless to say, it’s totally impossible, at least under our current scientific understanding of human mortality. The diligent, hardworking, apolitical employees in the federal government appear to have diligently preserved a shadow army of dead or nonexistent “Americans” on the books — zombies — with tens of millions of them potentially still receiving benefits, filing tax returns, and “voting” Democrat.

This appears to be a scandal of unfathomable, indescribable, revolutionary proportions. Since I have a very strong feeling that we will not be receiving tax refunds for our cataclysmically misspent entitlements lavished on millions of career criminals, including those inside the government, I say burn it all down.

There is no fixing this. There is no audit big enough. There is no reform package meaningful enough. It is a soul-crushing abomination. It boils the blood. It is enraging beyond explanation. Just napalm the whole Kafkaesque apparatus and start over from scratch.

This scandal will be the Deep State's Waterloo.

🔥🔥🔥

Speaking of French dictators, consider yesterday’s UK Guardian’s breathlessly misleading article headlined, “Trump suggests he’s above the law with ominous Napoleon quote.” What gave media the vapors this time was a classic Trump troll in the form of an uncharacteristically short and muted single-sentence post. To be fair, he posted it everywhere, on Truth Social, on X, and it was re-tweeted on the official White House Twitter account. It simply said:

In no way, of course, did Trump’s post suggest doing anything illegal or unconstitutional. Media had to project and to impute motives to discover Trump’s sinister hidden meaning. Which they did, of course, in spades and with great enthusiasm. See! We told you! He’s a dictator!

But Trump just appeared to be obliquely quoting the 1970 film Waterloo, directed by Sergei Bondarchuk, in which the dictatorial frenchman Napoleon said he “did not ‘usurp’ the crown.”

The quip arose during a compelling scene where Napoleon Bonaparte, played by Rod Steiger, addressed his marshals during a critical moment. Pressured to abdicate after a series of military setbacks, Napoleon confronted his marshals, who’d presented him with a paper urging his abdication. In a display of defiance and justification, he soaringly said: “I found the crown in the gutter, and I picked it up with my sword, and it was the people … who put it on my head,” he says. “He who saves a nation violates no law.”

CLIP: Waterloo (1970) - Napoleon trailer (3:38).

The media’s absurd reaction was swift and totally deranged. The New York Times’s Jamelle Bouie hysterically called Trump’s latest statement “the single most un-American and anti-constitutional statement ever uttered by an American president.” Neocon Never-Trumper Bill Kristol, a living caricature of Godwin’s Law, raced to grab the Hitler comparison, darkly warning that “We're getting into real Führerprinzip territory here.”

Once again, the media owned itself, falling headfirst into Trump’s trap. Meanwhile, the indefensible DOGE disclosures keep escalating—like yesterday’s thermonuclear Social Security nuclear apocalypse. To mix film metaphors, they’re going to need a bigger Deep State.

🔥🔥🔥

Another reason the overwrought ‘dictator’ charges keep falling flat is because Trump keeps following the law. On Saturday, no less than the New York Times ran a narrative-smashing op-ed headlined, “Trump Might Have a Case on Birthright Citizenship.” The Democrats’ first ‘win’ against Trump is already crumbling—and even the Gray Lady is sounding the retreat. Like Napoleon at Waterloo, they confidently stormed into battle, realizing too late they marched straight into a legal ambush.

On his first day in office, President Trump issued an executive order ending so-called birthright citizenship for certain children of illegal immigrants. Democrats sued, wailing that his EO violated the 14th Amendment, which provides, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.”

The key issue, intentionally provoked by the executive order, is what exactly does the Constitution mean by “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States? Federal judges in four states promptly enjoined Trump’s order. One of the judges claimed it “conflicts with the plain language of the 14th Amendment.”

But, the article advised, “Not necessarily.”

The Supreme Court has never held that children born to illegal immigrants are citizens — never. But thanks to decades of judicial hand-waving and bureaucratic indifference, citizenship has been quietly doled out with all the discretion of Social Security numbers.

The 14th Amendment’s well-known purpose was to convey citizenship to children of freed slaves. At the time it passed, Lincoln’s administration had rejected the Supreme Court’s infamous Dred Scott decision, and had already recognized free African Americans as citizens. The 14th Amendment resolved the Constitutional crisis in Lincoln’s favor.

The carefully considered article delved into the history of citizenship through the centuries. Then it noted the Supreme Court’s awareness of that storied common law history, which has long provided that only those born “in amity” receive the sovereign blessings of citizenship status:

This isn’t just some obscure legal technicality—the principle was common knowledge at the time the 14th passed. Citizenship was for people who owed allegiance to the U.S., not just anyone who happened to be born here. As our forefathers never fought for millions of imaginary Social Security recipients, the 14th Amendment wasn’t written to pass out citizenship to millions of undocumented invaders lacking loyalty to the country.

This editorial’s publication was a massive shift in the Overton Window, preparing the Times’ readers for bad news. The left’s sacred cow of birthright citizenship is finally getting serious legal scrutiny, and the fact that the New York Times is already conceding ground means they know their side’s legal foundation is much shakier than they’ve previously pretended.

🔥🔥🔥

The Swamp is going to need a bigger unemployment database. CNBC ran a story yesterday headlined, “Unemployment spikes in Washington, D.C., as Trump and Musk begin efforts to shrink the government.” The sub-headline added, “Jobless filings in Washington, D.C., surged to 1,780 for the week ending Feb. 8, a +36% increase from the prior week.” Pro tip: get out of Washington.

During the disastrous Obama-era economy, as jobs for people outside government crashed and burned, Nancy Pelosi infamously coined the term “funemployment.” The fossilized Speaker urged people collecting generous government unemployment benefits to spend time traveling, writing poetry, painting landscapes, and starting up NGO’s to teach transgender basket-weaving techniques to Namibian kindergartners.

It’s fun!

During the first two years of the pandemic, as ordinary Americans lost our jobs and small businesses by the millions, we were constantly assured by our federal betters that we were sacrificing for the common good. Meanwhile, the federal workforce metastasized, swelling like a taxpayer-funded tumor. Government workers got paid to ‘work from home’—which meant collecting full salaries, grant payments, and dead grandmothers’ Social Security checks between Netflix binges.

Maybe now it’s federal workers’ turn to sacrifice something for the common good.

Prepare for corporate media to circulate their perennial “hardest hit” sob stories, interviewing scores of bizarrely named ex-federal workers on food stamps who used to work on critically important projects like measuring the immeasurable land speed of treadmilled tortoises, mapping the astonishing diversity of prairie dog dialects, or making sure dead people kept getting their Social Security checks.

But remember: Trump gave them a chance. He offered eight month’s severance to any federal worker that wanted to take the deal. They didn’t take the deal.

There’s an old saying about making your own bed. It goes something like, if you make your own bed, you have to clean out the cheeto crumbs by yourself. Or words to that effect. They made their own beds. Don’t fall for media guilt manipulation.

Trump promised to drain the Swamp, and he meant it, this time. I’d only ask that he turn the draining machine up to 11.

https://www.coffeeandcovid.com/p/waterloo-monday-february-17-2025
« Last Edit: February 17, 2025, 01:15:09 PM by Body-by-Guinness »

Body-by-Guinness

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Brokenists v. Statusb Quoists
« Reply #182 on: February 18, 2025, 10:27:58 AM »
An apt way to look at the current moment, IMO:

The ‘Everything Is Broken’ Administration

‘The choice was between a slow canoe ride through more of the same, or a roller coaster. Americans chose the roller coaster.’

By Oliver Wiseman

02.17.25 — U.S. Politics

Are Elon Musk and the DOGE boys disrupters or vandals? Should Robert F. Kennedy Jr. be in charge of public health? Does the footage of the USAID sign being removed from a government building fill you with excitement or dread? Do Tulsi Gabbard’s criticisms of the “deep state” make her unfit for the role of director of national intelligence—or precisely the woman for the job?

A good predictor of how you answer these questions—better perhaps than whether you are a Republican or a Democrat—is whether or not you are a “brokenist.”

That term, coined by Tablet editor-in-chief Alana Newhouse a few years ago, has been bouncing around my head ever since Trump returned to power last month. In fact, I’m increasingly convinced it’s the key to understanding this administration. Allow me to explain.

In January 2021, Newhouse wrote an essay addressing what she would later describe as “the growing sense, made more glaring during the first year of the pandemic, that whole parts of America were breaking down before our eyes.” She argued that major institutions of American life—from the media to medicine—no longer worked. “Everything Is Broken,” was Newhouse’s unsparing conclusion—and the essay’s memorable headline.

Almost two years later, Newhouse wrote a follow-up, titled “Brokenism,” which translated the ideas of her first essay into a new political rubric. The most important divide in our politics, she argued, wasn’t between left and right, but between “brokenists” and “status-quoists.” Brokenists can be on the left or the right, or in the middle, but they agree that “what used to work is not working for enough people anymore.” Status-quoists, by contrast, “are invested in the established institutions of American life, even as they acknowledge that this or that problem around the margins should of course be tackled.” Bernie Sanders? Brokenist. Liz Cheney? Status-Quoist. Or—to pick further examples Newhouse doesn’t name in her piece—Joe Rogan? Brokenist. Matthew Yglesias? Status-quoist. (Presciently, Newhouse identified Marc Andreessen and Elon Musk as two tech world brokenists—two years before they would come out for Trump.)

Newhouse’s argument struck me as obviously true and important back in 2022. It explained how tech, Trump’s first term, Covid, wokeness, and so much else had combined to scramble our politics. After almost a month of Trump’s second term, “brokenism” looks like a more important idea than ever—the thread that connects so much of the revolution underway in Washington, D.C.

Does Newhouse agree? “100 percent,” she said when we spoke over the phone recently. This administration and its supporters are, she said, “a coalition of people who feel that whole parts of America’s governing bodies have decayed past the point of usability.”

J.D. Vance more or less tweeted as much last month when—in a push to secure the votes needed to confirm Gabbard as Trump’s intelligence chief and RFK Jr. as secretary of Health and Human Services—he wrote that these former Democrats “represent parts of the new coalition in our party. To say they’re unwelcome in the cabinet is to insult those new voters.”

In other words, what binds that new coalition is brokenism.

Gabbard, a military veteran and former Democratic lawmaker from Hawaii, was picked because she, like Trump, believes our intelligence agencies are broken. “For too long, faulty, inadequate, or weaponized intelligence has led to costly failures and the undermining of our national security,” she said in the opening statement of her confirmation hearing.

At his confirmation hearing, RFK Jr. took aim at a broken health system. The U.S. “has worse health than any other developed nation,” he said. The fact that he has long been pro-choice—a stance he only started to move away from after joining Trump’s team—didn’t matter. Well, it did to the editors of National Review, but the fact that their opposition didn’t make a difference only confirms the brokenism realignment. As does the fact that Chip Roy, a conservative Texas congressman and a staunch pro-lifer, enthusiastically backed RFK’s nomination. Read his explanation as to why in our pages and it’s clear that the thing he and RFK agree on—and the thing that really matters to Roy—is that America’s public health system doesn’t work and requires something more like revolution than reform. Whatever profound differences of opinion they have on other things, including abortion, are secondary.

You might think that the biggest Senate holdouts in the nomination fights over two former Democrats would be ultra-conservatives. Instead they were the self-styled moderates who are generally keen to preach the virtue of bipartisanship. According to the old left-right rules, this makes no sense. Viewed through a brokenist lens, it’s obvious. Mitch McConnell—the only Republican to vote against both Gabbard and RFK—is a quintessential status-quoist.

Time will tell if the brokenist coalition is durable. Indeed, the infighting has already begun. Take, for example, the fight between Elon Musk and Steve Bannon which flared up over legal immigration last month. (Bannon called Musk “truly evil” for supporting H-1B visas for skilled workers.) Their disagreement is broader than that, though. Bannon views Musk as a neoliberal plutocrat and threat to authentic MAGA populism—the problem, not the solution. “Bannon is a great talker, but not a great doer,” said Musk in response.

For Newhouse, what’s interesting about the Musk-Bannon debate “is that they’re both brokenists. What they’re fighting about is what to replace it with.”

“It’s part of the reason why I think the right has all this energy,” she said. “Because they’re not having fights about whether or not we should defend the old stuff. They’re having fights about what to replace the old, broken stuff with.”

For others, these fissures show the limitations of the brokenist framework. Yuval Levin is a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who has spent a lot of time thinking about why we’ve lost faith in our institutions and what to do about it.

“I think it’s not so much status-quoists and brokenists as something more like building crews and demolition crews,” he told me. “There’s work needed. The institutions are broken. I think there’s broad agreement on that. The question is, is the work that is needed demolition or construction?”

Newhouse may be a brokenist, but she’s interested in construction, not demolition. “One of the misimpressions about the piece and about me in general is that I want to burn stuff down,” she said. “I don’t want anyone to use their energy to do that, right? It’s just about where we put our resources. Which institutions are worth putting our energy into?”

Brokenism explains why, for those of us in the news business, every day feels like a week at the moment. Part of this is down to Trump’s own mode of operation: the off-the-cuff remarks, the late-night posts on Truth Social, the almost daily press conferences, the “flood the zone” approach. But the frenetic energy in Washington stems from the fact the brokenists aren’t outsiders any more. They’re in charge.

“Every day feels like a roller coaster,” explained Newhouse, “because now the people who want others to focus on what’s broken are in power, which means we all have to focus on what’s broken every day. We all have to wake up and see some new evidence of some new thing that is broken beyond what any of us could have imagined.

“There was no lever to pull in the last election for ‘change, but make it responsible and well-paced,’ ” added Newhouse. “The choice was between a slow canoe ride through more of the same, or a roller coaster. Americans chose the roller coaster.”

Under Joe Biden, Washington was run by people eager to cover up or minimize problems—including the president’s own mental decline. The new administration sees its job as being to expose those issues for all to see. Whether or not it will fix them is another story.

Levin recognizes the “weirdness” of institutions being run by people whose “basic ambition is to tear those institutions down.” And he’s skeptical that strategy will work: “To run for office and to want to be a public official is to want to be an insider, to think that there is work to be done inside the institutions that could be constructive for society. If you don’t think that, then you’re not really going to be able to play the role that our system assigns to insiders.”

Whether or not the Trump administration is capable of fixing the institutions it considers broken, its efforts to do so will lead to much tension and drama in Washington. For those of us in the news business, it’s been exhausting. And it’s only been a month. But Newhouse thinks it’s invigorating. “The brokenists say, ‘We can do better. We can make something better than this.’ Is it an exhausting challenge? It is. Is it more exhausting to sit in the misery and the stagnation of institutions that are broken? Many Americans certainly think so.”

As Newhouse put it in her essay a little over two years ago: “The ground is moving again. Everything bad comes from change, but so does everything good.”

https://www.thefp.com/p/the-everything-is-broken-administration