They've just begun to fight — screw 'em

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face of the enemy

Your Connecticut tax dollars at work:

What a difference a VP makes — and an IQ, for that matter

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OOF! That's Gonna Leave a Mark: J.D. Vance BURIES Ro Khanna in Heated Exchange About 'Racism'

Twenty-five-year-old Marko Elez had resigned from the DOGE team over his old posts, one of which saw him proclaim, 'I was racist before it was cool.' To any normal-thinking person, this was obviously a statement in defiance of the left and their cancel culture. They call EVERYONE racist. Naturally, many people responded the way Elez did, saying, in effect, 'Fine. Call me whatever you want. Your words have no power over me.'

For Democrats, however, who despise that DOGE is exposing so much corruption in Washington, they saw it as a chance to (pardon the expression) POUNCE on the young man. 

They clearly haven't gotten the memo that this doesn't work anymore. Vice President J.D. Vance addressed the issue on Twitter, noting that he might not agree with some of what Elez said, but that DOGE should bring him back.

Vance’s defense of the Elez triggered a response from a freshman congressman who thought he saw an opportunity to make his chops with the liberal Californians who put him in office; he should have resisted the temptation.

UPDATE: (Mr. Elez has been reinstated on the Musk team)

And now for a trip down Memory Road:

Ten minutes? The GOP could have run a five minute slice of this every day during the election campaign and Trump would have won by 90%

UPDATE:

DOGE takes another nibble at the leviathan, and that gives David Strom a happy — me too

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DOGE Cancels $180,000 Anthony Fauci Museum Exhibit

…. not a dime should be spent to celebrate the modern-day Mengele who terrorized Americans and people around the world and who, not coincidentally, spent our tax dollars on torturing puppies. 

Fauci was Director of the National Institutes for Allergy and Infectious Disease for nearly forty years--remaining there until he was 82 years old. 

82. From his 40s to his 80s he was one of the least known and most powerful people in the world. Until COVID, when the media made him a star and the Democrats wielded his supposed credibility to oust Trump from the White House. 

During his time there, he controlled untold billions of dollars, directed the medical research budget of the US, and funded biolabs around the world that have leaked an unknown number of diseases. 

And DOGE just killed his museum exhibit. 

Good. If only the Justice Department could prosecute his ass too, I would be happier still. 

First they came to enlist the girls, but I was not a girl, so I remained silent. Then they came for the gays, but ...

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Cishets formerly known as BSA scoutmasters celebrate the rebranding of therz organization’s rebirth and rebranding as The “neurodivergent multi-bigenderism phophoo dance club”

The organization adopted the new name, Scouting America, on its 115th anniversary, "marking a pivotal moment in the organization’s journey," according to a statement released Saturday.

The shift comes after a recent policy change in 2018, allowing girls to join the program. The organization began allowing gay youth in 2013 and ended a blanket ban on gay adult leaders in 2015. 

Looking at the timeline here, my headline is inaccurate so far as it refers to the order in which the BSA deteriorated: first, they came for the gays, in 2013; then in 2015 they brought in gay scoutmasters to minister to the needs of those gay boys (and any of their friends who were “looking for adventure of a new and different kind” — sooie!); and not until 2018 were perzons identifying as grlz and wimin brought in to replenish the scout’s mysteriously dwindling ranks and afford an opportunity for scouts and leaders of all genderish persuasions to explore different avenues of amusement. Regardless of who brought up the rear, however, the result was the same: no more Boy Scouts; it’s surprising they lasted as long as they did.

Forwarded by a good friend, who describes it as "The best article that sums up the past 2 weeks". I agree.

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Rocket Man storms the Winter palace

I’m less optimistic than the article’s author about the permanency of this revolution, but we’ve at least delayed to collapse of the country, and who knows? Maybe Tucker’s right; I certainly hope so.

10 Days That Shook the World

By Jeffrey Tucker

In 1917, American journalist Jack Reed, a naive but talented communist ideologue with a blue-blood education, was in Russia to watch and cheer on a revolution. He was there in October when the provisional government of Alexander Kerensky held power—Czar Nicholas II had been overthrown—but refused to pull the nation out of the murderous Great War or otherwise reform.

 The government was thus overthrown again, this time by the Bolsheviks who ruled for 70 years thereafter. Reed chronicled the moment in his famous book “Ten Days that Shook the World.” It set forth the narrative of these days for a century. It was a major reason why that generation of literate Americans, lacking access to other information sources, considered Vladimir Lenin to be a hero. Reed, by the way, later died and was buried in the Kremlin.

That book and the events it valorized has now been superseded by another 10 days that have shaken the world. Donald Trump took the oath of office to become U.S. President on Jan. 20, 2025, following a sweeping and decisive victory that the entire establishment fought ferociously.

 I’m typing this 10 days later. It is clear to me and many others that nothing will ever be the same, not in the United States and not anywhere in the world that is watching the exciting events unfold. It’s nothing like we’ve ever seen, and far beyond anything we had expected or even been promised.

Whereas Reed’s Ten Days were about the building of the Leviathan state, our own 10 days is about tearing it down and restoring freedom. Already what has been uncovered and stopped is for the ages, to the point that as I write the United States has plugged scandalous spending leakage at a rate of $4 billion per day, thanks to the work of Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency.

That appears just to be the beginning. Agencies and funding sources are being shut down by the day and hour. The whole spending machine was shut down for a few days before a federal judge intervened. Even that did not stop the push to shut down the spigots: it took a second judge to intervene and finally restart it all. Even then, it was just the beginning.

What is popularly known as the “deep state” has never faced such disruption.

Hardly a minute goes by when we do not get news of various outrages operating at all agencies of government, spending that gives new meaning to the word decadence. It’s all been happening for many years, even decades, even as the American middle class has been hollowed out, real incomes have declined, and economic opportunities for average people have thinned out to create culture-wide despair and ill-health. 

The excitement began minutes after inauguration when the team of Elon Musk, tasked by Trump to figure out what is going on with this empire of lies, unfurled a plan that had long been in the works but never announced. They installed sofa beds on the 5th floor of the Office of Personnel Management and tossed out the chief of staff. The plan was to work 24/7 to get the job done, never leaving the offices. Yes, in Godfather parlance, they literally “went to the mattresses.”

 They gained access to the computer system and sent a memo to 2.3 million federal government employees. It invited all of them to resign immediately and get 8 months of severance. They only needed to hit reply and type “resign.” The expectation going into this was that 10 percent would flee but it could be more. We are still waiting for the numbers.

All the while, the Trump administration was issuing executive orders, more than 300 in these magical 10 days. They froze regulations. They froze spending. They issued a universal fatwa against all DEI policies and abolished “affirmative action”—all while heralding the single principle of non-discrimination. They proclaimed that no government agency may ever again tell private media and social media accounts how to operate, either directly or indirectly through third-party cutouts. They banned the absurdities of the transgender movement and made adolescent mutilation illegal.

….

Following the takeover of the Office of Personnel Management, the truly great challenge was to get to the source of the largess, the spigot spilling so much money that it was creating $1 trillion in debt every 100 days. This has gotten worse decade after decade. It is the determination of DOGE to get to the bottom of it.

The team—which converted itself quickly into an official government office to evade that obvious criticism—headed to the U.S. Treasury and announced an audit of the entire government. In order to conduct that, they would need the logins to the system. The auditors had already figured out that the whole government was operating on autopay, with billions flowing to enemy regimes and rackets of all sorts. Shutting that down had to be priority number one.

 What they found was an acting head of the U.S. Treasury named David A. Lebryk, who turns out to be the highest-ranking person in the civil service. Lebryk had been promoted to that position on January 20, but his former boss was the deputy head of Treasury, a Nigerian émigré named Wally Adeyemo, who had at one time been head of the Obama Foundation. His resignation put Lebryk in the driver’s seat of the world’s biggest outgoing payroll system.

….

 Lebryk absolutely refused to turn over the passwords. After what was said to be a shouting match, he resigned on the spot. Then Elon’s crew took control of the passwords to the system that was sending out $6 trillion on autopay.

This action generated panicked headlines in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal that the Trump administration has gotten hold of the control center of government spending, strongly suggesting that nothing like this has ever happened. For reasons that are unclear, regime media seemed shocked and alarmed that the Trump administration had broken into the sanctum sanctorum. 

When regular people think about this, they start asking serious questions. Why is it not a normal thing for the new administration to be in control of the spending systems? Why is this such a shocking thing to have happened? Isn’t auditing the books just what any new president would do?

Most likely, it is shocking simply because it has never happened. For all the world, this looks to be a situation in which we are witnessing the very first actual transition of power in our lifetimes.

….

 No one can say for sure how this story ends but we are getting an intuition. The Trump administration, barring some unforeseen disaster, is well positioned to go down in history as the regime that saved the country from secret and systematic pillaging that has been going on without check for probably all living memory. …. 

Jeffrey A. Tucker is the founder and president of the Brownstone Institute and the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press, as well as 10 books in five languages, most recently “Liberty or Lockdown.” He is also the editor of “The Best of Ludwig von Mises.” He writes a daily column on economics for The Epoch Times and speaks widely on the topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.

"It's pennies on the dollar" — Senator Coons proves the point of the previous post; the rulers are contemptuous of the people who were foolish enough to put them in a position of authority.

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From another time and another country, but USAID was there. How’d this one work out?

Scum; pure scum.

Dem Sen. Chris Coons Explains Why Funding Iraqi Sesame Street Is Vital for U.S. Nat'l Security

The "conspiracy theories" almost always turn out to be true and then the Dems end up at the next phase of the operation:

Assuming arguendo that Sesame Street actually teaches values useful in a Middle Eastern culture (or our own), why should a U.S. citizen’s money be confiscated and shipped overseas for the moral education of an Iraqi? Asking for a friend.

$8 Million to a Sri Lankan journalist group to learn to avoid using “binary-gendering language”

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(X/IGrok can’t spell, or learn that DOGs HAve only one head , desPite repeated requests, but you get the gist of the quote from 2013)

Somewhere in this country, there’s a small town that could use a grant of $8 million to help rebuild its school, or library, or upgrade its sewer and water system. That town is not in Sri Lanka.

I heard a Democrat congressman on the radio this morning admitting that yes, there does seem to have been a bit of unnecessary spending going on, “But he [Musk] should prepare a report, and present it to Congress so that we can study it, discuss it, and only then take action.” He really meant “and then bury it”, of course, just as Washington has been doing with such studies for at least the past 60 years.

To a Congressman, $4 million dollars sent to Kazakhstan “to combat disinformation”, or $1.2 million to fund a Peruvian tranvestite dance group may seem a piddling, insignificant sum, not even worth noticing, but to a taxpayer who has worked all year and sent in, say, $25,000 of his earnings to the IRS this month, thus depriving his family of that money, it’s a spit in the face, a stick up the rear end. And yet the screams of outrage from the trough-suckers are focused solely on Musk and his boss’s rough tactics; nothing is said about the waste of money itself, no mention is made of what the government has been doing to the free citizens who voluntarily surrendered a part of their freedom to the care of their elected representatives. Congress has so grossly abused that trust that the people voted in a firebrand, a man who promised to clean the stables and flush out the manure, as well as the people who have deposited it.

No wonder the most equal of the pigs are trembling in fear and outrage. Senator Kennedy isn’t buying it, and neither is the public.

WATCH: Sen. Kennedy Takes On USAID’s Wasteful Spending, And It's Awesome

The Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE) recent scrutiny of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has sent Democrats into a panic, exposing their favorite taxpayer-funded slush fund for radical causes. The revelations have struck a nerve, and they’re scrambling to contain the fallout. Meanwhile, Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) delivered a devastating takedown of the Democratic Party for its shameless defense of USAID, making it clear just how deep their priorities lie—and it’s not with the American taxpayer.

And it would be a shame if you didn’t see it.

"To my friends who are upset, I would say with respect, call somebody who cares. You better get used to this. It’s USAID today, it’s going to be the Department of Education tomorrow," Kennedy said on Fox News earlier this week.

And he has continued to call out the waste that has been funded through USAID.

“This has been going on for a week,” Kennedy explained. “People have been screaming like they're part of a prison riot. ‘Oh, my God, look at what Musk is doing. He's looking at the spending.’ And I've listened to people talk about the process and debate whether it's constitutional and discuss how many lawyers can dance on the head of a pen. But you know what? I haven't heard one single person who's upset with President Trump or Mr. Musk, talk about what he's found.”

So Kennedy went on to explain what has been found.

“Okay, listen up,” he began. “Now, Mr. Musk started with the USAID that handles a lot of foreign aid for America—American people—very generous. But I tell you what Mr. Musk discovered. I found it fascinating."

He discovered that the American taxpayers are giving money to Afghanistan. He found that we are giving money to Yemen. He found that we are giving money to Syria. I didn't know that some of our foreign aid is going to Yemen, Afghanistan, Syria. He found that the USAID has 10,000 people, 10,000 people—employees—and every year they give away $40 billion. He. He found that the USAID gave money to support electric vehicles in Vietnam. Our money, taxpayer money. He found that USAID gave money to a transgender clinic in India. I didn't know that. I bet you the American people didn't know that. He found that USAID gave $1.5 million to a Serbian LGBTQ group called Grupa Izadji.

He went on to point out how DOGE has uncovered $164 million in taxpayer funds funneled to radical organizations worldwide. “We’re not talking Cub Scout troops here,” Kennedy said, highlighting the shocking fact that $122 million went to groups aligned with foreign terrorist organizations. He specifically called out USAID for giving “millions of dollars to, quote, organizations in Gaza controlled by Hamas,” demanding answers: “Why? Why? Why aren't my colleagues talking about that? Can anyone answer that? Recipients of the money they found have, quote, called for their lands to be cleansed from the impurity of Jews. That's who we're giving foreign aid to?"

Kennedy further exposed egregious spending, including $2 million for sex changes in Guatemala, $20 million for a “new Sesame Street show in Iraq,” and $7.9 million to teach Sri Lankan journalists to “avoid binary gendered language.” Kennedy didn’t hold back, asking bluntly, “Do you think most taxpayers would support that?” His takedown laid bare USAID’s disturbing misuse of public funds, leaving Democrats scrambling to defend the indefensible.

“I could go all night, and many of my colleagues are upset,” Kennedy said. “They're really mad at Mr. Musk. Hell, I think we ought to give him a medal.”

Good Point: "I never saw stories like this after Biden canceled the Keystone Pipeline, did you?"

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Scientific (sic) American:

U.S. climate policy hung a U-turn yesterday, with President Biden using his Inauguration Day to launch a domestic and international response to climate change that is diametrically opposed to that of his predecessor.

The new administration marked the day by rejoining the Paris climate agreement, revoking the Keystone XL oil pipeline’s federal permit and pledging to “review” a laundry list of Trump administration regulatory actions aimed at propping up high-emitting industries.

Politico’s got the same horrified take as the Daily Mail; only its subscribers will care, and they’re not long for the magazine’s reader base once the taxpayers stop funding their subscriptions.