These are the people the Bushes and our G&T Republicans want to return to power

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And it won’t stop at Musk — see last entry, below — and that’s just fine with these nominal Republicans: every trace of Trump and the peasant rebellion must be erased

Politico. One Week Ago

Capitol agenda: Dem gavels are coming for Elon Musk

Democrats have long eyed investigating the world’s richest man and the GOP’s top donor. They may get their chance if they win back congressional power in November.

Calen Razor

10/20/2026, 4:55am ET

Elon Musk is facing a gauntlet of Democratic oversight.

Democrats have long eyed investigating the world’s richest man and the GOP’s top donor. They may get their chance if they win back congressional power in November, and senior members are mulling how a range of panels could target Musk and a huge swath of his businesses.

Their list of potential probes is growing.

Some members are eager to dig into Musk’s possible role last week in throttling crucial internet access to the Ukrainian military as President Donald Trump seeks to pressure the country into cutting a peace deal with Russia.

“What happens when one guy gets a giant contract from the government and then uses it to do something that shuts down communication in a war that has been extremely important to the United States to support Ukraine?” Rep. Pramila Jayapal said in an interview.

The incident is one of a glut of alleged conflicts of interests members cited as ripe for oversight, as Musk’s companies like SpaceX and Tesla rake in multibillion dollar federal contracts and subsidies.

“The sheer number of conflicts of interest are astounding,” top Space, Science and Technology Democrat Rep. Zoe Lofgren said.

Spokespeople for Musk did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Members of House Oversight and other panels also want to examine Musk’s role in eliminating over 250,000 federal jobs during his time at DOGE, withholding congressionally appropriated money and accessing sensitive government data.

“Congress must demand a full accounting of the damage Mr. Musk and DOGE caused, and we will not let anyone obstruct our oversight,” House Foreign Affairs ranking member Rep. Greg Meeks said in a statement Monday, referring to the so-called Department of Government Efficiency Musk headed last year.

Meeks named Musk’s part in “the cruel dismantling of USAID” as a prime target for his panel next year.

Some Democrats are not waiting for gavels: House Homeland Security Democrats demanded last month Musk testify under oath about a watchdog report claiming DOGE overstated its savings. And Ways and Means Democrats called for an investigation into the group’s alleged data theft from Social Security records.

But even members on panels with less obvious ties to the tech mogul are eyeing targets. Rep. Maxine Dexter, who sits on Natural Resources and Veterans Affairs, said she sees Musk among “the well-connected billionaire, trillionaires who have seen government contracts as a way to subsidize their own company’s research, development, and bottom line.”

“We need to shut that down,” she said.

A la lanterne!

continued. …. “If these corporations think that the Democrats, when they come back in power, are going to play by the old rules…they’ve got another thing coming." “There will be an accountability agenda." “This is not going to be an instance of forgive and forget."

Communism dodges a bullet, for now, and so has Bolsonaro

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Well, with the Cuban communist government on the way out*, and the US at least an election away from its own version, someone has to keep Marxism alive in the western hemisphere, and so the Left will just keep Brazil going for the interim.

HotAir’s Beege Welborn has today’s developments on the Brazilian “election”; the background material below hers is from a draft I was preparing yesterdy and hate to see my efforts go to waste.

Brazil Bug Out: Bolsonaro Bolts for the Border

Things are moving rapidly in the aftermath of the contested Brazilian election, and one of them appears to be the candidate who wound up on the short end of the Lula-engineered polling malarkey - Flávio Bolsonaro.

Bolsonaro had been leading in most of the polls after pulling off a surprise win in the first round of the presidential voting, only missing the majority to take the whole thing by the merest fraction. That's what threw the race into a run-off with the incumbent Brazilian president, Lula Da Silva.

The other candidates in the first round had also been right-of-center to Lula's hard left. Everyone expected, especially after they all endorsed Bolsonaro, that most of their voters would still swing to the right.

That's initially how the very close election last Sunday seemed to be heading, until a literal last-second appeal from Lula to extend voting for two additional hours was approved. This was done not by the Superior Electoral Court, which constitutionally has control over all election functions in the country, but by Lula's former personal lawyer, now a Brazilian Supreme Court justice. He sent out the order for the polls to remain open. 

It was timed so badly, perhaps purposefully so, that many of the districts had already closed at the prescribed times, sealed their ballot boxes, and turned off the machines. Those cannot be restarted. Curiously, many Lula strongholds didn't miss a beat and kept votes rolling in. 

As the votes were counted, it was clear that a sea change in the election's direction had taken place precisely when the order came down. The closed polling stations effectively disenfranchised Bolsonaro voters.

…. In his victory speech, Lula laid the groundwork for taking control of social media platforms to roars from the crowd, and his Supreme Court toadie, the creepster who channels an 18th-century vampire, Alexandre de Moraes, gave the high court blessing to a call to confiscate Lula's opponent's passport.

When Flávio Bolsonaro walked out of his seriously ill and under house arrest father's home yesterday, regime thugs were waiting in the street outside to demand he surrender his passport.

*Related:

Cuba's Government Has Collapsed and Cubans Know Who to Blame

The Atlantic published a story today which says the Cuban government has all but collapsed. Officially it still exists, but in most of the country, and even in Havana, there are few signs of its presence.

The Cuban regime has stifled any viable domestic opposition. But the withering of the state—a process that has been under way for decades—has accelerated, and is shocking to see up close. The ration cards that used to guarantee basic foodstuffs for every Cuban had been blank for weeks when I visited in August. Police and soldiers were once ubiquitous throughout the country, but I saw hardly any...

The government still purports—on faded billboards, in party speeches—to meet all of the material and spiritual needs of its citizens, but it is now bankrupt in every sense. Almost no one believes in the system anymore, and many, especially outside Havana, behave as if the government simply does not exist.

The only thing that Cuba's government seems equipped to do at this point is take the blame. Even regular people the author encountered have had enough of communism.

Not long ago, the country bristled with informants working for the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution. But when I asked people about the CDR, some laughed, and few seemed worried about being overheard. One evening on a beach in Baracoa, a man in his 30s asked me what I thought about Communism. He was lying in a hammock talking with four other men, drinking cheap sugarcane rum from a plastic bottle; they had been complaining about the ever higher prices of rice, beans, and other basic foods. I told him I thought Communism was a lousy way to run a country.

He looked squarely at me and said, “I shit on Fidel Castro’s mother.” The other men laughed. He uttered a few more obscenities. Then, suddenly, all of the humor drained from the man’s face. His voice went taut with anger, and tears welled up in his eyes.

“Cuba is frozen in time!” he shouted. “There’s no hope. It’s a sad thing to be born a Cuban. That’s what I think, and I don’t care; they can send me to prison if they want.” The other men had gone silent.

Surprisingly, no one is blaming President Trump, not even when prompted to do so.

During nine days of travel around the island, I did not meet a single person who blamed Donald Trump or the United States for their situation...

“I don’t see any change since January,” a retired engineer named Guillermo Almeida told me. “That oil from Venezuela wasn’t reaching the people anyway.”

In Havana he visited a nursing home full of old men who'd once had roles in Cuba's government. One man, age 65, had been a big supporter of the revolution and even had a tattoo of Che Guevara on his arm. But his opinion of communism had changed.

I asked him what should be done to make things better. Cuba needed to be bombed, he told me. Specifically, Raúl Castro, Fidel’s brother and successor, should be bombed. And Raúl’s daughter Mariela. And the prime minister, Manuel Marrero Cruz.

All that's left now is for something to replace the failed government of Cuba. Last Friday, Secretary of State Rubio encouraged Cubans to partner with the CIA.

It survived two seperate foreclosures, but it's now been fixed up and is ready to go again

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18 Dwight Lane hit the market today at $4.5 million. Previous owners have not done well here: Foreclosed on by a lender in 2016, it was sold by the bank to new owners in 2017 for $1,359,750, and they, in turn, lost it in their own foreclosure in 2019. These current owners paid that bank $1.299 million in 2020, and, as noted, have fixed it up.

It needed it: the place was wreck when I toured it during its first foreclosure, and it only deteriorated further during its second go-round. Looks better now, if you like this kind of style and layout. Very nice grounds.

Say Goodbye To All That

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Microsoft announces buyouts for 60K employees — quarter of workforce — as part of AI transformation

Microsoft is offering voluntary buyouts to 60,000 employees — over a quarter of its workforce — as the software giant works to cut costs and revamp its staff for the AI era.

Employees in the US, Canada, the UK, and India on Monday received a memo saying the voluntary exit offers “are a few of the ways we’re trying to meet different business needs while continuing to create opportunities for our own people to grow and contribute.”

Microsoft had about 223,000 employees at the time the memo went out.

The large corporations don’t need them and their participation diplomas are useless because they deliberately cheated their way through college and learned nothing, so what else have these kids to do except screw around?

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: ‘Comprehensive kink guides,’ ‘dildo-making contest’ part of University of Southern California’s annual Sex Week.

These learing opportunities are available at all our finest universities, like Harvard, whose own kink fest is coming in two weeks.

Hell, even the traditional dumping ground for the untalented and unwanted, government, seems to be in jeopardy

Dutch government to cut 16 percent of workforce as part of AI efficiency push.

No job is secure from the advent of artificial intelligence’s rapid growth. In a lengthy post detailing how the Dutch government plans to improve efficiency, it announced that it would get rid of 25,000 full time jobs over the span of a few years as part of cost-cutting measures. As part of that effort, the government is also planning to lean on AI to contribute to productivity.

According to the Dutch government, the goal is to cut back 900 million euros, or around $1 billion, in costs by 2027, with that estimate rising to 3.5 billion euros, or approximately $3.9 billion, by 2035. The post detailed that not all government agencies will be affected, with police and defense being excluded.

It’s unclear how the government plans to deploy AI to reduce costs, but the post read that the Dutch cabinet will “come up with goals and savings plans for deploying AI to work more productively,” in the first quarter of 2027. The country’s state secretary, Eric van der Burg wrote in a letter to the Dutch parliament that this overall effort was part of a push to make the government “simpler, smart and smaller.”

DOGE helped shrink the federal workforce to its lowest level in 60 years, but there’s always room for AI-enhanced improvement.

Old Greenwich, sale, NoVi (North of Village?)

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18 Shady Brook Lane, listed at $3.450 million, has “sold direct” to Park Slope buyers for $3.5 million. Not quite sure how that works; sometimes, the listing owners have a family friend or relative who’s previously expressed interest in the property and their names are excluded from the listing’s requirement that a commission be paid on any completed sale.

And styrofoam coffee cups are better than paper leakers*

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moral: don’t leave environmental policies to 7-year old’s school projects or paste-eating “Good intentions” eco-warriors.

A South Korean government-commissioned study has determined that paper straws are actually worse for the environment than plastic straws.

Researchers measured the full life cycle impact of four types of straws: plastic straws, paper, biodegradable, and bio-based polyethylene.

From The Korea Herald:

Conventional plastic straws had the smallest impact in 10 of the 16 categories, including climate change, acidification, particulate matter, and human toxicity.

Bio-PE straws had the largest impact in 10 categories, including ozone depletion, acidification, and smog.

Paper straws had the largest impact in three categories, while biodegradable plastic straws did so in two.

South Korea has some skin in the game here. They restricted plastic straws at cafes and restaurants in 2022. A survey, of course, found that almost 90% of Koreans prefer regular old plastic straws.

And they’re environmentally correct in doing so.

Compared with conventional plastic straws, paper straws also had 2.04 times the acidification impact.

Bio-PE straws were even worse, with 16.18 times the human carcinogenic impact and 5.9 times the acidification impact.

Biodegradable plastic straws had 3.34 times the carcinogenic impact and 1.98 times the acidification impact.

*I have a lengthy, lengthy ChatGTP analysis of the environmental impact of styrofoam vs paper cups, suitable for framing and available on request, but it’s far too long to burden readers of this blog (especially our Irish ones), so here’s just the concluding summary:

Foam tends to perform better on resource efficiency; paper tends to perform better on environmental persistence and litter. The importance assigned to those different impacts determines the winner.

One final point: A particularly revealing study is A Critical Comparison of Ten Disposable Cup LCAs (2013). Rather than advocating for either material, its authors examined why different scientific studies reached different conclusions.

That is the sort of work I would give more weight to than the claims of either the plastics industry or the anti-plastics movement.

And if I were evaluating a proposed ban on foam coffee cups, I'd insist that its supporters distinguish between reducing plastic litter, which is a defensible environmental objective, and reducing energy consumption or greenhouse gas emissions, which the evidence does not consistently support. Those are different policy goals, and conflating them makes for poor public policy.

This is now, that was then; I prefer then

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october 17, 2026

I could swear that I've seen this house before – oh! that's right: 33 days ago

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3A W End Court, Old Greenwich, listed June 10th $1.595 million, went to “highest and best” immediately, and closed September 23rd, 2006 at $2.135 million. That lucky bidder has put it back on the market today for the same price, $2.135.

Now you see it, now you do, I assume there’s a story here; I hope it’s not an unhappy one.