The Goat Pen

Trumps economic advisors may not be the brightest, but the hilarious thing is they clearly won’t be as insidious and diabolical as the Dems and establishment Repubs. Even if this thing backfires badly at least he’s not trying to fast track everything to the billionaires, bankers and hedge funds like Biden, Obama, Pelosi, and McConnell.

Shrimp is the fruit of the great salt lake

aTm wrote: ↑Tue Feb 04, 2025 10:43 pm Shrimp is the fruit of the great salt lake

I doubt they have many folks like Bubba there though.

Trump is going to face some backlash over this gaza bullshit he just started. Pledges to keep us out of wars and then says were going to take responsibility for terrorist ground zero. If he believes in fairness to Palestinians, which I'm sure he doesn't, the Jews would condemn him anyways.


also, lost in all the bluster of Trump is this, which is kind of a big deal in 2A circles

Shall not be infringed

where are all the anti-tariffs posts at today?

Dude, we're on a 30 second news cycle now...

Congress has to delegate some level of authority to make particular expenditures in service of congressional appropriations. Congress can't sit around all day deciding what brand of hammers to use on construction projects, what kind of coffee to put in the break room, and where every single grant dollar is going to go. The people to whom that authority is delegated shouldn't be second-guessed by any random American citizen who thinks some bucket of money should have been spent differently. Because you can't get 10 people to agree on how every dollar in the federal government is spent, much less the whole budget.

That's why this sort of line-item exploration of every single grant dollar ever sent out is just such a spectacular waste of time - and such an obvious bad-faith exercise from Musk and the Trump admin, who have no desire to actually reduce fraud and waste but instead are looking for any pretext they can find to unconstitutionally arrogate to themselves the sole power to make decisions on expenditures.

So USAID was funding media like Politico? And by “funding”, apparently that means so much that when the faucet is suddenly shut off Politico cant even make payroll????

There's a "protest" at the state Capitol today, evidently it consists of people marching around the perimeter with anti-Trump/Musk/DOGE sign, Mexican flags and other signs of various complaints. At some point somebody started up a call and response chant: "Tell me what democracy looks like!" "This is what democracy looks like!" Yeah, I'd say democracy is fucked. Well, it was fun while it lasted...

I heard a left-leaning commentator say this several years ago, can't remember his name but it obviously caught my attention to such a degree that I typed it out verbatim at the time and saved it:

Street clashes do not distress the ruling elites. These clashes divide the underclass. They divert activists from threatening the actual structures of power. They give the corporate state the ammunition to impose harsher mechanisms of control and expand the powers of internal security.

When ANTIFA assumes the right to curtail free speech it becomes a weapon in the hands of its enemies to take that freedom away from everyone, esp. the anti-capitalists. The focus on street violence diverts activists from the far less glamorous task of building relationships and alternative institutions and community organizing that alone will make effective resistance possible.

We will defeat the corporate state only when we take back and empower our communities. As long as acts of resistance are forms of personal catharsis, the corporate state is secure. Indeed, the corporate state welcomes this violence, because violence is a language it can speak, with a proficiency and ruthlessness that none of these groups can match.

aTm wrote: ↑Wed Feb 05, 2025 3:03 pm So USAID was funding media like Politico? And by “funding”, apparently that means so much that when the faucet is suddenly shut off Politico cant even make payroll????

its insane they couldn't meet payroll once USAID was locked down.

All these Democrats ranting and raving about all the good USAID does and how THEY control the taxpayer money are just corrupt assholes.

I'm sure Republicans are in on it too but at least they understand the vibe in America right now and keeping their mouth shut. Democrats polling at a 31% favorability and they are talking about a reckoning coming.

Even worse for USAID, if the CIA wanted to do something they couldn't get permission for, they'd just go thru USAID because it didn't require the same oversite they had. Its some Jason Bourne shit going on

but yea, I can see why people are against Musk and his band of austitic prodigies going thru this with a fine tooth comb and filtering out all the corruption, I mean when you have Democrats saying that we didn't elect Musk and THEY control the taxpayer money, its a powerful argument for being progressive. You can see why it's working out so well for them.

Heh

if this is true, god damn, this is great.



start with that New Jersey politician that said he was hiding an illegal in garage like Anne Frank

Can't wait for Musk and DOGE to march down to the Pentagon, throw out some generals and stop all DoD payments after uncovering a cache of $400 hammers. In 2023, USAID managed $40 billion in appropriations, just think what Musk will uncover when he gets around to ferreting out wasteful DoD spending, which "manages" 25 times the appropriations of USAID. DoD "wastes" USAID's entire budget before the end of the first fiscal quarter, hell, probably before the end of the first month of their fiscal year...

"but yea, I can see why people are against Musk and his band of austitic prodigies going thru this with a fine tooth comb and filtering out all the corruption"

Irony on a couple of levels...

he left out Trump did it dirt cheap

hedge wrote: ↑Wed Feb 05, 2025 4:15 pm Can't wait for Musk and DOGE to march down to the Pentagon, throw out some generals and stop all DoD payments after uncovering a cache of $400 hammers. In 2023, USAID managed $40 billion in appropriations, just think what Musk will uncover when he gets around to ferreting out wasteful DoD spending, which "manages" 25 times the appropriations of USAID. DoD "wastes" USAID's entire budget before the end of the first fiscal quarter, hell, probably before the end of the first month of their fiscal year...

Large Scale Social Deception

"he left out Trump did it dirt cheap"

A

"Large Scale Social Deception"

Is this a new thing, like the Great Awakening or the Great Replacement (or whatever they're called)?