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Ruth King

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5 Trillion Reasons Why DOGE Should Have Access To Treasury’s Payment System

By on February 13th, 2025

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/02/13/5-trillion-reasons-why-doge-should-have-access-to-treasurys-payment-system/

In the brief time when Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency team had access to the Treasury Department’s payment system, they discovered that the government’s bookkeeping is so sloppy they can’t say where checks are going or why. That the government sends money to people on “do not pay” lists. And that some $100 billion worth of entitlement money goes to people with no Social Security number or temporary ID.

“This is utterly insane and must be addressed immediately,” Musk posted on X after a federal judge blocked his access to the system.

Musk is right about this being insane. But just how insane isn’t obvious – until you realize that each year the federal government writes almost $5 trillion worth of checks for individuals. (It’s expected to be $4.8 trillion this fiscal year, and is on track to top $5.7 trillion by 2029.)

Today, more than two-thirds of all the money spent by the federal government are for what the government labels as “direct payments for individuals,” which it defines as “spending programs designed to transfer income (in cash or in kind) to individuals or families.”

This isn’t money to buy weapons, or build roads and bridges, or maintain national parks. It doesn’t pay salaries for government workers or soldiers, or fund Congress. It doesn’t fund NASA, or get shipped abroad as international aid. It doesn’t go toward securing the border. This is cash, taken out of Peter’s pocket and handed over to Paul.

Yes, it includes things such as food stamps and housing subsidies, but the vast bulk of it is made up of middle-class entitlements paid for by middle-class taxpayers (minus the federal government’s cut).

Up until 1945, these “direct payments” accounted for a small fraction of federal spending. But they then steadily rose as FDR’s New Deal programs started kicking in. They got another huge boost from Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, and by 1972 ate up 40% of all federal spending, which was roughly where they stayed until Bill Clinton pushed it up to the 60% range. By the end of Barack Obama’s second term, as Obamacare was taking hold, payments for individuals topped 70% of all federal spending. They reached an all-time high of 72.2% of all federal spending in 2022 under Joe Biden.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Resettling Gaza Is it the right thing to do and can it work? Yes it can. by Daniel Greenfield

By on February 13th, 2025

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21388/resettling-gaza

Many, if not most, “peace plans” propose the further resettlement of hundreds of thousands of Jews living in Judea and Samaria to make way for a “Palestinian” state. Even as they object to resettling Gazan Muslims in Arab countries, they refer to Jews living in the “West Bank” as settlers, refer to their communities as “settlements,” and propose that they be resettled elsewhere.

The same people who insist that it’s morally wrong and impractical to resettle 2 million Muslims out of Gaza also argue that it’s morally right and practical to resettle nearly half a million Jews….

Despite being told it was impossible, Israelis evacuated hundreds of thousands of Gazans to make way for military operations. During the beginning of the war, around one million Gazans left the north for the south of the Gaza Strip, and the UN would later claim that as many as 1.5 million Muslim settlers in Gaza had been displaced.

The resettlement of large numbers of “Palestinians” has happened before in the Middle East. While the resettlement of Gaza would take place on a larger scale, it would not be that much larger than the resettlements during the war or in the aftermath of the Gulf War.

The objections to it [resettlement], both moral and practical, are groundless. Resettlement is feasible and moral. If the Kuwaitis and the Jordanians could resettle the “Palestinians” out of their countries on far less grounds than the atrocities of Oct 7, the Israelis certainly have the right to do it.

The PLO and Hamas used terrorism at every turn to press for more Israeli concessions while giving nothing in return. Their leaders have said again and again that they intend to destroy Israel.

After Oct 7, everyone is finally taking them at their word.

After President Donald Trump proposed resettling the Arab Muslim settlers currently living in Gaza, there was an outbreak of furious objections from politicians, activists and media outlets.

The objections could be roughly divided into the moral and the practical. The “moral” objection was that it is “wrong” to resettle the population currently occupying Gaza, and the “practical” objection was that it would be impossible to accomplish. Both objections do not hold up.

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Mythologies About Musk Musk’s role in DOGE is misunderstood: he’s an appointed auditor with legal authority to find waste, not cut programs, and foreign aid isn’t ending, though USAID’s inefficiencies may be restructured. By Victor Davis Hanson

By on February 13th, 2025

https://amgreatness.com/2025/02/13/mythologies-about-musk/

Here are some of the untruths told about Elon Musk and DOGE.

“Musk has no right to cut USAID.” 

Elon Musk and his team are not cutting any federal programs.

They are auditors. They were given legal authority under a presidential executive order creating the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

Its mandate is to identify waste, abuse, fraud, and irrelevance in the federal budget at a time when the U.S. is $37 trillion in debt.

The agency will expire on July 4, 2026.

Ultimately, Trump can propose program cuts, but Congress holds the authority to approve or reject them. He may or may not act on all, some, or none of the DOGE recommendations.

“No one elected Musk.” 

Like hundreds of government officials, Musk was appointed by an elected president to run an agency that does not require Senate confirmation.

Musk is as legally legitimate as the national security advisor and his National Security Council, none of whom require Senate confirmation.

Does the left believe former national security advisor Jake Sullivan, who made decisions far more pivotal than Musk, had no authority to do so because he too was neither elected nor confirmed by the Senate?

“It is a dangerous precedent to give a private citizen billionaire like Musk so much power.”

In fact, Musk has far more legal authority than did FDR’s best friend Harry Hopkins. He moved into the White House and de facto set U.S. foreign assistance policies toward Stalin’s Russia.

Musk’s position is more akin to past captains of industry like Henry Ford, Henry Kaiser, and William Knudson appointed by FDR to run the wartime economy.

None of them were either elected or confirmed by the Senate. All of them helped to save a poorly armed US after the debacle of Pearl Harbor.

“Foreign aid is ending.”

Hardly.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

The Latest in DEI, CRT, and Gender Issues While they are all still with us, there is growing resistance. By Larry Sand

By on February 13th, 2025

https://amgreatness.com/2025/02/13/the-latest-in-dei-crt-and-gender-issues/

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. Critical Race Theory. Transgenderism. Whether you consider them cults, creeds, political movements, or cultural Marxism, they have been around for some time now, but there is mounting opposition.

DEI

Many U.S. Colleges still ooze DEI dogma. For example, the University of Michigan announced in December that it would no longer require diversity statements in faculty hiring and tenure decisions, but its Board of Regents stopped short of cutting DEI spending. One regent voiced concerns about the millions of dollars the public institution is spending to embed DEI into every campus nook and cranny under its DEI 2.0 plan.

Scarily, Brown University’s Medical School now gives DEI more weight than clinical skills in its promotion criteria for faculty, raising questions about the quality of patient care at its medical school and underscoring how deeply DEI has penetrated medical education.

The criteria, which are now posted on Brown’s website, include “demonstrated commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion” as a “major criterion” for all positions within the Department of Medicine, which oversees the bulk of the school’s clinical units. Clinical skills, by contrast, only count as a “minor criterion” for many roles.

DEI is also still quite prevalent outside our schools. In Los Angeles, which just suffered some of the most grisly fires in the nation’s history, the fire chief is on record “highlighting her DEI agendas rather than emphasizing traditional fire department criteria like response time or keeping fire vehicles running,” writes Victor Davis Hanson.

It’s also possible that DEI played a part in the recent American Airlines crash, which killed 67 people in Washington, D.C. As revealed by The New York Post, the Federal Aviation Administration is embroiled in a class-action lawsuit brought by 1,000 would-be air traffic controllers who were allegedly turned down for jobs because of diversity hiring targets. The New York Times mentions that staffing levels were “not normal” at the time of the collision.

But there is good news on the DEI front. The Heritage Foundation reports that it has launched a new initiative to stand up against corporations targeting individuals based on political or religious beliefs.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Death Match: China’s CCP vs. America’s Democracy by Gordon G. Chang

By on February 12th, 2025

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21387/communist-china-vs-america-democracy

President Trump, according to reports, wants to go to Beijing in his first hundred days and reach a bargain with China. Unfortunately, an enduring accommodation with the Chinese regime is not possible.

China is not done killing with disease.

Driven by these beliefs [replacing the Westphalian order of sovereign states with the Chinese imperial-era system], the Chinese regime has always thought it had the right to do whatever it wanted to others.

Try as Americans might, they will never have amicable relations with China as long as it is ruled by the Chinese Communist Party. There can be only one survivor, either the People’s Republic of China or the United States of America.

President Trump, according to reports, wants to go to Beijing in his first hundred days and reach a bargain with China. Unfortunately, an enduring accommodation with the Chinese regime is not possible.

Why not?

For one thing, the Communist Party of China (CCP) appears determined to kill every person in the United States. A quarter-century ago, General Chi Haotian, China’s defense minister and vice chairman of the CCP’s Central Military Commission, reportedly gave a secret speech advocating the extermination of Americans.

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Why Jews are fleeing the West The rising anti-Semitic tide in Britain and North America is driving Jews to seek new safe havens. Joel Kotkin

By on February 12th, 2025

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/02/12/why-jews-are-fleeing-the-west/

Jewish history has long been defined by migratory movements away from trouble and towards safer places. Over the past half millennia, the safest harbours for ‘the world’s foster children’, as David Mamet put it, have generally been English-speaking countries, first Britain, then especially the US, Canada and Australia.

This is increasingly no longer the case. The British Jewish community is being battered by a rising tide of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish agitation from both the left and segments of the UK’s much larger Muslim population. In Australia, Jewish childcare centres and an MP’s office have been attacked. Even the United States and Canada, where over 70 per cent of the Jewish diaspora resides, are showing signs of increased anti-Zionist and openly anti-Semitic sentiment. Indeed, in the US, anti-Semitic hate crimes now dwarf hate crimes against Muslims, blacks or Asians. No wonder many Jews are thinking of departing for safer pastures new.

The potential decline in the Jewish Anglosphere has been presaged by a more precipitous fall in Europe and throughout Asia. The Jewish population in Europe stood at 3.5million in 1950, after the Holocaust. Today it has fallen to well under 1.5million. France is home to the world’s third-largest Jewish community, but it’s shrinking. Since 2000, nearly 50,000 Jews have left France, mostly for Israel. Even more shocking has been the virtual annihilation of Jews in Islamic countries – one million strong until the 1960s, there are fewer than 15,000 Jews living in these places today.

Anti-Semitism, driven by attacks from Islamists and their leftist allies, has been a prime driver of this decline. A survey found that barely 13 per cent of anti-Semitic attacks in Europe were traceable to right-wingers. To be sure, there’s cause to worry about some right-wing anti-Semities within the ranks of Austria’s Freedom Party (founded by former SS officers), the AfD in Germany and Jobbik in Hungary. But right now, the immediate danger lies elsewhere.

Until recently, the Anglosphere provided a bulwark against anti-Semitism. As Barbara W Tuchman explains in Bible and Sword, Jews have long had ties to Britain, reaching back to before Roman times. In 1290, Edward I did announce the expulsion of Jews, but many returned largely at the behest of Oliver Cromwell in the 17th century. Cromwell’s Roundheads drew a lot of their inspiration from the Old Testament. Of course, at the same time, Britain’s Jews have suffered considerable discrimination over the past half millenia, and were unable to vote in parliament until 1858.

In the late-19th century, Britain’s Jewish population swelled thanks to migration from Russia-dominated regions in Europe’s east, notably Poland. Many helped shape the British left, and the Labour Party, while others went off to participate in Britain’s robust economy, including as migrants to the colonies, notably South Africa, Australia and Canada.

But over the past half century, the Jewish population in Britain has declined. Today, with central London often resounding to the sound of pro-Hamas demonstrations, a vibrant centre of Jewish life has been turned into a no-go zone. As secular Jews migrate or intermarry, one study predicts that England’s Jewish community will largely be Orthodox by the century’s close.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Christopher F. Rufo How to Dismantle the Department of Education GOP presidential candidates have long vowed to shrink or abolish the department, but its budget has only grown.

By on February 12th, 2025

https://www.city-journal.org/article/dismantle-department-of-education-trump-elon-musk

There is a tingle of fear in any corporation whenever the words “restructuring,” “merger,” “acquisition,” or “hostile takeover” spread through the office. Employees work on their resumes, whisper about projected layoffs, and assess their options.

We’re seeing the same phenomenon unfold right now in our nation’s capital. Since taking over last month, President Trump has promised to blitz through federal departments to roll back waste, cut ideological programs, and return fiscal sanity to American governance. While Republican presidents have long promised to “reduce the size of government,” they have usually failed to do so—the bureaucracy always wins. This time might be different.

The second Trump administration has been surprisingly aggressive in its efforts to reform federal agencies, including a controlled demolition of USAID and an audacious buyout plan for government employees. And Elon Musk, leader of the president’s Department of Government Efficiency, has a long track record of successful, and sometimes extreme, cost-cutting. When Musk took over Twitter, for example, he fired 80 percent of the employees, and at the same time managed to improve the product and increase its profitability.

The next stage of the conflict between Trump and the bureaucracy looks to be the Department of Education, which the president has correctly identified as a hotbed of left-wing ideologies. Almost every Republican presidential candidate since 1980 has promised either to shrink or abolish the department, but its budget has only grown. When Trump made the same promise on the campaign trail last year, I was skeptical. But Musk changes the calculation: the tech entrepreneur has already routed USAID and, as I can confirm from my own reporting, dispatched his DOGE engineers to investigate the DOE. While the department, as a public entity, does not have the same kind of balance sheet as a corporation, it must nevertheless be broken apart and ultimately shut down.

What is the best way to proceed? The administration must first understand that the Department of Education administers three primary activities: college student loans and grants; K-12 funding; and ideological production, which includes an array of programs, grants, civil rights initiatives, and third-party NGOs that create left-wing content to push on local schools. It is not possible or desirable to shut down all three functions at the same time. Rather, Secretary of Education nominee Linda McMahon, in partnership with Musk and DOGE, should handle each separately.

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A United America Is Democrats’ Undoing By J.B. Shurk

By on February 12th, 2025

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/02/a_united_america_is_democrats_undoing.html

Of all the things I loathe about the Democrat party, its celebration of victimhood takes the cake.  As is true of all political parties infected with virulent Marxism, it does not seek to help those truly in need.  It does the opposite.  It seeks out people who might never have seen themselves as victims and convinces them otherwise.  It is a party whose growth in membership is directly proportional to Democrats’ capacity to convert Americans into victims.  

Once a person understands Democrats’ pathological need to harvest new victims, it becomes obvious that they are not in the business of solving problems.  Fixing anything in society only reduces the number of future Democrats.  By celebrating victimhood, Democrats are committed to making things worse today than they were yesterday and even worse tomorrow than they are today.  Their growth model depends upon perpetual misery.

Americans saw this self-destructive phenomenon play out during Obama’s presidency.  Before the 2008 election, race relations between black and white Americans had steadily improved since the ’60s.  Racism was widely rejected as a repugnant practice of the past.  In fact, discrimination based upon the color of a person’s skin had become so offensive that courts were dismantling affirmative action programs that explicitly prioritized race over merit.  A lot of Republican voters, unhappy with their party’s nomination of Senator John McCain, crossed lines and voted for Barack Obama’s nebulous promise of “hope and change” with the expectation that a post-racial America would take root.

President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder chose another path.  They looked for ways to inflame racial tensions.  They deconstructed a half-century of American racial progress by routinely injecting racial controversy into matters that had nothing to do with skin color.  A black Harvard professor is detained in the Democrat stronghold of Cambridge, Massachusetts?  That’s because all cops are unconsciously racist (even the black ones).  A black male dies in a confrontation with a neighborhood watchman?  That’s because black boys are hunted outside their own communities.  Americans don’t want to pay more for worse health care?  That’s because wealthy white Americans are too selfish to understand the appeal of socialized medicine.  

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Department of Veterans Affairs Eliminates $178,000 in Politico Subscriptions By Eric Lendrum

By on February 12th, 2025

https://amgreatness.com/2025/02/11/department-of-veterans-affairs-eliminates-178000-in-politico-subscriptions/

On Monday, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) announced that it had discovered and subsequently canceled $178,000 in subscriptions to Politico Pro, in the latest uncovered example of excessive government spending.

As reported by Fox News, VA Secretary Doug Collins made the announcement in a post on the social media site X, saying that he “ran across a $178,000 contract VA had with Politico and we promptly canceled it. That money can be better spent on Veterans health care!”

“It’s a new day at VA,” said Secretary Collins in a subsequent statement to the press. “We’re putting Veterans at the center of everything the department does, focusing relentlessly on customer service and convenience. We’re working every day to find new and better ways of helping VA beneficiaries. That means cutting wasteful spending and redirecting resources toward programs that benefit Veterans, families, survivors and caregivers.”

The news comes after a previous revelation that the entirety of the federal government had spent over $8 million on Politico subscriptions. This and other examples of government spending have been targeted by President Donald Trump and Elon Musk, head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

Politico issued a statement denying that the publication was a “beneficiary of government programs.”

“As surely many of you saw today, there was a spirited discussion at the White House and among officials connected to the Department of Government Efficiency on the subject of government subscriptions for journalism products, at POLITICO and other news organizations,” said Politico’s CEO Goli Sheikholeslami and editor-in-chief John Harris in an internal memo distributed to staff on Wednesday.

President Trump, along with Musk and DOGE, has vowed to severely cut government spending that is determined to be wasteful, and to abolish federal jobs and even entire agencies that are determined to be unnecessary or redundant. DOGE has especially targeted the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), as well as the Department of Education.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Trump’s Gaza Vision The president is right: the Middle East mold of the past 78 years must be broken. by Kenneth R. Timmerman

By on February 12th, 2025

https://www.frontpagemag.com/trumps-gaza-vision/

Albert Einstein famously said that the definition of insanity was doing the same thing over again and expecting different results. That’s what the Arab states and the Palestinian leadership have been doing for over seventy years.

Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, who has pitched himself as the modernizer of a very backward country, has rejected President Trump’s radical new proposals to spring the Gazan trap by saying there must be a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital – or else.

This is tired old dogma, which has paralyzed the region and legitimized the attempted genocide of the Jewish people of Israel for the past seventy-eight years.

In the past, the Saudi “or else” meant an oil boycott of the United States, which they imposed after the 1973 war – when they quadrupled world oil prices, ostensibly to punish the United States and other world powers that had supported Israel.

Could the Saudis pull off such a stunt today? Sure, they could cut back production, which would temporarily raise world oil prices. But with the United States now energy independent, the pain would be felt mainly by Europe, China, and the developing world.

The pain would also be felt by the Saudi people, who have become accustomed to lavish handouts from their princely leaders. What would happen to the Saudi monarchy if it could no longer afford to buy off their people?

Maybe the “or else” means that Saudi Arabia will fund the Palestinian Authority, either alone or with its Arab allies. But do the Palestinians want to become vassals of the Gulf Arabs? I think not.

Maybe by “or else” MBS (as the Saudi crown prince likes to be called) is signaling his willingness to finance the reconstruction of Gaza and the re-establishment of the political mafias that have terrorized the Palestinian people – as well as much of the world – since 1974?

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