Displaying posts categorized under

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION

50 STATES AND DC, CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT

Halftime at the Super Bowl I failed to understand all but a few words. by Larry Elder

https://www.frontpagemag.com/halftime-at-the-super-bowl/

President Donald Trump became the first sitting president to attend a Super Bowl, and his presence was flashed on the jumbo screen. It’s always a crapshoot when a politician attends a spectacle like this. Attendees will let him or her know exactly how they feel. When the big screen showed him, fans cheered. But when the big screen showed the hyper-woke Trump critic Taylor Swift, fans booed.

So far, so good.

What to say about the halftime show performed by the popular rapper Kendrick Lamar? USA Today wrote: “The Grammy-winning rapper took the stage … for an exhilarating medley performance that paid homage to the Compton emcee’s eclectic catalog.”

“Exhilarating medley performance”? OK, call me biased, and I’m certainly not in his age demo. “Artists” like Lamar could not care less what I think. But I lean toward performers who can sing, dance, play an instrument or, heavens, do all three.

Nearly 50% of voters in a poll conducted by Darren Rovell gave the performance an F.

My nephew, Eric, loves rap. While driving and listening to a popular “song,” I said, “Eric, I don’t understand a word.” He proceeded to translate each line as it was recited.

“How many times did you have to listen before you were able to figure it out?” I said.

“Figure what out?” he said.

“The lyrics.”

“Once.”

So maybe it’s me. During Lamar’s performance, I failed to understand all but a few words. Before the game started, a couple of songs were performed before the national anthem. A beautiful, well-dressed woman used sign language for the hearing impaired. Where was she during Lamar’s performance for those of us who suffer from rap lyric comprehension impairment?

Why Elon Musk and DOGE Terrify Democrats And what their absolute meltdown tells you about the Left. by Derek Hunter

https://www.frontpagemag.com/why-elon-musk-and-doge-terrify-democrats/

You may have noticed the absolute meltdown of the left over the existence of Elon Musk and the DOGE team doing exactly what Donald Trump was elected to do. I phrased it that way because that’s exactly what is happening – someone is finally going through the government’s books and records to figure out what people do, how much it costs, where the rest of the money is going and whether or not we can live without it since we’re more than $36 trillion in debt. Why would anyone meltdown over that? There’s a very simple reason: Democrats cannot afford for the American people realizing how much government they can live without. More than that, they can’t have the public recognize how much the government was actually getting in their way and impeding their success. The public doing either of those two things would be the end of the Democratic Party.

Not one single person in the Democratic Party, either elected or in journalism, has commented positively on anything the Department of Government Efficiency has uncovered and ended so far, nothing. No matter how wasteful, no matter how absurd, no matter how insane or stupid, Democrats are angry that DOGE exists, not that we taxpayers are being ripped off. That tells you something.

The most amazing part of all of it is how these people, who’ve spent decades milking taxpayers for their pet causes, for money to fund organizations that employ their children and fund their campaigns, that hire and pay them exorbitant amounts of money for no-show or symbolic jobs when they retire, that use insider information that make them more successful at stock trading than people who do it for a living, have the audacity to refer to what Musk and the crew are doing as somehow motivated by “greed.”

Under what circumstances would the richest man in the world risk prison for a little more? He’s not Mr. Burns, he’s an OCD kind of guy obsessed with determining what is absolutely essential to the operations of something and eliminating everything else involved in its creation and production. Read Walter Isaacson’s biography of him, for crying out loud.

The “kids,” as the left likes to belittlingly call them, who work with him are not in it for the money, either. Most have founded companies, won massive investments in their ideas, and don’t need anything to be more successful than anyone whining about them. What they want, what they crave is a challenge.

‘Fact-checking was a sham industry’ Robby Soave on why we should welcome the demise of the misinformation ‘experts’.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/02/13/fact-checking-was-a-sham-industry/

One of Donald Trump’s first executive orders promises to bring an end to the American government’s censorship of social media. Although the First Amendment forbids the state from censoring citizens’ speech, federal agencies would previously get around this by pressuring the tech platforms to censor content on their behalf. Entire topics, such as the Covid lab-leak theory or the Hunter Biden laptop scandal, were branded ‘misinformation’ by the state and then scrubbed from social media. A whole ‘censorship industrial complex’ of self-appointed fact-checkers, disinformation experts and ‘pro-democracy’ NGOs emerged to help enforce the state’s diktats. But what happens next? Could the era of Big Tech censorship finally be on its way out?

Robby Soave – senior editor of Reason and co-host of Rising – returned to The Brendan O’Neill Show to discuss all this and more. What follows is an edited extract from the conversation. Listen to the full thing here.

Brendan O’Neill: How are you feeling about the first few weeks of Donald Trump’s second presidency?

Robby Soave: I do find myself in a very unusual and frankly uncomfortable position of being happy with a lot of changes that are taking place in the government. I don’t know that I’ve ever been in that position in my entire life.

Initially, I wasn’t quite sure about Trump. We’ve already been through four years of Trump. Frankly, they weren’t that different from what you would have seen from any other Republican, or any other political figure. There was a lot of continuity in policies I don’t really like, so I was lukewarm for Trump running again this time. I thought he talked a good game on some stuff and was wild in other ways.

And then he came in and put Elon Musk in charge of cutting government waste. You’ve got a lot of the other tech titans who are, if not getting explicitly on board with Trump, becoming more favourable towards him. I don’t agree with everything he does by any stretch of the imagination, but there really does seem to be a desire to disempower the censors. That whole movement seems to be falling away.

O’Neill: One of Trump’s very good executive orders was on ‘ending federal censorship’. Do you think that ‘misinformation’ became a shield for what was essentially political censorship?

Help! The Establishment’s Fallen and Can’t Get Up! By J.B. Shurk

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

The Senate’s confirmation hearings for President Trump’s political appointees have been gladiatorial spectacles.  Tulsi Gabbard; Kash Patel; and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. followed Pete Hegseth’s example in demonstrating fierce determination and an unwillingness to have their honor questioned by dishonorable Democrats.  

Gabbard told the Intelligence Committee that the Russia collusion hoax, the Hunter Biden laptop scandal, and her own experiences as a Biden regime surveillance target proved that the CIA and its sister agencies had become politicized weapons endangering the Republic.  Kennedy admonished Senator Bernie Sanders for being a bought-and-paid-for stooge of the pharmaceutical industry.  When Senator Adam Schiff (who should be a defendant, not a lawmaker) accused Patel of betraying law enforcement officers, the next director of the FBI stared back intently and reminded inveterate liar Schiff that those who police our streets know who has their backs.  

These types of hearings have gotten increasingly combative over the last thirty years, but this aggressive jousting between nominees and lawmakers is something new.  What we’re watching is not just rhetorical gamesmanship or made-for-TV fireworks meant to capture distracted Americans’ attention.  Like their boss in the White House — whose mug shot from the Fulton County Jailhouse in Atlanta, Georgia, two years ago only added to Trump’s legend as an everyman hero — these nominees have approached their confirmation hearings with a stoic seriousness befitting an administration whose every move conveys a simple message: “There’s a new sheriff in town.”  When Patel gave Schiff the “evil eye” and calmly asserted that his friends in blue had his six, I thought the corrupt California senator wet his pants.

Will the nominees be confirmed?  If the proceedings were done entirely in secret, they would not.  As more Americans have steadily realized, the U.S. Senate is not divided between Republicans and Democrats.  Almost all senators are stalwart members of the same Uniparty.  The Senate is a privileged chamber of egomaniacal “nobles” who work for the Intelligence Community, protect the permanent bureaucracy, and remain loyal only to their Establishment Club.  Most Senate “Republicans” oppose Trump and his nominees.  

The Spawn of Leviathan The Trump administration’s counterrevolution against the “treason of the agency clerks.” by Bruce Thornton

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-spawn-of-leviathan/

For more than a century, our Constitutional rights and freedoms have been insidiously eroded by the progressives’ technocratic imperialism of government agencies. This virtual fourth branch of our government has usurped the powers of the other three legitimate ones that the Framers crafted to check and balance, and hold accountable the ambitions of nascent tyranny.

The dangers of regulatory hypertrophy have been recognized since Alexis de Tocqueville in 1835-40.

A century later, even the progressive Walter Lippman, in his 1937 book The Good Society, warned of the dangers of an expansive executive branch and its agencies unaccountable to the citizens: “It is evident that the more varied and comprehensive the regulation becomes, the more the state becomes a despotic power against the individual. For the fragment of control over the government which he exercises through his vote is in no effective sense proportionate to the authority exercised over him by the government.”

Pace Lippman, the return of Donald Trump to the presidency, and the growing resistance of the “forgotten citizens” exercising their right to vote, have put in the White House an administration that is leading a counterrevolution against the “treason of the agency clerks,” and their violations of our Constitutional rights. Trump and his aides are investigating agencies like the FBI and DOJ, along with other intrusive outfits such as the EEOC and EPA, and the corrupt globalist slush fund, the U.S. Agency for International Development––and demanding from them accountability to their new boss and we the people he serves.

Created in 1980, the Department of Education has been one of Leviathan’s most pernicious regulatory spawn, for the ordered liberty of a diverse free people depends on what Alan Bloom calls “education for freedom, particularly the freedom of the mind.”

So, it is important that Trump has also put on the chopping block the DOE, a particularly gross violator of the guardrails of federalism, state sovereignty, and the principles of localism, particularly important for K-12 schools, given the critical role of families, churches, and neighborhoods in education.

Moreover, the DOE has become ground zero for dubious pedagogical fads, and the politicizing of our schools, using taxpayer money to promote progressive and leftist ideological goals, while sacrificing its mission to teach the foundational skills necessary for creating informed citizens.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.  

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

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.

The Democrats Doth Protest Too Much, Methinks

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/02/12/the-democrats-doth-protest-too-much-methinks/

The Democrats’ reaction to the Department of Government Efficiency’s necessary mission might seem a bit excessive. But it is understandable. Their taxpayer-funded slush fund has been exposed.

Rather than joining with Elon Musk, who is leading DOGE to root out federal waste and fraud, and improve the transparency of the murky federal leviathan, the Democrats are attacking him. At a rally a week ago outside the Capitol, Democratic Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland and Massachusetts Democratic Rep. Ayanna Pressley, chanted “Elon Musk must go” along with a rabble that seems eager to do harm to the South African billionaire.

There have been similar protests in other cities in which baying mobs demand that Musk be deported, sexually violated, even launched to Mars.

Meanwhile, the Congressional Progressive Caucus wants the Democrats to find a way to “fire” Musk. New York Democratic Sen. Charles Schumer has groused on X that “an unelected shadow government is conducting a hostile takeover of the federal government,” surely unaware that he’s implying that the permanent bureaucracy is a separate, unaccountable, untouchable and unconstitutional branch of the government. Harpy pundits swear Musk is carrying out a coup and is a threat to democracy, a frivolous slogan that the political left cannot resist using.

Other complaints against the DOGE operation included grousing that Musk’s team has access to sensitive Treasury data and is holding back important federal programs.

But the real reason the Democrats are so upset is because their racket at the U.S. Agency for International Aid has been exposed, and they fear it’s just the first of many similar duplicitous schemes throughout the government that will be uncovered. They’ve even been able to convince their core voters that Musk and his team, merely doing the job they were asked to do by the duly elected president, are pure evil that must be stopped.