An old friend's daughter was a ski instructor in Colorado during the '70s and '80s. One morning, who shows up with his kids in tow but Donald J. Trump. He asked for two instructors: one male, one female for his kids. Nikki was selected as the girl.
She told me that she was used to snot-nosed celebrity kids and braced herself for the day's work. She was pleasantly surprised: Trump's children were without exception polite and friendly, worked hard to ski better and were in general a joy to instruct.
At the end of the day, Trump approached her and the other instructor and pressed three one-hundred-dollar bills into their hands. Three hundred dollars. That would be over a thousand these days. That's who is in charge today, and I couldn't be happier.
Great story. There are hundreds just like it. Compare Trump's children with Biden's. And try to image where say Don Jr. would be today if he did what the pervert drug addict son did.
I would say that Hunter’s two appearances before congress certainly qualify as the actions of a snotty rich kid.
(For those who don’t remember…The first time, when subpoenaed, he only showed up in front of the Capitol building to make a self-serving little poor me speech before leaving. The second time he sat down with his lawyer in the hearing room for a couple of minutes and then got up and left. Unlike Steve Bannon, he got no jail time.)
A friend of mine was also a ski instructor and assigned to teach some of Bobby Kennedy's kids to ski. He found them impossible. At one point, Little Joe (the future Congresscritter) came up to him and said, "Tie my shoe." My friend picked him up and tossed him in a snowbank. Bobby told him he did the right thing.....
Agree that the Democrats look like losers. However, they are also ugly people. As the saying goes: beauty is skin deep, but ugly goes all the way to the bone. Start with Maxine Waters and Adam Schiff, who define the word ugly.
02/20/25: 1946 Nuremberg. Proceedings come to a halt. Waters, Schiff, Hunter Biden and General Milley enter the courtroom, and to the abject horror and consternation of the 12 Nazi defendants, are ordered to be seated next to Goering, Hess, etc. (Waters is issued headphones so that she can understand what is being said in English).
The following morning, the Nazis lawyers say to the presiding judges that their German client-defendants have requested to be immediately hanged so as to save them from further misery and disgrace. Goering, forced to sit next to Waters for six continuous hours, has beaten them to it and an investigation into his overnight jail-cell suicide has begun.
The boys are in heaven with our LORD. I cannot imagine how the family is suffering. May Israel wipe Hamas and their supporters from the face of the earth.
Daily over flights with B-2 bombers dropping an incendiary here, a bunker buster there. Bomb the rubble into powder. No set schedule, no specific targets just random death from above with no warning whatsoever.
I try to keep my feelings about them in check, but agree 100% with you.
Right now Hamas is the boogieman. Previously it was the Taliban. Before them it was Al Quida. There are a dozen sects of the same problem currently operating in the world somewhere. We can’t kill them all regardless of how hard we try. The real issue is radical Islam and until Islam is forced to correct their behavior it isn't going to stop. And they will likely never rein in the radicals. So until something happens to change their thinking, we have to marginalize them, and make their radical actions so painful for them they start to reform. I understand your feelings but killing them just works shorterm. Israel has the right approach. If they harm an Israeli they harm 100 in return. But to be successful, we have to have a united front of all nations to push back. Remember, this evil exists because of ignorance. If Islam had not had access to oil revenues, this problem would never have expanded as it did.
It isn't. The upside is they will return to their vomit and when they do the IDF can make them dead. Something the liberal courts in Israel refuse to do.
War is what we turn to when conversation and debate has failed to open peoples minds and turn them away from a destructive course.
That's why we came very close to an actual Civil War in America this past year. Incredibly, Trump got a "too big to rig" win, and we have had a peaceful transfer of power--so far.
But this is why we HAVE to keep communicating with the people in our lives who are on the Left and wake them up. I have found quite a few are actually perplexed and trying to figure things out, and are even reaching out to discuss what's happened.
A segment of Democrats are having a moment of receptivity, and it will be good if we engage with them now.
Reddog, I mostly have agreed with your comments either totally or in part. However, I deviate on this one. Hamas is a special kind of devil's spawn and the Palestinian (or Gazan, if you prefer) people simply HATE Jews and Israel and that has completely taken over their "culture". Little boys (and girls too) are hammered from earliest age with invective about evil Jews who will kill them and eat them or some other nonsense. These little snakes become big snakes with guns, grenades, and rocket launchers. Somehow this cycle has to end but how do you remove this evil from these minds? So far, not much short of termination has seemed to serve the desired effect.
Then there is Iran. Money is the oil and oil is the money, and when it stops coming from Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah don't have the ability to buy what they have been. Radical Islam needs money, everywhere, and Iran has it. Saudis used to give to them, but not so much now as they fear what Trump might do. Rocks just aren't bullets. So, stopping Iran is the first priority in my thinking and Israel looks like they intend to do that for us. Go for it, Bibi!
BTW, my dearest friend from childhood was called Red Dog, and I wish he were still around.
There is no limit to rejecting the evil that is Hamas. Those who enabled Hamas through funding any US agency should be paraded on the way to court in shackles and then to prison for life. I have a red haired son and ginger grandchildren boys and girls. I ache when I see the snaps of those boys. I can feel those little boys squirming in my lap and laughing.
Looks like one of the losers, Stacey Abrams , got caught with her fat fingers in the cookie jar. Her environmental support NGO got 2 billion dollars of X's money. A and B weren't counting on DOGE ever finding it out. BTW, we're freezing our asses off down here in Texas. Send us a little global warming...
This Stacey Abrams story is outrageous. $2 BILLION is ALOT of money.
This "set up" seems like a quintessential example of how the grift has been working:
Big hunks of money going to a front--$20 BILLION from the EPA for "Greenhouse Gas Reduction"-- to that Citibank account; then siphoning it off in smaller parcels to 8 companies, including the $2 BILLION in April 2024 to Stacey Abrams start-up shell company, which had only $100 in revenue and no activity yet, and whose purpose was "housing, equity, and 'resilience'(?)".
Then from Stacey Abrams "non-profit" in chunks to her many "partner" organizations, including two other non-profits set up by Stacey Abrams with a purpose of "racial equity and economic power", AND the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), AND the AFL-CIO.
The rest is not documented in that Washington Free Beacon article, but it is a no-brainer to assume that money also went to a bunch of other Leftist groups that also aren't even related to the supposed purpose of the original $2 billion. As it made its way to these "grantee" non-profits, the corrupt individuals who were the "officers" (or "legal consultants") of those organizations, probably ultimately took the money as their "salary", after first making big contributions to Kamala Harris's campaign, and smaller amounts they paid to Antifa and other agitators for various demonstrations. Or whatever.
Multiply this process by a million such money-channeling transactions, and you do have--literally-- the largest fraud case in the history of the world.
Disagree there. What we're seeing is utter and flagrant financial obfuscation--which per a quick Google search is defined well as: "deception, evasiveness, mystification, confusion, equivocation, muddying, prevarication, sophism, and sophistry".
Yes, we are in the super-early stages of this, and more very thorough work and documentation will be required to try and indict anyone for this. But the "bullsh--t" distribution of many BILLIONS, even TRILLIONS, of dollars is crystal clear.
In accounting, there is a special category of financial transactions which require extra-careful review and analysis, and can be serious red flags--they are called "Related Party Transactions". I have personally been involved in auditing frauds where Related Party Transactions were the crux of the case.
What we have here is an extremely incestuous web of Democratic-operative related party transactions riddled with conflicts of interest and lack of disclosure.
What would be foolish is to think this is all "hunky-dory".
I hope everyone is paying close attention to what we are seeing come out of our government. It’s mind numbing how much fraud and wasted funds they are finding. I just pray Bondi goes after the most obvious corruption.
I feel our new AG should prioritize all the DOGE identified criminal activities and go after EVERYONE named as involved. Squeeze and flip a few of them and then squeeze those they identify. Suddenly you get leads pointing to the actual Criminal Ring Leaders. I think when that happens some very familiar names will be identified. Then, “We The People” will receive Justice.
Yes, Dems have indeed been ignoring the Forgotten Man for decades. But the remember the price of eggs, they remember to scream; Trump's a "Nazi", whitey's are all "racists", women are going to lose their "reproductive rights", and the best one is black people should not be punished for crimes because that is part of their culture. LOL. The more Dems go by the old play book the more extinct they become. Keep it up!
I watched that video. Black crime should be legalized because it's part of black culture. This is a perfect example of the soft bigotry of low expectations.
Biden’s ignoring of the people of East Palestine really hit home. All he had to do was show up, say a few comforting words, throw some money at it and leave yet he couldn’t do even that. Same with the folks in North Carolina. Nothing for them.
Yes, the forgotten man spoke this last election and hopefully they won’t forget the callousness of the Dems who aren’t the party of the people but the party of themselves.
Thanks for today's piece, Don. I have read Amity Shlaes' book, "The Forgotten Man," about the Great Depression, and her biography of Calvin Coolidge (who was a better president than either Hoover or FDR). But I had never heard of Sumner's essay.
About every 80 years we have a major political realignment. They take about 20 years to work through. The last one was during the Depression and WWII. The previous one was from about 1850-1870. This one started with the Tea Party in 2010. It isn't over yet. But based on the last two, it's likely the Democrats will not elect a president for 20 years or more.
This time Trump is not alone working against the Deep State. He has won control of the Republican party, and he has built a team of younger people who will keep things going. I don't know who will succeed him as president, whether it will be DeSantis or Vance. But the Dems don't have anybody who can really lead them through this.
Please be careful with those 20 year predictions. We have a history of great outrage followed by a correction and then apathy and indifference. The lessons are getting more and more dangerous as well. I want everyone to see what happened, see why it happened, see what the fix is and how painful it is, and burn it into their brains so we never get to the edge again.
It has actually happened twice. Usually the presidency changes hands about every 8-12 years. But after Herbert Hoover served one term and was defeated by FDR in 1932, there wasn't another Republican elected president until Eisenhower in 1952. And after Lincoln's election in 1860, no Democrat was elected president until Grover Cleveland in 1884. He served two separate terms, with Benjamin Harrison's single term in between. After Cleveland there wasn't another Democrat president until Woodrow Wilson was elected in 1912--and he might not have won if the Republicans had not been split by the feud between Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft.
Yes, we’re in a Fourth Turning. American Revolution, Civil War, WW1, WW2, and here we are. And we see the post war global structure, completely fall apart.
The Post WW2 global "structure" and its handmaiden, "the international rules based order" are not fit for current circumstances--not just because of the tech revolution and the ascendancy of independent media.
Trump shows his intelligence and wisdom in how he has adapted to how our country and globe have changed. We are blessed to have someone that knows the score and the time and works assiduously to rescue our Constitutional Republic from destruction.
I've read Strauss and Howe's book, although I don't necessarily agree with all their details about generations. George Friedman, formerly of Stratfor and now at Geopolitical Futures, wrote a book, "The Storm Before the Calm" that talks about the 80-year cycle, but adds a second one--an economic change every 50-60 years. And he added that this time both cycles will hit during the same decade. He did not specify what the next economic crisis will be--I suspect the national debt, now at its highest ever level, but I don't know for sure. I do find it significant that a suggestion has been made that most of the waste reduction now taking place should go to actually paying down the debt--and Musk seems to agree.
I haven't read the book but have listened to several podcasts about the 4th turning and it makes sense. I think a 2nd economy cycle makes sense too. So much change in so little time! We have been mis-governed for a long time and it does feel like a second Revolution. The Dems & the Deep State will fight, but they will not win.
Poll question was a toss up. But the truth about the Democrats, and soon the RINOs, will be coming out piece by piece. And the truth is they may be losers, but they hate us, they hold us in contempt, and they’re thieving liars of the worst sort. They might have forgotten about us, but we will not forget about them. And with a lot of luck, the punishments will fit the crimes. Oh, and happy Kash Patel Day!
In hindsight I should have known better, yet before the election I worried incessantly about having to live through yet another presidential term with the inmates in charge of the asylum. But not all of that incessant fretting was my own fault. In hindsight -- which is always 20/20 -- it was clear that the dead-weight media had been running a campaign of making Cacklamala look like an irresistible winner, and the purpose of that must have been to depress Republican voter turnout. That it didn't pan out was not because their cheating was glaringly obvious but because the geniuses at the DNC had recruited the world's worst candidate.
Kash in Time! 51-49, which includes the 2 newest Dems with R by their names- Collins from Maine, and the one whose name I can never think how to spell from Alaska.
Great read ! I would venture that most of the populace never think that deeply ; even though they ( we , us , ) are the engine that makes the world function day in and day out .
Damn Don. You had me sweating. 😥 I had to look up the square root of -1. Turns out it’s negative-1. I thought I was back in high school being terrified by Miss Pauline Wilson. An old maid who drove a 1964 black Chrysler 300. At the time I said to myself “I’d like to meet the salesman that sold her that!”
A+ on your math grade Jeremy. Had an engineering professor with an advanced math degree who loved to slip trick problems into our assignments in college so we would waste all night trying to solve the unsolvable. He thought it was funny. We all had little figures with his name on it that we stuck pins into to stop him. Didn't work. I still have nightmares about that guy.
Nice. You kept me from replying. Multiplying two negative numbers results in a POSITIVE number. At least that was so when I went to school. But things change. Sometimes. 🙄😉
Interesting formulation by Sumner about how A and B get C to provide for X, where X is the designated victim of some misfortune or inequity. I see this a lot on the left: their self-satisfaction of calling for all taxpayers to cough up mad stacks that pay for the relief of certain groups of people. On social media, and I'm imagining Facebook here, you make a post like "make college free" or "forgive all student loans" or even--and I actually saw this--"give everyone enough money to live on comfortably because nobody should have to work; rich people just have to pay more taxes".
You make a post like that, and a hundred people give it a "like". So there you have it: you made a proclamation which was really about calling for the spending other people's money, and then a great number of people signaled their support and validated your brave virtue, and you bask in the warm sunshine of in-group approval.
This process also is intrinsic to DEI. It costs a white lady or any nonwhite person absolutely nothing to call for discrimination against white males and promote less-qualified and less-capable nonwhites. In academia, the white men who support discrimination against white male job applicants already have their sinecure, so DEI costs them nothing as well; in fact, they get to be especially brave and virtuous because they are willing to discriminate against their own kind.
It's very interesting these days at the university. A real shake-up in the works, what with DEI being literally outlawed by the legislature. Somber mutterings of resistance and gnashing of teeth at faculty meetings. I think what it's largely about is lefty profs losing their moral stature as self-appointed saviors—saviors who dispense favors to one sort of person by stomping on the civil rights of another sort of person.
No administrative personnel will be fired. Departments will be re-named but not defunded. The harpies will have to be pulled out of buildings by their keffiyeh or Marxist red neckerchief scarves.
“Hakeem Jeffries calling for a street fight in a $1,000 suit” is poetic. It’s probably a $2,500 suit, a $400 shirt and a $250 tie. How much the ridiculous rubber white-soled sneakers he wears cost, I have no idea. What a waste of taxpayer money.
Don, all of the above is exciting and fun and I wake up every morning awaiting what comes next. So far, it appears Trump’s ultimate, in your face, challenge came with an executive order he signed this Wednesday. Commentators have been slow to recognize the significance, but on Wednesday Trump asserted his control of the “independent agencies.” He’s taken the position that “regulations” only become effective when he says so. This changes almost a century of “business as usual” for the deep state. Sure, there will be litigation, but his challengers will lose because the very first sentence of Article ll of the Constitution says the President IS the Executive branch. There is so much more to say about this. I’ll leave that to you! But trust me Trump and America cannot lose this argument.
One more (redundant?) thought: Article ll is clear that the Executive branch is the President alone and everyone in the executive branch reports to the Pres. But Trumps opponents will likely argue that prior Congresses and Presidents have enacted LAWS creating these independent agencies. Thus they argue Trump is bound to follow those LAWS. The fallacy with that argument is that Art. ll is clear and neither legislation nor Presidents can change the language of the Constitution. The legislation creating the “independent agencies” contradicts Art. ll and is therefore unconstitutional.
I understand your concern, but the Article 2 language is so clear that the Sup. Ct. will have to twist itself into pretzels to challenge Trump. Further, Trump already has cases headed to the Sup. Ct. re firings and spending halts in the same agencies. This last executive order goes to the legality of “regulations” promulgated w/o his consent. This is very audacious stuff and he has the advantage. If the Sup. Ct. agrees he can fire or defund, but then denies his over-site of regulations, he can simply fire anyone who regulates. Finally, when the Dems and Rinos scream “dictator” Trump will be happy to tell Congress he will happily sign laws eliminating these agencies and to enact real LAWS rather than force the executive to do the dirty work of “regulating.” My bottom line is that the agencies are Congress’ way of avoiding accountability by avoiding actually legislating. What Trump is telling Congress is DO YOUR OWN DAMN JOB. It’s a win win for Americans because when Trump wins it will result in smaller, cheaper government. Either Congress gets to work doing their Constitutional job of legislating (they won’t they’re to lazy and busy getting reelected) OR the President takes control of the independent agencies, vetos their B.S. regulations and then answers to the people at election time. I’ll grant you that the deep state won’t surrender easily, but Trump is exercising power that no President has used in a half century. This will be fun to watch because the worst that can happen is nothing.
An old friend's daughter was a ski instructor in Colorado during the '70s and '80s. One morning, who shows up with his kids in tow but Donald J. Trump. He asked for two instructors: one male, one female for his kids. Nikki was selected as the girl.
She told me that she was used to snot-nosed celebrity kids and braced herself for the day's work. She was pleasantly surprised: Trump's children were without exception polite and friendly, worked hard to ski better and were in general a joy to instruct.
At the end of the day, Trump approached her and the other instructor and pressed three one-hundred-dollar bills into their hands. Three hundred dollars. That would be over a thousand these days. That's who is in charge today, and I couldn't be happier.
Great story. There are hundreds just like it. Compare Trump's children with Biden's. And try to image where say Don Jr. would be today if he did what the pervert drug addict son did.
I wouldn't say Xiden's spawn act like snotty rich kids though, they act like the spawn of satan.
I would say that Hunter’s two appearances before congress certainly qualify as the actions of a snotty rich kid.
(For those who don’t remember…The first time, when subpoenaed, he only showed up in front of the Capitol building to make a self-serving little poor me speech before leaving. The second time he sat down with his lawyer in the hearing room for a couple of minutes and then got up and left. Unlike Steve Bannon, he got no jail time.)
92/20/25: Destiny is far from done with H. Biden. Something to look forward to with great anticipatory pleasure.
The kids are mirror images of their fathers.
Addendum: that is $300 EACH.
Absolutley! His kids are not on TMZ or any other trash network. They are respectful, successful Americans.
02/20/25: Then they are truly "The Forgotten Americans."
A friend of mine was also a ski instructor and assigned to teach some of Bobby Kennedy's kids to ski. He found them impossible. At one point, Little Joe (the future Congresscritter) came up to him and said, "Tie my shoe." My friend picked him up and tossed him in a snowbank. Bobby told him he did the right thing.....
Agree that the Democrats look like losers. However, they are also ugly people. As the saying goes: beauty is skin deep, but ugly goes all the way to the bone. Start with Maxine Waters and Adam Schiff, who define the word ugly.
02/20/25: 1946 Nuremberg. Proceedings come to a halt. Waters, Schiff, Hunter Biden and General Milley enter the courtroom, and to the abject horror and consternation of the 12 Nazi defendants, are ordered to be seated next to Goering, Hess, etc. (Waters is issued headphones so that she can understand what is being said in English).
The following morning, the Nazis lawyers say to the presiding judges that their German client-defendants have requested to be immediately hanged so as to save them from further misery and disgrace. Goering, forced to sit next to Waters for six continuous hours, has beaten them to it and an investigation into his overnight jail-cell suicide has begun.
GMTA DJ !!
Pray for the Bibas family and Israel.
The boys are in heaven with our LORD. I cannot imagine how the family is suffering. May Israel wipe Hamas and their supporters from the face of the earth.
Right now I’m in favour of carpet bombing Gaza. Hamas delenda est.
Daily over flights with B-2 bombers dropping an incendiary here, a bunker buster there. Bomb the rubble into powder. No set schedule, no specific targets just random death from above with no warning whatsoever.
I try to keep my feelings about them in check, but agree 100% with you.
Right now Hamas is the boogieman. Previously it was the Taliban. Before them it was Al Quida. There are a dozen sects of the same problem currently operating in the world somewhere. We can’t kill them all regardless of how hard we try. The real issue is radical Islam and until Islam is forced to correct their behavior it isn't going to stop. And they will likely never rein in the radicals. So until something happens to change their thinking, we have to marginalize them, and make their radical actions so painful for them they start to reform. I understand your feelings but killing them just works shorterm. Israel has the right approach. If they harm an Israeli they harm 100 in return. But to be successful, we have to have a united front of all nations to push back. Remember, this evil exists because of ignorance. If Islam had not had access to oil revenues, this problem would never have expanded as it did.
At the very least, we can stop funding them.
infuriatingly Israel is having to release hundreds of bad guys to get each hostage back, dead or alive - can anyone tell me how that is fair?
I assume Israel agreed to this but think bad guys are just walking dead for a short while.
It is sickening.
It isn't. The upside is they will return to their vomit and when they do the IDF can make them dead. Something the liberal courts in Israel refuse to do.
War is what we turn to when conversation and debate has failed to open peoples minds and turn them away from a destructive course.
That's why we came very close to an actual Civil War in America this past year. Incredibly, Trump got a "too big to rig" win, and we have had a peaceful transfer of power--so far.
But this is why we HAVE to keep communicating with the people in our lives who are on the Left and wake them up. I have found quite a few are actually perplexed and trying to figure things out, and are even reaching out to discuss what's happened.
A segment of Democrats are having a moment of receptivity, and it will be good if we engage with them now.
Reddog, I mostly have agreed with your comments either totally or in part. However, I deviate on this one. Hamas is a special kind of devil's spawn and the Palestinian (or Gazan, if you prefer) people simply HATE Jews and Israel and that has completely taken over their "culture". Little boys (and girls too) are hammered from earliest age with invective about evil Jews who will kill them and eat them or some other nonsense. These little snakes become big snakes with guns, grenades, and rocket launchers. Somehow this cycle has to end but how do you remove this evil from these minds? So far, not much short of termination has seemed to serve the desired effect.
Then there is Iran. Money is the oil and oil is the money, and when it stops coming from Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah don't have the ability to buy what they have been. Radical Islam needs money, everywhere, and Iran has it. Saudis used to give to them, but not so much now as they fear what Trump might do. Rocks just aren't bullets. So, stopping Iran is the first priority in my thinking and Israel looks like they intend to do that for us. Go for it, Bibi!
BTW, my dearest friend from childhood was called Red Dog, and I wish he were still around.
There are some hints floating around the www that Iranian infrastructure has started to implode i.e. massive power outages .
Palistidiots. When Israel goes after the Iranian nukes, much of the funding will cease.
The Horde will not change ; take their oil or fight .
There is no limit to rejecting the evil that is Hamas. Those who enabled Hamas through funding any US agency should be paraded on the way to court in shackles and then to prison for life. I have a red haired son and ginger grandchildren boys and girls. I ache when I see the snaps of those boys. I can feel those little boys squirming in my lap and laughing.
Hamas delenda est.
That is so incredibly sad, my heart breaks for the Bibas family
Looks like one of the losers, Stacey Abrams , got caught with her fat fingers in the cookie jar. Her environmental support NGO got 2 billion dollars of X's money. A and B weren't counting on DOGE ever finding it out. BTW, we're freezing our asses off down here in Texas. Send us a little global warming...
This Stacey Abrams story is outrageous. $2 BILLION is ALOT of money.
This "set up" seems like a quintessential example of how the grift has been working:
Big hunks of money going to a front--$20 BILLION from the EPA for "Greenhouse Gas Reduction"-- to that Citibank account; then siphoning it off in smaller parcels to 8 companies, including the $2 BILLION in April 2024 to Stacey Abrams start-up shell company, which had only $100 in revenue and no activity yet, and whose purpose was "housing, equity, and 'resilience'(?)".
Then from Stacey Abrams "non-profit" in chunks to her many "partner" organizations, including two other non-profits set up by Stacey Abrams with a purpose of "racial equity and economic power", AND the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), AND the AFL-CIO.
The rest is not documented in that Washington Free Beacon article, but it is a no-brainer to assume that money also went to a bunch of other Leftist groups that also aren't even related to the supposed purpose of the original $2 billion. As it made its way to these "grantee" non-profits, the corrupt individuals who were the "officers" (or "legal consultants") of those organizations, probably ultimately took the money as their "salary", after first making big contributions to Kamala Harris's campaign, and smaller amounts they paid to Antifa and other agitators for various demonstrations. Or whatever.
Multiply this process by a million such money-channeling transactions, and you do have--literally-- the largest fraud case in the history of the world.
Let's not forget that Abrams sister is a feral judge. Part of that may have been funneled to her.
Cluck Cluck
Chickens coming home to roost?
Cluckbait.
The tiniest thread linking someone of nefarious behavior who is not in favor with conservatives gets carried as true, over and over.
4.7 dollars missing.
Cluckbait
We do that which we decry.
Makes us look foolish.
Tom Hanks wasn't completely wrong.
Disagree there. What we're seeing is utter and flagrant financial obfuscation--which per a quick Google search is defined well as: "deception, evasiveness, mystification, confusion, equivocation, muddying, prevarication, sophism, and sophistry".
Yes, we are in the super-early stages of this, and more very thorough work and documentation will be required to try and indict anyone for this. But the "bullsh--t" distribution of many BILLIONS, even TRILLIONS, of dollars is crystal clear.
In accounting, there is a special category of financial transactions which require extra-careful review and analysis, and can be serious red flags--they are called "Related Party Transactions". I have personally been involved in auditing frauds where Related Party Transactions were the crux of the case.
What we have here is an extremely incestuous web of Democratic-operative related party transactions riddled with conflicts of interest and lack of disclosure.
What would be foolish is to think this is all "hunky-dory".
I don't disagree with anything you said.
You disagree with me but change topics.
You don't think this is going on, David?
Cluck Cluck
We can only hope that Pam Bondi and Josh will make an example of Stacey and she goes on the prison diet.
Start up all the internal combustion engines. Nature is starved for CO2!
I'm in South Carolina and it is 37° degrees here now. Coldest winter in 10 years. Where is fat Al when we need him!
No temp,here at least that is what the digital thermometer says a big fat 0. ☕️☕️
Me too. Going down to 25 tonight here in Charleston.
Cry me a river. -8ºF here this morning in Iowa!
I would, but my tears will freeze to my face! 😉
-15 here in central Kansas.
Gah!
Keep it
I hope everyone is paying close attention to what we are seeing come out of our government. It’s mind numbing how much fraud and wasted funds they are finding. I just pray Bondi goes after the most obvious corruption.
I feel our new AG should prioritize all the DOGE identified criminal activities and go after EVERYONE named as involved. Squeeze and flip a few of them and then squeeze those they identify. Suddenly you get leads pointing to the actual Criminal Ring Leaders. I think when that happens some very familiar names will be identified. Then, “We The People” will receive Justice.
Yes, yes, yes!
I wouldn't want to be on Pam's radar. Godly serious and her sternness reaches my bones.
You really do have to wonder what Biden’s override for that is. In $ and % and whether direct to his overseas account or to the “Library.”
At least our warm up starts tomorrow and today looking out my big breakfast room window, I see a bright, sunshiny day!
Trump killed it darn it. That was one thing I hoped he would leave alone but I'll still keep him.
Cluck Cluck
Paraphrasing Milton Friedman "Government aid is A and B deciding what C should do for D. And A & B get a commission"
I prefer, "two wolves and a sheep deciding what to have for dinner."
We should start a Forgotten Man’s club so it will be easier to get the word out. Of course, we would never have meetings.
Yes, Dems have indeed been ignoring the Forgotten Man for decades. But the remember the price of eggs, they remember to scream; Trump's a "Nazi", whitey's are all "racists", women are going to lose their "reproductive rights", and the best one is black people should not be punished for crimes because that is part of their culture. LOL. The more Dems go by the old play book the more extinct they become. Keep it up!
I watched that video. Black crime should be legalized because it's part of black culture. This is a perfect example of the soft bigotry of low expectations.
Stewped wite gilt via mis-ed systems.
💯
Biden’s ignoring of the people of East Palestine really hit home. All he had to do was show up, say a few comforting words, throw some money at it and leave yet he couldn’t do even that. Same with the folks in North Carolina. Nothing for them.
Yes, the forgotten man spoke this last election and hopefully they won’t forget the callousness of the Dems who aren’t the party of the people but the party of themselves.
How much of FEMA monies went to luxury hotels to house illegals? $50 million was it?
$59 million in NYC alone. There may have been other payments like this elsewhere.
Way way too much
Thanks for today's piece, Don. I have read Amity Shlaes' book, "The Forgotten Man," about the Great Depression, and her biography of Calvin Coolidge (who was a better president than either Hoover or FDR). But I had never heard of Sumner's essay.
About every 80 years we have a major political realignment. They take about 20 years to work through. The last one was during the Depression and WWII. The previous one was from about 1850-1870. This one started with the Tea Party in 2010. It isn't over yet. But based on the last two, it's likely the Democrats will not elect a president for 20 years or more.
This time Trump is not alone working against the Deep State. He has won control of the Republican party, and he has built a team of younger people who will keep things going. I don't know who will succeed him as president, whether it will be DeSantis or Vance. But the Dems don't have anybody who can really lead them through this.
Please be careful with those 20 year predictions. We have a history of great outrage followed by a correction and then apathy and indifference. The lessons are getting more and more dangerous as well. I want everyone to see what happened, see why it happened, see what the fix is and how painful it is, and burn it into their brains so we never get to the edge again.
It has actually happened twice. Usually the presidency changes hands about every 8-12 years. But after Herbert Hoover served one term and was defeated by FDR in 1932, there wasn't another Republican elected president until Eisenhower in 1952. And after Lincoln's election in 1860, no Democrat was elected president until Grover Cleveland in 1884. He served two separate terms, with Benjamin Harrison's single term in between. After Cleveland there wasn't another Democrat president until Woodrow Wilson was elected in 1912--and he might not have won if the Republicans had not been split by the feud between Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft.
Yes, we’re in a Fourth Turning. American Revolution, Civil War, WW1, WW2, and here we are. And we see the post war global structure, completely fall apart.
The Post WW2 global "structure" and its handmaiden, "the international rules based order" are not fit for current circumstances--not just because of the tech revolution and the ascendancy of independent media.
Trump shows his intelligence and wisdom in how he has adapted to how our country and globe have changed. We are blessed to have someone that knows the score and the time and works assiduously to rescue our Constitutional Republic from destruction.
I've read Strauss and Howe's book, although I don't necessarily agree with all their details about generations. George Friedman, formerly of Stratfor and now at Geopolitical Futures, wrote a book, "The Storm Before the Calm" that talks about the 80-year cycle, but adds a second one--an economic change every 50-60 years. And he added that this time both cycles will hit during the same decade. He did not specify what the next economic crisis will be--I suspect the national debt, now at its highest ever level, but I don't know for sure. I do find it significant that a suggestion has been made that most of the waste reduction now taking place should go to actually paying down the debt--and Musk seems to agree.
I haven't read the book but have listened to several podcasts about the 4th turning and it makes sense. I think a 2nd economy cycle makes sense too. So much change in so little time! We have been mis-governed for a long time and it does feel like a second Revolution. The Dems & the Deep State will fight, but they will not win.
Amity Shlaes is a smart one.
USAID, where money goes to get laundered.
Poll question was a toss up. But the truth about the Democrats, and soon the RINOs, will be coming out piece by piece. And the truth is they may be losers, but they hate us, they hold us in contempt, and they’re thieving liars of the worst sort. They might have forgotten about us, but we will not forget about them. And with a lot of luck, the punishments will fit the crimes. Oh, and happy Kash Patel Day!
“Kash Patel Day”!
Hah~ LOOVE it!!
And I hope JD Vance is in Washington DC today, standing by to cast the tie-breaker vote for Kash Patel, who may need it.
In hindsight I should have known better, yet before the election I worried incessantly about having to live through yet another presidential term with the inmates in charge of the asylum. But not all of that incessant fretting was my own fault. In hindsight -- which is always 20/20 -- it was clear that the dead-weight media had been running a campaign of making Cacklamala look like an irresistible winner, and the purpose of that must have been to depress Republican voter turnout. That it didn't pan out was not because their cheating was glaringly obvious but because the geniuses at the DNC had recruited the world's worst candidate.
If they had kept her locked away and only done press releases she might not have done as poorly. Still, they had to run on zou's record.
I believe you're right; Biden set the example for that during his 2020 "campaign".
But who is "zou"?
"Zou": Chinese for "Joe".
Should be "Zhou". Chinese "Z" is phonetically still "Z", but Chinese "Zh" is approximately English "J".
Thanks, I'll try to remember that.
Too much info. Just go with it.
Zou Xiden, since he's a puppet of China.
Don- my hat’s off to you. That was a piece of work, and you pulled it off. Put it all together.
A prognosis- Unless Kash’s Gov’t Gangsters was no more than Obama’s Red Lines, we are about to hear the last of the price of eggs.
Hopefully. No more delays on confirmations!
The GOP Senate is scared to death of what will happen if they buck Mr Trump. Good.
We should primary half of them whether they buck Trump or not. They can't be trusted to work for the people they 'claim' to represent.
Can't wait for Alaska to get rid of rank choice voting so Murkowski can be sent to the 'ugly person's home' to retire.
Tired of winning?
Kash in Time! 51-49, which includes the 2 newest Dems with R by their names- Collins from Maine, and the one whose name I can never think how to spell from Alaska.
Murky Cow on skis.
Great read ! I would venture that most of the populace never think that deeply ; even though they ( we , us , ) are the engine that makes the world function day in and day out .
Damn Don. You had me sweating. 😥 I had to look up the square root of -1. Turns out it’s negative-1. I thought I was back in high school being terrified by Miss Pauline Wilson. An old maid who drove a 1964 black Chrysler 300. At the time I said to myself “I’d like to meet the salesman that sold her that!”
-1x-1=1 the square root of a negative number is imaginary, much like the voters who cast all those ballots for Xiden.
A+ on your math grade Jeremy. Had an engineering professor with an advanced math degree who loved to slip trick problems into our assignments in college so we would waste all night trying to solve the unsolvable. He thought it was funny. We all had little figures with his name on it that we stuck pins into to stop him. Didn't work. I still have nightmares about that guy.
SQ Root of -1 is imaginary. It can't be done.
The calculator on my phone responded with "keep it real".
Nice. You kept me from replying. Multiplying two negative numbers results in a POSITIVE number. At least that was so when I went to school. But things change. Sometimes. 🙄😉
It’s true. Joe Biden x Kamala Harris = Donald Trump. Two negatives multiplied together equals a positive.
touché
Well done !!
😂
Negative x negative = positive , don't think a negative number can have a square root .
Bingo.
That has always been a trick question.
Great post today DS.
Interesting formulation by Sumner about how A and B get C to provide for X, where X is the designated victim of some misfortune or inequity. I see this a lot on the left: their self-satisfaction of calling for all taxpayers to cough up mad stacks that pay for the relief of certain groups of people. On social media, and I'm imagining Facebook here, you make a post like "make college free" or "forgive all student loans" or even--and I actually saw this--"give everyone enough money to live on comfortably because nobody should have to work; rich people just have to pay more taxes".
You make a post like that, and a hundred people give it a "like". So there you have it: you made a proclamation which was really about calling for the spending other people's money, and then a great number of people signaled their support and validated your brave virtue, and you bask in the warm sunshine of in-group approval.
This process also is intrinsic to DEI. It costs a white lady or any nonwhite person absolutely nothing to call for discrimination against white males and promote less-qualified and less-capable nonwhites. In academia, the white men who support discrimination against white male job applicants already have their sinecure, so DEI costs them nothing as well; in fact, they get to be especially brave and virtuous because they are willing to discriminate against their own kind.
It's very interesting these days at the university. A real shake-up in the works, what with DEI being literally outlawed by the legislature. Somber mutterings of resistance and gnashing of teeth at faculty meetings. I think what it's largely about is lefty profs losing their moral stature as self-appointed saviors—saviors who dispense favors to one sort of person by stomping on the civil rights of another sort of person.
The moral preening is disgusting.
No administrative personnel will be fired. Departments will be re-named but not defunded. The harpies will have to be pulled out of buildings by their keffiyeh or Marxist red neckerchief scarves.
“Hakeem Jeffries calling for a street fight in a $1,000 suit” is poetic. It’s probably a $2,500 suit, a $400 shirt and a $250 tie. How much the ridiculous rubber white-soled sneakers he wears cost, I have no idea. What a waste of taxpayer money.
The clothes or Jefferies? I vote both.
Me, too!
Don, all of the above is exciting and fun and I wake up every morning awaiting what comes next. So far, it appears Trump’s ultimate, in your face, challenge came with an executive order he signed this Wednesday. Commentators have been slow to recognize the significance, but on Wednesday Trump asserted his control of the “independent agencies.” He’s taken the position that “regulations” only become effective when he says so. This changes almost a century of “business as usual” for the deep state. Sure, there will be litigation, but his challengers will lose because the very first sentence of Article ll of the Constitution says the President IS the Executive branch. There is so much more to say about this. I’ll leave that to you! But trust me Trump and America cannot lose this argument.
One more (redundant?) thought: Article ll is clear that the Executive branch is the President alone and everyone in the executive branch reports to the Pres. But Trumps opponents will likely argue that prior Congresses and Presidents have enacted LAWS creating these independent agencies. Thus they argue Trump is bound to follow those LAWS. The fallacy with that argument is that Art. ll is clear and neither legislation nor Presidents can change the language of the Constitution. The legislation creating the “independent agencies” contradicts Art. ll and is therefore unconstitutional.
It does not give me great comfort if we end up needing Amy Coney Barrett and CJ Roberts to decide it.
I understand your concern, but the Article 2 language is so clear that the Sup. Ct. will have to twist itself into pretzels to challenge Trump. Further, Trump already has cases headed to the Sup. Ct. re firings and spending halts in the same agencies. This last executive order goes to the legality of “regulations” promulgated w/o his consent. This is very audacious stuff and he has the advantage. If the Sup. Ct. agrees he can fire or defund, but then denies his over-site of regulations, he can simply fire anyone who regulates. Finally, when the Dems and Rinos scream “dictator” Trump will be happy to tell Congress he will happily sign laws eliminating these agencies and to enact real LAWS rather than force the executive to do the dirty work of “regulating.” My bottom line is that the agencies are Congress’ way of avoiding accountability by avoiding actually legislating. What Trump is telling Congress is DO YOUR OWN DAMN JOB. It’s a win win for Americans because when Trump wins it will result in smaller, cheaper government. Either Congress gets to work doing their Constitutional job of legislating (they won’t they’re to lazy and busy getting reelected) OR the President takes control of the independent agencies, vetos their B.S. regulations and then answers to the people at election time. I’ll grant you that the deep state won’t surrender easily, but Trump is exercising power that no President has used in a half century. This will be fun to watch because the worst that can happen is nothing.
I like your perspective on this and pray you are right jimok
Hopefully the Supremes will realize that once the power is stripped from the President the next target will be them.
Or will they throw the president to the wolves in hopes of saving their own hides.
I pray they stand on principals.