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1 hour ago, royiv said:

Paid $8.28 for a dozen organic eggs at HEB this afternoon. When the fuck are the promised cuts to my egg prices coming?

Concern for high egg prices are so last year, nobody cares anymore.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/digital-assets/2025/02/02/this-needs-to-stop-now-elon-musk-confirms-radical-doge-us-treasury-plan/

Now, as fears emerge Trump’s administration is “dangerously” undermining the U.S. dollar, Musk has confirmed he wants to put the U.S. Treasury on a blockchain, the technology that underpins bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies—including Musk’s pet project dogecoin.

---

How are both parties just sitting back and letting this happen? Elon was having private conversations with Putin last year, he has no legitimate claim to the network and data he is collecting, and he's running around bragging about putting the Treasure on a blockchain. WTF!

Meanwhile I have a family member posting speeches about free market Libertarianism and the downfall of the West due to Collectivism. As if that has fuck all to do with what is happening to our country right now. Too distracted by hating Socialism to pay attention to anything else.

Non catholic church service today the pastor started off by a call to the congregation to step up as the catholic charity that assists newly settled refugees are SOL on funding with doge bs. Local branch currently oversees 300 refugees, about 85 fams who would be up a creek. No fucks given

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6 hours ago, C-Man said:

Ottawa Senators crowd boos US national anthem at last night’s game.

Well, it's nice to see some Senators doing something

  • Popular Post

Re: the Canadian hockey fans booing the anthem, I'd forgotten about this, but does anyone remember the Maple Leafs' fans stepping in last year to sing it for us after their singer's microphone stopped working?

We can no longer have nice things.

Thanks, Trump.

 

Edited by wood

  • Popular Post

Really good article imho from the NYT that was gifted to me earlier today.

I agree with Klein here, that what Trump is displaying with this blizkrieg of EOs is weakness, not strength. 

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/02/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-trump-column-read.html?unlocked_article_code=1.t04.mwSZ.KfcjTizcj7to&smid=url-share

Quote

 

If you want to understand the first few weeks of the second Trump administration, you should listen to what Steve Bannon told PBS’s “Frontline” in 2019:

Steve Bannon: The opposition party is the media. And the media can only, because they’re dumb and they’re lazy, they can only focus on one thing at a time. …

All we have to do is flood the zone. Every day we hit them with three things. They’ll bite on one, and we’ll get all of our stuff done. Bang, bang, bang. These guys will never — will never be able to recover. But we’ve got to start with muzzle velocity. So it’s got to start, and it’s got to hammer, and it’s got to —

Michael Kirk: What was the word?

Bannon: Muzzle velocity.

Muzzle velocity. Bannon’s insight here is real. Focus is the fundamental substance of democracy. It is particularly the substance of opposition. People largely learn of what the government is doing through the media — be it mainstream media or social media. If you overwhelm the media — if you give it too many places it needs to look, all at once, if you keep it moving from one thing to the next — no coherent opposition can emerge. It is hard to even think coherently.

Donald Trump’s first two weeks in the White House have followed Bannon’s strategy like a script. The flood is the point. The overwhelm is the point. The message wasn’t in any one executive order or announcement. It was in the cumulative effect of all of them. The sense that this is Trump’s country now. This is his government now. It follows his will. It does what he wants. If Trump tells the state to stop spending money, the money stops. If he says that birthright citizenship is over, it’s over.

Or so he wants you to think. In Trump’s first term, we were told: Don’t normalize him. In his second, the task is different: Don’t believe him.

Trump knows the power of marketing. If you make people believe something is true, you make it likelier that it becomes true. Trump clawed his way back to great wealth by playing a fearsome billionaire on TV; he remade himself as a winner by refusing to admit he had ever lost. The American presidency is a limited office. But Trump has never wanted to be president, at least not as defined in Article II of the U.S. Constitution. He has always wanted to be king. His plan this time is to first play king on TV. If we believe he is already king, we will be likelier to let him govern as a king.

Don’t believe him. Trump has real powers — but they are the powers of the presidency. The pardon power is vast and unrestricted, and so he could pardon the Jan. 6 rioters. Federal security protection is under the discretion of the executive branch, and so he could remove it from Anthony Fauci and Mike Pompeo and John Bolton and Mark Milley and even Brian Hook, a largely unknown former State Department official under threat from Iran who donated time to Trump’s transition team. It was an act of astonishing cruelty and callousness from a man who nearly died by an assassin’s bullet — as much as anything ever has been, this, to me, was an X-ray of the smallness of Trump’s soul — but it was an act that was within his power.

But the president cannot rewrite the Constitution. Within days, the birthright citizenship order was frozen by a judge — a Reagan appointee — who told Trump’s lawyers, “I have difficulty understanding how a member of the bar would state unequivocally that this is a constitutional order. It just boggles my mind.” A judge froze the spending freeze before it was even scheduled to go into effect, and shortly thereafter, the Trump administration rescinded the order, in part to avoid the court case.

What Bannon wanted — what the Trump administration wants — is to keep everything moving fast. Muzzle velocity, remember. If you’re always consumed by the next outrage, you can’t look closely at the last one. The impression of Trump’s power remains; the fact that he keeps stepping on rakes is missed. The projection of strength obscures the reality of weakness. Don’t believe him.

You could see this a few ways: Is Trump playing a part, making a bet or triggering a crisis? Those are the options. I am not certain he knows the answer. Trump has always been an improviser. But if you take it as calculated, here is the calculation: Perhaps this Supreme Court, stocked with his appointees, gives him powers no peacetime president has ever possessed. Perhaps all of this becomes legal now that he has asserted its legality. It is not impossible to imagine that bet paying off.

But Trump’s odds are bad. So what if the bet fails and his arrogations of power are soundly rejected by the courts? Then comes the question of constitutional crisis: Does he ignore the court’s ruling? To do that would be to attempt a coup. I wonder if they have the stomach for it. The withdrawal of the Office of Management and Budget’s order to freeze spending suggests they don’t. Bravado aside, Trump’s political capital is thin. Both in his first and second terms, he has entered office with approval ratings below that of any president in the modern era. Gallup has Trump’s approval rating at 47 percent — about 10 points beneath Joe Biden’s in January 2021.

There is a reason Trump is doing all of this through executive orders rather than submitting these same directives as legislation to pass through Congress. A more powerful executive could persuade Congress to eliminate the spending he opposes or reform the civil service to give himself the powers of hiring and firing that he seeks. To write these changes into legislation would make them more durable and allow him to argue their merits in a more strategic way. Even if Trump’s aim is to bring the civil service to heel — to rid it of his opponents and turn it to his own ends — he would be better off arguing that he is simply trying to bring the high-performance management culture of Silicon Valley to the federal government. You never want a power grab to look like a power grab.

But Republicans have a three-seat edge in the House and a 53-seat majority in the Senate. Trump has done nothing to reach out to Democrats. If Trump tried to pass this agenda as legislation, it would most likely fail in the House, and it would certainly die before the filibuster in the Senate. And that would make Trump look weak. Trump does not want to look weak. He remembers John McCain humiliating him in his first term by casting the deciding vote against Obamacare repeal.

That is the tension at the heart of Trump’s whole strategy: Trump is acting like a king because he is too weak to govern like a president. He is trying to substitute perception for reality. He is hoping that perception then becomes reality. That can only happen if we believe him.

The flurry of activity is meant to suggest the existence of a plan. The Trump team wants it known that they’re ready this time. They will control events rather than be controlled by them. The closer you look, the less true that seems. They are scrambling and flailing already. They are leaking against one another already. We’ve learned, already, that the O.M.B. directive was drafted, reportedly, without the input or oversight of key Trump officials — “it didn’t go through the proper approval process,” an administration official told The Washington Post. For this to be the process and product of a signature initiative in the second week of a president’s second term is embarrassing.

But it’s not just the O.M.B. directive. The Trump administration is waging an immediate war on the bureaucracy, trying to replace the “deep state” it believes hampered it in the first term. A big part of this project seems to have been outsourced to Elon Musk, who is bringing the tactics he used at Twitter to the federal government. He has longtime aides at the Office of Personnel Management, and the email sent to nearly all federal employees even reused the subject line of the email he sent to Twitter employees: “Fork in the Road.” Musk wants you to know it was him.

The email offers millions of civil servants a backdoor buyout: Agree to resign and in theory, at least, you can collect your paycheck and benefits until the end of September without doing any work. The Department of Government Efficiency account on X described it this way: “Take the vacation you always wanted, or just watch movies and chill, while receiving your full government pay and benefits.” The Washington Post reported that the email “blindsided” many in the Trump administration who would normally have consulted on a notice like that.

I suspect Musk thinks of the federal work force as a huge mass of woke ideologues. But most federal workers have very little to do with politics. About 16 percent of the federal work force is in health care. These are, for instance, nurses and doctors who work for the Veterans Affairs department. How many of them does Musk want to lose? What plans does the V.A. have for attracting and training their replacements? How quickly can he do it?

The Social Security Administration has more than 59,000 employees. Does Musk know which ones are essential to operations and unusually difficult to replace? One likely outcome of this scheme is that a lot of talented people who work in nonpolitical jobs and could make more elsewhere take the lengthy vacation and leave government services in tatters. Twitter worked poorly after Musk’s takeover, with more frequent outages and bugs, but its outages are not a national scandal. When V.A. health care degrades, it is. To have sprung this attack on the civil service so loudly and publicly and brazenly is to be assured of the blame if anything goes wrong.

What Trump wants you to see in all this activity is command. What is really in all this activity is chaos. They do not have some secret reservoir of focus and attention the rest of us do not. They have convinced themselves that speed and force is a strategy unto itself — that it is, in a sense, a replacement for a real strategy. Don’t believe them.

I had a conversation a couple months ago with someone who knows how the federal government works about as well as anyone alive. I asked him what would worry him most if he saw Trump doing it. What he told me is that he would worry most if Trump went slowly. If he began his term by doing things that made him more popular and made his opposition weaker and more confused. If he tried to build strength for the midterms while slowly expanding his powers and chipping away at the deep state where it was weakest.

But he didn’t. And so the opposition to Trump, which seemed so listless after the election, is beginning to rouse itself.

There is a subreddit for federal employees where  one of the top posts reads: “This non ‘buyout’ really seems to have backfired. I’ll be honest, before that email went out, I was looking for any way to get out of this fresh hell. But now I am fired up to make these goons as frustrated as possible.” As I write this, it’s been upvoted more than 39,000 times and civil servant after civil servant is echoing the initial sentiment.

In Iowa this week, Democrats flipped a State Senate seat in a district that Trump won easily in 2024. The attempted spending freeze gave Democrats their voice back, as they zeroed in on the popular programs Trump had imperiled. Trump isn’t building support; he’s losing it. Trump isn’t fracturing his opposition; he’s uniting it.

This is the weakness of the strategy that Bannon proposed and Trump is following. It is a strategy that forces you into overreach. To keep the zone flooded, you have to keep acting, keep moving, keep creating new cycles of outrage or fear. You overwhelm yourself. And there’s only so much you can do through executive orders. Soon enough, you have to go beyond what you can actually do. And when you do that, you either trigger a constitutional crisis or you reveal your own weakness.

Trump may not see his own fork in the road coming. He may believe he has the power he is claiming. That would be a mistake on his part — a self-deception that could doom his presidency. But the real threat is if he persuades the rest of us to believe he has power he does not have.

The first two weeks of Trump’s presidency have not shown his strength. He is trying to overwhelm you. He is trying to keep you off-balance. He is trying to persuade you of something that isn’t true. Don’t believe him.

 

 

Edited by wood

5 hours ago, DreadHead said:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/digital-assets/2025/02/02/this-needs-to-stop-now-elon-musk-confirms-radical-doge-us-treasury-plan/

Now, as fears emerge Trump’s administration is “dangerously” undermining the U.S. dollar, Musk has confirmed he wants to put the U.S. Treasury on a blockchain, the technology that underpins bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies—including Musk’s pet project dogecoin.

---

How are both parties just sitting back and letting this happen? Elon was having private conversations with Putin last year, he has no legitimate claim to the network and data he is collecting, and he's running around bragging about putting the Treasure on a blockchain. WTF!

One party holds the House, the Senate, the Presidency, and the Supreme Court and you’re “both partying”? What do you think the Democrat’s options are here? Unless you get a Republican to step up this country’s cooked.

1 hour ago, wood said:

Re: the Canadian hockey fans booing the anthem, I'd forgotten about this, but does anyone remember the Maple Leafs' fans stepping in last year to sing it for us after their singer's microphone stopped working?

We can no longer have nice things.

Thanks, Trump.

 

I watch hockey with a good canadian friend every week or so. We both stand up for the anthems. Hokey on TV? Sure. But he does it so I will as well. Green card dude, been a teacher for 21 years in the US. Yeah, he is gonna get deported.

2 hours ago, wood said:

Really good article imho from the NYT today that was gifted to me earlier today.

I agree with Klein here, that what Trump is displaying with this blizkrieg of EOs is weakness, not strength. 

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/02/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-trump-column-read.html?unlocked_article_code=1.t04.mwSZ.KfcjTizcj7to&smid=url-share

 

Made it a decent ways thru but stopped at “trumps political capital is thin”… they still don’t get it. 

What an astonishing level of self-harm.  Simply malicious, broke-brained idiocy.  There’s not even ideology, it’s just brainworms.

image.thumb.jpeg.dd2713a0f0add5a277cf38c091f96e85.jpeg

10 hours ago, F250 said:

Concern for high egg prices are so last year, nobody cares anymore.

The ever increasing cost of birth control for chickens...

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ecf09af5d796fb96f850cf4e2b475bee.jpg

Legal eagles want to chime in? This was released by FEMA today. Only agency I saw post it.

NOTICE OF COURT ORDER
You are hereby advised that a temporary restraining order has been entered in the case of New
York et al. v. Trump, No. 25-cv-39-JJM-PAS (D.R.I.), ECF No. 50 (Jan. 31, 2025). You are
receiving this Notice pursuant to the Court’s directive that notice of the order be provided “to all
Defendants and agencies and their employees, contractors, and grantees by Monday, February 3,
2025, at 9 a.m.” A copy of the Court’s Order is attached for reference.
This case challenges an alleged “pause” of certain Federal financial assistance, related to OMB
Memorandum M-25-13, Temporary Pause of Agency Grant, Loan, and Other Financial
Assistance Programs (Jan. 27, 2025) (“OMB Memo”). Although that OMB Memo was
rescinded on January 29, 2025, the plaintiffs in the above-referenced case allege that the funding
pause directed by the OMB Memo is still in effect, including because of recently issued
Executive Orders by the President.
 

Spoiler
or title[.]” (Order, pg.12). Additionally, any decision to pause, stop, delay, or
otherwise withhold federal financial assistance programs must comply with all
notice and procedural requirements in the award, agreement, or other instrument
setting forth the terms of the award or obligation.
4. Out of an abundance of caution, all federal agencies (even those not named as
defendants in the case) should comply with the above-referenced terms.
As the Court’s Order reflects, the above terms are temporary as litigation in the case is ongoing.
At present, however, the Court’s Order is in effect and must be complied with.
If you have any questions about the scope or effect of the Court’s Order, please contact your
agency’s Office of General Counsel or your grant officer, as appropriate. Thank you for your
attention to this matter

 

This speech is attributed to the Assistant Head of School at Liberty Christian in Argyle. Yes, that’s where Jason Witten coaches the football team.

9ecbebfb1af2a3750db189f3efbffd3f.jpg

Just now, royiv said:

It’s always the democrats fault. Can’t expect the republicans to have a spine and stand up for the constitution.

If the wannabe dictator is going to be stopped, the GQP is going to have to do it.  Which means turn out the lights the party’s over

 

16 hours ago, royiv said:

Paid $8.28 for a dozen organic eggs at HEB this afternoon. When the fuck are the promised cuts to my egg prices coming?

As soon as the grocery stores read Trump's executive order I guess. 

12 minutes ago, The Dog said:

 

Not gonna lie, I am looking forward to Trump's nickname for a democrat named Schatz.

9 minutes ago, GhostOfTomJoad said:
1 hour ago, Horn Dog said:
Praise be

Blessed be the fruit.

Under his eye.

Everything that Musk is doing is unconstitutional, but that doesn't matter because Trump will just pardon him.

4 minutes ago, bolverk said:

Under his eye.

May the lord open

(I use these lines when someone wishes me a blessed day...  yeah, I know, I'm an asshole)

Edited by locodos

33 minutes ago, The Dog said:

 

well glad to see someone is at least trying to do something finally besides sternly worded letters and pithy tweets. 

15 minutes ago, The Dog said:

image.png.700c759ce59f108b0f43b043f8495d7a.png

lol

oh i hope maybe one of Anon secretly works for Elon lol

27 minutes ago, C-Man said:

Rubio says he’s acting director of USAID as humanitarian agency is taken over by the State Department

Little Marco takes over USAID: https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/03/politics/usaid-washington-workers/index.html

Um, well see, um, yeah.... He already was. State has a lot of bureaus and agencies within it. Non-proliferation, human rights, propaganda, I mean public affairs, and yes, DEVELOPMENT. State runs Foreign Military sales, not DOD.

USAID kind of is a part of State. There is not Secretary of international Development. The Agency Director works with the Sec of State. It is not an independent group. That is why its budget is tied closely. A lot of USAID's overseas management budget is tiny. One reason, It is within the State budget. The Country Director reports to the Ambassador, etc.

The cost is going to be large for this transformation. New systems, emails, etc. And yes, new leadership.

 

7 minutes ago, InkaUtexas said:

Um, well see, um, yeah.... He already was. State has a lot of bureaus and agencies within it. Non-proliferation, human rights, propaganda, I mean public affairs, and yes, DEVELOPMENT. State runs Foreign Military sales, not DOD.

USAID kind of is a part of State. There is not Secretary of international Development. The Agency Director works with the Sec of State. It is not an independent group. That is why its budget is tied closely. A lot of USAID's overseas management budget is tiny. One reason, It is within the State budget. The Country Director reports to the Ambassador, etc.

The cost is going to be large for this transformation. New systems, emails, etc. And yes, new leadership.

 

Actually I think USAID is an independent agency at least in terms that they don't (didn't) have a cabinet secretary that they reported to. They most likely worked closely with State and the NSC, but they didn't officially report to them. 

 

11 minutes ago, Ted Lange said:

 

This is the Central Valley lakes that were released into a flood zone miles away- great job by the press on the follow up. 

  • Popular Post
12 minutes ago, Ted Lange said:

 

The water released literally did not and does not flow to Southern California....where LA is actually located.  He's a psychopathic lying madman.

Quote

Now, the water released from dams at Lake Kaweah and Lake Success is rushing into a dry lakebed in the Central Valley, where experts say it can't flow to Southern California and will likely go to waste.

"There is absolutely no connection between this water and the water needed for firefighting in L.A.," said Peter Gleick, a climate and hydrology expert. "There's no physical connection. There's no way to move the water from where it is to the Los Angeles basin."

There is literally no functional hydrological connection between the Tulare lake bed and L.A.

He's a fucking psychotic idiot.  Seriously, @realgreggym, please tell us how this is the "grown-up" thing to do -- order the release of water hundreds of miles away, not connected to the L.A. area at all, AFTER the fires are largely under control anyway, makes ANY fucking sense.  It's an idiotic stunt, meant to please idiots.

2 minutes ago, C-Man said:

Trump orders creation of US sovereign wealth fund, says it could buy TikTok

https://www.reuters.com/markets/wealth/trump-signs-executive-order-create-sovereign-wealth-fund-2025-02-03/

Percentage chances that if something like this is created, it will be used primarily to 1) enrich Trump allies who will earn huge sums serving as its "managers," and 2) enrich Trump allies who will be the beneficiaries of much of its spending?

I remember the old stories of the Mexican highway department, many decades ago, spending $5 million building a fantastic new road....that went to only one place, the Mexican president's large and remote ranch.  That is exactly the kind of thing this sort of slush fund would be used for.

Drain the swamp my ass.

2 minutes ago, C-Man said:

Trump orders creation of US sovereign wealth fund, says it could buy TikTok

https://www.reuters.com/markets/wealth/trump-signs-executive-order-create-sovereign-wealth-fund-2025-02-03/

he needs an act of Congress for this- there is a whole popular musical about it and everything. he can’t appropriate taxpayer dollars into a slush fund by decree. Honestly the press is failing at showing the weaknesses of attempting to govern by lawless EOs and doing little more than repeating verbatim the press releases from the White House 

1 minute ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

 

How do you fund a wealth fund if you are $36 trillion in debt?

 

 

With blockchain.  Come on, keep up.

11 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

The water released literally did not and does not flow to Southern California....where LA is actually located.  He's a psychopathic lying madman.

There is literally no functional hydrological connection between the Tulare lake bed and L.A.

He's a fucking psychotic idiot.  Seriously, @realgreggym, please tell us how this is the "grown-up" thing to do -- order the release of water hundreds of miles away, not connected to the L.A. area at all, AFTER the fires are largely under control anyway, makes ANY fucking sense.  It's an idiotic stunt, meant to please idiots.

Midland needs water, so let's drain Lake Brownwood.

Sure, that checks out 100%.

8 minutes ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

How do you fund a wealth fund if you are $36 trillion in debt?

Quote

“I’m the king of debt. I’m great with debt. Nobody knows debt better than me,” Trump told Norah O’Donnell in an interview that aired on “CBS This Morning.” 

We elected this.  We elected the greatest businessman of all time.....who has ended up in bankruptcy a jillion times.

11 minutes ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

 

How do you fund a wealth fund if you are $36 trillion in debt?

 

 

Administration officials did not say how the fund would operate or be financed, but Trump has previously said it could be funded by "tariffs and other intelligent things."
 

Football ... Basketball ... Baseball ... Other Sports ... Futbol ... 🤫995🤫 ... Gambling ... Movies & TV ... Music ... Hobbies ... Lulz ... Food & Travel ... Daily Texan ... Business & Markets ... Cloak Room ... Help ... For Sale ... Board Discussion ... Advertise... Tailgate Donations

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