Yeah, you must have missed the last four years of the Biden Administration....
Incoming Trump Administration
- Thread starter GURPS
- Start date
Yeah, you must have missed the last four years of the Biden Administration....
So, to be clear, you are OK with a one-sided staff report released by the Democrat Oversight and Accountability Committee whose ranking member is Jamie Raskin? Kind of like all the evidence that Schiff had but never showed, isn't it?
You’re absolutely right Joe is way creepier than anybody up to this point.
Liberal Media Is Already Melting Down Over Pam Bondi
Florida’s former attorney general, Pam Bondi, will serve as the next attorney general of the United States under the Trump Administration. As Republicans celebrate and applaud the president-elect’s pick, Democrats are already hitting the panic button due to her tough-on-immigration stance and vocal opposition to President Joe Biden’s expose of his family’s ties to the corrupt Ukrainian gas company Burisma.
In other words, Bondi won’t pander to the left. She will fight for what’s right both for the country and the American people— and that’s why Democrats are scared out of their minds.
MSNBC couldn’t deny that Bondi has an impressive background because she “actually knows how to do this job.”
Two Far-Left Veterans Behind Claim Pete Hegseth’s Tattoos Are Linked to White Supremacy
Reuters reported last week that one of those soldiers who reported him was now-retired Master Sergeant DeRicko Gaither, who was then the unit’s head of physical security. Gaither had sent the then-D.C. National Guard Commander Maj. Gen. William Walker an email with a photo of Hegseth’s tattoos.
Gaither’s email, published by the Associated Press, was a word salad accusing Hegseth of being a white supremacist. It said:
According to Jerry Dunleavy, a former investigator for the House Republicans’ investigation into the Biden administration’s bungled Afghanistan withdrawal, parts of Gaither’s email were plagiarized from a 2018 article by an “extreme leftwing professor” who identifies herself as a “intersectional feminist”:
Gaither, who is black, has a podcast where he has only featured black guests and used the hashtag #BlackAuthor when promoting his wife’s children’s book on Instagram. He also recently liked a post on LinkedIn congratulating the Mecklenburg County Sheriff’s Office’s “FIRST all female armed detention officer graduating class,” whose members also happen to all be black.
Despite his seeming discrimination against non-black people, his email claiming Hegseth’s tattoos were associated with white supremacy was enough to convince the D.C. National Guard commander at that time, who is also black, to revoke Hegseth’s orders for the inauguration.
Now, Gaither’s email is being used to again suggest Hegseth is a white supremacist.
But Gaither was not the originator of the smear. It was another pro-DEI veteran who is heavily involved in Democrat activism.
A Navy veteran named Travis Akers, who was still serving at the time, first tweeted out the photo of Hegseth’s tattoos, which was forwarded to Gaither, according to the Washington Post.
Akers deleted his tweet but not before it was captured:
Akers has been openly involved in Democrat politics since his retirement from the military in June 2023. He co-founded a pro-gun reform group called Left of Bang along with other far-left veterans that included Fred Wellman, the former executive director of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project.
Akers is also on the board of directors of DemCast, which states its mission is “to cultivate, amplify & maximize the impact of grassroots digital media, bolstering blue electoral and policy victories at all levels of government, across America.”
Akers listed on his LinkedIn account a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in the Workplace Certificate from the University of South Florida, issued in April 2024.
In 2024, he ran unsuccessfully for a school board in Duval County Public Schools to represent District 7 in northern Florida, but he withdrew before his first public debate. During his campaign, he espoused support for “equity” and “inclusivity”– two major tenets of DEI.
Akers also serves as an adviser for the Jacksonville Urban League, whose mission is to “enable African Americans as well as other underserved communities to secure economic self-reliance, parity, power and civil rights.”
Also in 2024, he campaigned for Democrat Vice President Kamala Harris, participating in an event with other far-left veterans, including Wellman, disgraced Navy veteran Malcolm Nance, Army Gen. (Ret.) Tammy Smith, former Army veteran Naveed Shah, and Army military spouse Rebekah Sanderlin. Sanderlin has attacked conservative troops and veterans despite being affiliated with the non-partisan United Service Organization (USO), which is supposed to serve troops regardless of political beliefs.
While Akers has called for “transcend[ing] the bitterness,” he has frequently launched personal attacks against strangers on social media.
He then frequently deletes those personal attacks to erase the trail and has changed his social media handle on X several times.
He also has a history of threatening to doxx social media users.
On July 18, 2024, he taunted a user: “Uh oh. Looks like little Timmy clicked on a linked [sic] that captures an IP address and geolocated the device. It’s going to be an interesting Monday morning for little Timmy.” He deleted that tweet afterwards.
On May 6, 2024, he posted on X to another user, “You should use a VPN, your IP address shows your name.”
On June 1, 2024, he wrote about another user, “I’m holding on to the identity of Sandal for a rainy day. I can say this, it’s not the person we initially expected, but still someone known to the politically inclined of Jacksonville.”
On XXX, he posted, “Geolocating this image made unmasking this account easier than most. Thanks, ‘Catherine.’
He then posted, on 6/27/24, “I didn’t doxx her. I let her know I know who she is. So if she wants to continue her behavior, that’s fine, but she now knows it’s not anonymous. Stand behind what you say when the mask is removed.”
Akers has written as recently as 2020 about his battle with alcoholism, lying to his wife about it, and being part of an anonymous group to deal with it.
Despite Akers’ checkered past and open activism for Democrats, his claims that Hegseth’s tattoos are linked to white supremacy have resurfaced as Hegseth prepares for his confirmation as Trump administration defense secretary.
Akers is a real piece of shite
More from Newsmax:
What is the purpose of the military if not this? And, frankly, given the fact there are tens of thousands of violent criminals, Chinese nationals, and terrorists invading our southern border, using the military is not only appropriate, but necessary.
Most X users agree:
Finally, you can’t talk about his withdrawal without mentioning all the salacious sex allegations about Matt Gaetz and his alleged just-underage girlfriend. So I looked into it. The full story is literally unbelievable. I’ve seen enough to convince me it happened, and I already knew the intelligence and law enforcement agencies were out of control, but I’m still not sure I can believe it has gotten this bad.
Matt’s story involves at least four U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies, a covert American spy who the Iranians allegedly ‘disappeared’, an illegal, off-book, decade-long intelligence community plan to rescue the disappeared spy, and a blackmail scheme by the intelligence agencies fabricated against Matt Gaetz and his wealthy family to raise off-budget to fund the rescue or pay the ransom.
Try to comprehend this unreal Daily Mail headline from 2021:
That’s only the tip of the sordid, weaponized, corrupt iceberg. For a more complete picture (leaving off a lot that nobody knows for sure), read this thread by @Villgecrazylady on Twitter/X. No wonder Gaetz never bothers explaining what happened; where would he start? And nobody would believe it anyway.
And it’s no wonder Gaetz, who refuses to take lobbyist money, hates the Justice Department and the intelligence agencies. Maybe the most convincing fact of Gaetz’s innocence is that, even though they tried hard to screw him to the wall, they failed.
☕️ SOMETHING’S HAPPENING ☙ Friday, November 22, 2024 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠
Trump swap Gaetz for Bondi and swap for judges; Tucker theory; turbo cancer picks up steam while experts resist; 5th contamination study; covid success; laugh and cry ads show conservative wins; more.
www.coffeeandcovid.com
Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal included an op-ed titled, “Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy: The DOGE Plan to Reform Government.” Depending on how things play out, this op-ed, which for the first time disclosed details of how the ‘efficiency’ plan will work, could become one of the Nation’s historic documents, a modern Declaration of Independence. Or re-Independence. Whatever, you get the idea. Freedom from the Swarming Bureaucracy.
Somehow, in the rush of events this week, this historic op-ed that described exactly how Musk and Ramaswamy plan to streamline the bloated U.S. government, got much less attention than it deserved. The plan potentially affects every man, woman, and child in the country, not to mention the vast federal workforce, and you’d think the talking heads would have something to say about it. But nope.
First, the article defined the problem: Our representative government has grown too big and unwieldy for our elected representatives to manage. Thus, over the course of time, the overwhelmed (if not outright lazy) politicians delegated more and more management responsibility to unelected, partisan bureaucrats, assembling in the process a massive, biased federal bureaucracy that has become an anti-democratic shadow government. Elected representatives come and go, performatively figure-skating across a peaceful frozen lake, while all the real business of government frantically transacts in the churning, sunless waters concealed below the icy surface.
Whenever a particular politician stops skating and tries to peer into a crack in the ice, the pallid finger of the deep state emerges from the frozen waters and pokes them in the eye.
Musk’s op-ed answered all the many critics of the “Department of Government Efficiency,” or DOGE. It’s been tried many times before, critics have correctly pointed out in stacks of articles and op-eds since the election. It’s too big, at best DOGE could only clip a little off the margins they complained. It would take more than four years, and Trump doesn’t have the time, the critics shrieked. And finally, DOGE has no power and Trump can’t do anything without Congress.
In response, Musk announced that DOGE will have it all wrapped up in less than two years, completing its mission by July 4, 2026, well before the mid-term elections. So, it’s to be a sprint after all, and not any kind of bureaucratic marathon. They don’t expect any effective deep state resistance. This goal would seem like nothing more than a silly pot-smoker’s fantasy if Elon weren’t so well-versed in how government operates. But since the space billionaire knows his way around DC, the goal suggests instead that speed is part of the strategy.
The article was light on particular policies, but the details it did include were practical and made sense. Elon promised the process would lean into legal and Constitutional executive powers and not rely on Congress. Remember, the deep state works for the President, our Nation’s chief executive officer. The problem for a particular president is figuring out who exactly does work for him.
They aren’t going to slow down to try to figure out who’s infesting the deep state, so that it can be carefully pruned by hand. They plan to use a weed wacker. So, for example, Trump will cancel all the generous “work from home” policies that mushroomed up during the pandemic, which Elon and Vivek expect will “result in a wave of voluntary terminations” by employees who can no longer tolerate the thought of getting dressed and going into the office.
Similarly, the authors suggested that executive rule changes to relocate federal agencies out of DC would trigger yet more “voluntary terminations.” I guess they imagine some DC residents will reject moving for work to slower-paced, pastoral environments like Kansas.
Next, DOGE will lean into the logic of the two recent, anti-bureaucratic Supreme Court decisions: West Virginia v. EPA (2022) and this year’s Loper Bright decision, which terminated the much-hated Chevron Doctrine. According to Elon, using embedded lawyers in the agencies and artificial intelligence tools, DOGE will interrogate each agency’s regulatory books, querying whether regulations confine themselves to the narrow limits of what Congress specifically authorized.
The majority of regulations will almost certainly fail that test. Elon said they would be collected into batches and sent to Trump in a series of executive orders requiring agencies to either reform or rescind the non-compliant rules. It will be a regulatory bloodbath.
These two recent Supreme Court decisions are critical for ensuring that the fixes stick beyond Trump’s term. As Vivek pointed out, “after those regulations are fully rescinded, a future president couldn’t simply flip the switch and revive them but would instead have to ask Congress to do so.” If I didn’t know better, I’d suspect the two decisions might be part of a much bigger plan that began during Trump’s first term.
Finally, massive cuts in regulations will necessarily make large numbers of federal workers redundant. Redundancy is one of the only ways to remove federal employees without getting tangled up in unionized federal civil-service protections. The law allows for broad “reductions in force,” so long as they don’t target specific workers. Musk promised all redundant employees would be treated respectfully, offered incentives to retire early, given generous severance packages, and aided in applying for private sector jobs.
There was much more, read the whole thing. (Try this link if you hit a paywall.)
The bottom line was: this is a breathtaking, grand, brilliant vision. Musk and Ramaswamy answered each of the critics’ objections, and proposed an efficiency plan that, in spite of all odds, and despite and having the deck completely stacked against it, might just work.
www.coffeeandcovid.com
Somehow, in the rush of events this week, this historic op-ed that described exactly how Musk and Ramaswamy plan to streamline the bloated U.S. government, got much less attention than it deserved. The plan potentially affects every man, woman, and child in the country, not to mention the vast federal workforce, and you’d think the talking heads would have something to say about it. But nope.
First, the article defined the problem: Our representative government has grown too big and unwieldy for our elected representatives to manage. Thus, over the course of time, the overwhelmed (if not outright lazy) politicians delegated more and more management responsibility to unelected, partisan bureaucrats, assembling in the process a massive, biased federal bureaucracy that has become an anti-democratic shadow government. Elected representatives come and go, performatively figure-skating across a peaceful frozen lake, while all the real business of government frantically transacts in the churning, sunless waters concealed below the icy surface.
Whenever a particular politician stops skating and tries to peer into a crack in the ice, the pallid finger of the deep state emerges from the frozen waters and pokes them in the eye.
Musk’s op-ed answered all the many critics of the “Department of Government Efficiency,” or DOGE. It’s been tried many times before, critics have correctly pointed out in stacks of articles and op-eds since the election. It’s too big, at best DOGE could only clip a little off the margins they complained. It would take more than four years, and Trump doesn’t have the time, the critics shrieked. And finally, DOGE has no power and Trump can’t do anything without Congress.
In response, Musk announced that DOGE will have it all wrapped up in less than two years, completing its mission by July 4, 2026, well before the mid-term elections. So, it’s to be a sprint after all, and not any kind of bureaucratic marathon. They don’t expect any effective deep state resistance. This goal would seem like nothing more than a silly pot-smoker’s fantasy if Elon weren’t so well-versed in how government operates. But since the space billionaire knows his way around DC, the goal suggests instead that speed is part of the strategy.
The article was light on particular policies, but the details it did include were practical and made sense. Elon promised the process would lean into legal and Constitutional executive powers and not rely on Congress. Remember, the deep state works for the President, our Nation’s chief executive officer. The problem for a particular president is figuring out who exactly does work for him.
They aren’t going to slow down to try to figure out who’s infesting the deep state, so that it can be carefully pruned by hand. They plan to use a weed wacker. So, for example, Trump will cancel all the generous “work from home” policies that mushroomed up during the pandemic, which Elon and Vivek expect will “result in a wave of voluntary terminations” by employees who can no longer tolerate the thought of getting dressed and going into the office.
Similarly, the authors suggested that executive rule changes to relocate federal agencies out of DC would trigger yet more “voluntary terminations.” I guess they imagine some DC residents will reject moving for work to slower-paced, pastoral environments like Kansas.
Next, DOGE will lean into the logic of the two recent, anti-bureaucratic Supreme Court decisions: West Virginia v. EPA (2022) and this year’s Loper Bright decision, which terminated the much-hated Chevron Doctrine. According to Elon, using embedded lawyers in the agencies and artificial intelligence tools, DOGE will interrogate each agency’s regulatory books, querying whether regulations confine themselves to the narrow limits of what Congress specifically authorized.
The majority of regulations will almost certainly fail that test. Elon said they would be collected into batches and sent to Trump in a series of executive orders requiring agencies to either reform or rescind the non-compliant rules. It will be a regulatory bloodbath.
These two recent Supreme Court decisions are critical for ensuring that the fixes stick beyond Trump’s term. As Vivek pointed out, “after those regulations are fully rescinded, a future president couldn’t simply flip the switch and revive them but would instead have to ask Congress to do so.” If I didn’t know better, I’d suspect the two decisions might be part of a much bigger plan that began during Trump’s first term.
Finally, massive cuts in regulations will necessarily make large numbers of federal workers redundant. Redundancy is one of the only ways to remove federal employees without getting tangled up in unionized federal civil-service protections. The law allows for broad “reductions in force,” so long as they don’t target specific workers. Musk promised all redundant employees would be treated respectfully, offered incentives to retire early, given generous severance packages, and aided in applying for private sector jobs.
There was much more, read the whole thing. (Try this link if you hit a paywall.)
The bottom line was: this is a breathtaking, grand, brilliant vision. Musk and Ramaswamy answered each of the critics’ objections, and proposed an efficiency plan that, in spite of all odds, and despite and having the deck completely stacked against it, might just work.
☕️ DOGE-OPOLY ☙ Saturday, November 23, 2024 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠
Media ignores thoughtful details how DOGE will do the impossible; Trump lawfare grinds to stop; Trump nominates three key health agency heads; Florida issues astonishing health guidance; more.
www.coffeeandcovid.com
The Washington Post ran a story yesterday headlined, “Trump pushes past sting of Gaetz’s exit with flurry of new picks.” Trump nominated most of his Cabinet in the first 20 days after the election. I’m not positive, but I can’t recall a faster transition in the modern era. Yesterday saw a slew of new names for the less prominent roles, including three key positions of special interest to the C&C community. The first was Dr. Janette Nesheiwat for Surgeon General. Here she is in 2022, complaining about military jab mandates:
Of the three health slots named yesterday, Janette’s was the most potentially disappointing, although we remain hopeful. The bad news was that the regular Fox News Contributor, who owns a chain of urgent care centers in New York and is related to lots of career political people in DC, was an early and loud covid jab pusher and a pro-masker who even once demonstrated the double-masking technique on air.
Piling on, buffoonish bowtie doctor and vaccine salesman Peter Hotez, one of the pandemic’s minor villains, called Janette a “good pick.” So that wasn’t too good.
On the plus side, despite pushing jabs, during the pandemic Janette was consistently anti-mandate, pro-religious-exemption, and pro-military. In early 2020, before it went sideways, she even endorsed Trump’s recommendation for using hydroxychloroquine to treat covid infection. We have no idea whether Janette has "evolved" any of her pro-jab positions after seeing how badly things played out. She does seem sane, so there’s a chance.
In any case, the office of Surgeon General is largely symbolic, lacking any particular power besides glorified marketing of government narratives. The Surgeon General says squirrels do not usually make good indoor pets…
Trump’s next two more influential and important health picks were much stronger.
www.coffeeandcovid.com
Of the three health slots named yesterday, Janette’s was the most potentially disappointing, although we remain hopeful. The bad news was that the regular Fox News Contributor, who owns a chain of urgent care centers in New York and is related to lots of career political people in DC, was an early and loud covid jab pusher and a pro-masker who even once demonstrated the double-masking technique on air.
Piling on, buffoonish bowtie doctor and vaccine salesman Peter Hotez, one of the pandemic’s minor villains, called Janette a “good pick.” So that wasn’t too good.
On the plus side, despite pushing jabs, during the pandemic Janette was consistently anti-mandate, pro-religious-exemption, and pro-military. In early 2020, before it went sideways, she even endorsed Trump’s recommendation for using hydroxychloroquine to treat covid infection. We have no idea whether Janette has "evolved" any of her pro-jab positions after seeing how badly things played out. She does seem sane, so there’s a chance.
In any case, the office of Surgeon General is largely symbolic, lacking any particular power besides glorified marketing of government narratives. The Surgeon General says squirrels do not usually make good indoor pets…
Trump’s next two more influential and important health picks were much stronger.
☕️ DOGE-OPOLY ☙ Saturday, November 23, 2024 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠
Media ignores thoughtful details how DOGE will do the impossible; Trump lawfare grinds to stop; Trump nominates three key health agency heads; Florida issues astonishing health guidance; more.
www.coffeeandcovid.com
Trump Border Czar Tom Homan Plans PR War over Migration and Repatriations
Homan has a tough enemy. Pro-migration advocates have their own poll-tested narratives, and boatloads of cash, many advocacy groups, skewed polls, and media support to push their messages via many channels. “I think it’s really important to pin this [deportation fight] on Donald Trump” because he does not want to be blamed for the drama of deportations, said a leading advocate for more migration.
These pro-migration groups cite the economic gains from their Extraction Migration economic strategy — but they ignore the domestic economic losses, civic damage, and national risks, and the vast civic damage done to the migrants’ home countries, such as Haiti and Nicaragua.
They raise alarms about separated families, crying mothers, border chaos, and military-style enforcement — but they ignore Americans’ civil right to secure borders, the many migration-caused crimes in the United States, as well as the migrants’ deaths, the child labor, and the migrants’ left-behind families.
“There’s never been a bigger separator of families than [Joe Biden’s border chief, Alejandro] Mayorkas,” said Jay Palmer, an expert in labor trafficking expert and former advisor to President Donald Trump. “What he did was he ripped [foreign] families apart, left the kids there and brought the men to the United States to work as cheap labor”:
All of Trump's prior criticisms of EV mandates were correct. They do amount to a de facto ban on gasoline-powered vehicles despite the Times' best efforts to claim that's false above. The strict emissions standards put in place would force manufacturers to make EVs at least two-thirds of all new cars sold. That's eight times the current number. That would mean lots of people would not be able to get the gas-powered cars they want while prices of used, gas-powered cars would no doubt skyrocket. It would be a disaster for Americans.
Big Auto, which has long supported Democrats politically, sees the EV mandates and subsidies as a cash cow, though. They've put infrastructure in place to take advantage and they don't want to lose that. That's also the reason the UAW is against ending EV mandates and subsidies. They have gotten used to suckling at the government teet and don't want the free ride to stop.
Trump picks former adviser Brooke Rollins for Agriculture Secretary
President-elect Donald Trump on Saturday selected Brooke Rollins, a former White House domestic policy adviser, to serve as his agriculture secretary.
“Brooke’s commitment to support the American Farmer, defense of American Food Self-Sufficiency, and the restoration of Agriculture-dependent American Small Towns is second to none,” Trump said.
“As our next Secretary of Agriculture, Brooke will spearhead the effort to protect American Farmers, who are truly the backbone of our Country.”
Rollins is the president and CEO of the America First Policy Institute, a think tank led by former Trump officials, which was created with the goal of preparing for the president-elect’s return to the White House.
The Wall Street Journal first reported that Rollins was the expected nominee for the cabinet position.
Trump administration takes shape: President-elect completes top 15 Cabinet picks
President-elect Trump has rounded out his picks for the top 15 positions within his Cabinet, handpicking an array of establishment and unconventional officials for top posts in just three weeks.
Trump has moved at a rapid pace to shape his upcoming administration, which stands in contrast to his first run at the presidency in 2016.
The president-elect's picks have diverse ideologies united under Trump's Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement.