Friday, February 7, 2025
Musk Strikes Again
It is reported that Musk claims to have spotted $100 billion in fraud and waste in the Medicare and Medicaid programs. I wish I thought it was an exaggeration.
Lots of unnecessary procedures and frivolous charges are submitted to the Feds. When my elderly mother was hospitalized prior to her death the hospital charged $175 a day for psychiatric services which they did not provide, but billed Medicare for nonetheless.
When we pointed this out to them, they replied "What do you care? You won't pay it, Medicare will. We bill all inpatients that fee." Hat tip to Lucianne.com for the link.
Gov. Newsom Gets One Right
Mostly CA Governor Gavin Newsom does dumb, woke things. And I berate him for it. When he does something right, maybe I ought to take note, yes?
In that spirit, Breitbart quotes the following from the San Francisco Chronicle (behind their paywall):
Gov. Gavin Newsom is ordering the state to speed up its rulemaking for wildfire safety around homes in fire-prone areas that would ban most plants and combustible materials like mulch and wood fencing.
The rules would require people to clear an area within 5 feet of homes — dubbed zone zero, or an ember resistant zone — of any flammable materials, with the exception of mature trees. The rules would apply only in areas where the risk of fire is rated “very high,” in accordance with the state’s fire-risk designations.
The DrsC had a hilltop home in rural CA which survived the fire which burned the town of Paradise. That fire came within 10 feet of our house but it nevertheless survived with only smoke damage. We followed rules more stringent than those Newsom is proposing, and they worked.
If homeowners in the LA area had done so, more of their homes would have survived. Perhaps Newsom is only echoing smart advice he's been given, but credit where it's due - he is correct. The state should mandate it and cite homeowners who refuse.
Thursday, February 6, 2025
A Better Revenge
After the election and Trump’s victory, a number of Dims claimed they feared retribution, that he would unleash the Lawfare the Dims perfected back on them with (pardon the pun) trumped-up criminal charges. So far we see little evidence of this.
I’m guessing Trump is learning you can punish your opponent more effectively by destroying the edifice of graft, confederates and propaganda that he has built up, aka the Deep or Administrative State. Doing so not only makes your persecutors miserable but also hinders their return to hegemony when the next Dim president is elected.
AG Bondi may eventually find some prosecutable offenses done by the prior leaders but it won’t happen soon and likely won’t involve bogus, nit-picky stuff.
Move Fast, Break Things
Someday there may be a little book of the sayings of “Chairman” Musk, and one of them will be this.
Very few in the bureaucracy actually work the weekend, so it's like the opposing team just leaves the field for 2 days! Working the weekend is a superpower.
The Feds have had a monopoly nearly forever, and that makes them lazy. Warriors don’t take off the weekends. Musk’s ‘troops’ are fighting a war against government waste, their opposition works a nominal 40 hours a week, maybe from home, over 5 days. Ceteris paribus, which side would you suppose is winning?
Musk is moving too fast to be stopped. The bureaucrats and their Dim allies in Congress have been left sputtering with impotent rage and indignation while Musk enacts a cross between a “hostile takeover" and a forensic audit. After the way the Dims treated Trump, you have to know it is hostile.
Church Membership Down
Power Line's numbers guy - Steve Hayward - has a chart with interesting data. The subject matter: membership in mainline Protestant churches. You might guess it is declining, and you'd be right.
I don't find these numbers particularly discouraging. While all of these are declining, the group that is growing - not shown on the chart - is the group who answered the church affiliation question by checking "None."
Wednesday, February 5, 2025
A Second Robin
The Western Journal reports SecDef Pete Hegseth Xing as follows:
In December 2024, the @USArmy had its best recruiting number in 12 years.
In January 2025, the Army hit its best recruiting number in 15 YEARS.
Signs, if any is needed, that our society has experienced a sea-change, an inflection point. In 2016 we saw Trump elected and thought, "One robin does not make a Spring." In 2024 we saw Trump reelected and thought, "That's a second robin, Spring has arrived."
Still Taking No Prisoners
Almost as an aside, the always unfiltered Kurt Schlichter drops the following gem in a column mostly about Republican establishment figures who resist the Trump initiatives.
The whole trans thing started out as live and let live – “OK, you want to pretend you’re a girl, fine, just leave me alone” – and became them not only telling us that we had to lie to keep our jobs but also give them access to our women and children. We are far beyond living and letting live – we offered it, and they rejected it, so now there’s a new deal. You don’t get to be a freaky weirdo and expect us to tolerate it.
I'll say it again, if your 'gender' doesn't agree with your plumbing, the problem is between your ears, not your legs. Gender "issues" are properly the responsibility of psychiatry, not of plastic surgeons.
Who Is Farage?
Buried in an article about Trump leaving the U.K. out of his tariff threat to the EU, and whether this means Brexit is finally paying off, is a statistic that I have not seen before. It relates to the trouble the Conservative or Tory Party is in with Brit voters.
A poll from YouGov on Tuesday put Farage’s Reform UK ahead of Labour, in first place nationally for the first time. Polling this far out from the next election is easy to write off as meaningless. But while today’s numbers can’t predict what will happen in 2029, it would be a mistake to dismiss the risks for Labour.
What those of us sympathetic to the U.K. will want to watch going forward is whether the Tories will co-opt the populist nationalism reflected in Brexit or whether Farage’s Reform UK will absorb the Tories, paralleling the way MAGA absorbed the old GOP. I’m asking the question will Farage be a Ross Perot or a Trump?
Tuesday, February 4, 2025
From Gaza to Glitter?
After meeting with Israel's PM Netanyahu, President Trump came out and announced that he would propose moving the Arab population of Gaza to other countries and then the U.S. taking over the site, cleaning it up, and redeveloping it into a super city, perhaps one modeled on Singapore.
That sounds to me like a slum clearance program, writ large. The Israelis have already demolished most of the buildings so site prep will be clearing the rubble.
Get rid of the tacky poor, build lavish establishments they'll never be able to afford, get the affluent to move in. You can see why the idea appeals to a developer, which Trump is. This is Trump Tower on steroids.
Does it sound like I disapprove? I do, though for different reasons than Democrats will express. My objection is that the U.S. is terrible at nation building, not good at it at all. Recent examples of our failure include Afghanistan and Iraq.
I can honestly write this is the first Presidential proposal of Trump 47 which I don't much like. I'm going to hope it is him stating an aspirational goal when he hopes to actually accomplish some much less grandiose.
Later ... Stephen Green at PJ Media has thoughts similar to mine in the previous sentence. He also gives semi-recent examples of "ethnic cleansing" that have worked!
Why CA Stays Blue
In COTTonLINE’s continuing coverage of the decline and fall of California, here comes a column at Chronicles which adds measurably to that discussion. Its contribution is in noting the importance of state and local government employees in the CA Democrat coalition.
The D coalition consists of the wealthy and the poor, that much is common knowledge. Add to that all the various government employees who are its middle class members. The Ds makes sure they are treated well and they make sure the state continues to vote D.
Consider California’s notoriously generous CalPERS (California Public Employee’s Retirement System) payouts. In an era where pensions in the private sector are increasingly rare, CalPERS benefits (while they last) are a boon to millions of middle-class Californians.
As one can imagine, this makes government employment for at least one family member very attractive and, in turn, fuels the demand for and creation of ever more government jobs—whether legitimate or, as in most cases, concocted.
Some are concocted, most are not. But government employment at some level - school or other special district, city, county, regional agency, state, or federal including military - provides many of the middle class jobs left in CA.
Demographer/pundit Joel Kotkin famously compares the role of government employees in modern society to that of the Church in medieval society, and refers to them as the “clerisy,” meaning “the literate ones.” I get a mental image of a fat friar - robe, sandals, tonsure and all, but of course it’s wrong.
Schools in Trouble
Power Line's numbers guy, Steve Hayward, posts a chart comparing the performance of three types of schools at educating the nation's 4th and 8th grade students.
What is discouraging is that charter schools do no better than regular public schools. At both grade levels and for both reading and math, Catholic schools outperform the other two types and the differences are not tiny.
When parents are paying monthly fees to keep their kids in school, it appears they pay more attention to whether their allocation of funds is paying off, whether their kids are doing homework and learning. It is also likely the RC schools are more serious about maintaining classroom order and discipline.
The other DrC - who trained teachers for employment in the public schools - believes those schools are no longer doing their job. Another chart shows things are getting worse over time. This testing evidence substantiates her dismal opinion.
Monday, February 3, 2025
History ... Rhyming
This Oren Cass column deals with the some of the same issues as the previous post below. It also contains some foreign policy thoughts current in the Trump White House you need to see. Hat tip to Power Line for the link.
In it Stephen Miran, chair of Trump’s Council of Economic Advisors, quotes Scott Bessent, the new Treasury Secretary, as proposing the following.
Putting countries into different groups based on their currency policies, the terms of bilateral trade agreements and security agreements, their values and more. … These buckets can bear different tariff rates, and the government can lay out what actions a trade partner would need to undertake to move between the buckets.
More clearly segmenting the international economy into zones based on common security and economic systems would help … highlight the persistence of imbalances and introduce more friction points to deal with them.
To which Miran adds:
Countries that want to be inside the defense umbrella must also be inside the fair trade umbrella.
Cass describes the dilemma facing other nations thus.
Doing so will be in their interest, as compared to the alternatives of falling into the Chinese sphere or being excluded from both ours and theirs. Only while the United States offers the alternative of “take advantage of us and gain all the benefits of our alliance anyway” does the option of complying with U.S. demands seem strange.
What they're proposing would essentially reestablish the Cold War "us vs. them" duopoly, with China replacing the USSR as our designated foe and some third group of "non-aligned" nations, typified by Indonesia and a few others in the first Cold War.
"Second verse, same as the first." History doesn't repeat itself but it often rhymes.
The Power of the Purse
Not everyone in the U.S. is wealthy, but collectively we represent the biggest import market for other countries’ raw materials, manufactured goods, and services on the planet. We’re their biggest customer.
President Trump figured out something that we should have known for decades, but obviously failed to recognize. Namely, the enormous leverage the huge, lucrative U.S. market’s demand for goods with overseas roots gives us.
Trump decided we should demand the respect the biggest customer should always expect to get, by reminding countries of how much they depend on our custom. Plus how he can price their offerings out of our giant market with his targeted tariffs.
He recognized that - if we decided to buy less from them - they’d rather please their biggest customer than continue with whatever policy we found offensive. That is precisely what his tariff threats represent, pricing their goods out of our market.
So far Panama has decided to not renew it’s deal with China, Mexico has decided to help us with a drug crackdown, and several have decided to allow us to repatriate their citizens now illegally in the U.S. Who knows what other nations will offer up in return for unfettered access to our market?
So far, only Canada seems not to recognize the “biggest customer” reality. It may take a political shift there before it does.
Saturday, February 1, 2025
A Third Term?
Yesterday Politico headlined a speculative piece about ways Trump might succeed in having a third term as President. It quotes Trump as joking about the possibility.
Was he kidding or floating a trial balloon, who knows? He sometimes says outrageous things just for the fun of watching Dims’ heads explode.
It then lists the four ways this could come about, beginning with a new constitutional amendment. The most plausible of these is he could run as another Republican’s vice president with the public understanding that individual would resign and hand the job to Trump. There is precedent for such transparent trickery overseas.
I will make a prediction that, in 2028, Trump will not want to run for a third term. I know he seems like the Energizer™ bunny now, but his current pace would tire a much younger pol. The office wears its occupants down, even the younger ones age visibly over 4 years. He won’t want to risk the Joe Biden experience of losing it in office and looking foolish.
From Zion NP
If you have been wondering where the Friday and Saturday Snark postings have gotten to, here’s the scoop. We decided on a last-minute weekend getaway and booked in at the lodge at Zion National Park.
We have been here since yesterday afternoon and it has been super, not crowded at all. The other DrC has pretty photos at her blog, as well as some very well earned praise for this special place.
As she notes, we each came here as children with our parents. We’ve been coming back over the decades, not every year but more like every 3 years, give or take.
Now that we winter a 1.5 hour drive from here we’ll be back at least yearly, and always in midwinter. It is the only time the place isn’t overrun with what the other DrC calls ‘tourons,” a portmanteau of tourists and morons.
What would I call the scenery here? Literally one of the most spectacular places on this planet, much of which I’ve seen in our travels. They named it Zion because you can feel the presence of the creator here, even if not especially religious.
Do you remember a Sunday comic strip featuring a Western sheriff Rick O’Shay and his gunslinger pal Hipshot Percussion? When Easter or Christmas would roll around, they’d ride out to the rim of the Grand Canyon and, looking in awe at the enormous view, feel like they were in church. I get that feeling at Zion N.P.
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