State of the Discussion

Why not? President Trump said he was going to do this. Promises kept (even if I am not a fan of this one).

If he continues with those promises, these tariffs are not meant for the long term (though I would bet on the China ones lasting long).

Once concessions, “concessions”, or nothing are worked enough. They will go away and markets will be happy.

We saw the bounce on Trump's delay last month, and something similar will happen when these tariffs are removed.

I didn't say all of them were but I think the evidence definitely shows that most non-voters lean way too the right rather than the left politically but either find politics distasteful or did not have a Republican willing to be as obviously far to the right as Trump. The evidence that a further left ticket could win in the United States is basically non-existent.

Dry Run for DOGE. (What, you thought the twentysomethings were the real deal? They’re a stalking horse.)

A 'stalking horse'?

Do you know who pointed out the previous audit in 2013 had not been correct?

The Pentagon Inspector General. It's literally in the link you gave.

Do you know who oversaws those audits?

The DoD Inspector General. Both of them. The 2013 and the 2023 audits. (Neither of which, you may notice, happened under Trump. The president at the time doesn't really deserve the credit, but instead of arguing that, I will just point out it wasn't Trump anyway.)

Do you know who Trump fired?

That's right. The Inspectors General.

None of this has anything to do with Trump, considering that the auditing of all departments was directed in _1992_, and the audits started by the military not any particular president. What he has done is make it _impossible_ for anyone to require these audits to happen, along with making it impossible to collect any instances of waste or fraud from whistleblowers, because that's what IGs are for.

NPR says that Trump fired six four-star level people. The other five were dudes.

Did you...not read that?

One of the other people was the only Black officer in the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Really doesn't undercut the 'bigot' concept there.

Three of them were the three top lawyers for the services, which feels like less bigotry and more 'The lawyers will not agree with what I am trying to do'. Which is literally the justification Hegseth gave, that he 'didn’t think they were “well-suited” to provide recommendations when lawful orders are given.', and lots of stuff like that.

Firing _all_ top lawyers so they will not try to advise the military on what orders are lawful is not relevant to removing _specific_ individuals from their post elsewhere. (It is, however, pretty relevant WRT our slide in fascism.)

So that leaves us with exactly one white man: General James C. Slife, vice chief of staff of the Air Force.

He probably was fired for supposedly giving women special treatment in the Air Force's elite special tactics field. This is actual nonsense, he called for an investigation _into_ that, but is as what he was smeared with: https://www.vox.com/donald-trump/401174/trump-fired-generals

So, to be clear here, we have Brown, who is supposedly doing DEI stuff, and Slife, who is supposedly helping one specific woman although he isn't. Okay, there's a very, VERY thin justification for removing them, even if the second is a lie and the first is just the general 'encouraging Black people and women into the military' that is 80% of what 'DEI' is there.

Which then leaves Franchetti. Who is not, in any manner at all, have alleged to do _anything_ even vaguely DEI related at all. There just is nothing there.

Her crime appears to have been that she _is_ a woman, and thus Hegseth, as he has claimed claimed repeated on podcasts, feels she does not deserve the position, despite not offering the tiniest bit of support to that claim.

That is bigotry. That is how bigotry works. You just talk about the vague _vibes_ of how someone isn't as good as other people don't deserve their position.

Ha... was just responding that I wasn't spending time in right wing world back then, so I may have just missed it. This might be the origin of it in the broader discourse, then. I remember liberals referring to MAGA as a cult during Trump's first term (maybe even the '16 campaign, I can't remember), and was thinking maybe that's where it started.

And I'm not gonna lie, I remember going to an Evangelical church in 2017, where Trump was much discussed in extremely religious terms, and thinking this was disturbingly cult-like behavior.

I wonder when people started referring to hyper-partisans or staunch supporters of particular candidates as cultists. I don't remember it being a thing under Bush or Obama, though it's possible I missed it, or just forgot about it because it wasn't a super common thing. But at least since Trump's first term, I've heard people on both sides refer to people on the other as cultists. I get the idea of Trump as a Cult of Personality, but where does the rest of the cult talk come from?

Generally, in a financial audit anything around 1-2% of asset discrepancy is considered immaterial. For $46.3 billion that's $463 million on the low end. The fact that only half a million was not accounted for is laudable, but how much was spent finding the rest? That's what an accountant would call waste.

So it looks like she went on Hannity and explained that *NOW* she has a new and improved bunch of files that she and the FBI are now digging through and she's waiting on Kash Patel's report on why these files were withheld last time.

Jam tomorrow. Jam Yesterday.

BREAKING: Attorney General Pam Bondi says a "truckload" of Jeffrey Epstein files arrived on Friday, says FBI Director Kash Patel is looking through them now.

"We got them all Friday at 8AM. Thousands of pages of documents. I have the FBI going through them."

"It's now in the… pic.twitter.com/rxABwmO5p2

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) March 4, 2025

"Downside: Current events, future implications, an immense amount of avoidable human suffering

Upside: I was very right, and people who dismissed my warnings as outlandish, hysterical, and biased (or whatever) were badly wrong, in ways they won't acknowledge nor learn from

I don't like this trade"

https://bsky.app/profile/nicholasgrossman.bsky.social/post/3ljjcwnx45s2i

The Hatch Act only applies at the federal level. It bars precisely nothing at the state level - though many similar laws exist in states for similar reasons. It also doesn’t apply to elected officials.

Citing your sources, we have $71.8 billion dollars of improper payments from the SSA alone. That's "waste" if not fraud. Yes, it turns out we do actually have people who are paid government workers, who do catalog this.

Let's say Musk manages to cut that to a third of what it currently is? That's about $50 billion dollars saved.

Fifty Billion Dollars.

That's a lot more than the $200 million dollars that Treasury thinks they can squeeze out of SSA by going over "Payments to Dead People."

But, seriously, we have a lot of waste that can be cleaned up.

SSA is just one program. And, again, citing your sources, one that isn't actually "high error rate."

In 2022 I said "the endgame for this is that Russia gets the land bridge to Crimea that was their original goal, and the rest of the fighting is just about exactly how much of a salient there will be in Northeastern Ukraine", and nothing about that has changed so far, and nothing about it seems like it's going to short of Ukraine somehow generating a Clone Army.

Some people may be confused about Jaybird's stupid conspiracy theory that the Ukrainian president is a cocaine addict.

There's a simple explanation of why he believes that, and that is that he has direct access to dumb conspiracy theories piped into his head.

But for those who wish to know the origin of his wrongness, feel free to Google 'Zelenskyy cocaine', where you will learn that it was a doctored video. Multiple doctored videos, in fact, probably as part of deliberate Russian misinformation.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/03/business/economy/trump-tariffs-china-mexico-canada.html

While there are just over 3 hours left on the West Coast and a bit more time left in Alaska and Hawaii, but it doesn't look like things are going to be smooth this time.

Also we are way past the time of Trump 2.0 operating like Trump 1.0. Thinking like this is psychological succor but not reflective of reality. It is the cult of savvy that thinks showing alarm or heightened emotion or distress at anytime is oh so uncool.