To Chait, what’s bizarre is that people on the left aren’t freaking out more because “what is actually happening in the capital is, by any rational standard, disturbing.”

A prime example, Chait says, is Trump’s appointment of Michael Anton as director of policy planning at the State Department, which, he says, highlights “the banal ubiquity of authoritarian thinking in the Trumpified Republican Party.”

What he says next is one of the purest, most unadulterated forms of projection we’ve ever come across.

Here’s what he writes about Anton:

Anton is best known for an essay published eight years ago called ‘The Flight 93 Election.’ In it, he argued that conservatives should support Trump, despite their serious reservations about his character, because another Democratic term in office would amount to the death of the republic. (Hillary Clinton, like the 9/11 hijackers, would steer the country toward the equivalent of a fiery demise.) At the time, Anton’s argument stood out for its existential tone and hysterical life-and-death metaphor. Now his logic — that permitting Democrats to win a single national election is tantamount to national suicide, the prevention of which justifies any measures, legal or otherwise — is a required belief for service in the power ministries. Once an oddball, Anton is just another Trump bureaucrat who subscribes to the party’s rule-or-perish ideology. (emphasis added) […]

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Not three months ago, the World Economic Forum eagerly mentioned a study that predicted that a “total collapse” of Greenland’s ice sheet “could happen by 2025.” Last year, a Washington Post scare-’em-all headline declared “Greenland glacier’s rapid melting may signal faster sea level rise.” In another of the many examples we could cite, AZoCleantech.com has claimed that Greenland’s changing landscape signals a global threat.

Now back to the researchers: Using satellite readings, they determined that “the ice-free sub-regions of Greenland are warmer than the ice-covered sub-regions,” which they attribute “to population density.” Overall, though, there was no significant change in Greenland’s temperature for the period studied, 2000 to 2019. They further noted that “in coastal southern Greenland, the temperature during 1958-2001 showed a significant cooling.”

And those ice-covered sub-regions they studied? They found “no evidence of warming over” ice-covered areas. Yes, this thrusts another deep gash into the politically spun global warming yarn.

Following are a few more examples that indicate the alarmists’ narrative is unraveling: […]

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Many of those who feel their self-interest is threatened by a search to eliminate excess costs of government have treated DOGE as if it was a historically unique effort (which helps them characterize it as “untried” and “outside the mainstream”). But there have actually been many such efforts, as Bob Maistros has recently laid out, but they have not been notably successful in achieved their lofty goals. A major reason is the standard political reaction.

Defenders of every spending program insist that theirs is exceptionally deserving and must be spared. Some will even claim that far more of their favorite spending is necessary, not far less. The extent of their claims makes me think DOGE actually stands for “dozens of gross exaggerations” made in response. Their common theme is that every possible funding reduction they face is unfair and unjustified, and it is not long before those claims are backed by threats that the most valuable services (rather than the least valuable ones) would be decimated under the control of the bureaucrats in charge, often referred to as the Washington Monument strategy.

In large part, that concentrated opposition to reining in insufficiently effective government programs is because every government spending initiative creates an interest group of beneficiaries and program functionaries, regardless of whether the services provided to citizens justify the costs. That is why Milton Freedman once suggested that the most reliable way to stop such programs was in their cribs, before those interest groups were formed.

DOGE-type efforts must combat such a bias toward growing government. But there is a powerful logical tool to reinforce such efforts, but which is all too commonly overlooked. It is the recognition that not only is it necessary for citizens to get at least a dollar of value from every dollar the government spends to advance the general welfare referred to in the Preamble to the Constitution (sometimes referred to as an ideal but seldom demonstrated as a reality), it is necessary that each dollar spent must create far more than a dollar of value to citizens, for the simple reason that every dollar of government spending costs Americans far more than a dollar. […]

— Read More: issuesinsights.com

Trump’s decision to make administration appointments from figures who are outside of the establishment adds to the loathing that so many in the political-media establishment already directed toward him. Various grifters, vipers and unprincipled schemers from both parties have spent their adult lives seeking seats of power, comfort and endless tenure in the capital. To see the secretarial positions, directorships, administrator posts and bureaucratic jobs that they have for years lusted after filled by outsiders makes them angry. No one should feel sorry for them, though. They are a drag on both our civic health and our economy.

In regard to the latter, the damage is more extensive that most would ever guess. A research paper updated during the first year of Trump’s initial term that measured the “cost per regulator” in the bureaucracy reached some appalling yet unsurprising conclusions about Washington’s impact on the private sector. According to the authors, “one regulator costs the U.S. economy the equivalent of 138 private-sector jobs per year.”

Here are a few more choice findings from the paper.

• “Each $1 million change in the regulatory budget is associated with a change of about four regulator jobs.”
• “A 10% cut in the regulatory budget results in a loss of 21,756 regulatory jobs.”
• That same cut “provides for an additional $1.2 trillion in GDP annually over the five-year window, or $244 billion annually.”
• “Each regulator costs the U.S. economy $11 million annually.”

The root cause is, of course, overregulation. Trump needs to continue the deregulatory agenda he promised during his first term, when he said he was committed to cutting the regulatory federal regulatory framework by 75%. […]

— Read More: issuesinsights.com

But what really worries people like French and those on the left isn’t that Trump will fail. It’s that he’s off to an outstanding start and has the wind as his back to succeed.

And by that, we don’t mean he will live up to the left’s gross mischaracterization of Trump as a fascist, but that he will actually do what he’s promised: gut the administrative state, restore order to the southern border, and get the economy moving again.

Think about what Trump was up against and what he accomplished in his first term.

After winning in 2016, Trump struggled to appoint his team. On inauguration day, he’d named only 29 of his 660 executive department slots, and ended up with several Obama holdovers. […]

— Read More: issuesinsights.com

But that’s just a base number set by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, tagged by President-elect Donald Trump to head the new Department of Government Efficiency, or “DOGE” for short.

“As President Trump said, what we need is common sense,” Musk said. “This won’t be business as usual. This is going to be a revolution.”

And by that, he means a root-and-branch restructuring of the U.S. government and its sprawling, wasteful mega-bureaucracy, with co-leader Ramaswamy set to “dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies.”

Ambitious indeed. […]

— Read More: issuesinsights.com

But Newsom could have a fight on his hands with Californians who are clearly tired of Newsom’s and his fellow leftists’ “values.”

Almost across the board, California voters rejected leftist ballot initiatives, often by wide margins. “State voters took a hammer to the most progressive propositions,” noted I&I contributor Thomas Buckley.

Examples:

• After watching previous minimum wage increases devastate local businesses and do little to improve the welfare of unskilled workers, a ballot initiative to hike the state’s minimum wage to $18 lost by a 51% to 49% margin.

• Even after Bidenflation drove up housing costs, voters rejected an initiative that would have let cities and counties impose strict rent control laws. Back in 1995, the state approved the Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing Act, which blocked cities and counties from imposing rent control on certain types of housing or when units become vacant. By a whopping 60%-40% margin, Californians voted to keep that 1995 law in place.
• A proposal to lower the threshold for local bond measures from a two-thirds supermajorty to a 55% majority went down in flames, with 55% of Californians voting against it. […]

— Read More: issuesinsights.com

You thought common sense and true normalcy would return to government, society, and the culture?

As if.

Don’t kid yourselves. The least intelligent, least articulate, and most incompetent presidential candidate ever may have failed to attain the Democrats’ customary deep blue state-fueled popular majority.

But the reality is that America remains a deeply divided, essentially 50-50 nation. Meaning that: […]

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But being wrong has never caused elite media types to self-reflect. They just issue a new set of catchphrases, aphorisms, mantras, and predictions.

So, rather than wait for them, we decided to make our own predictions. We will have much more to say about this election, about the unprecedented legal attacks, the vitriol hurled at half of American voters, about any violence that is unleashed by the left, about where the Democrats go from here, and so on.

But for now, here is our list of what will be out and what will be in after this truly historic presidential election.

• Out: Questioning election results is anti-Democratic!
• In: Trump stole the election!!
• Out: Democracy is on the ballot!
• In: Democracy is not over!!
• Out: Election fraud is not a real problem!
• In: Trump stole the election!! […]

— Read More: issuesinsights.com

Case in point is the $15 billion giveaway that Biden-Harris snuck through this summer without a single hearing, vote, or advance notice, in an attempt to buy seniors’ votes. Followed up by a campaign email to these same seniors on behalf of Kamala Harris, also paid for by taxpayers.

Is any of this legal? Who cares, if it helps Harris win in November? At least, that’s how the mainstream press is treating this scandal.

Here’s the background.

The criminally misnamed “Inflation Reduction Act” that Joe Biden signed on Aug. 16, 2022, after Harris cast the tie-breaking vote, including among its many horrid provisions, several that affected Medicare Part D – the drug benefit for seniors – is set to go into effect in 2025. […]

— Read More: issuesinsights.com