Ziggy Stardust
Absolutely Sane
China.Someone remind Trump and his voters - who would be paying the tariffs he threatens to invoke?
Trump In Charge: Wrecking Ball
- Thread starter Birdjaguar
- Start date
Moderator Action: Back to Trump and company please.
Trump ally Elon Musk calls to ‘delete’ US consumer protection bureau
Musk, a confidant of the president-elect, is set to co-lead Trump’s newly created Department of Government Efficiency.
www.aljazeera.com
By Al Jazeera Staff
Published On 28 Nov 202428 Nov 2024
Elon Musk Asks if IRS Funding Should Be 'Deleted'
Published Nov 28, 2024 at 6:41 AM EST
Updated Nov 28, 2024 at 9:08 AM EST
www.newsweek.com
Musk, a confidant of the president-elect, is set to co-lead Trump’s newly created Department of Government Efficiency.
Trump ally Elon Musk calls to ‘delete’ US consumer protection bureau
Musk, a confidant of the president-elect, is set to co-lead Trump’s newly created Department of Government Efficiency.
By Al Jazeera Staff
Published On 28 Nov 202428 Nov 2024
Elon Musk Asks if IRS Funding Should Be 'Deleted'
Published Nov 28, 2024 at 6:41 AM EST
Updated Nov 28, 2024 at 9:08 AM EST
Elon Musk asks if IRS funding should be 'deleted'
Social media users voted in a poll regarding $20 billion in funding for the federal tax-collection agency.
www.newsweek.com
Moderator Action: Drug posts moved to their own thread.
Ah right. Just like Mexico paid for the border wall, ahem, border fence.
Ziggy Stardust
Absolutely Sane
Ah, thanksgiving. A time to reflect. A time to be graceful, grateful and thankful.
And a time to be full of chicken.
As some old sod put it:
Or as a certain imbecile put it: Happy Thanksgiving to all, including to the Radical Left Lunatics who have worked so hard to destroy our Country, but who have miserably failed, and will always fail, because their ideas and policies are so hopelessly bad that the great people of our Nation just gave a landslide victory to those who want to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!
And a time to be full of chicken.
As some old sod put it:
Or as a certain imbecile put it: Happy Thanksgiving to all, including to the Radical Left Lunatics who have worked so hard to destroy our Country, but who have miserably failed, and will always fail, because their ideas and policies are so hopelessly bad that the great people of our Nation just gave a landslide victory to those who want to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!
Ziggy Stardust
Absolutely Sane
In 1930 ...
Broken_Erika
Play with me.
Concerns raised over Trump's FBI nominee's agenda and qualifications
Critics of President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the FBI have expressed doubts that he is qualified to lead the US government’s principal law enforcement agency.Some also raised fears that Kash Patel, a marginal figure in Trump's first administration known for his loyalty, aims to dismantle an apolitical federal security service and refashion it into a means of partisan retribution.
"Look, 99.9% of the bureau is made up of hard working agents who adhere to the principles of fidelity, bravery and integrity," Jeff Lanza, a former FBI agent, said. "But he's said that he's coming in to just decimate the agency. How is that going to go well and how will that play into the morale of the agents who have to work under him?"
The FBI director leads 37,000 employees across 55 US field offices. They also oversee 350 satellite offices and more than 60 other foreign locations expected to cover almost 200 countries.
Former FBI and Department of Justice officials who spoke to BBC said the job is difficult, and it would be nearly impossible for someone like Patel, who has limited management experience, to operate effectively.
Gregory Brower, a former FBI assistant director and deputy general counsel who worked closely with the past two directors, called the job "nonstop".
"It's relentless. It's high stakes. It requires expert judgment, stamina, experience, and a strong ethical and moral compass," he told the BBC.
When he announced his pick for FBI director, Trump called Patel "a brilliant lawyer, investigator, and 'America First' fighter who has spent his career exposing corruption, defending Justice, and protecting the American People".
Patel began his career as a federal public defender in Miami before working as a terrorism prosecutor at the Department of Justice between 2014 and 2017. He then spent two years as senior aide to Republicans who led the House Intelligence Committee, reportedly fighting the investigation of Trump and Russian collusion in the 2016 election.
When Democrats took control of the House in 2019, he was hired as a staffer on Trump’s National Security Council. In February 2020, he became principal deputy in the Office of Director of National Intelligence - then led by acting director Richard Grenell.
By November of that year, he had moved to the Pentagon to serve as chief ofstaff to Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller - a position he held until Trump left office two months later.
“Kash Patel has served in key national security positions throughout the government. He is beyond qualified to lead the FBI and will make a fantastic Director," Alex Pfeiffer, a Trump transition spokesman, told the BBC.
Those critical of Patel cite past FBI directors, many of whom worked their way up through the justice department or FBI for decades, as a better measure of the qualifications needed to lead the agency.
"It's certainly not like the backgrounds that we've seen other directors of the FBI and those who have overseen other similarly sized and important federal agencies bring to their jobs," Brower said of Patel's experience.
Some pointed to former US Attorney General Bill Barr’s recollection in his 2022 memoir of Trump's attempt to place Patel in a senior FBI position in his first term to stress the point further.
“I categorically opposed making Patel deputy FBI director. I told Mark Meadows it would happen ‘over my dead body,'” he wrote. “Someone with no background as an agent would never be able to command the respect necessary to run the day-to-day operations of the bureau.”
Since leaving office, Patel has promised in interviews that, if Trump returns to office, he and others will use the government to go after political opponents - including politicians and members of the media who he alleges without evidence helped overturn the 2020 US presidential election results.
"We're going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections," Patel told Steve Bannon, a White House chief strategist in Trump's first term, on the War Room podcast.
"We're going to come after you, whether it's criminally or civilly. We'll figure that out. But yeah, we're putting you all on notice… We're actually going to use the Constitution to prosecute them for crimes they said we have always been guilty of but never have."
Trump said during his reelection campaign that he considers Patel’s book - titled Government Gangsters - to be a “blueprint” for his next administration.
In the memoir, which criticises the so-called deep state, Patel calls for "comprehensive housecleaning" of the FBI by firing “the top ranks”.
On a recent podcast, he said the incoming Trump administration intends to retain about 50 members of the FBI’s Washington staff, and the remaining workforce would be put into the field. They would, in essence, "close that building down", he said, referring to FBI headquarters.
“Open it up the next day as the museum to the deep state,” he added.
The FBI did not respond to a request for comment.
Mr Grenell and other former Trump administration officials who worked with Patel have praised his nomination and characterised him as a hardworking public servant.
“I have no doubt that Kash Patel will inspire our line FBI agents who want to fight crime, destroy the cartels, capture spies, and jail mobsters, thugs, fraudsters and traffickers,” Robert O’Brien, Trump’s last national security adviser, said on X.
Few, however, mentioned current FBI Director Christopher Wray, who was appointed by Trump after the then-president fired the agency’s last leader - James Comey - or that he still has three years remaining on his term.
Ultimately, it remains up to the Senate who will vote on whether Patel's nomination will be confirmed.
While most senators have remained relatively quiet about Patel and a few Republicans have praised the pick, there is some apparent scepticism.
Senator Mike Rounds, a Republican from South Dakota, seemed to raise some doubt that he would receive the necessary votes.
“I think the president picked a very good man to be the director of the FBI when he did that in his first term,” Rounds told ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday.
“We’ll see what his (Trump’s) process is, and whether he actually makes that nomination,” Rounds commented about Patel. “We still go through a process, and that process includes advice and consent, which, for the Senate, means advice or consent sometimes.”
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin, a Democrat who will soon hand his gavel to Republicans, stressed that Trump knows Wray’s term has not yet expired and called for his colleagues to block Patel's confirmation.
“Now, the President-elect wants to replace his own appointee with an unqualified loyalist,” Durbin said in a statement. “The Senate should reject this unprecedented effort to weaponize the FBI for the campaign of retribution that Donald Trump has promised.”
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c89xwjqwe5vo
Ziggy Stardust
Absolutely Sane
They just can say he and others will use the government to go after political opponents - including politicians and members of the media. Straight up. No one bats an eye.
Trumpies go: yay! Make librul cry more! Uhm ... I mean "freedumbs!"
Macron’s Paris invite shows power fast flowing from Biden to Trump
There’ll be a strong sense of déjà vu when French President Emmanuel Macron lays the flattery on thick for Donald Trump in Paris this weekend.
Few foreign leaders did more to woo Trump when he was the 45th president. In fact, Macron treated him with such deference at a Bastille Day parade on the Champs-Élysées that Trump came home wanting a military parade of his own — on July Fourth.
As Trump prepares to become the 47th president, Macron has surpassed himself, inviting Trump to attend the year’s most vaunted opening — the unveiling of the newly restored Notre Dame Cathedral five years after a savage fire.
More here:
I'm trying to resist the schadenfreude hearing members of the media complaining that Trump is coming for them... I have maintained for years that the media created the Trump monster by giving bottomless free-media to his 2016 campaign, when they should have ignored his campaign as the joke it initially was. They sold out for ratings/entertainment value, which elevated Trump to the front of the pack and vaulted him to center stage in the Republican debates.
RFK wants to follow in the Taliban footsteps. More polio will make America Great again.
California Democrat Flips Seat in the Last House Race to Be Decided
Adam Gray, a former state lawmaker, defeated Representative John Duarte, a Republican, in a reversal of their 2022 race.Adam Gray, a Democratic former state lawmaker in California, defeated U.S. Representative John Duarte, the Republican incumbent, in a House contest finally decided on Tuesday, nearly a month after Election Day. The contest in California’s vast agricultural heartland, the Central Valley, was the last House race to be determined, giving Democrats 215 seats compared with 220 for Republicans. Though Republicans won more than the 218 seats necessary to control the House, President-elect Trump wants two House members to serve in his administration, and a third, Matt Gaetz, resigned his seat this month.
Mr. Duarte conceded on Tuesday, according to Duane Dichiara, a campaign spokesman. The congressman trailed by 187 votes in a contest in which more than 210,000 were cast.
Mr. Gray declared victory on Tuesday evening, two days before counties in California were required to certify their results. The Associated Press had not yet called the race.
“The final results confirm this district is ready for independent and accountable leadership that always puts the Valley’s people ahead of partisan politics,” Mr. Gray said in a statement on X.
NYT
I am starting to think that some of these Trump Cabinet nominees are just fake/sacrificial lambs to make the real picks look better by comparison.
In any case he is trolling the Dems.
‘High on the list of items’: Ramaswamy threat to claw back Rivian loan sparks criticism of Musk’s conflict of interest
Vivek Ramaswamy, the incoming co-chair of President-elect Donald Trump’s commission to cut government spending, has set his sights on money the Biden administration is dispersing in its final days in office, including a key loan to a rival company of his commission co-chair, Elon Musk.Last week, the Department of Energy announced a $6.6 billion conditional loan commitment to Rivian, the electric vehicle startup that is a nascent competitor to Tesla, Musk’s $1 trillion car company.
Ramaswamy says that loan and others like it are “high on the list of items” that he will look to claw back once his cost-cutting commission, known as the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, gets going next year. “Those types of last-minute actions that are taking place in the lame duck merit particularly special scrutiny,” Ramaswamy told CNN.
Since the election, Biden officials have continued to hand out billions of dollars in government-backed loans and other federal funds, much of it to finance clean energy and domestic chip manufacturing projects.
It’s unclear whether Ramaswamy will make good on his promise to claw back that money, or what legal grounds he would use to justify it. Despite its broad mandate of cutting government waste, DOGE has no statutory authority and is essentially a presidential advisory commission that can make recommendations. Only Congress can claw back money it has previously approved.
Still, Ramaswamy’s comments are seen as a warning shot. Not only do they open another front in what promises to be a tense battle over efforts to reduce the size of the federal government, they also highlight the potential conflicts that could arise as spending cuts bump against Musk’s vast business empire, which itself has benefitted from government assistance.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/04/politics/ramaswamy-musk-china-doge-kfile
For now, industry groups and lobbyists around Washington are in a wait-and-see mode, with some expressing skepticism over how seriously to take Ramaswamy’s threats.
“I would say we’re a few steps from having to even potentially deal with this,” said one auto industry source, asking incredulously, “Is he going to be in the government?”
Conflict of interest
The DOE loan to Rivian was in the works for two years and would help finance a new manufacturing plant in Georgia, which Rivian says would create some 7,500 full-time jobs. The loan is among 32 deals worth a total of nearly $55 billion that the DOE has doled out under Biden. All of that money eventually has to be repaid to the federal government, which isn’t on the hook unless companies go bankrupt.In speaking to CNN, Ramaswamy was cynical about the chances of taxpayers getting their money back and suggested the post-election timing of the loan was political.
“There’s no way that that money will ever get paid back,” Ramaswamy said. “And If you’re seeing an uptick in the rate of expenditures going out the door in response to the election, that suggest politicization, and suggests a differential change in standard, which from the standpoint of protecting the taxpayer, we believe would be inappropriate.”
The irony is that Tesla received a similar DOE loan for $465 million in 2010, a time when Musk’s company needed cash ahead of its first public sale of stock. The loan proved to be a game-changer for Tesla, which in 2013 ended up repaying it in full, nearly 10 years ahead of schedule. “Tesla is the bright, shining example,” said Albert Gore, executive director of the Zero Emission Transportation Association – an EV trade group that represents both Rivian and Tesla. “I think that it would be great to continue supporting that type of growth here in the US.”
Dan Ives of Wedbush Securities says while it is legitimate for DOGE to review last minute loans, singling out federal funds going to a rival company of Musk is not a “one off” and will likely “become the norm.” “If Musk is your friend, it’s going to be a positive,” said Ives. “If he’s an enemy, it’s going to be a huge negative.”
Neither Rivian nor its lobbyists commented on their plans should the loan not go through. In a statement to CNN, the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs director Jigar Shah said it would be “irresponsible for any government to turn its back” on private companies and communities that are receiving loans from the office.
Though industry sources say they aren’t overly concerned about DOGE’s ability to claw back federal loan guarantees, Ramaswamy’s decision to single out the Rivian loan struck some as concerning.
“If you’re going to claw back money based on the perception it’s going to a competitor of your co-chair, that will end up delegitimizing your place in this whole system,” the auto industry source said.
Trump’s Energy Department could conceivably cancel the loan commitment to Rivian under certain circumstances, according to two lawyers familiar with the government loan program. The loan won’t be finalized until both the agency and Rivian satisfy certain conditions. Even still, it would be hard to cancel the deal without cause, said Mary Anne Sullivan, a former Energy Department lawyer in the Clinton Administration.
“There’s so much room for judgment in whether the terms of the conditional commitment have been satisfied and so much room for judgment to decide whether the financial assumptions underlying the loan guarantee have changed,” she said.
‘Shoveling money out the door’
The Biden White House has spent much of the past year getting money out the door from a series of domestic spending bills the president signed while in office. As of October, there’s still about $288 billion from the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law that won’t be available until fiscal year 2025 or later, and $14.8 billion from the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which contains much of the clean energy projects funded under Biden. There are legal guardrails to ensure that money continues to be spent through the Impoundment Control Act, which limits the White House from withholding funds already appropriated by Congress. But Trump made the use of impoundment authority – a practice where the executive branch unilaterally refuses to spend money already appropriated by Congress – a cornerstone of his presidential campaign’s pledge to impose fiscal discipline.https://www.cnn.com/2024/11/15/climate/climate-law-trump-republicans
“All of the trillions of dollars that are sitting there not yet spent, we will redirect that money for important projects like roads, bridges, dams and we will not allow it to be spent on the meaningless green new scam ideas,” Trump said in his Republican National Convention speech.
Doing so would set up a direct confrontation with lawmakers in both parties, who closely guard their authority over federal spending. It would also almost certainly trigger a high stakes court battle.
Trump has already taken steps to make good on that pledge by nominating Russell Vought to lead the Office of Management and Budget. Vought, who served as Trump’s OMB director in his first term, drafted the 25-page chapter detailing an expansive view of executive authority in the conservative playbook Project 2025.
The White House may try to lean on Republicans in Congress, where lawmakers can claw back money that’s been previously approved, so long as it hasn’t been obligated by the White House. Last year, as part of the deal to address the debt ceiling, Democratic lawmakers agreed to rescind $20 billion of the $80 billion they provided to the Internal Revenue Service.
But they may face resistance, particularly when it comes to clean energy money included in the IRA. Even though no Republicans voted for the bill, close to 80% of announced clean energy investments are in Republican districts.
Industry and advocacy groups in the clean energy sector are already reaching out to GOP lawmakers to highlight the benefits – including funding and jobs – that the loan program, as well as the energy tax credits approved in the IRA. “It’s a much more targeted and much more urgent effort,” said one clean energy industry insider.
At an Energy Department conference in Washington on Wednesday, White House senior adviser John Podesta talked about the need to “keep shoveling money out the door” until inauguration. “We, by the way, plan to get more done by the end of this month. We read the papers, we know that the next four years will bring a lot more uncertainty to federal clean energy policy,” said Podesta. “No one can reverse the momentum that we’ve created together.”
Canadian Bluebeer
Prince
better late than never.
hee-hee.
Embrace the power of AND
Of course he's trolling both sided (dims and rinos), and of course the msm.
yes, he's put nominations in just to watch the chaos (and see just who freaks out)...
did anyone check if he bought stocks in popcorn?
