Howdy All, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy –
In this issue –
1. Shutdown
2. UN
3. On Deck
4. Fedsurrection
5. Opportunity
6. Tylenol
7. A&M
1. Shutdown. I expect I have a similar reaction to most of my readers listening to the most recent edition of Government Shutdown Theater. Media is doing its level best to instill a reaction to the general public lying somewhere between public rending of garments and full blown nuclear winter. That was then. This is now. Appears this year’s edition might just end up being fun, as we seem to have a Trump administration and leadership in congress interested in doing something other than going through the motions while simultaneously allowing democrats and media to beat them around the head and shoulders. First, what do both sides want? For the democrats, they want spending cuts, rescission and downsizing of government they reluctantly agreed to in July’s Big Beautiful Bill reversed. Republicans want a 7-week extension, a short omnibus that kicks the can down the road to Thanksgiving. These would be incompatible goals. Perhaps, but they are fundamentally similar to previous editions of the same play. How is this one different? It is different in at least three ways, especially if they can pull it off. First off is a return to what is known as Regular Order on the budget. Regular Order is the passage of 12 budget bills in the House. Each bill funds a part of the government for the next fiscal year which starts in Oct. This was last done by the Gingrich House majority in 1996 for FY 1997. Speaker Johnson claims to have 12 bills out of House Appropriations, several of them passed by the House and sent over to the Senate. The 7-week spending bill allows all of these to get to the senate and the senate to do something with them. The stopgap is a flat-funding piece of legislation. It is the 12 bills that will lock in cuts in government spending and manpower. The second way this may be different is that none of these bills are subject to a filibuster, so a 50+1 vote in the senate will get each of them passed. Finally, the Trump WH has threatened significant cuts in the size of the federal workforce should we go into October without a budget. They didn’t mention it yet, but this also applies to rescissions, discussed here a couple months ago. Any spending not continued by congress can be cut by the vehicle of pocket rescission. And Trump just got a SCOTUS opinion allowing him to do so last week. If Schumer is silly enough to force a shutdown, he opens the door for Trump to take a chainsaw to the federal budget and workforce. Like I said at the beginning, if they can pull this off. As of this writing, there is no reason to believe they can’t other than the Stupid Party being the Stupid Party. So far, on the budget wars, they have been pretty good.
2. UN. Trump visited the UN last week and spoke to the General Assembly. This was the 80th anniversary of this useless organization, so it was reasonably well covered by media. All did not go well, as the UN flying monkeys, staffers who had previously joked about shutting down various pieces of equipment when Trump visited did precisely that. First up was the escalator which stopped when Trump and Melania got on it. The other one continued to work, so it was not a failure. Trump and Melania walked up the steps. Second was the failure of the teleprompter a few minutes into his speech, something that allowed Trump to turn what would have been about a 40-minute long speech into an hour-plus piece of comedy gold. Trump wasted little time reminding the assembled delegates of the intentional failures. The sound system for the room mysteriously failed at times during the speech. The Secret Service is investigating the “failures.” Giving Trump free rein to bash the UN for an entire hour is one of the dumber things I can think of, especially after he cut US funding for the UN in previous months, the same cuts that irritated the staffers to the point they entered FAFO-land with Trump and the US. Like Shutdown Theater previously discussed, this should be a lot of fun to watch.
3. On Deck. As we approach the 2026 midterms, we also approach the beginning of the 2028 presidential race. While there are several interesting races shaping up for various governors and US Senators in 2026, most notably in Alabama where Tommy Tuberville is reportedly thinking about resigning the senate and running for governor, and at least two sports-related figures jockeying to replace him in the Senate, it is time to at least see who is in the on-deck circle for democrat nomination for president. There are at least two names not on that list. First is Kamala Harris, who went scorched earth with her book on the 2024 campaign, 107 Days. Next would be PA Governor Josh Shapiro, who was recently targeted by democrat-friendly media with corruption allegations. Shapiro is Jewish, something double plus ungood in the democrat pantheon of victims, which is good for Our Side, as he along with fellow US Senator from PA, John Fetterman, are a couple of the more reasonable and electable democrats out there. IL Governor Pritzker is making noises about running but may not be electable due to his size. Former Transportation Secretary Buttigieg is likewise making noises but should be unelectable because his support among black men as a gay guy is miniscule. Who does that leave? There are three possibilities. Two are eligible to run, AOC and CA Governor Newsom. The third, David Hogg is mentioned as a future possibility. There may be a fourth should Mamdani be elected NYC mayor next month. From a persuasion standpoint, all four of these have a complete and formidable talent stack. The politics of three of them are awful. The fourth, Hogg is an ardent anti-gunner. I expect AOC and Newsom to do their level best to position for the democrat nomination in 2028. The persuasion skill stack make these two possible nominees. And once nominated, with brainwashing assistance from the media, they both become electable. Mamdani is not far behind. Hogg is still young, but he appears to be a learning machine and will build that stack quickly.
4. Fedsurrection. We finally have an actual number of undercover FBI agents sent into the Jan 6 protests. The FBI claims that 274 plain clothes agents were sent into the protest after it became clear it was going to be something uglier than a simple protest. No word about how many FBI assets (contractors, informants, provocateurs or other ne’er do wells) were prepositioned. We also do not have any accounting of how many US Marshal Service, DHS, Capitol Police or other law enforcement agents / officers were present. That number could easily exceed 1,000. This is not a final number. Rather, it is a start. What will happen? I expect some number of these guys will come forward as the investigation continues. When that happens, we will find out who gave the orders, what the mission was, who these guys reported to, and eventually how high up the food chain it went. I expect Nancy Pelosi and Muriel Bowser were in the fat middle with FBI leadership fully on board, not letting that crisis go to waste.
5. Opportunity. Speaking of a stupid party doing stupid things, we have congressional democrats now making noises about legislation to:
…bolster legal protections for people targeted by President Trump for speaking freely, moving to counter his administration’s threats to weaponize the government against his political opponents.
The legislation falls out of the cancellation of Jimmy Kimmel for a week. Somewhere in the press release linked from Rep Chrissy Houlahan (D, PA), she notes that the legislation will be introduced in both the House and Senate but they do not expect the big meanies in Republican leadership to allow it to reach the floor. Don’t be too sure about that, Madam. The proposed No Political Enemies Act (NOPE) has a list of legal protections for people targeted for political speech, create a specific legal defense for those targets, allow them to recover legal fees if subjected to government harassment and censorship. What a great idea given our recent experience with government led censorship running wild during the COVID and Biden years. Want to make that illegal? Great. You bet. Sign me up. Better yet, apply those penalties personally against every single government employee involved. Apply those penalties against all businesses, universities, NGOs and other parts of the leftist blob. Best of all, make it retroactive to Jan 2020, when the CDC started censoring public pushback of all things COVID. Carry it through the Biden years when his administration used government power and threats to coerce social media and other companies to censor, debank, fire and otherwise harass conservatives for their political views. Want to introduce this? Be my guest. Enjoy the ride. I’m sure it will be a fun one.
6. Tylenol. Last week’s reminder that liberalism is a mental disease was leftist reaction to the joint Trump – RFK Jr announcement of a possible link between Tylenol (acetaminophen) and autism. Like all things medical, the data is either garbage or compelling depending on your point of view. The compelling part is the prevalence of autism in the developed world, particularly the US. What the cause of this is anyone’s guess, ranging from drugs and combination of vaxes to diet to the ability to identify it in children in the third world. RFK, Jr’s input was that we think we have a problem. We don’t know what it is yet. And we intend to find out. Meanwhile, Tylenol is added to the growing list of things pregnant women ought not to ingest while pregnant. Along with the Tylenol recommendation, Trump also came out against bundling vaccinations, calling for separate injections for each of the 90+ now on the recommended list. Reaction was swift and predictable, with the public health apparat coming out strongly in favor of the status quo and not taking a closer look. It didn’t take long for the skeptical right to come up with what may or may not have been a 2017 Tylenol warning label for pregnant women not to take it. I have no idea as to the truth of that claim. Liberal women were far, far worse, posting more videos than they should of them overdosing with Tylenol, a life-threatening act. While Tylenol is ubiquitous these days, it is not without its dangers. For example, it does not play well with alcohol in the system. One of the charming little side effects is to destroy your liver. And it takes a while to leave the system after stopping. There are multiple reports of hospitalized pregnant liberal women with at least one of them declared brain dead. The brainwashing job on these ladies is so successful that they instantly do whatever Trump tells them not to do regardless of how life-threatening that may be. That brainwashing needs to stop before more people get hurt.
7. A&M. General Mark Welsh resigned as President of Texas A&M last week following his handling of a complaint by a student over gender identity propaganda in a children’s literature class. The scandal broke last summer as a Junior English course, Literature for Children, were given a novel that featured a 12-year-old coming out as non-binary. The presentation featured a purple gender unicorn used to teach the differences between gender identity. A student took exception with the novel and the attempt at inserting gender identity into the course because it was not on the syllabus. She recorded the interaction. After a short discussion, she was kicked out of the class. She complained to President Welsh who initially defended the prof. She recorded that interaction too. Both videos were sent to Texas legislators and released to the public. The class was cancelled a few days later, the prof fired, and two Deans demoted. Reaction broke down predictably, with the academics in full-throated defense of the prof’s ability to push this garbage in their classrooms and the student’s right not to be propagandized with it. The State of Texas has taken great pains for years to root out this sort of thing from education on all levels and are being fought tooth and nail by educrats. This is a small victory, though I think Welsh ought not to have been fired. Sadly, it is difficult for a politician (and all General Officers and Admirals are politicians) to immediately go all Carthage on a department, but it appears he eventually did the right thing.
More later –