“You had said that you saw no difference between economic power and political power, between the power of money and the power of guns—no difference between reward and punishment, between purchase and plunder, between pleasure and fear, between life and death. You are learning the difference now.“
– Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
The big news in America right now is that Our Lord and Savior Donald Trump decided to declare Los Angeles a war zone after he sent ICE out to an Hispanic neighborhood to barge in and arrest residents without a warrant and they encountered resistance for some reason. I say “decided to declare” because as Keith Olbermann among others has pointed out, when the LA Lakers won their last championship in 2020, the number of arrests for rioting was 76 suspects, whereas over the last weekend the number of arrests (at a Home Depot) was 42. I mean, the LAPD first put out a statement saying most of the protests were peaceful, and recently put out another statement saying “The LAPD has not received any formal notification that the Marines will be arriving in Los Angeles. However, the possible arrival of federal military forces in Los Angeles—absent clear coordination—presents a significant logistical and operational challenge for those of us charged with safeguarding this city. The Los Angeles Police Department, alongside our mutual aid partners, have decades of experience managing large-scale public demonstrations, and we remain confident in our ability to do so professionally and effectively. That said, our top priority is the safety of both the public and the officers on the ground. We are urging open and continuous lines of communication between all agencies to prevent confusion, avoid escalation, and ensure a coordinated, lawful, and orderly response during this critical time.” Basically, ‘hey, we’re the professionals at beating up civilians, and even we think this is overkill.’
[As of Tuesday evening Marines were in fact deployed to Los Angeles.]
But in my mind, this is just another example of Trump doing something big and outrageous in order to scare liberals (and conservatives) so that nobody is thinking about what’s going on behind the scenes. Prior to The Battle for Los Angeles, the big story was the apparent break-up between Our Perfect Lord Donald Trump, who was born from his mother’s side and sent by Dharma to teach the Path of Enlightenment to the nations, and Elon Musk, who is best known for spending multiple billions of dollars to actually make Twitter worse than it already was, in order to spend a mere few hundred million to elect Donald Trump and get a role in his regime (since ‘administration’ is the antonym of what we’ve got even by comparison to 2020).
But how did that break-up happen? Well, several reasons, one being that Elon’s ‘move fast and break things’ ethos didn’t work that well in reorganizing government, not that it worked that well with Twitter, and it really hasn’t been working with Tesla or Space X. Related to that is that Elon and his hired Musketeers in DOGE* became very unpopular even within the Trump regime for their high-handed actions. Related to that is the fact that Elon is, basically, higher than a bald eagle’s nuts most of the time, which was confirmed second-hand due to news exposes fueled by those offended inside staffers, and confirmed externally by just looking at him. And part of that is the specific rumor that Elon poached the wife of Stephen Miller, both professionally and romantically. This may account for the non-rumor black eye that Musk sported in his White House event announcing his alleged retirement from the Trump Team, although he said it was caused by his son, whom I believe he named after a quadratic equation. That kid’s got a mean left. But then, I think of A Boy Named Sue, and when Elon’s son grows up, he’s gonna be able to kick Sue through a wall.
Well, that’s just the behind-the-scenes mess. But then it blew up on social media, which is the only thing either of these two care about. Why? Because Elon objected to Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill.
For one thing, the official title of this thing in the House version is One Big Beautiful Bill. Because apparently the average IQ in the United States is still over two digits, and something MUST be done about that.
The bill in its current form barely passed the House by one vote, partially because two Republicans voted against it which they could afford to do because three Democrats died of old age or sickness during this term of Congress. The current dispute is how much of it the Senate is going to use and how much of that bill will be approved when it comes back to the House for reconciliation. To complicate things further, reconciliation in Washington means that a Senate majority can override an otherwise prohibitive filibuster but only so long as the bill affects mandatory spending, revenue, OR the federal debt limit and can only pass one such bill per year for a maximum of three reconciliation bills, although the subjects are frequently combined, hence Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill.”
Now prior to the Celebrity Divorce, this bill was best known (or not) for all the cuts it is going to make to social-spending programs like Medicare. But the Big Bullshit Bill also has little provisions that were either buried in the dross so as not to be noticed, or added in at the last minute, which caused even some Republicans to object after the fact. Like Section 70302 (that’s how big this thing is) stating that: “No court of the United States may enforce a contempt citation for failure to comply with an injunction or temporary restraining order if no security was given when the injunction or order was issued pursuant to Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 65(c), whether issued prior to, on, or subsequent to the date of enactment of this section.” In effect this would mean that judges would need to create a bond amount in order to make injunctions enforceable, and since this is retroactive, any current injunctions against the Trump regime in court cannot be enforced. (Technically this applies to ANY contempt citation, not just against Trump, which is a great example of The Law of Unintended Consequences.)
This is not so well publicized, especially by our ‘liberal’ media, cause let’s face it, Donald Trump won the most votes without the Electoral College, so clearly Americans don’t care about homo commie shit like ‘rule of law’ or ‘the Constitution’ anymore.
But Elon Musk still seems to think of himself as a classical capitalist and thinks it’s a bad thing for government to overspend and waste money. I mean, that was the ostensible reason for DOGE, not to send college kids into every bureaucracy’s database to get all their info so that Peter Thiel and Palantir** could have access to it. But apparently the increase in the deficit not only disturbed some Republicans (in private, of course) it disturbed Musk enough to speak publicly. And it’s a real issue.
Largely at the behest of people like Musk, the Big Bullshit Bill (hereafter referred to as BBB) changes the tax laws (including state and local exemptions from federal tax) so that all but the highest income levels will have a net tax increase, Medicare would be cut by $500 billion over eight years, and Medicaid would be cut by $880 billion over time.
The end result, according to the Congressional Budget Office, is that over the next decade, the federal deficit, which is currently almost 2 trillion dollars, will increase by an additional $2.4 trillion.
You can look at CBO’s pie chart for fiscal year 2024 here. https://www.cbo.gov/publication/61181 In that year, defense spending was only $850 billion. It is dwarfed by the combined cost of Social Security ($1.5 trillion), Medicare ($865 billion) and Medicaid ($618 billion).
For those of us who still consider ourselves right-wing (on the standard that right-wing means ‘there are objective realities that cannot be changed by politics or social consensus’, not ‘Trump is my Shepherd; I shall not want’) the big question over all this is: how does a bill that specifically targets entitlement spending end up raising the deficit by a factor of trillions (with an s)?
Because:
military spending is $150 billion above and beyond normal budgetary increases such that for the first time the military budget would be 1 trillion dollars in itself;
spending on ICE alone is increased $9.5 billion in addition to increases in support funding for Border Patrol and Department of Homeland Security;
Republicans are going to renew the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act tax cuts, mainly on the upper percentile, that otherwise would have expired after 2025. (Republicans may fear the wrath of voters but they fear the wrath of the donor class more.)
And in the midst of this, let us not forget that all of this will end up undermining America’s living standards and economic performance, which will undermine our bond market, which will increase the national debt. When the whole premise of conservative anti-tax theory is that economic growth will make tax cuts pay for themselves. (If that was ever true, it was in the glory days of JFK and LBJ when ‘progressive’ taxation was so high that it demonstrated the Laffer Curve.)
So Elon decided to twit about this. First, he declared he could be silent no longer and declared Trump’s budget bill a “disgusting abomination”, a phrase that usually brings to mind Trump himself.
He said that Trump wouldn’t have won without him and he wouldn’t have more than 51 Senators without him. Which is probably true.
And then Musk pulled out the BIG news: The reason Trump hasn’t released the Epstein Files is because Trump is in them. And the country’s collective reaction was: yeah.
Look, Trump is a convicted felon and while technically not a rapist, was found in a civil case to have committed sexual assault. Clearly that wasn’t enough to stop him from getting elected again. Saying that Trump is in the Epstein Files is like saying that your cousin is an alcoholic whose “sister” is really his mom- everyone in the family knows it, you’re just not supposed to talk about it.
And yet that was probably enough to get Trump to pull this stunt in LA. It probably has more to do with Stephen Miller (aka Pee-Wee German) trying to get quotas for arresting “illegals” because there aren’t enough violent criminals to go around. But it’s still part of the Trump technique of flooding the zone with shit and making sure you can’t deal with the last outrage cause there’s always a bigger one around the corner. “Hey, don’t pay attention to that teenager I raped! Lookit all these orphans I killed!”
Who’s going to win the catfight? Who gets custody of JD Vance? Trump, easily. Trump has control of the federal government, and he can and has threatened to cut Musk’s lucrative government contracts. Musk has no equivalent leverage. It’s already looking like Musk is backing off, mainly by deleting a lot of his comments on X, which is apparently supposed to make everyone forget they saw them (or saved them). And this weekend, Musk decided to share a post by Trump against the rioters and the officials in California, apparently finding new solidarity in their shared fear of dark people.
But Musk still has Twitter. Which has undermined most of its reputation and business model under Musk, even before his fusion with Trump, yet it is still used by many influencers, especially the type who care about both Musk and Trump. And those are exactly the sort of people who still care about conspiracy mongering and who were rather annoyed when the FBI heads Kash Patel and Dan Bongino did an about-face and told the press that Jeffrey Epstein did in fact kill himself.
Meanwhile on June 8, Senator Rand Paul (BR.-Kentucky), having some ancestral memory of being “libertarian”, objected to the BBB’s increased funding for ICE. About the same time, Cato Institute think-tank writer David Bier posted that the costs of deportations would by themselves add almost 1 trillion in costs to the BBB.
This week there was a column in The Hill (another outlet that has undermined its reputation in the Trump Era yet still has a following for that reason) saying that the fallout between Trump and his sugar daddy could still have long-term consequences for Republicans as a whole: “Trump was counting on the bill’s passage to be a significant political tailwind that would boost his polling numbers and Republicans’ midterm hopes, particularly given the ongoing chaos over tariffs and trade policy. Now, whichever version of the bill eventually passes, Republicans look like the party of chaos.”
All of which is leading up to the June 14 parade in Washington, ostensibly as a celebration of the US Army anniversary (though they never asked for it), but really as a birthday parade for Donald Trump, because a military parade is the gift you give to the man who has everything, including the most powerful country on earth. Is it right that we turn our military, and our country as a whole, into a monument for one man’s shriveled manhood and even more decrepit brain? Well, we could have had a president who was your stereotype career social democrat who would have run everything business as usual but at least wouldn’t have run every aspect of this country into the ground.
But no, you had to prove you were so much smarter than people who read books and stuff. Well, at least we don’t have a president who’s a doddering old man who can’t keep track of one sentence to the next, who doesn’t know what direction he’s facing and who can’t even climb the stairs.
* – pronounced like the Venetian ‘doj’ by the press, though I always preferred it like ‘dough-GI’. Shoutout to Jonathan Capehart at MSDNC, who has pronounced it ‘dodgy.’ And then of course there’s ‘douche’.
– ** ‘Palantir’ of course comes from the lore of J.R.R. Tolkien, referring to a crystal-ball communications and surveillance device developed in the First Age. According to Wikipedia: “A major theme of palantír usage is that while the stones show real objects or events, those using the stones had to “possess great strength of will and of mind” to direct the stone’s gaze to its full capability. The stones were an unreliable guide to action, since what was not shown could be more important than what was selectively presented. A risk lay in the fact that users with sufficient power could choose what to show and what to conceal to other stones: in The Lord of the Rings, a palantír has fallen into the Enemy’s hands, making the usefulness of all other existing stones questionable.”