Feb
23
2025

Jessica, You Had Me at "If Mitch Daniels was running DOGE, …"

Maybe the "Move fast and break things" strategy isn't the greatest motto in the world. (Even Facebook gave up on it, changing to "Move fast with stable infrastructure" in 2014.)

Randal Munroe commented awhile back:

[Move Fast and Break Things]

Mouseover: "I was almost fired from a job driving the hearse in funeral processions, but then the funeral home realized how much business I was creating for them."

But do not despair, let Christian Britschgi describe The Sunny Side of Donald Trump's Power Grabs. It's fair, balanced, thoughtful throughout, and his bottom line is:

The one thing you can say for sure about Donald Trump is that he eventually makes fools of everyone. The man has a talent for embarrassing his fiercest defenders; his fiercest critics have a talent for embarrassing themselves.

Predicting where this administration will be in a week is difficult. Plotting its impact on the American government decades from now is impossible.

If I were to hazard a prediction anyway about where this roller-coaster ride is headed, it'd be that we end up with a president who looms supreme over a more lawless but much-diminished federal government. The judiciary and the voters will check the most egregious executive excesses. Members of Congress will guard entitlements, do media hits, and slowly forget they ever played an actual role in policymaking.

It's not great or perfectly libertarian, but it's better than the alternative of ever-growing government.

And that's about as sunny as it gets for this blog.

Also of note:

  • Another prediction of "interesting times" ahead. Jeffrey Blehar makes an informed guess at How Elon Musk’s Service to Trump Will Probably, Eventually End. (NR gifted link)

    A week ago Donald Trump went to both Truth Social and the White House’s official social media account to proudly quote what he thought was a line from Napoleon, stating that “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.” (As a stickler I will point out that the quote actually comes from Balzac’s posthumous and sentimentally apocryphal 1838 Maxims and Thoughts of Napoleon — there is no proof Napoleon himself said it — and in any event is a mere epitome of Book III, Ch. 41 of Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy.) Then, a few days ago, Trump trollingly pronounced himself royalty after rescinding Kathy Hochul’s New York City car congestion tax with an AI-drawn Time magazine cover of himself wearing a crown and the all-caps statement “LONG LIVE THE KING!”

    Okay, that's good. But Elon's fate? The prediction comes many (pretty funny) paragraphs later:

    So as fond as Elon Musk seems to be of visualizing himself amid the ranks of the world-bestriding heroes of history, he would do well to remember one of history’s most instructive lessons, repeated throughout history across all cultures: When the miserable masses would threaten the monarch’s rule by gathering outside the walls of the palace to vent their rage over his failed policies, the monarch would sometimes make a rational calculation. He seized his most notoriously disliked subordinate, designated him the cause of all problems, lopped his head off, and tossed it over the ramparts to slake the bloodthirst of the crowd.

    We live in more civilized times. But when Musk finally runs afoul of Trump — or, more brutally, needs to be sacrificed to deflect anger away from him — he should expect a rhetorically equivalent fate from his new best friend.

    And the Trump cheerleaders will shake their pom-poms every step of the way.

  • Just say "Sell". Cato's Chris Edwards and Yasmeen Kallash-Kyler aren't fans of Trump's Post Office plans: Privatize Not Bureaucratize.

    In a seeming reversal, the Trump administration is rumored to be considering ending the US Postal Service’s quasi-independence and absorbing the company into the federal bureaucracy. The Washington Post reported yesterday, “Trump is expected to issue an executive order as soon as this week to fire the members of the Postal Service’s governing board and place the agency under the control of the Commerce Department.”

    That would be a mistake, creating an agency even more distant from the entrepreneurial postal system that America needs. […]

    If you're interested in the details, I've freelinked that WaPo story. Which contains a quote from a Notre Dame prof:

    “The anxiety over the Postal Service is not only three-quarters of a million workers. It’s that this is something that does not belong to the president or the White House. It belongs to the American people.”

    Um. Prof, if it belongs to us, why can't we sell it to some willing buyer?

    And that put me in mind of an LBJ anecdote:

    Mr. Johnson was in California seeing some troops off to Vietnam. He walked toward a long line of helicopters and a young corporal, holding his salute, said, “Mr. President, your helicopter is this way.”

    Mr. Johnson turned to the young man and said, “Son, they're all my helicopters.”

    Arrogance or a joke?

  • I agree with a Berkeley Prof? It appears I do. Ed Morrissey quotes a Politico article written by Jerel Ezelli, a Berkeley Prof: Enough With 'People of Color' Already!

    Last month, in the televised moments leading up to President Donald Trump’s arrival at the U.S. Capitol Rotunda to be sworn in, CBS Mornings co-host Gayle King scanned the room and noted, “I do not see many ‘people of color.’” She and her co-host took another 20 seconds or so to point out a few attendees who fit the term.

    The moment, predictably, triggered a backlash from conservative commentators, who accused King, who is Black and a journalist, of being preoccupied with race. But it was also a reminder of the awkward, clunky and frequently backward attempts by the left (or those perceived to be on the left) to, literally and figuratively, read the room. For years Democrats’ understanding of race has not only not evolved, it has arguably been in full-blown retrograde. Nowhere has this been more evident than in the party’s canned usage of the term “people of color.”

    Couldn't help but notice the other day that the University Near Here loves that phrase, People of Color. (Six pages worth of POC links!)

    And to see how totalitarian this pigeonholing can get, check out the Official Government Rules for Collecting Race And Ethnicity Data from Students and Staff. Eight, count 'em, eight "musts" on a short page. And one "may NOT".

    Many years ago, Thomas Sowell recognized, tongue-in-cheek, the fundamental problem with the idea, titling his first collection of essays Pink and Brown People. You don't have to have a spectrum analyzer to observe we're all people of some color.