Common topic when I debate politics with friends over here, because it's just as bad on this side of the Atlantic:
"Do you think you should pay for my hobby?"
"No, of course not!"
"Then why am I paying taxes for insert-something-or-other-not-an-essential-service?"
"But if there wasn't tax funding no-one would be doing it?!"
"And yet! We had art, music, sculpture, dancing, sports and so on for centuries earlier."
Which is where the topic is changed to what was on the telly last night or what has the Dastardly Putin/Trump/other done this episode, et cetera, we've all experienced it.
Even funnier is when people defend politicians' wages and perks by saying: "If they don't earn a lot, they are more likely to take bribes, and if the pay is bad then the best people won't try for politics!" It is pure anti-understanding of human nature.
Or as the saying goes: "Scum and cream both rise to the top"
I disagree about politician pay. Were I a manager type, I would be comparing business pay to government pay. If government work paid competitively, talented people might be attracted to the work.
Instead, we get grifters, rich hobbyists and ideologues who would do it for free.
you obviously havent seen us federal government pay compared to private industry for the same jobs. and the benefits as well as the workload. simply no comparison. paid handsomely for less valuable work and less work in general.
busy maybe but not productive. generally. and for politicians yes sure thats why we have such honest chaps now.
Were you a manager type, you'd do better as a professional civil service clerk in some area of expertise, and be better for society, than you'd be as a politician.
Politician is not a job or a career but a calling based on being trustworthy and acting according to the will of the community (or it ought to be, rather).
And that's the fundamental difference, and by offering really good pay and perks and immunities (de facto if not de jure) you instead ineviatbly get grifters and only grifters, narcissists and people with visions dictating how "people ought to think and behave".
With basic pay, you get people wanting to serve the public trust, since those in it for a buck will go do something else in the private sector.
Also, comparing public vs private sector always skews because their incentives are (or should be) different. Public, the profit is the services provided: private, the profit is monetary. Completely different incentive-structures and a large reason for the public sector becoming worse and worse since the 1990s (where I am) is that it was made to adopt the private sector incentives and goals; it is the inverse of trying to run a for-profit business but with the goal of breaking even.
I think it’s pretty clear that these sorts of pork projects mainly happen because NIMBYism has erected an insane thicket of overregulation on what everyday citizens and businesses can do with their own property. (Ed: As in, it’s literally illegal to do the sorts of common sense things you want to see, and that is retarded.)
It’s not surprising or evidence of some great conspiratorial racket that a whole complex of consultants and nonprofits arose to navigate these channels of pork and siphon off the money.
But the solution is abolishing the vast majority of local government regulations, not merely targeting federal pork for zeroing out.
They are too easy a target that is essentially indefensible to a swarm of cheap drones. Im not saying to mothball them and other similar programs, just to turn to more modern things.
How many wars were lost by countries using out moded approaches?
The worst thing is that it is creating a single government that you cant escape from. If local govt gets out of your comfort zone, you’d vote with your feet. But “Uncle Sugar” (nice Chris) ensures those boundaries are blurred.
and like was written in the piece—this includes both sides of the aisle 100% of the members.
plus, maybe it is above board Chris. but what about the actual obligated amounts that go to contract?
am I to believe that those contracts are all fairly competed locally and the cost estimates are sound and to the penny? and those reps ensure there is a bidding process thatnis in the government’s favor?
the grifting runs deep. I am sure those estimates are padded and too many of the contracts are payback and/or predetermined.
It’s everywhere and it’s ridiculous. Western summit county Utah has maybe 20,000 residents and a ton of tourists visit. They have had somewhere between $25-50 million in federal grants to build a second public transit district. Yes a second one because varying groups couldn’t agree on goals and mission for the original one. Our tax dollars are so misused it’s beyond criminal.
Or hold the dance programs literally in the middle of the Interstate, like Orlando Jones and his 7-Up machine, just as the barrelling Freightliner pulverizes it.
Dear Chris, these federally funded projects are quietly called "Black Fingerprinting Classes" in educational circles. Calfornia is covered in these projects.
You and I travel many of the same roads. If you look, many of these small towns with shabby old business disricts have long rows of new bright shiney street lamp posts in front of their closed, boarded-up old downtown. Porterville (CA) is a fine example. Somehow illuminating this blight will restore prosperty to these small towns. Some corporation is installing these fancy street lamp posts.
Brand new federal skate parks exist in the smallest of towns in the San Joaquin valley. These are often named for former Senator Dian Feinstein. I had no idea of her love of street skates.
Four lane streets lose two of their lanes to an unnatural green florescent paint for bicycles. Four lanes are often crowded into 2.5 lanes. Summer high temperatures are often over 100° F in this area. What bikes? Some corporation is making a fortune on that lime-green unnatural paint.
My favorite doggle-boon! Driving at night in the country, you can find your car flying wildly though a new, poorly marked round-about. Whatever happened to that formerly safe 2 or 4 way intersection with stop signs?
My wife just LOVES these round-abouts. "They are so European!" Like most rural Californians, she has NO idea how to drive these. She tends to come to a complete in front of on-coming circular traffic. I close my eyes waiting for the crunch of automotive fiber glass. But it will be a "so European" accident.
These small towns that you pass through have "minority and women owned business" that no bank would ever lend to. There is a large wildly over-staffed pizza palor in Lindsay that sells minimal pizzas per week. There is a cookie shop in Cayucos that sells mediocre cookies at high prices. There aren't enough cookies in the world to pay for the building and the land and the excessive staffing. But all the employees are LGBT+. It's the "Sexual Minority Full Employment Act of the Central California Coast" all by itself. Federal money leaking out of some pot.
Then there is "Kim Fleeman Plumbing" in my modest city. Kim is the wife of a plumber. She can turn on a faucet, but that is it. The husbands plumbing business goes into her name and ownership for all the specia business privileges they recieve as female tradesmen.
He thinks he is clever, but he looses the rights to the name of his own business in the divorce.
In the High Sierra at 7,000 feet, there is a road that only I seem to travel. There is no human settlement what so ever --- not a house, not a cabin. It has been significantly upgraded to link two wilderness Sequoia groves. There used to be a construction sign up announcing the 100's of thousands of dollars being spent on my road. It was the least essential road project in the entire state of California.
The graft and special privileges are endless. The good boat USS Federal Graft leaks money over all of California.
I once visited a Parisian-themed "confectionery" in small-town Kansas that sold chocolate bars for eight dollars each in a town of less then 2,000 people with a median income of $21,000. It got a bunch of CDBG cash.
Is there any historical precedent for something like this actually retreating to "normal"? Outside of collapse and catastrophe? Given its scope, I don't see how. We will fund outer dining until we die.
Some of my colleagues were recently bemoaning cuts to interlibrary loan services, provided by the federal government. That this did not strike any of them as being out of scope for the FG struck me quite deeply.
Libraries aren’t pork. Illiteracy is how we got here. Can we please have fed post offices and libraries? Can we manage to reason well enough to collectively pay for functioning services we’ve had for centuries as a civilized society? Have we lost the ability to tell the difference?
Let’s throw darts at a phone directory every four years to get representatives turned in & out. We could not do worse.
libraries and post office?? seriously?? i dont disagree in ANY way with your point about illiteracy, but have you been to a library recently? it is mostly homeless guys surfing porn (at least in a city). with every book being digital now, maybe we could have fewer buildings and staff?? and the post office- why are we still doing daily mail? just going to every other day would save close to half of the cost- literally 1/2 of equipment and carriers. nothing important is delivered by actual mail, and would be hurt by one extra day. already, just about weekly the PO skips one of my deliveries because of "short staff".
at any rate, for all of the outrage about the various retarded pork projects (and it is ALL warranted) the simple fact is that ALL of that is only ~10% of the budget. we are running a deficit of more than 25%. you wont come close to balancing the budget unless you cut "entitlements" and defense....
My take on public (vs publicly funded) libraries is similar to my take on government funding for healthcare.
Them: “Who will build hospitals if not the Federal government?”
Me: “Yeah, right? If hospitals had to be state or privately funded you’d probably see a bunch of hospitals named after state universities, private universities, saints, Jewish landmarks, and weird fraternal organizations like the Shriners, and is that THAT what we see …? No, wait …”
There are national benefits emerging from an educated populace. Without that, we have an idiocracy who sees no point in “book larnin” making decisions that affect everyone.
because history shows us that all current libraries are massive centers of intellectual curiosity in every community. They bring in people from all over the community to rejoice in learning, to collaborate, and to be contemplative. They overflow with people daily with lines out the door in the morning. The people cry “we need more libraries!”
or….
I have other examples that are reality and it is not the aforementioned fairy tale.
What I see is a bunch of people who haven’t spent a scintilla of time at civic meetings to do the oversight necessary to run a government going berserk because it turns out people tap the toll when no one’s looking.
“Public libraries” are local collections, managed locally, historically instituted by locals in every self-respecting city, with whatever funding they can get, with a national set of standards that preclude censorship and surveillance. That’s gov’t 101.
Check how your local library is managed, on the city, county, and federal basis. Join the Friends of board and do citizen oversight.
> Federal government, which swings from left to right and back again, delivers left or right solutions, solutions which 50% of the time solve one constituency’s problem and harms the other.
> Local solutions for local problems is why we formed a Republic, not a democratic tyranny of the “majority”.
> Step away from your phone and start working locally.
> Our Federal government is bankrupt because people have been poorly educated and believe that our Federal government is a limitless piggy bank for solving every f’ing problem a community organizer has a wet dream about.
Tens of trillions of dollars in debt and you’re calling for more handouts? Does it make sense that you’re calling for off-loading your brain to a bunch of semi-elected grifters?
I apologize for my lack of tact. You seem like a caring person. Turn your talents to solving problems locally. You can get much, much more accomplished.
I know how things went wrong. They can’t be fixed without a vision for a better world. You don’t know me so you’d best not criticize my record of working locally, which made me hard boiled, not over easy.
Grifters and handouts are the opposite of the intentions that built libraries like temples since the beginning of the written word.
Maybe some feudal lords or kings back in the day would count. We had one or three kings who when they took the throne ran a realms-wide audit of the entire kingdom, including executions and stripping of titles for the most venal abusers of the previous incumbent's rule.
Back in my day, which seems longer and longer ago, youth groups like 4H or Boy Scouts (RIP) would volunteer to do these sorts of things for free or for the cost of materials. Youngsters got some experience working on a project in a group, the job got done, and there was a great deal of civic pride to go around. It was a win for everyone. There are restaurants around here that put up a pop-up tent and some borrowed picnic tables and voila! outdoor dining for the summer season. I suppose they're not doing it right since there are no government bureau-weenies in charge.
As for Becca Balint, she was not content to tell us all to get in touch with our own "scrappy inner little dyke" or vociferously to support illegal alien criminals, but now she's worried that if we stop illegal immigration, we'll have no one to "wipe our a**es".
I’m not surprised. “Becca” is a product of our nationalized public education system. She was told “activism” is an integral part of being educated and probably was part of the shift to not having to study the fundamentals of literacy, which includes both reading comprehension AND mathematical literacy but making public activism a non-negotiable requirement for graduating high school.
We’ve been sleeping while our children were being turned in weapons of our destruction.
Day 23 of a current events and social media water fast. I make exceptions for SubStack writers, but never click the links to bring me into X where I have found myself wasting hours of my time.
I feel lighter of being.
With that update out of the way, without Chris's clever eye and skeptical nature, I would have NEVER thought about this in the first place. I'm still disappointed so many of our countrymen are upset about DOGE instead of the crimes identified.
TRUTH: When Chris showed how to find out what is going on in my own district--I had the urge to check it out and see if there is any Federal money I can find for our animal rescue. I'm as guilty as anyone else.
83 in Tacoma today. These are the days living here is better than any place on the planet. Wishing you all well.
Well, he did do the whole trail of tears thing but and the “the Court has its ruling, now let them enforce it” thing, so maybe not? One good federalism quote might not be worth it. (I personally think he’s on the $20 bill (or any money) as a sly F—k U to the memory of the guy who opposed the US bank!)
Possibly. Hard to Remember that not so long ago Jackson was a Great American Hero to the Democrat party. The annual Jefferson-Jackson Dinner Party was a Big Event.
Then it became awkward becuase of slavery and....uummm, other things.
Chris. Awesome. I wonder how much money is spent every year to pay for these little local boondoggles. If they didn’t have the power to destroy out lives I would suggest a tax boycott. Perhaps a start would be claiming maximum deductions, then file early and send them a buck and a penny.
Common topic when I debate politics with friends over here, because it's just as bad on this side of the Atlantic:
"Do you think you should pay for my hobby?"
"No, of course not!"
"Then why am I paying taxes for insert-something-or-other-not-an-essential-service?"
"But if there wasn't tax funding no-one would be doing it?!"
"And yet! We had art, music, sculpture, dancing, sports and so on for centuries earlier."
Which is where the topic is changed to what was on the telly last night or what has the Dastardly Putin/Trump/other done this episode, et cetera, we've all experienced it.
Even funnier is when people defend politicians' wages and perks by saying: "If they don't earn a lot, they are more likely to take bribes, and if the pay is bad then the best people won't try for politics!" It is pure anti-understanding of human nature.
Or as the saying goes: "Scum and cream both rise to the top"
I disagree about politician pay. Were I a manager type, I would be comparing business pay to government pay. If government work paid competitively, talented people might be attracted to the work.
Instead, we get grifters, rich hobbyists and ideologues who would do it for free.
That is not taking into account pensions after 20years and a lifetime of health insurance. It's a great grift for the marginally motivated.
you obviously havent seen us federal government pay compared to private industry for the same jobs. and the benefits as well as the workload. simply no comparison. paid handsomely for less valuable work and less work in general.
busy maybe but not productive. generally. and for politicians yes sure thats why we have such honest chaps now.
Were you a manager type, you'd do better as a professional civil service clerk in some area of expertise, and be better for society, than you'd be as a politician.
Politician is not a job or a career but a calling based on being trustworthy and acting according to the will of the community (or it ought to be, rather).
And that's the fundamental difference, and by offering really good pay and perks and immunities (de facto if not de jure) you instead ineviatbly get grifters and only grifters, narcissists and people with visions dictating how "people ought to think and behave".
With basic pay, you get people wanting to serve the public trust, since those in it for a buck will go do something else in the private sector.
Also, comparing public vs private sector always skews because their incentives are (or should be) different. Public, the profit is the services provided: private, the profit is monetary. Completely different incentive-structures and a large reason for the public sector becoming worse and worse since the 1990s (where I am) is that it was made to adopt the private sector incentives and goals; it is the inverse of trying to run a for-profit business but with the goal of breaking even.
I think it’s pretty clear that these sorts of pork projects mainly happen because NIMBYism has erected an insane thicket of overregulation on what everyday citizens and businesses can do with their own property. (Ed: As in, it’s literally illegal to do the sorts of common sense things you want to see, and that is retarded.)
It’s not surprising or evidence of some great conspiratorial racket that a whole complex of consultants and nonprofits arose to navigate these channels of pork and siphon off the money.
But the solution is abolishing the vast majority of local government regulations, not merely targeting federal pork for zeroing out.
I'd take both
Fair.
Add in a 20% reduction in the DOD.
That is where the Republicans fail for me. They are unwilling to look at DoD at all for cutting.
We have more aircraft battle groups (It's not just one ship) than the rest of the world combined. It's not even close.
The whole Federal Spending Complex interlocks in such a fashion that it can not be safely dismantled.
And to boot, Aircraft Carrier battle groups have been made obsolete except when picking on weaklings
We absolutely for sure could win World War II 25 times over with our current military with few casualties. Not sure about WW III.
Trying to attack people that can actually shoot back will end badly.
this is true but the vast supply chain and industrial base for ACs is a tough nut to crack. Also, there goes my pension...
They are too easy a target that is essentially indefensible to a swarm of cheap drones. Im not saying to mothball them and other similar programs, just to turn to more modern things.
How many wars were lost by countries using out moded approaches?
Like all of them?
Tru dat!
"turned the federal government into Santa Claus"
😆
If only that were true, though, because then it wouldn't exist.
The worst thing is that it is creating a single government that you cant escape from. If local govt gets out of your comfort zone, you’d vote with your feet. But “Uncle Sugar” (nice Chris) ensures those boundaries are blurred.
and like was written in the piece—this includes both sides of the aisle 100% of the members.
https://massie.house.gov/services/additional-services-and-resources/member-designated-projects.htm
exactly
plus, maybe it is above board Chris. but what about the actual obligated amounts that go to contract?
am I to believe that those contracts are all fairly competed locally and the cost estimates are sound and to the penny? and those reps ensure there is a bidding process thatnis in the government’s favor?
the grifting runs deep. I am sure those estimates are padded and too many of the contracts are payback and/or predetermined.
^^This!^^
It’s everywhere and it’s ridiculous. Western summit county Utah has maybe 20,000 residents and a ton of tourists visit. They have had somewhere between $25-50 million in federal grants to build a second public transit district. Yes a second one because varying groups couldn’t agree on goals and mission for the original one. Our tax dollars are so misused it’s beyond criminal.
I must be a secret bureaucratic genius because I immediately thought, they need to make these dance programs interstate.
Or hold the dance programs literally in the middle of the Interstate, like Orlando Jones and his 7-Up machine, just as the barrelling Freightliner pulverizes it.
Everybody hates pork but PIMBY is good!
Dear Chris, these federally funded projects are quietly called "Black Fingerprinting Classes" in educational circles. Calfornia is covered in these projects.
You and I travel many of the same roads. If you look, many of these small towns with shabby old business disricts have long rows of new bright shiney street lamp posts in front of their closed, boarded-up old downtown. Porterville (CA) is a fine example. Somehow illuminating this blight will restore prosperty to these small towns. Some corporation is installing these fancy street lamp posts.
Brand new federal skate parks exist in the smallest of towns in the San Joaquin valley. These are often named for former Senator Dian Feinstein. I had no idea of her love of street skates.
Four lane streets lose two of their lanes to an unnatural green florescent paint for bicycles. Four lanes are often crowded into 2.5 lanes. Summer high temperatures are often over 100° F in this area. What bikes? Some corporation is making a fortune on that lime-green unnatural paint.
My favorite doggle-boon! Driving at night in the country, you can find your car flying wildly though a new, poorly marked round-about. Whatever happened to that formerly safe 2 or 4 way intersection with stop signs?
My wife just LOVES these round-abouts. "They are so European!" Like most rural Californians, she has NO idea how to drive these. She tends to come to a complete in front of on-coming circular traffic. I close my eyes waiting for the crunch of automotive fiber glass. But it will be a "so European" accident.
These small towns that you pass through have "minority and women owned business" that no bank would ever lend to. There is a large wildly over-staffed pizza palor in Lindsay that sells minimal pizzas per week. There is a cookie shop in Cayucos that sells mediocre cookies at high prices. There aren't enough cookies in the world to pay for the building and the land and the excessive staffing. But all the employees are LGBT+. It's the "Sexual Minority Full Employment Act of the Central California Coast" all by itself. Federal money leaking out of some pot.
Then there is "Kim Fleeman Plumbing" in my modest city. Kim is the wife of a plumber. She can turn on a faucet, but that is it. The husbands plumbing business goes into her name and ownership for all the specia business privileges they recieve as female tradesmen.
He thinks he is clever, but he looses the rights to the name of his own business in the divorce.
In the High Sierra at 7,000 feet, there is a road that only I seem to travel. There is no human settlement what so ever --- not a house, not a cabin. It has been significantly upgraded to link two wilderness Sequoia groves. There used to be a construction sign up announcing the 100's of thousands of dollars being spent on my road. It was the least essential road project in the entire state of California.
The graft and special privileges are endless. The good boat USS Federal Graft leaks money over all of California.
I once visited a Parisian-themed "confectionery" in small-town Kansas that sold chocolate bars for eight dollars each in a town of less then 2,000 people with a median income of $21,000. It got a bunch of CDBG cash.
These scams are everywhere once you start asking yourself regularly who would fund or loan on this.
Was it Lucas, Kansas? I heard that it's scheme collapsed. No-body came.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9Hj-5Nq9X8
Is there any historical precedent for something like this actually retreating to "normal"? Outside of collapse and catastrophe? Given its scope, I don't see how. We will fund outer dining until we die.
Some of my colleagues were recently bemoaning cuts to interlibrary loan services, provided by the federal government. That this did not strike any of them as being out of scope for the FG struck me quite deeply.
Yes…. we are ‘taught’ to go to Big Sugar Daddy first for pretty much everything.
Of course, it's other peoples money or no ones money at all.
Exactly!
Libraries aren’t pork. Illiteracy is how we got here. Can we please have fed post offices and libraries? Can we manage to reason well enough to collectively pay for functioning services we’ve had for centuries as a civilized society? Have we lost the ability to tell the difference?
Let’s throw darts at a phone directory every four years to get representatives turned in & out. We could not do worse.
libraries and post office?? seriously?? i dont disagree in ANY way with your point about illiteracy, but have you been to a library recently? it is mostly homeless guys surfing porn (at least in a city). with every book being digital now, maybe we could have fewer buildings and staff?? and the post office- why are we still doing daily mail? just going to every other day would save close to half of the cost- literally 1/2 of equipment and carriers. nothing important is delivered by actual mail, and would be hurt by one extra day. already, just about weekly the PO skips one of my deliveries because of "short staff".
at any rate, for all of the outrage about the various retarded pork projects (and it is ALL warranted) the simple fact is that ALL of that is only ~10% of the budget. we are running a deficit of more than 25%. you wont come close to balancing the budget unless you cut "entitlements" and defense....
My take on public (vs publicly funded) libraries is similar to my take on government funding for healthcare.
Them: “Who will build hospitals if not the Federal government?”
Me: “Yeah, right? If hospitals had to be state or privately funded you’d probably see a bunch of hospitals named after state universities, private universities, saints, Jewish landmarks, and weird fraternal organizations like the Shriners, and is that THAT what we see …? No, wait …”
The states can fund libraries.
There are national benefits emerging from an educated populace. Without that, we have an idiocracy who sees no point in “book larnin” making decisions that affect everyone.
because history shows us that all current libraries are massive centers of intellectual curiosity in every community. They bring in people from all over the community to rejoice in learning, to collaborate, and to be contemplative. They overflow with people daily with lines out the door in the morning. The people cry “we need more libraries!”
or….
I have other examples that are reality and it is not the aforementioned fairy tale.
Libraries are Part of the Delightful Diversity that Enriches Us All!
I don't disagree about the benefits of libraries, but it should be funded at the state level. YMMV!
PS: I actually have a library card.
Or from private corp/donors - like Carnegie!
and the problem is someone in california shouldnt be funding a dance trouppe in kansas.
shorter the distance from fund source to fund obligation, the better the control and oversight. it is auditing 101
What I see is a bunch of people who haven’t spent a scintilla of time at civic meetings to do the oversight necessary to run a government going berserk because it turns out people tap the toll when no one’s looking.
“Public libraries” are local collections, managed locally, historically instituted by locals in every self-respecting city, with whatever funding they can get, with a national set of standards that preclude censorship and surveillance. That’s gov’t 101.
Check how your local library is managed, on the city, county, and federal basis. Join the Friends of board and do citizen oversight.
Fix it.
You really don’t understand, do you?
> Local government should supply local needs.
> Federal government, which swings from left to right and back again, delivers left or right solutions, solutions which 50% of the time solve one constituency’s problem and harms the other.
> Local solutions for local problems is why we formed a Republic, not a democratic tyranny of the “majority”.
> Step away from your phone and start working locally.
> Our Federal government is bankrupt because people have been poorly educated and believe that our Federal government is a limitless piggy bank for solving every f’ing problem a community organizer has a wet dream about.
Tens of trillions of dollars in debt and you’re calling for more handouts? Does it make sense that you’re calling for off-loading your brain to a bunch of semi-elected grifters?
I apologize for my lack of tact. You seem like a caring person. Turn your talents to solving problems locally. You can get much, much more accomplished.
I know how things went wrong. They can’t be fixed without a vision for a better world. You don’t know me so you’d best not criticize my record of working locally, which made me hard boiled, not over easy.
Grifters and handouts are the opposite of the intentions that built libraries like temples since the beginning of the written word.
Maybe some feudal lords or kings back in the day would count. We had one or three kings who when they took the throne ran a realms-wide audit of the entire kingdom, including executions and stripping of titles for the most venal abusers of the previous incumbent's rule.
I know it’s not Sunday , but all I’ve got is an AMEN 🙏
Back in my day, which seems longer and longer ago, youth groups like 4H or Boy Scouts (RIP) would volunteer to do these sorts of things for free or for the cost of materials. Youngsters got some experience working on a project in a group, the job got done, and there was a great deal of civic pride to go around. It was a win for everyone. There are restaurants around here that put up a pop-up tent and some borrowed picnic tables and voila! outdoor dining for the summer season. I suppose they're not doing it right since there are no government bureau-weenies in charge.
As for Becca Balint, she was not content to tell us all to get in touch with our own "scrappy inner little dyke" or vociferously to support illegal alien criminals, but now she's worried that if we stop illegal immigration, we'll have no one to "wipe our a**es".
Vermont is not sending its best.
https://newsbeyonddetroit.net/2025/02/06/another-nutcase-unhinged-lesbian-lawmaker-tells-dems-at-anti-musk-rally-to-get-in-touch-with-your-scrappy-little-dyke-video/
https://nypost.com/2025/06/04/us-news/vermont-democrat-slammed-over-disturbing-argument-for-more-immigration-were-not-going-to-have-anyone-around-to-wipe-our-aes/
I’m not surprised. “Becca” is a product of our nationalized public education system. She was told “activism” is an integral part of being educated and probably was part of the shift to not having to study the fundamentals of literacy, which includes both reading comprehension AND mathematical literacy but making public activism a non-negotiable requirement for graduating high school.
We’ve been sleeping while our children were being turned in weapons of our destruction.
It’s not the schools job to indoctrinate students in how to wipe hence the need for illegals.
Day 23 of a current events and social media water fast. I make exceptions for SubStack writers, but never click the links to bring me into X where I have found myself wasting hours of my time.
I feel lighter of being.
With that update out of the way, without Chris's clever eye and skeptical nature, I would have NEVER thought about this in the first place. I'm still disappointed so many of our countrymen are upset about DOGE instead of the crimes identified.
TRUTH: When Chris showed how to find out what is going on in my own district--I had the urge to check it out and see if there is any Federal money I can find for our animal rescue. I'm as guilty as anyone else.
83 in Tacoma today. These are the days living here is better than any place on the planet. Wishing you all well.
bsn
Plus interest, plus interest, plus interest. Plus interest on the interest on the interest ad infinitum.
I love that Andrew Jackson anecdote. Can we bring him back? Wait - we just had a president who wasn’t fully alive and that didn’t go so well
Well, he did do the whole trail of tears thing but and the “the Court has its ruling, now let them enforce it” thing, so maybe not? One good federalism quote might not be worth it. (I personally think he’s on the $20 bill (or any money) as a sly F—k U to the memory of the guy who opposed the US bank!)
Possibly. Hard to Remember that not so long ago Jackson was a Great American Hero to the Democrat party. The annual Jefferson-Jackson Dinner Party was a Big Event.
Then it became awkward becuase of slavery and....uummm, other things.
Chris. Awesome. I wonder how much money is spent every year to pay for these little local boondoggles. If they didn’t have the power to destroy out lives I would suggest a tax boycott. Perhaps a start would be claiming maximum deductions, then file early and send them a buck and a penny.