A single serve of "Ned", a substantial dollop of claptrap, should be more than enough ...

Extraordinary really. You had to crawl way down below the headlines in the lizard Oz to get to a small update, Russia vows ‘no NATO troops in Ukraine’ after US talks.

It was beyond the frame the pond usually captures to show the summary of reptile interests at the early morning start to the day ...

While the reptiles were busy ambulance chasing an aeroplane crash, you had to head off to the Graudian to see it in the headlines ...

Presumably the reptiles were operating on the basis that there was nothing to see there, it was a done peace deal ... a piece here, a piece there ...

Over at The Conversation there was a good short read by Matt Fitzpatrick, Professor in International History, Flinders University, titled Ukraine isn’t invited to its own peace talks. History is full of such examples – and the results are devastating

The usual suspects copped a mention, but that doesn't stop their ongoing relevance. 

The pond has always been haunted by this one:

4. The Munich Agreement
In September 1938, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and French Prime Minister Édouard Daladier met with Italy’s fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini, and Germany’s Adolf Hitler to sign what became known as the Munich Agreement.
The leaders sought to prevent the spread of war throughout Europe after Hitler’s Nazis had fomented an uprising and began attacking the German-speaking areas of Czechoslovakia known as the Sudetenland. They did this under the pretext of protecting German minorities. No Czechoslovakians were invited to the meeting.
The meeting is still seen by many as the “Munich Betrayal” – a classic example of a failed appeasement of a belligerent power in the false hope of staving off war.

Well yes, and meanwhile, over on the extreme far right, there was the usual motley bunch on display, more rag tag with the continuing absence of petulant Peta (not that the pond is complaining about that) ...

Simplistic Simon - no conflict of interest there - was busy decrying the rate cut, and snappy Tom was blathering about the national vibe.

The pond felt no need to look further than the infallible Pope du jour, conjuring up the reptile spin:

And what a relief to be able to avoid Dame Slap. 

Just the tag was a complete turn-off:

The ASX Corporate Governance Council has dealt itself out of the governance debate. Controlled by pseudo-culture warriors, rent-seekers and activists, it’s become a de facto legislator and regulator.

What on earth does she mean by "pseudo-culture warriors"? That they're not like that mean-spirited, bitch from hell, hard core, certified genuine, culture warrior that she is? 

And yet again that abuse of the term "rent-seekers"? 

The entire point of the filthy rich is rent-seeking, leeching and sponging. Back in Victorian days it was reckoned  quite the thing to have investments and property that allowed the idle rich to lead a genteel life and indulge in succession wars ... just like today's media proprietor families.

The reptiles themselves, lurking behind a paywall, are a bunch of rent-seekers. If you work at the Graudian, you're in the company of rent beggars ...

Nah, it's a pass for the pond...

With the bromancer yet again MIA, and petulant Peta mercifully out of sight, that left only the tedium of a "Ned" Everest kind.

Such was the slackness that early in the morning the reptiles had been forced to make him top of the barking mad commentariat world, ma ...

"Ned" was, in the usual lickspittle both siderist way, blaming the disease on others, rather than blaming the disease on the disease.

The pond blanched and felt incredibly fatigued at reading that opening line ...

Elite’s long march scuttled by hubris and overreach

What the fuck does "Ned" think he is, if not a member of the reptile 'leet, regurgitating the usual sort of claptrap, while sounding completely unaware of the role played by Faux Noise and other Murdochians in the rising of the beast and its slouching towards Bethlehem.

The rest of the tag confirmed the diagnosis. It's always the fault of progressives that King Donald I took the throne:

The American progressive movement hates Trump yet this movement triggered the pro-Trump rebellion. The scale of their hubris testifies to a movement with self-destructive instincts but in denial of its flaws.

And yet, and yet, if there's ever been a movement with self-destructive instincts in full abject and pathetic denial of its flaws, it's the forces behind the Cantaloupe Caligula.

As evidence of "progressive" flaws - being deeply conservative, how the pond loathes that term - the reptiles inserted a terrifying snap of sans culottes hordes on the march to prove their point: Demonstrators rally against US President Donald Trump during a protest in Sacramento, California.

Call the pond terrified as "Ned" offered his opening gambit (he'll get on to his usual ploy of endlessly quoting others later in the piece):

The lesson of politics is that every new government is prone to overreach and empowers its opponents – this was Joe Biden’s fatal mistake, it was Anthony Albanese’s blunder with the voice and the question is surely relevant for Donald Trump.
It was Biden’s support for and succumbing to a relentless progressive agenda that refuelled Trump’s remarkable revival.
The American progressive movement hates Trump yet this movement triggered the pro-Trump rebellion.

Um, actually "Ned" before there was Biden, there was that Kenyan socialist Obama, eradicated from "Ned's" history by "refuelled" ...

The point of course is not to analyse the likes of Faux Noise, the point is rail and rant like a Faux Noise host and blame it all on jolly Joe.

The pond has its own quibbles with Joe, but let's not throw out the Faux Noise baby with the Scranton second childhood blather ...

Witness its support for soft borders, identity politics, law and order laxity, bigger-spending government and corporate diversity policies, its hostility to America’s foundational compact and its quest to recast institutions with progressive ideology.
In retrospect, the scale of progressive and elite hubris testifies to a movement with self-destructive instincts but in denial of its flaws.
Many progressive champions (along with traditional conservatives) issued justified warnings that Trump, given his refusal to accept his defeat at the 2020 election, had defined himself as a threat to US democracy.
Most voters heard the warnings about Trump but refused to act on them. Why? Because they believed American democracy was already in dire trouble because of the unprecedented campaign by a highly educated elite imbued with a progressive philosophy and consumed with a moral superiority that insisted on its top-down implementation.

At this point the reptiles inserted a snap designed to terrify the hive mind, People rally during the "Not My President's Day" protest at the US Capitol.

And yet it is a verifiable coup, with an unelected Nazi-salute white nationalist oligarch cutting a swathe through government.

Naturally "Ned" ducks all this and blames the straw dogs ...

The upshot was a collapse of trust in the political system, in institutional, professional and education leaders, and a chronic suspicion of corporations, universities, many police forces, government bureaucracy and much mainstream media.
Trump supporters became fixated by a belief that the US system of democratic accountability no longer worked for them; indeed, that it was betraying them, a cultural conclusion reinforced by the economic damage from high inflation and struggling wage levels.

And who promoted all this whining and moaning, this snowflake crybaby sense of entitlement gone wrong?

You know, the whiners about 'leets and the long march and hubris and all that ...

Stop right there.

Somebody had to write it, and the pond vowed the next time it stumbled on a reptile use of the word "woke", the pond would drop everything and draw attention to Thomas Chatterton Williams in The Atlantic, How the Woke Right Replaced the Woke Left, The hypocrisy of Trump’s language wars (archive).

"Ned" had the rat cunning to avoid deploying "woke", but that blather about the long march is even more offensive, coming as it does from a member of the reptile 'leet on a long march through the lizard Oz.

So the pond decided to do it anyway.

Call it doing a "Ned", heading off from base camp in a long detour, and running with Williams.

The pond isn't going to quote it all, just enough to capture the tone after the preamble:

...Donald Trump promised that his election would free Americans from ever having to worry about saying the wrong thing again. He even signed an executive order titled “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship.” But a few weeks into his administration, we hardly find ourselves enjoying a culture of free speech and tolerance for opposing views. Almost immediately, the president did the opposite of what he’d promised and put together his own linguistic proscriptions. Most of the banned words related to gender and diversity, and this time the rules had the force of the government behind them.
“Fear that other words could run afoul of the new edicts led anxious agency officials to come up with lists of potentially problematic words on their own,” wrote Shawn McCreesh in The New York Times. These included: “Equity. Gender. Transgender. Nonbinary. Pregnant people. Assigned male at birth. Antiracist. Trauma. Hate speech. Intersectional. Multicultural. Oppression. Such words were scrubbed from federal websites.”

Plus ça change. The government itself determining the limits of acceptable speech is undeniably far more chilling and pernicious—and potentially unconstitutional—than private actors attempting to do so. But what is most striking about this dismal back-and-forth is how well it demonstrates that the illiberal impulse to dictate what can and cannot be said is always fundamentally the same, whether it appears on the right or the left.
An extraordinary number of conservatives have ignored and even delighted in their side’s astonishing hypocrisy. But a few consistent defenders of free speech have not gone along with what they see as the new “woke right.”
The pervasive and nitpicky control of language is a crucial, but far from the sole, component of the woke-right movement. Like its antithesis on the left, the woke right places identity grievance, ethnic consciousness, and tribal striving at the center of its behavior and thought. One of the best descriptions I can find of it comes from Kevin DeYoung, a pastor and seminary professor, in a 2022 article called “The Rise of Right-Wing Wokeism.” DeYoung, reviewing a book on Christian nationalism in The Gospel Coalition, argues that the book’s “apocalyptic vision—for all of its vitriol toward the secular elites—borrows liberally from the playbook of the left.” It “redefines the nature of oppression as psychological oppression” and tells white and male right-wing Americans that they are the country’s real victims. But “the world is out to get you, and people out there hate you,” DeYoung warns, “is not a message that will ultimately help white men or any other group that considers themselves oppressed.”
Another hallmark of wokeness is an overriding impulse to contest and revise the historical record in service of contemporary debates. The New York Times’ “1619 Project,” which reimagined this nation’s founding, was emblematic of this trend from the left. But similar attempts are happening on the right. Last summer, the amateur historian Darryl Cooper caused an uproar when he made the case, on Tucker Carlson’s podcast, that Winston Churchill was the real villain of World War II.
The compelled politesse of the left has been swapped out for the reflexive and gratuitous disrespect of the right. Representative Mary Miller of Illinois recently introduced Representative Sarah McBride, Congress’s sole transgender member, as “the gentleman from Delaware, Mr. McBride.” The activist Christopher Rufo, one of the most belligerent voices on the right, endorsed the move: “We are all tempted to be polite,” he wrote on X. “But complicity in the pronoun game is the opening ante for the entire lie. Once you agree to falsify reality, you have signaled your submission to the gender cult.”
Speaking of falsifying reality: The Trump administration seems to be devoting a remarkable amount of energy toward making sure people call the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.” In the White House press room last week, the administration went so far as to eject Associated Press reporters because the publication refused to alter its stylebook to comply with the change. “I was very up front in my briefing on Day 1 that if we feel that there are lies being pushed by outlets in this room, we are going to hold those lies accountable,” the White House press secretary said. “And it is a fact that the body of water off the coast of Louisiana is called the Gulf of America.” European exploration records have referred to El Golfo de México since the 16th century.

Trump supporters fell immediately into line. Representative Mike Collins of Georgia—in a gesture encapsulating the digital-political fusion that has come to define the woke right—tweeted trollingly, “Stop deadnaming the Gulf of America.”
Just as corporations genuflected at the altar of wokeness during and after the summer of 2020—posting their identical black squares on Instagram and Facebook and, in the case of Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, and CBS Sports, pausing their content for a symbolic eight minutes and 46 seconds—some of the country’s most prominent companies have preemptively submitted to the woke right’s new power play. Google and Apple have both relabeled the Gulf of Mexico on their map apps with Trump’s risible neologism. And an NPR analysis of regulatory filings found that “at least a dozen of the largest U.S. companies have deleted some, or all, references to ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ and ‘DEI’ from their most recent annual reports to investors.” 
Some state leaders are following in Trump’s footsteps. In January, Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders issued the “Executive Order to Respect the Latino Community by Eliminating Culturally Insensitive Words From Official Use in Government”—a loquacious way to say she ordered state agencies to stop using the word Latinx. Others, including Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, were woke right avant la lettre. The 2022 Individual Freedom Law, paradoxically known as the “Stop WOKE” act—developed under Rufo’s guidance—imagines the state as one enormous, humid safe space. The legislation aggressively restricts speech in workplaces, K–12 schools, and public universities, and even encourages snitching on community members who dare to advance illicit perspectives.
All of these moves are ripe for mockery—and they deserve it. The scholar and provocateur James Lindsay gained a large online following in 2018 after he and two colleagues successfully placed a number of outrageously bogus papers in peer-reviewed academic journals focused on what Lindsay called “grievance studies,” including one text arguing that dogs engage in “rape culture” and another that rewrote Mein Kampf from a feminist point of view. Last year, Lindsay applied the same test to the woke right, cribbing 2,000 words from Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto and submitting them as a critique of liberalism to The American Reformer, a respected platform in conservative Christian media. The gag ran under the title “The Liberal Consensus and the New Christian Right.”
“What the Woke Right fundamentally don’t understand as they make their bid for power now, and why they’ll lose,” Lindsay wrote last week on X, “is that none of us want more ideological crazy stuff. We don’t want another freaking movement. We want to go back to our lives.” The obligation to call people aliens or unlearn the name of a body of water appears every bit as petty as the prohibition on describing boring things as “lame.” More than that, it amounts to a politics of brute domination, a forced and demoralizing expression of subservience that only a genuine fanatic could abide.
Voters in both parties are already signaling that the right’s woke antics are unattractive to them. When it comes to its edgelord in chief, Elon Musk, an Economist/YouGov poll found that the share of Republicans who say he should have “a lot” of influence has dropped significantly over the past three months, to 26 percent. Seventeen percent say they want him to have no influence “at all.” Over the past two weeks, Trump’s approval rating has fallen.
The truth is that most Americans bristle at wokeness from whichever direction it arrives. As the left is learning now, no victory can ever be final. The right’s illiberal zeal only creates the conditions for an equal and opposite reaction to come.

Phew, that was a longer sidetrack than the pond realised, but that's what happens when you're confronted with the deeply unhappy prospect of returning to "Ned"...

But return the pond must, as it resumes the "Ned" climb and "Ned" turns to his usual trick of quoting useful idiots, useless idiots and idiots who imagine they're idiot savants ...

When Biden defeated Trump in 2020 there was huge relief from the American centre and left. Biden pledged to unite America and bring it together. He did the opposite and betrayed that promise. Much of the Democratic Party assumed Trump was finished and set about imposing a radical cultural, identity, spending and climate agenda on the country.
New York Times columnist David Brooks said the attack on classic liberalism – by insisting that people be treated differently by law according to their race, religion, sex and identity characteristics – set up a social schism that would be incompatible with democracy.

You see? Is there a bigger useless idiot than David Brooks, an idiot savant completely unaware of the way he paved the way for the current GOP and King Donald I. (The pond understands that the term is deemed outdated, non-PC and offensive by some, and should be replaced with terms such as "savant syndrome", but any point in a comedy storm when dealing with snowflakes, pussies and NY Times types offered a slot on PBS).

"Ned" proceeded to role out more useless idiots ...

For most of the anti-Trump progressive leaders the notion that their own side had undermined the democratic compact in the eyes of many Americans was simply inconceivable.
Political commentator Andrew Sullivan, gay rights champion and savage critic of left authoritarianism, recently said: “On the central questions of immigration and identity politics what Trump is proposing is simply a return to common sense – a reflection of the sane views of the vast majority of Americans who support secure borders and oppose unfairness in sports and medical experiments on children.” It is politics 101 – if you tolerate massive illegal entry of migrants to your nation you will fuel a public backlash that supports forced removal, at least for people who have broken the criminal law.
Addressing critics who say Trump’s campaign wildly exaggerated the transgender issue that concerned so few people, author JK Rowling highlighted its symbolism as a decisive political moment for progressives, saying: “Do not tell me this is about a tiny minority.” She said: “Gender ideology has undermined freedom of speech, scientific truth, gay rights, and women’s and girls’ safety, privacy and dignity. Nobody voted for it, the vast majority of people disagree with it, yet it has been imposed, top down, by politicians, healthcare bodies, academia, sections of the media, celebrities and even the police.”

Still with Andrew Sullivan, still with Rowling and her trans obsessions? 

So much hate, so much fear and loathing, so much relentless stupidity. Go with that mango Mussolini lie about boys heading off to school in the morning and returning home a girl in the arvo?

The reptiles decided that the business of quoting useless idiots could do with an AV distraction quoting a useless idiot.

Commentator and comedian Alex Stein claims US President Donald Trump and Elon Musk are a “threat” to the deep state. “I would say Donald Trump is the biggest threat to the deep state,” Mr Stein told Sky News host Rita Panahi. “Elon Musk is equally a threat because of the power that he yields, not just with his super popular cars or his super popular space program, but also because he controls the modern-day press, which is X.”

Um, that's his super popular government financed space program and his super popular cars, busy shredding its position in the market place ...

A brief detour to look at the car wreck involving his super popular cars, and not just the failed self-driving mode ...

Tesla (TSLA) Faces Growing Revolt from Shareholders and Consumers

Electric vehicle maker Tesla (TSLA) is facing a growing backlash among shareholders and consumers over CEO Elon Musk’s political activities in Washington, D.C.
Irate consumers have begun staging protests at Tesla dealerships across the U.S. On social media, consumer advocates are organizing the showroom protests using hashtags such as “Tesla Takeover” and “Tesla Takedown.” At the same time, images of damaged and vandalized Tesla vehicles are spreading across social media platforms.
As the consumer protests grow, so too are calls among shareholders for a change in leadership at Tesla. A growing number of shareholders are unhappy with Musk’s increasing focus on the U.S. government and politics, which they claim is taking his focus away from the electric vehicle maker. There are also concerns that Musk’s polarizing reputation is harming TSLA stock.
Sinking Share Price
The Tesla revolt among consumers and shareholders comes with the automaker’s stock down 30% from an all-time high reached last December. The share price has fallen more than 20% since U.S. President Donald Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20, an event that Musk attended.
Shareholders and consumers are growing frustrated with Musk’s leadership of the U.S. Department of Government Efficiency (D.O.G.E), which has slashed government budgets and headcounts in recent weeks. At the same time, Tesla’s vehicle sales continue to decline in markets ranging from China to Europe.

Now there's a super popular car for certain types of car lovers ...

Back to "Ned", diligently quoting the thoughts of others in a way that the pond can't hope to match ...

Writing in The New York Times last month, Thomas B. Edsall outlined the extent of the conservative-driven backlash against progressivism that had got so little analytical attention and was under-appreciated in Australian discussion during 2024 about the US election contest.
Edsall quoted Stony Brook University sociology professor Musa al-Gharbi saying Democrats were “increasingly out of step with the median voter as they catered ever more around the preferences of knowledge economy professionals” – those employed in higher education, hi-tech, the law, healthcare, entertainment, human resources, media and information.
Divisions across different economic and social domains had a deeper meaning as “facets of a more fundamental schism in American society”. In the same article Edsall quoted Yascha Mounk, author of The Identity Trap, saying the reason Republicans were successful in spreading their message was because they were “more adept at telling an aspirational story about the nature of the country – one that, as it turns out, a lot of citizens from all kinds of demographic backgrounds found to be convincing”.
The source of progressive strength – its long march through the institutions – has been derailed in Trump’s victory. Suddenly, it was a negative – a turning point in contemporary politics. In America the institutions that had become the carriers of progressive ideology had become unpopular and untrusted.

There it is again, that blather about the long march through the institutions, with "Ned" resolutely unwilling to take the long march through Faux Noise ..

And yet at the end of the ranting and railing, "Ned" begins to have a few saucy doubts and fears ...

Indeed, they generated hostility towards themselves precisely because their progressive values were seen to be about their own image and self-interest, and not the values of the public.
The Democrats chose to become “the party of the educated class” but the progressive arrogance and moral superiority of the educated class began to eat the Democrats politically in the 2024 election.
A critical symbol of this phenomenon became the failure of US universities to address the crisis of anti-Semitism across their campuses – an intellectual and moral failure to appreciate this concerned not only Jewish students but also undermined the principles essential to sustain a multicultural society.
But the irony in America cannot be missed – Trump and JD Vance are engaged in their own project of political overreach. Their mood is hubris on steroids. They are gullible believers in their own propaganda.
In his opening weeks Trump seeks to transform US governance, push executive power to its limits, purge much of the bureaucracy, impose tariffs to reindustralise the US heartland and punish surplus trading nations with the US, signal an agenda for territorial expansion, withdraw from historic commitments to Europe, strike a deal with Russian leader Vladimir Putin over Ukraine and transform Gaza.

Ah, Uncle Leon time again ... Elon Musk listens as US President Donald Trump speaks in the Oval Office of the White House.

And yet we know who facilitated Uncle Leon's short destructive rampage, adopting his slogan and modus operandi ...

And that's when the both siderist "Ned" comes into full play. 

After blaming everyone except Faux Noise, "Ned" is suddenly in s state of shock ...

Shock therapy is an effective political weapon. But multiple shock therapy never works for any sustained period.
Consider Vance’s “shock effect” speech at Munich that the real threat today is not Russia and China but Europe’s retreat from fundamental cultural values.
The US Vice-President offered some valid truths and was right about Europe’s internal weakness. But his central point was a ludicrous falsehood. The most serious threat facing democracies today is the political and military alignment from Russia, China, Iran and North Korea. In terms of relative military power this is a far more dangerous threat than posed by the fascist countries in the 1930s.
If Trump and Vance don’t get this, if they don’t grasp the fundamental power equation in today’s world, then we are all in trouble. Yet, if Vance is taken at face value, they don’t get it. They don’t seem to grasp this is an existential strategic dilemma. Perhaps they are just rationalising the argument for US withdrawal. On display is the demise of strategic reality and its substitution by manic cultural conservatism.
The risk for Trump is engaging in many and different forms of overreach. Transformative change that sticks needs to be bedded down and buttressed by public support. Consider the great Peggy Noonan warning about Elon Musk: “He has wild confidence in his ability to engineer desired outcomes, but unstable elements have a way of exploding in the beaker, and like everyone else from Silicon Valley he lacks a sense of the tragic.
“They think human life can be rationally shaped and perfected, that every problem just needs the right wrench, and in any case they all think they’re God. My fear, here we switch metaphors, is that Mr Musk and his young staffers and acolytes are mad doctors who’ll put 30 chemo ports in the sick body. They’ll not only kill the cancer, they’ll kill the patient.”

"Ned" has a sudden blinding flash of light ...

If Trump and Vance don’t get this, if they don’t grasp the fundamental power equation in today’s world, then we are all in trouble

Actually we've been in trouble for some time. 

Look at the climate science denialism, given a haven in the lizard Oz; look at the refutation of what Christ had to say about the treatment of strangers - the pond will spare you the quotes: look at the attempt to demonise a very small percentage of the population, as if being trans was the ruination of everything; look at all the anger and hate and the rage directed at the different and the other, the sortof fear and loathing you expect from a conformist authoritarian cult ...

Or for fun, look at the splitters at work...

 

The pond needed a distraction after all that "Ned" nonsense. 

Cue Steve Bannon Ramps Up His War on ‘Parasitic Illegal Immigrant’ Elon Musk

Cue the splitters, turning on each other ...

Steve Bannon unleashed a new torrent of insults at Elon Musk on Tuesday, escalating an ongoing feud with President Donald Trump’s new favorite confidant.
“Musk is a parasitic illegal immigrant,” the former media impresario turned Trump White House adviser turned podcaster, told UnHerd of the president’s South African-born lieutenant. “He wants to impose his freak experiments and play-act as God without any respect for the country’s history, values, or traditions.”
Bannon, who represents the first wave of Trump’s supporters who coalesced around his populist, nativist message during his first bid for the presidency, has been fixated on Musk, the broligarch poster boy for Trump’s new term.
Trump has tasked Musk—his benefactor, surrogate, and adviser—with finding $2 trillion in spending cuts through the DOGE task force he was appointed to lead.
(The Trump White House curiously claimed Musk is not the leader of DOGE on Monday, despite both men repeatedly indicating otherwise, in a response to a lawsuit targeting the task force.)
That has pitted Bannon’s populism, rooted in stoking working-class grievances, against Musk’s burn-it-all-down ethos that has already seen DOGE marshal the firing of thousands of federal employees, access the systems of key departments, and push to shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development.
Last week, Bannon warned the Trump administration not to take a “meat ax” to Medicaid, which insures more than 70 million low income and disabled Americans.

Do it Uncle Leon, rip the guts out of it, swing that meat axe, tear America apart, enrage the splitters...

“Medicaid, you gotta be careful,” Bannon, 71, said on the Thursday episode of his War Room podcast. “Because a lot of MAGAs are on Medicaid, I’m telling you. If you don’t think so, you are dead wrong.”
Bannon told UnHerd that Musk and DOGE’s priorities were in disarray, failing to achieve enough cuts while ignoring the massive Defense Department budget.
“DOGE is sitting there with the budget, but where the f--- are the DOGE cuts?“ he asked. ”We are 30 days away from approving a budget for the entire year with $2 trillion already baked in, and not one penny of anything that DOGE found. It’s ludicrous.”
He added: “I notice there is a hesitancy to cross the Potomac and go to the Pentagon. I would like to see $100 billion taken off the $900 billion budget right now, which is really a trillion.”
Bannon told the outlet that, while he considers DOGE merely “performative,” he still thinks Musk has a purpose, calling him an “armor-piercing shell that’s delivering blunt force trauma against the administrative state.”
Bannon, meanwhile, has absolutely kept the faith in Trump. He told UnHerd he’s “exploring” options to secure the president a (currently unconstitutional) third term.
“I don’t have right now a tremendous amount of support on this legally,” he conceded.
In December, when he first floated the idea of a third Trump turn, Bannon suggested the Republican standard bearer could get around the 22nd Amendment—which says, “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice”—by arguing it’s open to interpretation whether it applies only to “consecutive” terms.

So barking mad ... now on the outside, but wanting somehow to get in.

Look around and you'll find that the barking mad are now everywhere, and in power ...

They can be reliably found recorded at sites like Mediaite ...Why Are You Not Celebrating the Cuts!?’ Trump Advisor Stephen Miller Loses It During Fiery Segment With CNN’s Brianna Keila

And at The Bulwark, including this low point in comedy, Meet Kevin Hassett: Conservatism’s Invincible Ignoramus, Trump's director of the National Economic Council is a silly man.

Just a sample to keep the comedy flowing ...

It's worth heading over to the butterfly to get the clip and some of the comments...

The pond could have used that Asimov quote when dealing with "Ned"...

Is there an upside? Well even the mutton Dutton realises he needs a different strategy ... time to freshen up the old warrior ...

But looming in the distance are the Murdochians, Faux Noise, and the Cantaloupe Clown ...

The flapping whump whump nightmare is always in the detail ...