Tom Faranda's Folly

WSJ re: Doge: "If Trump and Musk don’t succeed in showing the bureaucracy who’s boss, it’s likely no one ever will."

Good article from the Journal.

The federal bureaucracy has ballooned from a few agencies to more than 400, many of which are “independent” of the president. Americans often view the president as responsible for the actions those agencies take. The system nudges new presidents to give up and go along. And that’s exactly what they’ve done. No president—not Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Richard Nixon or Ronald Reagan—has cracked this nut. Most reforms have made the administrative state larger, not smaller.

As we’re seeing now, substantial opposition awaits anyone who challenges the bureaucracy. Unions are powerful. Intimidation from those with institutional knowledge can be overwhelming. Fear of the media has also been a deterrent to action. Every president has been at least somewhat fearful of the intelligence agencies. Industry leaders who have captured the agencies, including many campaign donors, have been too powerful to unseat or control.

Countless cabinet secretaries come and go with the intention of changing the system. They get big offices, a nice portrait and social status, but the bureaucrats know that the political appointees are temporary and easily can be ignored. ...

Meanwhile, the American people feel increasingly oppressed, taxed, regulated, spied on, browbeaten, hectored and harassed. Voting never made a difference because the politicians no longer controlled the system. The bureaucracies rule all. We’ve come to know this in our gut, which is why voters’ trust in the system has eroded as agencies’ power has built up.

The Biden years underscored this point. We didn’t even need a conscious or active president, only a figurehead. Behind the scenes, institutions ran everything.

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The message from today’s civic elites is that the president’s job is to pretend to be in charge while doing nothing meaningful. Shut up. Don’t disturb the administrative state. Let it keep doing its thing without oversight or disruption, and you’ll get your library and bestselling memoir.

Mr. Trump refuses this deal. In his second term, he’s determined to slay the bureaucratic beast he knows all too well from his first term and the Biden years. DOGE’s efforts are epic, breaking more than a century of acquiescence to the deep state. The Trump team is courageously confronting the problem head-on, come what may. Mr. Trump’s allies know that they must act quickly and with some degree of ferocity, even recklessness, lest we default back to the status quo of leaders who pretend to be in charge while the embedded “men of the system”—to adapt a phrase from Adam Smith—run things behind closed doors.

Mr. Jeffrey Tucker is president of the Brownstone Institute.

Tuesday wordle

Family (minus me) off to England for Brigid's sister Libby services

Without me because someone has to be here to maintain our business. We can function out of the office; it's the four hour time difference that is the problem.

I posted about Brigid's sister here -    Sad News: Libby Dent Conyers on February 27th

The average social security payment in every state

Off the CNBC website. To get the # in your state hit the link and scroll down to click on your state, or scroll further for a listing. 

In Connecticut, for example, retirement beneficiaries receive an average payment of $2,114 a month, the most in the country, according to the latest available Social Security Administration data. Beneficiaries in Mississippi receive the lowest average payment of $1,756 a month.

Monday wordle.

Bill Maher and guests comment on the updated Snow White movie

It's embedded in one of The Rubin Report videos.

 

NR: Is AOC the Democrat Party Future?

An article in the conservative (old time conservative - not Trump style) National Review. They sent it to me as an enticement to become a "premium" member of their website - this article would normally be behind their paywall. So I don't know if the link will work but excerpts below the link.

If AOC Is the Democratic Future, the Party Is Even Worse Off Than We Think. There is no woke policy she doesn’t support.

... the problem isn’t a lack of organization per se, but the hangover of their dogged, dishonest support for a comprehensively failed presidency, joined to an irrational commitment to outlandish positions on cultural issues.

The Democrats shouldn’t be shocked that after insisting that Joe Biden was hale and hearty and fit to serve as commander in chief until January 2029, the public has a dim view of their party. The Democrats attempted to perpetrate one of the worst frauds on the American public in recent history, and then followed it up with another lie — that Biden’s overmatched emergency replacement, Kamala Harris, was joyful and impressive.

In a new CNN poll, the Democratic Party’s favorable rating is 29 percent — a record low going back to 1992.

In a new NBC poll, the Democratic Party’s favorable rating is 27 percent — a record low going back to 1990.

Detect a pattern?

Part of the reason for the dismal rating is that Democrats themselves want their party to be more confrontational with Trump and are dissatisfied. But the Democrats have taken a broader hit — in the NBC poll, only 11 percent of independents have a favorable view of them, and 56 percent unfavorable.

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In the fierce backlash against Schumer for saving his party another embarrassment, the left-wing congresswoman from New York, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, is getting promoted as a potential primary challenger to Schumer, and even a national leader for Democrats. In the CNN poll, Democrats were asked which political figure best represents the “core values” of their party, and AOC narrowly led.

She has as good a claim to this title as anyone — and that’s the problem.

AOC is Kamala Harris, if the California Democratic hadn’t flipped-flopped away from all the fringy things she said in 2019. She’s Bernie Sanders, if the Vermont socialist were about 50 years younger and could plausibly appear on the cover of Vanity Fair wearing the latest fashion. She’s Mahmoud Khalil, if the Columbia University activist that the Trump administration wants to deport somehow managed to get himself elected to Congress.

AOC rejects the term “woke,” but there is no woke policy that she doesn’t support. She loved the neologism Latinx (“gender is fluid, language is fluid”) and still supports males competing in female sports (“trans girls are girls”). She’s never met an immigration restriction that she likes.

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Will Rogers once commented, “You’ve got to admit that each party is worse than the other. The one that’s out always looks the best.” If their fervor to oppose Trump throws Democrats into the arms of AOC, they will test the accuracy of this proposition.

Sunday wordle

Waste, fraud and abuse poster child: NY Medicaid

FULL DISCLOSURE: Everyone is entitled to healthcare. Further Disclosure: I know lots about healthcare; providing health insurance is part of my business and I am a recipient of wonderful care since 2003.

Medicaid as everyone should know is a Federal/State program (and NY State is unique in requiring local governments to contribute; NY City budgets $6.7 billion for medicaid this year) with costs split about 50/50.

I did an AI search on PerplexityAI pro and also ChatGPT and they came up with differing enrollment  #'s both from each other and the article below. In all cases the numbers are very high.

"The Empire Center for Public Policy has noted that in recent years the driving force of New York’s enrollment growth has been emergency Medicaid for undocumented immigrants. That program has 480,000 enrollees. It has grown by a breathtaking 1,200% since 2014." See my DISCLOSURE above!

Examples from the article to the level of fraud in the NY system are below the link.

Over 44% of the state’s 20 million residents — 8.8 million — are enrolled in Medicaid. ... On a national level, it’s 20% higher than the overall average of the 50 states.

"Most importantly,” Bill Hammond of the Empire Center has written, “adding millions of less needy, healthier employees to Medicaid rolls tends to divert resources from what should be the program’s core mission: providing decent care to people who cannot help themselves. People with serious, lifelong mental and physical disabilities are a shrinking faction of Medicaid enrollment.”

Then there is Medicaid corruption. Here are a few examples:

In October 2024, the U.S. Attorney for New York’s Southern District announced the indictment of eight people, including the owners of two senior citizen daycare facilities, for allegedly bilking the state’s Medicare Home Care Program of a whopping $68 million. The accused were charged with money laundering, conspiracy to collect kickbacks, and fraud.

One month later, New York’s Democratic State Comptroller Tom DiNapoli released an audit that concluded: “billions of dollars have been spent on Medicaid home care services for New Yorkers without the required verification that the services took place.” The audit DiNapoli said “found a disturbing lack of oversight and failure to comply with the required service verifications.”

The amounts that were not reported are staggering. Here’s a summary:

• $14.5 billion (yes, billion) in Personal Care claims for 82 million services (44%) that had no matching electronic visit verification record.
• $97.6 million in home health care claims reflecting 400,557 services (89%) that did not have a matching electronic visit verification record.
• $11.6 million in claims for visits that lasted less than 8 minutes — too short to be billable under Medicaid rules.
• $9.7 million for home services provided when the patient was hospitalized, and home visits should have been suspended.

"These findings are outrageous. But they may only be the tip of the fraud iceberg. Remember, what the auditors discovered were from a handful of samplings. This could mean there are millions and possibly billions of squandered tax dollars that have not been uncovered.

Sadly, these reports did not generate any major headlines. As far as I know, heads did not roll in the Department of Health. For Gov. Hochul and the Democratic-controlled state Legislature, it’s business as usual. They will continue to dump more and more money into a dysfunctional status quo.

Hopefully, Elon Musk and his DOGE posse ride to the rescue and clamp down on New York’s scandal-ridden Medicaid program.

George J. Marlin, a former executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey

Saturday wordle

This took a lot of time...

 

NY Times: Trump v. Columbia University

As Columbia has given in to some Administration demands in an effort to receive the $400 million being withheld -

Columbia, facing the loss of government grants and contracts over what the administration said was a systemic failure to protect students and faculty members “from antisemitic violence and harassment,” opted to yield to many of the administration’s most substantial demands.

The university said it had agreed to hire a new internal security force of 36 “special officers” who will be empowered to remove people from campus or arrest them. The wearing of face masks on campus will also be banned for the purpose of concealing identity during disruptions, with exceptions for religious and health reasons.

Columbia will also adopt a formal definition of antisemitism, something many universities have shied away from even as they, like Columbia, faced pressure to do so amid protests on their campuses over the war in Gaza. Under the working definition, antisemitism could include “targeting Jews or Israelis for violence or celebrating violence against them” or “certain double standards applied to Israel,” among other issues.

Taken together, the administration’s plan — issued in an unsigned, four-page letter — reflected a stunning level of deference to the Trump administration from a top private research university.

And Trump and Columbia have a history -

A quarter century ago, the university was looking to expand. It considered, and rejected, property owned by Donald Trump. He did not forget it.

That drama dates back 25 years.

Today, these two New York City institutions — the billionaire president of the United States and the 270-year-old Ivy League university that has cultivated 87 Nobel laureates — have been locked in an extraordinary clash involving free speech, academic freedom and the federal government’s role in funding higher education.

The first battle between Mr. Trump and Columbia involved the most New York of New York prizes. It was over a lucrative real estate deal, according to interviews with 17 real estate investors and former university administrators and insiders, as well as contemporaneous news articles.

George Foreman

Even though I don't like boxing, I loved Foreman. He reclaimed the heavyweight title at the age of 45. He was a total character - and had 12 children.

George Foreman, Boxing Champion and Grilling Magnate, Dies at 76. He claimed a world title in his 20s and again in his 40s, and then made millions selling grills.

 

Friday wordle

Friday cocktail - The Harvey Wallbanger !

First cousin to the screwdriver - Another cousin is the comfortable screw which substitutes Southern Comfort for vodka.

 

NYT: "Here’s One More Reason to Try to Exercise"

 

The Wellness section of the NY Times - one of the Times best sections.

Next time you’re feeling the burn during a workout, it might give you a boost to know that exercise can also be a balm: Research suggests it is one of the best tools for fighting chronic inflammation.

Here’s One More Reason to Try to Exercise Consistent workouts can be a powerful way to fight chronic inflammation.

Inflammation has emerged as a looming health concern in recent years — experts say it can be both a cause and a sign of disease. And while there’s still a lot we don’t know about its significance, most experts agree that the less chronically inflamed we are, the healthier we are.

The scientific evidence is also clear that people who are sedentary tend to have higher levels of inflammation compared to people who exercise regularly. And when sedentary people start moving consistently, their inflammation levels generally decline.

Some researchers believe that exercise’s power to fight inflammation may even be at the heart of why physical activity is so effective at protecting us against cardiovascular disease, diabetes, dementia and other chronic conditions.

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...chronic inflammation is a low-grade condition that can simmer for years. It can begin with an infection or injury, but then morph into a lingering state, in which the immune system starts attacking healthy tissue, Dr. Shmerling said. Experts suspect this prolonged immune response may put you at greater risk for disease, and in some cases, make you feel fatigued, depressed or foggy. 

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Research suggests that consistent, moderate exercise can fight inflammation by tamping down on the release of inflammatory chemicals, and ramping up the release of chemicals that fight it, she said.

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Most moderate-intensity exercise seems to reduce inflammation in the short term, and the more consistently you work out, the more you keep chronic inflammation at bay.

Strength training is crucial as we age, including for its potential to fight inflammation.

For starters, resistance training helps to reduce inflammation-causing fat cells, particularly when combined with regular aerobic exercise.

People with chronic inflammation tend to lose muscle mass more rapidly as they age than those with less inflammation, Dr. Nicklas said, so strength training may be especially important for them to remain mobile and independent.

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High-intensity exercise itself produces a temporary surge in inflammation, so it’s important to properly heal between workouts, Dr. Hong said.

 

Thursday wordle

Last year's Baltimore Orioles team broke an interesting, little known record.

This Baseball Team Recently Broke a 79-Year-Old Record. Why Didn’t Anyone Notice? The 2024 Baltimore Orioles did something historic—and not even the team knew.

...the Baltimore Orioles who, in 2024, hit into 71 double plays.

The 2024 Orioles’ 71 is the lowest full-season total in the history of Major League Baseball. No team hit into that few double plays when they only played 154 games. No team hit into that few double plays when they all wore wool pants. In fact, no team had ever hit into fewer than 75 double plays, a record set by the 1945 St. Louis Cardinals and equaled by the 2021 Tampa Bay Rays. The 2024 Orioles were, by a handsome margin, the best baseball team at not hitting into a double play that there has ever been.

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To be fair to every other baseball team in history, double plays around the league are in modest decline. There were just 0.66 per team, per game in 2024, the lowest total in decades. Maybe this has something to do with the banning of the shift, or the rule allowing video review of the “neighborhood play” (otherwise known as the “We’ll just say the second baseman touched the bag because he had the vibes of having touched the bag” play).

 

But does it matter? We don’t discount the slugging accomplishments of Pete Alonso or Aaron Judge because they play in the homer-happy 21^st century. Every team had the opportunity to hit into the fewest double plays ever. Only the Orioles did it.

 

 

 

 

Wednesday wordle - an Ace!

The second in the last two weeks. As always a combination of luck and skill.

Tariffs: Bad news for wine sellers - and wine lovers

Ugh. Well one of the downsides of potential 200% tariffs. This from the Wall Street Journal.

From Champagne to Bourbon, Alcohol Lands on Front Lines of Global Trade War Trump threatens a 200% tariff on European alcohol

Alcohol has landed on the front lines of a global trade war, throwing French wines, Irish whiskeys, Kentucky bourbon, Japanese beer and Mexican tequila into the crossfire between the U.S. and its biggest trading partners.

In the Canadian province of Ontario, liquor stores have cleared their shelves of California wine and Tennessee whiskey, replacing them with local varieties and signs declaring: “For the good of Canada.” A restaurant wine director in Washington state is dreading the arrival of shipping containers full of European wine so expensive it’s unsellable. The Kentucky governor is pleading for the survival of his bourbon industry. And makers of American sparkling wines are poised to make a windfall. 

President Trump on Thursday opened a new front, threatening a 200% tariff on U.S. imports of all alcoholic beverages from the European Union. Trump’s salvo was a response to the EU’s decision to move forward on a 50% levy on American whiskey.

Thursday’s escalation caused panic on both sides of the Atlantic. 

The EU exported wine worth more than $5 billion to the U.S. last year, according to EU data agency Eurostat. Almost half of that came from France and about 40% came from Italy. 

A 200% tariff would push many bottles on store shelves above the $20 range that many American wine drinkers find acceptable, said Lamberto Frescobaldi, patriarch of the Italian winemaking dynasty that spans 30 generations. Above that price range, he said, “most people probably are not going to buy.”

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Now a tariff on European alcohol could hurt the ecosystem of retailers, distributors and restaurants Domaine Carneros depends on, Cohen said. “If they’re adversely affected, pain will be felt throughout the entire industry,” she said.

To be sure, a 200% tariff on European alcohol might never materialize. It could be delayed, scaled back or imposed for just a few days. Trump in February was poised to implement 25% tariffs on all imports from Canada and Mexico—including Canadian whisky and Mexican tequila—and at the 11th hour delayed them for a month. The tariffs then briefly went into effect this month before largely being put on pause.

That didn’t stop Ontario Premier Doug Ford from firing back with a reciprocal assault on American alcohol. 

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Erik Liedholm, the wine director for three restaurants in Washington state, said he learned about Trump’s latest threat Thursday when his phone “blew up” with texts and emails from friends in the wine business who sell to Canada and Europe.

“They were just saying, ‘What do I do? What do I do?’ I looked at the trail of texts and it was just extraordinary,” Liedholm said. “I was speechless.”

One of the messages was an email from his wine importer, telling him that prices would be going up.

“Our margins are getting thinner and thinner,” Liedholm said. With shipments currently en route, “it’s almost like the boats are arriving with the plague.”

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Cedric Nicaise, a co-owner and sommelier at the Noortwyck in Manhattan, said he isn’t so sure that American consumers would change their drinking habits. He was drinking coffee Thursday morning when he received a text from a regular customer, with whom he had shared a glass of Marquis d’Angerville Volnay the night before. The message said: “Drank up at the right time!”

Nicaise buys between 30 and 35 cases of wine a month for his restaurant. The majority is French, Italian or Spanish. 

“If you drink Burgundy, you might drink a Pinot Noir—but you might drink a cocktail,” Nicaise said. “You don’t just switch to American wine. You drink French wine for a reason.”

Tuesday wordle

Federal Judge orders astronauts be returned to Space Station.

All power to the Judges! It's Biblical. And despite this - Stuck No More: NASA Astronauts return Home

A district judge has issued a ruling saying Trump lacked the Constitutional authority to pick up two astronauts who have been stranded at the International Space Station for several months. SpaceX has been ordered to return the astronauts immediately.

Eyewitnesses say the judge then donned a Keffiyeh and spray painted a Cybertruck while screaming "Black Lives Matter."

Sources in Washington say Trump plans to brazenly ignore the lawful order and bring the astronauts home anyway. "This is just the kind of wanton lawlessness we should expect from a dictator who is literally Hitler," said one legal analyst.

The SpaceX craft docked at the ISS on Sunday and was preparing for the return journey to Earth when the orders stopped the process short. "Please bring us home, I just want a cheeseburger and a nap in a horizontal bed," said one of the crew.

At publishing time, Trump was polling at 100% approval among the stranded astronaut demographic.

 

Trump on disarming Iran and nuclear disarmament worldwide.

This is part of an extensive interview about ten days ago.

 

NY Times "We were totally mislead..." about the cause of the Wuhan virus

Uh huh. Now they admit it. Seems not that long ago that politicians and scientists who suggested the Covid virus escaped a lab were jeered at by much of the media. Excerpt below but hit the link for the whole story

So the Wuhan research was totally safe, and the pandemic was definitely caused by natural transmission — it certainly seemed like consensus. We have since learned, however, that to promote the appearance of consensus, some officials and scientists hid or understated crucial facts, misled at least one reporter, orchestrated campaigns of supposedly independent voices and even compared notes about how to hide their communications in order to keep the public from hearing the whole story. And as for that Wuhan laboratory’s research, the details that have since emerged show that safety precautions might have been terrifyingly lax.

Five years after the onset of the Covid pandemic, it’s tempting to think of all that as ancient history. We learned our lesson about lab safety — and about the need to be straight with the public — and now we can move on to new crises, like measles and the evolving bird flu, right?

Wrong. If anyone needs convincing that the next pandemic is only an accident away, check out a recent paper in Cell, a prestigious scientific journal. Researchers, many of whom work or have worked at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (yes, the same institution), describe taking samples of viruses found in bats (yes, the same animal) and experimenting to see if they could infect human cells and pose a pandemic risk.

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You’d think that by now we’d have learned it’s not a good idea to test possible gas leaks by lighting a match. And you’d hope that prestigious scientific journals would have learned not to reward such risky research.

Why haven’t we learned our lesson? Maybe because it’s hard to admit that this research is risky now and to take the requisite steps to keep us safe without also admitting it was always risky. And that perhaps we were misled on purpose.

Monday wordle.

 

 

Sunday wordle - a miss!

The word is STAMP

Tom & Vinnie - St. Pat's Day

In my office - my cap says JAMESON. PHOTO by Tim

Ex-marine (Vinnie not me!) and super great guy!

Who pays? The latest Federal Income Tax Data

This is  posted by the Tax Foundation. hit the link for more information.

Taxpayers reported nearly $14.8 trillion in AGI on 153.8 million tax returns in 2022, an increase of $30 billion in AGI and 211,000 returns compared to 2021. Total income taxes paid fell by $57 billion to $2.1 trillion, a 3 percent decrease from 2021. The average individual income tax rate inched down from 14.9 percent in 2021 to 14.5 percent in 2022.

St. Patrick's cocktail(s) - Six cocktails in 3 minutes; starting with breakfast starting tomorrow!!

When I told Brigid they start with breakfast she said "Great idea I approve ". But our choice doesn't start with breakfast - it's the Irish Old Fashioned in the video -  with our recipe below the video. The video is short, fun, and full of ideas.

 

 

Farandaville Recipe for the Irish Old Fashioned

2 oz. Jamesons (obviously...)

0.33 oz. demerara syrup - or up to 0.5 oz or down to 0.25 oz depending on taste. It adds much more than just simple syrup or sugar. Available on amazon. Go with Secret Sauce  variety.           

2 dashes Angostura bitters

Stir in a mixng glass and pour over ice or not. Or just mix in the glass with a large lump of ice.

Garnish with orange slice, or cherry, or both.

Saturday wordle

ABC: Tesla, in letter, tells Trump they're worried about tariffs

HAHA. Yeah it's a concern. But I wonder if someone simply used the Tesla letterhead - easy to copy - and sent the letter.

In a letter to the Trump administration this week, electric automaker Tesla raised concerns about President Donald Trump's ongoing tariffs, warning that the company could be "exposed" to retaliatory tariffs and urging the administration to "consider the downstream impacts." The comments were made in an unsigned letter on Tesla letterhead to United States Trade Representative Jamison Greer. It came after the USTR office earlier this year said it would be conducting a "review of unfair trade practices."

As ABC News has reported, some Tesla shareholders have publicly questioned Musk's commitment to the company as Tesla shares have fallen dramatically since Musk joined the Trump administration.

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In the letter, Tesla noted that tariff actions by the Trump administration have resulted in "immediate reactions" by the targeted countries, including increased tariffs on electric vehicles.

More if you hit the link.

 

 

 

Friday wordle.

10 Senate Dems join Republicans to pass government spending bill

Schumer was right - they would have been blamed for shutting down the government. The final vote was 62-38. Formal vote later tonight. Other Democrats are "outraged". 

Schumer has defended his decision by arguing that a shutdown is a political loser for Democrats that would further embolden the Elon Musk–run Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and empower the administration to pick and choose which federal agency services are nonessential.

 

British Prime Minister starting to sound like Trump

Ten days ago it was "rebuild our military" and now it's chop the bureaucracy. In this case he's referring to an overlay on the British National Health Service (NHS). And Sir Keir Starmer is PM and head of the Labor Party.

Friday cocktail - Sangria!

This is a bit of a different recipe and he's doing it for a one person drink, not a batch. For a batch just multiply everything by 20 or so!

 

Thursday wordle

Leann: "When you have too much estrogen"

Funny lady!

Wednesday wordle

BBC: 5 years on from Covid; lockdown countries vs. non lockdown

An analysis of how things worked out in various countries with various rules. And of course various systems from extreme harsh lockdowns to virtually none at all - and everything in between. And the results are ... mixed.

It's a long analysis.

While these case studies of various countries show that it was clearly possible to tackle the Covid-19 pandemic without resorting to national lockdowns, the end results seem to depend on the attributes of specific countries, their populations, and their healthcare systems. Ultimately, the vast majority of nations did enact lockdowns at some point during 2020 or 2021 and it would be hard to suggest that they are all significantly worse off because of that intervention, specifically.

Still, five years later, the harshness of lockdowns and their effects on millions if not billions of people has become clearer. Even some researchers who have found evidence that lockdowns saved lives have cautioned against turning to this measure in haste in the future. The longer-term effects on children, education and economies are still playing out and will likely not be fully understood for many years to come.

Whatever governments decide to do, having a plan that they communicate in advance of any new pandemic will likely improve public acceptance of and adherence to any strict mitigations, says Grout. "It needs to be super clear." That means everyone could know ahead of time what circumstances would trigger a lockdown.

In Gothenburg, Mc Manus remembers the debates she once had with her fellow Swedes over whether her country was doing the right thing in 2020. And how some people seemed cavalier or uninterested in observing social distancing guidelines at the time.

"You don't even talk about it anymore," she says, "Thinking back, I feel like, as a society, did we really learn anything from this?"