@8

~I'll make more moves than Allied Van Lines.~

Wow, they don't write lyrics like that anymore.

(possibly A Good Thing?)

@#6 ... On the surface, at least, it appears that both Trump and Musk were blinded by greed. ...

"Were blinded" or "are blinded?"

More from the article...

... According to two White House officials, the Trump administration has spent months preparing for a Democratic takeover of Congress. The White House counsel, Will Scharf and his team are also looking at "what Trump can legally do on his own, where he could push the limits of his authority and how to defend those decisions in court," the White House official said. ...

@#28 ... We don't win wars because we keep starting ones that aren't existential. ...

The emphasis on your comment should be upon the "we keep starting ones" aspect.

We should not start a war without an end-game to end that war.

OK, I do give credit to fmr Pres G.H.W. Bush.

When he did his invasion to the Middle East, he had a firm goal and an exit plan once he achieved that goal.

And he executed that plan.

Now, what do we have?

A President whose goals seem to change almost daily, i.e., showing that he has not a clue of his end goal.

@#4 ... It could take years to restore civil service and agency institutional knowledge. ...

But ~destroying institutional knowledge~ may have been the end goal of DOGE.

Looking at DOGE's actions from a different angle...

What if the end goal was not really the oft-proffered ~reducing government expenditures~ but more of ~reducing government oversight of stuff?~

And that stuff might include corporations going awry?

So, while DOGE has been shown to have failed miserably in its stated goal of reducing the cost of government, maybe DOGE actually may have achieved its main goal of eliminating government oversight of corporations. One or two of which may be benefiting massively from government expenditures?

(imo, Can you say, Mr Musk's corporations? I knew you could ...)

@#23 ... Go back to your previous alias, the current one sucks.

OK, your current alias has piqued my curiosity.

I'll play for the nonce.

What was my former alias?

@#14 ... David Frum was the one who put Iran into the "axis of evil" speech ...

Looks that way ...

@#2 ... Elon Musk and team DOGE all belong in prison. ...

I am not yet at that point.

But what I want to see are investigations into their actions, and see if those investigations result in actual evidence of wrongdoing.

Then, based upon that evidence, let the Courts decide what should be done.

@#11

From the first link cited ...

... David Frum, a senior editor at The Atlantic, helped ghostwrite a speech for the Israeli U.N. ambassador in 2014"at the same time as he profiled the ambassador for the magazine.

Frum's galling, undisclosed conflict of interest was exposed via the ambassador's hacked emails, first reported by Ryan Grim and Murtaza Hussain for Drop Site.

In 2014, Israel was in the midst of waging war in Gaza, ultimately killing over 2,200 Palestinians and wounding over 11,000. It was Israel's most devastating campaign against the Palestinians since the 1967 war, according to UNRWA. As the country faced criticism for its conduct, allies like Frum reached out to Israeli government officials to offer their support in spinning the narrative, according to Drop Site.

In Frum's case, he could offer more to the Israeli cause than just money or positive news coverage: Before coming to The Atlantic, he had been a speechwriter for George W. Bush.

Frum contacted Ambassador Ron Prosor on July 31, 2014, during the height of the war, in an email titled, "an earlier draft of that speech I sent you." The speech, seemingly meant to be delivered to the U.N. Security Council, described the war as "the most tenacious challenge to the free world in decades," and asked Americans to continue to support Israel. "This version was drafted by Seth Mandel of Commentary, with whom I've been working," Frum wrote in his email.

Only one day before, Frum had contacted Prosor from a different email address, with a different request: to interview him for The Atlantic. The ensuing profile praised Prosor for his "toughness," and painted a sympathetic portrait of Israel as unfairly maligned on the global stage. "In many ways, and on many days, it feels as if the whole UN system is concerned with the monitoring and critiquing of one small member nation," Frum wrote. ...

@#11 ... it's all out there ...

Thanks for providing a link.

'Tis a shame I had to goad your current alias into doing so, though.

                      :)

@#5

OK, your alias is starting to sound a lot like a new incarnation of the C0RI0LANUS alias.

Accusations without substantiations.

Aside from the aspect of cancelling such an Executive Order in the future, there is a question I have ...

Why does Pres Trump think that his current, I'll say, ~decor~ of the esteemed Oval Office represents the President of the United States who serves the people of the United States, and not himself?

Or does Pres Trump seem to think, as his current Oval Office decor seems to indicate, that the President of the United States is an autocrat who must be worshiped by subjugated subjects?

A look at what might have caused to 2026 Blue Tsunami ...

@#17 ... we need to do what must be done to neutralize the Islamic vermin. ...

Your current trolling alias really needs to try harder to be rational.

Jus' sayin'

... The White House has denied rumours that Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio might leave their jobs ...

Pay attention to the details.

... The White House has denied rumours that Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio might leave their jobs in a post-election shakeup of the Trump administration. ...

So, "leave their jobs" as opposed to being asked to vacate their jobs?

Back in the very early days of MS Windows (early 1980's, maybe even earlier), Microsoft had an awesome PR agency that was quite skilled in such nuance in their press releases.

So, what the White House statement did not deny was that they may be asked to leave their jobs.

In Sec Def Hegseth's case, yeah I can see why he might be ~asked to leave.~

But with Sec State Rubio, he seems to be one of the few qualified people in the Trump admin. So, he might also be asked to leave ...

@#5 ... Fox News suffers ratings drop on bleak election night for Republicans

With an average viewer age of 69 ...

Probably why MAGA current aliases here seem to be so focused upon noting that opinions they disagree with are invalid because they are expressed by Boomers.

Just another lame deflection attempt on their part, imo.

@#116 ... Treasonous collusion with Putin and other enemies of the United States. ...

Yup. There's that.

So... Pres Trump is helping Pres Putin to finance his support of Iran.

Yet Pres Putin is helping Iran to kill American troops.

Wow.

When might there have been such a president who may have acted like a such traitor? Helping to kill American troops?

And then that does beg the question, what is the level of control that Pres Putin can exert (and has exerted) over Pres Trump?

@#6 ... Today, the rarity of those conditions has fostered a false sense of security, and a naive assessment of the natural world. ...

If I may be allowed to word that differently ...

Those voices against vaccination do not seem to provide information of the deadliness of the disease they seem to want to ravage our communities with their anti-vaccine diatribes.

Now, the good residents of South Carolina and New York seem to be learning of the consequences of their aversion to measles vaccination.

It saddens me to see such intentional ignorance in action.

"There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action."
- - - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

@#11 ... The buttons on your steering while navigate the screen ...

Yeah, and?

While you are pressing those buttons on your steering wheel, you still need to pay attention to the home-entertainment display on the dashboard to see what is happening.

So, pressing buttons on the steering wheel, or pressing virtual buttons on the home-entertainment screen on the dashboard.

What is the difference when in both instances you have to divert your attention from driving to what you see on a screen in front of you?

imo, the focus of a car's driver interface should be allowing the driver to pay attention to driving

@#4 ... The promises are part of OpenAI's new National Community Compact, a framework outlining how the company plans to work with locals in places where it builds data centers. The framework also includes pledges to be more transparent about construction plans and noise levels, develop water-use plans tailored to each community ...

So, OpenAI has effectively admitted that it has not been honest (transparent) about those issues in the past?

And then there is this aspect of prior behavior ...

... The company behind ChatGPT announced Thursday that it will limit the controversial practice of using nondisclosure agreements with public officials and cover the electricity and energy infrastructure costs of future data centers it owns and operates. ...

So, OpenAI will ~limit~ the use of non-disclosure agreements, but it will not say that it will eliminate such usage? ...

Why does OpenAI seem to have a need to hide what it is doing in communities from those who live in those communities?

@#1 ... his companies have direct government involvement ...

Yeah, there's that aspect.

More from the article ...

... Just three of the 37 Republicans Musk backed for the House of Representatives won on Tuesday night, compared to 33 who lost. The remaining race had not been called by Thursday afternoon, though a Republican was running ahead in tallies so far.

Of the seven Senate Republican candidates Musk backed, six lost and one race hangs in the balance. In that last race, Alaska, Democrat Mary Peltola was narrowly ahead with 78% of votes counted.

In Texas, where SpaceX and Tesla are headquartered and where Musk plans a chipmaking venture, Musk also came up empty after spending almost $230 million on the Senate contest, $5 million on the governor's race, and $500,000 on the lieutenant governor vote.

"A lot of Democrats see him as the Mr. Money Bags for their Republican opponents and that's certainly going to color how they're going to treat him personally," said David Hopkins, political science professor at Boston College. "He's particularly at risk because he's been part of the Trump administration and his companies have direct government involvement." ...

@#27

I do not disagree.