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White House Claims Elon Musk Isn’t Running DOGE After All

https://www.yahoo.com/news/white-house-insists-musk-isn-112225421.html

Quote

 

Elon Musk is not the head of DOGE, the federal spending task force President Donald Trump charged to take a chainsaw to the bureaucracy by finding $2 trillion in spending cuts, the White House said in a Monday court filing.

In fact, the billionaire Republican benefactor is not a part of it at all, the administration claimed.

This is despite Trump saying three months ago, when he first announced the Department of Government Efficiency during the transition period, that Musk would “lead” it.

The head-scratching revelation was made in a three-page declaration by a White House administrator who said Musk works as a “senior adviser to the president” and has “no actual or formal authority to make government decisions himself.”

“He is not an employee of the U.S. DOGE Service or U.S. DOGE Service Temporary Organization,” reads the sworn statement by White House Office of Administration Director Joshua Fisher. “Mr. Musk is not the U.S. DOGE, Service Administrator.”

The court filing appears to directly contradict Trump’s own words, as he’s repeatedly characterized Musk as the leader of DOGE.

“Elon is doing a great job. He’s finding tremendous fraud and corruption and waste,” Trump said on Feb. 7. “I’ll tell him to go here or there and he does it.”

Trump added, referring to the DOGE team staffed by Musk loyalists: “He’s got a very capable group of people.”

Three days later, on Feb. 10, Trump explained in an interview with Fox News how he was going to send Musk from department to department leading DOGE’s efforts to find spending cuts.

 

Liar Lie GIF by Fluffy Friends

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Posted (edited)

Here’s a story about Kevin Hassett, Trump’s president of the National Economic Council, who said Sunday that chickens don’t fly and therefore didn’t spread avian flu easily.

First, here was his quote:
 

 


Now the fun story:

https://open.substack.com/pub/thebulwark/p/meet-kevin-hassett-conservatisms?r=3agz2m&utm_medium=ios

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1. My Kevin

Over the weekend the director of the president’s National Economic Council went on TV to share his thoughts about chickens and avian flu. It was . . . something.

That man is Kevin Hassett. I want to tell you two stories about Hassett, one tiny and one large, to illustrate what a silly man he is.

The point isn’t to clown on Hassett—the world is full of silly people—but rather to demonstrate how bankrupt the conservative intellectual world has become. Because no system based on any kind of merit would elevate a man like Hassett to the the heights he has reached.

I took Kevin Hassett to lunch once. It was 2007 and I was a thirtysomething writer at The Weekly Standard while Hassett was a fortysomething scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

Hassett had published a piece about comic books in AEI’s in-house magazine, the American. He argued that comic books were an amazing investment that should be part of everyone’s portfolio.

This was a subject about which I happened to know a truly embarrassing amount. Enough to know that Hassett’s argument was ridiculous:

A savvy collector who purchased a first edition of a Fantastic Four comic book for 10 cents and kept it in pristine condition over the past 45 years could sell it today for $36,000. That comes to a compounded average annual return of 32 percent.

The Fantastic Four are not unique. Consider Justice League of America and The Avengers, two flagship superhero-group comics published, respectively, by DC Comics and Marvel Comics. According to data I gathered from The Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide, these comics—kept in mint condition—produced annual returns of 21 percent since their inception. Issues of The Amazing Spider-Man comics generated an average rate of return of 26 percent a year. An original 1939 edition of Superman #1 is currently valued at $335,000. In all, a random sample of comic books I constructed for this article returned a whopping 23 percent.

These data raise an important question: Why don’t sophisticated money managers and operating companies invest in comic books?

First, this question is not important. Second, Hassett’s premise was flawed: Certain key issues of comic books would have served as excellent investments if you had bought them for cover price and then preserved them for 50 years.1 But the fundamental problem with investing is that there’s no way to know what issues will turn out to be keys.

In order to get the big returns you’d need to have bought an entire index fund of comics—you’d have to buy every comic book.2 Because that would have been the only way to be sure you bought the issues that eventually saw big appreciation. Then you’d have to preserve many thousands of comics and store them (which costs money at scale). And because the capital outlays for this project would be significant, you’d have to figure out the opportunity cost. Would the resources spent buying and storing every comic book published for half a century have outperformed investing the same dollars in the S&P, or real estate, or whatever?

I could not believe that an economist could miss something so fundamental; the only explanation I could come up with was that Hassett didn’t know anything about comic books. I sent him a friendly email trying to explain his misapprehension and found him unmovable. He was convinced that he was right and that comic books were a great investment.

Thinking that something wasn’t translating over email, I invited him to lunch.

I forget where we met; some place not more than a couple blocks from 17th and M in Washington, where both the Standard and AEI were located at the time. When we sat down Hassett began talking, and kept talking, with little interruption. He talked primarily about how gifted his young son was at baseball.3

Eventually I brought up comic books and tried to explain to Hassett the flaw in his analysis: Sure, if you’d bought Amazing Fantasy #15 (the first appearance of Spider-Man) in August of 1962 and preserved it, then in 2007 it would have been worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. But you would have had to have known that Amazing Fantasy #15 would be the issue to get. And if you had bought all of the comics published in August 1962, then your returns would have been significantly smaller because most of those comics didn’t appreciate at anything close to the rate of AF #15.4

Your argument, I said to Hassett, amounted to: If you only pick stocks that go up, then stocks are a great investment.

Hassett was unmoved. Utterly and completely. It wasn’t that he didn’t understand me; it was that he didn’t want to understand. Invincible ignorance.

Walking back to the office I was amused that someone so daft could have ascended to such an august post at a prestigious think tank.

The amusement did not last.

 

Edited by C-Man
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Posted
1 minute ago, C-Man said:

Here’s a story about Kevin Hassett, Trump’s president of the National Economic Council, who said Sunday that chickens don’t fly and therefore didn’t spread avian flu easily.

First, here was his quote:
 

 


Now the fun story:

https://open.substack.com/pub/thebulwark/p/meet-kevin-hassett-conservatisms?r=3agz2m&utm_medium=ios

 

So now we need to build a wall for the chickens?

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Posted
4 minutes ago, Shut up Lou Holtz said:

So now we need to build a wall for the chickens?

As a chicken owner I can verify that they indeed can fly. Not far, but they can get airborne. 

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Posted
46 minutes ago, C-Man said:

Here’s a story about Kevin Hassett, Trump’s president of the National Economic Council, who said Sunday that chickens don’t fly and therefore didn’t spread avian flu easily.

First, here was his quote:
 

 


Now the fun story:

https://open.substack.com/pub/thebulwark/p/meet-kevin-hassett-conservatisms?r=3agz2m&utm_medium=ios

 

"Better ways with bio-security and medication?"

That sounds an awful lot like "increased regulations and government overreach" and Doge should look into purging that wokehivemindvirus. #muhfreemarket #birdfluforall

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Posted
22 hours ago, gernblansten said:

At first I thought "this isn't Trump's America, that's in Toronto". I keep forgetting Canada is the 51st State.

The flight was from MSP on an obviously USA carrier.

Posted

Somehow I missed this.  

Bankers everywhere are celebrating.

https://financialservices.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=409464

 

Quote

Today, House Financial Service Committee Chairman French Hill (R-AR) and Senate Banking Committee Chairman Tim Scott (R-SC) introduced Congressional Review Act (CRA) resolutions to overturn the Biden Administration’s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s (CFPB) final rule capping overdraft fees at banks and credit unions. The committee leaders cited the rule’s impact on access to important financial services and reiterated that lawful and contractually agreed upon payment incentives promote financial discipline and responsibility. 

 

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Chairman Hill was joined on the resolution by Reps. Bill Huizenga (R-MI), Ann Wagner (R-MO), Andy Barr (R-KY), Roger Williams (R-TX), William Timmons (R-SC), Ralph Norman (R-SC), Dan Meuser (R-PA), Byron Donalds (R-FL), Andy Ogles (R-TN), Maria Salazar (R-FL), Troy Downing (R-MT), Mike Haridopolos (R-FL), Tim Moore (R-NC), and Glenn Grothman (R-WI). Senators Mike Crapo (R-ID), Roger Wicker (R-MS), Jim Risch (R-ID), Jerry Moran (R-KS), John Boozman (R-AR), Thom Tillis (R-NC), Kevin Cramer (R-ND), Cynthia Lummis (R-WY), Bill Hagerty (R-TN), Katie Boyd Britt (R-AL), and Pete Ricketts (R-NE) co-sponsored Chairman Scott's resolution.

 

 

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Posted
5 minutes ago, tx 3 putt said:

 

send them to the states 

THATS SOCIALISM!  But sending them to Nivek so he could sell them back to people..... 

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Posted
2 minutes ago, David Dennison said:

Gen X: We are so fucked.

Also Gen X: Whatever.

Once shit gets really bad, and it is too late, people will start to whine and maybe write some sternly worded letters. We deserve this and it will be fun as hell. Get ready to find your own food supply! We aren't a coalition anymore. We are subjects.

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Posted
6 hours ago, aggie08 said:

Canadian immigration and citizenship applications must be off the fucking charts right now.

Italy is really tightening up their qualifications because they are getting so many requests. And that’s Italy. Not exactly free of right wingers over there. 

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Posted
3 minutes ago, Biff Tannen said:

I hope we all die. Fuck all of you that caused this. Fucking unbelievable. 

Hey man, that's the feature, not the bug. We elected idiots, we get to figure out why crops don't grow with brawndo!

Posted (edited)

Newest EO straight up says that the executive is responsible for interpreting the law

https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/02/fact-sheet-president-donald-j-trump-reins-in-independent-agencies-to-restore-a-government-that-answers-to-the-american-people/

Quote

The President and the Attorney General (subject to the President’s supervision and control) will interpret the law for the executive branch, instead of having separate agencies adopt conflicting interpretations.

I can't wait to see Roberts overturn Marbury v Madison to roll out the modern American version of the Enabling Act of 1933

Edited by Captainant
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Posted
20 minutes ago, Chuckie Finster said:

The lack of blood and fire is such an indictment on our country.

We’re a summer time blood and fire country 

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Posted
Just now, jimmyjazz said:

So wait a minute . . . the judiciary no longer has a say in what is and is not lawful?

Both the other branches of government are the 'Suggestions Branch' and the 'Other Suggestions Branch'

Posted
37 minutes ago, jimmyjazz said:

So wait a minute . . . the judiciary no longer has a say in what is and is not lawful?

I think that what that actually means is that expert agencies won't interpret their own enabling statutes, only POTUS and AG.

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Posted
1 hour ago, HOOKEM4 said:

Where are all the folks telling us how this is good? 

I am just amazed I am lucky enough to live through the best times and now watch the fall of Rome. I always wondered what it would be like. Just a bunch of idiots rooting it on. 

Heil king trump!! Good luck people.

Literally no “keep it in the CR” poster will come in and defend this or 95% of the shit Trump does. They won and that’s all they truly care about. Thinking they’re rich enough to get a tax savings that matters, but don’t make anywhere near enough to matter. Thinking they are sticking it to “others” they don’t like, but pretending like it’s not self reflection on their own insecurities. 

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Posted
We're all too fat to do anything.

And too busy. Until there is no work to get up and go to, no one is going to actually do anything. People live pay check to paycheck. They can’t miss work for some revolution. People aren’t poor enough. We don’t even have shanty towns yet.
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Posted

This was written in December…. Similar to a YouTube video someone posted I can’t remember who. A chilling account of what was to come and what has already been done. Again written before Trump took office.

they truly believe they HAVE to dismantle everything and start over and that a dictator is the only way, but hey at least he will be conservative.

there is no route to win over MAGA. All we can hope is that he moves so fast the leopards eat enough faces and it backfires.

 

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/21/curtis-yarvin-trump

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