Mar
5
2025

"I Lift My Lamp Beside the Golden … Hey!"

Jim Geraghty minces no words: We Have Effectively Switched Sides in the Russia-Ukraine War.

The heart of this dispute is the cold hard fact that Donald Trump trusts Vladimir Putin a lot more than he trusts Zelensky. The president explicitly said so.

The Russian government has broken its promises and assurances in peace treaties in Chechnya, Georgia, and Syria, as well as the Budapest Memorandum that was supposed to guarantee Ukraine’s territorial integrity in exchange for giving up the nuclear weapons stationed on its soil. Putin violated the extension of the START treaty that Joe Biden bragged about for a year. Vladimir Putin, and the regime he heads, lies, lies, and lies some more, and he was raised and shaped and came up through the ranks in a system that lied as easily as it breathed. As a KGB officer stationed in Dresden in the 1980s, regularly accessing files over at the Stasi regional headquarters across the street, Putin lied for a living.

As Ronald Reagan said in his negotiations with Mikhail Gorbachev, “Dovorey no provorey — trust, but verify.” At one summit, Gorbachev quipped, “You say that at every meeting.”

But, as far as we can tell, Trump trusts Putin. The American president has demanded no concessions from Russia, no denunciation of its war crimes, not even a peep of criticism. No one in this administration wants to publicly say the obvious fact that Russia invaded Ukraine. This is an administration that fears the hostile dictators who are genuine threats to America and makes up for that insecurity by berating and bullying democratic allies.

That’s our policy now — we side and stand with the aggressor.

It appears Jim's article is outside the paywall. Read the whole thing, and feel ashamed for our country.

Also of note:

  • That would be nice. Dominic Pino reports a good policy recommendation coming from an unlikely source: Trump Calls for Repeal of CHIPS Act.

    In his address to the joint session of Congress, President Trump called for the repeal of the CHIPS Act, a bipartisan industrial policy law signed by Biden. “We don’t have to give them money,” he said of semiconductor companies benefiting from the law’s subsidies.

    Trump portrayed it as a Democratic law, saying, “Your CHIPS Act is a horrible, horrible thing,” while gesturing toward the Democrats’ side of the House chamber.

    In his address to the joint session of Congress, President Trump called for the repeal of the CHIPS Act, a bipartisan industrial policy law signed by Biden. “We don’t have to give them money,” he said of semiconductor companies benefiting from the law’s subsidies.

    It is mostly standard-issue corporate welfare, giving gobs of money to politically favored companies such as Intel. Last year, Intel announced it was cutting 15,000 jobs, which was 5,000 more jobs than it said it expected to create with CHIPS Act funding.

    It was horrible. Back when it passed the Senate in 2022, I said it was "a demonstration that nobody learned their lessons about central planning, industrial policy, and corporate welfare."

    As for it being a "Democratic law": 17 GOP senators voted for it, as did 24 GOP CongressCritters.

  • But another lousy, or worse, idea is always imminent. Jeff Maurer thinks, correctly, that Trump’s Obviously Corrupt Plan to Use Taxpayer Money to Buy Shitcoins Is the Indefensible Thing That Republicans Must Defend Today. Specifically:

    Jeff's opening paragraphs:

    So: The president wants to spend taxpayer dollars to buy fake non-money that Twitch streamers use to buy drugs. And he’s not limiting the government to the less-laughable cryptocurrencies, like Bitcoin — if Bitcoin is Coca-Cola, Trump wants to also buy Jittery Jimmy’s High-Fructose Fizz Drink. Trump has mused that buying cryptocurrency could get the government out of debt, which sounds like the plan a degenerate gambler makes right before his body turns up in a New Jersey landfill.

    The potential for corruption is off the charts. This plan clearly benefits someone — the value of the cryptocurrencies Trump mentioned spiked after the announcement — but because cryptocurrencies are anonymous, we don’t know who got rich. It could be donors, foreign interests, or Trump family members — the only thing we know is that it was somebody terrible. Plus, someone placed a highly leveraged $200 million purchase right before Trump’s announcement, so there’s probably an old-timey insider trading scam happening alongside this Digital Age scam-of-the-future.

    Unfortunately, that sounds all too likely.

  • Let's see what else we can junk. At Reason, Jeff Luse tries to get Elon's attention: Hey DOGE: If You Want To Make Yourself Useful, Kill the Federal Energy Loan Program. Specifically, the Department of Energy's "Loan Programs Office", or LPO:

    The LPO was created in 2005 to finance high-risk, first-of-a-kind cleantech projects. Since its founding, the office has funded $43.9 billion worth of projects. While some of these have included eventual winners like Tesla, the program has mostly been marred by failed projects and wasteful spending—which permeates throughout the LPO today.

    In December 2024, the Energy Department's Inspector General (I.G.) identified several violations of conflicts of interest, which could give applicants an unfair advantage when applying for federal money. The I.G. concluded that the LPO "is administering more than $385 billion in new loan authority" without properly vetting, managing, or tracking conflicts of interest.

    In light of the report, the Energy Department has "paused all new loan actions," Jonathan Black, the agency's chief adviser for oversight, told the House Committee on Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations in February.

    I'd prefer to go for the whole hog, and follow Cato's 1997 recommendation to eliminate the Department of Energy.

  • Tanks a lot, Roger. Now Roger Pielke Jr. has me Thinking About Tanks. But he makes a good point first:

    Speaking yesterday on Fox News, U.S. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick indicated that official data for U.S. GDP would now separate out government spending from the rest of the nation’s overall economic tally.

    “You know that governments historically have messed with GDP. They count government spending as part of GDP. So I’m going to separate those two and make it transparent.”

    Lutnick seems not to be aware that the Bureau of Economic Analysis — which sits in the agency that he leads — already separates out federal spending in its quarterly GDP reports. You can see that in lines 51-57 of Table 3 in BEA’s report on U.S. 4th quarter GDP in 2024, released last week, and shown below highlighted in yellow. Federal spending (annualized) was about $1.9 trillion of the nation’s $29.7 trillion economy.

    It's always seemed a little odd to me that Uncle Stupid's spending on whatever contributes to a measure of the country's economic health. Still, as Roger points out, it's "standard practice". Or as they said in Animal House, it has a long-standing tradition of existence..

  • Today's "Unclear on the Concept" Award goes to… Maggie Goodlander, our state's newest CongressCritter. She is quoted at the New Hampshire Bulletin, which asks How has New Hampshire’s congressional delegation responded to Trump’s first month? And she wants you to know this about efforts to cut federal spending:

    “We’re talking about existential threats to federal programs and funding that really can’t be overstated,” Goodlander said. “These are dollars that make our way of life in New Hampshire, the Live Free or Die state, possible.”

    She is, like all Democrats, a fan of (what I've called):

    … But Maggie's claiming this legerdemain is something that makes LFOD possible is … what? Insane? Stupid? Evil? I'm going with "all three".

    (By the way, if you click over to Twitter and ask Grok to explain my post, you will see some incorrect, but amusing, misinformation. I never appeared on "The Mary Tyler Moore Show". Unfortunately.)


Last Modified 2025-03-11 6:29 AM EDT