They say that, when you’re in a hole, you should stop digging.  After the 2024 election, Democrats have found themselves in a hole, but they’re doing all they can to dig it deeper.  Case in point, President Trump gave his State of the Union address this week.  It’s never easy for the out-of-power Party to sit through one of those speeches.  There have been past instances of verbal outbursts, to be sure.  But Tuesday night, the Democrats tried to turn the event into a three ring circus.  Unsurprisingly, they provided the clown show.

The head clown in this circus was none other than Texas Representative Al Green.  Green has been in Congress for 20 years.  He’s a lawyer, who has the distinction of graduating from law school without ever earning an undergraduate degree.  The ABA accreditation standards say that is an “extraordinary” feat.  And Al Green hasn’t let them down as, if nothing else, he’s proven to be extraordinarily irritating to one John Donald Trump.

Hailing from the Party that likes to denounce Republicans as “election deniers,” Green is himself the quintessential election denier.  You may recall that he was the first Democrat to call for the impeachment of Trump.  And I’m talking about Trump 45, not Trump 47.

Green and Mad Maxine Waters started Trump impeachment talk after the 2016 election, even before Trump’s first inauguration.  It was February 2017 when Green filed his first impeachment articles based on Trump’s firing of James Comey.  Given that Green is such an extraordinary intellect, he should have known an impeachment for firing a Cabinet member didn’t work in 1868.  It didn’t work in 2017 either.

Democrats were still counting the 2024 votes when Green started talking impeachment for Trump 47.  This was before Tuesday’s speech.  On Tuesday, about five minutes into the speech, Green jumped up brandishing a cane and began yelling at the President, staging what might be called the Cane Mutiny.

That’s Adam Schiff (for brains) sitting in front of Green.  I was hoping he might get hit in the head by an errant swing.  Too bad.  Maybe Green was hoping to reenact the 1856 Capitol protest, when another Democrat, Preston Brooks, used his metal tipped cane to beat Republican Charles Sumner unconscious. In any event, Green never got the chance, as he was escorted from the Chamber by Sergeants at Arms.

And Al Green was only the center ring of the circus.  Democrat women attending the event all wore pink clown suits, because “pink is a color of power and protest.”

Well really, pink and some purple –

Boy, that’s telling him.  It looked like the bar room scene from Star Wars.

And then, in the third ring, were the stupid little signs.For a while there, it looked like the Democrats thought they were at an auction.  I was waiting for Trump to point the gavel at them and say, “Sold, to the lunatic with the purple hair.”

If Democrats thought that this nonsense would revive their  Party’s flagging popularity, it failed.  At least in the sane world.  MSNBC’s only complaint was that more Democrats didn’t follow Al Green’s lead, and rise up to be expelled one after the other, “to inspire their base.”  But inspiring their base isn’t the problem.  Their problem is that their base is down to below 25% of the electorate.

In the land of the living, Trump’s speech was wildly popular.  A CBS poll found 70% of viewers thought it “inspiring.”  77% supported his stands on cutting waste and on immigration.  More than 70% supported his remarks on ending the war in Ukraine, and 65% agreed with his stand on tariffs.

Such numbers would be a grim reality check if only the Woke Resistance actually was in touch with reality.  They’re not.  To the Left, Trump is still Hitler.  When you try to tell them how rare it is for nearly 80% of Americans agree on anything, it falls on deaf ears.  They give you Liberal Answer #1 – “That’s not true,” and then intone, “anyway, Trump is Hitler.”

And although the Democrat Party is being described as “out in the wilderness,” even by the few remaining sane Democrats, the loony Left base is firmly convinced that the “Trump is Hitler” meme is their path to salvation.  Although nobody asked her, and although few either knew or cared that she was still alive, actress Mia Farrow sounded the alarm online – “If we have 6 months of democracy left I’ll be surprised.  I’m guessing 3-4 months – unless we do something.”

She didn’t explain what the “something” was that she wants to be done.  She concluded, “Trump is a monster- loathsome.  All these fawning people know better.  I would never be in the same room with him.”  Don’t sweat it Mia, I’d lay odds you won’t be in the same room with the President anytime soon.

The point is, although Farrow may be a nut, she’s a nut with 200,000 followers.  Poll numbers indicating the will of the electorate mean nothing to such people.  And many of them happen to be Members of Congress.  These are politicians, who are supposed to be adept at feeling which way the winds are blowing, and turning changes in public opinion to their advantage.  Not this bunch.

Faced with issues on which 8 of 10 Americans disagree with them, they just keep doubling down on crazy.  So wedded are they to the continuation of unbridled illegal immigration, they object even to the deportation of violent criminal aliens.  Here are remarks from New Mexico Democrat, Melanie Stansbury, “It’s total bullshit.  Absolute bullshit.  They are not making America safer and what they are doing is terrorizing immigrant families.”

When Trump acknowledged the families of women murdered by illegal aliens, Democrats sat silent.  When he recounted outrageously wasteful spending, they sat silent.  They couldn’t even stand in sympathy for a 13 year old cancer patient, whose only crime was wanting to be a police officer.  Simply put, Democrats went out of their way to prove themselves worthy of the sign Representative Stansbury bravely sported Tuesday night.

No, Melanie, it certainly is not.  And not to be outdone, Mad Maxine Waters burnished her “election denier” persona.  Maxine boycotted the speech because she didn’t want to listen to “that bullshit.”  Afterward, Mad Maxine cornered the market on bullshit, suggesting  that “Elon Musk’s high technology ass” might had rigged the election for Trump.

With every breath they take, and every move they make, Democrats only seem to dig themselves deeper into their hole.  My message to Democrats is, keep digging.

Elon Musk and his DOGE boys once again have swung their mighty budget axe.  They now are seeking to chop down a familiar part of Americana.  The penny.  To many, in this age of tapping debit and credit cards and Venmo, the penny is just a nuisance to be well rid of.  But I’m old enough to appreciate the penny.

Once upon a time, people said, “Find a penny, pick it up, and all the day you’ll have good luck.”  Now people are too lazy to bend down.  In my youth there were things that you could buy for a penny.  Penny candy comes to mind.  There were candy stores with endless supplies of wax teeth, jawbreakers, and edible flying saucers.  Now they’re all but gone, at any price.  7-11 and WaWa stores now sell single tootsie rolls for 39 cents each.  So much for penny candy.

The powers that be have been trying to get rid of the penny for many years.  The latest attempt came when the DOGE boys announced that each penny we mint costs 3.7 cents to produce.  DOGE is doing good work, but that really wasn’t a revelation.  It’s cost more than one cent to make a penny since the 1970’s.  In fact, in 1974 the Mint experimented with an aluminum penny.  They were never produced for circulation.  I’ve handled aluminum coins.  They are the very embodiment of cheap crap.

Over the penny’s 232 year history, metal shortages and increases in metal values have caused numerous changes in the penny’s composition.  The penny was the first coin produced by the U.S. Mint in 1793.  From 1793 to 1857 the penny was the large cent, almost the diameter of a half dollar. Up to 1837 it was 100% copper.   In 1837, in the midst of a financial panic, the composition changed to 95% copper, 5% zinc and tin.

In 1857, the small cent was born.  This one (the Flying Eagle) was 88% copper and 12% nickel, giving the coin a white appearance.  A shortage of nickel during the Civil War changed the 1864 penny to bronze (95% copper, with zinc and tin).

That composition endured till World War II, when shortages of copper and tin caused the Mint to produce zinc coated steel pennies in 1943.  They lasted one year.  From 1944 to 1946 pennies were brass (95% copper, 5% zinc).  From 1947 to 1962 the bronze alloy returned.  From 1962 to 1982 they again were brass, the tin being removed.  Since 1982, pennies have been 97.5% zinc, with copper plating.

But now not even zinc is cheap enough to make minting pennies pay.  Congress unsuccessfully tried to cancel the penny in 2017.  Numerous other proposals to end the penny have been met with resistance.  Vending machine companies complained the loudest.  About the only machines that take pennies today are the supermarket self-checkouts.

Another defender of the penny is a man named Mark Weller, who represents an organization called Americans For Common Cents.  Is he fighting for the penny for its historical value or because he’s a coin collector like myself?  Hardly.  Mr. Weller is a lobbyist for the company that sells the Mint the zinc used to make the pennies.  So much for sentiment.

Until last year we were producing about 7 billion pennies a year, at an annual cost of more than $100 million over face value.  I can’t argue that that’s not a wasteful misuse of government money.  President Trump has ordered the Mint to stop producing pennies this year.  It would take an Act of Congress to cancel the penny altogether.

If pennies are no longer minted for circulation, they still could be produced for collectors.  New pennies could join the list of other coins we mint that few people ever see or use.  We minted 58 million Kennedy half dollars in 2023 and 37 million in 2024.  Ever get one in change?

Every year we mint millions of dollar coins in two varieties (Sacagawea and Presidential).  Only coin collectors ever see them, which is a shame, because if Americans would use a dollar coin, which lasts 20 years, we could stop printing $1 bills, which last 18 months.

But back to the penny.  It is estimated that there are 250 billion pennies in circulation.  That’s enough to give every American about 800.  And if you’re paying cash, how many do you need for the rare purchases requiring 3 or 4 pennies?    The Mint has produced over 150 billion pennies in the last 20 years, and pennies last from 20 to 30 years, so there have to be a lot more than 250 billion usable one cent coins out there.

The question is, where are all the pennies?  With fewer Americans using cash, are they in piggy banks or jars somewhere?  The point is, we need not cancel the penny outright.  We can just halt production while we make use of  the billions of coins already produced.

We need to enlist the American public to bring their pennies to banks to get them back into circulation.  During World War II there were metal and rubber drives.  Why not a penny drive?  If Trump and Musk ask Americans to help them save the government money it could work.  And there is precedent for such a plan.

Remember that I said the Mint experimented with aluminum pennies in 1974.  That’s because the price of copper caused people to melt pennies for the copper value.  There was a  penny shortage.  The Mint ramped up production, minting more than 100 billion pennies in 10 years.

In 1974 the U.S. Treasury Department called for pennies to be cashed in at banks to ease the shortfall.  Then Mint Director Mary Brooks put out the call for pennies, telling Americans “There are plenty of pennies.  But they are in the wrong places.”  For every $25 in pennies turned in to banks, the Treasury issued a Certificate of Appreciation.  I got one.

The same situation exists today.  There are plenty of pennies out there, but just in the wrong places.  I think I’ll give Treasury Secretary Bessent a call.

Donald Trump has been President for one month, and that squealing sound you hear is coming from Leftist pigs who are outraged that their endless supply of government slop no longer is being mindlessly dumped into their bottomless troughs.  Simply put, Trump has derailed their gravy train, and for once, the interest of the taxpayer is being considered.

Trump arrived with his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) ready to ferret out waste, fraud, and abuse in government spending.  It wasn’t hard to find.  As of February 18, and after reviewing the books of only a handful of agencies, DOGE has uncovered mind blowing excesses, and has recovered some $55 billion in illegal or wasteful spending.

Back at a time when our elected officials actually paid attention to how they spent your money, Senator Everett Dirksen famously mused, “a billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you’re talking real money.”  Multiply that by a thousand and you get, “A trillion here, a trillion where?  And is it any wonder we’re going broke?”

Elon Musk and his highly intelligent wunderkind have been hard at work looking into areas of the government that the bureaucrats hoped would never be inspected.  What they have found is shocking.

After the election, the Biden Administration frantically went about trying to spend as much money as possible before Trump arrived and could shut down the Democrats’ free candy store.  Some of the bureaucrats even bragged about it.

A now former EPA official posted about the rush to offload your tax money,  “It truly feels like we’re on the Titanic and we’re throwing, like, gold bars off the edge.”  They sent some $600 million to something called The Alliance for Climate Justice, which sounds laudable, but which turns out to be an anti-Semitic front, whose website proclaims, “Climate justice travels through a Free Palestine.”  New EPA Director Lee Zeldin was able to claw back $50 million.

Zeldin also found that the EPA had run out of phony front groups to shovel your money to, and had parked $20 billion in two banks, in preparation for pissing it away to some Leftist group, which no doubt would kick back to deserving Democrat politicians.  He got that money back.

Democrats wasted your money on things that even The Babylon Bee couldn’t dream up.  $10 million for circumcisions in Mozambique.  $25 million for biodiversity in Colombia.  UC Berkeley got $9.7 million to develop “a cohort of Cambodian youth with enterprise driven skills.”  $32 million to the Prague Civil Society Center.

Here’s a Democrat slush fund if ever there was one – $486 million to the “Consortium for Elections and Political Process Strengthening.”  That dubious group spent money on elections in Moldova and India.  $29 million to strengthen the political landscape in Bangladesh.  Is there one?  Maybe the money went for shrubbery.

Nepal made out very well.  They got $20 million for “fiscal federalism,” whatever that is, and $19 million for a “biodiversity conversation.”  At that price, it must have been a long conversation.  Biodiversity deals with endangered species.  I’m sorry there are only 193 Bengal tigers left in Nepal, but it’s not my fault, and I don’t want to pay for it.

DOGE found that HUD had “misplaced” $1.9 billion.  When that much government money gets “misplaced,” somebody ought to go to prison.  Shockingly, the DOGE boys uncovered government payments totaling $4.7 trillion, for which there were no listings as to what, or to whom, the money had been paid.

Now, I don’t for a moment believe that all that money was fraudulently spent or stolen, but I would bet that in that mind boggling amount of untraceable money, some of it surely went astray.  Maybe I’m just jaded from having practiced criminal law for 45 years.  All I’m saying is, I know people who will kill you for 2 dollars, so if there’s trillions, and nobody’s looking …

Perhaps the most alarming revelation came from DOGE’s cursory look into the records of the Social Security Administration.  Social Security spent $1.35 trillion in 2023.  But, I must digress.  I’m pretty conservative, but my dentist is so conservative he puts me to shame.  A few weeks ago, during a cleaning, he told me millions of people over the age of 115 were receiving Social Security checks.  I doubted him.  Sorry Doc.

Elon Musk has found millions of listings for Social Security recipients whose reported ages on the SSA books are from 100 to over 300 years of age.  Now, while I’m sure there are plenty of deposits going to dead people, I can’t believe it numbers in the millions, but that’s not the point.  If a government agency is spending over a trillion dollars a year, shouldn’t its records be accurate?

Musk claims that the number of people getting Social Security payments exceeds the reported population of the country.  What if he’s right?  A study has shown that 75% of the untold millions of illegal aliens are using fraudulent Social Security numbers.  Until Trump arrived, the SSA would do nothing about that.  Again, somebody, maybe a lot of somebodies, need to go to prison.

Predictably, Democrats are opposing the efforts of DOGE.  A number of lawsuits have been filed.  The Democrat line is, “we’re not in favor of waste and fraud, of course, but we just don’t like the way its being uncovered.”  “Musk wasn’t elected,” they scream.  True, but what’s the point.

The President is the Chief Executive.  He’s responsible for all the money spent by these myriad agencies, but Democrats incredibly claim that he has no right to look at the books.  They say it’s illegal and unconstitutional.  Bullshit!

Look at it this way.  If a President hired a Big Eight accounting firm to do audits at $600 an hour, that would be wasteful, but legal.  Here, Trump has gotten the richest man in world to do the job for free, and the Dems have a problem with that.

“Musk isn’t a government employee,” they cry.  Not so fast.  It turns out he is a senior advisor to the President.  Joe Biden had Anita Dunn in that role, and nobody ever questioned what she was doing (which probably was running the entire government for Clueless Joe).

But Democrats are marching and singing about DOGE, and they’ve sued Trump to stop the DOGE inspections.  Not to avoid uncovering fraud, of course, but because Elon Musk wasn’t confirmed by the Senate.  Uh huh.  And if you believe that, USAID has a bridge to sell you, probably in Nepal.

No, no, Democrats protest, it’s not the results of the audits, it’s the process.  Sure, that’s what it is.  They don’t object to you finding out they’ve been cheating and stealing for 50 years, they just want to ensure no laws are broken in the process of proving them to be crooks.  The truth is, these bastards are opposing Trump on the basis that he’s recklessly saving your money.  Isn’t that noble?

Even Federal Judge Tanya Chutkan isn’t buying that one.  Remember her?  She’s the D.C. Judge who was trying to throw Trump in prison, even after the Supreme Court said he might have immunity.  14 Democrat AGs sued Trump to stop the DOGE audits that are leading to the cancelling of wasteful grants.  They want to protect their phony baloney federal stipends, so they sought a preliminary injunction.  Judge Chutkan said, “No.”  Did we really need a Federal court to rule that the President is allowed to access government computers?

Trump and Musk claim that the efforts of DOGE can cut up to a trillion dollars out of the Federal budget.  Let’s hope they keep looking under the rocks.  The American taxpayer is entitled to see what crawls out.

Anybody out there remember Chubby Checker?  Those of us of a certain age will recall his mega-hit The Twist.  Chubby debuted the song in Wildwood, New Jersey in 1960.Chubby was pretty hot in the 60’s, but you don’t hear much from him today.  He sold a lot of records, but 65 years after The Twist, he’s still not in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.  You may well ask, what in the world has motivated this obscure stroll down memory lane?  Then again, speaking of obscurity, I probably shouldn’t say “stroll” because The Stroll was a 1958 hit for The Diamonds.

But I digress.  What made me nostalgic for Chubby Checker was that I had the misfortune of witnessing the Superbowl halftime show perpetrated by Rap (or is it Crap) artist Kendrick Lamar last Sunday night.

Still confused?  Okay.  The Lamar performance was so offensive and revolting that it prompted me to look up the halftime performers at past Superbowls.

Superbowl XXII in 1988 featured Chubby Checker, 88 Grand Pianos and the Rockettes.   Be honest.  Wouldn’t any of those three have been preferable to the largely incomprehensible, obscene, insulting, misogynistic mutterings of Crap Impresario Lamar?

And if Chubby Checker isn’t your cup of tea, here are just a few of the other past halftime performers – Michael Jackson, Diana Ross, Patti LaBelle, Gloria Estefan, Stevie Wonder, Aerosmith, U2, Paul McCartney, The Rolling Stones, Bruce Springsteen, Travis Tritt, Shania Twain, and Bruno Mars.

Was Kendrick Lamar truly the best performer they could find to entertain?  Maybe the problem is that, for about five years, the show has been produced by Jay-Z.  Since he got the job, the show has featured rappers Bad Bunny, Snoop Dogg, Dr. Dre, Eminem, and Kendrick Lamar (twice).  Enough already!

I’m unconvinced that Rap is music at all, never mind the only music worthy of being played on sport’s biggest stage.  And keep in mind that the show is supposed to be entertaining people who paid anywhere between $3,000 and $20,000 for game tickets.  In large measure, these are corporate people who have little in common with “artists” whose greatest talent is trying to rhyme every line of a song with “Bitch” or “Glock.”

Now, I’m aware that I’m an old fart who’s ill equipped to appreciate, what shall we call it, urban artistry?  It’s true, I’m out of touch.  And it’s also true that I’m firmly convinced that the Rap music business is peopled by too many lowlifes and criminals.  That’s probably because when rappers make news, it’s usually because one murdered another, or they were arrested for some other depravity.  And also because the only denizen of the Rap business I’ve ever known was a client in prison for theft, and later civilly committed as a sexual predator.

So, as far as I’m concerned, the fact that nearly all of Lamar’s performance was undecipherable was a blessing for America.  About the only thing recognizable was Samuel L. Jackson dressed as Uncle Sam, and I’m still not sure what he was doing there.

I really couldn’t understand much of what Lamar was saying.  For most of the show he was crouched down and muttering gibberish.  He had Samuel L. there doing his Apollo Creed impersonation.  He had dozens of clowns jumping out of a Buick Clown Car.  Then there were about 400 alleged dancers dressed in red, white and blue, some of them still wearing their Covid gator masks.

As for the “songs,” I had to look up the lyrics.  Turns out we were lucky we couldn’t understand him.  He sang Peekaboo.  A lovely tune –

Surprisе, bitch, it’s that nigga Chuck E. Cheese
Peekaboo, let me FacеTime my opp, bitch, I’m up the street
Peekaboo, yeah, it’s AZ, I’m puttin’ somethin’ to sleep
Peekaboo, he on the ground, I praise God and start stompin’ feet
Peekaboo, I put ten on his face, bitch, my shooter playin’
Peekaboo, I hit it from the back, I told her move her hands
Peekaboo, then slide my thumb in it where her, uh, at
Peekaboo, I’m on your top, I’m with Dot, bitch, don’t look back.

Charming right?  The perfect song for America’s Game.  Revenge, aggravated assault, and sexual abuse.

Then he sang Squabble Up.

I feel good, get the fuck out my face
Look good, but shе don’t got no taste
I walk in, walked out with the safе
Mando, let me know what the play

I got hits, I got bucks, I got new paper cuts
I got friends, I got foes, but they all sitting ducks
Hit his turf and get crackin’, double back like a deluxe
Fifty deep, but it ain’t deep enough
Fuck a plea, there he go, beat him up

Yeehaw, we outside, whoadie ’bout to kill him off
Blaps on blaps [blaps are gunshots], it’s a fact, this a brick of raw
Tell me why the fuck you niggas rap if it’s fictional?
Tell me why the fuck you niggas fed if you criminal?

Great.  So now we can add burglary, theft, and murder to The Big Game.

Lamar moved on to DNA

I got, I got, I got, I got
Loyalty, got royalty inside my DNA
Cocaine quarter piece, got war and peace inside my DNA
I got power, poison, pain and joy inside my DNA
I got hustle though, ambition, flow, inside my DNA

I was born like this, since one like this
Immaculate conception
I transform like this, perform like this
Was Yeshua’s new weapon
I don’t contemplate, I meditate, then off your fucking head …  Sex, money, murder—our DNA

Sex, Money, Murder is a sect of the Bloods gang.  Probably just a coincidence.  I guess the moral of the song is, you were born that way, so get high, then kill somebody.

Lamar’s song, Man at the Garden, continued the glorification of senseless violence.

I burn this bitch down, don’t you play with me or stay with me
I’m crashin’ out right now, no one’s safe with me
I did it with integrity and niggas still try hate on me, just wait and see
More blood be spillin’, it’s just paint to me

Lamar then segued into Not Like Us, taking the occasion of the Superbowl to air his feud with fellow rapper Drake.  Way to make the whole event about you Kendrick.

Suffice to say, I hated this crap, ah, rap.  Clearly though, it’s just me.  USA Today loved the filthy spectacle.  “In case you missed it, K. Dot came with the heat for sports’ biggest stage.  It had everything you could possibly want out of the Compton rapper.”

Newsweek agreed.  “Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl LIX halftime show was more than just a performance—it was a statement.”  “Lamar used the world’s biggest stage to make powerful cultural and political commentary.” “Lamar, known for his socially conscious lyrics and thought-provoking visuals, turned his performance into a platform for reflection on race, power and American identity.”

Seriously?  What were they smoking at Newsweek?  I think they broke into Kendrick’s stash.  The Superbowl halftime show was an obscene insult to America.  He’s providing social commentary about race prejudice holding the Black man down?  Wake up!  He’s a Black multi-millionaire who was hired by a Black billionaire.  I don’t begrudge them anything they’ve earned.  God Bless America.  But give us a break already!

The whole show reminded me of the inscription on W.C. Fields’ gravestone, “On the whole, I’d rather be in Philadelphia.”  Which reminds me, I had to watch the Philadelphia Eagles win the game.  Ugh!

Chubby Checker was raised in Philadelphia.  So how about giving him another shot?  “Come on baby, let’s do the twist!”

This week the wrath of DOGE struck again, as Elon Musk sharpened his pencil and focused his attention on USAID, the United States Agency for International Development.  As you may recall, last week Elon Musk identified government programs that long ago had expired, yet unaccountably were still spending millions of tax dollars.  The key word here is unaccountably, because our government has been spending billions for decades without oversight of any kind.

In 2023, USAID distributed some $75 billion to projects worldwide.  Until this week that may have sounded noble.  Then we finally found out where our money was going.  Giving the devil his due, USAID funds legitimate projects such as smallpox inoculation and anti-malaria campaigns.  Other outlays are less useful.

Your hard earned tax dollars have gone to fund DEI in Serbia ($1.1 million); a DEI musical in Ireland; a Trans opera in Colombia; and Trans comic books in Peru.  We gave Egypt $6 million to promote tourism there, while hurricane victims in North Carolina are still living in tents here.  We gave Vietnam $2.5 million to promote electric vehicles.  I thought they already had bicycles.  But in the greater scheme of things those outlays were peanuts.

USAID funded Ukraine to the tune of billions, and sent Ukrainians to Paris for Fashion Week.  You paid Afghanistan hundreds of millions of dollars to irrigate and fertilize poppy fields that produce opium used to manufacture heroin that is sent here to kill Americans.  Some $40 million went to the Wuhan Virus Laboratory to fund Gain of Function research  that was outlawed in the U.S. in 2014.  2014 – wasn’t that the start date for Dr. Fauci’s pardon?  That was money well spent, as it only led to the deaths of about 7 million people worldwide.

This week we were told that the U.S. wastes $236 billion a year on unwarranted payments to dead people and fraudsters. Democrats are content to continue being defrauded, because part of that money goes back to them.  President Trump is not content.  He shut down USAID, sent all its employees home, and put Secretary of State Rubio in charge of the agency.  These actions caused Democrats to lose their minds.

There the Democrats were, on retreat in Maryland, where they were trying to choose a new nonbinary Chairperson for their Party.  They had just agreed that Kamala Harris only lost the election because of racism and sexism, and had reaffirmed their judgment that Trump is Hitler, when the Musk hit the fan, and Trump destroyed their secret USAID slush fund.

Democrats were apoplectic.  They called the actions against USAID “illegal” and a “constitutional crisis” while vowing to take their defense of the agency to the courts.  During a news conference outside USAID headquarters, Rep. Don Beyer of Virginia said, “What Trump and Musk have done is not only wrong, it’s illegal.” “USAID was established by an act of Congress, and it can only be disbanded by an act of Congress. Stopping this will require action by the courts and for Republicans to show up and show courage and stand up for our country.”

Well Don, not so fast.  USAID wasn’t created by Congress, but by a JFK Executive Order in 1961.  Since its inception, USAID has morphed into a clearinghouse for Progressive fantasies, and worse.  On Wednesday, we learned that the employees at the Left leaning political website Politico, which exists solely for the purpose of combating MAGA and supporting Progressive Democrats, had not been paid.  Turns out the money for their paychecks were coming from USAID.  When the USAID payments were frozen, the Politico hacks were left out in the cold.

Dem Representative Jamie Raskin called the halt in USAID funding “a constitutional crisis.”  Enraged Democrats renewed their claims about “a threat to our democracy.”  But the closing of USAID didn’t threaten “our democracy.”  Instead, Trump’s long overdue actions are a threat to their bureaucracy, the secret fourth branch of government that wastes your money no matter who gets elected.

USAID was staffed by Leftists, and permitted to piss away untold billions of your tax dollars on Woke fever dreams all over the world.  Congress would never appropriate funds for Trans comic books and operas, but it doesn’t have to.  USAID just sends them a check.  Congress long ago abandoned its oversight responsibility, so no one was looking.  And even when some troublesome Senator, like Joni Ernst, demanded to see the books, no problem.  USAID stonewalled her, threatened her staff, and kept funding the idiotic programs that put smiles on the faces of Progressive imbeciles.  USAID was a bottomless pit of money, just waiting to be laundered and kicked back to deserving Democrats.

Yet if the USAID malfeasance was limited only to funding Leftist nonsense it wouldn’t be so bad.  It has been reported that USAID long has been a cutout for illegal and off the books activities by our intelligence agencies.  Ever hear about the CIA having a “black budget” beyond the scrutiny of the Congress?   USAID was a convenient deep pocket.

That not bad enough?  How about this.  Two days ago, investigative journalist Michael Shellenberger tied USAID to the 2019 Trump impeachment.  Remember Trump being impeached over a phone call seeking information about Biden family corrupt dealing in Ukraine?  The Russia hoax originated with a media outlet called the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP).  That outlet was funded by, guess who? – USAID.

Trump asked too many questions about Ukrainian money being paid to American politicians, including, but not limited to Biden.  So the USAID/CIA paid OCCRP to smear him, then used the smear to try to oust him from office.  There’s a technical term for that – TREASON.

But USAID is only one of the sources of untraceable money.  Remember all those defunct programs that are somehow still spending your money?  Ever wonder where agencies like the CIA get the money to do things they don’t want the Congress to know about, like funding foreign drug deals, fixing elections, and overthrowing countries?  How about from things like the government continuing to make payments to entities that no longer exist, or from a slush fund like USAID, that had the ability to hide illicit payments among legitimate humanitarian outlays.

Regardless of the primal screams coming from wounded Democrats, Americans should celebrate the fact that at least one President has recognized that we can’t continue to borrow money forever.  And consider that the Democrats who are complaining aren’t trying to justify the ridiculous spending done by USAID.  Instead, their complaint is that Elon Musk has no authority to look at the books.  They much prefer one of the Deep Swamp auditors who have been looking the other way for 50 years.

Trump’s USAID actions were necessary, but they come at a price.  Trump has successfully forced foreign nations to take back their illegal immigrants deported from the U.S.  But making foreign countries fold is the easy part.  The real enemy is within.

Remember Detestable Chuck Schumer’s 2016 warning to Trump that, “When you go after the intelligence community they have six ways to Sunday to get back at you?”  It wasn’t an idle threat.  These are dangerous people who are not above resorting to violence to remove threats to their existence.  JFK could attest to that if they hadn’t killed him.

So, I salute President’s Trump’s efforts to get control of the government Leviathan that threatens to bankrupt the richest nation on Earth, but I worry about him.  He’s already got the Iranians trying to kill him.  He said this week he’s left instructions for the annihilation of Iran should that happen.  The CIA would be harder to deal with.