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Coming from a guy who cannot find current major news, that's fucking hilarious.

Effective != efficient. Effective government is never going to be as efficient as a private enterprise as they have different objectives. Unfortunately the foxes are guarding the chicken run. The first place to start would be term limits for all politicians, aligning their benefit packages with those of other public servants, getting rid of big business in political donations and limiting their ability for insider trading. One of the problems with the 4 year election cycle is that large scale changes can take years. This incentivises politicians to implement quick fixes, and also muddies the waters. The administration often gets the blame or credit for actions from a prior administration.

The Enola Gay was the B-29 bomber that dropped the first nuclear weapon during wartime. It was named after Enola Gay Tibbets, the mother of the pilot, Colonel Paul Tibbets. Tibbets said he chose the name because, as he was thinking about it, "my thoughts turned at this point to my courageous red-haired mother, whose quiet confidence had been a source of strength to me since boyhood, and particularly during the soul-searching period when I decided to give up a medical career to become a military pilot. At a time when Dad had thought I had lost my marbles, she had taken my side and said, 'I know you will be all right, son.' " It was a historic mission that stretched the limits of the aircraft - and there was no good data to show that the aircraft would even survive the event, since there had not yet been an airdrop test performed on a nuclear weapon. But they took the chance. It worked and they survived. The US then made a second bombing run over Nagasaki and dropped a second nuclear weapon. This brought the Pacific war to a close, as Japan quickly surrendered. The aircraft itself was left outside for a while and was vandalized. Feelings ran strong over it. Some saw it as a sign of American power and victory. Others saw it as a tool of mass murder. The head of the National Air and Space museum resigned over the controversy at one point. Finally it was fully restored and now is on display in the Virginia annex of the Air and Space Museum. And yesterday, Trump banned any pictures of the plane within the US Military because it's "gay."

I expect they'll expunge this guy too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_H._Gay_Jr.

Hi Mark, This is what I have difficulty with. To me, Trump is like the school-yard bully; in reality, just a coward. It is so obvious. I suppose once one puts his head in the sand, it becomes difficult to see the truth. Jerry Baumchen

Such a pathetic weakling.

Yeah, they said that about Boris Johnson too during the Brexit negotiations - "he's just pretending to be crazy and unpredictable, but he's really playing 4D chess! Those EU negotiators will be thrown off-balance and we'll gain leverage!" Then Boris pretty much rolled over and gave the EU everything they asked for. Then complained that he was "forced" to take the deal and tried to back out of it almost immediately... Those people saying this probably haven't negotiated anything significant in their lives.

Exactly, self policing politicians is a disaster. Probably the one good thing an initiative like DOGE could achieve (I’m not on crack, not suggesting Musk is the one).

One of the things all us old farts forget is the 9/11 was 24 years ago. To most people under 40 that is a history lesson, not a life experience. A 30 year old was 6 years old at 9/11 they sure as hell don’t remember how everyone came together in support of the US.

Hi folks, Looks like the Jack Daniels people are crying crocodile tears: Jack Daniel's maker says Canada taking bottles off shelves 'worse than tariffs' Too fucking bad, I say. Jerry Baumchen

To this observer from across the pond it appears Trump and Vance seem hell bent on dissolving NATO. Formed in 1949 in Washington NATO comprises a collective of countries who agreed to support each other in the event of hostility being targeted against any of its members. (Article 5) In 76 years Article 5 has only been invoked once. 12 September 2001 by the USA, every member country stood by the US, most lost hundreds of troops in the subsequent war on terror in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Who gets to judge those things, though? Currently it is a crew of inexperienced 19-23 year old coders who might be able to write script but clearly have not a clue about anything else. Cuts are being made on the basis of what Elon Musk thinks is useful to himself. He is of course well known for his lack of ability to care about anyone except himself and his 10,000 offspring (or so I infer from his statements and behavior), so condemning a few million people to die of malaria, HIV, or starvation is a small price to pay if he gets his tax cuts and trip to be the king of Mars. When Congress creates programs and allocates money, the Executive Branch has no constitutional authority to kill or defund those programs. The Executive can lobby Congress to get rid of such programs, but to do so they would have to convince Congress to take responsibility. Unfortunately the current cult formerly known as the Republican Party is all too happy to let Musk, who doesn't have to worry about re-election, take the heat for killing programs and ruining many lives, at least until he goes after Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid (which will begin any day now) and 2/3 of the people who vote R suddenly find themselves in line at the soup kitchen. I fear, though, that virtually every Republican congresscritter will discover that they have no idea where to look for their cojones after Trump and Musk cut them off and fed them to a drove of pigs.

Interesting how you are one of few conservative posters (generally the kool-aid drinkers) who doesn’t post endless narrative videos for our edutainment. Nobody watches them, and I completely understand why you’d ignore this one. That said, do you know how “useless” is being defined? And useless to whom? Because, well, there are plenty of services I pay taxes for that I don’t use directly; drug rehab, prescription benefits, wars (what exactly was Iraq supposed to protect us from?), voter ID. But I’m not so short-sighted as to think that I have to personally benefit from today’s efforts of each and every functionary. If I were in charge, I’d start with Medicare for all, no more school vouchers, and a top-down and bottom-up AI analysis of overlapping laws and regulations, with a view to identifying redundancies, conflicts, and anachronisms. Also the ones with extremely low applicability (although in a country of hundreds of millions, there can be hundreds of thousands of “one in a thousand” cases. But it’s a start. The medical motto is “first, do no harm, not “shoot first and ask questions later.” I happen to believe that as a rule, curing isn’t as good as preventing Wendy P.

And of course one of the best ways to do that is to cripple the revenue generating arm of the organisation. Yeah, it's for sure all about that balance. Totally.

So tell me when GM employees voted to be laid off? Which circles back nicely to the point of the thread, which is that Trump and Musk lied to their voters about what they were planning to do, and now a lot of people are regretting believing them.

Business is about making a profit for the owners or shareholders. Government is (or should be) about providing services that are not inherently profitable, such as protecting peoples rights and safety, regulating business to limit their tendency to maximize profit by screwing over people, supporting basic research that isn't profitable in the near term but eventually may lead to advances that can be picked up on by industry to develop products such as new drugs, and so on. It's infuriating (to say the least) to see the US government being taken over by grifters who clearly seek to personally profit, either by direct means or indirectly by eliminating the ability of government to prevent them from running roughshod over everybody else. "it's just the way it is" is just a slightly different way of saying "fuck anybody who I don't like".