Categories
FYI

How the DOGE Do

“DOGE is a temporary organization repurposed from U.S. Digital Services,” explains The Epoch Times. “Trump and Musk previewed the idea to prospective voters on the campaign trail.”

The new “department” was not created ex nihilo, but, instead, fashioned out of an existing outfit that had been established by the Obama Administration. It was actually a “Reorganization and Renaming of the United States Digital Service. The United States Digital Service is hereby publicly renamed,” the January 20, 2025, executive order put it, “as the United States DOGE Service (USDS) and shall be established in the Executive Office of the President.”

Establishment of a Temporary Organization.  There shall be a USDS Administrator established in the Executive Office of the President who shall report to the White House Chief of Staff. There is further established within USDS, in accordance with section 3161 of title 5, United States Code, a temporary organization known as “the U.S. DOGE Service Temporary Organization”.  The U.S. DOGE Service Temporary Organization shall be headed by the USDS Administrator and shall be dedicated to advancing the President’s 18-month DOGE agenda. The U.S. DOGE Service Temporary Organization shall terminate on July 4, 2026. The termination of the U.S. DOGE Service Temporary Organization shall not be interpreted to imply the termination, attenuation, or amendment of any other authority or provision of this order.

Notice that this is a sunsetting operation, of limited duration. And also notice how the “Department of Government Efficiency” is contracted to DOGE (with its own history in the crypto space), which is then subsumed under the initialism of an existing organization, “United States Digital Services,” and note that many of the members of the DOGE team are proficient masters of modern technology and organizational methods — or, as The Epoch Times puts it, “Many individuals publicly associated with DOGE are very young and highly technically accomplished.”

“Doge” was also the title of rulers of several renaissance era Italian city states, perhaps made most recently memorable in the banter of Danny Kaye in the 1955 film The Court Jester:

King Roderick: The Duke. What did the Duke do?
Hubert Hawkins: Eh . . . the Duke do?
Roderick: Yes. And what about the Doge?
Hawkins: Oh, the Doge! King Roderick: Eh. Well what did the Doge do?
Hawkins: The Doge do?
Roderick: Yes, the Doge do.
Hawkins: Well, uh, the Doge did what the Doge does. Eh, uh, when the Doge does his duty to the Duke, that is.
Roderick: What? What’s that?
Hawkins: Oh, it’s very simple, sire. When the Doge did his duty and the Duke didn’t, that’s when the Duchess did the dirt to the Duke with the Doge.
Roderick: Who did what to what?
Hawkins: Oh, they all did, sire. There they were in the dark; the Duke with his dagger, the Doge with his dart, Duchess with her dirk.
Roderick: Duchess with her dirk?
Hawkins: Yes! The Duchess dove at the Duke just when the Duke dove at the Doge. Now the Duke ducked, the Doge dodged, and the Duchess didn’t. So the Duke got the Duchess, the Duchess got the Doge, and the Doge got the Duke!

Extremely clever. The legal creation of the DOGE, we mean. Much more clever than renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America.” And to much more pointed effect.

Categories
Thought

Ayanna Pressley

We are all willing to work with anyone who’s serious about doing the work of censoring the American people and advancing progress.

Representative Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), taking “a bit of umbrage” and speaking “on behalf of my colleagues.” Best guess as to what she meant to say is “centering the American people,” whatever that means. But she did not say that. She said “censoring.” She is talking about the Department of Government Efficiency and the closing of the rogue agency the CFPB. She concludes this statement with “But they are not serious,” referring to the people she opposes: the Republicans and President Trump’s team constituting the DOGE.
Categories
Thought

Ayn Rand

A genius is a genius, regardless of the number of morons who belong to the same race — and a moron is a moron, regardless of the number of geniuses who share his racial origin.

Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness (1964).

Categories
Today

Remember the Maine

On February 15, 1898, the USS Maine, a battleship, exploded in the Cuba’s Havana harbor, killing 260 American sailors. An official U.S. Naval Court of Inquiry ruled in March 1898 that the ship was blown up by a mine, without directly blaming Spain. Nonetheless, Congress declared war and, within three months, the U.S. had decisively defeated Spanish forces. On December 12, 1898, the Treaty of Paris was signed between the U.S. and Spain, granting the United States its first overseas empire with the ceding of such former Spanish possessions as Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines.

In 1976, a team of American naval investigators concluded that the Maine explosion was likely caused by a fire that ignited its ammunition stocks, not by a Spanish mine or act of sabotage.

Categories
general freedom ideological culture

American History Month

Thomas Sowell, Morgan Freeman, race, America

When we think of Black History Month, whom do we tend to think of?

One person I think of is Morgan Freeman, who “detests” this commemoration, “the mere idea of it. . . . You are going to celebrate ‘my’ history?! The whole idea makes my teeth itch. . . . My history is American history.”

He also dislikes the term “African-American,” calling it a misnomer.

“Most black people in this part of the world are mongrels. And you say Africa as if it’s a country when it’s a continent, like Europe.”*Freeman regards his skin color as only one attribute, and not one that goes very far to distinguish him as an individual.

What events and which achievers might we ponder in addition to Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglas, Martin Luther King, other champions of civil rights, great inventors, scientists, educators, business, artists, even actors like Freeman and Denzel Washington? The list of celebration-worthy black Americans is endless.

In a proclamation about Black History Month, the new White House mentions a name that doesn’t always make the list: scholar Thomas Sowell.

Highlighting Sowell may make the teeth of many progressives itch, for he advances unconventional perspectives and reasoning about race and the real impact of racism on economic as well as other features of American life and our global civilization. He has done this for decades, especially in books featuring provocative titles, including Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality? (1984), The Vision of the Anointed (1995), Black Rednecks and White Liberals (2005), and Discriminations and Disparities (2018), often criticizing policies such as “affirmative action.”

Black history is American history — and vice versa — every month of the year.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Of course, in this part of the world, most of us are “mongrels.”

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Categories
Thought

Samuel Butler

Heaven is the work of the best and kindest men and women. Hell is the work of prigs, pedants and professional truth-tellers. The world is an attempt to make the best of both.

The Note-Books of Samuel Butler; Part II: Elementary Morality (1912).

Categories
Today

Saint Valentine

On February 14, 278 A.D., Valentine, a priest in Rome during the reign of Emperor Claudius II, was executed.

In order to facilitate the raising of an army for his unpopular military campaigns, the emperor outlawed all marriages and engagements. Valentine defied Claudius’s order and continued to perform marriages for young lovers in secret. Once discovered, Valentine was arrested and condemned by the Prefect of Rome to be beaten to death with clubs and to have his head cut off. The sentence was carried out on February 14.

Valentine was named a saint by the Roman Catholic Church after his death.

Though February 14th is celebrated as “St. Valentine’s Day,” in today’s vernacular, the 14th of February, 278, was, ahem, “not his day.”

Categories
deficits and debt meme

Just Imagine

debt, Congress, spending, corruption, meme

Imagine stealing everyone’s money and still being $36 trillion in debt.

Categories
insider corruption regulation too much government

Killing a Bureau

consumer protection, bureaucrats, paperwork, regulations, freedom

First, Trump fires the holdover director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a radically anti-business agency. He appoints the new treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, as acting director.

Bessent orders the agency to stop everything — “rulemaking, communications, litigation,” Bloomberg Law reported. “A source inside the bureau who asked to remain anonymous said the order appeared to shut down the CFPB altogether, for the time being.”

So far, so good.

Trump replaces acting director Bessent with Russ Vought, a former and also the new director of the Office of Management and Budget.

The CFPB’s website goes dark and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) begins to audit the books.

Musk and his team will find bad things. But “efficiency” isn’t quite the issue. Suppose the Bureau proves to be extremely efficient and noncorrupt at the task of making businesses extremely inefficient?

The mission itself is bad.

This agency sets its own budget, is perversely cut off from congressional oversight, has been able to run wild. One of its strokes of genius: treating video games as bank accounts.

Now we have oversight. Internal. “The calls are coming from inside the house”; it’s being gutted from within.

RedState hopes the CFPB’s “hyperaggressive regulation-writing and legal thuggery will be markedly reduced” and that the agency may even be closed.

Yes, end it: as critics have long argued. Why does this agency exist except to harass and murder businesses and free enterprise? One of many federal agencies that should expire. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Previously on the CFPB:

Give Them Credit — February 2, 2014
Invulnerable Government — November 28, 2017
Peel Back the Onion — November 30, 2017
Protector Protection — January 6, 2020

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Thought

Ayn Rand

Ayn Rand, socialism

When you consider socialism, do not fool yourself about its nature. Remember that there is no such dichotomy as “human rights” versus “property rights.” No human rights can exist without property rights.

Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness (1964).