RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2025/02/20/tom-hanks-margaret-brennan-and-the-european-ministers-reveal-it-all/

Three recent but completely unrelated events illustrate the deranged hatred of Donald Trump and his supporters continuing now even into a second decade. And yet the venom only further marginalizes the left.

In its too-long 50th anniversary spectacle, Saturday Night Live offered a skit in which marquee actor Tom Hanks did an impression of what the left thinks is a supposedly neanderthal Trump supporter.

The episode was NBC’s tele-version of the recent Obama-Hillary Clinton-Biden vocabulary of cheap MAGA disparagement: clingers, deplorables, irredeemables, chumps, dregs, semi-fascists, and ultra-MAGAs.

Most of those stereotyped props were evident in Hanks’ character.

He was wearing a red MAGA hat (real and not the fake versions of Jussie Smollett’s wild and sinister imagination).

Hanks sounded off as a superstitious evangelical, a slow-speaking Southern twanger, and a poorly dressed slob.

And of course, the SNL writers insisted that he play the gratuitous racist. So, Hanks, as a clueless Black Jeopardy contestant, initially refused to even shake the hand of the African-American, assumed intellectually and morally superior, gameshow host.

We are supposed to believe the Hanks caricature is in contrast with progressives—usually represented in society as the bicoastal enlightened, well-spoken, and snappily dressed.

Perhaps the SNL crowd thought the counterpart to Hanks’ MAGA sluggard was the recent hard-left, Democratic standard-bearer—the eloquent Kamala Harris of mesmerizing word-salad fame?

Aside from the reality that Trump captured a record number of African-American male voters, nearly split the Hispanic vote, and made gains with Asian- and Jewish-Americans, he also won massive defections from Wall Street and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/democrat-faces-of-failure/

Pity the poor Democrats – actually, don’t pity them because they are terrible people, and their sorry situation is purely of their own making. They got too used to being in charge, too used to ruling from their throne, and now that they have to get off it they have found that their spindly legs have withered and atrophied, so they hobble around, unable to stand fully upright. It’s funny for us, but it’s an existential challenge for them. What are the Democrats to do? Who do the Democrats have to try to do it with? Their bench is worse than the 2024 White Sox, which is a sportsball metaphor indicating that they’ve got nobody good on their team. And they’ve got no prospects for the future.

Now, this is all great for America, but we need to temper our gloating by remembering that we’re Republicans, and Republicans have a unique ability to squander any advantage they happen to have, so let’s not get too uppity just yet. Yet, we do appear to be in a rare interregnum when Republicans are making smart choices and ruthlessly pressing their advantage, so maybe this is when we run up the score. The Democrats are down, and I say kick ‘em in the gut.

The Democrats have the worst issue set ever. They’re still embracing the same nonsense that helped lose them the election. Complicating it is that they have an opponent with a supernatural power to make his opponents assume the least viable political position possible at any given time simply because it’s the opposite of where he says he stands. Trump has maneuvered these people into deciding that the hill they want to die on is USAID funding of bizarre social pathologies overseas and of the regime media here at home. If there are two things the American people dislike, it’s foreign aid and the pinko press, yet that’s where the Democrats decided to position themselves – as unapologetic Japanese soldiers 40 years after the war fighting to the death to take hard-working Americans’ money and give it to grubby, ungrateful foreigners and the reporters who hate them. The other issues they’ve decided to stick with are just as unpopular. DEI? Everybody outside of a faculty lounge and the Beltway hates it. Trans lunatics and perverts who want to hang out in girls’ changing rooms? Again, there are skin rashes that poll better. Where are the Democrats? All over them. And that was just last week.

https://tomklingenstein.com/how-pete-hegseth-can-purge-wokeness-from-the-military/

President Donald Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth have a clear mandate to restore the United States Armed Forces as the global standard of military excellence, rolling back four years of decline under the DEI-obsessed Pentagon of the Biden-Harris administration.

They will face resistance to these reform efforts not just from the political Left and the Democratic Party, but from an entrenched class of senior officers whose bureaucratic ethos and commitment to woke ideology have undermined mission readiness, eroded cohesion and morale among the troops, and transformed our military from a merit-based institution singularly focused on national defense into a laboratory for costly and destructive social experimentation.

Hegseth’s success in setting the Pentagon straight will depend on his effectiveness in checking the overreach of these woke officers and restoring civilian control over our Armed Forces. That will require more than simply overturning race– and sex–based quotas, ending the indulgence of transgenderism in the uniform, or any of the other worthy and necessary measures to unmake the woke military at the level of policy. To achieve real and lasting change, Hegseth must enact structural reforms that remove not just the woke policies themselves but the climate and the culture from which they emerged. 

Below are three ambitious but achievable recommendations that Hegseth could adopt to tame the scourge of wokeness in uniform and restore control of our defense establishment to the American people and their elected representatives.

Eliminate woke officers by restoring civilian control of personnel processes.

It would be difficult to overstate the extent to which the upper echelons at the Pentagon have been taken over by left-wing ideology. In one analysis published by the Center for Renewing America, out of almost 600 generals and admirals, over 60 were found to have politicized their service to an objectionable extent — more than one in ten. 

https://justthenews.com/government/federal-agencies/musk-brings-receipts-polling-shows-trump-and-doge-have-public-backing

Elon Musk is bringing receipts to substantiate his claims of large-scale fraud in the American government, undermining claims from detractors as he rides a wave of popular support for President Donald Trump and a government overhaul.

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) under Elon Musk has attracted its fair share of critics, though the agenda of dramatically downsizing government itself appears to have overshadowed the negative press and public suspicion of Musk.

Over the first month of the Trump presidency, DOGE has torn through federal agencies seeking instances of fraud, waste, abuse and other non-necessary expenditures hoping to dramatically reduce the scope of the federal government. The department has yet to post a comprehensive list of savings, but its website currently promises “receipts coming over the weekend.” So far, however, the department has already shown hard documentation of apparent fraud and waste via its X account.

Thus far, the agency has largely taken aim at executive branch agencies and has yet to post any workforce data on Congress or the Judiciary. But the executive branch agencies make up a substantive part of the federal workforce and payroll, accounting for more than 2.2 million employees and an annual expenditure of just over $211 billion.

Over the weekend, the department published its initial reports outlining the scope of federal agency expenditures and regulations, estimating that 18.5 federal regulations existed for each law Congress approved.

A change in approach

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/02/20/while-the-white-house-sizzles-congress-bumbles/

In our lifetimes, we’ve never seen anything like what we are witnessing at 1400 Pennsylvania Ave., as the Trump administration sets the town ablaze with rapid-fire executive orders, mass firings, and DOGE investigations. The White House is “flooding the zone” with an unprecedented sense of purpose and urgency.

But a mile-and-a-half east on Pennsylvania Avenue, Republican lawmakers act like it’s just another day at the office at the U.S. Capitol – an attitude that could end up dooming Trump’s presidency.

So far, Congress has passed one bill. And it can’t seem to get its act together on the make-or-break “reconciliation” bill that will determine the future success of Trump’s second term.

This is in stark contrast to 2021, when Democrats handed Joe Biden his $1.9 billion “rescue plan” in record time.

Like Trump, Biden laid out what he wanted in that bill before he took office. The House and Senate got to work and passed a “budget resolution” on Feb. 5 of that year – the first step to getting Biden’s massive “rescue plan” passed through the filibuster-proof “reconciliation” process. The final bill hit Biden’s desk on March 11.

Today? House Republicans still aren’t sure they have the votes to get their budget resolution bill passed against opposition from moderates and fiscal hawks over spending cuts.

And the House can’t agree with Senate Republicans on whether to push for one big reconciliation bill – favored by the House – or two separate bills being pushed in the Senate. Any differences would then have to be ironed out in conference committee.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21402/usaid-funding-taliban

[T]he ultimate responsibility lay with USAID. The $40 million on the tarmac was part of a much larger scheme under which USAID and the State Department provided over $1.7 billion in funding to the UN which then shipped $2.9 billion in cash to Afghanistan.

Under the guise of humanitarian needs, $1.7 billion was provided to the UN, which used some of the money to buy dollars to fly into Afghanistan, to trade for Afghan currency, which the U.S. had also arranged to have printed on behalf of the Taliban.

The cash is not provided to the Taliban or DAB by the UN, but by the groups funded by the UN.

During the intermediate step, DAB held ‘auctions’ of the dollars which elements linked to the Taliban, including the Haqqani network allied with Al Qaeda, reportedly ‘win’. The auctions prop up the Afghani currency and keep the Taliban in power.

Putting the money into UN pooled accounts allowed USAID to claim that they “do not provide assistance to or through the Taliban”, they just put money into “pooled UN accounts….”.

The State Department responded to these revelations by falsely claiming that there are no sanctions on Afghanistan, that banks refuse to carry out wire transfers because of “the lack of profitability” and that “to the best of our knowledge, no electronic financial delivery systems are currently scalable to meet the liquidity needs of the UN” requiring it to instead convert billions of dollars into paper notes and ship them by plane. None of this is true or even a plausible lie.

The Taliban money laundering scheme was not an exception, it was how USAID, the State Department and the UN have operated for too long, not only in Afghanistan, but in Syria, Yemen, Gaza and many other terrorist areas around the world, using plausible deniability and chains of organizations to avoid accountability and direct responsibility for aiding terrorists.

Americans have become the financiers of their worst enemies. It’s time for that to stop.

In 2022, the DAB Afghanistan Bank showed off photos of $40 million in stacks of hundred dollar bills sitting on the tarmac at Kabul International Airport. The Taliban-controlled central bank described this as one of three shipments of “humanitarian aid” amounting to over $100 million.

DAB, Afghanistan’s central bank, was headed by Noor Ahmad Agha, a “specially designated terrorist” who had been named as the “financier of bomb-making”, including the IEDs which had killed over 1,000 American soldiers, and sending money to a sanctioned figure was illegal.

Despite that, someone had sent a massive fortune in U.S. cash to the Taliban’s terror bank.

https://thespectator.com/topic/trumps-presidency-is-an-ink-blot-test-for-america/

Americans are being given a national ink-blot test. Their answers tell us how a divided country sees the political landscape and what they think of President Trump’s bold efforts to reshape it.

The scope for differing interpretations is illustrated by a story about one such Rorschach test. The psychiatrist shows his new patient ink blot after ink blot. No response. Finally, the exasperated doctor pleads with him to say something, anything. “Look, doc,” he says, “I didn’t come here for you to show me dirty pictures.”

That’s exactly how Democrats see Donald Trump’s presidency. It’s one dirty picture after another. A few moderate Republicans share that perspective, but they are outliers in a party Trump has reshaped in his own image.

When Trump’s party looks at the same ink blots, they see the Sistine Chapel. For them, this inspiring vision paints over the graffiti scrawled by the Biden administration. Of course, Democrats think Trump is doing the spray-painting.

It is hard to imagine two more starkly different interpretations of American politics today. Average voters lie somewhere in the middle, but closer to the Republican view, according to recent polls. They are pleased with the opening weeks of the new administration, repulsed by the Democrats’ inflammatory rhetoric, and soured by their memories of the Biden years. Public approval for the Democratic Party has plummeted to historic lows, nearing 30 percent.

The Democrats’ catastrophic numbers and Trump’s strong ones are huge political assets for the new administration. The crucial question is how can the president exploit those assets before the glow fades?

https://amgreatness.com/2025/02/17/151m-in-food-money-for-u-s-soldiers-was-spent-elsewhere-report/

A stunning new report reveals that a significant majority of U.S. Army funding that was designated for food programs for soldiers was spent on other things.

As reported by Breitbart, the claims were made by Military.com, which investigated the funding from the Basic Allowance for Subsistence (BAS) program, which is meant to provide meal funding for junior enlisted soldiers. Out of $225 million collected by BAS in 2024, $151 million did not go towards providing food for soldiers, with only $74 million actually being used for its original purpose.

“It’s just returned to the big pool of army funds, and it’s used someplace else,” said an anonymous Army official.

BAS funding is provided primarily by a “tax on troops,” with approximately $460 being deducted from each soldier’s paycheck every month. Junior enlisted soldiers only make about $30,000 a year, thus amounting to $5,520 – over 1/6th of their earnings – being taken from their paycheck every year for BAS funding.

Military.com’s report was compiled through a study of the 11 largest military bases in 2024. The findings quickly revealed significant differences between the amount of money that was collected and the amount of money that was actually spent.

“Given that the Army operates 104 garrisons, the true amount of unspent funds is likely far higher,” the report notes.

The report led to bipartisan criticism of the Army’s misuse of funds, with Congressman Jul Tokuda (D-Hawaii) issuing a statement saying that “stealing food money from our soldiers is not how we achieve military readiness.”

“The fact that at least $151 million was collected from soldiers and not spent on food as required demands not just an immediate investigation, but swift accountability,” Tokuda added.

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/02/18/virtue-signaling-now-means-you-have-to-sell-that-tesla/

Remember when all the best people, the elites and elitists among us, the correct thinkers, the self-appointed guardians of all things good, were buying electric vehicles, particularly Teslas? What a terrific way for them to demonstrate their green street cred. But that’s passé. The latest in look-at-me virtue signaling is selling that Tesla to make an important political statement.

Because Tesla CEO Elon Musk is aiding President Donald Trump in rooting out federal waste and corruption, he’s become a villain to the left. To be caught in one his cars is simply an embarrassment to status seekers and the prigs obsessed with placing themselves on Barack Obama’s “right side of history.” So like entertainer Sheryl Crow, they have to unload their Teslas, and, naturally, do it as loudly as possible.

Last week, Crow “dramatically bid adieu to her black Tesla,” the New York Post reported, to protest the man she tagged on her Instagram account as “#PresidentMusk.”

Crow took to social media on Friday to reveal she had sold the electric car and was donating the money to NPR, “which Musk has repeatedly called to defund as his Department of Government Efficiency looks to slash federal funding.”

“My parents always said … you are who you hang out with,” wrote Crow. “There comes a time when you have to decide who you are willing to align with. So long Tesla.”