Some people didn’t read up on what happened to Ernst Röhm

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You just blew my mind.

I kept wondering why semi-literate politicians with fully-illiterate supporters would write books at all… who is the target audience? What makes it worth the trouble? Like I don’t agree with their priorities but I see them as perfectly effective at what they’re trying to do; why are they doing this weird thing? Why can I buy a book Matt Gaetz “wrote,” hardcover, on Amazon for $10?

This makes it make sense.

I mean, it’s working for her so far. What else is she qualified to make six figures at, let alone while not having to behave professionally or do any work?

If she believed in hell, I think she’d have some reservations, but as it is I think she’s probably pleased as punch about the result.

I don’t think she cares what the actual policy is. The point is, she gets to make noise about the right’s well-trodden favorite topic. What’s actually going on is of no concern.

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I’m fairly irritated at myself to report that I just wasted half an hour of my life looking through Rand Paul’s report in detail, because I was curious how he managed to arrive at $900 billion dollars. I spent some time with Google Sheets and trying to de-obfuscate his numbers. I’ll cut to the punch line. It’s:

• $659 billion in interest on the national debt
• $236 billion in “improper federal payments” – basically, money that the federal government erroneously paid out to people it realized it shouldn’t have ever given it to in the first place. This number is, apparently, actually real, and I sort of agree with Paul that it sounds big enough to be a problem. I will note that the number went monotonically up all through the Trump years, up to a peak of over $300 billion, and monotonically down through all through the Biden years.
• $851 million on all the rest of this culture-war bullshit aside from those two single line items

Or, to put it in visual form:

Everything in any news story, about Egypt or lobster tanks or transgender monkeys or whatever, is part of the orange slice of the chart.

Yeah. The US government is one of the biggest and most byzantine entities on the planet. You’re going to be able to find some bullshit in there if you look. But that doesn’t all of a sudden mean this culture-war pettiness is the whole problem, and the tax breaks and giveaways for the rich and the Death Star defense budget all of a sudden aren’t relevant to the discussion.

Among notable instances, the National Institutes of Health allocated funds to study Russian cats on treadmills; photos of Barbies were utilized as identification to obtain COVID relief funds; the Department of Defense lost $169 million of outdoor-stored military gear; $6 million went towards tourism in Egypt by the United States Agency for International Development; and the Small Business Administration provided over $200 million to “struggling” music artists such as Post Malone, Chris Brown and Lil Wayne.

Oh, so it’s culture-war bullshit. Neat.

“Who’s to blame for our crushing level of debt? Everybody,”

Oooooh… okay, I get it now. It’s a desperate attempt to find a catchy and memorable thing to blame that isn’t “we give money to rich people by the trillions and tax them less than we do the electricians.” $6 million is like a week’s worth of lost tax revenue from any one of 500 different companies. But sure, tourism in Egypt is the problem. Everyone please remember that.