Rant

I’m going through some personal stuff right now, and it’s been rough. Some of the responses I’ve gotten to my last few posts have left me feeling raw and frustrated, and unsure of what to do and say going forward. After some long talks with Chris and others, I’m writing this to try and get some general thoughts out that I hope will help you guys and me.

First and foremost, if something is labeled “From Behind Enemy Lines,” then I am doing just that – talking about the Left, FROM the Left. That is what I’ve been asked to do, when I’m posting under that banner. I’ve been asked to give a Left perspective, or at least a “more Left” perspective, so that you guys can learn and to be sure that Vine isn’t an “echo chamber.” I am going to be more obvious in it, adding FBEL at the top of posts that are “representative Left” or “explaining Left” so that they stand out.

So my last post was about the memes I’d seen floating around, and in particular, about the Trump 2028 one. From where I’m standing, there are three groups of people. First, we have the far Left. They’re going to do what they’re going to do, and nothing you or I say is going to change it. I ignore them. Second is the group of “normal Left” or what I tend to call “thinking Left.” These are people who have chosen willfully to be Left of center, but are self-consistent, thinking, and reasoning. I might not LIKE their reasoning, and I may think it’s false in the grand scheme of things or missing important points, but they’ve shown me that they give actual thought and consideration to their position. I have many friends in this group.

The third group consists of people like me. We were a little Left of Center, if you asked us. People on the Right just lumped us in with “The Left,” and the Left considered us oddities and “too far Right for comfort” but generally tolerated us. We are no longer “a little Left of Center.” We are deep state Right, at this point, because the Left has shifted so far Left that we’re not even close anymore. Some, like myself, have chosen to take the couple of steps Right to join the rest of you under the Conservative tent, albeit in our own little corner while we acclimate. Others are dithering out there on the sandbar, wondering where the hell the tide went and why it’s so fucking cold these days.

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One of the great things about following people on X is that you get news faster and from different points of view.

One of the worst things about X is that you get idiot NPC talking points dumped into your feed constantly.

For the last three weeks, every weekend, there is a spat of NPCs telling me that Trump has gone golfing. That he has gone golfing every weekend since he took office. That his golfing has cost some number of millions of dollars. The number is the same across every post.

This week, the talking points included that Trump was golfing while there were fires on Long Island. How can he be so cruel. And he went golfing last weekend during the fires in North and South Carolina.

Last weekend it was about how the fires in the Carolina’s were happening despite the claims of good forest management. Claims that there wasn’t water to fight the fires. While showing the same video of firefighters using water to fight the fires.

The biggest NPC talking point has been on “Tax cuts for Billionaires.” The claim is that Trump is taking money away from veterans, the sick, and the elderly to give to his “billionaire friends”.

If you open the curtain and peek behind it, you find that they are lying.

So let’s do a little numbering.

We are going to look at somebody making $12000/year, $50,000/year, $100,000/year, $500,000/year, and a million dollars per year.

We use a progressive tax rate, so as your income goes up, so does your tax rate.

Somebody with an income of $1,000,000 pays 328 thousand dollars in taxes. If everybody got a 1% tax cut, he would get to keep $3,281 of his money. The person making $50k per year would get to keep $500 of his money. Oh my goodness.

So what are these huge tax cuts that “Trump gave his billionaire friends?” The Trump tax cuts apply to everybody. The NPCs claim that everybody getting tax cuts is not fair because a millionaire gets $3k back, but regular folk only get $500 back. This is so horrible, that they proposed an amendment that would have increased the tax rate of people making more than $999,999.

This would have added another tax bracket. They are literally saying that if we don’t raise the taxes on those making more than $999,999 we are giving a tax cut.

It doesn’t make sense to anybody except NPCs.

This entire talking point also avoids the question of how billionaires make their money.

If I was working a full-time job and pulling in a billion dollars per year, I would be charging $480,769.23/hour.

It isn’t happening. A million dollars per year income is only $480/hour.

Yes, there are some professions that charge at the $500 to $1000 per hour rate, but they are generally not taking it all home. Instead, that hourly rate goes into paying for many people.

What a millionaire does is they make money by investing. Pretend you made $174,000 in 2024. After paying all your bills, you might take home $50 to $75 thousand for fun stuff.

Now, supposed you took that $50k and invested it in a stock, like $TEM in January 2025 at $32/share. If you sold it at the end of February 2025 at $89.44 you would have made a profit of $89k. Not a bad return over the course of a month.

This is a short-term capital gain which gets taxed at your as above, according to your tax bracket. On the other hand, if you hold that stock for a full 12 months and then sell it, you would only get taxed at 15%, not 24%. That is a 9% savings in taxes.

If you were to have a taxable income of over $533k/year, then your rate would be 20% on that $89k, not 37%. That translates to savings of $15,140.

Trump is not talking about cutting the capital gains taxes. He is talking about income tax changes.

This is the same language game that congress critters make every year. “We made cuts to the budget!” translation, “We aren’t going to spend as much as we wanted to. We are only spending $500,000 more, not the $3.3 million more we wanted”

A cut is when the amount spent this year is less than the amount spent last year.

I believe that I managed to lose some of my article. Still, it is just a rant.

Years ago, I was in conversations with a lady, we agreed to meet for coffee and then a movie. When I arrived, she was busy with other people. I waited. When she was finally done with the others, I asked her which movie she was interested in seeing.

“I’ve decided I don’t want to go to a movie with you.”

My reply was, “I’m disappointed with you.”

I walked away. Later, I heard through the grapevine that my sentence had nearly broken her. “I’m disappointed” carries great weight, emotionally.

For years, I’ve felt like I’m in a political battle where the other side gets to decide what rules I fight by and what rules they fight by, but their rules are not the same as mine.

I remember every time somebody called me a murder for wanting to keep my guns. Every time I was blamed because some asshole killed children. I was to blame for the blood spilled in the cities.

If only I would consent to common-sense, reasonable gun laws. It is all about safety.

After Sandhook, I was hearing the same things again. One of the people doing it showed up on my Facebook page.

I proceeded to call her a heartless subhuman for wanting children to die. Why wouldn’t she agree that it was just common sense to have teachers armed to kill assholes that would harm our children? How could she be so selfish?

Every attack that had ever been leveled at me, I threw back at this lady.

Turns out that his lady was a friend’s aunt. They came to me and asked me to tone it down. To back off because I was being hurtful. She was a teacher and had spent her entire career helping children.

I did. I took the highroad, again.

This is where we always went.

When Trump v0.1 came on the scene, the Democrats loved him. They loved him because they knew he was a Democrat at heart. They wanted him to win the primary because he would be easier to beat than Hillary.

Trump v0.9 showed up when he became the Republican candidate for President. The Democrats turned on him like a pack of hyenas.

Trump v1.0 started when he took office the first time.

One of the reasons he won that time was because he was fighting back. He was calling the left out for their lies. But he used belittling terms for them. He fought from the gutter where the left lives.

Ally was so upset about his words that she couldn’t accept his deeds. Almost every interaction regarding Trump was her telling me about something he said that was mean.

She was still part of that leftist mindset. That mindset that looks for a reason to throw a person out of the tent. If a person is in perfect lockstep with the sheep of the left, then they are kicked out.

Every conservative was unacceptable to her because they had done something that disqualified them.

She has come around. But some of those old habits die hard.

We got into a big argument after a Republican representative introduced the mentally ill representative as “The representative of ??? Mr. ???” sorry, I don’t recall the names.

When I was talking at dinner, I mentioned this and mentioned that I got a chuckle over this.

She was very upset with me. “I expect better of you.”

From her perspective, I was being mean to that ill person. It would have been easy for the Republican to introduce the other member as “Representative X”. No Mr. No Mrs. No Miss. Just “Representative”.

Yeah, she could have. But I was pleased to have her punch back.

But everything she observes from her new group gets that same, “I expect better of my team” treatment.

I read Alito’s dissent. It didn’t pull any punches. Thomas joined him in his dissent. When those two are in agreement, then the right thing to do is what they are saying.

Barrette didn’t agree with them. She voted with the majority to deny a stay pending appeal.

Having mulled over it for a few days, I have to agree with Amy. And it is one of the reasons why she is a good choice for the Court.

I do not want somebody who votes the “right” way on my issues. I want somebody who respects the law and follows the constitution, regardless of where it leads.

I am sure that it was hard for her to withstand the powerhouse that is the Thomas-Alito team.

The short of it was that Roberts made the issue moot. This saved everybody time. It kept the status quo for a bit longer. And it put the case on the correct footing for an appeal of the preliminary injunction. In addition, even the denial was a win because it slapped the inferior courts square in the face with their rogue behavior.

I expect more of my justices. Amy gave me more. It hurt, to be sure, but she did the right thing.

When I see Trump 2028 I know it is not going to happen. The push for allowing a president to have three terms happened near the end of the Obama presidency. The left wanted their chosen one to have another term.

I didn’t like the idea then, I don’t like the idea now.

Because I don’t see any real push to get Trump a third term, I know that Trump 2028 is a troll. It is a good troll because the left can’t treat it as a joke. They can’t because they were serious when they were trying to get Obama a third term.

When I see “Trump 2028” posted on the idiot signs held by Democrats during the address to the joint session of Congress, it makes me smile even more.

It trolls on so many levels, and it makes me chuckle. It isn’t being pushed by anybody seriously. J.D. 2028 is what I’m actually hearing. The serious faces of the people holding idiot signs makes it work more. The fact that if it happened, the Democrats would have an even bigger meltdown. There would be accusations all over the place.

And not a single Democrat would admit that they had seriously looked into it for their guy, for Obama.

As a practical matter, getting a third term for a president requires a Constitutional amendment. If somebody were to propose one, I would be on the phone to my Senators and Representative to tell them to vote against the amendment.

Until that happens, this is a great troll. I’m not going to let realities get in the way of good humor.

As many have said, the left can’t meme.

When I started writing, regularly, for Miguel, I took it upon myself to cover legal cases. Since that time, I’ve learned more than I really wanted to about our justice system.

As my mentor used to say, “The justice system is just a system.” As a systems’ person, that allowed me to look at cases through the lens of my experience analyzing large systems.

One of the first things I noticed was that most people reporting on cases didn’t provide enough information for us to look up what was actually written or said.

CourtListener.com has come to my rescue for most legal filings in the federal system. If you know the court and the docket number you can find that case on CourtListener.

Once you have the docket located, you can start reading the filings. These are stored as PDFs. Most of my PDF tools allow me to copy and paste directly from the PDF.

What isn’t available on CourtListener is Supreme Court dockets. I’ve talked to Mike and others, the issue seems to be something about scrapping the Supreme Court website as well as other stuff. I’m not sure exactly what.

I want to be able to keep up on all the current cases in the Supreme Court, what their status currently is, what has been filed. They entirety of the case. I’m not concerned about most of the cases, but often it is easier to get all than a selected portion.

To this end, I have code that uses patterns to pull cases from the Supreme Court docket without have a listing of cases.

This tool will have search capabilities and other tools shortly, for now, it works well enough.

I am using the PySide6, which is a python implementation of the Qt framework. For the most part, I’m happy with this framework. There are parts I don’t like, which I work around.

My most recent success was figuring out how to allow me to click on hyperlinks in text to bring up my PDF viewer. This was not as simple as I wanted it to be, but it is working.

The other night, I wanted to write about a current case. I had the case docket in my tool. I pulled up the docket, clicked on the link, and John Roberts’ order popped up in my viewer, exactly as it should.

I started writing. Went to pull the quote and nothing.

Copy and paste does not seem to be functional in my tool.

Which takes me to the rant, which @#$)*&@$) coordinate system should I be using to get the right text!

Qt is built around widgets. Every widget has its coordinate system. In addition, there is the global coordinate system.

Each widget also has a paintEvent() which is when it paints itself.

To start the process, I capture mousePress, mouseMove, and mouseRelease events. While the mouse button is down, I draw a rectangle from the place clicked to the current location of the mouse.

I attempt to draw the rectangle and nothing shows up on the screen.

Through debugging code, I finally figured out that I am not updating the right widget.

The QPdfView widget properly renders the PDF document in a scrollable window. I have made a subclass of QPdfView so I am catching all paint events. But even though I’m telling the system that I have to redraw (update) my widget, there are no paint events being sent to my widget.

Turns out that my widget only cares about update signals that require the framing content be redrawn. I.e. if the scroll bar changes, then I get a paint event. Once I figured this out, I was able to tell the viewport that it should update and things started working.

So now I can draw a frame on the screen. But what I want is to get the text from within that frame.

I asked the QPdfDocument for a new selection from point_start to point_end. It tells me nothing is selected.

Where do I currently sit? I have my frame in my PDFViewer coordinate system. I have the PDF document in a different coordinate system. The PDF coordinate system is modified by the scroll bars or viewport. The scroll bars and scroll area modify the actual coordinate system of the viewport contents.

Somehow, I need to figure out which of these coordinate systems is the right coordinate system to use to get the text highlighted by my mouse.

I’m tired of this fight.

My mentor was a federal employee. He, and his team, worked odd hours. I would put in my 8 hours as a contractor and then go to his lab and work with him and his team until midnight or later.

Somewhere along the way, people noticed that his team didn’t have set hours and raised a fuss. They complained to the IG that he and his team were mis-reporting their hours.

This led to the IG sending people to investigate.

Now, this was in a secured area. During normal hours, you could just walk in after you should your badge. After hours, you had to sign in and out.

What this meant was that his team had security logs showing when they left for the night. And with a bit of work, they also had the time when people got to work.

After a thorough investigation, they found that yes, the team was misreporting their hours.

They were underreporting by 10 to 15 hours per week.

For me, it didn’t make any difference. I was on salary to the contractor. The time I spent with my mentor, working on projects for the government, were not billable hours. I didn’t care. I learned astonishing things.

Our system administrators were a pair of very sharp ladies. They arrived on time and they left on time. During their 8 hours, they worked constantly. I never felt like they gave less than 100%. When they needed to work late, they did.

Others I worked with were the same way. They gave their 8 hours and left. We got what we were paying for.

Some scientists over worked too.

Then there were the “slackers”. They arrived at work exactly on time. They went to their desks, were seen, then went to the restroom for their morning dump. This lasted anywhere from 30 to 90 minutes.

Subsequently, they went and did a bit of work before it was time for morning break. After the morning break, they had a pee smoke break. Then lunch, then a bit of work, then home, exactly on time.

Total time working, maybe an hour and a half.

A former friend worked for the state government. He was proud of the fact that he got paid for 8 hours of work per day, but on a normal day, he only spent about 2 hours working. The rest of the time he was doing own time projects/stuff.

Now, sometimes people look like they are cheating, but they aren’t really.

We had a group of scientists that looked lazy. They would get to work and sit around talking, reading the paper, for anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour or two. Then they would get busy pouring over results for a couple of hours. Then they would have another long gab session.

After that, they would spend a bit of time putzing with their program before telling the program to “run”.

They would twiddle their thumbs doing nothing until quitting time.

They were incredibly productive. They submitted a run before they left for the day. That would run overnight. If they had the parameters right, the run would complete shortly after they got to work. They would then analyze the results and submit the next run.

On Fridays, they would submit jobs that would run all weekend long. That made Mondays look like they were goofing off for an extended time as they waited for the runs to complete.

Their work was so important that it justified a major computer upgrade. The new computer was 4 times as fast. What used to take them 16 hours of run time now only took 4 hours. They should now be able to get two or three runs per day done.

Nope. With the faster computer, they were able to get more detailed results in the same 16-hour run time. They adjusted to the increased speed by answering more of the question more accurately.

All of this is to say, when I see former federal employees screaming about being fired, my heart gives a little thump of happiness. If they are good or needed, they will be rehired. In the meantime, learn to code. I hear COBOL is a good choice.

People have a difficult time making hard choices.

The Trolley Problem brings is one of the ways that we explore ethical choices. The general premises are that there are five people that will die if you do nothing. There is one person, who is currently safe, who can be sacrificed to save the five.

Do you do nothing and let five people die, or do you throw the switch and kill the one?

What if we change the problem statement a little, what if the one was a child? What if the one was a woman? What if the one was a “person of color”? What if it was your wife?

Now take that same list of changes and insert it into the five. What if one of the five was a child, a woman, a person of color, your wife?

Ok. How about if your daughter was the one and your son was one of the five?

The problem hasn’t changed, but the emotional stress is greatly increased.

Politicians know this. They use it to their advantage.

The term is “Emotional Blackmail.”

Consider the following dilemma, you can choose to pay more in taxes or the school system’s proposed budget is capped at a half million increase rather than the 3.5 million increase they were asking for.

For me, that’s an easy choice. Cap at a 0.5 million increase. At which point the emotional blackmail begins.

“If you don’t give use the extra three million dollars, we will have to fire teachers.”

Is that really the only choice?

That is the question I posed a teacher. What other things in the budget can be cut, before we have to fire teachers.

Now, I’ve been told that I’m against teachers. That I oppose her. Why? Because I don’t want to cut teachers?

For her, there are only two choices, pay or cut teachers. If I don’t want to pay more in taxes, I must hate teachers and want them fired.

So I asked her about programs in the budget that could be cut instead. In our first iteration, there were no programs she was willing to cut.

The problem she has is that every cut is equally bad. Every choice is equally bad. Since all the choices are bad, the only option is to get the 3 million dollars out of the stone of taxpayers.

We had a similar issue at a family level years ago. We had a 16k windfall. We all agreed we would put that money into the homestead. The problem was that nobody could agree on what we should do.

Should we get new siding for the house? Should we replace one of the vehicles? Should we pay off a loan?

It wasn’t even that simple, there were about a dozen different projects or expenses we were considering.

By default, humans will spiral rather than make a hard decision.

I had to listen to people tell me that project A was more important than project B, but B was more important than C. And C was more important than A.

It was a circle. Everything was more important than everything else.

The first process was having everybody create an ordered list of by importance.

They couldn’t do it. They all had situations where they had multiple things with equal importance. Or worse still, some couldn’t do it because they couldn’t choose.

The method that did work was creating binary choices.

We lay out a grid, in that grid we compare every item to every other item, asking if item row was more important than the item in the column.

Once that grid is filled out, we can create an ordered list. Once we had ordered lists, we could present and come to an agreement as to what our priorities were.

From this table, we can create an ordered list

1. Roof
2. Foundation
3. Gutters
4. Siding
5. Paint
6. Truck
7. Car
8. Computer

The problem we have with our school budget is that every program is equally important. In the end, they will likely fire teachers and programs.

Whenever I see a motion for a TRO, Preliminary Injunction or a Stay, the opinion of the court always includes a reference to —Winter V. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc., 172 L. Ed. 2d 249 (2008).

These are known as the “Winter Factors”. They must be addressed in order by the court before granting any of the above.

The first factor is the likelihood of success on the merits. Is the person requesting the TRO, PI or Stay going to win the case in the end? If it is more likely than not, then the first factor has been met.

The second factor is the question of the amount and type of harm being done. The key phrase is irreparable harm. In short, this means that the harm cannot be redressed by throwing money at it. All violations of Constitutionally protected rights are considered irreparable harm. You will never again have that opportunity at that moment of time with those people listening back again.

The third factor is the balance of equities. Who will be most harmed whether the motion is granted or not granted. If the motion being granted will force a business to close, while not granting it will impose an eyesore, the balance of equities’ favorers not granting the motion.

The final factor is what is in the best interest of the public. The public has no interest in enforcing unconstitutional laws. This always favors The People. The state will often argue that “keeping the public safe” is the correct scale to use for determining what is in the publics best interests.

The court did not use the Winter Factors.

And this is why she is using the Nken instead of Winter To be able to discount the likelihood of success because of the amount of harm. In other words, instead of having to prove they are likely to win on the merits, the plaintiffs have chosen to prove that they might be horribly harmed if some hypothetical comes true.

Yeah, that doesn’t make much sense to me.

IANAL. My opinion is that the first question to be resolved is if the APA law(s) passed by congress limiting the power of the President are constitutional. If they are not constitutional, then they must be vacated and there is no cause for the case.

Instead, the court assumes the APA overrides the authority granted to the President under the Constitution. She then turns the Winter standard on its head.

Even though the text reads To establish a likelihood of success on the merits, a plaintiff need not show that success is an absolute certainty. It need only make a showing that the probability of … prevailing is better than fifty percent.

The plaintiff bears the burden. Not the defendant. This judge says it is the States that bear the burden.

The gist of this is that the courts are planning to ignore the Constitutional issues as much as possible and instead base their opinions on laws that are unconstitutional.

For somebody who makes many grammar errors, who can’t speel worth a damn, and in general suffers dyslexia-driven writing issues, I am obsessed with communication.

My mentor taught me the “four parts of communication”.

1. What I say
2. What you hear
3. What you say
4. What I hear

If there is a mismatch between any of the two steps, then communication has failed. Only I know what I intend to communicate. Only I can do the work to verify, through what you say, and I hear, that I was able to communicate my concept correctly.

Part of the task of communication is agreeing on the meaning of words and of being able to identify what you are addressing.

If I use a word with one meaning, and you use the same word with a different meaning, it is unlikely that we are communicating when either of us use that word.

In the late 70s and early 80s, the feminists were becoming very vocal. They were making claims as to how good they were and how little they needed men for.

To put some perspective on this, in 1973, Billie Jean King defeated Bobby Riggs in a tennis match to prove women were as good as men or better. She was 29, at the top of her game. Bobby Riggs was 55 and most definitely not at the top of his game.

But, at the time, we couldn’t actually talk about how men were different from women and how some jobs were better suited to men. We couldn’t because to try to discuss the issue would get you slammed as a male chauvinist pig.

By controlling the language, the progressives were able to stop any dissent or even discussion about the issues from a male perspective.

It took a new term to come into existence before that discussion could take place. “Politically Correct”.

Once the term was available to us, we could actually begin the discussions that were needed, on equal footing.

Affirmative Action is another one of those topics. The phrasing is wonderful. Everybody wants to be affirmative.

How dare you want to discriminate against blacks by taking away affirmative action.

We can’t, or couldn’t discuss the harm that was coming from affirmative action because doing so would get you labeled “racist” or worse. The topic was forbidden. Not because it shouldn’t have been discussed, but because it lived in a protected state.

The new language is “DEI”. We are trying to discuss it. But we are being shouted down as bigots, racists and misogynists.

Now consider a current topic, plane crashes.

First, if you look up the NTSB numbers for plane crashes, you will find that more planes crashed in January 2024 than in January 2025. Not what we are talking about.

One of the questions that came out of the crash in DC was the sex of the pilots.

Why?

It was because there are people, myself included, that believe that the pilots of the helicopter were not qualified to be flying that Blackhawk in that airspace at that time.

Why? Because they caused a fucking midair collision!

They messed up and killed people. We KNOW that the helicopter was above its max authorized height and had no pilot input to avoid the jet. We KNOW that the jet had nearly full elevators and a 9-degree roll to the left to avoid the helicopter.

So we ask, why were they allowed on that flight?

One of the first things that came out was that the pilot was female.

Was the collision because she was female?

There is nothing in the record, the facts, that indicate that her sexual organs had anything to do with the crash.

But that is only half of the question. The rest of the question is, “Was she qualified?”

This raises further questions, “Were the standards lowered to allow more women to ‘qualify’?” and “Were better qualified males passed over to have more female pilots?”

These are all questions that should be asked.

We are having trouble asking them because to ask them is to be yelled at for something that was not said.

What are we being accused of? We are being accused of saying that the crash(es) occurred because they were women.

The media talking heads make the claim that they have the secret decoder ring that allows them to translate our questions into what we “really” mean. And what we “really” mean is that women are not qualified to be pilots. We DIDN’t say that.

But it gets worse. That message gets out there. And some on the right are not careful with their words. They might be attempting to ask the same thing we are. But it comes out as “because they were women”.

As soon as that happens, there are a hundred NPCs to claim that that dogcatcher speaks for every conservative, for every Trump supporter.

And those on the left believe them. As Ally has pointed out, one of the difficult things for her to accept as being right of center, is that we aren’t in lock step. That we don’t support everybody with an R behind their name or a MAGA hat on their head.

That duffus over there can have his crazy ideas. I don’t agree with him.

A hearing was held on Friday. I expect the judge to issue an order regarding the Preliminary Injunction on Monday.

The TRO expired on Friday, so the judge will either issue an order regarding the case. If she is going to go rogue, she will want to have that done on Monday to stop the President from doing his duty. If she wants to respect the constitution, she will issue an order denying the preliminary injunction.

In my businesses, I sometimes had a bookkeeper. She would receive the bills, make entries in the books, then bring me checks to sign to pay those bills.

I could also tell her to issue a check to somebody or some business. It was never her job to tell me not to pay that person, nor to verify if that entity was supposed to get the money. It was my job to make sure that when I told her to pay an entity, that entity should be paid, and how much.

She was supposed to tell me “no”, only if it would run afoul of the law or if we didn’t have the cash for it. If it meant we would be short later, she still did it.

The Bureau of Fiscal Service (BFS) is that bookkeeper for the Federal Government. They are tasked with making payments. They are not tasked with verifying that the payment should be made.

The decision to make a payment comes from other entities within the bureaucracy.

These payment files are checked against a list of “don’t pay”. If the recipient of the payment is on any of those lists, the payment is held. The agency that sent the payment file is responsible for determining if the payment is proper.

In the best of worlds, this would mean that no payments went to bad actors.

Now consider the case of the President issuing an Executive Order stopping payments to purple people eaters. There are dozens of agencies that send money to purple people eaters. All of those agencies are responsible for stopping payment files from going through to pay purple people eaters.

The BFS receives a payment file to send a payment to a PPE. If that PPE is not on the do not pay list, they will send the payment to that PPE. If the PPE is on a no pay list, the payment is held and the agency is informed.

If that agency sends back “pay it”, the BFS pays it. And the PPE gets money, regardless of what the President ordered.

When the bureaucracy is working with the President, every agency would have heard the “stop payments to PPEs” and would have done so. Any payment files that were already sent might be called back or stopped. If the BFS flags a payment as going to a PPE, everybody says “good job”.

If the bureaucracy is at odds with the President, they ignore the EO and do whatever the hell they want. If BFS flags any payments, they just order them paid.

If some agencies are attempting to obey the President, there can still be others that are not.

Worse, in many cases, contracts are let and budgeted. Some low level GS-2 with TDS can order a payment on a contract they control, and it just gets paid. Even if all of his bosses have told him “no”.

The President has ordered that no more payments to PPEs be made. To make this happen, he can either send people who are willing to obey him to every agency and every desk where somebody can send a payment to a PPE.

Or, he can send a few people to the BFS, and they can analyze each payment file as it comes in, check to see if it is a PPE payment.

Watching the bookkeepers doesn’t mean that the bookkeepers are doing something “wrong”, it is just the proper chock point in the flow of money.

The argument being made by these former treasury officials is that “career officials” are non-partisan and can be trusted to do the right thing.

For decades, BFS has been staffed by nonpartisan career employees led by nonpartisan career official…

There appears to be a claim without evidence that these workers are nonpartisan. At least they left off the “nonpartisan” when describing the fiscal assistant secretary, their boss.

They claim that all these nonpartisan career employees have undergone a security screening. Screening is one of those weasel words we see people use when they want the reader to think one thing when it isn’t true.

When I purchase a firearm, I fill out a 4473 and a “background check” is performed. This is a type of “security screening”. Having undergone a “thorough security screening” does not mean that this person has a clearance. If they had clearances, the brief would have said they have clearances.

This is intended to make it seem that the DOGE team’s actual clearances are not as thorough or complete as the BFS security screening. The reality is that any real clearance is likely better than the screenings these people got.

There is more, I’ll leave you with Grok’s explanation, it isn’t bad.

You might have heard that the DoJ is suing Hochul and James. This is not quite true. They are being sued in their official capacity. So the Governor, Attorney General, and head of the DMV of New York state are being sued.

What is the suit about?

New York will give a license to illegal aliens. I am not sure how that works, but they do.

The license indicates that the person is an illegal alien. As an illegal alien, they have extra rights under New York law.

In particular, the “Green Light” law requires the DMV to inform the illegal alien anytime the feds request information about them from the DMV.

Things are happening.