“Deep State”

With DOGE, the hits just keep coming.

Elon Musk has used his formidable communications reach to highlight DOGE’s discovery that Social Security, which is going broke, seems to be paying a whole lot of people who shouldn’t be drawing any money at all. With the agency’s solvency window shrinking every year, as fewer and fewer workers contribute while more and more draw benefits, that’s a critical mission.

WTF???

HOLY CR*P

WHISTLEBLOWER: They were incentivized to qualify illegals for LONG TERM DISABILITY to qualify illegals for Social Security FOR LIFE, “So they were set for life”

“They wanted us to try to identify them in such a way that they would qualify for long-term social… pic.twitter.com/woqYi3g6C4

— Wall Street Apes (@WallStreetApes) February 18, 2025

H/T XC

The Trump administration has directed defense agencies to turn over a list of their probationary employees by the end of Tuesday, with the expectation that many could be laid off as soon as this week, according to five people familiar with the matter.

The directive coincides with the arrival at the Pentagon of personnel from Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service, which has overseen the firing of thousands of probationary employees in other federal agencies and coordinated the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development.

Asking the most obvious questions about the U.S. gold supply in Fort Knox: What’s there and how much is it worth?

Auric Goldfinger.

For James Bond fans, Goldfinger’s obsessed-with-gold villain in the Bond movie that bore his name way back in 1964 was, to say the least, memorable.

Life magazine memorably ran an immutable image from the film of a “Bond girl” (as such were called in the day) stretched out on a bed quite naked and dead, painted, from head to toe, in gold paint. Dead at the hands of Goldfinger, of course.

If an obscure nonprofit received hundreds of millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars, trained thousands of journalists, influenced media outlets worldwide, and quietly scrubbed its leadership and key records from the internet—wouldn’t you want to know why?

That’s precisely what’s happening with Internews Network, a so-called “independent” media organization almost entirely bankrolled by USAID since 2008.

Treason is the one exception to a presidential pardon.

Legend divulged that the cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean at Okinawa, Japan’s Camp Courtney, the headquarters of the commanding general of the Third Marine Division, was where Japanese soldiers committed harakiri rather than be taken prisoner during World War II.

You could say the view was to die for.

It was also my introduction to the palatial digs of Major Gen. Steven Olmstead, as the food delivery detail I was assigned to made it obvious this wasn’t your typical stopover on mess duty.

Members of Elon Musk’s “department of government efficiency” arrived at the Pentagon Friday, in what appeared to be their first meeting with defense department staff, a US official told Reuters. The official spoke on condition of anonymity.

Donald Trump has said the Pentagon would be an early target of Musk’s government budget and personnel slashing team and that he expects the tech billionaire to find hundreds of billions of dollars in fraud and abuse in the department.

Last week, Trump confirmed that he had asked Musk to review spending in the sprawling defense department. “I’ve instructed him to go check out education, to check out the Pentagon, which is the military. And you know, sadly, you’ll find some things that are pretty bad.”